That first reaction, however, was almost immediately lost in a deeper sensation. Richard will swear today it was the same as if the night with its light, its weaving voice in the pine trees, its smells, and its seeming stillness was remonstrating with him and saying: “I am only secret. Not threat. I don’t hurt. I reveal. Do not repel me.”

He dropped the whistle from his mouth and sat down on the slope, overwhelmed with one idea that kept drumming quietly at him in words that sounded like his own: “I have yielded. I am going against my training. But I want ... I have yielded . . . against my training . . .” About this time he felt surrounded by shapes and presences which had lain hidden or dormant up to this point. He was sure they were there, although he could not see them. Fear was gone. Only perplexity remained. The wind in the pines and the light on the water were part and parcel of those presences.

But there was something else he could not recognize, could only accept or struggle to reject. Something spoke in the wind and shone in the light. All together, these mysterious things wove a web around his perplexity, washing it in a strange grace and, at the same time, softening some part inside him, some part of him that was supposed to be hard and insoluble, but that now was becoming soft, supple, diffuse, flowing into some mystery. He remembers murmuring again and again: “I have yielded ... I want to ... against my training . . .”

Then, even in the darkness, he began to notice details: the variant colors of rocks around him, different kinds of ruffles on the water, various shades to the trees, successive notes in the wind. And, in flashes of memory, was back in the past: on the edge of the woods in St. Joseph, listening to his sisters and his mother chatter and talk, watching his father dancing with his mother at a family celebration the previous winter, holding the hand of a high-school girlfriend as they walked home from the cinema.

And, as that deep core of him melted, he heard his father’s voice in a frequent phrase used to his sons, “Chin up, young man!” dying away into repulsive jumble, “We men must be strong. Chin up chin up young man chin man strong chin up man . . .”

He felt his body shudder as if shaking off scales or armor. It did not go limp or cling to the ground. Rather, it was now a supple continuation of ground, light, the voice of the wind, the silver of the moon, the silence. His body seemed to hold the possibility of all natural things at once. He knew it was incredible. There was one last, clutching moment when something in him warned with a sharp voice.

But, after an instant’s inner pause, he appeared to himself to let go, willingly to accept, and to do so in almost poetic language: “I don’t know you. I want what you are. I want to be in that mystery. I don’t want a man’s hardness and strength. I want your wholeness.” He actually spoke the words. They tumbled out half-whispered, incredulous-for his brain kept telling him he was alone at night on the mountainside. But something more powerful, not in his brain, kept enticing him. He responded: “I want to be a woman . . . yes ... man woman.” He did not know the sense of what he was saying, but he kept saying it. And everything that night responded to him in turn-infallibly, it seemed to him-and said: “You will be. You can be. You will be. Secret. Strong. Mystery. Open. You will be. You can be. Woman. Man. Soft. Hard. All. You will be. You can be.”

He lost track of time. He lit no fire. He did not budge from where he sat. The moon rose and set. The wind waxed and waned. There were occasional cries from night owls, and once or twice the scream of a bird surprised by some night killer. Richard’s memory recorded all this indirectly. Filling those hours was something else: the voice or the sensation of a voice which soared and sank in a melody of notes.

Richard now underlines two things in his memory of that song. It had no particular rhythm, no detectable beat. It seemed to be fully and completely, but only, melody. More significantly, it told him nothing new or shocking or awesomely strange-he seemed to himself to have had all its notes already recorded in him; but now they were evoked as echoes to the melody. And, as they resonated, they delineated a quality or condition in which he always was but had never realized, much less ever expressed it in his taste, walk, glance, in the corners of his words where meaning’s shadow hid, or even in his perception of the world around him.

But no longer now was knowledge a thrust outward to grasp an objective, to obtain an exact pinpointing with the lens of logic-“fixing the cross-hairs on it,” as his shooting-enthusiast father used to put it. In that melodized condition, all objectives were received within a delicate maze of sensibilities, emotions, reactions, intuitions. And, over all, a sense of sacrament, of pact with what made water and earth and air simultaneously strong and tender, soft and unyielding, masculine and feminine. For this sense of the possibilities of all natural things at once, in one condition, was an inner persuasion now. And he felt a light-footed, almost unstable touching on all things, with strength that was gentle, with firmness but no pride, with definitive choice but no violence.

On and on that melody went throughout the night, until at sunrise his classmates and Captain Nicholas found him sitting on the slope, fresh-faced, smiling, a little dreamy, but fully awake.

Only Captain Nicholas noticed the change in Richard: the peculiar haze at the back of his eyes and the way he turned his head to greet them as they approached him. After the first bantering, as they were all clambering down the slope toward the camp for breakfast, the captain drew abreast of Richard and said: “You okay, kid?” When Richard turned his head to the ranger, the haze Captain Nicholas had caught in his eyes before was gone, just as if Richard had pulled veils down closing off his inner state. His answer was normal: “I had a ball. Did I do okay?”

A week later the vacation was over. The entire party left the mountains in the late afternoon, climbed down the slopes, and walked to the forest ranger’s wayside post where they had left their station wagon. After an hour’s ride, they arrived at the ranch house, where Captain Nicholas’ wife and daughter, Moira, greeted them. They were all tired; and after dinner all went to bed.

Richard, however, did not sleep very much. From the moment he met Moira, he had a renewal of his recent experience on the mountainside.

Fresh from that experience and still full of the pact he had made with the air and the water and the earth-the ecstasy of it all was quite vividly present to him for weeks after-Moira seemed to Richard to be a walking, breathing embodiment of a secret figure he carried in his memory. She seemed an answer to his prayer uttered on the mountainside, and the model he had felt promised him in the shadow of that slope. He saw the unconscious gravity of her head, the light strength of her figure as the light strength of that figure he had felt beside him on the mountainside that memorable night; the gentle swaying of her walk as an expression of its freedom.

And all the details of her appearance and person were a revelation of what he desired to have most: the husky tones of her voice together with the natural grace of her hand movements, the sense of privileged look her eyes carried, at least for him, and the soft bed of feeling that he knew cushioned her laughter and made it utterly different from the loud laughter of his companions.

