Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  I led him into the living room.

  “Your polymer is impressive,” Fennis was saying to Vashti in a superlatively unimpressed voice—but then again he’d never liked her, and why had we invited him again?—and produced his own polymer, a jagged solid jelly in a glass jar, marbled and muddied with a mix of clear first-generation inert polymer and the darker second-gen stuff that could change color, cast light, play videos, and he opened the app on his phone and we watched it come to life, writhing and thrashing and then elongating, sharpening, shattering the glass with a single explosive motion. It penetrated Vashti’s polymer, which denatured and was assimilated into Fennis’s. Before her cry of protest was completed his polymer spat hers back out and both stood there as though the whole thing had never happened. His finger swirled on his phone screen and the thing took a wobbly bow. Everyone applauded.

  “Field control assertion like that must have cost you a pretty penny,” she said sourly.

  “Not really. Some boys on my block are battlers, they love sharing their new tricks.”

  “Otto is working on a story about polymers,” said Trevor, patting my thigh proudly when I came to hover over him and silently command him to return to the kitchen. He was using That Tone, the one that said Be chatty, be witty, be handsome, perform. “About the dangers. Aren’t you, honey?”

  “I am,” I said, doing my best to simultaneously smile at our guests and glare at him.

  “Vastly exaggerated, those dangers,” said Aarav, who I’d been doing a damn good job of not looking at since he walked in the door, except now he was talking so I had to look, and, yes, damn, there it was, those broad chunky shoulders, that ample bottom he was surely standing in three-quarters profile precisely to best display, and I hated Vashti so much in that moment, for calling that morning to plead with us to make space for him at our annual vernal equinox supper—“He just moved to New York, he hardly knows any other gay guys, I feel so bad for him.” I gave him the most withering smile I could find. He continued, “No more dangerous than cell phones or networked microwaves, and no one’s writing articles about that.” His face was warm, almost sad, and the multiplex of my mind stuttered to life with a dozen different pornographic scenes starring only us.

  “You should interview Aarav for your story,” Vashti said. “He works on polymers!”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I do communications for Verizon. My unit does focus a lot on polymer-related promotions. The kaiju battle community is a very important demographic.”

  “You two talk,” Trevor said. “I’ll go make the dressing.”

  And what could I do, but be seated, beside Aarav, and curse the smallness of our couch, because I could feel the heat of his leg where it pressed against mine, and surely everyone in the room would know, at once, how badly I wanted him, what a disgusting pervert I was? And, of course, matters were made immeasurably worse by his wisdom and sense of humor—he had everyone giggling, which meant I had to giggle too, lest someone wonder why I wasn’t.

  “I heard that hammer sales are plummeting,” someone said.

  “Screwdrivers too,” said someone else.

  Ten people at our party, and suddenly everyone had something to say about nanopolymers. I didn’t care one way or another about the damn things. They assigned me the story because I’d cultivated relevant contacts on previous articles. I drank my gin and tonic in one long gulp and switched to wine.

  Aarav would not let me stay silent. When I failed to weigh in on whatever theory or fact or opinion was passing around the room, he touched my arm and said, “What do you think, Otto?” Was that because he was a kind and generous person? Or did he know the game I was playing—the game of hunger, of lust, of trying to be good—and could play it just as well as me? The problem with returning to the smiling happy world of dinner parties and office jobs and responsible adults after a long addiction is that you’ve seen people at their worst, especially yourself, and it’s hard to assume the best about anyone.

  “When my old broom wore out, I didn’t buy a new one,” someone said. “So much easier to just download broom instructions and beam them into your polymer.”

  “Dinner!” Trevor called, and I sprang from the couch. He frowned at the glass in my hand, made stern eye contact.

  “We never buy new toys for Tripp anymore,” said Fennis, leading the troupe into the dining room. The oven had heated the whole place up so high that we’d had to open a window, and an undercurrent of cold city winter wind tugged at our sleeves. “Whatever he wants, we can just make it on the spot. Now the problem is, he keeps on begging us for more and more putty! Quite the status marker at school, how big your total polymerload is.”

