Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

Someone dragged open the big glass doors to clear the air, and the party moved out into the sheltered garden. Suddenly you could hear air move in trees.

He gave them twenty minutes.

Then the old man blurted out of the bedroom doorway like a coltish teenager. His glass tie was askew; his smile was wet and broad. It was a grin. He looked foxed, as if a shaft of God-light had blazed its way back into his life.

Michael had time to feel happy for him.

Then he saw Tarzan's face. Tarzan was innocent no longer.

His face had curdled with disgust and outrage. His look said to Michael: I want to kill you.

He gave one animal growl and then hurled himself over the banister of the landing. People screamed. Tarzan landed catlike on his four padded feet. Then he jumped up onto the bar, bounded over the heads of the people.

Don't hurt anyone! Michael commanded.

Tarzan jumped up into the fig tree, and gave one long backward yodel, the Tarzan cry. He scampered up the branches. The main trunk bent under his weight, then sprang back and he leapt up and over the brick wall. It was as if he were suspended for just one moment, against the stars.

Then he sank from view. Everyone in the room applauded.

Michael tried to leave.

'But he was magnificent! Who was he?' the beige woman asked. Michael thrust his way past her and through the crowd.

Billy stood back for him at the head of the stairs. He knew something was wrong. 'What happened?' he asked, walking with Michael down to the kitchen.

'I made him do something,' said Michael, and heard his own voice: shaken, sick at heart.

Billy's high heels made a sound like Carmen Miranda, as he ran on ahead to fetch Michael's coat.

'Does he have any other clothes?' Billy asked. 'He'll freeze out there.'

Michael stopped and turned and faced him. 'He's the real thing, OK? He's not in costume.'

Michael stumbled out the front door. In the brick street, he could hear the murmuring of the party. It was cold and he felt lumpen and foolish in his leopard skin. It was a bleak place of old brick warehouses and a single closed pub with lights on and street lamps throbbing yellow like the aftermath of a burglary.

Yes, I can make them do what I want. I can violate them.

'I'm sorry,' Michael said, to the shadows and street lights. 'Johnny? I'm sorry.'

'Not Johnny,' said a voice. It was fierce with pain, affirmation. 'Tarzan. Me Tarzan.'

Michael stood and waited. He could see nothing. He walked forward, out of the light, to the side of the house, in shadow. Tarzan stood there. He hugged his arms and shivered and the top of his head was pressed against the wall.

'I'm sorry,' Michael said again.

Tarzan threw off his hand. 'Tarzan want woman,' he said, accusing.

Michael had made Tarzan let himself be sucked off by an 88-year-old man. It would have been the first time he had had sex, the first time in his fictional universe that sex had ever been present. Love for him had been sexless: kindness, tickling and caresses. It had been the sensuality of childhood. Michael felt the full crushing weight of what he had done.

The physical reality of sex is always a jolt. How much worse if it is the wrong gender, with loose jaws and crumpled flesh.

'Sick. Old. Man,' said Tarzan. All three things were out of kilter.

'He loved you,' Michael tried to explain.

Tarzan snarled in rejection. That? That was not love.

'It wasn't his fault. He didn't know.'

Johnny glowered at him. 'You want that too.'

This was pushing certain buttons from Michael's past. Those buttons pushed deep. 'I didn't touch you. I left you as you were. Did… did you want to do anything with me?'

Johnny/Tarzan considered. 'I wanted what you wanted.' He made a cutting gesture with the edge of his hand. Only that. To hold and be held. Johnny's eyes, fixed on Michael, were now those of an adult. Michael had destroyed any trace of affection in them. That affection could only survive in innocence. Tarzan had grown up. He had wisdom.

Boy looked at Johnny. I don't know what you are, but you have feelings of your own and a mind of your own and you have a right to be happy. Michael thought of Jane swimming naked in darkness in the jungle of innocence. Maybe, he thought. Maybe I just fancy her enough.

Suddenly, there were many urgent questions to be answered.

Do they have to be male?

Can I make more than one at once?

Where do they go back to?

The answers came quickly one after another.

There was a blurring of flesh as if reality had been dipped in turpentine. Flesh smeared like paint. Something flowed sideways out of Tarzan's belly and ribs – skin and bone poured out of him onto the pavement.

Flesh sprouted like a plant in time-lapse photography, growing a leather skirt like leaves, long hair like flowers.

In the time it takes to pipe a musical scale, Jane had risen out of Tarzan. She stood beside him as if fresh from the depths of the river.

She was played by Maureen O'Sullivan. She was tiny, with a face as fragile as china under a mass of wiry hair.

Michael introduced them. 'Jane, Tarzan. Tarzan, Jane.'

Click. They fitted together. They had been married in spirit from the beginning.

Michael spoke quickly to Jane, who always spoke for both of them.

Michael asked, 'Can you go elsewhere?'

Jane's chin thrust out, and her voice was chilled. 'I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.' It was the voice she used with New York lawyers.

'Can you go back to your jungle?' he asked. 'I mean, does it exist somewhere?'

Jane's face softened. Her voice quickened. 'I think we can, yes.'

Back to the treehouse, with its Flintstone home conveniences, waterwheels driven by elephants. Back to a land where animals spoke and Tarzan could talk with them, where lions lived in forests, where chimps and gorillas mingled in the same tribes. A world where there was always another wonder, another lost tribe, another adventure.

Protectively, Jane took the arm of her innocent. 'Come, Tarzan,' she said, her voice cracking like an adolescent's on the love she felt for him. 'We're going home.'

And Michael felt the same ache of yearning he had felt as a feminine boy. He yearned for love, for that particular love between them. He heard the MGM strings, swelling like his heart, like his adolescent sexuality, for them both.

So Michael sent them home. He sent them to their monochrome jungle full of giant trees with conveniently placed trapeze swings. Tired old predators prowled slowly, but were speeded up when anyone was looking. Where love filled their days in pre-lapsarian innocence.

The pub lights rippled again, and the two of them evaporated into fiction, reels of film that had never been shot.

Hypothesis: Angels are a kind of fiction.

Method: call up an Angel who is entirely fictional.

Who killed Dumb Duck?

When Michael was sixteen years old there had been a hit movie called Dumb Duck, Detective. It combined live action with state-of-the-art animation, and it resurrected a great old cartoon character called Dumb Duck.

It was Michael's fourth trip to California and he saw it in floods of tears, to escape. He had to get out of the house. The television was barred to him, and his favourite records had been broken. Michael had fled, wanting never to return, wanting to die.

He sat trying to follow the plot while crawling inside his own skin with anxiety. Dumb Duck was a detective and his partner was a real live human gumshoe played by Clint Eastwood. Dumb Duck asks his partner to follow his wife, Taffy Duck. 'I'm too closssh to thisssh thing.' Dumb Duck sprays everybody every time he talks. Only Clint Eastwood can stand it. Eastwood follows the wife, but she keeps giving him the slip, and you keep on hearing things about her: like she's generous, like she's a good-time girl, like she keeps you guessing. You don't see her, so you assume she's a duck, like her name.