Some of the other boys had noticed his fascinated look on the evening of their arrival at the ranch, and he became the immediate butt of their banter. “Richard wants to make her! Richard has the hots! Richard wants to lay her!” He took it all in good part, even when one of them seriously offered to “fix him up” with Moira.

Moira herself recalls being quite aware of the joke during that evening. At first, she had the usual reactions, half-amused, half-embarrassed. And she probably would never have been of any help to Richard if she had not taken the initiative. It was in the morning before their departure. Richard came down early to find Moira preparing for breakfast.

From the beginning Moira quickly sensed that this was not just another young man flirting with her. Nor did he act shyly. Beyond a cheerful “Hi, good-mornin’,” he said little in the beginning, but started automatically to help her in the breakfast preparations. But she had a strange conviction that she and he had an unconscious agreement or bond. The feeling was disturbing at first; then it became a surprising pleasure.

As they worked she asked if he had any sisters.

“Three.” His expression was blank, neither pleasured nor disdainful.

They busied themselves setting the table. He glanced at her once or twice. Then: “The trip was fantastic. Ever been out there?” She shook her head, waiting for the usual litany of events, feats of male endurance and strength. But Richard continued: “I found what I want to be out there.”

She asked if he wanted to be a forest ranger. “No! No!” Richard answered. He had found out, he explained, what sort of person he wanted to be. He looked up at her, his eyes shining. Moira braced herself for some protestation of eternal love and irresistible attraction. But Richard, eyes still shining, said only: “On the level, Moira, I want to be like you.”

Moira’s first impulse was to burst out laughing, make a wisecrack, and carry on. But something stirred within her cautioning her. She turned away quickly to the stove, disturbed, a little frightened. He worked on, talking all the while.

He said he knew he sounded funny, but he meant what he was saying; it was hard to explain, but he wanted to tell her. She tried to interrupt, but his voice cut across hers hard, almost in reproach. She looked around at him. His eyes were filled with tears. He still had the shining look, but a strange expression of an apologetic grimace touched his mouth fleetingly. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout.”

“You weren’t shouting. I just opened my big mouth.” She followed his glance out the wide floor-to-ceiling windows of the kitchen. The mountains covered with forests crouched out there, their distance foreshortened in the morning haze; they looked as if the boy and girl in the kitchen could touch them with outstretched hands.

“Whatever it was, Richard, it was very beautiful,” she said to break the tension of the silence. “I hope you get what you want. It. must be very beautiful.”

“You know, then. You know.” He was excited and boyish, still looking out. “I will get it. For sure, now.”

Moira had no clear idea of what he was thinking. Since her early teenage she had been used to boys of various types for which she had her own names-the “brawns (athletes, outdoor types), the “softies” (nice but weak), the “teddy bears” (effeminate), the “profs” (studious, serious). They all talked about themselves and nearly always in terms of achievement in school, in business, in sport, or with other girls. She was sure now that Richard fitted into none of her categories. The caution about him she had felt earlier in the conversation had given away now to a sensation of fragility in him matching her own. She felt that he knew-even if he did not possess the instinct for-that detailed intimacy so characteristically feminine and the real bond between all women as compared to and distinct from men.

Richard talked on happily while they finished the breakfast preparations. He spoke of feelings and tastes, of touching trees, leaves, grass, flowers, of the smell in the air, of the wind, of the silence, and of his desire to be as “inside” himself as she was and as independent as his father was. It was a staccato speech, punctuated with pauses, over forks and spoons and glasses, running on pleasantly and softly. Just before the first pair of legs bounded down the stairs, he paused; and she, looking him straight in the eye, said: “Richard, shouldn’t you ask someone . . . ?”

“No one of them will understand. You know that,” he answered immediately but not abruptly. “Don’t worry. I have plenty of advice. From the right ones. When they’re finished, I’ll know how to feel things, to be really boy and girl. All in one.”

Moira remembers protesting with all the earnestness she could convey and trying to tell Richard that his “plan” sounded like the hardest and maddest thing in the world.

“No!” Once again his tone had changed to a rough note. She caught a glint at the back of his eyes which recalled her dim memory of an Alsatian baring his teeth and growling at her long ago when she was three. Now she was afraid. He told her abrasively: “Only a few can get it.” He was smiling, but she did not like the smile. “That’s the name of the game,” he remarked some moments later.

Moira thought that he was going to continue talking. But at that moment the kitchen was invaded by seven other young men, loud, laughing, joking, looking for breakfast, and loosening the spell of a situation that had become uncomfortable and eerie for her. Moira saw the veils closing over Richard’s eyes. He became once more the easy, good-natured, smiling companion she had seen entering the house the day before.

Back home in Detroit a few days later, and into the school year, Richard continued to live in the memories of his vacation. Without knowing it, he was probing deep into one of the most mysterious elements of human personality: gender. In retrospect we can see how the peculiarities of his personal makeup were responsible in some degree for his later development. They do not, however, explain in any way the onset of possession.

After one more year in high school, Richard went on to college. During his first year there, both his older brothers got married. His three sisters had already left home and were married. Although he spent a lot of time comparing himself to them, Richard never really knew them. He never engaged in any deep conversations with his sisters, and he did not get any clear feeling for their points of view where they differed from his.

He majored in mathematics, taking English literature and French as extra credits. He corresponded regularly with Moira in Colorado, and with time a deep friendship sprang up between them. Sometimes he spent vacations with her and her family; sometimes Moira came to Detroit and spent time with Richard’s family. Moira was studying English literature and journalism at the University of Denver. She intended to enter the field of publishing.

Toward the end of his second year, he had a conversation with his father, who was taken aback to find his son spouting what seemed to him to be very advanced and unorthodox ideas about sexuality. Richard had read all of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, George Sand’s Indiana, and a host of other books his father had never I heard of. He could quote anthropologists and social scientists in support of his views about matriarchy and woman’s superior power and status.

