A contact for real

http://www.proza.ru/2015/12/13/2312
Ïåðåâîä: Ë.Ë.


                Imagine the text is my fate,
                And readers are like angels
                Everywhere


 He came out from a corner and…
 «Will you tell me where’s the nearest underground station?»
 Why the underground, pretty boy? I can see you are not local, can feel you’re in our city for the first time. And there’s something more…
 Stop. I was standing and watching the boy and he, as if nothing was really happening, was quite at ease allowing me to eye him. A minute, another… Seemed like nothing special, I could pass him by and not catch sight of him. His outfit was in a quite ordinary office style: grey trousers, a shirt with some computerish design on it made of micro-points, microchips, micro-stars. A clerk who was shirking his job quite voluntarily. There’s a whole lot of such workers, they rush all over town in search of customers, taking time to enjoy sightseeing. His regular features with a certain Assyrian or ancient Roman touch, a neat hair-cut... Two arms, two legs, a pair of… There was something remarkable about his eyes, that’s what. Meaning they were all right but were making me nervous somehow and I looked away in direction of an advertising board which all of a sudden trembled, bothered by a burst of wind. At that moment it seemed to me that I was being X-RAYED! All through. Did it mean that there was… a video camera implanted in one of his eyes? And it was working all the time, over and over, shooting and shooting and stripping off layer by layer… But let me, instead, pick you up?! Right here, on the street, right by the front door of my house? Will get you stripped… will strip myself… Take a dare, pretty boy, will you?!            
 But, sure, all that I said aloud was something polite and cheerful, something like «it’ll be my pleasure to accompany you, to explain anything you want, to share a valuable advice with a dear guest from another town…» But stop scanning me with your LAMPS! For I won’t bear it… I want to live on for a while! AND TO LOVE , AND TO BREATHE, AND…
 His name was quite a common one - Nicholas. We were walking along the street having a chat. It was me who was talking the most and Nicholas, with a light smile, was listening, specifying now and then some details of St. Petersburg bohemian life and allowing me to deliver one more speech about…       
 Golly gosh! I wanted to tell the boy, who’d hypnotized me at first sight, about all the ins and outs. Sure thing, since when I feel quite an affection for a lad there’re always the professional teacher’s reflexes evoked and I remember that all the best of the best boys, poor students included, were always my best disciples. But the lesson couldn’t go on and on, could it? It had to come to a conclusion, right? 
 Honest, I can’t remember how come Nicholas agreed to go to my place. It seemed like I invited him to watch an exhibition of my graphic masterpieces, presented a ticket for an half-hour poetry party, a one-man show of the series called «The crazy life of a genius» (what, don’t geniuses live among us?!), or… Come on, what does it matter?! Things to watch, to listen, to spiritually consume…
 In the dark of the room the light of his eye cameras seemed all the more bright and penetrating.
 «Are you shooting me?» - I couldn’t stand that anymore and all at once, as if not wanting to get the right answer, kissed Nicholas’ right cheek. Surprisingly for me, it turned out to be unshaven, just the way I like. By my reckoning barely a couple of hours passed since the moment we’d met. Does his… bristle grow quicker than anybody else’s!? And… peering more fixedly at the guest… did he have time to, SPECIALLY FOR ME, pump up his muscles, to grow up on some inches, and… the hair on his head turned slightly harder and paler?! And… seeing such metamorphoses what, may I ask, name was I to dignify thou, newcomer? What language had I to use with thou to hold talks on sexual delights? Would we, maybe, do without words?         
 God knows how many times my tongue has let me down! One time it’s to overload a guy with a philosophical discourse so that he can’t utter a single word, another time it blurts out some obscene nonsense nearly during an orgasm. But this time EVERYTHING WAS RIGHT: without many words, no - thanks a lot - mysterious monologues, none of empty talks on the problems of modern existence… Sharp, firm. Kissing deep, oh, so deep.   
