The Great Lover (21 page)

After a minute or so the commotion off to her left, the direction the two students took, grows louder again and suddenly she feels him and the next instant she can feel him coming very fast — wild insane laughter first like an explosion of trapped birds ricocheting everywhere and then he barrels past moving much faster than before, the bow wave of nasty air bops her in the face and trickles back through her hair. Now comes clomping and gasping and muttering, and four feet go thumping by like a soft-shoed dray horse, following the Great Lover back toward the stairs and the platform.

Vera turns abruptly and grabs hold of the bars, scanning with her ears — she hears the crazy arabesque of his glee stretching out swiftly in a straight line, on the platform, and farther and farther behind the breathless plodding of the two armbands. He seems to move as lightly and easily as though all he’d been was a voice, and yet when he passed she could feel his mass punch through the air with compressed force. And she could feel his frenzy, his wild abandon, as though it were bubbling out of her.

“
I felt his bravery!” she says, and the incoming train pushes a pie of sour tunnel air into her face.

*

Why the sudden thrill as I run across the words “dead bodies... An inn, country house” in a book?

We’re killing an afternoon sitting around reading books I found in boxes in a closet.

“
What does this mean?” the Prosthetic Libido asks, pointing to the words “jack off” on the page.

“
Slang for masturbate.”

“
Jack off,” he says smiling and lifts his face to the ceiling, “jack off jack off jack off.”

“
I am going to jack off,” the Prosthetic Libido says, and beams at me.

He lies back on the bed.

Deep in the night, I sit with my chin on the table, looking at a lemon seed twirling at the bottom of a glass of sepia gin. Brown candlelight shines through the glass with its painted Spanish dancers, illuminates shadow lemon seed spinning behind painted stems and blossoms in the steady flame glow... two tufts of pulp cling to the flat seed... I give the gin a twirl with the spoon and watch the seed dancing.

“
Help!”

I go over to him, his eyes two gleams in the dark.

“
Touch me — touch me anywhere but just touch me!”

I grab his outstretched arm — his body undulates, twists, and cracks like a whip — he shouts three times growing in volume and his penis flips up spattering the wall with nectar. When I look him in the face, he’s a corpse.

*

“
I want you to call me Pearl,” the Prosthetic Libido says, his words stretching themselves lazy as smoke drifting across the room.

I glance over at him. He is sitting up in bed, holding his knees, same as before. His fingers lightly rub the skin of his calves with an undiminished longing I can almost see coursing like ripple reflections of all colors in his flesh.

“
Pearl,” I say. “Sure thing.”

“
I’m a pearl of great price,” he says happily, with a little waggle of his head. He leans back, drawing his hands along his body, and begins caressing his erection again, which is my cue to skiddoo.

“
You’re leaving?”

“
We both have important things to do.”

He grins — “You’re going to go spy on that Vera.”

I smile too and cross the room.

“
If you love her so much, why do you keep away from her?” the Prosthetic Libido asks. “I’m curious.”

I stop.

“
Is it a game?” he asks.

I go out.

*

Is it my turn again? This is Vera, still not a character, although I may turn into one eventually. This doesn’t concern me excessively because I would rather slide along on the smooth surfaces I love, like skating along, with no important directions, and be now this, now that. I go along with my thoughts like a horse with no reins, capering and streaking around freely.

The back of my guitar’s neck is powdery smooth, like a glass table covered in thick dust, while the back of the body is so silky it clings to the grease on my fingers. Rubbing persistently creates excitement deep inside me, and the wood seems to revive in a way it never does when I play. I don’t enjoy playing on the subway, trying to play over the whoosh, but my father tells me it’s a good way to go unnoticed and I feel he’s right. I end up rubbing more than I play, which is my business.

Some people think tuning is a nuisance and others don’t seem to be able to stop adjusting and adjusting. I keep tuning, but mainly because I like to hear the tone bong in the wood. I forget all about melody and harmony and go deep inside the tone, so I can feel it all around me like a buzzing tube. The string makes half the tone, and that calls its other half out of somewhere. They stand side by side without being completely distinct, but without really mixing either. The answer is hard to hear, but it’s the singing of the wood and the space, just like a forest.

