by Todd Grimson
“This is my new friend Sal.”
Sal says nothing. She blinks her eyes, but seems to be in a lugubrious trance. Keith drives them away. Tamara turns around in the front seat to look at the action in the back.
“Watch.”
Justine’s fangs are out. She turns Sal’s face toward her, as if for a kiss. She slowly presses onto the vein, then bites, so that the skin tears, and some blood runs down—until the fangs are fully engaged.
Keith pulls over the car and parks it, turns off the lights.
Sal moans.
“Usually,” Keith says, “it wouldn’t be the throat. Less conspicuous places—”
“Like behind my knee.”
“Right.”
”And she won’t remember any of this.”
“I don’t think so,” he says, quietly. Is he sad? Tamara cannot tell. He appears serene.
When Justine is done, she slumps for a moment, her forehead against Sal’s nose and lips. She wipes off her mouth on the lesbian’s black t-shirt.
“She asked me if I needed discipline,” Justine says, in a slightly hoarse, low voice. “What does that mean?”
“What did you tell her? Did you say yes?” Keith is amused.
“She was very serious, so I was serious too. She wanted me to say yes, so I said yes.”
“Is that the first thing she said to you?”
“No. She asked me if I had come in there before, and I said yes, but it had been a while. Tell me what she meant by saying ‘discipline’ like that.”
Justine’s fangs are retracted, Tamara notes. Keith explains what Sal probably had in mind.
“The club seemed different,” Justine says, thinking back. “What should we do with her?”
“We should take her back to where you got her. She won’t wake up for a while, will she?”
“No. Don’t you want to just let her off somewhere?”
“I think you guys should take her back,” Keith says, “at least to the front door. Say that she’s too drunk, she passed out. They’ll know what to do with her.”
“Wait a minute,” Tamara says.
“I’d do it,” Keith says, “but I’m a male, and they’d suspect the worst. Especially since she’s bleeding from the neck.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” Justine states, and Tamara turns and complains that she’s here as an observer, it’s not her job to get involved. She doesn’t want to.
“What if we dump her someplace and she gets raped and killed?” he says.
“You can find a safe place if you want to,” Justine notes, and Tamara realizes this whole problem is something between the lovers, friction for the sake of friction. Justine says, “What about Griffith Park?” and Keith just says no, that’s not good tonight.
Meanwhile, he is driving them inexorably back to the damn club.
“You bastard,” Justine says, as he stops the car.
Tamara and Justine prop up the tall, muscularly heavy Sal between them, and walk her to the door of the club, just as some new arrivals are going in.
“What did you do to her?” the fat doorwoman says, light mustache and tattoos, and they bring Sal in as Tamara replies, with amazing composure, “We played vampire, and she fainted at the first sight of blood.”
“Yeah,” Justine adds, deadpan, “she’s no fun. What a pussy.”
They sit her down on a chair just inside the door, in dim reddish light, and Sal opens her eyes.
Justine kisses her on the cheek, and she and Tamara go back outside, Tamara laughing to herself in her blue jeans, ponytail, and long-sleeved white shirt.
It seems quite funny now, driving away in the car. The madder one was at Keith, the more unwilling, the funnier it seems.
PART THREE
FIFTY-NINE
It is the same face as before, but it is different. She used to have faint shadows under her eyes; these are now gone. It is the same face, and yet it is as if it formerly was wearing a mask, which has now disappeared, dissolved. This unselfconscious smile—she would never have allowed her face to be so open, back in 1912. He cannot believe she is this vulnerable. He simply needs more time to study her act.
David looks closely, also, at her companions, who do not seem to have received the baptism of blood. No, as far as he can tell, they are free agents, they are with Justine by their own choice. She appears to feel safe enough, though, as he watches her. No, she does not think she is invulnerable, and her face is not so constantly accessible as all that. But she looks younger than he remembers. Slender, mobile, quite in contrast to the languid, unknowable vamp.
