Phantom

Chapter 18

The drive to Las Vegas is more pleasant than I anticipated. There is something about roaring along a dark empty road that relaxes me. Keeping an eye out for police, I set the cruise control at an even eighty. It seems only a short while before the horizon begins to glow with the polluted lake of colored neon that is the gambling capital of the world. I will roll the red dice today, I think, and pray for a successful combination of DNA. The eastern sky is already warm with light. The sun will rise soon.
I park a block down the street from Arturo's house and scan the area for FBI agents, cops, or army personnel. But the place appears quiet, forgotten in the fallout of the incinerated army base. Slipping over Arturo's back fence, I am through an open window and into the house in less than a minute. An eight-and-a-half-by-eleven photograph stands in a cheap frame on the kitchen table--Arturo and me, taken one night while we were out on the Strip together. When I believed he was a down-on-his-luck govern?ment employee and he thought I was a sucker. The picture gives me reason to pause. I pick it up and study Arturo's features. They remind me so much of someone I know.
"You are Kalika's father," I whisper, stunned.
Everything makes sense in an instant. Vampires are sterile, with one another, with human partners. But Arturo was neither a vampire nor a human. He was a hybrid, forged in the Middle Ages, a combination of the two, and I slept with him in a Las Vegas hotel room just before he betrayed me to the government. I was pregnant from before the transformation. In other words, I was still a vampire when Kalika was conceived. Yet she is partially human, and that no doubt explains her lack of sensitivity to the sun. She is the result of a queer toss of the genetic dice, and perhaps that's what it took for a soul of her dark origin to incarnate on earth.
And I assumed Ray was her father.
I'm aware of him at my back even before he speaks.
"I'm surprised you didn't guess earlier," he says.
I turn, still holding the photograph. Ray remains hidden in the shadows, appropriately enough. It is not just Kalika's birth that I suddenly understand. But my new insights, which are not entirely clear to me yet, are ill-defined ghosts that refuse to enter the living body of logical reason. Despair and denial engulf me.
I feel as if I stand in a steaming graveyard with a tombstone at my back. The death date of the corpse is carved in the future, the name scribbled in blood that will never dry. I know the truth but refuse to look at it.
And there is a mirror on this tombstone.
Covered with a faint film of black dust.
"You could have told me," I say.
"I could only tell you what you wanted to hear."
The weakness of grief spreads through my limbs. Ray has become a travesty to me, someone I cannot bear to look at, yet I don't want him to go away. He is all I have left. The graveyard in my mind is littered with hidden mines. I fear that if I move or speak to him, one might explode and toss a skeleton in my lap.
"How did you get here?" I ask.
"You brought me here."
"Does Kalika know I'm here?"
"I don't think so. But she might."
"You didn't tell her?"
"No."
Putting down the photograph, I take a moment to collect myself. My imagined graveyard falls away beneath me as the tombstone collapses. Yet I am forced to remain standing in this house where Arturo once lived.
"Can I ask you a question?" I say finally.
He remains in the shadows. "Don't ask anything you don't want answered."
"But I do want answers."
He shakes his head. "Few really want the complete truth. It doesn't matter if you're a vampire or a human. The truth is overrated, and too often pain?ful." He adds, "Let it be, Sita."
There is emotion in my voice. "I need to know just one thing."
"No," he warns me. "Don't do this to yourself."
"Just one little thing. I understand how you found me in Las Vegas. You explained that and it made sense to me, but you never explained how you picked up my trail again in Los Angeles. While I was driving here, you should have been in the basement in this house, changing back into a human."
"It was dark that night," he says.
His answer confuses me. "It's dark every night."
"It would have been dark in the basement."
The confusion passes. "You need the sun to power the alchemy."
"Yes."
"You must still be a vampire?"
"No."
"You must have followed us to L.A.?"
"No."
"Who are you? What did Eddie's blood do to you?"
"Nothing. Eddie's blood never touched me."
"But you said--"
"I lied," he interrupts. "You asked me to lie to you. You do not want the truth. You swear to yourself that you do but you swear at the altar of false gods. Let it be, Sita. We can leave this place together. It can be as it once was between us, if you will just let it. It is all up to you."
"You are not ready to hear."
"When will I be ready to hear?'
"Soon."
"You know this?"
"I know many things, Mother."
"Why is it all up to me?" I ask. "You're as responsi?ble for what happened to us as I am."
"No."
"Stop saying no! Stop saying yes! Explain yourself!"
He is a long time answering. "What do you want me to say?"
I place my hands on the sides of my head. "Just tell me who you are. Why you are not like the old Ray. How you found me in the coffee shop." I feel so weak. "Why you knocked at my door."
"When did I knock at your door?"
"Here." I point. "You knocked at that door right there. You said it was you."
"When did I knock at your door?" he repeats.
Of course I have not answered his question. He is asking about time, and I am talking about place. I have to force my next words into the air where they can be heard and understood.
"You appeared right after I changed into a human," I say.
"Yes."
"You're saying that's a remarkable coincidence."
"I am saying you should stop now."
I nod to myself, speak to myself. "You are saying the two events are related; the transformation and your reappearance. That you only reentered my life because I had become human."
"Close."
I pause. "What am I missing?"
