Three Disorientations
by H Felix Chau Bradley
I. An Encounter with Feet
Snow falls from under my eyelids, interruptions produced by glare. If I blink hard and often enough, I can delude myself into believing I’ve gotten rid of the flecks. But try walking around the city, on and off of buses, in and out of doorways, up and down escalators, blinking so hard you can’t see what you’re walking through, or into.
I’m safely on the right bus now, and I’m letting my eyes drift as they like. The flakes recede sometimes, if I stand still and remember not to think about them. My body is drifting too, I notice. I try to dissuade my body’s motion; but in the bus, motion, mostly forwards, is inevitable.
I press my eyelids together, like pasting shut the gluey flaps of an envelope, in hopes of triggering a deluge. But their surfaces, though brushed against, remain dry. Tacky.
I fix my gaze loosely on the floor, where a circular cut-out spins back and forth. I am standing in the area known as the Accordion, which requires a certain amount of balance, and openness to motion within motion. A lurch brings a pair of feet into my sightline.
Feet in a particular boot. This boot is a common choice in this part of the city. On this bus, and in the streets surrounding its route. But I can detect a familiar stance, despite the ubiquity of the blunt footwear. I blink again, urgently, which coincides with the horrendous blare of the “Arrêt demandé” chime. As if the blinking is producing this ear-splitting note. Squeezing shut and then dragging open creates a necessarily harsh sound.
A permanent ringing sets in, alongside the permanent snow. I stare harder at the boots, which surely house the feet of my recent ex, MH. Under no circumstances must my eyes be raised above the ankles. If MH and I make eye contact—but it’s unthinkable. The rules on the bus state that strangers may interact within it, briefly—to offer a seat, to get by, or to scold each other for blocking the exits. “Reculez vers l’arrière!” being a common cry. But those who are acquainted must absolutely refrain from speaking to or even acknowledging each other. There is a certain attitude of eyes and ears—a calculated yet apparently natural unfocusing into the middle distance that must be resorted to upon catching even the faintest glimpse, vocal emission, or even perfume waft from a familiar person.
I try to commit to the unfocusing. The blizzard still storms. Inside, not outside, where the weather is inconceivably warm. Even looking at the boots of MH is inadvisable. My neck aches. I cannot unfocus. I can see the uneven, lacy edges of salt deposits on the leather. I can see that one toe is more worn than the other. The positioning of the feet, slightly akimbo, is what reveals MH as their owner. Butch, always aligned with their centre of gravity. Never stumbling or caught off guard. They probably noticed me before I noticed them, and decided to say nothing. As is only appropriate.
I make a valiant effort to turn my awareness elsewhere, towards the footwear of others, but already I am beginning to revisit our mutual past—the shy fumblings in lamplit bedrooms and kitchens, the frenzied declarations, the flurries of posts and pings, the eventual inevitable recriminations and the torrential catastrophes of misunderstanding. After so much silence, we are here together, in the Accordion. The moment I noticed MH’s feet, I should have shuffled toward the back, even if there was no room to sit there. Now, we’ve been swinging back and forth in this circular area for several stops. I’ve let it go too far, I realize. I’ve inadvertently created an opening.
At any moment, MH may engage. Now that I have acknowledged them from below, and failed to move away, the possibility has germinated. I tense, I shudder with the bus. To the bus’s angry pitching, I add my own roiling motion, as if to declare that I surrender.
My neck aches, all the flakes in my vision having built up into an indissoluble pile inside my skull. Anyone living in this city knows the immovable weight of wet, packed snow. I know it is going to happen. MH and I will accidentally look up at the same time, and then we will have to greet each other, I am already anticipating it. The other passengers will loudly protest. “This is forbidden! This is not to be done, here! Please!” Amidst this refrain, MH and I will have to process our shared past, again, face to face, citing specific incendiary passages from certain text exchanges, appealing to memory, reporting the editorial opinions of various consulted friends and therapists, descending into melodrama. Having witnessed such commotions before, as a bystander, I know this will culminate in one or both of us being thrown out of the vehicle, without the option to transfer. Subsequent buses on the route will be closed to us, and we will have to wait on the side of the road together, with no one to come to collect us, and we will have to rehash and rehash the past until our words and gestures become exhausted and meaningless, which is something that I can’t stand to imagine, tired as I already am, from the constant blowing snow in my eyes and the insistent shrill tone in my ears. Oh, don’t engage, don’t look at me, I silently project to MH, whose boots are right there, on the other side of the rotating circle, whose eyes are certainly attempting to connect with mine, whose ears are open to the sound of my voice pronouncing, tentatively, “Sa-lut.” Which I will not do. I must not. But there is a pull, a strong pull, toward MH’s person, to look into their face, a once-familiar terrain, a source of pleasure and romantic charge, and what if I do raise my gaze, what if the two of us are forced to reconnect, to be thrown off of public transportation in humiliation but also in solidarity, what if the hours spent waiting on the sidewalk together could lead to a real reconciliation, what if the accumulated burdens of rage and mutual accusation could be resolved, it could in fact be—
And in a moment of pure risk, I straighten my throbbing neck and flick my tired eyes up, to meet the steady gaze of my old love, MH—
Who is not MH at all but just another queer standing on the bus, their face blinking with transmissions from their screen, into which they are peering obliviously, and of course they are wearing the boots that everyone wears, and in fact their stance is wholly different from that of MH, who is more regal in their bearing, less slouched, and who always of course puts their weight on their left foot and not their right as this person is doing. With a terrible feeling that all my organs are sinking simultaneously into quicksand, I punch the “Arrêt demandé” button repeatedly until the bus doors grind open and I am projected into the brisk, bright afternoon street, dishevelled by misplaced emotion, my vision assailed by a new flurry of black dots, through which I can still recognize that I’ve missed my stop by many city blocks, and that I am in an unknown part of town, a stranger even to myself.
