Black Ambrosia

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  I returned to the bedroom closet. Sarah’s jaw was stiffening with the rigor, and it took all my strength and the high heel of one of her displaced shoes to open her mouth. With my fore­finger, I swiped the back of her tongue, bringing forth a thickening scoop of the elixir of life for which Sarah had no further use. Returning to the bathroom, I applied it slowly and carefully to my lips, evenly coating each curve, each nuance. Then I licked my white teeth and spoke softly to the new face, the starkly chiseled features that looked back to me, and I said, “Angelina,” watching the tip of my tongue show for the briefest of moments as the L came alive. Yes. It was Her. In my mirror reflection. These were the lips, the teeth, the tongue. Dark, wet, and seductive, the lips now had a total face to bring them true life.

  She and I had become one—or was it always so?

  “I almost gave up. In Santa Fe. We’d missed her and I tasted the disappointment of the waiting game, searching the newspapers, putting out bulletins to uninterested policemen, and knowing she’d probably slip us up at her next stop anyway. I knew someone else would carry on; I knew someone else would continue the search, I didn’t have to; I could go home.

  “To what? To a stupid job in a boring town with my punk brother and my worn-out father?

  “As much as I hated to admit it, Angelina had given me something to live for, something to look forward to, other than just living, growing old, and dying in Westwater.

  “And I guess I was kind of afraid of catching her.

  “But then that cop finally, finally fucking remembered that she said she needed to get to Red Creek, and it was right then that I knew Angelina’d changed. She’d turned, somehow, and she was looking for a place to rest, lick her wounds. A den. A hole.

  “I smelled a wounded animal when I read that cop’s statement. A wounded animal is unpredictable. Angelina must have been delirious to talk to a policeman at all, much less tell him where she was going. Yep, I smelled a wounded animal, and when an animal’s wounded, you’ve got no choice but to track it until you find it. A wounded animal must be brought down.

  “A wounded animal changes the whole hunt. It’s changed, insane, dangerous. Everything changes when you’re looking for a hurt one. There’s no time to lose, and no longer a choice. I was in for the duration, because I had chosen the hunt.

  “Extinction is unnatural. Everything escalates. If an animal is not too far gone, it’ll go into heat, to try to breed before it dies.”

  31

  I found myself requiring time alone, time to become accustomed to my new properties, my new gifts. I also needed cash.

  I rummaged in Sarah’s dresser and found the envelope marked “Rent.” It had one hundred dollars in it. There was another ten in her purse, which I took without remorse. Money was a mundane thing; Sarah had no further need. I borrowed her car and drove to a small motel several miles from Red Creek and checked in, requesting a room at the back.

  I posted a letter of explanation to the bank in Wilton, giving the motel as my current address. By return mail, they sent me, per my request, a cashier’s check.

  The week I spent waiting for my money, I also spent adjusting. I had acquired some wild talents, the most dramatic of which was the use of the music. Yet the tremendous gift of music was nothing next to the immense confusion it brought. Questions and answers, mismatched and abstract, tumbled about in my head like laundry in a dryer. I would hook up one question to an answer as it fled by, creating a composite question, leaving me to chase down another answer that refuted the first, masking the question and turning the whole of my conscious mind into a vast bowl of noodles, questions and answers all wrapped around each other, with no beginning and no ending.

  Was I odd at birth or did I acquire oddities? Were there others like me? Were my oddities perversions of the personality, or was an outside influence controlling me as I once thought She had done? And if and when I discovered that influence, would it wash over me in a moment of extreme hostility and become part of me, leaving me to discover that there was still yet another influence, higher, more covert, more ominous? Was I at the center of a hideous puppetry plot that would reveal layers of self as I matured? Had I a disease or a gift? Was the music universal? Could others hear it? Could others control it the way I could?

  How I longed for the simple questions of adolescence, the questions of “Why me?” Now it seemed that a sense of eternity hindered my thinking, expanding the simplest of ideas into a complex march of countermoves and strategies.

