The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  The far ends of the platforms are extended, projecting out into the tunnels and lined with penny arcade peeper machines; they take only the thick coins of heavy gold I make myself, a tree embossed on one side and on the reverse a segment of the map. These movieola devices relay impressionistic and vague messages between cultists. These are not really directions so much as they are magical indicators meant to stimulate spiritual projections of certain kinds. This one, with a bronze medallion on the front depicting a centaur copulating with a faun, shows a dark high-contrast film of grey dusk over a heath. In the foreground are trees so dim they seem like coagulated shadows pulsating in the wind, their eerily soft-looking branches stroke the air.

  *

  Rushing sweeping impetuous speed of the train, communicating its frightening motion to me. I am rigid, sitting by the glass. Human energy is turning my head, like a confusion of smells — Now, there he is! The sewerman lumbering out of the tunnel mouth. I move swiftly, taking the passage under the tracks. He’s gone; but I see he has only just left, returned to the tunnels, after leaving a bottle of transparent fluid in a tiny niche below a ventilation grate. There — I see the shape of his jagged head and fluffy collar there against a blue light far away.

  I follow him into a maze of ramps and stairs, where I see him now high, now low. He appears and disappears. I catch sight of his upturned face on a ramp overhead, and the now tiled edge of a passageway draws in the black hump of his back like fluted white lips. Yearning billows through me, making jelly out of me, and I sway against the wall in confusion — bright terror of being abandoned cuts through this nearly at once, and I hasten to find him again.

  He knows he’s being followed. He drops through the traps of bathroom doors, bundles himself into phone booths, inserts himself between token machines, idles in place, crossing and recrossing vast floors. He’s a dark blot in the unbroken flow of bodies right to left oozing in and out among them. A harsh squeal of brakes coasts through the station, and he sidles up the steps to the street.

  I stay with him — he flashes along a hill top, slipping in and out of trees as he did people a moment before. Here’s a paved what-do-you-call-it with empty seats, hexagonal flagstones, a granite rail from which to look down on the drenched park, black trees against saturated green, cold as death!

  I still haven’t managed to lose my pursuer, so I stop and wait for him. Here he comes. The Prosthetic Libido stands a pace away from me, dressed in a yellow slicker with the hood up and a rain hat mashed down over that, lean trouser legs taper to his ankles, his feet are wedged into ill-fitting satin slippers nearly colorless with grime. Agony twists in his shining face, his lips tremble, his brow knotted, tears welling in his enormous eyes powerful with enchantment. He walks up and flings his arms around my neck, clutches me and presses his whole body against me. He trembles so violently I am nearly thrown from my feet.

  “Help me!” he sobs into my ear. His voice is so beautiful I gasp aloud.

  The Prosthetic Libido cinches my lapels, his small fists bolted hard in a grip like iron knots. Withdrawing his coral mouth from my ear, he slides his face along my cheek, leaving a cool trail of perfumed grease. He brushes my lips with his and for a moment our breath, which is one breath, mingles again in the narrow gap our mouths make. The Prosthetic Libido’s eyes open. I turn away my head, my eyes suddenly feel dead my dead gaze drops through the air from my eyes like a stream of lead pylons.

  The Prosthetic Libido shivers, the sensation enters me through my coat. In a throbbing voice he says, “Hulferde died!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Let me tell you about the Prosthetic Libido: in the dim mass crowding the streets of downbeaten and tense faces, his features gleam bright and clear with powerful, unadulterated feeling — he steps off the curb into the crosswalk into the light of the sun, and suddenly the light in reflecting puddles is dazzling, the street blazes with blinding flakes of burning light. Everything in your field of vision burns stiffens and rings like wind chimes around him, in all of literature there is no character more beautiful.

  I watch a wheel in articulation of his neck that spins slows down and speeds up again. When the Prosthetic Libido talks, his lips click against each other, and the hinge of his jaw whirrs softly. Hair tossing in the wind as dusk gathers against his profile, the vitreous fluid of his sob story spills from him like treacle. He turns to me and speaks words directly into my eyes, then turns away to stare at the ground, or the horizon, memory pawing and sporting with him. When he turns from me, I feel as though a sticky contact is tearing, as though he were glued to me with tacky melted candy cracking in long crisp strings. When he turns his face toward me, I feel a force like a bubble of magnetic repulsion that breaks instantly over me and spellbinds me as he takes all my weight into himself through his eyes and mouth and holds me in his story.

  The result of his full activation exhilarated Hulferde like amphetamine. With new energy and clarity he was able to handle twice as many projects. He locked the Prosthetic Libido in an empty, windowless room in the basement, and forgot about him. The Prosthetic Libido lay there in the dark, in an astonishment that lasted for a very long time. He remembers getting up off the floor many times and walking around the room, which was not that much farther across than the span of his arms, stretching his limbs, kicking and spinning in the dark, ricocheting off the walls, luxuriating in the elasticity and strength of his limbs. His discovery of the light switch, which set fire to the single bulb in the ceiling, occasioned great excitement. Revelling in the light, he switched it off for the pleasure of watching it return, and enjoyed the effortless exertion of power over it. Then, by its light, he discovered his own body, but his caresses began to awaken an acute yearning in him to be touched by another person. He had repeatedly tried the doorknob, but with only a pretty vague idea of its function. The door now became the most distinct presence in his mind as he learned to see it as a barrier. He tried, with patience and steadily mounting ardor, to open it, but Hulferde had seen to it that the door was reinforced, and had made it as near to a bank vault’s in strength as he could. Then the Prosthetic Libido began to cry out for help — and this went on forever, so that crying out became like a kind of sleep. When he next awoke, his cries had been transformed into language.

