The Great Lover

by Cisco, Michael; Hughes, Rhys

  That’s the demiurge world, isn’t it? Once it’s all decided, the story is already over. It ends before it ends.

  “Vera get me down,” I say sawing dust in mummy throat.

  “Wind them back up again.”

  “Start time over?”

  “Start all over.”

  “Start again!” I feel the nonstep, the splash, sewer water bubbling in my throat. “Nonstop!”

  “With whose time?” I ask.

  “The time it takes you to figure out this,” she’s waving an envelope by the bench, my name — my proper name — calligraphed on it in red satin. “This time is your time, this time is my time,” I get a blast of smell, dry musty pine needles baking in the sun, so weird to smell it in this dank place. Clotted branches droop in a torrent of sun funereal and reticent holding something back — they hold back time and bank it up for me to draw.

  “It’s beautiful you’re beautiful—”

  “Go get ‘em tiger,” she titters as she disappears.

  “OK coach,” I say to the steel rail by my cheek.

  Jump up. Feel it flash — that’s time running back into me. All the time I want, sopping handfuls of nerves saturated with it, draw me to the ceiling and out of sight.

  At once the Prosthetic Death is back on him rushing up to where he fell, but she does not find him. She rises and looks around her, looks up, sees nothing.

  “I can’t hide,” she murmurs. “I can’t fight.”

  Repeating these words softly she searches for him... about a dozen steps into the station lights she stops and abruptly claps her hands to her head. She begins to reel and spin. She’s found him, hiding inside her head.

  She turns to blue sky, ocean to the horizon and a giant’s sun howling with light, green cliffs like living emerald roll away to distant hills and copses and he flits around her just out of the corner of her eye no matter how swiftly she turns in place, he is cackling at her deafeningly loud. She opens her mouth to speak and his mockery seems to bat the voice out of her throat — she is mute. She feels herself speak, but hears nothing.

  His form, pelting away up the slope of a green hill. She follows. As she comes up to the top the deep sun is rising on the other side, towering over her and she at once stops like a statue. Lowering her eyes she sees, far below, that the deep sun has a pair of legs — he is carrying it up the hill, not actually resting on his back but on a cushion of cold air trapped in a wicker cage of sprouting nerves. The deep sun forges the daylight into a blinding scimitar that sweeps the ground before it coming her way, and the grass touched by it smokes steams and blackens then suddenly bursts out more dazzling green from black flakes.

  The Prosthetic Death is flying away from this arc...

  Multiply is watching incredulously as the Death God flits to and fro across the tracks inexplicably pantomiming. He turns to go, happens to look up — there’s the Ding-a-Ling up on the ceiling of the tunnel, wrapped in nervous webs, sound asleep.

  The Prosthetic Death raises her hand and the end of his curtain rod crashes into her face driving her back onto the rocks. He is on top of her in a flurry of wild blows his face a mask of mindless glee — she lurches and careens, always without expression. She is desperately trying to escape him in endless miles of flying green; running, a naked, sexless mannikin with the impassive face of a dead woman.

  Barren white, all the walls, the floor, and stubbled with wan blue light, white radiation of the windows, dully painful like a smoldering headache; stale smell of taken-up carpets. There is something in the room, like a long, low, sobbing note, mechanically repeated at a fixed interval. A bleak, hollow, hopeless sound that bypasses the ears and is inaudibly heard in the brain; the sound of white, the sound of annihilating veils, around you drooping, closing, soft numbing anemone petals, tender deadly pistils of living frost.

  No no, she is still running, trying to get away, she can’t get control of the dream. Peach-colored flames swirl across the surface of puddles in the rocks and lunge into the air growing taller and taller as he rises standing into the sky a giant with his head just below the sun, his face fluorescent and smiling, the irises of his eyes have gone white and the whites glisten like the flashes of sunlight on thick agitated water, his lips are pale on the outside and crimson on the inside as though he’d been sucking rich fruit and his pale lips are streaked with feathery strokes of red. An elegant black heart-shaped beauty mark has appeared on his right cheek just above the jaw. He raises his arms to the churning sky, and the flames whisper out across his sodden coat.

