The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  Charred black leaves spill against the stark brick corner of the vault. They batter against the wall, rise up, fly round in a circle, and swing down again; a sign — Spargens is watching. The black vault is growing cold.

  I see a desert, covered with stationary black clouds. A breeze stirs up the dust sends a pang of longing through me, that black air, blended water and wind. Now I see: the clouds are made of swords and wings. The air of cold, yelping flames. Like wires these lines spread round the vortexes making a golden fingerprint like a wood knot, braided shining fibres patched with dust and brown threads in parallel curves and strokes, apostrophe marks like rabbit tracks, like black seeds thrown into the shit of the wind.

  Fractured wings stampede down the black rain-clotted sky and power rises from the mountains, the horizon, the grave-clotted ground fertile and stinking. The flirting of the air tells me I’m underground. I crouch and put my palms beside my feet, reach out touch rock and loose stones. I take one and toss it; sound of rock on rock — the same all round. I wet a finger: the air comes from somewhere ahead. I creep forward, feeling my way.

  Now I get a sense of space opening on all sides; a continuous rushing ahead. A light emerges from the ground; a lean-faced woman I’ve never seen before — sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, dark hair, dark dress of shiny material to the ground, massy bronze candelabra perfectly still in her upraised right hand. The ground under her feet is powdery, like ash, loose and filled with small stones. Now by the light I see she has come out of a groove in the rock.

  She stops and turns, a gorge open at her feet. Looking around, craning her neck and pivoting her head, she is searching for something. She has deep, triangular eyes; they train themselves on me directly, and she motions to me. Without waiting, she turns and continues along the path which clings to the edge of the gorge. I follow at a distance, and the rushing sound grows a little louder — the sound of a waterfall. The woman comes to a spur of rock and stands there precariously, gesturing beyond her.

  There, past the point where the gorge forks into two jagged cracks hundreds of yards across, is a phosphorescent city, spread out like so many toy blocks on a bare plateau. There are no lights, but the buildings are all made of soft-looking stone that sheds a dreamy blue-white glow like reradiated moonlight. The city is bordered on the far side by a continuous sheet of plummeting water that must be miles wide, a gargantuan waterfall that drops in a transparent, unbroken curtain out of the gloom above and down into a chasm below. The chasm is broader than the city, and evidently so deep that the water strikes bottom only long after it vanishes from sight. Despite their astounding size, the falls are awesomely silent.

  A colossal woman’s face has been carved into the soft phosphorescent stone of the bluff behind the falls. Its contours flicker through the screen of water — a dreaming, unfamiliar face, a little uptilted and twice the size of the city. Her eyes are closed, an almost wide mouth the lips softly compressed and nearly smiling in sleep. Her face I’ve never seen before, I say it to myself again and again to fight a persistent feeling that I have, I have seen it before.

  ...Cinders are blowing everywhere, a racket like the snapping of flames bristles from the forest. It grows, the noise gathering to a roar like an invisible avalanche. Spargens walks over and gives me a long searching look.

  “Let’s get him out of there.”

  We run to the tank. I take up my hook and almost immediately I have him. With Spargens, I draw him from the freezing water, enormous tears blazing with gold dust spill from his eyes. We pull him to the shack and the noise in the forest grows.

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I try to revive him. As he begins to cough, the lights all go out at once and wind flaps wildly at us in all directions — from where?

  “Is the roof caving in?”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  The trees are groaning like ship timbers in a storm. Suddenly he sits up and seizes our arms. Though I can’t really see him, I can tell by his attitude that he is straining to see or hear something in the dark.

  “What is it?”

  There is something rolling around in the distance, back and forth along the far wall by the opposite side of the lake. It is circling round and round back there, where no one is — a huge thing, I imagine like a little planet, struggling in the cavern like a fly trapped in a glass.

  Suddenly there is a bellow and wings come from all the trees with a noise like a terrible hailstorm. We are huddled together in the dark, beneath the flimsy roof of the shack, feeling the wings in the air. Their flapping seems to make the air lighter, like what I imagine a tornado must do — I feel the air being sucked from my lungs.

  A blinding flash and for a moment I can see a cyclone of wings. A thunderclap seems to blast right on top of us and sets my ears ringing, and the ground shakes with its rumbling — thunder and lightning inside the room. My patient turns to me and shouts something at me.

  “We have to get out! We have to get out! We have to seal them in behind us!”

  Another burst of light shows the wings diving into the brine tank, churning the water into foam, the surface is choked with thrashing wings. The thunder comes with a second flash — the wings are dragging themselves out of the tank onto the shore — they have attached themselves to bodies — now they launch into the air, the bodies are dangling from them.

  —Darkness.

  —An explosion throws us on our backs.

  —Light: the bodies are circling above the brine tank on mismatched wings. Only the wings are alive.

  Darkness, a single blast of light and then the thunder, loudest of all. Darkness and silence. I can hear our breathing. I can feel, all around us, the winged corpses, crouching motionless in the dark. I can hear the dust trickling from their hair, their empty eyes, their gaping, slack mouths...

