The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  considered of no importance. The only important thing was getting enough for them both to eat. Being accomplished in this, he felt content that he did his duty; after all, without him Younger Brother must perish. The truths that he learned from the ice were not simple, but neither were they ambiguous. So Elder Brother strode with sureness through his ice-life.

  Younger Brother was less sure who he was. Sometimes he thought he was a seal, and lay on his stomach barking. The wind was cold, and Younger Brother wept even as he barked, but he would not move because he wanted so much to be what he thought he must be; there were so many seals that he was sure that they were his relatives. Once when Elder Brother returned from a hunt he found Younger Brother almost buried in the snow, so long had he been there. - "You are not a seal, you know," said Elder Brother. "You are a boy." - But Younger Brother did not know what a boy was. Elder Brother was a grown man, and there were never any other people.

  At other times Younger Brother was convinced that he must be a polar bear. He strutted about on his two little legs, growling and seeking to kill the seals. The seals said, "First he barks like us, and now he tries to bite us. What sort of fool is he?" They spanked him vdth their flippers. Younger Brother cried because he was too weak and slow to kill the seals.

  One day he was sure that he must be a gull. He waited until a strong wind came; then he flapped his arms. The wind said, "What is this? A cub-animal? Good, I will pick him up and then drop him. What fun it will be to watch him fall!" - The wind seized Younger Brother and bore him high above the ice, so that Younger Brother screamed, and all the other gulls screamed back at him. They were trying to instruct him in the important skills of screaming and flying, but he did not know their language. In his fear he wet himself. The wind was disgusted at this and dropped him at once. By a fortunate accident he landed in soft snow.

  After this. Elder Brother decided that it was dangerous to leave him to himself Really he was too young to begin hunting, but there was no one to take care of him. If he continued to think that he was not human, one day he might turn into something inhuman.* So Elder Brother put him on his back and took him hunting. Younger Brother always cried.

  Elder Brother was very skilled at walking on the ice. He could tell from its color how safe it was to walk on. "Never walk where the ice is black," he told his brother. "That ice is young ice; it is weak ice." And Younger

  * In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

  BLACK HANDS

  87

  Brother listened because he wanted to be like his brother. - "Never walk on snow-covered ice," said Elder Brother. "You cannot see what color it is. Sometimes the snowdrifts will float on open water. That is called mafshaak. If you walk there you will die." - And Younger Brother listened, remembering every word.

  "Sometimes you wdll see me walking on black ice," said Elder Brother. "Do not try to imitate me. You are ignorant and weak. I can walk on ice so thin that my foot breaks through it with every step. If you try it you will die." - Younger Brother listened without saying anything.

  "See this pole wdth the bone point?" said Elder Brother. "This is called an unaak. When you mistrust the ice you walk on, use your unaak. Jab the point firmly into the ice. If it punctures through, the ice is not safe. If it does not go through, you may proceed." - Younger Brother listened well to these words.

  The Bear-Shirt

  One day Elder Brother carried Younger Brother on his back to hunt seals. For a long time they had gone hungry. They saw a breathing hole on the far side of a region of black ice. Elder Brother set Younger Brother down and told him to wait while he went to stalk the seal.

  Younger Brother sat very still on the ice. The sky was seamlessly grey. The wind was blowing. He could see Elder Brother sitting beside the seal-hole.

  TOUNeEB BTROn-HIrl^ AONe O-N THS XCfc

  his spear resting on his knee. Elder Brother never looked away from the hole. As Younger Brother sat watching him across the black ice, he began to feel very lonely. He felt that his brother did not understand him or care about him. He began crying softly. He wished that he was something else than a boy. As he looked around he saw a polar bear crossing the black ice. The polar bear spread his legs wide and moved slowly and steadily across the dangerous ice. When the ice groaned, the bear got down on his belly and began to swim upon it. As Younger Brother watched, he became convinced once again that he was a polar bear, for his thoughts were but a succession of stars that wheeled about in his skull-sky like the moon and the sun, chasing each other through all the lovely hells. He stood up, spread his legs wide, and took his first step onto the black ice. He heard Elder Brother shouting at him, but he paid no attention. He was sure now that he was a polar bear. He felt comfortable, ferocious. His hands had become furry claws. He decided to kill Elder Brother and eat him.

