WILDCARD

[OVA version]

By Cathrine E. Barnes

Chapter 3: From the Same Cloth

“Next in line, please,” the cashier at the local donut place called forward the man in front of me to the counter.

The place was packed, as one would expect for a Tuesday morning during rush hour. A lot of people really hate being in crowds like this, but I honestly kind of like it. Being the only person in a shop or whatever makes me really nervous, you know? I’ll be flipping through CDs and feel the shop clerk’s eyes boring into the back of my neck, and then I can’t focus on what I’m doing. During a rush I can just do my business and get out.

If you know anything about New England, and the Atlantic coast generally, it’s probably that a certain chain of donut shops is beyond dominant. It’s consistently like, fine, so of course I used to go a lot, but it’s nothing to write home about. For whatever reason they didn’t exist out here at all though, so I’d been poking around quite a bit trying to find a new place to go for breakfast on the mornings when I’m running late. Incidentally, today it was because Lum puked on the carpet while I was in the shower. I was trying my best to be a good big sister and not hold it against her too much. The promise of sweets and espresso was helping a lot.

“I can help whoever’s next in line,” the cashier said.

I stepped forward. “Hi-”

“Good morning, miss,” she said, “the usual?”

I cocked my head to the side. “Uh, the um, the usual?” I stammered back to her. I didn’t think I’d even been to this one before had I? Maybe I had..?

“Pink frosted donut, jelly donut, half a dozen chocolate donut holes, and a cappuccino?” she listed off.

I blinked. “Uh. Yeah.” I agreed, too dumbfounded to offer much resistance.

“Oh, sorry, I know sometimes regulars get startled when we start to recognize them,” she giggled, “The hair and glasses kind of stand out.” She held a marker to a styrofoam cup. “Tracy, right?”

Realizing I was in too deep to back out, I nodded and produced a meek noise of assent, and wandered over and leaned against the wall next to a kiosk with cream and sugar and such.

This is the part where I try to justify allowing myself to be a doormat, without resorting to psychoanalysis: I was going to get at least one pink frosted donut anyway. A cappuccino is kind of like a mocha latte. I’m definitely going to get a buzz from it at least. Surely it caused less total discomfort if I just went along with it than if I corrected her, and we held up the line exchanging awkward apologies. And so on. Whatever. I collected Tracy’s usual order and sulked back to Bubblegum to get the rest of the way to work.

To be honest, eating was probably my least favorite thing to do in a car, but I didn’t really feel like taking my breakfast into the break room or eating at my desk or something, so here I was. I did my best to avoid getting crumbs and granulated sugar all over Bubblegum’s interior while I ate, but it was a somewhat fruitless effort. Jelly donuts are good, but god they’re desperate to cast sticky detritus everywhere at the slightest provocation. I made a mental note to vacuum this weekend while I was giving her a wash.

I finished and got myself situated in my cubicle. When work had resumed after the holiday, I added the photo I’d taken of Trixie to the knickknacks on my desk, behind the Cathy calendar I received for the wrong birthday a few months back, and next to the 1:43 model Fairlady Z and the Gigan action figure, both of whom had been very nearly swallowed up by the landscape of reference manuals and dictionaries and pads of translation notes that stretched across my desk.

That morning I had been trying to ease into the day by chipping away at some of the materials listings in the software itself. You know how many of these things there are? Thousands! Most of them were either like, numbered metal alloys or transliterated english terms, which were relatively easy to handle, but there were still a lot of them.

The work was tedious but easy to turn to when I was procrastinating on something else, or like today, when I was having a difficult time getting my brain in gear. In addition to the Lum Carpet Incident, I’d had my sleep ruined again by a night terror or something. I just remember waking up gasping and freaking the cats out.

I got up to stretch my legs and see if anything was new with Mr. Coffee since the last time I paid him a visit an hour or so ago. When I got to the break room, he was in the middle of a conversation with Rosa as he worked on a fresh pot, whom I exchanged distant smiles with as I entered.

In retrospect twenty-three was pushing it, but she really did come off as a lot younger than she was. Or maybe I just thought she looked nice. She was one of the only women in the office that hadn’t really gotten sucked into the current pantsuit shoulder pad arms race, which I appreciated. Instead she seemed to like floral print blouses a whole lot. Today’s was kind of a dusty yellow color, forming a striking contrast against her darker skin tone. Her curtain-style bangs kind of looked like antennae when she leaned forward. Altogether kind of a wasp-like image. I wondered if it was intentional. Did genetic girls do that kind of thing on purpose?

“So who’s the cat? Have you been holding out on us?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh, uh, that’s Trixie,” I explained. “She’s a stray I picked up back in... August or so, I think.”