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A clock tower with its illuminated dial all white with concentric rings drifts past the window like a dream.

  Clouds break up, the sun shines through, and the sky is like a giant carousel. The entrance into a wholly new and unfamiliar landscape is like being born; what is called a moment of clarity — the experience is the opposite of a headache — a sense of pleasure in a clear panel of the head, of lightness and transparency. Racing along through the tunnels with a fantastic, steadily-building dream tension suddenly explode from the tunnel into a vast panorama of ocean sky and trees going off in his pants and slumping forward against the glass... blood spurting and spattering to the sound of radio squelches in the slow elongations of the clouds. Images and dissociated phrases blur past in subway windows—...

  *

  Working together, we managed to seal the cavern. A commotion of pounding and thudding comes through to us on the other side. At first, we had simply boarded up the entrance as a provisional measure; now Schwips’ team is bricking it up.

  I report to Ptarmagant—

  “The Phaedrus thing was a warning,” I tell him.

  “Not much of one — oh well, find out what they want, if you’re able to.”

  So they are creatures of desire, or reverence? Did our prayers and desires by-produce them?

  Deuteronôme proclaims, “With new things, signs are needed.”

  “The divinity,” Ptarmagant dictates, “is like a formless being consisting of overlapping images in minds, but possessing an element or dimension independent of any mind, being to it what the composite sound of the chord in music is to the individual notes that constitute it. The harmony is greater than the sum of its tones, it is another and wholly distinct sound — and so the divinity is a wholly distinct mind that is simply the new quiddity of the resonation of many other minds, and this is the case with every mind. These models are not binding but are only appearances.”

  A little country shop standing alone in a crescent depression in the hills... a doll hangs where the signboard should be, from an iron rod, pirouetting against a sky the color of wet sugar... c
louds before me and sun behind, like gazing into a cavern... a Christmas tree smell, like a fresh-cut apple... Wings of nerves sprout from his shoulders, seize the wall enmesh themselves into its stuff and tear it to pieces like lightning roots, he emerges into an open canyon under ultraviolet dusk where court convenes and charges are being read somewhere in a barely-audible, low mutter, inside one of the dark houses. The prosecutor is in another house, his attorney if any in another, each juror in another still, and the judges are a pair of little girls on the swings — just two dim, colorful shadows with streaming hair in the gloom, calling to him as they swing toward and away from him: “...hell-LO, bye-BYE... hell-LO, bye-BYE...”

  Escaping the park, I sail down the steps from the street to the subway the fabric of my coat billows up against the fist that holds the knife at the end of the sleeve. I go into the tunnels they smell of iron rust and rank water; in the shade just beyond the lights of the platform I strike my left palm with the pommel of the dagger, then jab the palm with the point. A pool of blood, black streaked with bright scarlet, grows there, and I lets some of the filthy water dripping from the ceiling mix with it. The droplet makes the pool vibrate like a blob of jelly, the vibration releases a buzzing into the air that granulates and grows darker.

  “What do the wings want?”

  Multiply turns a crackling log on a spit, dropping flakes of ash, cinders, and glowing coals. The log makes a regular whooshing sound with each rotation as flames slap the air. He can bring voices out of the air by touching a skull and you hear them from the inside, as if you spoke that way. Salt fills the eyesockets and the circle drawn in dust — shadow of a knife rotating over a clock face made out of dust. Speaks the words he hears, the echo comes rebounding down the passages before he speaks it; typewriter rods arranged around the face of the clock that are tripped as the knife’s shadow passes over them, so the movement of the shadow causes a regular clicking; a mechanism rotates a paper tape that the rods type on. The indeterminacy is not a matter of which rods are thrown but which hit the tape and ink the paper. The tapes roll out the next phase.

  *

  I was an only child, and grew up among the churchical families at Meadowlab. This was no doubt what prevented me from becoming that abomination a parson’s daughter — I knew too many of them already. They charmed everybody at first; brisk, practical, level-headed and self-possessed, like the Stoical little girls in story books... but when I got to really know them, I saw they were cold. Coldness just poured out from their bodies. Are you so cold you can’t melt? When I would get excited, my natural ebullience foamed up out of me, then all of abrupt I would be checked by chill of their disapproval. I learned to hold back, and avoid the shame beams. But when I was alone I guess I giggled and twittered to myself, spoke in cartoon voices repeating lines making up nonsense or just making funny sounds like a TV, and capered around striking what felt like hilarious poses to me.

  (Inside eight golden coffins... something cracks in a parsimonious girl’s face, a perfumed breath of love freezes and shatters against it as a deadly stone bluff suddenly emerges from the features. Growing older... “my secret treasure”... demure without shyness, arch and sniffing. Getting up on others by doing things for them, using domestic tasks as leverage. Citing scripture. Reproaches, sermons, lectures often turning imperceptibly into analysis. “And why do you believe that?” Vera got away from them in time — her sex will flash startling bright from her witty face, a happy face — she has escaped mummification and she knows it. Come and take, come and give.)

