He is turning the pages of his newspaper, laid flat on the counter. The neighborhood is unusually quiet. A faint sound draws his attention. Idly he turns to scan the store wondering if maybe a cat got in through the back. Empty streets, blank windows, go winding by.
“I seem to have lost my way,” he thinks. All colors have taken on unusual depth, as they sometimes do on densely overcast days, or in rooms neither dimly or brightly lit, because this is a phenomenon of the middle range of light. Just for an instant, right away, there is the window of his shop, gorgeous with these strong colors. A smell of newsprint, just a momentary whiff.
There are no such colors in this street now, though the light is the same it has nothing to illuminate but the greys and blues of the gutters and cobbles, the edge of the hardtop, thick and ragged like a scab.
“Didn’t I just see it? It must be right around here.”
He searches for his shop.
Slumped over his counter, his face pressed against the newspaper.
He goes on searching through whole towns and the still country in between, with a faint, intermittent feeling of irritation, uncertainty.
“It must be this way. How could I have imagined — no, the sun is there that must be west. I must put it behind me. Perhaps — up this way?”
As though there were no air at all everything is photographically sharp and clear, each brick and empty window, and every locked door, the uneven line of the pavement, and country roads lined with dark, stationary trees, where every blade of grass stands distinct.
*
Her taste is at work. Only these ballet slippers will fit her. She takes them off, pulls on white hose, replaces the slippers. She selects a full-skirted green dress and wraps her forearms with rolls of gauze. A buff coat with an exuberant fur collar and lapel, and a flapper hat looking a bit like a helmet with a dilapidated plume sprouting from costume jewelry in front. No gloves or rings, she winds gauze around her throat, and then strings of pearls. A glass case filled with spectacles attracts her. She pulls out all the lanyarded ones and loops them one by one around her neck until she has a heavy yoke of them. They fall once against her flat breast, and then lie still and silent.
She makes up her face in a round mirror on the counter. With lipstick and powder she covers her transparent lips, so that her teeth can no longer be seen through them. She then pats down the rest of her face to match. Cosmetics into an alligator handbag.
*
I apprise Dr. Thefarie and Deuteronôme of this new development and what it likely means. Sure enough there is word already of a new presence and efficacy among the vampires — a mysterious woman, their queen yet. She has only been spotted from a distance.
“And that’s the only way she will be spotted at least anyways so anyone can tell us about it.”
It was natural she should gravitate into the Vampirism.
Deuteronôme however is skeptical and angry — “She is not coming to act against us so much as against you. Every moment you spend among us, you are drawing her here.”
“I don’t agree,” Dr. Thefarie says, “I think she is drawn by what we are doing, not by his presence among us.”
The cult is working overtime, calling out day and night to its new nameless divinity, feverishly invoking its assistance.
“The more we call, the hotter we get, and the heat is what draws them,” the Great Lover says.
“When the god comes, the heat will become too hot even for them. What are we doing here otherwise?!”
Dr. Thefarie nods.
“We have already lost three people,” he whangs three fingers in the air, “to her! And this is because you made her possible! You must go — just keep away from us!”
*
She moves in foggy landscapes of primordial earth before life, walking from fog to fog. Wherever she stops, the wings that hang all over her drop down and squirm together to form a throne, raising above her a dirty carapace made of the same waxy biological plastic of feathers, like a cloudy hood of fingernail.
A cultist in a huge anorak is collapsed drunk on a subway bench. The air goes still and dry. He smacks his mouth and turns uneasily in his uncomfortable seat. Not wanting to be conscious he pounds the woozy dark with his fist seeking reentry, but the insistence of a low voice is nagging at him — someone nearby keeps talking. No not nearby, someone at the other side of the platform, just within the lights, keeps asking
“Where? Where do I hide?”
Siren goes whimpering by and fades.
“Where? Where do all of I hide?”
“Where do I hide?” he slurs. Then he jerks awake, clutching his throat with starting eyes. Drags his collar open, hacking and gagging, tries to get up and falls on his knees, then on his face.
Empty station.
“Why can’t I get up?” he wonders. “Why can’t I sleep?”
Fog in the tracks.
“I’ll get up when the train comes in. No use bothering myself until then.... I wish I could sleep...”
Fog filling the station like a lake.
He is half-buried in motionless fog.
*
Dr. Thefarie watches fog sweeping into the station, thin at first but quickly gaining density. The tunnels plunge sharply down from here, going under the river. Perhaps the water temperature has suddenly lowered, and the tunnels have become massive cloud chambers — but what would change the pressure?
I’ve never seen anything like this — it doesn’t move like fog, or like smoke, but it seems heavier, appearing to crash in the air like something crumbling away.
