The Coming of Bright (20 page)

Zora was in for a shock that only 6000 vibrations per minute of full A/C electric power can provide. Leave it to those masters of modern technology, the Japanese, to find the perfect machine for the lush contours and infinitely sensitive nerve endings of the clitoris. It was as though millions of years of evolution of the female body had culminated in the invention of the Hitachi Magic Wand. And Zora was going to experience its full evolutionary potential. Technology pumping new blood, rushing gushing bright blood, into the heart of nature.

Victor brought her down to the bare hardwood floor of the library. It was cold, shiveringly cold. He had already taken the book from her, the first edition volume of Keats, a $20,000 find at an antiquarian bookseller in San Francisco. It sat on the floor nearby. He plugged the Magic Wand into the wall and lay behind her, maneuvering his body into the curves of hers.

“Count the number of times I turn the Magic Wand on and off. If you can concentrate.”

He had hardened up again, without needing any assistance from her. She felt his penis slide into her vagina. His breath on her neck. As he moved in and out of her, methodically, meditatively, he turned on the Magic Wand. He reached around and vibrated it in little circles against her clitoris, moving it around to find every note, every tone, of gratification she could muster. The sharpest, most sultry moans. After her first refrain of music, he turned off the device, taking a moment to kiss her neck, rub his hand across the side and front of her higher thigh, the raised fleshy curve of her hips and buttocks. Their toes curled against each other, tickling and playing.

He turned the Magic Wand back on and began the process anew. The problem was that the damn thing was so good at doing its job that Zora had almost no mental capacity to form her own name—much less count how many times Victor had turned it on and off. He had to start over several times when she lost count. It was a contest to see which would burn out first from pure exhaustion, her libido or the Magic Wand’s motor. In the end, to spare the overheating motor as well as Zora’s surging heart, Victor simply told her the number she needed to know.

“Thirteen. Add a hundred to that, and you’ll have the page to look up in the book.”

They were both lying face-up on the floor, unable to keep their hands and feet to themselves, their bodies steaming the library’s cold surfaces. Zora pulled the book to her, finding that the leather binding was actually an encasement for the smaller paperbound book of poems. She turned to page 113.

Ode on a Grecian Urn.

She knew this poem! Keats’ most famous. And from the poem, before her vision, leapt a most famous line.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In the light of the truth of her beauty, Victor would reveal to her the shadow of the beauty of his truth. No matter how ugly it was. She noticed then that Victor had changed the title of the poem. He had defaced the book to show her his truth.

Ode in a Grecian Urn.

She closed the book.

“The truth about Chloe Ming is hidden inside a Grecian urn somewhere in your home?”

“Yes, I put it there after she killed herself. Her family got her remains, this is what I got—my ode to her, from her. Go find it Zora—it will answer all your questions.”

Silently Zora got up, put her clothes back on, leaving her feet bare. Victor continued to lie there on the library’s ivory wood floor. The planks had come from Mozambique. He closed his eyes.

“I’ll take a nap and wait for you.”

She trod back into the living room, didn’t see any urn there, she would have remembered it anyway. Oh, the memories seared into her mind from that room. The kitchen—no urn. She found his Pilatesium and its assortment of medieval machines—no urn. A bathroom, drenched in green serpentine marble from the quarries of Connemara—no urn.

In his bedroom, where surprisingly she had never before set foot nor lain by his side, she found the urn. On a platform at the head of his bed, a masterpiece of sleep designed by Giuseppe Vigano for Italian furniture maker Bonaldo, lo and behold there it was. A single Grecian urn.

The urn had been found in nearly perfect condition in the sealed tomb of an Athenian noblewoman and had been sold at auction a number of times as it moved from one private collection to another. Victor had bought it for $1.7 million.

On the urn was painted, in a series of scenes, a terrible story: the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades. One scene showed Hades erupting from the bowels of the earth on his chariot, Persephone nearby picking flowers in a sweet meadow. Another scene showed him carrying her roughly in his arms, her semi-nude body flailing in a vain attempt to escape. The final scene showed her on a throne in the underworld, sitting next to Hades, fated for a time to be captive queen of the dominion of the dead.

Zora reached over and pulled the urn close to herself. She felt the presence of the dead girl come near to her. She removed the lid, gingerly, sensing the value of what she was uncovering, the value of Chloe’s life, the meaning of her death, much more than the worth of the urn itself.

In the shadowy depths of the urn she found the final trace of Chloe’s self: a rolled-up scroll of plain white stationery. She withdrew it from the urn. It was secured with a thin piece of black silk. This she untied. The urn stood there empty, forbidding and dark as the River Styx. Beside it she unrolled the note and began to read the wavering handwritten text.

Victor, my once and only love—

This is the last thing I will ever write, and the last piece of me you will ever have. I go to my death. By my own choice, of my own free will, probably the only truly free expression of myself I have ever had in this life. Do not blame yourself. Because of you, I have realized who I am in this world, and who I am not. Who I can never be. You told me, in a moment of the purest, most beautiful honesty, that you could never marry me, that I was not strong enough to be your wife, that no woman was. Least of all me, a foolish girl of twenty-two years. That is all the time I have had to learn about life and love, and that is all the time that I want. I hope that once I am gone, I can grow in your mind, mature in your soul, into the woman you could not imagine, a woman strong enough for you, a woman you could love without reservation.

Remember me always, Chloe

At the end of the note, Zora bowed her head as if to pray, and her body racked with sobs for Chloe’s fleeting life. Rage flowed together with her sorrow, each deepening the other, until she could no longer bear the horror, the agony, the vindictive pain cascading through her. She was sure that Victor felt vindicated by those words,
Do not blame yourself
, sure that he felt justified in the callousness of his cruelty. He cared only for himself, for his own pleasure, his own ambition, his own warped sense of right and wrong, of life and love.

