There’s a pearl in the night’s oyster shell and it’s there in the weather station which is larger and closer than it is; everything is far closer. It’s growing bigger as the path climbs — I’m so happy and excited, I bite my lip smiling at the air, because now there’s an electrified circle inside me now, so I can’t wait!
Wooden thump against my toe. I lift my foot and down it comes on something wooden. I climb steps, but the air is still moving freely around me. Before me: invisible bulk. I reach out to touch it, but I still have to take several careful steps before I feel smooth warm wood, the door right there — and it gives, swing silently open for me.
Across the threshold I step out of night and into late afternoon sun, warm and nostalgic, lying along the floor. Hot dusk of the first evenings in Fall. Electric fire!
Arms sweep me up into thick air! My hands fly up, and fall on bare shoulders. Is it him I stroke his face—
Her hands flicker up the neck to his face, and she cries out with happiness, droops and wraps him in herself.
He carries her swiftly into another room. She feels beneath her the fragrant and yielding sheets, through her clothes, then on skin.
We ghosts watch their bodies coil. Dark against the windows and his eyes like red hot coals. Her cries are long and low and almost mournful. Faces made of cobwebs window gaze in through the window with smudged eyes, shining among shimmering leaves. A transparent little girl stands in the hall. Tears drop on to her face, run into her thick hair. His head lunges, his hands grasp her shoulders and they sink. The girl trots down the hall, silhouetted against window of golden flakes, turns as she runs, and is lost in shadow. An arc of pleasure like a band of warm metal flexes through her body, like a thin tissue being torn a little at a time.
A shrill voice answers from the hall. She shudders and cries, calling out her body together and his breath shakes on her shoulder a tragedy too, when bright white and gold seared edges burnish tragedic note bright sharp sunset’s lances speak pressed leaves of gold flood shine stark clean gold note song in ringing bowl grow loud as thunder killing light splits each in two and joins the split gaps into perfect one up unending ladder of abandon—
—Un-ending ladder
*
Vera woke up in her own bed. She sits up, and Futsi stirs beside her. She feels her face, draws her hair down over her face — cool spots on her face. Salt tears in her hair. It happened.
*
The Great Lover and Pearl are taking a walk the next afternoon Pearl incognito in his yellow slicker rain hat and knee-high rubber boots, looking and moving like an oversized boy, and keeping to the shady margin of the path.
Pearl’s attention is sheared away — cold erupts in his chest and his limbs grow heavy and numb, his head is light and hollow and he staggers a little.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know... what a horrible feeling. It’s passing off, I think.”
“You should be able to tell me exactly what’s wrong.”
“I tell you I don’t know... This must be what it’s like for you.”
The Great Lover’s lips fold down, unhappy with this answer.
Again, on a narrow path through the trees, above the pond, cold bursts in his chest heavy as a bag of cement and he staggers, then rushes first to one side of the path, then the other, his eyes blank with panic, groaning, terrified. When this episode fades, the Great Lover insists they go back to the house and by the most direct route, over the bridge and along the pond. Past the bridge where paths converge this time he feels it too, a ghostly rill of nausea like a glass plug in his throat. The Prosthetic Libido goes rigid up on his toes and screams the sound squeezed out of him as though he were running through a slow mangle, an unbearable sound from so beautiful a voice.
“What is it!?”
He is screaming at what he sees in his mind, absolute image superimposed over the water, the mute and astonished trees and the sky; an acute dome of weak light, and a thought in the light.
Pearl sees the inside of a skull, or of a mind. A pale, pink-white glow fills it, and there are symmetrical structures forming a floor with a round dais in the center. Soft white and translucent wands radiate from the dais, angling in identical, evenly-spaced bows to the curved ribs that line the dome. Against the dais, the wands end in soft hooks, like the fronds of a sea anemone. There’s a ring of clear pebbles where the floor meets the dome. Between the wands are struts like spokes dividing the floor into crescent-edged troughs with round openings like bullet holes in their bottoms. Froth percolates from the holes and gradually accumulates in the troughs.
