Fiend, page 25
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
None of his massive circle of acquaintances and half-enemies could specify what had changed within old Danny Blum; he just looked better, somehow. Most of the girls assumed that it was the florescence of true love. Danny had never been seen with anyone for as long as he had been with me. I was happy to accept the credit for improving his looks.
In a way, it had been a transformation born of true love. But true love did not mean what I had always thought it meant.
I did not give up my apartment; neither did Daniel relinquish the Dummschwallen, which I happily paid for. I was glad for him to have somewhere else to go besides the café down the street and my bathtub. I heartily and sincerely encouraged his enthusiasm for the little theater. I made sure that he always had something to do, remembering my long stretches of Parisian boredom, broken only by hideous self-reflection, savage acts, and needless emotional involvements.
The Dummschwallen venue, after several months of inactivity, began booking musicians, poets, dancers, amateur films, and experimental theatricals. Daniel launched himself back into the cause of creative expression with a vengeance I had not seen but had been typical of his life before. If one could not get a booking elsewhere in Berlin, the Dummschwallen would eagerly provide; the place was crawling with a massive variety of nontalent. The awfulness of the performers became part of its appeal, and it was typical to have the audience hissing and shouting abuse, often degenerating into destructive brawls that spilled onto the street.
Compared to them, Daniel’s poetry recitals, singing, and piano improvisations were exquisite, and of course his charisma could not be denied. He developed a cadre of regulars who always showed up with alcohol and opium pipes and watched him in silent devotion. He was mad poet and showgirl in one body, a creature of extraordinary magnetism, and best of all, it didn’t cost anything. I know that if he had charged admission, these regulars would gladly have paid anything he asked.
I was hopelessly ensnared myself. I felt almost as if I were leashed, or rather, that I held the leash of a rampaging lion, with no choice but to keep holding on, though I was dragged to and fro. Even when I attempted to create time for myself, to work on a painting of the view of the Tiergarten from my front window, I felt an inexorable pull to rush to Daniel’s side, even if only to be in his presence. When I was without him, I was consumed with crippling melancholy and guilt that could be eased by a visit to St. Hedwig’s, but never dispersed until I was near Daniel. He sometimes scowled at me when he saw me appear after making a huge fuss earlier in the evening, with my insistence on getting away from him for a while, but I felt his relief at beholding me again, and I took a tiny comfort in the fact that he shared my affliction.
But the comfort grew less and less, the melancholy more profound, his scowls blacker and blacker.
What, again, were you thinking, Monsieur Ricari?
As the Dummschwallen transformed and grew in infamy, and Daniel gathered the adulation to which he had always felt entitled, his true nature at last began to assert itself.
“I will not be your pet,” Daniel told me. “I learned how pointless that can be from you yourself, my darling. From now on, we are equals.”
“We are not equals,” I informed him. “We shall never be. That’s all there is to it. There is still much that you can learn from me, if you can set aside your pride for a moment.”
“I am not like you, Ricari. You were a clueless shrinking violet when you were made, whereas I already know how to set aside soft, irrelevant feelings for the lesser beings I must consume. I mean, really; how can you eat a steak if you keep falling in love with the cow? How can you have kid gloves without killing soft, sweet, tiny baby goats? And I know you don’t want to give up your precious gloves. It seems that you could learn a few things from me if you’d just set aside your own . . . sinful, damnable pride.”
I hated when he said these things, because I found it difficult to answer him. It is hard to use faith and compassion as an argument against an opponent to whom these virtues are strangers. He simply had no conception of the true nature of kindness, and mistook standards of moral self-discipline as a form of punishment. And he saw in himself no misdeeds worthy of punishment.
“I give the poor little mundanes ecstasy,” he explained, “if they are willing to embrace it. Isn’t that better than a gray life filled with meaningless symbols?”
