THEN AGAIN, BECOMING A GOD AND BEING A GOD WERE not quite the same. And even gods knew madness at times.

I wanted simplicity and serenity without interlude. But this could not be. I decided to go to another meeting, a different one, where there would be little or no chance of encountering the bane of the self-adoring sex addict.

What I did encounter was a young, tall, thin, sexy, longhaired, flat-chested girl in skintight blue jeans. There was a time when I did not like them thin and flat-chested. But time changes everything.

“You’re doing what I should’ve done,” I said to her after the meeting. She looked dead straight at me. The light of the cold sun settled in her long straight chestnut hair.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Coming here in time. Quitting in time.”

“ ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ is that it?” she said.

I couldn’t tell if the look on her face was antagonistic, suspicious, or good-natured. This is probably because it was all those things, a vacillation to and fro of all those things.

“No. I mean, I’ve wasted my life.”

I felt that these words flowed honestly from me and had much truth in them. Then I thought of the books on shelves, the ones I had written, the “postcards” of my life that attested that I had been more than a drunkard wasting away in bar after bar, drinking bottle after bottle, the postcards that attested that I had accomplished things, more than most, and that what I regretfully saw as a life of discarded years, shiftlessness, and drunkenness was in truth much more than that. Maybe that was why I kept those books around. Maybe I needed those postcards.

These thoughts shot through me in an instant. There was no noticeable pause between what I had begun to say and the words that followed: “You have yours still ahead of you. All those years to live.”

“You’ve got a face like a map,” she said.

Again, antagonistic, suspicious, or good-natured. Again, probably all those things.

I tongued and sucked my false teeth into place for what I wanted to say and I said it: “Terrestrial or celestial?”

“Both.”

Good-natured. No ambiguity, no vacillation. A good-natured look.

“Thank you,” I said.

I smiled, then she smiled too. Her teeth were pearly and perfect. I hated her for them. I wanted her for them.

We ambled from the room together. I was careful to speak calmly, easily, casually.

“Have you been coming here a long time?” She knew that I was referring to this specific meeting, at this particular room.

“Oh, for about a year or so,” she said.

That was good. It meant that she wasn’t a newcomer to the program. There was an unwritten law that there should be no interaction with newcomers in their first ninety days of sobriety that did not relate directly to the program, and especially no interaction of even the most vaguely romantic kind.

We walked slowly south on Sullivan Street. She said she was returning to work. Even in her old-fashioned Keds Champion sneakers, she was as tall as I. Wanting not to force foolish conversation, I fell silent and waited for her to say something. I was curious as to what, if anything, it would be.

“This has been the worst fucking winter,” she commented idly.

I nodded slowly, deliberately, before adding my words to hers. “Yep. It sure has.” A brief pause. Then, ruminatively: “But, then again, I guess it beats six feet under.”

Her quiet laugh was like the hint of a cough that did not come to pass.

“You live around here?” she said.

“Yeah, down a ways, below Canal.”

“Tri-Beh-Ca,” she said, in a manner that served as an open indictment of real estate agents.

“Tribeca. Treblinka. Whatever.”

This time her laugh escaped her thorax, and she smiled. “It’s nice there,” she said.

“Yeah. Springtime in Treblinka. It was a lot nicer before they ever gave it that cutesy-poo name.”

“What did they call it before then?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a great name,” she said. “They should’ve kept it.”

“Where do you work there?”

“On Greenwich. The Tribeca Film Center. The Treblinka Film Center.”

“Do you know Chiemi Karasawa? She’s got an office there. Isotope Films.”

“Oh, God, Chiemi. I love her.”

“I’ve known her more than twenty years. She’s the best.”

“Really? What’s your name?”

“Nick. Just tell her you met her friend Nick.”

“My name’s Lorna. Yeah, Chiemi’s one of the few people in that building that actually care about making movies. Real movies. The kind without the 3-D glasses and the pre-production merchandising deals. Not like the people I work for. I think she’s on the fifth floor. I’m on the fourth.”

I was in. I knew Chiemi. I was no longer a stray pervert set only on getting into those skintight blue jeans. I mean, I was. But not in her eyes, not now. I hoped.

“And what do you do there?” I asked.

“Bookkeeper. Every bit as boring as the movies they make.”

She asked me what I did, and I told her, adding that I hadn’t been doing much of it lately. She said she had heard of two of the books I had written. She didn’t say she’d read them, only that she’d heard of them. That was good enough. This was getting better as it went along. I suggested we stop for some breakfast on the way.

We managed to get a quiet corner table at Locanda Verde. I never used credit cards and I never made reservations, so I never got mistered by name in these joints. But I guess they knew me by face and could match the face with the tips, so they treated me all right. I got the uovo modenese. She got the oatmeal with grappa-stewed fruit, and we split an order of garlic potatoes. She asked for a cup of coffee and was surprised when I didn’t.

“I thought everybody in the program was a coffee junkie,” she said.

I told her that I drank more than my share of coffee, too. But I never drank it unless I could smoke with it.

“Cross-addicted,” she said with a smile.

“Cross-addicted? Vector-field-addicted,” I said with a smile of my own.

As we ate, we talked about this and that—How did she like the potatoes? Did I come here often?—with the customary reserve and politeness of two people conversing for the first time.

I mentioned something that Johnny Depp had told me about the movie business, being sure to use his name but being also sure to glide smoothly and glibly over it, as if the name were nothing more than the equivalent of “somebody” or “this guy.”

“You know him?’

“Yeah. I’m the godfather of his son.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s a good guy. A really good guy. I liked him better when he was living in France, before he moved back to Hollywood. Probably that’s because I saw more of him then.”

“I didn’t know he had a son.”

“Yeah. Jumpin’ Jack. He’s got a birthday coming up. April ninth, something like that. Getting big. Probably wouldn’t recognize me if he saw me. It’s been that long. Too long.”

I had eaten the same thing for breakfast here many times before. But never had it tasted so delicious. It was another Eucharistic meal. My newly heightened senses had lost none of their keenness.

With my fork I moved some cotechino hash through some egg yolk, raised it to my mouth, chewed it slowly—my only option—then said what I wanted to say. She was in the movie racket, even if she was just a bookkeeper with few kind words to say about the racket. But you never knew with these people. Still, I wanted to say what I wanted to say. In a way, I needed to say it.

“L.A. is a fucking disease. It’s the land of death. It’s like the Egyptians said. The Western Lands. Death.”

I imagined the taste of her blood. I would get no closer to it than that, I was sure: imagining it. That’s why it didn’t matter saying what I said. But who knew? The writer angle. Chiemi. Johnny. The garlic potatoes. Who knew? It was a good breakfast, if nothing else. I was ready to order a cappuccino to go, take care of the check, walk her down the block to where she worked, make a left, and go home.

All of a sudden I saw that she was looking at me—into me—in a way that left it all far behind, as if the morning until this very moment had never been. The writer angle, Chiemi, Johnny, the casual reserve, the breakfast, everything that had transpired or been said. It was as if a mask had suddenly been torn from me, revealing someone, or something, that had lurked behind it. That may have been true. But when my heart slowed, I saw that it was she who had torn the mask from her own face. The beauty of that face was still there. In fact, she looked more beautiful. But her now unsmiling beauty reminded me of the beauty of a big cat in the wild: a leopard daring any other creature to peer into the irresistible splendor of its eyes, at which fatal instant, the instant of eye contact, it would by nature pounce and kill.

The one with magic of her own saw into me and shocked me:

“Do you want it?”

I didn’t know exactly what she was talking about, but I knew that it was drenched with sex. My “yes” remained in me, unsaid. It seemed that neither of us knew quite what was going on here, other than that we were wading in a voluptuous but perhaps dangerous pond away from the light.

“Want what?”

She wasn’t talking about her lithe lovely body. Or rather she was. But her question cut more deeply—devastatingly, astonishingly so—than that. I could sense her looking at me as if she knew my words of ignorance were false. As if she were waiting for me to replace them with truer words.

A thousand things I might say whirled, sped, crashed through my mind. But as I dared a glance into those fatal leopardess eyes, I heard myself say only:

“How did you know?”

“There’s a look,” she said. “It’s haunted me all my life. It was the look in my father’s eyes. I was twelve, almost thirteen, when I first saw it. Maybe it was there longer, but I didn’t see it until then. The night he came into my room, tickled my belly until I was thrashing with laughter, then threw up my pajama top and sank his teeth into me. That was the night I saw it. Fourteen years ago. And every time I see his face in my mind or in my dreams, I see that look on his face.

“He died young. Killed himself. I saw that too. I mean, after he did it. I came home from school, and there he was. Looked sort of like this.” She gestured to what was left of her oatmeal and stewed fruit. “His brains or whatever the hell it was. What a fucking mess.

“I thought it would change then. I thought it would die when he did. But it didn’t. You know what’s funny? I never, ever had a single nightmare about finding him that day. How he looked and all. Nothing. Every time I see his face in my mind, every time he comes to me in my sleep, there it is. That look.

