The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  The pain was exquisite—he'd forgotten how exquisite pain could be, on blood. He could feel his hard-on pressing against the front of his jeans as she drew the razor across his throat.

  Nick opened his eyes. The hooded robed figures were at the edge of their seats, staring down at him. He remembered Ben Casey on television: the operating amphitheater. And now he was the patient. He noticed that he was breathing—no bubbling noise; glanced down—no spurting; touched curious fingers to his throat and then held his fingertips before his eyes—only a thin red tracery of blood.

  He remembered a joke: guy slits another guy's throat with a straight razor; second guy says you missed; first guy says oh yeah, wait'll you try to turn your head.

  Nick turned his head—when it didn't fall off he decided it was safe to sit up. "Does that milk the toad?"

  Selene nodded. "Bygones are bygones."

  "And I'm free to go?"

  "Or to stay." She handed him the chalice.

  The lake was lower than Nick had ever seen it. He placed the chalice down carefully on the brick step, pulled off his boots one at a time, then his socks, picked up the chalice again, and stepped down onto the lawn, which was cut low as a golf green. It felt glorious, like walking on cool green velvet. The more skin, the more better, he thought. God help me but I love this drug.

  He was able to walk a long way out on the beach, in the moon-shadow of the dock. He still hadn't taken that second sip from the chalice. On the other hand, he hadn't exactly poured it out, either, and what was going through his mind as he bent over to roll up the cuffs of his jeans was a prospect that he'd thought dead forever, buried under the derisive laughter of a hundred twelve-step meetings. It was the most dangerous of fantasies, covering the entire spectrum of addictions: I can handle it. I'll just smoke pot on weekends I drink at parties I eat an icecream cone every Monday after work for a reward. The rest of the time I'll stay straight I sober/thin.

  Nick waded into the lake until the cold black water was lapping at his ankles, and lifted the chalice towards the moon in a toast. "To the Dream of the Occasional User," he said aloud, then lowered the chalice, took a sip, smacked his lips. "And a delicious fucking Dream it is, too."

  Nick opened the keeping-room door quietly and tiptoed in, wary of interrupting the wedding ceremony. But as the ceremony at that point seemed to involve the groom and the pregnant bride copulating naked on the floor of the amphitheater, there wasn't much danger of that. There was an empty space next to the door, on the first tier of cushions; he slid in.

  "Hi Nick," whispered January. "You okay?"

  "Okay?" He thought about it for a minute. "I suppose so. I'm stoned. I suppose I'm going to be fine so long as I'm stoned."

  She laughed under her breath. "Tell me about it."

  "Are these two married yet?" asked Nick.

  "I dunno. They didn't say 'I do' or anything."

  "Well what's going on at this point?"

  "I didn't understand everything Selene said, but it's like on spring equinox the lord of the green fucks everything that moves, but in summer he has to settle down with the goddess."

  "Oh, I remember Midsummer now. 'Forsaking all others, and cleaving only to each other,' right?"

  "Right. You have to pick a partner and stick with 'em all night. You should have heard everybody bitching."

  Lourdes was nearing a climax at their feet; Nick hoped she wouldn't hurt herself. Whistler and the Creature did seem to be taking extra care tonight, but still, he'd never seen so pregnant a woman naked before, much less in flagrante. He was getting off on it, too—but then he was high on blood for the first time in five years: he'd probably have gotten off watching Mr. and Mrs. Ed.

  Nick glanced around the amphitheater—the pairing up had already begun. Sherman and Catherine were leading the procession out of the stands and towards the door. He felt January tugging at the sleeve of his nylon windbreaker. "Wanna cleave?" she asked.

  "There's a problem," he replied carefully.

  "I don't care," she said. "I'll keep my shirt on, strap on a dildo, and call you—" She lowered the register of her voice to a deep tenor: "Bud!" He laughed. "Well, okay—but what are we going to do for blood?"

  "At Whistler Manor?" It was January's turn to laugh. "Follow me."

