It takes a lot to attract attention on Sunset Blvd. There are a lot of clubs that have ropes that are velvet with steel cores, a lot of hotels with bars you can't get into unless your Prada little-black-dress is size one. A lot of neon and a lot of expensive penis-substitute cars cruising for young flesh. This time of year the lbd's are miniscule, and you can see more skin here, dear, than you can in Jumbo's Clown Club in the Valley. Fashionable is necessary, but sweating is declasse, so all of a sudden, mirable dictu! The mavens proclaim that Skin is In. That's true all up and down the Blvd. this summer. But there is skin, and then there is…
Down by the Keyclub was something that had already nearly caused so many traffic accidents the West Hollywood Sherrifs were considering setting up barricades. Lips parted, ice blond in just-got-out-of-bed-but-my- hairdresser-sleeps-with-me style. The expression on that cat-shaped face about as thoughtful as a summer movie plot, but a lot behind it. Some of the tourists (such a dirty word!) who looked at her thought she looked a bit like a 21st century Marilyn. Kinda-sorta. Delicacy here, but that petite beauty and pale hair didn't inspire feelings of protectiveness the way our dear dead Goddess does. Sometime this story is going to get dirty, and here we start, with the fact that somehow instead these bitable lips, too-small nose and too-large eyes made a lot of men think very different thoughts than being a saviour. Different thoughts from this type indeed.
Thoughts of damage. Every cry for mercy from those full lips would seem to beg for more pain. Maybe it was in the confidence, how she held herself, how she wore those expensive clothes. Nonchalance. That was the word. It was clear the pashmina and silk would land wherever she threw them at the end of the evening. But maybe it was the way her style, her pose, rejected both the onlookers and the scene. There was nothing anyone in the world wanted to be but one of them, perfection that pretended to nature, but not here. It was the Real fake thing. Too bright-green eyes, too-pale platinum hair. Every girl seeing it felt in her soul that twinge, that knowledge that only the really beautiful could let themselves be that fake.
But that was all window-dressing. Mostly, this girl was young with a capital yuh. Young in the way that lasts for the few minutes from puberty to adulthood. Once it was gone nothing could bring it back, that glow girls had before they knew what it was good for, and lost long before they did. The tight parts tight as a jazz quartet, the soft parts soft like pollen-covered butterfly wings. The skin apricot peach fuzz over Chinese silk. The breasts so small, so high, no Baywatch action here, the thing men really want but can so rarely get. Between those slim legs that wet silk would be hard to open with a finger's touch, would grip so tight it would almost hurt.
Oh to feel that hurt.
This girl had that look you see on every crop of new starlets in Maxim, with all that editorial prediction of future genius and all those pictures that scream another two years, three, and then she's Alicia Silverstone, Kate Winslet, Claire Danes. B movies from now on. Beautiful still, but not nineteen. Hell, let's be real, not sixteen. That's the age, that's the glow, that's the youth. It's a baby girl's mind in that body, but the body has all the action. That body looks like it's never had fingerprints left on it, like a gardenia, one touch and it'll wilt.
And it will. Touched or not.
But right now this girl has far more going on. No little-girl brain in this head, except for that part we all envy, the part we all pretend doesn't exist after it's gone. Every experience shines like a gem for this girl, it's all new, it glitters. Diamonds or rhinestones, sunset over Malibu or latenight on Hollywood Blvd. That cat you love more than life itself, the bitch in your class you would send to hell if you could. The NIN cd that was written from Trent's soul to yours. The smell of pikake blossoms like summer in a bottle. The taste of blue-cooked ahi, the smell of Pink's hot dogs. Everything feels so strong. Everything is there to be devoured.
Remember? Really? And are you willing to admit it? Remember how you thought you'd always feel that way? And now a full moon is something you notice maybe once in six months, and if you go to take a look at the Smokey Mountains in full fall foliage and part of you is just wondering if you should leave early to avoid the traffic? You try, Gods you try, but the songs that speak to you aren't the new ones, the ones that make the kids sweat and turn it up, it's the ones that say what you don't want to admit. I've seen the future brother, it is murder. I used to care but things have changed.
I'm sorry, my friend. I wish it were different for you. Screw you, I wish it were different for me. Go ahead, age all you want, I want sixteen and nights that mean everything and a body that never says anything I don't want it to
Jane has all the good and none of the bad. Watching the waves at night and thinking about the bacteria in the luminescence; seeing some That hasn't happened to her yet. But she's done a lot of reading in her short, lonely life, (let's not get too far into it and say plenty of money and not much attention, okay?) and she's discovered that except for a chosen few like William Blake, like Stephen Hawking, she only has a few more years of feeling like…well, of feeling at all. Everyone else goes on and pretends that it's all just as wonderful as it used to be, even as they search for new sensations, new worlds to conquer. Cortez' men wrote that when they saw Tenochtitlan, the city of the Aztecs, for the first time, some of them cried. Many swore something so beautiful must be a dream. They fell to their knees, sobbing, these few hundred men at the edge of a new and glorious civilization.
In just a couple of years they had destroyed it utterly, so completely it took hundreds of years just to find the ruins and they built their own image on the surface. And there are plenty of people like that today. They are dead inside, so they try to suck all the life out of everything else. See, feel, be a part of, lose, destroy.
She didn't want to be like that. No. She was maybe too aware for her age in that respect. But maybe she was just right. Because the feelings she liked most weren't the ones other kids her age liked. Ecstasy and dancing till dawn. Playacting at love with other kids. Discovering or inventing the latest thing. It wasn't enough. It never had been.
No. What she loved so much it nearly broke her heart was to make her brand new fresh nerve endings scream. Three-fifths of a mile in ten seconds of incredible pleasure, of terrifying pain. Overloading her precious new brain with fear, with agony, with ecstasy, sensations angels or demons would envy.
She'd had the desire since before she knew what it was, since she'd run her hand through tender little newly-wet slit and thought about being a deer, shot, gutted. Or an abused child in one of those stories on the news. Soon she blessed the internet for teaching her so fast, for helping her avoid the fumbles in college and the inevitable revulsion from her lovers that would follow, avoiding the depression of feeling like a freak, like the only one in the universe.
But mostly she blessed it for letting her find out so very fast just how far it all could go. Just how far she wanted it to go.
She knew from books and pictures and chats that there were a lot of half-pretty, half-dressed people who'd come to the pleasure/pain she loved so much out of boredom, out of being jaded from the pleasure of their youth. That wasn't true for her. When she was ten, she was reading about it. When she was eleven she was doing it, clumsily yes, but she never made the same mistake, never let some half-assed pedophile who was as scared as her touch her again. Her third time, and the time she lost her virginity, was with some of the best dominant men in the city. By the time she was fourteen she'd exhausted all the men she'd wanted to try, and they'd become to scared of her to come close. Because by then she'd started telling men what she really wanted. "But Jane, dear God, you don't know what you're saying, you're too young, you can't imagine the reality of this, you're too young--"
She sighed, feeling older than him, older even than these Hollywood hills he lived in, the ones geologists said were, as mountains go, flying up into the air, becoming another set of Alps although no one could see it.
"Peter. I do know what I'm saying. I'm not too young for you to have pierced my nipples three times each. I can imagine the reality of what you can't even say, Peter, the reality of being dead. And you're repeating yourself again, so I will too. I'm not too young. Really, I'm too old for you."
She didn't see him again, but there were others like him. They seemed dangerous, edgy as the term went. And they were, they certainly were. One of them loved to hang her until she lost consciousness, waking up wet from her urine with his cock in her ass, his groaning with pleasure as she spasmed and twitched around him. One of them used her in rituals, sacrificing a cat above her nude body then watching as each member of the cult fucked her, finally filling a cup with their mixed juices and the blood for them all to drink. His magic had worked. Everyone wondered why someone who was such a wooden actor was such a star. But he never sounded like a valley boy when he called on the Enochian demons that served him.
One of them even stripped her naked and hunted her with bow and arrow across Catalina Island. Her heart racing, a wild grin on her face, she made every second count, fighting for her life as she prayed she'd lose it.
And then he'd caught her dead to rights, naked and sweaty, eyes wide as a deer's, frozen with terror and expectation…and he'd shot the arrow deliberately into a tree. She screamed like a panther and launched herself at him, then fought with teeth and nails and all her strength as he tried to fuck her. He'd beat her and then when she was at last subdued, he was too limp to rape her. He was sobbing as he knelt by her, examinining her, apologizing to her. He dressed her after he was sure she wasn't seriously hurt. He was limping worse than she. Then he drove her back to the yacht, and begged her over and over not to tell anyone in The Industry. He offered her anything, everything, for as long as she wanted it. She wanted one thing, the only thing she'd ever wanted, and she told him so. It was all she said the whole long trip home, and for once she didn't look at the water, the dolphins, the sun. At first he said he couldn't. An hour out from the island, her ice-eye fixed on his, he'd cried and said he'd heard things but he couldn't tell her, no one ever told, and it probably wasn't true. She said nothing at all, sipping Crystal and staring at him, a seventeen-year-old with the eyes of a bacchante, and at last just before they docked he asked her for two weeks and swore he'd see what he could do. She'd made him drive her to his safety deposit box for the yellow sapphire he had strung on a cord to strangle her with once and took it with her as collateral. He added a diamond pave bracelet she sold to finance her lifestyle. He was sobbing as she walked away. She got a cab without even trying. She was that kind of girl.
