The Inherent Queerness in Asking ‘What If?’

Don’t die wondering, the old yellow button told me, but of course this only made me wonder more: Who wore this pin? Who made it? Who said it first? The pin is from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. There’s three of them, two yellow and one pink, all in big commanding capitals, no metadata provided to satisfy my curiosity. According to a book review on the Wellesley Centers for Women website, the phrase was originally “an old bar pick-up line.” 

I anticipate I will die wondering, not if I’m a lesbian, but about everything else. Lately, I’ve been wondering about lesbian experiments. There’s the defining what-if—“what if I’m a lesbian?”—one of those questions that tends to answer itself in the asking. After that, there are more questions. Coming out creates a new, strange world; you can’t know it until you’re in it. It exists alongside the consensus reality of everyone else, your straight family and friends and teachers and coworkers and bosses and landlords, but sometimes you’ll describe your reality and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking sideways. 

Evidently this is not only true for lesbians. But then, the irresistible charge, DON’T DIE WONDERING, could apply to all sorts of things. It is at once general and specific. If you know you know, and if you’re wondering, you know. 

Myriam Lacroix’s recently released debut, How It Works Out, conjures a world literally defined by what-ifs. What if the central couple, Myriam and Allison, found a baby in an alley? What if Myriam could only muster the will to live by eating Allison’s flesh? What if they were married lesbian celebrities who hated each other? What if Myriam was a praying mantis and Allison the dog who killed her? What if Myriam was Allison’s evil boss and Allison dominated her sexually? 

There’s been a glut of media about multiple universes in the past five or so years, some of them queer. The reason seems obvious: people have been joking that we’re in “the darkest timeline” since at least 2011, when the Community episode “Remedial Chaos Theory” aired. It’s nice to think that somewhere out there, things are going better. Or, that when our world feels most fractured, repair is possible. That’s not the point of How It Works Out, which may not have a point, which may just be the point. How It Works Out is not linear, not directional, and not reparative. By posing and then pursuing these hypotheticals to their sometimes funny, often painful conclusions, Lacroix creates a set of parallel possibilities in an attempt to better know this relationship from the inside out. 

Two other popular queer titles from the past five years have used similar constructs of parallel possibilities to similar ends-that-are-not-ends. Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In The Dream House, follows an abusive relationship Machado survived while completing her MFA. Machado uses a fragmented form in order to explore how domestic violence between queers has been left out or vanished from our collective history, the archive which defines what is thinkable or speakable. In order to speak on her experiences, Machado must “break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears … to access their truths in a way [she] couldn’t before.” In Harrow the Ninth, from Tamsyn Muir’s bestselling Locked Tomb series, Harrow, the last necromancer of her House, has only three reasons to live: she must save her people, serve the Emperor, and figure out what exactly she doesn’t remember she doesn’t remember. She has locked something away, and in order to discover what happened, she must first live what did not. In these books, the what-if serves as a lesbian move—like a knight on a board—to uncover, as Machado writes, “something very large [that] is irrevocably missing.” In other words, they are wondering in order to not die wondering.

In another universe, How It Works Out was probably published as a collection of short stories, not a novel. (Indeed, several chapters were first published as short stories, sometimes using different names, universes upon universes: Leah and Sarah find the baby in the alley in Issue 35 of Blue Mesa Review; Jessica the dog eats the praying mantis in Litro Magazine.) How It Works Out does not move forward in any particular way; the universes do not collide; each chapter has its own discrete beginning, middle, and end; and the end is more of a beginning, anyway. 

The novel proffers a few explanations for its shape. In the baby ‘verse, one of the few that works out happily, Myriam notes that,

“They were so in love it felt like living inside a dream, only some nights Myriam got nervous. She’d grown up with her single mom, moving every time her father made a new threat. She couldn’t turn love into a story that made sense, and would get into these existential spirals.” 

How It Works Out could be read as one such existential spiral, dreamy yet catastrophic, staring up at the ceiling asking yourself what-if after what-if. In another chapter, the one where Myriam can’t stop eating Allison’s flesh, her thesis on trauma and the cycle of abuse might suggest to us that, like any trauma, the relationship is being “restaged repeatedly through bodily performances until it has been turned into a complete, coherent narrative.” Elsewhere, Allison discovers, but does not understand, that Myriam is writing the life they are living, the chapter we are reading. We are watching an iterative performance, the point of which often seems to be: what if I was terrible, awful, so bad, worse?

