By Blood We Live (23 page)

Wrong. The flower that had been opening all this time turned into a black red hole that sucked me in, head-first, a long fall that ended when I felt the bump of my teeth in his throat and the first warm spurt of his blood going into my mouth.

At first there was …

I felt myself thinking: I’ve never had to use this word before …

Joy.

Joy
. This is what joy is. Like those flying dreams the moment you first realise you can do it … At first it was simple. Three, four, five seconds the blood was just goodness. The goodness was immense and nothing to do with him. He was just a funnel for the blood that was coming from somewhere else, from the universe, and the blood went into me and forced delicious warmth through my shoulders and face and breasts and belly and legs and feet. It was as if the blood was in a mad rush to map every part of me, to get all of me. And from the first swallow I was in a mad rush to get it in me, all of me. We were like two animals, me and the blood, two animals who loved each other but had been kept apart for years.

Then on the third or fourth or fifth swallow it turned into
his
blood—and I saw him, maybe eight years old, and a basketball hit him full in the face and broke his nose (I felt some tiny echo of the bone going in my own nose) and the kid who’d thrown it laughing and the force of the blow knocked him onto his ass and they laughed harder because he sat down in a shallow puddle on the uneven court and I could feel his face hot and big and his heart full of something like shame. I thought: You can’t stop. Once you start drinking you can’t stop. You don’t suck the blood, the blood sucks you. Video-game footage raced, trolls and marines and things that looked like they were made of mud and it gave him not peace but took his memory away for the hours days months years that the explosion graphics
and death screams filled him though it was also a kind of boredom like too much food. There was a girl and the two of them in a bar that looked like a ski-lodge but it was hot and I could feel the air like soup because the air-conditioning had gone and he was feeling that it was going okay with her (I saw her moist, big face and heavy blonde bob like a helmet and her hands were a little cracked with eczema but with fat red fingernails) and she’s laughed a couple of times but then time speeds up and he’s holding her elbow and trying to force her away from the bar and people are looking and she yanks her arm free and knocks a pitcher of some red cocktail from the counter and it hits the floor and bursts. The familiarity of this is like more heat on him, as if someone’s holding an electric fire close to his face on top of how hot it is already in the bar. It’s so familiar to him, this moment when it goes from going well to them not wanting his hand on them and one minute they’re laughing the next it’s get your fucking hands off me and they’re all the fucking same fucking cunts and it’s like a bored relief for him to have this thought, fucking
cunts
, and it
is
a relief because the truth is he doesn’t want them and I wanted to stop but I didn’t want the blood to stop it was so good so good and then I knew what was coming, what was coming through the blur of surfed channels and image after image of children’s small half-undressed bodies and confused or terrified faces and each image brings the same claustrophobia, the space they’re trapped in and the big heat of unfamiliar bodies and someone shouting orders or silently positioning them with a focus and farawayness that’s more terrifying than the shouts and slaps. Oh please let me stop but I couldn’t. Every ounce given over to the rhythm of the sucking, the gulping, the swallowing in time with his heartbeat—which brought the other heartbeat, his beating into my back and I saw myself from his point of view and when I saw the back of my head and the yellow t-shirt and felt myself through him crying I tried to shut my eyes shut my eyes block it out but I couldn’t because the blood kept coming and it was in my head whether I shut my eyes or not and it broke my own chest like I’d broken his and I felt all the time I’d lived since then and was saying sorry, sorry, sorry to the little girl I was as if she was someone I’d abandoned and never gone back for and it wasn’t her fault it wasn’t her fault it was mine.

Don’t let the heart stop, angel! If the heart stops you’ll go with it!

From somewhere. Maybe I remembered him telling me or maybe he was in my head right then but I knew I had to stop and the hearts were close and only in the last moment before I pulled my mouth away did I see the final image of the little boy, four or five years old, and the man with his trousers down and his cock exposed and I felt Leath always trying to get away from it and it always dragged him back and I knew it had happened to him. It had happened to him, too.

