Alien

Joann stood as well and came over to my bedside, “You haven’t eaten for about a week, so I don’t know what the doctor wants to do, but it’ll be at least a day before you’re on real food again. Do you want me to get you a Popsicle?”

“That would be nice. Did anyone find my backpack?”

“It’s in one of the cupboards, would you like it?”

“Please?”

She went over to the cupboards on the wall and fished around until she had my backpack in her hands, and brought it over to my bed. “Do you want cherry or orange?”

“Cherry please.”

“I’ll be right back.”

She left, and I opened the pack to find my book. There was another book in the pocked along with my vampire romance. I pulled it out and turned it over in my hands. Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. It was old, but in good condition. Cover had little damage, just some wear. I opened it to the printing page and saw, ‘First Edition.’ Then under all of the printing information, Copyright 1884. I didn’t know how much it was worth, but I would guess: a lot.

I turned the page to see, in very weird handwriting, “Aisling, this will start to explain.” I wondered who Aisling was, and who had bought this for them over a century before. “I hope they got the explanation they wanted.”

Joann came back then, and I put the book aside. She unwrapped the Popsicle for me, the right way, keeping some of the wrapper around it. Then she sat down again and leaned her elbows on her knees. “We have a lot to talk about. I got a hold of your mom, and she’ll be calling me back soon. She’s getting a plane ticket to come down and see you.”

I leaned back and sighed with my Popsicle in my hand. Then remembered it and popped it back in my mouth.

“Ash, we have to talk about what to do, and I want to lay some decisions on the table. Right now, with present technology, and a lack of time travel, you have one option. Remain biologically a girl. That’s it. With a visit to a therapist for a bit, you might be able to start hormone treatments.” She leaned in and put her arm on my leg. Normally I would be creeped out by a stranger touching me. Instead I was grateful for the contact. “I told you, I work for you. Nothing needs to be reported. And Ash?” Here she leaned in, “I’m not against fudging some records here.”

It was a relief. I’d have a penis again, get rid of these boobs, and be okay for the rest of my life. I could use the right bathroom and change in the right locker room. I took the first bite out of my Popsicle, and felt a few dribbles on my chin..

“Your insurance is required to pay for transitional services, but they won’t do that if the government says you’ve always been a boy. I have to talk to your mom about it but… I know some people in Social Services who won’t mind a little incentive to… move things around for you. It’s very illegal. But imagine what would happen if we tried to do this through the court system.”

She made a lot of sense. This was in all of the shows about children who have some kind of accident and have to hide it, so they won’t become an experiment. I was just thankful I had an adult who understood.

Her phone rang then, and she took her hand off my leg to look at it, “It’s your mom.”

I reached for the phone, took it, figured out how to answer it, and put it up to my ear, “Hi mom.”

“Hi dearheart, how are you?”

“I’m okay. I’m a girl now.”

“That’s nice sweety, how’s school?” I love my mother.

“Rotten, the classes are easy, but the students are crap.”

“How would you like to come live with me for awhile?”

“That would be nice.”

“Good, the closest plane I could get leaves at eight in the morning. I’ll see you .”

I hung up the phone and handed it to Joann. “That seemed like a nice phone call,” she said.

“Yeah, my mom is a psychologist. She’s hard to phase.”

Joann gave me a smile, and then laid her hand on mine, “I can stay here for awhile, or I can let you get some rest.”

“I just want to read my book,” I gestured to Flatland.

“Do you want me to stay? They can bring a bed in for me.”

I tried not to cry as I said, “Yes.”

I opened the book as Joann took out a kindle and her knitting. Then six hours went by.

Flatland was… well it was staggeringly racist. Like, ‘triangles are dangerous, so we encourage wars between them, when we’re not imprisoning them as examples for school children’ racist. And it was alarmingly sexist. Like, ‘women are more dangerous than triangles, so we keep them in a closet at home, but it’s okay because they only have a short term memory’ sexist.

It wasn’t until I got to the part where Mr. Square was talking about how color and art were illegal that I caught on that it was satire.

Mr. Square is a resident of Flatland, which exists only in two dimensions. Half the book is about the limitations of living in flatland, while the other half is about his experiences with Mr. Sphere, and his subsequent imprisonment for trying to tell the inhabitants of Flatland about the third dimension.

Mr. Square lives in a pentacle house with his wife and children and grandchildren, and Mr. Sphere takes him outside, and shows him that the house isn’t a collection of lines. He can see the whole of his house, even the inside of his cupboards, and the intestines of his children from outside.

It’s truly fascinating, once you get past the typical 19th century dialog, and the fact that the only time no one seems angry, is when they’re casually sentencing one another to death. Aisling must have had some strange questions for someone to have given her this book.

I finished it around eleven o’clock, while Joann was snoring softly in a roll away across the room, and went to sleep.

I swam slowly into consciousness sometime in the morning, so late it was early. Joann was still snoring, but she’d gotten steadily louder over the course of the night. It reminded me of my gramma.

In the dark I could see a nurse sitting next to my bed and asked, “Can you hand me my water?”

