The Y Chromosome

by Leona Gom

  Five-thirty, said the time-chip imbedded in the wall. He lay back down on the bed, thinking he should probably just stay up and study, but within a few minutes he was soundly asleep.

  At eight o’clock the timer beside his bed began to chirp, and he struggled awake, turned it off. Mechanically, he got up, turned on the lights, and went into the bathroom. He set his shower selector for warm, knowing that would double its duration from what he could get at hot, and when it came on he stepped quickly out of his pyjamas into it. The water needled at his face. He leaned back against the warming tile, let his mouth slide open, the water prickle his tongue. Without letting himself think about it, he began to comb his fingers lightly through his pubic hair, cupping his genitals gently in one palm. When his penis thickened under his touch, he stroked himself easily to climax, almost choking on the mouthful of water he gargled into a moan of pleasure and release.

  The timer above his head beeped, reminding him he had only a minute left, and quickly he rubbed his underarms and genitals with soap, barely in time to let the last of the shower carry it, frothing, away. He was getting too slow, too self-indulgent, he told himself as the water clicked off.

  He dried himself and began his other morning rituals. The last thing he did, and the most careful, was to shave, with the razor he kept hidden behind his allotment of soap and shampoo. Not that having a razor would have been seen as all that bizarre — they were used for other purposes, after all — but still he made sure he never left it out like something used daily. He was lucky, actually, that his beard was so fair. Once, during his first term here, when he was so miserable and homesick that nothing seemed to matter, he went out one day without shaving, and no one noticed. But he vowed never to do that again. If he wanted to quit and go home he could — but it was inexcusable to take chances like that. When he thought of how hard it had been to convince the farm to let him come here — how could he betray them through sheer stupidity? They had argued about it for weeks, even sent him to East Farm to discuss it with the Leader there, but at last Highlands, largely because of the calm and unwavering arguments of his father, had agreed, and the others, reluctantly, finally gave in, too.

  “I won’t disappoint you,” he had said fervently. And he hadn’t. Highlands, who had approved his return for second term only because he had done so well first term, cautioned him, with at least a degree of seriousness, not to be quite so outstanding a scholar this time.

  He took out the flesh-coloured cream that Kit had told him about and that he’d bought in Hospital’s specialty store, and he began rubbing it on his cheeks and chin. The face in the mirror turned stiff, impassive, as though the skincream were smoothing out all expression, all personality. He thought of his grandmother years ago teaching him the few words she knew of the old language his people used to speak many generations ago. The word for “lonely,” she said, meant “me, I don’t even look like myself.”

  He made himself smile at his mirrored image, the lonely face he would take with him outside. He was ready to “pass.” It was a pre-Change word he’d learned, what some black people had tried to do to gain acceptance in the privileged white world. And of course, in the times when universities were open only to males, there were people who, hungry for the forbidden knowledge, tried to pass as males. What would they think now? he wondered. It was certainly a better example of irony than the one in the back of his literature book.

  He brushed at a speck on his cheek, and then he went into his somewhat cramped centreroom, furnished with a desk, a sofa, a bookcase, and two chairs and small side tables. He had bumped his knees several times on all these things, seemingly incapable of manoeuvring around them as easily as did the people who had grown up in rooms such as these. He glanced up, as he did every morning, as though in greeting, at the place where the pale blue north wall met the ceiling and where someone, a former student, perhaps, had painted two fluffy cumulus clouds. The painting was rather crudely done, but it cheered him to look at it. He picked up from his desk the book he used for his geology class and went down to his apartment section’s common dining-room, which was a flight below his own level. He still felt vaguely guilty eating here when he had done nothing to help with preparing or serving the food, and he was probably one of the few students who didn’t mind the several hours of clean-up duty to which they were all assigned once a week.

  He sat with the one friend he had made here, Mitchell-Star. Last term someone from East Farm had been here, and sometimes he felt it was all that kept him sane, knowing there was one other person who knew his secret, to whom he could go if he had to. She had been sympathetic at first, clinging to him a little, too, someone else from home, but as she made her own friends and romantic liaisons she became impatient with him, embarrassed to have him around, and eventually they began to avoid each other. Still, he was reassured to know she was there in case of an emergency, someone he could trust. But she didn’t come back after harvest leave, and so this term he was alone.

  He didn’t let himself think about it. He was stronger now than he had been in first term, more able to deal with the isolation, the difficult times, when he would sit in his room with his books and the knowledge in them suddenly seeming like his enemies, aware of himself as an imposter, carrying an explosive secret. Most of the time, he realized, he was quite happy. Sometimes he would look around himself and laugh in sheer joy: he was at University. The dream everyone had told him was impossible had come true. He would write long and grateful letters to his mother and father and to Highlands, wanting them to be proud, wanting to reassure them they had made the right decision, wanting to share with them already the things he was learning.

