Authors: Kameron Hurley

Brutal Women (7 page)

Rule always ordered the drinks:
mandalas straight up, sprins over ice, four tonic and tarls . . . and then he’d
order drinks for the rest of us.

By the end of the night, we were
always drunk, and Margin would be slumped over in the seat next to mine,
wearing a blue tunic or pink tutu and enough makeup to paint a landscape.
Margin would blubber about the latest love he or she had lost that night, Page
and Nib would be yelling about whose turn it was to be male in their ongoing
adolescent opera, and Rule would be wearing a dress, illegally. Around two
hours till dawn, when the perpetually sexed couples were going home to baths
and babies and picket-fenced houses, we’d start to talk photographs. History.
We would start talking about who we were, who we wanted to be.

Those were the worst nights.

But I need to tell you what I did
outside the Madhattered, before Liquid Sunshine and the end of adolescence.
Before perpetualism, complacency, adulthood.

Photographs form our historical
memory, our past. The image of our forebears, sexed in the ideal of their
vision upon our discovered landscape of sand and stone, is our starting point:
they upon the black shores, wrapped in lingering sea-fog, posed among amber
forests, recording our landscape as significantly as the record of their own
existence; back when the landscape was still significant. Each of us is
remembered in the same way. Photographers, through photos, prove our existence.
Mine. Yours. Ours.

I’m one of those photographers. I
help document every mature citizen who’s formulated a sense of gendered
identity. In little towns like Tansy and Burdock in the north, most people are
photographed male; that’s the perpetual gender they chose, the one the
government ordains they’re recorded in. You’re stuck with perpetualism until
you’ve dried up your breeding potential. Some change back afterwards—many do
before I come to town—but really, it doesn’t much matter after the photograph;
whatever you’ve chosen as your twenty-year perpetual sex is the one you’ll be
remembered by, the one that forms your perpetual identity for posterity. In a
little town south of Tansy called Grass, I once waited four weeks—a whole
season—for half the elder population to shift itself back to female so I could
capture the images of themselves they were bound by law to portray for
posterity. All those perpetuals, adults, so certain of who they were, where
they belonged. I envied them: their unchanging core of identity, their sense of
themselves as a part of our historical present, permanently recorded for our
future.

After I met Sunshine, I called
every night I spent in those tiny towns, and every night Sunshine laughed and
said, “Cue, have them send you home. I’ll remind you who you are.”

But the Historiographical Society
has its own agenda, both now and then, and by the time I got back to the city,
high summer was usually over, the leaves were turning lavender, and I’d almost
forgotten those peculiar things about Sunshine that fascinated me from the
start.

When I first met Sunshine, I had my
imager set up outside a couple of storefronts in a backward little town called
Sage. Some neuter youths were throwing stones at the windows of one of the tuck
shops, and I wanted to bring a copy of the photograph back to the city and put
it into the Sage collection in the archives. I was going to call it “Violence
Outside the Window,” which I thought was quite clever. We’re normally not
allowed to photograph underage neuters. They’re not considered a part of
historical memory until after they’ve chosen a perpetual gender. In this case,
however, the town elders had had trouble with these neuters vandalizing storefronts,
and they employed me to provide the artifact with which to procure compensation
from the neuters’ families.

After I’d snapped a few images, the
neuters caught sight of me at the end of the street. They started throwing
stones at me. I panicked, looped my imager around my neck, left the tripod, and
ducked into the first door along the street that opened for me— and tumbled
into a thin blond man giving a seasonal presentation on sex mutation theory to
a room full of prostitutes. The man and I crumpled onto the maroon carpet in a
tangle of arms and legs. I got a mouthful of his hair, my imager banged into
his groin, and he punched me so hard he gave me a black eye.

The imager didn’t break, and
Sunshine wasn’t really hurt, but he spent the next three weeks being female out
of spite. I asked her to lunch to make up for it. She said she didn’t like to
eat in public because her last partner was from Thosaline, and Thosalines
considered eating in public aesthetically unappealing.

We settled on iced water. I had a
citrus in mine.

Sunshine gestured with her slender
hands when she spoke. Her voice was soft, and she was very open, articulate.
She was the only person I’d ever met whose mannerisms remained the same no
matter their sex. Sunshine still looked me directly in the eye when male, and
used the same effeminate gestures. His laugh still came out a girlish giggle.
Sunshine’s indifference to gender prescriptions unnerved even
my
friends.

I loved Sunshine for it.

Sunshine was slim and
straight-hipped, even when female. The government had recommended she become
perpetually male, as bearing children would likely kill someone with hips like
hers. Because of that, he hadn’t had any identity issues since he was a neuter.
I always envied her that. She worked as a social health worker and disease
counselor for the city University, which explained his lecture at the brothel
in Sage. He practiced yoga and knew jujitsu.

Sunshine asked for my call number
at the end of our iced-water date. She said she wanted to get a copy of the
prints when they were done.

I didn’t get back to the city for
another two weeks after that, and then I spent four days locked up in my flat
waiting for her to call. I drank a lot of citrus-flavored water. Margin and
Rule called me three times, concerned about my mental state.

“She’s a small-town flirt,” Margin
said. “I’ve met a thousand like them. Get off the floor. Come meet us at the
Madhattered.”

But I didn’t go. And Sunshine
called. When she asked me out for dinner (attempting to get over her previous
lover’s aversions), I spent the next three days trying to decide which sex I
should show up as. An hour before I was to meet Sunshine, I made a hysterical
call to Rule asking for advice.

“Listen,” he said, “anyone the
social authorities are going to tag as perpetually male’s going to want to
spend a night with a male. Might help some in making up for that twenty years
of perpetual pairing with a woman he’s got ahead of him. Government’s got their
dirty fingers in everything.”

