Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

  The answers came quickly one after another.

  There was a blurring of flesh as if reality had been dipped in turpentine. Flesh smeared like paint. Something flowed sideways out of Tarzan's belly and ribs – skin and bone poured out of him onto the pavement.

  Flesh sprouted like a plant in time-lapse photography, growing a leather skirt like leaves, long hair like flowers.

  In the time it takes to pipe a musical scale, Jane had risen out of Tarzan. She stood beside him as if fresh from the depths of the river.

  She was played by Maureen O'Sullivan. She was tiny, with a face as fragile as china under a mass of wiry hair.

  Michael introduced them. 'Jane, Tarzan. Tarzan, Jane.'

  Click. They fitted together. They had been married in spirit from the beginning.

  Michael spoke quickly to Jane, who always spoke for both of them.

  Michael asked, 'Can you go elsewhere?'

  Jane's chin thrust out, and her voice was chilled. 'I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.' It was the voice she used with New York lawyers.

  'Can you go back to your jungle?' he asked. 'I mean, does it exist somewhere?'

  Jane's face softened. Her voice quickened. 'I think we can, yes.'

  Back to the treehouse, with its Flintstone home conveniences, waterwheels driven by elephants. Back to a land where animals spoke and Tarzan could talk with them, where lions lived in forests, where chimps and gorillas mingled in the same tribes. A world where there was always another wonder, another lost tribe, another adventure.

  Protectively, Jane took the arm of her innocent. 'Come, Tarzan,' she said, her voice cracking like an adolescent's on the love she felt for him. 'We're going home.'

  And Michael felt the same ache of yearning he had felt as a feminine boy. He yearned for love, for that particular love between them. He heard the MGM strings, swelling like his heart, like his adolescent sexuality, for them both.

  So Michael sent them home. He sent them to their monochrome jungle full of giant trees with conveniently placed trapeze swings. Tired old predators prowled slowly, but were speeded up when anyone was looking. Where love filled their days in pre-lapsarian innocence.

  The pub lights rippled again, and the two of them evaporated into fiction, reels of film that had never been shot.

  Hypothesis: Angels are a kind of fiction.

  Method: call up an Angel who is entirely fictional.

  Who killed Dumb Duck?

  When Michael was sixteen years old there had been a hit movie called Dumb Duck, Detective. It combined live action with state-of-the-art animation, and it resurrected a great old cartoon character called Dumb Duck.

  It was Michael's fourth trip to California and he saw it in floods of tears, to escape. He had to get out of the house. The television was barred to him, and his favourite records had been broken. Michael had fled, wanting never to return, wanting to die.

  He sat trying to follow the plot while crawling inside his own skin with anxiety. Dumb Duck was a detective and his partner was a real live human gumshoe played by Clint Eastwood. Dumb Duck asks his partner to follow his wife, Taffy Duck. 'I'm too closssh to thisssh thing.' Dumb Duck sprays everybody every time he talks. Only Clint Eastwood can stand it. Eastwood follows the wife, but she keeps giving him the slip, and you keep on hearing things about her: like she's generous, like she's a good-time girl, like she keeps you guessing. You don't see her, so you assume she's a duck, like her name.

  Then suddenly, Dumb Duck is found murdered. He's been partially erased. There are still crumbs of mingled eraser dust and ink on the floor. The wife shows up having spent the night elsewhere. She tells everybody she's innocent. She looks like a combination of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, shoehorned into a dress that clings to her like a kid's tongue to a lollipop. She hunkers down over the corpse and cries and her heaving boobs make a sound like rubber balloons.

  Eastwood goes to her nightclub. He sits in the dark and watches her sing. Taffy sings like Marlene Dietrich. She rasps every word. She sings like somebody's tickling your testicles. She's a sex bomb married to a duck.

  Gay men can desire a woman if she is caked in enough artifice. Young Michael forgot his trauma. He found himself yearning to bury his face in those huge soft perfect breasts. And sleep. And wake up somewhere else, as someone else.

  It was a comedy about being wrongly accused of murder. Ho, ho. The weapon, a giant eraser – stamped: the Philadelphia Rubber Company – is found in the trunk of Taffy's car. Tests confirm that the inkgroup is the same as Dumb Duck's.

