by Geoff Ryman
‘Someone said that to you?’ asked Michael in wonder. Doh. Lawrence’s eyes were filmed over. His voice was slightly rougher when he said, ‘You can sit closer to me, if that is your desire.’
Michael understood that this was an act of kindness, to understand and to do all of the work. Michael smiled at himself, to acknowledge that he was behind in the game. Feeling thickarsed, Michael snailed himself in heaving stages six inches nearer to Lawrence.
‘You have never suffered physically,’ judged Lawrence.
Michael shook his head, no.
‘I always made myself suffer physically, so that I would be enduring when I most needed to be. I would do without food or sleep or water. I would walk barefoot miles over rocks, so that I would disdain the physical.’
Michael was puzzling his way through the words. ‘It’s true. The worst I’ve had is a sprained ankle.’
‘The heat and the dust and starvation all burn away illusion. The body is an illusion.’
Michael was beginning to fall in love.
Lawrence looked at him, fiercely. ‘I have never,’ he said, ‘allowed myself to achieve a sexual climax.’
Michael was beginning to fall out of love. Lawrence of Arabia was barking mad.
Then Lawrence of Arabia pulled Michael to him. The arms were still hot from sunlight. The wolf eyes blazed with a demand. They were insisting. They were insisting on something that was only somewhat like sex.
‘Be my desert,’ Lawrence demanded. ‘Be my sunlight. Burn me.’
Michael looked at his watch. ‘I have to keep you talking for twenty more minutes.’
‘Is this a spiritual exercise?’ Lawrence asked, hungry to be told that yes, it was a deliberate act of withholding, a reining in.
‘No. No, it’s a medical one.’ Michael’s Viagra hour was not over. He checked for any of the side effects: flushed cheeks, a slight sense of palpitation in the hands and heart.
‘Is the condition chronic?’
‘Ah. Yes, actually, it is.’
‘Then you do know pain,’ said Lawrence, his voice sinking several octaves lower. ‘Are you in pain now?’ The thought seemed to entice Lawrence. He began to stroke Michael’s temples.
‘I am beginning to get a mild headache.’ That was a side effect too. Gosh, Viagra was fun. Michael couldn’t wait for the splintered blue plates in his vision, either, especially the ones with zigzag flashing edges.
‘Then I bind myself to that vow also,’ announced Lawrence, and sat back.
Then he announced, ‘To be really alive, you have to be prepared to die.’
Michael thought: if Viagra can work against this, it can work against anything.
They spent the next twenty minutes discussing pottery shards. Lawrence loved his subject, Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, and the excavation of Nineveh. ‘It is a tonic against romance, to read the tablets. They are all contracts, the equivalent of shopping lists.’ They finished the tea. Lawrence nodded and then turned and stretched himself out, face down on the carpet. He saw Michael’s belt and asked to be struck with it. ‘There is to be no indulgence,’ he said. ‘Use the end with the buckle. There should never be any shirking of the worst.’
Michael had never thought of sex as a trial of endurance. ‘Um. Are you sure this is necessary?’
‘It stops me becoming effeminate,’ said Lawrence.
Oh no it doesn’t, thought Michael.
The perfect buttocks wobbled. Without any fuss, no trumpets, or even any particular sensation, it was simply noticeable that Michael’s penis was erect. His temples thumped with an increased flow of blood, and his thumbs felt curiously weak as they held the belt. Something was shivery and loose, not in his body, but in his mind.
Michael struck the buttocks, and they tensed. ‘Is that enough?’ he asked. Lawrence shook his head, no. ‘Harder,’ he said once. Michael struck again until the buttocks reddened and something like anger rose up in him.
Michael held down Lawrence’s tiny arms and pushed him down flat and mounted him, definitively. Lawrence had an ugly anus, lumpy and twisted shut several times, rolling over itself. Michael forced himself through the resistance of the sphincter. Lawrence did not react. The cock pumped as if all by itself, and Lawrence looked grim as if enduring something dreadful. Michael kept pumping and pumping, and the idea came to him: perhaps science had freed him after all, given him back to himself.
