The Great Lover (47 page)

A little underground neighborhood, maybe two blocks. Dark browns and greys, brick warehouses, rows of homes, some dim shops. Not too noisy, but a ghostly gaiety here. Brass band, balloons, smell of beer.

The windows of the passing omnibuses have been blacked out by order of the transit authority, and, riding outside, I soon learn why. No one is meant to see the prisoners of war working down in the tunnels, packing the earth and shoring up the stone roof. We regular citizens are forbidden the sight of livid white eyes in grimy faces. What war was it again? Where is it now? It rambles here and there like a god in the world, it sweeps through the room like a vacuum, sucking out warmth and sound, and then it’s gone again and everybody goes on talking about the whether. No one seems to know where the prisoners come from or in what war they were taken. There’s nothing in the papers — what papers? — but there they are working down in the tunnels, laying track, propping up the walls.

Flash of copper sunset light in whites of the POWs’ eyes, ragged and surly with clouds. They are leaning against the walls like so many momentarily abandoned tools. Their chains make it difficult to lie down. Foxes slip in and out of their secret streets in the wall in an old English riddle.

Hands emerge silently from holes in the wall, from crevices and from under platforms, abruptly seize the chains and begin filing away at them rapidly. Hands drift out of the shadows to where the POWs stand like tilted tools, hands take hold of the links binding them and break them one by one. The prisoners are instantly animated the moment they are set free: they dash into the darkness flapping out their arms, their laughter spiralling around the circle of tunnel walls — shadows melted into gas, away into stale tunnel air.

Deuteronôme steps out into the little neighborhood through a heavy black curtain. The air here is cool and light, “flutterings full of electric purpose” in autumn cloister, settling calm attentive light.

A rustling sound. There against the wall are a heap of uprooted iron mailboxes still attached to their cement posts, and a hand from the shadows has just deposited atop them a brown paper lunch bag with its mouth crimped shut. Before the hand vanishes, POW insignia on the sleeve. Father Ptarmagant emerges from the door of the coffin maker’s hovel in the next moment, notices and retrieves the bag. It is marked with a small bundle of orange and black metallic ribbons; opening it, he finds it is filled with dates and candy corns. Ptarmagant pulls the mouth open and holds it toward Deuteronôme; after a moment, Deuteronôme steps up and puts in his hand. He removes a date, looks at it judiciously, sniffs it, then pulls it apart and discards the pit. The date makes a bulge in his cheek. Ptarmagant only now takes the bag back toward himself and pulls out a handful of sweets.

They start walking together. The bag has a hole in it and Ptarmagant leaves a candy trail. Tiny, frail looking monkeys pop out of holes in the rubbish and collect the sweets, putting them to their mouths and looking imploringly wary. Deuteronôme and Ptarmagant fall roughly in step with a stiff easiness.

“
So, why are we all to be hypnotized coming in here?” Deuteronôme asks.

“
We’re hypnotized but not deluded — quite the opposite. It’s something to do with outrunning lies or excluding liars.”

“
You’re afraid of lies? They don’t have the brains to be liars. Not good ones.”

“
That’s not quite what I mean. I mean they are liars because they have no truth of their own. They have brains, but they don’t have nerve.”

Black fire escapes pass overhead, with curtains blowing out the windows; gangly pennants that dwindle tapering to single endless threads float above the rooftops. Bodies on golden plinths along the roads, sheathed in a thin layer of clear ice and shining with ice like they were painted with light, and tiny round bells hang from their fingers and ears, send pure, protracted humming notes sailing across the nearly breathless street.

They pass glistening-trunked trees whose branches are foliated with dense masses of reeking tar, hanging in strings and webs that flop in the breeze. Some bodies are woven into the supple boughs. Impregnated with tar, they look like rubber statues. And here a buried body has sent a crown of roots up from its head to emerge into the air, a rattling spray of salt-encrusted white nerves stiff and plastic as fingernails. The windows of the houses spill alchemical apparatus into the street in massive piles, brass and glass glint from the mounds of iron and strong-smelling lead slag. They walk close together now, weaving to avoid the puddles, the deep, cauldron-like potholes; and here, where goats have congregated nervously to drink, a gutter gushes water into a mushy iron grate.

