So I sit back and smile at the woman who’s staring the most openly, and raise my glass to her, and smile to myself as she looks away. I raise my glass to my lips and the champagne hits the back of my throat as the chorus reaches my ears, your voice easing through the air like razors through silk. I can feel the razors open me up.
I’m bleeding inside as he catches my eye.
For a moment I think he’s you. Back from the dead. My eyes take him all the way in, and I see that it isn’t you, it isn’t you at all — it’s what you wanted to be, maybe. All your rough edges and fears smoothed away to a polished alabaster surface.
My breath froze in my throat. I leaned closer to Eva, not taking my eyes off him; managed to ask her, “Is — is that — ?”
“Shhh,” she tells me, her voice low in her throat. “Don’t stare. Where?”
“By the stereo,” I tell her, and my words make me wonder, did he put in the CD?
She looked away from me, eyes idly taking in the whole room with a casual turn of her head, looking at him without really looking at him.
I couldn’t help staring. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew if I gawked at anyone, if I stared like a tourist at the dominatrices covered in vinyl and leather or at the senator from Kansas or at the whispering nuns that I would be quietly asked to leave and just as quietly forgotten while this world kept turning without me. But he’d caught my glance and was holding it tight in those ice gray eyes.
He’d just been handed a drink by another man, younger than he was, disheveled and pathetic. The smaller man looked around the room nervously, sniffling, edging closer and closer to his pale god for comfort and protection. He jumped when he looked back and noticed that the man was holding a cigarette out to him, and he fumbled for a lighter to serve him with.
“That’s him,” Eva said. There was a trace of amusement in her voice.
“He’s beautiful,” I breathed. She didn’t say anything.
I wasn’t surprised at her silence. I was more surprised that she’d brought me here at all. I never thought she liked me, and asking her had been nearly a last resort. But the net of people I’d been asking had grown wider and wider, the question discreetly set adrift from ear to ear among the stranger contacts we’d made, you and I, out on the road:
I want to meet a vampire, I’d told people. A real one.
I’d grown tired of the wannabes, of the nervous skinny little boys with their dental acrylic fangs and slicked-back hair, powdered pale faces and kohl-black eyes. The kind I used to bring backstage after the shows, let them work their lithe little bodies against me and leave my neck ragged and bleeding, let them touch the scars at my wrists with their tongues. The kind I’d hand over to you when I was done with them, and stay up late all night listening to you have sex with them, thumps and moans clear and loud through the wall. Lying awake listening to you love them and wishing for the millionth time that you liked girls, replaying over and over in my mind the words the boys would whisper to me as I bled, awkward and adolescent promises of forever, of immortality, little boys lying to me in the dark.
You remember. Or you would if you were still alive.
I want to meet a real vampire.
And those words had finally reached Eva’s ears, and she’d taken me by the hand one night at a bar and drawn me aside and asked if I was serious. She’d never spoken directly to me before and I was too startled to say anything but yes.
That was when she’d reached inside her purse and pulled it out and showed it to me, the cream-white, gilt-edged invitation, folded many times and cherished and kept. Eva Radcliffe, it read — and Guest.
Tonight I was the guest, and she led me by the hand again, this time across the crowded dance floor over to the stereo.
The press of the crowd and the cry of our music was disorienting. I lost track of where I was and almost who I was —
We emerged on the far side of the crowd and there was no one there but the small man, alone, sizing me up nervously, looking as if he was trying to decide if he should run from me. He was shaky and twitchy and looked as if he hadn’t eaten in days.
Flies, was the first thought that came to mind. Shouldn’t he be eating flies? Like Dracula’s Renfield?
Where is he, I was about to ask, and then arms snaked around me from behind, whip-thin and confident, a cigarette dangling from one hand and a drink from the other. The smell of the cigarette hit me, intoxicating, strange spices mixed in with the tobacco, and a warm voice breathed past my ear: “Who’s your little friend, Eva?” The arms drew me possessively close.
“Nikki Velvet,” Eva said, looking past my shoulder into the eyes I’d seen staring at me. “She’s the one I said I’d introduce you to.”
“Really.” He let go of me, held his cigarette out to the small man, who took it. His hand freed, he placed it gently on my shoulder and turned me around to face him. “The Nikki Velvet?”
It was him. I almost wanted to look away. “That’s me,” I said, making myself meet his eyes.
The CD went on to the next track. I knew the song immediately, Hand Grenade Heart. I’d done something to the guitar to make it scream.
“This is you?” he said, pointing up, indicating the music. I only managed to nod.
He smiled, and it was like a brilliant full moon coming out from behind the clouds. “How perfectly delightful.” He took my hand, held it to his lips, and kissed it.
I was already his.
He led me away from the party. I don’t remember what he’d said, what gesture he’d made, but he led me all the same.
I hope I had the presence of mind to be polite enough to say good night to Eva. I really can’t remember. But I hope I did. I never saw her again.
He took me down, buried and descending in the confining elevator, the three of us pressed together. He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.
