Lust Or No Harm Done

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.

Out of love, Michael called up his living father.

His avenging father wore mirror shades and his Marine uniform and stood six foot four. He put a hand on Nick's shoulder. Nick spun around and gaped in terror. Michael's father hauled him to his feet and held him and bore him off.

Michael sent Nick back up the nerve into eternity to Nick's own unilluminated self. The air closed shut over them all.

Did we learn anything?

Michael woke up in crisp white sheets. He smelled them first, and then opened his eyes, and saw pale blue walls. Ebru was sitting on a small hard chair, legs crossed, reading a magazine.

Michael wanted to ask her the time. He couldn't talk. Something harsh and foreign was stuck into his nose and down his gullet and it was long and slithering, and he thought it was some kind of worm. He cried aloud and tried to hoist it out of him.

Ebru's head snapped up. Inshallah, she murmured and launched herself beside him, grabbing his wrists. 'No, Michael, no. It's OK, Michael.'

'Awwww!' was all he could say. His throat was unbelievably parched. He could feel these things reaching all the way down into his belly. My God, what were they?

'Sssh. Rest, Michael. You have been sick. You are in hospital. Sssh.'

He calmed down, panting. He ached in all his joints, and his feet felt huge and his knuckles looked swollen – swollen and gnarled at the same time.

'Do not try to talk, Michael. OK? OK Michael, you just nod your head, OK. I am going now just to get the doctor. Leave those things, OK.' She ran out of the room and her sneakers on the linoleum made noises like mice.

Michael looked around. Hills and valleys of sheets rippled over him. There was a drip feed into one of his arms. The skin on his hands had gone scaly, and his wrists and forearms were the same width. There was tape, like a very thick moustache, on his upper lip.

He tried to think, but it was as though his brain was elsewhere, huge and fiery and unwilling to cram itself back into his tiny skull. It waited, half-unsure that it wanted to be there.

Nick tried to kill me. That's why I'm here. In sudden alarm, his hands skittered down the hospital cloak, to his chest. There were no bolts and stitches, no swollen tissue. The knife wounds were gone.

The door thumped. Ebru stood in the doorway holding it open as if remembering her manners, her eyes round with something like fear. A male nurse bustled in around her. He was small, neat, pale, friendly, cold. He reminded Michael of Nick.

'All right, Mr Blasco, let's have a look at you.'

'What day is it?' Michael sounded like Donald Duck.

The nurse chuckled. 'I wouldn't try to talk if I were you.'

Ebru still clung to the lintel of the door. 'It's Thursday, Michael.'

He'd been out of it for several days.

The nurse leaned over and propped open one of Michael's eyes and shone a light into it. 'Do you feel dizzy or weak?'

Michael nodded his head.

'I'm not surprised.'

Neither am I. I came back from the dead.

'You're not that bad, considering. If you're awake, we can probably get rid of the tubes. Hold still, this is going to give you a free shave.' The male nurse grinned as if he'd said something funny.

As it was torn off his upper lip, the tape sounded as if the nurse were ripping up Michael's best shirts. It did hurt, uprooting stubble.

'Are you ready? These are coming out now.'

With a certain degree of professional skill, the nurse began to haul at the tubes as if pulling a barge. It didn't hurt, exactly. It was just horrible having something slither up through the hiatus valve, then up his gorge. Michael began to retch. The tubes heaved their way through his nasal membranes, burning with stomach acid and smelling of vomit. Michael coughed and expelled the tubes at the nurse, with fluids.

The male nurse smiled and sneered at the same time. 'Right,' he said, wrapping up the tubes and placing them in a bag. 'We can feed you properly now. Which is more than you were doing for yourself.'

He began to haul off surgical gloves, like a trick anxious to get home whipping off a condom. 'You've been a silly boy, haven't you? You'd have left us, if your colleague here hadn't come to find out where you were. So, they're going to send you to some counselling. Find out what that's all about. Otherwise, you'll be fit as a fiddle in no time.'

'You sound,' croaked Michael, 'as if you think I don't deserve to be.'