The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  Out on the ice there are algae mats growing beneath the pack in motionless lakes and in high salt pools that don’t freeze. In some of these one finds mummified remains of animals, some thousands of years old, or wind-scrubbed bones scattered among the rocks bruised with lichen. I am still lying on the floor, behind the pylon. An antarctic riddle trickles through the humming glass and asks me:

  What kind of plant is it that grows

  On infertile ice and barren stones?

  “Lichen,” I say into the crook of my elbow. Lichen grows on ice and stones, although lichen isn’t really a plant — he listens to himself — it’s not a plant, it’s the marriage of a fungus and an algae.

  *

  “Nine-thirty, all right,” I step still a bit shaky from the friction of re-entry through an open door into one of the many iron passageways set into the ice. My breath misting, I unerringly follow the tunnels to find the deep sun.

  Some are so amazed on first seeing it that they never want to leave, it’s all they ever want to look at. Their eyes have been taken out of the level of their lives and now they can look at nothing else. It is forbidden to touch the ice wall, or to get too close. One’s breath, or perhaps the mere heat of one’s ardour, may melt the ice. Attendants are kept on hand at all times to remove those who have fainted, or those who otherwise manifest some indisposition. The tunnel entrance is lit with pale, heatless chemical lamps, but the deep sun is brightened only by the thin daylight illumination that filters through the ice sheet above it. The light descends, a blue-white dome.

  On first seeing the deep sun, I sob once involuntarily, something heavier than a gasp. It is a hollow sphere of nearly clear ice, over a quarter-mile in diameter, embedded in but wholly distinct from the ancient pack ice. That it is hollow has been demonstrated by analyzing the spectra of light passing through it, although it is not clear whether the interior is a vacuum, or contains some rarefied atmosphere. It was discovered during excavations centuries ago and has since become an object of pilgrimage, the closest thing to a church in the City of Sex. An apartment was cut into the ice at the initial point of discovery of the deep sun, just before its base, so the sloping wall sweeps overhead. One can see up into and through the deep sun, all the way to the far side. Again, the encyclopedia goes rattling through my mind like a decrepit old cart.

  Pilgrims congregate at the base of the deep sun, processions arrive daily from the city to visit it, and some never leave. Their improvised shelters are kept to one side of the passageway, so as not to close it off entirely. Hallucinations among those assembled are common; most of them involve a dimly-visible figure, or silhouette, hovering in the heart of the deep sun — a human form, usually, but sometimes a seal, or whale, or some variety of fish, or a huge starfish, a crab, or polar bear. For most of those who involved themselves with it, the deep sun was an emblem of eternity; they felt that, by gazing at it continuously, they would imbibe something of the essence of time itself, or achieve single moments altogether outside of time. A guidebook phrase trickles through my head: “Our region is full of spectacular attractions like these.”

  I see my face reflecting in it — the face is not European, I see no traits or color. There is the mask of cracked muck I always wear. I can see my gaze but not my eyes. My expressions are there, but no features. I look down at my hand and it’s a color — the name of the color is on the tip of my tongue, but the color itself is something else. I have some color, anyway. Am I male or female? It doesn’t show.

  One of the attendants politely asks me to stand to one side. This brings me back to my lines and as I feign embarrassment I look around, scanning the faces of the devotees. One man’s nondescript, sacklike features suddenly throb at me: a single, equivocally grey pulse of neutral emotion. This is my contact. I amble over to where the man is sitting in a shapeless heap of rags, taking my time. He had routinely to pass through inundated rooms where cadavers floated upright. The man’s rags are scraps of raw silk watered with ash-perfume, his prayer-rug is the color of salmon meat, with cobalt dragons woven into the fabric and a white fringe. The man is counting an ice-rosary with purplish-grey fingers; he has already been paid. I kneel nearby, just slightly away from the praying man; a moment later I feel a dash of coldness hit my midsection on the inside, and something in my coat pocket that wasn’t there before.

