Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  As she falls asleep she remembers—a memory consciously sought, and found—she remembers the devout young priest, so long ago, whom she visited one night, meaning to confess.

  What was it that he said? Oh, she had been hungry, she put her spell on him, but lightly … and then they had talked, at midnight in the village church. He said that the wickedness of her existence was not for him to judge, that it was not of this world … it was older than that, older than sin itself perhaps—it came from before the fall of the angels.

  Justine has often thought about this since. Or endeavored to thrust the thought away, as dangerous and absurd.

  The priest said, when she asked him about hell, that hell is a place where no one is able to love. Not to love. And he said, You think that sounds ordinary … but even to understand what love is is a manner of love. A gift of God. Love comes from God. It was surprising, given the times, that he did not conjure up torments and exotic fire. Maybe her “venom” (which she always thought of as being like sugar-syrup) made him somewhat drunk, so that he was moved to a more personal utterance, or maybe the extraordinary circumstance affected him in this way.

  The candles were burning, the cross towered above them as they approached the narthex. Outside it was dreary winter, it was endless night. Justine did not kill the priest. She left him unconscious, having fallen and gashed his poor neck. He would recover. He would be fine.

  Keith reminds her, she realizes now, of that young priest in Provence. The priest was so innocent, so unworldly, devoid of any vanity. Is Keith like that, really? She tries to concentrate, to bring it back. The priest was plain-featured, even homely, frail and thin. No, the resemblance, if there is one, isn’t physical. It’s like some sort of indefinable rhyme.

  FOURTEEN

  Dissociated, yet feeling quite sane, Keith finds himself talking to Renata, “Look what you’ve driven me to,” somehow believing that, from the grave, scattered, her problems solved, she’ll understand. Perhaps even forgive.

  This is the worst thing he has ever done. It was so easy. He slaps his own face at one point, as if to make himself realize the full gravity of his crime—but the slap and the talking are for his own benefit, and he sees this even as he cannot stop playing dumb. The truth is that he knows very well what’s going on, and what is his role.

  Formerly, before Justine, there were many things he had done that he was ashamed of. Most dramatically, he mistreated Renata, he misunderstood her, he was right there looking at her as she fell into the abyss. He looked right into her face, and he didn’t save her.

  Before that, there were many other things, but in comparison they all seem trivial and small. Renata saw right through him. She knew, she knew him, she chose him because she knew he’d help her fall.

  One night, after he’d been with Justine for only a couple of weeks, maybe a month, when they were still getting used to the new situation … one night he drove her down to Venice, they went into this nightclub together and then separated. Keith was nervous, so he soon left to go wait in the car. He was afraid (probably groundlessly) that someone from the music scene might recognize him, that he might run into someone he knew.

  Soon Justine came out, along with a young man. “He’s my driver,” Keith heard her say, and the young man laughed low, murmuring something. Then there was silence. Keith did not even glance in the rearview mirror.

  He heard some sort of a sound. It went on for a while, and then Justine said his name. “Keith.” He turned the key to start up the automobile. “No,” she said. “No, stop. Look at me. Look at me.”

  And he turned and saw the blood, the fangs, the puncture wounds black in the shadowy light. It was some kind of a test. Keith put out his hand, and she kissed him on the back of the wrist, looking up at his face in a moment, grazing the fangs tantalizingly on his sensitive skin.

  “Will you help me?”

  Keith nodded, then said aloud: “Yes. It’s okay.”

  They drove the kid to a park, carried him out onto the grass. Keith knelt there, took the knife from her, and cut into the throat to make some kind of a plausible wound.

  Justine never asked him to do anything like that again. If she killed, he didn’t know it.

  Tonight, though, Keith knew that that thief was still alive. When he cut his throat. Extenuating circumstances, sure, but a murder. Something permanent and unfixable. Consciousness and personality violently stopped. He tries to forget. There are these things he needs to do, so he tries to lose himself in the details, one by one.

