Powers

It was dark. Richard waited for his eyes to adjust but nothing happened. It was a darkness too complete. He felt as if he was under the earth but with no sense of confinement. It was cool and breezes were coming from different directions at random intervals. Richard re-closed his eyes and opened them again. No difference. He was scared and could not move. He realised now that he was sitting on a dry surface, hugging his knees to his chest. He could have been sitting on a pillar, or on the floor of a huge cave or the cell of a drafty dungeon. Richard wished there was a light, then realised he didn’t want to see. It was better not knowing what was happening.
It seemed as if some time passed. He felt hungry, but not tired. His eyes were filled with light as if from a strobe. He wondered if this was some reaction from his optic nerve to being in total darkness. The burst lasted for a fraction of a second, but left an after-image. Richard moved his head and the burnt shape blurred through purples and golds. Within the etched after-glow he could see some darker areas. Now they looked like black eyes. They stayed fixed no matter how he moved his head. It was the same with eyes open or shut.
Richard closed his eyes and tried to think about something else. No use. He hypothesised that the image of a face had been projected on to him by some powerful machine. Now his retinas were smoothing themselves. That was how he imagined them – like those children’s toys that are a matrix of metal rods in a frame. Push your hand or face into them and produce a 3-D model of yourself. Shake the rods back and you can start again. Everything was on its way back to black. But as it faded, Richard saw a reddish image of a face. It was her.
When Richard was growing up, there was a thalidomide boy in his road. Flids, they called them. Name of Kevin. The name stuck in his mind because of that song: my perfect cousin. They used to tease him. This Kevin was far from perfect. Short limbs. The hands looked unfinished, like some seedling interrupted in its secret uncurling; mis-formed fingers bent back against the forearm. He was scarred too, from some kind of surgery, perhaps. Richard never asked him.
He told them a tale about the secrets of his body. They listened intently, unable to judge if he was telling the truth. He said that when he was with a girl, his body shrivelled even more, enlarging his penis, gorging it with borrowed body-mass. It seemed plausible at the time. This differently-made body, more plastic than our own perhaps, ready to assume another form. He was a kind of super-hero. Like Daredevil – receiving powers in return for his lost sight. A kind of cosmic, karmic compensation. Richard wondered if he was due some kind of compensation. What had he lost? She didn’t belong to him. But then the notional perfect pair of arms had never belonged to Kevin either.
The flat was dirty. The air hung heavy in the rooms, he could see dust in the air of the bedroom. As he looked down the hall into the kitchen, he could see crumbs on the working surface. They were more visible from this angle than if he had been looking right at them. Richard undid and removed his trainers. He pulled off his socks and stepped into the coolness of the bathroom to toss them into the washing basket. The lino felt cold against his toes; he was relieved to be out of his shoes. His t-shirt clung to his back a little as he removed it. He moved into the kitchen and got polish and a duster ready, placing them in a corner just outside the door. So that he wouldn’t have to come back in once the floor was wet. He filled a pint glass with water and put it on a coaster on his desk in the second “bedroom” of the flat, which he used as a study and shrine room.
Now ready to begin, Richard took everything off the long worktop surface along the back wall of the flat: kettle; toaster; mug-tree. He put them behind him, on the smaller piece. He took the dishcloth and spray and cleaned down the empty space. [add hob] Now he moved everything back and repeated the process for the rest of the room. He bleached the sink and cleaned draining rack and washing-up bowl. He swept the floor and then mopped it. Although no one else was in, he angled the mop across the kitchen doorway, to keep any feet off the clean wet floor.
