Chapter Text
“I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God.”
Anton Chekhov, The Bet
He has the eyes of a mutt; they’re different colors. One is golden red like sunrise warning, the other a soft and human brown. Daniel has to turn away from them as if from a cliff edge.
The image of those eyes don’t leave him, however. They are burned into his mind as if he had stared into the sun too long. And he knows all the rest of the man immediately - the delicate glass cheekbones, skin as warm as spring, shoulders as slim as a doll’s.... Daniel walks past him because he’s not here for pretty, beaten boys in handcuffs.
The military police stop him with a strong hand on his elbow.
Daniel tries to rip out of the grip.
“Fuck off,” he says. “I’m press.”
“You can’t go back there.”
“I can go anywhere I want.”
“Not there.”
Daniel tries to pull his elbow away again and the MP grabs him with another fist.
“If you try to push your way in there I’ll put you in handcuffs and sit you down beside this guy.” He nods to the man in cuffs in the back of the truck.
“Who’s this guy?”
“None of your business, that’s who he is.”
Daniel looks at the man whose hands are bound and whose left leg is set into a brace and whose face looks like it lost a fight with a wood chipper. That man smiles with eyes like boulders, like knives or grenades or bombs, like weapons of mass destruction. Daniel won’t be the first to blink. He’s stared down the barrels of guns before, none of which had been chained up in the back of an MP’s truck and beaten until harmless.
When Daniel squares his shoulders, the prisoner grows explicitly amused.
Fuck this guy.
“Get out of here,” the MP says. “Last warning before you end up looking like him.”
Daniel rips his elbow away and this time the MP lets him go. Still, he feels those ridiculous eyes on him.
“Did these guys do that to you?”
The guy in the back of the truck laughs in a way that seems to surprise him, “These gentlemen? No.”
Daniel frowns, “Are you a Frenchman? What the fuck is a Frenchman doing here?”
“Step off, reporter.” the MP presses on his chest. “I’m getting tired of asking politely.”
“Are you going to fucking shoot me because I’m talking to your prisoner?”
“No, I’m going to fucking shoot you because you won’t get out of my sight.”
Daniel lets the soldier shove him a step back, but he lifts his camera all the same and snaps a picture that encapsulates both the MP and the prisoner in his truck. He turns and pushes off towards the other end of the trail.
“Don’t be getting yourself involved in anything east of here, reporter,” the MP shouts after him. “Best to travel west. If I see your face again, I’m throwing you in prison, too.”
“Your advice sounds an awful lot like illegal threats,” Daniel calls over his shoulder.
Half an hour later, they have him face down in the mud with his arms behind his back and his camera confiscated. They’re not nice about walking him up into the truck, in fact he trips into the bed and ends up dropping onto the Frenchman’s injured leg. There’s no real time to apologize since the MPs work hard to get him into a choke hold and drag him up to the bench like he’s some violent resisting soldier and not some thirty-something with no training who had to work a second job flipping burgers to afford his own plane ticket to this hell.
Maybe it had been a stupid idea to bypass back to the path through the forest and maybe it had been even dumber not to wait for the boys to cool down and forget about him, but Daniel has had an itching in his stomach like there’s something important here since he first saw the MP’s truck.
The MPs both let him know that it definitely was very stupid by roughing him up a bit. It’s a lot of back of the hand slaps across the face and a fist to the gut, nothing serious, nothing new, but each time he gets his head up he spots the Frenchman watching and that adds a whole other level of embarrassment to the whole thing. It’s not his first MP rodeo. It’s his first time getting knocked around with an audience, however.
Eventually, the MPs lay off. They get bored or hungry or their heart was never really in it and they fuck off to play a card game outside. It’s hard to have a hobby in Vietnam; there’s something about the crisis of conscience of an unjust war that diminishes most of the fun of other war crimes.
The Frenchman is still staring at him with those weird, dog eyes when they are left alone. Daniel’s head falls against the back of the truck and he licks away the bit of blood on his bitten lip.
“So,” he grunts, “What are you in for?”
The Frenchman has a stick up his ass but what did Daniel expect to find in the back of a truck meant for war criminals? Good company? Other than a few monotonous words and a prestigious disregard, the Frenchman hasn’t bothered interacting with him in the last two hours. In fact, the guy is sitting all stiff like there’s barbed wire between them.
The humidity is building, the sun is coming up, and Daniel is breaking out in a gross sweat. The Frenchman seems hardly disturbed by the climbing summer heat in his long sleeves. He does, noticeably, shift further into the truck bed to bask in cooler shadow.
Around noon, the truck starts up. Two of the MPs load into the back and bookend Daniel and his little French friend so that they can’t tuck and roll out of the back. They light up a cigarette each without offering Daniel one. What bugs Daniel isn’t the nicotine itch, though, and it isn’t the empty stomach or the sunburn he’s getting on one side of his face. It’s not the gun lazily pointed at him by the uncouth MP across the way that drives Daniel instantly mad. What bugs Daniel is what is distracting the soldier.
