Pretty Dead

by Francesca Lia Block

Unsuspecting young men and women visit museums with us in the day, ride with us in carriages through the park at night, dine with us in glittering rooms, and, drunk on our wine, fall asleep like babies with their heads on our pillows.

  We will live like this for years to come, and every time I balk, every time I tell him I have had enough, he takes me in his arms and kisses me, gives me jewels and flowers, shoes and perfume.

  “I regret this part, too, Charlotte. But there is no other way. We must make the best of it. We must love our victims, honor and respect them. We give them meaning. We give them value. By dying this way, their lives have purpose.”

  He makes me believe that we are only being true to our natures, nothing more.

  San Francisco, 1939

  Fourteen years have passed since William made me. I’ve been his creature almost as long as I was human, and in no time I’ll have left my young human self far behind. Not just chronologically; I am less and less like the girl I was. I don’t think about my parents much, or even Charles, except in those moments when someone who resembles him crosses my path. I am a devoted partner to William, and my concerns revolve around keeping him happy as well as experiencing all the cultural riches he offers me. But I am already growing restless.

  William was here in San Francisco in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition. He has told me about the Tower of Jewels, 435 feet covered in 100,000 glass gems lighting up the night. The Tower of Jewels was temporary, but the Palace of Fine Arts is still there, with its dome, its colonnade, its frieze of weeping women reflected in the water that surrounds it. Swans float on the still surface, and the sky is soft and gray, with very little threat of sun. To brighten things dangerously, I wear a shocking-pink Elsa Schiaparelli dress with silver tambourine buttons.

  William likes to travel to see the world’s marvels, to appreciate the beauty of man’s artistic achievements. He says they inspire him.

  Now we are on Treasure Island for the new exhibition, held boldly in the wake of the Great Depression. Two bridges have been built, and an exposition is being held defiantly, as if to say, “This city is immune from such calamity.” Just as the 1915 world’s fair was held only a few years after an earthquake that nearly ruined San Francisco forever.

  In this way, the bold but foggy city reminds me of myself and William. Laughing in the face of danger. Challenged by it to grow bigger, more powerful, more immune.

  William has things to show me. The Court of Flowers. The Elephant Tower. The Peru Building. The Tower of the Sun.

  “Look! Look!” he says. “Aren’t humans endearing? I can hardly remember what it was like to be one anymore. They make magical little structures to boast about how ingenious they are. They make a whole temporary city just to boast.”

  “At least they make something,” I say.

  I am angry at William today. I used to be so creative; perhaps I could have been a painter or a writer. He took that away. I am tired of his incessant talk, his cold eyes. Last night I had to lure a young couple to him again. He made me watch but I refused to eat. I went hungry. Now I am weak.

  “I make things, too,” William says haughtily. He stops and takes my face in his hands. “I made the prettiest thing of all. And she isn’t going to be destroyed by earthquakes or wars. She’ll eat all her dinner tonight like a good girl. She is going to live forever.”

  When you become only art and not the artist, the girl in the shocking-pink dress, what becomes of your soul?

  London, 1940

  Now I only wear a brown gabardine suit. In Paris, in defiance, the women are wearing high heels, full skirts, and even fur coats. They say the enemy will have less fabric if they use more.

  When the bombing started, most everyone went underground, but William, impervious, takes my hand and leads me up to a high balcony where we can survey a large portion of the city.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he murmurs.

  I must look horrified, because he puts his arm around my waist. “Oh, I know, it’s evil personified, but you can’t deny that it is beautiful, too. And I hate to say it, but bloodshed fosters the creative spirit. They are connected.”

  There are too many fires to count. The horizon is aflame, like a hundred suns flaring before they set. But these suns do not set. They keep raging, consuming the city in red flashes and, above that, billows of pink smoke. The buzzing sound of the planes’ motors seemed to emanate from the fires themselves, as if the flames are made up of thousands of burning bees. From where we stand we can see the Thames and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, both glowing surreally. This is the first time in my life, as a human or something else, that I contemplate an apocalypse.

  “What will we do if the world ends?” I ask William, as all around us the city burns to ash beneath a sky of terrible roses.

