Lust

Michael reassures her, no, no, no problem, as he tries to put out the newspaper before it burns his fingers. Finally, he flips it into the toilet. The basin is still full of flame when he closes the bathroom door. He arrives back in time to slide the chair under her as she sits down.

‘I can’t tell you how awful it’s been. People simply don’t understand my relationship with Uncle Duck. Oh, I know he was older than I …’

He was also a duck, but then hey, you’re both cartoons.

‘People find it so hard to believe that you can love someone for their mind. Those terrible cheap parts the studio made him play …’

You mean the one where he keeps blowing off the top of the bald hunter’s head? Or the one where he drops an anvil on it?

‘This is a duck who dreamed of playing Hamlet, who read philosophy, who wrote poetry.’

Always tell an intelligent person that they’re beautiful. Always tell a beautiful person they’re intelligent. Tell a cartoon that they’re both.

Michael says, ‘It must have been wonderful for him to find a soulmate like you.’

Dreamily, she nods. ‘Reading the classics by firelight together. It was all I ever wanted.’

Except for your boyfriend Bruno Bruiser.

Taffy bursts into Hollywood starlet tears. All coughing sobs, hankies and dry eyes. ‘And to think that people could say that I am capable of … of … uh-huh uh-huh [sniffle]. Forgive me for carrying on like this.’

‘It’s understandable. Under the circumstances.’ Michael lays his hand on top of hers, and she gives his a quick warm squeeze. She feels warm, human warm, but smoother too, slick, no creases or texture to the gloved and perfect hands.

Michael. Do you really want to have sex with a cartoon?

She looks up, determined now. ‘We must find whoever killed my husband. I have money, Mr Shamus. I’ll pay every last penny of it to find out who killed Uncle Duck.’

And to prove you didn’t do it.

‘I warn you. I don’t exactly come cheap, Mrs Duck.’

She breathes heavily and leans forward. ‘People say that you’re the best in the business.’ Appreciatively, she takes his hand again.

‘Perhaps we can leave this difficult decision until later. Won’t you eat something? Starving yourself won’t help.’

Taffy looks wistful. She has a perfect tiny nose that is completely invisible except when she is in profile. ‘No, thank you. Cartoons are different from people. We’re fuelled only by our motivations.’

‘Your motivations?’

‘Our passions. They sometimes take us over. We like or don’t like. We love, or don’t love.’

OK, let’s go for it.

‘Then,’ Shamus says, still steely in his old-fashioned, white knight/tough guy pose. ‘Perhaps you know how I feel about you.’

Alarmed, she stands up. ‘No! Don’t say it.’ She flees to the window on little high-heel steps, and frames her face between her kid gloves.

‘Mrs Duck. Taffy. Kiss me.’

What does it mean when a homosexual wants to stick his face between two artificial breasts? It means that what he finds desirable about them is that men have thought of those breasts. Men imagined them and drew them and shaped them and shaded them. It means it is the male desire behind the image that draws him, the desire of other men.

‘No. We must wait.’

‘No one will know. It is our secret. Our love.’

‘But the court case. People will talk. You don’t know what it’s been like.’

Oh, Taffy.

Her lips are not human lips. They are better than human lips. They are like Juicy Fruit chewing gum: thick delicious mobile wads that respond immediately to pressure, yielding and flowing but never too wet. They are the best lips Michael has ever kissed. And no moustache.

Over the tiny pinprick of her nose, her eyes go wide, wider, big as saucers.

‘Oh. Oh, Michael. Hold me. Hold me close. Take away the fear.’

He cradles her. She has an invented nature and her invented nature is to respond in this way. Her mammoth breasts heave against him; the fabric of the pink dress stretches. She protests, but it is in the script, though normally after the fadeout. The breasts are unleashed from their pink constraints. They are Platonic breasts, breasts in the ideal. Large and firm, but also soft, peach-coloured with baby-bottle nipples. They are supported, protected by her crossed, fluid arms. She keeps changing shape, subtly, to embody the ideal.

Her nipple fills his mouth. She tastes tangy and slightly salty. He fondles a nipple with his tongue, and it engorges. Michael thinks of all those hairy arms that drew those breasts, the thick hands that outlined the nipples through the pink of the dress. Did they dream of supping where he now sups? Michael feels his lips move in unison with theirs. He lolls her in his mouth.

