by Todd Grimson
Devoutly, Keith works at building the friction, never allowing himself to be frightened by how much some momentary spiky spasm may jolt him with pain. Sometimes it feels as though his penis is being drawn up through her body, like it’s been stretched to four feet long, or like it’s bisected, right and left devils, each surging up into separate new worlds. Everything outside them is being obliterated by this blinding love.
They join themselves in devotion on the floor in his bedroom. Afterwards, she doesn’t want him to pull out. “Oh no, no” but he must withdraw. Soon she follows him to the bathroom, where he attempts to wash his penis of this black, sticky, tingling, burning substance. But it will not wash off.
“It dries, and then seems to disappear while I’m asleep.”
Justine puts one foot up on the toilet seat, trying to see her vulva in the mirror. “Is it on me too?”
“No,” he says, examining the vestibule of her genital. “It comes from deep inside you. I can feel it, I think I can, when it begins to gush. I like it,” he says, and she is pleased. Her fangs come out as she smiles.
The bell rings, from the speaker-button at the front gate.
“Oh no,” she says, and pretends to be afraid.
“I’ll protect you,” he says, taking her in his arms, and she allows herself to be, in play, soothed.
FORTY-SEVEN
Because Tamara cannot—she does not want to—keep anything from Patrick for long, she has told him all about the evening she ran into Keith and Justine, with its strange aftermath, and the subsequent meeting with Keith.
Now, a week or so after hearing about this, he remains suspicious, and skeptical of Keith’s alleged good will. When Keith called and invited Tamara over, naturally she asked if Patrick might come along. Keith said yes, of course.
They have been at a party, in Laurel Canyon, so it’s actually quite convenient to stop here on the way home.
It is Justine who lets them in, who greets them at the door. Patrick and Tamara are dressed up, Patrick in a navy blue blazer and black silk shirt. There may be just a hint of mousse in his hair. Wire-rimmed glasses. A new wave wonk.
Tamara has on a rather sexy aqua dress. Scoop-necked, leaving her arms bare. Her brown hair down. A few freckles. They sit down together.
Justine brings in four glasses, a bottle of champagne. It’s a wonderful room, in what seems like a devastating house.
Keith comes in, greets them, sits down.
‘Who is that by?” asks Patrick, gesturing toward the painting taking up most of the wall to his right, the hexagon radials.
“I don’t know,” Justine says. “Do you like it?”
”Yes. It looks like it’s a Balthasar Cady.”
“My dead husband bought it,” she replies. “There are some others, by this same artist, in some of the other rooms. Shall we drink?”
“Yes,” Tamara says. “To friendship, and truth.”
They clink glasses, and sip.
Patrick is fascinated by the lovers. They go together wonderfully, he thinks, just as complementary types. They’re both so good-looking. He leaves aside all other questions, just trying to absorb the impression that they make.
Tamara talks to Keith about the writer, and Keith thanks her for withholding the phone number.
“I really wish there wasn’t someone trying to do a book like this,” he says. “I guess it’s inevitable, but it’s too bad. I wish I could stop him.”
“You look very pretty,” Justine says to Tamara. Justine doesn’t seem to have any eye makeup on, but her lips are terribly red.
“Thank you. I like your dress.”
“Do you really? You’re very kind. Keith has told me how nice you are, and I see it now, in your eyes. But when I first met you, I’m afraid I thought you were, ah, stuck-up.”
“Did you?” Tamara rejoins, after a beat.
“Yes. I was mistaken. I’m very sorry for what happened to you that night.”
“What did you do to me?” Tamara asks, not judgmentally, leaning back, black pump dangling on her right foot. She takes a good-sized sip of champagne. Patrick takes one too, as if he must. It tastes good. He feels a certain sympathy in common with Keith, and he realizes that Tamara was right. The situation is by no means black and white.
“Did you give me some drug? If you did, what was it?”
Justine puts down her glass, and smiles in a way that seems to mean she will not answer, that she is lost. Keith finishes his glass, calmly, and pours everyone but Justine some more, the bottle in his black-gloved hand.
