Nyx
I don’t know what it was that finally pushed me over that precarious edge, what made me decide the time had come. I had pondered it for some time – years, in fact – but I never had the courage to do violence to my own body. The pain in my heart and soul had never outweighed the pain I felt a thousand times over when I imagined a knife in my chest or a bullet in my head.
Maybe it was that one movie, where the man I thought could have been me found someone who loved him just like I wanted to be loved, then threw it all away. Or maybe it was that song on the radio, the one which I had once called my theme song, the one that now only filled me with the despair for what I knew I would never be. Maybe I had just finally been convinced by a friend at work, through an impassioned but meaningless conversation (meaningless to him, anyway) that there were “people” out there who would take the responsibility from me, who would do it without pain, and who would find some use for a life I had given up on.
I went downtown, to the strip, and, because it was summer, all the clubs had spilled out onto the streets and flooded them with a swirling mass of people and music and lights for at least ten blocks. Tables and chairs and couches were scattered about on the sidewalk and the street, and dancers clogged the intersections – which were safe enough since the block had been pyloned off from traffic. Someone had driven an SUV between the barriers and parked it outside a bar – the doors hung open and the radio blared, and the hundred-odd-watt bass sounded better than the over-taxed speakers from the clubs. A black-clad man and a barely-clad woman leaned against the mirror-like polish of the sidepanels, entwined in a throbbing, wet embrace.
There were empty bottles and discarded red plastic cups everywhere, but I didn’t buy more than Pepsi myself, since I thought it would be best to keep my wits about me for a little while longer. I wandered further down the street, past the pop and hip-hop music, past the alternative stuff and that little jazz club, down to the end of the strip where everyone wore black and silver and leather, and both men and women had eyeliner on. I felt a bit out of place among all the darkness – I was a normal, average-looking fellow wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. The only thing saving me from complete social rejection was the pair of army-surplus combat boots I had worn to put out the bad-ass vibe and avoid muggers or pickpockets or whatever. Tattoos of an eight-ball and aces, and of Crazy Jane on a Chevy peeked out from beneath my sleeves.
I sat myself down with my Pepsi on a saggy purple-velvet couch just outside a club where they were playing what sounded like a funeral dirge set to a drum machine. I watched the people walk by, especially the women. I hadn’t ever paid much attention to them before, but they were pretty attractive in an evil, dangerously seductive kind of way, dressed in their shiny black leather and leopard spots and fishnet stockings, all made up to look like agents of death. Whether with natural beauty or with a mask of blood-red lips and heavy-shadowed eyes, whether thin as a waif and draped in long, flowing black gowns or slightly plump and sensuous beneath tight and suggestive skirts, they all had something to offer, but they certainly weren’t offering it to me. Out of the 90 minutes or so I sat watching people from the couch, I caught the fleeting attention of a half-dozen people at most, all of whom seemed more interested in the couch than its occupant; the rest didn’t notice me any more than they did the fire hydrant a few feet away. It was all right, I was used to it… and that wasn’t my reason for coming, anyway.
About an hour after I had coaxed the last drop of Pepsi from the bottom of the cup, I stood to stretch my legs, then squeezed my way through the crowd to a promising-looking club across the street. (The couch was instantly taken.) I headed inside, stopping at the door to pay seven dollars for an ink-stamp on my hand and a once-over of disdain, then made my way down the stairs and around the floor to the bar, to begin numbing my senses.
After leaning against the wall for quite a while and spending about twenty bucks too many on drinks, I thought I spied the one I had been waiting for. She was tall and had long, curly, auburn hair. She wasn’t overweight, but neither was she bony and thin – she looked soft, and healthy, though her skin seemed pale in contrast to her black satin dress. She was as goth as anyone else in the room, but elegant goth instead of punk-rock goth, if that makes sense. She was Death, not it’s groupie. Most importantly, she had that aura of selfhood – that self-confidence and assurance that people admire in movie characters. It seemed to me that when she looked around the room, her attention was directed toward determining how the people in the room would suit her, rather than if she fit in.
She came hovering down the stairs into the room, and I lost her for a few moments in the crowd. I pushed away from the wall and through the crowd until I saw her again at the other bar. She glided as she moved, buying some expensive drink; grace dripped from her fingers. In her wake all of the other women seemed cheap and fraudulent in their dangerous seduction.
I watched her for a long time, and I emptied my wallet as she moved from club to club to bar. My lower arm was a galaxy of stamps. I usually stayed about a dozen inconspicuous steps to her side, sometimes passing in front of her or casually glancing over when I thought she was looking my way. I wanted desperately to capture her interest without looking like I was trying to. I needed to be where she could notice me, be that magic place where her heavy-lidded eyes would fall on me and she would decided I was the one. But if she saw me she never made a sign; perhaps she hid her notice of me, or perhaps I was to her as I was to everyone else in the room: scenery – something to move around when walking by.
