The Great Lover (38 page)

A body is stirring as its sense organs are beginning. Now suddenly the processes all whir and a brilliant light appears in the center — thread comes down and splits instantly into fans of threads, these turn and fold together forming grids — each line passes through the center of a square defined by the intersection of two other grids, and rising columns of firefly lights, like ropeless pearls, slither up through the squares and track their way up, back down, in toward the light in the center or out toward the dome by dipping round each line like acrobats spinning around the parallel bars. The membranes of the pink kidney-like complexes inflate, and tendrils of colorless syrup flow down from the outer shell and connect to the bubbles, which take on a pale yellow color around the join like a powdering of sulfur. Motor activity, ratiocination, memory, association.

The Great Lover sees none of this, although he can feel something... something a little. Pearl lunges spasmodically this way and that, bounds up onto a park bench his right leg flails out once and smashes the wood and steel of the back of the bench as though he were idly knocking off dandelion puffs. On the ground he takes two steps loses his balance and spins off to one side of the path; his right arm shears a streetlamp in half. The Great Lover rushes over and grabs him. Pearl, clutching the Great Lover’s upper arms, rotates his wrists upward and rises off the ground his spine arched and his head flung back shrieking uncouthly, his legs, feet pointed straight down at the ankle, kick convulsively at the Great Lover’s chest. The Great Lover grunts as he’s kicked, and black blood or vomit trickles from his lips, but his dense body barely moves and he continues to hold on. All this as something like a clammy grey hood of nausea bears down out of nowhere onto his head. Angrily, he takes hold of the Pearl by the midsection and shakes him violently for a long time...

Now he is lying on the ground, watching as the Pearl flops and tosses in epileptic frenzy against the pavement. Suddenly Pearl is staring him in the face, clutching his lapels asking him again and again if he’s all right, the glistening, exquisite face contorted with emotion but still bizarrely perfect. He’s got the Great Lover by the lapels and shakes him gently, rolling his head around.

“
Oh, oh, did I hurt you? I couldn’t help it — oh what are we going to do? Oh no, didn’t you feel it, too? You must have.”

He thrusts his face into the Great Lover’s his eyes perfect brimming circles and nearly wholly black—

“
Do you know what he did? He made another one! He modelled it on
me —
on me!
” he sobs. “Now she’s awake! A Prosthetic Death — what are we going to
do?
”

CHAPTER NINE

Back to Hulferde’s house.

Hulferde’s newfound energy plus knowledge acquired in creation of the Prosthetic Libido equals creation of Prosthetic Death. That means the transposition of his mortality into an artificial vessel to do all his dying for him so he never has to.

Hulferde is dead.

Hulferde most likely did not complete Prosthetic Lib I mean Death. But Pearl just now experiences something connected with it, possibly the appearance of its mind, having never had the slightest inkling of the existence of such a being.

Somehow it failed to preserve Hulferde’s life, but nevertheless it is in operation.

Why did I feel it, too?

Getting off the train... How would a Death Prosthetic work?

The only principles derivable from the creation of the Prosthetic Libido pertain to transference to a double acting as a process-vessel with positive retransference back to the source. Transference of death to Prosthetic double entails perennially sustained dying ergo Prosthetic Death is a shunt attached to a living organism and draining out the death. If the intended host dies, then there would be no death to die. Perhaps Hulferde has been restored to life somehow; if the Prosthetic Death has only just begun to function this will mean a terrible awakening for Hulferde in a decayed body. Supposing revivification is not possible, and Prosthetic Death has no host? Pearl seems unaffected by death of Hulferde, has achieved a separate life.

With Hulferde dead, the Prosthetic Death will be an empty vessel? What does that mean?

I turn in to the lane. Hulferde’s house glimmers dull white against the drab brick houses to which it is attached, like a carious tooth under speeding clouds, satin-grey and ocean-blue shadowed. I enter through the front door.

