A mutter is going through the room. The Great Lover reaches down and takes hold of something invisible and social, like big cables, and tugs them. Bosanquet swings by. The Great Lover, with a crooked finger, summons him.
“Can I get you anything?”
The Great Lover nods glassily. The next moment he has hypnotized Bosanquet with instructions to insinuate himself alongside Futsi and launch into a protracted expatiation on the subject of his choice.
The Great Lover peers out at the high table from behind one of the apartment’s many pillars, and watches as Bosanquet, already in position, launches into a set piece on Marx’s theory of exchange value. The Great Lover watches anxiously: Vera sits there, stroking the edges of her empty plate with the tips of her fingers. Futsi is feigning interest. The Great Lover rivets his gaze on Vera. Futsi remarks something to her. She raises her head up to him with an ear-to-ear blind smile, the glory of the world. His hand she holds in her lap.
She abruptly goes still, except for her eyes. Then at once she turns her face in his direction.
Voices are calling, faces turning in his direction. He wants to get to Vera, but suddenly everyone has noticed him.
“He’s back! He’s back!”
“Ah, brothers and sisters!” Dr. Thefarie stands on his chair, a glass in his hand. “Let us welcome back our nameless friend!”
A rush of scattered uncoordinated applause, raised voices. For a moment, the Great Lover’s eyes meet Futsi’s, as the man rises onto the seat of his chair to see this living legend. Vera is standing there with her mouth open.
“Help. Help,” he whispers barely moving his lips.
The Great Lover leaps onto a table with a huge black grimace and eyes like two white-hot coals, clasps his hands together over his head and brandishes them like prizefighter.
“The winner!” he screams, “And still champion!”
He crouches like a frog and leaps thirty feet right into the channel, disappearing without a trace.
*
Later that night, nervous feathers vibrating like pneumatic drills slip between the stones, unlacing the masonry with a steady friction... chunks of stone and cement crack and drop away, the abandoned floor of the chamber, strewn with the remains of the banquet, is battered by the falling debris. Wings seethe in. A limp figure drags itself into the gap on huge, sinewy wings. The body lies face down on the rubble, the wings adhering unnaturally to its back straddle like bowed legs, and knuckle-walk it forward on the flattened tips of its wings. As the figure slides down to the tunnel floor, untenanted wings sluice through the gap after it, spinning in air made musky by their grease.
Futsi is walking with Vera, back to his apartment.
“That demon is something! How does he jump so far...” He makes a wing-spreading gesture and then looks at her.
“You’re so silent.”
“I thought he wath gone. We were all thyure.”
“...He is dead, isn’t he?”
His heart is beating. I can hear it. I’m even feeling it.
“No, he wath dead. Now he’th alive.”
“That’s something!” Futsi says. “Did the demon bring him back?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll ask him!”
*
The Prosthetic Libido holds a feather up to the light and sighs. It’s the next day.
“Why can’t I? Go out there, I mean.”
“Sooner or later someone would try to copy you, or improve you. They,” I make a gesture including everything outside the window, “aren’t worthy of that knowledge. And you, for that matter, deserve better than the treatment you’d get from them.”
I reach into my coat and withdraw a new-looking steel blade nearly two feet long, with a pole socket in one end, hand it to him.
“Sharpen this for me, will you?”
Pearl takes the blade in his hands, edge toward him, pinches the edge between right thumb and index finger, and slides the pinch in one smooth zip along the edge; the metal rings and a cloud of filings fine as ash spurts into the air. He pertly hands the blade back to me with unblemished fingers. The cutting edge is sharpened down to near invisibility.
“What’s that for?” he asks.
“Just a feeling,” I say. “You might try... moving very quickly.”
“...?”
“If you move as fast as you can, perhaps you will be too fast to see — at least up close. Velocity has a lot to do with being able to see things.”
“...What’s wrong?”
He’s staring at me. He’s concerned. Taking a step toward me, he lays his hand, light as a leaf, on my arm.
