by Rice, Anne
We’d come to Magazine Street and passed it, but we were not at the river, only almost, and this was a street I had no recollection of, or knowledge of, in my wanderings of this city—their city, Louis’s and Lestat’s—just a narrow street with these houses the color of driftwood under the moon and windows hung with makeshift coverings, and inside there was this one slouching, arrogant, vicious mortal fixed to a television set and guzzling malt from a brown bottle, ignoring the roaches and the pulsing heat that pressed in from the open window, this ugly, sweating, filthy and irresistible thing, this flesh and blood for me.
The house was so alive with vermin and tiny despicable things that it seemed no more than a shell surrounding him, crackling and friable and the same color in all its shadows as a forest. No antiseptic modern standards here. Even the furniture rotted in the trashy clutter and damp. Mildew covered the grinding white refrigerator.
Only the reeky personal bed and rags gave off the clue to reigning domesticity.
It was a proper nest in which to find this fowl, this ugly bird, thick rich pluckable, devourable sack of bones and blood and shabby plumage.
I pushed the door to one side, the human stench rising like a swirl of gnats, and thereby put it off its hinges, but not with much sound.
I walked on newspapers strewn on painted wood. Orange peels turned to brownish leather. Roaches running. He didn’t even look up. His swollen drunken face was blue and eerie, black eyebrows thick and unkempt, and yet he looked quite possibly a bit angelic, due to the light from the tube.
He flicked the magic plastic twanger in his hand to make the channels change, and the light flared and flickered soundlessly, and then he let the song rise, a band playing, a travesty, people clapping.
Trashy noises, trashy images, like the trash all around him. All right, I want you. No one else does.
He looked up at me, a boy invader, David too far off for him to see, waiting.
I pushed the television set to the side. It teetered, then fell onto the floor, its parts breaking, like so many jars of energy were inside, and now splinters of glass.
A momentary fury overcame him, charging his face with sluggish recognition.
He rose up, arms out, and came at me.
Before I sank my teeth, I noticed that he had long tangled black hair. Dirty but rich. He wore it back by means of a knotted bit of rag at the base of his neck and then straggling down his checkered shirt in a thick tail.
Meantime, he had enough syrupy and beer-besotted blood in him for two vampires, delicious, ugly, and a raging lighting heart, and so much bulk it was like riding a bull to be on him.
In the midst of the feed, all odors rise to sweetness, even the most rancid. I thought I would quietly die of joy, as always.
I sucked hard enough to fill my mouth, letting the blood roll over my tongue, and then to fill my stomach, if I have one, but above all just to stanch this greedy dirty thirst, but not hard enough to slow him down.
He swooned and fought, and did the stupid thing of tearing at my fingers, and then the most dangerous and clumsy thing of trying to find my eyes. I shut them tight and let him press with his greasy thumbs. It did him no good. I am an impregnable little boy. You can not blind the blind. I was too full of blood to care. Besides it felt good. Those weak things that would scratch you do only stroke you.
His life went by as if everyone he ever loved were riding a roller coaster under snazzy stars. Worse than a Van Gogh painting. You never know the palette of the one you kill until the mind disgorges its finest colors.
Soon enough he sank down. I went with him. I had my left arm all the way around him now, and I lay childlike against his big muscular belly, and I drew the blood out now in the blindest gushes, pressing everything he thought and saw and felt down into only color, just give me color, pure orange, and just for a second, as he died—as the death passed me by, like a big rolling ball of black strength which turns out to be nothing actually, nothing but smoke or something even less than that—as this death came into me and went out again like the wind, I thought, Do I by crushing everything that he is deprive him of a final knowing?
Nonsense, Armand. You know what the spirits know, what the angels know. The bastard is going home! To Heaven. To Heaven that would not have you, and might never.
In death, he looked most excellent.
I sat beside him. I wiped my mouth, not that there was a drop to wipe. Vampires slobber blood only in motion pictures. Even the most mundane immortal is far too skilled to spill a drop. I wiped my mouth because his sweat was on my lips and on my face, and I wanted it to go away.
