King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  The girl fetched her shoe from the floor.

  “Look around,” she said, “and see if you can find some paper to stuff in the toe.”

  “That’s big enough to fit me,” said Cornell.

  “It was the smallest I could find.”

  “You stole this stuff from a sperm conscript,” he said.

  “See if you can find some paper, will you?”

  “You were supposed to be a man who was drafted like me. What about the civilian clothes you came in?”

  “They weren’t in good taste. I threw them away.”

  Cornell’s eyebrows rose.

  “Don’t you think this is a nice outfit?” she asked.

  “Swell.” He studied her for a while, and then he finally picked up the shirt and trousers that lay between them.

  “I don’t know who you really are,” he said, “or even what you’re pretending to be any more. But I’ll tell you something, I don’t think you are crazy. And I also don’t think that you think you’re a man.”

  “Georgie Cornell,” said she, in the most matter-of-fact voice, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “It’s the name you used in jail.”

  “Jail?”

  “The Men’s House of Detention, my dear cellmate.” She said these things in a self-satisfied rhythm punctuated by insolent stresses. He had an impulse to slap her face.

  “You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Here she had known his identity all along, but his immediate feeling was one of competitiveness rather than fear.

  That was stupid. After what he had gone through in the past few months, he should be capable of something better. He forced himself to grin.

  “Well, I guess you’re right. You are smart.” He felt better for having said that, because it was the truth. “I thought the nose job made me look different.”

  “It does.” His praise had taken the edge off her. She looked aside in a certain delicacy. “Actually, I probably wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  “Was it my voice, when we had that run-in over which group used the john?”

  She peered earnestly at him. “Georgie, the Movement was using you as a dupe.”

  “I figured that out for myself after a while…. I guess you know the whole thing, the masturbation scheme? It couldn’t possibly have worked…. Stanley tipped you off about me, didn’t he?”

  “Stanley? I didn’t know his name.”

  “Now it seems I have betrayed him” Cornell said stoically. “Oddly enough, that doesn’t please me—even if he does deserve it.”

  “The name is probably false,” she said, sitting there behind the wheel in her oversized male clothing. “Is he the leader?”

  “I can’t tell you anything else,” said Cornell. “Even if they did set me up as they did. I don’t intentionally sell out anybody. That would make me their sort, you see—people who manipulate others, and for what? They want to liberate men, but I’m a man, and they would have got me castrated. I may be dumb, but I’m smart enough to understand that.”

  She said hastily: “You’re not dumb, Georgie! You’re the only prisoner to have escaped from the Men’s House of Detention in ten years.”

  Strange praise from her.

  He shrugged. “That took no great intelligence and not even a large amount of courage. Despite the brutality of the jailers, the place was barely guarded. The woman on the front door was asleep—like the sentry back there at the camp gate.” He looked out the window at the rear of the billboard. “Speaking of which, we’re only a hundred yards or so from the camp. Is this the place to sit and talk? Won’t they be searching for us? Any pursuers who looked closely could see our wheels from the road. There’s a space under the billboard.”

  She was smiling. “There you are: you’re pretty shrewd.”

  “Yeah,” he said in chagrin, “so clever I forgot for a moment that you are one of them. What’s your game?” Suddenly he turned hostile and shook his fist. “Get this thing going if you don’t want your face smashed in.”

  She threw back that small, fragile face and laughed, a movement which caused her trunk to arch and the front of the loose blouse to show the projection of her breasts, which she had freed, when donning the male clothing, from the constraining band. They were small, but conical and definite.

  Nevertheless he shook his fist again and said: “I’m warning you.” He had a great fear of being conned.

  “Georgie,” said she, “will you please get me some paper to stuff in my shoe?”

  He looked at the threatening hand: he had forgotten he was still holding her sling pump.

  She said: “You had your chance to beat me up that time we fought in jail, and you didn’t use it. Even though I deserved a beating for what I did to you. You exerted just enough force to subdue me. I was impressed by that. You know, I used to wrestle in college. I had never before been overpowered without being hurt.”

  He found a big, almost clean handkerchief in the back pocket of the lieutenant’s trousers, easily tore it in two, and stuffed a half into the toe of each shoe.

  “Try this. If you’re going to keep dressing like that, remember a hanky is better than newspaper, because it doesn’t rustle. Just plain Kleenex is good, too, but you need quite a bit because it compacts.”

  She put on the shoes and stamped her feet. “Feels O.K.”

  “It occurs to me to ask where’d you get the men’s clothes you wore when disguised as an inmate in jail and a sperm conscript? You’re awfully small, and yet they seemed to fit.”

  “The FBI had a wardrobe department.”

  Cornell pursed his lips, but like most men he couldn’t whistle. “You’re FBI?”

  “Sexual sedition is a federal crime.”

  “You’re an FBI woman and you were assigned to me? Good heavens, I was just an insignificant little secretary. I really did get into all this by accident.”

  With her shoe firmly seated, she depressed the clutch and put the gearshift into reverse.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s all over for me. I really am defecting.”

