I. Practice Makes Perfect
The first time wasn't an impulsive spasm of fury or reckless well why not curiousity.
The first time was at an event.
That's what we call them: events. Because 'party' is passé. Because 'party' is a Hollywood ideal. 'Party' doesn't convey the pomp and circumstance or the circumstantial pomposity of an event celebrating the creation myth of a glittering figure who burns for the west coast art scene.
The party was not crafted for Loukas Sandoval-Desjardins but he shines in its setting, but as the evening burns itself toward a stub he finds himself amused but weary with a head full of propositions from the hopeful mostly involving his patronage and wouldn’t he like to and doesn’t he think. They’re out tonight en masse — the sharks, nonprofit fundraisers, desperate and self-important. He wonders if he’s bleeding.
He didn’t think he’d find someone else in the empty coatroom down the narrow staff only hall, but he has. The woman couldn’t be as old as he is (which is somewhere in the upper realms of the third decade) but he’s struck by a self-possession which makes it difficult for him to guage. The woman definitely isn’t as old as he is but she’s got that quality some starry things have of agelessness. No, that’s not quite right: not agelessness. He can’t strike on the right word. The young woman cuts him a sidelong glance a restrained startlement in the sharpness of it. Loukas isn’t self-conscious about being caught looking, not even when she turns toward him. Executes a gesture with the hand holding a cigarillo that rakes him in toe to tip.
“I’m here for petty revenge,” she says. “You?”
“Nothing so ignoble. Respite and refreshment.”
“Revenge, respite, refreshment,” she says, musing with the curl of a smile. She has looked away to study the end of the cigarillo. “But isn’t it ignoble to seek respite from people who are so busy meaning so much meaning?”
Loukas snorts. He doesn’t ask if she’d like to be alone and leave. She doesn’t tell him she’ll leave him to his respite. Loukas shuts the door. The service hall blocks out some of the din from the event but now the din is truly dampened, a smear of noise for a backdrop.
“Was that your plan for revenge? Whisk yourself away from somebody who is expecting you to be there? They turn around and well well well.”
The woman doesn’t laugh but there’s a suggestion of the possibility of laughter when she brings the cigarillo to her mouth and flicks her gaze back to Loukas’s face. “No. Is that how you enact your petty vengeances?”
“Couldn’t say I’ve ever thought about it.”
“Are you lying?”
She sounds so frankly curious that Loukas finds his eyebrows lofting and his response is a spare chuckle. He’s the sort of man who chuckles yes but his chuckles are like burrs that catch in somebody’s trouser leg or burrow stealthily under a sock. Only you don’t notice them or their intent until they stick you or prick you and ow — they bite. Often they bite. He’s the sort of man whose chuckles are gritty (silt [salt]).
That’s how the conversation begins. They discuss getting a pilot’s license (he has his and a jet besides) and they discuss what it feels like to be an ex-pat during war-time and one thing leads to another. They return to the subject of [petty] revenge. The conversation ends with a kiss and then a Kiss. His heart is a stag running, panting when the Kiss is over.
“I'm married. I have a wife.” He doesn’t sound cocky or guilty.
Offhand, she wonders whether if she concentrated she could taste guilt in his blood. Would the senses, heightened and omen-drenched, distinguish a particular flavor? Was he telling her because he felt guilt? For a moment she just looks at him. Then she says, “I wonder, what am I supposed to do with that? Either I say something like ‘oh, but does she have you?’ and become a villain or I flee and you get to become one. Go on, why’d you say it?”
“For honesty's sake.”
This is the first time and it happens at an event and it is an event. Don’t say ‘party.’
The woman being so honored (let's name her Francis Simon) is standing up to say a few words because this is the last swallow of the evening before it’s nothing left but backwash and dregs. The woman’s funny, used to performing, a youtube star turned museum piece slumming it while she blurs the line between performance and art. Loukas is getting ready to leave when he spies the young woman again, slouching over there in a small cluster of people, not the center [but isn’t she a lodestone?], or at least not actively the center. Their eyes meet and she turns away and
his heart dislodges.
Love at first sight does not exist. Love is blindness. Love at first sight does exist. Don’t all the poets say so? All the artists everywhere? Haven’t they always said so, as long as there’s been art and as long as art’s been shadowed by let’s call them dark muses? He doesn’t believe in love at first sight or love as anything beyond something he’s got an academic interest in. He leaves quickly as soon as he’s touched by it, but he returns as she’s leaving, his car an oil-slick smear of darkness gliding up behind and beside her the windows rolling down. Her reflection wavers on the glass naiad-etched and pale and the headlights loose shadows fleeing across her and away and the curve of one rounded shoulder rises as she [starry things are ageless, but what else? Lucifer’s sword, burning where-ever it fell like Icarus in that painting by Breugel] turns to look. The ambient light on the street is just enough to hint at the relief in her eyes as she lifts her chin and says, “Hello again.”
