11. The Wilderness (The forgotten bars)

The taste was bitter. Still I was surrounded by the aura of youth, and I looked and though I was seeing again, the boy was still there. This boy was dead. I had sucked him dry by the banks of the Seine.

“How?” I said. How had he brought back my first memory of my second life, alive?

“To the initiated, such things are easy. I can give you the power to recall your kills. The sweetest ones.” Everywhere I looked the world blurred, choppy color blocks. But the voice I heard clearly; it was delicate and cultured; it was wise with years. “You must eat.”

The invitation held power. So much of humanity is spoiled, the passions convoluted or overindulged, grown fat or stringy. The young ones still rich with uncut feeling was my favorite flavor. Hope was even better, and ever more rare. And the power over death. I had cheated death, the gaping maw, but to be able to bring others back from it, from the smithereens of the earth’s ceaseless toiling.

“Just eat,” he said.

But just eating was the wheel that crushes, the tiger that takes the deer, the wolf and the rabbit, the eternal cycle. I hate the wheel, I thought. “Always the fear in the little ones, always the hate in the big ones.”

“No,” I said.

He said, “Ah. Do you imagine that there is anything of meaning beyond your thirst? Tell me what is it? You are some agent of good? For what and whom? These ones don’t even want to live,” I saw them all, their smell as sweet as honeysuckle, and all had the good in them, even the homeless and the old.  

“No.” I said. “I am of the earth.”

He laughed, a bell. Now I now the voice. Then I smelled it, a bouquet of life released, as if someone had crushed flowers under a steel tack boot. The glug of slaking as the punkrock boy with his fresh anger died a second time.

“Delicious.”

I don’t remember anything after that. I woke and somehow I had crawled into a group of bushes. The sun was still finding its way through, and I shrouded myself in sodden porn that I found.

That night I walked the streets again. I should have been thirsty. Either that or passing out—but I discovered that the Romani was right. I had full energy, even a single focus that was new. The blurry fugue world of thirst was replaced by a moon lit world of black and white, and my hands closed around weapons, fractals torn from old cross beams.

The first mark is a blond sweeping a middle aged man along. He is marveling at his luck, but looking back too. He has a squat woman at home, I can see, whom he loves, but this fine thing is taking him home. He never planned to cheat. He never thought he’d face an opportunity this good. His heavy brow is creased with determination. He will have his way.

She is pale beneath the moon and elf thin, pretty like porcelain. Her fingernails are red, they press into him, little dents raised in his hand. She laughs at something he says, he smiles like an idiot with a piece of tinsel.

I grab her hair and pull it back. She falls on her back and I fall with her, pinning her. I slam the splinter into her ribcage. Thunk. Thunk. Multiple times. She gasps then gurps. I look up. The middle aged man’s mouth is open. He doesn’t know what happened. I smile at him. Let him see my canines.
He scampers, home to his woodchuck.

This does not answer the craving the way that drinking does, that ephemeral first sip’s kaleidoscope. I am always thirsty. But this kill strengthens my purpose, a compounding, like the process whereby rock becomes diamond.

Young flowers surround her, peeping out of the earth. Hoping for spring.

10. Eat the Earth (Forty Nights)

I wandered through the countryside, sleeping in closed wells and bear dens. Still the smell wafted to me from farms and towns, the children with their kites flying, dragging the kids souls up. The smell of teenage boys, their desire unfraught and free. I smelled it on the air and I burrowed into the earth, the smell musty, mineral heavy. Wet dust. Terrible.

Still it was better than the hunger thirst that the human breathed air caused me. After a day, I headed into the woods. Birds twittered into the night, singing some shit about spring time while squirrels ran figure eights in celebration. I growled at them “Go to bed,” but they didn’t seen me.

After seven nights, the hunger was less. I walked back toward the towns. I saw a shockheaded boy with strong shoulders and a perpetual smile, driving his combine through the fields, the cutting head lifted as the dark had fallen. He waved at me and even drove over.

“Need a ride?” he asked.

The brown skin that stretched over his neck sinews reminded me of the sun. Blood can taste sunny. But the odor, I barely smelled it.

He said, “What are you doing out here?”

I laughed. “Getting some space,” I said.

He said, “I’ve had enough of space.” He pointed to the wheat fields. “You going to the city?”

I said that I probably was.

He said, “Can I come with you? We’ll run away.”

I said, “Keep your innocence.”