But he didn’t come.
Finally, he just stopped.
‘You withheld,’ said Lawrence. ‘So did I.’ He lay still as if broken. Michael slid back from him, and tried to coax him to roll over, to speak to him. Like a wounded child, Lawrence cast off Michael’s hands.
‘I have allowed you to violate the integrity of my body,’ he said, and buried his face.
Michael felt like an unwanted guest at a wedding. He wanted to bring back the beauty of an hour before. ‘Would you like some more tea?’
‘I want some clean fresh air,’ said Lawrence, angrily, to the carpet.
The hashish cigarette still smouldered on the fake wood tray. He’s burnt my tray, Michael thought and then remembered. He can burn nothing; he’s an Angel.
He’s powerless. Michael looked at the unmoving body.
OK. He’s from another age. All of this was inconceivably dirty and evil. Denial became all mixed up with the thing you desired. Denial made you able to ride in the desert with the Arabs. It made you tough. It meant that when you and they made love, you both understood each other’s shame and guilt. They could respect and admire your shame and guilt as they admired your prowess. You are quintessential, Lawrence; you are genuinely warlike, as the English are. You are loyal and hard and self-sacrificing, and you regard militarism with its uniforms and flags and shouting and terrible music as irredeemably foolish.
You found yourself in Arabia, in particular circumstances. You found a kind of love, also in particular circumstances. It does not mean that you were not also noble.
Michael touched the small of the white back as if in benediction, and ordered Lawrence home, back to his desert and whoever it was had grown him as part of his soul.
I’m learning.
If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be?
Sexually armed and dangerous, Michael now found there was no one with whom he wanted to have sex. This was, if nothing else, a serious failure of imagination.
There was a time when every afternoon’s lecture presented Michael with students who seemed improbable miracles of health and beauty. Cosmopolitan London youths with V-shaped backs wore perfect white T-shirts. Their hips were slim, their crotches were full, their Scandinavian or Indic or West Indian complexions were unblemished, unlined, glowing. They had sat arrayed in front of him, legs wide, as if with the malicious intent of disturbing his calm.
Now Michael saw the imperfections that would distort their beauty with age, the gap teeth, the sunken eyes. For the first time ever, his students provided no sexual inspiration. In the mornings, the train seemed full of middle-aged men who needed exercise. Michael had to remind himself that some of them were, objectively, young and attractive. It was summer, the season of T-shirts and shorts and hairy knees. The beautiful naked legs had no effect on him.
Michael began to realize that he did not really like sex. He had only ever liked parts of sex, sudden jagged frozen moments. He would recycle them as images in memory or fantasy.
Often, the people in the fantasy did not matter. The core of the fantasy was the situation he himself was in.
These situations were not anything he would care to have written down. Just recently, one fantasy involved him being tied up in a Berlin dungeon. In another, he was pressed by a wall of waiting men in the urinals at Cairo train station. His potential partners in the fantasy might wear gelabiya or more Western dress. They could be Nile Delta plump or desert thin; young or old. Who they were did not matter.
In other fantasies, Michael imagined he was twelve years old in Carlsbad, waylai
d on a beach and seduced into a weekend life in a male brothel. He imagined himself at twelve wearing the tight little trunks and dancing for men. He danced to T-Rex and put his finger on the cloth under which his sphincter lay. It made no difference if the customers were fat, black and middle-aged, or off-duty wrestlers still in costume, or fathers of childhood friends.
What made him come was the situation he was in and the different scenarios that could lead to. The dream was not of someone else, but of himself, changed.
Life had given him the wrong miracle.
Look, I said I kept fancying guys, but I don’t. In fact, I think I don’t really like most men. If anything, I am rather chaste. What I want is to be somewhere else, doing something I would never normally do. The fantasy actually is that I become someone different.
So that was what the miracle should have been. It should have changed me.
