The Great Lover (37 page)

She doesn’t know she’s supposed to close her eyes, lids only a little slack her eyes’ dammed vitality has made them hard vital and sparkling. They writhe like netted fish in jackets of gelatinous water... Her mouth is warm, her lips are a little chewed up, rasp their torn thread on lips scaled to rend from my warped lip the ragged marrow of my breath... Short breathings escape our peculiar faces kneaded together partly hard; lips of fingers knit and part, his cradle her jaw and skim her eyelids — and her twin wands of hands seethe up to his shoulders in serial pressure that push her touch through the clothes to his skin.

We fold together in a shaggy apostrophe, moving our faces from purchase to purchase, and eight golden coffins glow unseen in a diamond. An inaudible chorus of eight voices lifts its smoking ray up, making it around early Autumn, lulling warmth of slumbering sun patching ember-colored leaves in Vera, streaming brightly, sere crisply bright-edged through airborne dust in me. Flame tongues flare red as coral, unnoticed above she and me brows as they cinch. She breathes aloud, I pull my face not so far from hers that she won’t know by its heat that it’s near, and gaze down, stark love look slices through my eyes and carves happiness onto her face. Her fingers sweep my cheeks, nose, eyes, my forehead, her mouth works thoughtlessly as she builds my portrait in her mind. She looks distraught, her hands seep joyously into his body. He clings again splitting and resplitting fiercely: cruelly strong. Empty-handed thoughts weave blank wall hangings around them, their sound listens to the sound of listening.

Now quick run upstairs together — and under open sky (hung with blazing pink veils) you can feel without having to look at it.

Under clouds’ pink pelt cross-combed back, in brown light of dusk, that is at once only brown, only pink, only orange... in the stealthy approach of the confiding hour her hair will be one whole earth.

*

A spotter reports by signal-light morse relay a
Vampirism
in rush hour crowds midtown. Uar rendezvous with the demon — he calls him the Duende — and the two come on from opposite directions. Uar arrives first.

The station is a half-cylinder lined with orange tiles, wide open without supports or barriers; his man is pasty, middle-aged, with watery blue eyes and meager colorless hair, limp big and tall body in a short-sleeved green shirt and wide khaki shorts, white sneakers, canvas baseball cap. He walks dully back and forth with a pink newspaper, numbly scanning the crowd, and the attentive eye can see the cone of grey silting around his face. Uar walks toward him purposefully. Where the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers conjoin, their waters flow alongside each other in a massive bed, one side black and one side red. His teacher had taught him to use this metaphor for power, observe as the two halves close around you like breath and feel yourself borne up and along on a vast current. Think of the edges of the two rivers together getting thinner and thinner to the unimaginable point of division which is both or neither, a blade thin upright and sharp.

“
Now pick it up and use it.”

The Duende is making power somewhere in the tunnel, and the vampire glides sluggishly toward it. Uar is blowing out a bubble of alert attention around himself, within which everything is faster and simpler. Fear makes the vampire dangerous — not Uar’s fear, but the vampire’s own, strangely abstract, fear. They are running in the tunnels. Every dimly glimpsed thing around him flies by at incredible speed, and he is light as air in air, running without effort, the knife in his hand. He sees the vampire silhouetted against the light of the next station. The vampire rushes out onto the platform and melts into a waiting bank of
Vampirism
. As Uar emerges from the tunnel there is a uniform turning there of red eyes at him, snarling mouths packed with dusty feathers. The Duende swirls in from the other side, scattering the cloud. A body thuds to the tile, torso broken open like a split cast, wings spasming behind exposed ribs.

Uar trots forward and attacks without seeing. It’s better not to see their faces, but to keep the gaze turned inward. Under the left arm, go behind, then thrust knife back fast where the spine joins the skull, hilt bangs against the back of the head. Draw out the knife, kneel, and cut the head off.

One of his teachers told him, “You will find you become many animals. Certain animals will come more readily than others, and you can use them to get into the rapids of changes.”

With Uar it’s horses, who knows why, and he brings his chin down, snorts through his nostrils, and kicks up his right leg bent at the knee while sort of hopping once or twice on his left foot, like the front half of a horse doing dressage. Strike out into the haze and impale a flaccid heart, pull the knife back and slice a throat, two chops make a V in the smoke and a slab of smoke slides out of the notch and splatters on the tile, becoming a corpse. Uar glances up at the Duende, who draws off long tendrils in the coils of his curtains, dodge and dodge and dodge again. This
Vampirism
is thinning like mist in the sun.

