by Dave Smeds
“Do I really have to do this?” Neil asked.
“Humor me,” Matthew said meaningfully. “You have to get out and about sooner or later.”
“I’ve been busy. Architecture’s changed a bit since I last generated a set of blueprints.” Back then, such things were still duplicated on paper and were still sometimes blue.
“Gramps . . .”
Neil sighed. He’d never shared a home with Matthew before these past few weeks. He’d been surprised to learn that his grandson could be just as stubborn as he.
This time, Neil had conceded defeat, if only because the kid was right. Neil had been a hermit, and despite his excuses, all too little of his time had been spent at his interface studying to resume his career. For the most part he simply sat in his room.
Matthew at least had the good grace not to lecture. Dr. Rosen had already done enough of that. All that talk about how the very old — and Neil was about as old as anyone on the planet — didn’t always adapt to the installation of nanodocs. They exhibited “a reluctance to engage in life,” as if those who had fought the war against age were now suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Some had gone as far as suicide.
That was their prerogative, Neil thought. Who said that a person had to act young just because he looked it? Who said a person had to embrace immortality?
“You’ll enjoy it out here,” Matthew said.
“You keep telling me that.”
“Trust me. This part of town did wonders for me just after I had my nanodocs installed.”
They turned a corner, arriving at their destination.
“My god,” Neil whispered.
The area was nothing like he remembered. The dingy gray concrete, blacked-out windows, and peeling paint had become a panoply of clean, bright façades with an abundance of glass, proudly displaying the interiors. Gone were the hawkers and the girls lounging like slung beef on the curbsides, replaced by stylish registration desks, openly displayed lists of services, and comfortable parlors for interviews between clients and artists.
The paint on the remodelled apartment house across the street rolled its molecules, shifting from an off-white to a deep beige that reflected the sun less harshly. The last time Neil had seen that building, its bottom floor had been festooned with handbills warning of aids. Those posters would be collector’s items now that nanodocs rendered any and all venereal diseases a part of the past, along with unintentional pregnancy.
The crowds of prospective clientele, still mostly male, wandered past the establishments like children at an amusement park. Joy soaked the air, a carefree piquancy that slid in with each inhalation, caressing taste buds on its way past the tongue like a fine, dry wine. Neil followed his grandson’s lead like a marionette, with his jaw slack and eyes numbed by some new sight almost every instant. Matthew plunged ahead, clearly gripped by an aphrodisiacal contact high.
Two female artists chatted on the steps of a coffeehouse, taking a break during the lull between the morning rush of patrons and the traditional evening barrage. One of the women noticed Matthew’s attentiveness and turned slightly, providing both men with a view of a cleavage in which a banker could lose small change forever, if banks still used coins.
“Let’s go in here,” Matthew suggested.
Neil resisted the tug on his sleeve. “No. I’d like to look around a bit more.”
Matthew raised an eyebrow and tilted his head toward the buxom artist. “You sure about that, Gramps?”
“Yes. Maybe I’ll drop in later. If not, meet you at seven by the fountain.”
Matthew shrugged. “Okay. See you then.”
Neil wandered. In its new incarnation, the redlight district stretched far past its old confines. One place of business after another washed past him. None held his interest more than a few seconds. He thought he understood why Matthew had chosen to bring him here. Sex certainly was the epitome of “engaging in life.” And he could well believe all the therapeutic effect Matthew had personally derived from visits here. Matthew was seventy-two, and thanks to the vaccine had stopped aging at fifty-four. He’d never been old enough for sex to lose its allure.
Neil drifted by a palatial bordello with a statue of Lily St. Cyr out front, continuing on even though the receptionist, in her elegant woman’s tuxedo, flashed him a wonderful smile. He ignored a tidy hotel with its rooms where, so the marquee claimed, the virtual whores were Custom Programmed by Maestro Roberto Niezca Himself. He even skipped the old-fashioned video arcades, something familiar from episodes of youthful curiosity or loneliness.
