Lovely weather for a little suspension of disbelief, isn't it?

In case you haven't gone there...

[Emasculation]

I came to in a hospital, but that was all I knew.  I knew it was a hospital by the stale chemical smell, the too bright whiteness that surrounded me, the soft intermittent chirps of machinery, and the hushed tones of those around me not yet realizing I was fading into consciousness.  Everything was so numb I couldn’t remember what feeling felt like, or if I ever knew. Then, my body, my memory, my emotions, began tingling all at once with recollection.  

What hurt first and loudest was not the raw, recently repaired flesh underneath my freshly wrapped and padded exterior; not the restraints just tight enough around my hands and feet to keep me from struggling and straining my strategically sewn stitches; not the dull, tribal thud of blood pounding in my brain, simultaneously protesting the drugs and begging for more.  

What I recognized first as the brightest pain and freshest of my wounds, was a sharp fear, attached to an exaggerated gravity threatening to suck me straight down into a foreign hospital mattress, through the floor, and into darkness again.  It was triggered by the slight recognition of the woman to my right, almost hidden in my peripheral vision. 

She didn’t notice me notice her, but continued to speak quietly with a well-groomed man in a well-tailored suit, who answered her in soft, polite tones, dipped in the accent of a country I couldn’t place.  At first seeing her brought relief.  She was the only familiar element besides the white walls.  There was something comforting in her controlled presence.  

Her skin was smooth and pale, with precisely applied makeup bringing life to her cheeks and eyes.  Not a hair of her Jackie O bob was out of place and she wore what I knew to be her favorite made-to-measure black wool Donna Karan suit, the one she wore when she demanded complete attention and compliance.  The edges of my memory thawed, relief turned a shade of suspicion, then was entirely blotted out.  

This was Sandra, my wife, knowledge brought to surface with the sharply spiked pain that had been numbed out by who knows what kind of drug cocktail dripping into my veins for who knows how long.  This stabbing pain came outward from my core like a scream wailing out of a dark damp tunnel, echoing horror, fear, and disgust that I sensed was not unrequited.  Consciousness felt like long, sharp pins, dragging their way to my surface, exposing real physical pain that engulfed me in flames, made me gasp for air. I croaked out my first word in months.

“Please.” 

I had felt pain like this before; the ghosts of pain past were spinning around me.  I willed myself to embrace it, a trick I had learned to get through a healing process I thought I had left far behind.  As I gathered mental strength, and collected whatever wits I found in the muted corners of my mind, the room abruptly stopped. Time had paused to allow re-entry into reality. 

Activity resumed a fraction of a breath later with rushed footsteps, doctors and nurses whispering, machinery whirring and beeping, charts and clipboards fluttering and flapping under scratches of ballpoint.  All I could focus on was the eyes, moving too quickly in their skulls, looking at me, looking at charts, looking back at me, looking at each other, checking electronic devices and the measures of my bodily functions, finally resting dutifully on the woman in the corner in deep discussion with the only other person not in a white uniform.

In an uncharacteristic, momentary loss of composure, my wife sharply inhaled whispers in transit to that man, replacing an expression of uneasy determination with the pretty, perfect features that made up a very familiar mask.  Her eyes displayed motherly concern, ultra soft affection.  The man moved into the periphery.  My wife hovered over me, promising the doctor would be back soon to talk to me, and that the nurses were on their way with more drugs.  I shut my eyes.

“Please,” I whispered again, “just get away from me, Sandra.”

Old memories clamored for attention with new voices.  Just a few weeks ago I had been free.  Free from her, free from the cage of my own body, and living a newly formed life carved out of my former self.  Three months before that, I had just gotten out of another hospital, and moved in with Chiara.  Chiara was an accidental lover, the only one I could count on to take care of me, to love me unconditionally. Chiara reinvented my definition of love by letting me see myself through her eyes, eyes that had seen straight into my dreams. I was desperate for a connection to myself, isolated in a false world of my own construction. I met her by sheer luck, or will.

What changed me were her eyes.  I entered her perimeter a carefully crafted, well-suited and shod, wife-approved paragon of manhood, and was transformed into a creature I could never have imagined. She looked at me, beyond my exterior, straight into my eyes, and she saw me, me.  She smiled.  She found me, she knew me, and she knew what to do with me.  She spoke in soft tones, soothing my fears and awkwardness. She saved me from a desperation that had threatened to suck me down into depression’s quicksand. 

I have no idea how she knew my dress and shoe sizes, but she began to buy clothes for me that she kept at her apartment.  At first we kept to ourselves.  We ordered in, protective of my newly exposed femininity.  She eventually convinced me that I deserved to be out, expressing myself as the beautiful person I really was.  