Now she paced the Boulevard, as if she were a caged animal. No one who saw her even considered that she'd been stood up, or that she was a hooker. No one talked to her or even smiled. Most refused to meet that emerald gaze.
Nobody on the street scared her, none of them ever had. But she was very scared that she had been stood up, and, she had to admit, rather scared that she hadn't. Because Jane had a meeting to attend, people to meet. And while that certainly wasn't a bad thing in Hollywood, in this case she knew for damned certain it was more than a bad thing. It was a Very Bad Thing. And it was the Very Bad Thing she'd wanted since she'd read her mother's copy of de Sade when she was nine. Unlike most little girls she knew what she wanted to be. She wanted to be perfect, and then she wanted to stay that way forever. But before that, she'd wanted to make such an art of her suffering that no one who witnessed it would ever find anyone to compare with her.
The world wouldn't know her name, but she'd always be a legend.
She was ten minutes early, if she'd left the apartment when she'd been ready she'd have been here an hour ago. She had never been like this, when she'd gone to meet the men who'd fucked her for the first time she'd gotten ready then sat motionless like O by the door until it was time to leave. Now she was so anxious she was chewing on her nails. She didn't really mind so much, she'd carefully cut her nails to nothing, polished them the color of gunmetal and then carefully chipped them just the right amount. But now she was down to her cuticles and tasting blood now and then. The tasted calmed her somewhat, she'd learned that when she was nine and she'd intentionally cut herself in the bathroom so she could feel what it was like. She'd loved it, but she'd left scars on her arms, so she'd never done that again. Only those who knew how to avoid scars cut or pierced her, except for a very few permanent marks she'd begged for. She smiled just a little, red-plum lips open over perfect teeth, as she recalled how it had felt, getting the cigarette burn just at the top of her inner thigh. But it didn't really stop her mind from ratcheting back and forth.
Of course everyone thought of her as preternaturally calm. Even with tears streaming down her cheeks, screaming herself hoarse as clamps tightened around her multiple nipple piercings, there was something almost…absent about her. No, that wasn't it, it was the knowledge that when the pain stopped she'd go away again, fading bit by bit till all that was left was her tear-filled eyes, like the Cheshire cat's smile. And she was truly a calm person, she thought carefully about what she wanted, decided exactly what it would take to get it, and worked single-mindedly until she had it. If something happened that wasn't related to her goals, it was ignored, the way the other girls at her high school called her names, tormented her. It didn't stand in her way, so it didn't exist. If something did interfere with her, she calmly decided if she could work around it, or destroy it. If not, then she would vent her anger, seduce and break some boy, ruin some precious object belonging to someone she hated, walk into a bar on the South side of town and fuck everyone there. Then she'd set a new goal and move on.
But now she was just too damned close the only thing she'd really wanted since childhood. If it didn't happen, she didn't know what she'd do. If it began only to end badly she wasn't sure she could go on.
But worse, if what she'd wanted so long happened and was banal, sordid, if she died with her last thought on what a waste it had been, on how stupid he'd been, on how ugly the carpeting was…then her life would have meant nothing at all.
But she took a deep breath, letting the energy of the City flow around, through her. The man with the yacht who'd arranged this had certainly seemed to have the requisite class, even if he'd refused to do her at the end. She'd heard legends occasionally about this man, or men, he'd introduced her to, and although legends grew in the telling, it felt right. In fact it felt as if what was about to happen had been waiting for her as much as she had for it. This could be perfection as nothing else ever had been.
She thought about how little she knew. Two weeks after the ill-fated hunting expedition she'd received a letter on the internet to her "Lilith" account from no one she recognized, and it had been very brief, stating only that Barry had mentioned her interest in meeting. Not meeting "a group" or "someone", just meeting.
She'd started a half-dozen replies and saved every one of them to the "Draft" folder. Then she'd minimized her mail program and tried to do some work. Brought Yahoomail back up again. Took it down, wrote a brochure for a new club in Word, killed Word without saving the brochure, brought up the letter again. This time she'd left it up as she wandered around her apartment in a tiny brown t-shirt and matching panties, left it sitting there like a ghost as she'd boiled some plain pasta with olive oil and a little rosemary and added a little fresh grated cheese and pine nuts and sat with her feet up on the edge of the computer desk to eat, tasting nothing, not really looking at the letter or anything short of the middle distance. Then she'd in one draft affirmed her interest just as cryptically as the original letter, and an hour later got a letter asking her to secure a mail drop box and check it the following Wednesday.
It took forever but Wednesday arrived as it always did, and she found a fairly thin, vellum envelope addressed by hand. When she opened it in the privacy of her room, she found that it was terse but informative. She'd been investigated, it said. There was a chance that she deserved the interest that was being bestowed upon her. Again the passive voice, neither male, female nor plural. There were a series of questions and instructions, and the letter did not bother to say that she was required to answer and fulfill the requirements to the letter. The questions were thorough and far ranging and all of them asked for their answers in detail. They included as a small sample: How old was she? It had taken her fifty pages, typed, to answer all the questions. The last one gave her a great deal of pause. Fortunately because of her natural reticence the number was small. There was a friend, a girl when she was eleven and she was trying to find out if someone nearby felt as she did. She only knew the girl's first name and was sure she didn't remember. Other than that, the internet group was largest, since it was almost a support group. There were perhaps twenty there who knew that "Lamia" wanted to die during sex, but she had lied to them a lot about her "real life". That left four, all "in the scene", as the common and annoying term went. Three were lovers, one the man with the bow and arrow, and two who had claimed they had killed a woman and then backed off quickly when she'd asked if they'd do her. The last, a woman, she'd talked to when she was drunk, and it seemed they had similar desires, although, Jane thought, with the woman's age, weight and natural air of one who feels unselfimportant, the only way she'd achieve her desire would be to put herself in danger and hope to get lucky. Cold, but true.
Now, however…she wondered how many of this list would survive, or if the questions were all bluff. She felt guilty. But she didn't even consider lying. Jane had never gone halfway about anything at all.
The next letter had thanked Jane for her responses, and asked if she had any desires, wishes or requirements, and if she had any questions at all. While it took no time at all to write this letter, she spent a great deal of time thinking it out. And she was terrified as she did it. She'd had many fantasies, and other nightmares, about how she wanted and did not want it to be. But what was important? If she were too demanding would this happen at all? She finally decided to be honest, even about her ambivalence.
She wrote that she truly only had one firm requirement. She wanted to be treated as a creature as valuable as she was. She was an egotist and she let it show when she said that she was lovely, educated, intelligent and sensitive to pain. She wanted to be treated as an exquisite sacrifice, a work of art. In return she would do the same, give all of herself up to suffering, to pleasure, to whatever was desired. She expressed the horror she had of cheap plywood and cork dungeons, of fake leather, of laughable theatricality, of calling a balding, none-too-clean and none-too-confident man "Master". She cared not at all how her tormentor or tormentors looked, so long as they seemed truly worthy to be her superior, her lover, her tormentor and ultimately her killer. She didn't require luxury, but she hoped that the setting would also be worthy, simple perhaps but no matter what not tacky or low-class.
After thinking an even longer time, she wrote very briefly that, she gave herself over to him, her or them. It was not her choice what occurred, whether she was tortured exclusively or given some pleasure, whether things proceeded quickly or lasted for years (although it was her hope that she be allowed to die before her beauty faded more than a very little). Of course, any marring that would be done to her body was not her choice. Shuddering, she wrote that mutilation that significantly decreased her attractiveness, such as scarring of her face, amputation of digits, limbs or nipples, or stretching of her taut skin she would not deny, could not deny, but she prayed that it would be the choice of her Master or Masters to appreciate her beauty to the end. She wrote that she never got into some stuff, like dressing up like acting as a maid or pony, or coprophilia, but she wasn't stupid enough to believe that it would matter.
Besides, she wrote, chomping the pen she'd unconsciously clamped in her teeth into icky little plastic bits, she never had said no. To anything. Then, after padding into the kitchen for a shot of tequila and a Xanax, she came back and wrote the one thing that mattered in this whole little game. She could smell her own sweat, and she could smell her own wetness.