A long car, just modest enough not to be a limousine, waited for him, valet driver surrendering the keys to his small companion. The little man opened the doors for us and settled himself in the driver’s seat. It was easy to imagine that he wasn’t even there, that the car moved by magic, and that I was alone with my rescuer.
My ghostwhite angel held me in his eyes again, sitting across from me as the car pulled into the street.
“So.” He said.
I held my breath, waited, nothing but attention.
“Eva tells me you wanted to meet a vampire.”
I nodded.
“There are only two reasons,” he said, his voice liquid, flooding the space between us, “that I can imagine for wanting to meet a vampire.
“The first is that you want to die.”
I didn’t answer, and my silence was my answer. He sat forward, anticipating, listening to my silence, then settled back in his seat and nodded.
“The second reason,” he said, “is that you don’t want to die.”
“Not ever,” I said, and my voice was harsh against the musical sound of his voice. Yours was always the voice, Gabe; you were the one who sang. I could never talk without a guitar. My words were two short sharp scratches, scarring the air. Not ever.
“You want to be a vampire. You want to live forever.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding. I nodded again.
“Tell me.”
“I — yes.” I couldn’t look at him; I couldn’t stand to look away. “Yes, I want to be a vampire.”
His turn to nod. “I can arrange that.” He reached inside his jacket — he was dressed just as he should be, just as I’d pictured it, all black velvet and white silk — and pulled out a small, elaborately engraved metal case. Too small for cigarettes. Business cards?
He opened it, held it out to me. A single razor blade immaculate on a bed of rose petals.
“Bleed for me,” he said softly.
I took it, forcing my hands not to tremble. Just
like stage fright, just like making myself hold the guitar, I made myself take the blade and hold it.
It was the first time I’d held a razor blade in years, since before I’d first met you. Since before I knew the world could ever hold anything as dark and magical as you and I didn’t want the world anymore. Back when a razor blade had been a constant friend, my ticket out of here; nights spent opening my wrists, first across the wrist and then, when I’d learned better after having been rescued too many times, down the wrist, trying to open up a whole vein instead of just slashing across it. I’d never managed to bleed enough to die, not then. But the attempts had left me with cruciform scars, a perfect cross on each forearm.
I held the blade above one vivid white old scar and with one quick motion made it into a wound again.
“Good. That’s good. You didn’t hesitate.”
The fresh wound stung and burned and his words were like a salve.
“I imagine,” he said, “that you have many questions. Questions about what it’s like. To be a vampire. About what’s involved in becoming one.”
“Yes,” I said, watching the first drop of blood hit the floor of the car. The world was a blur outside the rainstreaked windows.
“Questions I’m not going to answer.”
I looked up at him. His hand reached out to catch the drops as they fell.
“You lived another life before this one,” he said. “Nine months of warmth and comfort and security and silence and nothing anyone said to you then, if you could even have understood the words, could possibly have prepared you for this life. You wouldn’t have known what it meant to go from floating to crawling and walking; you wouldn’t have understood what it was to breathe. You have a hundred questions, I know. But you were born once without any knowledge at all of the world you were being thrust into. And you can do it again. You’ll have to.”
“I — I understand.”
He smiled a crooked and cruel smile. “No. You don’t understand. But that’s all right.” The blood was pooling in his hand. “Now — knowing that you don’t know, that you can’t know what’s ahead of you — do you consent to it all the same? Do you still want this?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me for a long moment, the light from passing neon signs running hazy and soft over his perfect features. “Then it will be done,” he told me.
And those were the last words he spoke to me that evening. The car took me home; he hadn’t asked where I lived, and I hadn’t told him, but I was home just the same. His driver opened the door for me, a look on his face like pity or sympathy or hunger, and I got out and walked away without a look back. He’d find me. I knew he would.
And without looking back, I could see in my mind as clearly as if I was watching it myself, what I knew had to have happened next; his blood-filled palm raising to those perfect lips, tasting me at last. It had to have happened.
I fell asleep that night with my window open, windswept rain falling into the room like a blessing. Face down on my bed, still dressed, my mouth pressed gently against my own wrist.
I still had the razor blade, and the next day, I used it to slit open the envelope.
It had taken me a while to remember where I’d put it. I’d given up on the idea, many months ago, and had hidden the envelope away. I found it on a bookshelf, tucked behind a patchwork collection of children’s books and Kathe Koja novels, sheltered and dark.
I slid the razor under the flap of the huge, bulky envelope, opened it like a vein, and spilled the contents onto the table. A half a dozen smaller envelopes stared stillborn up at me, their pale faces bearing addresses, but no return address. I never intended to get an answer to these letters.
Understand — I didn’t mean a word of these as I wrote them. Back when I was still suicidal, I never cared enough to write a suicide note. So when I wrote these, I knew I was lying with each word.
A few whispered goodbyes in the right ears, I thought to myself, feeling the paper crinkling under my fingers, and the world would let me disappear.
I wrote these just after you’d killed yourself. When the world wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d just simply followed you. When I didn’t want to die, not even then, but when I was seriously considering letting everyone think I had.
