Precious Blood (7 page)

He closed his eyes, then tilted his head down, his lip working as he began to cry.

His wife stood and put a hand on his shoulder; he tried to wave her away, but she caught his hand and stayed. She pulled him to her and stroked his head as he wept.

Jenner said, “Mr. Delore, I can’t imagine how hard this day has been for you. Perhaps it would be better if we spoke a little later.”

Delore, sobbing, tried to shake his head, but his wife said,

“I think that would be best, Doctor. We have your telephone number. When he’s had a chance to get some rest, my husband will call you.” She nodded to Jenner, grateful.

Jenner stood as she helped her husband to his feet, then put an arm around him and led him from the room.

Jenner let himself out.

Ana was still in his bed when he got home. She got up quickly and made a feeble show of tidying the bedroom.

He shooed her into the TV room and ordered pizza.

Precious Blood

49

They ate at the kitchen table, both too tired to speak. After dinner, she took a long bath. She tried to make him take the bed, arguing that he was much taller than she was, and that she felt really guilty, him being uncomfortable on the couch. But he wouldn’t hear of it, and insisted that she keep the bed.

It wasn’t a wholly altruistic act, he realized: at some level, he liked her gratitude. Still, at six-foot-two, for him the couch was an uncomfortable prospect; it was just as well he was exhausted.

But he couldn’t sleep—the day wouldn’t leave him alone.

The girl on the wall. Whittaker. Tony Delore weeping in his plush hotel suite. And now Ana, in his space, in his bed.

He was wired; he needed to come down, to feel himself again. He got up and went to his desk. He opened up a mahogany case and took out a double-sealed bottle of tincturing alcohol, a glass laboratory flask, and several dark vials of floral and herbal extracts.

After the whole 9/11 thing, when he finally admitted to himself that he was coping poorly, Julie bullied him into seeing one of the government-funded therapists. Dr. Rother had said it might help him to get the collection of essential oils. Jenner, amused, had bought the set, only to be amazed at how wonderful he found the small library of scents. He later explained slightly sheepishly to Rother that the oils hadn’t helped him in an
aromatherapy
way, but had helped him get out of his head and back into his body. Working with the oils was a purely sensual pastime, with no goal beyond experiencing the scents. Learning to spot the different aromas, experimenting with blending extracts, observing how the scent changed as the perfume met the air, provided Jenner with an almost Zen immersion in a natural,
real
thing: a fleeting moment of pure sensation that couldn’t be touched by burning fires or collapsing buildings, by radiation or by weaponized bacteria.

At first, he’d struggled to tell ylang-ylang from jasmine,
50

j o n at h a n h ay e s

but soon he could easily separate the sweetness of jasmine grandiflorum from the heady, erotic perfume of night-blooming jasmine sambac, and before long he was dis-criminating between Bulgarian and Turkish extracts of the same rose species. His favorites were the grasses—hay, mel-lilot, flouve—the thick, coumarin scents, sweet as vanilla, made him feel as if he were lying in a field at sunset in late summer.

He decided to work on saffron. He’d once extracted a saffron essential oil, but beyond the absurd cost, the scent of the oil had been fleeting. He found a four-hundred-year-old tincture recipe in the online archives of a society of French food historians in Beaulieu, and spent the rest of the evening experimenting at his desk. He began by gently heating diluted alcohol, then dropping three thick pinches of brick red saffron threads into the warm glass flask. He swirled the flask, savoring the warm, buttery scent of the stamens as they swelled and turned crimson, watching the alcohol’s almost imperceptible change from gin clear to the palest of canary yellows. He dipped a test strip, clipped it to a stand, smelled it, and then methodically sniffed it and made notes during the first hour of the dry-down. After one last sniff, he closed his notebook at 1:00 a.m. and put sheets on the couch.

When he turned out the light, Julie’s cat, invisible all day, slipped out from under the club chair. The cat crept warily across the floor, then jumped up onto the couch to lie against him. Jenner was already asleep.

monday,

december 2

Jenner had had nightmares for months after 9/11, but they had finally gone away, replaced by solid sleep, dreamless and deathlike.

