He read through a few more letters and was curious to note that not a single one had come from a male. He couldn’t say for certain whether this reflected the actual demographics of his fan mail or just his own curatorial bias, but in any case he had no memory of ever getting a letter from a dude.
Not all of his female admirers were so hot and bothered, of course.
Dear Mr. Greenyears,
I am thirteen and I hope to be a professional actress someday. I wanted to express to you in this letter that I think you are a really good actor. I saw E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears at my friend’s house during a sleepover, and even though I was really scared, I thought you did a really great job! Now I can’t wait for Titanic! Congratulations about that! How did you learn to act so great? Do you have any advice for an up-and-coming actress? I hope you win an Oscar. You totally should. Also, can you send me an autographed glossy photo please?
Sincerely,
Theresa
Not every letter was glowing. There’d been more than a few complaints from outraged mothers—as if it made any sense to grouse about the film’s content with the eighteen-year-old lead instead of, say, the writer or director. And anyway, the content wasn’t that bad. Yes, Elliott makes love to an alien, but there’s nothing full-frontal about the scene. Moreover, Korelu is clearly a female alien from a dimorphic species, and while she and Elliott can’t quite communicate yet, it’s clear from the soundtrack that they are madly in love. Some critics found it implausible and disgusting, worse than bestiality, while other, more forward-looking reviewers saw in it a bold bid for sexual equality. In any case, it stimulated discussion, which could only be a good thing considering that before long such questions would cease being theoretical.
Young man,
I hope you’re worried about the state of your soul. I saw the pitiful excuse for a film you were involved in, and I just want you to know that I found it disgusting and sad. When America goes down the tubes once and for all (it began in the sixties), we will have moral reprobates like you to thank. Don’t you know that you’re here in this world for just a brief time? Look to the state of your soul, young man, and consider yourself prayed for.
–Gertrude Winifred Gans
The irony of that penultimate line was thick. Sure enough, Dylan had remained on Earth for only a brief time after receiving that letter, though he was pretty sure Gertrude Winifred Gans was no prophet. Had she written “you’re here on this world for just a brief time,” it might have given him some real pause, but she’d written, “in this world,” and eternity hinged on that single letter of difference. Still, some atavistic, God-fearing part of him was just beginning to look to the state of his soul when Erin, mercifully, called him in to dinner. Like Aeolus bottling the winds, he stuffed the letters back in the box, and closed the lid.
As soon as he swiped away the door, the kids came and hugged his legs.
“Daddy!”
“Da—y!”
Now he was ready. Now it was nice.
• • •
The next day at school, Dylan attempted, again, to stage act 3, scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with his freshman drama class.
“Okay, so let’s review the situation here because it’s a little complicated. Who likes whom5 at this point, do you recall? Let’s start with Hermia. Whom does she like? You know what, Connor, maybe you could draw it on the board for us?”
5_____________
As a lover of language and a product of Catholic school, Dylan had grown up clearly distinguishing between “who” and “whom,” but over the course of his career he’d watched that rare inflection all but go extinct. He still used it, but his students by and large did not, and he was not so puritanical as to want to wage that losing war alone. Things change with time, whether we want them to or not, nothing lasts, and in the words of the immortal Lao Tzu (though they might as well have come from Darwin): “What is malleable is always superior to that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.”
Connor nodded and slowly lifted himself up. Friends in baseball caps on either side patted him on the shoulders as if he’d just lost a contest or a loved one. When he got to the front of the room, Dylan handed him a green marker.
“All right, so Connor, please draw a girl on the board for us. You can keep it simple. A bathroom girl will do.”
“A bathroom girl?”
“You know, the restroom girl? The intragalactic sign for girl?”
“There’s an intragalactic sign for girl?”
“Sorry. I misspoke. I mean the international sign for girl, the Terran one.”
Even after the better part of two decades on New Taiwan, Dylan still put his foot in his mouth like this on a regular basis.6
6_____________
The problem here was that while the natives were more than 99.8 percent identical to humans at the genetic level, and while they reproduced sexually in much the manner that humans did—their genitals being homologous to, and very much resembling, the human penis and vagina—their secondary sex characteristics were almost diametrically flipped, such that the vagina-bearing ones, or females, exhibited traits Terrans typically associated with males. Relative to the penis-bearing ones, i.e. the males, the females had bigger frames, deeper voices, and more body hair. They dressed plainly and practically and kept their hair short. And despite their being the ones to carry the babies (the gestation period of the natives, incidentally, was considerably shorter: just over seven months), the females were traditionally cast in the role of the provider. The males, on the other hand, had smaller frames, higher-pitched voices, and less body hair. They grew the hair on their heads long and invested a great deal of time in washing and styling it. They tended to wear makeup, jewelry, and clothing roughly analogous to those worn by Terran females in first-world temperate zones. Humans had hoped to find on other worlds some radically different gender roles and relations than those that obtained on Earth. Should there turn out to be intelligent life, they had hoped to find they came in a single gender, or three, or twenty. They had hoped for fluid genders, androgynes, sequential hermaphrodites. Alas, all of the newly settled worlds had turned up dimorphous hominids at the tops of their respective food chains. There was nothing, sexually, on New Taiwan that one couldn’t find on a walk through Greenwich Village, with one notable exception: the male, penis and all, was the lactating member of the species. Terran biologists still hadn’t puzzled out exactly how the birth of the baby from the female stimulated the hormonal changes in the male that resulted in milk production, but it was theorized that pheromones played a key role just as it did in the equally mystical-seeming Terran phenomenon of women’s menstrual periods synchronizing themselves with those of other women living in close proximity. The point here being that, beyond perhaps + and - , there was no universal sign for male and female. Dylan’s default mode of thinking was not just politically incorrect; it was flat-out wrong.
Connor drew:
“Okay,” Dylan said. “That’s Hermia. Now whom does Hermia love?”
“Lysander,” said Becky.
“Correctamundo. Connor, please draw Terran-restroom Lysander next to Terran-restroom