He hates her like this. He hates what seeing her like this does to him. There is too much mystery, too much he doesn’t want to think about, but he must. The situation is a problem for him to solve. It may be mathematical in nature. The answer may be found through subtraction, or division, taking something away or separating what is now joined.
The man, for instance. Obviously, he is a candidate as some sort of a love object for Justine. David prefers to suppose otherwise, but the longer he watches them together the more he notices that they seem to be familiar with each other, physically, in that love object kind of way. She is playing a strange game, a masquerade. David cannot guess her reasons. Maybe there is some great sum of money to be had by romancing this fellow. Maybe she doesn’t want to bite him because he has AIDS.
This is one of many possible scenarios. The brown-haired woman may be the man’s sister, presumably a lesbian. She sits with the man and Justine, in a booth in the bar. They are talking about something. David cannot hear. He wonders about the tall woman who went into the lesbian nightclub.
It was at that moment, as the three women were on the sidewalk, that he had first noticed Justine.
Her incandescent face.
His first thought was: She bears an uncanny resemblance to Justine. How interesting. I will pursue her.
Then he realized, by the other women near the entrance to the club, that he would be conspicuous if he went in.
She came out again with this other one, they got into the waiting car. He was glad he had not parked. He followed them, and they came to this bar.
David has written down the license number, not knowing if this will be worth anything. Since it is fairly crowded, he has dared to come inside. Justine does not appear to be properly wary. He is memorizing her new look, her expressions, what she is wearing. It’s disturbing to view her with only this strapless bra on, she has taken off the red jacket, bare shoulders and arms and stomach, hand moving her hair out of her face.
When they leave he follows them.
The brown-haired woman drives back out the gate, in a different car. Get her license number. There. The most important actors are here. David lingers, although there’s no place to park and get out. He drives around and around, slowly, thinking of what he has seen.
He wishes he could see her again, to make sure this is real. He’ll have to come back another night.
He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
SIXTY
“Why don’t you go after Tamara? It wouldn’t take much,” Justine says, in her white nightgown, in the dark.
“She has Patrick.”
“So? You could take her away from him.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You admit that you could, though, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t think so. Why are you jealous?”
“I can’t help it. What if I suddenly grew old overnight, if I aged a hundred years? You’d be disgusted by me.”
“Maybe. How can I know? What do you want me to say? It goes the other way, too. What if the Venezuelan gangsters had burned my face with cigarettes, and I was disfigured? It’s all so hypothetical.”
“I would still love you.”
Keith laughs at her.
“You would never have gotten to know me in the first place. I’ve never yet seen you pick someone ugly or fucked up.”
“But if you were burned no
w, I’d take care of you. I’d bite you, and make you like me, and the skin would all heal.”
“If I was a vampire,” Keith says, “we would bore each other ridiculously. I’d like it better, just to try it, if I was one, and you weren’t.”
“What a dream,” she says, unamused.
“Why don’t I read some more to you?”
“It’s late.” Some nights, he reads aloud to her, lately from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which she especially likes. Keith discovered, some time ago, that Justine is virtually illiterate. She’s embarrassed by this.
They are silent. Then Keith says, out of nowhere, as if they’ve still been talking all along, “Besides, I killed any possibility of that when I took care of Eric Zimmerman. I knew what I was doing, too.”
“What if we were both Chinese, on the other side of the world? If we were normal people, and we met in school.”
“We’d be in Chinese prison,” Keith announces. “Chinese jail.”
“Good,” she says, with a little smile, bringing his fingers up to her lips. The gesture has a ceremonial feel.
SIXTY-ONE
He doesn’t want to get too close. Maybe he doesn’t get close enough. But he doesn’t want Justine to sense him lurking.
The notion that he doesn’t get close enough makes him want to get closer, and so he does. He sees things. He sees them doing things. One night he actually comes into the house. Then he runs away.
These aren’t streets an automobile can just park on, generally speaking, so he instructs Minh to drive in a large circuit, coming around every so often, and he can recognize the sound of the engine of this particular car. If Minh is arrested, through some fluke and an inability to satisfactorily explain herself, David thinks he could make it home before sunrise. He avoids cutting the time too close.
