Cellibrex says the world is flat—there is no argument, as far as he is concerned, and saying otherwise is silly. To me that sounds so absurd, I never thought to argue. In his childhood, he saw men and adults kill people who held contrary opinions. He says he grew up in a commune—which I always assumed meant an artificial environment, the way it’s used here—but I can’t be sure since I wasn’t there—with an apple in it, which was like a big pocket phone or a pad with a screen on it, which I never encountered. It’s not a popular opinion, but it’s not one that would get you killed at a public tale telling, either. (Those are the parts of the story I’m not allowed to tell.) Though he never was taught how to use it, Cellibrex knew we were ruled by the internet, which was not a book but a group of men, and very shortly he found himself rounded up and shipped to a sprawling penal combine, where he spent a dozen years of his life. (I assume dozen meant twelve, but I can’t be sure of that either: He says he learned to use the word for an approximate general number from us. What he and the boys he was captured with were incarcerated for, he does not know or refuses to say. He says he didn’t learn the word “dozen” meant a specific number until after he’d escaped from the military.)
That’s when I began to wonder if “flat” to the Flat Earthers meant curved so slightly that it might as well be flat in all directions… and just gave up because they didn’t need to know anything else to do their work. Like the famous detective (who was probably gay, since his best friend was an Asian woman).
From the time he was eleven until he was twenty-two or so, Cellibrex has told me, he does not know where he was either; but it was far away. He killed people while he was there, and he does not believe he can go back, which at first made me wonder if he had been a Hermit or a Hermit’s assistant. But later I realized he’d been in a gang called a family, or a family called a gang: It had lots of people in it, of all ages. His gang-family had no parents in it that he was aware of. There was a lot about age mates, which were important. It was all male and the sex was pretty ritualized and possessive. He remembered standing on some rocks, either in the morning or the evening, seeing fields full of his gang moving below, in groups of what he was sure had to be hundreds.
Then, somehow, he spent some years in a military unit, which he said entailed thousands of men—again, no men who were even called women had survived among the gangs of his childhood.
But the sex and the work were so different that he thought for the first six months it would drive him crazy, learning to understand them. But somehow he found, once he stopped resisting, it was actually both interesting and easier. And he’d traveled around enough to make him believe in the world’s flatness.
I remember a childhood of living in units with people who were responsible for me. He remembers sleeping in piles of brothers in which anything might happen.
But I didn’t find out he believed all these things about the world and had seen so much to make him sure of them—unless he was just bat-shit crazy, which now and then I have considered, though he was pretty quiet most of the time—until after we had known each other almost a year.
He was a very expressive man, but not a communicative one.
He knew his real name—which I don’t think there’s any reason to tell—but not where he came from, though he had an ID number. But it began with QX4, which makes me think it was from a long, long way away.
YOU WANT TO know how we met?
It was during my recurring two days off from my job that—like I say—good literary form stipulates I not specify as to time and place, though I’ll be vulgar and mention it entailed baskets and boxes and keeping track of the food and electronics they contained. But I don’t want to get myself in trouble, telling whether I worked indoors or out, or if it was mostly physical labor or information tracking that I did, whether I was paid in copper notes or material certificates, etc. Distinctions of that sort are not literary. Today what is valued in a tale is the universal, not the specific, what is common to all men and women, whatever their sex; how we are all alike.
You get in the habit of not talking about things like that with others, and soon you don’t think about such things yourself.
It’s that forbidden mean production again.
At any rate, I was walking up through the recreation area between the major living hoods and the farming areas, through trees and by ponds, where the wild animals are kept with their tracking collars and the tame ones walled away on the Farms (another kind of institution entirely) that smelled so incredibly when you rode by them on a bicycle or glided over them in a glider. I’d taken my blue shirt off and tied the sleeves around my neck and was wondering about taking off my sandals and going barefoot, when a very large, unshaven brown-skinned fellow wandered from behind some trees.
He was already barefooted. He had lots of rough tattoos on his chest, arms, shoulders, thighs, buttocks and face—he was practically naked. That is not common in this part of the world. He had on a belt under a furry belly that looked full, fed, and strong, and a kind of—I guess you’d call it—groin cloth. (I was eighteen. I kept a neat beard back then in which a lot of folks said they recognized my Asian ancestors, which is not rare at all in this part of the Yucatán.) He was at least thirty or thirty-five, and his broad bones were heavy with muscle, and that looked kind of threatening. I’ve seen pictures of the natives who were supposed to have lived in this area a few generations ago, in the local library, with its forty books that anyone can go in and look through (though I gather I am one of about a hundred people in the neighborhood’s three thousand who does), and he looked like one of them, though physically a lot larger. He had a beard and was starting to go bald, and a broad, brown nose. He had bright, oddly blue eyes for such dark skin and rough, straight hair.
