Chapter 11

All good things must come to an end, I suppose, and the ladies departed early to go home and compose their letters of resignation. I was left feeling both elated and frustrated. Elated because of the way our three-way relationship was developing well and frustrated because I still had two more weeks at work and it would be a month before we could all be together all the time. Still, what was a month? For the promise that our long-term future seemed to hold, I could afford to be patient for a month.

Charles had other ideas. To him even a day was too long to wait. He reminded me of a child who sees a new toy and wants it now. He importuned me during my final weeks at work to take advantage of the women there, to go out clubbing and pick up more girls, even to drag them in off the street. His constant nagging was extremely irritating and I couldn't understand why he was so obsessed with sex. For me, I had had more sex in the last month than I'd had in the last two years and all of it so mind-bogglingly good I wondered how I'd been satisfied before. I tried to interrogate Charles about his obsession.

"I'm not obsessed," he said huffily.

"Charles," I said with as much patience as I could muster, "today alone you've proposed that I grab some girl or other at least six times. It was the same yesterday and the same the day before. I call that obsessive behaviour."

"If I'm obsessed then it's because you are. I only take the thoughts from your mind."

"I'm not obsessed with sex."

"Yes, you are. You're primitive ape-mind thinks about sex all the time. Whenever you see a female, you assess her for her copulative potential."

I was honest enough to admit that, in a crude sort of way, he was right.

"Yes, but just because I assess them doesn't mean that I want to jump their bones. It's an intellectual reaction, or probably an instinctive one."

"It must be instinctive. You don't have enough brain to have an intellect."

"Coming from someone with as much common sense as a five-year-old child I resent that," I said hotly.

He sighed. "You still don't get it, do you? With me you are what you call an alpha male. You can have whatever you want. Nobody can stop you. Reach out, man, and take it! Even that disgusting caveman realised that simple fact of life. It's only you that keeps putting all these artificial barriers in the way."

It was my turn to sigh for I was again reluctantly forced to admit that he was correct to a large extent. The idea of taking what I wanted without considering others was alien to me. I had been brought up to be grateful for what I was given which is why I probably wouldn't amount to very much. It was simply not in my nature to reach out and grab; the guilt I would feel at such an action would immediately negate any pleasure I might derive from it. Now, here, I had been given the opportunity, indeed was being actively encouraged, to take what I wanted without any consequences — and I lacked the gumption to make the best use of it. I felt totally depressed.

"So how does this alpha male thing work, anyway?" I asked more for something to say than any real interest.

"I don't know," he said, smugly.

"I thought you knew everything." I couldn't keep a trace of bitterness out of my voice.

"You asked me a similar question when you first released me and I gave you the same answer then. I don't know precisely how my powers work. I know how to use them but not how they work. How does one of your vehicles work?"

"What?"

"I asked you to tell me how one of your barbarous transportation vehicles worked."

"I don't know, exactly. There's an engine and you feed it with petrol and air and there's some sort of explosion but that's about all I know. Oh, and there's a clutch which you use to change gears and you need a low gear for hills and a high gear for going fast. I'm not mechanically minded."

"You surprise me. You do appear to know something after all. The point is you don't know much about how it works but you can drive it; make it start and stop, steer it round corners. It's the same with my powers. I can control them but I don't know the details of how they work. I'm not a quantum physicist."

"So they're based on quantum physics, then?"

He gave an exasperated sigh. "I don't know what they're based on. Quantum physics is a good as anything. It might be sympathetic magic for all I know."

"I may not know about cars, but I could learn," I said brightly.

"Oh? And how would you go about that?"

"I dunno. Night classes, maybe."

"Quite. And pray tell me which local institution is running a night class on the theory behind my powers?"

"I hadn't thought of that. So what do you know?" I was becoming quite interested in this conversation.

"I told you..."

"Bear with me," I interrupted. "You've used your powers quite a few times now. Describe what you do."

"Hmm. It varies."

"Varies?"

"Depending on what I'm doing."

"Okay. Try a concrete example. I walk round a corner and bump into Tonia. You persuade her to have dinner with me. What did you do?"

"Much as it pains me to admit it, you explained it pretty well to her at the time."

"But I just made that up on the spur of the moment."

"Nevertheless, it was a reasonably accurate description, given your limited powers of perception."

I was sceptical. "Suppose you put it in your words."

"If you insist. As you were staring stupidly into her eyes, I manipulated the environment so that she saw you as an extremely desirable male."

"So you did something to her."

"I manipulated the environment."

"I'm only a dumb ape-man. What does that mean?"

"What it says. I altered things in the environment so she would react favourably to you."

"I assume she was part of the environment?"

"Naturally."

"As was I?"

"Of course."

"Then you manipulated both of us to achieve a favourable outcome."

"If you put it like that, yes."

"So you manipulated me to appear to be an alpha male in her eyes."

"No. I manipulated the environment so you would appear as such in her eyes. What has this to do with anything?"

"Wait. If I've got this right, I was still the same and she was still the same. It was the way she perceived me that was different."

"Very perceptive." The praise was grudging.