The soldier sitting next to the Frenchman can’t keep his eyes to himself. It is written all over his face that he can’t stop thinking about pushing the kid face down on the bench, twisting his cuffs tighter, and rucking his pants down. What is all too clear is that the soldier’s friend wouldn’t stop him if he starts. Already, he’s looking away, ignoring the whole build up and tension.
There’s a whole lot of bullshit being steamrolled by systemic pressure. The Americans tend to be cruel in these parts; many men are falling to their animal instincts. That’s putting it kindly. To put it plainly, there has been a great, big bottleneck funneling a whole lot of the worst scum in the world to this little area and whichever soldier isn’t ready to commit a crime is certainly ready to ignore one. Even the most barbaric acts can become normalized by a bit of repetition.
It isn’t another klick up the road before the soldier starts spreading out his knees, finding an excuse to be bigger to remind everyone that he’s quite the fucking guy, that he has guns that need to be shifted around and big hands that take the cigarette from between lips. He splays that same dumb, neanderthal hand out over that Frenchman’s thigh when he’s done beating around the bush.
As soon as the man gets the eggs up to grip the Frenchman’s knee, Daniel speaks. He knows immediately that he’s interrupted whatever the Frenchman was about to say but it would break his cold, hard heart to hear the guy begging right now.
“Listen, if you’re about to fuck this kid, you’ve got a world of hurt coming. You are going to have to kill me or I’ll come after you. I’m not just going to be coming for your job, keep that in mind. I’m coming for your life .”
The soldier pauses. He keeps his hand on the Frenchman’s knee but Daniel certainly has his fucking attention.
“I’ve got connections with the paper I write. I have your name, your rank, and I have more hatred in my heart than the day is long. If you try to fuck this kid, I’m not only going to kick your fucking teeth in but I’m also going to publish your name in every fucking journal whether it’s covering the war or not. If someone writes a puff piece about a new style of fucking jacket collar your brutal legacy will be mentioned. If someone wants to write a piece on the top ten red flags to look for in their man, all ten warnings will be you. Look me in the eyes, if you touch this guy, any child unlucky enough to be spawned by you is going to rue carrying your shameful last name.”
Daniel cannot believe he’s about to get clobbered in front of this French guy.
To make matters worse, this guy is probably going to have about three minutes to appreciate the hill on which Daniel’s idiot, idealistic brains will be smashed before attention is returned to him. Daniel will be dead, or worse, forced to lay on some rocking truck floor with no teeth and oozing brains while the poor kid cries out. All of this just so that Daniel could postpone the attack and make the MP mad as a hornet?
The MP is moving slowly, threateningly. He drops his cigarette back on his lower lip and gathers his gun into his hands, readying it to work like a bludgeon. Daniel doesn’t watch it happen. He doesn’t care about the stupid MP. He meets eyes with the little Frenchman, who’s turned directly toward him and is staring at him now with unabashed curiosity.
Daniel asks, “Is this guy bothering you?”
The Frenchman smiles. It’s a pinched smile - as if he had not meant and did not want to smile in his whole life. Daniel finds himself instantly endeared to that smile, that nothing smile, that not-even-there smile.
“He is bothering me,” says the Frenchman in his soft and lovely voice. “In fact, he has been bothering me for quite some time with his very terrible thoughts. I had hoped that he would practice some restraint.”
“Did you tell him you weren’t interested?”
“My threats are not as dramatic as yours.”
“The trick is to really mean it.”
“That’s the problem, Mister…”
“Molloy. Daniel Molloy. Call me Daniel.”
“That’s the problem, Daniel,” the Frenchman admits. “I tend to go for the throat.”
“Oh,” says Daniel with an interesting shiver.
The butt of the MPs rifle comes up and Daniel closes his eyes. He doesn’t flinch - or he tries not to flinch. He doesn’t want to look like a coward in the end.
“Stop,” says the Frenchman.
It’s not a shout or a panicked request or a plea for mercy but rather a calm, deliberate order. Miraculously, the soldier stops. As if frozen solid, the soldier is stuck exactly where he was with one hand pinching his cigarette and the other pulling his gun back like a club.
The next calm order follows, “Eat it.”
A chill runs through Daniel and leaves him with gooseflesh.
The soldier, seemingly twice as mesmerized by the voice, turns on a point and eats his cigarette up in one bite. Daniel can hear the hiss of the cigarette going out on his tongue before the other MP shouts but, by the time he moves to pinch his friend’s jaw open, the soldier has chewed the cigarette up and swallowed it down.
“Pirouette,” says the Frenchman.
The soldier snaps up onto his tiptoes, throwing his rifle to the side so he might set his hands up at a beautiful point, and then spins around like a ballerina.
“Again.”
He spins.
“Again.”
He spins.
“Ag--”
A shot rings out and Daniel shields his head as much as he can with his bound shoulders. Daniel slips off of the bench and onto the floor at the feet of the tip-toed ballerina. The other MP is shouting, trying to startle his friend back into his own head.
