Chapter Eight:Talking Shit[cw: self harm, suicide, abuse, transmisogynoir, police violence, derealization]

  “I’m worried about this,” Scatter is saying with careful, measured words. “We all are. I’m not trying to put you on the spot, but… this is becoming a pattern.”

  Piper looks sad. She’s always looking sad these days. The energy she brought to things before, the way she put forward her own perspective, has drained out day by day and now she’s just living moments at a time, haunting the space like a ghost. They’re gathered because she has fresh bandages up and down her arms. Lilly doesn’t know whether or not to be worried. The cuts this time were not as deep, not as directly an effort to do more than draw blood. But there are a lot more of them. Dante found her this time, not even trying to hide it, and he and Lilly cleaned and bandaged Piper who just watched, passively. Nails watched too, offering occasional phrases of support that rang hollow to Lilly.

  Houndstooth, an emo guy Lilly doesn’t know very well but who’s one of Piper’s friends, Dante, and a couple of the regurs at the house are sitting around the living room. Scatter is pacing back and forth by one of the doors and Piper is leaning against the wall. She doesn’t even look like she feels attacked or wants to be doing something else, she just looks miserable. Defeated before the day even began.

  The energy in the house has been bad tely. Less people have been through. The structures in pce when Lilly first moved in have been colpsing, dirty undry piling up and people going hungry, zines left unfinished, patches half-embroidered, bits of bicycles abandoned in the middle of the process of repair all around the house. When she sees a pte with moldy food, it’s an effort of will to take it to the sink, and beyond her will to wash it. People everywhere are feeling the stress of the recession. Piper has been spiraling, avoiding others, and it was easy to let it slip by, easy to ignore. Not today. Dante made the call and Lilly was gd he did. She didn’t feel like it was her pce to say what should be done. Maybe one day she’ll feel like she has the authority to speak out to the people who don’t believe in authority.

  It’s an issue she brings with her. When she’s doing badly that’s how she thinks of all three of them in the basement, Nails and her and Piper. People who brought their issues into the house. Maybe the disease rotting the vivacity of the punk space with bad vibes and shitty interpersonal patterns.

  “I’m tired of being alive,” Piper decres. “I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to live like this. It’s as simple as that. I try to listen to people. I try to make it go away. I feel like I’m just ruining everyone’s life.”

  “You’re not ruining our lives, we’re just concerned for you,” says the male friend. “You’re hurting yourself a lot. I don’t wanna see it turn into something worse.”

  “Well I do, that’s what I’m saying. I’m tired of lying, saying I’m okay, that I found a reason to keep going. No, every day just sucks. It just sucks.”

  “Please, don’t do this to me,” he says.

  “I’m not doing this to you, I’m doing this to me. I’m done with it.”

  “No, I don’t accept that. You have a lot to live for a lot of the time. Things are just hard right now, but they will turn around. I want you to see that.”

  “It’s just not true.”

  “Fuck!” Dante shouts. They all turn. He’s staring at the ground, tobacco spilled everywhere from the torn-open pouch. He bends down toward the floor like a contortionist to start scooping it up. “Sorry.”

  The male friend Lilly doesn’t know shakes his head. “And, Piper, you are doing this to me. Like it or not, there’s people who care about you. We don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “Most of you don’t even know me, you just live with me.” Gring at Nails.

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about you,” says Lilly. “You don’t have to know someone well to care about them.”

  “Then it’s bullshit. You’re just saying you care, because you want to feel like a good person. You don’t have to live my life, I do. If you had to live my life you would feel the same way about it that I do.”

  “Maybe,” says Houndstooth. “On the other hand, a lot of this is things that you can let go of. It sucks to feel bad about yourself and your life and your body but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”

  “Hippie crap,” says Piper. “I hate this coast. Why is it so hard to hear me say that I don’t want to keep being alive?”

  “Because you’re an important part of other people’s lives,” says Scatter.

  “That’s what I keep trying to say,” says the guy friend. “You’re such an important part of my life.”

  Lilly’s tongue seems swollen in her mouth, twitching with frustration as she tries to figure out the right thing to say. She won’t, though, none of them will, if there’s any right thing to say at all, because a few months ter Piper will disappear from the house and then Houndstooth will find the note and then they will go searching and Lilly will find her body. And a few months after that they will have completely pissed off Coordination Division after losing the house and they’ll be squatting a pce out in the old industrial sector and the police will come busting through and Scatter’s helping her through the window but she’s still half asleep, half out of her mind with panic, and then the cop grabs Scatter’s arm and she delivers a fist to his neck and an elbow to his jaw and he reels backwards and Scatter’s through the windowframe, right on top of Lilly, who has a moment of the strangest appreciation of Scatter’s long wiry body pressed up against her nearly nude body until they both colpse painfully into an empty lot filled with thistle and foxtails, and Scatter rolls and tries to help Lilly up but she’s all covered in thistles painfully pressing into her legs and belly and she sees Scatter pausing again, once again trying to help her, when she should be running and in that moment Lilly realizes she will not keep running, she understands that she is too fucked up right now to make it, she is being captured, and she doesn’t want that for anyone else so impulsively she screams out, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Scatter pauses a moment, staring at her with an inscrutable expression. Lilly’s never been able to figure out Scatter’s feelings toward her but they’ve grown closer over time and in this moment, in this critical moment, Lilly thinks that there’s no way Scatter will leave her behind, even though the cops are circling around and Lilly’s had the wind all knocked out of her and is mostly naked, just one arm through the sleeve of a jacket fpping uselessly around, covered in thistle heads painfully stabbing her, with a knee giving out, she can’t run, she can’t make it.

  “Go,” she begs and somehow Scatter does, gets up and turns and runs and is around a corner as Lilly colpses into the foxtails and dirt and old beer cans, falling two feet forever until the figures come around the corner of the building toward her, shadows first then bodies following, a cop and two others wearing navy blue suits and then she knows who it is, knows what’s coming for her once again, and she thinks thank god that someone made it away because maybe they can make sure I make it out this time, as the cop grabs her and zipties her wrists together, a biting pain with the hiss of pstic, and one of the Coordination Division operatives reaches into his coatjacket and pulls out a piece of paper with an uncanny twisting symbol on it—

  *****

  She wakes up, sweating, squirming, twisted up in the sheets of her bed in Richmond. Sophia’s next to her, reading a book, Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Her body still aches from the pains of the concrete floor colliding with her knee, the rough windowframe, the thistles sticking in her legs and belly, the tight zipties on her wrists. When she closes her eyes she sees the fshing blue and red lights of squad cars like the face of childhood monster. She hears a voice interrogating her, asking her the right questions to trick her into formuting the answers it wants. The winding, tangling thing in her mind that withers away in the desert, eyes red, throat dry. If you go on like this too long you disappear.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” says Sophia. “How are you doing? It seems like you had another episode.”

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuck,” Ivy moans, and curls up into Sophia’s side. A sensation warm, comfortable, and familiar if she forces herself to think of it that way. Sophia puts her arms around her. You can get used to anything, even comfort. “I guess I did. Did I just zonk out while I was talking to Gravity?”

  “More or less. Seemed like Empty was fronting for a bit. You kinda just came to the bed and id down so I decided I’d join you.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Oh, not too long. A few hours.”

  Ivy sighs, a deep, heavy, long sigh, as if she could expel all her problems as miasma.

  “You’re having a difficult time, aren’t you?” Sophia asks. Ivy can feel her watching.

