I thought it was too late. I did not yet know that the molecules in a body of water go in any direction. Imagine Orlando’s surprise when he wakes up a woman after living decades as a man. Imagine mine when, on the Friday before my 42nd birthday, I inject T for the first time. It’s the color of something that a wasp—not a bee—might make. The exact color I imagined Ben Affleck’s character shooting into his buttocks in A Body to Die For, when I watched him a quarter of a century ago from the leaf-print couch that appeared in everybody’s house. Congratulations, says my doctor—you have the testosterone levels of a teenage boy and the estrogen of a woman in her 40s. Nobody mentions that I’ll have a little dick—or maybe they do, the way the adults told me I’d have a broken heart someday and I thought it meant one thing while actually it meant something wildly different. Time has nothing to do with it. The T coursing through my body feels like someone left the lights on all night long. I am Rio. I am Tokyo. I think I finally understand why men are men, I say to my friend. She jokes, Don’t be out here in these streets, but we’re both a little curious about what comes next. I walk the city feeling for the first time like the pavement belongs beneath my feet; block after block with this strange, erect new feeling. I chase something that keeps changing, the way Orlando for hundreds of pages goes after the goose that flies too fast. But I don’t want to be Orlando. I want to be George Michael. I want to be Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Die Hard III (but not Die Hard II), or Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills, or an X-Man who exists only to be hurt. You can be T-shaped, the website says. You can have the jaw you’ve always pictured yourself having. You can grow a beard that won’t sweat off or smudge. My voice changes. My smell, too—the difference between bread and toast. Something slots into place. My own words in my chest, rain in a drum. The dog listens better to commands now. Children startle. The women I pass look at me with a question on their faces. My father-in-law blinks at me like I’m somebody he’s supposed to know, or a German panzer he once saw on the History Channel. My dreams are full of all this stuff I could never before do while unconscious: land a punch, get caught in a torrential downpour, ride a thundering animal with a sloping body and a thick, wet coat. Every female should have a little shot of this every now and then, I think—but then women would set fire to their fleets the way they did in Troy when they wanted their men to listen. My father always wanted a son. He cried when the last girl was born. I wonder what he would say now, if he weren’t ashes; I wonder if we would both carry the scent of soldered metal. Water molecules move in any direction, yes, except the ones at the surface have nowhere to go but down. Orlando lived 300 years without aging. As do I, from Friday to Friday, syringe to syringe. A prick beneath my belly button, tiny beads of T shining like Orlando’s pearls against Virginia Woolf’s moon. If water moves in all directions, then so must blood, right? And if time has nothing to do with it, then I am back on the couch with my childhood friend, telling her, I wish I were a boy. She’ll run and tell / her mom is banging a spoon against a bowl / a guttural sound comes out of the mother’s mouth / which ends with That’s such an ugly thing to say. So I spend lifetimes as a woman. I wear a yellow dress I love. I am the before and the after. At the end, Orlando looks up, sees a plane for the first time, knows it to be the goose. At the end, I understand there is no water, no body, no blood, only an idea taking shape against the flickering light. So what should we call you? What are you now? Him? She? They? Them? Call me Orlando.
