*
The odor of the wind from the tunnels is always changing — now, a clammy, buttery smell. Slovenly, sitting with his legs up on the seat, usual drab shapeless clothes, staccato words alternating only two vowels his teeth capped with fountain pen nibs. The shuttle of the subway car makes a loom out of the city. He gets off at the next station. The subway map is eyeing me. The brown line is swelling in one place, where I am — the pigment sprouts out in a bead that breaks and runs like a tear down to the metal frame, where it collects again like a beady eye, watching me. The doors open and two almost identical young men in suits, beards neatly trimmed, roll through in wheelchairs, side by side. They watch me in silence. The one on my right is holding a hat box with a slot cut in the side.
“Nice weather we’re having, wouldn’t you say?” I ask, jumping up from my seat. I switch glasses, this prescription grabbed at random blurs my vision drastically so that I barely avoid tackling them both. Not able to see whether the one on the right has jostled the hat box or did hat box move by itself? “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
I toss heart-shaped boxes of candy into their laps and switch glasses again. The doors open and, with knowing smiles at me, they unlock their wheels and elbow out. A weak, muffled voice can be heard speaking with an accent: “Keeping secrets can become a habit, and you may find yourself harboring irrelevant or indifferent secrets.” They kept the chocolates, though.
*
The police are sweeping the stations for panhandlers and I head for the tunnels the express booming into the station. Craning my head to look behind me I face front again just as my left shoulder clips a beam — I lose my balance spin round with a sickening shotput in the stomach and fall in front of the express. It hits me before I make it to the ground and bats me forward—
According to the map, he tumbles spinning across his width like a lathe, catches sight of the tracks flashing up towards him and dextrously pushes off them with a lightning fast touch of his palms. He is thrust back into the air where the train rams him again, sets him spinning again, and he spins, swinging his left leg directly out in front of him it jolts as it lands square between the rails and tosses him up again.
Now for blocks this goes on with the Great Lover tumbling like a porpoise riding a bow wave before the implacable steel brow of this despotic train, keeping himself in the air and off the mangling tracks with hands and feet elbows and knees and once, finding all these too far elevated to be within call, he drops down on the crown of his head and pogosticks himself up with his neck muscles — his right leg swings out awkwardly and brushes the third rail his body cracks like a whip and steam belches from his coat — he shouts in pain and dismay like the bray of the subway horn, narrowly missing the ground and the slashing silver rims. He waves frantically at the TO when the opportunity presents itself but the city spins past like a tornado in darkness made of pillars platforms tracks and the spray of rusty brown slime—
The train shunts wildly onto the local track and according to the map the Great Lover hurtles fifty feet down the express track — the train thunders out of sight up a ramp and the Great Lover lies where he stopped his head hovering off the ground and body bent like a warped LP. The train’s noise fades, somewhere far off bellowing once... the sound spreads and thins out. The two men in wheelchairs are sitting on the tracks a few dozen feet up the tunnel from where he lies, looking at him, evidently waiting for him to notice them. They are both holding storm lanterns in their laps, and paperbacks into which they’ve stuck their thumbs. Somewhere in the distance at the end of his arm his hand is being shaken with energetic cordiality — the vibration of a congratulatory voice I can’t really hear is dragging over me. My body is flushed with cold like a tube of wind, the intermittent sound I now hear is being made apparently by me as my body moans with shock and dismay and my mind just onlooks in confusion. The two men are rolling away from me with their lamps, in a trembling envelope of buttery light. There’s a button I’ve never seen before pinned to the rotting fabric of my lapel that says “8.8” on it, in small numerals just off center. Oh how well is this I fall back to lie still and a rat is licking my hand rapturously like a faithful dog.
*
Studying a water-damaged station map more than half of it blurred out and bleached making it more like an image of time, localized, than of the whole transit system. A dry, hollow-voiced wind brushes past like a gigantic ghost... I go to the edge, where a rat forages in the shallow water between the rails. Its nervous movements are made visible by the vibration of the water, as though its energy shimmered around it in black circles. Suddenly it is gone. It seems as though all the air in the station were leaking out into space in an ever-intensifying silence as every station light goes out at once.
I fling myself from the edge, retreating uncertainly until I feel the wall behind me. Thud of my feet, and then the tile cool through the back of my coat. From the depths of the station comes the faint sound of an exhaled breath that shivers in the air. Ammonia smell and a single clink of metal.
A few fluorescents click back on the far side of the empty platform. A two-car train with Not In Service signs stands there. The door rolls back and there’s backlit Algebra waving me aboard with a floppy hand; the whites of his eyes burn in the gloom. Door drops to behind me and the station falls away in screens of passages and truant lights tunnels and catwalks.
I follow Algebra. The next car is full of shot glass candles and hanging paper lanterns, chairs cabinets a sink and a table, no windows. The two men in wheelchairs flank the door, and a remotely familiar Arab man is there among a group of strange faces, all different but all subway types. Right in front me, seated behind the table, sits a big white man looking at me with his head thrown back.
