The Great Lover
Page 36
“I can stay,” she smiles, patting the seat next to her. “I can love you.”
But she sits there without doing a thing.
Then the lisp reappears stronger than ever, and all sign of the pregnancy is gone.
A woman’s body throws off its white garments and calls out—
Show me the Great Lover, in all his regalia.
A figure steps through the curtain and advances across the yawning span, the Divinity Student, the Golem, the Traitor, the Tyrant, and now here is the Great Lover, a bristling demonic superhero in fur coat, Bowery boy cap, holding his curtain rod, his eyes burning and his teeth black as onyx, his Maori face and his eyeglasses and pearls — Vera the God the gypsy the Prosthetic Death Hulferde’s sister from the cloister savor in on his arms span... finally she sleeps.
From out of the Great Lover’s eyes the Prosthetic Libido steps and he and the Prosthetic Death twist together in gravity fire. Vera and the Great Lover, the gypsy and me, imagine a rotoscope spins pairs of faces together but always in pairs.
You’re through the dream now. All around you is strange light, what you see is unreal but pressing in on the senses very intensely, like colors with mass, substance of their own. Weightless, insubstantial intensities. You waver between contradictory descriptions here, because the distinctions are no longer discernible.
And there’s a sense of anticipation, uncertainty as to what’s going to happen next. Time is completely open. In space, you orient yourself by finding down and up, drift in space. In time, you look for the gradient — you are drift in time, which is slack, looking for the tension to come back.
Hold that feeling of the story ending — of the life that you turn to when you put the story down starting to shine through it it is becoming transparent and to feel like a dream hold that feeling and stay in it. Just stay in it.
The darkness splits in rags and sunlight of the Deep Sun, then grows instantly dim and remote, and here is a planet striped red green and grey with distinct, rippling skeins of plant, animal, and fungal tissue. The borders are gold where the bands touch. The Great Lover before them — the two Prosthetics — is a figure in a haze of his own parts, dissected and hanging in the air around a gold ring that attracts particles of gold from the landscape bands below, and from gilded light on underside of cloud. The Prosthetic Libido and the Prosthetic Death are screaming across the sky in pure intensity: Pandora’s Box. Coupled up they open over land and sea, and out comes this candy wrapper blown across your path today on your way to work, and this slab of concrete, grey and black in impossible contrast deep and sharp as a dream, a hushed prophetic voice here in the crease of fabric at your elbow, out of them comes the smell of the subway saturated with bitter music, all quotations composed on the spot.
Now the sky contracts to one flame burning at the tip of a green bough and gilding it with its light. This is the bough you offer to Charon to get across the Styx if you want to visit the dead while still alive yourself. The gold tongue is transparent and inviting to the eye like a crystal ball. What do you see?
—I see what I read here.
What you read here, we write together: you and I and eight coffins.
Here is the Great Lover crossing rolling green pastures, clambering awkwardly over fences and far away the sound of that bell. The sky is brilliant blue and white with foaming clouds; the light dims and surges, amorphous shadows ripple over the ground. Shade closes over him as he makes his way into the forest, climbing lungingly up a dry creekbed lined with moss furred rocks. It’s quiet; remote songs of birds, and an occasional gasp runs through the nervous wood. The air is cool fresh and clear like a glacier stream.
A naked figure the size of a ten year old child observes him a moment from between two boulders on a low rise off to the left, then bounds away the next instant — vanished. Here and there the Great Lover can see them, some no bigger than his hand, dart and rustle around him, always too far away or too fleeting to make out clearly. Fingers slip back behind a screen of black stalks, glittering eyes flick open and closed in the shade of bracken hollows. The woods breathe and listen. In the hollow lined with boulders the sun lances through holes in the canopy and walks huge beams across the green floor; here the Prosthetic Death is sitting on a stone, its hands thrust inside a pale little torso. The Prosthetic Libido turns from what he is doing, trots over to the Great Lover and smiles, pure joy gleaming from his beautiful lips.
The two Prosthetics live together here in the seclusion of the woods, making machine people together. The materials they extract from the rocks and soil, digging out the oil, picking out the ore, working it with their fingers or changing it in their stomachs until it is ready for use. They will populate the woods with devices like themselves; the Prosthetic Libido shows him the face he’s been working on for their latest: an exquisite, inhuman, long-eyed face. The Prosthetic Death comes over and silently takes Pearl’s hand.
“We have something for you,” Pearl beams. The Prosthetic Death and Prosthetic Libido walk hand in hand to a huge dead tree, still standing and draped all over with mistletoe and vines. From out of an arched opening in the hollow trunk steps an exact likeness of the Great Lover, identical to him in every detail, although even this exactness seems like a distortion.
“Just for fun.”
