Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

  There was nothing for it. Michael went in.

  Upstairs, Picasso had changed into boxer shorts, and was reclining on Michael's sofa bed. 'Miguel Blasco,' he said, with real affection. 'I like you really. Come here.'

  Michael yelped. 'You just told me I wasn't good for anything!'

  Picasso chuckled at himself as if he had done something silly and amusing, like trying to roast potatoes in the fridge. 'I did not like that pub.' He patted the sofa. 'Sit next to me.'

  Picasso Mindfuck, really! Michael's eyes felt heavy, like two hard-boiled eggs. He hated feeling the surrender and gratitude that welled up in him. He wanted to stay angry. He shouldn't allow himself to be jerked this way and that like a puppet.

  Picasso stood up. 'Don't be mad over something so small. Mmm?' Picasso encircled Michael with his arms and stood on tiptoe to kiss Michael's shoulder. 'See? I am so small to be mad over.'

  Picasso had given Michael a choice: he could go on being angry and have a major row, which would almost certainly fail to change how Picasso behaved. Or, he could weaken as he wished to do, be carried off by Picasso's return to kindness.

  Picasso seemed to sense him relenting. 'My maker of Angels.'

  I'm in love and I'm helpless, thought Michael. I am shooting Whitewater rapids of love. All I can do is hang on and try to avoid the rocks.

  Picasso leaned around and kissed him, and the river bore Michael away.

  The apartment never recovered from the move. As fast as Michael tried to put it in order, Picasso created another row of jam jars full of brushes in the bathroom, or a pile of printed help files on the floor. There were heaps of opened boxes from amazon.com. Half-read books were left open and face down on the floor. Sandals, socks and paint-stained newspapers stayed where they fell. It had never struck Michael until then that he himself was basically a tidy person.

  'Leave it, it will continue to protect the floor,' said Picasso, bemused by Michael's protests.

  'It's a horrible mess,' said Michael, going firm.

  'That is a matter of aesthetics,' Picasso replied. 'I will not be bullied by you over aesthetics.'

  Something shuddered in Michael and went still.

  Paintings began to appear, stuck to the walls with Blu Tack: gouache on crumpled paper: a parrot in blue and green and red; a vaguely African-looking pattern in black and ochre with white dots in swirls, a tunnel of blue and white light. A sculpture in Blu Tack was stuck to the coffee table, a kind of amused Isis with hips and breasts, and a shocked open mouth. Michael asked who it was supposed to be. Picasso had to repeat several times before Michael penetrated his accent: it was a Blu Tack Geri Halliwell.

  Picasso developed a bewildering affection for the Spice Girls: he played the CD over and over.

  'Why don't you stop?' Michel asked him.

  'I will when I understand it,' said Picasso. In self-defence, Michael bought him a compilation of Asian dance, Anohka, and Madonna's album Ray of Light. He bought him Philip Glass and Arvo Part. 'They are no good, they try to be intelligent,' Picasso said, dismissing everything else except S Club 7 and Steps.

  Picasso loved CDs. In the world music section of HMV he found compilations of Europop and Brazilian brega. He played CDs incessantly. 'They do the same to music, make it perfect but inhuman.'

  Picasso loved Pot Noodles and disposable cameras; he was entranced by Play Station and tried to get Michael to buy one and a samurai game called Soul Blade. 'Tush. You buy rubbish that does not move. I want Ade's Oddyssey. I want Sonic Hedgehog!' He kept buying glossy magazines – Q, Maxim, Elle, Vanity Fair, Empire. He would tear them to pieces and Blu Tack together mosaics out of fragments of shiny, laminated print. Discarded corpses of shredded journals began to litter the flat. He made himself little bracelets of Blu Tack, he stuck shards of magazine colour to his T-shirt with Blu Tack. In the corners of the room or running along the picture rail were little families of creatures not entirely unlike mice made out of Blu Tack.

  'You practically breathe Blu Tack,' said Michael. He was being driven, slowly and without cessation, out of his box. The first of his blinding headaches arrived, after a glass of wine on a Friday evening.

  Three weeks later, Picasso called him to the screen. 'The first,' he said.

  It took a moment for Michael to understand what he was looking at.

