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It’s morning, in-between the dead and rising. It’s not yet light outside, but Lorenzo can feel the departure of the stars, even though he’s sitting on the floor inside of Michael’s small—or rather medium—library.
They’re cornered, or more accurately, they’re right out in the open, like the red of a bullseye. It’s coloured so to attract attention, right in the middle of pointed black and white, which is ironic, because it feels like there are arrows pointing to their location. But there is nothing pointing to the cabin. It is just surrounded by endless forest.
There are no other cabins in the dense, thick forest that covers an area the size of several countries. There are no other built structures in the forest at all, according to the map made by the old vampire, who was here before Lorenzo. This forest is a home to a single house and no more. Even though Lorenzo isn’t alone, it feels like he is.
Michael sits in the old vampire’s vintage damask armchair, the one that took Lorenzo in and was here, its colour blemished and the plush imprinted with weight. It had once been a rich royal blue, but now it has darkened to the colour of a denim night sky, the woven pattern falling apart like shooting stars. With the passage of time comes erosion, just as with love comes change.
It clashes terribly with the rest of the furniture and décor around it. Michael had redecorated the place some time ago—either a few months or a few years ago, Lorenzo cannot remember—but even then, the old vintage armchair, which has lived longer than the both of them, probably combined, is still here.
Now that Lorenzo thinks about it, the armchair remained in perfect condition as long as the old vampire was around, but ever since their departure, the chair has begun to disintegrate, almost as if it were alive. The thought of an inanimate object crumbling without the familiar heft of its original owner fills Lorenzo with inked stones; with the taste and weight of something.
“There are hunters in the forest.” Lorenzo says, his back aching from his position on the floor, even as he leans against a new and untouched chair. No matter how Lorenzo chooses to sit on the floor, his bones ache in the worst way, but he sits anyway. “I heard them when I ventured out to restock, OK?”
This is something Michael already knows, which Lorenzo already knows he knows, which means that ultimately, they both know about the current situation. But the silence kills Lorenzo, because Michael isn’t doing anything, even though there are hunters. He does nothing, and the silence, combined with the stillness, turns Lorenzo’s bones into sticks, bark grating against his skin.
“I know,” Michael says, his voice calmer than undisturbed water and air flowing from an air conditioner. So soft that the silence is not broken, but caressed. “I can sense them.”
There’s a beat of silence as Lorenzo considers repeating Michael’s “I know”, but in the end he doesn’t, because he knows Michael knows he knows. What he doesn’t understand is why Michael doesn’t do anything. Has he given up because the sun is bound to rise soon? Surely there’s a way out—there must be a way out. Why doesn’t Michael do anything?
When the old vampire died—or rather disappeared one day, nowhere to be found in the cabin—Lorenzo learnt that vampires were not invincible. The vampiric realm was new to Lorenzo then, though to be honest, it still is, but Michael simply told him: “We don’t like to live forever, and we don’t like to pass on in front of humans. It would kill them”.
Which was evidently not the truth at all, not because Lorenzo has any empirical evidence to the contrary, but because he knew Michael well enough by then to know what he was like, and just how much he liked to keep vulnerable information secret. Maybe witnessing a vampire’s death really does kill other people, but that sounds silly enough in itself, so Lorenzo has deduced it the untruth.
It reminded Lorenzo of the time the village librarian told him about how some animals in the wild die honourably, or at least in a way that preserves their own honour, as if such a value were held in the hearts of beasts, and Lorenzo specifically remembers how gatto—even when domesticated into a loving home—tend to run away and hide, to die in a safe place, as if to preserve their honour.
It makes sense to Lorenzo. He would do the same, so he let the old vampire go, even though they were already gone before he could say anything about it, and moved on with his life.
On the other hand, it’s no secret to Michael how much Lorenzo thinks about death, reads about it, writes about it. He is so obsessed with it that he automatically knows when Michael is lying, or perhaps joking, about it. He has an unusual way of telling jokes, because they always sound more like insults than anything else.
Maybe the ‘secret’ is why Michael isn’t doing anything. There must be a way out, away from the hunters. Surely Michael isn’t sentimental enough to refuse to move away from the cabin and the forest to somewhere safer, somewhere the hunters don’t know. Why doesn’t he do something? This is Michael Kaiser, the most stubborn asshole in the world, although Lorenzo doesn’t know many people. Has he become sick of living? Why? There must be more to the situation than Michael is telling Lorenzo. But why the fuck doesn’t he tell Lorenzo anything?