“Oh how sweet,” She cooed. “My dad did that once when I was younger. Took in a stray cat, I mean.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. We named him Angel.” she giggled. “He was kind of a little weirdo. Whenever anybody was sitting on the couch, he would jump up behind them and start trying to eat their hair or something.”

“Oh yeah, my other cat does that sometimes,” I said. “I think it’s some kind of grooming thing.”

“This is uh,” she snaps her fingers a few times, “Chocco? Chocho? Was that it?” Rosa asks. “Do they get along?”

Chou-Chou, I had gathered, was Cathy’s cat. Lum naturally had been cast in her role after I’d been put on the spot shortly after I’d started at the company, and filled the role satisfactorily. For the record, Lum was also a stray. I found her under the car one morning just after I moved, and almost ran her over.

“It was kind of chaotic at first, but they’re pretty close now,” I explained. “They hid in different closets for the first week or so though. And Trixie yelled at me every time I went for my shoes.”

“Cats are so funny,” Rosa giggled. She poured herself a cup of fresh coffee. “Okay, I gotta get back to trying to decipher Dean’s handwriting.” She started towards the door, and then stopped. “Oh, we might need you to come in early on Thursday to help with a conference call, is that okay?”

“Yeah, I think I can manage. Good luck.”

She left the break room, and called out from the hall, “Don’t forget, you still owe us a picture of Chocho!”

Mr. Coffee provided me with my drink as well, and I resumed work.

Cathy Barnes. Despite kind-of-sort-of assuming her identity at work, the stuff I knew about her was pretty sparse. I mean, I never got to talk to her myself, right? She didn’t stick around for training or anything. All I had were little snippets of details I’d picked up from coworkers out of context. When I started working here I got a lot of comments that implied things about her appearance, you know, Oh, did you lose weight? Did you dye your hair? That kind of thing. She had a cat. She smoked (I’d quit a few years ago). I don’t think our interests lined up much, since people were surprised about the stuff I’d decorated my cubicle with. I got the impression that her Japanese cultural fascination was more in the spirituality world than with movies and cartoons. Jury’s out on whether she thought all the Cathy junk was funny. Maybe she did.

That was about it though. The other people seemed to like her, generally, but they didn’t seem to really know anything about her. Which I suppose is how the confusion happened right? They don’t know anything about either of us. One quiet translator lady, who was good at her craft, a perfect unobtrusive conduit that faded into the background to allow international business to flow, left the company and got replaced by another no-name woman with a similar attitude. It’s only natural it ended up like this.

...Not. In reality it didn’t make any sense at all. I’m not all that great at remembering people either, but even I’d notice if any of them got swapped out with a new person suddenly. Maybe I wouldn’t be too curious about it, but I’d notice. These people straightforwardly think I am Cathy Barnes. I honestly thought they were hazing me at first, but nope, it kept going, with no signs of stopping. I’m thankful the payroll system at the very least changed things over, or else I would have some very interesting problems.

For a long time, to various degrees, I’d lived with a secret that would thoroughly ruin my life whenever anybody found out about it. And naturally this influenced a lot of decision making, right? I never wanted to stand out. I kept people at arm’s length. I felt uncomfortable whenever I was the center of attention. The only people who have known me past a surface level in many years have been other trans women and the like, and I had long since made peace with that kind of solitude.

But it felt like something changed since moving to LA. There were so many weird coincidences... stuff like the donut shop this morning, this whole stupid job, the photographs... it was just so weird! Beyond nobody knowing who I was, it was like some fundamental me-ness got stripped away, and all that remained was a faceless mannequin people projected whatever they wanted onto. I couldn’t tell how much of it was congruent with the general experience of moving to a new city with absolutely zero contacts, and how much of this was something specifically wrong with me.

Ugh.

I finished the workday angry and arrived home irritated. I ate dinner frustrated, and after several hours of lazing around with the cats, I went to bed merely annoyed.

I awoke briefly in the middle of the night, startled by what I assumed was one of the cats getting comfortable on my abdomen, only to find myself pinned in place by what appeared to be a large tick. Like, the bug? Those gross little guys that get stuck to you sometimes when you’re hiking? Well, I guess I couldn’t be sure it was a tick. After all, it was about the size of a kei truck, and seemed slightly bioluminescent. But it looked kind of like one in the thin bands of light from the window.

It had that giant swollen abdomen, which in this case was nearly scraping the ceiling. There was a comparatively smaller, flat head about the width of a bicycle wheel resting on my stomach, with... some kind of mouth part- oh, what do they call those? Probosci? No, I think that’s like, bug-bugs. Chelicerae, was it? Whatever they were called, they were reaching up under my pajama shirt (the green one with pinecones and needles), and I could vaguely feel it passing through my torso cavity, from my belly button to somewhere in the back of my neck. It held my body in place with its tremendous weight, and two hand-like structures on its uh- damn it, what were those called again? Peda- er, pedipalps? Whatever.

