Fiend, page 20
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
“But I hate him,” she insisted. “He broke my heart when he left me for that bitch Eva. Besides, he’s a dirty cross-dresser and a pervert.”
I smiled at her reflexive hypocrisy. But I knew that she would obey me. She had no choice.
I kept missing him by moments, and I almost wondered if Daniel Blum was conscious of my desire, and his own desire was to avoid contact.
I found that he vacillated from being an employee of the Grinzing in Haus Vaterland to being banned from the premises. From that point on, I always went to the Grinzing first, but the moment happened to coincide with his fresh unemployment.
At Mass, I prayed that I could set eyes on him again.
My efforts to precisely recall his features infiltrated my dreams. I had begun to dream of Lorenzo again, remembering our time together, the memorization of lessons and the exquisite agony of our unions, ingrained into me as deeply as the Glory Be. But now Lorenzo wore a mask of Daniel Blum’s face, made of fine carved ivory that dissolved into steam when it was removed. When that happened, I awoke, groggy and unsatisfied, my limbs as heavy as mud, and if and when I returned to sleep, my dreams were of something else entirely.
When I found that Daniel Blum himself had been slotted to perform on the night before Christmas, at a place called the Dummschwallen, I found that I could not sleep at all.
Oddly, I couldn’t bear the thought of going alone, and I felt like enacting a bit of mischief upon my only Berlin acquaintance. I bought Liesl a superb dinner to convince her to accompany me to a performance by her “enemy.” Even so, she insisted on bringing along her new boyfriend, a glum youth named Klaus, with a little, crooked, bark-colored mustache that I did not like at all. I hardly cared about the extra expenditure of feeding a stranger, even though Klaus ate enough food to cram a hippopotamus full from stem to stern, but I could not resist punning on his name. “It is short for Nikolaus? Saint Nikolaus? Have you got toys for children in your knapsack, dear old St. Nick?” I winked and blew cigarette smoke in his direction.
“No, just Klaus,” he mumbled, unfazed, his mouth full of sausage.
“Leave him alone, Ricari,” Liesl pled. “He is much better to me than you are.” Klaus and I shared an odd glance over the laden plates and empty liebefraumilch bottles. “You are a dandy and a coward; you can’t even go to your own seduction by yourself! I thought I’d be done with him once I told you about the show, but you insist on dragging me along. I am just about done with you, too, Herr Ricari. I have no use for men like you when I have Klaus.” She stamped a rosette of lipstick on his cheek.
“I’ll tell Freddy Geneva you said that,” I replied. Klaus frowned at her, and she let out a brittle laugh and a smile that folded into a pained grimace. I folded the napkin next to my empty plate. “Come, let’s go. I want to get on with meeting your worst enemy.”
I may have held my head up and traded verbal artillery with Liesl, but inside I quaked, and each step ached with a private embarrassment. I was nervous about being in the presence of a mortal! That should never be—I can control their movements and thoughts as easily and instinctively as I shave my face. But I had no control over my fascination, my obsession, with this man. There was too much of Lorenzo in his appearance, and despite all the blood I’d drawn and the lives I’d ended, despite all the miles and years that separated us, Lorenzo still retained a fragment of power over me. Over a hundred years after the fact, I still wanted to please him. That realization disgusted me but made it no less true.
Maybe this time will be different, I thought.
Dummschwallen was located in the district of Prenzlauerberg, which I had not ever visited, at the end of a long, dark, narrow street. The northeastern outskirts of Prenzlauerberg had none of the expensive sheen of Unter der Linden or the economic bustle of the Ku’-damm; this was a neighborhood well on its way to becoming a slum. Only one of the streetlamps seemed to be operational, and the flickering electric light caught the scaly tail of a dog-sized rat, skittering away from the path of our taxi. The street was far from deserted; packs of young men in odd handmade uniforms stood in small knots, talking and laughing among themselves, and female prostitutes of various shapes and ages shared cigarettes and chatted with the boys. “That’s the Sträubenhund Ringverein,” Klaus said quietly. “Don’t worry. I’m friends with them; there won’t be any problems.”