She had, she wrote, one requirement, and one only. She had to know, had to have it proven to her beforehand, that she'd die. That she'd die during sex. Any act of sex. She wanted it to be up to her killer, she wanted to know that her death pleased him, she wanted the last thing she saw to be the pleasure in his face. It didn't matter at all if people watched, if they filmed it, any of that shit. As for how, she wanted to hurt. She wanted to bleed. She didn't want it fast, or mechanical. She'd read Dolcett too and it even turned her on. For about a week. But now she wanted it as she had always wanted it. She wanted to die slowly, even if she'd already been tortured beyond her endurance.
And she wanted it to be erotic. Romantic. Sensual. If they had to degrade her, okay, but more than anything…
Well, stupid as it might seem, she wanted a death with candles and roses.
Beyond that, all decisions were theirs.
She added a sentence stating that she hoped she had not been too demanding, and promising utter and grateful obedience once all decisions were made. She said that she had only been honest, believing that her unknown reader would prefer it so.
And she mailed the letter, even though in part she wondered what she had done.
That night she got smashingly drunk, high and out of her mind on prescription pills. Now that she had made the effort to gain what she had wanted, she felt very near to breaking down completely. She had given complete and utter strangers carte blanche to do anything they wanted. Perhaps she'd spend four or five years scrubbing floors. Maybe she'd walk the streets as a prostitute. If they wanted, they could amputate all her limbs, her breasts and her tongue and have her cunt sewn shut, then leave her in a basket for years. It was virtually guaranteed that she'd spend a great deal of time doing things she would never have chosen to do, left to herself. She was beautiful, rich, and intelligent, and she might end up with her face scarified, a bit in her mouth, and taken only from behind as some anonymous piece of ass. But just as long as they could would assure to her that eventually, eventually, she'd have what *she* wanted. Gods, if she even wanted it by then, if she were even sane, if she weren't wishing she had her life back. She was seventeen. She'd been told over and over that she was so young, she didn't know what she wanted. And if they were right? What horror had she set in motion? Ah, fuck, she really truly wanted this, had been sure just as long as she'd understood the concept. She wanted to die. Bloodily. Painfully. Slowly. Erotically. Why? She laughed and washed down a Valium with some tequila. Hell, she didn't have the faintest fucking idea. She'd just always wanted it that way, the way some guys like to lick women's feet, and some girls like vinyl maid's outfits. So her desire resulted in ending up ultimately on some forensic scientist's table, probably in sections, while that most intimate of examinations tried to find out everything about her. She wondered if they'd be able to see it in her brain, to discover it in a slide-section of her heart. Let fucking Quincy figure out the "why". Mommy didn't cuddle her enough, or Daddy drank too many martinis. She was overprivileged. She was underdisciplined. Who cared. It was her fantasy. She laughed again, a little too loudly. Even that steel autopsy table aroused her.
And pretty soon all this would be her reality, too. She'd dreamed of it for half her life, but only recently had she found someone who said he would, that his arrow would pierce her, that she'd die while he took that one last fuck. *That* took it from fantasy straight to unfulfilled reality. She'd had a lot of unfulfilled realities, and she knew how to handle them. It had been that way with anal sex once, until someone had. And golden showers, and being beaten until she bled, and seeing a needle dimple and then pierce her flesh, and a whole host of other things. All of them waiting for her to experience them until someone had taken her, and shown her. Not even unfulfilled anymore. Instead, experience, real concrete experience.
But then Barry had decided that for it would stay firmly in that realm of fantasy, and Jane had gone from dreaming to desperate. She stopped thinking -someday-- and furiously started making it soon. And thanks to Barry and all of Barry's friends, supposedly as of now Jane wasn't looking anymore. She could truly anticipate, that brief, endless like feeling that skewer about to punch through her breast. Like feeling that cock leave her cunt and move back that crucial little ways, brushing erotically just...*there*. Yeah, Keats had it right, something about the chase and the wait...
Oh, God, though, it didn't mean anything if that chase didn't finish. So our Jane had a lot to think about as she waited on that damned street corner for someone to show up. Of course she had a vivid imagination, and at least she was coming to understand how little this person was like all those people in all those anonymous chats online. Her prospective...lover? Killer? Predator...that was a good one, her predator…seemed educated, got her at least some of her literary references, had some taste in music, even if she didn't share it. She might have been willing to move her toothbrush to his place after a date. But then there wouldn't be an after...well, there would after *this* date, the one she'd required, the proof. She'd been dicked over without actual benefit of the dick more times than she could count. So this time when the guy said he was a stone killer she said "prove it" and was surprised when in the very next conversation he typed back "you want proof, pretty thing? Come get it."
So. No slouch, able to come back quick when he needed to. She'd wondered what she'd find. She pictured a Harley pulling up with a guy on the back, leather jacket, more hair on his face than she had on her head. Or some businessman in some status-car, leaning over to open the door for her. Or some pudgy, bearded nerd in a car with a squealing transmission. Or more than one guy in a Caddy, one getting out fast and shoving her in faster. Maybe even a limo…so many possibilities...
If he would just fucking show!
And still five fucking minutes to go.
It's amazing, banal but amazing, how slow time goes when you're waiting. She read the ad for Snoop Dawg's album on the diamondvision screen across the street about sixhundred and sixty six times. Her heart raced every time somebody pulled over and asked her if she wanted a date. But even bored she was observant and when the silver Spyder had cruised by her several times, her pulse accelerated even more. Finally the car stopped, the door opened, and with no preamble an average voice confidently said "Lilith. Get in."
She'd planned a whole little scenario, a long look, "You're not a cop are you," scoping him out, all of it, but that didn't last. She got in.
Deep breath, deep breath…she didn't even really dare look at the man yet. She was at least sure this was just one man. Because Spyders don't have backseats. -Clever Jane, gee, some of those higher brain functions are still working.- You don't really drive on Sunset, you do a long succession of parking jobs. He'd been heading west, the direction everyone who talks about Sunset says is "towards the ocean"; and it certainly is between 3 and 5 in the morning. The rest of the time it would take so much time to get to the ocean that way you'd be better off getting on the freeway going the other way and just heading for some beach in the Carolinas. But he turned up some very small, very steep street that moved even further into the hills, and made a few turns after that, and pretty soon she could tell by the moon (the total eclipse by the neon now having ended) that they were heading east. He didn't say anything or do anything except handle the standard-transmission car, but then on these curves that was plenty, she most distinctly did not want to die hitting the stop sign at Mulholland.
She'd been avoiding looking at him, and besides on Sunset if she'd looked at him he would have been a constantly changing kaleidoscope of color and shading, and she would have seen just about nothing. Now here, even in the darkness she could get a little more information. His hair seemed light, but grey or blond she couldn't tell. His face was slim and the moonlight on the slim planes of his face made her think about that old poem about "the skull beneath the skin." He had a bit of the Eurotrash look to him; his suit was light-colored and lacked a collar, his hair was very short without looking low-maintenance. She wouldn't have been surprised if when he spoke again she heard a trace of an accent.
But she didn't. The voice was gravelly, as if he'd smoked a lot of cigarettes; she thought a little of that tape of that guy from the Natural Born Killer soundtrack, that old, hip guy who'd known Dylan or something. "Is it still Lilith now?" he asked. He still didn't glance at her and considering the next curve, no surprise there. She managed to avoid a stupid laugh and said "No, not much point now, it's Jane."
"Plain Jane who isn't, then. I haven't seen a picture on the net or in the ones you sent me that did you anything like justice Jane." She smiled the standard smile for that sentence but her "thank you" was cut off. "I'm not Mack, either. I'm Darien." He grinned and his teeth glinted in the lights from the oncoming car. "It seems the exotic name factor has switched places." She laughed for real, the kind that relieves tension, and she liked that fine. He told her to please herself with the music and she reached for the radio buttons and clicked the jazz he was playing to a station she wanted to hear, Beck and Artificial Joy Club doing "Sick and Beautiful". The streets were so narrow here that had they met someone they would have had to back up, and then she was looking across a street at an old ruin she recognized as the Houdini mansion, so she knew they were on Laurel Canyon and then suddenly they were turning up another itty-bitty street and into a steep driveway and she guessed they were home. Something about the way he left the car so quickly told her to stay and wait for the door to be opened for her, and it was. The warm wind washed over her with the strong scent of greenery that one caught only up here in the hills.
There wasn't a garage, and the stairs up past the expensively-lit and exquisitely faux-wild vegetation were old stone. She knew the garden wasn't really wild because it was green; this time of the year the hills looked like gold crushed velvet and would burn with the slightest spark. The winds were mild tonight; on another night those winds would make the threat of fire so great that people who lived up here went on alert at the slightest taint of smoke in the air.
