WILDCARD

[OVA version]

By Nobody in Particular

Chapter 5: Mirror Images

As one might expect, I barely slept at all the rest of the night, and I had to get up early anyway in order to help with the international conference call. If we’re keeping score, I probably got about two hours total, in a series of short bursts. Less time for nightmares, I guess. I wished I could get away with calling out another day, or hell, maybe forever, but of course, the only thing worse than being a tranny in the workplace was being a tranny who wasn’t even carrying her weight. If I wanted to survive this, I had to figure out how to pull myself together.

As I was in and out of the bathroom while I was getting ready that morning, I found myself keeping my eyes on the ground. It’s kind of a stereotype, right? Local transsexual has a complicated relationship with mirrors, more at 11:00. The thing was I usually got along okay with them, even when I was younger. Well, except that one time Kathy-with-a-K convinced me to try growing a beard, which was a stupid little detour that mysteriously coincided with a gap in the photographic record. Still makes me shiver to think about. No, this was a truly new feeling. The silvery creature that loomed over the vanity today was full of a rancor I couldn’t even have dreamed of just hours before. Any morning I could look into a mirror and be annoyed with it for reminding me of the familiar asymmetries of my face and the unruliness of my hair. The way things were, I worried what it reflected might not be so familiar at all.

Normally this was the kind of morning I would solve with donuts and espresso, but given things this week, I felt compelled to stick to what I could make at home, and quickly devoured a bowl of cereal instead. As I got dressed (a mint green turtleneck under a grey tweed blazer, with a black pencil skirt), did the dishes, and other morning things, the cats followed close behind, protesting my advancing of the household’s morning routine a few hours earlier than usual. They changed their tune a bit when I gave them their breakfast too. Lum ended up getting a little overzealous, and I had to physically pull her away from Trixie’s food bowl.

Eventually there was no avoiding it, and I spread out my usual array of cosmetics on the bathroom counter and steeled myself. I looked into the mirror. My heart sank, and my face felt flushed. It... it was definitely my reflection looking back from inside the mirror, but... I could feel a strange disagreement happening in my head. I knew in my foremind that the image before me was what I looked like, and it reflected, like, what I was doing. Posture, expressions, gestures. But the back of my brain, the roots, kept trying to parse the image the same way as seeing a separate person. I started feeling nauseous again. I fought it back while I helped my reflection apply her makeup. The dissonance was messing with my hand-eye-coordination, but ultimately she ended up -I ended up- looking okay.

I wondered whether this would abate as I woke up more. Maybe I had incurred some real brain damage somehow. Only one way to find out, I guess.

Pre-dawn was probably the best shot anyone had at moving around LA with light traffic, it hit that sweet spot between when the night owls were off the street and the office workers like myself hadn’t gotten out the door yet. Bubblegum took a few tries to start in the cold, which part of me took as her warning that I probably shouldn’t have been driving. Even with two cups of coffee in me, I was still feeling pretty drowsy. On the road, I caught myself nodding off, and nearly swerved into a car passing me. Their horn woke me up long enough to pull over to try blasting the radio the rest of the way, and miraculously I made it to the office without anyone dying.

The lobby of our building was silent, save for the echoing clop-clop of my heels on the hard tile floor. The piercing scent of cleaning products still hung in the air from when the janitors had come through. The security guard at the front desk barely looked up as I passed by him.

Wandering around in a familiar place when it’s this empty always feels so surreal. The summer my sister taught the rest of us how to pick locks, the old middle school building was slated to be demolished, and the two of us snuck in one night. Seeing the halls, the cafeteria, the gymnasium that I spent a period of my life in again, now darkened and silent apart from our footsteps and muffled giggling felt like we were transported to a wholly other place, separate from the real world. It was captivating. I still think about it a lot. I also still have the doorstop Robin stole from our old history teacher’s classroom somewhere.

I stared blankly at the directory while I waited for the elevator. Matsubara Softworks, suite 464. That’s me. For now, at least. I wondered what my next job would be. I did end up liking working with this kind of stuff, and there were, of course, a lot of other Japanese electronics companies trying to set up shop either down here or up in the Bay Area. But I also felt like it would be pretty likely that I’d run into people from here at the next gig if we went to a trade show or something. Maybe I could give publishing another shot, if I tried to stick to non-fiction. I could try pivoting to automotive. That could be cool.

The elevator arrived, empty. I quickly pressed the button and drew my gaze to the floor to avoid the mirrored walls of the carriage. My reflections did the same. Deep breaths, girl.

When I got into the office, only half the fluorescents were lit in the main room with all the cubicles. The conference room on the other side of the office was fully illuminated in that pale blue glow, though it seemed like the warmth of the rising sun through the windows would soon take over. If I wasn’t expecting to have to fight for my life in there in a matter of minutes I could consider it tranquil, or even pretty. But alas.

