by Becket
The arrangement of the art and furniture explained the psychology of the one who had arranged it. It hadn’t been Wyn.
I could smell Earl Gray tea steeping in a kitchen. The kitchen was a few stories below me. The bitter aroma of the tealeaves stretched out before me like a lightshow, revealing a map of their history. The scent told me that they’d been grown in India, stored in London, imported in a hermetically sealed container, and flown in on Wyn’s private jet plane.
In the same way that my clothes had been tailored to me, these tealeaves also had been gathered specifically for the taste buds of a Blood Vivicanti. They were for my particular sense of taste.
All of it was Wyn’s gift to me. He knew my Blood Vivicanti senses would be more intense than any human sense. He knew the right scent that would perfectly please my sense of smell. He knew the right flavor that would rocket my taste buds into orbit.
Wyn is a scientist. This means that he has the emotional capacity of a Vulcan. Yet his capacity to show kindness always surprises me.
Wyn and I are similar in that way. We have to think about being kind. We don’t do it naturally. We have to watch how kinder people behave. And then, when an opportunity for kindness arises, we have to tell ourselves: What would a kind person do?
Thinking how to be kind is how we are kind.
At the end of the hallway was the master stairwell. It was white marble. Down the middle ran a long black rug.
My body moved nimbly now. My footfall hardly made a sound going down each step. I didn’t have to tiptoe, but I did anyway. I didn’t feel safe yet, like a cat left to her own devices. I was acting the way I once did in grade school: I was trying to go unnoticed.
Life had taught me thus far to avoid looking at my own power. So at that time I couldn’t see how powerful I’d become.
I could have slammed my foot down and shaken the stairwell with the force of an earthquake. Perhaps even shattered it to shards.
I must be careful how I walk.
The stairs ended in the main foyer. It was as ornate as the upper floors. It was as large as an ordinary house. The floor tile was a black and white checkerboard pattern. The walls had bright white wainscoting. The wallpaper above was rich red cloth. Along the walls were matching red sofas with ebony frames. A grandfather clock stood beside one sofa, ticking and tocking. A round marble table was in the center. On it stood an immense spray of sweet smelling orchids. The delicious scent made my head spin.
The aroma of the tea had moved. Now it was coming from an adjoining room. It was a library. Tall bookcases almost touched the high vaulted ceiling. Small staircases led to a platform halfway up. Books of all shapes and sizes and of all subjects filled each bookshelf. Their various colored spines painted the room like a rainbow.
Some books were from the 12th century and some were from the 21st. It was the scent of human progress throughout recorded time. There was the scent of long-dead monastic hands that had illuminated tomes – and the scent of ancient printing presses – the scent of Koenig's steam-powered press – the scent of the Stanhope press – and the metallic scent of movable type. I could smell it all, the whole history of the world in miniature, all kept hidden here in this mansion, in a small village peopled by quiet villagers, aspiring artists, and teens like me.
One bookcase appeared to be missing a book. Only Blood Vivicanti eyes would have seen it.
I had the peculiar habit of noticing the shape of something’s absence because I was always secretly hoping that people would notice the shape of mine.
Wyn was in the library, sitting in a comfortable leather chair. He was wearing another expensive suit. His dark hair was slicked back. A book was in his hands. He had been flipping through its pages fast, reading with superhuman speed. The way I read books now.
For instance: Yesterday, in an hour, I read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It took me so long because I reread a few times the episode of the madeleine.
I’ve never eaten a madeleine cake.
But my china doll’s name is Madeleine. Driving my tongue deep into her neck reminds me of our first date. I was still human then. We had been sitting on the swing set. My Madeleine had tasted so sweet and delicious.
The mind is a playground of associations.
Wyn paused his reading and he watched me enter. He didn’t say a word. He was observing me the way Darwin observed nature.
Becoming a Blood Vivicanti means becoming a part of a family. But each person is a unique species.
Wyn wanted to know more about me. He wanted to see if I would survive for much longer. Maybe he thought I was endangered.
Wyn saw me see him. He grinned. It made his brown eyes twinkle even more.
Even though he was fortyish, he still had a boyish charm. His sonorous voice resounded in the library, a total contrast to the silence.
“You remember me.” It wasn’t a question.
I did remember him and I touched the spot where he’d pierced my neck with his tongue. No wound.
His venom had healed my bone and muscle and flesh because, you see, our venom is a salve for wounds on the outside as it is also an aphrodisiac for scars on the inside.
Once we pierce you, we will heal you – in more ways than one.
Wyn closed his book, stood, and strode toward me. He moved like a rushing river.
“Your photographic memory is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever known,” he said. “You are beautiful,” he said. He spoke in melody. His words were honey.
Did I trust him then?
I don’t trust him now. Wyn is like a cat: Opportunistic. He comes to you when he wants petting. He purrs when you’re giving him attention. He runs off when he needs you no more.
