by Geoff Ryman
You found yourself in Arabia, in particular circumstances. You found a kind of love, also in particular circumstances. It does not mean that you were not also noble.
Michael touched the small of the white back as if in benediction, and ordered Lawrence home, back to his desert and whoever it was had grown him as part of his soul.
I'm learning.
If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be?
Sexually armed and dangerous, Michael now found there was no one with whom he wanted to have sex. This was, if nothing else, a serious failure of imagination.
There was a time when every afternoon's lecture presented Michael with students who seemed improbable miracles of health and beauty. Cosmopolitan London youths with V-shaped backs wore perfect white T-shirts. Their hips were slim, their crotches were full, their Scandinavian or Indic or West Indian complexions were unblemished, unlined, glowing. They had sat arrayed in front of him, legs wide, as if with the malicious intent of disturbing his calm.
Now Michael saw the imperfections that would distort their beauty with age, the gap teeth, the sunken eyes. For the first time ever, his students provided no sexual inspiration. In the mornings, the train seemed full of middle-aged men who needed exercise. Michael had to remind himself that some of them were, objectively, young and attractive. It was summer, the season of T-shirts and shorts and hairy knees. The beautiful naked legs had no effect on him.
Michael began to realize that he did not really like sex. He had only ever liked parts of sex, sudden jagged frozen moments. He would recycle them as images in memory or fantasy.
Often, the people in the fantasy did not matter. The core of the fantasy was the situation he himself was in.
These situations were not anything he would care to have written down. Just recently, one fantasy involved him being tied up in a Berlin dungeon. In another, he was pressed by a wall of waiting men in the urinals at Cairo train station. His potential partners in the fantasy might wear gelabiya or more Western dress. They could be Nile Delta plump or desert thin; young or old. Who they were did not matter.
In other fantasies, Michael imagined he was twelve years old in Carlsbad, waylaid on a beach and seduced into a weekend life in a male brothel. He imagined himself at twelve wearing the tight little trunks and dancing for men. He danced to T-Rex and put his finger on the cloth under which his sphincter lay. It made no difference if the customers were fat, black and middle-aged, or off-duty wrestlers still in costume, or fathers of childhood friends.
What made him come was the situation he was in and the different scenarios that could lead to. The dream was not of someone else, but of himself, changed.
Life had given him the wrong miracle.
Look, I said I kept fancying guys, but I don't. In fact, I think I don't really like most men. If anything, I am rather chaste. What I want is to be somewhere else, doing something I would never normally do. The fantasy actually is that I become someone different.
So that was what the miracle should have been. It should have changed me.
Michael looked at the escort ads in the gay press. The photographs were supposed to be genuine. They usually displayed the wares from the neck down: slim bodies with large cocks, muscular bodies with tiny ones. He could have any of them, just by asking. He didn't ask. Perhaps he was satiated.
Perhaps it was his computer course.
Seriously. The instructors had forgotten to set enough coursework to give final marks, so suddenly, week after week another report or essay or study was due. All weekend and most evenings, Michael read learned papers about Windows NT system design. Finals were coming as well, so he was having to memorize circuit diagrams. All of this was far from arousing.
Perhaps it was simply that he could have whomever he wanted.
When Michael and Philip used to go out together, the bars would seem to be full of delicious men served cold. When Michael went alone and sex was a serious possibility, the men all seemed to be ballet fans pretending to be motorcyclists, or over-coiffured skinny young queens, or bitter old ones, or flakes who believed in numerology, or fake rockabillies who talked only to each other, or men who lived with their mothers. Availability washed the bloom off the fruit.
Michael invited all of the team at the lab out to lunch. In the first flush of summer, they sat outside on a jetty on the river, crowded around two tiny silver tables. The day seemed to yawn and stretch in the warmth. Across the river were the Houses of Parliament, looking misty like an old aquatint.
'If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be?' Michael asked his staff after three bottles of red wine.
