Survivors

I saved a man’s life once. When the world didn’t know me, when I believed myself to be weak, as did the world.

The world knew the man whose life I saved as Mark Miller, but he had wandered from any socially legible version of himself by the time we met. I found Mark at this bar called the Lucky Horseshoe, one of a handful of bars within a couple hours’ drive of Yellowstone’s West entrance. Park employees liked this spot best because tourists rarely showed, and I was there with three co-workers for a ‘Girls’ Night Out’ that I longed to flee.

Mark was at the far end of the bar from us, making a ruckus with the pool crowd. He was a middle-aged, paunchy white guy in need of a shave, with wrinkled and raggedy clothes and no attractive features that would have suggested to my friends a reason for ditching them. But his rowdy attitude and macho confidence drew me in, and when I spontaneously introduced myself to him as Luke, he glanced at my ponytail but asked no follow-up questions, my true name falling from his mouth without hesitation when it was my turn to shoot stripes.

“Good game, Luke!” Another man calling me by name: my body flooded with the same chemical response I got from my first kiss. I’d lost the game, but it didn’t matter. “Better luck next time, huh? Hey, the night’s young, this place seems dead, you wanna get out of here? Go bar-hopping, shake the prairie until some adventure falls out?” He bounced on the balls of his feet, thumb rubbing over the green chalked tip of the pool cue, giving no indication that he realized his request was a strange one, given that this part of Montana lacked the civilization to support more than one bar per distant town.

“Sure. I’m sober, I don’t mind driving.” I kept my words nonchalant but inside, I was glowing. I knew already that I’d do whatever it took to match his spontaneous spirit, regardless of his restless tics or the holes in his canvas jacket. I loved the idea of hitting the open road together, whether or not we found another watering hole. I wanted to hear him say my name again, and again, like the affirmation in his voice could make my chest sprout hair, my biceps grow strong, shrink down my breasts until they disappeared. Until I was just another rural Mexican guy, a cowboy hat appearing spontaneously on my head, a charro, a possible subject for a corrido.

My friends objected not only to my ditching them, but to the danger of leaving with a strange man. I feigned innocence about their worried implications. I had already determined to be unafraid of him.

“Will you at least call us when you get home? Please, Lucy?” My most cloying co-worker, Rachel, held my baggy shirt sleeve pinched between her fingers, like a child who doesn’t want her mother to leave. She was close enough that I could smell her sickly-sweet shampoo, and I fought the urge to recoil and shove her off. I wanted to insist I could handle myself, that if the worst-case scenario happened and Mark attacked me, I could handle that too. I cared more about posturing bravery than I did about any danger that might have been present. Prioritizing my safety would require acquiescing to my body, shaped like a victim’s body, looking like the kind of body that shouldn’t travel down dark alleys or leave with strange men.

I frequently had nightmares that involved struggling with a faceless threatening man who’d laugh at my helplessness and then overpower me. I never managed to fight back. Instead, I would pull back my fist only to find all my limbs frozen, my arm unable to command force to hit back. At this point I would always wake up. I was never beaten or raped in these dreams; the assault hovered outside the frame, my weakness the real horror.

I stepped back and away from Rachel, giving her my chirpiest “Of course I will!” Then I turned and left, ignoring her calling the name she thought was mine. I hated the dysphoric reminder that I had a female body, and that I couldn’t sidestep the humiliations that all others born with this body insisted were my birthright. I hated my theoretical friends, for accepting the lie of Lucia, for the constant reminder of my prison via inclusion in their sisterhood.

I didn’t use to hate girl friends for being themselves. I used to hate only myself, without ever understanding why. I was a self-injurious kid, at turns anorexic and bulimic, and precocious when it came to scissoring my wrists. I tried to kill myself in college, resulting in a month-long stay in a mental hospital. I wouldn’t wish involuntary commitment on anyone, but all those long hours kept inside, suffering through group activities, swallowing pills from paper cups and playing checkers with the only friendly orderly, allowed long skeins of truth to unspool in my mind. Or maybe it was the psycho-affective drugs providing some mental clarity. Maybe it was the passage of time, which warped while I was inside. By the middle of that month, I’d realized that although I now possessed the crumb of a desire to live, I still loathed myself for failing at suicide. Why? Because a higher percentage of suicide attempts by women fail than do those by men. And why did I hate to be a part of this statistic? Because it reminded me that I was a woman, which was the whole reason I’d wanted to die in the first place.

