Life wish, death wish, red fish, blue fish: "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess (BASS 2025)

This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another. Best American Short Stories has long maintained a tradition of listing its stories in alphabetical order according to the surname of the author. They maintained this practice this year, in spite of the change of editor. So when two stories have similar themes or subject matter, it's a coincidence. 

Sometimes, it's one hell of a coincidence, though, enough to make me wonder if the guest editor selecting the winning stories is actually such a genius that, as they read through, they were able to consider how the stories would play out through juxtaposition by considering author surnames. "Let's see, yes, Wilson's story is about as good as Baker's, but if I choose Wilson, it'll go right after Weber, and both are about a family mourning the loss of a dog..." I can't believe any editor chooses stories like that, but in all the years I've been doing this, "Unfathomably Deep" by Sophie Madeline Dess, coupled with "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein, the story just before "Unfathomably" in the 2025 BASS, have got to the take award for "two stories most difficult to believe just happened to end up next to one another." This is because of the way both stories squeeze all the meaning they can out of the uncanniness of the female body. 

Freud just won't go away

I always wondered, from the first moment I realized there was such a thing as literary theory, why Freud was such a big part of it. In any anthology of or introduction to literary theory, psychoanalytic criticism will probably occupy a large chapter somewhere near the front (because it was, chronologically, one of the earliest influential theories in modernity). A good chunk of that chapter on psychoanalytic criticism will belong to the work of Sigmund Freud. 

When I first found myself spending a chunk of a semester learning to apply Freud to a literary text, I was surprised. Freud isn't very influential in the actual practice of psychology or psychiatry anymore. The science of the brain has advanced far enough that we can pretty easily dispense with a lot of his key concepts. For example, we don't really think that dreams are the unconscious trying to tell us something, even while repressing that message. I don't think anyone believes that women go around their whole lives wishing they had penises. Even if we aren't professionals in mental health or cognitive science, we can read his work and see a good deal more cultural assumption than rigorous science in it.

And yet...

Some of the major concepts in it have appeal, not as science, but as a way of explaining art and why certain motifs continually show up in literary works. Freud isn't relevant much anymore if you're going to a mental health professional to try and quit smoking or to deal with your anxiety, but it's hard to read some stories and not think of his categories. So as unlikely as it seems, Freud is still worth considering, not as a psychologist, but as a cultural thinker who brings psychology into the discussion of art. He's more Joseph Campbell than Michael Gazzaniga. 

I wonder whether doctors who did bloodletting or doctors who tried to fix patients based on the images from their dreams have done more harm in the world. 

Life and Death

Two concepts in Freud are the "life wish," which he called eros, because one way this wish manifests itself is in the decision to have children through sex, and the "death drive," which he called thanatos. Thanatos manifests itself in all of humanity's violent and risky behaviors. Since sex can be one of those risky things, it's pretty clear that the life wish and the death drive are kind of mixed up in one another. For a male to do his part in traditional procreation, he has to have an orgasm, which has been compared to death in many cultures and languages. 

In "Unfathomably Deep," the two drives are completely mixed up for Izzie, the first-person narrator. They're so mixed up, they almost have the same name. One is Danielle, her dead sister, and the other is Daniel, the doctor-in-training who's doing his OBGYN rotation at the place where Izzie is a hired actress playing a patient. 

But which is death and which is life? It'd be easy to say that Danielle, as the dead one, is the death drive, while Daniel, playing a doctor helping Izzie to achieve her make-believe pregnancy, is life. But when Danielle died, she was herself pregnant. And the frequent references to Medea, who killed her own children, mean that even Doctor Daniel's role in bringing forth children could be tied to death. 

When the story opens, we immediately get a very funny play on the meaning of the words of the title. Immediately below the title of the story and the epigraph from Medea, we get the opening line: "Three men were supposed to spread me open, check me out." Izzie, as a fake gynecological patient, is getting an exam of her "unfathomable depths." In Freud, the unconscious mind, deep waters, and the vagina all occupy similar psychological territory. There are a number of reasons why. The ocean is deep, the unconscious mind is deep. The womb is watery. The vagina is a depth to plumb. All are something primordial from which our existence stems. 

