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.

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.

2. The Hall of the Valkyrie (JR’s)

A song to listen to while you read.

The name of the bar today was JR’s. The place was worthy of the name, with a floor more gum than linoleum.  An old man sitting at the bar nodded at me. I ignored him.  A middle-aged man with long hair who still thought he was good looking saw me and said, “Hey, Snow White.” I ignored him too. Then I sat at the end of the bar and the barkeep was already there. Looked like he was twelve, must have never shaved.

“I didn’t know boys could tend bar,” I said.

He said, “I’m not a boy.”

I just laughed.

“What are you having? It’s on the house.”

“Oh? What’d I do to earn that?”

“You walked in here. Look around, we’ve got a sausage fest going on.”

“Ginger ale then.”

He said, “We got a lot nicer options.”

I said, “I don’t drink. Beside ginger ale.”

“That’s a shame,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” I thought.

I wanted to go ahead and have some more thoughts but another drinker was leaning into my space.

“The bars already got my drinks.”

“Let me buy you a real drink.”

I turned. It was the middle-ager with brown and gray streaked long hair and two days of stubble. I said, “Look, no offense but I want to be alone.”

“Why’d you dress so nice then?”

I could have told him a lot of stuff, but he was just a human, so why waste my time. If he thought I was dressing nice so he could touch me with his greasy hands, he was too fucking deluded to talk sense into anyway. Since when did a tank top and jeans become nice? Nice is now a way of saying he can see that I’m a woman?

“Fuck off,” I said.

There was a time when I dressed in sweat pants and hoodies, hiding the fact that my body was female. At that point I wanted to be free from my body. When I first died, everything I wore was allure and promise, the body half in, half out. The whole deal with drinkers is the drink has to come willingly. It’s not right if you just fall on people between the alleys, or whatever. They have to want it, to say, “Come in,” or nod when you say, “Let’s go,” follow you into the alley. And when I was done with all that, I said, no more clothes like that. Sweats. I didn’t want to look like a girl. Cut my hair short, just a buzz.

But then they still talked, “Yo, dike, let me show you what a man can do.”

“Why’d you steal my sweatpants, baby?” It was like the fact that I didn’t dress how they wanted me to was some sort of crime. So I came around to thinking that I may not be in the drinking game, but I’ll wear what I want. I like to look in the mirror and see my forever twenty one complexion. It’s not like I have much else to hold onto.  

Grabbing my wrist. It was the half-dead greaser. “Fuck off? How about fuck on?”

I twist, hammer him in the balls, and let another elbow flow through his head. Nice audible knock like the UPS man. Everybody in the old dirty bar looked over. “Excuse me,” I said, “he was getting a bit fresh.”

Greasy Hair was crawling around on the floor like a deranged dog. The old man started clapping, junior behind the bar looked kind of nervous. I dragged Greasy Hair to the door, stood him up, where he wobbled for a moment before I sent a sneaker into his ass, propelling him into and through the door. It slammed back after letting in a gust of cold. Cold felt good.

I went back to my seat. Don’t know why I came here. JR’s. Game was going on a tv small enough to be from another century. They didn’t sell food, the sign behind the bar said. It’s scribbled in pen, “Order pizza, we got no food.” They should have written they only have drink. Didn’t matter, but I’m explaining, “Shit place.”

Then I knew. It wasn’t a drinkers’ hunting ground. The kind of place to find drinkers is where the young people, the promise-full, love-hoping, dream-believing are at night. Beach parties, down by the fire, with a cooler of cold ones. The trendiest clubs where they go, looking to make a connection. Bars with cover charges, anywhere that the young and hopeful drink, that’s where we drink.

Not JR’s. Another iteration of Joe’s Bar. “I’m looking for a break,” I realize. “I need to figure some stuff out. It started just as desire to kill the drinkers. But now I know everything I’ve been doing, it’s nothing. I can kill these young ones all day—or night—but we’ll still have the problems. It’s the old one. And I’m not equipped to kill him. Hustle, passion, some ju jitsu, it’s nothing against the old one.”

“Drink?”

Not again, “No thanks,” I said, not even looking up. It’s another technique. If you ignore them they sometimes leave. Not always. Not usually. Sometimes I just want to go back to the old days and take them outside and open up their necks like I was eating a watermelon.

“You look like you’d be so good at drinking.” The voice, delicate, cultured. The tongue caressed the word drinking, like saying a prayer.

I look up, and see the curtain of hair hanging across his face, the bright lips and the piercing eyes. Traces of a long fine nose. Short break.

He asked, his voice as precise as the ticks of watch, “You want to go outside again? Take a little jaunt around the alley and see if you can stick me with that bit of oak you got in your pocket?”

I knew I was outclassed. Not only that, I remembered the knee, the pain. The not healing.

He responded to my silence. “Worried about your knees?”

I looked at him. I was wondering if he’d slide his hand along the bar and touch me and my joints would unsling themselves and jangle like broken rubberbands.

“The one knee seems to have healed. Tell me how that happened?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really understand it.”  

“You will tell me, though.”

I could hear some actual passion in his cultured voice, and realized that he wanted to know. At least he couldn’t read my mind.

I said, “My business.” I took of ginger ale. So sweet. I wanted to spit it out, but I managed to swallow it.

He laughed, a bell like melody. JR’s clientele looked up, startled. He said, “So tell me, why are you killing your brothers and sisters?”

“They suck.”

“Haha. A bit of word play. You also suck, though your way of sucking, is sucking at sucking. Drinking old blood? Blood without the hunt? Don’t you notice how flavorless it is, how it curdles in the mouth?”

I said, “I don’t drink.”

 “Just so,” he said. “Listen, I like your energy. I can show you new hunts, more complicated targets. The game is afoot, and you sit here, in JR’s.”

I said, “I think it’s pretty obvious where I stand on that.”

“Of course. Well, I’ve decided to double my kill for every night you don’t hunt. You know, so that you know your abstinence isn’t saving any lives.”

Great. “Don’t put yourself out for me.”

“Oh, it doesn’t put me out. The exercise will do me good, and of course, a beautiful lady such as yourself is worth every extra effort.” The things he said were stupid but somehow those hundreds of years of life made them sound important and clever. And then he walked out to go and kill his quota and mine. Not that humans were a big deal, no offense.

I looked at the ginger ale, fizzing meaninglessly on the counter, shrugged, and walked out after him.