Walrus
Sarp Sozdinler
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Where the name came from, I have no clue. I don’t believe anyone knows, not really. God knows the first time I heard it, my spine tingled in alarm. I don’t like the looks of them, those walruses. Someone told us back then that the name sounds even worse in German. I can’t remember what it was exactly or who I heard it from, but the name had to do with some bloody torture tool, maybe a bludgeon or whatnot. Perhaps it was in Spanish or Portuguese, but who cares. What matters is that it was far away, so long ago, and a peculiar, peculiar name for a peculiar, peculiar man. I told you, they make me feel funny wherever I go, those walruses. Far or close. Male or female. No debate.
It wasn’t all bad memories with Walrus. There were gentler times, in a twisted kind of way. The first time we met, she was still a he, and we were maybe twelve, thirteen years old. We were on a field trip to the middle of nowhere, somewhere near Erath, but it was a good day for most of us kids anyway because we were far from home, and the teachers cut us loose once we arrived at our destination. Everybody flirted their way out of that afternoon except for the two of us, their spidery fingers ready to unbutton things just at the right moment.
All the girls in our class were smitten with Jacson back then. Those who weren’t were into either Bret or Bryan, aka the Twin Towers. Everyone talked about those boys, monitored their every move. Each word they uttered, each gesture they made was analyzed and reanalyzed in the backseats of the school bus as if we all were some actors in a lousy reality show. Girls tried to figure out who among us was most likely to suffer or who would be the lucky one.
In truth, those cats never really walked the rope for me. They were all too good-looking for my taste and a bit birdbrained. I had my eyes laid on Walrus the whole time, just like Jeannie and Hannah and that McSomething slut did with their humongous moneymakers and shiny haircuts. Walrus still went by Max back then and, most days, I found myself staring at his deliciously complex skin, his dull eyes, and his moplike curly hair. His whiskers were neither too short nor too long, but not of the medium length either, which complicated things like pretty much everything else about him. Max was surely bony. Skeletal almost. I can say he had this choir-boy vibe going on about him even back then. It was true I fell for his shapeless face, those big brown eyes flitting restlessly in those narrow windows of melancholy. I fell for his ghostly complexion, too, soul-white and sin-smooth, which glinted its truest colors under the Erath sun.
On our way back home that afternoon, Max sat next to me on the bus for the first time and said, without wait, that I didn’t look too ugly to be loved by God.
“You know,” he added, “for a girl.”
I didn’t get mad at him for saying that, for I appreciated every bit of candor in this town full of two-faced men, and there was no point in fighting the obvious. I’d been skeptical about my facial features for a long time running anyway and my suspicions were almost proven about right when my sweet Aunt Tyra, who wasn’t necessarily gifted with a better facial configuration herself, had winked at me one day from the back rows of the church Max was choiring in and said that I might just be of perfectly fair-to-middling beauty to serve the Lord.
“Not one inch more or wrinkle less,” she said.
Following the field trip, Max and I became fast friends. We started seeing each other a lot after school. Flirting, however, had never been on the table. Like all the other dull fascinations of our peers, a romantic affair was something neither of us had ever indulged in before, and I didn’t get the impression that we were planning to start anytime soon. Most days, the fantasy of having something appealed to us more than having the actual thing, pretty much like how everything worked in our town, so we just went with the flow. Though, we particularly eschewed flings as if they were cocaine, for they did more harm than good to those around us who’d had a crack at it. Sure: everybody would love it as soon as they got a taste of it and feel like they were making a shortcut trip to the center of the world, but once the gravitational force between the surface and the core, the brain and the heart got severed, the downfall would remind everyone involved it wasn’t probably worth the venture in the first place.