We both dressed in outrageous outfits made of tight, shiny black, with high heels and blonde wigs to match.  We went to a club in Chelsea called Ina’s Silver Swan, a German restaurant that at the magic hour transformed into a hangout for all types of men who self-identified as women; some who looked like burly mechanics in makeup and dresses, many who looked like gorgeous women but were still really men underneath it all, and a few who had been completely transformed into post-operative women.  There were all shapes and sizes, and though it felt odd to be surrounded by so many people who would be considered freaks by my wife and her mother and many others, it also felt comforting, somehow familiar.  

Chiara and I danced, laughed, drank, made plans.  Dreams came tumbling from my mouth, surprising me as I told Chiara in detail the things I never knew I wanted.  I never knew I wanted anything before.  Since well before we were married, Sandra had been the one to tell me exactly what I wanted, and how I was going to go about getting it.

“Darling,” my wife would tell me, “this is what my mother did for my father, now I’m doing it for you, for us.  These men are important to us.  They’re the ones that will pave the path for all of your promotions.” 

Sandra wasn’t asking me to comply.  Her arrangements of a dinner party celebrating my fifth anniversary at the company her father had created were already in place.  I couldn’t argue with her. Her father had died of ‘natural causes’ according to the coroner, but when his long time assistant fell into a permanent state of mourning after his death, a rumor spread quickly.  The entire company was convinced that his wife, Sandra’s mother, had found out about the one relationship she hadn’t pre-approved.  Rumors notwithstanding, the truth is that accidents in this family just don’t happen.  

Sandra had always been uncannily similar to her mother in looks, mannerisms, and motivation.  She had a way of making me bend to meet her slightest desire.  For years Sandra masterminded every event, every party, every trip, everything I wore down to the socks and shoes she chose to match the suit she had tailor-made for me.  There was not a single person in the company who doubted our relationship.  Our love for each other had been carefully designed for display beginning on the day we met, when she created a ten-year plan that would get us to exactly where she wanted us to be.

My wife is incredibly perceptive and intelligent.  After meeting Chiara, I must have been blinded by the light at the end of my tunnel vision.  I became careless.  I have no idea if my wife noticed the subtle plucking of my eyebrows, or the atypical optimism in my posture, but she definitely picked up on the fact that something was wrong with me, with her ‘me,’ something wrong with the life she had worked so hard to create and have me implement. 

She began to note my every move, and kept a close watch on me, through her friends who were the wives of my co-workers, and through her mother who enlisted errand boys to follow me from work to my car, to Chiara’s apartment, to the clubs.  She let it go on for months, never letting me realize she knew anything at all was different.  The veneer of her treatment of me never changed, and I became happy in the throes of a better existence.

With almost a year of encouragement from Chiara and my new friends in the scene, I finally made a decision that would change my life irretrievably.  It would enlist modern science in an effort to remove the appendages that made the world think I was a man, betraying the inversion I had felt inside me since I was a very little boy, the premonition that I would grow up to be a woman. I didn’t bother quitting my job or telling Sandra I was leaving, I just disappeared.  I dropped completely out of my old life, and moved in with Chiara.  I dreamt of being reborn, completely leaving everything behind.  I wasn’t afraid of burnt bridges; I didn’t want a way back.

Months after the surgery, the worst of the physical healing was over, and I planned a trip to Prague. I had fantasized about it for years, one of a dozen fantasies that kept me sane, kept me from completely losing my shit and exterminating Sandra, her conniving mother, and all of her arrogant friends.  Whenever I needed to escape, having been manipulated into knots yet again by one or all of them, I’d close my eyes and step into my fantasy.  

I’d imagine walking the streets of Prague by myself, my sunglasses reflecting admiring glances from men and women I passed.  I was dressed stylishly, having long ago mastered the art of balancing on high heels.  I’d stop for a coffee so I could sit and watch others pass me by, and finally I’d watch as a tall, elegant man…no, woman, walked right up to me, asking me something I couldn’t understand.  I never got beyond that point, I was afraid to let myself be too happy, to rely too much on the hope that this could actually happen. But this time my fantasy was about to turn into reality.  I was taking bold steps, relying on reserves of inner strength I had stored up over decades.

Chiara took such good care of me while I was recovering that I wanted to treat her to a vacation, but she insisted I go to Prague by myself for the first week.  When I looked deeper, I knew I was afraid to go without her, and she had once again looked straight into me, seeing that I needed to do it by myself.  I was my own person, at last, and did not need the crutch of anyone else to live my life the way I wanted to live it.  She promised to meet me there, and she promised me I had the strength to go on my own.  I believed her.  She hadn’t let me down yet.

