Help

 

I’ll never forget the first time someone told me I “needed help.” It was a faceless user on a Yahoo! Answers responding to a question I had about feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, and whether feeling as though I didn’t belong here or there or anywhere in particular was normal for a high schooler in Michigan. It turns out people think it’s stranger if you don’t feel uncomfortable in high school, but that’s the sort of thing a person can only learn a posteriori, so at the time I couldn’t have thought less of myself when I learned that someone I’d never even met could tell I was a nutcase. I tried talking to the counselor at school, a thick, too-white woman who always wore black pantyhose because she was embarrassed by the turquoise veins that ran up and down her legs like tributaries, or at least that’s why I would have worn them if I were her and had legs like that. She wasn’t much of a help to me over the course of the two sessions I spent with her because she was a churlish propagator of Freudian horseshit, although I can’t say I expected any more from the psychological authority at a Midwestern public school. In fact I was so unimpressed by our first session, the only thing that brought me back a second time was that I suspected she had gout on her left foot and that this was what was causing the veins of her leg to be so protrusive. She wore flats this time so that I had no clear view of her foot. When I asked about her gout her pale face grew flushed and she told me it wasn’t an appropriate topic for our meeting so I left without another word.

I know she had gout, though. I don’t see how she could expect me to be honest with her about my most secret thoughts when she wouldn’t just come out and tell me about a simple medical condition.

Although I don’t remember her name anymore, my counselor did teach me something very valuable: help wasn’t going to give itself to me. I would have to hunt it down in whatever alcoves it had taken as its residence.

My earlier reading had led me to believe I was a simple misanthrope with elements of sociopathy, but I soon debunked that theory with the simple act of finding friends. I like plenty of people, as it happens, and they seem to like me alright, but I never keep close friendships for very long. My level of intimacy with a person has always been inversely correlated with how comfortable I am in our social dynamic. I prefer those people who never ask questions, the ones who make stupid jokes about their genitals and never bother remembering your birthday. With these people I never run the risk of entering the spotlight, an appeal I’ve always had trouble understanding.

During my senior year of high school I decided I was transgender and spent the rest of the year stealing clothes from my mother’s closet and wearing them to school. She was a bank accountant who didn’t really enjoy going out so I often found myself wearing unflattering skirts and sexless tops that made me feel less like a woman and more like one of those headless mannequins you see at department stores. It was always funny to me that they’d go through the trouble of making a full body and then skip the head, but that’s me.

Eventually I started borrowing clothes from friends at the LGBT Alliance at school, girls who loved queer kids like other people love the elephant exhibit at the zoo, but one day while I was applying lipstick in the girl’s bathroom I saw my reflection in the mirror and it occurred to me that this wasn’t even close to what I was looking for, like I was suddenly even further away from it, a pathetic clown trying desperately to be something, anything else. By now I was sick to my stomach so I washed all that Sephora shit-cake off my face. I removed my tube top and short shorts and exchanged them for some ugly, sweat-soaked PE clothes from my locker, and after that I never dressed like a woman again, except for the rest of that day I kept on the underwear because going commando in those gym shorts tended to make my junk flop around a lot and I heard that can affect your sperm count, and even though I don’t want kids the thought of having defective, two-tailed sperm just seems terrible.

Let it be shown in my fossil record that my counselor diagnosed me with some very unusual anxieties. This, at least, I agreed with.

 

When I got accepted to NYU they told me that the first thing I’d have to learn to get used to was the hugeness of the city. Of course there’s no doubt that the city is big but that never really came as an issue to me. Instead, the thing that really blew my hair back was the smell. Michigan smells like earth and grass with a hint of hotdog water; New York smells like nothing at all because it smells like everything. It smells like the color white, an amalgamation of every point along a possible spectrum. New York gives me a new way of navigating the world through olfactory cues like a prehistoric predator, using scent to tell the place, the time, and the relevance of every slice of life. It isn’t lost on me that this is not a normal human quality.