The Great Lover’s double strides sulkily toward him, looking this way and that with exaggerated malice and surliness and sullenness, a wonderful living cartoon character.
Vera and he re-enter the world, I mean yours. Here they leave behind their marks in the sky — her hair, his tattoo.
The Great Lover raises his head slowly, as ponderously as an elephant, as a vast mythical animal, the world serpent. The Great Lover raises his head in that green-blue soupy thickness of sky, a cloudy broth that sluggishly gathers its folds on itself like the bunching, slowing waters of a swamped river. His breath is a sound, but he can’t feel the air. Fronds blow almost too slow to see in an impalpable wind, and crumbed black fir boughs nod and stir the clabbered light like witches’ hands. He cannot lower his gaze, no matter how he moves his head — the movements are thoughts, not actions. His head does not go down, though he tells it to, and in the confusion that follows, his imagination rushes eagerly ahead into the gap and supplies to vision what he cannot bend his eyes to see. He shuts his eyes, and remains in the thought of lowering his head, until he seems to go to sleep in it. His head has lowered, and now he looks out over rolling green hills from a high place. Copses, and stone farm houses huddled at the skirts of the lordly hills who rule here. The trees are courtiers and hangers-on. In the tunnels, through graveyards and sewers — how far back does it go? All the way, all the way there is: as long as there is way, there it goes. There is no “it,” only something ongoing like a proceeding, and maybe a passage there. The end of the story, when it’s becoming transparent — hold on to it. This is where you come in.
The preparations are all finished. It’s time for the big performance. Multiply, Futsi, and their friends are skating to and fro on the curved wooden skate deck, and Deuteronôme sits in the center facing Dr. Thefarie. The skaters create the magic circle with their boards, a dynamic circle of movements that constantly redraws itself in new ways within its limit of variations, always a circle.
Far off across the floor, Vera enters, wrapped in white, with her four attendants. She summons the Great Lover, who must obey her call. Her robe slips to the floor and her nerves turn invisible and fill the air in this huge underground chamber. Suddenly the Deep Sun is there, hanging above the ramp. Its cold light shines down on a floor filled with Merlins dervishes shamans witches fortune tellers, all Immigrants.
Sewer water boils in the corner and the Great Lover appears. He seethes across the floor toward the ramp. The two Prosthetics stand in the center. Every voice rises to a crescendo at once as every subway train in the system shrieks its brakes and blasts its horn and the sun, high in the sky over the city, directly overhead, sinks. It drops from the sky and
down into the city, driving down into the ground, its light disappearing from the sky, blazing through the buildings without harming them. Mobs of screaming people in the streets — the sun is vanishing into the earth — a dome, now a disk, of blinding, shrinking light—
Now it’s gone — the stars shine in the sky — a rioting mass of people are clawing at the ground where the sun disappeared.
Down below, the Deep Sun erupts in brilliant light like countless transparent fires. The Great Lover sings out and flies up into the air. Light cataracts into the chamber as the sun descends into the Deep Sun and joins with it in a cyclone of vaporized water that at once condenses into white clouds. The cement ceiling turns transparent blue, the clouds drift in it, the chamber is a meadow and the underworld is a landscape overflowing with light. The sky has gone underground.
About the Author
Michael Cisco is the author of The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press; International Horror Writers Guild Award for best first novel of 1999), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime Books, 2004), The Tyrant (Prime Books, 2004), a contributor to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (eds. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts) and Album Zutique (ed. Jeff VanderMeer), and his work has appeared in Leviathan III and Leviathan IV (ed. Forrest Aguirre). His novel, The Traitor, is published by Prime (2007). Secret Hours, a collection of his Lovecraftian short stories, is published by Mythos Books (2007). In 2009-2010, his stories have appeared in the Phantom (“Mr. Wosslynne”), Black Wings (“Violence, Child of Trust”), Lovecraft Unbound (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark”), Cinnabar’s Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (“Modern Cities Exist Only to be Destroyed”), and Last Drink Bird Head anthologies. Forthcoming works include a story in The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov (“The Cadaver Is You”), an appearance in The Weird (Atlantic/Corvus), an omnibus edition of published work from Centipede Press, The Wretch of the Sun, from Ex Occidente Press, and The Narrator, from Civil Coping Mechanisms. His columns and the occasional review can be found at TheModernWord.com. He lives and teaches in New York City.
Also from Chômu Press:
Looking for something else to read? Want a book that will wake you up, not put you to sleep?
“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”
By Quentin S. Crisp
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
By Justin Isis
Revenants
By Daniel Mills
The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children
By Brendan Connell
Nemonymous Night
By D.F. Lewis
For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/
Subscribe to our mailing list for updates and exclusive rarities.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Rhys Hughes
The Great Lover
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen