by Geoff Ryman
Billie slumped back, shaking her head, now a slower gesture of stupefaction. ‘Why are you fooled, baby? Why are men fooled by whores? We hate you sons of bitches.’
Michael was saddened. ‘Do you want to go now?’
‘Yes. Now.’
Billie stood up as if her joints were aching. Her eyes were desolate. Suddenly she was back in her polka-dot dress, as if it were a home or a bad habit. Her history, Michael saw, was always dragging her down, behind the beat.
‘Anything I can do for you before you go?’
Her mouth did a disparaging downward turn that was also somehow amused. ‘You keep talking about Angels. When I was a little girl, I always wanted to see an Angel.’
There was a swelling in Michael’s heart that seemed to flower out into the world. There was a crackling sound in the air, as if roots were growing in speeded-up time. The air in the room blossomed. Petals of light unfurled.
In the centre of them stood Henry. The unfurling continued. Wings rose up behind Henry’s back, silver and fleecy. Henry wore a 1930s dinner jacket, and on his arm, ready, was the silver fox fur.
‘I’m just your foil for the evening,’ said Henry.
Billie dipped slightly, calm smoothing her round high brow. She did her downward smile, pleased and gracious.
In December of 1938, Billie played downtown in a club called Café Society. Her new style transfixed the President’s son and white society ladies who had married for money. In 1939, she recorded a draggy song with the Café Society Orchestra about a lynching. Columbia had refused to record it. In Britain the BBC banned it. Nevertheless, the first time the world heard ‘Strange Fruit’, it ground to a halt.
‘My stole, please,’ Lady Day asked the Angel.
Henry held it up for her and she slipped delicately backwards into it. Henry said, ‘I’ll take you to where the band is playing.’
The two of them walked arm in arm towards Michael’s wall. He could see them walking well into the distance beyond the wall. Could he hear an orchestra? He saw Billie laugh and place her head briefly against her escort’s shoulder. Girlish and ladylike, she did a little skip of joy, and told a joke that made the Angel laugh.
Do blondes have more fun?
So.
Michael finally went out and had some fun. There really was, on the face of it, nothing else to do.
He got his final marks for the first year of his degree in Computer Science and they were surprisingly bad: a 68 per cent overall. Despite his hours of programming, Michael had not performed well on the final.
I don’t have the time to study, Michael realized. Suddenly he knew that he wouldn’t start the second year in September. It was as simple as that, as simple as a flower opening. It didn’t even feel as if he had made a decision. He felt relieved by the simplification of his life. He had other things to do.
Michael called up the entire New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. They looked so big and beautiful from a distance. Up close they were bulky and hairy and broken-toothed.
Michael pulled down one pair of black shorts to reveal a round, hard tummy and perfectly ordinary white genitalia. Michael knelt in front of them. The favour was returned. ‘They’re kinda sweet,’ said the player, in mild surprise. ‘It’s not that bad.’
Michael called up a famous Maori player as broad as he was tall. The Maori’s eyes glittered with something between rage and panic. He kept jumping; the miracle spooked him; desire was an affront. Michael assured him that all would be kept secret, that no one would ever know. In practice, the Maori was far more passionately accepting than his teammate had been. To Michael’s surprise, the warrior presented himself face down on the bed. Crowned with a Viagra headache, Michael prised open the boulder buttocks and pushed himself inside. It was like fucking a turtle; the brown back was sectioned with so many muscles it looked like a shell in patterns. The body was not used to being penetrated. The sphincter clenched and squeezed. This had an unfortunate effect of trapping blood in Michael’s cock, making it bigger. The drag of inner wall across the head of the penis made Michael gasp. The Maori’s face was contorted in pain, and suddenly, in one lunge, he extruded Michael’s dick. Michael came while being pushed backwards.
The Maori left Michael with a quick post-coital word. ‘Maori men don’t sleep with each other. It messes us up. We sleep with white guys, and there is less contention. Thanks.’ The Angel gave Michael a hearty athletic slap and rolled to his feet. His air of expectation left Michael no option but to fade him out.
