Ryman-Paradise-interior-ebook
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Mom sighs and says, “Well I suppose we’re stuck with it now.”
Yeah Mom, you kinda are. Aren’t you suppose to say something mimsy like, Ron honey you know we still love you? Not my mom. Oh no. Saying exactly what she thinks is Mom’s way of being real, and her being real is more important to her than anything else. Like what I might be feeling.
So I dig back at her. “That’s a shame, Mom. A few years later and I would have been embryo-screened and you could have just aborted me.”
Mom just sniffs. “That was a cheap shot.”
Yeah, it was. NeoChristians are about the only people who don’t abort homosexual fetuses. Everybody else does. What do they call it? Parental choice.
So Mom looks at me with this real tough face and says, “I hope you think you’ve given yourself a happy birthday.” And that’s all the conversation we have about it.
My little brother is pretending he isn’t there and that he isn’t happy. My little brother is shaped like a pineapple. He’s fat and he has asthma and he’s really good at being sneaky and not playing by the rules. I was always the big brother who tolerated stuff and tried to help Mom along. Her good little boy. Only now I’m samesex. Which to a NeoChristian Mom is like finding out your son likes dressing up as a baby and being jerked off by animals. Sometimes I think Neo is just a way to find new reasons to hate the same old things.
What really dents my paintwork is that Mom is smart. What she likes about Neo is that it’s Darwinian. Last summer she’s reading this article “Samesex Gene Planted by Aliens?” And she’s rolling her eyes at it. “The least they could do is get the science straight,” she says. “It’s not one gene and it’s not one part of the brain.” But then she said, “But you gotta wonder, why is there a gene like that in the first place?”
My mom really does think that there’s a chance that homos are an alien plot. Please do not fall over laughing, it hurts too much.
Ever since the Artifacts were found, people have been imagining little green men landing on this beautiful blue planet and just going off again. So people scare themselves wondering if the aliens are about to come back with a nice big army.
Then about five years ago, it turned out that the genes that control sexual orientation have some very unusual sugars, and all of a sudden there’s this conspiracy theory that aliens created the samesex gene as some kind of weapon. Undermine our reproductive capacity. Even though when they landed we were all triblodites or whatever. Maybe having homos is supposed to soften us up for conquest. Hey, if the aliens invade, I promise, I’ll fight too OK?
On my way to school I ring Billy and tell him. “Mom found out. She read your mail.”
Billy sounds stripped for action. “Did she go crazy?”
“She went laconic. You could just hear her thinking: you gotta own this, Ronald, you did this to yourself, Ronald.”
“It’s better than crying.”
Billy’s in Comportment class. He believes all that shit. To be fair to him, that “you gotta own this” was me digging at some of the stuff he comes out with. That stuff pisses me off. In fact right now, everything pisses me off. Right now, it’s like my guts are twisting and I want to go break something.
Comportment says you’ve got to own the fact people don’t like you, own the fact you got fat hips, own the fact you’re no good in math, own the fact that glacial lakes are collapsing onto Tibetan monasteries. Comportment says hey, you’re complaining about the Chinese treatment of Tibet, but what have you personally done about it?
It’s like: we’ll make everybody who has no power feel it’s their fault if stuff goes wrong, so the big people don’t have to do anything about it.
My mom hates me being a homo. She likes being a big tough lady even more. So she, like, doesn’t get all upset or cry or even say much about it. Being a tough lady is her way of feeling good about her son being an alien plot.
Billy is too focused on being Joe Cool-and-Out to cut me any slack. His stab at being sympathetic is “You should have just told her straight up, like I told you.”
I say back to him in this Minnie Mouse voice, “I acknowledge that you are absolutely right.” That’s another line he’s used on me.
He’s silent for a sec and then says, “Well, don’t be a bitch with me about it.”
“It’s my authentic response to an emotionally charged situation.” Still sounding like Minnie Mouse.
I’m mad at him. I’m mad at him because he just won’t unbend. Nobody unbends. It’s bad comportment.
Billy comes back at me. “This is just you going back to being a baby. Only you don’t have tantrums, you just whine.”
“Billy. My NeoChristian Mom now knows I’m samesex. Could I have some sympathy?”
“Who’s died, Ron? Anybody dead around here? Did you lose any limbs in the detonation? Or are you just getting all significant on my ass?”
“No. I’m looking for a friend. I’ll try and find one, you know, someone who likes me and not my dick?”
And I hang up.
Like I said, I’m so mad.
I’m mad sitting here right now. I got my stupid kid brother who’s been giggling all day, like it’s such an achievement he likes pussy. I got my Mom doing the household accounts and her shares and her rollovers, and she’s bellowing into the voice recognition and it’s like: look at me having to do all the work around here. I’m realizing that I’ve probably screwed up my relationship with Billy and wondering if I really am the incredible wimp he thinks I am.
It’s like everything all around me is Jell-O and it’s setting into lemon-line, which I hate. I’m out. My brother knows and will try to give me a hard time, and if he does I’ll slug his fat face. My Mom is being hard ass, and so I’m going to be hard ass back. I’m not an athlete, I’m not Joe Cool-and-Out, and I’ll never go to Mom’s Neo seminars.