"So it wouldn't have mattered if I'd been a three-eyed frog, she'd still have seen me as a knight in shining armour?"

"Er, yes."

"Good. Now supposing I'd been a real alpha male, you know, Mr Irresistible. What then?"

"How should I know?"

"You're the one who keeps going on about alpha males. But never mind that. Suppose I really had been her ideal man. Would she have accepted my invitation?"

He sighed. "I don't know. Logic suggests that, as I made her see you as her ideal man and she accepted your invitation, she would have done the same for the real thing. Really! Now I'm an expert on human psychology?"

"According to you, you're a bloody expert on everything. Now here's the real point. You didn't make me into an alpha male, you just made it appear I was one. And I assume you did much the same with Debbie and Harry and Lola. Correct?"

"Much the same, yes."

"So all this talk about turning me into an alpha male is just that — talk. All you can do is make me appear to be an alpha male — you can't actually turn me into one."

"It's the same thing, isn't it?" He was sounding defensive.

"No it's not the same thing at all," I said scathingly. "Others might see me as Mr Wonderful but I would know I wasn't. I'd be a fraud. How d'you suppose that'd make me feel?"

"Good?"

"Good? To see all around bowing and scraping and know it was all a lie? No it would not make me feel good. It would make me feel a complete shit. That's what it would make me feel."

"Why? What difference does it make? If everybody around you treats you as one, then you are one."

"Hah! The Emperor's new clothes."

"The reference is unknown to me."

"It's a fable. A tailor cons a very vain Emperor into believing he can make him the ultimate suit of clothes. Word gets around and the whole populace want to see this wonderful suit. The Emperor parades down the street and everybody oohs and ahhs and says how grand he looks. The trouble is — he's stark naked. The point I'm making is that what you do is an illusion, a con trick. It doesn't change reality and, sooner or later, like the Emperor, I'll get found out. Like the first time I meet a real alpha male."

"Are you doubting my abilities?"

"No, merely trying to define their limits. And to work out what you can really do. So you can change my physical appearance but you can't change my nature. You can 'manipulate the environment' to obtain useful information providing you know what it is you want to find out. You can 'manipulate the environment' to make people think I'm a good guy, to do what I want and to ignore me if I don't want to be seen. Wait a minute. The bouncers at the night club saw me, one of them nodded to me. They must have seen me."

"They did. I merely manipulated their environment so that it was correct that you should be there and they weren't to concern themselves about you."

"But what about after I left? If all you did was manipulate the environment so they saw nothing wrong with me waltzing in and out, what happened when I left?"

"I do not follow your train of thought. If they thought about it at all, which I sincerely doubt as they were, if anything, even more moronic than you, they'd have remembered your visit but it would not have caused them any concern."

"So you did change them," I said triumphantly.

"I manipulated the environment so you could enter and leave the club safely," he said in a tone of exasperated patience.

"Yes, but that manipulation of the environment caused a permanent change in their memories. So, by definition, you changed them."

"The results of the manipulations are permanent. I didn't forget about money when we left the bank and you still have all this furniture — and a number of coffee services."

"So the effect on Tonia, Lola, Debbie and Harry are permanent, too?"

"Of course. I'm surprised you need to ask."

"They'll always think I'm their number one guy?"

"On top of all your other failings you have an inferiority complex. Yes, of course they'll always think of you as their 'number one guy' — until you tire of them and tell me to change them, of course."

"What would happen then?"

"You have a mind like a butterfly. Nothing would happen then. They would stop seeing you as the greatest thing since sliced bread, that's all."

"Yes, but would they be upset? Would they remember our time together fondly or would they hate me for what I had done to them?"

"What on earth and any other planet in the known universe does it matter? They're only females."

"They are not 'only females'. They happen to be the women I love and I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when speaking about them. If you want a reason that directly affects you, they're your meal-ticket. They've more brains than you and I put together and they're the ones that are going to make us rich and powerful, or is your memory span so short you've forgotten that little fact."

"Females aren't meant to be smart," he said huffily. It was as close to an apology as I was going to get. "I can arrange it that they will have fond memories of their time with you."

"If you can do that sort of thing with them, why can't you do something similar to me?"

"What? Give you fond memories?"

"No, jackass. Make me believe I really am an alpha male."

"Ah... Well... The situation's a bit more complicated."

"Oh? Do tell."

"Well... It's difficult to explain. The manipulation takes place in a nexus of energy with me at the centre. To affect a manipulation I reach out and adjust the energy strands in the immediate vicinity. That is, of course, nothing like what I do at all but it's the best I can do with this pathetically crude language of yours."

"I think I sort of get that. You mean it's like lots of interwoven threads. You pull this one to find out about money. You pull that one to make a woman mine. And yet another one to make me invisible."

"Considering you human's inability to think in more than three dimensions, it will have to do," he sneered. "It is, of course, infinitely more complex than that and involves infinite space-time dimensions which, of course, I can manipulate precisely."

"So you're at the centre of this infinitely complex web of energy which you can manipulate as easily as a child can Lego bricks..."