The Great Lover (10 page)

(He smells like wet concrete. — (heart with smily face in it) GL)

“
but are you toying with me?”

He points to the Prosthetic Libido — “Not me, him!”

*

Oh brothers and sisters, the labor is hard and the hours are long. Hulferde nods off on a chair, his head falling forward he is reading a book called
Drugs and the Ocean
, a passage describing a man hooked on panic: lying sleepless in his bed, nausea, tachycardia, shivers, the bed clothes soaked in cold perspiration... That was a good one, gleaming in memory like precious stones in the sun, and the bitter acidic grey of the steel wing, gagging on the acrid mustard of diesel jet fuel as the plane hurtles wildly down the runway his knuckles white as snow on the armrests...

...A man gives a woman a diamond ring. She pops it into her mouth and bites down, gnashes her teeth on it — blood jets from her gums cheeks as she screeches “I want to feel it cut my mouth!! I want to feel it cut my mouth!!”

—
A woman speaking Spanish nearby, her eyes suddenly flicker like fluorescent tubes and her jaws, tongue and lips accelerate like a rabbit’s, picking up speed until her jaws rip clear of her face and splinter apart, teeth blasting all over creation like bullets. A truck’s back-up beeper starts with a drawling first note: the driver reclines smiling in his seat, the two beeper horns close around his head screaming the note into his vibrating ears — he sighs with pleasure as his eardrums are smashed and blood streams down his neck.

Pigging down fistfulls of cashews from a birdbath, a pair of idiots in grimy tweed suits are playing a
weltspiel
(world-game) on a stone table; each pair of tiles removed from the board is a pair of lovers who will never meet: the goal of the game is to
remove them all
.

An evil image... an Edwardian parlour... noon... light slants in acutely... There is — this is not one of my dreams, is it? It feels like memory, but I have no such memories — there is an upright piano in the middle of the room... a voluptuous, woozy woman in a very sheer dress leans over the back of it while a small boy practices at the keys... from time to time she takes a candy from a dish and pops it gracefully into his red mouth...

I am red mouth light crick in neck being dragged by the collar, I am awake — the sewerman has me by the collar and is pulling me through the door — I stumble and grope for words to complain. I see stars and bare branches. We are going to a stone outbuilding I don’t recognize — I still dream. On a stone table the Prosthetic Libido is lying in a box packed with cashews. Glancing into the arch of the ribcage a balmy summer day, milky haze over the grass, already with thee, tender is the night...

*

While the transplant will take only a single operation, he says it is advisable to record some libidinal material in advance. During live transplant, the libidinal wire recordings will be played back to supplement my own spontaneous libidinal activity, and this will imprint my libido more strongly on the artificial nerves of the prosthetic. He explains to me, again with that annoying look of hidden mockery I am starting to hate, that the playback through the nerves creates a so-called “phantom patterning” which itself acts as a microreceptacle for the sex drive.

I must stimulate my libido in order to make this recording. I have some pornographic films here, but he refuses to permit their use, saying, “You’ll have to buy new ones. The unfamiliar material will be more arousing and, ideally, produce an occasional shock response. The closer you can get to your limit the better the readings will be.”

“
Perhaps — a living woman?”

“
That would not be appropriate.”

“
Why not? The response would be more natural...”

“
It is no less in our nature to love images. I am able to make communication across dream-membranes by means of this principle.”

*

Hulferde watches blue movies while I read the ticker tape, and record the nervous response on a specially-made device. This all takes place in the basement. Hulferde sits in a chair with a jumbo umbrella over it, his privacy protected by a curtain on rings. Beneath his bathrobe he wears a number of sensitive measuring devices like delicate little propellers. I sit behind him. The recorder is the size of a freezer, open on top with a pair of upright needles that occasionally spark across. They write the ganglial information on wire that spools on steel bobbins. The recording “head” is an array of tone arms not unlike the mystifying bundle of feelers around a lobster’s mouth, engraving the entire surface of the wire as it passes.

We run tests using some of Hulferde’s old favorites, in order to calibrate the sensors.

