by Geoff Ryman
Then Picasso took Michael’s hand. It was evidently unpremeditated, thoughtless, sincere.
Michael found himself grateful and slightly weak at the knees. So, evidently did Mr Miazga. He settled back in his chair from relief, and his chest expanded, and his eyes zipped left towards his wife, and then widened, once. See? he seemed to say. I told you. They are lovers. You get all excited over a man who is homosexual.
After they left, outside on the landing Picasso promised, ‘I will have the wife.’ His voice was airy, amused, and he spoke out of the corners of his mouth as if Madame Miazga were a cigar.
The new flat in Camden was dark and in disorder. Street lights outlined the crags and valleys of jumble. Michael was given no time for regrets. Picasso herded him to their unmade bed, driven by a lust that Michael knew that he himself had not inspired. Picasso wanted Marta.
Picasso dozed and then woke up with a snort. He flung off the single summer sheet, and padded into the sitting room, leaving Michael in the bed. Lights blazed around the edges of the bedroom door, and there was a sound of assembling, plugging in, mild swearing. Michael finally admitted that he was awake and would not sleep. He stumped downstairs into the sitting room and saw Picasso at 2.00 AM, sitting in front of the computer playing Myst. His bare buttocks hung over the edge of the chair as round as peaches.
‘Hmm,’ said Picasso. ‘This is not three-dimensional … you just move closer to the drawing.’ On his right, there was a pad and scrawled sketches of the Myst world populated with drunken people and smiling goats. Their smiles were drawn as a series of single unbroken spirals describing cheeks. Michael glanced down over Picasso’s body. Picasso worked erect.
‘Coming back to bed?’ murmured Michael.
‘I don’t know,’ grunted Picasso.
In the morning, the bed was cold and when Michael went downstairs Picasso still sat in front of the computer with a cup of cold coffee and strewn stale bread. Had he been up all night?
‘You eat too much,’ Picasso announced, in a bad mood. ‘You will get fat. You will become a drunken boor.’ He sighed, as if it were inevitable. ‘Do not expect me to cook you breakfast,’ he said. He slip-slopped his way out to the roof garden, carrying his coffee, escaping Michael. It was summer, warm, with beautiful light over the ferns. Michael joined him and Picasso said, ‘You missed work yesterday and the day before. If you were more dedicated, you would do a better job.’
Picasso wanted him out of the flat. Michael showered, and deliberately took his time over coffee and yoghurt and bananas, and pointedly washed up – not a Picasso habit – and left at his usual time feeling bloated around the eyes and saddle-sore.
No one at work mentioned that Michael had missed two days. He began to explain that he had had to move flats suddenly. No one asked him any questions about it. Ebru and Emilio were quiet, brisk and business-like, as if Michael were a customer they would attend to in a moment. He filed slides and looked at data, and by the end of the day realized that he had spent it alone.
When he got back home, he found Picasso at the computer, now wearing Michael’s best Japanese bathrobe. The game was noisier and the images moved. A tiny alien leapt and jumped and avoided being fried by robots.
Picasso kept playing. ‘She is softened and ripe and if you are a man at all you will have her,’ he said. Then he looked up. His eyes were angry and hungry. ‘Do it because I tell you. I will like fucking you better if I think you are a real man.’
Upstairs, Mrs Miazga was in Michael’s bed. She was huge, pink and dishevelled, her hair in Pre-Raphaelite waves. The room smelled of her hair, and of her body, opened and reopened during the course of the day.
‘Visit me,’ she said in a warm and friendly voice, and held out her arms. She looked dazed and dazzled, her blue eyes warmed like a southern sea. She smiled in complicity. I know you are lovers, we will be his lovers together, love me too.
Well, thought Michael. He could just surf it. Let himself be carried by the wave of adventure.
He went into their new bedroom, stuffed with boxes, some of them full of shoes and vinyl records, and found his sponge bag. He crunched his Viagra into a bitter, tongue-curling paste, to make it work faster. Then he cleaned his teeth to rinse away the bitterness.
