Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  This discourse, Chase realizes, has been directed to Mark, and Mark understands. David pats Mark on the shoulders, and says, “Take off your clothes.” Mark nods his head and complies. Without anything being said, he gets down on his hands and knees. In a position of submission, expectant, skinny frail tattooed body and bleached lusterless dead hair.

  David holds, horizontal, on his fingertips, like an Egyptian offering at a sacred ceremony, his precious sword. His sharp, finely balanced, Confederate officer’s sword.

  Chase accepts it from him, hefts it. This is a test. He remembers David explaining to him once that when the Ku Klux Klan first started, they wore the white sheets “to frighten the Negroes, who were very superstitious at that time.” The white sheets and hoods transformed the night riders into the ghosts of the Confederate dead. Yet David says he had nothing against blacks, and that in fact he has never spent any time in the deep South.

  The part that bothers Chase the most is Mark’s voluntary, passive acquiescence in all this. Proving himself as a predator is one thing, he knows he has to do it, to rise to the occasion, but what is Mark doing? How can he … commit suicide, at his age, in this way?

  Mark is a sacrifice. Chase, trembling, takes a deep breath, and prays for whatever athletic prowess and strength he still possesses to guide him through, in glory, like Rameses or Thutmose, a warrior-pharaoh, the incarnation of the god.

  Thwunk! Oh no, it’s not going to come off with one stroke, there must be a trick to it, a vertebra to aim at, he was supposed to just naturally know. Tunk! He’s already tired, and Mark has rolled onto his side, his position isn’t so ideal, but Chase now hates him, he brings up all his frenzy to win, to live, to survive, and the head rolls free—blood flying up everywhere, Chase finds it all over his face, his hands, soaked through his shirt.

  Now Ruby. David pulls up her hair, to expose the nape of her neck, as she kneels, wobbly, weak. Some forgotten info-bit—oh yeah, in the French Revolution, the guillotine, the hair would dull the blade. Chase does much better this time.

  “Kiss her,” David says, holding up the severed head by the hair, and Chase is ready to, David laughs and Chase finds himself fondling Ruby’s head in his own two hands, it’s fascinating, he feels an interest and attraction that he never felt when she was alive, he is suffused with the fearlessness and lust of a demon, or of Satan, as he kisses the dead mouth and touches his own living hot tongue to the dead piece of interestingly foul meat between her lips. He loves this head.

  Sabrina must never know. When he becomes a vampire, he will not do such things, but these are his initiation rites, and he must seize this power beyond all human understanding, seize it or forever fall, and he is finding it in him to dare the transfiguration, his fear he will discard forevermore.

  Later on, putting Mark and Ruby into black plastic bags, his breathing troubles him, his heart seems to beat like each muscle-clench will be the last one. He has to stop for a while, he knows it’s just nerves, there’s no way he’s going to have a heart attack and drop dead before the change.

  He breathes regularly, he calms himself, he is okay. He takes a break and has a cup of tea before coming back down to finish his job.

  The sun comes up and hurts his eyes as he loads up the trunk of the car. Inside, Sabrina says, “Where are you going? What happened to your little pal?”

  She knows, Chase thinks. And what has she been doing? David fucks her, and she likes it. If she cannot stand where this is going, then commit suicide, he thinks. She’s weak. She does not comprehend.

  His hands are shaking, but this will pass. The blood is washed off, but Chase is not and never will be clean again.

  FIFTY-ONE

  She wants him to do everything to her. She doesn’t want to miss any possibility of indulgence in the flesh. These nights, they are in a mood of constant excitation, their genitals respond to the momentary expression on a face, the tone of a voice. Every nuance between them is sexual. The music Keith has on when she wakes up, the way he turns his head to gaze at her as she comes into his room—pure sex.

  Justine is jealous of his body, she wants him to do things with her he never did with Renata or anyone else. She has never known a male this intimately, and it fascinates her, there is a mad intoxication in it, a joy in being wanton, of being, to her mind, his whore.