  It helped, too, having a friend like Mitchell-Star. He had been drawn to her because her name reminded him of his sister and also because he felt no physical desire for her. He could only hope she felt none for him, but then, he thought grimly, his body was not exactly an attractive one, which was fortunate under the circumstances. For a moment the image of Bluesky burned in his mind, and quickly he snuffed it out, feeling now not pain as much as guilt at the thought of her, for it was her sister, Shaw-Ellen, with whom he was expected to mate when he returned — and he would have to return, he had resigned himself to that, that he could never have a permanent place here, no matter how much he might yearn after the dazzle of University. And when he went back Shaw-Ellen would be waiting for him, Shaw-Ellen, with whom he made love but did not love, whom he would have to learn to love.

  “G’morning,” Mitchell-Star said, her pudgy cheeks pushed out even farther now with a mouthful of toast. An acne pimple glowed redly on her chin, but she wore it defiantly, refusing to take the Metane tabs that could clear her skin overnight. “You get that report done on The Montrose People?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You?”

  She groaned. “Not yet. Merde. That wordstyle is so tedious.”

  “I thought it was okay.” He poured himself a glass of milk.

  “Everything is okay for you. It must be nice to be so smart.”

  “I’m not that smart. I just work hard.” Which isn’t difficult, he thought, if you have no extraclass life. But it was true that he found the work easy. He spooned a large helping of bean curd onto his plate.

  “You’ll get fat if you keep eating like that,” Mitchell-Star observed.

  “I’m storing up for winter.”

  “It’s winter now.”

  “Fall.” He took a large mouthful and grinned at her, letting the bean curd ooze slightly from the corner of his mouth. She groaned in delight, stuck out her tongue at him; it was covered with bits of chewed toast. He had to stop himself from making an even more disgusting face back; already the people across the table were watching them. He wiped away the bean curd. “So,” he said. “Are you going to Geology today?”

  She took a bean curd helping at least as large as his. “I thought I’d try some of the history sections. I heard they’
re pretty good. Why don’t you come?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “I like what we’ll be doing in Geology today.”

  His first term all he had taken were agriculture and mechanics courses — knowledge he would be able to use directly back on the farm — but now he was trying a greater variety — literature, meteorology, geology, anthropology, nutrition, internationalism, algebra, taking advantage of all his exploratories. They were interesting and gratifying; but they were safe courses, ones that dealt mostly with the world today, a world in which he didn’t exist. It was still easier than history, than examining the past.

  He had gone to one history class last term, and it had completely unnerved him, the way he had to see the story of his own kind as one of progressive brutality and destruction, the way it made him feel guilty and fearful just to be alive. He thought he had prepared himself for such situations, but it was one thing to read the information in books at home and discuss it with his classmates there and quite another to encounter it here, where he dared make no response, among people who thought males were long and safely dead.

  After that he began to make a habit, when he encountered references to pre-Change times, of mentally excusing, disputing, what he read or heard. Nine million people were tortured and killed as witches during the Renaissance: but surely that was the result of primitive religion, not the organized malevolence of males. Wars were imposed, not by the aggression of males, but by expectation, precedent. The “domestic violence” that killed millions of people was committed by males themselves brutalized as children, not because of their intrinsic evil. Males owned more than ninety-nine per cent of the world’s property although people did most of the world’s work: but perhaps people then, like now, simply cared less than the males did about property, ownership, possession. And the mass murders of people during the Change: well, those were terrifying, chaotic times, and the majority of males, after all, were probably not involved.

  So when Mitchell-Star urged, “Oh, come on. Let’s try a History. Just this once,” he gave in. He would be able to handle it, he assured himself. And he supposed he would have to try a class again sooner or later.

  “All right,” he said. He took a deep swallow of milk.

  • • •

  IT WAS DELACOUR’S CLASS.

  He didn’t recognize her at first, sitting at the back as he was with the non-registrants, but gradually something about her began to seem familiar, the way she held her head jutting forward a little as she spoke, the way she scratched now at her arm —

  And suddenly he was back in the longhouse, dizzy with fear because the people he was watching through the crack had seen him naked, naked in the woods with Shaw-Ellen —

  And one of those people was in front of him now, in this room. He felt dizzy again, clutching the desk as though a spasm had shot through him. Highlands had told him the two were from Leth, that he must be careful in case he saw them, and when he came here his first term he often looked nervously around for them. But then, eventually, he’d put them out of his mind, telling himself that, in a city of thirty thousand, it was highly unlikely he would run into them, or that they would recognize him or he them even if he did.

  But here she was, the one that had been most persistent, incarnated from nightmare, pacing up and down in front of the room, her eyes jumping from student to student. He bent his head forward, let his hair, which he’d let grow long and never braided, fall forward to cover as much of his face as it could. His heart was charging at his chest.

