by Harvey Click
There’s nothing for me to do, so I sit in my study. I’ve been looking over our investments, which I’ve neglected too long. All that money we pay our financial attorney, what exactly does it buy? Over a very long time investments should grow like Jack’s beanstalk without the help of any financial wizard, and Carmina and I have had a very long time. I need to do a thorough audit to see if he’s robbing us, but it’s hard to concentrate.
Maybe Carmina is keeping the boy to distract her from her madness. Our nights together have been the same story repeated over and over, and there’s no novelty in me to provide the diversion she needs. I can’t heal her or even distract her.
I feel the sun preparing to rise like a purple sore, and my arms are weak. To sleep now, to the sleep like oblivion.
***
It’s been six nights since she brought Leo home. He’s up now, strong and ferocious, insolent and arrogant. It’s obvious he believes Carmina belongs to him and I have no right to exist. I often catch him looking at me with hatred, and I believe if he ever finds me nodding he’ll try to kill me.
Last night he went hunting with us for the first time. He stared out the window like a starving wolf, as if ready to plunge right through the glass and strike any living thing that dared to be out. All the while he yammered on sub-literately about each “hood” we drove through, trying to impress Carmina with his know-it-all stupidity, which people these days call “street smarts.”
Before long he spotted an attractive young woman, and he told Dimitri to stop. He jumped out and tried to ensorcel her with his eyes, but his eyes are no more potent than his brain, and in the end Carmina had to get out and do it for him.
His failure put him in a nasty mood, and he demanded that we get a room so he could “show dis bitch how to behave.” Amazingly, Carmina took his side and ordered Dimitri to find a hotel.
This was her madness speaking. Prints would be taken from the room and some people might remember our faces, unless we had time to ensorcel them. I explained this, and Leo said, “Den we kill da fucking witnesses, dude.”
Dimitri has his own opinions, even if he isn’t paid to express them, and he headed out of town while we argued. I had climbed in front when they picked up the girl, so I couldn’t see Leo, but I felt his eyes glaring malevolently at the back of my neck. I wondered if he would try to kill me before we reached our house.
He dragged the girl to Carmina’s room and played with her for a long time, scratching and poking like a nasty boy torturing an animal. He kept glancing at me to make sure I appreciated how bad he was. After raping her, he used his stiletto to cut her nearly in two, and then he raped her again. All the while Carmina capered about the bedroom naked, singing nursery rhymes and gibbering about how she used to be a monkey in Tibet.
After the two of them were sated, I fed without pleasure on what was left of the poor girl and went to my study. In the unlikely event that anybody ever reads this, I suppose I should explain a couple of things. We don’t need to feed every day, though we want to. I’ve fasted for as long as a week, though by the end of that time I was terribly sick and feeble. And we don’t need to kill our donors. We can draw off what we need and let them go on about their business, after ensorceling them so they don’t remember what happened. And no, they don’t become like us unless they die and come back.
Sometimes we kill inadvertently, but now we do it to satisfy Carmina’s insane whims. Owing to her madness and Leo’s meanness, I’m sure there will be killings every night. The disappearances will draw attention, even if the donors are prostitutes or homeless winos, and attention is just as deadly to us as sunlight.
Right now Carmina is enjoying her boy-toy in her room; I hear their giggles and grunts and moans like noises from a zoo. I feel so tired. Usually I dread morning, but tonight I wish it would hurry.
I don’t dare shut my eyes until he does. One minute of napping, and he’ll have a stake through my heart.
***
Last night I moved out of the house. I’m staying at the apartment we keep in the city for emergencies. It’s a cheap little place, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and one more room for all other needs, but it’s fine with me. It’s good to be by myself for a change. The sole window is covered with a thick black drape tacked carefully around the edges so sunlight can’t leak in. The bed’s not too bad, and there’s a table, a good reading lamp, and a comfortable chair, where I sit and read Proust.
I started rereading him to sharpen my French, but now I’m caught up in the rhythms, the counterpoint of past and present, the celebration of memory. Without memory there’s no meaning. When an infant first opens its eyes on this world, it must see nothing but chaos because it has no memory to make sense of what it sees. The past gives shape to the present.
