Wounds, page 31
part #2 of Voice of Blood Series
“You had a very interesting face,” Daniel explained. “Have.”
“No, no. I once had a pretty face. It remains interesting.”
“Do you mind if we . . . I mean, I hate to make you work right now. I know you’re tired and you just ate.”
“No, no, ate? That wasn’t eating. I might as well have been taking vitamin pellets. Green vegetables with no butter or salt on top of sticky rice? That’s not dinner. I want a corned beef sandwich and a bottle of Belgian doppelbock. Perhaps even two bottles. And I would love to look at figures for a while. All this relaxing depresses me.” Gestwirt led Daniel down the hall that ran the length of his apartment to the door of his office. Daniel glanced into the other rooms. The doors had always been closed when he had been here before, but now he could see into them, dark and neatly arranged with antiques, and each room had its own individual scent. Daniel felt a terrible pang of longing for his flat across the street from the Met, the soft blue study full of fascinating books, the infinite bathroom. He missed the cleanliness, the luxury of comfortable new furniture, oceans of running water.
Once inside the office, Gestwirt thrust a sheet of paper at Daniel. “Your account numbers,” he proclaimed.
“Oh! How did you know?”
Gestwirt sighed. “I know,” he said. “Tying up loose ends, like I said.”
Daniel scanned the page. He didn’t recognize half of them, having been opened by Gestwirt on his behalf. “I don’t suppose there’s time to consolidate these.”
“I have all the time God gave me to consolidate them, but do you? It will require a lot of research, as some of these are more stable than others, and some have nastier tax penalties than you’re probably comfortable with.”
“No, no, never mind. I’ll deal with them later. Money. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have any. Life would be so free.”
“Unfortunately, food and rent most certainly are not.” Gestwirt sank down onto the visitor’s couch, sighing heavily. Daniel followed, sitting on the floor beside Gestwirt. Gestwirt stroked Daniel’s hair. “I don’t suppose you will indulge me by going to the deli to get me a corned beef sandwich?” Gestwirt asked.
Daniel chuckled. “No, I won’t. I’d hate to think that I was responsible for killing an old man with a corned beef sandwich. How about, though, you trade me a blow job for a cigarette?”
Gestwirt laughed, a full belly laugh that he should not have been physically capable of. “You’re joking,” he gasped.
“Yes,” said Daniel. “I’m joking. I don’t have any cigarettes.”
The old man lay and watched raptly as Daniel stood up and slowly undressed, the yellow-green light casting peculiar shadows over his angular body. He remained silent when Daniel lay on the couch beside him, untied the robe, and slid his arms inside it. Daniel ran his fingers through Gestwirt’s hair, shaking off the strands that came loose. “Is your head warm?” Daniel whispered.
“Quite warm, yes, thank you.” Gestwirt’s voice was reasonable, pleasant, ordinary; but after he spoke, Daniel felt him holding his breath.
“Please remember to keep breathing. Cecily would be very upset if I forgot to remind you to breathe.”
“Yes, thank you.”
Daniel angled himself up on one elbow, gently pulled Gestwirt’s trifocals from his face, and set them on the floor. He stroked both sides of Gestwirt’s face, pulling back the wrinkles, examining him. “I still see a pretty face in here,” Daniel told him. “With long, pretty eyelashes.”
“Cecily would be very upset if she saw what you’re doing right now,” Gestwirt said.
Daniel pursed his lips, unbuttoning the shirt of Gestwirt’s silk pajamas. “Somehow I think she’d understand,” Daniel said. He passed one hand over Gestwirt’s sunken chest, stroking erect nipples with his fingertips. “I think I saw you,” he continued, listening to the soft hiss of Gestwirt’s breath through his teeth. “I think it was you. You went to Haus Vaterland at least once, didn’t you? You would have been about ten—”
“Twelve,” Gestwirt said. “With my uncle Karl.”