Michael looked at the escort ads in the gay press. The photographs were supposed to be genuine. They usually displayed the wares from the neck down: slim bodies with large cocks, muscular bodies with tiny ones. He could have any of them, just by asking. He didn’t ask. Perhaps he was satiated.
Perhaps it was his computer course.
Seriously. The instructors had forgotten to set enough coursework to give final marks, so suddenly, week after week another report or essay or study was due. All weekend and most evenings, Michael read learned papers about Windows NT system design. Finals were coming as well, so he was having to memorize circuit diagrams. All of this was far from arousing.
Perhaps it was simply that he could have whomever he wanted.
When Michael and Philip used to go out together, the bars would seem to be full of delicious men served cold. When Michael went alone and sex was a serious possibility, the men all seemed to be ballet fans pretending to be motorcyclists, or over-coiffured skinny young queens, or bitter old ones, or flakes who believed in numerology, or fake rockabillies who talked only to each other, or men who lived with their mothers. Availability washed the bloom off the fruit.
Michael invited all of the team at the lab out to lunch. In the first flush of summer, they sat outside on a jetty on the river, crowded around two tiny silver tables. The day seemed to yawn and stretch in the warmth. Across the river were the Houses of Parliament, looking misty like an old aquatint.
‘If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be?’ Michael asked his staff after three bottles of red wine.
No one answered at first. Who would you sleep with? is not a question anyone can answer easily. It’s not only that the question is too personal. The answer changes, moment to moment. It could well be that at that moment you do not want to sleep with anyone at all.
Ebru smiled and said her boyfriend. ‘Of course,’ she added.
‘Well … and who else?’
‘No one else,’ she insisted, smiling.
Michael turned to Shafiq and asked him.
‘Oh!’ said Shafiq, and looked pleased and embarrassed. ‘Oh, I don’t think I could answer that.’
‘Don’t say your wife,’ said Ebru.
Emilio was humorously outraged. ‘You said your boyfriend!’
‘Yes, but that is the privilege of the one who is brave and goes first.’
‘All right, I will tell you,’ said Shafiq. His eyes sparkled with daring. They all waited. ‘Sophia Loren. I like the mature women.’
Michael imagined sleek brown thighs in old-fashioned stockings, with a little wrinkle just above the knee. ‘I can see that,’ he said.
‘They are more … you know. The young ones are beautiful, but…’ Shafiq was shy and his smile overwhelmed his face.
I know, thought Michael. You can’t imagine that the young ones are really interested in you.
Ebru kept up the attack. ‘Emilio?’
‘My girlfriend,’ he murmured under a sheltering elbow.
‘Oh dear, so unimaginative.’ Ebru was teasing.
‘We are all being that,’ said Shafiq.
‘There is good reason for that,’ Ebru replied. ‘We would all like to sleep with many people. But there are consequences in doing so. I would only do anything if there were no consequences.’
Michael could promise. ‘There would be no consequences. Nothing would change. You couldn’t get sick, you could not get pregnant.’
Ebru chuckled at her own naughtiness. ‘And my boyfriend could not find out?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Then … I would consider sleeping with George Clooney.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Emilio. ‘And not Anthony Edwards?’
‘He’s bald. I couldn’t. Now it’s your turn, for you to say.’
‘Anne Heche,’ said Emilio, with an air of finality and a grin that was frankly smug.
‘Oh, but you know that she is a lesbian?’
Emilio’s smile went hazy and naughty. ‘Hmm, maybe I like that.’
‘Oh. We are learning many things about each other. It is good to be social so that we can all get acquainted better.’ Ebru plucked each word like strings on a guitar. She turned to Michael. ‘OK, boss. This was your idea, now it is your turn.’
Michael grinned and thought: I’m the only one here who can actually answer that question.
He drew it out. ‘Well. First. Hmm. Who would I ask first?’ Michael crossed his arms. ‘I think it would be … Mother Theresa.’
Emilio yelped. ‘Mother Theresa!’
Michael surfed it. ‘Is she not beautiful?’
‘Yeah, but to sleep with?’
Ebru was pleased. ‘That is a very clever answer.’