“I didn’t get your name or your number.”
[Perspective shift.]
This is the first time.
“I hope he chooses to invest,” says Bianca Castro, a gallerist Lux has met before and whose conversation she is taking part in (by listening, inadvertently providing a center).
“Him? Who is he?” A beat. Laughing, “And invest in what?”
Bianca Castro isn’t wikipedia but by god in this moment she’s just as good if not better. Loukas Sandoval-Desjardins. He’s not an artist. He’s a formidable sharpness, eye and tongue. He’s not on the Power 100 list this year but everybody agrees that’s a fluke. Or he is on the Power 100 list and he’s number #67. Invested in e-flux, owns galleries in London, Zurich, Los Angeles, New York. Played artistic director for the Sandoval Art Foundation before being succeeded by Margaux Beaton and so on and so forth and what’s he doing in Denver? He’s got a house that he visits sometimes on his way elsewhere.
Loukas is on his way out when he looks around the room, meets Lux’s eyes, and when their eyes meet she knows just how to cast her line — how to make a hook and how to sink it into the heart how to grab on an individual’s heart string and play it for keeps. It’s a visceral sense that now she knows and it surprises her for an instant. The theory she’s understood for a while, but with an amateur’s understanding. Now. Now she is surprised, turns away and then baits the hook with Blood (his, recently [fitting: neat]). Does it go off?
Look at her. This is one manifestation of Discipline that no one who knows how it works could doubt comes naturally. Has the potential come easily. She was made to enthrall people, to compell them with her beauty; to ensnare and to move them, just so. Made, not born: isn’t that right? Because nobody’s born to be one image for eternity.
Did it go off? She thinks that it did, but when she looks back he is not there.
The event’s just ending, Lux can see another Kindred she remembers vaguely from Elysium slipping away with a meal. Lux is not satisfied, but the hunting edge has been dulled even after her efforts. In the street, she’s planning on going to a park and running as fast as she can. That’ll whett the hunger, but sometimes it just feels good to be what you are, doesn’t it? Then she has some emails and letters to write before the sun cracks on the horizon and forces her into sleep.
Headlights sliding, gliding, shadows like bars drifting on the sidewalk and she is ready to become a sword. The narrow look is wary; the wariness is subsumed by relief tempered with curiousity when the window rolls down and it’s Loukas Sandoval-Desjardins.
“I didn’t get your name or your number,” he says. Did it work? Is he entranced? The Anarch studies his features carefully: as if they might give her a hint.
Lux stops walking and the car stops rolling forward. She rests her hip against it (the car’s warm — she is not) when she pulls a pen out of her bag, writes across his hand. His hand is warm and callused and all hard sinew and when she’s done, she caps her pen and says, “Call me in the evening.”
“Do you need a ride?”
Lux: considers the car and considers Loukas. And of course she considers the streets. Dangerous streets, even and especially here. Never know when a Lick’s going to demand a password or a display of privilege. Never know a lot of things and it’s forcing her senses sharp, re-shaping her into the kind of creature with a keen edge. But there’s something freeing, something free, about being untied and at loose ends — this event happens in the nights before she begins to feel lonely. Before she has a minor revelation of the kind all immortal things have eventually, as they mature.
“No,” she says. “But if you’re offering, I’ll take it gladly. Conditionally.”
Her eyes have come to rest on Loukas Sandoval-Desjardins again. She can see where salt has begun to pepper his hair, where he carries himself like a man younger than he is and where he carries himself like a man who is older. She can even hear, although most wouldn’t, buried in his voice some other accent, some spectre of other cities. If he were near, she fancies — though she is not a fanciful creature — that she could feel the sunlight’s presence on his skin. Lux is a vampire who can’t remember her last sunset, if she was even outside that day. If she remembers soaking up sun-rays in Hollywood, remembers what gave her those freckles that skim the surface of her cream-pale skin, then perhaps she remembers them only as the aura of warmth from another human being.
Is Loukas lucky? Is thinking about warmth, about auras of heat, halos made of radiance going to give her the discipline to slant her gaze just-so and push it like-this and see his halo? No. But she tries anyway.
She still doesn’t know. Did the blood tug on him? Has he been ‘capt? And for how long?
Her eyes have come to rest on him: they’re curious and fixed.
“Conditionally?” he says, in a tone of disbelief.
“Sure,” she says. “First you introduce yourself.”
—
They talk about a lot of things in that car.
