The Great Lover (36 page)

“
Stupidians! To the attack!”

He brought in the punks and with the punks came these Immigrants who seemed to emerge from the neighborhoods they played in. Now he’s sitting in his eighth holding cell bobbling his knees and smiling at the guard. Doesn’t seem to care.

Lying there trying to sleep — I hope Vera doesn’t worry. She’s a rainbow worrier, worries like a rainbow, brightly. Bright worry. Brighten
ing
.

He was drawn to her when he saw her playing guitar on the train, started asking her one question after another, about her music, about being blind, about the cult when it came up.

Demon man in a fur coat, turn there on the platform at the end of your leap, draw along through the air the curtain rod, the long red curtains ripple slowly — you made them a weapon. Is he avoiding me? Maybe he’s too busy.

He attached himself to her and kept by her. When he kissed her, he stunned her. Her face turned to cotton, her mouth dropped open. She grabbed his arms, at the elbows, and seemed to want to look around for something. He had kissed her on a sudden impulse, because he suddenly realized he was in love with her. What followed was a space between two moments, during which the world changed shape.

They are going to transfer him to some other jail. He is led out, handcuffed again. Fresh air on his face — then a loud mutter of unfurling cloth and everywhere he looks there is heavy red fabric flying, grunts and curses from the police — the cloth is all around him and he’s off his feet — his board is under his feet and he is rolling along the pavement. The fabric snaps away into the sky, a long leaping figure just flashes out of sight near a culvert, looking like a shadowy ink splotch. His hands are free. He is on the street.

Futsi glances back, seeing the top of the police building and hearing a siren now wail thinly there, a few blocks away. Laughing he kicks himself going and rides the handrail down to the subway.

*

Like coming suddenly awake I know he’s there. His voice comes to me as I’m waiting, from somewhere ahead of me, across the tracks. There are many platforms here. He is across several tracks, but I can hear him, as though he pitches his words just right, through space to me. I can’t make the words out but I hear his voice, the tone of his voice.

He’s changed. Why couldn’t he have changed before, when I was free? He would have to pick now to do it, plighting his troth from far away.

Closer—! I think he jumped! I heard a slam, I think it was his chest hitting the edge of the next platform. I hear him grunting as he gets to his feet, it must have hurt like mad. His heart is white hot and rings like an anvil, howls like bellows. I’ve been taken to visit blacksmiths and I could feel the wild heat, hear the clash of the hammer and the horseshoe, it’s coming back from the tunnels and the rails, the anvils of the wheels, a sound like turtledoves’ sobbing all smeared together in the deep echo of caves. But somehow the crowd parts us, and I am on the train leaving his longing behind me.

I turn around at the next station and come back, but he’s gone. Then Futsi comes, and I forget again.

Dream of a medieval castle, musty stone and tapestries. Futsi, with long hair, is rolling me around on a fur rug that’s now by the fire now on the bed. I brush my hair, sitting at the mirror just for fun. Swing my hand out I can stroke the cold glass with the back of my knuckles. Futsi has gone out for a piss.

Suddenly I’m excited, because I know he is climbing up the fantastically high wall, toward the window. If I lean out the sill, he could see me. Should I put something on? Being unsure whether to do that or not is incredibly exciting. Any moment now he will boil up and fill the window. If Futsi catches us!

I reach out my hands, and my right brushes his knee, which is bare. I slide my hands along his bare legs — he is crouching on the sill. Futsi is behind me, running his hands over my shoulders, and in front of me there is a shapeless amorousness.

“
You have to go.”

“
Why? He won’t drop dead,” he says.

“
I don’t want to make him unhappy. You’ll see me again soon, now collect your smell and go.”

“
I won’t go unless you tell me when.”

“
You must go, before he sees you.”

“
I’m right in front of him.”

“
He doesn’t see you yet you’re invisible.”

“
No.”

“
I’ll see you.”

Lenore calls out “He’s here.”

Vera runs out to meet Futsi, stall him coming in. She uproots herself from him and leaves — he remains—

He dreams he is looking at a corroded box fan barely turning its blades in the open grate of the ventilation shaft — the blades turn, and all at once his face is wet with tears.
Sadness
— she’s
gone
. A creak, a snapping sound — the fan crashes to the floor.

*

A cultist named Carver crawls into a meeting at the edge of a defunct platform and tells how she’d seen the wings congregating in a huge underground roundhouse room or switching yard. She was not detected in the act of spying, but was set upon by a group of wings some time later and badly injured. Deuteronôme and Dr. Thefarie both are present when she succumbs to her wounds, and the bitter rage that communicates itself throughout the ranks of the cultists is palpable even to the wings themselves, like a red-black thunder.

“
This anger will draw them to us,” Deuteronôme says. “We must attack them first.”

As the situation is summarized in a hastily-convened meeting, I sit distractedly watching Spargens playing with his white bull terrier at the back of the room. Spargens holds a stick at either end, the dog clamps his jaws on the middle, and Spargens spins him around off his four feet. Something sinuous and electric in the movements of the dog powerfully expresses love for Spargens.

We attack at “dawn” — underground, this is when certain work lights are illuminated by timer switch — when the wings congregate in the roundhouse yard. Enormous fans generating perpendicular air currents and noise disrupters designed by a woman named Karla will conceal our approach until the moment of attack.

