Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

  Tony slipped his fingers under the spandex waistband, and pulled down both trousers and underwear, businesslike, as if finishing a warm-up.

  Stop! thought Michael. Tony stopped. 'Pull them up!' said Michael. Tony did. The Cherub looked back at him, scowling slightly as if he couldn't quite hear what was being said.

  Jesus, thought Michael, this is what you get for fancying some guy at the gym: you chat away, you're nice to him, and suddenly you've got a psychopath following you home. There was sweat on Michael's upper lip. The lift did a little bounce and stopped, mimicking the sick sensation in Michael's stomach.

  The doors opened and Michael swept through them, fumbling to pull his season ticket out of his jacket pocket. He strode to the barriers, slipping his card into the slot like a kiss, nipped it free and pushed his way out and away. He could feel Tony's eyes on his back as he escaped.

  Michael thought and then stopped: you know he's in trouble. It might be an insulin reaction, something like that. You can't just leave him. He turned around. Tony was standing dazed behind the ticket barriers. What if he's too ill to even know his way home? Michael sighed and walked back.

  'Is this something that happens to you sometimes? Are you diabetic, are you on any kind of medication?' Michael was thinking schizophrenia. The ticket barriers were hunched between them like a line of American football players.

  'No,' said Tony, as if from the bottom of a well.

  'Well look, the Central Line is back that way,' Michael said. 'Go back down and change at Tottenham Court Road.' Michael glanced sideways; the guard was listening.

  The guard was a young, handsome, burly man whom Michael had once halfway fancied, except for his unpleasant sneer. The guard was looking the other way, but his ears were pricked.

  Tony said, mildly surprised. 'Don't you want to fuck me?'

  Michael said, 'No. I don't.'

  The guard covered his smile with an index finger.

  Tony looked bruised. 'You do,' he insisted.

  Michael began to talk for the benefit of the guard. 'I'm sorry if you got that idea. Look, you're in a bit of a state. My advice is to try to get back home and sort yourself out.'

  The guard suddenly trooped forward, his smile broadening to a leer. 'Bit off a bit more than we can chew, did we, sir?'

  'I think he's on something and he's been following me,' said Michael.

  'Must be your lucky day,' said the guard. He began to hustle Tony back from the barriers. 'Come on, let the Professor be. He probably can't afford you anyway.' The guard had the cheek to turn and grin at Michael like he'd said something funny.

  'He's not well,' said Michael. Gosh, did he dislike that guard. But he needed him. The guard herded Tony back towards the lifts. Michael saw Tony look at him, with a suddenly stricken face. It was that panic that frightened Michael more than anything else. The panic meant that Tony needed Michael. For what? Something was out of whack.

  Michael fled. He turned and walked as quickly as he could, away. He doesn't know where I live, Michael thought, relieved. If I get away, I find another gym, and that's the end of it. Michael's stomach was shuddering as if he had run out of petrol. The tip of his penis was wet.

  It had been raining, and the pavements were glossy like satin. A woman bearing four heavy bags from Tesco was looking at her boots; Michael scurried to make the lights and bashed into the bags, spinning them around in her grasp.

  There was a shout from behind him. 'Oi!'

  Michael spun around, and saw the Cherub sprinting towards him. Michael knew, from the way his athlete's stride suspended him in mid-air, that Tony had jumped the barriers.

  Michael backed away, raising his arms against attack, terror bubbling up like yeast.

  Keep away from me! Get back, go away!

  And the street was empty. Tony was gone.

  Michael blinked and looked around him, up and down the pavement. When he looked back, he saw the guard hobbling towards him, pressing a handkerchief to his face. He'd been hit.

  'Where did he go?' the guard shouted at Michael, strands of spit between his lips. 'Where the fuck did he go?'

  'I don't know!'

  'Bastard!'

  Michael tried to look at the guard's lip.

  The guard ducked away from Michael's tender touch. He demanded, snarling, 'What's his name, where's he from?'

  Michael did not even have to think. 'I've no idea. He just followed me.'

