Voice of the Blood

by Jemiah Jefferson

  I was interrupted by the entrance of Dr. John Thurbis, bringing my lunch, hot from the PhysQuad microwave. "Spinach lasagna," he sang. "I bought it myself—Jesus, Ariane, what's the matter?" In a second he had set down the lasagna and taken me tightly in his arms. "Ariane!"

  "I just…" I felt dizzy in his arms. "I think I'm just hungry."

  "You look like you've just found out someone died."

  "No, no, sweetie, I'll be OK. I stood up too fast." I squirmed away from him, shuffled my mail, and covered the brown slip of paper with some Xeroxes. John was staring at me, blankly hurt. "Thanks for the grub, sweetheart."

  He sat on my chair and pulled me down into his lap. "Are you sure you're going to be all right without me?"

  "I'll manage. Geez, John, I get a little lightheaded, you think I'm about to have puppies. It's all right for you to calm down now." I kissed him on the top of his head and stuck my finger into his ear. He giggled. "I bought you some clothes. I hope you don't think they're too 'Liverpool gutter punk.' "

  And so on. I led him off the trail. In a while he was heading off across the grass back to the safety and logic of the PhysQuad, and I was alone in my office with the lasagna and the letter. I read it over and over for hours, touching it until I thought I would rub a hole through the paper.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  I had already made up my mind to go. John's plane to Gatwick Airport was on December 12th. I don't think I could have given myself up to the unknown had John still been around—of course, there was no way of knowing what to expect, but perhaps my Southern clairvoyant streak had betrayed the future.

  John's and my last night together was pretty unromantic—we stayed out half the night moving his things into storage and buying his last-minute items. At two A.M. we toasted each other with gin and juice at my kitchen table, took off our clothes, and got into bed. We felt each other up for a few minutes, but both fell asleep—before anything more interesting could happen.

  In the morning I drove him to the airport, and we shared coffee and flavorless blueberry muffins in a blond-wood airport cafe at seven. "I think this is a good thing," he said hesitantly.

  "I agree. Don't worry. You'll enjoy yourself. And then you'll be back." I gave him my sleepy understanding smile, and he cupped his hands over mine cupping the coffee cup. He looked into my eyes for a second, and leaned across the table and kissed me gently on the mouth.

  "I'm still worried about you," he said.

  "Please, don't. I'm going to be OK. You take care of yourself. You better hurry—they're boarding."

  Bags were shouldered, and coats still damp with the morning's rain were doffed, and he kissed me again. I watched him jog-trot down the concourse to his gate, wave back at me with an uncertain smile, and disappear.

  I actually don't remember the rest of that day. (Amend what I said earlier—it's the rule proved by it's exception.) I know I went home and probably ate something, and I may have taken a bath: I certainly slept most of the afternoon away. Everything else is gone in a haze of white noise, my mind's preoccupation driving off even the memory of what happened.

  I woke up at around six-thirty, somewhat sweaty and with a faint headache that swelled if I bent over or turned my head too quickly. Not knowing what to expect—and deathly afraid of overdressing—I put on clean black pants, a black T-shirt with a faded Adidas logo, and a threadbare cardigan the green color of split-pea soup. It was a warm night for San Francisco in December, rainy in breaths, with a moon beginning to glow luminously through a thin frosting of clouds.

  I had looked up the Saskatchewan in the phone book before falling asleep. It was in North Beach, the real North Beach where it converges with Chinatown, and not the nebulous ritziness that borders the Marina and Pacific Heights. I drove along Van Ness in the dusk, hoping that it wasn't some crack house filled with junkies, or Chinese child prostitutes, or both.

  I parked outside a closed record store and walked up to the address. It was a tall thin brown building wedged tightly between a bookstore that was still open, and a dry cleaner's. The lobby didn't look too bad—like something from a Jim Jarmusch movie, a little seedy and old, but still slightly respectable, with a very old man behind the desk reading this week's TV Guide. He looked at me with vague interest, and I nodded to him as I went to the double elevators along the far wall.