  The air is hemorrhaging light; an ominous stillness falls in response to the upraising of the Great Lover’s arms — he stands there like a huge telephone tower. The clear air is blackening, clouds boil into existence above him and let down feelers dark as smoke over him. A colossal screw of air coils down with implacable power, the full moon in its blue center. The air turns dark bottle green and brown, the tip of the funnel congeals around him his arms are lifted like a child’s — pick me up!

  It writhes toward her with terrifying speed, a lead column constricted with the muscular sinuousness of a snake — lightning wound and lashed into it like a whip — its fantastic speed weirdly contrasting with the dreamy inconsistency of its outlines, thorough, capricious, remote.

  She is pinwheeled up into it —

  —suddenly ejected into blue, and the sun flashing by as she spins above the clouds. Below, the top of the tornado vomits topsoil like an erupting volcano.

  The Great Lover piledrives the Prosthetic Death from above —

  —so much earth has been flung aloft by the tornado — it coagulates into an undulating floating mass, like a suspended ocean of loose dirt crossed by heavy billows. The Great Lover and the Prosthetic Death are moiling their feet and legs in this earth for leverage, kicking up spirals of soil that dance weightless about them. She is trying to evade him, clear her mouth to speak. The sun is attacking her — clouds made of swords and wings locked in deadly combat go convulsing by and the glints from the dull nickelly blades of those nicked swords are like thrusts she must avoid. Now he is on her again bringing the curtain rod down on her head again and again so that she reels to and fro — in the tunnel she crashes from one post to another as the Great Lover flails at the ceiling dripping slaver—

  In the dream... the airborne ocean of dirt is succumbing to gravity, falling in a mass back through the clouds—

  Suddenly with a shrill cry of anger and exasperation the Prosthetic Death lashes out with a blow that sends him flying he regains his feet and stares for a moment incredulous at the raw ends of his curtain rod broken in half and now the Prosthetic Death is slashing and pounding hammering at him with hydraulic arms a noise like an axe in hard wood — but the Great Lover catches sight of her face not impassive not impassive any more — her mouth drawn open her eyes round and wide her brows knotted in rage in rage — and rage is mine! Rage belongs to me! and he rears up in hysterics his face bright as lightning eyes wild on her glare provoked and furious she’s forgotten herself, she’s enraged she wants to hurt him and blows now spin like a flurry of hail. Through the soil there shows the sullen blue-green of the ocean hurtling up to them like a hammer and now they strike the surface, hard as concrete sending a plume of white foam high into the sky.

  Limp and smashed, they sink apart below the froth in scaffolds of colossal sun beams.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The setting is underground streets lined with brick buildings all in disrepair and slouching, men in hats, celluloid collars, women in hats, long waists. Animals everywhere and the heavy smell of animals, horses pulling carts, cows gaze dreamily from the windows, pigs wallow in the road, dogs bark at the pigs, monkeys chirp at the dogs and apes waddle down the steps to the street, and everywhere in those passages of tamped earth that join these streets together foxes slither along their burrows that open in the soil or slink unhurried to and fro across the way. Inspect stalls of animals drawing cartoons.

  Here co
mes her hand, slip from the sleeve and take the key. Winding it back up again. Wind, rain, lava, and a huge ram of black ooze surging up from the bottom of the ocean. Inky sea bottom slime overruns the map and redraws its lines in a frame of eight incompletely inscribed golden headstones.

  Welcome!

  Here comes our hero. You remember the hero, everybody always does. He’s walking along. Miles underground. No time for your questions! The story is beginning...

  I come to a break in the tunnel wall, which looms high above me. Now I know this tunnel is old, and flooded with black water. A slick of stinking grease from the bottom of the ocean shrinks there on the surface, with a man-shaped hole cut of out of it. Did I come out of that?

  A harsh taste in my mouth. I have something wedged under my tongue. I draw out a gold coin; my head on one side, what looks like a sea urchin on the other. I look at my head again — is it my head? At most it resembles me. The engraving on the flip side is not a sea urchin, either, but a flower, very plainly. The next time I look, it is a star. Then an open hand. Without thinking I put this magic coin back in my mouth.

