A moral romance

The restaurant, which offered simple but excellent fare, was lit by a large artificial moon augmented by some weak recessed lighting in the walls. The owner oversaw proceedings from the till. At one table, oblivious to the comings and goings of the waiters and the other customers, a man and a woman were trying to downplay their excitement at the conversation they were having by occasionally looking out of the window. Down below, the river was dancing, the lights from the homes that lined the shore glinting playfully off the water. 

They’d finished their meal and were drinking aropi liquor in little sips. Flugo, a well-built redhead, wore his ugliness well. Otami was tall and stunning: perfectly proportioned blue eyes, short hair the colour of dates, a ravishing nose, beautifully angled upper incisors and a lower lip that wobbled slightly, like a tic, a subconscious effort to right a slight unevenness. A moment before she’d missed the rim of her glass, and some of the liquid had splashed onto her chin. She wiped it away then lowered her eyes and took off her jacket. Flugo tried hard to keep his saliva in check. She stretched out her arms to show off the special features underneath her bracelets. Flugo’s hairy arms only had functional enhancements. He showed them to her. Both were fidgety and irritable, as though something with no discernible odour were cooking between the two of them. The bill was brought to the table, and Otami declared that as she’d invited him out she’d pay. Suddenly they heard an inhuman roar. Flugo’s hair grew redder, and Otami’s back glowed.  

A flame emerged from the entrance to the kitchen, right next to the counter where the owner stood at his post. It was already racing up the hiluven screen. With the rapidly spreading flames snapping at their heels, the chef and his assistants ran out as fast as they could while the robotios backed away, ineffectually spitting out their water reserves. New tongues of flame slithered along the floor like fiery snakes. While the owner stepped back, slapping at his cuffs, his customers ran for the exit. Seeing that Flugo was about to use his wrist extinguisher, the man asked him not to come any closer. Flugo looked down at the remains of their meal and the clipboard with the bill. He took out his money pouch and fingered the notes while the bar went up in flames. Otami made a grab for him and tried to pull him away, but her sweaty hands slipped and she went on alone. The owner hesitated like the captain of a ship before heading out the back. Caught between the fire and the night, Otami turned around and called to Flugo until, eventually, he agreed to come out with her. On the esplanade, about fifty metres away, they watched as the fire consumed most of the restaurant and the windows began to crack. Eventually the firefly units arrived. Calmed by this reassuring sight the crowd dispersed, and they were left alone under the stars. Flugo was torn between melancholy and Otami’s gleaming shoulders. They’ve all gone, she said. And none of them paid, Flugo replied. Still clutching the money, he made as if to go back inside. She pressed herself against him. It’s cold, she said. Aroused by her whisper, he realized that now was the time to put an arm around her. They went down to the seafront to look for a taxi before driving to a tall residential icosahedron. In her studio, which, like her, was beautiful and uneven, they rutted like fugitives from the law. All the positions, all the orifices, all the juices. While Otami made an effort to be industrious, Flugo strove to be liberated. He was disoriented, as though he hadn’t yet come to terms with the new horizons opened up by their unexpected escape. He looked down at his uncommonly firm trombon as she begged him to plunge it into her and wondered what to make of the two fingers she’d shoved in his arse. She clung to him tight, making a strange sound, a kind of purr begging for succour or a timid mantra to ward off oblivion. They slept well but not blissfully. In the morning she stroked him but didn’t cling to him like she had the night before; she was distracted. He, however, was trying to concentrate. In this minor difference, Flugo found the room to mill his incredulity into anxiety.

It was a tragedy, he said. What happened to that man was a tragedy, and people… like us… such a good meal… We need to pay for it.

She reminded him that all the covers put together wouldn’t come to anything like what he’d be getting from his insurance. Also, it had been her treat. He said that it wasn’t about the money so much as paying what one should, acting responsibly. Basic human decency. The resulting silence suggested that for him this was no trivial matter. Flugo stifled a yawn. He’d never thought about how important such things were before. He didn’t say that neither had he ever slept with a woman like her before, but it was obvious that he was somewhat flustered by their exertions. She stretched, rubbing against him. The fact that she was able to do two things at once piqued Flugo’s trombon, and they went at it again. By the time they’d finished he was braying while she was pleading, as though she had begun to founder. But then she recovered immediately: she was ephemeral as a dolphin. She kissed him, slapped his arse and sat down on an elegant-but-dirty sofa with a quarnaklo draped over her legs. The night before she’d told him that she didn’t deal very well with confrontation and that she designed persuasive images for neural links. She plugged in to the Panconscious. Flugo was left staring at the only painting in the house, a landscape of very different places: a reed bed, a lake on a high mountain, a hall in a cheap hotel and more. Then he left for work. He was a quality-control officer at a factory that made fluid injectors.  

