He brings it down slowly as though it were emerging from the sun on a long lancelike ray.
Ptarmagant gives me the knife. I raise my hand up to chest level to take it, and when it is in my hand, it seems to glue my hand to space at chest level. The knife has embedded in it the sensation of searing heat. The edge of the flint blade shines like a thread out of the sun. I feel something like a soft blow in the solar plexus as the idea acts itself in my mind. My body goes tense and tears ruin what’s left of my vision, but the knife doesn’t shake. Vera, my hand comes free to my control. Beneath the light of the sun the knife tears a ragged ellipse in my chest with a sound like ripping burlap and the sun rushes up to me.
Sound of surf when I wake, someone brought water; the ragged wound is gone. Later Ptarmagant comes to check on me.
“Can you stand?”
I get up. Ptarmagant leads me into a dark, windowless room, lead sheeting on the walls, a table and a chair. I am made to sit down at the table and a silver tray covered with smooth black and grey stones the size of robins’ eggs, some scored with deep-incised characters, is set before me. Ptarmagant leaves the room.
I look at the tray for a moment then realizes these were the marked stones she had vomited, years ago. I reach out
and gather the stones by
pressing them all together between
my palms at arms’ length across the table — as he touched the stones
that had been in her body I felt
an intense warm pressure against my chest
and in my throat, and the bones
of his arms and back shivered,
a green light erupting from the center of my chest
in a ragged ellipse
a brilliant golden evolution of lines and corners
from here to the radiant sun like a pipe
curving away in its depths,
a silhouetted figure stands in the sun,
reaches out his arm and presses
his fire hand against the sky, pushes
down on it and the stars spin down,
pushes up on it and the stars wheel back up,
the figure does this without
ceasing to look at me
watches the wall decay overrun with
seething golden scurf
a black slimy aperture opens in the wall
vomiting a slough of lit candles spangling
the walls with brilliantly flashing gold reflections
saw copper light through frothing trees felt the glee bursting in my ribs a honeycomb of gold light breaks leaving viscous warmth there in my ribs to spread
three vapor men are there
crystal breath of the machines, of her hounds silent sleek and intent tracing the scent
the teacher emerges from the shadows
stripped to the waist her skin painted white and her lips red as coral,
and a huge opal hangs from a silver thread flat against her collarbone
she stands in the spot and drinks in the light with her skin
she is standing over me now,
I touch the opal warm from her skin is her
soul clitoris warming my palm with all colors,
she turns to vapor and mantles lovingly around me without a sound. I still can see yet the moist coral lips carefully forming words around a dark center—
in total silence we’re locking on top of the desk and though her beautiful face is drawn
haggard and grieving as though she were being hurt
she clings hard to my shoulders and grips my waist with her legs,
(no climax ever but draughts carry them off in chalk dust
they melt away behind the echo of the bell
the Great Lover opens the path to the City of Sex).
*
Let the voice ring out like a softly-ringing bell from the sepulchres... “Nine-thirty all right.” He steps through an open door into the rafters of the city of s... The sky rises from the mountains, held up by unrelenting wind. Trains rattle on tracks hundreds of feet above the sheet ice and far below it, where they push through limpid cold water thick as syrup, black as pitch in the hollows of the ragged boulders, the deep pits in the stony bottom. The Great Lover finds himself in another, new narrative, another character.
The map says the city of sex is a mask. The bones of the face turn clear and light up train lines. A long, transparent tube emerges from the hollows of the flat bones and cautiously feels its way into the water. When its other end comes free, it unfurls a gelatin disk, which rises and then settles slowly down back onto the face, forming features, pulsing with bands of dim light. It cloaks the face the way two lovers’ faces are superimposed in an embrace. Now this dark mask, which in every way contrasts with his natural face, slips itself deftly behind his features. His face suddenly radiates an astonishing beauty, his natural features will always be seen in light of this invisible and absolute contrast with the mask inside, an anti-mask which makes plainer the true face.