“I’m not innocent,” he said. The baby-man fury was rippling off him, smelling so good I cold almost taste it, and he was ripe for the taking, asking me to escort him away from home. But I was good.

The thirst hunger died in me, and it didn’t return until I had been without for forty days. At that point, I had no thoughts of drinking. Actually, things passed me in a blur, the trees were painted in Monet brush strokes across the fuzzy purple nights and the people were just pastel dashes, their smell distant, and masked by the mineral truth that reeked in my nostrils.

Then a thin stroke of gray, topped with a triangle of white spoke to me, “Yuri. It is the time to drink your fill.”

My nose was flooded with strains as sweet as the music of the broken hearted. Riding over the top of the woven rainbow of possible savors, was a memory made new, the punkrock nectar of the sixteen year old lover and there he was in front of me, his eyes a bloodshot green, his pulsing neck white.

“Drink,” said the voice, “and be filled.”

The thirsty choked me and I felt my teeth grow long, as I reached out and took the boy by the arm. He looked at me in wonderment. Everywhere his youth, the mix of anger and desire, whirled through the air.

But riding back into my nose came the sting of wet earth, and the voice, “I am earth, and the fire does not burn me.” I fell down and scraped the human soaked dust from between the cobblestones and pushed it into my mouth.

The taste was bitter. Still I was surrounded by the aura of youth, and I looked and though I was seeing again, the boy was still there. This boy was dead.

“How?” I said.

“To the initiated, such things are easy. I can give you the power to recall your kills. The sweetest ones.” I could not see the owner of the voice, it was delicate and cultured, it was wise with years. “You must eat.”

It was no little temptation. So much of humanity is spoiled, the passions convoluted or overindulged, grown fat. The young ones, the innocence they have, this is the flavor I desired. Hope was even better, and ever more rare. And the power over death. I had cheated death, the gaping maw, but to be able to bring others back from it was true power.

“Just eat,” he said.

Just eating was the wheel that crushes, the tiger that takes the deer, the wolf and the rabbit, the eternal cycle. I hate the wheel, I thought. “Always the fear in the little ones, always the hate in the big ones.”

“No,” I said.

He said, “Ah. Do you imagine that there is anything of meaning beyond your thirst? Tell me what it is? You are some agent of good? For what and whom? These ones don’t even want to live,” and I saw them all, their smell as sweet as honeysuckle, and all had the good in them, even the homeless and the old.

“No.” I said. “I am of the earth.”

9. The Gods and The Earths (Romani)

Follow this link for listening accompaniment.

I woke up to the stink of garlic. I could feel the rash it brought up on my neck and cheeks. It was going to be hard to pull a drink with this kind of complexion, I thought.

I traipsed through Pigalle until I found a Japanese tourist drunk enough not to care about skin rashes, or just not see them, and split him open, and sucked him down, while he murmured quiet syllables of good bye. “That’s what you get for being drunk,” I thought, “Drunk.”

When I turned, sustained, to the night’s work, my real issue. Killing a drinker. I wandered through the alleys, watching for operators. I thought I found one I could take, a rotund masc with eyes like a clock. When I went to charge, I found the black haired vixen blocking my path.

I pulled up. “Good,” I thought. “No trolls.”

She said, “Such fortuity. Or, perhaps, I know you.”

She reached out, pointing a red fingernail at me like a gun, her finger as long as a spider’s tentacle. She grazed my temple and BANG. Kaleidoscope of negative color and out.

I woke under some garbage bags, in the gloaming, and felt my head swim and turn. I retched some Japanese blood into the earth. What kind of drinker has fingers that trigger mental explosions? She was some other thing.

I wandered lonely as a cloud, not thirsty, scared of hunting my own. I went into the countryside. Nights I walked, past little rues and hamlets until I came to a collection of raggedy cars and trailers and brownish children running in circles. When I was a long way off, I heard a man shouting something. The children scurried into the cars. The adults followed them in, and I walked up to the camp. I saw mothers peeking behind the curtains, holding up crosses and spitting prayers at me. In the middle of the camp was a fire, with a great pan of potatoes and green stuff, and some small animal too.

Stirring the panfry was an old woman. She looked up and her face was pretty, red lips and, behind heavy glasses rimmed in brown, large eyes. Her skin was more stretched than wrinkled.

I said, “You’re not scared of me?”

She laughed, and her voice was deeper than a man’s. It resonated through me when she said, “You don’t scare me.” Still she traced a cross in the air. Where her passed, a gold gas filigree hung in the air, ethereal x. She blew it gently and it wafted toward me.

