[note: I know that I said the next time I would upload would be when I finished the book, but it is happening so slowly due to unforeseen personal circumstances that I have decided to return to the old schedule to put pressure on the production of the work. Thank you for your patience and understanding.]

I think of the years to come. When I imagine what they will be, what can I know? I write from the perspective of he who is ignorant, but I write also with "a hopefulness that buoys me queerly," as has been written to me by my brother. Here I find myself, at this moment, certain that for the first time, that I do not know what is happening.

In former years, it was always the case that if some intelligence were available, Laurent knew about it. At this time, without him, I know barely anything. When I go home, no one knows what to say.

Because of this, life is quiet here. And it is quiet everywhere. Everywhere I go, what more can be in the back of my mind? Whatever I do, what do I do?

When I arrived in California, on Tuesday, I came through the window on the upper floor. Dasius had sent me a wire that I had picked up at Western Union, and I had taken a light rail to the airport, with a stiff card in my pocket stating that I was to be delivered into the hands of a Mr. D. W. Harrison and his wife in Boston, Massachusetts. There were all kinds of stories we had in those days, to cover our movements, but this one was true. Daniel Harrison, my brother's business associate met me at the airport and flew with me across the country. He kept his lips closed the entire time, and delivered me to the house, a drive of multiple hours. So delivered, he faded back into the woodwork, and departed again. A man of use. Upstairs, it did not take long to find Dasius at all, who, at the hour of 6 'o'clock in the evening, was sitting on the edge of the smallest guest room's bed, tying the short, fiddly laces on his wingtip shoes. 

"Ta," I said, softly, coming into the room. The lighting was very low watt bulbs, like most places where there is the expectation of sensitive eyes.

"Ta," he said, as softly.

He seemed somber, but it is likely that he always did. 

"Are you tired?" he asked, as I climbed the bed to sit beside him. 

I said, "I want to touch your face," to Dasius, and he let me touch it. 

"It's nothing," he said, de rien. 

"What happened to your nose?" I said. "Do you need help to fix it?" I could not see that it had been shattered before, but it seemed crooked. A blunt force. The work of an instant. I know his face well. He submitted to inspection. "It makes you look the part of the rogue."

"Rebreak it today, rebreak it tomorrow," he murmured to me. "I have had it since Saturday."

"Where is my sharp little arrow point?" I asked him, meaning the man between us, our Laurent.

Together, we sat in the room he had set up for him there. The duvet was put back, the bed unmade, and I saw a blond hair shimmering on the burgundy sheet. I reached for the hair but Dasius's hand stopped my wrist. He lifted me onto his lap.

"Whose hair is that?" I asked, because it was so yellow. My arrow's hair is platinum, and its strands spring into little corkscrews when broken. Never his paramour's either, Marcellus's, too long and too much curl.

"Nicky, listen to me," he said.

"Your fingers are all out of joint. Why has Laurent been hitting you?" I asked, taking his hand and looking at his joints. "Why haven't you fixed this? How did he do it?" Violence between them had been a frequent but private affair. Violence of this caliber, that could not be whispered out of memory by a sweet word, far rarer, never spoken of. I held his crooked hand in mine.

"Hush," he said, and whispered to me about what had happened on that Saturday previous, while I had been sleeping in a prostitute's arms in Cyprus.

I think I spent that week respectably. Cannot be sure. I remember sucking on his thumb, and sleeping against his chest, and I remember his hand massaging my head. "I am going to take care of you," I said to him. Morning or evening? In the darkened guest room, I had lost track of the time.

He didn't say anything to that, but Laurent had always taken care of him. He had never been kind to Dasius when Dasius didn't need it, and had always been available to lecture him, to suffer him, to make him feel wanted by seeming so unwanted. There was between them so much vinegar that it made the rare sugar nearly too sweet in the mouth, the sort of sugar that brings tears to the eyes.

He had never felt alone in his entire life. Never. Lonely perhaps, lonelier than most, but never without a true north.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, stroking my hair. "Don't try to be like him."

"Then I would be trying to be like you," I told him, too desperately.

The truth is that I do not make memories very well. Dasius says this is because I was made so young. But what I know I remember completely. 

