by Nick Tosches
That much had not changed. The words loosened some of the old knots in my mind while tying new ones.
If I wanted to eat on Easter, I had better shop now. The way they crowded the stores, you would think these rich creeps ate only on holidays. Melissa was on her way to Minnesota for the school break, to visit her parents. Maybe Lorna didn’t want to be alone. Maybe she’d be in the mood to come by for some high holy pig meat. In any case, I would go shopping today. But first a glass of cold milk and a Valium.
I looked through the surface of what I had written. It was good stuff. But was it fact or was it fiction? Or had it not yet settled on either, and did that yet remain to be established? Or was it neither, but a tone poem whose key I alone possessed, to turn and unlock in words to come? Had I misplaced the key, or was it still not mine to turn? Did I even know where in these words the keyhole was? Or was it not in them at all, but in words to follow?
When I began writing a book—and I felt no doubt that this was to be a book—I habitually returned, as if by instinct, to read in one of the same three works: Flaubert’s final Three Tales, Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master,” or Beckett’s “The End.” Through the years I had come to view the first of these as deeply flawed, but I returned to it nonetheless as often as I returned to either of the others. Maybe this was because it served as a warning sign for the hidden hazards that lay ahead, on ground that, no matter how well traveled, remained ever treacherous. But this time I felt myself drawn to none of these works; not for warning, not for reinforcement, not for encouragement. Instead, looking for The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius but not finding it, I drew down a Bible. Sticking from its pages as a bookmark was on old hundred-dollar bill, from the years before the fur was censored from Ben Franklin’s collar. I moved the bill to the opening pages of the book of Ecclesiastes, and I placed the Bible by my bed.
Later that afternoon, after returning from shopping, I brewed a hot dandelion-root drink, put on the second movement of Respighi’s The Pines of Rome, and relaxed. A certain feeling of unease came over me as the music played.
The shadows of early evening fell. I threw on my jacket and walked north, to Circa Tabac.
There was Lee. We were almost alone in the place.
“Nicky,” he said.
“Lee,” I said.
“What’s up?” he said.
“I had visitors this morning,” I said.
“The cops?”
“Yeah, thanks to you.”
“Christ, that was something, huh?”
“What was something? What was this ‘incident’ they were talking about?”
“You didn’t hear? Those chicks. Right around the corner from here.”
“What chicks?”
“Those two chicks you were talking to. You left, and they left about ten minutes later. You didn’t hear? They found them with their throats slashed. Right around the corner here.”
He gestured in the general direction of Thompson Street. I was looking at him, but my mind was on what I was feeling in the inner right breast pocket of my jacket as I leaned to the back of the barstool beside him. Last night I had found myself thinking of my little ebony-handled knife, wishing it were with me, feeling for the first time that it should be with me. It was with me last night, I now knew, as it had been with me on the previous several nights when I had ventured out. The only thing different last night was that I had carried it in my right rather than my left breast pocket. Not sensing it where it had been, I had felt that I was without it.
I went into the men’s room and locked the latch. I pulled the thin sharp blade from its narrow snakewood scabbard and looked at what I knew I would see. The blood had been dry for some time and was like a black crust over the blade. I remembered now: standing in the darkened doorway, taking the air, when they happened by. I heard the steps of the younger one first, in her high heels. She was a stepper, all right. Then I heard the voice of Sandrine, and she said it again:
“Are you all right?”
I would have to destroy the sheath as well as the knife. There was probably as much identifiable dried blood in it as there was on the knife. I hated to see this lovely little knife and its lovely little scabbard go. I felt that I was not alone in the men’s room. I knew that there was no camera. Then I remembered. Why is the weight of the mere head of this serpent that has turned to stone so much heavier than the whole of this identical serpent that has turned to stone? I put the knife back in my pocket and noticed then that there was dried blood on my jacket as well. Had I walked home with blood on my face? Had I made my way across the bright Canal Street crossing like that? Had my jacket been draped like this, with the bloodstained knife in its pocket, on the same chair in the kitchen this morning, while those two cops stood near to it? I shook my head.
“I keep thinking about that hamburger you told me about,” Lee said.
“I tell you, it was good.”
He lit a cigarette. I lit a cigarette. I asked him if he had talked to the same two cops, young numb-nuts and glue factory. He laughed a little.
“I’m sorry about that. I was just trying to do the right thing. I mean, those poor fucking girls. Jesus.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Those poor girls.”
He asked me if I wanted a drink. I took a club soda with a piece of lemon.
“You working on another book?”
“How’d you know?”
“You’re not drinking.”
What about my saliva? What about my DNA? No. They wouldn’t check the cut marks for that. They’d check elsewhere, if at all.
“Both dead, huh, just like that?”
“Yeah. One of them was dead when they found them. The other hung on awhile. She was in shock. Then she went. Yeah, just like that.”
I felt bad for Sandrine and the other kid. A part of me felt detached and different from whoever it was, whatever it was, that had taken their lives. Maybe that was why I could not clearly remember it. Because it was not me, not really. But it was to me that Sandrine had come. It was to me that Sandrine, who had given me my first taste of blood, had given her last.
