The Great Lover (23 page)

I dreamt I sat in a bungalow classroom, looked up to the windows set along the top of the wall in time to see the roof of the adjacent building silently peel off in the wind. It is torn off all in one piece and undulates away like a flying carpet shedding slates. I am in a basement draped in black — an elaborate puzzle here... There’s an altar and an aisle lined with upturned plastic paint buckets. Fixed in the ceiling above each bucket is a bizarre heavy metal appliance, a solid, round fan in a thick carapace pitted with regularly-spaced holes and a three-way switch on the bottom — all as solidly made as some kind of military hardware or sewing machines. In between these fans, coffee cans hang straight down from the ceiling on strings. I climb up on one of the buckets and fiddle with a fan switch — a menacing, far away voice speaks faintly, a theatrical voice unrelated to this scene — are these speakers? I feel a threat, trouble if I can’t figure this out; from one of the cans I extract a pamphlet that says: “
CHOCO MARC
—
DO NOT TOUCH
”... I think it means something backwards but can’t get past CRAM — cram what? Where do I cram it?

I’m scanning through a little diner, counter, booths, red and white checkered cloths, all empty. One shadowy booth in the corner — as I zoom in, I see a horrible godlike face glow there. It melts, and I know I am lying somewhere dreaming; I feel myself aping the melting face with grimaces that pull my features down and elongate them. I feel loss — the foreboding that someone will die, the fear that someone will die, and leave me forever. Alone I will be dead as well.

I make my way to the park. Who will die? Did I know that face? The question becomes too heavy to hold and I let it drop. I watch the wind stir the trees with pain, unbearably beautiful. I live again in the relish I feel for this longing; in the consolation of knowing I am able to feel this sweet light tactful sadness.

He’s there at the window, staring out. Something’s wrong — he doesn’t acknowledge me as I approach. I blunder upstairs quickly. He stands at one side of the window immobilized with an erection, his whole body almost imperceptibly swollen and trembling. His semen has splattered the wall below the window sill and congealed into an acute waxy triangle that sprouts vanes like mangrove roots near the floor. I cross swiftly to him and lay my hand on his arm, hanging like the other straight at his side. It buzzes under my hand and his spine begins to buck, nectar — his semen is a translucent green, like pale lime jelly — spurts onto the wall. His body limpens and I get around behind him putting my arms under his and drag him toward the bed. His feet seem to peel away from the floor. He comes three times before I get him onto the bed, just from being touched, and starts to whimper.

Now he turns and kisses me — I can see his face from the inside, like a wall with two enormous skylights. I draw near to the lights and look out, the vision focussing like a kaleidoscope I see the park blazing with greens and browns, each glint on the surface of the stream hits me like a savage kick, and deep down below me I can feel his yearning like a drum so deep it’s more palpable than audible. He has hawk eyes, zooming in on a couple here, or a solitary there — their incandescent pinks reds browns, flossy hair, all buttered by the sun, unbearably inviting. I feel how he longs to touch living flesh, marvelling at its tenderness, and I realize our mistake in not making him of tissue. He is miserable in intolerable rigidity of this mineral body, flexible as it is. I was stupid — I built him entirely out of the cycle. If we’d made him from tissue, he would have grown, matured, and withered, as he should have. The mineral cycle is far vaster in time by many orders of magnitude. Immortally dying to yield, to be soft...

Tiny white petals blown off the trees drift by on the air like snow; he is homing in on a squirrel, the soft glistening gems of its black eyes, the feathery tail... he aches for the trees, the grass, the wind, the clouds. Now I’m seeing a memory of last night — a woman... Helpless agony in his desire is like white-hot gusts of wind inside, crushing yelps of pain out of him to vibrate within the barrier of his paralyzed lips. The swell of those gusts lifts me right out of his mind.

With Hulferde dead he has no place to send all this power, and Pearl just swells up with it like an unbreakable bladder.

I stand, looking down at him. I bend over him, my jaw in my fingers, lift first one leg into the air, then the other, and float over him, peering down. I stand again.

“
Hang in there,” I tell him. “I’ll think of something.”