Several days passed before he went back to the restaurant. A pair of cyborgs was guarding some furniture that hadn’t been burned too badly, and a pile of brickling, woodpaste and metal had been placed alongside the two surviving walls. He noticed a fluttering tablecloth; it wasn’t the table that he had sat at with Otami, but the clipboard with the unpaid bill was still there. Flugo blinked, and the board disappeared. However, the boy piling up the objects that were still serviceable was certainly real. Flugo told him that he’d come to pay the bill for that night. The boy told him not to worry, Don Mayome had other things on his mind. Flugo left reluctantly without asking any more questions.

He couldn’t forgive himself for the delay. And yet he could, because to his surprise Otami called him, and they went out together not once but twice, and on both occasions they screwed like lost souls, once on an empty boat. Three fucks usually constitute a relationship, but this time that wasn’t entirely the case. They were tied together but not bonded. They grabbed, bit and stroked each other violently, mixing their breath, saliva, semen and juices, their eyes brimming over. They squeezed at each other greedily, until it hurt, but it was all for naught; neither could actually steal anything from the other’s body, they couldn’t physically merge, which is what they really wanted. When it seemed that they’d squeezed out all the pleasure they could and were finally sated, it only took a moment of contact to, unlike the fire at the restaurant, revive their flames and fury again. Otami was as crazy about Flugo’s trombon and mouth as she was for her own holes and emissions, as he was for every part of her, even her toenails. She revered Flugo’s bulk. She nuzzled her forehead into his chest and stroked his head, mumbling, You give me everything, moaning that if he let her go she’d fly away or drown, and so he would thrust, push, suck and try to reassure her, even though she never seemed to need consolation after the climax. Sex isn’t the only bond; it was more like when they were copulating a bond appeared that couldn’t seem to raise its head otherwise.

Flugo stammered that one must own up to the consequences of their actions. She gave a half-smile and massaged his shins without bothering to say that all they did was go to dinner, but it was probably what she was thinking.

But who will atone for the thoughtlessness, the selfishness of the people who left? he asked.

She glanced at him without irony, pity or the slightest irritation, without even reminding him, once again, that she was the one who was supposed to have paid the bill.        

When Flugo went back up the hill the next day, the boy told him that Don Mayome had died. He was his stepson. Flugo bit his lip.

Of course, after a calamity like that, he murmured.

No, sir, he died of something he already had.

What about you…?

I helped him to die, and he left me this. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sell it.

Flugo said that he didn’t think it would be hard. The stepson said that he didn’t understand; it wasn’t that he didn’t know if he could sell it, he simply couldn’t sell it.

Of course, Flugo said, there are unpaid debts.

Telling the boy again that he hadn’t been able to pay that night, he took out his pouch.

The stepson stopped him there: Don’t insult me.

No, no, it’s what I owe.

Sir, you don’t get this business at all.

Flugo considered arguing further but just nodded. He walked down the hill, clutching his side, as though he had a stitch, as though he were trying to climb up a cliff but couldn’t make any headway. One morning, after a sleepy but indulgent encounter, he asked Otami why they never did it at his house. It took her a while to answer: I feel better here. He looked at the only painting on the wall. Today it seemed as though the images had changed: palfreys galloping across the tundra, a morgue, a village in the mist, but it might have been an optical illusion. As usual, for breakfast they had tea, bread and oil and bunaston strips. They ate, and Flugo stopped himself from asking how she knew she felt better there if she’d never been to his house. Otami sat in her work chair looking so languorous, glossy and long legged that it was almost intimidating. Suddenly, he got up and exultantly slapped himself on the forehead. The noise distracted Otami from the Panconscious. She told him to take care, he was liable hurt himself; one needs to know how to handle an excess of endorphins.

At the former restaurant the owner’s stepson had cleared away the rubble. He was saying goodbye to a professional-looking lady, who then got into her autopod and drove away. When he saw Flugo, he sighed, not quite exasperated but certainly weary. He asked Flugo to try to understand that he had things to rebuild. Flugo smiled with a cunning expression he hadn’t seemed capable of. He looked at the three cyborgs struggling with a shipment of various different materials. He told the boy that he was very good at organizing construction teams, partly because he worked alongside them, too. He seemed so enthused that the stepson reluctantly agreed to let him help out. And so, help he did. 