Liesl looked at him curiously. “Are you working with those gangsters?”
“The Sträubenhund are not gangsters,” Klaus maintained in his monotone. “They are an athletic club. They are all gymnasts and sprinters; they represent good health and proper living.”
“And bookmaking and the skin trade, no doubt.” Liesl sighed, and looked uneasily into the darkness. I heard the sound of a piano playing, incoherent and badly out of tune. There was no sign, and no indication that a theater existed here besides the noise of the piano. A Sträubenhund stood in front of the entrance, toying with a coin strung on a cord, but he nodded at Klaus and moved aside. Liesl tightened her scarf. “In we go. And don’t say I’ve never done anything for you, Ricari.”
We stood outside of a covered garage that, through the chemical stench of petrol and paint, retained the smell of the cab horses that had been stabled there ten years before. One of the great stable doors stood ajar, and within, I could make out the flickering of candle flames. Inside, walls, floor, and ceiling had all been painted heavily with dull black paint. A handful of cheap, flimsy wooden chairs had been arranged, seemingly at random, in the space between the door and a stack of black-painted vegetable crates shoved against the far wall. Tallow candles, stuck into two-meter-high wrought-iron candlesticks, clouded the air with their heavy, meaty smoke, and the few people nervously milling around the chairs coughed into their handkerchiefs.
The smoke did not much bother me, so I gave my handkerchief to Klaus to contain his mustached sneezes. I insisted that he keep it. “Happy Christmas,” I added.
At last, wavering through drifting smoke, I saw my goal.
At the far rear end of the stage, Daniel Blum did not so much play as attack the piano, hunched over the keys on a chair too tall for the task, his head jerking back and forth with intense concentration. Once I had gotten used to the sound of the awful tone, I could tell that he played quite skillfully, a semi-improvisational American style known as “honky-tonk,” without a sheet of music to guide him. He had a crude, spiky crown, fashioned out of sheet tin, cocked at a jaunty angle on top of his rat’s nest of inky black hair, a black tuxedo worn over a bright red cummerbund on an otherwise bare torso, and a necklace made of wire strung with shark’s teeth.
The light entertainment in Hades consisted of piano torture and a handsome incubus clad in hand-me-downs.
I found myself coughing uncontrollably, and I turned back toward the door in search of a moment of fresh air.
But he turned and saw me then, and his pale, smoke-smudged face illumined with pleasure and awe. He knocked over his chair in his haste to reach me, and quite frankly elbowed Liesl aside as he thrust out his hand toward me.
“Please,” he begged, “do stay! Shall I put out the candles? I prefer darkness myself, but ordinary people need light to be able to see.”
His eyes swallowed me. Reluctantly, I accepted his hand, hot to the touch, the long pale fingers encrusted with a filth of coal and paint. I imagined the fingers in my mouth, and I knew he could see it, too.
“I don’t need light to see that you’re still a sack of shit,” Liesl yelled.
Daniel smoothly turned toward Klaus, but keeping his eyes on me, and said, “Sir, I’m sorry, but dogs are not allowed in the theater. I admit that she is a fine-looking pedigreed bitch, but I will have to ask you to remove her.”
I expected Klaus to make a violent move, but instead he took Liesl’s arm and turned to the door. Liesl’s face had gone purple with rage, and she struggled in Klaus’s arms, spitting on the floor at the threshold. I watched this with my peripheral vision; my eyes remained locked in Daniel’s eyes. He was a mirror reflecting my own fascination back at me, but shifting it slightly, clouding it, perhaps, or warping it into a different shape. I should have actively changed Klaus’s mind about attacking Daniel, but I know I did not, for my attention was wholly focused elsewhere. I still don’t know why Klaus didn’t punch Daniel in the eye, breaking our contact, maybe sparing me, but things happened as they did.
Daniel squeezed my hand between his palms. “I’ve wanted so much to meet you, Herr Ricari.”
He was much taller than I, and I could not shake off the thought that my head would fit very nicely under his throat, and my arms around his waist.
