By Blood We Live (2 page)

Randolf, or E., wasn’t alone. His gofer was on the phone in the downstairs office, and two sharp-kneed escorts in bikinis and strappy stilettos were drinking mojitos by the opalescent moon-pool. Randolf was in one of the upstairs bedrooms (Corinthian pillars, a fireplace like a wedding cake) shouting at his web manager about problems with the recently launched site, imsorrydaddy.com. His production company was facing legal action from a Christian counselling service who—courtesy of domain registration meltdown—had a site of the same name devoted to reconciling rebellious daughters with their churchgoing fathers. “I don’t fucking care what fucking Anthony fucking told you,” he was saying, while examining a possibly cancerous mole on his Tiresian chest. “I’m telling you we get
those
assholes to change the name. What? No, imsorrymommy.com
isn’t
a viable fucking alternative. Jesus fucking Christ. Why doesn’t any—What the fuck—”

He was having the moment of disbelief. That he hadn’t seen or heard me come in. But there I was. His mouth was open, breath a hot mix of Booker’s Bourbon and a meat-packed bowel.

“You’re on CCTV,” Randolf said. I didn’t contradict him, though it had taken me less than a minute to disable the system. I didn’t speak at all. There was nothing for me to say. At this moment there never is. He found himself on his back on the floor, with me on top of him. He didn’t know how that had happened. It was an awful magic, the blur, the compression, the two states—upright/on the floor—with no causal apparatus between them. And of course he knew what I was. Humans always do, when the time comes.
Vampire. Vampires. In spite of governments and Christmas and Microsoft. Well, I’ll be.
When their time comes there’s always a disinterested part of them ravished by such things being real after all. They think: Damn, this would’ve made quite a difference to my life. It wouldn’t, in Randolf’s case, but there was no point going into it with him.

I hoofed him in the balls and broke his left arm.

The last moment before the bite is like the last moment before coming: stopped time and shrugged-off space, an instant of seeing how it is for God. It’s why people in sexual extremis say
Oh, God.
It’s not a cry to the Divine, it’s a recognition of their own divinity. I was very aware of my mouth open, my heartbeat in my teeth, the obscene ease with which I held him, the room like a frozen grin around us, and beyond it the Californian night and the orange blossom and the desert and the sprawling dark continent’s indifferent consciousness gathering to a kind of Meaning. All Randolf’s details huddled in him like a terrified village crammed inside its church. This is what happens: the particulars gather, exude their fraught vibe like an odour and before you bite, before you drink, you get an inkling of what it’s going to give you, the base notes, the exploded secrets, the finish. All your victim’s decisions and imprecisions and crimes and losses gather and sing—in this moment—of the tiny and unique ways in which this life will, once you’ve drunk it down, change you.

He was trying to say something, but my hand around his throat reduced it to abortive sibilants and fricatives. He was struggling, I suppose, but he might as well have been a sack of oatmeal for all the good it did him. I shifted my grip to cover his mouth, lay fully on top of him, looked him in the eyes, once—then sank my fangs into his throat.

Dark and sweet and total. Surrender like the guillotine’s drop. The universe comes in through those eye-teeth as it does to a suckling babe through the nipples of its mother. You want more, you want it all. So you take more, you take it all. Randolf’s life.

If I’d got a woman to kill her own child while I fucked her in the ass
—

This was one of his last thoughts, unfortunately. It was unavoidable, once he knew he was dying. In the wake of every failure his psychology had said it was his fault, he hadn’t gone far enough, and he’d thought that would be about as far as you could possibly go. Only he’d never gone that far, and now he was dying this thought along with others (his mother’s powdery face, the Jersey tenement stoop, the hot flank of a big dog that had knocked him down when he was small, a million TV fragments and hoarding slogans and women’s faces spattered with come) flashed brief and vivid against the wall of fear. He’d thought he’d known fear. But I showed him the end of his psychology—worse even than a handful of dust—and he realised he’d never known fear before.

