CAENIS/CAENEUS,
JOAN OF ARC,
and IRMA — youngish transmascs.
POSEIDON,
GILLES DE RAIS,
and FRANZ — somewhat older men.
A grotto in ancient Greece.
POSEIDON: You would make a very beautiful boy, Caenis.
CAENIS: Funny thing to hear from a man who’s just raped me.
POSEIDON: I thought you liked it!
CAENIS: I did.
POSEIDON: Well, anyway, I’m not a man—though not for the same reason that you are not a man. Gods have their own system of gender. Our biology’s different, you see. For instance, with us there’s no harm in fucking your siblings.
CAENIS: My mother said I would’ve had a twin brother, but I swallowed him in the womb.
POSEIDON: ’Twas I who decreed that.
CAENIS: Was it?
POSEIDON: Yes.
CAENIS: Why the fuck would you do that?
POSEIDON: Because I like my women with a bit of boy in them. Look at your hips—they’re so narrow. Your breasts are so small, the hairs around them so wiry. You smell like an athlete, shiny with oil.
CAENIS: You smell like fish and slime.
POSEIDON: Do you ever wish you had a penis, Caenis?
CAENIS: All the time.
POSEIDON: What would you do with it?
CAENIS: I’d fuck the hollow of a peach pit and then I’d make a man suck the sticky sweetness, his soft-hard mouth on my hard-soft length.
POSEIDON: How would you like me to give you one, as a token of my divine favor?
CAENIS: What, right now?
POSEIDON: When else?
CAENIS: But I—I don’t know—I’m not ready—I never thought…
POSEIDON: Well, suit yourself.
(He begins to leave.)
CAENIS: Poseidon, wait! Come back!
POSEIDON: (Turning around) What is it now?
CAENIS: You can’t just ask me if—if I want a… and then not give me any time to think it over.
POSEIDON: The hubris of telling a god what he can and can’t do!
CAENIS: Look, just listen…
POSEIDON: Well?
CAENIS: …Would you really do it?
POSEIDON: All that and more, my darling boy. You know what you want. You don’t need me to tell you. All you have to do is say the word.
CAENIS: Just like that?
POSEIDON: Just like that.
CAENIS: Then do it. Turn me. Make me new. I can’t stand it any longer.
POSEIDON: Then, Caenis, be Caeneus.
(A burst of light fills the grotto, and CAENIS is transformed into CAENEUS.)
POSEIDON: Well, how do you feel?
CAENEUS: New yet old. Like a mended garment. Like there’s been no change at all. (He runs his hands up and down his body in wonder.) I’m flat where I used to be curved. I bulge where once I was flat. My skin is rougher—though not quite as rough as your scales. Thick dark hair creeps up my wrists, the backs of my hands, my knuckles, the tops of my feet, my stomach, chest, neck, face. My voice breaks, croaks, catches in my throat. (He coughs.)
POSEIDON: You’ll grow into it. Well? Aren’t you going to thank me?
CAENEUS: Isn’t this your way of thanking me?
POSEIDON: Certainly not! I granted your wish for entirely selfish reasons. I just thought you’d be even sexier as a boy, that’s all.
CAENEUS: Entirely shellfish reasons.
POSEIDON: Don’t push your luck, mortal.
CAENEUS: (Prancing around him exuberantly) And where’s my skin of indestructible adamant? And my strength surpassing that of Hercules?
POSEIDON: Listen to him, haggling with the gods!
CAENEUS: Not the gods, just a petulant lover. Or do you want me to tell Amphitrite how you’ve been cheating on her again? Those sea-nymph handmaidens of hers have sharp teeth, I heard!
POSEIDON: All right, all right! Take my trident while you’re at it, why don’t you!
(CAENEUS catches POSEIDON off guard and tackles him, then mounts him and starts riding him while slapping his ass.)
CAENEUS: Ridin’ Poseidon! I’m ridin’ Poseidon! How’s that feel, bitch! How’s it feel!
(Suddenly POSEIDON bucks him off and pins him to the ground.)
POSEIDON: You have much to learn, boy.
CAENEUS: Who better to learn it from than a god?
(They kiss.)
An army camp in the 15th century.
DE RAIS: My lady, please, I beg you.
JOAN: You must repent your sins, my lord de Rais, and your sins have been very great.
