The Great Lover (48 page)

A yearning lyric unfolds from the landscape, the trees, low hills, boggy meadows and metallic water, and mists over me. Beached boats, shattered listing shacks, crumbling brick switching houses glide past — one of the women from the cloister far off on a little prominence, a pale billowing hourglass figure against the grim trees, raising a ram’s horn to her lips. There is no sound but a feeling that thrums in his chest, beating the yearning there into a burning sharpness. Go into an immanent place, I feel full of power and that means love of pure immanence: she seems to reconstitute out of this landscape. Her face streaks because I am flowing into the glass of the window. See the edges of the glass from the inside, music here of harps, chimes, dulcimers. A fragrant greenhouse whose every window is black with starless night, a grotto with its own dark above the luminous ground, lit with milky fires twinkling inside white flowers, where the weeds stream in still water, caves curtains doors stairways and passages embrace embrace and embrace in accumulating folds of one long folded embrace. Here is anywhere, the woman lowers the ram’s horn and sets it on the floor, bending easily at the waist, a white veil wafting from her horns. She turns to me with a spitting opal heavy on her chest, sweeping her head up from down low bending up from the waist like a dancer. She puts off her veil, arms open, she is like a snake handling woman carved in Crete rising in the air on the head of a huge yellow snake.

The Prosthetic Death is smiling at me. I wrap my arms around her hips, for now she has hips, and she bobs in my arms light as a balloon. I looks at her weird face near to mine, a woman’s face, and women’s faces are so lovely. Marshlight, some bodies coil until they nestle inside each other like Russian dolls and form a ball together with a click.

A hand reaches in and adjusts her desire with a careful, deft turn.

The brick tenements all have thatched roofs, and some have low-hanging eaves made of bundles of papyrus. These banged brick faces, criss-crossed with feathered duelling scars, sullenly rest their square chins on the sidewalks until the street drops into the ground. Sheep in the windows bump Halloween and Valentine’s Day paper cut outs with their heads as they graze on the windowboxes — these immigrants are always getting Cupid mixed up with the Grim Reaper, maybe on account of the arrows. Death’s dart, they must think. The presence of dead persons and immigrants at performances creates an electric air of tension, not knowing what exactly stands beside you, a background of intrigue. You turn, and beside you a body clothed in rough blue serge, sporting one butterfly wing and one bird’s reversed back to front, antennae sprout from golden temples. The immigrants and the winged creatures, the cultists and the city, the great whorling vortex of misery like warped records turning into each other in a cloverleaf, almost a viscous slow whirlpool stark and grim.

No more clues — I follow walls where crêched bodies lean upright clutching their frayed documents. I can’t stop to inspect them, but some are made out of unusual materials. While they are all plainly corpses that once had life, parts of them are shining steel or flaking green copper. The face on this skull is half bone and half coarse fabric. Here is wood and here is ivory and here is stone, a pelvis studded with budding pearls, ribs of cloudy ice, a spine of desert air — a pumpkin made indistinguishable from the mashed and discolored head of a corpse by carefully layered carving massaging softening hardening and dyeing.

Man slumped snoring there on a bench in a wad of down and thick sweatshirts, profusion of hoods and zippers and stinking beyond belief. The moment you are out of sight, his face is intent alert intelligent. He pops nimbly from his seat and kneels arranging spark plugs in patterns on the tile floor. The pattern complete, a lump of lead time turns to gold in his hand. He will pick up subway tunnels like pan pipes, and play.

All the characters I meet have cracked faces that hang from their heads in crisp rags like ruptured papier maché. Dr. Thefarie, Multiply, all of them pass me without noticing me; their raw new faces are bursting out of the old ones. I find a window and check myself out — not me, my face is my mask. I have three flat diamond shaped flames jetting from my forehead like a diadem, and through the glass my brow meets the tree all shimmering with droplets of stationary fire. In the middle of the tree the whole cartoon is showing, with me whirling in empty space playing with my curtain rod and my costume, me turning into a cartoon, me writing the cartoons to be drawn by stalls of animals. The bell rings over the street.

