The Great Lover (31 page)

The brick gives way and the water around me drives forward all at once, carrying me into a passage.

There is a barely-perceptible shift, a remote click — the pressure is off, tea-colored light is sifting through to him — something prods him in the back — prods a few times, then drags him through icy water and out into warm, dry air, grass against his face. Dr. Thefarie has retrieved him from the brine tank.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The immigrants were noticed first in the spring, after the solstice, which was about the time the Great Lover disappeared. No one could make out their language or find their variously-designated region of origin on even the most detailed maps. Many in the cult therefore concluded that the immigrants didn’t come from anywhere; they preceded the ones they left behind, or they had migrated here from no other place, but out from nothingness, with all its customs. Deuteronôme catches sight of a knot of them standing with their heads together at one end of the platform and there arises all around him the yipping of coyotes, disembodied and far away, a sound from a desert hill across thousands of miles.

Their numbers grow steadily, never quite becoming a torrent but regularly increasing. They are distinctive in appearance without any conspicuous exhibition in costume or toilette. Slow lugubrious men in voluminous sweaters, with close-cropped dark hair, leathery faces, with grubby hands and blackened gums, their voices thick and copious from years of heavy smoking. Yet, when they sing or make merry or drink, a light-hearted animal happiness comes fountaining up out of them, frank gaiety, boyishness, innocence, even beauty... sweet and plain. The candid women are bright, birdlike, businesslike, considerably fairer than the men, but with a certain darkness about the brow and at the corners of the mouth. Though it is not clear what exactly they do with themselves most of the time, they give an impression of unending laboring. When men respond by being slow, plodding, a little haphazard, the women make only partially necessary sacrifices to their pragmatism in anger, and vent hell on anyone who fails adequately to acknowledge their toil. As the day draws on the men work slower and slower and slower, while the drawn women turn frenetic and nervous, accomplishing less and less as they tire. The women don’t ever seem to lose the haunted look around the eyes even when they’re enjoying themselves... unless they’re drinking: like a magic elixir the alcohol — twenty years evaporate from their faces, and they are brilliant star-like young girls once more. Women have the burden of worry, the men have the burden of resignation.

They are not reticent to name their country of origin — quite the opposite, their names for it are manifold. Some call it Mnemosem, which means simply: “wolves.” In conversation with others one may hear the name Vkat-Vtonkonka, which might mean “a place where the trees have never been cleared away,” or alternately “where no sun ever touches the ground.” They write with their own peculiar alphabet of highly abbreviated pictures, mixed with appropriated punctuation marks which serve them as additional letters — ampersands, asterisks, a backwards capital D, and a few characters which are identified by Dr. Thefarie as Tamazight in derivation. Their preferred drink is a sort of akvavit. In chilly weather they drink it steaming hot and mixed with maple syrup; fibrous beads dropped into the hot punch open to tiny white blossoms, dried in the old country and revived here in the hot liquor, to which they impart a mild taste of hay. The immigrants consume a great deal of syrup and put it on everything. Their staple is a substance known as “moon cheese:” this is actually made of pressed fern piths bound together in wood tar and flavored with a variety of bitter peppercorn grown in ground sown with iron filings. The men always have tarry fingers from making the stuff.

The immigrants are not secretive, not exactly. Certain questions are simply no longer there when the opportunity to ask them arises. How many of them are there now? Even before your eyes the little knot of men and women resists your efforts to count them; they are impervious to numbering. Even when keeping company with a solitary one, you are forever catching the flicker of hands out of the corner of your eyes, and you find yourself turning to address one walking next to you when no one at all is there. The immigrants have dark powers of attraction. They are inexplicably magnetic; their accents are catching. You may find yourself using one of their words without understanding it, or remembering what you thought it meant at the time you first heard it. These never became immigrants; they are essentially Immigrants, all their lives.

