"L. Timmel Duchamp - De Secretis Mulierum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

doubt that Thomas was female, and that the rags were not from castration, but
menstruation.

In the case of Leonardo, I'd been so gleeful and exhilarated to find that his
sex had been female that I'd just about laughed my head off with pleasure. But
this . . . somehow this was different. For one thing, the coincidence was
troubling. For another thing, one could find nothing joyful in this furtive
scene involving a bolted monastic cell, bloody rags Thomas washed on the spot,
and bindings meant to conceal his true secondary sex characteristics from the
word.

The whole thing made me sick. I wanted to leave the room, but knew better than
to try. Teddy cursed and cursed only half under his breath, and all around us
people carried on low, tense conversations that I suspected were precursors to
screaming matches. By the time Thomas finished washing the rags, the water he
wrong out of them was running pink. He did not hang them to dry, but
refastened
them to his crotch. I suppose that was the worst, thinking of that wet mess
between his thighs, no doubt chafing them badly in the chill, dank December
air.
I swear you could see him shivering. My own body shuddered with tension, and
my
jaw ached, and I felt a fleeting twinge of cramping in my uterus, as though in
sympathy.

Afterwards Thomas sank onto his knees before the prie-dieu. We could not hear
his words, of course, since the scan doesn't pick up sound. But I could
imagine
his weariness, disgust and despair. When oh Lord shall this burden be lifted
from me, I could easily believe he prayed (in Latin, of course). Staring at
him,
I realized he'd practiced a lifetime of unimaginable deception. Later, the
awesome achievement of it impressed me. But that afternoon, watching him in
the
thin gray light of the cell, I felt instead like crying.

Teddy spent the evening at my place. Marissa usually worked late, and always
did
so after past-scans, since in the first hours following a scan her team always
made an evaluation and analysis of its technical aspects and combed through
the
data they referred to as "telemetry." Though the Thomas Aquinas project had
been
a concession to Teddy's campaign to get the historical community at large to
accept past-scanning as a legitimate resource of the historian and not of
particular interest to either his or my own research, he and I did a
postmortem
of a sorts, too.
Of sorts: namely, while I stood at the stove sauteing pancetta and onion for
pasta alla carbonara, Teddy paced in the hallway outside my tiny kitchen and