By the time I was discharged to the care of my parents in Bozeman, I knew myself to be a man and I’d even chosen the name Luke. I never breathed a word of this to any of the doctors inside, too scared that Transsexualwould be inscribed in my medical records or whispered to my parents, to whom my girlhood mattered so very much. Under no circumstances could I begin any gender transition while I lived under their roof.

Although they required me to live according to their upstanding Mexican, Catholic values–they spoke to me in gendered Spanish, my mother enlisted my help with cooking, I wore my best dress each Sunday to accept the body of Christ melting on my tongue–my parents did sympathize with my desire for independence. My doctors had advised against my returning to school, and Bozeman had no jobs that might have paid enough to rent my own place. My parents proposed that I move two hours away to work in Yellowstone National Park, at least for the summer. The park had employee dormitories, so I could live and work in a beautiful environment, and the steady routine would be good for my mental health. I hoped that leaving home would be a start, that if I got out of Bozeman, even if it was only for the nearest tourist destination, I might find an opening, some path that I could follow to transition.

But Yellowstone did not deliver me. I was still in Montana and could not see any way to approach changing genders when I lived in a dormitory in the middle of nowhere, rooming with my co-workers so that we all saw too much of each other. The continued bottling of my desires made me grimace at every misgendering and glower over every innocent sorting of me, the constant failure to hear the words I couldn’t speak. I berated myself for being unfair to my clueless colleagues, but this did little to keep my frustration in check. For years I had been asleep, and now I was wide awake but still powerless to act.

So, I dismissed my concerned work besties and followed Mark outside. On the mantle above the bar’s doorway, a horseshoe was nailed to the wall; as he left, Mark reached up and tapped it twice, for luck.

The sun set in the rearview mirror as I drove us through the golden desolation of rural Montana, with its rolling brown grasslands turning purple in the twilight, jagged mountains forming inky silhouettes in the distance. Ostensibly our quest was to find another bar, but Mark seemed content to sit in my passenger seat and talk. He spoke in word waterfalls, gushing forth about the childhood he’d spent hiding from one parent or the other, and the refuge he’d found in books and television and cheesy movie musicals. I learned that Mark’s abusive, elusive parents were dead, and that he had one sister and a daughter, both almost totally estranged. He was a more recent patient of the same mental hospital where I’d stayed, though because this was the region’s only public hospital with a psych ward, he didn’t live anywhere near Bozeman.

“Oh, yeah? What was your favorite food there?” Mark asked when I admitted that I knew of the psych ward from personal experience.

I answered without hesitation. “The chocolate pudding. I could barely choke down everything else, but the pudding slapped.”

He threw back his head and laughed, reaching out the open passenger window to hit the side of my car. “I knew you were going to say that! I knew it, oh man, I don’t know what they put in that pudding, but I would steal as much of it as I could, every damn day. The only good thing about that place. Pudding from the store just isn’t the same!”

His daughter had visited him there only once throughout his six-week stay and had refused to let him live with her upon his release. (He didn’t say where he was living instead.) Over the years he’d received many diagnoses for his mind troubles, but the most consistent, most recently confirmed diagnosis was bipolar depression, and (this he did not say, but I connected the dots) on the night I met him he was in the midst of a manic upswing, with a depressed downswing certain to come.

I enjoyed listening to him ramble, and had no desire to fight him for half the conversation or share my own life story. It was enough that he accepted me as Luke. I did not want to open myself up for questioning, nor break the spell by explaining Luke to him. It was better to be a mysterious stranger. We were simply two men, jostled together by chance, piloting our way through the mountain west and bonding on the open road.

Our journey took us to two more bars, and in the parking lot of the second he changed course after learning that I worked at Yellowstone. “So that means you can get me in there for free, right? Even after dark? Let’s go tonight, like right now! And, and get out there to the middle of it and look up at the stars!” He’d been leaning one shoulder against my car’s passenger side, and now he rolled over so his back half-sprawled against the windows, his chin wagging up at the sky as he gurgled, “Wow.”