II. The Corner in Question
Before I knew my lover, their street did not exist. They still lived there, but I was sure that there was no street there, as it left no imprint on the map of the neighbourhood. There is one main way to enter it, and even that way is often blocked. To get there, you take the street with the same name, which everyone is aware of. That street ends abruptly. Before it ends, you have to take a sharp right onto a perpendicular street, which has the same name, but is totally different. It is different because it is not widely recognized. Explain that your lover lives on this street and no one will believe you. “But there is not a street there,” they maintain. “Do you mean—?” And they insert the name of the longer, publicly recognized street, which is the correct name, but the incorrect attitude. “No, it’s north-south,” I insist. Do these people believe that I really have a lover?
I explain that there is in fact another, secret way to enter the lover’s street. Anyone can try it. This way involves walking for several trying minutes through an empty commercial parking lot, and locating a chain link fence with a gate in it. Beyond the fence is a gated community, a protected street behind my lover’s street, again with the same name, a stretch that believes itself to be more in need of security cameras than the rest of the neighbourhood. This so-called community has erected a sign on the gate that warns of penalties for unauthorized entry. The trick is to anoint yourself as a person authorized to enter. A physical attitude of insouciance mixed with the impatience of the powerful. It helps, of course, that my skin tone, though not white, is nonetheless fairly pale. The secret to the gate is that, up until now, it has never been locked. Declaring myself immune to “Keep Out,” I simply pluck its metal clasp, and walk through it.
Here, though, trouble may begin. If I’m not paying attention, too preoccupied by fantasies of what I will do to my lover once I arrive in their zone, I could get stuck in this surveilled stretch, where the residences looked pristine, with recognizably superior black window frames that actually kept the elements out, and iron handrails leading up to front doors displaying polished door knockers. I could get stuck here, despite knowing that my lover’s street is just on the other side of this slab of new builds—so close behind that it’s invisible from where I stand, feeling peered at though I see nobody about. The existence of my lover’s invisible building is tantalizing but difficult to hold onto. How can these streets exist back-to-back—one supposedly protected from the other by a gate that says “Accès interdit,” even though anyone, including me, can pass easily from one side to the other. How will I pass from this overly manicured block, where no one seems to actually live, to my lover’s crowded, social block, and then to their building, their apartment, and their bed? Already, I’m forgetting how to move myself from one urban mood to another. I fumble with my phone. I send a voice note to my lover, asking them to text me some photos of their apartment, so that I can remember how to reach it, and them. They don’t respond—probably busy, but possibly so far removed from my current reality that they are unable to communicate with me. This block of new builds could be preventing contact. Perhaps these people have erected some sort of anti-data wall between here and there, impeding my attempts to transmit beyond the row of matching brick façades. Desperate, I stride up to one of them, climb the stately front steps, and frantically pound on the smooth, stubborn solidity, in hopes that my lover will hear me from the other side. Instead, I hear the faint whir of a security camera turning its gaze on me. I scurry back into the road.