He cleaned methodically. As his mother had taught him. Always in the same order. The routine ensuring nothing is missed, freeing the mind for other things. He stopped for a few gulps of the water and realised he could have some music on. Cleaning topless somehow made it seem a far more male activity. Like a kind of exercise. A ritual purging. He was hungry. Cleaning made him hungry, always. Once the main rooms had been dusted, he got the hoover from its place in the hall and vacuumed the carpeted areas. He listened with interest to the noise of particles being swept up into the machine. As he did this job he remembered his mother hoovering. He’d be sat on his chair (the one on which he always sat and underneath which he was allowed to keep a few toys during the week). As she passed he’d raise his legs and she’d go underneath. Richard attended to which areas were the dirtiest and considered why there was more to pick up in some places. Crumbs dropped where he sat to eat a sandwich, pieces of fluff where he got dressed. Richard bent down to pick up a thread which the hoover could not disentangled from the fibres of the carpet. His stomach felt slimy with sweat as he bent double. Glancing over at the bed he remembered her hanging down, letting her head flop towards the floor as he sat there, complimenting her on the complex patterns of her irises. He moved each of the chairs, the table in his study. He hoovered over each of the areas he’d uncovered, noting the indentations left by legs and casters, putting everything back just where it was. Around his shrine there was quite a bit of ash, from incense he’d burned. He cleaned it thoroughly.
The bathroom was last of all. He placed every moveable object on the carpet in the hall as he sprayed and wiped the surfaces. He paused to urinate before bleaching the toilet, sweeping and mopping the floor. The shampoo, toothbrushes, deodorants and so on would have to stay on the carpet until the lino was dry. Richard reflected that, despite his thoroughness, millions of her cells would still be present in the flat. On his desk, tidy now, in a pile of books and a few loose sheets of paper he spotted a note she’d written. A reference to something she’d read, an article by Marvin Minsky she wanted to track down. She never dotted her ‘i’s. Writing at speed, a desire to get the main points down, not worrying yet about the details. Like a builder getting big, firm, but rather rough-textured foundations down.
He’s finished. He lights and incense stick and places it upright in a small bowl of sand. The flat is clean and permeated with fragrant smoke.

When he was 19, Richard thought the world was a matriarchy. Thatcher, his mother, the queen. At university, the female tutors were the most exciting. They had the freedom to be unconventional in dress which male academics did not, or did not embrace. He was painfully aware of his dependence on the bounty of females for any introduction into the arcane world of sexual experience. While he was able to express his feelings well in language, they had physical mastery. He took it for granted that they would make the first move. It seemed a form of violence to come on to a girl. He was aware of the threat he might offer, although in pictures of himself he was appalled by the pronounced curve of his neck (not a stoop exactly) and the way his bony hands suggested indecision. He had a horror about exerting excessive force. Something about growing up in the 1980s. All the crimes performed by men. All the rage and inadequacy worked out upon the bodies of women. Sex used as a power move. Men who never questioned the irrational bias of older relatives towards male offspring and had carried that superiority complex directly into the bedrooms of their first lovers.
His first lover had dominated him totally. He felt this was right. Men had sinned, he would pay, make up for it. For the world was no matriarchy, how quickly that became obvious when he allowed himself to be conscious of the reality beyond his family and school life. Even there, in the laboratories he noticed with pain the excess deference he received simply on account of his maleness. So he waited for her. She instructed him how to give pleasure. She laid her thin body out on the bed and her thin lips invited him to join her. He was honoured to share her bed, on whatever terms. He massaged her, listening carefully to instructions about speed, pressure and position. He waited. It was like a game of twister. He held himself above her, suspended on one arm and both knees while his hand worked. He touched her. She referred to her vagina as her monster. She asked him to go fast, hard. Richard was surprised – had thought the whole thing should be gentler. She paid him compliments: he was like a statue. So silent. She taught him how to kiss her there. The monster was bony. As her rhythm crested, he rode the bruising shudders, bashing his teeth through his lips. She came and he felt momentarily cleansed. Her orgasm like communion, purging him of sin and welcoming him into the fold. He gave without asking anything. He waited. She looked at him naked, handled him. Her eyes were steel blue and her kiss was fierce. His lips, tender from being clamped to her through orgasm, bled under the pressure of her teeth and mouth. She never guided him inside her and he never asked her. He waited. This was how he loved.