We are a small enough settlement that we don’t get a lot of strangers, but I guess we are on the sort of routes where the ones we get can be pretty varied from one another in this odd world we live in, so that not much surprises us—if they’re not toting visible weapons. And he wasn’t.
I am a gay man who had had a fair amount of local experience, but I was unprepared for the next thing he did: which was to raise his groin cloth, point to himself, look left and right, then look back at me—which I realized, to my surprise, in that isolated spot, was an invitation to… well, service him. My heart began to pound.
It was not a space where such encounters were common. But I knew of others not far away where they were.
I looked around, and thought, no, this probably isn’t a good idea…
Many of the marks on his body were what most of us would call obscenities, which for me oscillated between disturbing and intriguing. Bats, skulls, dragons, as well as male genitals, dogs and mules relieving themselves of urine, excrement, or desire using their fellows… his back was against a rock with lots of foliage on it, and I was on my knees in the fallen leaves in front of him, with his thick (if average length) penis in my mouth, which was pleasantly salty, and pretty much like mine. (That, of course, was when I thought of asking him if he thought this was… But his rough hands held my head, moving it out and in, while above me he breathed harder and harder. And I forgot about all such thoughts.)
When, three or so minutes later, he spilled into me, and I thought I’d better disengage, he didn’t release me, but held me to him, finally to let me rise and push against him and, still erect enough to hold aside his clout, with one hand against my buttocks and one behind my head, pressing my face into his neck, he encouraged me to rub against him until—I guess—it was clear to him I too had an orgasm. The upper joints of his left hand bore letters I won’t write, but they were now inked out as a second thought; while on the joints of his right hand I recognized a Latino term for excrement.
When finally I stepped away, he held my hand in rough-skinned fingers. Had it been three hours later, I would have had somewhere I had to go. Had it been the day before, while I might have been there on an off hour, I would have had to leave immediately
on finishing the first time.
But it was the day it was: He grinned, and without releasing my hand, with his other and his general expressions of humor and contentment, this tattooed giant communicated clearly without any words at all: “That was fun. Let’s do it again? No, right now…!” And so, with only a little variation, and because nobody else was there, we did. This time his tongue ended up way down my throat, as mine did down his. He was missing a couple of teeth in the back, which my own tongue learned and felt comfortable knowing.
He did not speak to me. When we were done for the second time, I said a few things to him. Where did he want to go? What had he come here for? He listened, looking at me curiously, but did not respond in any way specific enough to make me think he understood any particular word I’d said.
I knew there were people in the world who had once spoken other languages than mine; and I was innocent enough not to be threatened by it as a concept—at least when the results were pleasant, and so far they had been.
It was one of the things I’d taken from my time at the Tolmec Hermitage, supported by things that had occurred on my travels up from Old Mexico through Texas to New Mexico and the northern border to the three-state union that remains, where Canada starts.
I released his hand, and began to walk—and was both curious and surprised when he walked with me.
And somehow I went with him back to the three living units that I shared with some others in the town.
We walked down toward my cabin—and while we were getting to the more populous area I saw Marcus, my friend from work, who basically has little use for gay men at all, though he is a friendly enough work mate—and I reached over to take my big, new friend’s hand to make it seem a more normal relationship, at least in Marcus’s eyes. But the big fellow pulled his hand away and frowned. So I stepped a little closer and we went on walking.
Moments later, we passed Ara—who had been a Smart Girl back at the same Tolmec Hermit’s I’d been at, before all the traveling and disruption, and who had ended up here when Things Settled Down, as the News Pundits say on the Info Dumps that you can go and watch here and there in the streets if you’re really interested. Ara and I rarely spoke, but I always assumed there was a kind of bond between us. He blinked at us—and I supposed I understand what he was thinking: My new friend after all was as different from those of us as you might see around the streets and alleys of our town as a movie star or, really, some soldier, either of which, I suppose, he could have been.
Ara had lived a much more common life than I had, for those who had once been Smart Girls in a hermitage. His own travels had taken him way to the south, and rumor had it to Brazil, which was a million miles away culturally—and he had worked for several years in some non-U.S. space program in some South American Union that still had one (though whether he had been to an actual Other World or Other Moon or not I wasn’t sure) though now he had returned to Settle Down pretty close to where I had.
Someone else walked by, I believe, and looked, and so I just reached over and took the big fellow’s hand, again to make us look more ordinary. And this time he let me hold it, and minutes later we were at the porch of the six-unit dwelling—three on the north side, three on the south: I had the one on the north end. We came in, and he stopped at the door, to look around the circular room where I had most of my stuff, my futon, some pictures that a friend of mine had once drawn, some other things that had been printed that I thought were interesting, some on the door out to the shared latrine in the hall, that hooked up underground to the neighborhood waste disposal system for much of the neighborhood, the only sign for which was the blue band along the bottom of the roll of toilet paper that meant, ‘Don’t throw it in the hole!’ which, I suddenly wondered if my new, nameless (so far) friend was familiar with.