“What he did to me—and it was more than just a few bites—fucked me up good. I’ve never been with another man since him. I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. That’s where the drinking and the drugs came in: to help me break through, to help me break out. But all they really helped me do was drink more and take more drugs. I’m still a virgin. I’m still afraid of that look I once saw for real. It’s haunted me and fucked me up ever since. But at least I never saw it again in real life. Until now.”

I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. Then she asked again:

“Do you want it?”

Those dangerous leopardess eyes now seemed so limpid and vulnerable as to be about to well with tears.

“It shouldn’t be about what I want. It should be about what you want,” I said. “It should be about what’s going to help you.”

I meant every word of what I said. I really wanted to get out of there and have a smoke. I really wanted to feel my cock in her mouth. I really wanted to press myself to that little-girl’s flat-breasted body and be enwrapped in those big-girl’s long lithe legs of hers. And I really wanted the taste and life of her blood. But I meant every word of what I said.

“Help me,” she said, throwing aside the words as if they were rat-ridden refuse of worthless derision to be discarded. “Umpteen kinds of fucking therapy. God knows how many medications. Years of counseling. All this fucking sharing-and-caring program bullshit. Jung. Vibrators. Hypnosis.”

She threw away the phrase “help me” again and slowly shook her lowered head as if grinding the words underfoot. When she raised her head to speak again, tears truly were welling in her eyes.

“That look. You have it,” she said. “But on you that look doesn’t scare me. You seem like a nice guy. I feel some sort of intuitive trust in you. Don’t ask me why. None of this makes any sense.” Then she sniffled, gave a cursory little laugh. “Yeah. You seem like a nice guy who wants to drink my blood. Just like that. The usual stuff at the Norman Rockwell soda fountain.”

I smiled gently, and for a moment we smiled together. I wished I had a clean snot rag to offer her to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. That’s what nice guys do.

“Maybe you could get it all out of me,” she said. “Maybe I could break through with you. What could I lose? At this point, not a goddamned thing. The worst thing would be that I ended up running from you. Running right back to where I’ve been for all these years.”

I reminded her that I lived pretty much around the corner from where she worked, and I suggested that she come over when she got out this evening.

“It has to be at my place,” she said. “There are certain things. You’ll see what I mean.”

I never visited anybody. I had got like that slowly over the years. I simply never visited anybody. But something in me stopped me short of laying down this law to her.

“What do you mean, ‘certain things’?”

“Just certain things. I can’t have you bite me. I just can’t go there. So I need certain things.”

“I don’t want to take a blade to you or anything like that,” I lied.

“No knives. But there are certain things that I can enjoy. Certain things that I need. You’ll see.”

“I didn’t think I had any special look,” I said.

“Look at yourself in the mirror,” she said. “Take a good long look. Look at the size of your pupils. No, forget about that. Never mind the size; forget about the size. Look at the color. Your pupils don’t stay black. I mean, yeah, sometimes they’re black and sometimes they turn iridescent, like black pearl. And your irises. Who has eyes that change from blue to brown to gray to green to amber in the course of, what, half an hour? Nobody, that’s who. And it’s what I see in those eyes. You don’t look at me like you’re looking to get into my pants. I know that look like the back of my hand. Men don’t pick up on it. They don’t know there’s no entry. You look at me like what you really want is beneath my skin. I’m not talking about any of that ‘real me’ bullshit. I’m talking about the blood in my veins.”

I did not respond, but simply allowed my silence to let her know that she was right.

“That thing with the eyes. What’s that all about?” I said when my silence was done.

“A lot of molecular stuff. I tried to learn about it once. All I can remember is pigment polymers. Molecules. I’m no doctor. I don’t know. But it’s all molecules. And your molecules are going crazy.”

I ordered a cappuccino to go, took care of the check, lit a smoke as soon as we got outside, walked her down the block to where she worked. We exchanged lingering smiles. I made a left and went home. I was anxious to peer into my own eyes. I thought of the feeling of currents flowing through me that I had experienced lately, and the physical changes I had recently undergone. I thought of her.

I turned on the overhead lamp in my bathroom and pushed to its highest limit the slider on the dimmer switch that controlled the halogen lights to the left and right of the big medicine cabinet mirror. I looked into my eyes.

She was right. Even in the bright artificial light, my pupils were dilated, and I could see them turn from black to an iridescence that was like the shimmering of lustrous clouds in a moonless sky, then once again turn black. But it was the slow-shifting circular rainbow reflected in the membranes of my irises that first frightened then fascinated me.

Sunglasses, I thought. I had a few pairs lying around. I should start wearing them. A shame, I thought, because my eyes seemed less sunken, and the dark bags under them and the wrinkles around them seemed fainter. I mumbled words from one of Ezra Pound’s cantos: “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.” But vanity seemed part of the pleasure of my restoration to youth.

Those eyes, those fucking eyes. Had they got like this with the improvement in my sight? Molecules, as she said, molecules. All interrelated. There were no eyes like these. Prismic eyes. Magical eyes. The eyes of a fucking god coming into being.

I shut off the lights, sat with my cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette. I reflected on my fine fortune, to have had this new aspect of my metamorphosis, the radiant wonder of my new eyes, brought to my attention not by one of the flotskies at the Reade Street bar, but by her.

It was at that moment, more than three months after I had written him, that I had a call from Olivier Ameisen, the author of the book Heal Thyself, with whom I had been so eager to speak about the power of the drug baclofen to cure alcoholism. Having not heard back from him, I had wondered if he was laid out drunk somewhere. Quite to the contrary, he was in fine fettle and busy as hell, lecturing and trying to raise money for sanctioned testing that would provide the medical establishment with clinical proof of baclofen’s efficacy. He was up against a lot. Baclofen was an old drug, first synthesized in 1962 and long used as a treatment for muscular dystrophy before Olivier’s discovery that it was a cure for addiction. The trouble was, its patent had run out, so the pharmaceutical industry, which controls most of the funding for drug testing, stood to make no money from baclofen, no matter how miraculous-seeming and far-reaching its ability to suppress addictive cravings might be. It was a matter of life or death or the cash register, and the cash register was all that mattered. This problem was compounded by the tendency of those who call themselves “addiction specialists” to wish to perpetuate rather than cure their patients’ addiction. Again, this was simple economics. An addict who was cured of his addiction had no need to weekly feed the pockets of an addiction counselor, who thus preferred prescribing far less effective medications, such as naltrexone and topiramate, or even medications such as acamprosate that have been shown to be no better than placebos. Baclofen had an astounding success rate, well over ninety percent, better than the failure or relapse rate of any other known treatment.

My desire to take baclofen was now somewhat less compelling than it had been when I first reached out late last year. I was, after all, no longer drinking. And the dysphoria—a part of the underlying chemistry of addiction also alleviated by baclofen—that once had darkened my days had also been lifted by my regeneration. But at the same time, I had just witnessed and knew how deeply and insidiously alcoholism was ingrained in me. If I wanted to enjoy my new life, I must remain sober. Baclofen could do me no harm. It could only enhance and protect what other, more mysterious if no less complex chemistry had already brought about.

We talked a long time, and I grew more and more impressed with him, his knowledge, and his goodness as our talk went on. He was calling from Paris, on his own dime and time; and he spoke more like a human being than a medical doctor, and communicated scientific and other unsimple matters so well that I had to remind myself that English was to him a second language. We concluded by discussing the best way I could go about getting a prescription for baclofen in New York, this city he knew well and in which he had practiced cardiology, this city whose medical establishment was so inimical to baclofen as a treatment for addiction. Was there some hospital, some institution, some doctor he knew? He asked me if I had an internist, a personal general practitioner, whom I trusted. I told him that I did. He said to go to him, and if he cared about me, if he gave a damn whether I lived or died, he would give me the necessary prescription. I told him that I would make an appointment with my doctor and send a copy of Olivier’s book along with a letter via FedEx overnight. I promised to call Olivier after the appointment to tell him how I fared.

I called my doctor’s office and asked for the next available first appointment of the day. I never visited doctors unless it was their first appointment of the day. I was lucky. There was one open in less than two weeks. I got down my copy of Olivier’s book and hastily wrote a letter addressed to my physician:

I am hoping that you will have a chance to look at this book.

I had a long transatlantic conversation yesterday with the author, Olivier Ameisen, who is presently in Paris.

Since reading this book, and especially after speaking with Olivier, I have been convinced that the baclofen treatment he propounds is the only effective treatment for alcoholism.

He told me that if I had a personal physician whom I trusted and whom I felt cared about my fate, I could then easily obtain the necessary prescriptions.

There has never been an adverse reaction to, or negative effect of, this drug, which is believed to be safer than aspirin, and whose dosages are simple to establish.

I sent Olivier a detailed list of the medications I take, including the Valium, and their dosages, and he assured me that there was not the slightest risk of interaction with any of them.

Olivier said that if you should have anything you should wish to ask him, you should feel free to do so. He can be reached at the number you will find on the inside front page of the book. He also said that you could find his papers online at PubMed.

I have an appointment to see you a week from this coming Friday, and I am hoping that by then you will have had ample opportunity to review this material.

I apologize for the length of this letter, but this is extremely important to me.

