*
Futsi blames him.
I remember her walking on the platform. I hear her sing. The song sounds now under cancellation of death...
Now the streets of the narrative are stark and empty, the whole narrative has gone flat and cold and stark. The sky is a sheet of burning white that smarts the eye, and there is no sun, no dusk, no dawn. No one sees day and night change. The night sky is deep with blue hazes veiling the black, the moon is black, and the stars are soft and bright-guttering.
From out of the white sky a soundless wind comes that makes the street ripple like a canvas sail. Not cold or warm, not strong or weak, the wind sets the house and store fronts, the monumental banks and steep-laddered office buildings listing and rattling like wooden flats. Only a handful walk in empty streets, smudged and indistinct people, hard to see in broad daylight, a wind carries their voices away without a sound.
All around the Great Lover there is only sleep, cold. No light, no color, the streets appear to be unmagical, empty. There are clouds like gunsmoke in the street, sweeping past kneading and curdling, white and grey blurred against the black. A tourniquet closed on him full of loose grey earth. He is not moving, stands in the teeth of the wind. All visual objects are incised painfully in cutting strokes on a tender membrane, the grey cream sky just above the edges of the buildings, ready to melt into smoke.
Staring with an expression of sudden fright at the black spears topping an iron fence — cold watchers. He stares at them for a long time.
And now his face seems briefly disposed to laugh without mirth at them; I get the joke, we are more real than you.
A leathery wing, without hurrying, puts out the sky, and beneath it he turns into a multitude as numerous as the threads in his coat.
Her locks rise over the city and he paralyzes. I see what he sees: her face. Slack with death. Upright, as though she stood before and above him. Her dead face towers over him.
He watches as something shivers over her features. A moment more, and her face will crumple and darken like scorching paper. A vast, soft hand squeezes him, his face crumples and darkens, and nearly silent sobs come out from the rigid mouth.
Her face is never like it was. Her tresses sweep the sky over the rooftops like searchlights. He’s dreaming.
He takes her body in his arms and begins to run with her, as if her life were getting away. He runs onto a bridge, veers to one side to avoid a truck, loses his balance, and now he hangs over the side by one hand, the other holding her. He would have to let her drop to get use of his other hand, and he can’t pull himself up without both hands. Instead, he clasps her tightly in both his arms, and lets himself fall. Her body is wrenched from his arms as he crashes into the surface; he flails this way and that, looking for her, and then catches sight of her, just in time to see her body being sucked into the spinning propellers of a passing ferry boat, which instantly cut her to pieces.
He swims after the ferry. Nothing, not even a single lock of hair, is left of her.
Nothing — and he seizes one of the massive propeller blades with his hands. It swings him round he keeps his hold and pushes out with his legs — his feet come flat against the bottom of the boat and his body goes rigid, stopping the blade. Through the hull he can hear the engine shriek and shudder, as pistons erupt out of the cylinders and burst up through the deck to mangle reeling passengers. Howling, the engine rips itself completely loose and falls away into darkness.
The Great Lover lunges at the other propeller and tears it and its engine from the boat. The ferry lists backwards. He unfolds the longest blade of his pocket knife and stabs the boat with it, cuts a square in the hull and bashes it in with his fists. The ferry dips drastically sinking faster and faster listing to one side. The Great Lover clings to the edge of the opening he’s made tugging frenziedly, trying to drag the ferry down faster. Passengers climb over each other clawing trying to reach the hatches miring boots and pumps in wailing faces. Flailing his arms he is trying to push the water in quicker through the hole — the boat plummets to the bottom leaving a trail of drowned and writhing people — he flails with all his strength knowing none of it is any use.
Where is she? he’s shouting. Where is she?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She is coming.