  The deep sun glows a few feet from my face. A sun, deep down... As clouds cross the sky above, the light waxes and ebbs again making a grand, slowly smoking lamp of the deep sun. Cold air falls from its surface onto my brow, pressing down on my features in a new mask. I get up with care and get out of there, my new frost-face is already boiling away. Suddenly, a nameless jeopardy is there, all around me, a part of the book I didn’t know — probing attention and seeking all around like searchlights. Alarm bristling and snapping from the walls and the floor, I keep my face down, holding his breath. Getting into a group of visitors filing out the exit I slither along the red velvet rope past the attendants and the placards, straining to reach the anonymous tunnels before my breath gives out.

  Finally I duck aside into a small alcove with fuseboxes, and let go — my exhalation smashes through my mist-mask, destroying it. I reach into my pocket. My fingers pull out a piece of heavy paper, almost cardstock, folded in fours. It’s stiff with cold, and I have to pry it apart and scrape the frost from its surface to read the address in iridescent blue ink.

  *

  People are congregated in a dark, head-craning mass at the glass wall, to either side of one of the massive, airlock-like iron doors to the outside. These doors open onto an elevated causeway connecting two pavilions a hundred stories in the air, normally employed only by the maintenance men. Use of the causeways when the wind exceeds a certain force is forbidden for safety reasons, which is why the crowd is now gawking at the lone figure who lies face down out there, gripping the causeway floor with all his might and bracing himself with his legs as the bludgeoning wind trains on him in an unremitting flat horizontal beam.

  Oh good it’s me — I am clutching at the iron and randomly pounding with my toes as though I could kick footholds into the metal. My fingers are killing me, but worse yet they are numbing in the blast, particles of ice shred exposed skin and I don’t dare open my windward eye at all. The left eye, shielded by my nose, I can only open for an instant at a time, peer through a pink shroud of glare at the opposite door, the rails lining the causeway, some of which have already been blown off. In total confusion I hold on; frustrated hatred building up behind me, coming from some of the faces at the glass, the ones that clearly don’t belong to mere bystanders. It’s as though a pack of huge hate-convulsed dogs were snarling and howling for my blood, and I am grateful for the dangerous protection of the screening wind.

  The cold is sandpapering my lungs, and now nausea makes me retch helplessly — the caustic spray starts to freeze around my mouth. The sour taste wakes me up a little; I grit my teeth and they feel a little soft. Desperate and furious I lunge forward thrusting my arm out and down fast as a mousetrap — fingers clench and dig thin furrows into the iron and I drag forward, feet scrabbling. I’ve got to take off my glasses — if the wind got hold of them I’d be as good as blind — no sooner does the thought occur than I feel them slide loose from behind my ears they flash off to the left and with unconscious recklessness I snap them out of the air — with only one hand holding me in place now I slide toward the edge my fingers squealing and leaving blood marks. I plot the move in my head then do it — jam the glasses into pocket drop flat put left hand down on metal and push back stop the slide.

  The wind is like an avalanche. My clothes seem ready to disintegrate. Another burst of desperation fills my muscles with light and I dash forward veering into the wind and staying low, clamping down again when I feel the wind begin to draw me aloft. Squinting around with my left eye I seem to have closed the distance to the far door. Behind me, amid the frothing impotence he can sense the avid eyes, the innocent sympathy of the by
standers. I inch to the right again until I am up against the rails. Another wave of nausea wrenches me and I turn my head this time, watch as a translucent membrane of cloudy-clear mucous bursts from my mouth and sails off spreading its tendrils like a portuguese man o’ war. I compress then lunge, slip toward the left side with terrible speed grab the edge of the door and pull my body into the frame. The door is set directly into the glass, a large shielding ring around the glass and the door. The wind is still so strong here I’m back against the inside of the ring, and have to pull myself up, “standing” horizontally, to grab at the door latch. It’s locked. I gesture wildly to a maintenance man, Night person, in sky-blue coveralls, on the other side of the glass. He is waving his hands and making his inaudible reply:

  “You’ll have to go back!”