The smell of orange cologne, and the harsh alcohol beneath it. The acrid smell of heavy metals, pulverized to make leaded face paint. The smell of kohl heating, and the eye pencil still hot in my hands even after Laurent had left us for the evening, and the taste that I loved, of blood in his mouth whenever he returned, when I kissed him. 

I am impulsive, quick to a sense of wrong and vengeance. This aside from the monster you all consider me to be. But I have no interest in your humanity and your morals. I have no interest in being ruled by a sense of what is right,  as lives in the eye of others' judgment. You are afraid to be judged. I am not. Laurent's death does not change this.

I have early memories of a warhorse, as thick and supple as any overburdened fruit, and sucking upon him as a witch sucks milk from sleeping virgins. Our horse in Rouen. I remember the rough bristle of his horsehair against my cheek, his terror of me, no higher than his breast. I remember the power there was in spooking him, of digging my fingers into his tense flesh, and the smell of his fright. And I remember discovering that the living smell this way as well, men, women, children, the old, when they are frightened by what they thought they understood. Myself, I do not think myself so ordinary anymore, and yet at first to the living I seem so benign. Warhorse, remember that I know that you forget that I have teeth. Remember that it is the living who do not guard against the unfathomable. It is they who are surprised. Do not make it so easy. I will be disappointed in you. Do not think that his death ushers in an era of peace and gratitude. What existed before, exists now.

I am bored of threatening you. I am tired. Does it feel empty, what I say?

Dasius, tired as well, whispered to me in bed, that solemn week we spent together in California, "Do you remember that sailor that he loved?"

"Which sailor?" I asked, curled against his body. His voice was clouded with sleep.

"The Dutch one, in, maybe four hundred years ago now."

" 'I could have spread him on a cracker', that one?" I asked, recalling vaguely what Dasius had once said to me about it.

"Yes, him. When Laurent made him, the sailor, he developed the biggest blood clot I had ever seen. In the abdomen. Laurent tried to get it out before he died but he died anyway. Laurent was all gore to the elbows. It was horrible. Gruesome."

"Yes, I remember him. You told me about it. What about him," I asked, spreading my fingers out over his throat. After a moment, I retracted them, to clutch his collar, and sucked on the fabric seam at his shoulder.

"Nicky, did you ever have a cracker?" he asked, his tone unchanged.

"No, never. Did you have one?"

"Once. When I was a boy. An older gentleman gave me one, in church, for a kiss on the cheek."

"How was it?" I asked. 

"Well, it was like a bread, bigger than a wafer, just a little, dry bread, but with a little pepper."

"Oh. All right. You lucky, fancy, keep-it-all-to-yourself devil," I said, rubbing the top of my head against him as if trying to rub away a wax.

"You weren't born yet."

"So what?"

"Sometimes I think of that sailor and I hate him because he used to eat hardtack in front of me."

"You hated him because he liked to eat crackers in front of you?"

"Yes," he said.

"I used to be angry at Laurent for having all of his boys in front of me," I confessed. "So we're not so different."

"Maybe that is the same."

I craned my neck and kissed him on the chin. I took him by the hand and showed him his crooked fingers.

"The longer you let these keep," I said, "the worse it will be."

To be honest, at that time, he did not offer to take me to the body, and I did not ask. I think that for a very long time, too long, I wanted to continue on as if Laurent were still a part of my life. There had been years when I did not think of him at all, and thought of it as a victory, and for some time, I thought I might try to do that. I thought that I might try to carry on as before.

I have been a bit hesitant to talk about him. I find myself more shattered than before, as if I am seeing out of the eyes of two different people.

Until this past year, perhaps I have been doing rather well. Though the measure of "well" varies I suppose. I have come to understand, however, quite a lot in the past year, which has provided a clarity of purpose for me which has helped me to feel myself again. I feel as if part of me has been regained by all of this, and that I am not so lost as in the past.

I will explain it.

For the length of my life, I have thought of Laurent as a body. He has been to me always, flesh first and foremost. His is the body against which I recall most of my childhood. His arms, the beat of his heart, the pulse of a swallowing throat, the steadiness of strong thighs. I slept against him, rode in front of him, rested against his back, held onto his hands. His blood has been my blood. And yet somehow, we have been separated. 

He had always been a mystery to me in as many ways.

