Chapter 9: Simeon Thoroughly Spent
"The Lord dwells in the hearts of all beings, O Arjuna. According to their karmas, He directs the wanderings of souls. By the power of His māyā, He causes them to revolve." - Bhagavad Gita 18:61
Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.
I left Boston with new clothes and very little patience. The syllabus, at least, felt authentically me.
And that is all hilariously trivial next to the harrowing ordeal that followed my deposition. Because here’s what the fates had in store for me — and it was only Monday.
Southbound this time, I pounded the CliffsNotes into the pavement for mnemonics. Go slow. Her lead. New ropes. Take heart. I recited it at the treeline like a novice with his first rosary. I wasn’t praying the rosary, I consoled myself. I was praying the blooms of her garden, and that was close enough to gird my devotions without courting a conversion.
Fuck I’m a depraved bastard — getting off on semantics as I do.
I took New York by rooftop. The skyline is too uncommon to take in from pedestrian perspectives.
I watched the planes coming into LaGuardia as I ran and finally descended over New Jersey only to refuel. We need not linger in New Jersey longer than to note: I stopped into an isolated BP off the interstate, tipped over the attendant, filled up, and carried on.
I reached Austin at midnight and rushed back to the hotel hoping I’d catch her still idling at the bar with literally any book. But she wasn’t, so I retired to my room and fought off the itch to run a liminal scan for theta waves. It’s not my usual frequency while shopping but it was her frequency, which raised the question: why had I descended into theta that fateful night when beta is where I do my best hunting?
Like a poet depressed that his own virtuosity does not merit the adulation he’s hounded with, I sulked by the window and lamented my grievances. I passed the small hours of the night transposing my favorite longings into lyric fragments I would never compose into song because no one would understand their real craft:
O fair femme fatale of the verboten aisles
O somnolent creature of fire in thine eyes
Grant thou thy mercy — allow but a scan
I promise to be your most orthodox fan
…
And if you please, repeat your please
I’ve tarried in Boston to anneal a new lease
That the torments might cease
…
I implore on my knees
I implode from your tease
I await my release—
…
O, enchantress, O, please!
I—
…
Have a plan!
…
Your hair have I died in; your skull have I spared
I’ll savor sweet nothings and burn at your hands
…
I’ll serenade you, I’ll cool you off, too
Only say that I’m granted the way into you
Light creative fare well clear of lechery. I even managed to wrangle the coming lash into a convincing ravishment:
O Sourpuss of firmaments
Stay thou thy scourge
And suffer thy servant
Be flogged ’til he purge
…
O Death victorious, delay not your sting
Mayhap might I perish in Miri’s O-ring?
My melancholy was interrupted by a most peculiar sensation: a pull of piercing, disemboweling pathos when I penned orthodox and thy servant. I felt as though the words were lifting off the page, implanting in my gut, and evacuating the fullness of my duplicitous wordplay clear through my loins. Not a burning at all but an excision — no less lacerating in its intensity.
I marked the lesson in my answered prayers: God is not mocked, for He is boring — and I am not His servant.
At dawn I found myself haunting the lobby to catch her on her way to work. The infernal carpet received me like an old cellmate. I took a seat with sightlines to the elevators and I waited.
The air assumed the fragrance of perfectly overroasted coffee. The suits came down with their lanyards and rolling bags. And none of them were her. Seven o’clock became eight, and eventually nine. The elevators kept chiming, each one a dirge for a funeral of dying hopes that she did not attend.
I went to the desk.
“I’m looking for a guest. Miri.”
“Last name?”
And here, my abyss opened a newly-minted trapdoor: I did not know. I have counted the singular freckle below her jaw — just the one, and I would never need another. I have metered her pulse under four distinct emotional conditions. I could paint the shadow-textured shape of her spiritual striving.
And I did not know her surname. The clerk watched me not know it, his face performing the minor municipal pity that hotel staff reserve for men who have been left.
“She’s…auburn. Curly. She had a room on—” I stopped. I did not know the floor either. I knew her brain waves but I had been so scrupulous about not knowing more than strictly necessary that I now possessed nothing.
He typed anyway. Mortals are kind at nine in the morning; the shift is too new for impatience. And I watched his eyes register something on the screen and then shutter it, the way you’d close a drawer you regret opening.
“That guest checked out. Midday yesterday.”
Monday. Noon. While I sat on a recamier in Boston being taught to GO SLOW…and she was folding her clothes? While Saul was saying she’ll let you in, she was in fact handing back her key card. The chronology had the same flavor of pain as the vivisection, only it was in my heart.
“Could you furnish me with her home address? We’re…acquainted.”
“Sir, I’m sorry,” he pursed his lips, shaking his head. “That’s not something I’m at liberty to disclose.”
“I understand.” Straightaway, I felt this vivisected heart grow very cold. It’s not the taste of disappointment, but rather like something that you might call adrenaline.
And I knew what I would do next.