  It was pieces of his room. When Michael moved, flesh-coloured fragments moved in shards. The videoconferencing camera on top of the computer was feeding what it saw live to the hard disk, and those images, refracted and broken, were made part of a series of mirrors. The series of mirrors formed a face, in the same way that feathers form wings.

  It was a portrait of Michael, in fractured, virtual mirrors.

  The head could be turned, rotated and sometimes, as if at random, the entire face would blossom outwards, the mirrors separating and reassembling into a portrait from a greater distance.

  'It's your face when I fuck you,' said Picasso.

  Each time the portrait reassembled, its eyes would gleam brighter and a smile would assemble in sword shapes.

  'The audience can choose all angles, but each time they choose, the program will force the image of you closer and closer to joy. You look like that. When I fuck you, you have a joyful face. You look like a young man!'

  The face assembled and reassembled every time something moved in the real world.

  'Then you come.' Picasso mimed something explosive with his hands, fingers outstretched. 'You will break up into pieces of light. And you are reincarnated.'

  No one had ever done anything like that about or for Michael before. 'Do you…' Michael wondered how to proceed. 'Do you love me?'

  Picasso shrugged. 'I ponder you. You have this miracle, and you don't use it because I satisfy you. There is an economy about that which I like.'

  The face on the screen grew brighter and brighter and more joyful, unavoidably, pre-programmed. That was what Picasso wished for him.

  Picasso said, 'You have nothing. No money, no morals, no interests, no conversation, no friends to speak of. But you Are.'

  'What am I?'

  'There is no word for what you are. You just Are. Ah, watch now!'

  And the mirrored face dissolved.

  Michael's heart swelled like a satsuma growing wings, and rose up as if wanting to be born, jamming in his throat with love.

  When Michael came home at night, the whole apartment would smell of eggwhite, turpentine and glue. Suddenly the walls were papered with new Picassos, their colours like tropical glazed pottery: greens, reds, blues and yellows. The whole flat seemed to trampoline off itself with joy, bouncing back and forth between its own exhilarating surfaces, the spaces between gaping with amazement. The only possible response walking into the room was: who the fuck has done this?

  When Mr Miazga came to give Picasso his lessons, he was stunned, his mouth going slack and sad. It's not fair, his eyes seemed to say, that my rival should be such a man.

  Mr Miazga looked forlornly at Michael. Help me, he seemed to say.

  Michael found his return glance said: you help me first.

  At eleven o'clock one night about three months after his arrival, Picasso barrelled into the flat with ten boisterous, excited people whom Michael had never met, except for Phil's friend, Jimmy Banter.

  Jimmy's eyes boggled. 'My God it's M'n'M! You did land on your feet with this one, didn't you? So what's the story? Is he gay?'

  'No, but he sleeps with me.'

  'I wonder why,' said Jimmy. 'I mean, if he isn't gay. I mean, you were a man the last time I checked. Dear old Philip's not doing too well.'

  'I'm sorry to hear that.'

  'No, you're not.'

  'What's wrong?'

  'Lost his way, I would say. Says he's suffering from a crisis of direction.'

  'Maybe he's finding a direction,' said Michael.

  'He's painting portraits,' said Jimmy, miming horror.

  The guests studiously avoided saying anything about the work on
the wall. They stood back, and raised eyebrows, and waited for someone else to say something first. Michael offered them drinks, and learned that some of them were dealers.

  Among the influx was the art critic of the Evening News. The critic's accent was ludicrously posh, a deliberate effort to be noticed and to give affront to an egalitarian world. He fearlessly gave affront to Picasso. 'Are you unable to experience any anxiety of influence?' the critic demanded. 'You do know of course from whose work you are stealing?'

  'No,' said Picasso, looking smug. 'Tell me.'

  'Hockney,' said the critic, as if barely able to bring himself to say the name aloud. 'In his dreadful Picasso period.'

  Michael passed the critic his gin and tonic. The critic turned on him succinctly. 'You are the maid, are you?'

  'This is my flat,' said Michael.

