"There's no place for us on earth," I said. "Perhaps there was once, I don't know. The fact that we exist is no justification. Hunters drove wolves from the world. I thought if I revealed our existence that hunters would drive us from the world too. But it wasn't to be. My brief career was a string of illusions. No one believes in us. And that's how it's meant to be. Perhaps we are to die of despair, to vanish from the world very slowly, and without a sound.
"Only I can't bear it. I can't bear to be quiet and be nothing, and to take life with pleasure, and to see the creations and accomplishments of mortals all around me, and not to be part of them, but to be Cain. The lonely Cain. That's the world to me, you see-what mortals do and have done. It isn't the great natural world at all. If it was the natural world, then maybe I would have had a better time of it being immortal than I did. It's the accomplishments of mortals. The paintings of Rembrandt, the memorials of the capital city in the snow, great cathedrals. And we are cut off eternally from such things, and rightfully so, and yet we see them with our vampire eyes."
"Why did you change bodies with a mortal man?" she asked.
"To walk in the sun again for one day. To think and feel and breathe like a mortal. Maybe to test a belief."
"What was the belief?"
"That being mortal again was what we all wanted, that we were sorry that we'd given it up, that immortality wasn't worth the loss of our human souls. But I know now I was wrong."
I thought of Claudia suddenly. I thought of my fever dreams. A leaden stillness came over me. When I spoke again, it was a quiet act of will.
"I'd much rather be a vampire," I said. "I don't like being mortal. I don't like being weak, or sick, or fragile, or feeling pain. It's perfectly awful. I want my body back as soon as I can get it from that thief."
She seemed mildly shocked by this. "Even though you kill when you are in your other body, even though you drink human blood, and you hate it and you hate yourself."
"I don't hate it. And I don't hate myself. Don't you see? That's the contradiction. I've never hated myself."
"You told me you were evil, you said when I helped you I was helping the devil. You wouldn't say those things if you didn't hate it."
I didn't answer. Then I said, "My greatest sin has always been that I have a wonderful time being myself. My guilt is always there; my moral abhorrence for myself is always there; but I have a good time. I'm strong; I'm a creature of great will and passion. You see, that's the core of the dilemma for me- how can I enjoy being a vampire so much, how can I enjoy it if it's evil? Ah, it's an old story. Men work it out when they go to war. They tell themselves there is a cause. Then they experience the thrill of killing, as if they were merely beasts. And beasts do know it, they really do. The wolves know it. They know the sheer thrill of tearing to pieces the prey. I know it."
She seemed lost in her thoughts for a long time. I reached out and touched her hand.
"Come, lie down and sleep," I said. "Lie beside me again. I won't hurt you. I can't. I'm too sick." I gave a little laugh. "You're very beautiful," I said. "I wouldn't think of hurting you. I only want to be near you. The late night's coming again, and I wish you would lie with me here."
"You mean everything you say, don't you?"
"Of course."
"You realize you are like a child, don't you? You have a great simplicity to you. The simplicity of a saint."
I laughed. "Dearest Gretchen, you're misunderstanding me in a crucial way. But then again, maybe you aren't. If I believed in God, if I believed in salvation, then I suppose I would have to be a saint."
She reflected for a long tune, then she told me in a low voice that she had taken a leave of absence from the foreign missions only a month ago. She had come up from French Guiana to Georgetown to study at the university, and she worked only as a volunteer at the hospital. "Do you know the real reason why I took the leave of absence?" she asked me.
"No; tell me."
"I wanted to know a man. The warmth of being close to a man. Just once, I wanted to know it. I'm forty years old, and I've never known a man. You spoke of moral abhorrence. You used those words. I had an abhorrence for my virginity-of the sheer perfection of my chastity. It seemed, no matter what one believed, to be a cowardly thing."
"I understand," I said. "Surely to do good in the missions has nothing to do, finally, with chastity."
"No, they are connected," she said. "But only because hard work is possible when one is single-minded, and married to no one but Christ."
I confessed I knew what she meant. "But if the self-denial becomes an obstacle to work," I said, "then it's better to know the love of a man, isn't it?"
-"That is what I thought," she said. "Yes. Know this experience, and then return to God's work."
"Exactly."
In a slow dreamy voice, she said: "I've been looking for the man. For the moment." "That's the answer, then, as to why you brought me here."
"Perhaps," she said. "God knows, I was so frightened of everyone else. I'm not frightened of you." She looked at me as if her own words had left her surprised.
"Come, lie down and sleep. There's time for me to heal and for you to be certain it's what you really want. I wouldn't dream of forcing you, of doing anything cruel to you."
"But why, if you're the devil, can you speak with such kindness?"
"I told you, that's the mystery. Or it's the answer, one or the other. Come, come lie beside me."
I closed my eyes. I felt her climbing beneath the covers, the warm pressure of her body beside me, her arm slipping across my chest.
"You know," I said, "this is almost good, this aspect of being human."
I was half asleep when I heard her whisper:
"I think there's a reason you took your leave of absence," she said. "You may not know it."
"Surely you don't believe me," I murmured, the words running together sluggishly. How delicious it was to slip my arm around her again, to tuck her head against my neck. I was kissing her hair, loving the soft springiness of it against my lips.
"There is a secret reason you came down to earth," she said, "that you came into the body of a man. Same reason that Christ did it."
"And that is?"
"Redemption," she said.
"Ah, yes, to be saved. Now wouldn't that be lovely?"
I wanted to say more, how perfectly impossible it was to even consider such a thing, but I was sliding away, into a dream. And I knew that Claudia would not be there.
Maybe it wasn't a dream after all, only a memory. I was with David in the Rijksmuseum and we were looking at the great painting by Rembrandt.
To be saved. What a thought, what a lovely, extravagant, and impossible thought. . . How nice to have found the one mortal woman in all the world who would seriously think of such a thing.
And Claudia wasn't laughing anymore. Because Claudia was dead.
FIFTEEN
EARLY morning, just before the sun comes. The time when in the past I was often in meditation, tired, and half in love with the changing sky.
I bathed slowly and carefully, the small bathroom full of dim light and steam around me. My head was clear, and I felt happiness, as if the sheer respite from sickness was a form of joy. I shaved my face slowly, until it was perfectly smooth, and then, delving into the little cabinet behind the mirror, I found what I wanted-the little rubber sheaths that would keep her safe from me, from my planting a child within her, from this body giving her some other dark seed that might harm her in ways I could not foresee.