So I met Sunshine as a male, and we
ate a little, and talked a lot. I never ran out of things to say to him. We had
both studied political theory and both had an aversion to Revisionism, Rule’s
political party of choice.

Sunshine took me back to his flat.
Inside, bright washes of color lined the walls—paintings.

“You want a drink?” Sunshine asked.

I nodded. He brought me back a
tonic and tarl from the coldbox as I looked over the paintings.

“You did these?” I asked.

He nodded.

The paintings were a wash of bright
colors—orange, magenta, crimson, neon yellow, turquoise, vermilion, lavender.
In one of them, a pair of figures of indeterminate sex danced and embraced. A
frame of words bound them, too small to read. Another canvas portrayed the form
of a sexed male wearing gendered female clothing, and a sexed female wearing
gendered male clothing. The script border read, “They say love has a bitter
taste. But what matter? What matter? I have tasted you. Love is bittersweet.”

I studied Sunshine with new
eyes—the thin, yellow-haired man beside me. These were caustic paintings.
Anti-government. Anti-gender prescription. Rule had told me what they did to
people who created work like this.

“You could be bound for painting
these,” I said.

He sipped his drink, still staring
at the “love is bittersweet” painting.

“I wanted to show you,” he said,
“in case you thought I was too revolutionary to associate with.” He had a
smatter of freckles across the fair skin of his nose and cheeks. I wanted to
touch him.

“It’s just one more thing to like,”
I said.

Sunshine kissed me.

I spent the night.

Margin told me I must be in love.

We huddled over our table at the
Madhattered. I spilled everything. Nib and Page were babbling about their
lesbian sexuality course at Book’s School of Sexuality. They were having trouble
remaining dually female for consecutive days; too much like perpetuality, they
said. Margin wore a tutu and red heels, but I wasn’t so certain she was totally
female-sexed that night. Rule’s politics were catching.

“I don’t want to be in love,” I
told Margin. “Love is as changeable as sex.”

Margin rolled her (his?) eyes.
“What, you think it’s just about the sex? It’s never just about the sex. Maybe
for the queers and the perpetuals, but not for us. Too much variety. Why choose
one over another, if not for love?”

But I didn’t want to be in love. I
knew what that meant. Sacrifice. Obligation. Perpetuation. Two people pair up
and they have to know who they are: forever, unchangeable, as permanent as a
photograph, as history.

Sunshine asked me to move in. Sunshine
made room in the flat for me. I brought in my photographs, my imager, my set of
recording disks, my gendered wardrobes, my set of photography books,
gender-theory books, and sexual evolution books. I carved out my own little
corner of Sunshine’s world.

Sunshine went to jujitsu class
twice a week and painted four times a week. Whenever Sunshine was gone, I went
through the painting studio in the flat’s spare bedroom. I liked to touch the
brushes and dabble my fingers in the paint. I liked handling the things
Sunshine had held. The smell of that room always reminded me of Sunshine: wet
paint, fresh canvas, watered down color. The paint drippings on the floor made
their own unique Sunshine portrait. Whenever I missed my lover I would move
quietly through that room, breathing in the scent of Sunshine.

The government sent me out every
year, usually from high winter or low spring to low autumn, which meant that I
only spent about half of every year with Sunshine. Sunshine spent odd moments
on the Great Work, the one I always heard about when I came back, the one that
gave a new pattern to the paint-drippings portrait on the uncovered studio
floor. The Work itself, though, Sunshine always spirited away before I came
home, and switched to working on smaller projects: half-covered canvases
smeared in orange and lavender, smudged photographs and small portraits framed
in elegant script. I searched the studio for clues of the larger piece, but
found nothing unusual about the new pattern on the floor but the slow, sensual
silver arcs of spattered paint by the door.

So I ignored the Work. Sunshine did
not speak much of it in our three years together, and I never brought it up. I
didn’t see a need to. There were always other projects, always different
conversations.

“Do you believe being perpetually
sexed really means you know who you are?” Sunshine asked me one night after
we’d made love. I’d gotten back from another terrible historical imaging in a
muddy town called Root whose elders quietly told me they did not believe in
“unnecessary technologies”—like plumbing. I’d found myself shivering in an
outhouse at fourteen in the morning, wishing I was home. Here. With Sunshine.

Sunshine and I lay side by side,
blankets bunched up around our feet. Our fingers touched.

“Of course,” I said. “Only
perpetuals are part of the historical landscape. Perpetualism and identity
precede imaging.”

Sunshine sighed. He was male that
night, and he’d lost weight since I’d last seen him. Blue and silver paint
stained his fingertips.

“You think your friends are waiting
to be perpetual, or do they like being like they are, like the eight seasons,
cyclical, always changing, always the same?” Sunshine asked.

“They aren’t the same,” I said,
“except Rule. Queer. Changeless.”

“But they
are
,” Sunshine
said. “Believing that being perpetual precedes identity, you’d be arguing that
your friends change identity every night.”

“Why are you asking?”

Sunshine toyed with the edge of my
pillowcase. “Something I’ve been thinking about. About images and identity.
Honestly, Cue, if you were different every time you swapped, I’d be living with
two different people. You’re always the same.”

I sat up, offended. “This is—”

“Aren’t I always the same?”
Sunshine asked.

“You do it on purpose.”

“Have you ever dressed like a woman
while you were a man?” Sunshine asked.

“Only with you,” I said.

“In public?”

“That’s illegal.”

“Too political for you?”

“I just—”

“I love you.”

I looked over at him. He had never
told me that before.

“I love you no matter what sex you
are,” Sunshine said, “and that changes things.”