Mangoes

Chapter 2

Mom spends the night at my place. In the morning she leaves for work. She wanted to call off, but I convinced her to go. Her students need her and I doubt her principal would appreciate her taking any more time off. She was a wreck while I was in the hospital. She is every time. I heard from my dad that last time I went in, she didn’t leave her bed except on visiting days. She kept it together while she was visiting, for my sake. I don’t know how I would have handled seeing her cry then. I was disconnected from reality, but I think that would break me. 

Psychosis is a messy thing. It makes everything feel significant, like there’s some grand conspiracy that you’ve only now stumbled onto, but whose clues stretch back as far as your memory goes. When you’re in that mindset, your imagination runs wild and it becomes impossible to discern what is and isn’t credible. I hate the feeling more than anything. I can’t stand being so vulnerable, and when you’re stuck in the hospital, around other crazy people, the delusions compound with each other. I once had a conversation with another patient where I thought he was Jesus coming to take me to the afterlife. I’m not even religious, but it felt so real to me. Remembering it still makes me wonder if it was a legitimate spiritual experience, if all the stories of burning bushes and many-eyed angels were the result of similar episodes. I later learned that the patient I had been talking to believed I was Jesus. Go figure.

After I watch my mom pull out from the driveway, I grab a bowl of dehydrated noodles from my pantry and open it, removing a sauce packet and bag of freeze dried vegetables. I tear open the packet of vegetables and pour them into the bowl, then fill my electric kettle and set it to boil. I have no concrete plans for today, but I really should check my email. It's been two weeks without contact. My advisor is going to kill me. I’m going to show up to his office at our regular time and he’s going to ask me where I’ve been. When I tell him I went insane and I’ve been in the hospital, he’ll jump across the desk and tear out my trachea with his teeth, spewing gore across the room. My kettle turns off with a click and I pick it up, pouring the hot water into the bowl. My hand slips and I splash some onto my fingers. I swear and slam the kettle back onto the counter. I rush to the sink and run cold water over my hand. The skin on my fingers is furiously red and throbbing. I stand there for a time listening to the faucet run. I shut off the water and vigorously shake my hand, flinging water across the kitchen. I sigh and pick up my bowl of noodles, now just cool enough to hold, and sit down on my couch in front of my laptop.

I slurp my noodles as I scroll through unread emails, skimming over alerts for new publications, requests for homework extensions, and messages from various faculty asking where I’ve been. I’m about to open the latest email from my advisor when my phone buzzes. I pick it up and open a message from Mason.

wanna come over? miss you 

I finish my noodles and grab my car keys, leaving without closing my laptop. I send my mom a quick text that I’m going to Mason’s place. Traffic is bad enough that it takes me nearly an hour to get there when normally it would only take me half. I listen to the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. It rains the whole way.

***

I make my way up Mason’s driveway on foot. I park on the road because there’s a car in the driveway that I don’t recognize. It’s a dark green Jeep with a mess of bumper stickers spanning the back, ones with pithy slogans advocating for environmentalism and tolerance. The sort of milquetoast liberalism that seems nice, but is often superficial. The Jeep certainly doesn’t run on solar power.

I approach the side door and see that it’s cracked open slightly. It’s just warm enough outside that this makes sense, though I worry that Mason’s plants will get too cold. I open the screen door and knock on the inner door. It opens slightly and I peek inside. I see Mason on the couch next to someone I don’t recognize. She’s taller than Mason, wearing a fitted tank top and a flowy, patterned skirt that looks like a busy tablecloth. The two of them are huddled around a green mound on Mason’s coffee  table. The girl looks in my direction and smiles. Mason waves me in.

“Hey Bee! This is Adi, my dealer. Adi, this is Bee. We’ve been friends since, like, elementary school. She’s super chill.” I appreciate the compliment, but I wish Mason had told me there would be another person here. My anxiety spikes and instinctively wipe my damp palms on my jeans. I step into Mason’s living room and sit on a chair opposite the couch. I see now that the green mound is about half an ounce of weed sitting on a scale. Adi is portioning it out onto rolling papers. She picks one up and licks the edge, working it into a tube and twisting the end. There are already a dozen or so joints inside a gallon ziplock bag. She places the newest joint into the bag and begins rolling another. 

