And so, as has tended to happen, a routine developed in my life, though I remember it now as emotional. I should say, of course that it was. I have mentioned to you already the way that he could look. He glowed with the fever of death, Laurent, incandescent against the golden covers in the dark. His skin felt so cool against mine that it seemed hot. I have never known one of us, unless in great distress, to sweat in any way. Rarely is physical distress enough. He was not only despaired, but enraged, struggling. For me, the one in the other room was beyond my concern. Leis for me was barely more than my own heartbeat, expected, essential, yet ignored.

I have never understood the terrible power of love well. Perhaps I have intimated to you that I do now in some way. I do not. I could not even say to him, "Let that other die and let us go away" because it was impossible for me to say that. Perhaps Laurent would not have heard it in any case. He was busy with the nasty things inside of his head. The arrows shot at him by his lover clung to his mind like sucking leeches, drawing away from him his spirit. He clung to me, babbling, soft palms, sharp fingernails. 

"Come to me, dark one, come," he moaned, unseeing, mad from the torment and the inability to bleed. "Touch me." And I was not accustomed to his neediness at that time.

In the years following, I would learn to give him the things he wanted without offering him my body. A sense of wholeness, of fullness, to help forget how alone he had begun to feel. He had become occupied with his own body, and how he used it. I would catch him on the second floor, pale shadow, investigating his lean muscles, moles, the turn of his back in the one mirror he kept up there. 

Perhaps I do badly in blaming love. I would do badly also to blame vanity. I will tell you what I believe, and it's that he thought of himself as old, and used up, and wanted Leis because it made him feel different, and I think that even as I say that, it is a false notion, or not enough. I have also told you that I have always been badly at explaining him, or defending him. 

I am poorly these days. I am much consumed with thinking of him, and Leis has been here, and I see that he is poor condition as well. He says that you have been calling him, and he goes with Nicky to church, and I don't know what they talk about. He must be very pressed indeed to seek me out for an ear. He does better with Nicky, who has always liked him, though I don't know why. With Nicky, there are always reasons, and it is never very often that I know them. And Nicky comes to me at night, shouting Marcellus down and out of bed, so that Nicky may lie with me, and ask me to treat him as if he were like his age, and forget about before. 

But it is hard to forget when I am writing to you about it all of the time, though we are near an end here, aren't we? And if I have let Nicky write a little of it, since you have admitted an inability to fulfill your end of our bargain, that is reasonable, isn't it? You will agree I think, that it must be. Oh what is it that you are after? You are after news of Laurent, aren't you? And didn't Nicky know him far more deeply than I did? Or you will not think so, since you feel that Nicky is psychotic and not in control of his impulses. But Nicky is far more in control of himself than you or I, or is that too alien to you? 

Can you not even make out the difference in writing? Between our hands? When you see this close, careful hand, do you not know it is Nicky? Does Dasius not write in a rush, as if the cold breeze of death is breathing into his ear? So like a fool! When you profess to want to be bosom friends in letters that you keep writing, Miriam, as if you do not realize that it has been the two of us. The things you say about me. Oh I will be a good scrivener! Let us return to what D is saying behind me, remonstrating about kicking his lover out of bed. But I will do that! Old shoe. The boy, his lover, has lost all of the fire he had when living. D says, "What are you writing so furiously?" I say, if he will tear away the curtain then why should I not speak directly to you? and he says that it is not a matter of charade but one of manners. So do we talk of breeding? Are we not both sons of whores and raised up by the same hand? And loved well and the same? But he seems so tired that I shall bend. He is always so tired this time of year. The seasons change. The bitch is unraveling. 

Strike that last. I know that you have inserted lines. I know you have. Oh do it then. What does it matter? Know that I will not abide falsehood. Nicky, I have committed myself to be honest. Leis has already told you things he said to Laurent in those dark days. I will not repeat them. That would not be of any use. I could not keep Laurent out of Leis's room. It was his house. Quinine handled the stress. Leis is right. I could not sleep without it. 

But Laurent loved to sleep beside kitten when the quinine took hold. He did not seem to mind that it was a new and daily poisoning. He said, "Spare me your judgment. I have had enough of it. His body fits against mine. Now let me dream." But I could not leave them alone together, in case that kitten might wake up. So I sat in a chair by the door, alert and watching them sleep. 

The ticking of the clock no longer bothered me. Whensoever as I looked in the mirror, it was only myself looking back, and no other creature inside of my body. There were many feelings in me to take over from the numbness which had been creeping. My mind had quietened on its own account, and on account of the drug. I could see clearly, and without guilt, what I had done and why I had done it. It overtook me that I was where I should be, and to be of use, and not to do so much as I was told anymore. Perhaps, I thought, I should become useful as myself, and through my own pursuits, rather than seek to suit pleasures which were not my own. And I will be genuine and tell you that it had never occurred to me before to be my own person, or do things for my own self. I was not raised in that way. It is easy, I realized, to be tormented when I had been only ever reacting to torment. And then, then, something odd began to happen.

Queerly, quite queerly, I noticed the questions. 

