Third Person

We reconvened in the living room, Amanda and Phillip sitting close together on the couch, me across from them in the chair. I stared at my husband and this girl. I didn't believe them yet, I don't think. I'm not sure of the moment when I came to accept my husband's unique nature. It was probably later that night, when I realized that the deception was even less probable than the actuality. Why would anyone conspire to pull something like this off? What I was being told was impossible, but it was easier to believe as the truth than as a lie.

The three of us, or two of us I suppose, looked at each other for a long time before anyone spoke.

"Tell me," I finally demanded.

"OK," Amanda began. "It started when I was a little girl. This was my . . ."

"I don't want to hear it from you," I snapped. "I want to hear it from him."

They fixed me with identical expressions of frustration.

"It's me either way," Phillip said. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," I said. "You're the one I married."

"OK," Phillip said. "Fine. It started when I was a little girl . . ."

I let out a little scream.

"I was a girl first," Phillip said. "I told you that."

"Yeah," I said, holding my head. "Whatever. Go on."

"This was my house," Phillip began. "By that, I mean it was Amanda's house. It did belong to my parents, but I was their daughter."

"This is so confusing."

"Let me tell it this way," Amanda said. "It'll be less awkward."

I nodded and closed my eyes.

"I lived here," Amanda continued. "Me and my mom and dad. Phillip was our neighbor. He lived in that house across the alleyway. The yellow one."

"Wait," I said. "Phillip was . . . somebody else?"

"Just listen, Heather," Amanda said. "It'll make sense. Phillip was my best friend. I was five and he was twelve, but he was kind of slow, like retarded, I guess. Even though he was a lot older, we were really about on the same level. He came over and we played every day that I didn't have school. I think my parents were a little worried, you know, this boy was hitting puberty and they were afraid that he'd . . . you know, molest me or something. But all you had to do was talk to him for five minutes and you'd see that he wouldn't hurt anybody. He was the gentlest, sweetest person I've ever known. He cried when he stepped on a bug."

"That's why . . ." Amanda gulped. Her eyes were rimmed with tears. "That's why it was so evil what they did to him. His parents, his father, I guess it was, beat him. I mean, severely beat him. Every day he'd come over, he'd have bruises, cuts, burns. They burned him! With cigarettes. The body still has some scars. I know you've seen them."

I nodded. There were marks all over Phillip's back and chest, and even a few on his face. When I'd ask about these, he'd always tell me some funny story about Boy Scout camp or something. I motioned for Amanda to continue.

"They even broke his arm once. I'd ask him about it, and he always told me what happened. He'd swear me to secrecy, but he told me everything. I was just five, Heather. I didn't really understand. I mean, I understood, but I couldn't grasp how horrible it was. If I did, I would have told my parents and they could have called the police, and Phillip would still be alive."

"But . . ." I started to protest.

"Heather," Amanda said. She patted Phillip on the shoulder. Phillip was just sitting there, glassy-eyed and vacant. "This isn't Phillip. Phillip is dead. This is me. I just go by the name Phillip when I'm in his body."

I shook my head violently, trying to clear it.

"I know," Amanda said sympathetically. "This has to be difficult for you. But let me finish, OK?"

"OK."

"So I kept it a secret. I didn't tell anyone, not even after. See, it was summertime, and we played together every day. Then one day, he didn't come over. He didn't come over the next day, either. Then on the third day . . ."

Amanda was crying now. Tears were falling from Phillip's eyes as well. "He came over and he was bleeding real bad. From his head. The side was all bashed in. His dad hit him in the head with a hammer."

Phillip leaned forward and parted his hair to show me the scar, a swollen red patch of scalp. I had seen it before and wondered about it, but had never asked Phillip where it had come from.

"He said, 'Mandy.' He called me Mandy. 'Mandy, hide me. He wants to kill me.'"

"Heather, it was horrible," Amanda sobbed. "I was five. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to tell my mom and dad, but Phillip begged me not to. He was afraid that they'd just make him go back to his father. So I hid him. In the attic."

