The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  *

  “I want to go home with you,” the Prosthetic Libido folds lightly against me.

  “I have no home. I live in the sewers.”

  “Couldn’t we hide there?”

  “I have no need to hide myself,” he looks at the Prosthetic Libido sharply. “But you, that might be a good idea.”

  “Then take me down there.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to get you dirty.” Putting my hands on my knees and standing up, I say, “Come with me — we maybe could use the weather station.”

  The Prosthetic Libido wants to link arms with me, I can tell, but I choose to give him no indication that this would be permitted.

  Empty green slope deep trembling green in rain light, framed with soft trees.

  “Look at all the space,” the Prosthetic Libido cries. “May I run?”

  “Sure.”

  The Prosthetic Libido goes bounding away down the slope brandishing his limbs in transports of joy, his voice ringing out like a glass harmonica. He gambols like a toddler in an adult’s body, his rain hat flipping from his sculpted locks, his eyes greedily sucking in everything. He sees the great profusion of life the birds the squirrels the trees the plants —

  “Oh how awful that I can never be a part of it!”

  He crams his fists in his mouth and stops still. He drops into a crouch and his head rolls forward until his chin touches his chest.

  With a sigh, I lumber over to him.

  After a few minutes, he says, “I shouldn’t exist.”

  “Well, neither should I,” I feel the grin coming out from the inside. “We’re here aren’t we though?”

  A few minutes more, and I start getting impatient. I grab him under his arms and straighten him, then pick his hat up and hand it back to him looking him straight in the eye. He looks back confused, a cloud of resignation is beginning to shade his eye.

  “All right forget it.”

  Soon enough I hear rustling behind me.

  Under the boughs in the thicket of green to the edge of the meadow there is a broad black stream spattered with floating leaves; here it is crossed by the thick span of a stone bridge, small but massively built. I point to the black, motionless water.

  “I don’t want to go under the water,” he says.

  “It won’t damage you.”

  “I know. I just don’t want to.”

  He looks at me with painful attention, glorious eyes under misshapen rain hat.

  “You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

  “Yeeees... OK,” and I wave him after me. Night is only very gradually falling, grey of the sky is darkening to lead grey lined with blue. We ascend a dark hill. The Prosthetic Libido is still a bit clumsy, and is having trouble navigating the many obstacles off of the path. Neither one of us is what you would call graceful. I turn to look at him as he pauses before a heap of brambles, entirely uncertain as to how to proceed.

  “Here, I’ll carry you.”

  “I’m very heavy.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m immensely strong.”

  The Prosthetic Libido’s arms twined around my neck, I hold him with one arm down straight against his spine and hand under the bottom like a chair on a ski lift and climb. He catches a glimpse of a high gabled house at the top.

  “It looks menacing,” he says.

  “Yes, but its menace will be at your disposal.”

  This is the former weather station I’ve used before. It is a sort of a fantasy of Viking churches, the front of the house presents so many lofty triangles that it looks like a clipper ship in full sail. It looms up above us now dark against eerie, vibrating blue sky, like a witch’s head. The Prosthetic Libido stands, his hat rolls down his back to the ground and suddenly he grabs me by the front of my coat, mouth open. I meet his gaze with my eyes at half mast my face absolutely blank. The Prosthetic Libido, frustrated, shakes his head and then rolls his brow on my chest.

  I push him away, gently. “You’ll dirty your head doing that.”

  The Prosthetic Libido puts his hand to his brow.

  Rags of bygone weather haunt this place, and now, despite the gathering gloom outside, a phantom sun imbues the interior of the house with a honeyed, somber amniotic haze. The house seems to shiver with an inaudible swelling tone like the solemn basso profundo of an organ as we cross the threshold. The room to the left of the door is empty with leaves scattered on the floor, a drawn circle and stains. Up to the third floor, I lead him to a spacious and bright apartment just under the rafters, the ceiling slopes dramatically. The Prosthetic Libido is looking out the enormous window, a foggy silhouette against a square cloud of pale light.

  “The view is beautiful.”

  “What will you need?”