Daniel pulled down the elastic waist of the pajama bottoms and pressed himself against Gestwirt’s hot, sweat-moist body. Gestwirt breathed, but with difficulty, in abrupt fits and starts. “It was the week after Christmas. You were dining in the Grinzing—”
“Because—Karl and I both loved trains . . . but that was before—”
“Before Poland, yes. But forget about Poland. Forget about it.” He pressed his hands against Gestwirt, one against his heart and the other his groin, and concentrated as hard as he could on crumbling the mental architecture, on forgetting. He tore down the buildings, the faces, cleared away the broken glass, replacing it with the sensation of warm hands, a comfortable couch, the caress of silk. Gestwirt relaxed all at once with a huge sigh. “In the Grinzing. Having a divine meal and laughing. Watching the model trains going round and round the restaurant. And you were laughing at a man who had just spilled a tower of dishes that came crashing all around him. Do you remember that?”
“Oh,” sighed Gestwirt with a smile, “I do remember that. The whole restaurant was laughing.”
“Do you remember the man? Do you remember what he looked like?”
Gestwirt’s foggy eyes traced Daniel’s features. “He looked just like . . . like you.” One of his wrinkled hands reached over and tucked Daniel’s hair behind his ear. “I thought he was very strange to look at, because his hair was so long. . . . Uncle Karl and I joked after the mess was cleared away that we couldn’t tell if he was a man or a woman.”
“But you could tell, couldn’t you?” said Daniel. “You could tell I was a man.”
“You moved like a man . . . cursed like a man,” Gestwirt said lightly, then his face fell and his eyes closed. “I must be imagining things. It couldn’t have been you. I’m old enough to be your grandfather. You’re just a child. Cecily’s older than you are.”
“How old was I when I first came to you here?” Daniel pressed himself harder against Gestwirt. Both of them were erect now, cocks trapped against thighs.
“Th-thirty. Oh, Daniel, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“And how old am I now?”
Gestwirt frowned.
“I’m thirty, aren’t I? Isn’t it strange how every year I seem to stay the same age? Do you even remember setting my date of birth back a year every year? It’s because I told you to. And I told you not to remember. To be quite honest, I’m actually twenty-seven, or so it seems.” He rested his head against Gestwirt’s shoulder, listening to his fast, erratic heartbeat, and a faint gurgling that must have been his lungs trying to pump air through the fluid collecting in them. Gestwirt’s breath emerged with a high, falling note, was brought back in with a rattling wheeze. “I was born October 27, 1902 at four o’clock in the morning, in my parents’ kitchen, in Berlin. And twenty-two years later, I was the worst busboy Haus Vaterland ever had.”
He showed his teeth.
Gestwirt gasped, then gasped again; his hand flew to his chest and patted against it, trying to clear a path for air to his lungs. This did not work. His streaming eyes begged Daniel, and Daniel obligingly helped him sit up a little, allowing his chest more room to move. Gestwirt’s face went through several changes of color before settling on a shade close to his normal flesh tone. “You . . . impossible,” he whispered. “Immortal.”
“No,” said Daniel. “But close. I won’t preserve you forever like this. I’m cruel, but I’m not that cruel. I’m too fond of you to be that cruel.” Gestwirt’s trembling hand sought the pocket of his robe where the phone was, but Daniel caught the hand and held it down on his own belly. “Now, now. Why call Cecily? What could she do? Back to the hospital? Another catheter for this tender flesh?” Daniel grasped Gestwirt’s prick, still erect and hard as a pistol. “I think not. I think that if you go back to the hospital tonight, you won’t ever come out again. If I were a doctor, I would never let you go.”
Gestwirt lifted his other hand, held it up to Daniel’s smiling face, and touched the sharp point of one of Daniel’s fangs with his fingertip. The tooth smoothly slid into the skin. Gestwirt looked at the heavy bead of blood balancing on his finger, then wiped it onto Daniel’s outstretched tongue. “You don’t . . . want to drink my blood,” Gestwirt said. “It’s old and . . . sick.”
“Your blood will always be precious to me.” He pressed his lips against Gestwirt’s neck, speaking against his larynx, his voice echoing around Gestwirt’s throat. “You won’t survive this. You won’t make it through the night, no matter what I do. But I can take the pain away. You have nothing to worry about. And neither do I.”
The old blood was thin and slow but high in adrenaline and a huge variety of fascinating chemicals, some of which Daniel had never tasted before. And so much lust. He shifted himself to get a better position to hold his own neck, and found their joined loins slippery with semen and urine. “Heinz?” Daniel asked softly, licking his lips, and, enchanted with their flavor, licked them again.
