The Great Lover (2 page)

In one of my own forthcoming books there is a scene in a tavern where are gathered a selection of notable modern authors. Michael Cisco is the first of them to be introduced by a guide to the narrator, with the words, “He’s a writer of elegantly dark philosophic fantasy but one who is often overlooked — he’s philosophical about everything except that fact.” This is making an assumption about Cisco’s attitude that has no basis in reality; I don’t really know how he regards himself. Yet I suspect the time is coming when to overlook him will be still to see him, for if anyone has the ability to bend light it is surely Michael Cisco.

To sum up briefly,
The Great Lover
is a disturbing and enormously powerful work, a valuable addition to Cisco’s impressive bibliography. Among other things it creates a perfect equilibrium, by compression, between external and internal reality. Never before have I laboured so helplessly over writing a foreword to a novel. Immediately after reading it, I realised I had nothing much to say. It’s a perfect work of art.

THE GREAT LOVER

The birds suddenly leap into the air from the grass and from the trees, come together and rise in a palpitating clot, then disperse to the horizon... each one black against the darkening blue sky. The wind leaps from the grass and trees, it rises and grows stronger, more alarming. Over my grave the turf is ruffled, the dry flowers knock against my stone battering their petals away. The world is filled with energy; these minute events each impart another twist to this or that hidden coil, and behind our earthen walls decay rifles our bodies like hot wind — we feel it, too. The wind rises and flickers through our sere, pompous grave clothes. At its far extremity a woman in a costume raises her veiled head and howls softly at the sky. She is turning into a coyote with a light heart, though her appearance stays the same.

Though I can turn my head neither to the left or right and so am unable to look at my neighbors in the earth, our nerves have grown and penetrate our caskets. They wove a nervous lace through the solid rock. Batteries of memory in random series — we are there wherever wind blows fire burns water laps dirt melts because there are memories of yours in all these things, memory to heal or harm. In the
story
the weapons of memory cross with the present’s weapons; in the world, no one ever tells a story in which we have
no
part. The line passes through us, and we can feel every train go by. We can feel every word on every train going by.

My coffin is suddenly ablaze with light. A luminous vapor appears with a pop like a cloud in a cloud chamber directly above me and my coffin glows like a fluorescent tube. I can see myself, all withered. The ridgy skin is stretched taut over my deflated eyesockets; my eyes appear to be open but cast down; and it is this modest, still face that I bring to you. My lips have dried and stretched themselves over my teeth in a flattened ellipse, and it is through this crooning aperture that my voice passes out to you by way of those subterranean vibrations I mentioned by way of those subterranean vibrations. Now off to the left, I see another coffin, lit from within, transparent, its tenant bows her head. One by one, in some cases two at a time, like the lights of a theatre marquee, coffins around me burst alight with pale, blonde flame, tenuous as mist; the light is absolute. Irresistible commands drift horizontally through space and through matter like flakes of marine snow, evenly spreading on their own. Whenever one collides with a secret germ of happiness inside, it joins itself to it ardently, becomes it, so that it is a joy to obey. The turning of a page, an irresistible command.

The pale road presses out from between my lips, the anonymous skull voice. In the dark, we are hanging together on the billowing canopy our nerves made, a diamond of eight coffins trailing long nervous manes. We hang in fertile flesh-eating graveyard earth. Its spray flecks my skin with bright cinders, and lying here I experience the onset of spring, a warm elongation of limbs, of gently rising sap, the distention of lungs as they greedily fill themselves with the fragrance of new flowers.

A thrill of suspense draws us taught on nerve-lanyards. Something is happening. Our nerves rise like weary hands and clasp together, forming mercurial connections sealed with white coagulant. Dry and brittle as straw, they creak as they lean toward each other; as they knit, they become humid and supple. Now they gleam with perspiration, a salt mist gathers around an elastic web of thickening white cables. I feel a draught in my skull, sly jets and whistles of air — we eight are no longer strangers. Above us jaws open wide even blacker on the inside — now one by one our jaws also drop open. We will unhurriedly draw this light into our desiccated bodies. It will consume us and alchemize us, and when we are done, we will die again. Our frail bodies shudder, vibrate with strain. Our voices burn together into one voice, like rising from a terrible fire a ball of black smoke that is our voice speaking loud enough for you to hear. We are the undergrounders.

