Someone rang the doorbell down on the street; a window appeared in the corner of the screen, showing Felix shuffling his feet against the cold. Prabir felt a rush of guilt; he’d been meaning to call him all week. Felix spread his arms and looked straight into the camera, comically imploring. Prabir said, ‘Come on up.’
Felix entered the apartment smiling, looking around. ‘So what are you up to?’
Prabir indicated the TV. ‘Stupefaction therapy.’
‘Do you want to go somewhere?’
‘I don’t know. I just got home; I’m pretty tired.’
Felix nodded sympathetically. ‘Me too.’ He didn’t look tired. ‘I came straight here; I had a batch of coins in a reducing bath I couldn’t leave.’
‘Have you eaten?’ Prabir took a few steps towards the kitchen. ‘We’ve got plenty of food, if you don’t mind something reheated.’
‘No, it’s OK. I grabbed something at work.’ Felix took off his jacket and they sat on the couch.
Prabir said, ‘What kind of coins?’
‘English. Eighteenth century. Nothing very interesting.’ Felix was a preservationist at the Royal Ontario Museum; his job was a mixture of everything from art history to zoology. He often complained that most of what he did was mundane lab work, but he seemed to have a very different notion of ‘mundane’ than anyone who’d worked in retail banking.
He leant forward and kissed Prabir, then moved closer and put an arm around him. Prabir did his best to respond enthusiastically, kissing back, trying to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to be at ease, to be as unselfconscious as Felix was, but his heart still skipped a beat out of sheer panic at the first touch.
Even when Madhusree had first moved in with him, nine years before, Amita hadn’t fought him for custody; she’d resigned herself to Madhusree’s decision. But Prabir had never felt confident that there wouldn’t be a legal challenge from somewhere, and an eighteen-year-old guardian who slept with men under the same roof as his ten-year-old sister would hardly have been placing himself in the most secure position imaginable. He’d heard of established, respectable gay couples winning custody battles, but his own situation could not have been more different, and the prospect of his first clumsy attempts to find a partner not only costing him Madhusree but ending up as evidence in court was all the discouragement he needed.
The risk had begun to seem far less dramatic when Madhusree was a few years older, but Prabir still hadn’t been willing to gamble. By the time she’d turned eighteen and the danger of losing her had evaporated, Prabir had grown so accustomed to celibacy that he’d had no real idea how to end it. He’d had no social life for eight years; aside from not wanting to leave Madhusree with sitters in the early days, everything his old schoolfriends or colleagues had been into had seemed to demand either that he faked being straight, or that he tempted fate. But once there was nothing holding him back, he felt like a stranger in the country all over again. He knew he could have found Toronto’s gay bars and nightclubs listed in any tourist guide, but he had no reason to believe that he’d belong in that world, any more than anywhere else.
Felix began unbuttoning Prabir’s shirt. Prabir came to his senses and pulled away. He whispered, ‘What are you doing? She’s just in the next room.’
‘Yes?’ Felix laughed. ‘Somehow I don’t think your sister has a problem with us.’ It was Madhusree who’d introduced them. ‘And I wasn’t planning to tear all your clothes off until we were in your bedroom.’
‘I’m serious. She’s trying to study.’
‘I can be as quiet as you like.’
‘Quietjust makes it obvious.’
Felix shook his head, more amused than annoyed.
Prabir protested, ‘Don’t try telling me it’s not distracting, knowing that someone’s having sex ten metres away. She has a cladistics test on Monday.’
‘That’s why Darwin invented Sunday afternoons. Listen, I did my entire degree sharing a house with six other students. It was quadraphonic fucking twenty-four hours a day. Madhusree has it easy.’ Felix stretched his legs and sat back on the couch.
‘Yeah, well I’m sorry you were stranded in a bohemian nightmare, but it’s not my role to put character-building hurdles in front of her. She’s entitled to some peace in her own apartment when she needs it.’
Felix said nothing. He glanced at the TV.
Prabir said, ‘If you’d called me at work we could have met at your place.’
Felix kept his mouth shut, refusing to prolong the argument. He reached over and ran the back of his hand along Prabir’s forearm, a gesture that seemed both conciliatory and erotic, but Prabir wasn’t willing to let the matter drop. He said, ‘Just admit that I’m not being unreasonable.’
Madhusree emerged from her room. ‘Hi Felix.’ She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then addressed Prabir. ‘I’m going out. Don’t wait up.’
‘Where are you headed?’
‘Nowhere special. I’m just meeting some friends.’
‘That sounds good.’ Prabir tried to read her clothes, but he didn’t know the codes any more. She could have been on her way to a diplomatic reception in a five-star hotel, or a demolition party, for all he could tell.
He said, ‘Have fun.’
She smiled at him, you too, then raised a hand goodbye to Felix.
When she was gone, Felix feigned interest in the TV. The Zeitgeist Channel—a redirection filter that automatically displayed whatever the greatest number of people in the same town or city were watching—was showing a bland office comedy. Prabir said, ‘Did I ever tell you that one of my foster-parents wrote a ten-thousand-word academic paper called “Second-Level Mutual Inter-Sitcom Self-Reference as a Signifier for the Sacred”?’
Felix cracked up. ‘Who published it? Social Text?’
‘How did you know that?’
In the bedroom, Felix said, ‘Any chance of a visual cortex massage?’ Prabir knelt over him and gently peeled the electrode sheet from his back. The skin beneath was slightly pale, but it wasn’t waxen like the skin beneath a cast or a bandage; the polymer let through plenty of oxygen. Felix claimed to wash the twenty-thousand-dollar device in the laundromat along with his shirts, but Prabir had never actually witnessed this.
When Felix had been born with malformed retinas, in 2006, artificial replacements were just coming into use. But there’d been no prospect then of wiring the photosensor arrays directly to his brain. Instead, circuitry in the sheet received the signals from his eyes, and the electrodes stimulated nerves in his back. From infancy, he’d learnt to interpret the sensations as images.
Prabir started kneading, cautiously. Felix said, ‘You can be a lot rougher. It’s not hypersensitive. It’s just skin.’
‘But… do you feel my hands, or do you see something?’
‘Both.’
‘Yeah? What do you see?’
‘Abstract patterns. Rows of dots, starbursts. But it’s all pretty faint and unconvincing. The whole point is to get a strong sensation that’s more compelling as touch than as imagery, so I don’t lose the original function of the nerves.’
Prabir had found software on the net that let him transform a camera’s image into something comparable to the information flowing through the sheet. The impressionistic, monochrome version of his own face that it had shown him had barely been recognisable as a face at all, but Felix could spot people from fifty metres. Experience made all the difference. An operation to connect the artificial retinas directly to his brain had been available for about five years, but he would have found it as hard to adjust to the new way of seeing as Prabir would have found adjusting to the sheet.
Prabir’s hands began to stray. After a while, Felix rolled on to his back and pulled Prabir down on top of him. As they kissed, Prabir felt a warmth like liquid fire spreading through his veins, and a growing tightness in his chest, as if he’d been robbed of his breath by the sight of something astonishing. This was what he wanted, more than sex itself. He had no word for it: it was far too physical to be mere tenderness, far too tender to be mere desire.