The Great Lover (28 page)

“
I’m ready.” Vera. I failed you. I failed you.

“
You’re ready? Now?”

“
Now. Right away.” I tell his eyes Vera, I failed you. They remain fixed on mine for a while. Then he turns to Ptarmagant, who says.

“
All right then.”

I go with them down a long hall in silence. The hall is deep underground so narrow they must walk in single file, whitewashed plaster walls with callouses, rounded ceiling. Icy light from wall sconces like starched linen tulips. After a hundred yards or so there are small dioramas set into niches in the wall, set just slightly lower than would be convenient for the eye. Unable to see them without bending forward and unable to do this without falling behind I crouch a bit as I walk and glimpse rapidly from side to side. I see beautiful figures lying in coffins, but their chests rise and fall easily. Decomposing bodies form tableaux from life, marriage, dancing, even childbirth — a rotting child from a rotting womb. Some of the dioramas are purely geometric or nonrepresentational, including some that appear to be diagrams from geometry books, pi r squared and the Pythagorean theorem. Still others combine these various elements; dead and living students in a geometry class, triangles made of severed heads, dotted lines of sliced intestines; a repeating pattern of interlocked, decaying lovers; mummified geometrical figures in a latrine. Occasionally, there is a small round speaker set into the wall by a niche, the wire grid of the speaker mesh nearly choked with layers of thick whitewash, but showing gold where paint has chipped away. From these comes faint music, different at different places but blending all together into a spacious droning harmony.

At the end, the hall opens out into a small domed room like the interior of a burial mound. Deuteronôme presses the elevator button, the old-fashioned kind like a black, bakelite mushroom sticking out of the wall. Whir of far distant gears; I glance around at a number of framed official-looking documents on the walls. They have been framed under glass, and the glare on the glass makes them hard to read. The elevator door slides heavily to one side all one slab. The elevator is spacious; Spargens is the operator. Without a word, they enter the elevator and, in unison, turn round to face the door. Spargens has an expert touch, the elevator begins to ascend with only a barely-perceptible shift in equilibrium. They climb for a long time. The door opens on blinding light.

Hands peremptorily take me forward. Fresh air, wind rifles my clothes stirs my fear. Through a red haze comes a platform facing the sun in a cloudless, deep blue sky. We are miles afraid in the sky. A high rampart is the horizon. The sun blazes, swollen to enormous size. A godlike torrent of force, registering in all manner of almost purely random intensities in all my senses, blasts over me and sluices all around him. Witnesses look up at me from below the platform, obscured by the light shining over them from behind. Suddenly a shadow appears against the sun — Ptarmagant, raising the knife into the air.

He brings it down slowly as though it were emerging from the sun on a long lancelike ray.

Ptarmagant gives me the knife. I raise my hand up to chest level to take it, and when it is in my hand, it seems to glue my hand to space at chest level. The knife has embedded in it the sensation of searing heat. The edge of the flint blade shines like a thread out of the sun. I feel something like a soft blow in the solar plexus as the idea acts itself in my mind. My body goes tense and tears ruin what’s left of my vision, but the knife doesn’t shake. Vera, my hand comes free to my control. Beneath the light of the sun the knife tears a ragged ellipse in my chest with a sound like ripping burlap and the sun rushes up to me.

Sound of surf when I wake, someone brought water; the ragged wound is gone. Later Ptarmagant comes to check on me.

“
Can you stand?”

I get up. Ptarmagant leads me into a dark, windowless room, lead sheeting on the walls, a table and a chair. I am made to sit down at the table and a silver tray covered with smooth black and grey stones the size of robins’ eggs, some scored with deep-incised characters, is set before me. Ptarmagant leaves the room.

