Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  In front of the mirror, a bad memory strikes her, so that she clutches at the pearl necklace she was about to put on. Always, a woman alone, wandering around at night, is a target for criminals, or perverts, rapists, and murderers. Usually, Justine is well protected; in several cases she has taken care of such attacks with little problem. One time, however, a gang of drunken cowboys caught her, and she was so outnumbered, she thought it would be stupid to show her fangs.

  They overpowered her, and several of them raped her; then, feeling the need to move on before morning, outlaws on the run, they stabbed her ten or twelve times and left her for dead. This was in maybe 1883, something like that. 1892.

  They hung her up, in her torn dress, in the branches of a tree. Justine now has a look as if she has been turned to stone. She rocks a bit, side to side, and dares glance at herself, and begins with resolve to brush her hair. She can see Keith, reflected in the mirror. He is reading a magazine. Some music is playing, some guitars.

  She is conscious, as if at a great distance, of such delight with him, and at the same time, such dread. Keith is striking to her, not merely because of his good looks, but because of his grace, imbued in all his movements, spoiled only by the tragic feature of the mangled hands.

  Still, it is not the physical qualities that she sees in him that arouse her passion—it is the spiritual side, his soul. It has thawed her, dangerously, she’s frightened of what is happening, she’s afraid it may turn out very badly for them both.

  To be in a situation where he was indifferent enough to life to find it acceptable to spend time with her, to go out with her on her rounds, he had to have been more or less killed first, a great disaster had befallen him, he didn’t care if he lived or died.

  She goes to him.

  “When I died,” she says, “whatever happened to me, it was a terrible thing. Either my Soul left me, and I have existed all these years as a soulless being—which is how I can stand the things I do—or else my soul is still inside me, somewhere, hidden, shrunken down, doubly damned. I don’t think I have a soul. That’s what makes me so horrible.”

  “I feel a soul in you,” Keith says, affected by her distress. “It’s in there. You wouldn’t even worry about it if your soul had disappeared. I feel it in you.”

  “Are you sure? Then I am damned.”

  “You don’t know that. What you’ve done, it’s been necessary for you to survive. You haven’t gratuitously murdered children, or poisoned the water, or spread the plague. Have you?”

  “No,” she says, but she is not secure. Melancholy overcomes her, as she recollects some of her deeds. She clings to Keith, and she tries to think, to understand. He is all she has, and she knows that if she stays with him, she will be the ruin of him, her evil will infect him. But maybe he has been brought to her for a purpose. Their intersection will save both of them somehow. This seems flatly impossible to her, she can only imagine that they’ve come together by neutral chance; therefore they must get all they can out of what is possible in the fleshly here and now. She is afraid to try to imagine anything more.

  FORTY-THREE

  Everything Keith has done so far in relation to Justine he has done because it has come naturally, it has felt right. He has examined his behavior from time to time, to the extent that he is capable of rational thought at this point, and it all seems to make sense, given the unreal circumstance he has come to inhabit as his life.

  The sexual attraction to Justine has been slow in coming, although from the first he was curious about her in this way. There’s a certain wantonness she possesses, almost unconsciously, but he does not wish to respond to this. She has exerted power over people so easily, put them under a spell, that Keith from the start has wanted to differentiate himself from one of them, even if this means forever maintaining his distance, turning himself down to match her liquid nitrogen cool. He can do it. They get along well, though, and the very fact that he doesn’t want something from her helped them become closer as time has gone on.

  If he has touched her, it has been in a way to test himself, as well as to test her. He needed to touch her to keep faith in her corporeality, to find her … beyond this, he is not intelligible to himself.

  When she says that she has wondered whether or not she still has a soul, he feels a great emotion well up inside of him, at the same time that he thinks this is a false question. She may truly believe that she is damned, quite literally damned, but he is so sure he experiences the light from her soul he cannot believe she really imagines seriously that she is soulless.

