by Geoff Ryman
‘You’re going to tell Mom?’
‘No. You are.’
‘Me?’ Michael sounds like a scared little boy.
‘Don’t you think she has a right to know? Are you ashamed, Michael? Are you ashamed of what you did?’
‘Yes,’ says Michael, miserably. ‘Please don’t tell Mom.’
‘You should never do anything you’re ashamed of, Michael. It’s five hours to New York, say eight to London.’ His father counts forwards from 3.00 AM. ‘It’ll be eleven in the morning, right Michael?’
His father backs away into the hallway, and walks towards the phone in the kitchen. Michael follows, wretchedly.
‘Please Dad, please don’t. Don’t do this, Daddy, please.’
His father gets out his tiny, khaki-coloured pocket diary and starts looking up the number.
‘Dad please, look, I’ll go to a psych, I’ll do anything, but please don’t tell Mom.’
‘You sure as heck will be going to a psychiatrist.’ Dad listens to the dial tone.
Michael remembers shoes. He kept outgrowing shoes, and his Mom on her teacher’s salary had to find money for shoes. They always bought the specials or nearly out-of-dates in supermarkets. Her boss told her to smarten up how she dressed when she was teaching but she never buys clothes for herself.
‘Everything you do has consequences,’ his father says. ‘It’s time to grow up.’ His voice changed. ‘Hello Mavis, this is Louis. No, he’s not fine. If you wanna know, he’s just done something pretty godawful. Michael. Tell your mother what you did.’
Michael is sobbing helplessly now, and is shaking his head, no, no. He can’t even imagine saying the words.
‘You start growing up now, Michael.’ His father holds out the phone like a club.
‘No.’ Michael is wheedling, like he’s wet himself in public.
‘Michael.’ His father is starting to get angry.
Michael howls, and covers his face, and bolts from the room. The gesture is perfectly sincere, but Michael is also aware of very slightly overplaying it. He is offering up the shame and guilt and self-disgust his father wants him to feel. He runs out the front door, and down the steps.
‘Michael! Michael!’ his father shouts after him.
Michael has forgotten the key and the security gate is locked.
‘Michael!’
He hears the apartment door slam, and feet on the steps. The gate and fence are metal poles with something like spikes on the top, with crossbars only at the top and bottom. Michael jumps and hoists himself up. His shirt catches and tears. He stumbles and kicks and topples forwards, hands reaching out to take the blow. Grit is driven into them and his knee thumps hollowly on the sidewalk. He stands up and his knee is weak under him. He has to hobble along the sidewalk. It runs parallel to the fence, and on the other side of the fence his father strolls alongside him, on his way back to the condo staircase.
‘I’ll keep it simple, Michael. I’ll just tell her what’s happened. I won’t make any trouble. You’ll have to face her sooner or later, boy. And yourself.’
And his father climbs up the staircase to the waiting phone.
Michael hobbles on towards the beach. He can hear the sea, shushing like a mother to quiet his fears. ‘Oh man, oh man.’ Michael says to himself, over and over.
At 3:15 AM there are birds singing somewhere and there is a steely hint of dawn. He stomps flat-footed down the steps from the cliffs onto the beach. There is no one, just security lights blazing in shrubbery, street lights, the odd light bulb over the driveway into holiday apartments.
What Michael wants to do is flee. He wants to slip back into the apartment when his father is at work and pack up his things, maybe take some food, and not go back to either home. He can’t stand the thought of being back in either home. He just wants to disappear.
He flings himself down onto a hollow in the sand, in the dark, hoping that no one can see him.
The breakers keep pummelling. They keep coming back, one after another. You imagine a little kid in them, and he keeps getting knocked over, and the kid wonders why they don’t stop. They pull out for a little while, and the little kid thinks oh good, it’s gone, I can swim now, and then the wave hits him again.
