Camille — Part II

I was hungover in the airport and sore from the night before with the girl with the gold eyes, and badly discouraged of my own value as I normally was after my jaunts with trollops. I was drinking coffee, watching planes coming and going. It is amazing to me how well airports do such a thing with such uniformity and efficiency no matter where you go. It's all pretty much the same routine wherever you are. Only the skin of the people doing it is a little lighter, or darker, and the language is faster or slower. They have the same looks upon their faces. I was praying that I didn't have a venereal disease and thus have to suffer the indignity of going to the pharmacy for a prescription, but I doubt Jesus takes those prayers. Or if he does, he takes them most begrudgingly. 

I kept reading Camille's note trying to make sense of it. It is the same. In death as in life. What does she mean? There was a deslotion about it. Weltschmerz feel to it, which in turn affected my impression of her to be that of a beautiful woman drowning in melancholia. There was a certain misery that I could feel and empathize with. I wondered of her origin. And if, in fact, she brought the curse to Belém unwittingly, or so to curtail the suspicion of an inquiry in Paris, where she lived before and where I was headed now, presuming she ended up back home. It was the only place I had to look and more often than not, it is how it goes. People go home, given enough time. Vampires no less are true to their human instincts, so I've learned.  

A teenage girl next to me on the plane was reading one of those cheap glittery vampire novels you can buy in the supermarket and I wanted to tell her the truth about vampires. About real vampires. But the truth is not as interesting, and she'd probably tell me to fuck off, old man. I know a thing or two about teenagers as well. The first being that anyone over 30 is considered old. And I am considerably well past that. My knowledge of true vampires would bore her — all but the killing part. Killing never bores anyone and when teenage girls metamorphize into middle-aged women, they park themselves on a couch and watch true crime shows and serial killer documentaries for pleasure. I could practically tell her her entire future from experience. But I know how tired I get of everyone giving everyone advice on social media and on cheap wall decor at Pottery Barn and Target and such places, so I didn't say anything at all. Hell, even doormats these days give advice or express some useless sentiment like "It's five o'clock somewhere," or "When life gives you lemons..." Fuck. 

I could smell her youth. I closed my eyes and inhaled missing my own youth. People smell a certain way at different times in life. She looked rather young and she reminded me of my daughter when I saw her last. My daughter that I don't see anymore, and who I haven't seen in a very long time, but who I cannot forget despite my wish to, and despite a long lapse of years that are almost too many to recall. 

I ordered a drink and peanuts. I ate and breathed deeply and thought of how long it had been since I was in Paris and if I had anyone there to call when I got there to have a drink because I wasn't going to go straight after Camille. I'd need to brush up on my French and get acclimated to the city or else I would fuck it all up. So I plugged in my earbuds and listened to my French tutorials, but I went to sleep dreaming of abstract things in French like mon joli poisson.

I woke up as the plane landed. I was tired and groggy and my head pounded from last night's Bacardi and wine and the hooker's perfume. She left sometime in the early morning while I slept. The teenage girl next to me was looking at me and giggled when I jumped, startled by the landing. She probably could smell the booze oozing from my pores. But then she pointed over to my lap and said, "Elle est jolie."

"Merci," I replied. I didn't realize the photograph of Camille sat on my lap, which is what this curious girl noticed. I don't think she was much past 14, if at all, which is how old my daughter was when I saw her last. I saw her in a park playing with her dog — a small mixed breed with wiry brown hair. Her mother set on a bench nearby beneath an open umbrella, though it wasn't raining and though the sun was nearly entirely blocked by the canopy of several large sycamores, all but for a few gentle rays that snuck through those giant leaves. She was wearing a black dress. Behind them there was a pond and geese gliding upon the green-rippled water. I hadn't seen her before then in over eight years, and I only recognized her by the resemblance she bore to me and by the sorrow of her beautiful mother's face who watched her with a certain gloom.

She is pretty, the girl had said in French of Camille. She must have sensed I was American because she asked, in English, "Is she your wife?"

"No," I smiled. "She's 154 years-old. How old do you think I am?"

"She doesn't look like she is 154 years-old."

"Well, she isn't in this picture, but she certainly is. Look at her dress. Look at the photo. It was taken in 1896."

"So, she was 27 when it was taken? It could be a fake, monsieur. She's clearly holding a cellphone," she added. 

"That's a notebook."

"No," the girl shook her head. "That's a cellphone. An IPhone 10, I believe."

"It is not." I argued. I already regretted talking to her.

The girl looked again. Her eyes reconsidered. "Maybe you are right. She is beautiful. I hope you find her."

"How do you know I am looking?" 

The plane taxied down the runway before porting. The usual droning of the exhausted engines that you can feel in your stomach. The lull of the emormous tires on the smooth runway. The captain in four or five languages, announcing you've arrived. Giving you the weather. Wishing you well. 

"Every man is looking for a such a woman. And you wear no wedding ring," she noted, rather astutely. 

I shook my head to agree with a chuckle. Then I looked down to my finger as though to confirm, though I needn't. I knew I was alone and that I wore no ring of matrimony.

"How old are you?"

"Thirteen."

"Ahh! Thirteen. The optimal age of reason and bliss. It is all downhill from there," I smiled, before I cringed, realizing I was expressing an unsolicited euphemism. 

"How old are you?" she shot back. 

"So old that I forget, my dear." 

She giggled and waited for an answer until she realized I wasn't giving it. But I suppose she was right. She was intelligent for her age — witty. I bid her adieu as we funnelled out through the tunnel into the airport much the way fortunate salmon who made it through the jaws of hungry bears in a predatory stream must feel when they emerge into the lake or ocean of their primordial intent. And from there to follow signs to whatever destination has been preselected or ordained for us. Everyone doing their part to guide everyone in a safe and efficient manner whether they are coming or going. "Life's too short," an embroidered patch on someone's backpack ahead of me whined. Speak for your fucking self, I muttered. 

"Bonne chance!" the girl called from a distance, grinning, her teeth shining with silver brackets and crisscrossed with wires. 

"Merci, mademoiselle!" As she faded away, I realized I would never see her again. Just like my daughter. 

I took a cab to the hotel and had drinks at the hotel bar while someone carried my bags to the room. I sat at the bar and stared at the picture and read the letter. But my focus on killing Camille was suddenly deluded with thoughts of my long-lost daughter. Then the alcohol killed my motivation for the confrontation and resolution of my thoughts and I itched to find a woman of some terrible sort to be promiscuous once more, as though in her I might escape life itself. Shrink to the size of a pinky finger and disappear into one of her orifices that would consume me. But I resisted the urge and I thought again of Camille as I stared longingly at her picture. 

I watched absurd people seemingly so happy doing terribly mundane things. There was a pool visible from the bar through a large glass wall and they were in there swimming around like fish in an aquarium, or floating about like buoys whose purpose I never really understood. The planet could be on fire and there they'd be, doing just fine in their bathing suits, eating chocolates on their holiday. There could be World War III going on, but so long as they have TV, air conditioning and someone to pick up the garbage, everything is okay. There were several people watching TV at the bar trading stories in the fast French the intermediate tutorials don't quite prepare you for. It is the hardest part of any language. The pace of the spoken word in real-time. 

Three women were talking and laughing loudly. None of them were very attractive at all, two of them were fat, but any one of them could fill a void. Perhaps they were the magic hole, an inate part of me considered while the rational minority of me scoffed. My mind is a parliament, raging in constant debate. It became that way quite a while ago. These ladies chainsmoked cigarettes and flirted with the much younger bartender who was Portuguese and who looked like he could be a moviestar or a professional soccer player. Instead, he was a bartender. He flipped drink glasses and lit things on fire and amused them like a trained monkey. I was sure she would be in Paris. They always come home. 

I called a friend who worked for Interpool and he agreed to meet me for breakfast the next morning. I had a clear head because I went to bed early the night before and didn't call a hooker or stick around the bar to try to pick up a woman. Men cast nets with looks and eye contact, but I hadn't cast a net at all. It was a business class hotel so there were plenty of women on business trips looking to scratch itches, but I didn't care about them. I ate a corned beef sandwich and a candybar and retired to my room with a bottle of orange juice. 

