Chapter Text
Time present and time past, a boy said once. Read once. He spoke to an audience of one, languid in his oration, his tongue dragging behind his teeth and allowing for that low drawl so personal to the north and east of the United States. The shadow had studied it once, rolling his tongue inside his mouth to find the right cadence. A drawl, but staccato. Yes. He could mimic it well and fine. He was a quick study when it came to these things.
Time past and time future. Imagine it, the strangeness of a feeling that was completely new and yet, he could have sworn, he had felt a hundred times over.
“‘Who then devised the torment?’” the boy read to the shadow at the end of his bed. “‘Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name, behind the hands that wove, the intolerable shirt of flame, which human power cannot remove.’”
And the shadow curled upon the boy’s lap, feeling that his presence was not required, and perhaps that was why he wanted to remain so badly. This moment was not special. A hundred moments had passed, just like this, and the world had not stopped spinning because a boy had let him crawl onto his bed and lay his head in his lap, and asked for nothing, looked for nothing, did not so much as stutter on a word of his modernist poetry, but he did absently reach for the shadow, fingers toying with the dark wisps of curls that fell loose about his face.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
So said the modernist, anyway.
This is not about the boy. The boy should not really be here, in this tale, but he has a way with inserting himself where he shouldn’t be. There is an insistence to it. He can’t help it. It’s how he was made.
So about love. What is love? An intangibility that craves tangibility, and so lust is born. Maybe love is holding. Maybe it is wanting. That preludes a tangible result. A coupling or a tryst. Love was want and want was need and need was hunger and pain. Have you ever been so hungry that the pictures on the wall begin to move and speak? That is what it feels like to be without love.
Perhaps we could begin with the love of something the boy might understand. There is a city floating on calcified wood, staring down its expiration date with all the humor of an old maid. The buildings are clustered close, all sorts of colors vibrant against the shivering sun, and the green lagoon that ports the old city often looks like a shimmering jewel. Often, a boy named Amadeo used to skirt the edge of the lagoon, sitting on a ridge at low-tide and watching the boats drift sluggishly in and out of the bay. The smell was unpleasant, even then, but the sight was worth it.
Amadeo had loved that city, even if the city had hated him.
To put it simply, this was a boy who had never been a child, so the newfound freedom that came with his newfound name had created a bit of a monster. A demon, some would say. Everyone knew Amadeo in Venice, whether they wanted to or not. Amadeo, the maestro’s boy, who could not sit still. Amadeo, who was as learned as any bright young man from any university, was strange and exotic and a bit touched in the head, they would say. It was because, you see, when he wasn’t tearing through the canals like a street cat chasing a plump pigeon, he was, in all likelihood, wandering about like a beggar, completely lost in his own skin.
So enters our first love. Stage right. Right on cue.
The first person to meet Amadeo, after his rebirth, was a boy named Riccardo. He was called Riccardo Cosenzo, because he was from Cosenza, though the few older boys called him Rico. He had been tasked by his master to take care of the sickly, strange little thing that he had bathed and smothered with kisses like a mangy kitten plucked off the street. Perhaps if it had been a different boy, an older one, there would have been jealousy or scorn about the situation. Not Riccardo, though. Riccardo was given the task because he had a horrible habit of unrelenting kindness on top of being a rampant kiss ass.
It helped, probably, that Riccardo had been the darkest boy in Marius de Romanus’s palazzo before Amadeo had arrived. It is odd to think about now. It is harder, still, to remember what he looked like beyond Amadeo’s bone aching relief just to watch his dark eyebrows, thicker than one of Amadeo’s fingers, waggle and scrunch. Or to see how his thick black hair fluttered against the sea breeze. Or to witness his skin grow richer and deeper in high summer, how he would thrust a bare arm beside Amadeo’s, hairy and dotted with moles, and laugh at how they could be brothers, but only in July. These were things that should not matter much. But they do matter.
“Wow, Amadeo!” Riccardo had said, after only a few days of chaperoning. “Your Italian has improved so much already! And look at your letters— are you certain you did not learn these before? You’ve such a steady hand! Oh, you must paint with us today. I know you will be a prodigy, as with all else!”
A prodigy at painting Amadeo was not. Amadeo was fifteen and in a daze, trying to understand how drastically circ*mstances could change, how he could go one night sleeping on a straw mattress with four other boys and six other girls, to sleeping alone in a grand featherbed belonging to a rich man with a clever tongue. He had been able to speak to Amadeo in a language that Amadeo forgot soon after. It was, in all likelihood, Urdu. But that is not a certainty. Only a guess, as you have guessed. It is gone now. Lost to time.
Amadeo had sat with the other boys that day, listened to the instructions given to him, and as his new brothers had eagerly carved the face of Christ out of empty space, Amadeo had sat very still for a long, long time. The anxiety he felt in that moment was an indescribable sort of thing that cannot be put into words. But you can feel it, if you try hard enough. The immensity of another wrong and another sin and another and another, all compiling, and now this. How could he say it? Nobody would understand. So he sat frozen, surrounded by the face of Christ, and not for the first or last time in his short but long life, he wished he had died on that ship that stole him.
And then, when Riccardo had noticed his blank canvas, he’d approached him.
“Amadeo,” he’d said gently. “Don’t be scared to try. It takes practice to understand how to make the face look just right—”
“I can’t,” Amadeo had said. He had cried about it, certainly. Embarrassingly, he had cried so much about it that he had ended up in a heap in Riccardo’s arms until Marius had swept in to carry his boy away, back to his room, to the featherbed that Amadeo would one day die on.
The thing about Riccardo that Amadeo had always liked was his discretion. Riccardo knew exactly what Marius did with Amadeo, but he never told the other boys. Though the older ones probably knew. Amadeo did not sleep with the rest of them. He slept in the master’s room, in the master’s bed. It was obvious.
One day, when Amadeo was seventeen, Riccardo not much older, the boy plucked up the courage to ask.
“Are you happy?”
The question had struck Amadeo hard. He had been strolling, one foot in front of the other, upon a long bridge rail. If he were a different boy, less nimble and more easily startled, he might have fallen into the canal.
“Am I happy?” Amadeo echoed. The question had never been posed to him before, not once. Was he happy? He was certainly content, with his warm bed and easy companionship and full belly. But that was not what Riccardo was asking.
“Does he make you happy?” Riccardo seemed to correct himself.
In this memory, he was taller than Amadeo, but it is impossible for that to be true. Amadeo was standing on the bridge wall. And at seventeen, if memory served, Amadeo had gone through a growth spurt that had caused a great stir in the palazzo. He had so suddenly outgrown all of his clothing that he had begun wearing Marius’s without asking. And Marius had taken one look at him, scoffed, and turned away to hide his amusem*nt.
“Of course.” Amadeo had a way about him that made things sound insulting no matter how mundane. Riccardo, Amadeo’s oldest friend, had been immune to it. If not, this tone would have landed Amadeo in the canal one way or another. “Does he not make us all happy?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I assure you,” Amadeo said placidly, “I don’t. Explain.”
“The— whatever it is. The kisses or— or the lovemaking. Is it the same as it is between a man and a woman?”
“Oh. That.” Amadeo had rolled his eyes and carried on down the bridge wall, jumping to the cobblestone road with a small and easy leap. It used to be a longer drop, but his legs had stretched out over the winter. He had often wondered, at this time, if his father had been tall. “Don’t you have tutors for this sort of thing? Or am I the only one? Well, don’t you have the older boys for these things?”
“I’m asking you,” Riccardo gasped, chasing after him hastily. “Should I not? I have been wondering for a long time now, but— oh, are you angry with me?”
“Hardly.” Amadeo had smiled at him thinly, walking backwards through the throngs of merchants and fishermen that gathered near the bay. They parted for him easily. A few did double-takes. However, it was not so strange to see a boy of his complexion in this part of the city. He had been confronted a number of times by men who looked something like him in languages he did not know. “I think it’s charming. Come with me, then, if you want to know so badly.”
They found themselves stooped on a ledge beneath a bridge, breathless and sweaty from a combination of the summer heat and a well learned lesson. When it was done, Amadeo washed his hands in the canal, and leaned back against the stone behind him. He did not know why he felt so bad about it, but he did. He could not look at Riccardo as he struggled to come back to himself.
It should have ended their friendship. Or made Riccardo fall in love with him. It did neither. Riccardo had turned to kiss Amadeo on the mouth, and it was sweet enough that he felt less bad about toying with him. And suddenly Amadeo wanted so badly to fall in love with someone. Someone who was not Marius. It had never occurred to him before this moment, succumbing to the juvenile kisses of his best friend, that he could have someone else. He could really have someone else. And the idea of Marius, stony and fair, only ever melting for Amadeo in the dim candlelight of their bedroom, the mere thought of him jealous, that was more than enough for Amadeo to come to the conclusion that he had to find someone else.
But that someone was not Riccardo.
In the end, Riccardo had asked him again that very night, as they had sat and watched the sun setting upon the canals.
“Are you happy, Amadeo?”
“I can’t imagine I’ve ever been happier,” Amadeo said. It was the truth. He could not remember and couldn’t imagine a better life even if he tried.
“I just feel,” Riccardo said hesitantly, “that you get very worked up when he’s not around. I wonder if you love him.”
“Love?” Amadeo could only smile. “Maybe so. If this is love, then I must love you just as well.”
Riccardo had flushed at that, and the conversation died before Riccardo could pry more and discover that he was right to be concerned.
What Riccardo did not know was that when Amadeo was posing for portraits, often cast in grim roles such as Delilah or Judas Iscariot, he was just as often asked to perform a different sort of role. At first he had been appalled by it. He had assumed he was done with such things. But Marius had explained to him that his beauty inspired the hearts of men, and this was often the price of inspiration. And Amadeo so enjoyed these things, Marius said. Why not have a bit of fun?
Amadeo wasn’t stupid. But it did, at the time, seem like a small price to pay for the comforts afforded him and the attention of a man who had eclipsed God in a child’s heart.
So he found it strange, at sixteen, when faced with the reality that portraiture did not necessarily require a physical transaction.
When he met the painter now known as Giulio Romano, the man had been in his twenties. In his self-portraits, he was a man with a long face and curly dark hair. In his youth, he probably looked quite a bit like a boy who lost his mind from being a bit too fascinating. It is easy to imagine the boy in the place of this great painter. Even the self-portraits from the man’s older years are reminiscent of the man the boy grew to be.
Amadeo stumbled upon Giulio early one morning in the palazzo’s kitchen. Marius had been gone when he’d awoken, and his stomach had been uncomfortably empty, so he had wandered down into the dim kitchen to steal some bread from beneath the cheese cloths the cooking maids had laid over them. What he found was a man sitting at the smoldering hearth, viciously devouring the previous night’s soup.
Strangely, Amadeo had no real inkling of fear upon looking at the intruder. He had stood in his camicia, barefooted and stockingless, peering at him curiously. In hindsight, Amadeo craved death acutely, and sought it out with persistence. It was this curiosity and lack of fear for his own safety that had led to his death, after all.
“Have you come to rob us?” Amadeo asked the man. He had relished in watching him jump, nearly spilling soup all over his traveling cloak. The stranger’s eyes trailed over Amadeo confusedly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He set the quaint wooden bowl aside by the hearth. Amadeo followed the motion, noting the man's dirty hands. Ink stained or paint stained. One or the other. “One of the master’s boys let me in. I needed to eat. I won’t be long, if you are here to start the ovens. Have I disturbed you… boy?”
Amadeo drew his robe tighter around himself. He knew that the stranger had briefly taken him for a woman, by the tone of that “boy.” It happened often enough. It was something Marius and many other painters delighted in.
“Are you disturbing?” Amadeo had asked boldly, eyes flicking up and down the stranger before he laughed. Giulio Romano, who Amadeo had not known by name or face, flushed at this. He was being shamed in a very childish way. “What boy let you in? Perhaps he should be whipped.”
And for all that Giulio flushed, he blanched just then, looking at Amadeo with apprehension and fear.
“Surely that is not necessary,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry, what is your name?”
“What is yours?”
“Giulio. Is your master home?”
“Perhaps.” Amadeo had offered a shrug. “If you are a robber, I’m certain you will regret it soon. And if not, I wonder if you might regret that more. Hello, Master.”
And that was how Giulio met Marius, in the dark of the kitchen, somehow, with no discernable way for him to have appeared behind the man. Amadeo had laughed about it the whole next day until Giulio had come to him full of apologies. He had come, he explained, to see the great master of Venice at work. To study his technique and observe his muses.
“I did not know you were Amadeo,” he said, and Amadeo thought it was funny that he did not realize how insulting that was.
“Does it matter what my name is?” Amadeo had been, if memory served, tuning a lute when this man had approached him the next day. The other boys were watching curiously. He never did find out who had let the painter in. “You assumed I worked in the kitchen.”
“I—” Giulio was panicking, clearly, and Amadeo laughed at that. He knew well that it only mattered because everyone in Italy seemed to know that he was Marius de Romanus’s favorite child. The rumors had spread to his ears quickly enough.
He remembered wondering, anxiously, if Giulio had been Raphael's favorite in the same sort of way. If maybe they had something beautiful and terrible in common.
“I wonder why,” Amadeo said with a sigh. “Riccardo, why would he think I was a servant?”
“Perhaps it is because you’ve neglected to clean your fingernails again,” Riccardo had quipped without missing a beat. A reliable friend, to be sure.
“I’m sorry,” Giulio said. He had looked pitiful and ashamed. “I will make it up to you—”
“Who are you, again?” Amadeo demanded. And all around him his brothers laughed. This great, beautiful painter, a student of Raphael, reduced to the subjection of schoolyard bullying. Amadeo had never been more a child. And he had never felt more free.
In the end, he was more or less forced to sit for Giulio Pippi. That was how he had introduced himself, though they knew him as Giulio Romano in Mantua already by that point. It was a punishment that Marius had devised for being so rude to Raphael’s beloved apprentice. So Amadeo had sat naked on a stool, his muscles cramping in that usual burning sort of way when he sat for portraits. This time felt worse. He did not like when Marius ordered him around outside of the bedroom. It made him feel cagey.
Giulio had wrapped surprisingly early that first day. He had glanced at Amadeo over the course linen canvas and thrown him a blanket. Amadeo caught it with stiff fingers, staring at him blankly.
“You are very beautiful,” Giulio told him, turning away toward the door. “I should have known you were the muse.”
“Wait,” Amadeo had gasped, hugging the blanket close to his bare chest as Giulio paused at the door. “What about the painting?”
“Are you crazy?” Giulio frowned at him. “You have been sitting like that for nearly two hours now. Go lie down. We’ll go again tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Amadeo was not used to artists cutting the day so short, especially not for his sake. “Well, what can I do for you?”
“What?” Giulio had looked at him with open confusion, and Amadeo stared back with the same bafflement. “You’ve done enough. I’m sorry that your master has put this on you, but I will do my best. You are very skinny, though. You are how old? You should put muscle on those bones if you wish to escape the confines of villainy and womanhood.”
“Maybe I like playing the villainous women,” Amadeo snapped.
“I doubt that.”
It went on like that for a week or two. Every day Amadeo would ask what Giulio wanted from him, and Giulio would be left puzzled by the question.
