Doris Piserchia

NAKED AND AFRAID I GO

LAST NIGHT I dreamed I took a grain of dirt and examined it with a super microscope. I could see a cell in the dirt. The chromosomes lay in a pattern that tapered to two familiar designs—XX. The earth was female. I screamed, I screamed, I screamed.

She looked miserable, so I didn’t laugh, merely told her she was in a fine state of health and that the pregnancy should be a breeze. Her name was Rose Willis and she wasn’t one of my regular patients. She was attractive and young and probably worked as hard as any of us when she wasn’t marching up and down Main Street with the man-haters. I showed her no reaction when she sat up on the examination table and called me a chauvinist pig stud.

Mean, mad and terrified, that’s what she was, and if it hadn’t been for the last part I would have matched her with the other two. As it was, I didn’t want her to leave while she felt so low. She was no infant, about twenty-one or two, but right then she looked as if she had been hit with a battle-ax.

Broke and hungry and afraid, she stayed to talk, rested on the table and told me things I didn’t believe. She said I was the fifth doctor she had seen, that none of the others would X-ray her to locate the tumor. They had told her the same thing I did—she had a growth, but it wasn’t the kind that would kill her. Would I X-ray her? Somebody had to do it, she said, and no matter what it turned out to be she would feel better just knowing.

I had the idea that without more evidence she would go on refusing to acknowledge her condition. Not that it would have mattered in the long run; she wouldn’t be able to lie to herself after she started to show. She seemed to be a decent person, a bit secretive yet somehow disarming, and she was very confused. It would be no strain on my time to give her the added proof of an X-ray, since two of my afternoon appointments had canceled. Besides, I was curious. Afflicted with humanity’s most common malady, she behaved as if she had been created immune. Still, she was a stranger and could be mentally unbalanced. Girls became pregnant every day, and this one had no business bullying me into doing something so unnecessary. Well, not exactly bullying. Converting was a better word. She just wouldn’t quit, and before she finally ran out of breath I was halfway convinced that she was eaten up by tumors.

So I took the picture and it turned out to be what I’d said in the first place. The presence of the fetus made argument redundant. She was, in her own words, “knocked up,” and I was a slightly disappointed medic.

More confused and tense than ever, Rose Willis wouldn’t go away. She warmed the examination table and bent my ear for another hour. What I heard was a not too unfamiliar story. She hated men, but it was a superficial hatred. The group got their hooks in her when she was fifteen, and since she had nothing else to do, she went along with them. Not all that she did was phony. Plenty of things made her indignant, but this wouldn’t stop her from getting married eventually and she said as much to a friend. The friend squealed and the group put her in isolation for a month.

“Nothing like that really works on us,” she told me. “We think what we want to think. If I make up my mind to be reasonable I can figure out almost anything. I could be a nymph or a fag or an iceberg but it would never touch the real me. I’m way inside looking out, and someday I’ll see what I want. When I do see it I’ll go after it. Duty is a pain in the ass. Once I make up my mind that it’s worth it, fine, then I’m a dandy lackey, but it really depends on how much static is threatening. I bide my time when it looks like it’ll be too much to handle. You pig studs think we’re soft, or you think we’re like you. You just don’t know.”

She had a lot more than that to say, but when I remained patiently noncommittal she finally gave up, finally stopped trying to convince me. Slumping back on the table in exhaustion, she gave me a bitter scrutiny. I didn’t believe the main point in her argument and she was too tired to say any more. From the instant she walked into my office she had insisted that I explain to her how she could be pregnant and a virgin. Someone else would have to help her there. Emotional problems were out of my domain.

What I did for her was pull some strings and get her admitted free of charge to a good nursing home. The last time I saw her she thanked me and gave me a wry smile and called me a chauvinist pig stud. Rose Willis. She had conquered the enemy and the spoils were hers.

In a few days I forgot her.

There were only four doctors in our clinic and we were thick as thieves, had been friends since med school. Tad Fraser was a genius who bullied the rest of us, told us which days we’d donate ourselves to the poor, told us when we’d have vacations, even told us how to handle our wives. We let him get away with it because he usually knew what he was talking about. Jim Thorne was a crewcut man; everything worthwhile could be had only by conforming. I don’t know if he really believed this, but he said he did. Wally Cohen and I worked our cans off and were grateful for anything good that came our way.

