Vellum (31 page)

He stands there, as calm in his flesh as some alien or angel with no idea what this human thing called sex is.

I found Jack two years back, washed ashore on the beach like so much driftwood, on his side, half-shrouded in a black-green slithe of seaweed, and cold and dead. It was early morning and, as I came down the dirt path from town to watch the silver daybreak over the ocean horizon, I saw him lying there. First thing I noticed was the fear in the gulls. They strutted around in a rough circle twelve feet or so in diameter, cawing and flapping their wings as if to scare off an intruder. Next thing I saw was the arm stretched out in the low surf, hand clenched in a rigor mortis fist. And then, although half-hidden by the shreds and bubbles of kelp, I noticed the latticework of scars that hatched his chest and I realized that he was like us, like the rest of us in Endhaven—marked by the needle and scarred by the knife.

But Jack's something different. Where we all have just a memory of a tattoo and a small diamond of pink scar tissue on a shoulder or a thigh, Jack's whole chest is carved in a filigree of skin.

“Tom,” he says, “you're young and I'm…I'm not. I've seen what's out there.”

“Come on,” I say. “You make it sound like I'm—”

“Younger than me,” he cuts in.

He doesn't look it. At least, not much. Smooth-skinned and soft unshaven, he doesn't look any older than twenty-five max and me, I turned seventeen in Damnuary. He glares up at a gull, sighs and goes on.

“I know, Tom, believe me; I know you're not some idiot fucking kid. A kid fucking an idiot, maybe”—he smiles wryly—“but not an idiot fucking kid. But you don't know what damage a little knowledge can do. People can get hurt.”

“What people? What knowledge?”

Did you tell
them,
I want to ask him, how you can live and walk and be here with me without breath, without a heartbeat? Did you tell
them
whether you're even human, whether you've
ever
been human, because
I
don't know that much?

“What damage?” I say. “What people? Who did you hurt?”

“Let it drop, Tom,” he says quietly, and I back down, drop my gaze.

The gulls scatter as I slide down the dunes and move in closer. There's no smell of decay, only the pungent salt of seaweed, rich enough to taste; no bloating or rot on the body either, so he can't have been dead long. It's the first time I've seen a dead body and I'm scared. Death is something from the old world, from the cities. This is Endhaven, where people don't die, people don't just disappear out of your life with no good reason; that's why we're here. That's why we left the city. Here, at least, when people go it's because of a decision. A weighing of the scales. A reckoning. Death is an arbitrary, senseless thing, belonging with the chaos of the city crumbling on its headland out across the bay. A body washed up on the beach.

I crouch down to clear some of the debris and detritus, slip my hands under his smooth torso and heave him over onto his back. The body is in perfect condition, more like a statue than a corpse, some construction of erotic tranquillity. My dry throat, my tight balls, my erection, my heartbeat—I'm not sure I can tell the difference between my fear and my desire. It's sick, I'm sure, but I don't have a say in being, you know, and, anyway, it used to be OK they tell me…once upon a time, in a place far, far away.

Slowly, the fist uncurls, a little silvery box inside it, a cigarette lighter clutched like a talisman.

The Simple Pleasure of a Good, Square Meal

She closes her hand around the Zippo.

“What can I get ya to drink, honey?”

“A Mountain Dew,” she says.

She wishes she could have a beer—God, how she wishes she could have a beer—but she's driving, got the bike parked in the lot outside, and you can't have a designated driver on a bike…not that she's got anyone to drive her home, anyway. Not that she's got a home to go to anyway, just another motel room. It's kind of lucky that McDowell is a dry county, though she's not exactly sure how you can call the county dry with Ivan's roadhouse selling beer, bottled or draught—they've even got Guinness, shit, Finnan would be pleased—and the gas station out beside the Comfort Inn, its wall of fridges stocked with stacks of Bud and Miller, Coors and whatnot. God, how she wants a beer. But she can't have one; it's not just the driving, anyway.

“You ready to order?”

She asks for the filet mignon, caesar salad first, and after she's crunched her way through croutons drizzled with dressing, munched the greenery from an idle fork that hangs in the air every so often as she watches the New Jersey Devils put another puck into the net, after she's finished the salad, laid her cutlery together on a napkin to the side so she'll still have it for the main course, the waitress comes out with a ribeye, a huge slab of red meat served with mounds of cracked potato and red onion. It looks good, and from the menu she can tell that this is the house specialty; so she feels a little awkward, trying hard not to come off obnoxious as she calls the waitress back and says this isn't what she ordered, sorry.

Fifteen, twenty minutes later, she's got her filet mignon. More apologies and good-natured smiles on both sides—
You need a refill, there?

“Sure, thanks.”

The waitress fills her glass from a clear plastic jug.

The steak tastes great.

She settles back after the meal, feeling her stomach full to bursting, sated with the simple pleasure of a good, square meal. Square is the word in this little area of the Vellum. All the eateries she passed before she found this place were perfectly in tune with the terrain, the time and space of it—Hardee's and Wendy's, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut, a fifties-themed diner called Moondoggy's. She stopped to look at a menu in the window of a Japanese and realized it was basically all the same dish, different meats—stir-fry prawns with rice, or stir-fry chicken with rice, or stir-fry beef, or prawns
and
chicken, chicken
and
beef, beef
and
prawns. No miso soup here, no tempura here, no sushi.