“What are we doing?” Lorenzo asks, and Michael looks up from the book clasped in his hands. It’s a non-fiction book about the creation of the universe, one that Lorenzo has seen him read countless times. Perhaps Michael has his favourites.
In the last year or so, Michael has become interested in East Asian culture, particularly its fashion, and wears a variety of traditional clothing. Lately, he has been wearing hanfu dresses, the one he is wearing now a qiyao ruqun, layered in shades of blue.
It looks as if he wears every layer of the ocean. The sleeves of the daxiushan are wide, long, and free-flowing, as if air had been transformed into fabric, the edges almost white-blue in colour, then darkening to something more twilight near the shoulders, as if the sunlight zone had merged with the twilight zone.
The sleeve cuffs are decorated with stars alongside white lotus flowers, a combination of heaven and earth. A white-blue embroidered floral pattern is on the golden sash, which seems to bind Michael’s upper and lower body together, as it is tight around his waist. Around his arms and behind his back—part of which Lorenzo can’t see—is a gold and cobalt blue pibo, the base of which is golden and printed with blue roses.
While the ruqun’s skirt is layered like the ocean if it were parted by hands, the ruqun’s shirt is white, and covered with a golden fan-shaped shell, the lines on the shell darker and more pronounced. At the base of the skirt there are a few layers of white, like fabricated marine snow, only for the layers to gradually turn to darker shades of blue until they match the twilight on Michael’s shoulders.
The skirt is dotted with golden flakes in the shape of constellations, or so Lorenzo believes. After all, every constellation in the night sky is made up, and Lorenzo’s brain is already piecing together new constellations on the night sky of Michael’s skirt.
“Reading,” comes Michael’s reply, then he turns his attention back to the book.
“No,” says Lorenzo, “what are we doing? There are hunters in the forest. Why are we…” Lorenzo pauses, and then continues, rephrasing himself. “Why are you just sitting there?”
Lorenzo doesn’t know how long, but Michael was here before him. Same circumstances, or something like that. All Lorenzo knows is that Michael was abandoned too, even though he’s a vampire, which made Lorenzo laugh when he first found out—not with glee, but with befuddlement. To think that he would ever meet a vampire who had been abandoned like him.
Michael is an immovable boulder of stubbornness, always has been, so to see him give up, or rather submit to the enemy without a fight, is disconcerting. Lorenzo would think he was planning an ambush, but he knows Michael doesn’t work like that. Even if he did, he’d be organising things in preparation for it, but he’s not. Doing. Anything. Where is Michael Kaiser?
“There’s not much else to do when we’re cornered.”
It feels like Lorenzo is a cauldron bubbling with every red secondary emotion in existence. He feels hot with frustration and red with hurt, and right now he wants Michael to put him out of his misery with his own breath. He takes a deep breath and narrows his eyes at Michael, who continues to read his stupid little book, the curve of each letter memorised and its shape altered by constant re-reading.
“Don’t give me that shit,” Lorenzo practically spits, but his glare softens when Michael glares at him from over the top of his book, a battle already lost at the mere sight of Michael’s glaring scrutiny. Lorenzo doesn’t dare make him angry in case Michael does cook him into a human kebab. “There must be a way out. Why don’t you do something?”
“Those aren’t ordinary hunters,” Michael snaps the book shut and sets it down on the standing mahogany tea table beside his chair. “They wouldn’t dare come into these forests if they were. They know magic and they’re skilled, and there are packs of them, Lorenzo.” Michael leans forward slightly, his face closer to Lorenzo, but still at a distance. Michael doesn’t have a shadow, but it feels as if one is engulfing Lorenzo all the same. “Packs.”
“Dah. That doesn’t mean you can’t try.”
Lorenzo’s persistence makes Michael let out a sound that’s the equivalent of a laugh, the air moving his bangs. “If you weren’t here…” Michael leans back in the chair, his arms crossed over his chest, the plush beneath him squeaking as if in pain. The broad sleeves of his daxiushan seem to blanket him. “Maybe I would. But you’re here, so I won’t do anything.”
“What does that mean?” But Michael has closed his eyes and is now resting his cheek in the palm of his hand, his elbow digging into the arm of the chair, which feels more like a bone. “What does that mean?” Lorenzo repeats, but Michael doesn’t move a muscle, let alone his mouth.
The silence that follows hangs in the air like a dagger, and Lorenzo wants to impale himself on it at how frustrating Michael is. Everything was going well, they were doing well, but now suddenly there are hunters and Michael isn’t doing anything about it, and the silence is robbing Lorenzo of his skin and his patience.