No one answered at first. Who would you sleep with? is not a question anyone can answer easily. It's not only that the question is too personal. The answer changes, moment to moment. It could well be that at that moment you do not want to sleep with anyone at all.
Ebru smiled and said her boyfriend. 'Of course,' she added.
'Well… and who else?'
'No one else,' she insisted, smiling.
Michael turned to Shafiq and asked him.
'Oh!' said Shafiq, and looked pleased and embarrassed. 'Oh, I don't think I could answer that.'
'Don't say your wife,' said Ebru.
Emilio was humorously outraged. 'You said your boyfriend!'
'Yes, but that is the privilege of the one who is brave and goes first.'
'All right, I will tell you,' said Shafiq. His eyes sparkled with daring. They all waited. 'Sophia Loren. I like the mature women.'
Michael imagined sleek brown thighs in old-fashioned stockings, with a little wrinkle just above the knee. 'I can see that,' he said.
'They are more… you know. The young ones are beautiful, but…' Shafiq was shy and his smile overwhelmed his face.
I know, thought Michael. You can't imagine that the young ones are really interested in you.
Ebru kept up the attack. 'Emilio?'
'My girlfriend,' he murmured under a sheltering elbow.
'Oh dear, so unimaginative.' Ebru was teasing.
'We are all being that,' said Shafiq.
There is good reason for that,' Ebru replied. 'We would all like to sleep with many people. But there are consequences in doing so. I would only do anything if there were no consequences.'
Michael could promise. 'There would be no consequences. Nothing would change. You couldn't get sick, you could not get pregnant.'
Ebru chuckled at her own naughtiness. 'And my boyfriend could not find out?'
'Absolutely.'
'Then… I would consider sleeping with George Clooney.'
'Oh dear,' said Emilio. 'And not Anthony Edwards?'
'He's bald. I couldn't. Now it's your turn, for you to say.'
'Anne Heche,' said Emilio, with an air of finality and a grin that was frankly smug.
'Oh, but you know that she is a lesbian?'
Emilio's smile went hazy and naughty. 'Hmm, maybe I like that.'
'Oh. We are learning many things about each other. It is good to be social so that we can all get acquainted better.' Ebru plucked each word like strings on a guitar. She turned to Michael. 'OK, boss. This was your idea, now it is your turn.'
Michael grinned and thought: I'm the only one here who can actually answer that question.
He drew it out. 'Well. First. Hmm. Who would I ask first?' Michael crossed his arms. 'I think it would be… Mother Theresa.'
Emilio yelped. 'Mother Theresa!'
Michael surfed it. 'Is she not beautiful?'
'Yeah, but to sleep with?'
Ebru was pleased. 'That is a very clever answer.'
Emilio couldn't accept it. 'It would be like sleeping with ET!'
'Hmm,' said Michael. 'I hadn't thought of that one.' He pretended to consider the proposition, rubbing his chin.
Ebru was proud of him. 'You see, Shafiq, Michael likes the mature women as well.'
'And then, after that,' Michael announced, and all conversation stopped:
Michael was going to give them more than one? 'I think it would be… Johnny Weissmuller from the Tarzan movies.'
Ebru's eyes widened, miming shock, but she was smiling. She already knew.
'Right on,' said Emilio, which raised further questions about Emilio.
'And then it would be…' Michael took an olive from the dish, and chewed it, and they all waited him out. 'Taffy Duck from Dumb Duck, Detective, and after that… mmm… a girl from my high school.'
Ebru laughed some more and applauded. 'You win first place for originality. So as first-place winner, you now have to answer the next question, Michael. Who here in the staff of the project would you sleep with if it was no harm done?'
Michael smiled and shook his head. 'Oh no.'
Ebru drawled, amused, 'Oh, but you have to answer. It is the contest.'
'Oh no I don't.'
'I will tell you one other if you tell me.'
'OK, I will then.'
