King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  Harriet, if that was her name, tucked the shirttails into her shorts and turned around.

  “That’s not a bad outfit,” he said. “Sort of like a girl scout. Kind of cute.”

  She scowled. “Don’t make fun of me. It’s not my idea.”

  “You want to get out of here, don’t you?”

  “It’s the only reason I’m going through with this.”

  She gathered together the male clothing she had found in the dresser. “I’m taking this along, and as soon as we’re outside the camp, I’m putting it on.”

  “I won’t try to stop you,” Cornell assured her. “It’s certainly more comfortable below the waist. You don’t have to worry about modesty when wearing trousers, but that’s all you can say for them. They chafe.”

  “Just a minute.” She was very rational again. “You don’t think you can get away with posing as a little girl on a field trip?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “The only thing that would make sense would be for me to put on the blouse and skirt, and you to get into these trousers, making a complete uniform. Then anybody seeing us would take you for a soldier and me for a sperm-term conscript who was being taken out of camp for some reason.”

  She started to object, but he raised a hand. “I’ve got it. On the way to the garage there’s a wheeled stretcher. I’ll get on it and you push me to the ambulance. I’ll be a patient, see, who has to be taken to a civilian hospital in Newark or some place for treatment for some condition that they don’t have the facilities for here. Something like radium treatment, you know.”

  He ran the zipper halfway down while facing her, and he was naked beneath the fly.

  “Do you mind turning around?” he asked.

  “You’re the one who’s undressing. You turn.” She defiantly brought her eyes up to his.

  “All right,” said he, and dropped the trousers to his shoes. “You asked for it.”

  She continued to stare at his face. He stepped out of the pants, stooped, and brought them up from the floor.

  “O.K., let’s have that male stuff.”

  She looked at his chest and shoulders. “You’re too big. You’ll burst the seams or stretch things out of shape.” She held the bundle behind her back.

  “Come on.”

  “No,” she said. “No. I don’t want my outfit ruined.”

  “All I want to do is get out of here,” said Cornell. “It’s nothing personal.”

  There was a folded blanket at the foot of the bed. He wrapped himself in it, put his socks and loafers on, got the men’s clothes from the floor and brought them to her.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “While I’m on the stretcher I won’t need to wear anything but a blanket. I guess you’re right: this stuff wouldn’t fit me anyway.”

  Holding his blanket together, Cornell went into the storeroom and fetched the wheeled litter. The whole business about clothing was arbitrary and probably nonsensical. The olive-drab blanket was the most comfortable attire he had ever worn. The wool was slightly scratchy, but that effect could be alleviated by loosening the wrap so that it touched fewer areas of the body. It could be arranged to hang mostly from the shoulders; underneath, the naked body moved freely.

  When he had brought the stretcher up to the door of her room, the girl wore the trousers. The uniform was a little too big in every dimension, but still fitted her better than it had him.

  He climbed onto the stretcher and arranged the blanket over his body, tucking up his feet so the loafers could not be seen. The girl grasped the vehicle and wheeled it rapidly through the storeroom.

  “Stop here,” he said when they had reached the door to the garage.

  “Now what?”

  “Listen,” said he. “We have to cooperate for a while yet. Can’t we at least be friendly enemies?” He tried to smile.

  “If you give me some respect.”

  “I don’t want your damned clothes,” said Cornell, himself offended again. “You can stick them—No, I don’t mean that. What I mean is, let’s try to avoid this petty bickering. Now please open that door and push me into the garage, right up to the back door of one of the ambulances.”

  “What happens if someone tries to stop us?”

  Cornell suddenly remembered the general. He got off the stretcher with his blanket, opened the door, and peeped out. The general was gone. The mechanic was back and doing something under the raised hood of the nearest vehicle.

  Cornell closed the door. “There’s an enlisted woman out there. You can bluff her.”

  “Suppose you tell me how.”

  He suppressed the urge to say something rude again—“You’ve been a woman all your life” or “What about all the viciousness you showed at the Men’s House of Detention, and then your aggressiveness about who used the toilet,” etc.—because that would only have led to more wrangling, and all he wanted at the moment was to get out of a place where female domination was at its extreme—in view of which need, why should he complain that she deferred to him at a juncture at which a decision must be made and forceful measures taken?

  “Here’s how.”

  He flung the door open and cried: “Hey, you!”

  The startled mechanic dropped her wrench clatteringly into the engine, straightened up, and froze without turning.

  “Over here. Give us a hand!” Cornell let the door swing to, quickly climbed on the stretcher, and covered himself.

  The girl asked: “Who’s that?”

  “A mechanic, I told you. You’re in an officer’s uniform.”

  “Without the insignia. You took it off, stupid!”

  He checked himself. “It doesn’t matter. She won’t notice. She’s so dumb she smokes around gasoline.”

  After they had waited for a time and nobody appeared, he said: “Go see what became of that jerk.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because she may be on her way and I’m supposed to be the patient and I’m naked.”

  She grudgingly looked out. “There’s nobody there.” She wheeled him onto the floor of the garage. He peeped over the edge of the blanket. The mechanic had run off as usual.