Izzie's psychotic break into her own unconscious comes on the bank of the river, and it is described in terms of falling into a depth: "Then, as you all know, I fell in. Not down into the water, but backward, into the steep ravine that's cracked up my brain." This psychotic break is then followed by Izzie plunging both herself and Daniel into the water, where she kills him with love.

In addition to being life, Daniel is also sort of an Adam-like person to Izzie. She is first attracted to him because he doesn't do the interview right. He reassures her when he is supposed to be clinical and unemotional. She sees him as Edenically innocent: "My god, it's gotta be so beautiful to be dumb. To be born with such a stagnant little forever face. To be born so entitled to a certain eternity. It's gotta be like nothing just to live and live and live and live!" 

Contrasted to Daniel's innocent stupidity is Rebecca...ahem...Apple, the genius. That is, the fruit of knowledge, contrasted to Daniel's Edenic and stupid innocence. What attracts Izzie, though, is the thought that she might find depth in Daniel. Or, failing to find it, to create it herself. 

Daniel is innocent and child-like and is training to help people have innocent babies, but Izzie baptizes him, against his will, into the depths of the unconscious, the "unfathomable depths" of the womb from which we come and which ultimately leads us to death. 

Look! It's all here in one painting! Life! Death! Water! Unconscious!

On the one hand, one could look at this story as just a rendering of the break of a mind traumatized by the death of a beloved sister. But it's more than that, because it takes the local trauma and mythologizes it to universal levels. "They say I'm made of myth," Izzie speaks to her listeners. At the beginning of the story, her listeners seem to be friends listening to her meet-cute about Daniel, but by the end, they seem to be more the psychiatrists treating her in a mental institution after she kills Daniel. Or has a mental episode in which she thinks she kills Daniel. Izzie means "myth" here as a lie; she's saying her listeners are skeptical. But also, she has become a myth. She's become Medea. 

A lot of people tend to wonder, when reading a Freudian explication of a story like this, whether the author intended it. I think it's quite possible, given how well-known Freud's basic ideas are, and the extent to which the story plays with them, that there was at least some conscious desire to make use of Freudian images. But also, it doesn't matter. It's an example of why Freud is still relevant: because his ideas, while not great for treating mental illness, can sometimes do a great job of giving us a language to discuss ubiquitous images and motifs that crop up in human thinking. Medea is a mother. Mothers are the source of life. Medea murders her children. Life and death are bound up together. The gift of life is always an eventual gift of death. When we overcome our death drive long enough to "dive into" the female depth and create life, we are also creating eventual death for someone else. This life may start out innocent, but eventually, it will get sucked into the business of life, which means it's on its way out of Eden before it even gets started. 

Anything can go wrong, but it doesn't: "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein (Best American Short Stories 2025)

A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three. They also make an effort not to tip where the real heart of the story might be buried. That's true of "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" which was the last story in BASS I just posted about. At story's end, when I went back to the beginning and remembered that was the title, I had to do some post-facto thinking to re-insert the story's title into my overall understanding of it. Like many stories nowadays, it didn't even have the words of the title appear in the narrative itself.

None of that is true of "Abject Naturalism" by Sarah Braunstein. Rather than being a quick onramp into the story, something I read and then immediately sprang past into the narrative, the title made me stop and consider it before I moved on. In everyday meaning--at least among the kinds of people likely to use "abject" in a sentence--the word means something like "extreme, but only for bad things." In my mind, the word most likely to follow "abject" in a spoken sentence is "poverty," and the words most likely to precede it are something like "He/she/they lived in..." 

So maybe it's just talking about "really bad examples of naturalism," or "naturalism taken to extremes that are bad." If that's the meaning, it sounds like something an erudite critic would say about a painting. What would this meaning of "abject naturalism" in the sense of "naturalism run amok" be? Well, that makes us consider what naturalism is. The line between naturalism and realism can be hard to draw, but one boundary we might use are these words from Encyclopedia Britanica: "Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities." 

