Arden Shostak
When the oil flares in the pan, you forget everything you had learned, over and over again, about fire safety–you forget those days in elementary school when firemen in elephantine pants would show up in your classroom and explain the dangers of candles and matches, make you stop drop and roll on the reading rug, and instill in you for the very first time the awful knowledge that not only can something terrible happen, to you and your house and your family, but that the terrible thing can be your fault. When the flame rises from the pan with a burst of light and sudden fwoosh, which reminds you of the scary part of hibachi when they make the onion ring volcano erupt, you do not stop to think. In your hand is a measuring cup of vegetable broth. You do the obvious thing.
The burns on your chest and neck aren’t the worst of it. They heal well, requiring little intervention, and despite the sensitive location do not cause you too much pain. The problem is your arms, which are not really your arms, at this point in time, two months away from your phalloplasty, but one arm and one future dick. But now the skin graft needs a skin graft and you are totally fucked. Your husband is supportive, so completely sweet and selfless, that you dread the day that he will need you and you will drop the ball. “If I could,” he says, “I would give you mine. You deserve it more than I do.” But that’s not what you want at all, considering his penis regularly provides you a valuable service right where it is.
At first, the doctors say that they just need to wait and see, but the outlook isn’t good. To be gentle, they use the word postpone, though there is no new surgery date on the horizon. You think about how funny it is, that your body has now refused to give you this part of yourself in two different ways. That even the most miraculous feats of science, in which a flap of arm or thigh can be artfully rolled and sutured into a vehicle for selfhood, pleasure, and a new kind of embodied presence—even this intricate plan was unraveled by your bad cooking. You had grown attached to the idea of it. Laying in bed, you could see your ghost-penis silhouetted by the glow of the moonstuck window. You imagined it would feel something like the rest of your gender-confirming processes had felt—not anything particularly special, just something that had been out of place put back where it belonged. Still, sometimes a feeling of wonder would overcome your just-like-other-guys attitude. The privilege of having been more than one thing in a life. To have changed and survived the change.
You finally accept that this is a wish that would never be granted, just like you accepted so many other disappointments as you whizzed past them in the course of your life: you will never go to grad school, you will never learn another language, you will never have a baby, oh well. As soon as you make your peace with it, you get the call. It’s an experimental process, they say, with a very small chance of success. No longer eligible for a phalloplasty, it may be your only hope, and best of all, it’s free. They do not say, “what do you have to lose?” out loud, but they say it in an invisible voice beneath all the medical jargon.
At the surgical center, you sign a monstrous stack of incomprehensible papers. You understand the uncertain nature of this novel procedure. You agree to hold harmless. As you struggle through the fine print, your husband gives your knee an encouraging squeeze.
Doctors and researchers buzz around you as you follow the department lead down a fluorescent hallway. They direct you towards a private room, where you undress behind an emotionless blue curtain and put on the appointed gown. A technician waits for you. Per your instructions, your husband paces beyond the door, where his caring anxiety cannot reach you. They need to take a tissue sample. All of this was explained in person and again in the paperwork. You were informed that they must take a sample of the tissue closest to that which they are trying to replicate, which means that the technician will ask you to open your legs, and give a numbing shot to the densest concentration of nerves in your entire body. You think of the scene in Antichrist where she cuts off her own clit with scissors and think, well, at least I’m not doing that.
When it comes, the shot stings like a white flame. Your vision dapples and you think of the sun, the core of it which burns brighter the deeper you go, obliteration. And then the pain gives way to an uncomfortable numbness. You stare at the terrazzo-like drop ceiling tiles. They take the sample and give the wound a small dressing, and send you off with less fanfare than you think is deserved.
You don’t expect it to heal so fast. Within a week, the pain is gone, and in two weeks it’s like it never happened. The doctors tell you to be patient, but too curious to wait, you call and ask if you can see it. They tell you it’s not finished, yet. You insist. Since there’s no rule against it, and you’ve gambled a bit of the most sensitive part of you away for the sake of scientific advancement, they let you come in to see it.
Inside a glass chamber sits a row of potted plants connected to a sprawling web of tubes ferrying various substances in and out. The researcher tells you that yours is all the way to the right. Due to the humidity, a film of fog clouds the glass, broken intermittently by a network of trembling water droplets. Through them, you see a hundred little distorted images of green and fuchsia foliage. The plant is sculptural, with waxy variegated leaves and an orchid-like sprawl low to the base. From some radial center, you see what at first looks like the pert stamen of a Cala Lily. Then you realize that it’s your new organ, growing there, in flore.
