Excerpts from The Hermaphrodite

Daniel Grandbois

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Book One, Chapter Four

In which Simone undulates

and Kree excogitates

Simone’s surrender commingled beautifully with the cotton fibers of her panties, staining them with fertility icons and incomprehensible crystalline formations like snow. Oceans can be drawn into glaciers to reveal hidden connections between lands.

Kree lifted her hips and pushed her dress beneath them. When he forced his breath through her panties, a tickling twinkled inside her, but it seemed bodies away, dinosaur bodies away. The sort of tickling you can never get enough of, yet, if you did, you’d be crushed under the weight of dinosaurs.

He rested his head against her thigh. The nest of her pubic hair showed through her panties. A single hair poked out. Kree toyed with it, then traced the contours of her sex, which gave off heat. He snuck a finger under the fabric.

Simone got an ice cube from the freezer, popped it into her mouth and calved it down.

(Do you see Australopithecus, the first upright man, beating back an advancing glacier with the thigh bone of a saber-toothed cat? Do you see a saber-tooth burying its tooth bones into the skull of an Australopithecine man and dragging him to a cave, dragging him by the bone? Millions of years later, a member of Homo sapiens will find the skull with holes like a bowling ball and imagine.)

Simone leaned over Kree's legs and put his bone in her mouth.

(In his lifetime, Kree's balls may produce enough semen to fill an oil tanker. How gung-ho would the American government be to protect a ship like that through the Straits of Hormuz? What if America didn't protect her and an enemy blew a hole in her? What would happen to all that semen, not to mention those seamen? We could have an unprecedented semen spillage in the Straits of Hormuz. Would it be toxic to the fish and plant life? Maybe the sperm cells would swim around blindly and fertilize everything in sight. Would the spillage remain a roving blob, or would it solidify to form a new island, a vacation paradise with milk-white beaches, where deluded Christian women could go and upon their return claim they were bearing the children of immaculate conceptions?)

Kree fell into musing. “I'm thinking about our perceptual isolation,” he said. “People hear one another as they hear kelp growing beneath the ocean—”

Simone touched his lips. Words sprang from her mouth like a frog's curled tongue to catch the flies buzzing in Kree’s ear and give him a wet-willy besides.

He rolled to his side. She hugged him from behind. Her eyelids dripped down her eyes like wax down a candle. She took hold of his penis as she was falling asleep, as if it were the handle on the door to her dreams.

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Book Two, Chapter Two

One: A Simpleminded Morning

A pulsating, quasi-quasar perception spun a dream that woke me, a dream in which I was a laundry chute between universes. I sucked dirty clothes out of one and deposited them in another. No life-form on either side could figure out what I was or what I was doing. They watched dirty clothes appear or disappear, and they smiled like Eskimos.

I rolled out of bed and walked naked across my lawn to see if Alfred Lumberpunch was home, wanting to tell him of my dream. Alfred lived in a shed he’d built there. Before the shed, he lived in a tree—a story in itself—but the woodpeckers got to him. I wrote a poem about it.

Peckers of wood inside a tree

Where Alfred L. has carved a home—

Don’t they hear his coming near,

Along a path of sticks and stones?

Fo, fum, he comes on lumberdrums.

Careful, birds, do not disturb

A slumbering Lumberpunch.

Is there one of you who’d prefer,

Over sating your humdrum need for lunch,

Becoming caulk inside a crack?

Alfred wrote a melody for my poem. He was playing it on his oboe. My feet got wet with dew. I lay down on the dew and listened to Alfred play. It was a simpleminded morning.

I forgot why I’d come into the yard.

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Two: Tree-Hole Home

Before he moved to the shed on my lawn, Alfred had a dream. Most of the dream wasn't there because he dreamed of a hole. He couldn't put his finger on the significance of the hole. It seemed to curve local space-time. Most certainly it affected Alfred's local motion by sponging him up.

On awakening, Alfred set out to actualize the hole. Grabbing a hatchet for the rough work and a butter knife for the detail work, he abandoned his two-room cabin and headed deeper into the woods.

He carved the hole out of a tree, then crawled inside and fell to sleep.

Thus began Alfred’s life as a tree-hole hermit, which was much the same as his life as a two-room-cabin hermit. He fished in Rocky Mountain creeks; bugled with bull elk; waggle-danced with bees; broke pine needles and wild grasses like bread; sniffed mosses, roots and the backends of beetles.

