by David Gordon
vampT3: i hope so . . . but i understand . . . we can talk again like this tho?
crimson1: yes of course I’d like that
vampT3: good
vampT3: hey!
crimson1: yes?
vampT3: not that you care but if you want to check this out . . . goodnight!
She sent me a link, then quickly signed off, and her little light went out. I clicked the link and was led to a secluded site where vampire lovers gathered for vampire business. Here was a review of my new book, posted by one vampT3:
Crimson Night and Fog is Sibylline’s greatest work yet. While the plot revolves around trying to recover the Holy Sword of Mithras from the evil Baron Charlus von Faubourg St. Germaine, and is plenty thrilling, the real heart of the story is Sasha’s struggle between her desire for Aram and Ivy, her bisexual vampire lovers, with whom she shares a wild, erotic passion, and her growing feelings for Jack Silver, the war correspondent/fashion photographer and vampire hunter, for whom she feels a deeper and more mature love. This situation is further complicated by the fact that Ivy once tried to turn Jack after a night of wild sex. Jack refused, trying instead to slice off Ivy’s head. She has hated him bitterly ever since. This complex love triangle/square/trapezoid? reflects Sasha’s own duality. She is half vampire and half human, and is constantly struggling between these two sides. It is not a clear-cut good/evil battle, for as Aram explains to Sasha:
“Vampires are no different than tigers or wolves. It is only humans who kill for hate, bigotry, greed or lust. A vampire Holocaust or mob lynching is as unthinkable as one done by lions. Humans have been lulled into complacency by believing themselves at the top of the food chain and have, in their madness, turned on each other. The human race would be better off, with less war and disease, if vampires did even more to cull their ranks, like jaguars and leopards do with antelopes.”
Theresa, assuming it was Theresa, went on to elucidate these themes and the recurring imagery that expressed them. It was all news to me, a review of a book that sounded pretty good but that someone else had written. Someone like her, for example. Reading her writing (about my writing) filled me with a strange elation close to panic or vertigo. I felt myself swelling into a genius. I was also certain I’d be exposed as a talentless fraud. I was like a balloon, pumped full of hot air, flying higher and terrified of bursting. Isn’t this the deepest wish of every little scribbler? To be loved, not for ourselves, but for the beauty of our work. Except I hated my work. I squeezed it out and sliced it like baloney, page by page, and despising what I wrote, it was hard not to despise those who read it. Unless they were right about me and I was all wrong.
Why do we read? In the beginning, as children, why do we love the books we love? For most, I think, it’s travel, a flight into adventure, into a dream that feels like our own. But for a few it is also escape, flight from boredom, unhappiness, loneliness, from where or who we can no longer bear to be. When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me. These are the real readers, the maniacs, the ones who dose themselves with fiction the way junkies get high, the way lovers adore the beloved: beyond reason.
This kind of reading, ironically, precedes all judgment. Objective criteria don’t enter in, any more than with love. (I say ironically because it is these very readers who, having fallen for books, become scholars, critics, editors—in other words, snobs—while maintaining their secret vice.) Genre fans—vampire lovers, sci-fi geeks, mystery addicts—are a kind of atavistic species, a pure but anomalous breed. They still read like children, foolish and grave, or like teenagers, desperate and courageous. They read because they need to.
Of course, the other reader who fits this profile is the porn fan. He (or she!) is a prisoner trapped in a finite body and an unaccommodating world that will never fulfill desire’s impossible demands. Seeking ecstasy, they escape into language, which goes everywhere, touches everyone, and never ends. What love poem, what manifesto, what high cry of art has ever done what the lowest, dumbest scratch of dirty words can do to a lonely soul late at night?
And isn’t that why we write? (We writers, the worst readers of all.) To send our secret message out and reach that stranger we will never know? To meet undercover with the others, the ones who hide their faces in our books? Don’t we write to them? To Theresa Trio? To Darian Clay?