I suspected him of acting drunker than he actually was, and I doubted this Yellowstone suggestion was as spontaneous as he projected it to be. Still, he made me laugh and I wasn’t yet tired, still game for the adventure. Above us, the moon was new and the sky was clear. He was right about it being a perfect night for stargazing.

I took him through Yellowstone’s West entrance, and we drove towards Old Faithful in the park’s center. Mark had quieted down, staring out the window and giving me one-word answers when I tried to get him talking again. The unique geothermal landscape, so majestic when the sun was out, was manifest only as black nothingness beyond the lights on the road.

“Here, turn off here,” Mark said, abruptly pointing to the right. He’d mentioned no destination before, and this was so specific, a turn-off for the mud pots trail. Not the most obvious choice for stargazing, but he insisted, so I took the turn. The parking lot for the trail itself was closed, the gate padlocked shut.

“There’s nowhere here to sit, let’s find somewhere else.” I slowed to a stop, but Mark moved faster than he had all night, unclasping his seat belt and escaping the car. I yanked my emergency brake and ran after him, but he’d jumped the gate and started up the unlit trail.

“What are you doing, stop!” I reached Mark and grabbed him by the arm, my breath jumping in my throat as the trail’s sulfuric miracles hit my nose. “You can’t hike here at night, it’s unsafe.”

Mark tried to dislodge me, but I held on to his jacket sleeve. I attempted to drag him back to the car, and we stumbled. The cutely named “mud pots” along this trail referred to pools of boiling hot water so acidic that they dissolved rock into liquid sludge. These mud pools stank of rotten eggs and appeared the same color as the dirt around them, making it easy to step from solid ground into a calescent demise. The elevated boardwalks kept hikers at a safe distance from death, but nothing was roped or gated off, and the ground beneath the boardwalk trail was made of crumbling, slippery mineral formations crusted over wobbling rocks. At night walking anywhere near this trail meant risking your life.

“You don’t have to give me your safety talk, Ranger Luke. I’m well aware.” A tooth-baring grimace spread over his face as Mark looked past me at the gurgling pools, the edges of each popped mud blister glinting in the starlight before melting back into the invisible surface. “My last visit here gave me a souvenir.”

Illuminated by my car’s headlights, he yanked his arm free of my grip, unzipped his jacket and dragged up his shirt to show skin. Starting just below his collarbone, the surface of his chest was all scar tissue, lumpen and shiny and hairless and pink.

“I’ll spare you the rest, but it goes all the way down, a full body skin graft,” he said, cheeks rounding his face into a horrible grin. “Didn’t I mention that I used to work here?”

“You left that out.” I met his eyes and hoped my face betrayed no horror. My friends may have been right about my safety with this man. “Why this trail, what are we doing here?”

“I’m getting to that! Excuse my dramatic flair.” He smoothed down his shirt, then looked past me at the mud pots.

“I worked here the summer before college, with some of my high school buddies. We didn’t do much of the work part of our jobs, but we had some amazing adventures on our downtime. We explored all over the park. We skinny-dipped in mountain lakes, got lost more times than I can count, had a close call with a bear…” He chuckled in reminiscence. I said nothing. I was familiar with his type, the outdoorsy rich kids who worked here as a lark. They tended to be idiot slackers, making more work for the rest of us without even realizing it. “One night we were taking a shortcut to get back to the dorm. We weren’t walking on any trail, so we didn’t realize how close we were to the mud pots. There were four of us, walking single file, and I was second to last. Teenagers, you know? I never thought of the risk, I had no concept that, that anything bad might ever happen to me.”

He pressed his knuckles to his mouth, then gathered himself and met my eyes. I looked calmly back, holding in a shudder. Dread made my limbs feel like taut cables.

