I Need More You

Justine Musk

I look like an angel, but I am no angel.

“I know what you are,” the boy said.

He had been following me for God knows how long, skinny white-faced blur swimming through the sand-tossed air. Under normal circumstances I would have noticed him much earlier, but there was nothing normal about tonight: not this temporary makeshift city deep in a desert nowhere, camps set along concentric rings that framed the area known as the playa: and not my purpose for being here, my mind enfolding the image of my lover like it were some dark, priceless egg on the edge of breaking.

He had summoned me here. He was so close, now – out there on the playa – I could almost taste how I’d be tasting him later.

He did not look like an angel any more than the fake ones I saw in the crowds, raggedy wings sprouting from naked or near-naked backs, bobbing along with each step. Different strains of music – house, reggae, acid jazz, dubstep – poured from the elaborately fashioned art-camps that rimmed the inside of the playa, thumped from the speakers of the outdoor clubs. White and neon lights picked out the art-cars moving along the playa, described the domes and twisting organic shapes of the theme camps. And the Man watched over it all: a giant, primitive figure lit up a ghostly blue, striding atop a wooden dome. On the last night of the festival, they would burn him and watch him fall.

“I know what you are,” the kid said again. His voice came at me like a worm twisting through the sandy dark. “Sweet girl. Sweet, beautiful girl. I know.”

“Get lost. I have nothing for you.”

“I know what you have. I want it. Need it. Please.”

He darted round to face me. The wind blew sand in our faces. I did not slow for him, forcing him into an awkward back-pedal as his eyes tried to meet mine and dropped away. A string of beads draped his neck, he was fingering it like a rosary, his shirt flapping on a decidedly unappealing torso. I have a penchant for lean human forms, their carved-out beauty of muscle and sinew, but this was a vermin body, starved and dirty and desperate, with the high-sweet smell of something rotting inside. “Please,” he said again. “You are so beautiful. So fucking beautiful.” Couldn’t he bother to arrange himself more appealingly? Fall to his knees, lift his arms with dramatic flourish, tilt his head to expose that soft stretch of throat? Perhaps even quote some poetry. I can be a sucker for poetry. But there was no poetry in this one.

“I can give you what you need,” he said. “I can give you –”

I stopped. “You presume to know my need?”

Small muscles jumped in his face. “I . . . ” he said, and then, wisely, thought better of saying anything. That high-sweet smell came at me again: cancer. He was in the beginning stages of it.

I made a darting motion. Heat pulsed behind my eyes. I showed him my fangs, cold daggers in my mouth. Dropping my voice a full octave – a parlour trick, really, but it was a chance to amuse myself – I hissed, “You want my brand of cruelty? Because I can give you cruelty. I can give you pain.”

His eyes widened. Behind him – and the forming puddle at his feet – drifted a double-decker bus reinvented as a pirate ship, electro-pop blasting from its deck. Bodies hung out the windows, yelled through September dark: “Come aboard! Come, my pretties! We love you! WE LOVE ALL OF YOU!” Some onlookers cheered. Two young men ran up alongside it and launched themselves through the door. By the time it had passed – only art-cars were allowed on the playa, and no faster than five miles an hour – my little vermin-stalker was gone.

The wind died.

The sand settled.

The vermin had thrown me off. I’d been in some kind of trance, lulled by my lover’s scent in my nostrils, his taste in my mind, the memory and the anticipation. Now that was gone, throwing me back on nothing and no one but myself. I was alone on this dead Nevada land scattered with odd gigantic sculptures, over there some kind of laser show, and over there towering figures kneeling in worship of an oil derrick that, like the Man and the Chapel of Lost Souls, would be set afire at festival end. In front of me someone had set up a stand painted white with an antique telephone chained to a table and a sign reading TALK TO GOD. FIVE CENTS.

You bring me here, I said, streaming the thought-words out across the playa. Oh this desire, like a fierce blade twisting in my chest, his name engraved so deep there could be no substitute or replacement. It never truly went away. It hummed its dark addictive song beneath my days and nights – months and years and decades – while I travelled and hunted and loved (tried to love) and all the while pretending that I wasn’t just marking time until he came again to my dreams, and told me where to go. Where to find him.

