The Great Lover (35 page)

Something scrambling thuds into my back and I stumble, pitching through the closing doors yanking and tearing, snarling and cursing. I get a firm grip but the train jerks I lose my balance, my weapon slides out of reach like in the movies, a wing thrusting its clammy butt end down the back of my coat feeling spasmodically for skin. We’re angry now and I snare them both with whip hands and wrestle them again around to the front, beads of sooty grease on their feathers. The wings writhe away and I quickly slam my back up against the partition door separating the TO’s compartment from the rest of the car. The wings are crouched not six feet away, leaning first this way, and then that, assessing their chances; oh good, a long pinfeather rises up past the top of one of the windows near on my left — one of the wings before me takes a probationary step forward, folding and unfolding its powerful muscles strain along the length of its long bones. I listen with increasing strain and there is a brushing sound moving down the ceiling of the car at random intervals. The wings lunge — I flap hands at them and they drop into what might be a defensive posture, but without retreating. Listen... sound of feathers frilling along broken glass behind him now; feint toward the rod carefully exposing a little of my back, the wings flip in two different directions and I slam my back to the black glass of the door. Rustle of newspapers as wings creep on the floor of the TO’s compartment. The pair in front of me group up together a few feet away. I listen behind me and stare in front of me. Now I dive for the floor and the wings flutter menacingly—

Sharp crack of glass and flutter behind. I roll — the wings on either side of the glass, having pounced at the same time and at the same target, smash into each other: the wing stumps haplessly fuse and fall to the floor flailing wildly trying to tear loose from each other. As they struggle they slough dust everywhere, a cloud of it fills the car.

When the train stops and the doors open, the dust is sucked out. Nothing on the floor there but long needly bones. This is the Courtland station, whose name he read with his fingers.

*

When two collide and latch onto each other, they perish — they implode, each sucked all the way into the other.

Under the watchful eyes of cops, the crowd at the Courtland station flows. The car doors slide back like the barred gates of a cell block and the crowd emerges, each one holding-in him or herself in a peculiar way getting farther away closer apart and farther together under the watchful eyes of cops. The copeyes are full of watching, there are watches in their ticking eyes. All of them have bulbs velcroed to one or the other shoulder, spattering the air with squelched voices and sounds with an unintelligible technical significance. They stand on the high catwalks over the platform with their hands on black belts weighed down with weapons. Each one carries a spray to blind people with, a gas to smother people with, a device to give people electric shocks with, a club to beat up people with, white plastic twist ties to tie people up with, a gun to kill people with, a knife to cut up people with, a little microwave torch to burn up people with, steel clamps to torture people with, grenades to explode people with, a cat o’nine tails to whip people with, a mask to hide behind and frighten people with, gloves lined with tiny hooks to slap people’s skin off with, a pump filled with hydrochloric acid to melt away people’s flesh with, shrapnel mines filled with flechettes to rip the flesh of people to shreds with, a webcam to film and share images of people being raped with, an inflatable basin to drown people with, a power drill to bore holes in people with, and a thick record book in which carefully to keep records, with a column on every page that reads: blind, suffocate, shock, club, restrain, gun down, dismember, immolate, torment, explode, flog, terrify, flay, dissolve, lacerate, violate, drown, and bore, with an empty circle next to each word, to be filled in with a number two pencil made of human bone when appropriate. The crowd flows safely by under the watchful eyes of cops, who lean on the banisters, their eyes flicking to and fro, receiving prompts through their earpieces and eyeglasses who looks to be the wrong race, whose face exhibits a wrong expression, whose clothing is indicative of a wrong opinion, to arrest. From time to time a grabber arm not unlike the kind that are suspended inside clear plastic cases over heaps of toys, and are manipulated to pluck up one toy or other and drop it through a chute into waiting hands on the outside of the machine, suddenly will drop down without the same air of happy anticipation and pluck someone out of the crowd. Under the watchful eyes of cops, the chosen one is drawn up, struggling and protesting, through a mesh of interblended plastic brushes that conceals whatever is above it, and which forms the apparent ceiling of the station. The watches in their ticking eyes take in this sudden arrest with a quick blankness and contraction that is not much different from the subtracted response of the people on the platform. Those nearest the chosen one speed up, look down, and change their mouths, while keeping them tightly shut, under the watchful eyes of cops.

Futsi and a group of skating provocateurs have run into trouble, armbands behind and now they are hemmed in, almost rushing straight into a zone of strong
Vampirism
. They can see it now, like a grey cloud inside the eye, with slack forms moving inside. The armbands, whether they see it or not, will drive them into it and then they’ll be in trouble. The armbands are not affected by the
Vampirism
in the same way; it irritates them and wears them out with stress — unless they can find an outlet, like kicking someone to death.

The provokers break apart — Futsi escapes along the tracks but four of his colleagues aren’t so lucky. They veer in among the students, who lash out at them with baseball bats. Futsi stops and waves the others to regroup when there is a deafening shout from the far end of the platform. Shuffling forms advance on its source — the Great Lover has emerged carrying a pair of dull red curtains still on the rod, with two matador poms on his hat. He leaps up on a bench and waggles his curtain at the enemy — he lunges this way and that with astounding speed, dodging their blows, whips the curtains over their faces, tangle, distract, deflect with it, whip the rod around brass rings jingling. Admiration has nearly paralyzed Futsi where he stands.

A wiry student charges the demon — the curtain rustles up and when it flips back there’s nothing to be seen but a wall that shouldn’t be there — the wiry student bounces back and down clutching his chest. A misguided tackle ends with a collision of tackler’s face and the banister post at the bottom of the stairs. Red-faced hunk swings at him with a collapsible baton, getting in close enough to see the poms on the demon’s hat are really balled-up rats, who suddenly leap at him and he panics away tripping over his feet. A cotillion type raises a heavy fire extinguisher over her head — with one knock of the curtain rod the demon ruins thousands of dollars of orthodontia — her mate goes berserk, rushes him, misses him in a coil of red fabric and clotheslines the only other one left standing.