See that this is not so different than what relationship one can have with a corpse. It is a limited relationship, perhaps, far less than what a living body is, but as for the map of him that I had memorized, he had not been violated. I often visited him on my own, where he had been put in a little mausoleum on a slab, and after some time, I decided that it would be a good thing for him if I came to stay in California.

I can no longer hurt him.

I am not a fool. I know what my relationship with those that loved him is, how it remains. I know what I have done and do not deny it, though I do not think it is the business of anyone but between he and I. There is no love lost between myself and the others. But here is the queer thing, which is that even though things are like that, I am not dead.

Even though I have done something else, I am still alive.

At around 2 'o'clock in the afternoon, last year, 2012, Dasius received an urgent phone call. He did not know that I heard, because I was hiding. Sometimes, I like to be near without being known, so as not to be disturbed. I sat on the bottom shelf of his office supply closet, peering at him at his desk through the slats on the door. Thinking himself alone, he had folded up shirt sleeves. He had unbuttoned the second button of that white shirt. He had grown his hair a little while I had been away, keeping it longer.

The closet door I sat behind was designed so that, if pushed on the outside, it would fold in and away. The result is that when the phone rang and I realized it was something serious, I could pull on the inside and fold the door a little.

What I heard was plain denial. "No" and "Stop saying this", and so, folding the door, I unfolded myself, and dropped to the ground like a schoolboy in a tree. I think that Dasius always imagines that I am in the room even if I am not, and so he did not startle. He held his arm out straight, but I ignored it, climbing up onto his desk so that I could hear the phone as well as he could.

It is easy to know that it is Leechtin's lover, because his voice has the husky rasp of men grown prematurely old. I listened as if idle, taking my shoes off slowly, as if the laces confused me. After he hung up the phone, his hands found my shoes, and he picked at the knots I had made.

"I have heard something, just now, on the phone," I said to him. The essence being that something had happened to the body.

"It will not be me who goes there, though they ask," he said, speaking with a heavy heart.

I sat back on my hands as he freed me from my shoes, the leather blotter beneath me almost creamy in its softness. "I will go," I said.

"I cannot bring myself to believe it," he started.

But I could. I could see this, in my head. Marcello, who had been wise to show deference to his elders in the past, entering the tomb and violating the body. Doing what he thought he had to do. What is there to understand? Doing what he thought he had been told to do. Peeling back ribs until they split, pushing his hands in, far deeper than any hands before. I thought of what Laurent had done, trying to save his Dutch sailor. In my mind's eye, I saw Marcello cutting. Eating.

"Do what you will," I told him. "Do what you will, but I will go there, and I will see. They will do nothing, but I will act. They will condemn it among themselves, but they care nothing. Who among them has even seen the body since Leechtin shut the doors?"

Dasius had lost his ability to speak. They wanted him to snap the ribs together and sew up the corpse. To make it viewable. That is all that they called him to do.

"It does not belong to them," I said, but without the energy for vengeance necessary for numbness. "They do not get to say what is to be done."

When I was younger, I used to eat birds. Dasius tells me so, sometimes. These days, I still eat them. Little birds fit into my mouth whole. Little birds struggle in my mouth, their twitting heads and sharp claws. I crush them with my tongue. Unsatisfying for the blood. Good for the spirit, at times.

I catch little birds. I am faster. I crush them quickly. I am not a torturer. What could be done? When it could not be redeemed.

I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and looked Dasius in the eyes, sitting there on his desk with my legs askew. Children sit like this. Children forget their limbs. They do not know where to put them, how to sit. This is something cute to do, to make people happy who want to look at you. There are only so many things someone who looks like me can do, to meet expectations.

I put out my hands and he put his face in them. I looked into his eyes and I know that he saw what I meant to do, and understood. He gazed back at me, weary gray eyes of Athena.

"Not with spite," I said.

"I will go there soon," he said. "A week. Less."

Everything there is to be said between us, has already been said.

I am sorry about your body. I am sorry about your life. I am sorry about your head. I am sorry about your losses, all of them. I am sorry about everything you have had to do, which has made you like this. I am sorry so for loving you as I do. I am sorry for what must be done, and the depths of you that I do not understand. I am sorry for what I eat in front of you, that cannot be shared, the pleasures and the bitterness both. We have said these things to each other.