  Having driven the truck to a remote spot, he sets it on fire. This will draw attention at the same time as it obliterates clues. He has already taken all identification from the men, and retrieved from Justine’s victim’s pocket a map of the house and grounds, with the address. He rides away on the motorcycle, as the morning turns steel-gray to silver and rose-blue. Let them burn. The fire may be unnecessary, he realizes, but it seems necessary to him. As a ritual, a gesture of sacrifice. He feels like a lawless motherfucker back in the time when Justine was only a child. Exults in the destruction. Let them burn.

  FIFTEEN

  Michelle is wearing a dull silver way-too-large t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off; it hangs down over her right shoulder. The strap of a black bra is visible, in amongst sundry other black strings, a leather thong, and thin silver chains. A double-link piece of chain serves as a necklace, or loose choker. Elaborate custom or homemade earrings, continuing the chain motif. On the t-shirt, in red letters, it says SAINT AGATHA.

  But most notable, to anyone even glancing at her, is the fact that Michelle’s head is mostly shaved. She has a mohawk, though it is not, at this moment, moussed or otherwise greased to stick up. The henna’d brunette hair looks basically combable and soft. Michelle has had this hairstyle for a month, long enough so that her scalp no longer looks that sickly gray. Not that she would care. She liked the gray. The truth is, as far as outsiders are concerned, she doesn’t care if they think she looks bad or good. Fuck all of them. If it freaks them out, that’s their problem. She wants to make them unhappy like that, if only for a few moments, in the middle of their boring day. Her friends gave her this haircut, one night when she was on acid, but it wasn’t like she was out of her mind.

  She has somewhat of a roundish head, a roundish face, though she isn’t fat. Her mother once said, in typically casual, hurtful fashion, that she has “chipmunk cheeks.” Her friend Jason has said, thoughtfully, that she looks a bit like Linda Blair, when Linda Blair was young. But better, he said, sensing her frown.

  Well, since the haircut, within her circle she’s been more in demand. Jason is going to use her for the cover of the next issue of The Darkest Night, this magazine he publishes and edits, which Michelle does record reviews and interviews for. Their favorite band, goth-rock death-rock Saint Agatha … Michelle has got something going with the bass player, though she doesn’t think it adds up to much. Michelle is nineteen.

  Right now she is stopped at a gas station putting five dollars’ worth of gas in the van. It’s 10:30 A.M., usually very early for Michelle, in this case very late. She’s been up all night. She’s on her way home from a party at Saint Agatha’s house. Nothing happened with the bass player, Fred. She doesn’t know what’s going on there. She doesn’t like him that much, anyway. At about 6:30, she fell asleep on the rug. Curled up next to Jeff.

  She yawns. It’s a cloudy, gray, dirty, warm day. Across from the gas station is an aging bar and grill, maybe from the sixties, with these painted-on shadows of tall palm trees on the stucco wall, spiky silhouettes—while the actual, real trees seem to be dying, one of them is bent over, it looks sick.

  Out of nowhere, then, at the Coke machine, when she pulls over and jumps out to get a can of Coke, this guy comes up to her and says, “Listen, can you give me a ride home? I’ll pay you. How about, mm—really, fifty bucks?”

  Some other time it might be like one of her fantasies come to life, because he’s handsome, pale, kind of sad …
a chance meeting with a stranger. She shades her eyes against the sun, looking around, past the traffic and the telephone poles, the wires, and he says, “My bike broke down. I don’t want to fuck with calling a cab.”

  Michelle doesn’t ask why not, but she does look him up and down, like checking him for dangerousness or the possibility of weapons. He seems to read her mind, and smiles. He’s not too eager, so she says, “How far?”

  “Beverly Glen.”

  “Give me the fifty bucks first.”

  “Okay,” he says, and counts it out. His hands are in bandages, fresh bandages with some bloodstains.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Oh,” he says, and she thinks he might not answer, but then as they start to pull into traffic he says, “They got slammed in some car doors.”

  “Ouch,” she says. “That’s harsh.”

