The Future of Birds.

a novelette by Mike O'Driscoll.

Foreword.

The story in its original form was written in the early 90s, prompted by public and media reaction to HIV and AIDS, and by my own coming to terms with a couple of friends who were diagnosed in the mid 80s with HIV and who've since died of AIDS related illnesses.

I'd written a couple of stories prior to this about AIDS as a political issue, and about the scapegoating of those infected with the virus. The immediate catalyst for this story was watching a doc.u.mentary on television about the transs.e.xual scene in Rio de Janeiro. The partic.i.p.ants in the doc.u.mentary were, on the whole, motivated by financial need into undergoing gender rea.s.signment - the simple economics were that young male prost.i.tutes could make more money after gender rea.s.signment than if they had continued to work as males.

The programme prompted me into thinking about what else might provoke such drastic surgery, and it wasn't too long before I came up with the notion of a gender specific virus, one which, as in the story, targeted only women. This allowed me to explore the ways in which those who were unaffected might relate to or exploit those who were infected. Although other factors such as poverty, ambition or s.e.xuality might have motivated the two main protagonists, the fact remains that in a.s.suming a female s.e.xuality, they joined the ranks of the used and abused. Whatever other horrors HIV has forced us to confront, at least it isn't, like my invented virus, gender selective.

The Future of Birds by Mike O'Driscoll

While Dr Kleinfeld carries out his gynaecological explorations, I try to recall a life beyond the Sanctuary. It is an old game, one whose necessity is greater than ever now that the parameters of existence are closing in on me. The old dream has become a sour and sterile reality; my new dreams are of the disease.

Dr Kleinfeld completes his probing and unhooks my legs from the stirrups.

He makes notes in silence, ignoring me; his report is for Spengler's eyes, not mine. Seeking some rea.s.surance, I ask him, "And how is my c.u.n.t, Doctor?"

He says, "Is it necessary to use such terminology?"

"That's what it is."

"No no," he protests. "Had you undergone rea.s.signment surgery in Brazil, then such a crude appellation would be appropriate." And then he's off into his spiel about the techniques he developed to construct my l.a.b.i.a, c.l.i.toris and v.a.g.i.n.a, and the breakthrough he'd achieved in being able to lubricate the v.a.g.i.n.a from the seminal vesicles and cowpers glands, on and on like some demented Frankenstein.

"I've been having dreams," I cut him off.

"Isn't that the purpose of dreamdust," he says, an attempt at sarcasm that doesn't become him. "Why do you need that stuff?"

"I've been dreaming about the disease."

I see the momentary panic in his eyes before it is replaced by a synthetic rea.s.surance. "It can't harm you, my dear."

"It killed the woman who discovered it," I say.

He smiles and says, "A woman, Estela, which only confirms my point. What Dr Komatsu found in her tests on pre-cancerous cells from a patient's ovaries - the dysfunctional estrogen - merely served to ill.u.s.trate what it was she would die from."

"She was an expert," I persist. "And she couldn't save herself."

Kleinfeld shakes his head, as if speaking to a capricious child. "It caught up with her too fast. By the time she discovered that luteinizing hormone was triggering an abnormal reaction in estrogen, and that symptoms were only manifesting in women, she was already at the haemorrhaging stage. She lived just long enough to establish the viral origins of the gonadotrophin mutation. It was left to others to prove that this Hormonal Dysfunction Virus caused the disease."

"But I carry the virus," I tell him, watching his reaction.

"Yes, as do eighty per cent of males; but there are absolutely no cases of activation of the disease in men."

"How do you know it will stay that way?"

"Our knowledge of HDV is still growing, but the latest research indicates that the presence of male hormones may inhibit the viral activation. It's apparent that HDV is hereditary, and lays dormant in both male and female until the onset of a premature p.u.b.erty. When the pituitary gonadotrophins are at a high enough level to stimulate production of the s.e.x hormones, this process triggers the virus which in turn causes the dysfunction of the estrogen in the ovaries. The indications are that when s.e.x hormone production begins in males, the androgens produced somehow prevent the virus from becoming active."

"I produce high levels of estrogen," I say.

"Yes," he agrees, "but you still produce androgens in sufficient quant.i.ties to counteract HDV." He pauses, as if to savour a triumph. "A feature of the surgery I performed on you six years ago; you carry the virus but it cannot interact with your production of female hormones. The triggering process cannot take place."

