Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

Kiss Me, Genius Boy

(No More Dreams #1)

Ben Hourigan

Smashwords edition

Published by hourigan.co

© 2011 by Ben Hourigan

All rights reserved

v.1–2011.09.15

For everyone who grew up nowhere and wanted to be someone.

1. Reunited

Why ponder life’s complexities?

Visions, magic, God and all that—it’s bullshit. You’re not supposed to be able to see the future. There is no destiny. I knew that. But I didn’t believe it.

My name is Joshua Rivers. In just a minute, I’m going to show you the moment, and the woman, that cast a long shadow into my past and the future that radiated out from it. For now, what you need to know about me is that on the evening I met my future wife, I wasn’t used to taking responsibility for myself. I expected things would happen to me and for me, and that in spite of how dismal my prospects looked at times, things would turn around and I’d get what I wanted. I’d seen that they would.

My father, Colin, was proud of my dissolution. The PhD thesis I spent my days on was about videogames, and that meant it was not real work. Dad considered this a good thing. I had a scholarship from the government that kept me fed and housed while I worked on my doctorate. While I didn’t work on it would have been more accurate. It felt like getting away with murder. Dad enjoyed explaining to attractive women—such as the odd MILF that he might hit on while she was working the checkout at Kmart—that his son did something fundamentally useless for a living. Then he could segue into hinting he was an eccentric millionaire whose family would never have to work, which had once been true.

My mother would likely not have been proud, but that hardly mattered, since she’d been dead since 1998, the year I turned eighteen. Five years had passed, and the world had moved on, but I still felt like my life was something yet to properly begin.

A day of tutoring at the university each week, and occasional bursts of frantic writing, marked out the time in my unstructured life. But mostly I sat by the big window in the living-room of my apartment, surfing the web and playing old games on my laptop, trying to write ‘my novel,’ or just doing nothing at all, feeling paralyzed. Some days, I didn’t even go out to check the mail. Those days, I saw no-one and spoke to no-one.

I was wasting time.

I lived in the worst building on a beautiful street in Malvern, a suburb twelve minutes from downtown Melbourne by train, part of a cluster of places known for being home to old money. I’d gotten a good deal with the rent there, and it was on the line that led back to the family home in Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula, by the beach. So I’d stuck like a hermit in that little flat for years, instead of crossing north to the correct side of the Yarra river. There, in Brunswick, Carlton, Fitzroy, and Collingwood, all the young intellectuals shared terrace houses together. There, I might have had a life worth living, in the thick of a city of almost four million people.

Inside, my decrepit, rented top-floor flat had water-stained yellow carpet, kitchen cupboards that wouldn’t close properly, and a dingy bathroom. In the evening the smell of rancid cigarette smoke wafted up from my downstairs neighbor’s kitchen. The guttering leaked, and every time I reported it to the real-estate agent the landlord said he’d fix it, but he never did. In heavy rainstorms, water poured down the insides of the big windows in the living room. The yellow carpet soaked it up and held it, and in the weeks that followed, small wild mushrooms would sprout on the floor by the windowsill.

From the outside, the place was a rectangular slab of orange brick veneer, topped with an ugly flat roof. It stood on a block paved completely over with concrete where a few residents parked their shabby old cars. Most of us who lived there were poor, and couldn’t afford to drive. I didn’t even have my license. All down the rest of the street, turn-of-the-century weatherboard houses stood on either side, white and yellow and pink and cream. Doctors and lawyers parked European cars in the driveways, next to little front yards full of topiary and roses.

Fittingly for such a pretty suburb, there was a café around the corner good enough to be my regular. Its name, more ominous than it deserved, was the Black Curtain, and it sat on a quiet lane that ran alongside the train tracks and the station, a repose for old workshops and second-rate stores (a cobbler of lurid boots, for instance).

