Replication - chapter 10 (with images) (Patreon)

The mirror at six in the morning, the bathroom light on, the city still dark beyond the window.

I've been at this for three days. The gym is on hold. The consulting calls I said I'd make are on hold. The apartment is taking on the stale, closed-in smell of a space where someone has stopped doing anything but pacing and sleeping. There are two empty water glasses on the edge of the sink and a towel dropped on the floor and I haven't picked any of it up. Everything that isn't this mirror is on hold, which is what happens when a problem has a clear enough shape: it takes over the available attention and the other things wait.

Kate is with Mark. Kate and the date and how to get to it from where I am is the problem, and the problem requires this face, and the face requires the mirror.

Carol Hartwell existed in my memory precisely, the bone structure, the coloring, the gray coming into the dark at the temple. I had four encounters across three years and I'd retained the visual data the way I retain everything clinical: accurately, in detail, available when I reach for it.

But what I'm trying to build now is myself, a man.

I need Julian. I need the man she left. For three days, I have been learning that the mesh can be forced backward if you apply enough pressure to the underlying geometry. I can reconstruct the house if I fight the foundation. It isn't a natural process. The mesh fights every instruction that runs counter to the programming. It sends dull, thudding aches through the cartilage. It drains me until I have to lie on the tile floor just to stop the room from spinning.

I turn the cold water on. I wet my hands and press them against the pale skin of the face I woke up in.

I close my eyes and I start the build.

The brown comes first. It has to come first, the baseline to anchor the rest of it. My father's forearms on the construction site, the plaster dust settling into the deep lines of his wrists. My mother's hands on the comal. The forty years of the color of me that the mesh wiped to pale in a single night. I hold the image of the color, the heat of it, and the tissue moves toward it. The skin tone warms from the default pale toward an approximation of what was there.

It requires constant attentive pressure. The mesh treats the melanin like a temporary error. The tissue pulls back toward pale if the focus wavers even slightly, the color draining out of the cheeks the second my mind drifts to the ache in my neck. It's the difference between holding a position and fighting a current.

I hold the current. I move to the face.

The eyes are the one thing the mesh left, brown, the color that my mother says came from her father. I leave them alone.

The hair requires its own fight. The default rendered a heavy dark mass, long and slightly wavy, falling past the collarbone. I hold the memory of my own head, the tight crop I've worn for twenty years. I force the follicles to retract, drawing the keratin back into the scalp. It feels like a wave of cold static pulling backward across the skin. The length shrinks. The weight lifts off the back of my neck, the waves flattening out until the hair sits in a short, dense fade against the skull.

I target the jaw.

The mesh wants the biological rounding of female bone. It wants the soft curve below the ear. I hold the memory of my own jaw. The sharp edge I shaved for decades. I focus on the angle, the exact distance from the earlobe to the chin, the width of the bone across the lower face. The tissue protests. It feels like a low, grinding ache deep in the cartilage, a physical friction under the skin.

I push harder. The jaw squares off. It isn't a perfect recreation. The bone doesn't actually break. The tissue just reorganizes tightly, packing itself against the underlying structure to mimic the hard edge. It reads as male. Slightly softer than I was. A man who has lost some edge, but a man.

I force the follicles to activate. A fine, dark stubble pushes through the skin along the jawline and the upper lip. It isn't a thick beard. The mesh refuses the coarse, rough density of my old facial hair. But the shadow darkens the lower half of my face. It breaks up the smoothness. It adds an undeniable masculinity to the silhouette.

I move down. The musculature.

I demand bulk. The mesh allows a denser weave if I force it, packing the fibers tighter. I visualize the bicep. The deltoid. I push the tissue to thicken, expanding the arms until they carry the weight I used to carry. My shoulders broaden. The skin stretches, tight and hot, over the new mass.

I drive the pectoral muscles outward, hardening the chest wall.

The mass of the breasts doesn't disappear. The glandular volume has to go somewhere, and the mesh absolutely refuses to dissolve it. It flattens, spreading tightly over the hardened muscle beneath it. The result is a hybrid architecture. The breast tissue remains as a soft layer trapping the sensitive nipples against my shirt. It aches violently from the shift. The nerves fire dull warnings into my ribs, a constant, radiating soreness across the sternum. But the chest reads as broad and male.

