Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  Steve and Jon poke around, not knowing what they’re looking for exactly, not knowing if they’re engaged in productive behavior or not. Where’s Suzie? Secondarily, whither Alison?

  At about midnight, a few more people show up, and Jon questions some of them discreetly. They’re wary, a little suspicious of Steve, of narcs and undercover pigs as a general concept, a hit or two of halfway decent pot and this fades away, Jon is likable enough, yes they think Suzie has been here, sure, Susan Breck, like the shampoo.

  The stars arrive, and Suzie is clinging to the arm of the handsome devil who is undoubtedly the leader of this pack. Steve thinks if she doesn’t want to leave with Jon he himself is going to abstain from further involvement however tangential and just split. He’s tired of this scene, the mystery is solved. Suzie’s a free woman, she can do whatever she likes.

  “Heard you’re making a movie?”

  “Yeah, you might say that.” Suzie seems oddly somnolent on this guy’s arm, spaced, completely aloof to the cats she used to know in a previous life.

  Jon says, “Hey, Earth to Suzie. You tripping or what?”

  The leader of the pack guy says, “Are you fellows actors?”

  “No,” Steve says, a little distance away, drawing attention now. ‘We’re not actors.”

  “We’re, like, reporters,” Jon says.

  “Yeah?” David says. “Freelance? Well, we don’t want any publicity. We’re having some technical problems that we need to work out.”

  “Like what?” says Steve, and David smiles at him, he’s really noticing both brothers now.

  “Some stuff doesn’t show up too well on film. Twenty-five or thirty-five frames per second, whatever it is, it’s not fast enough to contain a certain vibration, I guess that’s what you’d call it… it just shows up as a kind of indistinct blur.”

  “Special effects?”

  “Who are you guys? Why are you here? I don’t really like having unauthorized visitors to the set.”

  “Yeah,” says this other girl, really zoned out but somehow feral, caressing Suzie’s hair, a slightly overweight, sluttish, Slavic-cheekboned chick in a short black dress. Her bare white fleshy legs gleam, her thighs seem damp and hot, Steve is turned on and repulsed at the same time.

  “Are you Olga?” he asks.

  “I was a few minutes ago,” she says. “Ask David now: he’s God. He’s Lucifer and Krishna and Osiris and Mick Jagger in an unmarked grave. We love you.”

  “What did you give Suzie?” Jon asks David, still trying to get Suzie’s attention, failing, concerned.

  “She’s meditating,” David says. “I’ve been biting her cunt for two nights now—she can’t get over how come it hurts so good.”

  The words stun like sudden bee-stings or lashes from an invisible whip. Jon is rendered speechless—he’s so used to nonviolence, he’s absorbed it from high school on, he’s not ready for an ugly confrontation, he stares at David but he doesn’t know what to do. He looks at Suzie.

  Steve breaks in, “Where’s Alison?”

  “Deader’n a doorknob,” utters Olga, with malice aforethought and the pleasure of a mean joke. She’s a mean girl.

  ‘Watch this,” says David now, pale blue eyes on Steve’s. Suzie stands up—Olga helps her pull her cotton mini-dress over her head, so she stands nude. She steps away from Olga, and smiles. “Suzie—bleed for me.” All these heretofore unseeable cuts on her belly and breasts and thighs, hands, even her face, like ultrafine razor wounds—blood cascades for one swift cranberry red fading swiftly to pinkish couple of seconds, something’s wrong with the blood, it’s thick but the color fades out in the light instead of darkening, clotting, turning mulberry-ish brownish like normal blood. Eighteen, nineteen, or twenty cuts. No swelling around wound sites. Little droplets soon ebb and disappear. It’s like the warm wind licks the drops away, too fast. What happened to the cuts?

  “I can do anything to you,” David says, and he’s still a human being, or has the appearance of one, he plays at this for a few moments more. Then he says, “You guys are unlucky. You shouldn’t have come,” and his fangs come out, he’s excited by the prospect of fresh, unique vibrations of cruelty and hell on earth.