On one occasion, Dr. Thefarie finds himself sitting beside a young immigrant woman with hair the color of cloudy beer, wearing a long coat of wool mail. When she rises and quits the car, he observes a leaf, shaped like an arrowhead, to drop from her coat. It flutters into his lap; as he takes it in his fingers he bruises the leaf — immediately his nostrils fill with a nameless odor of warm humid wood shadows in summer dusk, of stillness in long dusks drawn out like slow-ebbing tides of a light like ribbons of incense dropped from a sky patched with black olive clots of foliage, of narcotic softness in earthy air, and crumbling breath green with brothy dew like the bark of a thick-mossed oak.

Now the “demon” has returned from his long mission in the other world, and he has opened for us a passage to the sun inside. But what this means, nobody can say. Deuteronôme is still trying to divine it. I explained to him, when he came to, as best I could. The immigrants came with a man named Futsi.

“
OK OK but what about the wings?”

“
They went away. No one knows exactly what happened, but they must have made their way out either through the lake or down into the tank, going out the way you came back.

“
...And I must tell you — Ptarmagant is dead.”

He sat right up and stared into my eyes.

“
He ventured above ground not long after you disappeared. A car ran him down.”

I watched him droop.

“
Deuteronôme and I are now jointly in charge. That was his wish. And he told us both, a few days before he was killed, to trust you would return.”

“
His body...?”

“
Just like Wouvermans — we sent it down the tracks.”

*

Ptarmagant’s last words, addressed to Futsi from the foot of the stairs.

“
We’re not trying to replace
anything
. We’re only trying to clear a space for ourselves. If other people want to be slaves, that’s their problem.”

*

Cultists gather in a broad circular chamber paved in flat flags and looking like the inside of a dolmen. It might once have been a huge reservoir. Flambeaux line the walls. The sole appointment is a large stone table surfaced with a thick sheet of polished silver in which the subway map has been engraved. Each line is a deep groove enamelled in the appropriate color, each station is marked with an upright, narrow-gage pipe, and labelled in Sanskrit characters. As the assembly recites line to line, intoning the name of every stop, Deuteronôme solemnly anoints the grooved map with a light, clear oil. When the shining oil brims the grooves, he touches the flame tip of a long wand-like candle to the central hub stops, and a vivid sapphire flame ripples down the lines with a sustained whisper. A jet of complacent, viscous blue fire emerges from the pipe at each station stop, making the subway map both a Chinese character and a dazzling constellation. Deuteronôme takes a teak striker in his hand, and uses it to ring a pair of silver chimes tuned to the notes of the closing doors, and a steady murmur arises from the assembled celebrants, each of whom has been given his or her own sutra of the Ten Million Combinations to recite. Rosaries of tokens help them to keep track, and their fondling hands flicker. This relentless churning of the air in short and swiftly successant names creates a rolling psychic tide or audible hypnosis, which is broken at critical moments by a repetition of the two notes, and by explosive blasts of train horns. After the first hour, incense is paraded around the room in silver bowls with bas-reliefs of rats and cockroaches on them, and ewers of filthy water and pulpy trash are emptied into drains at each of the cardinal points.

After the ceremony there is what is known as a “slow soirée,” so called because the participants, largely drained of vim by the demands of the ritual, are subject to time-lag, and a not unpleasant lassitude drags at their arms and legs. Here, where a vast low-vaulted chamber of curving tiled arches, opens on the brink of an old water main, dangling gondola lamps on poles watch as their light is flung back at them by the water. Webby reflections spangle the vaults with their glue. Swords hang from the ceiling, points down, never rustling, never knocking together. Their blades are grey and dark in the shade, never sparkling but always dull and dim. Linen-sheeted round tables sit in prim circles radiating from the long high table opposite the channel, where Deuteronôme and Dr. Thefarie sit to either side of a large empty chair. Enormous carp circulate through the crowd in metal troughs embossed with bas reliefs; they knock imperiously against the metal from time to time with a muscular thump. These glowing fish, leprous white, fluorescent orange, or the water they swim in, give off a meaty, musty sort of odor. Illuminated panels of light shine on a magnificent roulette wheel, five feet in diameter, nearly half a ton of bronze and precious stone. Bronze everywhere is teased into flowing liquid shapes and volutes of smoke, skulls, nude bodies, fruits and sardonic flowers exhaling the decanted air of tormented sleep. A band plays in a corner, screened from view by huge potted plants: long windy notes slither on top of tensely-restrained percussion. The guests mill across the floor before the high table, calling to each other with their detuned radio voices. Some of these are Immigrants — the air is flecked with their alien words, their almost bleating-timbred voices slithering in and out of the crowd, hollow-eyed, cryptic-smiling, with shadows flickering on their brows.