His father consulted the rabbi of the local synagogue. And, during the following Easter vacation, Richard and his father went to see the rabbi. The rabbi found Richard quite sensible and his views reasonable. He pointed out to Richard and his father that the original Hebrew in the Bible does not say God created Eve, the first woman, from a rib of Adam. The word used at this place in the Bible means 1 “one of two matching panels.” He further pointed out that this Bible | account is essentially androgynous. “So man and woman are equal halves of the same entity,” concluded the rabbi, “but woman is most like God because she has the womb of creation in her.” It was all very confusing for Richard’s father. But Richard found in it a fresh impetus 1 for his dreams of femaleness.

Toward the end of his last year in college, Richard spoke to his father about a job in the insurance office. He had no particular desire to specialize in any subject. Medicine and law did not interest him. What Richard was really looking for was a situation in which he could achieve his dream.

In early June 1961, at the age of twenty-one, Richard took up daily work at his father’s insurance office. He proved a very willing apprentice. He was conscientious, took instructions, worked long hours, willingly gave up weekends to work on difficult claims, and studied law at night. His father was very proud of his decision and his performance. His mother loved having one son still at home.

In his free time Richard continued reading. He spent long hours walking by himself. Since he was out of college and no longer forced to take part in group activities, he began to elaborate his ideal.

He had one constantly recurring dream day and night. Once and for all, he fancied, everybody knew he was woman and man all in one. It was public knowledge, he dreamed, and accepted joyfully and admiringly by everyone. He wore either male or female clothes, according to the ebb and flow of his sexuality. His skin was either smooth or hard, his voice metallic and masculine or husky and deep, his hair long or short, his mind logical and rationalizing or intuitive and feeling, his breasts round and full with marked nipples or flat and formless, his genitals male or female. But he was chiefly female and feminine-with a very marked peculiarity.

In his dream he had, as a man, attracted a beautiful woman who possessed his own female face and body. She was he in female form. When they made love together, he was not merely a male entering a female. He was a female taking a male into her secret mystery. He not only had the male sense of arrival and expansion. He had the female sense of falling through the velvet veils of that mystery where wreaths of creation and shaping forms of arcane worlds wove around him with soft murmurs of love.

Sometimes in his dreams, all this took place at home in Detroit, sometimes at the lakeside in the Colorado mountains, sometimes in exotic lands. But most often the entire scene was played out in a small house surrounded by trees and standing on the edge of water. Wherever he traveled for the company, Richard began to keep his eyes open: perhaps, he would find a house similar to the one in his dreams.

His relationship with Moira now became something more than close friendship.

Moira, in Richard’s eyes, was still the woman of his Colorado experience and he felt she could be part of his continuing dream of perfect man-woman love. And Moira was in love with Richard. It seemed perfect-on the outside. Gradually it became a mutual assumption that they were engaged and that they would eventually get married. In Moira’s mind this would take place when Richard got a promotion in his company. In Richard’s mind it could only take place when he found his dream house.

In mid-1963, Richard’s company sent him to Tanglewood in eastern Illinois as a temporary substitute for a sick member of the local office. In Tanglewood, Richard found several advantages. His new boss liked him very much. It was a far cry from the urban ills of midtown Detroit. His new post was in effect a promotion. The Tanglewood office was just beginning to expand, and Richard could be in on the ground floor of the company’s ambitious programs.

Chiefly, however, Richard found what he knew was the nearest approach to the house of his dreams. It was called Lake House: single-storied, standing on three acres of land, with sliding glass panels in the back giving on to a large pond. The original owners, back in the late nineteenth century, had covered the three acres with trees, chestnut, sycamore, pine, elm, birch, oak. On his first visit to inspect it, Richard heard the wind in the trees by the water’s edge. He knew this was his house. And it was for lease.

By that autumn, he had moved into Lake House. With the recommendation of his new boss, he obtained a permanent transfer to Tanglewood. Then he wrote triumphantly to Moira asking her to marry him. She answered immediately by telegram.

They were married in Tanglewood on June 21, 1964. They decided not to go away for their honeymoon, but to spend it at home in Lake House. By their own choice, also, they arrived there alone in the evening of that day. All seemed perfect. The weather had a gentle balm to it all day; the sun was warm, but a light wind sang in the trees keeping everything cool and clean. “Our house is clean, not pots-and-pans clean,” said Moira misquoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, “but windswept clean!”

In all the years of their friendship and engagement, they had never gone beyond a very occasional kiss of passion. Again, as with many other aspects of their relationship, each had assumed that the other wished it that way. Their first evening and night together as married people was something Richard had lived again and again in his dreams. It proved a total disaster, however, and not because they both were virgins, but on account of Richard’s strange behavior and Moira’s reactions.
They had taken hours in going to bed, strolling down by the water and through the trees, chatting on the porch, and gazing quietly at the night all around them.

Eventually they were side by side. Moira’s mind and body, by that time, were totally attuned to Richard’s movements, the warmth of his body, the smell of it, the urgency he felt. She glanced at his face, her eyes full of invitation, Richard was lying on his back, his face turned toward the open glass panels. He seemed to be listening to the night sounds outside around the pond-the wind in the trees, the ruffling of the water, the owls hooting.

Then he turned his head toward her: “Now, darling,” he said, strangely quiet, “now Lake House is full of them. I am all of me tonight.”

Moira did not understand. She didn’t care. He was already kissing and caressing her, entering her. And, eyes closed, her hands all over him, she started for the first time to feel the urging climb of ecstasy in loving.

Then she heard his voice-this time with a note of stridency- saying: “Open your eyes! Look at me!”

The sight of his face froze every muscle in Moira’s body. It was like a flat, featureless surface without a line. There was no expression on it.

His mouth was closed. His eyes were open, but, unblinking and still, they were mere sightless hollows glazed over with a dead patina.

“You’re not seeing me, Richard,” she said weakly.

But his body had become enormously heavy; she could breathe only with difficulty.

She felt a sudden shooting contraction in her belly and groin. A sweat of pain broke out all over her body like a thin film. “Richard!” she tried to call out.

Richard was not with her. From the moment he turned back from the window, he had seen no one but his female self. When he entered Moira, a storm was on him over which he had no control. It was carrying him, petrified by increasing longing and intensifying loathing at one and the same time, at a speed which ruled out any resistance on his part. Longing and loathing were becoming so intertwined that the more repulsion he felt, the more readily he gave in to longing. But this only brought on increased loathing, so that longing and loathing became one. And both were coming from inside himself. He was their source. The higher he went on that first level of ecstasy, the lower he went on that second level of disgust.

