The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  On the subway, as my father explains, a system of unreturned gazes develops spontaneously. My blindness sets me permanently apart; my eyes can go wherever they want, but my soul remains dark. When you travel, you are nothing. The cult is going to make new identities out of this travelling nothing; he expects we’ll fade into another world that way.

  I hope he’s right. I can feel the flaccid, passive riders slump against me when the trains are busy. Their miserable weariness seeps out of them like residual cold, with an odor that makes me think of meat that’s been lying at the back of a freezer too long — years. I feel their limp bodies twitch. There’s fear panting all around me, not coming from anything or going anywhere. It just stands on them, all the time. More and more I feel those pikers polishing up their armbands, getting themselves good and angry and passing the same sour mush from one mouth to the next. Now and then I hear something robust, or something sweet, but less and less. Often, when I hear children, my senses nearly pounce on them, and I’m surprised at my own avidness. In my mind they are soft draughts and wind flurries close along the ground, with snowy voices when they’re small. The older ones have hotter voices.

  The map looks past Vera, toward the end of the train. The last car empties out and, now alone, the viewless numb eyes of the rag heap at the back grow crisp, drooping limbs are elastic in purposive movements defacing or subtly distorting advertisements, installing substitute subway maps that have been indetectibly altered. On the platform a begging man pockets his cup of coins and rubs his dirty face. Affable man in a slightly antiquated suit and tie smiles at commuters as they pass by, gets a thin smile and tilt of the head in return. The commuters move on and the man’s affable look drops away like a mask — he watches them go, face blank and alert like a prisoner’s. Vera’s train begins to fill again.

  Gaze chains lock in constellations, keying elements of system-program special procedure. The subway cultists vandalize advertisements, insinuating themselves into publicity shots in the streets like here’s a couple of models enjoying a day of shopping swinging heavy bags from the chic’er stores, faces incandescent with acquisitiveness like hunters — all is well except for that bum there in the doorway... where did he come from? — emanating crushing waves of merciless sadness that make the photo unusable.

  [The earth is hollow, and I’ll prove it to you! (goes down into the earth)]

  I have taken on the responsibilities of a man named Wouvermans, who had developed a technique whereby dust, precipitate of time, was boiled and distilled into a liquor sanitized and free of microbes (whose influence must be rigorously excluded, ruled out) — drink or breathe it my body sheds it as I sleep... A ringing word meaning also flesh. He took core samples from the tunnels, drilling deep into the wet clay and extracting canisters of mud and gas so hot he and his attendants would flip them onto the ground and roll them over and over with hands in towels, dousing them with ether from big jars to cool them. In certain places and at certain times the presence of nerve tissue would be detected in these samples, which were prayed over and then immediately burned. Wouvermans died of a stroke while riding the subway, and his body wasn’t discovered for some time. That is, he was in plain view, but mistaken for asleep. Ptarmagant holds that there is always at least one such dead traveller shuttling through the system at any given time. Dead, they continue on unnoticed. The cult recovered his body and gave him a Viking funeral; his body, wreathed in bright orange flowers, was placed on a plinth in the middle of an appropriated subway car, which was set ablaze and precipitated down the tracks, launched from one of the defunct stations. Car rolling somberly into the gloom, flames lick the tunnel walls and send volumes of smoke slithering along the vaulted ceilings. When the car was recovered by the city authorities later on, it was undamaged, without so much as a scorch mark on it. Wouvermans’ body and accompanying offerings had vanished without a trace.

  “What’s your name?” Deuteronôme asks me over his shoulder.

  “I’ll find out.”

  His nephew rolls around on his skateboard smiling to himself, “Uncle D. ask the Ring-Ding-A-Ling his name, and I say —” he lifts the bunch of keys hanging from a steel bead chain around his neck and jangles them — chish chish ch’chish, chish chish ch’chish.

  And later I stop one of my gnomes — “Hey, stop. What’s my name?”

  “The Great Lover!” the gnome says, eyes and mouth open wide in huge grin.

  “Was that a joke?” I ask in surprise.

