NOTES FROM A REGICIDE

Isaac Fellman is the author of Dead Collections, The Two Doctors Górski, and The Breath of the Sun, which won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for queer science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is also an archivist.

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“An all-too-timely tale of trans rights and loss.” —People Magazine

“Few capture the grubbiness of intimacy — and the starchy scent of home — as well as Fellman does in his depiction of his characters’ trans family. Magnificent, heartbreaking.” —Charlie Jane Anders for The Washington Post

“A delicate, ardent portrait of two aging trans revolutionaries and the son they never expected.” —Jenn Shapland, National Book Award finalist

“A glittering, empathetic story about the pains and pleasures of loving eccentrics…. Marvellous, and heart-breakingly unsentimental.” —Jennifer Giesbrecht, author of The Monster of Elendhaven 

“Notes from a Regicide is a dazzling meditation on art and desire…it is also quite simply the best kind of book there is — dangerous because it is beautiful, and because it is true.” —Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection and The Naming Song

FORWARD

I saw my parents at a riot once. I think of it when I hear them speak, in my mind, of love as a tool. A lot of things were tools to them, not because they wanted to control the world, but because they were skilled craftspeople and their tools were the best way they had of understanding and using it. There were good tools and bad ones, sharp and dull, some for daily use and some for nightly. Others were so obscure that they were only useful once a year, or once a lifetime. At least one was never used.

It was during the riot at the Sauce Pot. A lot of people claim to have been at the Sauce Pot, and it’s easy enough for them all to beright. The battle went on for six hours, and lasted through waves of reinforcements. But this was at the beginning, when the riot was fairly fresh—the coffee already thrown and the doors already barricaded, but still time for two elderly, precarious immigrants to do a little damage and make their escape.

I hadn’t even known my parents ever went there. It was a place I associated with trans people much rougher than them. By that point in their lives, they were of the rich class of any oppressed minority that more or less gets away with everything, and whichrarely mixes anything but money into the communal cup. Beyond that, my mother was an agoraphobe who never left their sleepy, filthy house unless she had to. But she must have had to that night, because when I arrived to cover the riot for the New York Greatheart during the blooming of its second hour, there they both were. They were the first thing I saw.

I was running through the blue alley on the far side of the building from the canal. People don’t remember how big a place the Sauce Pot was. It was a converted warehouse, with plenty of room to swing an arc of hot liquid—coffee or lava or piss. I could see the sign, the golden pot boiling over, through the corner of the side and front windows. From inside I heard talking and tinkling andsweet laughter, delighted laughter, and I thought of a play I had seen—about the sinking of a ship—where a simulacrum of a heavy instrument panel broke free of a wall and was supposed to crush two men to death. Well, I thought the crushing looked cozy. You may as well die with something wrapped tight around you. What I heard inside the coffee house was pressed out of a human body by a great weight.

I came round the corner and there they were. Zaffre’s back was full to me, her loose cotton dress flapping in the strong wind from the canal. Etoine was kneeling on the ground. Half in panic at seeing them so far from their context, I stepped back into my alley to watch.

A spurt of a giggle escaped Zaffre. Then there was a very soft sound of something slapping against water, something big andevenly distributed. I looked around the corner and saw that Etoine had stepped off the dock into a boat, and that the boat was a low-slung police cutter. He was concentrating—I saw his pale wrists twisting something, and then Zaffre said quite loudly, “Look out now, a butch has a multitool.”

“Pshe,” he said, and “shh.” But his voice was as delighted as hers had been. Then there was a loud noise of bubbling, and the boatbegan to sink under him—to visibly and quickly sink—and he stood erect in it as you’re not supposed to do in a boat, and in onemotion she stooped and picked him up, a hand beneath each of his armpits, and her shawl flew away and sank into the water, all of which she ignored, for she was looking into his eyes.

Zaffre possessed tremendous physical strength. She was a real Jeanne Valjeanne, as Etoine periodically called her (always waiting for her broken short-term memory to reset before he said it again). I am an athlete and I can lift—oh—a good deal on a good day. I ought not to tell you how much, because this book will be read when I am old and can’t lift much at all, and I don’t want to lie to you. It is not easy to hold a full-grown man in front of you with extended arms. Etoine was not the smallest of men, and Zaffre was not an athlete, either. Her only exercise was painting, although of course she attacked that with force, and her hard breathing alone sounded like work. But no matter how sedentary her life was, or how much estrogen she took, nothing could break the line of her shoulders. She might have liked her strength or resented it, when she was younger. Nowadays she took it quite for granted, and used it as casually as a machine uses its torque. Now Etoine, suspended for a moment above the empty river, said calmly, “There. Done.”