This emphasis on the "physiological" nature meant naturalism was more likely than realism to focus on humanity's grosser functions, its various excretions and weird growths. It's borderline scatalogical, but not like a gross-out comedy; more like a gross-out horror. In this sense, naturalism matches the meaning of the term "the abject" from theorist Julia Kristeva. I've delved more deeply into the meaning of "the abject" in this analysis of its use in female horror stories, but here, I'll define the abject briefly as whatever reminds us of our status as animals, as blood-and-meat carrying bodies that die and decay. Women are particularly depicted as abject because, among other things, their monthly bloody cycles and their fertile bodies remind us of our "naturalism." If we think of naturalism in this way, and this meaning of abject, the title becomes something like "Abject Abject." A double dose of abjection. 

And that's what we get

From the first lines of the story, it's this kind of naturalism, the gross and abject kind, that we get: "The baby's father left before the Cesarean incision had fully healed, when it was still a raised red line, tender to the touch, glistening with Vitamin E oil." In its reminder that female bodies produce other bodies, that those bodies get scarred in the process, it's introducing us to the uncomfortable facts of the female body, the ones that horror movies play with.

In fact, there are a lot of hints at horror in "Abject Naturalism." The narrator, Toni, is a former creative writing student who's given up, but when she did write, she wanted to write scary stories, scarier than Stephen King. (And what, in society, it more "abject," in the sense of being "thrown out," than one of the many former students of a writing program who have now given up, "all early sense of specialness evaporated"?) At many points, we get hints that a horror story is about to break out. Toni lets her daughter Amelie go jogging, and we, along with Toni, worry she won't make it back. There is a neighborhood man, Marco, who gives Amelie a telescope. He seems harmless, but we worry that Toni's decision to put off Googling him might be a mistake. When Amelie, commenting on deformed animals at Chernobyl, remarks that "anything can go wrong," we might be tempted to see it as foreshadowing. 

Nothing ever does take that turn for the worse and terrifying, though. Toni certainly faces disappointment. Her writing never takes off, but the jerk who got her pregnant, a romantic-adjacent foil to her naturalist nature, not only abandons mother and daughter for "texts," but then he goes and has a successful writing career right where Toni can see it. So Toni's dreams don't come true, but it's not all bad. Having decided to keep the baby when she gets pregnant and then committing to motherhood, right away "something lucky happened" to Toni when she finds a cool apartment in a hip part of the city for a good price.

The "abject" never goes away. Rather, it's there on every page. From Toni becoming a phlebotomist who draws blood, to her friends obsessing about their children's periods, to the body odor of the homeless in the library where Toni reads the father's successful novels, there is plenty of the gross and everyday about the story, what my mother used to call "bathroom talk" when my siblings and I were kids. However, when Toni is touring her lucky apartment, she notices that although her Cesarean scar is smarting, it's now so subtle "she could almost forget about it." The abject is always there, but it's not so "abject," in the sense of it not being as acute. 

Graduation from "abject" naturalism to "mere" naturalism?

The title of the story comes from a criticism that Toni's writing instructor made of her work, calling a story in which a couple fights about a skunk they need to get rid of "abject naturalism." This instructor went on to say the story's weakness was that "the plausible was described plausibly, credible things occurred in credible order." This is probably similar to the criticism many have made about contemporary fiction in the realist vein. Anis Shivani has called it "plastic realism," and many other critics have bemoaned our era's overreliance on verisimilitude. 

Personally, I've been more annoyed by "plastic magical realism" in contemporary fiction than realism, as I feel like the fantastic is more likely to feel forced and fake, but in any event, you can be too much of anything. There can be "abject" anything. 

Naturalism was a strange name for a trend in art that wasn't really about seeing nature for what it was. Instead, naturalism tended to see nature only in its "red in tooth and claw" version, never the symbiotic one, and it saw humanity's fate within nature as basically doomed. "The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane is one of the examples of literary naturalism most often assigned in schools, and if you've read it, that's the kind of "nature" that naturalism saw, a nature that was, at best, indifferent, and at worst (and more likely) out to get us. 

