“dein weitheth fleith erregt mith tho,
du biththt doch nur ein thigolo
dein weitheth fleith erleuthchtet mich
mein vather war genau wie ich”
Of course I sing it very sweetly, lowly and slowly... I enjoy all kinds of music, but especially what is abrasive, percussive — I like to feel it pound me, crash over me like panes of glass, pick me up and shake me like a rag doll. I repeat the chorus twice as slow, and now I know he is out there... yeah he’s right in front of me. This train is passing the one he’s on, I can just know he is there at the window, looking at me. His eyes pounce on me. Go ahead and look — I lift my head so he can see my face. His yearning is almost a sound, like a bass drum humming. I can feel him, that same wild crashing shaking and pounding — at Meadowlab: the dog barking and straining at the leash I held his body in my hands and felt his trembling, the violent life gone crazy in his silky muscles, his shivering fur, his straining, distorting head all his senses his ears and nose and eyes all bulging and straining to expand toward some intruding thing I couldn’t see.
I’m listening! I try to put it into the song for him to hear, or to see in my mouth. Go on! Tell me!
It’s pulling away...
Talk to me!
...he’s gone again...
“jettht hatht thu angtht und ich bin thoweitth”
Is he afraid of me, too?
*
Ex a dream of singing trees I find the spot on the map, just off the hub where the green lines mix with the brown.
A thick coin of cool gold, glazed with humid white muting its glow, made it myself. Vera’s own face I etched on it with dental tools Dr. Thefarie lent me. Drop it into the notched brass slot between the bricks... a pause of at least ten seconds then a far-off thump of wood, splat into a heap of change. There’s a faint knocking of wooden bolts, the brick panel slides to one side with a brushing sound. Soft air wafts from the aperture, with a fragrance of cool green for cool gold, and an apparition of yielding darkness recedes from the gap in the wall, to waylay beams of sight thrust into its space, muffle them up in its intangible billows so that vision goes to sleep in it.
I step through to tender grass, a melancholy lawn dark as wine lees, sloping down. I cross it — no sound yet but the whisking of my feet in the grass. Overhead a concrete vault is invisible; this cavernous place was formerly the sub-basement of some public works or other. Now there’s confidential grass like wet down growing here. To my right, the dark is deeper, and in places it forms scars whose edges glisten, blots that fade, or creep toward me only to sink out of sight again. Lapping water: it has seeped into the air.
Up ahead there’s a scribble of trunks and boughs, the smooth and substantial forms of trees that disintegrate on approach into a broken canopy of twigs. Dim lamps hung among the branches keep these photovore leaves happy. I pick a pair of glasses and remove the ones I’m wearing just now, but I take a look around before I don the next pair — the lights look like stemless brass dandelions, or like corrugated, peach-pit suns, regularly spiked all over with serene candle fires. Glasses on — paths slouch conspiratorially around the roots, shadows sway. Following one of the paths down and to my right, I find a decrepit jetty thrust out onto the scurrying black water. A jalopy shanty with one wall hoisted up like an awning sits by the jetty.
Part of the problem, according to Ptarmagant: an infestation of flüchtige hingemachte Männer or “hastily improvised persons,” flung together just offstage and shoved out into the footlights of reality, unprepared, barely existing; a jury-rigged, placeholder person. He points out a short mannish woman in nurse’s whites and a navy windbreaker. She has a wizened, square face, wears a brilliant orange wool hat emblazoned with a nearly shapeless electric blue logo, is listening to something very loud in her headphones and plays a portable video game.
“Rush job,” Ptarmagant says, dropping his hand back onto his thigh. This FHM will scuttle out the door and along the platform, drag itself slowly up the stairs until out of sight of the cameras and quite alone, then a pop like the bursting of a brittle bubble of hardened tar, and the windbreaker will fall empty to the ground... no one ever there at all.
“Life arose spontaneously once,” Ptarmagant says, “and nothing prevents it from arising spontaneously again. This is true of minds as of bodies. By this principle, they come into existence, and by applying this principle, we will bring a divinity of our own into existence... but we do not yet understand this principle well enough.”
