The Great Lover (24 page)

“
It calls to many... it has already called you.” Ptarmagant reaches out and touches my cheek, caked in dried sewage like fossil impressions of ferns. In a hermetically sealed station, cobwebs flutter in a breeze from where?

“
The subway is a maze of the names one must know and speak, like the passages in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The shapeless knot of its interlacing tunnels... it’s not a hieroglyph, it’s an instrument on which a skilled practitioner can play an infinite variety of improvisations. A puzzle has only one answer... it is only its answer’s elliptical name... but the hieroglyph of the tunnel map has many equally valid solutions. Why did I need to show you that portion of the
Phaedrus
?

“
...The sun’s locust light is always light and so provides for our physical needs, but what is in shadow is invisible to the sun. But what our spirits need is light out of darkness, the unknown name of the law.”

Ptarmagant pointing implacably to that dark place adamantly demanding that the light break there: “The light that shines so that you — you, the frightened, the confused — you, the cowering and the weak, suddenly become — you, the certain, the true, the adamant, the strong, the implacable, the calm. And now the monsters are cowering, recoiling, retreating, their faces blanched with terror, their eyes smarting with shame in the glare of that terrible, serene light.

“
I am a voice, not words, I am the voice—” Ptarmagant struggles to rise, “when Autumn inundates the land with holy death and time... regeneration... There is power in my body, there is power in my mind.” He faints.

*

This is John Brade the informer, sitting alone at the back of the car in the forward-facing seat by the door. He looks at his reflection in the black water of the tunnel, without really seeing himself. A lean, lightly-built young man with slender shoulders and fine metallic blonde hair cut short. He has calflike eyes getting a little puffy beneath, and a prim, unhappy mouth. Youth mixes with exhaustion in his face, his body seeps disappointments and sadness. Invisibly marked out for misfortune, bad luck has dogged him all his life. Last year, he agreed to let a friend store a box full of stuff in his apartment — six weeks later the police came, opened the box, and found a bag of heroin in it. Brade spent a week in jail and ratted out his friend, who shot himself when the police went to get him. He lost his job after his arrest, and so on. Eventually he hit bottom in the subway, and Ptarmagant’s people recruited him.

But the police remember him, they have something on him, and lately he thinks they’ve been looking for him... They liked his first song so much they want to hear him sing again. Well John your luck is about to turn even worse.

The lights dim and wink on again, and a shocking face is there beside his in the window, a hand closes gently but firmly on his right bicep, and another rests with deliberate lightness on his left shoulder.

“
Hello, John,” says the unctuous voice in his ear. Brade’s head swivels and he locks eyes at once with me.

“
Now pay close attention to what I am about to tell you, John. Concentrate...
concentrate
...”

*

“
Right in there,” I tell him. “Just your own private sex candy machine every man’s dreeem.”

Brade turns his eyes slowly to me.

I thump him lightly on the back.

“
Go get ‘im tiger.”

I shut the door behind him jam a huge cartoon key in the lock and rattle it round and round a few dozen times.

...In a trance, Brade takes the dim room in. It gathers around him like folding felt. The windows are smoking white, like panels of new snow, and a beautiful nude white figure stands in their light, turned nearly sideways to him.

Brade floats across to the statue. Outside the window there are black branches and other dark shapes quilted into the glare. The statue is of a lovely young man with an erection. The body is fashioned from a marble so fine it seems like living tissue, with veins deep in its translucence. The light throws the texture into faint relief, and Brade runs his hand along the upper arm.

It’s soft — it yields — the statue shudders, sighs. It orgasms and turns its frighteningly beautiful face toward him, it looks dreamily at him — Brade feels himself turn to mist — the gemlike mouth is like a fountain — their bodies lace together.

I listen at the door. All’s well.

*

Deuteronôme has a pronounced interest in any means of automating worship. I help him set up a sound booth by the lake. When he joined Ptarmagant, cultists were compelled to flash signals from station to station by cupping their hands over the signal lights and flicking them in code. His nephew, Multiply, brought in his skater friends to help run messages, and they still perform this service, hitching on to the backs of the trains and riding on one rail. But Deuteronôme’s underground radio is working, tunnel air whirrs and cultists call to each other in detuned shortwave voices. Transmission of information is only one function of the radio system — it also keeps the cult’s word in physical circulation at all times.

(Yeah I can pick ‘em. He emerged from the love nest three hours later, looking frail, as though he were projected on a cloud. As I shut the door behind him he glances sidelong at me uncertain and shying my God just like a calf.)

Spargens, who has taken up residence in the shack by the lake, had the idea to burn prayers onto adhesive plastic seals, and then paste them onto the wheels of the subway cars. Dark, limber arms reach out from beneath the platforms toward the wheels as the car stops to take on passengers. So they become prayer wheels churning out an invocation with each revolution.

(“Now John let’s keep a lid on this good thing huh?” I lock my pinky finger round his. “Promise?” His head droops a little, finally he manages to nod once. I squeeze his shoulder. “Go on home,” I say into his eyes. “Take a shower. You live with anyone?” — “No,” he whispers hollowly. “That’s fine. Take a shower, dress, sit down somewhere comfortably, and count to three. When you count three, you will awaken refreshed my fine friend.”)

Everywhere in the system now there is a strange, galvanic charge that tickles the heart as you board the train or pass through the turnstile, like it’s the last day of school. Commuters note with alarm figures leaping about a small bonfire on the far side of an underground switching yard, the smoke comes boiling along the low ceilings toward them like an angry black upside-down flood.

(I remove my hand from his shoulder and my eyes peer from his eyes and he staggers away. “Oh and John, around noon tomorrow, all right? Are you busy?” Tomorrow’s Sunday, he shouldn’t be.)