  "This used to be a bathroom," remarked Nick, in the pantry. Six months after Whistler's promise of all the blood she could drink, January still had a distinctly feral air, but with an edge of sleekness; her empurpled black hair, combed straight back and moussed to a shine, accentuated the length of her narrow skull, and she moved with a smooth confidence beneath the satin folds of her crimson robe.

  "Well now it's a secret passage to a roomful of blood," she said enthusiastically, sounding about nine years old as she pushed open the door at the top of the cellar stairs.

  When they reached the bottom, they found Louise and Sally in the blood cellar on a similar errand, so they waited in the four-by-six outer room, which had an ugly green indoor/outdoor carpet laid over an unpadded concrete floor, and a translucent light panel set into the high ceiling. Both long walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves lined with red windowpane-plaid contact paper and stocked with canned food—everything from creamed corn to caviar, peas to pate. Apparently there was a fan up there too—they could hear it whirring.

  "Hey Cheese, Sally," called Nick, feeling buoyant as a teenager himself. "You guys a couple too?"

  "Yeah," said Louise, emerging from the inner room through a revolving section of the wall.

  "But a couple of what, I couldn't tell you," added Sally, following her out with a bag of blood, her elegant head carried high and regal above her robe, waving like some exotic brown orchid on her long narrow stalk of a neck. "Come visit us later—we're in the bungalow."

  "I'd pay to see those two naked together," remarked Nick when he and January were alone. "But I don't want to get in trouble with Selene again." That last he'd added only half jokingly.

  "She just said we couldn't cleave with anybody else," replied January, leading Nick through the revolving door into the refrigerated room. "Didn't say nothing about watching. Besides, I'm not a witch—I only have to listen to Whistler, not Selene."

  Nick gave her the mezzo-mezzo gesture, as if to say, I'm not too sure of that. "One thing you have to remember about Selene: she's Whistler's creature entirely. I forgot that once—just once—but I'm still paying for it."

  On the other hand, there were worse forms of payment. Once inside the inner room of the blood cellar, there was nothing Nick could do but throw back his head and laugh. A room full of blood indeed: an entire wall lined with pigeonholes containing blood in sundry containers—thick plastic blood-bank bags; sparkling glass drip bottles used by hospitals half a century ago, refilled and resealed; test tubes and vials and labeled, dated Seal-a-Meal pouches.

  "Estate bottled?" wondered Nick, selecting a pouch and holding it to the overhead light to read the label. Selene. 5/5/92. He handed it to January. "Ah yes, May 'ninety-two. An excellent vintage," he remarked, in a toothy British accent meant to mimic Whistler but sounding more like Terry-Thomas.

  "Yeah, Selene's got killer blood," January agreed. "She takes herbs and shit. Come on, let's get this into my thermos while it's still cold. That way it'll keep all night."

  All the rooms on the third floor of the north wing were slope-ceilinged and windowless—servants' quarters, originally, accessible only by a single back staircase. January's room was one of the smallest, containing only a king-size mattress, a tangled pile of bedding, and her open suitcase, but there were patterned tapestry-like cotton wall hangings billowing from three of the four walls—it felt as much like a womb as a cave.

  Nick sat down cross-legged on the mattress to wait while January washed out her thermos in the dormitory-style bathroom down the hall. When she returned she tore open a corner of the pouch with her teeth, decanted the contents carefully, tossed the empty pouch into a corner, and handed the thermos to Nick.
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br />   He looked down into the wide mouth, hesitating.

  "For fuck's sake, Nick, are you gonna like, soul-search all night every time you take a drink?" complained January.

  He looked up. "I was just remembering something that used to happen at meetings, sometimes. M.A. meetings, especially. Some pothead with years of clean time would raise her hand and say—" He lifted his voice to a high-pitched singsong: " 'Hi, my name's Whatever, and I'm a pothead. I've been clean for...' "

  Back to his own voice: "Only instead of saying two years, four months or whatever, it'd be two days, or ten hours, and everybody except her sponsor or phone buddies goes Aaaah, and then she talks about how she toked on some piddly roach or something, and she went out, and it was hell, and the paranoia hit almost right away, panic, remorse, despair, blah blah blah…

  "And you know what I'd always think? I'd think, 'You silly bitch. Once your sobriety date's blown, it's blown—you might as well have had some fun.' "

  "Want me to say it to you?" asked January.

