“I’ve been having dreams,” I cut him off.
“Isn’t that the purpose of dreamdust,” he says, an attempt at sarcasm that doesn’t become him. “Why do you need that stuff?”
“I’ve been dreaming about the disease.”
I see the momentary panic in his eyes before it is replaced by a synthetic reassurance. “It can’t harm you, my dear.”
“It killed the woman who discovered it,” I say.
He smiles and says, “A woman, Estela, which only confirms my point. What Dr. Komatsu found in her tests on precancerous cells from a patient’s ovaries—the dysfunctional estrogen—merely served to illustrate what it was she would die from.”
“She was an expert,” I persist. “And she couldn’t save herself.”
Kleinfeld shakes his head, as if speaking to a capricious child. “It caught up with her too fast. By the time she discovered that luteinizing hormone was triggering an abnormal reaction in estrogen, and that symptoms were only manifesting in women, she was already at the hemorrhaging stage. She lived just long enough to establish the viral origins of the gonadotrophin mutation. It was left to others to prove that this Hormonal Dysfunction Virus caused the disease.”
“But I carry the virus,” I tell him, watching his reaction.
“Yes, as do eighty percent of males; but there are absolutely no cases of activation of the disease in men.”
“How do you know it will stay that way?”
“Our knowledge of HDV is still growing, but the latest research indicates that the presence of male hormones may inhibit the viral activation. It’s apparent that HDV is hereditary, and lies dormant in both male and female until the onset of a premature puberty. When the pituitary gonadotrophins are at a high enough level to stimulate production of the sex hormones, this process triggers the virus, which in turn causes the dysfunction of the estrogen in the ovaries. The indications are that when sex hormone production begins in males, the androgens produced somehow prevent the virus from becoming active.”
“I produce high levels of estrogen,” I say.
“Yes,” he agrees, “but you still produce androgens in sufficient quantities to counteract HDV.” He pauses, as if to savor a triumph. “A feature of the surgery I performed on you six years ago; you carry the virus but it cannot interact with your production of female hormones. The triggering process cannot take place.”
Despite the words, I sense his doubt. “Am I to be replaced?”
He frowns. “What have I just told you? There are no reported cases of Komatsu’s Syndrome in transsexuals.”
Soon afterward, Heinrich, my null, drives me back through the morning rain to my apartment overlooking the River Spree. As I undress I hear the phone hum, but I make no move to answer it. He picks it up, listens, then informs me that Spengler wishes to speak to me.
Spengler owns The Birds of the Crystal Plumage. He had me brought to Berlin; everything I have, has come from him—this apartment, the car, the clothes, the dust, and the body, most of all the body. Sometimes I feel I have as little free will as Heinrich. He is a eunuch in mind as well as in body, conditioned by hypnotics to respond only to my commands.
Reluctantly, I take the phone. “Estela,” Spengler says, “some business associates are stopping in town tonight. I want to take them to the club. They’re keen to see your act.”
“They always are,” I tell him. “I don’t feel well.”
Mock concern creeps into his voice. “What is it now, my dear?”
“Bad dreams.”
Spengler laughs, a brittle, humorless sound. “Don’t be stupid, you know they came for you.” He goes on to tell me which costume to wear, which jewelry, which perfume. “I’ll expect you at eight. Be in a good mood, Estela, don’t disappoint them.”
This life in paradise is my reward; it is the way I profit from the disease. I remember months of preparation, even after the surgery—instruction in oriental sexual techniques, as well more cerebral refinements, French, German, and English languages; literature; art—I can hold my own in the most refined or debauched company. And I recall my first years in Berlin, when the bars of my cage remained invisible.
I enter the bedroom, searching my body for signs of corruption. I lie on the bed as Heinrich comes in with a crystal pipe on a tray. He loads the bowl with dreamdust. As he heats it, my anticipation is tinged with the hope that I won’t dream.
Late afternoon finds me stronger, vaguely pleased at some dust-induced memory. This sense of well-being lasts only until Rudy Thessinger calls. “What do you want?” I ask him.
Laughter flows down the line, poisoning my brain. Rudy and I go back a long way, to Rio de Janeiro, more than six years ago. Rudy brought me to Berlin. He’s Spengler’s talent scout, my pimp.
As usual he inquires about my well-being, then says, “I have some news about an old friend of yours.”
“What friend?” I ask. I have no friends, only clients.
“Was Rio so bad you’ve forgotten who took you away from giving head on the Rua Princesa Isabel?”
I recall a name from the dream, “Cledilce.”
“She’s been in Paris a month, undergoing reassignment surgery.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“The word is she looks stunning,” Rudy says, ignoring my question. “You can imagine what—”
I hang up before his mindgames begin to sicken me. The new image is fixed in my brain, the face from my other life. Heinrich enters with a fix of dust and I surprise myself by refusing it. I’m not certain what I feel, but it is something strong.
Heinrich’s skilled hands massage my dark flesh, forcing tension from my limbs. I sometimes wonder why he allowed—why any null allows—himself to be surgically altered, his brain adapted so that the production of endorphins is tied to certain emotional states. Is it enough to have all feelings of self-interest sublimated into a desire to serve? To enslave the brain in return for the slow dripfeed of endorphins to its pleasure receptors? To be free forever of guilt and fear and stress? Perhaps, in his rare moments of lucidity, he wonders about my alteration?
Images begin to clarify, take on meaning. I sift through the chaos of memories, seeking to impose on them a sense of order.
I was not always Estela de Brito. I see a young boy, nine or ten, living on the streets of Rochina, the stinking favela that sprawled up over the lure of the wealthy suburb of São Conrado. And a sister, a year older, a pretty girl who sold her body so that they might eat. But already the teeth marks of the disease were on her flesh; there were nights when the boy awoke in the corrugated iron shack that was home, to her cries of pain as blood poured from between her legs. There were no parents.
Gangsters ruled Rochina with machine guns and calculated terror; occasionally some city politician wanting to make a name for himself would send the police into the favelas to wipe out a few marginals—lowlife petty thieves; the politician’s face would make the TV news and things would go on as before. Business-financed death squads would execute children; a cleansing process, ridding the city of future criminals, making Rio safe for gringo tourists. Their bullets spared the girl the worst ravages of the disease. The boy left Rochina and graduated to picking tourists’ pockets on Copacabana, and from there to the docks at Maua, where he learned to give head for ten dollars a trick. Soon, he was working the streets off Rua Princesa Isabel, discovering that he could double his take if he dressed as a girl. Evenings, he’d work the cars parked along the seafront, blowing the men on their way home from work; in one car, suck suck, open the door, spit it out and move on to the next vehicle; for an hour or two each evening, a prolonged chorus of slamming car doors.