A man clutches his chest and slumps against the wall — we scoot up observing him closely. Schwips explains to me — “We use these pains as a divination tool.” The man is one of ours, wearing a black tshirt with I Ching hexes on the left breast. He points to the source of the pain and his finger hits a hex which is then decoded.

“
He’s what you call a ‘prophetopath.’ He gets a series of injuries that spell out the message.”

“
That’s something weird,” someone says.

“
Happens to everybody,” Schwips says matter-of-factly. “He’s just got an acute case. Like once I was going to go confront a man I discovered was — carrying on with my wife. I planned it out, went to bed. The next morning I woke up with a sprained ankle, just like that.”

He snaps his fingers.

“
You must have kicked the wall,” Multiply says.

“
And sprained my ankle without waking up? I don’t—”

“
You slept on it wrong—” someone else says.

“
I’m telling you, no. It simply happened, and so I didn’t go.”

“
And what happened?”

“
Well, nothing conclusive,” Schwips sighs. “It’s not as though the building burned down around him — but I’ve never doubted it was better I didn’t go... Envision a world in which events are shaped by nothing more than judiciously planned accidents and injuries and illnesses, as agents acting on foresight intervene to prevent certain future events by incapacitating those responsible...”

(He’s gone — I look in on Pearl. He’s lying there in the tousled bed, looking like a corpse his smile a corpse’s smile.)

Sacrifices? The Great Lover is informed that most available livestock are not satisfactory for the purposes of sacrifice. They have been so long domesticated that their souls are no longer of good quality. Vermin may only be sacrificed by the diabolic divisions, who favor rat sacrifices, and break the spines of pigeons slowly and thoroughly.

In all manner of closed spaces you see the dormant shrines, the switching boxes transformed by steady, undetectable steps into idols. Their jewelled eyes are somber under corrugated iron lids, their look drops heavily on drooping fronds of thick incense oozing from a brazier made of thick bronze, sinking to the streaked and cracked paving. Dainty little girls with ribbons in their hair carry baskets of gaily-painted easter skulls, sealed with clear varnish, to be hidden in the shade in the bowers of the underground forest, where calm graceful cadavers dance with their knives and hang from the clean boughs of trees. From these skulls will hatch helper spirits known as “sweet minds.”

Things are getting good and strange these days. I take the tunnel beneath the river, honeycombed with new brick cells containing a votary pouring out his daily invocations. Prayer wheels and flags rattle in the cloying under-river air. I inspect a new tunnel under construction. Schwips used to be a civil engineer; a persistent foe of automobile traffic, he was fired for sabotaging a plan to expand certain streets. He supervises work on the new tunnel, which is itself a huge prayer, summoning and creating the new divinity. Cultists pick and hammer feverishly at solid rock; their bodies steaming and slick with perspiration they work fall back and drop to the floor exhausted like John Henry.

Standing water between the tracks suddenly erupts in rolling, boiling spurts; steam rises past the platform edge weirdly coiling itself into a cylindrical funnel above a churning slough of cooking offal and screaming parboiled rats. Cultists in the vicinity drop to their knees and bow their heads — not exactly in veneration; they are pressing down on the ground with their hands as though working a bellows. They are helping, coaxing, straining to bring something into existence — this is labor, not submission.

*

A small group of red-band students is rallying on the opposite side of the lake.

“
What happened to Z?” Spargens asks.

Ptarmagant is livid. His skeleton almost burns, like a filament, inside his voluminous, soft body.

“
A group of them caught him in the park last night,” he says his voice trembling, his eyes turned toward the other side of the lake. They are chanting over there and waving signs, accosting bypassers.

“
I’ve done what I can for him,” I tell Spargens.

“
Will he live?”

“
I don’t know,” I sigh.

Ptarmagant turns his eyes to our Holy Cartoon, who is standing off to one side. I didn’t see him come. The whites of Ptarmagant’s eyes shine through his sunglasses.

“
Call the demon.”

The Great Lover looks at Ptarmagant a little askance, quizzing him, then turns aside his back to us. He bends forward and lowers his head like a bull. His head begins to bob up and down, his feet begin to stamp the ground, his body filling up with rhythm. Rhythm is a magical thing; it’s not the same thing over and over again, but a single moment that continually renews itself, more and more new, growing ever stronger. He turns to Ptarmagant and we all inadvertently recoil from the fierceness in his leer-toothed and glare-eyed face.

Ptarmagant points across the lake his eyes on the demon.

“
Punish them!”

The demon laughs like a very young child, grunting his breath out through his throat in a sound with no shape.

Vera thinks it sounds like wet cardboard being ripped.

Instantly he lopes off toward the students, following the edge of the lake. His feet sink in the mud halfway up to his knees but this doesn’t slow him.

He’s up the slope on the far side and erupts into them knocking them down, picking them up and throwing them, swatting and roaring like a bear. Shouts of alarm and surprise come to us across the lake — now they are angry.

“
What’s happening!?” Vera calls.

One of them is trying to box with him, throwing punches. A couple have gotten behind him — they have him, they pin his arms — the boxer punches him in the face, breaking his glasses. He punches again but the demon is still struggling, still grinning, the others can hardly hold him — the boxer punches again and the demon catches his fist between his teeth, bites down and waggles his head furiously like a dog attacking a rag. The boxer screams and is dragged slightly forward. The demon opens his mouth and kicks him in the stomach with such force we can hear it all the way over here. The boxer drops, doubled over, onto his face. The demon lunges backward and turns, throwing off one of the two men.

“
He has a knife!” I shout as I see it. I turn as I say this toward Vera, telling her in particular, and she shouts with such an immense voice that it makes my ears ring like a clap of thunder. Her body twisted like a whip as she shouted, and across the lake all of them jerk at once, startled, looking like a clump of grass momentarily knocked flat by a gust of wind.