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Take It With You

It was blood. His blood was everywhere. He whipped round as he was falling, and the whole world was slow with his falling and his dying and his taking his life with him, away from all of us. As he whipped his red blood sprayed, a graceful, gruesome image, magical, ethereal, imperial, and I looked into his eyes, and he saw me, and his mouth opened, and the pain of losing him was on my face already. I held out my hands to him in that moment.

I went to him and I held him in my arms on the ground, his killer having slunk away, and I wailed into his blond hair, into his curls that I have loved since he was a child, that I have breathed in bed asleep and touched in fields of grain, and I wept more bitterly than I wept for my own children thousands of years ago, oblivious to the hands that were touching me, telling me, Leechtin he is still alive, let us take him into the house where we might save him, but I knew then that he was gone.

He took everything good about me with him, that is all there is, and I whispered "Escha," into his hair in the red packed dirt, in the air that had tasted his blood.

My Escha. I'm sorry. If I had known then that you would die like this would I have done any of it the same?

+++++
"Ariel," I said, to my servant, to my shadow who has followed me through all these years, "Ariel I cannot live if he is dead," and he is the one who tells me that Laurent is dead, and he whispers, "It is hard to live."


It is hard to live.




the 1st Act - Ancient Sinai, smoky rooms and white faces.

I laid looking up at the starry sky, and it was a particular color, this inky blue, as if had been spilled dark dark ink on a serrated metal surface, small twinkles of null oblivion shining on me, pinpricking my skin and world. My eyes drifted, lying in the four inches of water, dizzy, fingers floating, black hair the same color as the water. I could die here, I could. It was too hot, it was suffocatingly hot. The air filled my lungs like thick brine, lips open.

I was vaguely aware that my attacker was standing above me, and that he was going to steal my horse, and that he loved me loved me loved me, and despised me. It is possible more than possible to do both. Everywhere in the world they do it.

"There is a darkness in you," he said to me, in a language that was a dialect of my own, and it sounded serpentine, "That will destroy you," whisper. I couldn't move to stop him, but I had to get out of the heat. And any reason, any reason that had made me want to go to Cairo no longer mattered.

If I had known then what it meant, what our intimacy had meant, no matter how difficult I would have struggled out of the water and clung to him, made him love me more than hate me, would have begged to go with him.

I knew him for no more than ten minutes, his attentions unbidden and the result of no seduction beyond being of a particular age and a particular personal carriage. I would have kissed his hands and kissed his face and kissed his mouth and made him stay with me.

I believe he expected me to die in the heat within a couple of days. A fool, a victim of passion he did not leave me to die but gave me what he believed to be a chance, of which he knew very well I had no idea how to take advantage. But I was old, and full of my own passion, and he did not steal my horse.

It is funny the things that one remembers after the fact. I remember the name of my dead son, Gene, pronounced something like "Jenna", but not the name of my dead wife. I remember my maker's hands, because that is what he was, but not his voice. I know that he was old, or that he suffered, because of where he wandered, in hot hot Egypt. A caterpillar again in a world where I had long ago become a butterfly, a youth again, I needed the cold. I would have suffocated on my own breath, and baked from the inside out.

I had been walking my horse, sitting high, sitting straight, determined for something. I think I wanted to go to Cairo for revenge, because I think someone killed my family, and that I knew them, but that is all I remember. Maybe I knew for years after that, but I have forgotten it now. There are too many years piled on top of the knowledge, but the passion itself remains. I remember the passion that I felt, and that it was boiling inside of me, and it was a desire for blood that I had, and it was knocked out of me, from behind. He attacked me from behind. He dragged me down from my horse and pulled on my hair to keep me still while he intimately and lovingly took away my life.

I struggled against him until he had finished biting into me, and then I held onto him as if I needed him, and it was my embrace that he loved, and he kissed me. I do not remember drinking his blood. I do not remember dying. I have watched a lot of people die, so I have some idea of what it must have been like, but I think I didn't remember it moments after it happened, and the memory has not come to me.

So I held onto him. I realized that he had killed me, lying in the water, because nothing in my life before that mattered after it. I was a child again, not his child, but of the night in which I was enrobed, and of the water in which I lay, and of the blood which I could taste in the back of my throat. He did not touch me at all before he left, and I believe that I have never seen him again. If he lives still I do not know it, and if he knows that I live we are apart. I do not care to know him.

We never really knew each other at all.

+++++
I wandered. I have relived it so many times. It was dry, and hot, and all I knew. I grew up in one of the hottest places in the world, and suddenly, without knowing that such things could happen, I was walking dead and running from my homeland. It was unclear in my head what I had become. I had no way of knowing.

Near the beginning, there was water, and I bathed many times, fascinated. The heat of the day would become the warm enfolding night, and my limbs were fresh. Nearsighted vision had been replaced, graying hair had become long and fluid and black again. My skin was smooth, a soft white color, pink when I slapped myself. My nails were hard, long as they had been at my death, but much more resistant to breaks, and sharp because of their resilience. Sharp is how I felt.

In life I had been somewhat prone to napping in the midday heat, using the excuse of old age for my slowing down. I had been comfortable. Family I had had, an heir, a good position in society, money. I lost it all somehow near the end of the life I left behind, but I could stop caring about that. It was a singleminded flight to the north, to the delta and then across the sea, up through Italy.

For the first thousand years of my life it was flight, and travel, and never being in one place for long. I traveled beyond what I dreamed might exist when I was alive, and my heart was very quiet, very abiding.

But it found me in India.

+++++
India 5000 years ago was not as one might imagine it. I suppose that imagining it in itself would be difficult. I also suppose that my own idea of what it was is dependent upon where I went myself, but a lot of India for me, actually, is Nery's room, or Yaksha, as he is known now.

He was, is, a maverick character. Smooth, witty, and wild enough to go on living the way he always has been.

I was walking in the bazaar on a Saturday afternoon. There were no bazaars in India, you might say, if you know anything about what is now ancient India, but there was no "Saturday" then either, and I was in a bazaar. I was looking for hot oil, for my hair, and suddenly he was there, his white face staring me down in a sea of dark skinned flesh and blood living people, two feet away. My hand froze in midair between my side and the bottle I had been looking for.

He spoke to me in the local dialect, which I didn't understand at all, as I had just arrived.

"Tell me about your life," I saw his lips say, in my language, the one I still knew the best, the language of my own race of people, who do not exist anymore.

In those days, 1000 years old was not old for an immortal, though it is now. I did not know then that it was the standard to kill the younger ones, but it makes sense to me. It was more dangerous then, for the older ones to be crowded. Cities and technology are able to support much more of us now. Covens did not exist then. It was necessarily an individual existence.

"I will tell you about my life," I said, and his black eyes twinkled at me, reaching out a long white arm for me to take.

It was dangerous. It was a gamble, but I had managed to live that long without being afraid of anything, so I was not afraid.

We walked in the warm evening, together, intimately, his fingers entwined in mine. It was not closeness between us, but understanding.

He told me I was beautiful. I smiled with pouty lips.

"Your lips are so red," he said, and again it was not closeness, but understanding, that made him touch me, touching my mouth.

I was not afraid, but I was careful. All vampires are murderers. In those days we killed each other with as little feeling as we killed the living, and I knew he could do it.

If you were familiar with Yaksha, you would know that in those days he had 2000 years on me. I could smell that. He was 3000 years old, and he smelled like the humid, overpopulated city in which he lived. Which is to say, almost human, because it was a such a human place.

Yaksha and I were not lovers, but I wonder what "lovers" is. We were not in love, but we had that understanding, and that intimacy, and I slept in his bed. I never drank Yaksha's blood. He might have taken mine, but I never took his, and it was not offered.

I told him about my life, and he told me about his. Unlike me, Yaksha remembered being human very clearly, and just as clearly remembered every moment of what he called "rapture" and I call "dying". He did not consider himself to be dead, though he acknowledged himself changed. He had not stopped, but continued.

"Maybe you think you are dead because you were running from your life," he said.

Maybe that is the truth.

Many nights I laid in his arms, drowsing between dreaming and waking, in the warm afterglow that is twilight in the warmer parts of the world, listening to the frogs outside his window, the thin walls seemed to breathe. His body was very strong beneath and around me, and his good hands gently untangled my long hair, which he liked very much. I told him about what I remembered about living, about telling fortunes in my youth, and being important to the people around me in my waning years because I had married well. I told him about Gene, and how I had loved Gene, and how he had looked like me and wanted to be like me.

Yaksha says that I told him more, that I told him how my family died and why, and what I was going to do about it, but I don't remember telling him that, and we don't talk about it. We don't talk about that time at all when we see each other, which is as far from often as it is possible to be without being never.

And we were intimate. We were intimate the way two people can only be when they have shared some tragedy that only they know about. We were like family who had forgotten about family, and then realized that the only person who can ever really love you for no other reason than that they love you is your brother, your sister, but there were no brothers and sisters for those as separated and isolated as immortals were in those days. So we belonged to each other without speaking about it, and I was never so close to another person as I was to Nery, and I have never been again.

