The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  "Whistler baby? Is it dawn yet?"

  "Very nearly." In the bedroom heavy black curtains were drawn over closed blinds behind tight-fastened shutters. On top of a black dresser with delicate, almost feminine, bowed legs and brass ourobouros drawer handles, a small tasseled lamp provided just enough wattage to illuminate the genuine Whistler etching—a staircase in Italy—hanging on the wall over the dresser.

  "Let's go outside."

  "Can't. Turn to ash, y'know."

  "I don't think so," she laughed. "Homey don't play dat, either."

  "If I gazed upon sunlight, m'dear, my eyeballs would feel as if they'd been poached."

  "Only direct sunlight really bothers me. I bought some wraparound blue-blockers last month, though—they help a lot."

  "You're young yet—have you even been drinking for a year? I thought not. It's a progressive side effect. Soon you'll find yourself avoiding daylight altogether."

  "Why do you think drinking blood screws up your eyes?" They were sitting up in bed, passing the pipe; she was looking him up and down, frankly trying to guess his age. His chest was dead white where the kimono had fallen open, and in the aftermath of the blood blush the skin was dry and pebbly.

  He shrugged. "Side effects. Heroin constipates the bowels, marijuana rasps the throat, cocaine paranoids the mind. Thorns and roses, y'know—no such thing as a free lunch."

  She studied him for another minute. "All right, I give up—how old are you, really, and don't give me that 1680 shit again."

  "I was born in 1945, and I've been drinking blood for twenty-five years—all but the last three of them blissfully V.A.-free." He sighed, returned the pipe to the drawer, and lay down on his back.

  The top sheet was hopelessly lost—Lourdes nestled in next to him, covering them with the comforter. "That's something else I can't figure out—why are you hanging around with those creeps?"

  "Well, for one thing, they can make things extremely uncomfortable for anyone who tries to go out. The last chap to try it was Sandy."

  "Which one was that?"

  "Short? Freckles, reddish hair? Sat next to Nick at the meeting?"

  "Huckleberry Finn?"

  "The very. Tried to resign two years ago. They broke into his house for an intervention—and mind you, if you'd been less cooperative tonight, they'd have done the same to you—took him out into the country where no one would hear the howling, kept him prisoner for a week, holding meetings in his room, saving him from himself every four or five hours. Now he's the most enthusiastic twelve-stepper in the bunch, poor bastard."

  "Is that how they got you involved?"

  "At first, yes—they broke into the Manor and tied me to my own bed." He spread his arms by way of illustration; Lourdes reached out and grabbed his wrists, playing at pinning him. "And within twenty-four hours I was willing to do anything, say anything, join anything, to get them to go away so I could get my blood." He pretended to struggle; she pressed her length against him and he went limp. "I was so convincing they left after two days, and I've been convincing them ever since."

  "But why didn't you, like, just move someplace else?"

  He smiled for the first time since she'd asked him about V.A. Suddenly he broke her grip on his wrists, grabbed hers in turn, whipped her hands down to her sides, and rolled over on top of her. "When I turned twenty-one," he informed her—there was nothing in his tone of voice to indicate he had her pinned beneath him, "I came into a large enough inheritance that I realized it was within my means to live anyplace on the planet." Pause for emphasis. "I chose this one, and here I'll stay until I decide it's time for me to leave, and not some gang of Program Nazis."

  Gleefully, vainly, she struggled—strong as blood made her, it made him that much stronger. Still, she wouldn't stop fighting him until he brought her wrists to his lips and kissed them, then let them go. She went limp, with her wrists crossed helplessly on the pillow above her head—then he rolled off her. "I dunno," she said, breathing hard. "I still don't buy it. I mean, Whistler, I've seen them, and I've seen you, and it's hard to believe they could keep you going to three meetings a week for years if you didn't want to."

  He was lying on his side—he propped himself up on an elbow and looked at her carefully, as if he were seeing her for the first time. "You are a perspicacious little Orphan, aren't you?"

