Alien Sex полностью

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.”

“If it was a dream, everybody else had it, too,” said Rufinella. “And there’s the evidence: there they are—or at least their shadows—on film, on video, in the newspapers, in books, in the news…. They were real; if you’re going to judge by the evidence they left behind, they were more real than the women.”

“Then maybe they woke up to reality one day, and found that the women were gone.”

“Nobody dreamed me,” said the daughter of my best friend, very firmly. Rufinella was two months old when the men disappeared. Therefore, unlike her own daughter, she had a father, but she cannot possibly remember him, or any man. Although she has tried, through hypnotic regression. According to her, she succeeded in going back before her birth, to her time in the womb. She said she could remember her mother’s body. But she could not remember her father. She couldn’t remember a male presence, no more than imagine how creatures called men might have differed so dramatically from creatures called women, as all history, all art, tells us they did.

Art is metaphor, and history is an art. It was like this. It was not like that. We are language-using, storytelling creatures. Trying to explain reality, we transform it. We can’t travel in time and know the past that way, but only, endlessly, try to re-create it. As a teacher (I’m semiretired, now), I tried to make my students understand something they could never know for themselves. Imaginative reconstruction of a place that no longer exists. They can’t go there, but neither can I. My own memories are stories I tell myself.