There is no way this is going to get better. Everything, everything is going to change. He saw his mother’s long face. What is she going to make of this? What is he going to tell her? She knows I wanted to live with Dad. Now she’ll know why. She probably knows that now, right now. And she’ll know that Dad will want her to pick up the pieces again. It would be hard enough for her to find out I’m gay, but that I was crazy enough to make a pass at my own father. That I would be that dumb, that sicko.
Of all the guys in the world, why your father?
Because he’s beautiful. Michael saw his father’s face, his body, and the colour of his skin. He remembered the smell of him, the smell of his mouth, the feel of his lips. The love, the sexual love flooded back. In the end losing his father hurt the most, or rather, losing the dream of him. That’s why I did it; that’s why I dreamed myself into a hole. I could have shut up, not told him, lived my little dream. For how long, Michael? He would have started to ask you about girlfriends. He might have noticed my eyes straying. Sooner or later something like tonight would have happened.
Michael faced inevitability. This was always going to happen, he realized. From the moment I started making my plans, this was waiting for me.
So it really wouldn’t have been any good if I’d been smarter. Dad never would have loved me.
Michael started to weep again, for that lost dream; it had been his life over the last two months, and he had no other life to mourn. He’d already left his old one.
Michael must have fallen asleep in the end. Suddenly there was sunlight. Seagulls made exhilarating noises, one after another like the bells of many churches. There was a paved road along this stretch of beach and all along it old ladies were walking their dogs, or businessmen were jogging in grey tracksuits. For a moment it was beautiful, and then Michael remembered. He looked at his watch. It was 6:10. What if Dad came looking for him?
Michael stood up and started to hobble further down the beach towards Carlsbad. Between Carlsbad and Oceanside there was a marsh, a wildlife reserve with a lagoon and birds. The main road raced through the middle of it on a causeway. So did the railway on a separate series of bridges. If Michael slipped under the railway, he could hide from the road, amid the reeds. Then maybe about ten o’clock he could go and have breakfast at Café 101. He could pack some stuff and take off.
Well maybe. How was he going to take off? By bus? How much money did he have? What was he going to do? Say: Hey, Dad, I’m running away from home, can I borrow the car? It began to feel like another dream. He had developed distaste for dreams.
He felt exposed, naked in the wide expanse of beach and brilliant sunshine. He turned off the beach and limped as fast as he could up onto the railway. He scanned the road, slipping on gravel, for any sign of a blue Ford. He hobbled along the tracks, visible all the while from the road.
Finally he saw the pathway under the railroad. He skidded down the bank, and ducking low, scampered under the bridge.
The lagoon was lined with the backs of expensive homes and the railway. There was no road anywhere near it. Michael squatted on the banks and looked at the insect patterns imprinted on the creamy mud. He waited.
He remembered his Dad used to bring him here, to look at the birds, and spend an hour or two fishing. It was always hot and still. What do you think of your son now, Dad? Michael asked the memory of his fishing father. The sun pounded like unrelenting boredom.
Hungry, Mikey? You’ve still got the price of a Huevos Rancheros in your pocket. In a week you won’t.
Just how much of a baby are you, Michael? This is what a five-year-old does. He decides to run away and gets halfway down the block before realizing that he can’t cope.
Michael slapped his own face again. He had t
o slap something, he was so mad, so bereaved, so ashamed. He couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand being inside his own skin. He seethed under his skin, like oil in a joint being roasted in the oven. You’re not hitting hard enough, Michael. He really slammed himself on the cheek. It went numb. He picked up a stone and drove it as hard as he could into the centre of his face. His nose started to bleed. Drops of blood dotted his trousers.
Stupid fucking fairy, what the stupid fucking hell good does that do? He broke down again, and started to cry. It was late and getting hot and he was sick from hunger, bleeding, and lack of sleep. Ten AM. Maybe it was safe to get going.
A train roared overhead, hooting and rocking the track from side to side like a crib. Michael toyed with the idea of waiting for the next train and walking under it. That might even look like an accident.