I narrow the hips. I force the pelvic spread inward. The cartilage and fat compress. The tissue shifts, erasing the wide curve.

I open my eyes.

The face that couldn't before gives me this now: Julian Reyes, or close enough to pass for him.

My breath goes. I lean over the sink, gripping the porcelain, the ceramic cold under my hands. He's right there. A little younger. A little soft around the temples. But it's him, the face that gave me nothing a few weeks ago, dragged back out of the pale by repetition and effort.

Something I haven't let myself feel in weeks comes up before I can stop it.

If I can do this. If I can force the jaw, force the arms, force the chest, force the hips. I can fix the floor. I don't have to be a woman below the zipper. I don't have to carry the final, absolute wrongness. I can put it all back.

I close my eyes and drop my head, focusing all my attention, all my accumulated control, on the groin.

I know the anatomy better than anyone. I'm a urologist. I've spent twenty years in the architecture of the male reproductive system. The weight of the testicles. The exact vascular mapping of the spermatic cord, the fibrous envelope of the tunica albuginea, the spongy tissue of the corpus cavernosum. How the blood flows into the crus. The exact geography of the prostate.

I hold the image, build it in my mind with clarity, and demand the drop of the scrotum, the extension of the shaft. Every ounce of my focus, every scrap of the energy I have left, goes into the space between my legs.

Nothing happens.

I push harder. The pressure in my skull goes white. A thin whine starts in my ears. I visualize the cellular restructuring. I command the labia to fuse. I command the clitoris to lengthen. I throw everything I have against the body. The tissue doesn't even twitch. No warmth, no shifting at all.

I keep trying. I stand there with my eyes squeezed shut, my hands white-knuckled on the sink, driving my mind into the flesh until my nose starts to bleed. A drop of dark red hits the white porcelain.

I stop.

I open my eyes. I look down. The chest is still flattened, the hips still narrowed, the forearms still muscled.

I slide my hand down my stomach. I reach between my legs.

My fingers find the soft, wet cleft of the vulva. The entire female architecture, sitting there, completely unchanged.

It's permanent.

I can fake the jaw, flatten the chest, counterfeit the brown skin and put my old face on like a mask, but the floor stays female. The mesh isn't giving the sex back, not for any amount of effort. I'm a woman who can borrow a man's face for a few hours at a time. That's the whole of what I get.

I slide down the bathroom cabinet and sit on the tile floor.

I sit there for a long time. The tile is cold against the back of my thighs. The blood from my nose dries on my lip, tight and metallic. The effort of holding the male face slips. The jaw softens back toward the female curve. The chest swells slightly against my t-shirt, the glandular tissue pushing forward as the pectoral muscle recedes. The brown bleeds out of my arms, leaving the stark, blue-veined pale. I let it go.

I don't cry. There's nothing left to do it with. The hope was a mistake; it made the loss new again. I sit on the floor with my knees pulled up to a chest that isn't mine.

I wipe my face with the back of my hand. I look at the clock on the wall. It's seven-thirty.

Kate goes to the bookstore on the north side between nine-thirty and ten-thirty.

I stand up. My joints pop. I turn the cold water on and wash the blood off my face, watching the pink swirl down the drain. I look at the pale woman in the mirror.

I have a job to do. I have a night to win back. And if the costume is all I have, then the costume is what I will use.

I build the face again.

It takes eight minutes of sustained focus. The brown comes first, washing over the pale. Then the features, assembled in order, the eyes always already there, the nose and the jaw built up. I harden the arms, feeling the muscle fibers pack tightly together. I flatten the chest, ignoring the sharp protest of the nipples. I narrow the hips. I push the stubble out.

I walk into the bedroom and open the closet.

My old clothes are hanging exactly where I left them weeks ago. The dry-cleaning bags are still over the suits. I pull out my old jeans. The denim is stiff from disuse. I step into them and pull them up over my thighs. They fit over the narrowed hips, the waistband buttoning where it used to button.

But the fabric falls flat across the crotch.

The emptiness there is loud. The brass zipper sits right against the wrong anatomy and rubs the pubic mound with every step toward the dresser. There's no overwriting it.