  It was the second or third time he'd called her an orphan; she assumed that somehow he knew of her parentless state—her mother had drunk and smoked herself to death by 1988, and her beloved father had died just last year. As for perspicacious, she hadn't a clue, but in the context it seemed to be a compliment. "You bet your ass."

  "The whole truth, then, is a bit more complicated. As I said, at first I attended the A.A. and N.A. meetings with them out of fear. It was quite a shock to my system, after all, being denied blood after more than twenty years. I imagine that for an ordinary person, the equivalent would have been a week's worth of inventive mental, physical, and emotional torture. So I avoided drinking on meeting nights—one or another of them insisted on accompanying me to at least two meetings a week—and worked out all sorts of elaborate ruses to avoid daylight meetings.

  "Eventually, though, my fear began to be replaced by anger, and a thirst for revenge. For now, I told myself, I'll out-program-talk the best of them, I'll attend their meetings, I'll play their silly games. And then some sweet day… boom."

  He rested his hot forehead against hers, his wide gray eyes boring so intently into her eyes that she imagined he could see his tiny upside-down image at the back of her retina. "Boom?" she whispered, almost into his open mouth.

  "Boom. Somehow, someday, I promised myself, they'll all pay. Especially Nick. But then Leon…" He hesitated for a moment, then decided against telling her the truth about Leon's demise—it was too early. He lay back. "Leon died, and V.A. was chartered, or rather chartered itself, and one year turned into another, and the strangest thing started happening."

  Lourdes frowned. "What?"

  "I'd wake up with that old dead feeling—the 'weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable' blues. Lah-de-dah, another evening of ample supplies of the greatest drug in the world, and all the sex I wanted. Lah-de-fucking-dah. But perversely enough, if it happened to be the evening of a meeting, I would feel almost energized: Can I get away with it again tonight—can I fool them again? It was almost enough to get me out of bed.

  "And then I'd find myself rather enjoying the meetings—they're not that bad, you know, at least when you're high on blood. I could bait Bev, tease Augie, see if I could get a rise out of Nick, and all the while there'd be this element of danger. I especially enjoyed hearing them describe my wicked little lifestyle as if it were something grand and evil."

  Lourdes edged a little higher in the bed, and looked down at him.

  "Well it wasn't any goddamn fun for me, Whistler—and I hope I never get so fucking bored that it will be."

  He propped himself up on his elbow again. "Nor for me, m'dear, nor for me. It's been old and tired for at least a year. No challenge anymore—fooling them is child's play. That's why I risked it all on that one throw of the dice after the meeting. After all, I had no way of knowing whether you'd march right back downstairs and denounce me to the others."

  "But I didn't," she said, so earnestly that her breasts bobbled inches from his nose. "And now there's two of us, and we're together, and together we can finish those fuckers off—together we can tear that fucking meeting to the ground."

  "Not as easy as it sounds. As the old Sufi tale has it, it's like trying to dismount the tiger without being eaten."

  She slid down in the bed until her mouth was at the level of his ear. "I don't care. I don't… fucking… care! I just want off. I want off so bad I can taste it."

  "Are you sure?" When he turned his head his breath smelled of blood and pot, and of her juices as well.

  "Sure?" She felt her skin puckering up into goose bumps.

  "Baby, I been sure my whole life, way b
efore I even knew what being high was." She rolled onto her back beside him. "See, as far back as I can remember, I always knew somehow there was a different way to feel. I remember how when I was five I used to rub myself to sleep—I guess I was, you know, masturbating, but I didn't come or anything, but it was like when I was doing it at some point—crrk—everything would kind of like shift around me, and it wasn't like I changed, it was like the world changed itself around to fit me.

  "When I was about eight I lost it, lost the feeling. Then when I was ten I started sneaking my dad's gin—to get that feeling back. And from the minute the booze hit my stomach I could feel my body just relax all around it, and for a little while anyway, before I'd get sick, I could be in my world again.