I admired him, however, that he was big and wondrously hard for all his seeming roundness. I admired the black hair clinging to his wet chest where the shirt had been so inevitably torn away.
His black hair was something to behold. I ripped the knotted cloth that tied it. It was as full and thick as a woman’s hair.
Making sure he was dead, I wrapped its length around my left hand and purposed to pull the whole mass from his scalp.
David gasped. “Must you do this?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. Even then a few thousand strands had ripped loose from the scalp, each with only its tiny blooded root winking in the air like a tiny firefly. I held the mop for a moment and then let it slip out of my fingers and fall down behind his turned head.
Those unanchored hairs fell sloppily over his coarse cheek. His eyes were wet and wakeful-seeming, dying jelly.
David turned and went out into the little street. Cars roared and clattered by. A ship on the river sang with a steam calliope.
I came up behind him. I wiped the dust off me. One blow and I could have set the whole house to falling down, just caving in on the putrid filth within, dying softly amid other houses so no one indoors here would even know, all this moist wood merely caving.
I could not get the taste and smell of this sweat gone.
“Why did you so object to my pulling out his hair?” I asked. “I only wanted to have it, and he’s dead and beyond caring and no one else will miss his black hair.”
He turned with a sly smile and took my measure.
“You frighten me, the way you look,” I said. “Have I so carelessly revealed myself to be a monster? You know, my blessed mortal Sybelle, when she is not playing the Sonata by Beethoven called the Appassionata, watches me feed all the time. Do you want me to tell my story now?”
I glanced back at the dead man on his side, his shoulder sagging. On the windowsill beyond and above him stood a blue glass bottle and in it was an orange flower. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?
“Yes, I do want your story,” David said. “Come, let’s go back together. I only asked you not to take his hair for one reason.”
“Yes?” I asked. I looked at him. Rather genuine curiosity. “What was the reason then? I was only going to pull out all his hair and throw it away.”
“Like pulling off the wings of a fly,” he offered seemingly without judgment.
“A dead fly,” I said. I deliberately smiled. “Come now, why the fuss?”
“I wanted to see if you’d listen to me,” he said. “That’s all. Because if you did then it might be all right between us. And you stopped. And it is.” He turned around and took my arm.
“I don’t like you!” I said.
“Oh, yes, you do, Armand,” he answered. “Let me write it. Pace and rail and rant. You’re very high and mighty right now because you have those two splendid little mortals hanging on your every gesture, and they’re like acolytes to a god. But you want to tell me the story, you know you do. Come on!”
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “Have these tactics worked for you in the past?”
Now it was his turn to laugh and he did, good-naturedly. “No, I suppose not,” he said. “But let me put it to you this way, write it for them.”
“For whom?”
“For Benji and Sybelle.” He shrugged. “No?”
I didn’t answer.<
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Write the story for Benji and Sybelle. My mind raced forwards, to some cheerful and wholesome room, where we three would be gathered years hence—I, Armand, unchanged, boy teacher—and Benji and Sybelle in their mortal prime, Benji grown into a sleek tall gentleman with an Arab’s ink-eyed allure and his favorite cheroot in his hand, a man of great expectation and opportunity, and my Sybelle, a curvaceous and full regal-bodied woman by then, and an even greater concert pianist than she could be now, her golden hair framing a woman’s oval face and fuller womanish lips and eyes full of entsagang and secret radiance.
Could I dictate the story in this room and give them the book? This book dictated to David Talbot? Could I, as I set them free from my alchemical world, give them this book? Go forth my children, with all the wealth and guidance I could bestow, and now this book I wrote so long ago for you with David.
Yes, said my soul. Yet I turned, and ripped the black scalp of hair from my victim and stomped on it with a Rumpelstiltskin foot.
David didn’t flinch. Englishmen are so polite.
“Very well,” I said. “I’ll tell you my story.”