There was a quick exchange of nervous glances. No one, male or female, wants to know that the boss fancies them. 'Oh my goodness,' chuckled Shafiq and mimed getting up to leave. Michael should have studied drama. He looked at each of them in turn. 'I have to tell the truth… and say… that… I don't fancy any of you.'
There was a general groan of disappointment.
'And now Ebru.'
'No, no. I don't have to say anything.'
'You asked me the question and I answered it honestly. You wouldn't want me to lie, would you? So now it's your turn.'
Ebru laughed and picked at her fingernails, which did not look as if they had polish on them until you realized they were perfect and translucent. 'OK. Then it is Sean Connery.'
'Oh, everybody fancies Sean Connery. I fancy Sean Connery,' said Emilio. Which was probably just a shade too devil-may-care for it really to touch anything private. Michael studied Emilio: fresh-faced, a big nose, a shock of hair. Pretty, intelligent, lively… but no.
Icons, thought Michael. Everyone offers up icons. They're impersonal and safe and they never change and, for the most part, you even get people agreeing with you.
'I've got one,' said Hugh. The sciences can sometimes produce people who are colourless to the point of invisibility. Hugh had to say it again, amid the general clatter of disappointment at Ebru's answer.
'Hugh's turn, everyone,' said Michael, who knew enough to keep alert to anything that told him about his staff.
The table quietened down. Hugh was pale, with perfect jet-black hair and a neck so thin that it looked as if it could not support the weight of his spectacles. 'I saw a girl once, across the big courtyard at UCL. She was beautiful. She wasn't dressed like a student. She wore what I imagine very chic French women wear to work: a kind of brown jacket and almost a mini-skirt. She had beautiful legs and medium-length hair that was very tidy, and she was talking to one of the professors. No, actually,' he smiled to himself, and moved the spectacles up his nose, 'she was listening to him. Really listening to him. This bloke was a bit of a bad-tempered old hippie, but she was obviously asking him really good questions or something. He was taking it all so seriously. And suddenly she said something, and he laughed.' Hugh looked up and away, his smile growing. 'He laughed and laughed, and shook his head. And she said something else, and he laughed even more.'
'And so you have dreamed of her ever since?' Ebru had the good sense to make that a question.
'I asked the professor who she was,' Hugh corrected her gently. 'And he asked me why, and I said it was because I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.'
Ebru's face softened and she leaned forward. 'Oh, it is a beautiful story.'
Hugh whispered, 'Her name was Constanza Regina de Alencar Vrena. She was from Brazil, but she had an Italian father and she was a business major. So, I went to her class and introduced myself.'
Hugh mimed it. 'Constanza? Hello, my name is Hugh McPherson and you don't know me, but I would like to ask you out.'
Ebru's grin opened wide. 'You did that? You asked her out? Oh, but this is very romantic'
Hugh's smile veered sideways and his eyes turned inward. 'She couldn't speak English. She couldn't understand what I said. She'd been telling jokes in Portuguese.'
'What did she do?'
'She smiled sweetly and walked away.' Something strange was happening in Hugh's face. It was becoming beautiful: the fresh skin, the black hair. Tenderness suffused it. He looked at Michael. 'That is what I would do. I would use it to make restitution. For all the opportunities that I missed.'
The men I slept with, did they make a difference?
In his youth, Michael had imagined that he would be a traveller, visiting India, China and the Andaman Islands. Thailand was as near to it as he ever got. Mark knew a Thai art dealer who stayed in Michael's flat, and who returned the favour.
Michael went to Thailand in 1985, and spent the entire trip in an agony of unfulfilled desire. The Thais were sleek and smooth and friendly, but he turned them all down. He and the rest of the world were terrified of Aids.
Bangkok was not. The Thai friend took him to see shows where naked boys danced: some were slim and effeminate; others looked like samurai. They sat on Michael's lap wearing nothing but dressing gowns and jockstraps. He bought them drinks, and under the cover of their dressing gowns, they flipped their erect genitals out of the jockstraps and used the heads of their penises to give Michael's bare arms butterfly kisses. He still turned them down. His Thai friend shook his head in disbelief. Michael saw some of the other Europeans at the bar: outrageous air stewards who were going upstairs with one boy after another, or ugly Europeans whose faces seemed puffed out with disgust or greed. This, Michael thought, would be a terrifically easy place to get ill.