I froze in place, and I want to describe the kind of stillness I contain. You are familiar, I am sure, with the affected stillness of your beloved parlor panther preparing to pounce upon a much-abused toy? Their fast-twitch muscles a loaded spring holding paralysis under tension for mere seconds? This artful trick of their biology is but an echo of the motionlessness that visits my vasculature before the hunt. A perfected still, in heat, at absolute zero. The primordial predation.
“Thank you.” I pronounced it slowly, a model of calm — the second word an octave lower than the first. “My colleague may have left a bag with your luggage service. Might we check the back?”
He plainly did not want to check the back and plainly wanted me to leave. Humans can sense things, too. Some preternatural wisdom in him lifted its head but his discipline overrode it, as discipline does — hospitality is a harness, too — and reluctantly requested the proper credentials.
“Do you have a bag check stub?”
I did not, but I threw a glamour his way. He swallowed and smiled curtly. “Right this way, sir.”
He led me past the brass cart into the dim room of orphaned suitcases.
As soon as we were in, I slammed the door behind us and clocked the look of alarm that disfigured his face.
“Do you follow Jesus?” I barked.
He blinked. “What?”
“Christ! Are you baptized? Churched? Covered in any way? It matters procedurally.” The sourpuss trained me to check the tax code before I sin.
“N-no?”
Green light. Inside of a second, I gripped his lapels in one hand and his chin in the other, lifted him to the tips of his oxfords, and unsheathed my incisors.
His knees went limp and his toes lost their footing.
I helped him to another inch in the air, the oxfords and lower body thrashing furiously, his hands pulling against my wrists, while his chest and upper torso remained perfectly still in my immobilizing grip. “I require Miri’s address.”
The lash took my spine straight away — WHY THE LASH? He’s not Christian!
“B-B-Boston.”
Boston?! What the fuck?
“Where in B-Boston?” The stutter was mine. I did not mock. The pain grew more insistent.
“I—I couldn’t say—”
“Couldn’t say what, friend?” The bile rose in my throat.
“Thh-th—the address. For the— for the p-p-privacy of our guests! My manager would—”
“Then call the manager,” I sounded out in my most politely educational tone through the mounting torment — and underlined my point by licking my teeth.
He grinned at that like an idiot. His next words came out high-pitched with enthusiasm. “I—I could become one!”
“We don’t want you.” Fucking fang-loving pervert. I hadn’t run back here to make more vampires but to trace humans — one human!
“But I could be one if you like!”
Bloody groupie. “Get me the address and I’ll consider your afterlife.” I was up to my eyeballs in pain — except not figuratively — and freshly out of fucks to give for his weird fixations.
The clerk was keening now. “A Christian! I could be Christian! I can believe! If that’s—if that would…do I get to live if—?”
Ah, that. The absurdity of his bargain outranked the absurdity of what I thought was a fang fetish, and it snapped my very last frayed nerve.
But I was out of time. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I rooted myself to the parquet in the luggage room — my incisors still out and my feet on fire and a hanged man offering to ransom Christ to a monster — and I could do no more.
“I don’t believe it works like that,” I hissed and released the sorry creature, who crumpled to the floor in front of me and scampered into a corner like an overgrown mouse.
I turned, hunched over a suitcase to regain my footing as the fire died down, and retrieved three hundred dollars from my lapel pocket that I threw in his direction before storming out.
Twice now I had fled the scene with partial information. The first, when I hurriedly packed a woman into a cab knowing only her name and not how to call her. The second right then, back at the hotel, capitulating to a mixture of anguish, folly, and quite literally existential angst at his bid for conversion at the point of a fang.
Was I forever consigned to incompetence? I could have shaken down the manager and anyone else in their employ to extract my quarry. But I could not stand the pain. Centuries of hunting, and one woman had reduced me to an imbecile who cannot conclude a simple interview.
She must be despondent by now, wondering why I abandoned her in flagrante exspiro. Why I kept her awake for four nights and hadn’t even bothered to ask for her number.
If he wanted to, he would. Isn’t that what you all think?
Add to that, I had a new mystery on my hands: why was this atheist pick-me handing out hellfire while neither wretch on either interstate hassled me in the hunt? What the hell is the mechanism of your design, you divine demoniac?! And how the fuck do I install god-mode without tipping my king?
And Boston.
You have got to be kidding me.
Had she been in one of the planes flying over the New York skyline as I sped her way after running an ultramarathon in precisely the opposite direction the night before?
It would be impossible to fully convey the sense of bitterness and foreboding I felt gathering around me and walling me in. Utter hopelessness, knowing I had been outmaneuvered. Knowing I would always be outmaneuvered. Knowing that my head was a room in His and I had nowhere to make my bed to hide from His sadistic, relentless pursuit.
But Saul. Saul scours provenance archives for coffins to crack. He could scour the yellow pages — or whatever modern-day equivalent his NatSec buddies deployed to canvass for targets.
There was hope.
I shot Saul a text: “Back sometime tonight. Don’t wait up. More later.”
Yes, I was thoroughly, thoroughly spent — and I would gladly spend what was left and keep spending it on her, and be fully spent by her — but the charade must go on.
Saul answered moments later: “Is it still a woman?”
I turned around and did the only thing I felt proficient in anymore: I ran.
