The Female Man

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.

“Who are you!” said one of them. They all had these little stripes over their pockets.

“I am from another time, from the future,” I said, and held out the cat’s cradle. It’s not only the universal symbol of peace, but a pretty good game, too. This was the simplest position, though. One of them laughed; another put its hands over its eyes; the one whose desk it was backed off; a fourth said, “Is this a joke?”

“I am from the future.” Just sit there long enough and the truth will sink in.

“What?” said Number One.

“How else do you think I appeared out of the air?” I said. “People cannot very well walk through walls, now can they?”

The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There’s no sense, after all, in behaving that way towards a perfect stranger; where’s the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear. The door opened at this point and a young woman walked in, a woman of thirty years or so, elaborately painted and dressed. I know I should not have assumed anything, but one must work with what one has; and I assumed that her dress indicated a mother. That is, someone on vacation, someone with leisure, someone who’s close to the information network and full of intellectual curiosity. If there’s a top class (I said to myself), this is it. I didn’t want to take anyone away from necessary manual work. And I thought, you know, that I would make a small joke. So I said to her:

“Take me to your leader.”

VI

? a tall blonde woman in blue pajamas who appeared standing on Colonel Q----’s desk, as if from nowhere. She took out what appeared to be a weapon? No answer to our questions. The Colonel has kept a small revolver in the top drawer of his desk since the summer riots. He produced it. She would not answer our questions. I believe at that point Miss X----, the Colonel’s secretary, walked into the room, quite unaware of what was going on. Luckily Y-----, Z-----, Q————-, R———— , and myself kept our heads. She then said, “I am from the future.”

QUESTIONER: Miss X---- said that?

ANSWER: No, not Miss X----. The—the stranger.

QUESTIONER: Are you sure she appeared standing on Colonel Q----’s desk?

ANSWER: No, I’m not sure. Wait. Yes I am. She was sitting on it.

VII

INTERVIEWER: It seems odd to all of us, Miss Evason, that in venturing into such—well, such absolutely unknown territory—that you should have come unarmed with anything except a piece of string. Did you expect us to be peaceful?

JE: No. No one is, completely.

INTERVIEWER: Then you should have armed yourself.

JE: Never.

INTERVIEWER: But an armed person, Miss Evason, is more formidable than one who is helpless. An armed person more readily inspires fear.

JE: Exactly.

VIII

That woman lived with me for a month. I don’t mean in my house. Janet Evason on the radio, the talk shows, the newspapers, newsreels, magazines, ads even. With somebody I suspect was Miss Dadier appearing in my bedroom late one night.

“I’m lost.” She meant: what world is this?

“F’godsakes, go out in the hall, will you?”

But she melted away through the Chinese print on the wall, presumably into the empty, carpeted, three-in- the-morning corridor outside. Some people never stick around. In my dream somebody wanted to know where Miss Dadier was. I woke at about four and went to the bathroom for a glass of water; there she was on the other side of the bathroom mirror, semaphoring frantically. She made her eyes big and peered desperately into the room, both fists pressed against the glass.