Collected Short Fiction, page 926
“Which one is he?”
“There. By the couch.”
Nikki saw only a wall of backs. She tilted to the left and peered. No use. She would get to him later. Alexius Ducas continued to offer her his body with his eyes. She whispered languidly, “Tell me all about Byzantium.”
He got as far as Constantine the Great before he bored her. She finished her wine, and, coyly extending the glass, persuaded a smooth young man passing by to refill it for her. The Byzantine looked sad. “The empire then was divided,” he said, “among—”
“This is my birthday,” she announced.
“Yours also? My congratulations. Are you as old as—”
“Not nearly. Not by half. I won’t even be five hundred for some time,” she said, and turned to take her glass. The smooth young man did not wait to be captured. The party engulfed him like an avalanche. Sixty, eighty guests, all in motion. The draperies were pulled back, revealing the full fury of the snowstorm. No one was watching it. Steiner’s apartment was like a movie set: great porcelain garden stools, Ming or even Sung; walls painted with flat sheets of bronze and scarlet; pre-Columbian artefacts in spotlit niches; sculptures like aluminum spiderwebs; Dürer etchings—the loot of the ages. Squat shaven-headed servants, Mayans or Khmers or perhaps Olmecs, circulated impassively offering trays of delicacies: caviar, sea urchins, bits of roasted meat, tiny sausages, burritos in startling chili sauce. Hands darted unceasingly from trays to lips. This was a gathering of life-eaters, world-swallowers. Duke Alexius was stroking her arm. “I will leave at midnight,” he said gently. “It would be a delight if you left with me.”
“I have other plans,” she told him.
“Even so.” He bowed courteously, outwardly undisappointed. “Possibly another time. My card?” It appeared as if by magic in his hand: a sliver of tawny cardboard, elaborately engraved. She put it in her purse and the room swallowed him. Instantly a big, wild-eyed man took his place before her. “You’ve never heard of me,” he began.
“Is that a boast or an apology?”
“I’m quite ordinary. I work for Steiner. He thought it would be amusing to invite me to one of his parties.”
“What do you do?”
“Invoices and debarkations. Isn’t this an amazing place?”
“What’s your sign?” Nikki asked him.
“Libra.”
“I’m Capricorn. Tonight’s my birthday as well as his. If you’re really Libra, you’re wasting your time with me. Do you have a name?”
“Martin Bliss.”
“Nikki.”
“There isn’t any Mrs. Bliss, hah-hah.”
Nikki licked her lips. “I’m hungry. Would you get me some canapés?”
She was gone as soon as he moved toward the food. Circumnavigating the long room—past the string quintet, past the bartender’s throne, past the window—until she had a good view of the man called Nicholson. He didn’t disappoint her. He was slender, supple, not tall, strong in the shoulders. A man of presence and authority. She wanted to put her lips to him and suck immortality out. His head was a flat triangle, brutal cheekbones, thin lips, dark mat of curly hair, no beard, no moustache. His eyes were keen, electric, intolerably wise. He must have seen everything twice, at the very least. Nikki had read his book. Everyone had. He had been a king, a lama, a slave trader, a slave. Always taking pains to conceal his implausible longevity, now offering his terrible secret freely to the members of the Book- of-the-Month Club. Why had he chosen to surface and reveal himself? Because this is the necessary moment of revelation, he had said. When he must stand forth as what he is, so that he might impart his gift to others, lest he lose it. Lest he lose it. At the stroke of the new century he must share his prize of life. A dozen people surrounded him, catching his glow. He glanced through a palisade of shoulders and locked his eyes on hers; Nikki felt impaled, exalted, chosen. Warmth spread through her loins like a river of molten tungsten, like a stream of hot honey. She started to go to him. A corpse got in her way. Death’s-head parchment skin, nightmare eyes. A scaly hand brushed her bare biceps. A frightful eroded voice croaked, “How old do you think I am?”
“Oh, God!”
“How old?”
“Two thousand?”
“I’m fifty-eight. I won’t live to see fifty-nine. Here, smoke one of these.”
With trembling hands he offered her a tiny ivory tube. There was a Gothic monogram near one end—FXB—and a translucent green capsule at the other. She pressed the capsule, and a flickering blue flame sprouted. She inhaled. “What is it?” she asked.