Fraser was upset because his wife was pregnant. She had been a real slob, weighed nearly two hundred before he made her spend six months at a reducing farm. Three weeks ago she had come home in good humor and looking unrecognizably svelte, and then she dropped the bomb by mentioning that her factory must be out of kilter because she had missed two periods.

You could get an ovum by running a Wellman hose into a Fallopian tube and irritating the ovary. Polly Fraser spent a few days screaming the house down, then she showed up at the clinic and demanded to be examined by all four of us. Fraser threw her out but she was back the next day. Fluently profane, she let it be known that there was something wrong with her factory, not her morals, and that she was ready to shell out a hundred eggs to prove it. Fraser threw her out again so she went to the experimental lab at the University on the other side of town and offered to sell them two dozen ova at the going rate. The staff collected the ova, after which Polly stole the receptacles and brought them back to the clinic. She dumped them in Fraser’s lap and told him he would either examine them or she would get all her friends and boycott the place.

I don’t think she expected anything to come of what she did. She was scared and disoriented and acted on impulse. What she knew about anatomy would have fit inside a thimble, but desperation had made her grab at straws. No doubt she remembered Fraser’s favorite saying, that a woman was a pawn of her cycle and everything she did was inspired by it.

“I don’t know what this is going to prove,” Fraser snarled at us as he prepared to run tests. “Why doesn’t she just tell me and get it over with? She knows I wouldn’t divorce her if she banged a dozen guys. I might kill her but I wouldn’t divorce her. Now she says if I don’t tell her how a woman can get pregnant without a man she’ll find six doctors who will. That’s all I need, her opening her big yap and telling everyone she cuckolded me.”

“No offense,” said Thorne, “but why don’t you abort her?”

“Dammit, because she says any woman who knocks herself up would be a damned fool to get rid of it.”

Then was when I thought of the girl who had come to me a year ago. Rose Willis had said almost exactly the same thing.

How could Polly’s baby girl look so little like her?

We thought we knew so much about sex cells. The crossing of genes in an ovum fertilized by a sperm resulted in a child who possessed characteristics of both parents. This was supposed to be all there was to it.

Polly’s child developed from an ovum that had a full set of chromosomes. Of the two dozen ova, three had proved to be mutated. The genes in these three were strung out on the chromosomes in tiers or layers, huge numbers of them, and crossing seemed to take place spontaneously. This crossing was not confined within a single tier. All layers appeared to be involved, which indicated that nature was tapping an almost infinite supply of human traits. This was why Polly’s child did not resemble her except in a most superficial way. Gene crossing normally took place within a single layer, and this layer represented traits of the mother and father. Crossing in a mutated cell involved traits that conceivably represented the mother’s entire lineage. Polly’s child was, literally, a haphazard (so it seemed to us) product of an unknown number of parents.

Despite what the experts said about the minute statistical chance of a mutation turning out well, Polly’s daughter was big and alert and in perfect health. Her cells were complete and they carried the mutation.

There was something else. A sperm couldn’t fertilize a mutated ovum. Polly continued producing ordinary ova, in fact most were normal, but the others remained aloof to sperm and, indeed, defied detailed explanation. We hadn’t discovered, for instance, why one mutated ovum began to develop embryonically while others didn’t.

A pack of the Libs marched in the street.

Fraser was frightened. His deep voice left him that day as he pulled back the curtain window to look down at the women, and it never returned. Always after that he spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“Say that again,” he said, and Thorne repeated himself.

“Suppose there’s a trigger that has been in them since the beginning? Call it a defense mechanism. It activates when the species is threatened, or when they finally raise their heads and gaze over the stack of diapers, or when some part of their brains develops, or when we’ve done enough conquering and we aren’t essential anymore, or maybe their marching is doing it, or it could be nothing more than an emotion which has been pretty alien to them—united rage.”

Fraser seemed to grow weaker. Leaning against the sill, he stared at the street as if a monster were there, searching for a sign of life.

“Why not?” said Thorne.

“It sounds unscientific,” I said, and for a moment I thought Fraser was going to come over and hit me.

“You have to admit that this is the first time in history they’ve ever been united in anything,” said Thorne.

“We’ve kept them quiet,” Wally said. “Isn’t that what we’ve done? Barefoot and pregnant? I mean, never before have so many of them been enraged at the same time.”

“United in rage?” Fraser’s eyes were wide open and staring, but he saw nothing in his line of vision. I knew he was looking at specters.

