The Twenty-Third Century: Nontraditional Love

Translated from Russian by Geoffrey Carlson

“Life is a place where one cannot live.”

– Marina Tsvetaeva, Poem of the End

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

– George Orwell, 1984

Prologue
Confession of a Second-Rate Man

There are fewer and fewer of us. People laugh at us. They make jokes. To be honest, the jokes have become tiresome. It is difficult to find decent work. We can forget about being elected to public office – as mayors or members of Congress. People whistle at us. They ridicule us. They jeer at us. All because we are a sexual minority and represent a nontraditional sexual orientation.

We are the underdeveloped individuals of the male gender who prefer women for our sweet pleasures.

How has the world been arranged since ancient times? Men pair off with men, women pair off with women, and we, who are ashamed to admit, we are heterosexuals unable to overcome our sinful passion and become accustomed to same-sex love.

Homosexuals have stamped us with disgrace and demand the introduction of a new article in the criminal code: malicious cohabitation with individuals of the opposite sex shall be punishable by banishment to a corrective labor camp. Women shall be sent to women’s camps, and men to men’s camps. Just as it was in distant Siberia. They say that three years of isolation in a normal healthy environment will cure us, and that people will find their proper sexual orientation bestowed by Mother Nature. They will become gay or lesbian.

Human rights organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, International Amnesty and the Red Cross demand that people who check into these corrective labor camps on their own initiative should have their previous job positions held for them during their time of treatment. After a three-year trial period, they should be allowed not to report the sins of their youth in their biographical particulars.

But not everyone can conquer their own misgivings and turn themselves over to the police voluntarily!

It is very difficult for us to find each other. If we place an ad in the newspaper such as “Man seeks woman for love and marriage,” or the reverse, “Woman seeks close male friend,” the neighbors will break our windows, smear tar on our doors or slash the tires of our cars. And not every newspaper will risk printing such an ad. We can understand the editor’s position; a drop in circulation and a summons for a court appearance would be guaranteed.

How can we meet each other, and where? In a cafe or in the library, you gaze fixedly in a woman’s eyes, you detect a light movement in her lips, and your heart flutters in anticipation – here she is at last. But when the conversation timidly turns to the possibility of a friendly encounter, you recoil in horror at being discovered. It turns out she is a lesbian.

These homosexuals have respectable families. Their children are usually conceived in test tubes. A simple technology, and in fifteen minutes the laboratory technician selects the proper set of chromosomes. Lesbians receive a girl, and gays receive a boy. The customer’s wishes are the provider’s orders. The color of the eyes and hair, the height, weight and figure are all in the hands of the laboratory technician. The most complex task for homosexuals is to make a selection from the catalog. The latest fashion calls for yellow-eyed girls with blue hair – and red-haired boys.

A new technology has begun to take root in some medical offices – programming a code for changing the hair color. You could order a rainbow – and after a given interval of time, the hair color would become red, orange, yellow… You could order other palettes as well, but so far this is expensive and not within everyone’s budget. The technology has not been worked out, and medical errors occur – the green color in the rainbow sometimes turns to violet after passing through blue, and the red is replaced by orange…

In a lesbian family, one of the women gives birth to the child. If the spouses want twins, both women are involved in the creative process. For gays, the role of giving birth is performed by surrogate mothers. Every medical office has young nurses for this purpose.

It is different with us. There are sharp, clumsy movements, and a long wait for results. You never know ahead of time what to expect – a boy or a girl, a blonde or brunette.

But how do we get together? How can we avoid strangers’ eyes? Especially if you are in a prestigious profession and are under the watch of journalists, who monitor your every step and cannot wait to fill the pages of the tabloids with some new scandal. I won’t even mention the name of a famous composer who was forced to shoot himself after society learned about his lengthy romance with a female performer of fashionable pop songs.

People with high-paying jobs can still find a way out. Two heterosexual couples can disguise themselves as lesbians or gays, take out credit at a bank and purchase a two-family house. It would be difficult to find fault with them in public. When they visit friends, go to the movies or go on a walk, the women walk with the women, and the men with the men. Linking arms, in an embrace – they do what they can. Only when it becomes dark, when the doors are locked and the window shades are drawn do they run off to different bedrooms for an hour, and then come back. You never know when somebody might inform on you.