Consciousness is self-consciousness, and one’s self is the accumulation of one’s past. All these years I’ve tried to ignore my past, but sooner or later even we who dislike mirrors must steal a backward glance. As much as I abhor consciousness, I need to sharpen it now to a fine point because I need to solve an insoluble problem: I can’t live without her, I can’t live with her madness, and I know of no way to heal it.
Or maybe I’m just killing time. There’s nothing like Proust for killing time, when you have all the time in the world and it needs killing. And when I tire of those long French sentences, I scribble in this journal. I may as well admit it’s a journal, since that’s what it’s turning into. Though probably nobody will ever read it, I’m still breaking the rule of silence. I used to be able to share my thoughts with her, but now I can share them only with paper.
At least this room is a change from the sameness, and so is being alone. It felt strange tonight to go out hunting by myself. I didn’t enjoy it. I fed quickly on a prostitute, leaving her dazed but alive, and I even paid her for her service. What a good boy I am! Afterwards I walked for a while, having nowhere to go. Mid-October and nippy, but I like the chill.
I had to get out of there. They’re both out of control. Two nights ago Leo brought home a pretty young girl with bright red hair, innocent as a flower. He rigged up a kind of torture chamber in one of the spare rooms and has the girl hanging naked by her wrists from the ceiling, her feet barely touching the floor. He’s been careful not to kill her because he doesn’t want her pain to end. He feeds her a little bread and broth.
He soon grew bored with whipping her, so somewhere he found some needles. I suppose Carmina gave them to him. He has needles stuck in her forehead, her eyelids, her nose, her lips, her tongue, her nipples, everywhere. Carmina dances around the room giggling like a stoned schoolgirl while the redhead screams.
The red hair reminds me of Nicole, and thinking of her took my mind back to the short time I spent in the seminary. Funny the things you forget. All of these years, I’ve been trying to bury my past behind a wall of darkness, hoping to drain the present of its meaning, to shrink it down until it disappears. It hasn’t worked.
My only reason for attending seminary school was to make my father unhappy. He wanted me to take over his business. When I was very young I learned that my pretense of interest in religion upset him, especially the anti-materialistic aspects, which I soon learned to weave into self-righteous socialistic harangues that made his face turn purple. When I likened a rich man’s salvation to fitting a camel through the eye of a needle, he knew which rich man I meant. Being, after all, a merchant from a long line of merchants, a wealthy purveyor of worldly goods, he must have believed that Jesus had spoken that parable especially for him.
“The clergy and the taxman are one and the same!” he would exclaim. “They both want their percentage.” He’d fix me with his beady eyes and mutter knowingly, as if this were esoterica privy only to a few enlightened businessmen, that Matthew himself had been a tax collector.
Father had paved the road of my life before I was even born, and there was no better way to raise his spleen than to take instead the road to Canterbury, leaving him in London to fume about
taxmen and the eyes of needles.
But once I was away from him, my resentment found new targets. The priests who taught me were a dozen fathers even more self-righteous than the one I’d left behind. During my free time I visited taverns and whorehouses, and with the arrogance of youth I believed I was like no one else. Who else read Aquinas by day and de Sade by night? Who else had ever thought my bold new thoughts?
After a few months I set off for the continent. My father was pleased, and sent me money whenever I wrote. He thought travel was good education for a young man, and he no doubt hoped my meanderings would soon bring me to the road of commerce he had paved for me. So I, who neither toiled nor spun, enjoyed the filthy lucre that I so disdained.
In Spain I relished the bullfights and the dark visions of Goya. I took pleasure in the cathedrals of Italy, and more pleasure in the brothels. In Germany I met writers and freethinkers almost as daring as myself. But France pleased me the most, so I soon headed back to Paris.
There I met Nicole. It was her purity that provoked me. She was scarcely eighteen, all innocence and health and sunny good cheer. I can almost see her in my mind after all these years: rippling red hair, sinless blue eyes, their lids shy and demure, pale pink lips wearing a smile not yet quite a woman’s.
She was sweet milk from the nipple, and I had to have her. I wooed her with powers that I didn’t know I possessed. I told her whatever she wanted to hear. I read poems to her and pretended they were my own. I played a mandolin and sang sad songs that I’d learned on my travels. I told stories, jokes, promises, lies.
