The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  The movie has broken into its high-calorie phase. I really got to ride the oil pressure control, which is a garden hose faucet — lean forward to spit on the hissing valves, little puffs of steam slither out of the open chassis. I can’t stop sniffing. I can feel the worm oozing down from my nose and pressing against the rim of my upper lip. The focus just went out — I fix that, damp the motor a bit more, check the gas pressure, re-key the foot pedal again, wipe condensation from gauges, spit on the valves starting to glow hot, goose the current a bit more.

  The room rocks and booms. There are rows of straight glass ribs between the valves, each one ends in a bulb filled with shuddering mercury. As the experiment continues the room fills with a musty smell of hot grease, like the inside of a typewriter. A chorus of voices lacing through the noise, on the screen a hydraulic struggle is playing out in a series of unedifying close-ups, the soundtrack gargles and whines out the speaker. The machine is churning, dark curling red flames sputter around the wires as they pass through the guide-holes to the spools, the magnetic filings shoot to the top of their bulb and hang there vibrating, a desperate commotion ripples across the machine, the tone arms blur together with a sound like a whole string section playing pizzicato and a forest of bare arms are lifted on all sides... the machine thumps the floor and falls still. The end of the film pops off the rear spool slap slap slap slap slap...

  *

  My name is Vera. I am not a character. I won’t explain, but I will tell you where I am now... on the platform, of course... there is cold wind, there is trash on the curb I can smell. It stinks like death.

  My father says now is the only time when anything can happen, which is naturally why now writes as it does. I repeat these things to myself feeling I understand them perfectly, but without being able to explain them at all.

  Let’s be alert again. Now nothing has changed, the rags still blow around the tree, whose branches rattle with a barren sound, and the earth holding its roots is pounding like a drum. I hear it, and it makes a hot spot of excitement in my chest. The rays of the sun lie flat against the ground and warm my face, and I imagine the earth whirling gaily around the sun, and the earth throbs like a drum... No amount of lies can separate me from this scene — or that remains to be seen. I can’t see their lies, so they don’t affect me so much. My father says I’m lucky — why should I argue? I let it go.

  I play with words so they won’t remain exactly but stay alive in their own way, or so I feel them living. The lies I feel all around are different; they’re not playing. I visualize an arch crisscrossed with wires, sky a perfect crescent of blonde gold, blonde air golden — brass fumes and copper smoke. Is the word I want “blonde,” like a blonde word? It must be smooth, smooth and groovy. From this image all the rest proceeds. The arch, arching back to my parents and my ancestors. Wherever they came from, my ancestors all gave me exactly the same things: heart, bone, brains, silly eyes, gristle, muscle, appetite, nerves, hair, teeth, malice, spirit, and love, and breath — no I take it back, the breath is mine, my happiness. They gave me this language and these color words I hear without knowing what they mean. Everyone is confused when I use color words or I speak about brightness and darkness. I think about color incessantly.

  On the train one may observe these people whose lives are an endless rustling and rummaging in bags, eternally taking out and putting away, forever management of parcels of surrogate foods carefully wrapped and unwrapped like morsels of precious gold, like Etruscan artifacts. Bags within bags, systems of bags, hours, whole nights of bags; the world’s silence fumbled away in the flames of thousands of tireless fingers rustling in bags.

  My hand: fat pink yarns threaded with green, so I’m told. Color is as close to me as the vein in my neck. It’s here in my hand, actually in it, not even so far as to be in contact with it. Color is a secret property of me. It’s as weird as if I had a halo or an intangible tail. A spot on my wrist where something poked me. I have nothing to do. My guitar bag strap squeezes my shoulder. I try to picture the scribble described by this bottle here, rolling this way and that on the floor of the car. What if it drew something?

