The Great Lover (12 page)

—
the Prosthetic Libido raises his torso, flexing at the waist, raises its arms elbows curled hands bending back at the wrists, as though the laughing and the music were buoying him up — his face is transported, his body sways and twines itself up the air — he is singing out with passionate joy—

The Great Lover capers up and down the room roaring with laughter, like a toe-dancing bull cavorting around the equipment, his tangled choker of spectacles rattling like a shamanic instrument. He thrusts his face, hard with fierce satisfaction, within an inch of the Prosthetic’s dazzled eyes gloating and cackling, the bell above his head crashes and whips against itself as though a hurricane were driving it. He turns and dances out of Hulferde’s house.

*

Hulferde gingerly removes the metal tube and the wires from his head; there is no sensation. He bandages his wound carefully and extricates himself from the contacts and devices. Not yet fully able to appreciate the change he sits on the stretcher a moment, rubbing his face.

Hulferde stands, and crosses the room, pulling the curtain aside. The Prosthetic Libido lies on its table, masturbating blinking and sighing — he turns his glorious eyes on Hulferde in astonishment and pleasure. Sunlight vibrates from his skin.

Hulferde looks at his creation with sour distaste — finally throws a cloth over it and wheels it into the storeroom. As he locks the door, he is already thinking only of the work that waits for him. He turns away preoccupied, a benzene ring in his mind.

CHAPTER FOUR

The earth is hollow — and I can prove it to you! (goes down steps to subway station)

...

I need love like I’m a plant in a cave but now there’s no Love at all to be found, nothing like it anywhere, aynewerhe, wheneraye — I kick around in the trash feeling — I’m just sighing and pining. I clutter together among the other objects at the dark end of the platform, past the reach of the sodium lights that turn the mist into a blizzard of orange motes. I look out at a switching yard filled with broken furniture and tufted bracken, dark iron trestle bars the sky. The platform trembles, but I don’t see the train for a long time. There is something at work below the trestle, right down deep into the earth, that is shaking the platform.

The train pulls in with rain rilling down its sides and I take a seat in the first car. It’s empty. I close my eyes and I open my eyes and I see needles of light reflected in the polished steel pole. I close my eyes and open my eyes and I see tan floor streaked cream and plum. The train creaks through black space upon which lights and illuminated surfaces have been scattered. The distant skyline is stationary and the intervening buildings hurtle past and fall back into the cavernous night. A building stands there, crowned with an amber cone. Dead trees whisk along scribbling on the lights. Gleaming steel and fluorescent lights in the excessively bright car like a mobile morgue, a ghostly, transient feeling, like visiting a hospital.

Travel has an erosive effect on what is called sanity; the further one goes, the more uncompressed and irrelevant become the thoughts. The train dives into the ground and suddenly the fluorescents overhead go out; in rushing darkness I hear the door at the end of the car snap open, bang from the jam, slide back and clap shut. When the lights dazedly blink on again, there is a large shambolic man in a shapeless sweater sitting opposite me, writing something on a sheet of paper against his leg. Brow knotted against the upper rims of his thick glasses and crazy grey hair sticking out all over, his lips protrude to form a rigid bow-shaped funnel. Over the sweater he wears a burgundy vinyl jacket that’s too small for him and a broad rock-and-roll belt with two parallel rows of metal-rimmed eyelets on crooked across his hips.

Suddenly he thrusts the paper at me, with a chewed-up pencil under his planklike thumb. There are three algebra problems written out on it. “Show your work,” it says. Subway stations and tunnels pass like illuminated shipwrecks on the other side of the express brackets. I finish doing the problems and hand the paper back. The man runs the pencil down the page, making marks and checks. As the train stops, he gets to his feet swaying nearly off balance, hands the page back, and blunders out the door without a word.

In a circle at the top it says:

“
A-

—
this would have been a B+, but I’ll give you extra credit for factoring the problem so thoroughly.”

He’s added this at the bottom of the paper:

“
I am the first leper corpse and I lead a leper corpse.” Train rolls through the station and for an instant I’m eye to eye with the head of a black man hanging in the window.

