The Great Lover (45 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The setting is underground streets lined with brick buildings all in disrepair and slouching, men in hats, celluloid collars, women in hats, long waists. Animals everywhere and the heavy smell of animals, horses pulling carts, cows gaze dreamily from the windows, pigs wallow in the road, dogs bark at the pigs, monkeys chirp at the dogs and apes waddle down the steps to the street, and everywhere in those passages of tamped earth that join these streets together foxes slither along their burrows that open in the soil or slink unhurried to and fro across the way. Inspect stalls of animals drawing cartoons.

Here comes her hand, slip from the sleeve and take the key. Winding it back up again. Wind, rain, lava, and a huge ram of black ooze surging up from the bottom of the ocean. Inky sea bottom slime overruns the map and redraws its lines in a frame of eight incompletely inscribed golden headstones.

Welcome!

Here comes our hero. You remember the hero, everybody always does. He’s walking along. Miles underground. No time for your questions! The story is beginning...

I come to a break in the tunnel wall, which looms high above me. Now I know this tunnel is old, and flooded with black water. A slick of stinking grease from the bottom of the ocean shrinks there on the surface, with a man-shaped hole cut of out of it. Did I come out of that?

A harsh taste in my mouth. I have something wedged under my tongue. I draw out a gold coin; my head on one side, what looks like a sea urchin on the other. I look at my head again — is it my head? At most it resembles me. The engraving on the flip side is not a sea urchin, either, but a flower, very plainly. The next time I look, it is a star. Then an open hand. Without thinking I put this magic coin back in my mouth.

On the other side of the torn wall, there is a narrow ledge of sloppy concrete, broken ends thrust out just above the water showing grey surfaces like cottage cheese. A little brass lamp, just a sheet of brass with holes cut in it, curled into a cylinder, shines from an iron curlicue a couple of feet above the concrete surface. A lonely confidential light there, and by its glow he sees a long solemn boat drawing up. It’s a black gondola with jade trim, poled by a stubble-headed old man with a pastrami-colored face. I catch his eye. He rows over, flips his paw open, and I spit the coin into it.

The water is calm. We pass fragments of tiled wall bristling with rusted iron wands. A warm fog trickles around, growing steadily denser, hotter, more mineral-smelling, like hot brass, and in a moment more I glimpse through it a stark scarlet seam up ahead, under the water. A soft black rod slithers out from a red joint in the rock, smoking underwater and making the surface steam; it veers to and fro like a thick, muscular snake just below the clear, hissing water. The boat lands with a thump against a marble ledge, adjacent to the dreamily erupting rocks, and I hop out. Here there is a diamonded floor and a tiled wall pierced in the center by a door the shape of a peacock-backed cane chair. Above the door is an inscription that reads: VERA.

The arch leads into a quiet, somber place of large red-ochre alcoves and pillars thick as barrels. There is a ringing silence here in the gloom, as though an inaudible gong were humming. The ground is tramped earth, covered with many faded, spidery-patterned rugs, and these breathe a smokey, heavy fabric smell. There are gods in the alcoves, forms with trunks, fanged beaks, riveted heads, wings, all carved of the same purple-cocoa colored stone. Each one is interlaced with a consort; a profusion of grotesque, intent and meditating faces gazing into each other. I look at one after another, feeling the searching calm of the place wind into me. Unlike the gods, the consorts are all formally-rendered perfect people, with no anatomical peculiarities. Then he comes to the last alcove, and this last figure is alone. The enormous sulking erection stands as though it were making an accusation, angrily dejected, stubborn, penetrating only the stilled air. The idol’s face is crumpled and downcast below its horns; the cheeks are drawn up like two eggs flanking the short nose, and form grooves to either side of the hollow eyes. Thick, ropy tears resembling the gold braid of epaulets fill the grooves and ooze down the face in fixed stone beads. I think of blood channels in altars, tear channels in altar eyes. But the arms of the god are hovering outstreched in the air, curved in — perhaps he embraces an invisible consort, and this not-seeing is what torments him.

