The object of his good wishes fingered a ringlet and turned away.
A wide, brawny man with a head of woolly brown curls sat to Cornell’s right. At one point their naked thighs had touched, and the man gave him a dirty look. Which is why he had chosen the other one to talk to. Well, he could hardly have done worse!
The robust fellow was conversing with the man on the other side. To get his attention Cornell found it necessary to lean close. Their shoulders touched.
The man turned slowly, his large nose high and his eyelids lowered.
“Really,” he said. “Do try to keep your body to yourself.”
Cornell forgot his mission. “I beg your pardon,” was his frosty response.
He decided it would be politic to wait until they were all dressed again before making further overtures to his fellow recruits. Such feeble aptitude as he had for exhortation was ruinously diminished by the common nudity, men naturally tending towards paranoia when stripped. A good many boys sat with crossed hands in their laps. He sighed and felt a sensitivity in the thin red scar below each nipple. Jerry had excised his boobs six weeks earlier. The stitches had been taken out long since, and the skin had certifiably healed, but any unusual intake of breath was a reminder of that surgery, as was a damp day. Supine on the sheet-covered subway bench which served as operating table, Frankie pressing that mask over his face and dribbling ether on it, wrestling Frankie to the floor of the car, being overpowered by reinforcement Brothers, green-gowned Jerry approaching with the gleaming scalpel…. The ether was the worst part: he vomited for the next twelve hours.
Now, as he saw, here and there around him, boys with protuberant mammaries, he wondered again what real need there had been for his alteration. Who from the old days could have identified him from the curve of his breast? And anyway, scarcely a week later—his chest was still sore—Jerry had gone up his nostrils and done something to the cartilage to change the shape of his nose: black eyes for the next fortnight. When the bandages were removed, he and the stranger he saw in the mirror shrieked at each other. Eventually he got over the shock. He had not been actually defaced, just coarsened somewhat, the nose broader and no longer retroussé. Perhaps he was now, in a way, more attractive. He tried to make the best of it; but the loss of his breasts still rankled.
At last the door at the end of the hall was opened by a stout little soldier in the uniform of the Sperm Service staff.
“O.K.,” she shouted, pointing her finger like a pistol, “First!” When the man nearest the door rose and went through it, she ordered the others to move their asses along and close ranks. Cornell took the precaution to raise his behind and not slide along as some did, collecting splinters and squealing. He had arrived early; there were only a half-dozen ahead of him.
Even so, it was a good hour before he confronted the young medical officer in the examining room. She wore the chino summer uniform, the twisted-snake insigne on one side of the open collar and a silver bar on the other, top of T-shirt visible in the vee, stethoscope around her neck, and a mirror on her forehead.
“Skin it back and milk it down,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
The doctor had been looking at Cornell’s groin. Now she lifted her pale eyes to his face.
“Your peter, fellow. Peel the foreskin back as far as it will go, then push it up again, squeezing the shaft right down to the head…. Mmm, all right. Let it go now.” She looked up with a sneery smile. “You’re clean.” Then: “Corporal!” Looking around. “Where the fuck is that goldbrick?”
The doctor shook her crewcut head and picked a flashlight off an examination table. “I gotta do everything myself.” She bent and directed the torchbeam into Cornell’s crotch. “Ruffle up your pubic hair, so we can see whether your crabs are healthy.”
She peered, then snapped off the light. “O.K.” She made quick, negligent entries on a document attached to a clipboard.
Cornell’s resolution to endure this sort of thing stoically was still firm. His weeks with the Movement had then, apparently, worked a change. He had always been notoriously craven in doctors’ offices.
The medical officer pointed to his chest and snickered.
“Changed your mind?”
Instinctively, Cornell’s hands came up to cover the scars below his deflated breasts.
