The Great Lover (22 page)

Here among the branches and drifting lamps, in a silence punctuated by the barely audible creaking of the boughs and the rasp of leaves falling, settling, delicate corpses are suspended like wasps’ nests, dappled with shadow and soft, shabby patches of decay. They are stored among the branches until all of them have convened, filling the wood with a musty odor, mixed with the smell of the trees the forest has the scent of an ancient spice cabinet. Incense is wafted over the bodies daily; the censer-bearers move patiently along from trunk to trunk, and tender shoots of smoke slither in the grooves of the bark, coil up in bunches under dully lustrous leaves.

“
We must put the bodies in the brine tank.”

The music of these words reverberates from one end of the narrative to the other. Down below you, in the sewers, I struggle in the strong, brown current. Pale helpless bodies shrink deeper into the protection of my arms.

The map (aside): He works doggedly, with a kind of protestant strenuousness. Without pause he turns and goes back to the tunnels, drops instantly into the water and is gone, coat flapping out behind him in the current like a ray’s wing. He emerges again, a body beneath each arm; the water seems reluctant to release him, dropping from his back like a heavy hood. These are the last.

A wind stirs the wood, the bodies nod dreamily, serene faces dip, fingered by branch shadows. The wind animates hands and feet, and the bodies gesture with a voiceless grace, celestial, fairy tranquility. They are like shafts of sunlight dropping down through the forest canopy, light or dark their skin sheds a mist of light, as though these woods had been invaded by an army of gigantic glow worms, inexplicably locked in sleep.

By sympathy with them, a body has risen to the surface of the earth — a young boy’s head and shoulders, and the tips of his fingers before his breast poke out of the soil, his long blonde hair hangs straight from his head’s high crown and falls like a curtain across his brow, the tips pressed into his face. His features are slightly flattened, the creases seamed with dirt, and his skin is mottled, like a thickly-clouded sky. This naked boy is carried with great care to the brine tank; the workers gather to see him, and a few ginger hands timidly caress his cheek, lightly pat his head.

Now all the bodies are in the brine tank, and have already started their slow orbits along its walls. When this boy’s body is introduced, however, the others gather at the spot like carp around a morsel of bread. The boy tumbles languidly in among them, the bodies jostle and the boy is touched here and there by a hand, a breast, a foot, a shoulder. Presently, the bodies drift back to their rounds, until they are once again evenly distributed in a ring, languidly circling the empty center of the tank.

*

They’ve found the forest. I am waiting for my train, at the far end of the platform where I can drop the plumb-line of my listening into the tunnels to hear for him. I believe I would know the sound of his shoe on the gravel. There are other things I have to think about but even while I turn away to stand, or hide, by a post, I feel myself still there by the tunnel mouth, turned toward him like a statue.

Suddenly the world is becoming enormous, rushes out to all sides. I feel nostalgia for something new; I’m remembering right now as it happens for the first time the only time. I have a sort of puppet of him in my mind that I can’t stop playing with. I do something else, but my mind’s hands are still playing with that doll. Bow, jump, kiss my hand. But I always remember he is not there. Some part of him is, though, because I feel it, or I act it out with my body in my mind. Just like an imagined sound, I imagine the sensation of moving like him, as he must move — explode leap flail bound tumble forge blunder pop up. A small ghost version of me is doing all these things on a stage inside; I can feel an outflung hand or foot pass through me from time to time, a little cold streak there where it broke my surface and left ripples. The thought of him keeps starting over, exciting me. I’m wildly excited! I have a static heat in my forearms that almost makes my hands shake, and even more intensely I feel it in my chest in a ball sticking out from my backbone. At random it spreads out to either side along the backs of my lungs, and strokes the backs of my lungs like the walls of a circus tent with a gentle pressure shortening my breath. It’s something else, I don’t know whether or not I’m suffering but I’m full to the brim with something lighter than water that bulges out of the brim and trembles. Hisses.

He’s crazy and he stinks. Where is he? Why isn’t he here?

