The Female Man

I

I had got stuck with Jeannine. I don’t know how. Also, everybody in the Goddamned subway car was staring at my legs. I think they thought I was a cheerleader. Way up in the Bronx we had waited for the Express, forty-five minutes in the open air with tufts of grass growing between the rails, just as in my childhood, weeds surrounding the vacant subway cars, sunlight and cloud-shadows chasing each other across the elevated wooden platform. I put my raincoat across my knees—skirts are long in nineteen-sixty-nine, Jeannine-time. Jeannine is neat, I suppose, but to me she looks as if she’s wandering all over the place: hanging earrings, metal links for a belt, her hair escaping from a net, ruffles on her sleeves; and on that kind of shapeless, raglan-sleeved coat that always looks as if it’s dragging itself off the wearer’s shoulders, a pin in the shape of a crescent moon with three stars dangling from it on three fine, separate chains. Her coat and shoulder bag are overflowing into her neighbors’ laps.

So I remember the horsehair petticoats of my teens, which bounded out of one’s hands every time one tried to roll them or fold them up. One per drawer. The train groaned and ground to a stop somewhere between one hundred and eightieth and one hundred and sixty-eighth streets. We can look over the plain of the Bronx, which is covered with houses, to something near the river in the distance—a new stadium, I think.

Petticoats, waist-cinchers, boned strapless brassieres with torturous nodes where the bones began or ended, modestly high-heeled shoes, double-circle skirts, felt applique’d with sequins, bangle bracelets that always fell off, winter coats with no buttons to hold them shut, rhinestone sunburst brooches that caught on everything. Horrible obsessions, The Home, for example. We sat looking over the tenements, the faraway bridge, the ball park. There were public parks on islands in the river where I don’t remember there being anything of the kind. Jeannine’s giving me gooseflesh, whisper, whisper on the side of the neck (about somebody else’s home permanent across the car), never still, always twisting around to look at something, forever fiddling with her clothes, suddenly deciding she just has to see out the window, I’ll die if I don’t. We changed places so she wouldn’t have the bar between the windows cutting off her field of view. The sun shone as if on the Perfect City of my twelve-year-old dreams, the kind of thing you see on a billboard under Pittston, Future Jewel Of The Finger Lakes, the ramps, the graceful walkways, the moving belts between hundred-story buildings, the squares of green that are supposed to be parks, and above it all, in the cloudless modern sky, just one sleek, futuristic Airplane.

II

JEANNINE: Cal is too much. I don’t know if I ought to give him up or not. He’s awfully sweet but he’s such a baby. And the cat doesn’t like him, you know. He doesn’t take me any place. I know he doesn’t make much money, but you would think he would try, wouldn’t you? All he wants is to sit around and look at me and then when we get in bed, he doesn’t do anything for the longest time; that just can’t be right All he does is pet and he says he likes it like that. He says it’s like floating. Then when he does it you know, sometimes he cries. I never heard of a man doing that

MYSELF: Nothing.

JEANNINE: I think there’s something wrong with him. I think he’s traumatized by being so short. He wants to get married so we can have children—on his salary! When we pass a baby carriage with a baby, we both run over to look at it. He can’t make up his mind, either. I never heard of a man like that. Last fall we were going to go to a Russian restaurant and I wanted to go to this place so he said all right, and then I changed my mind and wanted to go to the other place and he said OK, fine, but it turned out to be shut. So what could we do? He didn’t know. So I lost my temper.

ME: Nothing, nothing, nothing.

SHE: He’s just too much. Do you think I should get rid of him?

ME: (I shook my head)

JEANNINE (Confidingly): Well, he is funny some-times.

(She bent down to pick lint off her blouse, giving herself a momentary double chin. She pursed her lips, pouted, bridled, drooped her eyelids in a knowing look.)

Sometimes—sometimes—he likes to get dressed up. He gets into the drapes like a sarong and puts on all my necklaces around his neck, and stands there with the curtain rod for a spear. He wants to be an actor, you know. But I think there’s something wrong with him. Is it what they call transvestism?

JOANNA: No, Jeannine.