I wrote down Olivier’s number where I said it would be, then read through the letter as hastily as I had drafted it. The grossly grammarless phrase “whom I trusted and whom I felt cared” was set aright, to “whom I trusted and who I felt cared,” and the should-dense mess of “if you should have anything you should wish to ask him, you should feel free to do so” was recast so that only one should remained. There was a time when I would not have made such slovenly mistakes, not even in slipshod haste. I had gone far too long without writing. Far too long. I felt like an imbecile, and I denounced myself for it. Then the god in me rebuked me for this, telling me that I had caught and fixed my errors as quickly as I had committed them, and negligences such as this had probably always crept into my writing without my even being aware of them. At least this time my awareness was sharp and quick. I would err no more. My heightening sensibilities would see to that.

I signed the corrected letter, folded it, placed it in the book, prepared a FedEx form, put the book with the letter into a package, and made it to Mail Boxes Etc. on Greenwich Street in ample time for the last FedEx pickup of the day. On the way back, I bought a banana from the vendor on the corner of Chambers Street and ate it as I walked home, wondering about the night to come and the nature of “certain things” to be made known.

My haunted virgin angel, long, lean Lorna, lived up in Hell’s Kitchen, or Clinton as they liked to call it now. A third-story walkup in a decent enough old building on West Forty-ninth Street. Night was just beginning to fall when she buzzed me in. The three flights had no effect on my pulse or breath.

I gave her a bunch of yellow roses with red-edged petals. She seemed truly surprised, truly pleased. She was wearing an unbuttoned shawl-collar beige cashmere cardigan over a man’s ribbed white athletic undershirt. I wondered for an instant if the sweater had been left unbuttoned for my sake, to show off that irresistible flat chest in that tight, thin boyish undershirt. But I figured she had not. Flat-chested women, no matter how beautiful, do not very often believe just how sexy their barely-there breasts can be.

My eyes were then immediately drawn to a doorway draped with thick black velvet. From beyond that doorway a dark ruby light emitted a peeking blush that was dimly discernible at the hem folds of the heavy black curtain.

“I almost asked you if you wanted a drink,” she said.

“Old habits die hard.”

“I didn’t have a chance to shop after work. I really don’t have anything here.”

Oh, yes you do, my dear, oh, yes you do.

“We can order something if you like.”

I wondered aloud if Shun Lee delivered to West Forty-ninth Street. But I wasn’t really hungry. No, that’s not quite true. What is true is that my hunger for Shun Lee was eclipsed by a different, deeper hunger.

“I’m good,” I said. “Maybe in a little bit.”

“You’re sure? You don’t want anything?”

“I want to know what’s on the other side of that curtain.” I smiled.

She seemed oddly hesitant, as if she had been living here with this red-lighted curtained-off room of hers and nobody had ever before been curious about it. And come to think of it, why was that red light on if the drape was drawn as if to hide it?

“I want to show you,” she said. “It’s just that since we were talking this morning, I…” Her words trailed to silence.

“I just want you to feel comfortable,” I lied. Or maybe it was the truth. I did want her to feel comfortable. But it wasn’t the only thing I wanted. “I want you to feel better.” More sweet truth with the peach pit of a lie at its center.

She took me by the hand, led me to the big black velvet curtain, and drew it aside. The room was small. That dim red light came from a single bare overhead bulb. And there it was, overwhelming and oversized in this underwhelming, undersized room.

It was the big X of a Saint Andrew’s cross made of two planks of wood bolted together diagonally.

My first thought was: how does she keep that fucking thing upright? Then I saw that it was not upright. It was leaning against a wall with the bottom, about a foot from the wall, fixed to the floor with big fat galvanized nails, and the top fixed to the painted brickwork of the wall with big fat masonry nails. It looked as if it stood upright because the incline was so slight. At the top and bottom far-corner ends of the two planks were big fat old-looking steel eye-lags. Hanging from the top lags, one from each, were pairs of old-looking Smith & Wesson chain-linked handcuffs. Hanging from the bottom lags, one from each, were pairs of old-looking Smith & Wesson chain-linked leg irons, with the chains knotted to reduce their length.

I put my hand on the cross as if assaying its integrity. That’s when I saw the three or four whips of different sizes in a supple heap, like dead snakes, in the corner of the room. Real whips. Leather whips.

“Did you make this yourself?” I asked, moving my hand and my eyes over the grayed and slightly cracked and warped two-by-twelve lumber.

I suspected that she was indeed its maker. Whoever did make it wasn’t a carpenter. It was nigger-rigged. No notching of the beams where they traversed. No real joinery. No knee-brace struts. No joisting. Just nails, no screws except for the threaded eye-lags, which had probably been driven in, somewhat crookedly, by hammer blows followed by turns of a screwdriver shank or some other rod-like object placed through the eyeholes. Then again, nigger-rigged or not, it was one hell of an imposing piece of work.

“Yeah.”

“You want to show me how you use it?”

“Sure. Let me go change. You sure you don’t want anything? Coffee? Anything?”

“I’m good.”

“All right. I’ll be right back.”

Standing there by that certain thing, I realized that I might be the one who was supposed to get spread-eagled and cuffed to it. That would fit in with the father thing. The humiliation and punishment of the father-surrogate. Ah, yes, the Reverend Thomas Fuller, who gave us the adage “It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.” In the same seventeenth-century book in which he said that, a book about his travels in Jerusalem, a book whose title I recalled only as a strange one, he also said, writing of the good old days of crucifixion—and why did I remember these things, when at the same time, entering a store, I could not remember what I had come there to buy, or to boost?—and I believe these were his exact words: “Hereupon a substitute or surrogate was provided for him to bear his Cross.”

Could the same be said now of Lorna’s father? Did she think that I was to be his provided surrogate in her longed-for freedom from the haunting he had inflicted on her? There were moments this morning when she could have been talking about anything. The thirst for her blood that she saw in me might have meant that I was the right and ordained sacrificial victim. “Maybe you could get it all out of me,” she had said. That could have meant anything. For all I knew, her father had turned her into a lipstick lesbian with intent to kill. She said she had gone to change. What the fuck was she changing into? A cuirass, mail gloves, and an executioner’s hood?

She returned barefoot and naked under a transparent vinyl raincoat that reached to just above her knees. She went to the cross. She positioned one bare foot then the other, so that, bowing down, she could adjust and clasp the leg irons above her ankles. She braced herself and stood. With one hand she handcuffed the wrist of her other hand. She raised her free hand to touch the opposite set of cuffs. She spoke over her shoulder to me:

“Could you do this one for me? I can do it myself sometimes but it’s a bitch.”

I handcuffed her wrist and stepped back to look at her and the way her long, slender limbs were stretched to form an open X that conformed to the X of the Saint Andrew’s cross to which she was shackled and pressed hard against its slight incline. The tautened curve of her spine and the tension clench of her buttocks were visible through the clear raincoat. I began to like the dim red light of this room.

“Why the raincoat?” I asked.

“A long time ago I read that the cops used to throw raincoats over people before beating them with rubber hoses because it left no marks or scars. It turned out to be true. I don’t like scars.”

She spoke with her face hanging slightly forward and resting sideways on the brick wall in the cleft between the cross-beams.

“Why a clear raincoat?”

“I like the way it feels. I like the way it exposes me.” Without a breath of transition, she said, “Get the blacksnake.”

“Where is it?”

She moved her head a little in the direction of the nest of whips. I didn’t know one whip from another. She seemed to sense this.

“It’s the biggest one.”

I lifted it by its thickest part. Its narrowing braided leather, a good deal of which lay on the floor as I held the thick handle near my hip, appeared to be about six feet long.

“I clipped the fall and cracker,” she said, as if making clear to me something about this. I had not the vaguest notion of what she was talking about, but I asked her why.

“Too much. They hurt too much. Way too much.”

I instinctively moved farther from her with the whip in my hand. She sensed this and she asked me to go farther, to just within the doorway.

“All right,” she said. “Go for the center of the raincoat. Stay away from the legs.”

When she said that, I looked at her bare slender ankles and bare arched feet in the dim red light. I wanted to rape her.

I raised the whip and cast my arm forward to let it unfurl. It was not as easy as I thought. There was not enough force. The end of the whip did not even reach her. It just drooped awkwardly to the floor in midair. I thought of the summer days when I was a little boy trying to perform lariat tricks and lasso dogs with a length of old clothesline.

I reeled the narrowing plaited leather into a loop, which I hooked with one finger of the hand that grasped the girth of the whip’s stock. Unhooking my finger and heaving forward with a much faster and more violent pitching motion, I heard the loud smack of the whip against her vinyl-covered body, seeing it strike her at the small of her back. She uttered a sound that struck me as being more an expulsion of anticipation than an expression of its fulfillment. I struck again, with even faster and more violent movement. This time she cried out as the lash struck her hard below the shoulder blades. Her cry was intense.

“Get me something for my mouth,” she said.

“What should I get?”

“A facecloth. A wet facecloth. Anything.”