*

I kneel by the edge of the tank, whose walls protrude a little more than a foot above the level of the soil, and take hold of the dull brass edge. I shake, my vision goes dark — stumbling away.

I stop. Turning, I look at the tank without seeing it. I make myself return, plant my knees back in the grooves they made. With a moment of lightheadedness, I feel all my vitality running out of me like streams crashing down a rock face. I reach down into myself and close my hand on the throat of my life, throttling it. I feel it blocked. It struggles, pushing against my hand, but I am putting all my fading strength into my hand. Cold comes in, and my vision goes dark again.

How long has it been...

He tilts forward, his eyes dull. He jerks back numbly. A moment later, he tilts again. Tilts a little more, more — then drops face-first into the water, and dies.

I am watching him carefully. Spargens holds the stopwatch and reads out the minutes neutrally.

His body describes a gradual somersault in the water. He floats round face down again, and drifts into the empty center of the tank, just below the surface. Now he mingles with the other bodies. He is brushed by the backs of hands, by stockinged feet, his face slides through locks of hair, brown tresses interlaced with pale ribbons. The hems of dresses, neckties, arms, breasts, heads, and legs, trail nervelessly over him.

Now he can no longer be distinguished from the mass of slack hands, dark forms, moving sluggishly counterclockwise — and vast, dark forms turn round in flags of white cloud, dark cloud, rags of sky, blue black and white, circle around like frost planets in a cold wind above them, unseen. Hands swim past and arms are raised and sink in unreal gestures. A woman in a print dress: her face tips up to the light lips apart, turns in a grand slow swoop of straight, sandy hair, and vanishes in the shadow of a vast black coat.

*

I can’t stop these dopey fantasies they’re too much fun, I can’t resist playing him up like a hero.
Coming
to the rescue, arrayed in hope and power oh boy — he’s crazy and fearless and powerful, and strong and light and silly — smelly I mean — like a fierce skunk or a wombat or something — I’m smiling — but he’s charging in out of nowhere, blast our enemies crashing into them like a bowling ball hitting the pins like go man go mow ‘em down! Punch them to pieces and explode them like a hurricane, piss-peddling assholes! With their fucking
armbands
my God! I change into him and sail out into the mass of them like an eggbeater churning up the batter, getting lighter and sillier I whip their bone heads laughing fantastically until they’re scurrying everywhere in total dismay, lashing out thoughtlessly in all directions and hitting everybody but me can’t catch me! Hee hee hee! Can’t catch me! Whose voice?

Come catch me!

*

When Spargens reads “ten” I extend my boat hook and snag him, by the back of his coat. The momentum of his body pulls my arms straight, and I stumble along the edge of the tank tugging repeatedly at the handle, steering him to the surface and toward the edge. Spargens and a few others grab fistfuls of material, an arm or a leg, and clumsily drag the body out. I untangle the hook and kneel beside him, chafing the hands and slapping the face, which is frigid and stiff as bog leather. I draw down his chin, exposing the pale teeth and criss-crossing black laces between his lips, take up a pinch of black soil and rub it around his mouth and eyes, and under his nose. A strangling sound, like marbles rattling in the maze of his bronchial tubes. Ejaculations clotted with gelatinous water belch from his chest, and as his eyes roll a streak of light is stitched a moment into the darkness overhead, below the ceiling.

Shooting star over the park, where the wind kneads the black crinoline of the trees. This young woman with straight sandy hair, large green eyes, a straight severe nose and tapering chin is Audrey. She’s got on a white dress with straps and a string of pearls that get caught in the stark hollow of her throat. In a white dress that makes her pale skin seem darker than it is, and in white canvas tennis shoes. She walks up the slope swinging her arms fluttering her small hands. Meteor shoots above wind-tousseled trees gnaw the air, above them on the hill appear the dark angles of the weather station. It looks like an otherworldly ship anchored on foliage waves, it takes part in the serene immobility of the starry sky and the frothy craziness of the rustling trees, hanging above the porous ground that sways beneath her feet and seems to want to subside. Reach up and smear the stars around they are wet and sticky like daubs of liquid candy and they trail long tacky filaments. Stars gleam through the foliage making tiny points of illuminated green, stars hovering just above the horizon, stars beneath the level of her head... she drops her eyes to the stars.