  After all, she has long been accustomed to regarding herself as evil, as living in a state of continuous sin. Yes, undoubtedly, at times there has been a perverse pleasure in this. And there have been times when she has lain with mortal men, for often they have been very attracted to her, in a sexual way, perhaps even the more so when they know what she is.

  But never before has she so wanted to play the whore, and to so indulge herself in a man’s body, to know him everywhere, to have him enter her and discharge in every hole, she swallows his seed as though, like they used to say of the weasel, she might conceive via the mouth.

  She entertains the dark fantasy that she will pierce her flesh with a knife, forming wounds which he might thrust into and then heal with his semen, she could give birth to who knows what writhing demons, slick wet glistening red and blue-black.

  However, even as she has become sensitized to pleasure, so too has she become liable to pain. She tries to cut herself, and it hurts, sharply, it takes an effort on her part to unfocus it, and it seems that the wound closes more slowly than it would have shortly before. She is changing, unknowably, and she dares hope, with unbelievable foolishness, for some sort of a crazy miracle, she does not allow herself to think it through.

  But then, the next night, upon rising, she tries an experiment. Coldly, apart from Keith, she drives a knife right through her hand. She feels it, it hurts, but it’s not nearly as severe as it ought to be, were she human, were this mortal flesh.

  “What did you do to yourself?” he asks, and she shrugs, she does not respond to him as she has.

  She wills herself to feel nothing for him, to see him as ordinary, banal. She pictures him dead. An hour passes, though, and somehow it comes back, some small movement on his part sparks it, the way he looks at her then, so calm, and she thinks, “How beautiful he is.” Her pierced hand begins to throb, and freshly bleed, as she puts her arms around his neck.

  They fit their bodies together, familiarly, as if it is the most natural thing in the world.

  She wears him out. If his cock is not inside of her, she is touching it, or sucking it, coaxing it, reddened and chafed, to rise once more before dawn. It sometimes seems to her that the cock has its own personality, its will, separate from Keith.

  “Black is my true love’s heart,” he says, with a little smile, and he has some of her mysterious black substance on his finger, holding it up for her to see before he sucks it off. Nothing of hers is unlovable to him, he seems to have said. She embraces him as hard as she can, rolling on top of him, kissing him tongue to knowing tongue.

  FIFTY-TWO

  On an impulse, Keith calls long distance, to New York. Pacific Time, it’s 3:30 P.M. Part of it is he’d like to let Michael know that he’s all right. They haven’t spoken since Keith was in rehab, more than a year ago. Before he got out, went back on heroin, because he wanted to, and then a month or two later ran into Justine.

  He flexes his fingers. It’s hard to understand, but they don’t seem to be as bad.

  “Yeah?”

  “Michael, this is Keith.”

  “Jesus. So I guess you’re not dead then, right?”

  “Not yet.”

  They’re laughing together, the old rapport immediately there. Michael can read his voice.

  “What’re you doing? Shit. Are you still in L.A.?”

  “Yeah. I’m in this relationship. It’s kind of different, a different scene.”

  “Rumor has had it, motherfucker, that you’d snuffed this mortal coil. A guy came around, a writer—have you heard about this? He’s doing Renata’s biography, and he’s been trying to track you down.”

  “Yeah,�
� Keith says, noncommittally. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the guy.”

  ”Really? Why not?”

  “I don’t want him to write his fucking book.”

  “Oh.” Michael pauses. “Listen, I gave him the name of that doctor you saw. Does she know where you live?”

  “I don’t think so,” Keith lies. To change the subject, he says, “What are you up to? What’s the latest project? It’s been a while since I’ve read any of the alternative press. Though actually, now that I think of it, I know a girl who writes for The Darkest Night”

  “Goth-death shit, right?”

  “That’s what she led me to believe.”

  “Actually, man, I’m working for a publisher now. Designing book covers. I take the subway and wear a tie.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, Shawn’s brother knew the guy, and he liked the artwork for our CDs and a couple of others I did.”

  “How is Shawn?”

  “She’s great. We’re married now, you know.”

