“What do you expect?” said Elaine. “I only had a few hours to find someone.”
“You could have arrived sooner,” said Jenay. “Everything is always so last-minute with you.”
Elaine made a dismissive noise.
“No, really,” said Jenay. “It’s tiresome. You’ve never taken your responsibility seriously.”
“This hardly qualifies as a responsibility.” Elaine pushed back her cowl and I saw that she had left a white streak in her hair. “This is a pig party. It cheapens us. Though I must say…” Coquettishly, she touched my chest. “Yours is wonderful! Where you did find her?”
“She found me,” I said. “She more-or-less fell into my lap.”
Elaine smiled. “Repeatedly, no doubt.”
I had grown weary of Lucan’s dramatic entrances, as had we all, this mostly a reaction to his overabundant personality, which was redolent of a gay maitre de; yet I must confess that I also anticipated them. Music preceded him, piped in over hidden speakers: Verdi’s March from Aida. Next came Professor Rappenglueck, Lucan’s lover for a term, now reduced to a familiar, and a guest at our dinners for nearly thirty years: a diminutive man, once handsome, his looks severely diminished by age and a slovenliness attributable to mental deterioration. He shuffled forward, gray and shrunken, like a piece of fruit left too long in the icebox, mumbling as he came, absently stroking his beard, and stood at the end of the dinner table, his voice increasing in volume and waxing lectoral, addressing the empty chairs as if they were a vast assembly, holding forth in an erratic fashion on the subject of Cro-Magnon sky maps in the caves of El Castillo.
“…the Northern Crown,” he was saying. “Remarkable in its accuracy. Of course, these maps are not the greatest…the greatest secret of El Castillo.”
The professor fell silent in mid-ramble, and Lucan stepped into the doorway, his white hair combed back from his face and glowing like a flame, lending him a leonine aspect. He swirled his opera cape with a magician’s flair, as if making himself reappear after an occult disappearance, then bowed to each of us in turn, reached into the corridor and drew forth not a rabbit, but a rabbity, stoop-shouldered girl. Liliana (so Lucan introduced her) was at least six feet tall, no older than eighteen or nineteen, with dark circles under her eyes, possessed of a morose expression and a flat chest that seemed hollowed due to her posture and loose-fitting blouse. Everything about her testified that here was a girl who had contemplated (and perhaps attempted) suicide more than once, and was likely to do so again, possibly before the evening was over. A distinct threat to Giacinta in our competition, but one I was confident that she would withstand, for although Liliana’s presentation offered a complex palette of disaster, she was long of limb and doe-eyed, and neither bad skin nor poor posture nor the attrition caused her flesh by the poisons of depression hid the fact that she was a real beauty who, but for the indifference of chance, might have been walking a runway in Milan. Lucan, who had not spoken a word other than her name, presented her to Giacinta with an ornate gesture, and Liliana put out her hand.
“We’ve met,” Giacinta said, and turned away, ostensibly to select an appetizer from the table; but the insult was clear.
Liliana snatched back her hand and held it clenched at her waist, looking crushed. I suspected, if given the opportunity, she would brood over this slight the rest of the evening and later memorialize it with a cutting or some other form of self-punishment.
Lucan winked at me and said, “I’ll bet those two become a lot friendlier before the night is done.”
“If you say so.”
“Oh, I absolutely do.” Lucan removed his cape, folded it over the back of a chair. “It’s a natural pairing, you see. Liliana has gotten the better of this one”—he indicated Giacinta—“in an affair of the heart. Nothing else could have provoked such a reaction. It’s our duty to heal the breach between them.” He lifted a glass of wine, held it to the light to judge the color. “Lovely little town, don’t you think? Have you seen the murals?”
“A few.”
“Liliana took me on a tour this afternoon,” he said. “Really spectacular, some of them. But I feel they need a centerpiece, something monumental to provide them with an overall context.”