It feels as if there is no Michael sitting parallel to him, as if there are no walls caging him, as if there are no particles of dust covering every surface, and also making up everything in the room. Lorenzo feels utterly alone, as if drifting through nothingness, surrounded by nothingness, as nothingness himself.
It reminds him of a distant memory he cannot remember, like a dream you have of falling and then your body jerks in reaction, or tasting something nostalgic, and not being able to put a name to it. There is something familiar about nothingness, but just because it feels familiar doesn’t mean it’s home. That’s something the world always mistakes as being one and the same. The familiarity Lorenzo feels is not home, it is just a hole of black.
They were doing well. Lorenzo doesn’t know for how long, but they were doing well and had reached an equilibrium, to the point where Michael would talk to Lorenzo about what he was reading and Lorenzo would tell Michael about what he was writing, always on the same subject. They created a lot together and Lorenzo can still feel the paint on his skin, even though it was washed off days ago.
Michael is so frustrating, and Lorenzo wants to kill him. He wants to kill him by saving him, because that’s the one thing Michael doesn’t want.
“They’re most likely here for Marc,” Michael’s voice flits through the room, the silence in the air flustered by the touch of his voice, Lorenzo’s eyes blinking. They haven’t looked away from Michael for hours, however long they’ve been sitting for.
“The old vampire who made the map?”
“Yes.” Michael confirms, his eyes opening to meet Lorenzo’s. “They want his power, or more precisely, his brain.”
“But they left eons ago,” Lorenzo furrows his eyebrows, but Michael doesn’t budge, as if it’s perfectly reasonable for the hunters to be searching for a dead man. “Why don’t we tell them they’re gone? We can’t just sit here, you know?”
Michael throws his head back with a short laugh, and Lorenzo thinks it’s the most genuine he's ever done so, "They're hunters, Lorenzo. They will not listen to you." And after a beat of silence, Michael adds, “They’re the same people who gave you up to this forest in the first place.”
Lorenzo’s face paints into a blank canvas, his eyes boring into Michael’s, “OK. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything.” Michael emphasises, his oceanic eyes ringed with red-orange as they land on Lorenzo for a moment. He has always thought of Michael’s eyes as encompassing the Ring of Fire, the ocean that his eyes are, hiding layers of long-buried rage. He’s not very good at hiding it from Lorenzo. “Don’t pretend it doesn’t.”
“Dah,” Lorenzo sighs with a roll of his eyes, his posture slacking. His back feels like it’s decomposing, but the pain in his back helps him ignore the rest of the pain that stings him all over. He wishes he wasn’t so helpless and that his body didn’t hurt like it was being bulldozed just by sitting on the floor. “That’s beyond the point. They’re still human and—”
“Yes, and that’s the problem, Don.” Michael gravels, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “They’re human, which means they’re scum.”
Lorenzo doesn’t bother to argue any further, because Michael is right about them not willing to listen because they’re human, and because Michael called him by his first name. He only drops it when he doesn’t want to discuss a conversation further, and Lorenzo is respectful—much too respectful for a man of Michael’s calibre, but respectful nonetheless. It’s just that Lorenzo still wants to try and negotiate, because he doesn’t want Michael to die, even though it’s inevitable, whether in or out of their current position.
Ever since he was as young as eight years old—or as old, however you like to put it—Lorenzo has wondered about death: how it ends for people like him, what it feels like, and where it leads. It’s a normal human curiosity, or so they say, until you identify with it so much that people label you as death itself and throw you into the supernatural.
When Lorenzo was ten, or thirteen, or maybe he was eight, and that is why the curiosity started then, he was... offered to the supernatural beings that were said to live in the forests surrounding his hometown, a local biome that spanned the length of countries—or so the villagers whispered, shuddering. It is a very dark forest, and those who went in never came out.
Sometimes the universe takes pity on the unfortunate, the universe which is made of atoms, just like people, and Lorenzo was lucky that the eyes of the universe were on him. He was lucky because the old vampire who took him in—made of the same formula that the universe is made of, as people like Don Lorenzo are made of—pitied his circumstances and took him in without bloodshed. At least not Lorenzo’s.
So, Lorenzo was lucky. He wasn’t sacrificed—well, he was—but the final step was never taken. The old vampire took Lorenzo to a big cabin deep in the forest. Lorenzo doesn’t know exactly where it is, because it’s not marked on the map the previous old vampire made, but if he had to name a country, he’d say the distance from the village to the cabin was the length of Italy, from the tip of the boot, all the way to the top.
