29 Dorian
29
Dorian
Once I’m nearly back to the marina, I stop the boat and let myself crack open, my body shuddering with great, wrenching sobs.
What have I done?
What the fuck am I doing?
I’m desperate. I want to live, to stay young and beautiful…but Baz…god, Baz… The look on her face when she realized I plan to keep her in that house…
I’ve seen that look of betrayal on so many faces. It has never agonized me this deeply.
Did I look at Basil like that when he left me?
My lungs are convulsing so hard I dry-heave, bent double. On the floor of the boat, I see Baz’s purse, not the expensive one I bought her but the one she loves: a cloth bag with a pattern of moons, hands, eyes, and moths. Something has slid half out of it—a notebook.
I pick it up, flip it open.
It’s full of pencil sketches of me. Well…not me, but my rings, every single one in intricate detail. The bracelets I was wearing the other day. The logo on one of my T-shirts. An ashtray with a cigarette propped on the edge. My phone.
So it wasn’t just the paintings I found in her house. She’s been drawing bits of me all the time. Hasty little drawings in snatched moments.
I stuff it back into the bag.
I don’t like feeling this way. And I could ball up these emotions and shunt them down the tether into my painting so I wouldn’t have to endure the nauseating twist of guilt in my gut.
But I don’t. Not yet.
I take my phone out of my back pocket and call Lloyd-Henry.
He answers immediately. “Is it done?”
“Yes, and fuck you. Don’t say it like that, like you’re some Mafia boss and I’m your henchman.”
“Dorian, you didn’t do this because I suggested it. You did it because you know it’s the only way.”
“Maybe I’m having second thoughts.”
“Leave her at the house until I get there. I’d like to speak with her. I’ll be coming into town tomorrow. She’ll be just fine until then. Might do her some good to think things over, rearrange her priorities.”
“While we’re on the topic, what are your priorities? You always used to tell me about your research, your projects—but you haven’t told me anything concrete in a few decades now. Have you found out anything new? About what you are or how we can resolve the aging problem?”
“My goal is health, youth, and provision for all humanity—the elimination of disease, disability, age, and poverty,” Lloyd replies. “That goal hasn’t changed. But progress toward that end is slow and requires—sacrifices. Some of which I know you wouldn’t understand. So wait, Dorian, and when the time is right, I’ll tell you everything.”
I don’t like the way he’s speaking to me. As if he is far older and wiser than I am. But I have looked up to him like an older brother for a long time, so perhaps it’s the treatment I deserve, what I should expect.
“She can stay there overnight,” I concede. “We’ll talk to her tomorrow, and then I’m letting her go, even if she hasn’t changed her mind. I can’t keep her prisoner, Lloyd. I think I’ve already broken things between us—I’ve broken her heart, damn it—and she’s been through enough already—” My voice gives out.
“It’s foolish for men like us to care about the individuals of the present, the humans who are already dying. We should care only for the greater good. Once death is a thing of the past for everyone, then we can begin to invest more emotion in a few worthy souls. I thought you, a man who knows the tragedy of true love, would be wiser than this.”
“What are you going to say to her tomorrow?”
“You’ve failed to convince her to paint portraits again. I’m going to try my kind of influence.”
“Your influence.” I press a hand to my forehead. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t you trust me, my heart? Hasn’t it always been you and me, like two boats adrift in this world of temporary flesh? Even when we’ve lived apart, haven’t we always found comfort in knowing the other person existed? That we were of a similar kind, a species above the rest?”
It’s the same familiar rhetoric. And yes, that knowledge has comforted me more times than I’d like to admit. But before she left, Sibyl warned me not to listen to Lloyd so often…
And yet if I can’t follow him, who the hell should I look to for guidance, for a plan, for a future?
Looking to myself seems foolish—I’m a rotten wretch, a sick monster with a soul covered in leaking pustules. I have never had much moral strength; what little I have left is a withered stem, untended, suffering from a long drought.
My vision of the future has been woven with Lloyd’s ever since we became friends.
Until now. Until Baz.
It seems unfair to lean on her for moral strength. But perhaps I must, until I can coax my own conscience back to life again.
