Chapter 3: Simeon Is Burning
"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door..." - Revelation 3:20
Four nights I lay there. She didn’t come back.
I waited in the dark each night, tuned to theta frequency, waiting at the place where her light had seared my synapses.
The garden was barren. Cold. There was no garden. No gate. No her.
Her absence was a different kind of heartburn, a new kind of torture.
It was merciless. Maddening. But it was not boring.
Four nights was not long for a man who counts his hours in centuries, but by the third meditation I’d begun to wonder if I’d hallucinated the whole thing. Was I merely hungry?
Eight hundred years of monotony and then a single moment of imagined contact with something that was not like me but recognized me with a sympathy so luminous it immolated my nervous system — was it possible I’d finally cracked? That the boredom had eaten through whatever passes for sanity in a creature like me, and I’d invented a blazing mind in the dark because the alternative was admitting that nothing new walked under the sun — least of all I, who skulked its long shadows.
But the burning had been real. The nausea. My body doesn’t invent pain to pass the time. Pain was protection. Something had happened. Someone had been in my mind.
Where was she?
I was restless. The rented room was too small. The dark was too monochrome. I found myself pacing: a pathetic, embattled behavior that I despise in myself because it means some fragility in the body is running the show instead of my mind — the mind of a monster — conquering its vestigial weakness.
My body. The parts that hummed when I wondered what she was. I was pacing like an animal in heat — and in a cage, except the cage is a mediocre hotel room and the animal is an apex predator who should be above this humiliation. And the heat — not intoxicating. Toxic. It would kill me.
I went downstairs.
The hotel lobby was the kind of anonymous, inoffensive space that American hotels specialize in: nondescript furniture, ambient lighting, a bar in the corner where people who pretended they preferred to sit alone sat next to people who pretended they didn’t.
I didn’t need a drink. I didn’t need food, or at least not the kind they served here. I just needed to be somewhere with ceilings higher than eight feet and air that didn’t smell like my own desolation. Here, at least I could pretend to enjoy other people’s people problems.
I sat in a chair near the window. I watched humans do what humans do: tapping at their phones, murmuring at each other, performing the elaborate social choreography of belonging. I used to find them entertaining. Then I found them predictable. Now I barely found them visible. They were furniture that breathed.
Where the fuck was she?
And then the pain hit.
A spike of burning, sudden and sharp, from within my sternum. The same quality as four nights ago — that specific signature, the one I associate with holiness and God and his omnipresent fucking churches. My body’s ancient allergy. My nature protecting itself.
But I wasn’t near a church. I was in a hotel lobby in downtown Austin seeking seekers and credulous hangers-on. The burning shouldn’t have been here. There were no saints here.
Unless.
I turned.
She was sitting on a stool near the bar. Twenty feet away. Maybe less. A woman with auburn hair. Curly like a rococo painting if the subject had just yawned herself out of bed. The kind of curly that has its own opinions about what direction it wants to explore.
She was reading a book. No — not reading — scouring, like it was a grimoire. I could see the blanching of the flesh where her fingers pressed against the binding, where her blood would seep instead of flowing. These are the things I notice without even noticing anymore.
She was small, but not delicate. There was a sturdiness to her, a density of presence that took up space even across the room. She took up more of it than her body accounted for.
And it was pressing against me. Her space — her presence — invading mine. The burning intensified. My chest. My throat. That low nausea rolling through me like a wave. My body saying leave, walk away, this is the thing that hurts you, this is the only thing you have to fear, this is fear itself, go.
I stood unmoving. Tied to a stake of my own construction. The only things rebelling against my stillness were the tingles filling my loins and the sickness roiling in my belly.
I looked at her. The book’s cover was turned toward me just enough that I could make out the title. Something about a cloud. Unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing. She was reading about the mysterious angst that pressed us to each other.
Oh.
This was going to be easy — even if it hurt.
A woman covered in the blood of Christ reading a book about contemplative prayer. Not scripture. Not theology. Contemplative prayer. The kind of practice that lives in the borderlands between traditions. The kind of practice that opens doors. Theories. Frameworks. Portals to slip through.
