Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

when we’re not allowed to have something we want, we get all fuckin weird about it.

Getting Stoned And Glaring At Cactuses: The James Hanson Story. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman.

He imagines the smoke billowing out of the bathroom behind him, like he always does, but leaving the bathroom is not dramatic.

Both Maria & James do this derealization, pretending to be in a movie

She has kind of a low singing voice but he can’t hear it well enough to say more than that about it. He can’t tell if she sounds like a guy or a girl or what, she just sounds quiet.

He looks down and his body is all scrunched up, knees to his chest in the little passenger seat of this little car. He’s pretty tall, which is important for a lot of reasons, but he’s making himself tiny.

watching your girlfriend become someone else, more of a grownup, but still stay herself, while meanwhile you’re still working the same job you always have, at the same level of broke with the same people who knew you years ago and knew you when you transitioned. When you see the same people every day that you’ve seen since before you transitioned and you already went through this massive social and physical change, and you’re afraid to really even consider changing or evolving in any way, because you kind of had to have all this bravado, to act like you really believed in yourself in order to transition.

It’s like, how do you take down that bravado in order to evolve as a person?

how do you transition but then continue to evolve as a person, post-transition, when it seems like the only way you got through your transition was to assert loudly, even just to yourself, that you knew who you were and you knew what you wanted and you trusted yourself?

And I needed to get over the idea that being responsible in a relationship means being consistent and stoic and out of touch with my own feelings.

I think I couldn’t keep up with her because I didn’t know how to be in a relationship so I just grabbed on to our relationship as tightly as I could and hoped for the best but inevitably I just squeezed all the blood out of it or whatever.

it’s because I don’t say, like, I think this movie sucks. Or: I don’t want to eat that. Or: I want to wear your underwear, I want to have a pussy like yours. It feels like one leads to the other. Like if he were to say, I don’t want to watch a stupid Drew Carey movie, Nicole would be like, Okay, what do you want to watch, and he’d be honest and be like Paris Is Burning, or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or Transamerica, some other movie about transgender people that he can barely even admit to himself that he wants to watch.

But like, what are my kinks telling me? Why am I so unable to talk to Nicole? She asks, clearly, all the time, what I’m thinking and what I want, but I don’t even know how to tell her, even if the answers were things that she’d want to hear.

He can’t think of a movie to talk about: he hates all the ones he’s seen in the last year or two and the ones he likes suddenly seem deeply stupid.

I’m hungry. Are you? I guess so, James says. He hadn’t thought about it.

He’s just some dude who wrote a book about how trans women are perverts, which is an easy thing to get a press to publish. You’ll never go broke selling regressive ‘common sense.’

even though he’s not close with his dad or anything how the fuck do you tell him that shit?

He wonders whether the yellow light and nostalgia can turn his body inconsequential enough

Nevada was always intended to be more of a “well, that didn’t work” narrative than one that tells anyone how to live.

Trans people are very often very funny. Jokes can be a defense mechanism, a trauma response; if you can make someone laugh before they remember that they hate people like you, you might get out of a 7-Eleven before they can hurt you. But I was good at being a dirtbag. I started wearing bandanas around my neck and romanticizing train-hopping without ever actually doing it.

Can I tell you something? We have bodies. All of us. Trans people maybe more than anyone else. And like it or not, the body keeps the score. (You should read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. It made me ugly cry on an airplane.) To put it reductively, trauma impacts our ability to exist in our bodies, which feels bad. You know what else can make it hard to exist in a body? Being trans. It feels bad not to be able to be in your body.