  'I see,' said the critic. Even his smile was designed to annoy. 'And how long do you think he will be living with you?' The 'y' sounded like he was about to throw up, the 'ou' hooted like an owl. Michael's riposte was succinct. He took back the gin and tonic and began to drink it himself.

  Picasso pronounced the critic. 'Noel Coward,' Picasso said, pointing. 'During his precipitous decline.' It was a miracle Picasso could pronounce the word: prayssheepetooose. It was effective enough. One of the many things Picasso knew is that it is more valuable to make enemies than friends. You can always make up with an enemy, but friends hang around as dead weight.

  It was instructive watching Picasso at work. He strode around the flat arm in arm with an apparent favourite, expansively describing the work. The critic laughed at him. 'He is like a very bad wine, one is amazed he has the effrontery even to wear a label.'

  The dealer didn't care; he was in this for the money, not to defend the sacred flame of art. The dealer began to roll a joint expertly, one-handed, while Picasso talked. Picasso stood in a combative pose, telling a story about a bullfight. Picasso could strut even when he wasn't moving. Only once did his eyes flicker sideways to another dealer from New York. This dealer was much older and better-dressed than the joint-roller. Though Picasso ignored him, the man's stone face looked neither annoyed nor forlorn.

  Michael had spent years cruising gay bars and he knew: Picasso was making a pass at the older man by playing up to the younger. Did the New York dealer know that? Come on, Michael, this is the air these guys breathe, of course he knew. The younger guy probably knew. What they all actually knew or rather had decided, was that this Luis Ruiz, wherever he was from, was a player. Right at the end of the evening, the New Yorker quietly passed Picasso his card.

  'Boy,' said Jimmy Banter to Michael as he left, 'am I going to make Philip jealous.'

  'Why would you want to do that, Jimmy? Just tell him I still love him, will you?'

  Jimmy had the grace to look chastened. He gripped Michael's arm. 'Just my little joke,' he said, and left. Camp will always let you down.

  When they had all gone, Picasso was slow and well fed, like a bullfrog. He put a hand behind Michael's neck and said 'I like being with you. You are useful.'

  Tender words. 'I keep you alive,' said Michael.

  'You will find when I am being good and you have not made me angry that I am good to you.'

  The thought arrived whole and clear and quiet. This is love, and this is adventure. But this is not good for me.

  Michael had assumed that love was always in one's interest. If love was a stone that rolled you naturally home, it must be a good thing. The idea that love could smash as well as build a home or roll you further and further from your self had never occurred to him.

  Michael's entire flat became a workshop: a pottery wheel appeared in the bathroom, with sacks of clay. When he was not painting or computing, Picasso was sawing wood from pallets he had found at Camden market. He would scoop up scraps of fabric, a baby's shoe, or the skull of some small rodent picked clean. Everything entered the maw of his art and was taken back to the flat to be used.

  Adoring women arrived. They no longer wore X-Files T-shirts and Camden nose rings. They were smart, bright young gallery assistants from Notting Hill or Bond Street. They wore slim black slacks, graceful shoes and medium-length, artfully tinted hair which they tossed from time to time to indicate fascination.

  'Hello, Michael,' the gallery assistants would beam at him when he arrived from work, as if genuinely pleased to see that their fascinating new artist lived with another man. 'I'd better be going,' they would offer, standing up after a decent interval.

  Picasso kissed their fingers, between the knuckle and first joint. 'Oh, but you will come back, I hope.'

  Amanda, Diana, Jill, Cecilia; apparently they did come back, judging from the state of the bed linen. Michael gave in and began to sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. His headaches started coming regularly. When do you get headaches, Michael?

  When you're angry.

  Michael came back from going to see In the Company of Men alone, to find Picasso painting another portrait of him: this time as a weeping clown. Was Michael flattered? He was certainly enveloped, and perhaps being digested.

  'People call idiots the Clowns of God.' Picasso touched Michael's nose with the tip of the brush handle. 'Clown,' he pronounced him. 'You are in an unequal contest with God. This is foolish, but inescapable. I learn new things from you, Michael. I did not know that the privilege of saints was to fight with God. Most of us don't even touch Him.'

  Picasso painted either in great easy sweeps, or impatient jabs and lunges that left the canvas or the previous layer of paint showing through in streaks. This was an impatient painting. Picasso had scrawled tears in the jagged, staring diamond eyes.

