Introduction by Lisa Ko

Time is murky these days, as the pile-on of the present makes it a struggle to remember what’s happened these past few years, never mind decades. I can’t think of any other American novel that traces the AIDS pandemic to the early months of the COVID pandemic with as much heart, humor, and radical style as Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Terry Dactyl. There’s a cultural amnesia around 2020, a preference to believe it never happened, as if denying memory will protect us from grief. Instead, Sycamore, a longtime activist, editor, and the author of multiple groundbreaking memoirs and novels, chooses to depict the early months of the pandemic with political exuberance and shimmering prose, and we are lucky to have it.

Raised by dykes during the height of the AIDS crisis, Terry Dactyl’s eponymous protagonist and narrator comes of age in 1990s New York City with a group of queer and trans club kids. Sycamore’s whirlwind scenes of glittering, coked-up party nights have a dreamy, lost world quality. Terry lands a job at an art gallery, where she curates a show called Club Kid Diaspora. Fast-forward two decades and Terry, now in her late forties, finds herself isolated at the start of COVID, dealing with chronic pain (“of course I’ve gone to chiropractic acupuncture massage biofeedback meditation yoga Qigong craniosacral acupressure reflexology kinesiology herbal medicine homeopathy naturopathic medicine integrative medicine and whatever else”) and living alone in a hypergentrified New York, her friends dead or scattered to other cities. After a solo cross-country road trip, she returns to a Seattle she barely recognizes, where she can find space on the less crowded sidewalks, commune with trees, and take part in the summer 2020 uprisings, while navigating the complexities of decades-long friendships.

In Terry’s breathless and stream-of-consciousness voice, the novel shifts between her childhood and young adulthood and her queer family growing into middle age, friends Zooming in from different countries in what she now calls the Club Kid Diaspora Helpline. Terry is a heroine for our times, defiantly building hope and connection with the world around her, particularly as it feels like it’s burning down. One night, listing things that make her feel less lonely, she names: “[F]inding a neighborhood cat in the park and sitting together, touching the ferns growing out of a retaining wall and sensing their strength, noticing that someone changed their lighting from fluorescents to something softer.” Through tears and joy, laughter and rage, she offers: “The best way to dance is with a broken heart.” What a gift this novel is, to shine so brightly in its refusal to not look away.

– Lisa Ko Author of Memory Piece

Ecstasy Is Temporary but Being Fabulous Is Forever

An excerpt from Terry Dactyl by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

The first time I met Sid she was on the dance floor in a silver and gold tube dress pulled over her head except it wasn’t just a dress because the fabric went on and on and somehow she knew the exact spot on the dance floor where the light would shine right on her or that’s how it felt when she was writhing inside this tube of fabric, pulling it up and down, a hand out and a hand in, and then her face exposed in harsh white makeup and black lipstick with long glittering eyelashes and then she rolled onto the floor, she was crawling or more like bending but also she was completely still in the bouncing lights and all this was happening on a crowded dance floor at the Limelight while I was sipping my cocktail and I didn’t know what I was seeing I mean it felt like this went on forever, how many songs, it was like there wasn’t even music anymore just my body inside the fabric peeking out and then she pulled the dress up around her neck like a huge elegant collar, and underneath she was wearing a gold bodysuit with a silver metallic skirt that flared out, with ballet slippers also painted gold and she walked right up to me and said what did you think.

And I had no idea how she even saw me but I must have mumbled something because then she took my hand and said let’s go upstairs, honey, and I thought we were going to the balcony but we went up the stairs in the back, and at the top she kissed the door person on both cheeks and then we went inside.

And there was a whole other dance floor there, the club inside the club, and she guided me over to the bar and said: I can’t believe she’s gone.

And then she said it again: I can’t believe she’s gone.

And then she looked up at me and started laughing—­oh honey, she said, I totally thought, I totally thought.

And then she just stopped right there. I didn’t know if she thought I was someone else, or if she thought—­I really just didn’t know.

She said what are you drinking, honey, but she didn’t wait for my answer she just ordered two vodka sours with grenadine, I loved the color and after I took one sip I knew this would be my drink from then on. She poured some coke out on a coaster and then handed me a straw, and I made sure just to snort half but she motioned her hand like you take the rest, and when I was done she handed me a big flat round pill and I swallowed it with the vodka sour.