The air in the house is stifling, and hums with a deep tone that makes my jaws buzz and smears my vision. Dying saturates it. I find the basement door hanging open; here the air is filled with painful tingling. A migraine ache knits along the top of my head like a white hot seam, pink and grey sparks, black rectilinear streaks seethe in my eyes. I can smell decay down there.

I stamp my feet and pound my head with my hands, slap myself, swing my arms like a skiier, trying to shake the feeling. The oppression does sullenly ease off after a bit. I head down the stairs to the basement, keeping my balance only with effort.

As I descend, I feel crushing pressure close on me like tons of deep sea water, and my own brittle defenses. I’ll need to do whatever down here fast. Before the stairs I see a figure crumpled on the floor. Hulferde, dead.

There is the black aperture of the Prosthetic Libido’s closet. Nothing inside, but as I cross the threshold I feel some relief, a lightening, a refreshing shadow of sadness there.

Turning from the closet I see it at once — a cloud chamber large enough to hold a person, hidden beneath the basement steps. Looking at these things, I see them, and I feel as though I were right at the brink of a bottomless pit. The fear covers another feeling down in the depths, or an unthought thought. Tearing myself away is like ripping free of a trapped limb.

On the floor next to the chamber, a dead fly rests covered in a light topping of ash. It is decomposing directly into its component elements, all its organic compounds simply falling apart. I step nearer and a draught stirs the little body; it slides along the floor from left to right and then turns over twice. On the second turn it collapses into a shapeless drift of dust.

My reserves are drying up, a sick crushing feeling in my chest like I’ve been feebly stabbed. In a delirium of escape I rush up the stairs and through the kitchen knocking table and chairs out of my way — out the back steps and into the deep shade of the back yard, where I stand, rubbing my face and shaking.

I imagine the clouds streaking across the sky, vast and impossibly rapid. The watery light on the yard, the heavy shadows. The door opens — a white arm gently thrusting out of blackness, a small form stepping gingerly over the jam. The Prosthetic Death is five feet tall, and lean — a round head with very short hair, a face I know must have been his sister’s...

white arm...

Long strings of syrup to a round structure looking like an astrolabe made out of translucent ivory fat. Acute domes folding around and above it, transparent like shrouds of fine ash closing about a rectangle of light that turns and spins and splits layers into other tangled lines and corners. The lines twist and form an unstable number of diamond-like leaves that darken and spread, rising from a stem made from half of each U-shaped thread of clear syrup with minute black flakes in it. All this with a suggestion of distant, more stable structures and a vast reverberating empty space, the vantage point of an alcove high in a cavern wall. From the astrolabe-like central structure something else is rising like an upside-down spur, spreading rows of clear membraneous wings on cloudy chitinous spindles, all alive with a wild acuity.

A plum-shaped face. Small eyes in sockets brown like a bad spot on a piece of fruit. The mouth is a child’s, lips and the flesh around the lips colorless and transparent. The body is slim, like a teenaged boy’s, with no apparent sexual characteristics.

She stood here naked. A line down the back, legs simply slot into the bottom of the torso. I see it step out onto the grass, which shrivels at its touch, moving with a vibratory, hesitant, electrical way. I can imagine it spring into wildly fast flailing motion that terrifies me. Birds drop to the ground from the tree overhead, sees the plants grow sere and wither. Yes, the grass here is brown and matted; matted into it are stiff, cottony birds like styrofoam.

Banging my forehead with the heel of my hand I get away from the house. I have to put some distance between myself and this crazymaking influence.

Now think: Pearl feels this thing because it is another part of the extended creature Hulferde was turning into, but there’s no evident reason why I should feel a thing, let alone all this. I ransack my memory until I am stopped short by a familiar smell... and a bottle with a small indistinct fluid residue by the cloud chamber, on a box or something attached to the wall. Hypodermic needle with injector tube lying next to it, the bottle unstoppered, the smell coming out. That smell is the smell of cadaverine a toxic base found in rotting meat but more specifically it is the smell of me: of
my own personal cadaverine
. He must have stuck me while my attention was somewhere else the little shit! The thing is part of me, too. Part of me too.

