The Great Lover (15 page)

“
If neither you nor your friends can give you any hope then you must go to your
enemies
to give you hope. I learned this from the Sufis —
There
—”

he breaks in, pointing to the platform as we float through the station—

“—
now take a good look. Do you see what I’m talking about?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
The stealing!” he says, squeezing my shoulder so dirty water trickles over his fingers.

“
You don’t mean that old thing about zombies?”

“
But aren’t they?” he says, squeezing again. “Think of what they could be compared with what they’re allowed to be — Now look at that one!”

The train stops halfway out of the station for a signal.

Not twenty feet away from me a young man stands on the platform, his head turned to look in the direction the train will come. Worklight glare throws his shadow down beside him.

“
So?”

“
Watch!”

From somewhere a few other men drift over; they might all work in the same place, they are the same enough. They aren’t identical; each one individually is distinctive enough as people go, but as they gather together on the platform they become impossible to tell apart. The man’s shadow has acquired a long point, as though he were wearing a conical hood that came down over his face.

“
Do you
see
it?”

The man moves aside a little to let one of the men float by. In the shadows, I see the tip of his hood brush and bend against the shadow of a pipe. The young man looks unconsciously embarrassed and darts forward to stand directly below the work lights, crumpling his shadow into a formless spot around his feet.

“
Did you see it?”

“
I saw it!”

All the men look directly at me. I can hear them mutter.

“
Wait, what is it? They’re all looking—”

“
Does he see it?” Ptarmagant asks anxiously. He prods me in the chest with his finger — “Does
he
see it?”

...“He sees it!”

The men are climbing down onto the tracks.

Ptarmagant looks at his watch.

“
Thieves
,” the Great Lover says the air around him becoming denser and denser.

The first man is raising his leg to step over the third rail when two bleats rap out from the far end of the station.

“
That’s right,” Ptarmagant sighs, lowering his wrist.

The train is now crying in strong steady pulses and its brakes are screaming. The men scatter, moving clumsily back toward the platform. The train rolls in, the doors open and the TO storms out of his compartment shouting at the men, who are swirling around back on the platform. Every few seconds is sucked in from somewhere — the TO is shouting and gesticulating — then he is engulfed — he shouts in alarm — the signal changes and our train lurches forward then accelerates smoothly down the track — I see the tall figure of the TO blur into them.

*

The map explains:

“
For this ptochocratic cult, the subway system recapitulates the progress of the dead soul, from the payment of special coins at the journey’s beginning to the negotiation of a maze of names, the pursuit of this or that colored fiber in the map. The subway system is a hermetic calculator, a wheel of essences moving you from this visible, organized space to another by way of dark chaos with no landscape or landmark; the subway system is like thought, and there are all sorts of guides. There are those who enter and never leave, and it clings to some others wherever they may emerge like a foul intriguing smell in the clothing.”

The map sighs, turning its lined face half to the sunset.

“
Some music is best heard at a distance half open to the sky, the fantasy stretched thinner and thinner like a powerful membrane offering itself to sensations. The air grows thicker and clearer, hardens to breathable diamond, shading out into absolutely unbound vacancy. The Great Lover, asleep in a spiral of sewage and spinning majestically in place, is also the Great Lover in his dream — this is one of his secrets, in the sense of a winning trick, an accomplishment in magic.”

—
A landscape with ashy soil and jagged mountains on the horizon, poisonous grey overcast turning to sulfurous yellow haze. He is walking arduously through craters, deep ruts. Somewhere the sound of a low-register reed instrument like an oboe plays something in and out of the wind. The sound does not strike him as having an origin, or as a message from somewhere else, rather it is simply present here like the flattened martian rocks and lichenous scrub. He emerges from a crater, and before him is the vast leprous flank of a colossal worm, lying across the world to horizon in either direction. The worm’s skin is dusty and twitches in minute galvanic spasms that cause it to shed little cascades of dust.