  "Sure. Why not?"

  "Okay: You might as well have some fun, you silly bitch."

  She stood up as he drank, and pulled the robe over her head. Nick handed back the thermos, looking her over frankly: long, small-breasted torso; muscled arms; legs that were long, white, slightly bowed, a triangle of hair emphasizing the empty space between her wiry thighs; a surprisingly shaggy pubic bush hanging down like a buffalo beard. A naked female body less like Lourdes's, the last he'd seen, could scarcely be imagined—the two women hardly seemed to belong to the same species, let alone the same sex.

  January took one last belt from the thermos, replugged it, and screwed the cap back on. When she stooped to set it down at the foot of the mattress, her small breasts drooped forward like commas. She straightened up—the room was so small she only had to turn and reach for the light switch by the door, but a fetching turn and reach it was; the long line of her outstretched arm, smoothly knotted shoulder, long back, straining boyish buttocks and thighs was the vision he carried with him into the sudden, complete dark.

  "I haven't done this in years," whispered Nick, pulling his jeans off. He was already rock-hard from the blood.

  "It's easy," came the whispered reply. He felt the mattress give as she climbed on, felt also the heat of her palm even before she grabbed him. "You just stick that—" She lay back, pulling him forward over her. "—in here. No, wait… no, not… oh, okay, in there."

  There was no clock in the room, and Nick had left his watch somewhere—oh yes, in his boots, on the steps by the front door—but they seemed to have made love forever, well into the wee hours of Sunday morning. Nick, after all, had five years of blood lust stored up, and January was young, wiry, and vampire-strong, and even with the lights on she didn't mind rolling over and playing at being a boy part of the time. That way, when he reached under her to play with her dangling little breasts and stroke the odd bony flatness between her legs, it seemed deliciously perverted and retro, the inverse of inverse.

  And of course after he'd come it seemed only fair to tuck his penis back between his legs and pretend to be a girl for her. Not that she was a lesbian—just so that they were both playing at being something else. She pinched his pecs together so they looked like breasts, nipped at them with her teeth, howled like a wolf when she came.

  "Hey," he protested mildly.

  She rolled off him, breathing hard. "Dja ever kill a donor while you were fucking?"

  He shook his head.

  "It's fun. Right when you come you bite into their throat. It's like poppers, only a hundred times more intense."

  "You must run through quite a few donors that way."

  He must have looked dismayed, for she dug at his bare ribs with her knuckles, and laughed. "Gotcha. I never really did that—I just wanted to see your reaction."

  "Whew."

  "But you gotta admit it sounds cool."

  "I do not," he said, but they both knew he was lying.

  Nick lay propped on an elbow, watching January nap. In candlelit repose her wildness did not show—the lips were relaxed, not drawn back in a raptorial sneer. Upon closer inspection, though, the eyeballs were oscillating wildly under waxy, reptile-thin eyelids, and when he drew the sheet back he saw that she had clenched in upon herself, the way a fetus would, if fetuses had nightmares.

  There was no window in the room, but he had the sense that it was nearly dawn. Shortest night of the year, he reminded himself. No matter how long it seems. He rolled over and felt around at the foot of the mattress for the thermos—he was long past the soul-searching phase. But he'd barely unscrewed the cap before January's arms came around him from behind, pinning his own arms lightly against his body. He sensed she was only teasing. "Mother, may I?" he asked.

  She had pressed her front against his back; he felt her chin nodding into his shoulder, and took a swig. The blood was a touch stale—my, haven't we gotten fussy fast. Turning around on the bed, he spread his longer legs on either side of January's. She grabbed the thermos from him, sat back between his feet, upended it, and swallowed greedily; he could see her throat muscles working in her taut neck.

  He watched the blush spreading between her little breasts, felt the heat in his own chest. "Thanks for taking me last night. I was afraid I'd be standing there like the nineteenth kid in a pick-up baseball game."

