Chapter 7: Simeon at Dinner

"Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known." - Luke 12:2

^{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 dropped the nameless wretch in the same alleyway in which I found him. I hated it — his stench, my need — but I had to eat and the city now had two fewer mouths to feed: the one homeless and the other a fiend.

Both thanks to my empress in Kyoto. And the fiend who made her. And the one prior, ad infinitum, all the way back to the garden whence we rose.

So you could say Austin was now a little less hungry and that much the wealthier for it. Hail Satan and all that.

You could not say the same about me. Because I wasn’t done. Not even close. But it wasn’t blood I was after now.

I had skulked off to the nearby I-35 underpass as soon as the tremors passed. I had two men to find: one to be my dinner, the other probably at dinner, entertaining some oblivious latter-day noblemen among Boston’s Brahmins with his literary acumen and taste for the overwrought.

Oh, he was insufferable, my encyclopedic best friend.

But this was no conversation for the telephone. I typed a hurried SMS to Saul:

“Coming by. Urgent. Expect me by morning.”

I sent it, pocketed the telephone, and walked out of the lamplight.

The way we move, we do not advertise. Your films portray us as bats, as shadows, as gentlemen disintegrating into mist. That’s our own press, all of it, planted centuries ago for misdirection.

We move like you do. Just faster. You can’t see us but don’t discount the stray gust as wind. Not so and not always.

I went up the darker side of Lady Bird Lake due east, then north along the Appalachian spine, arriving in Boston via the Berkshires by morning.

Deer scattered ahead of me all night. I am to them as weather — and you’ve so much more in common with deer than with me. Except Miri. She is like me — a puzzle that I was about to make Saul’s problem.

I did the math somewhere over the Colorado and hated it afresh: some poor fellow died tonight so that I could see a man about a girl. Pathetic.

The deer bolt without knowing from what. Near the Sabine, one took her fawn across a firebreak to get away from my gust and slammed into the side of a highway wall, and I thought of — no. I filed the thought. Miles to go before I never sleep.

And we tire like you do. Only slower.

This running is not effortless. The body I was given is an engineering miracle of diabolical proportions, but the miracle is engineering, not sorcery. Speed is paid for in the same coin as everything else: flora run on chlorophyll, you run on hemoglobin, I run on…yours. The circle of life.

Another thing your hemoglobin supplies us: the capacity to deliberate. We go mad when we’re starved, you get hangry — perhaps not so dissimilar after all. The point is we need energy to think clearly, and this effort was harder still than crossing half of America to sort out my feelings.

Saul would want everything if he meant to be helpful. I passed the time assembling his encyclopedia of my transgressions to work out how to dodge the celestial IRS, ordering the evidence as I ran, one item per state.

Texas. Item, liability. My original sin. Touching her mind. Not on purpose, mind you. I was merely strolling for victims when she hit me with the light of a thousand suns and I was reduced to my knees. So whose fault was that, exactly?

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Hers was a mind covered in the blood of Christ. So it wasn’t her mind — not exactly — I’ll grant her that. But by what sadistic machinery was I even allowed near it? I knew the rules of the game and I respected the players: keep away from the holy and keep your life, such as it is. But the game glitched, and it was somehow my bug to fix? Why am I footing the architect’s bill?

And while we’re at it: item, liability. I inched closer but it wasn’t even real inches. It was mental inches. Monopoly money. I just wanted to see what I was “looking” at behind her blazing inferno — if detecting electrochemical signals can even be considered looking — and she transferred the fire directly into my nerves instead. As if I physically took a scalpel and picked apart her prefrontal cortex. Thanks for that.

Two items already, and I wasn’t even out of Texas.

That’s fine — everything is bigger here.

As I crossed over into Louisiana, I thought of how I commanded her to stay in her seat. So: item, liability. I used my most extravagantly domineering register — the one generally reliable with the ladies. And it worked predictably well on Miri: she complied. But the fire arrived regardless! So, a command is still billed as a liability even when the transaction clears. I mean, she still had agency! No one forced her to obey. It was basically a request with more personality. What’s the crime in that?

And the voice I had used on women to great success for centuries immediately cost me a lash to the jaw in the 21st. That’s two for Louisiana. I might run out of states at this rate. Detour, maybe?

And then her hair hit my nose. Her hair. I had wanted to make my grave in that hair, sure — but I hadn’t yet committed to the bit. The sillage undid my hand anyway. I gave it no consent to fall. It merely did. And the fire cared not for who shot first. Strict liability. How very Roman. Saul will love that one.

And this is the one that most offends propriety. The small of her back. I was leading a dance, for fuck’s sake. You understand what that is to a man who learned women in ballrooms: not the hip, nothing so crude. The small of the back is the diplomat of touches! The hand must steer and never presume. I aimed it — and five inches off her back the air ignited. Court etiquette billed as a mugging.

If I can’t even steer, then fine — take the wheel! She could have placed my hand there herself for free!

