by Neil Clarke
On the night before I flew back I had some money left over, so I went to see the musical Ceres at New Broadway. I confess I found it dreadful—like most old farts, I can’t fathom music produced after the first three decades of my life—but it was definitely elaborate, with a cast of lithe and gymnastic young dancers in silvery jumpsuits leaping about in a slow-motion ballet that took full advantage of the special opportunities afforded by lunar gravity. At one point the show even simulated free fall, thanks to invisible filaments that crisscrossed the stage allowing the dancers to glide from place to place like objects ruled only by their own mass and momentum. The playbill said that one of the performers, never mind which one, was not a real human being, but a holographic projection artfully integrated with the rest of the performers. I couldn’t discern the fake, but I couldn’t find it in myself to be impressed. We were a few flimsy bulkheads and half a kilometer from lunar vacuum, and to me, that was the real story . . . even if nobody else in the audience of hundreds could see it.
I moved out of my hotel. I tipped my concierge, who hadn’t found me anything about Minnie and Earl but had provided all the other amenities I’d asked for. I bought some stupid souvenirs for the grandchildren, and boarded my flight back to Earth.
After about an hour I went up to the passenger lounge, occupied by two intensely-arguing businesswomen, a child playing a handheld hytex game, and a bored-looking thin man with a shiny head. Nobody was looking out the panoramic window, not even me. I closed my eyes and pretended that the view wasn’t there. Instead I thought of the time Earl had decided he wanted to fly a kite. That was a major moment. He built it out of newspapers he got from somewhere, and sat in his backyard letting out more than five hundred meters of line; though the string and the kite extended far beyond the atmospheric picket-fence perimeter, it had still swooped and sailed like an object enjoying the robust winds it would have known, achieving that altitude on Earth. That, of course, had been another impossibility . . . but my colleagues and I had been so inured to such things by then that we simply shrugged and enjoyed the moment as it came.
I badly wanted to fly a kite.
I badly wanted to know that Minnie and Earl had not left thinking poorly of us.
I didn’t think they were dead. They weren’t the kind of people who died. But they were living somewhere else, someplace far away—and if the human race was lucky it was somewhere in the solar system. Maybe, even now, while I rode back to face however much time I had left, there was a mindboggling little secret being kept by the construction teams building those habitats out near the Jovian moons; maybe some of those physicists and engineers were taking time out from a week of dangerous and backbreaking labor to spend a few hours in the company of an old man and old woman whose deepest spoken insight about the massive planet that graces their sky was how it presented one hell of a lovely view. Maybe the same thing happened when Anderson and Santiago hitched a ride on the comet that now bears their names—and maybe there’s a little cottage halfway up the slope of Olympus Mons where the Mars colonists go whenever they need a little down-home hospitality. I would have been happy with all of those possibilities. I would have felt the weight of years fall from my bones in an instant, if I just knew that there was still room for Minnie and Earl in the theme-park future we seemed to be building.
Then something, maybe chance, maybe instinct, made me look out the window.
And my poor, slowly failing heart almost stopped right then.
Because Miles, the golden retriever, was pacing us.
He ran alongside the shuttle, keeping up with the lounge window, his lolling pink tongue and long floppy ears trailing behind him like banners driven by some unseen (and patently impossible) breeze. He ran if in slow motion, his feet pawing a ground that wasn’t there, his muscles rippling along his side, his muzzle foaming with perspiration. His perpetually laughing expression, so typical of his breed, was not so much the look of an animal merely panting with exertion, but the genuine mirth of a creature aware that it has just pulled off a joke of truly epic proportions. As I stared at him, too dumbstruck to whoop and holler and point him out to my fellow passengers, he turned his head, met my gaze with soulful brown eyes, and did something I’ve never seen any other golden retriever do, before or since.
He winked.
Then he faced forward, lowered his head, and sped up, leaving us far behind.
I whirled and scanned the lounge, to see if any of my fellow passengers had seen him. The two businesswomen had stopped arguing, and were now giggling over a private joke of some kind. The kid was still intently focused on his game. But the eyes of the man with the shiny head were very large and very round. He stared at me, found in my broad smile confirmation that he hadn’t been hallucinating, and tried to speak. “That,” he said. And “Was.” And after several attempts, “A dog.”
He might have gone on from there given another hour or so of trying.
I knew exactly how he felt, of course. I had been in the same place, once, seventy years ago.
Now, for a while, I felt like I was twelve again.
I rose from my seat, crossed the lounge, and took the chair facing the man with the shiny head. He was wide-eyed, like a man who saw me, a total stranger, as the only fixed constant in his universe. That made me feel young, too.
I said, “Let me tell you a little bit about some old friends of mine.”
This one’s for Jerry and Kathy Oltion, the Minnie and Earl of the future.
2002
John Kessel’s fiction includes the recently published Pride and Prometheus,the novels The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and Freedom Beach (with James Patrick Kelly), and the collections Meeting in Infinity, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His fiction has received the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With James Patrick Kelly, he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, and Kafkaesque.