I thought I was getting to my feet, but I found I’d fallen, crashed to the floor. For a moment everything went black again. I could feel the room swinging. The blood was heavy on my chest and in my limbs, but as soon as I started to move, started to get to my knees, I could feel it changing, dissolving into an energy I’d never, ever run out of. I ran for the door—but found I’d got there in one huge high stride, as if the invisible soft arms had lifted me there. All I could think of was getting as far away from his body as fast as possible.

The house seemed to shrink behind me. A dog barked three times somewhere close. A mile away a truck downshifted. My hands were hot and wet with blood. There was blood all over me. I was soaked with it.

I got to the Jeep, got in, slammed the door. I’d left the keys in the ignition. Stupid. So stupid. But in those moments my stupidity and the risks I’d taken seemed like small things. Little objects far away.

Ten miles from Boulder City I realised I’d left the gun in the house, and fingerprints—in his blood—everywhere.

I
KNEW SHE
’
D
gone before I opened my eyes. A rip in the newly visceral fabric, a hole in the weave of shared blood.

Fear for her went through me like a delirious disease.
I promise I’ll never leave you.
As far as she was concerned I already had. The lines of the note she’d left me like grit in my blood:

Go and find her. Talulla. Vali reborn. The prophecy awaiting fulfilment. All reduced, as I stood in the study with the note in my hand, to the risible American pop ethic:
Follow your dream.
Naturally I’d
had
the dream, again. The twilit beach, the boat, the someone walking behind me. Naturally
He lied in every word
had woken me with its tongue in my ear. Naturally I’d sat up in the basement bed sickened and thrilled by the feeling of knowing something without knowing what it was.

Go and find her. Go and find the werewolf you believe to be the reincarnation of your lover of seventeen thousand years ago? Go and find her. Because after all, you’ve had a couple of dreams and scribbled down a prophecy or two, stoned out of your mind in a witch-doctor’s hut. Because after all you’ve had the beginnings of a hard-on after millennia of your dick being as much use as tits on a boar.

The full absurdity of it hit me, settled on me like a giant … Like a
giant vampire bat.
(Why not?) I saw myself for what I was: a confused fool. A
pitiful
fool. And there’s no fool like an old fool, the saying goes. Which made me the biggest fool in history. Only God could be a bigger one.

Not, of course, that the full giant vampire-bat weight of absurdity was the whole story. (Nothing is the whole story. The self’s curse—and the writer’s.) Yes, there was the concession to the pitiful old fool and his
dreams
—but there remained, whether I liked it or not, the prickle of
meaning on the ether, the design-wink of the world, the story-glimmer that wouldn’t be denied. There remained, stubbornly smiling, the beguilement.

Go after Talulla.

Go after Justine.

There was an old philosophical chestnut, Buridan’s Ass. Faced with two identically appealing haystacks—and therefore unable to prefer one to the other—the donkey starves to death.

But donkeys, of course, lack whim and intuition. More importantly, they don’t smoke. I reached for the almost empty pack of American Spirits on the desk (one left, slightly crumpled) and found that they were right next to Justine’s laptop.

I opened it and powered-up. Justine’s desktop image is the Apple logo. She doesn’t feel entitled to the personalisation of her technology. Even the former recorded Bette Davis greeting on her phone had been my doing.

Finder.

Documents.

File.

Encryption.

Password.

I rummaged in the blood. Dissolved myself internally and swam in the red dark. It’s not the same ease of access as when the other person’s nearby. It’s like holding your breath underwater. Sooner or later you have to come up.

I came up. The external world shivered back into authority.

My fingers didn’t hesitate.

The document opened.

Blank.

She’d deleted everything.

I loved her for her precautions, her stubbornness, her decision to be strong enough to do it all on her own. That was Justine: she
decided
how much strength she would have, then acted as if she had it. And in doing so, had it.

I took a deep drag on the cigarette, exhaled. Try again. Browning’s
Collected Works
, I noticed, was still lying where it had fallen the other
night. I ignored it—though the act of ignoring it made the ether shudder for a moment. I ignored
that
, too.

