Lust

by Geoff Ryman

Responsibility. We are responsible for them. They are our children too.

  Michael sat on the floor of the darkroom, and held up the chicken to look at it.

  ‘What shall I call you, eh?’ he asked it. The beak was stretched wide open, hungry for everything. ‘I could call you Ali, or Bottles. I could call you Johnny or Mark. Maybe I could even call you Nick.’

  Michael stood up, and gently tipped the chick back onto straw. ‘Learn,’ he told it. And he went and turned on the lights. Light flooded the room. Experiment ruined. No reason to kill them a second time. He left the lights burning, to make the point.

  Michael finished his day’s work well. He was determined that the lives and deaths of the previous batches would not be wasted. They would be wasted if the evidence were not in order, or the results without meaning. He melted through the reports. He saw what the stains meant. The stains went into incredibly convoluted patterns.

  Patterns, he saw, that were already there.

  We are born with our potential.

  Even chicks, their brains extend beyond this world back, forward, wherever it is we come from. Silent as settling snow, experience falls on prepared ground.

  At the close of that day, the world made sense for Michael. He went into the offices and said good night to them, Ebru, Emilio, and they said good night back, as if pleased to have him return.

  He walked back to Waterloo station, his feet crossing in front of each other again, but not from exhaustion, but from a kind of joy.

  When Michael got home there was a mass of pink flesh mewling on the carpet. It looked a bit like an unshelled crayfish only it was the size of an Alsatian.

  Nick leaned against the wall all sweaty, and pale and ill. ‘I nearly did it,’ Nick said. ‘Not quite what the porn market demands right now. But I’ll get better.’

  Michael paused. ‘That was meant to be a copy of me, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Nick’s laugh was a shiver. ‘Serve you bloody right mate, let you know what it’s like.’

  Gently, Michael waved it out of existence.

  Nick’s eyes. They were metallic, like the heads of drills that were somehow pointed inwards. ‘I’ll keep going. I’ll keep going till I do it.’

  Michael sighed. ‘Not while I’m here, you won’t.’

  There was something in the air and in Michael’s head at the same time. Something like a tentacle, or an arm … a member shall we say, and it rose up and tried to touch Michael or rather Michael’s power. Michael grabbed hold of it, felt it twist and turn in the air, and he wrestled it to the ground, and pushed it back and down. Nick even, involuntarily, made a swallowing sound.

  Nick was covered in sweat. ‘I’ll go cook dinner,’ he said. He stumbled into the kitchen. He cut up an onion. He started to sing ‘Zippity do dah!’ He left the knife on the counter top. The onions sizzled. Michael sat down and took off his shoes. He had a corn on his right toe and it was twitching. ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ he said, out of habit. He went to the kitchen counter. ‘Can I do anything?’ he asked. Nick turned and drove the knife into Michael’s heart.

  Michael didn’t feel anything, except a kind of inconvenience in the chest. Breathing had become choked and unnecessarily difficult. The knife was lodged deeply, and blood was pouring down his shirt into his trousers. It’ll be hell to clean up, Michael thought.

  ‘So,’ said Nick. ‘I guess you won’t be here then.’

  There was very little time left, no time to be afraid. Everything closed around Michael in a rush. The floor felt like a bed, cushioned and soft, and there was a reassuring sound like rain on a roof, a sizzle like onions, the hiss of white noise on a stereo.

  Michael floated as if in a warm bath somewhere up towards a corner of the kitchen. Nick and Michael, their little drama, seemed further and further away. He saw Nick lean over Michael. He saw the fat glisten on the wooden spoon. He saw the eyes go still and dry. Nick knelt next to Michael, almost as if he were going to help. The emotions Michael felt were the same. Poor boy, he felt for them both.

  Dying was delicious, like lying in late, like being on the beach at twelve years old, when you wanted nothing more than to be. It was as if all work had ceased, and everything been done to perfection.

  Death was like deciding, just this once, not to take out the garbage or not to do the ironing. It was like all the times when need is not strong enough to make you move. Death was like fulfilment: desire was no more.

