Voice of the Blood

by Jemiah Jefferson

  Silence. "I ought to go, it's Mum's phone, and there are relatives calling in all the time. I had to wrestle the phone away from her. I love you, though, darling, don't forget that. I love you and I think about you every single day. I'll be home soon."

  "It's all right, John. Take care of yourself."

  "You too," he said. "Don't smoke too much dope."

  "Okay. Don't drink too much."

  I rolled over and turned the ringer off the phone.

  The suite in the Saskatchewan glowed with candles. Ricari moved among them, touching his fingertips to the bright ends of the flames. Blisters rose upon the skin and were rapidly reabsorbed into the lines. "Imagine," he said, "having the same fingerprints for two hundred years. You would think they would have worn off by now."

  "Come lie down with me," I said impotently.

  He ignored me. He had had a haircut, and the clipped strands lay smoothly along his head, tucked behind his wide ears, like those of a young listening rabbit. He had a new shirt too, black, crisp, as if it had never come off its cardboard skeleton.

  "How did you become a vampire?" I asked.

  "The same as any vampire does," he said.

  "Who made you?"

  "Women," he said.

  "Which women?"

  He sighed and looked over his shoulder at me. His flesh was bright and hot and smooth today, though he hadn't tasted any of my blood in a long time. "Two women," he explained. "A noblewoman and her lover. Maria and Georgina. Polish, one of them, the other Swiss… or French… I don't remember. They took me in when I had no money and I was very hungry and just short of selling my body on the streets. I was their pet, their servant. I had no idea what they were at the time. They killed stacks of men—only men for them. They were lesbians, but they enjoyed young men, like myself. At first they had the intention of fattening me up and killing me like a goose for the foie gras, but they liked my poems, and my paintings—Georgina came upon me one day painting a portrait of Maria, which she thought was beautiful, and then I was made a permanent guest in their house."

  "Where was this?"

  "Paris."

  "Two unmarried women together in a house—"

  "Not uncommon, not in 1813. It was assumed by those who may have minded that they were spinsters sharing the space—Maria was very rich anyway and no one cared—and almost everyone knew about them. They made no show of hiding it from anyone. Such things were far more ordinary then—women kissing in the parlor, stroking, making love. No one thought twice about it if they were rich—who was hurt by it? And I was their plaything. Little Italian boy from the country. Trés au courant. I fell in love with Georgina, and she was fond of me as a companion."

  "You say that so coldly."

  "I will never forgive them," he said vehemently.

  "Have you never enjoyed yourself for what you are?"

  He tightened his lips over his teeth. "Every monster enjoys his brutality now and again," he surmised. "That does not erase the horror of it—and every monster lives an eternity of horror for his crimes. I will not forgive Georgina for her impulsiveness—nor Maria for giving in to her—nor the decadence of the times for thinking it was a witty idea. Together they made me. Together they brought me up as a young monster, sheltered me, taught me their ways."

  "Did you know they were going to do it beforehand?"

  Here he paused, letting the candle wax drip over the hand that held one of the tapers, not feeling the heat burn its way into him. "I don't remember," he said. "I… think… not." He turned and looked at me sprawled on his chaise longue, drawing sonorous clouds of smoke over my tongue into my lungs. "I don't think I would have stopped them. That was not how I was then. I too thought it was a witty idea—Romantic and strange—I would become what Lord Byron only fantasized of being—a true monster, consumed by darkness, laughing in the face of gods and devils. I did not much change for a long while after that. I just played the coquette to men and ladies and killed them for their blood, rather than sleeping with them or painting their portraits or writing them love sonnets, for the benefit of their coin or a place to sleep and a hot meal."

  "You were such a punk."

  Ricari smiled sheepishly. "I was a fool," he said, "and a murderer."

  "What happened to Maria and Georgina?"

  Ricari set down the melted spike of candle and began pulling the wax from his skin. "Maria was old and mad," he replied. "She was not jealous of me, for I was only a man, but another woman came in between them. A mortal woman. Maria killed her in a rage, and Georgina left, she ran away alone, I don't know where, to this day I don't know where. Maria killed all the servants, made me take her blood, and sat in the fireplace where we used to turn lambs on the spit, calm as you please, her skirts bursting up like onionskin. On fire. I couldn't watch. I ran away too, and hid. They boarded up the house where we had lived."