Thankfully he’s stopped leaping on my keyboard while I type.
My new sense of smell detected much about him. Where he’d been. What he’d interacted with. His scent wasn’t untrustworthy.
My new sense of sight espied much more in the manner of his movement. I could almost see atoms scattering with the wave of his hand. Wyn told me who he was by demonstrating how he was.
And how he was was who I wanted to be.
Wyn had been one of those youths who enjoyed role-playing games, the board games and the video games, such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. He watched Star Trek to appreciate logic and literature, and art and music and hope for the future. He watched Star Wars to consider a power greater than himself. Few people had accepted him and many had rejected him. From the get-go, he and I had much in common.
But he was also very handsome, for an older man. “Solo taught me swagger,” he once confessed.
I knew he got his boyish grin from somewhere.
Wyn had graduated valedictorian from the University of Oxford.
He gave a commencement speech that was virtually misunderstood. Few got it because few got him.
One part was a quote, not of Polonius, but from the next best comic relief: “A lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made.”
Wyn’s Alma Mater sent him no more invitations.
He is the most brilliant person I’ve ever known.
His life is suffused with quantifiable data. Qualitative data baffles him. Other people’s feelings are as perplexing to him as dark energy.
For him, feeling empathy is akin to working sorcery.
He seeks out the complexities of life. He wrestles with problems to simplify them for others. He doesn’t want other people to understand him: He wants other people to better understand their self.
In this way he is completely opposite of me. You can imagine that he was a breath of fresh air for me when we met. He helped me see my life from the inside out. I’d been so entangled in my own problems that I’d never even had a second-thought about making other people’s lives better.
Altruism was a word I c
ould define intellectually. Not vocationally.
I came to understand Wyn better in time. Yes, he did want to make me a Blood Vivicanti because of my photographic memory. But he also made me more like himself because I was already very much like him: We both suffered the tragic fate of perpetually feeling alone and lonely in a large group. He didn’t make me merely because he needed me. He didn’t need me: He wanted me. He made me a Blood Vivicanti because he glimpsed his own loneliness in mine.
It felt good to be wanted by someone.
But, yes, Wyn did also want my photographic memory to perfect the Blood Vivicanti. He hoped to bottle my ability. He hoped to fit it into his formula. He would have liked all Blood Vivicanti to have a photographic memory too. He was tired of losing his Blood Memories.
Yet my ability is one puzzle he could never figure out. He wrestled with the problem of my being.
That made two of us.
Let me put it this way: I didn’t distrust him. That’s saying a lot. All my life I never learned to trust anyone. I had learned to distrust almost everyone.
Choosing not to distrust Wyn was a big step for me.
Wyn led me from the library. He showed me around his mansion. It was my house now, he told me. I was welcomed to stay there as long as I liked.
Did I want to leave? I wanted to understand myself better. Always have. Staying with Wyn would show me much, not about who I was. He would show me more about how I should be.
He showed me the mansion’s solarium and the scullery, the arboretum, the wine cellar, the kitchen, and more and more rooms, including Game Room Three, which was palatial and immature.
I loved it! I’d never been in a house with so much space. It was an introvert’s paradise. So, no, I didn’t want to leave.
Would you?
Wyn talked while we walked. I listened. I am a good listener. He explained much. He could explain much well.
That was when I heard those two words spoken aloud for the first time.
“Blood Vivicanti.”
Wyn had thought of the name. He could read ancient Latin and Greek. Vivicanti was a new word from a dead language.
Wyn led me back to the library.
He led me through its tall stacks. He showed me vast sections of fiction and nonfiction. His library seemed as large as the Library of Alexandria. It seemed as grand as the library in Disney’s cartoon movie, Beauty and the Beast.
It wasn’t the Elysian Fields, but it was far from Gehenna. In fact, you could say that it was a way station for lost souls like me.
Wyn was a collector of first editions. He loved the scent of 19th century books. He used to have a signed first edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Wyn would snatch it from the shelf not only to read. He’d place his nose in the center of the book and he’d inhale the good scent of page and ink and the hand that had penned the sad tale of Marley’s Ghost.
Books were Wyn’s romance.
My Blood Vivicanti eyes saw much of the library. One bookcase was a tad askew. No human eyes would have noticed. Wyn led me to it.
He tipped out a book from one of its shelves. The bookcase swiveled open. It was a doorway.
Inside it looked like a dark broom cupboard, but the floor was missing, and ahead were two fire poles that went down into darkness, far below.
Wyn smirked at me and cocked his eyebrow. “Never pass up a good cliché.”
He winked.
Then he leaped onto one of the poles and slid down, yahooing like a kid.
The slide down the pole was farther than I expected. My fall from the cliff had felt shorter.
My feet touched down on a soft pad. I looked around.
Behind me and beside me were rock walls.