Despite the words, I sense his doubt. "Am I to be replaced?"

He frowns. "What have I just told you? There are no reported cases of Komatsu's Syndrome in transs.e.xuals."

Soon afterwards, Heinrich, my null, drives me back through the morning rain to my apartment overlooking the River Spree. As I undress I hear the phone hum but I make no move to answer it. He picks it up, listens, then informs me that Spengler wishes to speak to me.

Spengler owns The Birds of The Crystal Plumage. He had me brought to Berlin; everything I have, has come from him - this apartment, the car, the clothes, the dust and the body, most of all the body. Sometimes I feel I have as little free will as Heinrich. He is a eunuch in mind as well as in body, conditioned by hypnotics to respond only to my commands.

Reluctantly, I take the phone. "Estela," Spengler says, "Some business a.s.sociates are stopping in town tonight. I want to take them to the club.

They're keen to see your act."

"They always are," I tell him. "I don't feel well."

Mock concern creeps into his voice. "What is it now, my dear?"

"Bad dreams."

Spengler laughs, a brittle, humourless sound. "Don't be stupid, you know they came for you." He goes on to tell me which costume to wear, which jewellery, which perfume. "I'll expect you at eight. Be in a good mood, Estela, don't disappoint them."

This life in paradise is my reward; it is the way I profit from the disease. I remember months of preparation, even after the surgery - instruction in oriental s.e.xual techniques, as well more cerebral refinements, French, German and English languages; literature; art - I can hold my own in the most refined or debauched company. And I recall my first years in Berlin, when the bars of my cage remained invisible.

I enter the bedroom, searching my body for signs of corruption. I lay on the bed as Heinrich comes in with a crystal pipe on a tray. He loads the bowl with dreamdust. As he heats it, my antic.i.p.ation is tinged with the hope that I won't dream.

Late afternoon finds me stronger, vaguely pleased at some dust-induced memory. This sense of well-being lasts only until Rudy Thessinger calls.

"What do you want?" I ask him.

Laughter flows down the line, poisoning my brain. Rudy and I go back a long way, to Rio de Janeiro, more than six years ago. Rudy brought me to Berlin. He's Spengler's talent scout, my pimp.

As usual he enquires about my well being, then says, "I have some news about an old friend of yours."

"What friend?" I ask. I have no friends, only clients.

"Was Rio so bad you've forgotten who took you away from giving head on the Rua Princesa Isabel?"

I recall a name from the dream. "Cledilce."

"She's been in Paris a month, undergoing rea.s.signment surgery."

"You've seen her?"

"The word is she looks stunning," Rudy says, ignoring my question. "You can imagine what-"

I hang up before his mindgames begin to sicken me. The new image is fixed in my brain, the face from my other life. Heinrich enters with a fix of dust and I surprise myself by refusing it. I'm not certain what I feel, but it is something strong.

Heinrich's skilled hands ma.s.sage my dark flesh forcing tension from my limbs. I sometimes wonder why he allowed - why any null allows - himself to be surgically altered, his brain adapted so that the production of endorphins is tied to certain emotional states. Is it enough to have all feelings of self-interest sublimated into a desire to serve? To enslave the brain in return for the slow dripfeed of endorphins to its pleasure receptors? To be free forever of guilt and fear and stress?

Perhaps, in his rare moments of lucidity, he wonders about my alteration?

Images begin to clarify, take on meaning. I sift through the chaos of memories, seeking to impose on them a sense of order.

I was not always Estela de Brito. I see a young boy, nine or ten, living on the streets of Rochina, the stinking favela that sprawled up over the lure of the wealthy suburb of Sa Conrado. And a sister, a year older, a pretty girl who sold her body so that they might eat. But already the teeth-marks of the disease were on her flesh; there were nights when the boy awoke in the corrugated iron shack that was home, to her cries of pain as blood poured from between her legs. There were no parents.