The house above looked cobbled-together but that was so normal to Jane, with her experience of these canyons, that she barely noticed; he let her in an old mahogany door with the wrought iron grill such doors usually had and into a room she realized she'd been picturing for so long in her fantasies that for a moment this one seemed all wrong to her, imperfect; it wasn't the one in her head. It only took her a moment, though, to realize that it was quite lovely.
Each wall was painted a different, vivid, but not primary color. Pumpkin-orange. Sea-of-Cortez blue. Pomegranate-red. And the furnishings, all off-white linen on extraordinarily dark wood. There wasn't much art on the walls, just stretched drum-heads of tribal and colorful design, but on the shelves, the tables, were creatures out of the dreams of exquisite madmen, cats with the eyes of crazy humans, frogs who could sit up and play poker, mermaids in black and red with skull faces who smiled in their exquisite death.
Jane knew enough to know that she was seeing the art of Mexico, but through a glass darkly. This man had collected the oddest works from the strangest places for her to see. She still had the arrogance of the young, everything in the world was all for her.
But for one such as her, she was more than a little right.
She threw her wrap on an off-white linen couch, the splash of peach making a whole new element here. Underneath, short black linen, clashing with the furnishings but setting off the girl so well that Darien took a long moment merely to gaze at her from the door. It was odd; maybe he'd found a way to see, to feel; in any case he didn't waste something like the sight of this blond child in black against all this color. Paintings have been made, and well, from far less.
She stood, looking around but clearly waiting her due, an invitation, an offering. He was happy to make it. She didn't know it but many girls had stood where she did; none, however, had shone like an angel against the parrot-green and cornstalk-gold. "May I bring you something, Jane? Something to drink?"
She turned, pretended annoyance, was too young to succeed. "You promised me something…" He neither nodded nor made a denial but from his amused smile she could tell that she'd get what she came for, eventually, after the niceties had been observed. He would keep every promise made to this exquisite creation. He wondered for a few moments at how something came to be, from the inside-out. She finally went on. "Yes, then, something to drink, please."
Ah. The sign of the young, not having chosen that signature drink that would indicate their own sophistication. He smiled widely and she, staring at a wall-hanging of green-and-gold cornstalks on a pale background, very slim and stretched on pale framing, didn't notice. "As you wish, lovely Jane, a drink."
In the tiny kitchen, cut down from the rest of the house to suit his needs, he poured a very expensive tequila, an anejo from Porfidio, and then reached into the refrigerator for a sangrita of his own making. It would taste to her first of tomato, very fresh, from his own garden out back in this warm season; then of some sort of tropical fruit; then of spices. His own additive, matching in colour but not in taste, would probably not attract her attention.
When he returned she'd found the cd player (he nearly laughed; these children couldn't live without a soundtrack, they weren't in the movie if the music weren't playing) and he set the clear container of red sangrita on the blue-tile table next to the skull-shaped ceramic decanter of tequila and then he sat on the couch himself, pulling an alpaca throw from behind it, all glowing night-blues and quetzal-greens in case she became cold.
Knowing what she was about to see he guessed she might.
She'd queued up a few cds and apparently either hadn't asked why he'd owned them or assumed, rightly for some creature like her, that it was for her pleasure. He had to admit that of all the exquisite creatures he'd hosted she'd surprised him most. There was the usual, Depeche Mode and Hole, Cake and Soul Coughing and Concrete Blonde and Siouxie. But there were others a little more odd for something so young and confident: The Who, Warren Zevon. Dear Gods, Al Stewart. Sneaker Pimps he could ignore, but there was an awful lot of Radiohead. Still he could handle it all, even the Garbage. It was the John Prine, the Johnny Cash and the Hank Williams that made him hide a grin. This one was so fucking young and so old. Sometimes he wondered, in the things he did, the things he saw and heard and felt, if there was truly a transmigration of souls. This child was one he could barely believe began in her mother's womb less than two decades ago.
But it wasn't her soul he was interested in this time; there might be another time of course but not now… The girl settled tentatively on the cream silk settee and he pushed both her shawl and the throw towards her. He'd seen it before, she'd feel her emotions as chill and need them both. She had downed a shot of tequila in a way shameful for something so precious, but was willing to learn about the sangrita, and after that first sip of palate-cleansing spiciness the next shot was sipped, not slammed. He smiled and sat on the matching chair near her. He didn't want her crowded. Even at this stage he could arrange to get her out of here.
Although he hardly intended to. That velvet skin and silken hair… Finally she'd drunk a little and her breathing seemed even. He risked speaking. "Well, dear Jane, you made a request, and are you ready for it to be granted?"
She stuck her chin out in the most charming way. "Yes, I require proof, complete proof that you will take my life when this is finished. Are you going to do that?"
He laughed loudly, possibly frightening her but unable to avoid it. "Let's start with the VCR, shall we, unplain Jane?"
He pressed a button on a control hidden in his hand and they were looking at a stone surface, with some sort of soft surface above it. It took a good number of seconds in this extreme closeup to understand that this was a stone table, an altar if one was so minded, and the softness was the skin of a girl.
Jane's eyes grew wide at what was already obvious, as the tape panned back and she saw. Her companion smiled, knowing that this was a vastly edited tape, after all, there was much more to show Jane this evening… The blood had already begun to flow. The girl lay, face up, and a very black knife was laid almost sideways to her skin. Jane could see a pattern on the skin near the knife, but not quite make it out because of all the blood. Something bright in greens and blues. A thin cloth, body paint, a tattoo...
The girl's face was contorted, as if she were screaming, but there was no sound at all from the tape. The black blade looked almost uneven…suddenly Jane realized she was looking at a stone blade, not a metal one, and a blade that was slipping between the girl's skin and the flesh beneath. She was not being stabbed, nor teased with the blade.
No. The skin was being removed, whole, in one piece.
Oh fuck. She was being flayed.
Suddenly Jane felt ill, regretting her choice of cd, which right now was Stan Ridgeway, "Ring of Fire". Somehow she could feel what that girl was going through as the piece of skin on her lovely stomach was carefully, slowly, yes erotically cut from her body. Oh God to know that she would never grow that back, that this was final, that after this perhaps she could live a half-life but after agreeing…no, she'd die soon, very soon…Jane took another drink of tequila and realized she'd clutched the coverlet to her. This girl was having her tattooed skin peeled from her body for some purpose…oh shit…Jane had to look away, look up.
She saw the wall hanging, the parrot-tattooed-skin stretched on what she now knew was a bone frame, and just like a fucking heroine in a novel she flattened on the couch, barely able to think at all.
It wasn't moments before Darien was bending over her with water and sangrita, she knew because when she glanced to the rather small black television in the tropically-painted cupboard the girl's tattoo had still not been completely cut from her slim body. Jane impassively watched the girl's dark face, realizing that it was that skin tone that made the parrot she could see on the wall so very lovely. She'd been chosen for this, surely, and for her willingness…for Jane could see that the girl was not tied down, rather was holding hard onto the hands of unseen male companions, forcing herself not to interfere with the peeling of her own skin. She couldn't imagine how in the hell one could hold that perfectly still, that the knife wouldn't slip through the thin skin, but she could see no hint of haze in the girl's eyes when her face came into the shot, as it carefully recorded her reaction; she was not drugged, it seemed.
Darien must have touched a button because it all speeded up, soon the connective tissue behind the skin was being cut carefully, although with no less pain on the part of the subject given her expression. Soon after that Darien was helping Jane to sit and handing her a small shot of the tequila and talking to her.
"All right, Jane, you see what was done with her outer body, but she still deserves your attention. Now are you willing to-"
Jane nodded, her jaw set, her eyes like black holes, nothing wrong there but what had to be. She saw nothing wrong in all of this, she just understood that as stars are eaten by neutron stars despite the horror of all that information compacted into nothingness she needed to see this. And so become a kind of star herself.
She watched the stone knife, the first one, so sharp, turn from cutting along the line of the girl's flesh to plunging into it. She was unable to avoid crying out, and Darien turned the sound up from "Firestarter" to the cries of the girl as the flesh of her belly was pierced, deep, deeper until blood fairly flowed in a gush even around the plug of the blade from the last wound. Jane knew very well that with that blood loss it was only a few minutes… And she understood so fucking well that it meant they could do the same to her if she would only let them.
Soon in the tape the girl, although she'd been seemingly dead the moment before, thrashed and writhed, grunting and screaming, for several moments in the body's agonal spasm, the last-ditch attempt to take the body out of danger and save it. Soon, though, her eyes were glassy and milky and gone and her wounds trickled rather than bled, and she didn't move much, except the occasional spasm from muscles acting independently. The pretty tattooed skin was gone and there was a vast hole underneath, in her belly, with an even deeper hole where the knife had plunged straight back to her aorta, exsanguinating her in mere moments.
Jane was usually rather proud of all her knowledge of how violent death and dying happened.
