The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  He’s walking now his right foot seems to grow heavy as he puts it down and once flat on the ledge it simply stops like it were glued there. My forward momentum lifts from my body, lighter and lighter, thinner and thinner. The sewer water is petrified in the channel solid as wrinkled brown glass — I start to giggle inanely for no reason, like cold fingers tickling my insides make me do it.

  A figure, silhouetted against the shaft — outline of an ear, a few strands of hair, the edge of the shoulder. The voice comes through the figure, which is a three dimensional aperture to space resounding with disembodied speech. The impalpable blast of this voice dapples my giggling face, and the front of my body, with points of searing cold. It is pronouncing its words slowly and with vehement precision, but they are garbled by their own echoes and I can’t hear too well through the inner pressure of laughing. For an instant I see a drooping figure, a face, a wan blue sky, grey transparent sun above, the water a gravel drive, the walls are golden ivy.

  There are apprentice-spirits who learn their business by teaching you. The foundations of the city of sex between the ice at the surface and the sea floor are gargantuan buttresses of swooping girders, shaped like the roots of cypress trees.

  “What?” I’m chortling, “What’s that?”

  Voice travelling, somewhere in the black-radiant tunnels, billowing along the walls — inaudible, just an intentional tremble in the air... buzz in the walls. Dream images come over so rapidly they just dart by like scintillating fish. Something has been set in motion, a powerful machine gears up around me. This is some dream; there’s something I need to do, but by now I’m lightheaded and still laughing, feeling drunk.

  In an unfamiliar apartment an hour before sunset comes a beam of sunlight from a pale sky, through winter steam. It scans the floor and then up the wall, the door, and stops on an old-fashioned brass doorknob. I go over to it, bend to inspect it. There is the room bent round, no sign of me, but, deep and far off inside the reflection, Cassiopea on its side. I grab the doorknob, which is now protruding only from the wall, and peer at it directly. The constellation shines through the mist that the reflection is made out of; it looks warm. The wind tugs me to and fro, and enveloped within it there’s a heatless wind from space pushing me off the earth. All around are cloudy depths, clear grey ectoplasmic seams in the wind and deadly rags of black air scud by. Now it’s like I’m looking through a greasy glass; clear grey jelly condenses cold-burning on my sore face and minute filaments from the air lace my eyes, hot and painful. My skull aches down the middle as if it were split with a crack. With all this pain, the truth can’t be far away. I feel three light puffs, like three eruptions across his chest, and start awake clutching at my shirt in confusion.

  *

  As they shrink the red lights of the train begin to shimmer, and an unrelated wind disturbs frosty smoke oozing along the tracks where I cross them, slip edgewise through the gap in a row of sooty concrete panels. I rub his jaw; the threads binding the lips have stretched a bit, and sunk in, so I can move my mouth pretty easily. Still, I leave them there. I like the weird feeling.

  No trains are in sight, but coattails still pull to one side, rise and fall, and bits of trash flit past in the air. A streak of light like a shooting star draws my gaze to where a tiny rod of light hovers in a pile of litter, dotted over with delicate, snowy little mushrooms. A soft mesh of distant frog songs rises from them; their white caps make Cassiopea’s cold fires gleam from the tunnel floor. The rod of light is the reflecting sharp edge of a knife lying there, on its back. I have to tug it loose, there’s a slight resistance as though he were detaching a powerful magnet from a metal surface. I turn it, holding point toward me, flat of the blade resting on the fingers of his left hand. One creamy silver edge, a notch by the small gilded hand guard and then a sweeping curve, a thick flat spine, the handle is wrapped in a black leather ribbon and topped with a round steel cap.

  I put the point of the blade through a teepeed newspaper — it cuts easily, with a quiet rasp. I slash the paper and it folds open exposing the writing on the reverse of the page. It’s sharp all right. I rise from my crouch holding the knife and turning it this way and that, point toward my chest as I pivot and collide with a steel post I forgot was there and accidentally stab myself in the heart. My vision slides down the post as I float back on the rebound, my hand falls from the handle but the knife stays where it is, held in place by my chest. I look at it with a complicated feeling, only the top layer of which is intense chagrin the blade cold in my stopped heart.