The thought of Huevos Rancheros made him decide he wanted to be around. And that made him laugh and snuffle at the same time. All I’ve got to look forward to is a 101 breakfast.
He strode alongside the tracks, perfectly safely into Oceanside. He climbed up another bank onto a side street and walked among all the whispering ranch-style homes, with their lawns and succulent ground cover being automatically watered. Michael was watered too. He washed the blood off his face.
He turned up the street to the café and went in the back door from the parking lot, and the first person he saw in a booth was Dad. Michael thought about turning and running and realized that he didn’t have the strength.
‘Hiya Mikey,’ said his father, in a voice that seemed to come from far away across a valley. ‘Have a seat.’
And you thought you were being so smart: he knew you’d come here all the time. Michael sat down. The booths had tan upholstery and individual jukeboxes at each of the tables. They didn’t work.
‘You been in a fight? Who did that to you?’ His father’s voice really was different, it was higher and more gravelly at the same time. His sunglasses were different, old-fashioned, dark green, not mirrored at all.
Michael considered making up a story about how homeless people had chased him and beaten him up. But he didn’t have the heart for it.
‘Me,’ he said. His own voice was far away too and now he understood why: neither of them wanted anyone to hear.
‘You. You did that to yourself?’ His father’s mouth opened and shut helplessly. Michael couldn’t see his eyes.
Then his father reached across and touched the bridge of Michael’s nose, and made him turn his head. His father’s implacable face remained mostly unmoved but the voice shifted down an octave. ‘You’ve broken your nose, Michael.’
In that gesture, Michael knew it hadn’t gone away. The tips of his father’s fingers were soft and cool. This guy was his ideal man – big, masculine, kind. Michael still wanted to marry this guy. He wanted to take him in his arms, and kiss him, and live with him. Whatever this was, it would not go away.
‘What’ll you have to eat?’ his father said, business-like.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Yes you are, Michael.’
Michael’s head hung in shame. What could he do to make up for it? Starving himself wouldn’t do any good, if a broken nose couldn’t. He asked for a Huevos Rancheros.
His father paused at this and seemed to ruminate. It seemed to Michael he was thinking: I thought we’d be doing this a lot. He pretended to study the menu.
‘I … uh didn’t tell your mother everything. I just outlined some of the basics. I couldn’t say it, Mikey. I just couldn’t say it about you.’ He kept looking at the menu the whole time.
Michael felt relief, and felt cowardly for being relieved. ‘I will tell her. After a little while.’
‘I bet,’ said his father, darkly.
Another voice spoke. ‘Hi, what’ll it be for you folks?’ The waitress was too old and thin to fit the stereotype but her smile was huge and professional.
‘Huevos Rancheros. Two big cups of coffee. Maybe a Danish.’
The waitress had picked up on something. Her smile went rigid and her eyes skidded sideways towards Michael. There was a bruise across his face now, he could feel it, and his clothes were torn. She looked back at Michael’s father with suspicion. We look like it, thought Michael, for the first time we look like an older faggot and a poor kid he’s picked up and is bribing with a meal. His ears burned.
For the first time ever his father asked, ‘You wouldn’t be able to serve a beer this hour of the morning would you?’
Two days later, Michael was on the aeroplane. His mother greeted him wearily at the airport, circles under her eyes. She was wearing a beige mac in summer; it was drizzling a bit. She took him in her arms and gave him a hug that was meant to say: you’re still my son, whatever happens.
‘Welcome home, Michael.’
What the hug actually said was: Michael, you will never go home.
Home will always be with the man you love, and nothing else will ever be the same again. The externals of his old life, everything he had thought he would escape, closed over him.
As for his father, well, early to mid-forties is a bad time in the military. If you start slipping, your career almost certainly will end. They give you courses in making the transition. It’s still too big a shock for many people, to go from an ordered environment where people respect each other and work together for common aims, to a world in which loneliness and justified suspicion is the basis on which everyone must live their lives.
