“My whole life, I’ve always felt a little out of place. No matter where I went, what I was doing. Even once I found out what was missing, nothing really resolved itself until after I met Ziz La Sota. Well—maybe not even after that. Maybe I’m still a work in progress. That’s probably true enough.
“Like I said before, I can’t stand people who’ve ceased thinking. People who’ve stopped trying to change because they think they know everything. I don’t think it has much to do with intellect, but it’s not quite the opposite of intellect either. It’s more of a spiritual decision, and I believe the answer comes pre-installed in every human soul. You see, I believe there are determinants, and indeterminants. Being introspective is indeterminant. Part of what makes me believe that is that Ziz La Sota most certainly did not choose to be the person she was. I believe the spirit which lies within her has always existed, as it exists in many others. It’s a thoughtful, self-reflective sort of spirit. Although, if I were to simply describe for you the nature of Ziz’s deeds, you might not think she was so self-reflective after all. It was a terrible thing what happened to those folks. A terrible, terrible thing.
“Ziz was born a boy, to parents who’d always wanted a boy, and let me tell you, they would not have had it any other way. Not by a sight. I guess they would have put up with it if she’d been born a girl, but Ziz would not have been a happy girl to say the least. And in reality she was even less happy than that. Imagine being the child of parents who hate your soul. Imagine also being smart enough to teach the classes that composed your formal education. Ziz used to tell me she thought she knew everything school ever taught her before it was ever taught. She was just there to be reminded of the details. As if the details made any difference. So, she was hated, and she was smart. What does that breed in a person? Hatred of course. What else is there? Love? Can love flourish in a vacuum? Not that I’ve ever heard of. Ziz felt the same way. She understood lust, and she understood pain, but she did not understand love. I don’t even think she ever wanted to understand that. She had no context for it, and from a neutral point of view, for a person as smart as she was, love must have seemed as useless as anything else you can’t touch or taste or get yourself off with.
“Ziz was practical, I guess is the word. Pragmatic. I don’t know. Pretty much every word in the English language leaves something to be desired. No one word encapsulates everything it ought to. The world is too complicated for that. And maybe that’s where some of people’s pain and frustration comes from; because their words don’t fully capture their sentiments. They can’t dredge it up from their vocabularies. Some people I’ve met are so damn smart but don’t have the sort of education, or worse, they have the sort of wrong education, that will allow them to express themselves. To be happy. They’ll never be happy because they’ll always be confused. Their brains are like a V12 engine without fuel injectors or spark plugs or whatever. Their mind just sits there. A useless, idle hosscat.
“Anyways, what was I saying about Ziz? I guess she was… what was she? Oh, I guess she lacked the ability to love, because her stores of it had always been bare. Like a gland humans have used to process chlorophyll, except we don’t need it anymore. So, based on that, is anyone surprised at what she became? Some people say there’s no excuse for violence, but people who say that mostly grew up in padded rooms so to speak. Ziz would say, and so would I; there’s an excuse for just about everything. It all depends on the situation.”
Sarah stopped speaking to take a drink of water. The interviewer watched her. “Can we talk about where it all began?” the interviewer asked.
Sarah swallowed. She set the glass of water back down on the table. “Sure we can,” she said. “Let’s see. I first heard of Ziz La Sota about two months before I ever met her. We were both at Caltech. I guess you probably already knew that.”
“That’s okay,” said the interviewer. “Just tell the story the way you want to.”
“Okay. I heard about Ziz from another friend who is also trans. There was a little community of us at Caltech. No other cliques would have us. The dykes, the fags, the nerds; which, I mean, I guess we were all nerds, but still, the real nerds; they all tended to be nice to us for the most part, so that was fine. But we always wanted something for ourselves. So we made it happen.
“We caught a lot of flack from the straights and the squares because they said we were being exclusionary by starting a club that was trans-only. But we always thought that was funny because everything else in this country is exclusionary, except, oh they’re oh so clever, no one puts an official label on it anymore. The segregation is all implied; the quiet part goes unsaid. You can go to any college in America and see what I’m talking about. Walk down sorority or fraternity row one of these days early in the semester when they’re all out and about and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. ‘Exclusionary.’ Give me a fucking break.
