Chapter Text
Doug had a nightmare after he got back to his apartment. He checked his texts at 4AM because he woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. He saw this:
He blocked her number and stared at the ceiling. He started tearing up, frantically grabbed some of the propranolol on his nightstand, and swallowed two of them dry. He felt like he just drank gasoline and somehow expected it to be water.
He ended up being okay. He was able to get Casey to drive up from Des Moines to stay with him for a week, and he realized how much he loved him, and what that meant about himself. The two of them sat together in his apartment, fully furnished from the housing complex with furniture that was a little too modern to be comfortable. There was nothing like the silence he shared with his friends that suggested true understanding.
He went outside and felt the idyllic breeze.
He did not out Carson as being transgender to anyone.
Unfortunately, he didn't become important again until much, much later. For now, this story isn't about him.
One of the most interesting things about Ames as a place was the weather bubble. Whenever a tornado ran through the region, it always seemed to miss Ames. The weather was predictable to a fault, like the entire place was coated in a bubble of it-can’t-happen-here or it-won’t-happen-here.
The other most interesting thing about Ames was the Ames Project, sister to the Manhattan Project. In it, researchers at Iowa State developed the Ames Process, which was a method for preparing pure uranium metal. Without places like this, we might not have had the atomic bomb, which, depending on the result of the essay you wrote in middle school, may or may not have ended World War II, and may or may not have been an irreconcilable humanitarian tragedy.
During the time of the Project, Ames developed over 910 tons of uranium, not all of which was used for bombs. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that this place, this atmosphere, this air, was dropped on Hiroshima.
Carson often thought about this during walks on campus, back before he met Leah. Over on Pammel Drive, near the armory and Hach Hall was the Ames National Laboratory, where it all happened. The building was made in 1947, and Carson thought about how it looked like it had been there since the beginning of time. University architecture was both eternal and fleeting, both modern and ancient, both the product of human labor and the product of God. It was a design language deliberately constructed to make you feel like there was no other option.
Really, the whole place felt like there was no other option. It felt like a giant tent had been cast over the region, shielding it from the endless void that was the state of Iowa while also letting just enough in to keep options for doing anything at all scarce. The entire area was a non-place, full of adventure, mystique, and corn, fucking corn.
There was a rumor that if you dug far enough in the nearby woods, you’d strike buried leftover uranium, and the resultant radiation was the reason for the weather bubble.
Carson liked to walk a few blocks north of Emma McCarthy Lee Park because that’s where the liner notes for the album The Coroner’s Gambit said two songs were written. He didn’t know which house it actually was that John Darnielle put a Panasonic boombox in, and he didn’t know which tracks on the album were actually recorded here off the top of his head (for what it’s worth, they are Elijah and The Alphonse Mambo). But he loved that album to death, because it was one of the few things he had at the time that made him cry. If it wasn’t Family Happiness, it was Shadow Song. Sometimes, he would sit down near there, up on Ontario Street on one of the little benches that were out by people’s homes, and listen to it while he imagined bombs dropping.
The whole album existed in suicide, really. It felt like it was a last cry to a dying Earth, one full of nowheres like this, one where people were given the ability to create anything and they somehow managed to fail. He thought about failing, and then he thought about falling. Endless, endless constructed memories of falling.
Carson liked the quote on the liner notes for this album. It was one of the few quotes from anyone that he knew by heart, at least one that wasn’t a lyric, which he tended to remember perfectly. Everything else was conjecture, memory, fallible. This was true, though. This wasn’t going anywhere.
Stay in character, Carson.
They have been talking about a journey into the interior. They know
the dangers and yet they have already decided upon it. No one can talk
them out of it. It is clear that their minds are made up. Their
knapsacks are packed. Their guides have been chosen. They remain cool to
suggestions. They smile enigmatic smiles. They no longer answer
questions.
- Carol Emshwiller, Being Mysterious Strangers from
Distant Shores
He wasn’t out here today to listen to a sad album, though. He was here to get beat up in the freaky uranium woods, tied to a tree in the middle of the night when nobody was outside, back against the bark, cock sticking out.