You can hear my words, but you cannot hear the wild gaiety with which I speak them. I am the voice from the midst of eight golden coffins.

“
hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae”

“
this is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live”

—
motto from an autopsy room

CHAPTER ONE

The morning raises the city’s tide so you feel the whole city wobble, climbing up round your belt like weightless gelatin. (This is the map just breaking in to remind you to keep a look out for me.) On into the afternoon here it is again, the staggered city struts along tripping but never less full of itself than in the hours leading up to quitting time and sunset. The wind slaps a man going along the pavement full in the chest with a windblown leaflet. He peels it back and looks at the big black words without scanning them, only taking the whole sheet in at once shallowly; it says “Respect to the Skeletons of the Robbery Victims, To the Bones Red Without Blood, To the creeping Grins of Ghouls and Gibbons with Eyes like Full Moons, To all Nocturnal Animals that have not yet been mastered, To Sardonic Teeth, the Of of Of and the And The And The and To the destructive detriment of all thrones of every nation and the steady development of all astonishing disintegrations and transformations in and throughout all the Cardinal and Ordinal Worlds, and in All Spaces and Times, This Goes Out to Trim Hand and the two Stolen Skeletons, This Goes Out to Laughing Eyes, This Goes Out to You Here, This is a Four Noble Truths: Life is Joy — Desire is Life — Lose Desire and You Are DEAD — Strong Desire willing and desiring are one dance move the Very Biggest, distribute in and through your bodies with perfect ease and effortlessness.” — The
Preta Sa Terma
[70 B.C.E. (M.T.A/c.m.a.p.)] All right fine I drop the paper in a can and cross the street. Swivelling my head and shoulders around to look for cars I don’t see the open manhole. Falling in, I crack my head on the metal rim — knocked unconscious. A splash down there — only a whisper, unnoticed on the street.

Down below the streets, he is going to die. He floats face down, a bubble of air inside his coat makes a glistening hump in the brown water. A few viscous bubbles rattle in grey-brown froth around his ears and temples. The current carries him beneath slimy brick arches smooth as intestines, past a spacious concrete platform bristling with iron rods.

Here the tunnel is larger, the water thick and clotted; a thin bow wave ridge of scum rides before his brow. Brick tubes open on the main, admitting dim patches of sallow light on the rolling water. He is syphoned deeper, down a sloping ramp with a rustling cape of sewage, into pitchy tunnels. He turns this and that way in the stream like a tossing sleeper — his arms make weak, formless gestures. An evil slurrying sound is rising out of the darkness ahead. The current grows rapid, the water is disturbed, his body turns and flails against the oozing brick of the tunnel walls, feet and hands smack against the bricks, and a moment later are swinging in open water. The noise suddenly becomes a roar, edged with a hiss, resounding in a large, enclosed space. Still with his face in the water, the man begins an accelerating spin, one leg is sucked downward and his body is now fitfully exposed to the air, tumbling in the shallow bowl of a whirlpool. The drain batters his body against its edges for a few seconds, his puckered face white streaked with brown upturned as he goes down feet-first. The coiling water closes black over his face...

*

Morning egg white of the sun, light instantly frosting the sky in gold white and pink layers. A crumpled-up form is lying on concrete made dazzling by light on the water. Sewage steams in oblong tanks sunk into the platform, and flakes of sunlight throb on the surface of the river beside the treatment plant. I am lying in a puddle of dark brown water, on a water-marbled strip between two of the tanks. I can’t see any of this, because I rest on my face, shoulders pushed forward, palms up at my sides. I spread my arms a little thoughtlessly push myself up onto my forehead, chin down on my chest. Pain stiffens my arms or stiffness pains my arms... my hands grope distractedly at either side of my head.

