Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

There was very little time left, no time to be afraid. Everything closed around Michael in a rush. The floor felt like a bed, cushioned and soft, and there was a reassuring sound like rain on a roof, a sizzle like onions, the hiss of white noise on a stereo.

Michael floated as if in a warm bath somewhere up towards a corner of the kitchen. Nick and Michael, their little drama, seemed further and further away. He saw Nick lean over Michael. He saw the fat glisten on the wooden spoon. He saw the eyes go still and dry. Nick knelt next to Michael, almost as if he were going to help. The emotions Michael felt were the same. Poor boy, he felt for them both.

Dying was delicious, like lying in late, like being on the beach at twelve years old, when you wanted nothing more than to be. It was as if all work had ceased, and everything been done to perfection.

Death was like deciding, just this once, not to take out the garbage or not to do the ironing. It was like all the times when need is not strong enough to make you move. Death was like fulfilment: desire was no more.

There really was no longer any need to look at anything. So Michael ceased to see.

Vision was blotted out by direction. Michael felt a tug and looked inward. All he could see was a tunnel of light.

Yes, it was the optic nerve closing down. That was evident to Michael as soon as he saw it. It looked like a scan for glaucoma, when light is flashed deeper and deeper into the eye, shifting from yellow to red as it penetrates.

You had to understand, as Michael did, what the optic nerve was. It was a flow of time. Light triggers electrochemical pulses, which flow along the nerve in the current of time, deep into the head. It is broken apart like a sentence into a thousand grammatical parts. These are sent to a thousand different parts of the brain.

Now I am the light, Michael realized.

And he travelled, in time in one direction only, up the nerve, into the self.

Michael was read, like grammar.

Every cell in his brain that had ever been fired was fired at once. And he felt the whole lifted up, like a giant tangle of Christmas tree lights, lifted up as one final shape.

And it moved outside of time, to where time was not, and nothing more could happen. It preceded Michael, entered eternity, and froze. Its final frozen shape, spangled with light, seemed to be like a giant illuminated flower, in reds and yellows, sparkling with dew.

And Michael dying, still barely in time, was able to survey it. He was without location, without volume. He was a centre of gravity contemplating his life, able to think of something new one last time. Able to call for salvation, able to regret, able to feel joy.

In that eternal life there was Michael flinging snow in the High Sierras, there he was toting his bag to school, there he was in the Rialto cinema, Oceanside watching The Sting. There was Michael on a small funfair ride with his Dad at La Jolla. He had forgotten that.

There was little Michael taking a bath in a washing-up bowl, and his mother blowing bubbles at him. There was Michael, in his bedroom at night memorizing lists of endocrines. There he was pumping weights, there he was in Thailand, there he was bicycling in France with Mark sipping calva outside a bar tabac. There he was, making love to a 24-year-old from Brooklyn whom he had forgotten. There he was, staring down a microscope into the stained patterns of a chicken's brain. There he was on the platform at Waterloo station, cursing himself, cursing life.

And there were the dreams. They were real to the self. There were dinners of dogs' heads in his mother's kitchen. There were missed trains that turned into scarves trapped in car doorways. Michael's mind, saying to itself while consciousness slept: wake up Michael, you're forgetting something. Wake up Michael, you're walking the wrong way. Michael, look at me, I am here.

Michael saw something under the petals of light.

It snagged them, held them, twisted them, shook them.

It was dark, like a shadow, and it still lived, and it heaved and it dragged.

Michael saw all the parts of his brain that had never been fired.

They had been there before he was born. They were waiting for his birth, to become real. He had lived a life and never used them.

They were the wastes. They howled, these wastes. They were enraged. They shook the flower of light, wanting to be born as light.

The wastes were desire. And desire did not want to die.

There in that desert, Michael was not.

There was Michael not loving Mark.

There was Michael not travelling to India or China. There he was not, not riding a Jeep over the mountain terraces of Yemen. There he was not, failing to hold his own children. There he was not, bringing meals to his sick, dying brothers. There he was not, omitting to call his Mum. There he was not, never an actor on a stage. There was Michael without the brothers and sisters he never had. There was Michael not with his father for the last ten years of his life. There they were not hiking the length of the John Muir Trail. There was the Michael who had not known his father as a little boy. There was the Michael who had never known true love.

And above all, there was Michael, who had not slept with his father.

Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad…

Hello Mikey, a voice seemed to say. Hello my beautiful boy.

Dad, Dad-dy…

I picked you up when you were born, all wet, and I held you up to the light and I said Please Jesus, let this one live, let him be all he can be.

Michael wanted to be held and to hold in return. It was too late for that.

And I left you.

We carry our dead around with us as patterns we have learned. Love injects them into us. Semen is only the faintest physical mirroring of it. The patterns are as alive as we are.

The voice of Michael's living father told him, You don't want to die, Mikey. Nothing happens after you die.

The shadow wastes howled forever mourning. That howling would sear like sand blown in wind. It would burn like fire. And it would never cease. Desire was immortal and continued after death. And that was hell.

Heaven was what had been achieved.

You can't make up for things. You can't make anything right. Nothing can happen.

This, thought Michael, is the wrong time for me to die.

He saw his desire formless and aching and true to itself. He saw it trying to twist the flower even in death.

Desire tried to twist the nothingness. Like gravity it tried to wrench being from nothing. Desire reached out in rage and thrashed and seized and shook.

It was as if the shadow cast the light and not the other way around. The darkness was the spider that spun the cobweb on which the dewdrops hung.

Michael had always had a talent.

He could absorb people into his bones out of love, and could make his bones and mind move like they did.

If he were thwarted enough, he could wrench the molecules of the air and make them move and leap and think.

Michael knew, then. He had made the Angels himself of headaches and grief and rage.

Desire made Michael want to live. Right, thought Michael, and desire blossomed in him like a dark flower blooming out of his heart.

Right, he said, prising open reality, forcing it like an arsehole to accept him, the wrong way through the valve.

Right, and Michael tore reality.

He saw.

Nick was propping open one of Michael's eyelids. Nick contemplated this stare, quizzically, as if it were a painting of his own that he was judging. Poor Angel, thought Michael.

Michael saw again what he had seen the night before: the potential in the translucent skin. Again, it was the waste that Michael saw. It's what a parent sees and aches for and forgives. And punishes.