Lust

by Geoff Ryman

  How delicious, he thought. I can pay my bills and iron shirts at the same time. I can stay late for one hour and do two hours’ work. Everything will be perfect. My desk will finally be cleared; the flat will finally be clean. At last, I’ll finally get everything done! He felt merry.

  There were all kinds of admin he could feel virtuous about. There was his own personnel file that had been left blank. Let’s get that out of the way. He had to fill in the name of the nearest relative to call in case of accident.

  Once again, it would be his mother, miles away and untelephoned in Sheffield.

  Was there anyone else for whom he was number one? It wasn’t Phil.

  Who loves ya baby?

  ‘All done,’ he heard himself say. Michael looked up at the big, reliable broken face. He felt himself smile with gratitude. ‘So am I,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’d do the same for me,’ said the Angel, and grinned. It was a Michael kind of joke.

  He wouldn’t be able to get a copy of himself past the security guard without telling some pointless story. Hi, this is my identical twin. ‘I’m going to have to let you go,’ Michael said quietly. His voice, he realized, was full of love.

  ‘I understand.’

  The whisper in the air, like a blown kiss. Papers on the desk rattled, lifted up, and sighed back into place, and Michael was left feeling a little lonelier. He packed up his bag, turned out the light, and decided in the corridor just to look at all the beautiful slides.

  The cold room had a big white door and a big chrome handle. It was like a 1950s refrigerator you could walk into. Its surface trembled slightly from the chundering of the generator. It shook like Michael. You are in a bit of a state, mate. The door clunked open, the cold room breathing out refreshingly chill air. The temperature only sank into your bones and numbed your fingers once you were inside.

  He switched on the light and pulled open a drawer, to admire the neat rows, to be grateful.

  Instead there was a crumpled, much reused box, its red ink finger-smeared, cluttered with a cross-hatch of piled slides. A whole week’s work, neglected and growing.

  It was as if someone had reached into him, and grabbed his heart and held it still.

  He pulled open another drawer. It too simply stored an unsorted box.

  All that beautiful work was gone.

  But he had seen it! He’d seen it all being done, it was all just here!

  In a panic he pulled open one icy drawer after another. The tips of his fingers stuck to the metal each time. One drawer was spread with unsorted slides. The next was empty. He pulled open another drawer. And ah! this one was full of ranked and ordered slides. There was a moment’s relief, until he checked the dates. It was the first batch of slides from the learning group. Emilio had finished sorting that last week.

  It was all undone, as if the Angel had never been. Michael clasped his own forehead in his hands. You may have seen it Michael, and you may be going nuts.

  He called his Angel back. ‘Where are your slides?’ Michael whispered.

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well have a look!’

  The copy pulled open the drawer. His face fell. His chin dropped and looked temporarily double. He turned his whole body as if his back was stiff, his chin still resting on his chest.

  ‘Yes. Well,’ the copy whispered. ‘I’m not real, am I?’ He did not manage to smile. He closed the drawer slowly, delicately with the tip of his finger. He stared at the drawer. ‘I can’t change anything.’

  He looked back at Michael, and tried to smile. ‘I can’t write anything. When I go, so will all the marks on the page. I could do all your annual accounts and in the morning, you’d be back where you started. I can’t father a child. I can’t make a difference to anything.’

  The two Michaels stared at each other.

  ‘It really is a very peculiar sensation,’ said the copy and chuckled. ‘I am completely and totally impotent.’ The grin glazed. ‘Can you send me back now, please?’

  Afterwards, Michael went to the security room. The guard, Shafiq, sat there in slate-blue uniform, watching EastEnders.

  ‘Shafiq, do you think we could look at the CCTV tapes, please?’

  Shafiq was eating a Pot Noodle. His mouth stopped circulating for an instant and he froze in place. Then he swallowed and stood up.

  ‘Why, Michael, is something wrong, has there been an intrusion?’

