"I don't know," I sighed. The dope was soaking into me finally, making my body throb. My body missed Daniel, all asleep and dead upstairs. "I was totally in love with Ricari. I would have done absolutely anything for him—but he didn't want me to do anything for him. Except kill him. Which I didn't do. Which I should have done."
"Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What?"
"He wanted me to kill him," I said. "He couldn't do it himself, because it was a sin."
"No way!"
"And I couldn't do it either, because I loved him too much and I wanted him to take me away or something. All he wanted me to do was stuff him in the oven and walk away. But I fucking couldn't. I didn't want to face life without him." I crushed out my cigarette into an overflowing brass tray.
Lovely was completely absorbed, his pot-reddened eyes wide and awed. "Was he really, really beautiful?"
"Really, really beautiful."
"More beautiful than Dan?"
"In a way. He's a tiny little eighteenth-century guy."
"Blue eyes?"
"Gray. Brown hair. Really amazing skin."
"Oh, wow, he sounds cute." The boy stretched out on the cushions. "I kind of like my men a little more macho. Daniel's just about perfect. He has the savory body."
"I don't know if I want to hear about Daniel's body," I mumbled.
He laughed. "Tough. I talk about it all the time. I am so, so into Daniel, you have no clue. I seriously love him so much more than life itself. I don't even want to be like him. It would be wrong. I just want to be with him until the end. Listen, I have it all planned out, and Daniel even said yes." He rolled over and grabbed my ankle. "So, we're going to make out in a big bed all hung with black satin, like in an old movie. He's going to fuck me really hard. Then he's going to bite my artery and drain me dry in one big swallow. That's how I want to die, and Daniel said yes. Isn't he the greatest?"
"And when are you planning this blessed event?"
"On my twenty-first birthday."
"Oh, Lovely, don't you want to get a little older than that?"
"Fuck, no!"
He punctuated this with another bong hit and a fit of coughing that left him prostrate on the cushions, giggling faintly.
I fingered the French bread and chocolate and began to nibble tiny bites from it. At some point a very small girl in a black corset and floor-length skirt came in and asked for a bong hit; she was followed by another girl, and then a boy, and another girl. They crouched on the couch cushions smoking, introducing themselves. I was a little too stoned to remember any of their names, but they offered me drinks from flasks of hot tea, wine, whiskey, and water; they shared their berries and cigarettes. I asked them their ages; sixteen, sixteen, nineteen, seventeen. The boy had clear piercing pale blue eyes and hair colored black with shoe polish; he began massaging Lovely's bare, dirty-bottomed feet. One of the girls braided my hair, cooing in admiration of its color.
At last Lovely sat up and looked at a clock. "Shit," he said, "sundown."
Everyone scrambled up and ran up the stairs as quietly as possible. Not just us, but kids from every corner, galloping up the stairs two at a time, making little macabre haunted-house noises, giggling, spilling fragrant drops of wine.
We all gathered round the mattress where Daniel slept on. They made a place for me at the front. For a long time he looked as wretched as ever; then, as suddenly and as slowly as the sun begins to rise, his flesh began to come to life.
The gray shaded back to white, then to a healthy pale cream. His nipples pinkened and became erect, his lips flushed with color. Everyone was silent except for taped David Bowie, moaning, "It's War-hole, War-hole … as in 'holes.' "
Daniel took a great breath; and stirred. He scratched his face. He scratched the top of his head, and his balls. Some of the girls giggled faintly.
He rolled over and opened his eyes, and smiled like a pampered king.
"Morning, Daniel," Lovely said, his voice thick with adoration.
The liqueur eyes scanned us. Then he reached out and grabbed the tiny corseted girl from Lovely's room, dragging her into bed with him. He pulled the covers over them and a giggling and shrieking ensued.
I turned away, a wave of jealousy rising up so fast it made me dizzy. How could this have happened? What did I care? The girl made desperate noises of pain, culminating in a hollow "Owwwww!" that rose up like smoke. Lovely put his warm naked arms around me and hugged me very tightly; if he hadn't, I would have gotten up then and left that place and never returned.