I look at the tray for a moment then realizes these were the marked stones
she
had vomited, years ago. I reach out

and gather the stones by

pressing them all together between

my palms at arms’ length across the table — as he touched the stones

that had been in her body I felt

an intense warm pressure against my chest

and in my throat, and the bones

of his arms and back shivered,

a green light erupting from the center of my chest

in a ragged ellipse

a brilliant golden evolution of lines and corners

from here to the radiant sun like a pipe

curving away in its depths,

a silhouetted figure stands in the sun,

reaches out his arm and presses

his fire hand against the sky, pushes

down on it and the stars spin down,

pushes up on it and the stars wheel back up,

the figure does this without

ceasing to look at me

watches the wall decay overrun with

seething golden scurf

a black slimy aperture opens in the wall

vomiting a slough of lit candles spangling

the walls with brilliantly flashing gold reflections

saw copper light through frothing trees felt the glee bursting in my ribs a honeycomb of gold light breaks leaving viscous warmth there in my ribs to spread

three vapor men are there

crystal breath of the machines, of her hounds silent sleek and intent tracing the scent

the teacher emerges from the shadows

stripped to the waist her skin painted white and her lips red as coral,

and a huge opal hangs from a silver thread flat against her collarbone

she stands in the spot and drinks in the light with her skin

she is standing over me now,

I touch the opal warm from her skin is her

soul clitoris warming my palm with all colors,

she turns to vapor and mantles lovingly around me without a sound. I still can see yet the moist coral lips carefully forming words around a dark center—

in total silence we’re locking on top of the desk and though her beautiful face is drawn

haggard and grieving as though she were being hurt

she clings hard to my shoulders and grips my waist with her legs,

(no climax ever but draughts carry them off in chalk dust

they melt away behind the echo of the bell

the Great Lover opens the path to the City of Sex).

*

Let the voice ring out like a softly-ringing bell from the sepulchres... “Nine-thirty all right.” He steps through an open door into the rafters of the city of s... The sky rises from the mountains, held up by unrelenting wind. Trains rattle on tracks hundreds of feet above the sheet ice and far below it, where they push through limpid cold water thick as syrup, black as pitch in the hollows of the ragged boulders, the deep pits in the stony bottom. The Great Lover finds himself in another, new narrative, another character.

The map says the city of sex is a mask. The bones of the face turn clear and light up train lines. A long, transparent tube emerges from the hollows of the flat bones and cautiously feels its way into the water. When its other end comes free, it unfurls a gelatin disk, which rises and then settles slowly down back onto the face, forming features, pulsing with bands of dim light. It cloaks the face the way two lovers’ faces are superimposed in an embrace. Now this dark mask, which in every way contrasts with his natural face, slips itself deftly
behind
his features. His face suddenly radiates an astonishing beauty, his natural features will always be seen in light of this invisible and absolute contrast with the mask inside, an anti-mask which makes plainer the true face.

A new person, he will come to the city by land sea and air, in the present and in memory — his character has been here before, and thinks to himself:

This is an unusual car — is this a new kind? Maybe it’s an antique. In my mind I can see a gleaming head of gentle red hair turned to gold by the light of the new-dawning day, a shining white breast rises and falls, nostrils whistling mild euphoria. A few mornings ago... my memories are flattened like photos in a magazine. Trains churn alongside us in the frigid water, and I can hear the water rustling down along our shining sides. Tracks arduously laid down on the bedrock of the bottom by workers in purple metal caissons slide below our heavy wheels. A few of these cassons exploded from too much pressure; and their shattered fragments lie among the rocks all rusty brown, huge iridescent fish dart like lightning in and out of their rent up sides.