Jane sighed and had another drink of tequila and of sangrita.
For the few hours that it mattered Jane regretted her next statement, but by the same token she could see in Darien's face that it was expected and truly, could she have done any differently? But God, did that make her any less guilty?
She was leaning back against the lovely soft silk couch and drinking and talking. "Yes. Yes Darien. If you want that of me do it to me." There was a pause. Ah Gods fuck that pause. "But-"
"But what, Jane? What we will do to modify your body to our whims, and your own planned death, isn't enough?"
She sighed and motherfuck she knew her sigh was almost half fake. "No, that's perfect, but..Darien…special effects these days…"
She didn't even have a chance to say more.
"Right you are, Jane." He picked up a phone, pushed a button and said into the mouthpiece "Strephan, bring Margaret."
And a girl was brought out by a rather small, pudgy man, one of the net-stalkers she had originally envisioned, not what she'd expect here. The girl was put right in front of her, so close they could have touched, although the girl was bound. She had frizzy brown hair, a rather pudgy, aging body, a lovely tattoo of a frog on her upper thigh, and a willing face. She glanced at Jane, her look a mixture of fear, curiosity and that envy Jane was so used to from the normal ones, the ones who weren't unattractive, but even in their best outfits and makeup couldn't approach her on her worst day.
The man Strephan pulled a knife from his pocket, the kind that flips and locks open, this one with a reddish-wood handle grooved for his fingers. He stood behind the girl, his body pressed against hers, one arm bracing her against her throat. With the other hand he took the knife and put it to Margaret's stomach. Margaret's eyes widened.
Darien's voice was silky soft. "Well Margaret, time for you to get your wish I think."
Suddenly Margaret didn't look scared…she looked indignant. "But I thought, Strephan said that you-"
Darien cut her off with little effort and looked at her amusedly. "What Strephan said and what are true may or may not be the same thing. But in this case; he told you your tattoo was beautiful?" Margaret nodded. "He was right, and I approved you based on the pictures, it is. He said we could grant you an erotic death, and take your tattoo, make it a work of art, treasured through the ages? That's true too. Now, anything you may have fantasized, being worshipped by thirteen black-clad acolytes, sex for days and days, all of that…well I'm afraid that's your fantasy, Margaret."
Margaret looked as ready to spit as her namesake might. "But-but-but that's not fair, you only brought me here last night and barely talked to me-you call this erotic-"
Darien smiled but patiently. He seemed to be trying very hard not to act scornfully to the girl. "I disagree, dear. You're naked, and you'll die here, with three people paying proper attention to your every move, your every gasp. The next in line, as it were, is watching you die for her own edification, and I'm sure it's erotic to her as well. Strephan."
Before Jane (or Margaret) could protest at all Strephan had plunged the knife deep in the girl's left side, very high, and twisted it, holding her tightly against him as she screamed. There was an almost clinical quality in the way Jane noted the amount of blood, the way it fountained over the strong hand and arm of the man holding the girl in his grasp. No movie had ever gotten that colour, that texture, that flow correct. No one seeing it in reality would mistake it for anything but what it was, blood, sangre, nothing else was that red, that thick, that pure.
Jane took one step forward and in all the hours she lived she could never have told anyone why. To save the girl (something impossible now)? To immerse her own hands, her body, her face in that flow before it so quickly came to an end? To put her face to Margaret's, to see her mouth move as she screamed and kiss it, take the screams in her own body, to watch her eyes and see if she could discern the moment when life left her?
She never knew because Darien stopped her with one very hard hand on her wrist. The hand, the control, combined with with the scene before her, simultaneously aroused her and brought her back to herself. She put her face to his, her chin getting that pugnacious look she'd learned from her white-shark-businessman father. "I have a right to see what I'm getting myself into, Sir." She pronounced precisely but with no false British note. "Let go of me now or consider the deal off." He looked deep into her eyes and it was clear the thought flickered across his mind that he could tell her that no matter what, she'd never leave here alive. But these dramas were the essence of everything he was and he released her with some drama, his hand bringing hers to his mouth and kissing it. She hissed her impatience and moved to Margaret, a half a step. Margaret, eyes showing her pain, scream trailing to a moan and body starting to slump against her captor, reached up one bloodstained hand and grasped Jane's hands in a parody of Darien's grip. For a moment, green eyes met brown and the now-dead saw the one soon-to-die.
Then Jane shook Margaret's hand off, impatiently, and reaching around the girl's breast, her taut nipple brushing her wrist, moved her fingers in along the blade and into the wound in Margaret's side. Margaret's mouth couldn't possibly have opened any wider. She was screaming with no sound and her eyes, fixed on the other girls, ran betrayal/pleading/fury/despair like a quick loop reel on MTV. And Jane's eyes never changed a bit. She knew now, this was real (andwarmslickpulsingdyingsohothothot) and she forced herself with only the greatest difficulty to step back and move to Darien.
Then she wiped her bloody hand on his suit. "All right. I agree, but I want this to take more time than Margaret here."
He stared at her, expressionless, his body as tense as rigor mortis. When he spoke it was through clenched jaw. He was getting what he'd wanted so very much but at such a price to his pride, would it ever recover?
Fuck it, who cared. This piece the whole City would give anything at all for was his, his to mark, his to kill, his to memorialize forever. Pride his therapist could deal with. "As you wish, Jane. Many choices are still yours…you're not marked I believe?" She nodded once. "Then you'll need to decide what mark you want on your body and where, and I will leave that choice entirely up to you, although an artist can work with you if you wish. I hope, if you agree, to have you branded, scarified or, if you will, cut, and branded before the denouement."
She tilted her head to one side. Two feet from her a girl was being dragged off, dead or so close as made no difference, and while it hadn't seemed to affect her, it was clear she was no longer the child she'd been. "I agree." That pugnacious chin again." I want it special. I'm special, it has to be. It has to be the best, my mark, my death, what you make of it after, understand?"
Damn, his therapist would have something to deal with next week. Maybe move the appointment up and add some Valium. "Understood." He smirked. "Our girls who stay here longer than a day or two usually take new names. May I suggest one for you?"
Those full lips were as thin as they ever got. If she'd lived a long time, maybe it would have taken collagen to maintain that pout.
But then she never would.
"I agree, as long as I like the name. I'm not like her. No, I'm not like either of them." She didn't bother gesturing neither to either the body's feet disappearing around the corner nor to the tape of the body being cleared away on the TV. He smiled with no irony and brushed her cheek with one thumb, letting it caress those full lips, that thrust-out chin, then up her knife-thin jawline past those cheekbones to run fingers through the cornsilk hair. "No, Jane, unplain Jane. You're not like either of them. In fact, I'll tell you now, you are like nothing, no one, I've ever had here under my control, no, nor like anyone I've seen the world round I didn't control." She couldn't help the faint smile, nor could he help kissing it. "No, your name will reflect what you truly are, precious, royal by virtue of your beauty and your sacrifice, although you may not understand it at first." He laughed. "Or be able to pronounce it." She looked at him, a little confused. Blood was drying on her hand, on his suit, and she could feel it puckering, pulling. Without thought she put her marked hand between the two of them and licked at the clotted blood and he did the same until their tongues met. Finally, moaning very softly at the loss of his control (that bastard doctor best earn his pay….) he pulled back and held her by the shoulders. She looked drugged but still so completely in control. He looked at this perfect person…no…perfect…*thing*…and wondered if she'd ever been out of control from her cradle on. And wondered more importantly if she ever would.
"Here is your name. Chalchiuhxochitzin. Say it." She did, and he corrected her, over and over. She watched him, waiting for the meaning, knowing it would be given to her. "It means many things, but first, let me tell you that it means Lady Jade-Flower, in a language in which Jade is the most important thing in the world, and a flower the most emblematic of beauty and of death. Will that do for now?"
She tilted her head, that gesture that should seem theatrical and never did, and finally nodded once. "Chalchiuhxochitzin. I am Chalchiuhxochitzin." She laughed loudly, a little over the top and he realized that what she had seen, experienced today was a bit much for any seventeen-year-old, even one as in control as this one, and that she needed serious rest or she would shatter like a piece of the jadeite she was named after. "Such a strange thing, from such a plain name to one I can barely pronounce."
"You won't have to pronounce it really, ever again. You'll have to answer to it on occasion, but I think Lady Jade-Flower if there's ever cause for you to be, er, formally introduced, is fine. And more informally, you may merely use Jade-Flower. It's up to you." He spoke. "Chalchiuhxochitzin, I want to give you a drug to help you sleep tonight but the choice of drug is yours." Her eyes narrowed just a touch that she didn't have a choice of 'drug' or 'no drug' but she was exhausted and not stupid. She knew she needed sleep and how hard it would be to hunt him down. She'd been, as so many insomniacs were, cursed by the Gods of sleep enough times to take help when it was offered. He continued. "I can give you opium, or opium with marijuana, to smoke. I can give you a pill, something pharmaceutical, anything you choose. You can leave it to a doctor-friend of mine to choose what's best. Or…or I can shoot you up with a little something."