The nurse leaned forward and scooted the aggravating hospital table closest to me. As it did so, I felt my whole body freeze. The nurse—it wasn’t a nurse—had disapeared a portion of her arm as she moved the table, then reapeared it while it spun into place.

Well you’re a girl now, no reason not to scream. I opened my mouth to do that when it said, “Please don’t scream. No one can hear you, but it hurts my ears.”

I listened and realized that I couldn’t hear Joann’s snores anymore, and laid back, resigned. “Make it quick,” I chocked out.

“I’ll go as fast as I can, but I’m not sure you’ll be able to understand all of it.”

“Make it painless then.”

“Most of the physical pain is behind you, but the next few months are going to contain a lot of the emotional sort.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m asking you to make my death merciful,” I didn’t feel the need to cry, but I thought it would be appropriate to feel that. I was a little disappointed in myself.

“I suppose I could drop by in eighty years, if they’ll let me, and I remember.”

I sat up and looked at its mask face. I could see light shining through from all the way around it’s eyeballs. In an act of defiance I took a sip of water and said, “You’re not here to kill me?” I tried to do it archly, and was bad at that.

“No.”

I took another sip, and tried to pretend I was in a Quentin Tarantino movie. “Then may I ask why in fuck you are here?” Spot on Ash.

The thing ruined the dialog by being reasonable, “We felt—I felt, that you were owed an apology—”

“Oh, fuck off with that.”

“—and an explanation.”

“Not even a Biblical record…” Katie had said.

“Okay, you can fuck on with that.” It turned its head in a dog-like expression of confusion. “I mean, go ahead.”

It gestured to the book, “I’m glad you found it, it will help.”

Some things clicked, “You spelled my name wrong.”

“No, I was quite caref—Ah, I understand. I’m sorry.”

“Anyway, what was it supposed to explain?” Only I knew. The pieces snapped into place. “Do I call you, ‘Mister Sphere’?”

“Mister Glome would be more appropriate.”

“What’s a glong?”

“Glome. It’s a four dimensional sphere.”

“I thought I couldn’t see that.”

“You would see it like Mister Square did. A bunch of shapes that moved in ways you didn’t know were possible.” It waved it’s arm to demonstrate. The flesh between his shoulder and his wrist came undone, while his elbow bent in the wrong direction.

I laid my head back, and gave up the charade, “Okay, you made your point.” You can probably cry in front of this thing. He doesn’t know anything about humans. “What did you do to me?” My voice cracked as I said it, and I didn’t bother to clear it.

“You were injured in what will go into our report as a ‘construction accident’.”

“Well I hope whoever is responsible hurt as bad as I did.” A thought occurred, “Anyway they disappeared before they hit me.”

“And that never made you curious?”

I gestured to myself, bumping my breast as I did so. Damn, that smarts more than I thought. “I’ve had other things on my mind.”

“Yes.” It sounded truly sorry when it said, “I’m afraid I don’t even have the context to understand your situation.” It shifted in the chair again, and steepled too much fingers underneath its chin. “When she fell, she fell on top of you, and damaged a part of your body that doesn’t exist to you.”

“…” I said.

“It doesn’t exist to you, because it’s not in the third dimension.”

“…” I said.

“I have another book that will help, if you wish. Have you read any Vonnegut?”

“He’s on my list, after Anderson.”

“I would move him up the list. Slaughterhouse 5 is what you’re looking for.”

I felt the tireds hit me, and laid further back, “So they hit me where I don’t exist, pretend I accept that. Why am I like this?”

“She hit you at nearly ninety miles an hour. Nine point eight of your meters squared, you understand. It didn’t hurt her, but her insurance is going to take a hit. It almost killed you.”

I was too tired to retort.

“We did our best to save your life. You were in surgery for nineteen hours.”

“I thought I was found on the sidewalk within minutes.”

The freakture looked and surprised me with sarcasm, “Really, Ashley McKinnon? You’ve seen what we are in space. What did you think time means to us?”

I did my best to shout, but it came out as a cry, “Then why didn’t you fix me?”

It looked very sorry, head down, the tension drained from its face, “We don’t understand much about your bodies.The kind of experiments we’d need to do to learn would be incredibly unethical. No doctor or scientist would do it.” It finally hit the crux of the discussion, “Your gender lobe suffered permanent trauma. The part of you, outside your comprehension, that makes you who you are was crushed. The only way to repair the damage and save your life was to fuse some of it together.” Its face looked so sorry then that I almost felt bad for it. “That’s how you came to be this way.”

I closed my eyes. I’d been so close to crying this entire conversation, and now I finally felt tears on my cheeks. “You’re saying you can’t fix it.”

“No more than you could regrow a limb.”

“Why didn’t you just let me die?”

“We have ethical standards, and everyone deserves the chance to live a life, if not the life they dream about. You have many more years to come, Ashley McKinnon. I hope one day you’ll forgive us for giving them to you.” Mr. Glome stood then, all bones wrong, and alien. It made a hand gesture that probably meant something in its own idiom. “For what it’s worth. We are desperately sorry.”

The alien disappeared then without another word and left me to my tears.