Like any existential spiral, so many what-ifs can lull you into abstraction, numb and meaningless. Allison the nihilist tells us that, “if there was a meaning to life, it’d be love.” This is a nice sentiment, but not very useful for what-ifs such as: what if I hurt you, what if you hurt me? If there are infinite universes, surely in some of them it’s one, and in some it’s the other. That’s more or less the mechanism of How It Works Out’s multiverse. Questions such as “what if I were a bug” and “what if you wanted to top” and “what if I hurt you” are levers of equal force pulled variably from ‘verse to ‘verse. 

There are other theories about universes. In The Dream House moves more or less forward in the same narrative plane, the mode changing rather than the material, until the end of Part III. Then, a series of violent escalations shatters the narrative like a hydraulic press. We are in a new genre: Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure^®. Machado breaks one terrible morning into multiple potential paths. “If you apologize profusely, go to page 163,” she directs us, or, “If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 164.” Each choice makes a new universe—but each universe ends in the same place. Abuse turns choice into a trap you spring on yourself. There is only ever one way that In The Dream House works out. 

Still, we try. The reader can “cheat,” as Machado puts it, flipping against the textual directions to “a page where [they] shouldn’t be.” The reader can attempt to refuse the cycle, tell the woman in the Dream House to calm down or do her own dishes, though they will be chastised: “Are you kidding? You’d never do this.” In other words, amidst the abuse, we are still empowered to imagine impossible what-ifs. 

An impossible experiment is what Harrow Nonagesimus undertakes under the fracturing weight of her grief at the loss of her cavalier. She erases her history and rewrites her own brain to construct a wholly new universe built on a single what-if: what if Gideon Nav had not died at Canaan House, because Harrow never knew her at all? But the break isn’t clean. Harrow is seeing things that aren’t there, throwing up and passing out, she is haunted. In her memories, scenes from the first book play out differently, and Harrow’s friends and enemies ask her, “Is this really how it happens?”

Yes and no. It isn’t, and yet, it is inarguably happening. As one ghost tells her, much of Harrow the Ninth is “a play [Harrow is] directing.” It is a restaging, like one of Myriam’s. Playing out these alternatives is what unlocks the tomb in Harrow’s mind where she has hidden away her dead cavalier. As her own death looms, she triggers a new set of possibilities: what if Harrow were the cavalier and not the necromantic heir, what if the deadly competition in Canaan House was actually the Bachelor in space, what if she met a really hot barista, and to each of these questions the answer is Gideon. 

“This isn’t how it happens,” a dead ally tells her each time, like Machado tells her reader, who has chosen an act of resistance that would have been impossible, “That’s not how it happened, but okay. We can pretend.” Yet it’s not a thought experiment, not a hallucination. Because if it didn’t happen, where did this scab come from, and why can’t you stop picking at it?

Formally speaking, if the what-if is a narrative move as well as a lesbian one, the move should be describable. How we arrive at parallel worlds should tell us something about how it works out. These books are as slippery as lesbians, moving not only between universes but between perspectives and identities. They are nesting dolls of narrators, not unreliable but unfixed, shifting and splitting from what-if to what-if. And these books are as hungry as lesbians, too. What’s gayer than wanting your lover inside of you? 

There’s some understandable concerns over who-eats-who and what-does-that-mean. Myriam’s stomach problems recur across universes; the only time she is truly satisfied is with Allison’s flesh in her mouth. Harrow has stomach problems of her own. In order to ascend to Lyctorhood, the highest power a necromancer can achieve, she was supposed to eat her cavalier’s soul, but she doesn’t seem to have done it right. And she is trapped in a system that consumes, mired in the endless violence of an Empire that cannot stop colonizing and expanding and killing in order to survive. Gideon and Harrow promised each other, “one flesh, one end,” which means something different than “my flesh, your end.” Is there a way we can eat each other equally? The question feels dated, the sort of thing lesbian feminists in the seventies might have thrown a conference about. In the universe where Myriam and Allison are minor gay celebrities, their first book together is titled How It Works Out: Building a Healthy Lesbian Relationship in the Patriarchy. This might be the universe where they hurt each other the most. Perhaps hunger is just a justification for possession. The woman in the Dream House fills her fridge with produce to let it rot; in a parable, Machado writes that she wants Carmen “nestled in [her] stomach for all eternity.” 

