He was already barefooted. He had lots of rough tattoos on his chest, arms, shoulders, thighs, buttocks, and face—he was practically naked. That is not common in this part of the world. He had on a belt under a furry belly that looked full, fed, and strong, and a kind of—I guess you’d call it—groin cloth. (I was eighteen. I kept a neat beard back then in which a lot of folks said they recognized my Asian ancestors, which is not rare at all in this part of the Yucatán.) He was at least thirty or thirty-five, and his broad bones were heavy with muscle, and that looked kind of threatening. I’ve seen pictures of the natives who were supposed to have lived in this area a few generations ago, in the local library, with its forty books that anyone can go in and look through (though I gather I am one of about a hundred people in the neighborhood’s three thousand who does), and he looked like one of them, though physically a lot larger. He had a beard and was starting to go bald, and a broad brown nose. He had bright, oddly blue eyes for such dark skin, and rough, straight hair.
We are a small enough settlement that we don’t get a lot of strangers, but I guess we are on the sort of routes where the ones we get can be pretty varied from one another in this odd world we live in, so that not much surprises us—if they’re not toting visible weapons. And he wasn’t.
I am a gay man who had had a fair amount of local experience but I was unprepared for the next thing he did: which was to raise his groin cloth, point to himself, look left and right, then look back at me—which I realized, to my surprise, in that isolated spot, was an invitation to . . . well, service him. My heart began to pound.
It was not a space where such encounters were common. But I knew of others not far away where they were.
I looked around, and thought, No, this probably isn’t a good idea . . .
Many of the marks on his body were what most of us would call obscenities, which for me oscillated between disturbing and intriguing. Bats, Skulls, Dragons, as well as male genitals, dogs and mules relieving themselves of urine, excrement, or desire using their fellows . . . His back was against a rock with lots of foliage on it, and I was on my knees in the fallen leaves in front of him, with his thick (if average length) penis in my mouth, which was pleasantly salty, and pretty much like mine. (That, of course, was when I thought of asking him if he thought this was . . . But his rough hands held my head, moving it out and in, while above me he breathed harder and harder. And I forgot about all such thoughts.)
When, three or so minutes later, he spilled into me, and I thought I’d better disengage, he didn’t release me but held me to him, finally to let me rise and push against him and, still erect enough to hold aside his clout, with one hand against my buttocks and one behind my head, pressing my face into his neck, he encouraged me to rub against him until—I guess—it was clear to him I too had an orgasm. The upper joints of his left hand bore letters I won’t write, but they were now inked out as a second thought; while on the joints of his right hand I recognized a Latino term for excrement.
When finally I stepped away, he held my hand in rough-skinned fingers. Had it been three hours later, I would have had somewhere I had to go. Had it been the day before, while I might have been there on an off hour, I would have had to leave immediately on finishing the first time.
But it was the day it was. He grinned, and without releasing my hand, with his other and his general expressions of humor and contentment, this tattooed giant communicated clearly without any words at all: “That was fun. Let’s do it again? No, right now . . . !” And so, with only a little variation, and because nobody else was there, we did. This time his tongue ended up way down my throat, as mine did down his. He was missing a couple of teeth in the back, which my own tongue learned and felt comfortable knowing.
He did not speak to me. When we were done for the second time, I said a few things to him. Where did he want to go? What had he come here for? He listened, looking at me curiously, but did not respond in any way specific enough to make me think he understood any particular word I’d said.
I knew there were people in the world who had once spoken other languages than mine; and I was innocent enough not to be threatened by it as a concept—at least when the results were pleasant, and so far they had been.
It was one of the things I’d taken from my time at the Tolmec Hermitage, supported by things that had occurred on my travels up from Old Mexico through Texas to New Mexico and the northern border to the three-state union that remains, where Canada starts.
I released his hand and began to walk—and was both curious and surprised when he walked with me.
And somehow I went with him back to the three living units which I shared with some others in the town.
We walked down toward my cabin—and while we were getting to the more populous area I saw Marcus, my friend from work, who basically has little use for gay men at all, though he is a friendly enough workmate—and I reached over to take my big new friend’s hand to make it seem a more normal relationship, at least in Marcus’s eyes. But the big fellow pulled his hand away and frowned. So I stepped a little closer and we went on walking.
Moments later we passed Ara—who had been a Smart Girl back at the same Tolmec Hermit’s I’d been at, before all the traveling and disruption, and who had ended up here when Things Settled Down, as the News Pundits say on the Info Dumps that you can go and watch here and there in the streets if you’re really interested. Ara and I rarely spoke, but I always assumed there was a kind of bond between us. He blinked at us—and I supposed I understand what he was thinking: my new friend after all was as different from those of us as you might see around the streets and alleys of our town as a movie star or, really, some soldier, either of which, I suppose, he could have been.
