Philip slid the sword out of his victim, and the bloody corpse was left to float around the room while we fell asleep, exhausted from the turmoil. When the serum wore off, the body gently landed on Damon, who woke up with a low scream.
Chapter Sixteen
We didn’t talk about it for three days, but finally Damon brought it up. He could tell I was upset about him having told Nathaniel to go ahead and kill me.
“No, I’m not upset,” I said. “There’s nothing you could have done, right? It was a ploy.”
“What if I’m still tempted to kill you?”
“We’ll cope with it. We’ve coped with it before, we can cope with it again.”
“Oh, reckless Anna.”
Personally, I knew how I would deal with it. I would make light of it. If I saw him staring at me dreamily in the kitchen while holding the big kitchen knife, I would wave my hand in front of his glazed eyes and say, “Hello!”
And if I woke up in the middle of the night and found him standing over me with a sword raised, I’d say, “Can you please grab me a tissue as long as you’re up.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d say if he pushed me toward an oncoming subway train. I’d think about it when it happened.
Maybe I could get a whip with which to punish him if he tried to strangle me again.
Maybe I’d take a class in self-defense.
Maybe I’d keep my pepper spray on me at all times.
But things didn’t have a chance to come to that. A few days after our conversation, exactly a week after Nathaniel’s death, I found Damon floating around my living room, clearly weighing nothing. He had overdosed — I was certain of it. I knew it the instant I saw him, and I was overcome with such disgust and horror that I almost vomited.
Firmly, I said, “I want you to step on the sensitive scale.”
“It’s not necessary. What you think is the case, is the case,” he said.
I burst into tears and rushed over to him and grabbed him and lowered him and said, “What have you done?”
“I OD’d.”
“How?”
“I can’t live with you, Anna. You must know that. We have to accept it finally. I’ll kill you. We can’t have a life together.”
“Damon, how could you do this? I can’t live without you.”
“But with me, you won’t live.”
I was sobbing and hugging him. “You just had a problem. It could have been fixed.”
We didn’t know how long it would take for him to die. I wanted him to find a cure. After pressuring him to no end and convincing him that his murderous impulses could be toned down through psychological counseling, or maybe even through antidepressants, he finally agreed to try to find a cure for having become more cloud than man.
He locked himself in his lab for hours on end, searching, or so I thought. It turned out he was searching, but not for what I thought. He emerged a week and a half later with a big solid cloud. He had achieved his life’s goal before dying.
I was furious. I shouted at him and my breath blew him away. He grabbed onto my clothing to anchor himself to me. I accused him of being clingy. I told him he killed himself, did it on purpose, so now he had no right to cling to me. What was he doing: being clingy and then leaving me? It wasn’t fair. I told him that what he did was the same thing as a person injecting themselves with the AIDS virus on purpose, giving themselves a slow death, and I had never heard of such a thing.
Part of me wanted to detach myself from him emotionally, to diminish my suffering when he died. I marched out of the room, slamming the door, which he later asked me not to do again for it made him flutter around.
I tried to persuade him to spend the remainder of his time looking for a cure. I told him I’d help him, that he could tell me what to do. He refused, confessing that he had only pretended to believe he could be rid of his murderous impulses and masochistic tendencies. He didn’t want a cure, and even if he did, he said there wasn’t enough time to find one — he could already feel the rain coming. He wanted to spend his remaining time with me. So he did. It turned out to be three days. He spoke about my life, my future. He gave me advice, wished me happiness, told me how much he loved me.
And then he made love to me on the cloud. I retained my full weight, no longer willing to lighten up. I felt the cloud engulfing me, swallowing me, as if out of grief, the way I was swallowing my tears. The cloud felt too wonderful. It clashed with my pain and sadness. Damon and I should have been making love on a hard bare floor. A prison floor, perhaps.
I cried while he made love to me on his cloud. He had invented this heavenly thing, but at what cost? This was perhaps the last time we would ever make love. I held on to him tighter. Even though he had overdosed and therefore was now, technically, more cloud than man, he didn’t feel different to me. Except perhaps that he seemed more perfect than ever, more suited to me, made for me. He was my complement.
He pushed me toward the edge of the cloud, so that my head was leaning back, no longer supported by his invention, hair hanging down, swinging. I wanted to fall off on my head, if possible break my neck. But Damon didn’t let me. He pushed some of the cloud under me and covered my mouth with a kiss, suffocating me; my nose was filled with tears. I turned my head away to breathe.
I didn’t want to come. I couldn’t bear the thought of it, knowing he would soon die. But I couldn’t help it. It was cruel of my body to play this trick on my heart. Afterward, I lay there, feeling vague. Vaporous.
I wondered if the loss of fluid had brought him closer to death. Each kiss might have taken minutes off his life. His climax: How many hours might that have taken off? And that mist on his forehead, right now, was it stealing precious seconds from him?
Damon was content — I had come. He was kissing my breasts, my shoulders and neck, aware I was upset, but feeling content. I wished I could just evaporate and see how he’d feel then. I pushed Damon off of me and rolled from the cloud. I went in the bathroom, locked the door. I sat in the empty bathtub, the shower raining over me, my head against my knees. I focused on the hard cold surface I was sitting on, which I had craved.
Damon knocked softly on the door. “Are you okay, Anna?”
I took a deep, angry breath. “Yeah, I’m great.”
I heard nothing more from him just then.
It was the next day, when I returned from the kitchen, that Damon was crying.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“I’m not crying.”
“Yes you are. And why are you perspiring?”
“I’m not.”
I said, “Is it the end?”
“Yes, I think I’m raining.”
We didn’t even know. We had to see it happen to be sure. And we did. And we were.
He took off his clothes and I helped him step into the bathtub. I took off mine and stepped in after him. I didn’t want any of my clothing to absorb any of him. I didn’t want to lose a drop of him. We lay down, he on top of me. I held him.
“I can’t live without you,” I said.
“Yes you will. You’re strong. Do it for me, Anna. My love. Good-bye.”
I kissed him, and my mouth got wet; the water dribbled down my chin.
As he rained, he became less opaque, more transparent, like vapor. He was harder to see, his eyes harder to find on the tiled background, his outline harder to make out, his voice harder to distinguish from the distant hum of traffic.
And I had some questions left, that occurred to me when it was almost too late, inevitably. I asked them, but I was no longer sure if the voice that answered me came from him or from my mind.
The last thing I heard was, “I love you, Anna.” It was a whisper, like a breeze.