JEANNINE: I think it might be. I think I’ll throw him over. I don’t like anybody calling my cat, Mr. Frosty, names. Cal calls him The Blotchy Skinny Cat Which he isn’t. Besides, I’m going to call up my brother next week and go stay with him during vacation—I get three weeks. It gets pretty dull by the end of it—my brother stays in a small town in the Poconos, you know—but the last time I was there, there was a block dance and a Grange supper and I met a very, very handsome man. You can tell when somebody likes you, can’t you? He liked me. He’s an assistant to the butcher and he’s going to inherit the business; he’s got a real future. I went there quite a lot; I can tell, the way somebody looks at me. Mrs. Robert Poirier. Jeannine Dadier-Poirier. Ha ha! He’s good-looking. Cal—Cal is—well! Still, Cal is sweet. Poor, but sweet. I wouldn’t give up Cal for anything. I enjoy being a girl, don’t you? I wouldn’t be a man for anything; I think they have such a hard time of it. I like being admired. I like being a girl. I wouldn’t be a man for anything. Not for anything .

ME: Has anyone proposed the choice to you lately?

JEANNINE: I won’t be a man.

ME: Nobody axed you to.

III

She was sick in the subway. Not really, but almost. She indicated by signs that she was going to be sick or had just been sick or was afraid she was going to be sick.

She held my hand.

IV

We got out at forty-second street; and this is the way things really happen, in broad daylight, publicly, invisibly; we meandered past the shops. Jeannine saw a pair of stockings that she just had to have. We went in the store and the store owner bullied us. Outside again with her stockings (wrong size) she said, “But I didn’t want them!” They were red fishnet hose, which she’ll never dare wear. In the store window there was a zany-faced mannequin who roused my active hatred: painted long ago, now dusty and full of hair-fine cracks, a small shopkeeper’s economy. “Ah!” said Jeannine sorrowfully, looking again at the edge of the fishnet hose in her package. Mannequins are always dancing, this absurd throwing back of the head and bending of the arms and legs. They enjoy being mannequins. (But I won’t be mean.) I will not say that the sky ripped open from top to bottom, from side to side, that from the clouds over Fifth Avenue descended seven angels with seven trumpets, that the vials of wrath were loosed over Jeannine-time and the Angel of Pestilence sank Manhattan in the deepest part of the sea. Janet, our only savior, turned the corner in a gray flannel jacket and a gray flannel skirt down to her knees. That’s a compromise between two worlds. She seemed to know where she was going. Badly sunburned, with more freckles than usual across her flat nose, Miss Evason stopped in the middle of the street, scratched her head all over, yawned, and entered a drugstore. We followed.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of that,” said the man behind the counter.

“Oh my goodness, really?” said Miss Evason. She put away a piece of paper, on which she had written whatever-it-was, and went to the other side of the store, where she had a soda.

“You’ll need a prescription,” said the man behind the counter.

“Oh my goodness,” Miss Evason said mildly. It did not help that she was carrying her soda. She put it down on the plastic counter top and joined us at the door, where Miss Dadier was trying—softly but very determinedly—to bolt. She wanted to get back to the freedom of Fifth Avenue, where there were so many gaps—so much For Rent, so much cheaper, so much older, than I remembered.

Miss Dadier looked sulkily up at the sky, calling on the invisible angels and the Wrath of God to witness, and then she said, grudgingly:

“I can’t imagine what you were trying to buy.” She did not want to admit that Janet existed. Janet raised her eyebrows and directed a glance at me, but I don’t know. I never know anything.

“I have athlete’s foot,” said Miss Evason.

Jeannine shuddered. (Catch her taking off her shoes in public!) “I thought I’d lost you.”

“You didn’t,” said Miss Evason tolerantly. “Are you ready?”

“No,” said Jeannine. But she did not repeat it. I’m not sure I’m ready. Janet led us put into the street and had us stand close together, all within one square of the sidewalk. She looked at her watch. The Whileawayan antennae come searching through the ages like a cat’s whisker. It would have been better to leave from some less public spot, but they don’t seem to care what they do; Janet waved engagingly at passersby and I became aware that I had become aware that I remembered becoming aware of the curved wall eighteen niches from my nose. The edge of the sidewalk, where the traffic. Had been.

