The Female Man

XII

Six months ago at the Chinese New Year, Jea

XIV

Jea

XV

JE: Evason is not "son" but "daughter." This is your translation.

XVI

And here we are.

PART TWO

I

Who am I?

I know who I am, but what's my brand name?

Me with a new face, a puffy mask. Laid over the old one in strips of plastic, a blond Hallowe'en ghoul on top of the S. S. uniform. I was ski

I don't do this often (say I, the ghoul) but it's great elevator technique, holding your forefinger to the back of somebody's neck while passing the fourth floor, knowing he'll never find out that you're not all there.

(Sorry, But watch out.)

You'll meet me later.

II

As I have said before, I (not the one above, please) had an experience on the seventh of February last, nineteen-sixty-nine.

I turned into a man.

I had been a man before, but only briefly and in a crowd.

You would not have noticed anything, had you been there.

Manhood, children, is not reached by courage or short hair or insensibility or by being (as I was) in Chicago's only skyscraper hotel while the snow rages outside. I sat in a Los Angeles cocktail party with the bad baroque furniture all around, having turned into a man. I saw myself between the dirty-white scrolls of the mirror and the results were indubitable: I was a man. But what then is manhood?

Manhood, children… is Manhood.

III

Janet beckoned me into the limousine and I got in. The road was very dark. As she opened the door I saw her famous face under the dome light over the front seat; trees massed electric-green beyond the headlights. This is how I really met her. Jea

"Greetings," said Janet Evason. "Hello. Bonsoir. That's Jea

I told her. Jea

"On moonlit nights," said Janet, "I often drive without lights," and slowing the car to a crawl, she turned out the headlights; I mean I saw them disappear-the countryside blent misty and pale to the horizon like a badly exposed Watteau. I always feel in moonlight as though my eyes have gone bad. The car-something expensive, though it was too dark to tell what-sighed soundlessly. Jea

"I have, as they say," (said Janet in her surprisingly loud, normal voice)

"given them the slip," and she turned the headlights back on. "I daresay that's not proper," she added.

"It is not," said Jea

"I am very sorry," said Janet. The car? "Stolen," she said. She peered out the side window for a moment, turning her head and taking her eyes off the road.

Jea

IV

Was she trying to run away? Or only to pick people at random?

V

Why did they send me? Because they can spare me. Etsuko Belin strapped me in.

"Ah, Janet!" she said. (Ah, yourself.) In a plain, blank room. The cage in which I lay goes in and out of existence forty-thousand times a second; thus it did not go with me. No last kiss from Vittoria; nobody could get to me. I did not, contrary to your expectation, go nauseated or cold or feel I was dropping through endless whatever. The trouble is your brain continues to work on the old stimuli while the new ones already come in; I tried to make the new wall into the old. Where the lattice of the cage had been was a human face.

Spasibo.

Sorry.

Let me explain.

I was so rattled that I did not take in all at once that I was lying across her-desk, I learned later-and worse still. Appeared across it, just like that (in full view of five others). We had experimented with other distances; now they fetched me back, to make sure, and sent me out, and there I was again, on her desk.

What a strange woman; thick and thin, dried up, hefty in the back, with a grandmotherly moustache, a little one. How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.

Aha! A man.

Shall I say my flesh crawled? Bad for vanity, but it did. This must be a man. I got off its desk. Perhaps it was going out to manual work, for we were dressed alike; only it had coded bands of color sewn over its pocket, a sensible device for a machine to read or something. I said in perfect English: "How do you do? I must explain my sudden appearance. I am from another time."

(We had rejected probability/continuum as unintelligible.) Nobody moved.

"How do you do? I must explain my sudden appearance. I am from another time."

What do you do, call them names? They didn't move. I sat down on the desk and one of them slammed shut a part of the wall; so they have doors, just as we do.

The important thing in a new situation is not to frighten, and in my pockets was just the thing for such an emergency. I took out the piece of string and began playing Cat's Cradle.