Ivan's is not exactly cosmopolitan either, but who gives a fuck? They do know how to cook a steak, seared on the outside, bloodred on the inside, and the beef is good, high-quality Angus beef raised on the lush dairy farms of a land that's wetter than you might expect if you didn't know the little highlands nestling around the Blue Ridge Mountains.

She eats a lot of red meat, these days; can't get enough of it.

She runs a hand over her full-filled stomach, ever-so-slightly bulging now.

And she realizes that she's got a cigarette smoking in her other hand, a pack of Marlboros sitting on the table beside her silver Zippo where she's lain them down unconsciously, completely unaware of ever bringing them out of her jacket pocket, tapping a smoke out of the pack, tapping it down on the pack between her thumb and forefinger, turning it round to slip between her lips and flicking the lighter open and lit and shut again with a flutter of her thumb. She looks around for an ashtray, holding the bastard nicotine demon away from her, like she's got shit on her fingers and she really needs a wetwipe. A hand motion to the waitress. An ashtray brought over, wiped, lain on her table. Thanks.

She grinds the cigarette down into the glass.

Her fingers tap unconsciously as she gazes round the bar, needing some distraction from the demon. The old guy's still singing; surprisingly it's not the C & W she expected, but something much more bluegrass—country, yes, and western, yes, but more folksy and bluer, truer.

THE LIQUID LIGHT OF LANGUAGE

And he tells of the pyre that cast stones into men when Crow was king with all the cawing, raucous birdmen of his caucus, tells of the theft of primal theos and his torture on the rock, watching the Eagle as he talks of carrion's king and warrior hawks. Of fate and freedom, thieves of fire.

He sings, to Chrome and Mainsail, how the sailors of the argot called, cried for their hylic loss, lost at the fountain, calling out until
Alas! Alas!
called back in echo from the solid shore as they themselves set off again upon the liquid light of language, leaving the land, and all the matters of the flesh behind, a fallen comrade. He works on the loyalties of brothers-in-arms. He works his charms.

“O dear miss fortune,” Silence sings as others gather in the tavern round his song.

He sings to soothe those only pacified with their lost love of a white bull, those who'd be happier if the herds had never been.

“What frenzy grips your soul? The protean daughters filled the fields with their false lowings, but not one of them sought such unholy union, bestial mating, though her neck had shuddered from the plow and she had felt for horns with fingertips, smooth, touching on her forehead. Dear miss fortune, now you wander in the wilds, while he lies on his snowy side upon soft blooms of hyacinths and, under some dark ilex, chews the pale grass, tracks some heifer through the herd.”

The whole place seems to have quieted down to listen to him singing now. There's still a little chatter, here and there, but there are fingers to lips and prodding elbows, or even just unfinished sentences, conversations drifting off into the isolation of attention. Faces turn, necks craned to peer over a shoulder, folks leaning out of a booth or sitting back to slump into the plump squeak of the artificial leather.

He sings a song about a farmboy and his sister who lose their daddy's farm, and how she watches their white bull being taken away to slaughter and finds her brother lying under an apple tree, brains blown out with a shotgun. Life is hard and death is peace.

WHAT THE FUCK
IS
NATURAL THESE DAYS?

“So, are you going to stay a while or not?” says Jack.

“What?” I say, mind twisting back to now.

“Christ, you've only been here a couple of hours and already you're running off. You don't have to go, you know.”

He slips his arm around my waist and nuzzles my hair, nibbling at my ear.

“No…not really,” I say. “But I suppose I should. It's lunchtime; they'll be expecting me.”

“Bad times there just now?”

“They don't even look at me. You know, it's not even that they think it's immoral. I think they think it's…unnatural. Of all the people who should understand.”

He laughs.

“And just what the fuck
is
natural these days? You could stay with me, you know…permanently, that is.”

I don't want to go home. I want to stay with him and he wants me to stay—but that's not enough. Jack doesn't…
need
me to stay; that's something he just won't give, stubbornly insisting that if I come to him I come freely, by my own choice. He won't try and persuade me. Sometimes I think that cold, dead Jack is some kind of vampire, looking for someone with the will to spend eternity at his side.

“It just doesn't feel right,” I say. “They're my…”

I tail off, mumble something about how they've always looked after me. They didn't have to, after all. It's not like they even knew me or my parents.

“You don't owe them anything,” he says. “You know that. You don't owe anyone anything.”

I want him to tell me that I owe
him,
that I
have
to stay.

Jack scratches at a nipple.

“I've made you an outcast, haven't I?”

“I made an outcast of myself,” I say, but I'm lying and I know it. I'm not your teenage rebel, and I know that if I'd never met him I'd have made the step from child to adult just exactly the same way as all the others. A tentative first kiss with a nice girl who went for the more sensitive type—maybe at the Fireday dance, maybe with Mary-Jane; she used to smile at me when we were younger. A question, a ring, a contract of souls. I'd go to the rag-and-bone man and deal for what I needed to build my own little house for us. I'd work the land, maybe take over as Endhaven's teacher when old Hobbes retired. I'd still look at the soft skin on the back of Sam Finnegan's neck. I'd still jerk off over ancient magazine pictures of actors whose glittering Hollywood homes now lie sunken at the bottom of the blue Pacific. But I'd have lived the lie.