The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  In the alley peer at it burning like a red wire on my foul finger, still alive with her life and my yearning makes it glow so bright I blink and blink.

  *

  The Great Lover sits in his atrium, chin in hand, finger tapping his cheek knocks off little puffs of powdered sewage. He is lost in a brown study of the hair, which sits spotlit on a satin pillow beneath a glass bell. The white satin on which it lies glimmers with its magic fawn glow.

  I have a noisy neighbor inside my skull, thumping up and down and clattering pots and pans, which is what passes with me for thinking. Thinking has snared me and now I can’t stop. Shit, gold, water, and combinations of elements in general bring life about, this is my crotchet, and this thought has attached itself with an intolerably intense and sustained meaningful look in my direction to the feeling of pity and animal reverence I feel for these cadavers and body parts I’ve assembled and cubbyholed here in my den. All right all right — the amber gleam, the clue is there in the livid heat of that hair’s light. Gold. Red, rubies and blood. My buttery gold blood on the ruddy gilded guard of the knife, and right about then the boy caught me didn’t he? Yellow teeth in red lips, in a white face, in a color code. I clatter in my pots and pans; I can make gold. I know how, I think perhaps because I may have seen the trick go by in the flurry of my first death agony, as I flew, flowed, along in streams of golden turds.

  I excavate the wall at a strong point and hollow out a space, fill it with fuel and stoke it to kiln heat. The Great Lover, wearing a lady’s fur coat and pearls against the intense heat, and with a welding mask over his face, thrusts a skull-shaped crucible into the open hearth. His feet work a treadle-bellows. White-gold light shines in the vessel, illuminating a mosaic subway map taking shape on the wall. An amber drop glinting like sunlight congealed in honey drops into the harelipped leer of a maggoty rat — it spins and curls in on itself, turning into a perfect, seamless sphere of warm skin about the size of an orange. Too strong, and that’s a bit creepy, I think, edging the ball into the sewage with my toe.

  I dilute my elixir carefully and now it looks like scintillating black and gold quicksand. Fresh out of maggoty rats, I wildly dispense it to my collection of bodies. They stir and titter, begin to move. With a blaring wheeze of triumph, I take a long draught from the crucible and shiver across the brink — the flames reach out and try to grapple me — perspiration bursts out all over my body and my nose rebels at the stink. I want an antidote — but by mistake I take another drink from the crucible! I spit out most of it, my mouth is flashing hot and cold, and the stuff seems to want to sprout a cock’s comb from my chin where it dribbled from my lips. Taking out my shears, I trim the comb back aggressively, but I tend to bleed now my heart’s beating again. I’d become accustomed to its absence — it restarts, and I blow up like a balloon, or so it feels. White figures, blurry and moving with galvanic spasms, are roaming the atrium, chirping like birds and lowing like cows.

  Recovery was a slow and tedious affair, but steady, and I had help from the gnomes I call them that on account of they gnow things. Observe — I stop one of them, the zombie of a twelve-year-old with longish blonde hair and a rabbity mouth, powdered from head to foot like the rest of them.

  “Hey, you!” I call, “What’s six plus two?”

  “Nine!”

  “—See?” All kinda little friends.

  He becomes blurry, and knucklewalks off.

  The Great Lover settles back in his fur coat. Countless pairs of reading glasses, bifocals and half-moon glasses hang on lanyards around his neck running down to his waistcoat. A pair of specs is perched high on his filthy brow, and at the moment he has a monocle screwed into each eye. The spavined stool he sits on shimmies and creaks under his weight. He gazes in rapture at the red hair under glass, presses both fists to his chest, elbows up, and shivers in transports of desire. It is a ruby circle of glory!

