The Great Lover by Rhys Hughes, Michael Cisco Read Free Book Online Page A

sharpening slowly. The windows flash by. He wafts against an azure streak of windows, spotted with lights.
    *
    He lives in the sewers, insulated by the water and the dirt suspended in this water — long wool sleeves down over fingers trailing in puddles — and in the black world between stations: black and pumpkin lights — snow bank stations — the trains shrilly call to one another blind and massive in the dark — black rushing silence, rent by screaming trains... Like the hideous angler fish of the ocean’s deepest places, he is an otherworldly scavenger drifting in currents heavier than avalanches, slow as glaciers, a sea wasp with a bridal train of tingling nerves that drift in the sewage time and again tangling in women’s dreams. He doesn’t resist, but the effort involved is always too much. It isn’t necessary to make the effort, but then the dream engulfs him anyway dragging him by the nerves and that is by far the greater ordeal. So when the undertow of her godlike whim draws at him, he must go, and make the effort. It is comparable to improvising a complex piece of contrapuntal music in coordination with other musicians who know what they’re doing and who are extremely precise doing it... the pull on the nerves wrenches him with a strong gentle sway into his core, they are meanwhile reaching out to fondle and garland the dream like limp braille-reading fingers.
    An irresistible impulse drives him to pick from among the crowds on the subways, eyes gleaming with water through the rind of dirt, a shiny hard varnish on his face. Constant practice has given him total control over his stench; he can contain it on the subway cars using olefactory camouflage, then release it in a concentrated invisible attack if necessary, closing it around his victim like a suffocating cloak.
    Black hair, neat as a pin, stylish. When she got off the train I felt hurt, as though a long, comfortable acquaintance were suddenly interrupted; as though she and I were already sweetly old and familiar to each other. I was always too late. She had me following her from room to room. Now at last we are in the room together, briefly. She touches a lamp standing by the door.
    “ This would break up the lines of the room,” she says, and vanishes in the blackness of a huge window, leaving me alone.
    I look around. The dream is still going. I put my hands in my pockets, glancing without great interest at the walls and ceiling, which billow a little, like projections on screens. They are even slightly out of focus. Or my eyes are. No, I see the lines in the floor clearly. Uncertain what to do next, I lightly kick the lamp and in her voice it says, “This would break up the lines of the room.”
    I kick it again.
    In her voice it says, “This would break up the lines of the room.”
    *
    The glowing amber-ivory blonde, fine-featured, gazing soulfully out the train window. An invisible jet of time or space or something like that streams from her eyes, and in exactly the same way a jet of water introduced into a pool induces the rest of the pool to flow with it or through it, I feel myself begin to flow and stream repeatedly through her eyes.
    That night, in sleep, she watches a viscous tendril of smoke stretching across a shaft of pale sunlight, expanding to form a transparent canopy of grains too fine to see. This smoke — from a snuffed cigar or an incense stick or a snuffed candle’s wick — sinks toward the floor, seems to touch and sense it. There are dim white heaps of warm, crumpled linen in the hut’s shadowy corner.
    The whitewashed hut stands in a little clearing of tall grass, surrounded on two sides by spellbound trees; nothing stirs among these ancient, shaggy boughs, and the gloom about their trunks is perfect. Overhead the warm, crumpled clouds race across the sky, infinitely deep and high and remote.
    Half in the pale shadow of a tree by the path, she is standing in a colorless dress flowing to the ground, her hands