Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

There was a man. Now the story begins. It can’t have a happy ending, but still we keep hoping. At least it’s a story. There was a man where I worked. I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t want to ask, because to ask would reveal my interest. My interest was purely physical. How could it be anything else, when I’d never even spoken to him? What else did I know about him but how he looked? I watched how he moved through the corridors, head down, leading with his shoulders. He had broad shoulders, a short neck, a barrel chest. Such a powerful upper torso that I suspected he had built it by lifting weights. Curling black hair. An impassive face. On bad days, I thought it was noble. On good days, he looked irritatingly stupid. I did not seek him out. I tried to avoid him. But chance brought us together, even though we didn’t speak. I wondered if he had noticed me. I wondered how what I felt could not be mutual, could not be real, could be, simply, a one-sided fantasy; an obsession.

Pasiphaë fell in love, they say, with a snow-white bull.

One day I went to the zoo with Jennifer and her daughter. Little Lindsay was thrilled, running from one enclosure to another, demanding to know the animals’ names, herself naming the ones she recognized from her picture books.

“Tiger.”

“Tiger! Lion!”

“Ocelot.”

“Ocelot!”

“Leopard.”

“Leopard!”

“Panther.”

“Panther!”

I wondered what his name was. And what about his soul. What was his sign, his clan, his totem? What animal was he? The bull? The ox. The water buffalo. I considered the Chinese horoscope. A man born in the year of the ox was steady and trustworthy, a patient and tireless worker. Undemonstrative, traditional, dedicated. Boring, I reminded myself. And a determined materialist. He wouldn’t even know what I meant if I talked about the union of souls. He was certainly married already, a husband devoted to his wife and children, never dreaming of any alternatives.

I watched Jennifer watching her daughter. I looked at the fine lines that had begun to craze the delicate fair skin of her face, and at the springy black hair compressed into an untidy bun on top of her head. The red scarf (which I had given her) swathing her neck. The set of her shoulders. Her fragile wrists. She felt me watching, and caught my hand with her thin, strong fingers; squeezed. We knew each other so well. We felt the same about so many things; we understood and trusted each other. Sometimes I knew what she was going to say before she said it. We loved each other. The love of two equals, with nothing excessive, romantic, or inexplicable about it.

“Zebra.”

“Zebra!”

“Okapi.”

“Okapi!”

“Giraffe.”

“Giraffe!”

“Buffalo.”

Buffalo. The American Bison. Order: Artiodactyla; Family: Bovidae. A powerful, migratory, gregarious horned grazing animal of the North American plains.

Thick, curly, dark-brown hair grew luxuriously on head, neck, and shoulders; a shorter, lighter-brown growth covered the rest of the body. The bull stood there, solid and motionless as a mountainside, and yet it was a warm, living mountain; there was nothing cold or hard about it. I remembered how, as a child, traveling in the back of the car on family holidays, I had gazed out at the changing landscapes and dreamed that I could stroke the distant, furry hills. Something about this creature—wild, yet tame; strange, but familiar—stirred the same, childish response. If I could touch it, I thought, if only I could touch it, something would change. I would know something, and everything would be different.

The set of his shoulders. The curve of his horns. The springy curl of his luxuriant hair. A wild, musty, grassy smell hung on the air, filled my nostrils, and I could feel a sun that wasn’t there, beating down on my naked back.

“Buffalo.”

Pasiphaë fell in love, they say, with a snow-white bull.

To have her desire, Pasiphaë hid inside a hollow wooden cow, and so the fearsome Minotaur was conceived.

Was that her desire? To be impregnated by a bull? I understand her passion, but not the logic of her actions. It is not Pasiphaë’s story that we have been told. What we hear is the greed of Minos, the anger of Poseidon, the cunning of Daedalus. She was a tool, the conduit through which the Minotaur came to be. When her passion died did she understand what she had done, or why? Did she think, suddenly, too late, as the bull mounted her: But this isn’t what I meant! This isn’t what I wanted! Or was she triumphant, fulfilled? Afterward, was she satisfied? Did the desire she had felt vanish once Poseidon’s will had been served, or was it waiting, nameless, incapable of fulfillment, waiting to erupt again?

We are told that Pasiphaë’s love for the bull was an unnatural desire. But what is natural about any desire, for anything not necessary to sustain life? What does it mean to want a man? To want a husband?

Staring at the buffalo that cloudy day in the zoo, separated from it by distance, by time, by species, by everything that can distance one creature from another, I felt a wordless, naked desire. It was a desire that could not be named, and certainly could not be fulfilled. It was the purest lust I had ever known, unmuddied, for once, by any of the usual misinterpretations. If that had been a man staring back at me across emptiness with his round, brown, uncomprehending eye, I would have invited him home with me. I would have thought my feelings were sexual—sexual desire, at least, allows satisfaction—and if they persisted beyond that, I would have used the word love. I might have convinced myself that marriage was possible; I certainly would have tried to convince him. To have him. Forgetting that it was impossible; forgetting that desire, by its nature, can never be satisfied.

Remember, I told myself. And then, forgetting, I wondered what his name was.

“Buffalo?”

“Husband.”

“Sometimes I think we made them up,” I said to Rufinella. “Mythical creatures for the mythical time before Now.”

We had just been to see an old movie about the relations between men and women—husbands, single women, and wives—a horrible story that stirred up emotions unfelt for more than thirty years. At least in me. I don’t know what Rufinella felt: she had seemed to enjoy it. Although, given the number of times she had had to lean over and ask me, in a loud whisper, which ones were the men and which the women, I wondered what it was she had enjoyed, and just how much she had understood.

Rufinella gave me a disbelieving look. “What’s this? You’ve joined the revisionists? You’re about to confess you were a part of the conspiracy all along? That you’ve been lying to your students all these years, pretending that myth is history?”

“No conspiracy,” I said. “I’ve always taught the truth as I’ve understood it, but sometimes I wonder—what did I ever understand? How much of what I remember was true? Did they really exist, this other… gender? Like us, yet so unalike? Face it, the details are so unlikely!”

“But you said you had one.”

“You can’t say ‘had one’ like they were property—”

“People talk about them like that in the movies. And I’ve heard you say it—you’ve always said you had a husband. What are you telling me now—that it didn’t exist?”

“He,” I corrected automatically, teacher that I am. “Oh, yes, I had a husband… and a father and a brother and lovers and male colleagues…. At least, I think I did. When I remember them, they don’t seem so terribly different from the women I knew that long ago. They don’t seem like strange, extinct creatures… they were just individuals, whom I knew. Other people, you know? I was twenty-eight years old when the men went away. That’s—well, more than thirty years ago now. I’ve lived longer without men than I lived with them. What I remember might almost be a dream.”