What, Amadeo wondered, was wrong with this man? Surely even a man whose tastes skewed almost exclusively toward women could appreciate Amadeo. It was part of the charm of him, he knew, and yet he could not demure himself to please this man, no matter how intriguing he was, because Giulio was frustrating by nature. Amadeo simmered and sulked for days and days, feeling put out, feeling petty and small, and he sought after Marius with increasing fervor each night after a session, lost in this feeling of rejection and wondering if, maybe, it was Amadeo who was wrong, not Giulio.
On the last day that Amadeo had to sit for Giulio, Amadeo shifted on the stool. He had found himself increasingly interested in the way that the man had no interest in the transactional process of painting, which Amadeo had become accustomed to. It was not that Giulio was the first say no, it was simply that it did not happen often. Men, Amadeo had always found, give in to temptation quickly when it seems easy. Even men with no interest in other men. So who was the broken one here? Amadeo or Giulio?
Finally, Giulio put his brush down and lifted his eyes to Amadeo. He sat in place, waiting for the confirmation that he could move.
“What can I do for you?” Giulio asked. Amadeo had been so shocked he dropped the arm that he’d been holding above his head and gaped. “What do you want from me?”
“I…” Amadeo had been dazed and stunned. He had also been enthralled. “I don’t want anything.”
“Ah, bullsh*t, I think. Go on, tell me. You clearly want something.”
Amadeo looked away. He had to weigh his options here. After all, he’d dreaded this before it started, but now he had grown accustomed to Giulio’s bad manners and incredible ability to misspeak.
“A kiss,” Amadeo said suddenly, a boldness taking hold of him as he raised his eyes to the painter’s. “Please.”
Giulio looked at him quizzically. He seemed not to have expected that. But he rounded the canvas snatching a blanket as he went, and Amadeo found himself being covered in soft silk as the young man kissed his forehead.
“On the mouth,” Amadeo demanded.
“You are a strange little thing,” Giulio said quietly. Amadeo lifted his chin defiantly.
He got his kiss. Giulio departed for Mantua the next morning. Amadeo never saw him again, despite his best efforts to convince Marius to carry out an expedition to Mantua, but he did see the painting in a gallery in Geneva several centuries later. Scholars would later remark of this painting that it was strange for Romano, to depict a singular figure. The isolation, they said, was peculiar for a student of Raphael. Giulio had, in the end, painted him as John the Baptist. There was an irony there.
Had Amadeo loved that man? No. He had not reciprocated Amadeo’s clear desire, and it had baffled and frustrated him. And after finding himself embroiled in a strange affair with Riccardo, wherein intimacy did not produce love, yet love remained in spite of it— yes, Amadeo had been certain he needed someone else. Someone who understood him, but would not toy with him the way he was so often toyed with.
And so enters Bianca Solderini.
Like Riccardo, Bianca’s role in his life had never been lover, though she, like Riccardo, had been fitted into that space without much say of it. She had entered his life as a congenial friend. Her house was a grand and dazzling place, great halls filled with paintings and fresh flowers, indoor gardens creating a jungle for the ceaseless party guests that moved about her halls. He remembered being quite taken by it, the plants. He had not understood how she had been able to cultivate so many different flowers and herbs within her home. Marius had been disappointed with him, that he had been more interested in the flowers than the art, but not for very long. He had asked Amadeo to paint his favorite flower so that he might find it and cultivate it for him.
He refused to believe that Amadeo could not paint.
Perhaps Amadeo might have been able to paint roses or lilies once. If not for the horror that painting instilled in him. Not all painting was sin, he knew, but his sins were always so embroiled with painting that even the simple act of putting a brush to canvas filled him with revulsion. He thought maybe creation itself was sinful, if produced by his hands, and that God would punish him one day for the folly. Anything he made would be made evil. They all thought him strange for it, and after a while he agreed that it was a peculiarity that should be rectified. Beaten out of him. He wished for it, sometimes. But Marius never got angry at him for refusing to paint. He was filled with the utmost pity, you see. What a painful thing it must be for poor Amadeo, whose soul still contained the dregs of recognition of sin.
Bianca’s beauty was a renowned thing. Amadeo found a sort of kinship with her, though he had been reluctant to say it aloud. Botticelli’s angel, everyone called her. Everyone seemed to covet her, and she spurned everyone who made an attempt to make a wife of her. Amadeo was fifteen when they’d met, a boy who had lived a lifetime already without anything to show for it, not even memory. Even Marius— especially Marius— was taken by Bianca’s innate beauty. Whenever Marius graced Bianca’s house, he always offered her portraiture. Painted from memory. No transaction required. Amadeo did not understand it.
But Bianca was kind to him. She saw the scrawny, doe-eyed youth, and she cultivated him like a rose. His interest in botany had thrilled her. And he had thought it was nice, to have something separate from the palazzo. Separate from Marius. Yet when Marius learned of Amadeo’s learning of plant sciences, he had been so encouraging that Amadeo had been flushed with pleasure and stung with the dire need to stop immediately.
“Your hair is growing, Amadeo,” she had told him once, when he’d been sixteen, and he was very proud of this fact. His hair had been unbearably short for a very long time. “It suits you, you know, this life. You might be a better courtesan than I am.”
Amadeo had laughed, but it had unsettled him. Yet he needed the fashionable elite of Venice to look upon him and see an equal. He needed it so badly that he did not care how uncomfortable the flattery was. He learned quickly when to be Marius’s Amadeo, the polite and courteous angel. Only those closest to him knew the real Amadeo— a mercurial and mischievous thing, constantly teetering between deceptive euphoria and vivid melancholy.
Bianca was a socialite. That was something important to understand. She was constantly surrounded by people, and yet, without fail, she always made time for Amadeo. He had not understood it, her interest in him. He could not imagine it was lust, from his perspective, as he was certain from the moment he’d met her that she wanted Marius, who was Amadeo’s, and Marius very well might have wanted her as well. Amadeo could not know for sure. It made him feel horribly possessive and act out in foolish, terrible ways.
Something he wondered about, years later, was how he had not quite recognized that he’d found the cushions of Bianca’s chaise longue a better bed than Marius’s. He often got more sleep that way, dozing in the late afternoons surrounded by great ferns and foxglove bells. Bianca never woke him and asked him to leave. Sometimes he would wake in the dark of the early morning and find a velvet pillow had been laid beneath his head, and a warm blanket pulled up to his chin.
Sometimes he would spend days and days at Bianca’s house. Sometimes he would run into her house and crawl under her bed and curl up in the dark of it, knowing that nothing would save him from the evil he had brought upon himself. He thought, then, that he probably should have died. But then Bianca would come, kneeling on her woven rug, and coax him out into the light with jams and figs and a new book to read. Sometimes he stayed in her house and just waited for Marius to come whirling in, furious, hungry, wild— Amadeo had wanted it badly. He wanted his master angry and jealous and possessive. And yet, nothing came of it. The disappointment tasted bitter.
“Oh, Amadeo,” Bianca would say, in one of her various preparations for her extravagant parties, “would you take this to the apothecary? I fear I won’t get to it until tomorrow— but you are so swift-footed, I think you will get there and back in no time at all.”
He became her errand boy on occasion, ferrying various herbs from her indoor garden to the apothecary, not quite understanding or recognizing the significance of that fact. It did not matter to him that the plants had medicinal purposes beyond being beautiful. His interest in botany was a shallow thing. Like many other interests.
“Amadeo,” Bianca said one night when he sat on her floor, enraptured in a book that had found him in the market the day prior. He had not bought it— he wondered if a thing could be bought and paid for. He did not know, but it was some sort of manuscript, beautifully crafted, in a language he did not know. He had spent the last day running his fingers over the calligraphy, completely enthralled by the script. By the great beauty of the illustration surrounding each page, richly crafted borders, intricate designs loping around each other in infinite swirls or blocks or coils or flowery bells. The geometric patterns, painted expertly and lovingly in ultramarine and vermillion, seemed to leap off the page and dance around him, sending him into a daze. In his dreamlike state, he could almost recognize the technique used here. He could almost feel the stones beneath his fingers, lapis lazuli and cinnabar crushed to a fine powder to provide pigments for the paint.
Bianca had to pry the book out of his hands just to get him to look at her.
“Amadeo,” she repeated. She had let her hair down out of its lace caul cap, which had been left discarded by Amadeo’s feet. He remembered this clearly, how her pale curls had been left to flutter around her shoulders. Her dress had been gold. Vibrant and gold, like the gilded ceilings of San Marco’s. Like those shimmering mosaics come to life. Had she wanted Marius to show up to her party that night? A strange coil of envy had overtaken him, and he batted her hands away when she took his face in her hands. He fled beneath her bed. “Amadeo! You cannot sleep on my floor. Come out!”
“No!” This was a childishness that only Bianca and Marius knew. The impudence and desperation. One day it would become clear that this was all a facsimile of familial ties. It was three monsters playing house and the evil at the core of them had left the wood to rot and the stone to crumble.
“Please,” Bianca sighed, lifting the skirt of her bed to squint into the dark. Her curls slipped against her pale, rosy cheeks. He watched her from his childhood cave, not so much a boy anymore, and he watched the overspill of her pale breasts against the tight bone of her bodice. Her camicia, peeking out of the bodice of her gown, was lightly embroidered with pink flowers. Probably by her own hand. He followed the line of them and wondered how anyone could make something so delicate and beautiful. That too, was art. Like the illustrations in the Moorish book. “Amadeo, you mustn’t let the world scare you so. You are so full of life and wonder, yet you hide here like a child from thunder. Get up. Come out. Look at the stars with me!”
You see it too, the kindness of this woman. Amadeo did not deserve it. He was a wretched thing. He let her pull him out from under the bed, and he leaned against her as she fretted over him all the way to her balcony. He was taller than her by a good amount now. When they had met, Amadeo had been a bit shorter than her, if you can imagine. It was strange now, standing at her arm as she pointed out constellations to him. He knew them all, of course. He had studied them with the rest of the boys in the palazzo. But he enjoyed that she was passionate about them. It made him feel less ashamed for desiring her as she leaned against him and spoke of Aquarius and mythology.
“I know of Ganymede,” Amadeo had said stiffly after her lengthy explanation.
“I’m sure!” Bianca had laughed, patting his cheek and whirling away. He watched the twirl of her skirt, the way the heavy silk, ever embroidered with golden leaves, gave way to the linen camicia beneath. The leather of her chopines had been treated with a dye to make them red. They were not especially tall, which was not so fashionable, but Bianca had an eye for practicality above all else.
When Bianca stooped to pick up his book, she paused, frowning at the page.
“This is beautiful,” she said, perhaps not noticing his immense panic. “What language is this?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He ached when he said it. “A man at the port gave it to me. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“I haven’t.” Bianca flipped through the pages with great interest. Amadeo had to sit down on her bed, feeling like the room was spinning suddenly. “My God, I’ve never seen such delicate work! This is in gold, you see? And a man just gave this to you?”
“Yes,” Amadeo said, a bit defensive. But Bianca did not seem to think he stole it. She was almost as enraptured with the text as he had been. Again, he asked, “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“I’ve seen illuminated texts before,” Bianca said, sitting beside him on the bed without a care, causing him to scoot carefully to the edge. “Nothing like this, though. Have you asked Marius?”
The thought of asking Marius about this book made Amadeo want to vomit. He snatched the book back from her hands and snapped it shut.
“What interest does he have in a sailor’s diary?” Amadeo scoffed, jumping to his feet. “Would you bother him with such trifling things? Whatever language it is, it does not matter. It is a savage thing compared to God’s own Latin.”
Bianca stared up at him, her pale brow furrowed, and there was a strange anger that rose there as she opened her mouth to object.
“Those are Marius’s words,” Amadeo snapped at her. He watched her go red from the edge of her widow’s peak to the visible line of her cleavage. Backing away, he shook his head as he laughed. “You think I’m lying. Oh, beautiful Amadeo, head full of dreams. Mouth full of lies. Should I crawl beneath your bed again, lovely Bianca? Should I go back to being that mute, shambling boy who knows nothing but what his master taught him? Tell me to bring this to him and I shall.”
“Did he say such a thing about your language?” Bianca asked uncertainly.
“Why does that matter?” Amadeo shook his head. “Do you disagree? Do you think my master is a fool for dismissing the languages of these people, when compared to his own mother tongue? I think not. You must agree that Latin is superior.”
“Latin is a beautiful language,” Bianca said carefully. “But— Amadeo, I know Italian and Latin were not the languages of your childhood—”
“What language of my childhood?” Amadeo demanded. “Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you hear what they call me?”
“The Moor?” Bianca’s anger had faded into blissful ignorance and confusion. In that time, in that place, the word was less of an insult and more of a fact. And Amadeo could not escape it.
“The whor*.” Amadeo laughed at her shock as he turned toward the door. “You did not know? Do you think my master found me at the port, as a merchant’s boy? Do you think I came to this country that loathes me by my own will? What have I done to them? To their God? I go to church with all the rest, and I swallow down their wafers and wine, and I say the words and suffer the judgement of the prophets, and what, Bianca, do you think that does for me? Does that wash my skin clean? Does it wash my sins clean? I go to San Marco’s as much as I can stomach it and I plead for an answer from a God that has never known me, as I have never known him, and so I return to my master, who answers my prayers readily, and who knows me better than I know myself.”
And Bianca, lovely as she was, could not speak a word in response. There was a horror to it all that Amadeo did not quite understand yet. Perhaps she recognized it, perhaps not, but she saw Amadeo for what he truly was, perhaps for the first time. She had thought it peculiar, his origins, but her kindness had afforded her ignorance. The horrors of her own circ*mstances had likely blinded her to the reality of what must have befallen him to put him in the position he was in.
He left her there to think on it. He left the book as well. Later he would recognize that it had been the Quran that the traveling merchant had given him, a beautiful, personal artefact that conveyed a kindness that Amadeo would never truly understand. This man had seen him wandering the bay, lost in the shuffle, swaddled in red velvet and silk stockings, and he had known in his heart that the boy had needed this book more than he ever would in his life.
Amadeo had never gotten to read that copy. It had been Arabic, yes, and Amadeo had died before ever learning Arabic. Actually, the vampire they called Armand had not learned Arabic until 1916, when an Algerian soldier had wandered into the Théâtre des Vampires and mocked Armand viciously for his ignorance. An action that might have killed someone else, but not this man, a man who had been forced from his home for a purpose that appalled him, had knocked the strangest weight of empathy into the heart of the Maître. He had taken the slight in stride and thrown himself into learning as many dialects of the language as possible. And of course, reading the Quran, which he had found in French, and worse, found he already knew. Strange how that had not disappeared at all, but instead returned to him like an old friend leaving the door ajar to let him back into their home. Strange how much of it had lingered in his head. It was, he supposed, like how children’s rhymes never truly leave the folds of your brain after adulthood is sprung upon you. It was just a part of him. A lonely, guilty part. He wished he could read it and see God. He knew it, the words, the prayers, the motions— he knew, he knew, he knew it all! Amadeo had, too. And if that book had been in a language he had understood, perhaps it could have saved him.
So Amadeo had fled back to Marius de Romanus. He had gone through the front doors of the palazzo straight to the master’s room, saying not a word to any boy or servant that passed, and he found Marius there, painting by the hearth.
