Undead Text

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

That’s the first line of The Shadow of the Wind, a 2004 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón that I’ve been reading. Yesterday I was searching my document files — my private cemetery of forgotten texts — for a fragment I remember having written, thinking that I might be able to splice it into the fiction I’m presently writing. I never did find what I was looking for, but I did come across a document from 2004 that read like a Ktismatics blog post before Ktismatics even existed. Better late than never, I figured, so I reformatted the document as a post. I titled it “Wallace Stevens, Bond Man.” While proofing it I was remembering a couple of other posts I’d previously written about Wallace Stevens. So I googled myself: it turns out that I had already turned this same text into a Ktismatics post. It’s called On Keeping Your Day Job, posted in August 2007. So it was three years after having written the text that I turned it into a blog post, but that post is nearly six years old now and I’d forgotten all about it. Sometimes even the resurrected texts find their way back into the crypt.

Against Empathy

The psychoanalyst’s first task is to listen and to listen carefully. Although this has been emphasized by many authors, there are surprisingly few good listeners in the psychotherapeutic world. Why is that? …When someone tells us a story, we think of similar stories (or more extreme stories) we ourselves could tell in turn. We start thinking about things that have happened to us that allow us to “relate to” the other person’s experience, to “know” what it must have been like, or at least to imagine how we ourselves would have felt had we been in the other person’s shoes.

In other words, our usual way of listening is centered to a great degree on ourselves — our own similar life experiences, our own similar feelings, our own perspectives. When we can locate experiences, feelings, and perspectives of our own that resemble the other person’s, we believe that we “relate to” that person. We say things like “I know what you mean,” Yeah,” “I hear you,” “I feel for you,” or “I feel your pain” (perhaps less often “I feel your joy”). As such moments, we feel sympathy, empathy, or pity for this other who seems like us; “That must have been painful (or wonderful) for you,” we say, imagining the pain (or joy) we ourselves would have experienced in such a situation.

When we are unable to locate experiences, feelings, or perspectives that resemble the other person’s, we have the sense that we do not understand that person — indeed, we may find the person strange, if not obtuse or irrational. When someone does not operate in the same way that we do or does not react to situations as we do, we are often baffled, incredulous, or even dumbfounded. We are inclined, in the latter situation, to try to correct the other’s perspectives, to persuade him to see things the way we see them and to feel what we ourselves would feel were we in such a predicament. In more extreme cases, we simply become judgmental. How could anyone, we ask ourselves, believe such a thing or act or feel that way?

Most simply stated, our usual way of listening overlooks or rejects the otherness of the other. We rarely listen to what makes a story as told by another person unique, specific to that person alone; we quickly assimilate it to other stories that we have heard others tell about themselves, or that we could tell about ourselves, overlooking the differences between the story being told and the ones with which we are already familiar. We rush to gloss over the differences and make the stories similar if not identical. In our haste to identify with the other, to have something in common with him, we forcibly equate stories that are often incommensurate, reducing what we are hearing to what we already know. What we find most difficult to hear is what is utterly new and different: thoughts, experiences, and emotions that are quite foreign to our own and even to any we have thus far learned about.

It is often believed that we human beings share many of the same feelings and reactions to the world, which is what allows us to more or less understand each other and constitutes the foundation of our shared humanity… I would propose that the more closely we consider any two people’s thoughts and feelings in a particular situation, the more we are forced to realize that there are greater differences than similarities between them — we are far more different than we tend to think!…

In effect, we can understand precious little of someone’s experience by relating it or assimilating it to our own experience. We may be inclined to think that we can overcome this problem by acquiring much more extensive experience of life… We ourselves may fall into the trap of thinking that we simply need to broaden our horizons, travel far and wide, and learn about other peoples, languages, religions, classes, and cultures in order to better understand a wider variety of analysands. However, if acquiring a fuller knowledge of the world is in fact helpful, it is probably not so much because we have come to understand “how the other half lives” or how other people truly operate, but because we have stopped comparing everyone with ourselves to the same degree…

If our attempts to “understand” ineluctably lead us to reduce what another person is saying to what we think we already know (indeed, that could serve as a pretty fair definition of understanding in general), one of the first steps we must take is to stop trying to understand so quickly.

– Bruce Fink, Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (2007), pages 1-4

Better Angels or Tougher Cops?

This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not –and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.

