by Skyler White
I owe him the same. “Mine is darkest now,” I say and meet his kiss. I taste fear. And absinthe. It climbs inside me, an emerald velvet unbalance of delectation. I close my eyes and taste floating, am lifted, needed. He pulls me closer, and I see acutely—only tinted green—the magic of desire. I ride the wave of his lush hunger, rising verdant and new, pressing up within me. What is the taste beneath the absinthe? Beneath the fear? Kiss deeper. Kiss of death. Kiss of blessing. Tastes of love.
“Ollie, sweetheart, didn’t you need to be going?”
The singer and I blink at Evie, sitting flushed but composed, beside the pale and barely breathing giant. “Some people have a bad reaction to absinthe.” She shrugs and gives the singer a slow smile.
“We’re busy,” he says.
Evie’s eyes flash from the singer’s to mine and back. If vampires could have strokes, Evie would seize up and fall over. Does he deny her? Does he want only me?
Without his desire or fear, Evie cannot feed from him. It would break her teeth to try. But I know she will kill him barehanded before she’d leave him with me, so I stand.
Let’s go, I psycast. She will not feed from him. Not this night. Stunned, but already well-fed, she gathers her things. I turn my back and bite deeply into my lower lip to fill my mouth with blood. Over my shoulder, I wink at my satiated sister, and turn to my starving man.
Our mouths meet a final time in a communion of stained souls. He swallows what he cannot taste, kissing hungrily, trying to ask me to stay, knowing I am gone. His lips are slippery with my ichor. Tomorrow, he will blame the absinthe for his omnipotence and strength, the heightened smells and taste, the penetrating insight and angelic health. Evelyn’s fig will blame the same for leaving him drained and weak, tired, ill, and more than damned.
4
INTO THE FIRE
In my midnight midtown apartment, the demon of despair regards me in the red wink of my answering machine. Adam called again while I was out. I watch the diabolical electric blinking. Modernity is keen to alert us to what we’ve missed: calls, turns, TV programs. The city is ablaze with missed connections. I pull the blackout drapes closed against mine: Maria, Evie, Adam…
The death that comes with each new day, the pulseless, breathless sleep of angels has shuttered my race in the sexless bed of coffins out of simple convenience. But shadow can always be found or made. This is not true of light. Darkness clings in the corners and insides of things, but with blackout drapes and a little planning, the modern vampire can make her entire home a tomb. Handy that. Since 1962, I have kept my stone coffin, with my shadow and my wings, at home in Ireland.
I meet the answering machine’s small, steady stare. “What do you do when God tells you no?” I ask. But it doesn’t answer me, so I undress for bed. We are all pitch-black in the belly and the lungs; light reaches no deeper in than our closed mouths and eyes. The blackness without and the night within, barred only by flesh, longs to merge, fold on fold, into itself, touching both sides of my senseless skin. No other light, no other thought reaches me, and the green blush of tonight’s absinthe is swallowed by blinking, red-eyed despair. Who am I to deny that demon’s desire?
Without my loophole, without even its quest to scaffold thought, and unable to escape even into tumbling madness, I must still fall. It’s who I am. All I have left is my truth. I liked the taste of it in my mouth tonight. I want to go home.
“I’m going home,” I tell the unblinking red bulb.
Home is where you always tell the truth, even with your lies.
———
“Damn!” The water bath had just reached a hundred degrees, but the pounding on Dominic’s back door continued. He took a deep breath to calm himself, inhaling the familiar, pungent scent of developer and bleach. It was Paul, he was certain. The dogged postdoc would keep up the steady tattoo of fist-on-wood until Dominic came to the door. He looked balefully at the precise, ordered rows of tanks in his sink line, grunted, and marched up the basement stairs.
“Hey, D.”
“Hello, Paul.”
“Your car was in the drive, so I knew you were home.”
“I could have been out running.”
“You would have come back eventually.”
Dominic regarded the lumpy man whose bulk filled his back door. “Come in,” he said. “I was working downstairs.”