“Come to me,” Marius had said without looking up from his painting. And Amadeo was eager to oblige.
What had happened between Amadeo and Bianca was a strange and uncomfortable thing. Amadeo had loved her. Bianca had loved him. Amadeo had wanted her. Bianca had wanted Marius. Amadeo had wanted Marius, and had him, but Marius had wanted Bianca, too. It was an incestuous affair.
It was after Amadeo had fled his soon-to-be murderer that he found himself under Bianca’s bed again. He had gone to San Marco’s first. He’d let himself in and wandered between the pews, neck craned to peer up at the gold mosaic ceiling where the saints watched him keenly, knowingly, in the dark, in the candlelight. He’d trudged up to the chancel and took each curved stone step slowly. He peered up at the crucifix, below the Dome of Immanuel, rubbing his bruised collarbone, wearing Marius’s gold velvet tunic and feeling stifled by it. He gazed at the image of Christ dying below the apse, all the mosaics in the vaulted ceiling above him watching him with interest, and he wondered if he would feel this sick if this were really his God. He wondered if praying would do any good, or if damnation was his lot in life regardless of who his prayers were addressed to.
The dark stone was smooth when he knelt down and laid his forehead against it.
“My God,” he had breathed, “I cannot do this anymore! I cannot, I cannot! If you were really God, you would stop this. If you were real, you would save me. If I could be saved, I would be, but all you do is let me fall into the same pit again and again! You could not even save yourself, damn you. Who put you there?” He lifted his head to squint at the cross. “You should not be there. These are cruel men, to kill you this way. For what? To save us all? You didn’t save me! They killed you for nothing!”
He was on his feet, by the time he finished slinging accusations at Jesus Christ. You can understand why he did it. Or, maybe not.
He fled San Marco’s Basilica with tears in his eyes. He could hardly breathe as he ran through the streets, over the bridges, flitting along the canals in the dark. He thought about going to Marius, and was furious with himself for thinking it.
He was nineteen at the time. He was burning himself alive just to get the master’s attention. He was beginning to fear he might not be beautiful enough anymore. Or young enough.
The decision to go to Bianca had been one made out of madness. Looking back, if he had not gone to Bianca, he probably would have thrown himself into a canal clutching a stone to his chest. Maybe she had seen that in his eyes when he’d torn into her house that night. She had been entertaining, earlier, but by that time all the guests had either left or were too drunk to move.
“Amadeo,” Bianca called after him as he flung himself onto her rug and tried to wedge himself under her bed. She grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him back. “Enough! You are not a child! Stand up and look at me. Tell me what is wrong!”
“Let go of me!” Amadeo cried as she grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him up. She gasped at the bruises on his neck. The hand of his lover and future murderer was a fresh bruise darkening on his skin, and he had not recognized it until she had touched the tender flesh. “Don’t touch me!”
“Amadeo…” Bianca’s eyes had flitted over him anxiously.
She threw herself to her feet and marched to the doors, closing the heavy wooden things and barring them. Amadeo watched from her rug, shivering from his own incompetence. He pulled his knees to his chest and buried his face in them. What a miserable little thing, Amadeo was. He had wanted it, you know. That was usually how it went. He wanted it, he got it, and then he was left to wonder how anyone could hurt him like that if they really loved him. And then he thought, well, he probably deserved to be hurt, since he wasn’t very good at loving anyway. And maybe if he deserved it, there was something good to it. Maybe he liked it. And so the cycle went on and on, and he hated himself so thoroughly that he could not breathe.
“Amadeo.”
He heard Bianca’s skirt shifting against the floor. The silk whispered against the linen camicia. When he lifted his eyes, he saw the voluminous skirt bubble around her waist and swallow up her knees. It was a beautiful burgundy thing, and it seemed to shine in the candlelight, beneath the golden cioppa. Her sleeves detached, he realized, studying the gown. The camicia was visible in the lash between her shoulder and bicep. And the exposure of her breasts, too, was intentional. A seductive tactic, surely, to lace the bodice of the gamurra below the nipple line and expose much more of the camicia than was fashionable or modest.
If she followed his line of sight, she did not say a word about it. She merely took him by the shoulders and gingerly pushed the collar of his own camicia and tunic down so she could see the damage done to his neck and throat. This revealed further damage, of course. Bruises and cuts.
Later she would wonder if Marius had done this. Silly. Marius never left a mess.
“Oh,” Bianca said, her eyes growing very big as she took in the cuts on his shoulder and chest. They had been made with the blade that would kill him a few short months later. This was another delicious bit of irony.
He did not know what had done it. Perhaps it had been her fingers on his tender, bruised skin, or the way she had ignored his clear instruction not to touch him. Maybe it was just that he wanted so badly to know what it felt like to have power. In anything.
Well, regardless, this was what happened.
Bianca had gasped when he’d grabbed her hand and kissed her. There was no romance to this. Amadeo had loved Bianca, but that did not stop him from hurting her. It was a habit he had gotten into and could not shake.
So he kissed her. Yes, he did that. So he kissed her very hard and without permission, and yes, it did get worse. The idea of rape had only crossed his mind when he had her on the bed and fumbled with the laces of her dress. Too many laces, too many layers, and too much time to think. He realized it suddenly, and the well of shame overflowed. He stared into her eyes, open and watching, and he broke away with a gasp, rolling over onto her bed and muffling a scream or a sob into his hands. He bit his palm to keep himself from wailing.
She watched him as he curled onto his side. She was silent as he tried to heave a deep breath, tried to find his voice, but he was so sick with shame that he wished she would just kill him.
“I will not kill you, Amadeo,” she said gently. She had sat up while he buried his face in her quilted blanket.
"Do you see all thoughts too?” he whispered, a laugh perched on his tongue. He dug his nails into his scalp as he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He laughed and laughed.
“Hush!” Bianca’s hands grasped his own and lifted them from his eyes. He was forced to look upon her lovely face, and he saw that she was flushed and furious. “What is wrong with you? Who has done this to you?”
“It is only me,” Amadeo uttered, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I have done this to myself, and now to you— oh, I am the devil! Kill me.”
“Hush!” Bianca hefted him upright. He was rattled by her strength. Small as she was, she was deceptively strong. She might have fought him off, if she had tried. Why hadn’t she? “Enough! What has he done to you?”
“I did this to myself, I said!” he gasped.
“And I will say that you are a liar, and a poor one at that!” Bianca leapt to her feet and marched to her desk, which was covered in bushels of flowers. He watched her yank a drawer open and remove a mortar and pestle. “How badly are you hurt? Tell me.”
“It is only superficial,” Amadeo said faintly. Tears dried on his cheeks. He hiccupped. “Bianca, won’t you— please, look at me. I need to— I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure.”
Amadeo did not know what she was doing. There was a jar of honey on the desk that she dragged closer to her. She dug around in her drawer and produced another jar of either pine needles or fennel seeds. He watched her pour the seeds into the mortar and begin mashing them.
“What are you doing?” he asked dazedly.
“Fixing you.”
“But— why?”
Bianca merely ignored him. Her netted caul had slipped out of her hair, leaving it loose and wild around her shoulders. She shrugged it back, grinding the seeds to a pulp, and then scooped honey into the mortar, creating a paste.
“Take off your tunic,” she demanded, not looking at him. “And your chemise, as well.”
Amadeo was used to being ordered around like this. He had not expected it from Bianca, but he found himself lifting the tunic over his head and discarding it without a word. The camicia, too, fell away easily. He was left in his braies and stockings, bare from the waist up, and the chill came for the cuts that ran along his ribs and arms and chest and shoulders. Bianca turned and stared at him with widening eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Amadeo repeated. He said it more surely this time. “I will leave you. I won’t ever come back—”
“Do you believe that is what I want?” Bianca demanded.
“I—” Amadeo flinched. He sat as Bianca approached him, mortar in one hand, gauze in the other. “Why? Bianca, I wanted to hurt you.”
Bianca sighed deeply. She knelt very slowly, her silk skirt folding beneath her knees, and she set the mortar and gauze down. Then she lifted her head and watched him, her jaw set. She had a round face and delicate features, and he so rarely saw her in this sort of mood that he did not know what to do or say.
“Do I seem hurt?” she asked.
“No, but—”
She kissed him, then, and there was a kindness to that that Amadeo did not understand. He was too eager for the sort of absolution only a god could give. Or a lover. He kissed her as if he was a man dying of thirst. She kissed him back with a firm hand upon his cheek, and she pushed him back sternly when he got too close.
“I am going to fix you,” she said, eyes darting over his face. She looked suddenly stricken, and she smoothed his hair back behind his ears gingerly. “And then, if you still feel this way, you can kiss me again. I don’t mind.”
“You’re only saying that,” Amadeo whispered, tears in his eyes.
“Would you rather me mute and unwilling?” Bianca asked him sharply. His tears spilt onto his cheeks and he lowered his head to sob again. “Yes, I see. I see. I’m sorry, Amadeo.”
“For—” He shook his head furiously. He sucked in as much air as he could so he could get the words out clearly. “For what?”
“For not realizing sooner.” She scooped up the mortar and sighed. “I need you to be honest, Amadeo. Was this your master? Was it Marius?”
“What? No!”
She exhaled shakily. The tension in her shoulders seemed to release. Then she nodded.
“I see,” she said. “Still, you fear him.”
“No, I— I love him—”
“Hush. This will take some time and might hurt a bit. Ah, this one on your forearm needs cleaning. Stay here.”
She poured water from an ewer onto a cloth and began cleaning his wounds. It was baffling, this behavior. And Amadeo found that he was even more enthralled with this woman than ever before.
The honey and fennel seed concoction were an attempt at an antibacterial paste. The properties were there. Bianca was clever about these things. It worked well enough, though modern medicine will cast a long shadow on the antiquated poultice of a young and beautiful murderess. Or did you not realize what Bianca was?
No, of course you did.
When it was done, and he was bandaged up, she took the mortar back to the desk and began unlacing her gamurra. Amadeo sat in mute wonder and horror. She had first loosened the sash of her cioppa, shrugging off the richly embroidered golden overdress and tossing it aside. And then she undid the sleeves, yanking them off. Her camicia was set free to billow about her wrists. She came to the bed as she undid the laces of her bodice, loosening them from their eyelets. She sat down beside Amadeo, and he knew this was an invitation. It was something he could do quickly and surely, as he had done it enough times that he did not really have to think as he peeled the dress from her shoulders. The gamurra fell away like a shell of a beetle cracking open, crushed red beneath a pestle, just another needless act of violence for the sake of art.
Amadeo wondered if she knew just how kind this act was. He did not deserve it. He knew that. He felt horrible that he had ruined this thing before it had even started. He wished he could take it back. But now it was done. And he had done it. He took little satisfaction in it.
When it was all over and he laid inside Bianca’s bed instead of under it, he wondered if he was a monster in a story come to steal her away. When he said it aloud, she laughed.
“You are a funny boy,” she said, kissing him gently on the brow. “Nothing hurts, does it? Are you alright?”
“Are you?” he countered, flushed and exhilarated at the thought that she cared enough about his well-being to ask.
“Oh, I’m alright.” She smiled at him coyly. “And Marius? Will he not be angry?”
“He would have to notice,” Amadeo said bitterly, “or care. No. He will not be angry. Kiss me again.”
She obliged. She kissed him softly, and he did not understand it. She should hate him. Why had it not occurred to him sooner, the truth of his actions? Why had he allowed it to go as far as it had? Why with Bianca? How could he have repaid all her kindness with a vileness that he knew well enough to name it clearly. Had all of that which had been done unto him put that evil in him? Was he nothing now, except a vase for evil to spill into and feed poison to the flowers which fell into him?
She kissed him, and he began to cry again.
“What haunts you?” she asked him.
“What doesn’t?” he countered, laughing brightly as she dashed his tears. She frowned at that. He toyed with her hair and the line of her breasts, and he pretended to be very put out when she swatted his hand away. He pouted and laughed and kissed her again. She sighed into his mouth.
“Is this how it is with him?” she asked as he kissed his way down her throat. And froze, of course. He retreated into himself. “Do you kiss him like this?”
He found himself staring at her with all the horror of a young boy realizing that the deepest and darkest of secrets was something well sown in the garden of rumor that circulated this blissful little hell that was society. Everyone knew, he realized, what Amadeo was. Amadeo was Marius de Romanus’s whor*. No amount of grooming and learning and painting and loving would change that.
“Hm.” Bianca smiled faintly. “I see. Can you blame me for my curiosity?”
“Could we not leave him out of this?” Amadeo asked weakly.
“Perhaps I am jealous that he can have you in a way I can’t!”
Amadeo did not get flustered often about these things, as you can understand. This flustered him. He turned his face into her pillow as she laughed, and he found himself laughing too, at the strangeness of it all. And then he realized that Bianca felt trapped in her own body too, and that she wanted the power back too, and he could not give that to her. He was too selfish.
“Are you really?” Amadeo whispered.
“Be less sad,” Bianca said, watching his face as he grinned at her. “Why do you do this? Weep with your eyes and smile like a madman? I cannot kiss away memories.”
“Would that you could,” Amadeo said brightly, “and I would marry you.”
She laughed, in a way that told him that she would never marry him, even if she could. He felt very small and very young and very stupid.
“You know that you cannot tell anyone,” Bianca said carefully. “It is for your sake, Amadeo. They will call you worse names than a Moor or a whor*. I fear they will kill you. Your master—”
“Can we please,” Amadeo gasped, “not talk about my master? Please, Bianca.”
“He will know,” Bianca warned. Amadeo turned his face away abruptly, and she grabbed him by the chin and forced him to look in her eyes. “Do you think me a fool? He is a beautiful creature, but a creature, nonetheless. If I were a woman less mad, if I were a woman more sheltered, he would terrify me.”
“Why doesn’t he?” Amadeo asked dazedly.
“I am well acquainted with Death.” Bianca smiled then. She swooped and kissed him hard. And he thought he could understand, suddenly, why he was so drawn to her. He was Death’s lover once, twice, thrice, over and over.
You might say it is the choice of pyre or pyre— hush! There is no redemption for the damned! Do you listen at all? Listener of all listeners? Answer a prayer, maybe, if you have a tongue that speaks, “Redemption!” Oh, yes! To be redeemed from fire by fire. And the shadow said, “Cast me afire!”
Who then, asked the modernist, devised the torment?
They were a strange pair, in the end. Their friendship endured, somehow, through the tumultuous realigning of boundaries. One minute Bianca would ask him, “Amadeo, have you heard? Rome has been sacked!”
And the next he would be working open the laces of her gamurra with his teeth. You remember that trick—? Ah, or maybe not.
They found themselves in this position a handful more times, and Amadeo had an inkling that her desires were more complicated than the love of a dark and beautiful boy who was owned by the glorious white hand that she would kiss in his stead if he let her. It was a sickening thing, made worse by their odd relationship, wherein she often put him to bed with a kiss to the brow and nothing more or ravaged him completely. Yes, there was an awareness then, the strangeness, but only for Bianca, who recognized it as a horror uncontested. Amadeo had no way of knowing that line she straddled as mother and lover, for the role of parent and the role of lover, to Amadeo, was always just one solid being.
Unseemly now to think about, but yes.