“Don’t,” I said. As it breezed by me it unmoored my limbs from their sockets. Then it was gone. She grimaced through her thick glasses.

“You’re not scared of me?” she parroted back.

I shrugged. I had no idea what all was going on.

She said, “You seem upset. I smell garlic on you, and you talk woozily.”

I said, “And then there’s the way I look.”

She said, “I can’t really see.”

“You care?” I asked.

She took a tinsel fork from in the folds of her garment and with quick stabs loaded it with potatoes, greens, and small animal leg. Like a man. “Strange rumors, a former woman who killed three soul suckers in a night. Strife among the second born. You fit the description.” She munched for a while. “I hate your kind, by Mary, by Kali Sara. You march in the dark places, marshaling all to your appetites.

The children have to run inside. Not since Hitler has there been this fear. Blaming murders on us, knowing nothing of you. Always the fear in the little ones, the hate in the big ones. 

“What?”

“I’m saying, ‘What you are doing, it is good.’ However, you are doing it wrong.”

“You got tips, old woman, I’d appreciate it. I’m not making any progress out here.”

“You want to kill them, but they smell you. They smell the used blood, its fetid copper aura. You smell like the hunger of death, the insatiate thirst. To kill them, you must kill the drinker in you first.”

“What?”

“Stop drinking. In separation there is strength.”

“How am I going to survive if I don’t eat?”

“Fem does not live on blood alone.”

“Oh yeah? What else is there?

“Earth?”

“I’m supposed to eat the earth?”

“Pregnant women do.”

“I’m not exactly pregnant.”

“With purpose you are pregnant. And pregnant women are strong. You need strength.”

“I’m not eating the earth.”

She stood up. The eyes weren’t so much big I realized, as magnified from the glass on her spectacles. “Take my hand,” she said. I grabbed it. “Lead me to the fire.”

“You are at the fire. It’s right in front of you.”

She jumped then, into the flames. I shouted. “Help.” Then she rose in it. The flames wreathed her, a

wrapping of sheets. The crackle of the fire rose to the sound of the heavens drum, and then she unfurled, the flames buoying her and splaying into long arms. She was framed by a star of fire; she waved her many arms, threatening and promising. I cowered down, throwing myself to the dirt.

The sound subsided. I looked up and she was sitting by the fire again. She scratched at the dust on the ground, gathering a pinch. She brought it up to her mouth and dropped it in, and followed it by another pinch of potato. “Not bad,” he said. She said. The voice was so deep.

I was losing consciousness. The vision of the chasm that opened revisited me. She said, “I am earth, and the fire does not burn me.”

Then I was in it, a closing opening in the earth, the heavy smell, the tight quarters. A tunnel. I knew that I must go one, go further, before I found the way. The only way forward was to wriggle, and I did, but each wriggle made the tunnel smaller and I fought the panic rising within me. I hate earth.

8. Death to Suckers (Le Pigallion)

I awoke to purpose. Kill drinkers. First I needed a drink. I nodded at a middle aged guy with a red cap. His eyes lit up like he’d discovered the fourth dimension. Nineteen year old dream, staring at him? Slurrrp. Not that good. Too much realism. Enough to go on.

I marched back to Jardin de Luxembourg, but couldn’t find any drinkers, so I took the metro to Pigalle. English boys with full sized bellies wandered along complaining about the tip they had to give. I saw her, too elegant for the place, in calflength boots of kneaded leather, eyes like knife holes, and a smile that came from remove.

I reached in to the pocket of my sweatshirt, and got a good grip on my broken broom handle, and watched as she separated one of the bovine English boys from his herd, and got him headed off into the dark. I got close, hearing her say, “Of course. A one time. You and me. No-one needs to know.”

He said, “That’s good. I mean, I really like you, but Inny wouldn’t like it.” He must have been very drunk.

She laughed. “Inny won’t know.”

I was about to reach out and grab her straightened ponytail when something slammed me and I flew into the wall. I turned and four trolls glowered at me. The vixen looked, saw us, and then opened up the boy’s throat. “Ouch,” he said. Then it seemed to click for him. He was dying, “Inny, I’m sorry. I thought it was a bit of fun. Oh, Inny . . .” he lost the ability to speak. Then she dropped him.

She walked over to me. She bent down and looked closely at me. Blood was smeared all over her face. “Killing drinkers, Yuri?”