If I tried to press the point, he would silence me with his mouth and his body, reinforced by his lustful thoughts, a weakness to which I was particularly susceptible. For our lovemaking was undeniably magnificent. I had almost forgotten the power of sex with another one of my kind; added to the pure sensuality of flesh and fluid was a higher consciousness of self and other, a combining of wavelengths, of frequencies, to form a sublime harmony of souls. Even the struggle for eminent power brought us to greater heights of passion; try as he might, he could not physically overcome me if I did not wish to be overcome, and many pleasant hours of sport ensued as he attempted, again and again.
But as soon as our clothes were on, the struggle continued in a way that caused me no pleasure whatsoever.
He was no longer true to me.
He couched it in the context of scientific study, the hunger for experience, for the novel and extreme. At first, he tried to incorporate me.
“Don’t you ever miss pussy?” He said the profanity in Italian. He must have plucked it from my mind.
“Oh, honestly, Daniel, must you be so crude?” I always laughed whenever he was obscene. It was not so much that I found it funny (which I did, somewhere in my darkest corners), but it was my instinct to laugh whenever I felt embarrassed around him. It felt safer than a merely shocked or appalled expression. “I . . . well, I never thought about it.”
“Oh, come now, don’t bother lying to me. I know you miss it. I miss it. It’s only natural. Men and women are designed for one another.” We lay in bed, already soaked and sweaty though the sun had barely set, his cleanshaven face tucked into my armpit, his fingers tapping out a delicate rhythm on the drum of my belly. “You were just thinking about it. It’s been decades since you last tasted a woman’s snatch. Don’t you prefer that to my ass?”
“No,” I said, lightly pinching the back of his neck. “I don’t prefer anything in the world to that.”
“But how would you know?” he asked, sitting up. His black hair hung in a shiny curtain around his face, pouring down to his shoulders like liquid. “It’s not the same. Just because I put on silk stockings, it doesn’t give me a pussy. Or tits, real tits! How long has it been since you squeezed a real tit? We have to go get a woman tonight and give her the business, so that we know for sure. I know I’d like to find out for sure.”
The business. I grimaced. “I tell you that you are enough for me.” More than enough.
He scoffed, one eye twitching. Exactly, boyfriend; I’m too much for you. “Well, I’m bored. I want to go get some kicks. Are you coming, or are you going to stay in bed all night, getting moldy?”
We barely had to go four blocks before we happened upon a “five o’clock lady,” lovely, young, blond, still dressed in her pleasant and modest dress from the office, but with her stockings rolled down, a lot of freshly applied lipstick, and a certain uncomfortable air of expectation. I recognized this girl, and between my smooth introduction “Haven’t I seen you before, perhaps at the cinema?” and Daniel’s brash, direct “Twenty marks sound all right for the both of us?,” we quickly found entrance to her room.
Yet I stood, staring out the window, fully clothed, while Daniel gave the girl “the business” on her small, neatly made bed. “C’mon, Ricari,” Daniel grunted, still situated between the prostitute’s thighs, “get in here, would you?”
“I don’t really feel like it,” I said. Yet, of course, my body was aroused, with its own involuntary reaction to the stimulation of the sounds, the scents, the peripheral view of Daniel’s hips rutting, and the sensations flooding to me from Daniel’s overheated mind. My penis was so hard it ached, and my mouth watered. But I did not want to join them.
“Are you just going to jerk off, or what?” Daniel demanded, flinging his damp hair over his shoulder.
“I don’t want to.”
“Do I still get twenty marks?” asked the girl breathlessly. Daniel changed her words into cries with a frenzy of thrusting.
“Careful; don’t hurt her,” I said.
“I’m paying her twenty marks,” Daniel replied. “I can hurt her if I want to; can’t I, baby?” He pinched her nipples with his fingernails.
“Just don’t leave any marks,” she said, shutting her eyes tightly. Daniel laughed and kissed her quite gently on the mouth and neck, brushing her breasts with his hair. The girl relaxed and smiled her pretty typing-pool smile.
