by Glen Duncan
Thus the obscenity remained draped. For now.
“That’s good then,” she said. “It means we don’t have the entire species to worry about.” She was wearing a grey woollen sweater dress, black nylons and knee-length black leather boots. So you got the soft of the dress and the hard of the boots. Like the soft of the thigh and the hard of the hip. Not sartorial archness, just a sound instinct for sexual accents. We were more than halfway through the lunation and her scent was yielding darker notes. Under the bittersweet glamour of Chanel No. 19 her quickening She exuded a high, tight-packed smell of predatory knowledge. Heat throbbed around her. The Hunger was a second heartbeat still a long way beneath her own. The next dozen days and nights would be the story of its rising. In both of us. Synchronised.
“Yes,” I said. “But the danger is this twerp blabs. He looked as if I was his first lycanthropic run-in. An experience to discuss with his peers. If other vampires who are in the know are here in the city there’s no reason they wouldn’t hook up. He tells his after-dinner werewolf cherry story and they’re onto us. No. We should go.”
“Now? Tonight?”
“Can you stand it?”
She got up out of the chair, crossed to where I stood by the escritoire, slipped her arms around me, kissed me.
“We shouldn’t travel together,” I said, without much conviction.
“Don’t be insane.”
“They don’t have you yet. If they get to you through—”
“Those days are over. It’s you and me, now. That’s all.”
However ridiculous this sounds I already know there will never be a time when putting my hands on her won’t palliate the certainty of death. The feel of her waist between my palms is of the deep geometry that takes you back or forward past the incarnate incidentals to the elemental realm, the realm of soul, one wants to say, knowing one’s going soft in the head. Holding her is a Keatsian beauty-truth. I don’t know what to do with it. I know there’s nothing to do with it. Just live in it and let it bring what it brings.
“We could wait half an hour,” I said, moving my hands to the firm flare of her bum.
“Is it always going to be this bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hurry up,” she said. “Hard and fast. Please.”
We quit New York that night (cab to Penn Station, Amtrak sleeper to Chicago) with very little discussion. She knew I’d put arrangements in place, but to talk them through would have been, according to the intuited werewolf proprieties, vulgar. Instead we moved around it, our giant ugliness, our unforgivable end point, dirtily enriched, like molested children, by knowing all and saying nothing. I saw in her abstracted moments that she remained disgusted in spite of the months of violent self-baptism. She’d hardened herself in blood but not all the tender remnants were dead. She was a monster, yes, but all she’d lost could still ambush her, turn her gaze back to her childhood and force her to look. You Can’t Go Home Again. (Thomas Wolfe, Jesus how much more?) This hurt, very much. She’d been darling to so many, little black-eyed Lula with the high forehead and the beauty spot. Becoming a werewolf ought to have cut her off from all that but it hadn’t. Continuity of identity persisted. It was like being tortured by an innocent child.
“How do you get around the fact that you should have died several times already?” she asked. To any but new lovers the Amtrak sleeper’s three and a half foot bed width would have been a trial. The little window’s curtains were open, revealing a rolling night sky of curdy backlit grey and gun-blue cloud just beginning, in patches, to break. The train smelled of filter coffee and air-con. “You were born in 1808—which is not a sentence I ever imagined saying—and here we are two hundred years later. There must have been questions to answer.”
We could discuss these past practicalities. Past practicalities.
“It got easier,” I said. “It’s easier than ever now, if you’ve got money. It’s always money. The principle doesn’t change: You’re paying specialists in the manipulation of identity technology. Used to be old guys in basements with loupes and inks and plates and presses, now it’s young guys in lofts with computers. This is the primary level, the simple business of purchasing a fake birth certificate, passport, driving licence, social security number. You’ll be surprised how far you can go with just those: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, loans, investment portfolios. Over a regular lifespan it’s more than enough. Several lifetimes, it gets trickier. I can’t believe what I did the first time. I can’t believe I thought I’d be able to go on doing it.”
