S SPENT LONG HOURS focused on her genital self-portrait, her vaginal clone, experimenting with different materials to make a mold that would fit the contours of her body and someone else’s, something that would identify someone else just like her, following the same system in which DNA announces its carrier. Her table was chock-full of all sorts of materials to this end: fabrics, cardboards, drawings, maps, mirrors… everything her own hands needed to set the machine in motion that would find the form—her own and the double’s—that S was trying to find, her sexual twin, and after six weeks of studio time and elaboration it would finally come to fruition.
Here you are, sir. Thanks to the research and to S’s creativity, I found the perfect weapon without even realizing it, one I hoarded away for many years, the instrument to perform the crime. It was one of the few objects that came with me on every one of my trips. Jim always complained, saying it took up what he considered unnecessary space in our suitcase, and when he asked me why I felt the need to bring it, I never really knew what answer to give him, largely because there really wasn’t one. How many trips must I have taken with that thing in my luggage? How many scanners must have detected it to the amusement of airport security agents? Had they known my age these more recent years, they would have had an even better laugh. A young woman with a dildo is a slut, but an older woman with one is a batty slut. Now I have the last laugh, because they failed to grasp the fact that every object has multiple uses. I passed the object through security dozens of times right under their noses. You see, who needs to go to some supermarket to buy a firearm? I was against the possession of firearms, and when I actually needed one, I didn’t have to go to some North American supermarket for it, because S had already taught me how to respect the potential inherent in any object—its versatility, how it could be employed for both love and war, like the Mesolithic phallus. Who’s to say whether that woman who lived nine thousand years ago used the dildo as a dildo? Maybe she used it to open a wolf’s stomach.
I already mentioned how as a teenager, I found the architectural shape that corresponded with my sexual quest to be that of the arched bridge, not the flat kind, because again, the flat surface merely allows the pedestrian to go from one place to another, while the arched bridge goes beyond this primary function by allowing the eyes to glance around at different altitudes, taking in the surrounding environment from multiple levels. I always found the straight line the most complicated idea for a well-defined sexuality. Yet when I met S, I understood that my bridge simile lacked sophistication. And anyway, does a well-defined sexuality even exist? Just as the sun rises and sets in transformation, between two states, changing the light around us, the shapes of things, the intensity of its shine, so the walk across the bridge doesn’t depend only on the form of it, but also on the time we’re crossing. My sexuality was ambiguous before I met S; my gender, feminine; my sexual orientation had only ever manifested itself toward men. But for some reason meeting S was like an epiphany, because she revealed how ductile sexuality could be. I had thought that changing sexual orientations throughout our lives was the only logical thing; what sense did it make that I, precisely me, who from the anatomical point of view seemed conceived for ambiguity, stayed on the straight and narrow of heterosexuality? S’s personality seduced me entirely. If I hadn’t met Jim a little while later, S would have become my best sexual partner, if she had wanted it. I never sensed that she was attracted to me, though I was certainly drawn to her, and she could have kept her desire hidden behind what we often call friendship, as I did. As if a friend couldn’t also be your best lover.
I don’t want to take too long discussing the time Jim and I spent in New York waiting for the next trip. I don’t really remember how we prepared for the next trip, which took us to a town just north of Borneo. The guide brought us there and left. He said they’d come for us in three days.
The man who seemed to be the town’s ringleader welcomed us. Jim exchanged money for information. We’re not sure if for lack of any real information or out of fear, but the man offered Jim other services for the money. In broken English, he asked Jim to follow him. I wanted to accompany them, but the head honcho made me understand in gestures—hitting his chest like a gorilla—that it was a gift only for men. I must admit that these chest poundings meant to marginalize me as a woman struck me as a compliment. You see, sir, I’ve spent so many years living in the guise of a man, that when I’m finally recognized as a woman, I happily throw the advances women have made in social rights to the wind. Later I found out why the man didn’t let me go with them to the tiny house. From what I could see through the window when they went in, it was no more than a dark room. The sun was so bright my eyes had trouble adjusting. But as soon as they did, I could make out the presence of a female orangutan in a bed. I knew she was a female because her lips were painted and she was wearing a blond wig and a pink semitransparent top. She was shaved completely hairless. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but when I heard Jim shouting, I understood the nature of the invitation. That’s when I strode into the room for a closer look. They had chained her to a steel bed. Her genitalia were inflamed. I’d never seen anyone so mournful in my life. And I deliberately use the word anyone because the differences between that animal and a person were completely indiscernible. Her eyes moved to see us without raising her head. I started crying. I wanted to touch her. But I was afraid. I was overwhelmed by panic, a fear of everything. I just couldn’t grasp it. Jim embraced me and tried to pull me away. I resisted, but finally allowed myself to be led. The man stayed behind, I imagine to wrangle about the price with his first client. A line of men waited their turn outside the hut.
That night I thought about how different it is to destroy someone little by little or to take them in one fell swoop not to death but to nothingness. Not even a sudden bullet eliminates one’s existence entirely because it remains in one’s dead body or in the memory of one’s loved ones, or in the retinas of strangers who might have crossed one’s path only a single time. Only once have I been witness to an act that eradicated life not through death but through a sort of restoration of nothingness. Of course I’m talking about what happened in my hometown. Hiroshima was wiped out in a matter of a few seconds. And you know what? We had been in a state of alertness, we were expecting a brutal attack, and yet the power of the weapon was so new, so colossal, that the survivors’ testimonies differ wildly from the testimonies of any survivor of any other attack over the course of history, and the hibakushas, the survivors of Hiroshima, we all coincide on one very particular point: we all thought that day, without exception, that it wasn’t only Hiroshima being pulverized but the entire planet, and the majority didn’t associate the devastation with an attack—even though we were expecting it—but with the end of the world, the causes of which we couldn’t identify. The only thing capable of explaining such an abrupt and radical transformation of everything around us, the landscape utterly decimated, was an apocalypse. You see? Weapons are self-referential bellicose processes in which death is revealed by dying, and survival is revealed by surviving, but there was nothing self-referential about the weapon that destroyed my city, because its power to annihilate achieved something unheard of: self-annihilation. It peeled us away from the idea that someone was attacking us, killing us in the worst possible way, in a fashion that was until then totally unimaginable: they bombarded us as they erased from our brains the idea that we were being bombarded.