  It is not a modern question, this consideration of the soul. He leaves behind in an instant the nervous irreverence with which one might ordinarily banter about such an unknowable, metaphysical concept—he finds within himself an uneasy but hard-core reverence that he can connect to Justine like a sticky tentacle, answering her need.

  He loves her, or he loves the part of her he recognizes, and he can stand the other part, he can expose himself to it, collaborate with it, even if in so doing he is playing catch with death. He forgives himself for his morbid bravado, if that’s what it is. What interests him in Justine is precisely that which is alive, that which is vulnerable, reachable, that which he can be with as another human being, a lost soul maybe, a tiny blink of light that does not want to be forever alone. All the fantastic stuff around them—that she is a vampire, and once died, and has been alive for so very long—he tries not to dwell on any of this, or only to think about it as he must from night to night.

  Life is essentially mysterious, and he seeks to accept this. When he and Justine are fucking, the alchemy of their joining creates a new dark world that is something no one else ever can have possibly known, a world like a mesmerizing jungle that has never seen the sun, a jungle of huge pulpy molten metal fruits and flowers of dripping steel, blind insects that fill up the night and then fly away forever, animals copulating in squishy jewel-like trees, bleeding penises curling as snakes around and around the tendons and bone-branches into the blue-black nerve-ending pools of shining liquid, down into the living maze one never tires of exploring, running into convulsing glittery walls and back and round the turn into a canal that bursts into color where there can be no color, where everything is slippery wet black mirror fragments that come together and then fall apart, come together and fall apart in moonlit rooms.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Chase talks to these kids, in science-fiction glaring white sunlight, next to a chicken-wire fence with a big hole ripped in it, leading into dried-up dirt and broken glass.

  “We’re making a movie about teen life in the streets. Living in squats. That kind of thing. We’ll pay one hundred dollars each.”

  “For what, man?”

  “The initial interview. Then it depends on the director, how much we use you. If we use you at all. But the hundred dollars, that’s yours, unless you act like a jerk.”

  There are five of them, all dressed in quasi-stylish rags. Chase likes them, in his new fashion. He sees them as pawns. He has always been inclined to be manipulative, and he’s been clever enough at it that he’s usually gotten his way. He is under David’s spell, true, but he wants this bargain, he cooperates with all of his will. A few years ago, he had an episode, his heart beat irregularly, they kept watch on him in a coronary care unit—he hated that feeling of helplessness, helplessness and terrible fear. If he had died then, he would have died like a sheep, as most men die, unknowing and weak. This fantastic, bizarre opportunity—why of course he jumps at it. Meeting David is like getting a chance to meet God. God or the Devil, but a supernatural being who can grant one supernatural gifts.

  Sabrina, by contrast, seems to possess an insufficient fervor to live. Chase thinks … she has to take care of herself. If she comes along, he wants her, he will treasure her companionship, but he is prepared to be hardheaded, to cut his losses if he must. After all, she is his third wife. She no doubt married him with the expectation in the back of her mind that she would outl
ive him, and inherit, and that would have suited her fine. Well, maybe it will be Chase who survives, albeit on another plane of existence, by extraordinary means.

  In the evening, Chase and David come to the squat. It’s an abandoned apartment building, partially burned and then boarded up for several years.

  There were five kids this afternoon. Now there are seven. One of the new ones, a male with a baseball cap on sideways, insists on the money being paid up front.

  “I think you’re fags.”

  “We’ll interview you first,” David says.

  There’s no electricity, no water. The room for the interviews has candles, and a battery lamp.

  “What’s your name?” Chase asks.

  “Flip. Flipper to you guys.”

  David laughs, achieves eye contact. He puts the boy under. As each one comes in, he has them stand there, in a line. The last two, Ruby and Mark, are entranced but left seated in the other room.

  “Undress,” David says to the five kids in the line. “Take everything off.”

  Chase, without being asked, picks up the clothes as they are dropped, piles them into a corner, stinky, moist with sweat.

  David sucks on the neck of a fat girl, then takes some from Flip. This seems to Chase to go on for a very long time. Chase lingers uneasily.

