Beautiful Blood

2

Hematology had been Rosacher’s speciality in medical school, but the poetic character of blood, that red whisper of life twisting through caverns in the flesh, had intrigued him long before he entered university. And so it was a natural evolution that his scholarly concerns conjoin with his fascination regarding the dragon to create an obsession with Griaule’s blood. It astonished him that no one else had thought to study it. Blood pumped by a heart that beat once every thousand years, never congealing, maintaining its liquidity against inexorable physical logic…the potential benefits arising from such a study were unimaginable. Yet now, peering at the slide he had made, what he saw bore so marginal a relation to human blood, he wondered whether a study would prove rewarding. To begin with, the blood had no recognizable cells. It abounded with microscopic structures, darkly figured against the golden plasma, but these structures multiplied and changed in shape and character, rapidly passing through a succession of changes prior to vanishing—after more than an hour of observation, Rosacher had begun to believe that Griaule’s blood was a medium that contained every possible shape, each one busy changing into every other. He grew fatigued, but rubbed his eyes and splashed water onto his face and kept on peering through the microscope, hoping a dominant pattern would emerge. When none did he was tempted to accept that the blood was magical stuff, impervious to informed scrutiny; yet he was unwilling to let go of obsession, seduced by the infinity of pattern disclosed by the slide, the mutable contours of the mysterious structures, the shifting mosaic of gold and shadowy detail, pulsing as if they reflected the process of an embedded rhythmic force, as if the blood were its own engine and required no heartbeat to sustain its vitality. And such might be the case. No other explanation suited. The matter at issue, then, would be to illuminate the workings of this engine, to discover if its function could be replicated in human blood. He considered going for a walk. Physical activity would allow his excited thoughts to settle and he might then be able to construct an empirical strategy; but he could not pull himself away from the microscope, captivated by the protean beauty of the design unfolding before him, one moment having the smudged delicacy of a rubbing and the next becoming sharply etched against the golden background.

It was apparent that Griaule’s blood contained an agent that was proof against degradation, against the processes of time. Whether this was due to its intrinsic nature or to the enchantment that had rendered the dragon immobile, Rosacher could not speculate; but it occurred to him that the mutable constituency of the blood, the evolution of its patterns, might reflect an ongoing adjustment to the flow of time through matter, an adjustment that prevented it from decaying. This insight seemed not to arise from a process of deduction but from the blood itself, to be basic information carried by its patterns, information that he had absorbed by observing its changes—though to accept such an outrageous proposition was not in his character, Rosacher found he could not reject it. With acceptance came the recognition that the blood might offer not merely an anti-clotting agent, but a remedy to the depredations of time itself and thus to every ill associated with aging. So entranced was he by the flickering mosaic on the slide, he scarcely registered Ludie’s knock.

“Richard?” she called. “Are you there?”

Impatiently, he threw open the door. She wore a petticoat and a frilled bodice, and her kittenish, cocoa-colored face was troubled. He was about to tell her to come back later, when she was pushed aside by a gaunt lantern-jawed man. He towered over Myrie, who peeked from behind him, and was dressed in much the same manner: greatcoat, mud-caked boots, and a slouch hat. His acromegalic features were split by a grotesque smile, brown teeth leaning at rustic angles in the inflamed gums.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully, and clubbed Rosacher in the temple with his fist.

When Rosacher had regained sufficient of his senses to be aware of his surroundings, he discovered that he was trussed hand and foot, and lying on the floor. Ludie huddled beside him and two men—Myrie and the man who had struck him—were ransacking the room, tossing papers and books about, emptying shelves, knocking over his microscope. This abuse caused Rosacher to complain feebly, attracting the notice of the big man. He dropped to a knee beside Rosacher, grabbed him by the shirtfront and lifted him so their noses were inches apart. To Rosacher, dazed, his skull throbbing, that leathery face was an abstract of mottling, moles, and crevices, dominated by two mismatched eyes, one brown, one green—a barren terrain in which two oddly discolored puddles had formed.

“Where’s your money?” the man asked, his rotten breath gushing forth, as from the sudden opening of a stable door.

Rosacher had no thought of lying—he indicated his jacket, which lay across the back of a chair, and watched with muddled despair as the man rifled his wallet. Beside him, Ludie made an affrighted noise.

“This can’t be all!” The big man thrust the few bills he had extracted from the wallet at Rosacher. “It won’t do! Not by half!”

Myrie appeared at his shoulder. “I told you he’d no money, Arthur. It’s his possessions what are valuable.”

“His possessions? This sorry lot?” The big man pushed him away in disgust and, as Myrie fought to maintain his balance, Rosacher thought how strangely genteel a fate it was to be robbed and beaten by two men named Timothy and Arthur.

Myrie, who had fetched up against the workbench, hefted the microscope. “This here’s bound to bring a price!”

Arthur stared at it. “What’s it for?”

“He uses it to look at blood.”

“Blood, you say?”

“It lets him look at it close-like.”

“Oh, well. Now that is a treasure!”

Myrie beamed.

“Yes, indeed,” Arthur went on. “Why we’ll just carry this little item over to Ted Crandall’s shop. Ted, I’ll say, I know you’ve dozens…No, hundreds of people begging for a device that’ll let them look at blood. Close-like!” He gave a forlorn shake of his head. “God help me, Tim. You’re a fucking champion!”

Myrie’s smile drooped; then he brightened and went to the ice chest. “There’s this!” he said, producing the syringe. “He sets great store by it.”