“Talk English!” Giacinta slapped my arm, demonstrating once again her shrewish side, a flaw she hastened to cover by conveying her frustration with being unable to understand what I was saying. She wanted to understand, she said, because…well, I understood, didn’t I? She gazed up at me adoringly. Lucan rolled his eyes and, taking Liliana’s arm, escorted her to the table.
At dinner, the four guests were seated all on one side of the table, Vid and Daniele bracketing Liliana and Giacinta; our side had a similar arrangement, Elaine and Jenay separating me and Lucan. By the time the seafood course had been served, Vid and Daniele were sneaking glances at one another over the top of the women’s heads, and Liliana was casting shy looks at Giacinta, who was grumpily toying with her shrimp risotto. They struck up a conversation during the main course, an excellent veal marsala, and, when next I noticed, while the waiters cleared away the dishes, the women were chatting amiably, as if there had never been the slightest bitterness between them—it was clear that someone had influenced Giacinta to be receptive to Liliana. Recognizing this, I was incensed. An overreaction, perhaps, but I had grown fond of Giacinta and felt protective of her.
“Now that Taylor has overcome his reluctance for the game, we can proceed,” said Lucan, dropping back into the Old Tongue. “I’d like first…”
“It’s not reluctance,” I said. “I simply find it jejune, this business of having guests at our dinners.”
Lucan arched an eyebrow. “Yet Giacinta carries your scent. You had sex with her. You had sex with the one you brought last time…and the time before that. You enjoy that part of it.”
“I’m prone to the same perversity as the rest of you,” I said. “I fuck them because they’re there to be fucked. Because their helplessness encourages me in some fundamental way. However, I don’t make a big deal about it. And more to the point, I haven’t used my influence on her tonight.” I pointed to Giacinta, who, unaware of our attention, was leaning toward Liliana, touching her forearm as she spoke. “This is someone else’s work.”
“Why, that’s damned impolite!” Lucan said, not trying to hide his smile. “Interfering with another man’s…what shall we call it? Dinner date? Catch of the Day? A cross between the two, I’d reckon. It verges on the criminal.”
“I know it was you, Lucan,” I said. “You’ve always abused your authority, even in trivial matters.”
“Very well! I admit it!” With a theatrical display, Lucan made as if to bare his chest so it might more readily accept my blade. “I’m the guilty one! The poor creatures looked so lonely, I felt compelled to give them a push.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“You don’t need my permission,” Lucan continued, “to return them to something approximating their former state. But you’ll be denying them pleasure, and there’s so little pleasure in their lives.”
I refused to look at him. “Degrade them however you wish. I won’t take part in it.”
“Let me make sure I understand you,” Lucan said. “It’s not our behavior in general you’re objecting to; it’s the formalization of that behavior. Yes?”
“That’s it basically,” I said. “Though we might do well to examine the entire range of our relationships with them. It seems we’re not doing ourselves much good by…”
“Must we always have this conversation!” Jenay threw down her fork in disgust. “You or Elaine trot out the same tired argument every time. It’s become as much a part of our dinners as Rappenglueck.”
At the sound of his name, the professor began mumbling—Lucan hushed him with a snap of his fingers.
“Are you insane?” I said to Jenay. “We never have this conversation. Each time we start to have it, you complain how tedious it’s become. I was thinking abo
ut this the other night. We haven’t done more than touch on the subject since Torremolinos, and that was nearly sixty years ago.”
“Is there anything new to say?” Jenay attempted to make the question rhetorical by framing it in an indifferent tone.
“I don’t know! Is there?” I put down my napkin and stood, stepping around to the opposite side of the table, walking behind the guests, who took incidental note of me, but not so as to subtract from their attentiveness to one another. “Let’s find out. Does anyone have anything new to add to the conversation that we never have?”
“We’ve tried to help them—that hasn’t worked,” said Elaine. “And they’ve thwarted our best efforts at destroying them.”
“That goes without saying…though it’s been centuries since we made a concerted effort in that regard,” said Jenay. “They’re like roaches in their perseverance.”
