The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  I’ve holstered my right hand in my right coat pocket. As it lies there, not doing anything, something angular and paper is pressed into it, as though a person rushing down a dark street somewhere had paused to thrust this message through a chink in a wall, or into a really dark shadow where an alley is slimily drooling trash, through a dimension hole into my pocket. I pull out a pamphlet, a single sheet folded lengthwise, and read, stepping forward through the words — stand there emptyhanded in the ghost light. I remember every word. Walk along.

  I am in the binding; empty choirs soar on up to where, like constellations, overhead there are gleams of polished wood, the ornaments of choir screens and theater boxes, up and up in untenanted underground sky. The light of the Deep Sun, or DS for short.

  There are blue-litten salt galleries, studded with outcroppings of salt like enormous lalique sandcastles. As many of these caverns were opened, nomads with blue-painted faces would begin to emerge from them — Immigrants. The males took especially to the whores by the cloisters, kept them very busy and paid in new minerals. The nomad women sit on bolsters under waterproof fringed canopies with their few shaved-headed children, smoking stubby pipes and knitting brightly-dyed girdles for themselves out of bats’ wool. Marble heads roll in the streets that run beneath the cemeteries, and through the matted weeds at the boundaries of the subterranean graveyards, singing and rolling their eyes — a Carpathian castle high in distant mountains, one lit window in the tower, just like in the movies.

  In darkness I hadn’t seen, up ahead, timid light comes in glimmering, like a silent film beginning. Long cloisters, with slender stone braces and chipped flags, tan leaves in slate gutters, pregnant calm and mute activity breathing along the long cloisters. The women wear fawny-white dresses of substantial, creamy smooth fabric, cinched in at the waist; they wear truncated snowy wimples, soft and extending all the way up to the ears, rising from a circle of whiter material around the shoulders. Their hair falls down albatross necks, and they wear beautiful tapering antlers within their temples, or swept back between the locks of their hair, knotted all over with colorful ribbons. They are human, but they seem like aliens and something about them arouses me with a yearning for unknown sexual contact unlike any other, just a sweet viscous cream (so-so) like a warm, flat blob (not quite) centered just above the groin (not really) and somehow associated with a motion (no motion) and a contact, more physical than looking but not as physical as touching, a floating, unintelligible, weightless, invisible intercourse what is it? Like wanting to feel sexy in a simile for sex, somehow with them.

  Petrified writhing naked trees against fire-brown light high ahead. A woman comes round a corner, arms held out from her sides a little, looking down at the ground ahead, and smiling with pleasure at some shining thought she is carrying in her mind. She has pearly back-swept two-pronged antlers that curve back and up. Her soft hands, tender as snails, flip and snap their fingers in distraction. She stops a few feet away, looks up at me sweetly and says she will take me to see Brown Master now, if I’d like.

  She leads me over humped, hard earth wan as bone and netted over with snaking white roots, half-buried, molar-like stones, down into a mixed fresh and stagnant water smell, to a bridge covered with dazzling green moss, so that hardly any of the masonry can be seen. Gaping faces carved into the stone have sprouted disfiguring moss wens and goiters, their mossed features look swollen, as though they’d been drinking and brawling. To one side of the bridge and down the bank. She stops and extends her hand, indicating I should go under the low bridge, where the darkness is near total only a foot or so from in beneath. There is something stirring down there. I crouch, and walk on damp gravel into the shade of the bridge.

  In the stagnant dark, a smooth, featureless flank of glistening blue-black hide rolls streaked with brown slime. A dim, round, silky hulk is squatting or lolling there; I can just make out the flat, pan-shaped head surmounted by two little knobs, which might be protuberant eyes, nostrils, giraffe horns, ears, a matador’s hat. Without clearly seeing it, I knows there is a wide, all but lipless mouth, turned down and pulled back at the corners like a shark’s, but toothless. The mouth is open, and the long breath wheezes like poured water tumbling in a vessel. It seems to be bleeding from the mouth — thick congealed threads hang down... fresh bright iron blood. The head swings a little, looking a bit like a metal detector, on a monstrously thick neck, which would be diamond-shaped in cross section, with a ridge running along the top.