I was a little worried because I was already a bit coked up and alcohol and coke mess with ecstasy but I definitely knew not to turn down free drugs, I mean wasn’t this what was supposed to happen in New York?

Sid, she said. Sid Sidereal.

Terry, I said. Terry Dactyl.

And she touched my back, and said: Where are your wings?

I could feel them right then. It was the way she touched me. Like she was drawing my wings on.

One by one, the others came upstairs and took their magic pills—­I didn’t know anyone yet, but when they saw me with Sid it was like we were old friends.

Sid was so high that her eyes would roll back whenever she wasn’t speaking, and I was ready to go there. Jaysun Jaysin kept petting her coat like it would take her to heaven or maybe she was already in heaven. Bleached curly hair with dark roots, eyebrows dyed green, and she was wearing a big ratty faux-­fur coat and maybe nothing on underneath and she touched my nose and said: Twins. I looked at her nose, and noticed her gold septum ring did match my silver one, and everything in her eyes. And then String Bean arrived in clown makeup and ruffles, platforms that made her so tall that everyone had to look up to her. And CleoPatrick, with a giant red Afro and tattered ball gown. And then Tara and Mielle, in matching suits and bleached hair with spit curls like Jazz Age style-­dyke twins.

And eventually Sid said: Is everyone ready? And we all went downstairs to the coat check and Sid picked up a box with her coat, and then we went outside and jumped in two cabs—­I didn’t usually take cabs in New York because I was still in love with the subway but here I was with Sid, Jaysun, and Cleo, all of us squished together in the backseat and Sid said Christopher Street Pier and then soon enough we were there, one cab and then the other like we were in tandem.

And I’ll be honest here and say that I hadn’t even been to the piers before, I mean I saw Paris Is Burning in high school when it played at the Egyptian, and then of course everyone started lip-­synching to Madonna and practicing those moves, but that was about all. It was late, and I didn’t see anyone voguing, but there was music, and just as we started walking out onto the pier this queen ran up behind us and said Esme!

And Sid turned, and this queen said girl, I thought you were dead.

And Sid said: I thought I was dead too.

And this queen said: Oh honey I’ve missed you and your messy makeup.

And Sid said: My messy makeup can’t compare to you.

And then she put her box down, and opened her arms, and the two of them were jumping up and down and Sid said oh Monique. And right about then I started to feel this pounding inside and I looked around to see if everyone else was feeling it too, and Monique said so are these your children or did someone get lost on the way to the circus.

What was I doing wasting my time with the dead white men of the Core Curriculum when I could be so alive right here with tranny shoulders.

Monique was ready to read each one of us, and we just stood there in the way it takes a while to react when the X is really kicking in and when Monique got to me she said girl, you’re as tall as me and you’ve got them tranny shoulders so why the freakshow makeup—­and it felt like I’d been waiting for someone to say tranny shoulders all my life, yes, what was I doing wasting my time with the dead white men of the Core Curriculum when I could be so alive right here with tranny shoulders the air on my skin so much air and that current going through my body my eyes yes my eyes and lips yes lips and tongue, and there it was, language, when I said: Takes one to know one.

And Monique shrieked, and held out her hand, and I got on my knees and kissed it, and she said oh honey I’m not a lezzbian but I do like the attention. And then when she was done clocking all our outfits, she said: So what’s in the box.

And Sid said JoJo.

And Monique gasped, and stepped back, and she was so dramatic about it that at first I didn’t realize what was happening, but then she and Sid hugged again, and this time there were tears, and I got a chill up my back even though it wasn’t cold, not really, was it, I mean a second ago I was sweating and now I was cold and I knew this X was going to be good but also I felt like this wasn’t what I was supposed to be feeling, even if I could tell we were all feeling it, and maybe that was the point.

And Sid said I came here to tell Estella, and Monique said she’s with a date. And Sid said JoJo wanted her ashes in the river.

And Monique said that bitch stole a hundred dollars from me, twice, and then paused, and said: Not that I hold it against her.

