Rain Check
Paul B. Preciado
" Until she'd understood she'd be my bitch someday, she kept her distance, as if taking advantage of her last moments of conditional freedom. At two hundred milligrams of T a week, I find it hard to go three days without fucking. I think about going away to avoid being caught up in her biochemical web. I call her, and I tell her not to worry about infidelity, making a decision, loving me back. I'm going to spend two months with D in Los Angeles. I don't actually say the words infidelity, decision, love. I simply say that it would be easier if I left for a while; I'd give her a "rain check," and maybe it would be better like that. ...
She is silent for a moment, then answers that Los Angeles is her favorite city. Talks about the palm trees. I can't concentrate on what she's saying. My life stretches before me like a path that forks: one branch goes to the palm trees of Los Angeles, the other to V. Two paths interspersed with doses of T.
It isn't as if I were paralyzed at the crossroads. No. I'm the one who had the idea of leaving for Los Angeles, the one who invented away that hadn't existed until then. And I made its first steps, which are, inevitably, leading me away from her. A rain check is an embryo of congealed time, a vital possibility that can be artificially reactivated within a favorable con-text. It's love as a déjà vu that you can control intentionally.
She calls me two days later. She wants to go to the South of France, to Vauvert, write a book about her rape, about the period when she was a prostitute, on why the twen-ty-first century will or won't be feminist. She wants to go toward the sun. I give in. The arrogance of testosterone has given way in the presence of pure affect. I leave with her. "