All Richard could see was that beautiful face of his female self flung back in an effort to match his passion. At the same time he began to feel her hands on him as claws scraping his back and buttocks, first lightly, then with increasing pressure and tearing his skin. When she opened her eyes, their deep blue was swimming with feeling. Then they narrowed and glinted with a beige glow that reminded him of pigs’ eyes, but his fascination with all this only swelled.

“You’re not seeing me, Richard!” he heard his female self saying. “Look at me! Look at me!”

He groped with his body for her inner mystery, trying to explore every curve and cranny of her vagina. And, as he did, he felt in himself the rocking motion of something hard and angular. He heard the voice: “Let me take you, secret and all, mystery and all, Richard”-he could not know if it was his own voice or another’s-“I’m your fucker . . . your fucker. Let me!” The voice died away again to a heavy, labored breathing that rose and fell with increasing gusts. It seemed to be acquiring a voiced character, a sound produced in a spittle-filled throat, wheezing, grunting, blowing, inhaling.

Now his longing and loathing were reaching a climax. There was no ejaculation. Rather he swelled and grew bigger and swelled with desire until he felt his middle opening up; and, with a loathing that held him hypnotized, he knew that an alien body was pouring fluid through him, hot, sticky, scorching. Loving and disgust became one. He started to thrash and flail.
By this time, Moira was screaming with fear as his terrible weight pressed down on her. She began to choke on the scream. Suddenly, he was off her. Her voice trailed away.

Richard was over by the far wall, a letter opener in his hand. He was standing with his back to her, tearing and gouging at the wall with wide sweeps of his hand, scraping paper and plaster on to the floor, while he hammered the wall with a clenched fist. A muffled groan rising and falling was all she heard from him.

His back, buttocks, and legs were a field of criss-crossing welts, scrapes, and lesions oozing with little pinpoints of blood at various places.

By now, Moira was afraid for her life. Without hesitation, she was out of bed and running through the door. She grabbed her coat and the car keys, flung the hall door open, and made for the car. “Moira!” she heard him shout brokenly. “Come back! Moira, don’t go. Help me! Come back!” But by then she was halfway down the drive. She found her parents asleep in their hotel room. She never returned to Lake House or to Richard. Two years later she obtained a divorce from him.

Richard’s dream was shattered. But there was something else in its place. He knew now that he had something new in him, something alive, something alien to him, but now his familiar and cohabitant.

He spent the two weeks of what would have been his honeymoon inside Lake House, rarely eating, refusing all callers, never answering the telephone. Gradually he returned to normal life. He was back at work in the office on the appointed day.

Outside office hours and activity, unless he was traveling, Richard stayed at Lake House. He never received visitors. Even when his family came to see him, they stayed in one of Tanglewood’s hotels. Lake House was his refuge and his castle. On weekends he lay in bed in the morning waiting for sunrise. Regularly, as the first streaks of gray light appeared, the birds started to sing in the trees. First one here and there, then another one or two, then two or three together, until the house and garden were filled with the dawn chorus of thrushes, finches, robins, wrens, starlings.

At night and at any time possible he listened to the wind singing in the trees. It still brought tears to his eyes. And always he strained to remember the voice behind the wind and to capture its message and the identity of the messenger. His outlook was still filled with the mystery and power of femaleness. And, he was sure, the wind spoke of this and the birds sang of it.

Richard was now in the second stage of his development. His old idea of an androgynous self had melted. On his trips for the company business, he spent time regularly with prostitutes, and occasionally had relations with female clients and office personnel. He repelled any homosexual advances.

He admitted to himself after a while that in all these sexual encounters it was not a genuinely male sexual desire that impelled him. It was rather a jealous curiosity about the female and the feminine. He was always watching on the sidelines. No woman ever came back to him a second time. And more than one prostitute remarked as she left him: “You’re freaky.”

He once invited a woman to Lake House because he wished to have relations with her while listening to the wind. Everything went well for a while, but something frightened her, and she fled from him as precipitately as Moira had.

It was frustrating for him. He could only speculate about the female ecstasy and experience. He noticed that some women, in having intercourse, moaned in a dying fashion, turning their heads as if to avoid blows or to catch a mouthful of air. And he wondered what sort of lovely death that could be under the knife of female pleasure and secret power, and what sort of enshrined mystery a woman possessed that enabled her to live and die all over again the next time. For that was how he thought of it.
But, in the meantime, his own identity-sexual and otherwise- underwent an eclipse. For three years he never listened to or looked at another human being. He merely heard and saw them. He lost, therefore, any grasp on his own identity. He had no clear perception of who he was, what he was about, where he was going, where he came from. The pattern of his identity was in disarray: an essential piece had been withdrawn invisibly but with shocking results. All the earlier personal lines, geometrically clear and personally pleasing, had melted into a criss-crossed haze. The fine tones and delicate shades of taste and distaste, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion lost stability and definition. All were now clouds and swirls of the unknown and the unpredictable. The various gears of his inner mechanism in mind, will, memory, brain, heart, gut feelings were working at cross-purposes.

He stood helplessly hip deep in the running streams of impulses where before a sharp instinct or a brilliant perception had teamed with a never-failing voice in his heart.

The self he originally proposed to free and ennoble had become indeterminate; it was colored by any element injected into him. He was a cracked bell jangling to the blow of any hammer. He was a bag of emptiness blowing and puffing on insubstantial air. Living now in an inner uncertainty of selfhood that nothing could dispel, he had become the reality of his former nightmare: a nonperson for himself. What he had cherished as a dream of happiness had become in reality an empty void.

And this was not all. He found out on one particular occasion that already within him there were impulses he could no longer govern, and that these impulses seemed to arise from his original ambition to enjoy both masculine and feminine qualities. On that occasion he recognized the big change in himself. It was around the middle of December 1968. He was on the road for his company. The weather was very bad: snow, sleet, strong winds, gale warnings. On his last evening in the city he was visiting, he was walking home from a late meeting with a client. It was around midnight. No one was out at that hour in such wintry weather. Richard walked because the wind, his wind, was blowing with a high-pitched sound-almost a warning, but still enticing.