However, things are not quite so strict if you are not thinking of raising a family. After all this is the twenty-third century and we live in the USA, in a democratic country, where men are not prohibited from walking along the street with women, dining with them in restaurants, joking, snuggling up to them tenderly, and dancing the ancient tango. This used to be a rarity, acceptable only among the young hippies, people who grew up preferring audacious tricks, shocking those with refined morals. In our grandparents’ times, there were explanatory signs in all the public places – in theatres, in restaurants and in buses – “men only,” or on the other hand, “women only.”

In America, ostracism and witch-hunts are things of the past. In figure skating and in sports dances, besides the traditional performances by male and female couples, audiences have come to appreciate the variety of mixed formations. Perhaps this innovation will soon sweep over Europe, and someday it may even appear in the Olympics.

This is the situation where in public life and the proclaimed equal rights of men and women. Hollywood stands apart. As a rule, it tries to impress everyone, using drugs and heterosexual relations in its circles. For the world of cinema, society has made an exception – let people behave oddly. Hollywood is allowed some indulgence. But outside the walls of Hollywood, family values remain patriarchal, just as they have been for thousands of years – marriages must only be unisexual.

But it is not our fault that Mother Nature has created us differently, and has not made us quite the same as other people in our sexual preferences. In all other respects, we are the same kind of people! White or black, with two arms and two legs, eyes placed symmetrically on both sides of the nose. We do not differ in any way from the ninety percent of the population that constitutes the homosexual world. Why do people refuse to accept us as we are, with our slight deviations that do not affect anyone’s interests? Why are we not allowed to have heterosexual marriages? Even Mormons who practice gay or lesbian polygamy have more rights and freedoms than we do and society closes its eyes to their private lives.

We have to be afraid of our own children, for they may naively blurt out our secret.

They are always asked provocative questions in kindergarten or elementary school: “Who puts you to bed?” “Who fixes dinner in your family?” or “Who helps you do your lessons?” In the upper grades, when schoolchildren have definitively formed their sexual outlook, they are trained for adult life: in their “History of the Ancient World” lessons, they read excerpts from the Old Testament, which demands capital punishment for those convicted of heterosexual tendencies. Beginning in the ninth grade, the back cover of every school textbook contains the biblical prohibition against heterosexual love: “If a man lies with a woman as with a man, both have committed an abomination: they shall be put to death.”

When they reach the age of eighteen, we can take a risk and try to tell our children the truth. Not everyone is able to understand, forgive or endure such a shock. For many it creates an enormous amount of stress. To go through their entire lives with the stigma of not being conceived in a test tube! There have been instances of suicide – after learning about their inferiority, adolescents have slit their veins or poisoned themselves…

But we have no other choice – when we receive our drivers’ licenses for personal identification, our test tube number and genetic code are printed under our photographs. Those who were conceived differently are outcasts. They cannot raise a family of worthwhile people, genetically pure and devoid of hereditary diseases, and they are doomed to marry only second-class people like themselves.

Perhaps my testimony should have had a different name: “Confessions of an Unhappy Heterosexual.” One who lost both his beloved woman and his child…

Chapter 1
A Heterosexual’s Love

I was working as a programmer for a small Internet company in the Greenwich Village area, and if I had time, I would stop at Starbucks for a cup of coffee before work. That was where I met Liza, who was sitting at the next table. She was getting ready to leave, and she offered me the latest issue of the New York Post, which she had just finished looking through.

There was nothing suspicious about this, but in her eyes – there was no mistake about it – I caught a fiery glance and accepted the challenge. It was just the way signals were given in Morse code in ancient times.

For almost a month, we met at Starbucks. I carefully tested my original sensation, afraid that I might stumble; there were such cases, where a “decoy duck” provokes an attempt at flirtation that ends with handcuffs and jubilation on the television news: another successful operation by our valiant police. Liza was also afraid to take a risk prematurely – until she released her trial balloon.

“My fiancée Chris has a virus in her home computer. Would you be able to help?”