I looked for the bathroom and found it. On my way there, I passed her bedroom, looked in, and saw her pretty pink cotton panties lying on the bed. I wanted to put these in her mouth instead of the facecloth. I ran them under cool water, wrung them in my hand, rolled them somewhat, and took them to her open mouth. I watched her bite into them, and again I wanted to rape her. Maybe I had not stopped wanting to rape her since seeing her bound ankles and arched feet.

When I next cast the whip, it was as forceful as an act of rape. I was aiming for her buttocks, but the end of the whip passed hard and with angry noise across the backs of her thighs directly below her buttocks. I heard a muffled yelp through the dampened panties that were jammed in her mouth.

I was getting used to the physics of it. The power of the propulsion had to extend not merely from the shoulder of the arm that whipped. It had to begin in the heel of the foot on the side of the body that whipped. I felt the strength and velocity of my strikes, as well as their accuracy, increase. By the time I finally hit the meat of her ass, my upper arm was growing sore and tired.

This was strenuous shit. I could see how doing it with any regularity would give you biceps like a those of a pickaxe ditchdigger, but probably also the back ailment that came with the muscle.

It was a good cardiovascular workout as well. Fuck those assholes who went to the gym every morning. What was that stupid fucking country song? Well, fuck that. Whip an angel good morning. That was the way to go.

Yes, I was sore and I was tired. But what I saw made it all but impossible for me to lay down that whip.

The restrained writhings and jolts of her body drove me more wild with lust than if they had been allowed free rein and unfettered abandon. And her juices, which I had earlier noticed trickling down her leg in thin tendrils of chrism, had become a cascade that spilled to the floor from between her outstretched legs.

Her muffled screams grew less fierce. They became merely low muffled groans, as if she were spent. It was then that I decided that I would in fact rape her, in my way. I walked to the cross and ran my hand up her raincoat to the heat of her drenched cunt. She made a sound that I could not interpret. She seemed unable to spit the panties from her mouth. I worked the lower part of her raincoat up to her waist, and I bunched it tight and fast in the close cranny I forced between her and the center of the cross. I beheld her like that, and I backed away and shot the whip through the air with all my gathered might, slashing one of her buttocks and the back of one of her thighs. The sound was like that of a loud sudden hiss from hell. Something worse than a muffled scream shot from her gagged mouth.

I stood and watched the slashes on her raw flesh begin to bleed, slowly and slightly at first, then more copiously. I tossed aside the whip and knelt behind her. I sucked the warm running blood from her buttock and thigh. The more freely it ran, the more deeply I sucked. It was delicious. I drank until the flow was greatly diminished, than I ran my tongue down her legs, stopping to lick, kiss, and savor here and there along the way, following the lacy trails of blood that led as far as the slender ankles and heels of the lovely arched feet of her captivity.

We were both spent, she draped on her Saint Andrew’s cross, I lying at its base on my back, looking up through the dim diffuse red light. For a moment it occurred to me to leave her there. I had done what she had asked me not to do. I had lashed open her bare skin. I did not know what hostile censure was to come if I yanked those cotton dainties from her mouth. But I had to do what I had done. I had to open her skin to let flow the sweet warm ichor from beneath it.

I lay awhile longer, then rose. I was ravenously hungry. I was thinking of Shun Lee as much as of the damnation, exculpation, and calls for expiation I faced. I removed the saliva-drenched panties from her mouth. Her face was flushed, her eyes half closed, strands of her long soft hair clung to her sweating forehead, cheeks, and neck. I asked her where the keys to the cuffs and leg irons were. She seemed too exhausted to speak. This was a good sign, at least for now, I thought. She gestured with her head to a small round wooden end table in the corner of the room near the heap of whips. There was a little crochet-lace doily atop it, and the keys were on that doily.

I unlocked the handcuffs, gently massaging the reddened areas of her wrists, to show that I cared. I unlocked the leg irons, stroked the reddened marks above her ankles, again to show her that I cared, but really because it gave me pleasure to fondle the tendons near the base of her slender calf muscles. I did not touch her where I had slashed her, as I felt that any show of caring here would only serve to bring further attention to my misdeeds. She remained silent, and I took this, though awkwardly, to be a good sign.

“How about that Chinese food?” I said.

“Sure.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t care,” she said. “You pick it.” Her voice had a vague, lifeless, bereaved quality to it. She walked very slowly to the bathroom. I heard water running. I knew that she was washing blood from herself, maybe from her raincoat as well. Then I heard the shower running.

By then I had ordered the food. I lit a cigarette and looked for something I could use as an ashtray. In the kitchen cupboard I found a pair of two miniature Asian bowls, like the ones they give you to mix the cheap soy sauce with the fake wasabi for sushi in Japanese joints. Fuck it. Function follows form. I would be sure to wash it out good before I left. To show that I was a nice guy, and that I cared. If she didn’t end up throwing me out before I got around to it.

I felt wonderful. Even the soreness and tiredness induced by my exertions were giving way to a balm-like inner restfulness. Even my anxiety over the wrath of Lorna became dreamlike and inconsequential. My communion with her, and my fill of her succoring blood, had brought new rejuvenation, new life; and with every renewal this rejuvenation and life became stronger and more magical within me. I looked forward to the Chinese food and my next breath with greater anticipation and appreciation than the wretched and the self-appointed inheriting meek of the earth look forward to the envisioned glories of their eternal paradise.

She appeared clean and lovely, in flannel pajamas, her lovely long hair freshly towel-dried.

“How do you feel?” I asked her calmly, as if we were two souls merged and lingering for a single infinite breath. Her wrath would fall unheard and unfelt on one, a god coming into being, who would use it only to rinse and refresh his palate before the Chinese food got here.

“I feel fucking great,” she said.

She smiled beatifically. At that moment I respected and cherished her with all my being, and her happiness was my happiness. I was proud of her, and I was proud of myself for making her feel as she did.

“Don’t worry, I’ll wash this,” I said, grinding my cigarette butt into the little Asian bowl thing.

The Chinaman came. As usual, I had ordered too much stuff, almost everything that I had been craving from that joint for a long, long time. Roast pungent duck, steamed dumplings, prawns with garlic and scallions, twice-cooked pork, dry shredded crispy beef, and more. She got us cans of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke out of the fridge.

As we ate, we talked. As it should be, the talking was secondary to the eating, but on this night they went together well. The talk was natural and easy.

The red light was still leaking from the edges of the drawn black curtain at the doorway of the room where we had spent the last hour. I asked her if she always kept that light on.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Like a night-light, sort of.”

“Who usually does this?” I said.

“Buys me Chinese take-out?”

“Whips you.”

“Sometimes I pay somebody. Usually a chick. Sometimes I do it myself.”

“Why do you pay?”

“Anonymity. I like the anonymity. They don’t know me, I don’t know them, and that’s that.”

“And why usually a chick?” Maybe she was a lipstick lesbian after all.

“They’re gentler. And they seem to understand more what’s going on.”

“And how do you manage to do it by yourself?”

“It’s easy. That free right hand after I lock myself up, I use the crop. That’s the short, stiffer one. It’s got a popper, a little leather loop, on the end, but the popper doesn’t really hurt because it’s pretty hard to crop yourself hard over your own shoulder. Same with the Rose whip, the other short one, the one with the separate leather thongs, the one that’s sort of a candy-ass cat-o’-nine-tails: softer leather, no knots in the lashes. Though I guess you could knot them if you wanted to. I don’t know. The leather strips on that one may not be strong enough for knots that would last.”

“I’d like to see you do that. Whip yourself with that crop. I’d like to sit there and jerk off and watch you do that.”

“Not tonight. I’m beat.”

“Do you come when you do this? I couldn’t tell.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever come in my life. The nuns told us that women didn’t have orgasms, only men had orgasms. I know that’s not true. But I still don’t know if I’ve ever had one.”

“You had something going on there when those juices were flowing.”

“I had something going on there when you pulled up the raincoat and cracked me. I had something going on there when I felt you sucking the blood from where you cracked me.”

“I couldn’t resist. This morning, when you were talking, saying you knew what I wanted—then tonight I just, I don’t know, I—”

“It was perfect.”

“What you were talking about, breaking through, getting rid of that haunting, that curse you were talking about, I was afraid I might be doing more harm than good.”

“No,” she said, slowly, ruminatively. “I’m pretty sure you did more good than harm. We’ll see. I feel great now, but I don’t know how I’ll feel later, how I’ll feel tomorrow night, or the night after. We’ll see. Right now it’s better not to think about it.”

“I’m sorry about the marks.”

“It’s nothing. It already looks like just a couple of nasty scratches. And I’ve got so much vitamin E on them that I’m stuck to the seat of my pj’s. But, no, I really don’t like scars. If we ever end up fooling around again, we’ve got to keep that in mind and figure something out.”

We ate awhile in silence. It was amazing. It was like the Eucharistic croissant raised to the realm of golden heavens.

“What does it feel like?”

“Whipping you?”

“Drinking blood.”

“It feels like I’m closer to the beauty and fresh-blossoming life force that I crave than I could ever otherwise be. It feels like I’m one with it, drawing it into me; drinking everything beautiful about it and being transformed and renewed by it. Like a miracle. Like a sweet, delicious, transporting miracle. Lust, love, and life all at once, with an intensity that’s almost ecstatic. It’s great.”