Lorenzo takes a deep breath. There’s no point arguing when Michael’s right. They’re cornered. There are packs of hunters, and they know magic, and even if Lorenzo wasn’t here, if Michael bothered to fight, they’d probably kill him anyway. But Lorenzo doesn’t believe that at all, and only comes to such a conclusion because Michael has hinted at it. He knows his own power.
But even though Lorenzo knows it’s fruitless, he stalls for time because the green in his stomach tells him to do so. It feels like the walls of the room are closing in on him, and the only way to keep them from crushing him dead is to keep talking. What better time to ask Michael questions than before they both die?
Technically, it is Michael who will die, but is there a difference? They are one and the same. They’ve been sewn together like yin and yang for who knows how long now, Lorenzo forgets. Lorenzo forgets the rest because he is with Michael.
“Why do vampires choose to die?” Lorenzo asks the same question he has asked many times before. He can see Michael’s chest swell with air, or perhaps it’s fuel for the fire he’s about to breathe. “Why do you want to die?”
The change in question changes the atmosphere in the air. It was humid enough that Lorenzo could feel the vapours kissing his cheeks, but now the air feels packed with clusters of fog, or cloud—something transparent. Maybe it’s just Michael. His eyebrows are furrowed and his mouth slightly agape, something close to confusion etched into his features until they smooth out and return to their natural state of apathy.
It all happened in a second, or two, or three—all of it happened in a single moment, but Lorenzo caught sight of it all the same, because he’s Lorenzo, and Michael is a glass onion. He may be layered, but the centre of him is visible because he is made of glass. There was a time when he was made of the thickest sandstone, but with warmth comes glass, and so Michael is now transparent.
“There are hunters in the forest.” Michael avoids the question, and Lorenzo wants to laugh at the loop back to what he said earlier to break the silence.
“But if there was a way to get away—"
Michael cuts Lorenzo off with a sharp glare, “There isn’t.”
“If there was,” he repeats, persistent, “would you take it, Michel?”
A beat of silence, their eyes connected.
“Would you choose to live?”
Abruptly, Michael grabs the book he was reading and throws it past Lorenzo without breaking eye contact, the swift flight of the object so aggressive that it sounds like a thousand eagles plummeting. Hot air fans the side of Lorenzo’s face and brushes his soft hair as the book whizzes past, but the wind soon calms enough for the eagles to pick themselves up by the wings and carry on as if nothing had happened, the book sliding back into its place on the bookshelf.
Michael is a reader and, believe it or not, also a writer. He indulges in many things that no human would expect of a vampire, which is why Lorenzo has a habit of forgetting what he is until he breathes fire, or makes something float, or his pupils slit into edge faced knives, or he hisses with fangs. Lorenzo forgets that Michael isn’t human because he plays the part so well.
No matter the arsenal of his abilities, Michael’s display of levitation doesn’t make Lorenzo flinch, or even blink. He was prepared for a gust of fire in his face, so to be honest, Lorenzo got the pacifist end of the stick.
“You’re asking stupid questions,” Michael mutters, his body turned to the side and away from Lorenzo, one arm wrapped around it while the other’s hand is occupied with holding his face, of which Lorenzo can only see a sliver.
Lorenzo gives Michael a weak smile that he doesn’t see, “You know me.”
He shifts his attention to the floor, even though Michael is turned away, so it wouldn’t matter if Lorenzo continued to stare. Lorenzo stares at the cypress pine floor next to the kilim rug he’s sitting on, but the dark spots look as if they’re staring at him with pity, so he moves his eyes to the rug, only to be met with the sight of coloured eyes that seem geometrically shaped with sadness. He turns his attention back to Michael, because that’s where his eyes always end up, staring at his skirt and drawing constellations in his head, giving them names.
“I know you,” Michael repeats under his breath, as if the words were important enough to get his mouth used to the shape of them, and Lorenzo swallows a bile with an unfamiliar taste. “I know you...” Again, but drawn out, as if Michael was stopping himself from saying more. If only Lorenzo knew how to keep his mouth just as shut.
For fuck’s sake. Lorenzo’s skin has never felt so prickled. The whole organ is smarting like a cactus in the wrong environment. Lorenzo wonders if cacti can feel the needles in their skin, or if they’re just a part of it. The mere thought of feeling needles pricked all over his skin every second of every sweltering day is enough to make Lorenzo blurt out another question. Up the ante and you might just avoid becoming an ant by the witch’s hand.
"What's your favourite astronomical object?"
It feels as if Lorenzo is walking the line of an ecotone between the Arctic and the Sahara. His skin feels hot with buckets of sweat, while inside he feels cold to the bone. There’s a slight buzz in the air as Michael’s eyes glance at Lorenzo from the corner of their orbits, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion at the random question. The blueness of Michael makes Lorenzo want to swim in him.