“You look like you could be a corpse”, Leah said.
Carson moaned as Leah wiped the blood off his chin where he had been beaten. He was dressed in a dirty black crop-top that said “Kill Cancer” on it in red text and a pair of ill-fitting pink short shorts. There was visible rope burn on his legs. The stars in the sky didn’t even bother to come out for them that night.
“You look like a kidnapping victim”, Leah said.
In these moments, Carson felt like his body was the most real that it had ever been. The thing that made him feel the most embodied, the most himself, was this. He knew that he deserved it, and he knew that Leah felt good giving it to him.
“God, you look like you’re mine”, Leah said, as she pulled out a tennis racket from her black backpack full of toys. She started with light thwacks against his sides as he yelped and moaned. Then, she started going for the knees. Carson’s body began to look like it was grilled with a waffle iron, and he started to tear up, smiling and drinking his own salt and blood. He screamed loud enough that Leah had to tone it down to make sure nobody would find them.
“P-please, fuck…”, he said. “Fuck, Ri- Leah, fuck, please, I’ve- I’ve been-”
“Good bunny. Good, good bunny.” She got down onto her knees and puckered her lips to give his quivering dick a kiss on the side, then she tightened her expression to make a good hole for him to fuck. She could faintly taste blood in his pre, and she loved it.
Then, Carson started crying again, but it wasn’t the end of the scene. His mind went to the place that it always went when Leah did this to him, the place that he always wanted to be. He was in the Void, in the yellow room, the rabbit and the frog, imagining them in increasingly complex poses, positions, expressions. He looked down at the ground, which should have been an endless mess of leaves, but all he saw was a checkerboard pattern, like the one at the Cinemark when he left, like the one there. It was the only way he could possibly get off anymore, was imagining himself as someone else. Imagining her.
But he still couldn’t cum, even though he wasn’t on estrogen. He just
kept imagining her mouth as Leah sucked on his
nothing cock, and he said that he was okay with being edged,
even though, in reality, he hadn’t managed to cum in months, since
before all of this.
She ran her fingers along the scars on his arm, and Carson yelped before kicking Leah off of him. He threw up on the ground, just missing her due to the push, and got some puke on his crop-top.
“F
k. Oh my god. Are you okay?”, Leah asked.
Carson groaned, and Leah grabbed the pair of shears she kept around to break the rope she used to tie Carson to the tree. He almost fell to his knees but Leah made sure to catch him before he ended up in a puddle of the unsightly mess that proved he was alive. Leah dragged him away from the tree, and the two of them sat in the leaves after she helped him get his shorts back on.
She wiped the puke off of him with some napkins she had in her bag, and it felt really good.
“I- I’m sorry. Shit. Thank you”, Carson said.
“...Why do you cry every time I touch you like that?”
“Like what?”
“Over there”, Leah said, as she pointed at Carson’s crotch.
“...I don’t- know”, Carson lied.
“Yes, you definitely do… look, I try not to pry too hard. But you always tell me about what you’re feeling. You never tell me why.”
“Are we going to have a heart to heart after I threw up?”
“...Maybe?”, Leah asked, hesitating.
Carson leaned back, blood still on his cheek, as his slightly matted black hair fell down. He really needed to cut it to deal with some of that, but he didn’t… want to. He put his hands onto the ground behind him, and looked at the empty night sky, killed by light pollution even in a place like this. The trees swayed silently. “Alright”, he said. He didn’t want to disappoint Leah. He wanted to stay in character.
“I’m glad you trust me.”
“Uh… I had a weird relationship with my- my parents”, Carson said as he looked down, sitting criss-cross. “I… tried to come out as bi after watching Hotel Transylvania 2, when I was like 14.”
“Peak bisexual cinema”, Leah quipped.
Carson chuckled a bit. “She just said, ‘no you’re not’, like it was a stated fact. She said that she thought she was a lesbian in college. She said I had too much freedom, she said I should get off the internet, it was just… bad.”
