Louis’s back straightened like a string of beads being pulled taut. Behind his glasses, I knew, his pupils would have shrunk to pinpoints: the light pained him more when he was nervous. But no tremor in his voice betrayed him when he said, ‘What do you know about it?’
The boy shrugged. On his bony shoulders, the movement was insouciant and drop-dead graceful. ‘It’s voodoo,’ he said. ‘I know what voodoo is. Do you?’
The implication stung, but Louis only bared his teeth the slightest bit; it might have been a smile. ‘I am conversant in all types of magic,’ he said, ‘at least.’
The boy moved closer to Louis, so that their hips were almost touching, and lifted the amulet between thumb and forefinger. I thought I saw one long nail brush Louis’s throat, but I could not be sure. ‘I could tell you the meaning of this veve,’ he said, ‘if you were certain you wished to know.’
‘It symbolizes power,’ Louis said. ‘All the power of my soul.’ His voice was cold, but I saw his tongue dart out to moisten his lips. He was beginning to dislike this boy, and also to desire him.
‘No,’ said the boy so softly that I barely caught his words. He sounded almost sad. ‘This cross in the center is inverted, you see, and the line encircling it represents a serpent. A thing like this can trap your soul. Instead of being rewarded with eternal life … you might be doomed to it.’
‘Doomed to eternal life?’ Louis permitted himself a small cold smile. ‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘The band is starting again. Find me after the show and I’ll tell you. We can have a drink … and you can tell me all you know about voodoo.’ The boy threw back his head and laughed. Only then did I notice that one of his upper canine teeth was missing.
*
The next part of the evening remains a blur of moonlight and neon, ice cubes and blue swirling smoke and sweet drunkenness. The boy drank glass after glass of absinthe with us, seeming to relish the bitter taste. None of our other guests had liked the liqueur. ‘Where did you get it?’ he asked. Louis was silent for a long moment before he said, ‘It was sent over from France.’ Except for its single black gap, the boy’s smile would have been as perfect as the sharp-edged crescent moon.
‘Another drink?’ said Louis, refilling both our glasses.
When I next came to clarity, I was in the boy’s arms. I could not make out the words he was whispering; they might have been an incantation, if magic may be sung to pleasure’s music. A pair of hands cupped my face, guiding my lips over the boy’s pale parchment skin. They might have been Louis’s hands. I knew nothing except this boy, the fragile movement of the bones beneath the skin, the taste of his spit bitter with wormwood.
I do not remember when he finally turned away from me and began lavishing his love upon Louis. I wish I could have watched, could have seen the lust bleeding into Louis’s eyes, the pleasure racking his body. For, as it turned out, the boy loved Louis so much more thoroughly than ever he loved me.
When I awoke, the bass thump of my pulse echoing through my skull blotted out all other sensations. Gradually, though, I became aware of tangled silk sheets, of hot sunlight on my face. Not until I came fully awake did I see the thing I had cradled like a lover all through the night.
For an instant two realities shifted in uneasy juxtaposition and almost merged. I was in Louis’s bed; I recognized the feel of the sheets, their odor of silk and sweat. But this thing I held - this was surely one of the fragile mummies we had dragged out of their graves, the things we dissected for our museum. It took me only a moment, though, to recognize the familiar ruined features - the sharp chin, the high elegant brow. Something had desiccated Louis, had drained him of every drop of his moisture, his vitality. His skin crackled and flaked away beneath my fingers. His hair stuck to my lips, dry and colorless. The amulet, which had still been around his throat in bed last night, was gone.
The boy had left no trace - or so I thought until I saw a nearly transparent thing at the foot of the bed. It was like a quantity of spiderweb, or a damp and insubstantial veil. I picked it up and shook it out, but could not see its features until I held it up to the window. The thing was vaguely human-shaped, with empty limbs trailing off into nearly invisible tatters. As the thing wafted and billowed, I saw part of a face in it - the sharp curve left by a cheekbone, the hole where an eye had been - as if a face were imprinted upon gauze.