"Quasars,” comes Michael’s answer, after considering whether he should. “They stand out the most in the sky."
Lorenzo blinks, the muscles in his face lax with surprise, "You can see them?
"Of course I can see them," Michael rolls his eyes, as if it's an average thing, as if it’s normal. Just how strong are his senses? Lorenzo can’t even imagine how much he can see.
Though now that Michael brings it up, it reminds Lorenzo of something the old vampire once said about Michael's sight being unlike other vampires’, but the subject was dismissed as soon as it was introduced.
It makes Lorenzo wonder if Michael can see a million more colours than he can. He wonders if Michael can see his body like an x-ray. Is that how he knows when Lorenzo's heart is beating fast? His eyes can probably see the surge of blood pumping through his body. Michael can probably hear it, too. Lorenzo wonders if it ever makes him hungry.
“Hm,” Lorenzo thinks out loud, leaning his head back enough that it rests in the lap of the armchair behind him. “What’s your favourite type of blood?”
Michael has never bitten Lorenzo, for reasons unknown to him. He has, however, drunk Lorenzo’s blood, but only when he draws and bags it for Michael himself. Otherwise, Michael gets blood from elsewhere. He doesn’t need it to survive; Lorenzo learnt early on that vampires don’t need to drink blood. There are some who enjoy the taste of it and indulge, and others who do not. People like to talk about things they don’t know anything about, so most of what Lorenzo ‘’knew’’ about vampires was turned on its head when he was taken in.
It’s a stupid question, but Lorenzo is curious. It’s a stupid question, which means Michael won’t answer it truthfully or at all, because that’s the way they work. It’s a stupid question asked by Lorenzo, who is a stupid man and an even stupider thinker. It is a stupid question.
“Not yours.” Michael dismisses the question, which makes Lorenzo pout.
“Dah, you’re boring,” he drawls, and then jumps to another question. “What is your favourite flower?”
Michael has turned his body back to Lorenzo. Well, most of it, anyway. His knees are still slightly angled to the side, like toes bending into arches to test the temperature of water, as if Michael’s own knees are trying to run away from him. From Lorenzo or from Michael, who knows.
“What’s with all the random questions?”
Michael’s arms are crossed over his chest and his legs are spread, as if he weren’t wearing the most beautiful whale-road dress Lorenzo has ever seen, and he has to hold back a laugh at the sight. Michael looks like a sumo wrestler wearing something pretty and covered for a change, something blue with haunting and wishes and more haunting. What is a wish if not a haunting? What is a haunting but a life? What is a life but a dream?
“Taking my shots while I have them,” Lorenzo answers simply. “Maybe you’re more open when you’re about to die.”
Out there, someone loves you, Lorenzo wants to say. He wants to scream it at Michael and tattoo it on his skin with his lips. Out there, someone loves you, and Lorenzo knows this like no one else, because he is someone.
He doesn’t want Michael to choose this, but he also won’t stop him because he knows the someone who loves Michael wants the best for him, and no one can determine the best for Michael like Michael can himself. Not even Lorenzo.
It’s not like it’s the end. Lorenzo tends to think in absolutes, in extremes thorned with hurt. You live and then you die, but what they don’t tell you is that life bleeds into death, and from death sprouts life. This much Lorenzo understands because of his sacrifice, or the village’s attempt to sacrifice him, and because the deaths of the old vampires sprouted new life for him and Michael.
But in life there is death, and Lorenzo knows this—he thinks about it every day, he’s seen the very seeds of death sprout into life and watched the flowers wither all the same, an endless cycle. Everyone is a part of it, even Michael Kaiser, who is bundled up in layers of blue rose petals. He is the most beautiful flower of life Lorenzo has ever seen. He wonders if he will wither just as beautifully.
No more time for folly. The stars have long since departed, and soon the sky will be clear with sun dogs and scudding clouds. The time when they can no longer turn back, when they have only one choice, is nearing, and it is drawing closer to the horizon. The time has ticked, and it will continue to tick, even when this time ends.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" It’s a stupid question from a stupid man, but it is a question nonetheless. A question that has had an answer for some time now.
Time. The very concept makes Lorenzo want to puke laughs. It felt like they had so much, he was convinced they would have more, but now the time is up and Lorenzo feels like there are several clocks in his stomach that are turning into nothing but hands. Hands poking and prodding his stomach with fingers. Fingers that crawl up his gullet and tickles the back of his tongue.