And Sid said could you tell Estella for me. And Monique said what’s in it for me?

And Sid pressed something into her hand, and Monique held a baggy of coke up to the light and said oh honey you know me, you know me too well, and then she kissed her on both cheeks and we were off.

And when I say we were off, it wasn’t exactly runway it was just the only way to walk, all together now, walk, and at this point my eyes were rolling back and I was licking my lips and holding someone’s hand, feeling that clamminess, we were all bodies and wind and the cars going by—­me and Jaysun, String Bean and Cleo, Sid and TaraMielle—­they went by one name together I didn’t get it the first time but I got it now.

We walked down the West Side Highway until we got to another pier, I don’t know how long we walked and I don’t know which way because I’ve never found that pier again or maybe I found it but it didn’t look the same so all I know is when we got there it was just us, just us in the sky, the sky and the air, the sky in the air in my body inside this coat and we walked out to the middle of the pier, and Sid opened the box, and I’d seen this before, the ashes in a box like this or a big glass bottle or a beautiful urn or sometimes just a bowl so you could touch with your fingers, yes there were chunks of bone but on ecstasy it felt like I was part of this ash, this water, this bone, this air, the sky, this breath, it was all of us.

Sid handed out paper cups and maybe I was thirsty but the cups were for the ashes, each of us filled one up and we walked out to the end of the pier, the thing about the Hudson is it’s always wider than you think and you’re looking out at the skyline but it’s Jersey. The lights, I said, look at all the lights and everyone nodded their heads, we were there, in the lights, I could feel it.

And Sid said before we get this party started, I want everyone to know one thing, and we all turned to face her, and she said: Don’t ever call me Esme, okay? Sid, Siddhartha, Sadie, CeCe my Playmate . . .

And Jaysun said: Come out and play with me.

And Cleo said: Do you know what that bitch said to me? She said . . . No, never mind.

And Jaysun said: What.

And Cleo said: No, no, I don’t even want to say it . . . Okay, she said: you look better as a boy.

And we all gasped. And then String Bean hurled her cup of ashes way out into the water just like that, and then she did some kind of om shanti thing, blessed be, she kept saying blessed be blessed be blessed be, and I definitely didn’t believe in any kind of blessing but my eyes were open wide. Cleo said JoJo’s the bitch who taught me to walk, and she turned to show us, and so we all turned and there it was, New York, New York—­New York, New York and JoJo I mean Cleo was walking with New York, she was walking with New York but leaning to each side because New York was heavy in those big platforms that weren’t tapered so they looked kind of dangerous and right then I realized I needed to get the ones like String Bean’s with the wedding-cake effect, and when Cleo turned she almost tripped but what was wrong with falling, we were all falling another way to fly and some of the ashes flew out of her cup and when she got to us she said see, I still don’t know how to walk, and we can all blame JoJo. And you could really see the glitter in her eyes—­I tried to hear the ashes land but what do ashes sound like, just the water and the cars and the music, I mean it was the sound of the water against the piers or maybe metal slamming a buoy but it was music now.

TaraMielle sat down on the ground and we sat down with them and that’s when Jaysun started crying and Sid put her arms around her and then we became one big mass of breath and oh and oh and ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and I wanted to say this is the best way to celebrate death. But I couldn’t say that, could I? And just as I was thinking how did we even get here, when we were at the Limelight, suddenly it was like we were at the Limelight again because Sid pulled the tube dress over her head and down to the ground, there was so much fabric she was in the tube and I realized that earlier was a rehearsal because here it was again one hand out of the fabric toward heaven, and one foot out of the bottom toward the water beneath the pier and the way she could roll over herself, twisting around I mean everything was fluid and brokenness and this was a dance for death, I knew it now.

And then String Bean started waving her arms and Cleo was twirling around and around and then I threw my ashes into the air and they fell down on us as Sid was pulling one arm in and then pushing one arm through, like each part of her body wasn’t connected to anything, just floating on its own, her face peeking out, just one of those gold eyelashes and then back into the fabric, it was like we were all in the fabric we were inside we were inside we were inside we were inside-­out.