Gestwirt still sat up, but his chest lay still. His half-lidded eyes dilated to the point of blackness. Daniel reluctantly let go and stood up. He had left two big holes in Gestwirt’s neck; he bent down and whisked his tongue around them. Gestwirt’s thready heartbeat continued, although Daniel had sucked away his consciousness, and his body had begun the downward spiral. He kissed Gestwirt’s lips, whispered, “Gute nacht, Heinz,” and gathered his clothes from the floor and his file from Gestwirt’s desk. Now there was only one thing left to do.
He took a long, hot bath.
Scene Twenty-six: The Prince of Bones
The rat and the aquarium were gone, and in its place sat a note in green crayon on lined notebook paper. Join Me & Bastard Son at Teatro. When Daniel arrived, he understood that the green crayon had not been an accident—Ennio cracked the door of the tiny theater and an opaque fog of cannabis smoke roiled out. “Get in here, man, hurry up,” Ennio muttered in a strangled high voice; he turned his head and exhaled a lungful back inside.
Daniel slid into the dark room, closing the self-locking door behind him. Slow-tempo beats played faintly over the P.A. “Me and Sybil’s upstairs,” Ennio said, elaborately clasping and releasing Daniel’s hand. “You wanna smoke weed?”
“Yes,” said Daniel, taking Ennio’s shoulders, jaunting through the open doors of Ennio’s mind, and bending his head to Ennio’s neck. He drew two good mouthfuls from just below the skin, licked the wound, then pushed Ennio a safe distance away. No pretend kisses with Ennio, whose very first words to Daniel had been “I’m straight, man. I know you ain’t, that’s cool, but . . . nahah.” Daniel let the hypnotism fade, leaving only a gentle cannabis befuddlement behind. “So how’s it going?”
Ennio shook his head and blinked. “ ’S good, man, good. We been get’n some work done up on the computer. But still, we kinda need you to get finished. I woulda called, actually, but I don’t know the number. Damn, I got a headache.”
“Never mind that,” Daniel said. He started upstairs, sparing a look behind him at the interior of the theater space. It wasn’t large, only the size of his living room back at the old flat, entirely painted black from the ceiling and over the built-in speaker cabinets to the floor; the only light for the entire room came from a single “black light” bulb hanging from a cord in the back of the room. When Daniel and Sybil had come after meeting Ennio at the pizza joint, the theater had been essentially empty but for some overhead light racks that had not yet been installed; now, the lights hung up above in the gloom, and large bolts of patterned cloth and plain muslin, a couple of tall, spindly homemade four-legged stools, and several TV sets in various stages of age and repair had been stacked against the walls. “Spending the money?” Daniel asked pleasantly.
“Aw, yeah, man. I got some supplies ‘n’ shit . . . bought some props . . . I need to get started on this mural, y’know, but I want to finish up the computer stuff first.”
Upstairs, Sybil lounged in thrift-store underwear on a pile of handmade velvet pillows, weakly clasping the stem of a huge Moroccan hookah, surrounded by humming, blinking computer drives. The very tips of her blue hair had been dyed orange and styled into a soft peak at the top of her head; she looked like a melting, lit vanilla candle. “Oh, good, you got my note,” she said, scrambling to an upright position atop the pillows. “Hey, you want to see something amazing?” She stood, balancing herself on the table that held four large computer monitors, and pointed at another table to Daniel’s left. A familiar aquarium, lit from without by a low-wattage, white incandescent bulb, contained a familiar rat devouring a pile of seeded whole-grain bread. “See? His name’s Victim. Ennio named him. We got some plans for him. “
“I thought it was dead,” remarked Daniel, leaning in closer to examine the aquarium, now topped with a heavy wire rack and eight concrete cinder blocks. The rat’s eyes followed him, but it didn’t stop eating. One crumpled, swollen foreleg curled up against its compost-colored body.
“No, he’s never been dead. He was in a coma. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I didn’t do that to his arm. I wouldn’t have been able to catch him if his arm wasn’t all fucked up.” Sybil leaned against Daniel and blew smoke into his ear. “I saw what you did down there. You think you’re slick,” she murmured in his ear. “Did you have a good night out on your own?”
He kissed her, touching just the tip of his tongue to the roof of her mouth. “I tied up some loose ends with my accountant,” he said.
