Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  In looking at the spill of town lights on the sheltered water, Dawn first saw the person swimming toward her boat—a face, haloed white and streaming silver, moving at the point of an arrowhead of ripples. Dawn saw the head go under and the ripples change, close, and rebound. She craned over the side and caught sight of a form, a shape in water so clear that the streetlights shone through it in bright bands—water like smoked glass, the shadows of its surface ripples like flaws in glass.

  He reached her boat. He came up through the water, his face raised and eyes open. His head broke the surface. Dawn watched water run from his face, pour out of his eye sockets. He kept his eyes on her the whole time, blinked only once to squeeze free a few final drops. He flung his pale arms over the stern board of the boat and hung there, top half out of the water. He said her sister’s name. “Eve?”

  Dawn, curious about this acquaintance of Eve—someone she hadn’t known about—said, “Yes?”

  He smiled—a brief soberly satisfied smile. He let go of the stern board and dropped back into the water—but only to transfer his hold from his armpits to his hands. He surged up out of the sea, without pausing to balance his knees on the stern board or swing a leg into the boat. He came straight up, shedding seawater, landing crouched on the plank seat. Then he rose again, off his two distinct wet footprints, and threw himself against Dawn, wrapping himself around her so that his arms protected her spine from the edge of the rower’s seat and his hands cupped the back of her head. He closed her in a wet, cold embrace. He put his mouth against hers, pulled her tongue forward and into his mouth by suction, so strong a suction that Dawn felt her nostrils pinch closed as the air rushed through them, as her whole respiratory system—lungs, trachea, larynx, nose, and throat—tried to equalize pressure. Her ears popped painfully, and her tongue was pierced by something he had in his mouth. Dawn felt her body straighten in a spasm and herself go out of herself, roaring, like a powerful aria.

  Bad interrupted. “So … when you really mean business you bite a person on the tongue?”

  Dawn peered at him through sleepy slitted eyes.

  Bad felt he must remind her, “In Le Lien Vert you bit me on the tongue.”

  Dawn said she hadn’t wanted him to know he’d been bitten. Ila, on the other hand, wanted no one but Dawn to know he’d bitten her.

  Bad shook his head. He didn’t get it.

  “He chose Eve, but he took me. In a moment of curiosity, of impulsive mischief, I gave her name instead of mine. Or, at least, I said, ‘Yes’ to someone asking for my sister. He’d seen her photo on the dust jacket of the biography. Her author’s note neglected to mention an identical twin. And the joke was that I hadn’t even read Eve’s books properly. They were less familiar to me than they were to their many appreciative readers. People would try to talk to me about them and I’d just smile patiently. But with him I went further. I didn’t just smirk and pretend to have read my sister’s books. I said, ‘Yes,’ to someone in her name.”

  Ila rowed to shore, lifted Dawn onto the quay, got her onto her feet, and supported her across the road and into the warren of the old town. There he stood her up against the wall in one of those dark corners where the cobbles are set in silt from overflowing drains. He asked her where she lived.

  Dawn, intoxicated, gave him her address, and he leaned in to her, took her tongue again, and drank, then let go and, with his lips, caught the drops that spilled from her slack mouth. He slipped the chain that held her key off over her head, then tilted her chin to clean her face and neck with his tongue, his lick thorough and caressing. They left the dark passage, and he took her home, matched his walk to her weaving one, supported her when her ankles and knees wouldn’t lock. He carried her up her street. Semiconscious, she registered that she was cold where, that morning, she’d been hot.

  He used her key to let them in, locked the door again, left the windows open but pulled the shutters and curtains closed. He put her down on a rug in the only room without windows, the entrance hall, with its five doors.

  Dawn was panting; her hands and feet were freezing. She looked up into his eyes, whose huge pupils were rimmed with an iris of a pale, pinkish gray. She said, in her only attempt to defend herself, that her friends expected her. She spoke in a slur, her tongue full of deep, oozing perforations.

  He replied, but she couldn’t understand what he said, though she recognized the language from her sister’s studies.

  Dawn sat up abruptly and snatched at the quilt bunched at the bottom of her bed. She hauled it up and around her, eclipsing her glossy, dappled body. “Ila said, in Provençal, ‘Stay with me. And when I am old and forgetful you can teach me my own grammar again, and remind me who I love.’ He was quoting Chambord’s romance, the heroine, Grazide, addressing the hero—who doesn’t stay with her.

  “I hadn’t properly read Eve’s books,” Dawn said again, and looked at Bad for extra emphasis. “I didn’t like Lumière du Jour. I merely lived with Eve’s enthusiasm. I felt that I was being indulgent—that I was the worldly one, and she was my bookish sister. I had the boyfriends. She shut herself up and worked for two years on her translation. I read it and I thought, All this effort for a stilted, marginal work. But Eve had put Daylight back in a living language. She’d reanimated it; she’d brought it back into the world. Eve got her face in the papers, got her column inches. And I thought, Oh well, it takes all tastes. I said to her, condescending, ‘Good for you. Though, you know, Daylight isn’t really my cup of tea.’ Then the biography appeared, and she gave me my signed copy—rather diffidently, sensing that she wouldn’t get the response she wanted and deserved. I read it and I was shocked—because Eve was so much smarter than I knew. With a pen in her hand she was another person altogether—judicial and passionate, shrewd and thoughtful. I read the book inattentively, in a haze of envy. I resisted it. And look.” Dawn discarded the quilt and, shivering, pressed herself against Bad, strong and supple and, he sensed, almost ill with solitude. “Chambord’s Grazide is—well—my grandmother. In a way. Ila is the enameler’s journeyman in Daylight. You can ask him about it if you like. He might tell you.” She smiled. “He might tell you his coming out story, as I’m telling you mine.”