+++++
"So tell me about your life."

"I was born in Mongolia. My father was a general."

"So tell me about your death."

"I am not dead, Faya. You are so determined."

"We're dead, Nery."

"No no."

"Tell me about your rapture."

"I was in love with this girl who worked secretary days down by the water."

"It was her?"

"No it wasn't her. She lived near her. We thought she was a witch, one of the bad ones who didn't want to help anybody, but she wasn't a witch at all."

"She? The secretary girl?"

"No, the old woman who lived close to her."

"Oh."

"So I visited the witch because I was incorrigible."

"Much as you are now."

"Much as I am now. And I laid in her arms, and she looked into my eyes, and they were blue, her eyes."

The witch drank the blood of a young man, and as such stories go, her youth was restored and the young man was cursed, but Yaksha, one supposes, is far from cursed.

"It's not really a curse, you know, knowing what you're going to eat for every meal. I don't have to worry about it," he smiled, toothily.

I smiled, amused.

"How old were you?"

"How old were you?" he asked me.

"55."

"I was 72."

More of a butterfly than I was.

"Incorrigible at 72."

"As things go."

He kissed me because he wanted to eat my beauty, it was that kind of a feeling, and I laid in his arms.

++++
His hand motioned to me to come running, and I shuffled quickly past the barkers and all the early morning browsing people as he disappeared around the corner. It was dusty and hot, and my feet felt heavy. My head swam in the great milieu.

His arm caught me as I went around the corner and drew me close to him. He was browned in the sun, still lighter than all the rest, but darker than me who has never darkened in the heat. He was more beautiful with color, his features standing out, big, clear eyes always aware. My legs were bare, because it was cooler for me that way, short, black, wrapped linen.

"Don't stray too far away," he said. Friend. His fingers entwined with mine again. We stood side by side against the wall, and he was watchful, looking for something. I held onto his hand, tightly, aware of his age and his protection because of our understanding.

"There is another one here," he said, softly, "And I am going to kill him. You are going to help me."

Like slamming one's foot down on a cockroach. No thought at all. No sympathy.

"He arrived a week ago and he does not know that we are here."

I nodded, feeling young and vulnerable.

I didn't help him. It wasn't necessary, but I watched him do it, I watched him be a spider. I stayed where I was and he melted back into the crowd, and I saw the other one then. He was older than me, but younger than Nery, and it was Nery who killed him.

Yaksha is not Nery. Yaksha is who Nery is to everyone else. Nery is the spider part, because that is the part that is the closest to the heart of every immortal, the hunter, the part that knows necessities, the vicious part. The human part.

He did it right there, in the middle of the street. I saw him reach out, as he had reached out to me, but I knew what was going to happen before it happened, saw the eyes of the immortal who was as good as dead as soon as Nery learned that he was in the city.

"Don't you know," and the neck snapped where Nery wrenched it and more than a 1000 years of life ended in his hands in an instant. He brought me the decapitated body, and we burned it by the dank water where the frogs lived. He had beheaded the immortal who was older than me with his bare hands, faster than I could have seen it.

It did not change things between us. I had known that he could do that.

We held onto each other before the flames. Spiders. I was arrested by the beauty of the consuming blaze.
+++++

We hunted and killed together. I think Yaksha was tired of being alone. He would dance, wearing that black linen around his waist, a dance that now reminds me of kabuki, of Balinese dances as well, this vacant expression, these sharp graceful movements. I would sit on the silk cushions in his apartment and watch him moving. Yaksha did not teach me to be vicious, but he taught me that I did not have to enjoy it, that I did not need to lead a life to go on living.

We would go to theater shows together, sit in the dark, comfortable. He watched the stage with arms crossed, and every once in awhile he would lift his chin sharply and drop it, gesturing to me this way, as if to say "Can you believe this?" and I would silently smile. We still go, sometimes, but he is from the old time, and does not so much enjoy being alone as he is used to it.

He was sitting across from me in the apartment and it was quiet, and I was almost asleep, chin on my chest, listening to the everloving frogs.

"Give me your leg," he said.

I lifted my chin, wondering if I had heard him right, but his arm was out, waiting for my limb.

I lifted my left leg, from the hip, so he could hold my foot.

"Look at your ankles," he said.

I smiled. He pressed his cheek to my ankle, very cool. I flexed and unflexed my toes. He was quiet, but he looked at me, his always aware eyes reaching out at my sleepy ones, and we frowned at each other.

I turned my head away, knowing that I had to leave.

I know that we were in danger of loving each other, of getting used to one another. We have never talked about it. It wasn't correct, but we spent all the time together that we had meant to, and it was time to move on.

And I wandered again.
+++++

I was still vulnerable at that age, but I was not afraid of dying. I would sit by water and fix my hair, running my fingers through it, untangling it with my hard nails. Unlike Yaksha I have always been very social. I always enjoy company. I do not feel at my best when I am alone. I would melt into crowds and find my way into gatherings and make my way around money.

I closed my eyes to things that frightened me, and opened my arms to those who said they loved me. My heart was not lonely, and there was always ground moving beneath my feet. I don't know how long I stayed with Yaksha, but it wasn't long, perhaps only a decade, maybe a decade and half. Maybe less than that. It wasn't long at all.

My heart was quiet again, and I was glad to be admired, if only for my face, which was brighter and more willing at that time, and so, younger. I would end up in the back of rooms with rich men running their hands up my thighs and pushing their fingers into my soft cheeks. I was not startled by it, they were more surprised to find out what I had had in mind with the lure that was my body then. I did not cover my figure up and my eyes sparkled like Yaksha's did. Joie de vivre, they call it now.

I don't know when I started to feel old. Maybe it was just fatigue. But I sat with my head between my hands, between my knees, feet apart, looking at my ankles, looking at my sandals, studying my toenails, and I didn't want to go to Malta, or Morocco, or Jerusalem, just as clearly as I had known that I hadn't wanted to go to Cairo that night when the stars were oblivion peeking through the dark serrated metal sky. There was a weight on my back, pushing me to the floor, and the weight was age.

I picked myself up. It was Napoli. It was hot, but I was not so young any more, so the heat did not bother me so much. I stretched, rolling my shoulders, and looked back at the party I had left, having felt dizzy for a moment and wanting to sit somewhere quiet. There was fun back there. I dared cheat a glance toward the door in front of me. My feet moved without me.

+++++
It was around then that I realized I was being followed.

It wasn't obvious, but I kept getting that kind of feeling.

+++++
I stood in the dark room that had become my home. Cairo, my oldest destination.

"Show yourself," I ordered the darkness.

Silence. The shadows were full and seemed to move. The darkness was nearly total. No streetlamps. No candles. Half a waning moon. I could hear the wind rustling the trees outside, almost like the sound of rain.

I stood still in the middle of the room. My hair was long and damp, a dull shine in it in the moonlight.

"Show yourself," I ordered again, sternly. A kind of voice that I had only newly discovered I had.

I half expected to be imagining it, and when he stepped forward I was startled.

He seemed to come out of the darkness, as if to be born out of it, borne by it, released by it into my vision. He was a vision.

He nodded to me quietly, somehow ashamed.

I did not know what to say to him.

"How long have you been following me?" I asked him.

"I have always been following you," he said. He sounded like the earth. His name was, is, Ariel.
+++++

I don't think Ariel drinks blood. He might. He certainly is immortal. He may be older than me. We are not friends. He follows me.

He sat across from me, fingering my handkerchief. Maybe he is a golem. He smells like earth.

I have always been following you, he said to me.

"I have been alive for 1500 years," I said.

He nodded.

"How long have you been alive?"

"I do not know."

"Why do you follow me?"

He did not answer, not then.

I ordered him into my bed and he went there, looking awkward, blond curly hair (the likes of which I had never seen before), slight but sure body, very pale, almost sickly pale, wearing black linen from neck to knees, tightly wrapped around the middle. His eyes were wet eyes, glimmering in the slightest light, and he was very slightly rosy at the joints and in the cheeks.

"Do you feel me?" he asked me, from my bed, in the moving dark, the only question he has ever asked me without bait.

"Feel?"

He did not repeat himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

The room was still. And then I felt him, and it was a feeling that I had always felt, as if there were something beside me, around me, something assuring. I wonder if maybe it is the way some Christians feel about God. If maybe it is the way good friends feel when they are apart, but have said a good good bye, a warm "I will see you again, and I am thinking of you always" good bye.

"I feel you."

"I have known you since you were a child," he said, quickly, nearly interrupting me.

"You..."

"I saw everything."

Ariel is not an angel, whole or fallen. But I wonder exactly what he is, and I have wondered it since then, since he does not know himself.
+++++

In the morning I reached for him. He was gone, yet the feeling remained.

