Chapter 8: Simeon at Breakfast
"From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, even more will be expected." - Luke 12:48
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.
“How was dinner last night?” I asked, walking the stacks of his entryway library.
“The usual charade. They eat, I pretend to. I extract it all later, curdled in platelets I’d prefer to retain, if it were all the same. But the more notable extraction is informational,” he said, arranging some papers in his escritoire before closing the lid.
“Look here. MIT is funding an off-the-books study under the auspices of privileged pathogen recovery for their latest NatSec gimmick to sequence nuclear DNA off antique reliquaries,” he explained, handing me the brief. Little point enforcing non-disclosure between scientists and sanguinarians; we wouldn’t run to the presses anyway.
“What do they want you for? You’re a glorified lawyer.”
“Not for the fine print! They’re keen to have me scour the provenance archives to divine which coffins are worth cracking. Perfectly ghoulish affair — and barely licit. The paleogenomicists never disappoint in the letter if not the spirit.”
“Intriguing.” I had by now taken a seat on the recamier near the window, catching the rays of sunlight streaming in through the glass and warming my cramping joints.
“Obscene to trouble the dead overmuch — provided death has at last succeeded in them — and they had the good sense to stay so. And ravishingly otiose besides, I might add, while their real specimen sits among them playing at dinner. Anyway. Is this what you came to ask me about?”
I leaned back on the recamier and looked up at the ceiling. He walked over to hand me a glass of thin red liquid laced with aerated plasma — a breakfast sangria if you will — and settled into the chair opposite me, crossing his legs. This had the blocking of a therapy session. I suppose I asked for this.
“You ever get dinged for crimes you didn’t commit?”
He slow-blinked at me as if I’d asked whether all roads lead to Rome. But it was an honest question. He’s weirdly evasive about his past.
“This isn’t about me.”
“Okay,” I sighed out my weariness, loosed the research abstract onto the floor, and kicked my feet up on the lounger. “My troubles began when I was scanning the aisles in a hotel. Packaged goods would have been fine — I don’t resent the jaded. Organic optimism would have been better. But this was root-to-table stuff, Saul. The woman was—”
“Metaphors are my métier, brother, not yours. Give it to me straight.”
“She’s a goddamned Christian, Saul!”
Suddenly, he found the ceiling as noteworthy as I did.
“And what do we do with root vegetables, dear boy?”
“We let them grow.”
“And what did Simeon do instead?”
“This part’s not about me, Saul! Why was she even visible? More to the point, why was she pulling me in? I’ve known the rules for cen-tu-ries,” I sounded it out, “and respected the players. The fucking gameboard’s cracked, my guy. Or He’s finally cracked. Something’s not right.”
“Have I sheltered you so tenderly, brother, that you’ve been stalking under the impression that any of this is right?”
That’s the thing with Saul. He knows exactly what he is but refuses to accept the justice in it. My bitterness had long ago fizzled away into indifference. But his bitterness? It made him self-righteous. Exacting. And doggedly investigative of an answer that I knew would never arrive.
And so he ensconced himself among Boston’s punctilious elite, patronized by old families who wanted their libraries kept as if he needed the money — hiding behind a profession requiring no faces to names but rather tomes to be entrusted, and surfacing every so often to redirect a brilliant research effort away from the sunlight.
But his investigations often yielded other answers that proved useful to our kind, and that was why I was here. For the mechanics, not the metaphysics.
So I produced it. The exact mechanics. It was dark. I was ambling about. She was meditating. The light. The press of mental contact. The agony. The nerve. My nerves. Skull to sole incineration.
“So you lived to tell the tale.”
“By a hair on my head, Saul. Just barely.”
“And then you went back.”
“You of all people should understand the want for thoroughness.”
“This isn’t thorough. It’s reckless,” he said as if scolding a fudged lab result. “You put your hand on the stove and kept it there. The pain is not the finding, Simeon. The pain is the least interesting thing in this file. But you knew that. Continue.”
I continued. I gave him Texas properly, the rates, the location of each lash, the location of a limb—
“You might spare me that detail.”
“It’s instructive.”
“Gratuitous. I have limbs, too. And skip the tariff.”
“The tariff is the evidence—”
“The tariff is jurisprudence. The evidence is what you did and said. Go where there’s smoke.”
Saul is an attorney from the turn of the millennium. Not your millennium — not even the one when I was made — but that millennium. The one so eerie with holiness humans stopped counting down to it and started counting the minutes since. He was around then. A Roman citizen obsessed with every arcana he could get his hands on. He never told me what had his britches in a bunch so tight that he kept his formative years fastidiously vague. But when he heard about my turning in Kyoto, he ran to me. Ran to me clear from San Clemente to Fushimi Inari.