She got his cane into his hand and they walked off, not too quickly and not too slowly. I went on to the front of the building, passinga policeman running back to the sinking boat, and I took advantage of his absence to knock at the window. They opened the barricades to let me in, and I stumbled into a hot and welcoming room, where smashed crockery and sugar glittered on the floor. More than one person showed me where Etoine had stitched up their wounds in clean sewing-kit thread. Later, when they broke down the doors, I satunder a table with my press pass around my neck, taking notes and learning that tear gas sinks. The work I did that night won me a Hallam Prize.

The next time I saw Etoine and Zaffre, they were sitting at their kitchen table sharing a block of new chocolate from the awful tea shop he loved. Whatever new chocolate there was, Etoine bought it. It was candy that cost four times what it should have, whosetexture was dense and sharp. Etoine was saying, “It tastes like dirt, but fancy dirt.”

Zaffre said, “It tastes like . . . soil.”

“Soil,” Etoine agreed, and hearing me in the hall he half-turned on his stool and said, “Griffon, you have to try some of this shit. It’s delicious, and it tastes like soil.”

“Soil! ” Zaffre repeated, and they cracked up.

When I told them about the riot, they listened with great interest, but did not tell me they’d been there. On the contrary, Etoine said, “These people, my first instinct is to worry that they’ll get in so much trouble. After all this time, it’s still so hard for me not to be afraid.”

“Oh, if you’d been there, you know you would have raised hell,” said Zaffre.

Etoine shrugged. “I guess in the moment, I usually do. I just always expect something to stop me. That’s the trouble I’m afraid of—as if God will stop me. But if God wanted us to not raise hell, he would’ve made natural laws against it. You can’t go mistaking a human law for a natural law.”

“You don’t believe in God,” said Zaffre.

“I don’t really believe in laws either,” he said, and took another bite of the candy.

–

Who were these two people? Revolutionaries, or half-revolutionaries. Survivors, or half-survivors. They spoke a language that was half one thing and half another, and they had spent half their lives together. I was always conscious that I had half their attention.

I was not related to them by blood. They took me in when I was a terrified child, and smothered me with affection because they could not reach me in any less violent way. I reacted, in turn, like a smothered person.

They were, as I have said, immigrants. Refugees, really, although since they were rich and comfortable when I met them—no longer starving artists—I often forgot it. Long ago, forty years ago now, they fled from Stephensport in the far north. Stephensport was a city-state, a principality, which was always renamed for its ruling prince. Five hundred years ago it was called Francoisport and a thousand years ago it was called Liesenport, and before that it was called nothing in particular. And when they left it, they came to New York, the eternal city, which five hundred years ago was called New York and a thousand years ago was called New York, and in another thousand years will be called New York still. You can’t kill my city, though Etoine and Zaffre played a small but important role in killing theirs.

–

She killed herself, too. He died of cancer. She went first, when they were seventy-two; he followed two years later. This thought must always be a part of my book, just as it is always a part of my life. I can give you so many numbers. Etoine was twenty-fouryears sober; he was twenty-four years on testosterone. They married, by the powers vested in the New York Department of Immigration, when they were forty-three. They met when they were fifteen, and I met them when I was fifteen.

None of these numbers means any more to me than the casualty figures after a disaster, when three thousand, twenty-three thousand, a hundred thousand deaths all feel about the same. The numbers have nothing to do with the pulse of my family, which is uncountable, a furious asynchronous beating, a throb out of control. It is this throb which I wish to capture in the rhythms of this book. Its pistons, its broken machines.

–

When I assembled raw materials for this book, I thought I would base much of it on Etoine’s diaries. That was before I read them. They were working documents only—intended to aid in his sobriety. Repetitive and angry, they mostly recorded incidents of temptation. One representative entry, which was written a decade after his last drink: “A block from the house at Lalani’s bar, they’ve put up a printed sign that says ‘You don’t need forty whiskeys. You need one. But we don’t know which one, so we have forty.’ They don’t know how the FUCK many whiskeys I need.”