Walking through the kitchen later, I noticed my cell phone glowing on the counter. I had been so distracted by the instant messaging that I hadn’t heard its soft moan. There was a text message from Dani: “Thanks for coming the other night! You don’t have to write book if you don’t want. I understand. Call if you want.”
I didn’t call. It was too late.
38
The third name on Clay’s list was Sandra Dawson. She lived in Brooklyn, on the cusp of Bushwick. I took the L train to Montrose and then walked a few blocks. It was a neighborhood of car repair shops, mattress warehouses and restaurants advertising Mexican, Dominican, or Ecuadoran food. She rented a railroad flat on the top floor of a three-story brick building, with a bodega downstairs and a metal grille over the street door. I knew from her letters that she was in her midtwenties and lived with a roommate, a girl who had no idea who Sandra “really was.” Nor did her colleagues in the financial district, where she worked as “a word processor,” while pursuing a degree in library science. In the photos Clay gave me she was little and sly, with thin blond hair and thin pale arms. Her body was like a young boy’s, smooth, freckled and hairless. You could count the ribs. In person, when I hauled myself up her stairs, she looked more prosaic in glasses, a ponytail and a printed cotton dress with flip-flops. Her roommate was out, she said, but still, after a brief deliberation, she decided that she’d feel better talking in her own room.
Her bedroom was younger than the rest of the apartment, with a ruffle under the bed, a puffy white comforter, a beveled white dresser with a curvy mirror and pictures cut from magazines taped to the wall. Although there was a theme of dark glamour to the selection, the images were far softer than at Marie Fontaine’s place and featured red roses, black skies cut by a slivered moon, and voluptuous women in lacy underwear, pouting beside still waters or crumbling walls of stone.
“I’m a subslut,” she informed me, as if that were an official post, one rank below full slut, or perhaps she filled in for sluts who had the flu.
“What’s that exactly?”
“I’m a submissive masochist by nature. I like the man to control me. I like pain and humiliation. I like to be abused.”
“Huh, interesting.” I put what I hoped was a calm, thoughtful expression on my face. She was completely matter-of-fact, sitting cross-legged on the bed while I squirmed in a white wicker chair. “When did you first realize you were like that?”
“I just always was. When I was little I liked testing myself, seeing how hard my cousin could bite down on my finger and stuff. I was always trying to get the other kids to tie me up.”
“Like how? You mean for games?”
“Yeah, like tied to a tree, or if we played some fantasy game I’d always find a way to get taken prisoner with my hands tied behind my back or blindfolded. Most of the kids didn’t tie very well, and I’m skinny so usually I could slip right out, but this one girl tied me really tight—she was into it, really serious, she bound me so I couldn’t move at all—and the jump rope we were using, you know that white rope, really cut in, and it went between my legs and that was the first time I really remember being excited and I shifted around so the rope rubbed against my clit.”
“Huh. Interesting,” I repeated, sounding, I hoped, very professional. I crossed my legs without thinking, then realizing this looked like I was guarding my crotch, I uncrossed them.
“Then we started playing a lot, me and her. Her name was Clarissa. Always something like I was the slave or the captive. Sometimes we even played that I was her dog. We took my dog’s
real leash and bowl and put the leash on me and she made me fetch and then drink out of the bowl. Then she walked me in the backyard and I peed and my mom caught me.” She laughed brightly and covered her mouth. I laughed too.
“What happened?”
“My poor parents were so clueless. My mom told my dad, who spanked me. Which just totally sealed the deal of course.”
“What happened to Clarissa?”
“We drifted apart. She went to a different school. As far as I heard, she’s vanilla. You know, like a straight regular girl. I think she’s married.”
“And you don’t want that.”
“You know my ultimate fantasy?” She tucked her legs under her and leaned forward confidentially.
“What?”
“To be sold into the white slave trade.”
“Does that exist?” I asked, picturing a Technicolor harem movie with Jerry Lewis.
“I’ve heard about it.”