In bed that night, I read slowly the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem: “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
As I drifted off, I felt that I was about to leave a part of myself behind. Which part was it? The part of me that seemed detached and different? The good part? The bad part? The old part? The new part? Were the pieces of myself that easily divisible? The days and the nights would tell. Yes, I thought, the days and the nights would tell. I sensed a smile on my face, and I did not question it, but merely took it, as with any smile, to be a good sign. I did not consider that I might not sense this same smile again. I did not consider that it might be a smile of parting.
EASTER PASSED. I NEGLECTED TO CALL LORNA, AND I WAS relieved that Melissa was away. I wanted to be alone, to enjoy my pork roast in quiet solitary peace.
There was a feeling of being in limbo. I drifted not only to and from sleep, but through my days and nights as well. I was aware of undergoing a metamorphosis of sorts, but I knew not from what to what this change was taking me.
Slowly I began to feel that I was being brought from a new dimension of being to yet a newer, higher dimension. I was wary of it at first, but ultimately I knew I could do nothing but surrender to it.
For a few days I did not write. This was usual for me. Whenever I succeeded in driving down the first stake of a new book, I took a break. In the past, I drank. But now I did not. It was with a degree of disappointment that I did not attribute this to the baclofen, for I did not experience any of the attendant changes that baclofen was supposed to have effected in me. There was no quelling of the nerves, no banishing of anxiety, no newfound calm. Not from the baclofen anyway. Maybe my own answer had lain elsewhere
, and I had already found it there: in the same broached source of other wonders.
Or maybe I was not drinking simply because this felt like no other book on which I had ever set course. I thought of the book that lay ahead as a ghost-book, as something beyond a book, though I could not explain this to myself or to anyone else. And there was no need to. Aura and resonance transcend meaning and saying. Some things can not be captured and conveyed.
In a few days’ time, when I resumed writing, first in the mornings, then in the mornings and again in the evenings, increasingly into the late hours of the night or early hours of the next day, it was with a feeling, again and again, of going to meet the ghost. And soon the ghost became to me the Holy Ghost. Not the Holy Ghost of Saint Paul, not the Holy Ghost of any other; but my own Holy Ghost. And I felt as if I were entering a church. Not a sanctified place, but a sacred place. Sacred to gods or demons or both, I did not know. Sometimes it felt that this church was within me. Sometimes it felt far from me, in the dark woods of my soul’s traveling. Always it felt that I belonged there.
There were no cravings. I took this to be good. A sign of freedom. On May Eve, Walpurgisnacht, I lit a candle, a nice beeswax taper glommed from the emporium of high-born junk food and ecologically friendly toilet paper. On the first morning of May, I opened a bottle of good Margaux and drank two glasses with a big plate of soft-scrambled eggs and blood sausage.
I wanted to be alone. But I began to wonder why I hadn’t heard from Melissa or Lorna. Had they forgotten about me? I wanted to be alone, not forgotten. I began to feel a jealous anger well up in me. I imagined the worst things, and I flung the worst curses against them. These outbursts of senseless wrath incited by imagined wrongs were not like me. Of course, I had in my younger years experienced the insecurities and angers of jealousy, just as I had occasionally heard the hissings of ethnic intolerance; but I had known these follies only in the way that they are endemic to the species, and had for the most part seen through them and outgrown them. Even in my younger and more foolish years, I had never felt the likes of the sudden fast-rising wrath I lately had been subject to. It was as if, in my new life, the last remnants of old failings had been sloughed off only to be replaced by new failings. It was as if some seething vengeance or fury were trying to force its escape from me through any means, any fissure possible. In fact, these were not fits of temper that I felt. They were more like the spontaneous turmoilings of an unfamiliar presence seeking vent. I wondered if what I had done in the doorway was but a lashing forth by this presence as well. It must have been, for it was not I. It could not have been I.
WHEN MELISSA CALLED, IT WAS NOT TO TELL ME THAT she loved me and she missed me. She said those things. But I could tell that she was calling about something else.
“Do you know what ‘prions’ are?” she asked.
“How do you spell that?” I asked.
She spelled it. And within an hour she was sitting beside me.
“ ‘Prion’ is a rearrangement of the initial letters of ‘proteinaceous infectious particle.’ Actually”—she paused—“why would they do it that way? Anyway, prions can be transmitted by drinking blood,” she said matter-of-factly.
Her father. Of course. Her father was a medical researcher, and she had been home to visit him.
Prions. As she spoke I could not help recalling the night she expounded on Cologne and haunches and Keulen. I had learned later that Keulen was the Dutch name for Cologne, not an old German name as she had said.
“What, did you show him where I bit you, too?” I said.
“Oh, hush. He thought my curiosity was purely scientific. These guys can’t even unscramble words.” She looked down at her notes. “Prion. It should be pro-in.”
Like father, like daughter, I thought.