You bring me here, I said again, to this bizarre place, this carnival on the moon, you summon me and I come, like the dog that you have made me. And I do it. I cross the country for you. I cross the world for you. I would cross time itself if I had to . . . because I want, I need, more you . . .

But after tonight I am done with you.

I won’t be caught on this chain any more.

I waited, probing the air for some kind of response. There was nothing. But then that seemed so much of what he was: creature of silence and void. He seemed most at ease in the in-between spaces, as if to look on him directly would do to him what full daylight would do to me.

“They’re all over, this year.”

So lost was I inside my own head, and so still and striking the woman who had spoken, that for a moment I thought she was another sculpture: desert Venus rising from the sand.

“The joops,” she said. “Like the one that was bothering you. I thought you handled him well, by the way.” She sighed. “That’s what happens when we drink without killing. Word gets around. What a pain.”

I tuned into her with interest: the smell of her evoked berries and cream, richly coloured silks, Belgian chocolate.

“I don’t know you,” she said, tilting her head. Reddish-brown hair spread along her shoulders. She wore a long suede dress that crisscrossed her torso in an elaborate assortment of straps. “I thought I knew all the nightsingers out here.”

“Is that what we’re supposed to call ourselves now?” My voice was arch. “Is that the politically correct term?”

Of course I knew the word, which had come into vogue at the turn of the new century – “nightsinger”, meant to designate a certain class of vampire. Vampires come in all shapes and sizes, with varying degrees of appeal for our prey; the nightsingers, though, are the ones they write books about, and that the vermin – the so-called joops, a play on the words “junkie” and “groupie” – tracked and followed, begged to be bitten by, as if that same nightsinger beauty could enter them and make them something other than themselves.

Her eyes were pale gold, like a tiger’s, and they took me in and read me. “So you’re one of the rogues,” she murmured. “Lonely path, that. No wonder your scent trail was so strange. How long have you been off the grid?”

“I have my own life to conduct,” I said. “I don’t need to be wired into some global psychic network.”

“You don’t worry about being left behind?”

“How can I be left behind?”

“Even our kind –” and she held out her hands, palms up, as if weighing some invisible substance “– evolves.”

“Into what? We are what we are.”

She tipped her head, but it wasn’t a gesture of acknowledgment, more like sympathy for one in my position. I felt that – her sympathy – and the back of my mouth flooded with bitterness. I didn’t have time for this.

“Come back to our camp,” she said, “and have a drink – we have loveblood – and we can continue to argue the point.”

I laughed. “Goodnight,” I said, brushing past her, “nightsinger.” I passed a fire pit, humans huddling round it – had it gotten colder? Like others of my kind, I don’t always register a change in temperature – and walked round a giant plastic cube in which a woman in pyjamas slept atop a shag rug. People were passing messages to her, slipping folded bits of paper through slots in the walls. They knocked on the plastic, trying to wake her up, but her chest rose and fell in the rhythm of oblivion. I looked at the woman in the cube. Then I couldn’t help myself: I turned and looked back.

The nightsinger had not moved. People wandered the space between us, yanking up scarves or nursing masks as the wind began to move again. Green laser light streamed the air from a nearby installation. I could feel her gaze on me: fixed, unyielding. As if there was something she wanted to tell me, and that I desperately needed to know.

Your call: how I wait for it: how it thunders through my dreams, a tsunami of light sweeping me to you.