Toni's journey is the move from "abject" naturalism, one that fetishizes the gross and offputting and horrifying, to "mere" naturalism, one that can also see some good in the world because it actually considers the world on its own terms. She graduates from drawing blood to filing papers for the hospital, because paperwork makes more money. And naturalism, in the sense of letting nature speak for itself, is perfected in Toni's daughter, who uses the telescope to see the stars.

The strange climax

Toni and her daughter sharing a night looking at the stars through the now-fixed telescope is the denouement, but the climax is just before it, when Toni and Marco use the telescope to spy on the neighbors in their home. If ever there was a moment when the plot was going to take a turn toward horror, this was it. Suddenly realizing Marco used the telescope to look at people feels very Hitchcockian. But it turns out to be very tame. They see one person asleep and the other reading, occasionally scratching his balls. Toni finds "The dullness of the scene, the abject naturalism, aroused her." 

So is Toni's arousal her slipping back into fetishizing the abject? I don't think so. Instead, she's realized that the big, frightening thing, which is humans qua human animals, isn't really that frightening. It's more like what she'd always wanted to write, something much more terrifying than King, but also funny. The abject isn't terrifying. It's just a thing. That's naturalism that actually takes nature seriously. 

The story ends with as much abject grossness as it began with--Amelie throwing up in the coat room of her school after ODing on donuts and coffee too early in the morning. But Toni has come to terms with the abject now. She's gone beyond seeing nature as an impersonal force out to get us nearly to the other extreme: She reads the fact that "Bohemian Rhapsody," a song about a murder, ends just as she is dropping Amelie off for school in nearly providential terms: "When she starts the car, the radio is playing the right song, Freddy Mercury announcing a homicide, and they sing together, and it ends just when she pulls up to the school, as if God himself has set the needle down."

The world is a tough place. The story alludes to some of this toughness when Toni briefly thinks about the immigrant families in her neighborhood. I could probably just as well do an "against the grain" reading of this story that comes up with a reading totally at odds with the apparent catharsis of the narrator, one that argues that Toni only is able to become reconciled to abject nature and to develop a belief in at least some goodness in the world because of her privilege. But I leave that reading to others and stop here with the "with the grain" reading. 

My novel based on my career at the National Security Agency is now available--guaranteed to be one of the two best NSA novels by a former employee ever!

Do you get it? Because there have only been two. 

I’ve decided to go ahead and self-publish my NSA novel, the one I’ve been trying to get published for almost a decade now. It is not without a certain sense of shame and failure that I do this. Although there are plenty of authors now doing just fine in self-publishing, and some are even wondering, with traditional publishing in so much trouble, whether it might be the only way forward for authors, I can't get over the feeling that self-publishing is for amateurs who weren’t good enough to get published for real.  

But so be it. After sending out query letters to possibly as many as a hundred agents, and paying the money to go to a literary conference to meet agents, after having several say they admired it but it wasn’t for them, and after struggling to understand how something that meant so much to me could mean so little to the profession’s gatekeepers, I’m resigned to this. It’s too important to never share with the world, and if the world doesn’t want it, then I’ll have to live with that. There's a public service in publishing it, and I feel compelled to do it in whatever way available. 

A talented cartoonist, Jerry King, very kindly made the cover art for me.

I’m reminded of the example of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut’s alter-ego sci-fi writer who appears in many of his novels. Trout had great ideas but poor execution, and both he and his works live in ignominy within the universes of the novels he appears in. Characters find Trout’s novels only by the greatest of coincidences. When they do find them, though, it always causes something that changes the whole plot, and often the whole world along with it. If Trout can live with the shame of being a failed writer who still believes in himself enough to get his stories out any way he can, then so can I. What happens with it from here is up to fate and whatever author there might be behind the big show.