  “I hate this. I want to be a person. I hate just disappearing, getting caught up in things that happened ten years ago, things I barely even remember, then coming back to my life and more time has gone by but I’m just more of a mess for it all.”

  “It’s pretty common, for people dealing with trauma. Fshbacks and all that.”

  For a moment she wants to yell at Sophia, say stop trying to make it all make sense, stop trying to make it so logical and retable and common. Maybe that’s just a defense. Either way, she doesn’t want to be hostile. She turns to look at Sophia’s face, focuses again on that. Familiar in a way. Comfortable and loving. She remembers them sitting together, reading while Ivy got stoned and Eff’s cloud rap pyed on her tinny phone speakers, Le1f and Cms Casino and the soft touch of Sophia’s uncalloused fingers as a helicopter flew overhead toward the sunset hunting someone on San Pablo. Or maybe just reporting the traffic. This too can be reality. It doesn’t all have to be the horrors. “But it feels so real. Like I really am losing track of time. Like, it’s 2009 and I’m being grabbed by a cop after I heard my friend screaming as he beat them to the ground.”

  “Jesus. That sounds awful.” Sophia’s voice is uncharacteristically ft. Her eyes keep darting back to the pages of the book.

  “It’s just so confusing and it’s hard to keep track of myself and I feel like I’m making everything about myself. It’s all a huge fucking mess.”

  Sophia runs her fingers through Ivy’s hair. It’s blue right now, recently dyed so it still has the striking deep tones. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. I wish there was something I could do for you, to change it all, to take away all this suffering.”

  “I know. I don’t know that anything can change it. I’m just kinda broken. Every time I think I’m getting better I fall apart again. I’m gd you’re there for me, but I don’t want to be a burden on you.”

  “You’re not a burden. I knew you had stuff going on when we got together. I just feel bad for you.” There’s fear in her eyes, though, or is that just something Ivy imagines?

  Ivy holds her tighter. “Thank you.”

  “Do you wanna do something simple to unwind for a bit? Frozen pizza and Adventure Time?”

  “Yeah, that sounds good. Thanks.”

  They’re two episodes in and the pizza is out of the oven and cooling down when an arm goes off on Sophia’s phone. “Shit. I forgot, I have to start getting ready or I’ll be te for my tutoring gig.” She sighs. “I could cancel it. Are you gonna be okay if I head out?”

  “I’ll probably be fine,” says Ivy. “Worst case scenario I’ll just go a little crazy, run off to the past for a while, then chain smoke for a minute.”

  “That’s… not exactly reassuring me about heading out.”

  “Sorry. Yeah, you should go. I appreciate your support. I don’t want your life to be about supporting me. If it’s a real crisis, someone will let you know. There’s like a half dozen other people at this house and at least half of them care about me.” Even as she says it she regrets the hostility. It’s not that Jaime and Emiko and Ursu don’t care, it’s that they don’t know each other well yet. She’s still got Piper’s words on her mind.

  “Alright,” says Sophia, as she turns and takes off her baggy t-shirt and starts hunting the closet for a padded bra. “Oh and feel free to share the pizza with others, I’m sure it’ll be stale by the time I get back.”

  Ivy stares at the screen for another ten minutes while Sophia gets dressed and puts on some simple makeup. Sophia’s seen all of Adventure Time more than once, or twice, and has been erratically showing it to Ivy for a minute. Ivy struggles to pay attention to TV shows, or just about any other form of media, but when she’s watching with someone else it becomes more meaningful. She’s enjoying the experience of it with the other person, almost through their eyes. Now that Sophia’s busy getting ready, she’s not really processing any of the content, just watching colorful shapes moving in front of her. Her mind is off, thinking about the past. There’s something nagging her about all of it, the desire once again to sort out what is and what isn’t true. She had reached some sort of peace with all that and then that peace was shattered by Gravity’s arrival. At the same time, she hates fixating on trauma. She wants to believe, needs to believe, that somehow, at some point, all this trauma will get sorted away into its proper pces and she’ll be able to focus on something else, whatever that is. Something that comes next. What would come next? A career? Her retionship with Sophia? She watches as Sophia untangles her long hair, the way she wiggles her hips when she’s pulling on her socks. Being honest with herself, she hadn’t really been thinking about the future of their retionship when they’d gotten together, she’d just been enjoying the moment, appreciating someone attentive to her, kind to her, sweet and cute and clever. Now the whole future is on the horizon again. For a minute the question had been money for the house. What about her life, her life with Sophia? Will they stay together forever? Will they get married, or is that just something for straight or cis people to do? Will they keep loving each other or is that just something that they’re doing in the moment?

  “Goodbye, I’ll see you tonight.” Sophia kisses her on the cheek, and then once, longer, on the lips. Her lipstick tastes waxy and vaguely flowery, a hint of roses. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  A few minutes after she’s left, Ivy turns off the show, shuts the ptop, and fishes a pack of Newports out of her bag. Being alone, her mind becomes a carousel of unpleasant images: Piper’s cut arms; police cruisers with fshing lights; accumutions of rat shit and piss bottles in the corners of an abandoned building; the smiling face of Larry the corporate hypnotist; her father grabbing a belt; the ostentatious wooden cross at the center of the church altar; other kids screaming ‘faggot’ at her at bible school; a bloody body colpsed in front of a pickup truck on a turnoff in rural Wyoming; the nervous frustrated breaths of a hipster trying to finger her when she didn’t want it; endless stretches of identical suburb houses. Standing at the edge of a cliff by the sea wondering if the woman next to her is really thinking about shoving her to her death. Terror threads between brief breaths, and she lives on and will see tomorrow as well. The cigarettes will help exorcise the memories.

  Maybe I should have asked Sophia to stay, she thinks. Still she meant it: now more than ever it’s important to her that Sophia has her own life.

  There are animated voices from the back porch, another reality she could glide into. She grabs the pizza, the cooking sheet now cool enough to hold. The box says Tombstone. Nylon, Gravity, and Eff are sitting outside, staring into the emptiness of the backyard, talking shit. There’s a rhythmic quality to how their angry words weave over the beat of the instrumental music coming out of the bluetooth speaker.

  “I would’ve pulled a knife on him,” says Nylon.

  “I mean, okay, yeah, it’s easy to say that,” says Gravity. “I just don’t wanna deal with another dozen posts going around about how I’m violent and dangerous.”

  “We get your reasoning,” says Eff. “I think what we’re trying to communicate is, like, all of us know that Aiden’s an absolute bastard and a creep. I think of the three of us here, you have the highest opinion of him.”

  “Which is concerning to me, honestly,” says Nylon, “because fuck that guy. He’s living in a hell of his own making that he’s dragging everyone around him down into and I’m just desperately hoping that you’ll get an opportunity to actually for real screw him over, for your sake, and for everyone else’s. No one should be fucking talking to him for like a good five to ten years of like dedicated fucking personal growth or we should just curbstomp his ass until he’s got so much brain damage he can’t remember who he told what lies to and he drowns in his own fucking sewage.”

  Gravity looks a little exhausted. It’s clear that faer not yet really ready to be mad about the abuse fae endured. “I mean, their whole situation there is going to come apart at some point. I don’t even know how they’ll keep the pce clean without me to do all the housework for them.”

  “These motherfuckers,” says Nylon. “I can’t believe he’s still trying to make it all about him. He’s got a phallic attachment to his giant throbbing victim complex.”

  “Shit is outrageously fucked, and it’s a perpetual mindgame the way they do it. I’m just gd you got out. Get a chance to ground yourself in reality,” says Eff.