DE RAIS: You know I would do anything for you, but—
JOAN: But what, my lord de Rais?
DE RAIS: To even contemplate such a thing is agonizing. To think that you’d countenance a wretch like me—
JOAN: Then don’t think, just do. Prove your loyalty to me and to Christ.
DE RAIS: I—
JOAN: I know what you’ve done, Gilles, I know all of it. Do you think the Dauphin would be pleased to find out there is a Devil-worshipping murderer among the ranks of his paladins? Do you think he’d simply turn a blind eye and give the English goddamns more ammunition against us?
DE RAIS: …No, my lady.
JOAN: No. Of course he wouldn’t. He would have you burnt, as befits a sorcerer. And it would be just. Understand?
DE RAIS: Yes.
JOAN: Good. Now kneel.
(He kneels. JOAN puts a strap-on over her armor.)
DE RAIS: My lady—your munificence is unbearable—
JOAN: Yes, yes, let’s dispense with the groveling, shall we? Now pleasure me.
DE RAIS: Your wish is my only command.
(He obediently begins to fondle the strap-on with one hand, then two.)
JOAN: Not enough, my lord, not enough. Suck.
DE RAIS: My lady, why do you torment me? Surely you cannot mean—
(JOAN grabs him by the hair and thrusts into his mouth, which makes DE RAIS gag.)
JOAN: Ah, that’s good. Yes, just like that. Hey, look at me—I want you to look at me. (She tugs his hair, forces him to make eye contact.) Good. Keep going. That mouth, that silver tongue of yours, ah, yes, put it on me—I bet you wish this was a real cock, I bet you wish you could violate my virginity, but I shall never give it away, never, to anyone, ever—ah—
(She finishes, breathless, then shoves DE RAIS away so he falls sprawling on the floor.)
DE RAIS: My lady—my gracious lady—I have defiled—
JOAN: What, my fake cock, my lord? The only thing you’ve defiled is yourself, but you hardly needed my help for that. At least now I know you’re loyal. Go, get yourself cleaned up. The advance guard rides at dawn, and I expect you to be there with me as my companion-at-arms.
DE RAIS: (Standing up) Yes, my lord.
JOAN: Lady.
DE RAIS: Lord. Lady. Lord. Virgin goddess. Filthy boy. Angel. Devil. Yes. No. Marry me, Joan.
JOAN: I am the bride of Christ and the husband of France. There can be no other for me. (Stroking his cheek) Oh, you poor fool. You’ll spill your blood for me yet, and mourn me when I’m dead.
DE RAIS: Don’t say such things—you cannot—you must not ever die—I forbid it—
JOAN: Giving orders to your commander, knight? You’ve learned nothing.
DE RAIS: I’m sorry.
JOAN: And I’m tired—we both are. Go to bed, Gilles. Try to get some sleep.
DE RAIS: Will you pray for me tonight?
JOAN: I always do.
(He kisses her hand.)
DE RAIS: Good night, my master.
JOAN: Go.
(Now DE RAIS is sharpening a knife and JOAN is dressed in the ragged robe of a martyr. They’re both drenched in blood.)
DE RAIS: Does my lady require anything?
JOAN: Ugh. A stiff drink. But a bath first, I suppose.
DE RAIS: I shall go and draw one up for you.
JOAN: No, stay. I—I don’t want to be alone. I start seeing things when I’m alone.
DE RAIS: What things?
JOAN: Fire, mostly. But not the purifying fire of martyrdom. Hellfire, cold and livid. The kind of fire that kills the soul, not the body. I see it consuming me, my hair long and loose like a girl’s, and I’m wearing my old simple farm dress again. Don’t make me go back, Gilles. I can never go back.
DE RAIS: Oh, my poor Joan.
JOAN: A premature martyrdom is nothing at all. It’s worse than nothing. St Catherine and St Margaret don’t talk to me any more. The archangels won’t even look at me—they avert their eyes like I’m a fucking leper. A puddle of bile and blood. I haven’t been able to pray.
DE RAIS: I’ve forgotten how.
JOAN: Now that I’m dead God has no use for me. I didn’t win the war, just a few paltry battles nobody will remember. I never even got to taste the sweet spoils— (She bursts into tears, then pulls herself together.) And if they canonize me someday, I will rise from the dead and spit in their faces.
DE RAIS: They won’t, don’t worry.