  “Kids are so insufferable with it,” someone else said. “I made the mistake of calling it ‘magic clay’ the other day and my seven-year-old said ‘It’s not clay, it’s a plastic-based gel. And it’s not magic, it’s got millions of tiny machines inside of it that respond to commands from wireless devices.’ Can you imagine?”

  We could all imagine.

  “So is your article about the death of the manufacturing sector?” Aarav asked, sitting down beside me, and his eyes were immense, so light they looked like gold. “They say we’re less than five years from polymer automobiles. Imagine being able to upgrade to the latest car model with just a software update!”

  “That’s ridiculous,” someone said. “Toys and simple tools are one thing, but shape-memory polymers are a long way from being able to emulate complex machinery. Nanite stereolithography doesn’t even do batteries very well—the storage capacity is shit, they overheat…”

  “I don’t know,” someone else said. “I spun mine into a laptop, on a business trip last month. Wasn’t winning any beauty contests—battery was like a weird bloated tumor on the back, and it kept, I don’t know, writhing—but it got the job done.”

  “They let you take programmable matter on a plane?”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “But Virgin is doing this thing now where you can give them your polymer at the gate and get a bar code voucher, and then when you get off at your destination they give you the exact same amount back. They even get the blend of first-gen and second-gen stuff precisely right.”

  “Delta, too,” someone said.

  I prayed for them to stop. I drank a third cup of wine praying it, practically chanting it out loud. I wanted them to be quiet and I wanted them all to get the fuck out. Especially Aarav.

  Of course it was silly. No one could see the filthy thoughts I was thinking, how precarious this lavish scene of domestic virtuosity truly was. No one suspected how unhappy I was, how hungry. No one but Trevor, who put his hand out to stop me when I picked up the bottle of wine.

  Trevor was older, wiser. He’d picked me up out of the gutter—or, more accurately, picked me up off the floor of a dark room at a particularly nasty sex party. It was his apartment we were in; his job that bought the roast and the good wine and the cheeses on the platter. And I loved him. I truly did. But he was good and I was bad and his smile said he knew I was a fraud, and loved me anyway.

  “So?” Aarav asked. “Your article. You haven’t said what dangers you’re covering.”

  “Hacking,” I said, passing the rolls, pleased with how perfect they’d come out, how brown. The roast, on the other hand, lying in a dish of its own blood, was a different story. Our oven heated unevenly. One corner was blackened and burnt. Absolutely everything in the world was wrong.

  “What, like that whole thing about how terrorists might make your polymer bracelet turn into a razor blade and slit your wrist open? I thought people gave up on that kind of hysterical scare-mongering two years ag—”

  “Not that, so much,” I said. “There’s this whole new wave of what they’re calling aggregative malware, which could in theory cause polymers to compulsively link up. Predictives anticipate some pretty destructive scenarios as a result. Especially once the third-gen stuff comes out…”

  “Interesting,” he s
aid, his sturdy forearm innocuous on the table beside mine. Against mine.

  “Not sure I buy it, myself,” I said. “Though lots of smart people do.”

  “Thinkpieces will be the death of us all,” Fennis said. “Every other day people are trying to tell you we’re sowing the seeds of our own destruction with some stupid thing. No offense, Otto.”

  “None taken. Anyway, I’m with you. Even if it’s true, what are we supposed to do about it?”

  Everyone agreed that we were helpless, guiltless.

  Trevor turned his head in a slow circle, his smile immense, proud, blissful at what we’d built, what a life we had, what wonderful friends, what a stable glorious home he’d made for me. For us. I tried my best to smile back.

  I loved him. So, what was I hungry for? What did I still want, why couldn’t I keep from imagining ravaging Aarav in the wreckage of our living room?

  “It is inherently less secure,” someone said. “You can’t encrypt them in the same way. Your shaping app can lock the nanites, but only until something with a stronger field comes along. It’s fundamental to how the distributed CPU functions.”

