TWO – TAKING BLOOD

Nangi stalked the airstrip at twilight, after she rose from her stretch of daytime slumber, before she ventured to the Caverns and began a night of toil in Valeyria's degenerate entertainment industry. I sometimes perched in the frame of the window on the second floor, smoking my cheap cigarettes and watching her stick-thin, catlike body as it prowled the abandoned runway near my home. She was tinier from a distance, long legs under a short skirt with an unnaturally fluid stride. Her red hair stood out against the darkness and the concrete beneath her feet, and from my second floor window I couldn't see the matted, strangely beautiful nest of filthy dreadlocks her hair had fallen into. All I saw was this scantily clad figure, bright and sly, a dragon tail sneaking out like a thief from underneath her dusty black dress.

Around what used to be dinner time, every night, I would descend from my stairwell and walk out onto the blackness of the airstrip, meeting her halfway in the silent chill of the newborn darkness. Nangi always greeted me with a smile, and it always came as a relief. Every day that she still remembered me was a good day.

Dragons were gone from Valeyria. They had possessed the means to predict and escape the catastrophe, and even though the more noble of the race had endeavored to rescue those they could, no more remained. In their place were their illegitimate offspring, half-dragon mutations like Nangi who now bore a slur to
their existence, becoming "Snakes" to most of Valeyria's population. Nangi's mother, at least she surmised, had been a white dragon, leaving her with the ivory scales on her knuckles and ankles, the flickering golden eyes, and of course the twitching tail. The mother had never stayed to watch Nangi grow, leaving her with her human father who possessed no magical power beyond what Nangi liked to call a supernatural determination for sexual domination.

Now dragons, contrary to popular belief, are not as immune to disease as one would think. Their blood is more hearty and powerful than any medicine conceivable, but blood unfortunately does not hold dominion over every function of the body. In Nangi's case, the effects of disease had not taken hold on her physical person. She was as spry and healthy as she had ever been before the bomb, or so she said, her mother's blood pumping through her veins and fighting off every new threat of contamination, constantly vigilant against a perpetual threat. But the Snakes were suffering in their own way, a way most of the dying pitied.

Of the diseases afflicting us, we were exceptionally uneducated. The weaker amongst our population had fallen into fits of seizure immediately, vomiting and bleeding from every orifice imaginable as their inner organs seemed to liquefy. The later deaths were less visceral, slow internal bleeding that, by most accounts, failed to be as painful as one would imagine. They eventually passed from suffocation or heart failure. And now, those of us who had lived this long were facing a patient, tedious parasite indeed. There were fits of near-death--vomiting and dizziness, days of blackout followed by days of uneasy nausea. Sores on our skin, that bubbled into scarlet blisters and caused excruciating pain before fading and disappearing again. There seemed to be no pattern, no course of repression or relief. Little by little, the attacks became worse. The sores would start to bleed over time, and then death was certainly near.

My sores had not yet bled. But Nangi never had sores in the first place.

No, Nangi suffered as the Snakes were suffering, with gradual memory loss, gradual loss of motor skills, the slow, steady deterioration of the nervous system itself. Her brain was being eaten away by the parasites that found no nourishment from her blood. At best, she gave herself a year before life became worthless, before the inevitable outcome saw her without color or function, a beautiful vegetable whose body insisted upon surviving.

My sympathy was no great thing; stronger than Ganie were supposed to have, but scant nonetheless. Nangi ate up most of that sympathy and left me a quiet counselor to her fears and aspersions about life and death. It was no mark of friendship, exactly, but simply a by-product of the dependency she had on me, and the service with which I provided her.

"You weren't here last night," she began, as I pulled my coat tight against my chest and watched my breath crystallize in the brisk evening air. I had left The Stranger sleeping, still unsure of whether I would let Nangi in on my secret or not, "I was beginning to worry."

"I'm fine," I greeted her, and surveyed her figure. She was impervious to cold, impervious to heat, content to be wearing a miniskirt in even the most oppressive winter weather. A shawl of lavender chiffon had been thrown across her shoulders, more I knew for fashion's sake than anything else, "you haven't been waiting long, I hope."

"Not long," she glanced to the side and then back at me. Her eyes never failed to surprise, ebony daggers framed by boiling gold, a smoky rim of thick eyelashes and smeared, smudged black makeup. She was a sewer beauty, a goddess of the ruins, and didn't seem to care one way or the other. I admired her for that. "It's good to see you, Ontameni."

