The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

August - An Archive (Part Five)

            Gerard was still sleeping when I went into his room in the morning. I knocked quietly before I pushed his door open, and noticing his placid face in bed, I decided not to wake him. I tiptoed around, sitting on his stool by the shelf, and waited for the sun to give us more light. It was early; before the sun had even come up, which was a real feat in August. I had barely slept the night before, catching maybe two hours at my desk in my bedroom before I decided to see Gerard. Though I knew I would be utterly exhausted at work, as soon as Hunter had fallen asleep and his breathing changed, I got up and began to work on the archive again. Not in the same context, of course. Nothing would ever be the exact same since I first started it, but that was all right. That was the point of the archive. It was never to remember things as they were, but to help them change into what they needed to be. We were not at that stage yet, and I knew that I needed to finish it and give us all a resolution from the stories we carried around that no longer made sense.

            The archive had always been for us. For every single person I interviewed, it was our way to discover about ourselves and to put the pieces of our family together again. Our family was joined, not through blood, but these strange little connections to one another. While people recognized blood relations and legal documents, the rest of our mess did not make sense. And even the legal documents did not suffice now. Within a day, pieces of paper meant nothing. How was anyone supposed to comprehend that Hunter (with his old name on that license) was not married to Gerard Wyatt, but that they were only a smaller part of a whole? How was anyone supposed to infer that it was the three of us, and always would be? Our relationships and our lives could not be summarized on a form, and now that Hunter was who he was, I could not believe I could even fathom other people trying to understand our family from the outside. But I wasn't trying to make them understand, I had realized. I couldn't. I knew it as soon as the words had escaped Callie's mouth that it would take too long to explain all of this to everyone and it would drain me in the process. I was already so exhausted from all the collecting and dealing with my own life when I was inside of it. I realized that I was always going to be in the middle of the storm and in the middle of the greatest masterpiece alive; to be out of it, meant I was out of the family and I never, ever wanted that. We were all in this, together, and we may have not been able to fully comprehend our sheer magnitude, but that didn't matter. We pieced things together the best that we could, and we kept them all for ourselves in the end. My audience for this archive was not the outside world, because I did not want to use those words that I needed to when I was there. I didn't want to make the personal political, because the personal was sacred to me. But I did want to make the personal into art, and I believed that I was doing that with the archive. My audience for that had been us all along.

            I had taken out my work that night and I began to go through everything once again. I got the computer going and I began to print off several copies of each person's story. I felt bad, doing all of this while Hunter was in the next room sleeping, but halfway through the project he got up as well. He said that pregnancy made him sleep funny, and he was taking naps in the afternoon anyway.

            "I'm almost done work," he assured me. "I just have to get to September, and then Meredith is taking over until I'm ready to go back, and then we'll swap out and figure it all out."

            I asked him if the previous issue with Meredith's July magazine had been solved, and he shrugged. He would have to get used to people's opinions that differed from his own, he had stated. I swallowed hard, wanting to then ask him how he thought work would take this new decision. It wasn't like his employers were narrow-minded, and he had worked with transgender issues before in the paper. But it was a lot different talking about it openly versus coming in and saying that you were this person now. It was ridiculous, I knew, but I also knew how the world worked. If you were the person who had worked on that story, then you were still the same person. It didn't matter what you were called, only that you were called by the right thing as soon as you knew what that was. I had always known this as a given fact, even before the people around me had put it into words, but I had always considered it an abstract principle. I had always been okay with being Frank. For the most people, what people generally presumed me to be was correct. I had no idea, to the extent that he expressed, that Hunter had always wanted to be as such. He had needed different words to express himself and now it was falling into place, making language like an art where he needed to. He made the abstract principle from before become concrete, rendering visible the assumptions that had manifested, the catalyst that deconstructed them, and now what was beginning to be rebuilt. I held him close anytime he talked about work or about navigating this new terrain. He began to help me with the archive, and when I explained it to him that it was only going to be for us, he got into it more. We both began to draw family trees and plot connections. We made our own legal documents and got all of our paperwork together. Hunter made himself a new birth certificate with his new name, and for a while I wondered if he was going to make himself a death one, too. I thought of what Daniel had said about Gerard always being the exception, even if I slept with other men, and I asked if Hunter felt the same way about his previous life.