Kinked white plumes of luminous, ghostly material appear with inaudible pops above the dais. They hover in place, tendrils of fine viscous powder collapse out of them toward the surface of the dais, which is a regularly indented cushion of pink flesh. In the middle of this is an amber clitoris surrounded by porcelain tubes and a raised ring of cloudy glass at the base, dotted with grey and darker nodes like raisins in pudding. The plumes are part of a general, gradually accelerating process involving threadlike extrusions from high in the chamber reaching down to interact with elements in the floor. As the plumes braid together, forming a net that grows in symmetry, holes in the frosted glass ring emit clear bubbles that swell up over the clitoris forming a perfectly transparent carapace of locked shells nested inside each other, the elegant locking of transparent panels with the irregular contours and features of the flat bones of the skeleton.
Light braids above a cross section of internested shells, whose edges grow luminous and radiate an asymmetrical arrangement of elliptical fields converging on the center, below the groin formed by the ribs. The froth that has been accumulating in the troughs suddenly gelates becoming smooth organs like pink kidneys that bulge above the lips of the trough. These now exude a thick trembling whey that forms a web, and radiant grains like powdered sugar rise in the fluid and slide in toward the dais. They collect slowly as the light braids are pulled out into weblike fans and the crushing pressure exerted by that light grows more intense, which is perceived as an increased “brightness” without any corresponding increase of illumination. The grains are now all in the clouded glass ring, and they rush together forming tiny glowing firefly points around the ring like gems in a crown. Nodules of white enamel, like teeth, form lines in pink mush on the outer extremity of the dais. Two rods of colorless syrup swing down from the apex of the dome; their ends touch opposed points on the outer rim of the dais and lie flat. The rods spin like two coiling ropes, forming a layered outer shell. An area of light is forming in the white mist above the clitoris. As the processes are spontaneously coordinated, larger or “brighter” structures of a constellation placidly take shape with a gloating, assured calm. This is a mind, radiant with a warmth that feels like a disgusting cold, and a bitter, lustrous nausea.
A body is stirring as its sense organs are beginning. Now suddenly the processes all whir and a brilliant light appears in the center — thread comes down and splits instantly into fans of threads, these turn and fold together forming grids — each line passes through the center of a square defined by the intersection of two other grids, and rising columns of firefly lights, like ropeless pearls, slither up through the squares and track their way up, back down, in toward the light in the center or out toward the dome by dipping round each line like acrobats spinning around the parallel bars. The membranes of the pink kidney-like complexes inflate, and tendrils of colorless syrup flow down from the outer shell and connect to the bubbles, which take on a pale yellow color around the join like a powdering of sulfur. Motor activity, ratiocination, memory, association.
The Great Lover sees none of this, although he can feel something... something a little. Pearl lunges spasmodically this way and that, bounds up onto a park bench his right leg flails out once and smashes the wood and steel of the back of the bench as though he were idly knocking off dandelion puffs. On the ground he takes two steps loses his balance and spins off to one sid
e of the path; his right arm shears a streetlamp in half. The Great Lover rushes over and grabs him. Pearl, clutching the Great Lover’s upper arms, rotates his wrists upward and rises off the ground his spine arched and his head flung back shrieking uncouthly, his legs, feet pointed straight down at the ankle, kick convulsively at the Great Lover’s chest. The Great Lover grunts as he’s kicked, and black blood or vomit trickles from his lips, but his dense body barely moves and he continues to hold on. All this as something like a clammy grey hood of nausea bears down out of nowhere onto his head. Angrily, he takes hold of the Pearl by the midsection and shakes him violently for a long time...
Now he is lying on the ground, watching as the Pearl flops and tosses in epileptic frenzy against the pavement. Suddenly Pearl is staring him in the face, clutching his lapels asking him again and again if he’s all right, the glistening, exquisite face contorted with emotion but still bizarrely perfect. He’s got the Great Lover by the lapels and shakes him gently, rolling his head around.