But Carmen is hungry, too. The archival silence is an empty pit inside her. At the beginning of In The Dream House, she asks, “What is the topography of these holes [in the archive]? … How do we move toward wholeness?” Wholeness is just another word for fullness, which seems to me fundamentally impossible, but the hunger keeps us moving, never lets us forget that something is gone. Or, that something else is possible. Stuck in the loop of her own choices, chasing her own tail, Machado tells herself, “There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t—” 

There’s a way out of the Dream House, there’s a way out of the silence. The final chapter of How It Works Out follows FF,  face de fœtus, an actor, so called because of the watery, bloated, changeable quality of her features. When FF is cast as Myriam in the new TV show Love Bun, she has a series of erotic, unsettling encounters with the actress playing Allison which bring something secret to the surface. The role of Myriam is elusive, incomprehensible. Why does she want to eat her girlfriend? “It was hunger that moved her, that moved the story,” FF knows, and so she tries connecting with that hunger. When she touches her co-star, or herself, she finds herself “almost really remembering” the woods, laughing college boys, her father’s anger: “in the dark part of her brain, black bars were bubbling and lifting off of pages.” She wonders, what has been left out of this script? Of this book? What might she recover, and at what cost?

FF’s fetal face got me thinking about Lee Edelman’s theory about children and queers. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman argues that “what about the children?”-type concerns are the foundation for white, straight society to reproduce itself. Any and everything can be justified, so long as it is for “the children” (notably, not actual children with real needs like safe housing, free from violence, et cetera). To do otherwise, to act against the interests of “the children,” is unthinkable. It is queer. The queer fails to be appropriately reproductive, so (s)he becomes the enemy of “the children”, a threat to “the children,” and to the future. As queers, Edelman argues, we have the radical possibility of asking, “If not this, what?” Or, in other words, how else could this work out?

If this seems unduly optimistic—after all, climate catastrophe means no future for real—don’t forget that Edelman first made this charge against the future in 1997, in the wake of the most fatal years of the AIDS crisis in America. The world is always ending somewhere, for someone. Edelman does not promise us some brighter, gayer future. A promised future draws a moral line: It requires  “the stigmatization and exclusion (in other words, the queering) of those who put [the promised future] at risk.” There must be some other way to live, together and with ourselves. There must be a world in which we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees. 

Perhaps it seems counterintuitive that all three of the books I’ve discussed are preoccupied with lineage, heredity, children. There are a lot of sons named Jonah in How It Works Out; Carmen and the woman in the Dream House talk about having a daughter, and at one point Carmen experiences symptoms of a hysterical pregnancy. Harrow is the last of her line, the only hope for the Ninth House’s future, and in order to ensure her conception, her parents killed every child on Drearburh. “I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future,” she tells her cavalier in Gideon the Ninth, “because there is no future without me.” Ultimately, she chooses no future over a future without Gideon—and creates something new, unimaginable and unforeseen. 

What if, what if, what if each what-if is an act of creation, the lesbian creation that supplants and replaces and refuses birth, if by birth we mean heterosexual futures? I am riffing, I am wondering. These are lesbian experiments: questions that answer themselves in the asking, hypotheses that are functionally never hypothetical. What if we kissed just to see? There’s two outcomes in theory. It’s supposed to be possible for an experiment to reveal something isn’t true—but by acting on it, it becomes true. You can’t un-kiss or un-see. Potential energy (the thing that could happen) becomes kinetic energy (the thing that does) when an external force (lesbianism) is applied. 

This is how it works out. You keep wondering, and then you die. But at least you died wondering. Because how else will you know? What if you fuck your ex? What if you fuck your gender? What if your face bursts open and there’s another face underneath that’s been waiting, hungry for love, but if not love, blood will do? What if you delete the worst thing that ever happened from your brain, until the day the worst version of you is ready to go to war for the you that couldn’t? What if you touch another woman and your skin peels off? What if you think about touching another woman and you might as well have, for how irreparably it changes you? 

And the “unnamed thing, the shadow thing, the thing written between the lines of the book, the thing that tied everything together,” the thing you’ve been seeking all along—what if you find it? What if it’s you?