  On the other side of the torn wall, there is a narrow ledge of sloppy concrete, broken ends thrust out just above the water showing grey surfaces like cottage cheese. A little brass lamp, just a sheet of brass with holes cut in it, curled into a cylinder, shines from an iron curlicue a couple of feet above the concrete surface. A lonely confidential light there, and by its glow he sees a long solemn boat drawing up. It’s a black gondola with jade trim, poled by a stubble-headed old man with a pastrami-colored face. I catch his eye. He rows over, flips his paw open, and I spit the coin into it.

  The water is calm. We pass fragments of tiled wall bristling with rusted iron wands. A warm fog trickles around, growing steadily denser, hotter, more mineral-smelling, like hot brass, and in a moment more I glimpse through it a stark scarlet seam up ahead, under the water. A soft black rod slithers out from a red joint in the rock, smoking underwater and making the surface steam; it veers to and fro like a thick, muscular snake just below the clear, hissing water. The boat lands with a thump against a marble ledge, adjacent to the dreamily erupting rocks, and I hop out. Here there is a diamonded floor and a tiled wall pierced in the center by a door the shape of a peacock-backed cane chair. Above the door is an inscription that reads: VERA.

  The arch leads into a quiet, somber place of large red-ochre alcoves and pillars thick as barrels. There is a ringing silence here in the gloom, as though an inaudible gong were humming. The ground is tramped earth, covered with many faded, spidery-patterned rugs, and these breathe a smokey, heavy fabric smell. There are gods in the alcoves, forms with trunks, fanged beaks, riveted heads, wings, all carved of the same purple-cocoa colored stone. Each one is interlaced with a consort; a profusion of grotesque, intent and meditating faces gazing into each other. I look at one after another, feeling the searching calm of the place wind into me. Unlike the gods, the consorts are all formally-rendered perfect people, with no anatomical peculiarities. Then he comes to the last alcove, and this last figure is alone. The enormous sulking erection stands as though it were making an accusation, angrily dejected, stubborn, penetrating only the stilled air. The idol’s face is crumpled and downcast below its horns; the cheeks are drawn up like two eggs flanking the short nose, and form grooves to either side of the hollow eyes. Thick, ropy tears resembling the gold braid of epaulets fill the grooves and ooze down the face in fixed stone beads. I think of blood channels in altars, tear channels in altar eyes. But the arms of the god are hovering outstreched in the air, curved in — perhaps he embraces an invisible consort, and this not-seeing is what torments him.

  Something moves by the idol’s base — is it a mouse? No, it’s a wisp of smoke fading and uncurling there. A cord of smoke stretches along the ground, to a distant aperture from which it seems to come. Orange triangle in the dark, and a few boys in swim trunks are quietly pulling up the corners of the rugs, collecting what look like discarded ticket stubs. Their shadows crash through the orange triangle as they move back and forth before it. As I draw near they vanish into the shadows with muffled splashes. In the glowing triangle, I find a stereotypical gypsy tent, all purple velvet and moroccan cushions. Through a flap window there are dark trees and browsing giraffes undulating their necks from bough to bough in a landscape that rolls away and down from the flap. There is another aperture on the far side of the tent from the entrance — that’s where I am going.

  No one can pass through that way without first being hypnotized. Like so many other protocols of this kind of place I know that without having to be told. Perched on a stool before the cloth gate is a fake gypsy with a rather breathtaking embonpoint, and huge opal lying in its hollow, flat against the warm copper skin. Is she made up all over... and if she is, who gets to do the rubbing? Her hair is capped with a vermillion and gold scarf, her hair falls in blue-black ringlets down her back, giant hoop earrings the whole bit. She indicates I should sit before her, drawing an extra stool from somewhere behind her and fixing me with fog-colored eyes.