  Come by eight, Suite 900. I say again, I am nothing to fear.

  It was all brown inside too, long empty brown hallways of old wood and brass gone dull from age and dust particles settling onto the polish. Nine was the top floor, and there were only four suites, kindly pointed out to me by the brass placard on the wall opposite the elevators. Suite 900 was at the end of the hall, on the right.

  There was no sound at all save my footsteps falling onto the thick, flat, patterned brown carpet, and my nervous sighing and sniffling. I paused with my hand against the door of 900. What the hell was in there? Some terrifying obelisk? Corpses piled ceiling high? Or nothing at all? Was I being set up by some obscure Italian mafia?

  The pressure of my hand pushed the door ajar.

  From inside, I heard a faint clear voice call out, "Come in, the door is open."

  I stepped inside, onto a polished parquet floor.

  The room stretched out thin and narrow, with great Victorian windows hung with dusty Venetian blinds, open to allow what moonlight there was. Pieces of antique furniture stood around without much eye for form, a secretary here, a tall thin lamp there, all of it emitting a faint incandescent shine. Over in the corner by one of the windows, a boy lay on his side on a chaise tongue. He looked at me intently, and the same voice, a deep throaty man's voice, spoke again. "Close the door, please."

  I reached behind me for the doorknob, and drew it closed.

  It wasn't a boy at all, rather a small slight man, interestingly proportioned; his wrists seemed too long for his shirt, his long thin athletic legs crossed casually at the ankle. There was something in his face that I remembered, almost as if from a dream. He sat up and languidly gestured to me with his forefinger.

  Those claws. I remembered the claws. Now they were fingernails, smooth and oval and buffed to a high gloss, but still the claws from my nightmare, the ones whose scars I still wore on my thighs. His hands were long and seemed triply jointed with those silver-gray appendages on their fingertips, completely inhuman. I stared at his face for a long time, retracing the structure of those bones. Yes, that was him, all right, the huge staring orbs, now clothed in a delicate veil of eyelid and lash, the cheekbones smooth, the lips beautiful as if painted on in rose gouache.

  "Yes," he said, "that was me."

  I opened my mouth, about to speak, but nothing I was going to say would come out. He moved his face more fully into the light of the lamp, and ran his fingers through a few strands of unevenly ash-brown hair. He smiled, discreetly, almost shyly, not baring the frightening teeth that I knew were there. "Please don't stand there," he insisted. "Please, come over here, and sit down."

  I did what I was told. How normal he looked! But completely unnatural. He wore a loose white satin shirt and brown velvet pants, very fitted to his shape. He wore them well; they showed off the girlishness of his body, the incredible delicacy with which he moved, quickly and artlessly like a deer. He took a very deep sigh, and looked around him. "Are you hungry? I could send for something for you to eat. Or to drink. Wine?"

  "Yes," I said, "please."

  He leaned over and picked up a telephone—a completely normal plastic telephone, not at all antique, beige and streamlined, and held it against his face. Next to it, his skin was as white as a freshly cut chestnut. "Room 900," he said. "Some cheese and olives, please. Oh, and bread. And a bottle of—" He held his hand over the receiver and looked at me. "Red or white?"

  "Red," I said, after a moment's hesitation.

  "A bottle of chianti. Thank you." He hung up, clasped his hands, looked at me.

  "You're real," I said.

  He
had long sideburns, a disorientingly current fashion. "I am real," he agreed.

  "You're a vampire," I said, the first part a whisper, aspirating the word for what he was.

  He winced slightly, looking out into the corners of the room. "I know."

  "You drank my blood," I kept going. "So what happens now?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do I become… one of you?"

  As he shifted, I caught a glint of something hidden in his shirt, winking at me from the unbuttoned collar of satin. Before he could answer my previous question, I asked him, "What's that?"

  He looked down, pulled out a string of polished pale beads, with a dull ivory crucifix dangling from the end. "My rosary," he answered.

  "You keep a rosary?"

  "At all times," said the vampire.

  "For what?" I half laughed.

  He smiled at me a bit. "I'm a Roman Catholic," he said.