I shrugged. The trolls advanced. One of them hit me with something. It stung like a bitch. Then I realized it stunk to. It dangled form his hand. A garlic glove in a sock. Great.

He hit me with it again. The sting was so strong I about blacked out.

The vixen said, “You get it? We know what you did. You got a couple endings last night, ‘cause no-one knew, but now it’s different. We’re watching you.”

Smash smash an aura of garlic. The earth opens and swallows me.

7. The Earth Groans, I Stake (Jardin de Luxembourg)

Relentless, eternal youth, like my body was cased in plastic, preserved. An everlasting sheen.

No fear. The relentless thirst, and the unfurled talent for satiating it, the fingers strong as eagle talons, legs and lungs as powerful as the sky predator’s wings, they carry me faster than my prey.

Abstinence did not spring from memory, for that was a mental faculty I did not exercise.

In the Jardin de Luxembourg I watched one night, under the shade of an overbearing willow. I watched the last traces of the sun leave the sky I watched the picnickers pack their baskets, pour out the last bits of wine into their paper cups. I heard a murmur, the crickets, the wind in the trees, but that day the murmur turned to a moan, a decrying of the heaviness.

One group dispersed, leaving a couple. The man was a bit older, his skin pallid and his lips red. He chatted to a sprig of a girl. He was built stocky, but the second birth had cut the fat from his waist. The massive shoulders on the trim waist gave him the build of a boxer, a crusher. His chin was heavy with steel colored stubble. I could smell the pheromones he was releasing; they sung to her nose and she lifted her little chin, taking in the musk. I saw him nod his head. “Let’s get away. Go somewhere quiet.”

She popped up, as eager as a crocus sensing spring. Her sundress was striped yellow and blue. His eye held amusement, like a cat holds a mouse. He followed her up, his heavy arm cupping her waist, bearing her forward. The smell of her, the innocence and belief and joie de vivre amused me and I followed in the shadows of the trees, crushing some peonies to stay in the shadows.

“Chez moi,” she said, “Is simple. You will like it though. I have done things with the flowers.”

“Flowers,” he said. “I’m not a flower man.”

She laughed gaily, and promised that these flowers were so exceptional, even those who weren’t flower people would become flower people.

They traipsed across the curves of cobblestone, her trainers tip tiping along where his heavy boots clanked into the stone. He turned, his eye a ruby bead, and looked me in the eye. “Not sharing,” his eye said. “Find your own.”

My eyes said nothing. I did what I wanted.

He reached her apartment, green door, gray painted staircase. He flashed a gash of a smile at me and shut the door behind him. I leapt to the drain pipe, as easy as a leopard, and climbed. They were in her room and she talked about the flowers. “They must be fresh. I don’t think anyone notices, but I take them from the park. Nobody minds, there are so many there.”

He is behind her, sampling the bouquet before he drinks, holding the scent in his heavy nose. I too smell it, the passion she has flowers, her confidence of one hundred springs like this one, and I try to enter through the window.

No. It is barred to me. She has invited him.

Around her are vases. Some are in the window, and some are on the yellow table and three or four are set in the corners of the counter.

“Shall I weave you a crown?”

She takes some of the stems, daisys, wild susans, and sprigs of baby’s breath. She sits quickly in the green painted chair. She murmurs to herself, an almost song, as her quick fingers weave the green lines.

The groaning of the crickets turns into a ratcheting scream. The wind rushes and moans like the mother of a lost child. I feel it swirl about me on my perch, I see the flowers crane, and for a moment I feel the earth gaping open, a black chariot is riding forth!

He bears down, dropping his weight into her, the teeth hitting and cleaver the tendons and flesh on her shoulder. She falls to the floor, spasms. Somehow a chair has fallen, the flowers on the table are unvased, a disarray.

He rocks as he sucks, locked in a sweet coma, his butt banging the table. The flowers spill off the rocking table, dropping across his massive shoulders and onto the floor. Her limbs, paroxizing, crush them, a skew of broken petals, a slush of spilled blood.

He sucked for a long time, even after she was dry. This wheel, the big fish eating the little ones. How I hated it in that moment.

I found a rake in the yard and broke its shaft across my knee. When he came out of the door, slightly drowsy from his drink, I popped out from behind an azalea. I guided the wood into his heart, and watched as her blood leaked out of him.

He grunted, “What the . . .”

I said, “You know, I really hate us. We suck.”

Then he fell to the ground. The crickets subside into silence. The wind ceases. I recover the splintering shaft and head out. Twice more that night I end a thirst. I like it.