Tougher this time. Facts occluded by feelings. Heavier water choked with weeds. It began to hurt.

I surfaced a second time.

Not much. Karl Leath was still in North Vegas. The other man, the one they called “Pinch” (his actual name eluded me, but I knew it sounded odd … I struggled … Dale … Wayne … Schrutt) had won $814,000 in the Texas state lottery. Retired early. Gone to live in Thailand.

That was all. The house addresses were beyond me—though Leath’s and Pinch’s faces were in her like bloated twin suns, her system’s colossal binary star.

She’d go after Leath first, closest to home.

I looked at the clock; it was just after midnight. I’d slept so late again. A little portion of consciousness like a lone schoolboy at a solitary desk had been busy fretting about these lie-ins, this pissing away of darkness I’d been guilty of. I ignored it. In the VanHome I could make North Vegas in three and a half hours. If she was there, I’d find her.

I
N THE
B
OULDER
City apartment I lay on the bathroom floor in the dark, the door locked with all its locks, the little gap at the bottom blocked with a rolled-up towel. Leath’s life going into mine was like flashes of fire and sudden sheer drops and a sick feeling of certainty that it was in me forever now and what happens is that inside you make room somehow you have to make room and it hurts but you know that one day it won’t, one day it’ll be totally familiar the way like I said before you know driving a car will be. I didn’t want it. The image of the little boy pressing himself awkwardly into the corner of a big green velour couch and the sudden switch to his point of view seeing the big pale penis and snuff-coloured pubic hair and a tiny yellow-headed pimple buried in the hair on a man’s thigh. And like a reflex to it all the video-game footage and the peace of the intricacy of muscle car engines the peace of the cold grease smell of the workshop and the tools in your hands like friends. But the peace never lasted because you went back and those first pictures were when he was fifteen and he thought it was buried but the pictures when he saw them were like a warmth going through him and it was like the warmth of coming home and his face had felt so full and tender with this feeling of ashamed homecoming that even then he’d known would never be free of rage and boredom and sadness and he’d never be anything except alone and what he was.

I was lying on my side on a doubled comforter and pillow, knees drawn up, next to the base of the washbasin, which every now and then I would reach out and touch because my palms were hot and the coldness of the porcelain felt good. I was remembering something Fluff had said. He was always teasing me about not reading books, but one day he said:
Reading a book is a dangerous thing, Justine. A book can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you’d understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand.
I thought now: He wasn’t just talking about
books. He was talking about this. He said:
You know the people who dread getting called for jury duty? Big readers. The more you read, the harder it is to condemn.
Then he’d frowned and added:
Assuming, that is, you’re not reading execrable pap.

Execrable pap. He uses words and I don’t know what they mean, except the context makes it obvious. I missed him, suddenly, really badly. The last couple of nights it had been nice falling asleep and waking up next to him. I felt sad that I’d left him such a short note. I felt sad that I hadn’t told him how much I loved him. I don’t know why it suddenly felt like I was never going to see him again, but it did. I felt it so strongly that if it hadn’t been daylight outside I would’ve jumped in the Jeep and driven back to Las Rosas right then.

Thinking of the Jeep brought up all the unbelievably stupid things I’d done, all the ways I’d fucked this up. The Jeep itself, for starters. Should’ve used a rental. The gun. Fingerprints, sneaker prints. There were probably tyre prints in the spilled oil. I’d driven out of the city breaking every speed limit. In clothes covered in blood. I hadn’t even changed. Just driven to the building, put the Jeep in the underground lot and taken the elevator up to Four. It wasn’t that I was trusting to luck not to run into anyone. I wasn’t trusting to anything. I wasn’t thinking. I was just blind soft heat, and the first violent movement of the new blood finding room in me. If the police acted fast I’d probably left enough evidence for them to be here before sundown tonight. Practically a trail of goddamned footprints in blood. Weirdly, there was a sort of comfort in knowing that even if that were true, there was nothing I could do about it now, and nowhere I could go.