The drinks and the early morning hour had slowed my thoughts when she finally made her way out of a last bar and climbed into a limousine, which was waiting just on the other side of the barriers.
She left alone.
She could not be the one I needed – I had watched her get drunk on something blue, I had seen her careful grace slip away, her aura fade to a quiet haughtiness. She was just another woman.
I sat down next to a planter on the island divider and dropped my chin onto my fists. There were several hours of full dark left, but the crowd in the streets had begun to thin. There was nothing for me here. The women were no less alluring now, but that was not what I had come for. Why spoil a life-long career of virginity after all these years; even if they were to notice me, why embarrass myself with a pointless effort that would yield only mockery? The idea of casual sex is a much less frightening thing in the comfort of your own lonely room.
I decided I would spend another hour or so there, make a night of it, then head home to resume the same tragic routine which had brought me here in the first place.
And then two hands, strong but feminine, took hold of my shoulders, and a face pressed up to the side of my neck. “Do not turn,” whispered a low, breathy woman’s voice. “Do not see me.”
There was a momentary urge to pull away and turn around, but my instinct to obey commands won out. She spoke again. “I have watched you watch others; I have seen your thoughts. I know what you desire, to sacrifice yourself to me, like a lamb on the altar…” Her voice was sultry now; she brought her face closer and her lips brushed my earlobe. As she spoke, her hands, cool like a rock in the morning, came up to my neck and felt for my pulse. A cold electric thrill ran through me as I realized what was happening – I couldn’t believe it even as I was living it.
She pulled her thick, black velvet cloak around us both, and we stood. She pressed herself to me; she was naked beneath the cloak, and even through my clothes I could I could tell the rest of her body was as cold as her hands. Her body was soft and curvy – as she began walking me forward her hips sidled against me and her legs slipped between mine. Every sense but vision was directed behind me, reaching out for any nuance of her.
We headed for a shadowy walkway between two buildings – she pushed me onward until we were enveloped in darkness, and the din of the clubs and the street became a background murmur. I came to a dead end, a stone wall; she turned me and pushed me back against it. Her dark shadow loomed over me, and for a brief moment, fear took me.
But then she enveloped me in her cloak and her lips closed over mine and her hands grabbed my chest and pulled my shirt down and I was naked, down to the bare feet, and I had no time to figure out that impossibility as everything was happening as I had imagined it, as I had dreamed, except even more because it was real. I could do nothing but submit as her kisses became frantic and noisy and hungry, her teeth nipped at my ears and chin, and she pushed me down and straddled me, her cloak settling over us so we became one black lump on the ground, squirming as she covered me with her hands and her lips.
After I don’t know how long, she sat up and wiped her lip with the back of a finger, smudging away a bit of my blood. She relaxed, and looked me over. I would have expected her to be panting for breath after that salvo of long kisses, but she was still. Her long, dark hair disappeared into the shadow of her cloak, and I could imagine where her full lips might fit into the outline of her face. She was tall, and not thin, soft, and strong – if I had tried to wrestle out from under her I knew there would have been no escape for me, unless she wanted it. But I did not want to fight her, or run away; I wanted to be hers, I wanted to give myself to her – that was why I came.
Then she placed her hand on my face, her thumb on my lips, and she spoke. It was in some other language, completely unfamiliar, but from her mouth it was dark and beautiful. They were words of possession – my life was hers now. My blood burned within me, eager to be done with my body and sate hers.
With a hawk-like swoop she was on me, biting into my neck. Her full weight held me down, trapped me as she took numb flesh with blood, biting again, sinking her teeth deeper into me. She crouched over me, and the cloak fell closed around us. She was a pitch-black night on me, drawing the heat from my body; her teeth and tongue pillaged me, reaching further in for even more. I was hers, I was inside her, she had my life, and she wanted my soul.
But then she was gone.
The loss of her ripped into me like a cannonball in the stomach, and I sobbed with the enormity of it.
Someone came running up and knelt over me, pinning my shoulders against the convulsions of my tears. Fingers pressed into my neck, where blood still somehow managed to gush out. It hurt like the devil’s pitchfork, but my eyes didn’t much feel like opening, and I couldn’t seem to move my arms or my mouth to tell them to bugger off. A bright light flashed around and passed over my eyes and made my head hurt, and there were a lot of noisy voices, but that didn’t matter. The body wracking sobs were over, but I felt wrong, alone… I was a soul without life… I was hers, I needed to be with her, to be in her, but it was dark and she was gone and I was cold and alone and stranded.
I was being jostled, but that faded away.
At last I looked up and I saw her, her deep dark eyes intense in the moonlight. She had been there, always, and was laughing at me… but I needed her. I stretched out my hand to her, pleadingly, and she took it, lifting me up. She was huge, and growing bigger, or it was I who was smaller. She seemed pleased with me as she opened her lips, showed her teeth, and swallowed me. They closed behind me, sealing me into the endless, empty night which savored my soul.
I was finally, fully, hers.
And I was nothing.