  'Oh yeah. Just followed you, did he? If I press charges, mate, you'll bloody well have to remember.'

  The guard pulled the handkerchief away and looked as if expecting to see something. He blinked. The handkerchief was clean, white and spotless.

  This seemed to mollify him. 'You better watch the kind of person you pick up, mate.'

  Then the guard turned and proudly, plumply, walked away. For all your arrogance, Michael thought, in five years' time you'll be bald and fat-arsed.

  Michael stood in the rain for a few moments, catching his breath. What, he thought, was that all about? Finally he turned and walked up Chenies Street, mostly because he had no place else to go, and he began to cry, from a mix of fear, frustration, boredom. Christ! All he did was go to the sauna. He didn't need this, he really didn't. He looked up at the yellow London sky. There were no stars overhead, just light pollution, a million lamps drowning out signals from alien intelligences.

  Michael lived in what estate agents called a mansion block: an old apartment house. It was covered in scaffolding, being repaired. He looked up at his flat and saw that no lights were on. Phil wasn't there again. So it would be round to Gigs again for a takeaway kebab and an evening alone. Involuntarily, Michael saw Tony's naked thighs, the ridges of muscle.

  He clunked his keys into the front door of his flat. The door was heavy and fireproofed and it made noises like an old man. Michael dumped his briefcase on the hall table and snapped on the living-room light.

  The Cherub was sitting on the sofa.

  'Bloody hell!' exclaimed Michael, and stumbled backwards. 'What are you doing here?'

  Tony sat with both hands placed on his knees. 'I don't know,' he said in a mild voice.

  'How did you get in!' The central light was bare and bleak.

  'I don't know,' Tony said. He still hadn't moved.

  The scaffolding, thought Michael. He climbed up the bloody scaffolding. 'Get out of here!' Michael shouted.

  The eyes narrowed and the head tilted sideways.

  And then, Oh God, he was gone. The air roiled, as if from tarmac on a hot day. It poured into the space Tony had suddenly vacated. There was no imprint left on the cushions.

  The Cherub simply disappeared. Not even a flutter of wings.

  Michael stood and stared. He kept staring at the sofa. What had happened was not possible. Or rather it made a host of other things suddenly possible: magic, madness, ghosts.

  Michael sat down with a bump and slowly unwound his scarf. He stood up and poured himself a whiskey, swirling it around in the glass and inspecting it, yellow and toxic. Whiskey had destroyed his father.

  In a funny kind of way, it felt as if Tony was his father's ghost come back to haunt him.

  Michael took a swig and then sat down with his notebook and Pilot pencil to answer every question except the most important.

  Who indeed is Michael?

  In a very few photographs, Michael was beautiful.

  Most photographs of him were short-circuited by a grimace of embarrassment or a dazzled nervous grin that gave him the teeth of a rodent. If someone short stood next to him, Michael would stoop and twist and force himself lower.

  In other photographs, Michael looked all right. In those, he would have taken off his wire-rimmed spectacles and combed his hair and stood up straight. By hazard, he would be wearing a shirt that someone had ironed, and he would have left the pens out of the top pocket. It would be a period in which Michael was not experimenting with beards to hide his face, or pony tails to control his runaway, curly hair.


  The best photographs of all would be on a beach, on holiday, with something to occupy his awkward hands. It would be apparent then that Michael had the body of an athlete. He was a big, broad-shouldered man. Because of the flattening of his broken nose, his face was rugged, like a boxer's. Michael could look unbelievably butch.

  There was one photograph from Michael's youth.

  It was hidden away, unsorted. Michael would not be able to find it now. He didn't need to. Michael carried it around with him in memory. He could always see it, even when he didn't want to.

  His father had taken it from a riverboat in California, during their last summer together. In the photograph, Michael is sixteen years old and is quite possibly the best-looking person on the planet. He is certainly one of the happiest.