The Great Lover kneels beside it with a flicker of worry about getting dust on his pants and pulls sword segments out of his coat pockets. Fitting them together is a rather needlessly complicated business involving a great many tiny bolts that have to be fixed just so with a special allan wrench he has for some reason attached to a folding Japanese melon knife. Why can’t he just use the knife? The sword’s blade is over three feet long divided in one or two inch segments, those nearer the tip divided longitudinally.

“
With this many segments, it must be a really great sword.”

When the sword is finally assembled, the Great Lover proclaims something in a loud voice and swings the blade in three windmilling arcs, building up momentum, then with one lightning-fast nick he slices an opening in the worm’s side. The sides of the wound flap apart like tent canvas in a powerful wind, exposing translucent clear and white tissue; there is no bleeding, though icy water trickles out and darkens the powdery soil, forming a sort of pancake at the lower extremity of the gash. The worm, which looks to be a little over a dozen feet in diameter, has a chambered interior with seats. The chambers are lined with blue membranes and glow like ice caves. Someone has been waiting inside this worm for an unimaginably long time, and now he is going to come out through this aperture the Great Lover has made. A rat scoots across the Great Lover’s back and startles him awake — no pay off. Who was it?

*

Peering out the windows of the subway car at the bottom of the sea, stations dart away like startled fish.

“
Look intently enough, and there’s nothing you won’t find out there!” Ptarmagant says.

A platform sweeps by covered with panels of gold and bright, many-colored draperies, where rows of Minoan female priests lift snakes in their hands, the stepped rise and fall of their song precedes them and hangs after them in the air.

“
This is Deuteronôme,” he introduces me to a Haitian man in a striped shirt and leather vest who shakes my hand with one strong pump.

“
Deuteronôme le Sorcier,” he says with force in every syllable.

“
It’s like time travel, or music,” Ptarmagant says, oration cadences coming into his voice. “Don’t try to fit it all together into one story line, but transfer from line to line — now you’re in jeopardy, or a cold place — now you’re in a suave and confidential conversation—”

Later, as an experiment, I try to draw the demon into my eyes and ears. As he looks and listens out, the gnomes stagger and fall limp — rush over to the nearest — a painted corpse. They all are. The demon drops back down into my abdomen and the corpses stir and rise up smiling gnomes again. I stop and examine one.

“
Hey!”

The eyes swivel onto my face.

“
Are you all right?”

“
Fine!”

I exercise the demon moving it up into my head and letting it fall again into my abdomen, sliding into me and out of the circle of gnomes, and then out of me and into the gnomes. The demon’s strength improves, and soon I can draw him into my head without killing the gnomes. Now they just flop over onto the ground and sort of swim there in slow motion when I do it.

“
Send your nerves out,” Ptarmagant says softly.

I hesitate.

“
They won’t notice you. They can’t feel anything. They only know things abstractly,” Deuteronôme says.

Now I’m in a knot of them, looking from face to face. As they gather together an oppressive, smothering atmosphere intensifies around them; it’s hard to describe, an intense dullness. I try switching over to audio nerves, and immediately I pick up the sound, like a monotonous, insistently repeated lowing. Not much to see on visual nerves, but it’s as though I see them through a dusty window that gets dustier the more of them arrive. They dirty the light. Olfactory detects a smell reminds me of urinal cakes, and under that is a smell — I want to say a smell like sour lead. Touch and taste I’m leaving alone. It’s strange — nothing but moaning on the audio, but I can see them talking to each other. I withdraw.

“
They’re not vampires individually, only in the aggregate,” Ptarmagant is telling me.

