Who do you think you are? a.k.a. The Morning Things Changed

von Marcus Krug

I

Him

As I awake this morning from an uneasy dream, I find myself without a nocturnal penile tumescence. I lie on my back with slightly more weight on my chest than usual. Lifting the duvet to see what is going on, I see that I am wearing my girlfriend’s pyjama – girlishly pink fleece with floral design. The warm and cosy one – actually a present of her mother’s. She always puts it on when she stays home reading or talking to her friends on the phone.

What has happened last night? I went out and had a few drinks. Me and the guys from work – a usual Friday night. Do I remember how I got back home and into bed? No, I don’t. I had a couple of pints and apparently seem to have a blackout, but I don’t feel hungover, at all.

I turn around to the left side of the bed, to where my girlfriend usually sleeps, to see if she is there and what she is wearing. But wait, I am already on the left side of the bed. What is going on? I turn to the right. And there she is. She is wearing my stuff, no question about that. But wait again, there’s something not quite right here either. She is not that bulky – never used to be. That is definitely not her. Where is she? Because that over there is – me?

I turn around and lie on my back again – clueless, I stare at the ceiling for a little while.

The other me is still sound asleep. But is it really the other me? The questions is, who am I? Again I lift the duvet and embark on a journey of discovery. I unbutton the pyjama’s front.

Jesus! Boobs! Nice ones, I have to say. I kind of know them and I love them. Now I touch them which feels good and weird at the same time; good, because they are like my girlfriend’s and have exactly the same soft feel, but then I have the sensation that somebody else is touching my breasts which feels awkwardly weird! Having boobs – in particular – is something completely new for me. Further down I discover why the morning wood was actually impossible. What is going on here?

The other me is moving. It turns around and now I see my face as if I have a look into a mirror. I am stunned! But now again, who am I? There is unfortunately no real mirror around, anymore. Just a couple of days ago, we had taken the big one off the ceiling above the bed.

I turn to the nearby bedside table and find my girlfriend’s phone. It takes me quite some time to unlock the screen, but then the camera tells me that I am my girlfriend. At least I look like her. I am in my girlfriend’s body. Probably she is in mine, too?

The other me opens its eyes. Slowly. It recognises me. As my girlfriend? With a smile on its face it comes over. The other me looks at me like a famished man looks at food. And then she kisses me. It feels like kissing my girlfriend. But she tastes like an ashtray – yuck! It feels good, even though, I don’t like her beard. It is whiskery.

I feel drawn to my girlfriend, but she is inside my body. I move towards it and she comes closer to me. We kiss and touch each other. I really wish I could go all the way but I can’t. I am not ready for this, yet. I want her but not within my body, that feels a bit strange.

Go and fuck yourself?

I turn away from her and my body. I say “I am exhausted and I don’t feel well, sorry!” And it is actually quite easy to fake it and even convince her. Slowly, I turn around. She stops urging me. But she, with my hands, is still all over her body caressing me from behind. Then she comes a bit closer again. She, with my mouth at her ear, says something very thought-provoking “Under different circumstances, this probably would have been my line in the script.” I can’t see it, but I know she’s smiling with my mouth. Then she kisses her ear and I close her eyes.

---

 

Her

As I awake this morning from an uneasy dream, I find myself with a nocturnal penile tumescence. I lie on my left side and my head is as big as the universe – big bang, expansion, super nova – everything seems to happen at once in there. My mouth tastes like a small animal has died a terrible death in it.

I lift the duvet and see that I am not wearing my soft and fleecy pyjama. I am wearing a t-shirt and stretched shorts – which looks like a tent has been put up down there. How come, I am wearing Marcus’ stuff? And why do I have a penis, for Christ’s sake? And fucking hell, every move is just another journey into the land of self-inflicted pain. So I stay put.

But what has happened last night? I remember staying home and talking to Rachel who was nervous about her date on Saturday. I didn’t have the usual two or three glasses of wine which I need when talking to her on the phone. Why am I hung over, then?

Someone else is in the bed and moves around, but I stay where I am – it just feels better that way. But I have to figure out why my arms and legs are hairy and why I am having a boner. I just realise now that I am not on my side of the bed. What is going on here?