He thinks of these spying expeditions as “scientific.” Yes, he is studying Justine’s behavior, as if she is a rare bird, say a hummingbird that only drinks nectar from a specific, rare, exotic flower, poison to all others in the wild.
SIXTY-TWO
They used to play this song called “Doorcloser,” for twenty minutes, to end the show. Keith wakes up after having dreamed about playing it, only incidentally onstage. He wasn’t aware of an audience for a long time.
It’s 1:30 P.M. He’s restless. He wants some fresh-squeezed orange juice; he decides to go get some, driving the car.
Sometimes he used to think of the term “Doorcloser” as an answer to the Doors calling themselves the Doors. Jim Morrison claiming to open the doors of perception—well, it was a joke, but Keith conceived of some cartoon superhero-character, Door-closer, and that was his magic, that he would close the Big Door. He could close it on anyone. Was he a manifestation of Death? No. He just closed the door. Think of it any way you like.
Sometimes the door must be closed to keep evil outside. To keep out the cold. Wild animals. To make sure the children are safe.
He goes to the music store. Dissatisfied, he buys nothing, and goes on, abstracted, to the musical equipment store. It makes him deeply uneasy to go in, but he does. He looks down at his hands. They seem blurry, and not so misshapen as they have been. It is as if he sees them in hyperfast motion, they are blurry because they vibrate with new life.
This part of the store is so hi-tech it’s like a sci-fi interior of the future, all clean lines and Italianate elegance. He goes downstairs, and downstairs again, into the deserted warehouselike showroom where all the grand pianos and organs and harpsichords are crowded together, you almost cannot find space to walk between the furniture-pianos and all the potted ferns and palms. It’s dead quiet down here, and the air is cool and old.
He sits down at a piano, thinking of Justine. The black gunk that comes out of her vagina, upon orgasm—he believes that this substance is absorbed, that it is feeding him in some way. It is healing his hands.
Although he never had any lessons, he was always convinced that, in his own way, he knew how to play the piano. It wasn’t a matter of technique.
Great. He plays a chord. Softly.
The black substance does not have any sort of foul smell or taste. It is like deep, dark earth. Bitter, unsweetened chocolate. Chocolate that has been scorched.
Keith depresses the keys again, so faintly that only the last note sounds of the broken chord. A-flat. It means something to him, this note. He’s suddenly full of anguish, he could cry as he remembers how they came to him, in the cell, smelling of alcohol and sweat, it was so hot, and they held him. At first he didn’t know what they wanted to do. Rape him? Beat him up? The one in charge—Keith looked up into his shining brown face, big red lips.
Not hard, he puts his fist down, a tone-cluster, dissonant chord. There’s a way of pressing down all adjacent notes, like playing with a ruler, or a book, that creates what he’s always thought of as a rainbow effect.
When he goes upstairs to leave, a black man he vaguely recognizes smiles and says hello.
“Alonzo Pendergraph. I was in the Survival Network. We opened for you in Minneapolis.” He pauses a beat, dreadlocks, café au lait skin. “You don’t remember any of this, do you?”
His manner charms Keith, who shakes his head.
“I don’t even remember being in Minneapolis. I think I had a cold.”
They walk outside together.
“Jesus, you’ve got a Mercedes? I mean, excuse me for saying this, but I didn’t think you guys made that much money.”
“It’s my girlfriend’s,” Keith says, smiling. “I don’t even own an instrument. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be on the street.”
“No guitar? Serious?”
“I haven’t touched one in five years. Four.”
“That’s bad. That’s real bad. Excuse me, you know, for making a public service announcement, but don’t you ever think about the people who bought your album, mmm, your true audience? They’d like to hear what you’re up to, man. I know I would. Even if you only, say, had fifty thousand hard-core, one out of ten, that’s fifty thousand, waiting to hear your sound. Those are the ones who’re really listening, trying to understand, not just showing up because you’re fashionable, the flavor of the month.”
