“Well, when you’re trans you can look back and see how every gut sensation that told you something was off, too tight, wrong, airless, and incongruent was a beautiful curling script toward the future.”

“I bow to your truth,” she said.

Sophie was wearing a clingy T-shirt, and I could see the rather large breasts she must have demanded.

The surgeon probably said something like, Are you sure you want grapefruit-sized breasts? For your body type?

And she knew exactly the contour she wanted.

“Hey, are we having another Unfuneral next week?” she asked before I left.

God, I always blocked out the anniversary of the avalanche.

For the last few years, Sophie and I had been holding an Unfuneral for my parents. We went to the park at night with trowels, buried a handful of the stones they left me, lit a ritual candle, circled the burial ground twice, and then dug them back up. Their dewy, nerdy, quiet-but-full-of-love presence came back to me; I swore; we opened a door with a gesture. After that, they visited me at night, in waves of remembrance, and I knew that the flat world where they were truly dead was not the real one.

“Yah, let’s do it.”

I usually sent Margot a postcard invite with the Unfuneral date and time on it, in case she wanted to join. She never acknowledged receipt.

Aiden was meeting with another trans Gram influencer in our backyard, and I went down the street to the bookstore to avoid them.

An embroidered sign on the Chronos door warned, NO ADV-TECH ALLOWED.

The old red-cheeked bookseller waited for me to enter with arms crossed. In another era, he would have been the type of professor to give wild talks under trees and sexually harass female students, universally beloved by all who had agreed to overlook his faults.

“Magic words?”

I mumbled, “Kant, Hegel, Goethe.”

Flanking him were two or three young disciples who smoked herbal cigarettes and longed desperately for a father figure.

I perused Coetzee-laden shelves until I found something that I was thirsty for, set among the acacia trees and the futile priests of New Mexico. In spite of my knowledge, the mythic American West still appealed to me.

Gun belt. Horsefly. Saguaro.

I sat down in the café area and ordered a coffee from a silent barista. It came in a tureen-shaped bowl, and I pretended that the drink was brewed in a heavy iron pot over an open fire on the western frontier instead of in a smudged glass Chemex.

I started reading. I wanted to be transported, to walk the harsh paths, to cheer for the Hopi and the Navajo, but all I could think about was Blithe, and his night in the desert, with scorpions.

Headphones were banned, so I picked up on the disciples’ whispers as they shelved new arrivals, wearing linen gloves.

“I really don’t know how I can keep working here at fifteen dollars an hour when I have 90K in student loan debt from my undergrad years and philosophy master’s.”