Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  Tonight, she wants to see the woman Keith lives with, to check her out. Michelle imagines this person as someone who may be embarrassingly old. That will be good. She’ll see, and know, and Keith will know that she knows.

  Even if it’s some beautiful movie star, Michelle looks forward to discomfiting him a bit. He’ll have to explain himself, after she’s gone.

  There is no problem getting in the gate.

  “Come inside,” Keith says, as they get out of the van. He greets them, friendly enough.

  They all go in for a beer. Keith introduces Justine. She is not what Michelle expected. Michelle introduces Jason and Ken. Beers are produced.

  Jason goes on about how much he admired Keith’s work with SMX. He tells Keith that he would love to have him be a guest or guest host on his cable show, The Darkest Night.

  Ken catches Michelle’s eye, and smiles. She wonders if he is about to say something to offend everyone, for that is his way. He needs to draw attention to himself. Lately he’s been known to bring up the Holocaust, how the six-million figure is all wrong, it’s way too high. That’s just a start.

  Michelle drinks some more of the bottled beer, then remembers what she came for. Even though it feels awkward, she breaks in.

  “I want to pay you back this money,” she says, and hands Keith the fifty bucks.

  He says, “Thanks,” and puts it in his pocket. Michelle feels ridiculous, but it’s all right.

  When they leave, once they’re outside the gate, someone waves them down. It’s a man.

  “I want to help you,” he says, into the driver’s window, to Jason, and Jason lets him into the van. The man accompanies them home. A car follows, with another man and a Vietnamese girl.

  David speaks to the goth kids, one by one. He comes into their house. He intends to take them with him, to populate his set. It’s nice that they don’t mind when he kills Brian, who is up with his computer. They all want to be vampires themselves, they think.

  Brian’s head is removed from his body. He’s put into a trunk, on top of his papers and stuff. This is just like they’ve always thought the world works, and now it does. Sacrifice and mystery, ancient magical beings in the night. The primitive, holy truth of the blood.

  The spell. The sky and the earth. Severed limbs and transformation. Transubstantiation. It’s here. Despite whatever smothered misgivings they may fleetingly experience, whatever disquiet, it’s here.

  It’s come.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  As soon as Michelle would start to cry, when she was a child, she would go to a mirror to watch herself. At first, and for a long time, she couldn’t look into her own eyes, and hold it, without being freaked out, but gradually she trained herself to hold the reflection of the gaze as though it was a stranger’s. She would talk to herself, and she didn’t like to watch her mouth, until it came to seem as though the girl in the mirror spoke, she could dissociate herself from the image, from the words.

  She was a burden on her mother, an only child … she was unwanted, it seemed, and her mere existence made it harder for her mom to get dates. Michelle learned to be quiet, to stay in her room all by herself. The last thing she wanted was to be in the way. No matter how she effaced herself, however, she ruined things for Brenda. She made the boyfriends uncomfortable, she didn’t like them enough, they never thought she was an affectionate child.

  When she was twelve or so, these really strange feelings would come over her, and when Brenda would go out on a date, leaving her alone, Michelle would hold ceremonies, she lit candles and painted her face with white clown paint and black lipstick, runic symbols from Elf Quest comic books, drawn on herself with black and red grease crayons from the Magic Shoppe.

  She walked out on the street like this a few times, and people would cross the street to avoid her. She felt like she had powers, but mostly she sat on the floor in front of the mirror and talked to herself, she would feel like she was evil and strange.

  Any powers she possessed worked only at night. During the day, in school or whatever, it was like she was always putting on a major act. People only really saw you, your real face, if you wanted them to. Otherwise they just knew this mask.

  There began to be open discord at home. She got in trouble for cutting school, and flunking out, and it just went on from there. She was in rehab for a while. It was stupid. You just said what they wanted you to say. You broke down and cried, on cue.

  She never thought that much about being a vampire, though she loved Anne Rice. Clive Barker was better, though he was so gross. She liked that feeling of being shocked, seized, of there being no way to deny that you were at the scene of the crime.