Four for Louisiana. Well, it was a pretty big purchase.

Mississippi. Item, liability. Mere thoughts appear to be fair game — a discovery I found particularly perverse coming from a God who so enjoys congratulating himself on not leaning too hard on people’s understanding. He can watch my actions — fine. But are not my private ideas at the very least my own? I was lashed twice for simply wondering about getting inside her again. I meant her mind — do we draw no distinctions? And if her mind is off-limits, then why are you in mine, infernal celestial auditor?

Saul will demand the exact wording of my musings: maybe there’s the rub. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, because here’s Alabama. Item, liability. The mere thought of the gates, her garden, the frameworks for my schemes, and the electricity that lit up my nerves instantly reminded me how palliative fluorescent lighting can be by comparison. But we already noted the system has no mental privacy policy.

Georgia. Item, liability. My flair for wordplay and double entendre is the one part of my identity I still claim as my own. It affords me my rare amusement. It’s art. It’s craft. It’s evangelism so seductive I was marked for missionary work by my church precisely for my way with words. And this ledger would have me speak as a simpleton to Miri if I’m to have her. When she offered drinks, I counter-offered to “imbibe something later” and the invoice arrived on schedule. Somewhere in the celestial revenue service there appears to be an auditor assigned to enforcing tedium. How on brand.

Tennessee. Item, liability, and this item confounded me with its sheer injustice. Catching her head before it struck brick cost the same as striking her would have. I paid it twice to spare her skull and let her believe I was her personal AC unit when I was, in point of fact, fully ablaze while cooling her collarbones.

Fuck it. I can’t resent her for it. File under: expenditures, voluntary. But how the fuck does this system work? Is being good not enough for you, Father? Thou shalt not kill, but neither shalt thou prevent a damsel’s head from bruising? And they say the other guy is the father of lies.

Virginia, filed late because it happened earlier and I badly wanted to forget it: the hotel lobby. Everything in the hotel lobby. I merely caught a whiff and the spike hit my sternum. What, was I not allowed in public spaces anymore?

And the horrific beige carpet! A color devised almost scientifically to be forgettable. Except of course not in my version of damnation. Because in my existence, even precisely calibrated banality harbors liquid fire.

Oh, and one graze of her shoulder just to steady myself cooked my palm to the wrist. I hadn’t even meant to touch her, let alone harm her. I was nauseous, swooning, and steadied myself by instinct. She just happened to be in the way. I don’t know your tax code, auditor!

Ignorance of the law still gets billed under strict liability. Another one for my favorite pedant.

I’m going to need bigger states!

West Virginia. Item, liability. Shame would be more accurate in the final accounting. Because she said no. Space, sleep, do not invade. She had been clear. I stepped right over it — stepped in front of her explicitly delineated boundaries, and the invoice emptied me to the joints. But it was worth it. She would corroborate my story.

My wretchedness thus catalogued, I set out to reward myself with my redeeming qualities.

Maryland. Item, credit. Early in the evening I entertained a fantasy involving a glacier and was billed nothing: I had dismissed it myself before it ripened. Is there a grace period between navel gazing and intent?

Pennsylvania. Item, credit. Her hands. She took mine and drove a nail into my palm to make her point, but the meter did not run. Her ass, too. On the dance floor. Nothing but my dick lit up. Whatever she initiates arrives untaxed. I verified this at length. Four times, I think. I intend to continue verifying it at every available station. For bookkeeping.

New York. Item, credit. Welcome, once negotiated, discounts the rate. I led her through a dance by breath alone and paid pennies for what should have bankrupted me.

So the tariff respects treaties. The tariff, I began to suspect, wants treaties. I do not know what to do with a heaven that prefers negotiation to prohibition. Handing that one over to Saul to decipher, because I haven’t met a church that negotiates with antichrists.

And her single word. Her please. The toll evaporated so completely I smiled in relief. The auditor distinguishes desire from compliance. What church does that?

I focused so hard on her please that New Jersey passed unaccounted. Some states are penance in themselves.

Connecticut. Item, credit, and I’m proud of this one: When I had most needed to feed, I pinned a woman against a wall and took nothing, though I wanted everything and was fairly starved for anything. Cooled nearly every available inch of her. Stayed well clear of the spicier ones. But committed no crime. I was richly rewarded in the act — for as long as I was able to maintain it. (We need not linger on the I-35 underpass.)

I reached Massachusetts before first light. The two columns had by now resolved into a pattern legible even to a creature avoiding notice. Every charge has a taking clause. Every credit records a gift. But the lines get blurry.

I arrived at his door on Mount Vernon Street at full daybreak. The prohibition on sunlight? Another psyop. The devil knows why anyone would believe a story that hides his most beautiful creation from the light of day. We are made to be seen. It’s you that should be hiding.

The door flew open before I even knocked. Naturally, he had sensed my approach.

“You ran.”

“I did.”

“It’s a woman, then.”