 Nicholas was quite skilled and at the same time not so much skilled in kissing. There again, I wonder, was he that way on purpose so that I could teach him and he could show his skill acquired right there and then, or is that such a modern breathtaking trick used for seduction I know nothing about? By the way, which one of us… seduced the other?   
 Not me, I sure didn’t do a thing. The stars in the sky did. Only them… fell into the right line, ranged in a string they’d drawn an arrow. Straight into the heart. Directly to the paradise. Right to the…    
 I caught an unusual feeling which was impossible to understand: two adult men were fucking in a normal way, not using any sex-shop gimmicks, and doing it each to one another at the same time! It’s a hallucination, isn’t it? Nicholas, tell me, please, did you do that specially for me? And, by the way… what’s up with your penis? Why can’t I define its size?
 Yeah, it wasn’t funny at all. Seemed like it was easy as rolling off a log: here it was, the beloved one, take it, try it, measure it. But in the case of the stranger that method to process statistical data didn’t work, it just flopped. The figures turned out to be different and, accordingly, my sensations differed too: one moment I flew away to another planet, another I hung as a rainy drop on a green leaf, and sometimes I disappeared as a grain of sand in the boundless desert of the night. The disorientation was pleasant, amazing in the most miraculous sense of the word and... Nicholas, that’s enough, speak out! Who are you?      
 In the situation when you’ve just got acquainted with a man the most difficult thing is to admit him into your life. Sure, you can get away with a trifling prank – when you part with a casual lover feeling the highest, and you both are absolutely content with one another at that. But while you multiply the degrees of your personal freedom it’s impossible in relationships with others not to increase the degree of trust too. Of course, you shouldn’t torture someone checking the evidence with the passport data but yet… Would you let a stranger stay the first night even on condition of total stupefaction, caused by him and his intimate extremities?
 I did let him stay. I just had no choice. It seemed like Nicholas had settled on everything for me and I merely fulfilled the precise instructions, which had been prescribed as long ago as yesterday: don’t wake him up – wake him up the way you never woke anyone up – treat him to the well-deserved breakfast which was really deserved – don’t expect anything – don’t ask for anything – be in good shape - …    
 To be charged (by a man, a woman, with love) is equal to being infected. Being rather astonished by the fact that I hadn’t gone crazy I hurried for work leaving Nicholas at the same crossroads we met. So what’s next? Was that all? I was trying to recall his features, speech, the expression of his eyes, of his face and diction, the toponymy of his ancestry which, on condition of viewing Nicholas’ appearance with absolute detachment, seemed to lead into the mythological depths, primeval caves and other kinds of exotics. Of course, all of us are migrants from Africa. That was the way I, sticking out my lip and blowing out my cheeks, was reminding my xenophobic happy-go-lucky friends of the essentials of the natural historical process of settlement on the surface of the Earth. But it is one thing to creatively enjoy the fairy hero and it is another matter to shack up with him!   
 The next day it turned out that there was nothing left of the non-resident stranger. Only the evasive smell of the last night on the bed crumpled with fight traces, the dirty tableware with trite leavings of the unfinished salad, a cigarette Nicholas never touched and… me, who unexpectedly for myself adopted the role of investigator which had to define the point where the mythology of a virtual hero began and the naked reality ended… where there was an improvisation on the sidewalk and where a clothes-peg hung, forgotten on the rope of fortune.    