“What did you do?”
“I became my own son.”
“Holy moley.”
“Jacob Marlowe ‘Senior,’ as it were, became a recluse at forty-two, in the year 1850. I couldn’t put it off any longer: people were starting to notice I didn’t seem to be aging at all.”
She shivered next to me.
“What?”
“You. 1850. I think I’m used to it and then it gets me again.”
“To tell you the truth I can’t remember much about 1850. Dickens published David Copperfield. Wordsworth died. I’ll have to think.”
“It’s not the big events, it’s the ordinary stuff. A butler warming his hands. Those big damp houses. A bonnet on a chair.” She was trying to picture the time when the present would be as distant to her as 1850 is to me. She was feeling the backdraft or slipstream of the far future: a cold flow. She shuddered, turned towards me, slid her right leg over my hip. “Anyway, go on. Jacob Marlowe Senior.”
“Jacob Marlowe Senior went into reclusion—is there such a word? You think I’d know by now.”
“No one cares, honey. Go on.”
“Marlowe Senior went into reclusion if there was such a word in 1850. Not in England, but at a secret location known only to my lawyers. In fact I was rarely there. Couldn’t afford to be.” Because as you know we can’t let the victims pile up in one place. She felt us duck to avoid this present practicality, a motion like a kite dipping in the wind. “All his business decisions were enacted through authorised proxies and lawyers, who received their instructions from him—I had codes, passwords, ciphers, the whole fucking caboodle—in writing. A rickety arrangement. Near misses of catastrophic losses when messages didn’t travel fast enough. Telegraphy was a great relief when it came in. The telephone—well, you can imagine. Not long after leaving England I was ‘married’ and less than a year after that I had ‘a son,’ Jacob Junior. All fictional. A new will was drawn up—Jacob Junior would inherit everything—and that was that. All I had to do then was stay away from anyone who knew me.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. You’ve got to remember it was a lot easier not to be seen in those days: Photography was in its infancy. No television, no CCTV. Half a dozen false names kept me going through Europe—and eventually here—for thirty-five years. Again, I had money. Money and mobility, that’s how it’s done.”
“Thanks again for the twenty million, by the way. Another sentence I never imagined I’d have use for.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And the fictional wife?”
Another kite dip. The fictional wife evoked the real one. The aphrodisiacal kick Arabella’s ghost being forced to watch had given us, the promise of dark enlightenment. All apparent evil promises the same. It’s a lie. There’s no dark enlightenment because there’s no evil. Whatever it is you’re doing—raping a child, gassing a million—it’s just another thing you can do. The universe doesn’t care. Certainly doesn’t give you divine knowledge in return. All the knowledge and all the divinity is already there in you doing whatever it is you’re doing. Who knows this better than monsters?
Nonetheless my cock thickened next to the moist heat of her hand, and she took it and held it, and that was all the acknowledgement the moment required.
“Enteric fever,” I said. “Poor Emily. She was only twenty-two. And Jacob Junior barely a year old.”
“Birth and dea
th certificates forged.”
“Exactly. I followed them into the grave myself courtesy of heart failure in 1885. I grew an impressive moustache for my return as Jacob Junior, donned a pair of specs, got a new hairdo. My accent had changed, naturally. People see what they’re told to see, by and large.”
“And real kids? You must have them scattered all over the world by now.”
Oh.
As soon as the words were out she wanted them back. These were the last seconds before something was gone forever. Very briefly I considered lying.
“We can’t have children,” I said.
I felt it go into her, find the place already there for it. Of course she’d known, and denied, and still known.
“My periods stopped.”
“I’m sorry, Lu.”
“Richard and I were supposed to start trying. Then I found out about the affair.”
For a few moments we lay without speaking. Cradle comfort of the train’s rocking. It would be peaceful segueing into death like this, I thought, the deepening lull, a tunnel that gets darker and darker until eventually you’re gone out into darkness yourself. Gone out, quite gone out. I held her, but not as if my holding her could make any difference. (The fierce male embrace is invariably patronising to the female embracee.) She still had my cock in her hand. I felt grief and anger and futility going through her and her keeping very still. It was as if she were being burned and had to bear it without flinching or making a sound.
