Nocturnes (16 page)

“I said that I have met a vampire. I also had dinner, drinks, and conversation with
him.”

“Well then. That’s just fine, Isaac. I understand that the church is forming a spring bowling league. Perhaps you and your new friend could work on your
handicaps.”

“I am deadly serious about this, Evan. Now. Are you going to hear me
out?”

Now he definitely had the priest’s attention. Even the tumbler hung slack in his hand. He offered his first advice of the
day.

“I want you to take a healthy swig of that stuff, count to twenty, and tell me once more that you are
serious.”

Isaac filled his glass and began with his walk in the park in Atlanta. Over the course of the next two hours he covered every detail, his voice alternating from matter-of-fact monotone to excited exuberance. The priest sat very still throughout, revealing nothing of his thoughts, moving only to refill his glass. But try as he might, he could no longer hope for inebriation.

Isaac finished his story with his vampire walking away through the unsuspecting populace of Jackson Square. He sighed deeply, like a man suddenly pronounced innocent on the steps of the guillotine.

Evan finally broke the lengthy silence that followed Isaac’s story.

“We are both old, my friend, and may therefore be suspect in the matters of memory and the recall of details. We might well be forgiven for embellishment…a little garnish to spruce up the stale dish of our days. I will admit that, in all the years I have known and conversed with you, I have rarely seen more conviction. You speak the truth as you know it. I understand your hesitancy with this matter. And I sincerely appreciate your confidence in relating it to me now. But you must also appreciate my skepticism. The man that you describe is obviously insane. Convincing, perhaps. But most insane.”

“That was precisely my own reaction to it all, Evan. But I can assure you that he is…perhaps it is now ‘was’…not insane. However, if it will make it more palatable to you, we may speak of him hypothetically. Because I simply must have your opinions on some questions that are vexing
me.”

“If you will humor me…and let us assume that the man I met was, indeed, a vampire…if such a creature does exist, and if he has spent some six hundred years trying to become better than his nature dictates, despite tragedy after heartbreak after betrayal…then might this not imply a divine spark in ourselves that is worthy of our efforts to fan it into full flame? The man has suffered disproportionately. Yet he clings stubbornly to a faith in the salvation of
love.”

“This may be a little complicated, but try to follow me here.” He smiled broadly to assure the priest that he wasn’t usurping his omniscience. “Julian, the vampire, related to me many fantastic stories that rang of truth, but there was one in the cathedral in New Orleans that you might find of interest. It was an experience that convinced him we live in a love-driven universe. He had certainty that his individual soul was of the deepest value. And it became his greatest motivation to share that with me…the ultimate
skeptic.”

Isaac walked to the fireplace mantle and picked up the amber sphere, rolling it gently between his fingers. He debated sharing its secret with Evan, but something restrained him.

“If we assume that he was telling the truth—and I have many reasons to believe that he was—wouldn’t his faith be a kind of indicator…a sort of proof of God’s
existence?”

Evan waved his hands in an expression of his
annoyance.

“You still don’t understand, do you, my friend? There is no ‘proof.’ You have wanted this from the beginning. When you first came to me so desperate and lost, and I thought that I could assure you. We were both so very naive. And we are just as naive now. Even a bona fide vampire would offer no proof, no matter how pious he might be. He would be no different than any mortal. Perhaps he would have experiences that he couldn’t explain, which, when combined with his fervent desire for proof, he would be too eager to attribute to the hand of some grey-bearded being who sits around just waiting for our prayers to arrive so that he can leap into action on our behalf…and on behalf of the other seven billion souls down here wallowing in our own filth. His entire delusion could well be some deranged need to experience what he thinks is the ‘eternal.’ He kills, goes into denial, and then sees some divine intervention that forgives and reassures. Pretty common stuff for the psychopath, I’m afraid. Whatever he is, he has to struggle right along with the rest of us. As do you, my dear friend. I’m sorry. But there is nothing here to give you any more hope than anything else,
Isaac.”

Isaac was crestfallen. He had expected so much more than this out-of-hand
dismissal.