The train veers, and I see the city’s foundations off in the distance, a deeper dark in milky blue haze. There are pipes big enough to swallow city blocks bundled up there, all encrusted with clear tubes, gathered around a red rampart of solid iron protruding from the sea bed. Above me, where the light of the setting sun salts the blue of the pack ice pink, the city itself spreads out onto the ice sheet like an umbrella. The city is in chains, which hold it down to the spot bolted to bedrock on all sides. Up ahead, there’s a dead whale that got caught in one of the chains, covered with deep white lacerations, the drooping grid of the jaw frozen at an angle. Yellow and vermillion starfish have begun creeping up the tail and covering the body in bizarrely festive five-pointed stars. Off to one side a furtive motion catches my eye and I spot a puddle of living ink prowling along beside the tracks. Surrounded by a halo of threads, these featureless things slither along clever as otters, hunting among the coral.

From time to time the train passes near the edges of deep chasms hundreds of yards across. The tracks descend and the sunlight fades. I see a chimera with mirror eyes and transparent fins, cold-water dolphins like black glass... We pass a seep where the denser brine doesn’t mix with the sea water, forming the mirage-like surface of a lake underwater. A tourist brochure for the City of Sex appears in my mind, stray paragraphs keep coming back to me from this text I never read.

The tracks climb through the city’s foundations. On nights when the moon is full, the pack ice glows like a sheet of moonlight made solid. In places where the ice is clear, those who live below the surface can peer up at powdery indigo sky and brilliant miniature stars. Just before the train begins to spiral up out of the water — is that a woman I see, walking on the ocean floor? She has a round head, and the dark shape of her mouth opens and closes slowly as she sings her siren-song... I can make out the dark circles of her eyeglasses, and her neck stretches and grows longer as though her head wanted to float up to the world of air...

The City of Sex is all gradual motion, the slow passage and recombinations of landscapes, and sudden eruption of breathtaking panoramas of blue sky, white ice, black mountains, the sweeps of steel ribbons. In brochurese I “recall” the city’s history: founded millennia ago when a number of settlers from different parts of the globe accidentally converged on the same area at the same time. A flukish stretch of temperate weather made the establishment of a small colony possible. When the weather once again grew severe, the colony was cut off forever. As communications broke down, it was assumed in other quarters that the colony was lost. In time, it was forgotten altogether.

The colony did not disappear, but adapted, developed and thrived in an isolation that presently became a matter of preference, instead of necessity. Their space craft are occasionally observed in other parts of the world.

The city is a vast circular cradle of elevated rail lines and high spires, steel and glass pavilions. The streets are made of metal plates, curved with steam pipes under them to keep the ice off. The caterpillar sidewalks are flat ingots of thick steel linked together in broad ribbons. Overhead lights shine directly down on passersby, giving them an especially stark appearance.

All the metal buildings, the metal walls of the homes, are adorned with fine arabesques, like circuits of nearly invisible gold filaments. All structures are coated with a thin layer of transparent ice that lightly blurs the gold. The touch of polished metal molded and pressed into the folds and rolls the luxuriant foliage and rounded shapes of Gothic architecture, is weirdly pleasurable. It runs along the palm like warm skin, a fine fabric of minute etched scratches that form fractured spirals in the light.

Everywhere are humming wires and if you put your ear to them you can hear voices — some are voices belonging to people in the city and some are voices from the wind as it blows on the wires, or from the aurora when she lashes her cat o’ nine tails in the sky. These words are all too faint and too terrifying to be recorded.

In some places, where the streets are just ice, a manhole cover will glide back and a sea lion or walrus will thrust up its head. Floating there, it will watch the passers-by, supercilious, curious, or earnest. Cranes everywhere — I mean the mechanical kind — the city is constantly building itself — enormous, vistal works — steel suspension bridge in the frigid air... Wind harp in the wires, and an incessant rumble of distant construction. The train descends past the city, jagged black mountains, the vast eye-scalding plain of pack ice, and the city swims gracefully by gossamer-like steel and glass pavilions topped with tapering, bright pennants. The pavilions enclose vast boulevards, with three tiers of galleries on all sides over them. I watch them sail up or down through my reflection in the glass walls of the elevators. Vast trees grow from the floor to just within a few inches of the ceilings, their roots drink from the many fountains everywhere.