  For the remainder of that night, Dawn said, she was semiconscious and partly paralyzed. She voided herself, emptied her bladder and bowel. Was indifferent to being sat on the toilet, her drooping head resting against the vampire’s stomach, while her other end gushed, then dribbled. He ran her a warm bath and she drooped over the sink and vomited. He washed her, and her nose ran. Dawn wasn’t distressed; she was jacked up on the vampire’s venom and was in a crisis of delight.

  At daybreak—which she sensed through curtains and shutters and the thick cement of the apartment building, felt as if the world beyond all those barriers were a highly flammable medium into which someone had dropped a match—Dawn began to seize, to quake and foam and bite on her shredded tongue. The vampire forced the blade of his hand between her jaws, and she tasted him: spicy, medicinal, a tang of iron, a smell she knew from standing in the shallows and opening the gut of a fish, freshly caught, stunned but not yet done dying, a billowing scent of cool, ferrous blood.

  Later, Dawn came to in her own bed, under the covers but swathed in damp towels. She was alone. She’d been sick, she decided. Clearly, it was all a dream. She knew she must make the 8:15 bus. That a friend would be waiting for her at St. Agnes, on the terrace near the church probably, his eye on the bus stop. Dawn remembered that she had spoken to her friend the previous evening, before she went out to cool down at a beachfront café, to nurse a glass or two of its house wine, a dusty gray rosé. Dawn dressed, found her spare key, and went out.

  The vampire was asleep in the back room where the sisters stored ladders and trunks and the rust-speckled bicycle their father had bought them. The vampire was happy to let his victim wander—after all, the apartment was her home; her author’s note said “Eve Moskelute lives in Menton.” She wouldn’t run—if she
was even aware of what had happened to her, her body’s sudden dedicated loyalty to his venom would draw her back. She had shaken and oozed and gasped in a way that was wholly satisfactory to him, and secure in the knowledge that she was his, complacent and well fed, he slept.

  Eyes covered from brow to cheekbone in the graduated shade of her sunglasses, Dawn went out and made her bus. She made the journey, her head wobbling and eyes watering.

  “When I got off at the top,” Dawn said, “I lingered and looked about me. I’m so glad now that I stopped and looked both ways. Not at the traffic, not at the truck that hit me, but over the wall at the slopes northeast. Pointe du Siricoca and Razet.”

  Dawn saw their naked crests, short slopes of white shale, the brush and forest, and the benign blue sky. And the other way, over the sea, she saw heavy cloud with worn spots that let through patches of milky sunlight on the landscape, spotlights showing treasures without prejudice: the loopy exit from the autoroute, bare terraces, apartment houses. The whole coastline was in a capsule of mist with no horizon, no place where it came to an end. “I’m glad I looked. Since then I’ve had daylight in views out windows, full color to the edge of the frame, but I’ve lost the outdoors really—its color, which you take for granted, Bad, when you walk out the door in the morning and push your head into the day, immerse yourself in its thousands of possible points of focus and points of interest, right to the periphery of your vision, and wherever you direct your gaze.” Dawn sighed and stared at Bad, or dazedly at the air around his head, as though she saw a residue there, a halo made of all the detail and volume of daylight in the open air.

  Bad said that he thought she could see in the dark.

  “Even lemurs can’t see unless there’s some light,” Dawn said. Then she said, “The truck hit me, and my neck broke and over the next hour bleeding and swelling together finished the work of the first damage, cutting the signals from my brain to my heart and lungs. But I didn’t die, because it was only an accident, and Eve didn’t let the coroner keep my body, and my friends in the commune had strong beliefs about the ceremonies of interment, which were made too much of in our culture, they thought. Eve put me in the Moskelute tomb. Left me in a dark place, covered in cloth like dough left to rise. And I did—I’d changed already, had gone over even as I climbed on the bus and rode up to St. Agnes. I already had my aversion to sunlight—but was months away from my allergy to it. I lay in my tomb and repaired.

  “On that first evening Ila woke and found me gone. The apartment was empty. He went out looking. My friends had collected Eve from Nice Airport and had taken her to the communal farm. And the following morning was my funeral. Eve came back to our apartment in the late afternoon of the day of my funeral. She took tranquilizers and lay down. She woke up hearing her name called. It was Ila, but of course she walked about looking for me. Ila watched her and took in her scent and knew she wasn’t the woman he’d had. He listened to her call my name, listened to her speaking to me, and then he asked—from the shadows—where I was. She told him.