His rooms were on the second floor, not far from where I’d paused at the top of the staircase. What a change from the barren and unheated hallways! He’d made a library for himself and with tables and chairs. A brass bed was there, dry and clean.
“These are her rooms,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Dora,” I said. I breathed her scent suddenly. Why, it was all around me. But all her personal things were gone.
These were his books, they had to be. They were new spiritual explorers—Dannion Brinkley, Hilarion, Melvin Morse, Brian Weiss, Matthew Fox, the Urantia book. Add to this old texts—Cassiodorus, St. Teresa of Avila, Gregory of Tours, the Veda, Talmud, Torah, Kama Sutra—all in original tongues. He had a few obscure novels, plays, poetry.
“Yes.” He sat down at the table. “I don’t need the light. Do you want it?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Ah,” he said. He took out his mechanical pen. He opened a notebook with startlingly white paper scored with fine green lines. “You will know what to tell me.” He looked up at me.
I stood hugging myself, as it were, letting my head fall as if it could drop right off me and I would die. My hair fell long about me.
I thought of Sybelle and Benjamin, my quiet girl and exuberant boy.
“Did you like them, David, my children?” I asked.
“Yes, the first moment I saw them, when you brought them in. Everyone did. Everyone looked lovingly and respectfully at them. Such poise, such charm. I think we all dream of such confidants, faithful mortal companions of compelling grace, who aren’t screaming mad. They love you, yet they are neither terrified nor entranced.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I shut my eyes. I heard in my heart the swift, bold march of the Appassionata, those rumbling, incandescent waves of music, full of throbbing and brittle metal, Appassionata. Only it was in my head. No golden long-limbed Sybelle.
“Light the candles that you have,” I said timidly. “Will you do that for me? It would be sweet to have many candles, and look, Dora’s lace is hanging still on the windows, fresh and clean. I am a lover of lace, that is Brussels point de gaze, or very like it, yes, I’m rather mad for it.”
“Of course, I’ll light the candles,” he said.
I had my back to him. I heard the sharp delicious crack of a small wooden match. I smelt it burn, and then came the liquid fragrance of the nodding wick, the curling wick, and the light rose upwards, finding the cypress boards of the stripped wooden ceiling above us. Another crack, another series of tiny sweet soft crackling sounds, and the light swelled and came down over me and fell just short of brightness along the shadowy wall.
“Why did you do it, Armand?” he said. “Oh, the Veil has Christ on it, in some form, no doubt of it, it did seem to be the Holy Veil of Veronica, and God knows, thousands of others believed it, yes, but why in your case, why? It was blazingly beautiful, yes, I grant you that, Christ with His thorns and His blood, and His eyes gazing right at us, both of us, but why did you believe it so completely, Armand, after so long? Why did you go to Him? That’s what you tried to do, didn’t you?”
I shook my head. I made my words soft and pleading.
“Back up, scholar,” I said, turning around slowly. “Mind your page. This is for you, and for Sybelle. Oh, it’s for my little Benji too. But in a way, it’s my symphony for Sybelle. The story begins a long time ago. Maybe I’ve never truly realized how long ago, until this very moment. You listen and write. Let me be the one to cry and to rant and to rail.”
2
I look at my hands. I think of the phrase “not made by human hands.” I know what this means, even though every time I ever heard the phrase said with emotion it had to do with what had come from my hands.
I’d like to paint now, to pick up a brush and try it the way I did it then, in a trance, furiously, once and for only, every line and mass of color, each blending, each decision final.
Ah, I’m so disorganized, so browbeaten by what I remember.
Let me choose a place to begin.
Constantinople—newly under the Turks, by that I mean a Moslem City for less than a century when I was brought there, a slave boy, captured in the wild lands of his country for which he barely knew the proper name: the Golden Horde.
Memory had already been choked out of me, along with language, or any capacity to reason in a consistent way. I remember the squalid rooms that must have been Constantinople because other people talked, and for the first time in forever, since I’d been ripped out of what I couldn’t remember, I could understand what people said.
