The Days of Anna Madrigal (8 page)

She shrugged. “You and Ben are different generations.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“David Crosby did it for Melissa Etheridge, and he was like a hundred and eight.”

He gave her a crooked smile as she squeezed her hand. “Believe me, the invitation means infinitely more than the dance.”

She squeezed back. “Good. That makes me feel better.” She exhaled. “It depressed me for a while, you know. Knowing it wasn't possible.”

“Oh, frevvinsakes.”

“I know, right? But then I saw how silly I was being. Fuck HIV. And fuck some guy I barely know from Chakralicious. We're family, so this baby should be about us. All of us. And it still can be, Michael! About you and Ben even!”

Michael's mouth was agape. “How can it be about that?”

“Okay,” she said, her heart struggling in her chest like a small bird stuck in a chimney. “This is what I called about. I thought you and I should talk first.”

His face revealed that they were finally on the same page, though it might have been an obituary page, or a notice of imminent nuclear annihilation.

“Do you think Ben would be up for it?” she asked.

Chapter 8

THE ART CAR

“D
o you think she'll be up for it?” Jake asked the visitors.

They were standing in a derelict warehouse in Emoryville, a place chosen for its wide-open spaces and ready access to the freeway. Jake's upstairs neighbors, Selina and Marguerite—both transfolk—had just arrived on a trans-bay BART train from San Francisco. Kinda funny, thought Jake, since Trans Bay was the name of his camp in Black Rock City, but Selina and Marguerite were way too ladylike for a Burn.

They were here to see if the art car passed muster.

“It does look comfy,” said Marguerite, craning her neck, “but how on earth would you get her all the way up there?” A math teacher at the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, she was prone to asking questions. And since she was as short and waddly as a pigeon, practically everything she encountered in life struck her as too-high-up.

Jake was prepared. “There's a detachable ramp, see? We can roll her up there, if we have to. And once she's in place—wa-la!—all she has to do is sit there and watch the world go by!”

Marguerite frowned. “But, surely, when it's out on the highway . . .”

Selina Khan, a tall and deeply practical Canadian who advised people about their investments, shot a weary glance at her flatmate. “You don't seriously think this thing is going out on the highway, do you?”

“Well . . .” Marguerite screwed her face into a pout. “It has wheels, Selina. It looks very strong to me . . . with all that metal and . . . welding.”

Jake tried to soothe Marguerite's feelings. “A natural mistake. “It
is
a vehicle . . . technically. It's already registered in the Mutant Vehicles Parade.”

“It's a giant tricycle,” Selina said flatly. “So what do you do between here and the desert? Disassemble it or something?”

“There ya go!” Jake fired his forefinger at Selina as if she had just picked the right answer on
Millionaire
. He knew he had to placate both of them if this was ever going to happen. As members of Anna's caregiver circle, these ladies had a serious say in the matter. “We're packing the parts onto a flatbed truck,” he said, “and reassembling it on the playa. Anna won't even see it until we're there.”

“She won't have to pedal it, will she?” Marguerite again, with her questions.

“Nope. These three pods are the only ones that have pedals.”

Selina grabbed one of the pods and shook it, apparently testing its sturdiness. “And three people—just pedaling—can make this thing move?”

Stop calling it a thing, thought Jake. This is my baby—the Monarch. It took nine whole months to make, in fact, so have some respect.

“Want a demonstration?” He tried to say it without defiance, but wasn't sure that he'd succeeded. “It's really simple.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” said Selina.

Three of the other guys from Trans Bay, including Jake's boyfriend Amos, were huddled in a circle on the other side of the room, possibly smoking weed. Jake weighed the pros and cons of summoning them, then stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. “Yo, bitches! Magic Time.” Within seconds they had all come running, scrambling into their pods like firemen mounting a hook-and-ladder.

“Oh my,” said Marguerite, pressing her hand to her chest as soon as the art car began to rumble across the concrete floor. “Should we get out of the way?”

“You're fine,” said Jake. “They've got it under control.”

A section of plastic tubing fell off Amos's pod and clattered noisily to the floor, making Marguerite jump back several feet.

“That's just decorative,” Jake hastened to explain. “We're not finished with that part yet. The hardscape is totally solid.”

“It's quite something,” murmured Marguerite, obviously trying to say something supportive. “It's like an old-timey carousel.”