I put on a blue button-down. The cotton pulls tight across the broad shoulders. I pull on my gray jacket. The jacket has a faint smell of the hospital, the sterile, institutional soap I used to wash my hands with fifty times a day.

I look in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door.

It holds. I look like Julian Reyes. I look like a man who took six weeks off and didn't sleep well. The brown skin holds. The stubble shadows the jaw. The chest reads flat under the shirt.

I walk to the front door. The effort is a steady burn at the base of my skull, a physical weight I have to carry with every step. I grab my keys from the bowl. I open the door and step out into the hallway.

I arrive at the bookstore at nine-fifteen. I park on the street. The steering wheel is cold under my hands. I grip it until my knuckles pale, testing the strength in the forearms I've packed with tissue. I run through the hold one more time. It sits where it's sat all morning, low at the back of my skull.

I go in. The fiction section. I take a book off the new release table and stand there, holding the cover open. The paper smells like wood pulp and binding glue. I don't read the words. I run the hold without looking like I'm running it: jaw clamped, shoulders wide, the chest flattened against the sternum until the tissue aches.

At nine-forty, the bell above the door rings.

Kate comes through the door, coffee already in hand. A rush of winter street air follows her inside. She's wearing a gray t-shirt. Her hair is down. She looks exactly as she looked six weeks ago, exactly as she looked the morning she packed her bag and left.

Except that morning she wasn't only looking at a stranger. She was looking at the end of a two-year argument about distance, the one I'd been losing slowly the whole time without telling either of us I was losing it.

She walks toward the shelf to my left. I am at the shelf to the right. When she passes, I'm looking at the spine of the book.

She glances over. The standard library-bookstore look.

She takes two more steps.

Then she stops. Her boot scuffs against the carpet.

She turns around. She looks at me again. The coffee cup in her hand tilts. Her mouth parts slightly.

I don't look up immediately. I let the second look happen. I let her brain process the visual data.

I look up.

Our eyes meet.

"Julian?" she breathes. The sound barely makes it past her teeth.

I close the book. "Hi, Kate."

She drops her coffee cup.

It hits the carpeted floor with a dull thud. The lid pops off. Hot coffee splatters across the toe of her boot, soaking into the thin rug. Steam rises from the dark stain. She doesn't look down. A woman two shelves over looks up from a paperback.

She takes a step toward me, her eyes moving over my face, the jaw, the stubble, the brown skin, the shoulders under the gray jacket.

"You..." She raises a hand, trembling, and presses her fingers against my forearm.

I flex the arm slightly. She feels the dense, forced muscle under the jacket sleeve. I hold perfectly still. If she moves her hand three inches toward my chest, she will feel the soft glandular tissue packed over the pectoral muscle. She keeps her hand on my arm. She lets out a sharp, shuddering breath.

"You're back." Her voice breaks on the word.

"I'm here."

"But you were..." She swallows hard, her eyes darting to my chest, then back to my face. "The last time I saw you. The morning I left. You were a woman."

"The exposure," I say. My voice is male. I drop the register, forcing the sound deep into the chest I am compressing. "It was temporary. A reaction to the compound in the lab."

It's a lie, and it comes out level and whole, the way the easy ones do.

"Temporary," she repeats. She is staring at my jawline. At the stubble. "You fixed it. They fixed it."

"It took time. A lot of time. And a lot of treatment." I look at the spilled coffee. "You dropped your drink."

She finally looks down. "Oh God. I'm sorry. I…"

A bookstore employee hurries over with a roll of paper towels. "I got it, miss. Don't worry."

"I'm so sorry," Kate says to him, but she is still looking at me.

I step around the spill. I stand two feet away from her. The proximity is dangerous. If she hugs me, if she presses too hard against the chest, she will feel the soft give of the compacted glandular tissue over the muscle wall. I keep my hands in my pockets.

"Six weeks, Julian," she says. The shock is wearing off, and the edge of the separation surfaces. "You didn't answer a single text. You completely vanished. Mark said you resigned."

"I couldn't talk to anyone," I say honestly. "I was angry. I was angry at my body. I needed to just shut the door."

She crosses her arms over her coat. "I thought you were gone. I thought that thing in the apartment… You shut me out again. You always just shut the door."