  “Pizza?” offers Ivy, setting it down between them. She pulls out a cigarette and Eff leans forward so she can light it off the tip of hers.

  “Yessssss please,” says Nylon, grabbing a slice.

  Gravity sighs and crushes some piece of paper in faer hand. “They want me fucking dead, that’s the thing. It’s not—it’s not an exaggeration. I don’t know if they even know it, but I see the look of disgust in their face when I speak up or when I need something. It’s easier to just see me as an aggressor or a monster because then they have some kind of justification for their own feelings.”

  “That’s real,” says Eff.

  “I end up wanting to die, because I listen to them too much. I feel like that’s what happened with Midnight. I know that, like, we can never know why someone killed themselves, but at the same time, it’s not like she wasn’t living with people who wanted to make her life miserable, who wanted to bully her into death. And it’s so fucked up because this is our fucking community. I expect that from cis people, even cis queers, that they’re lowkey wanting me to die, because they can’t deal with what I’ve seen, with what I am, with what my truth implies about them. They’re going around throwing gender reveal parties and thinking about the genitals of newborn babies and they project that and call me fucked up things, and I’m just trying to have a fucking life but no one wants to accept that, they want to make it part of a story they’re telling about this or that. Even the so-called allies and all these fucking bay area liberals just want to use me for some story they’re telling about Harvey Milk or how progressive they are or what the fuck ever. The reality is that they couldn’t give less of a damn about how I see the world, either I’m just like some weird gender nonconforming bck guy to them or a drag queen they can go ‘yaaaass queen!’ at on the street but never think about how I’m gonna eat food or have a fucking pce to sleep because their reality can’t accept me. It’s not acceptance to treat someone like a rare fucking carnival show come through town, they’re just a bunch of bleeding heart Jerry Springers, and when I don’t have a pce to sleep they kick me out of the Starbucks for smelling bad and they follow me around the store cuz they think I’m stealing. Maybe I am stealing, I have to fucking eat, I can’t get a job, for ten fucking years now I’ve been doing this and their society just keeps chugging along just fucking fine. All they want is for me to be someone they met once or fucked once and then die so they can tell everyone stories about the tragedy of the tranny they once knew. Allies love when trans femmes die. So then I go to community spaces and it’s a bunch of trans men and afab enbies talking about how everything’s always too focused on trans women of color. I saw someone compining about being underrepresented at TDoR! And you’re like, okay, hey, you’ve got a job, can I get a pce to stay? And they’re like, sure, oh by the way I thought you meant that you were gonna be fucking me when I wanted and out of my sight when I didn’t want and if you don’t do that then I’m gonna tell everyone that you’re a fucking predator and imply some crazy ass shit and everyone will believe it cuz lowkey they’re all just ready to find another trans femme to sacrifice to, like, keep the fucking fme burning or something. And I can’t be a person anymore! Me and Midnight used to talk about it, like, we can’t even look at our bodies sober, not just because of the dysphoria, but because whenever someone desires us it’s only ever to use us up. That house was a fucking nightmare. And I know y’all said I could come here before, I just—like, it didn’t feel real, because there’s so many times people have said that but then they pulled it away, and even though things were so horrible there at least like they weren’t misgendering me. But then it was like they were done with their token, when they started to say I was male-socialized and violent and all of this antibck shit. And I wasn’t even leaving my room. I’ve barely been outside the house for the past two months. Like today, hanging out back here, this is the most I’ve seen outside in like a month. The sun hurts my eyes. It just got so that if people saw me at all they would get pissed off and if I stuck around they would yell at me or post about me or something. I think they fucking knew that I bmed them for Midnight’s death, and they felt guilty, and that’s why they couldn’t just bear to leave me alone and let me even have a pce to be. Like I was barely eating. That’s why I’m so skinny now, I’ve gone down about twenty pounds since she died and part of it’s, like, they took my EBT card and then they would yell at me whenever I was getting food about how I didn’t have a job so shouldn’t just hoard all the food. Aiden said I was looting the refrigerator! When Michel pointed out like hey don’t say that Aiden’s all it’s a joke which is bullshit cuz he said it three different times. I mostly have been like going out at night real quick to dumpster but I’ve been afraid to be away too long cuz a couple times they went through all my stuff and things were missing. Like I came back after a few hours and all my knives were gone, including a really nice one that Midnight got for me, and my DS, and random things, like a thumb drive I had that used to just have old personal photos on it, I never found that, and some jewelry and shit. And they would say that I was stealing random stuff like the dishes or some poster they put up for a band I don’t even know. Like why would I steal that, I don’t even remember who it was! And where would I put it, I didn’t even have any space!”

  “They were demonizing you,” Eff says.

  “Yeah! I mean, you saw what happened today, I was just leaving and they were acting all attacked.”

  “They were screaming at us the entire time we were packing the car,” Eff expins to Ivy.

  “They still have my EBT card,” says Gravity. “I’m gonna have to cancel it and get a new one. And they’ll probably drain my account as soon as possible.” Fae puts faer face in faer hands and lets out a long, heavy sigh. “I’m sure they’re gonna be spreading shit around about me on social media too, so now I’m gonna have to deal with that. You’re all maybe going to have to deal with that. I’m a little worried about Emiko and Ursu since they work on the socials and now, well, I mean we’re talking about white trans mascs with some amount of social capital so it’s pretty easy for them to stir up a witch hunt.”

  “That’s a risk that we’re always taking,” says Eff. “I’ve definitely had my share of getting called out and cancelled and dogpiled for, like, snder and bullshit. And I know Emiko’s already been targeted by a bunch of that crew. It’s probably just going to further the rift. The chaser sugar daddies won’t care one way or the other cuz they’re not really in the community and most the other trans girls who’ve been out a minute know the deal and how to recognize bullshit drama. It’s only the ones pying the clout game who will fall in line and half of them are straight or straight-acting and wouldn’t give a nonbinary trans femme with neopronouns the time of day anyway. I think you’ll be okay on that regard.”

  “Okay but like no offense but none of you are darkskinned except Jaime and they keep their head down. Like the trans girls might go to bat for you but their whole scene is totally white dominated. I’ve got the doubled up social death. So I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel like I can, like I have anyone I can trust, you know? Whatever I do no one’s looking at me or listening to me. I’m just sick of it. I’m sick of having to run and hide like a fucking pariah in every city. Things were supposed to be totally different.” Fae ughs bitterly. “I mean fuck what am I even doing this old?”

  “Fucking for real,” says Nylon. “Thought I’d be dead before now. I was sure I was gonna die before I got to 25. Hell, I thought I was gonna fucking die before 18.”

  “Same here,” says Eff. “I made no fucking pns for the future because I had no intention to have a future. A world like this? Why keep going, was all I was thinking, and besides, it’ll kill me for sure. It got other people I knew, I watched them die, but I kept going and now here I am. Survivor’s guilt is part of it for sure but there’s also survivor’s envy. It’s not that I wanna die. I’m just jealous of people who got to experience that. To get out of it when they did. I don’t know, it’s complicated.”

  “Death is always, like, a part of what we’re experiencing, but with it comes life, the corolry,” says Scatter. They’re walking down a sidewalk in a middle css suburb, Scatter and Nails and Piper and Lilly. “No one knows which is better or worse, until we die, and no one can report back on that.”

