Metallic Love

turquoise sheets of the bed.

He took off the tan for me because I asked him to. He did that in the shower, alone, and when he came back from the shower, he was naked, except for the curtain of his hair, which was that other red again, that red like velvet, streaming down from his head, and for the red hair coiled at his groin. Red and silver. Oh, he had the eyes of a tiger, or perhaps each of his eyes was a tiger, its amber pelt luminous yet barred with darkness.

Dusk was in the rooms. No lights except a couple of large candles I’d lit because they were there, expecting to be lit, their wicks still white, which they say is unlucky, to leave a candle with its wick unsinged, even if not in use, because then it means you’ll never burn them for a celebration….

“Tell me what you want,” he said to me.

“You.”

“Loren, I won’t let them see.”

“Let them.”

But he shook his head at me again. He was tender, cruel and omniscient, this god from the machine.

I have always very much liked sex. Found it simple. Ultimately unimportant.

His hands on me—do I describe that? How can I? What words are there that are any use? My hands on him—easier—textures like skin and muscle, of a new being, not mortal, silk that’s steel, steel that’s pliant as the body of a puma. Hair—like grass, hot and full of summer scents and the aroma of a distant sea, and of pines—hair like ropes of fire, like a wave. His mouth—a cool furnace. The passing of one body across another—planets striking, sweet, unbearable completion. Worlds without end.

No, I don’t have the words. There are no words for that act with him.

In all this earth, is there any place a word or phrase to describe it, as truly it can be? Not sex, not fucking, not humping or rocking or riding. No, not making love, that almost queasy emphasis on what isn’t always there at that moment, even if love is a part of it.

Find me a word. A beautiful and savage word that makes the hair rise on the scalp, the blood change to stars, the bones melt, the atoms flower. Is there such a word? No? Then, like the books of long ago that always left out the more basic, “uglier” words, I must resort to this: We——. That is what we did. We——.

I thought it could never end. It had no end, scarcely any beginning. It goes on still, even now. Even now, as I write this down, my hand cramped from every other ordinary describable emotion than love or pleasure or sex, even now it goes on. That——that we did, he and I, together on the blue-green candle-flicker plain of sheets, above a street whose name I have changed.

It was night eventually, and returning, as if from sleep or a trance, seeing him lying beside me, a silver lion maned only with darkness in the dark, for both candles had by then been, like other things, consumed, I whispered.

“Silver…” I said.

“Loren, don’t call me that. He’s gone. Recognize that now I’m someone else.”

“Silver Verlis,” I said. “An adjective, not a name.”

I went to sleep against his shoulder. He held me.

Yes, only once, for that act of——.

Once and forever. The sequel to the future.

• 3 •

Since the train, I hadn’t recollected any of my dreams. But that night I had a dream I recalled. At the time it seemed to go on for hours. It was oddly coherent, too, and unnonsensical, as sometimes dreams are. It seemed entirely to be happening, and I was full of regret and nervous fear—and sorrow. Though in the dream, I’d forgotten what he said about Jane, how he would have to meet her. It just started with that thing about his clothes.

Morning light was there, and he was dressing again, putting the clothes on, the pale shirt, dark pants and boots, and I said, “How do you do that? I mean, if you can make them come out of you, then how can you still… take them off… and put them back on?” He said, “I can get the firm to mail you their manual.” “You won’t explain.” “Look,” he said. He came over to me and, in that mercurial twilight, held out his hand. As I stared, a ring… evolved around one of his fingers. It was instantly solid, silver, with a flat pale turquoise at its center. I didn’t see how that had happened. It was only there. He took the ring off and said, “Now I’ll make this fit you,” and he did something and the metal—still fresh as risen metallic dough from the oven of his body—crimped in, and he slipped the ring onto the middle finger of my right hand. “It won’t last,” he said, “away from me. About twenty-four hours.” And there in the jaws of a technology beyond what I’d ever truly believed in, in the dream all I thought was: He means anything between us, too. Twenty-four hours, and it’s done. It was like a fairy tale—fairy gold—the sort that vanishes at midnight or in the rays of the sun. Sorcery, not science fiction. But I’d witnessed, and he’d shown me. I said, “Only the fake tan was different?” “Yes, and now I have to reapply it.” At which he took a flask out of the dark coat and said, “This coat, actually, was made elsewhere.” “Why can’t you make the tan, like everything else?” He said, “That’s the thing they’ve said isn’t allowed, Loren. To pass that fully as human. I’d need META’s say-so for that.” I got up and went to use the bathroom. (Yes, in the dream. Even those details are there.) The bathroom he didn’t need. I wondered if he would leave while I was showering. When I came out, he was sitting on my main room couch, watching morning VS.

I stood there in the long T-shirt I sometimes wear after the shower, watching him watch VS, like any young human male, just no coffine mug, and I thought, If I make coffine or tea, will he stay—play at drinking it— Then the door to my apartment called melodiously, “Loren, someone is here.”

Dreaming, I jumped. Out of my body nearly. Verlis said, “That’s okay. I think I know who.”

“Who?” I said.

It was the door that replied, “It is Copperfield; it is Black Chess; it is Goldhawk.”

“Okay if they come in?” asked the alien on the couch.

“Can I stop them?”

He smiled and said, “It’s only that META prefers us to travel together now, on the flyers, or in the streets.”

Together. Like Kix and Goldhawk, on the train to Russia.

The door said, with the same melodious insistence, “Loren, someone is here. It is Copperfield; it is—”

“Let them in,” I said.

I walked into the bedroom and shut the door as I put on clothes. In the dream I was very fast.

Yet outside I heard their noiselessness enter the rooms. My dream-mind was like a waking one. Did I feel invaded? I didn’t. The apartment—like the ring—wasn’t mine. None of it would last.

When I came out, four beautiful young men in smartish casual wear, hair long and tied back in tails, were standing across from the VS. They were laughing. Only Black Chess wasn’t brown-tanned. He’d pass as black, I supposed, if you didn’t inspect that immaculate poreless skin too closely. Yes, all this was that real.

Did I feel anything? I don’t know. I think I felt overwhelmingly alone.

Then Verlis turned and came across and kissed me again, lightly, on the lips. “Take care of yourself, Loren.”

He means good-bye.

The tanned man with lacquer black hair and long, Oriental eyes, spoke behind Verlis. All their voices are musical. Even asleep, you wanted to listen. No matter what.

“She is the one from the train,” said Goldhawk.

Verlis said, still looking at me, not looking round, “What does that mean, Gee? Which train?”

“The overland here, last month.”

I thought, Why are they talking? They can surely communicate some other mechanical, inner way. Part of