He went to the far north, to the Mekong and the borders with Laos where tourism ended. The Communist municipalities blared propaganda from loudspeakers across the calm river. Michael walked along its banks, and heard Blondie coming from a Buddhist temple, as if competing with the Communists. On tiptoe he peered in through a window and saw fifty Buddhist monks in training, all in their teens, bopping to 'Call Me'.
He walked on, until an uninviting soldier with a gun waved him back. When he passed the temple again, the same monks were all lounging on the river bank, sitting on upside-down, beached boats. They were young, bored and falling out of orange robes with unfulfilled desire. Their naked shoulders had the colour and gloss of polished wooden floors.
'Parlez-vous francais?' one of them called.
Michael did his best. It is a heart-stopping thing suddenly to be surrounded by admiring young men.
'Vous etes riches?' the young monk demanded.
They all laughed and giggled, and adjusted their dress.
No, he said, I am not rich, I am a scientist. This was a mistake. The boys veered away from any possibility of being kept by a rich Westerner. Suddenly they wanted Michael for his mind. They had only the dimmest idea of what a scientist did. Michael tried to explain: something about the brain. They all nodded in respect and looked a bit ashamed.
' Je suis pecheur,' said the one who spoke, his smile dim with shame. He was a fisherman.
'Vous parlez le francais beaucoup plus mieux que mot'
The smile widened. 'Je suis vietnamois. Tous les vietnamois parlent le francais. Je suis refugie.'
The boy explained shyly: his father had worked in the French embassy in Hanoi. He was not allowed to move more than a mile from the town.
The boys were interested in Michael and so demanded what in the West would be considered personal details. Was he married? No? Oh, that is sad, children work for you. Do you have a girlfriend? Michael lied and said many: he had many girlfriends. The boys all cooed and laughed.
One boy kept pressing questions on Michael: did he live in a big apartment? Did he have many clothes? Did he drive an ambulance? The boy was very pretty indeed and paler than the others, with a rounder face. Ethnic Chinese, Michael decided.
'Voo lee voo dang see?' the s
oft boy asked. 'Noo avong ung fate.'
Michael didn't understand. The fisherman explained. 'Une fete. Avec la musique. Il veut que vous allez danser avec nous.'
The boys all demanded it in unison. They made it clear that it would be an enormous privilege to dance disco with a real Westerner. Michael could also see that some of them were telling jokes about his height and girth and hairiness. They would see Westerners as big, clumsy, slow and indelicate. He very nearly said no, out of humility.
But he loved dancing. In fact it would be easier to dance with the boys than to talk with them. 'Ce n'est pas une probleme avec vos maitres?'
'Non. C'est educatif! Nous dansons avec un savant d'angleterre!'
So Michael bopped to Michael Jackson. It was the most enormous, innocent fun. Michel danced a reel and a jig, which made them roar with laughter. Each of the boys in turn did something silly to make him feel at home. Some of them made goofy demon faces; a big thick-bodied youth nipped onto his hands and walked on them; one of them moonwalked.
And then the little ethnic Chinese began a traditional Thai dance. There was no mistaking the hand gestures; the covering of the face, the alluring postures, the hands held out to ward off unwelcome advances. He was miming a female part. The boys chuckled but Michael saw them looking sideways to gauge his reaction.
The boy tripped up to Michael and, fully in character, made some kind of declaration or assertion. Suddenly sick in his belly, Michael knew that something was being offered, something he wanted. He pretended not to understand. Befuddled, he turned to his Vietnamese host.
'C'est une danse. Une mise-en-scene.' The Vietnamese started to laugh. He caught the eyes of his fellows, and slapped his hands together and turned away, grinning.