  In this one Tales from the Crypt comic, this guy was like a vampire, only instead of blood he had to have this gland from bodies that were young and fresh. Only, as time went by, he needed it more and more often, so at the end he called for a pizza, figuring a pizza delivery boy would be about as young and fresh as could be, coming right to your door.

  How weird to find out that Keith was living with a vampire! He was totally, David said, her slave. David said, Do you want to do it? and she knew what he meant, it sort of surprised her that he’d pick her, but she nodded, sure, she might as well. Somebody once said to her that doing heroin was like committing suicide, you got the feeling, without actually having to die. Michelle has thought about suicide and death a great deal, and she’s convinced she’s not afraid, as long as it doesn’t hurt.

  “You’ll wake up in three days,” he says. “Like Jesus Christ.”

  She nods to him, in the dark, heart beating, but staying cool, a blank face, like she knows. It’s important not to show weakness, and if she shows vulnerability, inevitably, and fear, she doesn’t know.

  She takes a deep breath, and lets it out, and is staring at the ceiling where it’s textured like the surface of the moon. Like a close-up of the pores of the skin, the skin of someone old, all ugly and rough. Someone like that, breathing, in an old folks’ home, forgotten and alone. It’s dark, and everyone working there is on drugs, shooting up in the hall closets, the call-lights disconnected and turned off. Low laughter. They’re just waiting for you to die. They don’t care. They don’t even know your name.

  It’s like there are bandages everywhere, you’re covered in bandages, your face, no that’s not you it’s someone else.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  “You see,” David reveals, “I have finally located her. The one who made me what I am.”

  He looks at Sabrina.

  “If you think I am so evil—she is a thousand times more evil than I am.”

  “She is a monster,” Sabrina says. This response pleases: it’s an example of why he likes having her around. She will say things to him.

  “Yes, truly a monster. What should I do?”

  “Destroy her.”

  Up on the stage, Minh shows Ken a chalk mark on the floor. He is dressed as an SS officer, in black, an armband with a swastika, one of those caps. He looks quite severe. Jason is fiddling with his video camcorder. Tiff is hanging around. Michelle is elsewhere, dead.

  ”Do you still love Chase?” David asks.

  Sabrina does not answer at once. Then she says, “The things he’s done, you’ve made him do them.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’ve simply allowed him to satisfy his deepest desires.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Sabrina is lovely, visibly tortured by these thoughts.

  “Do you still love him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe you,” he says, as though he does not. He brings her fingers up to his lips. A gesture. A kiss.

  Sabrina trembles. She feels weak. To fight this feeling, she says, “Will you do it?”

  “Will I do what?”

  “Will you destroy her? This monster, this other vampire—I suppose she must be thousands of years old.”

  David looks at her. He thinks then, in a moment, of Justine. What could he do, to make her turn her
head away? She’s too evil. It fills him up like molten silver turned to lead. Crucify her, make her watch as her lover is castrated. He could cut her violently into pieces, for hours, and never get the answer why. Head over here, legs over there, torso, arms thrown over there. Would she have the same unintelligible look in her eyes as all the rest?

  Then he would know. Or … it would be the worst deception, the worst trick of all time. He can’t think. It’s too huge.

  He gets to his feet and goes up onto the stage, to Minh, his golden-skinned pet. She’s sensitive to his mood.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  1969. “So, what you’re telling me is: you don’t know where Suzie is, she’s been gone for three days, all you know is that she’s probably somewhere with Alison, right? Am I following you so far?”

  ”Yeah.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Steve asked.

  “What’s the problem? Wow. That’s truly cosmic. You know Alison, right? You’ve met her?”

  “Once or twice,” Steve says, unwilling just as a matter of principle to play into his little brother’s scene.

  Jon says, “And so, your wised-up, Peace Corps, fucked-up, world-weary, seen-it-all opinion is, like, Alison is a rational person?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Steve lights a cigarette, looking out the window. “But … so Suzie went off with Alison, what are the diremost possibilities? They’re probably romping naked in a pig farm pigfuckers’ commune somewhere in Sonoma or Cucamonga or something. They’re singing backup vocals to some lunatic even as we speak. So what?”