  The next night Michael came home at 6.30 to find Mrs Miazga beside herself in what was now Picasso's bed. She was red again, but now it was from irritation. Perhaps she had found evidence of others. She looked miffed when Michael stumbled in to fetch shorts and a T-shirt to wear in the house, unconsciously imitating Picasso. They both stared, wishing the other gone, wishing themselves gone, wishing him gone.

  'I'm sorry,' said Michael, coldly. 'I didn't know you were here.' She drew the sheet up higher. She shrugged, but could only just bring herself to say, 'It's your house.'

  Michael found a private corner in the sitting room in which to undress so he could shower. His towel, he remembered, and his bag of toiletries were still in the bedroom. Damn. He marched back into the bedroom, his trousers wrapped around his midriff.

  'Where is he?' he asked, rifling amid Picasso's trash for his own few things.

  'I don't know,' she said,, after a pause. 'He left suddenly. I thought you were him coming back.'

  Michael blew out air from tension.

  'I know,' she said, and swung her feet out from the bed. She fumbled for a cigarette. She sighed. 'If you let me shower first, I could be gone.' She looked forlorn.

  'OK,' he said.

  He sat in the front room, and looked at the paintings, the new ceramics, the boxes of wood stuffed with found objects. How on earth, he wondered, do I end this?

  He doesn't allow other people to end things; leaving must be up to him. It would be hard to have him go, because it was a fascinating story to live beside: to see an artist climb. Especially one who climbs quickly, rather than slowly, painfully, humiliatingly as Phil had done.

  It would hurt, to tear Picasso out of his life. At first. But to live with someone you love who does not love you is indeed to eat your own heart. You have to live through cliches to realize how powerful and apt an expression they often are. Michael was eating his own heart out. He would have no heart left.

  Michael was good at avoiding decisions, at letting life decide. Life decided. 'Enough,' Michael said aloud. He had had enough. He looked at the paintings on the wall and had two goals: to get Picasso to go, and to save his art.

  So the next day, Michael took another long lunch break, and visited Mr Miazga in the flat that had once been his own. Mr Miazga was working alone at his computer, with the resigned
grimness of someone unemployed at fifty.

  'My wife is not here,' Mr Miazga sighed, 'Is she perhaps at your house?'

  Michael tried to think of what would be polite, and realized that nothing would be. 'I don't know. It's possible. I try not to go there.'

  'I hate that man.'

  Michael sighed too. 'Sometimes I do.'

  'You? You love him.'

  'The two are not mutually exclusive.' Michael looked at the Zip-drive disk in his hand. Thaddeus,' he began. 'I have a lot of respect for you, and so I am going to ask something that I would not ask from just anyone.'

  Mr Miazga kept keying in a program. 'OK. Ask.'

  'I want you to redo all his work.'

  Mr Miazga sniffed. 'He should make backups.'

  'He does. I do. But that won't work.' Michael had rehearsed this next part. 'It would be difficult to explain how I know this, but believe me it is true. Every trace of his work will disappear when he dies.'

  'A fault in how he programs?'

  'Stranger than that. I can promise you that all his paintings and ceramics will disappear as well. That would be a loss. But, consider if his new work in computer art would disappear as well.'

  Mr Miazga shrugged. 'I am not a critic'

  'No, thank heavens. You are a creative technologist. So, ask yourself this question. Is he not finding out what can really be done artistically with this stuff?'

  Mr Miazga went quiet. 'What are you asking?'

  'I'm asking you to rekey in any code he makes. I'm asking you to redo every gif. I'm asking you to rescan every graphic. That way the work will survive.'

  'Why?' Mr Miazga turned to him, his bafflement shot through with something genuinely enquiring.

  In his shoulder bag Michael had volume two of the John Richardson biography. The books are laced with every existing photograph of Picasso, often in his workshop. Michael opened it at the chapters dealing with the early 1920s. Silently, he kept turning each of the pages.

  Michael could see the exact moment when Mr Miazga understood. He jumped as if someone had stabbed him with a pin. 'It's him,' he said and turned to Michael wide-eyed.