  "I started smoking pot when I was twelve. My older brother turned me on to it—then he used to do things to me, but I'd let him do whatever he wanted, because when I was toasted it was still almost my world again, whatever he was doing down there. Then by high school I could get my own pot, and acid and 'ludes and coke, but no matter how high I got, it was getting harder and harder to get back to my world, and after a while I gave up on it—being stoned in this world seemed like the best I could do, and even that was getting pretty old."

  "And you discovered blood how?"

  She smiled—a secret smile, a remembering smile. "Anne Rice," she said finally. Whistler nodded knowingly. "It was last summer—this guy took me down to Carmel for a weekend, and I brought along Interview with the Vampire. I started reading it Saturday morning—talk about couldn't put it down—I mean, I read all day, finished it at like three in the morning—the guy I was with was really pissed.

  "But those first chapters, when Louis describes what a blood high feels like? It was the first time anybody, anywhere, any way, ever even got close to how I used to feel back in my little bed, rubbing my little pussy like it was Aladdin's lamp."

  Whistler had to turn away onto his side—Lourdes had the comforter pulled up to her throat, but even so, just the sight of her flushed face and bloodshot eyes, and her black hair, loose now, clinging in sweat-soaked tendrils to her neck, had roused the importunate Creature again.

  "So a couple weeks later I apply for the blood bank job, and a couple weeks after that I finally get my nerve up at the end of my shift—I was still working days—and boost a bag of O-pos from the refrigerated room, and smuggle it into the bathroom under my sweater, and drink it cold." She closed her eyes again, recalling that first tentative sip—the blood had been salty, and rang like adrenaline in the back of her throat. "And then—"

  "Nothing?" suggested Whistler.

  "Right. Nothing. Nothing. Finally I drive off to ballet class. I'm feeling so fucking disappointed—prob'ly a little relieved too, but mostly I feel like a total asshole. But then I get there, and I'm pulling on my pink leg warmers in the locker room, and all of a sudden I start feeling like I'm on acid—only without hallucinations—everything is realer than real—like you said, alive—I remember telling myself that I never noticed how… woolly wool is, the pink is totally fucking electric, the black is the blackest—

  "Anyway, by the time class started I was just totally floating. I never danced like that before in my life—my leaps are like flying, and for the first time ever I could feel what the teachers were telling me all those years, about sculpting your lines, about imagining your body is hanging from your head instead of balanced on your feet. Only I don't even have to imagine it. My teacher even told me that if I'd danced like that when we were auditioning the month before, I'd of gotten the role of Swanhilda instead of Coppelia."

  "Sorry, don't know much about ballet."

  "Well, the whole thing is typical of how my ballet career's gone. My whole life I never got a lead role, not even a feature role—even after five years with the East Bay Ballet Theater, which is strictly amateur, I still never even got out of the corps. Then I finally get a title role, and of course it's Coppelia. Because in Coppelia, Swanhilda is the lead role. Coppelia doesn't even dance: she's like this mechanical doll who spends the whole ballet being wheeled around in a chair—the high point is when she gets dumped onto the floor in the second act.

  "Anyway, when I finally get back to my apartment that night, the blood is still coming on, but it's not like any other high I ever had—I don't know what to do with myself—it doesn't matter what I do with myself, it's all so fantastic. Finally I end up taking a bubble bath—I dump in about a quart, and run the water so hot the steam is practically blistering the paint right off the bathroom wall—and I'm so high while I'm lying there I can practically feel it every time a soap bubble pops, and I'm closing my eyes, I'm reaching down, I'm touching myself—"

  Her voice grew dreamy again as her eyes closed; Whistler felt the comforter shifting rhythmically, whispering a silky song. "And all of a sudden I knew—I was three years old again, touching myself in bed—when I was on blood it was my own world again, the world I fit in, the world that fit me."

  She stopped, stroking herself oh-so-lightly with her thumb, then pressing against her sex with a cupped palm, feeling the warmth and comfort. The room, the farmhouse, the world on blood, was quiet except for the beating of her heart. She let go of herself, and with that same damp hand seized Whistler's shoulder and tugged him onto his back, whispering urgently. "It took me so many years to find my world again—I haven't even had it back for a year, and they're already trying to take it away."