In The Better Angels of our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker contends that, over the past several hundred years, capitalism and strong government have worked in tandem to reduce societal violence in the West. Capitalism encourages cooperation across traditional community boundaries, while government establishes a monopoly over the use of force, especially in matters of interpersonal honor. These pacifying benefits are imposed from the upper class downward:

The European decline of violence was spearheaded by a decline in elite violence. Today statistics from every Western country show the overwhelming majority of homicides and other violent crimes are committed by people in the lowest socioeconomic classes. One obvious reason for the shift is that in medieval times, one achieved high status through the use of force. The journalist Steven Sailer recounts an exchange from early-20th-century England: “A hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages. When asked, ‘How did your ancestor become a Lord?’ he replied sternly, ‘With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!”

As the upper classes were putting down their battle-axes, disarming their retinues, and no longer punching out bargees and cabmen, the middle classes followed suit. They were domesticated not by royal court, of course, but by other civilizing forces. Employment in factories and businesses forced employees to acquire habits of decorum. And then came an institution that was introduced in London in 1828 by Sir Robert Peel and soon named after him, the municipal police, or bobbies.

The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.” This has nothing to do with Women Who Love Too Much or Chicken Soup for the Soul; it is another name for vigilantism, frontier justice, taking the law into your own hands, and other forms of violent retaliation by which people secured justice in the absence of intervention by the state.

On the face of it, Pinker’s argument sounds like an apologetics supporting the status quo. Presumably the solution to reducing violence still further is to civilize the lower classes and non-Westerners. One means of civilizing them is to impose on them the discipline and decorum of wage labor; the other is to replace their DIY vigilante justice with state-administered justice, enforced more thoroughly by the police and the courts and the army.

Is Pinker right? There’s a whole academic discipline of criminology that purports to study issues like the one Pinker addresses in his book. I know little about the field, its findings, its theories. Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, a field that’s certainly relevant to criminology. But I don’t get a sense reading the first three chapters that Pinker lets the complexity of the issue speak for itself, nor that he takes seriously the work of any but a few criminology people. He’ll say something about how the social scientists find the issues complicated and multifaceted, but then, based mostly on his own opinion, he asserts that the explanation can be captured in the few factors that he advocates again and again. In the process he seems to marshal the empirical evidence to support his theories rather than letting the evidence shape the theories — the mark of a rhetorician rather than a scientist.

Pinker acknowledges that the upper class attained that status largely through the exercise of violence. Eventually the elite cooperate with each other, both politically and economically. Does Pinker acknowledge that the elite cooperate in order to consolidate their power and wealth against those who would take it from them, by force if necessary, the way they seized it in the first place? Does he acknowledge that corporate capitalism and strong government are means of securing the elite’s permanent higher status by pulling up the ladders behind them? Not that I’ve seen so far.

The American South

Pinker presents evidence documenting historically high homicide rates in the South and West of America. He contends that Southern culture was heavily influenced by a particularly pugnacious wave of immigrants who couldn’t abandon their longstanding traditions of honor and violence.

Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinkertons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual. This power sharing, historians have noted, has always been sacred in the South…

The northern states were settled by Puritan, Quaker, Dutch, and German farmers, but the interior South was largely settled by Scots-Irish, many of them sheepherders, who hailed from the mountainous periphery of the British Isles beyond the reach of the central government… Herders all over the world cultivate a hair trigger for violent retaliation.

Why in explaining Southern violence does Pinker invoke some long-standing cultural differences brought over from the Old Country? What happened to his acknowledgment that those who exercise monopolistic control over the economic and governmental means of “legitimate” violence achieved that status through illegitimate violence? Didn’t the earliest American emigrants from England, the ones who became the American elite, use violence to wrest control of America away from the Indians and to preserve it from the incursions of subsequent waves of immigrants? Pinker contends that the long arm of Eastern law and order hadn’t yet reached the Western frontier, so the pioneers regressed to an earlier stage of violent “anarchy” notoriously characteristic of the Wild West. Plenty of Western pioneers were Scots-Irish, but there were plenty of Germans too.

The Southern colonies were co-founded by the English crown and trading companies owned by English aristocrats. In exchange for their work, the earliest English colonists were granted tracts of land in the colony by the trading company. Subsequent waves of colonists, also mostly English, came as indentured servants. They worked for the landowners and, typically after 7 years, were granted their freedom. Those who paid the transatlantic passage of the indentured laborers were granted tracts of American land by the trading company. In other words, the labor importers received not only free labor but extra land as well. This arrangement continued with the subsequent wave of Scotch-Irish indentured servants. Most of them emigrated from “The Plantation of Ulster,” where they had worked as tenant farmers for English landowners on a vast tract of land confiscated from the Irish by the British in the early 17th century. The African slaves too fell under this agreement: American landowners who paid for the slaves’ transport would own the slaves and would be ceded a tract of land, typically 50 acres per slave. Of course the Africans didn’t get the benefit of a time limit on their servitude.

