'Goodnight, Mavis,' he said to her eternal and developing spirit. He slept.
Until something in the night stirred. There was a smell of talcum powder and liniment, and the sheets parted, and someone huge and smooth and naked slipped next to Michael. Biceps and forearms as big and wholesome as loaves of brown bread enveloped him. 'Hello, Mikey,' his father said, his voice low and hot and close to his ear.
'Jesus Christ!' hissed Michael in panic, and threw off the bedclothes and spidered backwards, away from him.
Street lights shone through the curtains. Michael saw his father's big and handsome face, and the light reflected in his eyes. The eyes shone with yearning.
'You know what this is, now, Mikey.' It was a statement. 'You know what this means.'
'Sssh!' Michael was frightened to shock his mother. Yes, he knew what this was. He had reached down into the darkness, and pulled something back like a plum.
What he had really wanted, outside time. All this time.
'So what's different?' his father asked, rumbling deep as if out of the springs of the bed.
What will be different is that this time you will want me. His father looked young now, almost like a teenager. He and his father were now nearly the same age. Their hands were the same size. Louis's hand enveloped his, and coaxed him back towards him.
'No,' said Michael. 'She'll hear.' Mum is real and you are not.
Michael pointedly rolled over and turned his back. The bulk of his father shifted closer to him. It was the smell that was the most powerful; indescribable and immediate, his smell, the smell of his body, still vaguely like honey, the smell of this breath tainted from too much exercise, a bit sharp, even vinegary! The smell of American soap, different from English.
Those ripped muscles, when pressed all around him, were soft and smooth and gentle, as if a giant baby were holding Michael. Not a 40-year-old Marine sergeant who could kill automatically on demand.
'Merry Christmas,' Sergeant Blasco murmured.
And Michael let himself be held. Yes, Dad, this is what I wanted, yes Dad, this is what I dreamed of, night after night, morning after morning.
But you know something, Dad? Big and beautiful as you are? I'm not sixteen now, and though it might be easy to slip into this, I'm not going to do it. I'm thirty-eight and it's been too long, and this is my mother's house.
Michael resisted. But Michael let himself be held. He settled into sleep.
He had a dream which mingled his father with Santa. He was a child and under the white fake beard, his saw his father's eyes.
Then Michael had to get up to pee. He stood up and rammed the front of his foot into his bookshelf. How could he forget the bookshelf? It was where all his records were kept. Outside, beyond the slatted Venetian blind, there was still the warm murmuring of the surf. Michael walked on towards the door, and walked into a wall. The door was on the left not the right. He fumbled through it, advising himself to remember: the stairs are just in front of this door.
There were no stairs. And the bathroom, instead of straight ahead along the landing, was right, and then left again.
And Michael's eyes started wide open, and he stared and saw: this was not his mother's house in Sheffield. This was the condo in Oceanside.
Michael looked down at his legs. They were thicker, and ice-blue in the light. He stroked them. They were hairless.
Michael was sixteen and smooth. There was no hair on his chest, and his nipples were sore and swollen from too much sunlight. He looked down at his own chest with desire and stroked it. Himself at sixteen. The dream was always of being someone else in a different situation. In the end, at root, all the fantasies had been this fantasy.
Michael's dick started to creep downwards. This situation was that he was young, only almost a man, and that his father in the last days of his sexual power wanted him.
This was no dream.
Michael was awestruck. I've really done it now.
He'd wrenched and pulled bodies out of nothingness, and now the need had wrenched round everything else. It had wrenched the whole universe around him.
This was the right miracle, now. This was the miracle he had really needed.
He had become someone else – Michael at sixteen again, back home, home in California. Without any Viagra at all, his dick was twice the size it had ever been, and it was slammed straight up against his stomach, reaching all the way to his belly button.
Michael was wide, wide awake, as wide awake as he would be if he were walking barefoot across broken glass. He remembered the flower of his self, the flower of cobwebs and light and areas of dark. It would not be thwarted, that flower. If even he himself blocked it, it could wrench other realities into this one. If thwarted sufficiently, it could, evidently, pull him, instead, into another reality. Into this one.
Michael at 38 could resist, but not Michael at sixteen. He felt the old white carpet under his bare feet, and he felt the lining of his stomach seethe. And Michael started to weep as he walked, out of relief and fear and joy. He knew he would do it now. It was really, finally going to happen.
Michael went to his father and hoisted up his smooth, thick legs, and he looked into his father's eyes, eyes that in this reality wanted him.
His father's pubic hair was a tight little purse over his pressed genitals. Like so many men about to fucked, he was not erect. Michael touched him. His father's ass was smooth, the crease between the cheeks was smooth, and the pucker of his sphincter was neat and tidy and hairless. To Michael at least, it still smelled of honey. Michael needed neither KY nor spittle to ease the passage; he was luminous with lubrication. He entered his father and looked into his father's eyes, and his father nodded and closed them as if to dream.
Michael saw his own young crouched thighs thick with muscle, his own belly, and his dick gently shifting in and out, lapping like little waves on the shore of a lake. My body isn't ugly, Michael told his father in his mind. My sex is not ugly, it's a gift, it's a gift I wanted to give to you. You didn't have to treat it like something dirty, you could have said no, no gently; no I don't want this. You could have been calm and wise and said, no, you feel like that now because you don't know me, because we've been separated, because I am a man to you, and not your father. You could have continued to love me and care for me and hope I would find myself and someone my own age.
You didn't have to go and kill yourself slowly. You didn't have to try to kill me. You might even have let me do this once out of love, just once, so I could escape you.
Now we've gone and torn the real.
And I don't know if I can get back, and I don't even know if I want to.
Michael rocked back and forth, and felt as if he were moving through curtains. He saw his own body shift – when he blinked it had hair again. He was 38. He had accelerated from one reality to another. Then he flipped back: sixteen. He kept moving back and forth between the two, and that acceleration became part of the ride. We are fucking reality, Dad.
And that acceleration rose within himself, hurtling as if towards a brick wall. And there was a sudden, disintegrating crash, and part of him seemed to fragment and burst apart, scattering inside his father's body. He came in at least two different realities at once.
His father's eyes were round and brown, like a cartoon animal's. He looked trapped, cornered. Then the eyes crumpled into a smile. You really are the most beautiful man, Michael thought.
And Michael rolled away, and settled. This was still the room in California in some kind of 1970s. Michael was still sixteen. Cupped between his arms, his own smooth pectorals swelled. His fingers rippled over his own flat tummy and down his lean thighs. There was a kind of sparking in the nerve ends and suppleness in his joints. He could sense speed and reactivity there.
Michael held up the sheet and looked again at his own sixteen-year-old body. The thought of being in that body, and in this room, in this situation, made him rise again.
This time Michael turned and rolled over and presented. His father now was erect and reared over him, and settled on top of him, as heavy as the sky, as heavy as God, and the thought came: it could go on like this. I could stay here. I could start over again.