“And what about those eyes?”

“What about those eyes? Like you said: molecules. The blood is regenerating me. I feel younger, stronger. That intensity, that ecstasy. I have your blood—you—in me now. There’s bound to be some kind of molecular change. And it all feels good. It all feels great.

“The most renowned scientists alive don’t even know how many trillions of cells there are in their own bodies, in any body; and every single one of those unknown trillions of cells, every one of them, has hundreds or thousands or millions of molecules. You’ve got almost three hundred million molecules of hemoglobin in one single red blood cell alone. Platelets, plasma, this, that, the other thing. Nobody really knows what the hell’s going on in there. These scientists can talk about molecules all they want, but they don’t know shit. At least I know that whatever’s going on with the molecules in me is good. It’s better than good. It’s great. I can feel it.”

“The way you describe it, you make me want to do it,” she said.

“But that’s the thing. You’ve already got it. You don’t need it. The essence of that young flesh and soul, that blue sky, that spirit of illimitable youth. You would just be drinking from yourself. Maybe you don’t feel it now. Maybe you need to break through and let the light out, like you say. But it’s there. It’s in you. It’s you.”

“I sure don’t feel it.”

“You will. That stuff you do in there. You’re not punishing yourself. You’re trying to drive something out of yourself. And it’s the dark, not the light, that you’re trying to expel. Some people cling to their misery. You’re not one of those. Believe me, you gave me more of you tonight than you give yourself. One of these days, you’ll feel the magic that’s in you, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll know the gift in you.”

“Does it feel like—I mean to you, what you’re talking about—does it feel like anything I might’ve ever felt?”

“Well, it sure ain’t like booze, I can tell you that much.” I ate and I thought if there was anything to which I could compare it, even remotely. “Love, maybe. But a kind of love you can’t imagine.” This sounded stupid. It sounded vague and senselessly airy. We ate a little more, saying nothing. Maybe it was the ethereal play of the food on my senses that brought me to say what I said next.

“I used to think that opium was the greatest thing in the world. It turns the world and every breath of this finite life to a poetry so pure it’s wordless and soundless. There’s nothing like it. Nothing comes close. Yeah. I used to think opium was the greatest thing in the world. In fact, I’d love to be able to smoke it again. The real stuff. I hate to travel these days. The only way I want to travel is internally. The only places I want to go don’t involve crowds or security checks. None of that. If I never saw the inside of another airport or airplane, that’d be good by me. But if I ever do travel again, it’s going to be to smoke opium.”

“You make me want to do that too, the way you talk about it.”

“Well, maybe you will. Maybe we’ll do it together one of these days.”

“So, that’s what drinking blood is like?”

“No. I said I used to think it was the best thing in the world. I used to think it was la chiave d’oro, the key of gold. Now I know that blood is. The right blood. Blood like yours. Smoking opium can let you dream of youth and love and the magic and poetry in the air. Drinking blood can give it to you. For real.”

“But those eyes,” she said. “They’re otherworldly. They’re beautiful, amazing; but they’re so otherworldly.”

She had said that morning that she had seen in her father’s eyes what she saw in mine. I did not want her mind to be drawn back to the ruinous darkness into which her father had long ago cast her. So I said nothing. I offered her some of the pork that I had just begun to eat. Her senses would not discern the subtleties of flavor or experience the synesthetic evocations mine did, but it was downright delicious enough to thrill any palate. An antidote for any wayward ramblings through the dark. She loved it. She was letting out light every time she opened her mouth, and she didn’t even know it.

At home, blissfully sleepy, I brought to bed with me a book I had purchased some time ago but, as much as I looked forward to reading it, had not got around to it: the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Although Beckett was one of my favorite writers, I was not as interested in these early letters, from 1929 through 1940, as I was in those of his later years. But still I was sure that there would be much here of interest and illumination; and it was always better, or so it seemed, to start at the beginning. Besides, when you got right down to it, I had no choice. Cambridge University Press had not yet published the second volume in this daunting undertaking.

It was the wrong book to bring to bed. I don’t know how much this hard-bound book of almost nine hundred pages weighed, but it made for highly unwieldy reading abed. I laid it aside, shut the light, and let myself drift off. While drifting, I encountered good old Keith. At first I wondered what he was doing in the passway through which I drifted. Then I remembered that I had been listening earlier to “Let It Bleed”:

Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on,

Yeah, and if you want it, baby, well, you can bleed on me.

Then I remembered the day’s reveries and talk about opium and eyes, and how on the night we met, at a dinner one spring night about a dozen years ago at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris, he politely asked someone sitting between us to tell me that I had “the most beautiful opiated eyes” he’d ever seen. I may have been directly back from Asia at the time. I don’t recall. What I do recall is that when I left Keith’s suite at the Plaza Athénée at dawn, I had met one of the most remarkable gentlemen I have ever encountered, and this esteem for him, and my fondness for him, grew steadily over the ensuing years as we grew closer.

Though he had spent much of his adult life seeing the world through hotel room windows, albeit the windows of very nice hotel rooms, he did not accept the fate of a prisoner of fame. To the extent that he could get away with it, he did and went as he pleased, wherever and whenever. There was a good deal of common ground in our far-rambling conversation, but there was little doubt that fortune and circumstance had afforded him a greater worldliness and ability to indulge it than me, though he never flaunted it or seemed even to look upon it as having much value. I liked the fact that he considered the library in his Connecticut estate to be one of the very special comforts and chambers of his home and life.

I thought of those old tales, though I knew they were not true, of his having full blood transfusions in Switzerland to renew and detoxify himself. I also thought of an article I had seen in a popular health magazine a few years ago titled “Why Is Keith Richards Still Alive?” I did not bring it to his attention, feeling it to be a reprehensibly vulgar and mean-spirited question to put forth about anyone but a detested personal enemy or a politician.

As these thoughts merged with my slow, soft descent into slumber, I felt that I should talk with someone about this sublime but strange matter of new life and the blood of blossoming young beauty. Someone who was not judgmental. Someone who had been around, who had done, seen, and learned of things that most were unaware of.

That person would be Keith, I told myself as I slipped into the sweet untroubled sleep of the debtless, wantless, and sinless.

There was no telling how long I slept in this deep and dreamless state. When I woke, the morning light was rising full and the telephone was ringing. It was Melissa. She wanted to know if I felt like getting together tonight. There was nothing I should like more, I told her. She said she had to put in an hour or so at the library, then run a few errands, and could be down here by half past six or so. That would be great, I told her. She lingered on the telephone awhile, as people often do, without having anything of consequence to say. She spoke of the weather, of how it was now spring but it still felt like winter. She spoke of a documentary film she had seen the night before at the Film Forum. She asked me what I had done last night.

“Nothing,” I told her, seeing in my mind that dim red light and that Saint Andrew’s cross, tasting in my mind the feast of that Chinese food, tasting in my mouth and throat the residue of Lorna’s blood. “I started to read the collected letters of Samuel Beckett, but the book was too damned heavy to read in bed.”

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “Something I think you’ll like.”

“And what might that surprise be?”

“You’ll see. If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, then, would it?”

“So you’ll be keeping me in a state of anticipation all day.”

“It’s nothing really. It’s something that has to do with my legs. Something I think you’ll like.”

“Ah, now you’ll be keeping me in a state of excitement all day.”

“I read Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing last year.”

“Great stuff. ‘The Calmative.’ What’s the other one? ‘The End.’ Yeah, ‘The End.’ Great stuff. Unbelievable stuff.”

“Did you ever see Waiting for Godot, or did you ever read it?”

“I hate that shit. His plays suck. All of them except for Krapp’s Last Tape.”

“Why does writers’ worst stuff become their best-known stuff?”

“Because people are fucking idiots. The stupider it is, the more they eat it up. With the highfalutin idiots, the more they’re told it’s art, the more they eat it up. Stupid shit, stupid people. The secret to success.”

“So I’ll see you later on.”

“Have you noticed anything weird about my eyes lately?”

“You have great eyes.”

“I mean the way they change colors.”

“Yeah, it’s really something. Isn’t that what they call pers in French? Pers eyes. Eyes that keep changing colors.”

She was as good with that one as she was with Hesse’s name. She didn’t pronounce the s at the end. But she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Pers eyes change between brown and green, or like the colors of the sea, or something like that. You haven’t noticed anything weird about the way my eyes change colors?”

“Are you stoned?”

“No.” I laughed. “Weird guy, weird eyes, I guess.”

“Who was that saint that carried around that plate with his eyeballs on it?”

“Oh, man, I forget. Those guys were always carrying around platters with some part of them on it. The broads too. Come to think of it, the only one I remember is Saint Agnes. I read this book once, some sort of sex manual from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Revealed. Something like that. And the guy who wrote it started talking about women afflicted with Saint Agnes syndrome or something like that, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. Then years later I found out that Saint Agnes carried around a platter with a pair of tits on it, because that was the way she was supposed to have been martyred, by having her tits cut off. All this just to say a woman was flat-chested.”