  He freezes Jon with his eyes and then Jon watches as his brother Steve is overwhelmed, Jeremy and others overpower him and bring him down. It’s mostly girls, rushing out of the darkness, but there are too many, and it all happens too fast. After Steve is held fast, David bites him on the wrist, injects him so that he goes sleepy and lethargic…. Steve is stripped then, and bound with bandages, yes like a mummy, Steve’s eyes show his terror—at the last moment, before his mouth is covered, one of the girls pulls out his tongue, using a silver, gleaming, delicate clamp … and with an incredibly sharp big scissors a fat girl snips the pink tongue off. Then they complete the mummification, and drag him away.

  “They’ll drive him to Death Valley,” David tells Jon. “It’ll only take a couple of hours. Then they’ll dump him into a gully…. It all looks so flat from a little distance, but there are hundreds of washes and gullies, dry runoffs, it’s quite a maze. If he makes it through the heat of the day, maybe a coyote will find him tomorrow night. But he probably won’t last much past noon. Do you remember that line, ‘The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken’? Your brother will have plenty of time to think, plenty of time to gather his thoughts.”

  Suzie, rather anemic already before her demonstration of picturesque martyrdom, has crumpled, she has lain down on the grass to rest, her mood flickering wildly if in slow motion, unsure if Jon Spelvin, her beloved Jon, is really here or if he’s a David-willed phantom, a dream, another hallucination.

  “Fuck her,” David says in Jon’s ear, his arm around his shoulders in a friendly fashion. “You can do it. Look at her ass, it’s like a pre-Raphaelite, the way her nether lips peek out there, she’s like a Burne-Jones. I’ll give you half an hour, no tricks. Your cock is very heavy now, isn’t it? This is all there is left for you.”

  David walks away. Olga is inside the house. David finds her. He is restless. This house is not where he lives, it’s an ex-movie star’s house. Didn’t Barbara LaMarr live here once, a long time ago? She was a silent movie star, a vamp, who died of an overdose of cocaine. Not Hedy Lamarr, there’s no relation. Barbara LaMarr was languid, men blew out their brains at her feet and she remained unmoved, she consciously sought to ruin men’s lives. Those were her lives on film.

  He finds Olga near the grand piano, on a gold-flocked beat-up couch, being fucked by some rapacious lead guitarist from Huntington Beach, long frizzy brunette hair and pretty, girlish foxy face. Pucca shell necklace. David twists his neck and kills him. Pulls him off Olga, whose cunt pulsates and throbs, swollen and red. He replaces the guitarist, member thrusting up into her belly, her head twists from side to side as he experiences her cervix, ovaries, fallopian tubes like waving palish fleshy plants on the bottom of the ocean, he fills her, she moans like an actress playing a dying tigress impaled by pharaoh’s spear, David feels the most extraordinary sensations like his cock has taken root inside her and it no longer exists, it’s a memory, that’s all he is now too, a thought, a dark mental fragment torn off and left under a bush, a bush in an artificial landscape built in a box. Olga comes, and he feels the waves, like he’s a shark trying to get back out to sea from the blackest coral beach, he struggles over each wave, he earlier saw the tall brother’s perverse desire and it pricked him like a thorn in his red brain. Sex is partly ugly it is mayhem.

  He thinks of Justine—it’s not really thought, it’s not a mechanically rendered verdict like a sought-out cinematic moving 3-D postcard it’s a dark enigma it’s more than the stupid vampire bitch herself it’s something more it looms it’s everything sexual and dirty and mysterious, just beyond reach like the end of a cunt even if you put your hand in and pull out the insides it’s never there always escapes you cannot grab it. Olga looks nothing like Justine there’s no resemblance he pulls out and it hurts her she
screams like she often does.

  It’s been sort of a paranoid phase for David lately and nobody knows where he sleeps most days, he doesn’t ever stay at Barbara LaMarr’s old decaying mansion rarely at Olga’s with that bunch there even though it has the attraction of a secret room no mostly he stays at another place he keeps it secret the old woman living there has no visitors no relatives friends.

  Jon and his sweetheart are yet feebly coupling on the lawn. Or at least he’s lying on her, sort of, while she languishes and fades, trance-ridden abandoned it won’t take much before her heart stops beating whump whump … whump.

  The cameraman is shooting heroin behind the dried-out ornamental fountain with the electrician and a thirteen-year-old runaway from Encino.