She gave an insinuating hum. “Did you miss me?”
“Aren’t you with me all the time?”
Ennio shouldered past them and slung himself into an ergonomic chair before the computers. With a swipe of his hand across the table, the monitors snapped from coruscating fractal designs into windows, two full of pink text on a black background, one with the photo of a nude, inquisitive Daniel, and the other, the negative of Sybil, arched defiantly in the same chair. “Do you think we should do a front and back?” Ennio asked. “I dunno. I can’t figure it out.”
“What do you mean, you can’t figure it out? You’re Bastard Son,” said Daniel. “You’ve got more visual talent in your big toe than I’ve got in my whole body.”
“I don’t got your talent for exaggeration,” Ennio said. “Man, you don’t make art. You be art. Just standin’ there.” He swiveled in his chair and stared at Daniel and Sybil. “Look at the two of you. It’s fuckin’ eerie, man.” He turned back to his computer screens. “Notice your girlie’s bigger than you are?”
Daniel scoffed. “Not possible.”
“Tell ’m,” said Ennio.
Sybil scoffed back. “Five eleven.”
“Six feet.”
“One eighty.”
Daniel gaped. “You do not weigh a hundred and eighty pounds.”
“She does, man,” said Ennio. “I saw that scale, man. That’s a big girl. And what do you weigh?”
Daniel hesitated for a moment, then confessed, “All right, so I’m skinny.”
Sybil wrapped one arm around Daniel’s head and wrestled him down to the pillows. “I win!” she crowed, sitting on top of him.
“I let you,” said Daniel, enjoying the pressure. “Don’t tickle me or else.”
“Oh,” Sybil replied, slipping her hand into his shirt, “I know better. You should bite other people, not me. I’m good for other things.” She spread her legs until she was straddling his right thigh. “Remember this pose?” She spoke to Ennio. “Where have you seen this before?” she asked, grinding her pubic bone into Daniel’s muscle and rubbing her palms against her crotch. “Mmmm, sexy bunny,” she groaned, impersonating the girl in the wig. “God, she was stupid.”
Ennio laughed, reaching over next to them to pick up the mouthpiece of the hookah, on the end of a long, flexible thread-wrapped tube. He took a deep gulp of smoke, swallowed it, and exhaled through his nose at Daniel and Sybil. “If you two feel like bonin’, go for it. Just know I’ll be watchin’. Not to mention the camera.”
“Camera? Where?” Daniel asked. Sybil pointed at her videocamera, resting on the tabletop but not pointed at them; instead, it focused on a large jar, buzzing with fruit flies. “Science project?” He bounced under Sybil.
“Reproduction, man,” said Ennio.
The flies buzzed over a gobbet of raw meat.
“Flesh and ghosts,” whispered Sybil.
Daniel slipped his hand into the gap in her underpants. Ennio watched this violation for a moment, then rummaged in a pile of hardware until he found a flat, blank plastic tablet. He plugged it into the back of one of the computer drives and hit a button on the front of the drive. As Sybil slid the camisole over her head, he began to stab and sweep the surface of the tablet with a translucent plastic stylus. “Keep going,” he said. “This your thing. You gotta inspire me to create.”
“You mean, you didn’t fuck her, just to see what it was like?” Daniel asked. Sybil unzipped his pants—two side zippers—and peeled them down, scraping her fingertips against the delicate trail of hair leading from his navel.
“I ’int say that,” said Ennio.
“Don’t be nosy, Daniel,” Sybil said, kissing his bare belly. “You fucked someone else last night.”
“I didn’t fuck him. I don’t think he could have handled it.”
“Quit talkin’,” Ennio commanded. He took another hit from the hookah. “You distractin’ me.”
Daniel hated to think that they were showing off for Ennio, but there was no denying that he and Sybil did things that they had never done before, and in more outlandish ways. Daniel bent Sybil’s knees up over her shoulders. She duplicated the position from their first time, then, without breaking contact, turned around until she was facing him. He aimed his ejaculate at her breasts. Ennio provided occasional commentary and direction. His stylus trembled and wavered over the tablet; on one of the computer screens, a complete portrait of their coupling emerged, bit by bit, not seeking to portray any particular moment in time but instead incorporating all of it.