  Lourdes shoved aside the comforter, spat into her palm and slathered the Creature up and down, then climbed on top of Whistler, squatting with her feet planted flat on either side of his hips. She had ballerina's feet, gnarled and strong. "Well I'll tell you what…" Eyes open, weight on her heels, head and shoulders thrown back, hands cupped lightly over her flushed breasts, she lowered herself. When she spoke again her voice was choked, husky, triumphant. "Nobody's taking my world away from me again."

  She closed her eyes deliberately and began to ride him with graceful determination, using her strong calves and thighs to balance herself. He watched her, delighted, comfortably distant. Her arms floated up over her head. "You're dancing," he remarked.

  "Always," she replied, without opening her eyes.

  "Not hurting you, is it?"

  "A little. But the best come of the night is always the one right after you're totally sure you can't possibly come again."

  Whistler's delight knew no bounds. "Take it, baby."

  "Oh, I will. Don't worry about that, I will."

  Chapter 4

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  ONE

  In the early months of his recovery from blood addiction Nick Santos had liked nothing better on a Sunday morning than spending a few hours out on his redwood deck with the bloated Sunday paper, a pitcher of screwdrivers, a few joints, and a pack of Kools. But over the years his recovery had progressed substance by substance until by now all that was left to him was the paper, the balcony, and the orange juice—a regular Virgin Screw.

  Still, he wouldn't trade his sobriety for all the drugs and blood and booze in the world, he told himself. And told himself and told himself, and attended at least one meeting a day to tell somebody else—or have somebody else tell him.

  But even clean and sober—especially clean and sober (he told himself, etc., etc.)—Nick found himself basking in the Sunday-ness of the morning; the deep greens of the hillside, the sun-dazzle on the bay, the mountains of Marin glowing on the far horizon were all denied to the blood addicts, poor bastards.

  Poor bastards indeed: he made himself a mental note to bring up the idea of an outreach program again at the next V.A. meeting. Perhaps he and one of the others (probably Sherman—Whistler's program had seemed a little weak lately) could fly out to one of the cities with a large vampire population, New Orleans, say, or New York or Las Vegas, to try to make contact with the locals, maybe isolate one for an intervention.

  The very idea energized him—he thought about going inside to do some research on the Internet, then recalled his pr
omise to help Betty Ruth fix her church doors. He loaded his tools into the trunk of his '56 Corvette convertible, and followed the Milky Way—Martin Luther King Jr. Way—to El Cerrito. He had to park the 'Vette half a block away so as not to leave it under a tree—couldn't subject the hand-rubbed Arctic blue finish to a possible birdshit bombardment.

  To his chagrin, when he set down his toolbox on the top step of the church and pulled open the doors to take a closer look at the damage, there was a service in progress inside. Betty, at the slightly raised pulpit, interrupted herself to acknowledge his presence with a smile and a wave; as Nick, his olive complexion darkening in embarrassment, slipped into the empty back pew with his clanking toolbox, several of the twenty or so congregants twisted around in their pews, presumably to get a better look at the idiot who hadn't figured out that there might be a service taking place in a church on a Sunday morning.

  But then she introduced him as the man she'd mentioned earlier in her sermon, and now the entire congregation turned to applaud him. Apparently she had turned their encounter of the previous night into some sort of parable, in which Nick had played the part of the man who, upon seeing a problem (i.e. the doors), had turned his immediate attention, not to complaining about it, or to delegating it, but to fixing it.

  It was all flattering enough, but good as it felt to be acknowledged, Nick couldn't help noticing how quickly he had jumped to his first conclusion. It ain't easy, being an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, he thought, not for the first time.

  Betty thanked him again personally after the service. He thanked her back, then complimented her on her outfit: a simple, but undeniably purple, wool dress and a black-and-violet silk scarf. She looked down at herself. "This? I call this my Moby Grape dress."

  He grinned. "I remember grape jokes."

  "Right—what's purple and big as a house and spouts off every couple of hours?"

  "Naah, I have a better one—you should call it your Alexander the Grape dress. You know, what's purple and conquered the world?"