‘Oh my love,’ she gasps.

Her thighs are perfect and without pores. Her translucent panties shimmer their own way down. Michael sees pudenda as babyishly appealing and round-eyed as Bambi or Thumper. There is a button-cute clitoris under his tongue. Unlike the breasts, it tastes real.

A cartoon orgasm, as yet unfilmed, makes the cheeks of her face quake and ride up like a stocking. Her breasts not only heave, but swell. Her face is nearly the colour of tomatoes, and her eyes are huge and crossed. She looks like she’s drowning, desperately holding her breath. Suddenly the nipples blow off steam, clouds of it. The breasts whistle in unison like two trains in a race.

Taffy settles back, crumpling. She goes fluid and pours down over the sofa onto the carpet, as flexible as a shadow, taking the shape of whatever supports her. She lies there panting for a moment, then sticks one of her fingers into her mouth, and reinflates herself, puffing, as if she were an air mattress.

Later, she dresses, in a lady-like fashion, smoothing down her hair and pulling straight the fingers of her gloves. She expertly cups the breasts back into their impossible fittings of pink.

‘Michael, I want to tell you this. That was one of the finest moments of my life. You know so much about the needs of a woman. How to lift her up, away from the inelegant struggle to survive.’

No my dear, that’s what you know.

What you know is what the men who embodied you want. Elegance.

Adjusting the perfect pink dress.

Need.

You turn your back for me to do up the zipper and I see the strong back, with two ridges of muscle down either side of the spine. You lift up the mass of your hair to show what every man dreams the back of a woman’s neck is like.

Class.

What clumsy, sweaty, fat, balding men imagine they want from women. They want to merge with elegance and delicacy, gain it by association.

She fiddles with what can only be called an evening bag. She extracts from it a tiny, flat silver case and takes out of it a single white address card.

‘Call me. Please. I need to know I can rely on someone.’

The high heels clack, on a carpet. The high heels control their own sound. The dress swishes like someone shushing a child to sleep. The shoulders wait for their white furs, a hint of shoulder blade drawn onto the broad expanse of her back. He complies with the script, or perhaps his father’s idea of how men should behave, and brings her wrap. She accepts it demurely, in a manner that can only be called gracious. As she walks away towards his front door, her bottom is shaped exactly like an upside-down heart under clouds of fur.

His door opens at the same moment as the neighbour’s door across the hall.

In the doorway opposite stands a little girl. She gapes at Taffy.

A six-foot-tall animated cartoon fills the apartment corridor, and leans over, warm and giggling.

‘Well, hello there,’ says Taffy. ‘Who are you?’ She coos with a voice like melted ice cream.

‘Mum, Mum come quick!’ the little girl cries in panic and turns and lets the door close.

Taffy Duck turns to Michael and shrugs. She blows him a kiss, and as if disturbed by it, the air ripples and closes over her, just as the neighbour’s front door opens again.

Perfect.

At the end of the movie, you find out that she didn’t do the murder. Her boyfriend Bruno did. She really loved the duck and the detective after all. The last shot is a long kiss between realities. But no one ever shows what happens after the ending.

Twenty years before, at the end of the film, Michael stood up and drove back to the condo in Oceanside and told his father, ‘I’m going back home tomorrow.’ His father said nothing. He just stared up at him from the sofa. Michael still remembered his father’s crew cut and his fathomless eyes, full of hatred.

Like the old actor said: the past is a chasm, don’t look down.

Michael stood looking down in his own sitting room, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora. Fancy dress again.

Weeeellllllll, he thought. It was fun and I always was good at acting.

Uh-huh. And you didn’t come and you didn’t have a hard-on so the sex was acting too. She was about as far from the real as you can get. So when do you get real, Michael? How? You don’t even know how, do you? You just keep repeating your youth. And it wasn’t even a happy youth, Michael.

Do people I copy really know it?

Michael remembered Tony. The real Tony had some kind of sense of what his copy had done. It was one thing to hurt a fictional character. It was another thing to harm someone real. Michael had no business experimenting on people without being able to assess the extent of the trauma he might be inflicting.