The sound of my voice is enough to set him off again — maybe he felt the vibrations.

I get the electric connection down beneath my solar plexus — “Ah I got just the thing—” snapping my fingers, gradually turning into a human cartoon.

He slaps his chest with his palm and in a wildly exaggerated Baltic accent gurgles “Me fix good!”

*

“
Why did I show you the
Phaedrus
?”

“
I don’t know yet.”

The train plummets through the dark with a fantastic racket from the open transoms, the fluorescents wink out sluggishly rekindle and wink out again. Ptarmagant is fitfully outlined by lozenges of tunnel light cookie-cut by the windows. When the lights come back on, both of us are gone.

During my time in the brine tank, I saw many images streak by like subway stations. Huge boa constrictors raise miniature effigies of Cretan priestesses in their mouths... the full-size, living priestesses sit on the constrictors’ heads like bar stools, their skirts draped louche over one massive serpent eye, and the snakes raise them slowly up to the fluorescent lights. And then I saw Ptarmagant, and inside him a tumor growing like an angry plum. I took this to Dr. Thefarie, who questioned me closely on the appearance of the tumor and concluded, “I believe you have seen something.”

He makes preparations for a procedure, requesting my assistance. While working out his plans a new idea occurs to him — Dr. Thefarie explains that, under his supervision, a number of exploratory surgeries were conducted on the city itself in search of any organic structure which might represent the condensation of urban thoughts into tissue, like an “urban nerve yeast.” Of the many samples returned — which included a table-sized burgundy-colored organ whose function could not be determined, and what appeared to be something approximating an opaque and useless eye — there was a scoop of nerve matter about the size and shape of an ear of corn. This tissue had mysterious properties: while it contained no acid, weak acids would spontaneously condense on any exposed surface in its vicinity; it also seemed to drain all the current out of any electronic device within a certain distance of it.

“
We could take advantage of the operation to graft some of this nerve material onto him,” Dr. Thefarie says. “I have carried out some experiments into relations between the activity of the nervous system and cancer, and I think that perhaps the presence of this nerve material could promote remission.”

Ptarmagant is agreeable.

The operation: Ptarmagant sits on a metal chair with a cracked vinyl seat, the arms bent out at an angle to accommodate his bulk, and leans forward resting his upper chest head and arms on the table fixed to the floor. A sheet is thrown about him, beneath which his shirt is removed. In the train operator’s booth, Spargens is perspiring at the controls, eating on a candy bar. Someone had evidently thought it would be fun to hang glow-in-the-dark stars and planets from the ceiling on lengths of dental floss. Astral goblins stroking ghost-lightning combs over my pain centers Ptarmagant doesn’t want to be put under, but Dr. Thefarie insists, saying Ptarmagant must not only be unconscious but dreaming. Warren with his speakers rocks and bellows at the top of his lungs, and he’s brought along his friend Jeremy, a fattish rumpled man with a head like a steaming pink snowball, fumes of flyaway white hair rising from his bald pate. As Warren rocks, his feet pump a broad sewing-machine treadle which in turn sets prayer wheels whirring all throughout the car. Negative charge from the wires creates a field; enter it and you experience a sudden coolness and pressure drop below the waist as though you’d just been cut loose from a corset. Slight lightheadedness goes with the feeling; I etherize Ptarmagant. The field will promote dream sleep. Another associate, a wiry little man named Schwips, adjusts the lights.

The train rolls smoothly into darkened tunnels on the abandoned line. Dr. Thefarie makes the incision along a t-square. He deftly removes the tumor, places it in a trash bag, snaps his fingers, and Schwips goes to retrieve the sample of nerve material from a battered steel icebox. With tongs, he extracts a steaming copper ciborium from a cloud of friedel-crafts reactions and frost stinking of corrupted batteries and chlorine. Blinking tears from his eyes, Schwips proffers the ciborium; the Great Lover unscrews its frozen top leaving some of the skin from his fingertips on the metal; using padded forceps Dr. Thefarie extracts a length of translucent tissue like clear ice sparkling with tiny white motes. Inside it there is a delicate, cone-shaped structure of mercury filaments. With a single deft jab of the scalpel, Dr. Thefarie nicks the sample and opens a minute pathway to the spine, aligns the material, then pulls the incision closed over the sample.