“Dorian?” Lloyd’s voice is softly insistent.
“I trust you,” I manage.
“Good boy. Now go and take your mind off the girl for a while. You deserve the indulgence. Remember what I’ve told you so often—resisting what you crave only sickens your mind. When you desire something, yield to that desire fully. You’ll enjoy it in the moment and have the delightful memory to savor afterward. No one ever truly regrets a delicious wickedness.”
At his words, the familiar itch wakes in my mind, the restlessness in my bones. I don’t experience physical withdrawal or craving as a normal man would, but there is a mental element to addiction, a psychological affinity for my favorite drugs, and sometimes it affects me.
“Are you sure I should—” I begin, and Lloyd interrupts.
“Of course you should, my love. After all, if I can’t persuade the girl, you will die very soon. You may as well enjoy the time you have left.”
“She did offer to try putting my soul back into my body,” I tell him.
“Of course she did. Because she wants to possess you, to limit you. She wants you to be hers, to decay like her, to end with her. She is jealous of us, like they all are. Will you let her change you into a weak human and sink into the horror of old age? No, Dorian, you must not go gently. As my friend Dylan Thomas once wrote, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ Make Basil feel that rage, and she must bend to your superior will.”
“I can’t harm her, Lloyd. I won’t.”
“Then you should hope I can persuade her tomorrow. Or you’ll be left with two options—dying unexpectedly when your painting fails, or taking your ruined soul back into your body. If she can even manage such a thing. And then I will watch you wrinkle and leak and rot on your feet. Your golden hair will turn pallid and fall out. You’ll be liver-spotted, bowlegged, slump-shouldered. Your balls will sag, along with your neck and jowls. You won’t be able to get your dick up for Basil anymore, but she won’t care, because she’ll be dry and papery, too. There will be no grace in your movements, no flush in your lips and cheeks, and the blue of your eyes will cloud over. You will be a limp, grotesque mockery of yourself, Dorian. That is the fate to which this girl would condemn you. Would real love ask this?”
“She can’t love me,” I rasp. “She says she does, but I don’t believe it. I’m not… I never expected her to.”
“Just as well. Go and forget all this, my dear boy. Drink, consume, enter the blissful delirium. Goodbye, Dorian.”
After he ends the call, I sit with the phone propped against my chin, staring at the ocean.
I don’t want to die.
All my life, growing old and dying have been the worst two things I could imagine. But Baz showed me that there might be something else even more dreadful. Imprisoning her is the worst sin I’ve committed. I’m sure there’s a horrible new twist in my painting to reflect that ugliness of soul. Even if she does craft a new painting of me and transfer my soul into it, a fresh start is no guarantee of future goodness. It doesn’t erase what I’ve done.
I’ve killed to protect my secret. I’ve been the cause of death in countless other ways as well—through carelessness, if not intentionality. What if I become all the terrible things she mentioned: a rapist, a serial killer, a cruel oppressor? What if it all begins here, with this choice to confine her wounded, beautiful spirit in that house?
Thick clouds have gathered, borne by a high wind, and they’re piling up on each other, heavy and threatening. It’s going to storm. I need to get off the water.
Baz and my painting will be all right on the island for just one night. I can monitor her through the security system in the house. Tomorrow I’ll go to her with Lloyd, and I’ll crawl, I’ll beg for mercy. God, I’ll do anything.
Anything to make her forgive me.
It’s starting to rain a little by the time I get the boat into the dock. I tuck Baz’s purse into one of the compartments where it will stay dry.
While I’m walking back to the Chandler, the sky opens and pours a heavy shower over the coastline. I lower my head and hunch my shoulders—pointless, because I’m already soaked, rain-slick and chilly. The deluge shatters on the black pavement of the street, pools in the dips of the sidewalk. I can barely see.
The concierge in the lobby of the Chandler eyes me as I walk through. “Good evening, Mr. Gray.”
I nod and duck into the elevator.
There’s no one in the penthouse. Lloyd isn’t back. Vane’s bedroom door is open, but he’s not there. Sibyl’s room is still empty, of course. The text that prompted my phone call to her still resonates in my head: Feels so good not to be your backup dancer. But I hope you’re taking care of yourself.