Probably a woman. No one runs like that for novelties. But again, he wouldn’t say. We forged our friendship one transaction at a time. I was the only christened creature other than him turned sacrificial lamb to the wrong god. He was the only fiend other than me who had been a practicing congregant. And so we helped each other — he supplied knowledge and I supplied…kinship, I suppose, of a sort.
We became brothers, but he was just as often fatherly, and a dungeon compatriot even more so. A tangled kinkship, I admit, but there’s no one squeamish enough among us to keep adopted genealogies from slouching toward Gomorrah. Whatever fits the scene. And we had similar tastes — especially as the centuries wore on and we kept upping the ante to keep ourselves from growing repetitive.
But our shared baptism was always a foil for him, I am sure of it — a fencing partner for some grander plan. The way he observed my discipline, the way he taught me to discipline others…it always felt like he was running a dress rehearsal. What Christ had to do with it, I never could work out. A woman, then.
“What’s in this sangria?”
“Agreement.”
“So much less jammy than the hospice stuff.”
“The kink scene in Boston has its advantages. Let’s return to the matter at hand.”
“So the hands were a real nuisance…” And I recounted how my hand fell on her accidentally to steady myself in the hotel — how it fell again on the dance floor because her hair made me weak.
“Strict liability.”
“I knew you’d say that. But it doesn’t cut both ways. Her hands on me? Clear passage. Her hair in my face? Open borders. Her please while getting pinned? I’m practically naturalized.”
“She let you pin her? That was fast.”
“With my breath. That’s the fascinating part. I couldn’t move her an inch on the dance floor — I had to keep a vigil of five away from her body or the tax collector came. But I guided her with breath and we managed beautifully, so long as I made no contact. And then later, outside the club, I was nigh on embalming her with it against a wall — had her near begging for my inadvertent execution.”
“Breath boasts an interesting pedigree in the lands you invaded.”
“You do me too much credit. I wasn’t breathing her to life. I was breathing her just this side of the little death. It wasn’t innocent. It just wasn’t cruel — not in the usual way, at least. I was fucking dying of need, you must understand.”
“It clearly wasn’t need you were dying of, or you’d have heeded your nature and walked away, which certainly has my attention. Dangerous territory, and you’re wired to survive. You’re an animal, and animals don’t kill themselves. That’s what humans do.”
How I wished that were true. I behaved more like a lovesick man around her than a monster, ardently courting death to end the immolation — preferring it, even, over simply skulking away to safety.
“Well, that’s just it. I did need to feed — needed it desperately. And that wouldn’t be possible with her. I can’t even conceive of what that blood would do to me. It would be ghastly.”
“I can scarcely imagine,” he said flatly.
“So how did the want of her manage to override my very nature? I’ve never required tazing to keep away from the flock. And here I was being prodded like a lab rat, and somehow managed to refuse being caged. How does that figure?”
“Tell me about the wall.”
“It was my pièce de résistance, Saul, I’ve gotta tell you. You would have been proud.”
“Did she ask for it?”
“No, I discerned it,” I said, cocking my head, conflicting feelings welling up in me — equal parts swagger, shame, and arousal.
“You mean you circumnavigated into it.”
“By way of nuclear fission, I remind you.”
“Then I’m not proud. What were her words, exactly? What did she offer?”
“She offered me the privilege of taking her home,” I shrugged. “She was tired — and wanted rest and privacy.”
“And you?”
“I respected the game. Stayed out of her mind. That’s what I mean: I discerned it, I did not smuggle it out of her. She wanted me, Saul!”
“She offered terms. You pushed your own agenda.”
“I did — a little. I know. And it cost me. But when she whispered please? When she looked at me like that? I knew I made the right call. The angels agreed,” I hastily added.
“Then note the aberrations. She gives an inch, you take a mile, you suffer. She gives an inch, you take it at face value, you live to die another day. Titrate your advances. Better still, why not simply let her lead?”
“I did. I would. I’d let her string me up on a St. Andrew’s Cross and white-knuckle my hands into fists until they bleed. I’m not greedy. The point is, how is any of this even possible?”
“Sometimes the faithful come with strings attached, and we pull on them. There is precedent. My own testimony, for example. Faithful to the law, Christian by the grace of God. But I made mistakes, surely chief among sinners. And were not you yourself grafted in dragging your feet before you were…drafted?”
“Granted.”
“We’re a lineage, you and I. Are you planning to expand it with — what’s the good lady’s name?”
“Miri.” He scribbled something at the sound of her name — more strokes than four letters warranted — but I continued: “And no, not even a little bit. Fuck that. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. What were you writing there?”