  The Prosthetic Libido looks at me, features washed out by the light. “Maybe... a bed?”

  “Thank you,” he calls to me as I go, and just as I am out the door, out in the broad hallway with its strange metal pillars running down the center, the Prosthetic Libido adds “father.”

  I stop right where I am my back stiff. The Prosthetic Libido hand to his lips realizes he’s made a mistake. Moving robotically I turn to face the pillar near me and I whack my head once against it with a loud dull ringing sound. Then I go find a bed.

  When I come back, laboriously dragging an iron bedstead and mattress up from the second floor, the Prosthetic Libido is daintily slipping out of his clothes. He rubs his upper arms as I wrestle the bed noisily through the door and shove it into the corner, toss down a pillow and a set of shoplifted rubber sheets. The Prosthetic Libido thanks me, very slowly and carefully begins to set out the sheets on the bed and smooth them down. I slump to the floor like a sack of potatoes and sit with my feet in front of me. The Prosthetic Libido sits down on the creaking bed, puts his hands on his knees, and looks at me. With a series of soft clicks like the tap of billiard balls he gets an erection.

  He looks down with a strange expression at it.

  “You want me to find someone for you?” I ask.

  The Prosthetic Libido jumps up, presses the heels of both hands to his lips and begins pacing up and down rapidly in agitation — “Would you do that? — I don’t know — I don’t know — I don’t—”

  “Male or female — which would you like?”

  “I don’t know — I don’t know—”

  “One of each?”

  Now wringing his hands and pacing still more swiftly, the Prosthetic Libido says, “I would prefer to be penetrated—” he stops and puts his hands over his face — “but this is grotesque! I don’t want anyone.” Flings himself onto the bed and lies there in an uncertain posture.

  Time passes, and the window grows dimmer.

  “Don’t you love me?” he asks, in a faint, wounded tone.

  “Huh?”

  Dusk thickens in the window and a cold smell of flowers infiltrates the room. The Prosthetic Libido asks exactly for what purpose he was created, and I explain.

  “Were you also made for a purpose?” he brings out.

  “I perform all sorts of functions.”

  “You’re like me?”

  “Yeah. What’s really on your mind?”

  “I want to know if you mean to shut me down?”

  “You are a living thing; shutting you down would mean killing you and I don’t want to kill you.”

  “Do you love me?”

  I laugh.

  “Don’t laugh at me!”

  “It’s all right — sure I love you.”

  This seems to make him unhappier.

  “What the matter now?”

  After a while, he asks me — “Can I shut myself down?”

  “Yes,” and I tell him how. It’s not complicated.

  “Don’t you care if I do it or not?”

  “Of course I care! Don’t do it!”

  “Oh, you don’t care at all!”

  “I have to leave you for a while,” I get up. “Will you be all right?”

  The Prosth
etic Libido looks at me in alarm.

  “I’ll — I’ll stay here,” he says as though he were telling it to himself, in a voice filled with pain.

  *

  I live borne up sustained held and tensed in a gossamer medium of will. Walking up the hump of the street, I have a yen to lean forward arms outstretched. Its slope receives my remains as easily as if they were tipped from a can: and this vile city that barks its hate at me from passing cars, whose buses and streets roar hate at me, whose hysterical citizens recoil from my bland, sallow, wickedly-vacant face. No I don’t belong among you with my nails imbrued in the loam of graves, my breath foetid with my own stale words. Coiled like a turd on my warm mattress, nestled in a chilly reckless draught I bring with me wherever I go. I am a spacious ruin. I am made, and despicable, and I will recount to you your crimes against my sainted person like beads of glowing amber. I have an excellent memory and nothing to gain from forgiveness; I have stored up the venom of blighted days, and trample out your pollution, your stupid trouble, your irreverent work. The music of my soul the world hates.

  Ah, Vera!

  (“But if you love her, why do you avoid her? If you love her...” Of course I love her! Now what was I saying?)