Actually, hang on, on closer inspection I don’t think it was a tick. I could see some larger, more defined eyes around the head, which was separate from the abdomen, and the mouth-things were two distinct tusks, like a spider’s, rather than the pointed beak thing ticks had. Yeah, definitely some kind of spider. Or, no, I think the fangs might’ve been pointed downwards rather than inwards. So I think that made it a mygalomorph, like a tarantula. Well that cleared that up.

When I was a kid I thought bugs were really cool. I mean I still do but it doesn’t come up as much outside of monster movies and stuff. One year for my birthday my folks got me this really nice handbook about spiders and everything that went into like, the biology and taxonomy and stuff of all the big arachnid groups. Did you know that horseshoe crabs are related to spiders? Did you know that “daddy long-legs” could refer to either a type of spider, a thing more closely related to mites (but still a type of arachnid), or a crane fly, which is an insect? Did you know that a spider’s fangs and a scorpion’s pincers are homologous, like a hand and a fish’s fin? Did you know arachnids don’t have blood? I mean ticks and shit do nothing but eat blood all day or plan out ways to eat more blood, but like, what are they doing with it? You don’t even use that. It’d be like if Bubblegum developed a taste for cooking oil. Well, I guess I eat a lot of things that aren’t in my body by default either. Tomatoes. Miso paste. Peanuts. I could go on.

I considered whether it was injecting me with some kind of sedative. Well, I really couldn’t move any part of my body at all, it wasn’t just the lower part it was sitting on top of. And this did seem like the type of thing one should be more worried about, y’know? But I really wasn’t. I actually felt totally serene. It kind of reminded me of when I was recovering after I’d gotten SRS done and they gave me a morphine button. It was kind of nice, not feeling any urgency about anything at all.

I gazed into the creature’s glassy expressionless eyes as I drifted back to sleep, and wondered if it was thinking about me. Like at all. Did it conceptualize me as another living creature with my own thoughts and feelings, or just as an automaton full of nutrients to remove. What was it taking out of me anyway? It sure seemed to have collected a lot of it, if that swollen abdomen was any indication. Its hand-things grasped the soft sides of my midsection in a gentle, firm, but slightly uncertain way. It reminded me of how I held Kathy-With-a-K the one miserable, dysphoric time we slept together.

When I woke up the next morning, I scanned the room and my body for any sign of the mysterious interloper, but it was just the cats. I ran my thumb over Lum’s head and she stretched her legs outwards and yawned. I was actually kind of excited. I didn’t remember my dreams very often, so having one so lucid and vivid was a rare treat. And beyond that, it was a genuine sleep paralysis attack! I remember having something similar once or twice when I was a kid, but that was decades ago.

I’ve never really bought into a lot of superstition, y’know? Well, perhaps I had a little bit of animism in me, I’ll admit. But certainly religion left an increasingly bad taste in my mouth as I got older, and the occult or UFOs or new-age stuff never really rang true for me either. But having a nightmare like this, it meant I could feel it. I could feel what made other people believe, if only until I woke up back in reality the next morning. To feel totally lucid while hallucinating strange beings all around you. It was genuinely haunting, in the truest sense of the word.

At work, I was once again groggy and had a hard time concentrating, but I was behind on what I wanted done this week, so I had to buckle down anyway. I was trying to work on translating some tutorial exercises, and had to flip back and forth through my notes a bunch because I kept forgetting what I’d called the features last time they came up.

I honestly don’t know what hit me, for once I don’t think I actually lost much sleep, but it felt like I had taken an antihistamine or something, or like I had the flu. Or maybe I was just dehydrated. My neck was kind of sore too, and I cursed that cheap office chair for not having very good support. Well, nothing copious amounts of coffee and water cooler breaks couldn’t fix.

The office was a bit busier than usual today, and Dean and Rosa were spending most of it in the conference room because some folks from the San Diego office had come up to discuss something or other. I hoped they weren’t about to put us through some kind of restructuring. They seemed generally cordial towards each other, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign for the rest of us or not.

When I got back from lunch that afternoon (I’d gone to a teriyaki place a few streets over. The sauce was good but the chicken was a bit overcooked), Dean and one of the San Diego guys were hovering around my cubicle. Uh-oh. I considered ducking into the break room briefly, but my old lady reflexes were the death of me. We made eye contact across the office and they waved excitedly. I waved back, confusedly. Dean motioned towards the conference room. Okay.