  I started wearing lipstick every day, and then jewelry, every day. I knew I wanted others to enjoy the sight of me, even if I could take no such pleasure in seeing them. When you’re blind, you need to do it, you can feel other people’s eyes on you, sensing you in ways you can’t understand or even imagine. You almost want to pile ornaments on top of each other all over you until you can’t be seen behind them. The other girls didn’t like these affectations of mine but pity always held them back a little from outright condemning me, the bitches!

  My early dreams had been only a clamor of sounds and feelings that would pull together into a line, not exactly speaking or reading but something like that, or in between. Other blind people I’ve met say they usually dream about getting lost or falling beneath the train, but I never seem to have those sorts of dreams — for which may the Lord make me truly thankful — I dream about whole landscapes filled with hanging curtains, so that I feel grass under my bare feet and thick fabric all around me. I can walk without using my stick, just by feeling along the curtains, with the sensation of the fabric continuously sliding over my face on and on. Now and then I’ll hear the voices of the curtains or of whoever hung them there; I imagine their voices were trapped in all the folds and I release the words as I push the folds back open. The voices sometimes thundered in my head so loud they actually would wake me up.

  Then I had my first sex dream. It took me about a year to realize — I’ll never forget the shock — that I had vision in my dreams. At first I thought of it as a combination of silent hearing and numb touching. What I saw were the first sensations I had ever not felt. Around that time I grew ill, and had to stay in bed for a few weeks sick to my stomach and feverish. The nausea never stopped — eating was so difficult, although I was only sick once... I was crossing my room — my head swam, I bent double and heaved in agony. I heard loud rattling on the floorboards, and when it was over, I was on my knees, wiping my face and groaning. My father was in the room, and I heard him exclaim loudly in surprise. In a few minutes more, I felt tired but all right. The nausea was gone. Later, when I was recovering in bed, my father told me, his voice very even, that I had vomited stones. He put them in my hands when I asked for them, a heap of smooth flat stones — he’d washed and dried them.

  “You’ve marked them?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, in a strange voice. “I’ve done nothing but clean them.”

  The stones had figures etched into them.

  “Are they letters?”

  “They have that appearance, but I don’t recognize them.”

  He never did identify what kind of letters they were.

  I worked hard to build up my vision, lying down, concentrating, trying to see. I would hold on to one detail in my mind, and add others. For a long time I didn’t know that sighted people also have trouble visualizing details of things — that the first ones tend to drop out of sight as more are added. I thought of my imagination then as a small shelf that would only hold so many things and no more; the job then was to extend the shelf. My dreams became more lively, and the humming sonic hands that caressed me got clearer, so that I eventually learned to see my own way. I could see the dresser I pulled my clothes from in the morning as a lattice of objects made of trapped sound that would escape when I dragged on the handles or banged the drawers shut, all held in place by a voiceless skeleton. The rug was a crispy thin sound sponge. The door was like a bell.

  The first face I saw was mine; I just knew it was. It’s a beautiful thing — I thought. Amazingly complicated, with so many flexible features that lock together to form the expressions. The face I drew sort of swam up and brushed my lips, and then it was mine. I was wearing it. That was the week I lost my virginity to a boy they called Woolly; I felt the cruel spots standing out on his cheeks and chin, but his face in my dream was clear, sad and maybe a little stupid. It was after a dance. The music had seemed to roll me right into his arms. That was the end of the school year, and he left that summer. A letter came once — it was dull, and I just couldn’t think of anything to write back to him, so I didn’t. That was the end of that.

  But I dreamt again and again about my own face, which gazed back at me with this implacable love, that was like it expected something from me, like “tell me something good.” It had no color at all, no particular color, — I used to bore my friends with questions about color. My friend Vicki helped me pick out clothes.

  When my father was cast o
ut like Antigone I followed him into exile. That cost me most of my friends, all except Lenore the Librarian. We share a cheap apartment by the tracks.

  *

  “The stars are heaven’s volcanoes and lace the night with beams of aged light, obscure spells of love that lay claim to all attention jealously imperiously persistently turning me back to you—

  “Oh Vera...

  “Night time comes down like a hand. Its gentle pressure squeezes voiceless sighs from me. The love spell develops and turns me into a painted landscape, moaning deep within my flat surface, something invisible and far away ignites again and again. Every time it says ‘Vera.’

  “I guess the spell I’m under has its own reasons for doing what it does. Maybe it derives a deeply soothing and perhaps even an ugly satisfaction from fastening on me. Maybe it reclines in its tyrannical sway over me...”

  Aw buzz off. I don’t have to answer your questions about her.

  At the station. Night brings blue darkness surging in. My gnomes shuffle in a low-key rampage through the house. Every now and then there’s a thud crash or tinkle as they knock something over.

  In a small octagonal room, which had been used to store meteorological instruments, Pearl has discovered a piece of equipment — something like a solid brass acorn the size of a watermelon, tricked out in valves and holes lined with supple rubber diaphragms. This thing hangs on bright brass chains from a pulley way up in the darkness and can be raised out of sight or lowered to the floor.