It’s the stench of metropolis that shows me what I am the second I step off the plane. It hits me like a punch to the jaw, a very welcome, exciting punch. I politely but hurriedly greet my new roommate when I enter my dorm. He’s a lanky Puerto Rican kid with wiry hair. His name is Trujillo, which is the same name as a fake Mexican restaurant back home in Barry County, so I’ll have no trouble remembering it. Without so much as unpacking my luggage I unsheathe my laptop and begin Googling confirming evidence for what I already know, and maybe what I’ve always known. New words start to pop up, words that become landmarks for discussions, themes of isolation and lapses in identity, a step beyond and far away from the simple answers my attempt at a transgendered lifestyle had offered. “Otherkin,” I read aloud. The word feels right to say, like it and my tongue are old friends who haven’t seen each other in years. With that, I know I have a lead.

There are many ways to get help. I was never the type to sit there playing word games with a psychiatrist, trying to out-intellectualize them like some cheap Will Hunting knock-off, and I’d met with a lot of them before leaving Michigan. Their shortcomings never hurt my resolve. One had even been helpful, if only marginally. He’d told me that if I was going to come to terms with who I was I would have to surround myself with people like me. It was a nice sentiment but I had to wonder how I’d find them. His answer was that I’d know them when I saw them, like art or pornography.

That was our last session together.

 

The Otherkin Student Alliance at NYU may seem like it fits a very particular niche in the student demographic, but in reality it’s probably the one with the most diverse membership on campus. Otherkin are people who identify as partially or entirely non-human. When being non-human is the thing a group of people share, their differences start to become very obvious, and in some cases particularly polarizing. This is immediately evident to me when I attend my first OSA meeting.

The first thing I notice is the attire. Out of the dozen people sitting in the circle of chairs in a lecture hall, only I and two other people are dressed even remotely conventionally. One person, an enormous pink potato of a guy, has chains connecting his ear piercings to the ones on his blackened lips. His head is shaven, but there are metal spikes protruding from his skull which I’m pretty sure are surgically attached. He is outfitted in a cocoon of black leather and metal studs. Another is a girl in a blindfold wearing a tanktop and what look like swimming trunks. Her high heels, covered with dazzling purple sequins, shimmer as she kicks them back and forth. She is not wearing a bra and I can see the outlines of dark nipples pressed up against white fabric, but I’m not looking at her in a perverted kind of way–more like a critical way, attending to everything that isn’t quite normal or familiar. A third person, a redhead, appears to be completely naked, except that I realize he is wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit that hugs his form tightly, leaving only a few textures and wrinkles to the imagination. They all seem amicable enough as I take my seat and place my backpack under my chair.

“Welcome,” says the guy in the bodysuit, “to the fourth year of this chapter of the OSA.” He flashes a toothy grin as everyone else claps. “As most of you know, I’m Robert, your president. I’m a third year environmental toxicology major, and I identify as Y-Chromosomal Adam, the most recent common ancestor from whom all living humans are descended patrilineally.” He nods at the girl next to him, the one in the sparkly shoes. “Hacintha, you wanna go?”

She clears her throat and stands. “Uh, yeah. I’m Hacintha. Vice president. Fifth year CogSci. I identify as a gray langur, which is this monkey that typically comes from India, but I’m from Jersey actually. So yeah, that’s me. Next.”

It’s the guy with spikes coming out of his head. “Todd,” he says. He sounds like if you made Gilbert Gottfried swallow all of the helium out of a balloon. “Treasurer. Second year, also CogSci, with a double minor in Gothic literature and East African studies. Last year I was sort of a vampire slash pixie hybrid, but over the summer I found out that I’m really more of a vampire lycan sort of thing, so I still get all the telepathic advantages but I also get a boost during a full moon, which is pretty cool I guess.”

A few more people take their turns. I don’t remember their names very well, because I’ve never remembered names very well, but their identities stay locked in–a sperm whale, a coniferous tree, the moon–all people I can’t wait to talk to this year, people who’ll go on and on about all the crazy and interesting shit they’re into without ever once wishing me happy birthday.

I’m pretty pumped about all this, but then before I know it I’m the next one up, and a terrible realization dawns on me.

