The Great Lover (40 page)

Patches of heat and cool float on me as I walk. The sun through the leaves. I’m a little close to the margin of the path and the twigs want to snag my clothes. Here a more sizeable branch grows or has fallen across the path; it catches at my throat and I have trouble getting free — it’s not a branch it’s a dry, tepid hand and it’s squeezing my throat — I don’t understand the grip is so hard — I can’t breathe — the hand isn’t budging I can’t breathe — I’m being killed — my tongue is sticking out — I claw with hands I don’t feel but — but — I’m struggle — my body clouds, my lungs! — I’m being killed but I’m alive! — but I’m alive! Alive! — weak but — light, but — sunlight — is it? — I’m alive! Still alive! — still alive! but—

for a moment an uncertain feeling, Schwipps has come up... he just stands there, looking from face to face, and it’s odd because he’s usually such an outgoing man — his hands are moving together and apart, like he’s playing a phantom squeezebox.

His mouth is open and his upper lip is long and stiff.

There’s a rush — tears flow down his face.

What is it—

His face—

He points—

The first of the two copses of trees.

“
It killed her!”

Without a word, all cross following him — there’s a path that turns in through the trees. Smarting eyes adjust to the dark and sharp breaths, a shape is lying beside the path. Vera lies there.

The demon stops. He makes a sound. He throws off his coat and hat takes two quick steps, stops.

He goes to her slowly, and kneels down next to her. Very gently, he rolls her over. I can hear a confused noise coming from him. Her face is grey. Very slowly he puts out his hand to touch her. A moment later he’s pawing at her sobbing and screaming like he’s out of his mind, it’s a sound like the ocean would make, like howling waves. He frisks her, as though he could find her life somewhere and put it back where it was. He picks her up and now he’s running around in circles with her.

CHAPTER TEN

There was a streak of brown grass linking the path to the copse. The trees near her showed where the thing went by. They were marked with dead patches. I used to wrap her up carefully in poems from top to bottom and made her poems even when I was holding her in my arms. Then, even when I held her. I can’t.

Even then I made poems, even then. If you’re looking for glib talk go find it in hell.

Futsi screaming at me tears run down into his mouth.

“
Why didn’t you protect her?!”

I turn, without one thought, thoughtlessly toward her and hit the blank that’s all that’s there, not even the memory. They’re not memories they’re past moments that suddenly fill me like pregnancy. I see what goes with her like a series in a scrapbook and from every frame she has been removed. I see what she would do, say, each what piled on top of the other growing brutally sharper until the sweetness impales me from inside out. Bayonets me from inside, and scalding grief gushes from the rip in my body taking out with it all my life. What an idiot I was not to see that life was handing me gems. Was handing me
fistfulls of gems
—

*

Futsi blames him.

I remember her walking on the platform. I hear her sing. The song sounds now under cancellation of death...

Now the streets of the narrative are stark and empty, the whole narrative has gone flat and cold and stark. The sky is a sheet of burning white that smarts the eye, and there is no sun, no dusk, no dawn. No one sees day and night change. The night sky is deep with blue hazes veiling the black, the moon is black, and the stars are soft and bright-guttering.

From out of the white sky a soundless wind comes that makes the street ripple like a canvas sail. Not cold or warm, not strong or weak, the wind sets the house and store fronts, the monumental banks and steep-laddered office buildings listing and rattling like wooden flats. Only a handful walk in empty streets, smudged and indistinct people, hard to see in broad daylight, a wind carries their voices away without a sound.

All around the Great Lover there is only sleep, cold. No light, no color, the streets appear to be unmagical, empty. There are clouds like gunsmoke in the street, sweeping past kneading and curdling, white and grey blurred against the black. A tourniquet closed on him full of loose grey earth. He is not moving, stands in the teeth of the wind. All visual objects are incised painfully in cutting strokes on a tender membrane, the grey cream sky just above the edges of the buildings, ready to melt into smoke.

Staring with an expression of sudden fright at the black spears topping an iron fence — cold watchers. He stares at them for a long time.

And now his face seems briefly disposed to laugh without mirth at them; I get the joke, we are more real than you.

A leathery wing, without hurrying, puts out the sky, and beneath it he turns into a multitude as numerous as the threads in his coat.

Her locks rise over the city and he paralyzes. I see what he sees: her face. Slack with death. Upright, as though she stood before and above him. Her dead face towers over him.

He watches as something shivers over her features. A moment more, and her face will crumple and darken like scorching paper. A vast, soft hand squeezes him, his face crumples and darkens, and nearly silent sobs come out from the rigid mouth.

Her face is never like it was. Her tresses sweep the sky over the rooftops like searchlights. He’s dreaming.

He takes her body in his arms and begins to run with her, as if her life were getting away. He runs onto a bridge, veers to one side to avoid a truck, loses his balance, and now he hangs over the side by one hand, the other holding her. He would have to let her drop to get use of his other hand, and he can’t pull himself up without both hands. Instead, he clasps her tightly in both his arms, and lets himself fall. Her body is wrenched from his arms as he crashes into the surface; he flails this way and that, looking for her, and then catches sight of her, just in time to see her body being sucked into the spinning propellers of a passing ferry boat, which instantly cut her to pieces.

He swims after the ferry. Nothing, not even a single lock of hair, is left of her.

Nothing — and he seizes one of the massive propeller blades with his hands. It swings him round he keeps his hold and pushes out with his legs — his feet come flat against the bottom of the boat and his body goes rigid, stopping the blade. Through the hull he can hear the engine shriek and shudder, as pistons erupt out of the cylinders and burst up through the deck to mangle reeling passengers. Howling, the engine rips itself completely loose and falls away into darkness.