I sat with my head in my hands, a posture that was becoming more and more familiar.
+++++

I don't really care what modern historians say about 4500 years ago. There were not a lot of people, they say, civilization was in its infancy they say, modern ways of thinking and living did not exist. History is a study in speculation from existing facts that are born from still existing documents and other "proof". It constantly changes. My memory does not change. It may be selective, and specific, but people are always people, and people are a product of where and how they live.

Where and how for me 4500 years ago was Cairo with enough money to get by. Cairo was a big city then, with many busy places to lose oneself and many quiet places to do the same. There were a lot of rich people, and a lot of poor people, and some in between. There was religion, ritual, and me. There was me, and there were others, a couple older.

I was of a certain age where I could tell when there were others near, but could not identify them. It was not so dangerous, able to know when to run and when to stand my ground. Mostly I kept to the areas of the city I knew and it was alright.

I never killed a lot of my own kind. I considered all of them a kind of family, though I know they were not. I did not want to be near them, but I did not want to kill them. Sometimes it was necessary to kill them, and I did, and there were no regrets or questions in my mind concerning what was right and what was not.

"I don't wonder," I said to my shadow, "If you are protecting me."

"I don't wonder," came his whisper.

"Will you always be there?"

"Always be there," whispered the trees.
+++++

I went back to India, feeling disassembled, and Yaksha was not there. He was not there.
+++++

I disassembled, disassembled, cried, bled, screamed, ripped myself up, tore myself apart, and slept.

I slept for a thousand years, and when I woke I cannot say that it was not me who did the awful things that I did, but I can say that I regret all of it, and that I am sorry, so sorry to Escha, so sorry to Escha, who is dead because of what I did more than 1000 years before he was born.

It was the second act of my life. The years when I was lost.
+++++

Pt.3- Remembering and Following the Lily

I loved a man in Cairo, before everything, before I slept for a thousand years, before time almost it seems. His name was Thieni, or Theeny, or Thein, or Themie... name slips, names, meaningless. He was tall and dark and soft in the face and he glowed; he gleamed in sunlight that loved him as much as me.

He was time before Eno and after Yaksha and with Ariel and he was hands in my hair and words in my ear and palms against my face. I remember Thieni, whether I should stoop to confess to those who ask me about lovers from the past or not. I tried to take him with me and he choked on his own blood and he died on my bedroom floor in the warm evening, with the sound of the frogs outside.

I had knelt beside him, and I had touched him, and I had refused to believe it, and something inside of me broke and I did not cry for Thein and I have not ever, and I will not. I won't, and I will continue almost to not remember that I loved a man in Cairo who was all names and none at all.

But I dreamt of Themie's hands on my face and of his whispers. And I dreamt that he ran his fingers through my hair and changed the colors of the sunset outside of my window. Blood ran down his chin and dripped on my face but I did not care. Thein the ghost, the dream, whispered "Leechtin" and skimmed between my world and his own, and he was gone between twilight and the rest of the universe, glimmer of Evening Star, and when my eyes began to flicker away from his twilight and blurred space between himself and myself, it was the sun that embraced me and I laid in the grass and laid there and laid there.

I dreamed in the interminable years, and when I woke I sat up, rested my elbows on my knees, and put my face in my hands. My hair was plaited by the golem who watched over me, and I rocked in the wild flowers of Greek lowlands where he had spirited me, without words, with no sound, and refused to move for a long time until Ariel took my elbow and embraced me.

+++++
I was Greek before I was Roman. I floated under the surface with the dirty money and persisted with sorrow until I was ready to get to my feet. Ariel would sit with me in the atrium of my house and pull his fingers through my hair, blowing on the hot oil that kept it from drying out in the sun, causing it to gleam. He bought me little statues; he swept out the leaves. I stared and thought and dreamed and tried to put myself back together.

I would stand out by the little fountain in the courtyard, my fingers clasping the edge, watching the sunlight reflect off the water and drift. It was easier just to drift, until Ariel would take my elbow and show me which way to go. I would sit in the grass in the long field outside my back window and listen to the wind rustling the wheat, listen to the breeze. I would sit for hours, and I would look for something in the long shoots, the calm waves of grain, what exactly for now I cannot remember. I would lie with my face on the ground, and smell the dirt that bore my body and be crawled upon by insects and allow butterflies to land on my clothes.

Ariel took care of everything. Ariel, macabre figure, bad dream, omen of death and loyal to me forever, abided me in every sense.

He was like ash; a figure made of clay and manipulated to look like flesh. His fingers, his face, ash. I never touched him to try, but I don't think that blood runs through him. I think that behind his eyes there is nothing, and yet he sees everything. He holds out his hands to me and in his hands there is no promise of warmth or shelter of any kind. He is a mechanism of shadow. A voice without true mouth. He abided me, and I abided him in the same irresistible stroke.

And I laid in the grass, and I played with the stems of flowers, and I bore up under the feet of the beetles, and the curious birds, and the spiders. A spider myself, quiet, in the grass, sobbing without any sound or display. I was ripped open, so composed of crystal, so translucent, and waiting to be myself again, someone I lost, someone I knew. Not someone like this, who kills children, who feels nothing, who is alone but surrounded by monsters. Not something like this.

I lived without living, miserable without knowing how I felt it, until Karpae wandered in and gave me something to do.
+++++

"Feeling younger than myself, as if out of body, as if full of stars, the warmest glow of cool skin on hot day, in the grass, on my back, being taken up by the whole sky, the air, the earth. So full and empty and waking up and being asleep at once, Leechtin. This is my body."

Leechtin. This is my body.

"It is the softest feeling."

This is my body.

"You are dying," I said.

My body, he had whispered.

"I am dying?" he whispered.

Body, whisper.

"You are dead," whisper.
+++++

Karpae died in my arms, in a tent that was tucked beneath an eave, with his soft red lips open and his green eyes staring up into a heaven that only he could see, glimmering eyes. I whispered to him with my own lips, shaped so much like his, and watched him with my own green eyes, that used to glimmer so much like those, and I said that I loved him, and he did not really see me while he listened, while he fell asleep, while I loved him more than I have ever loved him since that moment, or ever will. I held him; Karpae who was mine, Karpae who was a part of me. Karpae who became so much and who has failed me in every way since his death. I held him close to me and I breathed.

+++++
It was what is called now 337 BC, and where there were not armies marching across Europe it was quiet. I had been living quietly, mostly by myself, for a number of years.

I had established a villa, and I had a field of wheat to lie in, and a big blue sky to stare at. I had sat up on the day that Karpae came, watching the soldiers marching past my villa, hands clasped in my lap, wheat chaffs licking my shoulders. The soft gauzy red fabric wrapped around my body was clipped with a gold pendant shaped like a beetle at the right side of my neck, my hair fastened close to the back of my head with gold pin. I watched with inquisitive eyes the lines of boys who paid me no attention. One of them would come of course, later, to ask me about my house, and who I was, and what I did to make money, and all of those things, as always. I didn't occupy myself with the thought, watching all of their small faces.

He gripped me like a vise, captured me, arrested me. He was toward the front, with his small heart shaped lips, with his large, almond shaped green eyes, all 6 feet three inches of him, taller than most of the others and carrying himself with signs of low but good breeding. I wanted to get up, wanted to grasp his hands, wanted to ask him who his mother was, how this happened, how he could look so much like Gene, whose face I had forgotten. How could it be that he looked so much like me? and he did not see me watching him. He would not know for some time that I had begun to follow him from that moment, and would not know that I watched him always for longer.

I don't know what I wanted from following him more than I wanted very much to be near him. It was easy to tell that we were related, however impossible it felt to me that it could be the case. I watched him plait his long black hair, weaving it up to the back of his head in intricate patterns, hair so long and thick that he would weave it in circles, holding the pins in his small mouth. I ached, watching him plait his hair. What ache, I don't know, but I ached with my whole body.

*****

It is 3 in the morning and he is made of cracked porcelain in my arms. "Escha, Escha," I whisper, stroking his hair. Where is Karpae? I thrash and turn and Nataniellus is there and he puts his hand on my head.

"It's ok, don't worry. Don't cry anymore."

"Where is Karpae?"

"He's upstairs. He's there."

Nataniellus leans over the brushed leather chair back, kissing my cheek with his soft pink lips.

"You should let the doctor have your Escha now. Let Dasius have him. You can't do anything for him."

Nataniellus begins to put up my hair with his hands. He runs his hand up the back of my neck. I close my eyes.

Escha's mouth had fallen open. I want to touch the mole beneath, that one on the left side. How many people have kissed it? I let his body fall out of my arms and it hits the parquet like a doll. I shudder in Nataniellus's arms and try to forget. Forget. Forget. It's not real.

"Please take me upstairs. I want to be in bed with my son."

Nataniellus takes me there. Nataniellus who is always near.

Karpae's arms embrace me in his sleep, and he's waking up when I get there. He's taking me in like I love him and we love each other; as if I loved him for more than a few minutes in a cold tent in Macedonia.

