Closer—! I think he jumped! I heard a slam, I think it was his chest hitting the edge of the next platform. I hear him grunting as he gets to his feet, it must have hurt like mad. His heart is white hot and rings like an anvil, howls like bellows. I’ve been taken to visit blacksmiths and I could feel the wild heat, hear the clash of the hammer and the horseshoe, it’s coming back from the tunnels and the rails, the anvils of the wheels, a sound like turtledoves’ sobbing all smeared together in the deep echo of caves. But somehow the crowd parts us, and I am on the train leaving his longing behind me.
I turn around at the next station and come back, but he’s gone. Then Futsi comes, and I forget again.
Dream of a medieval castle, musty stone and tapestries. Futsi, with long hair, is rolling me around on a fur rug that’s now by the fire now on the bed. I brush my hair, sitting at the mirror just for fun. Swing my hand out I can stroke the cold glass with the back of my knuckles. Futsi has gone out for a piss.
Suddenly I’m excited, because I know he is climbing up the fantastically high wall, toward the window. If I lean out the sill, he could see me. Should I put something on? Being unsure whether to do that or not is incredibly exciting. Any moment now he will boil up and fill the window. If Futsi catches us!
I reach out my hands, and my right brushes his knee, which is bare. I slide my hands along his bare legs — he is crouching on the sill. Futsi is behind me, running his hands over my shoulders, and in front of me there is a shapeless amorousness.
“You have to go.”
“Why? He won’t drop dead,” he says.
“I don’t want to make him unhappy. You’ll see me again soon, now collect your smell and go.”
“I won’t go unless you tell me when.”
“You must go, before he sees you.”
“I’m right in front of him.”
“He doesn’t see you yet you’re invisible.”
“No.”
“I’ll see you.”
Lenore calls out “He’s here.”
Vera runs out to meet Futsi, stall him coming in. She uproots herself from him and leaves — he remains—
He dreams he is looking at a corroded box fan barely turning its blades in the open grate of the ventilation shaft — the blades turn, and all at once his face is wet with tears. Sadness — she’s gone. A creak, a snapping sound — the fan crashes to the floor.
*
A cultist named Carver crawls into a meeting at the edge of a defunct platform and tells how she’d seen the wings congregating in a huge underground roundhouse room or switching yard. She was not detected in the act of spying, but was set upon by a group of wings some time later and badly injured. Deuteronôme and Dr. Thefarie both are present when she succumbs to her wounds, and the bitter rage that communicates itself throughout the ranks of the cultists is palpable even to the wings themselves, like a red-black thunder.
“This anger will draw them to us,” Deuteronôme says. “We must attack them first.”
As the situation is summarized in a hastily-convened meeting, I sit distractedly watching Spargens playing with his white bull terrier at the back of the room. Spargens holds a stick at either end, the dog clamps his jaws on the middle, and Spargens spins him around off his four feet. Something sinuous and electric in the movements of the dog powerfully expresses love for Spargens.
We attack at “dawn” — underground, this is when certain work lights are illuminated by timer switch — when the wings congregate in the roundhouse yard. Enormous fans generating perpendicular air currents and noise disrupters designed by a woman named Karla will conceal our approach until the moment of attack.
From the radiant eastern tunnels four subway engines come in spearhead formation horns blaring and plough into the seething mass of wings and bodies at full speed. Two trains out in front and one on either flank a length back; Uar rides atop the foremost train on the right, a machete in his right hand and a kukri in his left, his feet braced under a chain wrapped around the roof of the car; he is instantly in motion and hidden in a blizzard of feathers, his calm face through ragged gaps in the flickering cloud, his arms darting jabbing. Similarly braced the Great Lover rides left foremost rapidly swinging his curtain rod on its line above his head in a wide circle that no wings can enter; the knobbed ends ring with each wing they split and the ringing is constant. On the rear left, Dr. Thefarie sits strapped in a marlin-fishing chair, wearing a pair of thick gloves with high-friction grabbing surfaces on the palms and fingers. Years of Civil-War-style battlefield amputations have made him an expert with the surgical saw he holds in his right hand, and as the wings come at him he snatches them in one hand with catlike speed and saws them apart with two swift strokes. Red-faced, swathed in five sweaters and drenched in perspiration, hard-breathing Spargens rides the fourth car, flailing away with a crushing loop of heavy chain.