Paul walked across Mrs. Lovett’s clean floor in muddy boots, took a beer from the fridge, and squinted at Dominic. “In your darkroom?”
Dominic nodded.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen your darkroom.”
“Not much to see,” Dominic smiled briefly. “What with it being dark and all.”
“Built it yourself, I bet?”
Dominic nodded again. “It really wasn’t too hard. Little bit of duct tape, some black silicone caulk. It was a fun project.”
“Can I see?”
“It’s not that much to look at, Paul. Have another beer.”
“But I’ve interrupted you. You can finish whatever you’re working on”—Paul popped the top off another Newcastle—“we could hang out.”
Dominic watched Weisel wind around Paul’s ankles. Even though he shared a back fence with Paul, the two neuroscientists never “hung out.” The sullen man appeared at Dominic’s back door several times a semester with a concern he would worry like a chew toy, growling and slobbering, but for the most part, they saw more than enough of each other in the lab. Dominic got himself a beer and allowed Paul, Weisel, and finally Hubel to follow him downstairs.
“Your basement is backwards,” Paul observed, squeezing himself through the darkroom’s narrow door. “The furnace is out there on its own, and the rest of the space is walled in.”
Dominic laughed and moved a large trash can full of rejected prints, film ends, and empty chemical packets outside the darkroom door. He pushed the stool from its place in front of the enlarger into the trash can’s empty spot, and Paul plopped down on it while the cats curled up before the metallic warmth of the exposed furnace.
In the brown shadows of the safelight, Dominic rechecked the water bath temperature and began loading film onto reels. He loved the smells and rituals of processing, the precise gestures and times, the slow discovery of what was hidden, but the darkroom itself was just a false front. Dominic refused to glance at the door in the back wall that led to his private lab. That, he wouldn’t show even to the cats.
Paul surveyed the darkroom’s interior—a study in utility over aesthetics. The small space was not drywalled, and blue electrical boxes capped with timers, dimmers, and switches clung to the bare studs like snails. Wires, tubing, and PVC pipe ran precisely, but exposed.
“Have you had this place inspected?” Paul asked.
Dominic looked up from his reels and spindle rods. “Nope. I’m sure I’ve violated city codes all over the place. But I figure I know a thing or two about electrons. It’s safe.”
“It doesn’t look it.”
“Paul, I know you’re not here out of concern for my safety.”
“No. That’s true.” Paul studied his feet. “I hear you’re going to be gone all of next month.”
“Yup. I fly out on April first. I don’t think that should be allowed.”
“Because you just landed five million from the Wright foundation, or because you want to be a part of setting up the new lab?”
“Because it’s April Fool’s Day.”
“Oh.”
Dominic chuckled and set a timer. He placed his film into the first tank with precise, familiar movements. He would need to agitate it every few seconds, but he fixed Paul with a hard stare. Time to make the fat man ’fess up. “Why do you ask?”
Paul fidgeted. “I just thought… It just doesn’t seem like you, to be away from here for a whole month. And Dysart hinted you might be going far?”
Dominic turned back to the film.
“Like Europe? Maybe Ireland?” Paul’s irritating adolescent habit of curling hi
s inflection up midsentence got more pronounced when he impressed himself with his own cleverness.
Dominic kept his eyes on the clock, counting off the resting and agitating time, waiting for the information to spill out of the man perched on his stool like pudding on a lollipop stick.
“Ireland is where Trinity is,” Paul observed in a conversational tone so tortured Dominic was grateful neuroscience required no acting. He said nothing. Paul jerked his sagging body straight. “Oh my God, are they recruiting you? I already know they’re after Dysart…”
“Are they?”
“It’s part of my job to open his mail!”
Dominic glanced over his shoulder at the fidgety man and moved his film into the bleach.
Paul executed a neat fade from frightened to affronted. “I pre-screen his correspondence for him. The faculty at Trinity’s Multisensory Cognition Lab has been trying to recruit Dysart since they got their fMRI machine. He’s considered the expert on fMRI localization on anatomical images, you know.”