I thought of Lorna, my beautiful virgin flat-chested leopardess and her cross of Saint Andrew’s martyrdom. Then I realized I had the wrong saint.

“No,” I said, “not Saint Agnes. It was Saint Agatha. She was the one with the tits on the platter. Saint Agatha of Sicily, not Saint Agnes.”

“And oh yeah, the eyeballs, that was a female saint too,” Melissa said. “Saint Lucy. She was the one with the eyeballs on a golden plate.”

“Who came up with this shit? Who were these sick fucks who concocted these stories? It’s like some fat kike Hollywood mogul or something: ‘All this martyrdom shit is getting tired. These martyrs are getting to be a fucking dime a dozen. We need some pizzazz. We need to sell some popcorn. That blonde. Let’s cut off her tits before we kill her. And that other one, what’s her name, that bitch with the bedroom peepers. Let’s rip out her eyeballs before she gets it.’ Is there some kind of art historian at school you could ask? I really want to know. The first Christian blue plate special. I want to know which saint and what was on his or her platter.”

“You’re on a roll. What did you have for breakfast?”

“I just woke up. Slept like a baby. I’ll probably just go with a Mexican breakfast, cup of coffee and a cigarette. What about you?”

“A bagel.”

“We’re livin’, kid. So before you run off to find that tits-on-a-plate professor, tell me more about this surprise.”

“No.”

“Come on, just a hint.”

“It’s something you can sink your teeth into. Something you can sink your teeth through.”

“Oh, man,” I said, then gave up.

She was in a sprightly mood, and I was feeling great. That cup of coffee was just a few minutes away.

“Did you ever think of killing yourself?” I said. The words just came out.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“No. Have you?”

“Never?”

“Maybe once when I made a cake for a school bake sale in the fourth grade and it fell apart and I tried to put it back together again with toothpicks and it came apart again even worse than before and everybody laughed at me. That may have been my suicide moment. I was saved by the intervention of my mom and dad buying me a cake with buttercream frosting at the corner bakery, which I palmed off as my own, blaming my previous failure on a faulty oven knob. I didn’t really think of killing myself. I just cried to my mom that I wanted to die. Which was pure schoolgirl melodrama. I was no good in the school play, either.”

I made a sound between a grunt and a laugh.

“Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering what you were doing with that suicide thing in your bag the other night.”

“What suicide thing?”

“That brochure. That what-a-difference-a-day-makes thing?”

“A friend of mine at school. She’s getting pretty spooky. She doesn’t talk it, not directly. But it’s getting to where it seems like just a matter of when and how. I really like her. She’s a really good kid. But as it turned out, that brochure was just a plug for an overnight walk to help prevent suicide. Something like that. Don’t ask me how a bunch of people marching down a street at three o’clock in the morning is supposed to help somebody a mile away not commit suicide. But there was also something in there about an informational meeting, but you had to register, your address and phone number and everything, which means they’ll probably drive you to suicide by bugging you for donations. I did learn that, according to that brochure anyway, suicide is the third biggest cause of death among teenagers and the second biggest cause of death among college students.”

“What’s the first?”

“They didn’t say. That’s probably a different brochure.”

“A lot of broken cakes out there, I guess.”

“You’d like her. She likes cutting herself a lot.”

“Bring her down sometime. I’ve never made a cocktail of two bloods. Is she pretty?”

“Shut up.”

I was smiling, enjoying the fact that she couldn’t see it over the telephone as I hung up. Actually it was an idea not without appeal. Two girls, four thighs. A nip from one, a sip from the other, long drinks in the dark from soft young legs entwined.

This brought to mind the fifty-milliliter sample vials, decanted from bottles of rare liquor, I had ordered from Oxygénée in England. A pre-ban Absinthe de Ville Chabrolle. A pre-ban Absinthe Gempp Pernod. And the one I really wanted, an extinct tea liqueur that was older by far than the century-old absinthes: a pre-1850 Crème de Thé from the cellars of Badminton House.

Why would a sober man, a man who intended to remain sober, be making exorbitant purchases of uncommon booze? I could tell myself that it was the collector in me. I could tell myself that I was making investments. There were, in fact, in my closet bottles of great-vintage Margaux and pre-ban absinthe, even a bottle of 1811 Cognac Napoléon Grande Fine Champagne Reserve, all of which had remained sealed and undrunk through numerous mad and mindless benders. But the three little vials of rarest booze I had ordered, as well as several wine futures I had bought, were not purchased, like the bottles in my closet, when the idea of sobriety was nothing more than an occasional fancy. These, the little vials and the futures, were bought in what I felt to be the full and never to be sundered embrace of sobriety. The snake in the alky’s skull. The self-deceit so consummate. Was I methodically, meticulously planning, as if in somnambulance, a bender to end all benders? In a few days I would be seeing the doctor, and was glad that I might likely be leaving his office with a prescription for baclofen. If it was not in my pocket when I left, I would go to one or another of those walk-up doctors’ offices in Chinatown and get a prescription there.

I relished a smoke and the hot strong brew lightened with half-and-half of my petit-déjeuner mexicain. I relished looking forward to spending the night with my sweet Melissa. I relished the little quiver of boyish excitement the prospect of her “surprise” presented. I relished the slow serene progress of drifting from this morning to this night that lay ahead of me, each breath of it a relishing to come. I relished the eidetic image of Lorna stretched and gagged in ecstasy on her Saint Andrew’s cross in the dim red whorehouse light of the poky black-curtained sanctum of her Hell’s Kitchen flat. I relished the sense of strength and renewed life and peace that ran through me like a soft current of spring brook water, reflecting the glistening twinkling light of godliness. I relished the very relishing of it all, and the growing sense of the all within me.

I placed a pair of old Ray-Ban sunglasses—more than thirty years old, in fact, in a style no longer made—on the kitchen counter beside the plastic cup that held my fake teeth. Two things now, instead of one thing, to which to attend before venturing out into the day: one to put in, the other to put on. I wondered idly if the color wheels of my irises were any more noticeable to passing observers than the fake teeth in my mouth. No one, after all, had commented other than Lorna, in her talk of “that look.” What if on Friday morning my doctor should cast the ray of his penlight into my eyes? What would he see and what would he say? Would it matter? Would it mean anything? There were biochemical “laws” that supposedly governed and explained muscle tissue growth. But none of them applied to the recent growth, the recent resurgence of my muscle tissue. And regardless of what might be seen in the narrow beam of a penlight, I knew my eyesight to be sharper and more acute than it had been in years. Was I outstripping the bounds of accepted medical science, which, for all its advancements and its posturings of understanding what it did not, remained not so far removed from its medieval antecedents?

Paeon, the physician to the gods, carried no stethoscope or disposable wooden tongue depressors.

There is a large black jagged rock that juts from the sea close to a secluded cove on Levanzo, an island off the western coast of Sicily, in the ocean waters off Trapani. The natives have a name for this eternal large black jagged sea-presence: Faraglione. In warm seasons of many years, I used to lie naked on the solitary little stony shore looking at it from early morning to sunset, immersing myself in the tossing blue waves between me and it, watching the sun turn from gold to fiery red, increasing in size as it did so and descended. It was easy to see how this great perfect circle of the red sun descending was a god to those who once dwelled in the caves in the high rock above where I lay; easy to see that while theologies and religions die, true gods do not. Since I felt cured of everything when I left that place and walked the long distance back over the hills to the island’s little hamlet, Cala Dogana, in the chill of nightfall, I had my own name for Faraglione. I called it il dottore, the Doctor.

I don’t think I knew about Paeon then. I had likely read of him in Homer without either awareness or memory. No, I did not know of him, but I felt his being there, nameless and unknown to me, all the same, whispering into the wind to me, or through the voices of the birds that flew overhead: “Someday, you who see and long for and worship what is right. Someday.” Paeon. Il dottore. The Doctor. It was when I stopped pilgriming to him and lying naked all day before him in the sun that my darkness fell and claimed me. Paeon. Il dottore. The Doctor. He was ready to see me now, by name, and I him. I felt him to be with me. I felt him everywhere. The only true value of his lessers lay in their prescription pads.

I could still faintly taste the traces of Lorna’s dark blood as the hot coffee going down liquefied them and drew them into its brew, to which they added an exotic enticing hint of something like angelica or dandelion root. It was delicious.

Looking out the window to gauge the weather by seeing how passers-by on the street below were dressed proved fruitless. A few women wore heavy winter coats, but it was impossible to tell if they wore them against the cold or only to flaunt their luxury. A few young fools wore T-shirts, certainly not because they were warm in them but to flaunt their biceps or present a show of self-imagined toughness to the elements. There was even someone with a raised and open umbrella, though it was clearly not raining at all. This umbrella at least served from my vantage as a decent wind indicator.

I put on an old heavy leather Schott jacket whose zip-in lining had been lost for about the past twenty years, and which I still expected to somehow reappear. I put in my teeth. I put on my shades, I ventured out.

