by Geoff Ryman
Something tiny and hard and alien thrust itself into his sitting room. Its eyes were wide and staring. It wore a crown of green and its skin was a battered, polished brown like an insect's shall. For just a moment, Michael thought he had called up a Martian by mistake.
Then he blinked and the thing came into focus as a human being. The crown was blonde hair, filthy and in spikes; the shell was leather armour. The saucer eyes still stared.
Alexander moved like a lizard, in swift halting gestures. Michael almost expected him to flicker a serpent tongue. He demanded something in a high, harsh voice that reminded Michael of dried and broken grass.
When Michael didn't answer, Alexander strode to the window and looked out. A car sighed past below. It was Alexander who honked like a horn in amazement, and his head jerked upwards, looking at the top of University Senate House, towering high. Alexander turned, glanced once at the ceiling, marched towards Michael, wrenched Michael's arm behind his back and pressed a sword against his throat.
Alexander barked at him again like a dog with its vocal cords cut. The stench from the mouth was appalling: rotten teeth, rotten meat and bad wine. Michael backed away, beginning to babble in terror. Alexander the Great sniffed him, or rather the smell of soap and deodorant.
Perhaps it was the scent that stopped him killing Michael. Nothing so flowery could be a threat. Alexander pushed him away, and strode out into the hallway. He saw the front door.
'I'll open it for you,' said Michael.
Alexander the Great knew nothing of doors or locks. He fumbled at the handle and its tiny knob for only a second or two, and before Michael could do anything else, he had jumped back and raised a horny, sandalled foot. Alexander kicked twice at the lock. The door could only open inwards, which meant Alexander had to shatter the lintel. He did it with the third kick, peeling back most of the frame around the door, and springing the hinge mounts free.
Alexander made a grave cry of triumph, and shouldered his way through the gap.
Michael was left panting. He thought of elderly neighbours being pushed out of the way by a drunk, mad, ancient Macedonian, and he whispered Alexander down to his own world. As if the doorway had blinked, the door and lock and hinges were back in place.
Well, thought Michael, at least it puts an inconvenient ex-boyfriend back into perspective.
And just this once, perhaps, a shot of whiskey was not uncalled-for.
Michael remembered his treasured issue of Q magazine, the one with the nude photographs of Terence Trent D'Arby. As an antidote to Alexander, Michael called him up.
In the flesh, honey-coloured and slim, the Angel deferred and demurred. 'It's not really my thing but do what you like,' he said, amused. He smelled of lanolin. Michael rested his head on the soft belly and rolled his mouth back and forth around the apricot-like head of the Angel's penis, soothing semen out of him. That tasted of apricots too. Michael slept, with his cheek still resting on the Angel's stomach.
Michael had yet more mistakes in him. The next weekend, he called up the Bay City Rollers. OK, they were a thing from Michael's youth. They were even weedier in the flesh, and the clothes, all cut-off tartan and pixie collars, were more twee than Michael remembered. They smelled of stale crisps and had spots on their backs and Michael sent them packing before they had fully unpacked.
So he called up two Nuba wrestlers from Leni Riefenstahl's photographs. They were naked and enormous and frankly had no idea what it was Michael wanted to do with them. So he sat back and watched them wrestle naked in his sitting room. They slammed into each other like bulls, their rolls of muscled flesh rearing up and settling back in waves, and their elongated penises flying like flags of victory.
Michael conjured up a plumber who had ripped him off. Andy, he was called: broad-shouldered, athletic, with cute button eyes. He had a number-one cut and he had known Michael fancied him. Andy took advantage.
Andy tore up the bathroom floor and removed the toilet. Then he disappeared for four weeks. Michael had to hire a chemical john, like it was a camping holiday. Michael still fancied him when he came back, so he let him finish the job and paid him; only then did the new toilet back up and flood.
Such was the power of love that Michael hired Andy to install the new fireplace, with its fake gas fire. It had a marble pedestal. Andy had to cut the rug, and got the measurement wrong, and cut away too much. Bare 1890s floorboards showed all around the polished stone. Michael traded the old pedestal for a larger one and paid the difference. Andy somehow managed to break the replacement in half. At this point, Michael finally sent him packing.