“I know.”
“Yeah, you would.” Paul rolled his cow eyes heavenward. “But if they’ve gotten their mitts on a MEG scanner,” he pondered, “you’re the one pioneering an integrative fMRI-MEG approach—Oh God! You’re going to end up full faculty at Trinity and I’m going to spend the rest of my life counting neurons!” Paul made an anguished noise. “Is that why you’re going to Dublin?”
“I’m not.”
“But Dysart said you were.”
“I’ll bet he said I was going to Ireland.” Dominic transferred the film to the first wash tank and turned around to study his almost-apoplectic audience. Dominic didn’t like to lie, but Madalene had made it very clear that the primary condition of her additional grant to MIT was the secrecy of Dominic’s Irish fieldwork.
“I’m going inland,” he said.
“The country?” Paul was incredulous. “What the hell is in the country?”
“Fields?” Dominic turned his innocent back to Paul.
“You’re taking vacation?” he spluttered. “You never take vacation. And a whole month? That’s”—he groped angrily for a word that captured his anxiety and suspicion—“weird.”
Dominic moved the film into the fixer. Paul was all cortex—no primitive territorial awareness, no love of battle, but his flaccid body registered as a physical encroachment in Dominic’s private space and tweaked a limbic violence in him. Paul sat stolidly outside Dominic’s holy of holies, scheming how to position himself for the coveted Senior Researcher title in the event that Dominic accepted a nonexistent offer elsewhere. He and Peter had been out-maneuvering each other over that feather for years. Paul sat up so abruptly he slipped off the stool.
“Who’s going to pick up your classroom hours?” he asked, re-situating himself.
Dominic turned back to hide a chuckle. Paul didn’t move quickly often. It was a good thing. “I don’t know,” he said. Dysart had asked him which of the Ps he thought should take over his teaching duties for the next month. Dominic had promised to decide, but hadn’t yet. Peter was good with students, but enjoyed his office hours with the female ones just a little too much. Paul hated people.
“I bet Dysart will be deciding in the next week. Damn.” Paul mashed his doughy fingers together. “You’d let me review your lecture notes, wouldn’t you, D?”
“Sure. I’ll email them to you tonight. Or you could look them up. They’re on the department website.”
“No.” Paul clambered off the stool. “I should look those over now, before I go, if you don’t mind. You’ve got a printer, don’t you?” He was reaching for the doorknob. Dominic’s hand closed hard over the spongy wrist. “Ow!” Paul whined. “What did you do that for?”
“Sit down,” Dominic said. “I have seven more minutes in here before you can open the door.”
“I’m trapped?” Paul’s voice, abnormally high for such a large man, climbed into soprano. “I think I’m claustrophobic.”
“You’re fine,” Dominic said, lifting the film into the final wash tank. He had dodged the Ireland question, but his laptop was on the wrong side of the darkroom’s back door.
“When can I print those lecture notes?”
“You’ll have to use the website. I left my bag on campus.”
Paul gaped. “You what?”
“I left my laptop in my office.” Dominic put the film into the stabilizer and turned a blank face to Paul. “Almost done in here.”
“I have never seen you with that bag beyond arm’s reach.” The flaps of Paul’s face quivered in agitation. “What the hell is going on? You’re taking a month off. You’re forgetting your laptop. Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Mysterious trips, erratic behavior… You’re going to rehab!”
Dominic sighed and hung the film to dry. It wouldn’t matter what he said now. Or what he did next. When he came back from Ireland, everyone on campus, with the possible exception of Dysart, who had been told a portion of the truth by Madalene, would believe he had returned from inpatient treatment.
“Drugs or alcohol?”
“Neither,” he said draining his beer.
“Ah,” said Paul knowingly. “I bet it’s that fancy place in Tipperary.”
“You can open the door now,” Dominic said.
“It’s a long, long way to Tipperary…” Paul sang with a wicked grin.
“You know, for a scientist, you’re remarkably unattached to evidence,” Dominic said, leading the way upstairs. “You want another beer?”