  For young Michael, Taffy's nightmare became his nightmare. At that age, he felt more affinity for fantasy than reality. When the film was over, it was back to reality, though in a curious way he felt the burden had been shared.

  It was many years ago, but Michael still felt that affinity. The idea of calling up Taffy made Michael grin sideways. He didn't fancy Clint Eastwood at all. You aren't meant to fancy Clint Eastwood – you are meant to want to be Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had played the gumshoe like Humphrey Bogart. Michael went out to Jermyn Street and bought himself a trenchcoat and an old-fashioned fedora hat.

  And then he wondered where you could go on a hot date with someone who was obviously an animated cartoon. It might cause comment at the Savoy.

  A candlelight dinner a deux at home was the answer.

  Phil, as always, was going to be out. Michael told him, I've got a hot date so come back late. Does this one jump out of trees as well, Phil asked. Ho ho.

  Michael cooked a light meal of salmon with salad and cold Chablis. Light enough to assuage hunger, not heavy enough to weigh down desire.

  Then Michael put on his trenchcoat and his 1940s hat and waited.

  Go, he told the universe, at 6.00 pm.

  At 6.00 pm the phone rang.

  It was her.

  'Oh, Mr Shamus,' she said breathlessly, helplessly. 'Thank you for returning my call. I need help so badly, and I don't know who I can turn to.'

  'Well. We can talk in private here. How soon can you make it over? I took the liberty of preparing a meal.' Michael curled his upper lip inwards, talking American.

  'Oh thank you. But I couldn't possibly eat. I'm too upset.'

  'I got a good bottle of Chablis growing dew in the cooler.' It was like being in a role-playing game.

  There was a pause. 'Mr Shamus. I'm sorry. I'm afraid cartoons can't drink wine. It dissolves the gouache.'

  'Forgive me.'

  'No, no. I know it's hard for you to imagine what it's like. I'm just so pleased that finally, finally, someone wants to listen to me.'

  That damsel in distress routine. Standard forties stuff. The audience can read it like a peach, velvet skin and pit, and so can I. Under that svelte exterior pulses animal heat.

  You spend most of the movie absolutely sure she did it and that she's playing Eastwood for a sucker. You see, Eastwood falls for her, and if Eastwood falls for somebody, you do too.

  She was the kind of woman whose high heels you hear ten minutes before the doorbell rings. You're there waiting, trying to pretend you aren't hanging on like it's a liferaft. Where's the shipwreck? You've got sweaty palms and the fettuccine aren't cooked. The doorbell rings, you wipe your hands on your trousers, and you open the door. There should be a soundtrack, the kind with blowsy music played on a sax.

  She's delicious. She's a cartoon, so her skin controls the light and shadow on her face. Right now she's dramatic, backlit, lots of shadows, and she looks up mournfully, helplessly. An unlit cigarette sticks to a white kid glove. The white kid glove goes up above her elbow. The gown is strapless, showing acres of shoulder and collarbone. The white fur stole has fallen back down to her elbows, like she's disrobing in public. Her red hair has a life of its own. It moves in a mass like a sexy octopus and there are no individual strands of hair.

  Her way of saying hi is to hold out one long kid glove.

  'Oh, Mr Shamus. I'm so glad we finally meet. Now I can put a face to that kind, kind
voice.'

  Never in real life could a pink dress be cut that low around mammary organs that large and stay in place.

  'Come in, come in please.' Like the gumshoe is a priest offering sanctuary.

  Michael reminds himself. This is an animated cartoon. It's walking across my hall carpet, and her stiletto heels leave no impression.

  The white fur slips, trails. The assumption is that he will take it up, and hang it on (non-wire) hangers. He does.

  Her head hangs down and she looks up coyly, the cigarette weighty on her lips. 'Could I trouble you for a light?'

  No one in the household smokes, and all Michael can do is offer a rolled-up newspaper lit from the gas-stove pilot.

  This kind of blows his cool gumshoe exterior. She looks stricken as he holds up the torching newspaper. 'I'm sorry, I should have asked if you smoked. How thoughtless of me.'