You can’t hear anything on the train, so I like to buzzsaw on the strings Ritchie Havens style. I can feel the spots where my pick has gouged up the wood just past the strings. My sonata guitar I normally keep at home, but now I play it on the train, because I suspect it will attract him to me. My father told him to find the forest, so let him hunt for it here in my lap.

“
dein weitheth fleith erregt mith tho,

du biththt doch nur ein thigolo

dein weitheth fleith erleuthchtet mich

mein vather war genau wie ich”

Of course I sing it very sweetly, lowly and slowly... I enjoy all kinds of music, but especially what is abrasive, percussive — I like to feel it pound me, crash over me like panes of glass, pick me up and shake me like a rag doll. I repeat the chorus twice as slow, and now I know he is out there... yeah he’s right in front of me. This train is passing the one he’s on, I can just know he is there at the window, looking at me. His eyes pounce on me. Go ahead and look — I lift my head so he can see my face. His yearning is almost a sound, like a bass drum humming. I can feel him, that same wild crashing shaking and pounding — at Meadowlab: the dog barking and straining at the leash I held his body in my hands and felt his trembling, the violent life gone crazy in his silky muscles, his shivering fur, his straining, distorting head all his senses his ears and nose and eyes all bulging and straining to expand toward some intruding thing I couldn’t see.

I’m listening! I try to put it into the song for him to hear, or to see in my mouth. Go on! Tell me!

It’s pulling away...

Talk to me!

...he’s gone again...

“
jettht hatht thu angtht und ich bin thoweitth”

Is he afraid of me, too?

*

Ex a dream of singing trees I find the spot on the map, just off the hub where the green lines mix with the brown.

A thick coin of cool gold, glazed with humid white muting its glow, made it myself. Vera’s own face I etched on it with dental tools Dr. Thefarie lent me. Drop it into the notched brass slot between the bricks... a pause of at least ten seconds then a far-off thump of wood, splat into a heap of change. There’s a faint knocking of wooden bolts, the brick panel slides to one side with a brushing sound. Soft air wafts from the aperture, with a fragrance of cool green for cool gold, and an apparition of yielding darkness recedes from the gap in the wall, to waylay beams of sight thrust into its space, muffle them up in its intangible billows so that vision goes to sleep in it.

I step through to tender grass, a melancholy lawn dark as wine lees, sloping down. I cross it — no sound yet but the whisking of my feet in the grass. Overhead a concrete vault is invisible; this cavernous place was formerly the sub-basement of some public works or other. Now there’s confidential grass like wet down growing here. To my right, the dark is deeper, and in places it forms scars whose edges glisten, blots that fade, or creep toward me only to sink out of sight again. Lapping water: it has seeped into the air.

Up ahead there’s a scribble of trunks and boughs, the smooth and substantial forms of trees that disintegrate on approach into a broken canopy of twigs. Dim lamps hung among the branches keep these photovore leaves happy. I pick a pair of glasses and remove the ones I’m wearing just now, but I take a look around before I don the next pair — the lights look like stemless brass dandelions, or like corrugated, peach-pit suns, regularly spiked all over with serene candle fires. Glasses on — paths slouch conspiratorially around the roots, shadows sway. Following one of the paths down and to my right, I find a decrepit jetty thrust out onto the scurrying black water. A jalopy shanty with one wall hoisted up like an awning sits by the jetty.

Part of the problem, according to Ptarmagant: an infestation of
fl
ü
chtige hingemachte M
ä
nner
or “hastily improvised persons,” flung together just offstage and shoved out into the footlights of reality, unprepared, barely existing; a jury-rigged, placeholder person. He points out a short mannish woman in nurse’s whites and a navy windbreaker. She has a wizened, square face, wears a brilliant orange wool hat emblazoned with a nearly shapeless electric blue logo, is listening to something very loud in her headphones and plays a portable video game.