Daniel sprang up from the bed, wrapping a sheet around him like a big black toga. The girl lay motionless on the mattress, her eyes rolled up in her head and one wrist trailing red streaks across the cheap fabric of the cover. "Get out, all of you!" Daniel shouted majestically, and without a word of protest, that was what everyone did. Everyone except Lovely and myself.
"What have you done?" I demanded of Daniel.
"Nothing, Ariane, keep your panties on." He rolled back his head, smiling and licking his very red lips. "She'll be fine in a few hours. Go on, you too. Lovely, take her outside, would you?"
I went down the stairs with Lovely.
"I don't get it," I said.
"He does it almost every day," Lovely explained, drinking from his plastic container. He handed it to me and I had a sip—gallon chablis. "Everyone wants to be it. He grabs you, gives you a little fondle, then he goes CHOMP! Sometimes you get more than a little fondle—I've sat there for hours while he fucks someone's brains out. But the bite's always part of it. It's Daniel's breakfast. He can't get going without it."
"That looked kind of serious," I said, glancing over my shoulder. "Does he ever…"
"Go too far? Sometimes. Part of the game. You never know." Lovely shrugged and smiled. "He doesn't kill any of us except rarely, and usually because they've asked him in advance. But he can't be told. Sometimes a kid will beg him and beg him to be taken and killed, and Daniel won't do it unless he feels like it. Usually, though, when someone comes to him and wants it ended, Daniel does what they want him to do."
"That's so fucked up."
"Isn't it great?"
"Is this what I'm to become?" I said out loud bitterly. "I just hang around, hoping he picks me to go with his bacon and eggs?"
Lovely stared at me with his eyebrows up—well, his eyebrow muscles anyway—his eyebrows were shaven clean off. "Do you really think that?"
I shook my head in mute fury.
"Girl, everybody gets jealous like that. You don't have to worry. He loves you. You're special to him—you've seen his sire. You've been with him. He loves you, Ariane, I mean it. Daniel may be a slut, but he doesn't say he's in love when he's not."
"When did he tell you he was in love?" I snapped.
"Night before last." Lovely blushed. "When you were asleep in his apartment. We went out hunting together in Venice Beach, and he told me, 'Lovely, I am completely nuts about this girl, and I don't know if she even cares.' "
"Hunting? Together?"
"I'll tell you about it later," he said. "What's important for you to think about now is that you're important to him. Has he bitten you yet?"
I thought about it. "No," I said.
"He would have killed you a long time ago. And he hasn't even bitten you. Maybe he should, then he'd know what you're thinking."
I began to laugh despite myself. "You're a real vampire expert by now, aren't you?"
"I damn well ought to be." He put his arm around me and led me away. "Come on."
That evening I had dinner with the others at a dim Middle Eastern restaurant in Hollywood, the kind of place where the guests are supposed to lounge on embroidered cushions and the only utensil allowed is pita bread; the lights are terribly dim, and young actors who have yet to be discovered languish in the shadows. The food had already been set on the table when Lovely and I arrived and sat down. A young woman with a cloud of dark hair and an oval, cameo-stone white face poured my cup full of red wine with m
ysterious shreds floating in it. "Good evening, Ariane," she said with a formal pleasantness. "I hope you don't mind, I've taken the liberty of infusing the wine with psilocybin mushrooms. It's not very strong, but the flavor is wonderful. My name is Chloe." She indicated, with one delicate white hand, a lanky gentleman with a spikier, blacker version of Daniel's hair and fishnet tights, relaxing back against the cushions, nibbling from a handful of black olives. "This is Mimsy, he's my lover; this"—she nodded to a shining platinum-blond femme in blue velvet and white lace—"is Nora, and I see you've already met Lovely. It's our honor and pleasure to meet you. We're Daniel's cabinet, so to speak." Chloe smiled as I took a cautious sip of the poisoned wine. It was pleasantly bitter, like unsweetened chocolate. "You could say that I am Daniel's right hand. Lovely is his left. Nora is sight and sound."
"I'm his butt," Mimsy said.
There were giggles. "We haven't found a body part for Mims yet," Nora said modestly. Her voice was surprisingly gravelly, coming from that fairylike body.
"I'm Daniel's fist," Mimsy said, quite serious.
"The executive branch," I said, selecting some food.
"In a way. We're not really a government. We're just the ones who take care of things."
"We're the only ones with responsibilities," said Nora. "Although I don't usually think of 'Lovely' and 'responsibility' at the same time." She smirked at Lovely nastily, and Lovely pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling.
Chloe rested again, leaning her head against Mimsy's chest. "I've been with him the longest. Seven years ago I was in nursing school, wondering why I wanted to kill myself every ten minutes. I had a friend, well, not really a friend, this guy I knew, who was a designer, and one day I went to his studio to see if he had anything interesting going on. And that's when I met Daniel." She paused to drink her wine cup dry. "He wasn't really doing anything at the time—just hanging out in gay bars all the time, picking up guys. He had picked up this friend of mine, came home with him. By the end of the evening he had gone home with me."
"Seven years?" I said. "So that makes you, what… ?"
"Twenty-seven," she replied with a smile.
"I'm glad there's somebody here older than me," I said.
Mimsy laughed. "I'm twenty-five, so don't worry too much. But we're about it. Nora here just turned twenty-two."
"Not like it matters," Nora said quickly. "I've still been setting Dan up for three years."
"How do you mean, 'setting up'?"
"I'm his manager," said Nora.
There was a faint bluster of protest from everyone else.
"Like, she knows all these people," Lovely explained, pausing to swallow, "so, like, she sets up club dates like the one we're going to tonight. And, like, making sure people don't figure out too much…"
"I'm the screen," Nora said. "The makeup. I show him, but only in a way that's safe. Daniel's a little reckless sometimes. I don't want him making any disastrous mistakes and ruining all our lives. I want him to be famous, but not too famous, y'know?"
"What are we going to tonight?" I asked, sipping my wine somewhat more cautiously. Not too strong, my ass—already I felt the telltale edge of excitement and nausea from the mushrooms, the hallucinogen ushered in by warmth, hunger, and wine. I began to nervously pick at my cucumbers.
"You'll see," Chloe said with a smile.
I relaxed upon the cushions.
At one point in the evening Chloe and Nora followed me to the bathroom, where they not-too-covertly fed me tiny methedrine pills; when I returned, Mimsy gave me marijuana chocolate truffles. Lovely was gone, and I hadn't even noticed when he left. I stared at my comrades helplessly through a wavering technicolor curtain, trying to express to them that I probably shouldn't be getting this fucked up, but I couldn't really speak. They were taking good care of me, though—giving me lots of cold water to drink, making sure I got something to eat and that I didn't mistakenly drink more of the wine.
Later Chloe helped me out of the restaurant into Nora's car (it smelled of patchouli and book mold), and we drove somewhere, listening to David Bowie's Low on the car stereo. Chloe sat in back with me, petting my hands and seeming to listen to me intently, though I wasn't sure if I was talking out loud or merely thinking a hundred miles an hour. I didn't feel too bad, all things considering—the wine had barely made me drunk, the mushrooms were good and not too nauseating, the speed was clean and pure, and the dope wore the glass-sharp edges off everything. The world shot by in a liquid concoction of amber and red lights. Nora and Mimsy seemed to be arguing, but I couldn't understand a word and decided that it had nothing to do with me.
By the time we arrived at the club, I had begun to sober slightly. It was a very pretty nightclub, most of the interior walls made up of square glass bricks, glowing purplish with black lights. A bar stretched along the wall to the right as one came in, the liquor bottles glittering in the uneasy rhythm of red light ropes; to the left was a partial wall, half solid black, the other half glass. Directly in front was a dance floor or stage, slightly raised, and currently set up with a wicked tangle of electronic instruments and drums.
"Want a drink?" Chloe asked me, leaning in close to my ear.
"Yeah," I said, suddenly thirsty from the speed. "I need a gin and orange juice. Can I have a cigarette?"
She gave me one of her Turkish ovals, lit it for me, and then walked away to the bar. The club was not crowded, and I wasn't so high that I didn't feel silly just standing there in the middle of the floor, so I meandered along to the wall of glass bricks, intending to run my fingers across them to make sure they weren't really ice.
