Mangoes

Chapter 1

My keys, my phone, and my hoodie's drawstring, all in a tall brown paper bag, are pushed across a desk by a grinning nurse. It’s a smile whose refinement betrays underlying disgust. One rehearsed during hospital staff meetings on cultural sensitivity, flashed between coworkers in response to an inane patient request. I return a terse smile of my own and scoop the bag under my arm.

“Bye now, Miss Bee,” the nurse says. “Take care of yourself.”

I nod and turn toward the exit door as another, larger, nurse unlocks it and swings it open. He hadn't said more than three words to me in a row at any point in my stay. He is my favorite. “Thank you,” I say in a half-whisper.

“Mm hmm.” He steps aside and makes no attempt at eye contact.

I plod through the doorway, led by the larger nurse. The grippy socks bunch at my toes, awkwardly sliding back and forth in my laceless shoes. We descend an elevator to the hospital lobby, a vast room, all glass and waxy-leafed plants. I hadn't come in this way. The way I entered was through a cramped emergency room. After checking myself in, I was placed in a gurney beside a hallway and watched closely by a police officer for the night. I cocooned myself with the rough-knit blanket I was provided and did my best not to think of all the kids with cancer who needed this bed more than I did.

My friend Mason stands waiting at the information desk, half turned away from me, eyes squinting at their phone. I silently place myself next to them.

“Hey,” I said.

“Oh Jesus, Bee don't sneak up on me like that. You've already got me tense as fuck driving all the way here at rush hour. Got all your stuff?”

“Yeah.”

They nod and wave to the receptionist, who has already struck up a conversation with my nurse escort. Something about betting on football, I think. The receptionist waves back to Mason, then glances at me with a smile—a genuine one—and says, “Have a nice day, sir.” Mason glares at him, but before he notices the look, he is already back to chatting.

Mason pulls away and I follow. They lean toward me as we walk, and under their breath they say, “I swear to God if they put you with the men-”

“It was co-ed,” I say.

“Well I would have known that if you had said anything to me. I'm glad you're safe but this is really fucked up. Two weeks without anything and you only call me when you need to be picked up.” They push the rotating doors and we are briefly separated by a pane of glass. “I would have visited you. Fuck, man.”

I say nothing.

Once we reach their car, an early 2000’s Honda Civic with a crack in the windshield and one off-color door, I open the passenger door and brush a pile of crushed water bottles and crumpled fast food wrappers onto the already cluttered floor. I fold myself into the car and slide onto the seat, hugging the paper bag close to my chest. It takes a couple of tries for Mason to start the engine, and once they do, the dashboard rattles and blinks to life with maintenance alert lights. Mason backs out of the parking spot and turns onto the main road. It’s the sort of weather that exists independent of season—an ambiguous mess of warm and cold breezes complemented by sagging, muted vegetation. A few inches of snow had fallen while I was inside, but they are now a greyish slush, black licorice snow cones at the corners of the street. I rest my forehead against the car window, lazily staring, eyes half-focused as buildings and cars pass by. I don't notice Mason is taking the route to their house instead of mine until I hear the crackle of tires against  the gravel of their driveway. It’s a quick drive. We could have walked.

“Why are we here?” I ask without turning from the window.

“I'm not leaving you alone,” Mason replies.

“I have to get my stuff.”

“Your mom picked up your backpack for me. She said she watered your plants and did a couple loads of laundry too.” I don't want to imagine what my mom's reaction must have been upon seeing the state of my apartment. I hope she did my dishes.

Mason's home can be discerned from its nearly identical neighbors at a two block distance. Where most houses on the street are largely unremarkable, theirs begs for attention. Their lawn, currently a wilted mass of native flora, is a sight to be seen in the warmer months. Wind chimes made from multi-colored glass shards dangle from the eaves, sagging the gutters from years of rough winds and occasional haphazard replacement. On the outer side of the porch railing hang a half dozen hubcaps that Mason and I hand-painted with cartoonish floral designs back in high school. The paint has chipped at the edges and faded, but the colors still contrast with the dreary weather. Flower pots of varying shapes and sizes clutter the porch stairway and crowd the front door. Few of them harbor plants; even fewer, living ones. This is made up for by the jungle that is the house's interior. Hardly visible as more than an emerald blur through misted windows, Mason's living room hosts an ecology rivaling that of the most dedicated hobby botanists' collections.

