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like a net and over all the pleasure of pain, the dreadful longing.
"Vitti, I love you."
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man
Go away! Was she wringing her hands?
"Love me!"
No! and she threw one arm up to cover her face. I got down on my knees but she
winced away with a kind of hissing screech, very like the sound an enraged
gander makes to warn you and be fair. We were both shaking from head to foot.
It seemed natural that she should be ready to destroy me. I've dreamed of
looking into a mirror and seeing my alter ego which, on its own initiative,
begins to tell me unbearable truths and, to prevent such, threw my arms around
Vittoria's knees while she dug her fingers into my hair; thus connected we
slid down to the forest floor. I expected her to beat my head against it.
We got more equally together and kissed each other, I expecting my soul to
flee out of my body, which it did not do. She is untouchable. What can I do
with my dearest X, Y, or Z, after all? This is Vitti, whom I know, whom I
like; and the warmth of that real affection inspired me with more love, the
love with more passion, more despair, enough disappointment for a whole
lifetime. I groaned miserably. I
might as well have fallen in love with a tree or a rock. No one can make love
in such a state. Vitti's fingernails were making little hard crescents of pain
on my arms; she had that mulish look I knew so well in her; I knew something
was coming off. It seemed to me that we were victims of the same catastrophe
and that we ought to get together somewhere, in a hollow tree or under a bush,
to talk it over. The old women tell you to wrestle, not fight, or you may end
up with a black eye; Vitti, who had my fingers in her hands, pressing them
feverishly, bent the smallest one back against the joint. Now that's a good
idea. We scuffled like babies, hurting my hand, and she bit me on it; we
pushed and pulled at each other, and I shook her until she rolled over on top
of me and very earnestly hit me across the face with her fist. The only relief
is tears. We lay sobbing together. What we did after that I think you know,
and we sniffled and commiserated with each other. It even struck us funny,
once. The seat of romantic love is the solar plexus while the seat of love is
elsewhere, and that makes it very hard to make love
when you are on the point of dissolution, your arms and legs penetrated by
moonlight, your head cut off and swimming freely on its own like some kind of
mutated monster. Love is a radiation disease.
Whileawayans do not like the self-consequence that comes with romantic passion
and we are very mean and mocking about it; so Vittoria and I walked back
separately, each frightened to death of the weeks and weeks yet to go before
we'd be over it. We kept it to ourselves. I felt it leave me two and a half
months later, at one particular point in time: I was putting a handful of
cracked corn to my mouth and licking the sludge off my fingers. I felt the
parasite go. I swallowed philosophically and that was that. I
didn't even have to tell her.
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Vitti and I have stayed together in a more commonplace way ever since. In
fact, we got married. It comes and goes, that abyss opening on nothing. I run
away, usually.
Vittoria is whoring all over North Continent by now, I should think. We don't
mean by that what you do, by the way. I mean: good for her.
Sometimes I try to puzzle out the different kinds of love, the friendly kind
and the operatic kind, but what the hell.
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man
Let's go to sleep.
XVII
Under the Mashopi mountain range is a town called Wounded Knee and beyond this
the agricultural plain of Green Bay. Janet could not have told you where the
equivalents of these landmarks are in the here-and-now of our world and
neither can I, the author. In the great terra-reforming convulsion of P.C.
400 the names themselves dissolved into the general mess of re-crystallization
so that it would be impossible for any Whileawayan to tell you (if you were to
ask) whether Mashopi was ever a city, or
Wounded Knee a kind of bush, or whether or not Green Bay was ever a real bay.
But if you go South from the Altiplano over the Mashopi Range, and from that
land of snow, cold, thin air, risk, and glaciers, to the glider resort at
Utica (from whence you may see mountain climbers setting off for Old Dirty-
Skirts, who stands twenty-three thousand, nine hundred feet high) and from
there to the monorail station at Wounded Knee, and if you take the monorail
eight hundred miles into Green Bay and get off at a station I won't name,
you'll be where Janet was when she had just turned seventeen. A Whileawayan
who had come from the Mars training settlement in the Altiplano would have
thought Green Bay was heaven; a hiker out of New Forest would have hated it.
Janet had come by herself from an undersea farm on the continental shelf on
the other side of the Altiplano where she had spent five wretched weeks
setting up machinery in inaccessible crannies and squeaking whenever she
talked (because of the helium). She had left her schoolmates there, crazy for
space and altitude. It's not usual to be alone at that age. She had stayed at
the hostel in Wounded Knee, where they gave her an old, unused cubicle from
which she could work by induction in the fuel-alcohol distillery. People were
nice, but it was a miserable and boring time. You are never so alone,
schoolmates or not. You never feel so all-thumbs (Janet). She made her
insistence on change formally, the line of work came through, goodbye
everybody. She had left a violin in Wounded Knee with a friend who used to
cantilever herself out of the third story of the hostel and eat snacks on the
head of a public statue. Janet took the monorail at twenty-two o'clock and
sulkily departed for a better personal world. There were four persons of
Three-Quarters Dignity in the car, all quiet, all wretched with discontent.
She opened her knapsack, wrapped herself in it, and slept.
She woke in artificial light to find that the engineer had opened the louvers
to let in April: magnolias were blooming in Green Bay. She played linear poker
with an old woman from the Altiplano who beat her three times out of three. At
dawn everyone was asleep and the lights winked out; she woke and watched the
low hills form and re-form outside under an apple-green sky that turned, as
she watched it, a slow, sulphurous yellow. It rained but they sped through it.
At the station which was nothing but the middle of a field she borrowed a
bicycle from the bicycle rack and flipped the toggle to indicate the place she
wanted to go. It's a stout machine, with broad tires (compared to ours) and a
receiver for registering radio beacons. She rode into the remaining night hung
between the plantations of evergreens, then out into the sunrise again. There
was an almighty cheeping and chirping, the result of one limb of the sun
becoming visible over the horizon. She could see the inflated main dome of the
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house before she reached the second bicycle drop; somebody going West would
pick it up in time and drop it near the monorail. She imagined great masses of
sulky girls being requisitioned to ride bicycles coast-to-coast from regions
that had a bicycle surplus to those crying out for bicycles. I imagined it,
too. There was the sound of a machinist's ground-car off to the left Janet
grew up with that noise in her ears. Her bicycle
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man was singing the musical tone that lets you know
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