  “We will wander the ruins together,” he tells me.

  Then we put on the tin hats he’s made for us and takes my hand. We run down, down, down the staircases to cavort and dance in hell.

  Hiroshima, 1945

  When we arrive, it hasn’t happened yet.

  The city fills a valley between hills and sea. Later I will find out that this was one reason it was chosen. To focus the destruction in one area. I don’t know why he wanted to come.

  “Why?” I asked when he mentioned it. “The war is on. I’ve had enough.”

  “I know,” he said. “But remember that wars feed…”

  “Culture and creativity. I know, you’ve told me.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t see that at all. They just bring death.”

  But I came with him anyway. Maybe part of me believed that seeing the horrors might wake me up again, in some way bring back my humanity.

  I was wrong. The horror hadn’t even really begun. That much horror can kill even the soul of a soulless being.

  We are staying at a traditional ryokan, or hotel, in the outskirts. We sit on tatami mats; eat fish and rice; wear kimonos covered with peonies, pine trees, cranes. It is possible to pretend the world is peaceful. Until that day.

  From the ryokan we see the flash of light, the sky with its mushroom cloud. A death’s-head in the sky. Black smoke. A whole city vanishing in a moment. If we were human we would have lost our hair later, developed tumors, died from the radiation. But our immortality saves us again.

  They say that light patterns on clothing protected one’s skin and black patterns were imprinted onto the skin from the flash.

  Soon after this disaster, in a hotel room in Paris, William rips up one of the kimonos he’d bought me in Japan. It has large dark flowers on a pale ground. I imagine flower scars, big petals burned into my skin. He lays me on the bed and ties my wrists and ankles with the strips of silk.

  “Call me master,” he says.

  “Tatsujin.”

  He holds a candle over me and drips wax on my breasts and belly. The wax is scalding but cools immediately, turns powder soft. Of course I don’t feel a bit of pain. I don’t cry. Maybe he is trying to punish me, or maybe he is trying to save me with my own tears. But of course none come.

  I think about the London bombing, and now this. I wonder if somehow William attracts disaster to him wherever he goes.

  Hollywood, 1947

  William is called Billy now. He has come here to be an actor and, he says, to help us forget some of the horrors we have seen. Acting seems to be a good way to forget a lot of things. But it’s hard to forget the image of the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, with her blue eyes and black locks. And the other images, the pictures they took in the morgue where she doesn’t look like a person at all but a chopped-up thing. It even sickens monsters like us.

  Billy looks debonair with his brilliantined hair, his sharkskin suits, two-toned oxford shoes. We go out for martinis and dancing at the Trocadero or Perino’s. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of a movie star. They look like us—too pretty, too smooth. Billy wants a girl and a boy this time, aspiring actors maybe. I find a couple sitting
at a pale pink booth. I’m wearing a sky-blue chiffon dress and ankle-strap shoes, my hair in a bun with loose tendrils. I smile at them and remove my white glove to take their hands. They join us for a cocktail. Music plays, a Nat King Cole song, and the lighting is rosy. Potted palms all around, parquet floors. So elegant. The girl is a brunette in a dove-gray dress and the boy is blond with a Midwestern accent.

  Billy leans over to me and whispers in my ear. “You did well, Char. Very pretty. Both.”

  He sees a flash of rebellion mixed with fear in my eyes and adds, “It’s just two little lives. We’ve been through wars, darling.”

  “What?” the girl asks. “What did you say?”

  “We were just saying how lovely it is to be here celebrating after all the hard times we’ve seen.”

  He raises his glass to the pretty prey with their trusting martini eyes. “Cheers,” he says hoarsely. “To eternal life.”

  The couple giggle and clink their glasses, not knowing they salute their death.

  Bethel, 1969 (Woodstock)

  So many years of the same thing. Wandering. Seduction. Death. Only the scenery, clothing and faces change. Except for our faces. They always stay the same.

  I sit in the rain. It streams over me, soaking my hair and my dress so that my breasts show through the thin, tie-dyed fabric. Rainwater fills my eyes and I pretend I am crying. Ravi Shankar is playing on the stage. Graceful rhythms of the tabla are stirring something ancient and human in my heart, but my tears are still only rain.