  My mouth filling with bile I pull back, can’t let go, ram the window with my forehead. A crack in the three-inch thick glass appears with a sound like a pistol shot. The man in the coveralls is flailing wildly. I draw back again, strings of vomit snapping between my face and the smeared glass, and ram again, the crack widens and develops tributaries. I wind up a third time, the wind threatening to bend me backwards against my own spine, and this time my head makes a blushing cloud of white cracks flecked with livid red. Pulling back again, I suddenly hear a voice calling wildly — the maintenance man holds the door ajar and waves me in.

  “Stop! Stop! You can come in!”

  I shift my grip and slither around the doorframe, collapsing on the floor as the maintenance man swiftly shuts the door again. I’ve got my hands to my head, half-frozen, half-deaf, and groggy. When my vision begins to clear, I notice I’m alone. Oh. The maintenance man has gone to get somebody. I take some steps through borax passages with tile walls, drains in the steel floor, out into the open streets of the pavilion. I have to vomit again — watery and black, a worm flops over itself weakly and expires in the air.

  “Sorry, man.”

  I came to get the tablets and time is running out on this incarnation or whatever — the address identified this pavilion. No one is pursuing me yet. I push on, but I can’t get myself going in a straight line. I slosh through a fountain and emerge whipping water from my pant cuffs in all directions I carve destruction through a sidewalk restaurant blundering into tables knocking diners from their chairs and treading on their food. My eyes are like riveted on this vague spot up ahead. There’s an escalator farther along the gallery; it’s a down one. Climbing up onto the gallery banister, I pull up to the next story using the jugendstil iron filligree fringing its railings. I get up to the upper banister, drop forward knocking my chest against a high planter, a sort of basket of woven steel ribbons that can’t ever be put anywhere but in the way, so I land on my face and get up slowly. I didn’t break my glasses because they are still in his pocket — I put them on.

  Now I see what I’m looking for: a booth selling flavored ices and glowing with a clean, snowy light. The proprietor has a boyish face; his eyes are rolled up toward the ceiling as though he were pertinaciously rereading a single word there, his fingers drum the counter and he grins foolishly, the picture of affected nonchalance. I crash into the front of the booth and plant the card on the counter like a drunk pawing his change on the bar. Suddenly smooth and efficient, the counter-man plucks up the card and drops two pale powder-blue tablets into my hand, sets down a small glass of very clear water with a tap.

  “These may cause nausea,” he says.

  “Swell.” I cram the tablets as far as I can into my mouth and drain the glass, leaving a thick lip print. In a flash, the glass is gone, the counter is wiped, and the affected nonchalance is restored as before.

  “Wait, what do these do?”

  “Prevent bends, pressure sickness.”

  *

  Fourteen minutes after he takes the tablets the ground slides out from beneath the Great Lover’s feet. The clock reads nine thirty and he falls in no direction, or in any, and the time he has spent in the city reverses itself. Light of all hues gushes from his eyes and drops away, a wild cacophony of backward sounds pours from his ears and sluices into his mouth, smells flow out his nose, his skin vibrates heat cold pain pleasure pressure textures into the air, as knots of memory are unwrapped into experiences and then into possibilities, all leaving him like rats deserting a sinking ship. Something is being left behind for him, in the new memory taking shape now, but it has already lost itself in his mind — it will take time to dowse it out again.

  I look out through the glass wall into a night that lasts months. My face mingles with the blackness outside, the character I am in this chunk of a story I’ve brazenly forced my way into, like those women’s dreams. Our enemies do this all the time, but they do it with no risk to themselves, and so what they bring back with them from the stories they ransack has no weight at all. It turns into more smoke to add to the screen.