You don’t let the heart stop. Anne Rice got that right. But I know when there are a dozen beats left. Ten. Six. Three. Two … Naturally you push it. Naturally the last draughts are precious, carry the yolky taste of the soul’s torn caul, the residue of its confused farewell. The swallowed life fans out in your blood, exhales its wisdoms and losses, its poignant incidentals that enlarge you, force you to find shelf-space in the groaning stacks. Your heart’s library, whether you like it or not, expands. I used to see it as a woeful irony that murdering humans increased my love for humanity. Now I accept it, drink, make room, get bigger, love them, go my ways.
Because someone has to bear witness
, the voice of my maker had said, long ago, in the darkness of the cave.

I sucked hard, went wholly seduced—went
wantonly
into the drink. If the soul was immortal it left its memories behind in the blood, shed consciousness and passed on, naked and pure, to the realm beyond image and word, to be wrangled over by God and the Devil, or to reach final dissolution in the void. But I didn’t need the soul. Only the blood. Always and always and always the blood. I drank and felt the rhythm of the drinking in my eyelids and fingertips and nipples and feet. I drank and swam down into Randolf’s goodbye pulse, softened into the beat, systole, diastole, systole, diastole, at last lost myself, went, for a time, out of time.

But the sixth sense hauls you back. I stopped with two heartbeats left. Watched his eyes flutter, observed the last moments. His psychology had brought him all the way to death then turned and left him with nothing. Now he was going, desperate, terrified, unready, like the last grains of sand sucked through the hourglass’s dainty midriff. Gone.

Randolf’s life had woken the other lives in me and my heart was a rose of fire. Cells bloomed, the song of my dead throbbed in the tissues. The universe’s half-revealed Meaning surrounded me. The busy clues to the grand architecture that was like an irresistible enigmatic smile.

I stood up, hilariously strong, a glut of sly power in the shoulders, the thighs. You forgot how good it was. You forgot it was everything. You forgot it took possession from soles to scalp, refreshed fingerprints, eyelashes, pubes, the queer little papillae of the tongue. You forgot it let Meaning bleed back in like colour returning to a monochrome world. You forgot it was something perfect, and in the way of perfect things—the pole-vaulter’s flawless clearance, for example, the skater’s nailed triple
salchow—made you want to laugh. I might have laughed, too, had the memory of the dream not suddenly flashed and fractured me again, had
He lied in every word
not buzzed like a wasp in my ear then whizzed away, leaving behind in me a feeling of knowing that I knew something without knowing what it was.

Downstairs, the gofer dropped ice cubes into a glass. I took a last look at Randolph’s shocked face (his formidable head was the centre of an expanding Rorschach butterfly of blood), wished, briefly, that I could always take the lousy ones, pick the human race clean of its wretches like oxpeckers rid Cape buffalo of their parasites, then I leaped across the room to the window, slid it open and jumped. One of the angular escorts looked up, thought, Jesus that was some fucking … Do eagles fly at night? No, that’s … that’s owls. Anyway, whatever …

S
TUNNED AND SYMPHONIC
with new blood, I retraced my steps through the woods to the car, a humble Mitsubishi (the trophy vehicles went years ago, novelty exhausted; I regretted it just then, remembering the lurch and grip of the bronze ’68 Camaro, its smell of gasoline and vinyl and the stoned end of the decade, Jimi on the eight-track) and within minutes was heading east on the 101. The moment—rolling darkness and the empty LA hills, me wide-eyed and stinking rich with stolen life—needed music (“O Fortuna” from Orff’s
Carmina Burana
and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” both sprang to mind), or rather, it would have needed music, had not the quenched thirst left me at dreadful liberty to consider the madness of everything that had happened since I’d opened my eyes in the vault less than three hours ago.

The inexplicable thirst.

He lied in every word.

The dream.

Oh, yes. While I’d slept. As opposed to the flashbacks and fugues my head goes in for when I’m awake.

A dream?

Impossible.

Im
possible.

It might not seem much to you, but I have to repeat: I don’t dream. Categorically: I
do not
dream.

Not since …

Not since you were very young. Not since Vali died …

Sadness swelled, suddenly—and I knew if I let myself I’d start crying. (I’d been prone to little weeps, of late. You’re a bit fragile, Fluff, Justine had said, not long ago, having discovered me in tears in front of a TV movie starring Lindsay Wagner dying of leukaemia …)

I didn’t dream.

I did
not
dream.

But there it was. Last night, I’d dreamed.

