Eli’s parents had disowned her for having moved away to the Middle East with Mano, but Eli hadn’t cared. If anything, she’d been only too glad to cut them out of her life as well. Mano missed her parents sometimes, but children grew up, pursued love and opportunity, sometimes moved away – it was the way of things. As for Eli, she’d been really hoping that her emotional condition would improve from getting away from her. Hope was a weird, new thing.
She’d always hated being told that she was the one who was choosing to be depressed. Of course she would have chosen to have been happy if it could have simply been as easy as that. Mano and Eli had talked about how much they despised the fetishization of the ‘depressed poet’ as somehow better because of their depression, not in spite of it. The tendency to fetishize suffering for its own sake had always reeked of nihilistic, anhedonic Judeo-Christianity to Eli.
The point was that, if there was a chance for her to be happy at all, she’d been going to take it. She would never have stayed in miserable circumstances on purpose, as if to keep her situational depression going as though it would make her create better art. All the famous depressed artists would have done at least as well and possibly better if they’d gotten the help they’d needed, she’d been convinced of it. It was creepy to her to imagine outsiders not suffering from her condition who would have been willing to sacrifice her chance for happiness on her behalf to extract better art from her, like oil from a whale. She’d used that metaphor in a poem.
“I know all artists are self-conscious about how fans interpret their output, Mano, but for me, it still feels like it goes deeper than usual somehow,” she’d told her girlfriend. “I mean, once art is out there, once you release it out into the world, it no longer belongs to the artists, it belongs to the fans, doesn’t it?” The octopus had tilted her head at her. “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”
Eli had thought about it. “Well, let’s take Lovecraft,” she’d started. “You’re just thinking about Lovecraft because you’re looking at me, aren’t you?” Mano had jested. “Kinda,” the turtle had admitted. “Now Lovecraft was like a grade A asshole, you know?” She’d seemed surprised. “Really?” Eli had nodded. “Oh yeah! He was a complete speciesist, and he wholeheartedly supported the colonization by England of countries just like yours.”
Mano had seemed disappointed. “But Cthulhu!” Eli had smiled. “I know. But see, it’s the fans that saved Cthulhu from his creator. He made Cthulhu to represent everything he was scared of and hated. His fans made Cthulhu hilarious and adorable. They freed him from his creator.” While she was the one who was a cephalopod, it occurred to Mano that Eli might have envied and related to Cthulhu. She’d hoped to be free from her own creator for a long time as well.
“What about Darwin, though?” Mano had asked Eli. “What about him?” the turtle had tilted her head at her. As a staunch defender of evolution from creationists, Eli had some admiration for Darwin. She would even have said she was a fan of his, she supposed. “You don’t care much for Social Darwinism, though, do you?” Eli had shaken her head. “No, not at all. Darwin would’ve abhorred it. He wrote about it. Evolution was a scientific observation, not a moral prescription to weed out the ‘weak.’ In this case, it’s other fans of his who took his work, which was good, and turned it into something evil.”
They’d heard of the religious violence in the Middle East, but seeing it had been a shock.
“Sometimes,” Eli had gone on, “I wonder whether or not the violence done in the name of religion happens because followers turned something good into something ugly... or because the people who came up with the religion were evil, and made good people do evil things because of it. And I wonder whether I’ll be remembered like Lovecraft, or like Darwin.” “So,” Mano answered, “that’s what you have on your mind when you sit down to write, isn’t it?” Eli had nodded. “Well, no wonder you’re stressed out,” the octopus had caressed her girlfriend’s face lovingly.
Eli had smiled. Mano had loved seeing her smile.
Eli had always been afraid of repeating the negative patterns of the past in her life. For one thing, back in India, Mano had technically worked as her housekeeper for a couple of years. Eli now published political essays, gathered support for activism, published poems about pressing issues and expressing her deepest emotions, and fought her fear of public speaking by giving public speeches against all forms of injustice, much as it rattled her. When she’d be too busy or shaken, Mano had often fallen back into her old habits of picking up around the house, doing random chores without even really thinking about it. Six hands made things a bit easier.
When Eli would feel that most of the housekeeping duties had fallen to Mano, she would cry, and feel terrible about herself. Mano would try to tell her that it didn’t matter. It wasn’t only that Eli felt that she had in a sense already been rescued by Mano once, that it seemed to Eli that she shouldn’t have had to continue relying on Mano’s help even after that. Eli felt that she, an English person, had gone to India to make Mano into her servant, just as her ancestors had.
“But we’re not our ancestors, Eli!” she’d say. “I try to help you because I love you.”
