Dasius, Part 5 - The Language of Pain

Whenever Marcellus slept, I left the house for my office. I'd had that office for many years in Boston, and sleep did not find me much in those days. After close of day, after watching television into the night with my new interest, we would go to bed, and already it was a good routine, nice for everything concerning my head and heart. The early 1980s, while fraught with emotional complications, were good for us financially after a decade or so of stagnation, and I would go into the office to monitor the numbers and make small adjustments. There didn't seem much need for heavy-lifting, but rather to make certain of our liaisons and maintain our connections in the world of the living. So often I spent most of the time making phonecalls both domestic and overseas. 


When first Nicolas crept into my office, I did not see him. I had a small glass magnifier, and had pressed my face against it and the desk to look at the little marks on a check I suspected counterfeit. He has a talent for entering rooms absolutely soundlessly, for pushing open a door so slowly that the movement fails to attract the eye. This he had done, and flattening himself, crept under the other side of my desk. 


We never say spider or ghost of Nicky. He is only himself, an old and separate creature worthy of his own designation, for there are no others like him. But he has surprised me so many times that I am no longer surprised. At the sound of his voice, my blood warms rather than runs cold. When I feel a foreign and unexpected touch, it is my brain stem that understands it will be him before it tells the rest of me.


"What are you doing?" I heard, from beneath my desk, and felt a touch on the bare skin of my ankle as he lifted my pant cuff. His hand does never feel cold, as we are of a temperature. 


I pushed back my chair a little so that he could climb into my lap. He did, refusing my help. His deep brown eyes were wide with excitement, his occasionally unhealthy color vanished. I brushed back brown curls from his high forehead and kissed him at his hairline. 


"What evil are you doing?" he asked me, picking up my glass magnifier and looking at me through it.


"God be good it will be nice to see your smile."


He gave me one, a friendly smile with all of his teeth. He pressed his face to my neck. "I am lonely though. Laurent goes to Europe without me."


"If it please you, give him a little time. You have been mad awhile."


"I am still a little mad," he murmured. "Do you think I mean to do such things as hurting his person? I do not mean to do it."


"How are you feeling?"


"Lucid. D, I cannot apologize for what I do, truly. I cannot be any other than myself, and sometimes there is more or less of the man I wish to be. May I have your glass object?" 


"May I see what you have?" 


He showed me that he still had the magnifier.


"Take it, magpie. I will get another."


"How I would like to be with you more often. You treat me with respect," he said, that familiar gravel in his voice, turning the glass over in his hands. 


I sat back, pleased with his familiar weight against me.


"So tell me now why you close your curtains on Beacon Hill," he said. "You wouldn't keep a secret?"


I hadn't known what he had been doing to our Laurent until it was over, for Laurent so hides his wounds completely. They had both kept the abuse from me, and I had only found out from Nicky in a moment of painful pique. He had visited me from California in New York in 1968, had come to me begging opiates for Laurent, with whom he sought to make amends. It was only then I had demanded for what, and found out about the violence in terrible detail. One cannot forgive Nicky, and one cannot ever say that he is sorry for what he has done. He does only ever what he sees as necessary at the time, and as I cannot speak for Laurent I cannot speak for him either. It is not in my power to excuse it, and there is no use trying.


That evening is the only time he has ever let me examine the scar on his back, the only time he has ever volunteered himself to be cut open, and the opportunity was certainly offered only to pacify my upset. He said only "Ssuh!" to anesthesia, and endured the knife rather than be dulled a single moment. 


"You should have come to me directly," I had told him in 1968, all lamentation at not having known he was in constant pain, at not having known what he had done to our Laurent. "I would have helped you. We would have been spared all of this pain. Can you imagine that Laurent will not grieve over what you have done to his body forever? Can you imagine that when you look upon yourself in the mirror, you will not see that you have lost a piece of your soul in doing this? Can you not see that those that know about this will never forget it, and seek you out if there is ever a chance of vengeance?"


"When I look in the mirror there is no one I recognize," he murmured, without bravado. "If they will kill me, let them come. I will draw blood before it is over and be thus satisfied to 'hallo' Death. Out of the corner of my eye I have seen Him. In the West, He moves in daylight."


"And what of me, if you are killed? What of me, that you have done this violence? What of Laurent, if he is too spiritually torn apart to live? You are the most precious to him in the world. Every knife wound tears him apart. Perhaps if his spirit has escaped from any of those openings you made in his flesh? I cannot hurt him as a single word from you may do. With your knife you would cut him more deeply than any other could."


Under my knife he was still as I cut through the scar tissue. He did not make a sound, though I felt the tension of his back beneath my hand. Immediately, I found myself confronted with bullet fragments embedded near his spine. As I examined them, I dated them easily to the 1910s, and so found myself suddenly a little faint, that he had been suffering already when he came back to us in 1921, that what I had suspected to be pain in his gait at that time indeed had been. Quickly I steadied my hands, as already his eager flesh crowded the incision I had made, knitting itself with healthful activity.