“My name is Danny Blum,” he added unnecessarily.
“I know,” I said, adding, also unnecessarily, “I am Orfeo Ricari.”
His eyes shone with open admiration, a kind of astonishment. The sound of my name made him tremble, as though he received a divine sensation. When he repeated it, I felt the same, my changeless self formed by the coalescence of the smoked tones of his voice. “Orfeo . . . ! Orfeo. Of course. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And now that I have made it, I shall never let it go.”
Too true, my Lord. Too true.
Conjoining
My head did fit neatly under Daniel’s chin, my arms comfortably around his waist.
Our big mouths fit perfectly together.
We fit perfectly inside each other.
He “lived” on the other side of that horrid garage, in a tiny, vertical room that was once a coal shed. He slept standing up, leaning against the wall, wrapped in a filthy, greasy wool blanket stained all over with mud, red lipstick, and black boot polish. “But I don’t usually have to sleep here,” he said, his lips wrapping themselves around my ear like silk snakes. “Like tonight. Tonight I’m coming home with you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
He was thoroughly unemployed, having lost his busboy job at the Grinzing for the last time, and had lived for the last week on scavenging, cocaine dealing, and outright and blatant theft. “I just walk into a place and take what I want and then leave. I never get caught. People are afraid of me. I used to steal from the Grinzing all the time; but I didn’t get caught, even there. I got the ax this time for taking off all my clothes in the middle of the dining hall. What could I do? I felt a spider bite me, right here.” He clasped my bare hand to his bare hip, where the belly muscles curved toward his groin like the wings of a hawk, and the bone slid under the skin under the press of my hand. “I didn’t know where it would strike next. What would you have done?” It was not a rhetorical question; his long, tilted, poison-green eyes demanded an answer, which, my breath stuck in my chest, I could not give.
“You are an offshoot, like me,” Daniel said. He held up my hand and swept his tongue along my fingers, from the valley of my thumb to the undersides of my claws. “You are not one of the usual specimens of humanity. You are downright peculiar, if you want to know the truth. You are much too alabaster. You glow in the dark like a will-o’-the-wisp! A will-o’-the-wisp.” He said this in English, in love with the sound, pronouncing the consonants in the German fashion, villozevisp. It was so beautiful, I was in love with it too. “You are so small and delicate, you look like you could be crushed in my fist. But underneath you are as tough as a willow switch, you’re just as cutting; you have laid me open, you gut me and skin me. You are too beautiful for anyone but me.”
I bent under him as a willow does under a torrential rain.
“Orpheus, son of Apollo and Calliope.” His tongue swept over my throat, and his blunt teeth nipped and pulled at the tight skin. “Was your father a god, and your mother a muse? Yes, I see it in your eyes that it’s true. Your voice would charm the stars into falling from the sky to get closer to you. Your Eurydice is underground, and she’s not coming back, ever, ever! And that suits me; you can be mine instead.”
“Don’t you want to be my Eurydice?” I asked in surprise.
He arched his eyebrow. “I would never be so stupid as to look back at you,” he retorted. “I’d want to get back to the world with you and I would never let anything jeopardize that, not even a glance at your demigod’s ass. No; I don’t want to play a dead-end role from myth. I’ve already got a Hebrew name that doesn’t say anything about me. I’ve never even seen a lion. Never mind; forget about it. I was just showing off the fact that I’ve read something. It’s my greatest fault and my greatest gift, that tendency to show off. Where would I be without it; who would I be? I would not exist much at all. How awful it must be to be ordinary and shamble through your life, going to work in a factory, coming home every night and screwing the same old woman, eating your wurst and beating your kids and paying taxes, and never seeing the absurdity of it. At least I am aware that what I do is absurd and meaningless.” He rubbed my throat with his fingertips and bit it again. “Except for you, of course. I do you, and you are sublime. Dammit, why don’t you bruise?”
“Try harder,” I told him. “Like this.”