“You boys!” jeered the doctor. “Skirt lengths are one thing, but cosmetic surgery has a tough time keeping up to date. What did you have, uplifts? And now the style is the low, soft profile, huh? But you got fed up and had ‘em taken out altogether. Right? What about the new tattooing? Gonna have that done? And then what, when that goes out?” She shook her head. “And it will, it will.”
Actually Cornell had never yet known a boy who had been tattooed. That was one of the extremist things that did not exist outside the pages of the high-fashion magazines: skinny models with butterflies on their shoulders, birds around the navels, etc., and even with them it was probably decals. However, he remembered that when breast implants had first turned up in Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, he and everybody he knew had said the same. Less than a year later he had had his pair inserted. That was three years back. It was premature to say the style was dead. A sore subject to him, in more ways than one.
The officer seemed in no hurry. She lighted a cigarette and leaned against the table.
“Relax,” said she. “Corporal Toomey’s probably got one of the conscripts in a broom closet. She’s the big asswoman at this station.”
But at that moment the corporal entered from a door at the rear, carrying a stack of small glass saucers on a towel. She began guiltily to explain her delay.
“That damn sterilizer takes forever nowadays, Lieutenant. I wonder if it’s on the blink?”
“Bullshit, Toomey, bullshit.” The officer grinned and winked at Cornell. “Was it a nice piece of cooze?”
Toomey was, or pretended to be, obsequiously indignant.
“Aw, ma’am, come on.” She put her burden onto a little white-enameled table. “I burned my hand, I was in such a hurry. Oowah!” She sucked a finger.
The lieutenant tore from a roll a disposable plastic glove, the kind you wore during the night if you went to bed anointed with hand cream, and having covered her right hand, dipped the index finger into an open jar of Vaseline.
“Assume the angle,” she said to Cornell.
Once again he wanted elucidation, but the corporal came behind him, pushed him to the examining table, bent him over by a hand between his shoulder blades, and held a glass saucer to his penis; the doctor swooped the lubricated finger up his rectum and massaged a point of unbearable pressure way up inside; something disintegrated in a rush like a breaking boil, and Cornell ejaculated into the vessel.
He was given a tissue for drying. He felt as one was supposed to after castration. He was directed to leave by the rear door and did, walking with his toes spread, as if the floor were surfaced with glare ice.
In the next room was another lineup of naked boys on a bench: those who had preceded him in taking the lieutenant’s finger. They were waiting for the next phase of the examination. Cornell’s stoicism was absolute, no longer even conscious. The large man who had been his righthand neighbor in the first waiting line was again in that situation. He turned from an impassioned dialogue with the boy on his other side and stared beseechingly at Cornell. His eyes were damp and glistening tear-tracks ran down to his blue jaw. He was no longer waspish.
“Did you ever…” he said in a voice gone to sob.
Cornell felt himself shrug, and heard his own callous answer as if from afar. He was actually remote from all this squalor.
“One fingerwave won’t kill you.”
The big man shivered. His chest was covered with stubble, and he had no artificial breasts. His lipstick was a near-maroon.
“I didn’t know it would be like this. I hadn’t any idea.” He was leaning towards Cornell now. “I was deferred for years. I thought I’d never have to go. I
’m just under the line. I’ll be twenty-five next week. You kids can take it better than me. I’ll die!”
As it happened, Cornell had never found it possible to disabuse the Brothers of the belief that he was still eligible for the sperm draft. He simply could not confess that he was almost thirty to a group of men who thought him five years younger. He was here today because of vanity: it was vanity’s finger that had massaged his prostate. Now this hysterical creature to his right also assumed that he was still a young man: this fellow who Cornell would have said was himself a good thirty-five.
“I was jilted,” said his neighbor. “I wouldn’t have caused any trouble. I’ve got too much pride. But she wanted to get me out of the way. She’s a municipal official. She got me deferred all those years, and now she got me drafted within a month of my twenty-fifth birthday.” The man slumped against Cornell’s side and made snuffling sounds.