There are some possible benefits to self-publication. As a former NSA employee writing (albeit very loosely) about analysis at the agency, I’m required to go through a pre-publication approval process for this book. That means some poor guy in the pre-pub office has to read all 80,000 words of this. I have no doubt this book is unclassified; I’ve gone to great, possibly absurdist, lengths to make it so. When I get back my approval from NSA, though, it will come with a note that says that if I change anything, I’ll have to get it approved all over again. If I worked with a publisher, there would be many rounds of editing, which is suffering enough for normal writers, but in my situation, having to work with my former employer working at my former employer’s pace, would be unbearable. Also, any interviews I might do would involve questions that, however reasonable seeming, might make me nervous. I might claim to be a bad boy, but at heart, I don’t really like to risk running afoul of authorities, especially not authorities I’ve finally gotten away from by way of retirement.

So this blog post is likely to be my only extra-textual commentary on the book. It’s perhaps a little unusual for an author to offer up an interpretation of his own work; for the most part, authors are authors and critics are critics, and if authors wanted to go around trying to say what stories mean they’d do that instead of writing the damn things. Since so much of this blog has ended up being about reading well, however much I started it with the intent to make it about writing well, I’ll offer my own take on what the novel might mean.

NSA has been criticized for being too intrusive. In my personal experience, it has resolved the balance between security and privacy in different ways over the past three decades, but in general, it has never been so far to either side that it wouldn’t have been within the lines of what most people would consider reasonable, if most people had the access to know what the agency really does and how it does it. In recent years before I retired, it might have even gotten a little bit deferential to privacy, to the detriment of its ability to do its core functions. If NSA were meant to be a backdoor to eavesdrop on Americans, it would be a miserable failure.

I wouldn’t die defending that understanding, but to me, the danger of an advanced surveillance program like NSA’s isn’t the risk of an omniscient despot using the knowledge to control subjects. The danger is in a country that lacks the self-knowledge to know what to do with the information it gets, no matter how much it gets. Knowing our enemies does us no good if we don’t know who we are, what we believe, and what we want. In fact, it will only confuse us.

I am only too well aware now of the faults of this novel. Its original creation was a blur, a true Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. I’d been at the agency a little over a decade, and I’d just met a group of enormously intelligent co-workers who, for some reason, let me attend their weekly gatherings. It felt like thoughts were all coming together at once. I was also blogging on the agency’s internal system, and the reaction from fellow employees was positive enough to give me a false sense of having something to say. My employer was either tolerant enough or didn’t care enough to let me become a minor celebrity within out little world, and I thought it time to share my ideas outside the walls of Fort Meade.

Once it was written, I realized I had the “shitty draft” that all the writing books say is the sole goal of a first effort. Fine, rework it, they say, but once I had the world of Zendia in place and the person of Tom Williams and his family, I found myself unable to see it differently. My provisional draft ended up being hard to overrule, even when I was confronted with many passages that made me wince, and I probably pruned where I should have replanted.

Even with all the faults in the novel, I still think it’s worth putting out into the world, however humble its entrance may be. And I think it’s worth you buying, reading, and hopefully commenting on the book, for two reasons. One, it’s only three dollars. It's the lowest price Amazon will let me get away with, and I don’t want price to be a barrier for anyone. This is a public service, not a way to make money. Secondly, even with its faults, it’s important to support a former agency employee trying to share something about the work there. Because of the difficulty in pre-publication and the concern about what might happen if we try to publish something wrong (a frequently heard threat is that the agency will come take all the devices from our homes if we write something on one of them that they deem to be protected information), hardly any former employees ever say anything about the work there. The only ones who do are usually either disgruntled or they’re former executives who are kind of homers, meaning the voices aren’t very balanced. I'm neither anti-NSA nor excessively a fan. I am forever grateful to them for taking a chance on me when they hired me and for allowing me a voice--often a voice of rather strong criticism--while I worked there. The fact that was able to voice so much criticism and still have what by any measure was a very successful career says a lot about how NSA is a place that at least sometimes values truth over being told what it wants to hear. Still, all those criticisms I made had a source, and I couldn't help but see the glaring weaknesses I saw there. The results is that I’m as balanced a voice about that place as you’re likely to get, and your support of this book will hopefully encourage other, more polished voices of reason to share their stories.

