Funeral Music

Perhaps they knew they didn’t have long to live. Perhaps they’re going on a spree.

Eve knows that Adam is sick before he does; he’s brushing his teeth in a bathroom in Vienna (what a funny artifact, the toothbrush) when she snakes her arms around his middle, when she feels the sickness heavy in his belly like a ballast of poison. Behind her eyes flickers a multiplicity of options, uneasy sensations nearly too subtle and too dim to make out, but her thoughts probe deeper like seeking for the bullet in a wound or picking gravel out of a bad scrape.

She has an intimate familiarity with death, with the full spectrum of sickness, humans going about their day shivering with flu or holding their secret cancers close to themselves. Long ago she’d known what was what before even laying on a hand, the signs had been so sure and clear – but the face of disease has changed. Strains die out, new ones emerge with the help of Adam’s beloved science. Whole stockpiles, whole bunkers full of distilled disease. Adam has swallowed a mouthful.

Her skin prickles. Adam melts deeper into her embrace, to let her lay her head against his bare white shoulder, and Eve gives him a guilty squeeze; the backs of her knuckles graze against his hip.

“Are you feeling quite well, my pet?” Her voice against his lovely soft throat. She’s going to lose him.

***

He won’t fade away. It will be considerably more difficult. For Marlowe it had been a pain both dull and deep, but they hadn’t caught it early – she doesn’t even know if she has, if Adam has been incubating this inside of him for weeks and she’s been too besottedly silly to notice. They even quarrel about it, but all she remembers of the push and pull of that is the Greatest Hits – now it’s her turn to be discouraged and for him to spark with unwarranted hope, or for him to simmer in despair and for her to pull him back from the ledge with words of sooth.

“Don’t you know that blood doctor of yours? Your phlebotomist? Why don’t you phone him?”

“We’ve been through this. Before.”

“That was ages ago, darling, surely there’s been changes, advances. Think of all the vaccines – you remember polio, don’t you? It’s been years–”

“Years? These animals couldn’t fix this if you gave them centuries–”

***

His head is on her knees, and she worries his matted hair into locks with her fingers. His skin has grown dull; his eyes are stuck permanently at a half-starved rotten red and he looks like a bad drawing of himself, an Egon Schiele painting reproduced inexpertly for a postcard.

“I’m frightened,” he says. “Do you think that’s reasonable?”

“I think that’s reasonable, darling.”

***

They’re at an art gallery, after hours, and Eve is lingering over a very fine altarpiece. A scream issues from the next lit room – a girl’s scream. Eve proceeds briskly to find out what the fuss is about, and before she sees, she knows.

Adam is crumpled on the floor, and before she takes a step closer Eve can feel him burning up – he blazes like a furnace, his valiant heart is battering away and hurting itself in the process and he is suffering. A fat bead of blood runs from his left eye, heavy and black. The sight is horrible, and the girl was right to scream, but no sound will come from Eve’s lips and she can only hurry to him. Her beautiful boy is silent, shaking, blinking away more blood.

“What’s wrong with him?” The girl’s voice is almost a scream again, but she’s stifling herself with her hands. She’s the least sentimental of the two of them they’d bitten that night, and has little fondness for Adam in particular.

“Oh, get out of the way–”

“What’s wrong with him? What do we do? What do we do?”

“Do you want me to call someone–”

(His hand is already in his coat pocket for his telephone. These children of theirs are awfully dim sometimes – who, exactly, would they call? A museum attendant, a doctor, a policeman? Some representative of the vampire community? But the boy doesn’t know that, and he couldn’t possibly have known how alone they are.)

“Never mind that, we’re going back to the apartment.” Eve pulls Adam up to his feet, a smear of red appearing on her white coat. He’s groaning a little, but conscious and complaint; he reaches to lace his fingers with hers as soon as they’re upright. Eve calls over her shoulder – “Do you have all your things? We’re leaving.”

The Moroccan boy is holding his girl friend closely – as if it just as well could be her, as if he’s seeing his own beloved there on the floor. They leave all the lights on behind them, and flee.

If it’s something in Adam, it could be in all of them – they’ve fed together, hunted together, and these things travel in packs. Whoever had it might not even have felt sick. That’s the trouble of it. Some kind of species-wide touch-me-not, to discourage predation. Or something less than that, and more. The living have poisoned the air, the sea, the earth, they go about earnestly flinging debris among the stars, and they can’t seem to help it.

Part of her – some adolescent part, never mind that her own distant adolescence was spent trooping barefoot through moss and stone, starving and learning patience – thinks that the best possible thing to do would be to die with him. But that’s a thing she cannot do. Someone has to know the old ways, to know firsthand how far they’ve come. She couldn’t have loved a man who would want her to lie down and be immolated with him instead of running far and fast from danger, until the running itself became a sort of dance.

