Detective Costeau hasn’t figured it out yet, you haven’t even met him yet, he’s still sleeping off his last bender. Kim, on the other hand, already had your pronouns in his notes alongside a comprehensive psych eval
Roland Deschain saves you from being harassed and mugged while you’re visiting the Big Apple and couldn’t get a cab after drinking with your girlfriends. With one hand missing half its features and the brutal butt of his antique looking pistol, he pummels the men to within an inch of their respective lives.
In 2011 in a movie theater, the homophobic ringleader of the men who hounded you, whose name is Geoff, goes to see Drive in theaters with his daughter and his daughters friend. They both think the lead actor is cute. That meticulous calm, that dread and serendipitous violence hidden behind the wistful eyes of the lead as portrayed by Ryan Gosling, stirs something in him. Geoff breaks down into tears remembering the girl he and his friends would’ve… he cast an askance glance at his daughter, reaching out to him, and the girl she brought, No, he realizes, they’re in love, how did couldn’t I see that?
Geoff’s old shuddering limp returns, a reminder lain dormant all these years that the butt of the gun that shattered his L2 vertebra hadn’t just broken him for the rest of his youth. (Psychosomatic the doctor said. Bullshit, Geoff said. My ass still hurts.) It hadn’t just taken years of physical therapy. It hadn’t just wiped away the group of friends (shitheels, he realizes). That mad diseased looking cowboy motherfucker had saved his soul. He had given Geoff time to become someone else.
In your present, the whirling madness continued and by the end of it, you weren’t sure this interloper had even been in your life longer than that black-sounding-white guy song you heard in the bar. How did it go? Baby can you–? (But he’s a righteous man!) Baby can you dig-- (Righteous man!)
He crushes hands, he kicks a knee in. You see the ringleader, whose hate you could see shining right through his eyes, collapse into a broken heap on the sidewalk pavement, unable to move. But you know he is not dead because the ungodly wail that comes ripping through him makes you almost wish this had never happened. Wished you were a worm that had died in a rotten hole in the Big Apple.
“You,” the satanic cowpoke offers raggedly, “have received my aide and now I must ask of yours. I am dying and there’s a quest needs doing. Many things hang in the balance, worlds upon worlds.” Though he didn’t seemed strained during the fighting you realize now he was deathly sick to begin with.
The longer he talks, the more words he says, the more the hellish dream land he describes as his home country reminds you of where you came from. Even when there is nothing in parallel you ken his heartbreak and his resolve and he kens yours. You are enveloped in a grand quest to find some Dark Tower. He merits that there may be “iron in you yet” and you may even have “the makings of a Gunslinger they would have sent west in shame”. Your training begins as he leans on you more and more to hunt food and fend off wildlife.
As hard as it all is to bear, as alien and terrible as this world is, as cruel as he is, he is one of the only people who truly ever saw you.
He saw you very well.
Another of the Unfound Doors that let the savage dying cowpoke into your world approaches on the horizon like the black silhouette of an army marching in single file. Roland’s only chance of survival may be the antibiotics found in any American pharmacy on the other side. If there is someone like you, or utterly unlike you, you pontificate, it is by the Way of the Gun and in the name of Arthur Eld and the White that you must be there for them. Like he was for you.
And will you be there with him when he blows his horn at the foot of the Tower, when your Tet has lain waste to all that opposed you and your worn through moccasins grace the roses at Can’-Ka No Rey, the red fields you’ve begun to dream about? A sick feeling in your gut tells you that although he has come to love you and you him, father and daughter after a fashion, you are just one more cartridge to be sent into Ka’s wind. And that feels so sickeningly right.
You know that when he speaks the dozens, perhaps hundreds of names he’s sworn to speak before the threshold of the Dark Tower itself, your true name, the one you gave yourself all those years ago, will be among them. The word that means you will shake the foundations of existence itself.
I was coming into this thread ready to post, “Hm, I wonder what Jessica Fletcher would do for this bit,” but by the beams, you’re here writing beautiful fiction
The csi team deduce you are trans by the fact that the bloodied corpse of the star cheerleader is making you so mad not because you wanted to be with her but because you wanted to be like her.
Frank Drebin ramraids your front door, notes that you live with no front door, figures out you’re quirky because nobody leaves the door open these days.
