Dismemberment

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I’m drinking tea with Kovalyov’s nose. 

We’re part-time neighbors. He rents a studio on the first floor, which he uses during the school year, on his teaching days. It’s a place to sleep, or to get some grading done. Most of the time he lives over in Chicago, with the rest of his person. Kovalyov is a tenured professor of Russian literature. 

The first time he had me over for tea, while he was messing with the kettle, I used my phone to find his faculty page on the university website. Office hours for Spring 2012. Link to a CV, but the link is broken. I’m not trying to cast doubt on his merit. He’s been tenured so long, he doesn’t need to keep his professional documents current. I guess I’m saying that beyond the information in Gogol’s story, “The Nose,” which must be obsolete, I suppose I know very little.  

I know the walls of his studio are painted onyx. There’s a bright Persian rug on the floor. In the far corner sits a tall indigo canopy bed. There’s a settee by the window, upholstered in dark green velvet. A small table with the hot plate and kettle. The apartment is a single room, but the building’s high ceilings lend it a wondrous sense of volume. There’s space overhead for a thought. Several years ago, when I was a postdoc in Michigan, I discovered I’d been wearing the wrong shoe size. I bought the next size up and experienced an epiphany. The doors to my life were opened to me. And that’s what it felt like when I moved into this building, four hours from Chicago. It felt like buying bigger shoes. If I used to crave time, it was only because I had no purchase on space. 

Occasionally, what I think I know about Kovalyov’s nose unmasks itself as fantasy. For example, he makes delicious tea, which I had believed to be Russian tea, a romance I mistook for fact until today, when I saw the box. It’s Twinings. I’ve got a box of my own, Irish Breakfast, upstairs. We discuss work together, mostly. I’m junior faculty. Different field, same university. I appreciate talking with someone of his age and experience. We are different people. That is obvious. We are different kinds of people. He is a nose. I am a trans man. Of course I understand that we’re not at all related, and yet I love it when he communicates like a father with me. 

Today I’m telling him about a humiliation in the classroom.

“This morning, Kovalyov, I delivered instructions for the final assignment to my graduate writing workshop.”

I would, at times, address the nose of Kovalyov as simply, Kovalyov.

“You’re going to conduct an author interview with yourself, I said. You’re the author and the interviewer. You must ask yourself at least three questions, and the questions must come from this master list of prompts. Of course I’d taken this from Renee Gladman’s recent novel, My Lesbian Novel. The form, or the idea. I’d printed copies of the list, which I passed around the seminar table. I came up with many of the prompts myself, but not all of them. Some were devised by the students in the workshop. Others were sourced from books we’d read earlier in the semester. 

“Except, sometimes students don’t read the things you wish them to read, Kovalyov. Assignment prompts, especially. Plus, so many prompts on that list, they have no direct or obvious connection to creative writing, that’s what makes the assignment fun and even potentially revelatory, I think, but it’s also what makes the assignment confusing and frightening from a student’s perspective, so I decided I would read through the entirety of the list during class, that way, if need be, I could model on the fly how a creative writer might interpret some of the stranger prompts and thereby alleviate my students’ anxieties. I stood at the head of the seminar table and read from the list of prompts, you know? The students followed along with their paper copies. There’s a prompt I lifted from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil and it goes: ‘Tell me what you know about dismemberment.’ I read it through, and one of the students laughed. I paused and addressed the student. ‘Do you find the prompt funny?’ And the student said that he doesn’t find it funny, it’s just how would anybody know how to respond to something like that? Sure, well, that’s kind of the point, right? How would you respond? You can take the prompt in any direction you want. There are many ways for a writer to reflect on dismemberment, but listen: You need only respond to three to complete the assignment. I was communicating candidly and interpersonally, and maybe that’s how I pitched myself into this trap, Kovalyov, well I don’t necessarily want to call it a trap but I don’t know, I do not know how to name what happened, in any case, I told the student he doesn’t have to incorporate this prompt into his self-interview, but also I said I guess I would expect transmascs like us, and transmasc is a word the student used, Kovalyov, to name himself in our classroom discussions, okay, it’s basically shorthand for transmasculine person, a category that also includes yours truly, it’s not the first word I reach for but remember I was communicating in this interpersonal mode, so I said to the student that frankly I would expect transmascs, I would expect transmascs like you and I, I said, I would expect us to have a very particular relationship to dismemberment, yeah? 

