The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  I stop him outside.

  “Awww—”

  “Silence!” I hold up my hand his mouth snaps shut like a trap. “That man has a demon in him. He cannot be trusted. I have seen it—”

  I jab him in the chest.

  “—you have not. Don’t antagonize him!”

  “Yeah all right—”

  “Don’t joke. What you put on your plate comes back in the spoon.”

  *

  Pearl is with John again and the Great Lover is in the sewers with his gnomes, sitting in a grease circle, peering through three pairs of glasses into a round bottle he’s washed and bleached transparent. A single feather — the same one he’d shown to Pearl — hangs suspended inside.

  I am trying to get a look in on the wings. There is no way to drift gradually in, or to sink down into the sight... but now and then something like a cold solar flare arcs past and over me, with a gush like wind or a harsh grating sound. I can almost see them — transparent brass shells that move through the air like rips in fabric — coming out of a smoke that gathers around the feather in a rough globulation. I have to drive my nerves into it—

  I feel pain and draw back, stop myself just in time as I see the problem — it’s not a membrane keeping me out, but something more like the momentum of a merry-go-round or a moving train — my nerves crashed into the motion. If I pull them back suddenly, they are likely to get tangled and ripped out of me, or drag me in with them to be mangled in the works, like Isidora Duncan strangling on her own scarf. Draw back carefully... not just slowly, but pulling each nerve ending out of the way when it’s safe.

  I’m beginning to feel right again; now to get in I have to match the speed, like boarding a moving train, and pick my moment to hop — every cog has a tooth missing somewhere and that’s the aperture you can use to get in, but it can only be done with a swift darting motion perpendicular to the... now—

  It’s like a huge whirling metal drum, groaning as it spins, a buzzing shell at my back, metallic smoke too that’s mostly rigid but fumes off its structures, a maze looking sort of like an abstract rendering of a London slum at one-third scale — blocks and rows, low walls and partitions. This is their subway. Everything is made of lead smoke. The spaces between objects are made of weak, colorless light, stronger than moonlight but not as strong as overcast daylight. There is a metronomic sound, too, with a soft attack, that undulates through the smoke in nearly visible scallops of tiny parallel streaks or hairs, not quite evenly spaced.

  My nerve form is too light to be affected by these waves; it is moving at the same speed as everything here. I float up to one of the “walls” and see the wave shred through it, momentarily crystallizing the smoke into a lead skein. Then it falls apart and resumes its former, homogeneous appearance. An empty, dying feeling presses me from these things. There is no atmosphere here in the usual sense, but I experience something like dry cold that has no bite. Temperature in the air has to do with movement of the air, but here there is no movement except the drifting of the smoke and the operations of the waves. The drifting smoke, which seems both to drift and to stand as still as statues, weblike though it looks, is too dense to penetrate, like a metal film. The note in the air has a lower, creaking tone I’m just beginning to notice, like someone groaning until the sound of the voice breaks apart into individual pops; I feel it more than I hear it, like the rumble of a subway train passing just overhead.

  How should I move? Without knowing what exactly threatens me, I know it is dangerous to be caught here; and that I may get stuck somehow, even if I am not detected. If I move only when the waves are flowing, don’t I risk being caught in them? If I move only when they aren’t flowing, my motion might be noticed. I’ll risk synchronizing my movement to the waves, play it safe by moving with the light, as far as possible from the smokes.

  The light is disgusting; a tepid mucus.

  I find the station. A feeble, even radiation fills the place, the tracks, pillars, benches and other features are all made of indifferent smoke. Almost no color, almost no contrast of intensities, like a completely smudged pencil sketch. The “vampires” are like leprous bodies clothed in a ragged plumage of fibrous smoke. They stand perfectly still, hands at their sides, with their heads thrown back. I look up, to see what they see. The ceiling is covered with furled wings, hanging upside down and jostling each other with weird violent movements. A downy metal dust sifts from their feathers and falls on the vampires; the vampires reply with song, not opening their mouths. The dust I can feel fall around me, and it’s like a stream of death pushing life down out of me like dragging down my clothes to the floor. The song is almost like the rising and falling of emergency sirens; the waves transmit the siphoned energies to the wings, and their jostling and shivering is part of the way they bask in it and consume it. It’s when the note, after sinking and sinking, suddenly wells back up in pitch again that I really feel it — and panic, horror, as though a spider had mounted on me, and gradually dissolves and absorbs my body.

