by Jes Battis
I sigh. “That’s between Derrick and me.”
“Right. I’m sure you have a good reason. But in the meantime, your grown-up business is adversely affecting me.”
“How?”
“Derrick refuses to make dinner.”
“Oh, for—” I close my eyes. “Just heat up the leftover pasta.”
“He bought all of the fixings for tacos, but he’s too sad to make them. He just stares at the fridge. I think he was crying earlier. He looks super puffy.”
“It’s complicated. Just leave it.”
“But I want tacos. We all want tacos.”
“I have to go. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
I hang up when she’s in mid-moan. I realize that I may have to apologize to Derrick for hitting him. I don’t want to, though. It’s childish, but the anger keeps my wick lit, and somehow that’s better than the desolation of knowing that my best friend invaded my mind.
I hear stilettos in the hallway. Lady Duessa enters the study. She waves at me and then collapses into the chair.
“Hey, sweetheart. Attia told me you were here. What’s up?”
“I have a question for you. It’s probably something I shouldn’t ask.”
“Those are the tastiest questions.” She slides a box across the surface of the transparent desk. “Marzipan?”
“No, thank you.”
“What’s your question?”
“I need to know what Pharmakon is.”
Duessa frowns. “Where did you hear about that?”
“A phasma told me.”
“They’re so fucking gossipy.”
“So what is it?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“I got attacked by a vampire. He was tripping on something—really strong and bold enough to walk around during the day without catching fire. He acted like someone on PCP. I threw everything I had at him, and it was like he felt no pain. The phasma said it might have been something called Pharmakon.”
Duessa looks me up and down. “Something’s different about you.”
“I’m on vacation. Don’t I look well rested?”
“Not at all. There’s something else.”
“Oh. Well, I just found out that I knew smoke magic when I was a little girl, and that my mom used to hang with avian demons. That could be it. The whiff of my decomposing youth.”
She laughs softly. “Figured that one out, did you?”
“Derrick ripped it out of my mind.”
“Go easy on that boy. He’s been through as much as you have.”
“He’s not the topic. Pharmakon is.”
“¡Calla!” She shakes her head. “Easy with the word. Some words bite back, you know.”
“Uh-huh. Is this going to turn into something with imagery?”
“Well, now that you mention it”—she stretches—“it does remind me of the time I was chilling at the thermae with the Dama de Elche. Crazy bitch had the most intense hair you’ve ever seen, and some badass necklace that she stole from a necropolis. But that’s not the point. What you’re asking about is straight-up dark, okay? As in, shit not to be trifled with. If it even exists.”
“Can you just tell me what it is? Or should I ask the de leche lady?”
“De Elche. Doesn’t anyone read anymore?” Duessa sighs. “All right. Pharmakon is made from undead leukocytes. You’d have to bleed a necromancer dry just to harvest a few drops. I don’t know how to make it, so don’t ask, but it’s supposed to give whoever drinks it a kind of invulnerability. I guess if you were a vampire, you could use it like sunblock and it would make you stronger. You’re sure the one who attacked you was tripping on something like that?”
“Not completely. But so far, it’s my best lead. It seems like harvesting necromancers’ white blood cells would be a pretty big treaty violation.”
“When are you people going to learn that treaties are just paper? They mean nothing to immortals who are in the game.”
“Then why do you keep signing them?”
She smiles. “It’s a photo op.”
“Of course.”
She writes something down on a Post-it. She’s just about to hand it to me, but stops. An odd expression crosses her face.
“I felt it,” she says, “when the old bird died. Like a feather on my grave. He was an artificer, so whoever killed him must have been searching for something. If they’re also mixed up in Pharmakon, you want to think twice before tangling with them. Got it?”
I eye the Post-it. “Yes. Understood.”
She hands me the square of paper. “Go to this address. Don’t go alone. Bring backup. When they answer the door, ask for the cook. She’s an expert on bad stuff like this.”
“This is getting weirder by the second.”
“Come here.”
I approach the desk. She takes my hand and kisses it lightly. I feel a shadow of her power adhere to my skin. It tickles.
