Voice of the Blood

by Jemiah Jefferson

"I'll do anything you want," I said, "anything you say. You hypnotize me. I just… don't want to live without you."

  "You are enamored of an insect," he replied. He blushed.

  "And if I am?"

  He giggled faintly, then burst out laughing. I took him into my arms and he pressed his face into my breasts. "My child," he purred, "you are seductive."

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  We had been thus for days.

  Ricari sprawled against me, naked but for his rosary, his cock swelling tightly against me and then receding again, his mouth closed over my nipple, which he periodically bit, then suckling the blood that seeped from it. I writhed, feverish, half conscious from hunger and delight, falling asleep at times with his feather weight on me. I would wake at times and he would be gone, crouched in my living room, investigating my possessions, playing a single track from a CD, then discarding it for another. As soon as he saw that I had waked, he would spring back onto me, tussling virginally, caressing me, kissing my face and neck and my swollen breasts. He would lick open the healing wounds that were my nipples, bringing fresh streams of blood.

  When I reached for his cock he would swat my hand away. "I am for you," he said, "you are not for me to take."

  But I was, night and day.

  I sat at my kitchen table with a pen and a sheet of blank white paper.

  Dear John, I wrote.

  I tore up the paper and dropped it into the morass of unpaid bills, past-due notices, empty paper cups, vitamin bottles at my feet.

  My phone had been cut off.

  I took up the pen again. My most dear sweet John, I am in love with another man.

  This wouldn't do either. More fuel for the dormant fire.

  Another clean white sheet. John—you will not believe this, but vampires exist, and I am in love with one.

  Shit. No.

  It was daylight; warm daylight, stinking of cut grass from the park. I found it hard to think. I was so rarely awake at this time of day. I had to tell him something. I had letters from him—dull things in his incomprehensible hand, the paper on mesons he was writing, the old friends he had come across. The last two or three lay unopened on the couch next to the front door. I hadn't the energy to face his wonders, his queries about my vacation, why I hadn't written him more than a hasty scribble on a grocery receipt, and that in February.

  My love, I would never want to hurt you, but I guess I had better. I have become involved with someone else—and it's not some random greasy intellectual or horny undergrad, but the most incredible being I have ever met. Sometimes I wonder if he really exists, and I also wonder if you exist, whether or not my life up to the point at which I met him wasn't all just a dream. It's so much worse than finding Jesus Christ or becoming a lesbian at the last minute or even deciding that I don't love you because I do—I still do—sometimes I miss your ordinariness, little things, I miss driving you around and stuff, I miss school—but I will never be able to escape this thing that's happened to me. I am in too deep to even make sense of anything and I am losing my wits—you would laugh to see me now—I'm a mess of bruises and I eat and eat but he takes it all—and he won't even fuck me or anything, but I swear it's real, he's real, you would fall in love with him too if you were here, if this was happening to you. It's like meeting an extraterrestrial or waking up one day to find that everything was suddenly on its side or stepping on the moon—this doesn't make any sense but I had to tell you something.

  I folded up the sheet before I could tear it up and stuffed it into an envelope. I scribbled his address at the school on the front and put it into the napkin holder, and left the kitchen, endeavoring to forget all about it.

  The doorbell sounded, startling a yelp out of me. I thought to ignore it and go back to bed, but it might have been Ricari. I put on a bathrobe over my T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and went to the door.

  It was Carole, the admin from the Bio Department at school. I stood dumbly looking at her from behind the grate, my hand on the knob.

  "Ariane," she said surprised. "You're home."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Can I… come in?" she asked.

  I nodded, and unlocked the grate so that she could come in. She shouldered her purse and looked reflexively around the room; she had been here before, ten months ago, for a party celebrating my grant for the year. The place was a wreck now. I hadn't felt like cleaning it. Ricari tended to make a mess at my apartment; i had so many things, and he didn't seem to care what he did in someone else's space. I sank down onto the couch, conscious of how this must look—four o'clock in the afternoon, me in pajamas, house a mess.