Deuteronôme and Multiply have switched to the downtown platform. It’s late, and they are alone. Deuteronôme is sitting with his elbows on his knees, looking steadily across the tracks. His eyes are alert, flicking here and there. A rat. Another over there? No, nothing. Is that nothing? He looks, peers. Not nothing and not a rat, a grey wisp. It is a little shower of dust, falling below the level of the platform, seeping in from the tunnel and now a whir surrounds them as they get to their feet in alarm...
Shadows adhere below her eyes, and she droops with fatigue. The wings rustle and creak in regular waves, a sound like laborious breathing through viscous lungs.
“I am so tired,” the voice whispers, with the slightest ring of a woman’s voice.
Multiply can feel his lips almost form the words, a sandbag emptying into him, a hand pinching out the wick.
“I can’t fight,” she says. “I must die...”
Heavy snow pouring down into him, a cold weight that drifts inside. He weaves on his legs.
His uncle seizes his shoulder and shakes him — a far-away feeling. But his uncle’s voice keeps driving toward him, cutting in clearer and clearer.
“Do you want to live? Do you want to live?”
“Y-yes,” he says, barely able to move his throat, his mouth. But saying it he feels a meager trickle of strength drip into him.
“Yes,” he says it again, louder.
“I don’t want to live,” she says, and the words rush down behind his face shooting toward his open mouth — clamps it shut and can almost feel them pound against the inside of his lips.
“You must fill yourself with the desire to live!” his uncle shouts. “It must fill you to bursting!”
Multiply reaches into that swelling feeling by his heart and lungs with weary agony, somehow barely able to do it — but he does it, and at once the life in him is strengthened. Stronger and stronger, coming back, stronger than before.
“I can’t fight... I am so weary...”
The voice breaks over him but it cannot enter. No room.
“You will fail here,” Deuteronôme says. “Go on.”
“I will fail...” Again the temptation to echo her...
“Go on.”
The breathing of the wings deepens, and there is motion of Vampirism on all sides, surrounding them.
Gliding forward, “I want the end.”
“Go.”
“It’s too much for me,” she wails without a voice, quietly — but now Multiply can see the lines on her face are shadows only, and the features are unmarked, impassive.
“Nothing is too much for you. You are the end.”
“I am the end,” she glides to within a few feet away. “No more sight, no more sound. No sense. No numbness. No nothingness. No peace. No relief. No end, no without end. No time or space. I am so tired. I want to lie...”
Words almost thrust at his lips like fingers.
“I do not exist.”
Like a blow.
The rustling has grown, the circle around them is closing. For a moment I see it — everything going dark, all the windows, the traffic stopped dead, lights going out until the city is just completely gone, and no sound at all. Just litter blowing over the bodies, in the park, on the sidewalk. This is like an infinity force that is bigger than the Vampirism or the students or anything human beings can make — just the dark of the dark.
“Quickly get behind me” — turning as he goes around behind him “ — Get on your board. Both feet.”
He pulls from his pocket a small digital metronome and starts it, holding it up by his face. It emits a clear pitch at a variable setting, right now about every other second.
“Now start skating round
me in a circle, so that you pass before me or behind my back at each stroke... You must adjust as I increase the stroke.”
Multiply keeps the board going in a smooth regular motion, his eyes darting this way and that and pancakes flipping over in his cold stomach.
“Keep your eyes on what you are doing.”
The intervals between the pulses are gradually shrinking, but Multiply keeps up, sinking into a slowly deepening crouch on the board. He has to keep his eyes on what he’s doing but he can hear a frenzied rustle all around.
A sound is coming from his uncle, a kind of boom he can feel shudder up through the floor into his wheels. Out of the corner of his eye he gets the idea his uncle is just a blur, humming there. He feels power well up, and far from stilling the tremble he feels this power is changing it into the shaking of rage or excitement, of a strong engine. The pulses have sped up now and he is turning into a streak making a magic circle around his uncle, who seems to be rotating in place without moving his limbs. He is saying something again and again.