  There’ll be no film.

  Lying half atop Suzie his dead girlfriend Jon has this weird sense of defective clairvoyance, of defective telepathy, or of defective clairvoyance and telepathy both at the same time. Tears flow from Jon’s eyes onto the cool soft skin of his true love’s face, her eyelashes seem so beautiful and vulnerable and this very vulnerability her helplessness her death seems somehow defiant, like she knows all and will help him when he makes the adjustment, the flicker into non-whatness, off-the-air, man down, all systems quiet blank green-gray screens no power full stop. He can perceive in a quick-flash movie his brother suffering grotesquely in the desert, rendered a cruel and hideous joke, mummy with severed tongue, black hole mouth.

  “See no evil, hear no evil, and, um, speak no evil,” David says, pulling Jon up and gazing into his eyes. He gazes deeper and deeper, he who has lived in darkness for so long sends the stored-up memory of the sun or something like it, red and yellow and then floating concentric overlapping nebulae of green, Jon has no idea the process has ended because his maculae have been burned out, he’s blind, he keeps seeing the same colors, as Olga and Melvin, the electrician, with great seeming thoughtfulness and kindness lead him away. He feels no pain. He doesn’t understand. They will drive him back downtown and put him out. He will never be able to rationally explain. Drug misadventure is assumed. The others all just disappear. Maybe they went to Mexico and started new lives, or went on a boat out to an island that didn’t exist, they were operating under an illusion, and they drowned. Jon goes to blind college and learns braille. He plays the flute. Whatever he once was, he’s not that now.

  See no evil. He listens to the television. “Yipes, Stripes, Beechnut’s got ‘em. Yipes, Stripes, Fruit-Stripe gum”.g He likes to eat more now than he ever did before, and he masturbates, and grows fat. Then he doesn’t masturbate anymore. He just waits. He was so innocent. His innocence was unforgivable. It was a crime. He’s a blind man on the bus, an odd expression on his ultimately unreadable face. He sort of smiles. He pats his dog. He can feel the sun he knows it’s out. Blind man.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  A nobleman had taken Justine away from home, and ravished her, meaning to make her his whore. She struggled, but then acquiesced to fate.

  Then, when she could, but with no clear plan in mind, she fled. The dogs of the chateau growled at her. Some barked. She walked off into the night. She had no plan, no goal. She was fairly certain her family would not be happy to see her return. The village priest would not protect her. After all, she was the property of the chateau.

  So it was in pure rebellion that she fled. She wept, but all the tears had dried in a short time. She had it in mind to head for Avignon, and then Jerusalem.

  If it was her fate to be a whore, then let her be a whore on the way to the Holy City. Yes, she would go to Jerusalem. It was clear to her, after two hours of crisp night air. She would be a penitent, a pilgrim.

  But there was someone following her. It was no one human, no one she could name. He caught up with her, and then took her with him, back underground. Catacombs, from forgotten Roman times. After he supped on her, she lay there on the cold stones, far from the light.

  She woke up, days later, in ravening torment, and the older vampire was indifferent, he did not care what she did. He did not seem to want her to survive. He had only wanted to see her come alive, to tell her what she had become.

  Justine went back to her village. Despicably, in her hunger, she caught a child who had come out to relieve himself against a tree.

  Another night, she went back to the chateau. She could quiet all the dogs with a wave of her hand. She began to prey on noble blood, and their minions, taking only a little bit at a time.

  It was later that she grew rapacious, and went through a period where she felt the need and the desire to kill, over and above what she required, to walk through habitations like the plague.

  Then, in despair, she lived like an animal, allowing herself to become filthy, her face all dirty, leaves clinging to her raggedy clothes. This went on for the very longest time.

  Fleur, her sister, had long since had children and died. The village had been burned down. Justine ranged far and wide. Her night senses became so acute and keen. She had as many as ten different places where she could hide during the day.

  It seemed like it could go on forever like this, but it did not. Things changed. She met a merchant she liked, and he became her devoted keeper. He helped her get to Paris, and there she flourished for a great many years.

  “Were you in Paris during the Revolution?” Keith asks, and her mind is clear enough, it’s open, she can reply, “Yes.”