“I knew,” she said. “Carried on taking the Pill in denial. I suppose the thing to say would be ‘Well, it’s for the best.’ ”
There were bigger patches of open night sky now. Stars.
Then suddenly the moon.
“And just to rub it in …” she said, feeling the unignorable insinuation of ownership where its light licked our skin. Then when I didn’t speak: “At least I’ve got a guy who knows when to keep his mouth shut. I guess that’s what two hundred years does for you.”
I too had thoughts of burning, quietly and without pain as she rolled me over onto my back and climbed by degrees on top of me. Burning—or accelerated decay, like time-lapse film of decomposition, my headless trio of foxes going from plump corpses to dust via maggot orgy in grainy fast footage. It looped while we fucked (while she fucked me), interrupted when she leaned back and the moonlight ran lewd riot over her belly and breasts. Finished when I finished. A cine reel with the end of its film strip still whipping round.
She fell asleep immediately afterwards, half draped over me. Her weight had in it the finality of the new fact, a brutal peace now the thing had been faced and taken in. We can’t have children. Somewhere in the sex she’d hated me for it, of course, and known that I’d known and made room in myself for her hatred. Somewhere in the sex was the understanding that love was among other things making room for the beloved’s irrational vengeances.
40
WE ONE-WAY HIRED a Toyota in Chicago. Stayed off the freeways. My thinking was the emptier the space the easier we’d spot a vamp or WOCOP tail. Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.
“But you’re saying there are WOCOP exorcists,” she said. “What are they exorcising?”
One returns to metaphysics, but with diminishing urgency. The assumption is that new phenomena must fill in the picture. But if the picture’s infinite, what difference can half a dozen new species make? She was seeing this already. She sat with a strange neatness in the passenger seat alongside me, knees together, hands in her jacket pockets. She’d pinned her hair up and her slender bare neck gave her a look of appalling vulnerability.
“Demons,” I said. “As far as I know, demons. That’s the idiom. That’s the terminology.”
“Which means heaven and hell, right? Demons and angels. God and the Devil.”
“You’d think I’d know one way or the other by now, wouldn’t you?” I was struck by how long it had been since I’d considered such things, how these questions had subsided. I had only a generic memory of small-hours conversations with Harley, though I knew his view well enough, that there was a transcendent realm but that it spoke in many languages. In one of its languages Isis was a word. In another Gabriel. In another Aphrodite. All we ever got was the language. We were a language ourselves. The thing behind the word remained unknown. Naturally: The Word was with God. What use would that be to her?
“But you’ve seen this stuff?” she said. “You’ve seen demons?”
“I’ve seen someone with something inside them that wasn’t them, that was definitely a separate entity. I’ve seen it—felt it, rather—go out of them.”
“And it was evil?”
This, of course, is the crux. It doesn’t really matter what the language is, only whether there’s a transcendent moral grammar underpinning it. No one really cares what hell’s called or who runs it. They just don’t want to go there.
“It felt like it intended harm to humans,” I said. “But not as if it had much choice about it. Evil has to be chosen.”
She kept her hands in her pockets. Stared at the road ahead. This was the problem with talking. Sooner or later it led here. Sooner or later everything led here.
Evening on our fifth day from New York we stopped in the middle of nowhere for me to pee. Sunset was a gap between land and cloud like a narrow eye or broken yolk of light, rose gold, mauve, dusk. On either side flat prairie to the horizon, an effect that remade the earth as a disk of pale grass. Ahead the road ran straight to vanishing point; turn 180 degrees and look back, same thing. Talulla got out, stretched, leaned against the Toyota’s bonnet, lit one of my cigarettes. (I’d told her smoking wouldn’t harm her and she’d said okay what the hell, it’s something to do.) We yet hadn’t said anything about where we were going or what we were going to do when we got there, and the not saying anything was for her like flies gathering on her skin, more every hour, every day. These last two nights the Hunger had kept us awake in shivering TV light, drinking bourbon, screwing till we were sore, unable to find comfort lying still. Full moon was eight days away.