I had told her, not long after our first meeting, how pleased it made me when she used my name. A gust of wind followed her words, haunting in the deathly silence that surrounded us, blowing her shawl against her neck but failing to disturb the heavy crown of flaming hair on her head.

Sighing, I managed a tiny smile and began our usual ritual. Her brow pulsed with excitement as I held out my arm, and pulled at the stretched sleeve of my coat. It went easily past my elbow, leaving my naked forearm exposed to the oppressive chill of the air. Somehow, I didn't mind, watching the look of elation on her face. "You're sure you don't mind?" She asked, worshipping my generosity with her eyes.

"Not at all," I assured her, glancing down at my ghastly pale skin, the discolored valley of my elbow where the veins seemed sculpted by relief, so strong and vibrant just beneath the surface. I gripped my fist tight and crooked my arm only slightly. With my free hand, I withdrew a syringe fom my pocket, "you deserve it, for waiting when I never showed up."

She dove at the syringe, plucking it from my fingers with a high-pitched moan of delight. "You have no idea how badly I need this," she sounded breathless, as if she had been hiding some deeper disturbance from me, "I've been so tired this week. So...so very tired..."

Nangi was a university educated student of music, who had once been the darling of Valeyria's up and coming fine arts community, before all of us were relegated to far less glorious lots in life. Her flair for drama and perseverance in her craft had not diminished one bit following the bomb, and she still performed, five nights at a time in the Cavern dives. I worried about her work ethic, wondered if it was pushing her too far, too soon, and only aiding the disease in its tactical consumption of her mind. She usually laughed my fears away coyly, claiming that I thought too much about her (which was true), and that she was perfectly fine (which was not). In these moments, a guilt filled her eyes that told me the truth. She tested the resilience of the syringe's plunger and sucked in a deep breath. I flexed my fist only tighter.

"Take two, if you need it." I muttered.

"I couldn't," she replied with a similar tone, her ice cold fingers wrapping around my elbow and pulling my arm closer, "you'd pass out and you know it."

"You need it."

"Stop it." She hissed, and my pushy generosity found its limit. Slowly, she positioned the needle over one of the veins in my arm, and depressed the plunger.

Dragons have a peculiar reaction to disease, beyond the standard battle that expels it from their body. There is a rush of feeling that accompanies it, somewhat like a security alarm going off in their brains, that reenergizes them every time their body is called upon to defend itself from an invader. Snakes had long ago discovered a crass way to exploit this mechanism, by injecting filthy blood directly into their veins and waiting for the fireworks. Nangi described the feeling as a hyperactive orgasm, a feeling that threw her into a momentary fit of laughter followed by a days-long period of sleepless euphoria.

It was her only joy, these days. To extract my blood and deposit it in her own body. I let her do it, demanded to be her exclusive provider. Something decidedly non-Ganie inside of me loved to see her happy. She had been a junkie when I met her, she would probably be a junkie when she died, but Nangi made me feel. Numbers and raw fact couldn't make me feel, not the way she did. I wished, sometimes, that I could feel the hyperactive orgasm that she always tried to describe in such detail. Perhaps my fascination was somewhat grounded in envy. I always kept a firm eye on her during the process, so that it never became a bore.

Even that night, as she pulled the syringe brimming with dark red blood from my arm and smiled, I noticed little differences. Some nights she was exhausted enough to not even look me in the eye, to roughly plunge the needle into my arm and suck up my blood like a vampire, fall to her knees immediately and inject it wherever it would go. Other nights, more thoughtful nights like these, she sank slowly into a kneel and held out her arm, glancing up at me mischievously. A worn leather strap was always tied on her arm, and she wound it in her teeth and pulled tighter, urging her weakened veins to the foreground, searching them out with her eyes like a fisherman holding a bloody spear at the ready.

When the time was right, she attacked, thrusting the needle inside and throwing her head back, groaning loudly as the first waves of feeling took over. The reaction was instantaneous, she said, and it took true effort to keep her fingers from shaking too badly. The blood she injected quickly, not wasting time as her whispers and moans grew in volume and rose to a peel of giggles.

I always stood in front of her, hands in my pockets, sleeve replaced loosely around my arm, and found myself smiling, too. If my filth and disease could produce anything so appreciated, I was perfectly content with fate as it had played out.