  “Sure!”

  “You tell jokes—”

  “Sure!”

  “—instead of answering my question?”

  The expression doesn’t change, but the head wobbles and the eyes jump around on my face.

  “The Great Lover!” he says again.

  “Well, what should I tell other people my name is?”

  “Yes!”

  “Yesss... What should I tellll them?”

  “Yeeeeees!”

  “Whaaat?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  —“What’s your name?”

  “...My name is Name!”

  “What’s my name?”

  “Name!”

  “Name?”

  “Yes!”

  “Your name is Name?”

  “Your name is Name!”

  “My name is Name?”

  “Name!”

  “Then what’s your—”

  I quit.

  “All right then Name, you come with me,” Deuteronôme guides me through passages and defunct steam tunnels into a vast area of communicating basements where banks of cannibal computers have been established, tapping power and telephone lines. Programmers intercept radio cell phone and television signals and generate their own deviant signals, monitor and jam existing ones. In most cases, the interference goes entirely unnoticed at the source. They are developing underground radio. He walks a little ahead of me, turns to look back twisting at the waist.

  “I taught at Meadowlab myself. They were conducting all variety of experiments there, involving what they called ‘psychic powers.’ But they did not understand that these so-called ‘psychic powers’ were not an internal property of mind, or even of spirit, like a stream of piss you can control. Even the urine must first be imbibed as water. There is no fire in the match, in the fuel. There is in the meeting of inside and outside, coming to the doorway, the threshold, the magic they tried to find only inside. I suppose even the unwiped assholes of the world need someone to speak for them!

  “But... their experiments, their inquiries, never went anywhere. From time to time they would see a little something but the circumstances were always equivocal. They never invoked, which is to step to the door and to fling it open. They did not want to risk being changed by letting something in. They wanted a gimmick. I told them in magic there is no gimmick — that is only for show.

  “For weeks they were trying all manner of experiments — nothing. Then a Chinese colleague and I did a demonstration, where we put energy into our cutlasses, and charged a battery, a car battery, in a closed room. And what did they do? They examine the swords, they examine the battery, they examine the room! They examine our pulse, our heat, our breathing. What can you do with people who will not see?”

  He shrugged, his hands open at the level of his slim waist.

  “So, I left Meadowlab. Then I hear that Ptarmagant was down here giving prophecy, so I came. I was a houngan then, but now I have had to leave that behind. What we do here must be completely new. It must leave behind the Meadowlab, houngan, clergyman — it must leave behind cult, it must leave behind black and white. I will not be a black man unless I must also be a Russian man, a Chinese man, an... Afghan man, an Eskimo man — all these men, are me.”

  ...Intriguing pink color to the light of sunset, a dimpled sheet of clouds high in the sky drifts past my window in slow flirtatious motion, whose friction excites a low murmur of pleasing expectation through my eyes into me. Sadly, there will be no outcome — but I w
ill carry away the vision, clots of silver blue in white blazes, thoughtful, like an interrogative glance from a woman I don’t dare to desire—

  The two men in wheelchairs roll past. One of them looks me in the eye and says, “— The novel is asleep. — Push on. — Push on.”

  Dream: after years of painful resignation, the aged mothers of girls taken away by vampires — having been brought together largely by chance, and having discovered from each other that the excruciating solitude of this loss is common to all of them — are rejuvenated by vengeful hatred erupting in cyclones.

  I am one of these mothers, my female body seems weightless, but hardened like solid bone by years of drudgery. We burst from our porches and swarm down the hillside into a caravan encampment of striped tents and sultry music in the twilight; into the largest tent we charge and pounce upon the vampire pasha in a halo of vindictive knives, our skirts stiff with chicken grease. Each of us darts forward and stabs him once. I feel his fibrous, papery flesh tear around my knife like a wasp’s nest, my own heart like sizzling ice. He staggers, helplessly clutching his temples. We mothers drop our knives and extend silver goblets, each one collecting a proprietary stream of spurting blood from the wound that hand inflicted — each of us catching only the blood of our own stolen daughters. He suddenly falls back onto a mound of cushions, a brittle, mummified jackal, his crêpey lips foiled around orange canines.

