The Great Lover (14 page)

“
He’s dazed and uncertain what to do next,” Ptarmagant roars, his eyes starting from his head.

“
He shoots himself again, perhaps by mistake, and falls.”

Another explosion crashes in the room as Ptarmagant fires up into the left shoulder, flying blood streaking his shirt, the white floor.

Ptarmagant manhandles the dummy onto the floor.

“
Now he wants to finish himself, but his right arm is pinned under his body and he cannot move it.” The anger is draining out of his voice. A helpless sorrow is replacing it.

“
He fires at himself from the floor.”

The pistol erupts again tearing the top of the dummy’s head in half, tufts of white stuffing spin in the air and blood spills out onto the floor.

Ptarmagant releases the body and stands, leaving the gun on the floor by the figure’s side. His white clothing and the floor are stained with red.

*

Now he speaks with the desolate serenity of a man who has had to learn to console himself — “It was a cruel thing to do.”

They dismissed him. He left town on foot one morning in the fog. The dream shows me.

Homeless, Ptarmagant walks on the margin of the road, leading by hand — Vera. No one knew her mother; Ptarmagant might as well have emanated her from his own mountainous person. She could have stepped fully formed out from behind an armchair standing in a dim corner in a quiet room, in the empty old house, on a breathless day. She doesn’t yet stand as tall as his shoulder: a grinning mannikin — is it even human? — her eyes rolling incessantly, her lips pulled back in a wet smile that makes her look a little crazy. No one ever told her to keep her eyes closed.

That face — that face... I’m afraid of it — I’m excited by it! I feel like I’m dying — I’m dying, I’m in heaven... I want her — I don’t know how I want I want... to be inside her I want her to be my home. How beautifully terrible she is and no one sees it, no one sees it but me — to everyone else she’s always been just a stupid blind girl when you, you don’t see yourself
you
’
re blind
, she’s you’re

don’t you see you’re in the presence of -------------? I love it I love it my language is breaking so I can barely talk even around what I mean — then push push
break it all
— you’re in the presence of

—
everything —life... life... makes me smile... I feel it on my face it’s her smile I wear. I’m not wearing it. I’m smiling it.

*

“
I am not a character.”

Have you guessed my secret yet? You’re far out ahead of me if you have. It’s there.

*

His reputation destroyed, he sank steadily losing everything a piece at a time and ended up riding the subway day and night, with only his daughter to look after him. Then he began to speak, specifically to prophesy to the cars; he would sit and boom out his prophesies for days at a time without moving eating or drinking, and began to attract a following especially among the others who had come loose, drifted and settled down here in the underground. His words and teachings rumble beneath the streets, along tunnels and across the sunless switching yards, transmitted and rehearsed back and forth making a web of living words in subterranean calligraphy. The cars are classrooms, students healed heads bent lips moving as they read and take notes, and he will at times address them, his disembodied voice ventriloquizes from no direction and hums with hypnotic power, but not sermonizing.

“
You’ve probably always had him — you wouldn’t remember the first moment...” Ptarmagant leans forward slightly, a big gesture coming from him.

“
We need your help, and you need something to do. We’ve already initiated you this far.”

“
Help with what?”

“
With the cult.”

“
Cult of the subway?”

“
Cult of the subway.”

*

The Great Lover first saw Vera Ptarmagant on the subway platform. Her left arm was linked in her father’s right arm, and they were walking together along the downtown side.

They boarded their train, and sat next to each other in a seat facing the rear of the car.

Unnoticed, the Great Lover stood on the uptown side.

Vera had been concealed by her father’s bulk — he towered over her. The Great Lover only had a few moments’, as they were boarding the train, uninterrupted view of Vera’s face, which was also a brilliant light. Vera’s face transfixing lights to drown this moment, this moment, this moment...

As her face floods the world, I transform into a ten year old boy, with his hands pressed against his breast and his elbows raised awkwardly as though he’d been shot and were clutching at the wound, were being propelled backward off his feet, his eyes wide, and his tender red mouth slack, his face frozen in an expression of shock, and a vast enough stupidity admitting unbearably sweet, warm, spirited light.

After this, nominally, there’s all sorts of stuff, moving around, talking, listening, day sky, night sky, indoors, outdoors, being alone and not, but whatever he appears to be doing is untrue, because he hasn’t budged from Vera Ptarmagant’s face, which is both hovering at her father’s side as they board their train, and visible through the windows of the car as they sit together, and emitting a lighthouse beam that washes over him again and again from across the city.

*

At first sight Vera Ptarmagant seems to be making comical faces, but this impression immediately gives way, not without a twinge of shame, to the discovery that she’s blind, of course. She is walking on her father’s arm, with her head tipped up and chin forward, her braid hanging straight down her back, its tufted end knocks against the base of her spine with each step. Now they board the train and sit beside each other; for one of what you will come to recognize as her suite of characteristic gestures, she strokes her spittly chin clean with her middle and ring fingers.

Vera was born blind, but, when she sleeps, she can see in her dreams. As a teenager, when her father was still at Meadowlab, she had been through certain trials, in which a boy was involved, difficult to explain, that had resulted in her extraction from school. After that, she had vomited stones everyone had to assume she’d swallowed flat and smooth like stream pebbles; some of these were inscribed with unintelligible, heterogeneous writing, and it was around then, although not for that reason, that she first began to see things in her dreams.

“
This was how I learned to visualize people; it is like picking a familiar voice out of a crowd — first the sudden touch of attention, then the gathering in, then naming. I think I am more precise about it than sighted people are. I’ve asked people about it, and it seems they have trouble with other things pushing in on them.