  There really was no longer any need to look at anything. So Michael ceased to see.

  Vision was blotted out by direction. Michael felt a tug and looked inward. All he could see was a tunnel of light.

  Yes, it was the optic nerve closing down. That was evident to Michael as soon as he saw it. It looked like a scan for glaucoma, when light is flashed deeper and deeper into the eye, shifting from yellow to red as it penetrates.

  You had to understand, as Michael did, what the optic nerve was. It was a flow of time. Light triggers electrochemical pulses, which flow along the nerve in the current of time, deep into the head. It is broken apart like a sentence into a thousand grammatical parts. These are sent to a thousand different parts of the brain.

  Now I am the light, Michael realized.

  And he travelled, in time in one direction only, up the nerve, into the self.

  Michael was read, like grammar.

  Every cell in his brain that had ever been fired was fired at once. And he felt the whole lifted up, like a giant tangle of Christmas tree lights, lifted up as one final shape.

  And it moved outside of time, to where time was not, and nothing more could happen. It preceded Michael, entered eternity, and froze. Its final frozen shape, spangled with light, seemed to be like a giant illuminated flower, in reds and yellows, sparkling with dew.

  And Michael dying, still barely in time, was able to survey it. He was without location, without volume. He was a centre of gravity contemplating his life, able to think of something new one last time. Able to call for salvation, able to regret, able to feel joy.

  In that eternal life there was Michael flinging snow in the High Sierras, there he was toting his bag to school, there he was in the Rialto cinema, Oceanside watching The Sting. There was Michael on a small funfair ride with his Dad at La Jolla. He had forgotten that.

  There was little Michael taking a bath in a washing-up bowl, and his mother blowing bubbles at him. There was Michael, in his bedroom at night memorizing lists of endocrines. There he was pumping weights, there he was in Thailand, there he was bicycling in France with Mark sipping calva outside a bar tabac. There he was, making love to a 24-year-old from Brooklyn whom he had forgotten. There he was, staring down a microscope into the stained patterns of a chicken’s brain. There he was on the platform at Waterloo station, cursing himself, cursing life.

  And there were the dreams. They were real to the self. There were dinners of dogs’ heads in his mother’s kitchen. There were missed trains that turned into scarves trapped in car doorways. Michael’s mind, saying to itself while consciousness slept: wake up Michael, you’re forgetting something. Wake up Michael, you’re walking the wrong way. Michael, look at me, I am here.

  Michael saw something under the petals of light.

  It snagged them, held them, twisted them, shook them.

  It was dark, like a shadow, and it still lived, and it heaved and it dragged.

  Michael saw all the parts of his brain that had never been fired.

  They had been there before he was born. They were waiting for his birth, to become real. He had lived a life and never used them.

  They were the wastes. They howled, these wastes. They were enraged. They shook the flower of light, wanting to be born as light.

  The wastes were desire. And desire did not want to die.

  There in that desert, Michael was not.

  There was Michael not loving Mark.

  There was Michael not travelling to India or China. There he was not, not riding a Jeep over the mountain terraces
of Yemen. There he was not, failing to hold his own children. There he was not, bringing meals to his sick, dying brothers. There he was not, omitting to call his Mum. There he was not, never an actor on a stage. There was Michael without the brothers and sisters he never had. There was Michael not with his father for the last ten years of his life. There they were not hiking the length of the John Muir Trail. There was the Michael who had not known his father as a little boy. There was the Michael who had never known true love.

  And above all, there was Michael, who had not slept with his father.

  Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad …

  Hello Mikey, a voice seemed to say. Hello my beautiful boy.

  Dad, Dad-dy …

  I picked you up when you were born, all wet, and I held you up to the light and I said Please Jesus, let this one live, let him be all he can be.

  Michael wanted to be held and to hold in return. It was too late for that.

  And I left you.

  We carry our dead around with us as patterns we have learned. Love injects them into us. Semen is only the faintest physical mirroring of it. The patterns are as alive as we are.

