Vampire Rising (3 page)

“As I placed him as gently as I could in my
carriage, I knew he was beyond the reach of medicine—even if I
could have persuaded a doctor to see him. I had no choice. I
couldn’t bear to lose him, so I…I turned him…”

Gatsby stopped speaking and sat abruptly.
Barnabas snapped out of his daze. Looking at Gatsby, he could see
exhaustion creeping in at the edges of his eyes.

“What happened?” he asked.

Gatsby could remember as if it had been
yesterday.

Yvet shoved Gatsby with the super human
strength he did not yet know he possessed.

Gatsby looked at Yvet towering over him as he
lay sprawled on the floor where Yvet’s shove had landed him. The
look of surprise on Yvet’s face was quickly obliterated by rage.
Gatsby stared into his inflamed eyes; his lips, looking bluish-red
against the new pallor of his skin, were drawn back over his sharp
teeth in hatred. “You robbed me of my penance—a life for a life,
right? You have damned me to eternal sorrow and guilt for the life
I took!”

“He hated me,” Gatsby answered simply.

“But, you saved his life, why would he hate
you?”

Gatsby laughed bitterly, it was a rough,
ugly sound full of anger and regret. “I thought I was saving him
from death, but Yvet, as it turns out, wanted only to be saved from
life—he
 
wanted
 
to die, you see. I wanted him for eternity; he
wanted death.”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, he’s still around. He still hates me.
Over the centuries we’ve ended up in the same cities from time to
time—perhaps inevitably when you’ve lived as long as we have and
move as much as immortality requires. I can always sense when he’s
near because we share the same blood, and I‘ve tried to find him
but he can sense me, as well, and he always flees, making sure I
know he knows I am trying to find him.”

“Gatsby—” Barnabas started to say more but
Gatsby put his hand up stopping him. “So, now do you see why I say
I would never turn you? I could never live with your hatred.”

Barnabas rose, and stood still, with his
head down and his arms at his side. Then he raised his head and,
meeting Gatsby’s gaze, he said, softy, “I have heard everything you
have said, and all I can say in response is: I love you,
Gatsby.”

Gatsby’s nostrils flared and his eyes
reddened. “You speak of love so easily, but when one is a Vampire,
one misses out on the poignancy of love which is knowing, as you
watch your lover’s face and body age and change, that your love
alone is constant, immutable as the march of time itself.”

“I should go,” Barnabas said.

“Goodnight.”

“Will I see you again?” Barnabas asked.

“Yes,” Gatsby answered, “You promised you
would show me your studio, remember?”

“Tomorrow,” Barnabas replied, relieved, “I
promise.”

“Until, tomorrow, then.”

Barnabas offered his hand and Gatsby took
it. Barnabas covered it with his remaining free hand, so that
Gatsby’s one hand was sandwiched between his two. Gatsby looked at
their joined hands: brown, and white, and warm, and cold.

* * * * *

WALKING UP TO THE BUILDING which housed
his studio, Gatsby at his side, Barnabas was nervous, and unsure.
He looked at everything through what he assumed was Gatsby’s
critical eye. He saw, with new eyes, how shabby and unworldly it
was: an old one-story building with a shallow pitched roof. A
former garage, its façade was composed of crumbling stone and
mortar. Its original windows, which had been few and precious when
the building was new nearly a century earlier, were covered with
weather-beaten sheets of plywood. An ancient Plymouth Valiant wagon
sat in the driveway in front of the original garage door like a
squat, rusting monument. The garden of bright wildflowers that
crowded the small side yard was all that brightened and recommended
the building. Barnabas unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Gatsby stumbled on the threshold, and
blinked several times. The room was a vivid chaos. He stood at the
threshold leaning against the jamb.

“What?” Barnabas called back impatiently,
flicking on the lights.

“You must invite me in.”

“Oh!” Barnabas’ cheeks colored slightly.
“Please, come in,” he said.

