Hari Kunzru - Transmission

She swilled out her mouth with water and hunted for her clothes. Arjun lay on his side, one thin arm outstretched where she had left it. Squashed against the pillow, his face looked childish and undefined. She could not find anything in it, or in the section of shoulder and chest exposed by the turned-down quilt, to remind her why it had been so important to come by at 2 a.m. and have sex with this man. Physically she felt battered but mentally things were worse, her ordinary landscape of thoughts and feelings reduced to a scoured bleakness, a wasteland strewn with the shattered remnants of whoever she had been before she got high. It was the traditional moment to swear never to touch ecstasy or coke or alcohol again. It was the feeling that would work on the kids. Don’t do it, OK? Don’t feel like me.

She gathered her purse and groped for her second shoe among the nameless horrors around the bed. When it had finally been located, she tiptoed out and closed the door, realizing as she stepped into the brutal daylight that she didn’t have her shades. Or her car. She stumbled down the driveway and, before buzzing herself out, leaned her cheek for a moment against the cool metal of the security gate. Then, in a halting b-movie-zombie shuffle, she headed in the direction she judged most likely to contain coffee.

Four hours later Arjun opened his eyes into a warm summer Sunday morning. He felt fresh and relaxed, suffused with a sense of the rightness of things. Ordinarily he slept in kurta-pyjama, but this morning he was naked. Unable for the moment to remember why, he turned on his side and spotted the little wrinkled slug of a used condom among the socks and foil trays on his floor. From this point of origin his memory expanded in a rush, bringing with it a sense of frank amazement at what had taken place in his apartment (in this very bed!) only a few hours previously.

The detail was too intense to face without embarrassment. The sheer bodiliness of it all. Wetness. The smell of skin. He remembered feeling out of control, which in itself seemed indecent. The memory had the confused quality of a dream.

And yet. The things she had done for him. Without help he would probably have never managed it. Now Chris had showed him, solved the uncomputable problem of finding another person to touch and be touched in return. He felt humble, grateful.

But also guilty. He got up and switched on the computer and ate breakfast still naked, listening to a desi talk-radio stream. So who was Chris? She was his lover. He was a man with a lover or, to use the shortened version, a man. This seemed good, though not pure. Masticating a cherry poptart, he found his mind turning to Papaji.

A week or so before he died, Arjun’s grandfather, already confined to his sickbed, had indicated that he wished to pass on certain advice to his grandson. Arjun, who was only eight, was not normally allowed into Papaji’s room and his mother made a great performance of presenting him to the old man. Arjun was shy. He had liked Papaji, but now the smelly shape in the bed frightened him. Squirming, he was led up close so that the frail figure had only to turn its head to speak. From under the covers a thin arm extended. A quivering hand fluttered over his cheeks and forehead. ‘Beta,’ came the whisper, ‘God bless you. You are a good boy. I want you to remember two things. Always conserve your semen. It is your strength. And —’ Arjun never got to hear the second thing because his mother dragged him indignantly out of the room. ‘His mind is wandering,’ she snapped. ‘Go and play.’ When he sneaked back in, Papaji was asleep.

Denied half his bequest of ancestral wisdom, Arjun had always given particular weight to the half he had. He had rarely participated in competitive sport, but knew that if he ever did, he would be certain to practise abstinence on the night before a crucial game. He had almost always steered clear of Aamir’s dirty pictures and assumed that when the time came, his sexual partner (he never thought in the plural) would be chosen with meticulous care. Continence had always seemed like the proper thing; holding back from the vicious cycle of seminal accumulation and expenditure was the mark of a mature man. Yet now at the first opportunity he had fallen headlong into incontinence. What did that make him?

And what did it make her? He knew what his mother would say.

Set against that were other arguments: the blue snakes coiled around Chris’s arm, the sway of her breasts as she ground back and forth over his pubis.

It occurred to him that since Aamir would be jealous, it would be fun to write him an email. He started, then stopped. For the moment he wanted to keep his news to himself. That morning he could not concentrate on his projects and spent most of the time lying on his bed, drawing out the ‘afterwards’ feeling like wire. It was a clear day and the sunlight filtered through the leaves of the tree outside his window, warming his skin, keeping alive the sense of being touched. Once or twice he dialled Chris’s number, but it went straight to voicemail.

Chris spent the afternoon with Nic, huddled on the couch watching eighties teen movies on cable. The scale of the disaster was becoming clear. Though Nic was asking no questions, mired in his own hangover, she could still feel a tautness about him, a clenched thing he got whenever he suspected she had been with someone else. Inquisitions were against the rules, but all the same he was wondering. She snuggled furtively up to him, pulling the quilt tighter around her.

It had been such a mess. Arjun’s erection had come and gone: when she first touched it, when she rolled on the condom. As she finally lifted herself up and tucked his penis inside her, the gesture felt (of all things) motherly. Instantly she lost her bearings and a grim self-consciousness lit up their struggling like a flare. She rocked back and forward and the drugs made her feel that someone else, not her, was having sex in that bombsite of a room. By shutting her eyes she could block out Arjun’s ridiculous slack-jawed expression, but she could still hear his throttled yelps of surprise, feel his tentative hands on her. She looked back down and his face suddenly crumpled like a piece of brown paper. It was over. She felt more or less the same as before, except now there was nowhere else to go, no way to squeeze any further sensation out of her Saturday night, and she didn’t feel like a sexual adventurer, just limp and tired, a rag of a girl held up by the drugs like a damp shirt on a clothes hanger, forced to carry on with consciousness when all she wanted to do was throw the off-switch and fade to black.

Even if he had not been preoccupied that Monday morning, Arjun would not have noticed the atmosphere at the labs. To most other people the tension would have been obvious. He dived happily into his testing routines, unfazed by the way the senior analysts kept shutting themselves in the conference room to make phone calls or have hurried conversations. He knew Darryl had been called away to a meeting, but did not spot the doleful way his colleagues were staring at Darryl’s office door, at certain tech news and financial websites, at the floor. Concentrated stares. People looking at their future.

He sent mail to Chris, but she didn’t respond. Probably busy, he decided. At the end of the day he went home as usual and worked solidly on his projects until one in the morning. Usually he kept a chat client open on his desktop, but that night he wanted to concentrate, which was how he came to miss the storm of Virugenix-related discussion in the AV forums. Before he went to bed, he tried Chris’s number again, now concerned that she did not pick up. By Tuesday morning he was probably the only Virugenix employee still unaware that the company had issued a profits warning, the stock price had tanked, and the board had pledged to cut operating costs across all divisions. Everyone else, the whisperers and the starers, knew what that meant.