  “… so we can see the male empowerment techniques used to cover feelings of inadequacy,” she was saying. “Of course, compensation theory is not incompatible with theories viewing the Change as natural evolutionary process, or even with the more peculiar viral theory, which posits the Y chromosome as a virus —”

  Daniel bent farther forward and his pencil fell from his fingers onto the floor. When the student beside him picked it up and handed it to him, he looked at it as though he’d never seen it before. Panic began to rush over him, as it hadn’t since the first days of his first term. There was a roaring in his ears, nothing of words, language, sense. Before he could force his panic under control, he felt himself pushing back his chair and stumbling to the door. He caught a glimpse of Mitchell-Star’s face, her mouth moving, her eyes alarmed, and then he was at the door, wrenching it open. The roaring in his ears stopped suddenly, and he knew it had been the teacher’s voice, pausing now, as she watched him flee, but it was too late, too late to think it might remind her of another time she had seen someone running away —

  Then he was in the hallway, running down a corridor, turning right into another, lost, looking for a door out but seeing only more corridors, blurs of faces coming at him. Finally the throbbing in his side dragged him to a stop, and he collapsed against a wall, wheezing, horrified at what he had done. Across from him he saw a bathroom, and he stumbled inside and leaned against the door. He reached behind him and snapped the lock in place. Safe, he thought bitterly, safe.

  How could he have let himself panic like that, after all this time, lose the control he had disciplined himself to acquire? It was the combination of shock, the sudden fear, the words she was saying —

  On the wall opposite him was a mirror throwing back at him his flushed and miserable face, his hair sticking to his forehead and cheeks in wet streaks. The mirror had a crack across the bottom left-hand corner, and it sliced off a piece of his chin, lifted it several millimetres, then glued it back on so the edges didn’t match. He looked at himself for several moments, the breath sliding more and more slowly in and out of him. The Y chromosome as a virus — he heard her voice again.

  “A disease!” he shouted at his image. “A goddamned disease!” He wanted to throw something at the mirror, smash the ugly face that would never be right, never belong. But he clenched his hands at his sides and let himself sink slowly to the floor. He sat there for a long time, his knees pulled up to his chest, staring at the thin skin of dust on the floorboards.

  Twice someone rattled the door trying to get in, and he heard the bubbling of voices in the hall as classes let out, but still he stayed where he was, his mind a muddy churn of feelings.

  Finally, when the noise outside abated, he got up and, avoiding looking at himself in the mirror, splashed some cold water on his forehead and cheeks, trying not to wash off the skincream. He rubbed at his eyes, which felt as gritty as if he’d been in a dust storm, and then, taking a deep breath, he opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

  The one student walking past had the glazed, preoccupied look of someone composing a late assignment, and Daniel felt reassured by the fact that she didn’t scream at the sight of him. He began walking down the corridor, continuing in the same direction as he’d run, although he knew he should try to retrace his steps if he wanted to find his way out. But he was too afraid of meeting someone from the history class. He wandered the corridors for about twenty minutes, leaving the History section entirely and winding up in Archaeology, before he saw the glint of outside light. Relieved, he hurried toward it. It took him another ten minutes to find a door that led outside — he couldn’t understand the aversion the city people seemed to have to going outside. He pulled the door open and gratefully sucked in the sharp scrape of cold air. It felt more like January than September.

  He wasn’t dressed warmly enough to walk outside today, but he was reluctant to return to the labyrinth of corridors, the people, the heavy, heated air, so he turned in the direction of the huge Hospital sector that loomed off to his left and began to walk; he knew his apartment was somewhere in the long connector that ran beside him between here and Hospital.

  The sun shone weakly on his face, barely warm enough to be noticeable, but it glinted off the snow with such extravagant sparkle that he felt his spirits lift a little in spite of himself. He let himself think of the farm, home, of his father and mother, of H
ighlands, of Shaw-Ellen, the people who trusted him and would welcome him back.

  He convinced himself that no real damage had been done. He had made a bad mistake, but it wouldn’t happen again. He was a non-registrant; he just wouldn’t go back. He had no reason ever to go near the History section again. And the teacher — surely she couldn’t have recognized him, not after all this time, not from just a glimpse. Even on the farm she had seen him only from a distance.

  He began to feel better. But the cold was pulling up through his legs, so he walked faster. Ahead he could see the end of the blue awnings and windowsills and the beginning of the yellow section, which was where he lived. He began to run, a stiff-legged trot, and then he thought of the windows looking down on him, and he forced himself back to a walk. Don’t draw attention, he told himself through clenched teeth, and he headed for the closest door.

  Inside, the cold held him like a sealed envelope, and it was several moments before he could stop shaking and let the warmth penetrate. He sat down and took off his shoes, held his icy feet, one after the other, in his hands. What would his mother say, he thought, his mother who feared frostbite above almost anything else, who had lost two of her own toes in a blizzard on her way home from Fairview five years ago?

  Finally he put his shoes back on, got up, and began walking down the long, straight corridor he knew would lead him to his own apartment. He had been in this section once before, last term, at a gathering one of his classmates had invited him to. It had not been fun, he recalled, him sitting huddled in a corner with a moronic smile hooked on his face, cringing whenever anyone tried to talk to him. It had been painful to watch his classmates pairing with each other, the erotic touchings and flirtations from which he knew he would be forever excluded. His own desires had begun to feel strange, abnormal to him, and he had to fight against imagining the horror and repulsion on those cheerful faces around him if they could see him as he truly was.