The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  “Plant genitals,” he says, lowering his fan shows black teeth.

  The Prosthetic Libido takes the flower in his fingers; heat waves from his face and his head audibly percolates. He rubs the flower against his mouth and cheeks with dreamy avidity, sighing with pleasure.

  “’Atta boy!”

  *

  Deuteronôme has designed and constructed special devices to be secreted in mosques churches cathedrals synagogues and temples for the purpose of skimming off and storing what he calls “prayer charges.” These leyden jars collect enthusiasm over the course of seven days, and are then smuggled out and “tapped” — employed as ritual objects. One group, acting under Deuteronôme’s direct supervision, has successfully precipitated a two-foot tall Vapor Man, who spoke to them in a chittering radiator voice and disappeared into the city’s network of steam tunnels. Thereafter certain banks and high-class hotels and apartment buildings report mystifying heating problems, while tenants in tenement blocks are growing hothouse flowers in their kitchens and sitting, dressed only in towels, on benches they’ve laid out in hallways billowing with lilac steam.

  Deuteronôme, no longer a houngan but still dressed all in the cleanest and whitest of clothes, takes up in his arms bundles of green twigs collected above ground.

  “Earth and weather sun and moon I demand your power... flesh and blood and bone, I invoke you. I am a ghost, I thump myself on the chest and declare I am solid ghost.

  “I send greetings and praise to the Great Anticipated One, who loves only bold words truly spoken, which are not squeezed out of me by circumstances. I declare a general amnesty, a complete forgiveness of debts and loans. I call on good citizens everywhere to account for themselves.”

  Hands emerge from tunnel mouths and snap back, leaving spinning tops that glide along the platform in tile grooves, whirling with serene purposiveness to the opposite end. The top passes a homeless man lying apparently passed out on a bench. He casually swings his drooping hand out and, with perfect timing, gives the passing top a supplementary twist. The top, with a kind of bravery, whirls toward its destination, sleek breast of movement thrust out before it, and a message, written in tiny characters on a slip of paper, is wrapped around its handle. The code phrase is “autumn in spring.” At the hub stations, hands emerge from dark tunnels on a dozen parallel platforms at once, snap their tops in unison, and the tops advance exactly in line from one end of the station to the other arriving in perfect sync. Autumn in Spring. At the end of each day, like the chorus at the end of a verse, Autumn in Spring. Trees underground.

  Campgrounds in the tunnels. It’s best to economize our time on the platforms, Dr. Thefarie thinks, now that there are so many right-wing student types around. Boarding a train today a couple of them shoved me as I slipped by them and garnished it with a bit of rather simpleminded abuse. Now they mutter it in sullen, low voices, but every day the volume will climb another click.

  They step right out of the catalog. Their uniform is the more fashionable preppy clothing, enhanced with plain red armbands. I don’t believe these were ever home-made, although I’ve only just recently begun to notice them in shop windows. The edges are neatly sewn together, and the color is consistent from one to the next, as are those who wear them. Their pale faces are a little flushed, a little red themselves, though their eyes are blue. Their eyes and teeth are as dazzling as sunshine on snow, the foam on their yellow beer is perfect, thick and even. The males gather with much back-slapping and call each other “nigga.” It’s quite incredible. And they say we live in fantasies. They knot together in a thick haze of Vampirism, huffing and puffing and laughing, and talking foolish talk, while, on our platforms, which they cannot yet reach, the bare-breasted priestesses of Crete, in their fetching hats, raise snakes in each hand up to the humming of the fluorescent lights, and their sinuous chant rises and falls with an exultant sound.

  A movie booth off to one side, with about nine seats and a poster-sized screen. Someone in the front row and Dr. Thefarie sitting urbanely by the door, legs crossed. They’re showing a cartoon; the rabbit is impersonating a surgeon. Dr. Thefarie occasionally contracts with a single, silent laugh, a rush of breath from this nose.

  He turns to me and flicks his thumb at the screen.

  “That’s why they want you, you know. What you have inside you is first cousin to that.”

  I suavely glide into the seat beside him.

  “There is more than an accident in the etymological relationship between animation and animism. He,” pointing to the screen, “is the spirit of free survival, called into existence by death.”

  “Sh!” says the person up front.

  “Like you,” he adds quietly.

  “The demon.”

  “That spirit. The rabbit is both insane and sane; he is insane from the point of view of his enemies, because he will not allow them to kill him, as they believe it is natural and right for them to kill him. To us, however, he is the one with superior sanity, because he answers only to the desire for life, ‘but for life,’ in any form — no matter what form he must take, to go on. The resourcefulness, the joyous plasticity of life. You are also like this, so they call you a ‘sacred cartoon’?

  “I get it, doc.”

  “I am not certain, but I believe it is as a result of this that you, or your nerves anyway, are convected into dreams.”

  “Ssh!”

  “Oh, shush yourself!” I snap.

  “You see,” he goes on, leaning slightly sideways towards me and speaking softly, “everyone’s dreams are subject to infiltration by this parasitic atmosphere Ptarmagant has discovered and called Vampire. So even dreams are made standard, according to established genres... As this happens, with the intrusion of the parasite a current is generated, not unlike the suction of a ship’s wake I believe—”

  “And that pulls in me—”

  “I think so. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right.”