  “Life is pretty fucking awful, though,” Nails says. “I would be done with it, honestly, half the time. Or at least I wish that I hadn’t come into it. I think it’s a fucking crime when people have a kid. You’re subjecting someone to abuse. You’re throwing them into this hellish world and saying, hey kid, fucking work for a living, do some bullshit, look like this and act like this. It’s inevitable at a certain point that a kid’s gonna become a monster, because everyone is a monster. Everyone hurts each other just to get by, just to have a bite to eat. So not only are you guaranteeing that someone’s going to get hurt, you’re guaranteeing that you’re creating someone who’s gonna hurt someone else. It’s a fucked up thing.”

  “The cycle of life,” says Piper. “It’s pretty much all that, isn’t it? There are some people who think you get reincarnated after you die and that that’s the worst thing of all.”

  “Well you can’t really know one way or another,” says Scatter.

  “There’s one,” says Lilly, pointing. Desperate to avoid the conversation, having just intervened on Piper’s suicide attempt a few weeks before, she’s been scanning all the buildings around her for the signs. Cameras with no lights on them. No cars in the driveway. A manicured and empty yard. And through the blinds, empty rooms, with nothing on the walls, nothing in them. No lights inside, though the sunlight is fading. An abandoned home.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty good,” says Scatter. “But don’t point like that. Be a little more subtle. Never forget that a neighbor can be watching. Just cuz the blinds around us look closed doesn’t mean people aren’t paying attention. People in a suburb might not give a fuck about each other but they don’t want to deal with squatters. They don’t see us as people, they see us as vermin to be exterminated.”

  “Did I fuck it up?” asks Lilly, feeling a little crestfallen. She knows that she shouldn’t be seeking approval, that this is about learning skills, but she wants Scatter to say that she’s good at it.

  “I mean, kinda, but also it’s not ideal cuz of how it’s in a pretty visible spot on that hill and it’s on part of a cul-de-sac with more houses behind it so it’s a little more suspect to be lingering around. Generally speaking, people in cul-de-sacs are more likely to be serious about those Neighborhood Watch signs they’ve got up everywhere.”

  “Damn.”

  “There’s one up over there on your eight that might be good, looks like it hasn’t been tended to in a minute because of all the dead leaves and the grass is starting to get overgrown,” Scatter says, gesturing with her elbow which direction she means. At first Lilly doesn’t see the house. No, it’s there, and it also looks as if it’s been sitting empty, there’s just a car parked somewhat in front of it. Also somewhat in front of the neighbor’s pce, and the driveway is empty. “Might be worth checking out when the sun goes down. Doesn’t look like they’ve got cameras or real arms on that one. It’s possible it’s genuinely being ignored.”

  Lilly makes a mental note of where it was. She might have mushy brains when it comes to time and memory but she’s been working on the skill of holding on to what’s around her, remembering the yout of these endless city streets and suburbs and mapping key locations. It might be all for approval from Scatter but it doesn’t mean she isn’t developing meaningful skills. Besides, most the things she’s done in her life were centered around approval.

  When she thinks back to the fragments of her time in Coordination Division one thing that really haunts her is the inability to fully understand her own motives. Brainwashing is one thing, whatever brainwashing is—it’s clear to her that some sort of substantial effort was made to control her mind and actions. Coexisting with that is the undeniable memory that she had a need for their approval. When she was interacting on a day to day basis with the other human components of that esoteric machine was it that different than her interactions here? Or her interactions with Darren, seeking his approval, or with the boys she pyed Dungeons and Dragons with? How many of her actions throughout her life were premised on anything other than desperately trying to read what the people around her desired of her and fulfill that role? So what did it mean when those roles were juxtaposed in opposite to each other? One man looked at her and said, yes, you’re being good, now let’s go and clear out these pieces of property, let’s make them clean and ready for new buyers. Another person, not a man, another trans girl, says, let’s go destroy that property, or let’s go squat it, occupy it, make it our home, or the home of someone else who needs a pce to live. Moral values prevail, but moral values are shiftable, and what do they even mean in a vast nightmarish world such as this one? You can try to be a good person, sure, and there’s eight billion different versions of what that means. It’s easy to say that the values of those in Coordination Division are defined by the ways they’ve been shaped, controlled, abused, brainwashed. At the same time, aren’t the values of the anarchist squatters shaped by the ways they’ve experienced control, abuse, brainwashing of a sort, even if it didn’t take, even if they’re reacting against it? Contained in Coordination is the rebellion against everything it wants, and buried in the fears and rage and anger of anarchists is the whole fascistic structure of society inverted in miniature. And here is Scatter, who doesn’t pass, and Piper, who doesn’t pass and is so hung up on it that she wants to die, and Nails, who doesn’t even want to try to pass, quite possibly because they’re afraid of trying and failing. And she, Lilly, who does pass, has had surgery, who can hide in the world of the cis, who can join with the society if she truly wants to. How did she end up here, is she really supposed to trust them that they had her best interests at heart when they abducted her? For that matter, did Coordination Division? Do two abductions make a right? One contrary to the other, yet consequential from it, premised on it. And what about what Nails is saying, about the ways that birth is also a form of violent abduction, thrown against her will into this terrible world?

  She very rarely tries to think about all that. About her childhood, her birth, her early life, the church, Jesus. It’s not the kind of thing it’s easy to think about and come back from. Yet the habit of breaking and entering was one she developed before she ever heard of anarchism or squatters or Coordination Division, when she just wanted to disrupt the sanctity of that terrible world she had come out of, so simple and ordered. Her fingers still remember the sensations of picks feeling out the inner mechanisms of the lock.

  So yes, she might be seeking Scatter’s approval, but it’s not comparable. When you look for the approval of a superior in the organization, you’re seeking to align yourself with it and it’s broad goals, with the world that it describes, delineates, and tries to manifest. She’s seeking Scatter’s approval for wholly different reasons, because here is a woman who is able to look at the face of that awful world and keep going, day after day, and to have a reason to keep going. She idealizes Scatter, she wants to be like her, and she even wants to… she likes the time they spend together. It’s complicated, emotionally, in ways she’s not ready to confront. There were three people in the van that pulled her out of that parking lot several months before. Arsenal treats her strangely, maybe a ck of trust or some other unspoken issue. Besides, she’s always traveling. Houndstooth still lives at the house and they still talk all the time but their dialogues have grown somewhat cold, functional together, friendly for sure but not quite on the same wavelength. Scatter, on the other hand, she has attached herself to and perhaps overly idealized. This girl now training her in the arts of identifying empty homes to break into and live in, who reads bizarre zines and practices knife tricks in the backyard while getting drunk on Wild Turkey. In many people’s eyes Scatter would be irresponsible, criminal, dangerous, a complete mess. To Lilly, who has seen the other side, who has sat in church pews and listened to the subtle cruel hum of air-conditioning units in newly constructed office complexes, Scatter seems like the closest thing to the possibility of genuine life, of a genuine way out, that she could imagine.

  “You okay?” Eff is asking.

  “Yeah, sorry, I was just, like, remembering something about Scatter,” says Ivy, sitting up in her chair. It’s dark out. Sophia is there, staring at her with naked distress. Fuck, so it’s been longer than just drifting off to think. She went somewhen again. She lost track. Sophia probably came home and found everyone talking and Ivy sitting there, staring into space, lost to the world.

  She sucks in a deep breath and stands up. Her head swims a little as she stands. Sophia is still just staring at her in concern so she stumbles over to her and hugs her. “Hey dear, how was work,” Ivy asks.

  “It was okay,” Sophia says. “Not too much happened. The mom’s been getting a little weird about me though. She kept rolling by to check in on us. I’m kind of worried she’s getting pulled into some TERF shit and is gonna fire me soon.”

