CW: Dysphoria, Implicit Suicidal Ideation
I don’t want to talk about what happened next.
Those first days, they haunt me, worse than death, worse than Abby, worse than anything I’d ever felt on Earth or on Selene. I close my eyes sometimes and I can remember them, the pain and the anguish and the feeling of inescapable doom like a thousand knives stuck in my back that nobody was willing to believe were there. There are days when I cry, still, as the memories wrack my body like the talons of some terrible beast, forcing me into the arms of whichever loved one is nearest, or else to sob and scream.
What is there even to say? I had lost everything. Laura, the love of my life, was gone, never to return. My strength was gone, the unbreakable vitality of my alraune body replaced by the brittle immobility of one who had suffered severe neurological damage from a lightning strike before spending six months in a coma. I was… There were the other differences too, my body felt more like it belonged to some hairy, gangly, deformed beast than to myself. It took days before I convinced the hospital to have a nurse come and shave my face for me. The physical therapy was hell, just hell, taking a body that my mind already recoiled at the thought of and jamming my snout into it if I wanted to ever be able to walk again, take a shower again, live without a caretaker again.
The worst part was that I knew it was all real. If I had been able to forget, to believe that Selene had been a long coma dream and this was the real world, it might have been somewhat tolerable. But coma dreams can’t teach you new languages, and I had learned four of them. I never spoke any of them aloud, there was no point, but I still knew them fluently; my mind would often drift and start thinking in Blueroser or Rochathan, and at times I would reflexively swear in one of those other tongues, forcing me to cover by pretending it was a tic.
I didn’t really have tics, per say. More of a tremor. I was weak everywhere, constantly; six months of total inactivity in a hospital bed will do that to you, but sometimes the nerves would misfire and I would barely be able to make my limbs move where I wanted them to. Even once I regained the ability to walk, a process of weeks, there was a while where I would still use a wheelchair just on the off chance that my nervous system would momentarily forget how to stand. Eventually, through a lot of effort—but Selene had gotten me used to pushing my endurance—I built back up to the point where I could get away with just using a cane, but that was months away, and some other stuff happened in between.
I don’t want to talk about how much people make using a wheelchair absolutely suck. Better by miles than being stuck in a hospital bed, but people are assholes. Anyway, I had a life to rebuild. Priority number one, even above clawing back what mobility I could, was getting my gender back. I needed it back. Seven months of being called Emma, of having a body that was soft and smooth and pretty, was something I hungered for, and being thrown back into my gangly, awful original made it seem impossible that I hadn’t realized before.
There was a problem, of course; if I woke up out of a seven-month coma asking to be called Emma and get the surgery, I would look completely fucking insane. Nobody would believe me, nobody would let me within twenty miles of a bottle of estrogen, and if I was particularly unlucky, it would probably get me thrown into a mental ward. I needed to play it sensibly, which meant coming up with a cover story. After spending many more hours than was healthy, I had a prepared monologue about how the brush with mortality that was my coma had caused me to re-evaluate my priorities, and I had always sort of known but never been able to admit it, et cetera et cetera.
Still, the first person to hear about any of this wasn’t a family member, or my therapist, or anybody important like that. It was a nurse at this one clinic downtown, someone I spoke to once and never met again. The clinic in question was one that I’d found after hours of obsessive searching, one of the first things I did once I had access to an unmonitored internet connection and enough dexterity in my hands to type, and it handed out estrogen without asking a lot of intrusive questions. I’d had to beg Mike to drive me there without asking any questions or revealing it to anyone, because driving was a no-go, and rolling into the clinic on my…
I haven’t mentioned Mike before, have I? He’s my brother. Four years older than me, works at a law firm. We were on good terms but not super close at that point, though him spending seven months thinking I was brain-dead made him unusually susceptible to requests for favors.
It was a terrifying experience. I was alone, rolling along as best I could and hoping my arms wouldn’t give out before my business was done. A global pandemic had started while I was unconscious, so I was paranoid that anybody around me might infect me with a lethal disease. The nurse who asked me what I wanted, who nodded along when I explained to her the answer was “estrogen,” who called me “Emma” when I asked her to… I don’t remember her name, but I’ll never forget her face.