“
We are here to make some living room for ourselves, not to unmask lies.”

Ptarmagant hunches his shoulders in his shirt, as we often read characters do. “The lies are part of what has to be cleared away, and they’re intolerable in any case. What we want to do is to open the way for the immigrants, and some new humans. Right now, Dominant Narrative co-opts or destroys all the other novels in progress the sooner the better.

“
We speak vaguely on account of we’re talking for something that we want to happen. We must make room for this to be able to mean something; right now, it might never mean anything. Ask your gypsy.”

“
She is neutral. I would not say she is entirely on one side. I don’t know why she is here.”

“
Perhaps the demon wanted her.”

“
She wouldn’t be the one to attract that sort.”

“
What sort is that?” his voice is perfunctory.

“
The sort to make some hapless woman’s face into a mask for the universe and her yes or no into a cosmic judgement in your whole life’s case,
comme
de Nerval.”

The other man plucks a huge drooping volume of Agrippa from the air and plunges his finger down into a swirling profusion of pages, reads aloud:

“
Now the fourth kind of phrensy proceeds from
Venus
, and it doth by a fervent love convert, and transmute the mind to God, and makes it altogether like to God, as it were the proper image of God...”

The Great Lover turns abruptly to Deuteronôme teeth bare in a blinding face — “
Never speak of her to me!
”

Again and again I return to this little neighborhood. I’d come more often, but I keep falling down manholes and drowning in the sewers. I can’t say for certain whether or not I come back to this neighborhood or to a roughly identical one deeper underground. The neighborhood looks the same but I have so poor a sense of its particulars; there are many performers here, some working out of their rooms and others on the street. Everyone is always talking about the big performance, and what preparations are called for, how it should be done, how cleaned up, and so on. I come to see the gypsy. There are always men furtively escaping from her tent with anxious looks — all of them. She’s tired tonight, and wants to turn me away, but she can’t bring herself to do it, because her generosity is so powerful and I am making her love me a little more each time. Someone inside her loves me, and strengthens every visit I make. I come to her because she gives me her body and with it her own particular kind of sleep.

I fall asleep, and she hands me a striped card. I take it, rise from the bed, and slide it through a slot in the wall — someone on the other side snatches it from my fingers right away. The magic door opens and I go through it into someone else’s dream.

The street is shimmering, as though flurries of snow rippled across it. The bodies lining the street were laid out carefully; now their heads are all turned toward the street and white sewage gushes from their gaping mouths, a few infrequent wisps of steam curl past sunken eyes and shrivelled ears, hair brittle as straw. White sewage runs in the gutters and spins there as it goes down, and I am spinning down with it. My head bangs the pavement as hard as a cannonball. I lie on a slope and slide backward, hands swing up along the ground toward my shoulders as the elbows bend, fingers execute an incongruously graceful dance as my body, seen from above, is screwed into the fit.

Down again, grit and small clots of matter pat by in the current, which flows against my face with a continuous, powerful but not irresistible pressure. I move forward holding on to projections in the walls, all made of brown bread-loaf bricks worn and chipped like lozenges. The shadow of a hand moves above the surface.

The tunnels are too elaborate to enter. The trains back then must have been miniature trolleys, only large enough to accommodate a pair of benches back to back, the riders’ feet protrude over the edge or hang in the air. Skylights throw down round patches of radiance, leopard-spotting the tracks. Buttery sunlight glows on the miniature platforms, decked out with brass triangles that hang down from the edges of the walkways above and below like strips of little flags, all enameled with triangular blue and red medallions. The platforms are lined with slender pillars, pinstriped mauve and silver. The benches are as colorful and baroquely decorated as carousel horses. The rails are only an inch wide. The ties are delicate, almost like pool cues, though splintery and stinking strongly of creosote.

The Prosthetic Death stands before me. I die, drop to the ground like a sack of death.

