by Geoff Ryman
The liquid looks of love, the hugs, the sudden rufflings of his hair, the kisses sometimes even on the mouth, thrilled Michael, and warmed his heart, and made him dream, and convinced him that they were, in everything but consummation, lovers.
Michael did not imagine, even in his daydreams, that they would proceed immediately to sex. Sex would emerge almost as an afterthought, almost as a by-product of complete intimacy. They would share meals, share showers, share food, share beds, and at some quiet moment, foreheads touching, they would proceed to make love.
Michael dreamed of the moment that his father would finally say something. He imagined it in some detail. His father would begin quietly, shy. It would be no easy thing for a Marine to admit that he – and he would look down, smiling – that he loved Michael. He knew such a thing was a bit unusual but he had seen something in Michael’s eyes, something that at first he wanted not to see.
Michael was romancing.
He began to be sure, from his father’s eyes. He was sure from the totally comfortable way that he would sometimes break into terrible campfire songs that he loved him too. His father was too shy to say so. His father had always been so masculine; so conventional. It would be hard for anyone to accept, let alone a conservative man whose utterly traditional American values were underpinned with an equally unforgiving Catholicism.
The thought came: you have to help him, Michael. You can’t leave him in doubt. It’ll be easier for you, Michael: you’re from the younger generation. And then it will be in the open. And then it will happen.
Michael began to rehearse how he would do it. He would sit and start a serious, adult conversation. Dad, he would say, let’s be honest about this … what’s happening. Let’s just say it. Dad, you and I well … we are …
Every time, imagination faltered. Every time the words, the magically correct words, would not formulate themselves. The right words were like the Loch Ness monster, expected, believed in, but swimming in the depths.
Michael convinced himself that it was his duty to make the situation clear.
And all the while love grew stronger. Michael would deliberately make his bed with his father’s old sheets. Night after night, he would breathe him in. Michael would take his father’s underwear, his swimsuits, anything personal and touched by him. He would take the swimsuit to bed with him and press it up against his face. Or he would wear his father’s underpants, to feel his genitals cradled where his father’s had been cradled. He would wear them secretly all through the day, as he drove to UCSD library to see what a university science course really expected you to know. It was as if he could feel himself cupped by his father, held.
By the end of those two months, everything about his father, from his name to his eyes, to his hands and feet, to the spreckles of his urine on the toilet seat, to his dirty knives and forks, to his hairs in the hair brush, to old photographs of him when he was Michael’s age, to his letterman’s jacket, to his tight jeans, to his loose shorts, to his white running socks, to the warmth he left behind him on the sofa, to his footprints in the sand and the imprint of sand on the bum of his wet swimming shorts, to the sand that fell from his feet when he dried them on the landing of the condo – everything about him made Michael feel loose and shivery, could moisten the tip of his penis.
It became, simply, an overwhelming, instinctual imperative. Michael needed his father to penetrate him, to leave his seed.
Every time his father laughed, every time he lightly touched Michael, every time he wrestled with him out of sheer high spirits and physical boisterousness, intertwining arms and necks and legs, Michael became more convinced.
His father wanted it too.
Why couldn’t either of them say anything?
You’re old, Dad; you come from a religious background. You’re a big bad Marine, Dad. All of that makes it hard for you. I’ll make it easy.
The words fail because they just say it, and that makes it sound weird and strange and it’s not. It’s just love. So why use words?
All I need to do is come to you, Dad. All I need to do is lie next to you and kiss you, and we will be together.
Michael, why are you such a coward? Michael, you know it’s up to you. You can’t just lie here night after night, dreaming of him, hearing him in the next room, seeing him day in day out, seeing him naked, seeing the way he looks at you. Michael you must, Michael you have to. Just do it, Michael. Just be honest.
So finally, a week before he was due to go back home, on 7 September 1976 at 2.00 AM, having lain awake for four hours, Michael finally said to himself, That’s it. I can’t stand this. This has to end. It has to end now. He kicked off the covers.