Pregnant virgins had to be showing up in other parts of the world. We had waited to see what would happen. Weeks went by but there wasn’t a whisper of it in the newspapers. The medical journals poured in and we learned that the abortion rate was rapidly increasing. The answer was plain. Medics were keeping the lid down tight and women were taking the fastest available solution.

Was I ever afraid of women? Had I always been afraid of them? There were so many who made me laugh, or who annoyed me, or who disgusted me. I remember boarding a bus behind one, and we stood on the steps for a moment, waiting for those ahead to get inside, and I was shocked at the size of her can. I had forgotten all about the Conspiracy and simply stood on the step staring at the awesome human rear at my eye level. My first sensation was, as I said, shock, and then came amusement, and then I told myself that their rears were bigger than ours because they had that all-important function, and then the sickness of remembering made me nearly lose my balance.

I met women who impressed me. The old ones seldom failed to do that. They looked at me and their eyes said, “But for the grace, you would be my son.”

The young women looked at me and their eyes said, “Whence and whither?”

I remember Wally saying to me once, “I envy the lion. He has an easy life. She does all the work and he sleeps and makes love.”

It was a few weeks after the Conspiracy had been organized that Jim Thorne said to me, “I keep thinking of fleas. The dog keeps them safe and warm and fed while they torment him. Then one day the fleas jump off his back and go away to build themselves a house. He watches them go and all of a sudden he drops dead. They were the only reason he was alive.”

Later I met Wally at JoJo’s and we had a beer. “I’m hearing things these days,” he said. “Sometimes out of a clear blue silence I hear swords clashing, bugles blowing, horses snorting. Not loudly, just echoes, as if they’re coming from the other side of the world. Sometimes I hear other sounds, but mostly it’s war. We were so good at that. I’m terrified when I hear those echoes, but I feel something else at the same time. My heart begins to pop and my legs twitch as if they’re eager to mount up and ride.”

People like Fraser were apprehensive by nature. They invented fear when they had nothing to be afraid of. Let something really frightening come along and Fraser’s kind went off half-cocked but with a lengthy, logical-sounding argument to justify their behavior.

The committee was made up of fifty medical men, all from our area. Our intent was to maintain the status quo of silence at least until we could find out what was causing the mutation. Of course Fraser wasn’t the only one who was insane those days. What we should have done was publicize the situation, but none of us thought of that.

A particular group of Libs that prowled the streets near the clinic consisted of young married women who were all known to us. In fact, any one of them might show up at any time in one of our offices as a patient. They were a vocal group and had succeeded in getting just about everything they demanded from the local government. Now they were protesting because other groups weren’t getting the same kind of satisfaction. Fraser came out with the news that none of the women in this group were pregnant. In this he was correct, but the conclusions he went on to draw were purely insane. Or so I thought.

He convinced the committee that the mutations were occurring only in Libs and that when the Libs were given what they demanded, their cells didn’t mutate. I don’t know how many committee members even half-believed this but nobody slapped Fraser down, and from then on the Conspiracy included the sanctioning of almost anything a member felt like doing. Primarily we were supposed to become dedicated ass-kissers. The Libs were to be given everything they wanted, and any politician who ignored the committee would find himself out of a job or worse.

Wally complained. “I can’t take this seriously. I can’t remember when I’ve heard grown men discuss such a stupid subject.”

“What’s stupid about it?” said Fraser.

“There are only fifty of us. How can you expect us to make all women contented?”

“We’ll do it a town at a time. First we make it work here, then the process spreads.”

“My God, do you realize how long that will take?” said Wally. “If it works?”

“You dumb clod, this has to be an immortal project or no project at all. Don’t sit there and whine to me that you’ll be dead in a few decades. What do I care about you? You’ll work on this for the rest of your life, the same as all of us, and long before we’re gone, the new generation of men will be hard at it.”

“Don’t you see that it can’t possibly work?”

“What do you want us to do, give up without trying? Even if we’re lucky enough to stabilize the situation for the time being, it won’t stay that way. Nature is pruning us out. From now on every time some female over the age of twelve decides that she’s getting the short end of the stick, she’s likely to start mutating. Dammit, don’t tell me it sounds unscientific. What the hell is scientific about life? Name one thing.”

“The enemy is exactly what?” said Wally.