Now I know how I got to Whileaway, but how did I get stuck with Jeannine? And how did Janet get into that world and not mine? Who did that? When the question is translated into Whilewayan, Dear Reader, you will see the technicians of Whileaway step back involuntarily; you will see Boy Scout Evason blanch; you will see the Chieftainess of the Whileawayan scientific establishment, mistress of ten thousand slaves and wearer of the bronze breastplates, direct stern questions right and left, while frowning. Etcetera.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Jeannine was saying miserably under her breath. I don’t want to be here. They forced me. I want to go home. This is a terrible place.

“Who did that?” said Miss Evason. “Not me. Not my people.”

V

Praise God, Whose image we put in the plaza to make the eleven-year-olds laugh. She has brought me home.

VI

Dig in. Winter’s coming. When I—not the “I” above but the “I” down here, naturally; that’s Janet up there —

When “I” dream of Whileaway, I dream first of the farms, and although words are inadequate to this great theme, while I live I yet must tell you that the farms are the only family units on Whileaway, not because Whileawayans think farm life is good for children (they don’t) but because farm work is harder to schedule and demands more day-to-day continuity than any other kind of job. Farming on Whileaway is mainly caretaking and machine-tending; it is the emotional security of family life that provides the glamor. I do not know this from observation; I know it from knowledge; I have never visited Whileaway in my own person, and when Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna stepped out of the stainless steel sphere into which they had been transported from wherever the dickens it was that they were before (etcetera), they did so alone. I was there only as the spirit or soul of an experience is always there.

Sixty eight-foot-tall Amazons, the Whileawayan Praetorian Guard, threw daggers in all directions (North, South, East, and West).

Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna arrived in the middle of a field at the end of an old-fashioned tarmac that stretched as a feeder to the nearest hovercraft highway. No winter, few roofs. Vittoria and Janet embraced and stood very still, as Aristophanes describes. They didn’t yell or pound each other’s shoulders, or kiss, or hug, or cry out, or jump up and down, or say “You old son-of-a-gun!” or tell each other all the news, or push each other to arm’s length and screech, and then hug each other again. More farsighted than either Jeannine or Janet, I can see beyond the mountain range on the horizon, beyond the Altiplano, to the whale-herders and underground fisheries on the other side of the world; I can see desert gardens and zoological preserves; I can see storms brewing. Jeannine gulped. Must they do that in public ? There are a few fluffy summer clouds above Green Bay, each balancing on its own tail of hot air; the dust settles on either side of the highway as a hovercar roars and passes. Vittoria’s too stocky for Jeannine’s taste; she could at least be good-looking. We strolled down the feeder road to the road to the hovercraft-way, observed by nobody, all alone, except that I can see a weather satellite that sees me. Jeannine keeps just behind Vittoria, staring with censorious horror at Vittoria’s long, black hair.

“I’ll they know we’re here,” says Jeannine, the world falling about her ears, “why didn’t they send someone to meet us? I mean, other people.”

“Why should they?” says Janet.

VII

JEANNINE : But we might lose our way.

JANET: You can’t. I’m here and I know the way.

JEANNINE: Suppose you weren’t with us. Suppose we’d killed you.

JANET: Then it would certainly be preferable that you lose your way!

JEANNINE: But suppose we held you as a hostage? Suppose you were alive but we threatened to kill you?

JANET: The longer it takes to get anywhere, the more time I have to think of what to do. I can probably stand thirst better than you can. And of course, since you have no map, I can mislead you and not tell you the truth about where to go.

JEANNINE: But we’d get there eventually, wouldn’t we?

JANET: Yes. So there’s no difference, you see.

JEANNINE: But suppose we killed you?

JANET: Either you killed me before you got here, in which case I am dead, or you kill me after you get here, in which case I am dead. It makes no difference to me where I die.

JEANNINE: But suppose we brought a—a cannon or a bomb or something—suppose we fooled you and then seized the Government and threatened to blow everything up!

JANET: For the purposes of argument, let us suppose that. First of all, there is no government here in the sense that you mean. Second, there is no one place from which to control the entire activity of Whileaway, that is, the economy. So your one bomb isn’t enough, even supposing you could kill off our welcoming committee. Introducing an entire army or an entire arsenal through the one point would take either a very advanced technology—which you have not got—or vast amounts of time. If it took you vast amounts of time, that would be no problem for us; if you came through right away, you must come through either prepared or unprepared. If you came through prepared, waiting would only assure that you spread out, used up your supplies, and acquired a false sense of confidence; if you came through unprepared and had to spend time putting things together, that would be a sign that your technology is not so advanced and you’re not that much of a threat one way or the other.