At his invitation, Gatsby crossed the
threshold easily. The air was heavy with the smell of beeswax and
paint. The star-riddled sky lay heavily on the massive skylight
that spanned most of the studio’s interior space. Gatsby surveyed
the room, taking in the special brushes and tools upended in empty
soup cans, and mugs, and mayonnaise jars; the heat guns; the stacks
of old books; the hot plate which Barnabas used to heat his
encaustic paint but just as often a can of soup; the stacks of
cradled wood on which he painted; the bolts of fabric and scraps of
paper and metal and buttons and loose coins that seemed to cover
every surface. His Vampire’s gaze missed nothing.

As Barnabas handed him a small painting,
Gatsby caught his hand and looked at it. Embarrassed Barnabas tried
to pull away. “Your fingers, they grow crooked.”

“There is nothing straight about me,”
Barnabas quipped hoping to hide his embarrassment.

Gatsby looked at him hard without
smiling.

“It’s a disease; my hands become more
crooked each year. One day I will no longer be able to hold a
brush, they tell me.”

Gatsby made a sympathetic sound.

“It’s OK,” Barnabas said, “I’m also going
blind—macular degeneration—”

“Is there—is there anything they can
do?”

“No. it seems to be genetic and the two are
connected somehow but it’s hard to tell since, I grew up in foster
care.”

“Do you have no family at all?”

“Oh, I have an aunt and an uncle who I have
seen exactly twice in my entire life.”

Sensing his discomfort, Gatsby looked at the
painting in his hand. Its waxy surface was buffed to a high shine.
“This is encaustic?”

Barnabas nodded.

“Tell me, again, about encaustic painting,”
Gatsby said.

“It’s more commonly referred to as hot wax
painting. It involves using beeswax to which colored pigments have
been added. You apply the wax to canvas, or wood—I prefer wood—if
you use canvas, the canvas has to be adhered to a stiff substrate
otherwise the wax will eventually crack. You use warm goat hair and
hog bristle brushes to apply the pigmented wax, and pottery tools
that have been heated to shape it.”

“And this is your favorite medium?”

“It is. It’s incredibly unpredictable
because it becomes solid in seconds. It requires constant heating
and reheating and even then you don’t have a lot of control. That’s
what I like about it—it’s like life: it goes where it goes.”

“If I remember correctly, encaustic painting
isn’t new. It has been around for centuries.”

“Yes. It’s an ancient technique. The
earliest encaustic paintings were the Fayum mummy portraits created
in the first century B.C., but many twentieth century artists, like
Jasper Johns and Mark Perlman have used it—” Barnabas stopped
abruptly realizing that he was talking too much, that even at age
25, confronted with Gatsby, he was still possessed of the student’s
need to impress the teacher. “Anyway,” he continued, “ I like that
it’s an ancient process,. To me it speaks to the timelessness of
art.”

Gatsby looked at the small square painting
in his hand. It was a landscape, sky and mountains. The mountain
range which formed the bottom half of the painting was composed of
a dark brown wax that seemed to be of the earth itself. Above these
mountains was a luminous blue-white sky as miraculous as heaven
itself.

“What do you call this one?” Gatsby asked,
handing the painting back to Barnabas.

“Genesis.”

Gatsby smiled approvingly for it made sense;
the painting seemed to speak to the mystery of all beginnings.

“Do you mind if I look around?”

“No, of course not. That’s why I brought
you.”

Gatsby walked around the messy room,
stepping carefully around paint pots and tubes of oil paint,
picking up paintings that caught his eye. Occasionally, he’d ask
Barnabas for details about a particular painting. He passed a small
sink which had a mirror mounted above it. Gatsby turned away
quickly, but not before Barnabas saw his reflection in the
mirror.

“Cover that. Please.” Gatsby said somewhat
crossly. His eyes reddened—not the irises as when he was angry, but
the whites, which flushed pink and began to tear, like those of
humans sensitive to pollen during hay fever season. Barnabas was
startled. He’d seen Gatsby angry, and he’d glimpsed his sorrow, but
he’d never seen any sign of weakness before.

Once the mirror was covered Barnabas turned
to Gatsby, whose eyes were still smarting. “Gatsby I’m so
sorry.”

“That’s OK,” Gatsby said. Bringing his
balled-up fists to his face, Gatsby knuckled the remaining tears
from his eyes.

“I have so much to learn about Vampires,”
Barnabas said. After a moment he added, “I thought Vampires
couldn’t see their reflection in a mirror.”

