Stainless

by Todd Grimson

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that her purposes might not be the same as yours. You get this hit off her, you like her, you find her sympathetic, and I’m not saying you’re foolish to respond to her in this way, I just think … well, she’s probably been manipulating people to her own ends for an awfully long time. How positive can you really be that she won’t sacrifice you, or Keith? You tell me she has hypnotic powers. When I hear that, I become suspicious—we don’t know how far it goes, do we? How can we know? Maybe you’re operating under her spell and you don’t know it, you can’t tell.”

  “Patrick, I… ”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll shut up.”

  ”No. No, it’s good that you’re thinking of these things.”

  She’s seems to mean it, sort of. They arrive. In the twilight, shutting the car door, the sound of it, Patrick has an eerie feeling, being here on these grounds. He doesn’t know what he wants. Does he need the whole thing to be on CNN before he trusts it, before it’s reified for him? Tamara has said that as far as she can tell, to this point, the phenomenon of the vampire is not explainable by ordinary physical means.

  This dismays him even as it seems somehow to comfort Tamara, to delight her. Can he not see the metaphysical implications? Is he an absolute materialist, to the point where it becomes nihilism, is that really what he has become?

  No, he tells himself. He doesn’t want to be like that. It’s just that … this takes time to get used to, that’s all. He’s not reconciled, yet, to the new version of reality he’s being forced to confront. He doesn’t understand it.

  They come into the house, let in by Keith, who’s wearing a purple shirt. Patrick is still a little bit jealous of him, that is, of Tamara’s attitude toward him, and it doesn’t really help that Keith is in league with this mysterious creature. In fact, it gives him a sort of glamour, potentially, in Tamara’s eyes.

  “What has been happening with your hands?” Tamara asks, touching them, and Keith just says, “They’ve gotten better.”

  Then they come into the presence of Justine. The object here is to obtain a tube of her blood.

  Tamara sticks her several times, but she cannot find a vein. She’s embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “I don’t really feel it,” Justine says, trying to ease her mind. Despite himself, Patrick is intrigued.

  “Your blood pressure is so low, or nonexistent—the only way to get access to a vein may be to do a cut-down, and I don’t want to subject you to that.”

  “What is it?”

  Tamara explains. It’s what it sounds like.

  “Go ahead,” Justine says. “I heal very quickly. Keith has seen,” she says, giving him a little smile.

  A scalpel is produced from the black bag.

  “Are you sure? This will hurt.”

  “I will survive it, I think.”

  The cut-down is performed, on Justine’s left arm.

  The tender, pale flesh. It must hurt, Patrick thinks, more than she lets on. He admires her stoicism. He doesn’t want to feel drawn to her, to be vulnerable to her, but he is. The blood is like black milk.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Jason just wants to get along. He wants things to go smoothly. It’s like he is a small child again, trying to be inconspicuous, to avoid drawing unwelcome attention to himself. He is afraid of David, and now of Michelle.

  It is he and Minh who keep the household running, who run errands and buy food and make tea. They go during the day to the costume store, and buy costumes. Minh knows what to get.

  Jason thinks they should be friends, but they’re not. Minh scarcely speaks to him. She is inaccessible. At night, she goes out with David. Jason has gathered that they’re keeping an eye on the house where Keith lives with Justine.

  Jason feels like a reporter, on a deep deep undercover assignment, in too far, a story he can only hope to survive. Then, if he is still around, he will be a witness, he will know.

  Minh says, “I’m going to take Sabrina her tea. Why don’t you take a nap?”

  EIGHTY

  It is The Two Orphans. The two sisters come to the big city and are separated. One of them is blind. She has been snatched by the beggar-chieftain, made to be a prostitute. This part is played by Tiff.

  Meanwhile the other orphan, Michelle, has become a nun. (There is a nun’s costume available, you see.) She asks Ken, the soldier on leave from his regiment, if he will help her find her blind sister, oh please. Ken has changed his name to Rudolph, for Rudolph Hess. Rudolph, from now on.

  Jason and some fifteen-year-old kid they picked up off the street, named Plunky, blond dreadlocks, light-blue dirty t-shirt, Jason and Plunky lead the dolled-up blind orphan prostitute to a marble bench, before a fountain, in this cityscape.

  David sits with Sabrina, his cold hand in hers. Michelle’s boyfriend, Fred, from Saint Agatha, sits nearby, with Minh. Fred is in a bit of a daze.

  “Is this your sister?” Rudolph asks.

  “Can it be? Oh yes, it’s her.” Michelle is an inexpressive actor, but David still turns to Sabrina and says, “I love this part.”

  The two orphans are reunited. They hug and kiss. The wooden figures known as Sam Bell and Lady Maude, exaggerated Norman Rockwell caricatures, impassively look on.

  Orchestral music swells, then fades back down where it was before, inconsequent and generic, continuing on.

  “I want to thank you for taking care of my sister,” Michelle recites, moving toward Jason and Plunky. It is Plunky whom she kisses. The kiss turns into a sustaining bite. Michelle is still not very slick at this. She is learning each time.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  “You don’t understand,” Sabrina says, in tears. “I’m half-Jewish, on my mother’s side. Rudolph wearing that … it just really bothers me. It troubles me. I want to kill him.”