  This character remembers coming into the city — I can see his memories there like plots in a botanical garden, each one has a label. As I am pulling loose again, my time expiring, I stretch. In memory, through the ice he had glimpsed the churning shadow of some figure struggling along toward the city, directly over the underwater train. He has only just arrived. The overpowering wind sparkles with minute fragments of ice, reflecting the light of the pavilions, and the long tapering banners of the roofs opposite are battering themselves to pieces in the blizzard.

  The Great Lover lumbers out of the gloom. The city limits are marked by a string of lights; the flying snow and ice grit make these lights appear to flicker. I watch myself come feeling this character’s panic — the person he sees is an intruder in this story. He is petrified, his eyes riveted on the Great Lover, who is now here, now there, seems at times to tower over the city, gigantic and terrible as Plague. An inch or so from each pupil his gaze turns into two jets of red fire that whip in the gale like bright rags, and as he nears the picket of lights, an idiotic leer on lips encrusted with frozen saliva glints at him like a humiliating secret.

  I will go back to this half-frozen idiot now — I can feel the pull of that mad body on me. My assumed character drops to the floor like a heap of empty clothes, his body dream collapses and his clothes turn to a flimsy trickle of smoke stretching itself languid and slow as a cat, turning in on itself, turning invisible, vanishing into finer and finer particles. He is siphoning back into time, in the direction of the start of his story.

  Good luck!

  I cross the ice, and enter the City of Sex. Filling my body again is like drawing a long deep nourishing breath, even in the lethal cold. I go to the Cadaverium, an enormous building of polished metal covered with solemnly decorous erotic engravings. Beneath high ceilings of unfinished black iron, whose vaults are mist-traps, deceased and desisted citizens are dropped into a deep shaft in the ice, dropping down out of sight. They find their level and their niche below on their own. Sometimes they actually swim down out of sight, without a moment’s glance at any of the living assembled at the surface. It’s unknown exactly where they go. I think however that they’re all together in one big chamber, where a mysterious current holds them firmly up against the walls, in two or three layers. And there they wave and nod, in the shadows, in twenty-three degree water. That chamber is bottomless.

  Relatives and mourners will sometimes come to ask their dead ones important questions. A dancing, blue-white flame is lowered on a silver tripod over the steaming water, and a figure slides into view far below... glides up, breaking the surface without troubling it with a single ripple. They always break the surface in a rolling or twisting movement, never suddenly. For as long as you speak with them, they stay. When you’ve finished, they turn and sink out of sight again. The light ebbs and throbs, and turns the icy skin of the face to a creamy torch. Dead lips move emphatically to form speech, the metallic voice is impersonal, the words are hollow, the sentences empty as robbed tombs.

  Bodies roll to the surface now: beautiful tender and heatless lips whisper Vera Ve
ra Vera, a sussuration rising from the water up to the dome, the shadows, the beams, the ceiling.

  I fling myself into the pool and sink. Indigo shade closes around me like a sack, shadowy hands and feet descending through deepening blue. A crushing pressure grips me, the blue turns black, although I can make out rows of slow-gambolling dark forms, like dancers languidly raising their arms...

  In total darkness, I suddenly feel close to Vera, as though this is where her vision is hidden. I realize she has never left my mind. Love is what floods into me now as I feel her inside me. Love for her. Love of her. I don’t see her, but my face is her face.

  Being alone is painful, but it’s pain you can get used to, like a chronic ache in the back, the stomach, in the hands. You have your dignity to brace yourself with, although it may not go numb until you get too old. It is the pain of not quite being a walking corpse. Even the coward who cringes inside his paroxysm of fright is more alive.

  People must hurt each other, as inevitably as they breathe. Nothing can stop it. It’s not enough to accept it. Accepting it is not enough, like sighing resignedly and putting on an attitude of long-suffering. Don’t get to be too good at protecting yourself. You’ve got to be ripped to pieces for the one you love, again and again. That doesn’t prove anything but love, and its entitlements are a frailty that can’t be held. But you will live even in that hell. The fire that hurts you gives off light like any other fire, that illuminates beautiful things, and that is beautiful itself.