Daniel slips his cuffed hands under his ass to get them in front of him and pulls the big rifle off the floor and into his lap. He’s never had to kill anyone before, but it’s got to be a lot like a camera. Point and shoot.
He can see the shadow of the Frenchman motionless on the bench.
It does not occur to Daniel that the MP has shot the Frenchman until he sees those still legs. He closes his eyes against it - but it’s not like this is the first corpse he’s seen. He’s seen all sorts of dead since he’s come to Vietnam. He’s taken pictures of murdered mothers and children and fathers and grandmas and sisters and cousins and whole entire families, entire towns, entire generations. He’s here documenting a genocide and he’s not not shot at, either. This isn’t unfamiliar to him, it’s just unexpected. This is not how he saw this day going.
The gun is kicked out of his hands. His hand is stomped on when he tries to reach for the weapon again. He ends up on his stomach cradling his bruised hand against his chest - exactly where he thought this would end up but with that poor kid dead. His head pounds with pain, with frustration, with the unfairness of the world and he doesn’t even fight when the gun is lifted off the floor. He presses his forehead to the truck floor and waits to not hear the bullet that gets him.
He hears a crash behind him. Turning onto his shoulder, he glances back to find both MPs on the ground and the Frenchman standing. He’s a mess of blood, it’s on his face, in his eyes, in his hair, and his hands are free - well, not free but the cuffs are broken off in the middle and hanging loose on each wrist.
Daniel sits up carefully, slowly, and when he comes to rest on his knees he finds himself kneeling before the stranger drenched in blood. Without meaning to, he takes the Frenchman’s hands and holds them. They are cold, the knuckles are busted, the wrists are bleeding and raw from the cuffs, the nails are long.
“Fuck,” Daniel whispers hoarsely. “Fuck. Fuck. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
The man says wondrously, “Am I hurt?”
Daniel pulls the man down gently so that they are face to face on their knees, “Christ Almighty, what happened? What was that? Fuck, what was that?”
The man looks upon Daniel with a strange calmness, a storm calmness, the center of great chaos. Part of him is agelessly, endlessly still and some part of him is racing on with energy like a wildcat. It’s confusing, overwhelming, strange to look at. It’s the type of thing that Daniel has only felt when absolutely blown away by the strongest drugs manufactured by man. The world is upset, unbalanced in those brown and gold eyes and if Daniel looks in them too long, he won’t know up from down, left from right, forward from back, or end from beginning.
The truck lurches to a stop and the Frenchman leaps to his feet with frightening speed.
“Come on,” he says. “We need to go before the driver comes looking.”
Daniel follows the Frenchman like he’s some dumb, lost puppy, trembling after him like a fucking kid, thinking stupid, stupid thoughts like, ‘ Look at his eyes, look at his hair, look at his shoulders, look at his lips, who is he?’
The Frenchman takes the cuff keys off the soldiers and releases himself from his broken shackles before tossing the key over. While Daniel unlocks himself, the Frenchman limps to the edge of the truck and drops to the dirt road. After turning back to offer his hand, his marble hand like a Roman statue, like a painting, Daniel freezes dead.
“You’ve bewitched me,” he whispers. “How did you do that? How did you do it to those guys and how did you do it to me?”
“I have not bewitched you, Daniel,” the Frenchman says simply. “Come along.”
But Daniel knows this isn’t true - there is fire and sunshine in his veins and he hasn’t felt any of that nonsense before. It’s the sort of feeling that would have a man pirouetting or eating lit cigarettes like a goddamned idiot.
There is a little bird voice in his head, a voice that cuts up his heart, ‘Let’s go, Daniel. I am not in a state to fight off a whole patrol of them right now.’
Daniel does not take the hand offered, choosing instead to stumble to the edge of the truck and drop down clumsily. It’s hard to balance when his ears are ringing like church bells.
“Hold on,” he mutters. “Hold on. Am I supposed to follow you?”
“If you like.”
“I need my camera. I can’t leave without my camera.”
“You may go wherever you like but I am leaving,” the Frenchman turns on a dime and begins his god awful limp towards the treeline.
Behind them, truck doors are slamming, men are making calls, guns are chiming with an ammo check. Daniel sighs, grits his teeth, and moves. He makes two long steps towards the little Frenchman’s side, finds him surprisingly the same height but light as a feather when he ducks under the arm on the side of his injured leg and takes most of the weight off of it.
The Frenchman grabs onto Daniel’s shoulder and allows himself to be led off the road.
He asks, “What about your camera?”
“Damn the camera,” Daniel hisses. “And damn you, too.”
They don’t stop walking until Daniel’s sure the little Frenchman is going to collapse. Any second now, it will start raining and with imminent rain comes bugs and humidity and Daniel is beginning to smell fierce. Hunger and exhaustion are beating Daniel down and so he can’t imagine what it’s doing to someone half his weight class and sporting injuries to boot.
