Lust

by Geoff Ryman

  ‘After, Mum, after.’ He sang along with the carol in a false and booming voice.

  His mum sniffed. ‘Roll over Pavarotti and tell Demis Roussos the news.’ She held up food on thick white plates. ‘You sit there. Go on, these plates are hot.’

  ‘May the Lord make us truly thankful,’ Michael said, finishing Grace before he had begun it. He tucked in.

  After breakfast, looking in the bathroom mirror, Michael was satisfied. Dammit, I am good-looking. I really am. I look my age, that’s all. It was as his Mum had said: intelligent, hardworking, kind. But also, he had to admit, kinda chewy, kinda chunky. Michael, just believe it. You’re sexy, OK?

  He looked back at his own flushed, still olive face, with its stubble and expression of slightly dazed delight. You’re in the best place. You’re in the best me.

  They opened their presents. Mum’s was a hand-written note. This is a new PC and Internet connection, it promised. She gave him new shirts and tie clips. ‘Every time I see you, your tie’s blown back over your shoulder,’ Mum said.

  They sipped sherry and ate Christmas cake, and about noon her friends called, all ladies of her age, all interested enough in Michael. He felt chipper. ‘My last project’s finished more or less,’ he told them. ‘I’ll think of something else to do.’

  On Boxing Day they went to PC World and he got a deal so good he was jealous of his mum: laptop, printer, Microsoft Office and five other bits of software including an encyclopaedia for eight hundred pounds. He took AOL because of its supposedly simpler operation, found its browser didn’t let you increase the typesize easily and spent the day with his mother who tutted and felt stupid because she didn’t get it. It was late at night when finally she sent an e-mail to his home address. ‘And how do I send you an answer again? And how do I find it when I want it?’

  He left the next day, a simple hug and a kiss.

  She said, patting his shoulder, ‘If you do move again, you know, change countries or the like, try to remember to let me know.’

  ‘I will Mum, I promise.’

  And not long afterwards, Michael found himself settled in on the train. The weather was changeable, turning between sun and rain. Outside the windows, the sky seemed lower and the world got smaller, lost in drizzle. It was a grey and indistinct world. Maybe that’s why he felt fear and misgiving close in over him. He thought of the dirty Camden flat awaiting him, cold and dark. He thought of his project.

  What, really, do I do next? The thought of going back to teaching filled him with dismay. It’s just daily life, Michael; it’s like that for everybody. He would finish revising the article, and it would end like this: chicks don’t make new pathways to see and interpret light. They are born with them.

  And what did that mean?

  Michael remembered the flower. It was moving and unmoving at the same time, like a bridge half built while its CADCAM model was whole and alive. That was him, that beautiful powerful thing. That was us all. Where was it?

  It would be where there was no time. And where would that be?

  Mathematics said there were eleven dimensions in all. Four of them existed only in time. The three dimensions of space were created by the big bang. They were expanding outwards. That expansion was simply time, flowing in one direction only: towards the future.

  But.

  That would mean there were seven dimensions outside time. They would be just as small as they were before the big bang. They would be a point. No height, width or depth. They would be like the smallest dot made by the sharpest pencil. But that dot would be everywhere. It would be at the core of everything around you. It would be in the core of you. You live there, but don’t know it. Everything in your life flows in one direction only, into it.

  A word came to him: neurophysics. The extension of the self into the universe.

  He knew something was there. He had once stood in its presence or rather, had not stood. He had thought there, like someone hovering on the outside of a black hole, just escaping before being sucked into its powerful maw.

  How would you research something like that? Was anyone else doing any work in it? Michael began to get restive. His hands, still in gloves, moved to assuage a sudden urge for movement in his gut. He wanted to get up and find out. He wanted a library, a bibliography, and a database to search.

  How would anyone research something like that? Well, how do they do black holes? They do thought experiments, they work through the logic of the mathematical descriptions, and they model the maths on something else. It’s mathematical metaphor, really. Like Einstein, proving atoms exist in a paper on molecules in tea. He just used the same maths that would describe ping-pong balls.

