Allies exist between crossed structures. One is the opposite from what he was born as, and the other is the same as what they said she ought to be, so they share a point of origin but not a current state of being. The person who crosses over wonders if “he” is really a “he” in a meaningful sense, or if he ought to become a “she” for meaningful, and therefore aesthetic, reasons. The thought comes over him in multiple guises, over the course of months, but returns to him as he walks to the corner store in a white dress, which he bought a couple of weeks prior. The dress is made of crocheted cotton and has a pleasant heaviness, and enough holes to offset its sense of warmth with a vernal levity. He feels he can do this, wear a dress out in public for the first time since he was eight, because he has decided to cancel his morning class, and is nearly certain that he won’t see or be seen by any of his students downtown.

If you came up to B and told him that life exists outside of language, he would agree with a violent conviction, yet he often finds himself in the position of affirming the opposite. B feels that his life has been constituted by language, as much of what occupies him is based in what he reads or writes. He has completed his coursework in a doctoral program, and spends many of his days alone in front of text, with no formal commitments outside of teaching a writing course twice a week. He convenes often with his students, in class and in office hours, but otherwise lives a rather solitary life, with no companions other than those he writes to, whom he has met at different times and places. B feels a strong alliance with certain writers and filmmakers, nevertheless, and this holds him in relation to a kind of rich field of artworks. Once in a while, he attempts to contribute to this field, but the poems and stories he works on always end up aborted. Sometimes he perceives this sense of alienation from his work as a sign of the sharpness of his originality, and further posits that the difficulty and impossibility of the endeavor is intertwined with a process of denial and recapitulation as basic as breathing. What he wants to accomplish is both necessary and impossible, so it will “never stop not being written.”

The magnolia tree is losing its petals, and it’s warm enough to wear his new sandals too. He hasn’t shaved his legs in weeks, and is afraid of speaking to the cashier, but he quietly thanks her once the transaction is complete. Nothing traceable happens except for an exchange of apples and yogurt for currency. Something is happening, nevertheless, which suggests the outline of a story.

C is a female writer. She has managed to create a first-person narrator who in turn seems to vanish from much of the narrative she conceives. This invented narrator evokes an atmosphere of blankness, of complete neutrality, as she relays the speech of others whom she listened to, often others whom she had just met. This narrator, her double or stuntman, is a figure of impersonality, of a vanished but tangible beauty, a kind of atmosphere of abstraction that was clearer and more motile than representation, than identification with the character. One reviewer describes her as a “vessel” for the speech which she listens to and records. The word “vessel,” however, seems to B insufficient. “Vessel” seems too removed from the gesture of the work, a gesture which might more appropriately be described as one of drawing or painting—applying with a utensil something fluid to a flat plane surface. C’s narrator is a drawn figure. She is like charcoal, like the charcoal used to make a sketch. Charcoal, as B learns, removes impurities from water through “adsorption,” meaning that particles cling to its surface.

B likes to identify himself with his gaze, and to otherwise vanish behind this.

“It’s going to take a long time to see C, to be able to describe her,” B tells me.

Something about the notion of “allies” compels him, “allies” and “alloys” and “allotropes.” He wants to mix himself up with whatever she is in language. B claims that it is thanks to her that in the last several months he has come to terms with the fact that he wants to be a woman, “again,” or rather, “for the first time.” I want to capture and convey this line of “alliance” between the two, down to thinking of C as a character, as a character in B’s psychological life. B came to talk to me for this, and for other reasons.

B came to me because he had fallen in love with a writer. It wasn’t, to his knowledge, C, though our sessions soon shifted from one to the other. The other writer, someone he had known personally since adolescence, had led him to feel abandoned, and absolutely wild with passion for the absent figure. It was the first time he had felt so abandoned in his life, it seemed, but he suffered less from this raw sensation of abandonment than from his shame or inexperience around the passivity of waiting for response, and of not being able to use hard work to gain further knowledge of a situation.

P, the writer, was someone he had known earlier in life, a boy from high school. Around the time they met, B had just begun to identify himself with maleness. He disavowed his “straight” attraction to P and it came as a surprise later on when he found himself in a renewed entanglement with this “straight” man.

If B is defined by his relationship with language, he is also defined by his choice to go by a different name and pronoun at the age of sixteen. Each week, B injects a molecule which his body reads and uses to regulate hair growth, protein synthesis, and erythropoiesis, the generation of red blood cells. And here comes the confusion for him: why is he drawn to wearing a white dress? Why is he reluctant to expose the pitch of his voice? How has he come to identify himself with femininity?