Seeing me awake, Roland stood and kissed my forehead gently. “Jamie.”
I looked up at him. Jus came close and touched my cheek.
Then I remembered what had happened. Greg. My fingers shattered, destroyed. There would be no more Chopin.
I felt tears coming. I didn’t much want to cry in front of them but there would be no more piano for me, no way to express myself. They would never heal the way they had been.
“How do you feel?” I could read the pain in Justin’s face. He blamed himself. He was still stroking my cheek.
“I want to die. That’s how I feel.”
“Jamie, that’s no way to talk.”
“Isn’t it?”
“They caught Greg. The security guard caught him beating you, even though you were already unconscious. You have a concussion.” I saw a tear in his eye, too. “This is my fault, Jamie. I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you about him.”
Roland looked at him. “The thug who did this was your… ?”
I could see a slight panic in Justin’s eyes. He was being asked. After a moment he swallowed hard and said, “My boyfriend, yes.”
Roland didn’t seem to know how to react to this.
Where was Danilo? I tried to move my fingers, but of course I couldn’t. Still, there was awful pain. I cried out, not loudly.
They both stared at me. Neither seemed to know what to say. How could they?
My Chopin was gone. I cried and could not make myself stop.
“Professor Semenkaru had to go out for a while. He’ll be back soon.” Roland seemed not to approving of what he was telling me.
“He was here?”
Jus nodded. “Some lovers really are lovers.”
Roland shifted uncomfortably and tried to put on a professional air. “The guard called Justin. He called me and Semenkaru.”
“Don’t let him go after Greg.” I tried to adjust myself in the bed but couldn’t. Roland helped me shift my weight.
“Go after him?” Roland smiled. “He’s an archaeologist, not a gunslinger.”
I looked at Jus. “Don’t let him, okay?” Then I turned to Roland. “I guess I never will get that last movement right, huh?”
“For God’s sake, Jamie, stop doing this to yourself.”
“I can’t help it. The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a pianist. The only thing I’ve ever loved is the music I play. That, and Tim, and Danilo.” We all fell quiet for a moment. “When will he be back?”
“He didn’t say.” Jus tried to give me a drink of water, but I wasn’t thirsty and pushed the glass away. At least my hands were good for that.
“This room is his doing.” Roland was sounding more and more like a professor. He must have thought it would help. “Your student med insurance wouldn’t cover a private room. He told them he’d make up the difference. He insisted.”
I stared at him, hard, as if to tell him, don’t say he doesn’t love me.
“The police have Greg. Everyone on campus is relieved, now they know who’s been behind all the attacks. They’re questioning him now.”
This startled me. I almost laughed. Greg, the fall guy for Danilo and me. It was too perfect. “They think he… ?”
Jus nodded. “It could have been me he went after next. I told them how he screamed and threatened me.”
“So, you’re a bit of a hero.” Roland smiled for the first time. “You helped put an end to the nightmare this school has been through.”
I looked at my hands. “Big deal. Big goddamned deal. What do I get?”
“It could have been worse, Jamie. You could be dead.”
“Without my hands, I am.”
“They can fix them. There are wonderful new therapies. I’ll have you at the keyboard again in no time.”
All I could do was cry.
* * *
Danilo had not come. I fell asleep wondering why.
Then, in the smallest hours of the night, I woke and saw him standing in my doorway, carrying a wooden chest under one arm.
We kissed. He held me. The pain seemed not so bad.
The light in the room was dim, but I could see tears on his face. “I thought there would be time. I thought we could delay this. I never thought…” From his chest he took a large candle. He struck a match and lit it. “Pure beeswax,” he whispered, “like the ones they use in church.”
There was an empty part of me. Danilo loved me, I loved him, it gave meaning to my life, but there was a hole in me now and always would be.
A nurse came to the door and saw us. “It’s past visiting hours.”
Danilo turned and stared at him. “Leave us.”
He took a step into the room. “You have to go. And that candle is a fire hazard. Extinguish it now. Or else I’ll call security.”
“You will not.”
Danilo spread his arms wide. The nurse’s eyes followed them. He seemed to go into a trance. Danilo told him to leave and forget he had seen him there; and he did.
Then he lit a second candle beside the bed and began to chant in what I knew was the language of ancient Egypt. The flames rose and turned red.
He made gestures over me. I didn’t understand why.
He pressed his lips to my eyes, then to my heart, then to my genitals, and chanted more.
Then he produced a shallow bowl. It seemed to be made of gold. By the candlelight I could see a row of hieroglyphics inscribed on it.
From one of his pockets he brought out a bottle. Ancient glass, a piece from the museum; I thought I had seen it, or ones like it, in the display cases. It was filled with bright red blood.
He poured it into the golden bowl. I understood now. As he said more prayers over me, I drank.
When I bled from cuts as a little boy, my blood had always tasted salty to me. This blood was sweet. It tasted like Danilo.
I drank. Greedily.
He prayed to the gods, or to one god; I knew which.