“I can’t believe that this is the same Evan Connor I have known and admired for most of my adult life. There was a time when you would have been the one admonishing me for my narrow-minded skepticism. You would have at least been intrigued. And whether or not you were convinced of the man’s identity, you would have been curious about the details of his faith, and perhaps pursued it all for the sake of another lost soul’s comfort. You are offering the sort of understanding that I offered the man myself…which was
little.

“It is reflection that has shown me how I failed him. I have to believe that Julian is who he claimed to be. But he is also more than he claimed. And this is what has possessed me for the past several months. What was it that he wanted me to understand? Not believe…but
understand
.”

“Alright, Isaac, take it easy. You have become too emotionally involved in this man’s affairs. I suspect that, in telling him the details of your life with Lessa, you may have unearthed some rather persistent and potent
ghosts.”

“That may be true, Evan. But there is something I am missing here that I feel certain could bring me a better understanding of this eternity question. Time and again, Julian showed me a compassion I have rarely witnessed. In the process he summed up his entire history…a sort of putting affairs in order. It was crucial to him that I comprehend his motives, that I see it all from his perspective. In the end, he was so very certain of some benevolent hand behind all that had
transpired.”

“Maybe,” Evan spoke softly, kindly, “what he needed was your forgiveness. You obviously harbored some vicarious hatred for the man, left over from the bitter dregs you swallowed under the Nazis. For him, your forgiveness may well have been as valuable as God’s. I sense some truth in
that.”

“You are right, to a point. That is enough to show me that I have missed yet another opportunity to do something noble. Will my anger forever sentence me to coldness? The man was no Nazi. I knew this. But he was the best thing going on the hate parade. It was too easy to lay some of my loss at his doorstep.
Damn.”

“Well. It is done now, Isaac. The poor creature has moved on to another chapter of his life. You can learn something from that and do the same. And I think you should start with a call to the police. I still believe that what you have described is a deeply disturbed human being…a man. Not a monster. They might be able to find him and get him some
help.”

A mocking laugh broke from Isaac’s
throat.

“If he is a vampire, Evan, they will never find him. And if he isn’t…well. They certainly won’t be interested in helping
him.”

“Hmmm. I will leave that to your better judgment. But I will remind you of one thing. In spite of the ghastly scene in Birmingham, you never actually witnessed this man doing any of the morbid things that mythological vampires are supposed to do. The thing with the girl in the club, Erica, could easily have been staged. The simple transference of twenty dollars could accomplish the trick. Be wary, Isaac. You know as well as anyone that this species is capable of almost any horror. And it will go to as many lengths to justify
them.”

“As always, Evan, I respect your opinions. But you lack my experience with the
man.”

“Well, you sleep on it, Isaac. I have to be on my way. I am sorry that I wasn’t more of a comfort to you. And I am sorry that I can’t seem to take it all more seriously. Now, I will wish you a pleasant evening. I am feeling suddenly quite
tired.”

Isaac walked his friend to the door. As Evan passed into the chill, night air, Isaac had a sudden thought to call him back. But Evan walked on determinedly, and Isaac bolted the door behind him. He walked back to the fire, then settled heavily into his chair. He watched the last embers go singly out.

Chapter Eighteen

E
van Connor leaned back against the porcelain incline of his tub. He watched the steam vapors rise and curl above the surface of the water, then spiral lazily toward the ceiling. Everything was moist heat and careless intention. Everything but the cold, malevolent wafer of steel balanced between his thumb and
forefinger.

He had read that this was the best way. The warm water would coax open the pores and the blood would flow freely, painlessly, with a minimum of mess for those who would come later. One only needed to pull the plug from the drain, and Evan Connor would flow into the sewers of the world.

It was an intriguing thought, this death…and how his life would swirl above the drain…the little whirlpool of what he had once been, now rushing among secret rusty places, mingling with the offal and waste of a thousand lives, a thousand dreary dreams…the flushing and the rinsing of filth and refuse. What he had once been…what he had once been. And now, what he was about to
become.

Would they wrap the dangling ends of his exhausted body against the curious eyes of his neighbors, the strange men and women in various uniforms and badges that gave them privilege over his dignity? Would someone say, “Here, cover him with this. He was a priest, after
all?”