Gangsters ruled Rochina with machine guns and calculated terror; occasionally some City politician wanting to make a name for himself would send the police into the favelas to wipe out a few marginals - low life petty thieves; the politician's face would make the tv news and things would go on as before. Business-financed death squads would execute children; a cleansing process, ridding the city of future criminals, making Rio safe for gringo tourists. Their bullets spared the girl the worst ravages of the disease. The boy left Rochina and graduated to picking tourists pockets on Copacabana, and from there to the docks at Maua, where he learned to give head for ten dollars a trick. Soon, he was working the streets off Rua Princesa Isabel, discovering that he could double his take if he dressed as a girl. Evenings, he'd work the cars parked along the seafront, blowing the men on their way home from work; in one car, suck suck, open the door, spit it out and move on to the next vehicle; for an hour or two each evening, a prolonged chorus of slamming cardoors.

And all the while, the boy worked on his appearance, improving his make-up and clothes, avoiding the older hookers and pimps till one day he gave lip to a marginal who wanted his money. The man was going to cut him bad and would have too, if it hadn't been for the tall, raven haired figure who buried a knife in the man's ribs. That was his first meeting with Cledilce Macedo. He was sixteen, streetsmart, and was making more money than the boy had thought possible from giving head. Cledilce's johns - American and European tourists - were a long way up from the factory workers and dockers among whom the boy plied his trade. They had to be, because Cledilce was a Bird, a transs.e.xual on a female hormone programme, and like any other route out of the gutter, hormones cost big money. He took the boy home to a shabby apartment on the sixth floor of a block on Rua Toneleiros. He got him on to hormones too and told him he needed a new name.

For three years he ... I learned, developing and refining my body, making contacts, saving money and loving Cledilce. At first, I worried that I would no longer be able to perform s.e.xually, that it would feel like nothing at all, but the strength of Cledilce's erection soon put my mind at rest. There would be no loss of libido he, or rather she, explained, not until after the operation. And even then, we wouldn't have to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e to experience o.r.g.a.s.m; s.e.x, she said, was mainly in the head. As my b.r.e.a.s.t.s grew and I lost my facial hair, I began to worry about the operation itself. I had heard tales of the awful consequences of the gender rea.s.signments carried out in the Centro clinics, even saw the evidence of their botched surgery with my own eyes. Till Cledilce had finally shared the dream with me, the dream of escaping to 'sanctuary,'

where Parisian surgeons - not Centro butchers - would sculpt us anew, transforming us so that we would feel what women were meant to feel.

As Heinrich sits me up to arrange my jet black hair into a dazzling coiffure, one that, like my body, will impress Spengler's important friends, I think: they lied to us.

Heinrich guides the Mercedes through rain slick streets, along Kanstra.s.se past shabby, smoke-filled kneipen, into Kurfurstendam, past sidewalk cafes with gla.s.sed-in terraces where unblemished middle-aged women sit alone with their drinks, past the Komodie theatre till it pulls up outside the 'The Blue Angel'. Young Babes - s.e.xually precocious girls of nine or ten - flaunt themselves outside the entrance, some of them menstruating so profusely that, even through their heavy padding, blood streams down their stockinged legs. Images of Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich fill their minds, feeding the awful need that has drawn them here to plead with implacable doormen, seeking to gain entrance to the scene of their mentors' former glories. One crumbling, anaemic beauty falls to the pavement. The others start bickering over her as she crawls away to die.

Then the doormen step out on to the pavement and form a cordon around Spengler, who comes out into the rain to greet me. The Babes try to grasp his arms and legs, but he strides through them, all lean arrogance and efficiency clothed in a black lounge suit. I get out of the car and he holds me at a slight distance, surveying my array of scarlet feathers and blue chiffon as if I were some prized possession. I move past him, into the club where a troupe of Birds re-enact a Sapphic orgy on the main stage, while in the discreet alcoves an a.s.sortment of Birds and Babes provide a range of s.e.xual favours for the rich clientele.

Backstage, I pop an Aktive 'poule against my neck to blunt reality. A house null leads me down a blue corridor to Spengler's private suite, reserved for the entertainment of important friends. The null clips wires to my costume as Spengler introduces the queen of The Birds of the Crystal Plumage, and then a taped barrage of Brazillian drums heralds my entrance.