Still wandering, I suddenly look up — there is the Prosthetic Death stepping out of a patch of light a hundred yards ahead. There is the Prosthetic Death turning into a side tunnel and out of sight. There is the Prosthetic Death, arms loose but not swinging at her sides climbing the few shallow steps onto a tiny platform where a carousel organ plays, its tubes like a fan-jet of saffron fires. She is walking away, she stretches and places her hands at the base of her spine — as she does this, the flat panel swells and splits open. There she is at my back, breathing out black oblivion without breath, and I collapse, die, hunt again. I claw through heaps in darkness. Is this it? With a shout I snap the bones of the cold forearm. Something withdraws in a swirl of displaced air, and whatever I hold in my left hand is limp and clammy and melting. A rattle of bones.

I pitch toward the sound and now my fingers clinch on a handful of cold locks. Trying to regain my footing I kick out with all my strength and I feel my foot crush something in my blind spot, the tension holding my hand gives way with a tearing feeling and what flies from me, in a direction I can’t take, trails a broken wing. The lead powder window is still there. I walk up to it and hold to the light a handful of fairy gold elf-curls already brittling, turning into a torn clump of tawny grass glittering with cold, dewy blood.

The music ended the moment he set foot through the door — it’s a dead suburb. Here, where the sidewalk is shattered as though it had been attacked with sledgehammers, there is a heap of fine powder like maybe unmixed cement. Small, neat, bare footprints barely indent the surface.

I go into a hotel under construction for twenty years, next to another construction site. The stairs still smell like fresh paint. One door, many floors up, is just ajar.

The Prosthetic Death is in the shower, washing herself. Malignant grey fire glows in the spine, flares slowly and dies slowly, like the deliberate gleam of an ember in a soft draught. She stops the motion of her hands and turns to face me through the misty curtain, and something flashes behind the face.

There is a steady, rotating distortion in the middle of the room. I edge from the blind spot, choose my moment and dash for the door, trying to slip myself into one of the gaps between the spiral arms of the distortion. I feel a brush of brilliant nerves, like a blast of intense temperature but without heat or cold, veer over the threshold off kilter and hit the far wall. The sight of the nerve exchange makes a sick feeling quiver in me like a glycerin dart. A domed atrium not much larger than an elevator is here.

I feel like I’m waiting, feeling disuse without ruin in the building. There is a dead potted plant shoved into the corner, and the tile floor is sparsely dotted with crumbs of rich black dirt. A triangular grey spider web ripples like a tiny sail in one of the atrium’s eight angles. They store meditative calm in this room. I sit by the wall, looking at an empty niche streaked with rust. Somewhere a big bell is being rung, making me think of boys’ schools, a dazzling green lawn and a sky of deep unreal blue, maybe just outside these walls.

The heavy bronze double doors, each seven feet tall and eighteen inches wide, have thick rod handles the length of the meeting edges. They fold back on smooth noiseless hinges. I was almost right — it’s a repository of enamelled skies lying stacked up like rugs, seeping light into the invisible aisles and up into the heavy black backdrops. The aisle is also a subway car, and as I walk its length with sky flashing in at the windows, I weave along a row of crystal balls on bronze wands that stands the center of the car. Each ball is pierced at its base by a huge needle, like bubbles of liquid glass which keep their shapes by virtue of a constant and smoothly-adjusted pressure from a plunger hidden inside each wand. The land here is dotted with what we may call nerve distortions, and, each time my gaze lights on one, I have a feeling of struggle, the murmuring of Brown Master. He is one of the gang. The people are familiar, smiling and conversing wittily with me and I am witty right back. They bustle through dark streets, push through a steaming cloakroom and into chairs in a kind of cabaret darkness. Warren is screeching away on stage with his speakers in his hands. I am sitting in the circle at six o’clock, trading remarks with these others, trying to hide the sadness oozing out of me. After the show we are on our feet and moving through the dark, and I feel a cool, wet kiss like a soft blow on my right cheek. Who kissed me? This is a remembering séance, with one voice doing all the voices... but someone else
is
here, stowing away in those times when as a boy I received the bafflingly equivocal kisses of girls. I missed the strip tease act.