Work Text:
> Who put this box on your doorstep? Open Collector’s Note #1
> Ignore the letters. Pick up the first item, Item 1.A, A handwritten note with the address of a hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, October 12, 1985.
The last time I saw you, you were very angry with me. I believe the reason you were angry was because we had done something horrible together, which bothered me but did not bother you in the same way. In my experience, sometimes a horrible act can bring two people together: a shared conspiracy, a mutual thrill. Not so in this case. The remains of the horrible thing we’d done were human-shaped. Ghosts lingered between us. We stood one and a half sins apart from each other (in my mind’s eye I see a vision of Daniel, holding the damn child…) and though it could have ended in blood, we merely tore each other apart with our words.
The last thing you said to me was, I always knew you were jealous. You hate that Daniel has a gift and you do not. You’re a parasite. You’re nothing. You’ll never create anything worth anything.
That was a long time ago.
I have grown very old.
I feel very old (please don’t laugh at me, though I know you will).
Old age bestows a maudlin propensity to revisit the past. At dawn or dusk, I wrap myself in a blanket or my red dressing gown and I go out on the balcony of my apartment. My husband watches me through the glass windows with questioning eyes (yes, I have a husband. Did you think Daniel would be the end of me?), but he is wise enough to stay inside, out of the light. Alone, I rest my forehead on the freezing railing and think about all that I’ve lost. All that I’ve gained. I think about Daniel.
(Do you think about him? Do you think about me? As time passes you’ve grown so mysterious to me. I can’t fathom the soft thoughts that now creep across your dark, velveteen mind.)
I dislike going back inside. At my age, every enclosed space becomes a tomb. Every empty seat invites a ghost. The dead linger at my bedside. They rattle my glassware, rifle through the shirts in my wardrobe, shake their eyeless heads at the kitschy art I’ve hung on the walls—such poor taste! They want entertainment, and they chuckle when I duck into a spare room to escape my husband’s questioning eyes. I love the archival work of record-keeping, but this is the first time I’ve written anything like this. The dead keep me company as I collect my scraps and write this story. I feed from them, though they are shrivelled and thin and offer poor sustenance.
I don’t know why anyone writes.I shall cross that line out and rework it (as you and I have done together so very often).
I don’t know why anyone writes, except to feed old ghosts.(One more try.)
I don’t know why I’ve written this, except that I have written this for you, to prove to you that I can. To show that, unlike Daniel, I have not forgotten.
—A.M.
April 2022
Item 1.A: [October 1985] A handwritten note with the address of a hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, October 12, 1985.
I once asked Daniel how he knows where to start his stories.
This is what he told me: for news pieces, never bury the lede. That is, the singular most important fact of the story must go right at the top to not mislead the reader. The average reader is very busy and is never paying as much attention as you’d like him to. The average reader is foolish, distracted, and easily misled. You must give him all the facts straight away.
Alright. What about fiction? I said to Daniel. What about your novel?
Same thing, Daniel said. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense.
He was quoting from an interview with his favourite novelist, who once wrote a diverting postmodern book about a man who travels backwards and forwards through time. Much later, I would pick up a collection of short stories from the same novelist. In the preface, the novelist gave a list of rules for writers. I like this one: Start as close to the end as possible. I have taken his advice, which is why the first item of my collection dates from October 12, 1985. As close to the end as possible.
**
When Danny collapses in the bathroom of a Parisian discotheque, it’s Armand who calls Alice from the hospital payphone.
“You should get here soon,” he says, airy as ever. “The doctors believe he might die.”
“Will he?” she asks.
“He might.”
The baby is kicking. It’s two in the morning and Alice is shivering in her thin nightgown, feet bare on the rough wooden floorboards of their rented apartment. All night long she had been dreading the telephone’s ring. The only surprise is Armand on the other end. As far as she can remember, this is the only time they’ve spoken on the telephone.
“Fuck you,” she says. She’s freezing and sweating all at once, hands clammy, heart punching against her chest in in staccato rhythm. “I thought you would take care of him.”
“I wasn’t with him tonight.”
“Thought you’d be the first one he’d call.”
“You mean, after you rejected his marriage proposal? Bien sûr.”
“Armand,” she says. “Stop being dramatic. Just tell me what happened.”
“I’ve told you already. Daniel is currently in accident and emergency services. The doctors are not optimistic. I believe his heart had stopped.”
“What did he take?”
“Cocaine to start. And then two heroin tablets from an English girl. And he was drinking beforehand. Brandy cocktails. Quite a few of them. I was halfway across the city when he fell unconscious. He was lucky that I heard the silent cry of his heart when his pulmonary functions ceased functioning. I went to him as soon as I could.”
“And then you took him to the hospital?”
Arman tuts. “First I told his lungs to inhale and exhale again. Then I took him to the hospital. The doctors have put him on a ventilator and administered five milligrams of intravenous nalorphine. He’s breathing on his own now, but he hasn’t regained consciousness. I’ve put off the orderlies as long as I could. You should get here soon.” He sighs. “There’ll be paperwork, etcetera.”
“Of course I’m coming,” she says, thought gritted teeth. “Give me the address of the hospital, I’ll find a cab somewhere.”
“Don’t overexcite yourself in your current condition,” Armand says.
She presses her palm against her swollen belly. All night long she’s been wearing a path between the bed and the toilet. If it isn’t her third-trimester bladder waking her up, it’s the vomit in her mouth from the acid reflux. Her mother mails her Chinese herbal remedies from San Francisco; they don’t help. Her ankles are swollen and her back aches all the time. She’s been desperate to get the whole ordeal over with and serve the baby its eviction notice. But tonight, all of a sudden, she’s grateful that the little thing is still locked inside of her, floating safe in its dark watery balloon, dreaming shapeless dreams. I’m sorry, she thinks. I hope you can stay inside forever. Let the adult worldly horrors pass you by.
“I’m not delicate,” she says into the receiver.
“I never said you were.”
“I’ve got a notepad here. Give me the address of the hospital,” she says.
As she’s getting ready to leave, she hesitates. It’s absurd, she knows: Danny is in the hospital, and she’s standing in front of the dresser, thinking about how she has nothing to wear. None of the clothes she brought from America still fit her swollen body. There’s the new purple dress Danny had bought her last week, but that’s lying in a crumpled heap in the corner of the bedroom, where she had left it earlier that evening. She had been too busy crying to hang it back up.
“Why are you crying?” Danny had snapped at her before he left. “I should be the one crying. You’re the one who said no.”
In the end, she settles for the same shapeless woollen smock she’s been wearing everywhere, leaving her cheap peacoat unbuttoned over her protruding front. There’s no time for lipstick, or to fix her hair. She splashes cold water on her face and hopes she looks respectable enough. Her pocketbook is on the table where she left it.
Before she can overthink it, she searches for the ringbox that Danny threw on the floor and picks it up—it hurts to bend down with her back aching and her belly sticking out—and puts it into her coat pocket. Then she hurries out the door to find a cab.
>To continue towards the inevitable end, proceed to Item 1.B, A patient intake form for “MOLLOY, Daniel”.
Item 1.B: [October 1985] A patient intake form for “MOLLOY, Daniel” [sic], October 12, 1985.
Danny looks dead.
That’s her first thought when she bursts into the room and sees the body lying against the white sheets. She has to stuff her hands into her mouth to muffle the instinctual wail.
“He’s not dead,” says the man sitting in the plastic chair at the foot of the bed.
She removes her hands from her mouth. “Bet you’d love it if he was,” she says.
Armand looks back at her coolly. “I would not.”
“How is he?”
“No change from an hour ago. Still breathing. Still unconscious.”
On the bed, Danny’s skin is as pale as rice paper. His eyelids are jumping—is he dreaming? Of what? She can see the spiderweb of purplish veins on them. She grabs his hand. Its warmth surprises her. She presses his fingers to his lips and kisses them, right on top of his writer’s callus. The side of his right palm, the side that rests against the page, is still smudged with ink. This detail makes her heart turn over in her chest. In her belly, the baby flutters.
“How long will he be asleep?” she asks Armand.
“I don’t know.”
“Can he hear us?”
“I don’t know.” Armand cocks his head. “I can hear the movement of his thoughts, but they’re faint. His mind is dark to me.”
Tears spill out of her eyes. “You said his lungs stopped breathing.”
“Yes.”
“What would have happened if you hadn’t got there in time?”
Armand opens his mouth, but a nurse in a white uniform comes through the door and interrupts them. She gives them a nod, and then click, click, click goes her sensible pumps towards the bed, where she checks her patient’s vitals with brisk efficiency. There’s a clipboard hanging by the bed. The nurse flips through the pages and asks a question in rapid French.
“Desolée, nous sommes Americaines,” Alice begins in her clumsy, schoolgirl French.
Armand cuts in smoothly and says something to the nurse. They converse for a minute or two and the nurse nods, looking satisfied. She glances at the swollen bump. “Bonne nuit. Prenez soin de vous, madame.”
“Bonne nuit ,” Alice echoes helplessly. She waits for the nurse to click, click, click away down the corridor before she asks, “What did she say, Armand?”
“She asked how we know the patient.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I was a friend. I also said that you were his wife but that your fingers were too swollen to wear your wedding band. I suggest that you go along with the deception. The French can be surprisingly conservative at times.”
There's a chance that Armand doesn't know about Danny's proposal tonight and her refusal, but it's not a very large chance. If anything, it’s very much like Armand to sprinkle salt in the wound. “Fine," she says. "I’ll lie and say we’re married on the paperwork. Did she say anything about Danny?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“How do you know?”
“The nurse was bored,” Armand says. “Boredom is a good thing with doctors and nurses.”
She draws a breath. Her mouth tastes disgusting from pregnancy’s acid reflux. The frightening reality of the situation is dawning on her: they’re in a foreign country and Danny just almost died. She’s twenty-eight weeks along with a baby conceived out of wedlock. At a time when most new fathers would be painting nurseries and building cribs, her boyfriend is throwing his life away in nightclub bathrooms for cheap thrills. It’s three a.m, which strikes her as a preposterous time for a heavily pregnant woman to be at a hospital for the sake of someone else.
“Sit down,” Armand says. “You’re in shock.” He gets up and pushes her—not unkindly—towards the plastic chair he just vacated. There’s no residual warmth on the seat at all; one can hardly believe a man-shaped thing was sitting there a second ago. “I’ve told you. He will not die as long as I’m here.”
“But how long will you stay?”
“Until his heart no longer needs me to keep it beating.”
“Fuck you,” she says. She’s too tired to think of anything wittier.
“He would have died without me.”
“Or he’s dying because of you.”
Armand shrugs.
Now that she’s found Danny, what is she going to do? She has no way of communicating with the doctors and nurses, at least not until daybreak and the normal world wakes up, and then maybe she can call one of their friends. Should she call Daniel’s father right now? But for what? To tell a man that his son almost died, but don’t worry, a vampire says he’ll be fine?
“You should rest,” Armand says abruptly. “Your heart rate is very elevated.”
She looks up at him. Armand’s appearance tonight is as polished as hers is frazzled. He’s dressed in a black turtleneck under a pinstriped jacket, sleeves pushed up, hair brushed back from his forehead in oiled black waves. His trousers hang in sharp creases; his wingtips are buffed to a high shine. It’s grotesque to look so well in at three in the morning in a hospital room, a time and place that is the nadir of human existence.
“That jacket makes you look like the middle manager of an Italian shoe company,” she says, reflexively, because even at three in the morning Armand and his clothes deserve someone to mock them.
Armand inclines his head. “Rest, Alice.”
“Will you wake me up if something happens?”
“Yes.”
“I trust you,” she says. She closes her eyes. The world goes dark.
>To hurtle towards the inevitable end, go to Item 1.C, The takeout flyer for the restaurant Les Saveurs d'Indochine.
>To continue from the beginning, proceed to Item 2, A Kodak photograph of a dark-haired young woman sitting at her desk.
Item 2: [September 1985] A Kodak photograph of a dark-haired young woman sitting at her desk.
I shall set the scene, though it’s pointless, as you know all this already.
**
Here are some facts about Alice.
Alice was born Alice Mok. That is the name she will wear for most of her life, except for one brief and ill-advised period, when she was briefly and ill-advisedly known as Alice Molloy, during which she published her first collection of short stories and doomed herself to be known as “Alice Molloy” to the literary world for most of the nineties, at least until she changed her name back for the publication of her novel.
Alice is left-handed. She’s allergic to cats and shellfish but fond of strawberries, the more overripe the better. Her looks are average and she has very few friends; she prefers solitude over company, though when she is around company she is cursed by an incurable need to please other people.
Is this interesting? Do you feel like you understand who Alice is yet? Here are a few more interesting things about her:
Alice was born in San Francisco, in 1953. Her father’s name in English is Peter Mok. Peter’s father—Alice’s grandfather—was educated by missionaries in Canton, who baptized him and taught him English so well that he could write English letters before he started to write Chinese. In the forties, right before the Communists took over Shanghai, Peter fell in love with a married woman whose husband was a brutish Kuomintang army officer. Their affair was soon discovered. Peter went to America. The married woman went to jail for adultery, which was something husbands could do to their wives back then. Eventually, her brutish husband died in the war, and she got out of jail. In 1951, when she came to America to marry Peter, she left her two children in China, as she wasn’t sure if her new husband would care for them or not. She had two more children in America: a daughter (who was Alice) and a son (who died).
Alice’s younger brother died from being struck by lightning when he was four and Alice was seven. They were playing outside in a meadow when it happened. The same bolt of lightning that passed through Alice’s brother and stopped his heart passed through Alice as well. It shocked the colour from one eyebrow, so she has one brow whose hairs fade to white at the end—like a mutt.
So you see, Alice has been surrounded by death from birth: her lost step-siblings, her dead brother. Her mother also told her stories about her own mother, Alice’s grandmother, who died from having too much of a good time (she died from eating a ball of opium). The result is that by the time she’s a teenager, Alice’s dreams are haunted by the dead. She would often dream about her brother’s dead, astonished face. In the middle of the night, she would wake up with a ball of opium on her lips, its texture sticky like a dried persimmon. In her mind, it tasted like black ink and American drugstore licorice.
“These are incredible stories. You should write all this down,” a young man once said to her.
His name was Daniel Molloy. It was the early days of their courtship and he was trying to flatter her. In time, he would forget that he was the first person to say this to her, but she never did. Along with many other reasons, this was one reason why she fell in love with him, and carried his child, and wore his name.
> To dwell on that one lost story, go to Item 21, A short story manuscript. “The Adoration of the Shepherd”, by Alice Mok.
>To continue towards the inevitable end, proceed to Item 3, A folded bar napkin with lines in handwritten blue ink. “Listen as though I'm the voice of God or an angel talking to you…”.
Item 3: [March 1974] A folded bar napkin with lines in handwritten blue ink. “Listen as though I'm the voice of God or an angel talking to you…”
Alice meets Daniel in 1973, introduced by a mutual friend.
Jeff Nakahara is one of her classmates in English literature, a skinny kid with bug-eyed glasses and a loose-jointed way of bouncing around from place to place. Jeff is irreverent about everything except for his ambition to one day become the editor-in-chief of a national paper, which he takes so seriously that he makes a point of scoping out other promising student writers on campus and passing them his card, which he had printed up himself. He calls it “networking”—not a term that anyone else has ever heard of in Berkeley circa 1974, other than the computer department.
She and Jeff are walking to class together one day when Jeff spots someone in the distance and sprints away from her. By the time she catches up, Jeff is talking to another boy sitting on a stone bench, a cheap paperback novel in his hand. The other boy has eyes that are a wonderful colour: a transient shade that’s not quite green and not quite blue, two drops of water caught between black lashes.
Jeff introduces them and makes polite conversation. He tells the boy—who introduces himself as Danny Molloy—that Alice just had a poem published in Gidra, and that they’re both writers.
That startles her. It’s the first time that anyone has called her a writer. She has never thought of placing herself and ambitious Jeff in the same sentence before.
Danny listens politely and smiles, not paying attention. She learns that he had taken the last semester off. (“Got too zonked out on some bad shit and bumped into a guy who freaked out on me. Couldn’t really go back to class after. Rough times.”)
She’s also only half-listening, distracted by the scar on the side of Danny’s neck: a silvery ring made up of regular indentations. Teeth marks, as if he’d been bitten.
“What are you reading?” she asks.
“Slaughterhouse Five.”
“Is it good? I want to pick it up too.”
“Sure,” Danny says. He hands her the book. “You can even take this copy, I’m pretty much done with it. Give it back whenever.”
She ends up returning it a week later, at a bar off Durant where Danny orders a grasshopper and she orders a small white wine. He pays for both with a handful of loose change he digs up from his jeans pocket. They’re sitting at a table in the corner, on the opposite side of the room from the jangly jukebox that no one is listening to.
“What did you think of it?”
“It’s good. Vonnegut is pretty much always good.” She takes out the note that Danny was using as a bookmark. “But what about this? I couldn't help but see it when I was reading.”
She smoothes out the sheet of notepaper on the bar table. It reads:
1973/09/08
- listen as though I'm the voice of God. I’m an angel…
- I’m in a room?
- I am important — more than just drugs
- A BRIGHT YOUNG REPORTER WITH A POINT OF VIEW
- stories—this is a story—I’m in a story—no story should be forgotten? The importance of stories?
- (I’m hearing it repeated over and over. There’s a song being played over and over)
- (it’s night, I’m been in the room for a long time, I’m at the kitchen table, under the stained glass lamp, he’s in front of me. This is important!! I must remember this because things will get bad and if they get bad I must remember to keep going)
- These words are important
- A rope? A string? A lifeline?
“It’s from a junkie I met in the Mission District,” Danny says. “I dunno. He was frightening in some ways, but he was also really kind. I was—it was a bad time for me, and I think he was trying to comfort me. I wrote this down when I came home from the hospital. I can’t remember what exactly he said to me, but it’s the gist of it.”
“What happened to him? Can you go find him again?”
Danny taps his finger on the table. “He, uh, he set himself on fire pretty much immediately after. It was—really bad.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Danny says.
“I think I can hear the message he was trying to give you,” she says. In the jumble of Danny’s notes, there’s something here that she senses could be woven together.
“What, like psychically?”
“No, no—”
“Are you one of those crazies who believe in ESP? Or you’re going to feed me some Buddhist hippie bullshit about opening myself up to the universe? Or is this just your way of flirting?”
The rapid fire of his questions takes her aback. “No, none of that,” she says.
“What’s your deal, Alice?”
“I just like odd things, that’s all.”
“You’re not one of those counterculture Wicca types, are you? Go around telling people you’re a witch? I don’t believe in any of that.”
She smiles. “Here,” she says. She takes out the pen tucked in her hair and starts writing on a bar napkin.
Listen as though I'm the voice of God or an angel talking to you, telling you this room doesn't matter, this night doesn't matter. You're not inconsequential or a junkie. You're a bright young reporter with a point of view. There are stories that need to be told. If things ever get bad again, these are the words you'll hear in your mind like a tape playing over and over, like a song stuck in your brain. These words will hold you up and carry you. They are your lifeline.
She touches the napkin when she’s done. It’s a good piece of writing. Short sentences and simple language. Bright, tape, song, life. Words like rocks you can cling onto by the fingertips. A mantra for survival. The sentiment of these words is not hers, but the words themselves are. “What do you think?” she asks.
Danny frowns. “In journalism, you can’t make up a source’s quotes.”
“Do you have a recording of this man?”
“No.”
“Are you going to publish this speech anywhere?”
“No.”
“Then take it, Danny,” she says. “Memory is imperfect. Have you ever read Cat’s Cradle? Do you remember Newt’s letter? I loved the way he wrote it. ‘ I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so anything I remember about that day other people have helped me to remember.’”
“Good old Vonnegut,” Danny says.
“I love that book,” she says.
Danny smiles at her. “Yeah. Me too. I always thought—don’t laugh—but I always thought that one day if I ever wrote a book, I’d title my book The Day the World Ended, like the fake one from Vonnegut. Y'know, as a joke.”
She smiles back. “I look forward to reading the next great American novel.”
"It doesn't have to be the next great American novel," Danny says. "I'd settle for an American novel, period. In fact, I'd settle for any novel at all. Doesn't have to be American."
"But you want to be a journalist?"
"I want to be a lot of things," Danny says. He tucks the napkin away in his jacket’s inside pocket and smiles at her again. "Alice, would you like another drink?”
“Yes,” she says quickly. “Yes, please.”
When Danny gets up to go to the bar, she flips over the original piece of notepaper that had been folded inside Danny’s dog-eared copy of Slaughterhouse Five. On the back, Danny had written just one sentence. She doesn’t understand it at all, but she assumes it’s a reference or a metaphor that goes over her head.
DON’T LOSE YOUR MIND. VAMPIRES CAN’T BE REAL.
> To move ahead to New York, skip to Item 6, A rental slip for unit #301 on West 107th St. Manhattan, New York.
> To see that bar napkin again, thirty-six years from now, proceed to Item 4, A print-out of an unsent electronic mail from an AOL inbox, July 2009. “Dear Armand, you’ll never see this, but look at this passage I’m sending. Danny thinks he’s driving a Buick to meet his dealer…”
Item 4: [July 2009] A print-out of an unsent electronic mail from an AOL inbox, July 2009. “Dear Armand, you’ll never see this, but look at this passage I’m sending. Danny thinks he’s driving a Buick to meet his dealer…”
In 2009, when she’s halfway through her uncorrected proof of Hate and Ashbury, she would see her words reproduced faithfully. It makes her laugh, as does most of Danny’s autobiography.
His memoir does not mention her, or their first date in Berkeley, or that bar napkin. He barely mentions her at all. He refers to her only as “my girlfriend in New York” and later, as “my wife.” She understands why. In her own collection of essays, she calls him “my first husband” or simply, “Danny” with no last name attached. It’s no secret that they were married to each other—it’s on both of their Wikipedia pages, for Chrissakes—but their mutual silence over the years is a courtesy they extend to each other, a delicate gesture, like averting your eyes politely when a drunk unzips himself to urinates on the street. Anyways, they’re hardly F. Scott and Zelda.
Look at this, Armand, she wants to say after she’s finished the preface. Danny thinks he’s driving a Buick to meet his dealer. Was that one of yours? But a Buick doesn’t sound like you, does it? Bit dull?
Since Armand is not there, she clicks her old-fashioned mechanical pencil and adds a note in red on her own:
We never owned a Buick.
Later, at her desktop, she types out her thoughts in an e-mail that has no recipient. She likes to imagine Armand finding it somehow, reaching through the secret blinking twisting pathways of the Internet to retrieve her messages for him. Although, she supposes she might as well seal a note inside a glass bottle and toss it into the sea.
> Remember how you always thought Armand was inside your computer? Revisit memories of San Francisco with Item 15.A, A paper manual for the Commodore 64 home computer.
> To recall, with a sense of nostalgia intertwined with horror, the early days of Alice and Daniel, proceed to Item 5, A newspaper clipping from the San Francisco Examiner, “Vietnam is No Victory for Returning Soldiers”, by Daniel Molloy.
Item 5: [May 05, 1974] A newspaper clipping from the San Francisco Examiner, “Vietnam is No Victory for Returning Soldiers”, by Daniel Molloy.
In the early summer of 1974, she and Daniel have sex for the first time. They go very slowly. She had carried her virginity around for twenty-one years, sealed up inside her like an uncracked egg. Daniel breaks her apart tenderly, slowly. When she compliments him afterwards, blushing, wrapped tightly in her crocheted blanket on her student bed, he just says to her, “Good, I’m glad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean—I’ve tried being cruel to a girl before and I didn’t like it. So it’s good. I’m glad.”
The second time they have sex, she does something she’s always longed to do, which is to fit her teeth around the silvery scar on Danny’s neck—it’s not an exact match, her mouth is too small—and bite down, hard, her teeth slotting into the existing teeth marks.
Danny gasps. “Fuck, fuck.” And then he whimpers and comes inside her with a shudder. Afterwards, he says, “Please never do that again.”
**
Two weeks after that, Alice brings Daniel home to meet her parents and her aunties.
This is a calculated move. She picks a weekend when they have guests over: her father’s sister, Auntie Winnie and her husband, plus two other families, the Wongs and the Lins. They sit crammed around the dining table, a heavy square-edged thing covered by yellowing plastic. When her mother announces that Alice’s boyfriend will be arriving soon, the adults act shocked, as if she is still a little girl instead of a grown woman. She accepts their gentle teasing and their sly glances. It’s better than the stultifying silence that overtakes her mother and father when they’re alone.