“What, like you imagine being owned by one person or turned out at a brothel?”
“Usually a mix of both.”
“And you like that? Do you think you’d really do it?”
“If my owner said I had to, of course.”
“Your owner?”
“Master Darian.” She smiled serenely.
“Oh, he’s your owner? Officially.”
“We made a contract. I belong to him. I’m registered as his slave on the Internet. That’s why I’m with you now.”
“He commanded you to talk to me?”
“Yes. Well, more than that.”
“More?”
She hesitated. “He said he was lending me to you.”
“Sorry?” I asked, pretending I didn’t hear.
“As a gift. Because he likes what you wrote.”
“Really? Huh. He didn’t mention it. Like, how do you mean gift?” She moved toward me, palms out. I felt myself blushing, not the coolest look for a middle-aged man.
“As a slave,” she said. “To use anyway you want.”
“I, I don’t know.”
“Please.” Her voice rose higher. “He’ll be mad if I don’t. He wants you to use me. He wants you to know how it feels, so that you can write about it.”
“Oh, well, thanks. Thanks a lot. That’s sweet, but-but.” I began to stammer, as if reaching for fresh ways to express anxiety. “I can just, just imagine it all from here, or I mean later at home. Or. Or what I meant to say. It’s all part of being a writer. Not really having to, to, to . . .” I swallowed. “To do anything.”
“But I want to,” she said. She dropped to her knees. “I’d be honored, sir, to receive your abuse.” She leaned forward, chest on the floor and gazed up at me in the posture of a supplicant puppy. Her nose touched the tip of my shoe.
“Well!” I giggled and jerked as if she’d tickled me, clipping her with my toe. She squeaked in pain.
“Oh, sorry, sorry. I’m terribly sorry.”
“That’s OK,” she mumbled, clutching her nose. “I like it.”
“Right, right.” Now I was no longer stuttering, but for some reason I had an English accent that I couldn’t control. “Well, it’s not that I’m not flattered. Because really I am. Quite.” I shoveled my stuff into my bag and stood. She followed on knees, arms out, beseeching, as I prattled on.
“It’s just rather bad timing. Do thank your master for me. And thank you as well. Good day.” I jerked her cool hand in my sweaty grip and ran out, embarrassed, weirdly upset, and, I admit, with one small part of me hating myself for not seizing the chance to do something awful. What kind of lame writer was I?
Somewhere between lust and tears, I bolted downstairs and up the street, so rattled that I was through the subway turnstile before I realized I’d forgotten my tape recorder. Great. Now I had to go back. I was tempted to just leave it behind rather than march back up and face her. As a nice final touch, the train came rolling in just as I began reclimbing the stairs to the street. Perhaps the passengers would point at me and jeer as they rode by.
Cursing myself, I hurried back and again trudged up the two flights, trying to catch my breath and stifle the images that bloomed in my overheated brain: the kneeling girl, the pleading eyes. When was the last time anyone had called me sir?
The door was still open like I’d left it. “Sandra,” I called. “It’s me again. Sorry, I forgot my recorder.” Huffing, I crossed to the bedroom and rapped the door frame with my knuckles, “Hello, hello,” as I stepped through. Then I halted, as if I had accidentally entered the wrong room, the wrong apartment, the wrong world.
How many times have I written scenes of horror and mayhem? Hundreds. And often, I admit, out of laziness or just to squeeze time, I’ve described them as “indescribable” or “beyond words.” But actually the words for violence are always simple and easy to find; a child knows them. It is the thoughts those words engender that seem impossible: Is this really the stuff we are made of? Is this all we are inside?
Once, on a sleepless night, I elaborated a whole theory of art predicated on simply reminding the ever-forgetful mind of the most basic truths: We float in water and revolve around the sun. We are born out of a woman’s body and are made of meat and bone. One day, pretty soon, we will die.
