Chapter Text
From the day Matt could talk, people would accuse him of saying every single thing that came to his mind, instantly. The truth is it’s only what he can catch in the stream. If he doesn’t say it the idea might drift away pitching and weaving in the current, or he has to exorcise it from his being, bring out the thought of his hand on the highlighter orange element of the stove or pulling the wheel into traffic to say No, not really.
It’s why he loves the internet. On late nights when Matt’s alone he’s comforted by the collective unconscious laid bare. He calls it spelunking, in the cave under his loft bed lit only by the CRT he can explore as deep as he wants. He can find chains of stories and experiences that no other generation has ever been exposed to all at once, or been so distanced from while witnessing. Not much ever really touches him. Secondhand stories and images rarely do the way they seem to with other people. That’s someone else’s life and he, very often, just wants to gawk at it, add it to the repertoire of a rehearsal and Jay will provide the soundtrack.
One night in summer he finds himself on a pretty tame tangent. He’s on a forum thread of EDM producers all arguing with each other, always a good laugh, and on one of the user’s personal sites he sees that she’s a regular on some LGBT forum.
It ends up being pretty boring. Gay minutiae isn’t that different from regular minutiae. He clicks around, about to close the tab and search for some new industrial accidents when he spots a thread titled “One Year On HRT!!!” It details someone’s year on estrogen which, apparently, does some sci-fi shit to transsexuals. He didn’t know about this, everything he knows about the subject is from movies. Finally some real freak-show reading, he thinks. Matt reads every word and all of the comments. Nearly everyone is really, really happy, it reminds him of a graduation card, or a birthday party. Suddenly he needs to know absolutely everything and looks for more posts. In the privacy of his room he’ll admit it’s kind of cool, some real biohacking going on. Modern science is amazing.
Something bizarre happens. He knows instantly he can’t tell a single living soul about this. More specifically, Matt can’t let anyone know he’s seen this.
Wouldn’t that feel crazy? The idea surfaces to his mind, involuntarily.
He categorizes it as a “hot stove” thought, a destructive impulse that he watches glance by his ear at speed and ignores. Thinking it is a nice rush of adrenaline but would probably fuck up his day.
He goes downstairs, Jay is engrossed in another play through of Majora’s Mask and only nods at him. Matt eats a bowl of cereal standing at the kitchen counter. He feels about twelve inches above his own head, the way he usually does after spending too much time in the dark on the computer. He wants to know more. Does it work on everyone? Is it permanent?
Matt sits next to Jay for a little while, gives him shit for missing an easy shot. He messes up his hair while getting up to go to bed, they’ve been living together for so long and often he still feels lucky, a sleepy contentment takes him over.
First thing in the morning when light is barely shining in from the window:
Wouldn’t that feel crazy?
He’s about as high up as someone can get in the building in his loft bed, his pillow is soaked with sweat. Maybe the thought is more like a phrase that gets stuck in his head, similar to a line in a movie. Except it’s one he can’t say out loud. He turns over and goes back to sleep.
The next day is normal, he lightly crashes a rental car into a bike rack because Jay spilled white paint all over the interior. It was a test to see if they could write NIRVANA THE BAND large enough to be seen on Google Maps and it was failing catastrophically. Jay was completely soaked and they’d been shooed off of every sidewalk they tried to paint on. And brake-checking Jay as a joke when he was fiddling with the lid was a little impulsive. The car is fucked.
Jay tries to scrape wet paint off of himself, standing by the parked car with a dent in the bumper.
“Hey – good thing we didn’t wear our usual clothes, right?” Matt says, rubbing the back of his neck, fearing whiplash. They’re wearing overalls and high-vis vests, but it wasn’t enough to draw away suspicion.
He keeps almost saying it. “I read about some crazy biohacking shit last night.” But he doesn’t and still isn’t sure why. Jay will hear anything on Matt’s mind, he’s more or less an extension of it, catching or rejecting whatever comes out like a hapless quality control specialist in a production line. He can’t say it, he doesn’t want to know what Jay might think.
“Did you get insurance on the car?” Jay says, his face a picture of agony as he shifts around. “Fuck, it got in my underwear.”
“Dunno. I hope I did - that interior…” He mimes an explosion. “Looks like a gang-bang in there.”