  "You go to Mass and stuff?" He nodded, once. "You take communion?"

  "No," he admitted. "I cannot."

  "Will you die?"

  "I will have a stomach ache. I cannot digest. Also it would be wrong. A mockery of the things that I hold precious. I do go to Mass, confession, everything. I went this morning."

  "Weird," I said.

  "You will not become 'one of us,' " he said.

  The room service came. A different old man came in with a wheeled cart, bearing a tray of bread, cheeses, and fat drab olives, and a bottle of wine that had already been uncorked. The vampire thanked the old man graciously and gave him a ridiculous tip, and the old man left with his wheeled cart, closing the door almost soundlessly behind him.

  Once again I was alone in the room with the creature. He leaned forward and poured wine into one of the pair of glasses, and handed it to me. I took the glass and sipped at it, testing its flavor for anything strange, but it was normal good chianti, quite dry. I downed the rest of the glass at a swallow. The vampire refilled my glass without comment.

  "Do you have a name?" I asked.

  "My name is Orfeo Ricari."

  "Italian?"

  "By birth," he said.

  "A long time ago?" I said, drinking another half glass.

  "Very long."

  "Why… why did you pick me?" The first glass finally hit me, burning through my empty stomach and hitting my bloodstream. It almost hurt.

  Orfeo Ricari toyed uneasily with his rosary beads, counting them unconsciously off with pinches of his fingernails. "I did not choose you particularly," he said. "You were simply the first person I came to. Your university is very close to where I was buried."

  "That… graveyard?" The one four blocks away, on the near side of Golden Gate Park, lovely, rather old, fenced in with razor wire to keep the kids away. "What are you talking about?"

  "Can't you guess? I was buried. I was dead. I came back out. I was practically dead when I came to you—obviously completely mad, quite far from any kind of control. I was dead for seven months and then I was dug up again by some idiot schoolchildren."

  I was getting there. That story, from the papers. "You killed them."

  "I didn't know. I didn't mean to. I had no control; I was furious; they were there. I needed their blood. I don't want to. I hate killing," he said passionately. "Do you understand? I didn't mean to come to you—but I could smell your animals on the wind, and then—you came in—and your blood—" He stopped short, and gulped. "I wanted to apologize to you. I wanted you to know that I had no control over what I did that night, and I shall make it up to you."

  Did he know? Did he know of my orgasms? And of the pain that lingered after the physical pain had gone away, the horrible longing to be taken again in his harsh and peeling hands and brought to his lips, like a bowl of wine? And now that he was no longer a walking atrocity of bones and decay, now that he was whole and beautiful again? I fell silent, not looking at him.

  Ricari made another gesture with his hand. "Please," he said. "Eat. Eat and drink and enjoy. I like to see people eating. I cannot."

  I picked up an olive and sucked it from its pit, washing it down with the end of my second glass. He refilled the glass again. I spoke with hesitation. "How could you… come back to life after you'd been dead and buried?"

  He sighed. "I have done this before," he explained. "I am very, very old. I have lived through too much and seen too many changes. I am tired of being alive. But I cannot take my own life—it is a sin in God's eyes, and the ways that I can die, truly and forever, are so few and so painful that I hesitate. But, if I starve myself of blood long enough, I grow less and less animate, less like a living thing. I cooperate with, or I force the cooperation of, an undertaker, and I arrange for my death to take place. I rid myself of possesions, and the time comes, and I am closed in a coffin like any other dead man. Then I am buried—no one the wiser of knowing that there is still a flicker of me left. Rapidly it too dies, and I am at rest, as long as I am underground and the temptations of the world are far away. However, I am rarely allowed to rest for long. Someone digs me up hoping to find riches hidden in my coffin, or to dislodge me for some newer corpse. As soon as I reach the air and take a breath, I am here again. And unfortunately for him that brings me back, the reward is immediate death. I cannot stop until I have the blood of two or three humans in me, and I can think straight again and stop myself. You should thank your rats. They saved a human life—probably yours."

  "I was just dessert," I commented.