It was the most terrible abuse of power to make Andy's Angel lower his trousers and take it. It was as if the whole home-maintenance misadventure was finally worth it: we both get what we want. The Viagra worked a treat. A migraine blurred Michael's vision of his own cock plunging in and out of Andy's sculptured derriere. He even had the satisfaction of making Andy come when fucked.
'This isn't my usual sort of thing,' said Andy, confused.
Michael cooed in his ear, 'Maybe not. But you liked it. Do make sure the real Andy knows that.'
National Geographic had been one of Michael's few sources of thrills when he was younger. He remembered photographs of bountiful Amazonian Indians. They arrived squat and square with burnished hairless bodies. Michael finally got to see and touch what had been airbrushed out of the colour spreads. The Amazonians were amazingly loving and affectionate. They rolled over and over with him, giggling and teasing and kissing him, and pressing their foreheads against his so that they could stare into Michael's black eyes. They started to sing to him; rhythmic huffings and clickings and poppings that somehow expressed both energy and longing. When it was time for Michael to go to work they refused to release him. There was a long protracted ritual of goodbye. They clung to his wrists and made elaborate pleading noises. They encircled his midriff and pulled him back down among them, and gave him a breakfast of love. They made him late for the lab.
Michael called up Ernest Hemingway from a photograph of the old gent in his bathtub, proud of the erection that peeked over the top of the tin basin. Michael preened it and stroked it, and found that even after a few minutes' conversation, Ernest Hemingway was a black hole of boredom. Every single hearty thing he said – God knows, about bulls or fishing or shooting or his war wound or the nurses who tended him – struck Michael as phoney. Hemingway really seemed to think that shooting, fishing and boxing were what made you a man. When not having erections was his real problem.
Then there was the man Michael had glimpsed in the changing rooms of the Oasis public baths when he was ten years old. The man had been blond, pale, athletic and embarrassed, quickly lowering trunks and pulling on underwear. He showed up in his swimsuit, full of early-seventies misgivings. He kept jumping in Michael's embrace, nervous, uncertain, still not really believing that it was legal or decent.
There was the lead male actor of the old silent film The Crowd, angelically beautiful and distant. And in person, blind drunk.
There was the fruit-and-vegetable man who in 1977 first told Michael about the Clash. Then he had seemed an adult, all of nineteen years old. He had a head of permed hair that looked now like a joke wig, and huge beautiful front teeth. It was his face Michael remembered. The slim and rather indifferent body seemed to melt into the sheets. But he and Michael stayed up late drinking lager, playing the Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, the Vibrators, but they decided, finally. The Buzzcocks were best.
There was his barber, Italian and sweet, on whom Michael had had a crush all through childhood and who, to give the adult Michael a better blow job, pulled out all of his even white false teeth. His gleaming toothy smile had been why Michael fancied him.
There was even the porn star Brad Rodger, who looked impossibly beautiful in publicity photos. In person, he was tiny and slim with a dick that was large only in proportion to the rest of him. Worst of all, he was, not to be prejudicial, quite the stupidest person Mich
ael had ever met.
'I really would like to do some serious roles.'
'You're kidding,' said Michael. 'You can't really think you'll get into serious acting doing the kind of thing you do.'
'I make up all my own dialogue, you know. I mean, I really improve those parts.' His voice did not rise and fall like a normal voice. Brad whined, like a caricature of the beautiful nasal stars wiped out by talkies. 'Like once, you know, they wanted me to say, like, oh give it me, give it me. I mean, what kind of line is that?'
Michael had to admit it didn't sound particularly original.
'So I changed it to fuck that ass baby. Fuck it hard. I mean, you know?'
Michael did his best with Brad Rodger, before the Viagra side effects began to grind away behind his eyes. He looked into Brad's pale blue blanknesses and decided it was too much like fucking a particularly pretty sheep.
