“You weren’t married?” I asked.
“Unable,” he reaffirmed.
Later, in making his body ready for “burial,” I discovered the reason for his “inability.” Sometimes, size does matter, no matter what they tell you. Thankfully his deficiency was not a gene he had apparently passed on.
“I began to experiment with utilizing my own genome, and that of some other unfailingly healthy, intelligent patients. Mixed with the mother’s genetic design to ensure a variant gene pool, I began to birth children who I knew would make their parents proud.”
My mouth dropped wide. My father wasn’t my father?
He could see my discomfort and rested a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s a lot to take, I know,” he said. “But regardless of who raised you, or who contributed your genetic material, you are who you are.”
“How do I know what you’re saying is true?” I asked, fishing for a way out.
He pointed to the mole on the right side of his face. And then touched my own.
“You are my son. And as my son, I need your help. I don’t have much longer. I’m dying.”
“Why should I help you?” was all I could think to say. I was angry. Betrayed.
“Not for me,” he said softly, leafing through page after page after page of pictures in the blue binder. Each side with a dozen baby pictures on it, each picture showing the tearful, scrunched up faces of infants. White infants, Chinese infants, black infants. Babies with hair as fiery as a carrot, and babies with no hair whatsoever. But every tiny face betrayed one signature trait. A mole.
His mark.
“I need you to help me notify them,” he said. “All my children. There are things they need to know.”
««—»»
“You’re here because you received my letter,” I said, looking out at the small audience. There were 11 today. Not a bad turnout for a rainy night. A few I had seen before. There were always a few that I knew. We rarely spoke, but nodded in passage. They were waiting for someone. And when they found that someone, they would leave for good and not return.
“It answered some questions you’ve had, but certainly raised many more. I will answer what I can for you, what I know. I, too, received a letter of calling. Only mine was from Chavis himself. Our father. He told me of his researches, of the genetic experiments that led to us.”
“You all have a mole on the right side of your faces,” I said, and several newcomers reached up to touch their right ears. “This is his mark. A way for us to recognize each other, and he, us. It’s certainly no guarantee of brotherhood, but it is a clue.
“You were drawn here by death; someone you loved has passed away. In the future, the only safe love you can think to have will begin here, in this room. With your own family. If you love an outsider, they will die.”
««—»»
“The only way I could make sure that these genes stayed pure,” he explained, “was to put in a failsafe mating recursive.”
We had moved to the couch in his outer office, and he had locked the entry door.
“What?” I didn’t understand him at first.
“A mating guarantee,” he said. “If you have sex with anyone who doesn’t bear the mark of my children, you will pass them a virus. They will become ill and slowly dwindle away. A wasting sickness. You saw it with Karen.”
If the knowledge of my parenthood hadn’t been enough of a slap, this was a thunderbolt.
“
You
killed Karen!” I screamed and launched myself at him, grabbing him by his white lapels and shaking that wizened head so hard it should have snapped off.
“No,” he wheezed, between shakes. “
You
did.”
««—»»
This night, as I do every night, I explained to the newcomers just what Chavis had done. And how that evil act must remain hidden, lest we be hunted by our marks for the death we bring.
I told them of how he found a way to preserve himself, so that he would remain an icon for us in death, a saint of his own cause. And I told them of how I brought him to this place, so that they could all have a chance to see their father. And meet their family.
“In his last days he charged me to go through the books that he kept. There were records on all of us; he tracked us quite well. I sent you all letters bringing you here.”
After the explanation, the room was always heavy with an injured, shocked silence, even though much of my talk had been detailed in the letter that brought them here. It was like that now. And so, as I did every night, I told them, “You may stay as long or as little as you like. Good luck to you.”
With that, my brothers and sisters slowly rose and walked to the front of the room, even the punk in the leather jacket. As if by instinct, we joined hands, and cried again together.
As we did every night.
We cried for the loved ones we’d killed, unknowing. And for each other. And for the loss of our childhood dreams of romance. And for the hope that we’d find another that we could love. One who wouldn’t die from our kisses. One who bore the mark.
All of us come to the crypt alone.
But not everyone leaves that way.
The strong will survive.
— | — | —
The end.
Angel spit in my face. Holy water sizzled on my skin, ice to flame. I didn’t brush it away. I lived for the pain she gave.
“Don’t you get it?” she screamed. The blue of her frenzied eyes was chilling. “We have nothing in common. Nothing! We never did. All we do is hurt each other. I won’t listen to you tear me down for doing the right thing anymore.”
“And I won’t listen to you calling me a liar, a demon and an asshole,” I whispered. I never raised my voice at her, even in anger. If I let those fires loose…who knew what hell a creature from heaven could withstand?
“But you
are
,” she insisted.
“Come here,” I soothed, arms outstretched to enfold her. She batted me away with wings of gossamer white.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “Ever again.”
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” I challenged. “It’s not seemly for a child of grace to spit and screech so. You might find your privilege in the City of Light revoked.”
“I’m only like this when I’m around you. Can’t you see?
You
do this to me. You turn me into this, this…witch!”
“If I’m not mistaken, we are all responsible for our own actions.”
“You bring out the worst in me.”
“Opposites attract.”
“Well you repel me.”
I bent forward to kiss those pale pink cupid lips and felt a knee in my groin.
“I warned you,” she said, and slapped a creamy palm across my face. I felt her cottony flesh catch and scrape against the blackened barbs of my stubble. I hadn’t shaved today.
“I love you,” I countered.
“You are incapable of love.”