  This is the first Keith’s heard. More on this subject, and he feels increasingly removed, although he doesn’t want to, after the initial brotherly recognition.

  “Also,” Michael says, “I’m going to be working on an album for Ghost, you remember them? I’d love it if you’d come and help me out. They just said they want it to be sort of like Pink Floyd. Spacey, slow buildups. You could twirl knobs and program some stuff, if that sounds cool. I’m supposed to go into the studio in about a month. Any ideas you’ve had floating around … well, this is a small label, but for some reason they seem inclined to let people do whatever they want.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Keith says.

  “Tell me about this relationship,” Michael says, in a little while. “What’s her name?”

  “Justine.”

  “Is she French?”

  “Yeah. But she’s been in America for a long time.”

  ”Do you live together?”

  “Yeah, we do. She’s in the other room right now, asleep.” Keith is uneasy and restless when he gets off the phone. He is not sure Justine will understand. But he will tell her, he knows, even if it makes her jealous and unhappy. Does he want to make her unhappy? He doesn’t know. It’s impossible to know if one’s own motives are pure.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Chase talks to Sabrina, in her bedroom. It’s funny how all the rooms have changed their appearance, how the commonplace has turned untrustworthy, unreal. Somehow, more out of the old habit of disputation than from genuine conviction, leaving unsaid all that lies so heavy on them both, he has ended up talking about Raskolnikov, though on any kind of close examination his situation and Raskolnikov’s do not match up well at all.

  “Of course you remember—how Raskolnikov pondered the hypothetical problem of how if the killing of one despicable old woman stood in the way of a Napoleon seizing his destiny, why then, is not the potentially great man called upon to act, to do it, sweep the obstacle out of his way?”

  “That didn’t work out so well then for Raskolnikov, did it? He was paralyzed afterwards. He found himself simply an axe-murderer, hiding in an attic room, afraid to get out of bed. Not so glorious, that.”

  “Yes, I know. But he had to try. And remember, even the late Tolstoy was frightened of death. Near the end he said, ‘What does it matter, what I have accomplished, if it all has to end in death?’”

  Sabrina replies, “Everyone has their moments of weakness. Tolstoy was human, all too human, and he was an open book, he hid nothing. He freely admitted his natural fear of the unknown. But… what if someone said to you, you will live, but the price of your continued life will be that a hundred Chinese people on the other side of the world will be tortured to death. Would you say, ‘Yes, kill them, I want to live’? What if it was a hundred children, here in America, and you had to stare into the face of each one? Would it be worth it? Would that be acceptable to you?”

  Chase cannot answer, cannot speak.

  Sabrina’s hand is shaking as she brings a filtered cigarette up to her mouth. She has started smoking again, after having quit for fifteen years. She looks good, a sort of dark glamour exuding from her eyes, even if she is feeling the strain.

  In the oversized living room, the carpenters are working on constructing a stage to David’s specifications. The wooden life-size figures have been brought up from the basement, even if they have no function as of yet. They stand about haphazardly, staring witlessly, seeming at times curiously animate, as if containing some unknown form of intelligence, or consciousness, as though at the proper moment, yes, they can move.

  Chase and Sabrina survey the work, and study the figures, neither of them exactly sure how it will all look when done.

  She tries to comfort Chase, who seems tormented, but she cannot bring herself to offer him much affection right now. If she could say, “It’s all right,” or “I understand,” but either of these seems false, and they are becoming, every day, more and more, strangers moving apart.

  Idly, as a way of avoiding everything else, they speculate, not for the first time, as to how old David really is. Like “tourists,” which they are not. They are far from that.

  David has given conflicting accounts. Once, in front of both of them, he said that he had been a druid, a Celtic ceremonial priest. Another time, however, he alleged that he had seen the Egyptian pyramids when they were first built, and had worshipped Amun-Re. Now Sabrina reveals that he told her he was first bitten in Romania, as a traveler, in 1695.

  And, supposedly, he was an actor in silent films. The truth may well be something never alluded to or discussed. They cannot tell.