I lean over the wound, part my jaws and a harsh buzz thrums out. The stitches pull loose from my lips and bind Ptarmagant’s wound closed. When I stand up, and my shadow falls away from his body, it takes the incision away with it. The skin is smooth and whole once more.

*

They didn’t invite me, but I had to be there. The door to the conductor’s compartment raps against the wall, and as I draw near I can feel no heat, none of the small perturbations of the air that mean a person is near. I slip into the compartment and sit on the seat that folds out from the wall. Behind me the window is open. My father is already coming round, talking faintly with Spargens, Schwips and a few others... him too — I knew he was there, hell I smelt him.

He’s speaking now. I hold the seat with both hands between my knees and listen through the racket of the wheels to his voice — the words are lost, but I can hear the tone rise and fall. I let my head drop back.

Why doesn’t he talk to me?

The train plunges into one of the tunnels — I can smell we’re below the river — and the sudden change in pressure hits the car with a thud. I feel my hair fly up around my head. My eyelashes beat against my bangs. Out in the dark, his voice is taking shape — a huge, squat form, like a big tiki. It has horns on top, and the head sits right on the broad shoulders. The brows are bunched up like burlap bags, and intense, concentrated heat comes from the blowtorches of his pupils. There are deep creases descending from the eyes over the cheeks, which gather on either side of the nose. The nostrils are flared out like two bells, and now the mouth, with a broad flat ring of lip, snarling, shaped like a figure eight on its side. Crackling flames whirr behind the triangular jack-o-lantern teeth. Warm syrup bathes my heart. I float in front of him.

Those teeth are like fence pickets. I touch the oily lapels and collar. Their grit clings to my palms like wet sand. I throw my arms around his neck — it’s so thick my hands don’t meet... I climb up onto him and press against his unyielding surface, with my cheek to the pebbly pig-iron of his bulging, bull-like neck.

(Vera’s arms rise in the air like someone who is being hypnotized.)

Now it’s turning into skin, the metal is changing, and begins to yield. It softens — it yields. The statue is turning its face to me, turning into a human being.

(Vera is deep in her imagination. An envelope of pleasure, invisible and shining, closes like mail around her as they lace together; there are fragrant, placid lips within reach of hers that seek out her kiss with delicious unhurriedness. They are reclining together onto yielding space. It spins faster and faster, their bodies become pale streaks then blur together and levitate a vibrating pale band of light, a human ring springs up and hovers in space.)

*

Ptarmagant recovers in a hammock at the back of the car. “Composite ghost,” he mutters, sweat rolling down his huge face, “composite ghosts we must put together as we put together the bodies — spirits stitched together with ectoplasmic sutures, the distilled essence of the mad testament.

“
A black box and a white box roll toward each other in a groove along the tree-lined horizon. Above them the sky rises dark grey like an infinitely high wall. My coat opens, the beetle flies up and carries me with it, blue consul he of the sedge and the bee.”

Dr. Thefarie glances at me — “Are you paying attention? He may say something important.”

Ptarmagant turns his head and his eyes focus slowly on me.

“
Given the proper conditions, life could arise spontaneously again, as it did at first. Nothing prevents this. It could happen here in the tunnels, or anywhere. New, unevolved organisms, living by wholly other principles, perhaps not even recognizably alive to us. The first organisms on earth were fermenters. They were superseded by the respirators. Nothing prevents the development of some new way...” His breath drops out of him in a puff, and he slumps back exhausted.

His body stiffens and his teeth clench in his quivering face. The spasm passes. He begins muttering again.

“
All gods are local: you can’t bring Allah to the Maine Woods and you can’t bring New England Transcendentalism to the Sahara Desert — the extension cord will not reach... It must have different names and practices, and be known to no one altogether.” As Ptarmagant speaks calcium dust siphons from the upright spines of books shelved on subway seats.