Chapter 2: Chapter One: Profile of a Forlorn Hope

(Narration)

What do we call this thing, this assembly of colors and movements? A simulacrum? A dissociative episode? Is "it" a code-phrase to shelter this half-vanished amalgam of rotten aspirations and cautionary tales? Are we the third-person of a grayscale camera that skips too many frames to capture a life, or a cracked mirror? We might ask ourselves whose perspective is more warped, that of the watched or the one who watches her. Who decides what it means to be warped, anyway?

We're all a little clichéd in the end. It's not our fault.

Every so often, the lady lounging against the underpass tries those words out while the traffic rolls by. "It wasn't my fault." She doesn't think it. Just thinks about thinking it. And then she thinks about how hollow it would feel.

It's her fault. Was it her fault she became someone who could be at fault?

Fault and faultless... who decides? There are things that happen, like a distorted wolf-whistle whipping out the rolled-down window of some rusted jalopy. There are things we do, like the fork the lady with her deep-ocean eyes makes with her fingers at the passing ghost of Motor City, like the tongue she waggles through the void between middle and pointer that's not half so pink as the bubblegum pink of her dyed hair.

There are meanings we make up. You can slap together some wooden pallets, put a tarp over them, put a tent on that and put a mattress inside your little newfound citadel of nylon hopes and dreams. There, inside the tent that keeps the biting needle-noses away from your skin. You can spend a night inside this three-dimensional island, cut off from the marshy muck beneath and the muggy air all around. You're near a swamp. You're denying yourself the experience of things that are not a swamp. But that doesn't mean you're experiencing the swamp, now does it?

Half-life in a halfway house that'll fall apart the minute you forget to take care, kick out the supports, and all the mosquitoes come pouring in to thank you for your life by sucking it right out of you. Maybe they'll give you a disease for the pleasure. You'll be tempted to think this is about sex workers. It's not about sex workers, though a sex worker could choose to make this about her. This is about me telling you about experience, and denial, about the creatures who give experiences of themselves, and the creatures who bleed them dry. And that's too much to amount to anything, isn't it?

Look down at Earth from the heavens and what is it? A blue marble, swirls of green and brown. If you stand on the surface, it's mountains, and storms, and valleys, and quiet, and cities and wilderness and yes, here and there, swamps.

That's the trap of the big picture. You can see it all at once. Seeing isn't the same as understanding... but you knew that already. You knew it, deep down, long before anybody gave you some words you could use to argue that you knew. This is the part where you find out--if you didn't know already--that no amount of words and feelings and truth will stop anyone at all from denying whatever they like about you, and trying to wedge everything they want into the empty spaces they imagine they've cut into your soul.

Of course the emptiness isn't really empty. It screams and writhes and pulps and bleeds and begs them to stop. And what do they say? "This isn't who you are. You'll thank me when your head is clear. I'm doing this for your own good."

And now we're talking about nothing. We're in the hazy dreamland of ideals, and patterns, and essays. Nothing can touch us in this utopia of vagaries, so there's nothing to fear.

Nothing to eat, either.

Heaven is empty. Hell is gone. And we could ask whether that makes humankind victorious, but that's too big for my eyes--I guess I shouldn't try to guess about yours--and I don't think any of us are really ready to relapse into the feckless quagmire of deciding for ourselves what it means to be human.

So let's go back. Back to the beginning, not of everything but of enough to fill our comprehension.

A baby was born at midnight on a day she would later learn was called January First, Year Two-thousand of the Current Era by the world, or at least, by the people who used the English language to define the world. Life began in the smells of burning sage and her mother, still panting from labor, who painted her tiny pale brow with patterns of henna and named her Amaranth while the water sloshed in a little plastic pool on the living room floor. Her mother was a jovial round-faced woman with a big belly and a big laugh and a big heart that seemed notably bigger for everyone who wasn't named Amaranth Dawson. Her mother was a witch, the owner of her very own magic shop in Salem, Massachusetts.