“Sure,” Paul said, “but maybe you shouldn’t have one. I’ve heard—”
But a delicate tap at his front door rescued Dominic from further theories of the more-probable alcoholic standing before his fridge.
“God damn it!” Paul roared, then clamped a meaty hand against the rolling flesh of his face. “God damn it,” he whispered. “I’ll wager your five-million dollar grant that’s Peter at your door! Isn’t that just like him! The rumors of your vacation just came out today and already that fuckwad is over here, sniffing around for an advantage while you’re away in rehab. I don’t want him to see me.” Paul set off through the back door at a heavy scurry and squeezed through the fence into his overgrown backyard.
Dominic checked his watch. He’d missed his next dose by half an hour. He knocked a capsule from the bottle in his pocket and swallowed it as he reached the front door. He had less than a week to prepare for this trip, and he was running out of time. He was confident he could get packed, fill enough capsules, and secure his lab before then. But he was equally certain that no amount of time could ready him to face the old man and his godforsaken hotel. The thought dropped a cold iron fist of terror into his gut. Dominic swallowed hard and opened the door to begin Peter’s scene in the afternoon’s farce.
———
“I’m going to Ireland,” the passenger wedged beside me grins.
You’re going to Hell, I psycast, but her mortal ears can’t hear me. “Yes,” I say aloud, “we all are.” The flight is JFK to Shannon, but the idiot traveler beside me just grins.
“You’re going on business,” she guesses.
“No.”
“You’re on vacation then! Me, too. Have you been before?”
“Once. A long time ago.” I stuff my ears with iPod plugs.
This is the closest I get to penetration—art, music—the frisson shock of the perfect new. The first chords of Undertow twisting into me, Van Gogh’s riotous blue night. I turn up the electric Stravinsky, and look down on the ocean. We are traveling into time, burning two hours for every one I endure beside this babbling, cursed child of Greece. I see them all the time, these bastard half children of stories and mortals, trapped between worlds, the genetic lineage of myth reasserting itself across the inextricable ages. Helen of Troy is born the socialite child of a partial Zeus mated to half of a swan-loving Leda, the mythic DNA in each of them dormant until they breed and damn their offspring with its expression. It wou
ld be easier for her if she understood, finally, who she is, but I can’t be bothered.
“… and then we may go west, Galway, Sligo…” The Persephone beside me prattles on, flying east into the night. Does she think this trip out of Hell will be any different? “… see Yeats country…”
“Of course.”
I will hire a driver to take me inland, to Cashel, to Gaehod, and there I will stay forever.
“What’s your name?” Demeter’s daughter asks me.
“Olivia Adies,” I say and finally meet her inquisitive gaze. I could take her home to Hell as my captive wife. The bare desire in my smoldering eyes silences her at last and I look instead into the ocean under me.
From this height, the waves form black hills, motionless and dead, but I know otherwise. Distance makes a topographical map of the ocean—a snapshot of the waveforms as they stand in a moment, frozen in time. But I know how movement below—and even on—the surface, unseen at elevation, is definitive at sea. The water roils, and the waves rise or vanish. You cannot map the sea.
Years ago, I sailed across these heaving, howling waters in the soft, feminine arms of my closest-to-love, my most happy days. In my darkest night, I fly above them in push-button electricity. The ocean is unchanging as I am. And as bottomless and cold.
———
Thousands of gas flames springing, without intervening glass or metal fixtures, from the naked stone walls lit the vast, cavernous space with a flickering blue-orange glow and gave the impression that the rock itself was burning. Dominic would have liked to investigate, but his jetlag-eroded attention kept being torn and refocused by the sheer, enormous scale of Hell.
Beautiful, doll-like women and dark, brooding men flocked across the rich, carpeted floor, or stood sniffing the air. They spread like nightmare crows around him in the foyer and above him on the sloped balconies that spiraled inward like an inverted conch shell toward the vast empty space of L’Otel Matillide’s central hall.
