The Brothel Creeper: Stories of Sexual and Spiritual Tension (33 page)

Doctor Morales loomed out of the gloom. He had been calling to her but the buzzing in her head from the music had deafened her to his words. Her fingers were closing around the seventh lever. Now he came close enough to be audible. His teeth gleamed.

“I strongly suggest you don’t touch that one.”

There was something in his expression that made her withdraw her hand and mumble another apology.

He winced. “I don’t want too much disruption.”

She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. She was aware her cheeks were turning red with shame, even though she guessed he wouldn’t care or even notice. It was time for her to reveal the real point of her visit and make her request.

“Shall I tell you why I came here today? It wasn’t a social call. I want you to create something for me. A private commission. I want you to invent a husband. Can you do that?”

He pursed his lips. “Not a good idea.”

“Do you mind if I ask why?”

“Artificial people are unreliable. I lost faith in them a few years ago. They just can’t cope in society. The ones I designed from scratch found it impossible to make friends. The only remotely successful model started as an organic man and I stealthily replaced him piece by piece until he was fully automated, but even he went wrong when his simplistic brain encountered something which was at variance with the expectations of his limited daily routine. He was a dismal failure.”

Daniela sighed. “Will you try again?”

“The effort and expense aren’t worth it. Why not look for a real husband instead? That’s my advice.”

“I need complete control over his behaviour.”

“You want a slave? Is it sexual?”

“He has to have stamina,” she whispered.

“Now I understand. But there’s no need for an entire man. You only require the relevant segment and I have a number of elegant male members in storage. Every inventor toys with such trifles at some stage of his career. Shall I fetch you a selection for demonstration purposes? They come in a variety of colours and textures.”

“No, he has to have a different sort of stamina, not physical but moral, or rather amoral. He has to have stamina in deceiving me and to keep doing it without regrets. I get turned on by jealousy, you see, by
being
jealous, but I have never known fulfilment.”

He tapped his nose. “It seems a harmless enough desire. It even has a name. Zelophilia. We all have special vagaries. Naked clocks arouse me, possibly why I decided to become an inventor in the first place. I have an idea. What if I design automatic genitals for you? If I model them on your own sexual organs and set them loose among the men of the city, satisfaction will be attained without you and despite you.”

“I hadn’t considered that option.”

“While you remain at home, lonely and unloved, your disembodied flower will be flooded with the lust of innumerable lovers, including the husbands of your friends. You will be betrayed by yourself, an unbearable and utterly unique sensation. Surely this will take jealousy to new heights? All those encounters denied to you by yourself! Is this not the ultimate expression of what you crave? The apotheosis of your perversion!”

She shivered in her chair. “Yes.”

“Good. That is settled. I need to know your measurements. You can take those yourself. I will fetch a micrometer.”

He walked away and rummaged endlessly in the shadows. She attempted to calm her excitement by talking again, pretending an interest in his other work, the machines that so littered her surroundings that it might be easier to comment on the aspects of the room which did nothing much, the few traces of bare floor and walls, the dust, the occasional surface of a shelf not yet filled. Finally she referred back to the rack of tubes, the pattern of light now different but still indefinable, the picture just beyond the margin of clarity.

“How many levers do you plan to grow?”

“Actually I’m waiting for the one that will turn the abominable thing off. My basement is full of unwanted levers. One day the correct one will emerge. That will be a relief.”

“Why not smash the tubes? Won’t that stop them?”

“It might. Or it might do something else. I don’t want to risk the consequences of spilling unset levers over the floor. A puddle of liquid levers might cause all sorts of trouble. One slip of a foot and who can say what might be activated?”

“Do all your inventions need levers?”

He returned with the measuring instrument. “No. What I design for you will turn itself on. You will be able to carry the finished item in your pocket and smuggle it into the homes of neighbours and it will be programmed to seek out the nearest male. I might have been reluctant to fabricate such a device earlier but a recent event has led me to the conclusion that it is now perfectly safe to do so.”

He averted his eyes as she raised her skirt and she grinned. “Do you get many visitors, professor?”

“Hardly any. Now there will be even fewer. I used to go out fairly often but I’ll have to stop doing that. It will become dangerous. I am gradually turning invisible.”

“How did that happen?” she asked.

“The sixth lever. It started a machine that is altering the nature of my skin. I wish you hadn’t pulled it, but it’s too late now, because the process is irreversible. The cells on one side of my body will soon become highly sensitive to light. Each cell on the other side will emit the same level of light in the equivalent place. Whatever is behind me will appear on my front, so if I walk in front of a billboard, the logo will appear on my chest and stomach.”

“Surely you can just wear clothes?”

“Unfortunately my skin will become too tender to allow that. I must spend the rest of my life nude and unseen, but I don’t hate you for doing this to me. Women always spoil my projects. It’s not deliberate, I’m used to it, that’s all. It’s a natural hazard. Women!”

She finished with the micrometer and lowered her skirt. Taking the instrument, the professor studied the readings. He was already absorbed in his work, mumbling to himself, searching for suitable parts among the piles of components. Daniela realised she didn’t care to observe the actual process of construction. She became squeamish at the thought of this reverse dissection, the birth of a second, independent lower mouth, nor was there any appropriate name for the little shell of implausible heat and greed detached from the muscles of her pelvis, nothing workable or clear enough at any rate, and so she rose and strolled to the front door, calling back that she would return in a week. He said nothing.

