Chapter VI. Dr. Erik Yurkov
VI
Dr. Erik Yurkov
Ariadne cleaned Quaint’s forehead with a gauze sponge.
The cut went from his brow to his left eyelid, and had caused some damage to his eyeball, but most of the blood loss had occurred when the blade reached the supraorbital artery.
His sclera was still scarlet, but the dilated pupil that leaked into the umber brown of his iris was returning to its normal round shape; as expected, he wouldn’t need sutures.
Despite his dizziness, the tissue was regenerating fast, stopping the blood and stitching threads of skin together.
I can walk, Quaint had said as they left Cabaré.
He had looked paler and thinner as she guided him to the elevator, and collapsed in the living room of the suite after a minute or two.
Ariadne removed his rings, the dinner jacket, the black tie, and his shoes, laying him against the sofa seat.
After checking the wound, she asked the gul clerk if he could buy her a few things from the drugstore, even though Quaint’s body would do most of the work.
Quaint slept with his head on her lap, his shallow breathing the only reason she knew he was alive, and Ariadne washed the sweat off his face and the thick dried blood from his hair.
She looked at the only ring left, the one with the braid, and read its inscription: DIED 12 OCT 1912.
Sometimes, she took a quick nap, but the images of the past night kept haunting her: Dami?o, slipping from her fingers into unconsciousness, his vile words, the bitten arms of the waiters.
“Shh,” hushed Ariadne whenever his body tensed, caressing his head with the hand that could still feel. The other prosthesis was completely numb, but its movements were mildly functional.
To distract herself, she read Erik’s journals, opening one from 1966.
There is always this ghost behind him, this elusive love that represents an ideal of perfection, and we fought again about it.
I’m not the jealous kind, I told him, I don’t care who he has been with during his long, long life.
I just think it makes him have high standards for how people should be, feel, or behave, comparing them to this first girl, who died tragically but was ever faithful to him and he to her.
I am not trying to compete with her (or anyone!
God forbid…), but I can be a little selfish, and a little rude, and a little careless, and love is not the only fuel for my soul.
He says I lack empathy, though I disagree, and that I value ideas more than people, which might be true.
I do think I’ve been getting more and more carried away with my research since I started to dabble in other fields.
I also fear that a piece broke inside of me when we met—something special, irreparable, intimate—and I can’t help but blame Quaint for the mangled humanity I have left.
Ariadne placed Quaint’s head carefully on the pillow and moved to the floor, her cheek close to his arm.
Another entry detailed a week in Beijing, where Erik had visited the National Library, the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, and the National Art Museum.
Q. didn’t want to visit the Forbidden City again with me, a sentiment his mother shares. Too bad!
There was a letter that had been ripped from the notebook, then folded and glued in again. I said all of this without thinking, but we have already talked it out, Erik wrote on the outside. Inside, it read:
I think it’s pointless to keep insisting on this fruitless endeavor.
You are right. We have nothing in common, and we’re both dissatisfied most of the time.
Our tastes don’t match. Our tempers clash.
Our morals are in constant conflict. We don’t even agree in bed.
I do love your company, and our conversations, and your face, but now more than ever I think: what are we even doing together?
At times, I fear that you search for pain.
That you’re addicted to the tragedy that is loving humans.
You find one of us to seduce, and they’re all fascinated by you (who wouldn’t be?), but they—WE—are simply too feeble, too ephemeral, too mortal.
Then we die, and you suffer, until you find a new human to do the same with.
I don’t want to be part of this, of your fixation with sadness and loss; it deeply disturbs me, in fact.
FUCK YOU, ERIK appeared in the handwriting of somebody else in capital letters. You don’t understand (never have and never will) ANYTHING about me.
Ariadne put the journal aside. Was she also part of this fixation?
She tottered toward the bathroom, facing herself.
The fabric of the dress was crumpled; the spaghetti straps were hanging from her shoulders, exposing the lace of her black bra.
What an unsightly thing she was, so human, so weak, so frail.
She had been an ugly child when she was taken to the yellow house, she had grown into an ugly teenager by the time Erik rescued her, and she would continue to be ugly for the rest of her life.