What’s worse is that they’re starting to have to fight their way through dense jungle. They’re stumbling on the precipice between uncharted wilderness and the well-known chaos of territory claimed by the most dangerous mammal on land - Americans. They’ll have to make a decision which direction to move; they could keep going straight towards the westward city or they could try their luck walking their happy asses northeast until they reach Europe.
He plops the Frenchman down on an old, fallen tree and roots around in his cargo pants for wherever he’s left his map.
It unsettles him a little that the guy doesn’t look like he’s made the same trek Daniel has. There’s mud on his shoes and blood on his shirt, but there isn’t sweat on his face, there isn’t a catch in his breath from the hike. Daniel would still offer the smug little bastard water if he had any, but he doesn’t and they’ll both suffer for it if they can’t manage to find a camp and set up some contraption to catch the rainfall soon.
The Frenchman stretches out his injured leg, rubs his tired thigh, and then glances up at Daniel with such coyness, such innocence in his eyes that it startles Daniel, no it stops his heart. On that lovely face, even deceit is spellbinding.
“Don’t say a fucking thing,” Daniel stops him talking with one finger raised. “Let’s get one thing sparkling clear: I know perfectly well that you’re up to something. I’m not an imbecile, or if I am, I am some special kind of imbecile. I see right through you, princess. I’m not about to be sold packaged bullshit from a snake oil salesman. Listen up, are you listening? Keep your mouth shut. You have one chance, one , to tell me exactly what a French aristocrat and his fucking loafers are doing hypnotizing soldiers on the war front. If you start spinning your little spider web of lies I’m warning you right now that I’ll see through it. If you don’t want to talk, that’s just fine, but you better keep it up all the way back to the city or so help me God I’ll break your other leg.”
Something is burning in those striking eyes. The Frenchman is looking around, sizing the place up, glancing up at the canopy where sunlight is strangled on the way in. Clearly, he thinks Daniel is of little consequence. It’s all over his face: the curiosity, the intrigue, with none of the seriousness Daniel is trying to command.
Finally, the Frenchman says, “What do you want me to say?”
“Why don’t you start by telling me your name.”
When his eyes meet Daniel’s, they are an anchor. Those eyes are an anvil tied to his ankle dragging him to the pitch black ocean floor. Strange that such darkness could mirror sunrise, but also fitting how the one eye, bright as the sun, is just as hard to look at.
“What do you want with my name?”
“I want to call you something ,” Daniel stresses. “If you don’t give me one I’ll just have to make one up for you.”
“What would you call me?”
“I suppose I’d name you after my dead childhood dog,” he lays the map out once he finds it and considers the movement of the sun and the place they started and their speed and how long they walked. “She had eyes like yours.”
The Frenchman touches his own face gently, as if surprised to hear it.
“One eye was brown, the other so blue it looked white,” Daniel taps the deep jungle on the map. “I think we’re here. If we move back to the road it will be easy to get to the city. What do you say, Alice? Ready for a walk?”
“My name is Armand.”
“I’ve already grown to like Alice. Come on, Alice, I think we should try to make it closer to the road before nap time.”
“It was you who needed a break, if I recall.”
“Don’t act all tough on me now, Alice. I’m not the one that looks like I took a tumble down the mountain. I don’t think you should push yourself to collapse out here. There’s at least three days between us and the city and I don’t want you hesitating to ask for help.”
Daniel’s mocking the guy. Needlessly. But that’s what’s always gotten between him and a crowd of successful friendships. He can’t stand to look like a fool.
“In fact,” Daniel worsens his attitude for what reason? Just to stick his foot in his mouth? “Don’t let an active war zone get in between you and a request for a piggyback ride.”
Armand leans back, stares at Daniel in a cold and serious way, but when he opens his mouth he’s drowning the world in sarcasm, he’s practically purring, “I would love that, actually.”
That’s exactly how Daniel ends up twice as tired and half the distance. He’s not beading sweat anymore, he’s fucking drenched and all he’s thought about for the last mile is those frustrating little thighs squeezing his side. It’s hard trying to come up with questions and it becomes a fucking nightmare sorting out the maze of Armand’s non-answers.
Throughout the day, he had peppered in questions as they came.
He had asked, “How did you get those MPs to do what you said?”
And Armand had said in his ear, “I am very charming.”
Daniel had asked, “How does a Frenchman end up here?”
Armand had answered, “I am not French.”
“What happened to your leg?”
“In a war torn country, anything can happen.”
“How did you speak in my head?”
“Maybe you have an undiscovered power to hear my thoughts.”
He wakes up to the purest blackest night. There are no stars, no moon, and so there is nothing by which to see. There are no sounds of nature - no winds rustling trees, no animal calls, no birds, no rain, no crickets. He has awakened from one dream only to enter another.
There’s an ache pounding in his head when he sits up. He pinches the bridge of his nose like coaxing away a hangover.