It’s easy to see how the earliest English settlers in the South also rapidly became the wealthiest, with free land worked by free labor resulting in profits for importing more workers and acquiring more land, etc. — a geometric rate of accumulation. It’s also easy to see how, after putting in their time as free labor, the indentured servants of England and Ulster would have had a hard time securing good land. When after 7 years they got their freedom they were still under the thumb of the landed gentry, with no possibility of rising in status or wealth or power. Three choices presented themselves: either continue working for the landowners; or settle in the hill country which, not being much use for farming or herding cattle, could be had for little or no money.

Or they could head for the Western frontier, where the Indians were and the plantation owners weren’t. So too with Northern frontiersmen. Pioneers would band together in small groups to clear the forests, build houses, plant crops, and kill Indians. They would also fend off European newcomers, pushing them farther into the frontier. Whoever won those violent skirmishes wound up dominating the economy and government on the frontier — they became the new elite, just as the old European elite emerged from similar violent confrontations. Eventually the new Southern and Western elites would form alliances with the Eastern elite, extending the power of capital- and government-empowered control over “legitimate” violence across the continent.

The Sixties

Pinker observes that there was a statistical rise in US violence beginning in the 60s. He contends that this regression to uncivilized behavior resulted from the “if it feels good do it” anti-establishment attitude of the times. He cites as supporting evidence the upsurge of violence in movies and aggressive lyrics in popular song, but what about empirical evidence?

In looking at Pinker’s graph of historical trends the reader observes the homicide rate starting to go up in the mid-60s, peaking from the mid-70s to around 1990, then dropping. That takes America past the hippies, past disco, past punk. As Pinker notes, most murders are committed by young men. Who were the young men during this high-murder era? Not those “decivilized” Baby Boomers of the sixties, but Generation X.

Per Pinker’s graph, the rapid rise in murder rate corresponds almost exactly with the years of the Vietnam war. The big anti-establishment protests weren’t about “if it feels good, do it;” they were about staying alive, and about anger at a government that would expose its young men to death for no good reason, and about questioning the legitimacy of the state’s monopolistic exercise of military violence. The Vietnam War led to the violent deaths of 47,000 young American men. Assuming an average of 150K US soldiers in Vietnam over a period of 8 years, that’s a rate of about 4,000 violent deaths/100K/year. Compare that to the recent peak years of 1978 and 1990 when the rate was 10 homicides/100K/year, and you can see why protesters were particularly exercised about ending the war as well as the draft that sent Americans into peril against their will.

Pinker points out that blacks experience a disproportionately high murder rate. While on the American side the Vietnam War was fought mostly by lower-SES kids, they were mostly white, as were the “feel good” antiwar protesters. Did black pride and resentment against the white-dominated power elite constitute a “decivilizing” impulse comparable to the anti-establishment hippies and rock-and-rollers? The spike in the US homicide rate lags significantly behind the most active phase of civil rights activism. If an upsurge in black violence expressed resentment against the oppressive white culture, then why did black-on-black crime among people who already knew each other account for most of the spike in homicides? Here Pinker reverts to his lawlessness theory: blacks constituted a separate subculture operating outside of the control of legitimate government-sponsored violence, so street gangs fill the power void — sort of like the Old West, or like the wave of Irish, Polish, Italian and other “pugnacious,” less civilized, non-Western European immigrants whose arrival in the US corresponded with an earlier spike in city crime rates. Pinker attributes the decline in homicides in the 90s to more police presence in black neighborhoods and tougher sentencing in criminal cases involving black perpetrators. Again, it’s the top-down imposition of civilizing forces via the exercise of “legitimate” violence that restrains illegitimate and uncivilized violence.

Crime is predominantly a young man’s game. I don’t doubt that black violence is triggered at least in part by frustration and resentment at lack of opportunity and active oppression by a white-dominated governmental and economic system. But in the black ghettos don’t the larger established authority structures exercise control from a distance,  containing the violence within well-established buffer zones, arresting all of the main (young male) combatants who have achieved some local power, repeatedly creating power vacuums to be filled by groups of new kids? Certainly frustration and anger don’t always strike out at the sources of that anger. Powerful emotion isn’t that easily channeled, plus the real targets have badges and bigger weapons and more backup than you do.