Ara had lived a much more common life than I had, for those who had once been Smart Girls in a hermitage. His own travels had taken him way to the south, and rumor had it to Brazil, which was a million miles away culturally—and he had worked for several years in some non-U.S. space program in some South American Union that still had one (though whether he had been to an actual Other World or Other Moon or not I wasn’t sure), though now he had returned to Settle Down pretty close to where I had.
Someone else walked by, I believe, and looked, and so I just reached over and took the big fellow’s hand, again to make us look more ordinary. And this time he let me hold it, and minutes later we were at the porch of the six-unit dwelling—three on the north side, three on the south; I had the one on the north end. We came in, and he stopped at the door, to look around the circular room where I had most of my stuff, my futon, some pictures that a friend of mine had once drawn, some other things that had been printed that I thought were interesting, some on the door out to the shared latrine in the hall, which hooked up underground to the neighborhood waste disposal system for much of the neighborhood, the only sign for which was the blue band along the bottom of the roll of toilet paper that meant “Don’t throw it in the hole!” which I suddenly wondered if my new, nameless (so far) friend was familiar with.
(Apparently he was.)
I asked him a couple of more questions. Didn’t get a couple of more answers. (Of course you have to normalize the dialogue; especially in the beginning, and even more especially if some of it is happening in a different language you don’t even speak. Though I’d learned a few of those words, I’ll leave them out. It’s not just literary universalism, it’s comprehension.) One of the things he said to me when we got inside was, “First, I think you mean ‘means of production,’” and explained what it meant, “and, second, arguing over whether the earth is round or flat is silly when you’re living in a geographical union where there’s only one sex represented, despite the varieties of genders, for a thousand miles in any direction, and since you were twelve and I was twenty-two neither of us has been allowed to cross a border; some of us are killed by the hundreds every day and others of us are left to die on our own—and the thing I worked so hard for and was in the year before I met y
ou was to escape from one group to the other. It just doesn’t happen to be happening right here, right now. Got it? But what either your or my forebears from three generations ago would recognize as ordinary human reproduction is only occurring in two very small republics under conditions of pain, oppression, and physical and emotional abuse.”
I frowned. “You,” I said, for the first time, “are bat-shit crazy.”
“I,” he said, “am not going to argue. But have you ever seen or heard of a person bearing a child, or getting pregnant, or birthing a child? How would someone here go about finding out if they were in such a condition—or even could be?”
I said, “I don’t know what those terms mean—can you explain them to me?”
He chuckled and shrugged. “Not tonight. But eventually perhaps you’ll see that because I am probably the only person you’ll ever talk to who thinks differently—and possibly one or two Hermits in their Hermitages—from the majority is the major proof I’m right.”
“Maybe that’s something they made me forget in my coming-of-age forgetfulness process.”
“Now why would they make you forget that?”
“I don’t know. What did they want you to forget?”
“I never had it. It’s very expensive. The vast, vast majority of people in this union don’t. It just removes all sense of personal and social conflict out of the experiences that frighten you out of your preferences for the same sex on the sexual level—which is to say that it assures there are a good number of people like you around who suck good dick and like doing it and feel it’s normal and they’re evenly distributed throughout the landscape. That’s all.”
“Come on. It’s got to be more than that. It has to produce a major advantage.”
“No, it doesn’t. It shifts a ‘natural’ balance by about three percent, which is enough to restructure an entire society. And nobody ever talks about it.” Then he said, “And the other thing they make you forget is just how few of you there actually were. How few a few thousand are who can only be imitated by others in a landscape of millions . . .”
And that’s maybe three years of normalized dialogue, between two people and discussions with whole groups, crammed into the account of a single conversation. Not the whole story at all, nor would it be if I added that part of it came during a shouting argument with some others during an icy morning’s breakfast at a conference we were visiting, and another part came with the support of fifty pages of transcript read on a secure line in a reader I found in the back of a library when I was browsing in an office while the light through the new windows went from yellow to red in the light outside in the courtyard—where there’d just been an execution of twenty prisoners.
Hey—what is important to me about our actual meeting was that the next I knew Cellibrex was at my small electric stove and making, first, an acceptable cup of tea (with a laconic “Glad I don’t miss coffee . . . ,” which bewildered me) and then, when we sat on the edge of the futon together, sipping it out of the ceramic cups that I kept over the cooking and washing sink by the stove, he came back in from the latrine, brought over a pot I hadn’t washed from the sink, and showed me the white streaks inside it while I sat cross-legged on the mattress.
“Oatmeal?” he asked.
I was surprised. “Um . . . yes,” I said. “I had it for breakfast. I haven’t cleaned the pot yet.”
“If I stay, maybe tomorrow . . . ?”
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t mind. I’ll make you some if you’d like. You like oatmeal?”
He stood above me, dangling the pot. With his other hand, he scratched himself. (His belt and groin clout were all in a pile on the futon’s corner.) “You,” he said, “are ridiculously talkative. If you shut up, though, maybe I’ll stay.”
Which surprised me. (And he seemed to think was funny.)
Then he got down on his knees, put his arms around me, and pulled me over and we began once more.