"Is he alright? Do you want him to sleep?" he asks Nataniellus in the dark.

Nataniellus leaves and does not touch me before he goes. Karpae snuggles close to me and I wonder where his lover is. He begins to hum in my ear and I clutch him with my fingers like a child, pressing them into his skin so that it hurts.

Tomorrow, when Escha dies, I will be asleep in Karpae's smooth arms while Karpae looks out the window and dreams of something I cannot know about.

*****

"I take it with a grain of salt," Karpae said, wiggling his toes, sitting on the stone pool edge, "My skin is getting whiter but my lips are also getting redder like yours."

I walked back into the house so as not to look at him.
+++++
The problem with Karpae in the 23 centuries ago that never really went away was his obsession with mirrors. He knew how pretty he was, of course he did. His mother was a spinster in what is now the north of Greece, and his father was a career soldierman who worked in the civil service to avoid persecution for being of the wrong talent and the wrong class. Those sorts of things change so often, who can remember the details? Karpae followed his father on that path.

He would spend hours sitting on that pool edge, where the light was the best, looking into his mirror and picking at his teeth, preening his hair, pressing his lips (which were not getting redder). He would sit looking like me with his ankles in the water; looking like me and acting like who knows what, some kind of nymphet in somebody else's worldly garden. Certainly not. Certainly not anything like me.

The whole story is that I followed him from my little house all the way marching across lower Europe into what is now Turkey. He began to notice me after awhile, and I noticed him noticing me, and I began sleeping in his tent even though he didn't know who I was, and I took from him what was vulnerable when his whole regiment became so much more vulnerable in that way. News from the top was that the general was dead, and I knew what I had to do if I wanted to keep him. Besides which, he was to me at the time the greatest treasure I had ever known, and I held him in my arms like that. Who could know that to me, so little time later he would become only so much ash and worthless chatter?

It is not a long chapter. He lived with me. He left to find his friends. There were three of them who he was associated with, and until recently there were still three who he associated with. I know hardly anything about them. I have barely met them. They are of no interest to me.

He is related to me through a long line of buried faces through a b*****d child I must have had in my youth. I don't remember children, but I knew his face when I saw it was my face, and I knew his blood when I tasted it was my blood, and that is all that is important about that. The cosmic improbability of something like that does not matter.

Sometimes I remember that feeling I had when Karpae whispered to me about how it felt when his body was dying and I know what it was like to feel lost and human and broken again.

We parted; we met again before I went into the woods in Candine, but that was a long time after, and so far away then. I was not yet so tired.
+++++
It is almost time to begin to think of Escha. Not yet.

+++++
I sat in the house watching the door after Karpae had left. He had gone quietly, as I would have done. I sat down heavily in the chair by the atrium statue, sitting on my hands, then folding them in my lap, slowly. I bowed my head. I knew Ariel was around, somewhere, but I had not seen his face for a long while. My heart was playing a beat for me that is familiar to me but has no name; something about desire, but not knowing for what.

I'd always known he would leave, and I hadn't liked him much anyway, but his voice, his lips near my ear, I couldn't forget those, and I think that those kinds of memories heavily influenced what I did next. There was some kind of desire. Some kind of want.
+++++

Act 5- Skeleton years—Cracking eggs and pulling hair

He was chewing on his nails, chewing the cuticles.

“Escha stop it.”

He relaxed, unfolding his legs. His hair was highlit against the sun; he rested his face on his bent knee, other leg dangling, began messing with his toenails.

“So I found a nice place in town where we could go eat, if you want to come,” he said, cleaning the dirt from between his toes with concentration.

“I’m busy.”

“Doing what?” his fair fell over his face, “Not going into town, probably. Busy doing that.”

“Probably,” I echoed. I sat next to him on the cold stone rim of the fountain, covered his fingers with my cold fingers, rested my head on his shoulder. He rested his head on my head.

“We’ve got to get you out of this rut you’re in, baby. You need to go out with me or something. That’s the thing to do, you know, go out and get happier. You are very depressed.”

I smiled and smelled his hair. I said something about him being 17 and other things, whispered them in a raspy voice in his hair.

I remember all of these things. I remember all of these things while in my own world I am sleeping and he is bleeding somewhere with other people’s hands all over him, people who don’t know any of these things.
+++++

Sinking. Inky black. He gives me a lily; he puts it on my face. I brought you this. I am grateful.
+++++

“If you don’t drink blood anymore then you will not be like yourself.” Yaksha comes in, fades in and out.

“I can make you disappear if I close my eyes.”

“Your eyes are closed,” he said, “Why do you still want him if you think he’s getting old?”

“I don’t want anyone,” I said. Yaksha pulled the sheet up to my chin and stood back, arms crossed behind him.

I rolled over while he went through my things, dumping things out and scraping things closer that rolled away. “You have so many things,” he said, picking through them.

“I have a prophecy for you, if you want it,” he said.

“I don’t want your prophecy.”

“Bad juju,” he said, I could hear him picking his teeth while he tapped things.

“I don’t believe you. You should always want to say that to me, because I am different from you.”

“We are very different, aren’t we?”
+++++

Escha stopped sleeping in my bed the first time he sort of fell in love. I was bitter about it. He would do what he always did. He was used to wandering around by himself in strange places. That is the danger with older children, I was always thinking to myself in a melancholy way, they don’t need you. It was how it seemed to me at the time.

He began staying out later and later. It was almost comical to me that he was doing it. I was feeling pretty old by then and though offendable, tolerant. I was busy anyway, lying to myself about being happy. Who cares about being happy? I told myself. Better just to be alive. Better just to eat and live and breathe and be satisfied. Unreasonable. Irrational. What more do you need? Forget about him. What’s so great about Nataniellus? Needed to get rid of him so he could grow. Don’t be stupid. It will all be better someday. So? What more do you want? I didn’t have very much peace from myself. There were no sides of myself that could agree, and some of them were dripping in blood from the pain it caused me. Who can understand something like that? No one is the same in that way.

I would curl up, go hiding places, a lump of red fabric in the corner or at the bottom of the dry pool. Sometimes I would go out to the manmade lake and float. “Someone’s going to hit you with an oar.” “I don’t know how they could miss me.” “They won’t miss. I’d hit you if I could.” “I meant I don’t know how they couldn’t see me.” “Do you think anyone sees us? Don’t be foolish. You are so foolish.”

Yaksha was no longer my friend. He and I just were. And we were a lot of things, just not friends. No one could have been further from lovers than we were. Loving a part of yourself is not really loving; there is no love in it at all. Yaksha would go off wherever he lived and maybe sleep or maybe dance or maybe eat and come back sometimes. I didn’t wonder then if he worried about me, or if he was looking after me in some way; I was very self absorbed. He wouldn’t have seen it that way anyway. Probably not.

It wasn’t long anyway before Escha had become very grown up. He has always been very short. It wasn’t horribly short, less than average, but he carried himself very well. He had a lot of childish pride, self assurance. His worries were about me sometimes, but we were only so close that way; I didn’t know very much about his street life. It was enough anyway. With me he had very little veneer, very naked to me. So I knew who he was even if he didn’t know, and even if we lose these things, they are always there. He was unsure about himself and his identity. It was always about identity then; it is now too I suppose. He knew he didn’t belong. Even in a port city like that, where was home? He was slow to talk about those things, but I knew. He was unsatisfied with not knowing where he had come from, who his parents were, and he was unsatisfied with the system that had caused him this separation from identity. How to tell him that I could understand some of these things? I am not at home either, I wanted to tell him, it does not matter as much as you think it does. Though I knew that it mattered so much when there were things calling it out like feeling alone.

We would lie together in my bed, and I would stroke his hair, and we wouldn’t talk very much. Sometimes he would cry. He never talked about Nataniellus, or missing Palomia, who was his best friend. It was the past. For him it was a long time ago, for me it was far away. He was 23 when I took him, and he was afraid of mortality, and I was afraid of loneliness, and meaninglessness. He did not go wild at all afterwards, and it was easy to take him, because he yielded to me so much. He cried; he sobbed. Nataniellus has accused me of being in love with Escha. It is the only time I have raised my hand to him in anger. Now that Escha is dying I am afraid of being alone, and feeling like there is no meaning. I am afraid the same way that I was then. I broke all of my promises to myself because I was so afraid. I would rather have taken my own life than taken his, but I have taken his, and now it slips between my shaking fingers like water.

+++++
After that things were going slowly. I wanted to get out of Alexandria. He seemed to glow to me. Escha was hot and cold. He would rub his arms with his hands, looking down. To me he was a reed flower, precious, delicate. I wanted to get him out of Alexandria because he knew Alexandria too well. He was too comfortable wandering there, and very vulnerable.

I waded into the water, red robes floating behind me, up to my nose, closed my eyes. Cool waters of Egypt, home. Escha sat on the shore, lolling, basking. Lizard. I dipped my head below the surface and opened my eyes. Went swimming, collecting shells, cooling off. When I came up again he was sitting up, looking for me. I turned my eye on him. He settled back.