  “She was working on this one,” he said, pointing at the nearest ambulance. “Try the next.”

  But the girl wheeled him instead towards the third vehicle. She was naturally contrary. He looked forward to their quick separation when they got out of camp.

  She pushed the stretcher to the right side of the ambulance, left it there, and walked towards the hood.

  “I think it loads from the rear,” he said.

  “Let’s see whether I can get it started, first.”

  “Good thinking,” said Cornell, and since nobody else was in view, he got up and off and immediately stepped into a pool of oil. He went to a clean patch of concrete and rubbed the soles of his loafers.

  She sat in the driver’s seat now, and in a moment the engine started. Then came a hideous grinding of gears, and the vehicle began slowly to back out of the garage.

  Cornell supported himself with a hand on the stretcher while he stood on one foot and looked at the other to see whether it was clean of oil. When he saw what she was doing, he rushed the litter to the rear of the moving ambulance and shoved it at an angle against the loading doors and the folded-up cast-iron entry step that formed a kind of bumper. The stretcher keeled over with a crash that went directly into a screech as the heavy vehicle crushed the tubular frame.

  The ambulance stopped rolling. Cornell ran to the driver’s door.

  “You were trying to run out on me!”

  “I was not!” She pointed at him. “Get hold of yourself. I’ve never driven one of these. It’s got all kinds of gears. I was just trying to find reverse.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well,” she said, “you have to. You need me. And besides, you’re naked.”

  He looked down, covering himself with cupped hands. He went back to fetch the fallen blanket. He had just pulle
d the wrecked stretcher aside when, out on the blacktop apron, the general’s car came into view. There seemed to be several people inside. Cornell snatched up the blanket, opened the rear doors of the ambulance, and climbed in. He had expected to find something to lie on, but the interior was bare metal.

  He called up to the front: “Get the hell out of here.”

  She backed onto the blacktop at the same sluggish speed she had used when he thought she was dumping him. He heard shouts from outside, and next the crash as she struck what was surely the general’s car. Cornell was thrown against the rear doors.

  “Damn you,” he shouted.

  She screamed: “I can’t get this into first.”

  He crawled up front and looked out the right window. The general had not been killed: she stood there roaring and purple-faced in her grease-stained shirt. Alongside her were the camp commandant who had addressed the conscripts on their first day in camp and another officer.

  The general recognized Cornell.

  “You!”

  He turned and looked down at the knobbed lever which the girl was trying to move with her small fist. He covered her hand and shoved.

  “Let me get the clutch all the way in.” She tromped on a pedal. He applied force. The lever moved forward and the vehicle followed suit. She shouted: “Let my hand go. You’re crushing it!”

  He gave her a dirty look but said nothing. Instead he sat up and looked out again. Now the officers were running to the front of the ambulance.

  “Step on it!”

  She did, and barely missed hitting the general.

  She shouted: “Now pull it straight back!”

  “What?”

  “The gearshift!”

  Ah, the lever again. It moved quite easily now; she could have done it herself. Their speed increased just as the third officer, whom Cornell did not recognize, leaped onto his side of the ambulance, hooking an arm into the window frame.

  “You’re under arrest!” she cried.

  Cornell kneeled on the seat, put his hand in her face, and shoved. She disappeared. The girl now moved the lever on her own, and they began to roll quite rapidly across the blacktop.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Cornell. “She had little crossed pistols on her collar.”

  “Then she’s military police.”

  She made a final shift and pressed her right foot down; they accelerated off the asphalt onto the camp road, which fortunately was straight on, for at that speed they could not have turned: Cornell knew that much about driving.

  “Take it easy,” he warned, “or we won’t live to get out.” The air was whipping his face.

  She suddenly applied the brakes. He would have gone through the windshield had he not caught himself against the dashboard.

  When she had corrected the subsequent skid and they were at rest, she said: “O.K., you take the wheel.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive. I wasn’t criticizing you.”

  But after they were underway again, as fast as ever, he could not help thinking: You wouldn’t even have got it in gear without me. You wouldn’t have had the idea in the first place. You were lying there helplessly, dressed as a child.

  However, there was no doubt that they had a better chance to get out of camp together than he would have had alone.

  “Do you know where this road goes?” he asked.

  “No. We’ll have to keep our eyes open.”

  They were approaching a barracks area. She hunched over the wheel, squinting, grim-mouthed, her short hair disordered by the wind.

  “Watch out,” he cried. “That column of men is going to cross the street.” He closed his eyes and braced himself. She accelerated further. When he next peeped out they were gaining a crossroads, with an Army truck approaching from the left and a speeding jeep from the right.

  “You can’t make it!”

  She cried: “An ambulance has the right of way.” Her knuckles were white against the wheel.

  He closed his eyes and, with two fingers, his ears as well. She made it, somehow. At length he unmasked his senses and saw a gate ahead, with a flanking sentry box.

  “Got your story straight?”

  “Screw that,” she said. “I’m blasting through.”

  As they shot past the little kiosk, Cornell got a glimpse of the guard inside: she seemed asleep. He had always thought of soldiers as the very models of discipline, efficiency, and order.

  The girl slowed down and turned onto the public highway.

