Lust

Michael felt sad for them. Because I know that when they are here, they love and feel and want. When they’re here, they’re alive.

Michael sat at his desk and looked at the brick wall again, and heard his own voice rage, demanding, ‘Why is the design of this experiment such crap!’

What is a sample of one going to tell you, God? Why bend all the rules of the universe just to do this terrible thing to me? Is it a joke, God? Does it amuse you to see people knocked sideways, their whole life go rotten like an apple? Do you like to see us hauled beyond our limits? Do you like to see us cry?

And why do this to an impotent man? What is it going to teach me, what are you going to learn from this except what we both know? I’m lousy in bed. What’s the big deal about that, I live with it, I’ve learned to live with it.

Michael went back to the cold room. In a rage, sweating in the chill, he tore through the work. The glass edges of the slides cut his fingers.

It took an hour. When he was done he had a sudden moment of irrational fear that his own work would also disappear. He closed the drawer and opened it again, to check. The work remained.

So maybe I do just make them up, maybe I make up that other people see and hear them. Maybe I am just nuts.

Michael arrived back at the flat late, exhausted, chilled and sweaty. He must have looked a state. Phil glanced up at him from what looked like a plate of tomato sauce on cardboard. ‘You didn’t tell me when you would be home,’ Phil said. ‘So I went ahead with dinner.’

So when did Phil ever call to say when he’d be home? Michael sat down exhausted, shambolic. Today was a bad hair day: his scalp itched and he knew his hair tumbled down in dank, greasy curls. His five o’clock shadow had arrived on time, but now, at 8.30 PM, it was even thicker and coated with cold sweat. Phil wouldn’t look at him.

‘That’s OK, I guess,’ said Michael. ‘You probably don’t realize that I’ve been coming home on time lately. You’re never in. It was my effort to be here in case you wanted to go to a movie or anything.’

Phil’s eyes were shuttered like windows. In the silence, Michael had the opportunity to examine Phil’s newly vegetarian food. There was no table fat on his bread.

Phil asked in a light voice, ‘Where exactly is your work?’

It was a question that produced an automatic prickling sensation of suspicion, even fear. Hold on, thought Michael. This is Phil. Then he thought, hold on, this is Phil.

He stalled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh. It’s just that you’ve never told me, that’s all. It can’t be that long a trip. Waterloo, isn’t it?’

‘Waterloo? No! No, no, the Elephant and Castle.’

Phil shrugged elaborately and his eyes didn’t move from the plate. ‘I thought it was Waterloo.’ His tiny mouth had to stretch to take a bite out of a chunk of bread that was the colour of brown shoes. ‘In an old warehouse or something.’

Michael began to trace the criss-cross patterns of green on the waterproof tablecloth. I’ve never said in an old warehouse or anything else. Certainly not in the arches underneath an elevated railway.

‘Yeah, an old warehouse. Near the Old Kent Road.’

Phil nodded now, very carefully, very slowly.

Michael pressed together his thick veined hands.

My boyfriend is pumping me for my work address so he can give it to animal rights demonstrators. My boyfriend of thirteen years wants to betray me. Henry has such a nice smile, doesn’t he?

‘So how is the gorgeous Henry?’ The emphasis on the ‘is’ somehow made it plain that Michael had been reminded of Henry by the previous topic, that there was a connection between them.

‘He’s fine, thank you,’ said Phil, coolly.

He doesn’t even care that I’ve guessed.

Michael struck back. It was a bit like playing tennis. ‘You know many couples in our situation would be busy reassuring each other that they practised safe sex with their lovers. They’d talk about whether they should be using condoms with each other. But …’

Michael considered letting his voice trail delicately away, but you play tennis to win. ‘But we don’t have to, do we Phil? We don’t make love.’

It was only then, finally, that Michael realized he needed a new life.

Can they give me Aids? (#ulink_79ced9de-a83f-53f4-8eb2-b05f6676ed69)

After California, Michael spent the next ten years missing sexual opportunities. As these years were 1976 to 1986, missing opportunities probably saved his life.