---

In ninth grade, we had an AIDS awareness assembly and I was prepared. My mothers were dykes and most of their friends were fags who had been partying at our house for my whole childhood and now they were dying, one by one they were dying I mean one day they would be dancing with that disco ball and the mirrored walls in the living room and then we’d be at a memorial at the park or the Arboretum or at someone’s apartment where I’d never been before.

When I was five, my grandmother died of brain cancer, but I’d only met her once when we flew out from Seattle to visit her, and when we were getting ready to make the trip from Boston to Nantucket my mothers said let’s play dress-­up. I already knew they weren’t going to let me wear my favorite pink dress because they wouldn’t let me bring it, and they said I couldn’t even wear my hair in pigtails, not until we got home, so I watched them get dressed instead. They were wearing wigs and makeup that made them look kind of like *Charlie’s Angels *and I knew Eileen didn’t really like that show but we watched it every week at Jack and Rudy’s and all the queens were obsessed. Eileen and Paula looked at each other and then at me and said isn’t this fun but I could tell they were tense. When we got to my grandmother’s house, she didn’t look scary like I’d expected she just looked like an old lady who pinched my cheeks and said my my isn’t he a beauty, just look at those curls.

I was focused on the glass panda sitting on the table in the entryway, I’d always loved pandas and my grandmother noticed and said Melody, please wrap this up for my grandson, isn’t he a prize, and she took my head in her hands and said oh, let me get a good look at you again, my my isn’t he magnificent.

That panda is the one thing I have of hers—­a clear glass paperweight with those dark panda eyes, and pink and red and blue flowers growing inside its belly, it looks like there’s water in there too but I guess it’s just glass. I still love that panda, the feeling of its weight in my hands, but now I know we were visiting my grandmother to prove that her dyke daughter was worthy of an inheritance, I was the proof that she had finally done something right. We got the inheritance, which paid for us to move out of the Biltmore and into our new house on 12th right by Volunteer Park and when I had an asthma attack on the first night and had to go to the hospital we moved back into the Biltmore while all the carpets were torn out, the floors stained, and the walls bleached and repainted and the windows replaced and I even got to choose the colors for my bedroom walls—­bubblegum pink, with lavender trim—­so when we got back a few months later it was a whole new place.

So my grandmother was the first person I knew who died, even though I didn’t really know her, but she was the only grandparent I ever met—­my grandfather died before I was born, and I never met my other grandparents because they kicked Paula out of the house when she was sixteen after she got caught making out with her friend in bed and that was the end, just like that, when I was little I didn’t understand how parents could be so mean when they were supposed to take care of you, and probably I didn’t understand death either, but when my mothers’ friends started dying in the ’80s I understood more.

They just got really skinny and their eyes got scared and then they were gone.

There were no platitudes about heaven or a better place or anything like that, they just got really skinny and their eyes got scared and then they were gone, like Peter who was standing on the card table in his gold platforms and gold pants with matching gold bomber jacket unzipped to show off his muscly chest, holding the disco ball and saying I’m Atlas, I’m Atlas, and Paula who was DJing said Peter get down. And then I heard he was in the hospital, he had thrush and pneumonia and maybe shingles, I would hear the words and look them up in the dictionary I mean I knew what pneumonia was but I didn’t know why.

So I was ten or eleven when it all started, and then it didn’t stop.

They kept dancing, though, and I kept coming down from my bedroom in the early hours of the morning to sit on the sofa and cuddle with these dancing queens and their cocktails and pills and visits to the bathroom to powder their noses. My mothers gave me my own cabinet full of potions in the kitchen so I could join everyone, and I would make elixirs out of pomegranate juice and St. John’s wort tincture or damiana and kava kava and lemon balm and lemon juice, and I would sip my potions in sparkling plastic cocktail glasses with all these queens dancing in the living room while Paula reigned from her DJ table, hair dyed and spiked out or permed and asymmetrical, makeup in bright colors forming shapes across her face or swirls and curls around her trademark cat eyes. When I was a kid I thought Paula was the rich one because every day she came home with a new hairstyle and some wild shiny outfit, but that was just because she was the receptionist at the hair salon so she was the in-­house hair model, and after work she would stop at Chicken Soup or Value Village, and Eileen might have looked plain in her burlap or denim or cotton jumpsuits, dark curly hair pinned back with barrettes, but everything was Liz Claiborne and she shopped at the Bon although it didn’t seem like anyone noticed the difference in those spinning lights with Paula playing Donna Summer or Nina Hagen or esg or Kraftwerk I mean everything felt like magic except when someone suddenly looked sad on the sofa all alone staring at the lights and I would go over and we would stare at the lights together.