The Prosthetic Death has fallen in love with me, but she hasn’t got the parts she needs to express her love. Vera loves me, hiding inside the gypsy. This is the way. John Brade, his face flapping to one side and his new face pink and still amorphous, like a newborn’s, holds the flap so I can see it: the Prosthetic Death seducing the gypsy. She is suckling the gypsy, how much smaller she is. Vera’s hair tosses inside the gypsy’s eyes and now she is gigantic, her vast fragrant body fills the street. I follow the Prosthetic Death, who runs the length of the body and now hides herself inside it.

The gypsy greets me the next day, immensely pregnant. Her eyes are weird, with clouds inside, and she lisps. She tells me she can’t see me — preparations for the big performance are more pressing now.

I go back to see her every day, and every day her pregnancy is a little less, her lisp a little less, and her manner stranger and stranger.

“
I can stay,” she smiles, patting the seat next to her. “I can love you.”

But she sits there without doing a thing.

Then the lisp reappears stronger than ever, and all sign of the pregnancy is gone.

A woman’s body throws off its white garments and calls out—

Show me the Great Lover, in all his regalia.

A figure steps through the curtain and advances across the yawning span, the Divinity Student, the Golem, the Traitor, the Tyrant, and now here is the Great Lover, a bristling demonic superhero in fur coat, Bowery boy cap, holding his curtain rod, his eyes burning and his teeth black as onyx, his Maori face and his eyeglasses and pearls — Vera the God the gypsy the Prosthetic Death Hulferde’s sister from the cloister savor in on his arms span... finally she sleeps.

From out of the Great Lover’s eyes the Prosthetic Libido steps and he and the Prosthetic Death twist together in gravity fire. Vera and the Great Lover, the gypsy and me, imagine a rotoscope spins pairs of faces together but always in pairs.

You’re through the dream now. All around you is strange light, what you see is unreal but pressing in on the senses very intensely, like colors with mass, substance of their own. Weightless, insubstantial intensities. You waver between contradictory descriptions here, because the distinctions are no longer discernible.

And there’s a sense of anticipation, uncertainty as to what’s going to happen next. Time is completely open. In space, you orient yourself by finding down and up, drift in space. In time, you look for the gradient — you are drift in time, which is slack, looking for the tension to come back.

Hold that feeling of the story ending — of the life that you turn to when you put the story down starting to shine through it it is becoming transparent and to feel like a dream hold that feeling and stay in it. Just stay in it.

The darkness splits in rags and sunlight of the Deep Sun, then grows instantly dim and remote, and here is a planet striped red green and grey with distinct, rippling skeins of plant, animal, and fungal tissue. The borders are gold where the bands touch. The Great Lover before them — the two Prosthetics — is a figure in a haze of his own parts, dissected and hanging in the air around a gold ring that attracts particles of gold from the landscape bands below, and from gilded light on underside of cloud. The Prosthetic Libido and the Prosthetic Death are screaming across the sky in pure intensity: Pandora’s Box. Coupled up they open over land and sea, and out comes this candy wrapper blown across your path today on your way to work, and this slab of concrete, grey and black in impossible contrast deep and sharp as a dream, a hushed prophetic voice here in the crease of fabric at your elbow, out of them comes the smell of the subway saturated with bitter music, all quotations composed on the spot.

Now the sky contracts to one flame burning at the tip of a green bough and gilding it with its light. This is the bough you offer to Charon to get across the Styx if you want to visit the dead while still alive yourself. The gold tongue is transparent and inviting to the eye like a crystal ball. What do you see?

—
I see what I read here.

What you read here, we write together: you and I and eight coffins.

Here is the Great Lover crossing rolling green pastures, clambering awkwardly over fences and far away the sound of that bell. The sky is brilliant blue and white with foaming clouds; the light dims and surges, amorphous shadows ripple over the ground. Shade closes over him as he makes his way into the forest, climbing lungingly up a dry creekbed lined with moss furred rocks. It’s quiet; remote songs of birds, and an occasional gasp runs through the nervous wood. The air is cool fresh and clear like a glacier stream.