“
These aren’t sensitive enough.”

Hulferde fidgets and snorts in frustration.

“
If you want this to work you will need more sensitive equipment. You buy cheap tin receiver modules at the five and dime don’t expect sound results.”

When everything is ready Hulferde breaks out the new movies — no pretext of a narrative and so brutally unadorned as to be almost abstract, like nature films shot by extraterrestrials. Passion-exasperated cries rattle in the plastic coping of the projector’s one speaker with the volume turned all the way up. I grease the pins and knock bolts of blank wire into place with a mallet, start with flat readings. Hulferde must prolong his excitement steadily, without starts and stops, and, when orgasm is eventually permitted, he must be careful to permit total relaxation afterwards so the whole sequence may be recorded complete.

“
At this point I’m going to have to ask you to start stimulating yourself,” I tell the curtain. “Avoid climax, please.”

A horizon of grey mountains and a wan, sulfur-colored sunset appears behind my back, and a wind with a slightly bitter taste to it brushes over me with its ringlets. The earth rumbles beneath me, as though a train were rushing beneath my feet, but the sound and the vibration seem to go down into the earth toward the City of Sex.

The first hour or so is completely wasted; Hulferde is too inhibited. But eventually after some impatient throat-clearing from me he hits his stride and the recorder starts getting good signal; the wires levitate off the spindle floating on recorded lust bands, and the lead motes swirl up out of the neck of the bulb. The curtain surrounding Hulferde shivers. The machine is whirring and clanking; far from distracting him, the sound of heavy equipment seems to encourage Hulferde. When the high stimulation begins to register I dip my finger in a pot of ink and slash it across the paper tape to mark the time. The recorder demands constant attention; I have to keep spitting on the valves to keep them from sticking. The fumes make my nose run, mucus cool on my upper lip.

Brief flashes — keep jerking to see who’s there in the corner of my eye — ectoplasm is gleaming on the console and dribbles down the curtain. Ectoplasm cool on my upper lip — a voice might be saying “’cause we like it so much” amid many other voices words equivocal sounds rise from the floor or topple in from the walls.

A silhouette rushes toward me flinging up its arms and vanishing... a woman stands beneath a tree in white haze on the bank, he can make out the white dress with green embroidered flowerets
como hielos
or icing I mean, tapioca pearls on her gown and
pelo de humo
, eyes drip lecherous milk onto glazed hands... the ribbon around her neck is crowded with microscopic embers for scales, and it creeps slowly from left to right across her white throat, saying
ma gorge est pleine de chevaux
or at least he smells like he’s been rolling in pungent grass, anyway her face is swinging to and fro like a peephole cover, and her long black bangs tattoo her twitching eyelids and lashes... her mouth is shaped like a diamond on its side and her lips are thin and dark almost like a cat’s (say
I own you
or maybe
I won you
). The lips are open and hide the teeth, the inside of her mouth is dark. Her lips are fairly dripping with saliva as clear as glass, and they don’t keep the same shape from one moment to the next. I can feel and smell her creamy breath... though she breathes it in my face, I feel it hit my lap...

The movie has broken into its high-calorie phase. I really got to ride the oil pressure control, which is a garden hose faucet — lean forward to spit on the hissing valves, little puffs of steam slither out of the open chassis. I can’t stop sniffing. I can feel the worm oozing down from my nose and pressing against the rim of my upper lip. The focus just went out — I fix that, damp the motor a bit more, check the gas pressure, re-key the foot pedal again, wipe condensation from gauges, spit on the valves starting to glow hot, goose the current a bit more.

The room rocks and booms. There are rows of straight glass ribs between the valves, each one ends in a bulb filled with shuddering mercury. As the experiment continues the room fills with a musty smell of hot grease, like the inside of a typewriter. A chorus of voices lacing through the noise, on the screen a hydraulic struggle is playing out in a series of unedifying close-ups, the soundtrack gargles and whines out the speaker. The machine is churning, dark curling red flames sputter around the wires as they pass through the guide-holes to the spools, the magnetic filings shoot to the top of their bulb and hang there vibrating, a desperate commotion ripples across the machine, the tone arms blur together with a sound like a whole string section playing pizzicato and a forest of bare arms are lifted on all sides... the machine thumps the floor and falls still. The end of the film pops off the rear spool slap slap slap slap slap...

