© Copyright Justin Cumberland 2008

In the end Vance decided to cut off his own testicles, or so, at least, he thought. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it, simply that he had never found the time – the right time, or the right attitude, and Melinda had certainly supplied that now.

If Melinda had once been a woman, and was now a man – or, if she had, alternately, once been a man, and was now a woman – Vance was unaware of it. Melinda seemed to him that impossible thing, a lizard in the shape of a woman, a human being who was not.

Once, on his couch in the evening, Vance had got a very clear picture of Melinda, and had seen her pain. She wasn’t human and couldn’t be, of course, anything other than a figment of his imagination. If she visited him in the morning, it was all well and good. If she rang his doorbell – well, so what?

She wasn’t real.

‘Hey Vance.’

‘You’re here again.’

‘Should I be elsewhere?’

‘You know,’ she said, coming into the room, and without invitation, ‘you really need to clean this place up, Vance; you really need to take a look at yourself, and what you’re doing, and wonder whether you couldn’t do better with what you’ve been given.’

Melinda was like this – given to profundities of a certain sort – offering consolation perhaps, in her own way.

‘Do you know, I think you have made some improvements – you’re certainly looking younger.’

But was he. ‘I don’t see it myself,’ he wanted to say, but the words were somehow stunted, and never made it out of his mouth. ‘Do you know what, Melinda,’ he managed, ‘we could go out somewhere, to a show or something. Would you like that?’

She got her coat.

***

At the seaside there were several fishing boats lined up upon the dock. The storm, the most recent one, had tossed them out of the ocean, as though all in a piece, depositing them on the walkway, where they should have been walking, but weren’t.

‘I thought we were going to a show, Vance.’

‘I like it here.’

‘You always did.’

‘Do you know, Melinda,’ he wanted to say, but was again somehow then stopped, saying only, do you known, ‘we could take this and eat it.’

‘What is it?’ Melinda asked him.

‘It’s a concoction of mine, dear; and if we’re now married, you’ll have to accept that.’

‘Would we have been married, Vance – would we have? – when you’ve seen me as a lizard? Would you like that?’

***

In the Marina building proper, Melinda took off her coat and began to dance. There was no music, but she was like this: able to make a motion without sound, and able to command the sea to do her bidding.

It rose beyond the windows, and threatenned there, in an enormous still wave, threatenning to overhwelm them.

‘You know, Vance,’ Melinda said. ‘You’re never going to be any sort of a writer if you can’t make sense…There isn’t any sense in saying nothing, and no sense in saying anything of the sort which you wish…Don’t you agree?’

The pauses in her speech seemed pregnant with time, as though she had stopped time in the intervals, and pressed onward in her search for him.

***

They were back in the apartment. ‘You oughtn’t to take that medication, you know…It isn’t good for you.’

‘What am I supposed to do about it? It’s either insanity, or it’s you.’

‘Why don’t you cut your balls off, Thomas.’

‘My name is Vance.’

‘Still, though, you could simply do it. You do have a knife.’

***

And indeed, he did, in the kitchen, have a knife; and though the foregoing seemed like a dream, he did it, what she bid, and heard them plop into the toilet before her final call.

The doorbell rang.

‘It’s Melinda, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m going away now.’