  ‘No, no, no, Shafiq, nothing’s wrong. I just want to check on something.’

  Shafiq was upset. ‘I have been here all the time, Michael. Watching, really.’ The television was still talking, and his eyes listed guiltily towards it. ‘I watch the television, you know, but I always keep one eye on the CCTV, too.’

  ‘I know, Shafiq, you do an excellent job. I just want to check.’

  In a more normal state, Michael would have been stricken with concern: Shafiq was a good man, a good father, who was proud of his work. Shafiq seemed to drop to his knees in prayer and began to open up the banks of secure tapes.

  ‘What rooms do you think suffered? When?’

  ‘About two hours ago. Let’s try my office.’

  ‘Your office.’ Michael could hear the bottom drop out of Shafiq’s stomach. ‘With all your records, and papers!’

  He really does care, thought Michael. Why does he care? What have I given him that he should give a tinker’s?

  Shafiq inserted the cassette and nervously punched rewind.

  ‘But Ebru and everyone were here two hours ago. Michael, they would have heard something too.’

  It wasn’t fair to scare Shafiq like this. But looking at the security tapes would confirm something.

  ‘There it is, sir.’

  Michael’s office. And there was Michael, turned around in his chair and plainly talking to empty air.

  ‘Thank you, Shafiq, you can turn it off now.’

  ‘Don’t you want to wait until you leave the office?’ Shafiq was beginning to look baffled. ‘How would there be an intruder, if you were there all along?’

  ‘It’s not an intruder, OK? Please Shafiq, don’t be too concerned. Do you think you can show me the cold store interior at 5.03?’

  Shafiq was going from baffled to slightly annoyed. ‘What are we looking for, Michael? Perhaps I could suggest something else. The CCTV looks at all the doors and even the ventilation shafts.’

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Shafiq, but please show me.’

  The cold room looked grey and indistinct and empty. It was hard to see; for a moment Michael thought he saw something move, as if through fog. He peered, but was finally sure beyond doubt. There was no one there.

  The security video jumped between frames taken one second apart. Suddenly, the door was half-open. Suddenly it was wide open. Suddenly Michael himself stepped in in stages, lurching like Frankenstein’s monster. He stayed alone and chatting to no one.

  ‘OK, Shafiq. False alarm.’

  Shafiq stood up straight and adjusted his blue shirt. ‘But if there has been anything moved, surely it would be better to study tapes when you weren’t there.’

  Michael closed his eyes, to avoid Shafiq’s face, and his voice was unnaturally quiet and precise. ‘I was mistaken, Shafiq. I don’t want to worry you further. Thank you for helping.’

  He walked out of the room, his back held straight.

  In the corridor he thought, I’m alone. I’m really alone.

  Maybe I am just crazy.

  But even if I’m not, they aren’t real. My Angel said that. They are the universe breaking its own rules. If unreal people walked free to change the world, it would be a catastrophe. And so they come and work and love and when they leave, they leave no evidence or trace behind.

  They can’t sort slides; they can’t be video taped.

  The only evidence, the only scars, will be in my memory. I am the only thing they can change. Otherwise, poor Angels, when they go it is as if they never existed.

  Michael
felt sad for them. Because I know that when they are here, they love and feel and want. When they’re here, they’re alive.

  Michael sat at his desk and looked at the brick wall again, and heard his own voice rage, demanding, ‘Why is the design of this experiment such crap!’

  What is a sample of one going to tell you, God? Why bend all the rules of the universe just to do this terrible thing to me? Is it a joke, God? Does it amuse you to see people knocked sideways, their whole life go rotten like an apple? Do you like to see us hauled beyond our limits? Do you like to see us cry?

  And why do this to an impotent man? What is it going to teach me, what are you going to learn from this except what we both know? I’m lousy in bed. What’s the big deal about that, I live with it, I’ve learned to live with it.

  Michael went back to the cold room. In a rage, sweating in the chill, he tore through the work. The glass edges of the slides cut his fingers.