  Try moving in on a specific object — here under one of the pseudo-stairwells. Unnerving, that everything here is purely geometrical, still, completely eternal and everlastingly the same. The line of the stairwell above me now, the blank floor and blank walls; I imagine lying in a casket, my head on one side, gazing out at the interior of the mausoleum forever. Vera and Futsi together, their bodies arc and flex together — a gasp brings me back to attention — I had permitted my thoughts to wander and the sharp feeling attracts them. They fasten on pain like that — I stay still and listen with all my mind. A pair of legs appears where the stairs climb out of the floor, their momentum fading. They stop.

  Now they drift away.

  But now I notice, in the deeper darkness under the stairs, a small group of them sitting with their heads together, talking in their garbled, monotonous whispers. They are talking about us — so that also distracts them. I suddenly can see their way: somewhere they are watching... here, on the platform of which this is the shadow, they are watching us — I see the grey smudged platform, covered with milling figures like silent movie people projected on smoke with a weak lamp. They are barely outlines, but they flicker in intensity, and project colors, which sometimes flash, brighten and then dwindle again. A stationary group catches my eye, each one with a streak of darker grey in the middle of the forearm — the red armbands. I don’t pick up any clues from observing them, until I notice that their shadows don’t match. They are the shadows of prostrates, doubled over flat on their calves with their hands bound behind them, their hooded heads bowed.

  Here and there, in the crowd, is one of us — a cultist, or fellow traveller — standing gaudily out with a lively or brilliant aspect that seems to attract and pain them at once. Here’s a woman they’re closing in on. She hums with a singing wine glass note, a constellation of puncturing intensities inside her, rising in chains like champaigne bubbles. The neutral figures of the vampirism begin to accumulate around her in a purely automatic fashion, so grey as nearly to be engulfed in the background. I hear a rasping creak that seems almost to come from inside me, like the sound your sinuses make when they suddenly depressurize. Her bubbles deform and bleed copiously, the blood coming out in vivid globs which vanish into the unclean grey of the vampires’ feathers. The woman droops, sagging against a pillar. She puts her hand to her head, and puts her other arm across her body, holding herself. The vampires numbly float away.

  This purulent light I’m in is becoming unbearable. I move through it with revulsion, heading for the wall of the station. There is a darker tile there, furred over with this metal smoke like thick dust. I can’t brush it aside — they’d notice if I did, anyway — so I slip my nerves in between the wall and the smoke, sliding a hand into a freshly dead body that’s not quite cold. I run my nerves over the tile, and suddenly I know what it says, which station this corresponds to. Gingerly, with a throbbing feeling like panting in horror, I draw my nerves out, can’t do it too fast, can’t ma
ke any sudden moves, and swim back the way I can let me let me let me make it out out out—

  That woman holds both hands to her face now. I can see the strands of hair hanging down, and she weaves a little. She drops her hands to her sides and takes two dragging steps, her head tilted a little too far back. All of her is just a colorless hollow with a few lit contours. I go over to her picking my moment. I move with care between two vampires. Then turn a little but they aren’t homing on me yet. There is a rustle in the air — train coming.

  Slowly I bring myself up to the woman, who leans against the back of the stairs, legs crossed at the ankle, like she can barely hold herself upright. The sound of her long breaths comes to me, an attitude of anxious listening, as though she expected an asthma attack or a bout of vomiting, and now and then, when the air brushes her vocal cords, she utters soft noises of distress. I keep myself cool until the train rushes in, baleful light and a visible metal wind, like a wiggling streak of dull mercury, pouring its force into the station like a wave washing the shore. The moment it comes I bright up and move in hearing the bells and whistles in my mind, seeing the flashing knife when the dancer slashes himself to drink his own blood, and I put my nerves into her and flare myself up, like puffing myself up with wind. I’m not draining into her, I’m stirring up her own native voltage. Her form straightens, her will is resurging, her voltage is strengthening. The train has stopped. Her head creates luminous filaments that spin lightly around each other like tea leaves. I speculatively give her a push — it should appear in her mind as a sort of random impulse or intuition.