Do it, Michael.
He stood up.
I’m actually doing this.
He felt the cold, cup-shaped American doorknob.
I’m going to touch you there. I’ll know what it’s like.
Michael listened as the door clicked open.
I’ll finally, finally know what a cock is like in my mouth. I’ll finally know what your cock is like. I don’t want it from anyone other than you.
Can you hear me, Dad; can you hear my feet on the carpet? Have you lain awake all night, thinking of me? Are you sitting up with a start, thinking, is that Mike? You’ll say, naw, he’s just going to the john. He doesn’t even know what’s going on. Mike’s innocent.
Well, I’m not innocent, Dad. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing it for both of us. We don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need to tell anyone what we’ve done. We can live together, father and son. You’ll know when I touch you. You’ll know when we kiss. I’ve just got to do this. I’ll bust wide open if I don’t.
The door hangs open. I can smell you. I can hear you breathe.
I stand over you. How do I do this? You look so sealed in the sheet, all wrapped around, how do I peel it? Do I just land next to you? Will my weight hurt you? I’m not so little now, as I used to be. Do I just lie down on the edge of the bed and kiss you?
Dad, help me, I don’t know what to do.
Maybe you’ll just keep on sleeping. Maybe you’ll never know. Maybe I’ll just touch you, hold you and you won’t notice. You’ll think it was just a dream, something not real, something that happened another time, another place.
No harm done.
So Michael sits down on the floor and feels the rough fur of the carpet on his bare ass, and he reaches in under the sheet, and goes up the cool soft thigh and feels the tip of his father’s big-headed penis and takes it firmly in his grasp.
Everything is still for a minute. Then Michael moves his hand around it, over it, to feel its sleeping shape. At last, I’m touching you; I’m holding it. It feels just like I always imagined, big and small, swollen and soft. Sweet. It feels sweet. It feels like it is meant for expressing love.
Suddenly, his father’s eyes snap open and glare into his.
There is no confusion, no awakening befuddlement. His father’s eyes are hawk-like, angry, watchful, and they stare into Michael’s face. It is as if they are made of ice, at sea, and glow faintly in the dark.
‘Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you doing?’
And his father scuttles back from him.
Sergeant Blasco crowds himself against the back of the bed. ‘What are you doing, Michael?’
He lunges sideways, fumbles with the neck of the lamp, and switches it on. Michael sees the eyes again, and thinks, oh fuck, oh no. Something seems to be sucking his stomach out through his ass.
Michael knows instantly, with horrible, shrivelling certainty, what the situation is. He was wrong, he had been wrong about it all. But his mouth, and another part of his brain, carry on, try to make the situation change, by a miracle, by sympathetic magic.
‘I was trying to make it easy for you.’ Michael feels skinny, like a concentration-camp victim, naked with ribs showing through, and he is nervously biting both the tip of his index finger and thumb.
‘Trying to make what easy for me, Mic
hael?’ His father has pulled up a sheet over his loins. He jerks it higher, to cover his tits.
Michael starts to blub, he can’t say it because to say it, and see the reaction would be the final end of the dream.
‘You were stroking my dick, Michael!’
His father has gone relentless, professional. He is trained to seek out problems and hound them. ‘Make what easy for me, Michael?’
Michael blubs it out now, as a confession, an admission of error with no hope of making anything right. ‘To make love.’
His father thinks he hasn’t heard right. ‘To make love? Is that what you said? Is that what you said to me, Michael?’
Michael nods, knowing his whole face has gone as bleary as semen, all tears and spit.
‘Jesus Christ.’ His father digs his fingers into his hair, and his hair stays upright. ‘What, you wanted to fuck me?’
It wasn’t like that; it didn’t feel like that. It was love. ‘No,’ Michael whines in an utterly bereft voice.
‘Suck my dick, or what?’