"I'm going out my way, Lorenzo, not a damn hunter's." Michael says, the words caught in a time bubble that bursts in Lorenzo’s face, almost knocking him dead to the floor.
There’s Michael Kaiser. The vampire that is human in more ways than one, in probably more ways than Don Lorenzo is, always doing things his way. No one else’s. Not even Lorenzo’s. Not even the damn world’s.
Even if the world were made in a stimulation, made in such a way that every step was predestined and every decision was determined by the first decision made a century ago, Michael would still find a way to do everything his way. There is no chain that can chain him. No hand that can hold him down. No person. Michael is made of bird bones and feathers, of wisps of wind and blown dandelions. Michael is freedom, and no matter how pretty a gauntlet you make, you cannot chain down freedom for it is free.
He is the line where sea and sky meet, a line you cannot reach no matter how fast you paddle, how far you run, how long you swim. It is a line out of reach, invisible but not invisible. A line of blue against blue and more blue. You can’t trap blue in a bottle because it is a haunting. Because it is Michael Kaiser.
Outside, daylight begins to break, the dark sky turning lighter, but not enough yet to burn, not blue enough to haunt. Even though Lorenzo can stand the light of the sun, the sight of the brightening sky fills him with dread, as if it will burn him at the stake if he so much as looks at it. A sunrise has never felt so dreadful, though they’ve always filled him with a sense of nothingness, a black void, even in the bright maw of the sky-candle.
“The sun will rise soon,” floats Michael’s voice through the silence that envelops them and into Lorenzo’s ears. Since they first met, the silence between them has never been broken. It has only ever been woven, soft and comfortable.
Lorenzo doesn’t say anything, just replies with a hum to let Michael know he heard him, the pinpricks in his stomach still dancing, the tempo increasing.
“The sunrise is quite beautiful.”
"Well," Michael begins, giving Lorenzo a look with a dramatic tilt of his head, "I wouldn't know."
There’s a moment of silence, and then Lorenzo laughs at the reality of what Michael is, his haired toes curling into the fluff of the rug laid out beneath him, a hue of autumn leaves spreading across his cheeks. "Right,” Lorenzo nods to himself, “I forgot you can’t touch daybreak, let alone view it."
“Then I’ve made up my mind.” Michael rises from his seat, the hanfu dress moving with him as he moves, like air against air. Lorenzo’s lilac eyes follow the blue, for every flower needs watering. “I’ll see for myself how beautiful this sunrise of yours is.”
Michael begins to walk towards the sliding doors that lead to the backyard, his dress following behind him like the layers of the ocean in worship, the deep scattering embracing his dainty body as stars dance along the shoreline of the dress. He looks like an angel dipped in holy water, but Lorenzo tries not to think so, in case Michael reads his mind and burns him with his breath.
Years ago, Lorenzo decorated the cabin for Christmas—over Michael’s objections—and joked about putting a custom-made angel that looked like Michael on top of the tree because of the etymology of his name. The comparison infuriated Michael, and that’s when Lorenzo learnt that Michael could breathe fire if you pushed the right buttons. They never decorated for Christmas again.
The memory leaves a bitter taste in Lorenzo’s mouth, not because Michael never let him decorate for Christmas again, but because he’ll never feel the heat of fire on his cheeks again. It’s a strange nostalgia. Lorenzo would let Michael burn him eternally if it meant he would stay.
When Michael is a mere step away from the sliding doors, Lorenzo steps between him and the final act, his lanky human form standing before Michael with the look of a puppy watching its owner leave.
He doesn’t know what he wants. No, that’s a lie. Lorenzo knows wholly what he wants, but it’s something he can’t have because time has betrayed him. Lorenzo knows what he wants, and he knows he can’t have it, but he still presses a wing into the clockwork of time, its fast-spinning hand slicing it off without a single tear. A perfect slice of wing.
“Are you sure you really want to do this?”
Lorenzo’s hand is on Michael’s chest, his palm pressed against his sternum to stop him from stopping the beating of his own heart. He doesn’t want Michael to go. Lorenzo can feel the faint beating of the centrepiece of his body—well, he could until it disappeared. Michael must have stopped it.
“Times call for ends,” is all Michael says before he phases through Lorenzo and the door.
Lorenzo wonders if death feels like what it does as Michael phases through him, or like what he feels as he watches Michael walk slowly towards the clear pond that is beginning to shine, the surrounding mountains cast in shadow. It looks like Michael is dressed for his funeral and it makes Lorenzo wonder just how long he’s been waiting for this moment, but he shoves the thoughts aside before they dive deeper, his feet leading him back into his satellite orbit.