One day, as Alfred was meditating in his tree, using the knocking of a woodpecker as his mantra, the significance of the hole became clear. It revealed itself as a kind of bird that took him in its beak and soared through the stratosphere and out into space, until the man’s humble hole took on the properties of an astronomical black hole, to which Alfred surrendered, as one must.

Some years later, a drought in the region helped bring him back. With insect populations low, birds of all kinds were starving. A delirious woodpecker entered the tree-hole unaltered by the forces that had zapped Alfred out of existence, perhaps because it knew nothing of theoretical physics. The bird saw something like a man and a tree grown together. Though the man part looked petrified, the woodpecker thought it could hear something moving inside. It went for Alfred's scalp. Flapping with excitement, it dug its claws in and pecked.

The attack roused a reversal of that quasi-fatal (for Alfred) series of events that had occurred years before. The black hole faltered and blinked like an incompetent warlock. Finally, it vanished, leaving Alfred (as he knew himself) back in his dream-inspired-hatchet-actualized-tree-hole-home. Here is the first word to reach his now fully awakened tongue: “Fuck!”

He struck the bird and pried out its claws. “Fuck you, woodpecker!” he said, crushing the thing against the wall of his home.

Alfred left the hole behind as an artifact, as testimony to human ingenuity. Artifacts are postcards from the past, sent to us to corroborate the places it has been, the things it has done, but postcards are flimsy, a thousand times removed from their subjects’ density.

Here’s a shard of ancient pottery.

Here’s Miami Beach.

Here’s a chunk of burnt wood that supported an early roof structure.

Here’s the Eiffel Tower.

Here’s a humanoid skull with a cat's tooth in the brow ridge.

Here’s the Parthenon.

Here’s one fucking dead woodpecker pasted in a tree.

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Book Two, Chapter Four

One: The First Footsteps of Rumor Substantiation

A rumor had spread through The Perception Potlucks that an imbecilic woman was being blown about the foothills by her own flatulence. Some said it was really a bowlegged man with bad breath. Years after The Potlucks were over, Kree, Simone, Thelma, Alfred and I set out to look for the creature. The world of the seventeen Four Dimension Generals was making us all a little claustrophobic. Though we didn’t expect to, we found the woman and the man—in the same body. We found a hermaphrodite.

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Two: There It Was

There it was.

Ignoring us, as if we were only pockets of air, it watched us with its ears. At last, Simone broke the distance by stepping toward it, momentarily bunching the air between them. The hermaphrodite turned toward us. Though its cockeyed stare was shaky, its breath was sure. It arrived like a wind nudged forward by an advancing glacier. The wind blew our hair back in slow motion. When the hermaphrodite inhaled, the glacier receded, leaving nothing behind of what we thought we were.

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Three: The Changing of the Day

It guided us to a clearing that housed a gigantic tepee made of patches of translucent, colored material that felt like animal hide. Somehow, it stepped through the material. We followed like ducklings.

Much as our hands had grasped the painted paintbrush in Alfred’s shed, so the hermaphrodite’s hands now grasped a distant yellow patch that was too bright to look at. It plucked it from the fabric. The neighboring patches must have rushed to the wound like platelets, for there was never a hole where the yellow one had been. The hermaphrodite threw the patch like a Frisbee—that’s how big the tepee was. Where it hit the fabric, it stuck.

It was easier to look at the sea of blue patches waving around us. Gazing at them softened me as if I were a sculpture of myself done in butter. I lay down. My back yielded shape to the ground. A dream woke from its slumber, a dark sun having risen in its window.

When I awoke from that dream, I found myself out-of-doors with the others, the bright sky over our heads—but wait, Waking Self, I was in a tepee when I fell asleep! Waking Self scrambled to reconstruct the correct setting.

Back in the tepee, the fabric around us was a miniature sky.

Kree’s fingers worked a lamb’s-wool patch from the fabric and replaced it with a gray one. Wordless, we joined the game.

Words are lighter than air, lighter even than the emptiest pockets of space. Air circulates. Matter conservates (even at its meekest densities). Words propagate for a moment, and then they're gone, like radio waves reaching through space to touch aliens but not finding any, or holy men reaching through flesh to touch justice but only finding God.

