by Geoff Ryman
Those ripped muscles, when pressed all around him, were soft and smooth and gentle, as if a giant baby were holding Michael. Not a 40-year-old Marine sergeant who could kill automatically on demand.
'Merry Christmas,' Sergeant Blasco murmured.
And Michael let himself be held. Yes, Dad, this is what I wanted, yes Dad, this is what I dreamed of, night after night, morning after morning.
But you know something, Dad? Big and beautiful as you are? I'm not sixteen now, and though it might be easy to slip into this, I'm not going to do it. I'm thirty-eight and it's been too long, and this is my mother's house.
Michael resisted. But Michael let himself be held. He settled into sleep.
He had a dream which mingled his father with Santa. He was a child and under the white fake beard, his saw his father's eyes.
Then Michael had to get up to pee. He stood up and rammed the front of his foot into his bookshelf. How could he forget the bookshelf? It was where all his records were kept. Outside, beyond the slatted Venetian blind, there was still the warm murmuring of the surf. Michael walked on towards the door, and walked into a wall. The door was on the left not the right. He fumbled through it, advising himself to remember: the stairs are just in front of this door.
There were no stairs. And the bathroom, instead of straight ahead along the landing, was right, and then left again.
And Michael's eyes started wide open, and he stared and saw: this was not his mother's house in Sheffield. This was the condo in Oceanside.
Michael looked down at his legs. They were thicker, and ice-blue in the light. He stroked them. They were hairless.
Michael was sixteen and smooth. There was no hair on his chest, and his nipples were sore and swollen from too much sunlight. He looked down at his own chest with desire and stroked it. Himself at sixteen. The dream was always of being someone else in a different situation. In the end, at root, all the fantasies had been this fantasy.
Michael's dick started to creep downwards. This situation was that he was young, only almost a man, and that his father in the last days of his sexual power wanted him.
This was no dream.
Michael was awestruck. I've really done it now.
He'd wrenched and pulled bodies out of nothingness, and now the need had wrenched round everything else. It had wrenched the whole universe around him.
This was the right miracle, now. This was the miracle he had really needed.
He had become someone else – Michael at sixteen again, back home, home in California. Without any Viagra at all, his dick was twice the size it had ever been, and it was slammed straight up against his stomach, reaching all the way to his belly button.
Michael was wide, wide awake, as wide awake as he would be if he were walking barefoot across broken glass. He remembered the flower of his self, the flower of cobwebs and light and areas of dark. It would not be thwarted, that flower. If even he himself blocked it, it could wrench other realities into this one. If thwarted sufficiently, it could, evidently, pull him, instead, into another reality. Into this one.
Michael at 38 could resist, but not Michael at sixteen. He felt the old white carpet under his bare feet, and he felt the lining of his stomach seethe. And Michael started to weep as he walked, out of relief and fear and joy. He knew he would do it now. It was really, finally going to happen.
Michael went to his father and hoisted up his smooth, thick legs, and he looked into his father's eyes, eyes that in this reality wanted him.
His father's pubic hair was a tight little purse over his pressed genitals. Like so many men about to fucked, he was not erect. Michael touched him. His father's ass was smooth, the crease between the cheeks was smooth, and the pucker of his sphincter was neat and tidy and hairless. To Michael at least, it still smelled of honey. Michael needed neither KY nor spittle to ease the passage; he was luminous with lubrication. He entered his father and looked into his father's eyes, and his father nodded and closed them as if to dream.
Michael saw his own young crouched thighs thick with muscle, his own belly, and his dick gently shifting in and out, lapping like little waves on the shore of a lake. My body isn't ugly, Michael told his father in his mind. My sex is not ugly, it's a gift, it's a gift I wanted to give to you. You didn't have to treat it like something dirty, you could have said no, no gently; no I don't want this. You could have been calm and wise and said, no, you feel like that now because you don't know me, because we've been separated, because I am a man to you, and not your father. You could have continued to love me and care for me and hope I would find myself and someone my own age.