  Now he takes up a scraper and a bucket and, walking in a crouch, stalks awkwardly after one of the gnomes. After a few near misses, he corners one and begins vigorously scraping it with the scraper, catching white shavings in the bucket. The creature whimpers — he’s not taking off any flesh, just the white coating. Finally the gnome slithers bonelessly out from his confinement and the Great Lover runs his fingers through the contents of the bucket. Then he puts it next to a hastily improvised gauge and the little lights tap on, indicating the presence of ionized matter: soap. The Great Lover grins with satisfaction and dumps the shavings into a bubbling vat scavenged from a brewery. It has a spigot at the bottom; when turned, a tube of hot white soap drops from the faucet into a mold. The Great Lover pulls back a curtain revealing shelves of fuming corpse soap. Selecting a ripe-looking cake, he steps into a clawfooted bathtub and scrubs himself vigorously without undressing, his many pairs of glasses whipping this way and that as he turns himself into an abominable latherman. He pulls a chain and the water comes crashing down over him with the sound of a toilet flushing. A passing gnome accidentally hands him a huge bath towel streaked and brown; he dries himself thoroughly and then dives into the sewer headfirst.

  He comes out a manhole and makes his way along the tunnel, shit gushing from his clothes. Pausing briefly for a breath spray — now he struts from one end of the subway platform to the other making eyes at female commuters, who flee in dismay clutching their noses or reel to the edge and puke noisily onto the tracks. Not seeming to notice he bends forward a bit to scan the seats of the subway car — an appealing haunch flashes past and he follows, swinging his right arm almost to the ground.

  Fast as a gazelle she has disappeared down a flight of stairs to a lower platform — no don’t let her go yet! He swings round the banister on one arm and leaps down the steps, landing with a slam of feet and a splatter of sewage in all directions from his clothes. Commuters scatter like roaches.

  The oblivious haunch flits into a subway car. She is an exotic fish, rare and beautiful, shimmering with color so vibrant it croons to him a long-noted female song. A moray eel pops from his fly and snaps the air in galvanisms of thrills. He scoots along the silver flanks of the steel reef — in the future: the subway car topples from a barge into the sea to form an artificial reef... fish move like ghosts among the seats, take turns bubbling through the intercom...

  The doors close behind me and everyone in the car reels away with groans of revulsion. Now where did she go? Hard to tell in this rout...

  *

  I’m restless and it’s not just because of the gnomes who seem never to sit still, but amble around bumping into me constantly as I lie on the shelf — my eye stubbornly returns to that red ring under the glass. I notice. I go cold inside, get up and go over to the glass and take out the ring.

  Abandoned buildings, formerly a hospital complex; four tall lean buildings with stone walls, little white-sashed windows, steep slate sleep state roofs, situated around a courtyard with dead trees. My fumes turn into eight fanciful golden coffins, rummaging like tiny birds in the branches, giant spinning diamonds behind the teeth in their skulls.

  He picks a spot at one end of a gallery hallway just two stories from the top, and draws a circle on the tiles with a thick grease pencil he’d found in a garbage can. Within the circle, he draws an oval, representing her, and a triangle, representing him, then unwinds the hair from his finger, laces it between his lips to straighten it with spit, then presses one end into the grease margin of the triangle, then presses the other end into the grease margin of the oval... leans forward with his palms on the ground, so that the two symbols are in the angles formed by his thumbs and hands. One by one, candle flames without candles descend through the ceiling and stop, hovering about a foot from the floor, forming a ring round him. He does not look up. With no plan at all in mind, he runs the tip of his finger along the length of the hair from the triangle to the oval, again and again, always in the same direction, from him to her.

  She is sleeping.

  In time, her dream appears: a small clapboard
house on a tufted grassy plain or marsh stretching off to a distant, mercury-colored beach. A waxy sky, a massive wooden picnic table with benches, laundry drying on lines strung from the house to a pair of tall bushes; weak wind pilfering everywhere. She is sitting at the table with scrapbooks of poems and drawings in a heap, most of them on butcher’s paper or brown newsprint. She is wearing a tweed skirt and a sort of tight khaki jacket, buttoned up, her hair gathered at the nape. She’s dreaming her face is darkened by incurable, mortal illness, and she draws, using small stones to hold the paper flat; her sketch is only just begun, he can’t make out what it will be. He can see another, pinned down against the wind with what looks like a wooden iron; a still life involving a bundle of flowers against a dark background — the flowers are luxuriant, and a little grotesque. He notes one in particular, which has long wavering petals, yellow spotted with black like ripened bananas, and there in the shadows just left of center is her face, hidden in among the flowers, shadowed and drawn, downcast, intolerably sad.