Kessel teaches American literature and fiction writing at North Carolina State University, where he helped found the MFA program in creative writing and served twice as its director. He lives with his wife, the novelist Therese Anne Fowler, in Raleigh.
STORIES FOR MEN
John Kessel
ONE
Erno couldn’t get to the club until an hour after it opened, so of course the place was crowded and he got stuck in the back behind three queens whose loud, aimless conversation made him edgy. He was never less than edgy anyway, Erno—a seventeen-year-old biotech apprentice known for the clumsy, earnest intensity with which he propositioned almost every girl he met.
It was more people than Erno had ever seen in the Oxygen Warehouse. Even though Tyler Durden had not yet taken the stage, every table was filled, and people stood three deep at the bar. Rosamund, the owner, bustled back and forth providing drinks, her face glistening with sweat. The crush of people only irritated Erno. He had been one of the first to catch on to Durden, and the room full of others, some of whom had probably come on his own recommendation, struck him as usurpers.
Erno forced his way to the bar and bought a tincture. Tyrus and Sid, friends of his, nodded at him from across the room. Erno sipped the cool, licorice flavored drink and eavesdropped, and gradually his thoughts took on an architectural, intricate intellectuality.
A friend of his mother sat with a couple of sons who anticipated for her what she was going to see. “He’s not just a comedian, he’s a philosopher,” said the skinny one. His foot, crossed over his knee, bounced in rhythm to the jazz playing in the background. Erno recognized him from a party he’d attended a few months back.
“We have philosophers,” the matron said. “We even have comedians.”
“Not like Tyler Durden,” said the other boy.
“Tyler Durden—who gave him that name?”
“I think i
t’s historical,” the first boy said.
“Not any history I ever heard,” the woman said. “Who’s his mother?”
Erno noticed that there were more women in the room than there had been at any performance he had seen. Already the matrons were homing in. You could not escape their sisterly curiosity, their motherly tyranny. He realized that his shoulders were cramped; he rolled his head to try to loosen the spring-tight muscles.
The Oxygen Warehouse was located in what had been a shop in the commercial district of the northwest lava tube. It was a free enterprise zone, and no one had objected to the addition of a tinctures bar, though some eyebrows had been raised when it was discovered that one of the tinctures sold was alcohol. The stage was merely a raised platform in one corner. Around the room were small tables with chairs. The bar spanned one end, and the other featured a false window that showed a nighttime cityscape of Old New York.
Rosamund Demisdaughter, who’d started the club, at first booked local jazz musicians. Her idea was to present as close to a retro Earth atmosphere as could be managed on the far side of the moon, where few of the inhabitants had ever even seen the Earth. Her clientele consisted of a few immigrants and a larger group of rebellious young cousins who were looking for an avant garde. Erno knew his mother would not approve his going to the Warehouse, so he was there immediately.
He pulled his pack of fireless cigarettes from the inside pocket of his black twentieth-century suit, shook out a fag, inhaled it into life and imagined himself living back on Earth a hundred years ago. Exhaling a plume of cool, rancid smoke, he caught a glimpse of his razor haircut in the mirror behind the bar, then adjusted the knot of his narrow tie.
After some minutes the door beside the bar opened and Tyler Durden came out. He leaned over and exchanged a few words with Rosamund. Some of the men whistled and cheered. Rosamund flipped a brandy snifter high into the air, where it caught the ceiling lights as it spun in the low G, then slowly fell back to her hand. Having attracted the attention of the audience, she hopped over the bar and onto the small stage.
“Don’t you people have anything better to do?” she shouted.
A chorus of rude remarks.
“Welcome to The Oxygen Warehouse,” she said. “I want to say, before I bring him out, that I take no responsibility for the opinions expressed by Tyler Durden. He’s not my boy.”
Durden stepped onto the stage. The audience was quiet, a little nervous. He ran his hand over his shaved head, gave a boyish grin. He was a big man, in his thirties, wearing the blue coveralls of an environmental technician. Around his waist he wore a belt with tools hanging from it, as if he’d just come off shift.
“‘Make love, not war!’” Durden said. “Remember that one? You got that from your mother, in the school? I never liked that one. ‘Make love, not war,’ they’ll tell you. I hate that. I want to make love and war. I don’t want my dick just to be a dick. I want it to stand for something!”
A heckler from the audience shouted, “Can’t it stand on its own?” Durden grinned. “Let’s ask it.” He addressed his crotch. “Hey, son!” He called down. “Don’t you like screwing?”
Durden looked up at the ceiling, his face went simple, and he became his dick talking back to him. “Hiya dad!” he squeaked. “Sure, I like screwing!” Durden winked at a couple of guys in makeup and lace in the front row, then looked down again: “Boys or girls?”
His dick: “What day of the week is it?”
“Thursday.”
“Doesn’t matter, then. Thursday’s guest mammal day.”
“Outstanding, son.”
“I’m a Good Partner.”
The queers laughed. Erno did, too.
“You want I should show you?”
“Not now, son,” Tyler told his dick. “You keep quiet for a minute, and let me explain to the people, okay?”
“Sure. I’m here whenever you need me.”
“I’m aware of that.” Durden addressed the audience again. “Remember what Mama says, folks: Keep your son close, let your semen go.” He recited the slogan with exaggerated rhythm, wagging his finger at them, sober as a scolding grandmother. The audience loved it. Some of them chanted along with the catchphrase.
Durden was warming up. “But is screwing all there is to a dick? I say no! “A dick is a sign of power. It’s a tower of strength. It’s the tree of life. It’s a weapon. It’s an incisive tool of logic. It’s the seeker of truth.
“Mama says that being male is nothing more than a performance. You know what I say to that? Perform this, baby!” He grabbed his imaginary cock with both of his hands, made a stupid face.
Cheers.
“But of course, they can’t perform this! I don’t care how you plank the genes, Mama don’t have the machinery. Not only that, she don’t have the programming. But mama wants to program us with her half-baked scheme of what women want a man to be. This whole place is about fucking up our hardware with their software.”
He was laughing himself, now. Beads of sweat stood out on his scalp in the bright light.
“Mama says, ‘Don’t confuse your penis with a phallus.’” He assumed a female sway of his hips, lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes: just like that, he was an archetypal matron, his voice transmuted into a fruity contralto. “‘Yes, you boys do have those nice little dicks, but we’re living in a post-phallicsociety. A penis is merely a biological appendage.’”
Now he was her son, responding. “‘Like a foot, Mom?’”
Mama: “‘Yes, son. Exactly like a foot.’”
Quick as a spark, back to his own voice: “How many of you in the audience here have named your foot?”
Laughter, a show of hands.
“Okay, so much for the foot theory of the penis.
“But Mama says the penis is designed solely for the propagation of the species. Sex gives pleasure in order to encourage procreation. A phallus, on the other hand—whichever hand you like—I prefer the left—”
More laughter.
“—a phallus is an idea, a cultural creation of the dead patriarchy, a symbolic sheath applied over the penis to give it meanings that have nothing to do with biology . . .”
Durden seized his invisible dick again. “Apply my symbolic sheath, baby . . . oohhh, yes, I like it . . .”
Erno had heard Tyler talk about his symbolic sheath before. Though there were variations, he watched the audience instead. Did they get it? Most of the men seemed to be engaged and laughing. A drunk in the first row leaned forward, hands on his knees, howling at Tyler’s every word. Queers leaned their heads together and smirked. Faces gleamed in the close air. But a lot of the men’s laughter was nervous, and some did not laugh at all.
A few of the women, mostly the younger ones, were laughing. Some of them seemed mildly amused. Puzzled. Some looked bored. Others sat stonily with expressions that could only indicate anger.
Erno did not know how he felt about the women who were laughing. He felt hostility toward those who looked bored: why did you come here, he wanted to ask them. Who do you think you are? He preferred those who looked angry. That was what he wanted from them.
Then he noticed those who looked calm, interested, alert yet unamused. These women scared him.
In the back of the room stood some green-uniformed constables, male and female, carrying batons, red lights gleaming in the corner of their mirror spex, recording. Looking around the room, Erno located at least a half dozen of them. One, he saw with a start; was his mother.
He ducked behind a tall man beside him. She might not have seen him yet, but she would see him sooner or later. For a moment he considered confronting her, but then he sidled behind a row of watchers toward the back rooms. Another constable, her slender lunar physique distorted by the bulging muscles of a genetically engineered testosterone girl, stood beside the doorway. She did not look at Erno: she was watching Tyler, who was back to conversing with his dick. “I’m tired of being confined,” Tyler’s dick was saying.
<
br /> “You feel constricted?” Tyler asked.
He looked up in dumb appeal. “I’m stuck in your pants all day!”
Looking down: “I can let you out, but first tell me, are you a penis or a phallus?”
“That’s a distinction without a difference.”
“Au contraire, little man! You haven’t been listening.”
“I’m not noted for my listening ability.”
“Sounds like you’re a phallus to me,” Tyler told his dick. “We have lots of room for penises, but Mama don’t allow no phalluses ‘round here.”
“Let my people go!”
“Nice try, but wrong color. Look, son. It’s risky when you come out. You could get damaged. The phallic liberation movement is in its infancy.”
“I thought you cousins were all about freedom.”
“In theory. In practice, free phalluses are dangerous.”
“Who says?”
“Well, Debra does, and so does Mary, and Sue, and Jamina most every time I see her, and there was this lecture in We-Whine-You-Listen class last week, and Ramona says so too, and of course most emphatically Baba, and then there’s that bitch Nora . . .”
Erno spotted his mother moving toward his side of the room. He slipped past the constable into the hall. There was the rest room, and a couple of other doors. A gale of laughter washed in from the club behind him at the climax of Tyler’s story; cursing his mother, Erno went into the rest room.
No one was there. He could still hear the laughter, but not the cause of it. His mother’s presence had cut him out of the community of male watchers as neatly as if she had used a baton. Erno felt murderously angry. He switched on a urinal and took a piss.