The way to his hotel led him past rows of detached houses. About half a mile from the hotel, he heard a moaning sound from some bushes and trees that stood in a deserted area between two houses. He stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. Most of the nearby houses were dark, their owners probably asleep or absent. Richard followed the direction of the moaning. Behind the bushes he came across a spread-eagled form. It was a young black girl. She had been raped and stabbed. She was practically naked; her clothes had been torn off her. Between her legs and at her shoulder blood stained the snow in small, dark patches.

Richard was fascinated. He watched her for a while. Then he lifted his head and listened to the wind, feeling its fingers brushing and striking his face. He crept forward, keeping his head down against the wind, then stopped and watched her more closely. The girl was still moaning; her head twitched now and then.

Richard remembers very little else. He recalls tearing off his own clothes feverishly (he was afraid she might die before he finished what he wished to do). He talks almost tearfully now of feeling an irresistible desire to have relations with her then and there. He recalls the wind whistling music in his ears and then, marvelously, changing that music to words. He remembers catching the last glance of the girl who stared at him for one instant before her eyes went completely dead. He felt her body shudder.

Then apparently he stood up in a frenzy of triumph-he had achieved the ultimate watch on woman, he felt. He was seized by a great giddiness as the wind whipped around him. And now, for the first time, he sensed clearly that all his thinking and willing and feeling and imagining led like so many strings back to some central point in him where they lay in the hand of another, who controlled them and him. He felt the security of being controlled and the promise of success: “You shall be as woman!”

Afterward, when he reflected coolly on the incident, he realized that even in her death throes that woman had shown him the power of the feminine; his sexual relations with her had been a revelation for him. He knew that a decision had been made for him. He did not, as yet, guess from where that decision had come. But he did know what he had to do.

In the new year Richard went to New York. In previous years he had read extensively about transsexuals and the new transsexualizing operation. He now put himself under the care and supervision of a doctor who assured him that within 16 to 20 months, if all went well with the tests and preparations, he could have the operation, remove all trace of his male inadequacy-this was how Richard looked at his genitals-and acquire the organs of a woman. In late 1970, after passing successfully through the psychiatric examinations, and the necessary changes in the chemistry of his body having been produced by repeated treatments, Richard underwent surgery and emerged successfully from his convalescence in a new state of almost delirious happiness. He returned to Lake House. His mother and father came to see him, as did his brothers and sisters. They had become reconciled to his new status as well as its his newly adopted name of Rita. His boss at the insurance office was persuaded by his father that Richard could do the same work even better than before. So two months later, Richard was back to a normal life of daily work. As Rita.

The tempo of Richard/Rita’s inner existence now changed. He found his outlook running in two main streams. One was the expected femaleness resulting from the operation. He found greater delight in little details-of cloth, of a story, of colors, of people’s voices, in architecture. No longer did he look for large, sweeping lines in the world around him, nor did he feel inclined to argue logically or to engage in verbal polemics. He felt himself more vulnerable, more susceptible to praise and flattery, on the watch for compliments from men. He had a varied sexual life: he did not discriminate between old and young, ugly and beautiful. It was enough for him that he was desired and that they all found in him something that mystified them while holding them.

The other stream in his outlook was pockmarked with some stinging deficiencies that distressed him continually. When he had intercourse, for instance, he felt a great deadness in himself: there was no after-feeling of warmth and togetherness and perpetuity. And often this lack was accompanied by an inner bitterness that drove him into rages. It became an obsession with him “to make love and feel life” in himself after he had done so, and to hear his partner express himself in similar terms. But nothing he did ever produced a ray of hope in this direction, until he met Paul.

Paul, a Chicagoan, a former minister who had turned to banking and brokerage and become a millionaire in the process, was a very impressive character. Tall, good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair, suave, well dressed, educated, a very good conversationalist, Paul had a brilliant smile. He and Richard/Rita liked each other from the first moment they met at a cocktail party. Richard eventually told Paul his life history. He was surprised by Paul’s matter-of-fact reaction. What amazed Richard/Rita more than that was Paul’s understanding of his difficulty in having intercourse and in its aftermath.

“I think something can be done about all that, Rita,” he said. “But you will have to consummate a carefully arranged marriage.”

“Marriage? But marriage is impossible-at least very difficult,” answered Richard.

“Not the marriage I have in mind. You just need the right partner under the right circumstances. You don’t realize it, but you have been preparing for quite a while for this marriage. Leave it all to me.”

Richard/Rita did not understand what Paul meant, until he participated in the Black Mass on June 21, 1971.

The invitation he received from Paul was ostensibly for a midnight party. It was a sultry night without a patch of wind. When Richard/Rita arrived around 10:00 P.M., he was struck by the lavish surroundings. The house, dating from the previous century, stood in its own grounds. About 80 guests were drinking and eating a cold buffet around an open-air pool illuminated by tall, thick candles. Another 40 guests were dancing inside in the ballroom. The air was full of chattering, laughter, music, and celebrations. Paul immediately introduced Richard/Rita to a table at which two young women and their escorts sat. Merriment pervaded the group. Everybody was excited and happy.

From his position, Richard/Rita could see both ends of the pool. At each end there was a long table covered with food, drinks, ice buckets, and flowers. Behind each table, a long, wall-high, embroidered red curtain hung from a pole. A butler in black evening clothes stood motionless by each curtain.

Richard/Rita felt surprisingly at home. He joined in the laughter and talk around the table, and cheered as some of the more mellowed guests shoved each other fully clothed into the water.

At 12:45 P-M., Richard/Rita suddenly noticed a hush. Nobody was speaking any longer. The stereo music had gone silent. Without his realizing it, about three-quarters of the guests had departed. The two couples who had been at his table had excused themselves shortly before, saying that they wanted to dance.

The guests who remained had fallen silent. They stood in two groups at either end of the pool, facing each other across the water. Then, Richard/Rita noticed his tall host signaling to the two butlers. With a solemn movement, they pulled aside the curtains.