  “Has she said anything shitty?” asks Ivy.

  “No. But it’s happened before. I just, I can recognize the pattern. It’s concerning.”

  It feels like Sophia’s just fishing for something to say.

  Nylon and Gravity have wandered off to another part of the yard. Eff might have been there too, until Sophia came in and expressed concern. It’s strange, Ivy knew Gravity long before she met Eff, technically, but it still feels to her like Eff is her oldest friend. All those other people are from another life, long ago, that someone else—Lilly—lived through. It was spending time with Eff that first made Ivy feel like a person, that got her to separate from the ways she was trying to assimite into the miserable world around her. The two of them were so close together during such a messy time—robotripping and benzos and the Cult of the Heart. It was Eff who had helped bring her into being, just as Scatter had for Lilly. Eff had seen a special potential in her. A potential to open something onto the world.

  Sophia squeezes her. And she squeezes back. She wants to ask what time it is. That might worry Sophia more, so she just stares into the darkness of the night sky, the little orange dots of jet pnes making their steady progress around.

  Gravity is wandering over, Nylon behind faer. “Hey, you okay?” fae asks. “You were pretty out of it for a while. I figured I should just let you sleep or whatever. I don’t know I guess this is something you do now?”

  “Yeah,” says Ivy, “I’m alright. I was just kinda drifting to a pce. I was thinking about Scatter.”

  “Oh damn, yeah,” says Gravity. “That bitch. I fucking miss her.”

  Sophia lets go and moves to sit down. “I’ve heard you talk about her a few times before, Ivy. That was back when you both knew each other?”

  “Yeah,” says Gravity. “Scatter helped keep together this crew of weirdos I nded in after I got in some trouble. I was a lot more, uh, a lot more messy of a person back then and I’d made some bad life decisions on the basis of not really caring what happened to me. This got me kicked out of the crew of people who had been keeping an eye out for me since my parents disowned me. It was like, they weren’t homophobic or anything, but there’s a difference between being willing to turn the other way about some sexuality stuff and having to deal with a transgender having self-destructive drunken breakdowns out in the street. This was back in, like 2006, 2007, just a couple years after I dropped out of high school and all. I happened to know Scatter through another mutual friend and when I put out the word that I had kinda fucked myself over she’s like, hey, I got a basement for you to sleep in.”

  “That was nice of her,” says Sophia.

  “It was a lot like this pce,” says Gravity. “Except that we were more focused on just like random radicals drifting through town than trans stuff. In those days there was a strong network of people who would go around working on shit, trying to open up spaces, make connections, push the politics a little further left.”

  “It got totally fucked over after Occupy,” Nylon says bitterly. “Every fucking thing that mattered got exploded. They went after squatter rights, they disrupted the networks, and I think they must have done some cointelpro shit because every fucking social connection fell apart.”

  “Well, not every connection,” says Eff, “just most. Seems like it was kinda worth it though. Like that whole scene was pushing to bring these ideas into the mainstream. Before Occupy, no one was even talking about stuff like that. Now, afterwards, well, I mean look at like Bernie Sanders. He’s still a liberal not really radical, but he’s saying stuff in the mainstream no one could’ve said in the eighties or nineties or after 9/11.”

  “I don’t think it’ll go anywhere. And it’s also flushed the movement with a lot of stupid people from the internet who don’t know the first thing about fighting power structures aside from working in an insult-based content farm,” says Nylon. “I meet these young people at events, they have no fucking clue what they’re doing there. Half of them are just trying to do what someone on the internet told them was right, with no personal principles.”

  “That’s just how it goes,” says Eff. “It’s not a bad thing, it’s social change. It’s our responsibility to educate them, bring them in on all this stuff.”

  “So bring me in,” says Sophia. “I’m one of these people you’re talking about, right? Half sure what I’m even doing here, it just seems right to support community and support each other. Like, I’ve read theory and philosophy and have that kind of context and that’s it. All of this stuff you’re talking about is really abstract to me. During Occupy there was stuff happening in Davis and, like, I knew it was going on and I thought, well that’s cool, in like an abstract way. Really I was very disinterested, I didn’t believe any of it mattered.”

  “What changed?” asked Eff.

  Sophia shrugs. “I mean, I don’t know that anything did. It’s hard for me to care about all this political stuff the way it seems to matter to you. It’s not that I want things to be awful or that I don’t agree with your opinions, it just feels really futile to me.”

  “Well like, what about the meetings, we’ve set up these pns around consensus processes, how we’re going to share the budget and responsibility for the house,” says Nylon.

  “Sure,” says Sophia, “that’s about how we’re interacting with each other as a small group of people. That matters to me, absolutely. That doesn’t, to me, extrapote to politics.”

  “Well, what is politics t—” Eff starts to say but Nylon interrupts.

  “I disagree entirely,” says Nylon. “Politics is just how we interact together at the small scale, writ rge on the big scale. So let’s say we’ve figured out a good way to interact with each other here, in this context. Why not, at least, try to convince others to adopt those patterns of interaction? Especially if otherwise they’re going to be pulled into some right-wing Trump shit or neoliberalism?”

  Sophia pauses, thinking. “Okay… well but what works on the small scale won’t work on the big scale. We’re a household full of people who already like each other, have shared interests, are predisposed to work together. Let’s say you try to structure a whole town like this. We already get too bogged down in meetings. For an entire town, it would be interminable, they’d always be debating in meetings, nothing would ever get done.”

  “Would that be so bad?” Gravity says with a wry grin. “Most of what people get done is fucked up.”

  “I think that’s a real critique.” Nylon is nodding. “Or, like, it’s a real problem. People do these societies though, they have solutions. You have delegates, spokescouncils. So each household just has people, and it shifts off who, who go and talk with the other households, each town has people who go and talk with the other towns.”

  “Okay that just sounds like liberal democracy. What separates that from the nightmare we have in America?” asks Sophia.

  “It’s delegates, not representatives. They bring the group decisions, not decide for the group.”

  Sophia frowns. “It still seems ripe for the possibility of falling apart. I mean, the accountability isn’t tangible. In a model like that. I just envision how easily people with money or—okay, let’s say you abolish money. There’s still going to be someone with better nd, better skills, better something. Like not to sound like a rightwinger it’s just that there are these real material differences. So we can try to be like, this is delegates not representatives but when people are making decisions for others that’s something that can be maniputed, always.”

  “Oh, it is,” says Nylon. “So is everything.” They press a finger to the table. “Everything can be fucked with. Nothing is permanent. It’s a better version, I think, of society than anything we’ve had so far.”

  Sophia shakes her head. “I’m still pretty unconvinced but I appreciate you making the effort. I think that, for me, my politics are more about just trying to look out for the queer community and keeping us safe from the genocidal impulses of straight society.” A fsh of concern and she looks over at Ivy. For a moment she hadn’t looked worried at all, inspiration crossing her face as she tried to think through the political problems. It was the same look she gets when she’s reading philosophy.

  “We had something like that at the old pce, actually,” says Gravity. “We didn’t call it a delegate or anything. There was that squatter network I was telling you about, right? This kid there, Arsenal, was frequently running off to other pces, pnning things with them, discussing with us. You remember Arsenal, Lilly? I mean, Ivy?”

  “Yeah,” says Ivy. “Of course I do.”

  “Yeah, she was the one that pulled you in. She was so connected, seemed like she knew everyone. Including a lot of stupid scumfuck punks.” Fae ughs. “That shit was so stupid.”

  “I heard stories about her from some oogles,” says Nylon. “Tall trans girl, always showing up to actions, fighting with cops and shit?”