I set down my briefcase at my desk and took my empty mug over to say good morning to Mr. Coffee. Rosa was there again, fidgeting with her nails as he finished brewing his first pot of the day. Beside her on the counter were her and Dean’s mugs. I waved sheepishly as I entered.

“Oh. Hey, good morning,” she waved back.

“Morning,” I offered. I admired Rosa’s outfit briefly: the white blouse with a black and white houndstooth miniskirt was simple but striking. She was always so good at this.

“Are you feeling okay?” She asked, looking me over.

“Uh, yeah, I’ll be fine,” I lied. I averted my eyes.

“Are you sure?” She worried, “if you’re not feeling up to it-”

“I’m fine,” I interjected. “Really.”

We stood in silence for a moment as Rosa filled the two mugs, then she stepped aside to make room for me to fill mine.

“So is it really true?” She asked. She blew on her coffee a few times. “Have you really been a man this whole time?”

How the hell was I supposed to respond to questions like that? I poured my coffee and tried to keep a cool head. It’s disappointing. I know I mostly kept to myself and it would be a stretch to say I was really friends with any of these people here. At the end of the day it’s an office anyway, right? But Rosa was like, someone I could hold a conversation with in the break room, or at an office party, or whatever. Now, I worried that the only thing she’d see was this odd part of my background, like so many others.

I sighed. “I’m not a man. It is true that I’m a transsexual, but I’m not a man.”

“Right, cuz you got your, um,” she gestured vaguely in the air. “Off.” Rosa blew on her coffee again, and took a sip. “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have been able to tell.”

I accepted the hollow compliment as graciously as I could.

“Sorry,” Rosa laughed nervously, “it’s just so crazy, you see it in movies and stuff sometimes, but you forget there’s actual people like that, you know?” she took another sip of coffee. “Well, I guess you don’t. Hm.”

We stood in silence for a moment

“Where’s that accent from, anyway?” Rosa asked, “I don’t think I ever asked.”

“New Hampshire,” I replied.

“Haymp-shuh,” She imitated, poorly. “Huh, for the longest time I thought you were from New York or something. Shows what I know about accents, I guess. Isn’t it weird how little you really know about some of the people you work with? I just can’t believe I worked with a transvestite for years and never noticed.” she mused.

Dean poked his stupid head through the doorway. Even this early his black hair was perfectly slicked back. “Hey, what the hell are you two doing in here, the call starts in 5!” Then he added, “Christ Cath, you look like hell.”

“Jeez, sorry,” Rosa was taken aback. “Wh- you were running late, so I- Sorry, coming!” she grabbed the other coffee mug and hurried out of the room.

I followed them to the conference room. Rosa quickly updated me on the situation so I had some context, while Dean sulked off to the side. A couple of the overseas executives were going to be joining Dean and the San Diego crew up at the new Seattle office the next month, and we were discussing some reservations and the itinerary. I was having a hard time keeping track of all the names, the caffeine just wasn’t helping. I wondered what was up with Dean, if he was just regular cranky, or if he was having a reaction to me.

Ugh, I always hated doing these things in the first place. It’s all the same tensions of translating fiction, but in real time, with no time for editing. It obviously required good command of the languages and people involved, but also total confidence in what you were presenting to each party, or else they’d think you were incompetent rather than trying to hedge against some nuance they didn’t understand.

And to be frank, I sucked at actually speaking the damn language. I could do keigo okay and that helped a lot with like, general amicability, but I had a lot of trouble thinking around gaps in my vocabulary. Also, Meg, who was my main practice partner for years, is from an Osakan family, so I always had a hard time discerning which bits I’d picked up from her were Kansai dialect and which weren’t, and my pitch accents and regular accent were totally haywire.

“Cathy, you’re up,” Dean signaled, and switched on the speaker phone

The call connected, and the secretary of the guy in charge of the American branches, Saito-san, answered.

“Hello, you’ve reached the office of Director Murakami Masayoshi-sama, at Matsubara Softworks Inc. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” she asked, in Japanese.

“Good evening, this is uh, Barnes, from the Los Angeles office. I’m speaking on behalf of Regional Manager Mulgrove-san, and we are also joined by Carrera-san,” I explained.

“Ah, fantastic. Unfortunately, the Director stepped out for a moment, but he should be back shortly. Could you hold for a few minutes?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” I said. I relayed the delay to the others in English.

I didn’t get to talk to Saito-san very often, just through conference calls like these, or exchanging memos through the Matsubara CompuServe clone Wonder Connect (another product destined to struggle in the western market due to JIS character incompatibilities and general language barrier problems) or the company BBS, but her voice was pretty, and one time we had a good laugh over a particularly embarrassing typo I’d made when the bosses got up to leave.