I left the envelopes sitting on my table, and went into the bathroom with a huge pair of scissors and a bowl full of hair bleach. I hacked off my long tangles and turned what was left a faded photograph blonde.
One last look around the old place, walking around and looking at ghosts while the bleach ate away at the color of my hair. Still-frame images in my mind, superimposed over the evening sunlit room. You standing in my doorway, a hundred goodbyes after a hundred practices, leaving when I wished right down to my bones that you’d stay. You in my kitchen, trying to teach me how to cook, laughing as I burned the last egg out of a dozen. You dancing around my apartment, arms and legs flying in a free and furious tangle — we’d gone out that night, bought fifty TVs and fifty DVD players all on credit, and we’d return them the next day but that night, that night they were all ours and the whole world was all ours and fifty horror films lit up my walls, Winona Ryder licking the blood from Gary Oldman’s chest and Catherine Deneuve taking off Susan Saradon’s shirt and Anne Parrilaud breaking her handcuffs, and you were my friend, just my friend, but you were mine, that night.
You believed it all. All the lyrics we wrote, everything you sang. The beauty of death and the tranquility of the graveyard and you believed it and you left me, I came to your hotel room that night on tour, banging on your door to tell you it was time to go, knowing, God help me, knowing what was on the other side, what I’d find when I had the manager let me in. You. Dead in the bathtub, razor cuts all the way up your arms.
And you know what? You know something, Gabe, you poor, sweet, stupid, stupid son of a bitch? There wasn’t anything beautiful about it at all.
I rinsed the stinging bleach out of my hair, got dressed, grabbed the envelopes, and shrugged into a huge coat. I took the envelopes out into the cold, walked five blocks down to the nearest mailbox, down to the river.
The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.
I held the envelopes tight in my hand over the open door of the mailbox, one last hesitation, then let go of my old life. I sat down on a bench by the side of the river and watched the boats go by. Watched everything go by. Then watched the clouds on the horizon bleed red, watched the sun gather up the last of its light and leave quietly, without even saying goodbye.
It had only been dark for a little while — and cold, although I hadn’t noticed the cold until he spoke — that I heard the now familiar voice behind me.
“One last sunset?”
The voice surrounded me, cold and liquid, and I closed my eyes and imagined that his voice was the river and I’d thrown myself in.
“One last sunset,” I agreed.
“Are you ready to come with me?”
“Yes,” I told him, but he’d already known the answer.
His name was Sylvan. At least, that was the name emblazoned in black wrought iron on his front gate as we were driven up to his house. My lips formed the word silently, Sylvan, as the car floated up the long driveway.
The house was what I’d imagined it would be. Just short of a castle, overlooking the city below us. He led me through it, and I followed him, lost in a dreamlike haze. I felt like I’d been awake for days, I felt like I’d been drinking nonstop; I had no body, just my eyes drifting along above the ground.
And somewhere ahead of us, his manservant, lighting candles to light our way.
The bedroom. What should have been the bedroom. The far wall was just glass, all windows, the almost empty room staring blindly out into the city.
In the room, no bed, no furnishings; just my picture, old publicity photo, poster sized, in a huge gil
t frame — your picture was missing, I could just see your arm in the shot, where your half of the picture had been cut away.
There were flowers everywhere. Wreaths. And to complete the mortuary image, a coffin, gleaming white and pristine.
“Welcome to your funeral,” Sylvan said.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted, when it gradually became clear he was waiting for me to say something.
“No. I told you you wouldn’t.” He opened the lid of the coffin, and waved a hand toward it.
There was no misreading the gesture. He wanted me to get inside.
This time I hesitated. Only for a moment. I stepped forward, and the little man, unsmiling, helped me up and into it awkwardly while Sylvan watched.
“Do you like it?” Sylvan asked. “The way death feels, close and warm and white around you?”
I didn’t answer him. I just stared up at the ceiling, unbelieving. The ceiling was mirrored — this had been a bedroom, I decided then — and I could see my own reflection staring numbly back. Sylvan was standing just to the side of the coffin, and in the mirror, he seemed to be hanging overhead, upside down like a vampire bat. His companion was nowhere to be seen. It seemed we’d finally been left alone.
“Well?” he asked. He reached up an arm, took the coffin lid in his hand, and pulled it down over me. I could hear the click of a latch, of a lock, a bolt —
And the darkness was suffocating around me. I automatically raised my hands and pressed them up against the lid, so close against my face. I tried to lift it and it wouldn’t move. I started to pound against the padded satin surface.
“Come on!” I shouted. “Let me out!” I didn’t know if he could hear me. I raised my scratched and imperfect voice as loud as I could. “Get me out of here!”
A long and unmeasured moment passed. It could have been a minute, it could have been ten. The only thing I could hear was my own ragged and uneven breaths and the pounding of my small fists.
Finally, another sound — the lock being undone. The lid sliding open. My eyes, wild and staring, blinked against the sudden candlelight filling them as if it was midday sun. I sat bolt upright, trying to get my breathing back under control, glaring at him.
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