When hands touch his shoulder, he nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Jesus,” he hisses. “What? What’s that?”
“Daniel,” says a soft voice.
“Shit,” Daniel squints into the dark.
Even though he knows that Armand is there he can only make out a silhouette of dark against the darker. There are also two glowing eyes like a cat in the shadows.
Off in the distance, what feels a million miles away, what feels on another planet, flares pop and scatter light. He can make out Armand, wide awake, leaning against the vines and snakes and all the creepy crawlers of the jungle. He’s staring at Daniel with those razor eyes and, when they shift, they cut him up. He watches Daniel rub his palm. That hand that had been kicked by the MP is still sore down to the bone. It’s not broken, just aching.
Daniel says darkly, “I thought you had one brown eye.”
“You were mistaken.”
“I don’t think so.”
“And yet, reality stares you in the face.”
“You know, talking to you seems to always feel as if I’m emerging from some fucking dream. Or some fucking nightmare. Do you get that a lot?”
With some difficulty, but not enough difficulty that it makes any sense , Armand begins to walk on his busted leg. By the end of the first day, when all the hiking should have worn him to straw, he seems to gain strength and he even removes his brace during one of their breaks in the afternoon.
Because of his slightness, because of his beauty, Armand seems in need of defending despite the fact that there is so little about him that appears in need of help. He is bizarre. He is a walking, talking human oxymoron. He confuses Daniel; he conflicts him. Armand leaves Daniel sputtering to lend him a hand or hold him steady on uneven ground and then, when he is touching a shoulder or a hand, he finds Armand as hard and as grounded as a statue.
These internal conflicts come to a swift and terrible apex at the speed of the sound of hummingbird wings, the off-in-the-distance flutter of automatic American rifle fire and the scattering of birds in the bushes. Daniel ducks, hears the whistle of close incoming rounds, and finds that he’s suddenly standing next to a dead man.
This is what Daniel says while he is torn apart inside, “You've been shot!”
“Have I?”
“Half a dozen times!”
“That is the curse of this new age, I suppose. The weapons are very efficient.”
Crowds of Americans stampede through the underbrush towards them. They look like dumb monkeys, spooked and wide-eyed, without a thought in their heads.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not like you think it would. Here, grab my arm.”
“Sure,” Daniel takes his elbow and gasps when Armand goes completely limp. “Shit!”
He protects Armand’s head as he lowers him to the ground. His hands rush off without his brain, touching Armand’s cheek in a butterfly frenzy, feeling down his neck, brushing the pad of his thumb over that soft bottom lip.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he whispers. “Armand? Armand?”
“I am fine, Daniel,” Armand slips his eyes closed all the same. “I am only playing for our audience.”
Fear wears off like morphine.
“You’re quite theatrical.”
Before the Americans rip Daniel away, he swears he spots a secret smile.
“I didn’t mean to shoot him,” one of the big men cries out.
He has his automatic rifle slung over his shoulders and a sling of grenades bouncing around on his chest. The kid’s maybe twenty, probably green, probably spending his first day on the front lines hunting down his first atrocity so he can write home about what a big hero he is.
The other men are a little calmer. They are senior platoon members who have, no doubt, killed on purpose and on accident before. One of them is kind enough to check Armand for a pulse.
“He’s already fucking cold,” he murmurs.
“He’s real handsome,” another says thoughtfully. “Like a girl, almost. You don't see many pretty girls here.”
“Problem is, he’s shot full of holes.” The soldier turns Armand on his back looking for an exit wound and finds plenty. “He’s bleeding like a river, like Niagara Falls. Look at that; he won't make it another minute.”
“Shame, that. He’s real nice to look at, is all.”
“Damn, he is pretty. It’s a crime; you should have shot some ugly old cow instead.”
Daniel sneers, “Can you give the man some fucking respect?”
The soldiers slap each other, “Yeah, respect the dead.”
“He's not dead yet, I don’t gotta respect him. Right now he’s just some shot guy. He'll die quick though. Can't mend up all those holes.”
The kid who shot Armand kneels down. He whips a folded bandage from his med kit and presses it to the wound on Armand’s neck.
“Don't bother,” reminds the other soldier. “He’s going to die.”
“Can we at least drag him under a tree for some shade? Maybe call a helicopter?”
The same kid who had shot Armand strokes his hair, brings his canteen to Armand’s lips, brings his hands up close enough to bite. Armand doesn’t bite. He lays there motionless, gray in the face, letting some fool dab blood splatter from his cheeks and forehead as if he wasn’t the one that put it there in the first place.
“Leave him,” Daniel croaks. His voice is shaking. In this climate, no one listens to orders that tremble. “Just leave him alone.”
Someone gets on the radio, “Dog Company in need of a lift off. We got a civilian down here near the LZ. He’s been shot to hell by friendlies.”
“K… Ki,” Armand chokes out, gargling blood. There’s blood on his teeth, in his lungs, and he’s choking out his final words.
