Joanna Russ - The Female Man

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

And here we are.

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 skinny as a beanpole underneath except for the hands, which were similarly treated, and that very impressive face. I did this once in my line of business, which I’ll go into later, and scared the idealistic children who lived downstairs. Their delicate skins red with offended horror. Their clear young voices raised in song (at three in the morning). I’m not Jeannine. I’m not Janet. I’m not Joanna.

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.

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 .

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. Jeannine Dadier was an evasive outline in the back seat.

“Greetings,” said Janet Evason. “Hello. Bonsoir. That’s Jeannine. And you?”

I told her. Jeannine started talking about all the clever things her cat had done. Trees swayed and jerked in front of us.

“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. Jeannine had all but disappeared.

“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 Jeannine from the back seat. We passed a motel sign in a dip of the road, with something flashing lit-up behind the trees.

“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. Jeannine gasped indignantly. Only the driver can see really accurately in the rear-view mirror; but there was a car behind us. We turned off onto a dirt road—that is, she turned off—and into the woods with the headlights dark—and on to another road, after which there was a private house, all lights out, just as neat as you please. “Goodbye, excuse me,” said Janet affably, slipping out of the car; “Carry on, please,” and she vanished into the house. She was wearing her television suit. I sat baffled, with Jeannine’s hands gripping the car seat at my back (the way children do). The second car pulled up behind us. They came out and surrounded me (such a disadvantage to be sitting down and the lights hurt your eyes). Brutally short haircuts and something unpleasant about the clothing: straight, square, clean, yet not robust. Can you picture a plainclothesman pulling his hair? Of course not. Jeannine was cowering out of sight or had disappeared somehow. Just before Janet Evason emerged on to the porch of that private house, accompanied by a beaming family: father, mother, teen-age daughter, and family dog (everyone delighted to be famous), I committed myself rather too idiotically by exclaiming with some heat:

“Who are you looking for? There’s nobody here. There’s only me.”

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

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: