CHAPTER VIII BREAK ON THRU # HIEROGAMOS The Id had died in infamy; it was the last issue--Stan Gleason was cancelling the script due to poor sales--I died w/ the Slime-thing, died inside. While I had been working on my writing (space literature), I had left the monad activated; I was trying to get the SIMPLE program to recapitulate my burning, aching feet to their pre-broken state. My creativity had distracted me, I hadn't noticed that I was being transformed in ways I hadn't expected; I had let the program run too long; all at once I felt castrated. I looked in the mirror, saw no serpent to taunt me: I realized that I was slowly growing breasts: The monad had created an extra Y chromosome. I was a woman now. The breasts were budding up faster & faster; it was as though the nipples contained violence: They thrust up against my green shirt, stretching the fabric. I knew in another minute the fabric was going to rend, tear. My short hair androgynously framed a cute face--I seemed almost a brunette Toni. I tore my gaze away from the silver-glass & the fabric actually did rip. SIMPLE was obviously no use; it would merely turn me from 1 woman into another. In desparation I set COMPLEX to full-speed RANDOMIZE; became a whir of bodies: All female. Like reality going to schizophrenia. Just then Toni entered the room carrying some sheets & pillows in order to make the beds. She had them piled high against her face; could barely see me thru the cloth. I sat helplessly, tatters of emerald cloth about my shoulders. In desparation I punched the monad another time; suddenly I was blessed w/ Melanie-sized breasts--& perhaps time enough to change myself back into a man. I hacked as though I had never hacked before--& I'd had to hack w/ the Thorazine Police breathing down my neck. An Y-Y chromosome map displayed upon the screen. Somehow, my X had disappeared to chromosome Bardo; this new Y was a replicant.... Monadic energies mutated my newly-created girl's body even while Toni teasingly flirted while changing the beds w/ efficient professionalism.... I wanted to tell her that I loved her; I wanted to ask her to be my girl forever....If she could even love a fired comic book author, mind seared by Nova conditions--but if I spoke she'd know that I'd changed because I'd speak w/ a woman's voice. Toni finished making the beds. I wanted her to leave so I could be alone w/ my computer & at least some hope of being a man again. Instead she sneaked up behind me, though I could hear her coming; I wrapped my hands more tightly about the buds of my nipples as she approached--planted a big kiss on my cheek, uttering the classic Toni line, "How'd'ya like being alone w/ your favorite nurse?" I said nothing. She pulled back, puzzled. She clutched at the tattered shirt now as though noticing it for the 1st time, was suddenly caring & concerned again. She was in my closet in a minute, searching for clean clothes--there was nothing she enjoyed more than dressing me, perhaps because it gave her a chance to see me naked. "Green shirts--you like green too much! Now why don't you wear this nice black & white striped 1; & yes as a psychiatric nurse I've read Jung & know what that means. You & your Savage...you're a woman!" she said as she tenderly plucked away the ripped shirt. I was a million women; I was all of them at once. I was some blond hooker waiting for a date; I was a nun at Midnight Mass; I was black as midnight; the brunette I had always been, now a tawdry bitch; a redhead w/ curls like magnetic corpuscles--every time she had turned her back I had hit RANDOMIZE, fluidly melting thru multiple feminine shapes.... "Oh my God! Lead, you've grown a pair of tits! Cute little buggers, gootchy-gootchy-goo--" Here she tickled, a gay rapture; invisible firmness ached. "The only question is...how did you do it?" She stared at me w/ a silly, lovesick grin on her face. Like she still cared in spite of the transmogrification. "You mean I'm not...you're not...the abomination of desolation?" Something inside me had just begun; the acid intensity of insanity was gone. Schiz-krieg delusions of invisible U-boat Captains were torpedoed by a new, clear dawn. The awesome paaranoid mania of Reality fighting fear & loathing dissolved like mist into a clarity of vision. I realized now that the entire incredible episode of the Height Park Hitman was just a fantasy--no more real than the comic books I'd been writing. Other episodes now receded into sanity like a developmental lock that has been scrambled suddenly being solved: I saw the strange world the de-phages had created, the imaginary religion of the post-death purgatory: the death of Zarathustra, the suicide of Sophia--how had I ever created so monstrous, so blasphemous a vision? That hallucinatory world suddenly shattered like bone on concrete; spinning out backwards from the awful hallucinations were the real causes of it--my total disability in the real world w/ no friends, no solace save my writing--of comic books, not the great classics that Vecker had predicted for me, a low-paying drudge of a job whose only pleasure was the joy I took in the way my mind split when I wrote & I became for just a little while a horrible reptilian thing who battled evil & was irresistible to women. I saw my father's coffin, open in the funeral home, w/ all the garlands of flowers strewn about as though for a marriage, & I wept. My tears never flowed so freely as the pent-up anguish & loss was finally released. The d-lock whirled thru more cylinders; Time cycled backwards: I saw Pop suffering much from Alzheimer's those last few weeks before his death, w/ my mother tenderly scrubbing bedsores which harrowed to the bone; I saw him living a life of quiet desparation in front of a holo-vision whose 3D cartoons made no sense to him, an occassional flash of smile at some silly animal; I saw him riding his bicycle & getting hope- lessly lost in a terminally small town; I saw him before the illness had been diagnosed, working w/ his electronic test-e- quipment--nothing makes sense; the world is insane & not me. Then I remembered him as he wanted to be remembered--a Union leader; my tears, my sobs became a hurricane. "Why are you crying?" Toni asked, drawing back. "It's not all that bad being a chick; that gizmo you've got--it could turn me into a guy, couldn't it? Nomadis?" I shuddered. "You...know?" She now bent to fit the clean shirt around my new form. I shuddered w/ homosexual fear & loathing. She said, "You babbled quite a bit in Isolation. A magical ring, a ring which changes your identity. Of course, Melanie just thought it was part of your comic book fantasies, but I took a close look at your ring. Fingerprint-sensitized controls w/ strange symbolic markings...not something you'd find in a Crackerjack box. So you replicated your Y-chromosome, right? Is there any way for you to get turned back, or do I have to like turn into a lesbian if I want to be your girlfriend?~ All at once my heart skipped a beat. "You`re serious? You want to be my girlfriend?" Then I saw a sweet young thing in the mirror. It could never be. # End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.