JEANNINE:(controlling herself): Hm!

JANET: You see, conflicts between states are not identical with conflicts between persons. You exaggerate this business of surprise. Relying on the advantage of a few hours is not a very stable way of proceeding, is it? A way of life so unprotected would hardly be worth keeping.

JEANNINE: I hope—I don’t hope really because it would be awful but just to pay you out I hope!—well, I hope that some enemy with fantastically advanced technology sends experts through that what-do-you-call-it and I hope they freeze everybody within fifty miles with green rays—and then I hope they make that whatever-you-call-it a permanent whatever-you-call-it so they can bring through anything they want to whenever they want to and kill you all !

JANET: Now there’s an example worth talking about. First, if they had a technology as advanced as that, they could open their own access points, and we certainly can’t watch everywhere at all times. It would make life too obsessive. But suppose they must use this single one. No welcoming committee—or defensive army, even—could withstand those fifty-mile green rays, yes? So that’s not worth sending an army against, is it? They would just be frozen or killed. However, I suspect that the use of such a fifty-mile green ray would produce all sorts of grossly observable phenomena—that is, it would be instantly obvious that something or somebody was paralyzing everything within a radius of fifty miles—and if these technologically advanced but unamiable persons were so obliging as to announce themselves in that fashion, we’d hardly need to find out about their existence by sending anyone here in the flesh, would we?.

(A long silence. Jeannine is trying to think of something desperately crushing. Her platform wedgies aren’t made for walking and her feet hurt.)

JANET: Besides, it’s never at the first contact that these things happen. I’ll show you the theory, some day.

Some day (thinks Jeannine) somebody will get yon in spite of all that rationality. All that rationality will go straight up into the air. They don’t have to invade; they can just blow you up from outer space; they can just infect you with plague, or infiltrate, or form a fifth column. They can corrupt you. There are all sorts of horrors. You think life is safe but it isn’t, it isn’t at all. It’s just horrors. Horrors!

JANET (reading her face, jerking a thumb upwards from a closed fist in the Whileawayan gesture of religion): God’s will be done.

VIII

Stupid and inactive. Pathetic. Cognitive starvation. Jeannine loves to become entangled with the souls of the furniture in my apartment, softly drawing herself in to fit inside them, pulling one long limb after another into the cramped positions of my tables and chairs. The dryad of my living room. I can look anywhere, at the encyclopedia stand, at the cheap lamps, at the homey bat comfortable brown couch; it is always Jeannine who looks back. It’s uncomfortable for me but such a relief to her. That long, young, pretty body loves to be sat on and I think if Jeannine ever meets a Satanist, she will find herself perfectly at home as his altar at a Black Mass, relieved of personality at last and forever.

IX

Then there is the joviality, the self-consequence, the forced heartiness, the benevolent teasing, the insistent demands for flattery and reassurance. This is what ethologists call dominance behavior.

EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD MALE COLLEGE FRESHMAN (laying down the law at a party): If Marlowe had lived, he would have written very much better plays than Shakespeare’s.

ME, A THTRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH (dazed with boredom): Gee, how clever you are to know about things that never happened.

THE FRESHMAN (bewildered): Huh? OR

EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL AT A PARTY: Men don’t understand machinery. The gizmo goes on the whatsit and the rataplan makes contact with the fourchette in at least seventy percent of all cases.

THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MALE PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING (awed): Gee. (Something wrong here, I think)

OR

“Man” is a rhetorical convenience for “human.”

“Man” includes “woman.” Thus:

1. The Eternal Feminine leads us ever upward and on. (Guess who “us” is)

2. The last man on earth will spend the last hour before the holocaust searching for his wife and child. (Review of The Second Sex by the first sex)

3. We all have the impulse, at times, to get rid of our wives. (Irving Howe, introduction to Hardy, talking about my wife)

4. Great scientists choose their problems as they choose their wives. (A.H. Maslow, who should know better)

5. Man is a hunter who wishes to compete for the best kill and the best female, (everybody)

OR

The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I’m never impressed—no woman ever is—it’s just a cue that you like me and I’m supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I’m dying and disappearing!

SHE: Isn’t it just a game?

HE: Yes, of course.

