‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he asked, hurriedly closing windows on his computer screen.
‘That would be a start. What were you doing, checking out porn?’
Arjun looked shocked. ‘No.’
‘I bet you were.’ She stepped over a dismantled tower case and a slew of Indian magazines, and started to clean a cup at the sink. Arjun bobbed up beside her.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
‘Just want a drink of water.’ She stroked his cheek. ‘Hello.’
‘Um, hello. So not coffee, then?’
Stroking felt good. She carried on.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing. Give me a hug.’
‘What?’
She drew his arms round her. Obediently he squeezed. The warmth set off more MDMA shivers in her body.
Despite her euphoria, Chris could not ignore the substandard ambience of Arjun’s living space. The smell she could live with, but the ceiling light-fitting had a bare high-wattage bulb, which cast hard shadows on the piles of junk and the undecorated walls and particularly on the man she was hugging, making him look disturbingly cadaverous and unmahogany. From somewhere beneath a pile of chemical pillows came the faint sound of an alarm bell ringing. She ignored it and pressed on.
‘It’s too bright in here. You got any candles?’
‘Candles? Why? Are you expecting a blackout?’
She barged around, stumbling over something which felt mushy underfoot. Ignoring it, she switched off the main light and turned the bulb of the desk lamp to the wall.
‘There. Much better. Music?’
Arjun, bemused, headed for the computer. The decision was too important to leave to him, so Chris waved him off, sat down and browsed a directory of MP3S. Discarding the Indian film music left her with a limited choice. Arjun hovered at her shoulder. He seemed nervous at having her around his system. As high as she was, she could tell he had it configured to do something unusual. A lot of crummy-looking hard drives had been networked together, and before he switched it off an old fourteen-inch monitor was displaying some kind of constantly updating log. She settled (‘N Sync? Jesus) for a Moby album: semi-lame but OK. Lush strings and blues samples filtered into the room.
‘There,’ she said, putting her arms round him. ‘That’s better.’
Arjun’s back muscles tensed under her hands. This is all — I mean, it’s a — very nice surprise.’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’
‘You seem hot. Have you been taking exercise?’
‘No, baby, I came here for that.’
‘Really? How come? I don’t actually have any equipment or anything.’
She ignored the buzz of his voice and slipped one hand underneath his shirt, drifting away into a world of touch. His back felt smooth, warm. She nuzzled his neck. It was annoying that he was still talking. The important thing right now was to be naked.
‘Arjun?’
‘Yes?’
‘You seem stressed. Would you like a massage?’
‘Um — is that why you came? To give me a massage?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, I must say that’s very — I wasn’t really expecting — but I suppose that would be OK. I was more or less finished with —’
‘Arjun?’
‘Yes?’
‘Shut up. I mean stop talking. You don’t need to talk. Lie down and take your shirt off.’
He made some more incoherent protests, but, after clearing the bed of printouts and Pringle tubes, she had him more or less where she wanted him, prone on his stomach with her straddling his hips. She started kneading his narrow back. After a minute or two she took off her top and unhooked her bra. He had his eyes shut and didn’t seem to notice. When she slid a hand under the waistband of his shorts, he did notice: his buttocks clenched and his back went rigid. Struggling underneath her, he flipped on to his back, only to be confronted by the crowning artistic achievements of San Francisco’s Needle Bob, snaking over her naked torso.
‘What are you —’ She took his hands and put them on her breasts. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
Some hours later the grey morning light revealed a scene of devastation. Since Chris’s contact lenses were glued to her eyes the world appeared mercifully hazy, but even with the visuals turned down she knew it was bad. Someone had filmed a splatter movie in her mouth. Someone else had administered a spinal tap. She had not slept, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. Since Arjun stopped talking and started to breathe regularly and noisily through his mouth, she had been less aware of her surroundings at certain times than at others. Did that count? Carefully she lifted up his arm and slipped out of bed. With her first pace she stubbed her toe on something sharp and had to put a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. The message was clear. It was imperative to leave. This was a bad place with sharp things in it. This was a chicken-smelling place of horror.
She swilled out her mouth with water and hunted for her clothes. Arjun lay on his side, one thin arm outstretched where she had left it. Squashed against the pillow, his face looked childish and undefined. She could not find anything in it, or in the section of shoulder and chest exposed by the turned-down quilt, to remind her why it had been so important to come by at 2 a.m. and have sex with this man. Physically she felt battered but mentally things were worse, her ordinary landscape of thoughts and feelings reduced to a scoured bleakness, a wasteland strewn with the shattered remnants of whoever she had been before she got high. It was the traditional moment to swear never to touch ecstasy or coke or alcohol again. It was the feeling that would work on the kids. Don’t do it, OK? Don’t feel like me.
She gathered her purse and groped for her second shoe among the nameless horrors around the bed. When it had finally been located, she tiptoed out and closed the door, realizing as she stepped into the brutal daylight that she didn’t have her shades. Or her car. She stumbled down the driveway and, before buzzing herself out, leaned her cheek for a moment against the cool metal of the security gate. Then, in a halting b-movie-zombie shuffle, she headed in the direction she judged most likely to contain coffee.
Four hours later Arjun opened his eyes into a warm summer Sunday morning. He felt fresh and relaxed, suffused with a sense of the rightness of things. Ordinarily he slept in kurta-pyjama, but this morning he was naked. Unable for the moment to remember why, he turned on his side and spotted the little wrinkled slug of a used condom among the socks and foil trays on his floor. From this point of origin his memory expanded in a rush, bringing with it a sense of frank amazement at what had taken place in his apartment (in this very bed!) only a few hours previously.
The detail was too intense to face without embarrassment. The sheer bodiliness of it all. Wetness. The smell of skin. He remembered feeling out of control, which in itself seemed indecent. The memory had the confused quality of a dream.
And yet. The things she had done for him. Without help he would probably have never managed it. Now Chris had showed him, solved the uncomputable problem of finding another person to touch and be touched in return. He felt humble, grateful.
But also guilty. He got up and switched on the computer and ate breakfast still naked, listening to a desi talk-radio stream. So who was Chris? She was his lover. He was a man with a lover or, to use the shortened version, a man. This seemed good, though not pure. Masticating a cherry poptart, he found his mind turning to Papaji.