It was a risky offer, but I agreed, although I left a means of retreat:

“My boyfriend Michael goes to his college class in the evening, and I’m free after six.”

Of course, I was lying about the boyfriend, but if she was from the police, I had given the signal: I was a normal, gay man.

That evening nothing happened. However, there was one moment that came close: we were sitting innocently at the computer when our knees touched and froze, without giving a twitch. My heartbeat quickened; I was afraid to move. Her reaction was the same. Our knees were stuck together, and it took some effort to detach them. In a voice trembling with agitation, Liza whispered: “That will do for today.” As we said goodbye, I hesitated to extend my hand – it was moist with sweat. But at our very next meeting – another alleged problem with the computer – we found ourselves in a semi-lit room (“the light bulb burned out, and I don’t have a spare,” Liza spoke in a whisper, with aspiration), and after she repeated the trick with her knees, we abandoned all restraint. I was blown away. We rushed into an embrace, into the insane passion of man and woman.

This continued for about six months, until Liza acknowledged that her friends Daniel and Helen suffered from a secret passion just as we did. She proposed a solution – we would buy a two-family home on Staten Island. For outsiders’ eyes, she would live on the first floor with Helen, and I would live on the second floor with Daniel.

As far as everyone was concerned, we were exemplary homosexual families. We even went through marriage ceremonies and held receptions. Incidentally, marriages between men and women can only be registered in Holland, which is known for its liberal morals. Moreover, the Dutch parliament had voted to allow heterosexual marriages only five years before, with only a three-vote majority. To this day, the parliamentary opposition is demanding a new vote, and the Dutch church cries out against the ruin of society’s foundations.

Daniel and I successfully played the role of lovers, as did Liza and Helen. We gave each other flowers, walked along the shore and tenderly held each other’s hand, and when it was time to have children, we maintained our cover by visiting Dr. Hansen’s office regularly and studying the catalogues.

This was the public side of the coin. In fact, Liza was carrying the fruit of our love in her womb. Helen and Daniel did not lag behind – the time between conceptions was only a couple of weeks.

In November, both women gave birth: Liza had a girl, and Helen had a boy. Just so we would not have to resort to any contrivances, we decided that the girl would be raised by Liza and Helen, and Daniel and I would take the boy. Both children turned out with dark hair and hazel eyes. No matter, there was an explanation for everything – the parents were old fashioned. They were using an ancient catalogue from the twenty-first century.

The only problem was that we did not have a certificate from Dr. Hansen indicating the number of the test tube and the genetic code.

In the old days, we heard that there were a few cases of false certificates being issued, but since the medical offices have been required to submit monthly reports to the Washington Family and Marriage Center, and the information acquired has been entered into a national database, it has become impossible to deceive the authorities. The forgeries were discovered eighteen years later when the children tried to obtain their drivers’ licenses. The court trial received wide publicity, the parents each received three sentences of imprisonment for life, and the innocent children were held in disgrace and contempt by society. Another incident that caused a nationwide sensation about thirty years ago was a court case in Dallas.

An enterprising doctor was selling medical certificates until he encountered a policeman disguised as a customer inquiring about the required documents. Ten life sentences without the possibility of amnesty for the doctor (in America, unlike Europe, there is no death penalty), and three life sentences for the parents – no one dared take the risk any more.

Therefore, our children (the girl was named Hanna, the boy Victor) were destined for a cruel fate in eighteen years – to pay for their parents’ sins. For now, we continued our hoax. Hanna was given the last name Conde – in lesbian families, the girl took the mother’s name – and Victor was given Daniel’s last name.

My daughter and I saw each other every day – she called the women “Mama Liza” and “Mama Helen.” Victor, naturally, called us “Papa Robert” and “Papa Daniel.” Robert is my name – the second-rate man. Girls in lesbian families call both women “Mama”; and, in gay families, boys call both parents Papa.

In fact, there is currently an investigation being held by the Constitutional Court in Washington to determine whether a child’s rights – in this case a boy’s rights – are being violated because he is tacitly prohibited from using the word Mama. Democratic Senator Gitson from Illinois proposed to give boys the right to call their surrogate nurse Mama. But this has proved to be a stumbling block that will not allow the legislative initiative to reach a Senate vote.