He doesn’t bother putting on any shoes, never had a taste for them anyway, and almost bangs his head against the glass door like a blind bat, forgetting the gap between him and Michael. The gap. The gap that has been there for years. The gap that will be there for evermore.
There were many times when they had spent the night by the pond, memories that poke into Lorenzo’s back like rocks. Once Lorenzo dumped water on Michael, who looked like a sopping wet gatito, and instead of getting angry he hit Lorenzo right back with more force because he had never been taught how to play around. Lorenzo didn’t mind it. He grew to like it.
He exhales, pins pricking his lungs and knots burning in his stomach. Usually memory lane is a calm walk through the wrinkles of his brain, but Lorenzo feels anything but calm as he thinks about moments long dead. Maybe death is just a memory, and life is but a dream.
The earth stabs into Lorenzo’s feet with every step he takes, but he doesn’t feel any of it. He doesn’t feel his body or the earth beneath his walking. Lorenzo doesn’t feel anything but want, and hurt, and more want. And some more hurt. Which are just stacks of the same thing. A want is the aching for a win in the middle of a game, only for you to lose in the end. Hurt. Rinse and repeat.
Beyond the pond and between the mountains is a valley, land stretching so far beyond the clean cut in the mountains as if it were cleaved by the hand of a butcher. God has their creations, as they have their collection of swords, to cleave the earth of hair and pop the mountains of pimples. What is a sword but a weapon of care? If you do not learn how to wield it, it will learn to wield you.
The sun is visible through the valley, walking towards them from the end of the Earth’s scar. It looks like it’s rising from the mouth of the pond held between the surrounding massif’s teeth, white rays shaped like hands reaching out from its full belly. As the sun rises between the mountains, it flickers like a candle.
And as the sun rises ever higher, it brightens, so much so it looks like a choir of angels singing together, their voices harmonizing to create a mass of light. Maybe the sun has had its fair share of angels lately, and that’s why it’s so bright this morning.
Michael has walked to the edge of the pond, his bare feet standing on pebbles of round and sharp, and it looks like the sun is opening its mouth to swallow him whole from where Lorenzo stands. He’s some distance away, only a mere hill, but the distance between them feels like that of a mountain.
He wants to take Michael by the hand and lead him back inside as he did when Michael got injured in the forest, back when he used to hate Lorenzo more than he does now, and made it known. Back when they had all the time in the world and never saw a single glint of the sun together. Back when—
There’s a wanting ache in Lorenzo to take a step closer, but something tells him to keep his distance. If he were to take a step forward, he won’t be able to let Michael go, so he remains a few metres away, biting into his lip to keep the wants at bay.
“Is that fucking it?” Michael laughs, the sound reverberating through the surrounding forest and echoing against the mountains, the beat bouncing off them like mallets against drums. The sound travels through the spanning forest in gusts of wind, and instead of birds flying away in fright, they tweet songs of departure and copy.
Lorenzo wants to say that death is ugly, he deemed it so ever since the village offered him to the forest to die, but there are no words filtering through Lorenzo’s head that are an antonym of beautiful as he watches Michael turn his back on the rising sun, its light shining through him as if he were made of clouds and the cotton candy they made last week. He’s smiling, genuinely smiling, the first Lorenzo has ever seen, the edges of him sparking and fading to dust particles as he looks at Lorenzo.
In the end, all vampires are is dust. They’re made of dust particles intricately stacked on top of each other like lovers, or like the books in Michael’s well-read library, or like the string of lights they both put up in the guest bedroom to see the stars when they’re not there, or like the intricately woven threads of the various rugs that dot the floors and are beginning to threadbare.
Though it’s not just vampires, because Michael Kaiser isn’t just a vampire, he is also human. He is just as human as Lorenzo is because they are made from the same formula. Everything in the world is built with atoms. Everything in the world is made of dust.
There are humans who believe there is an afterlife once the life you have lived on Earth ends, but Lorenzo has always understood it as a dream. Life is just a dream—there is no time, there is no death, just a dream of pictures strung together to form a movie.
Life is but a wish, made again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, all the way to eternity. Everything on Earth is everything; one another. Don Lorenzo is Michael Kaiser, and Michael Kaiser is Don Lorenzo. The old vampire is Don Lorenzo, and the old vampire before Don Lorenzo was the old vampire after Don Lorenzo. That is what everyone is. A copy. Layers on layers. A dream of a wish about a life.
It’s why Lorenzo feels like he’s burning, because he is Michael Kaiser, and it’s why Michael is smiling with every part of his body, because he is Don Lorenzo. The universe is but an egg, and every living thing is an embryo inside of it.