All this has taken only a few seconds. Futsi cries out an alarm as vampires flap out of that un-look-at-able smudge at the far end of the platform. The regrouped jokers converge on the remaining armbands as the demon draws the wings. Futsi pops up giving a frat type the bottom of his board across the face and drops again, looks up in time to see the Great Lover playing at high-speed blind man’s buff darting in and out of their reach. They are just empty clothes rustling through the air, just wings bunched under caps and inside denim shoulders. One passes directly beneath the fluorescents and for a moment Futsi can see the slack, flour-colored face.

The demon titters, impossible to follow — even from this far away Futsi only just catches sight of him as he veers out of view. The others keep pressing in, but he refuses them the opportunity to gather together, and they are moving more and more clumsily, slowly — this is how it’s done — The demon stands motionless, staring Futsi right in the eye from nearly a hundred feet away, with a look in his eyes that mingles too much at once. Then he shoots backwards so fast and two heaps of clothes coming at him from opposite sides collide and fall tangled to the ground, writhing and puffing out dust.

But that delay brings the others in on him in a group. A train howls, its noise building steadily. He evades them all like magic but they are hemming him in — now gathers himself together and leaps across the tracks — they follow just as the express comes crashing down the track and catches them ploughing through an explosion of feathers spraying everywhere like foam. The train is already gone — red lights veer away — and the demon is there on the opposite platform twirling his curtain rod around his midsection.

They are talking about me more and more, Futsi and me, me and Futsi. I catch sight of Vera leaving with him pulls open a drawer in me, pain and disbelief... it seems so stark and plain the funnel in time, something I can feel inside me and out, that is drawing us together, all an illusion as solid as a strong wind. White teeth against the dark of your mouth, lips bright, diamond clear, like a line drawing, and I strain — with no power; but why not? My question is frozen outside time, as you explain it completely and with every thing you do, in a way I never can understand. You just abolish my Destiny, kissing him on the landing, as easy as anything. Go to the utter end of humiliation — go further, go get on. There’s nothing I can do.

In the middle of that night, you see the two of them in one body, suffering down in the sewers; he’s raving to himself in a strangled voice, pacing a small flat space where there’s just enough room to stand erect, hemmed in by dark slimy bricks. Punches the walls as he turns, kneads his head in his hands, mutters, the two voices pulling apart. He sobs and whines like a dog with a broken leg, reels and staggers, crawls into a round bricklined passage with a low ceiling.

“
We can’t! There’s nothing we can do!”

Do nothing? Do nothing! I’ll do something!

“
I refuse! You can’t override me!”

Yes I can!

“
I won’t allow it! I’ll kill myself!”

I’ll keep you alive!

[Very suddenly leap to feet in a crouch, arms out. Then, just as fast, fling self down hard onto back.]

“
I’ll wall myself up sink us in concrete — I’ll never allow it!”

You will...

[Get up again and fling self forward onto face.]

[Like warning a child, tone rising.] “No, no...”

[Getting louder.] “No I never will, never... never... If you don’t like it you just leave me.”

I’ll never leave you!

“
No no of course not,”

I can’t leave you!

“—
you’ll just stick around to torture me—”

Torture?!

[The word splits the air.]

“
You can’t leave?”

Torture?!

You’re the one who fell in love with her! Not me!

I love no one!

“
So... you’re stuck—”

I love no one!

You’re the one who keeps me in chains!

You’re the one who tortures me!

I suffer what you suffer—

“
...You suffer because...”

You love her!

I love no one.

[Lying still on his back.]

Go to her!

“
Listen. I will never do that.”

Go—

“
Listen. I will never do that. That wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t help. It would be no good. No good for you either.

“
Listen. You have to trust me. I will try the other way, but you have to help. Trust me. That or give up, that’s the only way. You know I won’t allow any other.

“
...Help me. Shore me up, help me take it.”

*

Pop out here, where some students have cornered an Indian or Pakistani teenager. His face is tense, he is bracing himself to break out — while the students’ voices get louder, more ragged — now they curse push shove they lift their fists and punch him — Futsi and his boys bound their skateboards down one flight of stairs after another and explode in among the group. All smiles, they take up their boards and wade in. Futsi spins out from his pursuer shifts his board from under his feet to his hands and completes the spin with weight-balanced board upside a student’s head. Biting his lower lip in excitement Futsi leads them in a charge that drives the students stumbling onto the tracks reeling wildly to avoid the charged rail.

Here’s a group with a banner and megaphone in another station. Sudden riot of derision, a wet turd balloon splats bullseye into the megaphone and others rain down on the students. Again Futsi is there, all smiles, wheeling in and out. A fat giant with sideburns and a red armband proudly tied around the sleeve of his fucking Che Guevara t-shirt vibrates toward the skaters roaring redfaced like a shaved bear. The skaters overwhelm him and he droops under a shower of punches and kicks. The skaters are like human fire, their bodies strobe with a staccato vitality. Suddenly there are police converging — some escape, Futsi is caught. Still smiling, ruefully, he is manhandled away in cuffs, bent nearly double.

They put him in a series of holding cells, keep interviewing him but it’s not clear what’s going on — he’s an illegal immigrant, they need to get this and that from this or that department and what will Japan think, etc. Futsi came here with nothing, joined Saliva Bank on bass, got better at playing and joined Pyroclasmo, got better and started his own group on bass called Stupidians with the drummer from Pyroclasmo and developed a decent following. Every show starts with three garish chords and—