~*~

Nangi and I did not tend to stand on pleasantries. Our interactions were very limited to necessity, even on nights when she seemed to want me to stay. My brain worked on a clock, unfortunately, and I was too stubborn to keep her company most of the time. She had learned long ago that guilt didn't work to lure me into staying, and she would shuffle off, back to the Caverns after we had exchanged a few thank yous and goodnights.

I climbed the stairs inside my house, chilled more than usual from the cold. I started to wonder, how far the temperature would begin to drop as the planet turned from the sun and winter fell upon us. Summer had been torturous enough. Winter would no doubt kill off most of us who remained, leaving only those who found refuge in the Caverns.

Pausing at the top of the stairwell, I glanced at the half-closed, rotting door of the spare bedroom next to mine, and wondered for a split-second how I might keep The Stranger alive.

"Ontameni." His voice shocked me, and I sucked in a breath as my heartbeat surged. Lust, greed, anger, and elation--I may have been devoid of these feelings, but I could still be taken off guard as easily as anyone else.

"You surprised me." I called back to Fial from the hallway, moving across the mostly-worn carpet to his door.

"I apologize. I wanted to ask how things went tonight."

I had told him all about Nangi. How we had met in the Alleys a month after the catastrophe, her unusual charm, her past and her present. I had been more vague about the services I provided for her, but he had seemed to understand all to well, remarking that "Purebred dragons have enough self-control to resist the urge to do such things, you know. Of course, the joy of direct injection would probably kill them. Could you imagine...death by joy?"

I didn't need to ask, as I stepped into the room and saw him looking out the window, that he had watched our meeting from his place. "Things went fine."

"I wanted to ask you one more thing about her. About Nangira."

Nangira was her full name. Nangira Kezali.

"Yes, what is that?" I stopped just a few steps inside the door, hands in my pockets and head cocked at an impatient sort of angle.

He looked at me, his expression as well-meaning as ever as he asked, "Are you attracted to her? Sexually, I mean."

It seemed a terribly personal question for a stranger to ask, but somehow whatever Fial said seemed more simple and innocent than the snide teasings of a Valeyrian native. And, to be sure, I had suffered my fair share of snide teasings regarding my relationship with Nangi. "No," I answered flatly, "I cannot be."

"And why not?"

"She couldn't survive pregnancy. Logic forbids it."

I paused. He seemed satisfied by my answer, and stared down at his lap.

"Oh."

"Good night."

"I'm sorry if I offended."

"You didn't. Good night."

I walked back to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. The short exchange of words had brought memories back to me I had longed to forget. Memories, I had once assured Nangi, were a blessing, but sometimes they could also be a curse. She would be lucky to forget some things.

At times, I wished it would be so easy for me to forget her. When she died, if I even survived, I would have to learn to forget.

~*~

Sometime, during the night, the unthinkable happened. To the unacquainted eye, it might seem a trivial thing that I awoke from my slumber. But I knew better. I knew that any moment of sleeplessness from the moment I dozed to the moment I woke was cause for some curiosity. I was not prone to interrupted sleep. I wasn't even prone to dreams--every thought in my head was concrete and forefront. Perhaps, I used to believe until basic physiology proved me mistaken, I did not have a subconscious at all. Though I did have one, it did a wonderful job of disguising itself, and I worried for it when it acted up by waking me in the middle of the night.

And so, wide awake without a thought as to why, I sat up in my bed, the tattered remnants of knit blankets and woolen scraps falling down around my waist. I stared ahead at my walls, ghastly with their scribbled messages in the half-light, and sighed. The wall of my bedroom I had covered in my attempts at defining thousands of impossible figures, calculating pi to hundreds of digits, pulling random numbers from my head and working magic with them to keep my mind from wandering.

There was nothing chance about this moment, I surmised, and something had compelled me to be awake and experience it. The strange event had everything to do with the stranger Fial, or so my subconscious wailed. Despite its neglectful nature, I admit that my subconscious had its sparks of brilliance.

I would never have known that he was awake if I hadn’t pulled my jacket on and wandered under creaking floorboards into his room. He sat in the exact position where I had left him, hands folded calmly in his lap, his eyes reading slowly over my wall-markings with an expression of blank contentment. I wondered, had he been awake since we said goodnight? If so, the tickle of uncertainty in my brain was solidifying where the stranger was concerned. If I had been inclined to believe there was something not quite right about Fial before, I was now assured of it.