Michael can only make a noise. All Michael can do is haul in enough air and force it through the glue to say, ‘I love you.’
His father strides forward on the bed, towering over Michael, big enough to snap him in half, his bare shoulders still beautiful. ‘You’re a faggot. You’re a fucking little faggot and you touched me. You touched me.’
His father is now striking at Michael’s chest with just the tips of his fingers like a goose attacking with its beak. ‘You touched me, you fucking little fruit. Your own father!’
And his father pushes him to the floor. Michael hits his head on the edge of the open doorway. His legs lift up and his smooth bottom and smoochy little anus are visible, and this drives his father crazy, as if his son were doing this deliberately to lure him.
‘Get out of here, get out of my room, you fucking faggot! You fucking fairy!’
His father starts to kick him, in the butt, on the back of his legs.
Michael can’t talk. ‘Dad. Stop,’ he tries to say, but it comes out as a bubble of something. He rolls over onto all fours and tries to crawl.
That sticks his bare hairless ass in the air, like a porno photo of a dame in a fuck magazine.
‘Just get the fuck away from me.’ His father doesn’t exactly kick him, more like pushes him with his foot. Michael falls forward and friction-burns his elbow on the rug.
‘Go on, get out!’
Michael scurries forward on all fours. He manages to run mostly on his feet, except for the odd, steadying fist on the carpet. He scuttles into his room and closes the door. He waits, fearfully.
Michael begins fully to understand what has happened. The dream has collapsed. He won’t be studying at UCSD. He will never live in any house in San Diego or Carlsbad, at least with Dad. There won’t be a garden. There won’t be skiing in Aspen or a walk along the John Muir Trail. He won’t become an American citizen. He will never be Michael Louis Oliveira Blasco. He’ll go back to England. Will he ever see his father again? Maybe yes, after many years, after all this wears away.
Michael tries to think of something sensible to do. He does realize that his nakedness infuriates his father. He starts to dress. In the condo hallway, there is blood on the white carpet. That will stain, he thinks dully. He pulls on underwear, jeans, T-shirt, gets a towel from the bathroom and drenches it under the tap.
He kneels and starts scrubbing the carpet. At first the stain reminds him of the skids on his own elbows. But as he scrubs, the stain spreads, and the thought comes, it will never come out, never, never. And then it looks just like what has happened, a terrible bloodied wound that will mean the carpet is never the same.
‘Never, never, never,’ he says and he scrubs and then he breaks down. His hands go too weak to hold the towel. They rise up helplessly and waver like the necks of swans in a mating dance, and he sobs and chokes.
And his father walks out of the bedroom. His father has dressed now, and he looks at Michael with hatred and disgust.
‘Don’t look at me like that!’ Michael wails.
His father has come to do something else. He walks into Michael’s room. Michael trails after him.
‘What is this?’ His father holds up a book of Alice in Wonderland, and throws it down.
‘What’s this? Batman. A guy in leotards. What have you brought in my house? Huh? You fucking fruit! Were you looking at me? Were you looking at me in the showers? Huh. Huh? Were you looking at my men? Did you come every day into the changing room just to watch the men?’
It’s going to start again, his father’s hand jabbing into him.
‘I did it to be with you.’
His father stops. There is almost sympathy in his face. Now the anger has somewhere to go. His gaze lights on the records.
‘What is this? Huh? Fuckin’ Cinderella. You’re the fucking Cinderella. Fucking Cinderella.’ And Dad works the album back and forth, cardboard crinkling until the album snaps.
‘Dad, don’t,’ says Michael, but what he means is don’t be this angry, don’t break us.
‘What’s this? And this? All this faggot stuff.’ He starts flinging books and records to the ground.
‘Dad, stop.’ Dad has hold of a book and he is tearing its binding down the middle and he’s throwing the pages at Michael. He suddenly wipes all the books off the shelf, and he throws the stereo at the wall and it cracks with the sound of plastic breaking. He shoves the TV to the floor. Miraculously, only some knobs are broken off.