Pigeon was a former CIA man and was stationed in the Paris Interpool office. He smoked cigarettes constantly and his skin was the color of ash and so was his curly bush of hair and complimentary beard. Each were various states of ash and the white suit he wore made him look like he was rolled in cigarette paper. Pigeon was his last name. I am not sure what his first name was because everyone just called him Pigeon, or Pidge. I think it might be Paul. 

He smiled constantly and blinked rapidly by some defect or nervous condition as though there was something in his eye that he could not get out. It was so bad and rapid it almost appeared as though it were on purpose. He said it was some type of Parkinsons, and he was going to have a pallidotomy soon, but I didn't ask or care for him to explain it. 

Pidge knew everything. And I figured, for a few bills, he could locate Camille using the agency's facial recognition software that they don't admit to using. I made a copy of the picture and slid it across the café table to him and his pudgy gray fingers readily retrieved it, nearly spilling his espresso in the process. He smiled at the picture with his cigarette between the grisle of his lips and gave it that concerted look everyone who works in counter-intelligence gives any picture of interest. Then he said he'd see what he could do and I slid him 500 Euros which made his lips curl upright like the fried fat of a cheap steak. He quickly finished his drink and disappeared, placing the photo in the crease of a newspaper. And as he left, he farted loudly and didn't apologize. I suppose it was a European custom.  

I spent the next day walking the streets of Paris enchanted by the aromic smells of the street cafés and fresh bread purveyors and the wonderful allure of all the various music and delightful laughter. Everything is different in Paris. Even the sound of the cars, the motorbikes, the scuffle of shoes, the women. It's all different. It is all charming. Even the impoverished have style and the rats have class. 

The last time I was in Paris I had retrieved a lock of Marie Antoinette's hair for a collector in London, Ontario, which came much cheaper than I had expected, making me wonder if it was actually her hair. It was impossible to know for sure. On the same trip I bought a Picasso for an eccentric client, a retired oil broker in Kansas, who lived in a farmhouse in the middle of a wheat field that seemed endless when you stood on his porch and looked out onto the prairie. The sky was a shade of blue I had never seen before that was like Heaven, and the gold wheat danced like the ghosts of running buffalo as the wind played upon it. He wore a gun belt and carried two gold-plated six shooters he said belonged to Wild Bill Hickok like he was waiting for someone to draw on him or for dead Indians to descend upon the prairie. Perhaps they were to him what vampires are to me. He had a ornate cigar store Indian in his parlor he called Cochise. The Picasso was of a child holding a fish and he immediately hung it above a defunct fireplace on a red wallpapered wall. He paid me three million dollars for it. I got it for one and a half. 

I ate dinner and watched a play that was about vampires, of all things. It was in a small but ornate theatre on the banks of the Siene. It was a comedy and the vampires looked ridiculous. Afterwards everyone spilled into a nearby bar that was larger than the theatre. It was a bar with two floors and a mezzanine. A pretty woman, who was an actress in the play, with too much makeup on her face that she hadn't bothered to clean off, blew a kiss at me afterwards and I smiled, but took it no further. She had bright orange hair and those fake vampire teeth goth teen girls buy at campus head shops. I seemed not to have interest in anyone besides Camille, and if it was possible to fall in love with a picture, I suppose that I did. 

I stared at her picture. And I stared some more as I drank at a tourist bar down the street thinking I'd feel more at home amongst strangers and not quite as vulnerable. Then I was lost in the picture like someone else gets lost in the woods. I was enamoured. Maybe that was part of her powers. Then I tried to imagine all those guys who must have fucked her over the years. There had to be thousands in 154 years when you're that beautiful and that wicked. I imagine she has been done every way possible. Screwed loose. Bent over everything and anything. Armchairs, sofas, beds across an entire century. Bent up into every possible position. The act, once the human fountainhead of pleasure, becoming casually and abysmally reflexive.

