"Theft? How can a man steal something that everybody in the whole world will agree is his?"
"Then it's murder, for God's sake! You've effectively killed me!"
"Murder?" David Chilton shook his head. "Come on, now, Anna, I really have to go."
"I'll kill you," Gil warned him.
"I don't think so," said David Chilton. "Maybe you'll think about it, the way that I thought about killing the guy who took my body. But there's a diary in the living room, a diary kept by most of the men who have changed into Anna. Read it before you think of doing anything drastic."
He reached out and touched Gil's hair, almost regretfully. "You'll survive. You have clothes, you have a car, you have money in the bank. You even have an investment portfolio. You're not a poor woman. Fantasy women never are. If you want to stay as Anna, you can live quite comfortably for the rest of your life. Or… if you get tired of it, you know what to dp."
Gil sat on the floor incapable of doing anything at all to prevent David Chilton from leaving. He was too traumatized; too drained of feeling. David Chilton went to the end of the hallway and picked up his suitcase. He turned and smiled at Gil one last time, and then blew him a kiss.
"So long, honey. Be good."
Gil was still sitting staring at the carpet when the front door closed, and the body he had been born with walked out of his life.
He slept for the rest of the night. He had no dreams that he could remember. When he woke up, he lay in bed for almost an hour, feeling his body with his hands. It was frightening but peculiarly erotic, to have the body of a woman, and yet to retain the mind of a man. Gil massaged his breasts, rolling his nipples between finger and thumb the way he had done with "Anna." Then he reached down between his legs and gently stroked himself, exploring his sex with tension and curiosity.
He wondered what it would be like to have a man actually inside him; a man on top of him, thrusting into him.
He stopped himself from thinking that thought. For God's sake, you're not a queer.
He showered and washed his hair. He found the length of his hair difficult to manage, especially when it was wet, and it took four attempts before he was able to wind a towel around it in a satisfactory turban. Yet Margaret always did it without even looking in the mirror. He decided that at the first opportunity he got, he would have it cut short.
He went to the closet and inspected Anna's wardrobe. He had liked her in her navy-blue skirt and white loose-knit sweater. He found the sweater folded neatly in one of the drawers. He struggled awkwardly into it, but realized when he looked at himself in the mirror that he was going to need a bra. He didn't want to attract that much attention, not to begin with, anyway. He located a drawerful of bras, lacy and mysterious, and tried one on. His breasts kept dropping out of the cups before he could fasten it up at the back, but in the end he knelt down beside the bed and propped his breasts on the quilt. He stepped into one of Anna's lacy little G-strings. He found it irritating, the way the elastic went right up between the cheeks of his bottom, but he supposed he would get used to it.
Get used to it. The words stopped him like a cold bullet in the brain. He stared at himself in the mirror, that beautiful face, those eyes that were still his. He began to weep with rage. You've started to accept it already. You've started to cope. You 're fussing around in your bra and your panties and you're worrying which skirt to wear and you've already forgotten that you 're not Anna, you 're Gil. You 're a husband. You're a father. You're a man, dammit!
He began to hyperventilate, his anger rising up unstoppably like the scarlet line of alcohol rising up a thermometer. He picked up the dressing stool and heaved it at the mirror. The glass shattered explosively, all over the carpet. A thousand tiny Annas stared up at him in uncontrollable fury and frustration.
He stormed blindly through the house, yanking open drawers, strewing papers everywhere, clearing ornaments off tabletops with a sweep of his arm. He wrenched open the doors of the cocktail cabinet, and hurled the bottles of liquor one by one across the room, so that they smashed against the wall. Whiskey, gin, Campari, broken glass.
Eventually, exhausted, he sat down on the floor and sobbed. Then he was too tired even to cry.
In front of him, lying on the rug, were Anna's identity card, her social security papers, her passport, her credit cards. Anna Huysmans. The name that was now his.
On the far side of the room, halfway under the leather sofa, Gil saw a large diary bound in brown Morocco leather. He crept across the floor on his hands and knees and picked it up. This must be the diary that David Chilton had been talking about. He opened it up to the last page.
He read, through eyes blurry with tears, Gil has been marvelous… he has an enthusiastic, uncluttered personality… It won't be difficult to adapt to being him… I just hope that I like his wife Margaret… She sounds a little immature, from what Gil says… and he complains that she needs a lot of persuading when it comes to sex… Still, that's probably Gil's fault… you couldn't call him the world's greatest lover.
Gil flicked back through the diary's pages until he came to the very first entry. To his astonishment it was dated July 16, 1942. It was written in German, by a Reichswehr officer who appeared to have met Anna while driving out to Edam on military business. Her bicycle tire was punctured… She was so pretty that I told my driver to stop and to help her…
There was no way of telling, however, whether this German Samaritan had been the first of Anna's victims, or simply the first to keep a diary. The entries went on page after page, year after year. There must have been more than seven hundred of them; and each one told a different story of temptation and tragedy. Some of the men had even essayed explanations of what Anna was, and why she took men's bodies.
She has been sent to punish us by God Himself for thinking lustful thoughts about women and betraying the Holy Sacrament of marriage…
She does not actually exist. There is no "Anna," because she is always one of us. The only «Anna» that exists is in the mind of the man who is seducing her, and that perhaps is the greatest condemnation of them all. We fall in love with our own illusions, rather than a real woman.
To me, Anna is a collector of weak souls. She gathers us up and hangs us on her charm bracelet, little dangling victims of our own vicissitudes.
Anna is a ghost…
Anna is a vampire…
If I killed myself would it break the chain? Would Anna die if I died? Supposing I tried to seduce the man who was Anna before me… could I reverse the changing process?
Gil sat on the floor and read the diary from cover to cover. It was an extraordinary chorus of voices — real men who had been seduced into taking on the body of a beautiful woman, one after the other — and in their turn had desperately tried to escape. Business executives, policemen, soldiers, scientists, philosophers — even priests. Some had stayed as Anna for fewer than two days; others had managed to endure it for months. But to every single one of them, the body even of the plainest man had been preferable to Anna's body, regardless of how desirable she was.
By two o'clock Gil was feeling hungry. The icebox was almost empty, so he drove into Amsterdam for lunch. The day was bright but chilly, and so he wore Anna's black belted raincoat, and a black beret to cover his head. He tried her high heels, but he twisted his ankle in the hallway, and sat against the wall with tears in his eyes saying, "Shit, shit," over and over, as if he ought to have been able to walk in them quite naturally. He limped back to the bedroom and changed into black flat shoes.