Selina arched an eyebrow at her. “Pray tell, Marguerite. How is it like an old-timey carousel?”

“Well, it goes up and down as much as it goes around and around.”

“It's not supposed to go around and around. It's supposed to transport her from one place to another.”

“You know what I mean, Selina. There's all this wonderful . . . movement, in all directions. It's extraordinary, Jake. A real accomplishment.”

Jake felt himself blush with pride. He was tempted to show them how the wings worked, but the silk panels had yet to be installed, so the superstructure would still be visible. Without the softscape in place it would come off more like a pterodactyl than a monarch butterfly. He showed them Amos's sketch instead.

“This is how it'll look,” he said, offering the blueprint to Selina. “It's all about—you know—transformation.”

“What's that writing on the front?” asked Selina.

Marguerite tilted her reading glasses and read aloud: “ ‘Anna Madrigal—World's Oldest Transgender Activist.' ”

“That's lovely,” she said.

“Really?” grumbled Selina. “What if it said, ‘Marguerite McGillicuddy—World's Oldest Math Teacher.' Would you want to ride around town in that?”

Marguerite cocked her head in silent concession to Selina, then turned back to Jake. “You might want to go with something like . . . ‘Transgender Pioneer Anna Madrigal.' ”

“Sure,” he said. “Cool. Fine.” At this point there was everything to gain by compromise. He was just glad they had moved away from safety issues and onto more mundane considerations. It was starting to feel like a done deal. He signaled for the guys to come down, since they were following this exchange too intently.

“Does she know about this?” asked Marguerite.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Why not?” asked Selina.

Jake explained that first he had to be sure he could create something worthy of Anna's iconic stature in the LGBT community. He wanted every last piece in place, he said, before unveiling the finished product. And naturally that meant the support and approval of Selina and Marguerite, Anna's most trusted confidantes in the community and, needless to say, icons in their own right. He had his tongue so far up their asses, it was a wonder he could talk at all.

“How do you know she would even do it?” asked Selina.

Jake shrugged. “We're honoring her. Don't people
like
to go places where they're being honored?”

“The Hyatt Regency, maybe. Not Black Dog City.”

“Rock,” said Jake.

“What?”

“Black
Rock
City. It's named for the desert.”

“It's in a desert?”

Jake shrugged. “An alkali flat, actually.”

Marguerite gazed hopefully at Jake. “Is that better than a desert?”

Jake decided not to answer that directly. “I'm gonna rent an SUV with AC. We can come late and leave early and . . . you know, totally avoid the crowds. We'll have a great time, I'll be with her every minute, she'll feel the love . . . we'll have a photo op and get the hell out of Dodge the next day. Easy peasy Japanesy.”

It was just a stupid expression his mom used all the time back in Tulsa, but it tumbled out of him as if he'd coined the phrase himself. Selina made a face like he'd just spilled a glass of Two-Buck Chuck on her nice white couch.

“What?” he said. “You're Korean. Gimme a break.” He looked to Marguerite for support. “Doesn't this seem cool to you?”

Marguerite took her time answering, probably because she had to keep peace in the flat. She and Selina were not a
couple
couple, but they had shared that space for years, so they squabbled about everything in private. Jake had lived there with them, in fact, until he escaped downstairs into the low-stress Eden of Anna's flat.

“It
does
seem very cool,” Marguerite replied. “But there are other considerations. Cool isn't always enough, Jake.”

Oh great, he thought, now the good cop was turning on him. “Why are you making me sound like some sort of flake? I may not be as old as you two—”

“
Easy
,” warned Selina.

“—but I am middle-aged, and—”

“You are
not
middle-aged,” gasped Marguerite, sounding like a maiden aunt who suddenly wondered where the time had gone.

“I will be,” said Jake. “In a few years.”

Selina gripped Marguerite's arm in an act of sisterly consolation. “It's so unfair, isn't it? Age is so much kinder to the rougher sex.”

Marguerite wrenched her arm free and returned to the subject, addressing Jake in an even tone: “I know how much you want to celebrate Anna's life, and I think that's just beautiful—but she's very frail now. No one knows that better than you, Jake. There are blinding dust storms at this place and cruel, debilitating heat—”

“It's not that bad,” said Jake.

“Yes, it is. I've been on YouTube. Don't bullshit me, Jake.”