  In the photograph Michael sits in a dinghy. He's laughing and holding up a poor pooch of a dog. She was called Peaches the Pooch. Peaches gazes miserably out from under a thick coating of river-bottom mud. Michael's thighs and calves are also covered in mud. Even then he was a big lad, with wide shoulders and lines of muscle on his forearm. His black eyes are fixed directly on whoever is taking the photograph and they are wide with delight. His face is nut brown, like an Indian's, and his smile is blue-white in contrast. His black hair has reddish-brown streaks from constant sunlight. Sunlight glints all around him on the slick, brown water and onto his face, which is indisputably happy.

  If you look closely, the nose isn't broken.

  By the time that photograph had been developed and posted back to England, it was winter. That summer Michael on the Sacramento River was already history. Michael remembered opening the envelope. There was no letter inside from his father, just photographs, that photograph.

  It should have been the moment when Michael learned to love himself. Like every teenager he had been gawky and spotty. It should have been the moment he left doubt behind, and finally accepted that he was beautiful.

  Instead, all Michael could do was regret. The beauty, he felt, was a mask. He'd been hiding behind it. It was better now, being ugly. It was closer to the truth. Michael made himself ugly.

  The photograph was the last thing he ever had from his father. He knew what his father was saying: this is who you could have been.

  Everything changed without Michael noticing at the time. In the summer, he had been determined to be a vet. Now he was a scientist, who experimented on animals.

  The summer Michael had enjoyed acting; had been in a drama class for fun, and took the lead role in all the plays. He had a way of conjuring up old ladies, terrified spivs and policemen out of his own body.

  In winter, Michael seemed dispossessed of his own body.

  This made him mostly harmless. Women liked him; his students liked him. He always kept a distance from them. It was not that he was afraid of women or students, exactly. He was afraid of how he became around them. He knew he could be waywardly funny, exact, truthful. But then something would happen, and power would withdraw from Michael like the tide. Beached and helpless, he would fumble and make mistakes and let himself down. He would forget things, like appointments or his glasses. Uncomfortable, he would grin and grin and grin.

  Michael was impotent. If this were symptom or cause he could not distinguish. He didn't care. Impotency meant that only the most brutal and depersonalized of sexual episodes were safe enough for him. Only parks or toilets or saunas could hide him.

  If his partners had no idea who he was, how could they hurt him? If they could hardly see him in the dark and didn't know his name, there could be no embarrassment when he didn't get it up. They didn't care if Michael got it up. They were too terrified of police to notice and too desperate to come quickly. It all stayed hidden and detached.

  But it relieved the pressure. It relieved the pressure of living with someone who gave him no sexual satisfaction. It relieved a kind of erotic itch, which he could never satisfy, and had not been satisfied for more than twenty years. Michael was 38 and his very skin crawled with lust.

  A quick jerk off in a car park, a slap on the ass in bushes in a park provided cessation and a masturbatory climax but no satisfaction. So he would have to go back again, to a sauna or a cottage. And then, again. This is addiction. Michael was a nice man who was addicted to speedy, functional sex. He kept this shut away from the rest of his life.

  In the rest of his life, he offered the world sweetness, integrity and intelligence. He placated life. He worked himself nearly to death.

  Michael had a contract to teach biology two afternoons a week. He prepared his lectures and marked papers, just as if he were full-time, only he was paid less.

  He joined academic committees and fought for new IT networks. He joined Boards that recruited new teachers and exposed his bitter elders when they said, untruthfully, that a candidate for a post had been fired from her previous position.

  Michael lifted weights and read all the journals in his field and did desk research. He became a rising star in his field, producing publishable papers in biology from scanning work in two fields and bringing them together. Somehow this still resulted in very little extra money.

  The two fields were neurology and philosophy, the grey area where biology was helping philosophers answer questions such as: do we have a soul? What is the self?

  Michael understood how we see. Images are formed from millions of separate stimulations in the brain: one area responds only to vertical lines; others to angles; others to oncoming movement. Others are tickled by symmetry of any kind, or by green or pink. Still others react to shadow; whole other areas bring together the slightly different angles provided by two eyes.