  “I went to a kaiju battle last week,” Vashti said. “That’s the whole point of them, that struggle for control. Some pretty big mother fuckers.”

  “I’ve only ever seen the web videos. And that awful reality competition show.”

  “It’s so much fun,” she said. “Grimy, and a little bit scary. Some of these creatures look like something from a nightmare. Most fights, there’s this part at the end, what they call the death roll, where it’s essentially one big Silly Putty blob wrestling with itself to see which one has the stronger field control. People sitting in the front rows say they can feel their polymers moving in their pockets.”

  “Did you read that article, The Future of Hunger in the Age of…”

  Everyone had read that article.

  “Good lord,” Trevor said, finally. “This is worse than lunch with the straight guys from work, hearing them talk about football!”

  “Have you guys seen I Can See Right Through You yet?” I asked, because Trevor had me well-trained, and nothing derailed a boring conversation better than a controversial art/horror film. “That guy they got to play the demon lover was hot.”

  The night went on like that. Everyone happy but me—or everyone doing just as good a job as me of faking it. Snow and wind hammering at our windows. People peeling off, departing with regrets as the night got longer and the storm got worse. Me doing my damnedest not to make eye contact with Aarav, not to notice how smart he was, how once he’d voiced an opinion on something it just felt right, like my own, like it had always been my own. I tried, too, not to notice how nice it was to hang out with another gay guy who wasn’t Trevor, Trevor whose prim paranoia about my inherent weakness kept us from all but the most unfuckable friends.

  “Shit,” Aarav said, past two, the last guest, long after his sister had left, seeing the snow of an early-spring surprise storm stacked against our glass. “It’s piled up so much!”

  “Subways run all night,” I said, cheering inside as I went to get his coat. “Best part of New York City life, newbie.”

  “I have my car,” he said. “I know it’s not practical for the city, but I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it.”

  “That sucks,” Trevor said. “It isn’t safe to drive in this. Should be all plowed and cleaned-up by morning.” His eyes flitted to mine, made the smallest frown, a fraction of a second, long enough for me to read whole oral epics into it—he could see my weakness, knew what I ached to do to Aarav, saw how unwise it would be to have him in our house for a single unnecessary extra second. But he could see, too, with his exquisite WASP etiquette, that there was no other option than to say to him: “You can crash here for the night, if you want.”

  “You sure?” Aarav asked, looking to me, and I was conveniently taking a long sip of wine at that point, screaming inside, No don’t do this, but eventually the sip had to end, and I nodded as enthusiastically as I could.

  He did the dishes. We made up the guest bedroom. We all watched polymer videos online, saw the terrifying monsters and fancy clothes and seawalls and emergency shelters that people had built from nanopolymer, watched trailers for three or four new polymer-based reality competition shows. We placed our polymers and our phones in a heap by the charging hub. I was furious with Trevor for extending the invitation, with myself for getting so drunk, for enjoying the husky sound of Aarav’s laughter so much.

  “You shouldn’t drink so much,” Trevor said, once the bedroom door was shut behind us.

  “What?” I stammered, all false innocence, because, of course I shouldn’t. “Why?”

  “You embarrassed yourself. Practically drooling over Aarav.”

  “I was not!” I said, reddening, from alcohol and guilt, shame and defensive anger.

  Trevor shrugged and undressed, like it was all too obvious and inconsequential to argue over. I’d been surprised, when we first started dating, when we had The Talk about our sexual parameters, that he insisted on monogamy. “Addicts never stop with just a little,” he’d said, and what could I say to that? What could I say whenever he brought that up, which was often—whenever he wanted to end an argument? And what could I say now? Because any argument I offered would be a lie. He was right and I was wrong, he was perfect and I was wretched. I slid into bed beside him, felt the whisper of the wind from where we’d left the window open, heard the clanking of our radiators trying too hard. I touched his hip with one hand, which he seized, and held.