Daniel tries to shoulder the men out of the way but is tossed to the side like a rag doll.
The radio buzzes, “What’s that, Dog Company? You shot someone?”
“Yeah,” reports the soldier. “It’s all a bit FUBAR over here, Command.”
Armand still tries to fight the words out, “K..ki….”
And the radio buzzes, “ Who’s dying?”
Daniel would like to answer, ‘Me .’
“Some Indian fellow, I don't know. We think he might be press.”
The killer of Armand leans forward, “What’s that?”
Armand articulates, “Kill yourself.”
The soldiers scoff, grumbling with dark surprise at one another until they notice that one of their own has a sleepwalking hand drifting to his belt, landing on the pistol in his holster, unbuckling it with his thumb and lifting it up slowly, dreamily, to place it into his mouth. It knocks hard against his front teeth when it’s wrestled out of his mouth by his shouting friends.
“Whoa! Whoa!”
From the ground, Armand hurls himself onto the soldier like a wild thing. He is able to get his fingers knotted up in a jacket, tugging his killer off his ass and into the mud with one pull. Armand crawls onto his back, latching onto him like a spider, seizing the startled soldier by the head, Armand begins to twist, to twist so hard that the soldier screams at the top of his lungs for fear. He screams like the victims of gruesome accidents, the screams of lost limbs and great crushings under buildings. The other soldiers abandon their radio with a gasp and rush forward to Armand and his prey.
Daniel flinches from the sound, thrashes on instinct to get away from it and ends up in a huffing, adrenaline ruined mess on his feet at the edge of the clearing. When he looks over, he sees it.
Armand is hunched over the back of that soldier, with beast teeth sinking into a neck so twisted as to paralyze his victim.
He closes his eyes against the horror. He hears nothing over the screaming and turns back again only to see the soldiers flee, limping away while dragging their friends behind them. Their guns are hanging off their shoulders, forgotten.
They are running from Armand. They are turning around to look as if Hell itself were nipping at their heels. And Hell follows.
“Where are you going?”
Armand glances back, confused.
“They must die.”
Daniel’s stomach drops. To see those eyes in blood, to see gore on his face. What raw, unbridled power. What a terror to look upon.
Instead of chasing after the soldiers and slaughtering them one by one, instead of ripping mortal man limb from fucking limb, Armand turns to Daniel, approaches him timidly like one might coax an injured bird to trust.
“Daniel,” says Armand. “Are you alright?”
Although it is a lie, Daniel says yes many times.
Daniel lays on his back near the river and can hear the birds and rodents moving around him. His shirt is soaked with sweat and sticking to his chest and shoulder blades. He lays as if made of stone, without the energy to jab or to ask questions. There is no strength in him to laugh or to curse or to run for his life.
At his feet, he watches Armand clean himself in the moving river. Although Daniel had thought he would fall asleep the moment he stretched out in a relatively safe place, his mind has other ideas, a whirlwind of ideas. Obsessive exhaustion makes him sleepless and so instead he watches Armand bathe like some siren on the shore. Blood rinses off his hands and mouth. He slips out of his shirt, soaks it, and rings it out over and over until the water runs clear. The stains won’t come out. They may never come out.
Someone will have to come along eventually and slay this dragon. Like Medusa, they may have to hold him down, grasp his hair, and saw his head off with a sword. Whatever he is, this little beast, he is very dangerous. He’s not human, that’s for sure. No human moves that fast or has those teeth or gets inside someone else’s head and tells them what to do.
“Don't think of yourself as a hero,” Armand says without looking up. “I can hear it. Your heart is in your boots right now. Do not try anything you might come to regret.”
Daniel pats his cargo pant pockets until he finds his battered pack of cigarettes. There are three left, each more bent out of shape than the last. The best of the three he tries to suck to life with his sputtering, no good, fucked up, out of juice Zippo.
He thinks, ‘ You can read my thoughts ,’ and watches as Armand hides a smile.
“What sort of thing are you? You’re not human.”
Armand must be a spirit, the way he walks and never tires of walking. He must be some sort of fucking pixie the way he talks and Daniel can’t get enough; it’s not as if just one man is talking but as if stars and the moon and the trees are talking and they only use his voice.
This thing, this beautiful thing - it must belong somewhere, to someone, it must be something . Or maybe there is nothing else like it and so it wanders alone.
Would it be worse for it to be singular in the world or to have once had a people who turned it away? If there are people, they must lament his absence. How could it have happened? How they must suffer to have lost this beautiful thing that walked amongst them, spoke their language, belonged to their tribe. They saw and heard this thing and let it slip away. How could they have let a spirit of such all absorbing beauty leave them? What triumph could those people stand beside and be fulfilled the same? Would they always know themselves as the shores of which this miracle had once cast off?
“Daniel,” Armand says brokenly.
In a panic, Daniel sits up, “What? What happened?”