A naked figure the size of a ten year old child observes him a moment from between two boulders on a low rise off to the left, then bounds away the next instant — vanished. Here and there the Great Lover can see them, some no bigger than his hand, dart and rustle around him, always too far away or too fleeting to make out clearly. Fingers slip back behind a screen of black stalks, glittering eyes flick open and closed in the shade of bracken hollows. The woods breathe and listen. In the hollow lined with boulders the sun lances through holes in the canopy and walks huge beams across the green floor; here the Prosthetic Death is sitting on a stone, its hands thrust inside a pale little torso. The Prosthetic Libido turns from what he is doing, trots over to the Great Lover and smiles, pure joy gleaming from his beautiful lips.

The two Prosthetics live together here in the seclusion of the woods, making machine people together. The materials they extract from the rocks and soil, digging out the oil, picking out the ore, working it with their fingers or changing it in their stomachs until it is ready for use. They will populate the woods with devices like themselves; the Prosthetic Libido shows him the face he’s been working on for their latest: an exquisite, inhuman, long-eyed face. The Prosthetic Death comes over and silently takes Pearl’s hand.

“
We have something for you,” Pearl beams. The Prosthetic Death and Prosthetic Libido walk hand in hand to a huge dead tree, still standing and draped all over with mistletoe and vines. From out of an arched opening in the hollow trunk steps an exact likeness of the Great Lover, identical to him in every detail, although even this exactness seems like a distortion.

“
Just for fun.”

The Great Lover’s double strides sulkily toward him, looking this way and that with exaggerated malice and surliness and sullenness, a wonderful living cartoon character.

Vera and he re-enter the world, I mean yours. Here they leave behind their marks in the sky — her hair, his tattoo.

The Great Lover raises his head slowly, as ponderously as an elephant, as a vast mythical animal, the world serpent. The Great Lover raises his head in that green-blue soupy thickness of sky, a cloudy broth that sluggishly gathers its folds on itself like the bunching, slowing waters of a swamped river. His breath is a sound, but he can’t feel the air. Fronds blow almost too slow to see in an impalpable wind, and crumbed black fir boughs nod and stir the clabbered light like witches’ hands. He cannot lower his gaze, no matter how he moves his head — the movements are thoughts, not actions. His head does not go down, though he tells it to, and in the confusion that follows, his imagination rushes eagerly ahead into the gap and supplies to vision what he cannot bend his eyes to see. He shuts his eyes, and remains in the thought of lowering his head, until he seems to go to sleep in it. His head has lowered, and now he looks out over rolling green hills from a high place. Copses, and stone farm houses huddled at the skirts of the lordly hills who rule here. The trees are courtiers and hangers-on. In the tunnels, through graveyards and sewers — how far back does it go? All the way, all the way there is: as long as there is way, there it goes. There is no “it,” only something ongoing like a proceeding, and maybe a passage there. The end of the story, when it’s becoming transparent — hold on to it. This is where you come in.

The preparations are all finished. It’s time for the big performance. Multiply, Futsi, and their friends are skating to and fro on the curved wooden skate deck, and Deuteronôme sits in the center facing Dr. Thefarie. The skaters create the magic circle with their boards, a dynamic circle of movements that constantly redraws itself in new ways within its limit of variations, always a circle.

Far off across the floor, Vera enters, wrapped in white, with her four attendants. She summons the Great Lover, who must obey her call. Her robe slips to the floor and her nerves turn invisible and fill the air in this huge underground chamber. Suddenly the Deep Sun is there, hanging above the ramp. Its cold light shines down on a floor filled with Merlins dervishes shamans witches fortune tellers, all Immigrants.

Sewer water boils in the corner and the Great Lover appears. He seethes across the floor toward the ramp. The two Prosthetics stand in the center. Every voice rises to a crescendo at once as every subway train in the system shrieks its brakes and blasts its horn and the sun, high in the sky over the city, directly overhead, sinks. It drops from the sky and down into the city, driving down into the ground, its light disappearing from the sky, blazing through the buildings without harming them. Mobs of screaming people in the streets — the sun is vanishing into the earth — a dome, now a disk, of blinding, shrinking light—