“That’s my mark,” she says. “It won’t last for more than a day, but as long as you carry it, most of the cretins should leave you alone.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t go alone. I’m serious. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She smiles. “Sweet girl. Seems like only yesterday, you had no idea what you were in the middle of, or where you came from. But you’re learning now. Enjoy it. Learning is the hard part, but it only happens once.”
“Is it supposed to feel this awful?”
She lets down her hair. “Oh, absolutely.”
I doze on the bus. I dream about a feline heart, bloom of red muscle turning slowly in the dark. I can see the arabesque curves, silent transepts, secrets dropped carelessly in the left atrium that glimmer on the floor. I place a hand against the slick surface of the tricuspid valve, feel it clamp closed, then open. The heart doesn’t know that it’s dead yet, like a human heart it needs to be told. Music fills the dim chamber as the papillary muscle starts to pump, ever stubborn, doing what it knows how, the best that it can. Need reaches across the black spectrum and somewhere, in the dormant folds, a copper note sounds.
Departure is a trend. There are too many paths out of the body to be counted, too many exits, so hard to keep anything and not just locally. Humans leave in groups. They just pack up and leave; they dismantle, tents folding themselves, flattening into nylon absences. Animals, too. They grow dissatisfied.
It takes a lot to keep even one small life tied to a place. Warm textures of instinct pull them away, and they slip along wet concrete, along unearthly grass. Thick desire pulls them from their homes, from the foot of the bed, the old good spot by the fire. They know what they’re doing, where they’re going, no apologies.
One day we’ll wake up and all of our pets will be gone, unable to cope with us any longer. And it won’t stop there. Coffee will spray from cups, cursors will leap to their deaths from computer screens, music will trickle in streams of light from compact discs, emptying the sonic breath chambers onto all of the world’s surfaces. When everything leaves, all we’ll have left are surfaces—dark ice rinks and swimming pools choked with our leaves.
I think of Lucian. I remember the elastic silence of an old kiss. I’m writing on your mouth—what am I saying? I laugh. SOS. Send help. I lift my head knowing a kiss is a narrative with the windows open, a space for theft, a scattering of grave goods. Things get in. You accept their incursion as a mirror accepts steam. Send help. We may be sinking. His fingers cool on the back of my neck. We’re babysitting Baron, who watches us from the doorway, looking slightly embarrassed. Humans must seem so clumsy with their signs, honeypots cracked open with no subtlety whatsoever.
Can I stay on this bus forever? A man with gray hair nuzzles the neck of a woman in a leather jacket. She mumbles and turns away. Near the front a man has a garbage bag full of—what are they, buttons?—something that clinks when he moves. “Take me home,” he says to the driver. “You know where I live; take me home.” Can I stay on this bus forever?
There would be no harm in being a balanced equation, skipping interstices like a rogue particle or a verb that has nothing to lose. Someone starts to sing “O Canada.”
I blink from the wild glow of Save-On-Meats, Funky Winker Beans, all the souls gathered in front of the Carnegie Library.
“God look at them,” a kid says.
The man with the garbage bag leans close to him. “You’ll be one of them someday,” he says.
The kid sputters, laughs, then stares moodily out the window.
I think of the cherry trees blading up like pink scandals in the air, backlit tender by light at Burrard Street Station. Magic lives there, circling the man-made fountains. Or maybe just the idea of magic, surviving on transit tickets, quarters, and cold puffed sentences stolen from backpackers in love, the braid of incidental words that from some angles could be warm braids of challah bread. If that magic were real, she would have to be made out of flowers and cooling cigarette embers, dark steel gleams and crinkles of foil, the brave hum of the trains as they carry us in bundles through unmapped space, the terrorism of our tunnels. The next station is never what you think.