First of all, would the nurse agree to have roughly twenty boys calling her Mama? (For the record, nurses retire at the age of forty-five, and they usually bring forth no more than twenty boys during their career.) Second, more importantly, lawsuits may be brought against the surrogate mother if the parents divorce, or if one of the spouses dies. This is what the opponents of innovation fear the most. They insist that scheming lawyers in the future will use any loophole to bring material damages against the nurses. Their opinion is shared by the surrogate mothers’ trade union – a powerful organization with which no political party wants to risk a quarrel before the presidential elections.

Until the case is decided, Victor has no Mama. He has one – Helen – but for his own good, he must not know about this for the time being. In the best-case scenario, when he grows up, they will tell him that Helen is his surrogate mother.

Victor’s problems began from childhood. The traditional rules of upbringing state that children who have not reached sexual maturity are supposed to sleep in the same bed with their parents at least three times per week. According to textbooks on child psychology, “sleeping in the same bed with their parents subconsciously implants the habits of normal sexual behavior in children.” The physicians’ recommendations allow people to avoid tragedies like the one that occurred with Liza Conde’s family.

She was born in a normal lesbian family and brought up according to the generally accepted standards of secular morals, but when she turned sixteen, it was as if she had become a different person – Liza secretly began dating one of her classmates. When her parents discovered them in bed one day, they were in shock. After a terrible scandal, Liza’s parents moved to a different city. Psychologists examined Liza, and at their advice, her parents introduced her to a nice lesbian girl and convinced Liza to get into bed with her. However, it was too late; their daughter was irreversibly drawn to the opposite sex. When Liza enrolled in college, she moved into a dormitory and openly began making friends with boys. Her parents disowned her; they could not bear the shame.

Usually it is the other way around: a child born in a heterosexual family gets rid of the bad genes when he reaches maturity and becomes a homosexual. Even if there is no medical certificate showing that the child was conceived in a test tube, society is benevolent towards returnees. According to the law, they are allowed many privileges: increased grants for college, tax deductions for the first ten years, and most importantly, a new identity card with an encoded false genetic code (this is permissible for the government, even though it is punishable for private individuals), which prevents any discrimination based on sexual indications. Later on they raise single-sex families and enjoy the life of valued members of society.

Daniel and I, although our beds were right next to each other, naturally slept apart. In order to give the child a reasonable explanation as to why we could not take him into our bed, we lied that we were suffering from a skin disease that was outwardly invisible. The touch of a foreign body would irritate the meninx and cause skin cancer.

“And what is ‘skin cancer’?” the boy asked incredulously.

I had to give him a confused explanation.

“That’s a bad disease. They have to give you lots of shots. You don’t like it when they prick you in the fanny.”

“No I don’t,” Victor confirmed, and he prepared to shed a tear just in case.

I distracted him with a new computer game, but my efforts were in vain; the next day when he came in from the kindergarten, he gave me the next round of childish questions.

“How can you hold me in your arms? Won’t you get sick? Won’t you die?”

“No,” I assured the boy. “Until you reach the age of five, I can take you in my arms without any worries. But you need to sleep in your own bed.”

The next day the boys’ kindergarten teacher asked Daniel suspiciously:

“What’s wrong with your spouse’s skin? Why can’t you put Victor in your bed? The boy is suffering…”

Daniel had to give an evasive answer:

“You know, modern medicine does miracles, but in some cases it is powerless.”

“What do you have?”

“The same disease, unfortunately. Here are two invalids pairing off, comrades in misfortune.”

The teacher nodded his head sympathetically.

“That happens sometimes.” Then he told a similar story that had happened with Frank’s father. I guessed that Frank was one of “us.”

I had seen him several times when he came to the kindergarten to pick up his son, and I had never suspected that he was also a heterosexual. He also figured out my predilections by some sixth sense, but outwardly, we did not reveal ourselves in any way, and we did not discuss forbidden topics; we could never forget about the conspiracy.

I usually saw my daughter on the children’s playground. On weekends, the six of us would go to the park, which was furnished with children’s attractions and sports equipment. While Victor climbed on the horizontal bars, under Daniel’s supervision, I helped Liza push Hanna on the swing. While Helen read a book, Liza told me about our daughter’s little pranks and tricks.