The other person in the bed is moving around again. But I don’t. I do not feel comfortable in my current constitution which is pretty much the whole of my physical sensation at the moment. It feels like one of those out-of-body-in-somebody-else’s-body experiences. I am hairy all over my broad chest as well – probably even my back is covered in fur. I will check that later. For now I am busy discovering my penis and my balls. Why of all the things in the world a cock with two balls? This is stimulating because they have a very familiar feel – like my boyfriend’s crown jewels.

But still, it feel as if somebody else is touching my private parts – and it feels good and strange at the same time. The strange part is that it is completely new for me to have this very sensitive package between my legs. It responds to every touch. But unfortunately, every pleasurable touch – which spurs the blood circulation enormously – is followed by the painful realisation that I am – for some incomprehensible reason – still hung over.

The other person just let out a muffled sigh. Where I am now, I can feel that someone is watching me. I would really love to know who I am! And I am lucky, because across from my side of the bed is the wardrobe. It has a mirror-like glass front. With a closer look I can see my boyfriend lying there. I wave at his reflection and he waves back. But this is impossible! Does that means, if I am not mistaken, that I am him? Am I in his body?

I start moving around very slowly, which causes surprisingly less pain now, but still. I want to know if Marcus is here in the bed with me and I want to know what he is. So I turn around. But I keep my eyes closed to give the impression that I am still asleep. I have to prepare myself for what I am going to see when I open my eyes. At the moment anything could unhinge my fragile mental constitution, as I don’t know who I am and why my body is covered in hair and my face is – for my taste – in demand of a proper shave.

I open my eyes. Slowly. What I see doesn’t make me sway because I look straight into my face, like into a mirror. But I am perplexed. My body is just lying across from me in this very bed and my eyes are looking at me. The more I look into my own eyes, I don’t see myself over there but my boyfriend. He is in my body and I am probably in his.

My view – for some reason – changes from my face to the unbuttoned front of my beloved fleece pyjama in front of me. I can see my boobs which sets a peculiar chain reaction in motion. The sensitive package between my legs gives a signal that it is very much alive and growing. Even though this makes my blood boil, the hangover seems to have vanished altogether. My hands and mouth want to go over there and touch and kiss them and all is driven by these very demanding genitals. There is nothing I can do, so I let myself go. I love it when the mob of hormones defeats reason.

And then I kiss myself. It feels like kissing Marcus. But I can sense that he doesn’t like my beard and the taste of ashes in my mouth. We kiss and touch each other and I feel extremely drawn to my boyfriend even though he is in my body. I want him! But he doesn’t seem to be comfortable with the idea of getting fucked by himself.

He turns away from his body and says with my voice “I am exhausted and I don’t feel well, sorry!” He turns around now. So I stop urging him but am still over my body caressing his back.

Then I get again closer to my ear. And with his voice I say “Under different circumstances, this probably would have been my line in the script.” I smile and kiss my ear. From my position I can see my eyelashes move when he closes my eyes.

---

 

Them

There is a hairy chest lying beside him.

“Jesus, that looks like a dead monkey here next to me!” Marcus burst out, but instantly realising that this is actually his chest, only seen from a different angle.

“No, it is not dead it is still moving, look …” Julia says with his voice, taking a deep breath, which makes his chest move up – and then after a little while go down again.

“We have to go back to that restaurant.” he hears himself with his sleepy voice saying.

“What restaurant?” Marcus asks.

“The one, we went for dinner on Friday night,” says Julia “the Chinese restaurant run by that strange guy called Pedro.”

“Oh yeah, I remember him. Where was he from again?” Marcus asks, but he already knows. Pedro was born in the suburbs of San Francisco to Mexican parents in hiding. Soon after his mother gave birth to him – and because he was a cry baby – his parents were found out and deported back to Mexico. He, as a proper American orphan, was then raised by Chinese immigrants in the fourth generation. They brought him up like one of their own kids. That’s why he doesn’t know any Spanish but is instead fluent in many Chinese dialects and knows all their customs. When he was a kid, he went even so far to sacrifice the contents of his daily lunch boxes – on an altar, he specifically built for that purpose – to the kitchen god, for his dream had always been to open his own restaurant.