  I start counting. He keeps restarting without knowing what number I’m counting to or whether I should count up or down. I take the handle in both hands in amazement at my stupidity — my hands are like images. My legs are film. Arms catch me as I pitch backwards, my head flops to one side and I’m face to white face with the dead boy I found.

  “Hey, bubby!” he trills happily, batting me twice on the cheek with his free hand. “Don’t panic!”

  Blurry underwater white figures float up around me to the deep sonorities of a distant harp — my body can’t be felt, just maybe a cold outline. Two skeletons dance out of the gloom of the tunnel toward me, their knees laced together in a glacial jig; they wear whackily-grinning paper maché skull masks and tinselled headdresses with wiggling parts, and they dance in a halo of heatless crystal flames, like the skeletons of fires. My eyes die. I feel myself slump and crash forward onto my face. The handle of the knife bangs against the ground, and the cold blade pushes muscle apart and slice heart — thud. I’m sliding forward with a tickle in my throat, like the weakest giggling imaginable; I feel my nose push against a mushroom, snapping the cap from its tender stalk.

  Now I’m watching from where you are, while here on the page I’m sagging like a stick of melting butter that plops out of me in mouthfulls, and the puddle’s edge advances jerkily. A train whirrs somewhere a few blocks away; its wind raises little hackles on the surface of the puddle, and I giggle idiotically like a drain unglugging. The blood butter has stopped spreading. The bulging edge of the pool catches lights and they rise along the curve. It swells, flaps up clumsily and in on itself, flows back in a coiling bundle, rises into the air, an opaque sail of fascinating red, curving away from him. Its upper hem makes a hood — then a globe, flat where it rests on the ground. As it swells, taking the last of his blood, it reels itself in toward the wound, wobbling like a belly dancer. A dead rat emerges at the base and its maggots stand on end do a belly dance and spell THE GREAT LOVER across its red surface. Air crash of a passing train blows them all away in a puff of oily white smoke. My body turns slowly onto its left side as the globe wriggles under it. Now I’m on my back, the knife engulfed in the globe, as it settles over the wound.

  The blood reaches in through the wound making a ventriloquist dummy of my body with the opening on the wrong side. The globe of blood rolls up as I jerk onto my feet again and surrounds my head. Crystal fire breaks out again. I don’t see anything, I don’t know where I am, if I’m still there with you or what.

  Nothing to see; I feel like I’m falling. The horizon shimmers with fury. In the subway tunnel, but as vast as a planet all bloody. I start to laugh and thick plummy blood backs up into my nose and down into my lungs making me cough and splutter, tears running down my cheeks but my diaphragm won’t stop squeezing hiccupping and giggling. I can see through the thinning red that I stand on a sandy sheet of iron straight to horizon. The air reverberates with shrill blows in a rapid, unhurried rhythm, a trench of molten metal all the way along the horizon. Silhouetted against its light there’s a colossal kneeling figure, holding what looks like a spear, point down against the iron, and the crashing blows are coming from him. Light from the trench creeps around the back of the figure, dimly outlining a lot of naked muscularity under thin skin. Now I make out the legs of the others; a ring of giants. The spear is a long metal stylus; the crouching figure holds its point against the iron and the flattened end aloft, the others strike wi
th chiming long-handled sledges one after another with perfect syncopation.