  "Is it still there?"

  "Oh, God, no, paved over long ago."

  "Were they beautiful?" I asked.

  "The women?"

  "Describe them to me," I said. I pulled out my bag of tobacco, and the box where I kept my grass, and began twisting the strands together on a translucent paper.

  "Maria was very lovely—regal-looking, rich blond hair and white, round, soft shoulders. She must have been a hundred years old when I came into her house, and she looked perhaps thirty. She would not tell me who made her—it was a terrible secret. Also she would not tell me where her money came from, since she had never, in anyone's memory, been married.

  "Georgie"—he said it in the French manner, all Zh's—"Georgie was like a beautiful witch. She was tall, tall for those days anyway, taller than I was, and very thin, like a wraith. She had wonderful eyes—black and sharp and always rolling like this." Ricari threw back his head and dramatically rolled his eyes around in the sockets like an indignant Valley Girl. We laughed. "She wore red too. Always red and white. She was the Pole, I remember now. She had a voracious appetite for women. Sometimes she brought home two or three, when Maria wasn't home, and the women would" roll around in her bed, naked, groaning so loud I couldn't sleep. I slept in the servant's room outside the bedroom so that I could run in and warm their bed in winter."

  "Did you sleep with them ever?"

  That swell of color stained his cheeks again, and he smiled like a schoolboy caught picking a daisy for his girl. "I was Georgina's lover," he said. "Maria did not like men at all. Georgie said I was hardly like a man, my skin was so soft. We were like brooms in a closet, the two of us, so thin."

  "Did you love them?"

  "I did… love them. Yes."

  "And yet you can't forgive them," I reminded him.

  "No. I cannot. I am angry at them, for doing this to me. That's the problem with vampires. They don't think. They forget that they aren't humans, and that their decisions will last so long as to be nearly permanent. Your momentary whims—your lonelinesses—they don't mean the same. You have to be serious, and compassionate, not just to your own needs, but to the needs of humankind."

  "That's impossible," I said.

  "It is not impossible. I do it."

  "How old were you when you were made?"

  "I'm not sure," he said. "I was raised on a farm where birthdays are not important. I was… twenty-two or twenty-three, I think."

  "Come lie down with me," I said again.

  "I heard you the first time."

  "Don't you want me at all?"

  "I need you, Ariane, that is all."

  I laid my head on the arm of the chaise and put out the stub of my joint. Ricari lit a new candle, turning it this way and that, studying the flame until he tired of it too, and stabbed it into the pin at the center of one of the candlesticks. "Shit," I said.

  "You're stoned," he said.

  "Mmm. Yep."

  "I remember that. Nice sensation."

  "You've been stoned?"

  "I've taken blood from many of the stoned. Not so much now. Seems to be passing out of vogue."
>
  "Actually it's coming back in again."

  "It's very late," he said, "or early, as the case may be."

  "Happy New Year," I said.

  "Why aren't you out with other people? Drinking and carousing?" Even nine floors up we'd heard the great roar when the clock struck twelve; the din had died down a long time ago.

  "Not interested. New Year's boring. All the idiots feel like they have a real reason to celebrate. Being alive one more year, I guess. I don't buy it." Ricari's sleek dark form passed in and out of focus, blurred with the uneven light of the candles. His presence, though, was palpably strong, and in my leaden state it throbbed through my temples like a headache. "Anyway, there are a lot of drunk drivers out, and it's dangerous to drive."

  "Why did you come then?"

  "You know that," I said.

  "I suppose," he said.

  "You've been called beautiful before," I went on, "even when you were a little Italian love slave, haven't you? And even now that you're a monster as you so enjoy calling yourself? Haven't enough people told you that you're beautiful that you don't need to wonder why I came?" I opened my eyes; he stood very still, hands in his pockets. "I thought you might be lonely. Holiday season's hard for people alone. New Year's might be especially for you."