  I said it was like standing on the edge of a black hole.

  Heaven collapses into a point, where gravity can no longer work, because there is no space, and time cannot work because there is no expansion. Our eternal lives happen in something like a black hole. Mind you, only like a black hole.

  Why not use the same mathematics to describe it and see what happens?

  Michael went even more physically restive. He did a little jump in place. Does neurophysics exist? Did I just make that up, or did I read it somewhere? And if I did make it up, I could really be on to something, I mean I could, I could do that, I could take all that mathematical work, and just see what happens. And I wouldn’t have to cut up any chickens to do it. I could just go ahead and do it, and if I was wrong, then that’s great too, a negative result is still a result, we’ve still learned something.

  Suddenly the train was too small and too slow. All he had to read was a John Grisham novel, and he wanted to throw it out of the train, or chuck it into the steam furnace like the boat in Around the World in Eighty Days. They burned everything on it for fuel. Get me home, get me to my computer, now!

  And don’t tell me it’s not empirical. I’ve been there, buddy, I died to get there, and I saw it, and I’ll know it when I see it again, described in numbers.

  Michael settled back in his chair and slapped his own thigh. Outside, light rain was falling, like stars on grey farm outbuildings with tin roofs, pulled down by gravity, gravity which he had read in one paper could be described mathematically in the fifth dimension as electricity. The rain fell and dried and was exhaled as vapour. As a child he thought that was how the earth breathed. He loved the idea, the vapour going up like his own breath on a cold day, and turning into mountains of steam in the sky. The perfection of the system. It was perfect, the world was perfect, life was perfect, this rain and those farm buildings, ancient but with new roofs, were perfect.

  Gravity twists reality out of nothingness, what physics calls quantum vacuum.

  Is that what made his Angels?

  If so, his mind, reaching into eternity, can twist his dead father back into being. What does it mean that he can twist those different selves so far that he can slip into another life? It means there are parallel universes. Universes you can stub your toe on and have a black toenail the next day. And parallel selves, with parallel flesh you can touch?

  So gravity is thought? How can a black hole make anything?

  And Michael jumped up yet again.

  Well, because we know that matter going into black holes is ultimately ejected again as new creation, white holes.

  So, I can take those equations too, for white holes, and see if they tell me how my real self can make Angels.

  I can account for this, I know I can. I can account for the rain. I can account for the yearning between stars. Somewhere there in all that process is yearning between people as well.

  Michael took a taxi from the station, an extravagance to slice through the rain, to get home. He ran up his stairs unwinding his scarf, and threw it and his coat onto the sofa, and took down his Stephen Hawking and his Daniel Dennett. He did a search on Amazon and ordered books. He began to think about how he could organize his days, teaching, marking papers, researching at night, like Einstein in the Patent Office. He would be invisible, unkno
wn, effective. He felt fulfilled, abundant, forgiving. He had an answer to the question: What do I do next?

  Michael made himself a cup of soup. Sipping it, he looked at his Picassos, which seemed to rise up in colours like a flock of parrots. The rain had stopped, and sunlight pierced the layers of skyscrapers to glow on his wall. And Michael felt a sudden sense of joy.

  It could be of course that the miracle had been sent to teach him about the universe. It could be that it had come to help him understand God, or duplicate God’s experience of creation. But it seemed to him now that the miracle had simply come so he could finally learn to enjoy himself. That was what fun was: liking your destiny.

  Over the next three days, Michael called back Mustapha the Afghani engineer and they made the love they should have made the first time. He remembered Rabindrath, who permed his hair and who worked in college administration. At one time Michael had been so drawn to him that he would deliberately walk into Rabindrath to feel the warmth of his body and the wiriness of his arms through his cotton shirt.

  Michael remembered Stavros the Greek who delivered the post and lifted weights. In mid-winter he wore black T-shirts to show off his musculature. But it was his sweet, slightly dreamy smile that Michael had liked so much.