I carried Louis’s brittle shell of a corpse down into the museum. Laying him before his mother’s niche, I left a stick of incense burning in his folded hands and a pillow of black silk cradling the papery dry bulb of his skull. He would have wished it thus.
The boy has not come to me again, though I leave the window open every night. I have been back to the club, where I stand sipping vodka and watching the crowd. I have seen many beauties, many strange wasted faces, but not the one I seek. I think I know where I will find him. Perhaps he still desires me - I must know.
I will go again to the lonely graveyard in the bayou. Once more - alone, this time - I will find the unmarked grave and plant my spade in its black earth. When I open the coffin - I know it, I am sure of it - I will find not the mouldering thing we beheld before, but the calm beauty of replenished youth. The youth he drank from Louis. His face will be a scrimshaw mask of tranquility. The amulet - I know it; I am sure of it - will be around his neck.
Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain … the only true moment of self-knowledge? The dark pools of his eyes will open, still and deep enough to drown in. He will hold out his arms to me, inviting me to lie down with him in his rich wormy bed.
With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood. After that it will taste only of me - of my blood, my life, siphoning out of my body and into his. I will feel the sensations Louis felt: the shrivelling of my tissues, the drying-up of all my vital juices. I care not. The treasures and the pleasures of the grave? They are his hands, his lips, his tongue.
(1989)
Optional Music For Voice and Piano
1960
When the hand snaked out and dragged him into the alley, the boy’s only emotion was a sick sense of I-told-you-so. He’d known he couldn’t make it home safely.
There had been a new book about magic at the library. Reading it, he’d lost track of time, not knowing how late it was until Mrs. Cooper reminded him that she had to close up in fifteen minutes. His parents would be furious. He’d rushed out of the reading room and down the stone steps that led to the sidewalk, having taken only the time to close the book reverently and slide it back into its own space on the shelf. Even in a hurry, he had loved the newness of the red leather against the older, more faded cloth covers.
He had never been out by himself so late at night.
Somehow the night allowed familiar things to change their forms. Bats swooped around streetlights; they seemed too low, almost brushing the top of his head with their skittery wings. Two bristling, pointy-eared things darted across his path, and he jumped back and made an involuntary little sound in his throat. That was when the hand closed around his neck.
It dragged him into the alley and held him tightly against itself. His face was buried in the folds of a dress or cloak. A pungent, musty smell squirmed up his nostrils. He was unable to cough the dust away. He began to choke. Then the hand was at his mouth. The fingers, hard, dry, and impossibly sharp, scrabbled at his mouth. It was trying to force his lips apart.
He twisted his face away, clamping his lips tighter than he had thought possible. The fingers dug into his face, wrenching his head back into the folds of the cloak. Something tiny and delicate snapped in his neck. A soft cry escaped him—the pain was sickening.
There were two hands then; one pinched his nose, drawing blood. Finally, unable to hold his breath any longer, he opened his mouth and gulped great gasps of mercifully cool air. The other hand slapped down over his mouth. Something soft and slimy sli
d past his lips and spread over his tongue. He felt as if a salted slug had dissolved in his mouth. The stuff tasted the way the cloak had smelled, tangy and bitter.
He wanted to spit, but the hand was still clamped painfully across his face. The glob warmed his throat as it slid down. That part almost felt good. The warmth began to spread through him. He went wonderfully limp. His toes and fingers tingled. The hands let him go and he slithered to the ground.
The cool bricks felt good against his cheek. His neck was twisted at an awkward angle, but he no longer noticed the pain. Between the tops of the buildings that soared up on either side of him, he could see a sliver of darkness sprinkled with pinpoint stars. A night breeze brushed over his face and ruffled his hair as he stared up. The sky was incredibly beautiful. He wanted to sing to it.