  Could I change the future? Could I change the past?

  For five nights I sat in the motel room and pondered the questions. For five nights I listened to my internal music, turned it up, down, on, off, changed the tempo, and studied the effects. It erased the pain in my legs. The cane was still a necessity, as my legs were not healed—they were weak and inconvenient—but they no longer ached.

  I worked with the music, fine-tuning its minute variations and reveling in the dramatic changes I could make in the room with the slightest alterations of tone or substance. As I worked, I began to find a confidence in myself, a confidence that I had always associated with wisdom. I felt confident that I could begin to deal with the more delicate of life’s situations—could issue the appropriate music at the crucial time.

  Altering the mood of a room filled with people had always been a talent, but I’d gone about it blindly, instinctively. Now I had tools, insight, and a scientific approach. The knowledge calmed me.

  When the envelope from the bank came, I merely wafted a delicate mist of melody under the clerk’s ear and he gladly cashed the check.

  I paid my motel bill, bought some clothes, as my pack had been lost in the paint-container episode, and filled the gas tank of Sarah’s car.

  The following evening I left New Mexico forever, heeding the call to the north. I drove back toward Pennsylvania—back to Wilton, back to my roots, back to the frozen soil of my birth.

  Freedom was a different thing behind the wheel of a car. I was independent, and independence felt like responsibility.

  The headlights gleamed along the desert highway ahead of me, and I soon became accustomed to the brightness of the consistent, oncoming traffic. The tires on the road made their own music, monotonous, low-key, depressing.

  Then a flicker of something at the side of the road ahead caught my eye. A hitchhiker. Company. My attention perked as the tires slowed.

  He opened the back door and got in. A boy—dirty, odorous, offensive from the first moment. This was not what I had in mind for company, but perhaps . . . I lashed at him with a sharp run of command notes and he opened the door again and got right out. Then I sent forth a seductive little tune and he spun around, then opened the front door. He was so simple to manipulate. So simple. He was not to my liking, but there would be others. I made him shut the door, then open it and shut it again, without getting in, then I had him whirl around, touch his toes, then whirl again and again, and I watched him dance to my music. I jerked the puppet on my strings until I began to giggle, then I drove off, alert, watchful for more possibilities on my journey to Wilton.

  I drove, minding the speed limit, into Texas before I saw the next hitchhiker, but I couldn’t stop. The morning was approaching, and I had to find a place to bed down.

  I exited the freeway, drove slowly past dark service stations and awakening bakeries. Just inside the little town was a boulevard lined with supermarkets, their parking-lot lights shining down on acres of deserted asphalt, crisscrossed with territorial parking-space lines. I parked in an unobtrusive corner.

  The early morning traffic noise grew even as I sat there for a few moments. Soon deliveries would be made to the markets, then the shoppers would come, and the parking lot would be abuzz with activity. I smiled. Some fat shopper would be leaving her children, clean, healthy, succulent little babies untended in the car, parked innocently next to mine. I would be asleep.
The thought was distinctly pleasurable. Comforting.

  I opened the roomy trunk of Sarah’s car and pulled out papers, toys, and Samuel’s boy-sized tennis shoes. A large car has many conveniences. I spread out the blanket I had taken from the motel, covering up the little accumulations of debris, then unstrung a shoestring from one of Samuel’s little shoes, and climbed in. I tied one end of the shoestring through two holes in the trunk lid and knotted the other end around the jack handle, then lowered it on its weight, not heavy enough to latch, just enough to look latched.

  I stretched out, corner to corner, my head and one shoulder on the short rise to the back. This was heavenly. Roomier than the closet, more intimate than the motel room. It was close, warm, secure. It smelled like rubber, highway, road grit, and axle grease. I relaxed my muscles, settled in, and began to make music. I played the music to surround the car, to keep thieving hands from stealing it, curious hands from touching it, helpful hands from latching the trunk. I played the music until the car fairly hummed with the vibrations, and then the darkness receded and my consciousness went with it.