  In fact Michael, who had once found difficulty thinking of someone he fancied, was suddenly shocked by how many beautiful people there were in the world. There were his students, whom university protocols said he must not touch. They rained down onto his bed, sweet and young and at their best, no longer calculating grades or hoping to avoid paying fees until they were sure of an A. In the magic space of the miracle, he and students became what they were in fact: equals. His beautiful body did its work and Michael did not even allow himself the thought: I’m cured. Everything had become light and easy and floating, as if they all had the bones of birds.

  There was the boy behind the till at Tesco, whom Michael had once found almost unbearably beautiful. His beauty was not unbearable now because of that equality. Michael was up to it. The boy from Tesco liked being tickled and roared with delighted laughter on Michael’s bed. He recombed Michael’s hair with gel into a kind of cross between James Dean and Christian Bale. Michael combed it again to save it after the boy had gone, and realized he would comb it that way from now on.

  Other kinds of fear disappeared. There was the brain-damaged boy Michael had met at a dinner party years before. His name was Robin. Robin had reached out to Michael and tried to take his hand and fumbled with it. ‘I can’t say things,’ he said. ‘I want to touch you.’ Robin had offered up his hands that were helpless to hold. His slurry voice and his numb sideways lips had put off the younger Michael. Michael welcomed him now and was rewarded. In bed Robin was ruined, muscular, twisted, lithe.

  Michael wanted to photograph them but knew that was futile. He wanted to sketch them but he couldn’t draw.

  Then Michael called up an actor who had once stayed in the same house during the Edinburgh Festival. They had gone to bed with each other, and it hadn’t worked, and Michael had moped for weeks. Michael had him back now. His name was Stephen, and he began a dance around Michael’s bed. It was an odd, looping thing he had learned in some other country, somewhere like Bulgaria. After Stephen was gone, Michael found he could imitate it. He could make his belly and heavy feet move like Stephen’s.

  Michael found he could recreate Stavros’s dim smile and loping stride. He found he could light a cigarette one-handed like Nick. He could make his face and hands move like his brain-damaged lover. Among all his strengths, Michael’s greatest talent would be of use only to him: he could remember people in his body. He would remember all of them.

  A Christmas card came late from Philip. It was a photograph of one of his paintings, pasted on a white card.

  It was a portrait of Henry and was resolutely free from technical innovation. It was just Henry, with hair in his eyes, looking sweet. His gaze was directly back at the viewer, appraising.

  On the back was a note in Philip’s newly elegant handwriting.

  And so I relax and become a traditionalist. It’s more fun just getting on with the painting. Isn’t Henry beautiful? We have decided to go our separate ways. We’re still friends though.

  Would you come to a party? We’re having one New Year’s Eve, just a few friends. We were wondering if you wouldn’t like to come early, say about 5.30 PM. We need to have a chat, and there’s someone we’d like you to meet.

  Love,

  Philip

  The note produced a tumult of feelings. First was dismay; poor Philip, it couldn’t have been an easy note to write. What on earth did they want to say to him? Whom did they want him to meet? It sounded a bit formal, even a bit intimidating.

  Second was mystification. What did Philip know? Did he know Henry was an Angel? Was that why they were breaking up? And if so, what did Philip feel about it? Did he blame Michael?

  And if they were breaking up? Well. Would Henry live with him? Michael wouldn’t mind living with an Angel, he’d done that before. He could see himself so clearly living with Henry. Living here, with the Picassos and the unvarnished floors. Henry would like Camden Town; he’d like the market and its bookstores and its funky restaurants. But Michael wouldn’t make the same mistakes. If Henry wanted to live in the country, then Michael would move. He would make sure this time that they both felt that the house was their home.

  Hold on Michael, what if they’re splitting up because Henry got tired of Philip? It wouldn’t be surprising. Supposing Angel Henry had fallen in love with someone else? Michael’s heart sank. In fact, that’s the most likely scenario: Henry’s younger, he’s better-looking, and he isn’t screwed up.