For another thing, it was around that time, in her young adulthood, that Eli began to suspect that she might have been a man. It was often around young adulthood that people realized they were trans, she’d read, but it contrasted so much with the ‘always-knew’ trans narrative that she’d heard more about that she hadn’t been sure whether she should have trusted it or not. She wished she’d been born a man, she was certain of that. The thought of transitioning was a whole other thought entirely. She knew too much about how much of a struggle it could be to even think about it, when she’d already struggled so much. Maybe someday, but not for now.
When Mano had offered Eli to start calling her ‘he,’ Eli had refused. Mano knew enough to be polite enough to accept, but Eli could tell that she was curious about why. “On one hand, it seems too... easy for me to give myself this thing I want right now. Part of me fantasizes about saving it for when I really will transition. If I start using it now I might never be motivated enough to push myself to do it.” Mano had tilted her head at her. “And on the other hand?”
Eli had sighed. “In my body, in my heart, I’d rather be a man, but... in some ways, I’d still rather be a woman as an activist. If I’m a man, I’m just another man telling people what to do. If I’m a woman, I’m still the underdog. I don’t want to seem like I’m going for a power grab. And if I have to keep bringing up that I’m trans to still be taken seriously as someone who’s suffered enough to know what it’s like... that means I can never be seen as a real man anyway. I have to always keep reminding people of the exact thing about myself that I’m trying to forget. So since I can’t get away from who I am anyway... I may as well just stay like this.”
Mano had hugged her. “I don’t want to turn into my father, Mano. Don’t let me... You see, if we’re both women, then I feel like we’re like two secret agents, who met in enemy territory but who worked together to escape to go start a new life together somewhere. It’s silly, isn’t it?” Mano had nuzzled her. “No, I sort of get it.” “But if I’m a man, and you’re a woman, I just feel like I kidnapped you away from your family to drag you here for my own interests.”
Mano had shaken her head, vigorously. “You could never have done that! I was already studying to become a journalist when we met. This war is important. This is my own path. This is what I set out to do.” Eli had paused, and had slowly nodded yes. It had been important to talk about why what they were doing was worthwhile. The news that they would see every day were so depressing that, on some level, Mano felt bad to have been a journalist, contributing to it.
“Do you think it’s always better for people to know the truth, Eli? Even if it’s a painful truth?” Eli had grunted thoughtfully. “I think it’s important for people to know the truth so they can make informed decisions, I suppose,” she’d said. “This is about your job, isn’t it?” Eli might not have handled it the same way, depending on what it was about. “Among other things, yeah.” When they would watch the news, Eli would cry. Mano would offer her to stop, but Eli didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to stop the pain. Without pain, people would ignore injuries, then die, that was Eli’s argument. She didn’t want to be an ostrich with its head in the sand.
“What else?” Eli had asked. “Well, I meant it’s not just about how I feel about the news I’m reporting... It’s about what those news might imply,” Mano had sighed. “What do you mean by that?” the turtle had tilted her head at her. “Every day, I’m out there watching Christians, Jews and Muslims blow each other to bits over basically the same God, Eli,” she’d winced. “God’s a smokescreen,” Eli had answered. “It’s about land, really.” Mano had scratched her head. “Do you really think that?” Eli had nodded. “People are animals fighting over territory.”
Mano had looked downcast. “I’ve been asking myself, not just as someone who tries to bring truth to others, but as someone who believes in things... If the truth was different from what I wanted it to be, should I still not want to know?” Eli felt uncomfortable. If she imagined herself to have been born Indian, and an English person had shown up in her country telling her to abandon the beliefs that had parents had brought her up with, she wouldn’t have cared whether the person telling her to change had been a Christian or an atheist. It would’ve meant the same colonial aggression either way, from her perspective. She hadn’t wanted to become that either.
“I can’t have an objective viewpoint on religion, Mano,” she’d said, “not only because of what happened to me, but because I don’t know that there is such a thing. We all believe things because of what happened to us.” Mano also hadn’t wanted to be reduced to a subject of pity, truths kept from her out of the assumption that she couldn’t handle it. It’d seemed vaguely insulting. She hadn’t wanted to seem like she’d be accusing Eli of doing that either, though.
Sometimes Eli had briefly fallen back into the patterns of how she’d speak in her childhood, and talk about how evil religion was without thinking about who she’d be talking to. Mano had never brought it up, understanding that in context she usually meant monotheist fanatics, but Eli would catch herself, and apologize, which inadvertently had made Mano wonder if she really had meant her after all. That she could have still reflexively equated ‘religion’ with ‘monotheism’ had made Eli feel horribly ethnocentric herself, and she’d berated herself for it when it’d happened.