“
I have run my fingers over my father’s face, and over the features of old boyfriends, girlfriends, but I find a tactile portrait is usually just an incoherent composite, with the features and textures all in a heap like a drawer full of stockings. The eyes are vibrating brushes with a wildly excitable energy. I have of course inspected my own useless eyes and found the slit there, the rolling ball; I’ve touched the ball itself, as I have no need to fear I’ll hurt them, and felt them shiver with restless, electric power, all dammed up.

“
Darkness was the first thing I saw and recognized. When I tried to see in my dreams my own eyes, I felt fluttering clumps of sinewy wire in my face, and then I saw them, scribbling lights.

“
Eyebrows seem to be very high above the eyes and I never think of them unless someone mentions them. I feel my own, I suppose, embedded in my skin, but they just seem to go with the scalp and the wild ubiquitous material of hair. I have to remember the hair is connected to the head and not just hovering around it like a brambly background.

“
I can see my father’s head nestled in its hair. The nose is a flexible column with two slopes, standing upright on two intermittent legs of air. The skin’s bumpiness appears as a satiny quality; the mouth is a cushion on a shelf, the teeth and tongue float there behind mounds of chin and cheeks with triangular indentations on top of the cheeks, jutting rectangular brow like a fuse box. The speech is also a part of the face — of course I know the mouth moves, but I tend to see only the sound, in a procession of dusky complicated shapes... Each different voice is a kind of whorled canister, pouring out triangular streams of dark-colored sound with the texture like thin clay, sometimes soft, sometimes baked or even glazed.

“
When I have enough time to give, I can visualize people entirely. Sitting beside my father, I can feel heavy ruminative waves undulating from him. I don’t know what colors are, except that they are to seeing what different pitches or timbres are in music. If I could see my father’s waves, they would be the groaning color of a double bass or the boom of the lower notes of a guitar. When he appears to me, I see a jellyfish, or a space station: a no-color gourd floating in the dark, not quite upright, with thick sections, like pineapple rings, at intervals. The flat edges of the rings have regularly-spaced circular openings, from which protrude three or four feelers. Father rotates majestically in place, inside the shell of his sad and angry song.”

She has a dancing face and body, like she could dance away melt into air—

That holy word “her.”

Vera wears her thick hair in a frizzy black braid. She has a long neck, broad shoulders, an elastic body, her hands are long and a little oversized. She is wearing a shapeless, sacklike dress of dark material with tiny flowers sparsely embroidered on it. About thirty, seems younger.

What do I see in her I see spacious innocence perversity, she’s really free, untethered. She’s fairylike, but there’s heat in her, too. There is an earthy ground in there of passion and appetite; it sparks out from her face, her posture, like when she hunched forward and stuck her neck out asking her friend “Is he handsome?” avidly.

Her facial expressions are equivocal and exaggerated; she overextends her mouth to either side when she speaks, exposing her teeth. She has a propensity to grimace, pulling down the corners of her lips hard. She has a low, strange voice and a slight speech impediment that makes her lisp and gurgle a little when she speaks. Her blindness means her face is always improvising, it enchants me like a body of new slang.

And there is something too unreal about her and ghostly, as though she at any moment might melt into air, disappear and become everywhere. There’s a part of her that is always disappearing, in the expression of her simple, beaming face, like endless tissue paper leaves or it would be more rommanick to say petals peeling away one at a time and time by time. She’s fascinating and simple and beautiful, like a lightning flash or the moon. Or a firefly. She seems fairylike because there’s no bullshit in her, everything she does is essential. Am I just falling in love with a picture poem description no I know I’m not because I’m always waiting for her and I never can predict what she will next give me. If she is a picture I’m drawing she’s an automatic picture, every new line is a surprise to me and I can’t believe it but every line delights me every surprise is good—

Her smile is astonishing; when she smiles, something easily missed but her teeth are the color of rain clouds.

*

“
You know what I’m talking about,” he says, his lenses on me.

“
Not me bub,” I say.

“
You know... You’ve seen them.”

“
Seen?”

“
Everyone knows about it, even though no one will speak about it,” he raises his hands slightly, indicating present company.

“
We’ve all met it in our own ways. — Look at them!”

A scarred expression hardens the faces around me, a sullen, fierce and bitter fume from their eyes.

“
Oppression, theft... See it now?... They’re stealing from all of us. I’m not talking in allegories and this is not apolitical — Look for them!” he calls, “You will see them!”

We go our separate ways. Ptarmagant calls me over to walk with him; he lumbers along beside me breathing through his mouth, fumbling in one pocket big as a potato sack he pulls out a dull grey key. Goes up to a train standing closed up on the other platform, slides back the flap, inserts and turns key, one half of the adjacent door slides open. We siphon in and he keys the door shut from the inside. The train is heading back to the yard.

“
no passengers no passengers” the PA says and the cars go dark — almost silently we roll forward.

Now we ride along in the fermented night underground, shapes of light from the windows slide up and over his face, he has only to tilt back his head and the words march from his lips, talking to himself.

“
Not an apocalypse of one, an apocalypse of many: they lie in the dark where the spice of their malice is stored up over time. I sign away one salvation for another, while we must be always hunting for holidays. These days open up different time — their appointed proceedings. Death and counting... as I count the final tally of
my
years.

“
People exist only to grind each other into dust; the slowness with which this is done becomes the glue binding us together. Piles of human dust. Astonishingly, though we are from time to time perhaps cruelly reconstituted by someone, a friend or lover or a story song picture... Which is more forgetful, the dust, or the reconstituted one? The real is discovered when you sink down into the city, where the real sanity is... The real people are the ones with real dreams... The visionary city is the real city: the city is supposed to be an experience, not a running away from things...