I waded back out, heavy and dripping with water, shook off, pressing water out of my clothes, the low slung thin sash. “We are going to leave Alexandria,” I said to him.

He was quiet, his head was dipped low on his chest.

I put my hand on his arm.

“I won’t go,” he said finally, resolute in a meek way.

“It is too warm here for you. You will be happier where it is colder.”

He shook his head like a child. His hair was shimmering in the moonlight, little wisps capturing the gleam. I wanted to hold him, touch his face.

“I won’t go.”

By then he had had lovers, maybe three of them. He felt that he did not need to listen.
+++++

In the years to follow he would become much colder. When I met him again in France they were calling him “Laurent” and he spoke only French and a little English. He refused to speak to me in even the vulgar Latin of Alexandria where he had grown up, and called me by my name only to get my attention. Besides his coldness he was the same, maybe a little rotten on the inside, though the sweet kind of rotten for the brave who close their eyes and take the chance to taste. I believe it.

He was much more supple when he was younger; I want that to be understood. He was never sweet, not by nature. I don’t believe there was ever anything natural about his sweetness later in life. It must be understood that a lot of what he was in his later years was artifice. But it wasn’t all, not all of it. I know that it is thought that he was vain, and that his vanity was a part of his character but he was not vain. He was not insecure about himself either, but he had a lot of hurt.

He had a lot of hurt.

He must also have had a lot of longing.

He must have gotten so tired to have wanted so much more for himself.

And maybe tired to have not known what it was that he wanted.

+++++
I only heard him pass out from the other room. It was a great crash, as he must have tried to grab onto the long red cloth drapery over his dresser table, sending all of his silver accessories and precious ornaments to the floor with him. I found him surrounded by his baubles, bleeding from razorblade cuts up his arms and behind his knees.

“Escha what are you doing?” I begged him, holding him, holding his head.

It was too hot in Alexandria, that’s what it was. He couldn’t bear to drink or keep very much blood.

I washed his hair while he floated back up into consciousness, blood swirling lazily in the water.
+++++

There was a lover near the end, in Alexandria. Not mine, because I couldn’t bear those things, but for Escha there was. He always was thinking he was in love, but he was searching for something; it was easy to fall in love in those days. He was curious about other men. They were curious about him too. Perhaps he was easy to abuse for other reasons than he was small.

I did not follow him to protect him, because I was often at home. Towards the end of Alexandria he would come home tired, but I was not attentive enough to demand things of him. What are things that are so small? Some bruises, a few scrapes. Those things are nothing, so I did not ask about them. There was a lover that I killed out of anger, but I get so tired talking about those things. Did I regret allowing Ariel to interfere in Escha’s private affairs? Perhaps I do, but what could really have changed? That boy came back from the dead, the lover that I killed. So what? If I had killed him again would it have made a difference? They never saw each other again. That is all that really matters.

So we left Alexandria for good when he was 23, but he wasn’t very good for wandering.
+++++

It did not break my heart when we parted. We grew apart. He told me in advance.

It had only been a few hundred years, but his steeliness had grown enough to where he did not show me any grievance at all for leaving. I came in on him brushing his hair at his table. He laid down the silver brush, looked at me in the dressing mirror, “I’m going. I’m going next week.”

“When did you decide?” I asked him, taken apart by it.

“I decided it last week for sure.”

“Don’t go.”

He brushed his hair, turning his eyes down away from me, reading something or other.

“Where are you going to?”

He turned his body away.

I let him go.
+++++

Where did I go? They always ask me this. Where were you for a thousand years?

It seems like such a long time to them.

It’s not a tragedy. I no longer wished to be by myself, but I did not want to love anyone else. Did I feel betrayed? I did not feel betrayed by Escha. I was tired. That is true. I will not skip these years, or gloss over them but I will say that they did not have a lot of meaning to me. I lived in Germany, or what is now Germany. I spent most of my time indoors. Karpae showed up again, and he was the same, Yaksha did not come. I made my own food; ate inside.

Karpae tried to get me interested in things that I did not have time for. Lovers, travel, blood. I have never been very interested in blood.

“I saw Laurent in Moscow,” he would say. Go and find him, he didn’t say. He would bring me young boys, children really, give them to me. What can you do in those situations? It is easy to lose an afternoon with a child. I would carry them around my apartment, show them my collection of things, the little soft stone carvings Escha had made me at their age, when he still loved me the most.

These children.

Karpae would take away the bodies.

“Don’t take care of me.”

“I am not going to let you kill yourself. I need you.”

Escha had most of the meaning in my life in his body.

The truth is that I had lived for him, for all of the little pleasures associated with his presence. Maybe he grew up. Maybe he left me. I don’t care. I love him. I need him.

Nataniellus, don’t cry if I must follow him into the dark. I really don’t know that I can do much more.
+++++

So I went into the woods where Karpae couldn’t bother me anymore. I lived in the woods of Germany for awhile, sleeping out of doors, taking long walks, sunlight filtering through the trees. I would leave markers, clothes, things that I had accumulated so that I could remember where I had been, play in the dirt, spend time lying with my arms behind my head and legs curved beneath, look up at the sky through the pines. Not a bad way to be at all. It was not my world; I was outside of it. I had lost something that was easy to lose. The world where I had been and the world I now occupied were unfamiliar to each other.

I must say the only common element between those worlds is me, and it is a flawed comparison, maybe untoward, to place me in both. I require assistance figuring out the minutiae of life, small movements that were natural to me, intimate knowledge of the every day eludes me. Things pass by too easily. Most of all I missed Escha, like a hole in my body. Had there been such a hole before him? Maybe I had not been aware of it, but it galled me that a child could have borne such a thing into my intransient flesh.

I held my own hands in front of me, strolled, making pathways through the leaves in a hushed world that no ears had known for much time, many centuries perhaps. Perhaps no one human has been there. Perhaps they have not breathed so deeply, or been so aware of their own failure, for much of it was meandering through time, taking stock of what I could remember and making markers of what I could not recall. Names of places? Faces of people, I don’t know, a lot of what I used to know is all smoke and forgotten circumstances to me now. Escha’s little ears, the softness of Escha’s fingertips, I know those. Things that we remember after the fact. Escha’s soft hair, the way that he smelled, Alexandria’s earthiness and the thickness of the air in the summertime. Hard to live there, impossible for other immortals, I knew all of these things.

They were all so much of the dust in my mind while I wandered, robes trailing behind me through the leaves, scaring small animals. I felt myself grow weaker with time, and it pleased me in a quiet way to know that I had had the power over that. I had no one after Escha, I wouldn’t. His blood mingled with mine for a thousand years, untouched, mixing with no others, carrying him with me always. It is not so strange.

I did not wonder what he was doing, or wonder what any of them were doing, the body of lives that had become acquainted with my own, the permanent “they”. They were permeable, touchable, moldable, and I was not. I was unfettered, I was brilliant. Only then, at that time, when I was untouched by the world was I completely myself, and I was what Yaksha was, and I cannot explain that. There were even times when I did not long for company, for some kind of substance, for some kind of comfort from whatever other things that I longed for, that I still long for, unnamed things. Those were the woods of Candine, and I have visited them since.

+++++
Nataniellus’s hand in my hair, Nataniellus whispering, “I care for you,” Nataniellus whispering, “I forgive you.” Nataniellus whispering, I dreamt of it. I missed him. There have been faces without number, people who I have known. I dreamt only of him. Perhaps I have loved many times, maybe only a few, but it is only he who has remained. I came out of the woods hoping that he would find me. Only Nataniellus has ever had the power to forgive me for everything that I have done. I dreamt of his hands, the lines on his palm that start in infinity and journey forever, interminable, time without place.
+++++

When I came back into the waking world I didn’t know what year it was and I was a bit lost. It was not hard to find others of my kind, but they were not happy to see me. There were not many older vampires in Europe at the time, and I had as bad a story as any of them with having spent a millennium secluded and not being able to really say what I had been doing my whole life. What did I do? My English was very bad. As it is with languages, one’s aptitude in the local dialect is easy to confuse with one’s mental acuity, and so it was with me. It was not surprising, and I was unoffended, getting back into the rhythm of things.

Forget all of the old people of my type who will try to tell you that it is impossible to readjust to the world. It is easy to adjust, it is merely hard to master, and screw anyone who expects old people to master the present. Like any game that can be played for a lifetime, learning cities and making one’s way about things can be done by a child, and while none are as perfect as children at such things it is no task for time. A city is a city and all cities basically present the same challenges which are in part that of language, transportation, quarters, and color, where color is what needs to be known- what to avoid, the best places to drink, et cetera. These are information that if not actively cultivated can at least be absorbed over time. English for me has been an absorbed over time language.

