Conjuration

Maybe because it was wretched, wretched spring—the Conjurer’s season!—he didn’t realize what it was he was picking up off the jumbled-pile seventy-percent-off table at T.J. Maxx, Nicole off trying on, like, ten more goddamn things, distracted as he was by the calamity of sun and daffodils and screeching blue jays and berserk children and hip-hop-blaring jeeps cruising the shopping plaza out there beyond the giant storefront windows, and a cozy ribbed turtleneck, funereal black, perfect for October, November, in medium which was him automatic, sure gave all of it the finger, so into the big plastic cart he tossed it, and it wasn’t till the next afternoon, then, Nicole at work, he lazing at home in the sybaritic lassitude of the grad student’s spring break, all blinds down, all curtains drawn, alone in the dim bedroom, straight-arming his new acquisition on over his head, feeling it sheathe surprisingly snugly his bare ribs, hips, slink surprisingly far then farther still down his bare thighs, that he understood he’d bought a dress!, a dress!, he’d bought a dress!, and he stood there astonished, having wriggled all the way into it, tugged the tube of its still-tagged neck over and under his chin, spotted himself—himself but not himself—in the bedroom-door mirror, where what was revealed rather immediately was he was, face freshly shaved, hairy shins disregarded, a very pretty woman, tallish, athletically lean, Jackie O-jawlined, small- and high-breasted in just the way he liked, not that amply bosomed Nicole was ever prying that out of him, tight- and high-behinded in ditto, and again ditto, and he borderline took his own breath away, truth be told, the Conjurer’s horror show outside the shrouded windows forgotten, palms smoothing the ribbed black fabric against his thighs, not that there was much need of such manipulation, tightly wrapped as, again, he was, and though he was by now plenty—several minutes into gazing—libidinous, it suddenly dawned on him he couldn’t have said what for, not as in why but as in for what, since it wouldn’t have made sense to greet Nicole in this state, this get-up, when she got home from the restaurant that night: not only would she be too exhausted for this sort of no-doubt French philosophical post-whatever grad-school chicanery but chicks and otherwise feminine persons were not, to the best of his by-now considerable knowledge, her thing; nor would it have behooved present purposes (you figure it out) to project on the backs of his eyelids a woman whose thing chicks was, or were—whatever—for the simple reason he wasn’t one, so that hardly seemed polite, cordial, apt to be enjoyable for all parties involved, never mind one party’s incorporeality, and since this left the one option he felt obligated as a progressive individual to try on imagination-wise every now and again anyway (learning he liked himself fine in a dress seemed oblique reminder he was due, as did the memory-jog about his sure digging masculine-of-center chicks), he summoned to mind a beautiful boy, placed himself on his knees in front of him—and but then the usual invisible, misaligned-magnets force pushed him backwards, back to “reality,” if that’s what him in a dress was, no less distraught for the exercise, either, since only he, he, a misfit’s misfit, could harbor a desire so powerful (really: he was half dizzy by now) yet so ridiculously objectless, could possess a libido so hapless, and in the midst of spring, too, the whole world out there fucking itself stupid, or each other, rather—straight, queer, whatever—while here he was longing for some ghost in a mirror, some parallel-universe female him, some yin to a yang, and it was cold comfort knowing it would still be there, still with him, still inside him, pardon the . . . well . . . even after he pulled the dress back off, even after he informed Nicole sheepishly he had a return for T.J. Maxx and she (as she most certainly would) laughed her ass off, and he thought now of his and Nicole’s increasingly strident arguments, to use the honest word, about the Future, about such facets and aspects of it as nuptiality, saw now the essential problem was simply (if anything here was simple) that he, he, was his own and only soulmate, or the beautiful female boy in the mirror was, the one somehow both inside him and unpossessable, untouchable behind mirror’s cold glass, and he might have texted Nicole a picture of himself all dragged up (out?) by way of explanation, only this was before cellphones, so it was just him, alone, again, naturally, facing the Conjurer’s cruelest revelation yet, the Conjurer who every April uttered the spell that set birds singing tunelessly, bees careening drunkenly, hip-hop blaring from jeeps, young people gazing stupidly into each other’s other people’s eyes whilst grinding their bits and parts together, the Conjurer whose hand was passing even then—right then—in some burgundy-velvet-draped, incense-smoke-hung room over a crystal ball in whose shimmering pregnant belly was suspended him, or he, in a dress, upside down, camera-obscurated, a conception without an orientation, without a name, even, and more in love, it seemed, with desire itself than whatever desire was for, unless we meant not what it craved but what it, like, advocated, which was very possibly art, which was something he was years and years figuring out, which is why he’d had no idea, standing in front of that mirror, it was just him—his future self—doing all that conjuring all along.