  The brain responds to verbs of movement, adjectives of colour, and nouns of space and shape. We spend our first six months learning to read these complex sentences.

  Could the grammar of language have its origins in the grammar of sight? If so, then how could people blind from birth learn to talk? What if grammar came before both vision and speech? Michael wrote papers on the subject. They were influential. People were surprised that he was not a professor.

  In the spiritual space where ideas were formed, Michael had power. He found power in snatching those ideas out of air and putting them to paper with rattling keystrokes. Michael wrote all weekend long.

  In order to answer those people who insisted on modelling the living brain on circuit diagrams, Michael was taking a conversion degree in Computer Science.

  So, as if he did not have enough to do, Michael was learning how to program in C and studying how the registers of computer memory worked. He had to turn in programs to a colleague who opposed his views on what networks the students needed.

  The programming module alone took ten extra hours a week. When major coursework was due it would be twenty extra hours a week. Having worked all day, he would work all night, and when finally the program worked, he would weep from joy, as if he had climbed Mount Everest. That was the payoff. He had a blazing moment of joy. Two hours later, he crawled out of bed, and it all began again.

  Sometimes, Michael saw friends. He would arrive late at their houses, streaming cold air and apologies and feeling awful because he hadn't been able to organize buying a bottle of wine. His boyfriend Philip would be there waiting for him in worn silence. Perhaps everyone had already begun the first course.

  'Michael's always late – we told you he would be!' his hosts would exclaim, laughing and admonishing. Michael's smile would flick like a switchblade with annoyance. The blade cut both ways: himself and his friends.

  Michael spent some of his time in a haze of either petulance, or depressed exhaustion, elated only by his studies and his flashes of inspiration into who we are and how we think. These were brilliant enough and expressed clearly enough to make most guests sit up and listen. They found themselves asking intelligent questions, to which Michael could give simple replies. For the time that they were with him they found themselves in love with learning and with science, and so a little more in love with themselves.
Which is why even now, from time to time, Philip's eyes would shine with pride, if not exactly love. And why, curiously, Michael left the dinner parties even more drained and exhausted than when he arrived. Sometimes he cried without knowing why.

  He really couldn't think why he should be crying. He had a good job, didn't he? He had a flat in London 's prosperous West End. He had a sensible relationship that had lasted nearly thirteen years. His papers had helped earn his ex-polytechnic a 5 from the Higher Research Board. Who was he, to be unhappy? Who, indeed, was Michael?

  So where is Philip?

  Out, as always. Michael had no idea where.

  It hadn't always been like that. There was a time when they did things together and regularly cooked meals for each other. There was a time when he and Phil regularly attempted to make love.

  They'd met more than twelve years before. Michael had been 26 and had his father's athletic build. His beard outlined a smooth and doleful face, but in doleful repose it was rather beautiful. His hair, for once, was cut short. Michael at 26 was many people's cup of tea, if not exactly his own.

  They met at First Out, a gay coffee shop. Phil was trying to find copies of the free newspapers. Michael gave him his, and Phil sat next to him in the window.

  Phil had been skinny, intense and spotty. His cheeks were pitted, but that only increased the craggy drama of his face. He was all a-quiver, in his first week of art school, nineteen, terrified, anxious, and aggressive, like a stray terrier needing a home. It is perhaps to Michael's credit that he found this touching, moving and beautiful in a way.

  Their attachment was brusque. Halfway through the first lovemaking session, Michael had known it would work. Philip was hot to the touch and his ribcage showed pale and lean. His hands shivered like butterflies. The two men made a shape together – Michael's bulk against Philip's fragility – that seemed to tell a coherent story.

  On their second date, Michael called Philip 'my love'. Phil hated his student roommates; they didn't wash their cutlery or themselves. He needed a place to crash, he said. Michael, full of hope, asked Phil to live with him. There was something suddenly erotic about being the older man, about offering a flat, an income, a routine, a home. Philip moved in two weeks later.