  It took an hour. When he was done he had a sudden moment of irrational fear that his own work would also disappear. He closed the drawer and opened it again, to check. The work remained.

  So maybe I do just make them up, maybe I make up that other people see and hear them. Maybe I am just nuts.

  Michael arrived back at the flat late, exhausted, chilled and sweaty. He must have looked a state. Phil glanced up at him from what looked like a plate of tomato sauce on cardboard. ‘You didn’t tell me when you would be home,’ Phil said. ‘So I went ahead with dinner.’

  So when did Phil ever call to say when he’d be home? Michael sat down exhausted, shambolic. Today was a bad hair day: his scalp itched and he knew his hair tumbled down in dank, greasy curls. His five o’clock shadow had arrived on time, but now, at 8.30 PM, it was even thicker and coated with cold sweat. Phil wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘That’s OK, I guess,’ said Michael. ‘You probably don’t realize that I’ve been coming home on time lately. You’re never in. It was my effort to be here in case you wanted to go to a movie or anything.’

  Phil’s eyes were shuttered like windows. In the silence, Michael had the opportunity to examine Phil’s newly vegetarian food. There was no table fat on his bread.

  Phil asked in a light voice, ‘Where exactly is your work?’

  It was a question that produced an automatic prickling sensation of suspicion, even fear. Hold on, thought Michael. This is Phil. Then he thought, hold on, this is Phil.

  He stalled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh. It’s just that you’ve never told me, that’s all. It can’t be that long a trip. Waterloo, isn’t it?’

  ‘Waterloo? No! No, no, the Elephant and Castle.’

  Phil shrugged elaborately and his eyes didn’t move from the plate. ‘I thought it was Waterloo.’ His tiny mouth had to stretch to take a bite out of a chunk of bread that was the colour of brown shoes. ‘In an old warehouse or something.’

  Michael began to trace the criss-cross patterns of green on the waterproof tablecloth. I’ve never said in an old warehouse or anything else. Certainly not in the arches underneath an elevated railway.

  ‘Yeah, an old warehouse. Near the Old Kent Road.’

  Phil nodded now, very carefully, very slowly.

  Michael pressed together his thick veined hands.

  My boyfriend is pumping me for my work address so he can give it to animal rights demonstrators. My boyfriend of thirteen years wants to betray me. Henry has such a nice smile, doesn’t he?

  ‘So how is the gorgeous Henry?’ The emphasis on the ‘is’ somehow made it plain that Michael had been reminded of Henry by the previous topic, that there was a connection between them.

  ‘He’s fine, thank you,’ said Phil, coolly.

  He doesn’t even care that I’ve guessed.

  Michael struck back. It was a bit like playing tennis. ‘You know many couples in our situation would be busy reassuring each other that they practised safe sex with their lovers. They’d talk about whether they should be using condoms with each other. But …

  Michael considered letting his voice trail delicately away, but you play tennis to win. ‘But we don’t have to, do we Phil? We don’t make love.’

  It was only then, finally, that Michael realized he needed a new life.

  Can they give me Aids?

  After California, Michael spent the next ten years missing sexual opportunities. As these years were 1976 to 1986, missing opportunities probably saved his life.

  Everyone else was going at it like ferrets, not knowing there was something brand-new in the world. By the time Michael emerged from purdah, he and the world knew things had changed, and were taking precautions.

  But it was already too late for several dear friends. They rolled on all unknowing for many years, all through the eighties into the nineties, though they were, like Shrödinger’s cat, already dead mathematically. They had the virus. Or rather, it had them.

  If you can have sex with anyone in the world, you need to know as a matter of urgency, if they can make you ill. Answering this question presented Michael with several interesting methodological difficulties.

  If he experimented on himself and it made him ill, that would indeed be a result, but it would rather defeat the purpose. On the other hand, experimenting on someone else did raise certain ethical questions.