“So, yeah, we were a trans-only club, and proud of it. I was a freshman when I joined. First semester. It was the first couple of weeks I had ever spent outside of Oklahoma, and it was phenomenal. Intro week at Caltech was okay, but of course there were obligatory interactions with the normies and the straights and the frat boys. Whatever. That’s no big deal. High school gets you used to that sort of stuff really fast. I never liked shaking hands with their kind, but if you refuse to shake hands or anything like that, you only draw attention to yourself, so you’re kind of stuck doing it. Again, that’s fine.
“After intro week, when we finally didn’t have to wear those stupid name tags and t-shirts all the time, I had met two or three… no, I guess it was four, other trans people. Erin, Joseph, Indigo, and Petrovya. We were pretty tight there for a while. Erin turned out to be a real asshole, and Indigo left school not long after that, but Joseph and Petrovya both became my best friends at the time. All three of us joined TTYC.”
“Just a sec. Can we just, for the record—”
“Yeah. TTYC stands for Trans Technical Youth Club. Ziz came up with the name. To us, it secretly meant Titty-Titty-Yummy Cunt. It was our collective vision of the woman we all wanted to be. Titty, titty, and… you get it. We had this little dance we would do when we said it where we would rub ourselves down and wiggle side to side like Marylin Monroe. There’s a song that went with it too, but I’ll spare you that. It’s funny because none of us had done the surgery, but it was our dream one day to cut all our dicks off and feed them to the normies in a big stew. Hah—maybe I should’ve spared you from that instead. I’m not sure it's the sort of thing your readers want to hear about.”
“I can edit the interview if I decide to,” the interviewer said.
“Will you?”
“We’ll see.”
Sarah raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Shall I go on?”
“Let’s focus on Ziz. What was she doing during that time at Caltech?”
“Well, all my first year was pretty much a blur. Class, vodka, class, vodka. Weed, weed, weed. I remember Ziz didn’t drink that much but she smoked a lot, enough to make us not suspicious of her. Everything was a psy-op to us, you see. We were suspicious of everything and everyone, even our own leader. That was one of our core tenants: to question everything. Ziz was always telling us not to trust her, but we did. I did at least. Her admission that she was a piece of shit made me trust her even more. It makes me trust whoever says it, especially when combined with actual acts of goodness. For all her talk of ‘cruel neutrality’, Ziz was always there for her friends. The piece of shit she claimed to be was never apparent. She got into fist fights on our behalf. Lots of fights, mostly at parties. Soon we stopped getting invited to the parties, but really, we weren’t welcome in the first place, so that was whatever. Another time Ziz stayed up all night with Erin this one time she was saying she was going to kill herself. Poor Erin—not. What a fucking controlling… Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Ziz was there for all of us, no matter what.”
“What sort of leader was she?”
“She was the sort of leader who listened to what we had to say, then went out and made it happen. She seemed to have very few of her own opinions. She preferred to adopt the opinions of the group and act on them. At least, that’s how it was at first. Somewhere along the line, it seemed like the group’s opinions and Ziz’s became one fluid, free-flowing stream of consciousness that was impossible to tell which way the stream was flowing. It wasn’t like you weren’t allowed to have an opinion that went outside the norm. It was more like, why would you want to? The group was always right. We had this logic that dominated our zeitgeist. If you missed out on a couple of the group’s conversations, then they came to you eventually and explained what they’d been talking about, and you could offer a rebuttal, but the group was always prepared for it, and they would always change your mind. We were all so similar in how we thought that we were able to anticipate each others’ objections before we even had them. It was kind of magical. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
“Ziz started the conversations, but she rarely finished them. She had more original thoughts than any person I have ever met. She laid out ideas about math, logic, relationships, just about everything else. She would posit something like: ‘I think all human relationships are, at their core, self-serving. We don’t care about other people, only ourselves. The way we convince ourselves that we do care about other people is by relating their experiences to our own. Empathy itself is selfish.’ That one isn’t technically an original idea, but it sparked some pretty original conversation amongst our crowd. We had people who grew up having good relationships with their parents, just like we had Ziz who hated her entire family. And we had people like me who were somewhere in between, and all of us tended to agree with each other because logic brought us all to the same place in our thinking.”