And I felt life and energy flow through me like a river. My hands tingled, my fingers were alive with electricity. And I had an erotic reaction; I felt myself become erect.
“Feel the power, Jamie.” He whispered. “And this is nothing compared to what you will feel when your own power reaches its height.” He put his hand on my thigh. “This is only the beginning.”
We both fell silent. He studied my face. “It has worked, then,” he said into my ear.
“I don’t know. I felt something. They don’t hurt.”
“Quietly, Jamie. The things we do must be done in stillness and the dark.”
He bent down and kissed me.
In the candlelight I saw that there was a trace of blood on his own lips. He was young and beautiful. We had shared communion, then.
“You must keep the casts on for a few weeks, perhaps a month or more. The healing will seem miraculous, but they will be able to rationalize it then. An overnight healing… that would be too much.”
He placed his hands on mine. “You will play again, Jamie, more beautifully than before.”
“I never thought I would. Danilo, I—”
He held up a finger. “Shh. Quiet now. Your body needs sleep. I’ll spend the night here beside you.”
I wanted to ask him who he had taken that night, whose blood… But it didn’t seem to matter.
* * *
Two weeks later, he had to go out of town to attend a professional conference in Chicago. The University of Chicago has an Oriental Institute, the most important center of Egyptological studies in America. He wanted to show some colleagues the relief I had found.
It seemed I had become, quite without wanting to, a bit of a hero on campus, the one who survived the campus killer. There were notes of sympathy from the dean and the chancellor, from my teachers, from students I barely knew or couldn’t remember. I was on the news. Inevitably, the story of Justin and Greg’s affair came out.
Roland arranged for me to take the rest of the semester off. And I could take another one if I nee
ded it. The university was prepared to be as generous and forbearing with me as I needed. He kept telling me I’d play again. I did not believe him; I believed Danilo.
Justin kept fussing over me, taking care of me. It took me hours of argument to persuade him he didn’t have to feed and dress me. His guilt was so touching. It occurred to me in the middle of one of our little exchanges that I had never had a real friend before.
He and Peter had been dating. I don’t think either of them knew how serious it was, or how serious he wanted it to be. Then when the facts about Jus and Greg made the news, Peter was obviously shaken by it. “I can’t have people know,” he told Jus. “I couldn’t do that to my family. And my frat brothers would… well, they wouldn’t understand.” So their affair ended.
Each night, Bubastis slept beside me on my pillow, purring gently. Mornings, I’d wake to find her licking my nose, wanting to be fed.
Greg was being held without bail. The police were doing everything they could to prove he was the serial murderer. He kept saying I was the only one he wanted to kill, as if that would let him off the hook. And he kept insisting he and Jus had not been boyfriends, claiming rather desperately not to be gay. There was a lot of coarse humor around town at his expense; I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
At first, his basketball coach had tried to deny Greg could possibly be queer; when that got laughed at, he just kept telling everyone, “No comment.” That, I found very entertaining.
In two weeks that went by, I hadn’t left our apartment. Jus had tried to get me to go out, saying it would be good for me. But I refused every time. My hands were clumsy in their casts, and the concussion had left me a bit light-headed. The doctors said that would pass.
Then one night he suggested the campus observatory. “Neither of us had ever gone up there, Jamie, and I keep hearing it’s a really cool place.”
“I’m not sure I feel like it.”
“I called them. When I told them you were coming they offered to give us a private tour. They said Mars is at its nearest approach, and asked if we would be interested in seeing it.”
Mars. I didn’t hesitate. I told him we should get going.
There was a private shuttle bus waiting for us outside. The university ran them all over campus, but I had never heard of them sending one for just two students before. I was more of a celebrity than I’d thought.
The driver, an astronomy grad student named Mark, fussed over me, made sure I was comfortable. “Would you like me to put on a classical CD?”
“No thanks.”
“I have some jazz, then.”
“Sure.”
Ella Fitzgerald serenaded us. It was a half-hour drive, to the northern part of the city. For part of the way I leaned on Justin, and he put an arm around me. The observatory sat on a high hill. There were three domes, an enormous one flanked by two smaller ones. Mark told us it was the highest point in the county. “This place was built back in the 1800s. There were no houses or stores around then. This was pure country.”
“As long as the music isn’t.” Smartass Jamie.
And we got our tour, again by Mark. He showed us the two refractor telescopes in the side domes and the gargantuan reflector in the main one. There were rooms full of computers, rooms full of lenses and other optical equipment, huge archives of old photos and research notes. In the basement we saw, somewhat to our surprise, the tomb of the man who had built the place. It was under a red granite monument inscribed with a quote from the Bible: “And the morning stars sang together.”
“And now,” Mark announced dramatically, “it’s show time.”
He led us back up to the main dome, the one with the enormous telescope. There was a paddle with electronic controls. The huge dome began to rotate, slowly, making a low rumbling sound. The telescope swung around, following the slit in it. It was all impressive, even a bit awe-inspiring, like the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. “We don’t normally let the public look through this one,” he said. “It’s reserved for research. But you’re a hero.”