It’s only about the size of your thumb, but the shape and color look right. The researcher suggests that it will continue to grow until it’s neither an embarrassment nor a burden. You learn that the plant’s vascular system carries oxygen through the tissues, brings nutrients up through the roots, aids cell division. They tried growing dicks on synthetic 3D scaffolding but the interior mechanisms and layers of things were too difficult to get right. Growing them on animals was too disturbing, Cronenbergian, unethical. Besides, the genes of other mammals were too similar to our own, and the code kept getting scrambled. But plants could turn out to be the perfect biological machines for anatomical reproduction.
The plant exudes a strange, mesmerizing beauty. It is a part of you that is not part of you, a kind of offspring almost. There is a sense of innocent sexuality, like in spring when the air fills with pollen and trees drop seeds with spiraling tendrils that gather on the windshield of your car. You ask if you’ll be able to come back and see it again.
Over the next few weeks, you stop by the lab frequently to see its growth. It doubles, triples in size. A set of testicles swell below. The shape becomes more definite, a graceful architecture developing around the head. You are reminded of the hyacinths in your neighbor’s yard which rise from the ground each March, flowering obscenely, until the rubbery blooms become too heavy for their stems and topple over. Curious, your husband asks if he can come with you, and part of you feels like it’s bad luck for him to see it before it’s time, like a wedding dress. But you don’t want to deny him the absurd thrill of the dick flower, so you bring him along. He stares at it for a long time, and then tells you that it looks like yours, he could have picked it out from the lineup without being told. That night, you fuck with the intensity of strangers. Your phantom limb glitters in the reflection of his eyes.
One day, when you visit, you notice two of the other dick-plants are missing. They had been started earlier than yours, and a few of them had seemed almost complete. Marvelous variation was developing amongst them all. Each one is completely distinct among the others. When you ask about the missing plants, the researcher says that the time has come for them to be grafted to their respective patients. She says this with a breathlessness that reveals how deeply exciting this is for her. She tells you that if it works, then this technology is going to change the world. You think of how quaint that idea is to you, that one can change the world, but honestly she has a point and it probably will. You wonder if you will appear in some textbook, or Wikipedia entry, as the 5th or 6th or whatever plant-grown penile transplant in history.
The lab calls again. You’re on your lunch break from work and a dogwood is blooming profusely in the park where you’re eating. It’s over, they say. A total bust. The two penis transplants withered instantly once they were put into place. The result was bloody, putrid, made matters worse on all accounts. The researcher says that she shouldn’t be telling you this because of HIPPA but she feels that you deserve to know the truth. Her apologies are sincere and smell faintly of isopropyl alcohol. You thank her for her honesty and spend the rest of your thirty-minute break watching the way the shadows open and close beneath the branches of the tree. A petal falls into your hair and you brush it away.
That night, you tell your husband, and you’re surprised by your own tears. Your husband tells you that there’s no penis in the world worth crying over, and you laugh and laugh. He asks you what the researchers are going to do with your plant. You can’t believe that this question hadn’t occurred to you before, and as soon as it leaves his lips, you’re on your phone drafting an email to the lab. You think of schedule-sending it for 6:30 the next morning but then decide to be authentic and let it fly. They have to let you take it home. After making it this far, the thought of it being thrown away or incinerated or whatever they do to medical waste is completely intolerable.
To your surprise, they write you back promptly the next morning to grant your request. They’re so amenable that you scroll up to the desperate, manic language of your initial plea and cringe. You pick it up later that day. It feels inappropriate to brandish it through the hallways of the research hospital, so they tastefully wrap it in blue tray paper to protect the modesty of everyone involved. You strap the pot in the passenger seat for the drive home.
There is no surface in your house that seems to be the perfect place. Everywhere is either too public, too dim, too reverent or too casual. You finally put it on top of your dresser, and your husband nods in agreement. You let him remove the blue paper. In person, without the glass barrier misted with condensation to warp your view, the plant is stunning. A zing of fuchsia running along the base of the plant had intensified over the last few weeks, and now practically fluoresces onto the wall of your bedroom. The broad leaves of the plant sprawl like a complicated, melting ceiling fan. The dick is sculptural, heavy looking, and somehow unmistakably yours.
Your husband asks if he can touch it. You say yes, then quickly change your mind, and say you want to be the first. When you reach out to graze your hand over your shaft, you pull it back in shock. You hadn’t expected it to be warm. How on earth could it be warm? Your husband reaches forward, and you let him. You can almost feel it when he touches you.
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Arden Shostak is an artist and writer residing on Powhatan land in Richmond, Virginia. He holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and his writing appears or is forthcoming in The College Hill Independent, Volume One, andFlyway, among other journals. His work centers the necessity of dreams, visions, and other elements of the unseen world for building liberatory futures. Lately he dreams of dinner parties, bridges, and apologies.