                ***
 
If all of that was done for me… did it mean that I’m worth it!? That’s a kind of logic of a poetic genius which is conquering an imaginary Beautiful Lady if not the whole world. In my case Nicholas presented the undeniable fact: something rather uncommon happened in my life, and after the night spent with him my reckless sexual drive grew, in the twists and turns of an imaginary game, into the fact that I’m some kind of the chosen. In other words, I became a little of… a God. Why not?
 The masturbational world free of daydreams and phantasy. The fetishistic things are scattered all over the castle and you, marvellously immortal, are sitting in the sky-high tower, and in the semi-darkness of the imminent night are enjoying yourself. The prospect drew up in something like that - a life without Nicholas and his video camera implanted in one of his eyes. By the way, what exactly did he shoot?
 If he was shooting my reality then it automatically became the reality of himself. Whatever way A REAL CONTACT occurs it’s the both sides reality marks with its presence. Suppose, I lugged away some of Nicholas’ erotic snapshots, he stole my poems, my texts, my desire to share with him something one can see only from a window of my house. I bluffed when I palmed off, instead of usual commonplace cards, trump cards, he – like – didn’t noticed that (neither my age, nor loneliness) and offered a draw. Having won by the score defined beforehand. With the dignity of an actor who just left a madhouse. Something like that. 
 My thoughts got confused and I, unable to withstand it, a day after meeting him went to OUR CROSSROADS. The same place and the same hour. It was clear that the effect of a random acquaintance wouldn’t iterate but… Maybe there was something I couldn’t understand? Was there only one thing left for me – to wander all over St. Pete looking for the familiar eyes among the crowd? And what if he had already turned off his video camera?      
 I’ve been always keen on science fiction. It was easier for me to recognize Nicholas to be a stranger from the future than an absolutely common guy I picked up on a bystreet. Let it be that way! I am a mini-God so I am able to do an impossible thing. He is a God too, the one who managed to gather every little bit of information about me from his ultra-computer future and to accept my call signals. He is… my reader from the future who decided to send respectful duty, and love at the same time, to the author in person! Super. 
 I always thought that there’s a place especially adored by readers in any great manuscript and the more the text is autobiographical, the more it’s chequered with outspoken confessions of any kind, the more it is possible that somebody of the contemporaries will want to meet the author in person, one-on-one. Suppose in my case the one turned out to be not some slobbery compatriot but a super wonderful guy from…   
 Let us assume that it’s 2350. I don’t know why I chose namely this year. I was just riding by the underground and SAW EVERYTHING. It’s not frightening there, it’s rather pleasant, for sure unusual. You can choose and change your sex whenever you like. The development of genic technologies reached such a high level that worshiping a nice appearance isn’t in vogue anymore, and forget about a weak heart and liver trouble. Narcissism in its evolutional development, after all post-post-bisexual revolutions, reached, at last, the high point, and it turned out to be its own opposite, and now man can feel free and happy only when he belongs, by his free soul and general-purpose body, to somebody else. For example… to me!         
 Yeah, we, people from the past, are the most suitable material for experiments of the future. We are doomed to be sick of the unsatisfied desires of the flesh, and gays as the key «carriers of the maniacal infection» are compelled in addition to advocate their basic right – just to be themselves. So… the stars in the sky ranged into the right line. The pointer from the future was to steer Nicholas straight to the place where we met, and that’s where our real contact occurred!
 Having pronounced that science-fiction text over and over I came to the final conclusion: Nicholas (or whatever he’s called in the future age) was an extra-specialist with the built-in mechanism of humanoid abilities that were so marvellously realized with me in bed. The video camera which I observed with my own eyes most likely computed my sexual preferences adjusting, transfiguring his body accordingly to the appearance of my most topnotch lovers. The virtual plan of such a real contact is similar to the erotic feelings of a contemporary man, and the aim is – having reached total inter-penetration and mutual understanding with the past – TO FIND ME!
 
                ***
 
After a month I went as far as to be able to find the arrows. In the real life the rain took time to get mixed with the snow, and the night, having tumbled wearily onto the bed, enthralled with its freezing carcass the whole world. So be it, there was nothing that hindered me in my pilgrimage to follow the pointers of my/our future. It’s not difficult at all… to see the future. I was walking arm in arm with my virtual lover, dropping in a grocery to buy food for the joint dinner. With candles and aphrodisiac flowers raised specially for such occasions. There’s an outlandish bracelet dangling on my right arm with numerous buttons on it – to call in case of emergency. I haven’t used it but I know that if I touch the deep blue stone I will enjoy a movie, anytime. A movie about me pacing around an unfamiliar city smiling radiantly to the people who are passing by and suddenly I’m coming to understand that in the new block of the gigantic maze of streets I’ve lost my way for good and all, and I’m asking a young guy who’s running by: «Excuse me, uh… where’s the nearest underground station?»
 CONTACT MADE! Yeah…