It was a madness of the spirit to call up Harry Houdini. Michael had seen a nearly nude photograph of him in a review of a new biography. Houdini had loved his mother and loved being photographed wearing as few clothes as the law of his day allowed. The body in the photographs was without fat in a way that modern bodies never are. Despite the rounded muscles, Houdini looked malnourished, pale, and as hard as polished marble.
Michael called him and Houdini somersaulted into Michael’s sitting room wearing baggy bloomers. He smelled of the past: sweat, hair oil and sauerkraut. Houdini pulled down his bloomers and begged, ‘Photograph me! Photograph me!’ The genitals were lost in a tangle of fur and looked unused. Michael coaxed him to the sofa. Michael touched his chiselled chest. No, no, it was all too awful, he could not contemplate it, though he writhed in Michael’s grasp with the thrill of being exposed.
All Houdini wanted was to be stripped and bound and photographed. It was a bit cruel, but Michael explained to him, in halting German, that he could never be photographed. Then Michael sent him back to his mother.
Michael’s greatest mistake was great indeed. He conjured up Alexander the Great on a wet Sunday afternoon.
It was just after a phone call from Philip. Philip hadn’t found a place to live yet. Would Michael mind keeping his things a while longer? Michael now wanted nothing more than for every trace of Philip to be gone from his life. ‘I’ve bought a whole new set of crocks,’ Michael said. ‘I need the space. I’ll put yours in the basement, OK?’
‘Yes, all right, thank you,’ said Philip and his voice still chimed: take care of me, protect me. ‘Could you pack them carefully? I mean it would be great if I could just come and collect them and they were all packed.’
‘Come and pack them yourself,’ said Michael. ‘I won’t break anything, Philip, but I do have other things to do!’
The call left him shaken and annoyed. No doubt they both wished their old lives could evaporate painlessly. It wasn’t going to be like that. Michael found himself reaching for the whiskey bottle. He stopped himself. No, Michael, those are the old days.
Energized by anger, he did the craziest thing he could think of. Years before he had read, in floods of tears, The Persian Boy, Mary Renault’s novel. As if tearing the reality of the London flat and his old life into tiny pieces of paper, Michael reached down in time, for Alexander the Great.
He could feel time, its depth and chill, as if he were reaching down the air vents of a seven-storey underground city. He could feel its dank breath on his face. The London air in his flat rumbled and rolled back like a giant stone in a tunnel passageway.
Something tiny and hard and alien thrust itself into his sitting room. Its eyes were wide and staring. It wore a crown of green and its skin was a battered, polished brown like an insect’s shall. For just a moment, Michael thought he had called up a Martian by mistake.
Then he blinked and the thing came into focus as a human being. The crown was blonde hair, filthy and in spikes; the shell was leather armour. The saucer eyes still stared.
Alexander moved like a lizard, in swift halting gestures. Michael almost expected him to flicker a serpent tongue. He demanded something in a high, harsh voice that reminded Michael of dried and broken grass.
When Michael didn’t answer, Alexander strode to the window and looked out. A car sighed past below. It was Alexander who honked like a horn in amazement, and his head jerked upwards, looking at the top of University Senate House, towering high.
Alexander turned, glanced once at the ceiling, marched towards Michael, wrenched Michael’s arm behind his back and pressed a sword against his throat.
Alexander barked at him again like a dog with its vocal cords cut. The stench from the mouth was appalling: rotten teeth, rotten meat and bad wine. Michael backed away, beginning to babble in terror. Alexander the Great sniffed him, or rather the smell of soap and deodorant.
Perhaps it was the scent that stopped him killing Michael. Nothing so flowery could be a threat. Alexander pushed him away, and strode out into the hallway. He saw the front door.
‘I’ll open it for you,’ said Michael.
Alexander the Great knew nothing of doors or locks. He fumbled at the handle and its tiny knob for only a second or two, and before Michael could do anything else, he had jumped back and raised a horny, sandalled foot. Alexander kicked twice at the lock. The door could only open inwards, which meant Alexander had to shatter the lintel. He did it with the third kick, peeling back most of the frame around the door, and springing the hinge mounts free.