  "I don't like 'em," he admitted. "Closest thing to a birthday I have."

  "More'n two hundred candles on your birthday cake." An image of it crept into my mind—a fourteen-inch grocery-store party cake, being lit with a flamethrower.

  "Quite a cake," he said acidly.

  I sat up dreamily to take off my cardigan, but without realizing it at first, I continued shedding clothes until I sat on the chaise in my black cotton exercise bra and blue silk panties. My skin at the thighs was so pale it inspired me. I could see the green vein tracing up into the twirl of reddish hairs slipping from the bunched elastic of the panties, the vein John had rather liked to run his finger along just before licking my labia and my clitoris, before jumping on me with boyish embraces. I meant to explain that perhaps I had undressed because of the excessive warmth of the room, that I hadn't meant to take off all my clothes, I wasn't coming onto Ricari like a horny high school nerd, hoping to wow him with the sight of my unshaven armpits or the appendix scar on my side; but all I managed to say was "Warm."

  He looked at me, and sniffed a faint laugh. "You are lovely," he said.

  "I didn't…" I shook my head.

  "Come on, get into my bed, you'll get cold like that."

  I stood up and went through to his dark bedroom and sank into the clean soft cotton sheets. Ricari followed after me with a candle, setting it onto the night table next to the scalpel and a heap of crumpled credit-card receipts. He sat next to me on the bed. "I have no idea what you think of me," I said. "I don't know why you don't kill me."

  "I think that would please you too much," he said, still smiling. He moved the covers aside and touched the skin of my belly with his fingertips. I reached up and took his wrist, rubbing my thumb along its underside, like the tummy of a dolphin, and he arched his back, his fingers slipping down till they met the wisp of hair that came out of my panties to rest on my stomach.

  "Kiss me," I pleaded.

  He moved; hesitated; moved; then finally sat back and shook his head. "No. Go to sleep."

  "Aw… you suck."

  "Why then do you love me?" he said, cocking his head. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again he was gone.

  He came back before morning, smelling of secondhand alcohol, very disheveled. I had slept a little, slept a little of the marijuana off, and I bolted upright in bed to see him. The dawn was just beginning to violate the darkness between the slats of the blinds, and he was wearing a black shirt and ducked behind the screen, but I got a glimpse of his chin, streaked with a dark, definable substance.

  "Ricari! What have you done?"

  "None of your business," he said from behind the screen.

  "Did you just kill people?"

  "No."

  "What then?"

  "Nothing! Leave me be!"

  I got up and went over to the screen. He knocked the screen over with his hand and stood there, shirtless, glowering, his face bright red. "You must leave now," he said crisply, authoritative, little sleek fellow with hard pink nipples, to me, mostly naked, shivering, barefoot on the parquet floor.

  "Why?"

  "I need my sleep, you little fool! Now go away." His speech was slurred.

  "You've been boozing up," I said, and began to laugh.

  "Not my fault. Out!"

  "Why can't I stay? I won't molest you. I promise. I'll be a good kid."

  "That is the least of my worries." He sighed heavily. "Please. Go quietly. I don't want to get angry with you. You are so annoying sometimes. Go. Don't come again until I call you."

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "Please," he said. The color in his face was subsiding, but he looked exhausted, his flat muscled belly rounded like a fed kitten's. His voice sounded very young, and deep, and tired.

  I went and put on my clothes, gathered up my various things, and looked back into the room. He was swaddled in the gray robe again, lying his head upon the pillow. "I won't come until you call," I told him.

  He did not respond. He seemed to be asleep already.

  "You wanted to see me, Ariane?" Helen Troutman, the chair of the Department of Biology, let me into her office and closed the door. "You want a cup of coffee? I just made some."

  "Oh, no, that's OK." I stood in the center of the room, hands in pockets.

  "What's up?"

  "I know this is really late notice, but… I, um… think I want to take the semester off. Emergency leave."

  "What? Why? What's the matter?"

  I was so close to just dissolving, so tired and bottled up, that I thought I was going to explode all over the modern carpets and the white bookshelves, but I just ran my fingers across my head. "I'm… I…"

  "Jesus, sit down. What's the matter? Is it John?"

