The Titles Sequence From the Adventures Of Lucky Pierre

Robert Coover

Department of English
Brown University

 

(Cantus.) In the darkness, softly. A whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city.

 

And now, the flickering of a light, a pallor emerging from the darkness as though lit by a candle, a candle guttering in the cold wind, a forgotten candle, hid and found again, casting its doubtful luster on this faint white plane, now visible, now lost again in the tenebrous absences behind the eye.

 

And still the hushing plaint, undeterred by light, plying its fricatives like a persistent woeful wind, the echo of woe, affanato, piangevole, a piangevole wind rising in the fluttering night through its perfect primes, lamenting the beautiful princess become an unclean widow, an emergence from C, a titular C, tentative and parenthetical, the widow then, weeping sore in the night, the candle searching the pale expanse for form, for the suggestion of form, a balm for the anxious eye, weeping she weepeth.

 

The glimmering light, the light of the world, now firmer at the center, flickers unsteadily at the outer edges, implications of tangible paraboloids amid the soft anguish, the plainsong exploring its mode, third position athwart, for among all her lovers there are none to comfort her, and the eye finding a horizon, discovering at last a distant geography of synclinal nodes, barren, windblown, now blurring, now defined.

 

Now defined: a strange valley, brighter at its median and upon the crests than down the slopes, the hint there perhaps of vegetation, like a grove of pines buried in the snow, and still the chant, epicedial, sospirante, she is driven like a hunted animal, C to C and F again, she findeth no rest. How many have died here?

 

The plainchant, blowing through the gloomy valley like an afflicted widow, continues to mourn the solitary city. Overtaken amidst the narrow defiles. Continues to grieve, ignoring the gradual illuminations, a grief caught in secret acrostics, gone into captivity. All her gates are desolate. The eye courses the valley to its yawning embouchure, past a scattering of obscure excrescences with bright tips, courses the dark defile to its radical, this pinched and woebegone pit, mourning its uprooted yew, her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted. Gravis. Innig. In bitterness, yes con amarezza, she is with bitterness.

 

Beyond this gnurled foramen, crumpled crater too afflicted to expose its core to chant or candle, lies a quieter brighter field, yet one ringed about with indices of a multitude of transgressions, tight with uncertainty and attenuation, and, as it were, mere propylaeum to the ruptured conventicle of extravagance and savagery just beyond, just below…

 

Ah! what a sight, this wild terrain cleft violently end to end and exposed like an open grave! The light flares and wanes, flutters, as though caught in a sudden gale, as though eclipsed by a flight of harts. O woe, her princes are denied a pasture, nature is convulsed, and a terrible commotion, sundered by plosives, sounds all about. Angoscioso and disperato, rising and falling intervals in the tremulous matinal gloom.

 

Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed: letters. Flickering neumes. VAGINAL ORIFICE. LABIA MAJORA. And not a propylaeum: a PERINEUM. ANUS. Alas, despised because they have seen her nakedness. C to C and F again. Like the echo of letters, the shadow of codes, the breath of labia, yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward, a simple canticle, notations writ on the ass end of a kneeling woman, this kneeling woman, this ass end: URETHRA, CLITORIS, black indications quavering in this ghostly light, the light of the world, the light of a solitary city at the end of night, the coldest hour. Crying: her filthiness is in her skirts.

 

Between the spreading intrados of the massive thighs, below the keystone cunt, all barbed and petaled, through a filigree of letters suspended mysteriously in the archway–FLESHY PILLOW, now sharp, now diffuse–beyond and through all this, we see the distant teats, hanging in the wind, blowing in the dawn wind, oh, therefore she came down wonderfully, her last end forgotten, heavy teats ready for milking, their fat nipples swollen with promise. They sway in the wind, and something is indeed falling from them, yes, like frozen milk: snow! snow is falling, falling from the big teats, snow is swirling in the bitter wind, under the pale corrugated belly of the wintry dawn, blowing out of the ANUS and the VAGINAL CANAL, it is snowing on the city.

 

O Lord, behold my affliction! A vast desolation, the city, the afflicted city, far as the eye can see, stones heaped up to the end of the earth, lying dead in the winter, dead in the storm, whose hands could have raised up so much emptiness? the enemy hath magnified himself. Yet decrescendo this, spreading his hand on her pleasant things, diminuendo, the intervals blurred now by the grinding whine of low-geared motors, for in spite of everything dim towers, rubytipped, rise obstinately through the blowing snow, a multitude of lamps blink red and green in fugal progressions down below, chimneys puff out black inversions and raise a defiant clamor of colliding steel, and the snow itself is swallowed up by a million dark alleys, just as their fearful obscurities are obliterated by the blinding snow.