  "I was just wondering how you were," she prefaced, moving a heap of magazines and CD covers onto the floor so she could sit. "Whole department's kind of worried. I tried to call before coming over, but it says it's disconnected?"

  "I forgot to pay the bill," I said with a wan smile. "I know, I usually never forget anything, but… I've been really tired."

  "Are you sick? Don't let people tell you chronic fatigue syndrome is a crock—"

  "I don't know," I said. "I'll try to get the phone back on again next week."

  "You have lost so much weight," she said.

  "Looks nice, huh?"

  Her face was a cartoon of concern. "You want to come to the park with me? It's a gorgeous day out, you could get some sun. You're"—she laughed—"you're starting to look like a white person."

  I shook my head and failed in my attempt to smile. "I should really get back to sleep," I said. "I've been… I haven't really been the same since… urn, since my miscarriage. I've been kind of keeping myself doped up… it's kind of hard…"

  "Oh, yeah, I totally understand. Hard to be bouncy when you're bleeding all over the place." That explanation seemed to soothe her, and I mentally patted myself on the back. "If you need anything, call me, OK? A lot of people are really concerned about you. We all thought you'd be hanging around the lab this semester, and nobody'd seen or heard from you in ages."

  "I'll call you if there's anything," I said. "Thanks."

  I showed her out, my knees nearly buckling with fatigue. She gave me a quick hug as she went, and glanced back over her shoulder at me, obviously not quite convinced. Oh, well, too bad. I locked the grate. I wished to hell that people wouldn't give a shit about me, so I could just disappear and nobody would even notice.

  "The crudest month," Ricari said languidly.

  I looked up briefly from the room-service tray, then back at it again. A haphazard heap of roast beef, medium rare, stared back at me, and I took up the two-tined serving fork and began stuffing slices of it into my mouth.

  The old man was still in the room, having not yet uncorked the wine, and he gaped at me. "Want your veggies?" he asked dubiously.

  "Yeah, yeah, leave me alone. Spinach?"

  "Creamed spinach. All we had."

  "Cool," I said. "Now could you please get out of here?"

  He placed the cork on the tray, sighing theatrically. Ricari gave him a twenty-dollar bill and shut the door behind him. Ricari returned to his place on the chaise and watched me eat. "When you're done we can go out," he said.

  "You don't look so human," I said.

  He was very bony and his eyes were like rained-on metal. He shrugged. "When you're done we can go out," he repeated.

  I hadn't seen him for a full week. When I called the Saskatchewan from the pay phone at the 7-11, he was never in; when I went there, the desk clerk told me without looking up from his People that Ricari was not available. I spent nights at home in front of a candle, almost praying to him to listen to me, to get me out of this lonely hell I'd worked myself into; at last, earlier that afternoon, he'd sent over a florist's delivery boy with a silver-white hothouse rose and a card that said simply, Come tonight.

  I had jerked off until I lapsed into a dizzy half sleep.

  The candlelight ran over the panels of the parquet floor like melted butter. I sopped up the last of the crea
med spinach with a crust of bread, and washed it down with a mouthful of wine. Ricari stared fixedly out the window. "Need an aperitif?" I asked, leaning into his sight.

  He looked up at me without seeing me. Then a slight smile curled his lips.

  "Tell me something," I said.

  "Yes?"

  "How is one made into a vampire?"

  "By blood," he said. He moved away from me.

  "No, but how."

  "I've told you," Ricari said. "Shall we go?"

  In a systematic fashion, we did the clubs south of Market. We began at DV8, at this early hour not yet filled with gyrating, leather-clad fashion students, waiters, and methedrine dealers. In the bluish light Ricari insisted that I drink four gin and tonics, using the power of his mind so gently and skillfully that I was halfway down my third before I suspected I was anything other than painfully thirsty. I protested in a mumble, inaudible over the pulsing of deep-house, but Ricari heard me. He only smiled. "Drink up," he said, and my arm lifted the fourth cocktail glass and rilled my mouth with the bitter fizz.