  The guillotine was never used during the night. She would have liked to have seen it operate, just once.

  She nursed a great hatred of the nobility. She was glad to see them pay. At night, she walked the streets of Paris, wearing the red bonnet of a Jacobin wench. But it was a dangerous time for her. There were so many searches of old houses, and openings of tombs, looking for treasure or old bones to desecrate. She got out of Paris just in time, she thinks. Just before the Reign of Terror, under Robespierre.

  “I made it to Tours.”

  And then later, on a ship, she came to the United States. To Baltimore.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  There is a little scar near Keith’s left eye, from an incident in a mosh-pit when he was fifteen. She traces her index finger over the jagged white line of this scar. It is precious to her.

  The mere thought that he exists rouses her from inattention: everything becomes more interesting, the world takes on color, it sharpens, it contains the possibility of joy.

  She likes it that he has a history, that he for instance loved Renata, who was evil, he experienced sorrow, and suffered—he would not have the same resonance, they could not understand each other in the same way if he was too virginal, it would be impossible for them to connect.

  Some part of her even likes it that he murdered the writer, that he was capable of such a thing. It binds him to her, even while it also shows they are similar, they are capable of similar crimes. He has purity, but he is not pure. He is not so pure that his soul recoils from hers.

  Their flesh is inside-out. No it’s not. It is one landscape, molten, now one thing and then that.

  Moments stretch out, time is fractured; a hole is punched through to the blackness beyond.

  Then it returns, the drone of lived lives, the smell and sound of the lush, breathing grass just outside the window, in the humid night. She brings her mind back into the room, to listen to Keith’s beautiful skin. The beating of his heart. She avoids thinking about the prospect of them staying together, of him growing old, changing, while she stays the same. She could bite him against his will, then see what he felt about it when he reawoke, see whether he hated her.

  She doesn’t wish to rob him of anything, to steal any portion of him from himself.

  To make a plenitude, to overflow. That is love. It comes from and is made of the stuff of God.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  In a garish red room, the SS officer stands over Chase, whom he orders, naked, to fuck the corpse of Michelle. Chase manages, atop the body of the bald girl, to get it in. Somehow he is hard. As
there is no lubrication, it hurts his penis, rubs it raw. He moves himself on her, attempts to pull the lifeless thighs up around him in some semblance of a fuck embrace.

  Michelle’s eyes open. She’s incredibly pale. It looks ugly when she bares her new-grown fangs. She is incapable of casting a spell—as Chase tries suddenly to escape, she pursues him, and succeeds in gaining purchase in his neck.

  “No!” he cries. “No!”

  She sucks him until he loses animation. She continues sucking, gaining color, she’s so thirsty, sucks him until he’s dead. Sabrina closes her eyes. As Michelle rises, gasping, blood running down her chin, she is helped into a white robe with a big red cross on it, like the Crusades.

  David embraces her. Tiff and Jason congratulate her, with awe. She still looks frightened, wild, what has happened to her has not yet sunk in. It is so strange. She burps up some of the salty, rich blood. Gazes longingly at Chase as he is dragged away, offstage. To oblivion.

  Michelle manages to say, “I still feel horrible. I’m shaking.”

  “Sit down,” he says. “It will pass.”

  Sabrina weeps for Chase. Silently, without sobbing. David had left it up to her: should Chase be allowed to make the transformation into a vampire? Sabrina said, “No, I don’t want that.” So his body will be left out, exposed. It will become an ordinary corpse.

  The young SS officer walks after Sabrina, following her. He is attracted to her. He thinks they have something in common. The air smells, suffocatingly, of roasted, mysteriously digesting meat. Meat eaten by demons. Invisible, mindless demons. They are everywhere. Sabrina thinks: I am the Queen of Hell.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  In the car, driving, Patrick speaks without looking at Tamara.

  “Justine has killed people, hasn’t she? She’s admitted this to you. You’ve seen people die at the hospital, in medical school you watched people having open-heart surgery, so this glaring fact, that she kills people—it isn’t shocking enough to you. You forgive her for it too easily, because you’re fascinated by her. She’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Sure. I grant you all that.”