“These are new.” I roll a hanging vine between my index finger and thumb while kicking off my shoes just inside the side entrance. Its rosy, bean-shaped leaves splay out and bounce with the rotation. Mason shuts the door behind us. The house's warmth and humidity envelop me with familiarity.

“They’re string of hearts. Do you want coffee? I know it's late but I've got decaf. Drip or french press. Glass of wine?”

“Tired of  coffee and I can't drink on the meds. You steal these?”

“I'll stop propagating plants for free when they start putting armed security in the garden section. How about tea?” I nod and they turn a corner to descend a tight set of stairs. I follow, feet cold against the tile steps. The basement is unfinished, it’s where we spent most of our time as teenagers. In the years after Mason’s mom died, the two of us met up here every weekend. Mason’s aunt would drive them here from her place a town over. Mason technically owned this house, but their aunt insisted they live with her. They had to switch schools. Without someone to tend to it, the house fell into disrepair, neglect eating away at it like a fungus. Now, clutter lines the walls. Damp paper files and broken electronics crowd out our old board game table. It’s just as humid down here, if not more so than upstairs. Mason keeps their hydroponic microgreen farm on the far wall, verdant and pristine against the chaos that is the rest of the basement. The quiet trickle of the water pump is just soothing enough to balance my discomfort. 

We both climb the stairs, each with freshly ground tea leaves in reusable steeping bags. There are 255 different possible flavor combinations of the brewable plants Mason has. They place their bag down on the table as I stick my nose in my selection and sit down at the kitchen table. They named this mix “Puppy Dog Tails.” I don’t know how, but it smells masculine; not brutish, just the right mix of floral and spiced to produce a smell so opposed to the delicate beauty of a hibiscus in bloom. Mason places a steaming mug and a spoon in front of me. It’s one of their tacky novelty mugs that I always imagined throwing against the wall just to see shatter. I would never tell them this, of course. It has two red dragons curled around an image of a twenty-sided die. I drop the tea bag in and watch as bubbles form around it, holding it aloft in the water as burgundy whorls seep from the leaves inside. The bubbles detach from the bag and it falls ungracefully to the bottom of the mug. Mason sits in a chair opposite from me and sips their–surely scalding–tea. Their mug is in the shape of Snoopy’s head. 

“Bee, what the fuck happened?” Mason asks. They stir their tea so quickly, spoon clinking against the ceramic, that I worry for a moment that Snoopy might get a headache.

“I went crazy.” It was true, really, but only in the way that one goes to the bathroom or to the gym. It’s routine for me, at this point, to lose my mind every six months or so. I have to leave work, often without warning for my supervisors except for those who know me well enough to recognize the signs that I’m heading toward a crisis. I end up either under intense watch of my parents or in a hospital.

“I know that. But what happened this time? Did you fuck up your meds?”

I shift in the chair, trying to align my butt correctly with the contour of the seat. I once broke one of Mason’s chairs by squirming around in it too roughly. I cried on my way home because of it. I nod even though I know I was taking my medications exactly as prescribed. 

“You have to stop doing that.”

I freeze. Did they mean, Stop nodding, or, Stop moving like that in my chair, fatso? My face flushes red and sweat beads on the back of my neck.

“This shit is serious, Bee. Drugs like that fuck up your system. Not taking them correctly fucks up your system worse.”

I nod again, holding back tears, and pick up my mug. I blow on the surface and watch as the ripples form against my breath. I think of Bessel functions.