Would there be whisperings and nods of silent understanding? Would someone offer that the cancer was too much for him to bear? Would anyone wonder that it might be something more than that? Would a pretty, young woman look at the wounds on his wrists and wonder at what longings might once have pulsed there?

The priest ran his hands along the length of his body. It was an odd sensation. For a moment, they lingered on his genitals. He had never known the physical ecstasies that so many other men had known with women. He never would. And he guessed, now, that it would not have mattered in the greater scheme of things if he had, just once, responded to one of those warm squeezings of the hands, or the suggestive hugs against full, lonely bosoms.

Would it have been so damned damnable if he had dared to indulge in that peculiar pleasure that God’s own poets have written so eloquently of? Would it have cast him into the fiery pits, forever, without pardon? Or would it have been the crisis that, like St. Augustine, would have moved him to a deeper relationship with the
divine?

It hardly seemed to matter now. He sighed deeply and watched the steam move upon his breath. Everyone had regrets. Everyone had need and motive, desire and impetus…and everyone, in the end, created their own morality. His best friend had, just tonight, shown him that.

It had pained him to listen to the sad, desperate pleas as they fell like prayers from Isaac’s lips. Was God so far removed from Man that he was forced to create fantasies of angels and demons to fill in? It had been a pitiful display of the species’ unfulfilled longing to know the elusive entity called “God.” Vampires. A man who had survived the atrocity of all atrocities, only to come to a delusional dead-end where murderers create entire narratives devoid of salvation.

It was enough. Evan didn’t need to see any more. He was seventy-eight years old and could offer proof of nothing. Nor, for that matter, a halfway-firm conviction. All he had learned had eventually been proven wrong. Now there was only the vaguest sort of sorrow associated with that realization. And even that, even sorrow, was something he had never experienced at the level so many others had.

Well. This death, waiting there just beyond the next whisper of the clock, was something that would be uniquely his. The orchestration of it, at any rate, would be
his.

If there had been any doubt about robbing the cancer of its victory, it had been removed by Isaac’s troubling dialogue. The razor blade that waited there like an indifferent servant would soon become his one and only act of defiant independence. This was his call, his decision. There was no more wondering at what God or the Church would want from him. Those things had mattered too much, for too long. They had mattered to Isaac, too. What good had it done either of them? His friend was senile and he, the decrepit priest, was
faithless.

“Oh, God…why do you lead us, like cripples of hopelessness, to such despair? Do you require our abject surrender before you will save
us?”

His head fell back upon the rim of the tub and he stared up at the ceiling with swollen, accusing eyes. The silence. Always, the only answer…that indifferent, apathetic silence. How, then, are these prayers supposed to retain any dynamic? How, then, are they to avoid the numbness of routine, of empty habit? If only one prayer were to be answered with anything else but that infinite
silence…

Evan glanced briefly back upon the thread of his life. Was there anything that he could have done differently? Some alternative path that might not have led to this warm tub and this cold steel?

But that was foolish speculation. Everyone, every single mortal, was forced to choose and choose again, each day. The small, seemingly-insignificant choices carried as much weight and consequence as any others. If one were to look back at all the divergent roads, wouldn’t half those roads be chosen differently now…if they could be? And the deeper question of all: would it have really mattered if they were?

There were regrets, of course. And a man alone with a razor can accuse himself with them all. There had even been a woman. One that mattered above all others. Typically, she had come into his life when a decision had already been made…when the seal had been pressed, and the envelope delivered. Funny he should think of her now.

If he had decided to stay with her, to renounce his decision for the priesthood, would he be any happier today? Would he be watching the play of light as it skipped and balanced like a mercury-life upon the mirror of the blade?

It did no good to ponder on such folly. It did no good to remember how her scent embraced him through the lattice of the confessional when she came into the quietly-shadowed country church where he had started, fresh from her walks along the cliffs above the Irish Sea. Or how she would try to catch her breath, while she whispered that she hadn’t done anything really worth confessing…and oh, he knew that it was true. Just as he knew how he wished the two of them had done something very much worth confessing, together. Just as he also knew that he would have to walk seven miles to the next village after she had gone, to confess to his own desires to the young priest there.

