The Great Lover (33 page)

*

Homeless wings sneak up on unsuspecting victims and pounce, planting their stumps into the victim’s back, and making off with him to where? No one knows. I suppose the wings fly around with them until they succumb to privation, exposure, rough treatment. Deuteronôme has divined an uncertain relationship between the wings and what Ptarmagant had called the
Vampirism
. At first, I had assumed this was essentially
gh
û
l
, but now we have one of our own I no longer think so.
Gh
û
l
is the blank of the desert and of death; words spread in infinite space like pepper on the surface of the water, growing always thinner until there’s nothing left of them. It’s also the sandstorm that rages and erases. And the mirages, “will of wisps” the Europeans call them, that lure men into sand or quicksand. These vampires, on the other hand, leave us where we are but grind us away into phantoms, and this cannot be allowed.

A meeting is called inside one of the bridges. Futsi comes rolling in with the other skateboard riders; he glides in, standing on his board, smiling. He’s been a great blessing to us — a sturdily-built Japanese man with a mohawk, draped in a sweatshirt as big as a kameez. Long linen ribbons he has wound around his shins, making his black canvas pants bulge like onions at the knees.

Multiply greets Futsi. First time I saw Futsi, he thinks, I thought he had some mess on the back of his neck. Then I see it’s this tacky tattoo of a cougar head. It’s just the outlines, and the eyes and the white parts around the mouth, because his skin is already the right color. At first I thought it was lame, but now I look again and think it’s all right, like the old respect of the tribe for the animals. I asked him about it and he said he had a dream, and saw it there on his neck, so he went out and got it.

Dr. Thefarie noticed the tattoo as well — I had to ask what it was — a female lion? As I look at its solemn expression, I find I keep a straight face myself only with difficulty.

After some preliminary remarks, Deuteronôme cedes the floor.

Uar, a mestizo from Bahia, is an accomplished trance fighter with a curly mop of thick hair and a skin condition; while most of his body is dark copper the delicate skin of his face and neck, his hands and forearms to the elbow is bleached translucent grey. The hued skin meets the bleached in ragged lines dotted with flakes of pale in the brown. His jawline is spotted with the woolly buttons of his sparse beard, which glisten like glass thread against his ghostly face. The condition has also drained his eyes a moonlight ash. He wears a rumpled shirt rolled up at the elbows and half open.

Sitting down on a bench, something catches the corner of Deuteronôme’s eye and in the same moment he feels a hot streak in his spine — a huge boa constrictor slides by among the thick PVC piping overhead. It veers off toward a shadowy corner and before Deuteronôme can turn his head the demon is there, half hidden in the dark, listening to Uar.

“
Sometimes they come out of the jungle and burrow into graves, looking for bodies to attach to, and sometimes — we don’t know why — the wings attach
inside
the body, and not on the outside.”

Uar folds his hands across his broad chest.

“
They squeeze the lungs and heart like milking a cow,”

He flexes his hand open and closed.

“
to animate the body, and work the arms and legs from within by pushing on the bones. The cold brains revive with the blood, but they have no control of the body from the neck down. Their guts and their mouths are choked with feathers, and the feeling makes them insane. They hate like sulfur everyone who isn’t suffering like them, and so they turn into vampires. But since they can’t drink blood with their bodies full of feathers, they suck out your spirit with their eyes.

“
The sun doesn’t bother them. They walk in the street and try to go unnoticed, taking spirit away from everyone they pass. So you go in a crowd and come out feeling lightheaded, weak. They run people down, and run down the world. They like it when people cut down trees, because trees interfere with them. Wherever trees are being chopped down, you know vampires are there. They also like it when people put lights everywhere at night, because they feed by seeing you. But they don’t like being seen. They are insatiable, because they suck not by hunger, but because of insane irritation.

“
To fight them, you have to meet them vampires in a trance; the trance stiffens up your spirit like changing milk to cheese, so it is hard to suck away. The vampires notice when you do this and will want to come after you right away, so be ready.”