“Do you really think that religion makes people good or evil, Eli? Or do you just think that people are good or evil, and religion is just part of how that good or evil manifests?” Eli had sighed, and shaken her head. “See... For one thing, I don’t trust how religion can take an idea that’s evil, and enshrine it as part of a package deal with other ideas that are good, so that people who want the good from the good ideas feel forced to accept the bad along with them.”
Mano had encouraged her to continue despite her reservations.
“For another, I don’t like how people can take the ideas of old, dead people, who didn’t know a lot of what we know today, and say that we have to make moral decisions based on what they used to say, even if we’ve learned more things since then that seem to indicate that a moral decision should really be something else. As long as someone can explain why they’re doing something in a way that’s somehow connected to the interests of living people, in a way that’s in their best interests, in a way that can still make sense to someone who doesn’t share their beliefs... let them do it for their own reasons for all it does to me, I figure, you know?”
Mano had nodded. “I understand.” That didn’t seem like too much to ask to her.
“Who knows,” Eli had gone on, unselfconsciously, “maybe, in the end, it’s you who will convert me.” Mano had tilted her head at her. “What do you mean?” Eli regretted having said it. “No, forget it.” It was too late to take back. “No, what do you mean by that? I’ve never even tried.” Eli had sighed. “You see, some people think atheists must be sad. I don’t like playing into that. I don’t think God would make me all that cheerful. I can be plenty optimistic about the cosmos, about science and progress. It’s my own life that I’m sad about. I’m an atheist because I want to be an optimist, Mano. That’s part of why Eastern beliefs speak to me.”
Mano had shaken her head. “I’m not sure I understand.” Eli had ventured into an unintended area. “You see... When typical Westerners first hear about reincarnation, they usually just think about how fun it would be to come back as something other than what they were in this life, like a little vacation from themselves. They don’t get how it completely doesn’t work from the perspective of the people who came up with it in the first place. The goal is literally to be a good enough person that you’re no longer forced to come back... When I think about how deeply people must’ve suffered to understand what a hell this life is so well, it moves me to tears.”
Mano would’ve never imagined that her beliefs could’ve affected Eli this way.
She’d known that Eli had still carried pain from what had happened to her, but she hadn’t realized that it’d still been so bad that Eli had still thought of existence itself as this horrible curse that she’d wished could be lifted from her. She’d asked Eli if she’d thought therapy could help, but her parents had sent her to abusive therapists that had broken her trust in therapy in general, with or without drugs. She’d offered Eli to try to dull the pain with less conventional drugs but, again, Eli didn’t want to dull her perception in any way, to risk missing out on something else in front of her.
“Do you trust me, though?” Mano asked. “Of course I do. I may never have believed in your gods, but I’ve always believed in you,” Eli had smiled. “Do you want to try to talk to me?” Mano had offered. Maybe she could be Eli’s makeshift therapist, even if she didn’t trust an official one? “What would we talk about?” Eli had asked. “I don’t know,” Mano had shrugged. “What do therapists usually talk about?” Eli inquired, half-rhetorically. “I should probably ask you about your childhood,” Mano guessed. “Oh God, not my childhood,” Eli had half-winced, half-jested. “Was there anything about your childhood in England that you liked?” Mano asked.
Eli had stopped, and though about it. “Alice in Wonderland,” she’d said.
“Why is that?” Mano had tilted her head at her. “It’s the first thing I can remember that I knew came out of England that I didn’t hate. I liked the mock turtle soup bit, I thought it was funny. The way the griffin dismissed the tears of the mock turtle made me think of how easily people would dismiss my own tears as unimportant. ‘She hasn’t got no sorrows, you know!’” she’d chuckled. “Beyond that... Well, I related to Alice, in a weird way.” That, Mano had definitely seen coming even less. “Why was that?” Eli looked at her seriously. “Because I also sit, and dream of a better world that could probably never be. My impossible Wonderland...”
The Middle East had worsened her depression. After a couple of years in the Middle East, Mano heard that a position was opening up at her job for someone who worked there to become a journalist in Brazil. She asked Eli whether she wanted to stay in the Middle East, or to try taking the job offer as an opportunity to move out of the Middle East. There were enough social problems for them to tackle there for Eli not to feel like she’d be running away from other people’s suffering. Maybe a change of air would do her some good, she told herself. Maybe, somewhere in Brazil, she could find a way to live that would let her escape from the pain somehow. It also wouldn’t be quite so dry. A turtle could only grow as big as the tank it lived in.
So she took the job, and brought Eli with her, to try to save her love again...