The Clint Eastwood approach was not typical of Marguerite, so it knocked Jake back for a moment. He imagined her unleashing that tone on her students at the Harvey Milk Academy, having judiciously saved it for just the right moment.

“And here's what you must know,” Marguerite went on. “If you ask Anna to do this, she will do it. There's no doubt about that. She will say yes, because she won't want to disappoint you. We know what she's like—all three of us—and it's why we love her like we do. So here's what you have to ask yourself, Jake—”

Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?

She didn't say that, of course, but it's what she meant. Did he want to take sole responsibility if Anna died for an avoidable reason? The answer was no fucking way, which was why he'd hoped for a different response from the Ladies Upstairs, and why he felt, at this very moment, both pissed off and relieved.

What had he been thinking? It had been almost eight years—eight years!—since he and Marguerite and Selina sat by Anna's bedside after she suffered that stroke. She had been in a coma, and they had not expected her to come back.

“The good news,” said Selina, with uncharacteristic chirpiness, “is that none of this”—she made a sweeping gesture at the art car—“has to go to waste. You can still go to Burning Rock with your friends. It can still be a lovely tribute to Anna. You can ride up there on the top and—I don't know . . . carry a big picture of her.”

Marguerite's face lit up. “I can give you that shot of her in the garden.”

Jake shrugged. “Sure.”

“And then,” said Selina, building steam, “you can tape the whole thing and share it with her when you get home. Think how much she would love that!”

Jake felt something akin to mourning as he stared down at his battle-scarred work boots. He had not planned on giving Anna a tape; he had planned on giving her an Adventure, like Richard Halliburton himself, swimming the Panama Canal or crossing the Alps on an elephant. Then, in a flash of insight, he remembered Anna's scorn for the way Halliburton had died: lost at sea in a typhoon on some hokey-ass Chinese junk. “He was just being
vivid
” was how she had put it, and the same could be said of Jake's pedal-driven butterfly if it were to collide, say, with a blissed-out biker in a K-hole or a giant fire-belching mechanical octopus.

He was still young enough to take that chance for himself, but too old, he realized, to take it for Anna. That sucked. It really did.

H
e was glad about one thing: that he had told no one but Amos and the other people at Trans Bay about his dream of taking Anna to Burning Man. If he had blabbed to Michael or Ben or Shawna—all of whom were going—the postmortem would have been endless. They would have felt the need to commiserate, even if they'd always secretly thought it was a stupid idea. And Jake would have been obliged to trot out his reasoning (stupid as it might have been) for the umpteenth time. This way, at least, the dream could evaporate without further scrutiny or justification.

Jake felt for sure that Michael would bring up Burning Man when they met at a gardening job that afternoon. Burning Man was only six days away. But Michael was strangely silent, almost sullen, as they pruned the big podocarp hedge at a house on Belmont. Ever the greenie, Michael habitually shunned the use of gas power for hedge-clipping, but today his fierce little handmade snips seemed less about ecology than horticultural torture—death by a thousand cuts.

Something was clearly bugging him.

“Sorry I was late, boss,” Jake offered at last. (They'd been partners in this business for years now, but Jake kept the term out of simple affection, and because there was something inherently male, he believed, about one guy calling another guy “boss.”) “I had some friends I had to see in the East Bay.”

“Please,” said Michael. “You work a helluva lot harder than I do.”

Jake shrugged. “You're older.”

“And one of these days I'm not gonna show up at all.”

“I know.”

They had discussed Michael's retirement on several occasions, and you could easily read it between the lines of every grunt Michael uttered while going about his work. He was several years past sixty now, with a bum shoulder, terrible allergies, and neuropathy brought on by his HIV meds. He could not do this forever.

“I'm telling you,” said Jake. “You should start selling your weed to the clubs. That shit is kick-ass. Amos and I got so fucked up at the Schmekel concert.”

“Okay . . . I give up . . . Schmekel?”

“All-transman, all-Jewish band. Sort of punk, folky, satirical—you know.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Yeah, except that Amos is a Jew, and loves all that cultural Let My People Go shit almost as much as he loves transmen.”

“So?”

“So . . . there's a hot guy in the band . . . he's got this Jason Biggsy nerdy horn-rimmed thing going, and Amos is, like, practically coming on his pecs—like he can't wait to take him home to Mama and eat shiksa balls at Passover.”