Ahead was a massive cave. Stalactites hung from the ceiling. Stalagmites rose up from the ground. Filling the air was the rushing sound of a waterfall. All around was the scent of smooth river stones.
Beneath the mansion Wyn had a batcave.
Computer stations were everywhere. Most were embedded into the walls. Each operated independent programs.
In the center was a laboratory. Encircling it was a large computer terminal, full of buttons and switches and monitors and blinking lights.
The floor was covered in large metallic plates.
Robotic creatures scurried every which way, some on wheels, some on legs, some hovering.
This big boy’s batcave appeared to be a hybridization of a cave, a medieval castle, and an Apple computer store.
Above the laboratory in the middle was a massive holographic image. The hologram was of me.
The Red Man – the sight and smell of the cave reminded me of him. I still wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed him.
I looked for him. He wasn’t there.
Wyn didn’t know I knew about him. He never hid the fact that he makes the Blood Vivicanti through science. But the Red Man was the only secret he’d tried to keep from us.
Wyn was like Dr. Frankenstein remaking humanity in his own image and likeness. You could call him the Neo-Modern Prometheus. And you could say that the Blood Vivicanti were his monster, although we were never a patchwork of flesh, more like a patchwork of psychoses.
Often I feel like a monstrous patchwork of disorders, since, while I don’t do eloquent speeches like Frankenstein’s monster, I am very capable of becoming a different kind of demon, one more ruinous.
Two others were in the cave also. They were standing at the middle computer station, just beneath my hologram. They appeared to be arguing.
I assumed they were human, and I was mistaken. One was the boy I’d seen in the MISSING posters at the Academy. I could never have mistaken his muscular features, his wide mouth and soft lips, his mussed blonde hair.
I exhaled. “Theo…”
He could hear me. He glanced at me. He could see my porcelain white cheeks blush. A coppery scent emanated from him. It was the scent of blood.
Theo was a Blood Vivicanti.
There were only three of us at that time.
Wyn experimented on himself to become the first Blood Vivicanti.
He made Theo next. Theo was the perfection of his science experiment.
And then Wyn made me last. And I added perfection upon perfection.
The three of us were the only Blood Vivicanti in the whole world. We were alone and happy, like a little tribe lost in the woods.
And we had one common bond too: Flowing through our veins was the Red Man’s blood. Our blood glowed like violets on a clear summer day.
The other person beside Theo was an older woman. She was Wyn’s housekeeper. He called her, “Ms. Crystobal.”
But even to this day I doubt that was her real name.
She looked like a woman in her fifties. She was taller than me but shorter than Wyn. Her thin figure was deceptive. She always wore the same black uniform. Her black hair was tied back in a bun. Her mouth was always tightly pursed. Her eyes were always narrowed as if scrutinizing you.
I thought she was angry with me when I met her. Again, I was mistaken: She was incapable of feeling human emotion. Ms. Crystobal wasn’t a Blood Vivicanti and we all assumed she was from our planet. She hid her true nature well.
At any moment she could have hurtled a Franklin stove across the cave like a meteor.
Theo didn’t know about the Red Man.
Ms. Crystobal did. But Wyn didn’t know she knew. She knew much more than she led on.
Wyn approached her and Theo. Ms. Crystobal explained that Theo had not eaten real food in a week. Theo laughed. He acted like I wasn’t there anymore. Such a boy.
“This is an experiment,” he explained. “We have to know how long a Blood Vivicanti can go without food.”
Wyn once went three weeks without eating or drinking anything but blood. He wasn’t worried about Theo. “Let’s see if he can beat my record.”
I observed them both. Wyn was the Alpha. Theo was the Beta. Beta mimics Alpha, I thought. Alpha challenges Beta.
Blood Vivican
ti can often be more human than supernatural.
Wyn stood at the computer terminal beneath my hologram. My image was over twelve feet tall. It was as diaphanous as a ghost. My eyes were open. Staring straight ahead.
Words typed around my head. My image was being analyzed. You could see my tongue, from the tip, all the way down my throat.
A word appeared beside my tongue. Probiscus. Wyn had thought of that word too.
He turned to me and explained its meaning. “The Probiscus injects our victims with a chemical compound like dopamine. This chemical compound shoots electric messages to the nucleus accumbens. The brain then interprets this information as the sexual response cycle’s climax. In effect, the brain misinterprets the message. Blood Vivicanti venom disguises itself as a natural human neurochemical. The chemical compound is actually a neurotonin. It stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain. It triggers a heightened orgasm. Prolonged too.”
Theo called this effect: “OMG: Orgasm Maxing Gift.”
Ms. Crystobal went to a dumbwaiter in the cave wall. She brought from it a silver tea tray with teapot and teacups. She poured me a cup of Earl Gray tea. It was the best cup I’d ever had.
Wyn had my Blood Memories. They told him everything about me. He had handcrafted that whole night to perfectly please my new senses. He’d had my clothes tailored. He’d gathered that tea.