“You’re hurt—”
“Yes, that’s right.” My voice is so ugly he just stops.
*
He looks like a submarine, slipping along in the deep. Futsi’s head is right by my shoulder. I get up slowly — sometimes I still catch myself listening for my father, as if he might call to me from wherever he is. When it happened, I thought I heard him. I don’t want to feel sad now, I let the blackness and my sleepiness fold over the thought and cover it.
The bathroom is the only place you can go in the middle of the night a stupid thing to think. The window is open. Moving naked through the dark I imagine I can find my way a little bit better, feeling the air on my skin. If you pay really close attention it seems as if you can feel the air you push aside as you move bouncing back to you from objects, and the sounds you make of course. Out there the submarine is moving along in the dark, pinnng... ping is a bad word for it it’s more like tong! or just t’oonnn — ah or aw? He shoots through the sewage like a big furry torpedo. I feel so light I imagine I could melt through the wall, float away like a cloud.
I lie down again by Futsi’s strong warm body. Now I hear banging. Somehow I know the striker is a wrench — I can hear a little rattle when it hits. What’s Futsi doing? And there’s another rattle that can’t be anything but chess pieces or checkgammon pieces go stone mah tile jonggpoker chice strike out to the stars, echo against the eighteenth century on the walls. Each blow shakes me and I feel a warm droplet drip into me where it warm congeals keep hitting it! you monster!
He’s wearing cologne. I can feel lace ruffles below his chin, and when I lift my hands and drop them down on his head, there are these weirdly regular rolls, and my hand comes away with a residue on it. I laugh and pull his wig off — he’s mad and tries to drag it out of my hand. Jewels on his clothes scrape me. I can hear cracks open in the floor, a delicious, crisping sound. When my hand brushes his head again, I feel his hair — he’s not Futsi, it’s him.
I’m outside, under some trees. Birds are calling, and through the whoosh of air in the branches I hear waves. The light falling on my skin is almost sunlight but the color feels wrong, like it’s not warm enough. The sun is still heating up out there in space, so it follows the world is not very old. A few steps... the ground rises a little in a sort of bump... roots bend my feet. The trunk is pretty smooth — a beech tree? They’re smooth aren’t they? It’s denser behind me than in front of me, so I think I must be close to the water. I take a few steps away from the beech and cold seawater pulls my knees. My clothes are folded in a little pile where I left them under some low fern branches, somewhere. Why didn’t I go swimming? Because I can’t see — I must have forgotten. That’s a strange thing to forget!
Now I understand why — this isn’t my dream. I call to him — it’s his dream. Where is he?
The trees go right down into the water, and the long grass tangles my feet. This is the Immigrants’ country. This must be Futsi’s dream after all. I hear voices now — I half want to run out and show myself to them and I half want to hide. Since hiding came second I’ll hide.
Women’s voices, yowling something at the top of their lungs. Sounds religious. It must be a seasonal festival, when they make their way along the coast singing and shouting, and throw burlap bundles of grain and other harvest fruits into the ocean. Somewhere along the way I fo
und a Japanese book with raised characters and braille in alternating lines. The Japanese are fascinated by braille’s simplicity you know. I read some of it, but all I can remember of it when I wake up is the second half of the title on the spine. It was “...from Red Master.”
*
The night and sleep collude to create strays; a girl fell asleep in the park, where her body lay beneath a heavy, shapeless web of shadows draped past the trunk and thickening with dusk, beneath thick, heavy dark of dreamless sleep. A weak air feebly stirs leaves above her breathing face, wan patch against black roots. She falls deeper into sleep like alcohol’s quiet as she stands up, her numb eyes are barely broken open. Now she walks not slow nor fast, halting and stalking like a child just learning. In her sleep there is an image lying flat in invisible clouds of muffling black, the rough boundary of stone, the street washed with orange light, the leprous pale sidewalk, the black passage lined with steps down, and framed with iron scab. In the passage the grating is half unhinged and hangs, sags nearly to the ground, and is no bar to her.
