He hadn’t understood how little sense he made as a person without Reese until after she began to detach from him, until the lack of her became so painful that he started to once again want the armor of masculinity and, somewhat haphazardly, detransitioned to fully suit up in it.
So now, three years have passed living once again in a testosterone-dependent body. Yet even without the shots or pills, Ames had believed that he’d been on androgen-blockers long enough to have atrophied his testicles into permanent sterility. That’s what he told Katrina when they hooked up the first time, the night of the agency’s annual Easter Keg Hunt. He told her that he was sterile—not that he’d been a transsexual woman with atrophied balls.
* * *
—
Ames sifts through the papers in the manila folder Katrina has brought. Beneath the printouts from her doctor are more printouts, from what look like Reddit forums. “What are these?”
She drops her hand to her stomach. It’s flat, no baby bump, but she’s already holding herself like a pregnant woman. “Well, I know you said you were sterile now. I was looking it up, and vasectomies are like ninety-nine percent effective, but I found some message boards, from men who still got women pregnant—”
He raises a hand. “Wait a sec. I never said I had a vasectomy.”
His office, like all the offices in this row, has only a glass wall to separate it from the hallway. He’s at the end of the row, beside an alcove into which is tucked the copy machine, water cooler, coffee maker, and a little kitchenette stocked with—due to a recent human resources campaign—only healthy organic snacks. Coworker hallway traffic remains constant throughout the day. He would not consider his office to be an ideal location to come out as a former transsexual.
“No? But we haven’t used condoms for months and this whole time I thought—what did you mean, then? Like low sperm count?”
“I had very low testosterone for a while.” He works to keep his voice casual, to resist the urge to lower it nervously. “And during that time, my testicles atrophied, and my doctor told me that none of my sperm would ever again be viable.”
When Ames first went in for an estrogen prescription, he saw a gentle, elderly endocrinologist, who had taken on trans patients not because of any special interest in gender, but because trans patients were, in his words, “so happy to come see me for treatment.” The bulk of the doctor’s other patients suffered from hormonal disorders that made them emotionally volatile. After this endo discovered trans gratitude, he filled his appointments with as many transsexuals as he could find.
Ames, who had no history with trans therapy, and none of the paperwork that the hormone gatekeepers tended to require, had spent weeks before the appointment fretting that the endo would declare him “not really trans” and deny him hormones. Upon hearing that the doctor appreciated appreciation, Ames therefore gushed with gratitude, and duly walked out with a prescription for injectable estrogen. At his next appointment, the endo confided, “Perhaps, last time, I prescribed somewhat hastily. I should have said more about sterility.” He told Ames that permanent sterility would set in within the first six months of a hormone replacement therapy regimen, and he gave Ames a recommendation for a sperm bank.
The next day, Ames mustered great bravery and called the sperm bank. He did not want to think about fatherhood, that final plume in the cap of manhood, but he forced himself to call anyway. A receptionist on the other end of the line quoted annual prices for sperm storage akin to his cable subscription, which he supposed was a reasonable cost for preserving the viability of his future genetic line. The receptionist put him on hold to make an appointment and as Vivaldi played, Ames pondered whether he ought to cancel his subscription to HBO in order to afford this sperm bank. He couldn’t fully comprehend the enormous weight of fatherhood and generational lineage, but he could easily comprehend how much he did not want to cancel HBO.
Without further consideration, he hung up. By the time his nipples began to ache that spring, he figured it was too late anyhow. The more his nipples hurt, the less he suffocated from the dread that came from thoughts of fatherhood. Now, with Katrina sitting in his office, for the first time in a long time, he had to think about the possibility of having sired a child. Shortly, very shortly, he was going to be called upon to make some decision, which would lead to other decisions, generations of decisions generated by this decision.
“Your testicles atrophied?” Katrina asks, baffled. “But they felt normal to me!”
“Yes,” he agrees. “I mean, they’re not huge or anything.”
“No, not huge,” Katrina affirms, and then adds encouragingly, “but fine!”
On the other side of his office’s glass wall, Karen from the art department pauses in the hallway to unwrap a granola bar. Ames becomes suddenly aware that Katrina and he are casually discussing his balls in the middle of a workday.
Coworkers had shared the office gossip about Katrina almost immediately after Ames had joined the agency: bad divorce. She’d left her husband a few months before he’d interviewed. She cried in her office, the coworkers told him, then told her secretary not to put her husband’s calls through. He had cheated on her, said one. No, no, she’d had a miscarriage. Incorrect, said another, they’d had money problems. The speculation took on a tone both lurid and compulsory—to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one’s precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism’s arbitrary mechanics doesn’t satisfy—the heart demands a human explanation. Or at least that’s what Ames said to justify his initial crush.
Still, over that first year that Ames worked for Katrina, she kept her personal life just that. Instead of talking about her divorce, Ames intuited it. He noted the slight woundedness and exasperation that clung to her, the nearly teenage angst and willingness to test bad ideas that led to a certain oh-fuck-it-ness about her work and a straightforward honesty with her employees.
She developed a visceral suspicion of conventional narratives. The anodyne corporate clients who came to the agency occasionally saw one or two much darker and more experimental pitches for their online marketing campaigns slipped in among the conventional fare. Dadaism for the Clorox bleach campaign. Cyborgian despair for Anker batteries. A series of radio ads for Purina in which Jon Lovitz catered to nineties nostalgia by reprising his cult role as critic Jay Sherman in order to give negative reviews to various puppies. It made her good at her work. Ames interpreted her tendency to re-narrativize as divorce-induced.
Well into their romance, after they’d already slept together numerous times, she brought up the subject of her divorce. They were in his bed, on their sides, facing each other, he propped up on an elbow, she with her face resting on one of his forest-green pillowcases, her glossy brown hair stepping down from head to pillow to bed. The bedside light shining behind her illuminated the outer crescents of her face—he still instinctively noticed the curve of a brow.