“Why’d you break-check like that? Dumb ass. And you didn’t get any on you.” He shoves Matt, leaving a white paint-print on his shoulder.
“Don’t get that shit on me.” He laughs.
Jay tackles him, smearing him with paint. They wrestle around for awhile before losing the energy and taking the car home. They’ll try another plan tomorrow.
He wakes up in the middle of the night, turns on his computer and visits the forum. He searches elsewhere for before and after photos and finds himself hitting the power button on the the tower when he wonders what would happen if he-
The sun had risen but he didn't see it happen from under the loft bed until he stands up, a headache pounding behind his eyes.
—
Jay doesn’t know what to do with Matt when he’s depressed. It’s becoming a ritual around his birthday in July, and seems to get worse the further he is into his twenties. He spends entire days in his room on the computer or laying on his back on the couch listening to the TV. The plans get more manic and dangerous, and when he isn’t lethargic he’s demonically controlling and cruel. Jay threatens to move out after Matt nearly dislocates his shoulder for leaving their leftover take out on the counter overnight. When they make up, Jay goes miles out of his comfort zone to drop two hands on his shoulders and ask what’s wrong. Matt just says “I’m gonna figure it out.” with his arms limp at his sides. Jay has no clue what it could be. Matt has no reason to keep a secret, he never really has.
Matt’s trust pays out in late July and he refuses to say how much it is. Jay is pretty sure he’ll never know. His paternal grandma is an evil woman with “fuck you” money, in his words, and loves him the way a queen loves a court jester. Jay suspects she wanted to spite the rest of his family by spoiling him, and to spare the labor pool from his personality.
Matt pretends money doesn’t exist in only the way someone with too much of it can, but he’s always been strangely frugal unless it’s for a scheme. Matt wants to play the long game with it and never work a day in his life. Jay can sense his own presence in this future Matt’s seeing, he’s dutifully arranging a space for him in the nest, and Jay tells himself every day he doesn’t need to crawl in.
Jay makes them celebrate his birthday. They put on suits and get a fancy steak dinner, Matt draws the line at a limo just to be withholding. Jay knows if he wasn’t being such a pouting bitch, Matt would have loved a limo. What a waste of a guy, being this sad, Jay thinks. And for what?
Matt cheers up a bit at the restaurant and goes on a fifteen minute tangent about Niles and Daphne from Frasier. He thinks she could have done better, but Jay insists they were a good match, it just took them a little while to figure it out. Jay drinks most of a bottle of champagne that the waiter, who was practically begging them to get red wine instead, refused to open “movie-style.”
Jay feels lamplit by Matt’s attention and wants to fix whatever's wrong, hopes that it’s just something annual, like the flu.
As they walk home Jay’s limbs feel rubbery, his head full of effervescent bubbles, and he can see the gears turning in Matt’s head again.
“Stop!” He roughly puts his arms around Matt’s shoulders from the side, it quickly devolves into a headlock.
There’s no wind tonight and the air is muggy, stagnant with trash and whatever wafts out of the restaurants, laundromats and hair salons dotting the street. A pop ballad and the clink of dishware echoes from the bar patio across the road and the streetlights turn everything amber.
Matt’s laugh is the genuine, ridiculous barking sound that devolves into a boyish and nearly silent giggle. He makes no effort to escape Jay. If he was ever forced to try and explain how Matt’s smile made him feel that night, or on a lot of nights, out loud, he’d want to hit himself. There’s nothing else like it for him.
“Stop fucking pouting! I’m serious.” Jay pushes and pulls him around the sidewalk.
“I know -” He gasps. Matt’s hands clutch at Jay’s sides like he’s a piece of driftwood in a shipwreck. “I know.”
“Will you tell me?” Jay says quietly, like he’s the one with a secret.
“There’s nothing to tell.” Matt rests his cheek against Jay’s forearm. His eyes search empty air.
Jay doesn’t move away from this small push of affection. Matt’s always been clingy but lately he’s been shying away, and Jay’s had just enough champagne and good food to want to keep him close for now. It’s not that he misses the affection, or that he finds himself lost without Matt knocking into him and pulling him in, Jay thinks. It just doesn’t feel right otherwise.
“Bullshit.” Jay shakes him mercilessly.
“No bullshit - no bullshit!” He laughs. “I don’t know - I think I like, store up all of the ennui for the year and the box unlocks on my birthday. It’s my little birthday curse, in exchange for being such a sweetie all year.”
“That’s stupid, Matt.”
“My mind is a black box, even to myself.” He shrugs.
“You’d tell me though, if something was super fucked up?” Jay says, letting go of him.
“You know me, man. If something was even a little fucked up, you think I’d shut up about it?”
—
A few weeks later, Matt has a dream. Most of it is about him getting lost in an infinitely long mall with his third grade teacher, being pursued by gunmen and rescuing Jay from underneath an ice rink, but at one point he visits a pharmacy run out of a pretzel shop and receives a metal suitcase with exactly one syringe inside, and the pharmacist says, Ok, see you next week!
The relief and excitement is immense. It feels like getting the keys to the apartment with Jay. Brand new days forever. He can’t wait to get home.
He wakes up at five in the morning and for a few precious seconds thinks: Wait, there were no instructions. Maybe there’s some on the forum. He sits up to get on his computer and then just stares at the wall. He’s suddenly angrier than he’s ever been and paralyzed by it. Matt has a low tolerance for melancholy and his body always alchemizes it into something else. He’s not like Jay, who seems to enjoy it from time to time, staring longingly out of the streetcar window, or playing the same haunting melody over and over again, saying “It’s nothing…” wistfully when asked about it. Matt wasn’t built to wallow or contemplate. He was put on earth to run around and scheme. But this can’t become a scheme, it’s actually nothing, it’s a dead end.
He slips out of the apartment and wanders the streets, to join the company of baristas on their way to work and people slumped over in alleyways. He might have to let himself think about it at least once to convince himself it’s an empty thought. Maybe it’s like when he was twelve and really wanted a pet gecko, and then went to the pet store and realized they stink.
It feels like standing at the end of a dock and knowing the water in front of him is cold. He can’t just stand here like this.
He jumps, bracing for impact.
Okay, he thinks, he’s not like most of the people on the forum. Matt doesn’t have the same capacity for shame or self consciousness that others do. He just doesn’t think about this shit, if someone hates him or misreads him that’s their problem. He’s dressed up as a girl and liked it, but he loves dressing up as anything. His hands start to sweat.
He’s never had sex, which could be a missing piece of the equation. This thought is too big and one he really, really doesn’t want to touch right now. It’s tedious. So what if he doesn't want to meet some girl at a bar and then say a bunch of bullshit so he can awkwardly sweat all over her for five minutes? Big deal. He has to move on.
Does he hate his body and just not realize it? No, he just has one and it carries him around. People have called him strange looking and said he dresses like shit and it’s funny, again, not his problem. He compares himself to Jay, again, who agonizes about a zit on his face, checks his hair in the side mirror of parked cars, and stopped wearing short sleeved shirts outside of the house because he thought his arms were too skinny in high school. And the little smile on his face when he thinks he looks good, when he says ‘I like these pants’ when they’re not even cool looking, how he tries not to get bashful at compliments. Matt’s never had that impulse either.
This sucks, he thinks as he crosses the street. No wonder people go crazy thinking about themselves too much. There should be PSAs about how dangerous this is.
But why does he want things to change? He stops at a corner and rubs his hands over his face. He feels like he’s going to implode. He's doing this too fast.
Fine. This is the big thought experiment. If he did it, his body would change. Matt’s heart starts thrumming in his chest. A softer face, a different silhouette, what if he grew out his hair? Who would that be, would people like her -
Fuck. No, no, no. Matt pulls at his hair and can’t catch his breath. He wants it. He might need it.
He walks home and every atom in his body is begging him to wake Jay up and spill everything in one unbroken sentence. He wants to get told he’s acting crazy, to go back to bed. There’s no chance he’d listen and tell him it’s okay, right? This isn’t okay. It doesn’t stop Matt from picturing it, something he’s done more times than he’ll ever admit when he’s alone and can’t get himself under control. Take it easy, Matt.
Matt stands at the bottom of the stairs for a full minute, and then at Jay’s door for another. The words wouldn’t come out, he knows deep down. He goes back to his room and lays face down on his mattress until he hears Jay puttering around.