It did no good to recall that one glorious afternoon, when he had been out in the intoxicating sea air himself, secretly hoping to cross paths with her, and she had come up over the hill, the wind snapping against the hem of her skirt, revealing those muscular calves and even a hint or two of her firm, round thighs. The sight of her against the sky and the sea had been like a poem…a sonnet of holy flesh and radiant spirit. They had fallen in stride together, with few words necessary between them, the sighs of the wind more than enough language to bind them to their heart’s desire. A desire that led them to the privacy of a few stunted trees tucked into a windbreak of warm moor-stone and sunshine. A primordial intent that found her breath and her lips and her every cell encouraging her breasts into his trusted hands…and into his mouth. And her hands so summer-eager in his trousers, and the way he lay on his back and watched the clouds spiral into myriad forms before giving way to the formless. He knew a different kind of love in that moment, different than the love of an abstract savior. The idea leapt all bright and fully-painted in his mind that the only religion that mattered, the only one that was authentic in its potential, was the religion he had just that moment discovered as her hands and her lips danced exquisite circles on his body. That thought—that the love between two committed souls was the only religion that could truly save ANY one—suddenly turned from light to darkest, thunderous shadow…and terrified his mortal soul. He had pushed her away against her protests, shaming them both with his actions. They had gathered their things and fled from their
Garden…forever.

It did no good to recall seeing her years later in London with her husband and child…and how it had seemed a betrayal. Not by her, but by life, or something like it. He wouldn’t have felt that way at all if he had never had to see her again, if he could have kept his secret memories of her somehow sealed away from everything else. If he could have made them invulnerable to all disappointment. But she had been there, in London, when Ireland was her home. When Ireland should have been, forever, their place.

He had felt strangely uneasy with prayer for a long while afterwards. In his mind, he had given God everything of himself. Was he now allowed to keep a memory, something separate from the sacrifice and hardship of his
calling?

It did no good. He had followed the path that had led him here. Even though it had seemed to be one continuous path, he could see now that it had been many. It did no good to question, to wonder, to regret. The end was the inevitable thing. And he had reached his.

His faith had never really been tested. It had just been pressed into service for too long against the grinding-stone of his circumstances. As he brought the paper-thin sliver of steel into contact with his wrist, he understood that
that
had been the problem all along.

The blade lingered upon the blue thread showing through his pale skin. That was the path he needed to follow now. For once there was no mystery. The direction was clear. He needed only to trace the steel along that blue ribbon of life, and it would take him where he wished to go…someplace new and uncharted. Someplace different than
this.

He pressed the blade into his skin and watched the first reaction of blood as it rose like an eager bride to its marriage with the steel. But suddenly he stopped. There was one thing left to do. It would be a mortal sin not to call Isaac and say
goodbye.

He must be careful not to arouse Isaac’s suspicions. But he was obligated to give his friend something to look back upon after he was gone. Something that Isaac would later be able to identify as a farewell. There was too much between them for Evan to selfishly remove himself without any acknowledgment of that fact.

He rose from the tub and wrapped a washcloth around his bleeding wrist, then wrapped a robe around his body. He composed a few lines in his head as he made his way to the
phone.

“Hello, Isaac. I just wanted to call and let you know that I have appreciated your friendship over the
years…”

No, that definitely would get Isaac’s alarms going.

“Hey, Isaac. I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed our conversation tonight. It’s been my great pleasure to have been your confidante and
friend…”

That was still too close. To Hell with the script, he could make it up as he went along. The important thing was just to call him so that he would know later that he had been thought of.

But Isaac wasn’t answering. Neither was his machine. And, according to their old plan, that was definitely something to be concerned
about.

All thoughts of suicide vanished as Evan raced around his bedroom for his clothes and shoes. Why hadn’t Isaac engaged his machine if he was going out? Evan knew that he wouldn’t overlook that. He took a deep breath and willed himself to calm down. It wasn’t that big a deal, really. But it was. Especially in light of what Isaac had shared with him just a few hours before.

Their system had been in place for some fifteen years. And Isaac had never forgotten. Evan dressed quickly and headed off in the direction of Isaac’s
home.