  David and she lie on their sides. Her dress is up around her hips. He kisses the nape of her neck, around to the side, and she pulls down her lacy underpants to mid-thigh, then to her knees, and then off. His penis glides into her vagina, from behind, as she cries, warm, her eyes closed.

  “It’s just for effect. I have something planned. Then I’ll get rid of him, I promise.”

  He grasps her breasts. She turns her head toward him, eyes still closed, but seeking a kiss, or something else. She pants, and sobs a different, very different sort of sob.

  “Oh God,” she cries out, and she bites the pillow, she drools.

  She must be sick, she thinks, later on. Doesn’t she have a fever? She’s still so hot. When Minh enters, Sabrina asks her to touch her forehead, “Does it feel hot?”

  Minh does not say. Perhaps she shrugs. She sits down, watches the TV. David is gone, taking Michelle.

  “The road to hell waits for no man,” the figure named Spaceman says, downstairs, to Rudolph and Tiff.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  They thought of visiting Alonzo and Bridget, but it’s such a long drive. Instead, they go on an even longer drive, haphazardly, with no destination, and end up at the ocean. Keith parks the car, and they walk down onto the beach.

  They take off their shoes, and walk barefoot in the cool dark sand.

  “I’ve hardly ever seen the ocean,” Justine says. “With my own eyes, I’ve only seen it at night. I’ve seen it blue on TV.”

  Keith feels such tenderness toward her—toward what he sees as her fragility, her delicacy. He has a passionate nature; he gives himself unreservedly. He has been able to feel himself in her position, and nothing makes him happier than when, in his presence, she overcomes a certain innate melancholy and otherness, when she is spontaneous, and young, when she experiences things as though for the first time.

  She’s like someone met in a dream—and yet she’s here. Sure, there is an impersonal element to his love, for she symbolizes in her person the existence of all magic, witches and demons, spells. But there are impersonal elements in any romance. One woman represents the wondrous st
rangeness of all women, of the difference in sex, or simply the miraculous existence of others outside oneself, and that this chasm between oneself and all others can be momentarily bandaged, the wound can be healed.

  As they walk into the shallow salty wavelets, the sea foam shining silver and gray and white with phosphorence, they could be anyone, any couple at any time, old or young, ancient or brand new. She laughs, and her laughter mingles with the waves hitting the beach.

  Walking back, she murmurs to herself, then sings, “Well, my Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you need.” It’s funny how she likes these old blues songs. This one, Mississippi Fred McDowell much of the time just sings part of the line, creating a strange effect. It’s like he doesn’t see the need to finish, or believes his bottleneck guitar speaks in place of his voice, but Justine likes this, it creates a tension when the resolution is left off.

  She sings:

  Well, he will come in a hur

  Tell him what you

  Well, he will come in a hur

  Tell him what you

  Then:

  If you sick

  can’t get

  Tell him what you

  Back when Keith used to shoot heroin, “mainline” meant put the needle into a vein. Mississippi Fred McDowell probably meant the telephone, though, Keith tells Justine.

  “Jesus is on the uh, uh” she says, in a hard voice. “Could I be in your band?” she says then, teasing, her voice full of laughter. “You and Alonzo? Really?”

  It’s so funny. “Sure,” he says, and they go to the car, rubbing sand off their feet before putting back on their shoes. She falls over into his arms, in the front seat. Rapturously, they kiss, and look into each other’s eyes.

  There isn’t any real reason why they are so excited, but they are.

  “Don’t stop,” she says, and he drives through the red light. It’s a game, to get home especially fast. 2:35.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “I feel it too,” Keith says, and she touches his arm, just as a light comes on in the house. Somebody is inside, waiting for them, but not choosing to ambush them, exactly. The first notion that flashes into his mind is that it’s the other vampire, the one Justine had said she heard. He sees that’s what she thinks as well.

  But then … here is Michelle. Yes, she is with a man. Michelle, her hair grown out to a dark crewcut, with earrings, oh she’s very different, Keith sees it, he tenses, the handsome man says something to Justine and they all go inside, “We’ve been waiting for you,” the hairs on Keith’s body for a moment, involuntarily, stand quite on end, he shivers. He is the only human being here, and Michelle looks at him with open contempt.

  They sit down in the living room, a grotesque parody of two couples meeting socially.

  “Do you remember me? Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course,” Justine says, but beneath her anger she seems unsure.

  “What is my name?”

  She frowns.

  “I understand,” the guy says. “There have been so many.”

  Justine is very beautiful, wearing a slip-like peach-colored dress, one strap down over a pale shoulder, very red lipstick, no eye makeup.

  “It’s David,” she says, with intelligence. “You were an actor.”

  “Very good.”

  “You’re the one who has been … coming around. Spying.”

  “I was curious about you,” he says. “I wondered what kind of company you were keeping. We should be friends. There are not so many of us as all that.”

  He smiles again, and everyone here, seated, is wound very tight.