The missing piece in this equation is purpose. Why be there at all? I suppose if one is trying to get at something, job, education perhaps, or in love with someone like that purpose is important, but if one is just going on without necessarily trying to get forward or upward purpose is not so essential, sleeper fish in the equation as it were. I wasn’t trying to do anything in Europe, not anymore than I’ve been trying to do anything pretty much since I went into the woods.
+++++

I would occasionally smell myself on others and it became known to me what has been commonly known for centuries among our set because it is what has generally made our set, i.e. that Escha had been bloodying all of Europe and leaving conquests behind. I killed some of them because I didn’t care and left others living also because I did not care. It was also with my re emergence into the wide world that I became reacquainted with the smell of Eno, which was quite dangerous, but I was not particularly arrested by the desire to care about that so very much either.
+++++

So I tried to live in Germany again but ended up living in Italy just like pretty much always. I liked to go walking around in my bare feet, and there were brief moments of purpose like searching for an apartment. Living place to place, that kind of thing is exhausting. I have lived from night to night in different places and it is no way to be. I may have made money to pay for my quarters in a dubious manner, but everything was paid for, completely legitimate. A little more and no name required; a little more than that and no Italian required either which was good, because I have been a little lazy learning languages.

For awhile my coming back into the world after millennium of absence was completely unknown to my acquaintances, which was novel. It was nice not to be bothered, but more than that, to remain unfettered for awhile longer, to feel like I owned a part of the world that was unfamiliar. I did not want to be told what things were, to live surrounded by knowledge of the secondhand. I read mostly, Greek and Latin, collected books in my apartment, things that were familiar. I read treatise on love, and I agreed with some of them and not with others, and mostly I kept up like that, alone.
+++++

And it was then with a shock that he showed up, “I love you I love you,” he said, “I have followed you because I have loved you. I have loved you I have loved you.” And I sat with my head down and my hands beneath my thighs and he sat on his knees in front of me and wept on the stones and I couldn’t say anything because it was hard to breath in the closeness.

So the ghost and I lived together. Vivi and me, and he cleaned my house just like it had been only a few years, laundering the sheets in the cool air of the wintertime, airing them out the window with great motions of his long arms, flicking his thin wrists.

I wanted to ask him about his life. Where did you go after Herculaneum? After you left me. But he would hold my hands between his hands, sitting on the floor in front of me and I would not be able to speak. And it was that all he wanted was to be close to me, to have someone to touch, to talk to, to not be so alone. He was not passionate. He was still a ghost, but it did not matter that he was a ghost so much anymore because he did not have to be very much for me to need him, to crave him, to desire him. And he slept in my bed and he shivered in my arms and I slept with my head on his chest, his hand in my hair.

He whispered things to me, just like air, things that didn’t have to mean anything, and I felt something of a kind of safety in his arms in the drowsy sunlight of an afternoon, some kind of safety that might have eluded me in the past but which I couldn’t decide how I had lived before without. I could fall asleep there and he would continue to whisper. I never found out about his life or about his retinue within it. These are mysteries that neither of us have too much wondered about.

“Now,” he said in my ear so gently, so gently, “Now you must find these things.”

“These things,” I wondered.

“Those things,” he said, holding me softly, “Those things that you have loved.”

“I don’t know what I have loved anything. What is so good about things that I might have loved?”

“Dumb questions from those who are dying,” he said.

“I don’t even know if I know what they mean half the time,” I said, “And I don’t know that they know what I mean.”

“Are you afraid that they will misunderstand you?”

“I don’t care.”

“I think you thought so when I was a child too.”
+++++

I was with Vivacio when I walked into the cathedral where Ariel was. He was inside the box so I went inside it too, and he rolled back the shutter with a loud rolling snap so I could see him through the grate.

I watched him watching me; his grey eyes did not tremble. When he spoke I felt the whole earth rumble, a vibration from the bottom of the planet that felt like words.

“He is in Vienna.”

The grate snapped shut again.
+++++

In the future, cold and meticulous Vivi does not surprise me at all. He kills the same way he lives, which is without passion. He tortures his lovers by not loving them. I find him hard to figure out myself, but to me he has always been a shadow. I don’t think I ever kept him because I wanted him. He could always only be pale to Vasvius.

Vasvius remains fiery, though he is more scholastic. He brings me books sometimes, though he will not outright help me, he seems to understand that language and understanding are essential to continuing my existence. Sometimes also I think he just wants to share with someone, and I won’t betray him to anyone for that. Many of us I know are only living because we are living.

“You are winding up into nothing, perpetually,” Dasius said, the snake who was near to being born when I was alone in the dark thinking of Escha in Vienna, who would soon meet my most precious one in Paris and begin things that were new. When I found Escha again, these things were already far underway.
+++++

“Dear dear Butterhead, these things shouldn’t happen to those who are so very sweet.”

Nataniellus always called Escha by that name.
+++++

I cannot say that I was lonely. I was not alone all the time, so I did not go to Paris to follow Escha because I was lonely. I was not there because I missed him.

I had not been to Paris before. Like many times in my life however, the last thousand years of it is scattered across my mind and my consciousness and when talked about the details usually come unbidden and in an unfocused way. So much has changed within those years that it is hard to organize for me. When did this happen? Who are these people? It is so much the truth of it that I sort of do not know myself, but I am so much more confused by things these days than I used to be.
+++++

I went to Paris in the early 19th century. I stayed there by myself for some time. It was fascinating to me, because I had always been someone to avoid really major modern cities; too much noise, too much light, too many people, too many dangers. Escha has been my opposite in that sense. Moscow, Vienna, Paris, he loved all of these places. Rome, Herculaneum, Alexandra, Cairo, these were my cities. Some things were familiar, though much of it turned out to be altogether too foreign for me to handle by myself. Perhaps I am too withdrawn. Perhaps I am too personal. Perhaps the way that I had learned to do things no longer suited my world, but I reached for him with a hand that needed him, and it was a hand that he did not want, and in the end that he only took because he needed something from me. He gave away all his responsibilities to me, and I have them still. What could I do but take them from him when I saw how he had suffered? How could I know that it would not help him at all?
+++++

“You only want him in contrast to you, who is libertine, and he only wants me in contrast to him, who for at the moment we cannot tell if he is worse than you or not, because you cloud and mingle your judgment of yourself towards and with that of others. You are a clown,” the child spits at me.
++++

My first introductions to Escha’s companions were made through spying, and they were delicious and horrible. I had not yet heard the story, about the orphans whom he had adopted for himself after the conflict with whom I suppose to have been a former love affair. There was, there is, Nicolas with his brown hair and his small body. Nicolas is almost exquisite, but his eyes betray him constantly, for he is full of locusts and only in the black pits of his eyes can they be seen.

I had been in Paris for a few weeks, keeping to myself mostly, smelling Escha’s smell and trying to be peaceful. The day that I first caught view of Nicolas and Dasius the smell had been too overwhelming for me not to follow it. It was easy to see that the older of the two was different, but while it did not surprise me that the younger one was not as he seemed I was intrigued. It was not interesting to follow them, because life is so mundane. Watch the child get his hair trimmed, watch the older one watching him. I was more interested in the child at that time.

And then I saw Escha for the first time in so many centuries and I was stricken completely. Everything about him was wrong. He was present completely, but dressed like one of them, his hair was down and done and restrained. It was all so wrong to me. It was all so out of place. Escha, beautiful, delicate, looked tired and old, putting up with the younger one when he pulled on his arm. I wanted to destroy them both and take him with me. He walked into my field of vision surprising me so completely that I almost cried his name.

I crawled through his window instead and searched his room for things that might remind me of him, trying to preoccupy myself with some notion of the past, but he had left me for another world and given me nothing to remember him by. All of his baubles and mementos were from different times, and I found myself taking his pillow and crawling under his bed, destitute. I wished desperately for some kind of token of my Escha. I slept there in his room with his smell.
+++++

When I woke he had come into the room, locked out the others. He was sitting on the floor against the closed door, sobbing in a language I cannot speak, and I grabbed his leg.
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They didn’t like me at all. They spat at me and criticized me to him; that I was dangerous to him, that I had some motive, that I was old and therefore untrustworthy. I kept my own peace and he would come to me, like he had as a child, and lie on me and rest, and I would play with his hair with all of the love I have in my body and hold him. He would not speak to me at first.

It was not hard for me to see that he had brought responsibilities into his life like these children in order to feel needed, wanted, to be thought of. I didn’t really want to know about the things he had done, or the things he had seen. I didn’t really want to talk to him at all. The child’s criticisms were constant.

“You are a clown. You are selfish. You are two-faced. You do not love him the way that we love him.”

It swayed me to stay that he was so tired, that he would gesture to his Nicky and hold him in a way that seemed so familiar. His real treasure was Dasius, the taller and older one, the darker one. Dasius would hide from me in the shadows, watching me. He was not very vocal. I wanted to kiss him.
+++++

It is Dasius, so derided by Escha in his later years, who cares for Escha now while he dies, more desperate than myself to have him live, and this desperation is because Dasius and I are not so different. He has more of Escha in his behaviors and devotions than any of the ones who crowded around him because he has needed Escha the most, and Escha was not blind to this, abusing him by keeping distance and mocking his attempts to get closer. I have watched Dasius as much as he has watched me, and it is probably appropriate that he despises me and I keep it an amusing secret that I love him the best.