Sam and Max immediately act like you’re trans. There is no realization, just an off-handed quip. Sam takes one of your lightbulbs, and the world becomes notably worse less than a day later.
Jessica Jones calls you an idiot for not realising you’re trans, but she does it out of earshot and then offers you some beer from the bottle she’s drinking out of.
Rust Cohle sees you and has a vision about the vast emptiness of space, where he realizes that life has no meaning and time just repeats endlessly in an inescapable loop. He numbs himself every night trying to forget you, but he can’t escape the gravity of your memory. He’s pulled under the darkness, like a crashing ocean wave, and he’s drowning, over and over, in the inky blackness. He realizes you’re trans five years later, after everything he loves is dead, because he’s the only one who can.
Sam Spade knew you were trans because it’s the only thing that makes sense of the situation.
He lures you up to his office, only to tell you he’s sending you over.
You try to run, but he’s faster and stronger.
You try to plead, but he just gets meaner. He hits you.
“The cops want to pin this on me, so I’m giving them you. They won’t give a trannie a break. This may be San Francisco, but it’s also 1927.”
The cops take you in as a material witness. They ask you questions all night you couldn’t possibly know the answer too. They beat you up.
In the morning they let you go. The whole thing was a ploy to get the real killers off guard.
Phillip Marlowe guessed you might be trans when he was asking you a few questions. He follows you. Day 1, nothing. Day 2, nothing. Day 3, you go into a flower shop for an hour and come out without any flowers.
He snoops around the shop after you’re gone. There’s an illegal hormone clinic in the back room. This may be LA, but it’s also 1937. The doc sneaks in and saps Marlowe over the head. He blacks out.
The doc gives him a triple dose of the good stuff. Marlowe wanders LA as a women for the next 4 days in a smoggy haze. He comes to in a deserted Malibu beach house owned by the ne’er do well son of a vicious billionaire. The only clues as to what happened are a torn pair of pantyhose and a matchbook to club named “Squeeze” on Hollywood with Marlowe’s lipstick on it.
Marlowe thought he knew every club on Hollywood but he didn’t know “Squeeze” … Anyway, after a lot more stuff like that, Marlowe knows for sure you’re the murderer, but he thinks you’re alright, so he pins both murders on the heavy that killed the other guy. He had it coming anyway.
Jessica Fletcher would figure it out when she dressed up as a drunk to tail her niece. She’d sing a bit of shanty, kiss you on the forehead, and encourage you to be yourself. You were once her student, and she always knew from your writing that you were a kind soul and a wicked plot weaver.
Jessica Fletcher actually causes you to question your entire identity several weeks before suddenly hopping on a train and attending a book signing event she set up without her publicist knowing. Then when she arrives she bumps into one of your friends nowhere near the signing event, manipulates the conversation into talking about you, figures out where you work, shows up and claims that she was just passing by. After a couple days of back and forths while she tells everyone within earshot it was such a coincidence she was there at that time she, quite literally the night before her departure, tells you your life story and convinces you on the spot that you are indeed trans.
The Washington Times obituary of Spillane said of Hammer, “In a manner similar to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Hammer was a cynical loner contemptuous of the ‘tedious process’ of the legal system, choosing instead to enforce the law on his own terms.”
Christ, what vicious condemnation.
Jenny Nicholson reviewed the book Trigger Warning. In the last dozen pages, some Navy Seal Delta Force Army Ranger suddenly appears and offers the alleged protagonist a job as a “one-man strike team,” roaming the country and “righting wrongs.” Like all the three-letter agencies got together to make some witness-protection mooks into fascist vigilantes. Every single time, it is shocking to remember that this power fantasy is some assholes’ actual moral belief system. These are problems they really believe exists - these are solutions they desperately want to see.
Oh I just watched an episode of fuckin Columbo where the titular detective encouraged a beat cop to make an illegal search, and if it was a problem he would “get a warrant later.”
And that’s every single cop show. That’s so much scarier to me. That the common, every day, “likeable” “good guy” cop characters are constantly violating suspects’ rights, and it’s always presented as justified.
It’s so common and consistent that I think a lot of people just think of it as being part of a cop’s job, and that “rights” are in opposition to justice rather than a part of it. Including a lot of cops. It’s really fucked.
“You see, I need cocaine to accelerate my thought process and unleash the full potential of my mind. I’m not sure what you would get out of it, but I’m sure it would be a waste, by comparison.”
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