Brutal Women (8 page)

“You’re telling me a beautiful
painter says you’re the love of their life and you blow them off? You’re
stupider than Margin gives you credit for.”

We were, of course, at the
Madhattered. Page and Nib were male and female, respectively, arguing about
whether or not Nib looked better in Page’s tutu than Page did, which
technically wasn’t an appropriately gender-prescribed discussion. Margin was
flirting with someone named after a kitchen appliance. Rule was drinking tarls.

“I’ll never understand what a
bright person like Sunshine sees in you,” Rule said. “You can be mewling. A
lazy coward, when the mood suits you. Sunshine needs fire. Someone whose
thinking works outside the perpetual.”

I glanced over at Page and Nib and
Margin. “You think any of us is ever going to be perpetual?”

“No, Cue. I think we’re the lost
children of history. Perpetually adolescent.”

Sunshine remained male for almost
four months: four seasons, half the year. He spent his nights in his studio. He
locked it whenever he left.

I received my government contract
for the year, a detailed itinerary of little towns on the outskirts of the
northern province, most of which hadn’t been photographed in almost a decade. I
told Sunshine that I’d be leaving the next day. He said nothing. Something was
slipping away.

The day I left, Sunshine walked me
to the silver tube of the train.

“When you get back my project will
be done,” he said.

I nodded. I was female that day.
The first town on my itinerary was Lilac, a last resting place for female
queers. I wasn’t allowed to photograph the town, of course, because queers
can’t legally formulate a self-willed gendered identity—and are therefore
outside the realm of history. I was only going there to take a written census
for the health authority.

“I’ve been thinking about being a
couple,” I said.

Sunshine glanced up at me.

“When I come back I can be
perpetually female,” I said, “and you can be perpetually male. We’ll sign the
government forms for—”

Sunshine put his finger to my lips.
“You don’t understand, Cue.” He kissed me. He left me.

I called Sunshine every night, but
the operator could never get a connection through. “No one’s picking up the
receiver,” the operator said.

I photographed four women in
Evergreen and thirty-two men in Beech. In Coriander, a bridge washed out, and
eight men and twelve women died before I could photograph them, erasing them
from history forever. I met three men named Stove who took me out for tarls and
toast. I slept with a woman named Cup after I photographed her nude, surrounded
by her twelve perpetually sexed children.

“It’s so good to see them all as
real people,” she told me.

I went by mule and rickshaw and
carriage and steam car. A town named Magnolia, a blond woman named Comb. A stir
of queer men outside a pub in Fern being given handouts and then beaten away
with sticks. Mothers now perpetually male, fathers now perpetually female.
Neuter children plucking at my imager, tugging at my sleeves. The black, lined
face of a person named Ripple whose sex I never knew, because all I saw was the
face and hands, gesturing for the imager through the folds of a black robe.
Eighteen women in Hyacinth wearing crimson headbands. Two nude men in Willow
with bodies lean and sinewy as whips. A man named Rubble. A woman named Stone.

When I got back to the train line
it was already low autumn, and as the train curled toward the city, the rain
started, slow and steady, streaming past my windowpane in ever-changing
rivulets. Different patterns, different paths, but always rain.

I climbed the stairs to the flat
Sunshine and I shared, but there were no lights on. I unlocked the door and
palmed on the light.

Sunshine’s paintings were gone. All
of Sunshine’s things were gone. I walked slowly through the flat, the living
space, our bedroom. Her books were gone, his black suits, her red tutu, the
silver scarf I gave him for her birthday. I turned on the light in the studio.
The room was bare. The floor had been scraped clean. White walls, white floor,
an empty room looking out onto the cloud-heavy bay.

I stood in the doorway, numb.

The phone rang.

I dropped my traveling case and ran
to the living area, picked up the receiver.

“Connected,” the operator said.

“Sunshine!” I cried.

“Fuck, no! Why aren’t you here?”
Rule said.

“What?”

Margin’s voice crackled in through
another line. “Sunshine’s opening is tonight! Why aren’t you here? He told you,
didn’t she?”

“Where?” I said.

“Where else, fool, the
Madhattered,” Rule said. “Get over here. You’re missing it!”

“I’m coming,” I said, and dropped
the receiver. The operator yelled at me. I darted down the stairs.

The Madhattered was crowded, more
crowded than it had ever been. Adolescents and perpetuals vied for space. Three
extra bartenders tossed drinks. Margin wore a black tunic and four-inch green
heels.

Rule dressed in a snazzy suit with
a blue kerchief. Page wore a silver tutu. Nib wore a gold tunic and thigh-high
boots. I hadn’t had time to dress up. I wasn’t even sure what sex I was.

“Where is she?” I asked.

Rule pulled me up to the table.
Page and Nib and Margin all leaned in. Rule pointed to the open gallery doors
by the bar. “We’ve been in. You have to see it, Cue. This is a good crowd, but
it won’t last.”

“Why not? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Go,” Margin said.

I pushed my way to the gallery,
through the mass of tutus and tunics. In the first room were half a dozen of
Sunshine’s paintings, all of which I’d already seen, in one form or another.
Sunshine wasn’t there. The second gallery, behind the first, was more crowded,
and more people were talking in there, a low rumble of voices. I squeezed my
way past the crowd. Someone elbowed me. A drink spilled across the front of my
blouse. There was only one work in there, made up of seven canvases. A little
rope cordoned it off from the press of people. I was forced up against the
rope. I gazed at the paintings, only— they weren’t really paintings.

They had begun as photographs.
Seven canvases. Sunshine and a faceless partner. But when Sunshine added paint,
they merged into something else.