  Gravity scoffs. “Yeah, when she wasn’t fighting with her friends.”

  “You said she was the one who pulled me in?” asks Ivy. “I don’t—I don’t really remember that. I guess there’s a lot I still don’t remember.”

  “Huh, I thought you two were kinda close. You ran off with Houndstooth and Scatter and uh—well, I dunno, security culture. Anyway, yeah, she heard about you from this kid, Rain, an enby, you never met them, they were fucking around with some shit and basically ran afoul of Coordination Division. They told people who didn’t really believe them, right, they’re talking about bck vans with government ptes following them around and sounds like they’re getting paranoid. So they start digging up all this stuff about like, no, there’s some kind of secret society burying things under houses, they’re monitoring us, they’re coming for us, etcetera. I met them a few times they were a really great kid. Just a fucking open heart. Well, if I remember right—I was really drunk at the time—the suits had tried to sweep them up, like they got you, but they maybe botched it. Anyway, Rain, they were a great kid, real close with Arsenal. They disappeared one day, no one ever heard from them so it could’ve been the bck vans or they could’ve been run over, fuck if I know. They let Arsenal know like, hey, there’s someone in there who’s trying to get out. Which was how we ended up grabbing you.”

  Almost all of this is news to Ivy. Burying things under houses, bck vans, the missing person. “Trying to get out?” Ivy asks.

  “Yeah, like, trying to leave that whole mess.”

  Ivy can’t read Gravity’s expression. She tries to think back. Wasn’t she kidnapped? Was she trying to escape? “I don’t remember this.”

  “Really? You used to talk about it sometimes, when you got really tired. How you were sending out secret messages trying to get rescued. Seems like it kinda broke your brain after they killed all those kids.”

  Nylon’s eyes grow wide and Sophia sucks in a breath and asks, “They did what?”

  Ivy shakes her head. “You’re messing with me.” She sounds angrier than she meant to.

  Gravity puts out faer hands defensively like fae thinks she’s going to swing at faer. “No! No, I don’t have any reason to mess with you. You really don’t remember that?”

  “What do you mean, killed all those kids?” She’s trying to calm down. The others’ reactions tell her it’s not working. What do they expect? How can she be calm?

  “Hey, I’m sorry, you’re the one who told me about that. We used to get drunk all the time, remember? Sometimes when you were really drunk and tired you’d get all weird and start talking about a semi truck full of bodies. And like a field where they buried kids. I don’t know, if you don’t remember it maybe that’s better? It seemed like you really hated thinking about it. Maybe your mind, kinda, y’know, edited out some bad stuff so it would be easier on the day-to-day.”

  She tries taking deep breaths to calm down. Instead they’re ragged and heavy.

  “I’m not saying anything about you,” Gravity says. “It’s just like, this is what you said. I’m not trying to say anything about you, I’m sorry.”

  “No, I—I’m sorry, it’s just a lot, this is a lot. I—” She takes a deep breath. “I never know what to believe. You’ve had a rough day. I didn’t mean to react like that. I’m sorry.”

  Gravity puts down faer hands. Fae shrugs in a forced way. “You know, it’s whatever.”

  Ivy closes her eyes. She can’t bear to look at anyone’s face. She doesn’t know what she would see: disgust, pity, sympathy, fear, confusion. Any emotion right now would make her feel more alone.

  “So, you know about Coordination Division?” Ivy asks after a moment.

  “Yeah,” says Gravity. “I mean, it kinda dominated my life for a few months there. I didn’t really interact with them, which I figure is why they let me stay out on the streets rather than get me locked up or bury me.”

  “What are they?” asks Sophia. “To you?”

  “Uhhh… Fuck, so, they’re like some shady organization, right, probably framed as a charity or nonprofit or something cuz they’re half government, half corporation, half just a fucking cult. They move money around and influence the housing market, they try to control zoning and urban development, they go after anyone trying to communalize nd but they also don’t really respect private property, they’re kinda like some old school colonial project that way but operating in current America and probably the rest of the world. Oh, and they’re doing it all on some, like twisted up Rosicrucian geomancy or whatever. Fuck, I don’t know what Rosicrucian means but you get the idea. They move bodies on ley lines.”

  “This is just, like, really impusible,” says Sophia.

  “I mean, it’s America,” says Nylon. “You sp the image of Christ on something and associate it with a few evangelists, you can get just about anything you want done.”

  “Do you know about this stuff too?” asks Sophia.

  “No but I knew the people involved. Scatter and I were tight. And I’ve heard of Houndstooth. All of this makes a kinda sense to me. Weird shit happens. Like, okay, do you know about the Amway money connection to Jeffrey Dahmer?”

  “I mean, it felt even more crazy in the moment,” says Gravity.

  “Yeah, no shit,” says Ivy. “I hate this.”

  “You really think they were killing people?” Eff asks.

  “I don’t know,” says Gravity. “A lot of people disappeared.”

  The back door swings open and Ursu and Emiko come out, each with a beer. Ursu’s frowning, kicking at rocks. “Fuck all of this drama. I swear, she is just coming for me because she’s mad her sugar daddy left her. Like who the fuck even says that shit to someone?” She suddenly notices everyone gathered and realizes there’s been a conversation in progress. “Ah fuck, sorry, bad vibes.”

  “No worries,” says Eff. “More internet drama?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a new crusade directed against me, because I made the mistake of, like, criticizing the way someone handled a nonconsent scene. No one wants to talk about it which is stupid. If you’re gonna be doing stuff that just grinds on people’s triggers, you need to be able to have a fucking conversation about it like a goddamn adult instead of going through five years of my tumblr to find random problematic shit from fucking 2013! Like, I wasn’t even out then! Who didn’t say some stupid shit at some point in the past? So now everyone’s coming for me and, like, I wasn’t even trying to start a fucking fight or anything, I don’t give a fuck about the clout, I’m just saying that we have to have fucking conversations about CNC shit to be responsible to the people whose understanding of sexuality comes from this shit and to the people who will get triggered. Like who the fuck doesn’t have sexual assault trauma in the community? I wasn’t saying you can’t do it or anything, I’m not policing anything. Fucking hell.”

  “It’s totally unfair to you,” says Emiko. “Especially after everything you did to support her st summer.”

  “Right?” Ursu grabs the pack and lights up. “So like, y’all probably don’t know, but she was having a really rough one getting out of an abusive retionship and dealing with some surgery complications and she fucking reached out to me, which is fine, which is great, and we set up like a fundraiser and did some videos together and stuff and all that was fucking great but it’s just like I thought we were chill and on, like, some of that mutual aid shit? And now she’s like no, we were never chill, then bitch why did you hit me up to fuck you?”

  “So you’ve been having a hell of a day too,” says Gravity. “The fuck is it, right?”

  “I haven’t checked the charts in a minute, I’m sure it’s like, oh fucking Mars is fucking off in Aries or some shit, I don’t know,” Ursu huffs. “Just, ridiculous shit. What were y’all talking about, the assholes over at Tassel House?”

  “Nah, I think that topic’s pretty much been talked into the dirt at this point,” says Gravity. “Honestly I wouldn’t even be so affected if it weren’t for Midnight’s death and how they handled it. I’ll be okay though, just give me some time. I’ve seen worse.”

  “Yeah? Well that really sucks, I’m sorry,” says Ursu.

  “We were talking about Scatter,” says Nylon. “You ever meet her?”

  “No, who is she?”

  “Punk girl from back when Gravity and Ivy used to live together.”