In
the dream I was walking barefoot on an empty beach. It was twilight and the sea was black. There were a few lonely stars in the sky, as if the bulk of the constellations had been swept away. I was walking towards …

Towards what?

He lied in every word.

Someone else was there, close behind me.

That was all.

Was that all? Wasn’t there something else …?

My face tingled and my hands tightened on the Mitsubishi’s steering wheel. This had, actually, happened, no matter how much it seemed it couldn’t have. Millennia of empty sleep—now this. The last dream
before
this—seventeen thousand years ago (or was it sixteen? precision goes; epoch-edges blur)—had been of Vali. The night Vali died she appeared to me in a dream and said:
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.

Tears welled again. Stunned and symphonic with new blood I might have been, but it made the feeling of forlornness worse, and before I knew it, there I was—yes, ridiculous, ridiculous—weeping. I imagined Justine saying, as she had when Lindsay Wagner had upset me,
Don’t cry, Stonk.
I liked it when she said that. I liked it when she put her hand in my hair or wrapped her limbs around me like a monkey. There were so many things I liked. That was the awful thing about being alive: there were so many things one liked. The awful thing about life was that there were so many
things
, full stop. You’re not waiting for Vali’s return, Mahmoud had bitched to me, shortly before his suicide, you’re just addicted to
life.
You’re not a romantic. You’re a junkie.

I dried my tears with the heel of my hand, like a woman in a movie driving away sadly but bravely from a break-up, and forced myself to think back. With every hero from every pre-Seventies horror film I said to myself: Now just calm down. There has to be a perfectly rational explanation for all this …

Last night had been, as far as I could remember, unexceptional. Justine and I had watched
The Graduate
and
A League of Their Own
(Geena
Davis’s smile is one of the things I stay alive for, I’d said. Do you think that makes me an emotional moron?) then she’d gone out to the club and I’d gone down to the vault, drunk six O positive MREs from the cooler and read
Don Juan
for the last two hours of darkness until sleep took me just before dawn. That was all. Nothing unusual. Nothing to explain the dream, the wake-up panic, the pounding thirst, the conviction that I knew something without knowing what it was. Nothing, in short, to explain the overwhelming feeling that either I or the world had gone completely insane.

Desert night flowed over the car. I was aware of my face, thudding, and of the Mitsubishi’s instrument panel attending to my mental wrestle with a kind of sympathetic innocence. The dream’s images tantalised: the empty beach, the sparse stars, the black water, the unknown someone walking behind me. Naturally I’d forgotten what this was like, the way a dream’s churned wake or slipstream left you groping after the dissolving fragments, what they meant, what they seemed to mean. They don’t mean shit, Oscar the analyst had said to me one night in Alexandria. Dreams are prick-teasers
non pareil.
They promise and promise but they never put out. Don’t waste your time on dreams. Oscar was dead, too, it must be seventy years. So many dead. I had not known death had …

And, yes, back came the tears. Accompanied, this time, by the beginning of real fear, because what, what,
what
the fuck was wrong with me?

I spent the rest of the journey going through the same amnesiac loop, but I was none the wiser by the time I made it—precarious, tender, horribly alive to my own confusion—home.

Nor was home an end to the madness.

Having parked the car out front I paused, arrested in spite of the unhinged nature of things by the Californian night, the scents of orange blossom and bougainvillea and the lovely odour of damp travertine where the sprinklers’ arc had rinsed the drive. My memory being what it is I got by way of association an open mass grave at Auschwitz, thrilled rats rummaging the pale limbs as if for valuables long since purloined by the master race. I stood still for a moment to let the vision fade. There’s nothing to do with these headflashes but wait them out. Which is what I would have done, had the reverie not been interrupted by a sudden human whiff,
rich as a cured meats and pickles counter, that compelled me to turn and look back down the drive.

It didn’t need night sight.

He was standing between the gateposts, illuminated by the two outdoor lamps that sit atop them like twin full moons, a beggarly old man leaning on a single crutch. His bulk, I knew, came not from protein but from a dozen never-removed layers of clothing with an eco-system of their own. His face was gaunt—what there was to see of it amid the matted hair and health-hazard beard—and one of his large eyes was dramatically bloodshot. His hands were tanned and filthy. If one of my neighbours had seen him the cops were probably already on their way.