The four barrelling engines gouge a swath through the wings, ramming, running down, or breaking them above and the air is white with feathers like flying sea foam. A body drops clumsily down knocking Spargens back against the roof of his car; he is pinned beneath the remains and the wings are pounding his face and sides. With cries of alarm Spargens frantically wraps the chain around his fist and batters back at random. A lucky swing splinters the left wing and he hastily kicks the body forward to fall beneath the wheels of the car. Shriek of brakes, the cars squeal to a halt just within the tunnels opposite the ones from which they emerged, and now is the crisis when the volunteer operators must shift control to the opposite compartments while the fighters on the roofs turn round.
Covering this moment is a charge of cultists on skateboards and on foot, led by Futsi and Deuteronôme. The main body of the wings has been cut in half and driven to either side, now they rush to eliminate the flanking cars as the nearest targets of opportunity while the reinforcements close on them.
Spargens has barely turned himself around when the wings are upon him; he flounders desperately lashing out with his chain not infrequently bruising himself. Dr. Thefarie is snatching at wings with both hands, stacking them hastily beneath both feet and holding them down with mounting effort. The trains lunge back into the open space of the yard. With gleeful whoops, Futsi skates over and climbs to Spargens’ aid, sprints the length of the car cutting and clubbing with a hatchet. The Great Lover’s curtain rod lances down between Dr. Thefarie’s feet, splitting all the bunched wings struggling there in half. With a whip of the line, he has it up in the air again and sailing back to his hand.
The trains advance slowly into the center of the chamber and stop. The tracks, the entire floor, are nearly buried under a faltering layer of dismembered wings and crushed remains. Dismounting, the war-party regroups and advances in the same formation on foot, driving the wing remnants back against the walls, cornering them by the switching-house. Dr. Thefarie runs to and from Uar’s train, bringing a jingling crate in his arms. He opens the crate and quickly-formed details light the rags and hand the bottles forward. Crouched like ape-men, their faces blank as ghosts’ their irises gone white their gaze fixed without wavering without blinking on the massed enemy, the foremost receive the bottles into their open hands as they reach back and then hurl them from the right hand and the left hand into the mass. In silence, the wings churn in billows of flame, a greasy smoke sluices up the walls and undulates across the ceiling. The cultists remain at the blistering edge of the fire weapons ready to drive back.
Only when the fire has mastered the wings do they withdraw, their eyes and skin burning from the greasy, foul-smelling smoke. It falls to the Great Lover, who is unaffected, to clear the vast floor of the roundhouse and feed the fire with the remainder of their enemies.
*
I’m strumming like mad. His hand takes one of mine and pulls me up like I’m a balloon. We’re running together holding hands. I can still feel myself strumming the guitar, and it hums against my body, but holding his hand we’re running together. I can hear wind shaking the trees over
the low howl of the wheels on the rails, I can feel wonderful speed — my legs kicking way up behind me.
Now I’m suddenly completely confused, I don’t know where I am or who, but my impressions have become more distinct. They stand in a line. I guess I’m awake again, on the train. My hands rest on my thighs — I grab my legs, pat myself — my guitar! I feel around — nothing. I lay my head back not knowing whether to laugh or cry some asshole stole my guitar!
Something booms quietly near me, and rustles. I put out my hand — my guitar is there, hovering. I take it in both hands and I feel it move toward me, turning over onto its back, with a force that comes down the neck.
“Thankth,” I say, moving one hand to the neck.
Fingers deliberately brush that hand as they release the guitar.
“It’th you!”
I feel as though a furnace door had come open and heat swirls over the front of me.
Ding-dong. The doors roll open.
“Where can we meet?” his voice asks, and the heat stirs again.
“Uh...”
“Think of somewhere.”
“...There’th a pathage off the platform in the nextht thation—”
I mustn’t think — I won’t think any thought—
Ding-dong.