JOAN: They will. And I know what they’ll do to you—they’ll dig up your half-rotted bones and pronounce you an innocent man. (DE RAIS makes a sound of disgust.) Oh, but they will. And all that bloodshed will have been for nothing.
DE RAIS: You know, Joan, every time I slaughter a little boy I imagine I’m killing you. I admit there were times—so many times—when I wanted to slit your throat, just to smell your blood on me. And I longed to lie with my head in your lap when you were on your menses.
JOAN: They stopped almost as soon as I joined the army. I ate little, slept less. Didn’t have enough blood to go around. I became just like any other soldier—only bleeding if wounded.
DE RAIS: Pity.
JOAN: I liked it that way. I’ll let you in on a secret—I suppose I might as well, having nothing else to lose. When I spoke to the saints, it was not only for victory that I prayed.
DE RAIS: And what did you pray for, my martyr?
JOAN: I prayed for escape. I prayed for a white dove to flutter down from the sky through my narrow window and in a heavenly voice proclaim to me that I, Joan, had been chosen to do what no one else had ever done in the history of creation: to shed my skin, to cross the body’s boundary and give birth to my boy-self and yet remain ever-virgin, amen. So many nights I prayed and begged and demanded, knees growing numb against the cold hard floor, until finally the saints said to me, How about the next best thing? And made me a knight.
DE RAIS: You never wanted this, did you?
JOAN: Not really. But it was the next best thing.
DE RAIS: It’s not too late. You can start over, change your name, find different saints to pray to. I’ll take you on as a pageboy in my household, sew a handsome set of livery just for you, let you brush my horses’ sleek manes, and at night I’ll sleep curled up like a hound at the foot of your canopied bed. And nobody will ever suspect a thing.
JOAN: No. Some prayers are destined to go unanswered. Perhaps I’ll try again in a hundred years or more.
DE RAIS: I’m sorry I could not save you, Joan.
JOAN: I was not yours to save. I’m tired now, Gilles. Take me home.
DE RAIS: As you wish, my lady.
(He carries her, bridal-style, into the darkness.)
A dive bar in the 1930s.
IRMA: When I came to Berlin from Odessa, I didn’t know a lick of German. All I had to my name were three rubles—which were no good in Germany anyway—and my dead brother’s old sailor suit, which was a bit tight in the chest. I whored myself out pretending to be a gigolo. After a while it started to feel good and I didn’t want to stop pretending. My favorite clients were the ones who begged me to fuck them in the ass with my porcelain cock—a repressed aristocrat with silver hair, a young Brownshirt with scars all over his face, a war veteran who wore a false nose and was addicted to morphine. Some of them were even women like myself. Women who hated the clothes of their sex and longed to be boys. What do you call a thing like that? Double inversion, perhaps, or just plain perversion.
I went to Dr Hirschfeld once to present myself as a specimen. He was very kind, and he reminded me of my father, except unlike my father he didn’t say that he’d seen me in a dream with long hair and in a dress. Unlike my father he complimented me on my sailor suit, said it fit me admirably, introduced me to the girls working at the Institute as maids and receptionists. They were perfectly nice, but I felt even more like a specimen around them. These were true inverts, while I was so inverted that I looped back in upon myself and was just a woman again. And what’s so interesting about a woman who fucks men? Nothing, that’s what.
So I excused myself and went to a synagogue and prayed to God to make me a freak—at least then I would be legible, not this confused animal, not this half-hewn, half-hearted thing, this monkey in a sailor suit. God was confused. So you want to be a sodomite, It said. Yes, I said. Thing is, Irma, you sort of already are one, It said: sodomy’s sodomy regardless of gender. Yes, I said, that is true. Asshole, mouth-hole, earhole—it really doesn’t matter, It said. Yes, I said. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the universe, Who formed woman with wisdom and created within him many openings and many hollow spaces. It is obvious and known before Your Seat of Honor that if even one of them would be opened, or if even one of them would be sealed, it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You even for one hour. Blessed are You, Adonai, Who heals all flesh and acts wondrously. Do angels fuck, I asked. Yes, It replied, in fact the Ophanim in particular are sexual maniacs. They interlock their wheels and blink their eyes against each other; I’ve seen them go at it for eons. O God, I exclaimed, to have divine union with an angel would be glorious. You would be vaporized in a matter of zeptoseconds, It said—but yes, it would be glorious.