  He blushed. It was amazing—his face filled up with color like dawn spreading over the sky. "I apologize," he repeated. "That blood is richer. Goes further."

  It was my turn to blush. I covered it up with immature blustering. "So if you were dead and stuff and you gave everything away, how come you get to hang out here with room service and everything?"

  "I called my lawyer and told him there'd been a slight change in situation," said Ricari.

  "So he knows about you."

  "Yes."

  "How many people know? Am I just really out of it?"

  "I could count them on the hand of a three-fingered man," he said. "Including yourself."

  "So—wait—" I waved the hand with the wine glass in it. "How do you live? If you hate killing? And nobody knows about you?"

  "What I did to you," he mumbled. "Controlling with my mind. Usually it works. Usually they never remember anything."

  "But I remember all of it. I do now anyway."

  "With you I knew it wouldn't last, even as I was doing it—you did as I made you do, but you were still there, watching me, curiously, cautiously. You're different. I think it's because of what you do—what you've done. You make it your business to absorb knowledge without having to think about it." Ricari stared out the window. The moon was gone. "Usually my victims are asleep, drugged, or so weak of will that they would forget their mother's name if I told them to. One way or the other, they don't know what's happened, or they discount it altogether as preposterous."

  "I almost did," I confessed. "I sometimes thought I was going crazy… I thought I'd made it up. But then… I know what I know. I believe in what I see."

  "I wasn't sure whether you'd come," he said. "No. I was sure."

  We sat in silence for a while and I ate bread and cheese and olives, whisking them down with chianti. I was getting kind of drunk, but things seemed to make more sense that way. He chewed his lower lip, and I noticed that his lips were slightly chapped, and a very faint mist of stubble had begun to darken his chin and his jaw above the sideburns. How odd, I thought, his hair grows, and he sloughs off his skin.

  "I have," he began after clearing his throat, "something to ask you, Ariane."

  "Yeah?"

  "Will you kill me?"

  "What?"

  "End my life. I beg you. You are a woman of science. Death comes to you naturally. Surely you do not wish such an abomination to go on? Or think of it humanely. I want to die so much. Would you do no less for any stray cat, who cannot kill itself?" He leaned forwa
rd in the chaise longue, his eyes bright and passionate.

  "I—I can't," I protested. "No."

  "Ariane." He grimaced, and I saw for the first time in that angelic face, the bright sharp fangs, no longer than usual cuspids but very sharp, narrower than a human's teeth. The lower jaw had them too, but blunter, and a sleek little recess where the upper fangs rested, so as not to pierce the gum. Like an animal's fangs. "I am older than this building where we sit. I still talk of pianofortes and I clasped the hand of Wollstonecraft. Will you end this for me?"

  "Oh, my God," I said softly. "No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not!"

  "Why?"

  "I don't believe you for one thing!" I jumped up out of the stiff little chair where I had been sitting opposite him. "How do I even know you're telling the truth? I'm drunk! You might just be some Polk Street hustler with a cheesy accent and a fucked-up sense of humor! You're not a hundred years old! I'm not going to kill you!"

  "I will prove it," he said.

  He stood up, and grabbing a London Fog raincoat from another stiff chair, slipped it on. He found some black wing tips under the secretary and stepped into them. He was perhaps my height, less weight than I for sure, his movements almost too quick to see. "Come with me," he said agitatedly. "Since you didn't deign to take off your coat, come with me downstairs."

  I followed him out of the room and to the elevator. High spots of color dotted his cheeks above the sideburns. "By profession," he said as we got into the elevator and pulled the door closed, "I was a translator, in Paris, in 1812. I translated Italian into French, and Italian into English, and back again. Some of my works still exist."

  He burst out of the elevator into the lobby and past the front-desk man, who barely glanced up from the crossword puzzle, and I trailed meekly after him, half lost in a cloud of wine. Ricari flung open the door to the bookstore so hard it stood open, its hinges bent, and sat down in one of the booky corridors, trailing his fingernails across the spines of old, mildewy antique books. I came to rest beside him.