Cover

PRAISE FOR

FUTURE FEELING

“Smartly set in a strange, yet familiar American offscape, Lake weaves a tantric tale that measures the timelessness of trans identities not in well-intentioned DSM diagnoses, civil rights movements, or social media pedantries, but by cherishing the fissures in the rock wall of intersectionality. For as Future Feeling proves, it’s in these misalignments, misunderstandings, and inappropriate joking where we have space to be ourselves.”

—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“Who is this Joss Lake who seems to have peered into my mind? I loved this weird, fun book, and now I want to bite Joss Lake’s hypnotic style or maybe live in this book for a time. Or maybe we already do? If you want to feel better or worse about the time you spend on the internet, take my advice and buy this very book and then go post about it on Instagram. Joss Lake’s Future Feeling is turning everything upside down. I think I might still be buzzed from reading it.”

—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“The uneasy future conjured by Joss Lake is really a naked readout on our crumbling present moment. Like every ambitious literary visionary, Lake uses his delirious imagination and potent narrative gifts to sharpen the mirror on how we live and feel now.”

—Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet and Notes from the Fog

“Future Feeling marks a delightful contribution to the ultra contemporary sci-fi canon. Like (and unlike) the best of cyberpunk, Lake transforms the alienation and flatness of technoculture into a fully dimensional and absorbing alternate reality complete with sprawling queer resistance movements, t4t flirting/obsessions, and sexy magic plant life. And like the best humor writing, Future Feeling is ridiculously fun and smart, and accomplishes that rare and difficult goal: the conversion of anxiety into laughter. I loved this book. It is about the internet, but it is more fun than the internet!”

—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

“I devoured this funny, charming book of trans friendships and sly cultural commentary; a story about what truly matters for those of us lost in the maelstrom of identity and media. Here’s how unable I was to put it down: I accidentally dropped it in the toilet, fished it out, and kept right on reading.”

—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

“A wildly imaginative, subversively futuristic romp through the depths of the trans psyche, Future Feeling’s rendering of the forces that converge upon queer lives not only provokes while it entertains, but ultimately leaves us so much more hopeful for the world to come.”

—Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest: A Memoir

“In this brilliant and breathtakingly inventive debut, Lake captures the nuances, pain, and absurdity of obsession and idolization as we follow this refreshingly original narrator navigating the all-too-relatable process of feeling comfortable in one’s own skin and becoming a self. I couldn’t put this book down.”

—Zaina Arafat, author of You Exist Too Much

“Weird and wondrous, Lake’s eye-popping debut recalls the transgressive gender- and genre-bending of Jeanette Winterson and Samuel R. Delany but fashions something entirely original.”

Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Future Feeling will fit on your shelf right next to Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl . . . Lake has constructed a wonderful world where trans identity is celebrated and centered, where trans characters are allowed to be messy and complicated and human. It’s, quite honestly, the kind of book I’ve been waiting for for a really long time. I’m so glad it’s finally here.”

Christina Orlando, Tor

A.B.L.

The summons arrived the day after the wedding. Through honeyed dreams, I heard the knock.

Pulling on a stiff cotton robe, I shuffled to the door, stepped into the dark hallway.

There it was on the navy carpet, the magenta wax seal on a normative manila envelope.

I picked it up and pressed it to my muscular chest.

It was a literal miracle that I had gotten this far, that I, once-lowly Pen—always prying into other peoples’ lives, loosening the line around myself and diving headlong into others’ dramas, tastes, phrasings, ways of wearing a dick—was now being called to the Rhiz-Port for the next level of initiation.

I snuck back into the stuffy room with the summons and threw myself down on a sofa to prepare myself to open the envelope. My love rolled over in bed.

I wanted the Rhiz to know how I felt. Read me with your Bio-meter! See the golden power that lights me up! I wanted to shout, but the messenger was gone, and my love still slept.

1

In order to explain how I was called to the Rhiz-Port the day after the wedding of Aiden Chase and Rachel Remedios, we have to start back in my less-enlightened days on the other, more miserable coast.

A few years ago, I became a man in the city while working as a dog walker, creeping into other peoples’ houses to retrieve their pets, obsessing over their interiors, their quilts, and their adv-tech aromatherapy spritzers. I’d been a hopeful child—even after my parents were killed—but as I transitioned, injecting myself with shaky hands every week, I crossed into the Shadowlands, where inconvenient oozes get dumped and scorpions scuttle.

