The Great Lover (27 page)

Pearl is silent now. I can hear the chains creaking as the dingus swings a little. One of my gnomes peers at me steadily, half smiling.

“
What are you looking at!” I snap.

“
An ass!” he says, grinning in my face.

*

John Brade works at a record store during the week. I have his schedule all worked out. Pearl begs me to let him spend the night, but there has to be a limit. The boy needs his rest.

So Pearl is waiting impatiently for today’s visit. Sunset light throws salmon color over the pale white walls of his room, interrupted regularly by his pacing form.

“
What if he can’t make it? What if...”

I’m not paying much attention, doodling V’s in the dust by the door.

“
You’re not listening to me! You don’t know what it’s like, when it builds and builds and makes a statue out of me!”

“
Oh I don’t huh?”

He doesn’t answer, keeps pacing. Window light races along his glistening body, up and down, back and forth.

I get an idea.

From my inside coat pocket I pull me out a silver wine glass, and hand it to him.

“
What’s this for?”

“
Look at it.”

The Prosthetic Libido does.

“
Now think about it.”

The cup flops down double on its stem as though it were made of limp rubber, then runs down between the Pearl’s fingers in long viscous strands to the floor. Holding his hand perfectly still where it is, he bends his head to look at the streaming palm in astonishment, then gives me a woebegone look.

“
I don’t want this on my hand.”

“
Then boil it off,” I say, tying my shoe.

“
Aren’t the fumes poisonous?” and I just roll my eyes at him. “Oh how silly of me,” he says nearly under his breath. He looks at his hand and the metal begins to hiss and steam, white vapor flaps into the air and scatters along the floor.

I head for the door, and he, holding his hand gingerly at his side, follows me.

“
So I can discharge it like that?”

“
Apparently.”

“
...I don’t like this,” he says, shrugging at his hand.

“
Still, you might need it sometime.”

“
What on a
person
oh I couldn’t do
that
...”

The demon — I take his forearm in my left hand and thrust my right into his hot grip — a gout of steam reeking of searing flesh puffs up. Pearl’s eyes widen in horror and he jerks his hand away instantly.

“
See
, that wasn’t so bad,” I say with a smile, raising my host’s blackened hand with blood seeping through the grime on his palm. Pearl starts back appalled — there are a few rags of charred flesh stuck to his hand. He spins around the room like a mad top flailing his hand as though he’d slammed it in a car door trying to shake it clean and crying “Oh! Oh!” I stroll down the hall swinging my host’s wounded hand from the elbow like a chimp.

“
I am a sexual being, and therefore a teacher.”

(qui vivre verra)

Once upon a time Pearl and I are watching a thunderstorm from the windows of the abandoned weather station. A bolt snaps against the sky, the thunder unfurls invisibly around it in the next instant like a colossal wing.

(qui verra Vera l’aimera)

VERA VERA VERA I see her face in the heat lightning and I am in a cold wind below a grey sky my heart ensleeved in pale autumnal flame—

Ardent peace then we were children she rolls her head... sighs through her nose her soft chest swells—

If only you were here, lying next to me, none of these thoughts would have arisen to plague me, not even this one, because the night, this bed and my sleep would all belong to you, would all be of you—

You would be the firmament under which I could sleep.

*

A vapor man peeps at me from a radiator and passes it on — I am summoned to Ptarmagant’s side — recovery from the operation is not complete, and he has good and bad days. Dr. Thefarie recommends he keep moving at all times, so he’s been transferred to a garbage scow. Old yellow car with black stripes, portholes in the doors. The scow pushes two flatbed cars of rough boards littered with discarded rubber gloves, chip packets, crumbling spikes orange with rust. A motor car with a diesel engine roars at the rear.

The interior of the car is sheathed in soundproofing and dark oak panelling, lamps with thick green shades. The train glides along so smoothly the hanging shade is still. I see my own movements distorted in the heavy silver ewer on a sideboard. Beyond that, a dim white bulb in the far corner — pretty spacious car. Ptarmagant, in a caftan and tassled felt cap, wrapped in dingy blankets shawls and a rug, rests in a green leather chair. His large bean-shaped head is cradled against the top of the seat with bolsters, and a humidifier sends a mist of camphorated water lightly frisking around him.

Ptarmagant does not raise his eyes to me. He is already mumbling something, and I must crane my head right down against his lips, forcing back the edge of the bolster with the crown of my head. The words are clearly and deliberately spoken, but faint, with pauses between the sentences; he seems to repeating what another, still more remote, voice says to him.

“
I can’t tell you what exactly to do. What we do and think can’t have a center. The center can have many names, but it is best not to name it, or seek it, but to act from it. Hellfire is underground.”

A cat is looking up at him from the floor near Ptarmagant’s feet. It has pink-ash grey fur and aqua eyes.

“
It is by hellfire we are regenerated. Processing now only admits barbaric narratives into the brook to which we go to find our food. Vision initiation retakes the brook, the watered narratives flower and bud fruit, we pick the fruit and pass the seed on into the sewers that the city is founded on. Those who slander, buy and sell the Holy Spirit, go down to spectre manure.”

One of Ptarmagant’s hands, which had been lying out of sight under an arched fold of his blanket on the arm rest, swings out and picks up a Swiss army knife from the low table beside his chair. The knife is an inch across. Taking it in his palm, Ptarmagant breaks it in half with one gradual squeeze; the muffled snap is like the sound of deep ice cracking in a melting pond. I realize Ptarmagant’s entire body is not slack but rigid.

“
What do the wings want? Which side are they on?”