I come to you in Paris, a smoky cafe somewhere on the Left Bank, you wait in a corner booth with your notebook and glass of absinthe. I come to you in London, behind the rubble of a bombed apartment building, clouds mounting overhead, their promise of rain like a promise withheld. I come to you in the country town of Wagga Wagga and we lie down in yellow grass, kangaroos racing their shadows across the distant hillsides. I come to you in Kyoto, dripping silence beneath a stone bridge, cherry blossoms swirling in the water. I come to you in Starke, Florida, the night they executed a serial killer, people standing vigil with their signs that said BURN BUNDY BURN and you took my hand and led me to the back of a van filled with flowers and candlelight. I come to you in Thailand, music pulsing down a beach crowded with dancing young backpackers, their pupils like full moons inside ecstatic faces. I come to you in Manhattan, on a windswept hotel roof, the spotlights of Ground Zero like ladders of light that souls were still climbing.

I come to you.

I come to you, and you are waiting.

That is what I know. It is the fixed unchanging thing.

I come to you now, in Black Rock, Nevada, this ragtag city of tens of thousands that didn’t exist a week ago and won’t a week from now. I hitched my way here – getting cars to stop for me is never a problem – and walked the access roads marked with traffic cones to the Black Rock border, where dust-blown twenty-somethings dressed like refugees from a Mad Max movie checked tickets, searched incoming vehicles for stowaways, told people to make sure you take out everything you bring in, spoke about proper hydration and the increased police presence this year on the playa so if you have any drugs, keep them in your hidey-hole and no loose glitter or feather boas please, they drop and shed and litter. I walk the long, curving dirt road until it empties into the grid of “streets” – named and ordered on a map – and I walk past the RVs and the cars and the tents, the humble campsites and the more complicated affairs with their awnings and canopies and furniture, their whimsical signs and sculptures, their smells of barbecue. People in sarongs, shorts, bikinis, people in all kinds of costumes, people in degrees of nudity are milling around me, swigging water; they are lining up at the rows of porta-potties, they are riding bicycles, they are hanging out in deck chairs, on overstuffed sofas and love seats, on blankets, they are dancing on the roofs of RVs, silhouettes writhing in the harmless glow of dusk.

The last of the day bleeds out.

The wind livens, and I am out on the playa.

I find you beyond the Chapel of Lost Souls. Every year, I have learned, the Festival features such a chapel. Intricately constructed from small pieces of wood, this year’s model is an ornate and rambling two-storey structure with a peaked roof and surround balcony. A playhouse for adults. People roam the tiny rooms, post drawings and pictures of loved ones, create their own shrines and leave eccentric little items of devotion. They use the proffered pens and markers to write messages on the walls.

I can’t help myself. I grab a pen and scrawl furiously along the side of a column: “Jonas Alexander Stevens, 10 weeks”. He was a good baby. The knife in my chest digs deeper, twists more. When I leave through the other side of the chapel I step out into a sandstorm. The wind cuts against my clothes so that even I can feel the edge. I blink the sand from my eyes. I see nothing ahead except blurred gritty dark. But that doesn’t matter. Because deep inside the darkness of me a third eye opens and I see you striding towards me. I can smell you; I can breathe you in. You are night-blooming jasmine riding ocean air.

I feel your hand on my shoulder. I want to cry, and I am not the crying type, not even when I was just as human as those still back in the chapel. You fall beside me, your hand in the small of my back as you guide me through the sandstorm. The lights of the art-cars and sculptures and theme-camps thin out. We are at the far edge of the playa, as far out as we can go. Jagged rocks rise like teeth, cutting darker shapes against the dark sky.

We stand in the space you have created. Walls of sand swirl round us, a crazed and frantic periphery, but we are in a centre of perfect calm. The ground is layered with Turkish and Nepalese rugs; standing lanterns with textured bronze surfaces call a dance of gaslight and shadow.

I turn to you.

“I wish you would speak,” I say, like I’ve said so many times before, hoping for a different response. “Say something. Anything.”

You smile.

You are dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a tan leather jacket. You do not look like an angel. Then again, how is a creature like me to know? You look like an ordinary human male, if more attractive than most, just a touch of the uncanny in your sad, grey-green eyes. I stroke your face. Love your cheekbones, your wide, thin-lipped mouth, your olive skin. Love the way you pull me against you, bury your face in my neck. My hands move through your dark hair, trace the hard, sweet lines of your back and arms and shoulders. I can no longer catch my breath, or feel I need to. I take my sustenance, my life, from you. I am made full, turned whole, through you.

