Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  Justine presses her cheek against the glass and opens her eyes. Smeary, floating, dark shapes linger in her vision for a while, descending, replaying themselves as she blinks. She goes out of the room. She glides down the hall.

  She takes a bath. The water makes a noise.

  In the bathtub, she soaks for nearly an hour. When she gets out, the water makes another kind of noise, an orderly splashing as her body’s volume creates an empty space, now filled. She turns on the light, and, once dry, gets dressed. She thinks of Keith while she dresses, wondering if what she puts on will please him.

  It’s odd to her, just for a moment, that there is this person whom she thinks of, with whom she is more or less sharing existence. There has never been someone like this before. Not like this. It makes her uneasy, wondering where he is, where he has gone. It’s a mystery to her.

  She used to see all these people, and she did not know them. There was no possibility she would ever get to know them. She would see them coming and going, and there was no way for her to understand what was in their souls. She might be a few inches away, and yet know nothing of how someone really lived. She didn’t want to know. She was indifferent, or insensitive—she did not know how to understand what was right in front of her, because she saw them only in terms of danger, or of satisfying her need.

  She faked things. She acted. She lied.

  All the people out there now, she’s seduced by them through Keith. Tamara, the doctor. All the people they come in contact with at restaurants, gas stations, bars. They’re all so full of life. Even in the electric lighting of the night, their flesh glows, golden and warm and red.

  Oh, she presses her fingers to her closed eyes, pressing on her eyeballs through the lids. She seeks forgiveness. Is it not as God willed it? If there is mercy, let there be mercy. It is so hard, so painful, to understand and accept the will of God.

  SIXTY-SIX

  It’s after 1:00 A.M. when he comes in. He finds the house full of music, a solemn chorus, Heinrich Schütz’s Mass for the Victims of the Black Death, from 1499.

  Keith comes to her on the couch, and tells her about his evening with Alonzo. The vegetarian dinner cooked by Alonzo’s girlfriend, Bridget. How Keith played, with concentration, one eternal note on the electric guitar.

  “Do you know what a wah wah pedal is?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I used to be the wah wah pedal king,” he says, smiling, and she joins his smile. “There was once this band called the Reverb Motherfuckers,” he continues. “They didn’t live up to their name. But if they had, that’s the kind of music I would like to make. I’d be a Reverb Motherfucker … in the highest, truest sense.”

  Does she get it? What image can this possibly form for her? He kisses her. He strokes her hair, the nape of her neck. The chorus stops.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks. “Did anything happen tonight?”

  “No. But … there was someone here the night before last. I heard someone.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I thought maybe I was wrong. I didn’t want you to stop what you were doing to me right then.”

  “Someone here, in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple enough. It was a creature, able to move silently, a creature of the night. Like me.”

  “Oh.” He waits. She is quiet for a long time.

  “I’m feeling very psychological,” she finally says. “I didn’t want to recognize it that night, but my powers have not deserted me. I knew what was happening. I knew he was here. And then he went away.”

  “You know this person?”

  She shakes her head, slowly. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

  None of this sounds good to Keith. It’s like she doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to know about it, but if someone came into the house this leaves, to his mind, a distinct flavor of danger in the air.

  “You see,” she says, thoughtfully, “I wanted nothing. All I needed was for the nights to begin and end. I was without desire, or hatred, or revulsion against my fate. I wasted my time. There was nothing special for me to do.

  “I was alone. I forgot, and I even forgot how I had learned how to forget. I never expected to recognize anyone. I would look at people’s faces, and I never expected to know anyone, I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular. Do you see? I was transparent, I was a shadow, and I told myself I wanted it like this. I was superior, I possessed wisdom, but I forgot what this wisdom was.

  “Whoever this creature is,” she says, “he knows me, he thinks he knows me. I felt this. I don’t know who it might be. Maybe it saw and heard enough, and it will stay away.”

  “Somebody from the past,” Keith says, and she shrugs. Yes. He wants to know more, but he doesn’t want to have to ask. It’s all so impossible, anyway. Everything.

  “I was imagining, on the long ride home in the car, our life together,” he says later on, soothingly, and she curls up even closer to him, in his embrace, interested, and he goes on. “You were saved, and we went to all the beaches in the world. We would lie in the sun and swim and laugh. Nothing could go wrong. At parties we got a little drunk, we laughed at special in-jokes and went back to the hotel and threw off our clothes.

  “Here in the U.S., we drive across country, through Arizona and New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, stopping to eat in roadside diners, to sleep in cheap motels. We are hypnotized by the vast open spaces,” he says, touching her, “we become connoisseurs of the subtle differences in the sky. We learn the back roads of Maryland and Georgia and North Carolina, we see rivers and forests and big trucks, factories and new cars, hold-ups, different police uniforms … and we sit on a picnic table in the shade, kissing each other, tasting french fries and catsup and salt. We run out of money. It’s okay. We get dumb jobs.”

  When he is silent for a while, Justine murmurs, “More,” in a voluptuous, drugged sort of voice.