Gates.
The garden. Fuck. Again, that searing, searing pain. Fuck my life. Fuck my farcical irrational number of a life sentence.
I was on the verge of pouncing into a seduction that goes only one way — my need sated and her life emptied — when I remembered what I wanted.
I stayed my execution. To watch her read? To wait out my pain? For this infernal agony to abate? To…admire.
She wasn’t skimming. She was devouring the text — flipping back, rereading, her frenzied fingers denting the pages the way inquisitors extract truths from throats that refuse confessions. You don’t read like that when you’re reading for pleasure. You read like that when you’re hunted and the grimoire is the only thing between you and the thing that haunts you.
She haunts me.
Let her.
A soteriological bauble. Oh, the irony: she’s forcing a confession out of a book about surrender.
So. Her framework has flaws. I could work with this. I could toy with this.
I decided to stand up.
That sounds simple. It wasn’t. My body did not want to stand. My body wanted to go upstairs, leave the lobby, leave the hotel, leave the city. My body was doing what it always does near holiness: flooding me with every signal it had to make me turn away. Convulsive waves of concentrated, half-digested blood and my own cadaverous bile. A revulsion so structural it felt like my bones would tear from their tendons and walk in the opposite direction to anywhere if my reanimated flesh did not comply.
And how it was reanimated. I wanted.
I stood up in the direction of my want and the fire coursed up my nerves, sending a shock of electricity through the entire length of me — through my now erect spine directly into my temples. Her now deafening heartbeat piercing the ringing in my ears.
I would die tonight. I, personally, was fine with that. My body had other plans.
My body. Which body? Parts of my body were also fine with my plan. Tonight, we die.
Yes. God yes.
What the fuck.
What god?
Non serviam. I will not bow. I will consume.
I told my right foot to move. It moved. Annihilation. I told my left foot to follow. It followed. Exhalation. The splitting, insurmountable pain in the distance between my legs that I willed to walk. Hope, want, longing, care cooling the fiery agony I surmounted, yes surmounted, with the memory of the humming, throbbing, pulsing between the licks of flame fraying my nerve endings.
Twenty feet of beige carpet between me and her, and I had to think each step — consciously, deliberately, the way a stroke patient relearns to walk. The way a condemned man approaches the gallows. Foot. Floor. Weight. Shift. Foot. Floor. Weight. Shift. A body fighting against me the whole way. A body drawing me forward the whole way. Which body? Her body? My body? My very reanimated body?
My hands wanted to clench. My throat was closing. My vision capitulating its perimeter — narrowing, darkening, flashing blindingly as if my eyes wanted to stop me from staring at the sun.
Ten feet. The burning was in my teeth now. In my jaw. In the bones of my face. In the eyes abacinating from inside my skull. I kept walking.
Five feet. I could smell her — not blood, not yet, but something earthy. Rain? Moss?
Sweat. And salt.
Sweet? Her —
Skirt. Austin in summer.
My stomach lurched. I held it.
I stopped behind her. I was holding my breath — I don’t need to breathe, but the steadying habit of centuries is hard to break unless something shatters your defenses. Every sinew of my muscles clocking in overtime to clench against the revulsion — to withhold the release. I was standing upright through sheer willpower to touch what I want, and ignore what I need. It was costing me everything.
“That’s a good book,” I said.
She wouldn’t look at me.
A faint sound — like clearing her throat…or readying it. “You’ve read it?”
“I’ve read most things,” I stammered through my salivating mouth.
That was the truth, and a prideful thing to say to your judge, your jury, and possibly your executioner.
Wait. I’m the executioner. This is stupid. I’m walking away.
Then she looked up.
Her eyes were brown. Dark brown, almost black in the lobby light. And sharp. Eyes that discern and decide before they deign to respond.
She took me in the way a woman sizes up a man who approaches uninvited: quickly, thoroughly, with the part of the mind that calculates risk before social propriety.
She tilted her head. The auburn curls shifted. The shiny coat of my prey in prime refracting light from the window into my barbecued eyeballs.
“Most things about meditation specifically, or most things in general?”
