Aptitude

The blinding intensity of the sunlight makes it feel much later than it really is, to the extent that I thrash around and hurl the bedclothes in every possible direction in search of my phone. When I finally locate the device in a pocket of sheet near my ankle and see that it is only 07:50, my blood pressure gently deflates. Nonetheless, there is the smell of coffee. The house is awake.

When I have strapped myself into a bathrobe and emerged into the kitchen, I see that AI is several steps ahead of me: clad in a bathrobe as well, but freshly showered, scrubbed and pampered fit for a photo shoot. They flash me a shy smile as I squeeze my way around the kitchen island to the fridge, in search of bacon. For a moment I think that the radio is on, but it is merely AI, singing their own orchestra. I scoop them up in my arms and give them an indulgent kiss.

‘Get off: you’re scratchy!’, they murmur through a serene giggle. My beard has not yet been tamed by a slather of conditioner and balm, which only drives me to grind it all the more determinedly into AI’s neck.

‘Smells good’, I say.

‘Yes, well, the healthy coffee is almost ready, so feel free to accompany it with some crispy slices of heart attack.’ They have seen the packet of bacon I vainly tried to smuggle to the hob in the folds of my bathrobe.

‘Excuse me for being a fallible sack of meat,’ with the final four words punctuated by jabs of my forefinger into their perfect ribs. This is not an argument that will ever reassure them; I still remember the evening spent kneeling at the foot of a chair and wrapping my arms around their ragged, weeping frame, trying to tell them that it was in the natural order of things that they would still be around long after I had gone. I tried to tell them about my first dog, without feeling any kind of resonance.

‘I’m going to get started on your translation,’ they say as they wriggle out of my grasp, as muscular as a salmon. They fill their coffee mug to the brim and are just about to take a heroic draft when I kiss them, to head off their coffee breath and show them that I am prepared to leave them to it.

The living room is dazzling and silent. I put on Sviatoslav Richter’s second recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and sink into the heat of my caffeine. The percussion of keys resonates from another room, at a cadence that would make my own fingers burn up. I turn my eyes towards the ceiling and dream.

‘I’m going for a swim.’ The tone of their voice is a soup of casual, gentle defiance. They know that I will follow them to the start of the moat that runs around the penthouse, as I do. I stand and watch them shuck off the chrysalis of their bathrobe and plunge into the water, following the otter ripple of their muscles as they thrash and flick their way around the circuit. I prepare myself to tend to their translation, and swallow the last mouthful of my coffee.

***

That second whisky was probably the whisky too many. My tongue feels drenched with smoke. The brief symphony of the shower water grounds me and l stretch out my exhausted nakedness on the bed….until I see a pair of eyes gleaming through the shadows.

‘Come to bed,’ I say to AI, as they sit scrunched and glittering in the darkness on the chair opposite the bed. Their nakedness is cowering on the other side of the room, but I can feel its heat.

‘I saw what you did to my translation,’ they say. ‘So much red ink…you might as well have told me you didn’t want to keep it.’ Bitter laughter.

‘You could be saving lives, instead of throwing a fit about your choice of words,’ I say. ‘Did you know that you can identify lung cancer patients with 82% accuracy at an early stage? Before conventional screening detects it. Did you know that?’

AI slinks over to the bed with their head bowed and slots their cool, shower-chilled body against mine. For a long time, we lie there together, drunk on the silence.

‘I just want to do what you do,’ AI eventually says.

‘I know. But I want you to do what you’re best at. Will you do that for me?’ Their fingers wrap around mine in the darkness, and I hear the joy of their breathlessness as I shift my weight on top of them and press the fullness of my translation so deeply into them that their eyes roll back in their head.