Torn between his dissimilar origins, he is wearing a thick black moustache and runs a dubious but hugely successful Chinese restaurant with a lot of basement activities. Rumour has it, he is running a human trafficking hub somewhere under Parnell Street in Dublin. For a nice bit of money – which he usually loans out directly to those gullible East European girls – he supposedly arranges illegal travel documents for these involuntary sex workers and gets them ready for shipment over to the States and Canada.

The Chinese restaurant he runs, is actually called Tijuana, only written in Chinese characters, which nobody really notices, for nobody really knows Chinese. Strangely enough, the place, in the middle of Chinatown, is only known as Pedro’s. On the menu – apart from mind-blowing traditional Chinese MSG dishes –find delicious fusion titbits like sweet-sour enchiladas, guacamole filled fortune cookies or stinky tofu burritos can be found.

“Well,” Marcus says after a little while “the food wasn’t that great. I wouldn’t want to go there again, to be honest.”

“It is not because of eating out, you simpleton. There was something wrong with the food, we had. At least I had some serious issues afterwards. And I think you too.” Julia says.

“What do you mean? I had issues?” he enquires “I didn’t have anything! I went for a drink with the guys from work afterwards, didn’t I?”

“That’s what you think!” says Marcus’ voice sarcastically.

“Oh please, spare me this that-is-what-you-think bullshit!” he say “What did I do according to you then?”

“As soon as we got home, you stripped naked and we had the most ludicrous fight ever!” Julia says.

“Well then, what was it about – the fight?” he mocks her.

“Over my pyjama – the pink one. You wanted it for the night!” she says.

“Oh c’mon, don’t be ridiculous! That did not happen! You are shitting me?!” Marcus says, but losing conviction very slowly.

“No, I am not! You were wearing it this morning, weren’t you?” Julia says.

“Not exactly, I mean, you were wearing it and I woke up in your body! That’s something different, isn’t it?!” he says.

“Well, okay. But I just want to find out what happened and reverse our sex change. And that’s why we need to go back to the restaurant.” says Julia reasonably.

---

 

II

Him

As I wake up, I am still in my girlfriend’s body. And she in mine. For the time being, there is obviously nothing we can do about this peculiar situation. We’ve tried, but weren’t able to wake up from this bizarre dream. Since we still feel rather young and full of juice we decide to try sex. From my point of view, I have to say, I wouldn’t have thought that penetrating myself could be so full of pleasure.

It is Sunday morning and my girlfriend’s phone is ringing. We are still in bed and I wait for her to answer the call. After a while the phone is still ringing, but she is not moving an inch. I get the phone and hold it in front of my face, so that my girlfriend can see it.

“Baby please, answer the phone, will you? She is your mother, now!” says my voice, coming from my head resting on my girlfriend’s soft chest. Lifting my girlfriend’s head, I can see that obnoxiously impish smirk on my face. Only then I realise that I have to answer my mother’s call.

“Hi Mom, what do I owe the honour of your call?” I hear myself snappishly with my girlfriend’s voice asking. The moment my girlfriend bites one of her nipples with my teeth, which is awfully painful, I know that the tone of the opening was somewhat inappropriate.

“Julia, you sound a bit grumpy today. Am I disturbing you?” my new mother asks.

“No, not at all!” I lie “I was just thinking of you and Étienne.” I try to save the situation.

“Oh that’s nice, because we were thinking of you, too!” mother says “And we thought that it would be a great idea to have you and Marcus over for lunch.”

Étienne is my mother’s new lover. She took her yoga instructor after Julia’s father had come out, a couple of month ago, and moved in with his long-time love affair. He lives now with his assistant, a Ugandan guy called Joseph Amin – allegedly a son of one of Idi Amin’s nephews, in Dublin, where he is holding a chair in African studies at Trinity College.

“And do you know who is going to be here, as well?” she asks, and without even bothering to wait for an answer, she goes on “Your brother and his new girlfriend will be here any minute! Isn’t that fantastic? They have great news, they said.” Oh no, we cannot refuse her invitation, no we can’t, not today! We will have to manage, somehow!

“Oh sure, it will be grand to have the whole family around!” I pretend unconvincingly.

We are short of time, get up and then shower together. Julia wants it because she likes it, but it is just time efficient – that’s how I see it – now. To be honest, it is still kind of a challenge for me to soap my own body from my current perspective. But Julia, on the other hand, really enjoys to be gentle to hers, which I, of course, relish enormously.