Still, Max cut his walks short after school some Fridays and ran back home so he could get pumped up for a killer night-out. No one wants to admit it these days but he liked to look a certain way even back then. He liked to wear his late mother’s clothes when it was dark out, along with her pink jumpers and go-to red lipstick, the only colors in the world that suited his complexion, which was even once validated by an elderly creep who said he’d recognize Max by this color on the aisles of Walmart. Max didn’t care about any of it because he fancied the way he looked. The only time he felt good about himself was when he was in character, and he was especially in character when he got to choose for whom to stand out, to make an effort, no matter whether it was for Bret or Bryan or some other douchebag from our joint classes, like Donut Dan for instance, that weirdo sophomore who’d moved to our town with his pimply face and crack whore of a mother we’d heard some stories about from our buddies up in Perry. Everyone reserves their own level of awkwardness, so I get that. Some look at the sky, some check women’s backs. Max gazed between his legs and wished for a different body, as always.
Max and I were hanging out by the Poop Train one Sunday, watching the sky prepare itself for a proper afternoon. Poop Train was the name we gave to that stinky sixteen-wagon wreck that had been carrying gallons of solidified wastewater from Baltimore to Mexico for years until one day it ran off the tracks midway through its last handover and stopped, to our luck, near the old tracks between our school building and the baseball diamond. I tell you, the smell did something to our heads back then and stagnated the literacy level of a whole new generation of kids if you ask me, perhaps even Max too, ruining everything from our P.E. sessions to that saline, chemical taste of fish sandwiches on match days. That Sunday after Mass, however, Max perched down on one of the wagons all the way to the back in this awkward, crooked-back posture, not exactly doubled-up or anything, definitely not napping chin-on-chest either, but more like his eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see, somewhere down below if you know what I mean, with a dedication so razor-sharp you’d think he could give birth to a creature with the sheer intent of his gaze.
I asked Max if he was feeling all right. He stared up at me for a while and then asked me what I meant by that, and that was when I gestured with my eyes in the direction of his crotch. You see, around that time, he was only mentally becoming a woman but already wanting me to call him Maxine whenever we were alone. So that’s probably why he figured I was teasing him for it or something that day and told me that I can be an absolute fucking moron sometimes. He motioned to get up but then sat back down to apologize for his profanity. We fell silent for a while like two friends in a movie scene and listened to the uprising sound of crickets, another trademark of the South. He heaved the deepest sigh I’d heard in the longest while, the sigh of a person who made it back home after a long workday, and said it was true that he felt something close to darkness growing in his soul lately, in his body. Going on for quite some time, he said, this darkness that awfully resembles outer space. He said it felt as if every piece of his soul was being replaced by a void in him. A void that was itching so bad and didn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon.
“I know one day I’ll burn in hell anyways,” he said before fixing his gaze back between his legs. “Though in whose hell, I’m not so sure about that.”
Hell was certainly one topic Max liked to talk about. Heaven: not so much. Despite his white pleated tunic glued to his smelly body at all times and a yellowed clerical collar done proper even when he was asleep, Max was not a godly kid. For the most part, he would talk like a godly kid, sometimes behave like one too, though ask him anytime what the Bible was about and he would tell you that it was about one thousand pages of heedless fiction. Discuss politics, and he would never shy away from rating Castro a better revolutionist than Christ. He was in conduct and profile what Pastor O’Connor used to call a “Cafeteria Catholic,” the kind who attended sermons for the sake of free bread and booze. How a crotchety young man with an Asian physique and a muddy familial past in a Latin country managed to become an atheist altar boy with the ethics of a Javanese monk in the Bible Belt of America is still the million-dollar puzzle to me than the reasons why he chose to switch sides. You know, take the blade. Snip the worm. Pull the skirt. Whatever you’d like to call it these days. Whatever you’d like to call him. Or her. Or they. Max. Maxine. Walrus. It’s all one, yet none so. Not unlike the Lord Almighty if you ask me.