Something moves by the idol’s base — is it a mouse? No, it’s a wisp of smoke fading and uncurling there. A cord of smoke stretches along the ground, to a distant aperture from which it seems to come. Orange triangle in the dark, and a few boys in swim trunks are quietly pulling up the corners of the rugs, collecting what look like discarded ticket stubs. Their shadows crash through the orange triangle as they move back and forth before it. As I draw near they vanish into the shadows with muffled splashes. In the glowing triangle, I find a stereotypical gypsy tent, all purple velvet and moroccan cushions. Through a flap window there are dark trees and browsing giraffes undulating their necks from bough to bough in a landscape that rolls away and down from the flap. There is another aperture on the far side of the tent from the entrance — that’s where I am going.

No one can pass through that way without first being hypnotized. Like so many other protocols of this kind of place I know that without having to be told. Perched on a stool before the cloth gate is a fake gypsy with a rather breathtaking embonpoint, and huge opal lying in its hollow, flat against the warm copper skin. Is she made up all over... and if she is, who gets to do the rubbing? Her hair is capped with a vermillion and gold scarf, her hair falls in blue-black ringlets down her back, giant hoop earrings the whole bit. She indicates I should sit before her, drawing an extra stool from somewhere behind her and fixing me with fog-colored eyes.

I sit, and she pulls an opticians’ armature down out of the hanging veils on a steel boom arm and firmly thrusts it cold onto the bridge of my nose, clicking through lenses without consulting me. I occupy myself staring fixedly at her sparkling opal, which shimmers and dances back and forth as the lenses flip, and wonder if her movements in adjusting the armature aren’t really intended to make it turn this way and that, firing out its beams of different colors. She spritzes me with perfume — I feel the chill droplets weightlessly settling across my face and hands. Then suddenly she is drilling her gaze into my eyes through the lenses, saying things I can’t quite hear, and there is a snap like a knuckle cracking in the center of my head. I feel light, and momentarily overwhelmed as if there had been a blast of confused sound out of complete silence. She pulls the armature away from my face and smiles happily at me.

“
Are you afraid?” she asks this with eyes blazing and wide, smiling as though she really were saying “isn’t this exciting?” She seems otherworldly; in a blink see her slipping herself into that solitary idol’s embrace. In a second blink, I see her with her legs wrapped around my hips — in this flash, I am forbidden to go about the city unescorted: this fake gypsy must be locked to my body at all times. She’s my license. We must remain excited but climaxing would ruin the arrangement. Her copious skirts, fortunately, will preserve our modesty — not everyone who passes me is so lucky — and of course suspenders for are
de rigeur
for me. Walking in the streets I have to swing my head to one side of hers and then lift my chin up and over to the other side just to see where I’m going, trying to puff her unruly hair out of my way with blasts of breath. From time to time I have to stop, lean against a wall or lamp post breathing laboriously, face drawn trying to stay calm, face exasperated by the tickling of her hair. Constantly getting lost — how can I concentrate? The inevitable collisions with other pedestrians put us both severely to the test — I have to breathe and concentrate and push out and I can hear her chanting snatches of time-tables and recipes. Arms legs and back aching like mad, sodden fabric clinging to my thighs and abdomen. Sticky, chafed, overheated. She wants me to stop because she’s just caught sight of a fetching scarf in a window display like hell I’m stopping I ain’t a trolley, lady...

She is, after all, only standing in front of me, still smiling, holding the tent open for me. She smiles as though she’d had my thoughts, like I’d made her an innocuous compliment. She waves me through, and her bangles ding together for the first time. I blunder past her, and she brushes me with her body as I go by.

Bray of a tinny car horn right at my back as I trip out weirdly across a dusty white street in blazing equatorial sunlight, a figure there too obscure in the dazzle for me to make out waving me on and indicating a low triangular door in the wall. The figure is dark and shaggy and hops up and down in place, it has long hair and a glowing metallic face, broad across the cheeks, low-browed, and tapering to a pointed chin, and its dry paw pushes at my back as I go through the triangular aperture into an oily blue-black shadow.

