And what other pleasure could that thing desire but other flesh, people disappearing one after another, plunged into darkness?
That thing was moving to a new home.
I remembered the Tziganes bringing the boxes, helping that creature onto my ship.
“Denn die Todten reiten schnell!”
For the dead travel fast.
To England.
Surely to London, city of four million souls. How much blood there? How many people willing to become like him?
I imagined a world where we are cattle and the banners of the monsters wave over devastated lands, while a million bats in the heavens make the night eternal.
Where ignorant captains take vile seeds on their ships to new shores, in exchange for an ambiguous pleasure.
I screamed, kept screaming, still scream.
When I could calm down, when I forced myself to be again, I found again the fog and the insane impulse of the storm, with a myriad of sickly pale moths with incandescent eyes watching me. At night. With my men around me, pathetic in their excessive hunger.
“I did not kill Mikhail,” I told them. “Nor did I kill you.”
“And you will not kill all of London,” said the man, enjoying the voyage, laughing at me.
Hate always feeds on despair. And mine was infinite.
I had to hurt that thing. It was my duty to somehow sink into him the selfsame pain he had stabbed into my men, to return unto him the Hunger that had led them to mutilate themselves with their own teeth, which had made them beggars for my meager flesh.
“Blood,” they said, like children under the inclement light of a scorching sun.
“Look for other ships,” I whispered, damning myself with every word.
I should shut up, let them die again of Hunger.
Was it for them, who obviously suffered, or for me, who could not bear to see them begging, wounded, gnawing at their own hands, that I condemned other crews to darkness?
“We cannot. Water hurts,” Olgaren said, finding words difficult, as if he had lost something essential of himself when he died, the flesh in which he found himself imprisoned but a fraction of what it once was—such is not a good grave. Better beneath the Demeter.
The sea is a consecrated place for us sailors.
Blessed space where our bones are laid to rest.
But it is something more. Made a sepulcher by the ships that cast their dead into the sea, by the ceremonies carried out on deck.
When they sail away, when the ship is gone, the sea is sea.
The ephemeral magic of the funeral leaves with the boat.
So, the water hurts.
The world outside the grave a place of pain.
I knew, then, what we were transporting to England.
That creature could not leave behind the only thing true for every man. He had escaped the funeral shroud, death itself, but not the dark earth of the grave, condemned to always carry it with him.
The memory of dissolution.
Is peace not better: the incessant caress of the earth, of the oozing moisture that will rot away your flesh, obliterating rank as it does memory, destroying what you were, unique, to make you what we all become, dust? Is Rest not a dear-enough payment in exchange for life?
Exactly what would the earth say to that man?
And what did it signify?
He, It, had sealed the hold, closing it from the inside, burying metal and ropes in the skin of the Demeter without any effort.
I thought he had locked himself in, but he left at night without difficulty.
Through a crack, I supposed. Like the cracks running along the boxes we transported.
What could I do against him?
Helpless.
“Tomorrow,” said the man. “Tomorrow, we shall dock.”
Fate measured in hours, life like grains of sand that drop to nothingness, revenge lost in blood and flesh beneath the hunger of the victims.
I was going to die with my sin.
“I did not kill you, Mikhail,” I said, because all my faith, all my prayers had been reduced that one shaking affirmation.
“I didn’t kill him,” I repeated a thousand times. After so much silence, so many years of not admitting it to myself, of burying that simple statement in other skins, in other events, on trips along the road of ice and salt, I needed it to bleed from me now.
“I did not ….”
“Not ….”
I said it so many times, in so many ways, with such force that I ended up listening to myself.
Ended up knowing.
I did not kill Mikhail.
“They fear their appetites,” he told me once, but it was not true. It was not men wanting men that killed him.
Many secret Hungers (mayhap of flesh, of pleasures, of arrogance or sins) wielded those weapons.
The need to be hidden, to ferment in the dark. Rabidly desired because they were forbidden.
The crime a justification.
For the world, for normalcy, so that no one will free the throbbing demons of the flesh, of thought, of who we are behind the masks.
If I have appetites that I consider monstrous ... aren’t they all? Is the sin of others not as great as the one I dare not exercise, like the one I perform in secret?
Does it not deserve a punishment I cannot infringe on myself? Do I not kill with rage that which I want to kill inside me, but cannot, because that pleasure, that aberration, that which I treasure is more than I am, more than my own image?
If the Shadow that lives within us could take shape, it would show a void before the mirror: image itself, reflection in a world of unhealthy glow.
I know that Thirst is not evil in and of itself, nor Hunger a stigma that must be erased by fire and blood.
Not even Sin.
It is what we are willing to do to feed an impulse that makes it dangerous.
Who was more monstrous on that country lane in Dzerzhinsk where Mikhail died: he, shot down, or those who expiated their rage upon his body?
I committed a Sin by forcing him to accept my caresses. But I had the incredible luck of being forgiven by his acceptance.