Inside, Dean had rejoined Rosa and our trio of visitors: them being the clean-cut blond guy in a navy suit Dean had been standing with at my desk, a somewhat gaunt woman with graying hair in a bun, and a guy with tightly curled red hair and a shirt that hadn’t been ironed. They had an overhead projector set up and seemed to have been in the process of planning out a business trip to Seattle.

“You guys remember Cathy, right?” Dean said to the guests, “We stole her from you, what, a year and a half ago, two years now?”

“Are you kidding?” Gross Shirt Guy said, “So how’ve you been, man? This son of a bitch isn’t skirt chasing too hard, is he?”

“Hey, come on,” Dean protested, as he ran his hand through his slick, dark hair. Rosa rolled her eyes.

Well this was news to me. I certainly didn’t know who any of them were. I didn’t even know Cathy worked at another branch until roughly three seconds ago. In any case they seemed happy to see me, so I guess they didn’t know her from Eve anyway. I hoped this made it easier to bluff my way through this encounter in a few sentences and get back to work. I waved sheepishly.

“You look really good, Cath,” Bun Lady commented, “Let me guess, Fit for Life?”

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

“We’re really missing you back there, you know,” Blond Guy said, earnestly, “We picked up a new translator from UCSD and he’s got a lot of promise, but not the best culture fit.”

“We missed that eggplant stuff at the Christmas potluck,” Bun Lady interjected.

“Uh, not that I don’t get why it had to be this way,” Blond Guy continued.

“It is what it is,” I said, as if I had any idea what “it” was.

“Yeah,” Blond Guy sighed. “Anyway, hope it’s been working out for you up here, and the operation went well and everything.”

Oh right!” Bun Lady exclaimed, “I forgot all about that. You were getting ready for that when you transferred, right?”

“Operation?” Dean wondered. “Do I remember that?”

“You were probably off with the company reps somewhere pretending to work,” Gross Shirt Guy said, chuckling to himself.

Our guests, and now my coworkers, were waiting expectantly for any kind of update from me. Somehow this felt much more uncomfortable to lie about than the other bits, but what option did I have? I tried to formulate an appropriate terse answer, and hoped the conversation would move literally anywhere else. “Um, yeah, uh, it went... fine?” I stammered, “No serious issues.”

“That’s good,” Blond guy said.

“What uh, was it,” Dean ventured, “if that’s not too personal.”

Blond Guy and Bun Lady exchanged a look, and I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of I’m not required to answer that.

Shirt Guy uttered several words, but importantly two of them were “Sex change.”

I immediately felt a sense of vertigo and a TV snow ringing in my ears as all of the blood rapidly drained from my head. My worst nightmare was coming true. After all this, after all this..! Moving to the other side of the country, cutting myself off from everybody I’d ever met, being choosy about meeting anybody new, and still!

Over in reality, it seemed like the other two San Diegans were chewing out Shirt Guy for his abhorrent impropriety. Dean looked like he was turning a shade of green. Rosa sat rigid, hands in her lap and eyes on the table. Blond Guy started calling out to me, but I could barely even perceive his voice.

I stumbled out of the conference room without saying a word, ran my hands over my keyboard as I collected my briefcase, and left. Was there nothing I could do? Nothing to just live a normal, quiet life? I’d play the lonely old cat lady forever if it only meant that I never had to go through this again. Or maybe even that wasn’t enough. Maybe I should just move to Nowheresville, Wyoming and take up subsistence farming. I’d have some chickens, a cow, some squash or cabbage or something, the cats could help with the mice, and I’d just never speak to anybody again! And I already got electrolysis and SRS taken care of, if I could convince myself not to care about osteoporosis, I could spend at least a couple decades where I wouldn’t even have to talk to doctors!

As I set the bag down on Bubblegum’s passenger seat and undid the club on her steering wheel, it hit me that I didn’t even get the petty dignity of being outed as myself this time. When that happened I could at least hold my head up and own the path my life had taken for a brief moment before everything came crashing down. Instead, I stood here as a substitute while somebody else I never met got exposed in effigy. To the very end, my wretched life in this awful city wasn’t ever my own.

I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and cried. My face contorted and my makeup ran, my nose got clogged up, and the streams of tears collected in dark spots on my skirt. I cried for the life I almost got to live. I cried for all my other lives derailed and cut short in the same way. I cried for the myriad dead ends reached by all my old friends who walked the same path. I cried for me, for all of us, and I cried for Cathy Barnes, the woman I’d never met but had grown so strangely close to. I hoped she was out there somewhere living a life she was proud of.

WILDCARD

[OVA version]

By Cathrine E. Barnes

Contents

Chapter 3: From the Same Cloth