He loved the way her lips curved at "a little something." Hell, he was halfway to loving all of her, such was her beauty and the way it had remade her. She laughed, rain on eucalyptus leaves. "I like the sound of that, 'a little something'. And maybe-" she leaned close to him, the blood and shock already making her drunk "-you'll do the needle yourself, a little foretaste?" Her voice was so soft, the enunciation so precise and yet charming, suddenly there was much more of lost Marilyn in her. "Would you-" her fingers trailed up his bloody lapel to his lips "--*penetrate* me Darien?"
He laughed lightly, admiringly, and took her arm. "Over and over, my precious flower, I swear. Over and over."
The bedroom was suitably gothic without being tacky (the velvet was plush rather than crushed, for instance, and burgundy, not red). She lay on the bed posed like Christ in nothing but a paper-thin shantung gown the color of her skin and stared at the canopy above while he tied off one arm and plunged a needle into her flesh. She turned her head so she could watch as a tiny amount of blood was drawn up into they syringe, then he smiled into her eyes, pushed, and after a few moments she was waking on her side, mouth so dry it felt glued together, looking at the light coming through the sheers between the heavy velvet drapes.
Later that day, after a couple of light meals brought to her catered from some short-lived La Cienega restaurant and eaten by the window overlooking a garden of every type of California flower and many not so native, Jade-Flower was called to come down to Darien's office. She pulled on embroidered jeans and a brushed-silk shirt the color of her own peachy skin with one tiny button at the collarless top and bell sleeves, open all the way down the front between her small but perfect breasts. When she got there she found him in a room that was exactly what she would have predicted: dark, orderly bordering on obsessively tidy, filled with books. He was at the expectedly massive, expensive desk, in the obvious leather (cow?) chair with an empty velvet chair next to it, poring over a number of books, drawings and parchments.
"Ah, dear, come over please. Since there will be a few weeks of healing between the work we do on you and when we can properly remove and mount it, I thought it best we decide on a design immediately. I have suggestions, but in the end, the decision, as you demanded, is yours. Please, take the chair beside me."
Jade-Flower shivered at how easily he talked of removing and mounting her skin, ignoring the torture that would cause her, and how he even ignored mention of what would follow, her bloody death. She was silent and remained standing for a moment while she turned it all over in her mind. He didn't move, nor did he indicate any displeasure with her failure to sit down. At last she realized that she didn't want him worrying about her feelings, about her pain, her death. Those things were properly hers and hers alone. She vaguely remembered a song from some movie that had been popular a few months back, some '30's pastiche. "No one can walk that path with you" she thought the song had gone, and she liked that. She had hated it when a Dom had expressed concern, consideration for her. She wanted to be cherished but as an object; no one asks an Erte sculpture how it's feeling, do they? No. He was exactly right. His pleasure was in the art of the torture, hers in the art of the pain. He would delight in her death, and she in her dying. Both of them coveted in different ways that she would be a masterpiece, so what better place to work together?
She sat.
He pushed a large book of the coffee-table variety over to her and pointed at a page. "It occurred to me that the timing of your coming to us, and the nature of your beauty, should guide us in this, as it did in your name. Something…flowery seems appropriate." She looked at him puzzled and he laughed. "Not floury like the dough, dear, flowery like your name. Need some coffee, perhaps?" She (like most catlike creatures) couldn't bear to be laughed at, but laughed with she would allow, and she nodded, a little coolly, and soon was sipping café au lait at exactly the sweetness she liked. She didn't ask how anyone knew how she'd drink a drink she'd had only twice, in New Orleans. Instead she drank a bit and looked at the picture. It was a lily drawn by some female painter so as to be pornographic, and she shook her head in distaste.
"I don't see myself represented by a giant cunt for all eternity, thank you, Darien." He laughed. "Well, that's one way to see a painting like this. In any case, nothing I have put on your body will be exact to these drawings. These are by artists we do not know, and there are artists we do know who produce originals that are produced but once, on the body of our…canvas, and then framed and never created again." She smiled and took a long drink of coffee, leaning forward a little so he could catch a glimpse of one perfect breasts.
He smiled but coldly. "Ah yes, we'll have to do something about those too of course, but for now, the main piece-de-resistance. She frowned but didn't let it wrinkle her perfect brow. "Now, something else then, to do with flowers…"
They looked for over an hour through painting after painting of gardens, flowers in close up, realistic, impressionistic, symbolist. None struck her as at all representative of her, although sometimes Darien stared at her in wonderment. At last he rose and moved to the bookshelf, searching out some volume he had not yet had pulled for him. "All right then, Jade-Flower, you are not one flower but many, and yet not merely the flowers either…something…else…ah, here we are."
He pulled down a middle-sized book with a paperback cover, much worn. After flipping through the index and then the pages, he showed her a picture, rendered small but on good, shiny paper.
"John Keats wrote the poem 'The Death of Fleur', about a maiden who is compared to the very flowers of summer and comes to understand that she is more beautiful even than they. Near the end of their season she covers the ground under an oak tree with their blossoms, all she can find in the lush gardens around her father's estate, and lays herself down upon them, allowing herself to be overcome with their fragrance. Enveloped with this intoxicating, overcoming scent, she dies. Later, Burne-Jones painted this, a representation of the poem. How's this, my finicky Jade-Flower?"
She saw a full-color picture of a girl, her reddish-tawny curls tangled with the poppies and nasturtiums and flowing in individual curls down the flowers with which she had chosen to die, as her diaphanous, clinging blue-purple gown flowed over the iris and bluebells. The tuberose, the freesia, the honeysuckle and rose, those heaviest of scent, tangled over all. Her arm curved sweetly and erotically down from her bier to the ground, her soft white hand trailing; her right leg, the leg behind in the painting, was raised slightly, gave shape to her belly and the delta between her legs. No necrophiliac could have posed a corpse more beautifully to attract his own attention.
Jade-Flower-Jane was struck by the painting so much that she gazed at it for several moments, longer than anything Darien had yet shown her. Finally she looked up, her green gaze wide on his. "This is very…(she meant to say lovely)…pretty. But it could be prettier….if she were a blonde…her breasts smaller but more taut under her gown, her thighs slimmer, here…."
He smiled. "If she were you, you mean, Lady Jade-Flower."
She waited a moment, thinking. But she was not stupid, it was her appearance and youth that made her seem so. "Yes. If she were me. If she were me, she would be perfect."
The arrangements were made with their artist in the following days; the tattoo was to be in the pre-Raphaelite style, very symbolic, romantic and curvy. It suited a tattoo well. The brand and scarring would enhance the original painting as well. And because she refused to die on her stomach, most of her hidden from her onlookers whether present or by video, plans were made for her breasts as well. It was only four days after she arrived that these plans were set in motion, and she found herself lying on a rather surgical table but in a beautiful room. Darien was there, was ever-present, but so was a man named Lucan, a very very tall redheaded man with many tattoos who paid little attention to her except for touching her naked body and muttering to herself. Attempts at conversation, at seduction, failed utterly. She was reminded of legends of gnomes who performed metalwork but cared for nothing else. Perhaps, she considered, this man was a flesh elemental the way gnomes were elementals of earth, and all that interested him was flesh. Darien, even Strephan, looked to her reaction, but not Lucan. He cared for nothing except the working of her flesh into something else.
Music by a group Jade-Flower didn't know played softly in the background. Often, when she was laid naked, face-down or face-up (more often the former), she had nothing to do but listen to the music. She had had little chance to develop an imagination that didn't involve her own pain and killing, and this talk, all esoterics, left her adrift. At one point she asked whose music seemed to be playing, for it seemed to be very much the same in some ways while different in others. Darien answered her in an off-hand tone, "Steely Dan", and she accepted that as she accepted what she could identify horns and abstruse lyrics. At one point she remembered interjecting "But she must be me!" and seeing the faces of both the men as she lifted her own and their eyes met and they smiled, and she knew that her will be done, the face, the body of Fleur, would be Jane, Lady Jade-Flower's own.
It began two days later. She was shown the drawings, in blue ink on parchment paper, to adhere and transfer to her skin, she understood. First would come branding, to sear the Lady's curve of hip and breast, her leg and hair, onto Lady Jade Flower's back. Then healing, and then cutting…of the lovelier flowers, the calla, the rose, the iris, the orchid, deep into her skin, to give them depth, more texture. And then finally…the long, long process of tattooing…her very own hair and skin and figure, her expression. The flowers' color and subtlety. And then all would be done… She asked on that first branding that Darien be present and he did not deny her. In fact he had denied her nothing, dinners with her, her favorite music, even rituals she had come to invent in the boredom of her room, worship of the cymbidium, of the nasturtium, even of the rose itself as little as she liked it. She couldn't explain really why she hated the rose, something about that showy, scented bloom on that ugly, prickly bush made it seem worth stamping out except if cut and lovingly presented.