"I'm sorry," I say. I keep my voice steady. I remove the pressure from it. I don't lean in. "I just wanted to see you, Kate. I'm not asking for anything."

She watches me. Six weeks ago, this would have been an argument.

"You look..." She blinks. "You look softer. Younger, almost."

"The treatment was hard. I lost some weight."

She nods, accepting the logic. Her shoulders come down. Whatever broke their life apart is over, as far as she can tell. I'm Julian again, standing in the fiction section.

"Let me buy you another coffee," I say.

She wipes her eye with the back of her wrist and gives a short, breathless laugh. "Yeah. Okay."

We walk out of the bookstore and go next door. The winter air bites at my exposed face. I pull the jacket tighter. We get a table in the window.

We sit across from each other. The chairs are small steel frames. I force my legs to take up space, widening my stance, adopting a man's posture. The denim cuts into the missing space at my crotch. I ignore it. I keep my posture relaxed, leaning back slightly in the chair. The effort of the hold is a constant drain. My neck aches.

"So," she says, wrapping both hands around a fresh paper cup. She traces the plastic rim with her thumb. "Consulting?"

"Medical devices," I say, sticking to the script I prepared. "It pays well. The hours are mine."

"Do you miss the hospital?"

"I miss the patients."

She looks at me for a second, then she says that makes sense. "Mark said you were furious," she adds, her voice quieter. "When you left the hospital."

"I was."

"Are you still?"

"I'm tired," I say.

She accepts this. Exhaustion is a legible state. The conversation shifts. She pulls the sleeve of her coat down over her wrist. It's a nervous gesture she's had since I met her. She mentions a neighbor's dog. I ask if the guy still leaves his recycling bins on the curb until Thursday. She laughs. She leans back in her chair. The awkwardness burns off, replaced by the casual easiness of a man and a woman who dated for two years and know each other's rhythms. She tells me about the translation project. A Portuguese novelist. The concept she has been wrestling with.

"It's a word for a kind of longing for something you never had," she says, her eyes alive with the intellectual puzzle of it. "The melancholy of the unlived life."

"Saudade."

She blinks. "You know it?"

"I read an article about it once."

"Right. Well, the debate is whether to use the word itself and let it be foreign on the page, or to construct an approximation from what English has."

"Don't translate it," I say. "If you translate it, you domesticate it. You make the grief smaller than it is."

She stares at me. She looks at me like she is seeing me for the first time. "You always wanted things translated. You always wanted them clean and legible."

"I've spent six weeks in a body I didn't understand, Kate. Nothing is clean and legible anymore."

She reaches across the table. Her hand lands gently on my knuckles. Her skin is warm. My hand, the bone structure forced into a wider male shape beneath the skin, sits perfectly still under hers. The touch sends a sharp ache up my forearm. She is tracing her thumb over veins I am manually forcing to the surface.

"I'm sorry," she says softly. "I'm so sorry I left you there. That morning. I just... I couldn't process what I was looking at."

"You did what you had to do."

"I missed you."

The words land in the center of the table. She leans in, her thumb on the back of my hand. She thinks she's looking at a man who came through something and came out softer, more present.

We stay at the table for two hours. She checks her phone and cancels an appointment. She's decided this is where she wants to be.

When we finally stand on the sidewalk outside, she gives me her number. She types it into my phone herself.

"I want to see you again," she says.

"Thursday. Dinner."

"Send me the place."

The week between the bookstore and dinner is four days of texting.

They are strange, fractured days. When I am alone in the apartment, I drop the hold. The broad hips, the heavy breasts, the pale skin. The bookstore encounter left me drained, my muscles aching from the forced tension. I lie on the couch, wearing sweatpants and no shirt, reading her texts on my phone. My thumbs hit the screen at the wrong angles. The span of my hands is narrower. The reach is entirely different. I watch the pale, unblemished skin of my fingers typing words that sound exactly like the man I used to be.

Did you read the essay collection yet? she texts on Tuesday.

I type back with a woman's fingers. Halfway through. You were right about the civic architecture argument.

She sends a photograph on Wednesday. A dog in a window wearing a small suit. No caption.

Very dignified animal, I text back.

She replies with the skull emoji.