  Jon, crazy curling hair falling into his face as he hunts in the ashtray for that roach he just knows awaits discovery, he finds it, aha, knowing he has big brother Steve’s attention now, says, “Plausible scenario, man. Undeniable. Except the truth is more, uh, sinister or something than that.”

  “Sinister, no less. Explain yourself, Watson. What is significant about the dog that didn’t bark? Ah, exactly that. Why didn’t the dog bark? That’s the key to the whole case.”

  Steve is bullshitting, but hooked. Ever since he returned from the Peace Corps, down in Guatemala, he’s been so serious, so political, trying to write a book that will topple the evil empire.

  “Well put, kemo sabe” Jon drawls, and takes a hit from the roach. This is its best part. Steve accepts the roach clip, inhales. It might be, probably is, nothing, but Jon is sincerely worried. “I checked with Alison’s roommates, down in Venice, and they said she and Suzie were going to try to be in this vampire flick some weirdos are shooting up in Laurel Canyon. Karen said that these people are really into it, it’s like some motherfuckers out of the Devil House in Haight-Ashbury. Some bikers are in it, Satan’s slaves … that part I don’t like, I don’t like the idea—which I can visualize all too fucking clearly—Alison saying sure, we’ll go topless, why not, everything is everything, and Suzie is loaded and goes along, and these bikers get a little bored between tokes and go for a little gang bang out behind the swimming pool or something, I don’t know, it’s supposed to be sort of a mansion … I just think Suzie might be amongst foul and treacherous companions, that’s it.”

  “In a nutshell?” his brother asks, teasingly.

  “In a nutshell, yeah,” Jon says.

  “Like a little squirrel,” Steve muses. Then he comes back, in a few moments, with: “Look, Suzie’s not stupid. She doesn’t do everything Alison does. She didn’t think she had to get arrested for shoplifting, just because Alison did, in order to fully check out that scene. And … she didn’t work as a topless go-go dancer, just ‘cause Alison did, right? And didn’t you once allude to the fact that Alison has taken acid some number of times over fifty, that’s five-oh, and Suzie hasn’t blown her mind anything like that. Etcetera. Suzie didn’t fuck the drummer of Iron Butterfly or try to climb in a sixth-floor hotel window to fuck Jim Morrison—that’s all Alison’s trip.”

  “Yeah Steve, check check and doublecheck. But there’s an attraction factor here you haven’t reckoned into your otherwise sterling calculations.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Suzie’s in the drama department at UCLA. She harbors thespic ambitions. Ophelia, Hamlet. Mina Harker, Dracula’s Revenge. Suzie Breck, her name in lights. She could go for that.”

  “You might be onto something. So how does anyone find out where this alleged shit is taking place?”

  “There’s this crashpad … Karen said she thinks some extras have been recruited, or, like, chosen there. Somebody there should know where to find the set of Dracula’s Revenge.”

  “Is that what it’s really called?” Steve asks.

  ”I don’t know,” Jon admits, with a smile. “Dracula ‘69”?

  “Okay. You’ve convinced me. Let’s book.”

  Steve is taller, darker hair, strictly speaking better looking, but his hair is shorter, he’s much less hip than Jon. Steve is twenty-seven, Jon twenty-one.

  Steve drives, while Jon flicks a Zippo lighter on and off, telling him where to go, talking more about Suzie and her friend Alison. Suzie is Jon’s girlfriend, since their sophomore year in high school. She’s pretty, unaffected, maybe a little impressionable or innocent, open to be burned, but not really to the point where it’s like she just fell off a turnip truck, she can surprise you … it’s just that it’s fun to be open, ready to be amazed, and there still seem, somehow, so many never before known possibilities in the air.