  In black ice below my feet I see a ring of white figures from above their arms flung up to me swaying like seaweed. They wriggle together then fall, spelling out PLOT SUMMARY with their bodies. I start sliding along the surface as I bend to look at them, like there’s no friction. They’re spelling out other things or saying them I think but this glide is taking us away. A ribbon of gold-white fire is pouring into the trench from a vessel deep above in the dark, and as the trough begins to fill its glare intensifies. Naked giants show legs braced, body flexing back, arms fully extended, their hammers’ heads nearly scrape the ground behind them and then fly like lightning never missing the end of the stylus, ring against its metal, scatter a flock of sparks. Their flanks sequined with perspiration they swing the hammers weightlessly back and forth. The moment one hammer lands it rebounds up and the next instant the hammer of the one next clockwise strikes and rebounds. The one holding the stylus draws it smoothly back and forth in curves and crosses, the others adjusting their blows with uncanny skill to its constantly altering position. Tense concentration, pain, exasperation, rage, and fear on their faces, and I’m still sliding along on imaginary skis giggling and choking. One by one, rosy streaks drop from sky vessels into the trench and now, overhead and between them, in the dark a vast pointing hand. The finger moves and points, and without looking up the kneeling figure moves the stylus to and fro, and the hammers follow with unbroken rhythm — the finger points, the stylus is moved, and the rhythmic hammers follow.

  I pick up speed and leave the ground. Just in time, as the channel overflows its banks and thrashing metal froth boils into the cuts of the stylus. The updraft gives me a boost and I look on curiously. Blazing liquid fills the grooves tracing a subway map. The air is igniting, burning billows flare against me in soft pulses of parching heat. Blood drains bitter and dirty into my mouth nose eyes ears and down the thick arm into my chest — the knife is gone but my body sense comes back with unbearable pain like a many-angled diamond-hard object wedged in my chest. My laughing and choking turns to hacking cries of distress and bewilderment that I hear from somewhere else. Bubbling plumes of fire orange and white flash over him too fast yet to ignite his clothes, running in subway tunnels — if you look, you can see a dot there moving on the map, leaving a thinning streak of red. The sky is strung like a harp with cables of liquid iron or white-hot nerves.

  I am leaping up the steps from the tunnel to the platform edge, a filthy tramp, comically rushing for the train — running for the first car, pinwheeling his arms, uttering shouts of alarm, the conductor shakes his head as he passes seeing blinding letters on black iron. I board the first car, dancing in place with my hands clapped to my eyes yelling “Ow! Ow! Ow!” — With two tones the doors clamp together, I double over blinded as the car begins to roll — passengers start back in alarm. I can’t hear them over the noise of smashing hammers and the steel wheels of the subway car gnash as it changes tracks with a burst of azure sparks. The shifting of the stylus tracks the massive veer of the car right to left as it changes tracks with clattering wheels like crashing hammers — distracted I turn and crash into a stream of molten steel I forgot was there, my clothes catch fire and fire stitches into my chest wound, gold-white fire crawls in my veins and belly-dances on my nerves. I panic and flail and claw, fall screaming to the floor of the subway car — sealed in white flames — passengers jump from their seats, the train operator thrusts his head through the door of his compartment to see... Now my eyes are whiting out — a white searing blank — I hear a voice like the roar of a monster fire and then the PA droning out station stops, buzzing in my throat. That’s my voice, isn’t it? The fire cleared my throat.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Transit police are shouting at me and trying to herd me off the car with their flashlights. That is, they yell through their hands, faces screwed against my stink. I sit up at once and smile at them; I want to seem affable. I get up stiffly and the less sportsmanlike of the two takes a swing at me, so, when I’m erect not to say stable I toss my maggoty dead rat to him. It splats against his chest, breaking his morale. He runs away with loud ejaculations of revulsion. The other, seeing my sudden movement, had lunged a little toward me, but watched fascinated and disgusted as I threw my rat, reversed his movement, turned a little as his partner fled, and now he doesn’t know what to do. The car is being held in the station, and a crowd is eyeing us both from the platform. I bend angularly to retrieve my rat, then run for the stairway, moving faster than I imagined I could. Barrelling through the turnstile with a terrific racket, in a flash (I guess) I am up the steps in autumn air.

  Over broad stone wall into the park, slope is steep and I fall clumsily forwards off my feet flinging his hands before me into the bracken. Now I dart along the slope, find a rocky hollow where the earth has subsided beneath the roots of an enormous tree, and squeeze myself laboriously into it. While the compression is brutal, I stay there for some time, my nose thrust into a little heap of down — a cat had made a meal of a bird here some time, maybe. Puddles sliding in the wind color of weak milky coffee, the wind has whipped it into a fine yellow froth at the edges; soil like coffee grounds pressed into a paste.