The first thing little Amaranth learned about the way the world saw her was that her body could hurt people. Some folks told her that it would poison a boy's mind, make him do awful things, and it'd be her fault. Others, like her mother, told her that her body could hurt people who didn't have bodies as... as something, as it was. It wasn't that it was more beautiful. Everyone was equally beautiful!

So she, poor thing, was just unlucky. She just happened to be born a kind of beautiful that a lot of bad people had used to hurt a lot of good people. She was like the sun, her mother once told her: radiant and warm and needed for life. But she was the kind of beautiful that it hurt to look at unless she dimmed herself. She must hold herself apart so she didn't burn all the little people, and let them love her from afar.

Amaranth often remembered that she answered, "But people don't hug the sun."

"Well," Sylphira Dawson answered, "you're not the sun. You'll get hugs as long as you're good."

Little Amaranth did think, in a distant way, that it felt weird to be compared to the sun if she wasn't really the sun.

The first thing little Amaranth learned about the way she saw herself was that she liked the idea of poisoning a boy's mind, and that was the day she realized she was evil. Somewhere around Third Grade, she listened to another girl's laugh and her heart fluttered. She realized that she liked the idea of poisoning a girl's mind too, and that was when she knew she was beyond saving.

The Oracle received her. Apollo's priestess spoke her fate. And she, the fool railing against causality, wrote her own doom.

When she turned nine, Amaranth decided she needed to start becoming a woman. She didn't know what a woman was, only that the word--like the words "adult" and "mature"--carried this sense of bigness, of wisdom, of power.

The lady watching the cars roll by has to roll her eyes at herself. Power was never in the cards. Not for her.

Amaranth-the-kid hears Amaranth-the-washed-up-outcast. A dry and weary voice rolling backwards in time until it's so faded that only the promise of emptiness arrives. Amaranth-the-kid recognizes it only as a ripple of doubt blurring into the lines of her imagination. And little Amaranth refuses to see herself as someone doubtful.

So she hurled herself into witchcraft. We're supposed to sigh at this part, shake our heads, and say it was never going to work because she didn't really believe, or she didn't believe for the right reasons, or whatever other mutant strain of No True Scotsman we feel like using to comfort ourselves about the breaking of a child's hope.

Amaranth believed. She believed with a fire and a zeal that seemed unquenchable. That was probably her sin. Doubt is an empty space where other people can put things into our souls. The kinds of things they always frame as "you'll learn to like it", "a gift", "an important lesson." In the end it's always the same, or... it was always the same for Amaranth. All it really meant was "I need to know there's a piece of me grafted to your mind. I need it to believe you depend on me enough that I can control you."

In the preteen years when she took her friends on adventures in abandoned houses and back alleys and blind spots in the woods where her mother couldn't see, the barricade of blank expressions and polite silence didn't seem to matter. A dim unrightness, sure. A little disappointment, like the time Amaranth tried to lift one of her father's weights and her little muscles just couldn't budge it.

She reasoned that one day she'd just have to whisper a spell and wiggle her finger and she could move a whole house. No big deal if she couldn't budge an itty-bitty weight right now.

She imagined her mind's eye was a gateway such as no one else possessed. She talked to pixies and unicorns, and a beautiful blond-haired princess in a faraway realm. Once, and only once, she dared to talk to the Devil. She expected a hulking brute on a fiery throne, laughing with cartoon malice. The Devil she met was stranger and more beautiful and so much more dangerous.

"My dear, I'm dreaming far too deep to guide you," said She. "And besides, children shouldn't dance with the Devil. Should we meet again when you're a woman grown, well..."

There were terrible secrets in the shapes and turns of the body half-seen beneath spectral silk. Morphing hues and whispered becomings between the shadows of fantasy and the light of growing days. Little Amaranth did not understand. But for the first time, she understood that she did not understand something because to understand it would destroy her, and the terror of knowing that things she did not know could indeed hurt her... it made her swear there and then that she would never try to talk to demons again.