Finally he came to a three-story Victorian. “Gallery of Erotica” it read in Romanesque letters above the door. Few people seemed to be entering, and in their expressions passion rode serenely, absent the frantic urgency of most passersby.
Neil pressed the handpad, letting the gallery debit his account. The sibilant noises of the street vanished as the door swung shut behind him.
He meandered down an aisle filled with sculptures of bacchanalian orgies. In an alcove, a female mannequin wore lingerie that mutated at nano-levels through the fashions of many eras, from Colonial-era teddies to the brass inauguration bra made famous by Erotic Artists Guild president Elaine Agoura. Finally he came to a small section devoted to framed centerfolds from mid-20th century cheesecake magazines.
His glance lit on one he thought he recognized. He and Toby Wyckoff had found a cast-off Playboy once in a dumpster. The model had the same intensely black hair as that issue’s Playmate. Her breasts, naturally shapely — as opposed to the silicone balloons featured in later decades — pointed outward at an angle designed to knock teenage boys’ eyeballs out of their sockets. A bedsheet denied the viewer a glimpse of her pubic hair — a forbidden zone for the camera in that day and age.
Neil wiped his palms on his shirt. How easily the memory bubbled up. Had he truly been that adolescent, crouched breathless in an alley behind a dumpster, acknowledging for the first time the undeniable tropism of sexuality?
Yes. He had.
An hour later, emerging from the gallery, he drank in the ambience of the street with senses newly tuned. The redolent musk of sweat and arousal that wafted from open upper-story windows made him heady. A thousand night’s worth of gasps, sighs, and moans seemed to pour out of the walls of every building on the street.
Maybe Matthew had been right to bring him here. It had awakened something. Perhaps it wasn’t so unreasonable to explore the feeling.
But not in this rain of fire. Despite all the changes, one thing about this part of town was the same: here, sex was a commodity. It was for jaded palates, looking for something new, something quick, something uncomplicated.
Neil’s palate was not jaded. He’d been out of the game so long he was like a virgin. He couldn’t start with a business transaction. He’d have to do things his way.
He headed for the fountain to wait for his grandson, treading like a snow leopard across the Himalayas, knowing a mate must be somewhere up there among the alpenglow and mist.
o0o
The party scene was the same backwater it had always been, with the same fish caught in its eddies, lacking the vitality to dare the rapids to the spawning pools. Neil endured it until, at a housewarming for a neighbor of Matthew’s, he met Thea.
Thea was long and statuesque, with a deep ebony complexion that may or may not have been her birth color — did it matter these days? She came up to him as he sat, alone, on the patio retaining wall.
“Hello, you must be Neil,” she said.
Avoiding eye contact, he gestured indoors at the petite blonde Thea had arrived with. “Your spouse seems to be the hit of the night in there.”
“Oh, she’s not my spouse. Just my roommate.”
His cheeks reddened. “Whoops,” he said. She laughed in a way that told him both that she’d taken no offense, and that she thought it hilarious that anyone would characterize her as homosexual.
“What do you . . . um, do?” Neil
asked.
“I’m in household ai sales. Tell me, sir, do you want your door guard program to growl at Jehovah’s Witnesses or to politely tell them to fuck off and leave you alone?”
Neil snorted into his beer.
Thea kept talking. She was easy to listen to. The stiffness leaked from his shoulders and spine. He stopped compulsively running his hands up and down the handle of his mug. Thea filled the dreaded long pauses when he couldn’t think of a thing to say. Yet she listened when he did manage to stutter out a phrase. She laughed at his jokes.
Gradually the conversation became real, more than small talk. Neil managed to get past his tendency at earlier parties to keep it light. Dr. Rosen said that trait was a defense mechanism, a habit leftover from his twilight decades when any friend he made died. Old widowers risked much to try to forge deep relationships. Neil didn’t care about the analysis. He just did what felt right. Heart pounding, he got the words out: “Can I see you again?”