  He watches the screen for a while. Without lifting his hands from his knee, he points to it again.

  “Do that in their dreams. You will unhook the parasite.”

  “You mean, make a mess?”

  He nods, eyes on the screen. A Nazi is hunting rabbits in the woods.

  I am drawn into a dream — a red-haired woman is hunting me in midnight woods. She’s cinched into her hunting outfit and I am now a man, now a fox, now a man again, her hounds baying after me... Now she is at home in her bed in the dream and the hounds are kenneled, the fox bounds in through the window and lands beside her, she flings her arms around him and shapes him with her hands. I chase her through the night paths of her bed until she is cornered in a cul-de-sac and orgasm the only way out. As it splinters into brittles I fall through into a dream below the dream — a knife flies out of cold night sky and hits me in the middle of my forehead. I feel a strange sinus pain gathering in a bulge around the wound... blood oozes down either side of his nose and mouth. The knife is an antenna, and I can hear tinny voices shivering in the metal.

  “I want this little book of the recantation of a diabolic division,” a smoky, goblin voice is talking rapidly. “Celestial division, lest these arrogant despots are established and spend their breath... Mediums conduct séances full of halfway promises, sending us mysterious stations, pulling a word out of rose and musk, with life’s musics of the air reaching us every time the lights go out... Yes, we must put the cadavers in comparison as ten myriads to one. All have swerved aside into the brine tank. All all alike we must create to show kindness. Their throats are open tombs. But evil shall recoil on those that plot evil. Create the séance bank.”

  The Prosthetic Libido’s arm waves once from the doorway — can I dance? I pull the knife out and dance around the room, spurting blood all over the walls, shocking black on white — blood on the page — coffin comes down, prophet flung full of knives like Saint Sebastian flies out into space. Blood in plumes like solar flares — into the white of the wall I hu
rtle directly into the sun, and I see my blood drip down on the sun and stain it. I flash through the heat and now I’m inside the sun where the light is so intense it might as well be darkness, nothing to see, a continuous rumbling like subway trains lunging underfoot.

  The room is filling up with moving shapes like ghosts of moonlight; these are animated statues carved from the meat of the moon. Since the sun is inviolate and uncuttable, its statues must be cut from the moon, its reflection — and given life by a single red spot of my blood on it, the Golem’s marking.

  I draw back, raising my head. Before me on the table sits a candle in a tall glass cylinder, like a tube of fog long burnt out. With alarm I see a pale wisp of smoke rising from the corner of the table, from no apparent source... it is a long, transparent plume curling in the air. It gradually widens into an undulating cone, a funnel of smoke... then collapses, crumbling into bunched arabesques that hang nearly motionless, halfway between the ceiling and the floor...

  A nervousness I can’t explain, but that does not come from the dream, not exactly, shakes me. The dream and the woman are crashing in my mind and am too crowded in mind... I take pen and paper and start writing out my findings for Ptarmagant.

  “We must put the cadavers into the brine tank. We must create the séance bank.”

  *

  Ptarmagant and Vera are on the suspended walkway above the tracks, overlooking an operation involving the installation of a coin-operated fortune telling booth on the platform. The others have already vanished again into the tunnels, leaving Z to finish the job. He was a slender, long-haired man of medium height and a slender build, a Mexican illegal and painter who called himself just Z.

  “Police—”

  A policeman strides toward Z. Catching sight, Z darts away. The policeman shouts and charges him, arms closing in a pincer that catches Z loosely around the middle. Z twists in the grip while it’s still loose and swings an open hand at the policeman’s face — the cop jerks back avoiding the uncertain blow and Z squirms loose and sprints away.

  “He tried to hit him that idiot!”

  Stamping feet — “C’mon let’s bust a beaner—”

  “Students!” Ptarmagant whispers. They sweep past like a couple of buffalo heading for the stairs to the platform.

  “What are they doing?”

  “He’s trapped. The officer will chase him—”

  “What’s that bell?”

  “—directly into them—” Ptarmagant is distracted, watching the jostling backs of the two armbands then glancing down at Z streaking — all converging on the staircase.

  “Is it the demon?”

  “—The demon?”

  Vera’s head moves this way and that — “Isn’t that him? Isn’t he here?”

  A joyous cry — Ptarmagant, who had turned to look at Vera, looks back in time to see him tackling the two students from behind not a yard from the top of the stairs. He’s knocked them both down though not sprawling, and he waits, just for one moment, hopping up and down in place flapping brown water from his fur coat at them, then he turns and runs. Cursing the two students regain their feet and race after him.

  “They’re coming,” Ptarmagant warns and sweeps Vera behind him with one arm, shielding her with his bulk.

  Giggling like a maniac he bolts by them — Vera can feel the strong brush of foul-smelling air he displaces. The next instant the two boys pound past swearing and shouting after him. Vera clasps her father’s shoulder—

  “What about Z?”

