by Skyler White
“What the fuck? You think you’re leaving?”
I grip his earlobe between my forefinger and thumb. He scrambles, panting mutely away from the door as I bring my quilled fingernails together.
I leave him with his new piercing bleeding softly, already cobbling the story he’ll tell about the crazy chick he made out with in the bathroom on Valentine’s Day after he tattooed her damned. As his story ages, we will have had sex back there.
My breasts are already flattening by the time the tattoo parlor door slams behind me, shrinking toward the twenty-first-century ideal of full and firm, but more athletic than sensual. At least I won’t be hungry when I meet Adam for dinner tonight.
I have been a fool. Ed could never have been my salvation. Just another fig. Adam, however, might be. If only tonight goes differently than my birthdays always do, if only I don’t have to leave Adam like I left Ed in the blue bathroom—blindly wanting me. They can’t help it. They all want me. I am the angel of desire.
Desire is an angel in hell.
———
“Lord, deliver us from demons,” Dominic said.
His two junior postdoctoral students, one depressed, one anxious, and both on high alert, squinted at him across a peeling Formica tabletop.
“Do you really think that’s appropriate?” the anxious one asked.
Dominic stretched his jaw against the damage patience was wreaking on his molars. “Professor Dysart gave the ‘Lord, Deliver Us’ speech at the APA conference last year. ‘From ancient times,’ ” Dominic recited, “ ‘when mental illness was treated with technologies as crude as drills to cast out devils, to today’s arguably equally primitive psycho-pharmaceutical attempts to alter brain chemistry, blah, blah, blah’—that one.”
Peter, still worried, whipped a notebook from his lab coat pocket and began transcribing. “I thought we recommended ‘Psychopharmacological Therapies and Posttraumatic Stress Disorders’ for the APA,” he said.
Paul shook his jowly head. “That’s too technical for TED.”
“Obviously,” Peter sneered. “It’s the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference, for God’s sake. They’re not all medical doctors, much less neuroscientists. Some of them are artists. Dominic is right. ‘Lord Deliver Us’ is perfect. What was the subtitle for the PTSD speech, D?”
“Demons to Drugs.”
“Christ,” Paul said, “is there anything you don’t know off the top of your head?”
Peter continued his furious note-taking.
“I have it on the laptop.” Dominic gestured at the weathered shoulder bag on the seat beside him, but Peter scribbled on. Paul took a swallow of coffee, and Dominic surveyed the cafeteria again. It was a garish, uninteresting space, the only spot on the MIT campus he had not yet photographed. He squinted, mentally experimenting with focus and filter, and resolved to bring his camera in over spring break, just to challenge himself.
“Dysart won’t go,” he said, returning his attention to Peter and Paul. “His last flight had mechanical trouble, and he’s seventy, for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you two put in a joint travel request?”
“To speak at TED?”
“Both of us?”
Despite the union’s peppy color scheme and the energetic noise of undergraduates, it was the eagerness arcing between the two postdoctoral students that reminded Dominic how tired he was.
“You’re the senior research fellow, Dominic,” Peter said. “And the best speaker.”
“You wrote that speech,” Paul added. “You’re the one—”
“If you boys worked this little skit out ahead of time,” Dominic interrupted, “your script sucks.”
The two snorted but relaxed, only to bolt back upright again. “Hello, Professor Dysart,” they chorused.
“Gentlemen, I have exciting news.” A meaty hand landed on Dominic’s shoulder. “Peter, be a good chap and bring an old man a coffee?” Dysart handed over a crumpled bill and sat heavily beside Dominic, dropping a strategically folded newspaper before him. “Take a look at that,” he wheezed.
Madalene Wright, the article announced, had just withdrawn her funding from UCLA, the only other American university performing advanced research on brain chemistry and mental illness without pharmaceutical industry money. Dominic flashed a predatory grin and pushed the paper across the table to Paul. “Do we have a battle plan?” he asked Dysart.
Peter returned with a steaming mug and a jelly doughnut, which he placed before his idol. Dr. Dysart was not supposed to eat doughnuts. The distinguished scientist did not request them when he dispatched his underlings for coffee, nor did he send money enough to buy anything but the coffee he never touched. Without acknowledging its existence, the professor sank his yellow teeth into the forbidden offering. Dominic took the opportunity to change topics.