  Brown Master draws a gush of breath and speaks thoughts; I receive the thoughts somehow and caption them — something like computer circuitry made out of lumpy white clay, and glass beads bouncing around through the circuit maze. The caption goes something like “it is so hard to get through your thicket grounds,” with “you have so many words already” superimposed on top of it.

  Brown Master talks water; sliding by — a green darker than jade and deep shadowed green humped dense up on either bank. We move slowly with the current. We pass the massive heads of idols with their lips below the surface, drugged and somber. Here’s a brown-green Greek one, head all covered with barnacle-like curls, its brow clenched above hollow-pupilled staring eyes full of some raging emotion. Another staring one, a crowned Norse king with severe little nose and sweep of flat beard, shoulders up just below his tiny ears. All manner of idols, all looking this way and that in the meditating river, and beyond them are inky shadows in the green and oceanic depths there; their humming expanse gazes back, spreads wings of shadow air over the boat, or over me. Everything is watching, just watches, with no object, so I go through an attention.

  Down the pier and into the half-bustling town, there’s Uar sitting on a windowsill cutting shapes out of his newspaper and sending curls of it to the ground. He catches sight of me, beams and nods, walks over. He’s wearing a white shirt rolled up to the elbows, a tie, maroon pants with a belt at his waist, and loafers with no socks. He shakes my hand.

  “It’s kind of liking Manaus here.”

  “I’ve come to see Brown Master.”

  Uar smiles. “I’ll take to you.”

  The street is narrow, the buildings lean over looking down at what the tide washed in. Clotheslines are strung overhead, laden with brightly colored light robes, dresses, shirts and scarves, waving lower and lower until we brush through a soft jungle of dazzling sheets... All this light, but no day, no sky.

  British working-class neighborhood of neat houses, the blackened bricks looking translucent like smoked ruby glass. Feet crisp on wet concrete squares in the narrow alleys between the houses; sour-faced factory upthrust there in the middle distance, the glum stacks seep a plume or two of steam every now and then. Out into a boulevard so broad as practically to be a square, lined with tall houses whose façades look like crenelated eighteenth-century tombstones. The air is as cold and clear as a glacial pool, vacuumed clean by the underground wind, filled with sourceless light of the DS. I can make out every detail of even the more distant façades with unreal distinctness.

  The corner house and a few adjacent to it all show signs of fire damage, and in fact a few spots are still smouldering. The ground floor of the house on the corner is completely staved in with the exception of the front door, which opens directly onto the street, precisely at the corner. Smoke fumes from wreckage dusted with a sparse cinder layer, an incomprehensible jumble of busted beams and furniture shards. The door is untouched, the brass knocker gleams like new.

  A French valet lets me in and conducts me down the hall. Uar will wait for me. I pass a closed room resounding with many voices speaking Hindi, and now the valet waves me over toward the wall as a couple of dozen men in denim clothes, long black hair, look to be natives, go by in ones and twos, and each one clears his throat as he gets to me. There’s no end of these hallways and each one is jostling full of all kinds of people, with light pouring in from a distant window or an open door. This house must have about twenty-five sides and double that many back doors. Now a
n empty hall with a door at the end opening onto a yard — cool humid breeze blows in, big ferns lap the air. We stop by a door with the word tsathog ripped from a cheap poster and thumbtacked on the lintel.

  The valet, a compact younger man in a white shirt and ragged knee-pants says “Arrête” and puts his hands lightly on my biceps.

  “Parce-que tu es en partie démon, tu ne dois pas entrer dans cette chambre, compris? Ne regarde meme pas a l’interieur, seulement du coin de l’oeil droit. Fixe ton regard sur le rebord de la porte.”

