Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

“What about ‘Queers Bash Back’?” “But we don’t want to advocate violence as a response,” said Christopher. “We don’t want to alienate people.” “I do,” said Paul, more and more awake. “Fuck those queer-bashers. Fuck all those fucking breeders. Write that!”

“Nothing. He’s old. He’s like thirty.”

Rude

Dallas might be a drug-dealing skateboard punk rocker right now, but at heart he was an American, at heart he was a normal straight boy. He’d cover all his tattoos with a suit at his Texas wedding. Paul wouldn’t even be invited. Paul was repulsive, apart from the human flow of life; Paul was sitting alone outside waiting for a ride that would never come.

“It’s darling,” said Jane, and immediately experienced a spasm of impostor shame. She knew she camped it up around Paul, and wondered if he camped it up around her, if they were anxious collaborators in a consolidation of something supposedly shared rather than actual friends.

Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?

Reminds me of when i came out as nonbinary, having to do it all over again. Much harder the second time around

He’d sensed his own nascent malleability for years, since childhood. At first, he’d assumed all gays were like him and had quietly decided not to mention that they could choose. But he had pieced together over time, without revealing too much, that he was even to the gays a freak. He was alone in this world.

“We won’t get in trouble,” said Paul. “They’ll never know.” Jane looked over the top of her sunglasses. “Maybe,” she said.

they did not mind his absence, found him easier to miss than accommodate.

They were all women, except him, including him. No one was looking at him strangely. He was being paranoid. He was a girl, just like these girls.

Jane was angry about something that didn’t bother him.

I am a giant queer who threatens your pathetic sense of knowing anything about the world,

“Did you always know you were a girl?” Diane asked. The waitress came back, took their order, and left. Paul thought. Had he always been a girl?—

The first tape you ever got from someone was always an adjustment in how you thought of them, an insight into how they saw themselves.

He could tell she liked that he was girlier than her, liked that she was so much bigger than him, liked to do little things for him, but sometimes he did wonder if she liked liking what she liked.

“Right,” Paul said. “No, obviously that’s wrong, testing things on animals.” He wondered if it was wrong to test AIDS drugs on animals.

His body did whatever he wanted, so he belonged in all the genders.

He did not himself care to assimilate into the power structures of heteropatriarchal white Christian America, was bored and horrified by those who did.

All night he hovered just above sleep: missing flights, retaking the SATs, boarding express trains going in the wrong direction.

Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction.

If only he could remember himself, put himself back together…

Magic could be anywhere, Paul knew, but the odds were better in certain places.

He understood that he had failed the test. What do you do after you fail the test and you’re still alive?

“You’re a changed man,” said Ruffles one morning, desultorily pouring cornflakes into a bowl. “I’m not a man,” said Paul.

He was exhausted and broke from being so queer,

How could you trust your own taste?

He hated not-knowing. How do you know if you like something because the corporate radio brainwashers want you to like it or because it’s actually good and you have an internal sense of what’s good, which is a sign of your essential worth as a person?

he wasn’t crazy; this was happening, whatever it was going to be.

All his references were so mainstream and earnest; he was devolving or perhaps revealing some profound truth about himself.

“We’re like everybody else, only more so.”

Don’t pathologize your desires.”