*

...a woman’s dream body, collar floats above ribs arch above hips’ basin, small feet and hands, dream sound of a woman’s voice...

In my dream, she reaches for me: I see it sadly.

Delicious image — of Vera naked against total blackness, straddling darkness, sighing and rocking. All drops away, and she alone remains gleaming and transported ablaze with pleasure, the sound of her gasps her sighs swells in a shallow echo...

John Brade has just left the weather station, sleepwalking his way back to his apartment. He looks up at the lamps lighting the paths and they are unreal, all the green, the rich air...

Pearl gazes at me, his dim face is like creamy smoke. No, he’s not gazing. He’s just had his visit, and he’ll lie like this, a beautiful dead body relishing its death, for hours.

I go into another room and put the curtain rod back on its hooks. There’s a wardrobe against the wall. I open it. A mirror is fixed to the inside of the door. I’m there in it.

Vera sits on a bench by the tiled wall; she is talking quietly with Lenore, who holds her right hand. Lenore nods, and goes away for a moment.

“
Stupidians! To the attack!”

I take off my hat.

Vera in a hallway with a room she won’t look inside. Futsi I love him.

Futsi is playing for sheer joy.

I take everything off.

Love is filling me — Vera’s short of breath.

In the next room there is a bathtub, and I fill it with water, wash myself slowly and carefully, very thoroughly, always watching my reflection.

Desire is stretching me and I don’t know what to do.

Jumping up and down in place, pounding the strings and shouting like a maniac.

Down from the street, along the steps, and across the floor, a wisp of air visits me, and stirs in my hair. I pull out the cork — it smells like cool shade, leaf canopies that shade dry hollows. The glass tips up and the flow into my mouth longs for soft glades, grass chilled with dew. The city contracts into a tunnel.

All wrapped in wine the park is full of graves, I imagine. The sky is crowded with swords. I can’t see steel and pewter, they must be gloom, the texture of this weather, all made of bruised swords, long and lovely and smooth. Wine bruised my mouth, the tick tick of the steel cup against my teeth mixes with the tartness of the drink. Now the ocean billows in the air. Ships float in the air, feeling sullen. Waves crash in the trees lining the paths, mixed with the crunch of my shoes. The wind is mangling the trees — I can hear branches break off and fall. Wind blows smash into my face like a water punching glove, stewards crash together in the sky, fencing with no fencers over the trees, the hissing manes of their lees shiver like banshees.

There’s a pearl in the night’s oyster shell and it’s there in the weather station which is larger and closer than it is; everything is far closer. It’s growing bigger as the path climbs — I’m so happy and excited, I bite my lip smiling at the air, because now there’s an electrified circle inside me now, so I can’t wait!

Wooden thump against my toe. I lift my foot and down it comes on something wooden. I climb steps, but the air is still moving freely around me. Before me: invisible bulk. I reach out to touch it, but I still have to take several careful steps before I feel smooth warm wood, the door right there — and it gives, swing silently open for me.

Across the threshold I step out of night and into late afternoon sun, warm and nostalgic, lying along the floor. Hot dusk of the first evenings in Fall. Electric fire!

Arms sweep me up into thick air! My hands fly up, and fall on bare shoulders. Is it him I stroke his face—

Her hands flicker up the neck to his face, and she cries out with happiness, droops and wraps him in herself.

He carries her swiftly into another room. She feels beneath her the fragrant and yielding sheets, through her clothes, then on skin.

We ghosts watch their bodies coil. Dark against the windows and his eyes like red hot coals. Her cries are long and low and almost mournful. Faces made of cobwebs window gaze in through the window with smudged eyes, shining among shimmering leaves. A transparent little girl stands in the hall. Tears drop on to her face, run into her thick hair. His head lunges, his hands grasp her shoulders and they sink. The girl trots down the hall, silhouetted against window of golden flakes, turns as she runs, and is lost in shadow. An arc of pleasure like a band of warm metal flexes through her body, like a thin tissue being torn a little at a time.