I had been on hormones for maybe six weeks when I started actually coming out to people. Mike first. Then the parents, who for all that they still didn’t really care to be in my life, had at least been footing the bill for all the medical treatments. There weren’t many people from my old life who I cared to be in contact with, but there were a few, professors and good friends and other people like that. Even my old roommate John, for as much as I never wanted to live with him again.
Name and gender stuff was a bit of a hassle, but it was a hell of a lot easier in Illinois than it would be in a lot of other places, so compared to the nightmare of rehab it wasn’t anything. Suffice to say, it was a whole process. Just another thing on the list.
If you had told me before my stay on Selene that, after spending several months in a coma, getting back into my PhD program would be a distant fourth on my list of priorities, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. And yet, putting your job back together feels kind of unimportant when you have to put your mind, body, and sense of self together first. I made lots of calls to people, got told that I could re-join things partway through the fall semester if I needed the time, that the labs were wheelchair-accessible, at least in theory.
And that, at long last, brings me to how I met Yasmin. You see, it is mathematically impossible to afford an apartment anywhere within the limits of Chicago on a grad student’s salary, which means roommates are an absolute must. So I did the normal thing: make a post about it on the school’s message-board thing and hope. I had made sure to make it clear in the post that I was trans and used a wheelchair, which did at least scare away all the assholes, at the cost of it taking about a week and a half before I found anybody who I felt even a little bit comfortable with.
Yasmin and I talked things out for a couple of days, mostly just texting back and forth about preferences and so on, and once we had figured out that there were no dealbreakers, we agreed to meet up. Yasmin was living out of a guest house in the backyard of her parents’ place, so once Mike had dropped me off, I just had to input the code on the side gate and roll my way over some rough terrain to find myself at her door.
The person who opened that door was a stocky Palestinian-American woman, a bit on the short side, her black hair not long enough to cover her ears, a tattoo of some vines on her shoulder, and in her eyes, a look of delight that rapidly turned to shock. I sighed when I realized that I knew precisely what she was staring at and why. My whole gender thing meant that I didn’t look in mirrors too often, which meant there was one part of my body that I had somewhat forgotten to tell Yasmin about.
“You were not kidding about the lightning,” she said.
“If I wanted to come up with a lie about why I use the wheelchair,” I said, “I would have come up with one that sounded less stupid.”
“The scars look badass, though. You could probably make an insane tattoo out of those things.”
The doctors had tried explaining to me, at one point, what exactly the path was that the lightning bolt had travelled that led to the elaborate forking scar starting at my right eye and trailing down my face all the way to the underside of the jaw. Judging by the way the doctor didn’t seem convinced of the words coming out of his own mouth, I’m fairly sure it had more to do with Tersine’s bullshit than the actual mechanics of lightning. Either way, the mark is enough that people tend to at least do a double-take when they see me the first time.
I shook my head. “Physics tends to care about professionalism. Besides, it gets kind of messy under the mask.”
I had rolled forward maybe a foot when I found out there was a step. A tiny step, but enough to be problematic.
“I told you that I’m ambulatory, right?”
“Yeah.”
I got up out of my chair and pulled it over the step, then briefly considered if I could leave it at the door. It really felt like I could, like walking was just a minor challenge that I could overcome; but just as well, I knew how quickly that could change. I did a quick stretch before sitting back down.
“Electricity damages the nerves moreso than the muscles,” I explained. “So I can swing pretty rapidly in terms of how much control and strength I have based on, well, whatever this wreck decides it wants to do.”
Yasmin furrowed her brow. “I… well, thank you for telling me about that, Emma.”
She didn’t seem particularly thankful. In fact, she kind of looked like I’d made some sort of offensive faux pas. Then again, my continued existence felt like an offensive faux pas, so who was I to judge. Several seconds passed in silence as I rolled my way over to Yasmin’s small living-room setup, fitting my own chair into the gap between the couch and the small TV.
“Would you like something to drink?”
I shrugged. “Tea, I guess.”