  I sit, and she pulls an opticians’ armature down out of the hanging veils on a steel boom arm and firmly thrusts it cold onto the bridge of my nose, clicking through lenses without consulting me. I occupy myself staring fixedly at her sparkling opal, which shimmers and dances back and forth as the lenses flip, and wonder if her movements in adjusting the armature aren’t really intended to make it turn this way and that, firing out its beams of different colors. She spritzes me with perfume — I feel the chill droplets weightlessly settling across my face and hands. Then suddenly she is drilling her gaze into my eyes through the lenses, saying things I can’t quite hear, and there is a snap like a knuckle cracking in the center of my head. I feel light, and momentarily overwhelmed as if there had been a blast of confused sound out of complete silence. She pulls the armature away from my face and smiles happily at me.

  “Are you afraid?” she asks this with eyes blazing and wide, smiling as though she really were saying “isn’t this exciting?” She seems otherworldly; in a blink see her slipping herself into that solitary idol’s embrace. In a second blink, I see her with her legs wrapped around my hips — in this flash, I am forbidden to go about the city unescorted: this fake gypsy must be locked to my body at all times. She’s my license. We must remain excited but climaxing would ruin the arrangement. Her copious skirts, fortunately, will preserve our modesty — not everyone who passes me is so lucky — and of course suspenders for are de rigeur for me. Walking in the streets I have to swing my head to one side of hers and then lift my chin up and over to the other side just to see where I’m going, trying to puff her unruly hair out of my way with blasts of breath. From time to time I have to stop, lean against a wall or lamp post breathing laboriously, face drawn trying to stay calm, face exasperated by the tickling of her hair. Constantly getting lost — how can I concentrate? The inevitable collisions with other pedestrians put us both severely to the test — I have to breathe and concentrate and push out and I can hear her chanting snatches of time-tables and recipes. Arms legs and back aching like mad, sodden fabric clinging to my thighs and abdomen. Sticky, chafed, overheated. She wants me to stop because she’s just caught sight of a fetching scarf in a window display like hell I’m stopping I ain’t a trolley, lady...

  She is, after all, only standing in front of me, still smiling, holding the tent open for me. She smiles as though she’d had my thoughts, like I’d made her an innocuous compliment. She waves me through, and her bangles ding together for the first time. I blunder past her, and she brushes me with her body as I go by.

  Bray of a tinny car horn right at my back as I trip out weirdly across a dusty white street in blazing equatorial sunlight, a figure there too obscure in the dazzle for me to make out waving me on and indicating a low triangular door in the wall. The figure is dark and shaggy and hops up and down in place, it has long hair and a glowing metallic face, broad across the cheeks, low-browed, and taper
ing to a pointed chin, and its dry paw pushes at my back as I go through the triangular aperture into an oily blue-black shadow.

  From somewhere behind me a high-pitched whinny of song, I cross the dark floor with candled tables, making for a wonderland door of black wood in the far wall by the pay phone. Around me people lie on divans in various states of undress undergoing spirit cupping; ether-blue spirits respirate tumbling fire bobbins in glass flues pressed to the back, the abdomen, tops of heads. Haystacks of doors and tent flaps to get through everywhere stubbing my shoes or tangling round my legs, a tedious succession of doorknobs to turn and latches to lift, moving from car to car with a gush of stale tunnel air, picking up doors and flipping them over me and they pile up around my legs to my waist like a stack of hula hoops.

  The floor beneath my feet is made of boards painted dingy black, and spattered with flecks of all colors of paint. An expectant backstage/museum smell comes around him, like cosmetic carnauba wax and linseed oil, paint, printing, massive curtains, sawdust, glue, varnish. Black backdrops hang from dark heights all around. The warm yellow blob emanating from the ghost light embubbles me; I turn around in place until I catch sight of an angle of brick wall, painted a glossier black, looming out from between the hangings like a ship’s prow. I examine the wall, presently find a metal box painted over, with metal tubes for the wiring snaking out from it as though it were an angular heart. I rub just about in its middle with my index finger. Faint rasping sound on the paint, turning brown and crumbling away in tiny beads and curls. I’ve either exposed or created a slot there; I fish a coin from my mouth and drop it in the slot. The sound it makes, if it made that sound, comes from somewhere far away behind my left shoulder, and muffled by who knows how many of these dense black backdrops. The ringing of a coiled chime in a mantle clock.