But he couldn’t test it first, because he couldn’t call up anyone without being able to assess the damage, etc, etc. And it was not the sort of thing he could test on chickens, unless he was about to make the unwelcome discovery that he lusted after livestock. So how could he gauge what it was like to have a copy made of you? Michael spent a day in an experimental hall of mirrors, until that metaphor gave him his method.

He checked himself into the Hotel Chez Nous. He approached the front desk with some trepidation. He thought that Tarzan would have left the sheets covered in body makeup. Explaining that would be embarrassing.

The clerk was French and had irritating nostrils; they looked as if they were flaring in disgust at an unpleasant odour. He took Michael’s card, and once he had come up on the screen said smoothly, ‘Welcome back, Mr Blasco.’ It seemed there was no record of Max Factor on the linen. The clerk asked the screen, ‘Your usual room, sir?’

It was indeed the usual room. It was so usual Michael could not be sure if it really was the same room or not.

His stomach felt feathery, as if he had missed breakfast. He was, he realized, a little bit afraid of what he was going to do next. He started unbuttoning his shirt, knowing it was a delaying tactic. Every episode was a delaying tactic. He should just forget all of it, go to Alaska Street to get his rocks off and hope the whole thing would go away.

But then he would never know what this thing had come for.

Look, how can it hurt you? How can it hurt you, that is, any more than you have hurt yourself? Just do it and then you’ll know, and that will help you decide to forget it, write it off. Just do it.

Michael called up a copy of himself.

The air wavered, parting to admit the newcomer. He was tall and stocky at the same time. You only noticed on the second glance that he was not fat, but really quite muscular: the hair on the arms disguised the definition.

Immediately, Michael felt sympathy for him. There was an air of caged and baffled decency about him, a slight scowl, a hopeful smile. In fact, he was not at all bad-looking, what Michael called a black Celt: slightly sallow skin, a heavy beard and black eyes.

Michael fancied himself. It’s a well-known syndrome, and it had afflicted Michael far worse than most: daughters meeting their long-lost fathers for the first time; sisters and brothers separated at birth meeting on a course. There are two great triggers for sexual desire: extreme but complementary genetic difference, or extreme genetic similarity. You either find someone completely different to complete the genetic puzzle, or someone who is kindred.

So here he was, dragged back to the seat of his neuroses: himself.

‘Oh,’ said Michael and Michael together.

Then they both chuckled shyly and looked down at their shoes in unison.

‘Um,’ they said in unison, embarrassed. They looked up at each other and two pairs of black eyes sunk into each other.

‘Oops,’ they said, understanding each other perfectly. They wanted to fuck themselves.

With that unspoken agreement, they both began to undress. Love finds faults endearing. For the first time ever, Michael saw that he only combed his rich black unruly hair in front. The back of his head was practically in dreadlocks. The back of one trouser leg was tucked into the top of his socks. He looked back around and it was true of him, too. Oh well, he was a bachelor.

The Angel turned back to face him, and viewed as a stranger, he stirred Michael’s heart with forgiveness for what it means to be human. Here was a man of 38 winters, crepe paper around the corner of his eyes, and it was not until you held him that you realized all that flesh was solid. Somebody should tell him about his choice of knickers. And socks. The white Y-fronts were slipped to one side, and there was a penis that was in no way as tiny as Michael thought: it had a nice round head that was beginning to swell and weep.

‘What …’ they both began, and broke off, with a chuckle and a shrug. They were going to ask: what now? They didn’t need to.

A lover who really understands you? Who really knows what you are thinking?

Michael had not felt such a surge of desire since he was sixteen years old: heedless and irresistible. With no discussion, they were pulled towards each other, to embrace, in the French sense of the term: to kiss.

Suddenly his copy jerked his head aside, lips pressed shut. He was frightened of AIDS. It was insulting, disappointing and childish.

The original Michael said, ‘We can hardly give each other something we don’t already have.’

And immediately there was a sense of parting, very slight like a tangerine being peeled. They were no longer exactly one. Their histories were now very slightly different.

