The Great Lover (8 page)

She coos and sighs and spreads her hands on his waxy shoulder blades, his lean hairless body is clean and gentle and soothing, she melts in pink and blonde clouds and sunshafts. I am rocking frantically now, the sewage pool contracts and expands in regular intervals, and inside me somewhere are two parentheses facing each other, glowing with warmth, full with alien pleasure. A vast black bow regularly sweeps the sky as though the shadow of a gargantuan windmill were interposed between this dream and the sun, the dark arm of a machine the size of space. She is becoming abandoned, stopped wanting clouds: she grips and gets urgent, and the two parentheses in him are warmer and warmer without ever becoming hot. They only radiate a vilely delectable warmth. Her clouds rumble together like boulders, she is poised to fall in among them, and when she does the Great Lover’s body shudders and contracts, his nerves lash the ceiling like a whip. I vomit across the floorboards, spatter the dead leaves — my mouth stretches against the laces, my pearly features bulge, I heave thick spurts of fawn bile on the floor.

...She is lazily recoagulating herself in her dream. The clouds are back pink and gold, steaming with milk and honey and butter. In the dark of the room, I shiver and strain with the deepest-churning retchings, black pitch-thick dregs drop from my gaping mouth, hang from wrenched lips like threads of tar. I list forwards. My eyeless face lands on the sloppy boards with a splat, the notebook snaps shut and drops to the floor. Dream boy’s head rises woozily from her shoulder and he gazes down at her with his own stunned eyes.

“
Did I come?” he falteringly asks. She wakes up laughing.

...My eyes roll uncouthly, now back in their own sockets. Through the window, I see the metallic, deep-indigo sky like fragments of mirror. In among the branches I can make out something else: a large pair of perfectly round eyes. An owl is looking at me. Or is it a man?

A big, slovenly gray-haired man with thick glasses?

CHAPTER THREE

At the far end of the subway platform there is a jagged cloud of smoke turning its cheeks in the stale air. It forms sagging, many-jointed fingers that point in the direction of a solitary man standing at the far edge of the platform, gazing into the obscurity of the tunnel. Two twill legs project from his short raincoat, and there is a narrow-brimmed old man hat on his head. This is Armand Hulferde; he’s a
scientist
.

He looks old; a hollow-chested, slack-shouldered man. His big, flaccid hands, dangling at his sides, look like gardener’s gloves; he has a long toneless face just beginning to drop jowls, and sagging red eyelids. His features were birdlike once, now melting in time. Inside his raincoat his shirt fits loosely on his spare frame, the collar cinched with no necktie, pants belted up over his stomach. There’s a peculiar manner — how to put it — not pleasant to understand about him; more than detachment, he has the affectless air of an appraiser, veins full of smoke. Lately he has spent a great deal of time standing at the far ends of subway platforms, staring deep into the tunnels — and now he finally sees what he wants: a humped shape scuttling along the tunnel wall, an incongruent way of moving, like a suave crab.

Hulferde starts waving at it, trying unobtrusively to get its attention, restricting the movement of his arm so that his body will screen it from view should anyone be watching behind him. His embarrassed gestures don’t match the expression on his face. Hulferde peers into the dark for a few seconds, then waves vehemently at something to come to him out of the shadows. The ember at the end of his cigarette traces a lingering zig-zag in the gloom. The figure pauses, the head rises up against a blue light. Hulferde leans forward and waves his dry floppy hand at the sodden, spiky head. The shape glides toward him and then stops fifteen feet from the platform edge. Hulferde resolutely steps down to the purple gravel of the tunnel floor and crunches a few feet into the shade.

It’s late; there are no trains. The tunnels are eerily still. The dense air sliding over them both smells of ammonia, graphite, and rust, which smells like cold blood. The Great Lover is standing there by a heap of trash, his arms hanging down, returning Hulferde’s gaze with a slack, stupid look, eyes glistening like mercury in a face masked in grime. He’s wearing a hat that fits like a skull cap; the brim is folded back and stands upright, the fabric cut into regular triangles all the way around, like a crown of dingy black felt. He sports a very sophisticated-looking silk cravat around his neck.

“
I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Hulferde tells him peevishly.

“—
Well?” His voice is cloggy, like he’s got a wad of hair stuck in his throat.

“
The others told me about you.” Hulferde has been interviewing Great Lovers for weeks — fleetingly he remembers talking to one, a male with a flat golden chain around his turtleneck... “Oh that —
that one...
I’d say he knows more about nerve projection than any of us. I mean it is his entire technique.” The fragrant man had made a dusting gesture with his middle ring and pinky fingers, indicating panache.

In the present, Hulferde looks squarely at me. “You died.”

“
That’s right.”

“
...How did you come back?” This is off the subject, but Hulferde is curious.

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“
Did you do it yourself, or was it done to you?”

“
I don’t know...” I’m tired, suddenly irritated. I don’t like being made to talk. “Stop asking about it.”

“
Well, I have something else I want to ask you about. My name is Hulferde.” He has the wary formal demeanor of someone who doesn’t deal often or well with people, and whose chief concern in a conversation is to avoid contamination.

Nothing in the Great Lover’s appearance changes, and he does not answer.

“
Would you be so kind as to give me yours?”

The Great Lover’s behavior is a weird mix of weariness and punctilious exactness, like an uncertain performance. “I have none to give. You must refer to me in the second person.”

A mounting self-consciousness is making Hulferde uncharacteristically hesitant, dilatory. “You... abide down here?”

“
Here, and in the sewers.”

“
And... what do you do, when you are not above ground?”

“
I collect specimens.”

“
...Of what?”

