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.

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.

3. Primordial Curse and Transcendent Being (China King BEER)

Listen to this song while you read. The video is special.

I had a feeling he knew I followed him, though I had climbed up to the roofs. There was nothing in his movement, for his held was forward and a little lifted, his fine nose sifting the scents of the evening, as unconcerned as you would expect a creature that knows he is on the top of the food chain to be.

He walked by a group of girls, sixteen-years old, wearing bangles, hightops, eagles’ hats standing out front of the chinese store. The store had a neon sign saying BEER. One of the girls, a curvy Puerto Rican, said something to him, as they passed and he laughed.

She said it again, “You need a haircut.”

He turned, somehow appearing strong and masculine despite the thinness, “You could cut it for me.”

She said, “I’m going to charge. Take me half a day to cut that mop.” I reflected that is was not a mop. It was hard for a head of hair that full to look so perfectly quaffed. A frozen waterfall. A couple of centuries is all it takes to learn to style your hair perfectly.

He said, “I can pay you so many ways.” His voice went deep, rumbled.

All the girls tittered. Then he beckoned, his thin hand waving like windblown willow wands.

Her girlfriends said, “Don’t go with that freak.”

“Yeah, he pale as shit.

“Like a crack fiend.”

But she said, “What’s he going to do? Skinny-jeans-ass wearing. Nice butt.”

I could have told her but then he’d just drink someone else. Also, she wouldn’t listen to a freak on a roof anymore than her friends, especially when the freak on the roof was telling her he was a thirsty dead man. She followed him out of the glow of the streetlights, through the boughs of a yew tree in an abandoned lot.

I followed him in a little later, dropping off the roofs into a mulberry tree nobody have ever trimmed, onto the weeds and human detritus that coated the abandoned lot. He was wiping the back of his mouth. The girl, so full of energy a few moments ago, was on the ground. Little holes in her neck bled thin trails.

“Knew you were behind me. Like that?” he nudged the girl’s corpse. “Make you hungry?”

It did. Not her, already used, but the friends. “P? Hey, P, you all right.” They were calling from the block.

He said, “Maybe we should go. Don’t want to be around for the funeral. It’s such a drag.” His lips were curled into a half smile.

That half smile sparked something in my head, like, “I know this monster.”

He leaned forward suddenly, his copper tinted eyes staring deep into mine.

It flashed in my head, long fingers’ silently drumming on the desk, the excitement of the Lacanian text in my hand. Looking up seeing those eyes twinkling. The desire to feel their gliding caress, the assurance that it was full of knowledge, on my back, the slender arm, strong as a steel cable, pulling me, what would the tongue and then the teeth feel like? I had met this one before.

He said, “Ah, you remember now. That summer in Prague.”

The girls were yelling real loud from the block now, “P? P!! What the fuck, P? He do something? We ‘bout to come back there an’ shit. Yo, freak-white fiend, don’t do nothing to her.”

I looked back to find him and he was gone.

“Too late,” I said to no-one.

The corpse stirred, and looked up at me. The eyes didn’t; they wobbled and then the pupils dropped down. The head though was toward me. “Dead flesh . . .” she said.

I shook my head. And then she reached for me and touched my knee. And then I got scared, because I was in the tunnel again, and it was closer than before, and stunk, and I knew I had to go down it and that was the one thing I didn’t want.

I shook off the hand, and started running, but I heard her finish, “binds to dead.”

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.