Alexander made a grave cry of triumph, and shouldered his way through the gap.
Michael was left panting. He thought of elderly neighbours being pushed out of the way by a drunk, mad, ancient Macedonian, and he whispered Alexander down to his own world. As if the doorway had blinked, the door and lock and hinges were back in place.
Well, thought Michael, at least it puts an inconvenient ex-boyfriend back into perspective.
And just this once, perhaps, a shot of whiskey was not uncalled-for.
Michael remembered his treasured issue of Q magazine, the one with the nude photographs of Terence Trent D’Arby. As an antidote to Alexander, Michael called him up.
In the flesh, honey-coloured and slim, the Angel deferred and demurred. ‘It’s not really my thing but do what you like,’ he said, amused. He smelled of lanolin. Michael rested his head on the soft belly and rolled his mouth back and forth around the apricot-like head of the Angel’s penis, soothing semen out of him. That tasted of apricots too. Michael slept, with his cheek still resting on the Angel’s stomach.
Michael had yet more mistakes in him. The next weekend, he called up the Bay City Rollers. OK, they were a thing from Michael’s youth. They were even weedier in the flesh, and the clothes, all cut-off tartan and pixie collars, were more twee than Michael remembered. They smelled of stale crisps and had spots on their backs and Michael sent them packing before they had fully unpacked.
So he called up two Nuba wrestlers from Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs. They were naked and enormous and frankly had no idea what it was Michael wanted to do with them. So he sat back and watched them wrestle naked in his sitting room. They slammed into each other like bulls, their rolls of muscled flesh rearing up and settling back in waves, and their elongated penises flying like flags of victory.
Michael conjured up a plumber who had ripped him off. Andy, he was called: broad-shouldered, athletic, with cute button eyes. He had a number-one cut and he had known Michael fancied him. Andy took advantage.
Andy tore up the bathroom floor and removed the toilet. Then he disappeared for four weeks. Michael had to hire a chemical john, like it was a camping holiday. Michael still fancied him when he came back, so he let him finish the job and paid him; only then did the new toilet back up and flood.
Such was the power of love that Michael hired Andy to instal the new fireplace, with its fake gas fire. It had a marble pedestal. Andy had to cut the rug, and got the measurement wrong, and cut away too much. Bare 1890s floorboards showed all around the polished stone. Michael traded the old pedestal for a larger one and paid the difference. Andy somehow managed to break the replacement in half. At this point, Michael finally sent him packing.
It was the most terrible abuse of power to make Andy’s Angel lower his trousers and take it. It was as if the whole home-maintenance misadventure was finally worth it: we both get what we want. The Viagra worked a treat. A migraine blurred Michael’s vision of his own cock plunging in and out of Andy’s sculptured derriere. He even had the satisfaction of making Andy come when fucked.
‘This isn’t my usual sort of thing,’ said Andy, confused.
Michael cooed in his ear, ‘Maybe not. But you liked it. Do make sure the real Andy knows that.’
National Geographic had been one of Michael’s few sources of thrills when he was younger. He remembered photographs of bountiful Amazonian Indians. They arrived squat and square with burnished hairless bodies. Michael finally got to see and touch what had been airbrushed out of the colour spreads. The Amazonians were amazingly loving and affectionate. They rolled over and over with him, giggling and teasing and kissing him, and pressing their foreheads against his so that they could stare into Michael’s black eyes. They started to sing to him; rhythmic huffings and clickings and poppings that somehow expressed both energy and longing. When it was time for Michael to go to work they refused to release him. There was a long protracted ritual of goodbye. They clung to his wrists and made elaborate pleading noises. They encircled his midriff and pulled him back down among them, and gave him a breakfast of love. They made him late for the lab.