It’s a delicious feeling to leave the party, and imagine yourself missed, the mystery you’ve created simply by leaving for a minute, the sense of freedom and irony. Now she has found a fairy ring of cold-boiling trees, the sliding spiced leer of wind hiss in the grass, all elements of a spell that gazes down at her from pointed gables. Audrey looks up again and sees the tenebrous foundations massive forbidden and abandoned — that’s just what she wants. The windows are grey screens... now she spots a wan, phosphorescent thing at a high window and draws her breath sharply bolted to the ground. Stock still, a glowing figure is looking down at her. Its glow is reflected in the thick varnish on the sill. She clutches herself, feeling a detestable weakness in her knees run down into her calves. The face has huge dark eyes.

Wind rises, leaves pluck at the air. It’s a statue it’s not a statue — it is gazing yearningly at her. Without thinking, Audrey runs and hides behind the nearest tree. She looks out — the window is edge-on, but the wan glow is still there, like a stationary mist just emerging from the pane.

A voice calls her name, coming from below. Should she show them — no, it might still be there... They might want to I don’t know “investigate.” She edges out from her hiding place, breathing through her mouth.

The figure is still at the window. She can feel its gaze, imploring her with a weak magnetic adhesiveness. The voice calls again. It repeats her name with evil persistence, and she knows they will climb all the way up after her now. She goes back to the tree she hid behind and makes her way down from there, where she can’t feel the watching. Once she glances up and, through the leaves it is still there at the window — she has come round into view again on her way down. A remote, glowing shape. Now, does it waver? Or are the leaves interfering? The voice calls nearby and she sings out with weird gaiety. She won’t say anything to anyone — she’ll never breathe a word of it to anyone.

In the room under the eaves, a crown of stars ascends to the rafters. The lights gutter out against dry wood and webs.

CHAPTER SIX

The map, and the eight coffins it represents, explains: May is a good month for visions, particularly at dawn and dusk. This May has been gloomy, the trees ripen and their branches bend with fresh leaves so green they’re almost black beneath grey skies of distributed sun. Now behind the grey the big star drops behind the horizon leaving a glistening blue snail track of light.

I have to cover a distance of a few blocks to get from this station to the park. In odor — order, sorry — to avoid being seen I have developed a truly inspired methodologically diachronic system of hand gestures to screen myself from light contamination; for example, I might thrust my thumb down behind my curling fingers, or squeeze the tip of it between my knuckles (the classic “fig” gesture, voids the effects of the evil eye), with the idea that this gesture, acting as a will-triggering instance, will help to focus my mind and thus screen me from headlights, street lamps, and any other variety of directed, probing light. The armbanders especially favor — they all have cars — favor the most intense headlights they can find as a counterfeit for power.

Under these evil lights there is sleep without repose, without rest, unquiet, broken, harassed. The opposite of holy ground — waste ground: despair’s grey, littered ground against the green. Puddles sliding in the wind, color of weak milky tea: the wind has whipped it into a fine yellow froth at the edges. The soil in the park is fudgy tar paste. Two hawks come up in slow procession, nearly motionless in the sluicing wind. They proceed in jerks and flows and adjustments, seesaw describing invisible U U U in the air. They are like two disembodied eyes, and make their way stately and unhurried off to the west toward the water. The rainwater soaking my clothes is insulating me, the dirt suspended in this water, too — I slept and my long furry sleeves down over my fingers trailed in puddles. There’s grit on my cheek, and crunching inside my shoes.

The soil is a huge chemical battery. People misuse these telluric forces. They’re not so integral as they seem; being mostly water they reflect their surroundings — stand out in a field long enough and your mind will go blank — long enough and the person you were might vanish altogether and someone else will come out of the field. A lighter, leaner, alien, in a mature dream body—