When the curtains parted, Richard/Rita could see a low altar table at either end of the pool. Above each altar there hung an ornament in the shape of an inverted triangle. At its center there was an inverted crucifix, the head of the crucified resting on the angle of the apex of the triangle. From the interior of the house he now heard the low peals of an organ. And someone was burning incense there, so that the fumes drifted out lazily and lay across the air like slowly twisting blue serpents. Then the guests started to undress in an unconcerned fashion, each one dropping his or her clothes where they stood.
 

As if on signal, both groups turned and started to come around the sides of the pool toward Richard/Rita. He started to get up when Paul’s hand fell on his shoulder gently but firmly: “Wait, Rita.” The naked guests filed around him and stood stock-still. Nobody had yet spoken a word. Then Paul took Richard/Rita’s arm so that he stood up. Twenty pairs of arms stretched out from all sides; and unhurriedly, calmly, they undressed Richard/Rita. His host, Paul, was nowhere to be seen at that moment.

Then one guest, a young blond man in his late twenties,. came forward. Around his neck he wore a narrow black stole. There was a ruby ring on the index finger of his left hand.

“Rita,” he said evenly to Richard/Rita, “I am Father Samson, willing minister of our Lord Satan. Come! Let us adore.”

His voice, the hands and fingers of the guests, the low organ music, the sultry night, the light feeling in his body, the languid odor of the incense, all this fell into a pattern of softness which Richard/Rita felt all around him. He turned as gravely as the others and walked in procession around the pool, past the tall candlesticks, until they reached one of the altars.
Now he had no further difficulty in understanding what they required of him. He waited passively and quietly.

They easily lifted Richard/Rita and placed him on his back flat on the altar. Father Samson then appeared carrying a chalice. Someone placed a small folded cloth on Richard/Rita’s pubic hair. Samson stood the chalice on the cloth. Then Richard/Rita heard three voices chanting the opening words of the old Latin Mass: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” to which they added the extra name: “et domini nostri Satanas.” Richard/Rita now understood. He felt a strange exultation.

Father Samson had begun reading from a black-bound book held by another naked guest, a woman of about thirty-five. He gestured gravely as he proceeded. The others had grouped themselves around in two concentric circles: the inner circle, all males, had placed, each one, the left hand on some part of Richard/Rita’s body. Those in the outer circle, all females, had placed their hands on the hips of the males.

Just before the consecration, a woman pricked a vein in Richard/ Rita’s arm, letting some drops of his blood fall and mix with the wine in the chalice. Once Father Samson had uttered the words of the consecration (“This is my body . . .”), the guests paired off, lay down on the floor, each man lying between the legs of a woman. Father Samson parted Richard/Rita’s legs, mounted the altar, entered Richard/Rita fully, took the chalice, sipped it, held it to Richard/ Rita’s lips so that he could sip it, and handed it to the nearest pair. While this pair was sipping the chalice, Father Samson started rhythmically to push and pull in Richard/Rita, saying as a refrain: “Say-tan! . . . Say-tan! . . . Say-tan!,”lengthening the first syllable as he drew partially out of Richard/Rita and hitting the second syllable with hard emphasis as he drove into Richard/Rita. As each pair handed on the chalice, they started to copulate following the rhythm of Father Samson, until all-men, women, and Father Samson-were chanting and copulating in unison. Richard/Rita was the only silent one.

He lay, eyes closed, while Father Samson chanted on him. For the first time Richard/Rita felt a strange tingling starting at his buttocks, up through his spine, up the nape of his neck, around his skull, down into his shoulderblades, past his middle and abdomen, in around his vagina and down through his groin and calves, to the tips of his toes. For all the world it felt as if an electrifying fluid was being poured into him from Samson. Richard/Rita opened his eyes to look at Samson, but the light was too dim, and the blue trails of the incense were weaving through his vision.

Richard/Rita could hear heavy breathing, but he could see no face, only the outline of a head. He murmured: “Father Samson . . . Lord Satan . . . Father Samson . . . Lord”-but he was interrupted by a harsh, grating sound of single words coming to him through the heavy breathing.

“Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer!” Richard/ Rita no longer heard the chant of “Say-tan!” Now all seemed to be joining in “Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer! . . . Girl-Fixer!” Father Samson’s index finger was now deep in Richard/Rita’s rectum, massaging, scooping, probing, pulling, pushing. Richard/Rita felt his own semen being loosened and flowing; and, inside him, he had a sharp sensation of very hot, sticky oil squirting around the wall of his vagina as he heaved and shook.

“Have me! Girl-Fixer! . . . Father Satan . . . have me . . . smell me . . . fuck me . . . through . . . through . . .” Richard/Rita’s voice rose steeply into a loud scream. The organ notes thundered, filling the air. As each pair of the guests reached orgasm, they screamed and groaned in a jumble of half-words: “Sayt. . . fuck . . . take . . . Sayt. . . have . . . smell. . . cunt. . . prick ...”

The scene subsided slowly. As the waves of pain, pleasure, and exultation ebbed in Richard/Rita, he knew that he now had a shadow-or, at least, that is how he described it. It was not glued to his body, nor did it fall on the ground beside him wherever he went. It was like a twin spirit or soul of his own soul or spirit. And it possessed his own thoughts, memories, imaginations, desires, words.

Richard/Rita again opened his eyes. Father Samson was gone. Paul, his host, unsmiling, grave, helped him off the altar and motioned him to stand, legs well apart. One by one each of the guests came forward on their knees. Bending the head and pronouncing the long word “Say-tan!,” they clamped their lips over his vagina and sucked. Then they backed away out of the pool area.

When the last guest was gone, Paul handed Richard/Rita his clothes, helped him to dress, led him around the house to the front, where a limousine waited with its engine ticking. The chauffeur opened the door for Richard/Rita. “You belong now, Rita. Serve him well” was Paul’s parting phrase.

As he lay in bed later, Richard/Rita could sense his shadow near him and with him.

He felt secure. When sleep came, it was dreamless and deep.