“Your work is fascinating,” Fial tilted his head and mumbled, smiling imperceptibly as if appreciating a fine work of art in my calculation of Valeyria’s weather trends since the catastrophe. He lifted a finger and pointed in flowing traces at the figures, his wrist fluid, his fingers long and slender, “I notice the way you write your numbers, it increases in flow and speed as you draw closer to a conclusion. Here, for example, as you’re factoring in the lack of precipitation, you whisk through the crosses on your 5’s and 4’s. Why, you almost developed your own strange shorthand for an 8, it took you that much longer to draw it the regular way. I’d be extremely interested in seeing you work sometime. You must be incredible.”

Though pleased at the rare moment of flattery, I crossed my arms and tried to appear stern. “I work alone.”

“I gathered,” he smiled and glanced back down, “that doesn’t change my interest now, does it?”

So, he was a creature of logic after all. “I never wake up, you know, once I’m asleep. This is the first time in months.”

“Well, certainly I haven’t been making any noise.” He replied, his features softening as he glanced at me with a sympathetic look.

“You haven’t. I’m just wondering what might have caused it.”

“It’s not every day you find an amnesiac on the street, certainly,” he arranged the blankets at his waist and squirmed his torso, appearing to settle in when he didn’t actually move his lower body at all, “even your kind must have some form of nerves and stress.”

“A little, yes,” I sighed and walked over to the home-crafted wooden chair across from the bed. It was a rocking chair, ornately etched with domestic designs of rose vines and wreaths, hearts and little picket fence houses. Soot and dust encrusted the runners, and a threadbare cushion just managed to stay on the seat. It didn’t just creak when it moved, it literally cracked, as if threatening to collapse at any moment. But then, I never had much of a call to take a seat in it, “but that wouldn’t be enough to wake me.”

“Well, I’m not sure what to say, then. Maybe I can talk to you until you feel you can go back to sleep.”

It was a tempting proposal that I accepted despite my better judgment.

He seemed prepared for the encounter. “Tell me what it was like before the…bomb, you said?”

“Yes, a bomb. We don’t know what sort—it couldn’t have been nuclear, we’ve not been irradiated, but it was certainly come kind of chemical brand we haven’t seen before. I’ve tried to pinpoint some atomic signatures from the ruins, but I’m not as equipped and skilled in chemistry as I am in mathematics. Besides, none of the necessary tools are left anywhere that I know of—Ground Zero was the center of the city, the tallest buildings and the most notable places. The university, the offices, the banks and museums and political headquarters. Three miles, square with sprays of destruction along the edges, are just gone. You can’t even recognize the city anymore. The riots started after the bomb dropped, and a lot of the other areas of town were burned. The rains came—the soot and ashes fell and covered what was left in black…”

“But what about before? Do you have any fond memories at all?”

I sighed deeply and tried to answer him as diplomatically as I knew how. “The Ganie don’t have much need to relate their memories. We’re not very good about it. We’re not very poetic. We keep them for information, nothing more.”

“Then you can’t describe in detail how Valeyria felt in the springtime?”

“Mild, with gusts of wind. The sun was never very oppressive during the spring, so it was the most productive time of year. The last of the snow usually melted around March, and then everything came into bloom.”

“Is Valeyria beautiful in bloom?”

“I guess it is. I’ve heard so many people refer to it that way. We have botanical gardens that are quite renowned,” I stopped myself, “that is…had botanical gardens. They were near Ground Zero.”

“Did you have a job?”

“I was a student. I worked as a lab assistant most of the time, but I did not live an extravagant lifestyle, so I needed very little to get by,” I seemed to sense his next question, “I lived in the middle of the city, yes, just a few miles from the university, on the outskirts of the blast radius. Luckily, I was in the market district on errands that day. The market district was looted and then burned to cinders in the riots.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The market district was an eyesore anyway. I had never cared for the sterile, nouveau-consumerist environment that Valeyria was becoming. There were so many old buildings in the city that were pushed aside for that sort of thing—the university was a converted monastery, centuries old, with spires of limestone and towering pillars of ivy that crept up every weathered wall. They were beautiful buildings, the old type of architecture that drew benefit from a stern sense of proportion and dynamics combined with keen aesthetics.”

“You do appreciate aesthetics, then?”

“Occasionally.” For a moment I felt uncomfortable, as if Fial had caught me in some illicit act. True, I took a private pleasure in architecture, but somehow my mind was able to justify that by the rigorous numbers involved in the art form. Yet I’d never found a way to wrap my mind around certain quandaries. The fact that I detested skyscrapers and adored cathedrals. The fact that the pyramids enchanted me while marvels of modern structural engineering slipped through the sieve of my brain without a second thought.