  When she had backed out to the road, she had the old trouble with the shift lever. Once again he had to assist her to get it into first.

  Our women’s movement resembles strongly the gigantic religious and intellectual movement which for centuries convulsed the life of Europe, and had, as its ultimate outcome, the final emancipation of the human intellect and the freedom of the human spirit.

  OLIVE SCHREINER, 1911

  14

  THEY WERE APPARENTLY on some sort of back road, the main purpose of which was to furnish access to the camp. No other vehicles appeared while they were on this stretch. They were not pursued. This failure was not one of which Cornell could complain, but it amazed him, and he mentioned it to the girl.

  “That’s the Army for you,” she said. “They’re probably making a half-assed search for us in camp. They probably think we’re drunk and joyriding around. It wouldn’t occur to them that we were going over the hill.”

  She had her foot all the way down again, and they were speeding past the billboards, which were now separated from the road by a drainage ditch full of litter.

  “They’re a bunch of idiots in the Army,” she said. “Believe me, I know. I’ve worked with Army Intelligence on espionage cases. Once their agents arrested some of us as spies.”

  The wind was whipping his face, and Cornell instinctively began to roll up the window so his hair would not be disordered. Then he remembered he really had no coiffure to be ruined.

  Up ahead a big motorway appeared and soon they reached its feeder road. The girl turned onto it so swiftly that he felt the wheels on his side leave the ground. But he had anticipated this and clamped his fingers under the seat, and then braced himself for the inevitable braking. After a scream of tires, a skid, and a correction, they eventually stopped with the nose of the ambulance within a foot of the motorway on which the v
ehicles were motionless and bumper-to-bumper. A young woman in the sedan they would have struck shook her fist and raved in-audibly behind closed windows.

  The girl with Cornell made a vulgar motion with her vertical middle finger.

  “I don’t know why women get so ferocious when they’re behind the wheel,” Cornell said. “I used to have a very calm and gentle girl friend who would become insanely mad at other drivers. Once she climbed out of the car in the middle of some intersection and got into a fistfight. Imagine that. Because somebody cut her off or something.”

  “Have you had many girl friends?” She looked straight ahead.

  “Not many regular ones,” Cornell said. The question made him a bit shy. He looked into the lap of his blanket. “Like the one I’m talking about. I had maybe three dates. After that she stopped calling.” He cleared his throat. “The story of my life.” The girl was staring through the windshield. “How about you? Have you had many boys?”

  She continued to study the hood. “I’ve dated a few.” She blinked. “But I’ve never had one.” She turned and looked him in the eye. “So you can put your clothes on now.”

  Cornell could feel his blush go all the way down under the blanket.

  “How dare you make such an innuendo!”

  “Well, why are you still naked?”

  “I’m not.” He grasped his blanket. What hurt was that just as he thought they had established a genuine rapport she pulled this dirty trick. Indignantly he flipped his face in the other direction, but no sooner had he done so than he suddenly understood that she was paying him back spitefully for his undiplomatic remark about drivers.

  It wasn’t easy, but he managed to turn back and say, reasonably, while still blushing, or perhaps blushing again and more furiously from this effort: “Believe me, I wasn’t trying to lure you or anything. I simply forgot, because this blanket is so comfortable.”

  Now it was she who seemed embarrassed, whether by his display of self-control or by a sudden realization on her part that she had been needlessly mean. She did not apologize in so many words. Instead she quickly directed an abstract wrath at the traffic.

  “Look at that,” she said, pounding the steering wheel. “We’ll be here for hours!”

  Still he made no move to put on the lieutenant’s uniform, which was lying across his lap. Matters of attire seemed so trivial in view of their odd partnership, an association so complex as to have restrained him thus far from asking the obvious questions. But having deflected her thrust, he found the energy to begin.

  “Have you been following me ever since I broke out of jail?”

  She grimaced. “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not.” He reached over and touched the nearer of the two hands which still gripped the wheel tenaciously though the vehicle was at rest.

  She pulled away. “Don’t do that!”

  He frowned. “What’s wrong with you? I’m just trying to be nice. But you make it terribly difficult.”

  “Just keep your paws to yourself, that’s all. I don’t like to be touched.”

  He looked back at the road and saw the line begin to move. The car they had almost hit was stalled in place, leaving just enough room to get by. The girl deftly inserted the ambulance onto the motorway.

  The traffic, though solid, was moving at a reasonable speed, a speed preferable to Cornell over the rate at which she would have been driving had the lanes been empty.

  When Cornell awakened, his calves were tucked under him, the side of his head was against the seat-back, and he was looking at the girl’s thighs. The split skirt had parted and he could see one of those stockings all the way to the garter clip: in some ways a more grotesque image than had been her naked leg. Say what you would, styles of clothing had a reference to modes of existence: in his brief association with her, she had been many different persons rather than the same one dressed in various costumes—but that was a silly reflection. He looked at her face. Extraordinary: she now wore lipstick and eye make-up.