II. An E-mail Interlude
To: Karen Myllholland <???????@????????>
From: L. Desjardins <l.desjardins@art.edu>
Date: March, ???? 2014
Subject: Re: Denver, Co
A waystation? An oasis. Haven. Pilgrimage. Makkah before it had its rock? Ha Ha. Resilient. Potential. Unpredictable. Useful? Emergent.
I have half-decided to give Denver its rock. You know (God knows, Everybodysomehow knows the same cousin of a friend’s cousin) I’m ready for another project. Are you interested? Take a look over the business plan, will you? I plugged in numbers based on previous experience, etcetera, etcetera.
Why Denver? Good question. I have this vision of a Denver that is and has been all of those words I typed. Emergent. Ascendant. I’ve paddled around in the pool, thinking it a shallow thing, but I’m not so certain now. There is something attractive about a liminal space.
[the rest of the e-mail redacted on account of being a very dry business plan for a new gallery and a festival of the arts in 2015 preceded by a ‘guerilla’ festival
pretentious shop-top — the best fucking kind]
To: L. Desjardins <l.desjardins@art.edu>
From: Lux <?????@???????>
Date: April, ????? 2014
Subject: Re: Gallery Proposal
You’ve decided to give Denver its rock? Goody! Ask it to be yours to have and to hold? Or are you flinging rocks, shattering everything that’s glass-tenuous already in place? We’re a Djinni construct you know right now — glass scissors and glass spires and a hive of activity.
Do I sound pleased as venom in a sting? No? What about a flashlight with a fresh battery? Oil and a hinge? Well I am! Does this mean you’ll be back in town soon? Let’s talk about what’s really important.
Look I know it’s a strange little venue but have you thought about the Foxtail? Poor Shef has to sell because of tragedies and it’s got je n’est ce quois coming out of its ears and no doctors been able to help it. Lord!
To: L. Desjardins <l.desjardins@art.edu>
From: Lux <????@???????>
Date: April 22nd, 2014
Subject: Re: Concerned
You saw the footage too huh? Quite a thing, but the thing that kills me is it was probably the way he wanted to go. ‘Fortinbras’?
III. Family - Meditations, Early-to-Mid April
April is the Cruellest Month
This is after Nathan disappoints her so. This is after after after she is so infuriated that
Yes, Lux.
Couldn’t she kill him. Couldn't she just murder him.
Her older (much) brother is: implaccable, steadfast, loyal. He is also down two servants as of April 4th and though her attention has been claimed by another kind of family(.) emergency once gossip does what gossip does Lux pulls her thoughts from the troubling, infuriating antics of her descendent. He is temporary. Lux hasn't yet unlived long enough for everybody who once knew her to be dead but most of the important ones are and decades after she can already feel how temporary they are. Especially him. So many hospital visits and such recklessness, isn't it just a matter of months? He is temporary and she is supposed to have left thoughts of that family behind. Hasn't she another?
Another family, this one as eternal (conditionally) as she. Another family, centuries in the making, centuries behind them and centuries perhaps ahead if the world doesn't end if the dangerous business of staying quick doesn't catch them out. Another family, and isn't she concerned about it?
So she pens a note. Sends it care of G. Miller - speaking of steadfast - to Richthofen Castle where he is to find Jasper. Sends it care of G. Miller to perhaps instead some party she is not attending, but might reasonably expect her 'brother' to attend.
Too close!
Thence after en française.
No no no. I disallow you to lose any more possessions & that includes bright-eyed messengers. Ask my valet to give yours tips he's great at that kind've thing, knows just how much you mean to me.
IV. Auguries
The All Inn Motel is
[redacted]
--
Here are the rolls for Entrancing Loukas Desjardins + some rolls relevant to the Jack moodpost to follow. This is from a transcript dated 04/03 -- why can't I be speedy, Joey?
fleurs du mal
[I will roll Lux first. Lux: Hey, I think -- maybe if I do it this way, then -- Appearance (Specialty) + Empathy. -1 bloodpoint. Diff: subject's current willpower. I think, hm. 6. They can be willpowery for a mortal. +WP, because Perfectionism!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
fleurs du mal
[6 successes. Entranced, sir.]
fleurs du mal
[How alert are we re: surroundings, anyway? New (yay) Perception + Alertness.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )
fleurs du mal
[Boo. Better at being social-y than notice-y. Well. Now for Jack!]
leurs du mal
[First Jack is going to Summon animalz. Maybe rats or mice. Maybe cats. I will decide when I moodpost it. Charisma + Survival.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
fleurs du mal
[Now he is going to tell them to do things. I will say diff: 7, in case it is rats. But if it is cats, it is diff: 6. Why are the bats that are diff 6 specifically 'vampire bats'? Ugh, WW. Anyway. Manipulation + Animal Ken.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )
mnemosyne
WITNESSETH.
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