Well, wouldn't she be so? So she celebrated it as well, asked for incenses, candles, readings, cards and images to make her own obescience to that which would appear on her body forever.
The branding was a catharsis the likes of which she could never have dreamed. She asked that rituals be performed and the space be purified and she found herself in a room-within-a-room, the walls not quite reaching the ceilings, their tops covered with Saints' candles that she couldn't quite see. She scented incense she associated with death then realized it was what was burned in a shop on Melrose, Necro-something, with many bones and artifacts inside. It was soothing, distinct, not annoying like most incense. Lucan was naked from the waist-up, and touched her, placed her, talked about her, prodded her as if she were nothing but the finest canvas (or as if she were as precious as the finest canvas, her own impressions flickered one to the other). They showed her the small, curved pieces of metal that they would heat in a propane torch for a few seconds. She was instructed carefully as she lay naked face-down on the table, quivering, panting, trying hard to listen to the music she'd asked for, The Cure. "Don't move at all. Breathe, deep and constant. When I am about to strike I'll tell you to breathe deep. Do. Then when I say "Now" hold your breath; I'm going to make an imprint. It'll only take a couple of seconds, four at the most. When I'm done, I'll pull the iron away and tell you, 'Breathe'. Do you understand?"
She nodded and it wasn't good enough. She had to assent verbally and managed a strangled "yes" as she pictured how bad the pain of burning, again and again, would be.
They had told her it would take thirty-two strikes, or individual burns, to finish just the branding alone. She'd been silent and asked only that the song "Fascination Street" be played over and over, no matter how long it took.
"Okay, Flower, breathe, breathe, okay, now breathe deep hold it…Now {{'Cause I'm feeling I'm fading, impaling, and I'm begging you to drag you down with me, to kick the last nail in}} …breathe."
"Next, Jade-Flower….breathe deep, you're getting shocky…good, good.. You're doing fine…good. Now. Breathe deep, hold it…{{Open your mouth, I cannot be responsible for quite what goes in, or to care what goes out}} "Lovely, like your name, you are beautiful and doing beautifully…I'm proud of you, we all are. Now breathe, breathe, breathe, hold it{{put on your pout cut the conversation just open your mouth put on your face, put on your fear, let's hit opening time}} "Now, breathe, hold it, now…{{let's hit opening time down on}} "Breathe, hold it{Fascination Street…} Hold it{Fascination Street} Hold{Fascination….. It took two days.
For that part.
A few days of pain and boredom later they began the scarification to give literal depth to the flowers. It was amazing to her how much she could hurt and how much she could be utterly wishing that something would happen, anything, even something that hurt her more.
But it didn't.
Darien didn't fuck her. No one did. She was a trophy, a masterpiece, and either these people put their sex elsewhere or they did it at the end, she couldn't know. And no one would tell her. Strephan she saw several times a day with a raddichio and arugula balsamic vinegar salad or a sun-dried tomato pesto pasta, and he refused to speak to her unless she asked for lemons or romano cheese. Darien she saw only when something was done to her and he would listen sympathetically but answer little unless it was about the thing that was being done to her that moment.
The cutting was a revelation as bits of her skin were incised and others cut around and cut away to make empty spaces that would heal After that she paid great attention to her playlist.
Finally, two weeks in, they were willing to begin the tattoo, and that day they showed the design to her, done as a watercolour painting by their man. It was her.
It was her idealized (if that were possible) lying on a bed of perfect flowers, her cunt showing as yet another bloom among blooms, her breasts the same. Her head was tilted towards the point of view and her eyes were open yet somehow unseeing, to show those perfect green eyes. She wondered out loud if they had a tint that perfect, and the man who would do it, Lucan, showed her on his abdomen the leaves that matched her matchless eyes. The breasts of the original painting had been made more perfect, hemispherical, and were covered with perfect lovely blood-red roses. She thought the effect should be stupid and yet it wasn't. It was her hip uplifted on the left, settled on the right to show her shaven, delicate cunt. It was her arm trailing down amongst the bluebells to be covered by the honeysuckle. It was her legs, parted, that admitted the climbing vines of the Rose of Lebanon.
It At the first touch of the needle in the afternoon-sunlit room, she smiled. The buzzing sounded so horrible, like a dentist's drill, but the touch of the pain was merely more than a fingernail dragged rather heavily across the flesh of her back.
She had no idea how wearing it could be, having a fingernail dragged rather heavily across the flesh of her back.
Her pride kept her from begging for a break until two hours in. And at that time, as she was being given sparkling water, wine and peaches, she asked (foolishly) how much longer? And the answer came-about eight hours if all goes well with your (her) face.
For about a second and a half she wished she were not so vain.
It took three days to finish the tattoo, after the two days of the scarring and the two days of the branding. Add to that recovery of at least four days between each before the tattoo and she was left with a long time in the very very sexy, elegant room. She masturbated a lot (on her stomach), she watched the garden a bit, she played every bit of music she could get her hands on. She begged new music like Kid A off her captors (she thought of them that way even though it was her choice because…well, duh! Because it was sexy!) and old music too, like the Doors, which she'd discovered in Darien's collection.
She was swaying to "Moonlight Drive" when he came in, five days after her tattoo. "Let's swim to the moon, uh huh, let's climb to the tide, penetrate the evening that the City sleeps to hide…"
When she heard him come in she turned and danced just for him. It was always better with an audience. My body, Jim Morrison, a purple silk slip-dress and thou…."I can't be your guide….Easy to love you as I watch you die…"
He leaned on the door and watched, his jaw set. Set like steel. "Get real close. Get real tight. Baby gonna drown tonight."
She moved to him, slipping her hips lower. "Goin' down, down down down. Way down…."
He seemed unable to move at all from his cantilevered position as she danced on her knees. As she touched his belt.
Easy to love you as I watch you glide….
As she took him into her mouth.
Moonlight drive… Moonlight drive… As she took him all the way to the back of her throat, her eyes fixed to his over his flat belly.
Moonlight drive.
She tasted the salt of the sea and fell back on the sand/carpet as he left.
After her back was finished there was still her breasts to complete. She refused to die, for the cameras or for an audience, with most of her lovely body pressed to a table. And Darien and Lucan took little time in envisioning their masterworks. But completing them tortured Jade-Flower as nothing had before.
Oh, the tattooing, even on that taut, new flesh, those buds that had barely opened only two or three years before, was painful, moreso along her breastbone and ribs. But she was used to that. It didn't lessen it in any way, but familiarity removed the fear, and taking the fear away…ah, hell she could never explain it and no one would ever ask her to. They never asked her feelings, that was not what was required of her, what they wanted was the feelings her flesh provoked in them. But somehow to know how it would hurt, to hear the drone of the needle and know how it would feel on fat, on flesh, on bone, was somehow…a….
…a comfort.
But there was more to what they wanted there, much more. The rubies were very beautiful indeed. But the settings…Oh dear Gods even split in half and straightened how the hell did they expect to fit them behind her nipple?
For they were traditional jewel settings…rings of metal (gold in this case, platinum and white gold being wrong for a rose) with teeth to hold the jewel. And they were intended to sit just below the tip of her nipple, the ruby gripped by the teeth. The teeth were folded down and the whole straightened out. They had considerately explained to her the process, inserting the piece through one hole, then bending it with pliers while it was in her flesh, bending it into a perfect ring, finally joining it. Then they intended to probe into her with tools they'd acquired from a willing dentist to pull each and every jewel-holding tooth up from its seated bed and through her flesh… When all of that was done, a ruby would be put in the teeth and the teeth bent down.
She wasn't sure she'd make it to that part sane.
But as usual she did. Sane, in whatever way she ever was.
They decided to punch a hole around her nipple with a rounded implement, much too thick, she thought, to take.
"There's black in the mirror and a bloodstain on my bed, aw, baby you were a vampire and I am the walkin' dead…"
But they made her take it.
Although she screamed. Still, she screamed along with Concrete Blonde.
"I'm goin' down by the river where it's warm and green, I'm gonna HAVE A DRINK AND WALK AROUND, I GOT A LOT TO THINK ABOUT OH YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH….."
By the time she was singing that she was nothin' at all, they were finished. If anyone had looked for her nipples they would have found jewels instead. Hard, cold jewels. Like her hard, cold, heart? She was seventeen. Had she had a chance to find a heart? To grow one?
Did you really have one when you were seventeen? And if you'd looked like that? Tell me true.