“My friends ahead of me slipped and fell into a mud pool. They were both submerged before anyone could even shout. I was lucky: I’d seen them slip a half-second before me, so I had time to react – I still fell in, but my head and shoulders stayed out, out of the mud. My friend Sarah was behind me, and she didn’t fall in and she managed to drag me out and then she got help. I got to live, with my skin grafts. The two in front, Manny and Jake, two of my best friends since we were all in Little League. Boiled alive and then dissolved in acidic mud.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.” I hated my thin, quavering words, but what else could I say? I wanted to be sick. Falling into a mud pot up to his chest meant that he’d survived a boiling slurry melting through his clothes, skin, and muscle tissue. Dozens of people died in Yellowstone every year, despite the intensive safety training that every ranger had to sit through. The unforgiving deadliness of this place, an ecosystem where grizzly bears and wolf packs lived alongside geysers that shot up from the depths of hell, was part of its enduring appeal. But I’d never known anyone with a story remotely as gruesome as this.

Mark sniffed loudly, wiping a thumb under his eyes. “This is the first time I’ve been back. Couldn’t stomach visiting in the daytime, with all the tourists, I never had the courage. But I’m 48 now and, and…” His head lolled back on his neck, and now I could see the edges of scar tissue above his dirty shirt collar. He moaned, a low musical sound like an animal in pain. “I see it now. I see it, the facts, the facts are: nothing I’ve done in 48 years has given me a reason for why I got to live. I’ve tried! All the medications, the doctors, having my daughter, she’ll just be better off without me, I’ve tried living long enough and I’ve tried dying other ways, nothing took, I always lived, but now! Now it’s time! Here is the only place, the only way!”

His sudden shouts grew megaphone-loud in the deep quiet of the park’s night. I jumped at the volume, but he didn’t notice. He might not have seen me through the tears streaming down his face as he stared at the sizzling mud up the trail. My body had kicked into fight or flight, and I knew it would likely be a fight to keep Mark from killing himself. He’d guided me here, planned this for at least the past few hours—maybe he’d planned it since noticing I was a park employee, in that first bar. Despite his manipulation, a perverse part of me, the part that still located masculinity in the death drive, admired his confidence in attempting to do this with an audience. But I couldn’t let him boil himself alive. As trapped as I was in my own situation, as embarrassed as I still sometimes felt at the impotence of my own suicide attempts, on most days I managed a grudging gratitude for the continued function of my heart and lungs, and death offered little temptation. I barely knew Mark, but I believed that he might make peace with survival if I could get him through this moment. But he was bigger and older than me, and I didn’t like my chances.

“Don’t be so dramatic, come on, let’s go back to the car and think it through.” I tried to herd him in the right direction, thinking he was drunk enough that this might work. Mark let me touch his shoulders and usher him back a few steps, but then he pushedme and broke away. I stumbled, but didn’t fall, and then broke into a dead run to catch him, tackling him hard to the ground. I didn’t know how far we were from the mud pools, but I could hear their spitting bubbles.

I fought him hard. One of his blows glanced off my face and I tried to block the rest. I threw punches back,but the angle was awkward. Mostly we wrestled, scrabbling at each other on the rocky ground. He attempted to throw me off, but I used dirty tricks to keep my hold, yanking his hair and kneeing him in the groin as he howled, bucking beneath me. I was terrified that I’d accidentally roll both of us into a sulfuric pool, and the fear lent me brute strength as I knocked him down hard enough that he hit his head on a rock and went limp, groaning.

I checked the back of his head for blood and, relieved to find none, fell to one elbow on the ground, trembling from adrenaline’s aftermath. The night around me was so still, and the sky so full of stars. My breaths came longer and quieter, and Mark remained still. I’d kept him alive.

I smiled. Then I laughed, trembling, slumped with exhaustion as my chest filled with elation. Elated that this night hadn’t ended with death—Mark’s, my own, both of ours. But beyond that I felt proud. Victorious, as if I’d stepped out of my old role and crossed over, become not just an invisible prisoner to expectations but a person whose actions had an impact. For the first time I felt that the world’s perception didn’t matter, that no outside gaze would determine my future. My real self, that man who answered only to Luke, had come through when it mattered. I didn’t have words for it then but with my knees torn up by the gravel and bruises on my jaw waiting to color, I understood how much Luke deserved to live as himself. The smell of sulfur and the stars overhead promised that he would.