Armand looks moved, truly moved , like some fool has come waxing poetry to him, some idiot has come to win his heart. He stands there in the water, hanging his shirt up on some low hanging branch, and it’s like Daniel has bewitched him . Armand seems to take a half thought-out, half step toward him and Daniel realizes, recognizes, is haunted by the fact that Armand must have heard all of that.
“Oh, fuck off,” Daniel chucks his lighter towards Armand and it splashes into the water. “Don't even think about it. They’re just thoughts, stupid thoughts. A man shouldn’t be judged by the shit in his head. Don’t get it twisted, I think you're a beast. I pity you. You’ve crawled up your own asshole and died.”
“Come help me out of the water, Daniel,” Armand hitches his injured leg and holds out a hand for support.
Daniel leaps up, toeing off his shoes and grumbling, “You don’t need to bewitch me.”
“I have not bewitched you.”
“How am I supposed to know? I can't read your thoughts.”
“I do not need to bewitch you, Daniel. All on your own, you are very sweet.”
Daniel wades knee high into the water and takes Armand’s hand. Up close, he can see the burns. There are craters in Armand's skin - on his chest, neck, back, and arms. It’s as if someone rolled him on a fire poker or threw him in an oven. It’s healing; it’s definitely old, but it looks like it must have been a hell of a recovery.
Daniel has all these questions and a feeling that he will pay for them in nightmares.
“What the fuck happened to you?”
“Just a spat.”
“You got some star crossed lover?”
Armand sits on the edge of the river bed keeping his feet in the water. He laughs but it’s a laugh that sounds like it’s tired of laughing, “Something like that.”
“Jilted ex?”
“That may be more appropriate. He's a nasty man to row with. You see, he’s the sort to end a disagreement by locking me in a box and shipping me off to the war front in hopes I'll die in a phosphorus bombing.”
“A bullet won’t hurt you but you can die by white phosphorus?”
“And so can you.”
“It's not the same.”
“Death is death is death.”
But it’s different.
Daniel is pressing middle age with a penchant for driving drunk and snorting someone else’s cocaine. Daniel is just some guy running around Vietnam looking for the moral high ground like a chicken with its head cut off. Armand is something regal, something pretty and interesting. Burning him would be akin to burning the Mona Lisa or Starry Night or Dalí’s Melting fucking Clocks.
“You sound like an idiot,” Armand says.
“I didn't say anything.”
Armand taps one long nail against the center of Daniel's forehead, “Shut up in there .”
Daniel changes tracks, “You haven’t said what you are yet.”
“I am a vampire.”
“You are…,” Daniel sits beside that crazy man. “You think you’re a vampire?”
“I think it very much,” Armand says simply.
“Like no garlic, no sunlight, coffin vampire?”
“This is really going to become a conversation about separating fact from fiction.”
“You’re telling me.”
Daniel misses his lighter. He wants to flip something around in his hands. He wants to fucking smoke something. He wants to smoke something strong.
“I thought vampires couldn’t go out in the sunlight.”
“They cannot.”
Daniel looks up at the sun, the swaying branches, the birds tweeting.
“As we age, the sun loses its strength.”
“And you’re what? 25?”
“Nearly 500.”
So Armand is supposed to be walking history? Armand is the manifesting future?
“Sure,” Daniel says. “Does the sun still hurt?”
“It’s not pleasant, especially right now.”
“On account of the burns?”
Armand is particularly silent. His silences are very pointed, Daniel realizes, when he wants to say that he’s being a fucking moron.
“So what was the plan? When I met you, what were you in the middle of?”
“When I got out of my box I found myself packed amongst weapons and surrounded on all sides by war. I escaped, though not without harm. I was arrested for being somewhere I was not supposed to be and decided it would be very pleasant to receive a ride to Saigon. I knew at the end of that ride I would have been thrown into a wonderfully dark prison hospital where the meals of wounded soldiers who had shot themselves in the foot to escape conflict would land in my lap. Those deaths would have been dismissed as battlefront cholera or sepsis or any number of diseases. I would have healed up within a month, packed up, and shipped myself off to Paris to find my very special friend in time to pull his head off like a pen cap.”
“Alright,” Daniel leans back on his elbows. All he can see is Armand’s back, his profile.
It’s not exactly plausible, but neither is any other explanation.
“So you drink blood?”
“Yes.”
“Human blood?”
“Yes.”
“You kill people.”
“I hunt.”
“You say that like it’s two different things.”
“Would you have me starve?”
“Maybe.”
“Yet you keep thinking of how you are going to ask me to turn you into a savage killer.”
If Armand were to take him now, to sink teeth in with bruising force and drain away, would Daniel be able to know which heartbeat would be his last? Would he be able to count them down like five, four, three, two, one left, none?
“Don’t change the subject. So you’ve done nothing wrong? You didn’t harm anyone?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember? You can’t remember? It’s so insignificant, is it?”
“You need predators to protect the crops.” Armand says, “What will the corn farmers do when rabbits make like rabbits? Without coyotes, the grain won’t stand a chance.”