  "I didn't take you." She held her hand out; he handed her the red plastic plug and she recapped the thermos. "Selene picked all the partners." Then she laughed delightedly. "Hey, if you didn't know, that means you said yeah on your own. Nick, that's so fucking romantic!"

  "Fucking romantic: that's me." He wondered if he ought to feel worse, if only for having been beaten so soundly by Whistler and Selene. For he knew perfectly well that he'd been in some sort of cosmic contest with both of them over the past several months—or was it years? And sometimes, just to keep himself going when things were at their lowest, loneliest ebb, after losing Bev, he'd even pictured their struggle in terms of the Marvel comics he used to read as a teenager: the Silver Surfer and his archenemies hurtling thunderbolts at each other across trackless space.

  And now he understood well enough that their victory could not have been more complete—that he'd just had the cosmic crap beat out of him. Fortunately, he was managing to stay high—he wondered how much it would hurt when he came down. "Want to go for a swim before the sun comes up?" he asked January.

  "Are you kidding?" She'd tensed visibly. "I never even go near the water."

  "How come?"

  "My mother? Glory? Drowned herself?"

  "Oh, right. Bummer."

  "I haven't gone swimming since." January blew out the candle. "We have to rest up for tonight, anyway." But she'd curled up on the mattress with her head in his lap—face down.

  "Why's that?"

  She mumbled something around his rapidly inflating member.

  "Beg pardon?" He couldn't understand—or rather, hoped he'd misunderstood.

  She turned her head and looked up at him. "I said baby-blood tonight." She turned back to his penis. "Damn, now where did you disappear to?" She was referring to his erection, which had indeed gone the way of all flesh—only faster.

  Nick crept out of the room in his black Levi's, with his red wind-breaker open over his bare chest—those were all of his clothes he'd been able to locate. His polo shirt might have been under the mattress, but he didn't want to risk waking January, who'd finally dropped off to sleep with the aid of a few of the Quaaludes—Mexican, but pharmaceutical nonetheless—that Whistler handed out like after-dinner mints.

  It took him a few minutes to find his way from the back stairs to the kitchen, but from there he knew his way to the front door. He opened it tentatively, but the morning light was not unbearable—he paused in the doorway to watch the silver mist rising from the lake.

  Down by the water one of the Luzan servants, a boy of eighteen or so, wearing only a pair of tight cutoff jeans, was raking the bea
ch. Nick crossed the lawn barefoot and sat down quietly on the end of one of the redwood chaises to watch him. He found himself growing aroused at the sight of the boy's lean muscular back and long calves, and it occurred to him as he stroked the growing bulge at the front of his own jeans that while the sex with January had been vigorous and twisted enough even for a vampire, there had been an emptiness at the core of it.

  Suddenly the boy turned. "You need somet'ing, sah?"

  Nick realized he must have moaned out loud. "No—don't let me interrupt."

  "Finished anyway, sah. "He set down the rake, tines down, and trotted up to the lawn. He was a handsome boy, and the bleached-out indigo of his cutoffs set off the chocolate brown of his lean midriff. He knelt at the foot of Nick's chaise. "You cyare to drink me blood, sah? Got plenty—I ain' give none all night."

  "I suppose I could use a pick-me-up," Nick admitted, and in less time than he would have imagined, he was sucking from the heel of an upturned palm, where several of the Luzan Drinks had developed scar tissue that made their bloodletting nearly painless.

  As Nick sucked, the boy reached out with his other hand, and gingerly touched the bulge in Nick's jeans. "Cyare to fuck, too?"

  Nick looked up from the boy's hand, took a last suck from it, then released it, pinching off the wound at the wrist. "What's your name, kid?"

  "Hedley, sah." The boy put his hand over Nick's—at first Nick thought he wanted to hold hands, then realized the boy wanted to stanch his own wound, and let go.

  "I'm Nick. You gay, Hedley?"

  Hedley looked puzzled. "Gay? You mean am I happy, Mister Nick?"

  Nick started to laugh, until he understood the boy was serious. "No, I mean gay. You know, homosexual?" A shake of the Hedley head—Nick reached out and touched the soft tight curls. "Queer? Fag?" Nothing. "Man who likes to fuck men?"