 

Kilgore Trout’s tombstone read

 

Some Guy

Some Time to Some Time

He tried

 

That’s how I’d like this book to be read. Up against a lot of odds when it came to trying to write about my very secret workplace and what message I think the rest of the country should get about it, I tried.

The trans climax that never comes: "What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?" by Emma Binder (BASS 2025)

While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion. I don't just consider this to be the most interesting subject there is to study; it's the most essential. My interest in literature is really just a side quest of my main effort to figure out whether God exists. I gave a lot of thought to just becoming a full-time DoorDash driver so I could listen to philosophy podcasts while I work and then be free at home to read more, but I  ultimately landed on considering the people in my family and trying to find something that will provide for them a little better. So I guess I really am starting law school this week and putting the study of the thing I most want to do on hold for a while longer.

In any event, one of the side issues in the philosophy of religion is that of substance dualism. Are the body and the mind two things, and is the mind really the soul? Is who we really are somehow separate from the physical trappings we come in, even though we can't point to this other, more essential thing? Traditional philosophers are mostly the only ones who cling to dualism nowadays. The vast majority of scientists and philosophers believe that all we are is our bodies, that our brains are part of our bodies, and that our experience of a separate self apart from our bodies is somewhere between a useful fiction and an illusion created by old Western philosophy and theology. I would guess most everyday people have kind of muddled beliefs, and that if you were to ask them, you might get answers suggesting dualism, and you might get answers a materialist would make, depending on how you framed the question. 

It's kind of ironic that advocates for trans people end up promoting a kind of dualism. In a popular form of explaining their issues, they tend to talk as though they have a mind trapped in the wrong body. It's how Jazz Jennings explained things almost twenty years ago on 20/20, and it's been a pretty consistent trope of trans advocacy as long as I've been aware of it. The irony here is that trans advocates, who are about as far from traditional theology as you can get, are using a lot of similar language to that of traditional theologians, who are about the last people on the planet still talking about dualism and also some of the most hostile to trans platforms.  

Of course, people a lot smarter than me realized this long ago, and intellectuals associated with trans rights have already produced work that attempts to deal with this seeming inconsistency. One response is something like, "Well, we have to explain this to cisgender people so they'll understand, and because of the lingering influence of dualism in Western thinking, this provides an avenue that is politically expedient, if not strictly philosophically correct." Taking a different approach, Gayle Salamon has explained, using phenomenology (here, we can say phenomenology mostly means the study of subjective experience), that even though we don't have a separate soul, our psychological experience makes it feel like there is a disconnect between body and mind. It might be a disconnect between two physical systems, but it feels like a war between two separate things. 

I'm sure that dualists would seize on this "apparent but not real" contradiction and use it as evidence that the split is real, but I'm not mostly concerned with who is right in the dualism/materialism debate here. I'm just pointing out that trans narratives do tend to lead to a dualist, brain-vs.-body metaphysics.

And now we finally get to the story

"What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?," the third story in this year's Best American Short Stories collection, does some interesting things with the dualism (real or implied) of many trans narratives. Early in the story, Cody, the trans man protagonist, thinks back on past visits to Pearl Lake in rural Wisconsin where he grew up. During the time of the flashback, he would have been living as a young woman who felt out of synch with his body. At the lake with his sister Molly, though, he felt comfortable: "Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood."

In this flashback, Cody is having one of his few moments of feeling whole. How did he accomplish that wholeness? Not by uniting mind to body, but by obliterating mind. In many forms of traditional dualism, it's having a mind/soul that sets humans apart from animals. But Cody is here "an animal among animals." That is to say, his mind isn't out of synch with his body, because it isn't there. That's why he "had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose." 

