Double Trouble

When I open Instagram, I’m often presented with an ad for the streaming service Mubi. Over a curated selection of queer films, a bolded line reads, “This is not a coming out story.” The implication seems to be that our community, that nebulous alphabet of sexual identities, has transcended the need for stories of our emergence from the closet. To continue revisiting these tropes, the sponsored post suggests, dooms us to remain in a perpetual creative — and political — adolescence. However, as long as we live in a time and place in which heterosexuality remains compulsory, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, coming out stories will matter.

The closet remains a spectral presence in Eddy Boudel Tan’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut. When we meet the narrator, Casper Han, he’s already in his mid-thirties. He has moved away from his isolated hometown of Wilhelm, British Columbia, to Vancouver — and from his shame-filled adolescence into an ostensibly happy adulthood. When his father goes missing, Casper and his partner, Anthony — an actor who is “almost impaired by sincerity”— return to the “lonely place five hours north of the city” to join the search. Their arrival unearths an incident from Casper’s past, one that he has kept from Anthony: his identical twin, Sam, disappeared nearly two decades earlier and was never found.

The novel moves between these two time frames, which are linked by recurring images of performance and doubling. Its title refers to the costumes the nine-year-old brothers were wearing on the night that Sam “walked into the forest and never came back.” As Casper deepens his dual investigation into the mysteries, Anthony suddenly decides to go back to Vancouver. (In this otherwise tightly plotted story, I’d question the point of Anthony at all, but his privilege and his easygoing family make him a useful foil for Casper, who feels like an outsider at home.) Throughout, Casper replays — sometimes literally, with old home movies — his traumatic upbringing and, at twenty-three, the mortifying exposure of his first love. “Beneath the fear and humiliation, I felt relief,” he says of the circulated video that outed him. “There was no longer any reason to hide. This was who we were, all the sweat and the filth in poor resolution.”

Boudel Tan carefully expresses the difference between choosing and being forced to come out — a distinction that is relevant for someone like Casper, who reads in a magazine about the self-loathing among Asian Canadians that “resulted in the common practice of coming out much later in life than their non-Asian peers.” When Casper has the opportunity to speak with the journalist himself, he balks. “My costume was hanging on the closet door,” he says of a childhood memory, layering the figurative and domestic facades that ruled his adolescence. “I didn’t want to be me anymore.” Even so, Casper comes to understand his sexuality in relation to his racial identity. “The problem wasn’t the kiss itself but the fact that we were boys,” he realized, after being caught by his twin. “There were different rules for boys, just as there were unspoken rules determined by the colour of one’s skin.”

With The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, Boudel Tan continues to play with the rules of the domestic suspense genre. His debut, After Elias, could be overly ponderous at times, and the plot of his propulsive The Rebellious Tide was occasionally far-fetched and convoluted. Here Boudel Tan achieves a balance between introspection and action. One of the pleasures of reading a thriller is teasing out the truth and parsing the witness statements. Casper’s narration follows two inquiries: the mystery of his missing twin and the search for his authentic self. In both cases, the lines between lying and omission — or between reality and invention — become blurred. The book draws a parallel between the dread a young queer person may feel at home and the encroaching terror induced by the best suspense fiction. For Casper, just having Anthony meet his parents is fraught, even though it’s been years since he was outed. “Under normal circumstances,” he thinks, seeing his partner in his childhood bedroom, “this moment would have terrified me. I’d never brought home a boyfriend before.”

While heterosexual marriage and its indiscretions typically power works like these (Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl comes to mind), Boudel Tan considers parent-child dynamics as the source of danger. In his previous books, he excelled at showing how disorientation and travel can ignite family tensions. Here he turns his attention to his narrator’s own backyard. He casts Wilhelm — its seedy bars and motels, its familiar homes and folklore — as the place where Casper’s “present life superimposed on the past, as if cut from a photograph and pasted onto a faded backdrop.” If we can’t truly go home again, Boudel Tan suggests, it’s because we’re always already there.

Although Casper has moved away, it becomes clear that he hasn’t moved on. By unearthing memories and long-buried truths, he reconciles how the past has continued to affect his present. “It’s tragic,” he finally admits, “the ways we hide so much of ourselves.” The Tiger and the Cosmonaut shows how, for even the most well-adjusted among us, coming out is less of a one-way ticket to Fire Island than a round-trip fare. Despite the carry‑on limit, we bring our closets with us.