The taste of Mrs Miazga’s mouth was edged with hormones and a scent he did not quite like. But her huge soft, smooth body was a wonderful maternal harbour. Michael weighed into her, waves rippling around him. There was an excitement about being where Picasso had been, in the folds of flesh still moist from him. Perhaps it was the Viagra kicking in early. Whatever it was, it joined forces with Michael’s reluctance to have sex with a woman. Conjoined, they had an unexpected effect. Michael rode Mrs Miazga for forty-five minutes. He did not come, but she did, three times. ‘My God, you are super lover,’ she said in fractured English. Her fingers strutted pleased up the side of his arm. ‘I can tell, you have had many women through your hands.’
Picasso was standing in the doorway. He chuckled approvingly. Much of the time his eyes were kind, as now. ‘My big friend loves life,’ he said proudly. He mimicked the gesture of Madame’s fingers, and strode forward. ‘Now I show you,’ he said. With no manners, Picasso pulled Michael away from her. He grinned down at the woman. ‘I am back,’ Picasso said, his teeth bared, and she looked up at him adoringly conquered.
Michael was relieved to be relieved. He went downstairs, clothes draped over his arms, showered and sat in the sitting room. He poured himself a whisky and ate crisps. For the next two hours, the man he loved was in the next room fucking someone else. Michael turned on the television, low. He was just as alone as when he had been living with Phil. OK, you learn. Having a lover, husband, whatever, does not stop you being alone.
Michael had power. He could get rid of Picasso whenever he liked. He could walk in there now and banish him, leaving Marta stranded and shocked.
Except that that had not been the deal. Picasso had given him what he asked for in exchange for life. And why did Picasso want life so very much?
On the sofa, on a sketchpad, there was a drawing of Michael. It was one continuous line of charcoal, a single gulp of information, stylish and twitching as a cat’s tail. It was a drawing of a man who was windswept as if at sea, eyes narrowed in the face of some invisible force. The tiny Chinese eyes each consisted of a single charcoal line, but you could tell they were about to weep from wind blown directly onto the cornea. The mouth was downturned, enduring and elated, somehow just about to smile, as one smiles in a storm, from exhilaration. It was a drawing of a man caught up in a miracle. It was a new Picasso.
And it would disappear the moment Michael sent Picasso away.
Madame Miazga darted into the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her. The water suddenly hissed and she began to sing as she showered.
Picasso emerged in Michael’s boxer shorts, strutting like a welterweight champion. He slapped his belly and announced, ‘We go drinking!’
Madame threw on her light and translucent dress. She smiled warmly at both of them, and giggled with delight. Only a certain hardness in the contrast between her blue eyes and the mascara around them gave a clue that this was a woman who had mastered academic politics. She put a longer finger that was exactly at 90 degrees to the floor against her freshly glossed lips. Sssh, it meant, this is our secret. Her eyes went soft, forgiving, pleading, in memory of her husband. She loved Mr Miazga, but perhaps found him too fastidious.
They separated in the street, waving good night. In a local Camden pub, Picasso played cards and smoked and joined in a game of darts with fat bearded men in black t-shirts and earrings of whom Michael was very slightly afraid. Picasso’s cigarette balanced on his lips all night, and he nodded brusquely when his turn came. When others played he sipped beer, looking serious and constructively occupied.
They left at eleven o’clock and for some reason Picasso was angry with Michael.
‘Those people were trash,’ he said. ‘They have no conversation.
Why did we go there?’
Michael was dismayed at the unfairness of it. ‘Because you wanted to!’
‘Are you alive or dead? Don’t you know where the interesting quarters are? Or do you live inside your computer? I will have to find the interesting people. I can see that I will have to do everything. I even have to find women for you. I even have to cook! What do you do well, eh? Anything?’
Without waiting for an answer, Picasso flicked open the double lock on their door and raced up the steps ahead of Michael. Michael listened to the rapid fire of Picasso’s feet. He felt leaden. He did not want to go in. It was not his house or his bed. Come on, Michael, he told himself, you have nowhere else to go. But his legs simply would not move.