Without the noise of guests around to scare them away, the ghosts in the house take over. The wraiths creep up the cracked porcelain lamps and wind themselves around the kitchen utensils. Her mother’s two abandoned children wait for Alice in the bathroom mirrors; they pull faces at her until she flicks on the light. Alice’s dead brother is always pulling on his sneakers by the doorway. Every time she steps through, he asks, can you help me tie my left shoe? Can we go outside to play? Grief clings to every surface like an old film of cooking grease.
Daniel sweeps through her house like a cold gasp of fresh air.
He brings a bouquet of daisies and tells her he’s already practiced eating with chopsticks. When he greets her parents, he doesn’t try to speak mangled Chinese or act like he’s astonished by their foreign ways. At the table, he doesn’t interrupt others or try to dominate the conversation by boasting, even though Alice thinks that among all her cousins and partners, Danny stands out as the cleverest and the most handsome. He wisely does not attempt to eat the steamed fish, which saves her from having to pick out the bones for him like she would for a toddler. Her heart swells with pride, with love.
When the conversation (inevitably) turns into boasting—which cousin just got a promotion, which one is going to medical school—she jumps in eagerly. Other than going to college, she has almost no accomplishments whatsoever. She has never done anything particularly interesting in her life before. It gives her a thrill to announce that Daniel, at twenty-one, is a published journalist and just sold a story to the Examiner. They’re a couple now. By proxy, his achievements can be her achievements.
“What is the article about?” her father asks.
“This new drug rehabilitation program for Vietnam vets,” Danny says.
“He sold it for two-hundred-fifty dollars,” she adds quickly. “Can you believe that?”
It astounded her when he showed her the check, thinking about how someone was willing to pay so much for a few words on a page.
“That’s very impressive,” says her father.
Her mother says nothing.
Danny ducks his head and blushes. She loves him just a little more for that.
After the guests have all left, she does the dishes with her cousin Jen. They stand elbow-to-elbow in the cramped kitchen: Alice washing; Jen drying. It’s an old ritual from childhood and their rubber-gloved hands work in a quick synchronized rhythm.
“He’s a faggot,” Jen says.
Alice fumbles the bowl she’s holding. It slips out of her hands—a rotund clumsy thing—and sinks into white dish soap foam.
She closes her eyes. “Danny isn’t gay.”
“Sorry, honey, but a dyke knows a fag when she sees one.”
(A few notes on Jen: Jen works at a print shop and lives near the Fillmore with a rotation of half-feral cats and her on-off lover, a sansei girl who keeps breaking up and getting back together with Jen because she can’t make up her mind if she’s a lesbian or not. For various complicated and uncomplicated reasons, the Japanese girlfriend is not welcome at family gatherings. Jen always comes alone and always plays the role of the martyred family rebel. Usually, she makes Alice laugh.)
“You’ve only met him for two hours. How can you know?” she says to Jen.
“I know it’s not gonna last, Alice.”
“No, you don’t know that. He likes me.”
Jen raises an eyebrow. “Oh, hon . ”
She stares down at the mountain of white foam in the sink, which is easier to look at than Jen’s expression of pity. “I love him. He asked me to move to New York with him after I graduate.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to move to New York.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve lived here my entire life and I’m sick of California.”
“You’ll regret it,” Jen says. “He’s not going to make you happy.”
Later, at the age of twenty-five and thirty and forty and fifty, she would look back at this Cassandra moment and wonder, why didn’t I listen to Jen?
Because I was young. Because I was in love. Because I thought, Jen is a lesbian, what does she know about men and women?
“It’s because you wanted an escape, ” Armand says to her in 1985. “You hated where you were and who you are. It’s easier to lead an outsider in and let him blow everything up than to overcome the inertia of habit you’ve built up over the years. You wanted a bomb, not a boy.”
“I wanted Danny,” she says.
They’re in the apartment kitchen in Paris. She just finished typing up the latest chapter of Danny’s novel and she’s giving her tired eyes a break. Armand is hovering nearby (not literally, but close enough), opening and closing their cupboards, picking up notebooks and novels and making quiet noises of not-quite judgment. It’s his way of fidgeting.
How did the conversation get to this point? Ah, yes. They were debating if the love between two men is comparable to the love between two women, or if the two spheres of experience so far apart from each other that the term “homosexuality” can’t begin to reconcile the two. Armand says the word is an odious German invention. Alice doesn’t care, but it’s amusing to goad him. Then she begins telling him about her cousin Jen and Jen’s girlfriend, and then this story emerges like lost dishware bobbing up from murky dishwater. Whatever they talk about, it never strays too far from the topic of Daniel.
“Why do you love him?” Armand asks.
She’s astonished at the question. “Why do you love him?”
“I think he’s amusing. He’s playful. He’s both eager to please and easy to please. His blood usually has an interesting chemical cocktail running through it. And of course, the sex is very good. ”
“You could say those same things about a dog. Other than the blood part. And the sex.”
“Vampires can drink the blood of animals. Most of us have done it before.”
“Then just the sex part,” she says.
“I see you have not visited the seedier nightclubs near St-Denis,” Armand says. He's in a playful mood, as evidenced by his clothes. Today he's wearing red socks and saddle shoes, a green plaid jacket and checked flannel trousers with the cuffs rolled up. When he moves, the mixture of patterns and colours wavers like television static and makes Alice's eyes water.
“Well, I haven’t. And I don’t believe what you just said.”
“Alright,” Armand says, blowing out a plume of smoke. “Let me append to my previous statement. He rolls beautiful cigarettes. He’s very good at explaining various 20th-century technological inventions. He’s a fine writer, though cursed with a fondness for dashes and allergic to chronological storytelling when he’s writing fiction. There. A dog can’t do those things. Now it’s your turn to answer my question: why do you love him?”
She’s thinking: why does she love Daniel? For the same reasons any woman loves any man. Someone once said to her, few men are angels. Danny is no angel, but he’s no devil either. He’s sweet. He takes the time to talk to her. He’s gentle with her, most of the time. In their early days, he said to her, very plainly, “I’ve taken drugs. I’ve slept with men. I’m trying to quit both and I’m not always successful.” So at least he’s honest in his own way.
Danny isn’t a wolf who devours young women and spits out their bones. He’s not an ogre, belching and bellowing in his undershirt in front of the Sunday afternoon football. He’s not Bluebeard, reeking of danger, taunting her with the bloody door that conceals the corpses of his ex-girlfriends. Because writers–well. Writers are probably no worse than any other men. At Berkeley she had read about the death of Joan Vollmer in a magazine: William S. Burroughs shot his wife in the head when he was drunk. Later, Burroughs said that it was an accident, that he didn’t mean to do it, that they were playing William Tell. Even later than that, he said that Joan’s death invited an evil entity into his life which he named The Ugly Spirit. The Ugly Spirit spurs him into writing. Poor Joan. Wherever she is in the afterlife, it must offer her very little comfort.
If Danny has an Ugly Spirit, then at least it’s standing right in front of her, and she knows Armand is not interested in killing her. Or if he does, it would be an easier death than death than a bullet in the head. And in the meantime, the novel is still being written: Danny produces the raw pages, Alice and Armand rework and reshape the story to their satisfaction. The novel is good. She feels it. Though Armand pretends not to care most of the time, he can feel it too. It's so frighteningly good that she feels a pang of empathy for Burroughs, even if he is a wife-killer.
Armand is still looking at her, no doubt reading her thoughts as her brain creates them.
"I was asking you a question," he says. "Why do you love Daniel Malloy?"
Because of you.
“I guess I love him because he’s Danny,” she says out loud, and Armand gives her a look of sharp pity that’s not unlike Jen’s.
> To ponder the lost time spent on Danny’s novel, go to Item 18, A single typed page of a novel manuscript.
> You can’t say you didn’t get ample warning. Proceed to Item 6, A rental slip for unit #301 on West 107th St. Manhattan, New York.
Item 6: [1974] A rental slip for unit #301 on West 107th St. Manhattan, New York.
By August of 1975, Alice and Daniel have moved into a two-room apartment on the top floor of a three-story walkup in Manhattan. A derelict, ill-designed slum with a malfunctioning toilet and piles of needles and blackened spoons dropped behind the stove by its previous inhabitants, who also left long, hateful diatribes of anti-Semite graffiti on the walls. On her first day in the apartment, she scrubs the place down and sweeps away the dirty needles and broken pipes that have fallen behind the stove. Come evening, they crawl into the mattress on the floor—they don’t have money yet for a bedframe.
“It’s a shit hole, I know,” Danny says to her softly. “But give me some time. I’ll take us somewhere better.”
She’s watching the darkness behind closed eyelids. There’s no one in the room except the two of them. No dead brother with cold hands. No grandmother with her lips stained black. No pitiable children crying out for their mother. She has shaken them off over her long drive across the country. It makes her smile to picture her ghosts stranded in a cornfield somewhere in Iowa, running desperately after the fading tail lights of her car. Goodbye, California. May she never return.
“This is already somewhere better,” she says.
(At the time, she doesn’t know about Armand yet.)
> How did you end up here, in New York, with Danny Molloy? Return to your first date in Berkeley with Item 3, A folded bar napkin with lines in handwritten blue ink. “Listen as though I'm the voice of God or an angel talking to you…”
> Oh, the bygone days of New York and newspaper journalism! Proceed to Item 7, A newspaper clipping from The Village Voice’s Classified section.
Item 7: [September 23, 1978] A newspaper clipping from The Village Voice’s Classified section.
For the first two years after she moves to New York, she works as a salesgirl at a shoe store where she made two dollars thirty an hour. She doesn’t mind it, not until Jeff Nakahara calls her one day over the phone and declares that she’s wasting her life measuring feet and sorting orthopedic insoles.
“What’s Molloy up to, anyways?” he says, voice tinny over the lines. “Can’t he get off his ass and help you find a better job? Ask him to ask around his newspaper friends. Once you get your foot in the door, you can try to get a piece published. Lots of writers start off that way. ”
Jeff is now a junior reporter for a newspaper in Pasadena, which he says is the first rung of the ladder that he needs to scale to one day run the entire L.A. Times . He has a well-meaning but delusional conviction that everyone’s secret dream is to become a writer one day. She tells him that Danny’s busy with his freelancing, and anyway, she’s not sure that becoming one of those high-flying career women is right for her. Jeff listens and says, uh-huh, and then hangs up.
He calls her back a week later and tells her that Lizzie O’Reilly’s sister’s former roommate works at the Voice and they’re looking for someone in the Classifieds section. It’s not writing; they want someone to answer phones and deal with irate customers. The pay is terrible but not quite as terrible as being a shoe salesgirl. Is Alice interested?
Sure she is.
When she tells Danny over dinner, he blinks at her. “The Voice, huh,” he says.
“It’s cool,” she tells him.” I like what they do. They’re covering important stuff. They wrote about the women’s movement way before it went mainstream. I thought maybe it’ll be too radical for me, but I went to the office and the girls in Classifieds were really sweet.”
Danny smiles.“You know what everyone says? Fifty percent of the Voice is excellent and fifty percent of it is awful. The only thing is that no one can agree on which fifty percent. Did you see they just ran a cover story of fist-fucking?”
“I read that. And I already mentioned it in my interview: I’m against gentrification and for fist-fucking. I hope I got it the right way around.”
This makes Danny holler with laughter. “I think you’ll like it," he says. "I know some of the people there. What’s the name of the roommate again? Lynn? Lynn Walcott? I think I’ve met her. She’s a real nutjob. Likes to go places dressed like it’s The Great Gatsby. Y’know, pearls and her mother’s fur coats, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, that’s her!” She looks down at her plate. “Danny,” she says slowly, “if you know Lynn, why didn’t you let me know they were hiring?”
Secretly, she’s a little irritated with her boyfriend. Jeff Nakahara, she wants to say, got on the phone in Pasadena and made something happen for me. Why couldn’t you? And then immediately on the heels of that thought comes a wave of shame. It’s 1978. She’s supposed to be one of the New Women of the coming revolution. She shouldn’t be expecting her man to do things for her.
No, Jeff is a friend and he did her a favour. It’s all very equal and feminist. She vows to one day pay him back for the favour. It just rankles her, that’s all, the disbelieving way that Jeff had said, What’s Molloy up to? Can’t he get off his ass and help you find a better job?
Danny says, “I thought you were happy with the shoe store.”
“I guess.”
“You said you liked meeting new people every day. I wish you told me that you wanted to work at a paper. Do you want me to ask around more for you? If the Voice doesn’t take you, we’ll find you something else.”
“They already offered me the job.”
“I only met Lynn once or twice,” Danny says, apologetically. “But it all worked out, right? You know some writers’d cut off their right hand just to work there?”
He gets up and voluntarily starts clearing away the dishes, shooing her away when she makes a move for the sink.
“No, no, my turn tonight. When do you start? Let’s go out after your first day. My treat. We’ll go get dinner at this new Italian place I heard about, and then we’ll go dancing, or see a movie. Your choice. Have you ever had a cannoli before? Rob from the Digest is Italian, he was telling me about it. It’s like this pastry that’s shaped like a toilet paper roll but filled with cream. No, wait! Don’t laugh! It’s true! It doesn’t taste like toilet paper. I’ll buy you one to celebrate your new job. You’d love it. I want to see your face when you try it for the first time.”
She gives up. It’s impossible to be mad at Danny for any sustained period.
**
Alice gets the measure of the Voice very quickly: the paper exists on the verge of perpetual chaos. It’s always on the verge of folding or being sold, and each new owner hates the previous one the same way that each new editor hates the previous editor. If the gossip is to be believed, everyone is a raving genius or an incompetent drunk. It helps to think of it not as a paper, but as a collection of minor kingdoms and duchys, each headed by one particularly charismatic writer or editor (in the absence of charisma, loud-voiced will do). They’re arranged in a loose pyramid of shifting sand. At the top of the pile are the white male news reporters, loosely grouped into Next comes the culture writers (books, music, theatre, cinema) and then the art department and the typesetters, and at the bottom–holding them all up with its stolid columns of 8-point sans serif type–are the people who work in Classifieds.
“We bring in most of the money,” her new co-worker Lynn tells her on her first day. “That’s what people buy this paper for. The average reader takes a look at Jules’s cartoon and then they go straight to the ads. Everything else on these pages we just put there for our amusement.”
“I’m sure people read the articles too,” she says, spurred by a prickle of outrage on Danny’s behalf.
“Sure,” Lynn says soothingly. “Sometimes they read the theatre reviews.”
Her temp experience serves her well, as most of the time she’s doing clerk work: jotting down people’s ads over the phone and sticking the pieces of paper on an iron spike, to be later sorted by category: merchandise, art and crafts, truckers and movers, real estate, “massages,” childcare, help wanted, etc. She’s very good at it, as it turns out she is unflappable under pressure.
Three months after she starts the job, Peter, the head of Classified, moves her over to handle customer complaints.
"It's an asbestos job," says Valerie, one of the other Classified girls. "We call it that because you have to sit there and absorb the heat. You’re gonna be answering the phone and letting people yell at you all day. Sorry, Alice, but it’s only because you’re the new girl–do it for a few months and Petey will shuffle someone in.”
“It’s fine,” she says. She’s aware that she needs to prove herself as the only Asian in the section, and the only Asian woman in the whole office. For all its radicalism, there aren’t many non-white people at the Voice. In the newsroom, there are only two black writers, and no Puerto Ricans or Latinos at all. It’s the awkward truth that one just has to negotiate around. That’s life.
She ends up staying at the Voice for two years, from 1976 to 1978. Overall, it’s a good experience for her. In early ‘78, the union negotiates a scaled pay raise that benefits the lowest-paid employees first, and she goes from six hundred a month to six hundred fifty, which feels like quite a lot at the time. She only quits after she breaks up with Danny. She can’t bear to see his journalist friends coming in and out of the office, feeling their pitying stares.
> To pick up Danny’s phone call in 1980, go to Item 12, A receipt from Annette’s Diner in Massachusetts, for a total $5.76.
> To continue reliving 1978, that dreadful year (that annus horribilis ), proceed to Item 8, A pamphlet from the first commercially available home pregnancy test in the USA.
Item 8: [circa 1978] A pamphlet from the first commercially available home pregnancy test in the USA.
In the summer of 1978, two major events in Alice’s life happen in the same week.
On an August night, she is sleeping in bed next to Danny. Something wakes her up: a shift in the mattress, a rush of coolness in the air.
Besides her, Danny sits up. Says something. But next to him, she can’t move. The room is dark and too warm. She’s locked into place, staring up at the ceiling of their bedroom. There is a non-presence in the corner of the room, next to the battered wooden dresser. A monster. Something is not there, not watching her, not slowly making its way to their bed, languorous, insolent.
She can’t move.
The mattress doesn’t dip under its nonexistent weight. The air doesn’t stir. She is not washed through with nausea. Her stomach is not heaving.
Danny moans.
The monster doesn’t press Danny down and kiss him. It doesn’t strip Danny’s boxers off and bury its beautiful face in his neck. The bedframe doesn’t knock against the wall.
Danny moans again. Then he says, breathless, “No, we shouldn’t, Alice—”
The monster covers his mouth with a long, brown hand. It doesn’t tell Danny to hush. It doesn’t pick up the pace of its lovemaking.
Nothing is happening at all.
She can’t move.
Danny is making high-pitched noises. Ah, ah, ah.
If this is a vision, it is manifesting only on her right-hand side. She is pinned to the left side of the bed, unable to retch or sob. Tears drain out of her eyes and run like fluids from a corpse. She’s not a fragile person—during the looting and the chaos of the blackout last summer, she’d been more worried over Danny than scared for herself. So why can’t she move? Why is she frozen in terror?
A thought enters her head: maybe she’s the one who isn’t real. There’s no one called Alice here.
She is formless: no edges, no weight, no boundaries. Dissolving into the sheets. She stops crying because it seems pointless, and waits for what’s not happening to be over. By tomorrow morning the thing called Alice will be a fluid stain on the mattress, something for passersby to wrinkle their noses at when the bed is thrown out on the sidewalk.
Then the mattress dips again, and she thinks she hears Danny’s voice: “The sun will rise soon. You should go.”
And no one says anything in return.
The next morning, she wakes up and stumbles into the bathroom and throws up in the toilet, but nothing comes up except for bile. Danny brings her a mug of hot water with lemon; he rubs her back and makes sympathetic noises. She searches his face: he looks back at her, guileless.
Is it possible? she thinks, dizzy. Could a man who’s done such a thing to her turn around the next day and look her in the eye? It’s her boyfriend. It’s Danny. Surely, surely not. Stumbling back into their bedroom, she snatches away the blankets, but there are no tell-tale stains on the sheets. The bed doesn’t smell like sex. She sniffs. Danny’s soap and the laundromat washing powder. Nothing else.
Danny touches her on the waist. He backs away when she startles. “You were tossing and turning all night,” he says. “I think you were having nightmares.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“Are you okay? Maybe you should stay home today.”
But she can’t bear to stay in the apartment with the wretched bed. Despite Danny’s pleading, she gets dressed and walks to the subway. By the time she gets to the office, she is pale and sweaty. She tells Lynn, her deskmate, that she’s not feeling well.
Lynn takes one look and delivers a swift prognosis: you need to go to the doctor’s and ask for a pregnancy test, Alice.
But she’s too embarrassed to go to the family clinic—there’s no ring on her finger—so she spends that month’s lunch money and buys one of the new home pregnancy tests from a drugstore on her way home. The kit is a crazy science fair contraption and she has to read through the thick booklet twice to understand how to use it. Inside the box she discovers, among other things, a vial of purified water and a test tube that supposedly contains sheep blood cells. It makes her queasy to imagine, but on the plus side, it only takes two hours to get the result in the privacy of her own bathroom.
During those two hours, she paces around the empty apartment like a madwoman, putting out her hands to check that surfaces are solid, that her flesh is still warm. She sees swarms of buzzing flies around the windowsills; they strike her as malign creatures, the sexless naked souls of unborn children demanding to be let into this world. People think children are innocent, but what she remembers most of all from her childhood are the small cruelties of her peers. Children are foul-mouthed and hungry demons; they lie and cheat and steal and destroy those who are weaker. She doesn’t like children very much. But oh God, could she love her own child? And what about Danny? A day ago she would have said, yes, my Danny is gentle and clever, he will be a brilliant father one day. Now, she doesn’t know anything anymore.
The pregnancy test is positive.
She deliberates for a week over whether or not to tell Danny, but on the day she picks to break the news, she wakes up feverish with sharp pains in her abdomen. When she sits up, she sees that underneath her, the sheets and the mattress are soaked through with blood. The stain looks like a red inkblot. A children’s finger painting.
Numb, she goes to the bathroom and washes herself clean and takes out the box of her heaviest maxi-pads. She sits on the edge of the bathtub and breathes until she feels sane again. Early miscarriages are much more common than one might think. Women have them all the time—the pamphlets and magazine articles all say so. It’s normal. And anyway, she had been considering an abortion.
So why is she crying?
Danny is still in bed, sleeping off god-knows-what after a late night out. She comes to the abrupt decision that she’s not going to tell him about this. It’s too dreadful to share. There’s nothing to share. And besides, she doesn’t know how to tell him. She doesn’t trust herself to have the right words: there was a baby? but now there isn’t? but also, what happened that night, Danny? There was a shadow? and then there wasn’t? It’s all vision, conjecture, half-remembered nightmares.
All she’s going to tell Danny is that she’s decided they have to throw out this mattress and buy a new one. It doesn't matter if they’re broke. They'll find the money somewhere. They'll just have to.
Leaning over Danny, she’s about to shake his shoulder when he turns in his sleep and mumbles, “No, not yet. Lemme sleep, Armand.”
The name rings through the hollow cavity of her body with sick resonance. Armand, Armand, Armand. She pulls her hand back from Danny. Here’s something to think about that’s more interesting than the sticky clots sliding out between her legs. She touches the silvery scar on Danny's neck. Traces the teeth marks.
Armand.
**
She thinks— DON’T LOSE YOUR MIND: VAMPIRES CAN’T BE REAL.
She thinks—stakes, garlic, holy water, Bible verses in Latin, lines of salt, crucifixes, running streams.
She thinks—I think I’m losing my mind. I need a knife.
On a Saturday night, when Danny goes out, she assembles her materials in the kitchen. She sharpens a kitchen knife until the edge feels tacky against the pad of her thumb. Then, she boils it until she’s sure it’s disinfected. Then she cuts open a neat incision in the crook of her arms and starts to bleed into a glass bowl.
There’s a full moon outside: bone-coloured, giving off dry light. She can catch a glimpse of it from the narrow kitchen window. She doesn’t know if it matters or not, but it’s something to look at while her blood drips out of her. The radio is on and the late-night DJ is playing classical music: tinkly piano music that irritates more than it soothes. She licks her dry lips. They taste like ink and licorice.
There’s a pool of shadow next to the fridge that looks deeper than it should.
“Are you a vampire?” she says. The shadow peels itself off the wall and takes shape in the dim light. The monster crosses the kitchen and sits down across from her.
“I can see from your mind that you already know the answer to your question,” he says. His voice is accented and melodious.
“Do you drink blood?”
“Yes.”
She pushes the bowl of blood towards him, then opens a pack of gauze to staunch the bleeding from her arm. Her hands are shaking and she almost drops the gauze. “Go on, drink. You’re my guest tonight. This is the price I’ll pay for talking to you.”
“Charming of you to offer, but an empty gesture when I can drain you with little effort.”
“Please don’t,” she says, voice small. She had not thought–she had not expected it to work, no more than stupid schoolgirl rituals of playing with Ouija boards or whispering Bloody Mary in front of dark mirrors. To be honest, she had half-formed fantasies of Danny coming home early to find her like this, her arm bleeding, and coming to her rescue. She had pictured him rushing over, throwing the bowl to the floor, and promising that he’d never drive her to do something so grotesque again.
The monster tilts his head. “Daniel is not that sort of man. The sort of man you’re imagining does not exist.”
She stares at him. He’s wearing an old-fashioned black silk suit with narrow lapels, the sort of clothes they put dead old men in before they get laid down in their coffins. It looks incongruous—and frankly hilarious—with the gold-toned digital watch he has on one wrist. A vampire with an appreciation for technology. Count Dracula with a Casio.
“Is your name Armand?” she asks. “You don’t look like an Armand.”
The monster hisses. She blinks. Between the closing and opening of her eyelids, Armand is gone.
The bowl of blood on the table is empty. Licked clean. She picks it up and wash it clean in the sink. Now she has a face to put to a name, but it still doesn’t give her any answers.