The first time I got high, I was a freshman. My roommate’s friend brought his bong to our dorm and the two of them passed it back and forth a few times before offering me some. I took a hit, holding it in for a few seconds and watched as a white haze billowed from my mouth, whirling through the room before being sucked through our mini air purifier. A minute later, I was sobbing. I saw myself in the third person perspective, as if I were hovering just outside our third floor window. The room was cartoonish, complete with comic book style stippling. When I moved my hands, streaks filled my vision. I tried to stand up, but stumbled back into my seat. I cried more. My roommate and his friend left to get food. They didn’t come back that night. Mason called this an abnormal cannabis experience.

In spite of my horrible first time, or maybe because of it, I bought my own weed from my roommate’s dealer the next week. As long as I had money, I didn’t spend a single day sober. My grades tanked. I stopped attending class or doing assignments. By the end of the semester, I was failing everything and risking my scholarship along with it. I kept this from my parents. When I moved back in with them for the summer, I was too far from campus to buy any more weed and I didn’t know anyone who would sell me some. Mason and I hadn’t talked since the summer before, so I didn’t know that they had evolved into a bit of a stoner. I spent the first weeks of the summer dejected and irritable. My temper had a hair trigger. I snapped at my mom one day for asking me to do the dishes. I had never done that before. I cringe whenever I think about it. 

My therapist told me once that after people have certain traumatic experiences, they sometimes seek them out again, trying to relive it to gain some control over what has happened to them. I don’t buy this explanation. I bought and smoked all that weed because it felt good. Because it put me outside of my mind, and being inside my mind was horrible. That was the summer that I realized I’m trans. Drugs have a way of showing you things about yourself that you don’t acknowledge when you’re sober. This is true for weed. And psychedelics, I assume.

Adi finishes rolling the joints while Mason plays a game on their PlayStation. I silently scroll through social media. It numbs me just enough to forget about Adi for a moment, then I glance up to see that she has placed a blank orange pill bottle full of brown capsules onto the table. 

“What are those?” I ask, placing my phone in my lap.

“Shrooms. Wanna see?” Adi shakes a couple of the pills into her palm, snaps the lid back on the bottle, and tosses the bottle to me. I catch it with both hands and inspect the pills. They’re clear gelatin capsules filled with a ground up substance. I open the bottle and smell them. They smell vaguely earthy. I pop the lid back on the bottle and set it down on the table. 

“Cool,” I say, unenthused.

“Ever done psychedelics?” Adi asks. I shake my head. 

“They’re great for self reflection and trauma. Very therapeutic. I had a friend in high school who took an eighth of shrooms the day her dog died. Spoke with the dog’s soul for hours in a crystalline palace of light. Really cool stuff.”

“Did she ever get depressed afterward?” Mason asks. “Like, did the grief hit her later?”

“Any time she felt bad, she would just trip again and feel better.”

Mason glances at me with an expression I can’t place. I pretend not to notice. Adi places the pills she picked out into a smaller baggie. She places the scale and the bottle into her purse, then stands up, stretching, then cracking her knuckles. “I better go. Getting late.”

“No, come on, stay a while and smoke with us,” Mason says, quickly glancing at Adi and then back at their game. 

I shake my head. “I’m not smoking, but yeah, you should stay.” I have no idea what compels me to say this. Something about Adi makes me curious. I want to know what her deal is. 

“Sure, I guess. Got nothing else going on today,” Adi says as she sits back down, pulling a pink lighter from her purse. 