 

Through the city, through the snow, under the gray belly of metropolitan morning, walks a man, walks the shadow of a solitary man, like the figure in pedestrian-crossing signs, a photogram of a walking man, caught in an empty white triangle, a three-sided barrenness, walking alone in a life-like parable of empty triads, between a pair of dotted lines, defined as it were by his own purpose: forever to walk between these lines, snow or no snow, taking his risks–or rather, perhaps that is a pedestrian- crossing sign, blurred by the blowing snow, and yes, the man is just this moment passing under it, trammeling the imaginary channel, the dotted straight and narrow, at right angles. There he is, huddled miserably against the snow and wind and the early hour, shrinking miserably into his own wraps, meeting the pedestrians, those shadows of men making their dotted crossings, at right angles, meeting some head on as well, brushing through the cold and restless crowds, as horns sound and airbrakes wheeze, sirens wail, all her people sigh, they seek bread, the last whimpering echo of a plainsong guttering like a candle in the morning traffic.

 

His hat jammed down upon his ears and scowling brows, his overcoat lapels turned up to the hatbrim, scarf around his chin, he is all but buried in his winter habit. Only his eyes stare forth, aglitter with vexation and the resolution to press on, and below them, his nose, pinched and flared with indignation, his pink cheeks puffed out, blowing frosty clouds of breath through chattering teeth. His mouth, under his moustache, is drawn into a rigid pucker around his two front teeth, my god, it is cold, what am I doing out here? His hands are stuffed deep in his overcoat pockets, and poking forth from his thick herringbone wraps like a testy one-eyed malcontent: his penis, ramrod stiff in the morning wind, glistening with ice crystals, livid at the tip, batting aggressively against the sullen crowds, this swirling mass of dark bodies too cold for identities, struggling through the snow, their senses harrowed, intent solely on keeping their brains from freezing.

 

Oh, my poor doomed ass, I’m in real trouble, he whimpers to himself as he trundles along, tears running down his cheeks, teeth clattering, frozen snot in his moustache, up against it, expletives the only thing that can keep him warm, that he can pretend will keep him warm, shouldering his way through a thickening stupefaction, sidestepping the suicides, those are the lucky ones, man, not you, who gives a shit, all running down anyway, why do you have to play the fucking hero?

 

He walks through winter like that, wheezing and whistling, feeling sorry for himself, aching with cold, sick of keeping it up anymore, but scared to die, picking them up, putting them down, hup two three, attaboy, yes, there he goes, a living legend, who knows, maybe the last of his kind, seen through a whirl of blowing snow, through a scrim of messages, an unfocused word-filter, lamenting the world’s glacial entropy and the snow down his neck, bobbing along in this cold sea of pathetic mourners, this isocephalic compaction of misery and affliction, the dying city and he in it, whimpering: piss on it! yet refusing to quit, refusing to tip over and get trampled into the slush, and so celebrating consciousness after all, in his own wretched way, the man of the hour, the one and only: Lucky Pierre.

 

The swish and blast of the passing traffic modulate into a kind of measureless rhythm, not a pulsation so much as an aimless rising and falling, sometimes blunted, sometimes drawn brassily forth. Subways rumble underfoot, airdrills rattle in alleys, and there’s the thunder of jets overhead like occasional celestial farts. Tipped wastebaskets spill bottles, newspapers, pamphlets, dead fetuses, old shoes. Cars, spinning gracefully in the icy streets, smash decorously into each other, effecting dampened cymbals, sending heads and carcasses flying through their shattering windshields and crumpling into snowbanks. Above the crowds, a billboard asks: WHAT IS MY PRICK DOING IN YOUR CUNT, LIZZIE? Six blocks away and around the corner, a theater marquee replies: FUCKING ME! FUCKING ME! O SO NICELY! Smoke rises from a bombed-out building, and a crowd has gathered, warming themselves by the ruins. Distant crackle: trouble in the city. Somewhere.

 

A little old lady, leaning on a cane, hesitates at a curb, peers up at the light, now changing from green to red. Her spectacles are frosted over, icycles hang from her nose, her free hand trembles at her breast, clutching an old frayed shawl. The man, trying to catch the light, comes charging up, but not in time, skids to a stop, glissandos right into the old lady’s humped-over backside, bowling her head over heels into the street with a jab of his stiff penis. There is a brief plaint like the squawk of a turkey as a refuse truck runs her down. Old as she was, it’s still all a little visceral, but soon enough the traffic rolling by has flattened her out, her vitals blending into the dirty slush, her old rags soaking up the rest.