Surprised, I stopped and lifted my head. “Tell me your name.”
He had already started in again. “Why? I don’t know yours yet. But you suck some good dick.”
And about an hour later, while I was sucking him . . . well, let me pull a literary curtain over that. I mean it’s not like you have to tell everything you do in bed with everybody. (It’s not like there are any sexually transmitted diseases left that force you to be honest about all that stuff—as I read about once in the library.) At any rate, it caught me off-guard, but I went on swallowing. And when he was finished, I came all over his belly. Taking a big breath, I asked, “How’d you know I’d like that?”
He chuckled. “I took a chance. You can go on calling me Cellibrex. I’ll go on calling you Clam. I’ll tell you my real name if I’m still here in a week.”
I was surprised again.
But he was and he did.
And once out of nowhere he said, “You said your sister told you if you didn’t go inside the Hermitage, you would be killed . . . ?”
I looked puzzled. “Yes . . . ?”
“Well, admittedly it would have been ten years earlier, but if you had stayed outside, we—or children very much like us—are the ones who would have swarmed by and killed you. That’s who you were fleeing from.” He gave a hmmph. “That’s who I was fleeing from when I started my wanderings and was captured by the very gang of ruffians you were fleeing by seeking refuge inside.”
“That’s who you . . . defected from?”
He didn’t say anything.
“But why—?”
“Because by that time they would have killed me.”
When we were together for three weeks, Cellibrex was wearing clothing like mine, and both of us were spending a lot more time barefooted whenever we were in the house, and . . . well, it was kind of surprising just how much we had changed each other, in so much of what we did outside and how well we adjusted to what each of us liked to do when, together, we were indoors. (He too sucked some . . . well, he’d been imitating guys like me all his life. But I don’t feel comfortable talking about it, because of some of the trouble I’ve seen people get into over speaking of it.) “We are such different people, you and me,” I asked after three years. “Why are we still together?”
I thought it was probably because you can only feel so threatened by someone who makes tea and likes oatmeal and is good at sex, no matter how different they are from you.
“Because we like each other . . . ?”
“. . . are getting used to each other” was his own regularly repeated answer to that question for more than a decade. By then his tattoos had changed from things that now and then could repel me to things that I wanted pressed all over me, to simply something familiar and that I was glad were there because they were his.
(I don’t know what you are used to, so that I don’t know what you will assume as to cleanliness, technology, neatness, clutter, and will fill in . . . properly or improperly, if I don’t mention it or leave it out.)
That year they put out a new Star Wars (number four of the third tetralogy), and I went to see it on a sensory helmet in a theater.
While I was at a tea and cake shop nearby called La Colombe, pretty crowded that afternoon, I had a glass of water and a blueberry muffin. While I was eating it, a woman about my age came in to stand next to me: she was wearing an ordinary black coat and not the stripes that, these days, the disabled often wear. She must have had some kind of stroke, because one hand hung down beside her with the fingers turned to the back, and when she ate whatever piece of pastry she was eating, she had to lean way, way back, and she moved around kind of stiff-legged, and the barista who wore a knitted cap took it all in stride. I called Cellibrex on my pocket phone (the thing was working that afternoon), to tell him, as I walked out of the place, that I was going to stop off and see it.
She and I and about half the others had come in barefoot—which, at that time of year, was a slight but not major surprise.
I enjoyed the show. It had been playing for
about a week so there weren’t that many people in the theater, a large cinder-block building with decorative black curtains on both sides of the auditorium.
Nobody in the projection looked like anyone I was used to seeing—but I was pretty used to that too.
Still, the story had made me feel good, and afterward when I was coming home, I gave ten dollars to a homeless mother—at least that’s what her sign said, as she sat up against one of the uptown building walls, though she didn’t have her kid with her—and I also gave twenty to an old friend I ran into who used to hustle and who said he wasn’t homeless but he was still available for pay. So we wandered over to the same place I’d met Cellibrex and had a very unenthusiastic sexual encounter in which neither one of us got really excited.
I didn’t tell Cellibrex about any of this, because (one) he does not like movies of any kind in a theater, and though (two) he does not have a jealous bone in his body, he does worry all the time about money, and we both get our government pensions at this point. And it never seems quite enough to get by on, though we neither one seem to be losing any weight.
Ten or so years after that, when I was retired and took on a lighter job, I was offered a chance to become a Library Guardian, which meant we got a slightly bigger living unit if we took in five hundred books, which were stored in a separate room which was open to the public two days a week, and nobody ever really came for them, though there was a guy named Bill who came and worked there, and whom we both got to like, and who would fly back to his family up in Houston or holidays sometimes.
Cellibrex was much more outgoing and talkative by then around people outside, though he grumped to me in private that we would do it my way because we always did, and because that had become so habitual among his complaints about me, if anything it reassured me. And we did. And sometimes he would stand and glare at the young people who used the library, which I would tell him he just could not stand around doing. So he took to not going in that room at all.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 11