Fraser gave him another black look. “The pituitary? The ovaries? We’ll find out sooner or later. There’s a switch somewhere, that much we know, and it also looks as if the switch is automatically flipped when a bunch of them gets mad enough to march. So far every one of our patients has been from a frustrated Lib group.”

Said Thorne, “We’ll have to move carefully to set up establishments off limits to them. We needed batch bars before but, Lord, they’re absolutely essential now. Men are going to go out of their heads if they can’t get away from them.”

I said, “Maybe we needed those places because of the courage we gave each other.”

“Why don’t you go to hell?” said Wally.

Fraser jumped up from his chair and started pacing. “He didn’t say anything off base. But it was more because we needed to let down our hair. Goddamn, we carried the world while half the species was outside of things. Right?”

Wally shook his head. “I never went to batch parties or bars. Practically everything I did was done with my wife. I lived in two worlds. One was work, the other was living, and I’d have dumped the first any time I could.”

“To them you’re a chauvinist pig stud,” Fraser told him.

Never did I have more than a momentary urge to kill anyone. The old defense mechanisms always leaped to the fore and smothered the desire. Such mechanisms were a protection, a wall, an obstacle that had to exist, because if I had obeyed the urge I would have had to acknowledge that the step I’d taken from the cave was imaginary. To dwell in twilight is the destiny of man. Will those damned fleas hop off and go build a house?

Now I have an urge to kill and it isn’t momentary but is with me day and night, and the defense mechanisms regard it with indifference. I want to kill my mother, not the bewildered flesh who gave me body, but the other one who said to me thousands of years ago, “You think, therefore you are; go now and conquer.”

She is an infidel. She told me she loved me, but she never said she loved another more.

Wally and I were alone together for a few minutes before a meeting, and he said, “I’m highly offended by the whole idea, and I tell myself I shouldn’t be. Objectively speaking, what everyone really wants is for the race to continue, right? What does it matter to us what the man of the thirtieth or sixtieth century looks like, so long as he isn’t a monstrosity? Our egos have been shafted, almost the same as they would be if we found out the man of tomorrow was going to be black or Oriental. No matter how you look at it, we’re mostly sitting on our heads and thinking with our asses.”

Thorne came, then Fraser, and we sat for a while and looked at each other. Fraser was bitter and blunt. “We even opened up the solar system for them,” he said. “Do you suppose that had something to do with the switch flipping? Look at all the machines they’ll have to help them. Oh, you can bet they won’t have too many wars. I always said they were different from us.”

“You know what always bothered me?” Jim Thorne said. “I liked to see them primping or playing bridge or cutting one another, but I got uneasy when I saw them talking quietly.”

Wally sat looking bewildered. “We loved them. My wife … they were wrong when they said it was only sex. There were some, sure, but my wife is different. That house is her, and I’m full of her and she’s so much my world … I wouldn’t exist without her … oh, God, I mean what’s the purpose? What kind of human being is it that has no mate?”

Said Thorne, “More and more I think of the differences between us. Out loud I agreed with a lot of the bull, but, honest to God, privately I thought we were all one thing. Now, well, how are we different?”

“What makes you think sex requires two partners?” said Fraser thoughtfully, and we looked at him in disgust. “Go to hell,” he said.

“What is really awful is that they don’t know it’s happening,” said Wally. He stared at Fraser. “You like killing them, don’t you? You’re a sonofabitch. That poor woman you put to sleep like a damned cat the other day didn’t know what was going on. Don’t tell me it was her or us. I’m not willing to equate my life with a horde of helpless girls who are as much a product of nature as I am.”

“You’d better get busy and do the same thing yourself. And the babies, too. They aren’t human. Just keep telling yourself that.”

“I keep telling myself that we’re a bunch of murderers,” said Wally. “I’m convinced that we’d be better off if we publicized it. After it’s out in the open we can have every scientist in the world working on it. And that’s exactly what I’m going to tell the committee when we go in there. They had better listen.”

Could the Conspiracy endure? They said it could. They promised me that it was possible, that we would find the solution. The mind of man was easily dedicated, they said.

I would have warned Wally if I’d had the chance. I would have told him not to trust Fraser. I knew only too well how much Fraser had changed. Long before the killing started, I had tried to back out. Fraser hadn’t said much after I spilled everything I thought and felt. All he had done was look at me, then he had said, “This is a crusade. Every man who drops out shoves the rest of us that much closer to the cliff.” I got the message. In, I stayed alive. Out, I didn’t.