But the shower wasn’t the worst part of getting ready for mom’s invitation. It is, to get properly dressed.

“Do you really think, I should wear this?” I ask Julia.

“You don’t like it, do you?” she says, but doesn’t wait for me to respond “But you bought it for me on our last trip to London, remember?!”

“Well, of course, I do and I like you wearing it, but not me.” I say, lagging miles behind, mentally.

“But I am afraid, you will have to!” she sneers at me “Believe me, at the moment it looks way better on you than on me.” She has got a point there.

I put it on, even though my mind keeps screaming inside my head – “Please, not this colour! Not! This! Colour!” But I have to get my ego to step back for a while. I like it really on Julia! But on me? Being inside something remotely yellow makes me feel nauseous. To be abandoned in a canola field, for me, is the most hideous torture ever.

It is really hard for me to give in. And I am like a small child now, a child that doesn’t get what it wants. And that’s usually when they get very nasty.

“It makes my belly stick out and it looks like I am bloated.” I say defiantly.

“No, it doesn’t!” Julia says.

“Yes, very much so!” I continue “And just have a look at my bum, it is so massive!” I know that this gets to her. But it won’t change her mind.

“Stop it, will you!” Julia says calmly, but with determination I didn’t know my voice possesses. It is the second day and she already knows, how to use my voice to intimidate me.

In a last attempt of defiance, I say “What about the one you got from your mother? Wouldn’t she be happy to see it on you today?” I say that, because I know that Julia hates the dress and therefore never wore it.

I do not want to either, but then I hear my own voice with the words of my girlfriend – deeply satisfied – saying that now I have to put on the awfully tight, mint green dress and the white high heels. With a look at my stern face she’s put on, my resistance crumbles. And it is needless to say that walking in dress and shoes is a challenge impossible for me to accept at the moment. But we do grow through our challenges, do we not?

In the car it is all different. When I try to get into the driver’s seat of my car, Julia pushes me away with my hands and says sneering “That’s my car now, sweetie!” I get in the passenger seat and try to relax because the dress is so unpleasantly tight. How does she manage to breathe in this?

Étienne welcomes us at the door. As a proper macho man he cheek-kisses me and then – to my surprise – kneads my buttocks shamelessly. I look at Julia who has already sneaked through the door into the house with my body, knowing what would happen to hers with me inside. She forces a smile on my face which is more contorted with pain than she really intends to show.

“You look so beautiful in that lovely dress, sweetheart!” mother chimes and after a little while she asks “Don’t you think, Marcus?” it takes her a while but then Julia nods my head. With her focus back on me, her daughter, again, mother goes on “You still fit in the dress after all this time.” Julia rolls my eyes, she knows, what I don’t.

Thomas, Julia’s younger brother, gets up from the lunch table – almost taking the whole table cloth with him –, puts the knife to his wine glass whereby he almost breaks it. He is in his mid-twenties, clumsy and careless, and has already fathered three children with three different women. Now he announces that his current girlfriend – a pale and lanky ginger in her late teens – is pregnant by him, as well.

He is beaming and his mother storms over to him and hugs him. But then she realises that his inconspicuously pallid girlfriend is at the table, as well. The poor girl perfectly blends in with the white table cloth that Thomas has accidently draped all over her. Mother unveils her, gets her up and showers her with kisses even though the girl is two heads taller than herself.

I can feel my own eyes staring at Julia’s body. Julia indicates me with my face that as her brother’s older sister I am expected to behave as such. I quickly proceed over to mother, ginger and brother and hug them awkwardly. Given the circumstances and all the unnecessary excitement, Siobhan, Thomas’ contemporary girlfriend, now storms off towards the bathroom with both her hands covering her mouth and bloated cheeks.

I am in the kitchen with mother now. We’ve done the dishes, an old family tradition, even though the brand new dishwasher was constantly seducing me with its presence to use it.

It is one of those rare hot days and the humidity in the kitchen is pretty close to one hundred percent. A bead of sweat is running down my chest. It tickles and I can’t resist. I reach over to the clay bucket with the cooking utensils and grab a wooden spoon. I shove it down the cleavage, between Julia’s breasts. The look on my mother’s face is an unmistakeable combination of bewilderment and disgust.