  When I awakened, I awakened suddenly. My eyes opened with a snap and my senses were fully alert, primed, ready. I listened to the activity around me. Shopping carts rattled on their bad wheels, car doors slammed, children cried, a bottle broke.

  I felt for my cane, held it on my chest, fingered the cold brass lizard, fingered each of its carved scales, its long graceful sweep of tail, its smooth throat, its little brass eyes. I ran my fingers over the smooth, highly polished shaft of wood, and I heard it sing, as the rim of a wine glass will when stroked with a wet finger. I heard chords in the grain of the wood. So. The things around me had their own music. I had a lot to learn. It would be a long time indeed before I could realize what I had gained in the blending of my personality with Hers.

  Slowly, with difficulty and little grace, I exited the trunk and slammed the lid down. I turned to find three ladies watching me, and I serenaded them each in turn and their eyes glazed over, their faces softened, and they went about their business.

  I started the car and pulled out into the early evening traffic snarl, remembering with remarkable clarity the map I had studied at the motel. I felt a great need for Pennsylvania. I sensed also that Boyd was already with Sarah, and he would waste no time in his pursuit.

  I had no sooner brought the car up to speed than my headlights reflected the patterned clothing of a couple, a man and a woman, standing by the side of the road. I sped past them, making decisions, then pulled off onto the shoulder. They both ran toward me, illuminated from behind by the string of approaching headlights. The man opened the door and looked in. As he did, a terrible noise erupted, blanketing all the freeway traffic sounds, and the woman began to dance around, shrieking. Automatically I sent music to calm, but the noise continued, heightened, and a little yellow cat, its fur horripilated, fell out of the woman’s coat and danced, stiff-legged, around the blacktop on its toes.

  “God!” the woman said. “He ripped my chest to shreds!” She brought a bloody hand out from inside her coat. The cat continued to hiss and spit, fuzzed up and frenzied, and I tried to calm it with music, but to no avail. I tried to bring some semblance of reason to the agitated scene outside my open door, but the woman was crying and the man torn between his loyalties to the cat, to the woman, to this rare ride that would take him where he could be finished traveling with woman and cat. My messages were confused and I could do nothing in the situation. The sight of her blood made my skin tingle and I was rendered impotent by the variety of emotions that swirled just outside the car door.

  I stomped on the accelerator, the door slamming on its own, leaving them to stand there in the cold, dealing with their own problems. My emotions reeled from the confusion, my legs ached, my heart pounded, my hands stiffened on the steering wheel in the freezing cold.

  Limitations. There were limitations.

  I took deep breaths and recreated my environment. I eased the pain, erased the cold, settled my stomach. I could ill afford to allow another situation to distract me so.

  But the blood on her hand . . . The blood on her hand . . .

  The night was new and I was a lover.

  Thoughts of Pennsylvania fled as I slowed the car and kept my eyes open for the lone person on the highway.

  There. Just ahead. Confidence and certainty flushed through me with the intensity of relief. It was a young man. A college student, holding a sign that read “Princeton,” and he was clean-shaven with white teeth. I could not believe my good fortune. I loved him instantly.

  He threw his sign, one suitcase, and a shoulder bag into the back seat of Sarah’s car, then climbed in the front. He smelled of soap, he smelled warm, he smelled of life. I surrounded him with friendliness and welcome. He responded with enthusiasm.

  “Hi! I’m Jack. Gee, I’m glad you stopped. It’s colder’n hell out there.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Jeez, it’s cold in here, too. Can you turn up the heat a little?” He rubbed his hands together and blew on them.

  I immediately turned up the music, warming him from the inside, rather than the outside.

  “That’s better. Thanks. Say, where are you headed? I’m going back to school. Christmas break is over, time for the new semester to start. I’m studying anthropology. Hey, nice car. You from Texas?”