Mason and Adi smoke three joints, one after the other. Adi offers me a hit a few times. Each time I reject it she shrugs and takes another hit. I can feel that familiar ache of craving, but I keep my mouth shut. Mason knows about my weed problem, but if they have any reservations about smoking in front of me, they aren’t showing. Adi plays some music from her phone’s speakers. The tinny sound hurts my ears and I put in a pair of earplugs I carry with me. I can still hear their conversation. They’re trading hypothetical questions. What would you do if you woke up and left and right were switched, so everything’s backwards? What would you do if you saw a man on the street wearing a shirt with your face on it? “Adi,” Mason starts, “what if–”. They shake their head. “No, wait, that one was stupid.” I can see their mind working over something, mental gears jamming with serrated cannabis leaves.

Adi ignores the attempt at a question. Her head lolls in my direction. “Bee,” she says, drawing out my name like someone who’s never heard of the insect before. “What’s your deepest wish? Like, the desire so central to your being that everything else in your soul revolves around it. If you could talk to the gods and ask for one thing, what would it be?”

“I wanna be a mom,” I reply. The answer  is so obvious to me that I blurt it out before realizing that I might not want to share such intimate information with a stranger. 

“Aww, that’s adorable!” Adi coos. 

“I’ve wanted it ever since I was a little kid. A very cisgender feeling, totally normal for a six year old boy to cry after learning that he can never have his own baby,” I joke. I look to Mason, expecting some acknowledgment. I get none. Their head is tilted back to look at the ceiling. They’re stroking the arm rest of the couch. 

Adi’s eyebrows raise. “Hey, my cousin can’t have kids and he adopted a baby–just ten weeks old–and that’s just as much his baby as he was his own mother’s. Can you donate sperm?” I would have been caught off guard by the bluntness of the question, had my mind not been on the same topic.

“Probably not. Hormones usually make you infertile and I’ve been on them for years.”

“What about a uterus transplant? I’ve heard they’re working on that,” Mason chimes in. “I would give you mine.”

“I appreciate that but they’ve only done them on cis women. I don’t know anatomy well enough to say if it’s even possible to do on me. And anyway, finding a surgeon willing to do that would be difficult. There’s a lot of transphobia in medicine.” A couple years ago, my second time in the psych ward, one of the staff came into my room to supervise me shaving. I was openly trans at that time, and all the staff knew. This woman offered me the electric razor, but I declined. I was too depressed to shave. Being in a place like that really drains you, and anyways it’s supposed to be a less judgmental place than outside. She lunged at me, holding the razor up to my face, trying to shave it for me. I have no idea why she did that, and when I tried to confront her about it later, she just walked away. 

“Well, they’re always making advancements in science. You never know.” Adi pauses, deep in thought. “”Have you ever heard of HeadScratcher? They have surgeons on there sometimes and they always talk about the cutting-edge shit they’re doing. Really cool stuff.”

“I haven’t heard of that, no,” I say. 

“It’s like a game show. Check it out sometime.” 

I nod. Mason shifts in their seat and yawns. “It’s getting late,” they say. They stand up and stretch. Cracking their neck in the way that always makes me worry. “Adi, you should stay. I don’t want you driving.”

Mason grabs blankets and pillows from the linen closet. Adi situates herself on the couch and falls asleep almost immediately. Mason and I descend once more into the basement to retrieve a cot. Down there, I see that our board game table has been cleared of its debris. On top of it is a single empty pot. It’s ochre colored, the size of my head. Sitting on the radiator beside it is a translucent tupperware container. Mason maneuvers the clutter on the floor to pick up the container and show me its contents. Inside it is an envelope of wet paper towels cradling a wrinkled, brown, lima bean-shaped thing. They scoop it up gently and cradle it in their palm.

“This is a mango seed,” Mason says. “It arrived last night, just after you left.” I can hardly imagine a fruit coming from something so ugly. It smells weird too, like a dirty kitchen sink. “I’m germinating it for a couple weeks until it sprouts. Then, I’m gonna stick it in some soil and let it grow down here under that tent.” They point to an A-frame structure made of PVC pipe and plastic sheets. It’s big enough to crouch inside but I hadn’t noticed it because it’s nestled perfectly underneath the stairs. Inside is what I assume to be a UV grow lamp.

