Home » Archives » February 2004 » David Parker’s Journal: 11

02/20/2004: "David Parker’s Journal: 11"

Music: Mark O'Connor

I woke up to a strange sound and sat up in bed, blinking the sleep away from my eyes.

Rain. It was only the rain. How strange, I thought, that rain could be startle me from sleep. But then it was the dead of winter in a part of the country when it was usually close to zero at this time of the year.

I was in a strange room. I looked around, remembering, my eyes settling at last on the female body beside me, naked, half draped with a rumpled sheet. She could have been modeling for a 19th century odalisque painting, except that her skin was brown instead of milky white.

I slid my legs out of the bed and went to the window. We were on the tenth floor of the a hotel looking out over the Mississippi, though there was no view that night, with the fog and drizzle. The streetlights along River Drive barely penetrated the dank darkness. The big casino riverboat lying against the levee, its exterior decked out with an explosion of garish lighting, was reduced to a vague golden glow, a penumbra of false promise that never closed its doors to the suckers, a beacon to the gullible, the hopeless, the naively optimistic.

(Not that I have anything against gambling. Whenever I need money, I visit the poker room on the boat, where it is easy enough to read the players’ minds to see the cards they had in their hands. On principle, I never take money off of people who can’t afford to lose it, and I try spread the losses around table.)

The hot water in the shower felt good against my body. I was fully awake now, my mind clear and sharp as a diamond. The sleep, and blood I’d swallowed that night, had done me good. I felt like myself for the first time since Tatiana’s visit threw my life back into the vampiri whirlpool.

The girl hadn’t stirred when I emerged from the bathroom, toweling myself dry. For a moment I thought she was dead, but then I saw the subtle eddies her shallow breathing sent swirling in the darkness – the sort of thing only vampire eyes can see.

I got back into my clothes and put a hundred dollar bill on the dresser. Feeling a pang of guilt, I added four more to it. But what was the point? Her pimp would only take the money. She might not be able to go back to drugs, after the suggestion I’d planted deep within her mind, but the girl’s problems were far from solved. Sometimes, giving people money is the worst thing you can do to them.

I went back to her and stood looking down on her sleeping form. Her body was sleek and perfect, not an ounce of extra weight on her, everything exquisitely proportioned and shaped – the curve of her hip; the way her arm draped down across her bare breast; her long, delicious neck.

She would never be more beautiful than this. The rest would all be decay. All humans are born to die. They’re dying from the moment of their birth. For some poor wretches who can’t find their way in life, a quick death would be almost a gift, a release from the helpless struggle and decline, the disappointments, failures, and defeats, the slow, inevitable spiral toward the grave.

The desire stirred within me, awakening with it the Hunger.

Watching her breath, smelling the blood pumping through her supple young veins, I knew that I dared not take an ounce more of her blood without risking turning her into one of my kind, or, moving beyond that, killing her.

Driven by a force I could not resist, I felt myself kneeling next to her, wondering with horror what I was about to do. I reached out and softly put my fingers on her shoulder. Perhaps if I touched her just one more time, it would be enough.

She moaned in her sleep, sensing me near her, wanting me again even in her dreams, and offering herself to me – her body, her blood, her life.

“You do not know how much you tempt me,” I whispered.

I put my hand gently on her head, but instead of pulling her into my embrace, I closed my eyes and slipped back into her mind. I had no right to play with people’s lives, to meddle in the privacy of their innermost thoughts, but once you take the first misstep and fall, is there really any point in stopping yourself?

I gave her a very specific set of instructions -- step by step, detail by detail. When to wake up. Where to meet the cab I would send for her. How to slip back into her apartment, retrieve her child, and go to the bus station, avoiding her “business manager” in order to return home to Des Moines.

When I was finished I added five more hundered dollar bills to the five already on the table, but more to relieve my own guilt than to help her start over again in life. My hands were trembling.

I grabbed by jacket and left in a hurry, shutting the door behind me, leaving the girl and the temptation before it was too late to stop myself.

Again I must confess: Women are my weakness, or one of them. And my heart is filled with dark desire.