“We’ve just been discussing the TED conference next month. Since you’re cutting back on travel, Doc, why not send the Ps in your stead?”
“Paul and Peter?” Dysart regarded Dominic through gray barb-wire brows. “I thought you would go.”
“I’d rather not.”
“You spend too much time in the lab for such a good-looking young man. An escape to warmer climes might do you some good. Besides, I hear from Alfred in Chemical Engineering that the TED conference, to a hotshot young scientist, is like spring break to a buxom undergrad.” The professor winked lewdly. “The gratification of all your earthly desires, my boy! ”
Peter writhed in suppressed anguish, and Paul sank deeper into his ample flesh, but Dominic held his athletic body motionless, leaning back in his chair. “The advancement of knowledge is my fondest desire,” he declaimed.
Dysart and acolytes laughed. The tension eased. “Very well.” The doctor nodded, sucking his fingers for jelly. “I don’t suppose you fellows could tear yourselves away in March?”
“Professor, I—”
“I think we’d—”
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Dr. O!” A petite blonde with a heart-spattered T-shirt peeking out from her hoodie waved shyly to Dominic.
“Hi, Jessica,” he said, and swallowed against the sudden, unwelcome but familiar bitter taste in his mouth.
The Ps waited just until the girl turned the corner. “Dr. O?” they sneered gleefully.
“From my last name,” Dominic explained. “O’Shaughnessy.” But the sounds and faces of MIT were fragmenting into liquid shards, flying apart slowly, as Dominic’s memory seized on an image of the pretty coed as vivid and clear as it was impossible.
“What about ‘the advancement of knowledge’ and all that, my boy?” Dysart’s voice was a distant echo.
“I said it was my fondest desire,” Dominic struggled to joke, “not my only one.”
But it was too late. Already, a memory that could not be his had captured him. He was running, stealing away from his village with that girl—a girl—on a festival day six hundred years ago. Ghita tripped, and he tumbled with her willingly into the smell of grass growing. He rolled her under him, blond against the green. She tasted like mead, and he cupped her breast, pale and still panting, spilling from an undeniably medieval kirtle. Ridiculous, for him to have medieval memories.
“Parlan d’amore,” he whispered. Her delicate eyes crinkled in joy, but from Ghita’s beautiful lips came Dysart’s coarse laugh.
The hallucination flickered. Dominic shoved his fingertips hard against his eyes.
“I think the message that D.O.”—Dysart put a heavy emphasis on Dominic’s first initial—“was trying to convey, is that he can celebrate the rites of spring without the aid of an academic conference’s bikinied bacchae.”
“I’m not interested in the spring riots,” Peter clarified earnestly. “It’s the girls.”
Dominic opened his eyes, grateful to see only ugly men again. He stood up, shaking himself, as if to shrug the delusional memories away. “Peter and Paul will do great,” he said and slung his laptop bag across his body. “I’ll email you both a
copy of the speech.”
He had already turned to leave when Dysart’s phone shrilled and the professor gestured for him to wait. “My spies,” he mouthed, flipping open the slender device.
Paul and Peter exchanged a grin. Each man would have willingly sacrificed the other for the chance they now both had. Dominic held his steely focus on them. He would not return to Ghita, her skin, so richly pale, distended in black buboes. “Acral necrosi,” they would say now, not “the Black Death,” with little Luciana still suckling the breathless breast. He had buried them together, mother and child.
“Confess,” Peter whispered, mistaking Dominic’s fierce scowl. “Now you want to go, don’t you?”
“God, no,” Dominic said. He rested his laptop bag on the table, impatient to fire up the machine and document the latest, spectacular failure of his clandestine pharmacopoeia. Insomnia he could have continued to tolerate, but grief-wracked delusions of a wife lost six hundred years ago indicated a complete failure of the AEDvII.2 formulation. “Besides,” he explained, catching the Ps’ puzzled stares, “there’s no way the department would agree to three of us going.”