***

Her gift to him seems like an awfully small thing now – quite insufficient for any purpose. Adam is lying back, tickling out an old tune on the lute; when she approaches he sits up a little, twisting to face her, and his weakness is evident in every line of his body. His hands heft the instrument’s body and for an awful lurch moment she fears against all sense that he will break her gift. His hands might lose their deftness and he might drop it.

“Have you decided what you’re going to call her? Or is she a her at all?”

(Instruments aren’t like sailing ships, or rifles, and Adam’s world can be a bit of a boy’s club sometimes. Which makes the lady poets and the lady writers look all the more exquisite, though Eve has lived long enough not to have such a low estimation of the greats as to assume women geniuses are exceptions that prove some rule.)

“No, I’m afraid it’s another male – I hope I’m not getting tedious. Thomas Chatterton,” Adam pronounces, eyes lowered. “Poet and forger of the seventeen-sixties – he drank arsenic.”

“I know, my darling, I know. He wrote a few nice verses. A remarkably clever boy.”

“He was only a child.”

Adam turns his face away; Eve kisses him on the temple.

“Poor thing.”

***

(A Google alert on her phone tells her that the rock and roll kids have broken into Adam’s house in Detroit, and taken what they could carry away. It’s no real loss. Eve wonders what they will make of what they found there. At least this solves the question of what to do with his things – all his things will be broken apart and scattered to the four winds, they will make their way all over the globe like driftwood and there will always be a little part of him to be recovered. Some print of his soul will linger on hers, no matter where the rest of him has gotten to, until whatever day of reckoning is faced by lovers like them.)

***

Adam seldom get out of bed these days, and Eve usually joins him there; they chatter, or make love, or sing old songs and share a thimbleful of clean blood between the two of them. She reads to him from paperback books whose spines are cracking; he dictates new pieces to her on unlined hotel paper. Sometimes they say nothing at all to each other. He lies with his face against the pillow; her hands run down his back like she’s memorizing a page. She kisses his lips, and rises to go bid farewell to the young lovers downstairs; there is a taxi waiting.

Whether Ava ever made it back to L.A., Eve doesn’t know. Where the others are, if the others retain their old haunts, Eve doesn’t know. The new ones have their own business to be about – they may be lovely, but they aren’t loyal, they have no reason to be, they have no patience for old secrets and have their own trails to blaze.

The girl asks for a telephone number at which she can reach them if there’s trouble; she’s balanced on the railing of the the steps to their apartment, and could be any young woman, going anywhere. Eve tells her, and she hops lightly to the ground to punch it into her own device, coat hanging open despite the cold. There’s not much to be thankful for, so they exchange apologies, all three of them. The boy embraces Eve awkwardly, and she sticks a wad of bills in his coat pocket – Euros, Swiss francs, kronor, a thin smattering of American dollars. She brushes his cheek with a dry kiss like a dear old aunt and sends him on his way.

Perhaps Eve will collect them, a decade or so from now, and see how they’ve done – but until then they will be feral children, cautious and hungry, navigating both fear and desire. She cannot care for them and Adam both, and they can’t be expected to linger long where pestilence is. They’re young, and they ought to be free. Now they’re more free than they’ve ever been.

***

Before long Adam can barely walk. They find a hole to hide in, and to wait.

She lifts him down onto their hotel bed. There he has fits, and when the violence passes he is quite still. His fangs are out, and his mouth is a rose of spoiled blood. Eve clasps his face between her hands, and tries to impress on herself the memory of his face. This is the man she loves, the man she has married and would marry again if she had her choice, a thousand times. She wants to remember him in every attitude he assumes, for always.

Adam opens his eyes; their color is near-black. She presses a kiss above each of them and he lets out an awful, broken sigh.

“I haven’t died yet, have I?”

“No, my love, not yet.”

“Damn.”

“It must be nearly morning. Listen – they’re already going about their business outside. No birds yet, but I heard a woman’s suitcase with wheels, rolling along. There’s a car outside with a little engine trouble, too. Tell me what you hear, darling, you’ve always had the keenest ears…”

They fall to whispering, and Adam holds her there; she kisses his split and bloody lips. They sleep, and wait. Like Severn watching Keats – Adam would like that, he’d always liked that little pipsqueak, in a late-nineteenth-century sort of way. When the night comes again and it’s time for them to wake, Eve can barely lift her head. There are aching places on her body where Adam’s fingers have left marks from holding her too tightly, but he’s gone slack now, and quite still. Eve’s tangled up in him, her legs and his legs, her arm slung over his beautiful broad back, his lips and her lips unstirred by breath.

A sob starts somewhere in her chest, knotting up like a fist, but she does not move, she does not make a sound.

There will be no more music when he’s gone. Eve lies still, and knows she is alone.