  When David is done sucking Flip, he turns and looks at Chase, with a very odd look on his face. He looks like he doesn’t know where he is. He staggers, then turns back to the naked kids in the line. A knife is in his hand.

  The kids see the knife, it gleams in the dim golden light. They stay docile, almost with little half-smiles. David puts his hands over his ears, as if against some tremendous noise, mouth open, eyes closed. Then recollects himself, and begins cutting throats, standing behind each figure, grinning lacerations ear to ear, holding up the head by the hair if the body goes down too suddenly, too heavy and slack.

  Chase watches from the doorway, not quite nauseous, not recognizing the emotion that fills him up like ink.

  One of the children moans, another gasps, a whistle sound at the end of each breath. It’s interesting, the attitudes into which they have fallen. David hesitates, nudging aside an ankle with his shoe. He slashes the face of a boy. Crouching down, he castrates Flip, and places the product of this operation in the fat girl’s mouth. He cuts the eyes out of a blonde girl, and puts them where Flip’s penis and testes once lived, in the gashed-open red wound, which is something like a cunt.

  He wipes off the knife, and his bloody hands, on a t-shirt he’s picked up.

  They leave the building, leading out Ruby and Mark, who seem oblivious to what happened to their friends. There was a little winding river of blood beginning to flow out of the killing room; it seemed as if the floor was not quite level, from earthquake or shoddy construction. The river was slowly heading for the stairs.

  Chase is managing to refrain from any judgment of David’s behavior. He is unfit to think anything bad about the manifestation of Death. The rules have changed.

  A minimum of blood on him, David sits in the backseat with Ruby, fondling her, as the low-key, skinny Mark sits up in front. “You’re so pretty,” David murmurs. He kisses Ruby on the forehead. She’s not especially good-looking. She has a ring in one nostril, the letter S tattooed on her left shoulder. Brown hair with some green and pink.

  Ruby lets out a long sigh, nestling her head against David’s chest, as he holds her close.

  “I feel your heart beating,” he says. “You’re sweet.” He kisses her cheek, and holds her all the way home.

  Despite what his brain tells him, Chase has some difficulty driving, his legs are shaking so much it’s hard to give the car gas smoothly, and his foot seems to want to slam on the brakes. He does not know if David notices or not.

  FORTY-FIVE

  It was Flip’s blood. At the first surge of it into David’s fangs, everything radically changed, universes of colors and microscopic flamy atoms swirling in mathematically determined irregular nebulae, atoms that might be planets or the interior constellations of all reality, all bodies, all matter, these cheap plasterboard walls and this flesh, the water vapor suspended mixed with chemicals in the desolate air, the hamburgers and tacos on these teenagers’ breaths—David was suddenly on acid, Flip was on acid, David knew what it was from Olga back in 1969.

  The fat girl’s earlier blood diluted the effect somewhat, but he was determined to go through it, to ride the experience and see where it went. Before he had bit Flip he had had a terrible headache from putting out the energy for so much control. His hypnotic powers are not infinite; he had overextended himself. The fortunate thing is, so many people, once entranced, stop fighting it, and never try to fight it again, even as the spell may greatly weaken and wane.

  All this landscapeless floating, black dots over mountains of skulls. The ugly jolt-buzz of the same primitive, childish note hit again and again, flat lives of sticky concrete TV screens and the penis, penis again and again into the mouth, the other holes, the neck.

  In the backseat of the car, he sees all these buildings on fire, cherry-pink fires in the artificial electric night. Dead bodies moaning on the side of the road, crawling, skeletons burned black as if coated with oil.

  This breast belongs to a thirteen-year-old girl. No, it is an old crone. The rest of her body is crumbling, red and purple, rotting away. David stays outwardly calm. He was an actor. The easiest acting in the world is keeping a straight face.

  All he can remember of daylight is some scenes from overexposed, early silent films. Black and white, but really gray. White as if the earth is colliding with the sun.