  And now here are our girls, palely reclining on satin couches, holding postures of lascivious abandon. Terrible bun-haired silhouettes slowly rise at the feet of these couches, dingy lace swirling with appalling purposiveness — in unison the girls start upright staring and cry “Mother!”

  Grinning evilly we mothers kneel on our daughters’ chests and pour the flaming blood down their throats. Dragging them by their hair we vigorous, storming mothers lock our daughters in a huge set of stocks. The sun rises, shining directly into their faces. The girls scream and go into shocking convulsions as life is restored. Meanwhile the vampire’s twitching carcass has been hauled out onto the sand and exposed to the sun with the assistance of a huge magnifying glass. We screen him with our hoopskirts, then expose him again, to prolong his suffering. When he is nothing but a cindery smear on the ground, we mothers bear revived daughters, still raw and whimpering with fresh life, up through the hills in our powerful arms, voices raised in an anthem of martial triumph. I bound up onto the front porch and gently rest my rosy girl in the hammock that hangs there, leap over the railing into the grass, and turn into a gang of loping bears like quivering meatballs. I stand and watch, a bodiless ghost, fleshy bears barrelling full speed out of sight.

  I wake up to see Deuteronôme’s nephew bending forward some way away, looking at me. He sees me wake up, smiling now gets on his board, and rolls away, looking at me.

  “Yeah, Ding-A-Ling!” he calls softly, turns and surfs off.

  *

  According to the map, where the main is broken and water cascades down the brick wall’s irregularities the Great Lover sleeps sprawled on his back, his head sunk in a slimy pothole and his adam’s apple pointing to the zenith. His gnomes circle him in large, irregular orbits that pursue the irregular contours of this eruption in the sewer system.

  “Vera!”

  I wake up. My body angrily rights itself kink by kink, my chest is hissing like a skillet; I can feel her name gaily frying away in my green-brown heart.

  “I have to see her!”

  Now the spot contracts to a point of heat like a focussed sunbeam welding its tip to my body with a tiny burning hole. The hole melts and osmosis distributes it in shivers of heat all through me, leaving a globe of static adjacent to the heart. The glare of my eyes throws shadows on the wall, glints back at me from the water.

  Gnomes pat me on the back as I stride manfully among them and plunge judiciously into the sewer. The current conveys me to the ladder and, lowering my head, I rise with the manhole cover resting on my back, sliding off. Three steps and I stand in the center of the track, without knowing what I’m doing I hear my uncouth voice bray her name into the tunnel, my arms thrown out to her. A shrill answering note — a light gathers in the distance and to my right — the train crashes by on the next track and she is there in the second to last car — without thinking I reach out to her, my fingers brush the upright crash guard on the back of the train and close on it the train whips me high into the air; taking advantage of my good fortune I throw myself onto the roof and, by pinching the serrations that cover its upper surface I am able to hold myself there, veering this way and that to avoid low-hanging pipes and signs.

  I crawl the length of the train and insinuate myself into the gap between the last car and hers. The glass of the door is opaque and now spattered with muck from my clothes. Locked — I ram the glass with my shoulder and the entire pane pops out; with a sound I don’t care to describe I ooze through the opening into the small, unlit compartment. Another locked door, the glass is clear and I see her sitting there at the other end of the car, holding her cane like a pencil like a pencil so beautifully. Cold flashes through me and then I burn and gasp for breath, seize the latch and pull back the door with a bang as part of the latch whirs past my ear. I step through and the rebounding door spatters me against the jam.

  Commuters jerk to their feet at the noise, and moments later are fleeing to the back of the car faces contorted with revulsion as he lightly plucks aside the door a second time and enters the car. The train brakes and abets them in their retreat. A station careers up to the windows, the brakes scream drowning out his amorous serenading, and the passengers belch forth from the doors squeezing their noses. Vera is left alone with him. She stands, one hand on a post, the other, dangling her cane from her wrist, sweeps the air with its palm.