  “Well,” she said, slowing more, “where do you want off?”

  He stared at a landscape of weeds and deteriorating billboards. “I’m not yet used to the idea I’m out.” He stuck his head through the window and looked back at the camp. There was something scary about being free—whatever “free” was.

  “You’re really a good driver,” he said, coming back in.

  She grimaced. “How about Newark?”

  He rubbed his eyes. He felt faint.

  She glanced at him. “You O.K.?”

  The question touched him. “Sure, I’ll be all right. Newark will be fine.”

  They had traveled only a few hundred yards when she pulled off the highway, continued across the shoulder, and drove onto a patch of mud behind a billboard.

  She climbed over her seat and into the back of the ambulance, carrying her bundle of men’s clothes.

  When Cornell saw her begin to undress, he asked: “Shouldn’t we get farther away from camp?”

  “I’m not going another inch until I’m properly dressed.” She was already shouldering out of the lieutenant’s shirt. Embarrassed, Cornell looked away. He wondered again about the mystique of clothing. Both men and women had legs which could either be encased separately in trousers or swathed generally in a skirt. Men did have those exterior genitals which were perhaps more accessible, more vulnerable, when covered with an open-ended sack, but there were cultures in which females, even soldiers, wore kilts, like Scotchwomen, or miniskirts of many pleats, like the Greeks: both races in fact being noted for their ferocity in battle. And in certain Oriental countries men wore pants.

  The girl flung the shirt up to the cab. Cornell was none too eager to get back into its confines from his carefree nudity. In another moment the trousers arrived by air, landing across the gearshift which without his strength at a crucial moment she could not have moved. By chance the garment fell so that the knobbed lever protruded phallicly between the division of the pants legs.

  From the rear he heard the whisper of soft fabrics. Would she actually put on that lacy white garterbelt? Cornell hadn’t worn one for years, pantyhose being so convenient and a good deal more comfortable: nothing was worse than to sit on a garter clip. Comfort and convenience seemed to have become his ruling criteria as to attire. The blanket served both. Truly he was growing old.

  He swiveled the rear-vision mirror around to examine his face, which without makeup was as naked as his body. Physically he was at the moment a kind of blank tablet on which anything might be inscribed. He could for example let his hair grow on his lips and chin, and chest, underarms, and legs as well—but only if he lived in utter isolation from the rest of society. His eyes as usual looked smaller in the absence of liner, and shallower without shadow. His hair was definitely receding at the temples.

  He looked past the reflection of his left ear, wholly exposed by the feminine shortness of hair, and saw the girl’s peachlike backside underneath a virtually transparent film of underpants. The cleft was practically as clear as if she were nude. How gross, obscene, shameless. It was the kind of thing that a burlesque dancer might wear while wiggling his bum at the dirty old women sitting below the runway.

  She hooked the garterbelt at the small of her back. Her waist was so small he could almost have encompassed it with his two hands; just below began that extraordinary slope to the terminal globes of her bottom.

  She sat on the floor and began to pull on a dark stocking. Th
e light that came through the two little back windows was not so good as that from the windshield, and she revolved on her seat to face forward, to fasten the unfamiliar front clip of the garterbelt. Oblivious to all else, biting her pink mouth, rumpled blonde head lowered, one thigh stretched out, the other knee in the air—

  There was a double thickness of fabric in the plump vee of the crotch, but double spiderweb, and in her contortions the narrow strap became a ribbon and then a string and finally a thread which disappeared within a silken furrow of flesh.

  Cornell scraped his teeth across his lower lip, forced his eyes from the mirror, and cocooned himself tightly in the blanket, shuddering with revulsion and something worse. Eventually she finished and climbed into the driver’s seat with a show of garters and hosiery.

  She wore a Kelly-green nylon blouse with a panel of ruffles. It was much too large for her. A chocolate-brown maxiskirt, split to the knee. Textured stockings in navy blue, and enormous black patent-leather sling shoes with three-inch heels.

  Mary! What an outfit. Above it, her unkempt blonde head and those small features, so incongruous on one dressed as a male. Despite the attire, she didn’t seem masculine at all. Cornell in his various female outfits had looked much more like a woman than she resembled a man.

  She started the engine and probed, with her preposterous shoe, for what he remembered as the clutch. The spike-heeled shoe, which was outlandishly too big, fell off her foot, which was scarcely larger than Cornell’s hand. He realized only now that he had seen her vulva when she was putting on the stockings. It seemed to be a continuation of the division between the buttocks. How neat and efficient, how unlike a man’s pendulous growth. So up inside it, theoretically, was a complete Birth Facility. Hard to believe, looking at the small abdomen. As a schoolboy he had heard horror stories of perverted, criminal women who produced babies from their own bodies by some process that sounded like defecation, but in those days he had always been appalled by anything creepy, weird. He had first learned of menstruation when he lived with Pauline Witkovsky, the painter, who was wont to clog the commode with stained Kotexes, and it was he who had to work the plumber’s suction cup.

  He remembered another odd thing: that somehow he had felt guilty because she bled. That made no sense at all. He had never seen a woman’s bare groin; when they had you, they naturally stayed dressed, strapping the dildo over their trousers.