“‘Are you talking about your breasts,’ the student asked. 

“‘I mean your top surgery,’ he said. 

“Now the other students, who had been following our exchange as if watching a game of tabletop tennis, were staring at me, Kovalyov, with a collective plea, or shall I call it a demand, for it was knifed into the folds of their brows. In that demand, they were as one. One gargantuan brow draped along the backs and the arms of the chairs, encircling the seminar table like an agonized skin wreath. A mutant worm on fire. My students needed to know if something out of bounds had occurred, and they understood I was capable but also obligated to relieve them of their uncertainty. So I smiled with my teeth. I smiled with my teeth like a dog and said that no, I was not talking about breasts. If I had been talking about my breasts, I said, smiling with my teeth like a dog, then I would have said dismemberments. I emphasized the sibilance of the plural S’s in breasts and dismemberments. Because there were two of them, I said. The students laughed but not because the joke was good. The joke was bad, the sort of utterance that will make me want to kill myself every single time I remember that it came out of me. 

“What I had in mind when I spoke of dismemberment, I continued, was castration. How can you lose a dick you never had? That is what I meant by dismemberment. Castration.”

The nose of Kovalyov finished the last drop of his tea and said, “I’m sorry that happened. It was a humiliation, yes. Not only a humiliation but also a betrayal.” 

“You’re right. It did feel like a betrayal. And honestly, I think you might be the only person in my life right now who has the professional experience for understanding what it was that I just went through. I mean, I hope I am not presuming too much when I say that both of us probably know a thing or two about what it’s like to be fated to play the part of the agitation.”

The nose sneezed. “Agitation?” he asked.

“I can only imagine what it’s like for you when you’re standing, in the flesh, before your students. I have to imagine the experience is kindred to mine? We bring something up and out of our students, yes? Just by our standing there, by our physical presences. This power to agitate is something I’ve been aware of for some time, ever since the start of my transition six years ago. In those early years, the agitation appeared in the guise of a self-identified cis student, usually a self-proclaimed cis man, who would take a liking to me and stumble headfirst into certain trans registers during classroom discussions while avowing his own cis-ness the whole time, of course, and come the end of the semester, the student will pull me aside and ask if I have a bit more time to give. Do I have the time to read and annotate the novel he wrote when he was a child? It’s a request that I interpret as voicing a desire to deepen our contact in a way that might eventually lead to me scribbling You are a girl onto the pages of his teenage novel. I receive these sorts of requests all the time. Do you have any idea how much I dislike reading literature for young people? Why would I want to read thousands of pages of literature for children written by my students when they were children? So I tell the student that I would love to read his child novel, but that due to my time constraints and workload, I cannot annotate the manuscript. If you would like my feedback on the novel you wrote as a child, then please make an appointment to speak with me next semester, okay? I’d like to give you my feedback verbally, in my office. I’ll read your child novel over break and then next semester we can set up a time to discuss it. The student will say: Great, thank you. He’ll send me the child novel. But I know from past experience that he’ll never follow up on my offer to meet and discuss it. So that means I don’t have to read the child novel, ever. And that’s for the best, at least for me, I think. I mean if all of this is just the way through, to the end when I tell you you’re trans, then you’ll find another way, ideally through a different trans person, right? And even if I told you what you want to hear—because it does feel, Kovalyov, that I am positioned at times like some kind of anointer or mirror-tunnel—that’s precisely when you’ll turn and say No! You’ll force me to force it out of you, and that is not an appropriate role for a professor to play vis a vis a student’s development. I mean, would you want to read and annotate child novels written by your students, just so you can tell those students what they wanted to hear about themselves so they can turn around and tell you: No. Would you want to do that?”

“I would not,” said the nose. “That sounds hard, my son.”

“Of course you would not, we have that in common, and thank you for the son thing, but I’m not finished discussing the agitation. I’ve noticed something new afoot, when it comes to the agitation. This is related to the betrayal, as you have called it. The agitation is dividing and multiplying. It is morphing. These days it is not unusual for a student to get around my barrier by writing the child novel in my workshop. That way I have no choice but to read and respond to it when I evaluate their assignment. And this student isn’t always a self-proclaiming cis person, sometimes they’re a self-proclaiming trans person writing from behind the closed doors of their life. 