The Great Lover is still trying to explain his plan.
“We must put the bodies in the brine tank.”
Ptarmagant nods, “Spargens will help you.”
Now, Spargens has taken up residence in the shack by the jetty. He was too good at mathematics to be any good at anything else, and wound up riding the subways all day. He emanates an obstinate collectedness, as though his mind were a series of identical, sealed amphorae perfectly stacked in a ship’s hold. He never hurries and never seems to be waiting. His time always seems to be full, even when he is doing nothing.
I sit on a bench behind Spargens’ back; Spargens is hunched over the table. His pencil scratches without stopping. He sets the pencil down, tap, and leans back with a slight exhalation through the nose, hands on his kidneys and outcast eyes on the water. In the distance we hear the distracted water sucking the cistern’s concrete shell. In total darkness, a row of squat, pale green flames rock like masts on their wicks, and the nearly impalpable breath of the draft knocks them into spasms, doubled in pools of liquid wax. The trance skipping lightly off the water settles easily on the two of us, and stops our minds with a touch, like a thief who paralyzes his victims with the hand of glory.
*
I’ve discovered a defunct ice-making plant. I make my way in through the generous drains. Here it is: the brine tank. The parts are too badly rusted to use, or are missing to begin with, can be replaced — I steal what I need from a waterfront machine shop that services the large river-going boats, and from a warehouse full of plumbing supplies.
Working alone, I cut the tank into sections with a hacksaw and carry each piece down the plant’s ramp into the river. Then I drag the sections behind me on my muck sledge along the river’s sludgy bottom, using the current and the thickness of the water to help me.
The map (aside): Day and night he is loping back and forth down there, and occasionally drifting off to sleep. When this happens, he bobs stupidly along the bottom like an inebriated manatee.
In the meantime, Spargens has caused a pit to be dug in a clearing in the underground glade. Now and then, I stagger up out of the lake slime and slop out my cargo on the bank, turn and go back for more.
When all the parts are gathered, the tank sections are reassembled in the pit. This not only makes construction easier, but the earth will insulate the tank when it is finished. Cult welders work to close and seal the gaps on one side, while I drive in rivets by hand on the other.
Now the tank is finished and sealed with pitch and rubber, rinsed out and scoured with sand. The refrigeration plant is housed in a trench adjacent to the pit, where teams of workers bolt and seal the pipes and pumps. I’ve decided we’ll substitute ether (I make it myself out of lake mist) for ammonia, which is the usual refrigerant.
The tank is filled with charcoal-filtered lake water and mixed with road salt scavenged by Multiply, Deuteronôme’s nephew (the one who nicknames me Ding-A-Ling). The refrigeration equipment is powered by a small methane turbine. I can make any amount of methane from sewer gas, drawn off by my gnomes. Muffling the noise proves to be one of the more demanding problems. Even after damping down all vibration the equipment is still excessively loud. With the help of Dr. Thefarie, and some more scavenging, the moving parts are all packed in an inorganic gelatin, then baffled with regular soundproofing materials. These measures acceptably reduce the noise to a faint whir. The brine temperature is swiftly reduced to just below the freezing point, the water becoming
weirdly viscous like a thick, clear soup. Now, with the gnomes, I begin to move the inanimate bodies from their crêches in my sewer atrium.
Here among the branches and drifting lamps, in a silence punctuated by the barely audible creaking of the boughs and the rasp of leaves falling, settling, delicate corpses are suspended like wasps’ nests, dappled with shadow and soft, shabby patches of decay. They are stored among the branches until all of them have convened, filling the wood with a musty odor, mixed with the smell of the trees the forest has the scent of an ancient spice cabinet. Incense is wafted over the bodies daily; the censer-bearers move patiently along from trunk to trunk, and tender shoots of smoke slither in the grooves of the bark, coil up in bunches under dully lustrous leaves.
“We must put the bodies in the brine tank.”
The music of these words reverberates from one end of the narrative to the other. Down below you, in the sewers, I struggle in the strong, brown current. Pale helpless bodies shrink deeper into the protection of my arms.
