Soft chuckling came from the other side of the screen.

I came out, feeling awkward. I was taller than everyone else in the room, though I weighed much less. The floor felt cold against my bare feet as I crossed to the exam table and jumped up.

I lay back. Without having to be told, I lifted my legs and fit my heels in the gynecological stirrups. The room had gone ominously silent. The three doctors came forward, staring down. Their heads formed a trinity above me. Luce pulled the curtain across the table.

They bent over me, studying my parts, while Luce led a guided tour. I didn’t know what most of the words meant but after the third or fourth time I could recite the list by heart. “Muscular habitus . . . no gynecomastia . . . hypospadias . . . urogenital sinus . . . blind vaginal pouch . . .” These were my claim to fame. I didn’t feel famous, however. In fact, behind the curtain, I no longer felt as if I were in the room.

“How old is she?” Dr. Winters asked.

“Fourteen,” Luce answered. “She’ll be fifteen in January.”

“So your position is that chromosomal status has been completely overridden by rearing?”

“I think that’s pretty clear.”

As I lay there, letting Luce, in rubber gloves, do what he had to do, I got a sense of things. Luce wanted to impress the men with the importance of his work. He needed funding to keep the clinic running. The surgery he performed on transsexuals wasn’t a selling point over at the March of Dimes. To get them interested you had to pull at the heartstrings. You had to put a face on suffering. Luce was trying to do that with me. I was perfect, so polite, so midwestern. No unseemliness attached itself to me, no hint of cross-dresser bars or ads in the back of louche magazines.

Dr. Craig wasn’t convinced. “Fascinating case, Peter. No question. But my people will want to know the applications.”

“It’s a very rare condition,” Luce admitted. “Exceedingly rare. But in terms of research, its importance can’t be overstated. For the reasons I outlined in my office.” Luce remained vague for my benefit, but still persuasive enough for theirs. He hadn’t gotten where he was without certain lobbyist gifts. Meanwhile I was there and not there, cringing at Luce’s touch, sprouting goose bumps, and worrying that I hadn’t washed properly.

I remember this, too. A long narrow room on a different floor of the hospital. A riser set up at one end before a butterfly light. The photographer putting film in his camera.

“Okay, I’m ready,” he said.

I dropped my robe. Almost used to it now, I climbed up on the riser before the measuring chart.

“Hold your arms out a little.”

“Like this?”

“That’s good. I don’t want a shadow.”

He didn’t tell me to smile. The textbook publishers would make sure to cover my face. The black box: a fig leaf in reverse, concealing identity while leaving shame exposed.

Every night Milton called us in our room. Tessie put on a bright voice for him. Milton tried to sound happy when I got on the line. But I took the opportunity to whine and complain.

“I’m sick of this hotel. When can we go home?”

“Soon as you’re better,” Milton said.

When it was time for sleep, we drew the window curtains and turned off the lights.

“Good night, honey. See you in the morning.”

“Night.”

But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that word: “better.” What did my father mean? What were they going to do to me? Street sounds made it up to the room, curiously distinct, echoing off the stone building opposite. I listened to the police sirens, the angry horns. My pillow was thin. It smelled like a smoker. Across the strip of carpet my mother was already asleep. Before my conception, she had agreed to my father’s outlandish plan to determine my sex. She had done this so that she wouldn’t be alone, so that she would have a girlfriend in the house. And I had been that friend. I had always been close to my mother. Our temperaments were alike. We liked nothing better than to sit on park benches and watch the faces go by. Now the face I was watching was Tessie’s in the other bed. It looked white, blank, as if her cold cream had removed not only her makeup but her personality. Tessie’s eyes were moving, though; under the lids they skated back and forth. Callie couldn’t imagine the things Tessie was seeing in her dreams back then. But I can. Tessie was dreaming a family dream. A version of the nightmares Desdemona had after listening to Fard’s sermons. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling, dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Tessie didn’t allow herself to think about such things during the day, so they came to her at night. Was it her fault? Should she have resisted Milton when he tried to bend nature to his will? Was there really a God after all, and did He punish people on Earth? These Old World superstitions had been banished from my mother’s conscious mind, but they still operated in her dreams. From the other bed I watched the play of these dark forces on my mother’s sleeping face.

Itossed and turned every night, unable to sleep straight through. I was like the princess and the pea. A pellet of disquiet kept unsettling me. Sometimes I awoke with the feeling that a spotlight had been trained on me while I slept. It was as if my ether body had been conversing with angels, somewhere up near the ceiling. When I opened my eyes they fled. But I could hear the traces of the communication, the fading echoes of the crystal bell. Some essential information was rising from the depths of my being. This information was on the tip of my tongue and yet never surfaced. One thing was certain: it was all connected with the Object somehow. I lay awake thinking about her, wondering how she was, and pining, grieving.

I thought of Detroit, too, of its vacant lots of pale Osiris grass springing up between the condemned houses and those not yet condemned, and of the river with its iron runoff, the dead carp floating on the surface, white bellies flaking. I thought of fishermen standing on the concrete freighter docks with their bait buckets and tallboys, the baseball game on the radio. It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.” My time at the Clinic did that to me. I feel a direct line extending from that girl with her knees steepled beneath the hotel blankets to this person writing now in an Aeron chair. Hers was the duty to live out a mythical life in the actual world, mine to tell about it now. I didn’t have the resources at fourteen, didn’t know enough, hadn’t been to the Anatolian mountain the Greeks call Olympus and the Turks Uludag, just like the soft drink. I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It’s always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans.

In the end, it took Luce two weeks to make his determination about me. He scheduled an appointment with my parents for the following Monday.

Milton had been jetting around during the two weeks, checking on his Hercules franchises, but on the Friday preceding the appointment he flew back to New York. We spent the weekend spiritlessly sightseeing, assailed by unspoken anxieties. On Monday morning my parents dropped me off at the New York Public Library while they went to see Dr. Luce.

My father had dressed that morning with special care. Despite an outward show of tranquillity, Milton was beset by an unaccustomed feeling of dread, and so armored himself in his most commanding clothes: over his plump body, a charcoal pinstripe suit; around his bullfrog neck, a Countess Mara necktie; and in the buttonholes of his shirtsleeves, his “lucky” Greek Drama cuff links. Like our Acropolis nightlight, the cuff links had come from Jackie Halas’s souvenir shop in Greektown. Milton wore them whenever he met with bank loan officers or auditors from the IRS. That Monday morning, however, he had trouble putting the cuff links in; his hands were not steady enough. In exasperation he asked Tessie to do it. “What’s the matter?” she asked tenderly. But Milton snapped, “Just put the cuff links in, will you?” He held out his arms, looking away, embarrassed by his body’s weakness.