Eventually I landed a gig as a female impersonator at a seedy cabaret. Being a woman myself, I, of course, knew all about being a female impersonator. In fact, I was so believable people started to suspect I was a phony. They started spying on me in my dressing room, hoping to get a glimpse of breasts or cunt. In this way, the gig was not so different from everyday life, except at least I was getting paid. I wore a feather boa, feathers in my hair, on my wrists, at my ankles. I was a shimmering, shivering, mass of feathers, like a half-eaten bird coughed up by a cat. I sang songs about love and violence. People threw roses at me. I stepped on the thorns to make my feet bleed. Raucous applause. Men lined up at my door hungry for a taste of the invert. Women too. Imagine their disappointment if I’d revealed myself for what I truly was. The invert is never real, nothing about him is real, her cock is fake, his cunt is fake, her voice is fake—but at least his money is as worthless as everyone else’s. In those days we used money as toilet paper, because a single roll of toilet paper cost three million marks.
It was at the cabaret that I met Franz. He was a homosexual through and through, and he wondered if fucking me out of costume—when I was wearing my usual suit and tie, that is—would cure him of it. The convoluted logic being that the suit and cropped hair would entice him but the vulva would cancel it out. Careful with that, Franz, I said, you’ll just saddle yourself with a fetish for men with pussies, and those are even harder to come by than women with cocks. And you still won’t have turned yourself straight.
We tried it anyway, and it was a night of pure bliss. His hands on me, squeezing my breasts, hot desperate kisses, our eyelashes touching, our makeup rubbing off on each other’s faces. He had the calves of a runner, though he was not, I would say, particularly athletic otherwise. First he fucked me—slow and clumsy and earnest, gasping that I was tighter and hotter than any boy—then I him. Oh, he was completely unmanned, and so was I, grinding against the fake cock strapped to my hips and imagining I was filling him with my seed and finally, finally finding release. We collapsed against each other, panting and sweaty, like animals after a fight, and I asked him— (Turning) Well, Franz, are you still a faggot? And he replied—
FRANZ: Yes, Irma, and so are you.
(They dance.)
IRMA: No doubt you wonder what happened to me. Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know. I lost all track of myself in the historical record. One of the first things they did was loot the Institute, you know. All of our educational pamphlets and anatomical diagrams and harlequin romances and transvestite passports burned to ash in a great bonfire. Berlin glowed that night.
I wasn’t there. I don’t know where I was. Maybe I was with a client, maybe I was drunk or in jail, maybe I was nowhere. I like to think I survived, lived a long happy life and fucked all the men I could get my paws on. Got rich enough to have a personal tailor who fitted me for a new suit every week. My, my, Herr Irma, what a dashing figure you cut, he mutters reverently as he measures the breadth of my shoulders, the narrow of my waist, the severity of my hips. You’re the son I never had. Yes. I like to think that’s what happened to me. But you’ll have to do the imagining for me. You’ll have to picture me on Capri or Mallorca with a cool breeze from the sea blowing through my hair. A few strands ungelled. Graying at the temples. Maybe I’ve even grown a beard. Arm in arm with some wiry, languid gentleman, from whose mouth dangles a cigarette, and whose name is perhaps Franz, because perhaps he too grew old enough to go gray at the temples.
These are things I am not permitted to know, however. I asked God what happened to me and It said, Why trouble yourself about that? Everyone dies someday. Yes, I said, but when? Under what circumstances? Cabaret or camp? Onstage or on a scaffold? All the world’s a stage, It just said. Can you fucking believe that? That is not helpful at all, I said. That’s the best answer I can give you, It said. All is foretold and free will is given, It said. You, Irma, are but dust and ashes. For your sake I created the world, so can you be a little fucking grateful, It said. Grateful, I said. Grateful. Everything is burning and you talk of gratitude. You fucking asshole. You fucking piece of shit asshole. Some fucking world you created. Not like I asked.
God and I are no longer on speaking terms. It’s sad, but there it is. Some people there’s no getting through to. So you and I will have to content ourselves with imagining. If you visit the places in Berlin where my favorite haunts used to be, you’ll probably see flowers growing there. What kinds, I don’t know. But they are growing there, regardless of what you call them. Caressed by a cool breeze from the sea. A cool, cool breeze.