Human Sister (24 page)

 On the morning of my departure, he got out of bed and walked toward the bathroom. Halfway there, he looked around. I was lying in bed, watching him. He smiled, then walked back to the bed, knelt beside me, and gave me a long warm kiss. “I love you so much,” he said. “I’d like to tell you a little secret before you go.”

“What?”

“It makes me feel really good inside when I know you’re watching me when I’m naked. I’d like you to come into the bathroom with me this morning, and any other time you want, and watch me do whatever I do.”

I flung my arms around his neck. “Thank you! I think you’re so beautiful!”

I sat naked on the toilet, cover down, and watched him take a shower. He came out and dried himself leisurely in front of me.

“You sure seem to have an erection a lot of the time,” I said.

He looked down at it, smiled, then turned to profile himself to me. His erection arched up playfully. “It’s the way my body smiles at you,” he said, grinning.

Now, whenever I think of that moment, his form starts to take shape. First, an outline of his muscular thigh appears; then the curve of his firm, round buttocks; then his muscled stomach, its mid-parting incurvation enticing me—and suddenly, he’s there: black, glistening wet hair; full, ripe lips and white teeth smiling; dark-skinned torso arching back slightly to accentuate the v-shape it forms with his erection. And it’s true—his body is smiling at me!

First Brother

S
he walks, the dog runs, toward a sign that reads, “Private Property. Beware Of Owner.” She repeatedly looks toward the house just east of the graveled way leading down to the landing.

“Rusty!” she calls. “Come! Come here, boy!”

The dog stops, turns, and trots back to her. She reaches out with her right hand and strokes the dog’s shoulder. “Leave the pigeonoid alone. Heel. Good boy!”

The dog walks beside her for a couple of meters. She calls out toward the house and toward the garage north of the house: “Hello! Hello! Is anyone home?”

One door of the garage is open. A Toyota brand vehicle with two canoes attached to its top is parked inside the open garage door. She leans in beside the right side of the vehicle and again calls out: “Hello!”

The dog runs into the garage on the left side of the vehicle and disappears from sight.

“Come,” she says. She turns and heads toward the house.

Sara

E
ven though I wear gloves as I write, my hands occasionally get cold and I go to the module where Michael is working on the artificial wombs, where it is tropically moist and warm and where, sometimes, I can close my eyes and feel at peace. But this time during my break to rest and warm up, Michael was excited to show me the set of breasts he just completed fabricating, four breasts stacked 2 x 2 that he will strap onto his chest to nurse the first children. He already has names for them: Kyla, Sophie, Eddy, Jace.

Soon, using my eggs and genetic material preserved from Elio and some people Grandpa felt were superior both physically and mentally, Michael will complete the design of the coiled strands of the children’s DNA, those twisting tornadoes of possibilities, then nine months later will pull four wet infants crying and kicking from the artificial wombs, and for a year or so nurse them on the quadruple heated breasts strapped to his chest, where, I imagine, the newborns will suck and coo, cough and spit and wiggle themselves into caramel-smelling slumberous calm, their doughy thighs and pudgy little fingers cradled in his arms, their heads pillowed in his cruciform cleavage, their anterior fontanels—crested with white, black, blond, and auburn downy hair—visibly pulsing to the warm, red, iambic rhythm of human life. Sophie will be my clone, her eyes buttons of bleached-blue sky; and Eddie will be Elio’s, his skin chocolate and when in the sun, smelling of rain on warm stone.

Michael says I should see them as my children, too. But he insists that they remain here for a while, perhaps years, until he is certain the threat from the androids on Mars is over. I can’t imagine staying in this cramped, cold place for years. Each day I become more anxious, more eager to leave, to return to Grandma, Lily, home. And perhaps I suffer from an antiquated notion that a mother is someone who wraps her long legs around a father. There is no father like that here.

I longed for Elio during the flight home. But I felt drawn forward, too. I’d been gone for two weeks, and I missed home: Grandpa, Grandma, Michael, and Lily—and the vineyard, that palimpsest of sweetness and green, shimmering in the midsummer sun.

After playing with Lily and then talking with Grandpa and Grandma over lunch, I showered to rid myself of any clinging microdevices and stepped in front of Gatekeeper 3. The first door opened, then closed behind me. I placed my feet on the foot diagrams printed on the floor and waited for Gatekeeper to examine me. While still in Amsterdam, I’d called Grandpa and Grandma and told them Elio and I had become lovers. They had been wonderful, wishing us happiness. I worried, though, about how supportive (or upset) Michael would be. Had they told him already?

I heard the seals of the second door release, and there was Michael, smiling and reaching in for me before the door finished sliding open.

“I’m so happy you’re home!” he exclaimed, hugging me.

I reached for a pair of underpants, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me along toward our study. “I saw the recording of your telling Grandpa and Grandma about you and Elio. I was so excited that I asked Grandpa to bring me materials to examine related to the physiology and psychology of sex and love. It’s fascinating.” Near the computer was a pile of chip cases. “I want to brainjoin with you while you tell me about Elio.”

We sat cross-legged on the floor, and after the braincord made its familiar journey up my nostrils to its junctions, I began telling Michael about my two weeks with Elio.

He asked me to skip to just before I knew Elio wanted to make love with me. I did. After a bit, he asked me to go back in the story and concentrate on seeing Elio naked in bed. I did. He asked me to try to see and feel as much as I could about that first sexual experience, and as I did my nipples became erect. He bent over and looked at them closely. “I read about this. And you’re flushed and breathing heavily.”