> The phone is ringing. Pick up Daniel’s phone call in 1980 with Item 12, A receipt from Annette’s Diner in Massachusetts, for a total of $5.76.
> It’s coming sooner or later. To think about the 1978 breakup between you and Daniel, proceed to Item 9, A photostat copy of a poster for the Hellfire sex club in New York City.
Item 9: [circa 1978] A photostat copy of a poster for the Hellfire sex club in New York City. “DRESS CODE IN THE HELLFIRE AS APPROVED BY THE CLUB MEMBERS ON OCTOBER 1977: CYCLE LEATHER & WESTERN GEAR. JOCKS, ACTION READY WEAR, UNIFORMS […]”
One day in September 1978—two months after her miscarriage—Lynn catches her at lunchtime and asks her if she wants to buy sandwiches to eat outside at the park. The park by the office is little more than a scrubby piece of grass that’s littered with needles and empty soda cans, but Lynn is insistent, so off they go.
She is just unwrapping her tuna salad on a roll when Lynn says, in a rush:
“Alice, I have to tell you something. I saw Daniel this weekend. Outside the Mineshaft.”
“The Mineshaft?”
“It’s a club. A leather club. I was on my way home from a friend’s show and I passed by the building where I knew the entrance was. Daniel was there.”
She stares down at her tuna sandwich. She’s not hungry anymore. “And?”
“And,” Lynn says gently, “He was with someone.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I saw him with another man, Alice. And they weren’t just talking, if you know what I mean. They were dressed to go in.”
“How do you know it was Danny? Are you sure?”
Lynn shrugs. “I was just across the street and I said to myself, oh my god, that’s Daniel Molloy in the jacket. I didn’t recognize the other guy though. He was wearing a cap and aviator sunglasses so I didn’t catch his face. But Daniel I recognized in a heartbeat.”
“Oh,” she says.
“I’m sorry, Alice. It’s been wearing away at me for days. I had to tell you.”
“The other man. Was he dark-skinned? With curly black hair? Tall and thin?”
Lynn is fiddling with the long string of pearls around her neck. “Yes, I think so. Didn’t catch a glimpse of the hair, but the rest fits. Damn, girl, do you know him?”
“I might,” she says. “Thank you for telling me.”
That night, she debates whether or not to tell Danny what Lynn told her. It seems unfair to not get his side of the story before she makes assumptions. Isn’t that what fair reporting is? Getting both sides of the story? She decides to take a soft approach.
“Lynn at work told me she saw you this weekend,” she says to Danny over dinner. “In the Meatpacking District.”
“Yeah, must have been when I was out for that Cover piece . I was telling you about it, remember? The photographer who takes pictures of herself with sponges and Lysol sprays? Fifty dollars for three hundred words. I bumped into Ritchie and we went for a drink after. Where was Lynn? At the bar? Why didn’t she come say hello?”
“She said she saw you outside a gay leather club.”
Danny stares at her. And then he starts to laugh.
“And why is Lynn at a gay leather club?”
“She was just passing by outside.”
“How convenient,” Danny says, still smiling. “And then what, she picked me out from the crowd of all the guys fist-fucking and pissing all over each other? She peeked through the right glory hole and thought, hey, I know that guy?”
“She said she saw you outside the entrance, that’s all.”
Danny’s face turns serious. He sets down his fork. “Alice. She’s jealous.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how we decided that I should move to New York first so I could find an apartment, and then you’d follow me with the car? The first week I was here, a friend of a friend introduced her at a party. She was all over me the entire night, I couldn’t shake her off. I ended up leaving the party early to go home.”
“Lynn never mentioned that,” she says.
“Why would she?”
“She wouldn’t lie to me.”
Danny grabs her hand. “Then ask her about the party at Freddie and Burt’s in Greenwich Village, where they served the rum and raspberry punch. Ask her about the napkin with her phone number on it. She shoved it in my jeans back pocket without asking., I almost had to fight her off.”
“What about the dark-skinned guy?” she asks.
“Who? What guy? At the party?”
“Lynn said you weren’t alone that night in front of the Mineshaft. There was a guy with you.”
“Alice,” Danny says. “Ritchie’s as Irish as they come. I honestly don’t know where this is all coming from.”
Back at work, she pulls Lynn aside at the water cooler and tells her a truncated version of what Danny said. Lynn flushes bright red, then goes pale.
“I did slip him my number,” Lynn says. “But Alice, that was years ago and it wasn’t like that—he was the one who kept making jokes about it, daring me to put it in his pocket. Honest. Everyone was drinking. I don’t even think it was my phone number on that napkin.”
“It’s alright,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not out to steal your man,” Lynn says. She’s getting angry. Maybe too angry. “You think I’d lie for something like that? You think even the best of men don’t think about cheating? Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a scumbag who’s bored of fucking her.”
“It’s fine, Lynn,” she says.
So what if Lynn was lying? She likes Lynn. She has no wish to make an enemy of her only friend at the Voice. Two months ago, back in August, Lynn had been the one who held her hand in the hospital’s emergency room, who ran out and bought her a new box of sanitary napkins after she bled and bled through the ones in her purse. Lynn was the one who swore at the doctor in her brassy New Jersey accent when the doctor told them that pain is normal after a miscarriage. She made herself a nuisance until someone put Alice on the table and examined her properly. Lynn brought her a Snickers bar after, which they split into halves on the subway home. After the worst had happened, it was Lynn who had held together the ragged meat of her body, who told her, “I know you’re not Catholic, but we ought to cover all the bases, y’know, just in case Heaven exists. I’ll light a candle for the little soul this Sunday.”
She doesn’t bring it up again. It’s a pointless game of ‘he said, she said.’ She cuts herself again and bleeds into a bowl, but the monster—the mysterious man in the cap and sunglasses—doesn’t show up again. Her trick only works once.
There’s nothing left for her to do. There’s nowhere else for the rage to go. She doesn’t want to believe Lynn. She doesn’t want to doubt Danny. She settles on being angry with the monster. It’s easier that way for everyone.
**
Years later, in the Parisian apartment on 35 rue Jacques Mawas, she asks Armand, “In New York, did you ever take Danny to a club called the Mineshaft?”
“Maybe,” he says. “There were a lot of clubs.”
“Think. It would have been six years ago. The fall of ’78.”
He taps his red pencil against his mouth. “In May of that year, I took Daniel to a club called Hellfire. It was raining. We had trouble finding a cab until I made a passenger get out and give us the car.”
“No, that’s not it. It would have been August or September, I think.”
“Then I can’t recall. Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“Please don’t lie to me.”
Armand looks amused. “Why would I lie? I’m the only one in the world with nothing to gain from lying to you.”
> The phone won’t stop ringing and it’s annoying your roommates. To pick up Danny’s phone call in 1980, go to Item 12, A receipt from Annette’s Diner in Massachusetts, for a total of $5.76.
> To continue along that dreadful year of 1978 until you arrive at the breakup, proceed to Item 10: A ceramic shard from a shattered bowl, mid-1970s.
Item 10: [circa 1978] A ceramic shard from a shattered bowl, mid-1970s.
At the burnt-out end of 1978, that annus horribilis, just before Christmas, she gets into a fight with Danny. She can’t remember what caused it, only that it ended with her announcing she was going to move out.
On the afternoon she’s leaving, the large, green-glazed porcelain bowl they keep on the kitchen counter shatters. No one is near it at the time. Danny is sitting on the couch, a half-full bottle of whiskey tucked between his legs; she’s flitting about between the bathroom and the bedroom, holding items in her hands and putting them down again. It’s all meaningless taff like a bottle of Avon lotion or a plastic comb.
It’s 10 a.m. and she’s pondering the question of when the hell did she acquire such stupid, useless things. Meanwhile, Danny is blasted and he’s slurring pleas at her— look, I can move out. You can kick me out. I’m sorry. Alice, it’s almost Christmas. You’re being rash. Just wait a few weeks, baby, you’re going to regret it— and she’s picking up the Avon bottle and putting it down and picking it back up and then, boom.
The bowl explodes.
Danny jerks from the couch. The bottle of whiskey he’s holding tips over and spills on the floor. She’s standing by the doorway, next to where she had strung up a pathetic string of Christmas lights last week and from her angle, the liquid shines red like blood. By the time she finds a kitchen rag to mop it up, the dust on the hardwood floor has turned the liquid as black as writing ink.
“Watch for any pieces I missed,” she says.
“Don’t go,” Danny says. He’s sitting with his knees pulled in towards his chest. “Don’t leave me. Everyone leaves me.”
“I think one of us must have tossed a cigarette butt in the bowl earlier. The heat made it explode.”
Danny is weeping. “Don’t go, Alice. You’re my heart, you can’t go.”
She kisses his cheek. She tosses away the rag. She picks up the pieces of the shattered green bowl and wraps it in newspaper—there’s an old copy of the Voice right there, how convenient—and then she washes her hands of whiskey and tears and blood and ink. She picks up her suitcase and leaves.
By January, she moves into a ten-storey building on Varick Street. It’s a dirty, gutted shell she shares with two other girls, which has a cold-water sink but no bath or kitchen facilities, so she and her roommates have to wash themselves using buckets in the freezing winter temperatures. On the phone with her parents, she tells lie after lie: yes, she’s happy. Yes, she has a good job. Yes, the new apartment is wonderful. No, she and Danny haven’t planned a wedding yet.
Danny, she learns through the office gossip at the Voice, has moved back to San Francisco before taking off for Europe. That’s right. She sometimes forgets that his family has money. She pictures him strolling down a French boulevard, or maybe riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome. She tortures herself with thoughts of his perfect happiness until she feels—nothing much at all.
She quits her job at the Voice and tells Lynn goodbye.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Lynn says to her. The bristles of her fur coat tickle her nose when Lynn pulls her in for a hug.
“I won’t.”
“I heard what happened with Daniel. Fuck him. You were too good for that chump anyway.”
She studies Lynn’s face for a hint of duplicity, but then decides, who cares? Danny’s in Europe. They’ve split up. Everyone knows that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s kindling.
“Thanks for everything,” she says to Lynn. They hug again.
“Keep in touch, alright?” Lynn whispers to her. “New York’s not so big. It can get pretty lonely if you don’t keep your friends close.”
> Danny keeps calling and calling and calling. To pick up his phone call in 1980, go to Item 12, A receipt from Annette’s Diner in Massachusetts, for a total of $5.76.
> To catch up with Lynn, proceed to Item 11, A wedding announcement in the New York Times, “Marie-Lynn Walcott, Daniel Molloy”.
Item 11: [February 21, 1992] A wedding announcement in the New York Times, “Marie-Lynn Walcott, Daniel Molloy”.
In 1992, three years after the divorce, after they've laid waste to each other over the custody battle over Katie and after they’ve split their lives down the middle with a bloody scalpel and after they’ve redrawn the maps of their shared kingdom (this time, she gets California and he gets New York)—after all of that is done and dusted and laid to rest in the ground like a corpse, a friend shows her a wedding announcement in the Times.
Marie-Lynn Walcott, Daniel Molloy. Lynn and Daniel were married this Friday in Parsippany, N.J., in a Catholic ceremony…
A shock goes through her, but only for a moment. Danny, she reflects, is not the sort of man who stays single for very long. He needs to be taken care of. And Lynn, as she recalls, is very good at taking care of people. After some thought, she sends them a gift and a card. Best wishes from me and Katie, who sends her love to her Daddy, she writes in red pencil. We were both so pleasantly surprised when we heard the news.
She tucks the card into the same package as the gift. She’d picked out a beautiful glazed ceramic fruit bowl. The salesgirl at the store assured her that it was heat-resistant. Let it not be said that Alice is a bitter person.
> You understand by now that Danny is a complicated man. Return (or skip ahead to San Francisco in 1983) with Item 16, A tube of lipstick in the shade Frosted Cherry, Revlon brand.
> Fine! You’ll pick it up! You can’t take the noise of the damn telephone any longer. Proceed to Item 12, A receipt from Annette’s Diner in Massachusetts, for a total of $5.76.
Item 12: [October 19, 1980] A receipt from Annette’s Diner in Massachusetts, for a total of $5.76.
In the autumn of 1980, Alice gets a phone call from Danny. It’s been two years since she’s last seen him. She didn’t even know that he was back in America from Europe until the call.
When she asks Danny how he’s been, he’s vague about the details. All he’ll say over the phone is that: 1) his father had sent him to a place called St. Andrews near Boston, and 2) will Alice please, please, please come visit him before the boredom drives him out of his mind?
After she left the Voice, she has worked a series of temp jobs and secretarial contracts in the city. By 1980 she had landed in the office of a private school on the Upper West Side. That Friday, she asked around the office if anyone’s ever heard of a hospital or something called St. Andrews.
Because the private schools of Manhattan are filled with a certain class of people, many had.
“It’s a place for rich poets and actors to go dry out before they end up offing themselves,” said one of the other secretaries. “I knew someone at Radcliffe whose parents sent her there two summers in a row. Why? You know someone there?”
This was said with no little astonishment, as Alice is known amongst the other office girls for being hopelessly square and, not to be catty, of course , but she’s just not our set of people. Once again, she had landed in an environment where she was the only other non-white person around. In their last phone call, her cousin Jen had diagnosed her with subconscious racial self-hatred. According to Jen, the four years she lost to Daniel Malloy was the clinching evidence for the case.
Anyways. St. Andrews.
That weekend she takes a bus from Port Authority to Boston, and then another bus from Boston to Quincy, Massachusetts. At the bus stop, she calls a cab and they drive through rural New England roads so picturesque that she feels like she’s in a children’s storybook. The cab driver deposits her outside a set of wrought iron gates. Underneath an enormous maple scattering blazing red leaves, she sees a discreet plaque that reads Saint Andrews Rehabiliation Center in the type of stately typeface used by banks and expensive colleges. It does not look like any hospital that she’s ever seen before.
She hesitates by the intercom system. Danny wears his shambling bohemianism so well that it has mostly slipped her mind that his family has money. It's easy to forget. Danny made it easy to forget: he was so proud of every cent that his writing earned; the two of them had lived so cheaply. But outside of the imposing gates, she feels shy.
It dawns on her how little she knows about her ex-boyfriend. He had met her family, but she had never met his. Danny enjoyed the starving writer persona, but occasionally the glint of money slipped through like light creeping in from behind tightly drawn curtains. His father was ‘in the electronics business’ (no job title provided) and before Danny’s mother died, the Molloys used to ‘winter’ (as if California gets real winters) in Tahoe, for the skiing. When she pressed for any more details than that, Danny went tight-lipped. All she knows is that he has a father, a brother (whom no one is allowed to talk about), and a stepmother (whom no one wants to talk about)—and he’s half-estranged from all of them.
The choice of St Andrews fits with what little she knows about the Molloys: Molloy Sr. had selected somewhere very expensive and very far away to stash away his problem son.
She presses the buzzer for the intercom.
Inside the gates, the receptionist takes her name and tells her to wait in one of the floral-printed armchairs in the lobby. She sits next to two other sad-eyed women silently smoking cigarettes, their expensive but sensible purses standing upright in their laps as if shielding them from the world. Eventually, a nurse comes along and takes her to a glass room, where she gets her bag searched twice and has to remove her shoes before a security guard checks something off his clipboard and nods.
After half an hour of this, she is given a map and directed to the main building in the middle of the grounds, a big Victorian-style mansion surrounded by more flame-red maples and rolling green lawns.
On the gentle country path from the gatehouse to the mansion, she sees other patients shuffling around. They must be rich if they’re in this hospital, but they all have an empty look in their eyes that reminds her of the people panhandling on the Bowery. It frightens her. The patients here look worse than the vagrants in New York or San Francisco: in the city, people might be drunk, or ill, or often just insane, but at least they have the hustle to survive. The wealthy patients of St. Andrews simply look lost. As if they misplaced themselves somewhere and cannot pick themselves back up again. She’s never seen living people look so much like ghosts.
Entering the main building, she catches sight of an orderly helping a patient into a chair. The orderly is a handsome young Indian man dressed in scrubs. When she passes, he looks over the head of his charge—a slumped-over man with a bald pate in a ragged grey sweatshirt—and stares right at her. He looks surprised, then rageful, then amused. Each expression goes by so quickly that it looks like an optical illusion: images painted on a spinning disc, tricks to make the eye believe that something dead and static is really alive and moving.
He smiles at her, and his teeth flash white against his dark skin.
She quickens her footsteps.
She finds Danny sitting with a group of other men, inside a large wood-panelled den. There’s no door to the den; in fact, there are no doors to any of the rooms. Privacy is not a priority at St. Andrews. When she peeks inside the open doorway she sees that the men are sitting in a semi-circle. They’re all bent over pieces of paper, writing in notepads with yellow HB pencils. To the side of the room there is a cart with pitchers of lemonade and biscuits on it. No one says a word, but they drink cup after cup of lemonade.
She makes no particular noise as she walks in, but Danny raises his head anyway, as if he could smell her scent in the air. He turns around, eyes searching until they land on her.
When the group journalling is done, he sprints out of his chair and pulls her into a corner of the room. “Oh God, it’s wonderful to see you, Alice,” he says. “I’m so glad you came. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to see me anymore.”
“Of course I want to see you. Why wouldn’t I want to?”
“Dunno. Maybe you got a new boyfriend. Maybe you’d be married with a baby by now and you don’t have time for me anymore. A lot can happen in two years.”
Nothing has happened to her in two years. “I’m here now,” she says.
Danny grins at her. He’s thinner than she’s ever seen him. His skin is waxy where it stretches over his cheekbones. “And you look wonderful. I was so pleased when I learned you’re still in New York. I guess it must be treating you pretty well–you’re a real city girl now. Do you want some lemonade?”
“No.”
“Have some. It’s good. It has to be, or all the alcoholics here would riot. They make this stuff just to keep them alive.”
“And what do they give as a substitute for narcotics? Are those the cookies? No, of course not. I don’t see you eating any of them.”
Danny lets out a bark of laughter. “God, I’ve missed your sense of humour. No one else here knows how to crack a joke.”
“Can’t they?”
“The other day I was by the horse paddocks. You know they do horseback riding here? Like somehow an hour in the saddle would help us forget how fucked up we all are? Anyway, I was standing there when a horse tripped—when have you ever seen a horse trip?—and it stomped on my foot. It was so bizarre that I started laughing at how bizarre it was. And you know what the counsellor said to me? He said, Daniel, you have to stop finding humour in your own pain. My father’s paying thousands and thousands of dollars for people to feed me lemonade and tell me crap like this.” Danny grins at her. “But enough about my sadsack junkie story. How are you doing? You have that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“Like you're looking past everyone at something that's not there.” He touches the tail of her eyebrow, where it fades into wispy blonde hairs. “This place is upsetting you.”
“I guess.” She takes a sip of lemonade. It’s from the bottom of the pitcher and leaves her tongue coated with a grainy sludge of sugar.
“You look really good. I must’ve said that a hundred times so far. You look so New York now. It’s not just the clothes or the hair. You hold yourself differently than you used to.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah,” Danny says. “You do.”
She flushes and looks away. The room is nearly empty now. Most of the other men have handed their journals to a counsellor and shuffled away on socked feet. Only a few are still standing around, speaking in low voices. A few nurses hover nearby, their clipboards at the ready.
Danny coughs and shuffles his feet. His grin fades from his face. “We all have nurses assigned to us. They’re supposed to check what we’re doing every twenty minutes.”
“Like a prison.”
“Yeah. Like a prison. But at least prisoners get shoes.”
“It’s awful,” she says. “I hate seeing you here, Danny. I wish there was something I can do.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Danny’s expression turns serious. “Go ask for the bathroom.”
“What?”
“You’ve just drank a cup of lemonade. Go up to that nurse and ask for the bathroom. There’s one down this hallway. Wait there for me.”
“What do you mean?”
He grabs her hand and nuzzles it with his cheek. “I’ve missed you. I missed you so much.”
“But you never even wrote me,” she says helplessly.
“I couldn’t bear to. You’re the one who left me, I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me.” He kisses the side of her hand. “Please. Go to the bathroom. Wait there for me.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Alice,” Danny says, and his voice cracks over her name. “If you know how much I need this—if you know how much I need you, you won’t say no. Please.”
He looks at her, pleading, body quivering against her touch. The purple bags under his eyes only make them look more green. His new fragile appearance gives his handsomeness an unexpected edge; it cuts right through her. It’s not that she’d been pining for him for the last two years—frankly, she has not thought about Danny much at all—but seeing him in front of her again, something goes off inside of her like a gunshot.
“Please,” Danny says.
She wonders where is the handsome orderly now inside this building. Was he real? Did she beat him to Danny? She is triumphant and nauseated all at once.
“Okay,” she says.
She goes to the bathroom.
Danny comes in a few minutes later.
They fuck against the sink, standing up, fully dressed, with her tights pushed down and her skirt flipped up. Danny grunts something when he comes, but she doesn’t quite catch what it is. It could be a name. He kisses her afterwards—he tastes like smoke and sour lemons—and slips out the door without looking back or saying anything else. She wipes herself down with the toilet paper and scrubs her hands and thighs with the Pepto-Bismol-coloured institutional soap. Danny, she notices, has ripped a hole in her tights.
Her eyes are red when she looks in the mirror. The triumph from earlier is gone. She thinks what she’s feeling right now is disgust, mixed with despair, but neither are emotions that have any particular meaning in a place like this.
The light has faded by the time she goes through another bag search and leaves St. Andrews through the wrought iron gates. Outside, the wind blows the dead leaves around and makes skittering rat’s feet noises. She’s shivering in her duffle coat; New York was at least ten degrees warmer than Massachusetts, and she was silly enough to put on a nice dress and her good tights this morning. Why did she do that? Who was she trying to impress? She could have shown up in one of those brown paper bags they use for dead leaves, and Danny would have fucked her as long as there was a hole inside for him to fuck. Above anything else, she’s furious at herself for wasting a good pair of silk hose for this. She needs a drink. She needs a smoke. And where is her goddamn cab?
“Cigarette?” asks a voice coming out of the darkness, accented and melodious.
She turns. There’s a monster leaning against the brick wall, dressed in a white orderly’s uniform with a grey shapeless sweatshirt over the top.
“I saw you earlier,” she says.
“You did.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I like hospitals. They’re good feeding places.”
The grey sweatshirt he’s wearing looks at least two sizes too big for him, made for someone much broader. The thought dawns on her with sudden horror. “Did you kill him? The patient I saw you with earlier?”
“I drained his blood, yes.”
“Why?”
“Because hunger struck and he was there. It’s no great loss for the world. The doctors think he’s a depressed alcoholic, but he has an undiagnosed case of early Alzheimer's. His brain is dying slowly, and he knows it. Another year and he won’t be able to walk. Another two and he’ll stop breathing. That’s assuming a fall or a case of pneumonia won’t kill him before then. I gave him the easy rest he’s been longing for.”
“How do you know all that?”
“My kind can perceive subtleties that elude human senses,” says the monster. “Thoughts that pass unspoken do not go unheard.”
“Oh,” she says. “So you can read minds. Then can you—”
The monster looks bored. “You’re wondering if I’m going to kill you next. The answer is no.”
“Why not?”
“Daniel’s quite fond of you.”
“He’s not."
“He is. As I’ve said, I can see what others can’t.” The monster peers at her. In the orange light by the gate, his orange eyes look almost like they’re a normal colour. He peels the grey sweatshirt over his head and holds it out. “You’re cold. Take this jumper.”
After everything that has happened, this bizarre and singular act of kindness is too much to bear. She takes the sweatshirt. It’s soft in her hands. She has to fight down the urge to cry.
The monster watches her for a few minutes. Then he says, almost hesitant, “Shall we go to my car? I believe your cab is not coming.”
“Fine,” she says. The sharp autumn air hurts her lungs as she gasps for air. “Sure. Kill me there. I don’t care.”
“I’m not going to kill you, Alice.”
He leads her to the visitor's parking lot and unlocks a dark green Oldsmobile. Against every good instinct, she gets in and he starts the car. She wonders if he’s taking her to a farmer’s ditch or a backcountry pond, somewhere secluded to dump the corpse, but a few turns later they hit the main highway with its orderly columns of streetlights. They keep driving, and they pass trees and dark fields and dilapidated barns until they reach the next town over. The car comes to a stop in front of a diner. The monster gets out first and opens the door for her.
“Thanks,” she says, and gets an elegant shrug in return.
The waitress raises an eyebrow when they walk in: a tear-stained Asian girl and a brown-skinned hospital orderly with no jacket in the 60-degree weather. They’re the only two non-white customers in the diner.