  A nocturnal haze suffused with dingy blue light over the city... filling up space... the buildings look like mounds of old clothes. In the sky one can here and there discern irregularities. The mist is eerily meditating, the light mutes the colors and makes them glow like embers, emphasizes their rigid geometric shapes like cubist paintings of old clothes. Forest of nerves that the whole world is, warehouses and offices: senseless warehouses and offices really inexplicable (that is, what are they doing there, who uses them, for what?)... Man hails a cab, and then ignores it turning his head smiling shamelessly as he sails into a library. A bitterly tiny contest, in which the weakling antagonists are ignorant of each other. I look into the sparkling face of my enemy tonight, his wicked spires and massive facades, his fanatic streets and antic chatter, rotten night shadows, darkness and evil lights. Now that’s no weakling. As one moves around the city, one encounters gusts of hostility, friendly places, neutral places. Such imbalances are always paired, so that you find one sort of place and then another, on one journey or on another day.

  I find my subway, run into Warren on the platform. He’s a fellow cultist, blind and maybe a little retarded, who sings in front of coffee shops and subway kiosks. He sits on a folding stool in jacket and balaclava over his head leaving face exposed, cigarette in his fingers, holding the detachable speakers from his tape player one in each hand, backs of his hands resting on his thighs, and sings along with the songs at the top of his lungs rocking back and forth. No cup no basket for coins, nothing.

  “Pss pss pss — which train do I take for Time Square?”

  His head swivels toward me — “Eight,” and right back into his song. A lunatic’s mind yakking away like a defective music box, seems much more beautiful and honest than ordinary thinking to me.

  I’ll have to go two stations over and transfer. On the train again; a phrase like “time trap” is too crude to express the bewilderment of feeling trapped in a moment — this doltish boob barking abuse into his cell phone, this little girl at the front of the train shouting the letters “C... E... E... E... C... E...” breaks into a joyless but unconscionably protracted “Wheeee... wheeee... wheeee...” as we pull into the next station. Doors roll back and here come a group of ruddy Scandanavian rucksackers.

  At the next station the train is held for a few minutes, doors open; I can hear singing — a low woman’s voice throbbing with emotion, humming in the walls of a hidden room, singing a mournful, shapeless song. On the platform people pass in the grey-brown air...

  At my transfer station I escape the car and slither into the tunnels. “Eight train” is code for this passageway marked with an infinity symbol.

  Not far from the rendezvous point I passes a raised wooden landing like a hut on stilts on which are perched a group of Sterile Ones; to feel even a single bacteria alight on their skins is enough to send them into transports of anguish. No acidophilus in their intestines so their diet must be carefully limited; their only excreta is saline. The uncanny dry touch, warm and chemical-burning like camphor, of their hands so completely clean; without microbes they do not exactly participate in the grand mutuality of nature. The landing on which they sit is ringed round by little electric fans directed outward, to create a small bubble of cleaner air for them; the fans spread a dire smell of iodine across the tunnels. Rats cover their noses with their forepaws and turn aside. The Sterile Ones are accorded great respect. The core group had lived together in a board and care home for nearly a decade when budget cuts had put them out on the street to die. Now they live underground, with Ptarmagant’s sworn protection. They wave to me in silence as I go by.

  At the rendezvous point, I wait in the doorway of the marked passage. A train crawls by, slowed by rigged signals; I climb on board and meet Ptarmagant at the back of the fourth car, where he sits beside a Peruvian woman by the rear door. Ptarmagant speaks, words bursting from his lips — “We need the green of leaves and the black boughs the drifting leaves dreaming under the brown of the branches under the arbor of the sky... as falling night blackens the trees.”

  Ptarmagant is constantly making notes on screeds of receipts he carries with him everywhere; they will be compiled into a scroll and kept in a cedar chest.

  “There are thoughts without words,” he tells me, “but they are not our own. All voices are ghost voices, especially your own...

  He lapses into an uneasily meditative silence and the train plunges beneath the river — the air jams its fingers into our ears with a groan. The noise dies away and Ptarmagant is already speaking — I pick up the thread midsentence:

  “...impossible there not to dream sometimes of forests... forests dignified as orchestras... You see in that subway station that spring of water shivering between the rocks, silhouette of some big bird amongst the branches. It claps its wings as it flies, first above its body then below — something earnest about it, a piercing sadness. Now it’s disintegrated, and hangs around you, around in shreds now all shreds, when they drop to the ground and you forget about them they become trash, you’ll look up, and maybe you’ll see the forest another time...