You didn't have to go and kill yourself slowly. You didn't have to try to kill me. You might even have let me do this once out of love, just once, so I could escape you.
Now we've gone and torn the real.
And I don't know if I can get back, and I don't even know if I want to.
Michael rocked back and forth, and felt as if he were moving through curtains. He saw his own body shift – when he blinked it had hair again. He was 38. He had accelerated from one reality to another. Then he flipped back: sixteen. He kept moving back and forth between the two, and that acceleration became part of the ride. We are fucking reality, Dad.
And that acceleration rose within himself, hurtling as if towards a brick wall. And there was a sudden, disintegrating crash, and part of him seemed to fragment and burst apart, scattering inside his father's body. He came in at least two different realities at once.
His father's eyes were round and brown, like a cartoon animal's. He looked trapped, cornered. Then the eyes crumpled into a smile. You really are the most beautiful man, Michael thought.
And Michael rolled away, and settled. This was still the room in California in some kind of 1970s. Michael was still sixteen. Cupped between his arms, his own smooth pectorals swelled. His fingers rippled over his own flat tummy and down his lean thighs. There was a kind of sparking in the nerve ends and suppleness in his joints. He could sense speed and reactivity there.
Michael held up the sheet and looked again at his own sixteen-year-old body. The thought of being in that body, and in this room, in this situation, made him rise again.
This time Michael turned and rolled over and presented. His father now was erect and reared over him, and settled on top of him, as heavy as the sky, as heavy as God, and the thought came: it could go on like this. I could stay here. I could start over again.
I could stay sixteen for ever.
'Oh, Michael,' his father breathed out, and shivered and went still.
They lolled in each other's presence as if they were warm waves. Michael had finally obtained his ends. He slept.
For a while. He woke up when the Oceanside train went past, at 2.30 am.
His mind was clear. He touched his chest, and it was covered with hair. He looked down and saw the slightly greying fur and his plumper stomach. His father still slept beside him, only two years older than he was. Latin, big-dicked, as handsome as Brendan Fraser, and Michael did not want him in the least.
But this was still Oceanside in 1976.
Michael was terrified. He threw off the sheet and stood up, and looked out the window. There over the wall was the vacant lot next to the train tracks. The lot was now a multi-screen cinema, and there was a new train station.
My God, what have I done?
Michael still had to pee. He turned and walked out of the room and there was a sensation as if he were parting shower curtains. Reality billowed and separated and closed shut behind him.
In the dark, he felt his way straight along the landing, next to the stairs.
Michael pulled open the bathroom door in Sheffield. His mother had a 1960s colour sense and the walls were lavender and the door lintel was mauve. And on the toilet, naked, sat himself at sixteen. He was wiping his butt and looked up. His face was thicker and more obstreperous. He looked, curiously, more like his mother.
'Close the door, willya. Get the fuck outa he
re.' The accent was pure American. He was beefier; the strength concentrated in his shoulders and arms. He can throw, Michael thought. He plays football.
'We need to talk,' said Michael, his arms thinner, hairier, his stomach softer.
'I'll be with you in a second.'
'You're straight, aren't you?' Michael demanded.
'What's it got to do with you, fruit fly?'
Another self, another fantasy.
Michael sat on the edge of the bathtub.
'What happened?'
'Whatja mean?'
'To us. You were straight, what happened to you?'
This other self flushed the toilet. 'I dunno.'
'Go back to that moment in Oceanside when he pulls the car over and starts to cry because he's so happy you want to live with him for a while. So you go and study in San Diego. You play on the football team and you get your degree. What happens after that?'
This other self circled gum round and round in his mouth and looked confrontational, but curiously, he had Henry's puppy-dog eyes. He was bronzed and had a terrible seventies haircut: compromised Beatle with sideburns. He looked Latin.
'I met this girl, you know, in school. So we got married. I got my degree in veterinarian medicine, we moved north to Ventura, where her folks are.' This was still in his future but he knew his future because he was timeless.