“Cool, but is it going to be in your basement forever? You can’t plant it outside. Gets too cold.”

“I’m just trying to see if it will grow down here at all. When I move to Cali I can take it with me.”

Mason has been talking about moving to California since high school. They say they want to live in a place that’s more accepting, and that the only thing keeping them in Michigan is their aunt, since their mom died back in sophomore year. I think Michigan is accepting enough. I haven’t had any altercations because of my identity except in the hospital. I don’t want to leave. Even if things get really bad for trans people, I’m not leaving without a fight. At least that’s what I tell myself. I don’t blame anyone who does, though.

Mason and I carry the cot up the stairs, bumping it against the wall a couple times. They set it up in the living room and I settle in for the night. Under a heavy, scratchy blanket, I pull out my phone. I open the Wikipedia page for mango trees, Mangifera indica, and skim it along with a few linked pages until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. 

***

I wake up and check my phone. It’s 2:00. Wikipedia is still open, and I type “shrooms” into the search bar. Disambiguation: could refer to a horror movie from 2007, power-ups from the Super Mario franchise, or psilocybin mushrooms. I click the link and am taken to the page for magic mushrooms. I’m halfway through the section on dosing when I hear Adi turn over on the couch. I press my phone screen against my chest and hold my breath. Two minutes pass, and I slide out of my cot into a standing position. I creep over to the couch, breathing as slowly as I can. I open Adi’s purse and locate the pill bottle. I open it, muffling the sound with my shirt over the cap. I reach in and pick out a single capsule, slipping it into my pocket, and replace the cap, putting the bottle back in the purse. I know this is a bad idea. Dealers always know exactly how much product they have. Addicts are the ones who forget, using indiscriminately until they’re out. I try not to think about it as I slip back onto the cot and squeeze my eyes shut.

***

I wake up again, but this time Adi is gone. Mason is stretched out on the couch, playing another game on mute. I pull the blanket off myself and bunch it up at the foot of the cot.

“Hey, good morning,” Mason says. They pause their game. “Sorry about Adi. She can be kinda self-involved. I love her. She’s great. But she doesn’t care about much more than partying. I don't want you to feel obligated to entertain that, since I know you can’t smoke and stuff now.”

I’m not sure why they’re apologizing. “It’s fine, really. I don’t mind being around it. Just can’t partake.” I shrug, then pause for a moment. “Did you know that mango flies don’t even pollinate mango trees?”

“I didn’t even know mango flies were a thing.”

“They are. They’re super freaky. Lay eggs in the skin of large mammals and the larvae develop in there. You don’t want to see the pictures.” I, unfortunately, have seen the pictures. In my teenage years I spent an alarming amount of time on the darker parts of the internet. There was so much death and mutilation on those sites. The carnage seeped its way into my brain and I couldn’t remove the images from my mind for years. I used to tell myself it was practice for seeing the horrors of the world, that being a human means I’m likely to endure these things at some point in my life, and I had better get used to them before I’m caught off guard. I used to feel a sort of glee bringing up the grossest things to my friends just to see their reactions. I’ve seen worse shit than you have. I’ve long since sworn off visiting those sites, but the imagery stays with me, a polyp resting somewhere in my brain, waiting to burst from my skull at any moment, reminding me of how I treated myself.

Mason is about to say something when my phone rings. I pick it up off the cot and accept a call from my boyfriend. I really don’t want to do this right now.

“Hey, it’s Luke. Where have you been?”

“I was in the hospital. At Mason’s place now. ”

“Come over. We can get lunch.

We should talk in person.”

I nod before realizing he can’t see me, then say, “Okay. See you soon.” I hang up. “I’m gonna head out,” I say to Mason. They hold up a granola bar and raise their eyebrows. I nod and they toss it to me. I pocket it, give a quick goodbye hug, and I’m out the door.