  I followed him in a haze from DV8 to the Endup to the Bon Marché. I had no idea what he was doing; he wasn't there to dance, certainly; I couldn't imagine Ricari getting down and funky with the ravers. I think I remember dancing a little, helplessly drawn into the beat, but he wasn't watching me. His eyes were elsewhere.

  After my fifth drink, I sat still and watched him stare into space. He wore a white shirt with a slightly lacy collar—a woman's blouse that struck his fancy on his last shopping expedition for me—and plain slim dark trousers. He didn't fit in at all with the golden youth in their saucy neon colors and daisy appliques, but nor did he look awkward among them. He was a tiny, perfect creature, delicate, a capodimonte porcelain sculpture of a melancholy poet. I put out my hand to touch his, and he drew it away, not quite startled, but disliking the contact.

  I was confused.

  For a while we strolled along in the darkness and quiet between the Bon Marché and the Stud, not speaking. I didn't dare ask anything, and he volunteered nothing. A big jock type and his giggling, wasted girlfriend, walking past, made some comment I didn't hear, but I saw Ricari's cheeks flame scarlet. "Hey, shut up, you fucker," I said ignorantly. I was almost too drunk to support my own weight. "He'll kick your sorry ass."

  "What?" The jock stopped and started walking back. "What did you say?"

  Ricari and I both stood still, silent. He darted me a look that I couldn't interpret.

  "You better keep your bitch on a leash," the jock blustered, squeezing the giggle-jiggle queen possessively. She exploded with literally snotty laughter.

  "She's not mine," Ricari said, not without some humor.

  "You're a fuckin' asshole," I muttered, and spat at the jock's feet. I didn't manage to remember that I'd gotten beat up once in New Orleans, drunk and acting like a badass. It must be something with the red hair, the diluted heroic Celtic blood, half poisoned with alcohol and determined to have the last word, even if it's spat out with a mouthful of blood and teeth.

  The jock attempted to rush and take a swing at me. He never got that far—Ricari intercepted, adeptly tripping the jock so that he fell onto the gritty, filthy sidewalk and ripped his palms on the pavement. The girl broke, out laughing even harder at that, and it seemed to galvanize the meathead. He sprung up with truly impressive speed and assaulted Orfeo instead.

  It wasn't the best idea the jock ever had. Ricari took the jock's hands in his and gave a subtle twist; I heard, even at the distance of three or four feet, the moist popping sound of shoulder joints coming undone. The jock couldn't even yell; Ricari clamped his wee hand over the jock's open mouth and fastened himself onto the base of his neck, which was as far as Ricari could reach, standing on his toes. The drunk girlfriend watched all this silently, baffled into calm, but not yet into sobriety.

  She woke up, though, when she saw the jock slump narcoleptically to the ground. Ricari gazed up, his face blushing almost violet and his eyes brilliant, and gave her a look I will never forget—a kind of intent, pure even beyond the animal, beyond instinctual, something others might describe as pure joyful innocent evil. She had barely turned and began gathering her muscles to run before Ricari had her.

  I bit my hand to keep from crying out. I swear to God, I thought he was going to kill her. Instead, he gripped her by the throat and the belly, turned her around, and looked fully into her face. He didn't say anything aloud, but she gasped as though someone had plunged a needle into her. Then she relaxed in his arms, and her head fell limply back.

  He settled her gently in a sitting position along a concrete wall, frisked her, and produced her wallet from her little white leather purse. He pocketed the wallet and rejoined me under the streetlight. No one had seen; no one had driven by closer than a block away. "Is the guy dead?" I asked Ricari as we walked away.

  "Almost," he said coolly. "I think he'll live, with help."

  Despite myself, I glanced back, licking nervous salt off my lips. The girl was regaining consciousness, feeling with her hands along the pavement. No sound came from her. "And the cheerleader?"

  "She won't remember… anything," Ricari said. His voice was strange, bizarrely lighthearted, as if he were no longer himself. He was as pink as a clover blossom.

  "What do you mean? She won't remember what happened?"

  "She won't remember anything at all. A clean slate. She can start all over again."