SHE: And if you play the game, it means you like me, doesn’t it?

HE: Of course.

SHE: Then if it’s just a game and you like me, you can stop playing. Please stop.

HE: No.

SHE: Then I won’t play.

HE: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I’ll show you. (He plays harder)

SHE: All right. I’m impressed.

HE: You really are sweet and responsive after all. You’ve kept your femininity. You’re not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You’re a woman.

SHE: Yes. (She kills herself)

X

This book is written in blood.

Is it written entirely in blood?

No, some of it is written in tears.

Are the blood and tears all mine?

Yes, they have been in the past. But the future is a different matter. As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:

OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.

XI

I study Vittoria’s blue-black hair and velvety brown eyes, her heavy, obstinate chin. Her waist is too long (like a flexible mermaid’s), her solid thighs and buttocks surprisingly sturdy. Vittoria gets a lot of praise in Whileaway because of her big behind. She is modestly interesting, like everything else in this world formed for the long acquaintance and the close view; they work outdoors in their pink or gray pajamas and indoors in the nude until you know every wrinkle and fold of flesh, until your body’s in a common medium with theirs and there are no pictures made out of anybody or anything; everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside. Whileaway is the inside of everything else. I slept in the Belins’ common room for three weeks, surrounded in my coming and going by people with names like Nofretari Ylayeson and Nguna Twason. (I translate freely; the names are Chinese, African, Russian, European. Also , Whileawayans love to use old names they find in dictionaries.) One little girl decided I needed a protector and stuck by me, trying to learn English. In the winter there’s always heat in the kitchens for those who like the hobby of cooking and induction helmets for the little ones (to keep the heat at a distance). The Belins’ kitchen was a story-telling place.

I mean, of course, that she told stories to me. Vittoria translates, speaking softly and precisely: “Once upon a time a long time ago there was a child who was raised by bears. Her mother went up into the woods pregnant (for there were more woods than there are today) and gave birth to the child there, for she had made an error in reckoning. Also, she had got lost. Why she was in the woods doesn’t matter. It is not germane to this story.

“Well, if you must know, it was because the mother was up there to shoot bears for a zoo. She had captured three bears and shot eighteen but was running out of film; and when she vent into labor, she let the three bears go, for she didn’t know how long the labor would last, and there was nobody to feed the bears. They conferred with each other and stayed around, though, because they had never seen a human being give birth before and they were interested. Everything went fine until the baby’s head came out, and then the Spirit of the Woods, who is very mischievous and clever, decided to have some fun. So right after the baby came out, it sent a rock slide down the mountain and the rock slide cut the umbilical cord and knocked the mother to one side. Aid then it made an earthquake which separated the mother and the baby by miles and miles, like the Grind Canyon in South Continent.”

“Isn’t that going to be a lot of trouble?” said I. “Do you want to hear this story or don’t you?” (Vittoria translated) “7 sap they were separated by miles and miles. When the mother saw this, she said

’Damn!’ Then she went back to civilization to get a search party together, but by that time the bears had decided to adopt the baby and all of them were hidden up above the forty-ninth parallel, where it’s very rocky and wild. So the little girl grew up with the bears.