“Yes, well, remembering and describing all this is sexually arousing for me.”

“I know all about it. I’ve been studying. I also read that people masturbate to give themselves pleasure. I’d like to experience masturbation while we’re connected.”

“I’ve never done it by myself. Only with Elio.”

“But humans do this—usually alone. Couldn’t we do this alone?”

I had agreed to share my life with Michael, but I’d been only eight at the time. I hadn’t known then that one day I might want something only for myself.

I looked at Michael. He was so obviously eager for us to share this human sexuality, as we had shared everything before. For him, I was a confluence of many roles: mother, sister, teacher, friend—and I was a vitally important instrument for his ability to sense and feel, especially relating to activities in the outside world. And I loved him, loved him in a way that our special circumstances required, which meant, I felt then, that I had to share myself with him and had to try to be whatever he needed whenever he needed it, for how else could he obtain it?

“Okay,” I said, “but it’ll be more comfortable for me if I lie on my bed.”

Michael sat beside me on the bed, and I began doing what I’d never done without Elio—without his hands on my hands, his fingers atop my fingers, guiding them, pressing here, stroking there, releasing exquisite pleasure that shimmered magically over a river of contractions and moans. But though my fingers were in the remembered places doing the remembered things, they failed on their own to conjure up the shimmering pleasure.

“I don’t see or hear a story,” Michael interrupted. “From what I’ve read, aren’t you supposed to tell yourself a romantic story while you touch yourself in the right places?”

“Like what?” I said, trying not to think—for my thoughts he too would think—that the problem more likely was his presence studying me.

“Well, like about making love with Elio on your birthday. That aroused you before. It’s a story I already know, so I should easily be able to sense its many nuances.”

With my hands once again busy on my body, I began silently recalling the events of my birthday, when I found to my surprise that I merely had to evoke, in the manner already described, Elio’s body smiling at me to satisfy Michael’s curiosity and my sudden desire.

Michael stared at me without expression. Then he exclaimed, “Wow! That was amazing! The rising heartbeat, the tension, the crescendo of neural activity, the release—all that stimulation surged through our brains, crushing every conscious thought. I read about it, but I never anticipated such an experience.”

Yes, I thought. Words can only point, as the fingers of spectators point toward but can never give the experience of the blossoming of the event so many have come to see.

He reached over and touched my right breast near the areola, then jerked his hand back as if he’d been jolted by a spark of electricity.

“Ah! My fingers feel so cold!” His voice and manner seemed half-startled, half-despondent, and I instantly felt his or my—or our—pain.

“I like your cool touch,” I said, reaching over and taking his hand in mine. “It’s just that… perhaps my breasts are hypersensitive right now.” I became conscious then of the problem of someday finding someone who would long—in the way a lover longs—for Michael’s cool touch, his touch that was loving in every way but lacked mammalian warmth.

“Do you miss Elio?” he asked.

I nodded. “He might be coming to live with us in a couple of months. He wants to live here and commute to school at UC Berkeley.”

“Live here? With us? In these rooms?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind. And if we can get his mother to agree.”

Michael’s face lit up to its maximum expression of happiness. “That’s wonderful! We can play and talk and study together. And I can feel your sexual feelings for him, too.”

I thought for a moment. “Yes, it will be wonderful. But I would like you to wait awhile before you ask to feel my sexual feelings for him while he’s present.”

“Why is that?”

“We don’t want to frighten or offend him. Let’s wait until he’s nearly as comfortable with you as I am. Let him see to what extent my sense impressions and mental activities can be experienced by you. Let him see how you can take over my motor activities when I relax completely. Give him time. In the meanwhile, you’ll have many opportunities when he’s not present to experience through our braincord the love and pleasure I feel with him.”

A momentary buzz of seemingly incoherent words and images flooded my brain, which was still connected with Michael’s. Then he smiled, nodded, and kissed me on my lips, as we’d been used to kissing ever since he was born.

About a half-hour before dinner, I put on walking shorts and headed out to the vineyard, where I hoped to find solitude. As I walked I became aware as never before, not simply of my sexuality, but more expansively of the sensual richness and luminosity of the physical world. The gentle pokes and jabs of blades of brown grass and of clumps of dry, gray dirt made my feet feel free. The sun, low in the sky, felt warm and comforting, reminding me of how my skin had seemed to awaken for the first time on my birthday as it pressed against Elio’s dark silky skin; of how, since then, my clothes felt good in a new way when I put them on; and of how the spray of warm water in a shower now gave me goose bumps of delight.

I took off my clothes and sat cross-legged on them in the shade of the green canopy of leaves. For about fifteen minutes, I sat clearing my mind. Then, expanding outward with my newly ripened senses, I noticed the world anew. I’d expected the vines would have grown heavier in my absence, but I hadn’t expected them to be so exquisitely filled-out, or the soil so soft and comforting, or the air so sweetly redolent of green. I knelt in front of a vine and ran my fingers from the ground up along its rough trunk, caressing its jagged calluses. I kissed a leaf, feeling with my lips its velvety underside. I licked a small cluster of little green orbs of nascent fruit. I gently wrapped my arms around the vine, hugging its gnarled reality; and then, sensing I was part of life infinitely greater than my own, I looked up at the sky, felt sunshine pour through the leaves onto my back, and pinched dirt between my toes—as my body shivered its own shimmering smile at this precious Earth.