She never did tell her mother. How could she? Her mother never talked about demons at all, and gave Amaranth a deeply disappointed look the one time she asked.

"Demons are a tool of patriarchy," she said, "invented to make women ashamed of their bodies and desires."

As Amaranth grew older, her evil beauty grew with her. She was slender and curvy and improbable in her suppleness. Fat went to the places she soon learned to know as sexual, objectifying, dehumanizing. Glimmering black hair and eyes of such a strange, deep, rich blue, and yes, we could say all the usual things about her face and lips.

Everyone was beautiful. Amaranth was the kind of beautiful American media teaches its disciples to think of when someone says "a beautiful, black-haired woman." And while in most homes it would have been fraught, awkward, possibly led to a big head, there are plenty of big beautiful mothers with skinny beautiful daughters who they love and nurture and send out into the world with a firm gaze and a steady stride.

Amaranth's mother was subtler than shaming. She always talked about how much potential Amaranth had, about how drive, intelligence, "natural talents"--carefully hollow, an emptiness malleable enough to suit whatever Amaranth felt guilty about keeping for herself--meant she had to work that much harder to uplift those who weren't so lucky.

Perhaps Sylphira Dawson felt swells of pride and warm love at her visions of shaping a heroine, and perhaps she thought Amaranth felt the same things.

Amaranth-who-is, tossing her latest cigarette to the rumbling concrete of Detroit's arterial highways, knows only that Amaranth-who-was could point to her mother's love as a perhaps, an implication, a maybe, but her mother's disappointment was always a thing that happened, a thing her mother did, a thing her mother later affirmed she had meant.

Enough. We already talked about what happens when we try to eat ideals for a living.

Amaranth-who-was-a-witch sought refuge to grow in her magic and her theories the way she couldn't in her own body. But all too soon, the pruning time came. It never ended. Once in her fifteenth year she mentioned, lightly, that she'd been reading about the concept of causality. She wondered whether there might be acausal spirits. One of her mother's friends--forty-six, married, and a regular guest on a radio show with a name so intentionally memorable Amaranth had no choice but to forget it--this woman three times her age flared her nostrils and widened her eyes and went on a shrill tirade about the Order of Nine Angles, and fascist occultism, and something called "problematic."

Since neither her mother nor any of the other witches rebuked her, Amaranth assumed this was how an adult witch should act: placid and friendly until she had cause for anger. Then? Explosion. She rationalized it as a sign of power. Some hazy inward mumblings about deconstructing the idea of femininity as weak, submissive, and vulnerable.

These were important academic words. Amaranth pretended that she felt anything said with important academic words must be academic, and rational, and therefore good for everyone.

Amaranth mentioned the power of the mind, and received a lexical highlight reel of phone scams and crystal nonsense--entirely unlike the crystals sold in her family's store, of course--widows and parents exploited by wretched women with feigned sadness in their eyes and no talent for anything but snatching key details from social media.

A young witch heard two decrees: "There's nothing good left to discover. Now go discover yourself!" How else was she to reconcile one with the other?

Her last high school prom was witch-themed. Standing there under the pulsing lights with mediocre EDM rattling her bones while pretending to giggle at the clumsiness of a dance partner she learned to know as Morrigu... then and there in the spring of her eighteenth year, the last of that gleaming defiant belief in the supernatural suddenly snuffed itself out.

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Because as much as Amaranth Dawson liked to pretend that was she was fierce, stubbornly independent, that she renewed herself and needed nothing from anyone or anything else, she didn't know of a single story where magic visited someone for the first time after they were out of their teens. There in the best years of her life--that's how she thought of them, and Amaranth-who-is can't say she disagrees--if the lights didn't suddenly flare and burn out, if strange energies didn't weave around the darkened room and converge on her and open the gateway to her future, they never would.