“
Of whatever.”

“—
In this filth?”

“
My condition is not noticed here.”

“
You seduce women in their dreams — is my information correct?”

“
No.”

He looks annoyed. “I don’t believe I’ve made a mistake.”

I wave my hand a little. “Close enough.”

“
But you never pursue a physical consummation.”

“
I am not presently able to do so.”

“
You’re saying you’re impotent?” Hulferde asks.

“
You,” I say without really understanding what I’m saying, “and others of your kind are unable to touch me because I am below your level.”

“
You were human once...”

“
I was demoted.”

“
What are you now?”

He gazes directly at Hulferde smiles for the first time and says through his threads,
“
I am a character in a book.
”

“
Don’t say that! Don’t say that! Don’t say that!”

Hulferde flaps up and down the length of the platform in stroboscopic bursts of light and noise.

“
Forget that I said it.”

Hulferde really forgets, continuing to look expectantly at me, as though his question had not yet been answered.

“
I am like a demon, or a mischievous ghost.”

“
...I don’t normally discuss personal matters with others, so I may express myself a little awkwardly.”

The Great Lover’s outline alters slightly — what could this preamble possibly signify?

“
...I have a problem that might interest you.”

“
I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

“
Bluntly speaking, my problem is sexual.” He folds his arms on his chest and lowers his head. “Frankly, I don’t like women, never have.”

“
...And why indeed should a man in your position feel any different?”

“—
I don’t want women around me — I don’t want to be more attractive to them. I want to be released from these
ridiculous urges
, so I can do my work without this constant distraction.”

“
You have a strong drive, keeps interrupting.”

“
Yes. Exactly. I have been actively seeking a solution to this difficulty for some time, and to this end I have contacted and interviewed some of, well of your kind.” He looks up. I do nothing. “—An ordinary seducer is of no use to me, but your talent for nerve projection, as they call it, presents me with an intriguing possibility. If I may explain?”

“
I’m not doing anything.”

Hulferde begins to lecture. He speaks quickly, with his chin down.

“
Civilization removes us from the immediate exigencies of evolution. As Freud explained, the life-energies arise in the libido, and it is only by sublimation that they become available for uses unrelated to reproduction. This requires discipline, for, however thoroughly this redirection is accomplished, the energies in question always retain the essential character of their origin in the sex drive. Maintaining the divorce between drive and goal therefore cannot be achieved without a constant, enervating effort. Among those with weaker libidos this effort is correspondingly less, but so is the productivity of the individual in question. It’s my bad luck that I have a very powerful libido. While this means that I possess considerable vital energy, quite above average, there is a roughly equivalent claim on my self-discipline.”

Hulferde shruggingly indicates himself.

“
I have no illusions about my appearance. The trouble and expense intercourse entails seems excessive to me. In every conceivable arrangement, given present conditions, waste is indicated. I have been trying to discover some way to put an end to this waste, and to place all my energies at the disposal of my work. Naturally, I at first considered the possibility of a libidinal suppressant: a drug, or perhaps a simple surgical procedure. However, since the libido is so to speak the ‘engine,’ if mine were to be eliminated or reduced in force, there would necessarily be a corresponding attenuation of my energies overall. I would derive no benefit from these measures.

“
But then it occurred to me,” and now something faintly glimmers in Hulferde’s eyes, a clammy excitement, “that a prosthesis might be better; I mean a device which would have and suppress my sexual thoughts for me, while transferring their neutered force to me. I could then separate myself from my libido while continuing to derive from it the full streamlined might of my own proper vital principle. And because the negative effects of sex deprivation are a consequence of the stagnation or misflow of the sexual energies from the drive, once the drive is displaced, these negative effects would not be of any concern.”

He pauses to look at the Great Lover. Hulferde is an intelligent, unfeeling man, but he is not cagey or manipulative.

“
I needed to understand more about sex transfer, which is why I spoke to the others. But they mentioned you, and your ‘nerve projection.’ This is precisely what I must learn, as I hope you already see?”

The Great Lover lists to and fro on his feet, mouth slack, like a man on a meat hook.

“
My prosthetic device would have to be equipped with a telepathy axon for the transmission of neutered vital force. Already, I have constructed two different prototypes, and yet I find I cannot make them work. Could you help me?”

This last question is uttered with such tensely embarrassed flatness that it sounds like a statement. The Great Lover audibly inhales through his nostrils.

“
I infer from your gestures” (Hulferde waved his hands about vaguely while describing his device) “that you fashioned it in the form of a receptacle?”

“
That’s right.”

“
That’s wrong,” my voice sounds muffled and sleepy, and the words seem to pass through me without being assembled by me, as though I’d memorized them under hypnosis. I feel a tingling sensation at the top of my neck, and an acidic trickle or rasp at the back of my throat.

“
The sex drive is expressed in every nerve of the body,” I go on. “It is not restricted to a proprietary brain structure, nor is it a variety of thought. If you are to induce it to migrate, you must give it an environment recognizeable to it. You must construct your prosthetic in such a way that it corresponds in every particular to the dimensions of your own body. It needn’t be your double in every detail, but the volume and form must be identical. It must have your proportions exactly.”

“—
Yes, that sounds quite correct,” Hulferde says with thoughtful ardor. “I will assemble it as you say, but — while I am confident I can manage the task alone, it would take, I’m sure, far less time, with your guidance. I am at present working on a new variety of nerve gas, and my deadline is very tight.” Hulferde is getting excited; he is already designing a figure in his mind. “Will you help me build this device?”

My head wavers; I have trouble coordinating my gestures. They are fragmented over the several parts of his body at different times and out of order.