Oh, should I tell you what he says to me? That boy. I'll tell you. When he is angry, this boy in my life, he says, "D, D," from the doorway. "D." He is like the buzzing of a trapped wasp, insistent, always in my ear wherever he is in the house. He says that he wants intimacy, that it is my body, my voice, my head he wants to hold, but I am telling you that he wants my blood. Intimacy! It is a fine thing, have no doubt, but he says it in the service of a lie, and I want to shake him, and throw up my hands, and tell him, "Have you ever for one moment, in your life, thought of anything higher than your body?" but I know that he hasn't. When he was a young man, I envied him his simplicity, his young willfulness and lustiness, how of the moment he seemed to be. But he says that the scratching of my pen drives him mad, and that when he is mad it is only blood for him, and come to bed and cease it. What rows!
And here I am only thinking to write to you, for what? And when he calms himself down, he comes to me and says, "I'm sorry, forgive me. I know how you feel about this project." As if he could know anything! "You are too harsh to me," he says, when I go too far. Perhaps that is so. God knows. I am capable of it. How he can cry. That I could cry like that. How good he feels, afterwards, and very settled and too tired to be angry anymore. There he is now, in our bed behind me, sleeping from a long cry. Would L be pleased to know how well I suffer from torment in his absence? I am sure that he would tell me I have earned it on my own, and perhaps I have. Perhaps that dead sucking of love is the second face of Janus, but he is beautiful to me.
I sit alone, with my eyes closed, and I think of my young man, who like Leis still breathes, but only because he refuses to give it up, and so while he sleeps there is that continuous in and out of breathing, easy and deep with slumber. And I wish that I had not made him like us so soon, because I would that I could have seen him older, and what sort of man he would have made, shaped by the mortal peril of human life, that torturous inevitability of death, rather than the present threat of it in ours. They do not seem to live long do they? Most of the young ones. When faced with immortality, as far as we know, how they seem to die so soon, like paper suddenly burnt up into black wisps, only to float away on breezes so faint they cannot even be felt, and yet the ash is directed by them. Where do these little breezes, these notions of dying come from? Little reasons, unknown to anyone but the dying, and perhaps God, if he is there.
And so I thought it would be with Leis, and wanted it off and on, depending on the day, the hour, the moment. How easily he could die, and yet he did not die. How easily some little notion of death, as have afflicted us all, could have intruded upon him, and lifted his spirit up and away from that body, and yet he stayed. And I wonder if it was because in madness it is only blood, like with my M, and the creature that is vampire stayed in the body because it was mad with poison, and thirsted for us. Certainly, whenever I entered the room, its blue eyes followed me, with no more soul than a painting what eyes do the same.
It was a pattern. If he was docile, gentled and wondering, we washed him first. If he was violent, and screaming, and biting, we bled him first.
Whenever he slept, that then was the worst, because when most we expected him to be at peace he was in the most torment, crying and screaming as if even in sleep he could feel pain. And when he slept he was most like himself, and I took Laurent in my arms, who would try to go in and hold onto him, and Laurent would beat on me and abjure me, "Can't you hear him? Is it you who knows nothing about comforting the tortured? Let me go to him," and cry. "Maybe he is back, dove, please, I cannot listen to it," but if he woke there hid disaster in it, in letting Laurent into the bed of a sleeping creature, who one couldn't know who it would be when it woke up. And perhaps more than anything, these two faces, of tranquility and animal violence were the most damaging.
At one moment all felt of a peace, and that perhaps he would come back to himself, a gentle spirit, like an ethereal child wondering at us and our treatment of it, and in a snap, he would have my Laurent in his arms, a vise-grip I could do little to break, biting until I could pry his arms apart, and bind him. "Listen, can't you hear how he suffers? Dasius, let me go to him." I could hear.
But I could see as well the other side, and that other side was far more present to me. Because Laurent had begun to look that way again, that terrible way. I have described it to you already, and if you were in his life at all near the end, you know it yourself. I don't know if you were. It was more than frailty. It was in his eyes.
On the first day, when I forbade him to go to Leis sleeping, his looks were fierce. He was weak from the bite and afraid to fight me. "Let me go. You will regret it," he said. And on the second day, still fierce, yet more pointed, his eyes narrowed, his lips pursed, and saying, "Please." On the third day, unable to bear the moaning and crying, he shook me, who had stopped trying to restrain him, and the look in his eyes was that of a man pursued, hunted until he could not run anymore, and said nothing. He had begun to pant when we heard the sounds, and to dig his fingernails into me instead of speaking. I know that he knew what I did. It did not occur to that he needed the delusion that it would be all right, and all the same as it had been, and very soon. I had thought those same thoughts for a moment but relied on caution and on sense. I was hard on him.