So when I went to California, I did not say good bye to him, or hello to his child, who he does love, though he has not done his best, when the boy, Marcello, greeted me at the door.

The door I chose, the front door, so that he would know I was there. In the way that you know things, I knew that he understood what he faced now that I had come. I chose the front door so that he would have time to prepare, to accept it. Boys impress you in small ways, by being silent, by not running, in the ways that they defend themselves or do not. I looked on him with a little relish, entering the house, studying his limbs. One takes his pleasures where he can.

As I entered the house, it smelled of chocolate and sweat, so I knew that there was someone alive there, and yet he did not interest me beyond passing distaste. He struck no figure at all with me, not posing any sort of challenge to the quality of my relationships.

For two days I lived there, visible and listening. I tried to hear anything about vindication, that anyone would say anything about what Marcello had done. Marcello sat around the house, near me at times. He went alone to the body a lot.

I went there too, on the second day, expecting to find myself quite alone. Down the back lawn, it was raining, and as I walked my brown curls grew heavy and wet against my cheeks and against my neck. I felt the running of rain drops on my head, but went without running to the stone doors. Concrete, already overgrown with funny mosses, in the humid climate. No one to maintain it.

Even before I opened the door, I could hear whispering. Soft whispering, like the cooing of teenaged lovers unobserved.

When I opened it, the room was dim enough that my eyes needed time to adjust. It felt cooler than outdoors, fairly clean for such a place though unwelcoming. I stood quiet to listen.

"This is only temporary," I heard a lover's lips say softly.

Above, the pattering of rain.

Blond, sweet, vacant. For so long, I had loathed Leis. In my heart, thinking about him, there had been a dread felt deeply. It was not hatred, or jealousy, but the wordless pressure of both of them, that never given voice chokes the throat. It is that pressure of fear, of oneself, that creates love in the absence of it.

I sat to listen. He turned suddenly and saw me, gave up a little gasp, like the kind made by women pricked by sewing needles.

He began to fix his hair nervously. 

"Planning something?" I asked him. Normally I would smile, but there is no advantage to be gained in scaring Leis. Honestly, all that I really wanted to do was to hold his hand. 

He gestured to me nearly indetectably, and I went to him. He patted the slab. Sit with the body? He climbed up himself and I watched him, fine French man in his long pleated slacks and crisp white shirt. He pressed his arm around the corpse's torso, avoiding the gaping wound, tucked his face by Laurent's neck.

I hopped up, following his lead, and imitated him. The body was cold and slightly damp, but my eyes did not linger. I did not like to be so close, but he did. He must have closed the eyes at some point. Laurent's lips were slightly parted, as if he were asleep, but the colors were wrong entirely, too pasty, inert, lips tinged purple. He looked obviously dead the way a dead moth is obviously dead, too white, skin a little too translucent. The little subtleties compounded. When I rested my head against the corpse, it stilled the beating of my own heart, to hear nothing. A part of me was not there at all, and being so close made the rest of me want to follow. All this, quietly.

"I have decided," I whispered, "to go away. Will you come with me?"

Leis shook his head, no, no.

So quiet. The rain was a softness on the stone roof, like the licking of many cats. Leis's eyes were closed. I lifted my hand cautiously, to put it in his hair. He was kissing Laurent's cheek softly, as if it were not a corpse he was kissing. My eyes passed over Laurent's translucent white eyelashes, and I looked away.

"Come," I said, running my finger down the rim of Leis's ear.

He has always had in him what seems to be a touch of delicate madness, and yet, the more I know him, the more I do not know if he is mad. 

"Hm?" he asked me, softly, paying great attention to my finger without acknowledging it, kissing Laurent's dead neck.

"Come away with me," I said, even more quietly.

He looked at me, a dark look, eyes finding mine with a profound seriousness, very real.

"I cannot go with you, Nicky."

I was surprised at how let down I felt, had not known that I had really wanted him, felt in that moment that I had always wanted it.

"Later," he said, "I will tell you how it used to be between the two of us, because I think that you have forgotten."

"I never hurt you."

"No, not to worry." His voice seemed tender, but it was only a quality of his voice.

I sat up. I sat away.

"Do you do this a lot?" I asked, trying to match this quality of his voice, hoping it would make me gentle.