“Get outta the doors!” on the PA.
“When?” same level voice.
“...Two hourth?”
Ding-dong.
He’s gone.
Rest with my guitar in my lap. No thinking.
What am—
No thinking.
No thinking.
I can stay away —
No thinking.
No planning.
Futsi
Don’t think.
Just be there, in two hours.
*
He rushes in—
Sweet pressure in his chest of a new embryo breaking its bud.
I’m your bondsman that’s a happy note — he bends to press his rinsed ear to take in the delectable time beaten out on the soft anvil of her compact body, her heart is there, that’s her core — the encompassing ribs unlace to admit her heart’s companion, and combine by accomplished accomplice enlace and edit me, so do it incomparably. The wan boom of her breath rolls like a tide by my ear, rises going by my white and serrated moon of an ear. I press my lips where the skin is stretched taut and thick over a fixed undulation of bone, by the pit of her throat... These pompous words are for Vera too: if she laugh, what blessing, if they thrill even better.
Vera’s vine-locks trickle one by one from her shoulders, both our faces stop beneath her veil and compare features, and now lips combine again — start and stop. Her nostrils are warming my cheek. Scrub and scrub, the lines won’t go.
She doesn’t know she’s supposed to close her eyes, lids only a little slack her eyes’ dammed vitality has made them hard vital and sparkling. They writhe like netted fish in jackets of gelatinous water... Her mouth is warm, her lips are a little chewed up, rasp their torn thread on lips scaled to rend from my warped lip the ragged marrow of my breath... Short breathings escape our peculiar faces kneaded together partly hard; lips of fingers knit and part, his cradle her jaw and skim her eyelids — and her twin wands of hands seethe up to his shoulders in serial pressure that push her touch through the clothes to his skin.
We fold together in a shaggy apostrophe, moving our faces from purchase to purchase, and eight golden coffins glow unseen in a diamond. An inaudible chorus of eight voices lifts its smoking ray up, making it around early Autumn, lulling warmth of slumbering sun patching ember-colored leaves in Vera, streaming brightly, sere crisply bright-edged through airborne dust in me. Flame tongues flare red as coral, unnoticed above she and me brows as they cinch. She breathes aloud, I pull my face not so far from hers that she won’t know by its heat that it’s near, and gaze down, stark love look slices through my eyes and carves happiness onto her face. Her fingers sweep my cheeks, nose, eyes, my forehead, her mouth works thoughtlessly as she builds my portrait in her mind. She looks distraught, her hands seep joyously into his body. He clings again splitting and resplitting fiercely: cruelly strong. Empty-handed thoughts weave blank wall hangings around them, their sound listens to the sound of listening.
Now quick run upstairs together — and under open sky (hung with blazing pink veils) you can feel without having to look at it.
Under clouds’ pink pelt cross-combed back, in brown light of dusk, that is at once only brown, only pink, only orange... in the stealthy approach of the confiding hour her hair will be one whole earth.
*
A spotter reports by signal-light morse relay a Vampirism in rush hour crowds midtown. Uar rendezvous with the demon — he calls him the Duende — and the two come on from opposite directions. Uar arrives first.
The station is a half-cylinder lined with orange tiles, wide open without supports or barriers; his man is pasty, middle-aged, with watery blue eyes and meager colorless hair, limp big and tall body in a short-sleeved green shirt and wide khaki shorts, white sneakers, canvas baseball cap. He walks dully back and forth with a pink newspaper, numbly scanning the crowd, and the attentive eye can see the cone of grey silting around his face. Uar walks toward him purposefully. Where the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers conjoin, their waters flow alongside each other in a massive bed, one side black and one side red. His teacher had taught him to use this metaphor for power, observe as the two halves close around you like breath and feel yourself borne up and along on a vast current. Think of the edges of the two rivers together getting thinner and thinner to the unimaginable point of division which is both or neither, a blade thin upright and sharp.
“Now pick it up and use it.”