“
You take any one of them alone and all you’ve got is a rather soulless person. What we’re really talking about is a
Vampirism
; it was not deliberately developed by anyone, it just happened as a consequence of the imposition of this particular system. The
Vampirism
is the spontaneous formation of the system as it develops according to the law of symmetry — you can’t have one without the other. But you see, some people have noticed this and learned to use the
Vampirism
, most of them without having any really clear idea of what they’re doing exactly. I mean they wouldn’t understand if you tried to explain it to them, but that’s exactly what it is. Others are used by the
Vampirism
, necessarily unconsciously.

“
The cult will be a counter-system, you see? We are all people who have, for one reason or another, come to see the
Vampirism
for what it is. Or, well, whatever it is, we see that it is
Vampirism
. It has stolen our people, love, time. I’ll guess you’re being robbed too...

“
The demon is
that which fouls up system
. That’s why you’re so important to us.”

“
I’ll foul up your system too, then won’t I?”

Deuteronôme says, “That will be true to a point, but we’ll cut a deal with the demon. He will find his way to get around it, but it should reduce the trouble he might cause to a manageable minimum.”

“
We’ll be well enough covered,” Ptarmagant says. “That’s the thing: by the law of symmetry, though the demon is what fouls up systems, you can’t create systems without the demon. The demon gives the system its half-start energy. But then, if the demon gets lost, it can turn vampire once the system becomes self-sustaining, as it happened out there.”

Ptarmagant’s sermons are recorded and distributed in installments of what they call a “system-program,” by two of his lieutenants — a former medical examiner named Dr. Thefarie, who turned out to be the middle-eastern man I’d seen around, and Algebra, whose real name is Spargens. Deuteronôme develops magic weapons and, with his nephew, is working to create a rapid messenger network to disseminate messages system-wide.

*

I freeze when I see Vera appear on the platform — I am watching from the tunnel... The train is holding there, with doors open, waiting for the connection. She is walking toward the hindmost car — I watch her coming, the round rubber disk at the tip of her cane taps at points along the hypnotic arc she sweeps it in. Suddenly the cane darts elastically sideways like a striking snake, tangling in the legs of a right-wing student type who was passing in the opposite direction. He falls and pivots, cursing her, but the hate jams before it can leave his face as he sees she’s blind — and she is calling

“
Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” waving her hands.

Her voice! She has a speech impediment that slushes her pronunciation and makes my whole body twang with desire to lap half-swooning the clear syrup from her ivory chin. The student moves off sourly adjusting his armband and mutters with his friends and she resumes walking along the platform in my direction, grinning from ear to ear that grin just blooms across her face a blooming, moist grin of gratified malevolence — my knees buckle and I nearly swing off my feet — she’s wicked! so
perfect
— her skin glows like silent film and the rest of the world is lost.

...Someone is appraising me. I can feel it — more than the gaze I can feel the way I’m being turned into a picture of myself, like a wonderfully flattering caricature. Hummm there is a song there, looping its choruses around me. I can feel the love lyrics forming just there... I’ve always loved that feeling... Gone now. He must not have boarded the train. It wasn’t that little armbander I tripped either. Who was that, anyway? Don’t I know that?

On the subway, as my father explains, a system of unreturned gazes develops spontaneously. My blindness sets me permanently apart; my eyes can go wherever they want, but my soul remains dark. When you travel, you are nothing. The cult is going to make new identities out of this travelling nothing; he expects we’ll fade into another world that way.

I hope he’s right. I can feel the flaccid, passive riders slump against me when the trains are busy. Their miserable weariness seeps out of them like residual cold, with an odor that makes me think of meat that’s been lying at the back of a freezer too long — years. I feel their limp bodies twitch. There’s fear panting all around me, not coming from anything or going anywhere. It just stands on them, all the time. More and more I feel those pikers polishing up their armbands, getting themselves good and angry and passing the same sour mush from one mouth to the next. Now and then I hear something robust, or something sweet, but less and less. Often, when I hear children, my senses nearly pounce on them, and I’m surprised at my own avidness. In my mind they are soft draughts and wind flurries close along the ground, with snowy voices when they’re small. The older ones have hotter voices.