Cornell tolerated the weight for a while; it meant nothing to him. He had been rendered incapable of feeling. Emotions were useless when an utter stranger could penetrate your body and cause a hidden, private gland to perform publicly. He had never known what integrity was until now, after he had lost it.
“You’re very kind,” the man said, against his arm. “You’re an understanding person.” The man straightened his trunk. “My name is Jackie.”
“Georgie,” Cornell said numbly. He was still holding the tissue at his groin. He looked between Jackie’s legs and saw that so was he. “I wonder,” he said, “where we can dispose of these.” All these boys had gone through the same thing: a benchful of ejaculators. That was the idea of the sperm service, after all. But to acknowledge any sense in his situation seemed senseless. He remembered a boy years ago in school who claimed to have masturbated to a climax, but he was a crazy kind of kid, ostracized by most; he could have been lying. It was a shocking thing to boast of, loathsome to hear. Of course it was normal for boys to stroke themselves in early adolescence and feel the warmth and gentle tension, relieved finally by a pee of high pressure. But to provoke the discharge of this alien fluid, this snot, this filth….
Jackie had given him some answer, which he did not hear. Jackie’s toenails were pink-polished; his large toes were crooked, probably from wearing pointy shoes. How men painted, adorned, and even mutilated themselves—for women?
A person with three stripes on her sleeve came through a door and began to read from a clipboard.
“Abbott, Bumbaugh, Costin, Laird, McGonigle.” She looked over the board at the nudes along the bench. “Get up and sound off when your name is called.” She repeated the list, and the appropriate boys rose. “Follow me.” She went back through the door with the naked men in tow. They were an unattractive lot for their youth: bowlegs, protuberant behinds, pimpled backs. Cornell could certainly hold his own in this company. He realized he was still thinking in a fashion that the Movement decried: men should not be competitive with one another and so misdirect the energy that should be focused against the female enemy. It was a woman who had given him the fingerwave—but his Brothers had put him in the position to receive it.
Jackie said shyly: “Could we be friends, Georgie? I’ve heard that’s the way to survive the service—have a buddy.”
The door from the ejaculation-room opened and Corporal Toomey emerged, half-carrying the young boy who had earlier told Cornell he would die if rejected. He looked as though he were expiring at the moment, chin in chest, rubbery legs, face white as unflavored yoghurt. Toomey dumped him on the bench and smirked cynically at Cornell.
“Takes the stuffing out of some of ’em,” she said.
Cornell discovered he was coming back to life through compassion.
He spoke gently to the boy. “Can I get you something, dear? A drink of water?”
The boy shook his head. And just as well, for though Cornell had been sincere in his offer, he had no idea where he would have got water, or for that matter where even to dispose of the Kleenex he still clutched.
From the other side Jackie said, with false sympathy: “The best thing is to let him alone, Georgie.” Jackie was jealous. Men!
“He’s a good fellow,” Cornell said, to Jackie but for the boy’s benefit. “He’s got a lot of courage—more than I had when his age.”
“How old are you, Georgie?” Jackie asked.
Cornell turned back and said to the boy: “It hit me hard, too. You’ll get over it. I’m feeling better already.”
“I still hurt,” Jackie said, jealously. “I can hardly sit.” Cornell felt him dramatically shift from one buttock to the other.
The boy looked up, showing his tear-dampened makeup.
“You don’t understand,” he said in an agonized whisper. “I liked it. It actually gave me a thrill. I couldn’t help myself. I let go.” He sobbed. “It was horrible.”
Cornell thought about this for a while.
At last he said: “You mean you—” He coughed. “You mean you did something in the saucer?”
The boy’s head moved in shameful assent.
Cornell reassured him. “You were supposed to. That was the purpose of that phase of the examination. They had to get a specimen to test.” Oddly enough, he was also explaining it to himself. Actually, he had been, or should have been, prepared for the fingerwave by his Movement indoctrination. But at the shock of the execution thereof, his memory had blanked.