I’m just sitting here all alone thinking: how can I win? What can I do?
I’ll never be able to be a good little boy again. That is not an option. I’m not interested in being political about who I sleep with. I don’t sign up to anything, I don’t believe anything, and I don’t like anybody, and I don’t think anybody likes me.
Hey. A fresh start. Happy birthday.
So, twenty-six today!
I got up at 3:00 A.M. and holoed over to the Amazon to say hi to João. He looked so happy to see me, his little face was just one huge smile. He’d organized getting some of his sisters to line up behind him. They all waved and smiled and downloaded me a smart diary for my present. In Brazil, they still sing Happy Birthday.
Love conquers all. With a bit of work.
I called João later and we did our usual daily download. His testosterone levels were through the roof, he’s getting so stimulated by his new job in the Indian Devolved Areas. He’s about to go off to Eden to start his diplomatic work. He looks so sweet in a penis sheath and a parrot’s feather through his nose. Standard diplomatic dress for a member of the Brazilian Consular Team.
I love him I love him I love him I love him.
I am so god damned lucky. They didn’t have embryo-screening on the Amazon. Hey! A fellow sodomite. We’re an endangered species everywhere else. Must eliminate those nasty alien genes.
Then I had to go and tell him about how my project was going. And he looked glum.
“I know you don’t like it,” I told him.
“It feels wrong. Like genocide.” He pronounces it jenoseed. “Soon they will be no more.”
“But it’s not genocide. The babies come out hetero, that’s all. No more samesex, no more screening, just happy babies. And the adults who are left can decide for themselves if they want to be cured or not. Anyway, the Neos say that we’re the genocide.”
“You don’t need to help them.”
“João. Baby. It won’t affect us. We’ll still have each other.”
“The Indians say it is unwise.”
“Do they? That’s interesting. How come?”
“They say
it is good to have other ways. They think it is like what almost happened to them.”
That rang true. So me and João have this really great conversation about it, very neutral, very scientific. He’s just so smart.
Before the alien gene thing, they used to say that homos were a pool of altruistic non-reproducing labor. It’s like, we babysit for our siblings’ kids and that increases the survival potential of our family’s genes. Because genes that make it less likely that you’ll have kids should have died out. So why was it still here?
João tells his usual joke about all the singers in Brazil being samesex, which is just about true. So I say, wow, the human race couldn’t reproduce without Dança do Brasil, huh? Which was a joke. And he says, maybe so.
I say like I always do, “You know, don’t you, baby?”
His voice goes soft and warm. “I know. Do you know?”
Yes. Oh yes, I know.
That you love me. We love each other.
We’ve been saying that every day now for five years. It still gives me a buzz.
It was a big day at the lab, too. The lights finally went on inside Flat Man.
Flat Man is pretty horrible, to tell you the truth. He’s a culture, only the organs are differentiated and the bones are wafer-thin and spread out in a support structure. He looks like a cross between a spider’s web and somebody who’s been hit by a truck. And he covers an entire wall.
His brain works, but we know for a fact that it performs physical functions only. No consciousness, no narrative-of-the-self. He’s like a particularly useful bacterial culture. You get to map all his processes, test the drugs, maybe fool around with his endomorphins. They got this microscope that can trail over every part of his body. You can see life inside him, pumping away.
Soon as I saw him, I got this flash. I knew what to do with him. I went to my mentor, wrote it up, got it out, and the company gave me the funding.
People think of cells as these undifferentiated little bags. In fact, they’re more like a city with a good freeway system. The proteins get shipped in, they move into warehouses, they’re distributed when needed, used up and then shipped out.
We used to track proteins by fusing them with fluorescent jellyfish protein. They lit up. Which was just brilliant really since every single molecule of that protein was lit up all the time. You sure could see where all of it was, but you just couldn’t see where it was going to.
We got a different tag now, one that fluoresces only once it’s been hit by a blue laser. We can paint individual protein molecules and track them one by one.
Today we lit up the proteins produced by the samesex markers. I’m tracking them in different parts of the brain. Then I’ll track how genetic surgery affects the brain cells. How long it takes to stimulate the growth of new structures. How long it takes to turn off production of other proteins and churn the last of them out through the lysosomes.
How long it takes to cure being homo.
It’s a brilliantly simple project, and it will produce a cheap reliable treatment. It means that all of João’s friends who are fed up being hassled by Evangelicals can decide to go hetero.
That’s my argument. They can decide. Guys who want to stay samesex like me … well, we can. And after us maybe there won’t be any more homosexuals. I really don’t know what the problem with that is. Who’ll miss us? Other samesexers looking for partners? Uh, hello, there won’t be any.
And yes, part of me thinks it will be a shame that nobody else will get to meet their João. But they’ll meet their Joanna instead.