To the side, Dean folded his arms and occasionally fidgeted with his watch. Rosa was doodling something in the margins of a pad of paper. Some kind of rabbit-like creature. The sun finally rose high enough to coat the conference room in its blinding, warm light. I took a sip of coffee.

Eventually Director Murakami got back, I introduced us again, and we began the discussion in earnest. He started by congratulating us for making a good first showing at the COMDEX trade show that winter, which Dean accepted graciously. He thanked Murakami for a nice Utagawa Hiroshige print he’d received as an engagement present. Plans were discussed briefly about making an appearance at a smaller trade show in the area focused on East Asian electronics companies, since he’d heard Multitech was making an appearance there, and that would bring some attention to it. Dean agreed to put some of the sales guys on the case.

After that, things descended into bickering about restaurant and hotel reservations. Dean had had Rosa repeat the itinerary they’d done last year, but the director complained that the alcohol selection at the hotel was weak and they only had synthetic sake. He wanted to go to a baseball game while they were out there, but Dean reminded them that they’d be missing the season by a few weeks, and the Mariners were a deeply frustrating team to watch anyway. And on and on and on.

In these kinds of tasks, my duty, as always, was to functionally disappear from the conversation as much as I could so Dean and Murakami could pretend they were talking directly to each other. On a good day I could manage, but this was not a good day. I kept tripping over myself trying to navigate nuances, my pronunciation was trash, and every time there was an awkward pause, or I went back and forth with the director a few times trying to straighten something out, Dean started getting on my case, which did not help things. I couldn’t concentrate at all and I could tell everyone else on the call knew it too.

Eventually during a discussion about the schedule, I started explaining the third day of the trip (Murakami wanted to see the Space Needle), and the pair on the other side went silent for a moment, before Saito laughed nervously off to the side somewhere. I stopped in my tracks. Did I say somethi- oh. I realized that I’d gotten tongue tied and accidentally said something lewd, and vertigo quickly overcame me. I hastily stammered out a very deferential response as the feeling of abject panic spread through my whole body.

Dean didn’t know much Japanese, but he did know what profuse apologizing sounded like, and grabbed the sleeve of my blazer. “What the hell did you say to him?” he demanded.

“I- I’m sorry. I didn’t- it was an accident, I explained, I- sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” I pleaded, to Dean this time. I looked over to Rosa for some reassurance, but she averted her eyes.

“It’s okay,” Murakami assured, in English. In Japanese, he continued, “Now can we please get back on task?”

Dean let go of my arm, but continued shooting me a cold stare. I wished I was dead. As the discussion resumed, I did my best to focus, but if I was a mess before, I was a catastrophe after. My voice trembled, my hands shook, I could feel myself sweating bullets. I wanted nothing more than to bolt and hide in a stairwell, the alley between buildings, inside Bubblegum with the heater and radio turned up, back at home with the cats, but this stupid goddamn discussion never ended. Every time one sticking point got settled, another one popped up. Food. Art museum. Drinks. Onsen. Youfuu or wafuu rooms? Mercedes or Cadillac? Vice President Shimamura’s stomach didn’t agree with the lobster there last time. Director Kadomatsu is on a later flight, so he needs a separate ride from the airport. You can’t put Aoki and Namba next to each other, it’s complicated.

By the time it was over I felt like a corpse. I apologized to Dean and Rosa again, though Dean had no words of reassurance for me, and Rosa looked on. Eager to busy my mind with anything else, but surely unable to miss a third day of work, I navigated back behind everyone to get to my cubicle. As I excuse me-ed and sorry-ed my way around, I couldn’t help but wonder, were they stiffer than usual? Slower to scoot forward and make way? Or was it just my imagination? More to the point, did they know? I should’ve asked Rosa right away whether it had left the conference room or not in the day and change I’d been absent.

I received my answer pretty quickly: you goddamn bet it had. No sooner had I sat down at my terminal before my neighbor to the left, Lauren, started asking questions. Was it true that I was really a man? (Yes transexual, not a man) she wouldn’t have been able to tell (great) Had I gotten the surgery? (it’s weird to ask, but yes) It’s like being reeeeeally gay right? (not really) but you like men? (sure) her brother-in-law's cousin is gay (that’s nice) and on and on. At a few points my other neighbor Carlos chimed in with helpful comments such as that he used to see shemales trying to pick up guys near the naval base he was stationed at when he was in the military (that took longer than expected) and that he thought he saw a friend from high school crossdressing at a bar once (neat). He couldn’t imagine doing anything like that (of course not).

