Now Michael saw the imperfections that would distort their beauty with age, the gap teeth, the sunken eyes. For the first time ever, his students provided no sexual inspiration. In the mornings, the train seemed full of middle-aged men who needed exercise. Michael had to remind himself that some of them were, objectively, young and attractive. It was summer, the season of T-shirts and shorts and hairy knees. The beautiful naked legs had no effect on him.

Michael began to realize that he did not really like sex. He had only ever liked parts of sex, sudden jagged frozen moments. He would recycle them as images in memory or fantasy.

Often, the people in the fantasy did not matter. The core of the fantasy was the situation he himself was in.

These situations were not anything he would care to have written down. Just recently, one fantasy involved him being tied up in a Berlin dungeon. In another, he was pressed by a wall of waiting men in the urinals at Cairo train station. His potential partners in the fantasy might wear gelabiya or more Western dress. They could be Nile Delta plump or desert thin; young or old. Who they were did not matter.

In other fantasies, Michael imagined he was twelve years old in Carlsbad, waylaid on a beach and seduced into a weekend life in a male brothel. He imagined himself at twelve wearing the tight little trunks and dancing for men. He danced to T-Rex and put his finger on the cloth under which his sphincter lay. It made no difference if the customers were fat, black and middle-aged, or off-duty wrestlers still in costume, or fathers of childhood friends.

What made him come was the situation he was in and the different scenarios that could lead to. The dream was not of someone else, but of himself, changed.

Life had given him the wrong miracle.

Look, I said I kept fancying guys, but I don't. In fact, I think I don't really like most men. If anything, I am rather chaste. What I want is to be somewhere else, doing something I would never normally do. The fantasy actually is that I become someone different.

So that was what the miracle should have been. It should have changed me.

Michael looked at the escort ads in the gay press. The photographs were supposed to be genuine. They usually displayed the wares from the neck down: slim bodies with large cocks, muscular bodies with tiny ones. He could have any of them, just by asking. He didn't ask. Perhaps he was satiated.

Perhaps it was his computer course.

Seriously. The instructors had forgotten to set enough coursework to give final marks, so suddenly, week after week another report or essay or study was due. All weekend and most evenings, Michael read learned papers about Windows NT system design. Finals were coming as well, so he was having to memorize circuit diagrams. All of this was far from arousing.

Perhaps it was simply that he could have whomever he wanted.

When Michael and Philip used to go out together, the bars would seem to be full of delicious men served cold. When Michael went alone and sex was a serious possibility, the men all seemed to be ballet fans pretending to be motorcyclists, or over-coiffured skinny young queens, or bitter old ones, or flakes who believed in numerology, or fake rockabillies who talked only to each other, or men who lived with their mothers. Availability washed the bloom off the fruit.

Michael invited all of the team at the lab out to lunch. In the first flush of summer, they sat outside on a jetty on the river, crowded around two tiny silver tables. The day seemed to yawn and stretch in the warmth. Across the river were the Houses of Parliament, looking misty like an old aquatint.

'If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be?' Michael asked his staff after three bottles of red wine.

No one answered at first. Who would you sleep with? is not a question anyone can answer easily. It's not only that the question is too personal. The answer changes, moment to moment. It could well be that at that moment you do not want to sleep with anyone at all.

Ebru smiled and said her boyfriend. 'Of course,' she added.

'Well… and who else?'

'No one else,' she insisted, smiling.

Michael turned to Shafiq and asked him.

'Oh!' said Shafiq, and looked pleased and embarrassed. 'Oh, I don't think I could answer that.'

'Don't say your wife,' said Ebru.

Emilio was humorously outraged. 'You said your boyfriend!'

'Yes, but that is the privilege of the one who is brave and goes first.'

'All right, I will tell you,' said Shafiq. His eyes sparkled with daring. They all waited. 'Sophia Loren. I like the mature women.'

Michael imagined sleek brown thighs in old-fashioned stockings, with a little wrinkle just above the knee. 'I can see that,' he said.

'They are more… you know. The young ones are beautiful, but…' Shafiq was shy and his smile overwhelmed his face.

I know, thought Michael. You can't imagine that the young ones are really interested in you.

Ebru kept up the attack. 'Emilio?'

'My girlfriend,' he murmured under a sheltering elbow.

'Oh dear, so unimaginative.' Ebru was teasing.

'We are all being that,' said Shafiq.

There is good reason for that,' Ebru replied. 'We would all like to sleep with many people. But there are consequences in doing so. I would only do anything if there were no consequences.'

Michael could promise. 'There would be no consequences. Nothing would change. You couldn't get sick, you could not get pregnant.'

Ebru chuckled at her own naughtiness. 'And my boyfriend could not find out?'

'Absolutely.'

'Then… I would consider sleeping with George Clooney.'

'Oh dear,' said Emilio. 'And not Anthony Edwards?'

'He's bald. I couldn't. Now it's your turn, for you to say.'

'Anne Heche,' said Emilio, with an air of finality and a grin that was frankly smug.

'Oh, but you know that she is a lesbian?'

Emilio's smile went hazy and naughty. 'Hmm, maybe I like that.'

'Oh. We are learning many things about each other. It is good to be social so that we can all get acquainted better.' Ebru plucked each word like strings on a guitar. She turned to Michael. 'OK, boss. This was your idea, now it is your turn.'

Michael grinned and thought: I'm the only one here who can actually answer that question.

He drew it out. 'Well. First. Hmm. Who would I ask first?' Michael crossed his arms. 'I think it would be… Mother Theresa.'

Emilio yelped. 'Mother Theresa!'

Michael surfed it. 'Is she not beautiful?'

'Yeah, but to sleep with?'

Ebru was pleased. 'That is a very clever answer.'

Emilio couldn't accept it. 'It would be like sleeping with ET!'

'Hmm,' said Michael. 'I hadn't thought of that one.' He pretended to consider the proposition, rubbing his chin.

Ebru was proud of him. 'You see, Shafiq, Michael likes the mature women as well.'

'And then, after that,' Michael announced, and all conversation stopped: Michael was going to give them more than one? 'I think it would be… Johnny Weissmuller from the Tarzan movies.'

Ebru's eyes widened, miming shock, but she was smiling. She already knew.

'Right on,' said Emilio, which raised further questions about Emilio.

'And then it would be…' Michael took an olive from the dish, and chewed it, and they all waited him out. 'Taffy Duck from Dumb Duck, Detective, and after that… mmm… a girl from my high school.'

Ebru laughed some more and applauded. 'You win first place for originality. So as first-place winner, you now have to answer the next question, Michael. Who here in the staff of the project would you sleep with if it was no harm done?'

Michael smiled and shook his head. 'Oh no.'

Ebru drawled, amused, 'Oh, but you have to answer. It is the contest.'