He had but one purpose: to bend everything and everyone to his will, bring the world around him under his power. His was the charisma of the megalomaniac, the smile of the tyrant. Every corner of Zora’s mind, every ounce of spirit and will, flooded with the realization of Victor’s arrogant blindness, the barrenness of his heart, the hollowness of his soul. She knew what she must do. The only recourse of the weak: to show the strong that pain is a great equalizer, that the pain of oppression can be met with the pain of the flesh. That pain is the highest ideal of the weak.

She put the note back—it was Chloe’s wish that Victor have it as a final piece, a mortal token, of his dead lover, and Zora respected that wish.

She stood from Victor’s bed, rising erect upon her own tears. Her rage faded to nothing, and her sorrow. She no longer had a self. She was nothing more than a reflection of Victor’s self, joining him in the idealism of pain, dissolving with him in torment, the weak becoming one with the strong.

She walked back toward the library with no life left in her eyes, nor any light shining forth from them. Her eyes were like the urn without its lid, open to darkness. On her way back to where Victor lay, she passed the kitchen. She went to a spot she had seen earlier—a large wooden block holding Victor’s collection of hand-forged, razor-sharp
mizu-honyaki
knives. She removed each one, studied it carefully, looking for the right fineness of the tip of the blade, the feel of the blade in her hand.

She chose the
yanagi-ba-bocho
, the sashimi knife, designed to move cleanly and translucently through raw fish, without noticeable friction, like a shark’s fin slicing through calm water. She gripped the knife with barely enough force to avoid dropping it, not tightly, not with the clenched hand and fiery eyes of a maniac.

She arrived back in the library. She stood several feet from Victor’s body. His eyes were closed. Having felt the stir of the air as she entered, having heard the bare patter of her feet on the ivory wood, he opened them. He saw her standing there with the knife and quickly sat up. He didn’t stand.

“What are you doing, Zora? Why are you holding a knife?”

Her voice was flatter than his floor of the space they were in, her thoughts at that moment infinitely less rich in color and texture and tone.

“I read the note Victor. I found the truth. As you promised I would. The same truth that Chloe found. I have felt what that truth means, now you need to feel it as well.”

“Zora, listen to me. Put the fucking knife down. Just tell me what you want to tell me. Lie down next to me. Let me hold you.”

“No, Victor. No. Not this time. This time you will learn something from me. This time you will have to trust me.”

“Well, what the fuck do you want me to do? Eat some sashimi? I don’t know if you noticed, but there isn’t any raw fish lying around here.”

“No, I want you to lie back and close your eyes. As tight as you can. I am not going to kill you. Or even try. But you have to feel what I have felt. You have to accept the truth that I show you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I will cut my own throat. Right here in front of you. Bleed to death all over your precious library floor. And I won’t let you stop me. I’ll become your next Chloe, your next dead love.”

“Zora, you are so melodramatic. Grow up. You’re even worse than Chloe. What is it with you crazy fucking women? Do you actually try to be neurotic?”

“Listen to me Victor. Listen. Are you going to lie back down or not?”

Her voice contained no emotion whatsoever.

Victor sighed. A long, resigned release of breath.

“Are you going to hurt me?

“Yes, I am going to hurt you. You have to trust me. You need to learn the truth of yourself. You cannot teach yourself that.”

He looked at her, searching the blankness of her face, trying to sound the depth of her madness. When he saw no trace of anger in her face, nor tension in her hand around the knife, his fear eased enough to submit to her.

Perhaps he thought she had devised a dangerous game of erotic bloodletting. Perhaps he thought she would do with the knife what he had done with his fingernails, tracing deeply enough into the skin to arouse but not too deeply to truly hurt. Perhaps he thought she was testing his trust with a lie, that she had no intention of hurting him, only of convincing him without his resistance that she would. Whatever he thought, he lay back down flat on the hard floor, closed his eyes and waited.

She walked up to his naked body and knelt. As she had in his bedroom, she appeared on the verge of prayer. Instead she reached out with her left hand, not the hand holding the knife, and began to pleasure him. He exhaled sharply, more out of relief than arousal.

“I
knew
you had something kinky in mind—you are such a little minx. You really had me scared there for a minute, that you were going to stab me or something.”

“Don’t open your eyes yet.”

If Victor had been listening, really listening, he would have heard something primitive, something serpentine, underneath her voice.

It didn’t take long for his penis to become fully gorged. His face was suffused with anything but fear. He was getting more and more excited by the second, more and more expectant of the next move in her devilish game. He was proud he had taught her so well.

Fast as the blur of a serpent’s strike it happened. Zora flicked her hand with the knife gracefully extended. The blade entered the skin of Victor’s penis just deeply enough to leave a scar. Not so deep to damage vital blood vessels or nerves, yet not so shallow to leave a wound that would heal without a trace. Her calmness was the key to her deftness: had she been enraged, blinded by hate, she could never have imparted to his flesh such a surgical wound. It would have been much messier, had she not been calm. It would be messy enough this way, and permanent.

She rose from her position of prayer, and dropped the knife onto the floor next to Victor. Blood was starting to burst unchecked from the cut, and his eyes had opened aghast. She walked from the room, from the house, leaving Victor to fresh anguish. She ignored his cries, his curses, not bothering to turn back. She would not come to his aid, nor offer a single word of regret. There would be none of that. No weakness.

She had shown him the truth of himself. Of the fallen girl. Of the meaning of love and death and life. Pain and pleasure. Eros and Thanatos. The first thing that greeted his eyes, not long after he heard the clatter of the knife, was a paper-thin cut in the shape of a “C,” just beginning to bleed. His very own scarlet letter.