—
After that long walk in the sunrise, everything had snapped in half. There was no more abstracting it. Do or don’t, figure it out soon and move on. Matt begins what will become a thirty-four page password protected document titled DEAL OR NO DEAL.
Page three, PROS:
Transsexual spectacle angle for Nirvana the Band (NOW Mag coverage?)
Page thirteen, under CONS:
Jay?
Page twenty-two, JAY (this became it’s own section):
Say I got bitten by a tic or had too much red 40 as a kid and it’s a glandular disease that can only be cured by taking it?
Page fifteen, QUESTIONS:
QUESTION OF EFFECIANCY: will convincing myself not to for the rest of my fucking life take up more or less energy than what happens if I do?
Page twenty-one, JAY:
INT - LIVING ROOM
MATT
Hey Bird good morning so I’m injecting myself with estrogen not really sure if I’m like a chick or whatever just gonna see what happens are we good?
JAY
What?
Page twelve, CONS (50pt font, bold):
Possible immolation of my entire fucking life
Page twenty-two, JAY:
Went “nice” when I showed him the new Myspace of that kid from school who’s a chick now (he was BLACKOUT - stairway puke incident of 2009)
Page fifteen, QUESTIONS:
What do girls wear and would I have to dress like one every day? What are the rules?
Page two, PROS:
Won’t feel like I’m actually going to die
Page twenty-seven, CONSENSUS (this is the only item):
DEAL
The rest of the document covers logistics, timelines, costs (LOGISTICS, page 30: Million fucking dollars for a private clinic or wait a year.)
Matt still has no idea how to tell Jay, but decides there will be enough time in between starting and needing to confess, to figure something out. (LOGISTICS, Page 32: It will be easier with a clear head. He’s stupid, I should have a couple months or so.)
—
In Fall, Matt officially opts out of haircut day ‘for the foreseeable future’ and Jay doesn’t think anything of it. He’d skipped the last three and Jay liked how it looked, nearly at his jawline. That evening he’d just come back from a sudden day trip to visit his parents, which was strange, and held onto his backpack like it contained a Faberge egg. He looked a little manic running up to his room and he stayed there for half an hour. Later, Jay asked what he was excited about and Matt looked like he wanted to say, but just shrugged and started wrestling him off of the couch. He was happy to see Matt happy after such a long time. It was another Friday night where Jay didn’t know what was going on in Matt’s head. There were fifty-two of them a year.
A few months later they’re out for dinner at a shitty Italian place that Jay was craving. They rarely go because the food isn’t special or cheap, the atmosphere is bad, and it’s not that close by. Jay tries to explain why it hits the spot sometimes but he can’t conjure up the right words, and because Matt doesn’t agree he doesn’t do it for him.
Matt’s crinkling the plastic checkered tablecloth and laughing at his own joke, and Jay realizes he looks younger somehow - a lot younger. Maybe it’s the haircut, he thinks, how it’s almost brushing his shoulders these days.
Whatever bothered Matt is completely behind them now and he’s full of energy again. It gets kind of annoying, how on Matt is lately, but Jay will take it over the alternative.
Matt catches him staring and there’s a flash of anxiety on his face, but he chucks an ice cube from his drink at him. Jay gets food poisoning from the chicken parmesan.
Matt sits with him in his room while he recovers and says he wants to buy a house, slowly spinning around in Jay’s desk chair. Without a second thought Jay responds that they should find a place with a better kitchen than this one.
“Oh - you think you’re invited?” Matt says, beaming.
Jay shrugs, half asleep. He pretends not to see Matt wiping tears out of his eyes a few minutes later.
Another night Matt gives Jay a little too much shit for not getting the melody for an Ultima VII song right. The weather sucks and they’re stuck inside, Matt’s trying to piss him off.
“You know you look like a fucking girl with that haircut right?” Jay says, and feels all the air leave the room. He was in the process of formulating how to ask this question without sounding crazy, and figured it might take a day or two to really get a script on. Instead he’s being an asshole.
The night before, Jay was looking through the pictures on his phone and found one of Matt from his birthday, in the restaurant holding the bottle of champagne and one of Jay’s special occasion cigarettes. It was unlit, but they still got scolded by that buzzkill waiter. Jay liked this picture of him, trying to look cool but betrayed by the mischievous smile that always reached his eyes.