  Elder Brother ran toward him. There was anguish in his face. - "Stay still!" he shouted. "That ice is not safe!"

  Luxuriously, Younger Brother opened his mouth and growled. Then the ice began to crack beneath his feet. At once he forgot that he was a bear. - "Help, help!" he wailed. ~ Then Elder Brother was there to lead him back to loyal ice, and he loved Elder Brother more than ever before; and his tear-streaked face made Elder Brother laugh. - "Now we must listen by the seal-hole," said Elder Brother. "If you have no attention for that, watch Nanoq and learn how he walks."

  Polar bears give an impression of white snowiness, but incongruous with this is the almost triangular head, which the bear nods like a napping seal, in order to deceive other seals into thinking that he is one. Most of us want to be what we are not; but the clever ones, the predators, pretend to be what they are not, stalking and sneaking until their victims discover the deception too late.

  Although the bear nodded like a seal, he often upraised his head for his own purposes, as if to gaze upon the evil spirits in the stars. When no seals were near he was his real self, and prowled and stalked upon the ice, uplifting his head; -and when he padded so springily upon his black-toed feet. Younger Brother understood for the first time how quickly a polar bear could move, and was frightened. The snow-bear licked his feather-arrow fur. He grinned with his black mouth. His round nostrils dilated. He rushed back and forth upon his iceberg.

  "Elder Brother, can one create an ice-bear from one's thought?"

  "I cannot say for certain," said Elder Brother. "So my advice to you is to not think on ice-bears." He strode on his way. - Younger Brother hopped feebly in the snow, but he could not by any means go as fast as his leader.

  "Elder Brother, Elder Brother, where are you going?" cried the little one. "Please don't walk so fast or I'll be left behind."

  "You must learn to keep up," said Elder Brother, turning his face away. He strode away across the mist-blown ice. Younger Brother ran after as quickly as he could, but his legs were fat and litde.

  The Storrrt; the Spirit Woman and the Island

  "I feel a ringing in my ears," said Elder Brother. "A storm is coming." - That night the stars began to dance in the sky, as if they were being blown about by a strong wind. A ring formed around the moon. The next morning long clouds streaked the horizon. They came closer and closer. They were solid black; they did not reflect the white color of the pack ice. The seals lowered their heads in the water. The clouds became tinged with red in the south. A light breeze sprang up. As the hours passed, the breeze became stronger and stronger. Soon it was a stiff wind, then a gale. The sound of it was terrifying. Elder Brother could hear it coming down from the mountains before it reached him. When that far-off whistling came to his ears, he braced himself, holding Younger Brother as tightly as he could in his arms.

  There was nowhere to run to, because the wind was everywhere, and the two brothers had no home. They huddled together, unable to see or hear each other but taking comfort from each other, and still the storm increased. P
resently the furious chill of the sea-peaks, which could bum their flesh white, became a shelter to be desired (although they could not reach it now), because nothing else but ice-walls could break the force of that dread wind, which did not seem white to them, although it raked them with such great quantities of snow that they were almost suffocated; nor was it black, although there was such darkness in it that they could see no more with open eyes than with closed; it shattered the icebergs' bristles, splitting ice fi-om ice so that snow gushed through the rifts like white blood foaming down cliff-sides; and the sky screamed through every crevice that it could find or make until the ocean, frozen though it was, was creaking and crashing, wrecked upon the second sea, the wdnd-sea. And then snow fell and snow blew and the sky's light vanished into cold opacity; the greedy storm had swallowed the sky.

  At last there came a lull, although the clouds still roiled evilly about their

  heads. When Younger Brother looked up at his guardian, he saw that the frost had made his face into something strange and terrible. Elder Brother had great white moustaches, weeping with icicles. His eyebrows were frostbrows that went all the way up his forehead, as if Elder Brother had died and the ice had begun to grow and grow on him forever until after a million years he would be buried at the heart of some new frost-continent for a shroud, as in warmer climates dead faces quickly become overgrown with pale white mold until they are patchy and spotted like dogs' faces. To the very ruff. Elder Brother's hood had frozen into a creaking helmet of ice-hardened fur.

