The Tale of the Body Thief (30 page)

“Listen to me, ma chère,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Things simply went wrong. I know. I’m sorry.”

She moved to slap me but I caught her wrist easily and brought her hand down, hurting her a little.

“Get out,” she said again. “Get out or I’ll call the police.”

“I understand what you’re saying to me. It’s been forever since I did it. I was clumsy. I was bad.”

“You’re worse than bad!” she said in a deep raw voice.

And this time she did slap me. I wasn’t quick enough. I was astonished by the force of the slap, how it stung. I felt of my face where she’d hit me. What an annoying little pain. It was an insulting pain.

“Go!” she screamed again.

I put on my clothes, but it was like lifting sacks of bricks to do it. A dull shame had come over me, a feeling of such awkwardness and discomfort in the slightest gesture I made or smallest word I spoke that I wanted simply to sink into the earth.

Finally, I had everything buttoned and zipped properly, and I had the miserable wet socks on my feet again, and the thin shoes, and I was ready to go.

She sat on the bed crying, her shoulders very thin, with the tender bones in her back poking at her pale flesh, and her hair dripping down in thick wavy clumps over the blanket she held to her breast. How fragile she looked—how sadly unbeautiful and repulsive.

I tried to see her as if I were really Lestat. But I couldn’t do it. She appeared a common thing, utterly worthless, not even interesting. I was vaguely horrified. Had it been that way in my boyhood village? I tried to remember those girls, those girls dead and gone for centuries, but I couldn’t see their faces. What I remembered was happiness, mischief, a great exuberance that had made me forget for intermittent periods the deprivation and hopelessness of my life.

What did that mean in this moment? How could this whole experience have been so unpleasant, so seemingly pointless? Had I been myself I would have found her fascinating as an insect is fascinating; even her little rooms would have appeared quaint to me, in their worst, most uninspiring details! Ah, the affection I always felt for all sad little mortal habitats. But why was that so!

And she, the poor being, she would have been beautiful to me simply because she was alive! I could not have been sullied by her had I fed on her for an hour. As it was, I felt filthy for having been with
her, and filthy for being cruel to her. I understood her fear of disease! I, too, felt contaminated! But where lay the perspective of truth?

“I am so sorry,” I said again. “You must believe me. It wasn’t what I wanted. I don’t know what I wanted.”

“You’re crazy,” she whispered bitterly without looking up.

“Some night I’ll come to you, soon, and I’ll bring you a present, something beautiful that you really want. I’ll give it to you and perhaps you’ll forgive me.”

She didn’t answer.

“Tell me, what is it you really want? Money doesn’t matter. What is it you want that you cannot have?”

She looked up, rather sullenly, her face blotched and red and swollen, and then she wiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

“You know what I wanted,” she said in a harsh, disagreeable voice, which was almost sexless it was so low.

“No, I don’t. Tell me what.”

Her face was so disfigured and her voice so strange that she frightened me. I was still woozy from the wine I’d drunk earlier, yet my mind was unaffected by the intoxication. It seemed a lovely situation. This body drunk, but not me.

“Who are you?” she asked. She looked very hard now, hard and bitter. “You’re somebody, aren’t you … you’re not just … ” But her voice trailed off.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She turned her head even more sharply to the side, studying me as if it was all going to come to her suddenly. She’d have it figured out. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in her mind. I knew only that I felt sorry for her, and I did not like her. I didn’t like this dirty messy room with its low plaster ceiling, and the nasty bed, and the ugly tan carpet and the dim light and the cat box reeking in the other room.

“I’ll remember you,” I said miserably yet tenderly. “I’ll surprise you. I’ll come back and I’ll bring something wonderful for you, something you could never get for yourself. A gift as if from another world. But right now, I have to leave you.”

“Yes,” she said, “you’d better go.”

I turned to do exactly that. I thought of the cold outside, of Mojo waiting in the hallway, and of the town house with its back door shattered off the hinges, and no money and no phone.

Ah, the phone.

She had a phone. I’d spied it on the dresser.

As I turned and went towards it, she screamed at me, and hurled something at me. I think that it was a shoe. It struck my shoulder, but caused no pain. I picked up the receiver and punched the zero twice for long distance, and called my New York agent collect.