“When she was ten, there began to be trouble. She had some bear friends by then, although she didn’t like to walk on all-fours as the bears did and the bears didn’t like that, because bears are very conservative. She argued that walking on all-fours didn’t suit her skeletal development. The bears said, ‘Oh, but we have always walked this way.’ They were pretty stupid. But nice, I mean. Anyway, she walked upright, the way it felt best, but when it came to copulation, that was another matter. There was nobody to copulate with. The little girl wanted to try it with her male-best-bear-friend (for animals do not live the way people do, you know) but the he-bear would not even try. ‘Alas’ he said (You can tell by that he was much more elegant than the other bears, ha ha) I’m afraid I’d hurt you with my claws because you don’t have all the fur that she-bears have. And besides that, you have trouble assuming the proper position because your back legs are too long. And besides that , you don’t smell like a bear and I’m afraid my Mother would say it was bestiality.’ That’s a joke. Actually it’s race prejudice. The little girl was very lonely and bored. Finally after a long time, she browbeat her bear-mother into telling her about her origins, so she decided to go out looking for some people who were not bears. She thought life might be better with them. She said good-bye to her bear-friends and started South, and they all wept and waved their handkerchiefs. The girl was very hardy and woods-wise, since she had been taught by the bears. She traveled all day and slept all night. Finally she came to a settlement of people, just like this one, and they took her in. Of course she didn’t speak people-talk” (with a sly glance at me) “and they didn’t speak bearish. This was a big problem. Eventually she learned their language so she could talk to them and when they found out she had been raised by bears, they directed her to the Geddes Regional Park where she spent a great deal of time speaking bearish to the scholars. She made friends and so had plenty of people to copulate with, but on moonlit nights she longed to be back with the bears, for she wanted to do the great bear dances, which bears do under the full moon. So eventually she went back North again. But it turned out that the bears were a bore. So she decided to find her human mother. At the flats to Rabbit Island she found a statue with an inscription that said, ‘Go that way,’ so she did. At the exit from the bridge to North Continent she found an arrow sign that had been overturned, so she followed in the new direction it was pointing. The Spirit of Chance was tracking her. At the entry into Green Bay she found a huge goldfish bowl barring her way, which turned into the Spirit of Chance, a very very old woman with tiny, dried-up legs, sitting on top of a wall. The wall stretched all the way across the forty-eighth parallel.

“‘Play cards with me,’ said the Spirit of Chance.

“‘Not on your life,’ said the little girl, who was nobody’s fool.

“Then the Spirit of Chance winked and said, ‘Aw, come on,’ so the girl thought it might be fun. She was just going to pick up her hand when she saw that the Spirit of Chance was wearing an induction helmet with a wire that stretched back way into the distance.

“She was connected with a computer!

“‘That’s cheating!’ cried the little girl. She ran at the wall and they had just an awful fight, but in the end everything melted away, leaving a handful of pebbles and sand, and afterward that melted away, too. The little girl walked by day and slept by night, wondering whether she would like her real mother. She didn’t know if she would want to stay with her real mother or not. But when they got to know each other, they decided against it. The mother was a very smart, beautiful lady with fuzzy black hair combed out round, like electricity. But she had to go build a bridge (and fast, too) because the people couldn’t get from one place to the other place without the bridge. So the little girl went to school and had lots of lovers and friends, and practiced archery, and got into a family, and had lots of adventures, and saved everybody from a volcano by bombing it from the air in a glider, and achieved Enlightenment.

“Then one morning somebody told her there was a bear looking for her—”

“Wait a minute,” said I. “This story doesn’t have an end. It just goes on and on. What about the volcano? And the adventures? And the achieving Enlightenment—surely that takes some time, doesn’t it?”

“I tell things,” said my dignified little friend (through Vittoria) “the way they happen,” and slipping her head under the induction helmet without further comment (and her hands into the waldoes) she went back to stirring her blanc-mange with her forefinger. She said something casually over her shoulder to Vittoria, who translated:

“Anyone who lives in two worlds,” (said Vittoria) “is bound to have a complicated life.”

(I learned later that she had spent three days making up the story. It was, of course, about me).

XII

Some homes are extruded foam: white caves hung with veils of diamonds, indoor gardens, ceilings that weep. There are places in the Arctic to sit and meditate, invisible walls that shut in the same ice as outside, the same clouds. There is one rain-forest, there is one shallow sea, there is one mountain chain, there is one desert. Human rookeries asleep undersea where Whileawayans create, in their leisurely way, a new economy and a new race. Rafts anchored in the blue eye of a dead volcano. Eyries built for nobody in particular, whose guests arrive by glider. There are many more shelters than homes, many more homes than persons; as the saying goes, My home is in my shoes. Everything (they know) is eternally in transit. Everything is pointed toward death. Radar dish-ears listen for whispers from Outside. There is no pebble, no tile, no excrement, that is not Tao; Whileaway is inhabited by the pervasive spirit of underpopulation, and alone at twilight in the permanently deserted city that is only a jungle of sculptured forms set on the Altiplano, attending to the rush of one’s own breath in the respiratory mask, then —

I gambled for chores and breakfast with an old, old woman, in the middle of the night by the light of an alcohol lamp, somewhere on the back roads of the swamp and pine flats of South Continent. Watching the shadows dance on her wrinkled face, I understood why other women speak with awe of seeing the withered legs dangling from the shell of a computer housing: Humpty Dumptess on her way to the ultimate Inside of things.