  "No… well partially… I just think it's really time I took some time off. I've never even had a summer off in twelve years… I'm starting to… I'm showing the strain. I'm afraid I might get burnt out. I don't have any more ideas about my rats, I don't have any decent lesson plans, I just can't… face… another semester of lectures and labs. I just can't."

  She rubbed her cheek with her palm, and took a solid gulp of coffee. "Sometimes I wonder what's the matter with you driven types," she said. "You go like blazes until you finally crack. I for some reason thought—we all thought—you were going to keep up this insane pace forever. You are too hard on yourself, Ariane." Helen smiled at me. "It's your decision, of course. We can't force you to do anything. I for one think you should have taken some time off a long time ago. It's kind of bad timing, but we do have more than enough TAs to smooth over the cracks."

  "I know. I'm sorry."

  "Enough apologizing. It's OK. We don't want to lose you. Your kids will miss you."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "Take some time off. You can always come back. Keep in touch, OK? You all right for money?"

  "I've got plenty. Thanks."

  "Jesus Christ, take care of yourself. You're incredibly pale. And you've lost weight. Don't worry about it." She got up and put her arms around my shoulders briefly, in a strained, professorial intimacy. "I'll pass it along. OK? You should probably talk to Carole, you'll have to fill out some leave forms, but it shouldn't take too long."

  I stumbled out of the office gratefully, spent the rest of the afternoon filling out forms. In the space where applicants were to fill out their reason(s) for leaving, I wrote in big letters, "GENERAL BURNOUT."

  Ricari had me meet him in a trendy cafe south of Market. He was sitting patiently at the espresso bar with a humhle cup of Americano in front of him, sketching on a napkin with a black felt-tipped pen, and he looked up at me as I came in and shook the rain off my hat.

  I sat on a stool next to him. "Wel
l," I said, "I did it."

  "Did what?"

  "Quit my job," I said.

  "Why?" His voice broke it into two parts—one plainly interrogative, the other quizzical.

  "Because," I said.

  There was a long silence between us.

  "I wanted to be with you as much as possible," I appended. "Before we die."

  "We?" The same two-part voice.

  "I don't think I can keep living without you," I said. "Knowing I killed you."

  "You plan to kill yourself?"

  "No," I said, "just stop living."

  He did not quite laugh. "Don't say that," he said. "It is quite impossible to do. Don't commit suicide. Your soul is God's; only he has the power to take it away."

  "Or you do, if you choose."

  "What is your implication?"

  I glanced up at the countergirl, her whitened skin and spiked dog collar, her fresh, delectable young face and rows of hoop earrings. In a mumble I ordered a double mocha, short on the milk. I knew it would make me sick, for I hadn't eaten all day. When she had turned to the steaming machine, I looked back at Orfeo and told him, "I want us to go away together. Make a new life. Make me a new life."

  He scoffed. "Preposterous."

  "Really? You're so consumed by loneliness—I need you as badly—I—this is my chance to become something else. I'm tired of my soul as you persist in calling it. I don't believe in souls. I only believe in life—life forms—"

  "Too much Star Trek."

  "No, shut up, listen."

  "I will not listen. I thought you may have come to your senses in the interim. Instead I find you gibbering like a crackhead—"

  "You may not love you, but I do!"

  The countergirl peeked at my shout.

  Ricari gave her an oily glance, and moved us to one of the tables near the back. The scent of wet wool and the fashionable perfume of the season overwhelmed me, and I felt a pang of nausea. Once we sat, he pinned me with his vast, liquid bright eyes, staring out of his thin face, and began to whisper to me like an angry mother. "You must rid yourself of this inane notion. I have no intention of repeating my mistakes—"

  "You've made others?"

  The espresso girl interrupted again. Cute or no, I wanted to knock her down and crush her windpipe under my hiking boot for breaking Ricari's gaze on me. She brought the mocha in a clear tall mug, and had my hat under her arm. "You dropped your hat," she explained. She kept looking at Ricari hungrily, interested in his black severe garb, his coconut skin, his Shelleyan sideburns. I stared at her until she went away.