Uar taps the palm of his left hand with the edge of his right.

“
Luckily they are cowards, and will not like a confrontation with you face to face. They are parasites, not hunters. A grey thought held in empty hand.”

Deuteronôme’s eyes flick from Uar to the demon to Futsi. The demon’s eyes flick from Uar to Futsi, to Deuteronôme.

“
Perhaps you have something you can tell us,” he calls to the demon. Now all eyes flick.

The figure seems to rise and fall again as it creeps forward into the light. His face is different — the brown flakes of dried filth have turned into a mask of fine blue lines, like an etching.

Multiply thinks — now his face looks like someone went crazy with a ball point and a spirograph.

“
When Ptarmagant was alive,” the demon says, “he showed me a page from the
Phaedrus
whose meaning he felt was of crucial importance. Not to go on and on about it, the wings are city elementals of thwarted desire that bud off and become separate. They are a complement to the red armbands. I would recommend avoiding direct confrontation with them for the time being. As Uar said, trance is important. It is important because, if you simply attack them directly, you will be feeding them the vitality you throw into the attack. The harder you fight the more they will feed.”

“
And if they come for us?” Deuteronôme asks.

“
Run. If possible, get them to chase you. That will tire them out... I’ll get them to chase me. The more they chase and fail to catch what they’re chasing, the more they are weakened as a whole. In fact, if enough of us are willing, we should establish teams of runners to provoke them.”

Futsi has been staring at the Great Lover in rapt attention.

“
We could” he says, “do that to the armbands, too! Do you think that would work?”

The demon says nothing, but seems to shrink.

Deuteronôme: He
is
jealous. I can almost see his pain, like a fall of sick water pouring over him. It’s like a biting, sour smell.

“
Yes,” I say aloud, “we will coordinate teams of runners. You,” I point to the demon, “will deal with the wings, and you” I point to Futsi, “will deal with the armbands.”

We are breaking up now. The demon is dissolving into the shadows. Immigrants standing near me watch him go, talking with Futsi, who seems to want to go talk to him. They are making skeptical faces, and speaking to each other in their own language. “Dybbuk,” they call him, “kachina.”

Multiply rolls past his corner smiling at the shrinking demon. “Too bad he got your woman...” he sings softly as he is going by.

I stop him outside.

“
Awww—”

“
Silence!” I hold up my hand his mouth snaps shut like a trap. “That man has a demon in him. He cannot be trusted. I have seen it—”

I jab him in the chest.

“—
you have not. Don’t antagonize him!”

“
Yeah all right—”

“
Don’t joke. What you put on your plate comes back in the spoon.”

*

Pearl is with John again and the Great Lover is in the sewers with his gnomes, sitting in a grease circle, peering through three pairs of glasses into a round bottle he’s washed and bleached transparent. A single feather — the same one he’d shown to Pearl — hangs suspended inside.

I am trying to get a look in on the wings. There is no way to drift gradually in, or to sink down into the sight... but now and then something like a cold solar flare arcs past and over me, with a gush like wind or a harsh grating sound. I can almost see them — transparent brass shells that move through the air like rips in fabric — coming out of a smoke that gathers around the feather in a rough globulation. I have to drive my nerves into it—

I feel pain and draw back, stop myself just in time as I see the problem — it’s not a membrane keeping me out, but something more like the momentum of a merry-go-round or a moving train — my nerves crashed into the motion. If I pull them back suddenly, they are likely to get tangled and ripped out of me, or drag me in with them to be mangled in the works, like Isidora Duncan strangling on her own scarf. Draw back carefully... not just slowly, but pulling each nerve ending out of the way when it’s safe.