He did not think about it too hard, but there was an element of madness to this thing they had. She was his dear friend, and she took care of him in a way that perhaps no one else in his life could— he could not remember his mother, except for scraps that had come to him as he’d laid dying, and he knew few other women. It was as if she had to step into the space and fill all aspects of womanhood to a boy who did not really understand what a woman was. Bianca was like that ephemeral idea of the Holy Virgin that the priests went on and on about. To Amadeo she was virgin mother, impossibly so, yes, and that was funny. He told her that, and was delighted when she called him a blasphemous little beast.
“You must love him so,” Bianca sighed one day as he glided the royal blue gamurra over her shoulders, the morning sun catching her hair alight and spinning it into a gossamer silk veil along her ears. She had netted it again, opals catching between the blue silk and white lace. His fingers grazed her breasts as he pulled the dress together, lacing the bodice as tightly as he dared. “You avoid him more these days. Does it help, to use me as a distraction?”
“You are not a distraction, Bianca,” he objected. It was a half-truth.
“And we are not bound together by our own perverse desires,” Bianca countered, watching him linger at her breast. “I know you recognize it. We dance around it, but he is there, between us.”
“Marius.”
Saying his name aloud felt like a sin.
“Would you want me if it were not so obvious that he does too?” Her slender fingers carefully slid his curls behind his ears, as she often did when she wanted to see his face more clearly. She probably did not mean to treat him like a child, not the way Marius did. She was, after all, only a few years older than him. But those few years really did make all the difference in youth. “He and I could share you like a cup of wine and drink up the dregs of you until you are nothing.”
“Do you not imagine that the opposite is just as true?” Amadeo demanded, tying off the bodice of the gown and tilting his head down at her face so he could see the dark of his eyes keenly. She smiled at that.
“I do not,” she said.
The truth of the matter was that Bianca had never once feared him. She told him as much, later on, and Amadeo realized that she probably could have killed him if she had wanted to. He was lucky that she was fond of him. Oh, the fondness of monsters! And he fit in just as well.
“But you are innocent, Amadeo,” Bianca insisted, a baffling thing. He did not remember what they were doing at this time. It was probably a fight, and she was probably gathering herself back together while he laid shivering in her bed, wishing to be somewhere else. Perhaps she and Marius really were two sides of the same coin.
“I assure you,” he gasped, “I am not!”
“You make a show of it,” she said, “when you want attention, but you are not an evil thing. You have little malice in you.”
“You do not know me at all.”
“You drag yourself to the steps of San Marco and go into a frenzy,” she said to him curtly. “Marius has told me you grow ill from it, your want of God.”
“He told you that, did he?” Amadeo had thought he might break something then. He threw a crucifix across the room and laughed when the wood splintered upon Bianca’s lush woven carpet. “There is my want of God! Free the bastard! He should not be on that cross, anyway.”
Bianca dutifully gathered the pieces of wood and the shards of broken glass and set them aside.
“You are innocent,” Bianca insisted. “It is not a bad thing, Amadeo.”
“What is innocence in your eyes?” Amadeo laughed. “Youth? Beauty? You are innocent too, then.”
“You do not understand. I hope you never do.”
It was murder. Obviously. You caught that, surely. She, the murderess, the poisoner, the bright-eyed assassin, recognized the eyes of a killer in Marius de Romanus. And, likewise, saw the innocence of Amadeo when Amadeo could not fathom being more embroiled in sin.
Amadeo would have no qualms about killing, of course. Amadeo was a blasphemer and a whor*. What was murder? Bianca was just a woman, and women had fanciful ideas about these things. Didn’t they? Amadeo would not know. Again, Bianca was the only woman he had really bothered to get to know on any personal level.
She and Marius could have scraped him clean and seen the great cavity of his skull and ribcage with their eyes alone. That was the terror of it. Being pinned between two beautiful monsters who loved him enough to save him and kill him both, ten times over.
So. You want to know about Amadeo’s death? Fine.
Amadeo died at age twenty. He died in Marius de Romanus’s bed, crowded with flowers from Bianca Solderini’s garden. Lilies and roses and peonies. She had arranged them around him to mask the smell of rot. Of his body turning against him. Of his own urine soaking through the sheets as the poison truly took hold of him.
She had told him what the poison was. He forgot now. She explained it to him, as he’d laid there, staring at the ceiling, ignoring Riccardo’s frenzied words and mounting horror as his death was sealed. Yes, Amadeo would die. It seemed anticlimactic, to die here, this way. In and out of fevers, swimming in his own vomit. An undignified, unholy sort of death befitting a loathsome little demon.
It took days. How many, he did not know. Ask Bianca, if you are so curious. She likely would not lie. But yes, it was days, and he lost himself to that fever. He did not know what he saw, except strange glimpses of a home that was not his, loved wholly by hands that did not want, and the distant sound of a woman singing behind a partitioned screen. In his dreams, he knew the words and could sing along. Waking, he cried for a mother who probably did not exist at all.
He might have died in earnest.
Let us discuss the cause of death. Poison on a blade. A duel gone wrong. So enters the Earl of Harlech.
Let us be brief. The Earl of Harlech treated Amadeo with all the care one would expect an English noble to treat an exotic whor*. He found Amadeo beautiful, of course, as everyone did, but that did not change that the reason he found Amadeo beautiful was also a social commonality. Consult your post-colonial scholars for an answer to this riddle. A dark, mysterious boy, languid and well trained, demure when needed, wild when permitted. Yes, that was the appeal. Certainly you, too, were caught up in this spell. The enchantment of Amadeo, lovely and abhorrent. It is the story of a thousand and one stories, each one laden with contempt and desire. Why is that?
You already know the answer.
The details of the tryst with Harlech can be summed up rather than shown. You are not a voyeur, you’ve made that clear. Harlech was a madman, and he and Amadeo made good use of one another in that volatile way that thrilled Amadeo. He enjoyed it, you know. Being beautiful and insolent and being punished. There was a strange play of power that he had gotten with Harlech that he had never gotten anywhere else, except, perhaps, with Louis, and it had been a good thing, until it was no longer good (like, perhaps, with Louis), and Amadeo had realized it probably a little too late. So he had gotten rather brutalized in the process, which should have been all in good fun, except that Harlech was, again, insane.
Usually, at this point, you might imagine that this is an exaggeration, or that Amadeo had done something to bring this upon himself. Understandable. Amadeo did bring it upon himself. He got a thrill from it, the pain, the exchange of power, the way this nobleman seemed more than willing to give himself over to a common boy. And Bianca was right. Amadeo was innocent. He did not understand what Harlech was, or what he wanted, or how close he had been to becoming a slave again.
But Amadeo learned so much with him! Yes, he learned some English, and some poetry, and he had a great deal of fun, so it was not all bad, you see. It really wasn’t. It could have been worse. And yes, he was hurt by the end, and that was unfortunate, but Amadeo could take it. It wasn’t like Harlech had killed him just then. No, he had done that later. And sneakily! Poison was not a man’s weapon. Amadeo wished that Bianca had killed him, if he had to go out in such a way.
How Amadeo escaped this situation, months prior to his death, was a series of lies that allowed him some space to leave the man as soon as possible. He spent perhaps a few days, perhaps a week with Harlech, isolated from the city, isolated from his home and family. A few days of bacchian splendor, half drunk on the fantasy of running away to England with a man who loved him rather than waste away in Marius’s bed, growing old and withered while the master’s eyes wandered to the boys of the palazzo. A fantasy that popped like a soap bubble when Harlech’s fingers closed around his throat and did not relent. And Amadeo came back to himself, a broken thing, helpless to the body that God had formed for him, feeling that he had done it again, and that these pains were deserved. And when he stumbled into the dark night, spilled onto the canals like the lagoon after a storm, he vomited over the side of a bridge wall and wandered deliriously to San Marco’s before going to Bianca to sin again.
And what a life that was! What a demon, that Amadeo! Face of an angel, all that. His silver tongue got him out of that bind. Bought him a few months more, if only because Harlech had business to attend to in Spain before returning to Italy to collect his prize or mount it above his hearth.
The duel was not an impressive affair. Amadeo had found fresh grief in it, stumbling across a dead child in the hall of his own home. Horrible that he could not recall his name. A boy, not yet twelve, butchered because Amadeo had entertained madness for fun. Grief had been stolen from him, you know. By trauma or by a magic spell. He had never been so utterly brokenhearted as staring at that small, butchered body as it stained the master’s fine Persian rug.
It was not that he had never seen death before— this was the Renaissance. Death was everywhere, if rebirth was on trend. Yet being confronted with the fragility of life, seeing a boy he had himself tutored laying with a rent open chest on the floor, it felt like a slap. And soon Amadeo would know more of this feeling. To lose again and again. Each tether to humanity tossed into a fire. You spoke the modernist’s words aloud to me once, and said: “The only hope, or else despair, lies in the choice of pyre or pyre.”
There was no choice in this. Amadeo watched his world go up in flames, and he was not permitted to follow them all into hell. So he remained crouched in darkness, watching lives unlived pour out of flames meant for someone else, and for all he did not wither in body, he withered in soul.
Pity him if you’d like, or not. So much of this was his own doing and undoing.
But yes, more to the point, Amadeo killed Harlech. And the wounds he received in turn, which had seemed so superficial, had done him in. If Amadeo had not been so angry at Marius, would this have happened? If he had not desired someone else so desperately, could he have lived? All Amadeo had wanted was someone to love him, and for that love to feel real.
So? What do you do once you’ve loved so much, so fervently, so young? Do you try again?
Do you stop trying?
Ah, yes. Marius.
It would be kinder to think about Lestat first.
Yes, yes, let us speak on Lestat! A monster would be more than pleased to speak once more on Lestat de Lioncourt. Well, speak is a relative term. To ponder on, to elucidate, to toil in the shadow of— perhaps that is too much. Is it all too much? Do not answer. This is the hell that you asked for.
The explanation given to a boy at a table in Dubai might suffice enough. That boy-man had listened, but not believed, and that was not strange for he who is faithless. The boy who became a man when the monster and the shadow and the angel could not, that was a bitterness that settled between them. You have what I want. I have what you want. We are an incomprehensible pair of contradictions.
The monster said, if you recall, that Lestat’s rejections only inflamed him. The anger, yes, and desire, too. Rejections, plural, before the boogeyman came for Nicolas de Lenfant. There had been a confrontation in Notre Dame, which is not entirely relevant, but curious no less. Looking back on it, Lestat had certainly found the boy that masked the monster within to be something lovely to behold. Everyone did. Even you, trembling in your own skin, bartered with desire upon laying eyes on the thing that would unmake you.
So on Notre Dame. Lestat and his fledgling had been seeking refuge, and thus he learned of the Children’s fear of God. Learned enough to make a grand show of throwing a cross upon his shoulder, an artistic interpretation of the second Station of the Cross. And the Children of Darkness’s foolish leader, who had slipped into that holy, forbidden place and paused to look up at the face of a man or god or prophet he had long since lost any sort of feeling for, realized quickly it was his own fault. Lestat had destroyed it, but only because the door had been left unlocked and the windows unshuttered.
Upon looking at the visage mounted on the crucifix in Notre Dame, memories of San Marco’s came flooding back. Amadeo had not really understood what it was that made him weep about the face of Jesus Christ. Later, upon recollection of a religion that he had forgotten, he understood that his fragility surrounding the messiah, by force, and prophet, by heart, that it was not a weakness as he had always known it. It was simply Amadeo’s past leaking through the walls of his mind and soul, finding him in a state of undulating euphoria and despair.
“You should tie your hair back,” Lestat told him unhelpfully while his crossdressing fledgling smiled behind her hand. Moonlight glimmered through the great yawning windows of Notre Dame de Paris, skittering upon the marble, toying with their golden hair. Candlelight cast shadows on the stalwart Corinthian columns that stood as witness to this rearranging of the world by godless hands. Shadows were cast, too, on those pale white faces, as sharp and sure as stone statues, made of the same strong limestone that kept this cathedral standing. And the pair of them danced around him, predators circling their prey, while he stood listless and enthralled by their beauty and their grace and their complete lack of piety. “If you will not wash it, the least you could do is save us all from the stench.”
This was the vampire Armand. To Lestat, he was simply the boy. To Nicolas de Lenfent, he was the gypsy. To Gabrielle de Lioncourt, he was— “Oh my! It speaks?”
No reason to dwell on her. No time. Disregard.
“You don’t even believe in it,” Lestat had accused him, not so much later. The revelation shined in his eyes, and there it was, the glow of a man enlightened. “This thing they all fear, it’s a lie you hold to keep sane. I wonder if it’s done even that. You believe in nothing! Ha! Heretic to heretic, it is only ever worth anything if you own it. I see, though, that you own nothing. Oh, oh— or is it that you wish to be owned?”
Do not look here at what was done between the stranger you know too well and the lover you know not at all. What was carried out in words spoken aloud was not entirely inaccurate— there was something there, between them, but it was born of the same horror that set Amadeo upon Bianca, and Lestat was not so kind.
Here are some things spoken unto Armand by the vampire Lestat:
“You could be a pretty thing if you were not as you are. Oh, has no one told you that you are ugly? Only beneath the skin, love. Do not fear, that face remains as if painted by Caravaggio.”
“I was never painted by Caravaggio,” Armand had retorted.
“Mm. I wonder why.”
To point out that Caravaggio was born decades after Amadeo had died would be foolish. It did not take centuries of life to know when to take such a slight with tight lips and lowered eyes.
“Has no one ever done your hair like this?” he’d asked once, between their various, volatile encounters, fixing the part of his curls before retying the black ribbon that Armand had taken from him back into his hair. The blood had been mopped up by an offstage hand. That touch was gentle and womanly, and he had ached suddenly for Bianca, as a child given over to a stranger wishes for their mother.
“Not in an age,” said Armand.
“And you still have not learned to take care of yourself? And I thought my maker was useless.”
Another time, a bit earlier. Less romantic, more— well.
“Devil!” Lestat spat at him. A blow upon the cheek. Another, upon the chest. Blood bubbling upon his lips. This was how Bianca should have dealt with him. “Devil! That is what you are! Oh, you bleed like a man, well, isn’t that so sweet. You are a puppet for sin! If God ever existed at all— oh, that hurts you more than anything, doesn’t it? You are no heretic at all! Worship this!”
The cracking of ribs as a child rolling a boiled egg upon a tabletop. It is easy, this pain. Lie down and take it. Well, you already know what this monster is capable of, so there is no use coating the lies in honey. There was something there, you see, but that did not stop it from being a horror. And again, and again, the love was poisoned.
Lestat had stopped the violence. He had paced the street, streaking his fair hair with blood as he ran his fingers through it. He sat down on a bench and stared, wild eyed and confused. And the broken thing he so abhorred and so desired, that mockery of youth, he laid bleeding on the stones, watching him through swollen eyes. Yes, this is truth. You hardly trust it, coming from the monster, but there is little cause to lie about this.
When Lestat returned, he stood over him, scowling like a child, and he shook his head furiously.
“If God ever existed,” he told Armand softly, “he made you to contain a sorrow with no beginning or end. You will be a vessel for it until the end of time.”
And then he had picked him up and dragged him out of the street— and Armand thought:
This is love. It has to be!