Then he stood up and walked to me. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
It was an effort to turn around and meet his eyes, and I kept my mouth closed; to speak would be to compromise myself. I have to stand here and watch you, my only, my precious, my beloved, fuck someone else, that’s what’s the matter.
Daniel smiled smugly and mocked me by speaking aloud. “If you were truly in control of me, you wouldn’t let me, would you?” He chuckled, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit the three cigarettes in his mouth at once. He handed one to me and another to the girl, who dabbed at her vulva with a handkerchief. “You just can’t stand that you’re not enough for me, can you?”
The handkerchief came away dotted with blood. My eyes locked onto the tiny red smudges, and a moment’s accumulated saliva ran from the corner of my mouth before I could stop it. My prick writhed against my silk drawers.
Involuntary reaction to stimulation; I didn’t want her, I didn’t want to be there, I did not feel lustful, and yet my sex responded in a way that my consciousness could not. But the moral, or perhaps only the emotional, part of my mind instantaneously lost control. Carnal hunger will do what lewdness alone cannot accomplish.
The girl cursed. “Oh, no, you made me sick,” she said, complaining without anger. She stood up to wring out the handkerchief in her washbasin, and I closed the space between us in a single step.
“Allow me,” I said.
She gazed into me, and I stroked her temples and slowly backed her toward the now-mussed bed, taking the lit cigarette from her hand and stubbing it out into a little porcelain tray shaped like a clamshell. The girl fell into a trance instantly, still wearing the same gentle half-smile, and delicately lay back onto the bed surface, bending her knees and opening her thighs. I did not need to look at Daniel to see the smirk on his face.
I drew my tongue along her damp, scented channel. Her being blossomed into my mind. Such a sweet girl, intelligent and humorous, selling herself to earn money for her boyfriend (standing right downstairs, watching for trouble from other pimps or police) so he could buy a suit, so they could marry at Christmastime. Her hips arched toward me and a quiet moan fluttered from her lips. The blood had just begun, forced from her womb.
“Do you still like the taste?” Daniel said.
“This is . . . different,” I replied, faint with poorly restrained desire, “this is . . .”
“Heaven?” he said, speaking the word I could not say.
If anything could have broken me away from my act, that was undeniably effective. I stood up and broke my glamor over the girl, wiping my mouth, rubbing my damp hands down the sides of my coat. She sat up and stared at me wild-eyed, struck with the knowledge of my true and uncanny nature, only to have Daniel enfold her thighs in his arms and, murmuring sweet nothings, drain her lifeblood through her sex.
I lost my senses. Half-convulsed with horror, I fled from the apartment and rushed to St. Hedwig. I was just in time for the Compline service, into which I threw myself with the vigor of the condemned. After the recitation of opening prayers, before confession, I found enough calm to look around myself. The usual old ladies were there, and I felt a weird kinship with them; the majority of them were there to get away from their drunk, nihilistic, mistreating husbands and have a few moments of peace, quiet, and order.
“The Lord be with you.”
“And with your spirit.”
It was a different universe, but with echoes of the other; all throughout the service, throughout my long, painful confession and the singing of a hymn, I could feel the paroxysms of lust and the slippery, curious inner contours of a woman, and the flashing, ecstatic release of her consciousness at the moment of death. Heaven, Daniel kept transmitting to me. I could hear his laughter. Heaven up here, between a young Christian girl’s legs. You haven’t far to go. Will loving Jesus get you here? If not, he can go screw himself.
I bowed my head until my neck bones cracked. How could I devote myself entire when I had no privacy, even in my own mind?
That was only the beginning.
When the Great Crash came and the streets filled with penniless men and women, a great many of them attended entertainments at the Dummschwallen, retaining its policy of free admission, as long as one brought one’s own chair, as the old ones had long been smashed in brawls. The fights continued, becoming their own show in many ways; now they were not simply between the audience and the performers but among the audience themselves, and not merely over aesthetic revulsion but money, grudges, random explosions of frustrated rage.