  The voice of Michael’s living father told him, You don’t want to die, Mikey. Nothing happens after you die.

  The shadow wastes howled forever mourning. That howling would sear like sand blown in wind. It would burn like fire. And it would never cease. Desire was immortal and continued after death. And that was hell.

  Heaven was what had been achieved.

  You can’t make up for things. You can’t make anything right. Nothing can happen.

  This, thought Michael, is the wrong time for me to die.

  He saw his desire formless and aching and true to itself. He saw it trying to twist the flower even in death.

  Desire tried to twist the nothingness. Like gravity it tried to wrench being from nothing. Desire reached out in rage and thrashed and seized and shook.

  It was as if the shadow cast the light and not the other way around. The darkness was the spider that spun the cobweb on which the dewdrops hung.

  Michael had always had a talent.

  He could absorb people into his bones out of love, and could make his bones and mind move like they did.

  If he were thwarted enough, he could wrench the molecules of the air and make them move and leap and think.

  Michael knew, then. He had made the Angels himself of headaches and grief and rage.

  Desire made Michael want to live. Right, thought Michael, and desire blossomed in him like a dark flower blooming out of his heart.

  Right, he said, prising open reality, forcing it like an arsehole to accept him, the wrong way through the valve.

  Right, and Michael tore reality.

  He saw.

  Nick was propping open one of Michael’s eyelids. Nick contemplated this stare, quizzically, as if it were a painting of his own that he was judging. Poor Angel, thought Michael.

  Michael saw again what he had seen the night before: the potential in the translucent skin. Again, it was the waste that Michael saw. It’s what a parent sees and aches for and forgives. And punishes.

  Out of love, Michael called up his living father.

  His avenging father wore mirror shades and his Marine uniform and stood six foot four. He put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. Nick spun around and gaped in terror. Michael’s father hauled him to his feet and held him and bore him off.

  Michael sent Nick back up the nerve into eternity to Nick’s own unilluminated self. The air closed shut over them all.

  Did we learn anything?

  Michael woke up in crisp white sheets. He smelled them first, and then opened his eyes, and saw pale blue walls. Ebru was sitting on a small hard chair, legs crossed, reading a magazine.

  Michael wanted to ask her the time. He couldn’t talk. Something harsh and foreign was stuck into his nose and down his gullet and it was long and slithering, and he thought it was some kind of worm. He cried aloud and tried to hoist it out of him.

  Ebru’s head snapped up. Inshallah, she murmured and launched herself beside him, grabbing his wrists. ‘No, Michael, no. It’s OK, Michael.’

  ‘Awwww!’ was all he could say. His throat was unbelievably parched. He could feel these things reaching all the way down into his belly. My God, what were they?

  ‘Sssh. Rest, Michael. You have been sick. You are in hospital. Sssh.’

  He calmed down, panting. He ached in all his joints, and his feet felt huge and his knuckles looked swollen – swollen and gnarled at the same time.

  ‘Do not try to talk, Michael. OK? OK Michael, you just nod your head, OK. I am going now just to get the doctor. Leave those things, OK.’ She ran out of the room and her sneakers on the linoleum made noises like mice.

  Michael looked around. Hills and valleys of sheets rippled over him. There was a drip feed into one of his arms. The skin on his hands had gone scaly, and his wrists and forearms were the same width. There was tape, like a very thick moustache, on his upper lip.

  He tried to think, but it was as though his brain was elsewhere, huge and fiery and unwilling to cram itself back into his tiny skull. It waited, half-unsure that it wanted to be there.

  Nick tried to kill me. That’s why I’m here. In sudden alarm, his hands skittered down the hospital cloak, to his chest. There were no bolts and stitches, no swollen tissue. The knife wounds were gone.

  The door thumped. Ebru stood in the doorway holding it open as if remembering her manners, her eyes round with something like fear. A male nurse bustled in around her. He was small, neat, pale, friendly, cold. He reminded Michael of Nick.

  ‘All right, Mr Blasco, let’s have a look at you.’