In the mornings I’d wake up in my shitty apartment, open my phone, and go to the Gram, where Aiden, also a trans guy, spent his days lounging in pools of California sunlight, drinking maple water beneath a palm tree, wearing not-yet-released SpaceShoes, musing about how to be your “true self.” I admit, if I hadn’t been incredibly insecure back then, none of this would have mattered to me. If I’d possessed a solid sense of self, he could have molded each pube-like hair of his beard into a style that was milder than full-on gay bear and more kempt than the average cis, and it would not have destroyed my entire day.

I would have accepted my own patchy mess of facial hair—and dark urges—with a wry and full heart.

Alas.

I didn’t know it at first, but I needed to track down Aiden’s shadow as much as I needed to generate my own light.

Every damn weekday, Aiden unveiled a new portrait and the world (his 99,000 followers) watched his creepy mustache change from fuzz to a blond block, his biceps grow into pastel muscle tees, his lips receive anointments of juice and juniper water, his facial structure harden out of abject female fleshiness, and his limbs extend on all manner of mid-century modern furniture inside his minimalist, plant-filled enclave, and each morning, I thought about killing him in a metaphorical way, the trans-father whose shadow I wanted to step out of, even tho dude was younger than I was.

His first post. Picture it.

Him, reading, shirtless, on a wicker sofa out on his patio, framed by hanging candle sconces. He stared languidly at the camera, as if the mirror had always been his bruh. He held a book tilted toward himself at stomach level so you couldn’t see the cover, only his directive, BE TRUE, tattooed above the fading surgery scars. Out in the darkness beyond, his partner was surely waiting to be fucked, if only Aiden would stop fucking himself over and over again with his phone.

It would be a minute.

The only caption was a repetition of his tattoo, BE TRUE, and when I saw it, I thought, Ugh, here’s this beautiful trans guy in his lush backyard and I can’t even video-beam with my former guardian without wanting to apologize for transitioning and bringing drama into what could be her staid retirement!

Doubtless you are wondering, What kind of fool would take a Gram seriously, anyway?

Yes, that is where Aiden and I both erred. In our defense, Grams are one of the few places to see trans folks; blame it on the peculiar manifestations of late capitalism—Saintly Secretions of Non-Solace!—but only newer media contain any evidence at all that trans people are doing more than being murdered and getting kicked out of the familial abode. One could say my Aiden-rage reached hurricane-level swells because here was a trans dude—on the public internet, with hologram status—and all he could offer my impoverished imagination was a life as sleek and empty as all architecture since 1991.

Back then, I was casually hooking up with a celebrity, and on an intellectual level, I knew how much production went into façades: the makeup, the lighting, the PA who handled credit card statements and seltzer runs. And yet, with Aiden’s Gram, I still got seduced into believing his perfection was real, and then I was left gutted, like a teen who has binged a TV series on a long weekend and was disappointed at reentering a world that is never cut into episodic bites.

I sometimes fancied myself an evolved person, but would an evolved person spend at least fifteen minutes every morning comparing my long scroll of curlicued flaws to this person, as flat as a screen?

The list included flabby abs, trauma responses to loss and sudden noises, a tendency toward fantasies of spanking someone in a field full of gently swaying flowers, midwestern sensibilities including “niceness,” a future that appeared clouded in smog.

Each morning, I awoke, went to the backyard, and immediately scanned Aiden’s bod on the Gram, asking, Why can’t I attain such delicious perfection? A holey apple staring at a waxed, genetically modified one. I had no other trans role models, so who could really blame me for moving toward this trans-parent like a toddler swimming to open, tanned, and muscular arms?

We all need parents, and mine had been dead since the avalanche.

Disgust and love are self-perpetuating states. With Aiden, I swung back and forth between loathing and longing, and the universe always offered evidence for either pole.

My friend Sid generally tried not to inflame my Aiden-obsession, but one day he couldn’t resist and told me about Aiden’s pet goose.

Sid, my first friend in the city. We’d met in a bodega. I must have been looking particularly forlorn, staring at a row of flavored water, trying to decide whether I wanted the upscale cloudberry in a glass bottle or the everyperson’s lemon in a plastic, Earth-killing one. He walked straight up to me and asked if I wanted to dog-walk with him.

He read me.

I had my carabiner attached to my shorts, and at the time I was walking dogs in the fancier neighborhoods where you were required to fill out the following after each fifteen-minute stroll:

Walk Assessment

Mood (100 words):

Negatively influencing experiences (100 words, if applicable):

Activity for intellectual stimulation:

Doggie friends or enemies made (100 words):

Size, color, shape, and approx. weight of feces:

Duration and quality of urine:

I immediately agreed. Sid had known I was trans from my height, my beautiful face, and my irregular beard. I knew he was trans because he properly identified me. Even though he got on my case for not taking the job seriously enough, we were each happy to have a trans buddy in the dog-care world.