‘That’s true,’ said the copy, trying to look amused. He was stiff and awkward, and gave Michael a peck on the lips. Did Michael feel a slight echo somewhere, like a double image? Did he not very slightly feel his own lips peck someone else’s, while they themselves were being kissed?

‘Sorry,’ the copy said and gave Michael a little cajoling shake. ‘Old habits die hard.’ He planted another chaste kiss on Michael’s cheek. Michael felt a falling away. He let his own penis drop, and looked down and saw his copy, thrashing uselessly away at himself.

That was always the pattern. He’d start out well, with a promising swelling, gallons of lubricant, and then the sudden irretrievable collapse.

‘We’re not going to be much use to each other are we?’ the original Michael said.

‘We could just cuddle,’ said his copy, hopefully. Michael had done enough cuddling. He looked at his own body and asked it: why? It’s a beautiful body, everything else about it works.

‘Shall we try again?’ Michael asked himself.

‘OK,’ chuckled the copy, weakly. It was lie, Michael knew. He was ashamed and now simply wanted to escape. This Michael was an amazingly disheartening sexual partner. But Michael was determined to persevere, for both their sakes.

It is a very strange thing to kiss yourself. There is no change of taste, and you know exactly what the tongue will do, how it will respond. I’d never realized, thought Michael, how useful my lips are. I hated my fat lips. But they’re great for kissing.

If only this Angel would move them.

Michael leaned back and looked at himself. He was surprised at how angry he felt. He had been moved, roused, and then let down. It felt like rejection, it felt personal. He made a soft fist and gave his partner a gentle, chiding thump. There was a distant disturbance in his own shoulder, as if someone had thrown a pebble into a pool some distance away.

‘Now you know how other people feel,’ said his copy, something dark and steely creeping into his own eyes.

‘Oh, Jesus, let’s sit down,’ said Michael. They sat next to each other on the bed. His partner looked defeated, mournful. Michael put an arm around his shoulder to comfort him, and they lay side by side, comrades rather than lovers.

Michael changed the subject. ‘You feel anything? From me?’

‘A kind of a buzz.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt you, would it?’

The copy scowled. ‘I don’t think I would know what it was.’

‘I just wanted to know if I could hurt people.’

The Angel sighed. ‘It would give them a turn if they showed up at your flat and met themselves by mistake.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

They turned and looked into each other’s faces, like brothers, like friends. They both had the same dark eyes, and his copy’s eyes were black and sad. Do I always look this mournful having sex? Isn’t sex supposed to be fun?

The Angel asked, ‘Do you have any idea how we got this way?’

The focus of Michael’s vision seemed to shift and he saw something in the face, and jumped up, and scuttled away. ‘Jesus Christ, you look just like Dad!’

Michael turned back around, and the bed was empty. Even the baggy Y-fronts had gone.

Can Angels do work?

Back at work, Ebru asked Michael, ‘Where do you go in the afternoons?’

Her smile was rueful, teasing, an evident mise-en-scène. Because her eyes were saying: you’re supposed to be running this place.

‘Lunch,’ replied Michael. ‘Why, was there a problem?’

She was leaning as if relaxed across her desk. She sprawled. It was a difficult posture to read, because it seemed friendly but was also disrespectful.

Her voice drawled; she sounded sleepy. ‘The University called. You were supposed to be teaching a course today.’

Oh shit, oh no, of course, it’s Thursday.

Ebru looked bored. ‘What could I do? I told them you would call when you got back.’

‘Oh, Jees, was it Professor Dennis? Oh darn. OK. I’ll give her a call.’

‘Could you leave me with your number please where you will be when you go out?’

‘Yeah sure. I’ll get a mobile, so you can call me.’

Michael jerked forward, wanting to escape. Ebru had more to say. ‘The grant application forms have been on your desk for a week. I just wanted to make sure you knew they were there.’ Michael had to apply for funds for the next stage of research; they were to teach the chicks tasks such as pushing buttons for food. The aim was to keep the facility going, so the University could rent it out for other projects. The aim was that Michael would eventually make himself some kind of Director.

‘Right, yes. I’ve been meaning to get to that.’

‘Emilio was saying that he has not been told the file names for the control group slides. This means he has fallen behind on his data entry and filing.’