“You should join us,” he says in a voice that’s thready and weak, but rebounds in his deep chest a bit like a pipe organ. “You belong with us — that is, I think you—”
He seems to be fumbling to say certain things instead of other things that might come more naturally, “—you would do well for yourself to choose to work with us.”
“Uh-huh I get it,” I grin. “You want—”
“Well don’t assume too much. We can offer you something, things you don’t know about yourself.”
White shirt suspenders and pants, black shoes; his shoulders, though sloping, are at least a yard across, he must stand well over six feet. Huge hands splayed out on his thighs. The short white bristles of his beard show red-pink skin beneath like a smear of bloody snow, all the way down to his collar. The whiteness makes his thin lips seem redder. High pink forehead with a single unicorn-lock of white hair drooping forward. He wears big sunglasses like a pair of captured dusks that come down his face nearly as far as the tip of his nose.
“You want my special thing, like the ole man,” I say.
“We need a demon to get things done,” he says. Cold point in the hollow of my chest every eye here is fixed on me like I might do anything at any moment. Those gazes all burn in cold on me like focussed starlight. I see set mouths.
“And, well — what do —”
“We’ll never work out anything without demon energy,” he says to me.
All those eyes close bore into me; it’s stuffy and cold at once.
“It’s the most serious thing we’re missing. The world uncoils one spring and that coils another, back and forth in an energy economy of give and play, but nothing big is ever launched in the world without great play and a concomitant release of forces from the tensions that ordinarily restrain them.”
No motion, except the rocking of the train. The white man isn’t groping around for words now, he’s reading something back. I bubble out a stifled laugh.
“This is crazy,” feeling weirdly happy.
The white man had left his mouth open, and now it flexes slightly upward.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he says with a minute nod, and the rest of them seem almost to bend in a little, as though they were warming themselves of
f me.
“What are you talking to me about a demon for anyway?”
Still steady with that open-mouth smile, “You have him. He’s down in there.”
He pumps his pointing hand at me once.
“Sorry, friend. I’m not — I’m not a demon.”
“I assure you you are.”
*
This is Father Ptarmagant, formerly head of the department of ancient languages at the seminary called Meadowlab. When a close friend committed suicide, he left the school without a word. Then, on the first anniversary of his friend’s death, students were surprised to hear he was preparing to deliver a lecture in one of the school’s many old lumber rooms.
Here they find he has constructed a precise mock-up of his friend’s apartment. Dressed all in white, his mouth set as hard as a line cut in stone, Ptarmagant sets forth the unusual points of the lesson plan. Producing a white dummy on wheels, apparently a modified dressmaker’s model, and then an enormous Manurhin revolver at which the class gasps and a few start from their seats — the scent of its grease is detectable at the back of the room — Ptarmagant stands on the stage, gun hanging down in his right hand, commanding silence and attention with his eyes. He then begins to explain, in a booming voice, how his friend had returned home on this day one year ago at such and such a time, had washed, and changed his clothes, wrote the brief and hasty note... how he paced the room — and now Ptarmagant brusquely seizes the dummy by the back of the neck and wheels it to and fro.
“He paced the room for a quarter of an hour.”
Ptarmagant stomps up and down, the dummy’s wheels squeaking.
“A neighbor reported seeing him criss-crossing in front of the window.”
He points to the window.
“She did not see him load the gun. Nor could she see it in his hand, as it was below the level of the sill.”
Indicating relative position of gun hand and sill.
He moves the dummy in fits and starts.
“He’s trying to nerve himself to do it.”
He shoves the dummy down toward the floor at one end of the stage, by a low bookshelf.
“He kneels here and shoots.”
Ptarmagant fires directly into the dummy’s left side with a deafening crack jolting the whole room — the students scramble away from the stage shouting in alarm. Blood sprays from squibs planted in the dummy’s body spattering the wall and floor. Hot iron reek fills the room mingling with the powder smoke: real blood.
“But he’s only wounded himself,” Ptarmagant bellows. “He’s only managed to wound himself.”
He puppets the dummy into an upright position, making it move like an injured man, then wheels it erratically into the center of the room.
“He’s dazed and uncertain what to do next,” Ptarmagant roars, his eyes starting from his head.
“He shoots himself again, perhaps by mistake, and falls.”
Another explosion crashes in the room as Ptarmagant fires up into the left shoulder, flying blood streaking his shirt, the white floor.
Ptarmagant manhandles the dummy onto the floor.
“Now he wants to finish himself, but his right arm is pinned under his body and he cannot move it.” The anger is draining out of his voice. A helpless sorrow is replacing it.
“He fires at himself from the floor.”
The pistol erupts again tearing the top of the dummy’s head in half, tufts of white stuffing spin in the air and blood spills out onto the floor.
Ptarmagant releases the body and stands, leaving the gun on the floor by the figure’s side. His white clothing and the floor are stained with red.
*
Now he speaks with the desolate serenity of a man who has had to learn to console himself — “It was a cruel thing to do.”
They dismissed him. He left town on foot one morning in the fog. The dream shows me.