"My grandpa was the one who sealed off those rooms up there. He was a real eccentric guy, he wanted a place to hide out if the government ever came looking for him. He wasn't a gangster or anything, he was just paranoid. My parents had shown me the room, but nobody ever went up there. So I snuck Phillip up the back stairs, and I hid him. For days. I brought him food and water. I found my old training toilet and he went to the bathroom in that and I snuck it back downstairs to clean it out."

"Then . . . he died. I went up to check on him and he wasn't breathing. I was old enough to know what that meant. I lay down in bed next to him and I put his arm around me and I cried and cried."

"That's the first time it happened. I felt this weird sensation, like I was slipping away out of myself. I thought it was just sadness, so I let it happen. Then I was looking out of his eyes, not my own."

"I wasn't scared. I remember that. I was just . . . curious. I was so young, I didn't know that what had happened was strange. It made sense to me, that if someone was dead, you could go inside of them. His body was empty, so I just went in and filled it up."

"I looked down at my own body and saw that it was dead. I still wasn't scared, though. I knew I could go back whenever I wanted to. I only stayed in for a couple of minutes, because the head still hurt pretty bad. I remember, I just stood up and went to look out the window, then lay back down and went into my own body again."

"I left him up there. This might seem strange, but I forgot all about him. For years. I remember there was a big deal about Phillip being missing. His picture was in the newspaper, his parents were on TV, everyone thought he'd been kidnapped. My parents were worried about me, because he was my friend, but I wasn't upset at all. I forgot that he was in our attic, but part of me still knew, so I wasn't worried."

"Phillip's parents eventually moved away and I didn't think about him at all for a long time."

"I didn't get my first period until I was eighteen. My parents took me to all kinds of doctors, but none of them could figure out what was wrong with me. I just kind of figured it would never happen, you know? Then one morning, I saw blood on my underwear. I was so relieved that I was normal after all. But, this is the weird part. The blood reminded me of Phillip's blood and the whole thing came flooding back to me all at once. I remembered everything. I didn't know if it was real or not, though. Did you ever have a dream when you were real young that you remembered years later, but you couldn't tell if it was a dream or a memory?"

I nodded absently, just wanting Amanda to continue.

"Well, it was like that. I didn't know if Phillip being in the attic was a dream I had when I was five, or something that really happened. I wasn't even sure if the secret room was real, or if that was a dream, too. I hardly ever went up into the attic, because I was scared of it. I thought it was haunted. Just like you."

"My parents weren't home that day. I went into the bathroom and got one of my mom's maxi pads, and then I went upstairs."

"It was scary, and it was weird. Going up there, knowing what I was going to find, but knowing that it was impossible."

"I know the feeling," I put in.

Amanda smiled at me. "Yeah, it must have been almost the same for you, huh? Anyway, I found the trap door in the attic, right where I knew it would be, and then I went into the room."

"I had thought that if he was up there at all, if the memory was real, he'd be just a skeleton by now. But he wasn't. He just looked like he was sleeping, even though he wasn't breathing and didn't have a pulse. He'd aged, though. I guess he would have been about twenty-five. He was still dressed in the same clothes he'd died in, but he'd grown through them. Just burst right out of them. They were rags, hanging off of him."

"I inspected the body pretty carefully. I mean, I was at the age where . . . I was curious, you know? I was a virgin; I'd never even had a real boyfriend. And here was a naked man's body that I could just look at as long as I wanted to. All that hair, and his penis . . . it looked so big. It was like a weird alien thing attached to his body. I was fascinated."

"Then I remembered how I had gone into the body when he first died. I knew that had to be a dream, but I tried it anyway. I lay down on his chest and the same thing happened. I went into him, and I was him. Just like before, I looked down at my own body, but this time . . ."

Amanda laughed. "I lost my virginity that day. To myself. It was . . . amazing. It's like masturbation only instead of your hand, you've got a whole man's body which you control, and you can feel everything that both bodies feel."

"When I finally went downstairs, I felt like I was crazy. Not to mention the guilt, the shame, the fear. Jesus, I was a basket case. My mom and dad came home and they could tell how freaked out I was. They put it down to me just being rattled about finally starting my period, but they knew it was more than that. I mean, I could barely talk, I was so freaked."