He studied my passing fit of discomfort at the topic. “What did they smell like?”

Somehow I knew what he was getting at. “Excuse me?”

“What did the old buildings smell like? The inside of them?” His voice was soft, a low, cinnamon tone that was pleasant on my ears and found a way to make his interrogations seem more bearable.

“Like trees,” I answered, but only after a moment of consideration. Every fact, every memory was indeed stored away for me to relate to any willing party; the trick was in asking the right questions, “like trees, after a rain. That wild smell of old books and stream rocks. Always slightly stale, but somehow always clean. That smell was something I always trusted. I don’t always trust the chemical smell of the pasteurized market district, but I always trusted the rain tree smell of the university and the library.”

“Where was the library?”

I tried to remember, mumbling as I ran over the map inside my head, from one end of Valeyria to the other, trying to gauge the distance. “1.6 miles from the city hall, 2.35 from the university. A grove of sycamores was planted around the building, spaced one every two feet—the landscaping was simply…perfect. I measured it all one day, walking around for hours on end, jotting notes and adjusting for every leaf out of place. The building itself was rather plain, but architecturally sound, as it had been for decades. Four stories, one basement for records and reference. It’s mostly destroyed, now. The basement…the basement may survive yet, but I haven’t necessarily wanted to go near it.”

“Are you afraid of the city now, Ontameni?” His use of my name sparked something that made the short hairs on the back of my neck straighten. I breathed out through my nose as if the intrusion on my familiarity had nettled me, but in reality I found myself a little exhilarated by his show of confidence. He leaned over his lap, toward me, “is that why you live on the outskirts, by this abandoned airport that no one else wants to inhabit?”

“I don’t enjoy the city now.”

“Hundreds of Valeyrian citizens still survive there, struggling together for a common good. You’re one person out here, but you seem so much more content to be alone in this time of emotional drought. It seems to me the opposite of a natural psychology.”

“I don’t care to be reminded of the struggle. Death is mine to visit when it comes to find me, but until then I’m determined to live as I always have and—“

“Did you always live by prostituting yourself and eating Dwellers’ table scraps, shaving with a rusty scalpel in the morning and brushing your teeth with stagnant water at night?”

I stared at him. I’m sure my eyes were electric—I was never bereft of comments to confirm it in the past. Although my gaze was steady and firm I couldn’t bring myself to sharpen my tongue on such an easy target. My emotions were rising with their imperceptible ripples to the surface, but I staved them off for Fial’s benefit. I appreciated his words, even if I resented them.

“No. Of course I didn’t,” I snatched a blanket from the back of the rocking chair. Dust went flying from the knots of the knitted wool, and I coughed at the scent. Clutching it around my shoulders, I suddenly noticed how cold I felt, “but I never lived with people. I never depended on others to make my living for me, and I won’t do that now. I never had a community, I never desired one. Disaster is not a circumstance dire enough to merit some change in that.”

We were silent for some time then, both of us, as Fial stared in a slow circle around the room and I kept my eyes fixed on a large dust bunny alight upon my knee. Just as I achieved the presence of mind to banish the thing with a small gust of breath, Fial spoke with his eyes staring out the window, “Quite a ghastly place now, isn’t it? Very lonely. Very dead.”

The airport, of course. Acres of flat cement, abandoned parking lots, flat-ceilings on boxy buildings, and at the center of it all, a steeple-like control tower. If ghosts lived anywhere in Valeyria, I knew they haunted the airstrip. I heard the wind when I slept and it sounded like the muted screams of ghosts, whirring outside my second story window and raising goose bumps on my body. When I turned into a child again, during those vulnerable nighttime moments, I would occasionally pine for some comforting memories to relieve the undue nerves that gripped me, momentarily. I would wonder, even when it defied all logic, if I had been so lucky as to have a family, perhaps a caring mother who had assured me, once long ago that I had now forgotten, that ghosts aren’t real.

And those times, during the night, I would think back on the mother I wasn’t even sure I had ever had, look her in the eye, and tell her she was wrong. Ghosts did exist, I said to myself, in Valeyria and everywhere. They flew between the razor patterns in the sky and slid between the cracks of the doors to shiver up our spines at night. I didn’t fear them, but I knew them. And knowing them, I felt somehow obligated.

It’s hard to know, in a dying city, when the ghosts come late at night, which world you belong to.