Of course it’s not that simple. But it’s not as simple as Pinker makes it either.

Hemingway Jazzes the Mirror Neurons

When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enters into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do.

– Ernest Hemingway, “On Writing in the First Person,” in A Moveable Feast

Point Omega by DeLillo, 2010

There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible.

*   *   *

This first sentence captures the essence of the book. There is a wall between visible and invisible, between real and unreal, between human and transhuman, but the wall is itself a permeable membrane, a translucent movie screen. The wall is visible and real only when you look at it from the side where visible reality holds sway. From the other side it might look like something else.

I’ve discussed Point Omega at some length with Patrick on his blog. The story pivots around the disappearance of a young woman named Jessie. While there is no direct evidence of foul play, circumstances suggest that Jessie was kidnapped and likely killed by her stalker boyfriend. This is a guy who has become so obsessed with the movie Psycho that he seems to have merged with the film, and especially with Norman Bates.

That interpretation of what happened to Jessie might well be the right one. But in rereading the book (only 115 pages) I found myself looking at it from the other side of the movie screen. Most of the book is abstract, theoretical, aesthetic, almost inert, but when Jessie disappears the narrative shifts to more concrete considerations — the search for the missing girl, the investigation of clues. And yet even in the whodunit portion DeLillo alternates between concrete description and mystical reverie. In brief, I’m suggesting that DeLillo is inviting the reader to watch these concrete, visible, human events, possibly including a murder, from the other side of the screen.

The title of the book derives from an idea championed by the mystical Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. According to Wikipedia,

“Teilhard postulates the Omega Point as this supreme point of complexity and consciousness, which in his view is the actual cause for the universe to grow in complexity and consciousness. In other words, the Omega Point exists as supremely complex and conscious, transcendent and independent of the evolving universe. Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos namely Christ, who draws all things into himself.”

For Teilhard the Omega Point already exists; it is personal; it is transcendent, both preceding and succeeding human evolution; it is unconstrained by space and time; and it is inevitable.

The Omega Point might be the glorious singularity by which we are moved and toward which we are moving. But what does the passage into supreme posthuman transcendence look like from this side of the divide, bound by time and space, by material bodies and material objects, by calendars and telephones and trips to the grocery store? It might look like a barely-visible shadow on the wall, a hole in the air. It might look like death.

Yesterday I copied down a number of sentences from the middle portion of the book, when Jessie first appears and then later disappears. I focused specifically on passages in which DeLillo emphasizes the immateriality of things and places, of people, and especially of Jessie. In human terms she is hardly there at all, but on the other side she might also be a forerunner, a transhuman demiurge, an avatar of the Omega Point. I’m posting these sentences here without further commentary.

*   *   *

She was sylphlike, her element was air. She gave the impression that nothing about this place was different from any other, this south and west, this latitude and longitude. She moved through places in a soft glide, feeling the same things everywhere, this is what there was, the space within.

She was her father’s dream thing.

Other times she seemed deadened to anything that might bring a response. Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn’t reaching the wall or window. I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn’t feel watched. Where was she? She wasn’t lost in thought or memory, wasn’t gauging the course of the next hour or minute. She was missing, fixed tightly within.

It was part of her asymmetry, the limp hand, blank face… She was sitting next to anyone, talking through me to the woman in a sari on the crosstown bus, to the receptionist in the doctor’s office.

She had to touch her arm or face to know who she was… Her body was not there until she touched it… She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.

One day soon all our talk, his and mine, will be like hers, just talk, self-contained, unreferring. We’ll be here the way flies and mice are here, localized, seeing and knowing nothing but whatever our scanted nature allows.

I thought of Jessie sleeping. She would close her eyes and disappear, this was one of her gifts, I thought… She sleeps on her side, curled up, embryonic, barely breathing.

“Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have being. Unless there’s some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone.”

Then I adjusted the reclining chair to full length and lay flat on my back, eyes shut, hands on chest, and tried to feel like nobody nowhere, a shadow that’s part of the night.

But I just closed my eyes and sat there, nowhere, listening. When we got back to the house she was gone.

It was hard to think clearly. The enormity of it, all that empty country. She kept appearing in some inner field of vision, indistinct, like something I’d forgotten to say or do.

