Have you ever lived by a hospital? You know how eventually the sirens are nothing? That blue flashing wail that separates death from life, one day you realize it is nothing to you. What’s coming for me is a siren I’ve halfway tuned out. All I know now is that it’s angry. And it closes things. Ends things. There’s something it doesn’t want me to do, to breathe, to see, to feel, to know. I’m not sure which, but it wants something to end. Have you ever stared into a mirror so deep and so long that there’s a monster in there? A witch? A demon? What do you have? I have this. It’s nothing. I am always on the verge of seeing something.
It’s not the trolls. The daily rage. Not even the rage of highly trained, respectable, angry white academic men, or anonymous reviewers, the gatekeepers forbidding entry, forever warning me that the next gatekeeper is exponentially more terrible, the mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear, draining everything I can give to my career just so you won’t think you’ve neglected something. This isn’t it. This is a pattern with repeats: the old white men match up at the generational joins, just like when you hang wallpaper. Over time you realize the pattern doesn’t actually get any bigger. And once it’s up, everybody stops seeing it.
Instead, tune into the foreground. In front of the patterned wall stands a blank figure, a beige dummy from a store window. It has breasts and no face. Its raison d’être is to be that on which you may hang what you will. When the dummy makes these academic men mad they charge it wildly, like fighting stags. I suppose, in a way, it is about reproduction.
I know the deal, I agreed to it. I understood that I would be cast into a pit of flame for revealing the secrets of this Society. This weird club to which I seem to have been inadvertently granted admission while the universe wasn’t paying attention. I may, however, quietly remove myself from the arena. This is always allowed and often the wisest strategy. In the last year, I pulled out of three conferences. In advance of the third one, I was explicitly told by the organizer that I had been added for gender balance (making a ratio of 1:12), then scheduled to speak at a time I could not attend. I asked to move to a later spot, but he said that time was reserved for the headline speaker. I knew it would be okay to drop out, though, because my name on the program was all they needed from me. A character for their story.
Oh the slings and arrows. It’s not that. Zoom out. The sound dopplers from siren-cry to the taunting of children, nee-naw nee-naw neh-neh-nee-neh-neh. I don’t need thicker skin. Zoom out. What’s coming after me is something else. Something much worse, something that intensifies with scale instead of disappearing. Is it something I have done already or something I am going to do in the future? Is it outside of me or is it me? What if you got to the end of your life story and you were the baddie? What would Hitler make of his biographies? Am I really garbage?
—
I finally found Humberton again. It was just last June, at a hotel in Paris, and we were both there to speak at a conference on normativity. It was another one of those events that gave me the impression I’d been added at the last minute to avoid a sausage fest, although at least this time nobody said it in so many words. I agreed to the invitation at once, though, when I saw that Humberton had already been signed up. It was nineteen years since I’d last seen him. Why had I never written to him? I could have asked him about Deb. I could have. But some deep part of me already knew the reason not to. Still, when the invitation came and I saw his name on the speaker list, I thought it must be a sign. A sign. What an idiot.
My first evening in Paris, I saw him at the hotel bar. All the principal speakers had been given rooms at the same small hotel near the conference venue, reserved in advance by the conference organizers. Or more likely by their graduate students, who had probably done all the grunt work of arranging and administering the event. The hotel was a tall, slim building with Art Deco aesthetics. The elevator was original and took a long time to get anywhere. The rooms were narrow, with single beds and no wardrobes, and the whole ground floor was taken up with the lobby.
The lobby’s floor and walls were covered in black and white tile that made footsteps bounce around the space, sounding small echoes of the grand Wren Library in College. There was a tiny bar at the back, really just a few shelves of bottles and a table with two green lamps. I approached and asked Humberton if we could talk. He seemed pleased to see me, but I suddenly realized, once it came to it, that I did not feel the same.
Humberton looked strange and sad. His hair, strong and silvering when I’d known him, was mostly gone. A white semicircle was all that was left. A tired diadem in the painfully