“I was amazed at what you can’t get from drinking blood. You can’t get blood diseases. You can’t get leukemia. You can’t get AIDS, because HIV can’t be transmitted that way, unless maybe if you have lesions in the mucous membranes of your mouth, your esophagus, or your stomach. Your immune system would take care of the leukemia. Your stomach acids would kill the HIV and just about anything else.” She looked impressed. “Ingested blood will be digested blood. Simple as that. It’s not the same as a transfusion. The blood type doesn’t matter. Look at a steak.” She read directly from her notes: “A steak is merely cooked muscle with various amounts of blood. We do it all the time.” She paused. “But there are certain parasites that the acids can’t kill—and prions. They pass right through the acids and penetrate through the stomach into the system.”
“But what are prions?”
“They don’t seem to be so sure about that yet.”
“What is it with these guys? They misname something, then figure out what it is?”
“They’re these little virus-like particles. They’re still sort of hypothetical. They seem to agree on scrapie. They think that’s caused by prions, but only sheep and goats get that. Mad cow disease, that’s another one. Anyway, prions cause fatal neurological diseases. And maybe other things. They just haven’t figured it all out yet.”
She put aside her notes.
“Anyway,” she said, “here’s the thing. Whatever these prions and parasites are, I don’t want any. The same goes for HIV and whatever else, which I have more of a chance of getting from them going directly into my bloodstream from your mouth than you do from them entering your stomach.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t know who else you’re fooling around with like this. I like to think you’re not. But—”
“Well, you’re right. I’m not.”
I don’t know why I said that. I should have just kept my mouth shut.
“OK, you’re not. But let’s say you are, or you might. If you’re not going to worry about yourself, think about me. And you should worry about yourself. Parasites. Prions. God only knows what they are.”
What she told me served only to reinforce what I believed: that science as yet knew nothing. The croaker had said that my diabetes was improving, that my blood type seemed to be changing. These were impossibilities. Yet they seemed to be true.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “According to science, I have a better chance of getting sick from you drinking my blood than you have from drinking it.”
She wanted me to be faithful to her. And so, after all that, in her own way, she was really telling me that she loved me and missed me. That old black magic. The prion of love.
The cravings had ebbed, and this, I felt, was good. But as I sat beside Melissa, I realized that my sexuality, my desire for physical intimacy of any kind, had dwindled as well.
Maybe it was over, I told myself. And in a way this was a comforting thought. I did not want to relinquish my new life and all that it had brought me. But what it had brought me in recent days scared me more than a little, and there were times when I would have reembraced and reclaimed the solitary misery of my old life if I could. If I was becoming a god, then that god in turn was becoming something I did not know. There was a darkness and a stillness in the air. It was like the darkness and the stillness when I encountered the dead monkeys. Yes, maybe it was over, all of it: from the dead monkeys to my resurrection to the doorway in the black of night to the presentiment of the darkness and stillness in the air now before me.
Melissa touched my hand, and I withdrew it. She touched my neck and I turned away.
“Have you thought any more about those leopards?” she asked.
I looked at her. She was smiling.
“No,” I lied. “Have you?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m insane. Or maybe we both are. Simple as that.”
Her words were heard by me, but I was not listening. The whole business of that all-but-forgotten morning, the business of crossed lives and leopard souls was a minor key in the background now.
If I were going to tell anyone that I killed the two girls, it would be Melissa. And a part of me did feel a
need to confess, and to expiate my guilt. But I would not. I knew in that instant, I would not. No, I told myself. It was done, and it was not really me. To say it was me would not quite be the truth.
Did I any longer know the truth? I was not sure. I was not sure of anything anymore: of what was real and what was not. All I knew for sure was the terrible feeling that I had passed through a state of bliss and was coming out the other side.
We fell to sleep that night slowly, silently, her arm lightly around me. I had a troubling dream. There was nothing odd in this. Most of my dreams, if not all of them, were troubling. I had come to learn that this was common to almost everyone. The good-night lovers’ wish of “sweet dreams” was sardonic. But of this particular dream I could remember nothing.
I gently removed her arm from me and quietly went to make a cup of coffee. The morning light was still a mere insinuation. I returned softly to the bedroom and looked down at her. Her sleeping face to me, her raised right arm beneath her head, her left arm lying on her body, unseen beneath the bedclothes, the delicate protuberance of her hand resting on her crotch. She lay like the Sleeping Venus, but more lovely, and immersed in shadows that seemed to have grown and darkened and deepened in the more than five hundred years since Giorgione, as death neared, had labored with his brush to perfect the encroaching shadows of his painting.
I stood awhile. Her beauty mesmerized me. It was then, suddenly, that I realized that I hated her.
PALE LIGHT CAME SLOWLY AS I SAT ALONE WITH MY COFFEE. I did not delve into my feelings or my mind. I had no inclination to do so, and I knew that there was no real understanding to be had by such delvings.
The Ch’an Buddhists had known the truth. Thought was the great curse. Only when the mind was free of it could the power of no-thought bring the burning flame of being. Those who seek truth should realize that there is nothing to seek.