On and on it rang. No one there. Not even his machine. Most strange, and damned inconvenient.

I could see her in the mirror, staring at me in stiff and silent outrage, the blanket pulled around her like a sleek modern dress. How pathetic was all of this, down to the last jot.

I called Paris. Again it rang and rang, but finally there came the familiar voice—my agent roused from sleep. Quickly in French I told him I was in Georgetown, that I needed twenty thousand dollars, no, best send thirty, and I must have it now.

He explained that it was just sunrise in Paris. He would have to wait until the banks opened, but he would wire the money as soon as he could. It might be noon in Georgetown before it reached me. I memorized the name of the agency where I was to collect it, and I implored him to be prompt and see that he did not fail. This was an emergency, I was penniless. I had obligations. He gave me assurance that all would be handled at once. I put down the phone.

She was staring at me. I don’t think she had understood the phone call. She could not speak French.

“I’ll remember you,” I said. “Please, forgive me. I’ll go now. I’ve caused trouble enough.”

She didn’t answer. I stared at her, trying for the last time to fathom it, why she seemed so coarse and uninteresting. What had been my vantage point before that all life seemed so beautiful to me, all creatures but variations on the same magnificent theme? Even James had had a horrid glittering beauty like a great palmetto bug or a fly.

“Good-bye, ma chère,” I said, “I’m very sorry—truly I am.”

I found Mojo sitting patiently outside the apartment, and I hurried past him, snapping my fingers for him to come, which he did. And down the steps we went and out in the cold night.

I
N SPITE
of the wind gusting into the kitchen, and creeping around the dining room door, the other rooms of the town house were still quite
warm. A stream of heated air came from the little brass grilles in the floors. How kind of James not to have turned off the heat, I thought. But then he plans to leave this place immediately that he has the twenty million. The bill will never be paid.

I went upstairs and through the master bedroom into the master bath. A pleasant room of new white tile and clean mirrors and a deep shower stall with doors of shining glass. I tried the water. Hot and strong. Quite deliciously hot. I peeled off all the damp and smelly clothes, laying the socks on the furnace grille and neatly folding the sweater for it was the only one I had, and then I stood in the hot shower for a long time.

With my head back against the tile, I might have actually fallen asleep standing up. But then I began to weep, and then just as spontaneously, to cough. I felt an intense burning in my chest, and the same burning deep inside my nose.

Finally I got out, toweled off, and looked again at this body in the mirror. I could not see a scar or a flaw anywhere in it. The arms were powerful but smoothly muscled, as was the chest. The legs were well formed. The face was truly beautiful, the dark skin quite nearly perfect, though there was nothing of the boy left in the structure of it, as there was in my own face. It was very much the face of a man—rectangular, a little hard, but pretty, very pretty, perhaps on account of the large eyes. It was also slightly rough. Beard coming in. Have to shave. Nuisance.

“But really, this ought to be splendid,” I said aloud. “You’ve the body of a twenty-six-year-old male in perfect condition. But it’s been a nightmare. You’ve made one stupid error after another. Why can’t you meet this challenge? Where is your will and your strength?”

I felt chilled all over. Mojo had gone to sleep on the floor at the foot of the bed. I shall do that, sleep, I thought. Sleep like a mortal, and when I wake, the light of day will be coming into this room. Even if the sky is gray, it will be wondrous. It will be day. You will see the world of day as you’ve longed to see it all these years. Forget all this abysmal struggle and trivia and fear.

But a dreadful suspicion was coming over me. Hadn’t my mortal life been nothing but abysmal struggle and trivia and fear? Wasn’t that the way it was for most mortals? Wasn’t that the message of a score of modern writers and poets—that we wasted our lives in foolish preoccupation?
Wasn’t this all a miserable cliché?

I was bitterly shaken. I tried to argue with myself once more, the way I’d been doing all along. But what was the use?

It felt terrible to be in this sluggish human body! It felt terrible not to have my preternatural powers. And the world, look at it, it was dingy and shabby, frayed at the edges and full of accidents. Why, I couldn’t even see most of it. What world?

