Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

'Hiya Mikey,' said his father, in a voice that seemed to come from far away across a valley. 'Have a seat.'

And you thought you were being so smart: he knew you'd come here all the time. Michael sat down. The booths had tan upholstery and individual jukeboxes at each of the tables. They didn't work.

'You been in a fight? Who did that to you?' His father's voice really was different, it was higher and more gravelly at the same time. His sunglasses were different, old-fashioned, dark green, not mirrored at all.

Michael considered making up a story about how homeless people had chased him and beaten him up. But he didn't have the heart for it.

'Me,' he said. His own voice was far away too and now he understood why: neither of them wanted anyone to hear.

'You. You did that to yourself?' His father's mouth opened and shut helplessly. Michael couldn't see his eyes.

Then his father reached across and touched the bridge of Michael 's nose, and made him turn his head. His father's implacable face remained mostly unmoved but the voice shifted down an octave. 'You've broken your nose, Michael.'

In that gesture, Michael knew it hadn't gone away. The tips of his father's fingers were soft and cool. This guy was his ideal man – big, masculine, kind. Michael still wanted to marry this guy. He wanted to take him in his arms, and kiss him, and live with him. Whatever this was, it would not go away.

'What'll you have to eat?' his father said, business-like.

'I'm not hungry.'

'Yes you are, Michael.'

Michael's head hung in shame. What could he do to make up for it? Starving himself wouldn't do any good, if a broken nose couldn't. He asked for a Huevos Rancheros.

His father paused at this and seemed to ruminate. It seemed to Michael he was thinking: I thought we'd be doing this a lot. He pretended to study the menu.

'I… uh didn't tell your mother everything. I just outlined some of the basics. I couldn't say it, Mikey. I just couldn't say it about you.' He kept looking at the menu the whole time.

Michael felt relief, and felt cowardly for being relieved. 'I will tell her. After a little while.'

'I bet,' said his father, darkly.

Another voice spoke. 'Hi, what'll it be for you folks?' The waitress was too old and thin to fit the stereotype but her smile was huge and professional.

'Huevos Rancheros. Two big cups of coffee. Maybe a Danish.'

The waitress had picked up on something. Her smile went rigid and her eyes skidded sideways towards Michael. There was a bruise across his face now, he could feel it, and his clothes were torn. She looked back at Michael's father with suspicion. We look like it, thought Michael, for the first time we look like an older faggot and a poor kid he's picked up and is bribing with a meal. His ears burned.

For the first time ever his father asked, 'You wouldn't be able to serve a beer this hour of the morning would you?'

Two days later, Michael was on the aeroplane. His mother greeted him wearily at the airport, circles under her eyes. She was wearing a beige mac in summer; it was drizzling a bit. She took him in her arms and gave him a hug that was meant to say: you're still my son, whatever happens.

'Welcome home, Michael.'

What the hug actually said was: Michael, you will never go home.

Home will always be with the man you love, and nothing else will ever be the same again. The externals of his old life, everything he had thought he would escape, closed over him.

As for his father, well, early to mid-forties is a bad time in the military. If you start slipping, your career almost certainly will end. They give you courses in making the transition. It's still too big a shock for many people, to go from an ordered environment where people respect each other and work together for common aims, to a world in which loneliness and justified suspicion is the basis on which everyone must live their lives.

Dad got taken in by an investment scheme on the Salton Sea. How, they reasoned, can you ever lose on property? Look at what happened in Palm Springs. The folks who bought there early doubled, even trebled their investment. Now, this is Palm Springs with water, a lake even. A salt lake.

Michael's legacy from his Dad was an empty plot of land, on a named street without a single house on it.

His father never could handle booze. He just couldn't metabolize the stuff quickly. Nor, at forty-eight, could he get a job anywhere. He tried to stay in shape, hung around with floozies more and more, sold the condo in Oceanside for something right in the heart of where all the whores hung out. He drank and whored, which on the coast of California almost certainly means he also did drugs. He started to get fat.

He shacked up with a tough little Mexican lady. This most American of men was continually asked for his passport or identity papers. When he passed out on the street people started talking about illegal immigrants. Finally he moved back to LA, and tried to set up in his brother's law firm. He wore a suit and tried to find something to do: accounts, sales, even typing. He had a fight with his brother, and that's when he and Michael's mother lost touch. Michael's uncle said he'd heard that Louis was working as a gardener now, in Beverly Hills. 'A sad case. Not something we like to talk about, really.'

When Michael was in his twenties, his mother got a letter. Michael's father had died. The family were terribly sorry, they'd only found out themselves weeks before. They'd collected his ashes from the cremation agency and scattered them on the vast training grounds of Camp Pendleton.

'They may be sorry, but why couldn't they have told us when the service was?' Michael's mother looked baffled. Michael did not say: they didn't want us, Mom. They don't want me. They know what happened, and you don't.

Michael had a fantasy that lodged in his brain. He would return to it, even when he lived with Phil in their first full hormonal rush of love. He returned to it even now, when he loved nobody.

His father hadn't died. They made a mistake, and mis-indentified someone else's body. And one night, Michael is at an international biology congress, in LA, and for some reason it's raining, but there is a bar next door to his hotel. Michael doesn't know it's a gay bar, he has no idea. He just goes in to escape the unruffled anonymity of the hotel.

And he's leaning against the bar, and something about all these men together, big and butch or pretty and merry, starts alarm bells ringing. He's just beginning to realize what kind of bar it is, when a warm tender voice behind him says, 'Hello, Michael.'

He turns and his father is there, alive. He's still a big man, white-haired and a bit portly now. His skin is sallow, rather than brown, but he's stylish, all in black, and his eyes sparkle with love and regret. He's braver now, more willing to accept the truth. Michael books him into the room next to his in the hotel and what happens next varies, slightly, according to the scenario.

So what do you want, Michael?

Henry waited until long after Michael had finished speaking. Then he crawled up the bed in blue jeans and brown shirt and snuggled up to him.

'You know, Michael, I saw a TV programme once. There's a syndrome. Brothers and sisters who have never seen each other before, or fathers and daughters who meet for the first time as adults. They often fall in love. It's how we're designed. Either we go for someone who's totally different from us genetically. Or we fall in love with someone close to us genetically, because it's worked before. So it's not that you were perverse or bizarre or sick or just plain dumb. It's what people do.'

Michael was not to be mollified. 'So why doesn't everyone fall in love with their father?'

Henry sighed, and kissed him on the forehead. It was as if they had been lovers for decades, comfortable and relaxed and kind. 'The programme said that what makes the difference is living with them when you're young. You have to know them in childhood. There's a kind of barrier kicks in then. In China they sometimes choose a bride for a baby boy… she's a baby girl… and they grow up together and almost always they hate the thought of getting married. They feel it's incest.'