“My own mixture. Soma Number Five. You like it?”
“I’m smeared,” she said. “Absolutely smeared. Oh, God!” The walls were flowing. The snow had turned to tinfoil. An instant hit. The corpse had a golden halo. Dollar signs rose into view like stigmata on his furrowed forehead. She heard the crash of the surf, the roar of the waves. The deck was heaving. The masts were cracking. Woman overboard! she cried, and heard her inaudible voice disappearing down a tunnel of echoes, boingg boingg boingg. She clutched at his frail wrists. “You bastard, what did you do to me?”
“I’m Francis Xavier Byrne.”
Oh. The billionaire. Byrne Industries, the great conglomerate. Steiner had promised her a billionaire tonight.
“Are you going to die soon?” she asked.
“No later than Easter. Money can’t help me now. I’m a walking metastasis.” He opened his ruffled shirt. Something bright and metallic, like chain mail, covered his chest. “Life-support system,” he confided. “It operates me. Take it off for half an hour and I’d be finished. Are you a Capricorn?”
“How did you know?”
“I may be dying, but I’m not stupid. You have the Capricorn gleam in your eyes. What am I?”
She hesitated. His eyes were gleaming too. Self-made man, fantastic business sense, energy, arrogance. Capricorn, of course. No, too easy. “Leo,” she said.
“No. Try again.” He pressed another monogrammed tube into her hand and strode away. She hadn’t yet come down from the last one, although the most flamboyant effects had ebbed. Party guests swirled and flowed around her. She no longer could see Nicholson. The snow seemed to be turning to hail, little hard particles spattering the vast windows and leaving white abraded tracks: or were her perceptions merely sharper? The roar of conversation seemed to rise and fall as if someone were adjusting a volume control. The lights fluctuated in a counterpointed rhythm. She felt dizzy. A tray of golden cocktails went past her and she hissed, “Where’s the bathroom?”
Down the hall. Five strangers clustered outside it, talking in scaly whispers. She floated through them, grabbed the sink’s cold edge, thrust her face to the oval concave mirror. A death’s-head. Parchment skin, nightmare eyes. No! No! She blinked and her own features reappeared. Shivering, she made an effort to pull herself together. The medicine cabinet held a tempting collection of drugs, Steiner’s all-purpose remedies. Without looking at labels Nikki seized a handful of vials and gobbled pills at random. A flat red one, a tapering green one, a succulent yellow gelatin capsule. Maybe headache remedies, maybe hallucinogens. Who knows, who cares? We Capricorns are not always as cautious as you think.
Someone knocked at the bathroom door. She answered and found the bland, hopeful face of Martin Bliss hovering near the ceiling. Eyes protruding faintly, cheeks florid. “They said you were sick. Can I do anything for you?” So kind, so sweet. She touched his arm, grazed his cheek with her lips. Beyond him in the hall stood a broad-bodied man with close-cropped blond hair, glacial blue eyes, a plump perfect face. His smile was intense and brilliant. “That’s easy,” he said. “Capricorn.”
“You can guess my—” She stopped, stunned. “Sign?” she finished, voice very small. “How did you do that? Oh.”
“Yes. I’m that one.”
She felt more than naked, stripped down to the ganglia, to the synapses. “What’s the trick?”
“No trick. I listen. I hear.”
“You hear people thinking?”
“More or less. Do you think it’s a party game?” He was beautiful but terrifying, like a Samurai sword in motion. She wanted him but she didn’t dare. He’s got my number, she thought. I would never have any secrets from him. He said sadly, “I don’t mind that. I know I frighten a lot of people. Some don’t care.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tom,” he said. “Hello, Nikki.”
“I feel very sorry for you.”
“Not really. You can kid yourself if you need to. But you can’t kid me. Anyway, you don’t sleep with men you feel sorry for.”
“I don’t sleep with you.”
“You will,” he said.
“I thought you were just a mind-reader. They didn’t tell me you did prophecies too.”
He leaned close and smiled. The smile demolished her. She had to fight to keep from falling. “I’ve got your number, all right,” he said in a low, harsh voice. “I’ll call you next Tuesday.” As he walked away he said, “You’re wrong. I’m a Virgo. Believe it or not.”