Rob and I make eye contact. “Looks like we have a new member this year.” I look out into the crowd. Pretty much everyone is smiling at me. “Why don’t you introduce yourself?” He gestures to me so I stand up.

Remember how I said I enjoyed not having to be the center of attention?

My legs quaver as I speak. “I’m Michael,” I say. “First year, undeclared, leaning towards either geology or biology. I’m…” I pause. Sometimes the hardest thing to say is that you have nothing to say at all. “I haven’t quite figured out what I identify as yet.”

No one speaks for a little while. Then: “What do you mean?” It’s Todd, and he suddenly looks very impatient.

I swallow hard. “I mean I didn’t realize I was otherkin until very recently, so I’m still doing… you know, research.”

Hacintha somehow manages to speak words of curiosity without her voice conveying even a hint of it. “Do you have any idea what you might be, then?”

“I was… no, not really. Not yet.”

And then Todd says something I was hoping to never hear here at the OSA. “Are you sure you belong here?” he asks in that grating, tinny voice of his.

“Of course he’s s’posed to be here,” one guy says. He’s one of the ones who’s dressed normally. Button-up shirt. Gray jeans. Asian, either Thai or something close to it. Long hair, but not quite to his shoulders. An altogether normal-looking guy, and my unlikely savior. “He knows what he’s not, and that’s the first step, right?”

Rob steps in as well. “Yeah, listen to Uk,” he says, glaring at Todd.

“Yeah, but does he know he knows what he’s not?”

“Do you know he doesn’t know what he’s not?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Todd stands up and points an indignant finger at Uk. “I know what I am.”

“Todd, you change what you ‘are’ every semester.”

“‘Cause I’m constantly finding out new things about myself.”

“Well, Michael is too,” Uk huffs, “and he has just as much of a right to be here as you.” Todd, defeated, waves off the debate. His leather chaps squeak abrasively as he returns to his seat. Everyone exchanges tense looks.

“Excuse me,” I say, and dart out of the room.

I find the nearest restroom and barricade myself in one of the stalls. I’ve already started crying. It’s one of those stupid cries, the ones where you’re mad at yourself for crying and it just makes you cry even harder. Angrily, stupidly, I sob on the toilet. The smell of shit and cheap bathroom soap burns my nostrils but I fight through it.

Then someone opens the door and I clasp my hands over my mouth. Whoever it is, they peer under the stall. Normally I’d think it’s pretty pervy of them but when I notice that it’s Uk I’m more embarrassed than anything. Wiping the stupid tears off my face I push open the stall door and now we’re face to face.

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry, I must look super creepy.”

“No, it’s fine.” I crack a smile. “Gotta go when you’ve gotta go.”

“I saw your shoes and I figured…” His voice trails off. My reddened eyes betray the whole story. “Look,” he says, “for a bunch of people who’ve been ostracized all their lives, some otherkin can real dicks. But once you get to know them they’re good people.”

“Yeah. I can tell.” I hesitate to say what’s on my mind but Uk gives me this look that seems to say he’s not going to talk again until I say it, so I do. “I don’t think I’m gonna get the chance to get to know them.”

“Michael, people–creatures–things, whatever you wanna call ‘em–like us, we need to stick together. You’re confused now. You’re disoriented because you’re in between identities, the same way people get stuck in between jobs. But that doesn’t mean you stay unemployed forever, right?”

Now I feel even more stupid, because even though I’m entering a world where I’m not expected to conform to gender roles I still feel incredibly emasculated by the fact that Uk is having to talk me through a good cry in a bathroom stall, but there’s something comforting about his words so I tell him I’ll see how things play out with the OSA.

“Good.” He beams at me. “Should we head back now?”

“Yeah, we should.”

“Awesome. And hey, don’t take Todd too seriously. You may wanna claw his eyes out sometime but it wouldn’t accomplish anything.” His gaze shifts around mock-warily, as if he’s checking to make sure no one’s listening. “That vampire hybrid thing? That’s just weird.”

I surprise myself by laughing. “And what about you?” I ask.

“Me? I’m a barred lenticular galaxy near the Horsehead Nebula.” He chuckles. “Way less weird than vampires.”

