She touched my inner right thigh halfway between knee and groin. Her cold fingers rubbed that spot. Just the touch caused an echo of dark delight.
She bent over me and hovered an inch away from the place she’d touched, her lunar eyes gazing into mine.
“Bite it,” I said in spite of the panic in my chest.
OVER THE NEXT FOUR days she drank from my other arm and leg, and finally from my abdomen just above the naval. I was in constant ecstasy and dread. I didn’t eat, sleep, or feel the need to relieve myself. My body was in a state of total repose except when she fed on my blood.
“We never drink much,” she told me one evening after having feasted. She was lying back with her head against my thigh, savoring her perversion. “It doesn’t take much to keep us alive. We aren’t like your people who need to kill and squander to keep themselves going. Just a cupful of fresh blood and we can live for many days.”
“Then why do you bite me every day?” I asked. There was no fear in my question. Just after the bite I felt drugged, yielding. I simply wanted to understand what she was saying.
She sat up. Her once-black eyes were now white with that strange light.
“We cannot multiply like you,” she said. “We must create our progeny. Our bite contains a drug that would quickly become a poison to most people. To some, however, those that are sweet, we can pass on the trait that makes us unique. These we call our lovers.”
“You love me?”
“I love your taste.”
“You mean like I love a good steak?”
A wave of disgust passed over her face.
“No, not death, but the life that lives in you and in me simultaneously. The feeling of being that I carry in me that is you. This, this taste is the most exquisite experience that any living creature can know.”
“What about Martin?” I asked when I got the feeling she might leave. I hated it when she left after biting me. It was as if I needed her there with me to keep the darkness away.
“Our bite, like I said, is a drug. It makes those we feed on want us. Usually they forget or remember us as a dream, but sometimes they stalk us. This is one possible consequence of the symbiosis between us. I made the mistake of taking you to the place where Martin had met me. His hunger is strong, but if I were to bite him again he would certainly die.”
“How long ago did you bite him?”
“Two years.”
“And the wound still needed a bandage?”
“Probably not. Sometimes they wear the dressing as a reminder.”
“Do you…,” I began, but she put her cold hand on my forehead and I passed out.
WHEN I AWOKE, THE morning after the last bite, the chains had been removed. On a single straight-backed chair I found my clothes—neatly folded. Lying across the soft pile was a cream-colored envelope with the name Jɬ¤ÊËÌ NÍÎ printed on it. The room was quiet and I knew somehow that Julia was gone for good.
My bites throbbed but didn’t hurt.
I rushed out of the door that led into a hallway that completely encompassed my cell. There was a door from that hall into another corridor that surrounded the first hallway. There was no furniture or even a carpet in the two buffering halls. The only other room I found was a small toilet. Seeing this I realized that my body was coming back to me and I had to go.
Dear Juvenal,
You are mine from now until the far-off day when either you or I cease to exist. That may not be for many years, even centuries. You will discover many things about yourself over the next weeks and months. Do not fear them. Do not despair. You are mine as if you came from my own womb and I am yours, though we cannot see each other for a long time. Trust in your instincts and your urges. Give in to your hungers and passions. One day we will be together again—when it is safe for both of us. These rooms are now yours. Use them as I have.
I love you,
Julia
The letter was written with a fountain pen and each word was wrought for me.
I went back into the cell and looked around. The floors were bare, unfinished pine. The bed was simple. There was only the one chair. That room could have been a poem about Julia’s life and now mine.
I sat down hearing far-off music, like cellos, in the distance. After a while I realized that this music was the singing in my blood.
After a long time of sitting there, wondering what drug she put in her mouth before biting me, I stood up and walked away from her subterranean chamber, never intending to return.
THE DAY WAS BRIGHT, glaring. Everything sounded crisp and loud. I had been in darkness for so long that my eyes hurt and the sun burned against my skin.
But there was also a crystalline quality to the air and vistas. I crossed the bridge feeling light, weightless. The people around me seemed burly and somewhat bumbling. I felt friendly toward them. I was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge before I realized that I hadn’t thought about race once that day. White, black, and brown, they all seemed the same to me.
I chided myself to snap out of it and see the political and racial landscape as I knew it was. I tried to tell myself that my imprisonment had damaged my sense of reality, that Julia had robbed me of my ability to see clearly.
But try as I might I couldn’t find fault with the men and women going on their way. And Julia…her moony eyes and slight accent brought no anger or fear, recrimination or desire for revenge.
I walked on feeling lighter and happier with each step. The world seemed to be singing some joyous hymn to its own life and destiny. The birds and bugs and even the chemical scents in the air made me feel nostalgic for something that had passed away but lived on in sense memory.
I laughed and did a little jig as I went.
I decided to walk all the way up to Harlem and Central House.
I felt like some kind of prince walking up crowded Fifth Avenue. The people were my unwitting subjects and I was beneficent royalty. In amongst them, now and again, I saw bright-colored coronas reminding me of the yellow halo that had warned me about knowledge.
When I got to Central Park, the song in the sky turned strident. It was howling, but I didn’t mind it. The trees whispered of their age and gravity. They had gone one way while I had taken the opposite direction. There was a thrumming in my blood and I was so light-headed that I had to take a seat on a park bench.
I was grinning at the people going past. Some glanced at me with worried looks on their faces. Long ago, last week, I would have said that it was because I was a black man, filled with the purpose of my race, but then I thought that they couldn’t possibly understand the experience that flowed in my veins.