Arthur examined the syringe under the lamp. “This is the blood?”

“I reckon someone might pay dear for it,” Myrie said, and gestured toward Rosacher.

Arthur gazed in disgust at Myrie; without a word, he thumbed the plunger and squirted golden blood onto the little man’s coat. Myrie yelped and flung himself away.

“You brainless ass!” Arthur said, squirting him again. “Dragging me from the tavern for this! I’m marking tonight down. You owe me plenty for this exercise.” He appeared to be on the verge of leaving, but then caught Rosacher’s eye. “What are you looking at?”

Rosacher, not yet up to speaking clearly, managed a perhaps intelligible denial of looking.

“I understand.” Arthur flourished the syringe, which still contained a small amount of the golden fluid. “You’re concerned about the blood.”

“I…” Rosacher hawked up mucus from his throat. “I wish you’d put it back.”

Arthur cupped his ear. “You wish what? I didn’t catch the last bit.”

“The blood will degrade if it’s left out in the air.”

“Too right! We wouldn’t want it to degrade. I’ll put it somewhere safe, shall I?”

Arthur dropped to one knee and gripped him by the throat. An instant later the syringe bit into Rosacher’s left thigh. He cried out and tried to shake free, but Myrie kneeled and pinned his legs as Arthur pushed in the plunger.

The only immediate effect of the injection that Rosacher could discern was a sensation of cold that spread through the muscles of his thigh. Grinning broadly, Arthur dropped the half-empty syringe on his chest and stood.

“Well, now,” he said. “I believe my work here is done.”

He strode to the door and Myrie, after seizing the opportunity to spit in Rosacher’s face, hurried after him.

Ludie came to her knees and began working at his bonds, saying, “They forced me, Richard! I’m sorry!”

She continued to talk, prying at the knots, freeing his arms, his legs, asking if he was all right, her speech muffled as though she were speaking from inside a closet. The numbing cold that had followed the bite of the syringe dissipated and warmth flooded Rosacher’s body, attended by a feeling of glorious well-being. He thought he should sit up, but the impulse did not rise to the level of will. Everything in sight had acquired a luster. Spiderwebs glistened like strands of polished platinum; the boards gleamed with the grainy perfection of gray marble; his broken glassware glittered with prismatic glory, a scatter of rare gems; his possessions scattered across the floor seemed part of a decorative scheme, as if the apartment’s sorry condition were the work of an artist who, guided by a decadent sensibility, had sought to counterfeit shabbiness by using the richest of materials. Ordinarily he thought of Ludie as a lovely girl, but now she struck him as the acme of feminine beauty. Her hair, kept short like a skullcap, gave an elfin look to the clever, triangular face with its sharp cheekbones and large eyes and lips that, due to a slight malocclusion, lapsed naturally into a sulky expression. The hollow at the base of her throat that each morning she sweetened with lime and honey water; her breasts barely constrained by the lacy shells of her bodice…His cataloguing of her physical charms grew more intimate and, energized by arousal, he stood and swept her up and carried her to his bed. Startled by his sudden recovery, she asked what he was doing. He sought to respond, but his thoughts effloresced rather than developing in a linear progression, evolving into elusive, inexpressible logics and fantasies. Touching her skin was like touching warm silk and all the opulent particulars of her body seemed an architecture created to house a central bloom of light. Her anima, he thought. Her spirit. As he joined with her, their flesh glued together in an animal rhythm, he sought that light, plunging toward it, wedding his light to hers in a spectacular union that concluded with a shattering of prisms behind his eyes and a confusing multiplicity of pleasurable sensations that he did not believe were entirely his own.

At long last, leaving her drowsing, Rosacher threw on his trousers, went to the sitting room window and stood gazing out over the rooftops of adjoining shanties and the grander, slightly less ruinous buildings that spread in crooked rows up along the slope of a hill that merged with Griaule’s side. Of the dragon he could see only a great mound of darkness limned by the glow of the newly risen moon. The buildings were picked out here and there by flickering lights, and these lights appeared knitted together by golden lines that formed a constellate shape. Not the predictable shape of a bull or a warrior or a throne, but a complicated mapping of lines and points like an illuminated blueprint. He began to suspect that the pattern they made, like the patterns in Griaule’s blood, contained information that was imprinting itself upon the electrical patterns of his brain, translating its essentials into a comprehensible form. After staring at it for a quarter of an hour he realized that he had the solution to his problems in hand.

It was such a simple answer that he was tempted to reject it on the grounds of simplicity, assuming that a solution so obvious must have flaws—but his only question was whether or not a small dose would produce the same effects created by the massive dose he had absorbed. When he could detect none other, he addressed the ethical considerations. Setting the plan in motion would be an abrogation of his medical oath, malfeasance of the highest order…yet was adherence to an oath more ethically persuasive than funding his research? Toward dawn, the effects of the dragon’s blood ebbing, Rosacher experienced irritability, a symptom such as might attach to a withdrawal; yet this soon vanished, though his feeling of contentment and well-being remained. He wondered if whether the irritability might be due to the size of the dose with which he had been injected. If the blood were not physically addictive, that might be an impediment to his plan. But then he realized that a psychological addiction would be more than sufficient for the purposes. The populace of Morningshade, powerless and possessed of no legitimate prospects, would pay dearly to see their hovels transformed into palaces, their lovers into sexual ideals, and they had no will—none he had noticed, at any rate—to resist temptation, whatever toll it might extract.