The God Thing

for Nancy Mayer

Moses said to God, "When I come to the Israelites and say to them 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is His name?' what shall I say to them?" And God said to Moses, "I Will Be What I Will Be."

–Exodus 3:13–14

God comes after the worst nightmare I've ever had.

The nightmare isn't nightmarish at all. I'm at the family house, in the kitchen, at the end of a visit. My wife and children are leaving too, on their way to do something that involves boots and down vests. I'm curious. I'm always curious about their lives these days. My wife says little, and the older children consider it a betrayal to tell me where they've been or where they are going. My youngest is happy to tell me everything about anything but doesn't distinguish between memory, expectation, and fantasy. "Remember," she said to me once, "that night we were walking home and the dogs were barking at us and it was so terrible?" I didn't remember. I hadn't been there, and I was pretty sure she hadn't either, but after I had uh-huh-ed her through what I took to be a fantasy of externalized trauma, my older daughter began recounting the same event. A night or two before, my family— minus me—had struggled through the dark surrounded by barking dogs.

My dream self, dressed, like my waking self when I'm with my family, in a loose shirt that conceals the breasts my son insists I don't have, asks my wife what they are going to do. "Oh, a lot of things," she says vaguely, turning to usher her warmly dressed children out the door. "But what?" I ask. My voice has a note of pleading that I censor when I'm awake.

In the dream my plea hangs in the suddenly emptied air. My wife and children are gone. I hear them outside on the deck, laughing, bumping into each other, murmuring about their plans.

My heart—not my physical heart but the emotional pump that keeps feeling circulating through the soul—skips a few beats. In waking life, where this moment happens on average four times a week, when I close the door on their noise and needs, I've learned that heart stoppage doesn't mean the end of life. Feeling can skip a beat, emotion can freeze in the veins of the soul, and a moment, a minute, an hour, a day or two later, resume its laconic circuit. I don't even tear up anymore. I take out my razor and shave the gender-dysphoria-magnified stubble from my face and drive away as fast as I can, as though there were things to do, urgent things, on the other side of what used to be my life.

My dream self, though, hasn't learned to survive. It starts to cry. Not the stifled, make-sure-the-children-don't-hear sobs my wife and I perfected while I still lived in the house, but full-blown, lung-emptying screams. In the dream I want my children to hear me cry. I want my screams to dissolve the walls between my pain and their happiness. Deeply asleep, choking on my own anguish, I nonetheless have the presence of mind to try to manipulate and punish them into love.

Their laughter recedes. They've started down the driveway, and I worry that my screaming isn't loud enough to reach them.

Then I realize what's going on. Dawn has broken. The uncurtained window is smoldering muted reds and yellows, light is leaking through the branches, nudging me awake, and now that my eyes have started to open, I want nothing more than to keep screaming the screams I was dreaming. I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Dawn is long over. It wasn't light that woke me. The window is white with fog.

I start talking to God. You see how I feel...