‘You get all this stuff out of my house! I don’t care where. It just goes!’
His father storms out of the room.
Michael goes quiet. Well, Michael. This is what it is. He didn’t love you that way and now he doesn’t love you at all.
He knows what you are, that’s why. He never would have loved you, the second he found out that you’re gay. It never would have been any kind of love as soon as he knew who you were.
How … could … you … be … so … dumb?
Michael starts to slap himself. He slaps himself really hard, to wake himself up.
‘You stupid fucking little idiot!’ Michael growls at himself, and cuffs his ears and temples, and keeps his fist rolled and punches himself in the face.
There was only a week to go. If he’d left it a week, he would have got onto the aeroplane, gotten over whatever held him. He could have come back at eighteen without Dad ever knowing.
Michael stands in the middle of the room and looks at the bare light bulb, and feels the heaviness again. His fingers feel like fishing weights. They feel like they could pull the line all the way out of his reel. It’s late, he has no energy, no tears. He might as well finish clearing up.
Michael picks up the broken record. You can buy another. He puts the books back on the shelf, moving as if in a slow-motion study. The book torn in half is a veterinary textbook, one he was reading for UCSD. He might as well leave it torn, leave it here. He won’t have any use for it now – he won’t be studying at UCSD. The stereo is fucked, but what does that matter? He only uses it when he’s here, and he may never come back again. He turns the TV on and it’s a late-night Italian Western, claustrophobic voices in studios mismatching lips. He goes back to scrubbing the hall carpet, listlessly, mechanically, continually and to some effect.
Michael begins to be aware of a shower running. There is a noise coming from it, as if there is something terribly wrong with the plumbing. He thinks he’d better see what’s wrong. Then he thinks, If I go to the shower and he’s naked he’ll think I’ve come for him again. The towel has turned pink. Michael needs to rinse it. He goes to the kitchen instead, rinses the towel and comes back and recognizes the sound. It’s someone crying.
‘Dad. Dad, is something wrong? Dad?’
The door creaks when it opens like in a horror movie. The shower is running and something dark is on the floor behind the frosted glass, and there is a shredding sound.
‘Dad, Dad are you OK? Dad, ju
st say something.’
Michael opens the door and his father is slumped on the floor of the shower and he’s fully dressed with water running and he has been eating towels. Big, plush, California towels. The threads of them lie wound all over his black slacks. They coat his mouth and make him look a bit like the Cookie Monster. His accusing eyes look up at him.
‘Dad, get up.’
His father grunts and tries to and can’t quite get his legs to unfold, and Michael becomes seriously worried, but he can’t think of any way of helping that does not involve touching his father. His father’s dark eyes warn him: do not touch me. Michael backs away hands raised as if to shield himself, mime helplessness, display his innocence.
Outside the bathroom door, Michael starts to pace. He paces the hallway, and tries to collect his thoughts and can’t. They scatter away from him like pearls from a broken necklace rolling away down an escalator. He can’t think of anything to do.
He decides to pack. He will have to leave. In the bedroom he takes his shirts out of the closet. He can’t remember how to fold shirts so they stay flat. He remembers how his father and he worked together doing the laundry, just that morning, washing, sorting, ironing. ‘Hey Mike, I never did this as well by myself. When you move in, we’ll have the cleanest laundry ever.’
I guess we won’t now, Dad.
I really should go to bed. Michael has just about convinced himself that that is all he can do, since he can’t find his socks or his favourite pair of running shoes.
Then abruptly, determined, business-like, his father enters the bedroom. He’s changed into dry clothes, a form-fitting T-shirt and slacks. He’s still barefoot. He’s breathing heavily, through his nose. His lips are pressed shut.
‘What time is it in England? What’s the number?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Whot do you mean?’ His father is doing a hate-filled imitation of an English accent. ‘I’m going to ring your mother and let her know what a terrific job she did raising you.’