(Apparently he was.)
I asked him a couple of more questions. Didn’t get a couple of more answers. (Of course you have to normalize the dialogue; especially in the beginning, and even more especially if some of it is happening in a different language you don’t even speak. Though I’d learned a few of those words, I’ll leave them out. It’s not just literary universalism, it’s comprehension.) One of the things he said to me when we got inside was: “First, I think you mean ‘means of production,’” and explained what it meant, “and, second, arguing over whether the Earth is round or flat is silly when you’re living in a geographical union where there’s only one sex represented, despite the varieties of genders, for a thousand miles in any direction, and since you were twelve and I was twenty-two neither of us have been allowed to cross a border; some of us are killed by the hundreds every day and others of us are left to die on our own—and the thing I worked so hard for and was in the year before I met you was to escape from one group to the other. It just doesn’t happen to be happening right here, right now. Got it? But what either your or my forebears from three generations ago would recognize as ordinary human reproduction is only occurring in two very small republics under conditions of pain, oppression, and physical and emotional abuse.”
I frowned. “You,” I said, for the first time, “are bat-shit crazy.”
“I,” he said, “am not going to argue. But have you ever seen or heard of a person bearing a child, or getting pregnant, or birthing a child? How would someone here go about finding out if they were in such a condition—or even could be?”
I said, “I don’t know what those terms mean—can you explain them to me?”
He chuckled and shrugged. “Not tonight. But eventually, perhaps you’ll see that because I am probably the only person you’ll ever talk to who thinks differently—and possibly one or two Hermits in their Hermitages—from the majority is the major proof I’m right.”
“Maybe that’s something they made me forget in my coming-of-age forgetfulness process.”
“Now why would they make you forget that?”
“I don’t know. What did they want you to forget?”
“I never had it. It’s very expensive. The vast, vast majority of people in this union don’t. It just removes all sense of personal and social conflict out of the experiences that frighten you out of your preferences for the same sex on the sexual level—which is to say that it assures there are a good number of people like you around who suck good dick and like doing it, and feel it’s normal and they’re evenly distributed throughout the landscape. That’s all.”
“Come on. It’s got to be more than that. It has to produce a major advantage.”
“No, it doesn’t. It shifts a ‘natural’ balance by about three percent, which is enough to restructure an entire society. And nobody ever talks about it.” Then he said: “And the other thing they make you forget is just how few of you there actually were. How few a few thousand are who can only be imitated by others in a landscape of millions…”
And that’s maybe three years of normalized dialogue, between two people and discussions with whole groups, crammed into the account of a single conversation. Not the whole story at all, nor would it be if I added that part of it came during a shouting argument with some others during an icy morning’s breakfast at a conference we were visiting, and another part came with the support of fifty pages transcript read on a secure line in a reader I found in the back of a library when I was browsing in an office while the light through the new windows went from yellow to red in the light outside in the court yard—where there’s just been an execution of twenty prisoners.
Hey—what is important to me about our actual meeting was that the next I knew Cellibrex was at my small electric stove and making, first, an acceptable cup of tea (with a laconic “Glad I don’t miss coffee…” which bewildered me) and then when we sat on the edge of the futon together, sipping it out of the ceramic cups that I kept over the cooking and washing sink by the stove, he came back in from the latrine, brought over a pot I hadn’t washed from the sink, and showed me the white streaks inside it, while I sat cross-legged on the mattress.
�
��Oatmeal?” he asked.
I was surprised. “Um… yes,” I said. “I had it for breakfast. I haven’t cleaned the pot yet.”
“If I stay, maybe tomorrow…?”
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t mind. I’ll make you some, if you’d like. You like oatmeal?”
He stood above me, dangling the pot. With his other hand, he scratched himself. (His belt and groin clout were all in a pile on the futon’s corner.) “You,” he said, “are ridiculously talkative. If you shut up, though, maybe I’ll stay.”
Which surprised me. (And he seemed to think was funny.)
Then he got down on his knees, put his arms around me, and pulled me over and we began once more.
Surprised, I stopped and lifted my head. “Tell me your name.”
He had already started in again. “Why? I don’t know yours, yet. But you suck some good dick.”
And about an hour later, while I was sucking him… well, let me pull a literary curtain over that. I mean it’s not like you have to tell everything you do in bed with everybody. (It’s not like there are any sexually transmitted diseases left that force you to be honest about all that stuff—as I read about once in the library.) At any rate, it caught me off guard, but I went on swallowing. And when he was finished, I came all over his belly. Taking a big breath, I asked, “How’d you know I’d like that?”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 68