Mom rang up and talked for like seventeen hours. I’m not scared that I don’t love her anymore. I do love her, a lot, but in my own exasperated way. She’s such a character. She volunteered for our stem-cell regime. She came in and nearly took the whole damn program over, everybody loved her. So now she’s doing weights and is telling me about this California toy boy she’s picked up. She does a lot of neat stuff for the Church, I gotta say, she’s really in there helping. She does future therapy; the Church just saw how good she is with people, so they sent her in to help people change and keep up and not be frightened of science.
She tells me, “God is Science. It really is, and I just show people that.” She gets them using their Personalized Identity for the first time, she gets them excited by stuff. Then she makes peanut-butter sandwiches for the homeless.
We talk a bit about my showbiz kid brother. He’s a famous sex symbol. I can’t get over it. I still think he looks like a pineapple.
“Both my kids turned out great,” says Mom. “Love you.”
I got to work and the guys had pasted a little card to the glass. Happy Birthday, Ron, from Flat Man.
And at lunchtime, they did this really great thing. They set up a colluminated lens in front of the display screen. The image isn’t any bigger, but the lens makes your eyes focus as if you are looking at stuff that’s ten kilometers away.
Then they set up a mini-cam and flew it over Flat Man. I swear to God, it was like being a test pilot over a planet made of flesh. You fly over the bones and they look like salt flats. You zoom up and over muscle tissue that looks like rope mountains. The veins look like tubular trampolines.
Then we flew into the brain, right down into the cortex creases and out over the amygdala, seat of sexual orientation. It looked like savannah.
“We call this Flanneryland,” said Greg. I guess you could say I have their buy-in. The project cooks.
I got back home and found João had sent me a couple of sweet little extra emails. One of them was a list of all his family’s addresses … but my best address is in the heart of Ronald Flannery.
And I suppose I ought to tell you that I also got an encryption from Billy.
Billy was my first boyfriend back in high school, and it wasn’t until I saw his signature that I realized who it was and that I’d forgotten his last name. Wow, was this mail out of line.
I’ll read it to you. Ron, it starts out, long time no see. I seem to recall that you were a Libra, so your birthday must be about now, so, happy birthday. You may have heard that I’m running for public office here in Palm Springs—well, actually, Billy, no I haven’t, I don’t exactly scan the press for news about you or Palm Springs.
He goes on to say how he’s running on a Save Samesex ticket. I mean, what are we, whales? And who’s going to vote for that? How about dealing with some other people’s issues as well, Billy? You will get like two hundred votes at most. But hey, Billy doesn’t want to actually win or achieve anything, he just wants to be right. So listen to this—
I understand that you are still working for Lumière Laboratories. According to this week’s LegitSci News they’re the people that are doing a cure for homosexuality that will work on adults. Can this possibly be true? If so could you give me some more details? I am assuming that you personally have absolutely nothing to do with such a project. To be direct, we need to know about this treatment: how it works, how long a test regime it’s on, when it might be available. Otherwise it could be the last straw for an orientation that has produced oh, … and listen to this, virtue by association, the same old tired list … Shakespeare, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Melville, James, Wittgenstein, Turing … still no women, I see.
I mean, this guy is asking me to spy on my own company. Right? He hasn’t got in touch since high school, how exploitative is that? And then he says, and this is the best bit, or are you just being a good little boy again?
No, I’m being a brilliant scientist, and I could just as easily produce a list of great heterosexuals, but thanks for getting in a personal dig right at the end of the letter. Very effective, Billy, a timely reminder of why I didn’t even like you by the end and why we haven’t been in touch.
And why you are not going to get even a glimmer of a reply. Why in fact, I’m going to turn this letter in to my mentor. Just to show I don’t do this shit and that somebody else has blabbed to the media.
Happy effin birthday.
And why do I feel that when this project is finished I’m going to do something to give something back. To whom?
To, and this is a bit of a surprise for me, to my people.
I’m about to go to sleep, and I’m lying here, hugging the shape of João’s absence.
Today’s my birthday and we all went to the beach.
You haven’t lived until you bodysurf freshwater waves, on a river that’s so wide that you can’t see the other bank, with an island in the middle that’s the size of Belgium and Switzerland combined.
We went to Mosquerio, lounged on hammocks, drank beer, and had cupu-açu ice cream. You don’t get cupu-açu fruit anywhere else, and it makes the best ice cream in the world.
Because of the babies I had to drink coconut milk straight from the coconut … what a penance … and I lay on my tummy on the sand. I still wore my sexy green trunks.
Nilson spiked me. “João! Our husband’s got an arse like a baboon!”
It is kind of ballooning out. My whole lower bowel is stretched like an oversized condom, which actually feels surprisingly sexy. I roll over to show off my packet. That always inspires comment. This time from Guillerme. “João! Nilson, his dick is as big as you are! Where do you put it?”
“I don’t love him for his dick,” says João. Which can have a multitude of meanings if you’re the first pregnant man in history and your bottom is the seat of both desire and rebirth.
Like João told me before I came out here, I have rarity value on the Amazon. A tall branco in Brazil … I keep getting dragged by guys, and if I’m not actually being dragged, then all I have to do is follow people’s eye lines to see what’s snagged their attention. It’s flattering and depersonalizing all at one and the same time.