She could have wept with frustration. “I know all that! That’s exactly what I was trying to get away from. I thought we were supposed to leave the damn baggage behind. I wanted something purely physical… Something innocent.”
“Sex is not innocent, ‘Sonja.’ I know you believe it is, or ‘should be.’ But it’s time you faced the truth. Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control. Sex is no exception. Now that’s basic. You can’t escape from it in direct-cortical fantasy. It’s in our minds that relationships happen, and the mind, of course, is where virtuality happens too.” He sighed, and made an entry in her notes. “I want you to look on this as another step toward coping with the real. You’re not sick, ‘Sonja.’ You’re unhappy. Not even unusually so. Most adults are unhappy, to some degree—”
“Or else they’re in denial.”
Her sarcasm fell flat. “Right. A good place to be, at least some of the time. What we’re trying to achieve here—if we’re trying to achieve anything at all—is to raise your pain threshold to somewhere near average. I want you to walk away from therapy with lowered expectations: I guess that would be success.”
“Great,” she said, desolate. “That’s just great.”
Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It’s always the same story. Can’t live with you, can’t live without you…You can’t go on this way, you know. Its getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”
“I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”
Dr. Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”
He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’ ” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”
She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”
She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer, that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.
So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr. Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales: he would know. She recognized with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities; unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe “Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is cheaper, easier, and more fun than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.
The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…
Bondage probably isn’t my ideal equal opportunities sport. I have poor circulation and a short temper. I’d never want to take my turn as the bondee. But this story isn’t really about acting out control fantasies. It’s about the invincible human vices (aka survival traits) of cowardice and laziness. Sexual negotiations are costly and dangerous, and as soon as there’s a way to swipe the pleasure while avoiding the risks, nothing’s going to stop people, of whatever gender, from opting for McDonald’s.
I’m an unreliable witness on the subject of my stories and novels. I tend to give a different answer every time, as different aspects strike me as important. Magna est veritas, and there’s no end to it. But this is certainly some of the thinking behind Sonja.
The Future of Birds
MIKE O’DRISCOLL
Mike O’Driscoll lives and writes in Swansea, England. When not writing, he works with adults with mental health problems. His fiction has been published in Black Static and its predecessor The Third Alternative, as well as in Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Crime Wave, and Albedo One. He has also placed stories in several anthologies, including Inferno, The Dark, Lethal Kisses, Gathering the Bones, and Years’ Best Fantasy & Horror #17, and two volumes of Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
His story “Sounds Like” was adapted for the Masters of Horror television series. He writes a column about television for Black Static. His novella Eyepennies (2012) is the first in a new fiction series.
WHILE DR. KLEINFELD CARRIES out his gynecological explorations, I try to recall a life beyond the Sanctuary. It is an old game, one whose necessity is greater than ever now that the parameters of existence are closing in on me. The old dream has become a sour and sterile reality; my new dreams are of the disease.
Dr. Kleinfeld completes his probing and unhooks my legs from the stirrups. He makes notes in silence, ignoring me; his report is for Spengler’s eyes, not mine. Seeking some reassurance, I ask him, “And how is my cunt, Doctor?”
He says, “Is it necessary to use such terminology?”
“That’s what it is.”
“No no,” he protests. “Had you undergone reassignment surgery in Brazil, then such a crude appellation would be appropriate.” And then he’s off into his spiel about the techniques he developed to construct my labia, clitoris, and vagina, and the breakthrough he’d achieved in being able to lubricate the vagina from the seminal vesicles and Cowper’s glands, on and on like some demented Frankenstein.