The Great Lover (5 page)

Walter Benjamin observed that the city is where you find love at
last
sight: the Great Lovers are the hyena-jawed scavengers who retrieve the lost objects of ardent glances. They are at once more and less alive than I am, like vividly-colored picked flowers already wilting. They are faint and vague, and avoid each other resentfully. These Great Lovers home in on people who have unwittingly been charged with the longing of others, soaked with it like static electricity, and this is their food. So the more they feed the more they attract, but leave them alone a while and they clabber, shrink, grow hard and crack open in places like a dried-up piece of cheese. In an attic somewhere you may come across some unidentifiable piece of something, a pale hard adipocere thing of no particular shape or smell, fuzzed all over with dead mold — you’re looking at the belle of the ball, wasted and gone these many years. Pull away the mold, and see the intaglio broach, put your ear down by it and hear the ticking of a jewelled watch embedded deep inside. I may be a caricature of that caricature, the comic-book version, but it’s not so bad. What was I before? I don’t remember. What does it matter? What good would remembering do me now, anyway? I look with longing at forgetfulness. Never mind. Life goes on. I’ll wait to do my summarizing later, when I’ve had time to digest what I’ve seen.

Medical science tells us that red haired persons exhibit greater sensitivity to pain and pleasure. I have spent my time trudging between the lights, camouflaging myself as a sack of garbage on the curb, or huddled on benches. The other homeless here all seem dazed; their attention steams out of them in a diffuse broadcast, unless they are actually begging. Otherwise they’re waiting to beg or building up their strength to try again. I am building up my strength to borrow, since I’m not interested in money, and what I want is not something any amount of begging will get me. Medical science tells us... and a striking red-haired woman has just gone by.

At once, I follow, doing math in my head. My motions seem more robotic than amorous, but looking at her I am bursting with desire all at once, as though a second me had been jammed into the first like a foot into a tight stocking stretched at the seams. Desire bellows in me like droning music. Now she is waiting for the light, and I creep up near, desire reaching through my ribcage toward her like prisoner’s arms thrust out between bars. I have to mind the wind so she doesn’t smell me. At most she might think there’s a sewer grate somewhere near. A prisoner might half-dislocate his shoulder reaching out from his cell window just to feel daylight touch his hand. I chew my lower lip through the threads from left to right. Whisk! I spin one floating strand of her hair round my index finger hold it there, letting her pluck it loose as she steps into the street, turning away the moment it is free.

In the alley peer at it burning like a red wire on my foul finger, still alive with her life and my yearning makes it glow so bright I blink and blink.

*

The Great Lover sits in his atrium, chin in hand, finger tapping his cheek knocks off little puffs of powdered sewage. He is lost in a brown study of the hair, which sits spotlit on a satin pillow beneath a glass bell. The white satin on which it lies glimmers with its magic fawn glow.

I have a noisy neighbor inside my skull, thumping up and down and clattering pots and pans, which is what passes with me for thinking. Thinking has snared me and now I can’t stop. Shit, gold, water, and combinations of elements in general bring life about, this is my crotchet, and this thought has attached itself with an intolerably intense and sustained meaningful look in my direction to the feeling of pity and animal reverence I feel for these cadavers and body parts I’ve assembled and cubbyholed here in my den. All right all right — the amber gleam, the clue is there in the livid heat of that hair’s light. Gold. Red, rubies and blood. My buttery gold blood on the ruddy gilded guard of the knife, and right about then the boy caught me didn’t he? Yellow teeth in red lips, in a white face, in a color code. I clatter in my pots and pans; I can make gold. I know how, I think perhaps because I may have seen the trick go by in the flurry of my first death agony, as I flew, flowed, along in streams of golden turds.

I excavate the wall at a strong point and hollow out a space, fill it with fuel and stoke it to kiln heat. The Great Lover, wearing a lady’s fur coat and pearls against the intense heat, and with a welding mask over his face, thrusts a skull-shaped crucible into the open hearth. His feet work a treadle-bellows. White-gold light shines in the vessel, illuminating a mosaic subway map taking shape on the wall. An amber drop glinting like sunlight congealed in honey drops into the harelipped leer of a maggoty rat — it spins and curls in on itself, turning into a perfect, seamless sphere of warm skin about the size of an orange. Too strong, and that’s a bit creepy, I think, edging the ball into the sewage with my toe.