Angel turned and fled. Probably to her mother’s, the Saint of all Solace. No matter what good deeds that mother’s tongue supposedly suggested, I found her an intolerable gossip.
««—»»
It had all come down to the simplest truth. No creature of gentle heart and heavenly virtue should dally with a beast of blackened lust and perverse pursuits. She knew that going in, and so did I. But when I’d first met Angel, she was just a lonely spirit, yearning for something to brighten her nights and darken her days. Life in the City of Light was too constant for her, too predictable. She relished the shadows I cast on her path and the flames of temptation I wore like a robe. She adored me. She yearned to strip my temptations from me and explore my evil. She probably thought she could save me. A lot of City of Light girls are like that—always wanting to redeem someone.
My excuse? Lust. Of course. And something more. There was a particular sweetness in her, a softness, a beauty that I’d never seen in the hard girls of the Dark Carnival, where the mirrors of seduction were ever-present but the curve of a true heart could never be seen. The day that I slipped through the caverns of the Carnival and recklessly stole across the forbidden ash of the Grey Lands, I received my just punishment.
She was bathing, alone, in a crystal brook. I crept through the brush unseen, and spied on her from behind a rock. Her beauty took my breath away, and a strange pain bloomed within my chest. I grinned and considered all the ways that I could soil that perfect skin. I imagined her chained in a basement warehouse, breasts flogged bloody, flanks gored by the rabid teeth of a thousand starving rats. I smiled at the image of her downy wings tarred with pitch, and her thin legs spread in a spider’s crooked stance, pinned to a board by my hooks of iron. In my mind I hung her from rafters on meathooks and drank her blood like rain, my mouth open wide below her thrashing feet.
But then another image came, one more horrible than any that went before. In this vision there was no blood, and no bonds. I saw my head lying cradled in the cushion of her glowing lap. I felt her silken hands caressing the burnt furrow of my brow. I tasted the honey of her kiss smoothing and filling the bitter chap of my lips.
I laughed out loud at the foolishness of this dream and she heard. My naked Angel leapt from the water, darting into the woods beyond. Dazzling starbursts swirled to pop like soap bubbles on the still water in her wake.
It was the last day of my corruption. And her innocence.
The Between.
I won’t bore you with the details of our dysfunctional courtship. Of how each day I braved the Between, the forbidden limbo of The Grey Lands, to cross over to her. Of how she failed to appreciate the purity and ingenuity of my gift of three crucified, gutted virgins (one in each color—blond, brunette and redhead!) or of how she nearly poisoned me with her offering of a rosary made from the ivory-bone beads of St. Theresa and incense cultured from the leaves of a Golgotha olive tree on our one-month anniversary. She said it was symbolic, but it took me a week to wipe the blinding sheen of purity from my eyes. That was a week I almost didn’t survive, since you need your darkest vision to survive in the fetid bowels of the Dark Carnival.
Somehow, our love overcame these and other missteps. We leapt together past the boundaries of good, evil and propriety to merge with force and fury, my foul heat offset by the chill of her holiness.
Oh yes. We came together. We fucked wilder than demons or angels. And when she came, the air grew so thick with the heavenly musk of lavender that my own foul carrion scent was expunged. When we coupled, it seemed as if the universe imploded and exploded at the same time, as the pain and pleasure of the forbidden shot through our bodies in equal measures of exquisite excess. We drank in each other’s barred beauty and survived to suck down more. We should have been thrown out of both hell and heaven, but somehow, our liaison struck the perfect balance, and neither God nor Devil troubled us.
And then the balance shifted.
Entropy is the law of all life, and it proceeds much the same in afterlife. Or to quote the lyrics of lost rock star P. Rockrohr, “Nothing stays forever, anymore.”
The seven deadlies somehow came to play on our page in Scheherazade’s stories.
One night as Angel’s grace-embued sweat poisoned, burned and evaporated from the hellish furnace of my chest, she stared at me, blue eyes piercing as nails, and said “You fuck devils when you go home, don’t you?”
I was a little taken aback. I mean, I had never suggested to her that while I was gone to the Dark Carnival, she was swallowing the oily, holy crism of the cocks of angels, did I? Never did I even consider that she might be taking it up the pristine ass from the prong of a snow-white heavenly sheep!
But once heaven’s eye or hell’s middle finger is trained on a quandary, there is no looking back until it’s solved. Or dissolved.
I laughed at her probe, showing yellowed, pointed, deathly teeth. The teeth that had fed on the vile entrails of the lost, and the dead. Dangerous teeth that had touched her teats but tenderly.
“What do you take me for, Angel?” I begged. “I’ve given myself to you. Isn’t that enough?”
“I will not be soiled by the prod of a devil who’s carrying the oil of a hell-whore on his scepter.” She had a way of renaming the anatomy so that it sounded more exalted. Cock would have suited me fine. But I joined in the act.
“And I suppose you haven’t been spreading the chapel wide for the flock of the holy shepherd to graze upon.”
Her cupid lips drooped. “You know I’ve always been true to you, though I shouldn’t be.”
I laughed. “How could an Angel be anything but true? Unless, of course, she was fucking a devil?”
That earned me a slap that burned for hours.
And so the descent into our own private maelstrom began.
While in the past she had ignored my habit of hanging stray angels on coat hooks in her utility room to bleed poisonous holy salve from their wounds (the blood of an angel was worth a million bribes in hell), now she insisted that I put away my toys before they were fully fruited. She claimed the stench was murdering her meditations.