  “We need a forest of our own eh — I’m sorry I forget your name.”

  “My name is Name.”

  No expression. Then: “I don’t quite understand what it means, but we need a forest of our own. It may... yes — like the rebels who take cover in the jungle, the desert, or the mountains. We have the tunnels, but we must have trees as well, real trees.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Think about that!”

  “We could drag logs down here, or planters...”

  “No, it must be a forest.”

  “But there’s no sun.”

  “No sun...” Ptarmagant says, thought deepening into him. “Yes, you’re right. We have to think about the sun... But for now, think about forests.”

  “That’s my assignment?”

  “Yes. That, and I want you to read this.”

  He hands me a photocopied page:

  ...But he who is newly initiated, who beheld many of those realities, when he sees a godlike face or form which is a good image of beauty, shudders at first, and something of the old awe comes over him, then, as he gazes, he reveres the beautiful one as a god, and if he did not fear to be thought stark mad [μανίας], he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to an idol or a god. And as he looks upon him, a reaction from his shuddering comes over him, with sweat and unwonted heat; for as the effluence of beauty enters him through the eyes, he is warmed; the effluence moistens the germ of the feathers, and as he grows warm, the parts from which the feathers grow, which were before hard and choked, and prevented the feathers from sprouting, become soft, and as the nourishment streams upon him, the quills of the feathers swell and begin to grow f
rom the roots over all the form of the soul; for it was once all feathered.

  Now in this process the whole soul throbs and palpitates, and as in those who are cutting teeth there is an irritation and discomfort in the gums, when the teeth begin to grow, just so the soul suffers when the growth of the feathers begins; it is feverish and is uncomfortable and itches when they begin to grow. Then when it gazes upon the beauty of the boy and receives the particles [μέρη] which flow thence to it (for which reason they are called yearning [‘ίμερος]), it is moistened and warmed, ceases from its pain and is filled with joy; but when it is alone and grows dry, the mouths of the passages in which the feathers begin to grow become dry and close up, shutting in the sprouting feathers, and the sprouts within, shut in with the yearning, throb like pulsing arteries, and each sprout pricks the passage in which it is, so that the whole soul, stung in every part, rages with pain...

  “Originally in Greek?” I ask.

  “It’s from the Phaedrus.”

  “Why show me this?”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to find out for me.”

  The Peruvian woman is looking intently at me. My words appear on her steno pad.

  “So you want me to think about forests underground, and figure out why you showed this to me...”

  “Yes,” Ptarmagant says.

  *

  The Prosthetic Libido can tune in television. He watches people dancing in a strobe light club.

  “It’s wonderful! Everyone is so beautiful! — Do you dance, too?” the Prosthetic Libido asks abruptly.

  “Dance?!”

  He leaps halfway across the room and flamencos around the Prosthetic Libido like a berserker making up with frenzied energy what he lacks in precision, the explosive drumming of his heels cracks the plaster and rattles the floorboards. The Prosthetic Libido claps with glee.

  Now he drums his way to the center of the room, back to the Prosthetic Libido, and seems all at once to fold into his coat. It slops from his shoulders and a plume of straight, silky black hair tumbles down. He turns in place his body slightly flexed covers his face with a fan and coils tittering to the floor, staring at the Prosthetic Libido. Black sewage oozes from the corners of his eyes and streaks down his face, filling the room with its fragrance — then an odor like freshly butchered meat on ice breaks through, gradually becoming the watery smell of bruised petals. Almost as dense as crude oil, the sewage drips from his jaw, down the folds of his kimono to the floor on either side of him forming two dark mounds of soil. A magnolia bud sprouts from the heap on his right and flowers, perfuming the air. He plucks the bud and, rising, hands it to the Prosthetic Libido — it is already starting to turn brown.