I often sat there with Lilian Lau at the tables on the sidewalk and drank their overrated coffee while we ate brunch in the late morning. I’d order eggs Benedict, while Lily favored the chicken burger, which was full of bullshit ingredients and adjectives like Portobello and aioli. Still, the burger tasted vibrant and alive, reminding you as the juice ran down your chin that to sustain one life, other things must die.

This had been my Sunday morning for the past few weeks, and looked like it might become a routine. It meant things were improving for me. Though they didn’t mean much, these breakfasts, and neither did Lily herself, they were both sources of real sensory pleasure for me. Winter had thoroughly turned to spring, and my blood was up. Sitting in the sunshine with Lily at the café, in front of eggs and coffee, I would feel my life affirmed.

On a particular Sunday that spring, I woke late into a faceful of Lily’s black hair. When she’s naked, her slender body shows you the shape of her bones under light brown skin. Her breasts are flat and round, shallow domes crowned by dark nipples that shrink small and hard when you play with them. Her mouth is wide and behind her long white teeth there’s a tongue so sharp you ought to worry you’ll get cut when she goes down on you. But you don’t. She comes back up and you bite her neck. She spreads her legs and you pull her down on your cock and in the end she’ll get up on her hands and knees to arch her back and show you her perfect ass, and you fuck her, who gets wet like no girl you’ve ever known. It’s what anyone would do, and it’s what I did that Sunday.

Lilian Lau. Her skin is brown and her eyes are narrow. She was born in Hong Kong and her parents brought her to Melbourne when she was a baby. And none of that ethnicity stuff matters a bit, because she’s a force of nature, not a person, and she’ll shit on your rules and expectations wherever you or they are from.

So I came on her back, and we showered together and dressed, and went out into the concrete glare around my apartment to face a day of reunions. In this early afternoon, we were meeting my father, who I saw too seldom, and in the evening Lily was my date to a dinner of old school friends, brought back together by the unexpected return from London of one Anthony Coltrane.

On the concrete downstairs, Lily told me we’d take the car, because after brunch she’d go straight home to paint. If I’m going to waste tonight with you as well, she said, I need to work today.

Waste? Thanks a lot, Lily.

Without thinking, I walked to the door of a dirty white sedan. I often made this mistake. It was very like the car she’d had before.

But lately, Lily had been driving a red 1988 Porsche 944, with soft leather seats and pop-up headlights that sprang to life like eyes. Even now it looked like it was from the sexy future. She’d picked it up in silver for ten grand, and immediately had it sprayed the right color. I loved it. I wanted it. I knew she’d bought it with money not from her art, but from the family restaurant that she’d helped her mother turn into a chain. But the car still felt like a slap in the face. It wasn’t even that expensive, but it said, I’m making it. She was, and I wasn’t.

I remembered Lily as she’d been at eighteen, a sleepy, hungry girl with tangled, unwashed hair, who drove a rusted out old Datsun that was barely worth a dollar. I’d liked it better when she was poor.

Leaning my head back on the cushion with a sigh as Lily started the engine, I heard the Smiths in my head: Why ponder life’s complexities, when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat? But having my twenty-four-year-old fuck buddy, an important young artist, driving me in her Porsche away from an apartment that grew mushrooms out of the carpet when the winter rains came—it troubled the soul. I could not merely shrug it off as evidence of her bourgeois corruption. She made me jealous.

Sometimes I wanted to tell her I loved her

Dad hadn’t yet arrived when we pulled up outside the café. Instead, I saw a girl there, waving at me from an outside table. Imogen. I hadn’t known she was invited. She was like my sister, but… It was all kind of sick, when I thought about it carefully. I loved her, but her existence made me uncomfortable.

She was dressed simply, in layers of black and gray. Her luxuriant red hair curled around her face and tumbled over her shoulders. Hanging over her breasts there was a thin silver chain pulled down by a single blue stone, more likely a piece of colored glass, that echoed her eyes and the clear sky. She stood and we kissed each other on the cheek.

Lily, greeting her, put her hands on Imogen’s hips, like a man, and pulled her in—too close—so she could kiss her lightly on the lips. It’s so good to see you again, Lily said. Who are you fucking these days?