  He goes, and I stand there, fixementing my eyes on the fronds at the end of the hall. The door beside me is gradually swinging open on a dark room. A pulsing, eerie groan, and smell of Brown Master, come out. Peripherally I can see the room beyond is dark except for holes in the brick walls up near the ceiling, which might be partially sunken in. The air in there is fluttering with bats that become owls when they alight on the walls, or so it seems — I can’t make out what they roost on. The owls are doing the groaning, like Tibetan monks they groan out HOOOOOOOO churn around and around the confines of the room throwing up a higher overtone like a chorus of ghosts. Descending down from the ceiling somehow there is a huge Persian rug, mostly black and deep red. It curves down to the floor and runs up to the jam of the door, so I can see some of its pattern clearly — the fantastic loops of stems and ribbons in a pattern finer and more crazymaking to look at than the engraving on money. Dark colors, but beneath it a surly golden burn that shimmers out like petulant little lightning sparks.

  Suddenly that HOOOOOO roars up even louder and the rug slides out of sight away from the door. A massive thing rises from the floor under the rug, and gradually the hem slides back until it forms a hood. I will myself not to look. The owls die down and the weird voiceless voice of Brown Master comes to me from beneath the rug, the huge vertigo-inducing medallion right over its eyes, and coming from somewhere behind the door what looks like a burnt, reedy arm swings out and a long, slender hand with tapering fingers that curl like the toes of Turkish slippers offers me a little nunk of chocolate. As I eat it what might be a miniature copy of the rug unfurls before me like a sign post and I fall into the pattern to the drone of Brown Master.

  Ladies from the cloister atop the housefronts on the square, and standing nearby, raising their horns in zephyrs, turning their heads from the waist this way and that, with arms raised, admiring themselves in invisible mirrors, invisible snakes embrace their wrists. I trip headlong into satiny fabric, surprisingly strong, soft hands, a cooing voice by my ear.

  In order to get back, we will have to pass through Avenue A; and this is what the world looks like now.

  Lonely people don’t want to be immortal, and all these people are alone without realizing it. They don’t realize just how alone they are. Hooded sallow and grey-skinned in the street headphones trying to tune out the advertising station, all milling under the elevated train, which now only carries freight “no passengers.” The street is lined with wailing flat screen advertising, trash and surveillance cameras everywhere, everywhere worn and broken things, the rag ends of narrative worn threadbare, sharp and frayed like a banshee call. Watching everywhere, but the people don’t watch they stare, in blank incomprehension and an unending stun.

  The street is a prison yard: guards may or may not sneer down from plastic tubes, blackened one-way, that cross above the street at regular intervals. You can’t see them they can see you — if they’re there. Each tube sports an array of mace nozzles and a microwave emitter dish for dispersing crowds or sizzling them where they stand; all lit up at once they could boil the entire street. Arrogant helicopters overhead all the time, hovering, zooming, peering and spying with their lights. Pinecones of cameras bristle on every lamp post, the whole street inundated at all times with unrelieved ugly orange light that glares into every corner from huge stadium floods spaced fifteen feet apart all along its length, and not twenty feet off the ground. Uar and I scurry past a huge pile of broken concrete and onto the avenue.

  “Vampirism run this part of town from helicopters,” Uar tosses over his shoulder, head down.

  On the horizon, a solid wall of high-rises makes a continuous rampart of lit offices. The DS would set behind them. This wall of offices stops the wind, so it never reaches the avenue — so the air is stale. But these far-off offices are the only tall buildings in the city; the rest is a sprawl of three and four story piles and paved lots, very rare glimpse of grey dirt in which nothing will grow, not even weeds, not even mildew. You see no roaches or rats at the garbage cans, no pigeons pick at the junk, no dogs or cats, nothing animal, not even the people. The side streets are jammed with abandoned and wrecked cars; piles of these line the main drags, where huge ploughs have bulldozed a path for an endless stream of trucks groaning buses and emergency vehicles, layer on layer of them in stacks of cement overpasses streaming with hot engine air and exhaust. The sound of engines sirens and car and building alarms is continuous, one carcinogenic, deafening roar. The sky is gagged with floating billboards and even orbiting advertisements, almost all of which are malfunctioning or totally broken. Thanks to them, no celestial object can be seen. Collisions in the air are frequent and huge signs and lit displays come crashing down from time to time to tear black sooty gashes in the city blocks. People stand mutely watching the catastrophe with their fingers in their noses.