*

My name is Vera. I am not a
character
. I won’t explain, but I will tell you where I am now... on the platform, of course... there is cold wind, there is trash on the curb I can smell. It stinks like death.

My father says now is the only time when anything can happen, which is naturally why now writes as it does. I repeat these things to myself feeling I understand them perfectly, but without being able to explain them at all.

Let’s be alert again. Now nothing has changed, the rags still blow around the tree, whose branches rattle with a barren sound, and the earth holding its roots is pounding like a drum. I hear it, and it makes a hot spot of excitement in my chest. The rays of the sun lie flat against the ground and warm my face, and I imagine the earth whirling gaily around the sun, and the earth throbs like a drum... No amount of lies can separate me from this scene — or that remains to be seen. I can’t see their lies, so they don’t affect me so much. My father says I’m lucky — why should I argue? I let it go.

I play with words so they won’t remain exactly but stay alive in their own way, or so I feel them living. The lies I feel all around are different; they’re not playing. I visualize an arch crisscrossed with wires, sky a perfect crescent of blonde gold, blonde air golden — brass fumes and copper smoke. Is the word I want “blonde,” like a blonde word? It must be smooth, smooth and groovy. From this image all the rest proceeds. The arch, arching back to my parents and my ancestors. Wherever they came from, my ancestors all gave me exactly the same things: heart, bone, brains, silly eyes, gristle, muscle, appetite, nerves, hair, teeth, malice, spirit, and love, and breath — no I take it back, the breath is mine, my happiness. They gave me this language and these color words I hear without knowing what they mean. Everyone is confused when I use color words or I speak about brightness and darkness. I think about color incessantly.

On the train one may observe these people whose lives are an endless rustling and rummaging in bags, eternally taking out and putting away, forever management of parcels of surrogate foods carefully wrapped and unwrapped like morsels of precious gold, like Etruscan artifacts. Bags within bags, systems of bags, hours,
whole nights
of bags; the world’s silence fumbled away in the flames of thousands of tireless fingers rustling in bags.

My hand: fat pink yarns threaded with green, so I’m told. Color is as close to me as the vein in my neck. It’s here in my hand, actually in it, not even so far as to be in contact with it. Color is a secret property of me. It’s as weird as if I had a halo or an intangible tail. A spot on my wrist where something poked me. I have nothing to do. My guitar bag strap squeezes my shoulder. I try to picture the scribble described by this bottle here, rolling this way and that on the floor of the car. What if it drew something?

Lifting my head, I rest its crown on the poster behind me and forget the bottle. The tunnel crashes around us. I want to be a murderer stalking at night, I want to feel seared by malice and murderous hate, and I want to disappear into thin air when the sun rises... Or the sun’s light transforms me into a plant, a wind, a cloud — I could rejoin my brother and sister sunbeams, shine on the earth all day stately and calm as a god, and then, as night falls and the light turns blood-red, I revert, am restored to the night’s real pleasures of nakedness and swift stealth.

Wake to the sound of french horns imitating hunting horns, as they do in certain picturesque operas and symphonies. A woman sitting close by, talking on her mobile phone. She is listening; now she grins. Someone is gazing amorously at it, because it’s complex and baroque, glistening with venom — a grin he wants to suck on like hard candy — a jaw-breaker. The same radiant fire that animates the leaves is there, what must be its own unique color in her. But who is he? Why do I shake as I wonder that?

*

We insert the
in vitro
nerves, threading them down the spine and through the limbs, then leave them to develop the finer fibers within the tissues. The brain is fitted with resinous apertures through which we will draw the wires of the recorders. The top of the Prosthetic Libido’s skull can be removed easily during this phase of its assembly. Later, when it is operating independently, the sewerman says the skull will fuse on its own.