“Yeah, way less weird.” Somehow I feel closer to this peculiar galaxy than I’ve felt to anyone in my life, and somehow I’m not even freaked out.

 

It turns out Uk is right about the OSA. With him vouching for me, I’m able to break into some of the circles within the organization. They invite me to lunch at the campus Panera Bread after every meeting, impervious to the strange looks we get from passersby as we make rowdy conversation in our corner of the restaurant. These conversations let me deeper into their world, not only their Otherkin world but their personal worlds as well. Despite how they identify, most of the members have very normal, human agendas.

Hacintha works in a cognitive science lab on campus and is part of a dance crew in her free time. She talks about her history of sexual abuse nonchalantly, as though it’s a job she quit with a boss she wasn’t too fond of. Hacintha keeps up an aloof demeanor but when others talk I can see the light of empathy in her eyes, a constant pull towards something she can’t approach. I wonder about her but I can tell neither of us are the kind of people to do that thing people are into where they send each other little text messages saying “hey, are you okay?” or “need to talk?” So instead I watch her and let her watch me.

A girl named Puja, who believes she is the reincarnation of the titular beast of Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell, is an avid rock-climber on top of her linguistic studies. It is with her that I experience being black-out drunk for the first time. She’s there for the second and third times as well.

And Rob, our fearless leader, is well-known around the school as the poster child for the acclaimed musical theatre program. As the sole propagator of the human race, he takes a particular interest in its well-being, and every summer he and his family travel to developing countries to assist in humanitarian projects.

I remain wary of Todd, not just because he’s a fucking asshole but because he’s also probably a lot of other fucking bad things. This may just have arisen from my first impression of him, but there’s something off about him I can’t quite place, something voracious and predatory about his puffy cheeks and rancid body odor. I avoid talking to him when possible and am terse when I can’t. Except a part of me pities him greatly, as the other members of the group seem to hold him in a similarly low regard. Whenever we meet for lunch, he sits alone in a corner. He always brings in sandwiches with bread heels for both sides. He says they’re more nutritious that way. After a while I stop feeling guilty for thinking to myself that if he’s so concerned about his diet it certainly doesn’t show.

Uk and I begin to spend a lot of time together, and before long I know him a lot better than I know the people I actually live with. His family immigrated here from Micronesia when he was six. He speaks fluent Chuukese but he has virtually no accent except when he says certain words like “name,” which sounds more like “nem,” and “question,” which sounds like “quayschun.” He’s identified as a galaxy for nearly six years now. He has this idea in his head that one day he’ll shed his earthly shell and join his real body far away across the cosmos, an image I find unsightly and beautiful all at once. I’m drawn to him quite strongly and feel little compulsion to poeticize it. There are times where I read an entire chapter in a textbook and realize that all I’ve thought about is Uk; the words on the page haven’t registered at all. It’s just him and that funny way he’s able to tell me exactly what I need to hear even when I don’t want to hear it, which is refreshing to someone from a household well-versed in secrecy. Intimacy flourishes and comfort doesn’t waver. I am drawn to the galactic center like a fragment of space rock, hurtling haphazardly, aimlessly, out of control.

Now I guess I’ve gone and poeticized it.

The thing about the OSA is that they’re all these creatures and objects floating around this little space of ours, and even though they’re non-humans they still know they’re stuck inside human bodies, which is more important to them than you might think at first glance. And it shows. The reason people outside of these walls might call us freaks or delusional imbeciles is because they think we’re trying to escape from the world of human problems, but in reality we’re still dealing with them just as much as the next person. We’ve just got another set of parameters to fulfill, another source of worry and dissonance that underlies everything we do. At some point it’s hit me that, for a bunch of non-humans, we’re very good at being human.