  I’m looking around anxiously.

  “There’s nothing to fear them really,” Uar says, “While they can be pretty violent, nobody knows how to fight.”

  “What about the guards?”

  Uar smiles. Seeing that smile is a surprisingly big relief in this place. “The guards don’t know how to fight, they just spray you.”

  He taps the hollow of his throat, where his tie is loosened. “One comes up to me, I’d hit here.” From nowhere a length of strong brown forearm is suddenly there in front of him, a knife blade at the end, a hoarse “huh” booms from his chest. Then he holds the knife blade up and gives his fist a little pump in the air and smiles.

  “That’s good,” he says.

  We scoot hastily along the embankment of a paved river choked with dead bodies, some cars and trash. A mile or so away there is a delta of ruined suspension bridges, all their paint flaked away, scabbed with rust and slouching, their cables blow horizontal in the gusts of a high wind that never comes near the ground.

  The way out takes us through a rich neighborhood behind high barbed wire walls. Uar shows me a passage through a dried culvert. Dejected ugly stucco and cinderblock houses with cement yards pass by, drowning in hysterical orange glare. We’re triggering motion-activated cameras and piercing blue fog lights, but nothing much else seems to happen. The handfull of trees, the only ones I have seen, are all dead and melted, discolored, slumped flabbily against the ground and stinking like dead meat. The barricaded houses are huge and well-spaced apart from each other, solid and brutish as fortresses, relentlessly and waspishly unpleasant to look at. There is broken glass in the windows, and curtains wearily paw the air through the jagged gaps, the bars. The inhabitants are drinking their pool water and wilting away with chlorine poisoning that turns them the color of blue snot. But there is no rain, it will never rain here. They have paved the ocean.

  Uar points to a slot and I fish out and sink another coin. The secret place is before me, and my mind enters it, enveloped in the memory of a golden summer’s boy day I lived, and its warm amber serenely endomes us both like fire glow. From somewhere behind us a howl grates against scorched metal lids — we step at once lighter than air through the aperture, and dull lead air closes like a shutter at our backs.

  The next instant we must both latch on to crushing thoughts and heavy, sad feelings; otherwise, the sudden change in pressure will blow us wide open.

  Here are shining streets slick and black with rain and the sharpened lights’ sparkling; fleecy, glowing white clouds soar gigantically along against a dark dull indigo sky in unearthly, soundless flight.
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  Signs say “UNDERWORLD, THE.”

  We pass a warehouse all ablaze with blue-white light, the unexpected relief from sodium-orange smut, like breaking through into the true night remembered from childhood, an open, colored night of stark gleams and bright darkness. Weightless, cold, dark, electric excitement of the city wafts over them both. Uar goes his own way under the lonely streetlight at the corner, is gone with a smile and a wave into the dark like a swimmer turning to swim from the shore.

  A little underground neighborhood, maybe two blocks. Dark browns and greys, brick warehouses, rows of homes, some dim shops. Not too noisy, but a ghostly gaiety here. Brass band, balloons, smell of beer.

  The windows of the passing omnibuses have been blacked out by order of the transit authority, and, riding outside, I soon learn why. No one is meant to see the prisoners of war working down in the tunnels, packing the earth and shoring up the stone roof. We regular citizens are forbidden the sight of livid white eyes in grimy faces. What war was it again? Where is it now? It rambles here and there like a god in the world, it sweeps through the room like a vacuum, sucking out warmth and sound, and then it’s gone again and everybody goes on talking about the whether. No one seems to know where the prisoners come from or in what war they were taken. There’s nothing in the papers — what papers? — but there they are working down in the tunnels, laying track, propping up the walls.