She would prowl the edges of colonized thought, black paws against the rim of a white bathtub, skeptical, the way we test with one toe before sighing into hot water. Her voice would be rain on packed earth, an unlocking of ancient arcónes, or the stone kiss of smoke held in the lungs, held and kept, because the smoker is a lover who can’t let go. Her questing wet nose in your face with its modesty. Her dandelion spells breaking over you. To live at all is to share a world with cagey magic, skeptical magic, asshole magic. But, honestly, the trees must belong to something; the blossoms that tongue each groove between buildings, the water and the stone and the serious man-made steel railings all must belong. This major artery where blood and starlight pump along the tracks, where banks and malls and office towers shudder and gestate in the concrete like baobab trees.
One time, the power went out in Lucian’s loft. The heat stopped working and banged in the vents like a trapped animal kicking up dust. As a patina of coldness descended over everything, we lay on the rug eating brown bread right out of the package and letting it soak in bowls of steaming tomato soup, forming small lumped islands lost in continental drift. Afterward we huddled beneath his ugly striped afghan, thick with its odors of remembrance and transgression, bare feet cold and shocking each other. I could see under the table where a book had gotten lost or maybe buried; it was hard to say. Things do vanish into the intimate fissures of homes, into the coral reefs of beds with their quilts unrolled like someone’s bare ankle, into the quietude of unmarked doors and spaces just wide enough for something to fly out. The gap between warmth and window, maybe love but just as maybe a blind rune.
It’s quiet for a while, just the little hot pulse of Lucian’s breath on my back, the drag of stubble. I think that maybe the heat will never come back on. We’ll have to start a whole new civilization down here on the floor, in the space where the coffee table meets the rug, scraping stones together in the hopes that something will catch on fire. His fingers trace letters. I like to be written on but fear what that might mean. Lucian’s inscription is laugh-heavy with vowels and sparse wooded silences, the settling of things in snow. Every attempt at translation leaves some crucial word out. I’ve lost the frontispiece, the illuminated letter that sets everything into motion. The colorful grotesques camped in the margins continue to baffle me.
When I was a kitten, I would sit beneath shifting panes of light through the open window and stare at my mother’s books. There were so many, like bright toys or little rectangles of energy. We had an arrogant Persian with brown eyes that searched for unwilling laps. She exhibited a sun-kissed laziness as she sprawled on the stairway, not moving for hours, not even really watching the people as they stepped over her. One day the cat scratched me, leaving two half-moon puncture marks on my white knee. I drew back, startled, not understanding. Now I know that it was tender correspondence, that even the blood welling up from the wound contained a red, articulate love.
“Careful with the cat,” she said. “They don’t always play nice.”
Actually, cats don’t play at all; they live the most serious lives imaginable.
They have a lot to account for, a lot to manage. Ancient responsibilities whirl inside their pupils, inside the sad machines of their chain-linked thought. The agony of having to share this small slice of world with big breakable humans who are really just uncovered beating hearts walking around spilling their viscera and their words everywhere, not bothering to clean up. Animals are a smooth punctuation to human parataxis, resisting our love out of modesty. Sometimes I see Lucian’s face with shocked cat’s eyes looking at me, and where my body should be only a breaking kiss of shadow, and where my breath should be, only the feel of rough bark against an exposed tongue not ready for the touch.
Beyond the window, I watch the strays as they move sad and heavy along the streets, eyes glinting from Dumpsters, tails like satin pillows against the trash. I see the nomadic ones, dark prayer-flickers beneath the glowing signs in Mandarin. The girl with wet blond hair and, beneath her change cup, a cat asleep, head resting on scarred ankle. What complex trespasses does she dream of? What keeps her waking now and then to the sound of the trains as they thunder past, the clatter of souls, electric doors swinging in and out? She isn’t heavy enough to make them open. She sits outside and watches the supermarket light, her expression difficult to read.
When we stray, we move upward through bark rings, through pools of curious black matter, to the edge of the outer rim of human kindness, where the only sound is our fallen pauses, which turn to shadows and fog in the early morning, the dignity of gutters, rain in all of its angles, where demons and felines move the spiral galaxies.
