Lust Or No Harm Done

burning, to make the point.

Michael finished his day's work well. He was determined that the lives and deaths of the previous batches would not be wasted. They would be wasted if the evidence were not in order, or the results without meaning. He melted through the reports. He saw what the stains meant. The stains went into incredibly convoluted patterns.

Patterns, he saw, that were already there.

We are born with our potential.

Even chicks, their brains extend beyond this world back, forward, wherever it is we come from. Silent as settling snow, experience falls on prepared ground.

At the close of that day, the world made sense for Michael. He went into the offices and said good night to them, Ebru, Emilio, and they said good night back, as if pleased to have him return.

He walked back to Waterloo station, his feet crossing in front of each other again, but not from exhaustion, but from a kind of joy.

When Michael got home there was a mass of pink flesh mewling on the carpet. It looked a bit like an unshelled crayfish only it was the size of an Alsatian.

Nick leaned against the wall all sweaty, and pale and ill. 'I nearly did it,' Nick said. 'Not quite what the porn market demands right now. But I'll get better.'

Michael paused. 'That was meant to be a copy of me, wasn't it?'

'Yeah.' Nick's laugh was a shiver. 'Serve you bloody right mate, let you know what it's like.'

Gently, Michael waved it out of existence.

Nick's eyes. They were metallic, like the heads of drills that were somehow pointed inwards. 'I'll keep going. I'll keep going till I do it.'

Michael sighed. 'Not while I'm here, you won't.'

There was something in the air and in Michael's head at the same time. Something like a tentacle, or an arm… a member shall we say, and it rose up and tried to touch Michael or rather Michael's power. Michael grabbed hold of it, felt it twist and turn in the air, and he wrestled it to the ground, and pushed it back and down. Nick even, involuntarily, made a swallowing sound.

Nick was covered in sweat. 'I'll go cook dinner,' he said. He stumbled into the kitchen. He cut up an onion. He started to sing 'Zippity do dah!' He left the knife on the counter top. The onions sizzled. Michael sat down and took off his shoes. He had a corn on his right toe and it was twitching. 'I'll give you a hand,' he said, out of habit. He went to the kitchen counter. 'Can I do anything?' he asked. Nick turned and drove the knife into Michael's heart.

Michael didn't feel anything, except a kind of inconvenience in the chest. Breathing had become choked and unnecessarily difficult. The knife was lodged deeply, and blood was pouring down his shirt into his trousers. It'll be hell to clean up, Michael thought.

'So,' said Nick. 'I guess you won't be here then.'

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…