And they didn't, so that was that. Ten years of spells and theory and bitter silence before her mother and her mother's friends, consigned to the pyre of make-believe.

But all her invocations and imagination taught her to speak well and emote powerfully, and it turned out that if her beauty was evil, then a lot of girls at college found evil pretty exciting, so Amaranth comforted herself that activism was kind of like witchcraft. She thought of it as harnessing the collective power of people to summon a new reality.

Only ever foolishness.

That trail ends at Westhavelland Nature Park in Brandenburg, Germany, on a warm summer night in 2022. It's all public now. A falling out with a new member of Amaranth's coven, Carrie Rider, who said agonizing things about real witchcraft and demons and all the things Amaranth was denied. Carrie Rider, who Amaranth was nonetheless responsible for, disappeared later that night. Amaranth panicked, blamed the only other outsider in hopes of protecting her own--well, really, she just wanted to protect herself--and that's how she finally admitted to herself that she'd never really thought of trans women as women.

She wonders sometimes whether people have a sixth sense for buried sin. Or maybe she'd just been such a mouthy, unpleasant bitch that everyone was glad to tear her down the instant her mask slipped. Like her nominal service to the greater good was the only reason to tolerate her, so the second her usefulness ended, so did she.

Hannah Schumacher's mother was a full-bird Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. And Colonel Schumacher was everything Amaranth ever pretended to be: mature, collected, radiating this unbreachable aura of command. To the cameras outside the courtroom, she reserved herself to terse, pointed observations that Amaranth had no evidence to offer save the testimony of a group she herself controlled. Brown hair in a neat bun, hazel eyes sharp as talons. A sculpted oval face.

Beautiful like a statue.

Only off the record, in a hallway where no one else could hear them speak, did the Colonel pause long enough to voice her personal feelings to Amaranth.

"If I catch you within a hundred kilometers of my little girl, ever again, I'm going to nail you to the nosecone of the next fighter I take to the edge of the stratosphere."

Even now, Amaranth bristles a little at it. Not that the Colonel was wrong to say it. But obviously, after the case was thrown out and her fledgling political career exploded, she spent a good half a year seething with hatred for Hannah Schumacher.

How could she do other than hate the girl who had the mother she always wished she did? Since UM expelled her within a week of the court's decision, she had plenty of time to broil her own guts in rage while looking for the cheapest apartment she could find.

Another year plus two months of denied job applications and scornful words from former friends blurred towards April of 2024. All the fury is long since burned out. The Republican Party's grunts used to make some suggestive noises at the shell of Amaranth. She was tempted for a little while, but some jaded kernel rebelled. She turned them away until they stopped.

So here's Amaranth, neither Moonsilver nor Dawson, sidling along away from the highway, past old brick facades and the now-and-then-shine of corporate high-rises, into a bar near a rundown suburb. She doesn't bother reading signs these days. Here she sits in a booth, with her white croptop and her torn jeans and nothing to do but speak into the oddball recorder she picked out of a dumpster a few weeks ago while she sips whatever beer this is.

And she, knowing everything she knows of herself, knowing how the world knows nothing except the reasons to throw her away, struggles to know where to start when a lanky girl in her twenties with light brown skin and a mass of braids and a Spiderman hoodie slumps into the other side of the booth and grins at her.

"Absolutely not," Amaranth's voice says.

"You sure?" the girl asks. "I can't, like, annoy you until you laugh?"

"You can definitely annoy me," Amaranth answers. "Laughter, you have to pay for."

"You oughta charge for annoyance," the girl says. "Seems like you'd make more money."

A smirk on pink lips: Amaranth, who we'll call "I" for the moment, acknowledges a touch.

"For real, though, I'll leave if I'm bothering you," the girl says. "You just seemed..."

"Solitary, yeah," I agree. "It's by design. But since you're here and you're annoying me, give me your spiel."