The map (aside): He works doggedly, with a kind of protestant strenuousness. Without pause he turns and goes back to the tunnels, drops instantly into the water and is gone, coat flapping out behind him in the current like a ray’s wing. He emerges again, a body beneath each arm; the water seems reluctant to release him, dropping from his back like a heavy hood. These are the last.
A wind stirs the wood, the bodies nod dreamily, serene faces dip, fingered by branch shadows. The wind animates hands and feet, and the bodies gesture with a voiceless grace, celestial, fairy tranquility. They are like shafts of sunlight dropping down through the forest canopy, light or dark their skin sheds a mist of light, as though these woods had been invaded by an army of gigantic glow worms, inexplicably locked in sleep.
By sympathy with them, a body has risen to the surface of the earth — a young boy’s head and shoulders, and the tips of his fingers before his breast poke out of the soil, his long blonde hair hangs straight from his head’s high crown and falls like a curtain across his brow, the tips pressed into his face. His features are slightly flattened, the creases seamed with dirt, and his skin is mottled, like a thickly-clouded sky. This naked boy is carried with great care to the brine tank; the workers gather to see him, and a few ginger hands timidly caress his cheek, lightly pat his head.
Now all the bodies are in the brine tank, and have already started their slow orbits along its walls. When this boy’s body is introduced, however, the others gather at the spot like carp around a morsel of bread. The boy tumbles languidly in among them, the bodies jostle and the boy is touched here and there by a hand, a breast, a foot, a shoulder. Presently, the bodies drift back to their rounds, until they are once again evenly distributed in a ring, languidly circling the empty center of the tank.
*
They’ve found the forest. I am waiting for my train, at the far end of the platform where I can drop the plumb-line of my listening into the tunnels to hear for him. I believe I would know the sound of his shoe on the gravel. There are other things I have to think about but even while I turn away to stand, or hide, by a post, I feel myself still there by the tunnel mouth, turned toward him like a statue.
Suddenly the world is becoming enormous, rushes out to all sides. I feel nostalgia for something new; I’m remembering right now as it happens for the first time the only time. I have a sort of puppet of him in my mind that I can’t stop playing with. I do something else, but my mind’s hands are still playing with that doll. Bow, jump, kiss my hand. But I always remember he is not there. Some part of him is, though, because I feel it, or I act it out with my body in my mind. Just like an imagined sound, I imagine the sensation of moving like him, as he must move — explode leap flail bound tumble forge blunder pop up. A small ghost version of me is doing all these things on a stage inside; I can feel an outflung hand or foot pass through me from time to time, a little cold streak there where it broke my surface and left ripples. The thought of him keeps starting over, exciting me. I’m wildly excited! I have a static heat in my forearms that almost makes my hands shake, and even more intensely I feel it in my chest in a ball sticking out from my backbone. At random it spreads out to either side along the backs of my lungs, and strokes the backs of my lungs like the walls of a circus tent with a gentle pressure shortening my breath. It’s something else, I don’t know whether or not I’m suffering but I’m full to the brim with something lighter than water that bulges out of the brim and trembles. Hisses.
He’s crazy and he stinks. Where is he? Why isn’t he here?
*
I kneel by the edge of the tank, whose walls protrude a little more than a foot above the level of the soil, and take hold of the dull brass edge. I shake, my vision goes dark — stumbling away.
I stop. Turning, I look at the tank without seeing it. I make myself return, plant my knees back in the grooves they made. With a moment of lightheadedness, I feel all my vitality running out of me like streams crashing down a rock face. I reach down into myself and close my hand on the throat of my life, throttling it. I feel it blocked. It struggles, pushing against my hand, but I am putting all my fading strength into my hand. Cold comes in, and my vision goes dark again.
How long has it been...
He tilts forward, his eyes dull. He jerks back numbly. A moment later, he tilts again. Tilts a little more, more — then drops face-first into the water, and dies.
I am watching him carefully. Spargens holds the stopwatch and reads out the minutes neutrally.