We sink into the rugs, and it is like all the times before. I freefall through a sweet and blasted oblivion. And in this oasis of space and time, you tumble with me.

But I hit the ground alone.

And shatter all over again.

Your seed in my body, your blood in my mouth.

He was gone.

The lanterns cast spheres of light into the calmed air. I tried to hold on to the bliss as hard as I could, talk myself away from the despair I knew was waiting: If it bothers you this much – if he leaves you with nothing, worse than nothing – then put an end to it! Where is your will? Get over it. Get over it. Get over it . . .

But then his absence rose up under me, made pure and perfect and new. It knifed my heart, my very bones. I started to shake. Who knew when I could have him again, or ever? I drew my knees against my chest and cried out once, twice. I tried not to scream. The sky unreeled above me and his absence seemed more solid than I was, my existence as tenuous as trembling ash. Scattered, lonely figures drifted the playa, heading home after a long night’s revelry. An art-car with a pink shag canopy trundled past and took no notice of me. Morning crouched just beneath the horizon and I was exposed and alone. So be it. Anything was better than this loss that rang me hollow, this attack of the sweats, droplets of blood trickling on shivering skin. My body seemed to belong to somebody else. Let the morning have it then, and send flaming into the void what scraps of soul I had left.

The day’s first sun lashed my skin.

And all thought dissolved into a soundless screaming.

* * *

I opened my eyes.

Pain streaked my torso . . . or maybe just the memory of pain, because as my senses woke up one by one I realized I felt . . . not bad, considering I’d expected to be a blackened crisp.

I was in a queen-sized bed, piled with pillows, the sheets stained my own sweat-pink. I knew by the black tape covering the windows and the bloodstained wine glass rolling on the floor that this was a vampire RV. It was also the most spacious RV I’d ever seen, not that I was an expert in such things.

I stood. I expected a sweep of dizziness but instead I felt . . . not bad. Naked. I looked down at the whiteness of my body, the ridge of sunburn that ran from waist to shoulder. Someone had lathered me in ointment: I swiped off some of the glistening substance, brought it to my nostrils, but couldn’t identify it. Whatever it was, it had taken the edge off the pain and faded the scar.

A robe hung in the door frame: ivory silk and tattered lace, lovely enough not to part with and ruined enough to bring here. Slipping it on, I moved gingerly into the hall, found the screen door and stepped outside. After the coppery, strange-vampire smell that filled the RV, night came as a relief.

The vampire I’d met out on the playa was sitting beside a fire pit, dressed in jeans and a blue plaid shirt, her hair pulled back in a braid. She was roasting a marshmallow on a spiked wooden stick. As the screen door whapped shut behind me, she turned her head a little. Then she said, “I don’t actually eat them.” There were vampires who developed an eating fetish, despite the damage it did to their systems. They were generally held in contempt. “I just like to roast them. I like the way they smell. How do you feel?”

“I’m alive,” I said.

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Glad.”

“My name is Anna.”

Another RV, smaller and painted bright blue, was parked across the way. The space between had been turned into a lounging area, complete with oversized beanbag chairs, a Lucite coffee table, fringed yellow pillows. “You missed the others,” she said. “They’ve gone to watch them burn the Man.”

“You stayed behind?”

“I’ve been watching over you all this time, why stop now?”

“How long have I been out?”

“Three days.” She looked at me with those pale golden eyes. “I still don’t know your name.”

“Vincent.”

“You don’t look like a Vincent.”

“My father wanted a boy.”

“You are most definitely not that.”

“I renamed myself after my Changing.” It seemed absurd to stay with my original name, given by people clueless to who and what I’d become. “After Edna St Vincent Millay. Her friends and family called her Vincent.” I added, “She was a poet.”

“I know who she was.” Anna tipped her head back, said, “‘My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/It gives a lovely light.’” She slipped the marshmallow off the stick, lifted it to her nostrils. She grinned. “But that’s not true for us, is it? Our candle burns for a very long time.”