  “We get off the plane in New York,” he says. “The sky is cloudy and gray. We take a cab to midtown Manhattan, and check into a hotel. It’s old. I tip the boy two dollars, and as soon as he’s gone we take off our clothes and get into the bed. Out the window we can hear cars honking, people shouting, gunshots …”

  “Yes,” Justine says. “We’re all alone. We could be in the desert, in a tent. Or on a boat.”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  It’s Wednesday afternoon. 2:00. Keith is asleep. Someone rings, at the front gate. He feels irritable. Too many people are showing up these days. It’s fucked.

  “Yes. Who is it?”

  “Devlin Spanswick. I want to ask some questions about Eric Zimmerman.”

  “You’re with the police?” Keith thinks: This is it. He remembers where the guns are from the three Hispanic thieves.

  “No. I’m a private detective. Can I come in?”

  “Just a minute,” Keith says. He throws on jeans and a shirt, fetches one of the handguns, the most appealing, the simplest—then he leaves it, and strolls out to the gate.

  The guy on the other side looks like an actor, with his tan and his white-blond hair. But then, lots of people look like that around here.

  “What do you want?”

  “You don’t want to let me in,” Devlin states. “Why not?”

  “Fuck yourself,” Keith says, not in a real unfriendly manner. He and this fellow understand each other. “I was asleep. So what do you want to know?”

  “Well, my friend Eric said he was going to talk to you, he was looking forward to it, and then suddenly he checks out of his hotel, leaves for parts unknown, no word to anyone…. This is all very unlike him, you see. Eric likes to let his friends know what he’s doing, every step of the way. If he isn’t writing, he’s on the phone. So I want to know: did he see you? Did he get an interview?”

  “Yeah. We talked. I thought, actually, we were
gonna talk some more.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “Venezuela? I don’t know. There seemed to be a lot of stuff he wanted to cover with Gilberto Reyes. Other than that, I have no idea.”

  “Did he say that to you? That he was going to see Reyes?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  It doesn’t feel to Keith like he murdered someone. It doesn’t even feel like he’s lying, right now. He yawns.

  “Up late last night?” Devlin inquires, with a grin.

  “Always.”

  “Well, this is my card.” Keith takes it from him. “If you think of anything, or if he contacts you, I’d appreciate it if you give me a call. The service will take a message twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Okay.”

  And there the matter is left. Keith recognizes, in the sunny day, a portent of doom. Nevertheless, doom-laden, he is able to relax and fall back asleep.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Chase and Sabrina sit together, facing the stage. Several of the life-size wooden figures stand there, in their glory, mute. It is late afternoon. David sleeps. The Knife Thrower. Spaceman. Bikini Girl.

  “He has told me it’s not going to be long,” Chase says. “He asked me this morning if I really wanted it, and I said yes. Immortality. He said that word. What about you? Come with me, please.” He turns to Sabrina. “I’m frightened. He said there are one or two more tests, then that’ll be it.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been having the weirdest dreams. He still takes blood from me, he took some the other night. I’m numb.”

  There is only one “guest” these days. It is Minh, the Vietnamese girl. She appears now, in a chauffeur’s uniform. Long black hair pinned up under the cap. She changes the scenery on the stage to a dark purple sky with blue stylized clouds, an oversized emphatic pale yellow moon. She activates one of the figures, as a test.

  The Knife Thrower says, “Red sky at night, unhappy in love.”

  Anguished, Chase says, quietly, “You must.”

  “Don’t you think,” Sabrina says, “that sometimes David is bigger or smaller, different times? Taller, shorter, thinner or more solid, strong. His body changes.”

  Does Chase understand? Did she speak aloud? She looks at his face but cannot tell.

  SIXTY-NINE

  In Orlando, Virginia Woolf remarks about Time: “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.” And: “Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most.”

  Justine is keenly struck by this.

  It feels like there are secrets between her and Keith, because of the matter of the “visitor.” He doesn’t seem to accept this as matter-of-facdy as she has. It is a sign, she thinks, a sign of something else. It’s not important in and of itself, the fact that another vampire is nearby, aware of them.

  She persuades Keith to tell her more about this new friend, the musician, Alonzo. She is fascinated that he is a Negro.

  “I had black friends in St. Louis,” he says, when he recognizes the focus of her curiosity.

  While he was over there, he met the next-door neighbors, out in the backyard. There was a blind guy, also black, who recited a Dodgers game, the radio broadcast, so that it was hard to tell if he was really remembering it, or just making it up.

  “Hershiser lays down a perfect sacrifice bunt. There is only one play—to first.”

  This guy’s companion was a gaunt white guy in a wheelchair, who never said anything, who seemed insensible until he suddenly reached out and snagged a baseball the blind man tossed in his direction, illustrating a catch an outfielder made.

  An old woman took care of them, Alonzo said. Justine wants to hear more about Alonzo’s girlfriend. What does she look like? She’s pretty. Oh.