He flipped through to a more recent one taken from outside of a bar after they’d fumbled the “Cowboy Plan.” Matt in an embroidered denim jacket and bootcut jeans, long hair tucked behind his ears and holding a ten gallon hat by his side. Jay felt like he was going insane for a second. The angles of his chin, the roundness in the cheeks, something Jay couldn’t really explain in the eyes. Matt was pretty. He wanted to say this was a one off digital photo fluke. But from where he’s sitting now there’s no denying something is going on, but he has no fucking clue how, or why, or when.
Jay doesn’t get the reaction he’s expecting. Not outrage but nervousness, and the edge of a smile as if Matt just thought of a joke and through some miracle, kept it to himself.
Matt exhales, stares out into the dark kitchen as if reading something and then closes his eyes tightly. Opens them again.
“Bird. Do you - are you capable of even understanding how dense you are?”
—
It was fun keeping it secret at first. She’s never had a big one to herself. At the very beginning it was so electric and bizarre, and the thought of having anyone else in on the experience would have taken it out of her control. Matt was being lowered into her own body via a slow moving industrial crane. There was a lot of potential velocity at stake. She needed to buy time anyway.
She was given more time than she knew what to do with, and no surefire ideas on how to explain this to anyone. Anyone being Jay. Everyone else can just deal with her showing up to family New Years at the lake looking absolutely banging out of nowhere. Some good material is on the horizon with that one.
It’s been five months and some change and Bird’s mostly just chilling out. He’s asked three or four questions at most. Asked if she’s getting fat, why she cried watching Robin Hood even though it was the thousandth time she'd seen it. And last week, after four beers and a shot of whiskey, he asked why she never takes her shirt off anymore.
Despite how she feels right now, she knows Jay isn’t actually an idiot. He’s a true musical genius, the only other person on earth who knows what real performance art is, and one of the best Goldeneye players that’s ever lived. But if something doesn’t line up in his mind or pique his interest, or cause him to spiral out in rage or anxiety, there’s a seventy-percent chance it won’t ever write to his hard drive. But once he latches onto something like a song or a perceived transgression against him it could take up the whole week. And now he’s looking right at her.
She’s been wanting him there, dying to tell him about the craziest thing that’s ever happened to her, but still doesn’t know where or how to start. She needs her best friend but the risk of losing him is apocalyptic. Matt already prevented one in herself by starting estrogen, a fact that makes her look back on the last year like it’s one big Indiana Jones style death trap, acid pits and swinging blades, a sign that going back was never on the table. The unfairness of possibly having to choose one annihilation over the other hardens her resolve to just dig in and figure it out.
Matt and Jay, they’ve been boys together from the jump and she still needs that, too. After a long stint of forum reading and eye rolling she finally admitted that the really fringe queers were onto something and she’s like, twenty percent boy at minimum on any given day, sometimes more. (Deal or No Deal, ADDENDUM, page two: Essential to biohacking - MATH?) But the pitch is already hard enough without sci-fi gender math.
The biggest roadblock, not just in disclosure but what might the rest of her life, is being in love with him. His goofy smile and lanky slouch at the piano, how he’s insane but tries to hide it, and the way he would often listen to her like she invented talking. This fact was always in the background, but until she started living in her body instead of being suspended above it like a poorly tied helium balloon, it felt like over excitement, school-ish puppy love. It didn’t signify anything until it became the only direction any sign pointed to. Now she wanted everything with Birdie, to be dumbfuck guys that would fool around on the couch and his psycho girlfriend hanging onto his shoulders at the bus stop.
“Matt?” Jay says, irritation settling in his brow. “Tell me.”
Matt blinks again. How long had she been standing there?
“Ok. Yeah. Uh - the truth.” She says, beginning to pace the room. “Ugh. Jaybird, I need you to picture me as someone who wouldn’t joke about this. I have - and will continue to do so, especially having the proper clearance.” She peels up a cracked edge of the leather couch, picks up a ball point pen and presses her thumb against the tip, a little too hard. She investigates the black dot in the middle of her fingerprint. She’s about to blow this whole thing up.