There are only a handful of blue lights to illuminate the cavernous station, a broad wafer of pale blue space cut across by two silver-lined black grooves. Moonlight blue lights glow from tiles powdered with plaster dust. The booth is dark, the turnstiles are streaked with fine-lined splints of light, the turnstiles have black wings of barred grates, and the wide open gate watches her approach, her form is air, a feather, she leaves light steps.
The black mouth without breath of the tunnel grows, fills her fogged eyes. There is a strong smell of urine here, and the walls have isosceles triangles of thick yellow-brown residues rising from the floor up the walls. The smell is stronger, its acridness stirs her — as it grows suffocating she stops, and comes awake as a shape flops out of the mouth of the tunnel before her. The body is naked and prone, and dirty. Sinewy wings protrude from its back and reach down to the floor like legs, holding it off the ground and knuckle-walking it forward in a limp, loping walk. The head hangs down on slack stretched neck between the shoulders, the head is hairless and the scalp has peeled from the skull. In choking smell of cold urine it drags and walks out of the tunnel before her. The ridged back of the flopping neck and head stares at her like a face. Sleep-addled the girl retreats backwards. The wings lift the body, the head drops with a soft thud on the seat of the bench, and turns as the body is lowered. She sees the bruised face, and hears a panting sigh from mouth without breath. A ball in the throat and thickened limbs turned viscous as tar she cannot turn in time, the weight is pressing her to the floor, a beating at her back, a tug her dress gives way and air floods her skin, cold damp and thick as glue a heavy weight is shifted onto her, cold wormlike fingers bore into her back, a cold burn as her skin is boiled and fused, tugged to and fro. She struggles; the wings churn; she is lurched into the air, the platform falls through the open pit mouth of the tunnel, and with it the newly derelicted body lies abandoned its back ragged with rents where the wings had been. With each wing beat, she bobs; she hurtles alone in the air.
*
Homeless wings sneak up on unsuspecting victims and pounce, planting their stumps into the victim’s back, and making off with him to where? No one knows. I suppose the wings fly around with them until they succumb to privation, exposure, rough treatment. Deuteronôme has divined an uncertain relationship between the wings and what Ptarmagant had called the Vampirism. At first, I had assumed this was essentially ghûl, but now we have one of our own I no longer think so. Ghûl is the blank of the desert and of death; words spread in infinite space like pepper on the surface of the water, growing always thinner until there’s nothing left of them. It’s also the sandstorm that rages and erases. And the mirages, “will of wisps” the Europeans call them, that lure men into sand or quicksand. These vampires, on the other hand, leave us where we are but grind us away into phantoms, and this cannot be allowed.
A meeting is called inside one of the bridges. Futsi comes rolling in with the other skateboard riders; he glides in, standing on his board, smiling. He’s been a great blessing to us — a sturdily-built Japanese man with a mohawk, draped in a sweatshirt as big as a kameez. Long linen ribbons he has wound around his shins, making his black canvas pants bulge like onions at the knees.
Multiply greets Futsi. First time I saw Futsi, he thinks, I thought he had some mess on the back of his neck. Then I see it’s this tacky tattoo of a cougar head. It’s just the outlines, and the eyes and the white parts around the mouth, because his skin is already the right color. At first I thought it was lame, but now I look again and think it’s all right, like the old respect of the tribe for the animals. I asked him about it and he said he had a dream, and saw it there on his neck, so he went out and got it.
Dr. Thefarie noticed the tattoo as well — I had to ask what it was — a female lion? As I look at its solemn expression, I find I keep a straight face myself only with difficulty.
After some preliminary remarks, Deuteronôme cedes the floor.
Uar, a mestizo from Bahia, is an accomplished trance fighter with a curly mop of thick hair and a skin condition; while most of his body is dark copper the delicate skin of his face and neck, his hands and forearms to the elbow is bleached translucent grey. The hued skin meets the bleached in ragged lines dotted with flakes of pale in the brown. His jawline is spotted with the woolly buttons of his sparse beard, which glisten like glass thread against his ghostly face. The condition has also drained his eyes a moonlight ash. He wears a rumpled shirt rolled up at the elbows and half open.