A breath that smelled like illness, so close to my face, a long breathing out.

"Look," I started.

"The eyes are wrong," he whispered to me. "He keeps telling me the eyes are wrong, when I dream of him," as he kissed the corpse upon its purple lips.

**

I felt unsettled.

All day, from the first, a feeling in me that I could not shift from myself. There is nothing to say. I close my eyes, I see Marcello's face.

The truth is that I had not been taking care of myself, and it showed on me. Dasius had been merciful in his office and done nothing to me that he liked to do, exploring my body with his instruments, but if he had tried, I would not have been able to resist him. This weakness was the result of the same impetus that made me want to draw away from the corpse of the man who had been mother, friend, master, lover, body. A struggle inside of myself. A need for comfort and an irrational fear of it. A reckoning I could not bear.

Even so.

A locked door is no deterrent. Most house locks, especially tumbler locks, are easily forced. The lock on Marcello's door was flimsy, resisting hardly at all. It did not make any sound when broken, which was good. If it had been any harder, I might have had to wait, and things would have been different then.

Due to my size, it can be difficult to subdue even the living if they are full grown, because when in mortal terror, anyone can surprise you. This, incidentally, is one of the best things about killing, is the ability to surprise. However, to be in a position of advantage, it is necessary to draw close without alarm.

I found myself in a situation that seemed uncomplicated. Comfortable to be profiting from darkness, from silence, from the knowledge that because of our relative ages, experience might be counted upon where strength could not. And so I was able to mount up on the wooden chair by his bedside without attracting notice. In that position, I peered at him.

An unexpected threat, yes, and unlike most of Laurent's lovers, no snake at all. A sweet little thing, truth be told, as surprised as anyone to find himself a precious object in the eyes of a powerful man. His sandy hair had gone streaks of honeyed blond in the summer he was made, ten years gone, and had remained that way. He had high eyesockets, resulting in quite a bit of space between eyelash and eyebrow, for something of a sleepy look when awake. Not an expressive face, particularly, but caught in that fleeting period of youth when a man retains the hint of a willowy femininity, if he is inclined toward it.

I heard a tap on the window and turned my head, the finger of a tree branch, and when I turned back, his wide eyes were open. I had not even time to have opened my knife. For a long moment, we regarded one another.

"He wanted me to," he chose to say. "Don't you understand that? He wanted me to."

"Put your hand on the dresser," I said.

"He wanted me to," he whispered again, the intensity in his voice like the drowning trying to scream.

I did not say anything, because I had already said all that I meant to say.

"You can wait, but I won't do it. I did what I had to do," he said.

I opened my knife and checked its blade, reflecting the slim light of the moon.

Like that, we sat together, still except for his rapid breathing. I looked upon him with dull eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said, finally.

"What did you say?" I asked, surprised.

"I'm sorry for your loss," he said.

What happened? My heart beat so hard into my back that it shook my entire body. My heart, shaking me, drowning my ears with blood, pulsing in my fingertips.

For as long as I can remember, I have always felt as if there is something else living inside of my body. At times, I feel that I am as transparent as the half-molted shell of a cicada, papery and dry, and that inside of me is a new creature, larger, hungrier than I have been. This thing makes sharp, soft cries of wailing, of dying, and I hear him inside of my head, trying to cast me away. He is made of shadow things, half-liquid, unmade by his own cocoon, and unable to yet chew his way out of me. He loves my hands and my breast, and to use my body, and sometimes I feel that I am mad and I will cut him out, and sometimes I feel that others are like me, and I will cut them, too, and yet, it was me and not that thing.

I am not ashamed, but a little startled at myself, at how I leapt upon him, and continued to be startled by him, that in his panic he continued to speak, which enlivened my body to the point that it made me begin to cry out, to scream, unable to contain my desire for mercy, to make him quiet, to stop that feeling of bursting inside of myself, putting my knife in him to no result. Hateful face that had kissed and pressed itself against the man I loved, hateful body, hateful eyes, and hateful tongue.

Pretty mouth saying, "You don't have to do this," as my knife slipped inside.

Whose arms around me? Whose arms? As I pulled my warm little prize from its prison, and wept to the pleasurable sound of pleading subsumed by wordless gagging.