I see the heavy lid of the coffin, and the heavy slab in the floor... the end of the story. Trapped to stifle beneath the heavy lid forever, the end. A heavy lid of space, the last page, to seal me in a narrow tomb below the bottom of space.

“
A perfect sphere of ice... You’ve seen it before...”

“
That’s right — the Russian woman had it in her hand.”

“
It’s down below, inside the earth. That’s — I don’t know — it’s what we must do... I don’t — but it’s the goal of goals.”

“
The ice?”

Ptarmagant continues to mutter, voice clear but quiet. “You haven’t yet entered the true tunnels and sewers.”

...Interstellar night appears at the open window.

“
Death to the slandering tongue. Death to the counterfeiting spirit.”

Interstellar night floods the car.

*

Where is he? He is staying away. I look at the light in her window and just now a shadow brushes across it — was that? She is there... she is there... That’s knowledge, say it again and again, every time I repeat it I take another step away. My resolve is turning brown, falling in shreds like wet tissue, and my power is crashing down in big pieces. I’m a huge smooth ear, and every bit of sensation coming from that apartment falls into me and vibrates me. I hold out a vibrating hand and look at it, measuring its tremor against the background chain link. This is what fresh green leaves, still raw and tender from the bud, feel — a kind of mercurial terror or acid trembling. The lights go out.

Nothing comes from inside me but trembling, unbearable intensity, but I’m paralyzed. Where is he? I drive my fist into my abdomen with frustration and the anger seems to do me good — or no it doesn’t it only scatters the mercury so it runs everywhere and every inch of me is boiling in icy oil. I followed her to her apartment building, watching from a distance. Her figure before me now, walking away, toward the corner. The window I know, because I saw her roommate there open the curtain. They live on the second floor at the back, light from the window shines on the roof of the garage or whatever it is jutting out into the alley. I’m hunkered down by a lesser coffee klatch of oil drums turning purple with rust, behind a tree. Rail yards off to one side, deserted space.

In my tunnels I saw myself slide in over the sill. What to do next I’d left to my own boldness and the lay of the circumstances but now it takes nearly all my will simply to stay here in hiding.

With a burst of self-disgust I stand upright and take one heroic step toward her building. A pipe humming with rushing water doesn’t shake as bad as this. The little window off to one side is lit. Suddenly I rush up toward the garage and stop by one corner, where there is a fenced gap separating it from the shuttered little machine shop next door. I peer up — the little window is frosted. No it’s
steamed over
.

I take hold of the grill blocking the gap and pull myself up plant my foot on the cross bar. My hand shakes and I nearly impale myself getting up onto the roof of the garage. I draw near to the window. The sash is up a couple of inches from the sill. I have only to lift myself up — foot on that projection there. Under her window I stand — I know it’s not the other one, it’s her, unravelling like solar flares are ripping loose in all directions. If just being here makes me this crazy what if I do... I take hold of the sill lift my foot to the projection and look.

She has put on a robe, and she is bent sideways drying her hair with a towel. Warm soapy air billows from the window and steam folds its hands by the ceiling. There’s no sound. She reaches for the bar and puts the towel onto it, straightens the ends so that it hangs evenly. Spiral black hair hangs down her back and damp wisps cling to her shoulders. Her hands float down to her sides, her posture is a little bowed.

Her back straightens and her head turns slightly. Fear rams my chest — she is listening. She turns, leading with her left ear, sealing my throat. Now she takes a step toward the window, eyes dancing wildly. In the hollow of her throat her skin glows like nothing I can describe. She’s lit from inside, she’s carved out of a star beams I don’t know—

“
Is that you?” she asks uncertainly.

She takes another step, her little foot on the fluff of the bathmat. Her toenails are red.

“
Is that you?” she asks again — quietly, so that her roommate won’t hear.

A melting settles on her face and she raises her hands slowly to open the robe, flips it back from her shoulders and the robe drifts down her arms, past her elbows. Then I see again my filthy hand clinging to the sill like a ragged nest of bones, and I lower myself without a sound — I will stay here even if I have to wait for her to go out again tomorrow, rather than risk making a sound. She must remain in doubt. With overmastering gratitude I seize on this thought and fondle it and turn it over and over again because it makes me appear to myself as if I were selflessly serving her, like a devoted slave, and that, and a great deal of superfluous reasoning, is far better than the truth which shall not get a word in edgewise.

I wait til morning. Then the garbage truck comes around, beeping and groaning — they’ll see me up here when they reach this end of the alley. I hasten away, trying to use their noise as cover, but not without making sure, by the watery dawn light, that I leave no traces behind.

*

Ptarmagant is on his feet again, drinking brackish tea from a huge mug. I come across him as his briefing ends, in a tarped-off spot in the tunnels. As he looks at me his face changes.

“
My son,” he says, “Deuteronôme has an answer for you.”

Deuteronôme comes up — “In my dream, I saw you go down into the earth, even deeper into the earth, until you found ice. And I saw something else—” he gives me a pointed look.

“
You must think carefully about this,” he says. “You must ask yourself what
cherries
mean. The answer to the riddle is there. What do cherries mean to you?”

I remember — the dream of the fire escape, the cherry tree, and the map to the city of sex.

“
The City of Sex!” Ptarmagant says.

“
You must go there,” Deuteronôme says at the same time.

By way of explanation, he shows me the flint knife, lying across his palm, looking enormous.

“
It is death to go deeper,” he tells me. “Do you understand? We ask you, because you must go and come back.”

He waggles his finger at me, from side to side.

“
You cannot stay there. You must come back to us, and bring us the
tablets
.”

The last word is emphasized by a push of his two fingers gently into my chest.

“
I don’t know what they are, but they will be there, and you must bring them back to fulfill the dream.”