Michael had thought he was happy and that Picasso liked him. Michael thought: he can snatch away happiness like a scarf. The reversal felt complete. It felt as if all love were gone and the relationship over. Like a ship in warp drive, space seemed to travel around him, and Michael arrived at the opposite pole of the universe. He imagined moving out, selling the flat, sending Picasso back. He considered going direct to a hotel to spend the night. He wanted the affair to end. Michael’s eyes ached with loss.
‘Henry?’ he asked the night air. ‘Henry, I need you.’
There was a tap on his shoulder and he turned around, and there was Henry, hair in his eyes, waiting.
‘Henry, I’m in love and it’s all going wrong.’
Henry looked sad while smiling. ‘He’s impossible.’
‘Yes.’
‘He says things that are so unfair you can’t believe he said them. They’re outrageous.’
Michael found himself pausing, and waiting. The set-up was too neat. Henry had something to say. ‘That’s about it.’
‘Everyone’s impossible to live with, Michael. Even saints. I lived with a saint for years. Most of the time he was wonderful, but sometimes all he seemed to care about was his research.’ A smile kept playing about Henry’s face.
Picasso was something like a saint and nothing like one.
‘There’s nothing for it, mate. You just hammer each other into each other’s shape. And either it gets comfortable or it doesn’t.’
Michael half-chuckled. ‘You’re not much comfort, you know that?’
Henry reached up, and there, in the street in Camden Town, started combing Michael’s hair with his fingers. He looked up and down Michael in tenderness. ‘You look great.’
‘I feel awful.’
‘You look … adult.’ Henry’s eyes sparkled. It was love. Love of a particularly airy, open, fleshless kind.
And Michael felt a kind of hesitation.
Henry gave Michael a little push towards the door. ‘Go on. Have it out with him. See who wins.’
Michael hesitated. He would rather stay there, with Henry.
‘I’m an Angel, I won’t always be here. You mustn’t get dependent on me.’ Henry started to walk away, determined. ‘Go on. It’s down to you.’
There was nothing for it. Michael went in.
Upstairs, Picasso had changed into boxer shorts, and was reclining on Michael’s sofa bed. ‘Miguel Blasco,’ he said, with real affection. ‘I like you really. Come here.’
Michael yelped. ‘You just told me I wasn’t good for anything!’
Picasso chuckled at himself as if he had done something silly and amusing, like trying to roast potatoes in the fridge. ‘I did not like that pub.’ He patted the sofa. ‘Sit next to me.’
Picasso Mindfuck, really! Michael’s eyes felt heavy, like two hard-boiled eggs. He hated feeling the surrender and gratitude that welled up in him. He wanted to stay angry. He shouldn’t allow himself to be jerked this way and that like a puppet.
Picasso stood up. ‘Don’t be mad over something so small. Mmm?’ Picasso encircled Michael with his arms and stood on tiptoe to kiss Michael’s shoulder. ‘See? I am so small to be mad over.’
Picasso had given Michael a choice: he could go on being angry and have a major row, which would almost certainly fail to change how Picasso behaved. Or, he could weaken as he wished to do, be carried off by Picasso’s return to kindness.
Picasso seemed to sense him relenting. ‘My maker of Angels.’
I’m in love and I’m helpless, thought Michael. I am shooting whitewater rapids of love. All I can do is hang on and try to avoid the rocks.
Picasso leaned around and kissed him, and the river bore Michael away.
* * *
The apartment never recovered from the move. As fast as Michael tried to put it in order, Picasso created another row of jam jars full of brushes in the bathroom, or a pile of printed help files on the floor. There were heaps of opened boxes from amazon.com. Half-read books were left open and face down on the floor. Sandals, socks and paint-stained newspapers stayed where they fell. It had never struck Michael until then that he himself was basically a tidy person.
‘Leave it, it will continue to protect the floor,’ said Picasso, bemused by Michael’s protests.
‘It’s a horrible mess,’ said Michael, going firm.
‘That is a matter of aesthetics,’ Picasso replied. ‘I will not be bullied by you over aesthetics.’
Something shuddered in Michael and went still.
Paintings began to appear, stuck to the walls with Blu Tack: gouache on crumpled paper: a parrot in blue and green and red; a vaguely African-looking pattern in black and ochre with white dots in swirls, a tunnel of blue and white light. A sculpture in Blu Tack was stuck to the coffee table, a kind of amused Isis with hips and breasts, and a shocked open mouth. Michael asked who it was supposed to be. Picasso had to repeat several times before Michael penetrated his accent: it was a Blu Tack Geri Halliwell.
