Claire is the name of that woman in HR whose name no one can remember. It is the name of a female sitcom president who is incapable of connecting with the workingman. There are no poets named Claire. Similarly, no woman has ever chosen Claire as her stripper name.
There are no cats, dogs, ferrets, or parakeets named Claire. Human beings who transition from male to female never name themselves Claire, because—of all the female appellations—it is the most male. As proof one need only to look to the éclair, the world’s most phallic pastry (cock shaped and cream filled).
Claire is the nickname you give that annoying girl in study hall, who lines her pencils up in perpendicular rows and won’t stop asking what you got for number six on the final. It’s the name your parents give you when they were hoping for a boy, and still—fingers crossed—think you could grow up to become one. It’s what they name you when the position in the family they’re looking to fill is that of rule follower, of daddy’s little girl, of mommy’s perfect darling. Dammit, Claire, they say, whenever you show signs of independent thought. Dammit.
Claire has always been a disappointment.
In summation, why go out the window, when you can use the door?
Later, alligators,
The girl formerly known as Claire.
PS. In heaven, all the angels are named Claire. They smile at you with kind eyes, wiping the tears from your cheeks, and say with music in their mouths, What took you so long?
Simon
Of all the mysteries of the universe—what is the nature of time? Is there sentient life on other planets?—the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. Why do we make the choices we make? How much of our identity is biology and how much is choice? Simon Oliver considers these questions often as he is hyperventilating into a paper bag. There is something about sucking in his own carbon dioxide—light-headed, nose filled with the earthy brown essence of sack, ears fixed on the expansive paper crackle, as the receptacle for all his anxiety becomes a lung, ballooning and emptying—that bends his thought to the meaning of existence. What is the value of this absurd slog?
Then, as his breathing slows, as his oxygen-starved brain unclenches, he surrenders thought entirely, a wave of euphoric exhaustion crashing over him.
He has the meds, sure. Sertraline, Propofol, Effexor. But the bag is solid. The bag is trustworthy. The bag is an emergency brake, glass to smash in case of disaster—the world’s simplest stress reliever, forcing his outtake to become intake, a simple biofeedback loop. So he keeps it packed in his pocket during daylight hours, folded under his pillow at night. It’s his EpiPen, his defibrillator. Always the same bag. Its sameness is key. The bag has been with him for months now, since before Float, before the ever-tightening noose of adolescence that led to the panic attack and the private plane to a suburb of Chicago, where he has only vague memories of his check-in to the Float Anxiety Abatement Center. Otherwise known as “the great hold button.” Finish high school? Hold. Go to college? Hold. Find a girlfriend? Hold. Inherit the world? Hold, hold, hold.
Instead he does equine therapy and strikes yoga poses. He plants seeds and picks vegetables in the garden. They have plushies and squeezies and weighted blankets and heated stuffies that smell like lavender, which you pop in the microwave. Objects of infant comfort, which is what they have become, babies once more, pampered and inconsolable.
Float is a self-sustaining community, empowering its charges with a sense of earth, of tactile action and reaction. Being a teenager is already so abstract, Lemon Holbrook, the founder of Float, believes. It is through grounded physical task and spiritual expansion that modern adolescents can be given the skills they need to handle the uncertainty and terror of today’s world. Does it work? Simon can’t say for sure, but he does feel less like a fingernail on a chalkboard most days. That is, until he thinks about going back out there, about his eight-hundred-square-foot bedroom on the top floor of a New York brownstone, about the elite prep school and the ever-escalating pressure to succeed. Until he thinks about the headlines and the lawsuits. About how his last name has become synonymous with greed, with addiction, with death.
Until he thinks about Claire.
He is fifteen years old. It’s been ten months since he found her in his parents’ bathroom. Ten months of going through the motions—school, hobbies, friends—insulated inside the ether of the rich, while outside the palace walls, the line between fact and fiction continued to soften. Out there, in the land they called Main Street, the God King still ruled. Even as the Kingdom of Wall Street prospered, as the wealthy bought third and fourth homes, as boats became yachts and yachts became islands, mythical creatures were born anew in the forested loam outside of lofty cities, warlocks and sorcerers rutting in dark places, trolls and goblins poisoning the rivers of reason. They bloomed under shadowy roots, like toadstools, hidden from sight. As newspaper editors in the land of plenty assigned missives on the return of the EPA—protecting the land and the sea once more!—orcs and ogres tunneled deep into underground chatrooms and Parler groups, biding their time. They knew what Obi-Wan knew—that by striking them down, we had only made them more powerful. And so, even as we saw the return of what university professors referred to as normality, it was only a simulation. A smiley face hiding the sickness underneath.