I’m beginning to feel right again; now to get in I have to match the speed, like boarding a moving train, and pick my moment to hop — every cog has a tooth missing somewhere and that’s the aperture you can use to get in, but it can only be done with a swift darting motion perpendicular to the... now—

It’s like a huge whirling metal drum, groaning as it spins, a buzzing shell at my back, metallic smoke too that’s mostly rigid but fumes off its structures, a maze looking sort of like an abstract rendering of a London slum at one-third scale — blocks and rows, low walls and partitions. This is their subway. Everything is made of lead smoke. The spaces between objects are made of weak, colorless light, stronger than moonlight but not as strong as overcast daylight. There is a metronomic sound, too, with a soft attack, that undulates through the smoke in nearly visible scallops of tiny parallel streaks or hairs, not quite evenly spaced.

My nerve form is too light to be affected by these waves; it is moving at the same speed as everything here. I float up to one of the “walls” and see the wave shred through it, momentarily crystallizing the smoke into a lead skein. Then it falls apart and resumes its former, homogeneous appearance. An empty, dying feeling presses me from these things. There is no atmosphere here in the usual sense, but I experience something like dry cold that has no bite. Temperature in the air has to do with movement of the air, but here there is no movement except the drifting of the smoke and the operations of the waves. The drifting smoke, which seems both to drift and to stand as still as statues, weblike though it looks, is too dense to penetrate, like a metal film. The note in the air has a lower, creaking tone I’m just beginning to notice, like someone groaning until the sound of the voice breaks apart into individual pops; I feel it more than I hear it, like the rumble of a subway train passing just overhead.

How should I move? Without knowing what exactly threatens me, I know it is dangerous to be caught here; and that I may get stuck somehow, even if I am not detected. If I move only when the waves are flowing, don’t I risk being caught in them? If I move only when they aren’t flowing, my motion might be noticed. I’ll risk synchronizing my movement to the waves, play it safe by moving with the light, as far as possible from the smokes.

The light is disgusting; a tepid mucus.

I find the station. A feeble, even radiation fills the place, the tracks, pillars, benches and other features are all made of indifferent smoke. Almost no color, almost no contrast of intensities, like a completely smudged pencil sketch. The “vampires” are like leprous bodies clothed in a ragged plumage of fibrous smoke. They stand perfectly still, hands at their sides, with their heads thrown back. I look up, to see what they see. The ceiling is covered with furled wings, hanging upside down and jostling each other with weird violent movements. A downy metal dust sifts from their feathers and falls on the vampires; the vampires reply with song, not opening their mouths. The dust I can feel fall around me, and it’s like a stream of death pushing life down out of me like dragging down my clothes to the floor. The song is almost like the rising and falling of emergency sirens; the waves transmit the siphoned energies to the wings, and their jostling and shivering is part of the way they bask in it and consume it. It’s when the note, after sinking and sinking, suddenly wells back up in pitch again that I really feel it — and panic, horror, as though a spider had mounted on me, and gradually dissolves and absorbs my body.

Try moving in on a specific object — here under one of the pseudo-stairwells. Unnerving, that everything here is purely geometrical, still, completely eternal and everlastingly the same. The line of the stairwell above me now, the blank floor and blank walls; I imagine lying in a casket, my head on one side, gazing out at the interior of the mausoleum forever. Vera and Futsi together, their bodies arc and flex together — a gasp brings me back to attention — I had permitted my thoughts to wander and the sharp feeling attracts them. They fasten on pain like that — I stay still and listen with all my mind. A pair of legs appears where the stairs climb out of the floor, their momentum fading. They stop.

Now they drift away.

But now I notice, in the deeper darkness under the stairs, a small group of them sitting with their heads together, talking in their garbled, monotonous whispers. They are talking about us — so that also distracts them. I suddenly can see their way: somewhere they are watching... here, on the platform of which this is the shadow, they are watching us — I see the grey smudged platform, covered with milling figures like silent movie people projected on smoke with a weak lamp. They are barely outlines, but they flicker in intensity, and project colors, which sometimes flash, brighten and then dwindle again. A stationary group catches my eye, each one with a streak of darker grey in the middle of the forearm — the red armbands. I don’t pick up any clues from observing them, until I notice that their shadows don’t match. They are the shadows of prostrates, doubled over flat on their calves with their hands bound behind them, their hooded heads bowed.