It was my mother who operated Max up at her clinic in Mobile. She was the only adult in the entire town who understood the nature of our friendship and didn’t make him feel awkward for being who he was. Even though it had been a while since we graduated high school by then, his body still had this boyish quality. Surely enough, he’d gained some weight. Grown faintly muscular. Veiny, almost. I could name four, five girls off the top of my head who still had the hots for him, despite the rumors flowing from one motormouth to another about his fluctuating sexuality. My mother’s sweet assistant, her other—more favorite—assistant, Mary, who still happens to be working for her these days (a well-deserved accomplishment if you ask me), happened to be one of those girls and I figured it was why she chose to call in sick that particular day, the day of the operation. It was springtime, I remember that very well. I had to handle the whole assistance myself in Mary’s absence, and I was there to help her only from March through May.
A regular procedure went like this: Mom started with asking several questions. Asking her patients to talk about themselves, their lives, though just a little. She wouldn’t go into the specifics of the surgery just yet. It came way after. For when she did it, she had to do it with style. She had to be very careful, for some could fall into the throes of their own anxiety by that point and give up the whole idea, for which she also helped, with a bit of reluctance and a lot of assistance by me and her sweet, sweet Mary. Most patients turned so talkative in the latter stages. You see, my mother used to tell them, a doctor’s office is no different from a confessional box. In here, you’re stripped of all distractions. You’re just enveloped by sound, the pure voice. The voice of a different kind of God, she called it. This was when things could get a bit weird. Those were the moments when the dullness of the room allowed for other things to seep out, such small yet intimate details, which she took full advantage of as a doctor. Max wasn’t like that. He grew surprisingly quiet listening to my mother. After a while, she stopped talking, too. We all let the moment sink in and waited for something to change in the room. Nothing really did. He was a fine patient, though. Sweet Max. Always so sensitive and full of love.
Maxine’s transition didn’t start in the best of light. First she lost her place in the church, and then at home, and lastly her father followed suit and announced that he would disown her at once, his only next of kin. The townsfolk hadn’t yet figured out what to do with Stan McCullers by then, the second son to Jamie and Marge McCullers, who were first cousins, and having one more freak in town just meant one too many. Maxine defied all the templates they were familiar with and defined none in their place. She offered a new type of beauty and ugliness instead, a fresh marriage of look and smell, a unique form of brilliance and goofiness that inwardly charmed as many men and women across the state as it outwardly repelled. She always had a way of disturbing people with her actions, but I knew it was just her way of dealing with her loneliness. She would suddenly show up at town hall meetings or Mass, unannounced, mistimed, and each time with a new scare and a fight. Other times, they just wouldn’t allow her to roam freely around town. Do or say whatever she wanted. Wear makeup and her late mother’s clothes outside, especially when the elderly and children were present. Pastor O’Connor tried to talk some sense into her in the confessional box, but it didn’t work out. He addressed to her as Max during the whole exchange, despite her protests. Even the archbishop got involved at some point with his fancy stationery and flowery words, to no successful end. Maxine crashed at our place many a night back then.
“You don’t look too ugly to do God,” I told her one day before sleep. “You know, for a girl.”
Maxine skidded off the path soon after. Most days, you could find her dozing in the dumpsters or alleyways or in the canopy of that giant oak tree out by the mudbanks to the north. She had stopped showering altogether, so her body odor assumed a blended quality of nature and sweat. She started losing her marbles one by one. She would just kick stuff around for no reason and holler bullshit like her real name was Archangel Patricia and that the Lord had given her the power of walking through walls when no one was looking. She said she was frightened by other people’s fears and that if the church didn’t accept her ways, then she would soon have to form her own congregation to help people like her across the state. She moved into the marshland for good and worked day and night to make an old, abandoned boathouse near Erath her home and queer chapel. She turned into a bag of bones in the process, and I figured the only thing that kept her going most days was the fear of death. She never looked too miserable: just not content. Her sadness had become a natural part of her body, like air, like food. It was as if another presence was always in the same room with her, like a heavy yet unthreatening shadow, which eventually affected everything, including our friendship.