  “When’d you do that?” he asked, straightening up. Her eyes looked sore or burnt. A very sloppy job. And that purple shadow!

  She opened her smeared scarlet mouth and he saw red on her teeth.

  “What?”

  “The makeup.”

  “Oh. When we got stuck for a while. You dozed off.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  She lifted a beige purse from the floor. “It was in this.” A beige bag, with black shoes, green blouse, brown skirt, navy stockings.

  He realized that they were not moving and looked out to see why. They were no longer on the motorway, but in an urban situation, at an intersection controlled by a traffic light from which the green lens was missing along with half of the red. On the left side was a junkyard full of rusted car bodies; to the right, the crumbling shells of abandoned multiple dwellings, the occasional wino or junkie slumped in a doorway.

  “Where are we?”

  “Newark,” she said. “Where do you want out?”

  An evil-looking character had heaved itself up from a pile of refuse at the curb and was approaching the ambulance, wearing rags, grinning with purple teeth.

  “Get going!” Cornell cried. He couldn’t find how to lock the door.

  “It’s a red light.”

  “No cars are coming! Will you go?”

  But she made no move, and there was that loathsome face against the window. Cornell shrank over against the girl. The bum gestured, and shouted: “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”

  The girl leaned around Cornell, ran down the window, and said flatly, “Fuck off.” The bum dropped her hands and quietly lurched away to lie down in the rubbish.

  “I don’t get it,” the girl said to Cornell after the light had changed and they were in motion again. “You handled that MP officer. But then you’re frightened of some sick old wino.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I have my ups and downs. But I couldn’t bear to put my hands on something so dirty.”

  “Neither could I.I didn’t have to, did I?”

  Cornell made a thoughtful mouth.

  “See,” she said, “authority doesn’t have to be physical. In fact, when you have to go that far you’re usually in trouble.”

  “That’s a woman talking, an FBI woman besides. I’m a secretary by profession. Nobody ever does anything because I tell them to. The only times I ever got anywhere were when I used force, and if I did, it was because I was already in trouble. Like in jail.”

  She winced, and he added: “If you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  She said quickly: “You were right in that case.”

  “I don’t get you at all,” he confessed, as if the lack were his, but he was shaken not so much by the bum, nor even by his craven reaction, which was perfectly normal in a man; nor for that matter by her statement about authority, which she was certainly equipped to give—no, what moved him strangely was her persistent approval of his role in overpowering her. He might himself enjoy that memory, but why should she?

  He saw that the area through which they drove was degenerating further, if that were possible. Now instead of collapsing buildings they passed mountains of sheer rubble.

  The girl again asked where he wanted to get off.

  “Mary!” said Cornell.

  She shrugged. “It’ll get better when we’re out of the business district.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.” She leaned forward and squinted at the dashboard dials. “Not far, I guess. We’re almost out of fuel.”

  “I’ll look for a filling station,” said Cornell, peering strenuously ahead, to prove he was of some use.

  “How will we manage that?”

  “Well,” said he, “I never would have thought two people who looked like us could get this far in an Army ambulance, but not even on that crowded motorway did anybody pay the slightest attention. So I doubt some gas-station girl in this godforsaken place—”

  “I’m ref
erring to money,” she broke in. “Do you have any?”

  He searched the pockets of the lieutenant’s pants, finding nothing but the keys. “Hey, what about that purse of yours?”

  “I left the change thing behind when I stole it.”

  “That was clever.”

  “It would have been really stealing to take that.”

  Cornell stared at her and shook his head. Then he thought of something. “Listen, when you were posing as a sperm candidate, a barracks leader in fact, you had a bag of your own, and a man’s uniform. So why now when you’re running away are you dressed in that outlandish outfit?” He pursed his lips. “See what I mean? Since your FBI service seems to have consisted of your posing as a man, and presumably it drove you crazy from what I gather, then how come you aren’t running away to become a normal woman?”

  “Outlandish. Is that what you think of me?”

  He was not deterred. “Yes. You’re in the worst of taste, if you want to know.”

  “Oh, fuck you!” She swung into the curb and braked. “Get out.”

  He opened the door and stepped gravely out into the litter, careful to hold his blanket so it would not trail. She threw the chino shirt and pants at him, slammed the door, and drove away. He surveyed his situation, amid the piles of broken bricks and fragments of concrete with rusted rods protruding from them. Not a person in sight—fortunately, given the sort of person who might be found there. But he wondered where the rubbish came from, if no people were extant. Apparently the sanitation trucks came from the outlying residential areas to dump their filth in downtown Newark.

  Beneath the blanket he struggled into the shirt and trousers. He heard the noise of an engine and saw the ambulance backing down the street. When it reached him, the girl leaned across, opened the door, and said tartly: “Now that you’re dressed, come on.”

  “No,” said he, turned and started to trek away.

  She shouted: “I can’t leave you here! I’d never forgive myself.” He kept going. “Please, Georgie! I apologize!”