'What happened to Dad?'
'He lost his job at forty-eight, but with an NCO's payoff and stuff. I'll help him set up in a window repair business. There's a real call for that in Oceanside. All that salt air on those aluminium French windows. He'll show up looking cool, and all those divorced women, man. He'll get a lot of ass.' This Michael chuckled.
'He doesn't drink?'
'Well, that Latin blood. He knows he suffers for it in the morning, so he'll take it easy.' His head jerked backwards; his face was impassive. This was how a tough guy laughed. 'Man, you look so English.'
'I am so English.'
'You really gay?'
'Yup.'
'What's that like?'
'No different from being straight… except you lead a different life.'
'Did you, like, really make a pass at Dad?'
'Yes.'
'Jeesh. You're really sick.' He was amused. Michael thought he was going to say something like Gross-out City. Instead he said, 'Do you like me too?'
'Up to a point.'
The teenager's grin was steady. 'Jeez. What don't you like about me?'
Michael stirred. 'Your attitude. I know what's inside and I know what you're hiding. Remember, I never saw Dad when we were kids. So, whenever I did see him, he didn't feel like my father. When I did see him, he was my ideal man.'
There was a glimmer of understanding. The voice went softer. 'Mine too. He sees my kids a lot. He comes up that driveway and they go running out. "Grandpa Blasco! Grandpa Blasco." 'Cause he always brings them little presents and stuff, you know.'
Tell him I love him.'
Michael Blasco sighed. 'Where I am, you don't exist. And him and me, we don't have to tell each other that shit. We just know.'
'Cool,' said Michael, smiling.
'Cool,' agreed Michael the Angel. He looked around him at the walls and his face screwed up with distaste. 'Are all English bathrooms this colour?'
'Only Mum's.'
'I keep thinking I'll go and visit. I remember my English half too. Keep an eye open, you might even see me in London, England.'
They didn't really have much to say to each other. The other Michael narrowed his eyes. 'So. I guess I'll be on my way. It's been really… weird.'
'I'll go,' said Michael.
He stepped out of the bathroom. And looked down the corridor past both bedrooms to the sitting room. Somebody was watching the TV. He could hear sobbing music, and a breathy, posed woman's voice whisper a scripted lament. He padded down the corridor. The carpet and the walls were white.
In the Oceanside living room, another Michael was watching a movie at 3.00 am. He was crying, and hugging and chewing a pillow at the same time. He was practically bald, with long hair in wisps, and just above the ears, a line of black scabs.
Michael sat down on the sofa next to him, gently, fearful of disturbing or even breaking him. 'Hiya,' he said gently.
'Hiya,' this Michael replied, miserable, and with a quick jab wiped his face.
'Howya doin'?'
'Oh,' this one sighed. 'Not so chipper.' He had lost even more weight than our Michael had.
'Where have you spent the last twenty years?'
This Michael didn't want to talk. He wanted to watch his movie. It was Gene Tierney. Who, these days, was a Gene Tierney fan?
'Are you gay?'
Long pause. 'Uh-huh.' An American yes.
'Did you marry Dad?'
Longer pause. 'I divorced him.' With a shiver of irritation, curdled anger, this Michael suddenly roused himself and snapped off the television from the remote control. He turned and faced Michael, looking like death. 'So what exactly do you want to know?'
'What happened?'
'What the hell do you think happened?'
Michael's voice went soothing. 'I don't know.'
'How long do you think you can stay married to your father?'
'Oh. I'd say until about six months after you graduate. And then everyone starts to ask when's Michael moving into a place of his own? People start to say: has Michael got a girlfriend? People start to say: Louis, are you seeing anybody? They start asking each other: have you ever seen Louis with a woman? Are you sure that's his son?'
The other Michael was looking at the TV as if the film were still showing. 'That's about it. Plus.'
'It's that plus I can't imagine.'
