Vampire Sunrise

Chapter Thirty-six

 
ONCE THE ELEVATOR stopped, the nurses pushed out the opening doors ahead of me. Hallways led away in a half-sunburst pattern. Directly ahead were gold-sheathed double doors high and wide enough to admit King Kong.
I hoped the big ape was not the next CinSim I encountered. I was in no mood to play Fay Wray, although I was appropriately attired in my bare feet and winding sheet, with the cross-hung chains now a discreet bib necklace at my collarbones.
Even my gaudy familiar had decided to play it close to the vest.
I crossed the threshold as the nurses vanished to either side, leaving me to encounter Ms. Big alone. And she was a rarity indeed.
"Welcome to my kingdom," she said. "I am Cleopatra."
Her "throne room," though, was a lavish modern penthouse suite featuring sprawling leather-upholstered sofas and ottomans you could sink into and glass-topped coffee tables sparkling with art glass decorations from the window-wall light.
I recognized Cleo at once, and, for once, not from my long lone nights watching old movies on the group home TVs. I hadn't seen her on any film or any rerun TV channel. She was a creature of memory and the ether, like real Egyptian royalty. She was a Cleopatra for the ages.
Her tissue-sheer gown was a half-circle attached by jeweled bands at her wrists and upper arms, richly beaded in an intricate rayed design. Gold ribbons radiated from her nipples and the fork of her legs, providing such ineffective coverage the outfit would be banned in Boston to this day. An elaborate gilded headdress half-covered her thick dark hair.
Theda Bara as Cleopatra. Awesome. No footage of this silent-film queen portaying the Queen of the Nile in her first screen appearance remained to fascinate or amuse either lowly masses or sneering film critics. Someone, though, had recovered legendary lost footage to create this CinSim without peer. She was, as much as any moving being could be, even in Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, Cleopatra herself.
I moved my bare feet slowly over the icy thrill of granite floors, for she also was bare of foot, as if savoring the relief from the sandy sun-drenched climate we shared thousands of miles and many millennia apart.
"You are a traveler through the desert and have suffered much misadventure," she said. "My handmaidens will bathe and refresh you."
How could I resist this divinely corny invitation? Was I finally an extra in a vintage movie? Not a desirable corpse for a grue-drenched modern century but a guest in a desert land with an ancient code of hospitality to extend every civility as they had not been bestowed for centuries.
And then they could in good conscience kill me, of course.
But what a way to go!
THE VAMPIRE HANDMAIDENS, now attired in linen sheaths like fifties housewives (except the sheaths were see-through so they probably were Desperate Housewives), guided me through halls and chambers to a sunken pool tiled in lapis lazuli and carnelian.
I dropped the sheet like Miley Cyrus hadn't at that infamous Vanity Fair photo shoot. I wasn't worried. I was an adult and this was classy, folks! Art.
Clutching it together had helped me conceal the vial of my blood in my curled fist. Now I laid the tiny tube at the pool's edge before I waded into the limpid water and sank naked under its dubious cover. Wow. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. A tepid, body-temp tub after all my stress. Perfect.
A wary kid who always used the gym dressing rooms, I'd suddenly shed my inhibitions with my winding sheet. Call it resurrection. Maybe being alive and in possession of all my blood had encouraged me to go with the flow.
Actually, the early-sixties Cleo had been a kind of role model of mine. You figure it: me seeing late-night reruns of the Technicolor Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra: Liz: black hair, blue eyes, white skin. Okay, they said her eyes were violet. I could get contact lenses. Right?
The fanged handmaidens fluttered at the edges of the pool, laying out clothes and jewels. Yes! I so deserved this, and besides, I thought I had the whole scene figured out. Liz wasn't the only foxy chick on the planet.
I stepped out to be wrapped in white linen like the young cowboy on the streets of Laredo, only it was fine-woven white linen as sheer as silk and was a dressing gown, not a winding sheet.
The handmaidens outlined my eyes with kohl and painted my lips red and tinted my finger and toe nails. Just like a free makeover at Macy's.
They scented me with oils and perfumes and smoothed my tangled hair with an ivory comb carved with hyenas and elephants treading on really big snakes. (That ivory kinda bothered me. I used only cruelty-free beauty products at home, what few I had.) And why weren't the elephants treading on those really lethal hyenas?
