Joanna Russ - The Female Man

“You are a damned vicious cublet,” said Janet. “I’ll tell you something to sweeten your disposition. Do you want to hear about the three-legged goat who skipped off to the North Pole?”

“No,” says Laur. Jeannine flattens like a film of oil; she vanishes dimly into a cupboard, putting her fingers in her ears.

“Tell!” says Laur, twisting my little finger. I bury my face in my hands. Ay, no. Ay, no. Laura must hear. She kissed my neck and then my ear in a passion for all the awful things I do as S & P; I straightened up and rocked back and forth. The trouble with you people is you get no charge from death. Myself, it shakes me all over. Somebody I’d never met had left a note saying the usual thing: ha ha on you, you do not exist, go away , for we are so bloody cooperative that we have this solipsistic underside, you see? So I went up-mountain and found her; I turned on my two-way vocal three hundred yards from criminal Elena Twason and said, “Well, well, Elena, you shouldn’t take a vacation without notifying your friends.”

“Vacation?” she says; “Friends? Don’t lie to me, girl. You read my letter,” and by this I began to understand that she hadn’t had to go mad to do this and that was terrible. I said, “What letter? Nobody found a letter.”

“The cow ate it,” says Elena Twason. “Shoot me. I don’t believe you’re there but my body believes; I believe that my tissues believe in the bullet that you do not believe in yourself, and that will kill me.”

“Cow?” says I, ignoring the rest, “what cow? You Zdubakovs don’t keep cows. You’re vegetable-and-goat people, I believe. Quit joking with me, Elena. Come back; you went botanizing and lost your way, that’s all.”

“Oh little girl,” she said, so off-hand, so good-humored, “ little child , don’t deform reality. Don’t mock us both.” In spite of the insults, I tried again.

“What a pity,” I said, “that your hearing is going so bad at the age of sixty, Elena Twa. Or perhaps it’s my own. I thought I heard you say something else. But the echoes in this damned valley are enough to make anything unintelligible; I could have sworn that I was offering you an illegal collusion in an untruth and that like a sensible, sane woman, you were accepting.” I could see her white hair through the binoculars; she could’ve been my mother. Sorry for the banality, but it’s true. Often they try to kill you so I showed myself as best I could, but she didn’t move—exhausted? Sick? Nothing happened.

“Elena!” I shouted. “By the entrails of God, will you please come down!” and I waved my arms like a semaphore. I thought: I ’// wait until morning at least. I can do that much . In my mind we changed places several times, she and I, both of us acting as illegally in our respective positions as we could, but I might be able to patch up some sort of story. As I watched her, she began to amble down the hillside, that little white patch of hair bobbing through the autumn foliage like deer’s tail. Chuckling to herself, idly swinging a stick she’d picked up: weak little thing, just a twig really, too dry to hit anything without breaking. I ambled ghostly beside her; it’s so pretty in the mountains at that time of year, everything burns and burns without heat. I think she was enjoying herself, having finally put herself, as it were, beyond the reach of consequences; she took her little stroll until we were quite close to each other, close enough to converse face to face, perhaps as far as I am from you. She had made herself a crown of scarlet maple leaves and put it on her head, a little askew because it was a little too big to fit. She smiled at me.

“Face facts,” she said. Then, drawing down the corners of her mouth with an ineffable air of gaiety and arrogance:

“Kill, killer.”

So I shot her.

Laur, who has been listening intently all this time, bloodthirsty little devil, takes Janet’s face in her hands. “Oh, come on. You shot her with a narcotic, that’s all. You told me so. A narcotic dart.”

“No,” said Janet. “I’m a liar. I killed her. We use explosive bullets because it’s almost always distance work. I have a rifle like the kind you’ve often seen yourself.”

“Aaaah!” is Laura Rose’s long, disbelieving, angry comment. She came over to me: “Do you believe it?” (I shall have to drag Jeannine out of the woodwork with both hands.) Still angry, Laur straddles the room with her arms clasped behind her back. Janet is either asleep or acting. I wonder what Laur and Janet do in bed; what do women think of women?