Sleeping together, seeking mutual pleasure in our bodies, should not have ended in blood.
“I’m not a monster,” I told the Demeter, gripping the helm in the midst of the fog.
I wasn’t like him, like it.
And to prove it, I had to save my men.
Soul and Flesh in One.
What if the Flesh were destroyed? Wouldn’t that set the Soul free?
The sea hurts.
And for that am I alive. That is why, on a ship of the dead, I yet breathe.
I discovered it in despair, during days I sailed surrounded by ghosts, during nights when guilt twisted its claws inside me.
A clarity separates me from the man I was before the horror; a clarity achieved in the endless moments of the trap.
I understood it all. I managed to learn it, after I told myself that I was not a monster, when—for naught in particular—I forgave myself for a murder done with weapons I never held.
How to save them, how to save myself, how to destroy the monster.
I knew it when I saw what the tall man observed with such fascination every night ….
I left the helm to the wind and the storm that—I now understand—steers this ship, to the fog that surrounds us like a shroud. But not completely. There were rips here and there, over the sea. I saw the waters flowing fast, the furious foam we created on cutting the waves, the darkness become a liquid body beneath us.
I saw the route that ended, the time that carried me toward that tomorrow where I should die.
I saw something white and indescribable under us.
Something alive.
Someth
ing with a thousand mouths, that wounded the mind upon catching a glimpse.
Something that was only able to exist in an insane universe, one where there were tall men looking, fascinated, into the abyss, staring at one of its inhabitants.
I looked away from that monstrous, formless, obscenely multiple silhouette.
I felt that my soul had been stained by that thing, that who I was had died a little more just by seeing it.
“I believe it feels my presence,” said the tall man.
I believe.
The moment of revelation.
The ocean is a world that the creature did not know. There were secrets, things still hidden from his supernatural gaze.
Living waves that guarded their territories, threatening him with their very existence.
Therefore was I alive.
Therefore did I know how to beat him.
In dreams, I taught him how to calculate the dead reckoning, the course of the Demeter, the secret route through the water drawn by maps and stars.
He listened carefully, spent days learning, without touching any of us, even taking care of us. Pushing the storms away, stowing his own, practicing his knowledge.
He was a man of earth, naturally. He had no Tzigane crews to whom he might entrust his safety. He ignored fundamental facts of navigation.
But I taught him.
First me and then mine, in the dark.
But he was a creature of earth, who said I believe, referring to something of the sea.
Someone oblivious to the fact that the end is the most difficult part of a journey.
The tide charts, the reef maps, the sandbanks of the coves.
Therefore did he keep me alive.
In the event there was something he did not yet know.
Too arrogant to consider his ignorance might be so vast.
Therefore did he not give me his Dark Gift. What if I lost something vital, as Olgaren had lost his ease with words?
Therefore has he not deprived me of my mobility, not locked me in the forecastle.
He believes me necessary but not vital.
Under the sun, I pull off my clothes. For the first time, I go naked for my men, freeing my flesh from the mask of clothes, stripping myself of what I was, of what I am: A bare body is a body offered to the world, to the weather, to the mercy of fate. Naked we are born, though we strive not to die thus.
Covering ourselves from the world at the moment we leave it.
I do not. I cannot. I leave my flesh free and dive into the sea.
How long traveling the road of ice and salt through how many seas, oceans, climates, and never have I done this—leaping from my boat into the waters.
I immerse myself in the route, leaving behind the universe of wood and canvas, the sanity of ropes and rigging.
Behind me, the voice of the Demeter, whispering on her cursed journey, advancing with her sails stained with storm.
I take a breath (sharp, cold air) and let the waters cover me completely.
Diaphanous images before my eyes, ever-changing, as if the sea claims as its own everything that is sheltered inside, even the landscapes beneath its surface. A thousand clear sounds.
This is what the drowned hear.
The vociferous peace of the ocean.
I see my men clinging to the wood of the Demeter, like suckerfish protecting themselves from the noon sun in the shadow of the ship.
They see me with their fish eyes, not knowing what I want there.
Children, clinging to one another like puppies, defenseless, with no more security than that of their touching skin.
No longer are they men, nothing more than bare need, mere Appetite.
And are we not all, from time to time?
Can desire not deprive us of everything other than Need?
Was I not like them for many years?
Thus, do I take the knife clenched between my teeth. Because I know I loved them. In that instant.
Mercy is also love; therefore, I open a vein.
The only gift I can give is to kill them.
The only caress worthy of their Hunger.
My blood becomes one with the waters, spreading, a scarlet cloud that surrounds me, that moves toward them.
What is its flavor? Salt upon salt.
As soon as the red cloud touches their flesh, they go mad, their mask of humanity shattered by the craving that, it is said, awakens in hunters the taste of their prey.
Tiger apprentices doing what I always knew they would.