I dilute my elixir carefully and now it looks like scintillating black and gold quicksand. Fresh out of maggoty rats, I wildly dispense it to my collection of bodies. They stir and titter, begin to move. With a blaring wheeze of triumph, I take a long draught from the crucible and shiver across the brink — the flames reach out and try to grapple me — perspiration bursts out all over my body and my nose rebels at the stink. I want an antidote — but by mistake I take another drink from the crucible! I spit out most of it, my mouth is flashing hot and cold, and the stuff seems to want to sprout a cock’s comb from my chin where it dribbled from my lips. Taking out my shears, I trim the comb back aggressively, but I tend to bleed now my heart’s beating again. I’d become accustomed to its absence — it restarts, and I blow up like a balloon, or so it feels. White figures, blurry and moving with galvanic spasms, are roaming the atrium, chirping like birds and lowing like cows.

Recovery was a slow and tedious affair, but steady, and I had help from the gnomes I call them that on account of they
gnow
things. Observe — I stop one of them, the zombie of a twelve-year-old with longish blonde hair and a rabbity mouth, powdered from head to foot like the rest of them.

“
Hey, you!” I call, “What’s six plus two?”

“
Nine!”

“—
See?” All kinda little friends.

He becomes blurry, and knucklewalks off.

The Great Lover settles back in his fur coat. Countless pairs of reading glasses, bifocals and half-moon glasses hang on lanyards around his neck running down to his waistcoat. A pair of specs is perched high on his filthy brow, and at the moment he has a monocle screwed into each eye. The spavined stool he sits on shimmies and creaks under his weight. He gazes in rapture at the red hair under glass, presses both fists to his chest, elbows up, and shivers in transports of desire. It is a ruby circle of glory!

Now he takes up a scraper and a bucket and, walking in a crouch, stalks awkwardly after one of the gnomes. After a few near misses, he corners one and begins vigorously scraping it with the scraper, catching white shavings in the bucket. The creature whimpers — he’s not taking off any flesh, just the white coating. Finally the gnome slithers bonelessly out from his confinement and the Great Lover runs his fingers through the contents of the bucket. Then he puts it next to a hastily improvised gauge and the little lights tap on, indicating the presence of ionized matter: soap. The Great Lover grins with satisfaction and dumps the shavings into a bubbling vat scavenged from a brewery. It has a spigot at the bottom; when turned, a tube of hot white soap drops from the faucet into a mold. The Great Lover pulls back a curtain revealing shelves of fuming corpse soap. Selecting a ripe-looking cake, he steps into a clawfooted bathtub and scrubs himself vigorously without undressing, his many pairs of glasses whipping this way and that as he turns himself into an abominable latherman. He pulls a chain and the water comes crashing down over him with the sound of a toilet flushing. A passing gnome accidentally hands him a huge bath towel streaked and brown; he dries himself thoroughly and then dives into the sewer headfirst.

He comes out a manhole and makes his way along the tunnel, shit gushing from his clothes. Pausing briefly for a breath spray — now he struts from one end of the subway platform to the other making eyes at female commuters, who flee in dismay clutching their noses or reel to the edge and puke noisily onto the tracks. Not seeming to notice he bends forward a bit to scan the seats of the subway car — an appealing haunch flashes past and he follows, swinging his right arm almost to the ground.

Fast as a gazelle she has disappeared down a flight of stairs to a lower platform — no don’t let her go yet! He swings round the banister on one arm and leaps down the steps, landing with a slam of feet and a splatter of sewage in all directions from his clothes. Commuters scatter like roaches.

The oblivious haunch flits into a subway car. She is an exotic fish, rare and beautiful, shimmering with color so vibrant it croons to him a long-noted female song. A moray eel pops from his fly and snaps the air in galvanisms of thrills. He scoots along the silver flanks of the steel reef — in the future: the subway car topples from a barge into the sea to form an artificial reef... fish move like ghosts among the seats, take turns bubbling through the intercom...

The doors close behind me and everyone in the car reels away with groans of revulsion. Now where did she go? Hard to tell in this rout...

*

I’m restless and it’s not just because of the gnomes who seem never to sit still, but amble around bumping into me constantly as I lie on the shelf — my eye stubbornly returns to that red ring under the glass. I notice. I go cold inside, get up and go over to the glass and take out the ring.