He woke suddenly, disoriented, on the couch. Then he remembered: he was in his living room, in his loft, with Ana de Jong. Awake, eyes still closed, he felt the light through his lids. He remembered traveling with Julie in Spain, driving through Castile–La Mancha in early autumn. The road wound through fields of pale violet crocuses, and as they neared Consuegra, the air filled with the scent of saffron.

He opened his eyes, the saffron still in his nose. He sat up stiffly. It wasn’t a dream: Ana was at his desk, wearing his pajama top, perched on his chair, going through his things.

She was looking through the mahogany box, examining each vial in turn. He watched her take out the vial of Egyptian jasmine, unscrew the silver cap, and sniff it.

She’d had a bad night. Jenner had woken, then lain awake on the couch, listening to her cry. He wondered if she knew he’d heard.

She put the jasmine back and began sniffing the cabreuva.

She tucked one tan leg underneath her and glanced absently in Jenner’s direction, eyes widening a little when she saw him watching her.

“Hi,” she said. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to wake you, Dr.

Jenner.”

“No, you didn’t. Don’t worry.”

“Dr. Jenner?” She swiveled the chair to face him, leg still tucked under, looking tiny in Jenner’s pajama top.

“Please call me Jenner. Edward, if you have to; my friends call me Jenner.” She was sitting half naked in his house, wearing his clothes, going through his things: she might as well call him Jenner.

“You don’t like your first name?”

54

j o n at h a n h ay e s

“Not much.” He hated it. “You had a question?”

“No, I had to tell you I accidentally spilled one of the perfumes. I’m sorry.”

The saffron tincture. He told her not to worry. She was probably wondering why a man would have a collection of twenty glass vials of perfume oil in an elegant wooden case; let her draw her own conclusions.

Then he caught sight of her left hand and understood why she’d spilled the oil. He’d never been particularly good at dressing wounds; he’d bandaged her cut hand into a wad of white the size of a boxing glove.

“How does your stomach feel?” he asked.

“A bit sore. Not too bad.”

“I should probably have a look at it.” She made a little face, and then stood up gingerly, gently pressing one hand to her belly.

“In the bathroom again?”

Jenner nodded and got up, securing his pajama bottoms with his hand as she padded past him. He followed her into the bathroom, then squeezed by her to get the bandages and antiseptic.

He sat on the edge of the tub, and she lifted the pajama top, exposing her thighs and belly. How unself-conscious she was! The easy intimacy, the gesture of trust, it all made him uncomfortable. Her deep tan was accentuated by the contrast with her white panties. They said “Hi, Sugar!” in pink on the front, and there was a kitschy little picture of a waving sugar cube.

“This is going to sting a bit, okay?” She nodded and bit her lower lip.

Jenner slowly stripped off the bandaging he’d used to cover the scrapes on her lower belly. As she’d gone over the wall in the backyard of her building, the bottle-glass spikes embedded along the top had cut her hand badly, and carved three raking slices into her lower abdomen. The wounds
Precious Blood

55

were now raised dark seams of flaking clot, the skin around them unevenly bruised. They were clean, though.

“Jenner,” she asked as he sprayed antiseptic, then carefully applied fresh gauze and bandages, “will I have a scar?”

“I think you probably will. Yes.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes brimmed with tears.

He hurriedly said, “Give me your hand now.”

As he unwrapped the mitten of gauze and then redressed the cut, the tears came faster and faster, spattering hotly onto Jenner’s hands as he pressed the last of the tape into place.

He stood, waiting for her to stop crying. When she didn’t, he tentatively reached up to pat her head; it was the best he could manage. She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.

He saw himself in the mirror, the girl sobbing against his chest, watched himself put his arms around her, hold her stiffly as she wept.

Christ. Why
him
?

The man ran along the East River in the dawn sleet, his hard paces splashing thin gray mud in all directions. The sodden hood of his sweatshirt was plastered against his scalp and neck, the cold, clinging garment heavy as the hand of God on his back.

