Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

14. The Voice of the Future - Summer 2008

Summer 2008 Some mornings I hear the voice of the future. I wake early, dipping in and out of consciousness, muttering prayers that tangle with half-dreamt dreams. The trees behind my eyelids grow lighter, birds scream, and the paws of small animals rustle so loudly it sounds like they’re foraging in my room. It’s getting late, but for what? The sense of hurry that’s dogged my life remains, but the rationales have faded. Life asleep and life awake—I know it is important to move from one to the other, but I’m not sure why, or to whom. I wash and dress and step out of the latest in the series of inadvertently temporary shelters I’ve found since leaving the house that had been my home. It’s summer, and there’s a small waterfall next door. The sound of water, a hush that is somehow also a roar, is constant. The tangled white water-tresses remind me of the hair I never got to see on my dead father’s head. Morning is my time for walking. The area where I live is forest and water, with roads carved through and houses carved out of summer greenery. Unlike last summer, my first summer living as a woman, I’m not walking to be seen. This summer I’m walking to become visible to myself. I look down at the swirl of the hem of my skirt, the curves of my maturing breasts, the fish-belly flash of my legs. A piece of hair—my hair’s grown down to my shoulders—falls 187 14 The Voice of the Future over my right eye every step or two. I’ve repeated the gesture of brushing it back so many times that it has become natural to me, a feminine gesture that isn’t a copy of what women do but something that I do naturally, because I need to. I walk uphill as much as I can. Estrogen not only breaks down muscle and builds up fat; it also decreases oxygen absorption by the blood, which is why women tend to get winded faster than men. I need to feel winded and to ignore feeling winded. I need to feel my heart becoming equal to whatever road I’m on, no matter how steep. After forty-seven years, I finally feel alive. It’s a strange, almost terrifying feeling, amoral, self-justifying, triumphant. It’s as though, on all the mornings before, I’ve never actually been awake. Never noticed the trees, the birds, the squirrels, the fat rabbit nibbling grass between worn train ties. In one pan of the scales is the shattering of my family, the pain of those who loved me as a man, the losses mounting behind me, and, in the other, there is only this: the feeling of being alive. This, I know, is the voice of the future. If I listen, that future is mine. Once I played the Voice of the Future. The future in question was a gymnasium stage, tricked out with shifting cardboard sets. The play was as ambitious as they come in grade school, a zerobudget account of human history from the invention of the wheel to the present day. The cast included cavemen, Roman soldiers, wagon-riding pioneers, refugees, and presidents. I was cast as the narrator, the Voice of the Future, whose booming, feedbackdistorted function was to explain how the on-stage mayhem represented progress. It was the perfect role for the nine-year-old me—bodiless, characterless, an invisible harbinger of things to come. The Voice of the Future had nothing to say about anything that might give meaning or shape to history. This had happened, this was happening now, soon something else would happen—and that was progress, because the present is inherently superior to the past, and the future is always better than both. Part Three: The Door of Life 188 That, anyway, is what the Voice of the Future said, as empires crumbled and new empires crawled from the wombs of unacknowledged genocides. “Do you ever regret what you’re doing?” my best friend occasionally asks, meaning my transition. Her question reflects the moral logic of progress, which is a comic mode; as in romantic comedies, the happy ending moots all the car crashes and broken hearts that made it possible. Her question points the...