“Dominic?” Dysart snapped his phone closed. “I’m sending you.”
“What?” Peter leapt to his feet, and even Paul unfolded himself in protest.
“Madalene Wright has accepted an invitation to the TED talks. She has registered for a number of lectures, including ours. I have a very stout grapevine, have I not?” Dysart beamed.
“Then it’s gotta be D.” Peter re-creased the newspaper, closing Wright’s artfully pickled face away from them.
“If she’s going to be there, yeah, it has to be,” Paul agreed.
“Madalene has just pulled her funding from UCLA,” Dysart reminded them. “She’ll have a few extra million just freed up to hand about if she decides she’d like to.”
Peter drilled nervous fingers on Formica. “If Dominic could persuade her to redirect even some of UCLA’s endowment to us, we might start the memory project in earnest, start to parse which neurons are involved in a given memory—”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, gentlemen.” Dysart lugged himself to standing. “Dominic, you look ghastly.”
“Sorry. I’m fine. Tired.”
But Peter was electrified. “If we can pinpoint how neurons come together to form networks, we might find the physical representations of specific memories. And when we understand memory learning and expression, we’re one step closer to memory eradication…”
“We’ll patent the new soma,” Paul whispered.
“We’d be hearing from Stockholm…”
Dr. Dysart waved the Ps silent. “You’ll go then?”
Dominic released pale lips from the vise of his teeth and nodded. He didn’t give a damn for patents or prizes, but he did care, with rigidly masked intensity, about the neuronal signatures of memories and their identification. Even the impossible, if found, can be destroyed.
“So it’s D’s quest,” Paul mumbled, when Dysart had ambled off toward the lab.
“Slay the dragon lady and bring us back the gold!” Peter gathered three empty coffee mugs and one full one.
“Give the ‘Lord Deliver Us’ speech,” Paul said to the table. “What was its subtitle?”
“‘Following the Chemical Footprints of Devils in the Mind,’” Dominic said, handing the licked-clean doughnut plate to Peter.
“You have one hell of a memory,” Peter grumbled. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”
“Yeah, I’m blessed with a hell of memory.” Dominic turned down the corridor to hide a bitter smile. “I guess it beats a memory of Hell.”
———
My flesh clings too tight around my bones, at least a dress size smaller than when I left Eddie bleeding in the blue bathroom. He wouldn’t recognize me if he walked in the door. Not that you get many punk tattooists in swank sushi joints. I have showered his smell from my scentless skin and traded in my beater-T and blue jeans for a velvet vest and silk skirt which match the restaurant’s décor—tastefully understated—although it would be difficult to conjure two words further from my true essence.
Adam, innocent darling, believes I am an account exec at one of the ad agencies downtown. It’s something I could actually do, from what I read in the bookstore careers section. Every one of these elegant and polished bodies in the restaurant anteroom has a job to eat up their time in exchange for the titles they feed to one another. I want one.
Can they sense how different I am, nestled amongst them in the stylish lobby? Their appraising eyes rank each other and compare themselves, but I am thin and expensively dressed, and it is enough. Blind to my angelic lineage and my damnation, they note the style of my shoes, not the state of my soul. Just as well. They’re six-hundred-dollar heels.
“Happy birthday!” Adam’s light touch lands on my shoulder. I stand to greet him, quickly shrinking an inch from my native height. I always forget he’s short. My muted terra-cotta lips yield to his adoring kiss, my teeth’s sharp edges neatly tucked away. I need nothing from him after my inky snack. He steps behind me, forming a warm mantle of love against my back and shoulders in the packed lobby’s electric loneliness. I want to wrap my pulseless shell in the human noise and heat of his heart and lungs. I want to drill my unbreakable angel nails into this moment and refuse to let it slip. I would drain time and swallow it to keep the two of us standing thus, my body inside the protective cloak of his arms and love. It is enough to hope.
I steady myself against the scent of his wanting me, and touch the fragile answering ache of my own desire. Not for him, not for his body, not even his blood, but for his mortality and love. If I could turn in his arms and tell him every poisoned thing I am, and still smell desire, not rank fear—if he could see and love me—could I slip through him, out of human flesh and time, back to angelic wings and freedom? This is my threadbare hope.