It’s ambulatory and independent, no doubt about it, full function. It must have been brought to half start and then set to charge slowly in the cloud chamber. MY cadaverine employed to anchor living death in the vessel, a kind of magnet to draw the death in that’s dandy.

So what’s going on? The P.D. absorbed all of Hulferde’s death at once — I’m guessing he pitched headlong down the stairs and broke his neck served him right too. But a death the P.D. was intended to drain off gradual was instead entirely displaced into it at one jolt, and Hulferde’s life with it snapping to like an extended elastic. Consequently at full start the thing literally comes alive with Hulferde’s life, which is now its life.

Problem: its life depends on a function whereby it is perennially dying. It cannot be perennially dying and alive at the same time, therefore it must drain off death into other vessels; the device operates purely on a principle of displacement. The P.D.’s life continually displaces a volume of death which will in turn have to be displaced into other living things and that’s not something a living thing can survive. The Prosthetic Death must leave everywhere a trail of death; its own, everywhere displaced, everybody’s problem.

*

An invisible curtain hangs in the air like a grey fire. It pushes off from the ground and floats a few inches above the pavement down streets whose windows go dark as it passes. A woman slumps over the stove, crashes face first into a pot of boiling soup and then to the ground, her slack face steaming with hot brown broth. A baby’s cries stop. Dark drops like a shutter. A couple sitting on the brim of the fountain — she slumps forward against his chest and he topples sideways into the water, legs draped over the stone brink... her face skids along his belt, and she falls to the pavement on her side. Noise of breaking glass from an open window. A man’s cap rolls to a halt by the hem of the curtain. It begins to float across the square.

*

The proprietor of the neighborhood thrift shop has shut the door and turned off the radio. It’s getting dark outside, and he wants to close soon. He hopes surreptitiously to himself that no one will come to bother him. There’s no one in the shop, although you shouldn’t be too sure about that; more than once he’s been taken aback when someone popped out from behind a rack of thick coats. He’ll call, then give the place the onceover, before he locks up.

He is turning the pages of his newspaper, laid flat on the counter. The neighborhood is unusually quiet. A faint sound draws his attention. Idly he turns to scan the store wondering if maybe a cat got in through the back. Empty streets, blank windows, go winding by.

“
I seem to have lost my way,” he thinks. All colors have taken on unusual depth, as they sometimes do on densely overcast days, or in rooms neither dimly or brightly lit, because this is a phenomenon of the middle range of light. Just for an instant, right away, there is the window of his shop, gorgeous with these strong colors. A smell of newsprint, just a momentary whiff.

There are no such colors in this street now, though the light is the same it has nothing to illuminate but the greys and blues of the gutters and cobbles, the edge of the hardtop, thick and ragged like a scab.

“
Didn’t I just see it? It must be right around here.”

He searches for his shop.

Slumped over his counter, his face pressed against the newspaper.

He goes on searching through whole towns and the still country in between, with a faint, intermittent feeling of irritation, uncertainty.

“
It must be this way. How could I have imagined — no, the sun is there that must be west. I must put it behind me. Perhaps — up this way?”

As though there were no air at all everything is photographically sharp and clear, each brick and empty window, and every locked door, the uneven line of the pavement, and country roads lined with dark, stationary trees, where every blade of grass stands distinct.

*

Her taste is at work. Only these ballet slippers will fit her. She takes them off, pulls on white hose, replaces the slippers. She selects a full-skirted green dress and wraps her forearms with rolls of gauze. A buff coat with an exuberant fur collar and lapel, and a flapper hat looking a bit like a helmet with a dilapidated plume sprouting from costume jewelry in front. No gloves or rings, she winds gauze around her throat, and then strings of pearls. A glass case filled with spectacles attracts her. She pulls out all the lanyarded ones and loops them one by one around her neck until she has a heavy yoke of them. They fall once against her flat breast, and then lie still and silent.