Perhaps a dozen people were loitering along the wall, dressed in varying stages of severe black and vinyl, smoking bright sticks of smoking chalk. I thought to myself that in this light they all looked like vampires.
I saw Daniel then, leaning up against the wall where it became solid and black, his head thrown back and eyes closed; his arms were stiffly down at his sides. When a person moved aside to shift her weight, I saw Lovely as well, on his knees in front of Daniel, his head slowly weaving up and down. Daniel's hands gripped the suede sides of the boy's head so intensely that the veins stood out, the tendons like the skeleton of an umbrella.
I felt suddenly very sick, and it took me a moment to realize that I was angry, I was jealous, I was wounded. I felt like throwing up; I wanted to become sober again, to leave there and get back to something safe, something that made sense. But there was nothing to go to anymore. Nothing would ever make sense again. I wrung my hands, wrapped my arms around myself, digging my fingers into my ribs.
Daniel opened his eyes and looked straight into me. He smiled, slowly, knowingly, and he said to me, Yes, I know. But look. See here. See this boy. He is giving me head. He is giving you head. I am giving you head. You are mine always and he is mine always and I am yours always. This pleasure shall never be mine alone, as long as you stay with me and trust me.
And he was right. I held out my hand to the glass bricks to steady myself. Lovely was really giving it his all; his nude back muscles working intently to keep himself upright or from falling against Daniel with fatigue. A hot eroticism swelled inside me.
Chloe arrived with my drink. "What's the matter? Oh." She turned me away from them, blushing brightly against her white moon face. Her eyes were marked out in the face with smudges of black powder, the same makeup statement that Lovely himself employed, but in a more understated manner. "Jesus, he's always doing shit like that in public. It's so childish. Don't let it bug you."
"Are you Daniel's sex slave too?" I blurted out.
She laughed. "Mn-mn," she said, shaking her head slowly. "Oh, no. That's all in the past, long, long past. I was, for a long while. It's much more… filial now." She tugged at her hair. "He's kind of like a crazy uncle. Anyway, I'm with Mimsy, he's plenty."
"And Mimsy… ?"
"He and Daniel never were. Mimsy's straight, if you can believe that. What Mimsy feels is loyalty." Chloe p
ut her arm around me. "C'mon, let's go sit down. How do you feel?"
We sat in stiff chairs to the right of the stage, and I assured her that I was quite all right. She lit me another cigarette and we talked lightly about medicine. I spilled to her about my schooling, my ambitions, my experiments, and she listened quietly, looking up at me once in a while to say, "Yes, I know what you mean." At some point Nora joined us at our little table with a tall flute of champagne. She was brittle with speed, her jaws clenched in a tight little smile. She jarred Chloe's and my trippy repose, and I fell silent after a few minutes.
But then the show began and I forgot all about drug incompatibilities.
So this was what Daniel did: He and six or seven (I was too gone to count accurately) other people came out onto the "stage." The others, including Mimsy, were dressed in black jeans, exercise tanks, rubber shorts, ripped tights; an athletic and dangerous crew, male and female. Daniel himself wore a tight maroon velvet suit with no shirt under it, his livid clavicles shining under the black light. I changed my mind about the people looking like vampires under a black light; only a vampire could look that way, the skin glowing a brilliant blue like a gas flame, the color of the eyes clearly discernible through the light distortion. Daniel calmly gathered up a microphone and began to sing.
The songs were a kind of liquid flowing, accented with clangs from the woman playing a heap of metal parts mounted on cinder blocks; Daniel himself manipulated a tape machine, playing back recorded loops of industrial sounds—rumblings, drones, samples from old films—and sang. Daniel's voice was guttural and melodic by turns, a deep register without much range; he sang in German. I had the sensation that I wasn't so much watching a band as an impromptu collage. Mimsy played guitar, sparely, only adding an accent to the music now and again, sort of as an additional percussion instrument, like the car parts.
At length Lovely came and sat on the floor at my feet. Absently I petted the soft blond suede of his head and he rested his head against my knees.
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