Regiment of Women (24 page)

Cornell felt suffocated. He loosened himself from Gordie's thick forearm. He looked around at the faces of his men. They were watching him with what he interpreted as compassionate wonderment.

Gordie said: “Anatomy is destiny, Al. I guess all of us would rather have been born women.”

Cornell cried: “But we
weren't
, were we? And this is the only life we have!”

“Please,” said Gordie, seizing him again, this time not so gently as before. “Please, Al, you'll get into trouble. Suppose some passing officer hears you talking that way?”

“I hope she does,” Cornell cried. He wrenched himself away from Gordie, and ran to the screen door. He hurled it open and shouted: “Rotten women!”

When Gordie grabbed him from behind, he rammed both elbows back, freed himself, and turned to meet the assault of not only Gordie, but Greggie, several others, and even Jackie.

He was subdued by his fellow men and carried into the lavatory and held under a cold shower.

“I'm all right now,” he said five or six times before they let him out. He was still wearing the cloche, which now drooped with water. He went dripping into the dormitory and took out his spare uniform dress. Luckily he had not been wearing his shoes. The others followed him and stood around behind. He did not look at them. He had contempt for them all. But neither was he proud of himself. He should have seen it was hopeless to try to rouse them. He should not have lost control. He would do better next time. He didn't know quite what he would do, but he would do better. And it would be by, with, and for himself alone: not, certainly, for the Movement, and not, indeed, for the wretched male sex, whom he believed women were quite right to despise.

When he was fully dressed, except for the yellow cloche, which lay dripping where he had hurled it, he felt a touch at his shoulder. It was Farley, who had not been one of his subduers. He could imagine Farley's having lain sardonically on the bunk while the spectacle was in progress. But Farley had a point; Farley was always for himself alone.

“Georgie,” said Farley. He took Cornell by the elbow, as Cornell had taken him for that heart-to-heart talk. But this was different. Cornell shook his hand off with a bird-wing movement.

“Don't touch me,” he said, and turned away, seeking other eyes. But no one would look at him except Gordie, who had lately been his principal restrainer. Gordie raised his husky shoulders and let them fall; his broad pink face was expressionless. Jackie was seated again, working at his cuticles with an orange stick. Howie's back was towards Cornell and quivering slightly. Was he crying?

Cornell finally stared at Farley.

Farley shook his head. “You're sick, Georgie. You've got everything turned around. Marching us back and forth, calling yourself ‘Al.' And now you go berserk. I should have seen it coming from your remarks in the bathroom. For a while I thought you were some kind of radical rabble-rouser, talking about the exploitation of men. But then you said you weren't interested in politics, and now you run amuck for no reason at all. What if some officer had heard you? What would happen to
us?

“You need treatment, Georgie, professional treatment. Let's go to sick call.”

“Who are
you?”
Cornell screamed. “When did you get so stinking big?”

Farley slipped an arm around his waist.

Gordie, as usual the diplomat, said: “It wasn't Farley's idea personally, Georgie. We all got together and decided. And we elected Farley because you and he are friends. So don't resent him. It isn't an easy job, by any means.”

Jackie raised his face at that and said spitefully: “Georgie didn't break down when he and
I
were best friends.”

“And I haven't broken down now, you shits!” Cornell screamed. He ripped himself away from Farley, then seized Farley and threw him onto the seated Jackie. Jackie fell back and Farley tumbled to the floor. Gordie advanced, and Cornell kicked him in the testicles. Gordie instantly lost his high color, clutched his stomach, and without a sound collapsed onto Farley, whom his big body covered entirely.

Without these leaders, the other men fell back and continued to give ground in an expanding semicircle as Cornell moved into the aisle.

“Georgie.”

He turned and saw young Howie, who had climbed over a cot to reach him. Howie wore a sorrowful expression, but somehow Cornell was not offended by it as he had been by the fake sympathy of Farley and Gordie, which was really cynicism in the service of bitter envy.

“Howie,” Cornell said, “you understand, don't you? You know I'm not nuts.” He gestured. “Look at them, the disgusting little slaves. That's all they're good for—to be milked. Well, not me! I'm busting out of here, and I can do it. I've done it before. No woman can stop me!”