1980
The piano keys were bone-smooth and cold under his fingers. He loved the starkness of them, black on white against the deeper black lacquer of the piano. The room was stark too, purposely so. The piano and its bench were the only objects in the room. The floor was of dark polished wood with a honey-golden undertone that made it seem to glow.
He sat with his back to the long window which nearly filled the rear wall of the room. His house sat on a cliff overlooking the sea. When he stood at the window, he could look down at waves crashing and disintegrating on jagged rocks. But he sat on the far side of the room. If he had turned to face the window, he would have seen only a long expanse of gray-blue sky broken by the three heavy crossbars of the window.
It might have been an early morning sky or an early evening sky or a sky about to storm; he neither knew nor cared. He slept whenever he was tired and spent most of his waking hours at the piano. His face, bent over the keys, was serene and nearly expressionless. At thirty, he was almost as boyish as he had been at ten: his body was slim and compact, his unlined pale face overhung by a soft mop of dark hair, eyes like limpid black pools, a serious, sad mouth.
He let his hands wander across the piano keys. The notes rose, clustered, broke away from each other and drifted back down to melt into the golden floor. As they touched his ears, he smiled faintly. It had taken him so long to realize he could make this kind of music.
1960
His neck wasn’t broken. Having it wrenched so sharply had pulled a muscle, and while he was in the hospital he had to lie flat on his back, as nearly motionless as possible, with a thick metal-and-foam collar holding his neck immobile. He learned the position of every crack and speck on the ceiling. At times the boredom was almost tangible.
He learned not to cry because the tears would trickle down the sides of his head and make the hair behind his ears unpleasantly damp; he couldn’t lift his hands high enough to wipe the tears away.
After the first two days he discovered that singing relieved his boredom. Even better, it made him forget his pain and his experience in the alley.
One night a nurse heard him. He stopped when she came into the room, but she asked him to go on, and after a bit of coaxing he sang her a song. He had composed the words and the tune himself, while lying in the hospital bed. He could see trees and a piece of sky through his window, and he longed to be outside. He had rhymed “trees” with “breeze.” It was the work of a ten-year-old, although the poetry showed promise.
What mattered, though, was his voice. His neck was strained and padded; by all rights his voice should have sounded stifled, weak. Instead, it was glorious. He sang high and hoarse and sweet, tile voice of a child, but hidden in his song were hints of darkness, intimations of fear and pain.
As the nurse held his hand and listened to him, tears started in her eyes. She had remembered a night nearly forty years ago, when her parents had gone on a shopping trip to the city and forgotten to leave the front door unlocked for her. They were three miles away from their nearest neighbors, and she had huddled in a corner of the front porch, tiny and sick with terror, until the familiar car had finally turned into the driveway. Nothing in the boy’s pretty little song had suggested this, yet she recalled it so vividly that her stomach twisted with childish dread.
The memory hurt her, but the boy’s voice was so beautiful that she called the other nurses in to hear him sing. They held their breaths until he had finished. One of them, a girl barely twenty-one, ran out of the room sobbing. She explained later that she didn’t know what had come over her; she supposed she just felt sorry for the poor child, lying there so pale and thin.
The boy listened to the nurses whispering outside the door, and tears pooled in his eyes too. He blinked them away, remembering that he couldn’t cry. Instead he began to sing softly to himself.
1970
He stood with his forehead pressed against the cool glass of the small window that wouldn’t open. Behind him, in the dressing room of the club, the other members of the band were milling about; tuning guitars, running nervous fingers through their ratty hair, getting ready to do a show. He could see faint reflections of their movements in the glass.
He looked past the phantom images at the sky. Evening was stealing over the city. The sky was a gradually intensifying blue, deeper than eggshell but not yet azure; swirled through the blue were pale pink clouds as fluffy and ethereal as cotton candy. He couldn’t look away from it until PJ came over and clapped a hand onto his shoulder. “How are you doing, man? All set?”