There was the sweet Afghani who had asked him for instructions in the street, with unshaven stubble, and a slightly baffled air. Michael had held him in conversation. His name was Mustafa, and he was here studying engineering. His home was now rubble; his brother had been killed. 'My heart goes out to you, for being my friend,' he said. On his forehead was a callus where it habitually touched the prayer rug.
Michael called up Mustafa's Angel and found his only desire was to leave the innocence undisturbed. They sat eating chocolates and holding hands. And when it came to leave, Mustafa kissed him on the forehead. 'I love you,' he managed to say.
Michael was confused. 'Do you want to make love?'
Mustafa looked surprised, then coy, if not unpleased. 'Oh no. No, no,' he said, in a gentle voice a bit like a pigeon's. 'No. We… become romantic with each other.'
Michael saw in his eyes, a pleading: I want, but if I do, it cuts out the heart. Leave me the heart.
There had to be somewhere and somehow a way to combine the two, the heart and the body.
You discover two things if you can sleep with anyone. The first is that life is bountiful. It is more bountiful than an orchard at harvest time; more abundant than a pick-your-own field of strawberries that stretches beyond the horizon. The harvest of human genitalia attached to reasonably good-looking, reasonably behaved people is inexhaustible.
No matter how completist you are, you cannot collect the entire set. It grows too quickly: there are a half-billion penises in India alone. Like a kaleidoscope, ever blossoming, more and more genitalia, more and more beauty, unfold at high speed out of the old.
We walk around blind to prevent ourselves seeing this bounty. Its vastness diminishes us; its availability makes not only ourselves but our love seem arbitrary accidents. If we did more than only glimpse it, it would drive us mad.
Secondly, in contradiction to this, you learn how rare attraction is. We don't sleep with most people, because we would not remotely enjoy sleeping with most people. They smell, they fart, they occupy our space, all the things people we love do and which make us leave them in the end. Only, we don't understand what these strangers mean. Their preoccupations are alien to us. We are unmoved by the thing that most moves them. Their genitalia look shrivelled, hairy, forbidding.
Only sometimes are there exceptions.
Michael thought again of monks, and remembered his time in California. He had often visited an old Spanish mission surrounded by fields and an ancient graveyard. It was the only thing in Oceanside that a Brit would recognize as history, and it was shaded and cool. In the old storerooms there were exhibits of early California life: dummy Indians grinding maize; a replica of a colonial bureaucrat's office.
The mission had been restored in the 1930s by monks. They smiled out of old photographs in the historical exhibition. Unlike most people in old photographs, they looked contemporary. You could see who they were. They were all in their thirties or forties, some plump, some slim. But they all looked secure, satisfied, and even merry. They looked happy slaving in hot sun while wearing thick woolly robes. They sang or joked in photographs posed to demonstrate the robust Christian life. It seemed unlikely even to Michael at sixteen that they could all be quite that good-looking by accident.
Michael invited them all home. It was a Thursday evening and he made a party of it. The Californian monks had come from Spain, from Costa Rica, from Ireland, and they sang romantic 1930s songs on the guitars that came with them. They made something like sangria with a different name and became boisterous. The Irishman sang an old love song in a high and wild voice that was only slightly off-key. They began to dance arm in arm around his apartment floor until the downstairs neighbours thumped on his door.
'It's a religious gathering,' Michael told his neighbours and invited them in. The neighbours were Polish and rather shy. Michael knew them only well enough to nod to in passing in the corridor. He learned their first names: Thadd and Marta Miazga. They spoke a strained and cautious English and were overwhelmed by the ten thumping, handsome monks who sounded like a jolly tower of Babel and who wore robes and sandals, and who welcomed them with cries and kisses and resumed their religious songs, as if around a campfire. At one point Mrs Miazga slipped out of the flat and returned with more wine. At 1.00 am her husband shyly took the guitar and started to sing 'Good King Wenceslas' in a tired, happy voice. Michael suddenly saw that he was handsome too, and his wife. In fact everyone in the world suddenly seemed beautiful.