The Great Lover lunges at the other propeller and tears it and its engine from the boat. The ferry lists backwards. He unfolds the longest blade of his pocket knife and stabs the boat with it, cuts a square in the hull and bashes it in with his fists. The ferry dips drastically sinking faster and faster listing to one side. The Great Lover clings to the edge of the opening he’s made tugging frenziedly, trying to drag the ferry down faster. Passengers climb over each other clawing trying to reach the hatches miring boots and pumps in wailing faces. Flailing his arms he is trying to push the water in quicker through the hole — the boat plummets to the bottom leaving a trail of drowned and writhing people — he flails with all his strength knowing none of it is any use.

Where is she? he’s shouting. Where is she?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She is coming.

Deuteronôme and Multiply have switched to the downtown platform. It’s late, and they are alone. Deuteronôme is sitting with his elbows on his knees, looking steadily across the tracks. His eyes are alert, flicking here and there. A rat. Another over there? No, nothing. Is that nothing? He looks, peers. Not nothing and not a rat, a grey wisp. It is a little shower of dust, falling below the level of the platform, seeping in from the tunnel and now a whir surrounds them as they get to their feet in alarm...

Shadows adhere below her eyes, and she droops with fatigue. The wings rustle and creak in regular waves, a sound like laborious breathing through viscous lungs.

“
I am so tired,” the voice whispers, with the slightest ring of a woman’s voice.

Multiply can feel his lips almost form the words, a sandbag emptying into him, a hand pinching out the wick.

“
I can’t fight,” she says. “I must die...”

Heavy snow pouring down into him, a cold weight that drifts inside. He weaves on his legs.

His uncle seizes his shoulder and shakes him — a far-away feeling. But his uncle’s voice keeps driving toward him, cutting in clearer and clearer.

“
Do you want to live? Do you want to live?”

“
Y-yes,” he says, barely able to move his throat, his mouth. But saying it he feels a meager trickle of strength drip into him.

“
Yes,” he says it again, louder.

“
I don’t want to live,” she says, and the words rush down behind his face shooting toward his open mouth — clamps it shut and can almost feel them pound against the inside of his lips.

“
You must fill yourself with the desire to live!” his uncle shouts. “It must fill you to bursting!”

Multiply reaches into that swelling feeling by his heart and lungs with weary agony, somehow barely able to do it — but he does it, and at once the life in him is strengthened. Stronger and stronger, coming back, stronger than before.

“
I can’t fight... I am so weary...”

The voice breaks over him but it cannot enter. No room.

“
You will fail here,” Deuteronôme says. “Go on.”

“
I will fail...” Again the temptation to echo her...

“
Go on.”

The breathing of the wings deepens, and there is motion of
Vampirism
on all sides, surrounding them.

Gliding forward, “I want the end.”

“
Go.”

“
It’s too much for me,” she wails without a voice, quietly — but now Multiply can see the lines on her face are shadows only, and the features are unmarked, impassive.

“
Nothing is too much for you. You are the end.”

“
I am the end,” she glides to within a few feet away. “No more sight, no more sound. No sense. No numbness. No nothingness. No peace. No relief. No end, no without end. No time or space. I am so tired. I want to lie...”

Words almost thrust at his lips like fingers.

“
I do not exist.”

Like a blow.

The rustling has grown, the circle around them is closing. For a moment I see it — everything going dark, all the windows, the traffic stopped dead, lights going out until the city is just completely gone, and no sound at all. Just litter blowing over the bodies, in the park, on the sidewalk. This is like an infinity force that is bigger than the
Vampirism
or the students or anything human beings can make — just the dark of the dark.

“
Quickly get behind me” — turning as he goes around behind him “ — Get on your board. Both feet.”

He pulls from his pocket a small digital metronome and starts it, holding it up by his face. It emits a clear pitch at a variable setting, right now about every other second.

“
Now start skating round me in a circle, so that you pass before me or behind my back at each stroke... You must adjust as I increase the stroke.”

Multiply keeps the board going in a smooth regular motion, his eyes darting this way and that and pancakes flipping over in his cold stomach.

“
Keep your eyes on what you are doing.”

The intervals between the pulses are gradually shrinking, but Multiply keeps up, sinking into a slowly deepening crouch on the board. He has to keep his eyes on what he’s doing but he can hear a frenzied rustle all around.

A sound is coming from his uncle, a kind of boom he can feel shudder up through the floor into his wheels. Out of the corner of his eye he gets the idea his uncle is just a blur, humming there. He feels power well up, and far from stilling the tremble he feels this power is changing it into the shaking of rage or excitement, of a strong engine. The pulses have sped up now and he is turning into a streak making a magic circle around his uncle, who seems to be rotating in place without moving his limbs. He is saying something again and again.

A bow wave of fright nearly pushes him over and he knows that she is near, probably standing a few feet away. But she can’t get through the circle that he—

Faster his streak is pulling apart — he is a clear streaked ring connecting two pulsing, blurry images of himself at front and back of his uncle. Now he’s four images, one at each of the cardinal points. As the pulse accelerates and his speed increases to match it, he realizes he’s seeing all around himself at once. He can see himself. He can see her, and his uncle, like a flame shadow upright in the middle of the circle, a slender funnel of transparent flame coiling above his head like a charmed snake. He has eight faces in a circle, all speaking the same repeated word or formula, sixteen arms.

She is watching. He can tell she is at bay somehow.

“
It’s like you can’t get on a moving subway even if the doors are open, unless you’re on another train going about the same speed. We’re alternating here and there so fast she can’t sync up.”