It was not that bad out whenever the wind eased. The sun was high and the breaks in the rolling grayish-white clouds came often. I walked south, intending to pick up another coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and then stroll back to the Reade Street Pub and, if it wasn’t crowded, occupy a barstool while I drank it. The chill was still such that enjoying the coffee on one of the benches outside the bar was not an open choice. I did notice, however, that the fruitless pear tree across the street from the bar was beginning to bud. I took this to be a sign that warmer fresh air—as fresh as it ever got, anyway—might be soon coming to narrow, shaded Reade Street. And with it, as we cigarette-smoking malingerers and over-the-hill roués called it, good bench weather.

But after leaving Dunkin’ Donuts with my container of coffee, I decided to wander instead over to Uncle Mike’s bar on Murray Street. The barmaids there would be scantily clad. Instead of shooting the shit with Mike Hickey, the bartender, and random members of the usual cast of idling miscreants, barflies, and good-hearted buddies at Reade Street, I would whet my appetite for this evening’s pleasures. As always it was dark in Uncle Mike’s. I removed my shades. No one there was going to be looking at my eyes, not with those bartenders in those baby-doll negligees and come-hither smiles.

I didn’t know either of the girls working that day, so I put down a sawbuck next to my container of coffee and slid it toward the gutter of the bar so that they knew it was a tip for the privilege of taking up space while I drank the senior-discount buck-seventy-five coffee that I had brought in with me.

I was drawn to one of the girls, a plain grisette type who exuded an uncaring sensuality. I stared at her breasts, her ass, especially her thighs. She was fleshy, but not buxom. I imagined biting into those breasts, that ass, especially those thighs. What sort of sounds might she make as I drew her blood into my mouth through the broken skin of that flesh? She seemed blasé. Maybe she might make no sounds at all. What a delicious imagining. I would never know. But it did inspire me to the imaging of something else. An imagining that could be realized. Would Melissa play dead for me? The thought thrilled me.

I finished my coffee, gave a parting glance to those fleshy thighs, rose, and left, hearing her thank me as I did so. I slipped my shades back on and walked to Korin, the Japanese knife store around the block, on Warren Street. For some time I had been enticed by a one-of-a-kind hand-finished Togiharu gyuto knife, about nine or ten inches long, with a handle crafted from mammoth tusk. At about two grand, it was a steep price to pay for a kitchen knife. But every time I looked down at it through the glass of its display case, and the times I had asked for it to be removed from the case and held it, I became more enamored of it. Maybe it was the gleaming heavy steel beauty of the blade. Maybe it was the brown-streaked rocklike heft and beauty of the prehistoric fossilized bone handle. Probably it was both. Every time I hesitated, I knew that the day was drawing nearer when this unique knife would be gone, and that there would never be another quite like it. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow, as I told myself whenever I looked at it. Maybe that’s what I subconsciously hoped for: that it would one day be gone, and that I could then no longer desire it, for it could then no longer ever be mine. For I never fully understood the hold of its beauty on me. I never fully understood why I so wanted it.

When I removed my sunglasses to gaze at the knife, I noticed that the elder of the two shopkeepers was looking at my eyes. More than that, he was looking into them.

Did he see the eyes of one who had grown different? The eyes of one who had become transcendent? The eyes of one whose way of seeing had become rare, even unique? Was he now comprehending at last the attraction of those eyes, and what lay in and beneath them, for the rare deadly beauty of this thing that was also unique? In the past, we had exchanged friendly and easygoing words, and I had learned much from him about the arcane ways of traditional Japanese blade forging. Now he was silent and said nothing as I put on my shades and left. I wondered awhile what his silence meant.

Back home, I thought to call Lorna to see how she felt. I decided that I should, but not now, not today. It was better to wait and not to rush. If there was an emotional change for the better, and I hoped there was, it would need time to settle in. The years’ ghostly treadling at the loom of darkness could not be braked and stilled so easily.

Should I begin to write again? Was there a tale left in me to tell? How had Thomas Mann recognized and plucked from the air so that it might germinate in his hand the seed of the sublime, simple, and elegant tragedy that we know in English as The Black Swan? Could the sediment of unused words and rhythms be stirred to rise and dance once again in the distillate dregs of an alembic left so long to gather dust and grime? Of course it could, I told myself. The neglected alembic and the sludge of what years ago had danced and sparkled and sung, they were in me; and I was new, and they too could be as new. I decided that, yes, I should begin to write again.

I felt strong, and I took from the drawer the piece of paper with those words so strange that I had found on my desk that cold early morning in February. “Somewhere along the line, something went wrong.” Those words so unrecognizable, yet written in my hand, on that piece of paper that seemed to have appeared from nowhere, which had so unsettled me that I had hidden it—words, paper, the whole thing of it—away from myself, in a drawer where I would not see it. Now, holding it in my hand and reading it once again, I realized that I had hidden it from myself, yes, but why, I asked myself, had I not simply got rid of it, this eerie thing that still struck me as some sort of spirit writing, written by an unknown hand, which must have been my own, and left for me by an unknown hand, which must have been my own? What, for all the unease it brought me, had made me want to keep it?

I placed it down in open sight on the desk. Beside it I placed down what I had written on that equinox day when that leaf had appeared on my sill. I glanced at them. I just left them there, and I made up my mind to leave them there until—until what?

I shaved, took a long hot bath, changed into fresh clothes, took a Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, put on Arvo Pärt’s Alina, and sat and sipped my milk surrounded by its mystical simplicity. And still the answer to the question I had posed myself—until what?—did not come.

Instead of an answer, Melissa arrived.

“That Herman Hesse thing,” she said. “I got the original from the library.”

“That’s my surprise?”

“Hold your horses. It’s all connected. Like the Buddhists say. Everything’s connected. So just hold your horses.”

“I didn’t know the Buddhists talked so much about horses.”

“Shut up.” She unfolded some photocopied pages and a sheet of handwritten notes. “Do you know any German?”

“I know enough to know that the name of the guy who wrote that is pronounced Hessay, not Hessuh. And I can say danke schön, and Fräulein, and Gemütlichkeit. And sauerkraut. I can say sauerkraut. And die Betrogene. I can say die Betrogene.”

“What’s that?”

“It means ‘the black swan,’ ” I said.

“Quite a vocabulary you’ve got there in German,” she said.

“And Deutsch. I can say Deutsch.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“That I can say Deutsch?”

“Oh, come on. About Hessay’s name. Why didn’t you correct me the other night?”

“Because I didn’t want to be pedantic. Because you were saying it like everybody else says it. You were saying it better than most people. Because that’s the way I always used to say it, and so to correct you would’ve been like being a pompous asshole. Besides, fuck him, he’s dead, call him whatever you want.”

“You would’ve been sharing your knowledge. That’s not pedantic. Now I can say it right. And everybody will think I’m saying it wrong.”

“That’s another good reason. And, hey, I checked out those lines, and you edited them. You took them out of context. He was talking about the thigh of a deer, not gal-meat. The sick fuck was in love with a goddamn doe.”

“All I was doing was giving you the essence. The essence of what you seem to share with that sick fuck. And I’m probably the sickest one of all. At least the deer didn’t know what she was in for.” Her voice grew softer. “I thought I would make it special for us,” she said.

Her words made me feel slightly humiliated, humbled, and touched. I let my face relax in the calmed, loving openness I felt. She showed me the lines in their original German:

Ich wäre der Holden so von Herzen gut,

Fräße mich tief in ihre zärtlichen Keulen,

Tränke mich satt an ihrem hellroten Blut,

Um nachher die ganze Nacht einsam zu heulen.

“It sounds pretty cool in German. I listened to a recording of it. And see this thing here.” She placed her dainty finger below the ß in the word Fräße and looked at her notes. “That’s called a scharfes s, or an eszett.” There was slow care in her saying of this: “ess-tsett.” Her eyes rose from her notes. “And this one’s for you, smarty-pants. You may know how to pronounce his name, but I bet you don’t know how to spell it. You spell it with one of those things. She pointed to her notes, where she had written large: Heße. That thing, it’s the German double s. It sounds sort of like a snake hissing.

“But here’s what’s really cool. This word here: Keulen.” She said it, again with care: “Koolen,” with a slight accent on the first syllable. “It means the hip and the fleshy area of the buttock and thigh below it. Is that some kinda word or is that some kinda word? Keulen. And get this. It’s also the real name for the city we call Cologne. The city of the hip and the fleshy area of the buttock and thigh below it.” She grabbed this part of her body with her right hand, and with great mock enthusiasm and pride announced: “Keulen!” Then she looked at me with a mischievous, kittenish grin. “Well, buddy,” she said, “are you ready to go to Cologne?”

“I certainly am ready to go to Cologne, mein Fräulein. I most certainly am.”

She rose quickly from the couch and scurried with her bag into the bedroom.

And where had Hesse got Steppenwolf from? These Krauts were pretty fucking good at grasping seeds from the wind. It was spring now, the season of wind pollination. The pear tree on Reade Street was already budding. Soon it would blossom full and white. I looked at my hand, opening and closing it, then opening it again. I looked over to the sheets of paper on the desk.

Then I heard the commanding seductive click of those Jimmy Choo stiletto heels, and I looked only at her, and all thoughts vanished, and there was only lust.