Nikki returned, numb, to the living room. “. . . the figure of the mandala,” Nicholson was saying. His voice was dark, focused, a pure basso cantante. “The essential thing that every mandala has is a center—the place where everything is born, the eye of God’s mind, the heart of darkness and of light, the core of the storm. All right. You must move toward the center, find the vortex at the boundary of Yang and Yin, place yourself right at the mandala’s midpoint. Center yourself. Do you follow the metaphor? Center yourself at now, the eternal now. To move off center is to move forward toward death, backward toward birth, always the fatal polar swings. But if you’re capable of positioning yourself constantly at the focus of the mandala, right on center, you have access to the fountain of renewal, you become an organism capable of constant self-healing, constant self-replenish ment, constant expansion into regions beyond self. Do you follow? The power of . . .”
Steiner, at her elbow, said tenderly, “How beautiful you are in the first moments of erotic fixation.”
“It’s a marvelous party.”
“Are you meeting interesting people?”
“Is there any other kind?” she asked.
Nicholson abruptly detached himself from the circle of his audience and strode across the room, alone, in a quick decisive knight’s move toward the bar. Nikki, hurrying to intercept him, collided with a shaven-headed tray-bearing servant. The tray slid smoothly from the man’s thick fingertips and launched itself into the air like a spinning shield; a rainfall of skewered meat in an oily green curry sauce spattered the white carpet. The servant was utterly motionless. He stood frozen like some sort of Mexican stone idol, thick-necked, flat-nosed, for a long painful moment; then he turned his head slowly to the left and regretfully contemplated his rigid outspread hand, shorn of its tray; finally he swung his head toward Nikki, and his normally expressionless granite face took on for a quick flickering instant a look of total hatred, a coruscating emanation of contempt and disgust that faded immediately. He laughed: hu-hu-hu, a neighing snicker. His superiority was overwhelming. Nikki floundered in quicksands of humiliation. Hastily she escaped, a zig and a zag, around the tumbled goodies and across to the bar. Nicholson, still by himself. Her face went crimson. She felt short of breath. Hunting for words, tongue all thumbs. Finally, in a catapulting blurt: “Happy birthday!”
“Thank you,” he said solemnly.
“Are you enjoying your birthday?”
“Very much.”
“I’m amazed that they don’t bore you. I mean, having had so many of them.”
“I don’t bore easily.” He was awesomely calm, drawing on some bottomless reservoir of patience. He gave her a look that was at the same time warm and impersonal. “I find everything interesting,” he said.
“That’s curious. I said more or less the same thing to Steiner just a few minutes ago. You know, it’s my birthday too.”
“Really?”
“The seventh of January, 1975 for me.”
“Hello, 1975. I’m—” He laughed. “It sounds absolutely absurd, doesn’t it?”
“The seventh of January, 982.”
“You’ve been doing your homework.”
“I’ve read your book,” she said. “Can I make a silly remark? My God, you don’t look like you’re a thousand and seventeen years old.”
“How should I look?”
“More like him,” she said, indicating Francis Xavier Byrne.
Nicholson chuckled. She wondered if he liked her. Maybe. Maybe. Nikki risked some eye contact. He was hardly a centimeter taller than she was, which made it a terrifyingly intimate experience. He regarded her steadily, centerdly; she imagined a throbbing mandala surrounding him, luminous turquoise spokes emanating from his heart, radiant red and green spiderweb rings connecting them. Reaching from her loins, she threw a loop of desire around him. Her eyes were explicit. His were veiled. She felt him calmly retreating. Take me inside, she pleaded, take me to one of the back rooms. Pour life into me. She said, “How will you choose the people you’re going to instruct in the secret?”
“Intuitively.”
“Refusing anybody who asks directly, of course.”
“Refusing anybody who asks.”
“Did you ask?”
“You said you read my book.”
“Oh. Yes. I remember—you didn’t know what was happening, you didn’t understand anything until it was over.”
“I was a simple lad,” he said. “That was a long time ago.” His eyes were alive again. He’s drawn to me. He sees that I’m his kind, that I deserve him. Capricorn, Capricorn, Capricorn you and me, he-goat and she-goat. Play my game, Cap. “How are you named?” he asked.
“Nikki.”
“A beautiful name. A beautiful woman.”