The Great Lover puts my palms to the ground and pushes himself up. I stand slowly, tilting one vertebra on top of the last until he is more or less erect, though his knees are still bent. Sewage streams from my clothes and a cloud of flies dithers around me. His face is white as wax, my glasses are mashed out of alignment but the lenses are clean, the silver frames still gleam. I can feel their misfocus like a knot inside each eye. His face is coated with a grainy film of dried brown sewage laced with an arabesque of livid white cracks, and his lips are powdery and wan.

I tilt his head and shoulders back, staring transformed at the sun. Its warmth is welcome, but I’m cold inside. Seagulls are suddenly wailing all around me wailing, climbing on slow-rising ribbons of heat reradiated by the concrete. I stand in the center of their fat, up-spiralling column. I hunch a little, standing with head bowed because it’s heavy, with a sagging mouth, drooping shoulders, knees bent, arms hanging, surrounded by the darting forms of swift gulls and brown flies.

*

Street rumble is only just starting to grow, still somewhere far off, and the downtown streets are nearly deserted. You can see him coming slowly from the direction of the river, walking bowlegged with sewage slopping from his pant cuffs. I walk with his hands pressed to his chest; soft morning air flows over, full of invisible birds with brilliant metallic plumage, the street is lined with shining invisible skulls. Dawn light on a dull red rail trestle bathes it with honey, then changes it to the rich hue of arterial blood...

What happened?

The sky has turned white, clouds are pale irregular prominences and fat pillars blending with the white of the sky so that only their outlines are visible.

What happened?

The trees—

What hit me?

The trees are just closing, branches steeple over my head. Who is that? — And what’s it?

That is what’s that. Who doesn’t know the answer and asks?

The trees sparkle with bright new leaves. The lanes in the park are still empty. He walks slowly, pink afterimages dancing in his dazzled eyes. Did something happen? Something happened
to me
. What’s the matter?

Now he stops on top of a low ridge overlooking a vast meadow the grass breathing a milky haze; he is looking at a single tree far off across the meadow, standing a bit out from the rest, a towering corona of green on a mammoth black trunk. My knees go slack and I drop onto them, staring in astonishment at the tree that stands in the milky haze of the calm meadow like a god.

I hear a bird’s voice ring out clearly close by — and now I see: there is a single, enormous flame superimposed on the tree, no it’s inside the tree. A blonde flame extending from the roots nearly to the topmost branches. It is not an image: it burns but is not consuming the tree. It is still and perfect, like a candle flame in a closed room. And now I can see with eyes hot and brimming the flame is many flames, a small flame at the tip of each branch standing straight up like brilliant jewels. A gradual wind sets the branches nodding and the flames serenely rise and fall without changing their shape, or flickering, the bird is singing and the branches tenderly knead the air each with its serenely undisturbed flame.

He is gazing at the tree as though it were the first thing he had ever seen. Tears drip from his eyes, and soak into the shit on his face.

*

I peer at a warped reflection in the steel seeing dark whorls all through my face that seem to float between my face and the steel like they can’t make up their minds where they are. Fingers smudging the buttons brown I tap out a phone number I remember. He has a blind need to try to tell someone what happened. A few numbers in, he hangs up and fumbles out a brown slimy coin that oozes into the slot leaving ridges of pale brown filth to either side of the opening. Dials again, ring purrs repeatedly down the long tube of the line, then the receiver out there picks up with a snap and a voice like irritable smoke is instantly drowned out by a loud disgusting slopping sound like vomiting underwater.

I hang up and stagger out of the booth — the sound is what’s left of my voice. I try a few test words and the sound so horrifies him that he pulls out a pocket sewing kit threads the needle and sews his lips together, thread rustling through punctures in flesh like numb dough, cinched tight.