Michael called up Ernest Hemingway from a photograph of the old gent in his bathtub, proud of the erection that peeked over the top of the tin basin. Michael preened it and stroked it, and found that even after a few minutes’ conversation, Ernest Hemingway was a black hole of boredom. Every single hearty thing he said – God knows, about bulls or fishing or shooting or his war wound or the nurses who tended him – struck Michael as phoney. Hemingway really seemed to think that shooting, fishing and boxing were what made you a man. When not having erections was his real problem.
Then there was the man Michael had glimpsed in the changing rooms of the Oasis public baths when he was ten years old. The man had been blond, pale, athletic and embarrassed, quickly lowering trunks and pulling on underwear. He showed up in his swimsuit, full of early-seventies misgivings. He kept jumping in Michael’s embrace, nervous, uncertain, still not really believing that it was legal or decent.
There was the lead male actor of the old silent film The Crowd, angelically beautiful and distant. And in person, blind drunk.
There was the fruit-and-vegetable man who in 1977 first told Michael about the Clash. Then he had seemed an adult, all of nineteen years old. He had a head of permed hair that looked now like a joke wig, and huge beautiful front teeth. It was his face Michael remembered. The slim and rather indifferent body seemed to melt into the sheets. But he and Michael stayed up late drinking lager, playing the Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, the Vibrators, but they decided, finally. The Buzzcocks were best.
There was his barber, Italian and sweet, on whom Michael had had a crush all through childhood and who, to give the adult Michael a better blow job, pulled out all of his even white false teeth. His gleaming toothy smile had been why Michael fancied him.
There was even the porn star Brad Rodger, who looked impossibly beautiful in publicity photos. In person, he was tiny and slim with a dick that was large only in proportion to the rest of him. Worst of all, he was, not to be prejudicial, quite the stupidest person Michael had ever met.
‘I really would like to do some serious roles.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Michael. ‘You can’t really think you’ll get into serious acting doing the kind of thing you do.’
‘I make up all my own dialogue, you know. I mean, I really improve those parts.’ His voice did not rise and fall like a normal voice. Brad whined, like a caricature of the beautiful nasal stars wiped out by talkies. ‘Like once, you know, they wanted me to say, like, oh give it me, give it me. I mean, what kind of line is that?’
Michael had to admit it didn’t sound particularly original.
‘So I changed it to fuck that ass baby. Fuck it hard. I mean, you know?’
Michael did his best with Brad Rodger, before the Viagra side effects began to grind away behind his eyes. He looked into Brad’s
pale blue blanknesses and decided it was too much like fucking a particularly pretty sheep.
There was the sweet Afghani who had asked him for instructions in the street, with unshaven stubble, and a slightly baffled air. Michael had held him in conversation. His name was Mustafa, and he was here studying engineering. His home was now rubble; his brother had been killed. ‘My heart goes out to you, for being my friend,’ he said. On his forehead was a callus where it habitually touched the prayer rug.
Michael called up Mustafa’s Angel and found his only desire was to leave the innocence undisturbed. They sat eating chocolates and holding hands. And when it came to leave, Mustafa kissed him on the forehead. ‘I love you,’ he managed to say.
Michael was confused. ‘Do you want to make love?’
Mustafa looked surprised, then coy, if not unpleased. ‘Oh no. No, no,’ he said, in a gentle voice a bit like a pigeon’s. ‘No. We … become romantic with each other.’
Michael saw in his eyes, a pleading: I want, but if I do, it cuts out the heart. Leave me the heart.
There had to be somewhere and somehow a way to combine the two, the heart and the body.
You discover two things if you can sleep with anyone. The first is that life is bountiful. It is more bountiful than an orchard at harvest time; more abundant than a pick-your-own field of strawberries that stretches beyond the horizon. The harvest of human genitalia attached to reasonably good-looking, reasonably behaved people is inexhaustible.
No matter how completist you are, you cannot collect the entire set. It grows too quickly: there are a half-billion penises in India alone. Like a kaleidoscope, ever blossoming, more and more genitalia, more and more beauty, unfold at high speed out of the old.
We walk around blind to prevent ourselves seeing this bounty. Its vastness diminishes us; its availability makes not only ourselves but our love seem arbitrary accidents. If we did more than only glimpse it, it would drive us mad.