The boy’s eyes dilated. He was ten years younger than Cornell, if not twelve, but he had a skin problem on his forehead, and his ringleted coiffure was not the best choice for such a bony face. His figure was on the skinny, sinewy side, but he probably looked stunning in clothes.
“Are you sure?”
Cornell realized that this innocent, who reminded him of himself at an earlier age, was a perfect subject on whom to begin his assignment.
“Certainly,” he answered. “You stick close to me from here on. It’ll be easier than if you’re all alone.”
The boy smiled shyly. On Cornell’s other side, Jackie emitted a groan.
“I’m feeling very queasy,” he said. “I think I’ve got a temperature. Feel my head, Georgie.”
Cornell now had two followers. Jackie was the kind who could be manipulated by playing on his envy. That might prove useful. He touched Jackie’s brow with two light fingertips.
“Maybe a degree or two. An aspirin might be a good idea.”
“I wouldn’t have nerve to ask,” said Jackie, delighted at the attention. “The personnel are so brutal.”
Cornell decided on a bold stroke. He went to the door through which the sergeant had taken the candidates. He rapped twice, turned the knob, and entered a room full of cubicles. The sergeant sat at a nearby desk, checking off items on her clipboard. She glared at him.
“Where you been?”
“I wasn’t called, Sergeant. There’s a sick boy outside, and I wondered if you had an aspirin for him.”
“Get your ass out of here until you’re called.” She pointed to the door and lowered her head.
“Yes, ma’am. But in view of our function, I thought we were supposed to be maintained in good health.” He did not wait for the reaction, but turned on his bare heel and went outside.
He told Jackie: “It’s O.K.”
Jackie gave him a worshipful look. Only after he sat down did Cornell wonder at himself. Whence came this unprecedented assurance? And even while naked! He grew fearful. He had probably cooked his goose with that sergeant. He turned and stared at the boy.
“My name’s Georgie.”
“Mine’s Howie.”
Before he knew what he was doing, he was shaking the boy’s hand, feminine style. It was the Movement’s regulation greeting. He had got used to it during the weeks in the subway tunnel. Howie stared in amazement as Cornell pumped his limp hand.
Luckily he had finished before the sergeant came through the door. She carried a paper cone of water. When she reached Cornell, she opened her fist and revealed two aspirins.
Gruffly she said: “Here.”
Trying to obliterate the smugness from his voice, Cornell pointed at Jackie. “It’s this man.”
“Don’t make a habit of it,” the sergeant told Jackie, thrusting the tablets at him. Then she raised her clipboard and called another list of names. Cornell’s new pseudonym was first: “Alcorn.” Howie proved to be “Andrews.” Three other men stood up at the appropriate sound, and the five followed the sergeant into the next room. Jackie gasped disconsolately at being left behind.
Each man was directed to take his own cubicle. Cornell sat on the chair provided. In time a middle-aged officer appeared. She was small, stout, and gray.
She said: “I’m Captain Wilmer. I’m a psychiatrist. You cannot fool me.” She peered intensely at him. “Are you emotionally stable?”
Cornell had been instructed to answer all such questions curtly, dispassionately. Stanley had said: “Do not attract attention to yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You look like a dirty little whore.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why did you have your breasts removed?”
“They’re going out of style, ma’am.”
“Would you rather be a woman?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ah, you hate women!”
“No, ma’am.”
“Have you ever had anal therapy?”
Stanley had told him never to admit to having received psychiatric treatment. He must not stand out as an oddball.
“No, ma’am.”
“You could use it,” the little doctor said, her beady eyes boring into his. “Even if you think otherwise. It would help to make you a healthier man. It will be available at the camp. Think about it.”
She left, crying loudly: “Alcorn, O.K.”
The pseudonym had been chosen by the Council as more or less an anagram of his real name and thus easier for him to accept and remember than one altogether alien. His chest was flat, his nose was blunted, and his hair style was gamine, short, brushed forward, with little feathers at the ears.
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