I bit into him. My fangs smoothly penetrated the hot, pulsing skin over his neck, and simultaneously, his penis penetrated me again; and we rocked, ever so slightly, like a boat on a calm afternoon lake, toes curled, holding our breath. There was almost too much of him; too much, so early. I wanted to tell him that he had no need to be careful with me, but I savored any fragment of the tense pleasure of him inside me. There would be time for much more, and I could wait.
When his hardness waned, I knew I had gone far enough, and I sat up on top of him, my thighs spread across his pointed hipbones and my mouth lusciously wet with him. Daniel had fallen unconscious, his mouth still open in midmoan, his lips pink and glistening from my kisses. His face was uniformly pockmarked like ancient marble, hints of smile lines marking his cheeks, a grainy texture of stubble on the small, variable cleft in his chin. Fine black hairs ringed each of his nipples and trailed down the valley in his torso to the furred oasis of his navel. His skin was a motley patchwork of different scars, from the faded to the newly minted. He was not pretty, and less so without the animation of his active face and the black pearls of his voice; and yet I had never seen anything that I hungered to look upon more.
His blood blended with mine, and I felt the fascination and lust, admiration and curiosity held within his mind and the youth and strength of his body. He had resilience, too—a violent health fed on stolen milk and eggs, thick, frothy beer, and constant hard exercise. His heartbeat had flooded my mouth, growing stronger the more blood I drew.
Smiling to myself, I slid from his body, turned him and raised his right leg, and fitted my dew-moistened prick into his anus, taking his advantage while he lay with his mind in limbo, his limbs helplessly splayed out. I wanted to be inside him as he had been inside me, and I would not wait to ask his permission. I had never been able to perform this act before in all my life, natural or unnatural, and I had always wondered how it would feel; would it be difficult, as it sometimes had been with me at first? But no, there existed no difficulty whatsoever, and I made no effort to be gentle. Indeed, it was perfect, excruciating and grand, almost as if he had been made for me, and my former existence, lived without this incredible sensation, seemed a gray and joyless thing.
No wonder Lorenzo had stolen this innocence from me; no wonder he kept coming back for it, even long after my innocence was lost.
I pushed faint gasps from his throat long before Daniel opened his eyes; he began to frown and grimace, and the moans gained in strength as he regained consciousness. “Oh, my God . . . you little sneak . . . Orfeo . . . please, harder,” he whispered. “Oh, my God . . . ! Fuck me like I need to be fucked! I’ve been waiting for you all my life! Ah—ow!” He opened his eyes in shock as my claws accidentally grazed his belly, slicing swiftly into the skin like razor blades. “God of shit, those bastards are sharp!”
I withdrew and bent over him, licking the fresh cuts and tutting sympathetically, with every intention of finishing what I’d started once I’d soothed his pain. But Daniel pinned me to the bedsheets, attacking my penis with his palms and his mouth and probing my anus with his fingers. I mouthed some empty words of protest or struggle, but I was too late, already caught in the sucking vortex of his fingertips, tongue, palate, my spirit sparking and fading like a shooting star falling to earth.
Between convulsions, I saw him watching me with a serious expression.
I kissed his sparkling, sour, wet mouth, but he did not return the pressure, and when I stopped and looked at him, his eyes were open and his face still looked blank. He disentangled himself from me and stood up, staring down at his stomach, where the bleeding scratches had healed to faint, fading, pink hairline seams crossing the semen-veiled trail of hair. Without speaking, he walked into my bathroom and began running the hot-water tap to fill the bathtub.
I lay still, allowing myself to savor the sweetly dying ecstasy of my orgasm, until I heard the water shut off and the low splash of my lover sinking into the tub. I slid down the bed and crawled across the carpet to the bathroom on my hands and knees, passing under a cloud layer of steam from the boiler.
Daniel startled as I appeared suddenly, as if coalescing from the steam, and ducked under the water, his hand clasping his belly where the scratch lines had disappeared entirely. I sat back on my heels like a patient dog, waiting him out, until he surfaced with a gasp a minute later, water streaming through his hair. “My God!” he burst out. “Y-you really aren’t an ordinary man, are you?”
“I never pretended to be,” I replied softly.