  Some time later he sees her again. She had somehow been caught naked far off down the beach, and was running awkwardly back to the house over the uneven ground, her pale arms raised a little like wings, her hair not dishevilled at all but still pinned up neatly. She is uncanny without her clothes, like a figure in a painting. He is struck by the wind from her body, and it evokes in him a ghostly love, not for her, but for everything.

  “I love,” he says flatly, his lips not far from the floor. The words are soaked up by the wood and deadened. “I love,” complete in the intransitive, like “I go.” He can’t hear himself say it. If he could have heard it, he would have turned himself into a cartoon again.

  She dashes into the dark house. He finds her upstairs in a shift, trying to open the window. The sash won’t rise evenly, and keeps jamming against the sill, requiring her to jostle it and pull it down again and again, trying to raise it level.

  When he fills his palms with her warm shoulders she stops slowly and sways back against him familiarly. Then she turns abruptly and flings her arms around his neck, kissing a face that is, for her, perfectly featureless and clean. This is not his body, as it crouches on the tile in the hospital, tapping away at the little tiles with letters on them; she embraces a puppet she improvised just now. He in turn possesses the puppet, without really choosing to. Now that they are alone together in this room, her intimacy draws me in like water running down the sides of a bowl to the middle.

  When she presses herself against his icy body he can tell the puppet is death at the same time, frightening but not threatening her. The puppet isn’t death it’s a harbinger of death drawn by her mortal illness, something like that. She is going to bribe him with her love, or that’s what this is turning into. She accepts his anonymous weight and freezing hands, pressing her down into the yielding mattress, and in time the walls become grainy with gathering dark and the windows have faded to pale blue smudges in the air. Her dream is agonizingly slow to fade, and her bed has become a hard tile floor under her back. There is a ring of candles, or candle flames, burning around her, and somehow a terrible smell — weird to smell something strongly in a dream. Death has cheated her, and she is at her funeral — in the morgue itself not even in a chapel — lying in her coffin, without even a single mourner in sight. She bitterly reproaches her friends in a sharp voice that simply appears around her without compelling her to move her lips. Still death’s weight freezes and immobilizes her, and still death seems to enjoy her, more and more. I am inside her and her dummy, in the overlap. Suddenly she shies away from the sensation, horribly cold and empty, spirals away in anger and disappointment toward her friends; she starts awake, fumbles for the light, and gazes woozily at her furniture, which rushes forward from the recesses of her apartment to reassure her.

  Everywhere an even radiation of pearly light direct on the gritted nerves. Unmoored, he drifts down the gallery, seeing through the windows the courtyard, the tree whose upper branches are lost in the gloom, the tall brick façades, and a confusion of colored lights and clustered reflections of lights, orange and violet. His reflection seems faceless at first, but this is the blur in his vision which is sharpening slowly. The windows flash by. He wafts against an azure streak of windows, spotted with lights.

  *

  He lives in the sewers, insulated by the water and the dirt suspended in this water — long wool sleeves down over fingers trailing in puddles — and in the black world between stations: black and pumpkin lights — snow bank stations — the trains shrilly call to one another blind and massive in the dark — black rushing silence, rent by screaming trains... Like the hideous angler fish of the ocean’s deepest places, he is an otherworldly scavenger drifting in currents heavier than avalanches, slow as glaciers, a sea wasp with a bridal train of tingling nerves that drift in the sewage time and again tangling in women’s dreams. He doesn’t resist, but the effort involved is always too much. It isn’t necessary to make the effort, but then the dream engulfs him anyway dragging him by the nerves and that is by far the greater ordeal. So when the undertow of her godlike whim draws at him, he must go, and make the effort. It is comparable to improvising a complex piece of contrapuntal music in coordination with other musicians who know what they’re doing and who are extremely precise doing it... the pull on the nerves wrenches him with a strong gentle sway into his core, they are meanwhile reaching out to fondle and garland the dream like limp braille-reading fingers.