What else could it be? Brutality before benevolence. That was what love was, according to all that Armand had ever known about the thing.
You understand the issue. Love and worship became intertwined within the subject of your madness. You succinctly unraveled that thread to its logical conclusion. Where there was Armand, there was faith, however warped or misplaced. The God he had loved ardently as Arun had burned a hole in his heart when He had left him. And the thing that boy became spent an eternity trying to fill it.
Armand asked Lestat, “What can I do to make you love me?”
What you know of Lestat, up until this point, has been fairly romanticized, has it not? Romantic in the gothic sense, romantic in the ardor and the thrumming desire that crept beneath every impassioned anecdote about his crimes and his love. Well, Lestat never loved the lover, and that is only sad if you give the thing an ounce of pity. Which you don’t.
So let us be truthful here. Let’s try to be fair to the vampire Lestat.
Armand asked Lestat, “What can I do to make you love me?”
And Lestat’s eyes glazed over, fighting the impulses to run or scream or rip that vile tongue out of that cursed mouth.
Lestat took Armand by the shoulders and hugged him tight to his chest.
Mere hours earlier, Lestat had driven the hard heel of his polished latchet shoe into Armand’s sternum and just about collapsed his rib cage. And Armand had been so filled with love that he could not understand why Lestat would do all of that and hold him close and yet— and yet! He did not want him! Why?
“Am I God that you would worship me?” Lestat sighed against his hair. “I could be, but what an exhausting existence we would lead! You following me to the ends of the earth— would you follow me into hell, too? Oh, you would. Of course. That’s a shame. Devote yourself to something beautiful, and maybe I might be able to look at you and feel something other than disgust.”
If he could speak for himself now, he would probably say, “I did not mean devote yourself to Louis, you fanatical little rat!”
Well, with all of his gifts and all of his talent and all of his perfection, God should have made him prescient, too. Maybe if he had simply killed Armand on that road in Paris and never kissed him or showed him kindness at all, maybe everyone would be so much better off.
But God did not make Lestat anything but a man who could only see what was exactly in front of him at any given moment. He lived painfully in the present. He knew little of the word "consequence."
So enters Louis. You know most of this. You know it intimately. From the perspective of a lover, it was hard to grasp the idea that he was loved when it seemed so unlikely. Louis did not love Armand as Armand was used to being loved. Even the sex was a sort of playact of the thing that Armand knew well, as the power had never truly left Armand’s hands, though he had been desperate to submit himself to it. These things don’t work like that, unfortunately. Armand had never been able to give himself fully to Louis. And who paid for that?
All of them.
So much of Armand’s feelings about Louis is on the record, and we needn’t revisit it all. As awful as it is, the emotion behind the retelling of those events that had so thoroughly rocked the foundation of what Armand understood as love, that was real. That was true. Armand had loved Louis. Intensely, truly, undeniably, and so when it came down to it, when Armand had made his choice, he felt like the torment might end if he could return to the fire that had forged him.
The choice of pyre or pyre, a young man whispered once into the curve of a lover’s ear, to be redeemed from fire by fire.
What an ugly little thing that had destroyed the world for love. No, not even to save it. He had destroyed the love too, to keep himself buoying above the surface of the great abyss.
Do you fear death? I asked you this once, though you won’t recall that now. What happens to us, when we die? Is it the nothingness you so crave? The quiet you have always longed for? Or is it torment and hellfire forever, as the viperous Catholics foretold? Or is it only temporary? Is death just another fleeting thing that passes as drearily as life?
Once, Louis found these questions infuriating and delightful. Once, Louis had found Armand’s philosophical pursuits to be entirely engaging and full of such delirious life and passion that he had fallen in love with him. But Armand had not understood that. He had assumed that, like so many before him, Louis had loved Armand’s body but not his soul. After all, who could love a soul so withered and ugly and misshapen? It was a defect, this thing in him, that made all who touched him recoil and flee.
It was foolish. He saw that now. And worse, it was foolish to cling to the love that had been slain on a stage with that beautiful man’s daughter, sister, morality collar. We are all slaves to the things we love, are we not?
He called her a burden once. Armand believed that wholly, and yet, strangely, so far divorced from that feral mirror of contempt and delight and hunger for companionship, he wondered if it was true at all. He had difficulty looking outside of himself sometimes. He had thought her to be nothing, as he had thought a boy in a chair in the sickly yellow light of day filtered through magazine pages to be nothing, and he had been wrong twofold.
The Catholics would call this confession. In Islam, it would be another sin. God is everywhere if you have loved hard enough and sinned long enough. Silence did not make the pain of it ease, and confession to a boy with a camera and a tape recorder had filled him with such revulsion that he might have killed the boy the instant the tapes had been ripped to ribbons, if not for the burden of love.
Armand had told Louis once, “I want you more than anything in the world.”
And what was the cost of it? Love, which was want, which was need, which was…? On and on. Brutality before benevolence, reversed! It was benevolence before brutality for them. And Armand had done unto Louis what had been done unto him, as he had greatly shamed himself before Bianca, before Lestat, filled to the brim with an evil poured from a golden ewer by the white hand of Marius de Romanus.
If this were real, and you, the audience, were forced to sit and watch and be complicit, as so many before you have been, would you cry out? Would you object? It is not so bad, in the end, the thing that broke that beautiful and doomed child. He had always reveled in being destroyed. It is a sort of salvation, to be ruined.
Let us set the stage. We have gone through our players, one by one, and how they have wronged poor Amadeo, poor Armand. Or, rather, how Armand had wronged them, which you well know, as he had never been able to hide his truest self from you. When you met him, you saw the devil. Just like Lestat. But unlike Lestat, this did not repulse you. Somehow, despite everything.
More on that later. This is not your cue.
Enter Marius. Tall, fair, beautiful. Blonde, of course. This was so very fashionable in Italy in those days. Boys like Riccardo, born south, born dark of hair and eyes and skin, though not as dark as his foreign brother, they were overlooked and rarely seen as desirable. He did not even have the exoticism of Amadeo to lure eyes his way. He was plain and common and Amadeo had loved him for it, though he had not desired him either, which, in hindsight, was for the best.
Marius was endlessly wise. Marius had the knowledge of a thousand lifetimes compounding, folding into each other, like a fan collapsing. He enters the stage, and you see him now, in my mind, tall and fair, and it is not the same as in a discarded video cassette left to draw mildew in a basem*nt. The maestro of Venice arrives onstage in his heavy winter cloak and dark velvet tunic. Coins jingled in the purse that swung from his long white fingers.
The gold changed hands and the boy was turned to gold and all the horrible things that had happened before those long white fingers caressed his cheek faded away with a kiss. Yes, that is how it happened. The boy, who was not Arun then, suddenly did not know what it was the brothel had used to refer to him. Yet even still, as this was gently washed away, he could not help but flinch whenever addressed as “Moor.”
The first time you were told this story, the details came unbidden, pouring out of the subject’s mouth as if he, too, were a noble Roman statue affixed to a fountain display, puttering endlessly as he vomited all his secrets into a pool of coins. The coins that bought him, lost to time. The water that bore him, endlessly changing. The first time you were told this story, the horror of it gripped you like talons, and you stood and paced like Lestat after delivering a blow that had crushed a monster’s ribs, and that strange and horrible boy that you were lit a cigarette shakily while blinking up at a shivering exposed lightbulb. The sounds of Rome, garbled shouts and ambulance sirens, wailed outside the open window. Several hours earlier that boy had cast a coin into a fountain and wished for life. Life unending.
At that time, what was said to that boy, to you, was that the dazed young man was brought up off the perfumed cushions and placed in the ancient white hands of his very own savior. It was hard to know how long he had spent in that place, before Marius had come. What was told to you was that the coin changed hands, and so too, did the slave, and the instant that he was met with freedom for the first time, as far as he could remember, he stood before the dark canals of Venice and found himself shivering in the ecstasy of a vampire’s kiss.
The boy in Rome in 1975 had leaned against the window pane, shaky hand to his mouth, the hand rolled cigarette flashing as the paper smoldered between his fingers. He looked at the slave with eyes that glowed like embers in a dying fire, and he said:
“He didn’t even give you a minute to process it? He didn’t even tell you his name? He just bought you and used you immediately?”
Yes. Memory of this event was hazy, so excuse an old man for his halting recollection of the event. If Marius is the reason for this, he had probably done it to calm the little slave boy before looking into his eyes and giving him a merciful gift of forgetfulness.
He remembered being carried to a gondola, completely mesmerized. Completely under a spell. And yet he recognized that face, and he thought that finally, finally, God had come to save him.
Don’t laugh. He had been fifteen, and it did not occur to him that it was silly to imagine God as a great white statue of a man. He did not care what form God came in as long as God was with him, and so he had damned himself, thoroughly, without understanding the consequences. He had, in his heart, tied his allegiance to God to this beast in the dark, and given himself over to him completely.
The last time he had projected this memory, it had been to Lestat, who was not moved by it. Perhaps because his situation had been so devoid of love that he was envious that the round-faced, kohl-eyed nameless boy had been kissed and stroked and fretted over as the pleasure overtook the pain. He had no idea what was happening to him. He thought it was magic, or drugs, or both. And it continued, for the whole night, a series of sensations that you need not be bored with. He was bathed and fed and attended on in ways he had never imagined could be possible, as his life of endless toiling faded from his eyes and was replaced with a life of excess. He’d been plunged headfirst into hedonism, and laid drunk on the master’s bed, gold-threaded embroidery scratching at his bare skin, the ceiling swirling as he tried to remember his own name.
“Amadeo,” he called the slave boy, and Amadeo he was forever more, even when he wished he was not. The choice to forsake the name did not erase it. Just as Arun slept deep within him, so too did Amadeo. You met him once. He called himself Rashid. “Rest.”
You would not tell this story now, out of fear that you might fall into Orientalist pitfalls, which perhaps should have crossed Marius de Romanus’s mind in 1523 when he’d scooped that child out of the bowels of a brothel that had bought him from a slaver that had swept him away from a life that might have meant something. You would not tell this story now, out of fear of the implications, that your name would be blackened as Nabokov’s is, conflated with this egotistical, predatory figure. You enjoy this. You are complicit. You are the monster, too, and you are me, and we, together, are caught in this web of seduction and corruption and—
Rambling. Disregard.
Amadeo loved Marius with all his little heart. He wanted nothing more than to be with him forever. The days were filled with longing and the nights with lust and as Amadeo grew, he became more and more frustrated with the situation. Marius could go into the sun, of course. He was over a thousand years old at that time. But he preferred it in the dark. He was comfortable with the night and enjoyed his rest, as an old man is wont to. So Amadeo spent his days, as you have seen, wandering around Venice, pestering Bianca Solderini, pursuing love affairs as a way of coping with the idea that the promises were empty and he would be soon discarded. Sometimes Marius would speak of sending him to a university in Padua or Bologna or Florence to broaden his knowledge and temper his fiery spirit, and Amadeo would at first sit very still as the cold terror washed over him, and then he would find a way to make Marius regret ever saying such a thing.
Amadeo had a skill, remember. Marius was not by any means immune to it.
What comes as horror now seemed, at the time, a whirlwind romance. For a long time it felt that way. How could it be anything else? Marius had saved his life. And yes, there was something transactional about their relationship— the sharing of blood, the sharing of sex, on and on. It was lovely, you see. Just lovely. He had a beautiful little life and he was so completely happy. If only he had been satisfied!
When a boy with a tape recorder and a video camera had asked the next question, the subject had retreated into himself. He lives with all his past lives in this place you stand in now, this theater of love that is torment and torment that is love. He is the director of his own story, you see, and he sent every boy with the dark, sunken eyes and unruly dark curls to toil for eternity in the wet room. He should have fed each of them to the rats. Arun first, then the Moor, then Amadeo, and then the beasts you knew, the subject, the stranger, the friend, the monster, the boogeyman, the lover, the slave, and what else? What else could he be? There was nothing left! He had bled it all out for the approval of others.
Rambling again! What is the point? Oh, no point. Post-modern ego death.
The boy asked, “How did he hurt you?”
Winter in Rome was brisk, and the fresh air from the open window of the dingy hotel room toyed with the boy’s hair.
Let’s not dwell on that.
The horror is, of course, that Amadeo was not really sure what counted as pain or what counted as pleasure. So much of that time was conflating the two things. If Marius believed he needed to be punished, he dealt with it swiftly. Except for when he reveled in it. So to that boy in Rome, Armand described in excruciating detail what will be glossed over now, a punishment that had seemed, at the time, both awful and good fun. He so often deserved these things, the way he ran around, spoiled rotten, pleading for an ounce of attention.
He tore down his master’s door, you know. With an axe. For attention. And he got it! Blissful attention. With a whip. And no more detail than that, except that he bled and bled, and laughed and screamed and wailed through it all. And when he was all healed, he was showered with kisses and apologies and left wondering why he had not thought to do this all sooner.
The way to get love, you see, is to be open to the possibility of letting it destroy you.
“I love you,” Amadeo said, wiping his tears, glancing in small wonder at the bloodied skin of his thighs where there had once been angry gashes.
“I’m sure,” Marius replied. There was no remembering what he had been doing, only that it was probably too filthy to mention.
“But I do!” Amadeo gasped, fresh tears springing into his eyes. “Why don’t you believe me?”
An ewer pouring evil into him, and every love that he ever had, in turn, was touched by this evil. Marius put it in Amadeo so that one day Armand could put it in you.
To convince you that there was love there would be pointless. Saying it didn’t make it real. But Amadeo had really loved him. And Marius had surely loved him, too, right? Why else would he keep him? Why else give him the curse of immortality? And with that curse came the hatred.
The boy in the hotel in Rome had smoked a the equivalent of a pack and a half of cigarettes, rolling each by hand, while he bled this story from his soon-to-be lover. He moved around a lot. Anxiously going from the bed to the window to the floor, looking queasy and unsure throughout. Was this how Louis felt? No wonder he had spilled his soul out on the linoleum floor of that dingy apartment on Divisadero. In that moment, the reality of what was happening settled in. It was no mere cat and mouse game. If it was, the boy had won.
“It wasn’t love,” the boy said fiercely. And the subject blinked at him dazedly. He felt drunk on it, the desire he felt. “He did not love you.”
“What?” the subject breathed. He had sat on the floor of the hotel room, the camera on the chair beside him, recording every twitch of the eye and breathless sigh. Recording every barely contained wince. “How could you say that?”
“Because it’s true.” The boy who he had fallen in love with did not apologize for interjecting or for being astute, not the way he had with Louis. This was over a year later, and the boy was more confident, both as a journalist and as a man. He did not care that he was speaking to an ancient vampire or that he could be killed. He’d done this dance once before, and lived to do it again, so he believed himself invincible. “He didn’t love you. He was a creep who saw how young and vulnerable you were and took advantage. You didn’t even know what was happening to you. You were just a kid!”