Finally, someone glanced at a watch. The Miazgas had hatched out of their shyness, into a pleased, flushed conviviality.
'It is so silly to be neighbours and not know,' said the wife, in a voice like someone drawing a bow across violin strings. Silly not to know that our neighbour is jolly and pleasant. They had become, at least potentially, friends.
All the monks gathered round them in the hallway, and shook hands and kissed Mrs Miazga good night. They all chorused good night, and then were gone.
Silence fell like a curtain. Michael sipped some wine, and considered and called back the Irishman.
The Irishman had a mop of straw-coloured hair, and a classic profile and milk-white skin. Michael felt woozy with sociability, wine and a broad and generalized love of the world. He popped his Viagra, and asked the Irishman to lie down next to him. The Irishman tumbled into his arms as naturally as dice, his legs crossing over Michael's. He rested his head on Michael's chest and started to talk.
His name was James. He had grown up in Clonmel in Eire. From the way he described it, the town was almost medieval: a big Spanish-looking church by a river; peasants, weekend markets, horsecarts in the streets, cattle fairs. Like other children he had swum in the river, toppled outhouses, stolen and smoked cigarettes, and attended mass. Then he had fallen in love with God. He wanted to be dedicated to God. Half asleep, he used the word 'married'.
Then his neck arched upwards, yearning, and Michael kissed him. The young monk kissed like a woman, almost chastely, shyly. He ducked away, like a nervous horse. Waiting for the Viagra to take effect, Michael asked him questions. Yes, he had been in love once. While still living in Clonmel, he had fallen in love with a married man.
'A great big fella with a handsome moustache. He'd go riding past in his plus fours on a bicycle, and he was the handsomest thing you'd ever seen. And he always grinned at me. And then he started stopping by to talk. And I realized there was this look in his eyes. And I thought no, it can't be, he's a married man. Either that or he doesn't realize. So we did nothing about it. And one night I was walking in the moonlight. It was a beautiful night, and I was just out for a stroll. And I heard his bicycle coming. Brother James, is that you? he asked. And I just said, Hello, Georgie my dear, because my heart was full. He took me off into the hedges. I still didn't know for sure what he was going to do until he took my hand.'
Scandal had been an ever-present danger. They had to pretend hardly to know each other. They would meet once a month, when George had a good excuse to be away from the farm. Once they were walking along the road hand in hand, when the last thing they expected in the world, or at le
ast in Clonmel, came roaring up the road: a motor car. Its headlights blazed. They dived into a ditch, and the car roared on past.
James and George saw the car parked outside the local hotel and heard roars of laughter, and decided not to go in. Ah, it would be a great story to tell. Apparently the driver told it, roaring with laughter, buying drinks. These two fellows, he said, one of them a monk, and they both dived into a ditch! Maybe they thought it was the crack of doom.
The locals knew. Two men, one of them a monk, did not walk out together at night. The publican and his regulars neither knew nor really cared who the man was: likely a substantial citizen. But a monk was not exactly a man; if he went with other men then he was a monk who was doing the Devil's work.
'Would the monk be having blond hair?' asked the landlord, which earned a roar of steely laughter.
James was called into the Abbot's office, and the story of the motor car recounted as if it had happened to someone else. The Abbot said nothing too direct. A few of James's unexplained absences were noted, and he was asked, in the kindest, most helpful way, if perhaps he would not be interested in an exciting mission to California.
'So that was the end of George Kelly and me.' James seemed quite cheerful about it. 'At least I got out of Clonmel. And into all that sunshine.'
They kissed again, and the Viagra moved into the bed with them. James became suddenly demanding and masculine. In the street lights, Michael saw the outline of his lean stomach. Michael counted the years. If James were still alive, he would now be over ninety years old. James entered him.
I hope you found someone, James. I hope the sun and the sea and the health of California urged you to throw off your robes. I hope you moved to Santa Monica and met Christopher Isherwood, and set up a retreat in Big Sur. Or that you and one of your brother monks quietly and discreetly tied the knot. I hope you played guitar around campfires for many years to come, and that your God reciprocated your love.