  It works, she boards the train. The vampires are already closing in but so are the doors, and the car is basically empty — I see no one dangerous in there. It takes several of them to affect you. She is on the other side of the doors. I dim down fast the others are looking around and drifting toward me like amoebas; the train pulls out in another blast of force, whiting out their radar, and I escape. Turned heads. The wings twitch in waves.

  Now I’m out of their sight — the feeling of defilement is too much — I can’t let it overwhelm me — I reach out and begin to rub on the smoke, rub in a little circle, there on the “floor.” It starts to give, hollowing out. I can reach into the smoke now and start gently tugging — again I have to fight down panic and disgust — the smoke is tearing, the aperture is gradually opening... this is a little like working a pot on a wheel, the edges spinning and threatening to collapse — I have to work carefully, slowly, to make it stable so it will stay open until I can get all the way through it.

  My heavy body drops back as though a metal sheet had fallen on it — I’m not all the way out though, I can feel my nerves are stretched taut, half out the opening. I draw them out, hand over hand, like pulling a net from the sea. A clutch of nerves hits my jaw and I can speak.

  “Help — help me,” I gag.

  At once the nearest gnome is there, grabbing on and pulling. The others come monkeying up and join in. Feeling comes back to my legs, my abdomen; it’s as though my body had been completely rigid, and now, as the nerves are restored to their proper places, the muscles suddenly go slack.

  “It’s closing up!” I cry in panic. With a heave I draw in the last of my nerves like sucking in noodles.

  For a while I lie there, worrying. It’s almost impossible to know whether or not I left anything behind, tail end of a nerve sticking out in that vile spot. I wait... I begin to feel whole. I am whole.

  Frothing in repugnance, the Great Lover bounds to his feet, dashes from his platform, and flings himself into the purifying, shitty waters of the sewer.

  *

  Futsi meanwhile organizes the subway runners. The platforms are now “patrolled” by vigilante groups of right-wing high school and college students wearing red armbands, who often carry weapons. The runners taunt these students and draw them into ambushes or simply wear them out in endless cartoon chases. There are runners who dress as early twentieth-century Wobblies; stereotype punks; the baseball gang from “The Warriors” in pinstripe outfits and baseball stitching drawn on their faces; others wear sutured black leotard-like outfits and get themselves up as Cesare from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Goths, jesters, teddy boys, sad hobo-type clowns, mimes, as absurd as possible, designed to invoke the most clannish instincts, and to destroy the respectability of conformity by showing the mindless violence behind it. It was noted that nonwhite cultists did not have to dress up.

  There would prove to be some unexpected problems — most notably the designers, who were forever swiping the runners’ outfits. Constant alteration of costume was necessary to stay ahead of these fashion appropriations; intimidating or bumping off designers, fun as it might have been, was ruled out after careful consideration. Through them, the riots of the subway are both domesticated and transmitted, so, for a time anyway, allow the transmission to proliferate the images. But only as long as it helps to undermine conformity. Police charging in from everywhere — two emerge from the passage and instantly the demon sprints up and hypnotizes them on the spot. More and more police come and the demon is zooming back and forth hexing them all whammies flying around like custard in a pie fight. Weeks later some of the affected officers are still hypnotized. One shows up to work every day decked out in more and more gold, heavy chains hanging from his neck and diamonds welded to his badge. Snakeskin band around his cap, and tinsel hanging from wires, then tie dyes his uniform. A desk sargent excuses himself and re-emerges from the bathroom with vermillion lips and gold glitter all over his cheeks, gold eye shadow and his slacks are manhandled into thigh-high iridescent platform boots.