Picasso developed a bewildering affection for the Spice Girls: he played the CD over and over.
‘Why don’t you stop?’ Michel asked him.
‘I will when I understand it,’ said Picasso. In self-defence, Michael bought him a compilation of Asian dance, Anohka, and Madonna’s album Ray of Light. He bought him Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt. ‘They are no good, they try to be intelligent,’ Picasso said, dismissing everything else except S Club 7 and Steps.
Picasso loved CDs. In the world music section of HMV he found compilations of Europop and Brazilian brega. He played CDs incessantly. ‘They do the same to music, make it perfect but inhuman.’
Picasso loved Pot Noodles and disposable cameras; he was entranced by Play Station and tried to get Michael to buy one and a samurai game called Soul Blade. ‘Tush. You buy rubbish that does not move. I want Ade’s Oddyssey. I want Sonic Hedgehog!’ He kept buying glossy magazines – Q, Maxim, Elle, Vanity Fair, Empire. He would tear them to pieces and Blu Tack together mosaics out of fragments of shiny, laminated print. Discarded corpses of shredded journals began to litter the flat. He made himself little bracelets of Blu Tack, he stuck shards of magazine colour to his T-shirt with Blu Tack. In the corners of the room or running along the picture rail were little families of creatures not entirely unlike mice made out of Blu Tack.
‘You practically breathe Blu Tack,’ said Michael. He was being driven, slowly and without cessation, out of his box. The first of his blinding headaches arrived, after a glass of wine on a Friday evening.
Three weeks later, Picasso called him to the screen. ‘The first,’ he said.
It took a moment for Michael to understand what he was looking at.
It was pieces of his room. When Michael moved, flesh-coloured fragments moved in shards. The videoconferencing camera on top of the computer was feeding what it saw live to the hard disk, and those images, refracted and broken, were made part of a series of mirrors. The series of mirrors formed a face, in the same way that feathers form wings.
It was a portrait of Michael, in fractured, virtual mirrors.
The head could be turned, rotated and sometimes, as if at random, the entire face would blossom outwards, the mirrors separating and reassembling into a portrait from a greater distance.
‘It’s your face when I fuck you,’ said Picasso.
Each time the portrait reassembled, its eyes would gleam brighter and a smile would assemble in sword shapes.
‘The audience can choose all angles, but each time they choose, the program will force the image of you closer and closer to joy. You look like that. When I fuck you, you have a joyful face. You look like a young man!’
The face assembled and reassembled every time something moved in the real world.
‘Then you come.’ Picasso mimed something explosive with his hands, fingers outstretched. ‘You will break up into pieces of light. And you are reincarnated.’
No one had ever done anything like that about or for Michael before. ‘Do you…’ Michael wondered how to proceed. ‘Do you love me?’
Picasso shrugged. ‘I ponder you. You have this miracle, and you don’t use it because I satisfy you. There is an economy about that which I like.’
The face on the screen grew brighter and brighter and more joyful, unavoidably, pre-programmed. That was what Picasso wished for him.
Picasso said, ‘You have nothing. No money, no morals, no interests, no conversation, no friends to speak of. But you Are.’
‘What am I?’
‘There is no word for what you are. You just Are. Ah, watch now!’
And the mirrored face dissolved.
Michael’s heart swelled like a satsuma growing wings, and rose up as if wanting to be born, jamming in his throat with love.
When Michael came home at night, the whole apartment would smell of eggwhite, turpentine and glue. Suddenly the walls were papered with new Picassos, their colours like tropical glazed pottery: greens, reds, blues and yellows. The whole flat seemed to trampoline off itself with joy, bouncing back and forth between its own exhilarating surfaces, the spaces between gaping with amazement. The only possible response walking into the room was: who the fuck has done this?
When Mr Miazga came to give Picasso his lessons, he was stunned, his mouth going slack and sad. It’s not fair, his eyes seemed to say, that my rival should be such a man.