  “No shit? Wait, maybe I knew that.” Ursu shrugs. “Anyway, you were saying?”

  “Oh Scatter goes way back,” says Nylon. “She started showing up in traveler street kid communities around the time I did, back in like, what, 2005? And then got really involved in the runup to Occupy. I met her in Florida, we did some stuff there for a while and st I heard she maybe got arrested. Couldn’t find her on the prison registries or anything though, so I don’t know. At the same time, I don’t know her deadname. I’ve been worried about her.”

  “Yeah, for real,” says Gravity. “I wish I knew what was up. I’ve talked with Houndstooth a few times but they haven’t heard anything. They’ve just dropped out of the scene anyway, I think that roundup scared them a lot. Well, traumatized them. And aside from that I don’t know many of the kids from back then anymore.”

  “It’s weird how someone’s presence can have so much effect,” says Eff. “Like, I never knew her, but I’ve heard about her from a number of people. She shaped a lot of the scene, and how it came to be like what it is today. I mean, Nylon, you’ve basically said this house probably wouldn’t have come together if not for her influence on you?”

  “Oh yeah, no, it’s a direct outgrowth of what we were trying to do in Gainesville. I would never have thought beyond like okay people can stay here to the pce of like hey let’s actually make this a fucking intentional space. It’s just that it came together here and it honestly fucking sucks that she’s not here to see it because it’s the kind of thing she wanted. She helped me to learn the ropes for collective living. I used to just get pissed off at people.”

  “Yeah,” says Ivy. “She was a huge influence on me. I mean, even with all the stuff that’s gone on with me, with my sense of reality and identity and all that being tugged every which way. I was pretty much just a confused kid with a lot of trauma and she helped teach me how to live in the world. Not to mention, she and Houndstooth taught me so much about, like, being trans and queer, and how to survive in those ways. I was a real fool when I first came out, I didn’t know any other trans people. There was Darren, he tried to look after me but honestly he just did not have the context for, like, the degree to which my world was being ripped apart by the experience of being a trans woman. Scatter was the one who took me under her wing and taught me how to deal with this dual reality, where on the one hand you’re in a city or a suburb and you’re surrounded by the ordinary world with its nuclear families and 7-11s and then on the other hand all those people lowkey want to destroy you and there’s all this other stuff going on. I don’t even know what I would be without her. Probably a huge mess, or someone just making some really bad life decisions. I mean, Eff, you remember when you met me, and I had no fucking direction to my life? So like imagine if I also had no skills or way of making my way through the world… It would’ve been…”

  She trails off, thinking suddenly about those strange memories of mugging people out in the desert with Ellie. When she was also Ellie. Was that real? She hears Gravity’s voice, saying, maybe your mind, kinda, y’know, edited out some bad stuff so it would be easier on the day-to-day. It’s not a pleasant idea. It’s the kind of idea that can worm itself into her, dig around in the dirt a little, disrupt all the coping mechanisms she’s so carefully put together in the past few years.

  No, she’s thinking, I don’t want to be crazy again.

  Emiko is talking. “—so important to have those kinds of, like, positive influences, especially when you’re early in transition. I just got pulled into stupid internet communities, made some really bad decisions.”

  “This was back in the Bush years too,” says Gravity.

  Sophia’s staring at her and Ivy knows she must’ve seen the pse, seen Ivy trail off, be thinking that maybe she went somewhere again. She didn’t, she just got distracted by trauma. If there’s a difference.

  It’s awful to see Sophia like this. Always on edge, always watching.

  “Like nowadays online communities are at least somewhat capable of dealing with helping people, even if there’s a lot of toxic stuff going on,” Gravity continues. “Back then? It was like, Susan’s Pce, TSRoadmap, that was it. Having someone who could actually validate the radical things people were thinking was so important.”

  It’s still just the first day since Gravity got here. Maybe it’ll level itself out and she’ll go back to being a person. She has to think so, has to hope so. She hasn’t even gotten a good night’s sleep so far. Soon, she’ll just take some metonin and drift off and let her brain process what it’s going to process.

  “Fucking hell,” Nylon is saying about something. Ivy gets up and wanders inside. Sophia follows her. The others barely seem to notice.

  “Is everything okay?” Sophia asks.

  “Yeah,” says Ivy. “Fuck, I’m sorry for worrying you, yeah, I think I’m fine. I’m just stressed out. I need to eat something, I need to get to sleep. I don’t know what time it is but I’ve had a long day. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

  *****

  They don’t talk about it the next day. Sophia has the day off work and is focused on trying to understand Wittgenstein. When Ivy tries to get involved, Sophia seems irritated and it doesn’t take much for it to be clear that this is one of those times that helping Ivy deepen her knowledge of philosophy would only get in the way of the intellectual problem Sophia is grappling with. This has been happening tely, since things have gotten tense at her tutoring job. It used to be that just sharing what she knew excited her. Now it seem she’s always a little put off by it. Ivy just feels like a bother.

  Instead, she helps with errands. She still has a driver’s license, registered to some name that she has no retion to but is apparently her legal name. Carol? Just another artifact of lost time.

  Gravity and Jaime are hanging out with Nautilus and then the house needs more toilet paper and dish soap and she runs out of cash to get gas so she swings back by the house and the moment she pulls into the driveway Emiko runs up to the door and says, “Hey, Jaime just called, apparently something weird happened, anyway she wants to get picked up soon, is that cool?”

  Somehow hours have gone by and it’s already night before Ivy gets there, accompanied by Eff and Nylon who want to check on Nautilus. The moment they pull up to the trailer Jaime pops out and gets in the car while the others exit.

  “Everything alright?” Ivy asks. Jaime looks pissed.

  “Yeah, no, it’s fine. I just, I can’t be in there anymore, you know?”

  Ivy has no clue what Jaime means. She nods to show she understands anyway. They sit there for a half hour while Jaime scrolls on her phone and Ivy smokes two Turkish Golds and thinks about how much she doesn’t want to be left with her thoughts right now. Someone walks down the street brandishing a machete but he doesn’t come near them or the trailer. Jaime shakes her head dismissively. Gravity stops by to let Ivy know faer gonna spend the night here and get a ride back in the morning. Once everyone else is back in the car Emiko says, “Hey, I got a text that I gotta stop by my plug for a minute. You should come check it out though, they’re cool.”

  When they arrive all that’s visible in the nighttime city glow is a small square concrete ptform painted cinnabar red at the edge of a grassy slope, a long beam coming off it into the darkness of what appears to be an abandoned strip of nd leading to a block of something jutting out like a half-buried bunker or an exposed grave.

  “You have to take the right way to get there,” says Emiko. She’s far more drunk than she was when they left. “It’s a leap of faith.”

  “I don’t really feel up for that,” says Jaime.

  “I’ll show you.”

  Emiko gets on the concrete ptform and spreads her arms, striking the pose of a ringmaster. “Welcome! To the Temple of the Dead!” She begins marching off along the long beam extending over open space and almost immediately stumbles and misses her footing and falls down below, her legs flying out from under her as she vanishes into the darkness.

  “Oh my god, are you okay?” Nylon calls out as the four of them rush forward to see Emiko stumbling to stand, grass stains on her elbows.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  Nylon shrugs and walks down the grass slope toward the rger structure, Eff and Ivy following. It’s a shed or a shack half wood and half concrete, all painted that same cinnabar red bubbled and faded from years of sun exposure. Ivy lingers for a moment, unsure, until Nylon and Emiko brush past her to go inside.