He has gained a reputation for ruthlessness, viciousness, and general evil, but I feel that there is no such thing as general evil. It is far too subjective a business. It is easy to dislike someone who is generally evil, and easier to fear them if they are also vicious. I find that it is a reputation fed by an inability to communicate and a lack of desire on the opposing side to listen. In truth he is far too delicate for all of this ill treatment but I love to watch him struggle because the son of a b***h hates me so much. I lose my ability to be objective.

Nicolas in contrast I would like very much to strangle to death.

I cannot forgive him the things he has done.

+++++
In the quietest moments I would dream. It was hard in a place so metropolitan to go out and find a place to lie in the sunshine, and perhaps always my dearest wish has been only to be on a gentle slope someplace warm with maybe a pomegranate or a mango and the afternoon to myself, watch the lights come on after twilight, the stars twinkling into life one by one and sometimes in great sweeps, glimmering. The business of daytime settles and becomes quiet, close my eyes, be happy.

I spent a lot of time indoors or slinking around the smaller avenues of Paris, away from large crowds of people and an excess of noises and smells. A few times Dasius followed me, but finding that I was not up to anything he soon ceased to do so. I could not convince Escha to come out with me on such sojourns, maybe to show me his favorite places. He became increasingly melancholy, coming home later and later, forgetting his Dasius and his Nicolas, drinking great draughts of blood and fainting in my doorway.

Nicolas called him “Madonna”, caring for him like a martyr, but that to me is something that is too whimsical. Escha would often go to Nicolas, sleeping in his bed at night and losing his temper in the daytime because of Nicolas’s complete lack of regard for rules. Things that to him seemed “merely intuitive” escaped or remained ignored by Nicolas, things like not killing women with families or cleaning up after oneself were to him a matter of being honorable of the creature of man. His rules were not Nicolas’s rules, and while to him it must have felt disrespectful, he had a certain need for the validation that the violation of his principles delivered in the child’s behavior. If Nicolas is wrong, then he must be a more moral, forgivable character. It was easier that way, and Nicolas knew this very well.

Nicolas did not and does not care for any self restraint in any matter including in those involving hurting those he loves. I am sure that he has feelings and reservations just like everyone else, but he is unforthcoming, and very practiced at giving nothing away in his body or face. Escha has entreated me compassion for him, whispering to me at night about how murdering and stalking and drinking blood is all that Nicolas has ever known.

“He was only a child when I had to take him, Leechtin. I love him. Please care for him.”

I won’t. Now that Escha is dying I worry that I will have to make sure Nicolas comes to no harm in his absence, but for my heart I cannot judge how I might reach out a hand to a creature for whom I have nearly always felt nothing but severe bitterness and contempt.
+++++

“I might have died.”

“No,” I whispered.

Escha turned around to me in the café, smoothing his hair back from his face.

I looked away from him, refusing to speak.
+++++

Escha’s breath is hot on my skin. I am taken up by him and his brilliance, his face etched out in front of the sun in front of my body. With this heat, with this warmth, must I ache for the Evening Star at all? My heart breaks, my vision is clear just for a moment and I know that all I have has become transient and that I can’t breathe at all under all this weight.

I pushed him away from me roughly and he fell to the wood paneled floor with a clatter. Silence. We kept each other out of view, let me look at anything else. I held my hand to my throat and exhaled shortly; my hands shook like glass vibrated by sound.

“You wanted me to,” his face was stricken.

I did not deny him. His lips were very red; his cheeks were flushed.

I slumped forward in the chair, holding my head with my hands and sobbed.
+++++

I found that I had been mistaken. Dasius was not Escha’s favorite after all. He had an obsession, and when it arrived in Paris it became much harder to speak with Escha because he was always lost thinking.

Escha knew that Leis was in Paris the moment Leis set foot in the city and his demeanor changed. He became nervous, even more scattered. He constantly tucked his hair behind his ears, breathed in a different way. I wanted very much to comfort him, but it was hard for me to deal with. I remember wondering what kind of person this was, Leis, that not only Escha but Dasius also were obsessed with his being there. What must have happened? I stayed away from it myself.

I was not impressed by the rheumy blond the way they were. He was beautiful of course, delicately featured besides a prominent, straight nose, thin nostrils, long hands. He was six feet tall, and there was something dandyish about him, something fragile. Even for those who are not all there themselves, Leis seemed to be missing some part of his mind, and I could see that he lacked confidence. His beauty was very fashionable, very pale, sick looking, soft spoken.

Escha adored him beyond his ability to speak about it, but Leis had not come alone. This for Escha would be a struggle from that moment. It was never that he wanted Leis as a lover, but that he wanted Leis for himself. I can understand it very well.

It made me sick to see my own relationship with Escha echoed in that manner. It made me want to go away for a very long time.

+++++
I can remember Dasius sobbing. All of this wanting wanting wanting. He told me the story, of how he had loved Leis from afar, how Leis was afraid of him because of the violence in how Dasius took him away. The rheumy blond had been very advanced in his illness, and Dasius knew this because he had begun to study medicine in earnest.

“I do not understand why it persists,” he told me sadly, softly, “I do not know if he is dying because I cannot get close enough to inspect his health. It is very interesting isn’t it? That white death has survived in his body, but Laurent has weakened him anyhow. Do you see how they worship each other? Nicky has observed that they sleep in the same bedroom. To me it is unspeakable, to cause so much suffering in those that one loves.”

I could not figure out what he meant by the last sentiment, or maybe I did not want to understand that Escha could hurt so many merely by the fact of his existence. Too much wanting, how could anyone be pleased?
+++++

It was the stupid choice to stay together. It was the stupid choice to gather all of these disparate people into a coven, but they were none of them made to wander, and it was Escha’s fault for doing that, and I let him rest the responsibility on my shoulders because I couldn’t bear to imagine him wanting.

He never stopped wanting. It is Escha’s nature to want, to always want, to always be searching for that part of him that whispers to him so much dissatisfaction with living.

“When did you start searching for something you lost?” I asked him desperately, many years later, when it was already too late.

“I don’t know that I ever had it,” he had said to me, softly.

“You were never so empty when you were alive.”

“Don’t talk to me about when I was alive, because it fails me so much.”
+++++

It really wouldn’t be very long before I moved overseas, following Escha because he wanted me to, because he had been living there.

I spent the journey mostly below deck, indigent for space, disliking the motion of the boat and the high wind above deck. The rheumy blond spent time near me, coughing and making his own time about things. He was shy about me, and I did not want to talk to him. The man he loved made friends with Dasius and they talked with each other.

Quinn goes by many names. Mostly they are related to his manner, which is brief, knowing, very focused, completely opposite to his French lover. They call him Abaddon, Darkling, Lord of the Abyss. I do not have much regard for their foolishness. Darkling, why? Because he thinks with his brain?

I spent some time being contemptuous in my bed, refusing to speak to anyone, quite aware of my new and derided position in life. I had not been a head of household since Herculaneum and I had no desire to lord over anyone. Things were moving too fast for me. I would spend years observing a city, gathering the greatest pleasure by very slowly melting away all parts of myself into my surroundings, making no nuisance and hardly any footprint, bathing in my life. I had been taken over by younger people who wanted my attention and moved me places. I had not been so lonely as to want anyone to take over my life.

I began to know things I had no interest in knowing. The blond one hides his illness from his lover. The doctor is passionately in love with both of the blonds but does not know himself enough to understand it. I began to absorb all of their stories, all of their particularities, all of their useless information.

It was not that I wanted to be alone, but I did not so much want to be bothered. It was hard to remain bitter about it however, because in America there have been beautiful things, not least of which sunlight, strawberries, and the one I had been searching for myself for so much time.
+++++

I lead a life of intrigue, by which I mean I have become something of a cult figure, or a figurehead. I do not know that I have any kind of real power inasmuch as I only possess it because it is ascribed to me by those younger than my person. Is there security within it? Why should I lie to myself? There is great security in the love of many people. Do they love me? What difference does it make?

Perhaps I am being too harsh. I do not want for much and I am always tired. Why not let myself be pampered by so many hands? It is not that I have no freedom.

I arrived in America through New York. Escha was familiar with the city. Nicolas and Dasius melted away into the surroundings, Leis and his Abaddon left to go further south soon afterwards. It was Escha only and myself for some time, and though neither the most pleasant time of my life nor his we were able to be natural with each other, and he took no lovers.

I would find him picking through my things, and I would leave barely hidden tokens for him to find. I fantasized that he was searching for the same version of himself that I had been searching for in his room in Paris, though I know that such attributions are whimsical. He would flirt with my sensibilities, holding my hands, but he did not want to talk to me about his life and I did not require it of him. I did not want him to run away from me. Escha does not talk about the time we spent in New York.

