The Great Lover Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the subway car — sealed in white flames — passengers jump from their seats, the train operator thrusts his head through the door of his compartment to see... Now my eyes are whiting out — a white searing blank — I hear a voice like the roar of a monster fire and then the PA droning out station stops, buzzing in my throat. That’s my voice, isn’t it? The fire cleared my throat.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Transit police are shouting at me and trying to herd me off the car with their flashlights. That is, they yell through their hands, faces screwed against my stink. I sit up at once and smile at them; I want to seem affable. I get up stiffly and the less sportsmanlike of the two takes a swing at me, so, when I’m erect not to say stable I toss my maggoty dead rat to him. It splats against his chest, breaking his morale. He runs away with loud ejaculations of revulsion. The other, seeing my sudden movement, had lunged a little toward me, but watched fascinated and disgusted as I threw my rat, reversed his movement, turned a little as his partner fled, and now he doesn’t know what to do. The car is being held in the station, and a crowd is eyeing us both from the platform. I bend angularly to retrieve my rat, then run for the stairway, moving faster than I imagined I could. Barrelling through the turnstile with a terrific racket, in a flash (I guess) I am up the steps in autumn air.
    Over broad stone wall into the park, slope is steep and I fall clumsily forwards off my feet flinging his hands before me into the bracken. Now I dart along the slope, find a rocky hollow where the earth has subsided beneath the roots of an enormous tree, and squeeze myself laboriously into it. While the compression is brutal, I stay there for some time, my nose thrust into a little heap of down — a cat had made a meal of a bird here some time, maybe. Puddles sliding in the wind color of weak milky coffee, the wind has whipped it into a fine yellow froth at the edges; soil like coffee grounds pressed into a paste.
    Waking up is a succession of many lifting veils. I’ve been staring out at the weakening daylight, without really wanting to take it in. A mouse scoots out from under a bush and stops, looking at me. Taking this as a sign that there’s no one threatening around, I quit my hole and gingerly unkink my spine. There are yellow, eye-shaped leaves scattered all over the ground, and like cupped palms they have caught brilliant rainwater. I find a brown human femur without meaning to. I unhastily clean and pocket it, amble on in the direction of a shallow stream that flows beneath a stone bridge.
    The dashing stream, piebald with rags of light... fade to light shining on the faces of the busy street, water furling in the gutter and him walking oblivious there by the curb. The water bunches before my shoes. As night falls I’m noticing more love coming out, like fireflies. There are other Great Lovers here, of both sexes, suavely dressed, clean, with gold around their necks. Here’s a paved, triangular park with trees in planters, really a glorified traffic island; I drop onto one of the benches and unobtrusively observe the habits of “my kind.” They ripple along the edges of the pavement or hover in deep doorways, peer out from windows, from passing cars. Their lukewarm eyes probe the crowds with a soft insistent gaze, and some have invisible sea wasp feelers that stretch out in cigarette smoke, billow over a bar or a restaurant like limp piano-playing hands feeling for availabilities like reading braille. They select and ease alongside with a light touch and a light word and a smile like a white seam in a dark cloud, and an aerial spiral of a haunting fragrance... the transaction clicks in hardened shadows against a sky like orange cream.
    Walter Benjamin observed that the city is where you find love at last sight: the Great Lovers are the hyena-jawed scavengers who retrieve the lost objects of ardent glances. They are at