Raphael: an archangel and a Ninja Turtle: embodying a duality of Heaven and sewer in three syllables. High and low like desperate seeking; luminous and grimy-dim. But regardless: someone who fights. I name myself heroically. I name myself with an eye toward survival. “I’m into survival,” Nancy Thompson says in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, brightly lit by the waking sun, to explain why she’s reading about building traps, and I screencap this and post it everywhere. I am into these things, trapping myself into surviving, even through the muck of dreams. Left with no backward exits, no time machine: I must go on.
Chest still tender from surgical manipulation, a map of yellow and burgundy bruising, white dissolvable stitches rising periodically along my incisions like spooked hairs on the back of the neck, frayed seams on a beloved teddy bear, I take a printed name change petition and head delicately toward the train through cool grey May drizzle. I want my transformations all at once, as much a fell swoop as possible. Emerging into the summer from my silken cocoon, my frustrating stasis.
I spent the summer before I was seventeen hating my breasts with every breath. Always, in front of the mirror, smushing them to nothing with my palms, and imagining. My Bloody Mary reflective beckoning; my call for light as a feather and flat as a board. That summer, I crouched atop the bright blue built-in bookshelves of my bedroom and scrawled in mechanical pencil on the stitch-white ceiling the names I might take for myself when I—I optimism-ed—came out at school in September, emerging. Francis. Sandy. Jason. Maple. The names are long-erased, a faint smoky smudge. But a decade later, I pluck Francis from the past, an honoring of old wants, smudging of chronology, and place it delicately in the middle of my moniker.
Raphael and Francis: a surly symphony of ruh and fuh, sounds running around and flipping places. Rough and frantic. A peaked roof; a hank of fur. Therefore: a perching animal, soft atop the apex. This is what I am. The squirrel in your eaves. The rat in the attic. Small and intrusive: a carpenter ant, or the clipped hair that scratched my cornea in adolescence.
I once left Central Park in daylight because I was throwing up with violent vim and vigor and my then-girlfriend suggested that we get me liquids from the nearby Whole Foods. We returned in twilight, and the gloamy landscape was transformed by the presence of possibly a dozen raccoons, ambling along tree-lined pathways, fully confident in their belonging yet otherworldly as elves. They seemed to glow, like Mr. Burns in the Simpsons/X-Files crossover episode where he’s chiropracted into a gentle alien, broken into a woodland mystery. One begged doggishly and doggedly for a segment of soft pretzel from a woman on a bench; she refused its advances with nonchalance, as if turning away a suitor on the street. Just any other day.
The UPS store, I’m told when I arrive, no longer has a notary. Pandemic reasons; one employee mans the store at a time, but if I go to the end of the block, the realtor there should be able to help me. “Don’t cross the street,” the employee emphasizes twice, and I feel like I’m being sent on a quest to fetch an enchanted object. At the end of the block, no dice. The realtor’s closed up for Memorial Day weekend. Storefront armored and shackled, shadowed and unmanned. A bank, I think. A bank will help me! At the bank, I’m told that I must have an account there if I want any help—but the realtor across this street should have a notary too. More quests. More walking in the rain, red umbrella repeatedly blown inside-out. More absence of dice. Once again, a storefront dark and empty as a sunken ship. The enchanted object of my own name lies just out of reach. My fingertips s t re t c h and fail to make contact.
In the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, the eponymous man, Philippe Petit, describes the time when the idea for his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers fomented as “the gold-and-mud years of dreaming.” Gold and mud, Heaven and sewer. I understand exactly. My name is my dreaming. Becoming myself is my outlaw feat of levitated balance. My public spectacle. “The object of my dream doesn’t exist yet,” Philippe says, taking us back to when he was seventeen with a toothache and first read about the plans for the Twin Towers’ construction. When I was seventeen and hurting in the head, the object of my dream didn’t exist yet either. This is the nature of transition. We string our walking-wire between the towers as the towers are being built. The towers erect only because we string our wire. It’s a very backwards-and-in-high-heels sort of set-up.
“Francis” does mean “Frenchman,” French like Philippe. See it all come together now, this intricate puzzle, this well-devised trap. But I focus on Saint Francis, on an affinity for animals, picture myself preaching to the ambling raccoons, caught in conversation with these pre-rabid creatures, harbingers of night and therefore of nightmares, which are what we must survive. What we must be into surviving. The joy and fascination that accompany that preposition! Into like a passion. Into like I’m turned on by continuing, by the rhythm of my heart and lungs inside my newly flattened chest.
Waking abruptly: I was sitting up, legs dangling over the bed. In my lap, my stuffed raccoon, held delicately between my hands, and I danced him back and forth. S. suggested my inner child was communicating with me, bubbling up through my subconscious. But what was he/she/they trying to say, with this simple motion, this eye toward play, this transportation to a dusky Central Park, this engagement with softness? In dancing another, was I taken back to childhood ballet class, the rosining of my pale shoes, the hyperawareness of my short, stout legs, like boiling, singsongy teapots? Re-engaging with my corporeality’s shortcomings in the realm of the feminine. Smudging chronology, turning it to smoke. Building a mosaic whole from fragments.
Walking in on my consumption of A Nightmare on Elm Street, my roommate echoed my own impression by asking earnestly if I were watching Home Alone. The two match in their plot-dependence on DIY defensive devices, though in A Nightmare it’s the close-clutched, swimmy inner self that’s protected against invasion rather than just a dwelling. Slapstick is skinned to reveal its body horror innards, and Nancy’s armor gleams (Rube) Gold(berg)en in the light of a basement’s bare bulb.
Surgery was an invited invasion. Asking for my armor to be peeled, shed alongside a bucket of blood. For my slapstick outer to reveal the horror beneath—cream-pie-in-the-face softness taken and a harsh plane of bone shown, riddled with Frankensteinian stitching. I laid no traps to catch the doctor unawares. I allowed the anesthesiologist to send me to sleep just the way Nancy would never. The plastic mask fit over my face, and then, like time travel, like smoke and syllables across a decade, my dream was knifed into by a nurse’s voice beckoning me back with my name, my Burn(s)ingly glowy name, letting me know that I had survived the mud and the gold.