The Great Lover Read online

  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.

  The jive of the city is growing with the gathering day and people are starting to blunder out into the air, startle the daylight. Dream panic of being seen cracks — he looks around, sees a manhole, lifts it and darts down closing it behind him. For a while he hold on to the rungs, his face an inch away from the underside of manhole cover, listening to feet tramp on it.

  A patch of irregular light on scrolling brown water, a brick edge. The light casts a foggy reflection on the ledge. A rat is looking diagonally in his direction. Its eye is perfectly round and black as a pool of oil, with a shapeless gleam. Although it is surely filthy, its coat catches the dim light like a shirt of glinting mail. With only vaguely-coordinated, spasmodic movements, it begins to dance this way and that, lifting its muzzle, flicking its whiskers and ardently sniffing the air. For a moment, it seems to look directly at him, clutching the brick edge with its naked, mummy hands. Then, as if yanked by a string attached to its nose, it turns and vanishes. His left hand is trailing in the sewage, the rest of him sprawls on a spacious stone ledge. I’m in a domed atrium at the upper end of a long vertical shaft. The chamber is round, about eight feet high at the apex of the dome and twelve across, with a circular ledge around the top of the shaft. Sewage fills the shaft to within a dozen or so inches of the ledge, and I had to break through thick scum at the surface. Its tatters cling to me still, lending him a certain excremental majesty.

  The walls are made of bricks, fitting together into a smooth fabric of black rectangles and livid mortar lines. The bricks are smooth like partially digested and acid-eaten. One side of the chamber opens out into a low-roofed platform with a broad, curved, apse-like area, walls and floor coated in a dingy layer of whitewash and guano from the tropical birds that live down here instead of alligators. There is also, at a right angle to this, a truncated rectangular passage, looking to be an unfinished, high crawlway, ten feet long, whitewashed, with a number of deep, roughly cylindrical alcoves bored horizontally into its stone walls.

  I droop onto the ledge; what ensues is some
thing deeper than sleep.

  Now he rises stiffly, brushing aside a toucan, and begins to grope along the walls. Cool air slides through a crusty grate high up, also admits feeble light. It’s been a long time, and abstractly I notice I feel no hunger or thirst. But something is tickling far up in my nose; it makes me sniff, and sniffing makes it stronger.

  He crosses the ledge in two steps and drops face-first into the water. There is a slight upward current. He crawls like Dracula along the curved wall of the shaft, head downward, then turns to descend into the transverse tunnel at its base feet-first. The current is strong, but it takes him in the direction of the summoning smell. He rides at the surface his body limp his face exposed, eyes craned along his nose. When ledges appear framing the swift but still current, he grabs the stone and hauls himself clumsily out of the water, shit streaming off him like a hood flung back. Now he walks, bent slightly forward and sniffing ardently. There is an anemic light here, faint from manhole covers and storm drains, but the hum of the sliding water, and the crinkling and sucking it makes on the stones, cancels street noise.

  The passage opens out to form an irregular cavern, floor littered with rubble and trash, cone of light from a circle in the ceiling. Brown iron rungs run up the wall to the opening, but the scent doesn’t come from up there.

  He cuts into a subway tunnel — the lights of a station, blocks away, jab my eyes. Shadows of indistinct people interrupt the lights. They fascinate me.

  Shrill warble of a train somewhere, and a gush of wind that pushes the smell over me. I walk toward the platform, blocking its light with his hand the better to see his dim surroundings. A form, the smell’s source, lies near the wall. On approach it proves to be a dead boy, lying on his stomach, tousled muddy-blonde hair, little hand up near his face. The Great Lover stands over him — his hand reaches down, taking the boy’s shoulder firmly in his long fingers, and he gently turns the boy onto his back. The eyes are dark and flattened, the nose pushed to one side, the mouth droops, a black and wine-colored bruised band around his throat where he was strangled. The Great Lover squats down, dark and enormous over the brightly-colored boy; he takes the back of the boy’s head in his large right hand and scoops him off the ground with his left. He rises to his feet, the boy’s body lying along his left forearm, and head cradled against his right shoulder. Remote train shrieks come along the passage, and a low rumble.

  I take the boy with me back to the sewer. The current is against me in several places. Completely submerged, I hold the boy by the arm, trailing behind me, and brace myself against the tunnel walls with my feet, pulling myself forward with his right hand. The quiet, implacable current presses like an invisible palm, soft clots buffet face and body.

  Here’s the chimney. I put the boy on the ledge and haul myself out of the water. I know exactly what to do; he carries the boy into the apse and lays him carefully next to the wall. He’ll need to find a pillow or something; for now he will rest the boy’s head on a pair of bricks. He overlaps the boy’s hands on his solar plexus and carefully sets his feet side by side, wipes the muck from the boy’s face with his fingers. I sprinkle the boy all over with powdered stone, until he’s all white.

  Those who know how to look will find uncharted bodies lost or hidden everywhere in a city of this size. Between the massive, pyramidal foundations of towering buildings, in vaults and passages steam tunnels and drains, bones bursting from the black earth beneath parks and from former potters’ fields, the roots of the hanging tree. When I smell them, a pang of love and grief hurts me, a distinct pang for each one, as though each one were emitting his or her own proper grief, and the feeling burns there painfully in my otherwise numb and lifeless breast until I go do something about it. Here I follow a smell to a smashed shanty in another subway tunnel, walls of corrugated metal bolted to a heavy wooden frame now lie mostly flat on a heap of rubble, mounded over with spectral clear plastic tarp that had been the roof. Pull back the tarp, seize one of the heavy walls by its edge flipping it aside with one hand as though it were light as foam and shifting the stones this way and that I uncover the glassy dead gaze of a lean, dark-skinned woman. Now she lies beside the boy, shrouded in condensed milk powder I pour from a can. As I arrange her limbs, the pain runs out of me like water out of a jar.