The emptiness of the compliments devastated her. She realized she had arrived with mysterious suddenness at a necessary point of tactical withdrawal; retreat was obligatory, lest she push too hard and destroy the tenuous contact so tensely established. She thanked him with a glance and gracefully slipped away, pivoting toward Martin Bliss, slipping her arm through his. Bliss quivered at the gesture, glowed, leaped into a higher energy state. She resonated to his vibrations, going up and up. She was at the heart of the party, the center of the mandala: standing flat-footed, legs slightly apart, making her body a polar axis, with lines of force zooming up out of the earth, up through the basement levels of this building, up the eighty-eight stories of it, up through her sex, her heart, her head. This is how it must feel, she thought, when undyingness is conferred on you. A moment of spontaneous grace, the kindling of an inner light. She looked love at poor sappy Bliss. You dear heart, you dumb walking pun. The string quintet made molten sounds. “What is that?” she asked. “Brahms?” Bliss offered to find out. Alone, she was vulnerable to Francis Xavier Byrne, who brought her down with a single cadaverous glance.
“Have you guessed it yet?” he asked. “The sign.”
She stared through his ragged cancerous body, blazing with decomposition. “Scorpio,” she told him hoarsely.
“Right! Right!” He pulled a pendant from his breast and draped its golden chain over her head. “For you,” he rasped, and fled. She fondled it. A smooth green stone. Jade? Emerald? Lightly engraved on its domed face was the looped cross, the crux ansata. Beautiful. The gift of life, from the dying man. She waved fondly to him across a forest of heads and winked. Bliss returned.
“They’re playing something by Schönberg,” he reported. “Verklärte Nacht.”
“How lovely.” She flipped the pendant and let it fall back against her breasts. “Do you like it?”
“I’m sure you didn’t have it a moment ago.”
“It sprouted,” she told him. She felt high, but not as high as she had been just after leaving Nicholson. That sense of herself as focal point had departed. The party seemed chaotic. Couples were forming, dissolving, reforming; shadowy figures were stealing away in twos and threes toward the bedrooms; the servants were more obsessively thrusting their trays of drinks and snacks at the remaining guests; the hail had reverted to snow, and feathery masses silently struck the windows, sticking there, revealing their glistening mandalic structures for painfully brief moments before they deliquesced. Nikki struggled to regain her centered position. She indulged in a cheering fantasy: Nicholson coming to her, formally touching her cheek, telling her, “You will be one of the elect.” In less than twelve months the time would come for him to gather with his seven still unnamed disciples to see in the new century, and he would take their hands into his hands, he would pump the vitality of the undying into their bodies, sharing with them the secret that had been shared with him a thousand years ago. Who? Who? Who? Me. Me. Me. But where had Nicholson gone? His aura, his glow, that cone of imaginary light that had appeared to surround him—nowhere.
A man in a lacquered orange wig began furiously to quarrel, almost under Nikki’s nose, with a much younger woman wearing festoons of bioluminescent pearls. Man and wife, evidently. They were both sharp-featured, with glossy, protuberant eyes, rigid faces, cheek muscles working intensely. Live together long enough, come to look alike. Their dispute had a stale, ritualistic flavor, as though they had staged it all too many times before. They were explaining to each other the events that had caused the quarrel, interpreting them, recapitulating them, shading them, justifying, attacking, defending—you said this because and that led me to respond that way because . . . no, on the contrary, I said this because you said that—all of it in a quiet screechy tone, sickening, agonizing, pure death.
“He’s her biological father,” a man next to Nikki said. “She was one of the first of the in vitro babies, and he was the donor, and five years ago he tracked her down and married her. A loophole in the law.” Five years? They sounded as if they had been married for fifty. Walls of pain and boredom encased them. Only their eyes were alive. Nikki found it impossible to imagine those two in bed, bodies entwined in the act of love. Act of love, she thought, and laughed. Where was Nicholson? Duke Alexius, flushed and sweat-beaded, bowed to her. “I will leave soon,” he announced, and she received the announcement gravely but without reacting, as though he had merely commented on the fluctuations of the storm, or had spoken in Greek. He bowed again and went away. Nicholson? Nicholson? She grew calm again, finding her center. He will come to me when he is ready. There was contact between us, and it was real and good.