“A hero?” I laughed. “Try victim.”
“If it wasn’t for you, Greg Wilton would still be loose.”
I let it go. The dome and the telescope danced above us then came to a quiet stop. The slit in the dome opened. Mark switched off the lights and wheeled a stepped platform into place at the eyepiece. “Gentlemen, take a look at Mars, the Great God of War.”
There was a little platform on wheels with a ladder attached. Mark positioned it by the eyepiece, and I climbed the steps and put my eye to the lens. It was there. The fact he had been able to point the telescope at it without seeing it seemed a bit magical to me. The planet was a ruddy orange disk. There were darker markings across it, some dark green, some brownish like dried blood. I could just barely make out one of the polar caps.
Mars. Set. Watching it, I tried to remember what Danilo had told me: the ancients believed the planets were the souls of the gods. Seeing Mars, it was hard to believe. There seemed no real mystery about it, strange and even beautiful as it was. The markings were random. I thought I could understand how they might seem ordered, connected, but they clearly weren’t.
“Mars has always been associated with war, blood and death.” Mark gave us what sounded like a canned lecture. “The Persians, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans, even the Druids saw it that way. Every primitive society we know of.”
“Primitive?” I decided to goad him a bit. “Isn’t that politically incorrect?”
“Well, early, then. Scientifically primitive. You know what I mean.” I noticed a wedding band on his finger.
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
Jus tugged on my pants leg. “Do you mind if I get a look?”
“I’m the hero, here, remember?”
“Oh.”
I was only kidding. I stepped down and let him take my place at the eyepiece.
I asked Mark, “And what about the Egyptians? What did they make of Mars?”
His face went blank. “I… I don’t know. Same as the others, I guess.”
Jus stood and stared for a moment. “I think I can see the canals.”
“There are no canals,” Mark explained quickly, “just random surface markings”
“I can see them.”
“It’s just a trick of the eye,” Mark told him. “An illusion.”
Jus looked down at us, then back into the eyepiece. “I could swear…”
It made me surprisingly uncomfortable. “So much for Mars,” I told Mark. “How about the goddess of love, now?”
“Venus isn’t visible just now.”
“Oh.”
He showed us more, galaxies, nebulae, the planet Pluto, which looked like just another faint star. When we’d seen enough, we thanked him, and he drove us home.
Justin made a late dinner, pasta and a salad. We sat down to eat. He seemed out of sorts. “I think I’m sorry we went up there.”
I had quite enjoyed it. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“I felt like a damned fool. Having him tell me what I know I was seeing wasn’t there.”
“You’re not the first to see canals on Mars, Jus.”
“Even so. He made me feel like an idiot.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”
We ate without saying much more. Just as I was about to get up from the table he said, “And I saw all kinds of things in Greg that weren’t there. What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing. Not a thing.”
“I’m stupid.”
“No, Jus. You’re human.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
I paused. “No, I guess not.”
Later, in the living room, as I was reading, he went on. “I hate feeling stupid, Jamie. I know I’m not. But everybody thinks because I’m a jock, I’m an airhead.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s different for you. You play the piano, and those sonatas and things. People know you have a br
ain.”
I held up my casts.
“Oh. Sorry.”
I set my book aside. “Look, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I don’t know how I could have gotten through this without you.”
“You wouldn’t have gotten into it without me.”
“You don’t know that.”
For the thirtieth time, he apologized. Then we fell silent. Nothing I could think of could make him feel better. I only wished he’d get over it. Maybe, I thought, when my casts came off and I could play again, he’d stop feeling so awful.
“Jus?”
“Hm?”
“You ever think about dying?”
“On this campus? And with Greg in my life? How could I not?”
“I mean your own death. The end to your existence. The nothing we all face, sooner or later.”
“Life is nothing now. Peter won’t come near me. No one will.”
Justin was 20 years old, a college diver, and gorgeous. He could have lovers by the score if he wanted them. But there was no way to tell him that. He didn’t want to hear it.
I made myself smile at him. “If you could live forever… if there was something you could do to become immortal… would you do it?”
He laughed, rather bitterly, I thought. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Just say there was something.”
“I wouldn’t want my life to go on one minute longer than it has to. No.”
Oh. It had only been a thought. He got up and headed for his room. I went back to my book.
* * *
Much as I loved Danilo, and much as I trusted him, it was hard to believe my shattered fingers would play again, at least not well.
After another month the doctors x-rayed my hands and found the bones had knitted perfectly. They were pleased but rather obviously baffled by it. “You must have good genes,” one of them told me, as if that explained anything. They said they wanted me to keep the casts on for another week, “just to be sure,” but that my hands looked perfect. Word of the “West Penn Medical Miracle” spread, and I found myself the object of attention again. Not that I wanted it; all I wanted was to get the casts off and get back to my music.
The Blood of Kings Page 16