“
Rush job,” Ptarmagant says, dropping his hand back onto his thigh. This FHM will scuttle out the door and along the platform, drag itself slowly up the stairs until out of sight of the cameras and quite alone, then a pop like the bursting of a brittle bubble of hardened tar, and the windbreaker will fall empty to the ground... no one ever there at all.

“
Life arose spontaneously once,” Ptarmagant says, “and nothing prevents it from arising spontaneously again. This is true of minds as of bodies. By this principle, they come into existence, and by applying this principle, we will bring a divinity of our own into existence... but we do not yet understand this principle well enough.”

The Great Lover is still trying to explain his plan.

“
We must put the bodies in the brine tank.”

Ptarmagant nods, “Spargens will help you.”

Now, Spargens has taken up residence in the shack by the jetty. He was too good at mathematics to be any good at anything else, and wound up riding the subways all day. He emanates an obstinate collectedness, as though his mind were a series of identical, sealed amphorae perfectly stacked in a ship’s hold. He never hurries and never seems to be waiting. His time always seems to be full, even when he is doing nothing.

I sit on a bench behind Spargens’ back; Spargens is hunched over the table. His pencil scratches without stopping. He sets the pencil down, tap, and leans back with a slight exhalation through the nose, hands on his kidneys and outcast eyes on the water. In the distance we hear the distracted water sucking the cistern’s concrete shell. In total darkness, a row of squat, pale green flames rock like masts on their wicks, and the nearly impalpable breath of the draft knocks them into spasms, doubled in pools of liquid wax. The trance skipping lightly off the water settles easily on the two of us, and stops our minds with a touch, like a thief who paralyzes his victims with the hand of glory.

*

I’ve discovered a defunct ice-making plant. I make my way in through the generous drains. Here it is: the brine tank. The parts are too badly rusted to use, or are missing to begin with, can be replaced — I steal what I need from a waterfront machine shop that services the large river-going boats, and from a warehouse full of plumbing supplies.

Working alone, I cut the tank into sections with a hacksaw and carry each piece down the plant’s ramp into the river. Then I drag the sections behind me on my muck sledge along the river’s sludgy bottom, using the current and the thickness of the water to help me.

The map (aside): Day and night he is loping back and forth down there, and occasionally drifting off to sleep. When this happens, he bobs stupidly along the bottom like an inebriated manatee.

In the meantime, Spargens has caused a pit to be dug in a clearing in the underground glade. Now and then, I stagger up out of the lake slime and slop out my cargo on the bank, turn and go back for more.

When all the parts are gathered, the tank sections are reassembled in the pit. This not only makes construction easier, but the earth will insulate the tank when it is finished. Cult welders work to close and seal the gaps on one side, while I drive in rivets by hand on the other.

Now the tank is finished and sealed with pitch and rubber, rinsed out and scoured with sand. The refrigeration plant is housed in a trench adjacent to the pit, where teams of workers bolt and seal the pipes and pumps. I’ve decided we’ll substitute ether (I make it myself out of lake mist) for ammonia, which is the usual refrigerant.

The tank is filled with charcoal-filtered lake water and mixed with road salt scavenged by Multiply, Deuteronôme’s nephew (the one who nicknames me Ding-A-Ling). The refrigeration equipment is powered by a small methane turbine. I can make any amount of methane from sewer gas, drawn off by my gnomes. Muffling the noise proves to be one of the more demanding problems. Even after damping down all vibration the equipment is still excessively loud. With the help of Dr. Thefarie, and some more scavenging, the moving parts are all packed in an inorganic gelatin, then baffled with regular soundproofing materials. These measures acceptably reduce the noise to a faint whir. The brine temperature is swiftly reduced to just below the freezing point, the water becoming weirdly viscous like a thick, clear soup. Now, with the gnomes, I begin to move the inanimate bodies from their crêches in my sewer atrium.