They stop clinging to the Demeter and hurl themselves at me, at my flesh, opened for them.
I stop swimming and the schooner moves away.
And the Sea does what it has to do.
Away from their grave, in a kingdom not of their Master, a jealous kingdom.
Is it not said that to kill the vrolocks, the vlkoslak, the bloodthirsty living dead in Romania, one needs only living water?
In those green depths—caressed by my men, their lips running all over my skin before they begin to feast, shivering with desire for me—I love them before the water performes its task.
Living water, far from the shadow of the schooner, under the submerged light of the sun.
They begin to dissolve.
Arghezi and Muresh, Joachim and Olgaren, Abranoff and Petrofsky, Acketz.
Their skin warmed by my own blood, their members erect sexes from the pleasure of satisfying their Thirst, tongues in my mouth, in my veins, on my cock ... and—suddenly—the sensations fade. I look at them for a moment, all around me: solid, discernible forms amid those infinite waters, and then ….
The sailors are Lot’s wife.
Beings of salt.
I didn’t kill Mikhail and knowing it healed my soul. I did kill them and it saved me from guilt.
Flesh and Soul separated.
Dust to dust, into the sea.
Then the line I tied around my waist, linking me to the Demeter, pulls taut, dragging me with the speed of the ship, drawing me away from that stain under the sea that is losing shape, devoured by liquid.
I could cut the rope, remain here in the peace of the end, among my dissolving crew.
Free of sin. Blameless.
It is strange how many forms of redemption exist, Mikhail.
But I must see that man for the last time, tell him that Hunger is not a sin, nor is Necessity or Appetite.
What matters, I repeat, is what we are willing to do to satisfy them.
My ephemeral pleasures are not a stain; the fact that he sacrifices others, anyone and everyone else, just to satisfy his Thirst … most certainly is.
Or mayhap I simply want to spit my triumph in his face.
I have not eaten. I have refused every drop of water. I have bled endlessly among the waters. Even dragged by the ship, I can barely climb aboard the Demeter.
Who would think that dying could bring such peace?
Sometimes, I lose whole hours, my sight covering itself with a pleasant darkness, my faltering flesh full of incredible power:
I shall leave him helpless in the midst of the sea, with only my body, and the maps of the coast thoroughly shredded and devoured.
Mayhap he will reach land: It will depend on his luck and on fate.
He will command a dead ship along hungry cliffs.
Voices like dust, surrounding me.
No longer scared, no longer terrible. Not at this moment when everyone has died and I shall, soon.
I have dressed rigorously for those who find my body. Clothes are no longer a mask.
I am what I am.
I write the latest, little space in my shipwreck memory.
A few lines as an addendum to the log.
Still fog, which the sunrise cannot pierce. I know ther
e is sunrise because I am a sailor; why else I know not. I dared not go below, I dared not leave the helm, so here all night I stayed, and in the dimness of the night I saw it, Him! God forgive me, but the mate was right to jump overboard. It was better to die like a man. To die like a sailor in blue water, no man can object. But I am Captain, and I must not leave my ship.
But I shall baffle this fiend or monster, for I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch: an old rosary.
And then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honor as a Captain.
I am growing weaker, and the night is coming on.
If He can look me in the face again, I may not have time to act.
If we are wrecked, mayhap this bottle may be found, and those who find it may understand. If not ... well, then all men shall know that I have been true to my trust.
God and the Blessed Virgin and the Saints help a poor ignorant soul trying to do his duty ….
In the world of vampire fiction, there are those who would have you believe that the association of homosexuality and vampirism is a twentieth-century phenomenon, perhaps to be blamed on disaffected 1980s youths with black eyeliner and clove cigarettes. In fact, the first well-known vampire story with obvious gay overtones — Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian novella “Carmilla” — appeared in the London literary magazine The Dark Blue in 1871.
Even when fictional vampires themselves weren’t gay, they were frequently used as a metaphor for nightside behavior that included homosexuality. In her essay “A Wilde Desire Took Me: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” Talia Schaffer examines the novel’s queer subtext, particularly the possibility that Bram Stoker used Dracula to explore his own feelings about the ruination of his colleague, friend, and rival Oscar Wilde, who was convicted of gross indecency and imprisoned just two months before Stoker began writing it. Jonathan Harker and Dracula are projections of Stoker and Wilde, Schaffer argues: Harker a married man who initially admires Dracula’s intelligence and wit; Dracula “not so much Oscar Wilde as the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde’s name evoked in 1895.”
The connection between homosexuality and vampirism, Schaffer tells us, was already well established at that time: “The vampire figure therefore fit easily as metaphor for the love that dare not speak its name. To homophobes, vampirism could function as a way of naming the homosexual as monstrous, dirty, threatening. To homosexuals, vampirism could be an elegy for the enforced interment of their desires.”
The Route of Ice and Salt Page 10