She turned the handle and felt the warm breeze pass her face and enter the house, picking up dust and brown fumes and loose papers on its single circuit of the stuffy room and throwing them out into the early evening, where she ran, footsteps muted in slippers.

The hypothetical skeleton of the moon must resemble a net, with its latitude and longitude lines exposed like geometrical bones and no flesh between the nodes where parallels and meridians intersect. Streets full of shops are like unrolled versions of that skeleton, an urban grid that is distorted only along its edge. Daniela stopped running when she reached the mercantile heart of the city and eased into an intrigued saunter.

This grid should have been easy enough to negotiate, for no street could ever lead her astray, all were at right angles to each other, but she was briefly distracted by the pattern of lights in the windows of the upper levels of the buildings which contained the shops. Some were on, some had been turned off, creating randomness and asymmetry in the core of the perfect grid. All rooms directly above shops are enigmatic.

Rarely do they look occupied. More plausible to conclude that they have been left empty for years, filled with relics that nobody can remember how to recognise. But the fact that lights shine in many of them betrays this conceit. From the hills surrounding the city, over the period of an evening, these patterns of illumination gave the illusion of a vast and ancient mainframe computer clicking its way through an outmoded calculation programmed by technicians long dead. Daniela had seen this.

One night, purely by chance, it would happen that the arbitrary order of these lights would make a coherent figure. Something simple, maybe a stick man done in chunky squares, like a message broadcast to other stars to explain the dominant lifeform on planet Earth. The larger the grid, the more scope for accurate detail, the more realistic the result, but also a far greater number of meaningless patterns, abstracts that no mind could assemble into a shape with an equivalence in the true world.

Daniela saw no representation now: she was inside it.

On the other side of the mercantile zone she entered a neighbourhood of crumbling houses and scruffy gardens, the oldest part of the city. Why don’t I go straight home, she asked herself? It was a case of needing to walk off an excess of energy, for she had been given hope of fulfilment at last. She went into a park, her slippers raising clouds of spores from inadvertently kicked mushrooms in the thick grass. She sat on a bench below a branch on which perched a toucan. Elsewhere ripe fruit dropped.

“Zelophilia?” she pondered to herself.

The toucan was pecking at a strange growth on the branch. Now it flew off, evidently disappointed with the object. Daniela frowned closer and saw it resembled one of Morales’ levers. She reached and pulled. Then she realised that it really
was
a lever. She recalled how two of the levers on the console had turned to dust before her eyes. And the breeze that came in when she opened the door had carried it all off. Clearly some of it had been too heavy to float forever: it had settled here.

And reconstituted itself back into its original form!

She shrugged at the coincidence.

There was a rustling in the undergrowth on the far side of the park. The moonlight filtering through the canopy of trees had been generating random patterns on the ground. The vast majority of these shapes were abstract and meaningless, just like the lights of the clustered shops, but a few were given coherent form by chance. Now something protruded from the bushes: the head of a jaguar! The beast must have slinked out of the forest after the sun went down and secretly entered the park before the moon came up. Probably it would remain here until just before dawn. Hiding from view in this oasis of untamed wilderness, it might learn the ways of humanity, all the better to survive. But the vibrant pattern of moonlit speckles had attracted it out of concealment, called to its most basic appetites with undeniable force, had played a trick on its primitive urges.

It pounced on nothing, on a transient mirage!

Daniela leaned forward, her breathing shallow. What had the beast seen in the matrix of gleams? Perhaps a fawn, moon-coloured and helpless. Now the illusion shivered apart in the breeze, reformed into another abstract. Deceived claws gouged the rich soil, then the jaguar snorted, bounded back into hiding. Daniela stood and walked away slowly, quietly, leaving the park and closing the gate behind her. To be mauled in a jungle is one thing, a risk unavoidable and worth taking. But not in a park.

As she walked home, she thought about her own morning explorations of the arboreal tangle, that permanent dripping hothouse that surrounded the city like a balustrade, the festooned emerald mystery, never silent or still, in which rapid decay and faster life were simultaneous, overbearing, a green scream in the inner ear. She had found something there, the entrance to an underground passage, the mouth of an ancient complex that shouldn’t exist. There were no ruins in this corner of the continent, never had been. No stone cities, temples or even houses: this was academic fact.

But she wondered if the historians were wrong.

That is where she went before dawn, down a path known only to herself, picking her way between thorns and snakes, finally crouching at an entrance meshed with creepers to listen to the voice of the deeps, to a murmuring of a sunken sea, the sigh of a lost continent. It was a natural phenomenon grossly magnified and misinterpreted: a bigger variation of a shell positioned over the ear. Distortion of air currents. But she cared not to heed her rational mind on this point. Better to believe in a world beneath this one, a sanctuary under the bed of reality, in the finest space for eluding obligations.

A week passed. When she called on Doctor Morales again, his door swung open on its own. She stepped inside and saw nobody. But a small wooden box floated towards her and stopped there in midair. This was unnerving but she closed the door and waited. A voice said, “It’s all ready for you. I think you’ll appreciate what I’ve achieved.”