  Keith drives them downtown. They find a suitable candidate, a drunken man who’s dropped his keys. The alcohol in the blood makes Justine sleepy. She would rather have skipped this one. Coming back to the car, in her short skirt, dazed, she feels ashamed before Keith. Ashamed of what she is.

  He’s kind. He wipes her mouth. She leans against him, and he pulls her in. The guy is still lying in the doorway.

  “I feel sick,” she says, as they drive away. “No, I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

  SEVENTY

  “No,” Olga says. “Please.” She is weeping, standing there in her shabby, stuffy little apartment. She’s put on flesh since she was a teenage girl.

  “You locked me up for twenty years,” David says. “I was buried there, inside that box.”

  “José wanted to kill you, like we did Mother,” Olga says. “I talked him into leaving you alone. The only way he’d do it was if we chained you in. I thought you’d just sleep, that you would shut down.”

  “I was kind to you,” David says.

  “You had me go down on my own mother!” Olga exclaims. Then she relapses into helpless sobs. “Oh God, please.”

  Chase is uncomfortable. He stands as a witness, a right-hand man. A stooge. He looks impassive, studying Olga, who is divorced, working retail, behind on all of her bills. Her ex-husband has custody of their two kids. She has been a Scientologist, and spent time with a Tibetan guru, in an ashram in the Rocky Mountains.

  “I want you to say you are sorry, for all those years I was locked in a closed box. That’s all I want, Olga; I want to know that you’re sorry, you have regrets.”

  “Im sorry. Please. ‘I’m so sorry.”

  “Write it down. Here. Write it down. “I”m sorry.’ And sign your name.”

  Sniffling, her face red, Olga writes I’m sorry, in blue ink on a yellow piece of note paper. She signs her name. Olga Roubatieff. Uncertainly, she puts down the pen.

  “Now eat it,” David says. “So that it’s part of your body, how sorry you are.”

  Unhesitatingly, Olga wads up the yellow paper and chews it, once it’s wet it comes apart, torn by her teeth. She swallows the scraps down.

  “There. Say I’m sorry’ once more.”

  She begins to mouth the words, as David catches her eyes full in his, her voice becomes inaudible; he reaches forward and pulls her head back by the hair, pulling her up straight. He unbuttons her pink blouse, just the lower buttons, below the bra. He snaps his fingers at Chase, and Chase steps in, bravely, the butcher knife there in his hand.

  David caresses Olga’s cheek as Chase opens her belly, making an incision and gashing her open to find the actual stomach, there amidst everything else. Chase cuts open the stomach-organ to find, there in brine and semi-solids, the chewed-up pieces of yellow paper, by now much the worse for wear.

  “Yes, I believe you. You are sorry, aren’t you?”

  He holds her up by the hair until she is dead. The tip of her tongue protrudes between her lips. Then he allows her to drop.

  “This blood is no good to me,” he says to Chase. “Come on now, move. Let’s go.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  As soon as Michelle’s mother gives her the money, Michelle conceives of paying fifty dollars back to Keith. She knows he doesn’t expect it, it will mean nothing to him, but it’s a gesture that has some appeal.

  She’s had a bad week. She had a yeast infection, then got in a thing with Tiff. It’s still going on. She spilled beer on Tiff, in front of some guys, later they called each other sluts, and now they’re cold to each other. It’s stupid really, but they haven’t yet made up.

  Michelle’s period was unaccountably late, by seven days. That’s always good for a laugh. Jesus. What a bunch of shit to have to think about, just when she’s probably been drinking too much and taking too many drugs. Not good.

  At least, since her head’s been shaved, it can grow out some other way. The mohawk was getting old.

  Visiting her mom is mostly a drag, but this time it r
eally paid off. She had just gotten some extra tax money, and she felt rich enough to give some to Michelle. Michelle paid all her overdue bills, and she still has a couple hundred dollars left.

  It’s ridiculous to throw some of it away trying to impress Keith, but she doesn’t like the idea that he thinks poorly of her. Why this should bother her she doesn’t know. Well, since he turned her away that time, she supposes she could just show up again, but then he’d really have the upper hand. It would be weak.

  This is much better. He’ll notice this.

  Also, Jason will enjoy it. He’s been wanting to see where Keith lives, just to know. It’s a night when there’s nothing special to do.

  Ken comes along. It’s a long drive. Ken is telling them about some book he’s read. Diary of a Slave, or something like that. No, it’s from the dominatrix’s point of view.

  “Anyone can become a sex slave,” he says. “You get to like it. You start to dig the pain.”

  Michelle is not so sure, though she thinks it’s true that anyone’s will can be broken. If it’s done with enough skill. They smoke a spliff. Jason drives. He drives well when stoned. Careful and safe.

  Saint Agatha are off on a mini-tour, so Michelle hasn’t seen Fred for a couple of weeks. They’re just going up to San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, and Seattle, then coming back down.

  Fred sent her a postcard, from Portland, with a picture of a skull. It just said, “So far, so good. See you. Fred.” She likes him more when he’s away. The others refer to him as her boyfriend, and it’s okay, ‘cause he’s not here to get in the way. There’s no pressure or anything.