  That night, that night. He believes he had an erection when he died. Justine came so close, so dark it was as if she was made of the darkness herself. He breathed out, he breathed in. Justine, in a white gown against a stormy sky, the sky rushing, fast-motion dark clouds against a sky of orange-red.

  The mountain of skulls. He tries to climb the mountain of gray-blue and ivory, sometimes bloody skulls. He’s dressed in a black suit, climbing the skulls as best he can, slipping, hurting his hands, panting, the skulls tumbling, no matter how long he climbs he cannot see the top of the ridge. Some of these faces are familiar. He tramples them, he is triumphant, he climbs up to a sterile garden, dark blue with a black sky and white moon. The sky comes right down so that David can reach up and touch it if he likes. It’s not enough.

  He gets out of the car and goes into the house, his arm around Ruby’s shoulders. Then he puts his hand in between her shoulder blades, pushes her in.

  FORTY-SIX

  What Keith often does is go driving, listening to loud music in the car. He stops someplace where he can either eat in the car, sit outside and eat, or take something portable home. These expeditions take him an hour or two, sometimes longer, depending on how far he roams.

  Justine likes to accompany him, after it gets dark. In any case, whether or not she is with him, he always orders for two or three. Then he eats the same thing the next day, at home. Or goes out again, and these untouched portions begin to pile up. Justine enjoys watching him eat. She likes feeling like a citizen of this urban sprawl, slightly sweaty, making an entrance, looking around at the other denizens of this restaurant, cabanita, bar and grill.

  Keith generally favors little self-contained units, like blackbean burritos, Northern Indian vegetable or lamb samosas, individual gourmet pizzas, Jimmy’s famous hamburger and fries, a grilled half-chicken Jamaican-style, or a Syrian lamb schwarma sandwich, with pickles and baba ghanoush. When Justine is with him, she likes to smell things, and so far she hasn’t had any ill effects from just tasting such delicacies as mango ice cream.

  Tonight they go to get Indian takeout. Keith puts the white sacks next to him on the front seat, and Justine goes into the back. The samosas and pakoras and mint chutney smell good, even with the windows down. They’re both kind of dressed up. It’s Friday night. Keith wears a linen suit, pale cream, a plum-colored shirt, a
nd black gloves over his bandaged hands. Justine, in the backseat, playing a part, wears a short apricot-colored dress, gold earrings, a gold necklace and bracelet, and raspberry-hued stockings and shoes.

  They cruise the boy hustlers, until Justine sees one she likes. As she opens the back door, her skirt rides up, intentionally, to show soft pale inner thigh. A garter belt, this means. The blond boy wears a baseball cap on backwards. He feels lucky. It’s possible he’s no older than fourteen. Tall for his age, and tan.

  “What’s your name?” Justine asks.

  “Dree.” He is smiling, wondering what is expected of him. He has a hard-on, and Justine touches it through his jeans. He sighs, and it takes a moment to get him to hold her gaze.

  She sucks the crook of his arm. They lift him out of the car, and leave him in an alley, seated next to a dumpster, leave him to sleep for an hour or two. Justine gets in the front seat, and Keith eats a samosa as he drives them home.

  Tamara and her boyfriend are coming over later on. Justine is hot and restless. She wants to be next to Keith. She’s excited. Nothing that ever happened in the past seems to matter as much as her eroticized relation to this man right now.

  Once home, they realize there’s forty-five minutes or so until the guests arrive. This new thing they have, the sex—what else is there to do? They don’t really have to get undressed. The blood beats black. Keith bites her, his breath spicy, ecstatic, bites her vulnerable neck.

  It feels to her like his cock rearranges her vagina, taking it in new directions, moving around whatever there is in her that might correspond to a living, human female’s womb. Justine is violently moved, and her secret passages tautly grip and twist and contort, but it leads to such a saturation of peace, a liquid peace, the wet suction in inner blackness leads to unspeakable bliss. What is like a cunt squeezes, convulses. She can’t embrace Keith tightly enough. She wants them to literally merge, their flesh to melt together, there to expire in a pool of shiny ruby blood, or what’s left after blood.