  Someone has made off with a woman’s golden chain; at sight of transit police the thief drops it on the platform, walks past the police and boards the next train. I take it, leaving a smear on the dirty tiles, and put it around the boy’s neck, the heart-shaped bauble over his folded hands. The fire in me changes shape, and a small fragment of the pain becomes a sharp rueful little satisfaction as I do this.

  Now there are five bodies lying side by side in the apse. Clawing in the dirt where crumbled walls have fallen away he has uncovered numerous human bones and skulls. He homes in on them lying tangled in the roots of trees or where they have come streaming from a shattered coffin. One of the far-flung tunnels leads to a grouping of antique cisterns — the stone walls there are bulging and tearing, and in one place gave way entirely — tarry dirt had poured through the gap to form a ragged conical mound, studded with coffins. Over several days I carefully cover the intact coffins, and remove the skeletons from the destroyed coffins. Disassociated bones go in the alcoves of the crawlway, long bones lengthwise knobbed ends facing outward, flat and small bones at the backs of the alcoves, and skulls rest on top.

  I collect empty bottles and melt the glass on my gas ring, moulding the soft, glowing glass between his hands, making cloudy eggs and diamond-shaped ornaments clear or green or filmy brown. While they are still hot, I press the ornaments into the walls around the ossuary alcoves. The cooled glass eggs he gently pushes between the lips of the bodies in the apse. Using a piece of thin copper piping I can also blow glass bulbs and filmy intestines of thin glass.

  Gills of rich carmine fungus grow up the architrave’s ridges. The smaller birds like to perch on them. Some of these gills produce luminous bulbs, from which I make a thick phosphorescent ink. He sleeps in the atrium, either on the ledge or floating in the water. I don’t need the rest — I need the dreams, in particular, the memories that creep into them. Binding a lock of the dead boy’s hair to a bit of rusty metal, I make a brush, and write what I can remember on the walls of the atrium, using the glowing ink. In addition to being luminescent, it is also weakly caustic, so that the words are not only painted but shallowly engraved on the wall.

  An idea appear in his mind as though through glancing contact of an astral nerve. I blow some glass vessels including a sizeable alembic. Foraging in basements he finds some fittings he can use to string together copper pipes, and screws, and a roll of wire. He strips the insulation from the wire and uses it to hang the alembic, the glass tubes, and other vessels from the ceiling of the atrium; the copper tubing he uses to expand his gas ring, adding several new fires. After numerous tests involving heating and cooling, distillation and reactivity and so on, he identifies several varieties of sewage and gathers large samples of the more promising types.

  Now, after repeated reductions, homogenization and liquefaction, he has extracted a thick, black-ochre concentrate, volatile but still fluid. Steam and rank smoke from the vessels and burners braids into a single plume which escapes through the leftmost slot in the ventilation grate, while the other slots continue to admit relatively fresher air. The Great Lover produces a skull from one of the crawlway alcoves and lays it, upside-down, in a specially-constructed copper frame above a tiny radiating device dull red with flameless heat. There is a small opening at the skull’s base, into which he pours the steaming concentrate. Then he inserts a paper cone into the hole and sifts in a carefully-measured mixture of powdered metal he has rendered from the stones. He removes the cone and gently agitates the mixture by tipping the skull back and forth in its housing. Swiftly, he produces the golden earrings and places them in the skull’s eyesockets.

  Over the next few days I watch the skull, now and then idly
tipping it a little. In the meantime, I spread dust on the stone ledge and draw the same figures in it with his finger, groupings of threes and fours on a diagonal axis, arrangements of triangles. When I run out of room I smear the dust smooth and start again. This is not idleness, this is part of the procedure. I see each phase in flashes that come with a poignant feeling, like longing over a familiar landscape. I think they come from the dead bodies, as a repayment.

  A click inside, a warm light chest and buoyant head. The air grows lighter and fresher as though it were dropping straight from a dense canopy of new leaves. I pluck up the skull and upturn it. The mandible drops open and something pops out, striking the stone ledge with a clink. The Great Lover gently puts down the skull and takes up the fallen object: an irregular lump of shining gold.

  *

  Observing the passers-by from a drain, I stand ankle deep in a noisy flow of running-off rainwater. At this angle, I see mostly criss-crossing feet, but a steady enough stream of faces intently dart back and forth. I feel stupid, numb-minded. What is it about them that makes thinking so difficult? The street overhead is completely filled with them, their thought word and breath. There is enough room there, where somehow he impossibly used to walk every day, too hopeless to see. This person is now too flimsy, the mantle of weariness, soft and heavy, that used to lie like a yoke across his neck and shoulders, is gone and nothing is weighing me down anymore. Whether or not one could say it is easier, he is a site for the passing of time, like a landmark in the weather, and not yet an actor. I’m still hesitating. This has all the attributes of a dulling force, strange and tender like magnetic repulsion.

  *

  First the bodies — then the spirits. Pausing to frisk through a heap of refuse, it would suddenly become sad remains. He would hang his head at once, his hands would drop to his sides, as if I knew and grieved the passing of whatever bygone thing they had once been or belonged to. Elsewhere, a steadily-developing chill sensation, like a steady draft, comes over me, and at its most intense a blue-white snow-reflected light dazzles my eyes, making me squint, although I see no light. After a few moments, the impression becomes a little tentative, and I get back up, uncertainly looking to follow it, trying to encourage it. The feeling recedes — now it’s gone. I’m all giddy, pitching at random against the walls, all the wind knocked out of my brains.