God, Lily, I said, as she sat beside me and, full of provocative irony, insinuated herself under my arm, leaning her head in close so that my impulse was to kiss her affectionately on the cheek. She could be so offensive that sometimes I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t want to lose her.

All you need to know, Lily, said Imogen, is you’re no longer on the list. The line was cruel enough for Lily herself, but I could see the hurt in Imogen’s eyes, which like mine tend to water when emotion hits. From a distance, you’d never notice, but I could tell. Lily ignored the effect she had on the girl.

At that moment, Dad rounded the corner, looking like a freak. He was wearing turquoise Thai fisherman’s pants, Birkenstock sandals, and a red silk jacket that would have looked in-place on a kung-fu master, over an open-necked peasant shirt. On his head, covering short-cropped gray hair whose thinning embarrassed him, was a square-topped, brimless cap embroidered in a multicolored tribal motif.

In greeting, he hugged Imogen and shook my hand, but avoided Lily. Sometimes it was for the best. It was an understatement to call her flirtatious, and I think he feared getting too close lest he trade a son for a short-lived lover. I’d have forgiven him for sleeping with her, if it ever came to that—far better men had fallen for her. But I never told him so. I didn’t want to give him license.

It was a shame for Dad. Since not long after Mum died, his love life had resembled an illustration for the parable of the straight stick, which in my thirties I’d hear my female friends tell ruefully:

A warlock sends a princess into the forest with a mission: bring me a perfectly straight stick by dark or I’ll have your soul. In the morning, she finds a stick near perfectly straight, but with a crook in the end. She throws it away, and all through the day she finds and discards stick after stick, each more bent than the last. By nightfall she is desperate and clutches at any chance she can find. Leaving the forest with a stick as crooked as a Medici pope, she knows she is forever damned. And yet as she regrets leaving the straightish stick of the morning behind, she knows even that would not have saved her.

The year after cancer took Mum, Dad met a charming woman who worked at the local library. But ever the womanizer, he cheated on and left her, and since then, he’d appeared with a succession of increasingly shopworn floozies from Rosebud and its surrounds, along with a few disconcertingly mental girls barely out of high school who had a fetish for old men. Lily, by contrast, was a goddess. But he believed, on my account, he couldn’t have her even for a night.

"Well, what are you up to, lately, Im?" I asked, when we were all sitting.

Oh, you know, just studying, doing recitals. I’m doing a Ravel concert at the Conservatorium in a few weeks time. You should come.

Send me an email with the details, I said.

Ha—you won’t come anyway. You should get out more. You could even come see me sometimes.

I’ll go, Dad said. Thank god you didn’t go and study law like you threatened to, Imogen. No concerts there. It’s a mug’s game, working. Find some dupes who’ll pay you to do something soulful and fun. That’s the way to do it, eh, Josh?

It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, I said.

How’s the thesis going? he asked.

Fine. I’m working on the third chapter now, on utopian theory.

Josh, you haven’t been doing a damned thing, said Lily.

A waitress interrupted with the menus, giving everyone a pause in conversation to reflect on how I was wasting my life. We ordered while the girl was still at the table. It was the usual for Lily and I; the mushroom burger and green tea for Im, a vegetarian; and the big breakfast and a long black for Colin.

Why do you have to always tell the truth, Lily? I asked, once the waitress left.

Because it’s the truth, she said. And it doesn’t belong to you. If you won’t tell it, I will.

Hey, never mind, Josh, said Colin. When you find something worth writing, you’ll write it. Until then, never mind. Just so long as you’re having fun.

"I’m not sure I am having fun," I said.

What if he never finds it? said Lily. What then? It’s not like what you’ll leave him will make much of a difference.

When Colin won the lottery at twenty-eight and quit his job as a furniture restorer at a big antique store out in Tyabb, he thought he’d be able to live comfortably on investment income. But the markets hadn’t been kind to him, and since he’d retired, wages had outpaced inflation.