And so, stepping through that door in Brooklyn, I was not only, as I would probably say in a book, speechless with fear, I was struck completely wordless, breathless, thoughtless, by one simple English sentence I could not understand: Sandra Dawson was dead.
She was nude and hanging upside down, though it was hard to tell at first glance because her head was gone. Her feet were bound together and tied to the ceiling fan. Her torso had been slit open, and the skin peeled back, attached somehow to her hands, like wings or like a cloak held open to expose the interior of her body. Her intestines dangled beneath her, reaching the floor, where they gathered in a pink coil. Her neck still dripped steadily, like a broken pipe.
Then, as if it really were just a story after all, Sandra’s body began to turn. It rotated slowly, like an acrobat in the circus, picking up speed as the fan’s blades spun. I realized what this meant—someone had hit the switch—and suddenly feeling the presence of another in the room, there behind me, in the door, I began, with what felt like excruciating slowness, to turn around. That was it.
I woke up on the floor. Probably fifteen or twenty minutes had elapsed. Before I was knocked out, I had been too scared to even feel my fear, as if my cowardly mind had jumped clear, abandoning my body, which closed like a fist to protect the fragile heart. Now all that delayed terror was waiting for me. As soon as my eyes opened, and I saw where I was, I leaped to my feet and fled, as if on fire, through the apartment, down the stairs and out into the middle of the street.
I kept running, in a blind, dumb panic, and it was only at the corner, out of breath, that I was able to force myself to glance back, as if afraid the building would explode. Then, as some oxygen returned to my brain, I called 911 on my cell phone and reported a murder. I gave Sandra’s address and name. I gave my own name and number.
But when they told me to remain at the scene and wait for the police, I said I couldn’t. I was already running down the street again, frantically scanning up and down each block for cabs. I tried as best I could to explain the new fear that was forming in my mind: I had to get to Manhattan, to an apartment on Horatio Street for which I didn’t have the address, where another woman, whose phone number I didn’t have on me, was, I feared, in mortal danger, for reasons far too weird and complex to explain. By the time I got to the subway I was panting, and seeing no cabs but already hearing distant sirens, I hung up on the cops and ran down to wait for the train into the city, to find Morgan Chase.
39
Pacing the L train platform, cell phone dead in my hand, I realized that my head was pounding. It turned out that the alarm bell that had been ringing in my skull since I came to wasn’t just fear. It was pain as well. I touched the back of my head lightly and winced. There was dried blo
od in my hair and a sore place at the base of the skull. Was I mildly concussed? My thinking was both slow and madly racing, and as I paced the platform, craning my head over the tracks to squint down the tunnel for that dim light, I recalled the irrational thought I’d had as that body turned above me, just before the blow: Darian Clay had done this. Darian Clay is here. A primal terror had gripped me, and if I had not been knocked unconscious, I might have screamed. Now, as the shock wore off, and I felt the chills and tremors pass through my belly and my knees, another, quieter but more insidious fear began to spread. Whoever it was in that apartment with me, only one thing was sure: it was not Darian Clay. But then who?
The train came blasting into the station, and the shaking and screeching set off a major earthquake in my head. Maybe I did have a concussion after all. I hurried on board, took a seat, and immediately began psychically pushing the driver, as if I could will this one train to go faster, skip stops, to fly. I stood for no reason and sat back down. I ticked off the seconds at each stop. After the long passage under the river, we arrived at First Avenue. The train waited, it seemed forever, although no one got on. Third Avenue was next. A pointless stop, I decided, only two blocks away. We pulled into Union Square and I watched the people get on and off, staring at them in a rage. At last the door dinged and began to slide shut. Someone running late blocked it with an arm and I groaned out loud. Everyone looked. I smiled stiffly and turned away. I stared at the dark tunnel passing by and considered my pale reflection. I checked my cell phone, which I knew could not be working. And then, incredibly, through some combination of spent adrenaline, animal defense mechanism, psychic horror and head injury, I fell, briefly, asleep.
40