“I’m sorry.”
Carson continued without acknowledging her. “So when I was 16 I actually realized I was… like this. It was April Fool’s Day, and it was such a stupid time to realize that. I tried to... in some desperate attempt for help, come out to my pediatrician. She was actually the first person I told.”
Carson imagined a swirl of colors and lights, and he pictured himself in the doctor’s office, hearing yelling from outside, waiting for the rising tide. “I even told the pediatrician I was afraid of my mom, and she just… told my mom anyway, immediately, because that’s what I think she had to do. I was a minor, I didn’t have rights. I can’t even imagine the conversation she had with her still.”
He sat up and looked down at his hands. Leah gripped one of them and he gripped back tightly. “I- she walked into the room with the worst expression I’d ever seen, and she said that she’d read my journal, and that it was obviously rapid onset, and that I was going to regret it, and that… and that she was going to take away my phone, and…”, Carson said as his speech started to accelerate.
“Stay with me”, Leah said, squeezing his hand with immense force.
He breathed in, and out. In, and out. Four in, seven hold, eight out. Four, seven, eight. His legs looked wrong to him. He stared at the puke. “So I cried in the car the entire ride back to school, and I lashed out at her, and I said I cried every time I jacked off. And she just said ‘Trannies can’t jack off. They’re all neutered.’ It’s one of the only things she ever said to me that I remember.”
“Fuck, like it would matter even if that WAS true.”
Carson sighed. “So I just stayed at the library after school for a couple of days, avoiding her entirely, until I couldn’t anymore. I got her to promise to not tell Dad, but of course she did after a bit. He just kind of went along with whatever she said, but he was the enforcer, I guess. They kept sending me these awful texts, horrifying stuff, but every time they censored their… their swears, like that was the bad part. Dollar bill sign, percentage mark, star, at sign, you name it. Like they were playing with me.”
Leah thought back to the Circus, then swept the thought away as quickly as possible. It wasn’t the time, and she had already decided that she didn’t care. “That- sounds terrifying.”
“It was! And so I just told her to forget it, and she said that was okay. I just started… training it out of myself, with the knife. But I still can’t touch… I- I still can’t touch it. I cried then and I’m crying now. And now I look like a delusional man and a gay cartoon.”
“...Gay cartoon?”
“N- Nevermind, forget I said that.”
“Okay”, Leah lied. “I’m… sorry your parents talked so much about your dick. That’s awful. I… you know we can always do different stuff, right?”
“But I want it to work! I want it to work for you. I really… I really do.”
“You don’t have to change yourself for me, Carson. I like you how you are.”
Carson remained in character. “I don’t know if I like the way that I am.”
“...then believe that I do?”
Carson started sobbing. Somehow, he couldn’t cry until now. “She- she said she was going to kill herself- if I… if I ever started- and I tried to look up stuff from Vanautu or whatever but it’s just not- I couldn’t-”
“...I could always try and get it for you, if you want?”
“It’s really expensive”, Carson said, not realizing that he was basically completely wrong. “And I don’t- I don’t wanna do anything like that, not in a place like this. Hell, we’re probably irradiated by now.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it? It’s all in a tent. It's so fake.”
“Maybe it is. I have to get out of here. I don’t know if I can handle another semester of this. I can’t- I can’t handle this anymore.”
Leah’s mind started lighting up, shifting like the lookup table on a hard drive. She saw the same flashes of colors and shapes she’d always seen in moments like this, where everything gradually became abstract. She remembered being alone, and afraid, and she realized that she could really do something here. She could help. She was going to help. But first she had to stare into the distance and think.
“Leah?”
She stood up, and started scratching at a tree, then knocking at it with her fist. Then, she walked over to a rock, and stood on it, and crouched down. “Yeah? Sorry, I just feel more comfortable here right now.”
“Are you... good?”
“I think I figured out a way to get us out of here forever.”
Carson’s ears perked up before he realized that he didn’t have ears like that.
“You don’t like driving anyway, right?”