I still remember the first time some girl at school said everyone had a mother and a father, not two mothers, and when I asked my­ mothers about this Paula just laughed and said oh honey that’s nonsense, you have two mothers and a whole roomful of fathers, don’t you. So when I was little my fathers would hold me in their arms and tickle me and lift me up to the spinning lights and I would get giddy until I fell asleep on the sofa and someone would carry me up to my bedroom and I would sleep for the rest of the night. When I got older I would go to bed like usual, but as soon as I heard the music I would run downstairs in my favorite silky robe and a tiara, and everyone would call me their little princess, so I was a princess among queens.

Technically maybe they were my fathers, even the ones who didn’t seem like men at all, they were somewhere in between or beyond but that’s how my mothers got pregnant, it was their sperm in the turkey baster—­did all those queens get together for a sex party first, or maybe just one by one jerking off in the bathroom, of course it wasn’t just one time I mean the details of the story changed but what didn’t change was that all the sperm was mixed together so if this worked out then no one would ever know who the father was.

When I was little, my mothers told me they both got pregnant together, no men involved, but once I realized half of me couldn’t have come from one mother and half from the other they told me it was Eileen who gave birth to me but they were both my mothers and I could tell they were nervous about this but I was relieved because I thought they were going to say Paula, there was something about our connection that felt more physical, but once I realized it wasn’t her this kind of balanced things out.

So by ninth grade it already felt like all my friends were dying, like this had been going on forever and it would never stop, and I know they were my mothers’ friends but I grew up with them way more than with other kids. I didn’t understand kids, so I would climb trees, I liked the way you had to really focus to get somewhere but once you were there you didn’t have to focus at all, and at the AIDS awareness assembly I thought we would all share stories of friends we’d lost, so I was surprised when it was just about which bodily fluids contained HIV and how we were all at risk so here’s how to put a condom on a banana and I knew all that, I mean there were condoms and pamphlets about safe sex all over our house. But at school everyone laughed at the banana and then their questions were weird like can you get AIDS from kissing someone on the cheek or what if you cut yourself and no one was around and you only had a dirty sock to wipe it off, could you get AIDS from a dirty sock that really really smelled and then someone said I feel sorry for the AIDS victims but it isn’t their fault, and that’s when I raised my hand.

I said I have something to share, and the teachers nodded, and I took out a list that I’d prepared ahead of time because I didn’t want to get nervous and forget anyone. I started with Peter, and how he used to shake the tambourine—­he would run all over the house singing shake shake shake and I would run after him. And Marty, who used to cut my hair at home because of my asthma so I didn’t even have to go to the salon we would do it in the kitchen and he specialized in curly hair so he always got it right. And then his boyfriend Tommy who didn’t look sick but then I started seeing the sores on his neck and wrists and back, my mothers said they weren’t always painful but they really did look like they hurt. A lot of my mothers’ friends had the sores, some of them would try to cover them up with makeup but you could still see. Like Cammy who taught me the eyebrow trick and the secret ways to do contour and how to always use lip liner if you wanted your lips to stay that way. Or Ansel who used to wear the prettiest dresses and hold her hand like a microphone and do these elaborate dance numbers while I would try to learn the moves but I just couldn’t keep up.

I wanted to say more, but the bell was ringing so I looked up to see if it was okay to keep going and the first thing I noticed was that everyone was completely quiet, I mean not even the boys in the back were making jokes anymore, and as soon as I stopped I could tell there were kids who were about to cry or maybe they were already crying and the teachers looked shocked too, especially the PE teacher who everyone said was gay, so she must not have been gay or why would she have been shocked, and I didn’t know what to do so then I stopped talking.

Take a break from the news

We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.