The Duende is making power somewhere in the tunnel, and the vampire glides sluggishly toward it. Uar is blowing out a bubble of alert attention around himself, within which everything is faster and simpler. Fear makes the vampire dangerous — not Uar’s fear, but the vampire’s own, strangely abstract, fear. They are running in the tunnels. Every dimly glimpsed thing around him flies by at incredible speed, and he is light as air in air, running without effort, the knife in his hand. He sees the vampire silhouetted against the light of the next station. The vampire rushes out onto the platform and melts into a waiting bank of Vampirism. As Uar emerges from the tunnel there is a uniform turning there of red eyes at him, snarling mouths packed with dusty feathers. The Duende swirls in from the other side, scattering the cloud. A body thuds to the tile, torso broken open like a split cast, wings spasming behind exposed ribs.
Uar trots forward and attacks without seeing. It’s better not to see their faces, but to keep the gaze turned inward. Under the left arm, go behind, then thrust knife back fast where the spine joins the skull, hilt bangs against the back of the head. Draw out the knife, kneel, and cut the head off.
One of his teachers told him, “You will find you become many animals. Certain animals will come more readily than others, and you can use them to get into the rapids of changes.”
With Uar it’s horses, who knows why, and he brings his chin down, snorts through his nostrils, and kicks up his right leg bent at the knee while sort of hopping once or twice on his left foot, like the front half of a horse doing dressage. Strike out into the haze and impale a flaccid heart, pull the knife back and slice a throat, two chops make a V in the smoke and a slab of smoke slides out of the notch and splatters on the tile, becoming a corpse. Uar glances up at the Duende, who draws off long tendrils in the coils of his curtains, dodge and dodge and dodge again. This Vampirism is thinning like mist in the sun.
*
...a woman’s dream body, collar floats above ribs arch above hips’ basin, small feet and hands, dream sound of a woman’s voice...
In my dream, she reaches for me: I see it sadly.
Delicious image — of Vera naked against total blackness, straddling darkness, sighing and rocking. All drops away, and she alone remains gleaming and transported ablaze with
pleasure, the sound of her gasps her sighs swells in a shallow echo...
John Brade has just left the weather station, sleepwalking his way back to his apartment. He looks up at the lamps lighting the paths and they are unreal, all the green, the rich air...
Pearl gazes at me, his dim face is like creamy smoke. No, he’s not gazing. He’s just had his visit, and he’ll lie like this, a beautiful dead body relishing its death, for hours.
I go into another room and put the curtain rod back on its hooks. There’s a wardrobe against the wall. I open it. A mirror is fixed to the inside of the door. I’m there in it.
Vera sits on a bench by the tiled wall; she is talking quietly with Lenore, who holds her right hand. Lenore nods, and goes away for a moment.
“Stupidians! To the attack!”
I take off my hat.
Vera in a hallway with a room she won’t look inside. Futsi I love him.
Futsi is playing for sheer joy.
I take everything off.
Love is filling me — Vera’s short of breath.
In the next room there is a bathtub, and I fill it with water, wash myself slowly and carefully, very thoroughly, always watching my reflection.
Desire is stretching me and I don’t know what to do.
Jumping up and down in place, pounding the strings and shouting like a maniac.
Down from the street, along the steps, and across the floor, a wisp of air visits me, and stirs in my hair. I pull out the cork — it smells like cool shade, leaf canopies that shade dry hollows. The glass tips up and the flow into my mouth longs for soft glades, grass chilled with dew. The city contracts into a tunnel.
All wrapped in wine the park is full of graves, I imagine. The sky is crowded with swords. I can’t see steel and pewter, they must be gloom, the texture of this weather, all made of bruised swords, long and lovely and smooth. Wine bruised my mouth, the tick tick of the steel cup against my teeth mixes with the tartness of the drink. Now the ocean billows in the air. Ships float in the air, feeling sullen. Waves crash in the trees lining the paths, mixed with the crunch of my shoes. The wind is mangling the trees — I can hear branches break off and fall. Wind blows smash into my face like a water punching glove, stewards crash together in the sky, fencing with no fencers over the trees, the hissing manes of their lees shiver like banshees.
The Great Lover Page 27