“Why do you care?” Justine answers at last.
“I don’t like mysteries,” Tamara states.
“Is that why you said ‘and truth’?
” “Yes. I want you to tell me the truth.”
“I want to know too,” Patrick says, and Justine turns his way, the sandblasted-glass coffee table in between them, a porcelain vase there like an elliptical egg standing on end, white with a map of a thousand rivers or crossing streets in blue. It’s hard not to follow her gaze.
“I am a vampire,” Justine says. “I put you under my spell, and took some blood from the back of one knee.”
These words are so unexpected, and absurd, if not insane, that Patrick and Tamara are simply frozen, in shock. Tamara just stares. Patrick wants to laugh, but it suddenly crosses his mind that one does not lightly laugh at mad people in their own homes.
Justine’s head goes down, as if in thought, then when it comes up, she shows her fangs.
“Maybe these are not real,” she says, and then stands, and hesitating for just a moment, she walks up the wall, into the corner of the high ceiling, gravity baring her thighs. Tamara turns to Patrick, amazed, to check if he sees what she sees.
Justine vaults down, lands light as a cat. When she comes as though to sit down next to Tamara, Tamara pulls away, making a helpless little cry.
“I am not going to harm you,” Justine says. “But it’s tiresome … you both wish to believe this is some kind of trick. Let’s see. I don’t know what else to do. Do you want to stab me, and see that I do not die?”
“No,” Patrick says. “Let’s not have any stabbing.”
“It could be a retractable blade, with fake blood,” Keith offers, and Justine smiles at him. She would never have thought of such a thing.
“I remember … I had a scab behind my knee,” Tamara says. Obviously, however, she doesn’t know what to think of this. Her eyes reveal to Patrick that she is badly troubled—as he is—by the vision of Justine going up the wall like that, so effortlessly. That was just too weird.
Justine has given up. She sits down on Keith’s lap, turning sideways, her arms around his neck. Wordless, they are in communion.
“What about you?” Patrick asks of Keith.
He doesn’t answer, though perhaps he begins to. Patrick finds himself unsettled by the lack of calculation or guile within the look Keith gives him.
“Let’s go,” he says quietly, to Tamara, and she allows herself to be led outside, the smell of jasmine on the warm night breeze. Tamara is so docile, suddenly exhausted. It’s certainly not a night he’s going to leave her to sleep alone. Patrick keeps thinking of Justine in Keith’s arms, not even looking up as they left.
FORTY-EIGHT
Jason’s show, The Darkest Night, is in this version enlivened not only by the usual Russ Meyer clips—46D babes frugging to sixties surf guitar—plus various moments from assorted Italian horror movies, or black-and-white porn films just for a microsecond, or three good-looking women taking off their skirts, standing there in corsets and stockings, suddenly revealing penises—in the midst of all of this, we see, “live,” Michelle with a delirious smile on her face, shaving cream rubbed into her mohawk, that and five days’ stubble shorn off, a hand with a safety razor belonging to Ken.
Videos of various bands. Jason, on his own initiative, plays the rarely seen twenty-minute SMX “Doorcloser,” a song that builds and builds and builds, leading t
o crescendo upon feedback-drenched, mind-bending crescendo.
Michelle watches closely, on the monitors, extremely stoned, her newly bald head distracting her, new sort of heavy earrings hanging from her ears. There is some sort of a vague narrative to the video, maybe. The filmmaker has scratched the negative and multiplied the fast cuts wherever he shows the band. Scribbly white lines all over everything. There’s Keith, looking like he knows what he’s doing, smiling privately, as his guitar thickly wails and moans and blurs.
“I fucked him,” Michelle announces, to Jason and Ken. Tiff is in the bathroom, or she’d hear too.
“Who?” Ken asks.
“That guy. Wait. There. The guitar player.”
Jason says, bitchy for some reason, “What was it like?”