(There were never any fights during Daniel’s performances; the audience sat in attentive silence, hypnotized by him.)
At the end of each night, three or four people would stay behind, eager to meet their hero, some destitute and looking for a place to sleep for the night. “These are the chosen ones,” he would say to me, and upon them he would practice bloodletting with restraint. Again, I had to encourage him; if I wanted him to stop slaughtering innocents, I had to train him in the alternative. At first, he had the same difficulties that I had, and we made many deposits in the already corpseridden Landswehr Canal, but by spring he could finally take a mouthful without letting his control slip away.
Once he accomplished this, he kissed each of the night’s five survivors deeply on the mouth and sent him home. The next sunset, all five of them were there when Daniel and I arrived, hours before the time of the performance, milling around and speaking muted syllables to one another. “Will he be here?” “Of course he’ll be here. I can tell.” “So can I.” “It won’t be long.” Daniel stepped out of the taxi and stared at them with pleased incomprehension, and the five young men surrounded him and began talking to him, all at once.
I took Daniel’s arm and dragged him into the collaged coal chute. “What’s that all about?” he asked me.
“They’re attached to you,” I explained with a sigh. “It’s one of the annoyances you’ll face.”
“Like Liesl?” he asked.
I did not enjoy his habit of stealing my memories and then repeating them to me at the most uncomfortable moments. “Yes, like Liesl. And more so because you kissed them; I never kissed Liesl for that reason.”
“And others, like the fact that she looked like a dog’s dinner,” he added cheerfully.
“Daniel, please.” I crossed myself. “Don’t kiss anyone unless you mean it. And by no means should you screw anyone unless you want them following you everywhere.”
“So I could make them into my slaves?” His eyes widened.
“No—! No, Daniel. Please, don’t.”
“In other words, yes,” he said with a grin. “Thank you, sensei. I do learn things from you after all.” He kissed me quick on the mouth, then whisked back outside to the urgent chatter of the five young men.
By the end of the night, all five were dead, their blood inside Daniel, and Prenzlauer rubbish heaps stacked with corpses. “I didn’t want them following me around” was Daniel’s excuse. “I don’t want anyone who’s not useful. Or at least very beautiful; beauty is utility, as Keats says.” He laid his ruddy hand on my cheek and fluttered his thick eyelashes at me.
“It’s truth, you vicious, illiterate bastard!” I spluttered, knocking his hand aside, too angry to appreciate that I was being deliberately provoked. His response was breezy.
“My parents were quite married, thank you very much. And I hope you know that I wouldn’t keep you around if you weren’t useful.”
“You couldn’t be rid of me if you tried.”
“And oh, how I’ve tried!” he snapped.
“Yes, you have,” I said, suddenly exhausted, tired of carrying stinking dead bodies, worn out from the strain of trying to remain calm in Daniel’s presence. “You try and try. And I try, too. But you should know as well as I that we are together and we must remain that way.”
“I refuse to accept that,” he said. He stepped away from me, a haloed silhouette against the rising indigo dawn, and held his hand, palm out, toward me. “We can do as we please. Sleep on your own today, God-shit-whore Mary. Go home and jerk off to that ugly naked man on your cross. It is Sunday, after all.”
“You—blasphemous monster!” I screamed at him. “Go to Hell!” I threw my cigarette case at him, flipping and flashing in the streetlight, and one of the corners struck him squarely in the chest, next to his heart, so deeply that it lodged in the flesh.
He stared down at it and pulled the case free; dark blood rimed its smooth gold-plated edge and ran down the front of his dirty white vest. The pain staggered him, and nearly staggered me with the sudden force of its profound truth. It returned me to my senses.
But before I could apologize, he had launched himself at me with a roar of fury, his fingers outstretched. His claws tore at the skin of my face but did only superficial, stinging damage; but the force of his attack knocked me to the street and crushed the breath from my lungs. Once I was on the ground, he punched me in the mouth, breaking my front teeth onto my soft palate.