This wasn’t helping. I couldn’t focus on anything, I couldn’t calm myself down, all there was was an endless stream of anecdotes that didn’t matter and comments that weren’t welcome and questions I didn’t want to answer. I think this was probably the fifth cumulative conversation I’d had with these people in the time I’d worked here, and at this rate I would rather not see a sixth. But what was I gonna do? Shuffle behind them towards the break room while they were still talking, where I’d surely just run into another coworker anyway with lots of anecdotes and questions and comments and become their captive audience while Mr. Coffee did his thing? My brain felt like it wanted to ooze out my goddamn ears.

The remainder of the day passed without a coherent thought gracing the inside of my brain, just the inarticulate hiss of TV static as I tried unsuccessfully to focus on work through the fatigue and constant distraction. By the end of the day I’d managed to cobble together the rest of the tutorial I had started earlier in the week, and went to hand it over to Paul.

As I turned to go clean up for the day, he called after me, his voice hoarse and crackling from a lifetime smoking, “Take care of yourself, kid.”

I thanked him.

“You know,” he began, “My son, he’s a little younger than you. About three years ago he came back from college, told me and my wife he was gay. He had a boyfriend, who he’d brought over to visit before. I... didn’t react well. I told him, well, I told him a lot of stuff I won’t repeat.” his voice caught. “And I haven’t spoken to him since. I’ve never regretted anything more. My wife, she still talks to him sometimes. He’s still out there living his own life. But I worry a lot. I wish I could’ve been there for him.” he sighed heavily. “Uh, that is to say, If you ever run into a Peter Carbone out there, tell him I miss him.”

I stared back blankly. Despite the heartfelt plea I remained entirely numb. Exactly zero sympathy was sparked in my mind, nor any ill will towards his past indiscretions, I was simply exhausted. He might as well have spilled his guts to a statue. Though he surely expected something more, all I could manage was “I’m sorry to hear that. But I don’t really know anyone around here.”

As I packed up my things, it occurred to me that I was now probably going to have to drive myself home, a prospect I wasn’t very enthused about. I mean, I had already nearly killed myself and at least one other on the way to work, and now it was many trying hours later with only a steady stream of caffeine as a buffer. As I said my goodbyes to my workstation, I hoped I would see her again at least one more time. I just needed to get home, and see the cats, and get some sleep, and then this would all be over. Preferably without interruption. That’s all I asked for.

On the way out the door, I nearly bumped directly into Syd, also on the way out of the office. We exchanged excuse-mes and sorries before walking wordlessly side by side through the hall to the elevator. I again averted my eyes from the mirrored walls.

“Surviving out there, Cathy?” Syd asked, after the doors closed.

I scowled and mumbled something terse in response.

Silence.

Syd decided to start talking again.

“Sorry stuff, uh, played out like that,” he said, “If it helps, I would’ve never been able to-”

“Thanks.”

“Uhp!” he spouted, “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it, I just meant, uh...” he trailed off. “Uh, hey, could I buy you a drink, maybe? We could unwind a little? I just lost the biggest contract of my career to Apple, so I could use it.”

I turned his way. With heels, I had a good two inches on him, and something inside me compelled me to leverage this fact. “Let me guess,” I started, “you’ve always been curious, but never seen the real thing? You figure it’s the best of both worlds? Something exotic on the side?” From all angles, my reflections and I suddenly found ourselves laying into him. “Your type is always the same. You think you’re god’s gift to transkind, that we’ll just let you treat us like filth just for gracing us with your presence, but you’re a dime a fucking dozen. You’re trash. Don’t bother.” For good measure, I added, “And don’t bother holding it over my head that you’ll complain to HR about something, because Dean already wants my ass out!”

“H-hey, whoa,” Syd protested, “I- I didn’t-” He did his best to collect himself and largely failed, “No, I- It’s just that, s-sometimes I like to- I mean, sometimes I think maybe I’m- I’m also- and I wanted to-”

I sighed and folded my arms. “Oh god, don’t tell me you’re a crossdresser?”

He nodded sheepishly.

Words again flooded out before I could moderate them. “Listen. Ten years ago, before all this, I had a Bachelor’s degree and a place in my dad’s auto shop, I had a fiancee, we had a nice condo in Nashua. By now I could’ve had a stable career, a family, and maybe a house. But instead I chose this. I’m a perpetual stranger in a city on the other side of the country, always one random coincidence away from losing my job -which is certainly happening after this week, by the way- holding on for dear life to the distant possibility that I might achieve crazy-cat-lady-dom someday. Don’t be like me. Whatever it is inside you that makes you think you might want this life, stuff it down as deep as you can, never tell a soul, and hope that it fucking-” my voice cracked, and my vision blurred as tears came to my eyes, “that it fucking dies! And that it doesn’t ruin your fucking life first! Ugh!” I slumped back against the wall and sobbed. Before me, the endless reflections and counter-reflections that stretched into infinity did the same.

WILDCARD

[OVA version]

By Nobody in Particular

Contents

Chapter 5: Mirror Images