  “Ila went out, down to the sea, up through the old town to the cemetery. He found that the Moskelute tomb had a bronze door, with a hole for a big key that moved a thick bolt, and that its hinges were on the inside. He ran back to the apartment and, hungry, cut Eve with the little knife he carried, and lapped up her blood from the marble top of the vanity in the bathroom. He wrapped her wrist and walked her about the house opening drawers and asking where the key was. He spoke Provençal and Eve understood him. But she couldn’t understand what key he meant, nor—in her state—could she find the words in his language in order to ask him what he meant. He sat her down in our entrance hall. She escaped. He found the key, ran back to the cemetery, putting on one burst of speed to intercept a cyclist in the pedestrian tunnel. He hauled the cyclist off his bike, knocked him senseless, and employed not his knife but a needle and cannula and a length of plastic tubing as a drinking straw. He topped up, then ran on to the cemetery, outran the sun, and shut himself in the tomb with me.”

  Dawn was quiet. Bad lay holding her. Her stillness was emphatic but not expectant. She wasn’t waiting for a reaction, his verdict on her story. He wanted to ask her—but didn’t want to spoil a moment as uncluttered and easy as waking on a day without plans. Bad felt as he had once before, when he was alone in an apartment recovering from thirty-six hours of air travel. His hosts had left him provided for and had gone out. He had gone to bed at nine in the morning, without having spoken to anyone he knew. He had slept, then got up and stood at the window, a tall seamless sheet of soundproof plate glass, and watched the rush-hour traffic. He had slept again, and when he woke to hear someone in the shower he found he was finally back in time.

  Dawn’s heart was beating. She was beautiful. There was no bad news. Bad asked her again, “What will happen to me?”

  She didn’t respond.

  Bad detached himself from her and sat up, leaning over her.

  Dawn was asleep. He shook her, and her head flopped.

  “What happened to you after that?” he said. He needed to know now, before he slept again, committed himself to sleep in her presence, in this house. Dawn stirred, opened her eyes a little, and put up her hands. She pushed at the air above her as though there was a weight there. Her arms trembled against an invisible pressure.

  “What happened next?”

  “Corsica,” Dawn said. “We went there.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an island,” Dawn said. “And I wanted Eve. I would have tried to take her.”

  Her arms relaxed and eyelids drooped. “Later,” she said. She was asleep. Bad jostled her again, but she only moaned and lolled as though heavily sedated. Bad drew nearer, bewitched and inquisitive. He stroked the fine blond hair behind her ears and peered into them. He made a more thorough examination of her scars, checked for calluses of different tissue, and found only what he could see—an uneven coloration. He touched her scars, then licked a nipple, watched it glisten and stiffen in its goose-bumped aureole. He turned his attention to the other nipple—then stopped. It didn’t seem right. Despite the intimacy she’d shown him, he knew he was taking liberties.

  Bad looked at his watch. It was midday. The invisible weight Dawn had failed to raise with her trembling arms was the sun above the roof of the house. Bad got out of the bed, put his clothes on, unlocked the door, and went out into the main room.

  He found a lamp lit on the table and, in the circle of its light, a note.

  “I see you got the relic,” Bad read. “Good. Don’t forget to bring it with you. I’ve left you and Ila the car. I had to go back to Menton early to finalize a few things for the funeral, at which it seems I might not be the sole mourner. Eve.”

  Bad left the house to buy himself lunch and to retrieve his pack.

  The day was hot and his pack heavy. The four glasses of water he had had with lunch hadn’t quenched his thirst. He stopped by a covered laverie to dangle his hot hands in the piped spring. The water was cold and milky blue. Underwater, Bad’s skin paled and smoothed out, his corded veins contracting. He inclined, elbows on the stone coping, and looked over his shoulder at a tree, a tree like an exhibit, protected by a low stone fence. The elm’s trunk was partly hollow and canted like a broken column, the spread of its limbs slight in proportion to its trunk. It was in leaf late, still a tufted, tender yellow. Bad read “1713” on the stone fence.

  He took his hands from the icy water and shook them. From somewhere hidden, above the sunny piazza, a bird began to sing, its voice like glass marbles shaken in a bag. Then in his pocket, his phone played its speedy tune.

  It was Gabrielle, his girlfriend. She said, “Brian … look … this is crazy.”

  Gabrielle said that she knew now she’d been thinking in the wrong way about their relationship. Thinking of room for improvement as a personal challenge when the operative word was room. The space she should give him, should trust him with. “These days we’re all just a different sort
of risk-averse. We’ve gained some insights but lost others. We’ll take short chances but not take on the long. We look at one another and wonder whether we’re getting the best deal we can. We forget to factor in how things are on a day-to-day basis. The value of that.”

  “Things?” said Bad.

  “This is difficult for me,” said Gabrielle. “I miss you, Brian, but I’m staying away from places I might find you because I know you’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “You ended it, Brian. You were that mad.”

  “I couldn’t see a future for us.” Bad hoped that, put this way, Gabrielle would understand it.

  “But you don’t see futures, Brian—that’s the issue I have with you. You wait for problems to present themselves to you. You even go looking for them—big scary problems like bombs to disarm.”