  She feels his head swivel.

  “He’s heading for the stairs to the street—”

  “Will he get away?”

  “He might, if there’s no one waiting for him up there...”

  Z has emerged from the stairway to the platform and runs to the stairway to the street. He bounds up the distant stairs three at a time, his pursuer trailing, jogs one step at a time his heavy belt jumping up and down.

  “I think we should go—”

  “The bell!”

  “...I don’t hear it.”

  “He’s still near! He’s still near!” Vera, still holding her father’s shoulder, is hopping up and down with excitement.

  “Vera, we should—”

  “No! I want to know what happens!... He risked himself to give Z a chance!”

  After a minute or so the commotion off to her left, the direction the two students took, grows louder again and suddenly she feels him and the next instant she can feel him coming very fast — wild insane laughter first like an explosion of trapped birds ricocheting everywhere and then he barrels past moving much faster than before, the bow wave of nasty air bops her in the face and trickles back through her hair. Now comes clomping and gasping and muttering, and four feet go thumping by like a soft-shoed dray horse, following the Great Lover back toward the stairs and the platform.

  Vera turns abruptly and grabs hold of the bars, scanning with her ears — she hears the crazy arabesque of his glee stretching out swiftly in a straight line, on the platform, and farther and farther behind the breathless plodding of the two armbands. He seems to move as lightly and easily as though all he’d been was a voice, and yet when he passed she could feel his mass punch through the air with compressed force. And she could feel his frenzy, his wild abandon, as though it were bubbling out of her.

  “I felt his bravery!” she says, and the incoming train pushes a pie of sour tunnel air into her face.

  *

  Why the sudden thrill as I run across the words “dead bodies... An inn, country house” in a book?

  We’re killing an afternoon sitting around reading books I found in boxes in a closet.

  “What does this mean?” the Prosthetic Libido asks, pointing to the words “jack off” on the page.

  “Slang for masturbate.”

  “Jack off,” he says smiling and lifts his face to the ceiling, “jack off jack off jack off.”

  “I am going to jack off,” the Prosthetic Libido says, and beams at me.

  He lies back on the bed.

  Deep in the night, I sit with my chin on the table, looking at a lemon seed twirling at the bottom of a glass of sepia gin. Brown candlelight shines through the glass with its painted Spanish dancers, illuminates shadow lemon seed spinning behind painted stems and blossoms in the steady flame glow... two tufts of pulp cling to the flat seed... I give the gin a twirl with the spoon and watch the seed dancing.

  “Help!”

  I go over to him, his eyes two gleams in the dark.

  “Touch me — touch me anywhere but just touch me!”

  I grab his outstretched arm — his body undulates, twists, and cracks like a whip — he shouts three times growing in volume and his penis flips up spattering the wall with nectar. When I look him in the face, he’s a corpse.

  *

  “I want you to call me Pearl,” the Prosthetic Libido says, his words stretching themselves lazy as smoke drifting across the room.

  I glance over at him. He is sitting up in bed, holding his knees, same as before. His fingers lightly rub the skin of his calves with an undiminished longing I can almost see coursing like ripple reflections of all colors in his flesh.

  “Pearl,” I say. “Sure thing.”

  “I’m a pearl of great price,” he says happily, with a little waggle of his head. He leans back, drawing his hands along his body, and begins caressing his erection again, which is my cue to skiddoo.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “We both have important things to do.”

  He grins — “You’re going to go spy on that Vera.”

  I smile too and cross the room.

  “If you love her so much, why do you keep away from her?” the Prosthetic Libido asks. “I’m curious.”

  I stop.

  “Is it a game?” he asks.

  I go out.

  *

  Is it my turn again? This is Vera, still not a character, although I may turn into one eventually. This doesn’t concern me ex
cessively because I would rather slide along on the smooth surfaces I love, like skating along, with no important directions, and be now this, now that. I go along with my thoughts like a horse with no reins, capering and streaking around freely.

  The back of my guitar’s neck is powdery smooth, like a glass table covered in thick dust, while the back of the body is so silky it clings to the grease on my fingers. Rubbing persistently creates excitement deep inside me, and the wood seems to revive in a way it never does when I play. I don’t enjoy playing on the subway, trying to play over the whoosh, but my father tells me it’s a good way to go unnoticed and I feel he’s right. I end up rubbing more than I play, which is my business.

  Some people think tuning is a nuisance and others don’t seem to be able to stop adjusting and adjusting. I keep tuning, but mainly because I like to hear the tone bong in the wood. I forget all about melody and harmony and go deep inside the tone, so I can feel it all around me like a buzzing tube. The string makes half the tone, and that calls its other half out of somewhere. They stand side by side without being completely distinct, but without really mixing either. The answer is hard to hear, but it’s the singing of the wood and the space, just like a forest.

  You can’t hear anything on the train, so I like to buzzsaw on the strings Ritchie Havens style. I can feel the spots where my pick has gouged up the wood just past the strings. My sonata guitar I normally keep at home, but now I play it on the train, because I suspect it will attract him to me. My father told him to find the forest, so let him hunt for it here in my lap.