  “I like to put on shows. I did it in the thirties, and in the sixties, at the very same house. Maybe you will come over sometime, and see. Did you know The Old One?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, there was this Old One … he taught me things.”

  Justine frowns. She waits a few beats, then speaks.

  “You’d better go.”

  “Yes.” David stands up, and goes off the wrong way, and Justine rises as well, takes a few steps after him.

  Keith remains seated, studying Michelle. It’s like she is a wild animal, reacting to unseen currents and signals of the night. She has had a hard time keeping still. It’s as if she continually hears things, senses new input that she cannot yet easily sort out.

  “Michelle …” he says, putting a lot into her name, and she leans slightly toward him and replies, “You’re not even worth talking to.”

  The viciousness is right there, he sees it also in David, David is cool but it’s there, regarding ordinary mortals as lesser beings; as he walks back, saying something to Justine, and Michelle rises to join him, to leave, Keith sees something in common, even in his Justine. It’s like there may be a limit on their wisdom because of their not aging, never maturing, and the history they so readily develop of taking liberties with people, using them—it’s not good. They come to think they are so smart, they know all they need to know, but all they really know is one thing: how to kill. All their cleverness goes into this. How to survive and how to drink blood without getting caught.

  Justine returns slowly, as David’s car—which must have been concealed nearby—accelerates away, and she looks at Keith as if she understands what he feels, his revulsion at seeing three vampires at once.

  “Don’t be disgusted by me!” she says, somewhat wildly, she makes a noise that is somewhere between a scream and the cry of an animal, and all the windows and mirrors in the house shatter, it seems a vastly disproportionate effect.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  Day passes. Keith would have liked to sleep with Justine, but she won’t let him, she never will. She sorrowfully ironically shakes her head and says, “I have to be by myself. I couldn’t face you if you saw me like that.”

  He doesn’t know exactly how the windows all broke. Something about a pressure, a reverse pressure in the air. How it happened is just a detail, it doesn’t matter, there are other things to worry about in this world. Bugs come in, though. And having so much broken glass around looks bad.

  The lawyer’s office calls. There is this lawyer, Philip, who handles all the financial matters. Justine got him when her husband—this thought flares up unpleasantly in Keith’s mind, coupled with this David character, the very word “husband” makes him want to go someplace and get drunk—the lawyer is from that time, when Maximilian Durand passed on. All the household bills are paid out of that office. Somebody’s going to come by, today, to drop off some papers to be signed.

  “How do you know they’re not cheating you?” he once asked, and she replied, “I could find out. Do you care?”

  Some young woman from the law office comes by about 6:00. She pushes her sunglasses back on her head, looks around, noticing the shattered windows. She’s too cool to say anything; she waits for him to explain. He doesn’t. He just says, “What are these for? Where does she have to sign?” Let her think whatever she likes.

  She says, “Wherever there’s a little X marked in red.”

  The sunlight fades.

  After a while he hears a noise, a kind of groan, and he goes in to her quarters, he doesn’t know what he expects to find.

  “Are you here?”

  A movement. She’s in the bathroom, the door open, sitting on the toilet, underwear down around her ankles, he can see from here it’s soaked with shiny purplish blood.

  “I’m sick, a little bit sick.” She stands up, staggers a bit, flushes the toilet.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” She laughs a little, weakly. “I just need nourishment.” He sees a fang. “Let me get clean.”

  It’s like she’s putting up with him, but there’s bad shit she doesn’t know if she can trust him to understand. Also, like seeing David has put her into kind of a dark phase, and Keith is jealous, he doesn’t want to be but he is.

  When she finally comes in, he’s sitting in semi
-darkness by one of the broken windows, he doesn’t look up at first, it’s up to her to make the first move to return them to harmony, but she’s out of sorts, driven by her vampire nature, she probably wants to kill him and feels like she’s doing him a favor as she refrains. She touches his shoulder, lightly, and he understands that she wants to leave, to go out, she needs her sustaining fix.

  In the Mercedes, Keith turns on the radio. He’d play a tape or CD but he doesn’t want to exercise that much choice.

  “What about David?” he says, after a while.

  Justine wears sunglasses, at night.

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t like it that he did Michelle, that he was hanging around here, watching. What does he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he love you? Did you live with him?”

  “No, never. He was just… I went to his house with him, one time only, and I killed him. I didn’t mean to. I was … I left him there, I didn’t realize he was dead. I lost track of the days, and when I went back, to finish him off, he was already … changed. I didn’t even want to look at him. Then I never saw him. Until now.”

  “You never fucked him?”

  “No,” she says, obviously annoyed. She broods for a minute or two, and then says, “How could you do that with her? Why did you want to? She’s fat.”

  This seems an unfair assessment of Michelle. It pleases him, since they’re doing mutual recriminations, that she cares enough to say anything.

  “She’s not so bad.”

  It’s the worst it’s ever been. He doesn’t like it, he hates it in fact, his skin crawls, when she gets some guy and takes him in the backseat. The guy moans like he’s getting a blow job, and she’s taking forever, a long feast, Keith can’t stand it and he goes off for a walk, leaving the car.