The Convulsion Factory

enough.” She gulped her drink in desperation. “He’s not satisfied with my reasons for the change. He says I’m doing it because as a boy I was so threatened by the thought of wanting to make it with my mother.” Hysterical laughter. “Freudian quack.”

“Answer me one thing,” Gary said, low and electrified. He yanked open his shirt to bare his chest. “Just what the hell is happening to me?”

They stared at his nipples, in full extension, plumped as though ready to nurse. By now a pattern of four more pink-brown welts had erupted beneath them, down his ribs, like especially prominent mosquito bites.

Alexis smiled broadly, mischievously. “Isn’t that sweet. You empathized with Lana more than we gave you credit for.”

“This is some kind of joke to you?” Gary shouted. In that moment he wanted to hit Alexis, woman-in-the- making or not.

“It must’ve been love.” Gabriel leaned in to dart his once-feminine tongue onto a nipple. Unexpected pleasure trilled through Gary, horrifyingly intense. For a moment he wanted to feel it again, ever the hedonist.

He snapped his shirt closed, head aswim. “But I’m not the one who was taking hormones.”

“When two people love each other,” said Gabriel, “a little bit of each one stays inside the other. From you, Lana took a certain amount of independence, I think.”

“And this is what I got from her? Tits?” His laughter rivaled Megan’s in hysteria.

“It’s much more than that, Gary, surely you can feel that by now,” Gabriel said.

Gary peered down his torso and felt a rush of vertigo. With a clearer head maybe he could make sense of this, pinpoint some allergic reaction as the culprit. But a clearer head was at least a morning away.

“I don’t want this, I don’t understand…”

Gabriel propped his head atop a loose fist. “Do you know what the worst part of being us is? The very worst aspect?”

The question sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Try for an answer, any answer: “Your body is wrong, a prison…? What? Just tell me.”

“That’s it for me, all right,” Megan said.

Gabriel cocked his head. “Not quite.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” Megan shrieked, then stood and whirled on Gary. “I hope you know someday what it’s like to wake up every morning with something like tumors hanging between your legs! Because that’s what these are to me!” Clumsily, she hitched up the tight black dress she wore. Her genitals were framed within a garter belt and the tops of her stockings. “These are wrong! I don’t want them and nobody will help take them away from me!”

Alexis rolled her eyes. “I hate when you’re like this, girl. You’d think it was PMS.”

Gary watched, mortified, as Megan lowered herself enough to plop her genitals, flaccid from estrogen, onto the tabletop. Something new in her eyes, though, a drunken madness made worse by grief.

“Nobody cares,” Megan murmured, “I’m a joke and nobody cares,” then she seized Gary’s wine to smash the bottle against the table’s edge. She held the dripping, jagged remnant and for a moment it gleamed like surgical steel.

“Just a few little cuts, it’s no big deal,” she said.

Blood was drawn at the first firm stroke, Megan’s face twisting into an agonized mask of rapture and liberation. Alexis screeched and pushed herself away in the booth. Gabriel reacted with more sorrow than shock, shutting his eyes as Megan continued to saw.

New sights, sounds, tastes, sensations … damn them all. This was too much. Gary bolted to his feet and reeled from the booth. Fixed his eyes on the way he’d come up and lurched toward it. A moment later a firm hand gripped his elbow to steer him another way.

“Let me help you,” said Gabriel.

He tried to wrest free. “I just want out of here.”

Gabriel held firm. “And this way’s quicker, I promise.”

Gary struggled another moment, then saw the exit sign glowing where Gabriel pointed, and surrendered.

Gabriel hustled him through the gathering crowd, and when they burst through the exit, released his arm. Now on the roof, Gary recalled Lana’s talk of the garden. The fresh air hit him like smelling salts, thick and tainted with the watery brown scent of Mississippi mud. It drew him on, and he lurched past greenery, shrubs and bushes and small trees in planters. Within, shadows moved to the rhythms of breathy moans, and he saw them: face to face, head to lap, groin to buttocks.

Help. He needed help. Medical help.

Near the far edge of the roof, Gary collapsed, spent and shaking. He rolled onto his back, beginning to shed tears at the night sky while distant thunder rolled. The desultory rains were moving on, leaving gray and violet clouds in their wake, boiling past the face of the moon.

Gabriel knelt beside him, rested a comforting hand upon his traitorous chest. Beneath the hand, Gary’s skin throbbed. It wasn’t unpleasant, this rebellion, and part of him yet remained intrigued.

“Poor Gary.” Whispered, soft.

“What’s wrong with me?” Choking on tears.

Gabriel shook his head. “Megan — I’m sorry you had to see that. I was afraid she’d hurt herself someday. Things could never move fast enough for her.”

Gary shuddered.

“I never got to answer my own question. What the worst part of being us is. Can you guess?”

Again, that nudge of familiarity. Further this time, all the way to recollection. Lana had put to him the same question the night they’d met, before he had known the truth about her. The riddle had gone unanswered, soon forgotten.

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

Gabriel looked fondly down at him, that androgynous face at once strong and tender. But calculating. “We can’t go all the way across, you know. We never will make it one hundred percent.”

His hand stroked Gary’s lap, popping the button of his slacks and drawing the zipper down. Massaged him, bared him, and, heaven help him, against all expectations he was growing erect.

“If you’re going man-to-woman the surgery’s pretty successful but the hormonal changes are lacking. If you’re moving the other way, like me? The hormone change is better, but not the surgery. They can build me something that looks like a cock … but it won’t much act like one.” Gabriel gave him a squeeze. “This spontaneous hard-on? It’s something I’ll never know. At least, their way.”

Gabriel began to peel away his own clothing and reveal his hybrid body. Still on his back, Gary saw moonlight glint off the shiny healing scars of a double mastectomy, amid sprouting hair. Lower, Gabriel’s last remaining femininity hid within a triangle of hair.

“You’ve known Lana’s half, now try my point of view,” Gabriel murmured, then straddled him, mounting firm.

Raped. The thought was murky, surreal. Am I being raped? His hips surged upward all the same. Tomorrow had always been soon enough for self-reproach.

“So the very worst part of being us?” Gabriel stared down, sheened in sweat. “We’re made, not born. We can’t procreate. But … I think maybe you can change that.”

This was more than coitus, Gary knew when he saw the others gather round to watch. This was tranquilizer. This was anesthesia. Bribery and reward and homage.

“A friend once told me that the South is a land of ghosts.” Gabriel’s breath was deepening with the rhythm, voice growing huskier. “I believe that. And I believe that New Orleans is a magic place. There are people here, they know things that others feel they have no business knowing at all. Maybe they’re right. But I don’t think so.”

When Gabriel stripped Gary’s shirt away, he saw the twin rows of nipples aligned down his torso. Erect and straining, like those of a sow lying before her farrow of piglets.

Gabriel bent low, placed his lips to one, and sucked.