He lifted his head from the page, his gaze arriving later. “Miri, eh. Miri. I am…invested in two quite contrary theories about your plight. Which do you want, then, Simeon? To learn how to get closer to her, or to understand why He appears to be getting closer to you? I’m rather more bedeviled by the latter. I’ve a…personal stake in it. But you’re the one who ran here so it’s your call.”
Saul had never made a vampire. Not one I know of, anyway. But maybe he had one in mind. A congregant, dared I wonder? His personal stake was never on the table, though, so I didn’t bother.
“How much time do you have?”
He chuckled at that. “For you, brother, all the time in the world.”
“The truth is I suspect the answer to the second mystery is entangled with the first. I wouldn’t want to get closer to her — it shouldn’t even be possible for me to want such things — if it weren’t for some perverse trick the Man is playing.”
I could tell he liked where this was going. “And you like perverse.”
“Sustained.” Prude is just an intellectual kink for this fiend of rigs and gallows. “So teach me how to touch her — I’m not here for takings — and I’ll bring the booty back for bibliography.”
“You just promised me takings, sweet boy.”
“Just knowledge, freely given.”
“Sustained. Now tell me what you said. Your words exactly, for they may acquit or convict in equal measure.”
Like I said, Saul is insufferable when he’s at his best. “I made some jokes. The usual slapstick. It would be my pleasure to offer a proper introduction. Imbibe something later. The mortals love that kind of thing. She never bought it, and heaven never liked it. Lashed twice. Even when I simply thought a wayward thing, lashes almost every time.”
“She’s not mortal. She can see through you. That is why you failed.”
I spat out my agreeable sangria. “You have your life expectancies mixed up, you convoluted geezer.”
“Mind your tongue, young menace. I mean it exactly as I say it. It’s right there in their testament: this is not her life but Christ that lives in her. You think you’re playing with your food. Drawing out a fawn response at the tip of your silver tongue. Hubris. He’s not intimidated.”
“Well if He wants boring, then I can talk to her boring. But then answer me this: if her mind is off-limits to me, why is He in mine? What court reads the defendant’s thoughts and calls itself just?”
“Premeditation is statute. And whosoever looketh is gospel. But He isn’t reading your mind in any codicil.”
“The lashes arrive mid-thought, Saul.”
“Because your mind isn’t a room he’s peering into from beyond. Your mind is a room in His. He’s the substrate. You keep imagining a surveillance apparatus — an auditor at a desk, riffling your files. There’s no desk. You are inside the medium. The burning isn’t prying eyes; it’s doors slamming shut because they’re not for you to walk through. You don’t accuse the stove of spying when it burns your hand, child. You’ve merely learned where the stove is.”
“Then how can I brook agreement with a stove? Because the thing respects treaties! It was negotiating with me — most ardently! And I have never in eight centuries met a church that negotiates with antichrists.”
“You just haven’t sat in enough churches.”
“And you have?”
“It’s been a while. But I keep a finger on the pulse.” He circled the page absent-mindedly with his finger, though his mind isn’t given to absence. “What did you mean by almost?”
“Almost?”
“Earlier, you said lashes almost every time you thought to looketh lustfully.”
“No, that’s your flourish, Saul.”
“Indulge me.”
I rolled my eyes. “I looked not lustfully but from lack — genuine lack. I spent four nights scanning for mindfulness, leaving me little time to attend to my needs, and I was ravenous by the time her scent hit me. It was a fleeting notion: whisking her off to a glacier to have my fill.”
“Why a glacier?”
“Why not a glacier? My eyes were burning so much I couldn’t see straight. And every word from her mouth seemed to come out with glacial pacing. I must have put the two together. Drink her on an iceberg: cool the conflagration and hasten her screams.”
“So you dissociated?” He was scribbling again.
“Of course I dissociated. You would be out of body, too, in that much agony.” A frown flashed across Saul’s face that meant I either wounded his pride by insulting his stamina, or embarrassed myself with my lack thereof.
“It was pure fantasy, Saul. I was never serious. Patagonia is altogether too far a walk when I could hardly stand. And there’d be the Darién Gap to consider—”
“What precisely were you feeling? Pain scale — 0 out of 10, and show me where.”
He was furiously decorating the dossier on my demolition now.
“Eleventy thousand, Saul. I don’t know. But no new pain came. I was still standing there nursing the same…headache.”
He finished scribbling, pointedly dotted the page like he’d proved a theorem, and looked up all smug and victorious.
“What? Think you merit a medal for your medical diagnosis?”
“Poetic.”
“What? Perfidy in Patagonia? My artfully alluring alliteration? Or the understatement of a lifetime?”
“Your logos.”
“What?”