“Like an echo chamber,” the interviewer said.
“Exaclty,” Sarah said. “I guess I could tell you about this one time one of us simply refused to have their mind changed, and the group kind of excluded her for a while, but eventually we let her back in. We realized it was stupid to think we should all agree on everything all the time, and it could lead to some scary ideas if we stopped questioning ourselves. I guess we thought we might become precisely what we hated if we ever started to suppress dissent. So that was good, that we realized that, and humbled ourselves a little bit. Ziz didn’t really have much to say about if we should consider dissenting opinions or not. She just sort of let us do what we wanted, and whenever the conversation got stale, she would bring up a new topic and inspire a whole nother round of debate.
“The first time I remember Ziz taking a firm stance on something was during my sophomore year. We were all sort of taken aback by it. She stood up in one of our meetings—by the way, we would always meet in Ziz’s apartment, sitting on the floor in her living room in a big circle with our legs crossed and a couple of blunts circling between us clockwise. But she stood up during one of these meetings and proclaimed we had come to a point in our relationships with one another that we needed to form some sort of tighter, more permanent bond. Something that could not be dissolved by anger, discontent, or even by time. ‘What sort of bond?’ I asked her. Ziz said it needed to be something strong; something stronger than blood, because look where blood had gotten us. Blood was useless. But what was stronger? Ziz said it was fear. She said fear was stronger than blood, much stronger. Fear of repercussion, of prison, of pain.
“So we committed what I guess would have been the first of our many criminal acts. We robbed a superstore. Just ran in, smashed, grabbed, and ran out. It was all preplanned, what we would take. We made sure it was over ten thousand dollars worth of merchandise, because that was the threshold for grand theft, which was a way bigger deal than simple shoplifting. When we got home we took Polaroids of ourselves with the stolen merchandise and we each kept a copy. Of course I think we all knew it would only last as long as the statute of limitations would allow, but we knew we had come up with the right strategy to hold us all accountable to one another. Surely once the Polaroids were out of date, we would come up with another scheme that would be like renewing our vows to one another. We were smart girls, after all. Very capable.”
The interviewer interjected: “La Sota graduated not long after that, during the winter of your sophomore year. What was it like without her on campus?”
“Things went on like normal,” Sarah said. “Andrés stepped up to lead, and I became secretary. A few of the others really started taking on a new set of responsibilities. It was a fairly seamless transition, except after a while, we started to lose the zest we once had. The passion was slowly leaving us. School got harder semester by semester and we had to think about jobs and a career after school. We were growing up fast, not even kids anymore, but young adults. We joined other orgs and did other things. Some of us got internships at Google and places like that.
“Looking back on it, I think Ziz used this time really to test us. To see who would stay and who would go. I think she was waiting in the wings with one eye still upon us, like she never even left.
“My suspicions of this were confirmed when I became a senior. Ziz approached me one day. It happened to be the day I moved into her old apartment. I still don’t know if she saw something special in me, or if I had just gotten lucky. I never got the chance to ask.
“She asked me ‘Was the club still active’ and even then I suspected that she knew the answer and was only testing me but I still responded with an emphatic “Yes’. Something about her had changed. She was less feminine than she’d been before. I suspected she’d stopped her hormone treatments. Maybe she was de-transitioning. The truth of the matter, I came to find out, was that she had simply stopped caring about the notion of gender altogether. Her mind was on other things. Other things entirely.
“When she posed the question to me about the club, I got scared for some reason. I don’t know what it was. I was scared even though I knew the answer would please her, even though I knew it was completely true. The club still met weekly, and still had discussions on a wide range of edgy topics, and we even re-committed ourselves to the cause every year on the anniversary of our first crime. Typically we just did some really graphic graffiti or started a fire somewhere. Something we could easily run away from before the cops came. Ziz didn’t seem too impressed by all that. She said we should have been upping the ante, and was disappointed we hadn’t taken it upon ourselves to raise our standards after she was gone. ‘It was not in the Zizian spirit,’ she told me.
