John Kessel - Stories for Men

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Science Fiction
By John Kessel
Stories Fo
r
Men
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
2
Fictionwise
www.Fictionwise.com
Copyright ©2002 by John Kessel
First Published in Asimov's, October 2002
NOTICE: This ebook is licensed to the original purchaser
only. Duplication or distribution to any person via email,
floppy disk, network, print out, or any other means is a
violation of International copyright law and subjects the
violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment. This notice
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Distributed by Fictionwise.com
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
3
one
Erno couldn't get to the club until an hour after it opened,
so of course the place was crowded and he got stuck in the
back behind three queens whose loud, aimless conversation
made him edgy. He was never less than edgy anyway, Erno—
a seventeen-year-old biotech apprentice known for the
clumsy, earnest intensity with which he propositioned almost
every girl he met.
It was more people than Erno had ever seen in the Oxygen
Warehouse. Even though Tyler Durden had not yet taken the
stage, every table was filled, and people stood three deep at
the bar. Rosamund, the owner, bustled back and forth
providing drinks, her face glistening with sweat. The crush of
people only irritated Erno. He had been one of the first to
catch on to Durden, and the room full of others, some of
whom had probably come on his own recommendation, struck
him as usurpers.
Erno forced his way to the bar and bought a tincture. Tyrus
and Sid, friends of his, nodded at him from across the room.
Erno sipped the cool, licorice flavored drink and
eavesdropped, and gradually his thoughts took on an
architectural, intricate intellectuality.
A friend of his mother sat with a couple of sons who
anticipated for her what she was going to see. “He's not just a
comedian, he's a philosopher,” said the skinny one. His foot,
crossed over his knee, bounced in rhythm to the jazz playing
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
4
in the background. Erno recognized him from a party he'd
attended a few months back.
“We have philosophers,” the matron said. “We even have
comedians.”
“Not like Tyler Durden,” said the other boy.
“Tyler Durden—who gave him that name?”
“I think it's historical,” the first boy said.
“Not any history I ever heard,” the woman said. “Who's his
mother?”
Erno noticed that there were more women in the room
than there had been at any performance he had seen. Already
the matrons were honing in. You could not escape their
sisterly curiosity, their motherly tyranny. He realized that his
shoulders were cramped; he rolled his head to try to loosen
the spring-tight muscles.
The Oxygen Warehouse was located in what had been a
shop in the commercial district of the northwest lava tube. It
was a free enterprise zone, and no one had objected to the
addition of a tinctures bar, though some eyebrows had been
raised when it was discovered that one of the tinctures sold
was alcohol. The stage was merely a raised platform in one
corner. Around the room were small tables with chairs. The
bar spanned one end, and the other featured a false window
that showed a nighttime cityscape of Old New York.
Rosamund Demisdaughter, who'd started the club, at first
booked local jazz musicians. Her idea was to present as close
to a retro earth atmosphere as could be managed on the far
side of the moon, where few of the inhabitants had ever even
seen the earth. Her clientele consisted of a few immigrants
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
5
and a larger group of rebellious young Cousins who were
looking for an avant garde. Erno knew his mother would not
approve his going to the Warehouse, so he was there
immediately.
He pulled his pack of fireless cigarettes from the inside
pocket of his black twentieth-century suit, shook out a fag,
inhaled it into life and imagined himself living back on earth a
hundred years ago. Exhaling a plume of cool, rancid smoke,
he caught a glimpse of his razor haircut in the mirror behind
the bar, then adjusted the knot of his narrow tie.
After some minutes the door beside the bar opened and
Tyler Durden came out. He leaned over and exchanged a few
words with Rosamund. Some of the men whistled and
cheered. Rosamund flipped a brandy snifter high into the air,
where it caught the ceiling lights as it spun in the low G, then
slowly fell back to her hand. Having attracted the attention of
the audience, she hopped over the bar and onto the small
stage.
“Don't you people have anything better to do?” she
shouted.
A chorus of rude remarks.
“Welcome to The Oxygen Warehouse,” she said. “I want to
say, before I bring him out, that I take no responsibility for
the opinions expressed by Tyler Durden. He's not my boy.”
Durden stepped onto the stage. The audience was quiet, a
little nervous. He ran his hand over his shaved head, gave a
boyish grin. He was a big man, in his thirties, wearing the
blue coveralls of an environmental technician. Around his
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
6
waist he wore a belt with tools hanging from it, as if he'd just
come off shift.
“‘Make love, not war!'” Durden said. “Remember that one?
You got that from your mother, in the school? I never liked
that one. ‘Make love, not war,’ they'll tell you. I hate that. I
want to make love and war. I don't want my dick just to be a
dick. I want it to stand for something!”
A heckler from audience shouted, “Can't it stand on its
own?”
Durden grinned. “Let's ask it.” He addressed his crotch.
“Hey, son!” He called down. “Don't you like screwing?”
Durden looked up at the ceiling, his face went simple, and
he became his dick talking back to him. “Hiya dad!” he
squeaked. “Sure, I like screwing!”
Durden winked at a couple of guys in makeup and lace in
the front row, then looked down again: “Boys or girls?”
His dick: “What day of the week is it?”
“Thursday.”
“Doesn't matter, then. Thursday's guest mammal day.”
“Outstanding, son.”
“I'm a Good Partner.”
The queers laughed. Erno did, too.
“You want I should show you?”
“Not now, son,” Tyler told his dick. “You keep quiet for a
minute, and let me explain to the people, okay?”
“Sure. I'm here whenever you need me.”
“I'm aware of that.” Durden addressed the audience again.