It isn’t fog, it’s dust, fine as ash. Dust of crumbled feathers, I’m sure of it. The air is going dry, sucking at my eyes — they smart but what do they see? Against the tunnel lights shapes are leaping and turning, deep in the gloom... around a small figure... which advances without moving — a group of three people walking up the platform arm in arm and conversing, the one on the left waving his hand and smiling, they walk into the cloud and disappear. No one else sees it, but the people near its edge are starting to cough, and to melt into it — I draw back — a puff of air disturbs the cloud a little, parting it where the three people disappeared a moment ago, and for an instant I glimpse the soles of a pair of shoes, the slack legs beyond...
The cloud turns, sealing them over and opening in another place, and she is there, close enough for me to see the thin grey film over her unblinking eyes — the bodies wheel around her like flabby puppets, just as they did in the brine tank. And wings creep in the air around her. Their rattle does not disturb the fog at all. They are horrible, like a swarm of rats, wriggling with revolting animation, hungry parasites. Then the cloud encloses them, crashing deeper and deeper into the station in huge irresistible pulsations — and still no one sees it.
Now everyone is coughing, reeling groping at the walls or the pillars for support, but still calm, as if this were merely a fit that would soon pass.
I escape.
—As people are dying the authorities are completely at a loss — our struggle with the Vampirism and the Prosthetic Death is so invisible to them — where she goes she turns time to concrete and breath into lead, drains the light from the windows — and after comes a frenzy of recrimination... curfew imposed — it’s some kind of attack — then time passes and she is still — what happened? And then—
“Oh, your cousin’s dead?”
“Yes, she died suddenly one day, on a subway platform. They never did figure out from what — no sign of a heart attack. But strokes are less obvious...”
Futsi zooms toward the lower platform and then stops halfway down the stairs a deadly force strikes him like a wall. Not too many other people around and they don’t seem to notice. Sitting down on the steps he struggles for breath — asthma attack?
As he recovers he begins to scan around... there at the end of the far platform, like a smear of grease in the air. Their forms mill around, and a single figure standing like a statue there in among them, in a
bubble of space. A small female figure, slender, and dressed like the Great Lover.
“It’s her!”
One of them, whose spirit must have twined somehow with the Vampirism and so preserved itself better, now staggers toward her in a spasmic parody of longing, throws out his arms, its eyes burn in his slack face, and flings himself at her feet, taking her waist in his arms and staring up at her.
The Prosthetic Death gazes down at him. Her eyes blaze white and she beams, locking on his pupils.
“I can’t fight it,” she croons, barely moving her lips, “I can’t fight it.”
Futsi reels at the sound and grabs the handrail to keep himself from falling — holding up his head he sees her victim climb her body awkwardly clinging to her garments, and then mash his lips against her stony face, grinding them to pieces on her sealed mouth, her eyes still flaring like new snow in the sun. With no prelude at all he collapses in a heap, his insensible head striking the tile with a sound like a gourd.
Futsi feels a billow of incorporeal air waft toward him from the body, and drags himself up out of its way in time, hand over hand up the rail and out of sight. He has to lie flat on his back a moment. Her voice still whispers in his ear — an “I” that’s not her own. Struggling not to repeat “I can’t fight it,” he gets up with an effort that feels nearly deadly and drags himself away.
*
The eyes are completely dark, their surface is corded and dimpled like glistening prune pits. She has acquired from the Great Lover’s cadaverine a hypnotic power like his own, and when she uses it, these eyes excrete pupils of white spume through their pores. The spume curls like thick frosting and forms a little flat nipple on the front of the eye, through which she can project her fascination beams. Those pupils are like painted stars, which give no light.
A clattering sensation draws her to wherever there is noise and activity to be smoothed out like wrinkles in a counterpane; smooth and level. Flatness. Slackness. Silence. No traces. No signs. Without necessarily moving she mastered velocities. She is actually two, the machine and a dream self; the latter talks to itself about the former, but sees itself as one. She is never all there. She slowly blinks in and out. Just like Hulferde to make her female, to make her nearly, to make her partially, female. Around her, an unceasing, unvarying, eternal, infinite heart beat. It’s a pulsation of deep space that booms at the lowermost threshold of hearing. She must have a third self, hidden in plain view in distances out of distance, motionless in space between the stars and planets. In a crystalline darkness, darkness radiating through darkness, and every star shining in it, all exactly the same. The star dies, but its light continues to travel, with dark behind it. She should be there, the ghost of a sun.
Hulferde had no death to give,
death is not his or hers,
death is death,
not Death,
I am not Death,
death is me,
and what does that mean?
it means,
where I go,
I make silence,
I spread deep quiet,
I still,
I show true faces to light,
I watch myself,
a simple biological process of cessations,
all is done in no time,
I am sterile,
only a stop point,
no stink of decay — decay is life, bacteria,
the stink of life,
I have no smell,
I have no memory.