  Lifting my head, I rest its crown on the poster behind me and forget the bottle. The tunnel crashes around us. I want to be a murderer stalking at night, I want to feel seared by malice and murderous hate, and I want to disappear into thin air when the sun rises... Or the sun’s light transforms me into a plant, a wind, a cloud — I could rejoin my brother and sister sunbeams, shine on the earth all day stately and calm as a god, and then, as night falls and the light turns blood-red, I revert, am restored to the night’s real pleasures of nakedness and swift stealth.

  Wake to the sound of french horns imitating hunting horns, as they do in certain picturesque operas and symphonies. A woman sitting close by, talking on her mobile phone. She is listening; now she grins. Someone is gazing amorously at it, because it’s complex and baroque, glistening with venom — a grin he wants to suck on like hard candy — a jaw-breaker. The same radiant fire that animates the leaves is there, what must be its own unique color in her. But who is he? Why do I shake as I wonder that?

  *

  We insert the in vitro nerves, threading them down the spine and through the limbs, then leave them to develop the finer fibers within the tissues. The brain is fitted with resinous apertures through which we will draw the wires of the recorders. The top of the Prosthetic Libido’s skull can be removed easily during this phase of its assembly. Later, when it is operating independently, the sewerman says the skull will fuse on its own.

  “This was an excellent opportunity to experiment with independent recapitulatory formation. The diffuse mechabolism will monitor material autostatus and supplement the loss of any element by synthesizing new molecules directly. In most cases, the prosthetic will not even have to provide itself with any matter for use as raw material. Whatever is ingested will be processed at above ninety-eight percent efficiency, and, when there is waste, it will be evacuated in atomized exhaust from the mouth. He should be completely self-sustaining, over any length of time. Nearly indestructible, even in cases of significant injury.”

  “It will outlive me? What will happen to it when I die?”

  “I don’t know,” he says offhandedly.

  The Prosthetic Libido is my size and shape. When I die, it will go on. This thought strikes me with terrifying force as I look down at the table where it lies. I begin to imagine it has replaced me already.

  “Is it necessary to make it so independent?”

  “It must live!”

  “But that’s not what I wanted! I don’t want some living machine to be responsible for, I just want some relief—”

  He bursts out laughing — It is sometimes shocking, his reckless laughter, as if any moment he will have no face — only a wild mouth and light reflecting in his eyes with no gaze.

  “Look, you want this or not? If you want this to work, you have to do it my way.”

  “I never wanted to make some life — that always was your idea! I think you are appropriating this experiment for your own purposes!”

  “Of course what did you expect? I’m doing this all for charity — for your sole benefit?” His smile is wide and fierce, his whole face livid like steel, as I see it through the crumbling shit mask. “Of course I’m going to make life! Why else dude?!”

  *

  Now it is time to bring the prosthetic to “half-start,” which is a special coma it will remain in until after the transplant of my libido into it. In order to establish protomechanostasis, the reactor must be idling, like a car engine. The Prosthetic Libido has a contact pad under the skin of its solar plexus. I begin the half-start procedure by connecting this pad to an external reactor monitor by means of an adhesive electrode.

  The sewerman says, “It will not live without fire... tissue is solid fire, spirit is breath vibrating with word.” I don’t have any idea what he is getting at with that.

  “Can’t you be serious?” I a
sk.

  He smiles at me and says nothing, going to examine the prosthetic. This he had left on the workbench, so that sunlight can shine on it through a kaleidoscope device he made and attached to the window. Rings containing colored glass slowly spin, and the rings all together also spin, not always in superimposition but moving in and out of different overlapping arrangements to create a variety of patterns, which are projected onto the prosthetic’s body. This steady stimulation is supposed to promote the development of the nervous system in situ. For the same reason, he has brought in a device modelled on a marimba, consisting of metal keys tuned to different notes, which are played by a machine that also generates random patterns.

  “Now I must give him the breath of life!” he says. His manner is becoming completely theatrical, and I am losing patience with him. He puts his face up to the prosthetic’s face. “Be ready to start the reactor.”