Homeless, Ptarmagant walks on the margin of the road, leading by hand — Vera. No one knew her mother; Ptarmagant might as well have emanated her from his own mountainous person. She could have stepped fully formed out from behind an armchair standing in a dim corner in a quiet room, in the empty old house, on a breathless day. She doesn’t yet stand as tall as his shoulder: a grinning mannikin — is it even human? — her eyes rolling incessantly, her lips pulled back in a wet smile that makes her look a little crazy. No one ever told her to keep her eyes closed.
That face — that face... I’m afraid of it — I’m excited by it! I feel like I’m dying — I’m dying, I’m in heaven... I want her — I don’t know how I want I want... to be inside her I want her to be my home. How beautifully terrible she is and no one sees it, no one sees it but me — to everyone else she’s always been just a stupid blind girl when you, you don’t see yourself you’re blind, she’s you’re
don’t you see you’re in the presence of -------------? I love it I love it my language is breaking so I can barely talk even around what I mean — then push push break it all — you’re in the presence of
—everything —life... life... makes me smile... I feel it on my face it’s her smile I wear. I’m not wearing it. I’m smiling it.
*
“I am not a character.”
Have you guessed my secret yet? You’re far out ahead of me if you have. It’s there.
*
His reputation destroyed, he sank steadily losing everything a piece at a time and ended up riding the subway day and night, with only his daughter to look after him. Then he began to speak, specifically to prophesy to the cars; he would sit and boom out his prophesies for days at a time without moving eating or drinking, and began to attract a following especially among the others who had come loose, drifted and settled down here in the underground. His words and teachings rumble beneath the streets, along tunnels and across the sunless switching yards, transmitted and rehearsed back and forth making a web of living words in subterranean calligraphy. The cars are classrooms, students healed heads bent lips moving as they read and take notes, and he will at times address them, his disembodied voice ventriloquizes from no direction and hums with hypnotic power, but not sermonizing.
“You’ve probably always had him — you wouldn’t remember the first moment...” Ptarmagant leans forward slightly, a big gesture coming from him.
“We need your help, and you need something to do. We’ve already initiated you this far.”
“Help with what?”
“With the cult.”
“Cult of the subway?”
“Cult of the subway.”
*
The Great Lover first saw Vera Ptarmagant on the subway platform. Her left arm was linked in her father’s right arm, and they were walking together along the downtown side.
They boarded their train, and sat next to each other in a seat facing the rear of the car.
Unnoticed, the Great Lover stood on the uptown side.
Vera had been concealed by her father’s bulk — he towered over her. The Great Lover only had a few moments’, as they were boarding the train, uninterrupted view of Vera’s face, which was also a brilliant light. Vera’s face transfixing lights to drown this moment, this moment, this moment...
As her face floods the world, I transform into a ten year old boy, with his hands pressed against his breast and his elbows raised awkwardly as though he’d been shot and were clutching at the wound, were being propelled backward off his feet, his eyes wide, and his tender red mouth slack, his face frozen in an expression of shock, and a vast enough stupidity admitting unbearably sweet, warm, spirited light.
After this, nominally, there’s all sorts of stuff, moving around, talking, listening, day sky, night sky, indoors, outdoors, being alone and not, but whatever he appears to be doing is untrue, because he hasn’t budged from Vera Ptarmagant’s face, which is both hovering at her father’s side as they board their train, and visible through the windows of the car as they sit together, and emitting a lighthouse beam that washes over him again and again from ac
ross the city.
*
At first sight Vera Ptarmagant seems to be making comical faces, but this impression immediately gives way, not without a twinge of shame, to the discovery that she’s blind, of course. She is walking on her father’s arm, with her head tipped up and chin forward, her braid hanging straight down her back, its tufted end knocks against the base of her spine with each step. Now they board the train and sit beside each other; for one of what you will come to recognize as her suite of characteristic gestures, she strokes her spittly chin clean with her middle and ring fingers.
Vera was born blind, but, when she sleeps, she can see in her dreams. As a teenager, when her father was still at Meadowlab, she had been through certain trials, in which a boy was involved, difficult to explain, that had resulted in her extraction from school. After that, she had vomited stones everyone had to assume she’d swallowed flat and smooth like stream pebbles; some of these were inscribed with unintelligible, heterogeneous writing, and it was around then, although not for that reason, that she first began to see things in her dreams.
“This was how I learned to visualize people; it is like picking a familiar voice out of a crowd — first the sudden touch of attention, then the gathering in, then naming. I think I am more precise about it than sighted people are. I’ve asked people about it, and it seems they have trouble with other things pushing in on them.
“I have run my fingers over my father’s face, and over the features of old boyfriends, girlfriends, but I find a tactile portrait is usually just an incoherent composite, with the features and textures all in a heap like a drawer full of stockings. The eyes are vibrating brushes with a wildly excitable energy. I have of course inspected my own useless eyes and found the slit there, the rolling ball; I’ve touched the ball itself, as I have no need to fear I’ll hurt them, and felt them shiver with restless, electric power, all dammed up.
“Darkness was the first thing I saw and recognized. When I tried to see in my dreams my own eyes, I felt fluttering clumps of sinewy wire in my face, and then I saw them, scribbling lights.
The Great Lover Page 10