“Oh,” Michelle answers, “he’s just a guy. His hands are all fucked up now, you know. They slammed his hands in car doors … that’s why he got on heroin. That’s why he can’t play the guitar.”
Tiff returns to the control room. She’s laughing about something one of the technicians said. After they finish here, they’re all going out. It’s 2:00 A.M.
FORTY-NINE
“If vampires then why not witches?” Patrick says, over coffee, in his breakfast nook.
“Well then, why not?” Tamara replies, wet hair, in her terrycloth robe.
“Sure,” he says. “And UFOs, telepathy, astrology, werewolves … here, wait a second and I’ll get Dial-a-Psychic on the line.” Patrick rolls his eyes and squeezes lime juice onto his papaya half. “It’s all a trick,” he says. “I’m amazed you’d even think twice about such a business.”
“I have an open mind.”
“All we really saw that’s hard to explain,” Patrick avers, “is how she went up the wall. If it hadn’t been, you know, kind of theatrical, we would have examined that wall for hidden footholds. That’s what it must have been. She’s a performance artist-gymnast with magic-shop fangs.”
“I know,” Tamara admits. “That’s what it has to be. Only—why? Just as a joke, I guess.”
“Just as some kind of weird, alternative rock joke, from the girlfriend of a guy who used to be in a weird, alternative rock band. Remember, they did that song, ‘See Me Nowhere’? It’s like that.”
“I sort of liked them, though,” Tamara says.
“I liked them too. If we prove we can take a joke, maybe they can be our alternative friends.”
FIFTY
Out on the boat, dropping black plastic wrapped parcels weighed down with chains and cement blocks, slippery heavy torsos or legs going up into the hip, the buttock through black plastic, just drop them into the water as the boat rides the swells, up and down, there’s no pretense after a while of any spell on anyone. Chase steers the boat, the radio playing music, golden oldies, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and Jim Morrison’s “mojo rising… There’s a mojo rising” as Mark with a headband around bleached white Clorox hair dumps the last one with a kersplash! over the side. Chase offers him some coffee out of the thermos, it’s cold out here, and Mark puts in two packs of powdered creme and three, no four lumps of sugar, he’s got some kind of ring on his finger that came out of a cereal box or something, Chase thinks “Cracker Jacks” but doesn’t say it, it dates him, he doesn’t know if they have Cracker Jacks anymore.
Mark is shivering, sniffling, sitting there as they head back in to shore. It’s like he looks to Chase for something, just because Chase is an older male. Like the fathers he’s been hustling and fucking since he was twelve. Is he crying? Is it possible that he’s crying? No, it’s just salt in his eyes, and he’s shivering, his nose is running from the unexpected Pacific cold. Seagulls barking, dirty birds.
It’s another mission accomplished, and Chase has already begun to forget what they have done. The underside of the little death-factory that is immortal life.
“There are some donuts,” he says to Mark. The boy eats one, with more coffee, not looking at Chase, as if he knows. The father-figure would sacrifice him in an instant, for the promise of more life.
“I went down in one of those cages once,” Chase suddenly says. “You know, like on National Geographic specials about sharks?”
“Oh yeah?” Mark says. “Really? Was there a shark?”
“A big one, banging his snout against the bars, trying to get in. He could see me, I could see that he saw me, he knew I was there. I thought he was gonna break open the bars.”
‘What kind of a shark was he, man? Like I’ve seen those hammerhead guys, they’re fucking ugly, if one of those got you it would be incredibly gross.”
“This was a big white shark. He wanted me, there for a while. He was aware of my existence, as food. I used to have dreams afterwards, that he could just swim right through the air, he’d come down the street on a sunny day, about six feet off the ground.”
Mark laughs, a new donut in his mouth.
“Sounds like a pretty bad dream.”
“Yeah, it was.”
The radio plays some other song.
Back at the house, days go by and Mark isn’t bitten. Ruby, meanwhile, has her skinny bony body wounded all over. Chase wonders at this. Mark is just hanging out.
They all sit at a big table and eat nearly raw, bloody, just-seared-black steaks. David is still abed.