From the radiant eastern tunnels four subway engines come in spearhead formation horns blaring and plough into the seething mass of wings and bodies at full speed. Two trains out in front and one on either flank a length back; Uar rides atop the foremost train on the right, a machete in his right hand and a kukri in his left, his feet braced under a chain wrapped around the roof of the car; he is instantly in motion and hidden in a blizzard of feathers, his calm face through ragged gaps in the flickering cloud, his arms darting jabbing. Similarly braced the Great Lover rides left foremost rapidly swinging his curtain rod on its line above his head in a wide circle that no wings can enter; the knobbed ends ring with each wing they split and the ringing is constant. On the rear left, Dr. Thefarie sits strapped in a marlin-fishing chair, wearing a pair of thick gloves with high-friction grabbing surfaces on the palms and fingers. Years of Civil-War-style battlefield amputations have made him an expert with the surgical saw he holds in his right hand, and as the wings come at him he snatches them in one hand with catlike speed and saws them apart with two swift strokes. Red-faced, swathed in five sweaters and drenched in perspiration, hard-breathing Spargens rides the fourth car, flailing away with a crushing loop of heavy chain.

The four barrelling engines gouge a swath through the wings, ramming, running down, or breaking them above and the air is white with feathers like flying sea foam. A body drops clumsily down knocking Spargens back against the roof of his car; he is pinned beneath the remains and the wings are pounding his face and sides. With cries of alarm Spargens frantically wraps the chain around his fist and batters back at random. A lucky swing splinters the left wing and he hastily kicks the body forward to fall beneath the wheels of the car. Shriek of brakes, the cars squeal to a halt just within the tunnels opposite the ones from which they emerged, and now is the crisis when the volunteer operators must shift control to the opposite compartments while the fighters on the roofs turn round.

Covering this moment is a charge of cultists on skateboards and on foot, led by Futsi and Deuteronôme. The main body of the wings has been cut in half and driven to either side, now they rush to eliminate the flanking cars as the nearest targets of opportunity while the reinforcements close on them.

Spargens has barely turned himself around when the wings are upon him; he flounders desperately lashing out with his chain not infrequently bruising himself. Dr. Thefarie is snatching at wings with both hands, stacking them hastily beneath both feet and holding them down with mounting effort. The trains lunge back into the open space of the yard. With gleeful whoops, Futsi skates over and climbs to Spargens’ aid, sprints the length of the car cutting and clubbing with a hatchet. The Great Lover’s curtain rod lances down between Dr. Thefarie’s feet, splitting all the bunched wings struggling there in half. With a whip of the line, he has it up in the air again and sailing back to his hand.

The trains advance slowly into the center of the chamber and stop. The tracks, the entire floor, are nearly buried under a faltering layer of dismembered wings and crushed remains. Dismounting, the war-party regroups and advances in the same formation on foot, driving the wing remnants back against the walls, cornering them by the switching-house. Dr. Thefarie runs to and from Uar’s train, bringing a jingling crate in his arms. He opens the crate and quickly-formed details light the rags and hand the bottles forward. Crouched like ape-men, their faces blank as ghosts’ their irises gone white their gaze fixed without wavering without blinking on the massed enemy, the foremost receive the bottles into their open hands as they reach back and then hurl them from the right hand and the left hand into the mass. In silence, the wings churn in billows of flame, a greasy smoke sluices up the walls and undulates across the ceiling. The cultists remain at the blistering edge of the fire weapons ready to drive back.

Only when the fire has mastered the wings do they withdraw, their eyes and skin burning from the greasy, foul-smelling smoke. It falls to the Great Lover, who is unaffected, to clear the vast floor of the roundhouse and feed the fire with the remainder of their enemies.

*

I’m strumming like mad. His hand takes one of mine and pulls me up like I’m a balloon. We’re running together holding hands. I can still feel myself strumming the guitar, and it hums against my body, but holding his hand we’re running together. I can hear wind shaking the trees over the low howl of the wheels on the rails, I can feel wonderful speed — my legs kicking way up behind me.

Now I’m suddenly completely confused, I don’t know where I am or who, but my impressions have become more distinct. They stand in a line. I guess I’m awake again, on the train. My hands rest on my thighs — I grab my legs, pat myself — my guitar! I feel around — nothing. I lay my head back not knowing whether to laugh or cry some asshole stole my guitar!

Something booms quietly near me, and rustles. I put out my hand — my guitar is there, hovering. I take it in both hands and I feel it move toward me, turning over onto its back, with a force that comes down the neck.

“
Thankth,” I say, moving one hand to the neck.

Fingers deliberately brush that hand as they release the guitar.

“
It’th you!”

I feel as though a furnace door had come open and heat swirls over the front of me.

Ding-dong. The doors roll open.

“
Where can we meet?” his voice asks, and the heat stirs again.

“
Uh...”

“
Think of somewhere.”

“
...There’th a pathage off the platform in the nextht thation—”

I mustn’t think — I won’t think any thought—

Ding-dong.

“
Get outta the doors!” on the PA.

“
When?” same level voice.

“
...Two hourth?”

Ding-dong.

He’s gone.

Rest with my guitar in my lap. No thinking.

What am—

No thinking.

No thinking.

I can stay away —

No thinking.

No planning.

Futsi

Don’t think.

Just be there, in two hours.

*

He rushes in—

Sweet pressure in his chest of a new embryo breaking its bud.

I’m your bondsman that’s a happy note — he bends to press his rinsed ear to take in the delectable time beaten out on the soft anvil of her compact body, her heart is there, that’s her core — the encompassing ribs unlace to admit her heart’s companion, and combine by accomplished accomplice enlace and edit me, so do it incomparably. The wan boom of her breath rolls like a tide by my ear, rises going by my white and serrated moon of an ear. I press my lips where the skin is stretched taut and thick over a fixed undulation of bone, by the pit of her throat... These pompous words are for Vera too: if she laugh, what blessing, if they thrill even better.

Vera’s vine-locks trickle one by one from her shoulders, both our faces stop beneath her veil and compare features, and now lips combine again — start and stop. Her nostrils are warming my cheek. Scrub and scrub, the lines won’t go.