He turned to face PJ. The drummer blinked, then grinned. “I love it,” he said. “You look great.”
He was dressed entirely in black: leotard, tights, a long scarf tied around his head. His face was painted white, and around his eyes and eyebrows he had smudged black kohl, making them look sunken and veiled. His face was framed by his dark hair, which fell nearly to his shoulders. He looked ghoulish; he looked beautiful.
“I love it,” PJ said again.
“Thanks.” He turned away from the window.
“It’s pretty crowded out there. I looked.” PJ grinned again, nervous. This was the band’s first real performance, the first time they were to be paid for making music.
“Great,” he said with an effort. He didn’t want to talk; he could feel the anticipation building up inside him. Right now he didn’t want to use his voice for anything but singing.
The dressing room door opened and a head popped in. “Guys? You about set?” The other three grimaced at each other. He closed his eyes, feeling a shiver begin in the pit of his stomach and go througll him in two directions; it slid down his legs, making his knees lock; it tingled up through his chest into his throat, trying to push his voice out. He was ready.
At the first thrill of his voice, the crowd’s conversations dwindled. By the time he had sung the opening lines of the first song, everyone in the club was staring at him, some pushing forward to get closer to the stage, some breathing the smokeswirled air a little more shallowly.
Their set was not long, but time stopped for him; the show might have gone on a moment or an eon. At the highest notes his voice hoarsened and seemed as if it must break; the sound brought tears to a few listeners’ eyes.
By the last song, some of the crowd sang along with the chorus. Others sat absolutely still, eyes fixed on his face. Several were crying openly as they sang or listened.
In the back of the club, a heavy man in a business suit shuddered and put his hand over his eyes. He scouted for a record label, and he had come to ferret out marketable talent, not to have his emotions ravaged by the music. But the singer’s voice had brought to his mind a soft, sweet lullaby his mother had sung to him years ago. His mother had died swiftly and messily in a highway accident when he was fifteen. The memory was nearly unbearable.
The man shuddered again, then froze and pressed his hand to his chest. He felt his heart miss a beat. He started to get up with the vague idea of finding a phone, finding a doctor, asking someone, anyone for help. The pain slammed him back into his chair. He wanted to loosen his collar, but when he raised his arm, a bolt stabbed at his heart.
The last thing he
saw was the singer staring confusedly toward the back of the club, then, as people realized what was happening and moved to help, bowing his head as if in shame.
1973
She was a pretty girl, though wan and fair-cheeked, with shiny black hair in two ponytails and a battered metal boom box in her arms. An earplug cord ran from the box up to her shoulder and disappeared beneath her right ponytail.
The girl stood on the roof of a gray stone office building and stared down at the cars roaring through the grubby streets, the people milling eleven stories below. She imagined being in the middle of that crowd, smelling the people’s bodies, their hot stale breath. She hoped she would land on one of them.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. In car toons or on TV shows a crowd of people always gathered below, half of them trying to save the person, the other half yelling, “Jump!” No one had even noticed her on the edge of the roof. No one would see her go off.
A gust of wind startled her, and she stumbled for her balance. She wasn’t even sure whether she had the nerve to jump yet; she certainly didn’t want to be pushed off. She pressed a button on her cassette player. The tape began, hissing its silence into her ear; then the voice filled her head. Her band, her singer, her love—the only person she loved. None of her poems expressed the agony of her life as well as the darkness and pain in his voice. He had known the same pain, she thought—not worse pain, nothing could be worse than her pain, but he knew. He understood. The excruciating beauty of his singing told her so. Yes, he understood. If she died, she would die for him. She was glad she had written him that note.
The music controlled her entire body now. It would lift her off the edge of the roof. If she was meant to live, it would carry her away; she would fly. If not, she would fall.
Now his voice filled the world. “In the fire—in the center of the fire—I am pure,” he wailed. His voice crested on the word “pure.”
She leaped. His voice followed her down. The boom box shattered when she hit the sidewalk.