Thursday night. The restaurant is a small Italian place on the east side.

I arrive early and build the face in the car, the brown first, then the jaw and the arms and the chest, the stubble last. It takes everything. The body fights me the whole way, the breast tissue resisting the flatten, the nerves firing against the inside of my ribs, and I force it down. I put on a blue button-down shirt and the gray jacket. The collar feels too tight around a neck I'm actively trying to thicken.

She's already at a table in the back when I walk in. She stands up when she sees me.

She's wearing a dark green blouse, her hair loose around her shoulders.

"You look beautiful," I say, sliding into the booth across from her.

"You look good," she says. She looks at the face I'm wearing like she keeps almost placing it and missing. The soft jaw. The missing edge.

The candle between us throws light upward. I watch her face in it for long stretches while she talks.

The food is good. The wine is good. I drink a glass of Cabernet and feel the alcohol hit the bloodstream, immediately dulling my concentration. I have to physically clench my jaw to keep the bone structure locked. The mesh wants to relax. I drag it back into alignment.

We talk about the translation. We talk about her sister. Her sister is looking at a house in the suburbs and Kate is trying to talk her out of a bad mortgage. I remember the sister's husband. I offer an opinion on his credit history. Kate laughs.

The whole dinner has a rhythm I remember from the early months, before the management installed itself. The holding of the face takes the attention I'd usually spend managing. There's less of me available for the containment and more of me available for her.

She drinks her wine, leaning forward, her face flushed.

We walk after dinner. The night is mild. The streetlights cut sharp shadows across the sidewalk.

We walk for ten minutes before I realize we are walking toward an apartment building. I don't know the building. I've never been here. She moved out of my apartment and found her own place, and this is it.

We reach her door. She turns toward me.

The space between us closes in the sequence it always follows when two people have decided, and then she's kissing me.

She kisses the way I remember she kisses, thoroughly, like it matters. Her hands are at my jaw, holding my face. I feel the warmth of her palms against the bone I am forcing into shape. The soft stubble rubbing against her skin.

My hands go to her waist. I pull her flush against me.

Her chest presses against mine. The flattened tissue under my shirt protests the pressure, and the drag of her blouse against my chest sets the response off before I can stop it, low and immediate.

I'm wet against the rough denim before I've decided anything, a woman's body answering a woman's kiss. The body is running its own reflex, the heat blind and unthinking, none of it mine.

She steps closer. The space is gone. I feel her register the soft give of my chest. It isn't hard pectoral muscle. It's a layer of compressed glandular tissue over the muscle wall. A small adjustment, the accommodation of a person taking in new information. She thinks it's the weight loss. She pulls back just slightly, decides it doesn't matter, and kisses me again.

Her hands move from my face to the back of my head. I force the jaw to hold. The brown skin stays. I kiss her back.

Her hands move down from my hair. They find my waist, the hipbone.

She traces the line of my belt.

She moves her hand toward the front of my jeans.

She is reaching for the anatomy she expects. The anatomy of the man she thinks is standing in front of her. The male groin.

There's nothing there but a zipper and a wet, swollen vulva.

If her hand goes there this is over and I lose her on the spot. My chest heaves. The air catches in my lungs.

My hands close around hers. I grip her wrists tightly, stopping them before they reach the zipper. My fingers lock over her thin bones, the pressure perhaps a fraction too hard.

I pull back enough to put some space between us.

She looks at me. Breathing.

"Not yet," I say. My voice is steady. I don't know how my voice is steady.

She looks at the face I'm holding and something is happening in her expression.

"Okay," she says. She says it clearly, without edge.

She looks at me for another second.

"I want to see you again," she says.

"Yes," I say. "Me too."

She goes inside. I stand at her door for a second after it closes. The porch light shuts off, leaving me in the dark.

Once I'm back in the car I release the hold, an instant relief.

The jaw softens, the bone melting back to the pale woman, the stubble gone, the muscle receding under it. The chest floods forward, heavy and aching under the tight shirt, and the brown bleeds back out to the blue-veined pale.

I slump over the wheel. My forehead hits the cold leather. The wet between my legs is cooling against the denim, the body still running its own heat after everything, and I sit in the dark and let the shaking go through my arms.

She wants to see me again.