I have seen the pain in his eyes when I beg him not to leave me, when I beg him not to break my heart. He had left me amicably when we had first parted more than a millennium prior. In the intervening years we had grown apart. I never stopped seeking him. I eventually moved West into California where it was warm and quiet.
+++++

Eno would not begin to attack me until he sensed that I was no longer completely defenseless. He wanted his vengeance, but he did not want it so easily. Had he attacked me before then it would only have been me he could have had.
+++++

In California it was a boarding house of drifters. Often there was Escha, and many times there were others who I had never met but who had been within his care in previous times.

I did not complain about loneliness. I was surrounded by people, but Escha who I wanted was closed to me, and the others were strangers. I would converse with some of them, but often they were very similar in character and it would grow tiresome. I worried that Yaksha would never visit me. I worried that with having left the European and Asian continents I had left Yaksha behind as well. Though I had not seen him for longer than I had not seen Escha, there had always been the possibility that Yaksha would come. I worried very much that he would not ever come again.

My bones told me stories about my advanced age. Even as my head let it be known to me that these ideas existed only in my frame of mind, my heart whispered to me how tired it was. I haunted the hallways of the house, both inside of it and outside of everything, head of household though locus of absolutely nothing.

They came from all over, learning of Escha’s location and the comfortable atmosphere. There was some kind of comfort in numbers, and the possibility of not being so alone. It became a community of lovers and dreamers. I worried about the weakness that might be caused by this route but allowed it to happen because I was haunted by the vulnerability I had felt at their age. Most of those who stayed at my house were younger than five centuries and I could not kick them out for fear of sending them to their deaths. I sometimes wonder what Yaksha would have done in my place.

It was a strange existence. I had never been the sort to live in any kind of real close quarters with my own kind. I could not watch Escha consume the eyes of the men he killed. It made me feel faint, but always when Escha would turn over his heart a little and come to me at night every pain and every loneliness felt worthy of my weak body. If he would curl into my bed beside me I wanted always to remain in that room. If he would touch my hair I wanted always to remain in that moment.

It was a time when I desired anything familiar. Anything. The deepest recesses of my being were full with the agony of aching for things that I had known, and it was then that the one I had been dreaming of began sending emissaries to spy on me.

It is clear to me now what he was doing, that he was reaching out his fingers to test my receptivity, to find out my condition, to feel for the ripeness for his return into my life. I ignored the faces at the time. I ignored that certain or other of my wards occasionally delivered me to déjà vu or seemed to belong less than the others. He came under cover of darkness to see Escha with his own eyes, perhaps confident through the reports of my being oblivious to his children’s infiltration; but it was easy to be oblivious to them, because they had grown so much.

He had not changed at all. He tells a story about how he fled from me, that I chased him out of the house and that our reunion took place away from curious eyes, but that is his own fabrication to save my pride. When I saw Nataniellus again all that I could accomplish was to collapse to my knees and sob at his feet. I found myself unable to do more for several days. My consciousness was flooded with relief and all I wanted was to be beside him.
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Part II

So it is that we have come again to the beginning of our narrative, where Escha perished in my arms, and where I slept in the bed of my Macedonian relative, while Escha left the world we inhabit.

Some time has passed.

I cannot say that I have made many connections over the past several years spent on this continent. A lot of information I have not yet sorted out, and do not know how I feel towards. Maybe that is unfair to those who might say different concerning their feelings toward me, but it is how it stands now.

I know a lot of their faces, these young people who make themselves my wards, and I know many of their names, and I know much about their personal lives. It's the sorting out what faces belong to whom and what stories belong to what names that bears thought over time and I have more and more difficulty keeping up.

I am not the only one.

Ariel began coming around to me again in 1943. Sixty years exactly before my loss.

He brought trouble with him as always, as I had come to recognize the concurrence, Eno arrived scenting my trail directly behind him. Anyone else would have thought it a coincidence, perhaps something to do with Nataniellus and the entourage, but I have had enough misfortune in my life to notice the subtleties in a conflict and Ariel is nearly constant.

I cannot really help myself though, when Ariel comes and wraps himself around me like an aged cat and looks into my eyes. He is a familiar presence, deep voice rumbling but barely heard, purring into my ear, pin pricking his fingernails up my neck, smiling like a deep dark memory.

Eno came sometimes, like Yaksha did, a shadow far away outside my window, maybe standing a little forward of the treeline but far before the wide garden, stalking me but lost in his own world. He came many times, and I do not know why it changed, maybe it did only because all things do.

He decided that it was time for the endgame. He had long had a goal in his mind, and I am sure that he had thought about it often in the many years we had spent apart. It would only come out later that he did not return alone. It would only come out later that he had spent time vetting my precious one.

Perhaps I gained a new enemy when I strangled one of the twins, Eno's twins, for slithering into my household and sending information back to his patron, but I couldn't let him leave when he returned after Escha passed away with that smile on his face. Alois was not like his brother who refused to become involved, or even like Eno who whispered his regret. Alois's mean spirit made him come like a shadow to rub his victory in my face and I snatched him off his balance with one hand. I cannot imagine that Ambrose does not seek some measure of vengeance. I did not kill his brother, but I keep various parts of him in a jar that ensure that he will not be making very many more lovers for any purpose.

So that is how it has been. I have been very ill behaved since Escha left me again, but I really feel that I cannot be blamed for that. I spend time walking with Miriam a lot.




Act 1- Murky, Stormy

Miriam took my hand. We walked together, going out the back door, letting it bang behind us. The warm sunshine felt a little oppressive, like a latex glove across my face.

His black robes billowed, a light silk, a gold rope below his breast, wearing these things for me. His delicate fingers, his very soft smell.

"You must be kinder," he said, talking not really to me.

I did not answer.

"They see how you are with me, and they know then that you are capable of speaking in a manner they are more used to. Of course they cannot see how vulnerable this whole ordeal has made you, but they feel that they are vulnerable as well. They need leadership."

"I won't," I said, picking at the head of a pink rose as we passed.

"I realize that. It's just the problem of what you're supposed to do in a situation like this. What do they know? You should be kinder to them. Look at what it does to Dasius. Throwing himself at you as if you can do something for him."

Dasius had finally come out of his study the night previous to fall to his knees and cry on the hem of my dressing robe.

"Do you know how hard blood is to get out of silk?" I wrinkled my nose, pretending to make a flip remark, but it was wasted on my Miriam.

"I think that you should make the effort a little more. It is time to. At least with Dasius. You could afford not to insult him. That is what Laurent used to do. Don't pout. You must stop this kind of behavior."

He paused. I bent to pick up a few broken stems, the work of an errant child no doubt.

"I wish that Nicky wouldn't break the flowers."

"You can't blame him for acting out. He's taking this hard. He hasn't been out to the body."

"So no one goes."

"That's not true," Miriam shook his head, "Leis is out there every day, draped over it, crying. I hardly know what to say to him."

Miriam stroked my hands thoughtfully, holding them between his, "Promise me just one thing."

"I won't."

"Please promise," he said, kissing my hands delicately.

"I promise."

"Stop talking about your dead wife. It is driving Nataniellus ******** crazy."
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I threw a plate at Leis' head. He did not duck fast enough. Heavy breathing. It broke over his head on the way to the wall and he bled through his fingers.
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I tightened my hand around a fistful of Ariel's blond hair and it did not pique him. He stretched and I sat up, hugging the sheet around my knees, looking out the window. I knew then what I know now, that it was over for me, that it was not my responsibility to care for anyone with Escha gone. Why should I continue it? They were never part of my story at all. I knew that I could go with Nataniellus coming behind me and I could be done with it. Why didn't I go?

Maybe it had become that it was a matter of being tortured and I couldn't think at all. Escha was in my dreams always and it made it very difficult for me to sleep. I did not need Nataniellus to accuse me of setting up the circumstances of Escha's death, and he wouldn't, because Escha haunted me himself. For a long time after I went back to Nataniellus's bed I would thrash out at him in my sleep and he would wake me and I would find the greatest look of concern upon his face as if he worried for my health.

Is it strange that I longed for a woman whose name I couldn't remember and whose face had looked at me that way when I was alive? Woman, scion, avatar, soft. He could not be her, because he was too much like me. Maybe I should have kept it to myself because it broke his heart for me to say her name, dead wife, long time ago. What do you want? Do you want me to forget that I ever had a life before all of these things that have happened to me? When my heart was happy and I thought that everything was at peace for me to go myself? Long time away from that kind of thing, that kind of feeling.

It was easier to lie with Ariel who said nothing, who looked at me only to look at me, wondering nothing, caring for me not at all, part of me but no part. I would suck on his thin, feminine fingers and he would laugh, rattling my bones. Secret.

I don't know that Ariel is known anymore in my new life than he has been in my old ones, staying invisible. Maybe when I go, if I can go, Ariel will be the only one to follow. I think that maybe there could be no other way.