  It was also methodologically suspect. Michael would first have to ensure that whoever was being tested was HIV negative to begin with. Proving HIV negative status is extremely difficult. Antibodies take three months to show up after infection. That means a second test is necessary three months after the first. During those three months, you have to know absolutely that the person has avoided all risk of exposure to the virus. That means no kissing. If there are any doubts, you have to test again three months after that.

  If the subject was, say, a nun who never had sex with anyone, Michael would first have to find the one Angel in the world who could seduce her, and then persuade her that she needed an HIV test. This scenario seemed unlikely.

  Perhaps his own Angel could sleep with another Angel with Aids. And then be tested twice, once while the infected Angel was still in the world, and again, once he had left it to see if the virus remained behind.

  But that meant the slate would be cleaned whenever the carrying Angel disappeared. And even perhaps when his own experimental Angel dipped in and out of existence.

  Both the infecting Angel and his victim would have to remain in the world for an uninterrupted three months.

  Well, Michael could rent a house somewhere out of the way, Scotland maybe, and have them live there under iron orders to sleep with no one else. It was a little bit like keeping experimental dogs in kennels. There was no doubt that science was easier when you did it to animals.

  But Angels are not people. What if their immune systems worked differently? Suppose Angels could infect people but not each other?

  Michael considered testing with a less serious virus. He could conjure up an Angel with a severe cold, sleep with him, and see if he caught anything. Or call up a copy with diphtheria on his moustache and swab his own lips and grow a culture.

  But HIV was a retrovirus. It copied itself into the RNA of your cells, and took over their reproductive function. It becomes you, and you are real. Suppose over the three months it worked its magic, the virus became so entwined with your non-miraculous body that it gained a real life?

  The more he thought, the more difficult and absurd it all became.

  Then he remembered that one of his many lost opportunities had grown up to be an expert on Aids. Her name was Margaret White, but Michael had known her in school as Bottles. They had been friends during Michael’s brief period of popularity before his last trip to California.

  At sixteen, Michael was just American enough to find it easier to meet strangers and stay sunny and positive about things. He was invited to parties. He was likely to succeed, and grumpy jealous spotty pale blokes grumbled about him behind his back.

  Michael was in
the school theatre club and was big and strong and handsome and could act. There were more girls in drama club than blokes, so they did a production of Anouilh’s Antigone: lots of juicy female roles. Michael played the old, heart-torn tyrant. He moved with a combination of bullish swagger and slight arthritic limp that left the audience astonished. Michael had conjured up the king.

  His sport was long-distance running. The beefiness he inherited from his father was yet to develop; he maintained an easy luxurious swing to the way he moved. He combined beauty with a certain shy sweetness that did not threaten or repel, and his black eyes reminded people of a particularly friendly, lively spaniel. Indeed, he was very good with animals. He worked for the local vet part-time and had decided to become a veterinarian.

  The nicest thing about Michael was that he was no snob.

  Bottles was the unkind nickname given to a big-breasted girl who existed on the social margins. She was tall, big-boned, a little ungainly, with a certain daffy spinning to her eyes. Her classmates whispered about her with a fascinated prurience, because at sixteen, Bottles was living the life of grown woman. She looked 22, had adult boyfriends with cars, and spent weekends in clubs. Rumour was accepted as fact: Bottles did a strip show in the local pub.

  Michael got to know Bottles on a school trip to Windsor Castle, an attempt to steep them in the mystique of royalty. They met over a joke.

  As they got off the train at one of Windsor’s stations, Bottles said to him, cheerily, ‘My goodness, two train stations. Is that so the Queen can get away in case there’s a revolution?’

  It was 1976 and there was little to make any hungry secondary-scholar feel wild, free and funny. Bottle’s top was cut low, and her breasts were squashed together, showing pale skin and a hint of blue veins. She had been sent home recently for the unheard-of thing of piercing her nostril with an earring.