Mark says, “Man, I’m used to having my meat, you know, kinda, uh, cooked first, before I chomp it down.”
“Put some salt on it,” Sabrina says.
“Do you have any catsup?”
“Yeah,” Chase says. “Minh, get him some catsup.”
Minh is the almost pretty, seventeen- or eighteen-year-old latest addition to the household. She’s David’s pet. She is a superior violinist, he said once, but no one here has seen or heard her play. There’s no violin. She seldom speaks.
“And some Tabasco, or Heinz 57,” Mark adds. He is from Kansas, he told Chase. He and his mom just couldn’t communicate anymore. That’s four years ago. He went back once. He’s now sixteen.
In the garden, where Chase has found Ruby, she’s lying on her face, and Chase is checking her for signs of life—yes, she is alive—Mark comes up slowly, even shyly, as if he doesn’t want to interfere, and then says, without a great deal of conviction, “I’d like to leave now.”
“You can’t. I mean, I’d let you. I’d give you a couple hundred dollars and a bus ticket to Wichita, but…”
“I understand. You don’t think David would dig it. That’s cool,” Mark says, very low-key about the whole thing, his premature jerked-out-of-boyhood version of serious reflection and acceptance of life’s irrationality, something like that. Chase feels badly, he suffers a bit, pulling Ruby up to her feet to drag her inside. David is almost through with this one.
“How old do you think he is?” Mark asks, helping with the drooling, nearly comatose Ruby, who seems to respond to his touch more than to Chase’s, if she can perceive who he is at this point.
“We don’t know.”
They arrange Ruby very nicely on a couch. It’s late afternoon. The sun will be going down soon.
Mark could escape, he could leave, there’ve been many times he could have just walked away before now. Chase doesn’t know what he’s thinking, or what he imagines David is thinking. Maybe they have some communication Chase doesn’t know about, but he doesn’t believe this to be true. David seems barely aware that Mark exists. To the extent that he acknowledges the boy’s continued presence, he seems to accept it as perfectly natural that he should function as a kind of unskilled, not strictly necessary assistant for Chase. It seems to be, to David, a faintly amusing situation, one that reflects somehow on Chase. As though he should know what to do, instinctively, and does not, and has not done what should be done.
It’s uncanny how, at the moment David comes fully awake, everyone in the house feels it, feels him as he rises and prepares for the activity of the night.
Tonight he spends a long time in Sabrina’s room. What are they doing? Or rather: what
is he doing to her? Perhaps they are having a philosophical conversation. It has happened before. Or else something depraved may be going on. There are different ways for David to use each of them. Nothing holds him back.
‘Well, well.” David is suddenly there, in the living room, looking at poor Ruby. “She doesn’t look half good, does she? She looks all used up. What do you think, Chase?”
“You’re right.”
“Am I?”
“She looks all used up.”
“Thank you for confirming my observation. Let’s take her someplace quiet, where she can rest. Mark, come help us, won’t you? Ruby was a friend of yours, wasn’t she?”
“No, not really. I knew her, that’s all.”
“Did you like her?”
“She’s sort of a backstabber. You know, talks about you behind your back and stuff.”
“We’ve all known those kind of people, unfortunately. But then, don’t you think, there’s a little of the backstabber in all of us? In you, and me, even Chase?”
“Sure. Everybody’s mostly fucked up.”
David is enjoying this colloquy. They take Ruby into the killing room, where there’s a drain in the floor, a hose connected to a faucet over a big sink.
“Everybody has to die sometime,” David says, in a mock-philosophical tone, pleased with himself either over simply his own relative longevity or immortality or, more ominously, by some secret he has on his mind that Chase senses he’s about to share. “The leaf on the tree turns golden brown, or red, and flutters to the ground. Four out of five lion cubs starve to death or die from disease. They take it pretty well. What you should do, if it troubles you, is focus on all the time before you were born. You were happy then, you were at peace. There was no pain, and you knew the entire universe, you knew it from the inside out.”