 

With a little bit of Uk’s urging, I declare a double-major with an emphasis in paleontology at the beginning of my second semester. The machinations of evolution in a time all but removed from our own, anchored to us by no more than a thread of rocky corpses, have shown me the beauty I’ve long sought. I go to Uk’s house to tell him the good news. To celebrate we get very high–Uk’s roommate grows his own pot in his closet–and, after his roommate falls asleep on the couch, retire to Uk’s bed, where we talk for hours, so close to one another that our foreheads are touching. We talk about the OSA, Uk’s abusive biological father and my oblivious suburban parents, and Todd, of all people. By 5AM I’m too exhausted to remember the last two sentences of conversation, but my spirit is wide awake, and it drives me to be suddenly very forward in the ways I touch him, and I guess his spirit is awake too because he responds readily to my advances. Before I know it, we’re kissing, and then we’re somewhere else entirely, far away from any of the petty struggles of a miniscule planet.

His conductive plasma sears me to the pit of my stomach, tendrils of heat erupting forth to lick my skin. I am encased in the fires of a nebula in its infancy, bathed in its luminosity, close enough to its core that my flesh ought to burn off my bones and my bones ought to turn to stardust.

And yet I feel a lapse in presence.

The whole while, even through my pained-pleasured grunting, the myriad of sensations starting lower and moving upward, the hot skin against my hotter skin, my studies come to mind. In my research to discover my identity I’ve discovered my passion, but now, of all times, it occurs to me that maybe I found both.

In the midst of our union I become something else. But then, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it’s that I’m letting loose with something I’ve always been. In any case something changes, and the fingernails I drag down Uk’s back seem to become sharper. I begin to bite him, gently at first but then a little harder. He doesn’t reject it. I make noises too, strange noises that sound like something between a cough and a moan. He smiles at me and shuts his eyes tightly. I push him down onto the bed and survey my prey, stomping on deadly haunches, taking the raw flesh into my nose.

My hunger, my kill. My meal.

When it’s over we lie on our backs, exhausted. He struggles to roll over onto his shoulder so he can kiss me on the cheek. “That,” he heaves, “was outstanding.”

I laugh and take his hand into mine. “I’m glad you liked it.”

“I figured out what I was during my first time.” Uk’s fingers walk up and down my naked thigh like an arpeggio. “I get the feeling you have some idea of it now, too.”

I am very fortunate because Uk knows me better than anyone–far better than I know myself. Even without the words to say it he knows what I am.

 

“A dromaeosaurus?” Rob repeats. He isn’t incredulous but certainly intrigued. “What is that exactly?”

I look around at the only real friends I’ve made after four months at this school. I know that nothing I could say about the dromaeosaurus–its bite, three times stronger than a velociraptor’s; its slender, feathered frame; its wicked sickle claws on either foot–could be any stranger than certain facets of their identities, and yet it seems like I have something to prove with what I’m about to say, like I’m pitching the movie of me.

The next Jurassic Park, evidently.

So I paint them an extravagant picture of the beast, a tiny Late Cretaceous specialist, largely underrepresented in the fossil record but no less astounding for it. As I speak on my traits I begin to absorb them, even exhibit them. I feel the Campanian dirt beneath my vicious talons, smell the first angiosperms on the planet as they begin to flower. It is here that I realize I have made the right distinction; I’m no Todd who collects new abilities as though his identity is a choice. With such fervor I’m me, at long last. I’m me and only me.

And then Todd scoffs and says “You really just picked the first thing you saw, huh? Try harder next time.”

This is the discovery I’ve been pursuing all my life and just this once I’d like to have it happen without someone else telling me how misguided I am. And normally, even with Todd there to make me feel shitty about myself, I wouldn’t say anything. I’d just move on, ignoring the gout that’s on everyone’s mind.

Unfortunately for Todd, the dromaeosaurus in me is currently the dominant lifeform, and it doesn’t take kindly to any challenge to its authority. Relinquishing the human control that for a lifetime has done nothing but hinder me, I allow the thermals to carry me up high above his head and latch onto him, putting him into a screaming pile driver that brings him crashing down on his tailbone.

My kill.

I don’t know what comes over me. It could be the dinosaur within or the asshole without. Both are happy to make Todd extinct.

He shrieks and goes for my neck with sharpened teeth. I scratch at his face. My broken nails stream blood.