  "I'm afraid of you!" cried the little boy.

  "No, be afraid of the storm," said his brother. "Unless you are very attentive and obedient to wind-songs, you will die."

  At this. Younger Brother began to cry, but his tears froze on his cheeks. The wind was rising again. Impatiently, Elder Brother cut oflf a strip of sealskin from his parka and tucked it around Younger Brother's face. - "Tighten the drawstring of your hood, or your face will turn to ice," he said shortly. "Now come with me. We must find a sleeping-place before the wind sings again."

  After this they spoke no longer, for the storm-scream made hearing impossible. They staggered about all through that night-devouring night, but Elder Brother could find no protected spot. The little one came behind him wailing. Sometimes he could not go on; then Elder Brother had to carry him on his shoulders as he went. They were both near the end of their strength. They had eaten nothing but a little bit of frozen fish for five sleeps.

  At last Elder Brother stopped in the shelter of an overhanging ice-drift. -"Here we must rest," he said.

  He sat dovm on a rock. Snow was blowing in his face. Younger Brother fell dowTi beside him. His mouth opened, and his eyes closed. Elder Brother pulled the boy to him and set his head in his lap. He breathed gently in his face to warm him. He himself felt already rather warm. His face glowed with frostbite. He stroked his brother's cheek. Patiently, he waited to be killed.

  Then suddenly a Spirit Woman came flying down from the sky. Her eyes shone like moons. - The two brothers were astonished. They had never seen anyone other than themselves.

  "Spirit Woman, Spirit Woman, who are you?" said Elder Brother.

  The Spirit Woman laughed. "I am the blue snow-shadows all around you. You can always hear me; you can sometimes see me; you can never kiss me.

  She bent down; she struck the ice. An island sprang up! It was vast and

  white, and diere were mountains on it. The two brothers crawled feebly onto

  the shore, where they lay half-dead. - The Spirit Woman clapped her hands,

  and a snow-house sprang up around them. Then she bent over Younger

  Brother and did something to him, but he did not know what it was. - "Live

  together," she said. "I have fitted you for each other." After saying this she

  flung her arms up and rose through the roof of the snow-house.

  Younger Brother raised his arms; he bent them upwards at die elbows; he

  j wanted so much to be a bird! - but he could not follow the Spirit Woman.

  I He cried.

  For a long time the two brothers slept. They did not hear the voices of I the birds, or the steady vrnid. They lay encased in sleep, which melted slowly. [ When he awoke. Younger Brother felt a warm wetness between his legs that had never been there before. His fresh boy-strength became as feathers whirling in the air. (But Elder Brother's arms still cut through the air like knives.) The nipples flowered on his chest, and bore fioiit. Then his brother looked at him as men look at women. He pulled him to him; he kissed him. "I won't! I won't!" cried Younger Brother. But of course he had to.

  San Francisco Transvestites 1987

  Jerome had a long thin body. - "I look like an anorexic girl," he said. "Men are easily fooled. They're so stupid. Usually they just look at my hair." - He put his soft foam-rubber falsies tight up against his nipples.* He combed his long blond hair. He worked the black fishnet stockings up over his toes, his knees, his waist as if he were wading cautiously into female water. He rose; he put his high heels on. - "I should really get my fi-esh undies," he said. -His hair shone so beautifully gold and coppery on his shoulders ... - "I like comfort," he explained. "I'm not that concemed with looking like a woman. - Oh, whereas my black bra? That's such a nice outfit! Let me go look in the closet. That's where I keep my little lingerie bag. - Oh, good, here it is. La, la, la .. . This petticoat is really lush. I do have to take these undies off, though. I have to feel nylon against my skin." - And so he took his clothes voluptuously off to start over, kneeling thin and naked on the bed to sort through his

  * Being a guest, I was permitted to try the dried orange peels.

  flimsy things. At last he chose a fluffy black dress; lovingly he slid himself into it, but presently he bent himself on the bed and pulled the dress up to expose his buttocks ... He was famous for his paintings in nail polish. Ranks and rows of nail polish bottles of all colors stood by the window. He lay stroking his lovely clothes ... At his request he was gagged with a black scarf and a sock in his mouth. His wrists were tied to his ankles. He stared ahead of him a little desperately, it seemed, with his big blue eyes.