Emilio couldn’t accept it. ‘It would be like sleeping with ET!’
‘Hmm,’ said Michael. ‘I hadn’t thought of that one.’ He pretended to consider the proposition, rubbing his chin.
Ebru was proud of him. ‘You see, Shafiq, Michael likes the mature women as well.’
‘And then, after that,’ Michael announced, and all conversation stopped: Michael was going to give them more than one? ‘I think it would be … Johnny Weissmüller from the Tarzan movies.’
Ebru’s eyes widened, miming shock, but she was smiling. She already knew.
‘Right on,’ said Emilio, which raised further questions about Emilio.
‘And then it would be…’ Michael took an olive from the dish, and chewed it, and they all waited him out. ‘Taffy Duck from Dumb Duck, Detective, and after that … mmm … a girl from my high school.’
Ebru laughed some more and applauded. ‘You win first place for originality. So as first-place winner, you now have to answer the next question, Michael. Who here in the staff of the project would you sleep with if it was no harm done?’
Michael smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh no.’
Ebru drawled, amused, ‘Oh, but you have to answer. It is the contest.’
‘Oh no I don’t.’
‘I will tell you one other if you tell me.’
‘OK, I will then.’
There was a quick exchange of nervous glances. No one, male or female, wants to know that the boss fancies them. ‘Oh my goodness,’ chuckled Shafiq and mimed getting up to leave. Michael should have studied drama. He looked at each of them in turn. ‘I have to tell the truth … and say … that … I don’t fancy any of you.’
There was a general groan of disappointment.
‘And now Ebru.’
‘No, no. I don’t have to say anything.’
‘You asked me the question and I answered it honestly. You wouldn’t want me to lie, would you? So now it’s your turn.’
Ebru laughed and picked at her fingernails, which did not look as if they had polish on them until you realized they were perfect and translucent. ‘OK. Then it is Sean Connery.’
‘Oh, everybody fancies Sean Connery. I fancy Sean Connery,’ said Emilio. Which was probably just a shade too devil-may-care for it really to touch anything private. Michael studied Emilio: fresh-faced, a big nose, a shock of hair. Pretty, intelligent, lively …
but no.
Icons, thought Michael. Everyone offers up icons. They’re impersonal and safe and they never change and, for the most part, you even get people agreeing with you.
‘I’ve got one,’ said Hugh. The sciences can sometimes produce people who are colourless to the point of invisibility. Hugh had to say it again, amid the general clatter of disappointment at Ebru’s answer.
‘Hugh’s turn, everyone,’ said Michael, who knew enough to keep alert to anything that told him about his staff.
The table quietened down. Hugh was pale, with perfect jet-black hair and a neck so thin that it looked as if it could not support the weight of his spectacles. ‘I saw a girl once, across the big courtyard at UCL. She was beautiful. She wasn’t dressed like a student. She wore what I imagine very chic French women wear to work: a kind of brown jacket and almost a mini-skirt. She had beautiful legs and medium-length hair that was very tidy, and she was talking to one of the professors. No, actually,’ he smiled to himself, and moved the spectacles up his nose, ‘she was listening to him. Really listening to him. This bloke was a bit of a bad-tempered old hippie, but she was obviously asking him really good questions or something. He was taking it all so seriously. And suddenly she said something, and he laughed.’ Hugh looked up and away, his smile growing. ‘He laughed and laughed, and shook his head. And she said something else, and he laughed even more.’
‘And so you have dreamed of her ever since?’ Ebru had the good sense to make that a question.
‘I asked the professor who she was,’ Hugh corrected her gently. ‘And he asked me why, and I said it was because I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.’
Ebru’s face softened and she leaned forward. ‘Oh, it is a beautiful story.’
Hugh whispered, ‘Her name was Constanza Regina de Alencar Vrena. She was from Brazil, but she had an Italian father and she was a business major. So, I went to her class and introduced myself.’
Hugh mimed it. ‘Constanza? Hello, my name is Hugh McPherson and you don’t know me, but I would like to ask you out.’