 

–Pity, someone mutters.

 

–Life’s tough.

 

–Where’s the street department? Goddamn it, they’re never around when you need them.

 

The light changes, the old lady is trampled away. There’s the blur of hurrying feet, kicking, splattering, through the blood, slush, and snow. Thousands of feet. Going all directions. Whush, crump, crump, stomp. Crushing butts, condoms, fishheads, gumwrappers. Someone’s pocketwatch. Beer cans. Crump, crump, crump, a kind of rasper continuo. Windup toys and belt buckles. Bicycle sprocket. Ticket stubs. All those frozen feet, shuffling along, whush, whush, almost whispering: That’s right, Maggie, lift your arse and whush, crump, crump, tickle my balls! Oh christ, it’s cold! It’s too fucking cold!

 

Listen, get your mind off it. Think of something else. E.g. comma green places. Where it’s warm exclamation mark. That’s it. Chasing about in a meadow at the edge of a forest, how about that? Come on, give it a try, make it yet, hup two three, she runs behind a tree, peeks out, showing her ass. He bounds over fallen trunks, crackling branches and dry leaves. Splashing through a brook. Up mossy rocks. Delicious stink. Yeah, good, moving along now, keep it up colon. Cavorting in soft grass. Some kind of music…

 

(Front end of a heavy bus, barreling through the city street, spitting up snow, whipping it into black slush: BLAAAAT!)

 

Cantilena maybe, piped on a syrinx, that’s good, Cissy’d like that, all’ antico, right. Her handsome ass aglow in the sun. He licks it, tongues her cunt. Yum. She kicks him, springs away. They circle each other. Hah! She scampers off, he chases, catches her, they roll about, flutes fading, rest. Mmm. Silent now in the sunny green meadow, a sweet heady peace, street sounds diminishing to nothing more than a playful wind in the fading forest. Yes, good. He pokes his nose in her cunt again, nuzzles dreamily about.

 

(Sudden roar of the bus, splattering through snow, blackened with soot, its windows greasy, foglights glowing dully. City streets, buildings, people, traffic, go whipping by.)

 

Sshh! Getting there! Twelve girls now, a pretty anthology, in the sunny meadow, yes, twelve of them, standing on their heads, back to back, butt to butt, legs spread like the petals of a flower. He hovers, admiring the corolla, many-stemmed, each with its own style and stigma, the variegated pappi blowing in the soft summer breeze; then he drops down to nibble playfully at the keels, suck at the stamens, slip in and out of septa. Distantly: the sound of muted trumpets–

 

BllaaaAAAAAAATTT! He jumps back to the curb, but too late, a bus bearing dawn on him–THWOCK!–whacks his prick as it goes roaring by: he screams with pain, spins with the impact, and is bowled into the crowd, now crossing with the light, spilling a dozen of them. He catches a glimpse of the bus gunning it on down the street, an advertisement spread across its rear: I CAN SEE HER CUNT, GUSSY! and what looks like the eye of a pig in the back window, staring at him. The crowds, rushing and tumbling over him, curse and weep:

 

–What is it like, Nelly?

 

He hobbles to the edge of the flow, nursing his bruised cock, looking for a reason to go on, looking for something to wrap it in. He finds a bum sleeping under a newspaper and appropriates page one. Over a photo of the Mayor at a public execution of three small children, believed to be the offspring of urban guerrillas, is the headline: A LARGE HAIRY MOUTH SUCKING HIS PURPLE PRICK.

 

Aw hey listen: fuck it. Quit. Yeah.

 

He sits on the curb, snuffling, huddled miserably over his battered rod, trying to coax green dreams out of his iced-up lobes, feeling the snow creep up his ass, no sorrow like my sorrow: bitter snatch of the diatonic aubade. Something seems to leave him, some spring released, a slipping away…

 

No! he cries in sudden panic, leaping up. Forget that shit, fade it out, no more messages, pick ’em up and put ’em down, hup two three four, he’s running along now, prick waggling frantically, stiffarming the opposition, recocking the spring, leaping the lifeless, close now, yeah, central heating, all that, gonna make it–oof! sorry, ma’am!

 

–Good morning, L.P.!

 

–Good morning, love! (Whew!) After you!

 

–Thank you, Mr. Peters!

 

–Morning, sir! Thank you, sir!

 

Ah, damn it, is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

 

o o o o o