In the opening of Bee Sacks' aptly titled story, "The Song of the Bow," two trans men watch through the window of a coffee shop in Brooklyn as two Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox men across the street talk with great animation, then shake hands for a long moment, and go their separate ways. The watchers realize the Haredim are young, one has a "patchy beard," the other is "fresh-faced with pink cheeks," and though the watchers are young as well, they are acutely aware of the differences in their lifestyles. Here's how the narrator describes Haredim: "Two men dressed for an 18th—century Polish winter in the Brooklyn summer heat, all that trapped sunlight and no mature trees on our block."

The twist of humor in that absurd image was all the encouragement I needed to continue reading. Sacks' story was featured in the Dec. 9th edition of Electric Literature's Recommended Reading. I recommend it as well, not only because it provides an intimate view of two radically different, but geographically adjacent cultures, but more importantly for this column, because Sacks uses the technique of nesting one story inside of another masterfully.

This is the situation: Our unnamed narrator and their lover are at different stages of transition. When the narrator goes to visit their parents, they wear their old clothes and use their old name, but their lover, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family on the west coast, takes T shots in the stomach, ensuring the permanence of their transition.

Yet gender identity is not the true subject here, it's merely the context. Nor are the Haredim, an ultra-Orthodox sect the narrator's unnamed lover knows well because they grew up in a Hasidic community on the west coast, and at one time, studied Judaism in seminary. "`They are obsessed with separation,' you had explained. Now you had a new name and a growing mustache, but as a child you had learned Hebrew and worn long dresses that covered your knees and collarbones. Such a past life was part of your magic –who you were before you remade yourself completely."

The narrator has a lot of questions about the men they had watched from across the street, so the lover creates a story about them, naming them Dovi and Yoni, and as the story grows, the narrative line of "Song of the Bow" becomes a weave of the imaginary lives of Yoni and Dovi and the "real" lives of the two trans characters. And then, at some point, the made-up story occupies more and more space as tensions grow between the two lovers. There are also tensions in the made-up story, and soon the narrator thinks of himself as Dovi, the red-cheeked shorter man, while his lover is Yoni, the taller man with the patchy beard. Once that happens, the nested tale takes over.

"Song of the Bow" plays with binaries: inside/outside; distant/close; make-believe/real, mixing them up so thoroughly that with a deft sleight of hand it forms a mobius strip as the nested story and the real story are tied together (like a bow) so that a story that began with two different sets of characters, the two trans men and the two Haredim, ends with one set of characters that contain the others. The contexts are still different, but the emotion the narrator and his Haredi twin feel is the same. In other words, a story that opens with an assertion of separations--Jewish on one side of the street, Gentile on the other, or cis gender and transgender—achieves a finish where the separations are no longer operative because, in the end, love and heartbreak, in everyone's life, are close neighbors. That's pretty breathtaking. Additionally, "The Song of the Bow" achieves what, it seems to me, all fiction strives for, which is to widen a reader's understanding of, and hopefully, empathy for, characters who possessed qualities that made them seem alien in the beginning.

'The Song of the Bow' is available online at Electric Literature.

Filed under: A story within a story