He stopped dressing himself properly. His mind was elsewhere. As Leis remained nonverbal, Laurent's anxiety went unabated, and he stopped brushing his hair. I tasked him with going into town, and combed his curls, lay out his clothes to his specifications, and said to "get sharp scissors. Whatever sort you like, but very sharp." And he went. And when he came back, he brought more than that.
The scissors were good ones, and he put them in my hands, and he said, very lucidly, "Dasius, cut my hair, too. I won't have you looking at it, have you worrying about it." He set down several books he'd brought on my secretary table, and went up the stairs to our unused dining room.
I did not resist him. I followed with the scissors, and finding him up there he had uncovered one chair and set it by the window. The window had a nice view of the sun setting, and the light fading over the city, which we could see our fair share of on our hill, even from only the second floor, and with half the view obscured by the pointed leaves of a linden tree.
"I know," he said, very softly, "that you want to cut it. I don't want you to be nervous about my hair. It will grow back. It is only hair. I hear your worrying about it and about me. I bought these very nice scissors from a barber surgeon. He says they will even cut flesh as if it were fat."
"All right," I said.
I approached and he held up his hand, facing away from me, toward the window. I took it, soft, strong hand. "I am glad that we are speaking again," he said. "Cut it very close."
"You don't like to cut your hair," I told him, but of course he knew that, and even as I said so, I cut it.
While I did it, his head remained tipped down. The scissors were very sharp, as he had promised, easily nicking his ear once by accident, though he made no sound in reaction to it, as his pain tolerance has always been very high. It disturbed me viscerally that the little wound did not bleed at all. I finished the cutting, and said that I would sweep up his hair, and he said, sounding tired, "Leave it," and took me by the wrist. My fingers were still in the scissors' finger guards.
I think that you will understand what his hair meant to him. I think that you will suspect, as I do, that he had not cut it for centuries, and that he hated to look tired, or afraid. I did my best with the scissors. He took me to bed in the yellow room, and bade me go under the duvet, and him with me, where he let out a puppy's breath, and wanted me to hold his naked head against my chest with my palm. And so I did. Then, at the highest point of the day, dark in our room with its heavy curtains, he woke and patted me as if I were sleeping. Seeing that I wasn't, he pointed to something near the door, and made a soft grunting, pointing.
I looked and his sword was there. He has had many swords, and it was the bigger of the two he had at the time, the same he had given me when I'd gone away, now in its long scabbard. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and went to get it. It had become familiar to me during my time away, and it smelled like him, because he did then and always had perfumed his hands. He delicately gestured for me to come back and I did.
He took his sword from me, and without investigating it, turned away from me in bed with it and went back to sleep.
But I could not sleep, and seeing him safe, went to my desk to see the books he had left there. They were covered in roach dust, so I took the three of them out to the back door and shook them and blew on them until they were passably clean, and of course these were anatomy textbooks.
They were not the first I'd ever had, but you will understand that these found me at the correct moment, and unable to sleep, I read them cover to cover over a period of weeks.
And except for the moaning, it was a period of great and unexpected contentment for me. I went up the stairs and swept Laurent's hair into a small bundle, and tied it in a white cloth, to save. Leis's hair, when I cut it, always while he was sleeping, I burned, except for the bits Laurent could get away from me. And having gotten it away from me, I watched him make, with slow but patient dexterity, a bracelet which looked as if it were made of very fine flax, which seemed to comfort him. Somehow, he seemed content as well, taking my sharp scissors, and plunging them into his wrists every day.
To me it seemed macabre, as it should have, as if a hairless angel attempting to return to heaven through rehearsing a thousand mortal deaths. How might I have known that in another life he had already done this? For it seems clear to me now that he was content to move through our house as if he were in that other place, of his childhood, cutting himself open and nearly insensible from the feebleness of blood loss. If I asked him to stop, he would hear none of it, as if he barely understood I was there.
So that was how it was until Leis began to speak again. Rehearsal.
Oh if you could hear my lover now, crying for me to come bed. What pleasant music it is, compared with the sounds I can still hear in my head, of his father shattered by the things kitten said to him. I say, "Marcellus," to quiet him now behind me, and he says, "If you don't come now I will be angry, because you are suffering." How demanding are lovers, who have never suffered, and don't know what it looks like.