Thea played with one of her tightly kinked curls, like a cat next to a mouse it has trapped, letting the poor thing wonder if it will again set down its paw. “Yes. I would like that,” she said.
o0o
For their first date, they took the Slingshot up to low earth orbit, on a ten-hour tourist package Thea had signed up for on a whim years back. She’d never cancelled the reservations for two, figuring that when the time finally arrived, she’d find someone who wanted to accompany her.
Neil and Thea spent the bulk of the visit strolling along the view decks of the Earthrise Mall, goggling at the starscape. Their favorite moments, though, took place in what Thea labelled “the trampoline chamber,” a sphere eighteen meters in diameter, attached to the space station just so Grounders could fly back and forth to their hearts’ content. They giggled like children, hysterical at the peculiar effect of weightlessness on their faces and figures. By the time they took their berths in the descent vehicle, they were so pleasantly exhausted that they napped for the last half of the glide to sea level.
As they strolled out of the station into a blustery night, Thea threw back her head and hooted enthusiastically, “Oh, I love doing new things, don’t you?”
Her arm drifted into the crook of his elbow. Neil’s wits seemed to vanish into the breeze, knocked out of his brain by the unexpected chill of natural planetary atmosphere. He recognized the cue. The decision, said her body with a theatrical shiver, was his.
She looked so perfect, black flesh framed against a black sky. The warmth of her radiated all the way from his cradled elbow up his arm and down his torso to his crotch. Yes, he told himself, trying to reestablish his ability to breathe. If she were ready, so was he.
o0o
She took Neil into her with velvet-glove softness. She squirmed on top of him, rolling like an otter on the slick, firm surface of his torso. Her breasts tickled the hairs of his chest, pasting them down with her own sweat. Casting off his anxiety, he concentrated on pleasing her.
She was riding him again, much, much later, when his climax arrived. The ejaculation seemed to originate from the tips of his toes and the surface of his scalp, rushing to his penis and into her with flash-flood suddenness and force. As his hips collapsed to the mattress, he thought he would faint.
“Well!” she said, arching back and purring, still straddled across him. “What’ll we do tomorrow?”
He opened his eyes, peering under heavy lids at her beaming, gratified smile. His body still basked in post-orgasmic tremors, but his mind was working again. He replayed her comment from earlier in the evening. “I love doing new things, don’t you?”
The night lost the transcendence that came from banishing thirty-five years of abstinence. In its place rose the shame of having read the signs wrong. Neil choked down his disappointment. He began to count the days until Thea would no longer consider him to be “the new thing.”
o0o
Felice pranced across the tennis court, playing aggressively, forcing Neil to call upon old tricks to hold his own. Though small and fine-boned, she whacked the ball over the net with blistering vigor. The sweat flew from Neil’s hair as he lunged to catch her serve. The upper quarter of his racquet got there just in time, sending the ball arcing lazily to her side.
She caught it before the bounce, slamming it into a far corner of his court, far out of his reach.
“C’mon, Neil,” she yelled. “You can move those hunky thighs faster than that.”
He stuck out his tongue, and on her next serve, fed her the ball straight back to her face — another old trick. Startled, her backhand counterstroke fell apart.
“Barbarian!” she called cheerfully.
Neil grinned, enjoying the steady pounding of his heart, the burn in his legs. But she’d gotten him with the comment about sluggishness. He was trying hard, but whenever he flung himself full-tilt across the court, he recalled the time, at age 74, when a knee had locked up without warning, sending him to the asphalt so hard he broke his nose. He’d given up tennis at that point.
His body was good now. He should trust it.
He hated seeming less than ideal in front of Felice. She seemed like just the person to ease the bruises left by his three-week liaison with Thea. The winter had been long and lonely.
In other areas of his life, he was adjusting. He’d resumed his architectural career. He’d moved out of Matthew’s apartment into a place of his own. Dr. Rosen seemed satisfied with his progress. Yet this new world remained flat without a companion to share it with.