"I went upstairs a lot after that, to fuck my own brains out. It was so good while I was up there, but when I came down it seemed like nothing was real. Up there, in the room, with Phillip, seemed real. But going to school, being with my parents, that seemed like the dream. So, needless to say, I was sort of fucked-up. My grades went south. I started to get into trouble a lot. I stopped talking to my friends. Totally the opposite of how I was before."

"My parents put me in therapy, of course. And, of course, I knew I couldn't tell my therapist about going up to the attic. Or, wait, you know actually I did tell her about it. Only I said it was a recurring dream. The therapist, she was convinced that Phillip had molested me when I was younger and that's why I was having these dreams." Amanda laughed. "I wanted to tell her the truth, just to see the look on her face, but I knew she'd probably lock me up."

"I think my problem was, I was living in two worlds. Because they were separate, it was like I couldn't believe that they could both be real. So, one day, I tried something I had never done before. I went out into the world as Phillip. I bought some clothes, and then I left my own body up in the attic and went down the back stairs as a man."

"I just walked around town, but it was the strangest experience. I was convinced that everyone could see through me, like I was wearing a disguise. I went into a men's room and nobody threw me out. I pissed standing up at a urinal, and I was laughing the whole time at my own audacity."

"After that it was better. I knew I wasn't crazy. The two worlds had been reconciled, and they were both real. I started to act a little more normal. There were still occasional problems. Like when my parents wouldn't leave me alone long enough to sneak upstairs. It was so frustrating. It had become like a drug and I needed to fix up at least once a day. Plus, I turned into kind of a slut. Sex with Phillip's body was great, but it made me want to find out what it would be like with another person, you know? Like there was something missing. I was using another body, but I was still essentially touching myself. I wanted to be touched by someone else. But none of the guys I was with in high school did much for me at all. Either they were fumbling and awkward or they were selfish. Either they were too rough or too soft. None of them could do half of what I could do myself with Phillip."

"Then, when I was nineteen, my parents died. I already told you about that. They were going to visit my grandparents, my mom's mom and dad, in Chicago. The plane crashed. It was terrible. I was suddenly all alone. I inherited it all. The house, two cars, some property in town, a pretty fair amount of money. Luckily, my parents had put together a will."

"I realized then how much freedom I had. I could do anything I wanted to. I was out of high school, I had money, I even had the choice of living as a man or a woman. Or both. So, the first thing I did was to find this guy who made a fake birth certificate and social security card for Phillip. With those, I got him a real driver's license. Now Phillip was a real person. I decided to enroll in college as Phillip, to try living as a man. I took this body with me, of course. I have to be able to switch, otherwise I would lose my mind. But I was first, foremost, predominantly Phillip."

"At college, I went a little crazy. I mean, who doesn't? I wanted to try every new experience I could. Sex, drugs, you name it. Only with me, it was doubled, because I had to try everything twice. As Phillip and as Amanda. The sex was the main thing. I had to know. Now that my gender was pretty ambiguous, my sexuality was up for grabs. I had to try being with both men and women, both as a man and as a woman. I told you about my homosexual experimentation as Phillip, didn't I?"

I nodded, the question meaningless to me, framed as it was from Amanda.

"Yeah, well I found out that I preferred women, no matter which body I was in. Does that mean I would have been a lesbian had things gone more normally? I don't know. It was all pretty screwed up. Anyway, that's when I met you."

I shivered as the memory came back to me, inverted now in this new context. We had met at a party. It was winter time, and my car got stuck in the driveway. Phillip helped me get it out. He called me the next day and asked me out. I said no. He ran into me at a bar a couple weeks later and asked me again. That time I said yes. There was something about him, I remember, something below the surface. When he looked at me, it was like he was seeing through me, like he had some understanding of me. Kind of a feminine quality, too. Before he asked me out, I thought he was gay. All these first impressions came back to me now, making new sense.

"I knew right away," Amanda said. I tried to tell myself that these were Phillips words, coming from her lips, but I wasn't at the point where this concept came easily to me. Not yet. "I loved you from the first time I saw you. And when I saw that you were falling in love with me . . . I was so torn, Heather. I wanted you completely, but I could only have you with half of myself. That was hard. I wanted to tell you. So bad, Heather. The night I proposed to you . . ."

