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

1. Reunited // 1.1 I woke late

For everybody


who grew up nowhere 


and wanted to be someone.

1. Reunited

1.1 I woke late

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 defined my youth 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 wasn’t 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 Rye, 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. In Brunswick, Carlton, Fitzroy, and Collingwood, the young intellectuals shared terrace houses and apartments. 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. Cafe on Claremont sat on a quiet avenue that ran up to the train station, in an area that was a repose for old workshops and second-rate stores (a cobbler of lurid boots, a seller of rough pine furniture).

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. 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. 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 party 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' "This Charming Man" in my head. Why should I worry myself about it, when I got to enjoy her good fortune? 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.