"You could not have prevented it," he murmured.


"Nicky, I will give you blood for balm, for your pain, for your sanity. Do not go back there to California anymore. Do not stalk his counterparts, his children. You endanger yourself."


"I cannot promise you that I will not seek him, my brother. Though he seeks a self I no longer know, I need to hear his voice."


"He never fights back against you, does he? He cannot raise a hand to you. Oh I know that. Do not make me into the monster that must stop you."


"And so that is what I fear," he said, face pressed against the steel table. "For no matter what I do to Laurent, he is always seeing me as a child, and it is only you in whose eyes I may turn dark and unknowable. I feared your judgment in 1920. I so fear it now."


Beneath my fingertips there was dead nerve, dead muscle, grey and purple. It would do him no help to cut it out, and only mutilate his shape. Already, his body had isolated this dead part, and yet the pain remained with him. I had not ever seen anything like it before. I cleaned out the metal fragments, irrigated the wound, and sewed it sound. I whispered, "Who shot you?"


"I would not tell you now, if it is meet with you. Still it is difficult to talk of it directly."


All I know of what happened to him is what Laurent has told me Nicky said while delirious with pain. And in delirium, one cannot know if there is a single lucid thought, or if the hallucination mixes with all parts of a man's life, and clouds his sense of truth. Nicky raves of a woman that he loved, and who could know him, of her death, of a bullet that knew what he was. He once whispered, completely mad, in Laurent's ear that he loved a woman so ugly that she liked him to call her "aubergine", an eggplant, after the port-wine birthmark on her face. I do not know how much of that is true. Perhaps all of it is. All I can know is what I am told, and of the relationship between Nicky and Laurent so much is hidden. There is nothing that can excuse the violence, and I cannot apologize or make amends for it, but to my knowledge Nicky stopped attacking Laurent's body and mind in 1968, and though he continued to stalk Laurent's associates, he also refrained from inflicting them grievous and irreparable bodily harm.


Still, the creature that is called Nicky is one of violence, as is the one called David, who is not Dasius, and who understands that inside the living is a desire to do harm in order to impact the world. Dasius is only a mask over this truth. Dasius thinks himself above pain and harm, but inside each of us, there is that thing that is pure and knows itself for a thing of blood. For Nicky, there is no mask. He is Nicky, and has never known another name. In him are those intimate things of jealousy, desperation, and insensible love. And these things speak the language of blood, which is so often the language of pain, which I have known from many lips, Laurent's included. Violence itself does not trouble me deeply, just as love alone is not dangerous, and passion not acted upon tortures only the man who conceals it.


In 1968, after I sewed him up, Nicky slept in my arms. In the morning I found that he had left me a handwritten note to the effect that he was headed away to do some thinking. In 1980, while he rested against me, I dipped my nose to smell his hair, and it smelled of almond oil, so I knew that he had been inside my apartment in New York City. 


"You've been looking for me," I said. "I'm sorry I was not where you thought I would be."


"I don't need for you to be sentimental," he reasoned. "Only, tell me your secret so that my curiosity may be satisfied."


"There is a lover," I told him, incautiously. "There is a boy who I am coming to love."


"Don't pain yourself to worry if I envy that. I've no interest in romantic love at all. Will he care for me? Will he keep you from me? That is all I think about," he said, and gently plucked at my sleeve. "I can tell you again that being able to visit you is my comfort."


"I must be honest and say he does not seem to care for much of anything. Perhaps it is a contemporary attitude that I do not quite understand. At times he seems quite hateful," I sighed. "He's difficult to read."


"Is he your sort? Blond? Tall? Pale-lipped?"


"Yes that is type accurate," I chuckled.


"Then I suppose that he will also be somewhat arrogant, to diminish your pride. You like for them to squash your ego. Don't you love it very much when boys are cruel to you? You see how predictable things are after all this time." He paused to lick his lips. "Well I will leave you alone if you let me see him."


"Not so alone, not after so long."


"Well I won't be a shadow where I am not wanted. It's not for me to be disdained openly. I don't like that sort of creature who objects to everything. Leave your key with me and I will stay here in your office. I like it fairly well. And we will talk of a peaceful future, and the possibility of healing."


"The century has changed you much," I whispered. "Do not change so much that I don't recognize you. I don't know you to be so temperate." I so enjoyed listening to him talk. He fills a room with talk, and I am not so able to speak so many words at a time. His voice comforted me.


"Is he living?" he asked, taking my hand and putting it on top of his head so that I would rub him. "I know that he is living."


"How do you know?" I asked, rubbing him.


"Because you like them more than you like us. Have you tasted him?"


"Not of his blood," I said.


"That's foul. These ears belong to a child raised in a convent."


"Then those ears don't know what I mean."