"Wait," I interrupted. "I'm sorry, but you didn't propose to me. He did."

Amanda nodded thoughtfully, and then slumped over. Phillip came alive again.

"Yeah, I guess I should tell you the rest like this," he said.

"What about the night you proposed?" I said, wanting to cry now. This was one of my most precious memories, and I didn't want it to be ruined with this new information.

"I almost told you that night. The Amanda body was in the closet. Remember when I went out of the room for so long?"

"You told me you were trying to work up the nerve to ask me."

"I was," said Phillip. "But I was also trying to work up the nerve to tell you about . . . me. What I am. I couldn't do it then. I knew you'd probably just run screaming."

"I probably would have," I said, then regretted it. A look of hurt flashed across Phillip's face.

He nodded. "I felt cowardly for not telling you. The night before the wedding, I almost told you again. You remember?"

"You said, 'there's something I have to tell you that might make a difference in the way you feel, that you should know before the wedding.'"

"I chickened out again," Phillip said. "I just said that I'd had sex with a man and pretended like I was all ashamed of it."

"And I said that it didn't matter who you were or what you did before."

"Yeah," Phillip said. "But I thought you might think differently if you knew about this."

I closed my eyes and asked myself if it would have made a difference. I had no answer for that.

"For three years I lived with this secret," Phillip said. "For a long time, I just left my real body upstairs and tried to live only as Phillip. That was hard, but if that was the price I had to pay to be with you, I was willing to do it. I didn't go into my own body for over a year."

"I started to forget, Heather. It was like when I was younger, and I forgot all about Phillip. I started to forget my own self, Heather. That body upstairs was me, what I was born into, and every day I was away from it made it seem more and more like a dream. I had memories about growing up as a girl, but I even started to doubt those. I felt like I was losing my mind again."

"So I started to go out as Amanda again. You know, all those book-buying trips to Sedona and Flagstaff? I went as Amanda, left Phillip upstairs. Then I would come home and switch bodies, and you never knew the difference. But, Heather, I felt like I was deceiving you. It was like having an affair."

"Did you?" I asked.

"Did I what?"

"Have an affair. As Amanda. Did you ever sleep with anybody when you went out as her?"

"No," Phillip insisted. "Just because I wasn't in the body you married, that didn't mean that I could do that to you. You would have no way of knowing, but I would."

"Did you ever fuck Amanda when you were Phillip?"

Phillip hesitated before answering that one. "Yes."

"You . . ." I began, not having any idea what I was feeling, just knowing that it was strong.

"It's just like when you caught me jerking off," Phillip said. "That didn't make you mad. You just laughed."

"It's different," I said. "You had sex with another woman."

"But the woman is me. I am the woman. It's . . . Jesus, this is hard to explain."

"OK," I said. "Forget about that. What prompted you to come to me as Amanda?"

"I needed to, Heather," he said. "It's like I said. I feel like I'm only giving half myself to you. I wanted you to have the whole thing. I thought it would be easier for you to accept it, if I came to you like that. If you met Amanda and made love to her."

He smiled. "That's why it always turned me on so much when you talked about being with other women. Because it meant that I had a chance. Still, it took me forever to work up the nerve. I had no idea if you would go for me or not. Then, when you did . . . I was so happy. I hadn't been then that happy since the day we were married."

"I was on the verge of telling you so many times. I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know if it would be better to tell you as Phillip or as Amanda. I knew it was going to be hard to swallow either way. Then you started acting hurt and confused, which I understand, but I knew that I had this golden moment where you might have accepted it, and I let it pass. I chickened out again, and I might never get an opportunity like that again."

"I decided that, for the sake of our marriage, I would just have to live with this secret for the rest of my life. Give up my birth body. Forget about it. Let it die. Just be your husband. That alone is more than most people have, so I was being greedy by wanting more. It was a hard decision, but I was willing to make that sacrifice for you."

Phillip looked over at Amanda, her head resting on the arm of the couch. "I still am," he said. "If you want me to give it up, knowing what you know now, I will. I'll do that for you."