The Great Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

holding the knife and turning it this way and that, point toward my chest as I pivot and collide with a steel post I forgot was there and accidentally stab myself in the heart. My vision slides down the post as I float back on the rebound, my hand falls from the handle but the knife stays where it is, held in place by my chest. I look at it with a complicated feeling, only the top layer of which is intense chagrin the blade cold in my stopped heart.
    I start counting. He keeps restarting without knowing what number I’m counting to or whether I should count up or down. I take the handle in both hands in amazement at my stupidity — my hands are like images. My legs are film. Arms catch me as I pitch backwards, my head flops to one side and I’m face to white face with the dead boy I found.
    “ Hey, bubby!” he trills happily, batting me twice on the cheek with his free hand. “Don’t panic!”
    Blurry underwater white figures float up around me to the deep sonorities of a distant harp — my body can’t be felt, just maybe a cold outline. Two skeletons dance out of the gloom of the tunnel toward me, their knees laced together in a glacial jig; they wear whackily-grinning paper maché skull masks and tinselled headdresses with wiggling parts, and they dance in a halo of heatless crystal flames, like the skeletons of fires. My eyes die. I feel myself slump and crash forward onto my face. The handle of the knife bangs against the ground, and the cold blade pushes muscle apart and slice heart — thud. I’m sliding forward with a tickle in my throat, like the weakest giggling imaginable; I feel my nose push against a mushroom, snapping the cap from its tender stalk.
    Now I’m watching from where you are, while here on the page I’m sagging like a stick of melting butter that plops out of me in mouthfulls, and the puddle’s edge advances jerkily. A train whirrs somewhere a few blocks away; its wind raises little hackles on the surface of the puddle, and I giggle idiotically like a drain unglugging. The blood butter has stopped spreading. The bulging edge of the pool catches lights and they rise along the curve. It swells, flaps up clumsily and in on itself, flows back in a coiling bundle, rises into the air, an opaque sail of fascinating red, curving away from him. Its upper hem makes a hood — then a globe, flat where it rests on the ground. As it swells, taking the last of his blood, it reels itself in toward the wound, wobbling like a belly dancer. A dead rat emerges at the base and its maggots stand on end do a belly dance and spell THE GREAT LOVER across its red surface. Air crash of a passing train blows them all away in a puff of oily white smoke. My body turns slowly onto its left side as the globe wriggles under it. Now I’m on my back, the knife engulfed in the globe, as it settles over the wound.
    The blood reaches in through the wound making a ventriloquist dummy of my body with the opening on the wrong side. The globe of blood rolls up as I jerk onto my feet again and surrounds my head. Crystal fire breaks out again. I don’t see anything, I don’t know where I am, if I’m still there with you or what.
    Nothing to see; I feel like I’m falling. The horizon shimmers with fury. In the subway tunnel, but as vast as a planet all bloody. I start to laugh and thick plummy blood backs up into my nose and down into my lungs making me cough and splutter, tears running down my cheeks but my diaphragm won’t stop squeezing hiccupping and giggling. I can see through the thinning red that I stand on a sandy sheet of iron straight to horizon. The air reverberates with shrill blows in a rapid, unhurried rhythm, a trench of molten metal all the way along the horizon. Silhouetted against its light there’s a colossal kneeling figure, holding what looks like a spear, point down against the iron, and the crashing blows are coming from him. Light from the trench creeps around the back of the figure, dimly outlining a