“I’d have to learn to play all over again,” Keith says.
“That’s either a problem or an opportunity.”
“Yeah.” Then Keith says, “I’d like to play, like, one note. One note.”
“Come over to my house. I’ve turned the garage into a rehearsal shed. One note. I understand.”
SIXTY-THREE
“You’ve heard of ‘universal donors’? People who can give blood to anyone, regardless of type.”
“Yes,” Patrick says, though he doesn’t sound too sure.
“Well, Justine is a ‘universal receiver.’ She can receive anything, any type blood. I went to med school with this guy named Jay Culligan, who’s a hematologist—I’d like to consult him, if I could do it in some nonobvious way. There exist diseases where you damage your own red cells, immunoglobulin deficiencies, G6PD deficiency, where you’re treated by transfusion, that’s the only thing to do. There’s a lot about her that doesn’t make any sense to me at all… like the business about having to stay out of the sunlight. The ultraviolet light must have some sort of exaggerated effect. And this aging thing: I’m not sure whether to believe it or not. I’d like to look at a smear of her blood, see if there’s anything happening that’s completely off-the-wall.”
They’re talking on the telephone. Ordinarily, if they’re not together, they at least talk on the phone. Patrick doesn’t want to believe any of this supernatural business is true, but Tamara seems convinced. He’ll go along with her, he trusts her, but he wishes this all would go away.
On the television screen he locates a temporarily pleasing image, the sound off, he sees two four-women teams playing beach volleyball, in bikinis. Black seems to be triumphing over jungle print. What nice tans. Bare feet, long legs. One beautiful young woman wears blue-shaded wraparoun
d plastic sunglasses and a backwards baseball cap. She leaps and spikes the ball.
Patrick says, “You’re probably right.”
SIXTY-FOUR
The light and sign-filled vacancy, palm trees and stoplights, automobiles everywhere, the horizontal, broken geometries of this city—David’s senses are acute, he tastes the chemicals in the smoky, ancient air, he sees a tiny shard of broken glass catch the orangey black artificial light two blocks away.
He and Chase get out of the car, on this woebegone strip, and go into the office of the detective who’s been hired to run down some pertinent facts. He has stayed late, and as if to demonstrate that it’s unusual for him to be receiving callers at this time of night, he has turned on only one small desk lamp, so that for the most part the messy room is dark. The detective is a fat man. He’s perspiring.
“Here,” he says. Chase picks up the piece of paper, scrutinizing it, hoping that his master will be pleased.
David sits with his right buttock on the edge of the desk, facing, looking down at the man, who looks affronted, but does not protest.
“What about your files? You do keep files?”
“Naturally.”
David slowly shakes his head. “There shouldn’t be any record of this transaction. Not even in your head,” he says, touching a forefinger to his own temple, as the fat man meets his eyes.
In a few moments, David unfurls, and comes down to carefully bite into a wrist. He injects some venom, then pulls the sleeve down to cover the wound.
“He won’t remember?” Chase inquires, and David says, “No.”
The fat man is left, slumped in his chair, free to go on with his fat man life.
SIXTY-FIVE
She knows that he is not here. The house is dark. Nevertheless, after looking out at the grounds, she finds herself going into his room. Slowly, scarcely seeing what is before her eyes, wearing her long white nightgown, bare feet, she presses her face up against the cool glass of the mirror, half-expecting her face to go through, but it does not. She closes her eyes and sees a black swirl, some blue dots that outline something she cannot make out. She sees a white ladder on its side, some orange paper flames, and there is Lucifer, horns and a tail, dark, you cannot look at him too closely, your eyes want to squirm away. She saw this in her sleep, she realizes. It’s familiar to her. A screen, and beyond the screen a deathbed. Keith lies on the deathbed, his head propped up by pillows, not happy, no he’s not happy, but he’s calm. He sees the Devil and he can look him in the face. He is not without fear. It would be foolish to be without fear.
