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 acigarette 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 areyourpriorities? 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 youeverything.”
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 forguidance, 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.