Everyone else was going at it like ferrets, not knowing there was something brand-new in the world. By the time Michael emerged from purdah, he and the world knew things had changed, and were taking precautions.

But it was already too late for several dear friends. They rolled on all unknowing for many years, all through the eighties into the nineties, though they were, like Shrödinger’s cat, already dead mathematically. They had the virus. Or rather, it had them.

If you can have sex with anyone in the world, you need to know as a matter of urgency, if they can make you ill. Answering this question presented Michael with several interesting methodological difficulties.

If he experimented on himself and it made him ill, that would indeed be a result, but it would rather defeat the purpose. On the other hand, experimenting on someone else did raise certain ethical questions.

It was also methodologically suspect. Michael would first have to ensure that whoever was being tested was HIV negative to begin with. Proving HIV negative status is extremely difficult. Antibodies take three months to show up after infection. That means a second test is necessary three months after the first. During those three months, you have to know absolutely that the person has avoided all risk of exposure to the virus. That means no kissing. If there are any doubts, you have to test again three months after that.

If the subject was, say, a nun who never had sex with anyone, Michael would first have to find the one Angel in the world who could seduce her, and then persuade her that she needed an HIV test. This scenario seemed unlikely.

Perhaps his own Angel could sleep with another Angel with Aids. And then be tested twice, once while the infected Angel was still in the world, and again, once he had left it to see if the virus remained behind.

But that meant the slate would be cleaned whenever the carrying Angel disappeared. And even perhaps when his own experimental Angel dipped in and out of existence.

Both the infecting Angel and his victim would have to remain in the world for an uninterrupted three months.

Well, Michael could rent a house somewhere out of the way, Scotland maybe, and have them live there under iron orders to sleep with no one else. It was a little bit like keeping experimental dogs in kennels. There was no doubt that science was easier when you did it to animals.

But Angels are not people. What if their immune systems worked differently? Suppose Angels could infect people but not each other?

Michael considered testing with a less serious virus. He could conjure up an Angel with a severe cold, sleep with him, and see if he caught anything. Or call up a copy with diphtheria on his moustache and swab his own lips and grow a culture.

But HIV was a retrovirus. It copied itself into the RNA of your cells, and took over their reproductive function. It becomes you, and you are real. Suppose over the three months it worked its magic, the virus became so entwined with your non-miraculous body that it gained a real life?

The more he thought, the more difficult and absurd it all became.

Then he remembered that one of his many lost opportunities had grown up to be an expert on Aids. Her name was Margaret White, but Michael had known her in school as Bottles. They had been friends during Michael’s brief period of popularity before his last trip to California.

At sixteen, Michael was just American enough to find it easier to meet strangers and stay sunny and positive about things. He was invited to parties. He was likely to succeed, and grumpy jealous spotty pale blokes grumbled about him behind his back.

Michael was in the school theatre club and was big and strong and handsome and could act. There were more girls in drama club than blokes, so they did a production of Anouilh’s Antigone: lots of juicy female roles. Michael played the old, heart-torn tyrant. He moved with a combination of bullish swagger and slight arthritic limp that left the audience astonished. Michael had conjured up the king.

His sport was long-distance running. The beefiness he inherited from his father was yet to develop; he maintained an easy luxurious swing to the way he moved. He combined beauty with a certain shy sweetness that did not threaten or repel, and his black eyes reminded people of a particularly friendly, lively spaniel. Indeed, he was very good with animals. He worked for the local vet part-time and had decided to become a veterinarian.

The nicest thing about Michael was that he was no snob.

Bottles was the unkind nickname given to a big-breasted girl who existed on the social margins. She was tall, big-boned, a little ungainly, with a certain daffy spinning to her eyes. Her classmates whispered about her with a fascinated prurience, because at sixteen, Bottles was living the life of grown woman. She looked 22, had adult boyfriends with cars, and spent weekends in clubs. Rumour was accepted as fact: Bottles did a strip show in the local pub.