The Great Lover (44 page)

Multiply nods and pumps off on his board, no questions asked. Deuteronôme meanwhile takes up a bicycle from the ground and pedals after Futsi.

Now — the station — Multiply flashes onto the platform. In moments he has the place locked up tight and he’s on the other side of the barrier, heading up to the street.

John Brade is there only a moment later, rattling crazily at the chains — then running again the length of the platform. Multiply is already on the far side, locking it up tight. No way out now, and Futsi is there, feet flapping on the ties. Multiply is back on the street — gone.

John Brade has only one way to go, the local tunnel. He hasn’t taken three steps before a wall of dead air washes over him and dust is floating all around. Futsi sees it too—

“
It’s her!” he says.

John Brade looks back at him in anguish —

—
in the shed, Dr. Thefarie groans, rolls onto his side his hands slide heavily to his face—

—
then glassy-eyed runs for the garbage scow standing on the downtown platform. Futsi pelts after. John Brade gets inside the scow and is trying to shut Futsi out and that icy blast is creeping up steady on his back. Angrily Futsi yanks the door out of John Brade’s hands and shuts it behind him while in the blink of an eye John Brade is forward at the controls trying to get the thing moving they’re not fast enough to run from that influence. A light, distinct footfall on the boards of the scow.

Futsi hears it. He gives up on John Brade. Nothing to do but try to get out the way they came — the forward door is standing open and he makes for it but suddenly Deuteronôme is there, panting, slick with sweat, staring at him with implacable eyes as the door slides shut between them. He’s keyed the door shut from the outside. Futsi stands by the door like a statue, staring, stricken at this unaccountable betrayal. No way to open this door. The only open door is already within her colorless atmosphere.

A dry footfall just outside, on the wooden planks of the scow. Through the dingy glass of the door Deuteronôme’s face stares a moment indignant, then is gone. Rattle of his bicycle on the ties as he hastens away. He never saw John Brade frantically working the controls in the booth — he assumed John Brade had already made his escape.

The train suddenly groans to life, pouring diesel into the air.

John Brade turns and sees her enter the car. With a howl of despair he darts from the booth, picks up a huge metal peg and smashes one of the windows with frenzied strength — already the light is dimming, the drone of the engine is growing louder and louder and the stink of its exhaust — John Brade lunges through the window but he’s caught. Futsi has him by the waist. Futsi is dragging him back into the car with a tear-streaked face. Futsi turns at the last moment to see her. John Brade feels himself go limp all his life force disconnected with a thump.

His mind explodes like birds of fear shooting into the air and dispersing in every direction.

Futsi feels a snow hand stop his heart like the touch that stops the swing of a pendulum. His body swims away from him. The world turns to streaks up and down... just down.

“
Vera”

Two dead bodies, not four feet separating them on the floor.

*

Deuteronôme creaking away on his bicycle as fast as he can go — calling out a warning to din in the pipes and wires...

She has come looking for the Great Lover; chutes and slopes in time showed her where, brought her here. He has come, hunting John Brade — but now the wires and pipes are chattering at him — Deuteronôme’s alarm is jingling the rings on his curtain rod.

She has come.

Panting breath, a whirring sound. Deuteronôme on his bicycle, getting away.

The Great Lover alone in the tunnels. Ash sinks along the walls.

He feels something like a trap slam shut on him. The Prosthetic Death has him, is crushing him. He feels her flattening him out of this world. A face appears to him again through a whorl of grey films — he sees her eyes rolling whiter and whiter against a skin like smoke thinner and thinner.

I feel something give way, but now I desperately concentrate my strength in my right arm; my legs go numb, my body slumps heavy and unsupported, my teeth begin to chatter, I’m breathing as though my lungs were brick and my heart is throbbing wildly like a cornered animal palpitating with fear. All the while my strength is pooling steadily in his right arm — all my force into my right arm. Suddenly my arm cracks like a whip and the Prosthetic Death’s grip is broken; she had me, was crushing me in her hands, and now I’ve knocked her aside. I run. I am injured.

