Dual

Dual

by Anastacia Kellogg, illustrations by Hannah Boston, layout by Andrew Evans

The air is so cold, it feels like it’s going to take my nose right off my face and shatter my skin like the surface of a frozen puddle. I’m taking photos of charred-black rafters, burnt linoleum floor, book pages scattered in the snow and crumbling darkly like a scene from Fahrenheit 451. There’s something artistic about it that I want to capture, but my phone, at half charge when I began, dies before I get through the front room. Technology is no better at handling the cold than is my California-freckled nose. An orange cat darts across one of the few roof supports left. This used to be a perfectly serviceable home.

My mother is clinging to this plot of land with the tenacity of a winter frost: it’s passed through the hands of my evil witch of a great grandmother and my hurricane of a great aunt, and someday it or the profits from it will go to me and my four siblings. Our other plot of land holds a very lovely house whose temporary renters seem to grow worryingly more attached by the week. Down the street is an elementary school where my middle three siblings spent seven months, a bit beyond it is the evening school for high school dropouts which was the only place that would accept me at 18, and around the corner is the kindergarten where my baby brother was finally convinced to speak fluently. My mother wants us to have a foothold here. She wants us to have a place to live, a place to educate ourselves, a place to build a business.

I have trouble expressing to my mother exactly why I don’t want to uproot my entire life and settle in Russia. Usually I spread my hands and say some variation of “isn’t it obvious?” Her responses reflect the same flabbergasted tone back at me – “why wouldn’t you?” – as she lists all the benefits of not staying in the capitalist dystopia that is the United States. I stutter and respond, “I just can’t live in a place that’s so antagonistic to me,” which is always the wrong thing to say to an immigrant who has done exactly that.

The seven months that made up my last stay in Russia were in 2014, the year of the Winter Olympics that so many athletes boycotted to protest recent anti “gay propaganda” laws. The way my mother explained it, my siblings and I were in danger of saying something too liberal and being hated at school. The way my father explained it, “propaganda” could mean anything that sent the message “gay people exist.” For those seven months, I attended evening classes for the students who were too troublesome to keep in high school – druggies, delinquents, and one too-cool-for-thistown girl who seemed to have decided to be my friend. Most of them were too old for their grade, but at 18, I was one or two years older than any of them. On my first day there, I was bombarded with questions: most laughably, “Do you have smoking in America?” – most charmingly, “Do palms really just grow there? On the streets?” – and most dauntingly, “Are there lots of gays in America?” My cool-girl friend clarified the last question with the follow-up, “You know, pederasts?” I didn’t know how to respond. I was 18, they were 17; if I answered “yes,” I would be an adult spreading gay propaganda to minors. They asked me the question a few times, never once suspecting that I was one of the gays myself. I didn’t know how I could tell anyone -- even my cool-girl friend, even the boy who told me in English that he’d “once been like that” but was “all natural now” -- that I had tentatively applied the label bisexual to myself in the backseat of a van speeding through palm trees to LAX only weeks before.

(I literally wouldn’t know how to tell them. I typed bisexual into Google Translate later that day, and it gave me dvupol’nyy, a literal translation meaning “two gendered,” which is less than accurate.)

The thing is, I don’t know what level of responsibility I have. I feel like my inability to speak up makes me a bad social activist. But I also feel like if I did speak up, I would be trying to change a culture that I’m barely a part of and thus have no right to change. What right have I to tell Russians how to be Russian? My two red Russian passports don’t mean a thing once I open my mouth and let out the awkward accent. I passed the ninth grade standardized writing exam because my teachers corrected my scantron after hours. Who’s going to correct my grammar as I try to conjugate the Russian transliteration of the word bisexual?

We watched the Olympic opening ceremony live that year, and my mother stood behind my chair with a sour look on her face. “It’s like makeup on a corpse,” she said. “It’s all a fake cover for the turmoil going on in this country.” Seven months later, I saw makeup on a corpse for the first time in real life. I kissed my grandfather’s forehead and told him I loved him in broken Russian, silently raging against my hurricane of a great-aunt for shouting him into the grave. I wore heels to the funeral, shoes that I had packed but been too shy to wear even once. My only black dress ended mid-thigh and that morning I noticed, with a quiet sense of guilt, that my legs looked really good.

My coming out story is far less brutal than it could have been. Last summer, my mother wakes up and is running around the house by 4 am, and she sees me and my friend who slept over sharing the pull-out couch bed. I can’t account the thoughts that ran through her head – I’ve always shared beds at sleepovers – but her suspicions were right, I suppose. “I’m not mad,” she told me later, “I just wish you were dating a boy, because I want grandchildren.” The joke’s on her – my longtime gal-pal-turned-partner is a (trans nonbinary) boy after all – but we are unavoidably and visibly a queer couple.

When this week is over, my mother and I will head home to greet Christmas with the rest of the family. But I won’t be home until a few days later, when I’m back in LA in the roachfilled apartment with the roommates who forbid whispering after 9pm and call me and my partner “very good friends.” We’ll do propagandic gay things like hold hands and tell each other how much we love and value each other as human beings. We’ll dress up cute to go places together, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’ll remember snippets I’ve read about queer fashion being an act of resistance. It feels like a massive leap to compare the people who struggled on the front lines of social movements to me admiring how my own boobs look in a crop top or how shapely my legs are in a funeral dress. No one would call Narcissus a world-changer.

Today, the snow crunches softly under the combat boots I bought at a yard sale and stuck a dozen safety pins through. Hair frizzes around my face in dyed-green strands under a beanie that sits lopsided thanks to my undercut. I have found a thousand small ways to present a queer image, to be in control of the ugly that the world will see in me no matter what. My phone is dead, but I keep looking at these charred pages in the snow like an artist, a tourist, the disconnected outsider that I am. I still navigate the language in a series of surreal Google Translate errors (though thankfully, we’ve both gotten better: bisexual now translates to biseksual, the proper word). Behind me, the house that my great-aunt set on fire threatens to crash down. When I fly home, I’ll pass through the airport flashing the bright red passport that lays out my name in familiar Cyrillic letters, but once back in LA I’ll sink into the comfort of a 65° winter chill.

I think that all I can do, for now, is try to understand myself through palm trees and shoes.