"How I have sometimes thought of being grown like you, in order that I might try new things such as you do," he said, considering his words, knowing that I knew how deeply painful those thoughts had been to him. "But I don't think that way anymore. I want a quiet life."


"Not too quiet," I said.


"Be careful you do not give me permission to make things less boring," he said, much calmed to have his hair stroked. 


"I love you, little brother," I told him, and when I left, gave him the key to a little cabinet in the washroom, so that he could look inside and find a little propofol to help him sleep. I doubted however that he would use it. 


And I knew him as one to keep his word, so that when, a week or so later, the knock came at the door I knew that it was not Nicky who had let news back to Laurent. Perhaps Laurent had only put it together himself, and come directly. How he found out where we lived, I do not properly know. But as soon as I entered the front room to open the door, I knew who it was in my entire body, for my flesh shrank from what it must do. Oh now that I am thinking of it, it is obvious that Bellamy must have seen me coming and going from the guesthouse where I had no earthly need to be, and that in Laurent's mind, there could only be one purpose for such meetings under cover of secrecy. Oh he was not wrong. Oh he would have known immediately that I cannot separate intimacy from feelings of love. 


So when he came inside, he would have known that more than the physical relationship, there existed a tenderness. I am thinking now that is the reason why he did not say a single word to me, except, "I meant to kill him, how could you do this thing?" and struggled with me, intent on doing what he felt he needed to do before things could go any further. I couldn't stop him with non-violent means, for Laurent is so much stronger than me when he is fired with purpose. Though he is petite, shorter than me, leaner than me, I could not move him.


"Why kill him?" I begged, "Why kill him? Do what you would with me, with me," trying to keep him from my lover's bedroom door. "Please," I begged him, "there has never been a single one who loved me, have mercy on my spirit, please have mercy upon us both. I cannot endure this," trying to pull him back who would not be moved, and only when I desperately moved to press my fingers against his eyes did he turn on me in anger, and give me my chance.


When he turned on me I saw that he was looking at me through two different eyes, one familiar, hurt, deeply betrayed, the other something older, harder, terrible, and I fled into the kitchen, because both eyes meant to disable me if it could be done, causing me to babble and plead words that I cannot remember, my insides shaken loose with fear. "Speak to me so that we can be civil," I pleaded to his lividity, knowing that he could see the red welts on my neck where his child had unbuttoned my collar and sucked upon my skin. He hated to see me so naked, because he could not stand fleshly weakness, to be so touched, and maybe he decided to kill me as well in that moment, because he reached for me as my hand found a little paring knife upon the counter behind me.


I didn't mean to stab him but I did, above his collarbone, which poured with blood, to which he made no sound, and I struggled with him as he was trying to bite me. This was not the Laurent who did not truly want to kill me, who only meant to communicate what could not be said with words, to show me violence in desperation, but rather some other thing that only meant to stop me struggling, to silence me, to make me still so that he could complete his purpose. And that is not only something I am saying to justify what I did. This was a creature who had been changed by what Nicky had done to him, which had been allowed to surface through betrayal, a blind and unthinking pillar of violence and single purpose. And so did I have single purpose, getting myself several times with the knife before I found his eyes, my hands slippery against his bloodied flesh, to guide the blade home, to grasp him. And some of him seemed to come back at what he saw I meant to do, choking and clawing at my wrists, trying to speak, words trying to swim up through a larynx flooded from having been pierced, realizing that I meant to blind him, to do to him the worst that I could do.


I did it to him quickly, slipping in and twisting reflexively, before he could react to the pain and turn his head, which made him begin to cry to like a wounded dog, and to breathe blood in, and as he felt himself drowning all of his great physical fears were realized at my hands, which made me begin to cry bitterly, and say, "It's not true, I love you, it's not true," because he would be thinking that what he had prophesied had come true, and that I would abandon him, "Please," I begged him, "you are beaten, please do not fight me anymore," but from complete fright he had fainted against me. 


Like so many boys, the living, the dead, those shattered by living in between those states, I carried him to my car, in his bloody silk, without thinking to wipe my face or my hands, and to my office. And there, with a sorrowing expression, Nicky sat vigil over him, despairing like a child angel, unable to speak a word at what had been said in the language of pain. He only looked up at me with eyes so deep and so brown, telling me with his look what he could not say, would never ruin the illusion to say, that it was not him could cut our Laurent the deepest. That it was me who Laurent needed, and always had done, and that it had never mattered what Nicky did, if I was there to stitch us back together again.


But in the night, in the complete darkness, Nicky's voice welled up to my ears as if from inside my bones, "If you do as you are thinking of doing, I will find a way to kill our master. If you destroy your lover. It is you who deserves the love the boy can give you. Laurent is wrong. I would not let him take it from you for anything in the world," and then he were quiet, as if I were alone in that dark, and I wept, lost, and afraid of the future. For everything was different.

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