I don’t know what taking care of myself means anymore.
I change out of my wet clothes, then march into my bathroom and take out the case that holds my stash of various drugs. Heroin is my poison of choice tonight. Never have I needed it more.
The injection triggers a euphoric rush through my heart, lungs, and limbs, and I tilt my head back on the pillows, exhaling as my legs and arms turn warm and heavy, pinning themselves to the bed, while my mind spins into ecstasy.
Usually I’d be perfectly at ease, blessing fate for giving me this luxurious life. But I can’t settle in to enjoy the bliss. Not when I know Baz is unhappy.
I float in and out of unsettled awareness for a couple hours until a loud rumble of thunder sharpens my focus.
I need to check on Baz. The mansion she’s in once belonged to a friend of Lloyd’s, and he swears it has stood on that island for nearly a century, despite the hurricanes that hurl themselves against the coast every few years.
Grabbing my phone, I pull up the security feed for the mansion. There’s one camera overlooking the front door, one at the back door, and a few more inside, surveying the major living spaces. I had them installed two days ago, when Lloyd first proposed this plan.
I switch through the feeds until I find Baz, lying fast asleep on the bed in the room I prepared for her. She’s surrounded by bags of chips, a bowl of salsa, and a plate of half-eaten fried chicken legs. Comfort food to soothe her battered heart.
I am the cause of her pain. And here I am, shooting myself full of dope so I don’t have to think about it.
I’m a fucking coward.
Rage spurts hot in my chest, and I leap off the bed, rushing into the bathroom. I open my “happy case” and I tear out its contents—thousands of dollars’ worth of high-end drugs. I can’t dump that shit down the toilet—water treatment plants can’t handle the stuff, and it fucks up the water supply—so I crush and smash everything I can and dump it all into the bathroom trash can. Then I carry it to the kitchen and empty it into the bigger garbage can, mixing it into the mess of coffee grounds and moldy takeout.
I stand over it all, shaking. Then I stalk back to my room and get my phone, my lighter, and my cigarettes. Can’t smoke in Lloyd’s precious penthouse, so I go outside. Despite everything, I can’t bring myself to break that rule of his.
Rain streams off the roof of the balcony in a glimmering black veil. The ocean is a dark blur, etched with the faintest prickle of white masts from the boats in the marina. After lighting the cigarette, I pull out my phone and check the security feed for the mansion again, going through every room, then the back camera, then the front—
Wait.
I peer at the feed for the front camera again.
Someone is moving on the porch. Fiddling with the front door.
Heart thundering, I switch to the feed of Baz’s room. She’s still asleep. It’s not her standing out there in the dark.
When I go back to the front porch camera, the figure is hefting something—a rock? It plunges through the narrow window beside the door.
Two seconds later, the alarm on my phone blares, and a pop-up alerts me to the intrusion. The mansion’s alarm isn’t connected to any security company or to the police; they wouldn’t take too kindly to me holding someone captive at the house.
I’m the only one receiving the alert. Which means I’m the only one who can protect Baz from whoever is creeping through that window. And I’m far from her, across rough seas. It’d be dangerous to go to her. Deadly, even. The damage my potential drowning could do to the portrait…
I don’t care.
Stamping out the cigarette, I rush back inside, grab a coat, and stuff some cash in my wallet to bribe anyone who tries to stop me from taking the boat out. As a final precaution, I take my pistol from the bureau drawer. It was a gift from an admirer a few years ago—a custom job with gold inlay and walnut grips. I’ve always thought of it as more of a collector’s piece than a weapon. But I’ll happily use it if anyone hurts Baz.
I’m in the elevator before I remember my portrait is in the mansion, too. Granted, it’s enclosed in bulletproof acrylic, accessible only to me, and no one but Baz and Lloyd knows its importance. Still, it’s more vulnerable than usual, and that knowledge sends another jolt of panic through my system, along with a startled wonder that my concern for Baz came first. In my desperation to save her, I almost didn’t remember my portrait at all.
When the elevator opens, I race for the front door of the Chandler, ignoring the shout of the concierge.
The two most important things in this world are in peril. And I can’t run fast enough.