'Plus it fucks you up. Fucks you both up. You start saying to yourself every time you fuck and every time you don't fuck: this is my father. There is a word for this. The word is incest. It's supposed to be wrong.' This Michael punches the pillow. 'And you start to look at guys your own age. And he starts to think, it would be a lot healthier if you split up, if he found someone else too. He says that to you. You cry, because it's true. And because, goddammit, you don't want anyone else. Who could ever compete with your Dad?'
Michael asked, 'Did he start to drink?'
The other Michael just nodded. He sighed raggedly. 'And how.'
'Lose his job?'
Just a quick nod, yes. 'He had to have dental work.' Whatever that meant. 'He got all fat. You'd find him in the hall in the morning, and he'd shat himself. He'd get drunk and yell things. One day I just got in the car and started driving.'
'Bad scene.'
This Michael chuckled and shuddered at once.
'But you got out.'
A kind of cough. 'Not really, no. No, I wouldn't say that.'
'How come?'
'Let your father fuck you for seven years and find out.'
Michael coughed. 'I never did. I tried. I never did.'
Michael the Angel said, 'You end up in LA, you hit the bars and declare open season on your ass.' He shrugged. 'It was the 1980s. I got sick.'
'Michael, love. Is there somebody there?' It was his mother, calling from the spare bedroom.
Michael's heart stopped. He looked about the room. This was California; she shouldn't be there.
The other Michael answered, shouting towards the bedrooms. 'It's OK, Mom. I'm just talking to myself.' He leaned towards Michael. Michael could see the shape of his skull. 'She came over to take care of me. She's a nice lady.'
'She is,' murmured Michael. 'Look. I don't want her to see me.'
The patient's eyes said: she'd love to see you. You're healthy.
'See you around,' said Michael.
'You hope not,' said the other Michael. He flicked the film back on. Gene Tierney sat in a casino that was in circles like a circus.
'What year is it?' Michael asked.
'1995. Early.'
Before the three-drug treatment. Michael felt sick. He walked unsteadily b
ack to the California bedroom.
His father was in bed waiting for him, but there were strands of muscle down his neck, and his pectorals sagged like an old woman's dugs and were thicketed with snow-white hair. His face had collapsed.
'Everything all right, Mikey?' he asked in a phlegmy, quavering voice.
'Sure Dad.'
'I love you, baby.' His father's age-spotted hand clasped his. 'I thought you'd gone away.' The voice trailed off with relief from panic.
And it could have been this too, me at 38 and him… how old? Michael started counting and got up to 70 and stopped.
There was nowhere else to go. Michael lay down next to him. His father smelled now of dentures and catheters and the ending up of things.
Get out; go away, Michael told the apparition. Leave me alone, we never would have ended up here, it would have been terrible, sick, sad.
Michael looked back.
And in the bed, there was himself. Himself at 38 now as he was.
'Welcome home,' his self said, and held open his arms.
Michael could see that he was beautiful, and he could see his body was beautiful.
The Angel smiled shyly and rolled up and over and pulled open his cheeks, and the fur crinkled apart to show the oddly innocent-looking croissant of an orifice. Michael leaned forward to kiss this lower mouth. It was like having a foot massage – an unloved part of the body responded with delight to unexpected tenderness. Michael both gave the kiss and felt it.
Michael was surprised how feminine his body looked with its hips spread wide, and the back arched. This only made him love it more, so he stretched forward and kissed the back of his own neck, which he had never really been able to see before. It was the youngest part of his body. It looked sixteen years old, even now.
His unreliable cock was now buoyant as if floating in salt water. Michael pushed forward but against anal resistance, it missed and swept up the crease between the buttocks.
Michael felt his own penis between his cheeks, and he felt his Angel feeling himself feeling that. He seemed to stand between two mirrors and feel himself reflected off into infinity.
Michael pushed forward again, and felt himself sheathed and entered at the same time. There was an enfolding tenderness and warmth, and superimposed on it, a sudden cramp as the valve of the anus was forced to work in the wrong direction. 'Relax, relax,' both of them whispered. The pain subsided.