How many times have I run out of fatalism, out of the sense that my leaving would make something right? That from the volta of my body slanting away, some small tempered light would shine out? Now, my mother seems to have strayed, for reasons that only she understands. Her logic is painful but worthy. She never feared memory. Decay frightens neither of us. But as I stare out the window, something makes me hesitate. The breath on my back isn’t Lucian’s. I don’t know where my mother has vanished to, and she has always been my GPS signal, my standard time.
“Ronroneas,” Lucian says. “I like it when you purr. Preciosita. My wise little hyphen.” He claims an islet of my body and tends to it while I sleep, his tongue cleaning a problem of the flesh. We lie fused together and sepia beneath the dim, one myth, a cherubim rolling in the dark and tossing arms and tails about in a dreaming mess. A man’s purring is the sound of every held kindness at the bottom of human roots floating up, silver lux against the prow of the body, a wind that cools the bones.
We purr only in private, not for just anyone. Heavy petting doesn’t always work. Like cats, we sometimes need to be handled delicately. The hand must hover an inch above us, until we feel its warm currents and have to lean in. Bodies will turn toward each other in sleep. Men have been known to embrace this way quite by accident. Both Lucian’s purr and Derrick’s snore make me feel better about all things. I listen and close my eyes. World mending. To go back and hear that sound again. To return to my beloved crystal state. All mourning is a mourning for time travel.
The world hurts you. I realized this early. It hurts you because it can.
We hang over tenement buildings like strange clotheslines, our hearts about to drop—someone must catch them before they sing too far out.
Lucian, shadow, I look for you. In the discreet rustle of paws, the sighing of homeless cats as they burrow into stinking piles of cardboard, and the princely ones staring out from waterfront windows, peculiar in their sadness. Lucian, you aren’t, you aren’t, just null, no code, parentheses closing over. But are you safe? Are you somewhere guarded? Are you eating enough?
I look for you. In the graveyard where the white trains sleep like albino pups. In the puddles with th
eir chorus of worms. In the drinking roots of the high black buildings, their windowed mouths closed to human plea, measuring starburn in cupfuls of lapidary. I look for you, in the words that our old Persian stepped over, the white square of page that her shadow fell across like an amethyst quill, shim shivering and brave enough, even if I barely noticed. Along untranslatable alleys, Dumpsters that hold sleeping roos in their pouch, kanga-like, long snakes of power line that fall across grooved footprints of space, I look for you.
Lucian. Through the cellar door, in rime and brine, I look, down all of the epic ways through which objects escape. I redact our papers and take out every name. I cut them out and hold them, brave little lines on foolscap. Lucian. Know this, at least. How carefully I peer. How long into the night’s last watch I search for you. Count my mistakes as they wander by. Allow them their ministry. They care about you largely, about us. They like the feeling of doing what they have to do. As inevitabilities go, they’re my personal best.
You’ve no idea—slipping away beneath the weight of our stupid, tired days—that I am saved by you, excavated. Take my hand knowing that I’m a beautiful mess. On my watch, some harm will come to you. Some doubt. Some pointless pain. But at least I carry a knife at all times. If I can walk once more with you through a painting and into the city of the dead, I promise to eat everything there, the fruit spread with its square black watermelons, the cold-cut trays, the scalloped potatoes, the glowworms, everything, even the air, even the verb. My body is all staircases, but it’s yours.
I push open the doors and walk to Yaletown. The patios are alive. Everyone drinks Technicolor cocktails. This whole area used to be filled with dock equipment and factories, and now all that gets made here are people’s reputations. Little dogs wait patiently, tethered to wicker chairs. The smell of global cuisine leaves me craving something bland, like dry toast or oatmeal. I may just have both before bed.
I ring Lucian’s bell. One night, I know, he’s not going to answer. I’ll show up and there won’t even be a note, just bare concrete floors. Like death itself, necromancers know when it’s time to move. At any moment, he could step sideways into a painting and vanish forever. But tonight, he answers the door. He’s wearing a housecoat and slippers. He smiles broadly when he sees me. I kiss him. I put everything that I have into it. When I pull away, he looks surprised, but happy.