I loved Wally like a brother. No really. That’s a remark the conditioners say is okay and proper. I delighted in Wally’s being. I won’t say he was a friend or a pal or my best buddy. Lately I’ve begun to see things in a clear light. To hell with them all, I loved Wally, period.

This week I delivered twenty babies. One was a boy. I held him, cherished him, grieved. How could She do this to him?

Last night the committee executed Fraser. It was their last official act before they dispersed. He had been so vehement about keeping the silence, had talked so long and earnestly about how the women would view this as the supreme victory and how they would interfere with our trying to find a cure. Fraser had been wrong and they killed him.

There were too many female medics and scientists, and the whole thing suddenly blew wide open. It didn’t matter. The chances of our having found a solution had been very, very small and we ought to have realized it. Maybe we did. Maybe we knew. The felled giant may have had to be bludgeoned a few more times before he got the message. Anyhow, the human race fought its last big war in a quaint little place called ovaries. There was no bloodshed to speak of.

Charlotte gave birth this morning.

“Do you want me to kill it?”

I stood beside the bed and looked down at her. This was what Fraser couldn’t understand. He had refused to believe they would be willing to go to any lengths because of love. They would even murder their own children, knowing full well that it would serve no practical purpose, simply to let us know how much we meant to them.

With tears in my eyes, I said, “That’s a beautiful healthy baby and I hope she lives to be a hundred.”

“I don’t give a damn what my grandchildren a thousand years from now will be like, or what they’ll be doing,” she said.

We were all in it together. The men and women of the world were united in fear. For the first time in history no one looked to their children for a better future.

“Did you kill any women or babies?” she said.

I lied and said yes. There were many demented souls who had killed. I allied myself with them without hesitation. I always was a pushover for lost causes.

My daughters look like my mother. So do I. My father resembled his father, and that used to please me until I saw a photograph of grandfather’s mother. Everywhere I turned I saw women.

A computer might have said Nature’s plan was sensible. That is a word I always viewed with wariness. Subconsciously I may have suspected the truth all along. A thing is born and it is weak and unformed. The Maker knows this thing will be worthy one day (another suspect word, “worthy”; beauty is in the eye of the beholder; I wonder if She is myopic). Anyway, this thing must endure until it can stand alone. A helpmeet is what is needed. Pfft. There he is.

I feel as if I’m Everyman. I worked so damned hard, knocked myself out, turned up my toes early while the ballbusters continued. I made war, but I don’t know why. I seemed to exist on a high-tension wire while the ballbusters lazed and got fat. At times I was an aberration, in which case I would seek out a woman alone and then I’d open my overcoat and show her my nakedness. Or I’d rape. Or I’d beat.

I refute the above. I haven’t done those things. The idiots, the depraved, are the guilty, and I’m ashamed that we’re related.

Never once did I imagine that I, Everyman, my sum total, might be an aberration.

Often at night I get up and turn on the lamp. I sit on my bed and watch Charlotte sleep. In adjoining rooms the girls snore. They frequently have nightmares, which makes me wonder. Do they dream more than we? Charlotte has a habit of going to bed early. She doesn’t mess the bed by tossing and turning. Usually she sleeps on her back with the covers tucked under her chin. She looks like a papoose or a cocoon. Someday the adult will emerge from under the covers. Will it be a great deal like this woman or will it be different?

Thousands of women are coming to hospitals and clinics for abortions. This will solve nothing and they know it, but they do it anyway. This afternoon a big ugly fag threw her arms around my neck and cried. Little ones sit on curbs and watch with sad eyes. Rarely do I go out but that a group of women gathers and silently follows me. Teenagers come up to me and stare. They look so stunned.

Jim Thorne is cracking. He bought a rifle and in the evenings he stands by his upstairs window and draws a bead on every women who passes by. So far he hasn’t pulled the trigger.

I’ve been going to visit my mother a great deal. I sit on the floor beside her rocking chair and rest my head in her lap. She fondles my hair, and sometimes she weeps and tells me everything will be all right. I feel at peace with her. Like me, she is a thing of the past. Life, time, have abandoned both of us. For neither the son-lover nor the son will there be a tomorrow.

I stand in the middle of my house and listen to the darkness. It is all around me. Outside a low breeze sweeps along the street. I’m cold.

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