*

Riding on the undertaker in love withdrawal some days later — the passengers thin out in the mid-afternoon and you can feel the daylight energy of the sun just overhead. I’m sandwiched between that warmth and the icy entrails of the planet under me. So now we’ve just left the station and we’re rolling steadily into the dark. I’m alone in the last car. An unfamiliar voice comes over the PA and says, after announcing the next stop and the transfers, in a tone so level and quiet I wonder if I
am
hearing it:

“
Through the interstices of impersonal indifference hovers over the city like devil wings, not the indifference of one soul or another, but a property of the indifferent air and the hard blank canvases of the pavement the buildings. Like the ether of early astronomy it is infinitely rigid and permeates everything, a hard canvas the painted figures can feel unyielding behind them.”

I get up and make my way through the cars to the one with the conductor. He is coffined up behind his steel door, speaking over the PA. At the next stop, I get off quickly and rush round to peer in his window. No one there. I look along the train and see a head drawn in as the doors close and the train pulls away from me.

Riding the train you discover the other chronics — there are those who, this or that or no reason, lose interest in work, in daily affairs, in food, in sleep, and take to riding the subways, settling on the trains like marine snow on the sea bottom. Overwhelmed and drained by the vampiric demands of bills and mail, haircuts, laundry, rent, they begin to fill up with a desire for complete quiescence, and this desire adds to their inertia. They don’t want to die, to sleep — they want to forget and to meditate. They want to fall out of their sconces and stop working so hard to resemble this or that. No one is anything when they travel, or travel tends to rub identity.

...Vera swings a little against her father. On the subway, bodies shudder and tilt with the motion of the train like empty sacks. The communication of this movement makes the car into a big soup of partially-blended, partially-independent people. Most of them don’t notice how loose their edges get when they ride, because they get on at an important stop and get off at an important stop. The trip in between is only an interruption the ample business of their lives immediately reabsorbs...

I can pick out the ones who ride all the time — they let it happen. The encroaching anonymity is turning into a new person. It cuts right through me like a knife — it’s a horrible sound: I want you to watch me die, I want to be cut open and bleeding to death, and I want you to
watch me
bleed to death: it would be a tender, an intimate scene — the head goes pale and the lips droop — the face slowly drops with beautiful, celestial musi—

The petrified subway tunnel landscape: pencil-shaped stalactites, scurfy black scales, mineral ooze hardened like charcoal scum on the tunnel walls, dirty ink of puddles and leaks, flat blots of old fossil chewing gum... lichenous rust adhering to steel columns in modestly fantastic shapes, like gills of fungus... girders filmed with a thin layer of gelatinous metal, or sheathed in an elastic integument of thick paint like flexible amber. The lights in the tunnel, the pearly gates hanging in beaded lines... the corky crud between the rails, like chipped bark... thick flakes of congealed muck the size of rats’ heads and matchbooks... hoses and wires, painted-over half-moon lightbulbs... alarmingly bright dry orange stain on the ground at the base of one of the pillars... thick black dust on the tiled wall opposite, something intimate and cloistered there like a familiar closet under the stairs, a boy’s fortress as empty now as a rotted-out tortoise shell... steel button-box marooned high on the wall, where only the operator can reach it from the window of his compartment... serrations in the lower edge of the tiled wall like the outline of an inverted battlement... the motto “Don’t Piss Here” spray-painted in pale yellow on concrete piling out on the railed cement pier past the no-entry sign. Smell of urine, heaps of tools, bags of metal. Rumble of trains is like ventriloquism, hard to place the source until you see the lights, or hear them angrily rampaging overhead, and often you never know where they are. Messages everywhere, almost all of them impossible to read correctly at first sight. Soiled feeling of old iron, old painted metal, just solid soil.