I saw seven paintings arranged
vertically along the far wall, two-by-two, progressing closer to one another as
they moved inward to frame the final painting mounted below them. The images
were of Sunshine, altered photographs of Sunshine’s unmistakable form:

That final image, that blended
image, I realized, was Sunshine, dancing. Just Sunshine; not male, not female,
just the person I loved, sexless, genderless, Liquid Sunshine, painting
Sunshine’s past, present, future.

Sunshine had created Sunshine,
carved a history of this one image, this one self. No imagers, no
photographers. Just Sunshine, painting over the image that photographers like
me would have set down as truth. Remaking it.

I stared. For how long I stared I
don’t know. At some point I realized my cheeks were wet. I wiped at my face. My
tears.

A hand on my shoulder.

I turned.

Sunshine smiled. “You like it?” she
asked.

I couldn’t say anything.

“You understand,” she said.

I understood. I remembered the
little villages, the rain on the train window. I remembered Ripple beckoning to
me in black robes. Margin and Page, Nib and Rule. My friends, always changing,
cyclical, like the seasons, always the same.

“I wouldn’t have taken those
photographs you altered,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I still love
you for it.”

She smiled again. Turned. The stir
of people pulled her away.

I could have reached for her. My
fingers and hers, twining together, a merging, too late, of two bodies, two
people, just us, not perpetual, not sexed, just people.

But I did not reach out. I wanted
to watch her go, a ripple through the wave of bodies; there, then lost, adrift
and then swallowed.

I went back to the flat. I sat down
on the floor of the empty studio and cried.

Liquid Sunshine—I always thought of
the piece that way—drew attention from government authorities and moral
purists. Rule told me three months later that Sunshine had disappeared after an
exhibition in a neighboring city, Lavender.

I sat up for three nights wondering
if it would have been different if I had reached out for Sunshine’s hand that
night, if I had told Sunshine that, I, too am infinitely malleable, that I,
too, am capable of painting my own past and future, creating my own image. But
I would have been lying to the one person I loved. And to myself.

Rule and Margin became a perpetual
couple. Margin bore three children. Page and Nib never settled, and were lost
to history. I have no images of Sunshine but memory. They are fewer and fewer
these days, often mixed with more recent faces, freckled women in purple tutus
in Flower, a blond man in Lotus named Glass, three brown neuter children in
Wisteria with paint-stained fingers. I signed a permanent government contract.
I don’t come back to the city much. I don’t like to. It reminds me of my
adolescence. I am perpetually female now, and every year I ask for assignments
further afield, census trips to remote queer villages. I ask for them because
sometimes I think that the farther I go from the city, the farther I will get
from Sunshine . . . the farther I will get from myself.

I longed to create my own perpetual
identity for so long that I never stopped to think that perhaps I would not
like it when I discovered it. Sunshine was right: we all stay the same, there,
in that place that is ourselves, the blending point of sexed identity, gendered
existence, infinitely malleable. Sunshine knew that you could find that place
where the malleable was your view of the world, your view of yourself, but I
never found that. Maybe I don’t believe in it. But Sunshine did. Sunshine
believed in everything.

Even me.

So let’s say Macbeth was a
post-apocalyptic warlord called Madden, and his right-hand man was a woman
named Banan instead of Banquo? Still with me? Good. This one first showed up in
a now defunct online magazine called
The Boundless Realm
back in 1998.
It was the second fiction piece I ever published, and I got a whopping $5 for
it. It’s the original Brutal Women story, and sorta set the scene for
everything I’d write afterward.

I gave birth to my boy along a
barren stretch of the High Way near the King’s hold in Skall, twelve miles from
the Hold at Inveress. I squatted in a dusty ditch as twilight neared, a time
when spirits of the dead and dying roam free in search of unwilling hosts.

I pulled on my tattered trousers -
patched and bloodied so many times that I’ve lost track of which blood came
from whom - and started my walk to Inveress with my son wrapped up in an old
black tarp and bits of burlap. I would train him as I wished, I decided, with
help from the best teacher of battle and survival I knew.

The hold at Inveress is not like
the King’s hold in Skall. It is not one of the old, burned out structures,
built before the cataclysm when men loved their buildings tall and full of
large windows. Inveress was built to defend. It resides on a rocky rise called
Dunsinane Hill, about four miles from the black square of Birnam Glen.

The gate’s small peeking portal
swung inward, and a pair of sharp, frightened blue eyes peered out at me. My
boy sucked contentedly at my breast, wrapped up securely within the tarp. Warm
and fed, he kept silent.

The eyes continued to stare. For a
brief moment, I thought perhaps my greeter had been stabbed in the back; his
eyes remained so emotionless and still in their glistening. As I reached across
my boy for my blade, the man croaked, “Mistress...?” as if it were a question.
And, I suppose, it was. I did not look myself. Women do not carry babes at
their breast.

“Come now, get me your Master, the
Thane of Glen,” I said. “He will not be pleased to know that his comrade Banan
has been kept waiting.”

The peeping portal snapped shut.

The gate opened abruptly, and I
almost dropped my boy for my blade.

“Banan!” the figure cried. It was a
voice deep and familiar. I had to dart from the doorway to keep the man from
crushing my child in his embrace.

“Clumsy, drunken brute,” I growled.

The bright gleam - enhanced by much
drink - in his eyes faded, and he looked down at me from beneath thick,
furrowed brows. A hand strayed to his sword hilt, and I watched his form grow
wary and alert.

“I will ask only one favor of you
in this lifetime,” I said. “I want you to train my boy. Here, in Inveress. I
cannot raise a boy and command battles. You have servants and a Lady. I do
not.”