Ssslrrrp….heh he heh.
No, she'd never see the light.
It was weeks.
The garden bloomed. Poppies developed red, and lavender, and black blooms, and their pods were slit for the opium, and their pods brewed for tea. The night-blooming jasmine was sometimes so strong she had to close her shutters, but never her windows. The Pikake, an innocuous looking white flower on innocent bushes, overwhelmed her when she walked there and if she took a blossom and rubbed it on her wrist all night she'd dream of the blossom and the maidens to whom it belonged, maidens with piercing eyes and strong hearts and long hair that mingled with their long, long fingers all through the night. She awoke exhausted.
And pleasured.
But eventually she healed. She could feel her back, where the brands had been, the cuts, the reasons why she couldn't warm her bones in the hot tub nor even take too long a shower, the reasons why Strephan massaged her back so long every day, with a lotion, scented oddly enough of Pikake.
But for several days they neglected her and for those days she walked in the gardens and picked the final gardenias for her room with their strong and arousing scent, watched the maple leaves fall, the blooms die and float in the fountains. She never looked at her back in the mirror, nor tried to catch a glimpse over her shoulder. Nor did she look at her rose-breasts. She was Fleur and she refused to let her beauty wither as it did in the gardens, so her bare feet felt the dying plants and delighted in their failings for she would not share them. She would die as she had chosen, die and be preserved as a masterpiece, forever.
It is a strangeness that she never thought of pressed flowers.
One day she was awakened early.
By Darien. He told her that the night to come would be the night, her night, and she should prepare herself as she so chose, with the following exceptions: she was to shave herself completely, asking for help if she needed it for her cunt and ass; she was not to scent herself in any way, that would be done later; and she was to have her hair down and the gown of paper-thin white silk, like Fleur's, that had been brought to her, on. She asked, and received, permission to wear an anklet of fleourite and peridot that Darien himself had given her, in the colours of purple and apple-green.
Then he left her.
She did have a female servant (slave? Acolyte? She had been there too long to ask, or to care) shave her after she'd finished her underarms and legs. It seemed all the hair grew every which-way down there and it was impossible to both open herself and reach it at the same time. She marveled as she listened to her servant mutter under her breath that anything could be that hard to shave, yet it motherfucking was, and thank God she didn't have to shave it.
Finally, the bowl of soapy water taken away, her bed cleaned (to what end? The sane part of her mind wondered) and she freshly showered and perfumed in Pikake, her new favorite, she put on the silly, frilly diaphanous white silk pre-Raph robe that part of her distained and part of her understood how well it would suit the tattoo she already wore on her back and went downstairs.
It was in the main room, not the back room she'd been branded, cut, tattooed in, in which the table was set. There was more than just Darien, Lucan, Strephan there, and for that a part of her mind was gratified. There was a very lot of lighting and camera equipment and for that she was very gratified. She smiled at Darien and walked to him unhesitatingly {{how much more power if they see she wants it wholly}}.
He took her hand as the masked audience murmured. She guessed that all previous masterpieces had hesitated. She heard the music playing quietly just then and chose to voice it….
"We want the world and we want it…we want the world and we want it….NOW."
A murmur went up and she laughed joyfully as Darien smiled at her.
"Now, my Chalchiuhxochitzin. My Lady Precious Flower. Do you agree, here and now, to be stripped of the artwork with which we have entrusted you that it may be made eternal on the bones of your own body, do you agree that we inflict upon you more pain than the artwork itself inflicted upon you, do you agree that your body shall die that the beauty you bear shall live on?"
She looked long at him, her eyes on his. And then she laughed. "When the music's over, turn out the lights."
He didn't react and so she said, more prosaically, "I hereby agree to everything you have stated, my Lord. Chalchiuhxochitzin is ready to dance on fire as you intend…until the end."
Some didn't understand.
He did. He smiled, and took her hand.
She was laid flat on a fur-covered table, real fur, mink or ermine, she'd guess, and a knife was shown to her. It was slim and wicked, a boning knife her mother would have called it. But she knew her boning would come long after she herself was gone.
She moved her head forward and although it wasn't planned they let her kiss the knife, lick it, cut her tongue and drink the tiny amount of blood. When they took it away she relaxed entirely and laid her head down, her hair spread out behind her, facing the audience, and waited for the return of the knife's kiss.
The touch was so light, so light it was like the scream of the butterfly Morrison talked of in his song. A kiss indeed---but soon the point was slipping under her skin, a very gentle sound, very soft, very clear…
She let out a tiny cry when her skin was pierced at last, when the dimpling was done and the cutting had begun. But just to let the camera know and the audience that she knew, she understood, it had begun.
After that it was rapid, a slitting, a ripping she could hear through her bones. From one hipbone up her side along her ribs, to her shoulder blade. All so fast she screamed it all in one breath. And then over on her shoulder to the other side and down, and here she was hyperventilating, scream/scream/scream/scream! With each cut until Darien laid his hand on the back of her now bloody neck to calm her. Then she moaned quietly as the downward stroke finished and the cross ward stroke went through her pelvis, blade parallel to her body to cut as much of the tendon underneath as possible, and finish the canvas.
The Death of Fleur.
It took all of Darien's skills to keep her from fighting, squirming, screaming constantly as the connecting tissue was separated and the "canvas" was pulled perfect from her back, leaving her bare but for muscle and the bone underneath.
By the time they finished, some twenty minutes in, she was shocky but the idea of stopping to refresh her was ridiculous. She was going to die. She showed it in her eyes, that knowledge, and at last she showed that she knew what it meant to give up her entire life that her beauty and youth might live on beyond her. Darien, looking, drinking deep, calling the camera forward to catch the look, was transfixed. He saw the war behind her eyes and the eventual triumph when she forced herself to know, to understand, that she would never grow older, that her portrait would live as a masterwork, and her death be remembered forever in this erotic act rather than in some hospital deathbed decades hence. She would not fade like a flower; she would be preserved, perfect, sublime. She realized distantly that she was wet between her legs, and Darien, knowing this as well, slipped a hand there and brought it up glistening for the camera to see. She moaned and sighed…and spasmed in orgasm even in her pain.
Eventually, with her so shocky she was almost beyond them, she was turned over, and the two perfect roses that were her breasts were cut whole from her body in two quick strokes, to be stripped of fat and flesh later.
Then, one camera on her body and the other on her face, which watched back intently, a perfect black stone blade was plunged between her ribs and into her heart. She died as she lived.
Totally aware of everyone who watched her.
It was months later, after the leaves had fallen (those that did in Los Angeles) and the rain had settled in for those two terrible weeks in January that an Italian connoisseur came to look at Darien's collection and he showed her the portrait of the exquisite blonde in the ivory frame…and the Faberge-like piece, a globe of two roses, with rubies at the tips of their buds.
"Darien, my friend, I have seen much on my tour, but nothing like this. What was the model for your Fleur…and those roses…"
Darien smiled. "Sit down, my friend. I'll tell you a story."
When had she first thought about combining pain with sex?
When had she first allowed, or requested, another to hurt her during or before sex?
How often did she engage in sex now and was pain involved seldom, sometimes, frequently, always?
What acts had she performed? Which had she enjoyed, which disliked, why, how much?
Did she have any scars or piercings ? Could the piercings be removed and the skin healed?
What was the best sex she'd ever had? The worst? The most recent?
Did the appearance, age, sex or number of her partners matter?
Had she ever before tried to have someone kill her at the end of the sex act?
List all people, whether sadomasochists, family members, doctors or anyone else, who knew of her most extreme desires or of this recent contact, including those on the internet who might believe she really existed.
She
did
it.
Darien…" Formally introduced…answer to her new name…all at once it was too much for her. She swayed towards him, her hands on his body, mouth uptilted for a bloodstained kiss and he gripped her hard enough to hurt her, and kissed her with his teeth as much as his lips, then pushed her back, seeing more of her there in her eyes than there had been a moment ago.
Perfect. Next, let's go fast, we'll be over faster…
Street…}
More deeply than the skin around it. She'd chosen the music poorly, Sisters of Mercy's Corrosion, and after the first two or three plays she felt a lot like the character in Clockwork Orange, screaming for something different. But she was screaming so much then from the scalpel, that tight, prissy, unsexy little blade that did nothing except cause her un-erotic pain, that no one noticed.
Was
Her.
As much as he'd ever been he was in love with this girl, and no more so than now, when she saw that she had delivered herself unto her own death and had to accept that.
(Author's Note: There is no such poem by Keats and no such painting by Burne-Jones as referred to in this story. The author misremembered a story by Zola and a couple of bad paintings by other unknown pre-Raphaelites and preferred her version to theirs'. For those who want to see the real thing, look up "The Death of Albine" on the net or in standard reference works.)
But mine is better.
Much.