Tears blurred her sight. Ariadne had cried all she had to cry after Quaint went to sleep, grieving every second she’d spent inside Cabaré.
I never hurt her, or whatever Dami?o had said.
Tell them the truth. If Erik had been compassionate, she would not have had to hear any of that.
If he had smothered her instead of taking her home, she would not have grown up alone and rejected, stuffing those memories somewhere she didn’t have to see them all the time.
Maybe, like he said, she would stand a chance in her next life.
“Ariadne?”
Quaint was behind her, a thick red scar covering his left eye, and she took a few seconds to turn around, trying to compose herself.
“Are you feeling better?”
“The pain is mostly gone.” Quaint unbuttoned his stained white shirt, throwing it near the towels. “I thought I heard you calling me.”
Ariadne helped Quaint with his clothes, and he washed his face in the sink, scrubbing more dried blood from his hair. The water ran rust red, almost brown, and he looked at his own hands.
“Thank you for taking the rings off for me,” Quaint said, bending down to continue washing his face. “Although I’m curious to know why you left this one on.”
“You never take this one off.” Ariadne dried a few more tears when he wasn’t looking. “Isn’t it your wife’s?”
Quaint rubbed the crystal of the ring with a towel, wiping it gently. His left eye was still closed, and drops of water ran down his neck and the lines of his back.
“No, this one is hers.” The rings were stuffed in one of the pockets of his pants, and he lined them up on the porcelain of the sink. She picked up the discreet golden ring with a simple skeleton drawn in black enamel, engraved with the name FANNY and a date: JANUARY 1917.
“You must have loved her a lot.”
“Oh, I did.” Quaint smiled when Ariadne put the rings back onto his fingers one by one. “We were the greatest of friends.”
“Friends.”
“We were better friends than we were husband and wife, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t cherish our life together,” said Quaint. “We just failed at the romance. It happens, sometimes. With some people more than with others.”
Ariadne looked down, tears pooling in her eyes again.
Her throat tightened and the bathroom became a wet haze.
In her mind, she wished she had died in the yellow house, and never had the chance to meet Erik or Quaint.
Maybe it was just the shock from the previous night, but it didn’t matter when she felt about to collapse.
“Were you crying all this time?” Quaint held her by the face, his tone kind and soothing, but she shook her head. I don’t want kindness, she wanted to say. I want you to use me, I want you to fuck me, I want …
“No, no,” Ariadne mumbled, trying to cover her face. “I wasn’t.”
“Don’t be ashamed in front of me.” Quaint pulled her to his chest, kissing the shadow of her hairline, her small forehead, her nose, her lips. “Cry if you feel like crying.”
“Please, don’t pity me,” murmured Ariadne. She stood on her tiptoes to deepen the kiss, hugging his neck, hoping he would not push her away. Quaint didn’t. “I don’t want you to see me as a helpless child. I don’t want to be trapped there forever. This is not all I am, I promise it’s not what I am…”
One of his hands fell to her back, and he bent down to pick her up by the back of the thighs and lift her up, their bodies pressed together like they needed to be closer, closer, closer.
Ariadne circled his neck, hugging him as soft sobs escaped her throat.
She didn’t recognize her voice, high-pitched and pathetic, and when she saw their reflection in the mirror, she didn’t recognize her face either.
Her lips were red and swollen, her dark eyes glittered, her cheeks were stained with tears.
Yet Quaint looked as gentle as he did before, with no trace of judgment or irritation in his open eye.
“I know it’s not,” Quaint said. “I shouldn’t have left you alone after what happened, but I’m here now.”
Ariadne traced the white line of fibrous tissue that went from his brow to his lid.
The wound already looked old, not yet faded, but a hypertrophic scar starting to regress.
She guessed the only thing keeping him from being fully healed was the corneal injury, as the eye was an organ that guls struggled to regenerate.
Ariadne tangled her fingers in his black hair, recognizing each strand, feeling the coarseness of the undercut and each ridge of his skull.
Quaint took her to the bed, and she pulled him to lie over her.
“Touch me,” Ariadne pleaded, guiding him between her legs. If he didn’t, she would still be the girl who knew only Minotauro’s hands. “I beg you to touch me.”