“That’s an old wives’ tale. We can see our
reflections but we avoid mirrors.”

“Why?”

“Mirrors are glass with a coating of silver
and copper film. Silver is toxic to Vampires—silver in and of
itself won’t kill us but it burns and it slows the healing
process.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No. I’d like to see more of your work.”

“Go ahead. Look,” Barnabas said as he went
back to securing a canvas over the mirror.

“What are these?” Gatsby asked, discovering
a stack of cradled wood panels with their painted surfaces facing
the wall against which they leaned.

“Those are from a collection I did in art
school. We did a show around the theme of memory.”

Gatsby drew out a painting. It was
oppressive and dark. Gatsby stared at the painting. Around the
edges, in the swirling gray-black wax, faces, comic and tragic,
seemed to leer. He continued to examine the painting and felt
rewarded for his concentration when a portrait emerged. It was of a
woman with an enormous afro.

“Who’s this?” Gatsby asked holding up the
painting which was so dark, even knowing she was there, it was hard
to make out the woman captured within its waxy confines.

“My mother,” Barnabas replied glancing over
his shoulder.

“I thought you didn’t know your mother.”

“I didn’t—don’t.”

“But this is from memory?” Gatsby asked,
puzzled.

Barnabas, satisfied the canvas covering the
mirror was secure, turned around. Leaning against the sink he
explained, “Memory and imagination are often indistinguishable from
each other.”

Gatsby went back to examining the painting.
The woman’s eyes and the upper part of her face were obscured,
shadowed by the afro, but the shape of the face and the mouth were
unmistakably like Barnabas’. She wore a brightly colored dashiki
which Barnabas had created as a collage from scraps of Kente cloth
laid atop the pigmented wax. Around her neck old copper pennies,
which had been flattened, formed a necklace, and twisted strips
from aluminum cans hung from her ears. Her hand held a baby’s head
against her breast. The roughness and tension in the hand gave the
impression she was about to tear the baby from her breast and fling
it into the abyss at the edge of the painting.

“Are you angry at her?”

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

Barnabas shrugged.

Gatsby picked up another painting. This one
was a portrait of himself. The wax was thickly applied so he could
trace the curve of his own face and thumb his full blood-red lips.
A triangle of blue tinted cheesecloth was a stand-in for the crisp
white shirts he’d always worn at school. Except for the red, red
lips, the portrait was done entirely in blues and purples, but
unlike the mother portrait, which had been hurried and indistinct,
this one was precise, and spoke of desire. He looked at Barnabas.
“When did you paint this?”

Barnabas glanced at him. “A few years ago,
when I was still in art school. It was part of the collection on
memory.”

“You painted this from memory?”

“I did. That was the assignment. Memory.
When I look at you—when I look at anything, really—I look at it
with an artist’s eye and I think about how I would draw it—in this
case you. I always knew exactly how I would draw you. And one day,
I did.”

“You draw in your head?”

Barnabas nodded. “I’m always drawing in my
head—it’s how I see the world. I knew a writer at school and he
told me he saw the world in words—when he looked at an object or a
person he saw the words he would use to describe them. I redraw
everything in my head. It’s how I process and absorb the world
around me.”

Gatsby looked at the painting again. Its
precision, the passionate rendering of his features, the tenderness
with which his expression had been drawn, all spoke of a yearning
that made his breath catch in his throat.

“You know,” Barnabas said standing beside
him, “They say portraits reveal the soul of the subject, but I
don’t agree. Portraits are a window into the soul of the
artist.”

When Gatsby turned and met his gaze,
Barnabas seemed to see right through him.

“I’d better go,” Gatsby said, returning the
painting to its place against the wall and turning to leave.

“Gatsby!”

Gatsby turned, and having crossed the
threshold stood where he was. With the radiant night behind him,
Gatsby seemed carved out of silver and sorrow. Barnabas walked
towards him, stopping at the drafting table in the middle of the
room. “You can go, Gatsby,” Barnabas continued, “but know
this.
 
I
 
am not going anywhere. I will wait you out. But,
Gatsby, remember, unlike you, I don’t have forever.”