Popping sounds in the distance. Towards the far end of the playa, where a shadowed crowd of thousands gathered round the Man, bright lines streaked the sky: purple, blue and yellow, blossoming into fire flowers and breaking apart, falling. “I guess it’s started,” Anna said. She yawned. “Fireworks. I’ve seen so many of them.” She looked at me sidelong. “You know, I thought they were just myth.”

“What?”

“The fallen ones. He wasn’t as stunning, or as otherworldly, as I would have expected. I would have thought he’d look . . . more like you, actually.”

I shrugged. My beauty was no longer a subject that held much interest for me; and aside from singling me out to the vampire who had taken me for his own, before abandoning me for another pretty thing some sixty years later, it hadn’t done so much for me. But then the implication of her words penetrated even my vanity, and I said, “You saw him?”

“He came out of the sandstorm, told me where you were.”

“He spoke to you?”

If envy marked my voice, she showed no notice. “No. He put an image inside my head. I had to – I couldn’t figure out, right at first, how to align the picture in my head with the playa in front of me, otherwise I would have gotten to you sooner.” She stared at me for another long moment. “You thought he’d left you to die?”

“I’m nothing to him,” I said. “A toy. A dog on a chain.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. But if you believe that, why go to him?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say the response that came to mind – Why do people put heroin in their veins? – so I said nothing.

Anna grinned. “So what is it like, to bed such a creature? To drink from him? I can’t even begin to imagine.”

“It is like . . . ” I closed my eyes. Remembering. The moment he entered me, the raw wound of desire suddenly healed. The way everything else in my overlong life folded away and ceased to matter. The look in his eyes as he recognized my slow, shuddering rise to climax, and how he knew the moment to lower his throat to my mouth. I wanted to share this with her, but I did not want to put that feeling into words: such a feeling went beyond words, could only be compromised by them. I opened my eyes and said abruptly, “Why call yourself a nightsinger? I never understood.”

“You don’t like the term?”

“It’s pretentious.”

She lifted her eyebrows in what might have been amusement. “Eros and Thanatos,” she said. “Love, which is the force of life itself, and destruction –”

“Thank you. I did not know this.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “Everything you do, every choice you make, pulls you in one direction or the other. The nightsong,” she said, “is about life. Why not align ourselves with that? It’s as much of our nature as the rest.”

“But you kill, right?”

“Not always. The joops are testament to that. They don’t want to die, they only want the high that our bite can give them.”

“But from time to time. You kill.”

“Of course. “ She drew back a bit, looked innocent. “But it doesn’t have to be so . . . crude. We give appreciation. We respect and celebrate our connection to what we eat, we make the conditions as humane as possible. The nightsong has a place for all of us, the predator as well as the prey. We’re woven into its design like every other living thing.”

“We cannot make that claim to life. We are the eternal outsiders.”

“You are an outsider. You seem to like it that way.”

“I don’t like anything about it.”

“Need, then. You seem to need it that way.”

“I need him,” I said. My voice broke out of me. “I crave him every second I don’t have him. Do you know what it’s like, to be linked to someone in this way? There’s no room for anything, anyone else. It’s the loneliest thing I can imagine.” I hadn’t expected to say any of that. Tears were at my eyes, and I blinked them back with fury.

“That’s a fault of imagination,” Anna said, with such easy certainty that I wanted to strike her. “Your world is a bigger place than you think. You’re just too busy staring into this one little corner.”

“I can’t do this any more. I want . . . I want . . . ”

“What do you want, Vincent?”

“More,” I said, and couldn’t help myself: “more life. All he does is lift me on empty promises and take me apart. I have to finish it before it finishes me.”

“And you think he would just let you go?”

“Why wouldn’t he? It’s not like he sticks around.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Anna said slowly, “that he’s as trapped by the limitations of his own nature as you are by yours? Whatever chain existing between you is locked around his throat, my dear. He’s your slave as much as your master.”

“How could you know this?”