We spent a blissful year together, and then Sid asked his business partners to buy him out and he moved to L.A., like every trans person who found themselves wanting resurrection in a less gritty place. Who doesn’t dream of waking up from gender-affirming surgery to palm trees?

Still, there weren’t any good top or bottom surgeons in L.A., and the fantasy, like all fantasies, remained even more potent in its insubstantiality.

After he’d settled into a studio apartment with pea-soup-and-bacon-shaded carpeting, Sid texted me: I was at a party at Aiden’s place and the putz (he liked to interject a little Yiddish now and again) has a goose named Agatha.

That was all I needed to know to make a complete character assessment of Aiden Chase.

The laws of common internet decency rest on the understanding that if you have a goose named Agatha, you are obligated to overrepresent her. The fact that he chose to micro-document the reddish hair growing at the tip of his chin when he had Agatha running around, eating bananas, told me that his value system was all askew, and yet there he was, instructing an entire generation of young white queers on how to cock your snapback just enough to denote rakish young non-str8 without crossing into either “urban” or skater poseur territory.

Now that you know how disgustingly seductive Aiden was, I can proceed to the day when the balance shifted and the gawking voyeur and the flat subject were thrown into an industrial blender and wholly reconstituted, like that new meal-replacement line, Whizzerd.

Let me set the stage. The Black Rains had not yet begun, tho forest fires, flooding, and next-level storms had been reshaping the terrain for many years. I was still a lowly dog walker, creeping in and out of other folks’ homes. In my own apartment, I’d become a worn-down receptacle of my roomies’ substances. Walls did very little to stop the passage of the Witch’s beetle-shell extracts, asparagus decoctions, burning angelica leaves, moss, and myrrh, and the Stoner-Hacker’s weed, Mexican food, laughter at his video games, angst at his video games, and loud thumps every time he picked up Infinite Jest and then threw it back down on the floor.

I was no longer in the deepest part of the Shadowlands, nor was I in the light; I had found a ledge between the ooze below and the crisp air above.

That fateful morning I put down my plant, Alice the Aloe, and my coffee. I knocked three times, waited for the Witch’s booming “Enter,” picked up my things, and crossed into the heather-moss-and-dried-insect smell of my roomie’s bedroom. She knelt on the floor, her head under a violet shawl, reciting “The Hymn to Promote the Fecundity of the Fields.” The door to the backyard was open, the feeder swinging with birds. They loved the Witch’s honeyed insects, and she loved their shit.

The Witch paused and the unclean smoke of her room spooled around me.

Without moving her head, she said, “Note if there is any disturbance in the air today. We crossed under the light of the Worm Moon last night, a potent time when those wriggling creatures begin to wend their way through the cold earth.

“Blessed Bringers of Beatitude,” she howled scathingly, and I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about.

I passed through her room and stomped down the steps.

An empty packet of cigarettes had blown onto the grass-patched ground. The Witch kept crumbs, hairs, plastic strips that protect bottle seals, business-class envelopes, specialty bird shit, and other detritus for her spells. I was always trying to be a “good” roommate, and I forced myself to leave the white packet there. It would remain part of the tableau, along with the rose bushes, the apocalypse-gray condo across the way, an indifferent sky between tree branches, and the chainlink fence that someone had woven strips of plastic through, crude textile art that would soon be removed to go into some biennale.

I brushed construction Styrofoam off the stairs and made sure Alice was soaking up the early March sunlight. When I’d moved in, someone had left her (IDK why I gender her this way) in the dirt, not even buried, her roots exposed. Before I could take into account that I would be living in a windowless room in a Ridgewood apartment with two strangers, I’d gone to the hardware store to buy her a pot and some better soil and then walked her to the bathroom to get cleaned up. I started carrying her outside with me every morning to get some air. She soothed me if I got sunburned at the gay beach.

I sat down on a lawn chair, opened the app, picked up my coffee mug with FUTURE BUSINESS SCHOOL written in faded gold dust, and prepared for some Cali bullshit that would sink my bioaffective levels half a bar closer to depression.

The internet is just a low-grade representation of human consciousness, I reminded myself, and all those coding dendrites and coiled fiber-optic cables and locked web server catacombs are shittier versions of how trees talk to each other.

Why was I about to look at him if it made me miserable?