  "Ricari," I said, horrified despite myself.

  "Your moral judgments," he drawled. I realized that he was now almost as drunk as I was, his feed saturated with liquor. "Your moral judgments mean nothing here. These are the politics of the damned. I'll hate myself in the morning." His giddy cheer collapsed and he began to weep and bite his lower lip. "I… hate myself now…"

  I grasped his arm. He had not gotten a single telltale drop on his pristine white blouse. "Don't think that way," I said, embracing him. "You were—you were—defending me. That asshole would have turned me into ground beef. You did it because you like me. Didn't you?"

  He glanced at me, and a faint sloppy smile crept over his face. "Yes," he said, "keep believing that. Perhaps I too will believe it, in time."

  He scattered the contents of the wallet in various dumpsters along the street, and then embraced me with one arm and pressed his cheek against mine. In our final destination, a quiet jazz bar on Market and Valencia, we kissed hungrily for hours. I could taste the luscious blood in his mouth.

  There were still too many things to know.

  Ricari made me consent to fixing a date wherein I would put him into the incinerator and lock the door. It was to be April 23rd, a Saturday night, when there wouldn't be very many people around to see us. We would slip in at about two in the morning, make sure the oven was fired up, then I would open the door, Orfeo would climb in, and I would shut the door and leave; he made me promise I would leave immediately before I heard him scream. Unlike luckier fictional vampires, Ricari assured me that he was not highly flammable and would take as long to burn through as a human being would. "Think of me as you would a log of oak," he imagined. "You have no remorse about throwing a log onto the fire, would you? That's all I am is old firewood, branches from a dead tree."

  He made me make this promise in the red-vinyl cafe-bar, the staff so accustomed to us that they no longer made Ricari pay for my drinks. I sat with my back to him and he brushed my hair until all the frazzled brown-red curls lay smooth in his palm. "Orfeo," I said, struggling against the lump of sadness in my throat, "promise me you'll answer all my questions before then."

  "I will not promise," he said lightly. "I will try to answer. I don't have answers to everything." He dropped a kiss onto the side of my neck.

  "Why won't you let me sleep with you? I mean really sleep?"

  He hesitated. "You don't want to know."

  "Duh! That's why I'm asking."

  "All I will say is it's not very nice."

  "Do you turn into a ba
t?"

  He laughed. "No, my dear, just a sleeping version of myself. My dreams are contagious. I don't want you to have to share my nightmares."

  I smiled as the waitress brought me another cup of coffee—no alcohol tonight, I wanted to stay awake with him for as long as I could. I had less than two weeks left. "How many of your kind are there in the world?"

  "I have no idea. Maybe a lot, maybe only a few."

  "Do you know of any others in town?"

  "Why? Do you want a new one when I'm gone?"

  "That's not funny." I pulled away from him and poured some sugar into my tea.

  He caught hold of my hair again, and stroked it back into place. "I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm sure there are—they have never made themselves known to me. We are solitary ultimately."

  "What makes you think you'll die when you go into the fire?"

  His hands stopped on my head.

  "What makes you think you'll cease to be, go to heaven, whatever? How do you know your consciousness won't go on in those ashy little bits?" I continued.

  He had resumed his brushing, and neatly rolled the smooth curls into a bun, securing it with a thick comb. "Because I believe in separation of soul and body," he replied coolly. "As do you."

  "I believe in nothing. I only have theories."

  "My child, you will never go to heaven if you don't believe in anything."

  "I won't go to hell either," I said. I turned to face him and smiled. He took my face between his hands and kissed my forehead.

  "Lack of belief is a sort of hell," Ricari said.

  I put my hand on his chest and gently seized his nipple between my first and second fingers. He watched me, removed my hand, kissing the fingers, put my hand against his head so that I could appreciate the fine texture of his hair, and kissed me on the lips. "I think mystery is better than fact," he continued, "and waiting is better than getting."

  "So what you're telling me is that you'd rather die than have sex with me." I kissed his chin.

  "Ah, Ariane, you are lovely when you're pigheaded and deliberately stupid."