The aftermath was terrible. He now found that all his sexual activity-whether in fantasy or in fact-had become of the same texture as that repulsive level on which he had moved the night of his wedding to Moira. And it reduced all pleasantness, pleasure, beauty, joy, ecstasy, to sexual terms which today he characterizes as “animality.” It made him feel and think and live like an animal in heat, an animal which by a freak accident had been provided with a self-conscious mind and memory, but which would shortly lose those faculties and revert to being just animal.

Richard/Rita is the only ex-possessed person I have known who still has a clear memory of what precise differences the culmination of possession made to his inner self-mind, memory, will, emotions, imagination.

The entry point of continued possession, its bastion, was his imagination. In listening to him, one has to remember Richard’s specific problem: gender and sexuality were one and the same for him. Once possession was completed, it seemed to him that he had an invisible but tangibly felt shadow, a twin of himself but yet distinct from him, and that from that point onward self-control and direction in him were exercised by that twin.

He points to the fluid or electrifying effect he received from Father Samson at the Black Mass. For it now appeared to Richard/Rita that in his conscious hours all his thoughts and willing and remembering and sensations (and, therefore, all he said and did in the view or hearing of others) came in a very different way. Now continuously his imagination-rather than his memory or his senses or his reasoning mind-received “imprints” or “messages”: images, pictures, diagrams. There was also some other force or influence he could not accurately name. But because it specifically, directly, and exclusively concerned his sexuality, he calls it the S-factor.

Once his imagination received one of those “messages” or “imprints,” then the whole internal mechanism of thinking, willing, remembering, and feeling with his five senses came into play. The control thus exercised on him was absolute. If he smelt an odor, if he desired something, if he remembered anything, if he thought or reasoned, it was all made possible by a prior “imprint.” And consequently any words he spoke or actions he performed were made possible only by that source.
The exercise of his sexuality-his desire and its consummation-was under the strictest control. The desire came without warning: it did not arise due to any exterior stimulus.

To cap it all, there were other moments: hours of high possession when the control exercised over him acquired an intensity which blotted all else out. In “normal” time of possession, he was still self-aware, i.e., he saw and felt himself under the inescapable influence of those “imprints,” but it was he himself who thought, remembered, imagined, spoke, walked, acted. At the “high moments” of possession, it seemed to him that he no longer did any of those things. The very insides of his soul or spirit seemed to be drenched in another’s being.

He himself felt reduced to a tiny pinpoint of identity, to be imprisoned in the most solitary of solitudes, while every fiber and sinew of his life was permeated with an alien tyranny, a brute authority.

And, as he is able to relate it now, only in that microscopic reduction of himself did he spontaneously revolt. There he had no memory of the past-only a memory that there had been a memory. Nor had he any anticipation of the future-only a consciousness that anticipation was impossible. Neither praying nor cursing, neither praise nor blasphemy was possible there. It was an undivided and infinitely sad present, an awareness of oneself surrounded by utter blackness and nothingness. The very self of Richard/Rita always refused (although it could do nothing about expelling) that constant shadow.

Richard/Rita is emphatic on one point: the strict separation and distinction between the detectable and measurable area of his thoughts, emotions, memories, external actions, sensations, etc., on the one hand; and, on the other, the self he never ceased to be. All through his enigmatic experiences, that detectable and measurable area varied and changed under the influx of differing intensities, as masculine and feminine, male and female traits ebbed and flowed in him. Psychologists would, justifiably in their terms, describe it as rather extensive changes of personality. But the self-whether reduced to the pinpoint of possessed slavery or free within the general control of the central point in his imagination-that self never ceased to be the same.

Asked about the suffering specific to possession, Richard/Rita says that the genuine pain of possession does not come from any physical distortion, deterioration, or ravages-these most of the time provide the possessed with a savagely twisted pleasure and thrill. But it lies instead in what he calls the “mirror of existence” of the possessed.

The unpossessed, the normal person, is aware of the self he is only when it is reflected in another person or in things other than himself. And, without ever realizing it, when we perceive ourselves reflected in someone else or in objects other than ourselves, we instinctively compare that reflection of the self with an ideal measure we have formed but which we usually leave unspoken, even unthought. It is, however, ever present to us when we make comparisons of ourselves. This is the third, the hidden third, necessary for all comparison between two things. To be self-aware is to be able to compare our selves with the reflection and with the ideal measure.

The possessed has no such awareness. For in the state of possession, the self-consciousness and self-awareness of the possessed becomes absolute solitude. There is no hidden third, no ideal. Metaphorically speaking, in possession a mirror is held up in which the self of the possessed sees only itself in itself in itself in itself and so on in an infinitely receding number of self-containing, self-mirroring images, with no end in sight. And this awareness is, by definition, complete and unending solitude.

For those near Richard/Rita-his office colleagues, his immediate family, the few friends he had made in the immediate neighborhood of Tanglewood, there was a marked change in him dating from June 1971 onward. Their memories of this change are unanimous and date from about the time of the Black Mass-of which they knew nothing, of course.

Richard/Rita now always wore male clothing; but ordinary people, who did not know his story, could not make out exactly whether it was a man or a woman they were meeting in Richard. Then there was the smell, not unpleasant, just pervasive. It has been described by some as “musky,” by others as “faded perfume” such as you get when you open an old chest of drawers, by others still as “a clean animal smell.” It pervaded Lake House, his room at the insurance offices, his car, his clothes, even his handwritten letters. People always found it distinctive; some found it repulsive. It varied in strength.

Finally there were his peculiar fits. His normally deep-blue eyes would take on a greenish hue. Some hidden glow or luminescence emphasized the down of his face, neck, arms, hands, and legs, so that he looked sort of furry; but when you looked closely, you saw only skin. He spoke very little, mainly single words and at an extremely slow pace, accompanied by a combination of chuckles, grunts, snorts, twisting of his eyebrows, and mouth grimaces that contorted his lips around his teeth.

Yet it was the indescribably roughened tone or timbre of his voice that disturbed people the most during his fits.