Sitting on the train we’re subdued, watchful. To young thugs and religious old ladies on the train: you are wasting your time. This one here is so self-contained he absorbs light: his reserve is hostile most likely without meaning to be. My weird reflection in onyx window like the Cup of the Ptolemies, my grin warps out to the window’s edges, my eyes like twinkling black pits. My face asks:
so what do you want to do today?
— What are you asking me for? I look at the advertisements. There’s everything to read, but none of it makes sense, or the sense it makes is accidental. Silent and unconscious signs are also transmitted and received: I will stand here in the coveted spot by the door, I am just letting you on, I will move back to my spot by the door. Decay’s alchemy makes these tunnels more and more like living things or to speak more precisely and not using anything as crude as metaphor or similie the distinction between the tunnels and platforms on the one hand and the decomposing remains of once living things on the other hand is to be made with a difficulty that can only be relied on to increase steadily.

Passengers break away like spores from a single dark cloudy mass of cavernous night, bobbing heads lightly pour in through the doors without the slightest displacement of air. Tidal forces pull passengers on and off the platforms... and here and there people reel or spin or sway a little in the eddies of these tides you sometimes feel roll along you — or you may rock with the motion of this inorganic train.

Sitting and hurtling through space in my seat, looking at my counterpart there in the glass, because it’s underground that you meet yourself, and he says, “Oh Master I say : stay a journeyman” I tell him so that he nods agreement as the train pivots changing tracks. Watching from cover of an invisibility only the homeless can possess I make the whole system into my terrarium picking out the damned accommodationists from the typeless types I’m looking to contact. They eye me and I them and we make uncertain gestures testing testing 1 2 3.

Clean-shaven middle-eastern man in wool jacket and wool vest with a tote bag with “meadowlab” stitched on it; a shambling old man with a struggly beard, the pockets of his dirty down jacket stuffed with envelopes; woman in a kerchief and circles under her eyes surreptitiously picks a pornographic Spanish cartoon book from the seat beside her and, having concealed it in the plastic bag in her lap, pages through it poker-faced; drawn-featured black kid draped over a seat, head in a cave, his eyes scan crystal subways and amber subways, soapstone cars ride amber rails — roll on static cushions... I see his friends blast through the station on their skateboards and he glides out to meet them hands at his sides. The skinheads want you to see them as soldiers polices and racketeers, congregating in the last cars of each train hooked on nerve gas: they stow the canisters in their too-big-camouflage-jackets and dose themselves with modified inhalers. You catch a zap when the doors open and your whole face is wrenched around, your nostrils and sinuses burn like flaring embers...

The more you see the more you will see — stopped between stations and there’s a dimly-lit brick passageway plunging into the dark directly before me. Someone is walking there, away from me. She turns and looks in my direction — a middle-aged woman with a ruddy face, a brimless hat perched on the head’s crown, green wool coat. Her features are like a man’s just slightly feminized and saturated with a weird charisma, as though behind that face a hand held something rare and precious together in a gently firm grip. She turns and walks away swinging a censor of black iron triangles and trapezoids. The feathers of incense rub up against her shoulders and then stretch themselves like nerves, reach for the walls and muffle the exposed bulbs. The train reels a little forward, then accelerates in earnest, taking away the woman. On the elevated line at sunset, I moved my head so as to bring my shadow over the man’s eyes opposite me, shield the man’s eyes with my shadow from the glare of the setting sun — I had no sympathy for the man himself, but I had sympathy for his eyes. What I did, I seemed to do for her, as though I wanted her to see me do it and approve. I get the feeling she’s just died. I crack my hold on things in general fall into destabilizing gales, blow a tangle of clumsy, sincere nerves making cloud segments that fly away in every direction.

...Dr. Thefarie points out the Great Lover to me. Yes, he is clearly visible through the safety glass of the partition doors, alone in the car ahead — a filthy beggar, still in perfect possession of his faculties and yet he does not perform for the crowd. I do not believe he is — he is not oblivious to the crowds, on the contrary it is plain he attends to them closely, but he is observing them, and by that I mean he is scrutinizing them. That he is sensitive, and charged with a mercurial vitality which makes itself felt even across this distance, is as obvious as the raw and naked feeling he does nothing to conceal. His cheeks are wet with tears.