  Three people will die here. A heroin overdose. A ruptured appendix. The man who was run over by a tractor in his sleep.

  Don’t think about the three deaths.

  When William heard about them, he said, “Sacrifice to the gods, I suppose.”

  If I could still shiver, I would. Billy isn’t afraid of horror, but I am; maybe therein lies my salvation.

  A woman gave birth in the back of a pickup truck. I could hear her screams. I wonder what it would be like to hold my own baby in my arms. The small, round, wet head against my breast—this is something I will never know. It is another thing Billy has taken from me, but I try never to think of it. By now, if he had not made me, I would be an old woman, too old for babies, maybe no longer beautiful. If I ever accused him of robbing me of the gift of life, he would point this out. He would say, “I have given you the greatest gift of life there is.”

  I look around for Billy, but he is gone. Muddy half-dressed girls and boys dance around me. I think, How can it be that the world changes so much all the time? I feel the deep sense of emptiness that comes from having to witness so much change, over and over again, forever.

  The only way I can do it, I think, is to have Billy by my side. At least I will have someone who understands what is like to never grow old, someone who will never leave me. Even though he is savage, even though he is cruel, he is at least immortal. That alone makes him invaluable to me. He must never leave.

  Where is he?

  I take off my wet dress, peel the fabric away from my body, and stand to dance with the girls and boys in the relentless rain. I have seen bombings. I have seen brutality. I have seen blood. What is this? A bacchanal, a joyous thing, a brief interlude of peace and love. A time that will never come again. Celebrate the rain, the mud, Charlotte, I tell myself. Celebrate the lovely bare flesh, beating beneath the surface with young blood.

  Maybe someday you, too, can leave the earth with this memory inside you.

  I wonder, if so much of the mythology about us is untrue, what of the myth of the stake through the heart? Is that true? Who would do such a thing for me? Who would ever love me that much?

  London, 1972

  If not by disasters and music, I mostly remember my history by what I wore.

  Now it is floppy suede hats, minidresses, and psychedelic tights or bell-bottoms, purple suede platform boots. My eyelashes are false and sparkled. My lips are Mary Quant white. Billy in his three-piece dandy suits with the flared legs, thick-heeled boots. His hair brushes his collar, and he sports a handlebar mustache.

  We live in a Victorian flat with garlands embossed on the ceilings and walls. I remember the flat by closing my eyes and seeing myself dressed in my Carnaby Street finery, dancing around the living room to the Rolling Stones. “Wild Horses.” That’s how I feel about Billy; nothing can drag me away from him. His favorite Stones song is “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  There are always people crashed out on our floor; you have to step over bodies in the morning to get to the kitchen. Some of the girls are the ones I have procured for Billy, lost souls with pretty hair, long legs and lashes whom I found at boutiques or bars or in dark alleys. I feel bad every time I bring one home, but I can’t seem to stop. I am like a loyal hunting dog dragging back the birds by their broken necks. But these birds have not been shot down yet; that is to come.

  Why do I keep doing it? Not only because it is my nature. Not only because I am devoted and afraid. I realize now that my participation in his work was the closest I could get to creating something when I had nothing left to make myself.

  Paris, 1976

  Sometimes Billy takes me with him when he goes out. We walk along the Champs Élysées at night. He is incensed by the McDonald’s they’ve put there, can’t seem to get over it.

  “And they think because they serve red wine it is all right! Merde!”

  In France, Billy wants me to dress elegantly and all in black. I have a collection of black dresses and a lot of colorful printed silk scarves.

  “They can make it seem that you have more clothes,” he tells as he gives me a new Hermès scarf as a present.

  I have my original black Chanel cardigan from the 1920s and Coco’s No. 5 perfume. Billy prefers classic fashion for me, though he is quite a dandy himself, and I am still trying to please him.

  I really want to eat at McDonald’s and to buy one of the plastic necklaces full of virulent-seeming glow-in-the-dark green liquid that vendors sell along the boulevard, but Billy says they look cheap and are only for tourists.

  The city stretches out before us, twinkling with the magic of so many lovers’ fantasies and dreams. It has changed so much since Billy first brought me here. The fast food, the plastic, the traffic. But then, I’ve changed, too. He and I have changed. Once we loved each other all night long. He whispered poetry into my ear. He told me he would love me forever. Now we are like an old bickering couple, and we do not even have death to look forward to as an escape from each other.

  Manbattan, 1986

  Ten years can be a long time in the world of mortal fashion.

  I have my hair teased over the bandana at my brow. Strategically ripped white T-shirts over black spandex tights and shoes with pointed toes. Lots of bangles and chains. I want to wear big crosses for the fun, the irony of it, but it feels wrong, weirdly dangerous somehow, though I wouldn’t admit it. I am still dancing. The T-shirt, cut at the neck, slips off over my bare shoulders. The bangles click together.

  This time I am dancing to Madonna in a penthouse apartment lit with candles. Black marble floors. City shining down below us, looking immune, but it isn’t. Six years ago John Lennon was shot. We were here then, at the eye of the storm again. Lennon was only forty years old and as in love as a man can be. I remember how one Halloween Billy and I dressed in white and flowers, and I wore a long black wig, pretending to be Yoko. I suppose Billy thought this costume, like the crosses he wears, was ironic. I didn’t tell him that it was my fantasy, the way I believed love was supposed to manifest itself.

  But very little looks the way it really is. People are dying fast and it is blood-related, but it has nothing to do with us.

  Billy walks in—dark eye makeup smudged, a long chain in his ear with a cross dangling at the end. His hair is short and bleached, with dark roots, not the teased pompadour I would have expected based on his decadent style from the last decades; he’s a little more dignified now. He doesn’t like how I am dressed—I can tell by his e
xpression—but I am no longer quite as subservient anymore. I’ll wear what I like; it’s about the only way I have to express myself.

  Billy lies down on the couch and turns on the TV. There aren’t any sexy girls or boys lying around on the floor. AIDS has made everyone more cautious, more monogamous. Even though it can’t affect us, it’s hard to watch these lovely men becoming all eyes and cheekbones, then hooked up in a hospital, driven through streets in hearses, in coffins that will never open.

  Once Billy said, “There’s something so beautiful about all these young people becoming aware of their mortality. It’s a shame it took this disease to do it, though. But it’s still beautiful.”

  I close my eyes and keep dancing, trying to forget that those words came from the lips of the man who has become my whole life.

  Seattle, 1994

  Kurt Cobain has just died. And here we are. Eight years later and we’re in an entirely new era, but our faces are just as youthful. I am wearing a white satin slip dress, a plaid flannel shirt, torn black leggings and black Converse sneakers, and am sitting curled up in front of the TV, drinking wine. I can’t believe Kurt’s dead. He looked like me and Charles. He could have been our brother.

  They say he shot himself in the head.

  Part of me is jealous, although I feel guilty for thinking this.

  Outside it is raining. The relentless rain. Why do we live here? Our apartment is large and sprawling, with bookshelves everywhere, a fireplace and a wall of windows looking out over the wet courtyard garden. Sometimes I walk around the lake and look at the flowering trees. I go to the outdoor market and buy oysters and wine. Sometimes I spend whole days in a bookstore. Mostly I wait and wait for Billy to come home.

  He’s not back until late that night. I’m still in the chair with the television on. I can’t cry, but I want to more than anything. Without tears the pain turns to rage. I want to smash the TV. Why did you kill yourself? You had everything. Even mortality to save you eventually. What have you left me with? Nothing.

  Manbattan, 2001

  Finally the city is quiet. Too quiet. Hardly any sirens anymore. The silence of defeat. And the air still toxic. Photographs of missing family members paper the walls. I am alone in the apartment again, waiting for William. He’s been gone since it happened. I know he is safe, but I’m not sure I am. I’ve been sitting like this for days with William’s black cat, Ezra, on my lap. I haven’t eaten, showered, or changed my clothes. I have on the same pair of ripped jeans, the same black cashmere sweater. The television is always on, showing the footage of those planes and the towers over and over again.