Three afternoons a week Flugo parked his patacycle at the dock and went up the hill to work with Mayome’s stepson. He checked budgets, talked to suppliers, negotiated with paralaws, set the ratio for the adobaster mix, struggled in vain to hurry the insurers up and made improvements to plans for a facility that would have to wait. He lifted loads of brickling and helped the boy to manage the money that the prescient Mayome had set aside – two years’ rent – before the boy helped him to die. Flugo asked him what that help had consisted of.

It was just something I used to do, the boy said.

On the mornings following his afternoon at the construction site, Flugo had coffeto and biscuits with cream and jam for breakfast. The other afternoons he patalated home before heading out for consummation with Otami, sometimes after a quiet walk, a quick dinner and a prologue of dirtilthian words. Even with what little we know about Flugo, we can tell that he found this routine unsettling.

Late one night, looking at the painting of different landscapes, he said quietly: I have to do some research.

What, hunny? she asked.

What kind of a job is helping people to die?

Otami was asleep, but he didn’t notice. His monologue went on to reveal that trying to make up for the debts of so many people was wearing him down, except when he was cavorting with Otami. But he wondered whether what was wearing him down was his obsession with whether or not everyone should have paid, or whether his malaise was caused by exhaustion and he’d invented an excuse to avoid the bigger issue. One might say that the work he put in avoiding the issue was beginning to bore him, and it was the fact that he was bored that saddened him. He woke up with Otami licking his ear, and from the oblivion of sleep slipped into the oblivion she had to offer. Like an island rent asunder by an earthquake, Flugo was torn between sadness and satisfaction. Looking away, she put on a T-shirt and gave him a compliment: Hunny, I have so much fun with you. I’ve never had so much fun with anyone. Flugo blinked, his eyes shone.

I had so hoped it would be like this.

She got up and spent almost half a minute hesitating between going to the bathroom and the kitchen, as though she didn’t know what to do first or wasn’t completely in control of herself. Eventually, she decided to sit on the sofa, and the decision pleased her. He lingered in the soft embrace of the duvet. A couple of minutes later he heard Otami’s voice from the kitchen, like a neural advertisement whose soundtrack was the bubbling of the coffeto pot. You shouldn’t tire yourself out like that. What if you end up wearing us out, too?

Like a paradoxical pill, Flugo found the phrase reinvigorating. Three afternoons a week, once he’d finished work at the plant, he committed himself to paying off society’s debt to the restaurant. The remaining nights he recharged his batteries with Otami’s eagerness. Sweaty and chaotic, she squeezed, twisted and pushed him, telling him in a hoarse, cracked voice never to let her go, to seal the deal, to be there with her, but after the climax she was always the first to extricate herself. Outside of the bedroom she never asked him for anything. Neither did she seem to expect any answers. Caught between the dock and the buoy, it seemed that poor confused Flugo was only able to anchor himself when he was putting his back into the work for the stepson. It was his way of overcoming his doubt and bewilderment. This would appear to be a therapeutic story about the different lives a man can lead. 

But Flugo never congratulated himself for having discovered such a satisfactory balance between duty and pleasure. One afternoon, when it was time to go home, Mayome’s stepson was cleaning a sink they’d just put in. He said to Flugo: Flugo, you work like a convict.

Flugo wasn’t surprised by the comment. In fact, he replied, I see myself as a researcher.

What are you researching?

We-ell, I’d like to find out how to take ownership of myself.

The boy turned off the tap and dried his hands.

Why? he asked eventually.

Flugo’s face flickered into a smile before returning to its usual earnest state. I don’t know; so I can have a relationship.

The boy also began to look earnest. What kind of relationship?

A relationship like the kind where your breath is interchangeable, said Flugo. The words took him by surprise. The boy, too.

Like a romance? he asked in a quiet voice.

Maybe, said Flugo. One hand washes the other and both wash the face.

That night he was watching the screenatron, trying to consolidate his feelings into a single emotion, when the psyphone rang. It was Otami. With no help from him, her face appeared, looking surprisingly easy to read. Her smoky voice conveyed nothing more than the words themselves: Tomorrow night. Can I come to your house tomorrow night?

Of course, said Flugo.

Grandz, she said. Then we’re doing something new.

Flugo hung up and quickly gave his flat a once-over, but there wasn’t much to do. Everything was neat and tidy. It was a nice flat. The last we heard of Flugo he was in the supermarket buying bunaston strips.