Dragging Mark back to my car, and then getting him into the passenger seat, took more of my strength than the fight itself. I kept waiting for him to wake up and struggle, but he didn’t come to until we were back on the highway, and at first, he didn’t remember who I was or where he was. I tried to explain, but then he began sobbing, big heaving ugly sounds that only got louder when he slapped one meaty hand over his mouth. He doubled over himself, his body too big for my car, my glove compartment compressing his grief. I took my hand off the gearshift and touched his shoulder.

“I have to take you back to the hospital. I’m sorry.” I spoke with a conviction I didn’t feel. Taking him back to the one public psych ward in the state felt monstrous, considering what I’d do to anyone who tried to force me back there myself. Yet I knew he couldn’t afford a private option (and if he could, would a nicer imprisonment do anything for him, or would it just make me feel better?). If I took him to a different hospital, one without a psych ward, they’d hold him for 72 hours at most and then discharge him, perhaps with a referral to a psychiatrist or therapist that he’d never call. I felt connected to him, this older white man whose mind was tortured like my own used to be, who’d accepted me in ways my own family never would. But I couldn’t offer to take him home with me—aside from the problem of my living in a communal dormitory, I lived in the same park that he saw as a method of self-execution. I couldn’t pay for his long-term care.

Mark sat up to look at me, his face still a mess of snot and tears. “You don’t have to do that. Just drop me off at the nearest gas station instead, and I’ll be fine, really. You don’t want to go to that hospital. It’s four hours from here! And then once you admit me, they’ll keep you there for hours more, you’ll have to fill out forms and everything, they’ll want to list you as my emergency contact. Such a hassle! Right?” He sniffed and gave me a bright smile, showing a glimmer of the good cheer and assurance that drew me to him in the first place.

I smiled back, not as bright. “What will you do next if I just drop you off?”

“I’ll…” He looked out the window, and all I could see was his dirty hair and his ear and the side of his neck as it reddened. “I’ll be a good, stand-up citizen. No hurting myself. I promise. I swear.”

I said nothing. I felt trapped by the white, American logic of: this stranger is not your problem, you have no obligation here despite the empathy in your heart, you must do the thing that makes the most rational sense and then put this episode behind you.

“You know what it’s like there,” he said, still turned from me. “I’d rather die than go back.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “That much is obvious.”

This got me a glance and an almost-laugh. I wanted to say that I’d rather take him anywhere else than that hospital, but if he had any friends or family that I could trust with his life, he wouldn’t be in a stranger’s car. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

“You shouldn’t say that if you don’t mean it,” Mark retorted. He let his head fall till it thunked against the window and didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the drive. Four long hours. I felt too guilty to turn on music, and every time it occurred to me to try and start a conversation, one glance at his stony, tear-streaked face made me shut my mouth.

The sky was lightening in the east by the time we reached the hospital compound. Mark sat up straight and stared ahead at the entrance to the emergency room, his left eye twitching before his face became a blank mask.

I stalled at the turn-off for the road that would take us up to those doors. The steering wheel wiggled in my hands, shifting the wheels right—toward the emergency room—then left—toward an unwise decision. Toward inviting an unstable person further into my life. Toward accepting this responsibility that no one could blame me for rejecting.

Mark twisted to look at me but remained silent. I met his eyes and saw confusion there, and behind that a cautious hope. I had saved his life, hadn’t I? said his eyes. Could he maybe trust me still further? Could he trust me to do more than deliver him back into purgatory?

I cranked the steering wheel to the left and pressed down the gas pedal. The engine rumbled over the highway’s on-ramp, and we put the hospital in our rearview mirror, smaller and smaller, blipping out of sight.

Then I spoke. “No chocolate pudding for you tonight.”

He coughed. “I’ll survive without it. What now? Where to, buckaroo?”

I bit back a smile at the ghost of his former joviality. “My tank is almost empty. So’s my stomach. Let’s find a gas station that has a McDonald’s. It’s almost 6am, they’ll havebreakfast.”

“Roger that.” He gave me an actual salute, and laughed for the first time since I’d ruined his suicide attempt. I laughed too. The interstate’s two lanes stretched out almost empty past the hoodof my car, and a wide band of eastern sunlight [MD1] [CM2] encroached on the shadowed grasslands to our left. Hills rose into mountains on the horizon, but ahead was a straight and flat road. I did not know what came after breakfast, but we owed each other more than nothing.