He had made it from one side to another but wasn’t sure about it; the time spent getting there felt like a collection of holes and cliffs and eddies; was there any substance left over, was the landscape, pitted as it was, a good one to look upon for any other, and if not would he be able to make something of it?

Around the time the recognition was made, he had looked back and remembered what it had been like to care for the thin and lamellar leaves in his apartment; they still existed, they still grew, it was just that he no longer urged himself on to write about them, to stare at them, to make pictures of them.

He had involuted, left the green eros of malehood, become an intruder in her womb, and no longer even quickened it; she, in the meanwhile, became like an alabaster lamp. She seemed far more polite, like a listening vessel, and even fine to stroke or lie against, like a lute, or like the bellows of an accordion.

“I thought you were a lyric poet,” they said.

“I’m not,” she said, “but the man inside me is.”

The audience let out a collection of coughing noises.

She was wearing a green dress. It was tight around her waist, and made of some sort of iridescent taffeta.

To him, everything she said sounded like it was coming from several feet under water.

“Yes, I’m growing something inside here”—and pausing to look at the shadowy audience, she continued—“but it’s not something anyone here should be familiar with. It’s a lyric poet, not a human infant.”

One of the moderators opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it.

“I came here tonight not to sing, but to share with the public a very important piece of personal news.”

The woman—G—began to reach under the skirt of the dress, until it seemed that her hands had reached its waistline. Something crinkly dropped out from the folds—a piece of what looked like candy-wrapper, bright pink and gold. She smoothed it out with the back of a hand and began to whisper from it.

When she arrived home, she began to rustle through the numerous letters that had piled up at the entrance of her house. Among them she found several with unusual names, and she opened one of them. “I know you’re the most notorious feminist of this century,” it read. She laughed, and the lyric poet made a tinkling sound. She threw herself onto the sofa and continued to giggle, and said to the poet, “I should figure out what that means.” At this, the poet made no sound. “But not by reading the rest of the letter,” she continued. She picked herself up, rolled the letter into a thin pipe, and lit the tip with the smallest burner on the stove. Then she placed it on a square metal plate. It was close to midnight, but she wasn’t tired, so she went to her desk to write.

I’m not sure what to make of the change. I’m a green lyric poet and nobody knows I exist. I hide on slips of paper that my owner hides in the folds of her dress. I’m not a boy but everyone thinks I’m a fetus gestating inside of her. She wants to figure out what it means to be a notorious feminist and wants me to be the words that come out when she manages to write about it. But I don’t know anything about it.

At this she grinned—it had become fun to subject the lyric poet to the task of writing for her. Of course he wouldn’t comply, but the non-compliance was nothing if not funny. “Notorious feminist” came from beyond, anyway. What would she have to say about it herself? Her ex-husband might have a more substantial knowledge of the subject. He knew what it was like to suffer at her hands, or to hate her, and she only knew what it was like to burrow into skirts and pastries and books at this—or to feign a certain aloofness and ease or power. The poet was still thinking, on the other hand, of how jealous he remained of her orchids, which were receiving their daily misting from the sprinkler system in the other room.

I thought I wanted to have a child, so I had it, and then I killed it. That’s what makes me the most notorious feminist in the world. No, that’s just a story they like to tell about me. They also told the story of how my second child found out. It’s much worse, what I am. Destruction is palatable; I knew that it was good for others to watch me destroy, telling the story the way I did was what made me famous.

“How did I tell the story, little man?” (She had now resorted to calling the poet her little man, or LM).

I once dug myself into the soil of her flesh; I gave her the experience of scissiparity; I split the mermaid’s tail; she went from being fish to legs, she was a pure power, meaning that she didn’t exist without the act which engendered the fullness of this intensity. I didn’t name the sword which produced this change.

G was looking a bit perturbed; this wasn’t what she expected the plant-obsessed little man to care to write about. She wondered if the prompt was not right for him. “Why don’t I take you for a walk?”

“So the little man is a machine?”

“Not quite; if he were, there would be some sense to him.”

“Maybe there is, and you will figure it out.”

“I am certainly not invested in the question.”

G and her friend A were taking a walk through the streets of her neighborhood. She had left the little man “at home.” They spoke about her performance from the previous week, the nature of the questions, the nature of the performance. A was in general in awe of the things G did, and had an apparently simple outlook on life, wanting to find a husband to marry, wanting to raise children, wanting harmony in her relationships over strife. They had met in college, when both were far more similar in their literary investments, and now found a basic peace in sharing recipes with one another. G often hesitated before telling A something, perhaps because everything G had to say had something to do with the LM, whose existence embarrassed her vaguely, though of course she was very proud of its effects on her life.