  The edges of the doorway are curved and covered with severed body parts of old action figures illuminated by the cyan light inside. Light that seems to vibrate. Everything moves in shuttered moments under its glow. There’s music emanating from within, something that sounds like knockoff Santana. Painted over the door are the words, FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS.

  After a moment’s pause she enters a small metal vestibule with a descending passageway. Everything is metal and wires painted sea gray and lit by pstic string lights shaped into little dancing skeletons. She realizes the door she’s passed through is a naval bulkhead, the whole thing is a small section of a naval vessel somehow transpnted into the ground. The wall is covered in tags, some going back a long time: ‘08, ‘93, ‘87. She recognizes a stylized skull with twisted horns she’s seen around Oaknd for years. One tag, old and faded block letters, reads Temple of Death. Below it someone has written ‘dont answer ANY questions’. She climbs down the metal dder, the rungs thick with yers of paint, and emerges into a small room, cabinets and a desk and shelves, all still part of the custrophobic segment of ship. The floor is linoleum with a coating of grime, candy wrappers, scraps of paper, broken gss. It smells like beer and vomit. There are three doors coming off this chamber. Two are firmly shut and the third is cracked open and light and psychedelic rock is pouring out of it. No sign of where Emiko and Nylon went. She gently pushes back the heavy steel door and moves into a musty room lined with carpet and chunks of foam on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Most the room is taken up by an old corduroy sofa on which sit two people in full body rabbit costumes with big round heads, sorting out bags stuffed full of some pnt that doesn’t really look like weed. They both stare at her and she mumbles an apology and closes the door again. Still no sign of her friends.

  She’s overwhelmed with dread and fear, not a sense of threat directly but of some eternal danger, something watching her even through those steel armor bulkheads and ten feet of earth. Not this time and pce, a different one, one she remembers nonetheless. One that this pce reminds her of, with its secret underground passages. There is a coldness here, like she is standing in a great cavity, walking along a thin bance beam. She could slip off to either side. And the beast is watching her. Which side is grace and which is perdition? Who was damned and who was saved? Or were any? They were crucified all the same, they suffered all the same. What comes next is just an illusion. She squeezes her eyes and presses her hands against her head to push off the weight of those things she can’t remember. It’s as if there’s some doppelganger nearby, suffering, aware of her, wanting her to be aware of it, whispering with the wind and the sound of the sea. In the other room she can hear the shuffling movements of the rabbit suits, the crinkling of pstic bags, while the guitar moans and shrieks through tinny speakers.

  On the side of a shelf is a diagram of a dissected human body, the parts beled with Cyrillic script. The dissected body has no genitals but four sets of eyes, two hearts, two lungs, two stomachs, three winding paths of entrails knotted among each other. The eyes are all identical.

  With time, she resurfaces to the cool night air.

  Sitting on the grassy hill smoking a joint she notices there’s a few pces where covered pipes stick out of the ground, presumably venting air from the pce buried below. No indication of how far it extends. She can hear ughter coming out of one.

  A group of women emerge. One of them looks familiar; she used to live down in Santa Cruz and Ivy saw her occasionally at the pce she was staying. The woman must recognize Ivy because she avidly avoids her. Emiko comes out, talking to some trans woman that Ivy’s seen around about her amazing DJ career that’s totally just about to take off and all her amazing artistic innovations. They start whining about how the scene’s emptying out because everyone’s moving to Berlin.

  “But it is really amazing,” the other girl is saying. “Like, you actually do need to go to Berlin. It’s a totally different world there, they just do things differently.”

  “Oh don’t tell me you’re thinking of moving too,” Emiko says.

  “No, girl, I’ve been there, that’s what I’m saying. Anyway, the bay is trash now. I might be going to Phoenix for a bit.”

  “You’re moving?”

  “Yeah I’m like a shark, if I stay still I drown. Speaking of which I gotta get to that chaser bar in SF before it gets too te so I’m heading down to the BART, I’ll catch you again before I leave town.”

  The girl kisses Emiko on the cheek and Emiko smiles in a way that Ivy can tell is barely-concealed irritation. Emiko notices Ivy after a moment of watching her connect leaving.

  “Hey doll, what’s wrong?” Emiko asks.

  Ivy stiffens up. “Don’t—don’t call me that.”

  “Doll?”

  “I don’t like it, don’t—why would you call me that?”

  Emiko frowns, confused. “A lot of the girls call themselves dolls,” she says. “It’s like a thing that comes from bck trans femmes, more of an East Coast thing I guess. I hear it all the time in my social groups.”

  “It’s not like a weird thing?” Ivy asks cautiously. “Cuz just, when I hear that word it makes me think about… like, men with a very fifties culture approach to women. Objectifying.”

  “It’s about context,” says Emiko. “I don’t think you’re in a pce to say poor bck trans femmes are objectifying themselves.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” says Ivy. “I just—fuck, I’m sorry, it’s just a trigger for me. From when I was dating weird guys.”

  “It’s a word with lots of meanings,” Emiko says. “Like saying ‘dolled up,’ right? Or then there’s uh like a fetish about it. And actual dolls.”

  “When someone calls me a doll it just makes me feel weird. Like I have to obey them, like I’m being controlled.”

  “It’s just a word,” Emiko says with an awkward little ugh. “Don’t let it get to you so much.”

  Loud ughter echoes through the pipes from underground and with it the smell of smoke. Somewhere below the rabbits pack bags. Ivy doesn’t want to be here. At least it’s so overwhelming she’s not thinking about anything else.

  *****

  After picking faer up the next morning from Nautilus’ trailer, Gravity hasn’t eaten so they swing by the Taco Bell on Telegraph and Grand and then Gravity suggests they should go drive by the old house they used to live at together. Ivy’s embarrassed to realize she can’t quite recall where it was, that her memory of Oaknd is a lot worse than it used to be when she was Lilly. Gravity remembers exactly where it is and they roll by to see the same house they lived in ten years before. It’s boarded up now, painted beige in the patchy pattern that indicates repeated covering of graffiti. There’s a sign posted on the chainlink fence around it reading New Developments Coming Soon.

  “This city has changed so much,” Ivy says, “since those days.”

  “We all have. You and I. It’s in the nature of things to change.” Gravity’s staring at the house, staring through it. The basement down there, probably full of mold and rats now, where they first met. The backyard, once covered in art and potted pnts and a little garden, is now a scoured dead field. There’s nothing to indicate the sorts of memories people might have had here.

  “I wish it weren’t like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like we’re being slowly defeated. Rounded up. Driven underground. Silenced. Assimited.”

  “Sometimes that happens. At least we’re, well…” Gravity sighs. “I miss them too.”

  Ivy thought maybe she would feel closer to who she used to be if she saw it. No. Everything’s wrong. The colors, the smells, the sounds. Only the shapes remain, only in their blockiest ways. The other houses nearby are gone too, either refurbished with new tenants or repced entirely with generic modern architecture. It’s no longer the Oaknd she used to know.

  She’s overtaken by a horrible premonition. Some future era, all the eyes of the world turned hatefully on her and her friends. They want to make us extinct, she realizes. They want to erase us from the past and the future. To obliterate us utterly, to pass us into some void and close it off. They will never succeed, because that’s impossible. But they’ll keep trying, and we will suffer and suffer for it. And we will fight, because there’s nothing else a cornered animal can do but fight or die.

  “I feel like in some weird fucked up way I’m a little bit Midnight now,” Gravity says. “I’m incorporating part of her into part of me. Maybe that’s what grief does. Helps people with that.”