I have known many alcoholics in my time, but none like Etoine. Most of them find ways to live without drinking, come to feel that a drink is not close, but far as I can tell, he was white-knuckling it until he died. After he quit, his knuckles never took on blood again. These diaries, which he used to keep his grip, bore the marks of his hands, greasing the surface and wearing the paint away. They are too personal to publish, and frankly too uninteresting to anyone who doesn’t love him. Instead, I have based my parents’ New York story largely on my memories.

For the story of their lives in Stephensport, I have relied upon Etoine’s prison memoir. He wrote it when he thought that Zaffre was already dead, and he had nothing ahead but death on the gallows. He had no idea that he would live for decades after that, would outlive her again, would mourn her again.

Autoportrait, Blessé is what he called it: Self-Portrait with a Wound, or Self-Portrait, Injured. Nothing to do with the English “bless” or “blessing,” though you could be forgiven for thinking it, if you imagined my father had any hand for the sliding bow of a multilingual pun, or if you imagined he felt blessed.

I went through his desk when he died and found all of these writings (Zaffre left none behind, or vanishingly few). They are the ingredients for the book I am writing now. He would find that metaphor too homely, but I, unlike my parents, am a cook. They look like ingredients, too: notebooks thick with interleaved drawings, wrapped in shiny brown leather like chicken skin; small parcels ofold paper tied with string like roasts ready for the oven. Something organic about them. Autoportrait, Blessé was written out on thinnewsprint-like paper, already very brittle now. He has drawn on the pages, around and sometimes directly on top of his thick, dense handwriting. The drawings hide the words, and his words hide more. He never wrote a word that didn’t obfuscate another word. His words canceled each other out, as if each one precisely overlapped the two on either side of it.

–

I have cut and edited Etoine’s book heavily, because he wrote it deprived and manic with want. He cannot rest in this manuscript for aminute without exclaiming about all he’s not got: bits of old rubber swept along the streets, slum houses painted the heraldic colors oftheir aristocratic owners, the light weave of a yellow shawl with the sunshine blowing through it, the tongue-tip taste of a bowl of gelato or a glass of wine. Much of this is beautiful to read, but it makes the book exhausting, many small droplets coming together in a wave of rage and hunger.

None of this was ever in the foreground of the man I knew. Etoine was a witty and sophisticated painter, an enthusiastic reader, ataker of naps and a treasurer of props, old jewels, fresh cake. I knew he could be angry, I knew he was often numb under the glitter and bluster, but I never knew that he could ache so. Nor did I understand, in my heart, that he had spent his youth in a fairytale city, the fever-dream of people who lived thousands of years ago and had still not died.

–

A note on the translation. Etoine wrote in his native language, Portois. Portois is a small language; it is spoken nowhere else on earth. It descends from English as it was spoken a thousand years ago, and French as it was spoken sixteen hundred years ago—the French ofthe old Quebecois, for Stephensport is in that part of the continent. It is mutually intelligible with contemporary English and French, but only just.

When they came to New York, they picked up English words from the people they met—artists, queers, old Jews—and came tospeak it well. It remained something clumsy, though, heavily accented, made of thick wool, since they had not really learned English so much as drifted towards it. They often spoke Portois when they were alone with me, and I drifted towards it in my turn.

I abhor both the phonetically rendered accent and the convention of noting “he switched to Portois; she switched to English” in spy novels and novels of suspense, and so I have rendered both the Autoportrait and their dialogue entirely in English. If at times their language seems peculiar to you, you may imagine that they are speaking my language in their awkward way. If they grow eloquent, you may imagine that they are speaking in Portois. You may not always be right. Zaffre’s Portois was expressive but unpolished, her English limited but literary. But you will have a general sense of it all. Of course, all of this labor has made them sound a good deal like me, but I also sound a good deal like them; they have influenced me.

Perhaps you’ll take issue with my methods. I don’t care. Perhaps Etoine and Zaffre would have, and that matters more. But they are dead, and so I will translate them as I like. If there is an afterlife, and they take issue with my decisions, I am eager to discuss the matter with them there.

And that is all I have to say, by way of preamble. Except this: there is another world under this one.