  Despite these efforts he did not in fact become a woman until he went into the bathroom with Miss Giddings, dancing into an ecstasy of applique and eye-liner and rouge because the pair of them were trying for the look of weary whores. They helped each other on with their lipstick, each one the all-wise Spirit Woman to whom the other could turn for advice, for eye and lip correction. Miss Giddings made perhaps the most remarkable transformation, her lush black wig so sweet around her clown-pale face with its white makeup. But Jerome (now Miss J.) was just as much of a lady. "I always look good in red," she whispered to the mirror, when she thought that no one could hear. Then she made her debut. "I'm the Red and Green Girl," she announced. "I'm Miss Christmas Tree." - "7 feel like a gift!" cried Miss Giddings. - "You look like a hallucination," said Miss J. - "Oh, I love to hallucinate! Hallucinations are my favorite things!" - When they had drawn on their black and gold evening costumes, they became so stately, those two, and so beautiful ... - "Oh, but our clothes simply reek,'' they said. "You see, we've been having such excitement ..." They told each other that they looked stunning. They clacked about in the garden in their high heels. With sublime contempt, they decried what they had evolved from: - "Boys?" they said. "They're meat. They're less than objects! They're things you eat ^nd poop out.''

  Outside the Black Rose Bar (Z\t jFrienbliegt (^irlsi in l^oton, said the pink matchbox), a woman looked at her reflection in the window as she brushed her hair before going into that place of pink lights and mirrors where women who looked like angels would take you by the hand as you walked down their row to the bathroom (the floor of which was often covered with piss to the depth of your shoe-toe), and these women would let you kiss them and put your penis in the slits where their penises used to be, provided that you paid them money - this woman, then, finished brushing her hair and suddenly yawned, and her
face fragmented into a hundred lumps for a moment, becoming again a man's face, and then she licked her lips and smiled and became a woman again.

  The Woman-Shirt

  Before, Elder Brother and Younger Brother had been the same. Now they were different, and difference called to difference, so that they needed each other, but at best this yearning could only unite them for a space; it could not reconcile them. She was more capable of loing constanc' than he, for, having been the younger, the inexperienced, having trembled so often in the face of his quick intolerance, she now basked in this new need of his for her. Whenever he wanted, she laid her head down for him, smelling the bitter smell of dead leaves and earth. Smiling, she chewed a tender, bitter willow-bud. He took her hand; the wind blew, and the water trickled between the stones. - To him her youngness had always been an annoyance. But now her young eyes, her taut young shoulders, and those brilliant black eyes in her pale face, hurt him so happily. It was his need that he enjoyed, however, not she herself, although in that first moon he thought that she was evervthing to him. Looking at her, thinking of her transported him, which struck him as vile because now it was hard for him not to despise the icv' serenitv' of their earUer relations. And he knew^ that he should not love her, for she had been someone else whom he had been supposed to love differendy. - What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spidenveb?

  At first they did not know how to tell each other about their new feelings. They hung their heads shyly, like flowers in the wind. They thrilled sweetly to each other and kept their thrilling secret.

  They decided to live on their island forever. They built a house out of earth and stones, never having seen trees to build fi-om (even driftwood was so rare that they thought that forests, like seaweed, grew upon the bottom of the sea). From their rocky world they stood watching the sun wheel round and round in the sky, vanishing only when watery blue vapors blew over fi*om the volcanoes of the south. Spring came, and clouds puffed their beUies just above the moss, and streams appeared everv^vhere, grinding and groaning and laughing and sighing, and birds sang in the rain and insects buzzed beneath the moss, which, wet, sank deep beneath Elder Brother's step when he went hunting, and the sun was a white disk in a white skv', and the weather was cold and cool and cold and warm. They tried to live quietly in that beautifully terrifying spring landscape, with its chips of blue skv' whirling in the icv' cloud-sea as the wind blew and the rivers roared and ground stones together (being the motors of geology), and the ice-floes seemed to form such a dehcate white puzzle-set, unmoving in their matrix of black leads, more white than bleached bone, and in the §ord was an island besieged by floes and behind that rose the grand