The Great Lover (41 page)

“
I’m not tired,” he thinks. He can’t “look around,” though. It’s as though he has no head to turn, or rather, he does turn his head, but he is already seeing everything on all sides. His vision has no limit. He can feel his head like a soft, humming, dense whirlwind that just swirls this way and that as he turns it. He can even see it, from just behind or just inside. It has an aura with two dim separate layers, one blue and one sort of purple.

The faster they go, the more he sees. Now he sees himself from far off, whirling round and round and his uncle in the circle he draws with his board. The air in the station is whipping around them now, but he is not tired. He can feel the burring of the wheels and his uncle’s low drone, shifting evenly to and fro.

“
It’s balanced. As long as it’s balanced, we don’t lose energy and get tired. But he can keep adding force so the balance goes up too.”

Now he can see the switching yard, a mile away underground. And there they are, little mites on a platform far off in the distance.

“
Get ready to step to the side,” his uncle’s voice comes to him sharply.

“
Which side?”

“
Any side!”

The switching yard is crisp and visible. Multiply can smell it.

“
Step!”

Multiply steps sideways off his board. He is in the switchyard. The board rolls from him and to a stop a few feet away. He turns. Deuteronôme is pocketing his machine. From far off in the direction of the platform there is a dull throbbing sound dwindling quickly away, like the aftermath of an explosion.

“
We will have destroyed some when we left,” his uncle says. “But not her.”

*

The Great Lover is searching for Vera across the bottom of the ocean, lunging gracelessly through the thick grey muck, leaving a trail of cloudy water behind him. He flaps along in long shallow hops, his coat tails waft up and down like a manta ray’s wings. The water is filled with errant-slanting blonde light with no source; this ocean has no surface. The vast form of a sperm whale hovers over him, and just ahead; its flanks and lips are minutely flecked with gold.

Now the whale is ahead of him, coming toward him, a gigantic fluked brow growing like a dark blot. Its long flukes lower to form a kind of arch over the marble bench on which Vera is sitting. The Great Lover churns forward clawing at the water — her bench is the only thing occupying an area of worn pavings, clinched in spidery black weeds. As his feet touch the pavings he is able to move swiftly toward her, pressing hard against thick water. The whale vanishes, ascending up into space. The Great Lover rushes toward Vera; she senses him coming and stands not certain, her jaw as always is a little slack, like a fish’s, revealing her bottom teeth. He drops to his knees in front of her and flings his arms around her waist burying his face in her stomach, and she bends forward, mouth hanging open, her splayed hands pat his head here and there. He tips it back, and she presses her fingertips here and there on his face as though she were tapping something into an old-fashioned adding-machine.

She recognizes him. Her face lights up, and she leans forward lavishing awkward caresses on him. He takes her face in his hands and she lunges forward for his kiss, their lips meet — when she is kissing him she laughs triumphantly, it’s a hoarse, husky, primate sound. His tears ooze out hot into cold water and turn into boiling threads of steam.

He wakes with tears streaming down his face and into the grass. They never stop.

*

Now...

Now...

Now I’m in my imagination, which is sort of drifting along the world like a jellyfish. What current is carrying me I can’t say, but I do not choose to go this way or that.

At the moment, I’m idling here, in an alley where roaches and mice rifle the trash bags. The former creep, stop, creep, while the mice are always darting and electrified, like animated dust mats. Leaning up against a can, someone’s thrown away a painting of an owl perched on a branch, and there is an inverted river a dark triangular line between its eyes that expands under my gaze to become a crevasse, a clear, cold place cut from black glass, and I’m almost trapped in it. Its starkness endues the alley, which I still see distinctly, with the same quality, the same starkness, to the mice, the glinting black trash bags, the glinting eyes of the mice and scales of the roaches, and slimy tracks of the rank water—

No one knew anything about his daughter he might as well have emanated her out of his own person...

He
did
.

There is the room, the breathless day, the chair and the corner, and he is there in the hall, looking in through the doorway. This silent, hesitant, trembling room is there in the front of my mind, and in the back I see a ribbon of empty days for my father. He never married, there was no wife, there was a chasm of loneliness and dejection, and his friend’s suicide.

The light outside stands straight up and down, the sun directly over the house, the windowsills glow like moonlit frost and though the windows are open the snowy curtains hang still with dark folds. The room is empty. Then I step out from the dark corner behind the chair, a little girl in a white dress, my hair loose, a blot of shadow between my nose and the bangs I had then — my father is transfixed with joy and fright, I can feel his panic and his frenzied longing to believe in me. Then he holds out his arms, his heavy hands quivering. I trot forward into his embrace. He murmurs my name, repeating it as he lowers his cheek to brush the crown of my head. With each repetition I grow more solid, two white spots quicken in the shadow on my face and now I have eyes, if useless ones. “Love is blind.” I wonder if that flashed through his head just then, and if I owe my defective eyes to a cliché.

The crevasse is the form my choice imposes as I begin to comprehend it: I have a choice... even though I am imaginary, I possess a choice — that, as an imaginary person loneliness summoned I can come
back
... nothing prevents my taking form again — and everything will go on the same just the same...

Or I can
come
back, and everything will be different totally different. I’m following both at once — I come
back
and my image stretches to fill one long time with no events, and I and everyone else will run on in our routines like contented pocket watches... or I
come
back the other way — I can feel the power to do that hum, like the premonition of a fit: it means taking on the mantle of the god they’ve made, and coming as that god to them. I’ve called it a mantle, and before me I see the fireplace and hovering just above my shoulders ready to drop down at any moment is an elongated cool gelatinous blob of fabric.