They spoke for a while about a few recent events which had incensed them, both of which had to do with impolite or otherwise offensive statements men had made to them, the difference being that for A, the men were people she knew and cared about, and that for G, they were strangers she had encountered through work. “I wonder if it’s easier to be pessimistic,” A said, “when it’s strangers or friends.”

G didn’t think this was question was a real question. “I just find it embarrassing that we’re talking about this.” Her expression was blank, to a point of harshness. A felt like cowering. “I don’t know, we have observed a pattern? What good does it do to speak about it?” G’s mind had gone far away—she was looking at the cactus flowers in someone’s front yard. She knew she was dissatisfied with her dissatisfaction, and didn’t understand why she was in this absurd situation, spending time with A.

“Sorry, I think I’m just being hormonal right now.”

A grinned—“Yeah, it’s okay.”

“But I am finding it absurd that we don’t know so much about each other.”

“What do you mean?”

“We spend time complaining about men, and don’t know anything else about each other.”

A was no longer looking agrieved. She was just thinking about something else.

The two of them finished the remaining twenty minutes of their walk in silence.

It was a warm and humid late morning; her walk around the neighborhood had caused sweat to bead out of her forehead. He, on the other hand, was rather enjoying the dark and shaded view into her heart, which pleasantly superimposed itself with a shadow green, like the texture of a marred photograph.

The two of them bumbled along without thinking, and passed by a good number of trees whose forms varied only more wildly to each of their minds, because they were of the same species. A wasp buzzed close, investigating the shiny metallic buckle on G’s backside and she didn’t notice anything but the whirring close to the skin. LM felt like a cat in a synthetic carrier with black mesh. At a crosswalk, an old white car stooped and passed; the woman inside barely glancing at G before determining to move on.

Subtle clouds existed in the distance, though they were rather difficult to make out. There was enough of a breeze for G to feel unaffected by the heat, and she wore a very wide hat. The breeze interacted with the hat, and she suddenly felt annoyed, or a tinge of fear that her hat might slip off, though there was no actual risk of this happening. At this she began to think once more, as did the little man.

At first the thoughts were simple: the woman in the car had reminded her of someone she knew, not the friend, but an old lover. But she wasn’t sure if this was a thought produced by boredom, or by desire. LM was thinking, in the mean time, about how distracting G could be—whereas before he was able to contemplate the shadows of trees and consider the possible descriptions he might set to paper, now he had to listen to G’s thoughts about the woman and whether or not she truly recognized her, or if she only wanted to experience recognition. Voracious to see, unfortunate in her keenness, bored to intellection—

Instead of taking the usual turn to her house, she kept on moving towards the entrance of the neighborhood, and managed to exit, cross the highway, and enter a neighboring neighborhood.

This one was similar—replete with front gardens, stylish single-family homes. G and LM continued to no longer think about anything, and the latter was able to recommence with his poetic endeavors. Something about “calm” and “litchi,” then “scales” and “dragon,” then a question of the “ae” and the “k” of “cake.” “ablution” was the next word to come to him, and he had a more complicated thought about Vertigo and G’s apparent terror when she saw the film for the first time. The scene that had terrified her most, as far as he remembered, was the one in which the man looked at the woman who was not the woman he desired, but who had managed to look just like her—and it was the hair that gave it away, gave away the resemblance, the identity. Litchi, scales, dragon, ablution, cake, /ae/, /k/ all had some essential relation to the scene in the movie which he had once written a poem about.

Scotty loved that woman because she had the same blonde hair. Obviously she was the same woman, insofar as she was played by the same actress. But she wasn’t the same, you knew it by how she acted, how she was a different, sneering face, terrified by this stalker of a man. How do we know she is in fact different when their bodies are the same? How do we manage to take the sneering for the real thing?

“Guy, I’m thinking about that tree over there.”

“Guy?”

“Yeah, I’ve decided to call you that.”

She pronounced it first as ga-ee before pronouncing it as zhee, as in French.

“God, you want us to be the same?”

“It’s obviously not the same.”

“Anyway, which tree?”

The tree she was pointing at was a tall eucalyptus, a bit too large to take in at once, but not unusual in its aspect. Guy wasn’t sure if G expected him to ask her to follow up. “It’s very difficult to take in,” he said.

“Yeah,” she continued, “it reminds me of being in California.”

Guy felt a heat blooming in his cheeks. He hadn’t expected her to make such an easy reference.