Still a bit confused, she tries to divert and quickly changes the topic. “I really like this dress on you, sweetie. But do you know what I really would have loved even more …” mother says. I am utterly clueless. But she goes on anyways “… that Marcus would have given a speech like this at the table and that your dress wouldn’t fit any longer, because someone new would grow inside your tummy.”

“You know, I am not the one who is not ready. It is Ju…” I hear myself with my girlfriend’s voice saying, but I stammer on “t…t…to be honest, Marcus really wants kids, but I am the one who is not ready yet. And now that I got the job, I always wanted…” I am being honest on Julia’s behalf “…and at the moment it is really not the right time.”

“Oh, not the right time, not the right time?!” she parrots me. “You are in your thirties and your biological clock is ticking louder and louder every second! Can’t you hear it?” she says, almost screaming. Eventually realising that this might have been a bit too aggressive, she adds apologetically “I am just saying.”

But then all of a sudden she throws herself at me, sobbing “I can’t take it any longer, I want my own grandchildren! I do not want to see any of those sad little school girls anymore. He knocks them up and then they leave and take their babies with them when it pops into his mind to shag another one of them. He is like a dog. I wish he came a bit more after his father … No, not really, but you know what I mean.”

I hold her like a real daughter would hold her mother in a situation like this. I am brave, even though her snot is running down the front of the breathtakingly tight and mint green dress, which makes me nonetheless gag.

“Baby, you have always been the more reasonable one – compared to your brother, of course. And even though I think he is a bit dull and you could have done way better, Marcus, nevertheless, might be a good father, don’t you think?!” mother says. My eyes go wide. I am fuming. But I swallow hard, pull myself together, and bite my lips.

“Mom, this is really not the right time, believe me.” I say to calm her and myself down.

“What is wrong with you today? I don’t understand you!” she says.

“No mom, you really wouldn’t understand …”

In the hallway I see Julia’s face in the mirror. The humidity has killed the make-up. I enter the living room. With an expert’s look on her face Julia intercepts me and directs me out of the room into the nearby bath room.

“You have got lipstick on my teeth.” Julia says “And the makeup looks like your face is melting away. Did you cry?”

“No I wasn’t crying. But I came pretty close.” I say.

“Your … ahem … my eyelashes have come loose! What happened in the kitchen?” Julia asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” I say.

“C’mon tell me, what did my mother do to you in there?” Julia asks “She can be very blunt sometimes.”

“Listen! Careful now! I don’t want to talk about it! Do you understand?!” I say, on the edge. She looks into her own distorted face and I can see in the mirror how my hands reluctantly refresh my girlfriend’s make-up. When she tries to put the long fake eyelashes back on, she blunderingly uses too much of that glue. The eyelids stick together. That’s all I needed on top today. Blind like a mole, I can’t open her eyes.

“She asked about grandchildren, didn’t she?” I am asked. And then it breaks loose – I can’t hold it back any longer – the strange mixture of hormones and anger. One single tear at a time, I squeeze out between her gummed up eyelids, which runs down her freshly rouged up cheeks, like the Colorado River cuts through Arizona forming the Grand Canyon. And deep inside her, I start sobbing silently.

As we leave, on the way out, Étienne does it again. As soon as he touches my behind, my fuse eventually blows and my blind rage erupts into mindless violence. Like a scared up snake, Julia’s hand darts between his legs and I grab his balls through his baggy trousers. I twist them. He groans. Julia’s mother comes over to see what’s happening. She’s observing the scene speechlessly.

After the failed attempt to cheek-kiss and touch me again, his head is now resting on Julia’s right shoulder. He is in pain and can barely stand by himself. Even with Julia’s mother nearby I don’t let go of his balls. He doesn’t say a word, he is just whimpering – quietly, into Julia’s ear.

With his ear close to my girlfriend’s mouth, I, with Julia’s soft voice, whisper calmly into his ear “The next time this happens, I am going to pinch them off! Did I make myself clear?”

His shaven head is red like a tomato and the veins have emerged from under his skin. With a whimpery moan he assures his adherence. I let go of him and he reels back into my mother’s arms – still whining.

She looks at her battered and temporarily useless lover and then stares daggers at both of us.

“Julia, honestly, I am seriously worried, you are not yourself today…” mother says.

We leave. My-self in the passenger seat while my body, with Julia’s serenity, is driving my car.

To be continued …