A shrill voice answers from the hall. She shudders and cries, calling out her body together and his breath shakes on her shoulder a tragedy too, when bright white and gold seared edges burnish tragedic note bright sharp sunset’s lances speak pressed leaves of gold flood shine stark clean gold note song in ringing bowl grow loud as thunder killing light splits each in two and joins the split gaps into perfect one up unending ladder of abandon—

—
Un-ending ladder

*

Vera woke up in her own bed. She sits up, and Futsi stirs beside her. She feels her face, draws her hair down over her face — cool spots on her face. Salt tears in her hair. It happened.

*

The Great Lover and Pearl are taking a walk the next afternoon Pearl incognito in his yellow slicker rain hat and knee-high rubber boots, looking and moving like an oversized boy, and keeping to the shady margin of the path.

Pearl’s attention is sheared away — cold erupts in his chest and his limbs grow heavy and numb, his head is light and hollow and he staggers a little.

“
What’s wrong?”

“
I don’t know... what a horrible feeling. It’s passing off, I think.”

“
You should be able to tell me exactly what’s wrong.”

“
I tell you I don’t know... This must be what it’s like for you.”

The Great Lover’s lips fold down, unhappy with this answer.

Again, on a narrow path through the trees, above the pond, cold bursts in his chest heavy as a bag of cement and he staggers, then rushes first to one side of the path, then the other, his eyes blank with panic, groaning, terrified. When this episode fades, the Great Lover insists they go back to the house and by the most direct route, over the bridge and along the pond. Past the bridge where paths converge this time he feels it too, a ghostly rill of nausea like a glass plug in his throat. The Prosthetic Libido goes rigid up on his toes and screams the sound squeezed out of him as though he were running through a slow mangle, an unbearable sound from so beautiful a voice.

“
What is it!?”

He is screaming at what he sees in his mind, absolute image superimposed over the water, the mute and astonished trees and the sky; an acute dome of weak light, and a thought in the light.

Pearl sees the inside of a skull, or of a mind. A pale, pink-white glow fills it, and there are symmetrical structures forming a floor with a round dais in the center. Soft white and translucent wands radiate from the dais, angling in identical, evenly-spaced bows to the curved ribs that line the dome. Against the dais, the wands end in soft hooks, like the fronds of a sea anemone. There’s a ring of clear pebbles where the floor meets the dome. Between the wands are struts like spokes dividing the floor into crescent-edged troughs with round openings like bullet holes in their bottoms. Froth percolates from the holes and gradually accumulates in the troughs.

Kinked white plumes of luminous, ghostly material appear with inaudible pops above the dais. They hover in place, tendrils of fine viscous powder collapse out of them toward the surface of the dais, which is a regularly indented cushion of pink flesh. In the middle of this is an amber clitoris surrounded by porcelain tubes and a raised ring of cloudy glass at the base, dotted with grey and darker nodes like raisins in pudding. The plumes are part of a general, gradually accelerating process involving threadlike extrusions from high in the chamber reaching down to interact with elements in the floor. As the plumes braid together, forming a net that grows in symmetry, holes in the frosted glass ring emit clear bubbles that swell up over the clitoris forming a perfectly transparent carapace of locked shells nested inside each other, the elegant locking of transparent panels with the irregular contours and features of the flat bones of the skeleton.

Light braids above a cross section of internested shells, whose edges grow luminous and radiate an asymmetrical arrangement of elliptical fields converging on the center, below the groin formed by the ribs. The froth that has been accumulating in the troughs suddenly gelates becoming smooth organs like pink kidneys that bulge above the lips of the trough. These now exude a thick trembling whey that forms a web, and radiant grains like powdered sugar rise in the fluid and slide in toward the dais. They collect slowly as the light braids are pulled out into weblike fans and the crushing pressure exerted by that light grows more intense, which is perceived as an increased “brightness” without any corresponding increase of illumination. The grains are now all in the clouded glass ring, and they rush together forming tiny glowing firefly points around the ring like gems in a crown. Nodules of white enamel, like teeth, form lines in pink mush on the outer extremity of the dais. Two rods of colorless syrup swing down from the apex of the dome; their ends touch opposed points on the outer rim of the dais and lie flat. The rods spin like two coiling ropes, forming a layered outer shell. An area of light is forming in the white mist above the clitoris. As the processes are spontaneously coordinated, larger or “brighter” structures of a constellation placidly take shape with a gloating, assured calm. This is a mind, radiant with a warmth that feels like a disgusting cold, and a bitter, lustrous nausea.