A new person, he will come to the city by land sea and air, in the present and in memory — his character has been here before, and thinks to himself:
This is an unusual car — is this a new kind? Maybe it’s an antique. In my mind I can see a gleaming head of gentle red hair turned to gold by the light of the new-dawning day, a shining white breast rises and falls, nostrils whistling mild euphoria. A few mornings ago... my memories are flattened like photos in a magazine. Trains churn alongside us in the frigid water, and I can hear the water rustling down along our shining sides. Tracks arduously laid down on the bedrock of the bottom by workers in purple metal caissons slide below our heavy wheels. A few of these cassons exploded from too much pressure; and their shattered fragments lie among the rocks all rusty brown, huge iridescent fish dart like lightning in and out of their rent up sides.
The train veers, and I see the city’s foundations off in the distance, a deeper dark in milky blue haze. There are pipes big enough to swallow city blocks bundled up there, all encrusted with clear tubes, gathered around a red rampart of solid iron protruding from the sea bed. Above me, where the light of the setting sun salts the blue of the pack ice pink, the city itself spreads out onto the ice sheet like an umbrella. The city is in chains, which hold it down to the spot bolted to bedrock on all sides. Up ahead, there’s a dead whale that got caught in one of the chains, covered with deep white lacerations, the drooping grid of the jaw frozen at an angle. Yellow and vermillion starfish have begun creeping up the tail and covering the body in bizarrely festive five-pointed stars. Off to one side a furtive motion catches my eye and I spot a puddle of living ink prowling along beside the tracks. Surrounded by a halo of threads, these featureless things slither along clever as otters, hunting among the coral.
From time to time the train passes near the edges of deep chasms hundreds of yards across. The tracks descend and the sunlight fades. I see a chimera with mirror eyes and transparent fins, cold-water dolphins like black glass... We pass a seep where the denser brine doesn’t mix with the sea water, forming the mirage-like surface of a lake underwater. A tourist brochure for the City of Sex appears in my mind, stray paragraphs keep coming back to me from this text I never read.
The tracks climb through the city’s foundations. On nights when the moon is full, the pack ice glows like a sheet of moonlight made solid. In places where the ice is clear, those who live below the surface can peer up at powdery indigo sky and brilliant miniature stars. Just before the train begins to spiral up out of the water — is that a woman I see, walking on the ocean floor? She has a round head, and the dark shape of her mouth opens and closes slowly as she sings her siren-song... I can make out the dark circles of her eyeglasses, and her neck stretches and grows longer as though her head wanted to float up to the world of air...
The City of Sex is all gradual motion, the slow passage and recombinations of landscapes, and sudden eruption of breathtaking panoramas of blue sky, white ice, black mountains, the sweeps of steel ri
bbons. In brochurese I “recall” the city’s history: founded millennia ago when a number of settlers from different parts of the globe accidentally converged on the same area at the same time. A flukish stretch of temperate weather made the establishment of a small colony possible. When the weather once again grew severe, the colony was cut off forever. As communications broke down, it was assumed in other quarters that the colony was lost. In time, it was forgotten altogether.
The colony did not disappear, but adapted, developed and thrived in an isolation that presently became a matter of preference, instead of necessity. Their space craft are occasionally observed in other parts of the world.
The city is a vast circular cradle of elevated rail lines and high spires, steel and glass pavilions. The streets are made of metal plates, curved with steam pipes under them to keep the ice off. The caterpillar sidewalks are flat ingots of thick steel linked together in broad ribbons. Overhead lights shine directly down on passersby, giving them an especially stark appearance.
All the metal buildings, the metal walls of the homes, are adorned with fine arabesques, like circuits of nearly invisible gold filaments. All structures are coated with a thin layer of transparent ice that lightly blurs the gold. The touch of polished metal molded and pressed into the folds and rolls the luxuriant foliage and rounded shapes of Gothic architecture, is weirdly pleasurable. It runs along the palm like warm skin, a fine fabric of minute etched scratches that form fractured spirals in the light.