Sitting down on a bench, something catches the corner of Deuteronôme’s eye and in the same moment he feels a hot streak in his spine — a huge boa constrictor slides by among the thick PVC piping overhead. It veers off toward a shadowy corner and before Deuteronôme can turn his head the demon is there, half hidden in the dark, listening to Uar.
“Sometimes they come out of the jungle and burrow into graves, looking for bodies to attach to, and sometimes — we don’t know why — the wings attach inside the body, and not on the outside.”
Uar folds his hands across his broad chest.
“They squeeze the lungs and heart like milking a cow,”
He flexes his hand open and closed.
“to animate the body, and work the arms and legs from within by pushing on the bones. The cold brains revive with the blood, but they have no control of the body from the neck down. Their guts and their mouths are choked with feathers, and the feeling makes them insane. They hate like sulfur everyone who isn’t suffering like them, and so they turn into vampires. But since they can’t drink blood with their bodies full of feathers, they suck out your spirit with their eyes.
“The sun doesn’t bother them. They walk in the street and try to go unnoticed, taking spirit away from everyone they pass. So you go in a crowd and come out feeling lightheaded, weak. They run people down, and run down the world. They like it when people cut down trees, because trees interfere with them. Wherever trees are being chopped down, you know vampires are there. They also like it when people put lights everywhere at night, because they feed by seeing you. But they don’t like being seen. They are insatiable, because they suck not by hunger, but because of insane irritation.
“To fight them, you have to meet them vampires in a trance; the trance stiffens up your spirit like changing milk to cheese, so it is hard to suck away. The vampires notice when you do this and will want to come after you right away, so be ready.”
Uar taps the palm of his left hand with the edge of his right.
“Luckily they are cowards, and will not like a confrontation with you face to face. They are parasites, not hunters. A grey thought held in empty hand.”
Deuteronôme’s eyes flick from Uar to the demon to Futsi. The demon’s eyes flick from Uar to Futsi, to Deuteronôme.
“Perhaps you have something you can tell us,” he calls to the demon. Now all eyes flick.
The figure seems to rise and fall again as it creeps forwa
rd into the light. His face is different — the brown flakes of dried filth have turned into a mask of fine blue lines, like an etching.
Multiply thinks — now his face looks like someone went crazy with a ball point and a spirograph.
“When Ptarmagant was alive,” the demon says, “he showed me a page from the Phaedrus whose meaning he felt was of crucial importance. Not to go on and on about it, the wings are city elementals of thwarted desire that bud off and become separate. They are a complement to the red armbands. I would recommend avoiding direct confrontation with them for the time being. As Uar said, trance is important. It is important because, if you simply attack them directly, you will be feeding them the vitality you throw into the attack. The harder you fight the more they will feed.”
“And if they come for us?” Deuteronôme asks.
“Run. If possible, get them to chase you. That will tire them out... I’ll get them to chase me. The more they chase and fail to catch what they’re chasing, the more they are weakened as a whole. In fact, if enough of us are willing, we should establish teams of runners to provoke them.”
Futsi has been staring at the Great Lover in rapt attention.
“We could” he says, “do that to the armbands, too! Do you think that would work?”
The demon says nothing, but seems to shrink.
Deuteronôme: He is jealous. I can almost see his pain, like a fall of sick water pouring over him. It’s like a biting, sour smell.
“Yes,” I say aloud, “we will coordinate teams of runners. You,” I point to the demon, “will deal with the wings, and you” I point to Futsi, “will deal with the armbands.”
We are breaking up now. The demon is dissolving into the shadows. Immigrants standing near me watch him go, talking with Futsi, who seems to want to go talk to him. They are making skeptical faces, and speaking to each other in their own language. “Dybbuk,” they call him, “kachina.”
Multiply rolls past his corner smiling at the shrinking demon. “Too bad he got your woman...” he sings softly as he is going by.
The Great Lover Page 24