  His vibrancy caught me quite off guard. It had been a long time since I’d been so close to someone so vibrant. His young, virile, animal scent brought all my senses to their highest attunement. I had to be careful here. I could mesmerize him into blind obedience, like the ladies at the supermarket, but that would be a waste of his youth and vitality, and therefore a shame. Better to find the balance between desire and fear on one side, enthusiasm and greed on the other side. It would be a delicate task, requiring precise concentration. I hoped my skills were up to it

  “No,” I said. “I’m from Pennsylvania.” He smiled at me, and nodded, anticipating a long ride in a pleasant atmosphere, and I trilled inwardly, for the pleasure of us both.

  “I got really sick when I saw what she’d done to that lady in the closet. I’d never actually been on the scene with one of Angelina’s victims before.

  “She slipped us up again, so I had a lot of time to dwell on it, too. A lot of time to think about her.

  “How could she do it? Why didn’t she stop? I sensed that she didn’t think she could, but we always have a choice, don’t we? I mean we always have a choice, don’t we? Don’t we?

  “Unless maybe there comes a time when our choices are taken away from us. When we no longer have a choice.

  “My choice disappeared when I sensed Angelina as a wounded animal, one which must be caught before . . . before . . . I don’t know what. I had a moral obligation to restrain her, because those are the rules of the game I play.

  “What rules did she go by? And when did she lose her choice?”

  32

  My options overwhelmed me. I drove, gripping the steering wheel too tightly, listening to Jack’s chatter while trying to make sense of my new feelings. This new set of tools went with a new set of emotions, not necessarily conflicting, but confusing. I didn’t know where to take him, or how to approach him. My nostrils were filled with the pulse of him and my appetite was primed and ready, but I couldn’t seem to make a decision.

  Finally, frustration got the better of me, so I drugged him with the music—had him fall asleep so I could think as we sped through the night. She had always given me the answers before. Shouldn’t I now have Her imagination?

  I looked over at Jack, his head bobbing gently, his eyes closed, a smile gracing the corners of his mouth. He was so easily manipulated, so fragile. He was so beautiful, so available, and I was so alone.

  My passions told me to stop the car where we were and have my way with him, love him and be
nourished, give in to the necessary violence, grasp viciously with pleasure; my reason told me to wait, anticipate, stretch the moment, learn restraint. Without practice, my methods would always be coarse and vulgar.

  I needed to stop, I needed a place to take my lover, and then a thought landed gently on my mind, and the idea brought a smile as I realized I had the power to do the impossible—I could create a place in his mind.

  I pulled off into a darkened rest stop and parked the car at the far end. In the middle of the parking lot was a building with restroom facilities, phones, and drinking fountains. Behind it was nothing but flat, empty field for as far as the headlights shone. I turned them off, and the moon echoed my impression.

  “Jack.” I touched his arm, noticing with disgust the high artificial-­fiber content of his clothes, desperately willing my fingers to merely touch, not clutch, and I altered the music until he stirred and awakened.

  He turned sleepy eyes on me, then blinked a couple of times and rubbed his face. “Where are we? Hey, I must have dozed off. Didn’t even know how tired I was. Terrific company, huh? I’m sorry. Say, where are we?”

  “We’re at my summer home, Jack. I thought we could both use some sleep. Then tomorrow we’ll get back on the road. I’ll even take you all the way to your school.”

  He looked deep into my eyes and for a moment I was afraid that he’d found me out, that he could read the lie written there upon my soul. Afraid he could see Rosemary’s face in my seduction technique. In defense, I turned the music up and his probing look shallowed.

  “Great,” he said, then reached in the back for his things.

  “Leave them,” I said. “I’ll send a man for them.”

  “Okay.” He and I got out of the car at the same time, and I began a symphony for him. The music was a new sense to me, a new ability; I could compose and perform without any more concentration than seeing, walking, and talking at the same time. Jack turned to the empty field, and his eyes roamed over the imaginary mansion I had built there, and he said, “Wow.”