“You are such a stupid man, Don Lorenzo.” The whole of Michael is smiling; his eyes, his mouth, his nose. Lorenzo never knew Michael was capable of using the muscles of his face so intensely. He wishes he knew earlier.
As all of Michael smiles, the whole of him gradually shrivels into sparking embers, the tiny remnants of him shaking with laughter before there is a burst of light and then nothing, the ashes of him drifting away and out of Lorenzo’s reach, as he has always been.
Lorenzo shakes his head and looks down at the ground with a chuckle, the burning of a thousand suns kissing the back of his eyes, as if Michael’s breath has made a home in his sockets. He is beginning to understand everything about death, the very thing he’s been trying to comprehend all his life, right at the start of Michael’s.
Lorenzo starts off from the top.
You live, and then you die, which doesn’t mean you are gone because you live on as sprinkled confetti across lives. You live in the memories of people, in the scribbles you drew on the wall of your first home, in the things you created and left behind, and you live in the words you’ve said and engrained into minds.
It is all just fresco. You are watercolours painted hastily onto wet plaster and fixed into its every atom, a permanent stain of colours merged into the picture of you. Even once you have died, you are still there, painted into hippocampi.
With death comes life, and in life comes death, an endless cycle. Every drop of water in the world returns to the ocean which it has always been a part of. Every child returns to their hometown, slivers of their soul held there forever. Each person carries a memory that they pass on to other memories, just like pass the parcel, or Chinese whispers; forever looped.
It is an endless loop because it is a dream. You have to live every life on Earth before you can be born. Lorenzo wonders if he has already lived as Michael, or if Michael has already lived as him. He wouldn’t be surprised if Michael knew the formula of their universe all along, because he was akin to a sentient one, but all creations are just a universe in the end—tiny, indiscernible universes, but universes nonetheless.
Michael isn’t dead because the cabin standing behind Lorenzo is covered in his marks, and the old vampires’, along with Lorenzo’s. Death isn’t an end, or a beginning; it is more like a middle. It is an intersection, two choices of dialogue. It is like the line between sea and sky.
It all hits Lorenzo at once. The sun standing tall before him opens its mouth in answer, and the pond tears its chest open in answer, and the mountains bow their heads thick with hair in answer.
Nothingness feels familiar not because it is home, but because it is what Lorenzo has been swimming in all his life, or what you would call a life. It is but a wish. A coin thrown into the darkness of a well. Several coins thrown into the darkness of a well. Enough coins thrown into the darkness of a well to make the body of a [stupid] man.
It is all but a wish. Lorenzo is all but a wish. Michael is all but a wish that was wished again and again and again, but just as childhood bracelets run out of luck, so do purses and hands and stomachs run out of coins.
There is no Don Lorenzo. No Michael Kaiser. Just coins stacked upon coins. Dust stacked upon dust. Lines of blue intersected over and over in the form of roads and cities and maps of roads and cities and of the world. It’s all just a blue haunting wish, a domed sky over a full sea.
The black of nothingness is familiar because Lorenzo hasn’t been born yet. He has not lived every life in this egg of a universe yet to be born. He is still a mere atom of an embryo swimming in the darkness toward the pinprick of light in the distance. And Michael is there because he is Michael, because he is everything.
Michael is not dead. The old vampire before Lorenzo is not dead. The old vampire after Lorenzo is not dead. They are alive in old chairs and new decorations and stringed lights and terrible paintings and well-read books. They are scratched into Lorenzo’s coin of a brain and heart like a scratch ticket. They are alive because they are Lorenzo.
It was never so complicated to begin with. How stupid, he thinks. Stupid questions asked by a stupid man. Stupid questions with stupid answers that were given to the stupid man in the form of ash. Stupid. So fucking stupid.
The sun is hot against Lorenzo’s skin, the gold of him melting into nothingness at the bottom of a well. He sits down on the bank of the pond, wet puddles between the stabbing rocks feeling him to life as he sits at the bottom of the well. When he looks up towards the opening of it, towards the sky-candle, he swears he sees Michael’s face.
Faint voices and footsteps sound in the distance, but they do not matter. None of it matters because all of those hunters are Lorenzo. They’ll play their part while Lorenzo plays his. They’re all playing the part of each other. He stares at the sun, squinting at the light in the dark, and wishes a wish.
As the hunters cave in, the only thing Lorenzo thinks about is how much the rising sun looks like Michael’s smile, and what he would give to burn up in flames at the feeling of it against his skin.