  And what if Philip wanted to move back in with him? Michael felt embarrassment and dismay. Would he say, no, I’m waiting for Henry? What if Henry showed no signs of interest? Would Michael really turn down companionship, amity, kindness?

  What if the end of the story was that he and Phil got back together? Would that be so awful?

  In fact, Michael, you can calm down. Either way you win. You can’t lose. There is nothing to worry about.

  Even so, Michael went out and bought a new shirt. It was black, and he bought a fleece to go with it. He had a haircut. The Christian Bale hairdo made him look ten years younger. No, it didn’t, it just made him look less like a hippy. It made Michael look like himself.

  He sat around the house for a full hour before it was time to catch the train. He checked out his hair, his new clothes. Oh for God’s sake, Michael, they’re not going to love you because you’re wearing new clothes. You can’t go there in a tizz. You’ll say something daft. You have no idea what’s going to happen today. Just calm down!

  So he took the Northern Line down to the Central and from the Central to Docklands Light Railway at Bank. It was a long ride, on a sunny afternoon. He looked at London, gnawing on his thumbnail.

  The old East End had been shouldered to one side by glossy new buildings that looked like Christmas presents wrapped up in green metallic paper. The crumbling hovels of the poor were now refurbished and had BMWs outside. Sparse art deco factories had been done up as flats and had flags and signs outside. They still looked like art deco factories.

  Suddenly the train plunged into Canary Wharf. The train was all glass like eyes stretched wide open in wonder. It sighed to a halt surrounded by marble, dappled with the beautiful soft white light that comes when sunshine is filtered by a high glass roof. The doors opened, and there was a sound of a waterfall somewhere, and whispering music. The car sighed away and Michael saw to the right the new imperial buildings, huge with carvings and frontages of polished marble. There were fountains in squares with stone esplanades. There were no people.

  My God, it was bleak. Michael tried to imagine living here. It would be like living in a new suburb of Topeka. The only thing you could do was go to the mall. The train hoisted up its skirts to stretch across dockland waterways. There were boats in quays. There
were stranded new hotels with smoked glass and empty patios overlooking the river. The umbrellas over the white garden furniture waved in place of people.

  Finally the train stopped at South Quay, and Michael got out.

  The whole place smelled of drains. To be more specific, it smelled of sewage. Plainly all that new plumbing leaked. The pavements and the brickwork were new and gritty. Forgotten building timbers were piled in the parking lots beside the new buildings with TO LET signs in the windows. There was a newsagent, with an apartment over it. It was open, offering toffees and the National Lottery. Next to it was, of course, an estate agent. London property prices were booming, but not, apparently, here. There were plenty of studios for rent or pied-à-terres for eighty thousand pounds. Would suit company needing to provide accommodation to visiting executives.

  The air was clear and freezing, as if the day were made of ice. The distances between buildings were Californian in scope. The roads didn’t work like English roads; they melted away into huge parking lots, or twisted and turned around the canals like a dog trying to find a home in all this emptiness. Michael got lost, consulted his map and finally found an ochre-coloured brick building beside yet another canal. The doors and windows were new and half-sized.

  He rang the buzzer, and stomped his feet because he was so cold.

  ‘Is that Michael?’ said a voice. Michael couldn’t tell if it were Henry or Philip. ‘Come on up. Top floor.’

  The staircase boomed with the sound of Michael’s feet. The plain white pine stairs shook as he trudged up them. There were scratches from furniture on the new brick walls. This was not a staircase for moving pianos.

  ‘Come all the way up,’ called a smooth dark voice from on high. At the top of the stairs one of them waited, standing in the doorway against the light. Michael thought at first it was Henry. No, no, there were acne scars on the cheeks: Philip. They did look just the slightest bit alike.

  Philip exclaimed, ‘Michael! Hello, how are you, how have you been?’