“So you are the natural predator to humans.”
“Humans are humans' natural predators and war is your only means of natural selection. Vampires may be killers but men go to war because they are also killers.”
“Men go to war because they think their cause is just.”
“Is this war just by your standards?”
“Alright, maybe it’s not so deep. Men love war because it makes them look scary. It is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them. I'm not saying we get it right every time.”
“Do you ever get it right?”
‘That bastard looks at me like I’m shit. He’s looking down from some great height.’
“What about the last big war? The war against fascism?”
“And who fought for the side of fascism?”
“Germans.”
“Humans. I'm sure they thought their war was just. Perhaps mankind is not as evolved as you think; perhaps mankind is no more than rats fighting for territory and bringing plague fleas wherever they go. You would not mourn the death of rats if it were their blood I drank.”
“And what about temperance and courage and wisdom? Those are the qualities of mankind. You won't find a Plato amongst the rats.”
“Perhaps there is and our rodent philosopher was brutalized by a mouse trap.”
“And what about bravery?”
“Bravery,” Armand laughs. “There are no brave men. In order to be brave, you must know what is right and you must do it. Men are either stupid and cannot say what is right or they know what is right and they are too scared to do it. Bravery is more than going to war. It is more than charging into battle. It is more than suffering the loss of love.”
“And you are the expert on love?”
Armand continues without making room for him, “Bravery has been invented by man. It is an ideal they cannot reach and it is the closest they can get to God. It is a thing they keep on the shelves and do not touch. It sits beside those other perfect things called kindness and empathy. The terrible thing is that men invent these things and choose not to embody them. Men are no braver than the pasture cows who roam, fight, fuck, and then are slaughtered to be eaten up.”
Suddenly, Armand speaks very softly, “Every once in a while, there is a special man that will take one of those beautiful things off the shelf and wear it like a shield. Do not be mistaken, this does not make a brave man. For humanity, courage and kindness are merely armor and the day will come when they must take it off and hang their sword and shield up again.”
“You don't believe what you're saying. It’s written all over your face, Alice. You forget that I am your walking, talking contradiction. If men are just cattle, why didn't you gobble me up in the countryside.”
Armand admits the next thing very carefully, so carefully in fact that Daniel knows it immediately to be a lie, “And find myself without a crutch? How would I get to Saigon?”
“Why didn’t you ask one of your vampire friends?”
“If there was one around, I might have.”
“You’re telling me there’s a limited vampire population in Vietnam? That's a relief. Here I was worried that we would soon be swarming with you.”
“There are too few vampires to ever affect the human population. You wouldn't call a flight of stairs your predator because someone fell down them. You wouldn’t call lightning your predator if you were struck by it. To be killed by a vampire is only a turn of luck.”
Luck. Luck, he says. Only someone with no soul would compare murder to being dealt a bad hand.
“Maybe it’s as you are thinking,” Armand admits. “Maybe mankind is innocent and it is I that is an evil predator. Maybe I am the only evil thing left in the world and once I am vanquished the world will live on in perfect harmony. I do not know for sure that I am the last evil thing. However, I am certain of two things.
“I am certain that misery and strife and evil have far preceded me and will outlive me when I am gone. I am also sure, no I am absolutely confident, that there is no such thing as good and evil and we astride these qualities to others so that we might be the good guy in our own stories. There is no good or evil, no god or devil. I have walked this earth for a very long time and I have never seen a vision or learned a secret that would damn or save my soul.”
“I have to sit down and interview you at some point,” Daniel shakes his head. “I have so many questions. When I publish your story, I suspect the world will think I’m a fucking nut job. I guess they won’t be able to say I never warned them.”
“You cannot tell a soul.”
“Or what?”
Armand does not seem like the type to challenge someone for a slight but rather murder on the spot. The way this story is unfolding, it is quite possible that Armand will look him in the eyes, enter his brain, tell him to saw his own head off with a butter knife, and Daniel will do it without question. Daniel suspects that this vampire is capable of many terrible things.
Armand turns and sets one hand on Daniel’s inner thigh so that a jolt of electricity shoots through him. Daniel goes stiff as a rod, waiting to be mauled, for the end. Armand has his proverbial knife sharpened; he just has to decide where to plunge it.
Instead, a whisper comes, “Do you want to live in a new way? As never before?”
Daniel is trembling, not with fear but with a rush of excitement, “What?”
“If I offered you this dark gift and you were to be forever young, forever healthy, forever happy, forever hungry ,” Armand is so close now that Daniel can feel the heat of each breath. “Would you accept it?”
Yes. Yes, he would. Without question, he would. He would take Armand by the back of the head and force him to give and take. Daniel blushes scarlet because he knows Armand can hear how quickly he answers in his head.
“But this life is not for you.” The vampire says quietly, without judgment, “I kill people. I eat them. For some, it is very sad. But the truth is that you are not sad. You do nothing more than sigh over death and it is an hypocritical and inconsequential sigh.”