They spoke Greek, of course, these traders who dealt in slaves for brothels in Europe. They knew no religious allegiance, which was all I knew, pitifully devoid of detail.
I was thrown down on a thick Turkey carpet, the fancified rich floor covering one saw in a palace, a display rug for high-priced goods.
My hair was wet and long; someone had brushed it enough to hurt me. All those personal things that were mine had been stripped from me and from my memory. I was naked beneath an old frayed tunic of gold cloth. It was hot and damp in the room. I was hungry, but having no hope of food, I knew this to be a pain that would spike and then, of its own, die away. The tunic must have given me a castoff glory, the shimmer of a fallen angel. It had long bell sleeves and came to my knees.
When I got to my feet, which were bare of course, I saw these men and knew what they wanted, that this was vice, and despicable, and the price of it was Hell. Curses of vanished elders echoed down on me: too pretty, too soft, too pale, eyes far too full of the Devil, ah, the devilish smile.
How intent these men were on their argument, their bargaining. How they looked at me without ever looking into my eyes.
Suddenly I laughed. Things here were being done so hastily. Those who had delivered me had left me. Those who had scrubbed me had never left the tubs. I was a bundle thrown down on the carpet.
For one moment, I had an awareness of myself as having been sharp-tongued once and cynical, and keenly aware of the nature of men in general. I laughed because these merchants thought I was a girl.
I waited, listening, catching these bits and pieces of talk.
We were in a broad room, with a low canopied ceiling, the silk of it sewn with tiny mirrors and the curlicues so loved by the Turks, and the lamps, though smoky, were scented and filled the air with a dusky hazy soot that burned my eyes.
The men in their turbans and caftans weren’t unfamiliar to me any more than the language. But I only caught dashes of what they said. My eyes looked for an escape. There was none. There were heavy, brooding men slouching near the entrances. A man far off at a desk used an abacus for counting. He had piles and piles of gold coins.
One of the men, a tall lean one, all cheekbones and jaw, with rotted-out teeth, came towards me and felt of my sho
ulders and my neck. Then he lifted up the tunic. I stood stock-still, not enraged or consciously fearful, merely paralyzed. This was the land of the Turks, and I knew what they did to boys. Only I had never seen a picture, nor heard a real story of it, or known anyone who had ever really lived in it, penetrated it and come back home.
Home. Surely I must have wanted to forget who I was. I must have. Shame must have made it mandatory. But at that moment, in the tentlike room with its flowered carpet, among the merchants and slave traders, I strained to remember as if, discovering a map in myself, I could follow it out of here and back to where I belonged.
I did recollect the grasslands, the wild lands, lands where you don’t go, except for—. But that was a blank. I’d been in the grasslands, defying fate, stupidly but not unwillingly. I’d been carrying something of the utmost importance. I got off my horse, ripped this big bundle loose from the leather harness and ran with the bundle clutched against my chest.
“The trees!” he shouted, but who was he?
I knew what he had meant, however, that I had to reach the copse and put this treasure there, this splendid and magical thing that was inside the bundle, “not made by human hands.”
I never got that far. When they grabbed hold of me, I dropped the bundle and they didn’t even go after it, at least not as I saw. I thought, as I was hoisted into the air: It isn’t supposed to be found like that, wrapped in cloth like that. It has to be placed in the trees.
They must have raped me on the boat because I don’t remember coming to Constantinople. I don’t remember being hungry, cold, outraged or afraid.
Now here for the first time, I knew the particulars of rape, the stinking grease, the squabbling, the curses over the ruin of the lamb. I felt a hideous unsupportable powerlessness.
Loathsome men, men against God and against nature.
I made a roar like an animal at the turbaned merchant, and he struck me hard on the ear so that I fell to the ground. I lay still looking up at him with all the contempt I could bring into my gaze. I didn’t get up, even when he kicked me. I wouldn’t speak.
