In the other bubble—as my parents had taught me long ago—was the city of New York. In New York, for the moment, at least, a kind of reality still persevered, and New Yorkers could identify a con man when they saw one. In Gotham we knew who the Joker was, and wanted nothing to do with him, or the daughter he lusted after, or the daughter he never mentioned, or the sons who murdered elephants and leopards for sport. “I’ll take Manhattan!” the Joker screeched, hanging from the top of a skyscraper, but we laughed at him and not at his bombastic jokery, and he had to take his act on the road to places where people hadn’t gotten his number yet, or, worse, knew very well what he was and loved him for it: the segment of the country that was as crazy as he. His people. Too many of them for comfort.
It was the year of the great battle between deranged fantasy and gray reality, between, on the one hand, la chose en soi, the possibly unknowable but probably existing thing in itself, the world as it was independently of what was said about it or how it was seen, the Ding an sich, to use the Kantian term—and, on the other, this cartoon character who had crossed the line between the page and the stage—a sort of illegal immigrant, I thought—whose plan was to turn the whole country, faux-hilariously, into a lurid graphic novel, the modern kind, full of black crime and renegade Jews and cocksuckers and cunts, which were words he liked to use sometimes just to give the liberal elite conniptions; a comic book in which elections were rigged and the media were crooked and everything you hated was a conspiracy against you, but in the end! Yay! You won, the fright wig turned into a crown, and the Joker became the King.
It remained to be seen if, come November, the country would turn out to be in a New York state of mind, or if it would prefer to put on the green fright wigs and laugh. Ha! Ha! Ha!
As the drama of the tragedy of the Golden house moves into its later acts, I return my attention—now! But I was derelict in my duty then!—to the increasingly painful life of Dionysus Golden. It was hard to be in any kind of regular contact with [him]. (I still used the male pronouns when I thought about [him], though that increasingly felt wrong, and so as a gesture toward [his] ambiguity I put them in square brackets. In the absence of clear guidance from [him]—“I don’t yet know what my pronouns are,” [he] told me with a kind of embarrassment—this was my interim solution.) The world around D, the world in which D felt any kind of a sense of safety, had diminished to two and a half places: the Two Bridges Girls Club on Market Street near three playgrounds in the angle of the Manhattan Bridge and the FDR, where [he] volunteered four days a week, and the Chinatown apartment where [he] lived with Riya Z. Sometimes they went to the nightspot on Orchard Street where fire-haired Ivy Manuel sang—this was the half place in [his] comfort zone—but then there was the question of how to dress, and who might approach, saying what, and D’s growing and crippling shyness. At 2-Bridge the problem of attire was solved by the club’s unisex staff uniform, a white collared shirt worn over and outside loose black Chinese pants, and black sneakers on the feet, but everywhere else D was at a loss to know how to present [himself]. After [his] adventure in Vasilisa’s clothes closet [he] had admitted to [himself] [his] pleasure in women’s clothing and had found the courage to tell Riya what had occurred and Ivy also and they had talked about it. “Good,” Riya said. “It’s a first step. Think of this as the beginning of the next three years or so. Think of transition as slow magic. Your private one thousand and one nights, in which you stop being the frog you don’t want to be and you become, maybe, the princess.” And Ivy added, “But you don’t have to go further than you want to. Maybe you’re just a frog who wants to look pretty in pink.”
[He] was getting professional help but it didn’t really help. [He] kept wanting to argue with the Professional. [He] refused to tell me who the Professional was; instead, [he] used me to vent the frustrations [he] kept to [himself] around Riya, whose thing was identity, who had dedicated herself to the idea of the transmorphic fluidity of the self, and who sometimes seemed just a little too eager for D’s MTF transition to occur, and to be a complete metamorphosis. I should have been able to help [him]. Maybe I could have prevented what happened. Maybe we all could. Or maybe D Golden was just unsuitable for life on earth.
I imagine the following conversation taking place in a bare, black-and-white, cell-like room, with the speaker sitting expressionless on an upright metal chair, and [his] interrogator, the Professional, as a highly sophisticated android, a sort of combination of Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina and the supercomputer Alpha Soixante in Godard’s Alphaville. We do not hear either of the figures in the room speaking. There is no sync sound. We hear only the Monologue; although, as the Monologue quotes direct speech, the lip movements of the figures in the room sometimes—not always—match what is being narrated. There is something about the scene that is like an encounter between a prisoner and [his] attorney on visiting day in jail. It would not be surprising if the speaker were wearing an orange jumpsuit (if the scene were in color), or shackles on [his] wrists and ankles. There is also something about the scene which, if properly filmed, might be funny.
MONOLOGUE OF D GOLDEN REGARDING [HIS] OWN SEXUALITY & ITS EXAMINATION BY THE PROFESSIONAL
Chapter One. She asks me, right at the beginning, the Professional, comes right out with it, first question, when you were a child, did you prefer the color pink or the color blue?
I am frankly amazed by the inquiry. Is this a question to be asked at this date in the history of the world, I say: blue or pink?
Indulge me, she says, humor me, as if she’s the patient and I’m the shrink.
I reply, because I’m in that kind of obstinate mood now, Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, once said that pink is the navy blue of India, so I guess pink and blue in India are the same thing.
Why do you find this question so irritating, she asks, it’s just a choice between two colors. I might also ask, did you prefer train sets or dolls. Would you rather answer that question instead.
I should say now in parenthesis that I have never been a Marxist but her line of attack provoked in me strong anticapitalist sentiments. I thought, I replied, that we had moved beyond the materialist categories imposed by the market, pink for a girl, blue for a boy, trains and guns for boys, dolls and frocks for girls. Why are you trying to push me back into this antique, exploded discourse?
You are responding with considerable hostility, she said. Have I touched on something that triggers this display of emotion?
Okay, I said, the truth is that my favorite color was yellow and remains yellow. For a time I tried to swear in yellow like Stephen Dedalus’s friend, damn your yellow stick, but I couldn’t hang on to the habit.