“Yes.”
She almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth moved and then settled into a quizzical pout, as if the humor had been intercepted by priorities. She closed the book, one finger holding her place.
“Do you meditate?”
“Every night for the past four nights. Or every night of my lifetime, depending on what we’re calling…meditation.”
Her eyes narrowed. She paused as if perplexed, and then her eyes relaxed, her shoulders dropping. She sat back. It seemed she, too, understood how to navigate modalities. To seek answers in frameworks. To seek frameworks with copacetic answers.
“Then can I ask you someth—?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever meditated so deeply it terrified you?”
The lobby buzzed around us. Someone laughed by the bar. A phone rang at the front desk. A mosquito. Or maybe it was the ringing in my ears. The music shifted from one C major – G – Am – F progression to an indistinguishable other. I think a minute passed and we simply stared.
I didn’t speak. I let the silence impregnate the expanding spacetime between us the way her light had violated my darkness four nights ago. I could see the anticipation was burning her. She was uncomfortable.
But I…I was aflame.
I think I fucking hated her right then. I was so dizzy, I wonder if I managed to stare her down with the full weight of my intended accusation — of what I was living with or dying from, and her part in it — or if I merely looked pitifully ill. I wanted her to see that I had seen her in the most private place she’d ever been seen, that I had found her door ajar, that I had touched her mind, that she had felt me and run and not come back to burn away my want. That she had gone, abandoned me in my hour of stupid fucking pacing in a cage, to seek — I now fully understood from the title in her hand — some kind of puerile answer in whatever God-forsaken manuscript she thought would protect her, when her light was already enough to taunt me into suffering this charade, this interminable, abominable time and space and distance between me and my prize to go on like I’m some kind of simpering schoolboy.
I could hardly stand, but I let her see that I knew.
I watched the comprehension land.
Her face changed. The question in her eyes metastasized into horror. Her lips parted. Her knees — ajar. The finger — slipped from its place, the pages now fanning and she didn’t notice. The color left her cheeks and then came back, too much of it, a flush that climbed from her throat to her temples and I could smell the path her blood traveled.
She knew.
Without a word. Without a single word of explanation or context or preamble. She looked at me and I looked at her and the threat, the recognition, passed between us like a current — the same that had joined our minds in the dark, but now here, in a hotel lobby, in the merciless fluorescent lighting where nothing mystical should be possible.
She knew who I was. She knew what I was. Maybe not the specifics — not vampire, not ancient. But Not. From. Christ. That, at least, she knew.
Her breath caught in her throat, the halted intake engorging the carotid in her neck so subtly only a perversion of nature would notice. Her neck.
My throat. The fire caught in it. I couldn’t speak.
The burning was unbearable. My body was howling. My very cells were singing their own eulogy. But amidst the flames, there it was again. The care. Coming from a place flames couldn’t reach. The place that remembered what it felt like to want, and to meet the person who could quench it, stroke it away, release it, willingly.
My vision swimmed. Swam? Swum. And I lurched forward. My turncoat of a body shot an arm up to her shoulder to keep from falling.
The pain in my palm where it grazed the bare skin beneath her tank top incinerated my nerve endings as my forearm collapsed flaccid at my side. I nearly doubled over into the chair beside her. Head hanging over the bar, I angled my face with preternatural slowness toward hers. I peered sideways through squinting eyes into the alarm in hers. Laterally, like a cat, like a bird, like not a human.
And then I managed the only words I could still remember — an incantation:
“What are you?”
She froze. Her heartbeat quickened.
She thought to flee. Her legs, those knees, shifted.
The notion of fighting me flashed across her face. I noticed how it made her squirm in her seat.
Then, she let out a long withheld sigh. There it is. The fawn. My doe.
The book sat closed and abandoned. Her hand limp, fingers splayed, palm open, as if already belonging to the dead. To me. A glass of wine she hadn’t touched caught the light that had been in her hair and threw a small red shadow across the bar between us.
And then, quietly, barely above a whisper, with a voice that quivered the way my vision flickered, the admission of the spell:
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Finally.