Dad got taken in by an investment scheme on the Salton Sea. How, they reasoned, can you ever lose on property? Look at what happened in Palm Springs. The folks who bought there early doubled, even trebled their investment. Now, this is Palm Springs with water, a lake even. A salt lake.
Michael’s legacy from his Dad was an empty plot of land, on a named street without a single house on it.
His father never could handle booze. He just couldn’t metabolize the stuff quickly. Nor, at forty-eight, could he get a job anywhere. He tried to stay in shape, hung around with floozies more and more, sold the condo in Oceanside for something right in the heart of where all the whores hung out. He drank and whored, which on the coast of California almost certainly means he also did drugs. He started to get fat.
He shacked up with a tough little Mexican lady. This most American of men was continually asked for his passport or identity papers. When he passed out on the street people started talking about illegal immigrants. Finally he moved back to LA, and tried to set up in his brother’s law firm. He wore a suit and tried to find something to do: accounts, sales, even typing. He had a fight with his brother, and that’s when he and Michael’s mother lost touch. Michael’s uncle said he’d heard that Louis was working as a gardener now, in Beverly Hills. ‘A sad case. Not something we like to talk about, really.’
When Michael was in his twenties, his mother got a letter. Michael’s father had died. The family were terribly sorry, they’d only found out themselves weeks before. They’d collected his ashes from the cremation agency and scattered them on the vast training grounds of Camp Pendleton.
‘They may be sorry, but why couldn’t they have told us when the service was?’ Michael’s mother looked baffled. Michael did not say: they didn’t want us, Mom. They don’t want me. They know what happened, and you don’t.
Michael had a fantasy that lodged in his brain. He would return to it, even when he lived with Phil in their first full hormonal rush of love. He returned to it even now, when he loved nobody.
His father hadn’t died. They made a mistake, and misindentified someone else’s body. And one night, Michael is at an international biology congress, in LA, and for some reason it’s raining, but there is a bar next door to his hotel. Michael doesn’t know it’s a gay bar, he has no idea. He just goes in to escape the unruffled anonymity of the hotel.
And he’s leaning against the bar, and something about all these men together, big and butch or pretty and merry, starts alarm bells ringing. He’s just beginning
to realize what kind of bar it is, when a warm tender voice behind him says, ‘Hello, Michael.’
He turns and his father is there, alive. He’s still a big man, white-haired and a bit portly now. His skin is sallow, rather than brown, but he’s stylish, all in black, and his eyes sparkle with love and regret. He’s braver now, more willing to accept the truth. Michael books him into the room next to his in the hotel and what happens next varies, slightly, according to the scenario.
So what do you want, Michael?
Henry waited until long after Michael had finished speaking. Then he crawled up the bed in blue jeans and brown shirt and snuggled up to him.
‘You know, Michael, I saw a TV programme once. There’s a syndrome. Brothers and sisters who have never seen each other before, or fathers and daughters who meet for the first time as adults. They often fall in love. It’s how we’re designed. Either we go for someone who’s totally different from us genetically. Or we fall in love with someone close to us genetically, because it’s worked before. So it’s not that you were perverse or bizarre or sick or just plain dumb. It’s what people do.’
Michael was not to be mollified. ‘So why doesn’t everyone fall in love with their father?’
Henry sighed, and kissed him on the forehead. It was as if they had been lovers for decades, comfortable and relaxed and kind. ‘The programme said that what makes the difference is living with them when you’re young. You have to know them in childhood. There’s a kind of barrier kicks in then. In China they sometimes choose a bride for a baby boy … she’s a baby girl … and they grow up together and almost always they hate the thought of getting married. They feel it’s incest.’
Michael lay still. ‘So what do I do about it?’
‘What you’re doing now. You talk about it. You put it behind you.’
Michael laid his head on Henry’s chest. ‘Anything else?’
‘You could fall in love with someone.’ Henry was smiling at him.