So Yasmin fixed us both some tea. We set to talking business, or more precisely, housing. We’d already discussed things like financials and price range, our separate needs and wants for the location, and so on and so forth. Being together meant that we could start looking at individual places, dissecting them for size and accessibility and all of that. Hard, boring, work, but at least it was taxing only mentally, as opposed to all the physical therapy I was doing.
We had settled on one of two places, and applied to have a look at both of them, when the conversation finally trailed off. My instinct was to go home, but it wasn’t like sitting in bed and decaying at my parents’ house would do me any better than sitting in my chair and decaying at Yasmin’s place.
Eventually, it was her who picked things up again. “Are you okay? I mean–ugh–that wasn’t what I meant. Obviously you’re recovering from a life-changing injury. I mean more… how are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Considering the circumstances.”
Yasmin looked away from me, though I couldn’t trace her eye-line to see what she was looking at. “You don’t look fine. And I don’t mean because of the scar or because you’re in a chair, that’s whatever. You look like you just came back from a war. Hollowed out.”
She was right. She was right and there was nothing she could do about it and that made it all the worse. I scowled, which made me suddenly conscious of the way that the scar tissue pulled on my lips and cheek, which in turn just made me more angry.
“I’m fine.”
“There’s not anything you’d…” Yasmin sighed. “If you ever need to talk to me about anything that’s going on with you, you can.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re not my girlfriend. We’re roommates.”
“I know that, obviously,” she said. “But if we’re going to be living together, I’d prefer that I not have to deal with any kind of extra baggage if I can at all avoid it.”
I didn’t say anything, instead slowly rolling myself around and aiming for the door.
“Do you at least have a therapist? I know a few queer-friendly ones that I can recommend.”
“That’s none of your business,” I said. “Next Monday, right?”
“Next Monday,” she said, defeated.
“Thank you for the tea, and everything else.” I winced as I rolled down the step. “But please don’t pry like that.”
So our relationship was off to rather a rocky start, but we at least did manage to do the apartment tours. At which point we found out that neither of the places in question were wheelchair-accessible, and had to start the process all over again. The second time around we were more successful, though I was getting closer to being able to leave the chair behind with each passing day. It had been maybe four or five months since I woke up when I finally moved in and was able to resume my studies.
The first day back at my old lab, nearly a full year after the day I’d forgotten my phone inside it and changed the course of my life forever, felt like a fever dream. The same faces, the same professor leading it, a lot of the same old equipment in the same places. But everyone looked at me differently. My hair was longer, my body had been changed both by the softening effects of estrogen and the coma, and of course there was the scarring. It was a slow and awkward process getting me back up to steam on what everyone had been doing for the last year, made all the more difficult by the fact that it was hard for me to really care.
I had my wheelchair with me as a backup, but by that point I was mostly operating on crutches, or at least trying to. They made the work difficult, clumsily bumping into things as I milled about the lab, adjusting the machines back to my preferences and carrying out whatever instructions nobody else was going to pick up. But then I noticed something. It felt almost like the opposite, like something had noticed me, because at first it was just some niggling little thing in the back of my head.
I stared at the readout on one of our machines, a cutting-edge sensor for detecting electromagnetic fluctuations in certain forms of lightly ionized fluid matter, wondering where I’d seen the intricate arcing patterns before. The parts of my brain responsible for memory and cognition were supposed to be undamaged, for fuck’s sake. But it wasn’t something I’d seen in this lab, or anything I would have recognized before I went to Selene. The patterns in the machine, the patterns I was seeing right before my very eyes in my old laboratory on Earth, were almost identical to the vast arcs in the cage of copper wire enshrouding the salt mine where Tersine and I had had our final confrontation.
That was the machine that had sent me back. The implications were astounding. All at once, my calculative mind went to work, synthesizing what I knew from my physics education with the fragments of electromagnetovitalics that I had scrounged from books and university lectures on Selene. In a matter of seconds, a theory had begun to emerge.
I could build a machine on this side. Vitalics weren’t real on Earth, the physical laws were different, but there must have been some way to construct a bridge. And if I built that bridge… I could go back.