Cody's fleeting moments of happiness as a teen weren't a result of the union of an estranged body and mind, uniting, after much work in therapy and much medical intervention through testosterone and other treatments. His happiness isn't an improved dualism; it's an enthusiastic embrace of materialism. There is no conflict between mind and body because mind doesn't exist. As part of this instinctive, animalistic happiness, Cody felt "the clock of light" in his blood. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, clocks have served as cruel masters of humanity. We have to get up when they tell us to, go to bed when they tell us to, and plan to arrive everywhere when they tell us to. But animal, materialist Cody lived by the circadian clock of light that he felt inside of him. There was no society telling him how to be based on what it saw; he was free from a society handing him his identity. 

This looks a lot safer than what the guys in the story were doing.

The climax that comes and the climax that doesn't

There are two climaxes teased in "What Would I," one that happens and one that doesn't. The first one takes place all within the first five pages. Cody sees a bunch of guys ice fishing on ice they probably shouldn't be on, because the weather has been warming. But they're guys, who always think they know best and always underestimate the danger they're facing, so one of them ends up in the drink. Cody hesitates to go out to help him, and then, "without another thought"--his materialist, animalistic self reasserting itself--goes out to help him. 

This first climax ends with a setup to the second one, the one that never happens. Cody, having saved Greg, the man who fell in the ice, wraps him up with his jacket, and then he forgets to get his jacket back before Greg drives off, taking his cell phone and wallet with him. This leads to Greg tracking down Cody and inviting him out to drinks.

Cody reluctantly agrees to go to the local watering hole, the kind of place where tough and burly local men hang out. The whole time Cody is there, he's worried about them "clocking" him, a twist on the internal "clock of light" Cody felt before. Cody grew up around people like this before taking off to a friendly queer community in rural Massachusetts, and he's aware that if they do clock him as trans, it might be dangerous for him. So we, the readers, are waiting for one of two climaxes. Either Cody will be clocked and have to run for his life, or he will be clocked, and we will find out that hey, surprise, the guys are cool and let Cody know he's safe with them. 

Neither of these endings happen, though. Instead, Cody gets progressively more and more frightened that they will clock him, and he bolts as soon as he thinks he can do so with dignity. One of the three men at the bar follows him into the parking lot, but not to beat Cody up. Just to say thanks for saving Greg and to give Cody a hug. It's acceptance, but not the big Acceptance of what we might call an "ally" in the parlance of our times. 

While fretting his way through the night at the bar, Cody tried to use his father's clothing as armor, literally. He hoped the clothes would "shield" him and allow him to be one of those people who "moved through the world unquestioned." Based on Kevin's growing inquisitiveness, the shield might have only been partly effective. Cody kept hoping in the bar for a song to come on that would "anchor him in his body," meaning return him to his unitary, animal state, but it doesn't come, and he's left with the weak devises of subterfuge to hide his split selves from others. Cody barely manages to escape with his dignity. As he leaves the bar, he feels that he has been released "from a frozen world into fresh air and life." He couldn't find his unitary and animal self in the bar, trying to blend in as a man among other men. He isn't "anchored" again until he's far from the bar.

Cody's story as a small-town, rural queer kid who grew up troubled and misunderstood, then found acceptance, identity and happiness when he left, is a pretty standard story, told in almost every queer community in America. Cody muses on how he is a different person depending on his environment. When he feels safe, he's "easy, warm, funny, and shameless." Cody wishes he could be this person in Iron River where he grew up. He senses that he needs to come to grips somehow with Iron River, even if he never goes back once his dad either dies or recovers. Maybe he will never feel like his complete and comfortable self there, but he knows he has to learn to at least be okay with having come from there. 

At the end of the story, Cody has not managed to find a way to live permanently in the materialistic, animal self that brought him the only happiness he ever knew while growing up in Iron River. He is out walking on the ice. Earlier, he thought of how the ice was all connected, but here, he is thinking of the fractures in the ice, and he wishes he could be "brazen and unafraid, like any other man." At the end, not only has Cody has gone back to a kind of fractured dualism, but instead of the triumphant uniting of the soul and body that sometimes comes with the dualist view, the two seem as far apart as ever. We are denied a third climax, the psychological climax of Cody either absorbing his discordant soul into his materialist body or uniting soul and body into a unified whole.