I remember so clearly sipping a very expensive cup of coffee, sitting at an outside table in a beautiful café down the street from my hotel.  I was finally there, and it was all so perfect that I wanted to cry.  The afternoon sun slanted across the shops and restaurants across the street, its gold glow highlighting the intricate marble carvings surrounding the doors and windows of buildings as old as history.  I remember thinking to myself that I had never seen anything like it, that it had by far surpassed my dreams, and that I wouldn’t spoil such a beautiful moment by reaching into my bag to get my camera.  

That’s all I remember.  I don’t remember the screams of people diving and thrashing around me, or the crushing pain that squeezed consciousness from me, a wailing siren getting louder, or flashing lights coming up the street much too quickly towards the café.  I don’t want to remember any of that, and so I don’t.

And now this, here, Sandra by my side, and some man by her side, presumably one paid heavily for his services.  My arms and legs useless, weakened by bruises and drugs, tethered to the bed as if to prevent my escape.  What had she done to me?  Just as I was finally free from her, here she was.  In Prague!  

I suddenly realized I must still be in Prague, and here she was, stealing my dream from me.  When the doctor walked in, Sandra nodded to the man beside her, and he immediately began asking the doctor questions in Czech.  The doctor replied to him, then the man whispered back to Sandra in his thickly coated English. This system of communication seemed so perfectly normal to the three of them that it sent waves of fear crashing through me.  The doctor turned his head and barked a few sharp words towards the door, which brought a nurse scurrying in with a fresh bag of clear fluid to be hooked up to my I.V.  The blood was pounding in my head, making it impossible to hear or understand anything anyone was saying.  As the fresh drug cocktail slowly dripped into my veins, I faded back into numbness, lost my grasp on certainty, and Sandra’s voice began floating and echoing all around me.

“Darling, I’m so sorry.  I wish I could make all your pain and all the horrible memories of these past few months disappear.  I wish I would have found you sooner.  I feel just awful.”

I watched her as she broke down, covering her face and pressing a handkerchief to her eyes to absorb tears that were never there.  I couldn’t respond.  I didn’t have the strength, or the will.  I was starting to recede; I floated somewhere just inside myself, and her voice surrounded me.

“I have no idea how difficult it’s been for you,” she said, “but I want you to know I hired the best men to track you down right away, and those same men who found you for me are now going after the monsters that kidnapped you as we speak.  I made sure they will not stop until every last one of them is accounted for, and they know I don’t care if they’re brought back alive or not!”

Kidnappers?  Oh God, Sandra, what are you talking about? 

It took all the energy I had to open my eyes and turn towards her, but once I did the light forced them shut again.  She kept talking, and I knew that once again, she had me completely under her power.

“I hope you’re more comfortable now, darling.  You’ve been thrashing around in your sleep, undoubtedly thinking you were fighting off those disgusting perverts who mutilated and tortured you.  I asked the nurses to restrain you, dear, to make sure you wouldn’t hurt yourself.”

She was brilliant, faultless, and anticipated everything.  My mind struggled to clear itself, to try and understand how she could have pulled this off.  How did she know where I was, and how did she manage to reduce me to this state? 

“Don’t worry, darling, you’re all in one piece again.  The doctors here are geniuses, we really couldn’t have found you in a better city.  They’ve patched you all up, and told me that within just a few months, you’ll be able to have another operation to get your manly parts all in working order again.  We’ll have you back home and back to your comfy perfect lifestyle in no time, darling, please believe me.”

This time the pain came back in full force, not just my body’s pain, but a crushing lifetime of anguish.  The strange bandages and padding all over me began tingling and itching, as if all parts of my body cried out to me, Wake up!  Don’t you see what’s happened?  Look what’s been done to you!  

Then I heard a sad, whimpering pain coming from my groin.  There were parts of me there I had given up months ago, how was it possible?  I left those parts that should never have grown on me in the first place in a hospital in Brazil.  How on earth did they find me here?

Then Sandra’s voice again, tugging on me like concrete blocks chained to my ankles.  I was submerged; she was all around me, filling every crevice, squeezing the oxygen from my lungs with each word.

“Shhhh, please rest now, sweetheart.  You look like you’re reliving your horrible nightmare over and over again.  But it’s all over, darling, and you’re safe now.  You’re with me now.  You’ll always be with me.  Just go to sleep.  Shhhhhhhhhh.”