“I don’t care what either of you thinks of me,” says Laur. “I like it! By God, I like the idea of doing something to somebody for a change instead of having it done to me. Why are you in Safety and Peace if you don’t enjoy it!”

“I told you,” says Janet softly.

Laur said, “I know, someone has to do it. Why you?”

“I was assigned.”

Why? Because you’re bad! You’re tough.” (She smiles at her own extravagance. Janet sat up, wavering a little, and shook her head.)

“Dearest, I’m not good for much; understand that. Farm work or forest work, what else? I have some gift to unravel these human situations, but it’s not quite intelligence.”

“Which is why you’re an emissary?” says Laur. “Don’t expect me to believe that.” Janet stares at my rug. She yawns, jaw-cracking. She clasps her hands loosely in her lap, remembering perhaps what it had been like to carry the body of a sixty-year-old woman down a mountainside: at first something you wept over, then something horrible, then something only distasteful, and finally you just did it.

“I am what you call an emissary,” she said slowly, nodding courteously to Jeannine and me, “for the same reason that I was in S & P. I’m expendable, my dear. Laura, Whileawayan intelligence is confined in a narrower range than yours; we are not only smarter on the average but there is much less spread on either side of the average. This helps our living together. It also makes us extremely intolerant of routine work. But still there is some variation.” She lay back on the couch, putting her arms under her head. Spoke to the ceiling. Dreaming, perhaps. Of Vittoria?

“Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m here because they can do without me. I was S & P because they could do without me. There’s only one reason for that, Laur, and it’s very simple.

"I am stupid."

Janet sleeps or pretends to, Joanna knits (that’s me), Jeannine is in the kitchen. Laura Rose, still resentfully twitching with unconquered Genghis Khan-ism, takes a book from my bookshelf and lies on her stomach on the rug. I believe she is reading an art book, something she isn’t interested in. The house seems asleep. In the desert between the three of us the dead Elena Twason Zdubakov begins to take shape; I give her Janet’s eyes, Janet’s frame, but bent with age, some of Laur’s impatient sturdiness but modified with the graceful trembling of old age: her papery skin, her smile, the ropy muscles on her wasted arms, her white hair cut in an economical kind of thatch. Helen’s belly is loose with old age, her face wrinkled, a never-attractive face like that of an extremely friendly and intelligent horse: long and droll. The lines about her mouth would be comic lines. She’s wearing a silly kind of khaki shorts-and-shirt outfit which is not really what Whileawayans wear, but I give it to her anyway. Her ears are pierced. Her mountain twig has become a carved jade pipe covered with scenes of vines, scenes of people crossing bridges, people pounding flax, processions of cooks or grain-bearers. She wears a spray of red mountain-ash berries behind one ear. Elena is about to speak; from her comes a shock of personal strength, a wry impressiveness, an intelligence so powerful that in spite of myself I open my arms to this impossible body, this walking soul, this somebody’s grandma who could say with such immense elan to her legal assassin, “Face facts, child.” No man in our world would touch Elena. In Whileawayan leaf-red pajamas, in silver silk overalls, in the lengths of moony brocade in which Whileawayans wrap themselves for pleasure, this would be a beautiful Helen. Elena Twason swathed in cut-silk brocade, nipping a corner of it for fun. It would be delightful to have erotic play with Elena Twason; I feel this on my lips and tongue, the palms of my hands, all my inside skin. I feel it down below, in my sex. What a formidable woman! Shall I laugh or cry? She’s dead, though—killed dead—so never shall Ellie Twa’s ancient legs entwine with mine or twiddle from under the shell of a computer housing, crossing and uncrossing her toes as she and the computer tell each other uproarious jokes. Her death was a bad joke. I would like very much to make love skin-to-skin with Elena Twason Zdubakov, but she is thank-the-male-God dead and Jeannine can come shudderingly out of the woodwork. Laur and Janet have gone to sleep together on the couch as if they were in a Whileawayan common bedroom, which is not for orgies, as you might think, but for people who are lonesome, for children, for people who have nightmares. We miss those innocent hairy sleepies we used to tangle with back in the dawn of tine before some progressive nitwit took to deferred gratification and chipping flint.