There are twelve men in the room, seated on leather couches, their desires caged in refinement and respectability. I ruffle my feathers in time to the music as I strut across the marble stage, offering them glimpses into hidden dreams. Then Claudio swoops into view, suspended over the stage like a magnificent condor, the twelve inch p.e.n.i.s that Dr Kleinfeld has crafted for him, erect beneath the black plumage that adorns his laburnum flesh. He sweeps me up in his arms and l.u.s.t thrums in the air like the sound of swarming insects, hot and feverish, no different from the l.u.s.t of the dockworkers at Maua who came to be blown by a half-formed Bird. We glide over the stage, Claudio and I, borne on sensuous rhythms as we act out an improbable seduction. Until finally, in mid-air, he plucks my feathers with exaggerated care and then plunges his meat into me. Whatever perfunctory pleasures I once might have derived from these performances has been worn down by soulless repet.i.tion. We f.u.c.k like birds on the wing, Claudio's precision tool grinding against the template of my v.a.g.i.n.a. The only thing I feel is numb. He withdraws before he comes so that the audience may appreciate the bounty he showers over my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a seemingly endless rain of s.e.m.e.n; another of Kleinfeld's miracles.

The applause is thunderous as Claudio flies from view, while I wait without curiosity to see which of his guests Spengler has selected for partic.i.p.ation in the second act of my performance. I feel no surprise as all twelve men begin to undress and crawl up on to the cool, white marble like hungry dogs, ravenous for a taste of game.

Backstage later on, as Heinrich bathes my bruised and battered body, I reflect on the bitterness I feel; it's not the taste of s.e.m.e.n or any sense of degradation - I became inured to such things long ago on the docks at Maua - it's the realisation of what I did to get here.

Spengler enters the room. "You pleased them, Estela," he says. "You may go now."

"Rudy called me," I tell him.

"You are looking forward to seeing him again?"

"He says Cledilce Macedo is coming to Berlin."

"So I hear. It's nothing for you to worry about."

"I don't feel well," I tell him. "I'm not sleeping."

He frowns. "Kleinfeld said you were in prime condition. It's the dust perhaps? You mentioned bad dreams."

"It helps me to remember," I say, wondering at his immunity to the poison in my words.

"There are things we can give you to help you forget."

"I want to remember."

Spengler sighs, a pained expression on his face. "You mustn't make things difficult," he says. "For either of us." Then he leaves and I tell Heinrich to fetch the car and drive me home.

Rudy is waiting, lounging on the bed, drinking my cognac. He smiles behind his wire-rim spectacles, then gets up and kisses me lightly on the cheek.

I hate it when he does that, like a dog p.i.s.sing against a tree, marking its territory. "It's late, Rudy, what do you want?"

In his white Chinos and loose, Hawaiian shirt, he looks like a lost tourist, lacking only a camcorder. He runs a hand through his thick, brown hair and says, "You have been wondering about Cledilce?"

I ignore the question and pour myself a cognac.

He follows me to the drinks cabinet. "In two days she starts performing for the Birds of Paradise," he says.

"So soon?" I ask. "What about refinements?"

Rudy sips his drink. "They don't place the same emphasis on refinements anymore. She had one week with a Chinese courtesan. You're unique, Estela, a jewelled Bird. But these days, there isn't the same demand for cultured conversation; n.o.body wants to discuss Gunter Gra.s.s or the poetry of Ernest Newboy, they just want to f.u.c.k you. This bothers you?"

It does but I don't admit it, not to Rudy. "Spengler sent you?"

Rudy removes his gla.s.ses, holds them in front of him as if to magnify my features. "We talked. He's concerned about you, as an investment of course. I spoke with Kleinfeld; he mentioned you're worried about the disease."

"Shouldn't I be?"

Rudy shrugs his shoulders. "No, nor about Cledilce."

"I never wanted to leave her behind. That was you."

Rudy walks to the door, hesitates, and says, "There wasn't time, or have you forgotten what you did? By the time that mess was cleared up, our contract with her had lapsed." And then he is gone.

His parting words leave a fear stain on my mind. Faithful Heinrich brings the pipe. He heats the bowl and I hit on the dust, holding it down deep in my lungs, letting it flow into every dark corner of my mind, letting it illuminate the past. In the dream, I first see Cledilce, and then slowly, everything else begins to take shape around her.

Tall, copper-skinned and haughty, seventeen year old Estela de Brito sipped Caipirinha outside a streetfront cafe and listened as the rhythms of the batucadas drifted up from Leblon beach. She was on a natural high.