  Michael reassures her, no, no, no problem, as he tries to put out the newspaper before it burns his fingers. Finally, he flips it into the toilet. The basin is still full of flame when he closes the bathroom door. He arrives back in time to slide the chair under her as she sits down.

  'I can't tell you how awful it's been. People simply don't understand my relationship with Uncle Duck. Oh, I know he was older than I…'

  He was also a duck, but then hey, you're both cartoons.

  'People find it so hard to believe that you can love someone for their mind. Those terrible cheap parts the studio made him play…'

  You mean the one where he keeps blowing off the top of the bald hunter's head? Or the one where he drops an anvil on it?

  'This is a duck who dreamed of playing Hamlet, who read philosophy, who wrote poetry.'

  Always tell an intelligent person that they're beautiful. Always tell a beautiful person they're intelligent. Tell a cartoon that they're both.

  Michael says, 'It must have been wonderful for him to find a soulmate like you.'

  Dreamily, she nods. 'Reading the classics by firelight together. It was all I ever wanted.'

  Except for your boyfriend Bruno Bruiser.

  Taffy bursts into Hollywood starlet tears. All coughing sobs, hankies and dry eyes. 'And to think that people could say that I am capable of… of… uh-huh uh-huh [sniffle]. Forgive me for carrying on like this.'

  'It's understandable. Under the circumstances.' Michael lays his hand on top of hers, and she gives his a quick warm squeeze. She feels warm, human warm, but smoother too, slick, no creases or texture to the gloved and perfect hands.

  Michael. Do you really want to have sex with a cartoon?

  She looks up, determined now. 'We must find whoever killed my husband. I have money, Mr Shamus. I'll pay every last penny of it to find out who killed Uncle Duck.'

  And to prove you didn't do it.

  'I warn you. I don't exactly come cheap, Mrs Duck.'

  She breathes heavily and leans forward. 'People say that you're the best in the business.' Appreciatively, she takes his hand again.

  'Perhaps we can leave this difficult decision until later. Won't you eat something? Starving yourself won't help.'

  Taffy looks wistful. She has a perfect tiny nose that is completely invisible except when she is in profile. 'No, thank you. Cartoons are different from people. We're fuelled only by our motivations.'

  'Your motivations?'

  'Our passions. They sometimes take us over. We like or don't like. We love, or don't love.'

  OK, let's go for it.

  Then,' Shamus says, still steely in his old-fashioned, white knight/tough guy pose. 'Perhaps you know how I feel about you.'

  Alarmed, she stands up. 'No! Don't say it.' She flees to the window on little high-heel steps, and frames her face between her kid gloves.

  'Mrs Duck. Taffy. Kiss me.'

  What does it mean when a homosexual wants to stick his face between two artificial breasts? It means that what he finds desirable about them is that men have thought of those breasts. Men imagined them and drew them and shaped them and shaded them. It means it is the male desire behind the image that draws him, the desire of other men.

  'No. We must wait.'

  'No one will know. It is our secret. Our love.'

  'But the court case. People will talk. You don't know what it's been like.'

  Oh, Taffy.

  Her lips are not human lips. They are better than human lips. They are like Juicy Fruit chewing gum: thick delicious mobile wads that respond immediately to pressure, yielding and flowing but never too wet. They are the best lips Michael has ever kissed. And no moustache.

  Over the tiny pinprick of her nose, her eyes go wide, wider, big as saucers.

  'Oh. Oh, Michael. Hold me. Hold me close. Take away the fear.'

  He cradles her. She has an invented nature and her invented nature is to respond in this way. Her mammoth breasts heave against him; the fabric of the pink dress stretches. She protests, but it is in the script, though normally after the fadeout. The breasts are unleashed from their pink constraints. They are Platonic breasts, breasts in the ideal. Large and firm, but also soft, peach-coloured with baby-bottle nipples. They are supported, protected by her crossed, fluid arms. She keeps changing shape, subtly, to embody the ideal.

  Her nipple fills his mouth. She tastes tangy and slightly salty. He fondles a nipple with his tongue, and it engorges. Michael thinks of all those hairy arms that drew those breasts, the thick hands that outlined the nipples through the pink of the dress. Did they dream of supping where he now sups? Michael feels his lips move in unison with theirs. He lolls her in his mouth.