“Creativity, Simeon. I’ve seen yours on display. You’re peacocking at me now while I’m here laboring to draw you a map for your morbid merriment and mischief-making. See? I can do it, too, almost with the best of them, but I need no reward. Your imagination — even mine, though I am the least among us begging justification for such trifling excesses! Why do you suppose you have imagination in spades? God doesn’t ding us for our creativity — we’re literally made of it. And since you never meant to act on it, no premeditation and no bill.”
“I never meant to act on imbibing something later, either.”
“Ah, but you did, didn’t you, my boy.”
I said nothing.
“Even imbibing her was not entirely out of the realm of possibility given sufficient motivation. Patagonia, however? That alibi was bulletproof. Even in your delirium you are characteristically operatic. What matters is whether your staging can plausibly be operationalized against the dramatis personae in contravention of their will. You had far more pressing priorities: stand and keep your dignity, not take the scenic route for the plot. The lark was merely spectacle, not a viable plan. Our strengths are sometimes perfected in our weaknesses.”
I still said nothing. The surgical precision of the moral calculus was staggering. I’d be hopping around en pointe to toe this line.
“So you see, Simeon, Logos, not lechery. You don’t have to be boring. Just not realistic.”
Logos, not lechery, I filed away in my mind.
“Look, here’s the size of it, in my estimation,” Saul pressed on. “You are being taught. For what, would that I knew. So take heart, my good man, and submit to the initiation.” His eyes sparkled with the implications, the old devil.
“Take heart, huh.”
“Yes! Oh, learn to take some pleasure in it, Simeon! You want the injustice of the rates acknowledged: strict liability, an accident billed like a crime. Poor, unfortunate soul, arriving on my doorstep, pouting like a brat in a harness. But look what you stand to gain. You know full well the servant who doesn’t know still gets flogged; the one who knows just gets it harder. You’re simply learning ropes you never played in before.”
He let that one sit, knowing it should lift my spirit. And it did.
“You came here raving about knowing the rules and respecting the players. But you struck your own defense the entire deposition. You know next to nothing of what is now expected of you. I’m not being cruel, old boy. I’m reading your transcript back to you.”
I was beginning to see where he was going, and I can’t say I didn’t like a well-devised predicament — if I could manage the pain. In this, at least, I had experience. “So what are my options?”
“There is only one: have patience. Know only that this isn’t impossible. You and I are proof enough of that. You are being taught, and I would dearly love to know what in hell or heaven for.”
“This is a hard teaching. Hear what you’re saying: you want a Christian in a dungeon. Fat chance she’d ever go for it, honestly, you scripture-spitting scoundrel.”
“You can keep it upstairs.”
“Since when does heaven condescend—?”
“Since always, Simeon.”
“Yes, but to suffer its stock at the stockade? She’s a believer — and what you’re prescribing…it’s indecent.” My lips twitched at the image.
“I’ve not been able to puzzle this one out any more than you have. I don’t know why they come with strings attached. But I can tell what you’re being taught, and it’s the body’s consent architecture. We’ve been through enough seminars on this at every kink convention west of the Atlantic. You’ve even taught a few. Only to turn around and harvest their trust in your mastery,” he was standing now, gripping the back of his chair as he leaned into his speech, “systematically dismantling your students’ every boundary in subspace — to my insistent and everliving consternation, I might add! The boundary between life and death being the chief among them!”
He turned and walked over to the decanter to refill his glass before continuing. “For this I’ve scolded you endlessly and will continue to.” Back still toward me, I could see he was shaking his head. “Reprehensible,” he added.
Then, glancing in my direction while still facing the wall in front of us, he concluded his extemporaneous preening nearly in a murmur: “Try very much not to do that here, for my sake, will you?”
“I couldn’t if I tried, O Exalted Hypocrite, so you may stand down. It looks like heaven has the watch.”
“Then take your own medicine and keep it down this time,” he shot back, returning to my side and making sure I caught his emphasis before taking a heaping gulp of the liquid. “Go slow. It’s just a new discipline. For one so terminally bored, you should be loving the thrill of newer territory. She’ll let you in. Else something’s staging an invasion, which would be notable in itself. So do not allow yourself to be asleep at a wheel this consequential. And if He’s letting you in Himself, bring plenty of oil. For if it’s that, then I’d powerfully like to know when — why — He does. Are you staying the night?”
“Absolutely not.” I set the glass on the side table and straightened my jeans. “But I’ll take a change of clothes.”
He got up to fetch a new outfit. I waited, wide-eyed in front of the parlor mirror. Yes, I can see myself. Picture the awkwardness standing up a sub in front of a mirror to admire my handiwork, only for the poor thing to discover there’s no one else there.
Saul returned, handed the clothes over silently, and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Slow.”
I changed and I was gone.