“We don’t have the strength of will we once had. I’m sure that’s due in part to my leadership, but I won’t accept all the blame.” Lucan shook his head ruefully. “I wish you could have known Furio. If ever a man was suited for a time…”
“My mother knew him,” said Jenay. “In fact, he sent a gift on the occasion of my birth.”
“Furio was perfectly suited for the Dark Ages,” Lucan went on. “He was as decisive as an ax, and as pitiless. When it came time for his release, he…”
“We know,” said Elaine with heavy sarcasm. “It woke volcanoes, knocked down walls a hundred miles away, and created a symphony in the process.”
“You’ve never attended a release,” Lucan said. “If you had, you might not be so disrespectful.”
Elaine wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Nobody I know would be so vulgar as to perform such a ritual. It makes you wonder at the sensibilities of our ancestors. The pyrotechnic release of one’s life energy to entertain a crowd of drunks. It’s…” She cast about for an appropriate word. “Primitive!”
“Being primitive has its uses,” said Jenay. “There’s a reason for the persistence of these cultural relics.”
“That’s how it’s come to be viewed,” said Lucan. “A cultural relic. I prefer to see it as something more vital. When Furio knew death was upon him, he gathered his friends so they might witness the vigor of his passing and celebrate the potency of his days.”
“For all his potency, he failed to destroy the humans,” I said.
Lucan scowled. “The animals. They outbred the plague. That’s all. The one thing they do well is breed.”
“They outbred us, to be sure. If we hadn’t found our little French thistle, we’d have gone the way of the wooly mammoth.” I paused, tamping down my annoyance with Lucan. “Yet if they hadn’t outbred us, if it were a choice we’d been presented, a trade-off, giving up procreative dominance in exchange for long life and the enhancement of our mental gifts, who here would have it otherwise? We should view our survival as a gift, not a privilege. They earned their right to survive. They…”
Lucan snorted. “Next you’ll be telling us their survival is God’s will.”
“My problem is,” Elaine said, “I don’t enjoy it anymore.”
“Enjoy what?” Jenay asked impatiently.
“Exploiting them.” Elaine half-turned to her. “Taylor’s right. This ritual dominance, this antiquated behavior, colors our lives. It’s a debased practice, no different from a release. And I don’t like how it makes me feel.”
“How does it make you feel?” asked Jenay, archly.
“Taylor’s not right!” Lucan said. “Not in the way you mean, at any rate.”
“Uneasy.” Elaine met Jenay’s challenging stare. “Uncertain of myself. You know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Jenay.
I saw that Liliana had let her head fall back, exposing the arch of her throat, and Giacinta was pressing her lips to it, feathering her tongue along a vein that showed beneath the skin. The sight infuriated me.
“This is ridiculous!” I said. “The entire conversation.”
“You insisted on having it.” Jenay signaled to a waiter that he could remove her plate.
“We’re not having the conversation I wanted. Far from it.” I paced to the end of the table. “Look. We’ve established that we can’t exterminate them, not without killing ourselves in the process. Now, despite our best efforts to save them, they’re on the verge of destroying themselves…and us. We’re the superior beings. Can’t we come up with a scenario other than one that involves mere containment or their destruction?”
Without bothering to excuse themselves, a silent communion having been reached, Vid and Daniele left the table and, soon after, the room. His expression bemused, Lucan started to speak, but I cut him off and said, “We have to examine the possibility that our intervention is stimulating their urge toward self-destruction.”
“Not this again,” said Jenay.
“Yes, we’ve mentioned it,” I said. “But always as a drollery. We need to take it seriously. If these dinners have any purpose, they remind us how easily we can damage them. One touch and they start to come apart. Look at their leaders, the ones whom we’ve influenced most frequently. They’re pathetic. The majority of them can’t even muster coherent speech.”
“Pish-posh,” said Lucan.
“Look at Rappenglueck,” I said.