He collapses in the slough running between the rails.

Out of the corner of his eye... beneath the blue light on the wall, a beautiful face with shuddering eyelids and a dark diamond mouth.

Light of the deep sun, and those black locks twining into a head and body there between it and me.

“
Gorgeous,” I say, “What’ll we do?”

This is the big question.

The view from up high isn’t better than the view from down low, the very bottom, it’s worse, it’s the worst — from the bottom there is still everything to do and nothing decided, no end in sight — from on high everything is decided and nothing can happen. As the end draws near, the view gets higher, the possibilities are smashed to useless pieces, and the story dies. Futsi and John Brade are dead, who else? Each one of us is a wind-up toy started out all tossed in together bumping off each other like bumper cars, and each bump tilts each bumper a new way, but now the point has finally been reached when there are no more bumps, and each will follow out a course you can see from here, all the way to the end of each, until one by one they wind down and peter out in the fated spot. Always the same spot — live or die, find the girl or not, there’s no difference if the story’s over.

That’s the demiurge world, isn’t it? Once it’s all decided, the story is already over. It ends before it ends.

“
Vera get me down,” I say sawing dust in mummy throat.

“
Wind them back up again.”

“
Start time over?”

“
Start all over.”

“
Start again!” I feel the nonstep, the splash, sewer water bubbling in my throat. “Nonstop!”

“
With whose time?” I ask.

“
The time it takes you to figure out this,” she’s waving an envelope by the bench, my name — my proper name — calligraphed on it in red satin. “This time is your time, this time is my time,” I get a blast of smell, dry musty pine needles baking in the sun, so weird to smell it in this dank place. Clotted branches droop in a torrent of sun funereal and reticent holding something back — they hold back time and bank it up for me to draw.

“
It’s beautiful you’re beautiful—”

“
Go get ‘em tiger,” she titters as she disappears.

“
OK coach,” I say to the steel rail by my cheek.

Jump up. Feel it
flash
— that’s
time
running back into me. All the time I want, sopping handfuls of nerves saturated with it, draw me to the ceiling and out of sight.

At once the Prosthetic Death is back on him rushing up to where he fell, but she does not find him. She rises and looks around her, looks up, sees nothing.

“
I can’t hide,” she murmurs. “I can’t fight.”

Repeating these words softly she searches for him... about a dozen steps into the station lights she stops and abruptly claps her hands to her head. She begins to reel and spin. She’s found him, hiding inside her head.

She turns to blue sky, ocean to the horizon and a giant’s sun howling with light, green cliffs like living emerald roll away to distant hills and copses and he flits around her just out of the corner of her eye no matter how swiftly she turns in place, he is cackling at her deafeningly loud. She opens her mouth to speak and his mockery seems to bat the voice out of her throat — she is mute. She feels herself speak, but hears nothing.

His form, pelting away up the slope of a green hill. She follows. As she comes up to the top the deep sun is rising on the other side, towering over her and she at once stops like a statue. Lowering her eyes she sees, far below, that the deep sun has a pair of legs — he is carrying it up the hill, not actually resting on his back but on a cushion of cold air trapped in a wicker cage of sprouting nerves. The deep sun forges the daylight into a blinding scimitar that sweeps the ground before it coming her way, and the grass touched by it smokes steams and blackens then suddenly bursts out more dazzling green from black flakes.

The Prosthetic Death is flying away from this arc...

Multiply is watching incredulously as the Death God flits to and fro across the tracks inexplicably pantomiming. He turns to go, happens to look up — there’s the Ding-a-Ling up on the ceiling of the tunnel, wrapped in nervous webs, sound asleep.