From somewhere behind me a high-pitched whinny of song, I cross the dark floor with candled tables, making for a wonderland door of black wood in the far wall by the pay phone. Around me people lie on divans in various states of undress undergoing spirit cupping; ether-blue spirits respirate tumbling fire bobbins in glass flues pressed to the back, the abdomen, tops of heads. Haystacks of doors and tent flaps to get through everywhere stubbing my shoes or tangling round my legs, a tedious succession of doorknobs to turn and latches to lift, moving from car to car with a gush of stale tunnel air, picking up doors and flipping them over me and they pile up around my legs to my waist like a stack of hula hoops.

The floor beneath my feet is made of boards painted dingy black, and spattered with flecks of all colors of paint. An expectant backstage/museum smell comes around him, like cosmetic carnauba wax and linseed oil, paint, printing, massive curtains, sawdust, glue, varnish. Black backdrops hang from dark heights all around. The warm yellow blob emanating from the ghost light embubbles me; I turn around in place until I catch sight of an angle of brick wall, painted a glossier black, looming out from between the hangings like a ship’s prow. I examine the wall, presently find a metal box painted over, with metal tubes for the wiring snaking out from it as though it were an angular heart. I rub just about in its middle with my index finger. Faint rasping sound on the paint, turning brown and crumbling away in tiny beads and curls. I’ve either exposed or created a slot there; I fish a coin from my mouth and drop it in the slot. The sound it makes, if it made that sound, comes from somewhere far away behind my left shoulder, and muffled by who knows how many of these dense black backdrops. The ringing of a coiled chime in a mantle clock.

I’ve holstered my right hand in my right coat pocket. As it lies there, not doing anything, something angular and paper is pressed into it, as though a person rushing down a dark street somewhere had paused to thrust this message through a chink in a wall, or into a really dark shadow where an alley is slimily drooling trash, through a dimension hole into my pocket. I pull out a pamphlet, a single sheet folded lengthwise, and read, stepping forward through the words — stand there emptyhanded in the ghost light. I remember every word. Walk along.

I am in the binding; empty choirs soar on up to where, like constellations, overhead there are gleams of polished wood, the ornaments of choir screens and theater boxes, up and up in untenanted underground sky. The light of the Deep Sun, or DS for short.

There are blue-litten salt galleries, studded with outcroppings of salt like enormous lalique sandcastles. As many of these caverns were opened, nomads with blue-painted faces would begin to emerge from them — Immigrants. The males took especially to the whores by the cloisters, kept them very busy and paid in new minerals. The nomad women sit on bolsters under waterproof fringed canopies with their few shaved-headed children, smoking stubby pipes and knitting brightly-dyed girdles for themselves out of bats’ wool. Marble heads roll in the streets that run beneath the cemeteries, and through the matted weeds at the boundaries of the subterranean graveyards, singing and rolling their eyes — a Carpathian castle high in distant mountains, one lit window in the tower, just like in the movies.

In darkness I hadn’t seen, up ahead, timid light comes in glimmering, like a silent film beginning. Long cloisters, with slender stone braces and chipped flags, tan leaves in slate gutters, pregnant calm and mute activity breathing along the long cloisters. The women wear fawny-white dresses of substantial, creamy smooth fabric, cinched in at the waist; they wear truncated snowy wimples, soft and extending all the way up to the ears, rising from a circle of whiter material around the shoulders. Their hair falls down albatross necks, and they wear beautiful tapering antlers within their temples, or swept back between the locks of their hair, knotted all over with colorful ribbons. They are human, but they seem like aliens and something about them arouses me with a yearning for unknown sexual contact unlike any other, just a sweet viscous cream (so-so) like a warm, flat blob (not quite) centered just above the groin (not really) and somehow associated with a motion (no motion) and a contact, more physical than looking but not as physical as touching, a floating, unintelligible, weightless, invisible intercourse what is it? Like wanting to feel sexy in a simile for sex, somehow
with them
.

Petrified writhing naked trees against fire-brown light high ahead. A woman comes round a corner, arms held out from her sides a little, looking down at the ground ahead, and smiling with pleasure at some shining thought she is carrying in her mind. She has pearly back-swept two-pronged antlers that curve back and up. Her soft hands, tender as snails, flip and snap their fingers in distraction. She stops a few feet away, looks up at me sweetly and says she will take me to see Brown Master now, if I’d like.