By Blood We Live
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Glen Duncan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, Ltd., Edinburgh.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to following for permission to reprint previously published material:
HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt [from the film version of
The Sheltering Sky
] from
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles. Copyright © 1949 by Paul Bowles, copyright © renewed 1977 by Paul Bowles. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Excerpt from
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell. Copyright © 1949 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed 1977 by Sonia Brownell Orwell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Penguin Books Ltd.: Excerpt from “Genesis” from
Selected Poems
by Geoffrey Hill. Copyright © 2006 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-307-59510-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-385-35038-9 (eBook)
LCCN 2013044988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1
Remshi
I
T
’
S BETTER TO
kill people at the end of their psychology. They have nothing left to offer themselves or the world.
Not that I should have been killing anyone just then. Having fed less than twenty hours ago I should have woken slaked and mellow, indifferent to blood for at least a week. Instead I’d woken in a state of—not to put too fine a point on it—complete fucking pandemonium. Voices in the head (repeating, God only knew why,
He lied in every word … He lied in every word …
), earthquake in the heart, Sartrean nausea in the soul—and
thirst
such as I hadn’t felt in centuries. Not the domesticated version, to be fobbed off with a half-dozen pouches from the fridge. No. This was The Lash, old school, non-negotiable, the red chorus that deafened the capillaries with its single moronic imperative:
GET LIVING BLOOD NOW, OR DIE.
Traumatically baffling though all this was it wasn’t the main mystery. The main mystery was the dream I’d had. Do
not
start with a murder. Do
not
start with a dream. I know. But my defence is two-pronged: One, I’m a murderer. Two, the dream was a colossal anomaly. Not the content. Just the fact of it. I don’t, you see, dream. At all. Ever. Not since Vali died. And that was a long,
long
time ago.
No chance to consider that now, however. The thirst’s virtue is that next to the need to satisfy it everything else becomes laughably secondary. It gives you, as would a gun pointed at your head, focus.
So here I was.
The house of Randolf Moyser, pornographer, was, not surprisingly, the pornographer’s house: Milanese sofas in cream leather, jade side tables, cowhide rugs, chandeliers, planes of carpet the colour of Bahamian sand, mirrors it would’ve needed a crane to hang. I’d chosen it for its location, a mile northwest of Malibu Springs, high on an unoverlooked hill with pinewoods cover on the eastern side to within fifty yards of the
ground floor terrace, and on the west uninhabited scrub all the way to the nearest neighbour’s tree line a quarter of a mile away. I say “chosen,” but that’s not true. The Lash applies suave guidance, finds the ether’s invisible vectors and drifts, the spaces in space that lead to fulfilment. The blood’s dialogue—yours and theirs (or rather mine and yours)—starts before you’ve quite set eyes on each other. Like a love story. Like the moments just before I first saw Vali, seventeen thousand years ago.
(Yes, you read that right.)
I left the car in a lay-by on the country road and walked up through the woods.
Randolf, known in the industry as E. Wrecked (and known to me ever since a production company I own made a documentary about him), was at the end of his psychology. He’d just turned fifty-eight, and for more than two decades had been rich enough for it not to matter what he looked like. Letting himself go, physically, had been part of the psychology: there mustn’t be the slightest chance that the twenty-two-year-old on her knees with his cock in her mouth could possibly want to be on her knees with his cock in her mouth. Therefore unkempt toenails. Therefore waxy belly and flaccid bubs. Therefore yawning pores. It was quite something to be able to go bald not only without anxiety, but with satisfaction.
Yet his psychology had betrayed him. His psychology had said that if he got enough women to do things they didn’t want to do—no force (force was cheating), just persuasion, seduction, money,
psychology
—then the great burning formless question of his being would be answered. He didn’t know where this equation had come from—that the degradation of women was the doorway to revelation—only that it was his and that it was beyond contradiction or doubt. He hadn’t shirked it. After thirty-five years in the business there wasn’t much he could think of that a woman wouldn’t want to do that he hadn’t got a woman to do. But his psychology had lied. His psychology had been like the Devil, full of false promises. Leaving aside the problem of the small number of women who, for whatever reason,
wanted
to do all the things all the other women didn’t (in their performances you could glimpse impatience or irritation that they weren’t degrading themselves enough, a frantic desperation at the limits), leaving aside this small number of women who were useless to his psychology (and who were frankly ruining the industry for everyone else), leaving
these aside, the fundamental problem didn’t alter: degrading women or getting women to degrade themselves did not, in fact, answer the burning formless question of his being. It was Eve biting into the apple to discover only that it was an apple and she could bite into it. His psychology had no other methods on offer. His psychology was a one-trick pony, and the trick had failed, every time.