“When I was driving in the desert,” she said, staring at the horizon, “I’d go a hundred miles and see nothing, just empty landscape.” She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, a cream rollneck sweater. I was thinking of lines from a Thom Gunn poem: They lean against the cooling car, backs pressed / Upon the dusts of a brown continent, / And watch the sun, now Westward of their West … “Then suddenly,” Talulla went on, “in the middle of all this emptiness, like a joke, I’d see a solitary trailer. A washing line, a pickup, a dog. Someone living there all alone. I toyed with doing that, in the beginning, just get as far away from people as possible. Alaska, maybe. The Arctic.” A breeze simmered in the roadside grasses. She took a last drag, dropped the butt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. “But I’m not built for it,” she said. “Loneliness.”
I put my arms around her and kissed her, felt the compact warmth of her under the leather jacket. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke and fresh air. I was very aware of the precise dimensions we occupied just then, two bodies, all the miles around us. “You know what you look like?” I said. “You look like one of those actresses in an episode of a seventies cop show. Cannon or McCloud or Petrocelli.”
“I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve never heard of any of those.”
“ ‘Guest starring Talulla Demetriou as Nadine. A Quinn Martin production.’ They were so beautiful, those girls, they hurt men’s hearts. It’s your beauty spot and your high forehead and your centre-parting.”
“That doesn’t sound very attractive,” she said. “And you can call it a mole, you know, since that’s what it is.”
I he
ld her slightly away from me and looked at her. The Hunger had thinned the skin of her orbits but her face still had its centres of wealth, the long lashes and dark eyes, the mouth the colour of raw meat. A look of fragile control over demonic energies. It had been so much just the two of us that there had hardly been need to address each other by name, but earlier that day in a convenience store she’d said something and I hadn’t heard and she’d said, Jake, and I’d loved her, a sudden access of ridiculous piercing love just because there it was in her voice saying my name, the new deep thrilling familiarity.
Later, driving again in the dark, she said, “I toyed with the other thing too, in the beginning. The radical solution.”
Suicide.
“But?”
She didn’t reply immediately. Cats’ eyes ticked by. The Hunger’s night shift was limbering up. Lust was available to me, moved as with aching muscles towards her hands on the Toyota’s wheel, the small taut weights of her breasts, her knees, the beauty spot by her lip. She kept her eyes on the road. “Turns out I’m not built for that either,” she said. “I didn’t want to die. I put on a show of wanting to die for a while, that’s all. I couldn’t believe I was going to carry on, but there I was, carrying on. No point saying pigs can’t fly when they’re up there catching pigeons.”
The universe demands some sort of deal, so you make one. Yes.
“The truth is I was a monster long before any of this. I got my mother’s narcissism and my dad’s immigrant overcompensation. If it’s me or the world, the world’s had it. Of course that’s disgusting. And liberating. That’s the problem with disgust. You get through it. You feel bigger and emptier.”
Which observation broke some barrier in her, some last resistance to dealing in bald specifics. I felt it—we both did—as surely as we would have felt a tyre blowing out. She understood the genre constraints, the decencies we were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured pride. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. By rights, Talulla knew, she should have been orphaned or raped or paedophilically abused or terminally ill or suicidally depressed or furious at God for her mother’s death or at any rate in some way deranged if she was to be excused for not having killed herself, once it became apparent that she’d have to murder and devour people in order to stay alive. The mere desire to stay alive, in whatever form you’re lumbered with—werewolf, vampire, Father of Lies—really couldn’t be considered a morally sufficient rationale. And yet here she was, staying alive. You love life because life’s all there is. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the top and tail of the case against her.