***

Mason and I are on their couch. I’m drawing while watching them play a strategy game I could never quite understand. My ballpoint pen travels in lazy circles around the page. I begin drawing a Sierpinski triangle. An equilateral triangle first, then another inside it, this time upside down. Then, right side up triangles in the negative spaces, and so on. When I was younger, I used to call them “nth-order Triforces.” That was before I knew they were actual objects of mathematical significance. I still call them that in my head sometimes. I like to think it keeps the triangles humble. 

“I don’t know whether I want to continue transitioning,” I say. The words feel dry, disgusting, coming from my mouth, like spitting mucus when you have a bad cold. 

I’ve been taking hormones for four years and I’ve done all the textbook things you’re supposed to do as a trans woman. I grew out my hair, started wearing earrings, softened my voice with practice speaking into the memo app on my phone. I haven’t done much to alter my wardrobe, but the time I saved choosing outfits is instead eaten up by a painstaking hair removal routine. Most people in my life treat me as a woman these days. With the exception of an occasional pronoun slip-up or a cringe-inducing “bro” or “dude”, my loved ones are on board with my transition. Strangers are a different story. I’m gendered correctly maybe one in three times by strangers upon first interaction. I try to avoid them altogether. 

Mason pauses the game. They turn to me and say, “Tell me more.” There’s a softness in their voice that they reserve for conversations like these.

“I’m tired of dividing every room I’m in.” I lift myself from the floor slightly and turn my body toward Mason, but not quite at them. I avoid eye contact. “Even when I’m alone, there’s always some part of me that doubts that I am what I say I am. But when I’m with people, I don’t know who respects my identity, who wants me dead, and who doesn’t give a fuck either way. It’s near impossible to teach when I just don’t know which of the undergrads hates my guts. At least when I work with colleagues we have something more engaging to talk about than basic calculus and homework extensions.”

“Do you still feel like a woman?”

“I don’t know what that question means anymore. I thought that if I told myself enough times I did feel like a woman that eventually I would know. But I don’t, and I’m realizing that I never did. I don’t think I transitioned for attention, like, I know there was some genuine basis for it. I know I like the effects of the hormones and I like getting she/her-ed. I just don’t know. I don’t know.”

“That sounds very non-binary to me,” Mason replies. They speak with authority.

“Maybe I am.” I look back down at my paper. I write non-binary in a careful scrawl and surround it with wiggly lines. I flip the page over and draw elephants, each smaller than the last, in a line trunk-to-tail. They descend the page in a parade, shorter and shorter, toward a vanishing point where the elephants become be infinitely small. I think of how many of the elephants I can never see, can never draw, because of the largeness of my pen’s tip and the diffusion of its ink into fibrous paper. I think of the limitations of my body’s precision and how I’ll never be able to draw infinity, only argue around it, using letters from alphabets I’ll never be able to read and symbols that mean nothing at all on their own. I wonder why I chose arguing like this as my life’s work. I make sure each visible elephant is smiling.

***

The next morning, I wake up to the smell of imitation eggs cooking. Mason’s allergic to real eggs, or just doesn’t like them. They never told me which. I sit up and stretch, bringing my chest upwards and my shoulder blades together. My spine crackles. I pick at the corners of my eyes and squeeze my eyelids shut as tightly as I can until I see fractals. Mandelbrot, Weierstrass, Dragon. I reach into my bag to pull out four bottles of pills. I portion them out accordingly. Each a distinct color and shape. Mason has left a cup of water for me with a sticky note next to it indicating so. I place the pills on my tongue and swallow enough water to make my throat hurt on its way down.

“Hey,” I say to Mason, who hasn’t noticed me.

“Hey!” they reply, peeking over their shoulder. They look back to the stovetop. “I’m making breakfast if you want some. Eggs, bacon, whatever you want. I could make pancakes, or even grilled cheese. Seriously, whatever you want.” 

The thought of food makes my stomach tighten. I’m supposed to take my meds with a meal. I wonder if I can get away with just water.