From my lover’s back balcony, they can see the back balconies of the people whose street I am currently disrupting. Who wish to live behind a security gate and are never seen walking through the neighbourhood for toilet paper, diapers, pastries, coffee, a particular spice, or a chat. They have wide driveways for their vehicles, they have double-garages. Their back balconies are angular and clean. Dark, with few plants. My lover’s balcony, and the other balconies on their block are neither new nor clean. They are infested with pigeons and squirrels, teeming with vegetables and climbing morning glories and salvaged furniture. They are riddled with holes, which let the light in. As I stand here, longing for this chaos, and for sex, I can hear the security gate getting updated. Now, it announces in a soothing voice, it’s taking itself more seriously. It is locked. If I’m still standing there, I am locked in. This is unthinkable. Hopefully I’ve had the foresight to retrace my steps, in confusion, which means that I am now locked out. I wonder if the update has happened because people kept walking through the gate. Because I personally kept walking through it. My lover is probably impatient now, but there’s nothing to do but circle back around, through the fatigued parking lot, up the long block, over to the well-known street that shares its name with my lover’s street—and I fear that I won’t find the corner where I am supposed to turn sharply towards their apartment. This was the initial problem, I want to yell to someone. I want so badly to be understood in this moment of geographical undermining.
Instead of solidarity, I am dismayed to find a void. So few people believed in the existence of this intersection that it has ceased to be. The cul-de-sac where my lover lives and where they might still be waiting for me has retreated into itself. I have exhausted all the tricks I know. Once again, I will have to return to the terrible apps, signalling my own location, swapping coordinates with countless others, hoping to find a way to enter.
III. Possession
When I was young and looked like a girl, it was a common enough occurrence to be accosted. I would be walking along a street downtown, and there on a front lawn, or on the sidewalk under an overpass, or in the leafy entrance to a ravine, would be a man with a dick, waiting for me. The dick would be staggering around, loose from its fly, waving at me. The dick was often glowing palely, often in the pool of a streetlight, but sometimes simply clothed in the mundane light of a sunny afternoon. The owners of the dicks never said anything to me, or not anything that I could register. They held their dicks in their hands and waggled them around, winking at me.
Each time it happened, it began like a premonition. I would be walking, not thinking about the mechanics of setting one foot in front of the other, when, there up ahead I would glimpse the pale flesh where ideally there would have been a properly zipped fly.
I would think to myself, No, no, it’s not happening again, that flesh is not there for me, or maybe this person is just carrying a small pale package, some groceries wrapped in pale butcher paper, right at crotch level. The package covered in butcher paper is not aimed at me, I would insist, inwardly. But as I kept on walking towards it, now excruciatingly aware of the muscles it took to go on stepping in a forward direction, it would become undeniable that it was, in fact, a dick. Aimed at me, unquestionably. Sometimes I became caught up in the illusion that I was on an airport conveyor belt, being transported inevitably onward without having made the decision to keep moving, with the man and his dick standing there on the sidelines, not travelling, but waving at me, trying to flag me down with exaggerated, repeated gestures. Eventually my walking would propel me beyond the man, who would recede into the distance. My pulse would slow to its normal rate. I never allowed myself to look backward, to see if he was still standing there, waving. Five minutes would go by and by then I would have convinced myself that it had been an illusion.
I started to wonder what it would be like to be the man, the man with the dick, or just a person with a dick that could spill out anytime, insistent and unlikely, from the front of my clothing. Well, I wouldn’t go around pointing it at people who hadn’t asked for it. But even so, I wondered. Eventually I learned that you could just buy one. I went to the store and bought a mid-sized dick, and I bought the black leather harness that I needed to strap it onto my body. I went home and took the dick and the harness out of their wrapping and I took my clothes off and I pulled at buckles and snapped metal buttons and wriggled around, cursing, until I was properly attired. I opened all the curtains and turned down the lights and walked around my apartment, with my new dick wagging before me, rubbery and alert. With each step, it bobbed pleasantly in the vicinity of my thighs. I could smell myself reacting to this new appendage. I thought of the underpasses and the leafy ravines and I wore it, strapped onto my pubic bone, until it became my own.
Later when you asked me for it, when you demanded that I take my dick out for you, kneeling on the hardwood floor of my apartment, expectant and exacting, I knew exactly what to do, I knew each gesture and its weight, I knew the way the light played on it, how it glowed warmly in the lamplight, and I was glad that I had been thinking of the dick and how it might inhabit the world for so many years, and that I had learned to carry its weight myself, in ways that I hoped were different from the ways of the men in the underpasses, so that when you asked me for it, I could give it to you, as smoothly as riding a moving sidewalk, as smoothly as if I’d been in possession of it all my life.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
H Felix Chau Bradley is the author of Personal Attention Roleplay, which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize in 2022. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, the Humber Literary Review, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, PRISM International, Weird Era, Xtra, and elsewhere. They live in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), and work as an editor for Metonymy Press, This Magazine, and Le Sigh. @notesofacroc on Twitter. @notesofacrocodile on Instagram.
Photo credit to Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch.