Geoff Ryman - Lust

No my dear, that’s what you know.

What you know is what the men who embodied you want. Elegance.

Adjusting the perfect pink dress.

Need.

You turn your back for me to do up the zipper and I see the strong back, with two ridges of muscle down either side of the spine. You lift up the mass of your hair to show what every man dreams the back of a woman’s neck is like.

Class.

What clumsy, sweaty, fat, balding men imagine they want from women. They want to merge with elegance and delicacy, gain it by association.

She fiddles with what can only be called an evening bag. She extracts from it a tiny, flat silver case and takes out of it a single white address card.

‘Call me. Please. I need to know I can rely on someone.’

The high heels clack, on a carpet. The high heels control their own sound. The dress swishes like someone shushing a child to sleep. The shoulders wait for their white furs, a hint of shoulder blade drawn onto the broad expanse of her back. He complies with the script, or perhaps his father’s idea of how men should behave, and brings her wrap. She accepts it demurely, in a manner that can only be called gracious. As she walks away towards his front door, her bottom is shaped exactly like an upside-down heart under clouds of fur.

His door opens at the same moment as the neighbour’s door across the hall.

In the doorway opposite stands a little girl. She gapes at Taffy.

A six-foot-tall animated cartoon fills the apartment corridor, and leans over, warm and giggling.

‘Well, hello there,’ says Taffy. ‘Who are you?’ She coos with a voice like melted ice cream.

‘Mum, Mum come quick!’ the little girl cries in panic and turns and lets the door close.

Taffy Duck turns to Michael and shrugs. She blows him a kiss, and as if disturbed by it, the air ripples and closes over her, just as the neighbour’s front door opens again.

Perfect.

At the end of the movie, you find out that she didn’t do the murder. Her boyfriend Bruno did. She really loved the duck and the detective after all. The last shot is a long kiss between realities. But no one ever shows what happens after the ending.

Twenty years before, at the end of the film, Michael stood up and drove back to the condo in Oceanside and told his father, ‘I’m going back home tomorrow.’ His father said nothing. He just stared up at him from the sofa. Michael still remembered his father’s crew cut and his fathomless eyes, full of hatred.

Like the old actor said: the past is a chasm, don’t look down.

Michael stood looking down in his own sitting room, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora. Fancy dress again.

Weeeellllllll, he thought. It was fun and I always was good at acting.

Uh-huh. And you didn’t come and you didn’t have a hard-on so the sex was acting too. She was about as far from the real as you can get. So when do you get real, Michael? How? You don’t even know how, do you? You just keep repeating your youth. And it wasn’t even a happy youth, Michael.

Michael remembered Tony. The real Tony had some kind of sense of what his copy had done. It was one thing to hurt a fictional character. It was another thing to harm someone real. Michael had no business experimenting on people without being able to assess the extent of the trauma he might be inflicting.

But he couldn’t test it first, because he couldn’t call up anyone without being able to assess the damage, etc, etc. And it was not the sort of thing he could test on chickens, unless he was about to make the unwelcome discovery that he lusted after livestock. So how could he gauge what it was like to have a copy made of you? Michael spent a day in an experimental hall of mirrors, until that metaphor gave him his method.

He checked himself into the Hotel Chez Nous. He approached the front desk with some trepidation. He thought that Tarzan would have left the sheets covered in body makeup. Explaining that would be embarrassing.

The clerk was French and had irritating nostrils; they looked as if they were flaring in disgust at an unpleasant odour. He took Michael’s card, and once he had come up on the screen said smoothly, ‘Welcome back, Mr Blasco.’ It seemed there was no record of Max Factor on the linen. The clerk asked the screen, ‘Your usual room, sir?’

It was indeed the usual room. It was so usual Michael could not be sure if it really was the same room or not.

His stomach felt feathery, as if he had missed breakfast. He was, he realized, a little bit afraid of what he was going to do next. He started unbuttoning his shirt, knowing it was a delaying tactic. Every episode was a delaying tactic. He should just forget all of it, go to Alaska Street to get his rocks off and hope the whole thing would go away.

But then he would never know what this thing had come for.

Look, how can it hurt you? How can it hurt you, that is, any more than you have hurt yourself? Just do it and then you’ll know, and that will help you decide to forget it, write it off. Just do it.

Michael called up a copy of himself.

The air wavered, parting to admit the newcomer. He was tall and stocky at the same time. You only noticed on the second glance that he was not fat, but really quite muscular: the hair on the arms disguised the definition.

Immediately, Michael felt sympathy for him. There was an air of caged and baffled decency about him, a slight scowl, a hopeful smile. In fact, he was not at all bad-looking, what Michael called a black Celt: slightly sallow skin, a heavy beard and black eyes.

Michael fancied himself. It’s a well-known syndrome, and it had afflicted Michael far worse than most: daughters meeting their long-lost fathers for the first time; sisters and brothers separated at birth meeting on a course. There are two great triggers for sexual desire: extreme but complementary genetic difference, or extreme genetic similarity. You either find someone completely different to complete the genetic puzzle, or someone who is kindred.

So here he was, dragged back to the seat of his neuroses: himself.

‘Oh,’ said Michael and Michael together.

Then they both chuckled shyly and looked down at their shoes in unison.

‘Um,’ they said in unison, embarrassed. They looked up at each other and two pairs of black eyes sunk into each other.

‘Oops,’ they said, understanding each other perfectly. They wanted to fuck themselves.

With that unspoken agreement, they both began to undress. Love finds faults endearing. For the first time ever, Michael saw that he only combed his rich black unruly hair in front. The back of his head was practically in dreadlocks. The back of one trouser leg was tucked into the top of his socks. He looked back around and it was true of him, too. Oh well, he was a bachelor.

The Angel turned back to face him, and viewed as a stranger, he stirred Michael’s heart with forgiveness for what it means to be human. Here was a man of 38 winters, crepe paper around the corner of his eyes, and it was not until you held him that you realized all that flesh was solid. Somebody should tell him about his choice of knickers. And socks. The white Y-fronts were slipped to one side, and there was a penis that was in no way as tiny as Michael thought: it had a nice round head that was beginning to swell and weep.

‘What …’ they both began, and broke off, with a chuckle and a shrug. They were going to ask: what now? They didn’t need to.

A lover who really understands you? Who really knows what you are thinking?

Michael had not felt such a surge of desire since he was sixteen years old: heedless and irresistible. With no discussion, they were pulled towards each other, to embrace, in the French sense of the term: to kiss.