On the ground, starred and starless patches of dark hide were piled like Persian rugs. We used these to make our nights.

Four: The Laughter of Palms

Seasons of our self-made days had passed when, out of the blue, the tepee dissolved. The sun I’d once known bulged up over the world. It looked swollen, but it was not more real than our patch of yellow hide. To illustrate as much, the hermaphrodite plucked it from the sky. Tossing it like a beach ball, its hands laughed with broad palms.

Then, one of those hands became a huge bee. The other, a flower.

I understood the bee’s waggle dance. A field of flowers was very near, on a course a certain angle off the sun.

Out-striping any tiger, the bee insisted that we go. It leaned in and pressed me on, its hind end quivering.

I wanted nothing more than to oblige the bee, but, alas, I could not fly. I tried walking, but it only grew impatient. Finally, disgusted with my ineptness, the bee disintegrated buzzingly into a peach-colored lump of ash that floated in the air, a lump I soon recognized as the hermaphrodite's hand.

Five: The Dummy Head Throws Up

A volcano rose before us, its mouth hardened into a horrible dummy head.

The dummy head threw up.

For a moment, I knew that this too was the hermaphrodite. But the moment caught fire, and I had to run.

Already ahead of me, Alfred’s beard had grown a tail of debris, like a comet.

The others were out of sight.

Suddenly, I came upon Kree—seated on the ground.

“Come on!” I said, thrusting my arms under his. He laughed and made himself too heavy to lift. I swung around to see how close the lava was, but it was gone. So was the volcano.

Kree rolled in somersaults around me and then hopped to his feet.

We stood in a desert. The others were nowhere to be seen.

All at once, we broke into fits of laughter—madmen, frothing at the mouth, nose and ass. Stopping as quickly, we examined one another, unable to remember the joke. Something didn’t seem right about Kree. He sat down again and pulled his knees to his chest. That’s when two others approached. Thelma… and another Kree?

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Six: Shells of Kree

Kree standing before me.

Kree seated beside me.

Thelma’s fingers gripped my arm, her insect eyes strained on the sitting Kree, the one we assumed to be an imposter. The Kree Thelma had arrived with squatted beside the other and touched him all over, probing under his kneecaps, making them float. In imitation, he sat beside him and pulled his knees to his chest.

They were bookends.

There came a moment when it was clear that our Kree had moved into the body of the other. I felt the migration as though a snow had covered me and then melted.

More Krees appeared around us. It was his field of me’s. Thelma let go of my arm. Blood flowed again.

Seven: Cerebral Sphincter

We found Alfred and Simone. They were counting Krees. As in the Potluck vision, the figures collapsed into one body. The Kree that remained had a spirit in his eye. To see him that way quieted us down as only a sense of purpose can.

Disguised as a cactus, the hermaphrodite stole up on us. It poked needles in our asses, then gave Kree a playful wink, as if to say, Watch this.

A sphincter formed in the side of its head, dripping liquid. The hermaphrodite massaged the sphincter until half its forearm was enclosed in the muscle. Squinting, it seemed to search for something. With great care, it retrieved what it had found. A flounder flopped in its palm.

The hermaphrodite acted puzzled by the fish, as if it were scraping its brain stem for flakes of something to put together again.

Kree joined the charade, cocking his head this way and that, putting his eye right up to the fish’s.

Catching an insight, the hermaphrodite nodded, which caused its cerebral sphincter to gush. The flounder fell from its palm and burrowed into the sand. Losing all expression, the hermaphrodite straightened up. Its eyes rolled into its skull.

Then it came—a flood of saltwater out the hermaphrodite's cerebral sphincter.

Eight: Saltwater Brainchild

The water fell to earth maybe fifty years away but gathered quickly until it loomed over us on all sides, tossing froth to and fro like a mesmerist, whispering, “You're getting very frightened.” It filled in above and below us to who knows what depths, enclosing us in a pocket of air.

Though the hermaphrodite's face remained expressionless, it had aged. The saltwater must have drawn the pigments from its skin and hair. It dropped to its knees, its muscles hanging like slime from its bones. As the gush from its head slowed to a trickle, our pocket sanctuary threatened to cave in.

The last drop dripped out of its head with hardly enough mass to reach its ear. I watched it dry up. I watched the hermaphrodite dry up and crumble to dust, which drifted away on ripples and folds in the entrails of the hermaphrodite’s saltwater brainchild.