  'Oh my love,' she gasps.

  Her thighs are perfect and without pores. Her translucent panties shimmer their own way down. Michael sees pudenda as babyishly appealing and round-eyed as Bambi or Thumper. There is a button-cute clitoris under his tongue. Unlike the breasts, it tastes real.

  A cartoon orgasm, as yet unfilmed, makes the cheeks of her face quake and ride up like a stocking. Her breasts not only heave, but swell. Her face is nearly the colour of tomatoes, and her eyes are huge and crossed. She looks like she's drowning, desperately holding her breath. Suddenly the nipples blow off steam, clouds of it. The breasts whistle in unison like two trains in a race.

  Taffy settles back, crumpling. She goes fluid and pours down over the sofa onto the carpet, as flexible as a shadow, taking the shape of whatever supports her. She lies there panting for a moment, then sticks one of her fingers into her mouth, and reinflates herself, puffing, as if she were an air mattress.

  Later, she dresses, in a lady-like fashion, smoothing down her hair and pulling straight the fingers of her gloves. She expertly cups the breasts back into their impossible fittings of pink.

  'Michael, I want to tell you this. That was one of the finest moments of my life. You know so much about the needs of a woman. How to lift her up, away from the inelegant struggle to survive.'

  No my dear, that's what you know.

  What you know is what the men who embodied you want. Elegance.

  Adjusting the perfect pink dress.

  Need.

  You turn your back for me to do up the zipper and I see the strong back, with two ridges of muscle down either side of the spine. You lift up the mass of your hair to show what every man dreams the back of a woman's neck is like.

  Class.

  What clumsy, sweaty, fat, balding men imagine they want from women. They want to merge with elegance and delicacy, gain it by association.

  She fiddles with what can only be called an evening bag. She extracts from it a tiny, flat silver case and takes out of it a single white address card.

  'Call me. Please. I need to know I can rely on someone.'

  The high heels clack, on a carpet. The high heels control their own sound. The dress swishes like someone shushing a child to sleep. The shoulders wait for their white furs, a hint of shoulder blade drawn onto the broad expanse of her back. He complies with the script, or perhaps his father's idea of how men should behave, and brings her wr
ap. She accepts it demurely, in a manner that can only be called gracious. As she walks away towards his front door, her bottom is shaped exactly like an upside-down heart under clouds of fur.

  His door opens at the same moment as the neighbour's door across the hall.

  In the doorway opposite stands a little girl. She gapes at Taffy.

  A six-foot-tall animated cartoon fills the apartment corridor, and leans over, warm and giggling.

  'Well, hello there,' says Taffy. 'Who are you?' She coos with a voice like melted ice cream.

  'Mum, Mum come quick!' the little girl cries in panic and turns and lets the door close.

  Taffy Duck turns to Michael and shrugs. She blows him a kiss, and as if disturbed by it, the air ripples and closes over her, just as the neighbour's front door opens again.

  Perfect.

  At the end of the movie, you find out that she didn't do the murder. Her boyfriend Bruno did. She really loved the duck and the detective after all. The last shot is a long kiss between realities. But no one ever shows what happens after the ending.

  Twenty years before, at the end of the film, Michael stood up and drove back to the condo in Oceanside and told his father, 'I'm going back home tomorrow.' His father said nothing. He just stared up at him from the sofa. Michael still remembered his father's crew cut and his fathomless eyes, full of hatred.

  Like the old actor said: the past is a chasm, don't look down.

  Michael stood looking down in his own sitting room, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora. Fancy dress again.

  Weeeellllllll, he thought. It was fun and I always was good at acting.

  Uh-huh. And you didn't come and you didn't have a hard-on so the sex was acting too. She was about as far from the real as you can get. So when do you get real, Michael? How? You don't even know how, do you? You just keep repeating your youth. And it wasn't even a happy youth, Michael.

  Do people I copy really know it?

  Michael remembered Tony. The real Tony had some kind of sense of what his copy had done. It was one thing to hurt a fictional character. It was another thing to harm someone real. Michael had no business experimenting on people without being able to assess the extent of the trauma he might be inflicting.