The Prosthetic Death raises her hand and the end of his curtain rod crashes into her face driving her back onto the rocks. He is on top of her in a flurry of wild blows his face a mask of mindless glee — she lurches and careens, always without expression. She is desperately trying to escape him in endless miles of flying green; running, a naked, sexless mannikin with the impassive face of a dead woman.

Barren white, all the walls, the floor, and stubbled with wan blue light, white radiation of the windows, dully painful like a smoldering headache; stale smell of taken-up carpets. There is something in the room, like a long, low, sobbing note, mechanically repeated at a fixed interval. A bleak, hollow, hopeless sound that bypasses the ears and is inaudibly heard in the brain; the sound of white, the sound of annihilating veils, around you drooping, closing, soft numbing anemone petals, tender deadly pistils of living frost.

No no, she is still running, trying to get away, she can’t get control of the dream. Peach-colored flames swirl across the surface of puddles in the rocks and lunge into the air growing taller and taller as he rises standing into the sky a giant with his head just below the sun, his face fluorescent and smiling, the irises of his eyes have gone white and the whites glisten like the flashes of sunlight on thick agitated water, his lips are pale on the outside and crimson on the inside as though he’d been sucking rich fruit and his pale lips are streaked with feathery strokes of red. An elegant black heart-shaped beauty mark has appeared on his right cheek just above the jaw. He raises his arms to the churning sky, and the flames whisper out across his sodden coat.

The air is hemorrhaging light; an ominous stillness falls in response to the upraising of the Great Lover’s arms — he stands there like a huge telephone tower. The clear air is blackening, clouds boil into existence above him and let down feelers dark as smoke over him. A colossal screw of air coils down with implacable power, the full moon in its blue center. The air turns dark bottle green and brown, the tip of the funnel congeals around him his arms are lifted like a child’s — pick me up!

It writhes toward her with terrifying speed, a lead column constricted with the muscular sinuousness of a snake — lightning wound and lashed into it like a whip — its fantastic speed weirdly contrasting with the dreamy inconsistency of its outlines, thorough, capricious, remote.

She is pinwheeled up into it —

—
suddenly ejected into blue, and the sun flashing by as she spins above the clouds. Below, the top of the tornado vomits topsoil like an erupting volcano.

The Great Lover piledrives the Prosthetic Death from above —

—
so much earth has been flung aloft by the tornado — it coagulates into an undulating floating mass, like a suspended ocean of loose dirt crossed by heavy billows. The Great Lover and the Prosthetic Death are moiling their feet and legs in this earth for leverage, kicking up spirals of soil that dance weightless about them. She is trying to evade him, clear her mouth to speak. The sun is attacking her — clouds made of swords and wings locked in deadly combat go convulsing by and the glints from the dull nickelly blades of those nicked swords are like thrusts she must avoid. Now he is on her again bringing the curtain rod down on her head again and again so that she reels to and fro — in the tunnel she crashes from one post to another as the Great Lover flails at the ceiling dripping slaver—

In the dream... the airborne ocean of dirt is succumbing to gravity, falling in a mass back through the clouds—

Suddenly with a shrill cry of anger and exasperation the Prosthetic Death lashes out with a blow that sends him flying he regains his feet and stares for a moment incredulous at the raw ends of his curtain rod broken in half and now the Prosthetic Death is slashing and pounding hammering at him with hydraulic arms a noise like an axe in hard wood — but the Great Lover catches sight of her face not impassive not impassive any more — her mouth drawn open her eyes round and wide her brows knotted in rage
in rage
— and rage is
mine
!
Rage belongs to me!
and he rears up in hysterics his face bright as lightning eyes wild on her glare provoked and furious she’s forgotten herself, she’s enraged she
wants to hurt him
and blows now spin like a flurry of hail. Through the soil there shows the sullen blue-green of the ocean hurtling up to them like a hammer and now they strike the surface, hard as concrete sending a plume of white foam high into the sky.

Limp and smashed, they sink apart below the froth in scaffolds of colossal sun beams.