  He cried, and his frustrated desire began to inflict an agony of pain on him that he was helpless to resist, or ignore, and he started to scream and drum on the door with his fists, driving himself in a frenzy to make as much noise as possible. Again there was a kind of sleep in which this screaming and pounding extended into a new and unfamiliar species of infinite time — when the door opened he dropped backwards onto his ass, as shocked and amazed as someone stricken awake out of the deepest point of a dream.

  Hulferde stood fuming in the doorway with a poker in his hand. He rushed in and began beating the Prosthetic Libido wildly with it, cursing him and demanding that he be silent. Evidently the Prosthetic Libido’s screaming had been interfering with Hulferde’s work. The Prosthetic Libido kicked and snapped against the floor under Hulferde’s blows, shrieking and jerking like a hooked fish, making an uncoordinated, ineffective effort to avoid the blows. Hulferde beat him until he’d exhausted both his strength and his store of abuse, then, wearily turning to go, he shut off the light and left the Prosthetic Libido weeping bitterly on the floor.

  He spent his days then lying on his side, staring mournfully at the ground, darkness gathering each day in his raw new mind. The spontaneously orderly development that had been underway in him since he first became conscious was now thrown entirely into confusion. His behavior was spasmodic; he would play with the light, then shut it off and throw himself violently against the floor again and again for hours. Leaping as high as the ceiling and crashing down limp against the cement floor. Unconsciously his hands would move to give himself what small allowance of pleasure was available to him and then instantly would come violent convulsions and unreasoning panic.

  The desire he was c
onstructed to house could well up in him at any time, and he came to dread the relentless upsurging of this yearning because he had no power to contain it. He would begin to moan and drive his head against the floor trying to damage himself or knock himself out, but of course he is indestructible. As the desire became more intense he would begin to experience intolerable pain, and then he would be irresistibly compelled to scream and to howl, and to batter at the door. Hulferde would come, sooner or later, flinging open the door and knocking him down, and then he would kick and thrash him with a baseball bat he had purchased just for this purpose. Although they terrified him, through this devastation of pain and humiliation the Prosthetic Libido still learned to feel a kind of despairing gratitude to Hulferde for these beatings; at least this was touching. As long as he endured them, he would not be alone.

  “Why are you so cruel to me?” Those were his first words, each one perfectly formed, standing alone in a sentence broken into pronounced pauses.

  ...Hulferde walking away; he never answered.

  *

  In bludgeoned sleep, the Prosthetic Libido began to claw at the door with fingertips as hard and durable as diamond drills. Over what he didn’t know was several days’ time he managed to detach and peel back the steel armor at the lower corner of the door, exposing the wood. In time his panic returned, and he again attacked the door screaming and battering blindly at it. This went on for unmeasured time, the anguish growing more and more overbearing until suddenly it snapped and drained away. The Prosthetic Libido slumped to the floor, dazedly began clawing again, picking out tufts of fibrous wood from the door in a spot adjacent to the lowest of the three external hinges. When something gave under his fingers he was startled, and, becoming more alert, he pulled the now exposed hinge from the jam as easily as one might pull a shoelace from a shoe. He looked a long time at the hinge in his hand, and only slowly turned his attention to the steel armor adjacent to the middle hinge.

  Hulferde was there, as he always had been there whenever the door opened, but he was not seething at the threshold; he was farther away, lying on the floor, at the foot of the basement steps, with flies on his face. The Prosthetic Libido approached him timidly, and knelt by his side.

  He laid his hand on the damp chest, and felt there the bizarre sensation of decomposition. He took Hulferde’s wrist, and raised the nerveless arm that had beaten him. He looked at it for a few seconds, and then lowered it again. With his finger, the Prosthetic Libido cleared flies from Hulferde’s mouth, that had vomited curses on him in torrents. The lips made a licking sound on the teeth. When he took away his finger, the lips retained its dimple. The Prosthetic Libido lightly pulled the collar back from the throat, and touched Hulferde’s voice box. His own head drooped, and he slipped back onto his haunches, looking at the body. It had been a man, now it was just a smeared lump of refuse.

  The Prosthetic Libido stood up and looked at the other objects that were there. His eyes returned many times to the stairs, until, staring at them, he all at once fitted them with the regular thumping that had invariably preceded Hulferde’s visits, and found in his mind that decaying impressions were suddenly organizing themselves around what he saw. Hulferde came from the top of the stairs, and a vaster resounding openness was up there.

