Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

“You don’t want to leave.”

Of all those present, I was the only one heading toward the door. Which could only mean one thing: the remark was for me. I paused. Debated whether it was worth playing along. Curiosity — ever the saboteur — won. At the top of the staircase stood a figure uncannily similar to Bill Kaulitz in his Schrei-Scream phase. Which is precisely why I couldn’t, for the life of me, tell whether that piercing gaze belonged to a man or a woman.

So I said:

“Before you tell me why I don’t want to leave, let me make a confession. Ever since I first heard Schrei, I’ve known what you are. You’re not a person. You’re a syntactic error, Kaulitz. An amphiboly. I know — it sounds complex. But it’s actually simple. You even said it yourself: “Lasst sie wissen, wer ihr wirklich seid.”. Just… inside out. You follow?”

No reaction from the creature.

“Apparently not!”

I took a step up the stairs:

“What I mean is — most men amplify their masculinity. Most women, their femininity. But you? You’ve perfected ambiguity. You are so radically both that you’ve done something no one else has managed: You’re beautiful — as a man. You’re beautiful — as a woman. You’re too handsome and too gorgeous at the same fucking time. Which makes you a nightmare…”

I kept climbing:

“A linguistic nightmare. Because not knowing what you are forces me to say things like “Thou person!” Or, when I want to be polite: HeShe. Which is basically like being a unicorn that pisses supergravity. You unsettle the entire planet just by existing. You tracking? By your sheer presence, you blur boundaries that were set in place eons ago — when humanity, by divine decree, was split into two genders. Ever since then, everything we know — law, literature, liturgy — has followed suit. But because of you, Second-Wave Feminism will evaporate, gender stereotypes will crack like old statues, and phrases like “biology is destiny” or “you’re not born a woman, you become one” will sound like relics of a tired museum. Simone de Beauvoir will roll in her grave — that arch-priestess of abortion rights and armpit hair. Pronouns, chromosomes, aesthetic binaries — soon they’ll only survive in blonde jokes. Which makes you an X. An X… See? It’s already happening. I meant to say X-Men. But you’re not X-Men. You’re XMenYWomen. Or maybe an XYPerson. Some people bend fire. Others walk through walls. You bend grammar rules. You melt categories. You confuse the code. And in a flexional language —where gender is sewn into every suffix and article — you force me to live grammatically homeless.”

By the time I reached HeShe, I stopped. Beneath the theatrical weight of that makeup, one thing became unshakably clear.

I said, almost reverently:

“I’ve always wondered if the Phi Human exists. The 1.618 Being. And here you are. You are the one who translates the divine madness of the golden ratio into flesh. The length of your arms, the geometry of your shoulders, the slope of your cheekbones, the arc of your brow, the line — no, the equation — of your mouth and nose: A logarithmic spiral, incarnate. The golden section rendered in lymph and bone, the fever dream of mathematicians, architects, alchemists — and cosmetic surgeons. You are proof that the irrationality of a number can become a thing of unbearable beauty. A beauty that…”

And here, I paused. I was becoming Bruno Mars, if Bruno Mars had been a medieval mathematician with a lute.

“…that can ruin everything with a smudge of grunge eyeliner. We all love Nirvana. But on vinyl, not on your face. And the tattoos… It’s like catching someone mid-act while tiling the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

Those eyes —almond-shaped, depthless, black like myth — watched me without blinking. Studying me, as I studied them. And then, the man in me cracked:

“By all the gods… I want you to be a woman so badly.”

It was I who said it. And everything about her outfit dared me to believe I was right: A sleeveless, sheer black top revealing a tight bustier underneath. A pleated black skirt. Victorian mesh cuffs at the wrists, and a high, braided collar of black tulle — five or six centimeters tall, its ribbons vanishing beneath the waistband. Oversized boots, from which emerged black socks that ended just where the skirt began. Tattoos on every piece of skin left exposed — legs, arms, fingers…