The girl cocks her head. "My what?"

"It's German," I answer. "It means 'play.'"

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhh!" Poor Miles folds inward on himself as the girl leans forward. "Okay, uh... to be honest, I just followed you because of your hair."

"You know stalking isn't not stalking if a girl does it, right?" I ask. I'm a rushing heart under skin threatened by cold sweat and thoughts made of spiraling razor-wire. Why am I panicking, why is my head full of pain--oh. Right. Because the last time I got this close to a small woman with a superhero T-shirt was the night I destroyed my own life.

I loathe trauma triggers, I really do.

"Alright, yeah," the girl says, "that's pretty creepy. Sorry. Just, um... it reminded me of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Your hair, I mean. Your eyes aren't exactly the same color..." I return a flat stare because showing any emotion will split me apart at the seams. "It's like, uh..." she tries. "A lesbian sword anime from the nineties..." She trails off.

"I'm just gonna go," she says, fleeing.

I watch her rush out to the golden afternoon. Even after a few drinks and several cigarettes on the streets outside, my heart rate's barely come down. So of course when I stumble back into my moldy one-room apartment the first thing I do is spitefully tear open a browser...

And then after a few seconds, I wake up to the hilarious self-importance of the way I'm pounding the keyboard. It takes the wind right out of me. I laugh. Slower, steadier breaths. Then, with my aging laptop's fans whirring a little faster, I sift the usual roster of anime pirate sites until I find what I'm looking for.

Utena both is and is not what I expected. It does a lot of the usual. Utena most often wins because her opponents screw up, or if that fails, she shouts some cutting insight about their character and they're so destroyed mentally that they fold. She does the same special finishing move every time. Weird humor, some creepiness surrounding sexuality, and yet...

And yet, there's the rest.

During the four nights I spend on it before crashing four times into sleep on the creaky mattress opposite my rickety plastic desk, it occurs to me that I don't speak Japanese and I have no idea if the pirated dubs match the official ones. I know only what the dub-writer wants me to believe it all means, just as I know only what the characters want each other to believe they believe.

The more I learn, the less I feel I know them. Eventually, I decide I can either go with it, knowing full well the next episode might pull the rug out, or stop watching. I don't stop watching. It's such a weirdly perfect way to experience this story.

One phrase sticks out. Utena's major villains mostly manipulate others to fight their battles. After hearing these people talk about their problems, the villains often repeat the same statement: "Your only choice is to revolutionize the world."

Hey, Moonsilver. Fancy seeing you again, feigning sympathy for others to convince them their only way forward was fighting for you.

And of course, it's not true. None of these characters actually want to change the world. All their problems are everyday problems calling for everyday solutions. They're not running towards power. They're just running away from their insecurities--that so-human fear of being human.

I finally understand what Carrie was trying to tell me.

Utena and Anthy? They're not kinder or more deserving. They aren't chosen by fate, gods, or society. They keep trying because it's their only way forward. That's it.

I've seen what happens when I use others for their power. Even when it worked, it only ever made me miserable. One way or the other, I'll just have to become an incarnation of myself with power of her own. So I guess I finally know what I'm looking for out there.

Places where the logic of our world falls away. Sloppy sutures where the stitches holding our reality shut can be undone, at least for a moment, if you can just find rituals with the right spirit to them. That theme has to be a clue, right? It's one of the most common in storytelling. It exists across different genres, across cultural boundaries, across countless eras...

Alright. Time to try my luck with liminal spaces. Is my heart fluttering?

I'll find out soon enough whether my hope will bear fruit. A client passed me an urban legend that if I go wandering in the suburbs around the Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament after midnight on a Tuesday night, I might--and I quote--'find some folks who'll make anybody feel good about any body they've got.'

Come on, my probably-anomalous recording buddy. Tonight, we rest. Tomorrow, it'll be time to taste the Beyond.

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