The Tale of the Body Thief (34 page)

“I understand.”

Who spoke? I was startled, but it wasn’t Louis, it was David, David standing near with his copy of the Bible. Louis looked up slowly. He didn’t know who David was
.

“Are we close to God when we create something out of nothing? When we pretend we are the tiny flame and we make other flames?”

David shook his bead. “A bad mistake.”

“And so is the whole world, then. She’s our daughter—”

“I’m not your daughter. I’m my mama’s daughter.”

“No, dear, not anymore.” I looked up at David. “Well, answer me.”

“Why do you claim such high aims for what you did?” he asked, but he was so compassionate, so gentle. Louis was still horrified, staring at her, at her small white feet. Such seductive little feet
.

“And then I decided to do it, I didn’t care what he did with my body if he could put me into this human form for twenty-four hours so that I could see the sunlight, feel what mortals feel, know their weakness and their pain.” I pressed her hand as I spoke.

She nodded, wiping my forehead again, feeling my pulse with her firm warm fingers.

“ … and I decided to do it, simply do it. Oh, I know it was wrong, wrong to let him go with all the power, but can you imagine, and now you see, I can’t die in this body. The others won’t even know what’s happened to me. If they knew, they’d come … ”

“The other vampires,” she whispered.

“Yes.” And then I was telling her all about them, about my search so long ago to find the others, thinking that if I only knew the history of things, it would explain the mystery … On and on I talked to her, explaining us, what we were, all about my trek through the centuries, and then the lure of the rock music, the perfect theatre for me, and what I’d wanted to do, about David and God and the Devil in the Paris café, and David by the fire with the Bible in his hand, saying God is not perfect. Sometimes my eyes were closed; sometimes they were open. She was holding my hand all the while.

People came and went. Doctors argued. A woman was crying.
Outside it was light again. I saw it when the door opened, and that cruel blast of cold air swept through the corridor. “How are we going to bathe all these patients?” a nurse asked. “That woman should be in isolation. Call the doctor. Tell him we have a case of meningitis on the floor.”

“It’s morning again, isn’t it? You must be so tired, you’ve been with me all through the afternoon and the night. I’m so scared, but I know you have to go.”

They were bringing in more sick people. The doctor came to her and told her they would have to turn all these gurneys so that their heads were against the wall.

The doctor told her she ought to go home. Several new nurses had just come on duty. She ought to rest.

Was I crying? The little needle hurt my arm, and how dry my throat was, how dry my lips.

“We can’t even officially admit all these patients.”

“Can you hear me, Gretchen?” I asked. “Can you follow what I’m saying?”

“You’ve asked me that over and over again,” she said, “and each time I’ve told you that I can hear, that I can understand. I’m listening to you. I won’t leave you.”

“Sweet Gretchen. Sister Gretchen.”

“I want to take you out of here with me.”

“What did you say?”

“To my house, with me. You’re much better now, your fever’s way down. But if you stay here … ” Confusion in her face. She put the cup to my lips again and I drank several gulps.

“I understand. Yes, please take me, please.” I tried to sit up. “I’m afraid to stay.”

“Not just yet,” she said, coaxing me back down on the gurney. Then she pulled the tape off my arm and extracted that vicious little needle. Lord God, I had to piss! Was there no end to these revolting physical necessities? What in the hell was mortality? Shitting, pissing, eating, and then the same cycle all over again! Is this worth the vision of the sunshine? It wasn’t enough to be dying. I had to piss. But I couldn’t bear using that bottle again, even though I could scarce remember it.

“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” I asked. “Don’t you think I’m insane?”

“You only hurt people when you’re a vampire,” she said simply, “when you’re in your rightful body. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s true. But you’re like Claudia. You’re not afraid of anything.”

“You are playing her for a fool,” said Claudia. “You’re going to hurt her too.”

“Nonsense, she doesn’t believe it,” I said. I sat down on the couch in the parlour of the little hotel, surveying the small fancy room, feeling very at home with these delicate old gilded furnishings. The eighteenth century, my century. Century of the rogue and the rational man. My most perfect time
.