  But Futsi’s special genius lies in choreographing trouble with the police. Multiply taunts three students and they chase him through the station. He loses all but one, laughing mocking and staying just out of his reach until the student is in a frenzy of rage, pulling out his knife.

  “Show you—”

  Multiply gets his cue and scoots down a tunnel.

  “Come back here fuckin—”

  Rounding the corner hot in pursuit

  “—nigger!”

  barrel right into a black cop “What did you call me?!”

  Anger in the cop’s eyes turns to alarm as he sees the knife and before the student can explain a bullet rips through his ribs — his mind goes black and he drops. Enemy strength minus one. Echoes of Multiply’s laughter still can be heard fading down the tunnel.

  Armband girl tries to mace a runner in a djellaba with beard and skull cap, who suddenly isn’t there. Mace spins in the vibrating air and jabs into the eye of a passing female police officer — armband sees the jam she’s in and turns to run. The cop has had a long and very bad day. Armband girl tossed sourly into the backseat of the car body aching all over.

  After a slough of arrests and combats, some of the more die-hard types have started carrying guns. Multiply gets a bullethole in his sweatshirt — missed him by an inch — and one of his friends isn’t so lucky. Other runners drag him to safety with a trough cut across his leg showing white bone — another runner, more or less a dead ringer for the stricken one, decoys the shooter and bolts down a corridor. At this moment a street crimes unit appears on the scene, summoned by a precisely-timed phone call from Futsi. The sight seems to blur in their minds as the armband darts into the doorway after our runner. They see the black runner and the student’s gun somehow together and process: black man with gun. As one man they draw glocks and empty every round into the doorway. A Dartmouth boy’s bullet-riddled body slops out into the light, gun clatters along the platform and down into the slough between the rails with a deep “plunk.”

  Muttered exclamations, buzz of radio voices, heads sway up to the body. Bright red blood drips from the yellow platform edge. Skateboard wheels rasp in the distance.

  *

  Pulling back the red hinged no unauthorized persons sign at the brink of the tunnel, I walk out onto the platform and board the first car of the downtown express. No one sees m
e though the train is full; I brace my legs — man could get an infection hanging onto these grimy steel poles I think, sniffing sewage back up my nose.

  The train brakes abruptly throwing everyone in the car — I fall flat against the TO’s door, narrowly avoid a woman sitting with a fat tyke on her lap. She wears slippers of black mesh with pitiful embroidered little flowers fraying to nothing on the toes. Gazing at them, I feel poetic reverie coming on in contemplation of the gallant vanity of these wistful slippers. Only then does it occur to me someone pulled the brake cord — that’s the only reason a train might stop so hasty. Something balls up in my throat and I move quickly to the doors, wrench them apart forcing myself through a bit at a time as they fight me, biting at me like a mechanical shark.

  As I extricate myself the train suddenly lunges forward gathering speed. Out of the corner of my eye I see a wing beat against the inside of the TO’s window. I lose my grip and drop crash into a post. I get up and limp away from the train, heading for a tiled passage toward the adjacent station on a parallel line.

  When I get there I find a flurry of wings and limp bodies has knotted itself together at the far end of a platform stained here and there along half its length with thick streaks of blood, while citizens too out of it to notice mill about waiting for the trains delayed as usual, looking at watches, rattling bags and newspapers, walking to and fro with a slow stiff-legged step. They are tense, but they don’t know why and they don’t ask... that’s all. The wings have killed some of them on a lark no pun intended; through their mass I can see Warren, cornered in behind a stairwell.

  Brandishing his two speakers out in front of him, Warren is singing along with the radio at the top of his lungs, holding the wings at bay with his song, but as he comes into view so do a couple of police officers strolling down the platform and they will certainly attempt to quiet Warren when they reach him. I pitchpole my rod like a harpoon in a long arc — it javelins down like appearing out of thin air with a thunk impaling and pinning to the tile floor a winged body. We have bodies here and can fight — the demon must have found this thing. An attack might waste energy, but as their numbers are reduced so is their strength, and I had to get them off of Warren.