Abandoned buildings, formerly a hospital complex; four tall lean buildings with stone walls, little white-sashed windows, steep slate sleep state roofs, situated around a courtyard with dead trees. My fumes turn into eight fanciful golden coffins, rummaging like tiny birds in the branches, giant spinning diamonds behind the teeth in their skulls.

He picks a spot at one end of a gallery hallway just two stories from the top, and draws a circle on the tiles with a thick grease pencil he’d found in a garbage can. Within the circle, he draws an oval, representing her, and a triangle, representing him, then unwinds the hair from his finger, laces it between his lips to straighten it with spit, then presses one end into the grease margin of the triangle, then presses the other end into the grease margin of the oval... leans forward with his palms on the ground, so that the two symbols are in the angles formed by his thumbs and hands. One by one, candle flames without candles descend through the ceiling and stop, hovering about a foot from the floor, forming a ring round him. He does not look up. With no plan at all in mind, he runs the tip of his finger along the length of the hair from the triangle to the oval, again and again, always in the same direction, from him to her.

She is sleeping.

In time, her dream appears: a small clapboard house on a tufted grassy plain or marsh stretching off to a distant, mercury-colored beach. A waxy sky, a massive wooden picnic table with benches, laundry drying on lines strung from the house to a pair of tall bushes; weak wind pilfering everywhere. She is sitting at the table with scrapbooks of poems and drawings in a heap, most of them on butcher’s paper or brown newsprint. She is wearing a tweed skirt and a sort of tight khaki jacket, buttoned up, her hair gathered at the nape. She’s dreaming her face is darkened by incurable, mortal illness, and she draws, using small stones to hold the paper flat; her sketch is only just begun, he can’t make out what it will be. He can see another, pinned down against the wind with what looks like a wooden iron; a still life involving a bundle of flowers against a dark background — the flowers are luxuriant, and a little grotesque. He notes one in particular, which has long wavering petals, yellow spotted with black like ripened bananas, and there in the shadows just left of center is her face, hidden in among the flowers, shadowed and drawn, downcast, intolerably sad.

Some time later he sees her again. She had somehow been caught naked far off down the beach, and was running awkwardly back to the house over the uneven ground, her pale arms raised a little like wings, her hair not dishevilled at all but still pinned up neatly. She is uncanny without her clothes, like a figure in a painting. He is struck by the wind from her body, and it evokes in him a ghostly love, not for her, but for everything.

“
I love,” he says flatly, his lips not far from the floor. The words are soaked up by the wood and deadened. “I love,” complete in the intransitive, like “I go.” He can’t hear himself say it. If he could have heard it, he would have turned himself into a cartoon again.

She dashes into the dark house. He finds her upstairs in a shift, trying to open the window. The sash won’t rise evenly, and keeps jamming against the sill, requiring her to jostle it and pull it down again and again, trying to raise it level.

When he fills his palms with her warm shoulders she stops slowly and sways back against him familiarly. Then she turns abruptly and flings her arms around his neck, kissing a face that is, for her, perfectly featureless and clean. This is not his body, as it crouches on the tile in the hospital, tapping away at the little tiles with letters on them; she embraces a puppet she improvised just now. He in turn possesses the puppet, without really choosing to. Now that they are alone together in this room, her intimacy draws me in like water running down the sides of a bowl to the middle.

When she presses herself against his icy body he can tell the puppet is death at the same time, frightening but not threatening her. The puppet isn’t death it’s a harbinger of death drawn by her mortal illness, something like that. She is going to bribe him with her love, or that’s what this is turning into. She accepts his anonymous weight and freezing hands, pressing her down into the yielding mattress, and in time the walls become grainy with gathering dark and the windows have faded to pale blue smudges in the air. Her dream is agonizingly slow to fade, and her bed has become a hard tile floor under her back. There is a ring of candles, or candle flames, burning around her, and somehow a terrible smell — weird to smell something strongly in a dream. Death has cheated her, and she is at her funeral — in the morgue itself not even in a chapel — lying in her coffin, without even a single mourner in sight. She bitterly reproaches her friends in a sharp voice that simply appears around her without compelling her to move her lips. Still death’s weight freezes and immobilizes her, and still death seems to enjoy her, more and more. I am inside her and her dummy, in the overlap. Suddenly she shies away from the sensation, horribly cold and empty, spirals away in anger and disappointment toward her friends; she starts awake, fumbles for the light, and gazes woozily at her furniture, which rushes forward from the recesses of her apartment to reassure her.