  It’s late afternoon. The day is peach-colored, then burnt apricot and mashed raspberry-bronze, light reflecting off a million cars’ glass windshields and rearview mirrors and chrome, sunglasses on sunglasses off, buy a Coke, smells like bodies frying in a special huge frying pan, fleshy parts mixed with crashed automobiles and smog-spice and desert bones of a destroyed forgotten pre-Aztec city, sweat and nerves and fuck-sweat and dead bright green birds, they might be parrots starring in movies, bright green and crimson and marigold and cerise.

  The day is dying. In the crashpad they’re playing the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Who is this guy? His name’s Ray. He says, “I don’t know, I don’t know. Really man, I don’t know anything about it. Talk to Olga, if she comes round. Olga knows, I think.”

  “Where’s Olga?” Steve asks, not pushing it too hard, almost as if he feels some affection for Ray. Ray’s a creepy guy with a beard and darty eyes, some half-assed Southern felon accent. The jailbait teenyboppers are an unattractive, jumpy, cross-eyed lot. Jon’s checking them out, giving away a few cigarettes, while Mick Jagger starts to sing some song Jon doesn’t recognize, it’s strange that he’s never heard this one before. Maybe it just sounds different in here. Or it’s on the wrong speed.

  ”Olga doesn’t come by every night, man. Sometimes, I mean, to look for new talent and like that, but we might not see her for, I don’t know, a week or two.” This from a lank-haired bone-thin young man in a fading paisley shirt, gold lame scarf and magenta velveteen bell-bottoms, sandals and dirty feet. He keeps pushing his greasy hair out of his eyes. “Uh,” he says, privately to Jon, “I know where she lives. I’m lonesome, though—you ever hear that? Robert Johnson, the blues-player, he called up his record company guy one night and said I’m lonesome—hey, I’m lonesome about twenty bucks. Comprende?”

  “Yeah, man. You know where Olga lives.”

  “Sure do,” he says, smiling.

  “Okay,” Jon says. “Twenty bucks when we meet her. What’s your name?”

  “Mine? Dodge. Dodge City. You know, like out West.”

  Jon reveals the plan to Steve, who’s not crazy about giving money to this asshole. Especially since: is it a sure thing that Olga knows where this vampire movie is being made?

  “You’ll see for yourself, dude.”

  In the confines of the car, even with the windows rolled down, it becomes apparent, if they missed it before, that Dodge stinks. Steve makes him for a speedfreak ex-con. Dodge keeps drumming his fingers and diddy-bopping and twitching and babbling along with the AM car radio, bubblegum shit l
ike Tommy James and the Shondells, Dodge asking them if they can think of any other names that start with the letter Z.

  “Zorro, I know a guy named Zorro, Zenon, that’s for real, Zed, that means zero in England I’m not kidding …”

  “Zora,” Steve says, and Dodge is puzzled, shut up by this for a moment or two. “Zora Neale Hurston,” Steve elucidates, but this elucidation fails to convince.

  They drive on. It’s dark now. The air is sticky and purple and lavenderish and shades of brown. Atmospheric smut on everything that lives.

  ”You sure you got twenty bucks? You wouldn’t try to burn me, would you? You look too Christian for that kind of shit, brother, but these days beauty is barely skin deep—ugliness cuts all the way to the bone. Man, you wouldn’t believe some of the ugliness I seen.”

  “I’ll believe anything,” Steve says.

  “No you won’t,” Dodge says, with a kind of mean leer, “You won’t believe Count Dracula if he decides to drink your tomato juice straight out of the can.”

  “He does that, huh?” Jon says.

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  It’s a mansion, sure to God, and Dodge says this isn’t where Olga lives. I jumped ahead in time and space, he says. This is the actual movie location. Security is kinda lax. But this is what you want, dig?

  Out of the car, approach the mansion.

  “Who is it?” says someone.

  “Jeremy,” says Dodge. “It’s Jeremy and some friends. What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” the young woman’s jaded voice says, without interest. “Nobody’s here yet. You bring anything to smoke?”

  “Jeremy” smiles, produces one bent yellow joint. Inside the mansion, all kinds of big klieg lights have been temporarily installed, the floor is a bungle in the jungle of crisscrossed cords.