She doesn’t think she’s hungry, but when the waitress comes over with the menu, she hears herself order a hamburger and a strawberry milkshake. The monster gets a black coffee. “Do you ever eat normal food?” she asks after the waitress has wandered off.
“No.”
“Do you survive on blood?”
The monster looks around him, but the initial interest in their appearance has worn off and no one in the diner is paying them any attention. “Yes,” he says.
“So you really are a vampire.”
“Yes,” he says. “And you can call me Armand. It’s unpleasant to be thought of as ‘the monster’ all evening.”
“If you’re a vampire, how can I see you during daylight?”
“I’m not a storybook vampire. The sun is unpleasant, but it doesn’t hurt me.”
“Did you use to be a human?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“Four-hundred forty-five. Give or take a few.”
“Do you sleep in a coffin?”
“Not anymore.”
“What does blood taste like to you?”
“It’s hard to put into words the subjective character of experience,” Armand says. “For instance, how would you describe the milkshake you’re drinking to someone who’s never drank milk? Or ate a strawberry? By definition, qualia cannot be conveyed.”
“Qualia?”
The neon orange eyes light up. “Instances of subjective experience. Not the same as the property of an object. It’s a term to help explain the way consciousness is experienced.”
“Like jnana,” she says. “In Buddhism. It’s the Sanskrit word for the specific understanding of reality. In college, the hippie kids were all over that idea. Once you’ve had enough psychedelics you start questioning what the hell reality even means.”
“I don’t know it.”
(Later, she would learn that despite Armand’s unceasing fascination with philosophy, his response whenever she brings up Buddhism or anything to do with Eastern religion is a flat, I don’t know. It’s the Indian elephant in the room he refuses to acknowledge. Wherever he came from, whatever he believed in, that has all been washed away into a dark sea. He acts as though there’s nothing less interesting to him than the human he’d once been—something she never believed.)
She finishes her meal. Armand doesn't touch the coffee. When she's ready to go, Armand, in true gentleman’s style, leaves a crisp bill on the table and doesn’t ask the waitress for change.
Back in the car, they’re flying down the I-95 towards Providence by the time she realizes that he’s not taking her back to Boston, but taking her all the way back to New York. “Why are you doing this for me?” she asks.
Armand’s gaze is fixed on the road. “Daniel is special to me, and you’re special to Daniel. I preserve his happiness even when he can’t or won’t. He needs you right now.”
“I left him two years ago.”
“Two years is not a very long time, even in a human’s short lifespan.” Armand taps the steering wheel. “Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avide / qui gagne sans tricher, à tout coup.”
The smooth way he recited whatever he recited makes something click inside her mind. “When Danny went to Europe–were you with him then? And that night, in my bed…you’re lovers. Was Danny’s note from you? On our first date, he showed me a message that someone gave him. He said it was from a junkie in the city. Was it you?”
Armand is silent. “The message was not from me. But yes, I was in Europe at the same time as Daniel.”
“What was it like?”
“I don’t know how to answer that. What was it like? You’re better off asking me if it was raining on a specific afternoon in Naples, or how many people were in the third train compartment on the 10:36 from Amsterdam to Brussels. What do you want to hear? Europe is old and still tired from the war. Paris is not as I remembered it—it has been overtaken by filthy bistros, dog droppings, and fascistic policemen. And still the French spits on les bougnoles, even as it expects them to serve their fast food and sell their drugs. London is no better. Italy, however, I still enjoyed—modernity has not yet made Venice ugly. There. Does that answer satisfy you?”
“What about Danny?”
“You should ask him yourself, though I don’t know what he will tell you. He was not sober for most of it. And when he was—” Armand smiles to himself. “He can give you quite a good rundown of hotel bedspreads, I suspect.”
If he weren’t driving, she would have slapped him. “Fuck you,” she says. ”And you think I should take him back?”
Armand’s face goes blank in a complicated way. “You arrived before I did today.”
The window is cold when she presses her forehead against the glass. She shouldn’t have eaten the burger and milkshake so quickly. They sit heavy in her stomach and make her queasy.
She has also been circling the edges of this thought all evening, and now she will follow it down to its inevitable end.
“He called both of us, didn’t he? I didn’t know vampires have telephones.”
“Daniel telephoned you two days before he called out to me through the Mind Gift,” Armand says. “He wanted you first, Alice. He loves you more.”
Disgust and despair. Now that she’s outside of St. Andrews, away from the flame-red maples and the floral couches and the pink hand soap, these feelings return like the backwash of a wave returning to shore. Despair and disgust.
“Stop the car,” she says. “Stop the fucking car, Armand.”
Armand pulls over to the shoulder of the highway and watches silently as she retches onto the grey concrete.
Afterwards, he produces a cigarette and holds it out. It flares orange the second she puts it into her mouth, without the help of any visible lighter or match. Okay. Just another thing that vampires can do.
She takes a drag and lets the smoke clear out the taste of the vomit. Armand nods at her, and they continue driving. Somewhere past New Haven, he says, sullenly, “Two days. That means something.”
She nods. As they’re crossing the Triboro Bridge into the city, she says, “Maybe he called me first because he didn’t know how to reach you. The ‘Mind Gift’? Like ESP? You should have left a telephone number like a normal person.”
“Maybe,” Armand says.
“Maybe,” she echoes. And then, “Tell me more about Paris.”
Armand looks surprised. “Why?”
“I watched The 400 Blows in college and I liked it. I’ve always wanted to visit. Tell me more about the city. Oh, don’t mention the parts with Danny. Just tell me about Paris. You can complain about the fascistic policemen all you want.”
When they reach her apartment building, she pops the door open but stays sitting in the passenger’s seat. A mad thought flits across her mind: if this were a movie, and if this were a date, this is where the heroine is supposed to ask her gallant driver to come up for a cup of coffee. She opens her mouth. What she blurts out is, “Do you want the sweatshirt back?”
“No.”
“Well,” she says. “Good night then.”
“I’m going away after today,” Armand says. “I have other responsibilities that require my attention, and this will be the last time I see Daniel. From now on, he’s going to need you.”
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t tell you. That’s up to someone else to decide.”
“Who?”
“My companion.”
She ponders the word. “So you have an Alice too.”
“That is not how I would describe Louis.”
The masculine name is not lost on her, nor the sudden look of guilt that flashes through Armand’s eyes. She pieces it together in an instant. Why are all men so predictable? Even the vampires?
She says, “So your companion decided that he couldn’t put up with you gallivanting around Europe any longer. It probably started as a harmless indulgence, and now it’s just embarrassing. A philandering husband is only amusing for so long.”
“A puerile summary of a love beyond your understanding,” Armand snaps, though his orange eyes look even guiltier than before.
“Okay.”
Armand exhales. “My point still remains. Daniel is in a desperate state. Don’t judge him so harshly for what he’s done today.”
“Right.” She smiles at Armand, then before fear can stop her, she leans and kisses him on the cheek. His skin is cold and hard against her mouth. It feels like pressing her mouth to the side of a ceramic teacup. “I’ll think about it. Goodnight, Armand.”
She climbs out of the car and goes into her building without looking back.
> > Why did you pick up the phone call? Why? I’m curious. Why did you do it? Haven’t you learn anything? Pick up Item 7, A pamphlet from the first commercially available home pregnancy test in the USA. Or pick up Item 8, A newspaper clipping from The Village Voice’s Classified section. Or pick up Item 9, A photostat copy of the poster for the Hellfire sex club in New York City. Or pick up Item 10, A ceramic shard from a shattered bowl, mid-1970s. Go on. Do it. It's not like it would change the past.
> To question and re-question what just happened, skip ahead and pick up Item 13.B A reproduction of a movie poster for The Hunger (1983).
> To continue along the love story of Alice and Daniel, proceed to Item 13.A, A series of letters from Daniel addressed to Alice, mailed from San Francisco to New York City.
Item 13.A: [1981 to 1983] A series of letters from Daniel addressed to Alice, mailed from San Francisco to New York City.
Danny leaves the hospital in January 1980 and moves back to San Francisco. By April, he lands a gig with the Chronicle covering local politics. He starts writing her letters. Long, beautiful letters with little sketches in the margins:
dear alice, here’s the wisteria blooming on the street corner. here’s a cartoon of our staff assistant (coffee mug drawn to scale). here’s a stray dog that i’ve noticed sniffing around the office but no one else has so perhaps it’s a hallucination - i've drawn it a doghouse - there’s an animal in me which also fits in the house so if you keep a space in your heart - just big enough for a small doghouse, so not very big at all - i can put myself nicely inside of it
He signs them all the same way. with love, your danny.
He sends her clippings as well of what he’s working on, too. A local dermatologist is raising the alarm about a rare skin cancer that previously mostly affected elderly Greek men. Danny files a story that’s picked up by Reuters, but the Chronicle isn’t interested in doing a local angle. His editor reminds him that his beat is politics, not the gay community.
Which is bullshit, he fumes in one of his letters, as if the gay community isn’t the city community? what’s next - are we going to put in a separate water fountain for homosexuals as well? Disease is disease - if one person is doomed - we are all doomed.
In 1981, Danny does a story about a forty-year-old mechanic in Lower Haight who’s slowly being overtaken by purple spots and lesions on his skin. By now it’s clear that there’s a series of baffling diseases hitting gay men in San Francisco and across the country. The Kaposi’s sarcoma story finally convinces his editor to temporarily move him to cover the issue full-time.
Danny writes to her:
They call it GRID. GAY RELATED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY. it’s everything— pneumonia - infections - cancer—the bodies breaks down and all the pieces fly away from each other forever (ive stolen this from larkin). I heard about another case today from dr Dritz (i wrote you about her before if you recall she is wonderful) and she told me about a man who lapsed into a semi coma and his relatives are not letting his lover into the hospital to see him. I dont like to think of anyone all alone in a white beeping institutional world without someone to love him or even hold his hand. Its the lack of touch thats truly frightening. The nurses prod at him like he’s a thing, not a human—horrible. it's horrible.
She calls him when she gets the letter.
“It’s a plague,” Danny says. “It’s a depressing fucked up plague, Alice. If a madman went out on the street and shot three hundred people, we’d all be up in arms and the army would be sending out tanks. But since it’s an invisible disease no one wants to hear about it and no one cares. I come home every day and just cry. Is that silly to say? Don’t judge me. I set an alarm at eight every night and give myself fifteen minutes to sob, and then I sit back down at my desk and go back to work. I’m very efficient that way. I should look into patenting this method.”
He sounds tired but sober. She checks the time. It’s ten in New York; seven in San Francisco.
“Are you taking care of yourself?” she says.
“I’m mostly upright and sometimes clean-shaven.”
“You know what I mean.”
Danny sighs. “Yes, Alice. I’m keeping clean. I’m even going to the damn meetings, not that I have the time.”
“Good.”
She hears rustling movement down the line. Danny likes to pace around when he’s on the phone.
“I wish television stations across the country just had one feed,” Danny says.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I wish we could just sit down and watch the same show on TV together, without there being an East Coast time and a Mountain time and a West Coast time. I miss just sitting on the couch with you. Watching TV. Breathing the same air. I wish we could do that over the phone.”
“The sports channel,” she says. “That’s always live.”
“Ew,” Danny says. His distaste for sports is legendary among their friends. He calls it ‘the modern-day pageantry of brutes in spandex.’ She’s forgotten that fact about him until now: the myriad ways that Danny can be so charming.
She laughs. “It’s nice to speak with you anyway.”
“Yeah. It’s nice. I miss you, Alice.”
“I miss you too,” she says.
Item 13.B: [1983] A reproduction of a movie poster for The Hunger (1983).
The passage from 1981 to 1983 is marked by the slow, gelatinous stages of the reconciliation of Danny and Alice—the letters, the phone calls, the advances and counter-advances of flirtation. A weekend strolling through Mission Dolores when she comes back to San Francisco to visit her parents. Chaste dinners in Brooklyn when he’s in town to see his editor (there’s a small press here that thinks they can turn his reporting into a book). They reach a stalemate. She senses his impatience when another dinner ends without the invitation from her to come up and cross her threshold, but she’s afraid of the inevitable conclusion of Danny and Alice: the fights, the sullen silences, the monosyllabic conversations where he would have to beg her for grudging forgiveness. To go forward feels impossible, to go backwards is heartbreaking.
“You’re a good catch,” her mother says to her over the phone. “You’re almost thirty. Maybe it’s time to think about settling down and having kids. Marriage is what nature intends for men and women, you should let nature take its course.” The last part is an idiom she says in Chinese.
“I don’t want to get married,” she says back. “I think marriage is an oppressive institution for women.”
Her mother tuts. “Are you still not over the journalist boy?”
“His name is Danny.”
Even saying his name feels like a loud bang inside her head. If he were here, he would be pulling faces at her, trying to get her to laugh while she’s having a serious conversation. He used to like initiating sex while she was on the phone to the bank or the utility company: it was a game to see how long she can keep a straight face while he’s kissing her neck. I can’t help it, Danny always said, You have such an adorable frown when you’re thinking.
She wants him. Oh God, she wants him. Armand had it all backwards. Danny doesn’t need her. She needs him. It's hunger.
**
One day, around the spring of 1983, Alice and Daniel are in the middle of a phone call about everything and nothing in particular: the weather and the incompetent new girl at Alice’s office. Reagan’s insane new promise to take the Cold War to space. The new horror movie with David Bowie and that French actress that Alice has seen but Danny hasn’t. She’s trying to describe the (melodramatic, hilarious) plot to him when Danny says, out of nowhere, “Do you remember when you visited me in St. Andrews?”
“Yes,” she says cautiously. It’s the first time that either of them has brought up that day.
“Do you remember how crazy we were? Meeting in the bathroom like that?”
“Yes,” she says.
Danny’s breath of laughter sends a cackle of air down the line. “Oh my god, you were wild. I still can’t believe we got away with it.” His voice goes low and warm. “That kept me sane for the months left until I got out. Through all of Christmas–I mean, Christ, an institutionalized Christmas. I never want to go back there again. I thought about you all the time. Still do. I don’t think I can convey what that day meant to me.”
She can feel a metallic taste creeping up from the back of her throat, like warm blood mixed with milk. Back at the Voice, she once drank too much rum-and-ginger-ale at a staff party. Coming out the front door, she had missed the final step on the stone staircase. There was a drunken moment before she fell and sprained her ankle when she was suspended in mid-air, and the world held its breath, and waited. On that moment the future world depends.
“Alice? You still there?”
Doubt douses her back in cold sweat. She closes her eyes. Could she have remembered it all wrong? Had it been a lovers’ reunion, not something dirty, quick, and opportunistic? It had been awful—hadn’t it? Standing outside the gate, she’d been close to tears—hadn’t she? It’s his word against hers. It’s his story versus hers, Except it’s the same story, just a different narrator. Bang. Her memory splits into pieces like a shattered ceramic bowl.
“Alice? Are you still on the line? Alice?”
**
After that phone call, she spends a desperate evening trying to summon Armand. He calls it his ‘Mind Gift,’ so she tries to shout his name very loudly inside her head. She cuts herself and bleeds into a bowl. She paces around her room, trying to remember the license plate of the green Oldsmobile that he once drove, trying to remember if he ever revealed details about where he lived, where he slept, the last name of his mysterious companion (Louis? Was it Louis? Louis who?). Nothing.
Vampires come when they decide to, not before.
> It’s inevitable. Proceed to Item 14, Plane ticket, JFK to SFO
Item 14: [August 30 1983] Plane ticket, JFK to SFO.
The summer of ‘83 is one of the hottest on record for New York. Weeks go by with the temperature hovering around the nineties with no relief. By midday, the pavement gets so hot it fries the splotches of discarded chewing gum and melts the soles off of women’s high-heeled shoes. Garbage ferments in black plastic bags until the whole city stinks of its putrid juices. The wealthy families have all fled upstate; the middle class ones buy ice creams and crowd into swimming pools; the poorest families pry the caps of fire hydrants—the kids on Alice’s block call it “uncapping”—and let the gushing water grant them some respite from the relentless August sun.
Alice gets a rat infestation in her apartment. One morning, she finds a pile of rat droppings next to her coffee machine and decides, no, she’s had enough. She’s done with this city. She’s done fighting the inevitable.
“That’s fantastic,” Danny says when she calls him with the news of her decision to move back. “San Francisco misses you too. Are you job hunting yet? No? What about where you’re staying? Do you already have a place lined up? If you want you can take my spare room while you’re trying to find an apartment. I mean, unless you want to stay with your parents instead?”
She does not want to stay with her parents. “I’ll be there for a week or two at most, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“You can stay as long as you want, Alice.”
“But we’re only doing this as friends, alright? It’s just a place to sleep. I don’t want it to mean anything more.”
“Of course not,” Danny says. “But I should warn you: I keep terrible hours. Four in the morning I’m usually up and calling the newsroom manager to see what I missed overnight. It’ll get annoying real fast, but I make a mean cup of coffee to compensate. I just bought one of those new espresso machines. All the instructions are in Italian, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. When’s your flight? I’ll pick you up. Or I’ll find someone to pick you up.”
The rapid fire of his conversation makes her dizzy. “I can call a cab.”
“But you’ll have a ton of luggage with you. Dunno about you, but I hate wrangling cab drivers when I have luggage. No, I’ll come and pick you up. Tell me the time.” She hears the noise of a drawer opening and closing. “Right, I’ve got my agenda out. Just tell me the date, time, and airline. I’ll be there. I’ll move whatever appointments I have to.”
Jesus Christ, she thinks. Espresso machines and appointments. When did Danny get so polished, so grown-up? He has a respectable job and a book coming out next year. Meanwhile, she’s unemployed and directionless, about to live in his spare room for the next two weeks. How did things shake out like this?
**
It would be classic Danny to either show up late or not at all to the airport, but when she steps out the gate, the first thing she sees is his grinning face behind a bouquet of flowers. At the baggage claim, he finds a cart for her bags and gallantly pushes it all the way to his car. She’s never been inside his San Francisco apartment before. When they get there she discovers that it’s clean and tablecloth-ed and even has a few tasteful prints hanging on the walls: watercolour landscapes of what looks like France and Italy. There’s one that depicts a gorgeous view of what she thinks might be Rome, maybe; it shows the rooftop of a large white basilica framed by a set of window shutters. The impersonal details around the window makes it look like a hotel room.
She frowns and looks away.
“Oh, don’t pay any attention,” Danny says.” I just picked them up somewhere when I was traveling.” He leads her down the hall and shows her the spare bedroom.“Make yourself at home. Do you want anything? Water? Coffee?”
“Coffee’s fine,” she says. She looks around the room. “It’s nice here.”
“I should’ve warned you that I just have an old futon here. I’ve been told it has a vicious loose spring inside with an uncanny aim for the kidneys.”
“How do you know? Do you have a lot of people over?” It comes out more flirtatious than she intends.
Danny meets her gaze straight on. “Sure I do. And they all sleep on the futon.”
She never does find out what the futon feels like, because she goes to take a shower after her long flight. Coming out of the shower wrapped in only a towel, she bumps into Danny in the hallway, holding two mugs of coffee. The towel gets lost on the way to his bedroom. The coffee never gets drunk. They miss their dinner reservation. Danny forgets to make his four a.m. call the next morning. Her suitcases get unpacked but she never goes apartment hunting.
There’s no fighting the inevitable.
**
Despite everything, she’s glad she moved back to San Francisco. Danny’s apartment is in the Mission, not far from Haight Street. Despite the encroaching gentrification, the Haight is still how she remembers it to be. The funkiness of the sixties still clinging on like the spicy smell of marijuana and patchouli incense. The cosmic energy here is different from the East Coast, Danny says to her, and although she teased him for the hippie-ish phrasing, she agrees. They’re no longer in the era of peace and love, but runaway kids and burnouts still haunt the doorways, lost in the modern era’s stupor of punk music and drugs—tattooed, tie-dyed, track marked, stoned. She gets used to weaving her way around them on her way home.
A few times she thinks she sees a familiar dark face staring at her from the shifting crowd. But every time she gives chase, she is mistaken.
Item 15.A: [March 1984] A paper manual for the Commodore 64 home computer.
Danny keeps his act straight for much longer than Alice expects him to, that is, for the rest of 1983 until 1984.
He’s always had a workman-like commitment to his writing, but the newsroom job has him keeping hours that made his freelancing days in New York look like an amateur hobby. Other than their first day together in San Francisco, Danny never misses another 4 a.m. phone call. Even when he’s at home he’s always working: talking on the phone, reading new medical reports, studying epidemiological maps, frantically transcribing notes and interviews off his Dictaphone. The Voice had been its own universe; she assumes all newspaper journalists at the Chronicle work like this until Danny takes her as his date to the staff Christmas party, and she sees the way his colleagues look at him: amusement at his naked ambition, but also no little bit of awe mingled with jealousy. “No one feeds the newsroom beast like Daniel,” one of his colleagues says to them over the cranberry punch. “I don’t know how the hell he churns out so much copy. Not just the AIDS stuff, but everything.”
“That’s just what I do,” Danny says with a shrug. “That’s why they hired me. Because I write fast.”
Danny does write fast. And after Alice joins him, he writes even faster. Since she’s unemployed and bored anyway, it’s natural to offer to help out. It starts with her transcribing a few of his interviews (she worked as a secretary, she’s a better typist than Daniel or any of the news assistants). Once she starts, it’s no bother at all to mark out what she notices are the most interesting or informative quotes. And when she runs out of tapes to transcribe, she starts reading the medical journals and the government white papers, jotting down the most salient points for Danny to review later. And then—why not? She’s so familiar with the subject already—she takes a look at Danny’s drafts before it goes off to his editor. It only takes a moment, it’s no bother at all.
“You really don’t have to do this,” Danny says to her one night. “I’m really grateful for it, I want you to know that, but don’t you find it depressing? Isn’t it hard to spend so much time thinking about death?”
“You do it.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s different for me.”
“It’s good work,” she says. “There are some stories that need to be told.”
The truth is, she has an easy job. A coward’s job. She only has to sit at her desk and listen to the voices of the dying. She never accompanies Danny to meet his sources in person. She doesn’t have to look suffering in the eye.
**
To help their research along, Danny buys one of the newfangled home computers with the idea that they can save files on a disc to bring into the office. The C64 costs an eye-popping amount of money and Danny loses interest after two days, but it fascinates her. With Danny gone on so many evenings, she fills her time by messing around with cables and monitors, writing pointless programs and mastering useless techniques.
Over time, she becomes convinced that it’s sentient. Machines don’t have souls, but this one does, or else how can she explain the ghost that lives inside of it?
It happened at first inside a series of interview notes with a 70-year-old grandmother whom Danny had bulldogged his way into interviewing in San Bruno. The woman was gravely ill from receiving a contaminated blood infusion in ’79; her husband had recently also begun showing symptoms. Danny had called their family physician, who claimed that since the older couple were no longer sexually active, the transmission must have happened through saliva.
One morning when she opens the file, she notices a line of text she has no recollection of writing.
FACT CHECK BEFORE PUB.—AIDS SURVIVING IN SALIVA? MOST DRS STILL CLAIM PRIMARY KNOWN MEANS OF TRANSMISSION REMAINS CONTACT WITH BLOOD?
It sounds like the sort of note she’d jot down to herself, but she knows that she didn’t. She has no memory of writing this. When she brings it up to Danny, he frowns and starts making noises about calling the doctor again, so she knows it’s not Danny who wrote it either. And anyways, he rarely touches the C64 at home.
Other discrepancies start happening as well. She’d boot up the computer and find text files she has no memory of creating, transcriptions that she’s sure she’d written down differently. Once, she found that her entire folder re-named and reorganized from chronological to alphabetical order. She finds other notes that she’s sure didn’t come from her–unless she did? Is she going mad?
CHECK THIS.
REMEMBER TO CALL R.A. BY TUESDAY
MOVE THIS INFO UP INTO NUT GRAF
There’s no explanation to be found in the technical manual. She asks around at the electronics store where they bought it, but no one there can explain why it’s happening either. The salesmen there find her amusing: a young woman befuddled by machines too complicated for her understanding.
“ Computers aren’t like typewriters,” one of them says to her. “They store a lot of data in them, it’s natural that the files system is different from what you’re used to with paper—”
“I’ve read about packet-switched data communication that some universities are using,” she interrupts. “Is that possible with a home machine? Is there a way for computers to be affected from a distance? It’s either that or someone is breaking into my house to use my machine.”
The sales assistant starts guffawing, so she leaves.
When she sits at her desk, it feels like she’s communing with a magical being. There’s so much information encoded by invisible electrons, their lightning paths tracing faintly across the glass-walled screens. Words appear. Disappear. There’s no weight to pixels. Words dance across the darkness and are gone.
