“The Bio-metric report also said that some parts of him don’t yet know that he’s trans, and that his adoption had probably led to inner disorganization. He’s rigidly protected himself and will probably hate us for confronting him with this new knowing.”

I tried to sound overwhelmed with the task ahead of knowing and saving Blithe, but really, I loved digging into this guy’s life. It was way easier to enjoy the messiness of someone else’s transition, like watching a film up on a screen, in air-conditioning, with popcorn.

“I’m pretty jealous that he could convalesce in his parents’ house, although something has clearly gone awry. Were your parents cool with your transition?”

“No,” was all I got from Aiden.

“You should release all your info to the Rhiz, and then I can dig into your past,” I tried to joke.

He didn’t smile.

“Come on, what’s the deal with them?”

“Damn it, Pen, I don’t want to get into it with you.” He grabbed the seat in front of him and shook it.

“Well, my parents died in an avalanche,” I said, pretending that I wasn’t offended by the with you. “And I was raised by my non-emotive aunt. Like, her bioaffective readings would be in the gray area, unless there’s some magenta spot hidden at her core. I basically tried to avoid everything related to bodies or families, and the fog lasted all the way through college—even though I think some of my blackouts occurred on important family anniversaries. I stuck around my college town with my lover, who was transitioning and working on a PhD. I learned how to give him a shot and how other people responded to his transness.

“I lived in this cute bubble with my older trans lover until he went to Thailand to do his research. He was racking up thousand-baht bar tabs talking to khon kham-phet folks about gender performativity and dissolution, and in his absence, I knew it was time for me to transition. He was so certain about his transness that mine always hid away when we were together. He returned with another lover he wanted to bring into our relationship, and I had to leave.

“I moved from my midwestern college town to this city, and everything collapsed. The glue that was holding together my sanity (denial?) did not travel to the Northeast. Parents holding their children or yelling at them, the notion of cooking dinner, writing a security deposit check, visiting a doctor, buying more toilet paper—every single action and thought and association was frayed and imperiling to me as soon as I arrived. And yet, as I’ve learned, the symptoms often include their own cure, and the city, while maddening in every visceral sense, demands that our threadbare nervous systems get rewired.