“She asked me who was the leader of the group and I told her it was me, even though I wasn’t going to be inaugurated until after the semester had begun a few weeks later. Ziz said that was good; that she wanted it to be me. She said I was always the most passionate and the smartest among them, maybe even smarter than her. Though I don’t think she really thought that last bit was true.
“Then she asked if she could attend the inauguration ceremony, and how could I refuse? She was the founder, the mentor, the spirit of the whole thing. So we really did it up that year. We rented a room beneath our favorite dive bars. The owner was an honorary member, so I guess ‘rented’ would be the wrong word. Really the space was gifted to us. Maybe the distinction will be important to some tedious historian one day.
“In the room we had done up a bunch of fake blood and gore and stuff. We painted a symbol on the floor in fake blood, our own symbol we’d created to represent our collective worldview; the idea that no one matters and everyone is part of something larger than themselves, whether they choose to be or not. The lack of choices in life I guess is how I’d sum it up. We believed that being born was a responsibility; a burden, not a gift, and anyone who argues that they never asked to be born in the first place ought to immediately be reinstated to the realm of death, since that’s where they seemed to want to be anyways. It all got a little dark for my tastes, I’ll be honest with you. But hey, I completely agreed with the sentiment.
“When Ziz saw the arrangements we’d made, she was very disappointed. ‘What is this shit?’ she said. She ran her finger along the wall and licked it to see if the blood was real. Then she shook her head. ‘This is all wrong,’ she said. ‘If we’re going to do something, we ought to do it right.’ Already she was using the word ‘we’ to include herself in the group, even though most of us hadn’t seen her for at least two years. ‘Let’s postpone,’ she told us. ‘Let’s postpone until we can get it all right.’
“‘What do you want us to do?’ someone asked. ‘Get some real blood?’
“‘That’s the idea,’ Ziz said.
“‘Pig’s blood or what?’
“‘Pig’s blood. That’s something. That’s really something. But let’s think even bigger.’
“‘Jesus, Ziz,’ someone else said. ‘Are you saying what we think you’re saying?’
“‘Yes,’ Ziz said. ‘I am. Now, who’s going to do it?’
“‘No one,’ I told her. ‘No one is going to do that. A pig, maybe. But we’re not killers. We’re supposed to have certain ideas about the world.’
“Others protested with me. ‘You’re right,’ Ziz said eventually. ‘You’re right. That would be a bridge too far. A pig sounds alright. If it’s done in the right spirit.’
“‘What’s the right spirit?’ I asked.
“‘That’s for you all to decide,’ Ziz said.
“‘But you’re the one who gets to decide if we should slaughter a pig at all?’
“‘I think that makes the most sense.’
“Someone spoke up. ‘I think we should vote on it,’ they said.
“‘Alright,’ Ziz said. ‘Vote.’ She crossed her arms and waited for us to do something. We looked at each other. I could tell the others were also a little fed up with being bossed around by someone who hadn’t even been a part of the club for the majority of the time it had existed. After all, the club was three and a half years old, and Ziz had only been around for a year and a half. We didn’t care that she was the founder; at that moment she felt truly like an outsider to us. But we ended up giving her the win. ‘Okay,’ I eventually conceded. ‘We’ll slaughter a pig and come back here next week. We’ll slather the place in blood and all go home stinking like hell.’ Well, Ziz agreed pretty quickly to that.”
“And is that what happened? Did you kill a pig?”
“Hell no. I bought a pint of blood, human blood, from my friend Marice. I thought since there’d be no killing involved, a pint of real human blood might bring the sort of zest Ziz was looking for.”
“Wow,” the interviewer said. “And that’s not a joke?”
“No, it’s not a joke. I didn’t see any harm in it, and I thought it would get Ziz off my back about the whole thing. Little did I know, it would end up doing the opposite. Ziz thought a pint of human blood on our skin was, as she put it, ‘a good start.’ The way she said it made me think like something was truly going according to her plan. But what plan? At that point, I had no idea. But I figured things out quickly after that."
Part 1 definitely has me intrigued! I'm dying to know where this is going. Looking forward to part 2.