The professor lifted his head and belched, and Lucan said, “Let’s not make this personal, shall we? The thing is, our affairs are inextricably mingled with theirs. We can’t afford to take the chance that Taylor may not be right.” He pointed at the door. “Someone should check on the boys. Elaine?”
Elaine lowered her head. “Somebody else go.”
Lucan turned to Jenay.
“They’re just off to have sex,” she said.
“We don’t want that, do we? Not with the staff still here. And the manager. Why complicate things?”
“Oh, all right. I’m sick of this blather, anyway.” Jenay stood, adjusted the fit of her jacket, and strode from the room.
“You have a point, Lucan. We can’t change course abruptly,” Elaine said. “At the same time, we shouldn’t be overcautious. We’ve been acting within narrow parameters. Too narrow, if you ask me. We’ve been trying to maintain the status quo. It’s like trying to stop a two-ton boulder from rolling downhill by jamming a doorstop beneath it. Given we’re stuck with the situation, what I’m suggesting is, let’s change what we can safely change and see what happens. This, the dinners, is one area in which we can experiment.”
“That’s not all you’re suggesting.” Lucan pretended to be concerned with shooting his cuffs. “What you’re suggesting has larger implications.”
“I realize that,” Elaine said. “Changing our attitude toward them during these dinners may have a ripple effect. Perhaps it’ll engender cultural change and one day we may find ourselves in partnership with them. As things stand, we only weaken ourselves with this kind of interaction.”
“Partnership,” Lucan said. “You mean, reveal ourselves to them?”
“Not right away,” she said. “Eventually, perhaps. We’re not so different from them, after all. Our superiority is based on a plant, for heaven’s sake. An accident of biology.”
“And we’re not certain that the thistle can’t be of benefit to them,” I said. “We’ve only done the most primitive of experiments in that regard. It’s quite possible…”
“You’re talking about our enemy.” Lucan enunciated his words precisely, as if speaking to a child. “Surely you comprehend that much. Our natural enemy. They very nearly destroyed us. We’re at war with them. How can you forget?”
“When’s the last time we took a casualty in that war?” I asked. “They’re more our victims than enemies. Our governance of them sets the model for terrorism. We’ve become invisible, yet if we lift a finger, the earth shakes. As for our nature, I’d like to think we’ve risen above it.”
Jenay re-entered the room. “They’re fine,” she said as she sat down. S
he glanced along the table. “Did I miss anything?”
Lucan gave a limp wave, as if commenting on the hopelessness of our impasse. “Taylor was saying he thinks we’ve risen above our natures in respect to the animals. I won’t bother detailing how incredibly stupid I find that presumption.” Then, addressing me: “If we reveal ourselves, you know what will happen.”
“It would be nasty,” I said. “No doubt. But if we prepare the way, who knows? And if worst comes to worst and there’s a war, we’ll win it.”
Lucan studied me, as if weighing what I had said, but then he brought his hand down on the table, giving everyone a start…except for Giacinta and Liliana, who remained intent upon one another. “This is absurd! It’s like listening to children prattling on about their favorite puppy.”
“If you’ll just listen—” I began.
“No.” Lucan came to his feet. “I won’t waste any more time with this shit. If Elaine and Jenay want to discuss…”
“Leave me out of it,” said Jenay.
“If they want to discuss it, do it another day. As eldest, I determine the agenda for this meeting. It’s time we got down to business.”
Vid and Daniele wandered back into the room and stopped by the door. Daniele’s mouth was agape and there was spittle on his chin; Vid’s lips moved silently.
“Damn it!” Elaine spun about to confront Jenay. “You didn’t have to ruin them!”
Jenay took in the scene by the door. She gave an amused sniff. “Sorry.”
Elaine clenched her fists. “If you think I’m going to clean up after you…”
“Be quiet!” Lucan shouted it. “Jenay. Get them seated. And you…” He glared at me. “Sit. We’ve got work to do.”
Jenay herded Vid and Daniele toward the table and, after returning Lucan’s glare, I sat. Lucan refreshed his wine glass and said, “State the concerns of the clans you represent.”
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 38