I finished putting away the groceries. I tried to concentrate on this, where things go, but objects seemed transparent, I could see through them, think through them.

Passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do, what she was made for, two full days, no word, no sign. Had she strayed past the edge of conjecture or were we willing to imagine what had happened?

First thing [the sheriff] wanted to know was whether there had been any recent deviation in Jessie’s normal pattern of behavior. The only deviation, I told him, was the fact that she was missing.

I could think around the fact of her disappearance. But at the heart, in the moment itself, the physical crux of it, only a hole in the air.

Nothing happened that was not marked by her absence.

He began to see things out of the corner of his eye, the right eye. He’d walk into a room and catch a glimpse of something, a color, a movement. When he turned his head, nothing. It happened once or twice a day. I told him it was physiological, same eye every time, routine sort of dysfunction, minor, happens to people of a certain age. He turned and looked. Someone there but then she wasn’t.

“I think I know his name.” “You think you know.” “I was sleeping. Then I wake up with his name. It is Dennis.” “You think it is Dennis.” “It is Dennis, for sure.” “First name Dennis.” “This is all I heard, first name. I wake up, just now, it is Dennis,” she said.

The sky was stretched taut between cliff edges, it was narrowed and lowered, that was the strange thing, the sky right there, scale the rocks and you can touch it. I started walking again and came to the end of the tight passage and into an open space choked at ground level with brush and stony debris and I half crawled to the top of a high rubble mound and there was the whole scorched world. I looked out into blinding tides of light and sky and down toward the folded copper hills that I took to be the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment. Could someone be dead in there? I could not imagine this. It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry of furrows and ruts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer.

I walked back into the wash under the shallow line of sky and then stopped and put my hand to the cliff wall and felt the tiered rock, horizontal cracks or shifts that made me think of huge upheavals. I closed my eyes and listened. The silence was complete. I’d never felt a stillness such as this, never such enveloping nothing. But such nothing that was, that spun around me, or she did, Jessie, warm to the touch. I don’t now how long I stood there, every muscle in my body listening. Could I forget my name in this silence? Then something made me turn my head and I had to tell myself in my astonishment what it was, a fly, buzzing near. I had to say the word to myself, fly.

That night I could not sleep. I fell into reveries one after another. The woman in the other room, on the other side of the wall, sometimes Jessie, other times not clearly and simply her, and then Jessie and I in her room, in her bed, weaving through each other, turning and arching sort of sealike, wavelike, some impossible nightlong moment of transparent sex. Her eyes are closed, face unfrozen, she is Jessie at the same time that she is too expressive to be her. She seems to be drifting outside herself even when I bring her to me. I’m there and aroused but barely see myself as I stand at the open door watching us both.

We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.

There we were, coming out of an empty sky. One man past knowing. The other knowing only that he would carry something with him from this day on, a stillness, a distance, and he saw himself in somebody’s crowded loft, where he puts his hand to the rough surface of an old brick wall and then closes his eyes and listens.

This Bloody Sterile Promontory by Doyle, 2011

Their giggles and the click of their delicate heels foreshadowed their arrival.

That’s the first sentence from daughter Kenzie’s third completed novel, which she wrote in its entirety in November as a participant in National Novel Writing Month. The title cites Hamlet’s soliloquy from Act 2 Scene 2, with a crucial word added to signal vampiric intent. It’s an entertaining and thoughtful and accomplished novel, excellent to the point where I’ve gone from pride in the kid’s achievement to admiration and even envy at the writing. Here’s a scene from the end of Chapter 1.

“Good evening again, Miss Elizabeth,” he bowed his graceful head toward Beth, “Miss Francisca.” He fixed her again with that gaze that was not intense but was somehow incredibly captivating.

He stood with them, and continued the conversation he had been having with Francisca in the other room. He was still overwhelmingly personable, and it seemed impossible that he had ever conversed with anyone who did not feel they had somehow improved as a person after talking to him. His languorous smiles were unrivaled by any expression either girl had ever seen, they decided separately.

“I believe I’ll take some air in the garden,” he announced suddenly. “The champagne, I’m afraid, is making my head spin.” Neither girl had seen him take any champagne, but they did not give the explanation a second thought. “Would either of you care to join me?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t,” said Beth, casually annoyed. “I just know Georgia will be looking for one of us soon.”

