Patrick Cottrell
My Brother
It’s been six months on testosterone and I notice it’s easier for the people in my life to see me as a man. Even though more and more people in my life see me as a man, in my dreams, more and more people do not see me as a man. Last night I dreamt Clarice Lispector called me by my deadname and I had to tell her my new name and pronouns; she seemed embarrassed not to know already. Without understanding why I showed her my old driver’s license and my new one. She examined them and said I looked more in the new one. More what? I asked, casually entranced. Before she could answer I wake up, write down my dream, and take the train to West Fourth Street then walk south to Canal. I meet a poet friend at a café who tells me I look more like a man. But not a famous one.
For many years I have been writing down my dreams in the morning; I don’t expect anyone to care. Last night I read an interview in which a writer compared writing a novel to surgery whereas writing a short story is more ambient and less precise. Writing a story is like entering a dream state and the dream carries you along, she said. When I taught a graduate class on dreams and writing the students assumed the class would be like art therapy, but because of the cold, methodical way the students dissected each other’s writing, it was more like surgery. Dental surgery. A different writer, a dead one, said we must keep exploiting the same emotions, images, and scenes, over and over. He suggested we keep those exploitations to ourselves until we’ve become emotionally detached from them.
For a long time I found myself unable to stop writing about my brother. I wrote one book about him quickly then another very slowly. I have since exploited that relationship and there’s nothing new to say about it. My poet friend claims she likes being a poet because unlike a fiction writer no one expects anything from you; it’s so much easier that way. Although I’m a fiction writer no one expects anything of me because at some point I decided to become slow at writing. At another point I decided to become a man. At any point a person can change who they are, inform others, and sometimes immediately, eventually, somewhere in the future, somehow, the change becomes reality; that’s how literature is made.
It occurs to me I would like the people in my dreams to see me as a man just as the people in my waking life like my poet friend have begun to see me as a man, although the other day, two men came into my apartment to drop off a treadmill and I don’t know if they saw me as a woman or a man; they did not specify. If they do not specify, does that mean they see me as a woman? It’s impossible to know now. In my dreams my brother is everyone. The stranger at the door. The widow alone at a table with a basket of bread. A magnanimous king who swallows air. The uptight host at a restaurant who greets my friends and me as ladies. Over the course of ten years I wrote two books about one person, my brother, but this will not make up for the fact that my brother, now dead, always saw me as a woman and never knew me as a man.