At first sporadic through the summer of 1971, these fits increased in frequency, so that by late October they were of daily occurrence. There was then a peculiar fear-causing element in any conversation with Richard/Rita-and his job was 80 percent of a talking nature. When anyone spoke to him, their words seemed to fall into a deep, deep hole and to be lost.

They felt he hadn’t heard or that, if he had, there was no communication between them. Then, as they were giving up or trying again by repeating what they had said, he spoke either in single words or in a series of disconnected words. They made sense and, most of the time, gave an answer. But they seemed to come from far in the distance, from the bottomless depth of that hole into which their words had fallen. Impersonal, uncommunicative of any personality, unwarm, at that stage Richard/Rita reminded some people of the humanly unresponsive effect a tape recording gave them.

People quickly learned that his responses and conversation always made sense. Indeed, they were highly intelligent and relevant. His business judgment was better than ever before. But always the freakish atmosphere communicated by the tone of his voice disturbed them. This, together with an almost overnight suspicion in his colleagues that “wherever Richard/Rita is, there is always trouble,” finally brought his dismissal from work and caused him to lose his friends one by one.

The “trouble” was eerie. At first, it affected mainly his life at the insurance office. But gradually it affected anyone who contacted him even fleetingly-the delivery boys from the grocer, druggist, and dry cleaners, his cleaning woman, the laundry woman, his gardener. Once it got to a policeman who gave him a traffic ticket. And eventually it affected each member of his family who visited him. The “trouble” was strictly reminiscent of what happened at the Tower of Babel in the Bible story. Men and women who had known each other for years and had worked together intimately for substantial periods of time suddenly started to misunderstand each other and to wrangle and quarrel. To some onlookers of such “trouble,” it seemed as if what one person said was heard backwards by another person, i.e., with exactly the contrary meaning that the speaker intended.

The “trouble” affected only those talking and dealing with each other. But once any onlooker got between the disputants-entered their “atmosphere,” so to speak-he or she was also affected by the “trouble”; and there was an additional source of babel and confusion and wrangling.

Incidents of this kind took place always and only where Richard/ Rita was present physically. He seemed to be highly amused at the whole thing, but he himself never got caught by the “trouble.”

The “trouble” also affected those writing or typing in his presence: they wrote or typed the opposite of what they meant, or it turned out to be complete nonsense. And all incidents of the “trouble” cumulatively pointed too strongly in Richard/Rita’s direction to be explained in complete disconnection from him.

When there was no fit of any kind and no “trouble,” Richard/Rita’s accustomed sweetness of character and affability came to the fore. The change at those moments was almost shocking.

It was some time before Richard/Rita realized why he had lost friends, why he found people turning away from him, and why he became unpopular in his office.

In the last days of October he was fired. His brother, Bert, came in to see him. Then Bert went and talked with his immediate boss. From what Bert learned from him and from others in Tanglewood, joined to his own impressions, he concluded that his
brother needed psychiatric care. But Richard/Rita’s behavior then became a hide-and-go-seek game. Whenever he visited the psychiatrist, he was absolutely normal; and the psychiatrist could find nothing wrong or sick about him, no matter what diagnostic means he used. Indeed, the psychiatrist concluded that Richard/Rita’s dismissal from the office was based on the boss’s repulsion of Richard/Rita as a transsexual; and he advised Richard/Rita to sue for damages and reinstatement in his job.

But matters took another turn when Bert and Jasper came and stayed with him for a long weekend. Richard/Rita had several fits.

And the “trouble” was again very evident. Now, in his calm moments, Richard/Rita talked to them frankly and pathetically. He had begun to know in a dim and fragmentary way something of the drastic changes in him.

His brothers stayed on at his house, determined to get to the bottom of it all. Richard willingly underwent a complete physical checkup. The results were negative. Further psychiatric examinations were equally fruitless.

Bert and Jasper together with Richard/Rita decided to ask the local Lutheran pastor for some advice. He diagnosed Richard/Rita as a soul who had neglected God and prayer. When the pastor’s counseling was of no avail, they called on the local rabbi. This man, a very saintly person, consented to read some prayers in Richard/Rita’s presence. He also read some texts of the Talmud and explained them to the three brothers.

The following days, there was no change in Richard/Rita’s general condition. They then decided to call on the local Roman Catholic pastor. The three of them walked over to see Father Byrnes, who already knew Richard/Rita by name and sight. He listened to them, but threw cold water on any expectations of concrete help. It wasn’t because they were non-Catholics, he explained apologetically, and he sounded sincere to them. But he didn’t know what to do. Sure, he would include Richard/Rita in his prayers. But, they shouldn’t forget, so had the others. And what good had all that done? It didn’t seem enough, Father Byrnes concluded. Bert took Father Byrnes aside and pleaded with him: his brother was ill in some peculiar way. Doctors and psychiatrists had given up on him. Didn’t Father Byrnes know some Catholic priest who might help?
“Call me tomorrow, after midday,” Father Byrnes answered. He had just remembered Father Gerald and his great common sense.

The morning of the exorcism Richard/Rita rose early, bathed, washed his hair, carefully sprayed himself with deodorant, and applied his favorite perfume to neck, breasts, wrists, and behind his ears. He put on a pair of dark blue slacks, a red turtleneck sweater, and loose sandals. His long black hair was brushed and combed in a simple manner. He wore no makeup or jewelry. When he was dressed, he went out and fed the ducks in the pond, walked around for a while, then returned in time to greet Gerald’s assistants at the door.

Partly because his two brothers were assistants, it was almost like a group of intimate friends gathering for a reunion or for the celebration of a very private event. Richard/Rita collaborated laughingly and pleasantly, making coffee, arranging the room for the rite of Exorcism, and in general was very apologetic and apparently appreciative of the “inconvenience being given,” as he said repeatedly. For the exorcism, Richard/Rita’s bedroom had been chosen by Gerald after some discussion, and mainly because it seemed to be the place Richard/Rita wanted most to avoid.

When all was ready, Richard/Rita sat down with the assistants and waited, sometimes chatting, sometimes praying with them, until Gerald’s car was heard in the driveway. Bert went out, reported to Gerald, then came back and told Richard/Rita to sit or lie down on the couch. But Richard/Rita insisted on waiting for Gerald.

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