  Though I begin to believe there is no point in putting such questions to him, I ask, “Shouldn’t the breath — assuming it is necessary at all, which is not something you have adequately shown me — should I be the one to breathe into it, and not you?”

  “My breath is cleaner,” he says in a final way. “Please be ready to start the reactor.”

  (This is not an exaggeration; while the rest of me, I admit to my shame, stinks horribly, I do have odorless cold antiseptic breath, like an alpine blast. — GL)

  He nicks his left wrist with a small knife. His blood has a strange appearance. I can’t see it well from here, but it looks nearly blue. He pinches his blood and holds it up to his mouth, drawing a long breath through it. Holding his breath, he carefully parts the Prosthetic Libido’s lips. He closes its nostrils with his right hand and holds the chin down with the first two fingers of his left, presses his lips to the Prosthetic Libido’s lips, and breathes out. The Prosthetic Libido’s throat and chest expand and his body takes on a pink appearance, like a pink flush. At this sign, I start the reactor of the Prosthetic Libido going. The activity of the reactor is registered by the position of a copper bead on a horizontal indicator I have in front of me. The equipment around us makes no sound, with the exception of a small fan inside my console. The sewerman is striking poses by the bench like he is shooting arrows from an imaginary bow at the Prosthetic Libido. He does this so persistently that I wonder exactly what he thinks he is doing.

  In no more than a minute, the bead begins to move, and within another thirty seconds it has reached 6.22, which is the idling point.

  I say, “Half-start.” The reactor of the Prosthetic Libido from this point is operating at the minimum level necessary to sustain its independent production of energy.

  The Prosthetic Libido’s chest rises and falls, very gently. The skin has also changed; I have no other description for it but to say it acquires a life-like quality it did not formerly have. As expected, with the arrival at half-start, the total-loss surface lubrication system starts working, and the micropores of the skin begin to produce a layer of odorless mineral oil, making the entire body surface slick.

  When the sewerman sighs, I think I see an orange flame against the roof of his mouth, and when he speaks he appears to spit small pieces of the fire. The impression lasts only a few moments.

  “This confluence of elements has already engendered a larval spirit.”

  “In that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “The odor.”

  He leaves the room without elaborating.

  *

  The recordings have been edited and the operating theatre — a lumber room — is ready. The Prosthetic Libido lies on a table, its brain exposed pink and grey like a cloud above the rising sun. A heavy black curtain divides the room into two sections. The stretcher on which Hulferde will rest is head-to-head with the table, on the other side of the curtain, and it stands on an enormous wooden spool of metal cable.

  Now to bring the prosthetic up to full start. After several misconnections finally they throw the switches. For a moment there is total darkness and a silence in which everything stops. Now a dim glow can be seen. The light gradually returns, with a lazy stirring in its — his — genitals and extremities. Life always just trickles in at first.

  The breathing deepens... an expression of dreamy relish creeps over his features, his eyes open to two fringed slits, and mineral oil perspiration sequins his sides steaming with musk. Life rises and ebbs, rises higher and ebbs higher, higher still each time, like the swelling breast of a symphony, the Prosthetic Libido’s life trembles on the verge and then spills over, becomes self-perpetuating. It draws deep and pleasurable breaths. The folds of its membranes soft as if they were just made of sky like silky wads of dusk about a disk of blue wands, spokes from an off-center opening in the base. They shiver, then it’s as if they’d never moved, shiver again. A ribbon of pressure comes into existence nearly encircling the aperture from the outside. Its shadow is faintly visible on the interior canopy. At roughly regular intervals more such ribbons appear until the canopy is striped with spinning shadows, and now the lighter bands between them become shiny, a pink lambence makes them sparkle with heat mounting in gentle intensity as the instants develop them. The ribbons tenderly squeeze the canopy from outside, without deforming it, and the wands flex as a formation bows them outward. The off-center opening is sealed with a brittle film of some mineral like abalone lining—