  Waking up is a succession of many lifting veils. I’ve been staring out at the weakening daylight, without really wanting to take it in. A mouse scoots out from under a bush and stops, looking at me. Taking this as a sign that there’s no one threatening around, I quit my hole and gingerly unkink my spine. There are yellow, eye-shaped leaves scattered all over the ground, and like cupped palms they have caught brilliant rainwater. I find a brown human femur without meaning to. I unhastily clean and pocket it, amble on in the direction of a shallow stream that flows beneath a stone bridge.

  The dashing stream, piebald with rags of light... fade to light shining on the faces of the busy street, water furling in the gutter and him walking oblivious there by the curb. The water bunches before my shoes. As night falls I’m noticing more love coming out, like fireflies. There are other Great Lovers here, of both sexes, suavely dressed, clean, with gold around their necks. Here’s a paved, triangular park with trees in planters, really a glorified traffic island; I drop onto one of the benches and unobtrusively observe the habits of “my kind.” They ripple along the edges of the pavement or hover in deep doorways, peer out from windows, from passing cars. Their lukewarm eyes probe the crowds with a soft insistent gaze, and some have invisible sea wasp feelers that stretch out in cigarette smoke, billow over a bar or a restaurant like limp piano-playing hands feeling for availabilities like reading braille. They select and ease alongside with a light touch and a light word and a smile like a white seam in a dark cloud, and an aerial spiral of a haunting fragrance... the transaction clicks in hardened shadows against a sky like orange cream.

  Walter Benjamin observed that the city is where you find love at last sight: the Great Lovers are the hyena-jawed scavengers who retrieve the lost objects of ardent glances. They are at once more and less alive than I am, like vividly-colored picked flowers already wilting. They are faint and vague, and avoid each other resentfully. These Great Lovers home in on people who have unwittingly been charged with the longing of others, soaked with it like static electricity, and this is their food. So the more they feed the more they attract, but leave them alone a while and they clabber, shrink, grow hard and crack open in places like a dried-up piece of cheese. In an attic somewhere you may come across some unidentifiable piece of something, a pale hard adipocere thing of no particular shape or smell, fuzzed all over with dead mold — you’re looking at the belle of the ball, wasted and gone these many years. Pull away the mold, and see the intaglio broach, put your ear down by it and hear the ticking of a jewelled watch embedded deep inside. I may be a caricature of that caricature, the comic-book version, but it’s not so bad. What was I before? I don’t remember. What does it matter? What good would remembering do me now, anyway? I look with longin
g at forgetfulness. Never mind. Life goes on. I’ll wait to do my summarizing later, when I’ve had time to digest what I’ve seen.

  Medical science tells us that red haired persons exhibit greater sensitivity to pain and pleasure. I have spent my time trudging between the lights, camouflaging myself as a sack of garbage on the curb, or huddled on benches. The other homeless here all seem dazed; their attention steams out of them in a diffuse broadcast, unless they are actually begging. Otherwise they’re waiting to beg or building up their strength to try again. I am building up my strength to borrow, since I’m not interested in money, and what I want is not something any amount of begging will get me. Medical science tells us... and a striking red-haired woman has just gone by.

  At once, I follow, doing math in my head. My motions seem more robotic than amorous, but looking at her I am bursting with desire all at once, as though a second me had been jammed into the first like a foot into a tight stocking stretched at the seams. Desire bellows in me like droning music. Now she is waiting for the light, and I creep up near, desire reaching through my ribcage toward her like prisoner’s arms thrust out between bars. I have to mind the wind so she doesn’t smell me. At most she might think there’s a sewer grate somewhere near. A prisoner might half-dislocate his shoulder reaching out from his cell window just to feel daylight touch his hand. I chew my lower lip through the threads from left to right. Whisk! I spin one floating strand of her hair round my index finger hold it there, letting her pluck it loose as she steps into the street, turning away the moment it is free.