  It’s that smell — and that voice reaching out to enfold me in his theatrics — we’re alone, the train is moving again — he’s near... He’s dropped to his knees, at my feet. I have a handful of fur! Cords round his neck — spectacles how appropriate — and this is his sticky face. It’s firm. It trembles. His fingers take my hand — his lips press my palm... a current of warmth jets up my arm, the beast loves me! He loves me!

  Where has he gone?... He didn’t stay?

  I was just getting interested!

  *

  Lacking a God, the cult is going to create its own. Deuteronôme explains that casting a spell is about something getting denser and denser, acquiring over time one coat of reality on top of another, acquiring solidity all the time “... until there can be no other possibility but that it must be.” There is always a physical element: making gestures precedes even the manufacture of tools as a way of making something ideal real.

  In an emotional voice, odd for him, Ptarmagant says, “The magician is the grin through the fog.”

  “Magic...” Deuteronôme continues in his relentless way, “— The moment you are dealing with formulas, with a prescription, with a regulation, you walk away from magic. The spell is too subtle to be caught in a jingle. It is subtle that it can only be brought about in the improvisation of a true magician — un sorcier. Like the bones, the cards, or the dice, the elements are flung into confusion, and then, as the different configurations of elements present themselves to the magician, he — with lightning speed, of mind and body — seizes upon the right constellation for the purpose. He will pull out the only constellation that can be used for that purpose.”

  The map explains: The God of the subway cult is to be created in a huge prayer, extended in time, space, number of persons involved, and modes of address. This prayer is coordinated from four axial centers which regulate the operation of its sub-cells. These cells, known as “axons,” are carefully segregated from each other in order to minimize overlap, so that any redundancy is only coincidental. Each “joint” endows a number of axons. There is no center, and no single object of concentration. Even Ptarmagant is only a participant, although he did invent the method. In his work at Meadowlab, Ptarmagant assessed th
e empirical evidence of divine operations and determined that, while we encounter a gesture here, an assembly there, the divinity is never all there. Divinity, as a hexeity, a mode of existing, is always a matter of being a complete fragment, indicating a total whole of which it is impossible to conceive. Since a divine being is too “enormous” to be apprehended in its entirety by any human observer, the creation of a God is not possible where that God is planned out and described in any complete way. So the God must be created in whole fragments, and in such a way that no participant in the creative work is in a position to see even all of the prayer at once. Only one being, the divinity itself — it is hoped — will apprehend the prayer all at once.

  So, the invented God must have different names, its worship take a variety of different forms, often contradictory. A God must exceed the capacity of any single human mind in order to be a medium between minds.

  As Ptarmagant speaks, cobwebs flutter and dust sighs into the air over an abandoned platform, hermetically sealed. In the process of assembly, the cult’s God will gather all those fugitive scraps of ghostly energy, an ad hoc ritual here, a gesture there, a candle flame... It will take time, and there are certain counter-forces involved, an inert mass of misappropriated spirit, a deeply-entrenched and fortified metaphysical idolatry.

  On a bench on the platform the ragged shirtless man smoking a shapeless cigarette. The moment he is alone his eyes flick alive. He puts the butt in his lips, moves to the tiled wall and carves three vertical lines and a crescent into the grime with the tip of a long finger, and raps with his knuckle the four compass points on the wall around the figure in counterclockwise order starting at the top. He pours a libation of beer then returns to his seat. This is only one sign out of many used throughout the system to designate cult coordination points. Bottles of liquor or packs of cigarettes are stashed behind fuseboxes and ventilation gratings as offerings. Images painted in darkness are burned on the tracks, and seething baskets of captured cockroaches are smashed in hydraulic presses as a sacrifice. In some places the practice of compulsive wagering becomes epidemic. There is usually no clearly represented stake: more like — if I can get to the front of the car before the doors close — if I can hold my breath while bounding up this entire flight of stairs two at a time — if I can disentangle my book from this bag before the music ends — if no one else boards this elevator. The stakes were offerings, the winnings spirited away to accumulate someplace else.