  The workers are putting up painted scenery. Several different backdrops, to be slid into place by means of a lever and some machinery.

  Sabrina and Chase run out of things to say to each other, and each, separately, for a few long moments, apprehends the sadness of this. The lack of words. Words for which there are no use.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The air is metallic and worn out, old air recirculated in the warm city’s endless strips. Police helicopters hover, ominous. Eric looks up, then gazes around him, at all these beautiful or semi-beautiful, self-conscious, lightly clad bodies. He finishes the Thai lunch, extremely hot coconut curry shrimp. Devlin, his buddy the detective, has furnished him with the telephone numbers, the addresses, and since one of them is known to be Dr. Rothschild’s boyfriend, the other one, J. Durand, looks like the best shot. Devlin says he called it, a man answered. Yeah, it sounded the right age and so forth.

  Devlin smokes a cigarette now, dropping the ashes on his dirty plate. He’s telling some story about when he used to be a cop. After five years on the force, his blond good looks led him to try acting. Now he’s more or less unemployed. The detective business is in a slump.

  Eric’s hardly listening. A black car pulls up to the curb, like a hit man’s car. The Hispanic guy looks like a hit man, like gazing into his shades would be the last thing you’d ever see. Lost in his own introspections, Eric only responds when Devlin reaches the end of his story, the conclusion being: “I told myself, I looked at myself in the mirror and said, Get a grip. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last.”

  “Sound advice.”

  ”Yeah. All you can do is hope for the best. Last night I stopped for a car crash, on the exit ramp from the Santa Monica freeway. Everybody was kind of high on it, you know? Shit, this black guy and this Vietnamese family, they had blood on them, but no one was hurt too bad. The radio was playing, and the lighting was good, it looked good—everybody was taken out of their ordinary existence. They were so considerate of each other, so thoughtful, waiting for the police.”

  “Yeah,” Eric says. “It was a social event.”

  Nearby, where he parked, there’s this abandoned children’s playground, surrounded by chain-link fence, a locked gate, cement. All these brightly painted saguaro cacti, made out of iron, or steel, in different sizes so you could
climb on them, hang, play. Painted green, red, yellow, the paint now partly scuffed off to show silver, the remaining color dull, blackened in spots.

  As he drives, patient, past palm trees and thronged cars, parking lots of malls, a dull day that somewhere else you’d say it’s about to rain, Eric is thinking about Renata, it’s like once again she’s slipped away. He can’t imagine her. Sometimes she seems very real to him, not only when staring at her pictures, but at other times, he’ll suddenly feel like he knows how she felt, or how she would feel about something if she was here.

  It’s no surprise to anyone that he should feel haunted by her, or in love, obsessed, building a composite picture from all these tantalizing, ultimately mysterious pieces of the story of her life. He spends hours replaying one of her commercials, or going over and over some footage of her that was never cut, Renata topless, wearing only a kind of g-string swimsuit bottom, her face going through real emotions, there as she thinks about whatever was in her mind as the sun shone down on the Canary Island beach. As some woman fixed her hair, painted her lips.

  It’s been a year since Eric and Julie stopped seeing each other. Once in a while they still talk on the phone, but there are no plans to get together again, not even to share a meal. Traveling as he does, Eric has a number of “phone-pals,” male and female, whom he very rarely if ever actually sees. It can seem like an intimate friendship, because he can say anything to them, and vice versa, or it can seem lonely and forlorn, as if the voices exist only in his head.

  For several months, it’s seemed more and more like it’s him and Renata, like they’re bound together in some way. It seems more pure, since he can never have her; he feels virtuous, as though he is devoted to her spirit in an unselfish, unsullied way. If he has masturbated while studying images of her naked body, this is only human. He means it as an homage. Could he have the opportunity, he would worship her, he would adore her, kiss her feet and lick her ass, he would be her servant, if she wished to she could pee in his mouth, he’d drink it down. He’s never worshipped anyone in this fashion in real life, but he wishes he could.