Howie's hand came out, and Cornell reached to shake it, but missed because it moved too rapidly, changing into a fist which struck him on the point of the jaw, causing him to smell a sulfurous odor and to lose consciousness.

When Cornell awakened, he was dressed in a frilly pink nightgown through the neckline of which was threaded a satin ribbon. He lay in bed, alone in a small room with walls of raw plywood. A doll in a gaudy evening gown sat on one corner of a vanity table, the top of which was otherwise furnished with cosmetic bottles, boxes, and jars. A skirted stool stood in front of the vanity. There was a bedside table with a pink-shaded lamp, which provided the only light in this windowless enclosure. An air-conditioner, set into the wall, hummed quietly.

After a moment Cornell swung out of bed and went to the doll. He picked it up, and it spoke in a tinny voice.

“Hi
!
I'm Larry. What's your name? Won't you be my friend?”

With his free hand Cornell felt his jaw, which ached from Howie's punch. He had a feeling that had happened a long time before. He turned the doll over, raised its stiff satin dress, lowered its pantyhose and lace bikini, and found the button between Larry's buttocks, looking like the stub of a dildo which had been broken off there. He pressed the button, then let it out, and the doll repeated its salutation. He looked around front and saw that Larry was indeed represented as anatomically male. Its little plastic pudenda looked both pathetic and ridiculous. When Larry was horizontal, his eyes were closed. Cornell erected him, and one blue eye clicked open. The other was stuck. Cornell pried it open with a fingernail, and then suddenly was murderously sick of Larry, picked him up by the heels and was about to knock his head off, when the door opened.

“Go ahead, Georgie.” It was a plump young officer. She had dark hair and could not have been more than twenty-five. Her collar showed a first-lieutenant's silver bar and the golden medical emblem. The summer uniform of tan shirt and trousers was a tight fit on her chubby body.

“Go ahead,” she repeated. “Bust it.” Her round pink cheeks and tiny teeth were smiling.”

Cornell carefully lowered the doll to the vanity table, back on its button. He picked up a comb and, looking in the oval mirror, began to work on his rumpled hair.

“I'm Lieutenant Aster, or if you like, Doctor. You might prefer to call me Doctor: the decision is up to you.”

Cornell winced as the comb caught in a tangle.

“You probably wonder where you are, if you have just woken up. You were brought to the camp hospital yesterday. While you were under sedation we had an interesting talk. Then you were brought to this private room, which is still in the hospital but isolated from the wards.”

Cornell's face was smooth. Someone had shaved him. He pulled the front of the nightgown away and looked down. His chest, between the scars of his vanished breasts, was smooth as well. His fingertips went under his arms, then swooped down to rub his calves: both areas had been shaved. He took the pink stool from the slot in the vanity table, sat down and, ignoring the lieutenant's reflection, went back to work on his hair with a rat-tailed brush he had discovered among the cosmetic accessories provided.

The lieutenant stood behind him. “Believe me, Georgie, I know quite a bit about you: wishes, dreams, hopes, fantasies. But my diagnosis is encouraging. It is my belief that you are emotionally disturbed, surely, but not crazy.” She hooked her thumbs in her woven belt and was probably leering into the mirror, but he avoided her eyes.

“Now, I'm new around here, and you are kind of a test case for me. What happens to
you
will largely determine what happens to
my
career.” She touched his shoulders lightly with her two hands. “There's a new generation in psychiatry, Georgie, and I belong to it. For example, we believe that anal therapy is ineffectual in many cases and perhaps in some even deleterious, and only as a last resort would we recommend castration. I'm not criticizing the older practitioners, mind you. They were the pioneers, coming upon a frontier by covered wagon, as it were, to build log cabins. But time moves on and new building materials have been discovered, new techniques of construction.”

Bending, she put her head close to his and spoke confidentially. She smelled of a familiar women's lotion, Saddle Leather, bringing Cornell an oddly unpleasant memory of a certain former girl friend who had reeked of it.