  They go past some Vietnamese signs, stoplight to stoplight, and she thinks of mustard, blood, and gasoline. Pops in a cassette.

  “What’s your name?” she asks, as they go down this xerox’d gaudy, forlorn section of strip.

  “Keith.”

  He looks vaguely familiar. She says, “My name is Michelle.”

  “I really appreciate this,” he says, as if she is just doing him a favor, no money being involved. She can really use it, actually. She’s poor. Actually, this will allow her to go a little longer without asking her mom for money. They’re not getting along. Her mom, Brenda, is a CPA. She’s so full of shit, with her sorry-ass boyfriends, her desperate dating.

  Keith is thinking, Just get me home. Please, just let me get home. It had seemed like he deserved it when the motorcycle conked out, after hissing and dying all the way from San Bernardino. He abandoned it in an alley, near a used-car lot with colored little flags flapping in the wind. He was feeling very shaky when, at the gas station, he suddenly walked up to Michelle. She reminded him of the kind of girls he used to meet when he was in the band, before they were a success.

  Perhaps unfairly, he has instantly assessed her. He thinks he knows her type. Poor self-esteem, mostly dumb but sometimes more intelligent then she needs to be, morbid, self-conscious, a sucker for “bad boy” poseurs. She talks, overcoming her initial awkwardness, and he encourages her, although he’s not really curious about any of this stuff.

  Groupies, parasites, hangers-on. Every group accumulates them. People who will go get you a Coke, a takeout meal, or some MDA. Girls who will give you a blow job, etc. No, he doesn’t want to remember. But he can’t help himself.

  To interrupt, he asks Michelle to tell him more about this business of The Darkest Night. This leads to a discourse on Jason, the prime organizer of everything. Jason started out by doing videos in high school, and charging admission to his parties. You wouldn’t know the location for sure until the final day. They were always jammed, totally jammed, like turning kids away. He’s a true bisexual, too. Now besides the magazine, he has a cable show, and he’s getting into booking bands. It all fits together, it’s all part of the same thing. He has like a vision, a highly developed aesthetic

  Keith nods, as they travel past hundreds of car lots, used and new. Numbers, promises, gray cement. He understands that this is Saint Agatha, the band she and Jason and the rest are hot on, high on—that’s their album playing on the cassette.

  “What do you think?”

  “I like it,” Keith says, faking interest, just like when somebody back when would make him listen to a tape.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  She grins. A large healthy child. Teenage nihilism’s always in style.

  SIXTEEN

  Michelle is yawning. She confides to Keith that she’s been up all night, that she’s very sleepy. He doesn’t seem impressed.

  “I need to come in,” she says. “I have to go to the bathroom. And if you don’t mind, I sort of want to see where you live.”

  She refrains from saying anything about the evident wealth. The van is parked and turned off. She comes inside, annoyed by the feeling she gets that he doesn’t want her here now. It makes her want to bug him, to test him right away.

  Does she make him nervous? He’s so polite, it’s hard to tell whether he likes her or not, or in what way. She strolls out of the bathroom, gazing around at the spaciousness, and the art. Keith is looking down at a spot on the floor. When he sees that she’s observing him, he smiles and says, “Go ahead, look around.”

  “Do you live here by yourself?”

  “No,” he says. “But the other person … she’s gone a lot. She travels all over the world.”

  “Oh? What does she do?”

  “She’s an art consultant,” Keith says, as Michelle bends over, scanning the titles of his CDs, not exactly expecting to see much that she likes.

  “Would you like something to drink? I know I have iced tea.”

  It dawns on her. It’s like she’s known for a while, she’s known there was something: seeing the band’s name makes her fully realize, she looks at him, eye contact, and says, “I thought I recognized you. You used to be the guitar player in SMX.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s somebody that looks like me.”

  She laughs and shakes her head. “No, it’s you. Keith .. van der something. I’ve seen your picture, I’ve seen you in your videos.” She glances at his hands. “I remember that there were these rumors … and you dropped out of sight.”