Maybe she is going crazy, or maybe she isn’t, and the problem does lie with her understanding of machines. She’s read the story of the Mechanical Turk, the elaborate chess-playing machine that turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The automaton only worked because it was secretly being operated by a human chess master. The insensate machine is only an illusion; the secret lies in the beating heart and human brain hidden inside.
**
She thinks—stakes, garlic, holy water, Bible verses in Latin…
She opens a new text file and writes, ARMAND, STOP MESSING WITH MY COMPUTER. TALK TO ME.
**
When he does pay attention, Danny finds her new hobby charming. “Remember the time our radio broke back on West 107th Street? You were obsessed with fixing it yourself. This is like that but a hundred times worse.”
“My parents raised me to be frugal,” she says. “Why pay someone to do something you can do?”
“Sure. But if I recall, you never did fix that radio.”
“I could have. I just needed more time.”
Danny rubs her shoulders, digging his thumbs into the spots that get sore from bending over the computer monitor for so long. “I think your obsession with technology is cute. At least you’re better with this than you were with that poor radio.”
“Go away. I’m concentrating. And don’t smoke in here, it’s bad for the circuits. Computer World said so.”
Danny takes his cigarette out, but instead of stubbing it out, he sticks it in her mouth. He hides a smile when she gives in and takes a drag. “You want something to eat? I bought some ice cream on the way home.”
“Strawberry?”
“Of course. I’ve been too well trained to get anything else.”
In general, things are going so nicely. They work so well together. They’re not happy, exactly–no one can be surrounded by so much death and be happy–but there’s something burning between them that’s a holy, fragile flame. She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and blow the candle out. So she doesn’t ask about the bottles of pills that Danny keeps locked in a side drawer of his writing desk. She goes to bed early on the nights when he comes home with his pupils blown wide and his jaw grinding like he has a mouth full of Pop Rocks. She doesn’t ask about the nights when he doesn’t come home at all. Danny’s work takes a terrible toll; she wants to make his life easier, not harder.
On mornings when Danny can’t get out of bed himself, she does it for him. She starts his expensive coffee machine and runs the shower and picks out a set of clean, ironed clothes that she has laundered clean of other men’s sweat and other men’s aftershave. She dresses him and buttons his shirts and even combs his hair, and usually by the third cup of coffee he’s alive again and presentable to the world.
“You need to get your act together without me, Molloy,” she says to him one morning.
Danny blinks at her, sleepy. There’s a pillow crease on his left cheek. “But I love the feeling of your hands on me,” he mumbles.
**
I will add one thing here. Years later, on stage for a journalism event at CUNY, Daniel will say to the panel moderator, “Yes, I’ve had a history of drug abuse. It ruined my personal life, but I’ve never let it ruin my work. Yes, I’ve made mistakes, but I’ve never been so fucked up I couldn’t hold down a job.”
I was not in the physical audience, but I was watching the live stream of the event. When Daniel said this, I had to raise a hand to stifle my laugh, to not wake my husband sleeping next to me.
> To recollect the night when Armand 'returns', skip to Item 16: A tube of lipstick in the shade Frosted Cherry, Revlon brand.
> To continue recalling the ghost of his presence, proceed to Item 15.B, A newspaper clipping from the Bay Area Reporter, “Traitor or Hero? A Shadow on The Gay Community” by Ira Curran.
Item 15.B: [June 20, 1983] A newspaper clipping from the Bay Area Reporter , “Traitor or Hero? A Shadow on The Gay Community” by Ira Curran.
Since it’s a disease that primarily affects the homosexual community, starting in 1984, Alice buys subscriptions to all the gay alt-weeklies to keep up with the latest trends. After A Shadow on the Skin comes out, she finds a scathing critique about how the author is benefitting from exploiting the gay community without being out himself.
“Its description of the disease’s inevitability borders on the hysterical. While well-intentioned, it only adds to the taint surrounding our community and reduces our political power," writes the reviewer.“The book will become dangerous ammunition for primitive politicians who advocated quarantines for gay men, and for homophobes who place the blame on gay men for an emerging health crisis. Reporting from outside of the community, Molloy’s work is an affront to our hard-fought personal freedoms. It will set us back years, if not decades. ”
“Fuck that guy, he doesn’t get to speak for all the queers,” her cousin Jen says over the phone. “Tell Danny I think he’s doing great work.”
In recent years, Jen has done a miraculous 180-degree turn on her opinion of Danny, becoming the staunchest defender of their relationship to the rest of their family.
Jen is still ranting: “Who gets to decide what’s the ‘gay community’ anyways? There’s no membership card that you get to carry. What about dykes? Do those white Tom of Finland motherfuckers think about us when they talk about the ‘gay community’? There’s only one community, and that’s everyone.”
It sounds so much like something that Danny once wrote in one of his letters that she has to laugh.
“It’s not that simple. And it’s not the only review that says that. You know people are always writing to the paper complaining that there’s too much gay disease coverage. It’s really been dragging Danny down.”
“Tell him to ignore that, Alice. Fuck them too,” Jen says.
“I wish it’s that simple. He’s depressed most of the time.”
Jen clucks her tongue. “Oh, honey, you can’t fix a guy’s feelings for him."
"I'm not trying to—"
"Rule number of relationships," Jen says. "Remember that the other person is their own person. Don’t get sucked into their moods. You’ll go crazy that way.”
It’s easy for Jen to dispense advice, but Jen doesn’t have to see the despair on Danny’s face, or the bone-deep exhaustion that’s eating him away from the inside. She can’t fix Danny’s feelings. But someone else can. Someone once said, I preserve his happiness even when he can’t, or won’t.
She ends up throwing the alt-weekly with the bad review away, though she knows that Danny will just read it somewhere else. He’s obsessive about reviews of his work like that. Whatever Danny feels about the review, he never talks about it out loud. Not even to her. There are some things they just don’t talk about.
**
“Armand?” she tries again that night. “Armand, are you out there somewhere? Can we talk? Is there anything you can do for Danny? Can you help?
**
At the book launch for A Shadow on the Skin, another journalist asks Danny what he’s planning on doing next.
“I need a break from reporting,” Danny tells him. “The story’s out there now, there are lots of other talented people covering the issue. I think I want to try doing something else while I’m young. I’m talking with my agent right now, actually. He thinks he can get me a book deal for a novel. It’s going to be set in Europe. Alice and I might move there for a year while I’m writing.”
She looks at her boyfriend, astonished. It’s the first she’s heard about this.
Danny looks back at her, his blue-green eyes guileless. “Surprise? I just got off the phone with David this morning. There’s an advance too. It’s not huge, but it’s enough to live on for a year. What do you say?”
“Europe?” she says.
“Paris,” Danny says. “You’ve always said you wanted to go.”
>Computers are mysterious things. Go back to Item 4, A print-out of an unsent electronic mail from an AOL inbox, July 2009. “Dear Armand, you’ll never see this, but look at this passage I’m sending. Danny thinks he’s driving a Buick to meet his dealer…”
> To recollect the night when Armand returns, proceed to Item 16: A tube of lipstick in the shade Frosted Cherry, Revlon brand.
Item 16: [circa mid-1980s]: A tube of lipstick in the shade Frosted Cherry, Revlon brand.
In September 1984, Danny tells Alice that his father and stepmother want to meet her before they leave for Paris. In the ten years of their off-and-on relationship, this will be the first time that she will meet Danny’s family. When Danny relays the news, she assumes that this means they will drive to Modesto where his family still lives. But it turns out that Danny’s father had already made a reservation at a restaurant in San Francisco for next week. He and the stepmother will drive into the city instead.
She wonders what this means: ten years, and still no invitation to enter the Malloy family home.
“Oh God, no,” Danny says, “It’s nothing to do with you. I haven’t been back in that house myself in fucking ages. Trust me, my dad did it this way because he knows we’re better off in a public setting. It contains the damage somewhat.”
She discovers what he means by ‘damage’ when she arrives at the restaurant from work and discovers that Danny is nowhere to be seen. Eventually, a middle-aged man approaches her where she’s standing outside and asks if she’s Alice. When she says yes, he introduces himself as Danny’s father and ushers her inside where his wife is waiting at the table. The three of them make stilted small talk over their gin and tonics about her new job (part-time office temp) and the weather (foggy and rainy–it’s the Bay Area) and then where she’s from.
“From here, actually,” she says. “My parents bought a house in the Sunset District before I was born.”
“Good real estate investment,” Molloy Sr. says mildly, and though she’s braced for it, he doesn’t ask any follow-up questions.
She fidgets with the menu. It’s been a long day and she’s starving for dinner, but no one is ordering anything except more alcohol and she’s unsure if it’s a rich white person thing or a politeness thing, since they’re still waiting for Danny.
“Did Danny not tell you anything about me?” she asks.
“For a journalist, Dan loves to withhold details,” Malloy Sr. says. “My son doesn’t talk to us very much.”
When Danny does show up, he’s an hour late and already half-drunk.
They find him loudly arguing out front with the maître d’, who’d stopped him from entering because Danny has no jacket or tie and the restaurant has a strict dress code. Danny’s father takes the maître d’ aside, and either words or money must have changed hands, because the maître d’ comes back and announces they will look in the back for something to loan this young man.
“Sorry,” Danny mutters to her as they wind their way back to their table. “But isn’t this whole thing fucking ridiculous?”
“Sure,” she says through gritted teeth. She’s furious with her boyfriend, but it’s ludicrous to lay an adult woman’s complaints against him when he looks like this: a little boy scowling at his father, swimming through the boxy fabric of his too-big clothes. She settles for being furious at herself: she should have insisted on picking up Danny and coming here together. It’s a glaring oversight from her part. She has failed to manage the situation.
“I see you three have already met. How’s it been? Has my old man started on politics yet? Don’t let him. It’s awful.”
“He’s been nice.”
“My father,” Danny says, over-enunciating every syllable, “is not being nice. He’s being charming. There’s a difference.”
At least Danny’s only drunk. Mostly drunk. Maybe a 'lude or two. She’s become very good at identifying Danny’s different highs: his eyes are red but he isn’t walking into furniture. His hair is matted with sweat at the temples, but the jacket covers up the worst of his rumpled shirt. This has to be good enough.
The Molloys aren’t what she expected at all. From Danny’s stories, she thought that Danny’s father would be unbearably handsome and unbearably cruel: a stern patriarch with a Roman nose. In reality, Molloy Sr. is a short man with stubby features, pink like a molerat made pinker by his baby blue bowtie. The only resemblance to Danny is in the hue of his eyes and the way that he talks, which is to say, very funny and very mean. Next to him, the stepmother doesn’t say much and doesn’t eat much either. When the food arrives, she spends the night pushing leaves of lettuce around her plate. The stepmother has the youthful-but-not-young look that most rich women have where they don't age, they only desiccate.
The three Malloys don’t look like they belong at the same table, much less the same family—except when the waiter brings the napkin-wrapped wine bottle. Then they all drink very quickly with the same economic motions.
The drunker Danny and his father got, the funnier and meaner they both became.
“What do you mean, you’re planning to split the rent in Paris?” Molloy Sr. demands over dessert. “Alice, my dear, you have to let Dan pay. A lady should never have to pay for her own house.”
“Danny and I want to be equal in our partnership,” she says.
Molloy Sr. waves a fork. “So you’re one of those feminists, but so what? Listen, I’m not against the women’s movement. If women want to work, let ‘em, I say. But right now we’re talking about the specific case of you and my son. And Dan’s not a reliable man and you two aren’t married yet. Think about it: are you two earning the same money? Are you two going to get the same opportunities in life? And not to be indelicate, but when the time comes, Dan's not going to carry the child. You’re a young woman giving away your best years to my son. How much do you think that’s worth? My goodness, let Dan pay the rent for a year. He owes it to you for putting up with him. And maybe it’ll finally make him feel more like a man”
The stepmother finds her voice. It’s surprisingly deep for a woman, with a marked Valley accent. “If a man loves you, he’ll want to spend money on you.”
“I do love her,” Danny says.
“Then marry her,” says his father.
“I don’t want to get married,” Alice says.
Molloy Sr. shakes his head.“In business, my advice is to never get into a venture where you’re shouldering all the risks,” he says.
“It’s the twentieth century. Marriage doesn't have to be an economic arrangement. I'm not looking for a return on my investment. And who knows, maybe Danny is giving up his best years to me . Time will tell.”
“Dan’s never given anything worthwhile to anyone,” Molloy Sr. says. “Marry him or leave him, my dear, but don't expect much either way.”
Danny’s fork clatters when he throws it down on his plate. “Fascinating, Dad . Why don't we ask Linda if you were everything she expected when she married you?”
The stepmother flushes red.
“Dan,” Molloy Sr. says. “Don’t say something you’ll regret.”
But Danny is in one of his vicious moods where he can’t be stopped. “As far as returns on investment go, she should have waited to at least look at the second guy who walked into the country club before getting hitched to a guy losing his electronics empire to the South Korean imports.” He turns to the stepmother. “That's called market research, Linda. As in, you find your mark and you research him. Oh well. You’re not that old yet. Still plenty of moderately successful businessmen in Northern California.”
There is a brief silence at the table.
“My son needs to be the cleverest one in the room,” Danny’s father says, as mild as ever. “When he can't be the cleverest, he'll settle for the meanest. You seem like a bright girl, Alice. Dan must have made you suffer a lot over the years.”
Oh god, this family. “Excuse me,” she says. She pushes her chair back. “Ladies room.”
In the washroom, she takes several deep breaths. She’s not used to keeping pace with such seasoned drinkers, and now she’s drunk and furious with the world. In the mirror, her reflection looks blurry. She’s sweated off all her makeup; now her face resembles a peeled hard-boiled egg. Should she touch up her lipstick? She doubts her hands are steady enough.
A shadow shifts behind her in the mirror. “The man is intolerable, but he makes several good points,” the shadow says.
She yelps. “Armand? Oh my God, is that you?”
A man-shaped thing melts out from the corner of the stalls and steps next to her at the sink.
“Give me your lipstick,” he says.
Stunned, she hands it over. Armand uncaps it and studies the waxy cylinder. “You should pick a shade with warmer undertones. This clashes with your complexion. Still, better than nothing. Now hold still.” He tilts her chin towards the light.
She peers at him. Tonight, Armand is wearing a black suit over a contrast collar shirt, a red silk tie knotted at his throat in a full Windsor: an ostentatious clump of fabric the size of a fist or a heart. A vampire in Brooks Brothers is applying makeup on her, she thinks, hysterically. She’s surrounded by men in terrible costumes. “You look like a junior stockbroker in his boss’s tie,” she says.
Armand frowns. “Don’t move your mouth before I’m done.”
She’s about to say something as a retort, but an invisible force locks her in place and renders her immobile.
“What was that?” she asks when she regains control of her body.
“Different aspects of the Mind Gift. You may check my work in the mirror if you’d like.”
She does. “Why are you so good at this?”
“I ran a theatre in Paris for two hundred years. Grease paint was part of the job.” Armand’s neon orange eyes rake over her face. “Do you have a powder compact?”
She opens her purse and hands it over. He taps the puff and begins dusting powder over her forehead and her nose. “I have an eyebrow pencil too,” she says. She points at her left eyebrow where the dark hairs turn into blonde. “Can you also help me fill in this part?”
“It looks more interesting if you leave it as it is,” Armand says, but he takes the pencil from her and starts filling the tail of her brow with light strokes. He is very good at it.
“I thought you said you were going away,” she says.
“I did. But my companion changed his mind and asked for us to return to the United States.”
“Your companion? Who’s your companion?”
Armand hands her back the pencil. “His name is Louis. Do not ask me any more questions about him.”
“Okay,” she says. “How long have you been watching us? Are you going to take Danny away again?”
“I just arrived in San Francisco yesterday.”
She doubts this. “Danny’s doing really well,” she says. “Please don’t take him away. Let me have him for a bit longer. He wants to write a novel next. Let him finish the novel at least.”
“I’ll consider it,” Armand says.
She rubs her temples. “Oh God, I’m too drunk for this. I don’t want to go back out there.”
“Would you like me to cause a disturbance? I can set the kitchens on fire.”
“No!”
Armand studies her. Then he reaches into his suit jacket and takes out a small baggie of white powder. “Then maybe I can offer you a remedy for your current state.”
He taps out a thin line on the mirror of her powder compact.
“Jesus,” she hisses. “What if someone walks in right now?”
“No one will.” Armand begins rolling up a fifty-dollar bill.
“Where did this even come from?”
“From the same person this jacket once belonged to. How did you put it? A junior stockbroker in his boss’s tie?”
She hesitates over the compact. Despite all these years with Danny, she’s never done anything more serious than an occasional joint or quaalude or once, a pill that she thought was aspirin but turned out to be an amphetamine. “Is this what you do for Danny? Appear out of nowhere and offer him drugs?”
“No,” Armand says. “Most of the time I’m trying to remove the drugs from his vicinity. I think I’ve done an admirable job of steering him away from intravenous use or freebasing cocaine, though I can’t speak for the past two years. I hope Daniel has not undone all my good work while I was away.”
“He’s been good,” she lies, and does the line of coke. At first her nose feels numb, then she tastes old pennies in the back of her throat. The world clears up and her soppy drunkenness goes away. She smiles at Armand. “Thanks.”
He shrugs.
“Will I still see you around? Tell me you’re not leaving for years again.”
“I thought that you preferred for me to go away and leave Daniel alone.”
The coke makes the habitual filter between the world and her thoughts disappear. She feels light-headed. “I did, at the time,” she says. “But now I’ve decided I kind of like you. I think we could be friends. We’ll be moving to Paris soon. Will you be there too?”
“I’ll consider it.”
“I haven’t seen any ghosts in a very long time,” she says. “I didn’t like them when they were there but I hate that they’re gone. I don’t like to think that any phase of my life could disappear forever--do you ever feel like that too?”
“Occasionally.”
“In a book, do you like the first chapter more or the last one? I like the first page. It’s more exciting to not know how a story ends, but sometimes I sneak a look at the last few pages, and then the entire time I’m wondering about the book will reach the last point of the story. Is that better or worse than not knowing at all?”
Armand stares at her, then he pushes her towards the door. “Go,” he says. “You’ve already taken too long. Daniel and his father are about to start a very loud disagreement that will end with someone smashing a wine glass. Go distract them.”
Later, on the cab ride home, Danny lays his head against her shoulder. He’s at the stage where he’s so blasted that he gives in easily to maudlin sentimentality. He nuzzles the soft skin of her neck. “I’m so sorry we’re like this,” he whispers into her ear.
“It’s okay,” she says. She unhooks her dangly earrings in case they poke him. She pulls him closer. He acquiesces easily, leaning in so close he’s almost climbing into her lap.
“Things haven’t been the same since my mom died,” Danny says. “Ever since then, it’s all gone to shit. We’re fucked up people, Alice. My dad married Linda the next year. Did you know that? Mama’s perfume bottles were still on her vanity table. Her paintings were still hanging on the walls. And then my dad moves his secretary in and says, kids, here’s your new step-mom. Give her a kiss. He didn’t tell me and Mikey they were going to get married until a week before the ceremony. Can you imagine? Who does something like that?”
She kisses the top of his curls. “It’s awful.”
“Her paintings were still on the walls,” Danny repeats in a small voice.
“I’d like to see them one day.”
“I’ll show them to you.”
“What was her name?” She can’t believe she’s never asked this before. It’s what people are supposed to do with the people they love: learn the names of their families. Pay attention to their stories, so that you can show how much he matters to you, how much you love him.
“Zarouhie,” Danny says. “It’s Armenian. Isn’t it beautiful? She wanted to name me Taniel, like it would have been written in Armenia, but my dad put his foot down. Daniel is good enough, he said. It's a good Irish name and it goes with Molloy. He doesn’t want his children to have a mutt name.” They watch the city go by outside. It’s a clear night. The dark windows reflect the orange streetlights like they’re sheets of beaten copper. Danny sighs.“When we have kid, I’ll never let them go. I’ll hug them every night and tell them I love them until they’re sick of hearing it.”
She touches her eyebrow. She can’t remember the last time she saw her ghostly brother.
Danny kisses her, slow and deep. The kiss tastes like waxy lipstick and sour chardonnay. When he pulls away, some of the lipstick that Armand applied on her has rubbed off on his mouth. The cab driver is watching in the rearview but the coke makes her careless. She returns the kiss—can Armand and his supernatural powers sense this?—then wipes the lipstick away with a thumb before moving downwards. The silvery bite mark on his throat is one kiss wide by two kisses tall. When she rests her thumb over it, his pulse jumps beneath the skin.
“Will you marry me?” Danny whispers.
He’s drunk and maudlin. He will not remember this the next morning. She does not feel bad when she says, “No, Danny, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Danny makes a quiet, terrible noise.
“Shh, Danny,” she says. “Rest now. Go to sleep, sweetheart.”
There’s a business card in her coat pocket. She fingers the dull edges of the expensive card stock. Molloy Sr. had slipped it across the table while Danny was outside getting the cab. He said to her, “Our personal number is written on the back. Call us any time. Call collect if you have to.” At her awkward thank you’s he sighed and waved them away. “My son means well. That’s the curse of the Molloy men: we always mean well, but then, in the end—‘We all are men, in our own natures frail. Few are angels’.”
“Is that a quote from the Bible?” she asked.
“Shakespeare, Henry the Eighth,” said Molloy Sr. “One of the Bard's greats.”
She wanted to ask him what he considered to be the other greats—she regretted the time they wasted on small talk when they should have been talking, really talking, about his son. She should have taken her chance to pull back the curtain on what kind of man her boyfriend really is. She should have asked real questions. They should have talked about plays and Shakespeare and family tragedies. She only had the time to shake Molloy Sr.'s hand—his grip is cool and firm—and then Danny was at the restaurant entrance, waving to her, and then there was no time left, only enough to say thank you again for the evening and button up her jacket before rushing out the door for the taxi.
In the backseat, Danny has fallen asleep against her shoulder. She cranks down the window. She has the card with the phone number pushed through the crack, the rushing wind already tugging it away from her fingers, when she reconsiders the whole and changes her mind and slips the card back into her purse. As long as Danny never sees it, there’s no harm in hanging on.
> You were pleased that Armand showed up after all. Return to Item 15.A, A paper manual for the Commodore 64 home computer.
> Remember all Danny’s promises? Ponder them by picking up Item 11, A wedding announcement in the New York Times, “Marie-Lynn Walcott, Daniel Molloy”.
> Was the novel even worth it, in the end? Skip to Item 18, A single typed page of a novel manuscript, by Daniel Molloy, covered with revisions and comments from two pens, one red and one blue.
> To follow the thread of memory down its logical path, reminisce about Paris, proceed to Item 17, Two plane tickets, SFO to CDG.
Item 17: [October 21 1983] Two plane tickets, SFO to CDG.
Alice and Danny land in Paris in October of 1984.
There is nothing to say about Paris that better poets and better writers have not already said. Everything has a uniform beauty to it, even though, yes, she agrees with Armand—the streets are dirty with dogshit and the bistros are overcrowded. But still, she’s enchanted by the city’s tiny cars and its elegant stone facades. The air smells like smoke and sweet marzipan. And the people! The beautiful women, the businessmen in turtlenecks and long raincoats; the old women in silk headscarves, holding their little dogs (even the dogs here seem to know, somehow, that they’re Parisian).
On the train ride from the airport, Danny hooks a finger under the cuff of her sweater and strokes the skin of her wrist softly, privately, not looking up from the book on his lap. He’s not reading, she can tell, because he’s half-smiling at her tangible excitement. He’s trying to play it cool, her Danny. She wriggles his fingers out of her sleeve and squeezes his hand, which makes him look up. Raising an eyebrow, she gestures with her head towards the train window, where they’re pulling into Gare du Nord. Danny’s blasé facade breaks at the sight, and they grin at each other, basking in each other’s attention and each other’s joy.
“Fuck these French people,” Danny whispers to her as they join the cab line in front of the station. “Fuck them for living in a place like this and having this be ordinary to them.”
He makes a wide gesture that encompasses the street, the scampering pigeons, the shops that acquire a wild and alien glamour just because they say Tabac and Boulangerie instead of bodega or bakery. He kisses her with her laugh still bubbling out of her mouth.