Soon we were betrothed. Our families were pleased: mine had the money that hers lacked, and hers had the name that mine lacked. But once I’d won her troth, for which I had fought so hard, I was overcome with anxiety. My future seemed already dug like a grave: getting married, assuming my father’s business, having children, growing old on hard church pews.
I could scarcely sleep or eat. By day she and I strolled through parks, went to museums, enjoyed picnics, made plans. By night I haunted the whorehouses or drank with poets and painters in the absinthe bars. The gift of poetry descended on me in a sort of demonic Pentecost. As I prowled the streets, maddened with absinthe, phrases and sentences issued unbidden from my mouth, framing ugly images in pretty language, forming thoughts that my day-mind comprehended not.
I had to possess her, but not with matrimony. It was her purity that I wanted, not her hand in marriage. All of the powers that I had used to woo her, I now marshaled to reave her innocence.
I lured her to my apartment. As much as my fingers, I used silky syllables to undress her. The delicate petals of her clothing fell one by one, while from my mouth fell words and phrases, incantations that I had half-heard during my absinthe deliriums, snake tongues licking the language of lust.
Now her breasts were bare, and I mouthed to life nipples that had never before been sucked. My fingers tiptoed their way down a belly as white and pure as a communion wafer. Now she was naked, and I carried her to my bed and used my tongue on her sex, sweet and creamy with eighteen years of cleanliness and virtue, and I tongued her to a raging itch until she cried out for me to have her. Her precious innocence began to char and blacken like a child’s prayer book tossed in the fire. I let her cry out until her cries were like flames, and then I entered her and used her more savagely than I’d ever used any whore in the brothel. When I finished she was bloody and sore and wanting more.
In the days that followed I introduced her to absinthe and opium and the riding crop. Whenever the mood struck me, I’d bend her over the bed and flog her slender girl hips till the welts turned red like her hair. I was tasting forbidden fruit, and like her I couldn’t get enough.
Our revels were short-lived. Soon one of her brothers caught on, and I fled to Madrid. My money was low, and I dared not write my father for more. Surely by now news of my roguery had reached him—or had her family chosen to keep their disgrace to themselves? In any event, I never again communicated with my family.
I earned the few pesetas I needed by teaching English. I no longer wanted liquor or nice clothing, and I scarcely wanted food. Every hour I thought of Nicole. Had I made her pregnant? Had her family turned her out in shame? Was she walking the streets now, alone and unwanted? Had I corrupted her soul as I’d corrupted my own?
The Roman Catholic Church’s preoccupation with the sufferings of Jesus and the saints now appealed to me more than the bland proprieties of the Church of England. I plunged into its labyrinthine mysteries, and soon I was confirmed. I was terrified of the spirit of evil within me, and I spent my days and nights in a bitter penance, as if seeking a lye strong enough to scrub me clean. But nothing could cleanse me. Was I not a hypocrite, a whited sepulcher? For no matter how I sought salvation, there was no prayer, no parable, no liturgy, no sacrament, not even the holy Eucharist itself, that stirred in me such profound desire as the memory of the livid red welts on her naked white flesh.
One night in December, while I skulked through the narrow, twisting streets of Madrid plunged deep in these thoughts, Carmina stepped out of the shadows of a doorway. Though she can mesmerize anyone to her will, she didn’t need to use her occult powers on me.
In her eyes I saw the damnation I’d been seeking all along.
***
It’s been a fortnight since I’ve seen Carmina. I was hoping she’d visit me, but I suppose she’s having too much fun.
I’ve been spending my nights on endless walks, carrying on pointless conversations in my head, but tonight it’s too cold for walking. It’s November already, and the air bites like a nest of snakes. I need to pick up a warmer coat from the house. Also a hat, gloves, some clean linen. I should make a list.
Nothing to do but sit in this damned room. I’m sick of Proust. My past is much longer than his, more pages. I tried thumbing through my forgotten years, but it was like reading a novel written by a stranger in a foreign language that I can barely remember. Better to forget. Instead I carry on conversations in my head, night after night. With a priest, no less. An imaginary priest, so he knows no more than I do and therefore is useless. As if a flesh and blood priest would somehow be useful.