Everywhere are humming wires and if you put your ear to them you can hear voices — some are voices belonging to people in the city and some are voices from the wind as it blows on the wires, or from the aurora when she lashes her cat o’ nine tails in the sky. These words are all too faint and too terrifying to be recorded.
In some places, where the streets are just ice, a manhole cover will glide back and a sea lion or walrus will thrust up its head. Floating there, it will watch the passers-by, supercilious, curious, or earnest. Cranes everywhere — I mean the mechanical kind — the city is constantly building itself — enormous, vistal works — steel suspension bridge in the frigid air... Wind harp in the wires, and an incessant rumble of distant construction. The train descends past the city, jagged black mountains, the vast eye-scalding plain of pack ice, and the city swims gracefully by gossamer-like steel and glass pavilions topped with tapering, bright pennants. The pavilions enclose vast boulevards, with three tiers of galleries on all sides over them. I watch them sail up or down through my reflection in the glass walls of the elevators. Vast trees grow from the floor to just within a few inches of the ceilings, their roots drink from the many fountains everywhere.
When I come back to myself again, I am sitting in a hard steel chair on a terrace, with a view of the intersection of two boulevards. There is a fountain there, which surrounds the base of a colossal metal statue of two figures, in the Soviet style. She is straddling him, both upright, her head flung back ecstatically against the white grid of the glass roof, water oozing along the edge of the fountain’s raised metal plumes and hanging in heavy drops, dropping into the water with a musical sound... Every corner has a similar statue, and if I could spin by them I would see a time-lapse animation of their monumental, precisely-phased intercourse. The artist modelled the figures on himself and his lover, and incorporated her name somehow in a way no one understands. I peer up at her face, tilted away in rapture, and imagine the northern lights billowing and shining over her polished body.
People ride along the boulevards in hollow metal bulbs sliding along in deep grooves. I sit alone in one of them, a copper colored ball with red cushions, an encyclopedia drones on in my brain. Drone on, drone on. The human immigrants developed into two distinct strains, based on their preferred time of activity. In thousands of years of isolation, they adapted under the extreme evolutionary pressures of this difficult environment. Both types exhibit mineral characteristics, and have correspondingly more complex diets.
Along the galleries one may observe the Day People; tall lean with dark plum-black skin to protect against powerful solar radiation here. Eyes of vivid white and electric black. Long narrow noses pointed tip angled straight down between flaring nostrils, tip and nostrils in a row — narrow faces, full lips, and small ears. They don’t wrinkle as they age but their skin begins to powder away to dust... a grey coating of dust on the skin. The men wear their iron-colored hair short, it lies sleek against their tapering skulls like little filings, and bands of tiny ringlike beads, made from bone, frame their heads. The women walk haughtily along the galleries, wear their thick hair long and flowing, swept back from the brow; they are testy irritable impatient and waspish. The men are cordial and accommodating. The women possess thrilling alto viola voices, the men resounding double basses. With sweeping hinged ribcages and enlarged lungs they are outstanding runners for both speed and endurance. Their eyes have developed special ridges on the surface of the iris itself — contracting against snowblindness; and a pattern-fixing structure in the hippocampus enables them to see clearly in blizzards and to find the horizon. Their normal vision is extremely acute. A Day sharpshooter can knock a gull out of the air a mile away, detect extremely minute movements. They are indefatigable, heavy eaters, and possess a high resistance to cold. Characteristic Day gesture — in shaking hands they swing their arms out wide from the waist in a circle and bring the hand up flat.
The Day people sleep in wooden cabinets set into the walls of their angular, lean buildings. The Night people live in round or oblong houses clustered outside the pavilions; they sleep squatting on the floor wrapped in blankets with just their heads poking out. The Night people predominate in food services. In some places Night fishers dive through a hole cut in the ice floor of the bistro, pop up a few minutes later and hand fresh steaming aphrodisiac crustaceans to the patrons, their bodies steaming from the twenty-three degree waters. The diver is attended by a pair of assistants, change his goggles for a fresh pair swab his mouth nose and ears with something, pour boiling water over his suit, rub gelatin into his hair.