They’re in Paris, so she lets him. Normally, she hates these public displays of affection. She’s always aware, even if Danny claims not to be, how she looks as an Asian girl with a white boyfriend. That fact wriggles in her brain and makes her self-conscious and oddly guilty. She wonders often how they must look to strangers, and it doesn’t help that she’s so plain, while Danny is so good-looking, all blue-green eyes and James Dean cheekbones. Strangers don’t have ready narratives for ugly women. The two of them invite curious glances. What’s the story there? passersby ask with their eyes. Colleagues and friends who know them are no better: their unspoken thoughts weigh her down like bricks. Oh God, Alice took that man back again. Or— It’s that gay plague reporter and his beard, is he still in the closet? Or— It’s a pity how these girls will take anything from Caucasian men. Or—
No.
In Paris, she vows, she’ll be different. No one knows them here. The weight of their personal and cultural history is lifted from her shoulders. She will accept that she’s exotic, and it will be different from being exotic back in America. She will stop worrying. She will become an expat American, which is one of the best things you can be in Europe, according to Danny.
She takes Danny’s hand and swings it around as they advance their place in the line.
“You look happy,” he says to her.
“I am.” I will be, she thinks.
“I think Paris is going to be good for us. This book is going to be good.”
“I believe you.”
Danny’s in a playful mood. “When I’m a bestselling author, I’ll fly us back here to celebrate where it all started. Chauffeured cars, so we don’t have to wait in line. We’ll go straight to the Ritz and order oysters and filet mignon. There’s a swimming pool there with a mural of the sky painted on the ceiling, we’ll float in the water and make waiters bring champagne to the poolside.”
She laughs. “How much do authors make? You’re going to blow all your money in one weekend.”
“So? I’ll make more.”
“Is it that easy?”
“Why won’t it be? Things are falling into place for us, I can feel it. Mark my words. Next year—1985—that’s going to be our year.”
There are questions she can ask. Things she can say. For instance, how does Danny know what’s painted on the ceiling of the Ritz swimming pool, when the last time he was in Europe he was supposed to have been a broke young freelancer? (An accented voice answers: He can give you quite a good rundown of hotel bedspreads, I suspect) But it’s so nice between them right now. Danny’s eyes are bright, sober, focused on her. She gives his hand another fond squeeze, and then drops it, and then turns her collar up against the cold.
**
Their apartment is beautiful, as are most things they’ve seen so far. They experience their first moment of culture shock as their kindly blonde landlady leads them up the staircase. “Many Israelites used to live in this quarter,” the landlady says. “Then the war started and they went away.”
The landlady misses the stunned glances her new tenants trade behind her back, two lefty Americans knocked off balance by the casualness of this statement, the bizarre linguistic anachronism of the term ‘Israelite’. The Jews went away? During the war? As if they went on vacation? As if they left on a cruise and decided not to return? They wait to see if she will say anything else, but the landlady is perfectly cordial for the rest of the tour. When they’re almost done, she turns to Danny at the door. “Avez-vous de la famille en Tunisie?”
“Um, no,” Danny says, confused. “We’re Irish. Irelande.”
The landlady nods, her beatific expression unchanging. “It’s my mistake,” she says. “À bientôt, Monsieur et Madame Molloy."
They can hardly get her out the door fast enough before they’re clutching each other and choking on their laughter.
“It’s the ethnic hair,” Danny says. “Airports and landlords always notice.”
She laughs harder. This is something that always struck her as funny: how even white people seem to come in gradations of white.
(Despite all of her time spent in France, she will always remain baffled by the French people’s ability to differentiate, at a glance, an Arab from someone who’s merely very tanned. In contrast, Danny has an uncanny knack for placing ethnicities and accents. When she asks him why he does it, he says it’s his need to pin people down, to ‘get the facts straight’, to fold them down into a readable chyron. He claims that it is the journalist’s categorical eye. Danny has always been sensitive to these things.)
**
A month after they first arrive, Danny comes home with a dazed look on his face.
“How was your day?” she asks him.
He lurches past her and sits down on the living room couch without taking off his coat. “It was fine,” he says.
“Did you pick up the groceries like I asked? We’re out of milk and I’d wanted lamb chops to make dinner.”
“Hmm?” Danny says. “Oh. No. I forgot. I can go now.”
She peers at him. “Everything alright?”
Danny’s complexion is waxy pale, his eyes bright with a febrile glitter. Although the heating is on inside the apartment, he’s shivering inside his coat.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Just bumped into an old friend I once knew.”
It’s like a scene from one of those absurd French farces they show at the local movie theatre when the husband returns from an affair only to find his wife with her own lover hidden in a closet. She feels like the two of them are talking to each other on a stage, but only one of them has seen the script, and both of them are too terrified to step off the stage to find out what’s real and what’s not. Meanwhile, there’s no one in the audience except for shadows–and maybe a vampire, though she imagines the vampire must find the whole show terribly pedestrian. “Who was it?” she manages to say. “You should invite him around one of these days. I don’t have any friends here. It’ll be nice to meet someone new.”
“No,” Danny says evenly. “He’s not really the visiting type.”
> To ponder the nature of Armand’s visits, pick up Item 19, An emptied and flattened carton of cigarettes, Sobranie brand.
> How did you end up here, in Paris, with Danny Molloy? Return to your lost youth with Item 2, A Kodak photograph of a dark-haired young woman sitting at her desk.
> Proceed to Daniel’s novel with Item 18, A single typed page of a novel manuscript, by Daniel Molloy, covered with revisions and comments from two pens, one red and one blue.
Item 18: [January 1984] A single typed page of a novel manuscript, by Daniel Molloy, covered with revisions and comments from two pens, one red and one blue.
Do you remember all the time we spent on Daniel’s novel? This is the only page that I have kept, but I remember a sprawling, postmodern affair that leaps from setting to setting, with frequent flashbacks that bring the narrative backwards to reveal some fundamental revelation about the future. It’s preposterous, experimental, crude, full of breathtaking passages of drug abuse and sexual sadomasochism. I always think about one passage, in which Daniel writes that cocaine was like a girl and heroin was like a boy: a girl gives you a good time, but a boy, however, won’t be satisfied until you give him everything he demands and more.
Was he talking about us? His girl? His boy? How do you feel about this? What do you think? I should’ve asked you this back in the eighties.
**
In 1984, Alice and Daniel rented an apartment on 35 rue Jacques Mawas in the fifteenth arrondissement. The place has a sit-down kitchen, a small piano in the living room, and a balcony. It’s through the balcony that Daniel’s vampire lover likes to enter, once he’s deposited Daniel (sloppy, dazed, love-high) in the doorway of the building’s rez-de-chaussée .
The two of them fall into a working pattern. Every week, Danny hands her a notepad, or sometimes stacks of loose leaf paper, on which he wrote his drafts in longhand. Alice types up two copies: one for him to keep as a reference, and one that she mails to his editor in New York.
For sanity’s sake, they keep two separate desks. Danny is messy and keeps too many reference books around, so he gets the writing desk in the bedroom. For Alice, since she only needs a typewriter, they buy a folding table at the flea market and wedge it into the corner of the living room. She doesn’t mind. From the living room, she can open the wooden shutters to look out at the sycamore trees that line the street. In late October, a few stubborn leaves still cling to the branches against the coming chill; from the window, she watches their slow, fluttering descent.
As far as offices go, it’s good enough. She just wishes there was a door, so she doesn’t have to listen to Danny or the neighbours move around when she’s thinking.
Armand appears one day when she’s sitting in front of her typewriter, as she guessed he would. He simply materializes on the balcony and steps in as if he owns the place. She's amused by his choice of outfit that day: leather pants, a leather jacket, a necklace of silver bullet casings strung around his neck, as if he'd just eaten Siouxsie Sioux and stripped her of her wardrobe. The effect of all this black leather on Armand's lanky limbs is that her apartment looks like it's being invaded by one very long and lean cockroach.
“Danny’s out," she says.
“I know.”
“We have a friend visiting us from New York this week. They’re going to art museums this afternoon. I’m working.”
Armand wanders over and picks up the yellow sheet of foolscap she’s typing from. He couldn’t have looked at it for more than a second, but he jabs a pointy fingernail at one line in the sheet coming out of her typewriter and says, in an accusatory tone, “You switched the opening and closing sentences of this paragraph.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“It’s stronger this way.”
“You’ve also added a sentence here. And here. And the top here: you switched the speaker of this line of dialogue from one character to another one.”
“I had to, it doesn’t make any sense for him to say it here.” Armand still looks outraged, so she explains her and Danny’s working routine to him. “I do some light editing as I’m typing. Danny knows this.”
“Ah,” Armand says. “Just like how you two were in San Francisco.” He studies the piece of paper that he’s holding. “In that case, you should have moved this line here. And cut the end of this conversation. It goes on for far too long.”
“I didn’t know you cared about writing,” she says.
“I have worked with writers for two hundred years. Safe to say they always go on for too long. In love with their own pens, all of them.”
“What about Hemingway? I read somewhere that he wrote standing up, to make sure he says what he has to in the shortest way possible.”
“Who?”Armand seems genuinely baffled.
She goes to the bookshelf and finds her tattered copy of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Armand flips through it and pauses at the black-and-white author’s photo in the back. “Oh, him.” He smirks. “I’ve met him. In this city, actually. We did not discuss his writing habits much. We were—otherwise occupied.”
This makes her burst out laughing. “You did not.”
“I absolutely did.”
“Go on then, brag. I know you want to. What other artistic greats have slept with a vampire?”
“I made a pass at Jean-Paul Sartre in 1944,” Armand says. “But he turned me down.”
“No way.”
“I would not lie. Simone wanted a threesome, but her lover said no. Jean-Paul said my ideas were profoundly unserious.”
She’s giggling so hard now it’s hard to speak. “Does Danny know? He would just die.”
“He’s never asked.”
“You should tell him.”
Armand picks up another sheet of yellow foolscap. “He wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t want to hear about my past lovers.”
“How ironic.” She sit down at the desk, mirth gone.
“He’s the jealous type. He thinks we will be together forever.”
“But you won’t be?”
“We’re not even together now. He has you, no? And I have my Louis.”
She wants to ask Armand if this Louis knows about Danny, the same way that she knows about Armand. Perhaps she should write to Louis. They can be pen pals. (“Dear Louis, are you very handsome? Because I am not, and sometimes when I look into the mirror I wonder if all this would have been different if I were more beautiful. Although—an old co-worker once said to me, ‘Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who’s bored of fucking her’. Do you think that’s true? Even for vampires? What’s your theory about our mutual inadequacy?”) But Armand’s expression tells her this topic of conversation is closed.
“Bon,” he says. “Daniel’s prose needs a more austere eye than yours. Hand me a pencil. I will help you with his novel.”
> Remember when you were so excited about Danny making money from his writing? Return to 1974 with Item 5, A newspaper clipping from the San Francisco Examiner, “Vietnam is No Victory for Returning Soldiers”, by Daniel Molloy.
> But to be honest, maybe you shouldn’t have come to Paris. Regret comes in waves. Return to the days before you left with Item 16, A tube of lipstick in the shade Frosted Cherry, Revlon brand.
> To recall a typical winter morning in Paris with Armand, proceed to Item 19, An emptied and flattened carton of cigarettes, Sobranie brand.
Item 19: [circa 1984] An emptied and flattened carton of cigarettes, Sobranie brand.
It’s January 1985, eight in the morning, the lemon-coloured sun is coming through the cracks of the narrow shutters. Alice’s coffee is brewing on the stove, and she has made herself a breakfast of toasted bread and strawberry jam.
They’re sitting at the kitchen table, smoking pastel-coloured Sobranies. She has given Armand a glass of water for politeness's sake, which he does not touch. She’s asking him about werewolves (if vampires exist, do werewolves? She likes to imagine Armand’s counterparts howling at the full moon. In her mind, since she only knows the a male vampire, by fairness werewolves should all all women: leggy vicious women in S&M French Vogue getups, sprinting through pine-scented forests in the moonlight)
“C’mon, don’t laugh at me. Give me one good reason why werewolves can’t be real when you’re right here in front of me, Armand.”
“Do you know something?” he says. “Armand isn’t my real name.”
“Then what is your real name?” she says.
“I don’t remember. But a long time ago in Italy, they called me Amadeo.”
“But that’s not your name? What did your mother call you?”
“I don’t remember my mother.”
“My real name isn’t Alice,” she says. “Alice is just the name on my passport. I have a Chinese name, too, but I never use it.”
Armand-who-isn’t-Armand taps his long brown fingers on the wood of the table. “A name is just a word that answers the purpose of showing us what we’re talking about, but not telling anything about it. Hesperus is Hesperus, but it is also Phosphorous. We can call Venus the brightest star of the morning or the brightest star of the evening—names have no meaning other than what we assign to them.”
“Are you quoting from Mill, or did you just want to compare yourself to Lucifer?”
She’s impressed him a little, and she busies herself with pouring coffee to hide her smile.
“I’m trying to make a point about the semantics of proper names,” Armand says, haughty. He’s dressed down that day: denim and a loose cotton jacket. He looks like any young human student sitting in a café, holding court loudly on ideas in philosophy and the life of the mind. That’s because it was a young human student he’d drained and killed for those clothes.
She says, “You look weird in blue jeans. Like you haven’t learned how to put them on yet.”
“It’s the damn zipper. Idiotic human invention.”
She wants to ask Armand where he’s from, really, but she’s aware of how much it annoys her when people ask her the same question. I was born in San Francisco, she always said, even though she knows that’s not the answer they’re looking for when the question is directed at an Asian girl. She resents other people’s casual probing, and she’s too proud to do the same, even if it’s an ancient vampire. Even if it’s an ancient vampire who’s fucking her boyfriend.
She has other questions as well that are equally off-limits. Where did the two of you go tonight? What did you do? What did you do to him, and what did he do to you?
Armand looks at her. He can read minds, so she knows that he knows what she’s thinking, though he has claimed before that Alice has a mind that’s harder to read than most. Her brain isn’t wired right. Her thoughts are too slippery, like entrails or live fish. They lapse into silence. Often they have entire conversations through silences.
“I’ll check on Danny,” she says, finally.
“He’s fine. He behaved very well last night.”
“How bad is it? What did he take? He has a call with his book agent today at two.”
“Nothing. A sip of the blood and nothing more.”
She stiffens. She has resigned herself to sharing Danny, but sometimes, the agony takes her by surprise and strikes her afresh. Before they moved to France, she had not known that vampires could offer their own blood to humans or use it to heal. She was still working off Dracula rules, hopelessly naive. Armand, for his amusement, refuses to explain the depths of his powers. She asked him if giving Danny his blood would one day turn Danny into a vampire as well, and he had laughed at her. The sound made the hair on her nape stand up and flooded her with nausea. Armand has a surprisingly human laugh: silvery and warm, very young-sounding, strangely seductive.
“I think Danny’s struggling a lot these days,” she says. “He’s not as focused as he should be on the novel.”
“Because of me?” Armand says lightly.
“No. Because of everything back home.”
The point of them moving here was for Danny to block out the world and focus on his book. But the world is insistent on knocking on their door. When their mail gets forwarded to France, there is usually a funeral notice or another memorial invite which Danny has to decline. Periodically he gets long-distance calls from old friends and colleagues back home: they’re baffled why Danny, who had been steadily climbing towards the peak of a brilliant career, had put himself on leave in order to, in their words, “fuck off to France to write a fucking novel.”
She tries to explain this all to Armand. “Danny feels guilty because he thinks he should be back at the Chronicle on the AIDS beat. He feels like if he’s not reporting about it, people will keep on dying.”
“No,” Armand says. “People die all the time, with or without Daniel publishing their painful stories for the world to see. Daniel is conflicted because he knows he’s a better reporter than a novelist. He made the wrong choice to come here. It’s professional remorse.”
“You don’t know that,” she says. “And the novel—”
“Oh, I’m not claiming that Daniel is heartless. He does care about these people–but I’ve looked into his mind and I have tasted his blood and I know that the world of Daniel Molloy is only big enough to accommodate Daniel Molloy. And don’t try to defend the novel, Alice. I ran a theatre in Paris for two centuries. I’ve seen regimes come and go. What I’ve observed from humans is that people only sometimes demand change. They never demand art.”
His words sting. “Then why are we helping him write his novel?” she says.
Armand shrugs. “Like all art, it’s something to do. It preserves the time that passes.”
“And Danny, for you–”
“He passes the time.”
“Alright,” she says. She gets up to clear away her breakfast dishes. “Help me pass the time. Tell me about Amadeo’s life.”
After Armand is gone, she empties the ashtray and brings a glass of water to the bedroom. Danny is still asleep, his expression angelic in repose. She kisses his cheek and listens to him breathe. Then she looks for his leather satchel on the floor. Flipping through the pages of his reporter’s notebook, she double-checks that he has no other appointments or phone calls for this morning.
Satisfied, she lets him sleep. After excursions like these with Armand, Danny only wakes up in the late afternoon, after the sunlight has faded and the better part of the day has gone. Then he stumbles immediately into the shower and stays there for a long time to scrub himself raw. Alice finds it sweet in a way, like watching a child who thinks covering his face renders him invisible to the world. As if she did not have the entire day to observe the anemic pallor of her boyfriend’s skin, the silvery bite marks on his wrist and thighs. Who does Danny think washes his soiled underwear? Soaks the bloodstains out of his shirt collars?
Many questions are left unspoken in the relationship between Alice and Daniel. But as every novelist and journalist worth his or her salt knows, the unanswered questions are the most interesting parts of the story.
> To recall all that time poured into the manuscript, proceed to Item 20, A mechanical pencil, red lead.
Item 20: [circa 1930s] A mechanical pencil, red lead.
During those winter months from the end of 1984 to the spring of 1985, Daniel’s novel grows ever more sprawling, with long sections of it now taking place in the historical past. Danny’s writing is always good, but the new sections have a vitality that doesn’t quite feel possible, even with research. The details are too fresh; the people too finely drawn. Armand must be telling him stories about the past. She pictures it in her mind’s eye: curled against each other in a bar or outside of a discotheque, or on some soiled bed somewhere—where do they sleep together? Do they rent hotel rooms? Does Armand keep apartments around the city for Danny?—the two of them murmuring to each other the secret conversation of lovers.
Alice doesn’t ask. All her attention is on the novel.
Danny never asks to see his handwritten drafts; he prefers the neater typed-up copy when he needs to consult his previous chapters. If he ever did look at his original pages of foolscap—which she keeps in a locked box, tucked away inside an empty suitcase—he’d see a heavy crosshatch of annotations and arrows, X’s over sentences, lengthy debates scribbled in the margins. Alice in blue ink; Armand in red pencil.
The two of them get bolder as time passes, writing entirely new passages and inserting them into the typed version of the novel draft. Why leave a note and wait for Danny to get around to revising it (which he never does) when the two of them know his mind so well? It’s the next logical step.
She has never written anything so quickly and fluidly as she does with Armand. His way of speaking is lyrical, at times hypnotic. He never shapes a sentence that sounds like someone else’s. He takes facts and rearranges them; he breaks the bare bones of Danny’s story and reshapes them to his fancy, until the past bleeds into the present and back into the past. With his pencil, he pumps blood into the page until the words drip red. And once she’s seen Armand doing it, she begins to see the world his way. She becomes able to do it too.
**
One thing she noticed early on, during the span of their bizarre partnership: in addition to his stylistic corrections, Armand also has an eagle eye for historical anachronisms—this type of carriage was not in use yet in 1898, he would say. Or, a woman in 1932 would never wear her hair like this, touching her collar, unless she was a prostitute. He’s also a surprising prude about the treatment of religion, and she’s amused to discover that he flinches every time he has to read someone blaspheme.
There’s one passage where Daniel, with the telltale enthusiasm of someone who’s listened to too much Beatles as a teenager, went on and on about the spectacular beauty of the universe in Hinduism and the mystery of reincarnation—Armand scowls and crosses the whole thing out.
“Were you a Hindu?” she asks.
“No.”
“But you were a human once. You told me vampires don’t give birth, you can only make fledglings. What did you believe in when you were a human?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs, eyes never leaving the sheet of paper in his hands. “It was unimportant.”
“You can read minds,” she says. “You can control people. I think you can stop time. Can you also wipe people’s memories?”
“Yes.”
“So did someone wipe your memory?”
The chair underneath her rockets upwards, so the chair with her on top is levitating three feet off the ground. She opens her mouth to scream, but her jaw is frozen. Her entire body is frozen. Armand had moved so fast she didn’t see him. He stands in front of her, his streetlight-coloured eyes wide and furious. “Don’t ask me these questions,” he says.
The chair drops, her along with it. On impact, one of the legs breaks and sends her flying sideways. Her head clips the corner of the desk as she goes down. Sharp bright pain paints a red line in her vision. “Ow,” she says. She touches her forehead and draws away a finger stained with blood. “Oh.”
Armand kneels beside her. She sees the glint of fangs in his mouth. There’s a second when she wonders if this is it. Armand is tired of entertaining her and he’s going to drain her now. But then she sees that he’s holding his own wrist up to his mouth. He bites through the skin and swipes his thumb across the line of red that wells up against the deep brown.
“This might tingle for humans,” he says. He lifts the hair from her forehead and rubs his bloody thumb over the cut.
Her skin itches as it knits back together. Armand rocks back on his heels, surveying his work with a doctor’s detachment. She touches her head and feels nothing but smooth skin again.
“Thanks,” she says.
Armand doesn’t say you’re welcome or I’m sorry, but he does say, “I’ll bring you a new chair next time.”He flops back on the living room rug and picks up the manuscript page again.
She waits to see if there are any more outbursts coming, but it’s boring to sit and wait for one’s eventual demise to look up from his reading. Eventually, she leaves her broken chair and brings the typewriter to the rug as well. Armand makes an annoyed noise, but he does shift an inch to the left to make space. She says, “We should add a sequence here. Before they get to the hotel but after he drives away from Marseilles. The story needs time to breathe before it moves to the next act.”
“That’s a good idea,” Armand says. He taps the page. “And it’s good, here, how you rewrote this passage. It’s shorter and it reads better. You have a good ear for the music of English.”
She looks. “You’re the one who wrote this.”
“Did I?”
“I think so.”
“No,” Armand says, though he also looks uncertain. “This is yours. I remember you telling me about this idea.”
The truth is, once the words have been neatly typed up in black and white, their words are subsumed into each other’s as one. She can no more separate her thoughts from Armand’s than she can separate their words from Danny’s. There is no way of saying, This is me. This is you. There is only one truth, and it’s the story being written.
> Remember the way that Daniel said “yeah”? It was the “yeah” that annoyed you especially. Go to Item 22, A paper menu from Brasserie Chartier with today’s specials.
> To recall the time that Danny went missing, proceed to Item 21, A short story manuscript. “The Adoration of the Shepherd”, by Alice Mok.
Item 21: [February 1985] A short story manuscript. “The Adoration of the Shepherd”, by A.M.
In early February 1985, in Paris, Alice writes a short story. It’s the first thing she’s written since her student days in Berkeley, scribbling bad poetry in her notebooks.
She thinks it’s rather good. On Valentine’s Day, she gives it to Danny, who promises he’ll read it and let her know what he thinks.
**
It’s been decades since that story and it pains me to even see it again. From what I remember, this is how the story goes:
In the story, a young man known only as A. is seduced by his art teacher, M. at fifteen. He tells and re-tells the story of the affair throughout his life; each time, he grows a little older and the story a little more different. By the time A. is an old man, dressed in a black silk suit and ready for his coffin, the story is unrecognizable. Perhaps there is no art teacher called M. after all. Maybe A. has made up the entire thing for his own reasons.
The only evidence A. keeps of the affair is a painting of a young shepherd boy that his art teacher gifted to him. No matter where he moves–New York, London, faraway cities in the Middle East–he hangs it up on a wall where he sees it every day. When he dies the painting is still there, hanging on the wall above a green ceramic fruit bowl. After the funeral, the green bowl shatters. There is no reason for the explosion. It just shatters. Bang.
I cannot remember if the painting is also destroyed or if it remains as it is, immaculate. Maybe it is auctioned off to a collector, a lonely old man seduced by the look in the shepherd boy’s dark eyes.
This is the story. More or less. I cannot be more certain that this without re-reading, which I do not want to do. If I were to rewrite it today, I would change the ending so that A.’s whole bloody house burns to the ground.
**
In February 1985, a few days after Valentine’s Day, Danny goes missing for four days.
By the third night that he hasn’t returned, Alice has exhausted all his usual haunts. She has visited all of their normal bars and brasseries; she has asked around all of their friends in Paris, whose warm and sympathetic veneers start to crack the third or fourth time she calls them again to ask if they have news. The policemen are no help. Neither are the hospitals. One hospital receptionist suggests that maybe he has left the country, with the leering Gallic implication behind it that her boyfriend has probably run off with another woman. She slams the phone down and breathes through her nose.