I wondered which Hollywood Egyptian outfit I'd get and nearly swooned when they produced a filmy skirt and-truly a rare early film artifact-Theda Bara's gold metal bra with coiled serpents for cups and chain strap behind the neck
Okay, I'd been known to decry Princess Leia for having to wear a chain metal bikini in Return of the Jedi. Carrie Fisher had objected to her neck-high, wrist-and-ankle-long outfits in the first two Star Wars movies, I'd read, but she hadn't warmed up to the gold metal bikini: "When they took my clothes off, put me in a bikini and shut me up, I thought it was a strong indication of what the third film was."
Still, this funky bra was vintage history! Theda Bara hadn't had any such costume nudity or exploitation scruples. If she had, her Cleopatra film wouldn't be missing in action to this day. Besides, Ric with his boyhood belly dancer fetish would go berserk if he could see me now!
Sadly for us both, he was safe at home this time, and this was my solo film fantasy expedition. What a kick! I felt like Flash Gordon's girlfriend, Dale Arden, in the hands of the evil emperor Ming. (Look them up; those old movie serials rocked.)
And those thirties action babes always got an extreme makeover before being presented to the Main Man of Power for vague, sinister purposes... and then saved by the good guy. A little like Dorothy in the Emerald City, no? Kinda a male female fantasy. Like me sacrificing myself to Snow's Brimstone Kiss before I turned the tables and became Biker Babe and saved Ric.
Maybe I felt so safe running through the clichd routine because a woman was in charge. Probably a mistake. Women could be soul sisters, then they could turn on a dime like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and become rival bitches. Maybe like Lilith. Flip a coin and hope it's not silver.
Everything felt and smelled so good, though. I was full-bore me again with my in-board allies-the silver familiar and Irma-operative once more. I was beginning to get what was going on, big time, and who the players were, big time.
I tucked my precious blood vial into the only safe place in this scanty outfit and woman's ally since Eden-my tightly packed cleavage. Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
If I played along, I would learn much more.
CLEOPATRA WAS WAITING for me in the suite's lavish main room, arrayed on one sofa, but I greeted her again as "Theda" because a film buff knows several things.
One, "Theda Bara" is an anagram for "Arab Death," which was exotic fodder for film magazines in the last century's teens. Today it reflects international terrorism, but that's accidental.
She'd been born not-quite-plain Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati. She'd made herself into the very first and supreme female film "vamp" to counter those Mary Pickford curly-topped blondes of the day.
Brunette, with Cupid-bow lips and heavy-lidded smoldering eyes, she always played heroines, or villainesses, who thirsted for men's bodies, blood, and/or soul. She was a century ahead of her time, and it's only fitting that most of her film footage is "lost" to this day.
All that remain are fading black-and-white photos of her in gowns so risqu they went down in film history, even if she herself is just a fading footnote now. And here I was sitting in a duplicate of one of the most scandalous, a metal bra.
As femmes fatales go, Theda was definitely out of style. She was wearing the most revealing Cleopatra outfit ever, an exquisitely embroidered transparent silk robe that covered the three major juicy bits with stars that radiated five gilt bands of decorative ribbon. I couldn't help gaping at the decorations.
Her figure was not twenty-first-century. She was small up top with most of her weight between waist and knees, a leftover of the Rubenesque days of yore we women all longed for, when thighs were queen instead of liposuctioned.
Me, I was better balanced, but no skeleton, and I intended to stay that way.
"Would you like some beer?" those bee-stung lips asked.
I knew the ancient Egyptians relished the stuff as much as NASCAR fans-in that searing climate, you'd be crazy not to. Thanks to Shezmou, I also knew that Egypt also had vineyards of the gods.
"Wine, if you have it."
"White, or red?"
Shezmou's bloodwine of pharaohs had intrigued me. White sounded common. I decided to stand out.
"Red."
I wouldn't drink it if it was really blood. We sat atop a giant ant hill of vampires, after all. Somehow, though, I felt secure up here, as if it was neutral territory.
Theda waved a serpent-braceleted hand. I heard the bare feet of my fanged nannies padding away.
My silver familiar transformed into twin upper-arm-twining cobras to duel her golden jewelry. Theda and I gave each other our most mysterious, serene gazes.
I waited for my well-earned wine.