  —now it buckles before a gush of light, frothing in the wands and against aperture walls. In channels of soapy metal it sluices away into the body, bubbling up white and volatile where it touches the sides of the channels, shedding and reabsorbing thin shells of intense, pure hues on top, the color of the streams are pastels lit from inside that throw off striped fans and strobing marquees. The light thickens at the edges, then pulls apart in strings. The Prosthetic Libido sighs and shimmers a profusion of colors which, as I move to and fro, fitfully takes on the luster of sunlight — a hum of a hundred men I feel tremble in my throat and chest, then open out to a great and joyous cry I don’t hear but that runs a hot river down my body to the floor.

  The Great Lover gets the machinery running while Hulferde attaches contacts to himself, unable to see the machine through the sable curtain. He lies down on the stretcher in his street clothes, face down; there’s a padded ring into which he inserts his head to keep his spine straight. The Great Lover dons rubber gloves and applies a topical anaesthetic to the skin at the base of Hulferde’s skull. With one expert shove he drives home the point of an awl-like cutting instrument with an adjustable barrier around the base to prevent it cutting too deep. A brief sound of surprise issues from Hulferde, he jerks once, then goes limp. Only a drop or two of blood.

  The Great Lover presses a release at the end of the cutter’s handle; he extracts the device from the wound, leaving behind a small metal tube, angling up through the spinal aperture at the skull’s base. Through this tube, the Great Lover introduces a number of wires one at a time, expertly twisting them so as to position the end of each wire in the proper brain area, finishing with the spinal cord. The other nerve impulses will be drawn out through the skin contacts, which are rounded domes, modifications of the cupping method. There will be a feedback arrangement, employing the recordings made earlier, which will be played back on Hulferde’s nervous system and the Prosthetic Libido’s in exact sync, reproducing the arousal state and greatly augmenting it. When fully engaged, the faculty of arousal will commit itself completely, and may then be extracted in toto with the application of an external vacuum. The principle is to induce flow by creating adjacent zones of high and low pressure.

  In response to a question from the Great Lover, Hulferde mumbles he is ready to proceed. The Great Lover takes up a position perpendicular to the curtain, from which he is able to observe both Hulferde and the prosthetic. The machine controls, for the most part large iron wheels with protruding metal handles, surround him. At once, the Great Lover is setting gauges and turning cranks. Th
e recorded wires emerge from a spindle box bolted to the floor and pass like harp strings through holes in a steel ring around Hulferde’s head. From there they are drawn eight feet up to pulleys hanging from the ceiling, and go down again on the other side of the curtain. They feed, one by one, into the resinous apertures in the Prosthetic Libido’s exposed brain.

  As Hulferde responds to the recordings, the spool beneath his stretcher turns counterclockwise and the three-inch-thick cable unwinds, pulled into the Heavy Recorder against the wall opposite the Great Lover. The HR is triggered with a terrible sound, engraving Hulferde’s libido itself on the cable with massive hydraulic rams that thunder like locomotive pistons, deafening in this not over-large room. A smell of motor oil issues from the machine. The erections of the two subjects rise in sync.

  The cable runs parallel to the floor and enters a second machine which thrusts the end of the cable against a bore-headed bladed drill bit. The bit pares the cable’s individual metal threads apart neatly like a slow-turning star, and each thread is drawn into the Prosthetic Libido’s brain. Hidden wheels deep in its head draw the wires and respool them in that intimately dark spot; the wires are drawn at different rates and, after editing, are different lengths — one after another they suddenly pull loose from the spindlebox and with a violent spin of the prosthetic’s wheels the wires snap free and whip through the room, whizzing into the Prosthetic Libido’s brain with a sharp whine. Click — the wire vanishes — the resinous aperture closes; the Prosthetic Libido’s brain begins to hum, a tone which is modified with each closure. He will be animated in Virgo. A distant music is audible, like harp notes scattered in a cave.