“I was old enough,” the subject objected. “I knew what I was doing—”
“Did you?” The boy scoffed. He took one last drag from his cigarette before stamping it out on the terracotta clay ashtray that sat upon the windowsill. The January breeze caught in his curls, on the untucked, unbuttoned dress shirt, and betrayed the line of his hipbone where his wife beater had ridden up. His vest lay discarded at the foot of the bed. “Sounds to me like you had no idea what the f*ck was going on. He loved you? You mean the guy who bought you and immediately f*cked you. Because you were a whor*. Are you hearing yourself? He bought you like a whor*, he used you like a whor*, and where the hell is he now? If he loved you so bad, he wouldn’t have done all that and thrown you away like a whor*, too.”
“He—” The subject was stunned. No one had ever been so callous to say such a thing to him before. “No. He burned. He couldn’t save me.”
“So he’s dead?”
“I did not say that.”
“f*ck off!” The boy pushed off the wall and stomped toward him. “You’re delusional if you think he loved you. He didn’t even have to try to groom you! The work was already done for him, because you were a slave! All he had to do was come in and pretend to be your savior, when in reality, all he did was take you from a cage of iron and put you in a cage of gold. You are so— ugh!”
“I’m so what?” The subject laughed. “Stupid? Yes, Daniel. I know.”
“No, that’s not what I— f*ck it. You’re not listening.”
“I am!”
“But you disagree.” The boy scowled. “You think he loved you? He was a monster, not in the way that you’re a monster, because you can’t help that, being what you are, but he was a monster the way humans are monsters. He was a pedophile and an abuser, and he treated you like the whor* he thought you were. He bought you and kissed you before he even got out of the brothel door. He drank your blood before you even knew his name. He spent that whole night doing what, again?”
“So?” The subject demanded, feeling uneasy, feeling dazed.
“So,” the boy said, gentler this time, “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry that your life was like that. Nobody deserves that. Not even a monster.”
Perhaps this vampire has shown you too much.
Well, it’s too late now.
So the last great love of his life enters the stage. Or not. He would be a rather poor director if he relied on Daniel Molloy for anything, except maybe destruction.
But here he was anyway, against all expectations.
Daniel Molloy was a boy who should have died.
Yes, it’s true, you should have died, and the fact that you didn’t was maddening. Daniel Molloy was supposed to be another statistic. No one would have known for days or weeks or months. But there was something there, that will to live, which made all else seem trivial. Was it because he wanted to die so badly, and the idea of it being given to him freely made him do a roundabout? Always so contrary. Chasing Death at every avenue, and when you met him, you said, "No thanks, actually! I'm good!" Infuriating.
The way that Armand saw him was not flattering. Perhaps that was the difference? Every other love that Armand had ever pursued had been a flash of hot desire and the hard-used mantra: Love me, love me, love me.
Armand did not care if Daniel Molloy loved him or not. Armand had only saved his life incidentally. He could have died, and Armand would not have lost sleep over it.
Another small irony.
The chase began in early 1974. He and Louis had separated once Louis could move around on his own. That left Armand alone, which, as you know, was a rarity. So Armand had clung to the thing that had destroyed everything.
At first Armand was simply going to watch and see. And then he realized how utterly stupid this boy was. He wanted to die, it seemed, except when death was an offer, and then he wanted to live more than any human had ever wanted to live in the whole of history.Infuriating.
By the time Armand revealed is presence to Daniel Molloy, he had been following him for maybe two months. By the time Daniel had stopped fearing him, it had been six. By the time Armand had kissed him in those ruins in Italy, it had been over a year. And time stood still, then. It was like all the world revolved around the two of them, and nothing could shake them from their vanity. It was like being young again. It was like running through the canals of Venice with Riccardo, jumping boats and climbing bridges. It was like reading poetry at the foot of Bianca’s bed while she cut the stems of roses at her desk. It was like waiting impatiently for an artist to kiss him and fall in love with him.
It wasn’t anything like what he had with Marius, until Armand had begun twisting himself backwards to fit into Marius’s clothes, like that foolish boy who wanted so badly to be both grown enough to matter and young enough to be desired.
“What if,” Daniel said one evening, in the dark of whatever hotel they had ended up in, in Lisbon or Athens, “we stayed in one place for awhile? What if we tried to do what normal people do? Have a life, or something?”
“You want to be normal?” Armand had laughed into Daniel’s thigh. He had been using it as a pillow, as he often did in the quiet between, while pondering five hundred years of failure to attain this very ease of back and forth, give and take. The absence of which he had been aware of, but had never known how to recognize fully. He had nearly had it, with Louis, before he had ruined it.
“No,” Daniel snorted, his palm absently drawing circles against the back of Armand’s scalp, a motion which made his eyes flutter closed contentedly. “I don’t want to be normal. I just want to see if we can pretend to be normal. Call it an experiment.”
Daniel new him too well. Armand loved experiments.
Everything came easily with Daniel. The manipulations were obvious and known. Daniel knew everything vile and cruel and despicable about Armand, witnessed it, been victim to it, and yet he walked with him willingly through heaven and hell. He wanted more depravity than what he already received. It was mind boggling. He was a miracle. He was a gift. He made Armand feel like a boy again. Like a human again.
But Daniel did not want humanity. He wanted eternity. And he did not understand that it was not a gift. He did not understand that life everlasting was not real life. It was a play. They were all actors on a stage presenting themselves as something they were not for the benefit of the audience, quaint and guileless humans. But Daniel was in the wings, like an understudy, begging, pleading for the chance to shed his human skin just so he could make a mask of his own face and wear it in the dark of night.
So Armand said no.
“It could be like—” Daniel had sat up suddenly in their bed, laying a hand on Armand's chest as he peered over him eagerly. “It could be like we’re equals. Like we’re more than lovers, like— like a marriage. I could be all that, the way normal people are.”
“We are not normal,” Armand said, his heart sinking. A marriage? It felt insane. It felt like a lie.
“So?” Daniel’s fingers trailed up his sternum, past his collarbone, grazing his throat. He turned Armand’s face to his by dragging him by his chin with the tips of his fingers. “I’m not saying we have to be. I’m saying I want the opposite of normal. But it could be like that thing that everyone else has. We could be together forever.”
“Damned,” Armand reminded him softly.
“Together,” Daniel said eagerly. “Why not?”
“I don’t want you to be damned.” Armand sat up suddenly, swatting his hand away. He could not look at that lovely face and recognize the clear hurt there, like a kicked puppy flinching away from the boot that beat it. “I don’t want you to be dead. I want you alive and happy.”
“I’m going to die either way,” Daniel argued.
“I’m not going to be the thing that kills you.” Armand turned abruptly and kissed him hard, and that was enough to shut him up for that particular night, but as you know, it never got better or easier, and he probably should have expected it. But he didn’t.
So when Daniel started running away in earnest, Armand found himself completely bereft. He thought that surely this meant that Daniel was simply using him, that his addiction to the blood kept him around, that his lust for immortality overtook all else. This paranoia grew more and more potent as their fights seemed to outstrip their contentment. And the fights grew more and more intense, too. Armand hurt him, Armand was hurt, they hit each other and threw things at the walls and all the awful things that a doomed relationship is reduced to before they came back together in a haze of passion and desire.
It was not perfect. It was probably bad for both of them. But, if you can imagine, this was perhaps the most relaxed Armand had ever been in his love of anyone. Probably because he knew Daniel’s addiction would carry him back to Armand’s side so long as he still drew breath.
Except when it didn’t.
There were a myriad of reasons why Armand did not want to make Daniel into a vampire. For one thing, as you know, the idea repulsed him. Even for someone he loved, especially for someone he loved. It was the act of intimacy, yes, the knowledge that everything he was would be spilled out and left to fill someone else with life. It was the incestuous implications of it, which he had his full of as a human, and he felt too close to this, like he might lose himself to the creation. And creation, he felt, was always a little bit sinful. Creation of this kind was more than just a sin. Can you imagine anything more cruel than damning your lover to an eternity of nothingness? Better to live and die like a real man, and not the idea of one.
The choice to erase the memories was not the first or obvious one. It had occurred to him when reflecting on that first unholy kiss that Marius had given him, after that hellish meeting in the museum, and he wondered if maybe it was a mercy after all. He knew what had happened to him in the brothel, factually, but he had no recollection of what that felt like. Or how he felt about it. He had been so blissfully happy to be in Marius’s arms, all else was left to the lapping green canals. His past was drowned in an alley in Venice, and he was left empty, pliable, and willing. He was filled up with all of Marius’s wonderful teachings, and all his wickedness too. Evil poured and never drained. Forever and ever, a vessel. Never anything more or less.
Maybe all Marius had wanted was to be loved too. Maybe Amadeo’s constant searching for someone else is the thing that pushed the old man further away. Maybe it was his fault—
If you could object, you would. That is a fact. Rest. It will be over soon.
The choice to kill Daniel’s humanity or to kill Daniel, Armand’s lover, was a difficult one. A choice of pyre or pyre. That damn modernist again, drumming one of his various witticisms. Is April the cruelest month? Do you dare eat a peach? These are jokes, these quotes, that made a lover laugh over coffee at one or two or a dozen street cafés, basking in the simplicity of it, this love. And yet there was nothing simple about them. The love was real, wasn’t it? And what is left of it? A lifetime of regrets and desires twirling around each other in a waltz of easeful deaths.
Daniel once sat on their bed in Oxford and read this poem aloud. He had read it aloud before, as he had read so many poems aloud, but this recollection was never committed to film. If you looked, you could find this recitation a different time. It is boring, this long poem. But something about time, something about memory, something about love. Oh, God, it is a ghost, this thing between us! When will it be laid to rest? Dead things should remain dead. Go back to the crypt and lie there.
It was a rainy afternoon. Spring. The rain puttered softly on the window glass, and he watched it languidly as he laid his head in Daniel’s lap and listened to his voice intermingle with the rain. It was a life, this thing that he killed. It was not perfect, and they had hurt each other in the end, but it was not imaginary. It was not a production, a playact of the thing. It was real. They had loved each other. It was not easy or simple or beautiful, it had been so hard, really, and he could not understand it. How could love be hard? Why did he have to fight for it?
Why don’t you love me?
What can I do to make you love me?
Over and over, it’s all the same. He never learns, that devil of a thing.
“‘This is the use of memory,’” read Daniel, in Oxford, in their bed, a lover untethered. “‘For liberation—not less of love but expanding, of love beyond desire, and so liberation, from the future as well as the past.’”
Armand had rolled onto his back and let his legs hang off the end of the bed as he stared up at Daniel’s face. Not flattering, from that angle. Beautiful in the way his mouth formed words. The mundanity of it, that was beauty. That was love. To live, he thought. Just to live and be happy and be with each other. He almost understood it, then. For the first time, it really almost clicked. And he was almost whole. And that thought would later get lost in the shuffle of paranoia and need and want and love, idiotic thing.
When he returned to Louis, when it was all over, he threw himself into the thought that it was nothing, it had meant nothing, because the alternative was too much to bear. If it was real, then he had killed it, and if it was real, then he might never have love again. Unless he forced it. Unless he created it. Evil unto evil, crafted by his own hands. He had known it even as a child, that anything he ever made would be a sin.
In Oxford again, this final scene, it makes no difference. It is not important. It is not a soul-shattering discovery, a secret uncovered. It is not the arguments unending or the voyeuristic p*rnography that you desire and don’t desire. It is just this. A poem read with that breezy cadence that made the hair on his arms stand on end. The warmth of his body, the absent tracing of his fingers along the line of his hair, finding curls to get lost in. The rain. Simple things. It made Armand feel all at once very old, in the way that humans could feel old, in their contentment with the small things that the world had to offer. And in that offering, there was love.
Daniel read:
“‘History may be servitude, history may be freedom,’” he said as his lover watched his face and wondered how beautiful it might be as it matured and aged. “‘See, now they vanish, the faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.’”
Armand reached up and laid his hand on the small book. Daniel’s eyes flickered to his face. They watched each other, not without desire, not without want, but still, in a comfortable silence that came with the recognition that neither of them were going anywhere, and if there was want, if there was need, there was also time. In that moment, it seemed, they had eternity. Yes, yes, speak, modernist! If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. We cannot take it back, you see. It is over now. It was over the minute we met. And all the rest is up to you. Perhaps the circle can be broken.
Perhaps the center shouldn’t hold.
“‘Sin is Behovely, but,’” Armand recited the next line from memory, feeling a swell of great affection for this thing he had nearly killed one day and would one day kill in earnest. “‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’”
And so it shall.
Jerked from the shivering reverie, scenes passing rapidly with jump cuts and dissolves, there was a recognition deep in his bones that what he had just experienced was a horror he would never be able to unsee or unfeel, and yet, it had not happened to him. And pity was not the word, not even close. It was as if that boy lived in him now. As if he had taken one of those dark eyed waifs, Arun or Amadeo or the nameless Moor, and now he was settling beneath his skin, making a new home in the cage of his ribs.
Daniel found himself suddenly in a place he’d never been before. That was strange. The road stretched before him. He felt a light breeze, the chill of a not quite distant sea, the taste of winter’s end heavy in his mouth. He dragged his fingers through his hair. He turned around and found himself staring at a great ruin.
“Would you like to come inside?”
Whirling around, wobbling on his feet, he discovered Armand standing in the doorway of the crumbling old thing. They stood in a garden, delicately trimmed green hedges all around them. It was night, but he could see it all clearly. And he realized he recognized it.
“What is this?” he demanded, frowning at the dark green hedgerows suspiciously. His mind was swimming. He had not yet processed all the things he had seen and felt and learned. “Another memory?”
But how could he speak, if it was coming from Armand’s head? He had tried, numerous times, throughout the ordeal to object. There were things he had not wanted to see. The glimpses of it had been enough to make him feel sick for days. He felt sick now.
“No.” Armand lingered at the door. Then he stepped out into the light of the moon, and Daniel saw that he was clothed as Amadeo had been clothed, in silk stockings and black leather shoes, in a dark velvet tunic that was belted at the waist, and a sword on his hip. His hair had been carefully parted, the curls freshly oiled and hanging neatly behind his ears. He looked almost noble, like he’d stepped out of a romantic period film. Or a production of Romeo and Juliet, maybe. Weird thought. “This is your memory, not mine.”
“Okay…?” Daniel was delirious, he realized. He was losing it, big time. There was nothing that could be done about that. He just had to accept it and move on. “So what exactly is all this?”
“You know what it is, Daniel.”
Daniel shot him a puzzled glance as he began to walk around the garden. It was so strange. It felt like a real place. More real than Armand’s memories had felt. Those memories had been strange and hazy in places and then vibrant and intense in others. But all the emotion held there, that had felt real. Daniel did not know where to put all of Armand's feelings now that he felt them rolling around inside him.
He reached out and touched a dark leaf upon the hedgerows, feeling a shiver shoot through him. And then he saw his hand and he stared at it confusedly. He brough it closer to his face. The gnarled and shaky hands he had grown to know intimately had been washed clean of imperfections, replaced with the strong hands of his youth. His fingers flew to his face and he prodded at his cheeks confusedly. There was no loose skin, no wrinkles— how f*cked up was that?
“It’s just a memory,” Armand told him gently. “You will get your face back when you awaken. For now, take this gift and remember the man I fell in love with.”
“This is…?” Daniel had to really think. His mind was stuffed full with the memory of Armand. Of Amadeo and all those other selves flitting backstage. Had Marius known how fractured his sense of self was, when he had painted Armand dancing with himself in triplicate in hell? “You kissed me for the first time here. Told me you loved me.”
