These two are very young: one mustache is still sparse, one face is still blotchy.  Their youth is touching, but I know I can’t be deceived by it.  The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns.  They haven’t yet learned about existence through time.  You have to go slowly with them.

Last week they shot a woman, right about here.  She was a Martha.  She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb.  They thought she was a man in disguise.  There have been such incidents.

What we’re aiming for, says Aunt Lydia, is a spirit of camaraderie among women.  We must all pull together.

Camaraderie, shit, says Moira through the hole in the toilet cubicle.  Right fucking on, Aunt Lydia, as they used to say.  How much do you want to bet she’s got Janine down on her knees?  What you think they get up to in that office of hers?  I bet she’s got her working away on that dried-up old withered–.

Moira! I say.

Moira what?  she whispers.  You know you’ve thought it.

It doesn’t do any good to talk like that, I say, feeling nevertheless the impulse to giggle.  But I still pretended to myself, then that we should try to preserve something resembling dignity.

You were always such a wimp, Moira says, but with affection.  It does so do good.  It does.

And she’s right, I know that now, as I kneel on this undeniably hard floor, listening to the ceremony dron one.  There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power.  There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling.  It’s like a spell, of sorts.  It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.  In the paint of the washroom cubicle someone unknown had scratched: Aunt Lydia sucks.  It was like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion.  There mere idea of Aunt Lydia doing such a thing was in itself heartening.

So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish.

I can hear from all around us a susurration, like the rustling of insects in tall dry grass: a cloud of whispers.

We can feel their eyes on us as we walk in our red dresses two by two across to the side opposite them.  We are being looked at, assessed, whispered about; we can feel it, like tiny ants running on our bare skins.

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.  I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over?  All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even,  in the flesh.  Pain marks you, but too deep to see.  Out of sight, out of mind.

But I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something.

To be a man, watched by women.  It must be entirely strange.  To have them watching him all the time.  To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next?  To have them flinch when he moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps.  To have them sizing him up.  To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available.

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision.  To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman, who can see in the darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

She watches him from within.  We’re all watching him.  It’s the one thing we can really do, and it is not for nothing: if he were to falter, fail, or die, what would become of us?  No wonder he’s like a boot, hard on the outside, giving shape to a pulp of a tenderfoot.  That’s just a wish.  I’ve been watching him for some time and he’s given no evidence, of softness.

But watch out, Commander, I tell him in my head.  I’ve got my eye on you.  One false move and I’m dead.

Still, it must be hell, to be a man, like that.
It must be just fine.
It must be hell.
It must be very silent.

Love? said the Commander.

That’s better.  That’s something I know about.  We can talk about that.

Falling in love, I said.  Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.  How could he have made such light of it?  Sneered even.  As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim.  It was, on the contrary, heavy going.  It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space.  Everyone knew that.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him.  We were falling women.  We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.  God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner.  The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.  We were waiting, always, for the incarnation.  That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time.  That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain.  You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you’d wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men?  Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men?  Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go?  Who can tell what they really are?  Under their daily-ness.

Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn’t love me?

Or you’d remember stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found–often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst–in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed.  There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtain, leaving on lights.  These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you.  And for the most part they did.  Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.

But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight.  With that man you wanted it to work, to work out.  Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man.  If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too.  Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with a bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise.  If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.  Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves.  And so we would change the man, for another one.  Change, we were sure, was for the better always.  We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives.  I was like that too, I did that too.  Like was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last.  If he hadn’t been frozen in that way.  Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.

In former times they would send you a little package, of belongings: what he had with him when he died.  That’s what they would do, in wartime, my mother said.  How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say?  Make your life a tribute to the loved one.  And he was, the loved.  One.

Is, I say.  Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?