  He dashed up the stairs and began exploring the house, beside himself with excitement. On first catching sight of himself in a full length mirror, propped against the wall in a disused bedroom, he froze, stared at himself awestruck, then dropped to the floor in orgasm where he lay until hours past daybreak. Sexual release, in his case, was invariably followed by a brief period of dissociation, a perfect suspense of the association of one thought with another.

  When he finally emerged from that room, the next object to present itself to his attention was the sun, blazing in through an open window. Its warm light on his body and face made him more lucid, and his thoughts resumed their orderly array. With this new acuity came the acknowledgement that Hulferde was dead. He tried to think past that thought, but some other thing was also wrong and this thing, which he didn’t understand, interfered with his thinking.

  >>> surrounded by delicate hazelnut trees, then into dazzling sunlight, puddles on the pavement as far as I can see, and warm green afternoon mist, so that crying out, and the street blazing, became like a kind of sleep >>> when I awoke, cries that had been in my neck would spin and form into language >>> hair drunk from these yellow gourds, as dusk gathered semen with flies on his face >>> by telepathy I received a luxuriating idea of water from forests at night, and left Hulferde in the elasticity and strength of godly wind >>> catching sight of my self dawn stirs, revelling in the mere music, do I wake or sleep under the green oak’s jewels? >>> they can also be gold, and then you unearth blue-white waves of force: fake skies yearning in me to be touched <<<

  The feeling that he is not alone seeps into him, and with alarm he lunges toward the window and the open air. Although he has no need to breathe, he experiences suffocation — but the sight of people in the streets stirs him. He is suffused with choking desire, and with the desire come memories of torture. His thoughts and feelings strain in all directions and then come apart with a click. He falteringly thinks to return to the room in the basement and pull the door to, believing this will restore Hulferde to life and order to his thoughts.

  The Prosthetic Libido does none of these things, but stands by the window and turns his gaze with effort back to the sun. The serene and even light and warmth that he experiences gradually steadies him, and his mind is strengthened. Boil in the sun-dazzled corners of the dingy room, speaking to him from the little heaps of clotted dust, he sees someone else, that soiled other face that he knows, a clean coil of breath like a little kind snake in his mouth. He is wandering out the back door of the house and the sunlight chalks him in its warm urine.

  Sparse ivy covers the back fence — little girl in the alley on the other side says

  “Mother that man has no clothes.”

  A frightened older face transfixes him with a wild look, hastily gathers the child and is gone. The Prosthetic Libido stands where he is; the sun is now too strong and it’s squashing his mind. With relief he dips down into the shade of the house.

  Clouds gradually assemble in the sky. Rain descends with the sun and in confusion the Prosthetic Libido picks through Hulferde’s clothes. The slicker and hat he finds first; everything else he tries is almost immediately ruined by the oil on his skin. Trying on pants is an especially distasteful experience. Wrapping himself in the slicker and hat, he darts outside without a second thought and finds himself splashing down the narrow sidewalk in bare feet — no one else goes in bare feet, you know, and the water is disagreeably cold. The slippers he finds serendipitously in an ash can by the corner, sitting on top of the refuse.

  The rain helps to shield him from view; everyone walks with downcast faces and under umbrellas. Pursuing dim lines of association he walks uncertainly through the streets, arms held out at his sides, the wandering, irregular gait of a small child. He is exposed, and must remind himself not to cringe when someone appears suddenly out of a doorway, when someone emerges from an alley.

  Bark and howl of trains, the raucous calls and explosive laughter of a group of young men on the empty platform; they pile onto the train and speed away. The Prosthetic Libido emerges from his hiding place behind the tiled stair and perches on the edge of a bench, his presence there play a motet for a single voice and let its peal swell and ebb in the air. Squeal of the train: having assured himself it is empty he boards the last car and huddles in the corner seat at the very rear, head resting on the window and gazing out as stations come and go. He will remain here until:

  ...I am rigid, sitting by the glass. Human energy is turning my head, like a confusion of smells — Now, there he is! The sewerman lumbering out of the tunnel mouth...

  *

  The map had a dream, entitled:

  “Prosthetic Night”

  The Prostheti
c Libido breathed in chords, his body softly palpitating in the shadow on the floor. He raised his hand and it emitted jagged, transparent light; he’s fascinated by the light — clear flame in a fan of spearheads from his fingers. The sensation of his touch is truly indescribable: he touches me, and I see corposants rising in the air of this tiny, stripped room, there’s a green one, the pale color of spring leaves. There goes a gold one, I guess they can also be gold. Crashing, blue-white waves of force roll down as he looks up at me with expectation in his face... he is trilling. The light flickers violently, and the effect on me of those trembling glints darting over his face, with the unceasing, only partially coordinated movements of his features — the contained flight of his face was a series of foggy pictographs. Now, although the rest of its body is rigid, the head is lolling drunkenly — the waist swivels and bends, giving off a strong smell like roasting electrical insulation inside an old console radio, and boiling oil. Grease condenses and runs in droplets down the walls, now they’re slick with oil: the ceiling gone I seemed to see a shining ziggurat. The ceiling is a black pane of space. His manner, a mixture of yearning and exasperated tiredness, like an invalid velleity that has barely the strength to say “I want... I want...”