"Everything."
"But you just said I was close!"
"When you roll the dice, close does not count. You either win or you lose."
"What did I lose when you returned?"
"What is not important. Why is all that matters."
"Now listen to my song. It dispels all illusions... When you feel lost remember me, and you will see that the things you desire most are the very things that bring you the greatest sorrow."
"I have always desired two things," I say, remem?bering the Lord's words. "For five thousand years I have desired them. They were the two things that were taken from me the night Yaksha came for me and made me a vampire. The night he stole my daughter and husband. I never saw either of them again."
Ray is sympathetic. "I know."
I hang my head and it is now me who stands in shadows. "But when you came into my life I felt as if Rama had been returned to me. And when I became human and thought I was pregnant with your baby, I felt as if Krishna had returned Lalita to me." There is a tear on my face, maybe two, and I have to stop and take a deep breath. "But it didn't work that way. The things I craved so long were my greatest illusions. And they have brought me the greatest sorrow."
"Yes."
I lift my head and stare at him.
"They are not real," I say.
"Yes."
"As a vampire, I could see through my illusions, and that kept me going all these years, but as a human I couldn't see what was real and what wasn't. I was too weak."
"You create what you want. You always have. If you don't like it, you can always leave."
He speaks with gentle passion. "Don't say it, Sita."
But I have to. I feel as if I can see through him. Now I understand why he never went out. Why he never met my friends or spoke to anyone besides Kalika and me. Why I had to do everything with my own hands. Between us, they were the only pair of hands we had.
"You're not real," I say.
He steps out of the shadows. His face is so beau?tiful.
"It doesn't matter, Sita. We can pretend it doesn't matter. I don't want to leave you."
My body is a chalice of misery. "But you're dead," I moan.
He comes close enough to touch me. "It doesn't matter."
No tears fall from my face. Dry sobs rack my body. They are worse than moist tears, worse because they are the evidence of evaporated grief, and I have only these to show to this silhouette of a boyfriend who stands before me now. This lover who can only love me as I deem myself worthy. No wonder he turned against me when I turned against him. He is a mirror on the tombstone. The film of black dust clears, and I see in the mirror that I have slowly been burying myself since I first came up the stairs of this house and heard the knock at the front door.
Who is it? Your darling. Open the door.
"I can't keep this door open," I whisper.
He touches my lower lip. "Sita."
I turn my head away from his hand. "No. You must go back."
"To where?"
"To where you came from."
'That is the abyss. There is nothing there. I am not there."
A note of quiet hysteria enters my voice. "You're not here. You're worse than a ghost. No one can see you! How can I possibly love you?"
He grabs my hand. "But you feel me. You know I'm here."
I fight to shake free of his hand but I just end up gripping it tighter. Yet I do not press it to my heart, as I used to. His hand is cold.
"No," I say. "I know you're not here."
He lightly kisses my finger. "Do you feel that?"
"No."
"You lie."
"You are the lie! You don't exist! How can I make you cease to exist!"
My words wound him, finally--they seem to tear the very fabric of his existence. For a moment his face shimmers, then goes out of focus. Yet he draws in a sudden breath and his warm brown eyes lock on to my eyes. He is not merely a mirror, but a hologram from a dimension where there are more choices than time and space. He is the ultimate maya, the complete illusion. The perfect love dressed in my own grief. No wonder when I met him in the coffee shop he was wearing the clothes he died in. He is nothing but a memory shouted back down the tunnel all mortals pass through when they leave this world. Yes, Ray is dead but I have let him become my own death as well.
He seems to read my thoughts.
His hope fades. He answers my last question.
"I died a vampire," he says. "You must kill me the way you would kill a vampire." He grabs a knife from the nearby table and presses it into my hand. "My heart beats only for you."
He wants me to cut his heart out. I try to push him away, but he holds me close. I can feel his breath on my face, like the brush of a winter wind. Yet now, here at the end, his eyes burn with a strange red light, the same light I have occasionally glimpsed in my daugh?ter's eyes. He nods again as he reads my mind.
"If I return to the abyss," he says, "I'll see Kali there." He squeezes the handle of the knife into my palm. "Do it quick. You're right, the love is gone. I do want to die."
"I should never have been born," I whisper, ad?dressing his last remark.
He manages a faint smile "Goodbye, Sita."
I stab him in the heart. I cut his flesh and his bones, and the blood gushes over my hands, onto my clothes, and over the floor. The black blood of the abyss, the empty space of Kali. But I scream as I kill him, scream to God for mercy, and the knife mysteriously falls from my hand and bounces on the dry floor. The blood evaporates.
His heart no longer beats and I'm no longer bloody.
He is gone, my ancient love is gone.
Out the window, the sun rises.
Taking Yaksha's blood, I pour it into the vial that once held Seymour's blood, the clear vial that I place above the copper and the crystals, between the cross-shaped magnets and the shiny mirror that reflects the rays of the sun directly into Arturo's hidden base?ment. I recline on the copper and the alchemy begins to work its dark magic on my trembling body. I have to wonder exactly what I will be when the sun finally sets and the process is complete. On impulse I have added to the vial a few drops of blood from Paula's child. The blood of the infant that Kalika covets above all else. I can only hope it does me good.