The Night people exhibit a general attitude of dreamy intentness. The men are built like tanks with square inexpressive faces, skin white as beluga whales, fingers and toes without nails. The women are sweet and light as marshmallows, with little girls’ faces on large adult heads. Stony brawn of the bodies, pale crispy hair, beaky noses, large pupils fringed with a thin ring of icy blue, and sky-blue lashes. The women wear their hair in braids, men’s hair grows any old way. The women are pranky silver-voiced snipes full of teasy nicknames, the men speak with robotic flatness in voices like nasal flutes. Echolocating all the time with inaudible trills produced in a special sinus, registers a three-dimensional sense image of their immediate surroundings 360 degrees. Come into a shop: Night man at the counter, you ask for something on the shelf behind him pointing, without taking his eyes off of you he reaches behind his own back and unerringly takes it down for you. Like the Day people they are indefatigable, heavy eaters, with a high resistance to cold. Extremely good swimmers, pressure resistant, they can hold the breath for upwards of fifteen minutes.
Their space program is already a thousand years old — a Night waiter brings me the house special, a kind of invisible ragout, and I fold the thick, cumbersome newspaper in half so as to fit it on the rest of the table. The food weighs down my fork. I can get it into my mouth all right if I don’t think about what I’m doing. Go on reading the words in my mind:
Enormous tethered balloons were sent high into the atmosphere, from which stars and planets could be observed with sophisticated optics. The existence of planets in other solar systems was also established mathematically. Explorers were wrapped in a special substance and frozen within enormous balls of ice; balloons carried the ice aloft to floating platforms at the uppermost limit of the atmosphere, where the accompanying crew pushed it into a precisely-determined orbit (thereafter taking the balloon back down to the surface). The ice vessel gathered speed with each
revolution until breaking away at exactly the right moment. After centuries of travel through the interstellar void, the sphere would enter the gravitational field of the target planet at a certain angle well calculated to initiate orbit, from which it would then eventually sink into the atmosphere. The resulting friction would burn the ice away, turning the spacecraft into a column of steam, and the disintegrating vessel would finally expel its occupants several miles above the surface. The material in which the traveller was wrapped expands on contact with air to form a landing cushion and also to slow descent. This material is designed to dissolve completely within hours of its deployment. Assuming they had survived, the new arrivals would generally regain consciousness only after this dissolution was completed, awakening slowly from a sleep that began in the City of Sex to find themselves naked on another planet. These were not voyages of conquest, or even of discovery exactly, but ventures with the object of dispersing human beings among the stars, where they would begin entirely anew all over again. For this reason, nothing from earth could be permitted to remain with them. At present, it is believed that at least one planet has been successfully seeded with a population of human beings large enough to reproduce itself, and that new strains of the human type may already be emerging there.
I lie down behind an iron pylon, gazing out sideways through the glass wall. There is a man making his way into the city after crossing the ice sheet. A feeling floats through my head as though it gives off a balloon of light, and I remember coming to the city when I was somebody else — the wind rammed me from the side, burned in my eyes and rasped along my face brittle with ice around my nostrils and mouth. I remember too, the confusion and dazzled senses as the walls rose around me and the wind was suddenly gone. Open-eyed, I carried all that yawning open space in my mind, and I felt these others and the buildings pressing the billowing fabric of space back inside me, my inflated consciousness being pressed back into me... But I still could not speak, or think. The wind scrubbed my mind blank.
My common mind is returning; with groping self-conscious thoughts I have enough now almost to decide, somehow it’s something I can allow or refuse, that space I can give up or not, as I choose. I stagger in among the iron buildings and stop against a wall, and when I open my eyes, I see a wisp of smoke drift down from the open window, fall through an amber beam of sunlight toward the iron street, and at once am calm again.
The Great Lover Page 21