A bow wave of fright nearly pushes him over and he knows that she is near, probably standing a few feet away. But she can’t get through the circle that he—
Faster his streak is pulling apart — he is a clear streaked ring connecting two pulsing, blurry images of himself at front and back of his uncle. Now he’s four images, one at each of the cardinal points. As the pulse accelerates and his speed increases to match it, he realizes he’s seeing all around himself at once. He can see himself. He can see her, and his uncle, like a flame shadow upright in the middle of the circle, a slender funnel of transparent flame coiling above his head like a charmed snake. He has eight faces in a circle, all speaking the same repeated word or formula, sixteen arms.
She is watching. He can tell she is at bay somehow.
“It’s like you can’t get on a moving subway even if the doors are open, unless you’re on another train going about the same speed. We’re alternating here and there so fast she can’t sync up.”
“I’m not tired,” he thinks. He can’t “look around,” though. It’s as though he has no head to turn, or rather, he does turn his head, but he is already seeing everything on all sides. His vision has no limit. He can feel his head like a soft, humming, dense whirlwind that just swirls this way and that as he turns it. He can even see it, from just behind or just inside. It has an aura with two dim separate layers, one blue and one sort of purple.
The faster they go, the more he sees. Now he sees himself from far off, whirling round and round and his uncle in the circle he draws with his board. The air in the station is whipping around them now, but he is not tired. He can feel the burring of the wheels and his uncle’s low drone, shifting evenly to and fro.
“It’s balanced. As long as it’s balanced, we don’t lose energy and get tired. But he can keep adding force so the balance goes up too.”
Now he can see the switching yard, a mile away underground. And there they are, little mites on a platform far off in the distance.
“Get ready to step to the side,” his uncle’s voice comes to him sharply.
“Which side?”
“Any side!”
The switching yard is crisp and visible. Multiply can smell it.
“Step!”
Multiply steps sideways off his board. He is in the switchyard. The board rolls from him and to a stop a few feet away. He turns. Deuteronôme is pocketing his machine. From far off in the direction of the platform there is a dull throbbing sound dwindling quickly away, like the aftermath of an explosion.
“We will have destroyed some when we left,” his uncle says. “But not her.”
*
The Great Lover is searching for Vera across the bottom of the ocean, lunging gracelessly through the thick grey muck, leaving a trail of cloudy water behind him. He flaps along in long shallow hops, his coat tails waft up and down like a manta ray’s wings. The water is filled with errant-slanting blonde light with no source; this ocean has no surface. The vast form of a sperm whale hovers over him, and just ahead; its flanks and lips are minutely flecked with gold.
Now the whale is ahead of him, coming toward him, a gigantic fluked brow growing like a dark blot. Its long flukes lower to form a kind of arch over the marble bench on which Vera is sitting. The Great Lover churns forward clawing at the water — her bench is the only thing occupying an area of worn pavings, clinched in spidery black weeds. As his feet touch the pavings he is able to move swiftly toward her, pressing hard against thick water. The whale vanishes, ascending up into space. The Great Lover rushes toward Vera; she senses him coming and stands not certain, her jaw as always is a little slack, like a fish’s, revealing her bottom teeth. He drops to his knees in front of her and flings his arms around her waist burying his face in her stomach, and she bends forward, mouth hanging open, her splayed hands pat his head here and there. He tips it back, and she presses her fingertips here and there on his face as though she were tapping something into an old-fashioned adding-machine.
She recognizes him. Her face lights up, and she leans forward lavishing awkward caresses on him. He takes her face in his hands and she lunges forward for his kiss, their lips meet — when she is kissing him she laughs triumphantly, it’s a hoarse, husky, primate sound. His tears ooze out hot into cold water and turn into boiling threads of steam.
He wakes with tears streaming down his face and into the grass. They never stop.
*
Now...
Now...
Now I’m in my imagination, which is sort of drifting along the world like a jellyfish. What current is carrying me I can’t say, but I do not choose to go this way or that.