"Shall I go in now?" "What should we do in the evening?" "Do you wrap him like this?" "Will you tell me if you like my hair like this?" "How is that you care for your feet well?" "Where is it that you find buttons like this? Real ivory?" Laurent, appealing to me. "Do you think that I am too flirtatious? Shall I conduct myself in some other way? Be honest." And he began to take my hand, and hold it, and say nothing. Perhaps it is as Leis said, that Laurent had found me in some way "bloomed." But I don't know what that means. "May I come in? Are you very hard at work, precious dove? Are you at study? Let me leave you to your book." It felt strange for him to come in and then go out again. It was like respect. The distance between us it created seemed to make him the more fond of me. Are you jealous? For he never respected you at all, Mini. Nicky will say that I am mad because I praise myself. I am not mad. Perhaps I am a bit overtired. Perhaps I miss Laurent more at the change of seasons.

Laurent used to take me to sit on bridges over the Seine. It didn't matter which one, really, which bridge. He would take me out in the time before streetlamps, which were too bright for his eyes in later years. He liked to watch the stars come out over the water, reflected in the murky depths, which in those times could become so dirty that the water lay inert in the heat. In the fall, the wind would blow down from the north and the east, and he would breath of it, arm linked in mine. He was at his best in the open air, and his blond hair blowing in the teasing breezes. He would kiss my cheek, say nothing. I miss the touch of his lips on my cheek better than anything else. I miss that soft touch more than the graze of his fingernails, the tickle of his hair against my neck. I miss it more than the gentle prickling of his gaze in anger, or the sense of him watching me when he thought I did not know it. You will see that I knew him in that kiss to be proud of me. That pride made him he feel he could leave me because of Marcellus, and that I would be better off without him, as do those who think they will take their own lives. 

You all know that when he was dying he told me to leave him alone. That I took him to my steel table, and wept, and took off his heels, and held his feet. Yes, it is true that we vacillated between amour and detestation. That old associate of Leechtin's, who sent spies among us, who cut Laurent from hip to rib, did not kill him. But you know this, that he wanted to die. And it is the case that I knew that as well, and when he told me, "Leave off and go", I lifted my hands away from his soft bare skin, and covered my face. He was a gentleman. He hated to see me emotional, vulnerable over him, over anything. But I am the son of a whore, as have often been reminded, and have low blood, and so I wept, which to him was always very boring only because it made him grieve over my faults. 

He had very small feet, narrow. In later years, he slipped them into designer heels, very expensive, and learned to walk as if he were not in pain all of the waking hours of his life. But he liked pain, physical pain, because it took his mind off of whatever troubled him, and I cannot deny that. In that future, he often cut his hair short, angled towards his chin but yet wild with its curls. I remember him now as that one, in a short white minidress and black Pigalle 120 heels. When he wore white he seemed transparent. He liked to pull on ties and push his manicured fingernails into my hair, and to unbutton my collar with his teeth, and to kiss my neck in that familiar fluttery way until I begged for him to bite me. But he was wasting, and if he bit me, it was always very shallow. And if there was blood from so cautious of a bite, he would gasp as if set on fire. 

So I will tell you about the day Leis woke up, in the early fall of 1741, and found us wanting. I had put him in the bath before being bled, making sure to prop him well, because he had been devastated into sleep by an excess of quinine and laudanum, which I had only recently acquired. Laudanum then was a whole opium, and so you will understand that when he woke laudanum was responsible for it being in euphoria rather than fear. He was not feeling any pain upon waking, though his muscles were unattuned and he had not moved of his own volition in days. Of course you will know that his voice has a soft and lilting elegance, a bubbliness when he is happy, and so from hearing this cadence, I became immediately aware that he was completely lucid in the bath, and kept my distance. Laurent was weak, but our rows about it had passed. In the early weeks of our captivity in that house, caring for the body, we had fought like caged animals over how Laurent would not drink blood. But I had seen that he did not die from it, and remained stronger than me, which rather than frighten me gave me comfort.

I did my duty and slit my wrists for the last time, listening to them fight. I will say no more than that about what they were doing. They have always greeted each other after long absences like mad dogs, and it was no different at this meeting, going both for the neck, to injure. When I went in, there was color in Leis's face, a high peaky blush in the cheeks, and chin, and forehead, and in his lips. I shut off my ears. In the morning, he was gone, and had stolen a priceless vase I had been waiting to sell. I could not believe it. 

But I am a canary too afraid to leave the cage, who shudders at the hand come through the door to draw him out. I did not realize we were free until Laurent whispered it, and wept, and pushed me gently against the wall to drink my blood again. How could I be angry at kitten, when he had paid us back by letting in the light?  Which, for a brief time, was a blessing.

So I leave you for now, having fulfilled my end of our hopeless, faithless bargain, which you made knowing you could not give me what I have asked you for, which is the diary Laurent wrote you in the last years of his life, which I do not ask for for myself. It is not only the young ones who have short memories, and it is not them who must remember what it was to be loved by him, and to hear his voice in his written words, or to see his round, carefully-formed writing. It is easy to remember the hard times, and forget the good. It should be us who have it, especially as you ask us to elucidate only those weeks and months of our lives where we were most tortured. And I caution you also, not to ask Abaddon, Quinn, lord of locusts, for his perspective, as you have intimated you plan to. It is one thing to ask his lover, Leis, kitten, who is delicate for the story. It is quite another thing to ask one who knows far too much more than he should, and who though I am his friend agree should die. 

But I suspect that you will know why I cannot kill him, though I believe in it strongly. If you persist in asking him for the truth, you will find out more than you wish to know. I promise you that. I caution you against finding yourself alone with him, because it does not look mad until you find him looking into your head and into your very soul, if you have one, and talking to you of your own secret madness, which he will find though you had not suspected its presence. Do not go into the dark alone with him.

And that is all.