Danny has not packed any clothes or money or even his passport. He had simply vanished one night with only his jacket and the leather satchel that he carries around everywhere.
Her boyfriend, she thinks, is not the type to run off with another woman.
“Armand,” she calls off her balcony. “Armand, did you take him? Is he alright?”
The only noise comes from the ordinary pedestrians below and the rustling of the sycamore trees on the street.
On the small hours of the fourth day, a friend who’s a graphic designer for a small fashion weekly calls her on the apartment’s phone. He was taking his British cousin to see the famous red-light district of Paris. In one of the small cobbled lanes off rue Saint-Denis, he thought he saw someone who resembled Daniel Molloy smoking in the doorway, but when he turned to look again, the man was gone.
She gets the address from him and hurries there. In the tired grey light of morning, the neighbourhood looks deflated and sad, sagging at the seams. Whatever glamour it may have exuded the night before has been washed away with the rain in the filthy gutters. She passes a thin trickle of men hurrying away with their faces turned away from her: men who ran the gamut from lonely-looking students to middle-aged husbands to hardened-looking johns. There are women too, of every age and ethnicity, every imaginable shape from young to old: women still drunk from the night before. Women hurrying around with milk bottles and bundles of laundry. Women sweeping empty peanut shells and smashed wine bottles away from the door stoops of the stores and the hôtels de passe. She stops to ask for directions from a long-legged African girl, who points her towards the right door with a ballerina’s grace and a nun’s look of removed pity.
A sign outside says L’Opium in the same sort of typeface that one finds on Chinese takeout back home. She wonders how the Parisians have come to use this for their nightclubs; maybe it’s a circuitous import from the Far East to the New World and back around to Europe. Global circumnavigation in one neat package like her. Inside, it smells like stale smoke and hookahs and too much perfume. An ancient janitor is wiping down the bar top. She tries French with him, then English, and gets no answer, so she pushes deeper into the club, past fake banana trees and red lanterns, looking for some clue for Danny.
In the back of the club, near the heavy doors for the private rooms, there’s a painted mural of Shanghai flapper girls in skin-tight cheongsams. Bizarrely, hanging beneath are photographs of dancing Indian girls, their head and belly buttons festooned with gold jewellery. She squints at one photo: this one has a French white woman in an embroidered sari, her eyes outlined in kohl. It’s in such bad taste that she almost laughs out loud, despite the situation.
“That’s Catherine Deneuve, if you’re wondering,” a cool voice says behind her. “Considered the most beautiful woman in France.”
She turns. “I know, I’ve seen her in a movie before. Where’s Danny?”
“I’m not his keeper,” Armand says. “And he’s not my dog.”
“Oh my god. Just help me. Where is Danny? Give him back.”
“You think I’m keeping him somewhere,” Armand says. “I’m not. And it certainly wouldn’t be in a place like this. I have been away from Paris this past week. You’ve lost your boyfriend entirely on your own.”
She studies him. There’s no rhyme or reason to the clothes that Armand appears in: sometimes he shows up in fine suits, other times he shows up in jeans and sweaters, once in tennis whites, as if he got lost on his way to a country club. Today he looks like a cartoon vampire, wearing an enormous black coat made out of boiled wool. It swallows up all the light, like a piece of the night fallen out of the sky. If Armand unbuttons it, she expects Danny to spill out along with owls and bats and an insane moon.
“Won’t you help me?” she asks in a small voice.
A loud voice interrupts them, a heavy man with the hardened look of a bouncer calls “Hé! les serveuses et les pros auraient dû être parties déjà!”
Armand scowls in the direction of bouncer, fangs glinting in the red gloom of the empty club.
“Stop it,” she snaps. “Kill whoever you want later. Where’s Danny?”
“Nearby, I think,” Armand says.
“You think?”
“He’s not calling for me. He might be unconscious or asleep, and I can’t pick out his mind unless I’m close.”
“Armand,” she says. “Please. I’m begging you.”
Armand sighs. “I will try.”
He leads her out of the terrible nightclub and back into the cobbled lane. She has to run to match his long strides. She doesn’t recognize the dirty streets that he’s taking her down;. The sidewalks here are the narrow European kind that only allows one pedestrian at a time, made narrower because people park their cars with two wheels propped on the curb to save space. This isn’t the Paris of macarons and cafés, of the Luxembourg Garden and grand boulevards. The buildings don’t look that different, but the feeling she gets from them–unloved and unlovely–makes her shiver.
She asks, “What did the bouncer say to you earlier? Inside Opium?”
Armand doesn’t look back. “That the waiters and prostitutes should have left already.”
She thinks about something Armand said to her, years ago. And still the French spits on les bougnoles, even as it expects them to serve their fast food and sell their drugs.
“And which one of us do you think he mistook for which?” she says.
He stops abruptly. She thinks Armand’s going to bare his fangs again, or just disappear, but instead, he walks up to a battered steel door of a nondescript apartment building and rings the buzzer. The door opens a crack and he says something in rapid French to whoever is inside. On the threshold, he pauses.
“Stay here,” he says. “I’ll carry him down.”
“Why?”
“It’ll be ugly up there. Daniel would not want you to see him like this.”
“You both think I’m stupid and naive, don’t you? You think I don’t know what Danny’s like?”
“ Stay ,” Armand says, and an invisible hand clamps her down and holds her still, so she can only watch helplessly as he disappears into the building.
Armand comes down a few minutes or a few hours later, holding Danny in a fireman’s carry ( a bridal carry , she thinks, and from the glance Armand shoots her, she knows that he’s heard her). Danny looks bad and smells even worse, but he’s breathing and his pulse is regular. She and Armand have an intense back-and-forth over whether they should go to the hospital or back home, which Armand wins.
“Then you can find a cab,” she says. “And you can pay for it.”
“Easily done.”
If the cab driver had any questions about the two of them shoving an unconscious body in his car, a bored flick of the eyes from Armand silences him. Once they’re there, Armand carries Danny out of the cab and up the stairs. In the apartment, he deposits Danny on the bed so gently that it doesn’t even rustle the bedsheets. Tucking Danny’s hand under his cheek, Armand rolls him over to the side.
In the doorway, she holds up Danny’s leather satchel. “Where’s my story?”
“You should check on him regularly to check for emesis and if he’s still breathing,” Armand says. “I believe the worst of Daniel’s spree is over. I’ve already given him some of my blood. He’ll survive this as he’s survived everything else.”
“Where’s my story, Armand?”
He looks over his shoulder at her. “Ah. You persist in believing that I’m the one who whisked him away for his little drug ‘bender’. I am not. I’ve told you, I wasn’t in Paris this week. And what story? What on earth are you referring to?”
She stares at him. There’s no smirk right now, no show of smug superiority. Armand’s face is a perfect picture of innocence, which is how she knows that he’s lying.
“You’re mad at me,” she says.
“I am irritated at you,” Armand says. “There is a difference.”
“You’re mad that I gave Danny my story and not you.”
“Oh,” Armand says. “That story. Yes, I have read it. It’s juvenile work, Alice. Your prose is overly abstract and the pacing is terrible. The whole thing depends on a gimmick and ends with a flashy show of absolutely nothing. Consider it lucky Daniel lost it. I only pity the charwoman who might glimpse a few lines as she’s using it for kindling.”
“You saw it,” she says numbly. “Did you throw it away?”
Armand shrugs. “It’s a few pages of a story that no publisher would accept anyway. You have Daniel back, mostly alive. What more do you want?”
She sinks to the ground. The exhaustion of the last few days crashes down on her all at once. The unfairness of Armand’s way of thinking strikes her in its absurdity: as if suffering can be quantified and sorted into a neat line? As if cancer patients can’t get rocks in their shoes, or Job, after being tested to hell and back by God, gets told that at least his boyfriend is still alive by a really fucking annoying vampire.
“It was my only copy,” she says. “I wrote it out by hand. I didn’t make a copy. If that’s gone, then my story’s gone.”
“You can always rewrite it.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“Then you should’ve taken better care of your work, the same way that you should have taken better care of your boyfriend and better care of your gifts. You’ve been careless, Alice.”
There’s nothing she can say in her defence, because yes, she should be grateful. But still—she presses a hand against her chest. She had not thought of Armand as a friend, exactly, but she did not think that he hated her either.
“Is it all because of Danny?”
The neon orange eyes don’t even blink. “No.”
“Then why—”
“I don’t like the story that you’ve written about me,” Armand says. “But also I cannot spend all my time playing the nursemaid. Louis questions the amount of time I’m spending in Paris. He refuses to return to this city, so every night that I’m here is a night of absence from him. He’s fond enough of Daniel, but I can see into his mind and I know what he thinks of me: an ancient vampire running after a human. What’s the phrase in English? Il me trouve un traître, un Arabe de service, et je crains qu'il ait raison." Armand gestures at the door. "Now stop talking to me. I will feed Daniel more blood, and then I will leave. I’ve already been gone too long.”
“What do I say when Danny wakes up and asks how I brought him back?”
“Make up something cheap and lurid. You excel at that.”
“You’re inhuman,” she blurts out.
Armand laughs at her, silvery and lovely. “Why do you think Daniel loves me? It’s because I’m inhuman. He wants me to describe everyone I’ve ever killed like it’s the six o’clock news. Sometimes I’ll go a week without feeding for his sake, because he loves the touch of my cold hard hands. When I fuck him, I see myself from his mind’s eye, and I know he sees me as an ancient insect or an insensate machine. When he fucks me, he wants me to lay still like a corpse. He likes the taboo, don’t you understand? He loves that I am dead. It turns him on.” Armand brings his wrist to his mouth and bites open a thin red line. He looks up, fangs and teeth touched with red. “I’m a vampire, Alice. Don’t expect any signs of humanity.”
“I think you act like a vampire because you think you’re supposed to. You talk like a vampire and move like one, but it’s a game to you. You’re playing at being a vampire. What’s the example from Sartre? The waiter who performs as a waiter because people expects him to be a waiter?”
“I am not a waiter.”
“Of course not,” she says, bitter and angry. “You’re the vampire Armand.”
“Le terme que tu recherches est celui de mauvaise foi, mais tu comprends rien, ma vie n'est pas un rôle à assumer–—”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she says.
“Of course you don't," Armand says. "You understand nothing. And stop distracting me. I must see to Daniel.”
She can’t stand to watch him feed Danny, so she leaves.
**
“Mama,” she says on the phone. “Ma, I don’t know what to do.”
“What’s wrong?”
She tries to tell her mother the whole story about Danny going missing, but then she starts to cry and can’t finish it. The whole story comes out muddled: there’s her missing story, but there’s also that awful nightclub, and the thing she can’t explain—her anger at Armand, the sense of betrayal at his sense of betrayal. She thought they were conspirators together; how could he turn around and lie to her? The only thing that makes any sense in her jumbled retelling is Danny.
“He’s in love with someone else,” she sobs down the line. “I’m losing him. I don’t know what to do. I think I’ve already lost him.
Her mother is silent for a while. Then she says, “It’s my fault. I’ve let you become too American. Modern people don’t know how to deal with old problems.”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m dealing with an ancient problem.”
“You’re the First Wife and your husband has found a concubine—no, psh! Don’t interrupt me. I don’t care that you’re not married on paper. You’ve been with that same boy for so long, it doesn’t matter. But you’re his first wife, and now you’re worried because he’s brought someone younger and more beautiful into your house.”
“Not exactly younger,” she says.
“The point is, you’re fighting for your husband. You must do the only thing that guarantees you a place forever in the household.”
“Which is?”
Her mother says, “Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”
**
Armand disappears for the first two weeks of March. The mysterious Louis is unhappy with his absences, he says, and he had left Louis most abruptly when he returned to Paris to help her search for Daniel. She does not press Armand for more details; things are strained enough between them.
She misses Armand in a strange way, but it’s undeniable that Danny is more affectionate with her without Armand to distract him. And plus, Danny is keeping himself on his best behaviour as penance for his sins–a classic return to form and one guaranteed not to last past spring, but for now she lets herself enjoy Danny like this: charming and energetic and full of fresh ideas for the novel. One night, she suggests that they visit a brasserie in their neighbourhood, which is the kind of genteel, old-school place with faded wallpaper and checkered tiles. They drink two bottles of red wine over the roasted lamb and potato gratin, split the dessert, and talk about nothing whatsoever that has to do with newspapers or novels.
When they get back to the apartment, she pushes Danny down on the couch and starts unbuttoning his shirt.
“Wait,” he gasps. “The bedroom.”
“We can do it here,” she says.
The couch is perpendicular to the balcony door. From her position, propped up lengthwise on the couch, she can see their reflection in the dark glass of the windows, which means that anyone on the balcony can also see inside—if there’s anyone on the balcony, that is.
Seeing herself in the glassy scene (herself, but not herself) is like watching someone else: two other people named 'Alice' and 'Daniel' acting out a scene. 'Daniel' is about to get up to find the condoms they keep in their bedside drawer; 'Alice' pulls him down and kisses him instead. The scene goes on. When 'Daniel' gets close he tries to pull out of his partner. "We shouldn't," he gasps. "Ah, fuck, fuck—wait, no, I'm gonna come—"
The Alice in the window grabs her lover by the hair and he whimpers at the sudden burst of pain.
"You don't deserve it," she hisses.
"Ow, let go. It kinda hurts—"
"Fuck you, Danny. You're such an asshole. I hate you sometimes, do you know that? You're pathetic. Your writing's a joke. Your own father is ashamed of you. You'll never be more than a sad, lonely junkie looking to get his fix. Fuck you."
"Oh god."
"I hate you," she hisses. "You don't deserve me. Go on, admit it. Say you don't deserve me."
"Idon'tdeserveyou."
Where are these awful words coming from? Bubbling out from some deep crevice inside of her? Her mouth is moving without her brain, spilling all the horrible things she's secretly thought but never said. It's all coming up now. A gush of blood-red ink spilling out on the white page of her mind.
She says, in a low voice, "Fuck you. You're nothing but a hole, Daniel."
Danny makes a tiny noise and buries his face in her hair. When it’s all over he collapses on top of her, still conjoined, and she digs her fingers in his curly hair and focuses on the remnants that he has spilled inside of her and left there.
When Danny gets up to find them a towel. She thinks she sees a shadow move on the balcony. It looks like a slim dark figure, looking at this little set-piece in judgmental silence. But maybe it's only the swaying sycamore trees or a trick of the light.
The truth is, Armand doesn't even have to be there. Her words are Armand's words; his thoughts are her thoughts; they've spent so much time in each other's minds, editing each other's sentences. She can't decipher what is his and what is her's. When it comes to Danny their love and their hate are inseparable. Or maybe it's not, and she's going crazy. Maybe she's making it all up inside her head. Maybe she made up Armand.
Through the looking glass, and what did Alice find there? Nothing but a reflection of herself, since vampires can't be seen in mirrors.
**
The next morning, Armand shows up looking the same as always. When she enters the living room, she finds him already in his usual position, sprawled on the living room rug, socked feet kicking in the air, humming as he scrawls notes in red pencil. He's dressed down today: corduroy trousers and a patterned cashmere button-up. On someone else, the pink and dove grey colours of the shirt might look fresh and delicate. On Armand, it brings to mind entrails and innards, pinkish-greyish intestines unspooling from a living body.
She lights up a pastel-coloured cigarette from the pack on the table and hands it to him, then sits down at her own desk in front of the typewriter. Neither of them speaks, and neither of them even glances towards the couch. The events of the previous night drift across the living room like a ghost in full regalia, unacknowledged by the principal actors, already receding into the territory of the wordless.
She breaks the silence first. “What do you think about Danny’s latest chapter?”
Armand looks over. “Needlessly confusing and melodramatic.”
“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should merge these two minor characters into one person.”
“What do you mean?”
“These two. Their names are practically the same anyway. I can’t barely remember who’s who. I doubt any reader can.”
“It would be tidier that way,” Armand says.
“Yes.”
“Why not, then?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“But then you’ll have to—”
“Rework the end of the flashback? I know what you want—”
“You know that we can still suggest he restructure the whole thing chronologically: remove the framing device, make the events clearer—”
“But who cares if it’s clear?” she says.
They nod at each other. Armand clicks his old-fashioned red pencil. They go back to work on Danny’s novel. What else is there to do? It passes the time.
> Return to those early days with Item 2, A Kodak photograph of a dark-haired young woman sitting at her desk.
> Dwell on the proposal with Item 23, A velvet ring box, empty inside.
> Dwell on the child that never was and proceed with Item 22, A paper menu from Brasserie Chartier with today’s specials.
Item 22: [April 2, 1985] A paper menu from Brasserie Chartier with today’s specials.
It’s spring 1985, and Alice and Daniel are at a brasserie talking past one another. It feels to her like they’ve come to the end of talking, about themselves, about writing, about words. They’ve been in restaurants and bars and cafés; they’ve talked about families and relationships and illness and jobs and children. They’re bored with one another that day. There’s nothing left between them except for nuance, hunch, metaphor, shadows. She does not want to talk about what he’s done to her or what she’s done to him. They’re not the kind of couple to go through the tedious minutiae of who said what, to whom, or how they feel. Neither of them grew up in families that encouraged them to do that sort of thing.
“I’m pregnant,” she blurts out because it feels like the only thing left to say.
“Yeah,” Danny says, blank. “Um.”
“It’s yours, Danny. Obviously.”
Danny’s eyes look glassy. “Yeah, we should talk about it later.”
She nods. Danny mistakes the expression on her face as annoyance, but really it’s hollowness. She had been expecting a sense of triumph, but really, there’s nothing. She presses a hand to her stomach. It’s not like she’d been expecting ecstacy, but she had hoped for something greater than indifference.
“Sorry, it’s just—the novel. I can’t really—it’s hard to think about anything else when it’s taking up so much space in my head. And I have that call with my editor later at five–”
“At five thirty,” she says.
“Right, yeah,” Danny says. “I just need to get through the call. And then I’m all yours.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Sure. Tonight.”
Danny winces, the look of a man who knew he just fucked up beyond all belief. “Shit. That’s not how—fuck, Alice, oh Jesus Christ. I mean, sorry. That was so fucking idiotic and insensitive of me. Can we rewind the conversation? I mean, you’re pregnant, that’s incredible.” Danny takes her hand and kisses her fingers. “We need to think about where you’re going to have the baby. Here? Should we move back to San Francisco? And names! We should talk about names! I hope it’s a girl. Female names are prettier to choose from, don’t you think?”
She pulls her hand back from his grip. “We can talk about it tonight.”
In life, there is no rewind. Time runs on; what has been done cannot be undone. All that’s left is talking about what has happened. Talk, talk, talk.
“Okay,” Danny says. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she echoes.
**
She decides not to return to America, but rather to stay in France until the due date. When her family asks her why, she tells them that she wants to be with Danny. To help him through this difficult time when he’s struggling so much with his novel.
Danny says he’s called his father and stepmother in Modesto already with the news and they say congratulations. She debates whether or not to believe him, but ultimately decides she doesn’t care.
**
In the early August of 1985, she is told that she’s carrying a baby boy. Un beau petit gars, the ultrasound technician had said on their last visit. And recently she’s been seeing a child in the corner of her eyes. A vision of a small boy who’s nothing like Alice or Daniel. She sees his small clever hands holding a paintbrush, holding a red pencil; hands that flap in the air as he talks in a melodious voice. He will be good at drawing. He will make beautiful things. He’ll live forever and never die. He’ll have Danny’s black curls and her brown eyes and he'll be handsome, so handsome.
Their wonderful boy.
His name is—they should name him—
No, she must be careful. She must not romance too much about this child who does not exist. She will wait patiently to meet him. When she does, his name will fall into place like a stone.
> Even then, you would be lying to yourself if you thought that Daniel would be a good father. Return to Item 20, A mechanical pencil, red lead.
> Remember that time you wanted to say yes, but you didn’t trust him? Proceed to Item 23, A velvet ring box, empty inside.
Item 23: [October 1985]: A velvet ring box, empty inside.
In Alice’s third trimester, in October 1985, Danny takes Alice to a café on the corner of rues Palatine and Servandoni. She’s wearing the short purple dress he just bought her, and a pair of nice pumps that thankfully still accomodate her swollen feet. On the street corner she steps in gum. Despite her protests (“Jesus Christ, Danny, we’re getting in people’s way. Stop it. I’ll do it later when we’re at the café–”), he gets down on his knees and scraps the gum off her sole with the cardboard cover from a matchbook.
They get to the café. She orders the pavlova aux fraises.
Danny gets down on one knee and proposes. He says that he does not want to have any child of his born out of wedlock.
She tells him, very gently, that she’ll need some time to think about it.
Danny nods and says that he understands, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t take it very well.
That night, she picks up a phone call from Armand, who tells her that she needs to get to the hospital because Danny has collapsed in the toilets of a discotheque.
> There is no putting it off any longer. Proceed to Item 1.C, The takeout flyer for the restaurant Les Saveurs d'Indochine.
Item 1.C: [October 1985] The takeout flyer for the restaurant Les Saveurs d'Indochine.
She’s woken up by the morning sun laying its heavy palm against the frosted glass of the window. Someone had picked her off the chair and laid her on the unused second bed in the hospital room. With some difficulty, she sits up and swings her legs over the sides of the bed. The room is empty except for her, Danny, and the beeping of the machines.
She pads across the room. Danny looks better than he had earlier: his cheeks have some colour in them, and the rise and fall of his chest follow a steady beat. She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth—like waking Sleeping Beauty, though she knows this isn’t the type of fairy tale that she’s in. Danny’s mouth tastes faintly of copper. Armand must have given him some blood while she was asleep. No wonder Danny is already looking better. Right. This is a gothic romance, not a fairy tale. Don’t think too hard about what happens to young women in gothic stories, Alice.
She swigs her mouth out with water from a plastic pitcher. On cue, her bladder sends out distress signals as if it’s about to burst. She slips out the door to look for a toilet.
No sign of Armand outside the door. No sign of Armand in the hallways. She goes back to the room to keep Danny company. The sunlight picks out the shades of red and brown in his dark curls. She holds his hand and places it over her belly so he can feel their child moving.
Armand shows up eventually, a vampire looking annoyed as he juggles a box of pastries and three plastic bags laden with takeout containers. She pries open the lid of one plastic container and stares at it in astonishment: white rice congee topped with chopped green onions, its hot steam rising up golden in the slanted morning sunlight.
“Where did you find a restaurant open this early?” she asks.
“There’s a Vietnamese restaurant close by. The chef sleeps on the second floor of the same building. I woke him up and asked him to prepare something.”
“Asked? Or made?”
Armand shoots her a look.“He was dreaming about the refugee camp in Thailand. The rain hitting the plastic tarp of his tent sounded like bullets. I did him a kindness by waking him up and soothing his mind. Eat your breakfast. I don’t know what humans prefer so I told him to make a little of everything. You must eat well. For Daniel’s sake.”
She digs her spoon in. It’s not quite the same thing that her mother made her when she was sick as a child, with strips of lean pork and black preserved eggs, but it’s close enough that she’s overwhelmed by the nostalgia. “Did you eat too?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Not the chef, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She smiles to herself. “Armand,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Why weren’t you with Danny last night?”
“We had an argument.”
“About what?”
“Immortality,” Armand says after a long silence. “Daniel is insistent on its benefits. I cannot make him listen to reason. In the end, I had to leave.”
She translates this in her head. “He asked you to make him a vampire, and you said no?”
“I’m doing him a favour.”
“You sound very certain of that fact.”
“I’m as certain as you are not,” Armand says. “I can see the turmoil in your mind, Alice. You question your own fallible human judgment. I do not. I would not give the Dark Gift to Daniel. I would not do it to anyone. I am very old, and in five centuries of existence, I’ve never turned a human. I have sinned. I have done horrible things, but this is the one thing I will never do. Even the worst monsters must draw a line somewhere and say, here is the lowest I will go, but no further.”
She studies him. Armand looks dishevelled this morning, which is a new look for him. The sharp creases in his trousers have fallen out; his face is haggard; his hair is an unruly mop of frizzy curls as if he’s been running his hands through it all night. She says, “You must hate your own existence a lot.”
Armand strides over and grabs her by the shoulder, his sharp nails digging in through her dress. “Do you know what any of us would do for the chance to live a full human life?”
“No.”
“Daniel doesn’t understand the gift of his own existence,” Armand says. “And neither do you.”
“Is it really that good? A mundane human life?” she asks.
“You’re about to bring one into existence. You must answer your own question.”