There were moments in recent days when I had begun to take her beauty for granted. But what an extraordinary beauty it was, superlative in itself and enhanced by those touches—the ponytail and the insouciant curl at its end, the demure shapely curvature of her lips, the shimmer in her eyes, the natural glow of her complexion—that made of her the very picture of innocence inviting defilement. Now, as she stood before me, that picture had been raised to salacious perfection by the sort of masterly sable brushstrokes that belonged neither to skill nor to practice but to inspiration alone. She was purity poised for the brutal taking. She was the Virgin Mary casting from her lap into the dusty dirt the burden of that dead diapered thing and opening her chaste mouth to suck the cock of the next bestial passer-by. She was gorgeous. I had told her she was a goddess, and she was.

The smack of her hand on her hip was as commandingly seductive as had been the slow, louche click-clack of her approach. I was speechless. She wore, fitting her superbly, like a second skin of exquisite sinfulness, a corselet of black batiste lace and silk-satin. It looked as if it had been made for her, painstakingly, exactingly. The rich fabric that cupped her full sweet breasts was not a millimeter too loose, not a millimeter too tight. The garters that extended from the open lace bottom of the corselet were hooked into the welts of pale beige stockings that were so sheer I could not imagine the fineness of their denier. The one thing I did clearly discern, from their gleam, was that they were pure nylon: the real thing, stockings as they were meant to be, stockings as brought forth into the world by DuPont and the gods in the holy year of 1939, antecedent to the holy year of 1959, or A.N., Anno Nailonensis, in the Year of Nylon 20, when pantyhose followed them into this world. The black satin over-the-elbow gloves she wore, her fingers and forearms snug and well defined in them, delivered the finishing touch. I imagined the feel of them around my naked back, those satin fingers caressing my breasts and neck, clutching my cock, stroking it, drawing it to her mouth.

She wore no panties under the corselet. She drew closer. I buried my face in the soft ringlets above her cunt, moved my hands over the tactile Eden of her nyloned legs, kissed the bare skin between the lace of the corselet and her stocking-tops, ran my tongue along the taut garters, sucked at the hook-and-eye fittings half exposed and half veiled through the lush nylon welts.

My cock was risen full and rock-hard in resurrection. There was no end to this renewal, this rejuvenation. I had a hard-on like an eighteen-year-old.

“Where did you ever get these?” I whispered, one hand on the nylon at the bend of her knee, the other moving slowly on the nylon that ever so thinly covered her shin.

“I found some place in Leesburg, Virginia. I was on the computer in the library, looking for a chronology of Predynastic Egypt. I ended up in Leesburg, at this place called Secrets in Lace. They had a Bettie Page Collection in their Leg Salon section. A lot of cool stuff. I got these stockings. I got these gloves. This”—the corselet—“I got at a fancy-pants place up on Madison in the Sixties. What a store. Learned the difference between a corset and a basque. Absolutely no relevance to Predynastic Egypt, but then again. Agent Provocateur or something like that. Splurged. Check from daddy.”

As much as I wished I could savor her as she stood before me, I could not. My hands trembled, unable to relax and luxuriate in the lavish delights of her. Seeing her like this was too much. Restraint did not present itself as a crescendo of pleasure, but only as an unbearable torture. There was no fending back what surged within me. I felt like a madman with a knife in my hand. Savage consummation was the end, the means, the all.

What had she said? “Something you can sink your teeth into.” Yes, those were her words. They shot now through the fire in my brain. “Something you can sink your teeth through.”

I sank my teeth through the nylon into her thigh as she stood there. It seemed for a moment that the shuddering of her body as she gasped would take all balance from her and cause her to fall. But, clutching my shoulders as she swayed a bit, she remained upright and gasped again.

The first mouthful of her blood quenched me. It was divine replenishment. Consummation. The violence of my sucking eased, but I could not stop. I chewed on the sheer nylon, reached down to grasp her ankles and the heels of her shoes, as I drew her blood into me, more and more gently, as if sipping sparingly of one of those wines gathering the subtle nuances of increasing grace in the dark of my closet.

I coaxed a bend into her left knee, raised her leg as she clutched my shoulder all the more for support, brought her foot to rest on the edge of the couch between my legs, the toe of her shoe nudging at my crotch. I worked my cock and laid it on the black rat-snake skin, Chantilly lace, and suede of the shoe’s upper. Bending round, I brought my mouth to the flesh below the haunch of her upright leg and bloodlessly kissed and sucked as I slowly stroked my cock against her raised shoe. Grabbing her buttock to both steady her and fill my hand with her, my mouth still to her flesh, I began to fuck her shoe. The thrusts of my hips grew harder, faster. I bared my teeth. The bloodless kiss was bloodless no more, and I grasped her ankle and watched my cock twitch in a fierce spasm, as the white stain of its eruption spread, darkened, and penetrated the nylon where her shin flexed in response, raising and tilting the heel, snakeskin, and lace of her shod nylon-shimmering foot against my crotch.

At that moment she uttered a sound, low but clear, like a whispered hiss: “Jst.” Her breasts undulated as she breathed, looking down at me through half-lowered eyelids. She repeated it, accenting and lingering long on its sibilance: “Jssst.”

Then I recognized it. The true name of Isis, uttered as if it were she, the goddess herself, announcing her presence and dominion.

She let down her raised knee to the couch, then brought her other knee to the couch as well, straddling me as I sat there, spent. She leaned forward, pressing herself to me, my face to her breasts. Then she arched her back, so that there was between us freedom to breathe more easily.

“You don’t want to get blood on that thing,” I said. She knew I was talking about the fancy batiste lace and silk-satin that clung to her. She caressed my face with black satin fingers. Already my cock was stirring again, and again I imagined the clench of her gloved hand.

“Blood,” she said low, almost whispering, as if to dismiss my mention of it. “Phoenician purple, the dye of royalty, the most coveted dye of empire. Reddish-purple slime from the slimy glands of slimy crawling mollusks. One slimy ounce of it worth far more than its weight in gold, and far more coveted.”

She smeared her satin fingers in the blood that had run down her outer thigh from the haunch of my bloodless and bloody kisses. She put the satin fingers to my lips, anointed them, then to her own, opening her mouth to them and sucking them.

“The true dye of empire,” she said. Her voice was trancelike, so different from the voice I knew. “More precious than gold and Phoenician purple together. Caesar had all of both he could ever want. But this was the dye”—again she ran her moist satin fingertip across my lips, again she put it to her mouth and sucked it—“that turned out to be the one true dye of his imperium. The dye of himself. The dye of his fate. The dye of his immortality. The dye that blotted out all the gold-threaded Phoenician purple of that—what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Toga?”

I felt so comfortable, so glutted, so full, so dreamily relaxed. I knew the pattern now. First this, the becalmed lassitude, then the serene rest, then the renewed and ever more heightened vitality, the waking to new life.

“Yeah, but the all-purple one. All Phoenician purple. The fabulously extravagant thing that Caesar took to wearing as his regular everyday street clothes. Toga something-or-other. Come on, help me out here. You know Latin.”

“I don’t know Latin,” I said drowsily. My cock was no longer stirring anew. I was floating in placidity, white clouds and soft light flickering through leaves and boughs above. “I can bluff Latin, that’s all.”

“Well, bluff me what I’m trying to think of here.”

It was good to again hear the voice I was used to. No more of that trancelike stuff.

“Toga picta,” she said.

“See,” I said, “you’re the one who can speak Latin.”

“No. I’ve been thinking about this. I looked it up. Then I forgot it. Now I just remembered it again.”

I had never heard the expression before. I wasn’t about to get up and look in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. I wasn’t even about to get up. Merely lighting a cigarette seemed something like a labor of leisure.

“The dye of fate. The dye of life. The dye of death. The dye of immortality. The dye that blotted out and obliterated all the gold-threaded Phoenician purple of that toga picta.”

What the fuck was she talking about?

The foul smell hit me. I had lit the wrong end of a Parliament. I let it fall in the ashtray. I repeated this labor of leisure more attentively. I looked at her. Those satin gloves. Lace and nylon. That ponytail. I almost wished she’d put on my robe. But that would never cover all of her, and even if it did, I would know what was under it. My cock, which I did not want to stir anew, stirred anew.

Blood. She was talking about blood. That’s what she was talking about.

I thought of the girl in Uncle Mike’s. The blasé one. The one who might make no sounds at all. The dead one. I took Melissa to bed. All that satin and lace. The nylons, the shoes. The bared flesh. I laid her out on top of the bed and arranged her. She was pliant, asked no questions, said nothing. I shut off the lights and lit a candle.

“Be still,” I whispered. “Like you’re asleep.”

I kissed her on the forehead, on the lips, ever so gently on the forehead once more. Extreme unction.

She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. I knelt over her, took my cock in my hand, rubbed it to the lace, the nylon, the bare flesh. She mewled faintly.

“Sh-sh,” I whispered. “Like you’re asleep.”

She lay still beneath me as I knelt between the open unmoving legs. I worked the swollen end of my cock slowly into her wet cunt. She made not a sound. She understood.

I fell to sleep that night like a rock falling deep into the cradling sea, feeling her arm close around me.