“It is possible to call oneself trans and still be shut behind the doors. 

“People write trans novels back there behind them, trans novels that speak in voices tilted at me, almost as if to respond to something I never said. 

“They’re responding, Kovalyov, to the agitation. The novels go: You can’t make me shoot testosterone. If I shoot testosterone then I will become an ugly hairy short bald freak! You can’t make me cut my hair or wear men’s clothes! I will not be a bald retrograde walking anachronism! I will do the radical act which is not to do surgery! Why should I have to chop off my breasts to be cool? I think my breasts aren’t that bad sometimes and other times I hate them and want to hide my face but I will not be forced by you to chop them off! If you force me to chop them off, and then my parents disown me, and I cannot pay my rent, and I cannot stay in school or go home for the holidays, then how bad would you feel? So, I have to grade that, Kovalyov,” I told the nose of Kovalyov.

“I have to read, annotate, respond, praise, critique, grade it. I could circle the word bald and write a little note in the margin, right? Because here’s what I think, I think why should a person have to write a whole novel about why they can’t transition due to a fear of baldness, why should they have to do that when they could just take Finasteride with their hrt and then write about something else? I could scribble something like that in the margins. But I won’t scribble something like that in the margins. Because I am not a medical doctor! Do you see what I’m saying? The transphobic anti-transition treatises will just keep having to be written by the trans people enrolled in creative writing classes because the trans professor is not a medical doctor, but it is something to do with me, Kovalyov, what my presence elicits, while at work.”

“Do you wish you had gone to medical school, my boy?”

“I have to find all sorts of ways to comment on these assignments. Good job, I must tell them. Here is an A. Sometimes, I will make a critical comment, very tiny, very reserved, very professional. I’ll say something: Is someone forcing this narrator to chop off his breasts? Who? Clarification? What if the narrator were to ask himself, without anxiety, if he’d like to have a masculine chest? Yes or no? Either answer is fine and great. Have you considered how this text, a self-proclaimed trans text, might hold a transphobic point of view on surgery? Are you aware that there are trans people who do not think about top surgery in that way, as a mutilation? Sometimes a guy wants to create a masculine chest for himself.” 

The nose cleared his nostrils. “Have you considered asking your breasts how they think about it?”

“I do not have those breasts. There is no sense to that phrase. Who do you think I am, some kind of dismembered woman? Do I want to spend the rest of my life trying to connect with other transmascs over my breasts! I want to figure out how to lose the dick I never had, just like everyone else! 

“Why is that so impossible, Kovalyov, my father? Is it the climate? It’s the climate, right? The president? Now no one can be trans, not directly, so everyone trans has to be the kind of trans person who’s the Jeff-Goldblum-crossed-with-a-fly-divided-by-cat-dog-and-just-released-from-the-telepod-writhing-in-agony-in-a-pink-stinking-mess-on-the-floor kind of trans person? And I have to read it and respond to it before and after I undergo a series of endless ritual humiliations through which I flicker in and out of focus while standing with a smile on my face in the center of the class?”

“You know, one of your old breasts is a student in my Russian lit class.” 

“One!”

“Do you think I want to read that breast’s term paper?” The nose cracks his knuckles. “What, you think that’s my cup of tea? I don’t even like tea. I’m here on behalf of your breast, okay? I’m an ambassador of the breast. Would you like to know what your breast has been writing about, obsessively, in Russian Lit? Your breast writes about a runaway nipple. A runaway nipple. Your breast endlessly rehashes that cursed morning, in every single paper, that putrid morn when the cock did crow and your breast did wake up too early and—no nipple!”

“Does it want to know where that nipple went? I have it! It’s on my body!” 

“Oh you don’t just have the nipple, buddy boy. My son. Look at you. You are the nipple.”

This is what happens when you let someone into your world. They bring theirs.

I leave his studio, fly outdoors in a rage to smoke, and just before my cigarette completely burns to ash, I turn to myself and say, with tenderhearted openness: Are you the nipple? 

“But here the whole episode becomes shrouded in mist, and of what happened subsequently absolutely nothing is known. And yet, in spite of it all, though, of course, we may assume this and that and the other, perhaps even . . . And after all, where aren’t there incongruities?—But all the same, when you think about it, there really is something in all this. Whatever anyone says, such things happen in this world; rarely, but they do,” once said Gogol.