Something horrifying is happening in the fireplace — it’s cold, like the bottom of the ocean, and people I love are dying in it, crushed frozen and drowning — but then, with an inner blow I discover I
can
love them, I mean I do! I feel it like a magnetism tugging at my ghostly substance — so even an imaginary soul can really love — why not?—

If I come, people I love will die. It would be necessary; I feel this is certain, even if I don’t know why, I feel it’s correct. I could go, never to return; I could come
back
— but
coming
back to be god would mean — I see the crevasse stretching open — bringing them something really
new
. Which was always the aim. So was it an aim worth dying for?

*

The Great Lover lies in a ditch; silty grey light plays to and fro over him, like rays through the ocean. He stirs; he stands up in a silent movie.

Atop the ridge above the ditch, he stands with his hands by his sides, gazing up and around him at the sun, obscured by its own clashing rays. A column of bright birds coils around him spinning into the higher air. He sees the sun’s hard glints through their blurred forms; the birds braid the rays, dart to and fro like kingfishers.

A statue on a streaked stone podium points an index finger of bronze level at the horizon like a cannon. Now the sun is at the horizon, bowing steadily lower. Its steely brilliance fades. The charcoal horizon is plain against it. The sun is a sullen red ball now, like a globe of smoking blood. A figure emerges from it and comes toward him with slow, league-sweeping strides. Silhouetted against the sun, the figure’s elongated outline shivers. Standing on the horizon, it lifts its arms and seems to cup its hands before its face.

“
The Prosthetic Death is still alive!”

A woman’s voice it rivets him to the spot.

The moon is above the sun, full and white as ice. Its light alone shines on the wings of the birds, so that they are pale grey and snowy untinged with any of the sun’s scarlet, and wanly shine even against the disk of the sun, not silhouetted. Cassiopeia sparkles at the zenith. The sun, the moon, and Cassiopeia, are all together in one line, and, through all three, Vera flexes her slender waist in a still vaster constellation.

A sight high and austere, now the sky is filled with stationary comets, large light-spindled stars, in peach-colored space like a transparent fire. Where the sun was, he sees a tree, with peach-fire light on bronze leaves, and blonde flames fixed to the end of each branch. The tree is silent.

The woman on the horizon he now sees is wearing a long skirt, a garment that falls from her shoulders, a kerchief over her long hair. Gold hoops flash at her ears.

“
Oh, Great Lover, the sun is releasing-power, escapes all power, and can’t be bound. Always think of it. Be strengthened. Defeat
your
enemy.”

Something is lying there in front of him. He takes it in his hand — a piece of gold. In picking it up, he had clumsily plucked a few blades of grass with it, and these damp blades lie around the gold in his hand. He looks at the colors beside each other; I am saying he looks at the color of gold, which is not yellow, and the color of grass, which is not green. He sees these shining colors live in his hand, which is his own color. Look around. See a golden haze glowing on the tall dewy grass like softened fire. Look up, and see the sun make blue gold of the sky. Stand up. There is a lane, almost only a dirt rut, threaded across the deep grass, which vanishes through a small stand of trees. A hoop, like the kind children used to chase with a wand, but made all of dazzling gold, rolls along the lane and darts swiftly into the stand of trees. The gold winks as the hoop vanishes around a tree. Turning the trunk, he enters a meadow surrounded by old trees and dense bracken, all saturated with shadow. The grass is long and tufted, and a lofty, slender beech is growing there apart from the others.

Go up to the beech tree and drop to his knees at its roots. The hoop, although it has no gap in it, has encompassed the trunk, and hangs in midair, spinning slowly in place, like Saturn’s rings; it makes an inaudible sound against the air, like two earthenware plates rubbing together. In the shade of the branches — in that shade he sees the shade of her tresses. He breathes aloud, two fast deep breaths.

He mutters her name, he lowers his head as though he were too weak to hold it up, his hands on the ground, his head shakes and his eyes drip.

Then he raises his face again to the hoop; he feels her fingers drawn down his features, in his mind he hears her voice say “I am with you.” His head lowers again, and he sobs her name over and over, Vera Vera crushing black loam in hands that tremble. The hoop rotates slowly above him.

*

One of the women becomes a dark figure whose head ascends out of sight into blue shadows—

“
She is coming.”

*

Caught as a group, under the very worst circumstances: Futsi, Deuteronôme, Multiply, and Dr. Thefarie.

Welling up around the stairs is a mob, blurred in a lethal grey fluoresence, and dotted with red armbanders. The stairs are however the only way to get onto the overhead walkway from this platform. They make their escape, but, as they tumble down the stairs on the far side — no street exit — have to go deeper, to the tracks below and pray they haven’t made it that far yet — but, Uar is gone.

Uar is standing on the uptown platform they’ve just quitted, standing with his knife out at the base of the stairs. He’s going to hold them there.

Multiply and Futsi are for going back but Deuteronôme orders them sharply to stay together. As they race for the lower platform a wave of enemies crashes around Uar. Face calm with fierce concentration he drives them all back, his knife darting and slashing. At first sight of blood the armbanders scatter, running, as they tell themselves, for the police, for reinforcements.

Futsi nearly ploughs right into the midst of a grey haze waiting for them on the lower platform just before the stairs. A dull pull on them all as they wheel around the banister and head along the tracks in the opposite direction. No good — more ahead.

Now the mob on the upper platform falls back from the stairs. Uar remains in place, breathing hard, sweat beaded on his face, but uninjured. In his trance he is able to lash out at them without fear of being weakened. Slashed remnants of wings, mushy arms and legs, ears and other severed extremities litter the base of the stairs where he has been at work. But now the enemy has recognized his immunity, and a cry rings out from blank faces. A moment later, something huge lumbers from the tunnels not twenty feet from Uar.

Futsi and the others are forced to cross the tracks, leaping carefully over the charged rails. Shapes, rustling, footsteps on all sides. They’re hemmed in completely.