“It’s different. Parents don’t know what kind of life their children are going to have. But vampires know what kind of person they turn into a vampire.”
“Fledglings,” Armand says. “We call new vampires fledglings.”
“Alright, fledglings. You get to pick them, right? But human parents don’t get to pick their children.”
“I dislike children.”
She laughs. “So do I, I guess. But that was when I was a child myself.”
“What are you trying to get at?”
“Armand,” she says again. “Are you really going to keep doing this for the rest of Danny’s life? Watch him almost die, and then bring him back? Again and again? Say no to him for the rest of his existence?”
“You should be asking yourself that question.”
She rubs her face. “Okay, fine. A long time ago, you said that you watch out for Danny’s happiness.”
“I do.”
“Then why can’t you erase that part of his mind?” She watches Armand closely for his reaction. He stares at her, uncomprehending, so she says, “Can you erase the part of his mind that needs the drugs?”
“No. Not without lobotomizing him. I can erase memories, certain events, that’s it.”
She chooses her next words with care. “What do you think would guarantee Danny’s happiness?”
Armand hesitates. “A good human life. ”
“Such as?”
“A family. A career. Time to read and write every day. Sex. Opening the window to see the fog lifting early. The smell of mint tea and cardamom. Catching the baseball that gets hit into the audience. Driving home in the rain and seeing the yellow squares of house windows lit up at night. Lying in bed at night knowing that he’s a different man from his father. Getting recognition but not fame. Feeling the satisfaction of knowing he’s made his mark on the world.”
“You can see all of that?”
“Yes,” Armand says softly.
“I see it too,” she says. Her heart is breaking, but she must press on. “You know that none of that will happen for him. As long as Danny’s so self-destructive, he’ll get in his own way. We can’t stop him from using—but that’s a human problem and we have human treatments for that.” She's speaking very slowly, feeling her thoughts weave together as she's saying the words. “You know that as long as Danny thinks he can become your fledgling, he won’t care what happens to his human body. He’ll never live a full life as long as he thinks he can have an immortal one.”
“I’ve told you, I will never make a fledgling.”
“But Danny thinks you will.”
Armand sits down next to her on the bed. The normal grace that animates his movements is gone. He hunches over, looking very young.
“Get to the point, Alice, I can see what you want in your mind. Say it out loud and we’ll have it over with.”
She takes his hand. It doesn’t feel like a corpse’s hand, as Armand had previously claimed. It feels smooth, yes, and his fingernails are sharp like claws, but the shape is still human, and when she intertwines their fingers together, it feels not much different from the hand of another human. She rubs a thumb over his knuckles. “Give me Danny once and for all,” she says softly. “Let him be happy. Let my child grow up with a father.”
“You didn’t even want to marry him,” Armand says.
“I didn’t think it was a real proposal. And I can’t trust him, not like this. How can I marry him when he always has you?”
“He spent a lot of time picking out the ring.”
“Did he,” she says. She rifles through her purse and takes out the ring box. Danny had selected an old-fashioned-looking thing: a dark red stone set in a buttery-yellow gold band. It looks expensive. Far more expensive than what Danny should’ve been able to afford, even with the advance for the novel. She sighs. It’s sweet and insulting all at once. It’s Danny all over. It’s Armand all over. She wonders who got the idea first. “What would Danny have said if I asked him where he got the money?”
“I told him to say he found it in a flea market somewhere. Maybe sold by a poor and desperate widow who had no idea of its value.”
“Charming.”
“Ignore the issue of money,” Armand says. “Daniel did pick it out. I only smoothed the transaction.”
She tries to slip it on her finger, but they’ve been swollen for weeks now and she can’t move it past the knuckle. She looks over at Danny, unconscious in the white hospital bed, and fights down the urge to cry. He does try hard, her Danny. Men are like this sometimes; they can’t see the forest for the trees. Asking his lover to pay for the ring to propose to his girlfriend–it would have made sense to Danny somehow. He’s so human that way.
“Yes,” Armand says, reading her mind.
“What a mess we’re in,” she says. Armand puts on a front, but it must have wounded him too. Worse, because he’s had longer to dwell on the betrayal.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you hate him a little bit? Almost as much as you love him?”
“Yes.”
She says, “If you’re going to kill Danny one day, then kill him now. If you’re going to turn him, then turn him now. If you’re not going to go either of those things, then grant me my wish, Armand. Let’s end the little drama here. This isn’t repertory theatre, we can’t repeat this for the rest of our lives.”
“The rest of your life,” Armand says, sullen.
This is when she knows that she’s called his bluff. “You don’t want to kill Danny and you don’t want to make him into something like you. Then c’mon, Armand, listen to me. We can rewrite the story. You and I. We can do it.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Armand says.
He takes the ring from her hands and turns it over and over again in his hands, lost in thought. In the sunlight, the gem glints a juicy scarlet, like the flesh of an overripe strawberry. If he were to slip it onto one of his slim fingers, she has no doubt it would fit perfectly. Though to Armand’s credit, he does not try. When he holds it out again she takes it without a word, and she knows this proposal between them has been accepted.
“My powers awaken when the sun sleeps,” Armand says. “We’ll meet again tonight. If we were to do it, it would be well if it we do it quickly.”
**
In the hospital lobby, she goes to the payphone and dials a number from a crumpled business card she digs out of her pocketbook. When the operator asks, she requests a collect call to Modesto, California.
When she explains all that’s happened, Danny’s father is much kinder to her than he needed to be. He tells her not to worry, he will arrange for two plane tickets to be available at the airline counter at Charles de Gaulle. And don’t worry about the apartment in Paris, he’ll find someone to help pack it up for them and settle the lease. A woman in her condition has no reason to strain herself, he says. My God. When Linda had her first she could barely get out of bed by the third trimester. Just come home. Whenever Dan is strong enough to leave the hospital. Just come home. Whenever you two want. Whatever happened, there’s no mistake so big it can’t be undone. Don’t fret, Alice. It’s going to be alright. Take care of my son and take care of yourself.
Danny's father’s voice is very gentle, frayed by its journey through thousands of miles of transatlantic cable. This is the man that Danny is deathly afraid of becoming. She has to hang up the phone before she starts to cry.
> You can still turn back. Return to Item 1.B, A patient intake form for “MOLLOY, Daniel” [sic], October 12, 1985.
>There is no turning back. Proceed to Item 24, A taxi receipt for October 13, 1985.
Item 24: [October 1985] A taxi receipt for October 13, 1985.
She paces and smokes all day. She does the ironing and even gets out their suitcases, but she’s in no state of mind to decide what to pack, so she leaves them in a pile in the corner.
At sunset, she notices a subtle shift in the quality of the air outside on the balcony of 35 rue Jacques Mawas. “Come in,” she says, and the black shadow peels itself out of the night and enters as Armand.
At the kitchen table, they sit down together and share a last cigarette. They should move, but they do not, and she imagines this is what soldiers in trench warfare feel like before they steel themselves to go over the top. She says, “You know, it’s funny. I’ve always wondered what the two of you are like together.”
Armand leans back in his chair. “I can show you. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
“You mean—”
“Show me your Daniel and I’ll show you mine,” Armand says.
“Why?”
“Why not?” Armand says. “Consider it a parting gift.”
“I didn’t know you ever thought about that. About Danny and me, I mean.”
Armand looks away, which is as good an admission as any other.
What’s one more transgression in a sea of transgressions? She searches herself for any desire towards Armand. He’s handsome, yes, and as narrow-waisted as a girl. Bird-boned. Boy-shaped. His eyes shine like digital wristwatches. He’s not so inhuman that she can’t find some desire for him. The problem is that she’s spent so much of her life in love with Danny that she doesn’t know how to assess men other than in comparison to him.
“That’s fine,” Armand says, breaking into her thoughts. “I will be Daniel for you. I’ll show you what Daniel is like when he is with me, yes? That’s what you try so hard not to imagine, because you have your pride. But put your pride aside. It has no place here.”
“Are you talking to yourself?” she asks.
In the bedroom, he pushes her onto the bed and undoes the buttons of her dress before stripping off his clothes. He says, “I’ll go first, and then you will return my favour.”
She nods, and he pushes her gently down on the bed. He’s nicely shaped under the clothes, soft at the belly but ropey with muscle through his chest and shoulders, like someone who once had to do hard labour for his living. When she touches his naked hip, it’s not the coldness or the hardness of his vampiric skin that surprises her, but how alive it is despite all that: real skin and real bone. His penis is half-erect, and it looks no different than any other man’s, but. Well. What is she expecting?
She’s wondered before what makes up the vampire body, but with someone like Armand, she could only picture fabric. He’s an angry doll with a rotating wardrobe of dress-up costumes, layers and layers of cloth all the way to his core: crinkly cotton, antimicrobial wool, silk that still carries the silent pain of the silkworms boiled alive for their cocoons. A costume over a costume over a costume. Stripped of all that, he looks vulnerable. Then the moment passes, and he re-arranges his face into an expression she had not seen on him before.
In a flat American accent, he says, faux-breathless. “Tell me about the last person you killed.”
“Should I be you? I mean, should I be the vampire Armand?”
He leans down and nips her earlobe. “No, you can still be Alice.”
“But I’ve never killed anyone,” she says lamely.
She’s lying on the edge of the bed, Armand standing on the floor between her legs. He pulls back to give her a reprimanding stare. Play the game. “Then tell me about someone you watched die,” he says.
“My little brother,” she says. “We were playing outside in a meadow. It was rainy and the ground was muddy. Just a second ago we were holding hands, and then I let go to pick up a rock. I looked up and lightning struck him. He died. Just like that. It left me totally unharmed except for here. My eyebrow. The colour never came back.”
“Yeah,” Armand says in Danny’s voice, with Danny’s intonation and Danny’s bright, inquisitive interviewing face. “Keep talking, baby.”
She shivers, not at the monstrous memory, but at his pitch-perfect imitation. Armand slides two fingers into her; he gives her a questioning look. At her nod, he removes his fingers and lines up their hips. He pushes into her. At first, he holds still, then he starts, moving in and out of her with sharp jabs, maintaining a quick rhythm. It’s neither pleasurable nor painful; just fucking, nothing more.
“Talk to me, Alice,” says Armand-as-Danny, and she’s shivering again.
“I stayed for hours in the meadow afterwards,” she says. She wriggles upwards and tilts her own hips for a better angle.
“After he died?”
“Yes. I was trying to keep his body warm. He was just four years old. I was seven. I didn’t understand death. I got down and laid on top of him in the grass because I thought he was asleep and he was cold. That’s how the adults found us when they came looking.”
“Did you cry? ”
“I don’t remember if I cried.”
He’s still fucking into her, but slower now, the thrusts deeper.
“Why didn’t you cry?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t cry at the funeral either.”
But she’s starting to cry now.
Armand pulls out of her. He sits down on the bed and watches her struggle to prop herself up and wipe her face with the dusty bedsheet. He offers her no words of comfort, though he does not move when she splays a hand on his naked back and presses her face into his shoulder. After a few minutes, he says, “Now you will be Daniel for me, and I will show you what I am to him.”
“Jesus Christ,” she says. “Give me some time.”
“No. This is perfect. I like it better like this. Daniel often cries as part of our little games.”
“What does he cry about?”
Armand tilts his head. “About me denying him something.”
“What should I ask you for?”
“Beg for me to drink from you. Or beg to drink from me. Beg me for life eternal.”
She knows how to play this game now. “Armand,” she says. She touches his hair. “Please. Bite me. Drink from me.”
Armand smiles. “Not today.”
“Please, sweetheart.”
“No. You’re not strong enough.”
She’s ready for this, so she takes his hand and kisses the underside of his wrist. “But Armand, if you know how much I need you, you won’t say no to me. Please.”
From the little hiss of breath, she knew she had him. And after she did it once, it’s easy to slip into Danny’s skin again. She says, “Let me be the animal that wags its tail when you call. All I’m asking is a tiny piece of your heart, just big enough for a doghouse. I’ll fit so nicely inside of it. Don’t you want me to? Can’t you make space for me? Won’t you give me this one thing?”
Armand’s orange eyes are the size of Halloween lanterns; the look of wonder in them is both childish and grotesque. He hisses, “Is this what Daniel says to you?”
“Do you want to know my Danny?”
A small nod.
“I can’t embody him like you can,” she says, sitting back to ease the pressure of her belly on her hips. “But I have something better. Has he ever written you a love letter? No? I will give you one of mine that Danny has written to me. You know what? You can have all of them, I never re-read old letters. I’ll give them all to you. If you want them.”
“I do want them,” Armand breathes.
“Then you know what I want in return,” she says. “Go on. Let me try it just once.”
They look at each other, naked on the bed. Without another word, Armand draws a nail over the crook of his arm, over where the vein runs close to the skin. He holds it out. As she fixes her mouth over the bleeding line and begins to suckle, he curls his arm around her and holds her to his chest. His blood burns on her tongue. It tastes like water and the liquid stone of dark caves; it’s how flowers would taste if she were a bat, plunging her nose into their nectar-ed hearts; it’s sweet like licorice, astringent like black ink, strong like semen or wine—it’s all of those things, but also it’s rust, metallic and meaty.
“Enough, stop,” Armand says, though she’s barely drank anything at all.
He pulls his arm away and half-turns on the bed, so he’s leaning over her. His fangs are out; he sinks them above her left breast, above her heart, and latches on. She gasps. Then she strokes his head and lets him feed. The pain is sharp and immediate even through the haze of blood-pleasure, but she doesn’t cry out. This is her introduction to how to nourish another body. She’ll be doing this all the time soon.
Armand is gentle in the way he takes her blood. When she looks down she's astonished at the expression he has on his face: intent but also blissful, as if he's concentrating very hard on this simple act of feeding. It makes him look very young all of a sudden.
When they’re done, they lie together on the bed, naked except for the pall of guilt covering their bodies. The wound on her chest is already healing. She thinks about all of Danny’s shirts that she has repaired for him, tiny stitches in his collars like an elf would make. Sewing in the sunlight while Daniel sleeps and his bite scars heal. There’s a thought here: skin as fabric. Fabric as armour. The purple dress that Danny bought her is hanging in the closet, freshly ironed and ready for the show.
Armand buries his face in her hair, and she knows that he can hear her thoughts, that maybe his thoughts and her thoughts are one. Daniel, he sighs in her head. Daniel. It’s unclear if it’s a plea or a curse.
The baby in her belly turns in its dark dreaming waters. It kicks.
**
In the taxi to the hospital, she smoothes the purple fabric of the dress over her belly. She stares out at the blurry, rain-slick facades of stone buildings passing by. The street lights are butter; the streets are ash.
Armand breaks the silence first. “What was your brother’s name?” he asks next to her.
“Oh,” she says. She touches her eyebrow where it had been bleached white by lightning. “It’s Adam. My brother’s name was Adam.”
“You’re afraid to even think it in your mind.”
“I guess. It hurts too much. My parents don’t like it when I even bring up the topic.” She leans her head against the cold clear glass of the window. “Danny wants to name our son Aram, did you know that? He says it’s in honor of his favourite uncle. It’s a good Armenian name. I think it’s like the ring. It’s his way of being romantic.”
“Romantic to whom?”
“I don’t know. To himself, probably. He probably thinks it’s deep in some way. Aram. Adam. Armand. Paying respect to all of us in one fell swoop. This poor baby. So many dead people to live up to.”
“Undead,” Armand says.
They look at each other and laugh, a little rueful.
"What about Danny's book?" she asks Armand. "What will happen to it?"
"You'll finish it without me."
"Then it's decided; this is it? We'll never see each other again?"
Armand sighs. "My Louis loves books and he loves humanity, which is why he has been extraordinarily patient with me. But even extraordinary things reach their end and I fear I had exceeded the bounds of his patience. No doubt I will spend the next half-century ingratiating my way into his good graces."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," Armand says gloomily, "spending a lot of time making a lot of money and making no time to spend that money. Nothing pleases Louis more than the acquisition of assets."
It's such a banal fact about another vampire that she has to pause a minute and stare out the taxi window to take it all in. It's 1985, she reminds herself. Not all vampires are Count Dracula, prowling in the night for virgins in nightgowns. Modernity means that even vampires have stock portfolios now.
"Like a dog being called to heel," she says finally.
Armand frowns at her, but he says nothing.
The taxi cab stops in front of the hospital. She rearranges the purple dress around herself, composes her face, and gets out.
In the entrance a nurse hurries by, pushing a wheelchair with her trembling patient inside. Two young men are pacing by the receptionist, smoking handrolled cigarettes. A mother cradling her baby looks up when they sweep by, and seeing that they’re not the people she’s expecting, looks down again with a bored moue. So many people. So many lives. The thought that they are in but one small tragedy in a world of tragedies is a comforting one.
**
Outside the room where a young man named Daniel Molloy is sleeping, two people stand in front of the door. Overhead, the fluorescent lights are flickering. They're talking to each other in hushed voices.
“Are you ready?” one of them asks the other one.
“Yes.”
“Do you think we’re making the right choice?”
“Probably not. But we made it.”
They push the door open.
> I could not prevent it. Proceed to Item XX, N/A.
Here, in this hospital room, Alice and Armand begin their last collaboration together: Daniel’s life story. They’re putting it together; no, they’re taking it apart. Events take place, relative to other events. One damn thing after another. But that’s how all stories work. Sartre has a play where one of the characters say, quite famously, “Quelle plaisanterie! Pas besoin de gril: l'enfer, c'est les autres.” So perhaps hell is not isolation and darkness, but transparency and light. Perhaps hell is discovering that you’re a consciousness without interiority. Perhaps hell is being fixed, forever and ever, in the gaze of two people who love you and hate you above all else in this world. What a joke! No need for hellfire: l'enfer, c'est nous.
In 1973, Daniel Molloy meets a stranger in Polynesian Mary’s.
Snip, snip, snip. Away goes the second stranger who enters to both save Daniel’s life and ruin it. Goodbye to that chair and that television news broadcast about Spiro Agnew; goodbye cramped left leg and nose dripping with blood; goodbye dead body shrouded in plastic; goodbye goodbye goodbye.
In 1974, he meets Alice. They move to New York City together.
Most of this can be discarded too: the fecklessness, the horrible series of lies and transgressions. What was it like to be high off your mind, rubbing up against your vampire boyfriend outside of Hellfire or Mineshaft or wherever one found oneself? The squeak of leather, the slide of a needle. The dip of the mattress that your girlfriend one day made you throw out. Why? No one can remember.
In 1979, he goes to Europe.
Once they get started, it’s easy. So much free space. Daniel’s mind opens up like white typeset pages. Like a computer screen. They’re approaching his mind with pencils and pens, with scissors and matches. They reprogram it. Re-code it. They shape the narrative line. One choice after another. The crooked is made straight. The story is not perfect, but it gets told.
In 1980, he enters rehab and gets clean before moving to San Francisco.
Between 1981 and 1983, he writes and publishes his first book.
In 1984, he moves to Paris with Alice.
In 1985, he proposes to Alice, who says no. Who says yes. Who says—
In 1985, he proposes to Alice, who says yes.
From that point on, he lives happily ever after.
Farewell, the bedspreads of dubious European hotels, farewell to the Italian sun and the crumbling stone villas of Pompeii, farewell risky sojourns and doorways that swing in and out, all those warm, erotic nights. Those cruel games that made your eyes roll back and the wallpaper dance. Forget the long smooth metallic pulls of blood. Farewell any lies, which are erased forever. These are the truths now. Au revoir, mon cher.
Goodbye, Daniel.
**
Good morning, Danny. How did you sleep?
>To stop examining the A.M. collection, go to the Collector’s note #2.
> Or, as I’ve done so often, fall back in the cycle of memories and pick up Item 1.A, A handwritten note with the address of a hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.
In Hate and Ashbury, Daniel calls the act of remembering “the odyssey of recollection.” But I do not think of remembrance as a journey, because a journey–even one as meandering as the path Odysseus traced–implies a destination. And Dubai is no Ithaca.
I think of my mind more like a theatre: dark, cluttered, strewn with discarded popcorn bags and discarded prophylactics. As I unspool the memories of my long and aimless life, my layered consciousness lays itself out like the tiered tracks of concentrically wound reels of film. I turn on the projector: the reels play their shadow-and-light pictures on the screen. I am lost in their dazzle and blur; I tune in and out, I skip forwards and backwards. When I exit from my collection of reminiscences, the light of the present knocks me sideways with its heavy palm. I start to wonder, what do I have to show for it all? A handful of artistic achievements here? A few love affairs there?
I love my husband, though lately, he has begun to worry me: Louis and his questioning eyes.
**
I am writing this note on a private jet. We took off several hours ago from Dubai and I have spent most of my flight pondering this question: where do lost children go?
When Amadeo was purchased, where did Arun go?
When the father decides the baby will be Irish, why does the Armenian child disappear?
When the nurse says, “It’s a girl!”, what happens to the boy inside your head?
The last time we saw each other, you were angry with me. The doctors had given you all sorts of diagnoses. You were an educated young woman who got married too late; you were hysterical, neurotic, difficult, out of control. You had a case of the “baby blues.” You did not recognize your own daughter when the maternity nurse presented her to you, Baby Katie wrapped up in the hospital blanket. At first, you wouldn’t hold your daughter long enough to feed, because you kept asking for a boy: Adam, or maybe Aram—your garbled words made it hard to decipher. You believed that someone had stolen your son away and gave you this unfamiliar child in its place. You would not stop asking for your son. To the nurses and pediatricians you seemed drug-addled, an impression your bohemian journalist fiancé (wordless, pale-faced, dazed) did not do much to dispel.
The night that I came by to see you, you told me to get out of the maternity ward. You accused me of all sorts of things which were all patently untrue. I’m a monster, but I’m not a monster out of a fairy tale. I have no interest in your firstborn. As you know, I dislike children.
But the other things that you said about me: accusing me of having no art in my soul, saying that I was nothing compared to Daniel—that irritated me. So here, Alice, I have written your story, and now I’ve come to an end. Like all stories, it is made up of both truth and conjecture, which I’ve tied up with loose string and hobby glue. Forgive me. I can only recount what I’ve seen. The human mind is capricious. Perhaps you remember events differently from what I’ve set down. I can only offer vision, conjecture, dreams.
Of course, I can go on and narrate the rest of your life: your short story collection, your first novel. Katherine's childhood and your second marriage to Jeffrey Nakahara. The death of your parents. Your brief move to Tokyo. Your second, third, and subsequent novels. Screenplays and awards and teaching positions. What a glittering literary career you have strung together for yourself, Alice. I do not know if those of my kind have souls; but whatever void or shadow I may have in its stead, there is art in it. You would not be who you are today without me.
**
On the same table on which I am writing, there rests two packages wrapped up in brown paper:
1) A box of cassette tapes containing an interview with the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, aged 96. Recorded in 1973 in Haight-Ashbury by Daniel Molloy, aged 20. The last nine minutes of audio are drowned out by music from a mass televisual broadcast.
2) A file box of assorted ephemera and a bound manuscript, covering the years 1974 to 1986 (more or less) in the life of Alice Mok, also known as Alice Molloy, aged 20 to 33. Written by me, the vampire Armand, aged 514 in 2022. Any mistakes in chronology or historical detail are my own.
I have entertained and fought down, then entertained and fought down again the puckish desire to switch the intended recipients of the two packages. Let Daniel discover the truth of his own life. Let Alice hear my husband’s tales of woe and pen his story. Both, I think, would be very interesting. But I had promised Louis that I would take the tapes to his bright young reporter, and I will keep my word to my husband. I will carry out my duty. I must fly to New York first before I make my way to San Francisco.
But if I do change my mind at the last second, and Daniel, my beloved, if you’re the one reading this instead of Alice—I have nothing to say in my defence.
I am not sorry for what we’ve done.
I could not have prevented it.
(The pilot is announcing our descent. Quick. I must make up my mind.)
Whoever is reading this—I will tell you about this dream I often have about the three of us.
In my dream, I can pick out from the gloom a little dark-haired boy running towards us. He’s shrouded in a black coat. His little legs are stumbling, because he must carry a stack of heavy objects in his tiny hands. They’re books, we discover, wrapped in newspaper to protect their covers. These are the stories that we have tried to write but failed. The boy’s lips are stained with liquid. Blood, we might think at first, but when he comes closer we see that the liquid is not red but black, like licorice or opium or writing ink. We open our arms and cry out: Arun, Adam, Aram. Myself. My brother. My son. Our little lost boy. You’ve come back to us, our words have not been lost after all.
You have come from such a long way off.
You must have such stories to tell.
—Signed,
A.M.
Armand Marius
April 2022