Petit-point flowers. Brocade. Gilded swords and the laughter of drunken men in the street below
.

David was standing at the window, looking out over the low roofs of the colonial city. Had be ever been in this century before?

“No, never!” be said in awe. “Every surface is worked by hand, every measurement is irregular. How tenuous the hold of created things upon nature, as if it could slide back to the earth so easily.”

“Leave, David,” said Louis, “you don’t belong here. We have to remain. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Now, that’s a bit melodramatic,” said Claudia. “Really.” She wore that soiled little gown from the hospital. Well, I would soon fix that. I would sack the shops of laces and ribbons for her. I would buy silks for her, and tiny bracelets of silver, and rings set with pearls
.

I put my arm around her. “Ah, how nice to hear someone speak the truth,” I said. “Such fine hair, and now it will be fine forever.”

I tried to sit up again, but it seemed impossible. They were rushing an emergency case through the corridor, two nurses on either side, and someone struck the gurney and the vibration moved through me. Then it was quiet, and the hands on the big clock moved with a little jerk. The man next to me moaned, and turned his head. There was a huge white bandage over his eyes. How naked his mouth looked.

“We have to get these people into isolation,” said a voice.

“Come on, now, I’m taking you home.”

And Mojo, what had become of Mojo? Suppose they’d come to take him away? This was a century in which they incarcerated dogs, simply for being dogs. I had to explain this to her. She was lifting me, or trying to do it, slipping her arm around my shoulders. Mojo barking in the town house. Was he trapped?

Louis was sad. “There’s plague out there in the city.”

“But that can’t hurt you, David,” I said
.

“You’re right,” he said. “But there are other things … ”

Claudia laughed. “She’s in love with you, you know.”

“You would have died of the plague,” I said
.

“Maybe it was not my time.”

“Do you believe that, that we have our time?”

“No, actually I don’t,” she said. “Maybe it was just easier to blame you for everything. I never really knew right from wrong, you see.”

“You had time to learn,” I said
.

“So have you, much more time than I ever had.”

“Thank God you’re taking me,” I whispered. I was standing on my feet. “I’m so afraid,” I said. “Just plain ordinary afraid.”

“One less burden to the hospital,” Claudia said with a ringing laugh, her little feet bobbing over the edge of the chair. She had on the fancy dress again, with the embroidery. Now that was an improvement
.

“Gretchen the beautiful,” I said. “It makes a flame in your cheeks when I say that.”

She smiled as she brought my left arm over her shoulder now, and kept her right arm locked around my waist. “I’ll take care of you,” she whispered in my ear. “It isn’t very far.”

Beside her little car, in the bitter wind, I stood holding that stinking organ, and watching the yellow arc of piss, steam rising from it as it struck the melting snow. “Lord God,” I said. “That feels almost good! What are human beings that they can take pleasure in such dreadful things!”

A
T SOME point I began drifting in and out of sleep, aware that we were in a little car, and that Mojo was with us, panting heavily by my ear, and that we were driving through wooded snow-covered hills. I was wrapped in a blanket, and feeling miserably sick from the motion of the car. I was also shivering. I scarcely remembered our return to the town house, and the finding of
Mojo, waiting there so patiently. I was vaguely sensible that I could die in this gasoline-driven vehicle if another vehicle collided with it. It seemed painfully real, real as the pain in my chest. And the Body Thief had tricked me.

Gretchen’s eyes were set calmly on the winding road ahead, the dappled sunlight making a soft lovely aureole about her head of all the fine little hairs which had come loose from her thick coiled braid of hair, and the smooth pretty waves of hair growing back from her temples. A nun, a beautiful nun, I thought, my eyes closing and opening as if of their own volition.

But why is this nun being so good to me? Because she is a nun?

It was quiet all around us. There were houses in the trees, set upon knolls, and in little valleys, and very close to one another. A rich suburb, perhaps, with those small-scale wooden mansions rich mortals sometimes prefer to the truly palatial homes of the last century.