The more I thought of it, the less I felt. It's an old recipe. An ancient formula as old as the Aztecs. And I thought if I met her and even, as preposterous as it sounds, the most beautiful woman in the world fell in love with me and we had some sort of relationship, I would be one of a million. But if I killed her, I'd be the only one who ever did and that is truly something special. It is well known that vampires wish to die and that vampirism is a terrible curse one must bear until fate delivers unto thee the sympathy of death. But how I feared she was fictitious. That there was no body in the grave because she didn't exist and the grave was merely to attract credulous tourists. Or that she did exist, but she was buried somewhere else and the grave was simply to honor her memory, or to appease the locals.

But then she won and it didn't matter. None of it mattered. And I was back in love with her. Sure as ever. I knew I couldn't kill her, so why was I even bothering trying to find her. Could I kill her if she said no? Or if she was rude? Or if I gathered some evidence of her crimes which I didn't even bother to investigate, as I normally do. Maybe when the time came, though, I told myself, I would. 

I got drunk and met a woman at a small crowded bar down the street from the last one I was at and who only spoke French. She too had bright orange hair and I thought it must be a French thing. We made love in the hotel with the windows open, soaked in moonlight and sweat, as a cool breeze blew mercifully over the room and a ceiling fan wobbled above us. I could see her reflection in the black of the TV. I didn't realize she was the actress from the play with her wig and makeup removed until she told me that she was. She pulled her vampire fangs from her pocket out and snapped them in place as she rode me, wildly laughing, assuming that it would turn me on in some way that it did not. So I rolled her over and attacked her from behind, assuming she liked it hard and rough. I buried her head in the pillow so hard that the veins in my arm bulged, and when I relented, she gasped for air in gratitude. My hand grabbing a wad of her hair, controlling her in my fist. No woman who is an actress and who follows you to another bar and wears vampire teeth wants it like a girl scout. 

"Dans le cul!" she begged. "Dans le cul!" I ignored her, but satisfied her with my thumb and she let loose a demonic caterwaul of instant and hellish gratification. She was bald as a baby. I thought of murdering her. Leaving her head too long in the pillow. She pretended to be a vampire after all. Maybe she was. But the thought was displaced as I wonderered how werewolves make love — with all that hair. Do they exclusively screw other werewolves? Or do they screw people or dogs? I don't know any to ask. 

Predictably, I did not find a magic doorway in her, and when it was over nothing lingered, other than the smell of liquor and sweat, and the milt and truffle butter on the bedsheets, and nothing carried on after the cold familiar close of the hotel room door. And by an unspoken agreement made somehwere and sometime during the indignity of the act itself, like the girl in the airport, I would never see her again. 

Pigeon, who was the very definition of an urbane gentleman, called me the next day. We met at the café where we met before and he told me he found her. He gave me an address that was written plainly on a piece of paper. Then he gave me a list of addresses of where she has been the past week. I looked down at the paper and didn't say a word. 

"Monsieur George? All you all right?"

"She knows," I said. 

"She knows? She knows what?" he chuckled, a bit miffed. 

"She's been everywhere that I've been. She's — followed me. She's even been to the same hotel. She was here at the café yesterday when we met." 

I stood up and looked around. The people around us looked at me to consider whether I was a choking or going to shoot them. I scoured their faces for any semblance of her. I reached inside of my vest and put my hand on the supressed Sicario Mark IV Ruger that I carried in a shoulder holster. It was full of silver hollow-point bullets, for vampires and werewolves. I suppose the instinctive itch was to kill. And my natural inclination was to scratch. But she was nowhere to be seen, at least that I could see. I put the address in my pocket, thanked Pidge with a hundred Euro note, buttoned my suitcoat, and hailed a cab. He put out his cigarette om the street and got in with me. 

"I have to tell you something," he said as the Arab driver asked us for an address in a thick Lebanese-molested French. "But I don't think you're going to like it." 

The cabbie had an air-freshner that dangled from the rearview where I caught his eyes looking back, impatiently waiting for the address. It was of two hands folded in prayer and it read, "Eat. Pray. Love." Fuck. My eye twitched and I felt nauseas. Then I gave him the address and we were on our way.