“Remember what Mama says, folks: Keep your son close, let
your semen go.” He recited the slogan with exaggerated
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
7
rhythm, wagging his finger at them, sober as a scolding
grandmother. The audience loved it. Some of them chanted
along with the catchphrase.
Durden was warming up. “But is screwing all there is to a
dick? I say no!
“A dick is a sign of power. It's a tower of strength. It's the
tree of life. It's a weapon. It's an incisive tool of logic. It's the
seeker of truth.
“Mama says that being male is nothing more than a
performance. You know what I say to that? Perform this,
baby!” He grabbed his imaginary cock with both of his hands,
made a stupid face.
Cheers.
“But of course, they can't perform this! I don't care how
you plank the genes, Mama don't have the machinery. Not
only that, she don't have the programming. But mama wants
to program us with her half-baked scheme of what women
want a man to be. This whole place is about fucking up our
hardware with their software.”
He was laughing himself, now. Beads of sweat stood out
on his scalp in the bright light.
“Mama says, ‘Don't confuse your penis with a phallus.'” He
assumed a female sway of his hips, lifted his chin and
narrowed his eyes: just like that, he was at archetypal
matron, his voice transmuted into a fruity contralto. “‘Yes,
you boys do have those nice little dicks, but we're living in a
post-phallic society. A penis is merely a biological
appendage.'”
Now he was her son, responding: “‘Like a foot, Mom?'”
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
8
Mama: “‘Yes, son. Exactly like a foot.'”
Quick as a spark, back to his own voice: “How many of you
in the audience here have named your foot?”
Laughter, a show of hands.
“Okay, so much for the foot theory of the penis.
“But Mama says the penis is designed solely for the
propagation of the species. Sex gives pleasure in order to
encourage procreation. A phallus, on the other hand—
whichever hand you like—I prefer the left—”
More laughter.
“—a phallus is an idea, a cultural creation of the dead
patriarchy, a symbolic sheath applied over the penis to give it
meanings that have nothing to do with biology...”
Durden seized his invisible dick again. “Apply my symbolic
sheath, baby ... oohhh, yes, I like it...”
Erno had heard Tyler talk about his symbolic sheath
before. Though there were variations, he watched the
audience instead. Did they get it? Most of the men seemed to
be engaged and laughing. A drunk in the first row leaned
forward, hands on his knees, howling at Tyler's every word.
Queers leaned their heads together and smirked. Faces
gleamed in the close air. But a lot of the men's laughter was
nervous, and some did not laugh at all.
A few of the women, mostly the younger ones, were
laughing. Some of them seemed mildly amused. Puzzled.
Some looked bored. Others sat stonily with expressions that
could only indicate anger.
Erno did not know how he felt about the women who were
laughing. He felt hostility toward those who looked bored:
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
9
why did you come here, he wanted to ask them. Who do you
think you are? He preferred those who looked angry. That
was what he wanted from them.
Then he noticed those who looked calm, interested, alert
yet unamused. These women scared him.
In the back of the room stood some green-uniformed
constables, male and female, carrying batons, red lights
gleaming in the corner of their mirror spex, recording.
Looking around the room, Erno located at least a half dozen
of them. One, he saw with a start, was his mother.
He ducked behind a tall man beside him. She might not
have seen him yet, but she would see him sooner or later. For
a moment he considered confronting her, but then he sidled
behind a row of watchers toward the back rooms. Another
constable, her slender lunar physique distorted by the bulging
muscles of a genetically engineered testosterone girl, stood
beside the doorway. She did not look at Erno: she was
watching Tyler, who was back to conversing with his dick.
“I'm tired of being confined,” Tyler's dick was saying.
“You feel constricted?” Tyler asked.
He looked up in dumb appeal. “I'm stuck in your pants all
day!”
Looking down: “I can let you out, but first tell me, are you
a penis or a phallus?”
“That's a distinction without a difference.”
“Au contraire, little man! You haven't been listening.”
“I'm not noted for my listening ability.”
Stories For Men
by John Kessel
10
“Sounds like you're a phallus to me,” Tyler told his dick.
“We have lots of room for penises, but mama don't allow no
phalluses ‘round here.”
“Let me people go!”
“Nice try, but wrong color. Look, son. It's risky when you
come out. You could get damaged. The phallic liberation
movement is in its infancy.”
“I thought you Cousins were all about freedom.”
“In theory. In practice, free phalluses are dangerous.”
“Who says?”
“Well, Debra does, and so does Mary, and Sue, and Jamina
most every time I see her, and there was this lecture in We-
Whine-You-Listen class last week, and Ramona says so too,
and of course most emphatically Baba, and then there's that
bitch Nora...”
Erno spotted his mother moving toward his side of the
room. He slipped past the constable into the hall. There was
the rest room, and a couple of other doors. A gale of laughter
washed in from the club behind him at the climax of Tyler's
story; cursing his mother, Erno went into the rest room.
No one was there. He could still hear the laughter, but not
the cause of it. His mother's presence had cut him out of the
community of male watchers as neatly as if she had used a
baton. Erno felt murderously angry. He switched on a urinal
and took a piss.
Over the urinal, a window played a scene in Central Park,
on earth, of a hundred years ago. A night scene of a pathway
beneath some trees, trees as large as the largest in Sobieski
Park. A line of electric lights on poles threw pools of light
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ScienceFictionByJohnKesselStoriesForMenStoriesForMenbyJohnKessel2Fictionwisewww.Fictionwise.comCopyright©2002byJohnKesselFirstPublishedinAsimov's,October2002NOTICE:Thisebookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonviaemail,floppydisk,network,printout,oranyothermeansis...

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