She said in his ear: “I had to fight quite a battle to get you, Georgie. Everybody else around here is Old Guard. If it were up to them, you'd get the dildo, and if that didn't work, the knife. So I'm asking for your cooperation.” She straightened up and resumed her normal tone.

Cornell kept brushing.

“Femininity,” said the lieutenant, “is fundamentally a psychic and not a physical quality, though it takes its origins from biological and anatomical reality. Now, we in the new psychiatry believe that all human beings, of whichever sex, understand this, to put it in layman's terms, in their heart of hearts, guts, soul, or whatever you want to call what
we
call the Center of Basic Awareness. The old school also believes in a kind of CBA, but locates it differently for each sex—in women, in the brain; in men, the gonads. Hence the typical psychiatric surgery: frontal lobotomy for a female, castration for a male.”

Cornell had never heard of a woman who went literally mad, though he had known a great many he would have called eccentric—in fact, they all were—and he did not understand the word “lobotomy.” Nor was he interested in the lieutenant's monologue. If he had told all under the influence of the drug, his situation was hopeless, and she was toying with him sadistically. The solace lay in cosmetic particulars. He brushed his hair so hard that tears came to his eyes, but they were superficial water: physical, not emotional.

“We,” the lieutenant went on, “do not locate the CBA in any precise organ. It is contributed to by every cell of a living person.” She patted Cornell's shoulder cap again. “Emasculation may make a man socially tractable, but except with the really dangerous sex criminal, we think society loses more than it gains thereby. Thereafter he is useful only for heavy labor. He is no longer a man but a thing. We think men have their place in the world as men. The human race could not get along without them.” The lieutenant chortled. “At least not until one sex able to reproduce itself is invented.”

Cornell looked at the brush. The bristles were clogged with hair. He bent across and explored his temples with a forefinger. The hair was definitely receding. And his recent ordeal had accentuated his crow's-feet.

“Emotions emanate from the CBA, and that's where the trouble starts. They start out fine and true and healthy, and somehow become warped while en route, so that when they reach the outside world of reality they are perverse, crippled and crippling. The answer is not to try to eliminate the CBA by locating it in a particular organ which is then excised. The CBA is not a thing in itself; it is rather a process.”

The lieutenant cleared her throat. “This is a very complex subject, Georgie, and I'm sure your little head is spinning right now. Come over here, please.” She took his hand and led him to the bed. “Sit down, dear.” She drew up the stool for herself.

“I have got permission to work with you in a program based on this new approach. There is opposition to it, as I indicated, and such cooperation as I receive from my superiors is rather grudging, I'm afraid. I can survive that because my conviction is firm. But what I can't go on
without
is your cooperation, dear Georgie.”

She took his hand again and sought his eyes. She was so young that there were those satiny patches across her tear sacs.

For lunch Cornell was served a cheeseburger, french fries, and a chocolate milk shake. The tray was delivered by Lieutenant Aster. He had seen no one else for two days, and the door to the room was locked from the outside. When he washed or used the john, the lieutenant blindfolded him and led him to a lavatory consisting of a stall shower, basin, and toilet. She waited outside the door until he finished, and blindfolded him again for the return trip.

Now she handed him the catsup bottle. Cornell upended it, and naturally nothing came out until he shook it vigorously; next his plate was swimming in gore. He screwed up his nose and chased it with squirming lips.

“Oh, that's good,” said the lieutenant, “that expression. You're recapturing something authentic there. I'll bet you did that when the teacher announced a test, or when something really ooky was served in the cafeteria, like baked halibut.”

Cornell rather liked her by now, but he also had a contrary urge to resist her smugness. “That's the same face I make to this day if the coffee is too hot or something is sour.”

“Good!” She was undiscourageable. “There you have another link to a normal childhood. It's a childish expression, Georgie, male-childish. A girl's facial reaction by age seventeen is usually significantly different, showing not so much disgust as sullenness. An adolescent girl has the scent of her power and responsibility to come. She is growing impatient. A boy on the other hand is reluctant to mature and clings to the mannerisms of infancy. He will find them useful all his life.”