One day, in the aftermath of a hurricane that swallowed the better part of our town, I noticed I hadn’t heard from Maxine for a long time. I asked around, but no one knew where she was. No one could remember when it was last they saw or spoke with her. Days came and went, dog days, one after another. Life in town had leveled to a standstill, and time seemed to have stopped running altogether as if it were fed up with the whole thing and needed a break. I strolled into the marshland to check up on Maxine, but neither she nor the boathouse was around. Only a roof and a purple wooden cross remained in their place, washed ashore within half a mile apart. It wasn’t the first time she’d fallen off the face of the earth like that, so I wasn’t necessarily worried. At least not at first. I just figured she simply left. Called it quits for being on the wrong end of the joke all the time.
Soon after, everyone in town started to forget about Maxine. It didn’t take long, just a year or two. Those who’d last slipped her name out of their mouths didn’t even notice they were the ones who thought or spoke the last of her. Once all was said and done, it was as if she’d never existed, or better to say, even if anybody wanted to find any proof of her existence in this world it would have been to no avail, like how sometimes a muddy splash of water in a pothole wouldn’t reach the sidewalk and just go straight down the drain despite all its might.
A few years into her disappearance, I jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and felt a darkness watching me from inside the room. The weak moonlight illuminated only some corners and crevices, so I couldn’t see anything properly. For the reasons I cannot articulate, something about the darkness of the room soothed me instead of scare that night. I managed to keep my composure intact and reached over to the nightstand to turn on the bedside lamp. When the light finally expanded and revealed more of the room, I saw a barred owl standing in the corner armchair. Its eyes were piercing blue and didn’t deviate from me one second. It stared at me for what could be sensibly called a very long time and I stared back. No fear, no shame. By the size of it, I could tell that the owl couldn’t have been more than a few months old, but there was something frighteningly familiar about its face, its features, that reminded me of Maxine. After a couple of minutes, the owl hopped over to the window and soared away toward the crescent moon as if nothing had happened.
The next morning, I found on the unmade linens of my bed a hardcover book. I looked about the room to figure out if I was falling victim to a prank of some kind. I flipped through the pages with the hope of catching some sort of a clue but failed. The pages were wavy around the edges as if they had gotten recently wet, but in truth we were having the driest of seasons. I didn’t understand a great deal about books, but I knew I particularly disliked the ones whose author’s name shone considerably larger and shinier than its title on the front cover, and this book was no exception. I can’t remember the title anymore, but the book was written, according to my husband, by one of the hotshot Californian authors, the kind I usually try to avoid. He told me that it was one of those books that people fought each other to get ahold of lately, but after reading about a third of it, I threw it into the garbage bin. I just didn’t understand why anyone would want to give it to me.
Just a few days after the incident, I found a package in our mailbox on my way back from work. With its shiny wrapping, colorful ribbon, and fifty-cent stamp out of San Francisco, it looked and smelled like a distant part of the world to me, like pine trees and saltwater. The card squeezed under the ribbon was empty other than the drawing of an M-shaped bird in the bottom-right corner. The paper was of a similar stock to all my unsent letters to Maxine, their richly venous grains representing the magnitude of my anger toward her. I didn’t have the guts to admit it those days, but in the years that had passed since she was gone, I thought a lot about her. I wondered where she was, what she might be doing. What she must be looking like these days. We weren’t necessarily on the best of terms when she disappeared, but she had for the most part been my only glimmer of joy in this sunk place of masculinity that was our town.
I left the package on the kitchen counter and stared at it for a long while as if I could solve its mystery merely by staring at it. The room had turned into a still-life painting in the meantime until I opened the top drawer and grabbed the sharpest breadknife I could find. When I cut the envelope open from its short edge, I found another book inside, despite my hopes to the contrary. For some reason, I found myself clutching onto its hardcover frame as if the book posed a danger of slipping away. On the cover was the picture of a beacon satellite, its tip pointed at the sky. The lights around the beacon glittered with the same shade of yellow Max had once sported on the tips of his lightly feathered mustache. Browsing the index page I couldn’t make out whether the book was yet another piece of junk or a “serious one” as my husband would call it. Some of the chapters had the weirdest titles like D.I.Y. Wet Garbage or What the Vikings Found on Mars. Although the outer space wasn’t a topic I was particularly interested in, I’d learned to appreciate the mysterious workings of the universe during the nights I spent in the woods with Max first and then Maxine.