(I lost. I carried her baggage and did her chores for a day.)

An ancient statue outside the fuel-alcohol distillery at Ciudad Sierra: a man seated on a stone, his knees spread, both hands pressed against the pit of his stomach, a look of blind distress, face blurred by time. Some wag has carved on the base the sideways eight that means infinity and added a straight line down from the middle; this is both the Whileaway schematic of the male genital and the mathematical symbol for self-contradiction.

If you are so foolhardy as to ask a Whileawayan child to “be a good girl” and do something for you:

“What does running other people’s errands have to do with being a good girl?

“Why can’t you run your own errands?

“Are you crippled?”

(The double pairs of hard, dark children’s eyes everywhere, like mating cats’.)

XIII

A quiet country night. The hills East of Green Bay, the wet heat of August during the day. One woman reads; another sews; another smokes. Somebody takes from the wall a kind of whistle and plays on it the four notes of the major chord. This is repeated over and over again. We hold on to these four notes as long as possible; then we transform them by one note; again we repeat these four notes. Slowly something tears itself away from the not-melody. Distances between the harmonics stretch wider and wider. No one is dancing tonight. How the lines open up! Three notes now. The playfulness and terror of the music written right on the air. Although the player is employing nearly the same dynamics throughout, the sounds have become painfully loud; the little instrument’s guts are coming out. Too much to listen to, with its lips right against my ear. I believe that by dawn it will stop, by dawn we will have gone through six or seven changes of notes, maybe two in an hour.

By dawn we’ll know a little something about the major triad. We’ll have celebrated a little something.

XIV

How Whileawayans Celebrate

Dorothy Chiliason in the forest glade, her moon-green pajamas, big eyes, big shoulders, her broad lips and big breasts, each with its protruding thumb, her aureole of fuzzy, ginger-colored hair. She springs to her feet and listens. One hand up in the air, thinking. Then both hands up. She shakes her head. She takes a gliding step, dragging one foot. Then again. Again. She takes on some extra energy and runs a little bit. Then stops. She thinks a little bit. Whileawayan celebratory dancing is not like Eastern dancing with its motions in toward the body, its cushions of warm air exhaled by the dancer, its decorations by contradictory angles (leg up, knee down, foot up; one arm up-bent, the other arm down-bent). Nor is it at all like the yearning-for-flight of Western ballet, limbs shooting out in heaven-aspiring curves, the torso a mathematical point. If Indian dancing says I Am, if ballet says I Wish, what does the dance of Whileaway say?

It says I Guess. (The intellectuality of this impossible business!)

XV

What Whileawayans Celebrate

The full moon

The Winter solstice (You haven’t lived if you haven’t seen us running around in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting “Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!")

The Summer solstice (rather different)

The autumnal equinox

The vernal equinox

The flowering of trees

The flowering of bushes

The planting of seeds

Happy copulation

Unhappy copulation

Longing

Jokes

Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous)

Acquiring new shoes

Wearing same

Birth

The contemplation of a work of art

Marriages

Sport

Divorces

Anything at all

Nothing at all

Great ideas

Death

XVI

There is an unpolished, white, marble statue of God on Rabbit Island, all alone in a field of weeds and snow. She is seated, naked to the waist, an outsized female figure as awful as Zeus, her dead eyes staring into nothing. At first She is majestic; then I notice that Her cheekbones are too broad, Her eyes set at different levels, that Her whole figure is a jumble of badly-matching planes, a mass of inhuman contradictions. There is a distinct resemblance to Dunyasha Bernadetteson, known as The Playful Philosopher (A.C. 344—426), though God is older than Bernadetteson and it’s possible that Dunyasha’s genetic surgeon modelled her after God instead of the other way round. Persons who look at the statue longer than I did have reported that one cannot pin It down at all, that She is a constantly changing contradiction, that She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, “stupid” (or “dead") and finally indescribable.

Persons who look at Her longer than that have been known to vanish right off the face of the Earth.

XVII

I have never been to Whileaway. Whileawayans breed into themselves an immunity to ticks, mosquitoes, and other insect parasites. I have none. And the way into Whileaway is barred neither by time, distance, nor an angel with a flaming sword, but by a cloud or crowd of gnats. Talking gnats.