Nine: Exhaled Navigational Instrument

Our bubble popped.

My fingers scratched at my liquid tomb.

If only that flounder were visible, or anything at all. I chose a direction and swam for my life. Can you tell which way is up by the waving of your hair? Suddenly remembering the air in my lungs, I released some and followed the feel of bubbles tickling my face. First, a hint of light. Then, cascading fibers of it, like the fingers of God, plunged into the water to pull me up by the eyes. Breaking the surface, I choked and coughed, and the fingers bled back into daylight.

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Ten: It’s Those Flat Rolling Eyes

Thelma was shouting: “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I answered. “What about the others?”

Simone came through near Thelma, followed by Alfred beside me.

“I thought I was following you,” Alfred said, gasping. “Then, it swam away below.”

“What did?” I asked.

Kree did not surface. We dove and saw nothing. I dove again and was about to come up when a shape caught my eye—large enough to be a man. I swam toward it. It turned toward me. Whatever it was, it was alive.

“I thought I had him,” I shouted a moment later, “but it was a seal.”

“That’s what I followed,” said Alfred.

Plunging in again, I was startled to find the seal at my feet, its body rolling, while its half-dollar eyes remained fixed on mine. I surfaced, breathless, for I knew that seal was Kree.

Eleven: Something to Stand on

I needed to put my foot down, but I was floating in a sea.

Time passed, and then land came up and pushed me out of the water. The water tumbled off the landscape to leave me and the others (except Kree) in the foothills of Boulder, where we’d ventured once upon a time to see if we could find the bowlegged, unwieldy-titted thing we’d heard about.

I felt like tumbleweed. How was I to know if this world were any more real than the others? But the scent of spruce set in motion a soothing string of recollections. The shrill ji-ji-ji-ji-ji of the White-throated Swift did the same.

I was a daydream clinging to the edge of a falling leaf.

The others were beside me. They had leaves in their eyes. We waited. The waiting was an end in itself, like waiting for a fish to bite—using thread from your socks as line and bologna as bait.

I thought about Simone, the isolated shower near her hips that day in the submarine sandwich shop. I thought about Alfred, his tree-hole-home, the Glacial Epoch Spaghetti he’d perfected that was left out of this story. I’d known Thelma the longest. Remembering the perceptions she’d woven into her hair, I became aware of my great hunger.

Now, Kree and the hermaphrodite walked toward us, their gaits suggesting the nonchalance of the taunted lunar landscape. They had spirits in their eyes. We had leaves in ours. For the length of one stride, the hermaphrodite became a man with frog eyes. He gave Simone a buoyant grin.

“Nathan, you son of a bitch!” she said tearfully. With its next stride, it was again the hermaphrodite.

They gazed at each of us in turn. Reflected in their eyes was the world we’d left behind, the world of the seventeen Four Dimension Generals. It was also reflected in the fisheye lens a drop of spittle produced at the corner of the hermaphrodite’s mouth.

Without warning, the hermaphrodite bounded away, deeper into the hills, shaking the ground with each footfall, plucking my heart like a string.

Kree walked back to Boulder. We followed like ducklings.

Of early French Canadian descent, Daniel Grandbois was born in Minnesota and raised in Colorado, where he lives today with his wife and children. His first book, The Hermaphrodite (An Hallucinated Memoir), with forty original woodcuts by renowned Argentine printmaker Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya and translated into Spanish by Liliana Valenzuela (Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez), is forthcoming from Green Integer in spring 2008. His second book, Unlucky Lucky Days, a collection of absurd tales and prose poems (also translated into Spanish by Liliana Valenzuela), is forthcoming from BOA Editions in June 2008. Grandbois’ writing has appeared in Fiction, Conjunctions, Sentence, Del Sol Review, ATA's Beacons, and the anthology Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, among others. For years, Daniel played upright bass for Slim Cessna's Auto Club, a punk country band that opened for Johnny Cash in Las Vegas in 1998. Currently, he plays with Tarantella, a gothic western band on a Dutch label.

Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya’s work can be found in collections around the world. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the winner of numerous biennial awards. He is the illustrator of over a dozen books, including the bestselling children’s stories from the Shinkensen Series in Japan and the collector’s edition of Salman Rushdie’s The Firebird’s Nest.