The part where everyone hates me

I've admitted before to being a bad liberal when it comes to trans issues. Although I fully believe in supporting anyone in a quest to find fulfillment, and completely reject traditional notions of sex and gender that would critique trans goals either on religious or natural law grounds, I still don't think everything I'm being told by advocates for trans rights makes sense to me. To greatly simplify, my doubts come down to two things. First is the seeming muddling of sex and gender terminology that some advocates use, then applying that conflation to policy goals. The second is a more practical one: I don't think the care now available is advanced enough that it accomplishes its goals. If you could take a pill and magically change your male body that's out of synch with your female brain into a female body that went along perfectly with how you see yourself, great, do it. But what we have is painful, long, comes with risks, and still leaves many people worrying the whole time that they'll be "clocked." My hesitation to accept sex reassignment surgery isn't a moral objection; it's an entirely pragmatic, and it's kind of like me thinking that getting a hip replacement right when the procedure was first invented wasn't necessarily a good idea. 

"What Would I" offers both the materialist and the harmonized-dualist solution to fractured trans identity, but neither is a complete solution. The animalistic, materialistic solution is only achievable in the right environment. Unsafe environments make the corporal grounding needed impossible. So it is a partial solution, but not a complete one. The harmonized dualism possibility is limited by the state of medical technology. "T" can help, but it's not going to fully prevent raised eyebrows, even from people who mean you no harm, because they are going to sense that something is different. 

None of this is a reason to abandon trans political goals. But it is a reason to separate the language of advocacy from the language of real, lived experience. To advocate is to lie. You might wonder, if I feel this way, why I'm about to go to law school, when a lawyer's chief job is to advocate. It's a good question, and an even better one when I consider who much the law school's advocacy for the law as a profession annoys me. They can't stop talking about how hard law study is and how different legal work is from everything else. This isn't truth talking; it's the desire to make law sound important. It's exaggeration meant to improve the standing of the profession. I hear similar things from every profession when they try to make what they do sound more difficult than people think it is, just like advocates for political groups always try to make their plight sound as dire as possible. 

I am skeptical of the truth of propositions from advocates, but I can accept a kind of social dualism, one in which we allow advocates to do their thing but where we also reserve space for ourselves to be honest about what lived experience is like. Trans advocates can say, "Here's a problem, and here's a solution that would help if we could do it." If the lived experience of trans people demonstrates sometimes that this solution isn't always as great as advocates make it sound, that's actually okay. Advocates do their thing, sometimes, to give us space to try solutions that are less than ideal. 

When I read trans stories, I am trying to understand how the trans person views the problem, what solutions they look to for their problem, what they hope those solutions will do, and then whether those solutions actually do the hoped-for thing. What I like about a story like this one is its break from advocate-like narratives. You might do everything to try to find happiness as a trans person, and it still might not work. Or it might work, but only in the right environment. That actually helps me feel more connected to the needs and wants of trans people rather than less, but it means they're just like everybody else, groping in the dark for what they hope will make them happy, maybe succeeding a little bit here and there, but also meeting with failure as much as anything. Far from making me think that everything the advocate pushes is bunk, it makes me think that this is a group I can find common ground with and maybe even understand, because we are both equally lost and looking, perhaps quixotically, for light at the end. 

Andrea Long-Chu wrote an op-ed years ago explaining that her upcoming sex transition surgery might not make her happier, but that it shouldn't have to in order for her to be allowed to get it. The idea behind trans rights isn't that everything they try will work. It's a big problem, one that is probably beyond our current medical capacity to fix so that everyone will feel "in their body" in every environment. But the point is to give people the freedom to try solutions and the support to maximize success and mitigate failure. This story is a useful, honest, and human portrayal of someone stumbling through as he tries to navigate a problem with the solutions available. 

For Karen Carlson's take on the story, which includes an analysis of the title which I neglected to do, see here.