"Энepгия" was all the folder said. Energia. Energy.
I felt a slight shiver when I spread the papers to take the photographs. Men and their giant cocks, beating back Mother Nature. That thing fucked the ground so hard it blew 100 tons of metal deep into "I'll Call You" space. Behind all the chess and mathematics, the Russians had huge fiery balls. The most powerful rocket design in the world was spread out before me, much like my legs had been just moments before. Espionage always made me wet. I love my job.
To my way of thinking, there are 3 worlds. The Man's World, the Woman's World and the Real World. We grow up making our own little Venn diagrams, drawing circles to play in the overlaps. The Man's World is a world of doing. Men see everything in targets, coverage, payload, kilo-tonnage, yield. Men make solutions, thrusting their will around like phalli, cranking great anthills of policy and metaphor and steel into the air, forever running to the next goal, burning to solve. I can get behind that. I feel the nubbin of penis-resolve when I'm getting shit done, killing for my country, sowing the seeds and keeping the peace. I feel that need. The need to solve. The yearning. The pit of the belly, fuck the odds burn. Penis envy? Maybe. Do I care? I'm too busy to care. I'm in the Men's World, doing. It's my second skin, the wool I pull over my own eyes. Like a latex lie, I play tomboy for "The Man" and I love it.
You know those moments that you can only have when you're five-by-five in your element? The only one I can remember came that time I was in Argentina with Dutchy. We had this guy out in the jungle, working him over for something. I didn't know Spanish or Portuguese or whatever he was spouting, but I knew he was unraveling. The sweltering humidity, the thrumming rusty old generator, the smell of ozone and burnt meat, the thin sheen of guilty sweat and pleasure I got from all of it... I'll never forget it. I remember the cordy feeling of his throat under my perfectly manicured hands while I choked him. I remember drinking old tequila with Dutchy while we burned the hut, but mostly, I remember he died looking at my tits. Pig.
That's the Woman's World. I never felt that connection I should have to it. The need for closeness, security, understanding, control. I tried to clutch and nurture and gather, but it rang hollow. What I always did enjoy was the power. The power of influence, to steer men towards my whims, to bend the hive to my will. To be a queen, worshiped on a throne, my every impossible dream to be puzzled out by the throngs of the stupid worker bees. Rationality subdued, pinned under the heel of emotion and lust and need. I could get behind that. I could bend and wriggle and primp and polish, totter on heels and slink in scraps of fabric. Child's play, make-believe, easy. Let them get wrapped up and knock 'em down like pins on the alley. Lipstick is just war paint. I always understood that.
They tell their men that too. Don't be lead around by your balls, don't let the women dazzle you with a bouquet of flesh and silk. Keep it in your pants for Mother Russia. Yeah right, Momma. Your rocket boys are the easiest kinds of score. Physics is all about bodies in motion, collisions, endpoints, solutions. They can't fathom the delicacies of body chemistry, the artistry of teasing a man along by his basic reptilian hind brain. It was like picking up marbles with chopsticks. Much easier if the marble was molten, heated up past the point of rational thought, beyond surface tensions and smooth rolling. I made them sloppy, pheromones pumped out of me by the knowledge I was the smarter player, I was the Kingpin. The Queen, fucking her way to the top. This is the Real World. The world beyond illusions of control. The world of knives and blood and getting killed over ideas. The kind of place where you could find yourself butchering a man who moments ago stood shaking, digging desperately in his tweed pockets for a hotel key, the admission ticket to a paradise of foreign flesh, to the attentions of a cocktail pussy that had picked him over the alpha males. A world where you could die over "Energia", written on a page.