“Oh, oh, did I hurt you? I couldn’t help it — oh what are we going to do? Oh no, didn’t you feel it, too? You must have.”
He thrusts his face into the Great Lover’s his eyes perfect brimming circles and nearly wholly black—
“Do you know what he did? He made another one! He modelled it on me — on me!” he sobs. “Now she’s awake! A Prosthetic Death — what are we going to do?”
CHAPTER NINE
Back to Hulferde’s house.
Hulferde’s newfound energy plus knowledge acquired in creation of the Prosthetic Libido equals creation of Prosthetic Death. That means the transposition of his mortality into an artificial vessel to do all his dying for him so he never has to.
Hulferde is dead.
Hulferde most likely did not complete Prosthetic Lib I mean Death. But Pearl just now experiences something connected with it, possibly the appearance of its mind, having never had the slightest inkling of the existence of such a being.
Somehow it failed to preserve Hulferde’s life, but nevertheless it is in operation.
Why did I feel it, too?
Getting off the train... How would a Death Prosthetic work?
The only principles derivable from the creation of the Prosthetic Libido pertain to transference to a double acting as a process-vessel with positive retransference back to the source. Transference of death to Prosthetic double entails perennially sustained dying ergo Prosthetic Death is a shunt attached to a living organism and draining out the death. If the intended host dies, then there would be no death to die. Perhaps Hulferde has been restored to life somehow; if the Prosthetic Death has only just begun to function this will mean a terrible awakening for Hulferde in a decayed body. Supposing revivification is not possible, and Prosthetic Death has no host? Pearl seems unaffected by death of Hulferde, has achieved a separate life.
With Hulferde dead, the Prosthetic Death will be an empty vessel? What does that mean?
I turn in to the lane. Hulferde’s house glimmers dull white against the drab brick houses to which it is attached, like a carious tooth under speeding clouds, satin-grey and ocean-blue shadowed. I enter through the front door.
The air in the house is stifling, and hums with a deep tone that makes my jaws buzz and smears my vision. Dying saturates it. I find the basement door hanging open; here the air is filled with painful tingling. A migraine ache knits along the top of my head like a white hot seam, pink and grey sparks, black rectilinear streaks seethe in my eyes. I can smell decay down there.
I stamp my feet and pound my head with my hands, slap myself, swing my arms like a skiier, trying to shake the feeling. The oppression does sullenly ease off after a bit. I head down the stairs to the basement, keeping my balance only with effort.
As I descend, I feel crushing pressure close on me like tons of deep sea water, and my own brittle defenses. I’ll need to do whatever down here fast. Before the stairs I see a figure crumpled on the floor. Hulferde, dead.
There is the black aperture of the Prosthetic Libido’s closet. Nothing inside, but as I cross the threshold I feel some relief, a lightening, a refreshing shadow of sadness there.
Turning from the closet I see it at once — a cloud chamber large enough to hold a person, hidden beneath the basement steps. Looking at these things, I see them, and I feel as though I were right at the brink of a bottomless pit. The fear covers another feeling down in the depths, or an unthought thought. Tearing myself away is like ripping free of a trapped limb.
On the floor next to the chamber, a dead fly rests covered in a light topping of ash. It is decomposing directly into its component elements, all its organic compounds simply falling apart. I step nearer and a draught stirs the little body; it slides along the floor from left to right and then turns over twice. On the second turn it collapses into a shapeless drift of dust.
My reserves are drying up, a sick crushing feeling in my chest like I’ve been feebly stabbed. In a delirium of escape I rush up the stairs and through the kitchen knocking table and chairs out of my way — out the back steps and into the deep shade of the back yard, where I stand, rubbing my face and shaking.
I imagine the clouds streaking across the sky, vast and impossibly rapid. The watery light on the yard, the heavy shadows. The door opens — a white arm gently thrusting out of blackness, a small form stepping gingerly over the jam. The Prosthetic Death is five feet tall, and lean — a round head with very short hair, a face I know must have been his sister’s...
white arm...