“Very good.” Armand rolled his eyes. “I was beginning to fear that I’d given you brain damage on top of everything else. This is the Villa of Mysteries. We did not record what happened inside, but I can show you.”
“Can you?” Daniel watched him with some vague suspicion as he crossed his arms defiantly. He was wearing a leather jacket and sturdy boots. It felt unreal, and yet he felt the fibers of his woolen sweater scratch against his chest. He smelled the sea and the freshly overturned dirt from a recent rainstorm. “What makes you think I want that?”
“Oh, come on, Daniel,” Armand huffed, his impatience breaking through his mask of geniality. “You are not as opaque as you think you are. You want me. You don’t love me, but you want me, and you have seen enough to know what that means. Say the word.”
“No.” Daniel scowled at that. He turned to walk away.
“Daniel!” Armand stomped after him. At a human pace. Hilarious. Daniel laughed when he grabbed him by the arm and whirled him around. “Don’t you get it? Are you truly this stupid? What do you think is happening right now?”
“You’re trying to seduce me,” Daniel accused.
“I’ve already seduced you,” Armand snapped. His fingers were tight around Daniel’s bicep as he glared into his face. His eyes, Daniel saw, heart sinking, were a beautiful, rich brown. He could get lost in them, they were so big and wide and pleading. He gazed at Daniel, and he looked unspeakably sad. “I’ve already killed you. It’s already done.”
Daniel stood frozen in this beautiful memory that he could not, for the life of him, remember at all beyond the recording of it. The fingers around his bicep loosened. They watched each other, their youths gazing over the wall of centuries lived and unlived, meeting for perhaps the first time in this reimagining of a first kiss.
Time past and time future, right? f*ck.
“So what?” Daniel asked, letting out a short, shaky laugh. “I’m dead?”
“Dying.”
“And?” Daniel eyed him as he toed the compact dirt with his shiny, rounded leather shoe. “You want my permission?”
“I guess so.” Armand blinked up at him. He looked entirely unsure. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t want to do it.”
“Then don’t.” Daniel took a deep breath. Dying. He was dying, but he didn’t feel it at all. Maybe if death was like this, it wouldn’t be so bad.
“This is not death.” Armand’s expression twisted in sudden anger and frustration. “This is life. Our life. The one I took away from you. Just like I’m taking your life now. So choose.”
“Pyre or pyre?” Daniel mocked him, squinting at his lovely face and watching him flinch. He snorted as he shouldered past him, intentionally knocking into him as he strolled toward the ruined villa. “What if I didn’t want to die?”
“You were dying anyway.” Armand rubbed his shoulder with a frown. “Is this such a hard choice? Fifty years ago you would have wept for this chance.”
“Fifty years ago,” Daniel said flatly. He looked up at the sky. The moon winked at him behind shifting clouds. “I lived an entire life since then. Maybe I got used to humanity.”
“Stop dicking me around,” Armand snapped, earning a startled look from Daniel, who had the archaic translated Italian and French Armand rattling around in his head. The American colloquialism, said like a boy straight off the streets of Brooklyn, made Daniel bark a sincere laugh of disbelief. “Stop it! Stop laughing!”
“Do you mean to sound like that?” Daniel gasped. “Sorry, just— no f*cking way you’re not doing that on purpose. Why do you sound American?”
“Because I’m angry and I’m talking to you!” Armand threw his hands out with a huff, and gestured wildly to all of Daniel, who grinned at him broadly. “Do you want this? Do you want to live forever? Yes or no.”
Daniel didn’t think it was much of a choice. Pyre or pyre, Eliot had said.
“‘To be redeemed from fire by fire,’” Armand finished the verse softly, his hands falling to his side. He blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry. I’ve stolen it all from you again. I thought this is what you wanted.”
“I’m not mad about it,” Daniel found himself saying with a shrug. “I mean… I guess I’ll have to figure it out, but I’m adaptable. I can manage. But what about you?”
“What?” Armand’s frown made his already young, jubilant face look strange and glum. “What about me?”
Daniel did not want to admit that after all that, he did feel bad for him. He did pity him. No, it was more than pity. There was no word for what he felt. And the intimacy of this act was something that he understood better now. It was not just a simple thing, not like a kiss, not even like sex. It was as close as you could get to a person without actually becoming them.
“Do you want this?” Daniel asked, too bluntly, probably. But he knew he did not have the time to be gentle or polite. “Do you want me? With you? Forever?”
“An eternity of me inside you,” Armand said softly. He seemed startled by the confrontation of it all. His big, dark eyes darted away suddenly. He seemed flushed. And human. And that was strange. “Yes. Yes, I think so. If it had to be anyone, I want it to be you.”
“Okay.” Daniel took a deep breath. He still had to process the endless stream of trauma that Armand had dumped directly into his brain, but sure. He could die. That’s fine. And then get reborn as a monster. He could do that too. It was nothing, just a small thing. “I’ll go with you, then. Into this place. Wherever that door goes, I’ll go. But only if you come with me.”
Armand’s eyes grew wide. Daniel didn’t know why he looked like that, like his heart had been shattered in two. He didn’t think he’d said anything especially profound. He’d only stated a fact. He would do this, but only withArmand. It was not a thing that would be done unto him, and it was not a thing either of them would suffer alone.
Armand crossed the garden path, his leather shoes scraping against the soft dirt. They had hard soles, those old Renaissance shoes. They were hand sewn and sturdier than any shoe Daniel had owned in his life. The cobbler who’d made them had probably made a thousand shoes just like it, and each one would be worth more than his apartment in American dollars. Back then, though, they were just shoes.
“Take my hand,” Armand said. Daniel watched him offer it out, and the sounds of the night came to life. Crickets and low breeze through the hedge leaves. A distant car. Daniel took his hand, and it was warm and full of life. “Let’s go together then.”
“Into hell?” Daniel joked as he was tugged forward toward the villa door. It had swung open on its own accord.
Armand glanced back at him. His face split into a wide, mischievous grin. And then he laughed. He backed up right into the doorway, throwing his head back against it, and he laughed until he started crying.
“What?” Daniel gasped, having seen enough of his mind to finally, finally understand him a little bit. “What’s wrong? What have I done now?”
“It’s not you,” Armand said, his laughter cutting off as though it had been prerecorded. His eyes were shining as they flitted over his face. “I’ve just realized what I’m about to do. And I hate myself for it.”
“Don’t.” Daniel frowned. “I’m fine with it. And you’re right, I was dying anyway, it’s not on you. You can hate yourself for all the other stuff, though.”
That made him smile through the tears. And Daniel, one hand still clutching his, found himself using the other to wipe his tears gingerly.
“So?” he murmured. “What now?”
“To hell?” Armand leaned forward as if to kiss him, but seemed to think better of it. Instead they lingered, watching each other through heavily lidded eyes.
“Whatever you say,” Daniel murmured.
With a small, defeated sigh, Armand slipped sideways into the dark of the villa. Daniel was tugged dazedly after.
And suddenly it was like he was in two places at once. He had double vision. On one hand, he was drifting through this great and beautiful ruin, hanging on the arm of his ex-lover who had made a beautiful dream for him to die in. On the other hand, he was lying on the uncomfortable dark wood of a table, staring up at the floating bookcases as pain and cold began to sink in. He could distantly hear his own garbled gasps as he died.
“Look,” Armand said, pointing to the frescos. Daniel was shocked to see his own face. It was Noora Nasser’s painting of them, in all its hom*oerotic glory, half-finished and beautiful to behold. Up close, Daniel thought he might be able to decide if they were kissing or not. “The first time we were here I pushed you up against this wall and you told me to kill you. It was beautiful.”
“Mhm.” Daniel was unimpressed, or he pretended to be, but being so close to the act made him feel a sick sort of desire. He was dying, somewhere out there. And it wasn’t a horrible death or a scary one. He felt strangely safe. Strangely peaceful. Was this what Armand had been talking about, in San Francisco? Honey on his tongue? “You wanna f*ck me up against the fresco now?”
“Be serious.”
Daniel laughed. He had been. Armand knew that. They gripped each other’s hands. There was a comfort to this death. He was not alone at all, and he never would be again. But then he heard a gasp, his name breathed upon the ancient walls, and Armand stiffened beside him. And when Daniel turned around, he saw, to his great shock and horror, that Louis was standing there, in the dark corner of the villa, watching with wide eyes and an open mouth. Something had summoned him here. Had it been Daniel or Armand?
Armand peeked over his shoulder and scoffed.
“This is not your business,” Armand told him curtly. “You can speak to him when it’s done. Begone.”
“Armand—!”
But then they were alone. It was like seeing a ghost. Daniel stood uneasily as he stared at the space Louis had left, and he felt a bit queasy. He could barely see the floating bookcases any longer, his vision had grown so foggy. And his life, he realized, was passing along him, flowing into Armand. He was taking it all. And he stood beside him, tears on his cheeks, staring at nothing in particular while the world ended.
“What do you see?” Daniel asked softly.
Armand shook his head mutely. He did not want to disclose the details of Daniel’s life, even as Daniel felt him come to grips with it. Perhaps he was seeing Alice and the Mnemosynes the day they had met, seeing her shaggy black hair and red velvet vest, seeing the remnants of himself in the woman that Daniel had decided to marry. Maybe he saw how Daniel had been so enthralled with her that it had taken a month of seeing each other nearly every day for them to sleep together, because he had been convinced that something about him would scare her off. Maybe he saw how beautiful she was, and how Daniel really had loved her, and maybe that made him feel sad. Maybe he saw Annie in a basinet, on a Mickey Mouse scooter, swinging on a tire swing. Maybe he saw her laugh and realized that love was not just want and need. Maybe he saw it all fall apart and that was why he was crying now.
Everything seemed to spin on its head. The floor shifted, and it was marble or limestone. They were in Notre Dame, and then San Marco’s Basilica. They were drifting among saints and prophets, clutching each other’s hand. Daniel could see Armand drifting. But he couldn’t speak.
They walked, the two of them, up the rounded stone steps and through the chancel screen, peering at the silver wrought apostles who watched them with their prying eyes and whispery judgement. And Daniel could understand, suddenly, why this place made that poor kid go nuts. They passed through the archway and into the apse where an altar stood, shrouded in gold. On that altar was a chalice.
“Cute,” Daniel found himself saying as he was led up to it. It felt so silly he had to laugh. “You’re not even Catholic.”
“Neither are you.”
“My dad was.”
“So you’ve done this before?” Armand shot him a toothy grin. “Sanguis Christi?”
“Amen.”
Armand laughed too. He took the chalice and offered it to him. There was no double vision now. Reality was here, inside Daniel’s head. Whatever was happening to his body was not his business.
“It’ll be like waking up from a long dream,” Armand said gently. “It will be like seeing the world through a child’s eyes. Everything is beautiful and new at first. But that will fade, as the wonder of childhood does. It will not always be beautiful. And you will have to kill.”
“I know that,” Daniel scoffed. He should feel more guilty about it, but he didn’t. He reached out and grasped the chalice. His left hand was still wrapped tight around Armand’s. And now, so was his right. “I know what it means. To be you. It’s not exactly a happy thing, the life you’ve got. But I want it anyway. Give it to me, then.”
They held the chalice to his lips, hand in hand, and when he drank, he really did expect it to taste like wine. Instead, the sweetness of it hit his tongue, and it was like honey. It startled him. The cool cup hit his teeth as he drained it, and it fell away from him, clattering to the floor of the chancel. It was not enough. He stared at Armand dazedly, a hunger unnamed drumming inside him, and he watched the man's lashes flutter as his eyes flitted from Daniel’s eyes to his bloody mouth. His lips fluttered, too, open and closed, like butterfly wings flinching from human touch. His expression did not change as Daniel shoved him into the altar.
Armand had enough time to use his free hand to scrape the hair from his neck before Daniel pushed him over the white linen cloth and sunk his teeth into the meat of his neck between his throat and shoulder.
It was unlike any drug he’d ever tried, that was for sure. And he could not even process that fact, or the ferocity of the act that pushed him to this sudden and violent desire to take. To possess. He was the demon now, and no amount of exorcisms would drive him out. Armand would be stuck with him forever. And as Daniel drank, as he pinned him there, like Isaac before Abraham, it occurred to him that it was a wrongness that could only really belong to monsters. And he did not care.
He probably could understand Louis a little bit better now.
The life that Armand had led, the love that he had craved, it was all Daniel’s now. And maybe Daniel had been right to view it as a marriage. Only it was even more intimate. It filled him up, and he felt the immensity of it, the heaviness, and without it, what was there? How had he lived a whole life without it? It made sense that just a taste had unraveled him in his youth. This was a euphoria that made the world spin on its side. The axis of the earth had tipped over and now the seasons were gone and the world would be plunged forever into darkness.
When he came back to himself, he found he could not remember when the chancel of San Marco’s Basilica had morphed into the penthouse library. He was sitting on the table, blood running hot down his mouth and chest, and he heaved a few deep breaths and went to readjust his glasses. Only, he realized quickly, they were not there, and better yet, he did not need them at all. Everything around him was clear as day. Clearer than he’d ever known anything to be.
He looked around in wonder, blinking wildly. The magnolia tree was vibrant and bright. The rocks in the pit were like little diamonds. The great circular lamp sent a glow so bright it seared his eyes. He was completely enthralled.
“Oh,” Daniel breathed, giving a little laugh and feeling giddy as he bounced up and down against the table. It was like the blood inside his body was trying to puppet him up and make him dance like a fool. “Oh. Wow. This is…”
“Everything you hoped for?”
Daniel looked down. He saw Armand there beside him, lying half sprawled against the table. Someone had moved Daniel’s computer onto a chair, thankfully, so no one had bled on it, but there was blood everywhere. Everywhere. Streaking the floor, smeared along the wooden grain of the table. Some of it had even splashed up on the bookcase above them. It wasall over Armand’s shirt, up the side of his cheek, over one eye. He laid there, the skin of his neck hanging open, a vicious and unseemly gash that did not look good or healthy at all. Blood on his lips and chin. Down his arms and hands.
“I…” Daniel did not know what to say. He watched Armand close his eyes. Everything, it seemed, was entirely different. He could see every detail of his face. He could see a scar on his forearm. One on his pelvis, too, where his shirt had ridden up. Old, most likely. Maybe from Harlech?
As he thumbed the faint white line there, Armand seemed to read his mind, impossibly.
“Yes, that was a gift from my murderer.” Armand cracked open an eye. “You took all that rather well.”
“The memories?” Daniel asked with a scoff. “Or the vampirism?”
“Both, I suppose.”
“I don’t get beaten down easily.” Daniel licked his lips. The blood there made him shiver. He wanted more.
“I will get you some,” Armand said gently, “from the kitchen. But Daniel, you need to decide something.”
“What?” Daniel asked, taking Armand’s hand and licking the blood from his fingers. He could not tell if it was Armand’s or his own.
“What will you do now?”
“Huh?” Daniel could not think about anything but licking every inch of this man clean of their intermingling blood. And then he could laugh about it.