His body describes a gradual somersault in the water. He floats round face down again, and drifts into the empty center of the tank, just below the surface. Now he mingles with the other bodies. He is brushed by the backs of hands, by stockinged feet, his face slides through locks of hair, brown tresses interlaced with pale ribbons. The hems of dresses, neckties, arms, breasts, heads, and legs, trail nervelessly over him.
Now he can no longer be distinguished from the mass of slack hands, dark forms, moving sluggishly counterclockwise — and vast, dark forms turn round in flags of white cloud, dark cloud, rags of sky, blue black and white, circle around like frost planets in a cold wind above them, unseen. Hands swim past and arms are raised and sink in unreal gestures. A woman in a print dress: her face tips up to the light lips apart, turns in a grand slow swoop of straight, sandy hair, and vanishes in the shadow of a vast black coat.
*
I can’t stop these dopey fantasies they’re too much fun, I can’t resist playing him up like a hero. Coming to the rescue, arrayed in hope and power oh boy — he’s crazy and fearless and powerful, and strong and light and silly — smelly I mean — like a fierce skunk or a wombat or something — I’m smiling — but he’s charging in out of nowhere, blast our enemies crashing into them like a bowling ball hitting the pins like go man go mow ‘em down! Punch them to pieces and explode them like a hurricane, piss-peddling assholes! With their fucking armbands my God! I change into him and sail out into the mass of them like an eggbeater churning up the batter, getting lighter and sillier I whip their bone heads laughing fantastically until they’re scurrying everywhere in total dismay, lashing out thoughtlessly in all directions and hitting everybody but me can’t catch me! Hee hee hee! Can’t catch me! Whose voice?
Come catch me!
*
When Spargens reads “ten” I extend my boat hook and snag him, by the back of his coat. The momentum of his body pulls my arms straight, and I stumble along the edge of the tank tugging repeatedly at the handle, steering him to the surface and toward the edge. Spargens and a few others grab fistfuls of material, an arm or a leg, and clumsily drag the body out. I untangle the hook and kneel beside him, chafing the hands and slapping the face, which is frigid and stiff as bog leather. I draw down his chin, exposing the pale teeth and criss-crossing black laces between his lips, take up a pinch of black soil and rub it around his mouth and eyes, and under his nose. A strangling sound, like marbles rattling in the maze of his bronchial tubes. Eja
culations clotted with gelatinous water belch from his chest, and as his eyes roll a streak of light is stitched a moment into the darkness overhead, below the ceiling.
Shooting star over the park, where the wind kneads the black crinoline of the trees. This young woman with straight sandy hair, large green eyes, a straight severe nose and tapering chin is Audrey. She’s got on a white dress with straps and a string of pearls that get caught in the stark hollow of her throat. In a white dress that makes her pale skin seem darker than it is, and in white canvas tennis shoes. She walks up the slope swinging her arms fluttering her small hands. Meteor shoots above wind-tousseled trees gnaw the air, above them on the hill appear the dark angles of the weather station. It looks like an otherworldly ship anchored on foliage waves, it takes part in the serene immobility of the starry sky and the frothy craziness of the rustling trees, hanging above the porous ground that sways beneath her feet and seems to want to subside. Reach up and smear the stars around they are wet and sticky like daubs of liquid candy and they trail long tacky filaments. Stars gleam through the foliage making tiny points of illuminated green, stars hovering just above the horizon, stars beneath the level of her head... she drops her eyes to the stars.
It’s a delicious feeling to leave the party, and imagine yourself missed, the mystery you’ve created simply by leaving for a minute, the sense of freedom and irony. Now she has found a fairy ring of cold-boiling trees, the sliding spiced leer of wind hiss in the grass, all elements of a spell that gazes down at her from pointed gables. Audrey looks up again and sees the tenebrous foundations massive forbidden and abandoned — that’s just what she wants. The windows are grey screens... now she spots a wan, phosphorescent thing at a high window and draws her breath sharply bolted to the ground. Stock still, a glowing figure is looking down at her. Its glow is reflected in the thick varnish on the sill. She clutches herself, feeling a detestable weakness in her knees run down into her calves. The face has huge dark eyes.
The Great Lover Page 16