  He had been right, too, about my having had too much to drink. I slept poorly, in and out of hungry dreams—burnt meat and hairy barrel chests—too dizzy to lay still, until I sat up with my head spinning and my stomach doing its best to expel the charred corner of the roast that I’d taken for myself so none of our guests would eat it and think less of us.

  Dawn, almost. The sky just starting to brighten past the normal city luster of snowy winter nights. Everything else a blur. Was I home? Was I back in the hallway of that filthy apartment building where a john had kicked me out and I’d fallen asleep outside his door? I staggered towards the bathroom, imagining myself projectile vomiting absolutely everything absolutely everywhere.

  I had to puke. This much was true. But was that why I was out of bed? I walked slowly, silently, suspecting in my groggy fuddled state that this was all an elaborate ruse to watch Aarav sleep, taunt myself with his tantalizing profile and hope for a glimpse of a furry bare arm or the sheet-hidden outline of an erection. But would I be able to stop myself there, in the doorway, watching?

  Is this me? I wondered, peering into the dark. Am I capable of this?

  What I saw was so much better than mere sleeping nudity. And so much worse.

  His ass. Bare, damp with sweat in the overheated apartment, moving, a dire implacable rhythm. The chubby, perfect, naked bulk of him. My boyfriend beneath him. Trevor’s groans of pleasure. Aarav’s hand, clamping over Trevor’s mouth to quiet him.

  They didn’t hear me. I’d never seen Trevor eyes look like that. I didn’t move. I watched helplessly, wanting to, not wanting to want to. Memorizing what I saw, for the long lonely nights to come. Bracing myself for the apocalypse that was on its way, almost here, that would arrive the moment I opened my mouth to shout hate and rage at them. Wondering why I couldn’t open my mouth.

  Coffee in the camps was always a crap shoot, most mornings merely warm brown water the color of iced tea when half the ice has melted, but once in a while they’d get a donation of decent stuff, several bins of Folgers sent by fundie jocks or soccer moms in some idyllic safe small town who did a Kickstarter or bake sale to send toiletries or pleasantries to the poor benighted New York refugees, and that’s what kept us coming back, every morning, the hope that we’d get something other than shit—Upper West Side dowagers and Brooklyn graffiti virtuosi waited in line together, sweaters held tight against the wind, and then we drank the coffe
e we were given, and shivered together in the long windy tents, beside the stripped-bare orchard, and tried not to think about what lay behind us, or what lay ahead…and it was there, in the Canajoharie resettlement area, in a forest two hundred miles north of the crater where my city used to be, cradling a cup of so-called coffee, that I saw Aarav for the second time.

  As soon as I saw him, I knew he was doomed.

  Six months had passed, since the last time I saw him—the night he spent in at our apartment. Six months, since polymer kaiju stomped New York City into rubble. He’d lost weight, wore dark sunglasses now. The rest of him was unmistakable.

  I won’t lie: my first emotion was happiness. To see someone I knew, a memory of my vanished world. My mouth opened, eager to call out his name. But happiness faded fast, replaced by lust, which triggered rage.

  “And to think,” someone was saying, “we used to think it’d be rising ocean levels that would wipe us out!”

  “Stop being melodramatic,” said someone else, because everyone was an expert when it came to the polymer kaiju uprising, and these breakfast-table conversations were interminable, “We’re not wiped out. All those attacks barely made a dent in the total human population of the planet. Rising ocean levels still have plenty of time to destroy us.”

  “All our fault, either way.”

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “What else could we have done?”

  “That’s exactly the problem. Keep telling yourself you’re helpless, pretty soon you’ll start to act like it.”

  “They’re still out there,” Aarav said, and his voice was just as wise, just as insightful—except now I could hear his wisdom for what it was, what all of us were doing when we tried to sound like we understood what was going on around us. Cave men at the campfire trying to feel less afraid. “Just because we can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not coming.”

  Rage lit me up inside. Revenge plots percolated. Bloody murder tingled in my fingertips, aching to be let out.