Long strings of syrup to a round structure looking like an astrolabe made out of translucent ivory fat. Acute domes folding around and above it, transparent like shrouds of fine ash closing about a rectangle of light that turns and spins and splits layers into other tangled lines and corners. The lines twist and form an unstable number of diamond-like leaves that darken and spread, rising from a stem made from half of each U-shaped thread of clear syrup with minute black flakes in it. All this with a suggestion of distant, more stable structures and a vast reverberating empty space, the vantage point of an alcove high in a cavern wall. From the astrolabe-like central structure something else is rising like an upside-down spur, spreading rows of clear membraneous wings on cloudy chitinous spindles, all alive with a wild acuity.
A plum-shaped face. Small eyes in sockets brown like a bad spot on a piece of fruit. The mouth is a child’s, lips and the flesh around the lips colorless and transparent. The body is slim, like a teenaged boy’s, with no apparent sexual characteristics.
She stood here naked. A line down the back, legs simply slot into the bottom of the torso. I see it step out onto the grass, which shrivels at its touch, moving with a vibratory, hesitant, electrical way. I can imagine it spring into wildly fast flailing motion that terrifies me. Birds drop to the ground from the tree overhead, sees the plants grow sere and wither. Yes, the grass here is brown and matted; matted into it are stiff, cottony birds like styrofoam.
Banging my forehead with the heel of my hand I get away from the house. I have to put some distance between myself and this crazymaking influence.
Now think: Pearl feels this thing because it is another part of the extended creature Hulferde was turning into, but there’s no evident reason why I should feel a thing, let alone all this. I ransack my memory until I am stopped short by a familiar smell... and a bottle with a small indistinct fluid residue by the cloud chamber, on a box or something attached to the wall. Hypodermic needle with injector tube lying next to it, the bottle unstoppered, the smell coming out. That smell is the smell of cadaverine a toxic base found in rotting meat but more specifically it is the smell of me: of my own personal cadaverine. He must have stuck me while my attention was somewhere else the little shit! The thing is part of me, too. Part of me too.
It’s ambulatory and independent, no doubt about it, full function. It must have been brought to half start and then set to charge slowly in the cloud chamber. MY cadaverine employed to anchor living death in the v
essel, a kind of magnet to draw the death in that’s dandy.
So what’s going on? The P.D. absorbed all of Hulferde’s death at once — I’m guessing he pitched headlong down the stairs and broke his neck served him right too. But a death the P.D. was intended to drain off gradual was instead entirely displaced into it at one jolt, and Hulferde’s life with it snapping to like an extended elastic. Consequently at full start the thing literally comes alive with Hulferde’s life, which is now its life.
Problem: its life depends on a function whereby it is perennially dying. It cannot be perennially dying and alive at the same time, therefore it must drain off death into other vessels; the device operates purely on a principle of displacement. The P.D.’s life continually displaces a volume of death which will in turn have to be displaced into other living things and that’s not something a living thing can survive. The Prosthetic Death must leave everywhere a trail of death; its own, everywhere displaced, everybody’s problem.
*
An invisible curtain hangs in the air like a grey fire. It pushes off from the ground and floats a few inches above the pavement down streets whose windows go dark as it passes. A woman slumps over the stove, crashes face first into a pot of boiling soup and then to the ground, her slack face steaming with hot brown broth. A baby’s cries stop. Dark drops like a shutter. A couple sitting on the brim of the fountain — she slumps forward against his chest and he topples sideways into the water, legs draped over the stone brink... her face skids along his belt, and she falls to the pavement on her side. Noise of breaking glass from an open window. A man’s cap rolls to a halt by the hem of the curtain. It begins to float across the square.
*
The proprietor of the neighborhood thrift shop has shut the door and turned off the radio. It’s getting dark outside, and he wants to close soon. He hopes surreptitiously to himself that no one will come to bother him. There’s no one in the shop, although you shouldn’t be too sure about that; more than once he’s been taken aback when someone popped out from behind a rack of thick coats. He’ll call, then give the place the onceover, before he locks up.
The Great Lover Page 28