Despite the cold, he ran in shorts. He used to have beautiful New Balance running shoes, but his last pair had finally fallen apart over the summer. He needed his money for his projects, so he ran in work boots laced tightly around his knee socks. His feet had callused hard, and he barely noticed the pain of each foot strike through the uncushioned soles.

His route along the waterfront was more an obstacle course than a path, zigzagging through crumpled piers, fenced lots, collapsing brick walls, and barren fields strewn with junk.

56

j o n at h a n h ay e s

He was thinking about the house on East Seventh Street, what he’d done there.

After he’d finished with Andie Delore, when he calmed down, he’d caught sight of the TV screen; he had sat there transfixed and incredulous. MTV’s
Spring Break: Daytona
Beach
, an actual, real-life orgy, naked men and women, broadcast for all the world to see. He’d lived a life apart, mostly; spring break at his small rural university had been nothing like that. Or maybe he just hadn’t known about it; he knew some students went south to Florida and the Carolinas.

But he’d never gone, never had any real idea what it was about. Even if he could have afforded it, no one would have invited him.

How
available
they were, those girls! They danced for the camera in tiny bikinis, jiggling and writhing, all golden brown skin and glistening flesh, hot, slippery prizes for the mobs of boys. But it was the boys he really stared at, buff and vigorous in the sunshine, stripped to the waist, their skin smooth and tan. Had they never been adolescent, never had pimples? Where were their scars? he wanted to know.

In the bars at night, half-naked girls lay giggling as boys lapped alcohol from the hollow between their breasts. The drunken girls kissed each other on the mouth as the boys hooted like apes, and the girls cursed as if they were men, and the boys ate it all up like hungry little piggies crowding at the trough. And when they were vomiting drunk, they paired off and staggered away to finish what they’d begun, graceless and bestial.

He shook himself. Where they had chosen debasement, he had stayed pure.

He thought about the day before, coming back to his factory, her dried blood crusted on his white skin like lichen, rust red over gooseflesh. He had smeared her blood right up to his neck, had walked home in the rain, head bowed into the scarf that concealed it, half delirious from the scent.

Home and naked, he knelt on his mattress, holding the whip
Precious Blood

57

to his nostrils, the blood in the braided leather of the coiled whip clotted, but glossy and still damp.

He had knelt there, swaying slightly as he drew in her scent fully. The cold, the mortification of the cold, made it richer, intensified his sense of smell. The aroma of her suffering rose into his head in a vast crimson wave, filling him, expanding inside him. He was back there in the room, watching her flesh twitch with each stroke, watching her eyelids flutter, remembering how her life had ebbed away with one final convulsive gasp as she’d stopped breathing.

He’d worried he’d given her too much Fentanyl, that she’d be dead before he really got to work. But she’d been alive, and when he drove the first bolt through her feet and her limbs had stirred feebly, he’d rejoiced.

He’d taken the Polaroids from the box and set them neatly before him. Desire grew in him as he remembered the dry smoke of warming metal, the pop of each flash, that instant tungsten glare washing the girl’s skin white under the red, freezing her shuddering chest as she was dying. The later photographs were best, the ones after he’d realized that her mouth would look prettier open.

Oh, God—how
right
he had been . . .

As he approached Newtown Creek, fences and factory walls blocked the path along the waterfront. He cut back and forth, running inland in front of the factories, then a few blocks north until he could get back to the water, working toward Pulaski Bridge, a shadow in the mist ahead.

Running helped him focus. While he ran, he made his plans. But today his concentration was poor. Because last night, he had been seen. Ana de Jong had seen him, hard and slick with blood, revealed in his true, exalted state. Had she felt the energy? It burned through him like a glowing halo, an intense white light radiating off his skin. When he’d looked down at her from the window, she’d seen him and gasped! He’d felt his body flooding the night with light.

Ana had seen what no other living soul had witnessed,
58

j o n at h a n h ay e s

seen his power manifested in its purest form. By now, she’d know what had happened to her friend, know how he had fed upon her, how he’d transformed her. And she’d seen his own transformation, the majestic spirit that rose inside him when he killed, its mighty arms stretched wide and grasping.