“Daniel, focus.” Armand drew his hand back from Daniel’s mouth and sat up abruptly. Daniel frowned. It seemed a cruel thing to do, to withhold this from him. “I know it’s hard. I know everything in you has shifted and you can’t tell up from down, but you must. You wanted this. And yes, I killed you. I gave you my memories and I could not help but think of you in the moment, even though I knew it could overwhelm you. So I killed you, willfully, and now you are mine forever. Do you see?”
“I can be yours forever,” Daniel said dazedly.
“Now I know you’re completely out of it,” Armand sighed, flopping back onto the table and scowling up at the floating library. “I don’t want you to pretend to love me. I need you to really feel it. But now you never will.”
“Shut up,” Daniel gasped, frowning at the pessimism. “You don’t know that. I could try to love you. I feel like I love you right now.”
“That’s the blood. It will subside soon. And then you will hate me.”
“You don’t know me, man.”
Armand’s eyes slid to his in mild incredulity. Then he snorted. He licked his own lips. Daniel swooped to kiss them, and Armand gasped into his mouth. The speed had surprised both of them.
“You shouldn’t be able to do that!” Armand gasped after Daniel had licked his mouth clean, cackling madly at nothing. “You should be weak! You were just turned!”
“Oops,” Daniel mocked him, “did you accidentally make me more powerful than you?”
Armand looked at him with such intensity that Daniel realized that maybe he really could love this man.
“You’re so weird,” Daniel accused him, drawing his legs up on the table and realizing how pliable and nimble his limbs were. He folded them beneath him with a laugh. His knees didn’t hurt at all! Or his back! “God, I want to run a marathon!”
Armand smiled up at him faintly. He took a deep breath.
“Daniel,” he said. “We need to talk about your daughters.”
It was like he had been dancing in a bubble, and his good pal Armand here, his maker and sometimes lover, had popped it. He sat there, cross-legged on the table, Armand lying with his legs dangling off the edge beside him, and they were silent. Gravity had realigned. Reality settled in.
“I can’t be around them like this,” Daniel whispered.
“You would be smart not to be,” Armand said patiently, “but that is up to you. I lived at the palazzo for months after I was turned and was able to interact with the other boys well enough. I was hungry, certainly, but Marius was an attentive teacher. Not in all things, but in this, he made sure I knew restraint. I should extend the same courtesy to you.”
“But you won’t,” Daniel guessed, earning a surprised look from Armand. He opened his mouth, brow furrowing uncertainly. “No, I didn’t read your mind. I just know you. I know how your brain works now. Sorry, by the way.”
“I didn’t show you any of it so you would pity me,” Armand huffed, dragging himself upright and using the blood on his hands to smooth back his hair. His eyes slid to Daniel’s face curiously. “You understand me now. I wonder if you’ve ever understood me in your whole life.”
“Probably not.” Daniel grimaced. “Even if you told it to me, I don’t know that I’d get it like I got it then, with you in my head, guiding me through it. I felt what you felt. So when you told me that it wasn’t so bad, when you told me you deserved it, I was already three steps ahead. I already knew you’d say it, because I felt how incredibly lonely and desperate you were. I don’t forgive you, exactly, but I think we might be even now.”
“Maybe.” Armand smiled at him faintly. He tilted his head, studying Daniel’s face. “You look different. It’s strange. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Are my eyes like yours now?”
“Sort of.” Armand handed him a bloody cellphone. Daniel realized it was his own. He scoffed, turned the camera on, and peered at himself. He did look strange. It was an unplaceable otherness. And his eyes were different, too, of course. They were a strange, vibrant reddish, purplish color. Weird. “Would you like to—?”
Armand yelped as Daniel threw an arm around his shoulder and grinned, snapping a quick photo of the two of them. Then Daniel retreated, chuckling to himself while Armand glowered.
“You need to delete that,” he demanded.
“Oh, do I?” Daniel was typing faster than he could think. Armand reached for the phone and got his hand bitten for the effort.
“Ouch! Daniel! You can’t do that now, you have fangs!”
“Bite me,” Daniel mocked him.
Armand seethed. It took him a bit too long to decide to grab Daniel’s arm and bite him back. Shocking, that he had not immediately snapped. Too much time playing pretend social etiquettes with Louis. He forgot that he was supposed to be the devil.
Too bad he hadn’t bit his arm before he had sent the photo to Annie.
Daniel hung his head back while he did it, and felt the strangest glimmering of pleasure from the act. Weird. He had to get used to this. He was completely out of it. He tossed the phone aside to drag Armand’s bloody curls from his face. After a minute, Armand raised his eyes and looked up at him dazedly. His teeth retracted from his arm, leaving pinprick holes and human-teeth shaped impressions.
“Do you have any regrets?” he asked.
“Only that you stopped,” Daniel said, earning a short laugh of disbelief.
“You need human blood,” Armand said. “Come—”
“Show me how to heal you first.”
A line appeared between his brows. He shook his head.
“You can’t—”
Daniel took his hand and licked the puncture marks closed. He did not have to think about it. He felt like the world was his, suddenly. He could do anything.Armand stared at him blankly.
“Like that?” Daniel asked eagerly.
“Oh my God,” Armand whispered, eyes going very wide. “What have I done?”
“Ha!”
He did bring him to the kitchen for blood. Daniel drank it right out of the bag and asked for more. Armand handed him another. The shiny floor was covered in blood and empty blood bags soon, and Armand was watching him with bright eyed curiosity burning holes into Daniel's face. The gash on his neck still bled freely.
“Is there anything about my past that you found surprising?” Armand asked, looking almost shy as he continued to watched him.
“There was so much…” Daniel had yet to really process it fully. He thought it might take decades or centuries to fully understand the immensity of what he had seen and felt inside Armand's mind. “I feel like I understand what was going on with Bianca a bit better. Your relationship was f*cked up, but I get it. Like, my own track record with women isn't exactly stellar there. Though I don’t think I ever projected the idea of mother onto any of them.”
“Mm. It wasn’t intentional. I simply just didn’t have anyone else.”
“I get it.” And Daniel really did. Because he had felt it. And it was horrible, this thing that Armand had been forced to live with, but he had lived. Somehow. “You edited out the sordid details. Mostly.”
“You didn’t need to see that.” Armand’s eyes darted away. There was shame there. Daniel could read that clearly. “Now you never will.”
“Marius used to hurt you.”
“Only when I deserved it.”
“Armand.”
“Okay,” Armand laughed in that strange way that made it clear he might be holding back tears, “sometimes I did things to make him do it, so that he would look at me. Or touch me. What do you want me to say? ‘Oh, it was wrong!’ Of course it was! I knew that then, too. I’m just stubborn, I suppose.”
“No sh*t. And masoch*stic. Like in the literal sense. Get it together, man.”
Armand puffed out his cheeks indignantly. He went to a drawer and pulled out a metal straw. He stabbed it into one of the blood bags and hopped up on the counter beside him. They took turns sipping from it.
“I feel weird,” Daniel admitted.
He vomited into the garbage bin.
The bloodied floor was cool as he curled up against it, his whole body overcome with tremors like he had never felt before. His stomach cramped. His vision swam. He recalled Louis saying something about this.
“Yes,” Armand said, crossing his legs upon the counter above him as Daniel groaned, “there we are. Took you long enough. Drink some more. Lucky you, all you’ve really had in the past twenty-four hours is alcohol and coffee. You probably won’t throw up again.”
“f*ck…”
He was peeled off the floor. They drank some more. It made him feel better. The taste was strange, nothing like Armand’s blood. Sort of bitter and sort of sweet. There were undertones, notes of real foods that Daniel had eaten, but he was too delirious to think.
“Did you know?” Daniel asked after the silence passed easily between them. It was like all the real animosity had been swept from Daniel’s body. He did not care anymore what Armand had done to him. At least not enough to be angry about it actively. After all, they would be tied together forever. Eternity was a long time to hold a grudge. And maybe Daniel did not quite forgive him yet, but he felt it in him, this strange fondness that could be love. It was the ease of the silence and the company that startled him. And he understood it now, how mesmerizing being around Daniel had been for Armand, fifty years ago. Maybe it was Daniel's silence that Armand had been longing for, and not the other way around. “When you offered your memories, did you know it would kill me?”
“I told you that it was a possibility,” Armand reminded him gently.
“Prick.”
“And now we are together in hell forever,” Armand said, smiling at him sweetly. “Just as you always wanted.”
“So where’s my ring?” Daniel demanded. He was shocked to see Armand’s mouth fall open. He looked like he might even be blushing. “Oooh. You forgot that it’s like a marriage, right? Too bad. You can’t take it back now.”
Armand’s eyes darted away, his mouth forming words that were not audible. And then, to Daniel’s surprise, he lurched forward and kissed him with his mouth still a bit bloodied. Daniel laughed into his lips, pulling him closer, feeling exhilarated and dazed. He never wanted this to end.
And then his phone rang.
His eyes snapped open in a panic.
Oh. The photo. Oh.
“Daniel…?” Armand pulled back. He frowned at him deeply, glancing to the phone. At Annie's name. Then his eyes widened as the pieces fell into place. “What have you done?”
“Uhh…”
Armand grabbed the phone, glared at it, and huffed indignantly. He hopped off the counter and marched up to the sink, throwing the phone into it and flicking the switch on the wall behind it. Daniel watched in shock and complete disbelief as he witnessed shards of glass fly everywhere. He ducked, covering his face, while the garbage disposal ate his phone. It was the most heinous noise he had ever heard. And it was then that he realized that this was the devil he had tied himself to. He wanted to laugh in delight, but he was too annoyed that his phone was currently meeting its end at the teeth of an industrial grade garbage disposal.
“What the f*ck?” Daniel snapped when Armand flicked the switch again.
“You sent them that photo,” Armand accused him, plucking glass from his cheek and tossing it aside. He turned to face him. “You incredible idiot. You beautiful fool. You are going to kill them!”
“They deserve to know what’s happening to me!” Daniel gasped.
“What happens when they get the police involved?” Armand scowled. “What happens when you go to them, completely fine, and have to explain?”
“I told them I got turned into a vampire,” Daniel said, like it was obvious. He was confused. Why wouldn’t he have told the truth?
Armand looked at him like he wanted to strangle him.
“You…” Armand shook his head. He threw his head back and he laughed. “My God. What are you?”
It took Daniel a beat to answer. His instinct to mock Armand was replaced with the need to charm him.
“I am the love of your life,” Daniel declared, watching the words work their magic and melt the poor sucker’s heart. “And you will let me tell my daughters whatever I want.”
“It will kill them.” Armand looked pained. “For their sakes, leave them alone.”
“Do you care, suddenly?” Daniel watched him with a grin. “Ooh, you must have seen them through my eyes. Do you love them now?”
“No.” Armand scowled. “But— I felt it. The unconditional love. I don’t know, Daniel. I’ve never felt anything like that in my life. Please don’t go to them. Please, for their sakes, just pretend like you died here.”
“That just isn’t gonna happen,” Daniel told him with a shrug. “Sorry, beloved. I’ve got a life beyond you. Which includes my daughters. You knew that.”
“But your life is gone—!”
“It’s only just starting!” Daniel laughed. He hopped off the counter, strolled up to him, and he took his face in his hands. There were tears in his eyes, he saw. “What? We’re in this together. You can come with me, if you want.”
“Where?” Armand whispered.
“To hell. Or New York City. Whatever, same thing.”
Armand turned his lower lip in-between his teeth. He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head in disbelief. Then he turned his mouth into Daniel’s hand and kissed it. Then, without hesitation, he kissed Daniel’s mouth too. They stood like that, almost chastely, until Armand pried Daniel's hands from his face and backed away.
“Why not,” Armand said, “play a game with me?”
“Oh God,” Daniel groaned.
Armand’s smile was something a bit terrifying. And Daniel was thrilled.
“You can run to New York,” he said softly. “You can run anywhere. And I will find you. And then, once I find you, you have to find me.”
“Bastard.”
“Well?” Armand asked, swinging Daniel’s hand idly between them. “What do you say, lover? Let’s try again.”
“If I catch you,” Daniel said, eyeing him uncertainly, “you have to buy me a ring.”
“Would you wear it?” Armand at him with clear disbelief. “You hate me.”
“You are so f*cking stupid,” Daniel gasped. He laughed, and he pushed Armand’s head down simply just to kiss his bloody hair, and then he laughed again. “My blood’s all in your hair!”
“You’re not reliable right now,” Armand snapped. “You won’t know you hate me until you’re far away from here.”
“I’m gonna prove your sorry ass so wrong.”
“Fine, then!” Armand released his hands, flinging up his own in defeat. “Go on. Go forth into the world and bring hell with you. Try not to kill your daughters, while you’re at it.”
“I need a new phone,” Daniel pointed out.
Armand pulled his own phone out of his pocket and handed it to him. Daniel was startled by that.
“Don’t delete any of my apps,” Armand warned. “I want that back when I get to New York.”
“How much time are you giving me?” Daniel demanded. He was thrilled. His entire body was giddy with anticipation. He found himself growing competitive.
“Two days.” Armand crossed his arms and shrugged. “Enough time to get there and explain whatever it is you must explain without me, but not enough time to kill them. Hopefully. Fair?”
“Fair,” Daniel said reluctantly. He didn’t want to have a chaperone to see his daughters, but he had literally no idea what vampirism was going to do to their relationship. He at least wanted to say goodbye.
“Alright.” Armand took a deep breath. The enormity of what had passed between them seemed to hit them, then. “Two days. Are you ready?”
“No.” Daniel realized it all at once. He was not ready to face this new world alone. Not at all. He had been hoping that Armand would just come with him, as strange as it seemed. He had anticipated togetherness, and not really considered that Armand had not just a mountain of trust issues, but a field of icebergs that contained all his issues surrounding commitment. He craved companionship, but on his terms. He was terrified of Daniel now that they were on a level playing field.
And that was fun. This could be fun.
“Well,” Armand said with a devilish grin, “you better get ready. You know the rules. Don’t go into the sun. Don’t reveal yourself— again. Don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. If you must kill, plan it out and know how you will dispose of the body. Are you listening?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s almost five in the morning. How am I avoiding the sun again?”
“It is Louis’s private jet." He said it simply, and Daniel nodded, but it did not feel real. None of this really did. Maybe it had not registered, his death and rebirth. What had happened here, today, and the last few weeks, it was too much for his brain to comprehend. He was tired, suddenly. "The pilots know. Keep the window screens closed.”
“Okay, and if it’s daylight in New York?”
“I suggest taking the subway.”
“That was a joke, wasn’t it?” Daniel asked weakly. Armand merely smiled. “Ugh. Okay. Yeah, okay, ha ha. f*ck you. Stop being cute right now, this is serious.”
Armand’s eyebrows shot up at the remark, but he made no comment in reply. He merely hummed and shrugged.
“Coffin,” Daniel realized. “I need one of those, huh? Alright. Okay. I guess I’ll be making some calls.”
“I will forward you the numbers of businesses that will be the most expeditious in these endeavors,” Armand said with the bright eagerness of a friend recommending a barber. Daniel nodded dazedly. The high that addled his brain was not going away. He did not know why, but he had not expected it to last this long. He turned away, walking slowly toward the door. “Oh, and Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
Daniel half turned, and he saw that Armand was just behind him. His eyes trailed over his face. Then, taking his chin in his hand, he kissed him one last time. And shoved him viciously out the door.
“Run.”