Felice was a miniature tornado. She played with a determination that intimidated blossoms right off the nearby trees. She was easy to admire, and it was likewise easy for him to imagine building on that respect until it included an erotic element.
He was thinking of that, not his stumbling, as their court time expired. They collected their balls and ambled away, surrendering their spots to another couple.
“Good game,” he said. He’d been ahead, but she’d been coming up on him rapidly; if they’d had time to play out the match, she’d probably have won. He told her so.
“I did okay,” she said, shrugging in such a genuinely modest way that he couldn’t help but feel even better about her. The woman had no pretensions; he didn’t have to strut for her. He didn’t have to invent compliments.
“Want to shower together?” Neil asked.
Felice raised her eyebrows. He supposed she was wondering why go to the trouble — their nanodocs could scrub out their pores, dissolve the grit, and freshen them up. But showering together had a definite romance to it, like roasting marshmallows over a campfire under the starlight. He knew he wasn’t the only traditionalist left, or the locker rooms wouldn’t still be there, over at the edge of the courts by the redwood grove.
“Sure,” she replied, as if catching his mood. “Why not?”
The spray did wonderful things to Felice’s body. The rivulets born on her upper chest and shoulders twisted and forked as they negotiated her curves. The fine, almost transparent hairs at the base of her neck caught droplets like dew on strands of spider web in a morning garden. Her nipples rose. She arched her breasts toward him, as if to say, “Here, these need the touch of warm, soapy hands.”
He hesitated. The way her wet hair clung to her skull, and the color of it, reminded him of his own daughter — may she rest in peace — as a toddler.
“How old are you, Felice?” he murmured.
Old enough, her wink told him, but she answered, again without guile, “Thirty.”
He’d been a widower longer than she’d been alive. Christ, she might not even have reset her age yet; he might be seeing her natural youth. He stepped behind her, and used his warm, soapy hands — on her back. He didn’t want to let his body language commit him to a course he didn’t intend.
She leaned into him, rubbing her slick form against his. The spray couldn’t wash away her fresh, feminine aroma. His penis stirred against the curve of her buttocks.
He shifted his hips awa
y abruptly, as he would have done had a child, wriggling in his lap, prompted an inadvertent sexual response.
He needed time. An evening of candlelight and good food would reshape his mood, make him forget the ninety year difference in their ages. Even a few minutes might be enough, but not now, with the water rinsing away the delicacy of his fantasies.
He didn’t have time. The stiffening of her shoulders told him she’d taken offense.
Ah, thought Neil, he’d buried himself now. She’d made an offer, and he had slapped it down. She wouldn’t leave herself open for rejection a second time. If he wanted anything to happen later, he’d have to pursue her with diligence. She’d make him ask, in words, and would give him no encouragement until her ego had recovered.
But he didn’t want to pursue her with that kind of fervor until he was more sure of his feelings for her. Yet to delay would surely cause yet another insult. He didn’t have to be a genius to know that all too soon, Felice would be looking for a new tennis partner.
Slowly, like a senior citizen, Neil rinsed the soap from his hands.
o0o
Daffodils bloomed along the walkways of the cemetery. The heat of late spring had already shriveled natural daffs, but here the yellow King Alfreds and orange-and-tan Saharan Lords stood tall and proud, maintained by their own versions of nanodocs, programmed by the groundskeeper.
Neil followed a route his feet had traveled many times before, until the headstones took on dates-of-birth that sent a burble of acid up his esophagus. 1950. 1955. 1960. 1965. The last generation to die of old age. He could find the names of kindergarten classmates on those marble and granite markers. By the law of averages, his mortal remains should be here, too. But that burst appendix hadn’t claimed him, the lymphoma had been treatable, that drunk driver had swerved at the last moment. Here he was.
An ancient oak tree shaded the particular resting site that he had come to see. Weather had muted the sharpness of the carved letters. He scanned across the name to the impossible date-of-death. How had thirty-two years passed with so little in them?