Then we traded places. Daniel and I sat down to play chess, and Helen “took over” Victor.

It was more difficult to keep our intimate meetings a secret. Even though we lived in the same house, in order to get from one apartment to the other, we had to go outside and climb down two flights of stairs. This took about twenty seconds. But what if the neighbors would see us? These vigilant guardians of morals were ready to call the police at any time. How could we explain these nighttime transitions from a men’s to a women’s apartment?

It was Liza who found the solution. As she was looking through the Family Gazette – women bought this newspaper periodically, enjoying the gossip, women’s stories, and countless bits of advice from cosmetologists, dieticians and pediatricians – her attention was drawn to an announcement that seemed strange at first.

“How do you like this?” Without waiting for an answer, she started reading aloud: “For particularly whimsical customers: I do any type of construction work quickly and skillfully, including installation of safes and secret doors.”

“What does he mean by whimsical? Capricious? Someone with whims? It would be better to say fastidious,” I said, editing the text of the announcement. “Or rather, exacting. Or even better – nagging.”

Liza shook her head distrustfully.

“No, there’s something else. The tone is unusual.” She repeated slowly: “Particularly whimsical customers.”

As an experienced psychologist who can find the hidden springs behind this or that action, Liza had a theory.

“The announcement is in code. Let’s read between the lines. Safes are pretty far-fetched, neither here nor there. It must be a cover. It’s all in the ending. Maybe it would be a good idea to cautiously talk with this “builder” about the secret doors. This seems to be just what we need at the moment.”

“Do you want to give it a try?” I asked jokingly, not expecting that Liza would react even before the final word reached her ears.

“Why not?”

Without blinking an eye, she opened her bag, took out a portable scanner and held it up to the newspaper announcement. Next to the phone number, a man’s profile lit up on the telephone display. Underneath was his name: Richard Melloni.

Liza thought for a second, looked at me and asked:

“What do you think, should we risk it?”

“As you wish,” I agreed without much enthusiasm, secretly hoping that the telephone call would be a waste of time.

“Don’t be afraid, we’ll get through,” Liza smiled and pressed the “Talk” button.

After two long rings, someone picked up on the third.

In a very professional manner, Liza interviewed the person at the other end. Without giving the age of the children, she explained that the girls were friends, and they wanted to connect their rooms so they could visit each other without going outside. Liza easily told her inoffensive lie about the girls (in the plural!); heterosexuals are trained in the art of lying from the day they first realize their nontraditional orientation.

Both participants in the conversation easily understood an allegorical language, which was second in popularity after sign language. In order to get a quote, Liza arranged to meet the builder on Sunday. When he arrived at our house, I gasped. By an irony of fate, the person who submitted the announcement turned out to be Richard, Frank’s father. We laughed; although we had surmised about each other’s sinful predilections, we were afraid to acknowledge them. And now everything had been settled by itself.

Richard suggested doing a little modification. Our bedrooms were one on top of the other. The solution suggested itself: we would use the wardrobes, dismantle the floor in the closet and go down a stepladder.

That was what we did. We would make the arrangements over the phone, and then I would climb down to Liza for an hour or an hour and a half, and Helen would climb up to Daniel. Why not the other way around? That’s a silly question! This was the only way I could stand for five minutes next to my sleeping daughter’s bed, and Helen could stand by her son’s bed.

Our happiness lasted three years. Then Liza abandoned me; she went off with Richard. No matter how I tried to dissuade her, she applied for a divorce from Helen and moved to Bay Ridge to be closer to Richard. When there is a divorce in a lesbian family and that was what their family was officially, by law the child remains with the woman who gave birth to him or her. Helen had no objection; her relationship with Daniel was unchanged, and she continued to see her son every day. But what about me? What was left for me?

The fact that Frank’s father, who had taken Liza from me, had been punished by fate – he wouldn’t be able to see his son – was no comfort to me. His situation was similar to ours, and he had also lived in a two-family house until his wife had grown tired of running up and down the stairs, and she had become a normal woman – a lesbian.