  An irresistible impulse drives him to pick from among the crowds on the subways, eyes gleaming with water through the rind of dirt, a shiny hard varnish on his face. Constant practice has given him total control over his stench; he can contain it on the subway cars using olefactory camouflage, then release it in a concentrated invisible attack if necessary, closing it around his victim like a suffocating cloak.

  Black hair, neat as a pin, stylish. When she got off the train I felt hurt, as though a long, comfortable acquaintance were suddenly interrupted; as though she and I were already sweetly old and familiar to each other. I was always too late. She had me following her from room to room. Now at last we are in the room together, briefly. She touches a lamp standing by the door.

  “This would break up the lines of the room,” she says, and vanishes in the blackness of a huge window, leaving me alone.

  I look around. The dream is still going. I put my hands in my pockets, glancing without great interest at the walls and ceiling, which billow a little, like projections on screens. They are even slightly out of focus. Or my eyes are. No, I see the lines in the floor clearly. Uncertain what to do next, I lightly kick the lamp and in her voice it says, “This would break up the lines of the room.”

  I kick it again.

  In her voice it says, “This would break up the lines of the room.”

  *

  The glowing amber-ivory blonde, fine-featured, gazing soulfully out the train window. An invisible jet of time or space or something like that streams from her eyes, and in exactly the same way a jet of water introduced into a pool induces the rest of the pool to flow with it or through it, I feel myself begin to flow and stream repeatedly through her eyes.

  That night, in sleep, she watches a viscous tendril of smoke stretching across a shaft of pale sunlight, expanding to form a transparent canopy of grains too fine to see. This smoke — from a snuffed cigar or an incense stick or a snuffed candle’s wick — sinks toward the floor, seems to touch and sense it. There are dim white heaps of warm, crumpled linen in the hut’s shadowy corner.

  The whitewashed hut stands in a little clearing of tall grass, surrounded on two sides by spellbound trees; nothing stirs among these ancient, shaggy boughs, and the gloom about their trunks is perfect. Overhead the warm, crumpled clouds race across the sky, infinitely deep and high and remote.

  Half in the pale shadow of a tree by the path, she is standing in a colorless dress flowing to the ground, her hands resting on the skirts at her hips. The light of the sun slants across
the lens of her unshaded right eye, illuminating the separate fibres of the iris, bleaching its green to grey. Her vehement face is dappled by freckles, and the shadows of leaves. She is transfixed by a thought, and stares as though it had appeared before her like a ghost out of the sunlight.

  She looks up, past the hut, to the treeless slope above. High against the horizon, looming up like a tower, is the shapeless peak of naked rock. The slopes above the treeline are criss-crossed by wooden fences. Standing, by a fence below and beside the peak, interrupting the horizon, her lover faces her and the valley. He is wearing a nankeen vest, and has a fowling-piece cracked and resting on his right arm. His straw hat is pushed back above his brow, and his dog sits in the grass, just as still. He looks down, or rather back, to where he’d just been, using eyes not proper to him — they’re my eyes. These two are not looking directly at each other, but at some midpoint in the landscape which receives and relays the gaze of each to the other. His face, free and impassive, calm and happy like a god’s; her face, tense with a savage joy and expectation.

  *

  Young Katherine Hepburn type; from a distance she looked like a slight old woman. Pale skin, like wax paper, pink and red around the eyes — not from crying, could simply be from looking. Lean, wise-seeming face, precociously knowing. Swingy shoulder-length nearly grey-silver blonde hair in an old-fashioned style, a windbreaker over her dress. The man with her is the father, I suppose. They are conversing properly. She is cheery, but not bubbly or ebullient. Almost certainly very thoughtful. A hard-to-fool woman — ergo, less than perfectly happy. Mature, and resigned.

  That night I feel the tug. It’s like the initial motion of the train, as it overpowers the vis inertiae. I speak this scrap of Latin to myself in the way I might dawdle a little on the threshold or stop to look for something I already know the whereabouts of, a way of jerking back or pausing for a moment when my will is split between wanting to go on and not wanting to go on. I suppose I’m under the impression that a bit of erudition might encloister me, putting me beyond her reach, so I wouldn’t have to go with her.