  ”I’m okay now,” he says. “But I don’t want anyone to know where I am. Can you keep this a secret? Really. I’m out of all that.”

  “What about your hands? What happened to them? You’ve got bloodstains … are you all right?”

  “This? Oh, it’s not … don’t worry, it’s not anything. When they were broken, they weren’t set properly, so they’re still kind of fucked up. I do rehab, and occupational therapy. But sometimes … they’re easily hurt.”

  He comes close, puts his hands on her bare shoulders. Michelle knows it’s important to him, and so she doesn’t want to give in.

  “Michelle, please, will you promise me? Don’t tell anyone about me. It’s not much of a story, even to the alternative press. SMX is over. I had my day. I just wanna be left alone. I don’t want people talking about me, or even thinking about me. Don’t tell Jason….”

  He holds onto her wrists and lightly drags her to the couch, so they’re sitting together.

  “It could really fuck things up for me,” he says, and something in his tone makes her think this might be true, or that he believes it might be true, and she stops feeling like being a bitch to him, and says, in a different voice, “I won’t say anything. I can keep my mouth shut if I want to. There’re plenty of secrets that I never … I never say a word.”

  “Okay,” Keith says, very quietly, and she thinks, God, what’s wrong with him? What is he so afraid of? It’s not like anybody really cares. At the same time, his vulnerability and everything makes him terrifically attractive, even more so than before … and she just barely senses or imagines that there’s probably some mystery here she doesn’t understand. She’s drawn to him, and curious, very curious.

  After they’re silent for a few minutes, they look into each other’s eyes, and Michelle smiles in a way that she guesses he understands. She says, “Can I come visit you?” and he says, ”Yeah, sure. Come in the afternoon. That’s the best time. The nights aren’t so good.”

  SEVENTEEN

  1950. It’s a rainy, humid night. So sticky and damp you’re not sure when it is raining and when it has stopped.

  Frank McKenna, homicide detective, has seen some bad juju, but this time he knows he’s in deeper than he can ever get out of, he’s at the bottom of a hole going clear down dark to the endless void at the center of the earth. To hell, in other words.

  He strangles Justine, sort of experimentally, hard enough to kill just about anyone, make them stick their tongue out, eyeballs pop, for sure leave big handprints on her white throat, he strangles her but doesn’t really b
elieve that she will die.

  She goes limp, her eyes stare at nothing, it’s like she’s mocking him because she suddenly with a jerk is out of his hands, standing a few feet away. He wishes she would at least ask him why, but she doesn’t bother, isn’t curious, doesn’t want to know. Isn’t even mad. She owns him; they both know it well.

  Okay. He lights a cigarette, trying to steady his trembling hands. They stand there, in the run-down house in the Hollywood hills.

  Frank makes himself tough it out, smooth out his voice, interrogation technique, says, “You ought to put Gloria in the ground. She’s drawing flies. You’ll have coyotes soon enough, they smell that meat.”

  Gloria is the big-breasted bleached-blond whore who used to be Frank’s snitch. He shacked up with her sometimes. Now she lies there dead in a coffin, turning colors, just out the sliding glass doors. Guess Justine got tired of having her around, running her errands in the daylight, driving her places at night.

  “I’m watching her change,” Justine says, no huskiness evident from the strong thumbs on her throat. “I want to see what happens, day by day.”

  “Is she going to … ?”

  “No. I didn’t bite her.”

  “How’d she die then? Natural causes?”

  Justine shrugs, like how would I know, though Frank had noticed Gloria’s neck cut open ear to ear, as if with a jagged saw.

  He goes over to the bar, pours himself a drink. Straight bourbon. Knocks it back. The room is hot, perspiring.

  He’s been bringing people to Justine, white trash and drifters, prostitutes and spic pimps, mostly she just takes a pint or so but a few times in his presence she’s gone all the way.

  It’s bad. It gives him an unbelievably bad hink, Justine wanting to watch Gloria decompose. He turns on the radio to country swing. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

  “Listen,” Frank says, “you can’t just keep Gloria out there like that.”