The whole room seems to fly into a panic. Todd scrambles to his feet and leaps backwards, spreading his arms like some kind of hideous S&M bat. I make a go at him and kick him in the stomach. A hundred million years ago it would’ve been the killing blow, but as the dromaeosaurus has evolved a higher conscience it has surrendered some of its lethality.

Todd’s knees buckle. He’s crying, stupidly crying, and I stupidly wonder if my counselor cried when she discovered I’d noticed the legs she’d worked so hard to keep covered. I wonder what the point was in my prying, why the truth was anything more than that to me.

I decide to stop fighting Todd but people are already pulling us away from each other now, not realizing that the fight’s already over. Uk is there holding me back. My anger has given way to shame and embarrassment. In a way I’ve proven Todd right, but I haven’t accomplished what I’d hoped. Whatever they show you in the movies, there’s no elegance in violence. There’s only the living and the dead. In my case, a creature who’s always been built for the hunt, I’m both living and dead, and not in the way Todd is. In this world, for all my kind’s hubris, I have become irrelevant.

I don’t even struggle against them. I feel the disappointment in their grip on me. It feels very familiar.

 

After my fiasco with Todd, Uk and I don’t have the same kinds of conversations we used to. We talk about Todd briefly, once, but it quickly dissolves into silence. All that’s left in our budding passion is desiccated now. I stop noticing the days pass and before I know it I’ve skipped two straight weeks of class. Uk does notice that, but when he confronts me about it I get angry, not angry the way I was with Todd but enough to say some things to him I really shouldn’t–stuff about his dad and his ridiculous plans to metamorphose into something that isn’t even sentient–and that kind of seals the deal. A million supernovas fade into darkness and I’m stuck here on Earth, a galaxy away.

The OSA, as far as I know, is still going strong, although I stopped attending a month ago because I figure it’d be disrespectful to Uk or Todd for me to be there, and anyway that’s one spotlight I don’t mind never seeing again. A part of my life feels hollow again, as if I’ve found something special but lost something that might have been even more special. It’s hard not to frame things that way when you realize your loneliness, which you always held in such high regard, has come back sourer than ever. It almost makes you wish someone would do something considerate for you without you even asking. Almost.

Then one day Hacintha calls me to meet up for lunch and asks me if I know where Uk’s been. I tell her I wouldn’t know and she takes the hint because she’s pretty intuitive about that kind of thing, like I said.

Later on I find out, through a police report they email to all the students, that Uk’s decided to take it on himself to reunite his spirit with the galaxy near the Horsehead Nebula, and the way he’s opted to do that is to overdose on his roommate’s prescription benzodiazepines.

The whole OSA comes to my door that day, with flowers and posters and iceboxes. Hacintha’s holding this big cake, and then it hits me that they’re not here to offer me consolation. They all yell “Happy birthday, Mike!” and throw handfuls of confetti up into the air.

I smile and invite them all in. Puja’s brought plenty of booze. Todd’s here too. He shakes my hand and we exchange a look whose meaning is lost on me and probably on him too but I think it’s one of respect. I don’t bother asking if they’ve heard the news because I know none of them have checked their emails or else they wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here today.

I’m sitting on the sofa with a bottle of nasty, skunked beer watching my roommate frown as he concentrates on his homework. Half of me feels bad for him, but the other half of me doesn’t know him well enough for that, so that half of me focuses on getting drunk. Hacintha takes a seat next to me and says “Have you checked your email today?” I nod. She looks at me very carefully. “Are you gonna be okay?”

Maybe these people are so off their fucking rockers that they’re actually cool with Uk killing himself, but I give them the benefit of the doubt and say “Yeah. Do they all…?”

She stares me dead in the eye and shakes her head. I notice she’s got gorgeous gray eyes; in fact, she’s really strikingly beautiful. Then that beauty begins to extend to every part of her, and much of it stems from something–I guess it must be pain–in her eyes that’s clearly visible because it’s so familiar to me, like hearing a recording of my own voice.

“Thanks,” I say, barely above a whisper while the room rocks with the drunken debauchery of a dozen collegiate otherkin. Hacintha raises her bottle up to clink with mine and rests her other hand on my knee

“I figured you needed some help.”