“Human beings are funny,” my therapist Sophie always said, which I took as a lighthearted way of accepting that we often run in the opposite direction of our desires, and that even knowing that we’re running in the opposite direction doesn’t necessarily change anything.

In his Gram, Aiden stood on the roof of a hotel, looking out into the distance. Of course, he was shirtless. He’d set up the tripod and his tattoo could be seen, a shadowy banner across surgically sculpted pecs. He was not in his usual biome. Instead of woven furniture and fruit trees, there were skyscrapers sitting vacant and unfinished.

Heaping Hillocks of Hellfire! I cursed in the style of the Witch.

He was here.

The caption: So gr8ful to be in the city for a special project. I am always replenished when I get to bathe in the hum of New York. Sending muscular love + light.

My phone’s screen started to turn white, and the matchbook-sized hologram projector lifted out of its side. His perfect body hovered in my backyard, just below the cherry blossom tree. Aiden had enough of an audience to activate hologram-tech.

Welp, I thought, maybe it’s time to see this character IRL because when moments are strung together like language, in a breathing place, it is harder to hide behind a pose, a tired line, a landscape overswept.

When the hologram faded, I waved my hands through the space where his body had been.

Buzzing with anxiety, I texted R, my celebrity booty call. We had met the summer before on Cape Cod, due to forces so providential that they proved the tired-ass world was still enchanted. We continued to fuck each other, she a B-list movie star still playing teenagers and I a melancholic dog-walking trans guy from the non-coast, which made a kernel of inexplicable sense.

Hey, (I always had to sound aloof) u know Aiden Chase from the Gram? Could u get me a meeting with him while he’s here?

She did not respond.

Even tho we (men) are supposed to be rugged individuals who embark on heroic journeys alone, needing nothing but our Siren-barren solitude, the truth was, I couldn’t stalk Aiden by myself.

My other roommate, the Stoner-Hacker, was winding down his midnight-to-nine shift of Galaxy Hunt. Soon he would light a bowl and sleep until three, order some food, smoke another bowl, do some high-level hacking, reject his pinky-ring-wearing father’s calls about getting a real job, smoke again, and settle in for another nighttime battle as an intergalactic druid warlord.

As long as he opened the window, turned on a fan, used Bluetooth headphones to mute the constant bombing of Viking spaceships, and wiped up his late-night microwave explosions, I didn’t much care what he did. The fact that we had opposite schedules cut down on the awkward encounters when he walked around in his underwear yelling at his dad or trying to press his bean-sauce-and-cheese-splattered Styrofoam box on top of the trash instead of taking it out, and I had to pretend that I didn’t see his medium-sized dick through the opening of his penguin-printed boxers.

The S-H had assailed me with his immaturity for so long (the molding potato-pipes left in the sink, the waking me up at three in the morning to tell me about the colors of his existential dread, the immersing into VR soccer games until he became a dehydrated puddle on the floor and his father called me looking for him) that it was hard to conceive of him as useful.

Even so, I found myself walking back through the Witch’s bedroom. I passed her immobile on the floor, crossed the kitchen, and tapped on his door. No answer. Knocked harder.

“Hey, man,” I said casually, giving no immediate signal that I was stepping out of my role as compliant trans roommate who transferred the S-H’s untouched delivery food in the sink to the trash can after three days and had a supply of That’s okays to all his friends who, before I had robust facial hair, used to stumble, “She . . . he . . . I mean, shit, sorry, I mean, he, does he want a hit?” The S-H would go, “Sorry, dude, do you want some?” and I’d say, “That’s okay, I have stuff to do.”

I cracked open the door and inhaled a smell-lasagna of takeout containers, weed, Febreze over the weed and takeout containers, and some brand of manly cinnamon aftershave. The S-H swiveled around in his desk chair to look at me. He was shirtless in his Grinch boxers, showing his pale little-boy chest, which never fattened no matter what he fed it.

“Can you geo-tag someone for me?”

It was less a question of knowledge (I knew he siphoned imperceptible amounts of money from the many bank accounts of his father’s clients) than a question of his willingness to help. I hadn’t sent him exasperated texts about the marshes of hair-in-toothpaste left in the sink in a while; I figured our relationship was in a good place.

“I don’t know, bruh.”

“What if I drop off and pick up your dry cleaning?” I asked.

The pile was probably composting in his closet. The S-H’s father bought him clothes for the job he wanted him to have, a junior investment analyst, and the S-H wore each button-down shirt once, over his underwear, and then threw it into a pile and closed the door.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!