The letter was written with a fountain pen and each word was wrought for me.
I went back into the cell and looked around. The floors were bare, unfinished pine. The bed was simple. There was only the one chair. That room could have been a poem about Julia’s life and now mine.
I sat down hearing far-off music, like cellos, in the distance. After a while I realized that this music was the singing in my blood.
After a long time of sitting there, wondering what drug she put in her mouth before biting me, I stood up and walked away from her subterranean chamber, never intending to return.
THE DAY WAS BRIGHT, glaring. Everything sounded crisp and loud. I had been in darkness for so long that my eyes hurt and the sun burned against my skin.
But there was also a crystalline quality to the air and vistas. I crossed the bridge feeling light, weightless. The people around me seemed burly and somewhat bumbling. I felt friendly toward them. I was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge before I realized that I hadn’t thought about race once that day. White, black, and brown, they all seemed the same to me.
I chided myself to snap out of it and see the political and racial landscape as I knew it was. I tried to tell myself that my imprisonment had damaged my sense of reality, that Julia had robbed me of my ability to see clearly.
But try as I might I couldn’t find fault with the men and women going on their way. And Julia…her moony eyes and slight accent brought no anger or fear, recrimination or desire for revenge.
I walked on feeling lighter and happier with each step. The world seemed to be singing some joyous hymn to its own life and destiny. The birds and bugs and even the chemical scents in the air made me feel nostalgic for something that had passed away but lived on in sense memory.
I laughed and did a little jig as I went.
I decided to walk all the way up to Harlem and Central House.
I felt like some kind of prince walking up crowded Fifth Avenue. The people were my unwitting subjects and I was beneficent royalty. In amongst them, now and again, I saw bright-colored coronas reminding me of the yellow halo that had warned me about knowledge.
When I got to Central Park, the song in the sky turned strident. It was howling, but I didn’t mind it. The trees whispered of their age and gravity. They had gone one way while I had taken the opposite direction. There was a thrumming in my blood and I was so light-headed that I had to take a seat on a park bench.
I was grinning at the people going past. Some glanced at me with worried looks on their faces. Long ago, last week, I would have said that it was because I was a black man, filled with the purpose of my race, but then I thought that they couldn’t possibly understand the experience that flowed in my veins.
The sun was screaming at me and I decided to stand. It was only then that I realized how weak I was. I fell face forward to the pavement. It didn’t hurt because I was unconscious before I hit the ground.
SOMEWHERE THE SUN WAS setting. Its final shout over the horizon was followed by a silence so profound that I was yanked out of sleep, as if someone had dumped a hundred pounds of ice on my bare skin. I leaped up from the hospital bed and gazed out of the window into the burgeoning darkness of twilight.
“What’s wrong with you, guy?” a man said.
I turned to see him. He was one of six other men in beds around the room, a white man with a gray beard and a darker, though still somewhat gray, mustache.
“How did I get here?” I asked.
“They just dragged you in. We thought you was dead.”
I was still dressed. The excitement of the day was replaced by the certainty of night. The thrill that filled me was dark and dangerous.
I was in the street before I realized that I had no shoes on my feet. But I wasn’t bothered by the touch of my skin on the concrete and asphalt.
I headed back to the park. Once there I searched out my prey.
SHE WAS A YOUNG brown-skinned woman walking down a quiet lane. There was no fear emanating from her. I headed in her direction and, while passing, I put an arm around her waist, pulled her to me, and bit, with a lower tooth I’d never had before, into her neck. It was a pinprick, a small wound that would heal quickly. She fought me for all of eight seconds and then I felt her hand caress the back of my neck.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you doing to me?”
Her blood flowed slowly into my mouth. It was the richest, most sumptuous meal I’d ever had. It was steak and butter and thick red wine that gods ate on the high holidays of their divinity.
“Please,” she whispered in a wavering voice. “What’s happening to me? I feel it everywhere,” and she rubbed her body against mine.
I drank more and more.
She told me things in that park while people wandered past thinking that we were lovers who couldn’t wait for closed doors.
As I tasted her rich bounty, she whispered the secrets of her life. Her desires and disappointments, loves and mistakes flowed as her blood. I realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I was somehow feeding on her soul as well as the serum of her life.
This delightful experience lasted for a quarter hour and then suddenly the tooth retracted painfully into my lower gum. I pulled back from her and she reached out for me.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Juvenal Nyx,” I said.
“What did you do to me?” She brought the fingers of her right hand to her neck.
“It’s a drug.”
“I,” she hesitated, “I want more.”
“Meet me here tomorrow at the same time and I will bring it to you.”
She was about to say something else, but I put a finger to her lips.
“Go,” I said and she obeyed immediately.
I WAS RUNNING THROUGH the park with all the fleet lightness of a young deer or the quick-footed predator on its trail. I was laughing and uncontainable. My first prey would forget me. If she didn’t, if she came back, I would not return to that spot for many weeks. I knew, somehow, that the drug of my bite would turn toxic in her veins if I ever bit her again.
I sped all the way to Harlem, but when I got to the street where Central House stood I balked. For the first time I understood, in my intellect, that things had changed. I had been going on my senses up until that block. But then I realized that I couldn’t just walk into the political commune in bare feet, with blood on my breath.
I went into the alley of the building across the street and scaled the wall with little difficulty. When I reached the rooftop I hunkered down, black skin in gathering darkness, to spy on my friends.
CECIL BONTEMPS AND MINERVA Jenkins walked out of the front door of the house late in the evening. I concentrated on them with all of my senses. They talked about the meeting they’d just quit. It was a summit about me, my disappearance. They mentioned a white girl I was seen leaving with.
“Jimmy was always a flake,” Cecil said. “Prob’ly shacked up and high as a kite with that chick.”
An animal growled and I started, looking around the empty roof. It was only then that I realized the bestial noise had come from the anger in me.
“Jimmy don’t get high,” Minnie said. “You know that. Something’s happened to him. We should do like Troy says and go to the police.”
“We cain’t have the police rummagin’ around Central,” he said. “What if they found our weapons?”
We had been stockpiling rifles and ammunition for the coming revolution. We kept them in a trunk in the basement, ready for the day that martial law was declared on the Black Man.
“We got to do something, Cecil.”
“Okay. Yeah. All right. Let’s go down to that bookstore again.”