At last we entered a drive beside one of these dwellings, passing through a copse of bare-limbed trees, and came to a gentle halt beside a small gray-shingled cottage, obviously a servants’ quarters or guesthouse of sorts, at some remove from the main residence.

The rooms were cozy and warm. I wanted to sink down into the clean bed, but I was too soiled for that, and insisted that I be allowed to bathe this distasteful body. Gretchen strongly protested. I was sick, she said. I couldn’t be bathed now. But I refused to listen. I found the bathroom and wouldn’t leave it.

Then I fell asleep again, leaning against the tile as Gretchen filled the tub. The steam felt sweet to me. I could see Mojo lying by the bed, the wolflike sphinx, watching me through the open door. Did she think he looked like the devil?

I felt groggy and impossibly weak and yet I was talking to Gretchen, trying to explain to her how I had come to be in this predicament, and how I had to reach Louis in New Orleans so that he could give me the powerful blood.

In a low voice, I told her many things in English, only using French when for some reason I couldn’t find the word I wanted, rambling on about the France of my time, and the crude little colony of New Orleans where I had existed after, and how wondrous this age was, and how I’d become a rock star for a brief time, because I thought that as a symbol of evil I’d do some good.

Was this human to want her understanding, this desperate fear that I would die in her arms, and no one would ever know who I’d been or what had taken place?

Ah, but the others, they knew, and they had not come to help me
.

I told her all about this too. I described the ancients, and their disapproval. What was there that I did not tell her? But she must understand, exquisite nun that she was, how much I’d wanted as the rock singer to do good.

“That’s the only way the literal Devil can do good,” I said. “To play himself in a tableau to expose evil. Unless one believes that he is doing good when he is doing evil, but that would make a monster out of God, wouldn’t it?—the Devil is simply part of the divine plan.”

She seemed to hear these words with critical attention. But it didn’t surprise me when she answered that the Devil had not been part of God’s plan. Her voice was low and full of humility. She was taking my soiled clothes off me as she spoke, and I don’t think she wanted to speak at all, but she was trying to calm me. The Devil had been the most powerful of the angels, she said, and he had rejected God out of pride. Evil could not be part of God’s plan.

When I asked her if she knew all the arguments against this, and how illogical it was, how illogical all of Christianity was, she said calmly that it didn’t matter. What mattered was doing good. That was all. It was simple.

“Ah, yes, then you understand.”

“Perfectly,” she said to me.

But I knew that she did not.

“You are good to me,” I said. I kissed her gently on the cheek, as she helped me into the warm water.

I lay back in the tub, watching her bathe me and noting that it felt good to me, the warm water against my chest, the soft strokes of the sponge on my skin, perhaps better than anything I had endured so far. But how long the human body felt! How strangely long my arms. An image came back to me from an old film—of Frankenstein’s monster lumbering about, swinging his hands as if they didn’t belong at the ends of his arms. I felt as if I were that monster. In fact, to say that I felt entirely monstrous as a human is to hit the perfect truth.

Seems I said something about it. She cautioned me to be quiet. She said that my body was strong and fine, and not unnatural. She looked deeply worried. I felt a little ashamed, letting her wash my hair, and
my face. She explained it was the sort of thing which a nurse did all the time.

She said she had spent her life in the foreign missions, nursing the sick, in places so soiled and ill equipped that even the overcrowded Washington hospital seemed like a dream compared to them.

I watched her eyes move over my body, and then I saw the flush in her cheeks, and the way that she looked at me, overcome with shame, and confusion. How curiously innocent she was.

I smiled to myself, but I feared she would be hurt by her own carnal feelings. What a cruel joke on us both that she found this body enticing. But there was no doubt that she did, and it stirred my blood, my human blood, even in my fever and exhaustion. Ah, this body was always struggling for something.

I could barely stand as she dried me all over with the towel, but I was determined to do it. I kissed the top of her head, and she looked up at me, in a slow vague way, intrigued and mystified. I wanted to kiss her again, but I hadn’t the strength. She was very careful in drying my hair, and gentle as she dried my face. No one had touched me in this manner in a very long time. I told her I loved her for the sheer kindness of it.