Mason continues, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night about maybe detransitioning. Do you think it’s, like, impostor syndrome?”

I pause and tilt my head slightly, my eyes trailing off in the opposite direction. My head still hurts and this is early for such an intense question. I’ve heard the words impostor syndrome before, but I had never really thought to talk to anyone else about it. “Impostor doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I say slowly. “I feel like a tourist, like I’m not really living life for myself and I’m just collecting stories in spaces where I shouldn’t be welcome. I think I’m just a bad person.”

“Should is a word that shouldn’t exist. This is textbook impostor syndrome. As your friend, I want you to know that I’ll always be here to support you through your self-doubt. I know you, and I know you’re not yourself right now. Don’t make any big life-altering decisions so soon after a big trauma like a hospital stay.”

“It’s not a big decision. I’m just thinking.”

“Give yourself a break from thinking. It’s all you do, all day. You deserve a rest.”

I don’t know how to give myself a break. I’ve never been able to shut off my thoughts. I don’t see how I could get rid of the narrator without getting rid of myself entirely. The new medications calm it down and let me direct it more easily, but something still feels off, like the rails of my train of thought are built on ever-shifting sands and all it would take is a little disturbance to send me crashing down infinite dunes again.

“Do you think you need the permission of a native speaker in order to learn a new language?” I ask Mason. They turn to me, their eyebrows furrowed in that familiar way. 

“Where did that come from?”

I reply slowly. “I’m embarrassed that I only know one language. I want to learn Greek, maybe, but I feel like doing so would be an intrusion.”

“I’ve heard you present at a conference, Bee. You already know Greek.”

***

There are fourteen missed texts from Mom, three from Dad, and just one from my boyfriend:

Where are you?

I open my Luke’s message and quickly type: 

did you ever hear about the myth that says that soulmates’ hearts are joined by a string that connects them wherever they go? sometimes I worry our strings get tangled in buildings with lots of doors

I hope he reacts to it well. He’s always very accommodating.

I sit down across from Mason with a slice of french toast. It tastes chalky, from the faux eggs I assume, but I don’t mind the texture so I eat it happily. They’ve made coffee. I dip a spoon into mine and stir gently, then lift it from the mug and blow on it until it’s cold to the touch. Then, I stir the coffee again. I repeat this a couple more times. Dad once told me this cools the coffee quicker. 

The two of us chew quietly. Mason is about to say something when we hear someone knocking at the door. I freeze. Mason gets up from the table and walks to the door. They open it with a confidence I cannot imagine replicating. It’s my mom. She’s wearing a sweeping black cardigan over a teal undershirt. She has a lanyard with an ID badge from her workplace. It’s facing outward, so I can see the picture on it. She never wears it like that, always flipping it so her face is toward her chest. I’m glad to be able to see two of her.

“Hi Julia,” Mason says, waving her inside.

“Hi Mason,” she replies. She turns to me. “They told me you were here. How are you feeling?” She emphasizes the word they in the way that a student of the violin emphasizes each note in front of their instructor: not with force, but with a deliberate and gentle stroke meant to demonstrate respect for the instrument. 

Mom drives me to my place. I fall asleep in the car on the way there.

***

I sit on my living room floor and scratch my legal name from each new pill bottle using a pair of safety scissors. With each new gouge into the stickers, the pills rattle and rearrange. I think of entropy: how there are so many ways the pills in this bottle could be arranged together and the fact they’re arranged the particular way they are at any given moment is a consequence of thermodynamic laws. The whole universe follows these laws. Being an organism with a body that persists as long as it does is just me borrowing low probability for the brief time I’m alive. When I’m buried, I’ll diffuse into the dirt so that other improbable creatures can find nourishment from my flesh. 

“Sweetie, be careful with that,” Mom says from behind me. She’s folding my laundry on the couch. I continue removing the stain that is my deadname from that which is supposed to heal me. Only God, the government, and the hospital are allowed to call me that name. They’re all on thin ice.