The Great Lover emerges from the boundaries of the apartment, hanging back a little. The scum on his face has changed color from brown to indigo, a shaped mat of stripes and circles like a Maori tattoo cut from a subway map. His eyes avidly scan the crowd, and then he freezes.

Vera sits with her arm linked, talking to a young man he’s never seen before. He is smiling, their faces are close. The Great Lover zeroes in on them with his ears; the young man has a light, nearly disembodied voice, like the warble of an oboe dimmed and interrupted by the wind, but his every word is distinct. While he has small obvious accent, every sentence he speaks in English is indistinctly strange, perhaps because he pronounces every word distinctly, and orders his words with audible deliberation. His smile pushes back the curtains of his cheeks, making two curving brackets to either side of his mouth.

Nearby there is an ice fountain and a pyramid of champagne glasses. The Great Lover slithers out staring and immediately latches on to a florid, energetic little man, a raconteur ex-Communist named Bosanquet who is popular in the cult.

“
Don’t say anything — I want to make my entrance in my own time. Come here!”

Bosanquet obligingly retreats with him into the shadows.

“
Who’s that?”

“
Who’s...?” Bosanquet looks around trying to follow the Great Lover’s finger.

“
Sitting with Vera.”

“
Oh! His name’s Futsi. He’s the one who brought in the Immigrants. Would you like to meet him?”

“
They’re awfully chummy aren’t they?”

“
That’s been going on for months now.”

Vera gets up and makes her way out of the room.

“
Well... You don’t want me to mention you’re here?”

“
No, thanks.”

Bosanquet strides springily away with a glass of champagne in his hand and begins his rounds.

The Great Lover stands staring at Futsi from the dark, and the empty seat pulled right up alongside his own. He crumples. He wanders away like a man who’s just been struck hard on the head. He sinks down by the wall, deflating like a balloon with a tiny puncture in it. With withered hands, he smacks the wall, and beats his chest. The music and the noise of the crowd is fainter here. He sobs once, aloud. The sound is like a separate world against the other sounds. The face he turns back to look again is streaked from the eyes. It is turning into the face of a mummy.

He rolls onto his knees on the slimy ground, breathing harshly, pressing his fists to his chest. The sounds of his grief rise from him unheard.

“
Help me!” he chokes, “Help me! Help me!”

Now his breath is labored in a different way, his body seems to swell and shrink with each breath. The face he turns to the light is full again, pale white against the livid indigo of his mask, and his teeth have turned black. A contorted grin breaks the veil that had covered his face, and fractures the tear tracks.

Old Roy conducts the Great Lover to his table — across the room entirely from Futsi, and nearly on the brink of the open channel. He joins a group of thickly-built older Greek men quietly drinking raki with dazed expressions. They mutter and belch and puff ornate meerschaums. The Great Lover is scanning the room for Vera’s face — where is she? Not back yet. The entrée is a crumbly, stiff fish in cloying white sauce eaten with dainty fingertip forks — even our substantial Greeks are plucking morsels to their mouths with remarkable delicacy. The waiter slaps his plate down in front of him haphazardly and the fish sauce and all nearly slides off. Mice streak across the table leaping dramatically over the centerpiece and some veer toward his plate. A few steps away, sweet old drunk, looks like a minor functionary in an Italian ministry, is boring the croupier with his poetical effusions, pointing to the red panels in the roulette wheel—