They had to stop at the gas station first. They told the clerk that they were on a road trip, so they needed a container of gasoline to fill up at the pump. They weren’t going far enough to need it for gas, but they needed it for the plan to work. They got pizza while they were at the Casey’s in Nevada, but neither of them could manage to talk to each other. Leah was shaking, and Carson could swear that she was muttering something under her breath, but he couldn’t properly hear it.
For what it’s worth, she was probably saying “kill all TERFs with guns and knives”, as Doug would later attest.
Two cars were out front. One new Chevrolet, and one beat-up 1990 Nissan Pulsar. Leah had the money for a better vehicle, but she didn’t want one. She liked the design of the thing, and she figured that it would be a good getaway car for the heist movie that they were in. Ocean's Eleven. Inception, maybe. That whole thing was stolen from Satoshi Kon, but whatever.
While Carson was eating, he thought about his life up until this point. He thought about his mom browsing Reddit, about being a second-generation Redditor, and about the types of things she had probably read on /r/GenderCritical before it got taken down. He thought about how much he missed her, and about how much he needed to run from her at all costs. He thought back to his Discord friends who told him to take the first out that he could get, and how this was finally it, even though it was stupid. God, it was so very stupid.
The pizza was warm but tasted pretty bad, but it wasn't at the complete bottom of the pizza scale. The gas wasn’t cheap either, and he was the one who ended up paying for it. In cash.
Leah grabbed the screwdrivers that they'd need back when they dropped Carson off at the apartment to wash off all the blood and vomit so that everything would be minimally concerning. He was still in the same crop-top and shorts, just wet.
It was at that point that Carson realized that Leah made him feel safe enough to actually wear such a thing in public. If he lost her, maybe he’d never do it again. He was finally able to live his fantasies out, finally able to experiment, finally able to see himself. So why did it hurt so much when he thought about escaping Iowa?
The plan was simple enough. Carson and Leah would drive out somewhere in Colo, where there was basically guaranteed to be nobody at this time of night. Carson’s car insurance was uncomfortably good, and if there were no plates on it and it was in the middle of that dead place, it’d be a shoe-in for a regular old car theft. Who would care enough to actually investigate a single claim for a wrecked car in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere?
The claim would get them enough cash to keep driving and stay at hotels or sleep in the car. Neither of them had any idea where they would go, they would just go as far as possible, as fast as possible. They’d find jobs, maybe in Canada, or Chicago, or somewhere on the East Coast with a reasonable cost of living. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Durham. Raleigh. Wilmington. Trenton. Newark. Fuck it. They’d find a job at a grocery store, or as a delivery driver, at least one of them would, just enough to pay the rent and keep the lights on. They would live together and they would die together and they would eat together and they would be in a real place, happy, and Carson could get enough money to get some HRT, and maybe he’d finally change his stupid fake name.
As he got back into the car and started driving, he thought to himself how he always seemed trapped seemingly on accident. Trapped in Des Moines. Trapped with his parents. Trapped in Ames. Trapped with L- no, he wasn’t trapped, he could leave any time, she was so nice to him, so kind, so patient. Trapped in horrible Discord communities where everyone talked about suicide. Trapped in a story, in another story, in another story. Trapped in this headset. Trapped in this reality, trapped in this weather bubble, trapped in this fucking car, trapped with all this fucking corn, trapped under this desperate black sky, as the stars flickered like film stuck in a projector. Trapped there, trapped here.
He kept driving along the uncannily straight highway, and he imagined himself as if in a Japanese film, and he thought to himself that maybe if he tucked his arms in, and unbuckled his seat belt, and stopped, dropped, and rolled out the window, and he saw the car speeding away with no driver, maybe he could consider that to be a victory here. He could be a delusional man in the bushes, he could be free there, he could make his home with the birds. This was his last chance to turn around and live a life alone, without her.
But he wanted her more than he wanted air or good pizza or money for gas or a motor vehicle. He wanted someone that could understand him, who listened to him, who finally saw him. So he kept driving.