I flipped through the pages, first one by one, then in chunks, and then some more. Past the fifth chapter a dog-eared page made me stop, entitled On Sagan by a Dude Named Brooke:
For, all the night,
I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Start to faint star, across the sky.
I left the book on the countertop with a quickened sense of dread. I glanced out at the early evening sky. The marsh glowered from across the water, its lights winking like fireflies. It was only in that moment that I realized someone was whistling a somber tune in our backyard. It might have been going on for a while, but I hadn’t paid attention to it until the moment I did, like how the sloshes of a tidal wave would sometimes get barely louder by the second and then the loudest in an instant. God knows I would have been scared headless in other circumstances. But just like the night with the owl, I managed to remain composed. I mustered the courage to step out into the backyard, only to find a mountainlike figure in the far corner, his back turned to me in the dim light. I paused to survey the scene, wary of a misdemeanor. I heard a rustling sound, and the shadows in our backyard trembled slightly. I figured at first that this person might be jerking off into our trash bins, such public, though thankfully rare, indecency not unheard-of in our town. Still, my immediate impulse was to head back inside and call the sheriff’s office, or my husband, to put an end to this gross act for once and for all but something made me stop.
“You know those days you jump in the shower but forget to wash?” this person who had Maxine’s voice but bore different bodily features turned to me with a shit-eating grin on their face. I stood still, my heart pulsing in my stomach. I stared at their cheeks, which were all smeared with makeup. The veins in their temples swelled like fat worms as they spoke. They seemed to have lost some of their front teeth, leaving the stage to some remaining few that popped out from the sides like fangs. “I know God is in there somewhere,” they started speaking again, then sniffed their armpits, “lurking in the layers of my meat and grease.” They nodded to themselves as a form of self-approval, reeking of cigarettes and other bad habits, some of which I could recognize by the smell. “But for some reason, He just wouldn’t show, you know.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just watched this new version of Maxine talk and roam about our backyard aimlessly. They seemed to have grown a limp, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of the surgeries or the hurricane or all of them at once, or something else entirely. Their body looked different from each angle: a Roman statue in the making one second and an American greaseball the next; strangely older and younger at once. With their unevenly cut hair, foggy eyes, and the beginning of a beard budding along their cherubic jaw, they looked like everything but a she, but not totally like a he either, which confused me deeply.
When I asked Maxine what they were doing out here, showing up in my house like that after all those years, they looked at me as if it were the first time they saw me, then told me that I should better call them Walrus from now on.
“What?” I asked, ever more confused.
“Did you like the book I sent you?”
I faltered momentarily. “Why are you here, Maxine?” I asked again.
“Walrus,” they corrected me.
We stood there staring at each other for a while and waited for something to change in the backyard, but nothing did. Eventually, I invited them in and seated them on one of the high stools at our kitchen island. I gave them a towel to clean up. Poured them a glass of orange juice. Walrus wouldn’t talk to me but wouldn’t turn anything down I offered, either. They just asked me at one point if I had any food in the fridge in this low, trembly voice that I remembered well from my childhood. They kept pulling at the hems of their skirt from under their bleached denim jacket and gazing at something between their legs, something down below if you know what I mean, almost ashamed.
“It’s gonna rain tonight,” I said, opening the door of the fridge.
“Why not?” Walrus said, swatting away some invisible mounds of lint.
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Turkish writer & poet, Sarp Sozdinler, has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, JMWW, and Normal School, among other journals. Their work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently working on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
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