Ah, but tomorrow! Oh, Lord, another miserable cliché! I started laughing and another fit of coughing caught me. This time the pain was in my throat and quite considerable, and my eyes were watering. Best to sleep, best to rest, better to prepare for my one precious day.

I snapped off the lamp, and pulled back the covers of the bed. It was clean, I was thankful for that. I laid my head on the down pillow, brought up my knees close to my chest, drew the covers up to my chin, and went to sleep. I was vaguely sensible that if the house burned, I would die. If gas fumes came up out of the furnace grilles, I would die. Indeed, someone might come in the open back door to kill me. Indeed, all kinds of disasters were possible. But Mojo was there, wasn’t he? And I was tired, so tired!

Hours later, I woke.

I was coughing violently and bitterly cold. I needed a handkerchief, found a box of paper tissue that would do well enough, and blew my nose perhaps a hundred times. Then, able to breathe again, I fell back into a strange feverish exhaustion, and the deceptive feeling that I was floating as I lay firmly on the bed.

Just a mortal cold, I thought. The result of letting myself become so miserably chilled. It will mar things, but it is also an experience, an experience I must explore.

The next time I woke up, the dog was standing beside the bed, and he was licking my face. I put out my hand, felt his furry nose, and laughed at him, then coughed again, throat burning, and realized I’d been coughing for some time.

The light was awfully bright. Wonderfully bright. Thank God, a bright lamp in this murky world at last. I sat up. For a moment, I was too dazed to rationally acknowledge what I saw.

The sky in the tops of the windows was perfectly blue, vibrantly blue, and the sunlight was pouring in on the polished floor, and all the world appeared glorious in the brightness—the bare tree branches with their white trimming of snow, and the snow-covered roof opposite, and the room itself, full of whiteness and lustrous color, light glancing
off the mirror, and the crystal glass on the dresser, off the brass knob of the bathroom door.

“Mon Dieu, look at it, Mojo,” I whispered, throwing back the covers and rushing to the window and shoving it all the way up. The cold air hit me, but what did it matter? Look at the deep color of the sky, look at the high white clouds traveling to the west, look at the rich and beautiful green of the tall pine tree in the neighboring yard.

Suddenly I was weeping uncontrollably, and coughing painfully once more.

“This is the miracle,” I whispered. Mojo nudged me, giving a little high-pitched moan. The mortal aches and pains didn’t matter. This was the biblical promise which had gone unfulfilled for two hundred years.

W
ITHIN moments of leaving the town house, of stepping out into the glorious daylight, I knew that this experience would be worth all of the trials and the pain. And no mortal chill, with all its debilitating symptoms would keep me from frolicking in the morning sun.

Never mind that my overall physical weakness was driving me mad: that I seemed to be made of stone as I plodded along with Mojo, that I couldn’t jump two feet in the air when I tried, or that pushing open the door of the butcher shop took a colossal effort; or that my cold was growing steadily worse.

Once Mojo had devoured his breakfast of scraps, begged from the butcher, we were off together to revel in the light everywhere, and I felt myself becoming drunk on the vision of the sunlight falling upon windows and wet pavements, on the gleaming tops of brightly enameled automobiles, on the glassy puddles where the snow had melted, upon the plate-glass shopwindows, and upon the people—the thousands and thousands of happy people, scurrying busily about the business of the day.

How different they were from the people of the night, for obviously, they felt safe in the daylight, and walked and talked in a wholly
unguarded fashion, carrying on the many transactions of daytime, which are seldom performed with such vigor after dark.

Ah, to see the busy mothers with their radiant little children in tow, piling fruit into their grocery baskets, to watch the big noisy delivery trucks park in the slushy streets as powerfully built men lugged great cartons and cases of merchandise through back doors! To see men shoveling snow and cleaning off windows, to see the cafés filled with pleasantly distracted creatures consuming great quantities of coffee and odoriferous fried breakfasts as they pored over the morning newspapers or fretted over the weather or discussed the day’s work. Enchanting to watch gangs of schoolchildren, in crisp uniforms, braving the icy wind to organize their games in a sun-drenched asphalt yard.