I am silent.
what are these words?
they must be silent words.
Caves inside the dust clouds, with a tunnel light nearby, she blinks in and out, visible, invisible, visible, invisible. There, not there. Her dream is never there, it is always somewhere else, settling down, down, down into Being, a silent, lightless, colorless, motionless, unfeeling dream.
*
It’s counsel-taking time, now that things have changed. Tactics have to be discussed. And we get together under the sun; for a change, we meet in small groups in the park, scattered through the park. The demon and Vera sit together in a group with Spargens and Dr. Thefarie, me, a few others — Futsi’s away. They sit beside each other, don’t seem to have anything to say, just at the moment. He glances away toward the water as the talk eddies around and away — Vera slips away just at that moment, unnoticed by him, in among trees and bushes their leaves brilliant with sunlight. There’s another little conclave further along, not too far away. That must be where she is going.
He turns his head, and might just see an edge of her hem floating away, behind the explosion of the leaves, toward the other little conclave further off. Spargens asks him about the cadaverine and he answers Spargens. Talking going on.
Tactical talk that slowly winds down, toward no clear
Spongy grass beneath my feet, and all around me an ocean of free air whooshing. I want to stretch my body, and move freely. I can’t stand to listen to all that talk, not anymore. It fills me with boiling impatience; I get frustrated without knowing why. And bored. And weary. Their voices rail on and on and won’t stop. Suddenly what was interesting turns depressing and I must escape.
Thicker, taller grass; I must have reached the edge of the meadow — normally I would hear birds ahead and above, but there don’t seem to be any birds today. A breath of air stirs the leaves, and now I hear the trees. If I walk along the margin, with my right foot in the short grass and my left in the long, I expect I’ll find a path.
There — so soon! Level ground; it’s clay. I turn left. The hood of the trees rises over me, a bank of cool air, and whispering high over my head. That I’m alone I know from the stillness. Even a quiet person makes noise enough, just the huff of air in the nose is sound enough.
Patches of heat and cool float on me as I walk. The sun through the leaves. I’m a little close to the margin of the path and the twigs want to snag my clothes. Here a more sizeable branch grows or has fallen across the path; it catches at my throat and I have trouble getting free — it’s not a branch it’s a dry, tepid hand and it’s squeezing my throat — I don’t understand the grip is so hard — I can’t breathe — the hand isn’t budging I can’t breathe — I’m being killed — my tongue is sticking out — I claw with hands I don’t feel but — but — I’m struggle — my body clouds, my lungs! — I’m being killed but I’m alive! — but I’m alive! Alive! — weak but — light, but — sunlight — is it? — I’m alive! Still alive! — still alive! but—
for a moment an uncertain feeling, Schwipps has come up... he just stands there, looking from face to face, and it’s odd because he’s usually such an outgoing man — his hands are moving together and apart, like he’s playing a phantom squeezebox.
His mouth is open and his upper lip is long and stiff.
There’s a rush — tears flow down his face.
What is it—
His face—
He points—
The first of the two copses of trees.
“It killed her!”
Without a word, all cross following him — there’s a path that turns in through the trees. Smarting eyes adjust to the dark and sharp breaths, a shape is lying beside the path. Vera lies there.
The demon stops. He makes a sound. He throws off his coat and hat takes two quick steps, stops.
He goes to her slowly, and kneels down next to her. Very gently, he rolls her over. I can hear a confused noise coming from him. Her face is grey. Very slowly he puts out his hand to touch her. A moment later he’s pawing at her sobbing and screaming like he’s out of his mind, it’s a sound like the ocean would make, like howling waves. He frisks her, as though he could find her life somewhere and put it back where it was. He picks her up and now he’s running around in circles with her.
CHAPTER TEN
There was a streak of brown grass linking the path to the copse. The trees near her showed where the thing went by. They were marked with dead patches. I used to wrap her up carefu
lly in poems from top to bottom and made her poems even when I was holding her in my arms. Then, even when I held her. I can’t.
Even then I made poems, even then. If you’re looking for glib talk go find it in hell.
Futsi screaming at me tears run down into his mouth.
“Why didn’t you protect her?!”
I turn, without one thought, thoughtlessly toward her and hit the blank that’s all that’s there, not even the memory. They’re not memories they’re past moments that suddenly fill me like pregnancy. I see what goes with her like a series in a scrapbook and from every frame she has been removed. I see what she would do, say, each what piled on top of the other growing brutally sharper until the sweetness impales me from inside out. Bayonets me from inside, and scalding grief gushes from the rip in my body taking out with it all my life. What an idiot I was not to see that life was handing me gems. Was handing me fistfulls of gems—
The Great Lover Page 29