Francisca was not so concerned with Georgia, and replied, “Yes, I think a stroll would be wonderful.” Beth observed the way neither took their eyes off the other, and let them go, strangely pleased.

It was dark in the neatly kept garden, as it was illuminated only by the dazzling mansion. This too was beautiful and pristine, even in its difference from the party. Mr Fenmore and Francisca strolled between trees and flowering bushes, next to classical white benches and statues, still conversing. There was something so easy about the dialogue that passed between them, and Francisca felt that surely this was what she had always thought to be an overly romanticized notion, rather than something real. It occurred to her that there was no one in the world she trusted more in this moment than the refined young gentleman by her side. For this reason, it did not occur to her that it was anything but enjoyably ordinary when he placed his hand on her arm – which resulted in shivers coursing through her – and lightly directed her toward one of the little benches that was dark and far away from the mansion.

“I apologize if I seem forward,” he said, unexpectedly nervous, “but I think I ought to tell you. No, I owe it to you to tell you.” He paused, and she leaned toward him, anxious and anticipatory. He continued.

“I would intend to pursue you. As would a suitor. I would not, of course, be so direct about it…it would be terribly uninteresting if I were to remove all the thrill of uncertainty so soon.”

Her heart pounded loudly, and opened her lips as if to speak as her brow contorted to express confusion and disappointment. It took a moment for her to finally vocalize the word, “ ‘would?’”

Mr Fenmore looked away, clearly frustrated with himself. “I am telling you this because I wanted to assure you of my feelings for you established tonight. But I also feel that it would be improper for me to hint at such sentiments while being unable to pursue them. It would be cruel to you, would it not?”

“But this is cruel to me! Why can you not?”

He stared into the black hedge across the path from them for an enduring few seconds. His face moved slightly a time or two before settling into an expression of determination. With a for-him unusual sentimentality in his eyes and a soft smile upon his finally fully open lips, he breathed, “You smell of tangerines.”

The urges to lean forward to him and recoil in horror kept her immobilized, eyes wide.

“O-open your mouth,” she stammered quietly. He fixed her again with that inescapable gaze for a moment before obliging. She stared.

“I did not know – I did not know that you – that what you are even existed.” It was not an exclamation, merely a statement.

He slowly closed his mouth again, still watching her intently. “This is why I needed to warn you. There would be – well, it’s terribly implausible, and far too early, of course…but…”

She raised her eyes again to meet his. “What do you mean?”

He hesitated. “I cannot lead you on, as we are so different. But surely you feel what I do?”

She nodded. “Yes…yes, I do.”

He sighed and closed his eyes briefly in relief. “We would have to be more similar, if we were to attempt a romance. I cannot return to what I was – what you are – but there is a way. You understand.”

She could hardly breathe.

“It does not hurt,” he was no longer looking at her, but staring through the hedge, into the past. “It is, in fact, quite surprisingly enjoyable. Both the initiation and the experience.” He looked back at her suddenly. “Shall I continue?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“The only unpleasantness is at the split second at the start, which feels only like a pin prick to the throat. But then it becomes otherworldly, pure perfection. Make no mistake, it requires that you be drained almost completely, and you will be weak. But then…then you replenish yourself by drinking from me. And then, my dear,” he leaned forward, “we have an eternity of beauty.”

She gravitated forward until they could feel the energy from each other’s skin.

“Dare I ask?” he murmured.

“Dare…and I will say yes.”

“Will you join me, my Francisca?”

She managed only to exhale a confirmation before he was at her throat. He kissed it lightly twice, one hand supporting the back of her head, before piercing the skin with the sharp points he had concealed all night. She made a small sound of surprise, but immediately relaxed, eyes closing, and placed a hand to his hair. Her strength left her, but it was marvelous, just as he had said. Eventually he was all that kept her from collapsing, but she was light-headedly ecstatic to be in his power like this.

Finally, when her heart had slowed almost to a stop, he pulled away and looked back at her. He rose and lay her down on the bench delicately, crouching beside her as she stared back at him, smiling with her eyes unfocused.

“My dear, you could not have made me happier,” he told her, but his voice was different now than it bad been moments before. He ran a finger lightly over her forehead to brush a lock of orange hair out of her face before standing and turning away. She wanted to object, but her mind was blurry and her face numbing.

His form receded cheerfully, smirking slightly, into the darkness. Her field of vision restricted gradually, heart growing fainter, until blackness prevailed and the weak fluttering stopped.

He wiped a stray drop of blood from his cheek disdainfully.