‘Sorry,’ said Michael. ‘A lot on my plate.’

Ebru dismissed it, as if sleepy. ‘I wasn’t chasing you.’

Oh yes you were.

Alone in his windowless office, Michael told himself: you have been neglecting your job.

It had been just over three weeks since the episodes began. There had been five afternoons at the Chez Nous, four with Johnny and one with himself. They had moved from late winter into spring. How did he think people would not notice?

There was a Fridge full of frozen, unfiled slides. How could he ask people to work for him? People who were on short-term contracts, which meant they could not get a mortgage. How could he ask them to work punctiliously, perfectly, as science demanded?

And, oh shit, he was also supposed to be writing a phase paper on the difference between Windows NT and Unix for his MSc in Computer Science. It was due next Monday. He’d done nothing about it.

Michael hung his head, and then lowered it into his hands from shame.

God, he found himself asking, why have you done this to me?

God, in the form of the painted brick wall, could not answer, or rather, decided not to, or rather, couldn’t be bothered.

Well, the wall seemed to say, on its own behalf if not God’s, I’m just a wall and not very interesting, but I am the life you have chosen. You put yourself in this office with these slides and files and papers and coursework and you’d better get on with it.

Michael needed to talk to someone. He had no one to talk to, most especially not his staff, his lover, or their friends. All his friends were Phil’s friends.

‘Help,’ he said in a small voice that was not meant to be heard.

‘Hiya,’ said a voice that poised somewhere in mid-Atlantic. Something white moved in the corner of his eye.

His Angel was sitting on the corner of the desk, wearing his white lab coat. His smile was mild and his eyes faded; he looked detached.

Michael saw himself. I have good feelings for people, but I don’t connect. So they don’t always know that.

‘Hiya,’ Michael said. ‘I’ve been neglecting things.’

‘You have a miracle to deal with. Ah. I think you’ll find that most people who have one of those find it’s a full-time job. I mean, Phil Dick just saw pink lights, and look how long that took to sort out.’

Michael’s face shook itself with unexpected tears, like a dog getting out of water. He certainly didn’t feel that unhappy. The reaction didn’t seem to link to any emotion until he spoke, vehemently.

‘I didn’t want an extra full-time job. I didn’t ask for this. What is it for, what I am supposed to do with it, and why, why me?’

The Angel looked back, big and kindly and powerless. ‘I know less than you do.’

Michael apologized, his default mode. ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t easy for you either.’

‘I don’t matter. I’m not real.’ The Angel managed to say that with a smile. ‘Why don’t you let me help?’

It took a while for the anger to be stilled. The Angel kept talking.

‘I know what you know. I can do just as good a job as you can. We’ve got a backlog. Why don’t you stay here and do the accounts or whatever? I’ll go to the Fridge and do the slides.’

What a wonderful idea. Michael chuckled. ‘It’ll be like the Shoemaker and the Elves.’

‘Let’s wait until tonight,’ said the Angel. ‘That way no one will see you in two places at the same time. We don’t want to give anyone a heart attack.’

‘Can we talk afterwards?’ Michael asked. He felt the same yearning he would for a lover.

‘Sure, baby.’

That was what Michael always used to say to Phil. When they were young and in love.

So he filled in the form for the second stage of their research grant, and wrote the first draft of the accompanying business case. Michael’s career plan was simple. He would keep using the lab for further research projects until his own reputation was established and then let out the secure facility for other projects. At 5.00 PM he was able to bustle into Ebru’s office, fluttering papers.

‘Well, here we go. This is the business case for the grant. First draft. Can you read it for me, make any comments. Oh. I also know nothing about the admin costs, so could you run off a 104 on the office expenses.’

Ebru was still watchful, languid. ‘It’s five o’clock. Do you need it this instant?’

‘Not right now, of course. Close of play tomorrow for the comments. I’ll need the 104 sometime tomorrow morning.’

‘I can do that for you,’ she said airily, gathering up her bag. No, she seemed to say, I am not working late to make up for your lost time. She smiled a hazy, hooded smile at him, and gave him a dinky little wave with the tips of her fingers. ‘Good night. See you tomorrow.’ Faultlessly polite. The draft was left on her desk.