At the moment, I’m idling here, in an alley where roaches and mice rifle the trash bags. The former creep, stop, creep, while the mice are always darting and electrified, like animated dust mats. Leaning up against a can, someone’s thrown away a painting of an owl perched on a branch, and there is an inverted river a dark triangular line between its eyes that expands under my gaze to become a crevasse, a clear, cold place cut from black glass, and I’m almost trapped in it. Its starkness endues the alley, which I still see distinctly, with the same quality, the same starkness, to the mice, the glinting black trash bags, the glinting eyes of the mice and scales of the roaches, and slimy tracks of the rank water—
No one knew anything about his daughter he might as well have emanated her out of his own person...
He did.
There is the room, the breathless day, the chair and the corner, and he is there in the hall, looking in through the doorway. This silent, hesitant, trembling room is there in the front of my mind, and in the back I see a ribbon of empty days for my father. He never married, there was no wife, there was a chasm of loneliness and dejection, and his friend’s suicide.
The light outside stands straight up and down, the sun directly over the house, the windowsills glow like moonlit frost and though the windows are open the snowy curtains hang still with dark folds. The room is empty. Then I step out from the dark corner behind the chair, a little girl in a white dress, my hair loose, a blot of shadow between my nose and the bangs I had then — my father is transfixed with joy and fright, I can feel his panic and his frenzied longing to believe in me. Then he holds out his arms, his heavy hands quivering. I trot forward into his embrace. He murmurs my name, repeating it as he lowers his cheek to brush the crown of my head. With each repetition I grow more solid, two white spots quicken in the shadow on my face and now I have eyes, if useless ones. “Love is blind.” I wonder if that flashed through his head just then, and if I owe my defective eyes to a cliché.
The crevasse is the form my choice imposes as I begin to comprehend it: I have a choice... even though I am imaginary, I possess a choice — that, as an imaginary person loneliness summoned I can come back... nothing prevents my taking form again — and everything will go on the same just the same...
Or I can come back, and everything will be different totally
different. I’m following both at once — I come back and my image stretches to fill one long time with no events, and I and everyone else will run on in our routines like contented pocket watches... or I come back the other way — I can feel the power to do that hum, like the premonition of a fit: it means taking on the mantle of the god they’ve made, and coming as that god to them. I’ve called it a mantle, and before me I see the fireplace and hovering just above my shoulders ready to drop down at any moment is an elongated cool gelatinous blob of fabric.
Something horrifying is happening in the fireplace — it’s cold, like the bottom of the ocean, and people I love are dying in it, crushed frozen and drowning — but then, with an inner blow I discover I can love them, I mean I do! I feel it like a magnetism tugging at my ghostly substance — so even an imaginary soul can really love — why not?—
If I come, people I love will die. It would be necessary; I feel this is certain, even if I don’t know why, I feel it’s correct. I could go, never to return; I could come back — but coming back to be god would mean — I see the crevasse stretching open — bringing them something really new. Which was always the aim. So was it an aim worth dying for?
*
The Great Lover lies in a ditch; silty grey light plays to and fro over him, like rays through the ocean. He stirs; he stands up in a silent movie.
Atop the ridge above the ditch, he stands with his hands by his sides, gazing up and around him at the sun, obscured by its own clashing rays. A column of bright birds coils around him spinning into the higher air. He sees the sun’s hard glints through their blurred forms; the birds braid the rays, dart to and fro like kingfishers.
A statue on a streaked stone podium points an index finger of bronze level at the horizon like a cannon. Now the sun is at the horizon, bowing steadily lower. Its steely brilliance fades. The charcoal horizon is plain against it. The sun is a sullen red ball now, like a globe of smoking blood. A figure emerges from it and comes toward him with slow, league-sweeping strides. Silhouetted against the sun, the figure’s elongated outline shivers. Standing on the horizon, it lifts its arms and seems to cup its hands before its face.
The Great Lover Page 30