Why a priest? Because when I was young damnation was the forbidden fruit, and now salvation is. Nothing tastes so sweet as that which I can’t have. But I want salvation for her much more than for me. I miss her horribly and waste my time blathering with an imaginary priest, asking if there’s some way he could heal her with his sacerdotal sorcery and save her from the fires that await us both.
Useless thoughts. As for this journal, it’s worse than useless.
***
Last night I went to the house. I called to ask Dimitri to pick me up, but also to warn Carmina. I was afraid to walk in unannounced, afraid of what I might find. Though I suppose I already knew.
She has killed the redheaded girl, and now Leo has taken her place. Carmina has him hanging upside down from the ceiling, with chains instead of straps because he’s as strong as a bull. With a scalpel she has carved elaborate arabesques in his skin. He’s a purple mess, oozing pus. His eyelids are fastened open with safety pins. He groans and thrashes and rattles his chains and rages, though his words are unrecognizable because his lips are gone. I don’t know whether she cut them away or he chewed them off in his agony. She can keep him like that forever if she chooses, feeding him blood to keep him ticking.
I tried to leave the room, but she stopped me. “Look at his eyes,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
“They’re bloodshot and bloody. Kill him and be done with this.”
“You see fires, don’t you? He knows the fires, and now that’s all he can see.”
She came up close to him and looked in his bloody eyes. He roared and tried to grab her, but she giggled and moved away.
She threw her arms around me and said, “I did this for you, my love. I know how sad and bored you’ve been. I know how dreary you’ve found our nights for a long time now. I
tried to cheer you up, I brought home beautiful women for you but you seemed to find no pleasure in them. I danced like Salome and sang cheerful songs to amuse you, but you just stared out the window and sighed.”
She let go of me and paced around the room for a while, speaking nonsense. “If I were a bat I’d be a hat,” she said. “If I were a snail I’d be a whale…”
I noticed the fanciful arabesques on Leo’s skin were made of letters, and I stepped closer to read them. She had carved a grocery list into his pelt: anchovies, Camembert, hummus, black olives, pita bread, pickles… Yes, Dear Reader, assuming anybody ever reads this, we do eat as well as drink, and we’re both quite fond of anchovies.
Lucidity returned to her for a moment, or maybe it didn’t. “If you persist in staring out the window and sighing, I’m going to leave you,” she said. “I’ll go far away, where there’s song and laughter. If I want to hear someone moan and sigh like a sick cow, I’ll rip his fucking skin off.”
She kicked her boy-toy’s head, making him roar and scream. “Here’s the happiness you can have,” she said. “Find joy in the cries of your victims. Take pleasure in the peeling of skin. Follow your bliss in the blood you spill. This is paradise.”
I gathered up some clothing and left.
***
Last night I found my priest, or rather he found me.
I was taking one of my endless walks. I had already fed, quickly and lightly, as I’ve done since being apart from Carmina. I told myself I wasn’t so different from any normal man who has left his wife of many years. Instead of the comforting ceremony of a sit-down supper, he now eats in haste and finds no pleasure in doing it alone. Just an ordinary guy, going through an ordinary middle-age adjustment.
To compound the absurdity, I was admiring like a lover the overcoat I’d picked up at the house. It’s a dark-gray wool flannel coat with countless years on it, and better for the wear, as familiar—and far more comforting—than my own skin, and last night, as I strode along, my hands deep in its pockets, fingering the mysterious hole in the back corner of the left pocket where the stitching has come loose, finding in the pockets a tattered matchbook, a card from a now-defunct discotheque, a wadded shred of paper with a forgotten woman’s name and phone number, a ball of thread that I worried over and over with my fingers, rolling it into a tighter ball, as if I were rolling up my consciousness to make it infinitesimally tiny, the coat added to my comfortable illusion of being an ordinary human being with the scraps of an ordinary past buried in the pockets of a faithful and ordinary overcoat. Now that I had the coat I hardly needed it, for even though it’s November the weather is unseasonably mild, and with this heavy wool coat I should have been uncomfortable, but I was savoring the excessive warmth, feeling secure and mothered in its embrace.