“The myths. They get passed along – to some of us, at least.” She looked at me pointedly. “They’re like vampire fairy tales, or at least that’s how I always saw them . . . The allure that we have for them, the ones as fallen, in their own way, as we are in ours. We crave to bite, they crave to be bitten, and in the act of it both find a transcendence.”

“It’s an illusion.”

“Who’s to say?”

“Because I wouldn’t feel like this,” I said, “if that ‘transcendence’ were real. I would not suffer such an aftermath.”

“There’s always a price to pay,” Anna said mildly. “You’re just not used to being the one who has to pay it. Come with me. We’ll head out to the playa, meet up with the others. If you like them – and I think you will – you’re welcome to travel with us. We’re a fun little dysfunctional family, and it’s a lovely feeling,” she said, “to make yourself a part of something. You should maybe give it a try.”

I only looked at her. I wanted to say something, but didn’t know what I might possibly express. “Come,” Anna said, rising. “Come on,” she said again, and there was laughter in her voice. I did not take offence.

She took my hand. It was a foreign feeling, this hand holding, and seemed a little awkward, and yet I did not mind it. We threaded through the camps to the nearest road and walked to the beginning of the playa. We passed a small group of people chanting, “Save the Man! Don’t burn the Man! Save the Man!” and Anna tossed her head and laughed.

By the time we reached the dense walls of crowd, the Man was on fire. I could hear the flames, see the light cast into the sky, but my vision was blocked by the people in front of me. The art-cars and pirate ships – there was more than one, apparently – were parked along the crowd’s perimeter and people filled the decks and roofs, or sat on each other’s shoulders to get a better view. As Anna wove her way through the throng and I trailed behind, I caught the sense of restlessness beginning to sweep the crowd. “The damn thing won’t fall,” someone muttered, and someone else said, “They made it too strong, this is taking way too long.”

I turned my head.

It was the kind of gesture you do for no reason, on impulse or instinct, only to lock eyes with someone who’s been looking right at you.

He was standing about fifteen feet away from me, light from the nearby pirate bus falling over him.

His eyes were hooded, his face slack, as if he was held in a trance, and I felt my body and face mirroring his until I floated in a trance of my own. We moved forwards at the same time, and although I was not aware of crossing the space between us, suddenly I was bumping into his chest. My eyes fixed on the ground. I couldn’t look up at him, didn’t dare. I didn’t know if it was shyness or submission or even naked fear. But then his hands were on my shoulders, and he dropped his head towards mine. I could see the wound on his throat; I had marked him, put my name on him.

His breath at my ear, and then he spoke.

“Love,” he said, and his voice was hoarse and ancient and thick, and I knew he wasn’t suited to language, had to fight to trespass this limitation. “Love,” he said again, and very gently kissed my forehead.

His hands slipped off my shoulders and he backed away from me. I could no longer locate my knees; they slipped away; I was down on the ground. People, laughing and shrieking, two of them wearing angel wings, fell into the space around me. I was trembling. I cast about for Anna, but couldn’t find her.

I found, instead, the vermin who had pursued me on the playa. He was huddled against a rock, clutching a blanket around his thin shoulders. I noticed how people were keeping a certain distance.

Something inside me shifted, broke open. I can’t explain it any better than that. It broke open and spilled all through me: an ache and a tenderness and a kind of breathless awe. It filled me up. I looked at the joop and I realized that I was in him and he was in me. I let my gaze wander through the dense gathering of onlookers and understood that I was in all of them and they were in all of me. I had worlds within me.

The joop glanced up as I approached. His eyes widened as I lowered myself beside him and he started to speak, but I pressed my finger to his lips. I flinched at the contact, at his sick-sweet cancer smell. But I knew what it was within my power to give. I took hold of his wrist and brought it to my mouth. He drew breath. “Only a little,” I warned him, “I will only take a little,” and, closing my senses to the foulness of it, I sank my teeth into his underwrist. A cheer rose from the crowd, followed by yelling and whistling, the blowing of horns. The Man had started to fall. I listened for a moment, then began to drink.