Every vampire is a fallen angel of desire, and we nourish our deathless beauty on what we fleetingly inspire in mortals who live but briefly. But just as I would break my teeth on Adam if he did not want or fear me, he must see through the desires I create and those I embody, in order to taste my truth and free me. But desire, like humanity, is quick to breed and quick to die, and accustomed to do both with closed eyes.
“You look incredible.” Adam’s lips brush my ear. He sounds excited, maybe nervous. Is there a ring in his pocket? Has he called ahead and planned something humiliating with a waiter? His capable hands squeeze my elbow. I look at my expensive shoes. Red tears bite my eyes.
“Adam?” The hostess is a luscious thing in green velvet.
“Right here.” He twines his fingers in mine and excuse-mes his way through the lobby. I trail him, following the hostess, winding through the lush rows of tiny tables dotted like topiary in this garden of sensory delights. The men, women, and tables are all draped in the same rich, earth-toned palette of wealth and sophistication—designer skin, exotic eyes, flesh and food in artful presentations. But my skirt is too red. It’s expensive and exquisitely detailed, but blood-colored, and draws glances. I am forever tripping over the human thread between eye-catching and obscene. I hate every woman I pass.
Adam beams across our table. “How was your day?”
“I got a tattoo,” I tell him.
“Very funny. How was work?”
I only want to study his strong jaw and wide cheekbones, the way his blond hair falls into his earnest eyes—mortal beauty is so moving—but Adam’s end-of-day reunion ritual dictates we confess our grievances using the form of the employees’ creed. I learned the contemporary version easily, two variations on the theme of “my betters are worse than me.”
I elect to berate The Client, the mysterious entity who pays our salaries and thus, in a market economy, is our superior and therefore, in American mythology, our inferior. Adam recites his day in the Idiot Boss variation, but I barely hear for feasting my eyes on his face, and hoping. The waitress brings glisten
ing jewels of fish on tiny rice couches and handleless clay mugs of tea. Adam orders wine. Not a glass each, but a bottle. Reckless, for him.
“Olivia.” He grasps the stem, but does not drink. “I have something I need to ask you.” He toys with the fine rim. “I know we haven’t known each other that long, in the grand scheme of things.”
The scheme is infinitely grander than he can comprehend. And he doesn’t know me at all. One man once, a few hundred years ago, almost did, but I could not sustain even that for long. Poor Vlad, I’m not sure even he ever fully believed me.
“I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you,” he says. But has he fallen far enough? Too deep to scale the sheer wall of his desire? If I can show him everything I am—wingscars and quills—and he can stay fallen with his fallen angel, then I might finally be free. But I’ve screwed this up every time since the fall of man. I must watch my step.
“I love everything about you, the way you look, your eyes, your laugh…”
I have to tell Adam now, before he proposes, or the loophole will dissolve. If my body had scent like a mortal’s, I would smell wet fear.
“I love that you think my jokes are funny, and that you care how my day went.”
In his infant-blue eyes, I see naked hunger glint like light off glass. He wants me, truly and deeply. He wants me, and his desire creeps through my body like food. I could sustain myself on such hunger, surely? Fill myself up with his need? It isn’t love, but it is power. Almost as sweet.
“I want you to know”—Adam leans forward, his voice a husky whisper in the crowded restaurant—“I totally respect your intention to save yourself for marriage.” His eyes, darting to the adjacent tables, give the lie to his professed respect. “I would never put any pressure on you to do something you weren’t comfortable with.”
I’m not comfortable with the close-spaced tables, with the red of my skirt, or the briny smell of Adam’s excitement. The waitress brings more small plates—shimmering Szechwan pork ribs on curly lettuce leaves—and takes the rest away.
“Olivia, I want to wake up every morning and see your heavenly face beside me. I want to come home every night to find you there.” His fingers convulse around the glass and release it. His hand disappears beneath the table, reaching toward his coat pocket. He is shifting in his chair. Will he go down on one knee here, where there is barely space to stand between the tables? The ridiculous, antiquated, public gesture will knock something over. It will ruin my chance.