  ‘What day is it?’ Michael sounded like Donald Duck.

  The nurse chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t try to talk if I were you.’

  Ebru still clung to the lintel of the door. ‘It’s Thursday, Michael.’

  He’d been out of it for several days.

  The nurse leaned over and propped open one of Michael’s eyes and shone a light into it. ‘Do you feel dizzy or weak?’

  Michael nodded his head.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  Neither am I. I came back from the dead.

  ‘You’re not that bad, considering. If you’re awake, we can probably get rid of the tubes. Hold still, this is going to give you a free shave.’ The male nurse grinned as if he’d said something funny.

  As it was torn off his upper lip, the tape sounded as if the nurse were ripping up Michael’s best shirts. It did hurt, uprooting stubble.

  ‘Are you ready? These are coming out now.’

  With a certain degree of professional skill, the nurse began to haul at the tubes as if pulling a barge. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It was just horrible having something slither up through the hiatus valve, then up his gorge. Michael began to retch. The tubes heaved their way through his nasal membranes, burning with stomach acid and smelling of vomit. Michael coughed and expelled the tubes at the nurse, with fluids.

  The male nurse smiled and sneered at the same time. ‘Right,’ he said, wrapping up the tubes and placing them in a bag. ‘We can feed you properly now. Which is more than you were doing for yourself.’

  He began to haul off surgical gloves, like a trick anxious to get home whipping off a condom. ‘You’ve been a silly boy, haven’t you? You’d have left us, if your colleague here hadn’t come to find out where you were. So, they’re going to send you to some counselling. Find out what that’s all about. Otherwise, you’ll be fit as a fiddle in no time.’

  ‘You sound,’ croaked Michael, ‘as if you think I don’t deserve to be.’

  The male nurse didn’t respond. He polished off the task of throwing out the gloves as well. He sealed the bag in silence. ‘Dr O’Connor will be here soon,’ he said to Ebru. Then he was gone.

  Ebru stared at him for a few moments. ‘Michael,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Michael, what happened?’

  Michael wasn’t sure.
‘What do they say is wrong?’

  ‘They say you must have had nothing to eat for weeks.’ Her hands twisted. ‘They think it is an eating disorder.’

  Aw. Michael understood. Nick had done all the cooking. All those takeaways, curries and stews; they were all undone. All those neatly packed lunches. They now no longer existed. Angels cannot really even care for people.

  ‘I’ll show you what happened,’ said Michael.

  And he called Nick back.

  The air did a belly dance and unveiled, and Nick came back.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said. And then. ‘Ooooh shit!’

  Ebru gave a faint little cry.

  Michael told her. ‘Keep well back from him, he is dangerous.’

  Nick froze, looking watchful.

  ‘I’m going to let you live, Nick.’

  Ebru was at some kind of end. ‘Michael, what is this?’

  Michael kept talking to Nick. ‘I’m doing this for my sake, because I do not kill. Also, I wanted my colleague here to know that I am not crazy.’

  ‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ said Nick.

  ‘Oh no you haven’t. It will take a lot longer than that for you to think your way through it.’

  Ebru was still hiding her heart under her hand. ‘Michael, where did he come from?’

  Nick answered her. ‘From eternity, love. I’m an Angel. Michael makes what he calls Angels. He thinks he’s God.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  The blue eyes were fixed upon him. ‘You’re God to me. Shall I tell you what’s going to happen to you, Michael? You’re going to have the same life that God had.’ Nick gave a narrow amused little smile. ‘And God has had a terrible life.’ He sniffed. ‘He keeps trying to do good.’

  ‘I’m going to put you where you can do no harm. You know how they seal radioactive material away? They drop it into salt caverns a mile deep and the salt migrates and closes, so nothing can get out. I’m going to put you into one of those caverns, Nick. And I’ll give you companions. You can make a kind of porn with them, if that’s all you think they’re good for. They can be your little demons.’

  Nick was sourly resigned. ‘I always said. Prison went with the territory.’