The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (9 page)

I glanced back from Isabella’s
smiling face to the package on the table, then back again, incredulous. I felt
violated, disgusted. Abruptly, I pushed myself up from the table, sending the
chair skidding across the floor, and struggled past Isabella into the kitchen.
The stench of the laboratory was beginning to make my head spin. I heard
Isabella returning the chair to its rightful position by the door. I felt like
I couldn’t breathe, like I needed to get some air. I couldn’t understand what
she’d done.

It was only then, as I stood in
the kitchen rubbing my face in my hands, that I realized I’d brought the sachet
of blood along with me. It felt cold and damp against the warmth of my palm,
the plasma inside it sloshing around like putrefying jelly. My stomach heaved.
My mind went blank. Isabella was calling my name from the doorway. Something
inside me snapped.

I reached out for one of the
kitchen knives from the block upon the windowsill and pressed its serrated edge
against the bag of blood in my fist. At first the plastic gave a little under
the pressure, but then it burst with an expressive pop and showered the worktop
with little red droplets, a patter of crimson rain. The smell of iron replaced
the odor of bleach, and I almost retched as I drained the fluid away down the
kitchen sink, watched it swirl and gurgle as it was swallowed by the hungry maw
of the drain. Isabella stood expressionless throughout.

Now, when I look back on those
moments with the clarity of hindsight, I can’t help thinking that a small part
of me was also washed away down that hole in the sink, that this one simple act
has come to define me, to set out who I am. It is as if, by committing this
transgression, this spurious rejection of my own bodily fluid, I displayed my
frailties to the world and embarked on a course from which there would be no
return, stumbling down one route without properly considering another.

I had turned to Isabella,
angry, emotional and unsure of myself, the hairs on the back of my arms matted
with speckles of my own blood. I didn’t know what to say, or how to give voice
to my feelings of violation. I didn’t know how to tell her I still loved her,
still wanted and needed her, still clamored to hold her and tell her everything
was going to be okay. I simply stared at her, my hands covered in blood.

She hung her head, refusing to
look up, as if she couldn’t bear to meet my eyes. As if she were judging me,
like I’d let her down in some way. As if everything was my fault, that I’d
failed some obscure test she’d prepared for me. As if something had broken
between us that could never be repaired.

She uttered only one further
word, which seemed to stick in her throat as she spoke it: “Go.”

It was terrifyingly firm and
hollow.

I could do or say nothing more.
I left.

It took me a further two days
to pick up the telephone.

“Hi. Isabella? It’s me.” I
offered hesitantly to the receiver. I could hear her breathing softly in the
background and thought of her as she had been when we had lain together in bed,
listening quietly to the cars rolling by in the street below.

“Isabella? Hello?”

I was met with only the
bubbling sound of static as she returned her handset to the cradle.

A week later, as I lay half
asleep on the sofa, a bottle of cheap Italian wine drained and empty by my
feet, I thought I heard the sound of someone rapping on my door. I hesitated,
and by the time I made my way along the hall and pulled drunkenly at the latch,
they had gone. A gust of frigid air swirled in and hit me like a wall; I felt
dizzy and inebriated and returned myself to my makeshift bed.

The next morning I convinced
myself it had been her. I resolved to lay my hands on the Fiesta and drive
round that afternoon, to apologize for my reaction and explain that I had
misunderstood her intentions; that I had failed to appreciate the implied
intimacy and trust in her gesture. I still felt uncomfortable, violated, even,
but felt also that I’d come to an
understanding
of Isabella and her emotional needs. Blood was her liv
elihood, her
life
.
By rejecting her gift of blood I was, in essence, rejecting
her
,
rejecting everything she stood for. By the same token, if I could only make her
see why
I
had reacted the way I did…. I played the scenario over and
over again in my mind’s eye, saw her reaction in a thousand different ways. In
some of my fantasies she embraced me earnestly as soon as I stepped through the
door, having been through a similar revelatory process, the whole sorry affair
helping us to achieve an even greater level of intimacy than before. In others
she would look at me awkwardly, chewing her bottom lip and taking her time to
come round as I offered her platitudes, before the curl of her lips would
betray her true feelings and she would jump to her feet, laughing brightly,
clasping my hand and dragging me off to the bedroom where transfusions were
unnecessary and the exchange of bodily fluid came in forms less macabre and
indecipherable. At the time I had no idea which—if any—of these myriad
scenarios would come to pass yet, regardless, I knew I had to find out.

I took a
shower, and then afterwards sat for nearly half an hour on the edge of the
bath, drying in the cool draught from the open window. I cut myself shaving,
and laughed at the sheer irony as blood spattered stark against the white
porcelain of the sink. It seemed almost obscene that something as vital as
blood could run so freely, so easily, and that at the same time was so easy to
re-engineer, to tinker with, to reconstruct.

I put the thought out of mind
as I attempted to gather myself in preparation for the afternoon’s encounter.

It was with a knot tied firmly
in the pit of my stomach that I drew the car up to the curb alongside
Isabella’s house later that afternoon. In my mind I ran through the events as I
had planned them, and appraised myself in the rearview mirror. I felt tired and
anxious. I had no idea how she was going to react.

I sat there for a while,
willing myself to get out of the car and walk slowly up the path toward her
house, to mount the little red steps and rap confidently on the door. There was
no sign of her at any of the windows. I waited.

Finally, I got out of the car,
slamming the door shut behind me. I could have been any pre-pubescent schoolboy
or condemned man; my heart was hammering wildly in my chest and my palms were
clammy with sweat. I knew it was foolish to feel so nervous, but in confronting
Isabella I also knew that I was bringing the situation to a head. Whilst the
words were left unspoken there was still a chance that everything could be
redeemed; once she opened the door there was no turning back, and all the
answers would be revealed.

I brushed myself down and made
my way slowly up the steps to the door. I cleared my throat and then rapped the
knocker. Standing back, running my fingers nervously through my hair, I took
deep breaths and shuffled my feet on the top step.

There was no reply.

I waited for a moment longer,
and then tried again. A minute passed like an hour. I peered through the
curtains into the living room. It was empty, the TV switched off, a plate of
half-eaten food on the floor by the sofa. It looked like the debris of a
microwaved lasagna. A magazine lay open on the windowsill. I could just make
out the headline at the top of the article, printed on cheap paper in large,
lurid fonts: “One Hundred Ways to Impress Your Man!” I shook my head, feeling a
brief pang of remorse.

When I was sure that nobody was
going to answer, I decided to try the handle. To my surprise, it turned in my
hand. The door creaked open with an expectant sigh. I peered into the hallway.
There was no sign of Isabella.

“Hello?”

No response.

“Isabella? It’s me. Can I come
in?”

The silence was eerie, like an
absence of something familiar punctuated only by the measured ticking of her
old grandfather clock, monotonously counting away the seconds, crawling
steadily toward the future. I wondered if she’d gone out and accidentally
forgotten to lock the door. Feeling awkward and uninvited, I slipped inside,
clicking the door shut behind me.

“Isabella? Are you home?”

Nothing.

Unsure what else to do, I
decided to see if she was working in the lab at the back of the house where she
may not have heard me come in. I made my way down the hall, through the dining
room and into the kitchen. There was a smell of over-ripe fruit and burnt
toast. I felt a sharp stab of guilt at the sight of the kitchen sink, this time
full of dirty pots and pans, as if I were a criminal returning to the scene of
his crime. I called her name again, just to be sure. This time I heard a sound
of movement from within the laboratory. My heart lurched.

“Isabella?”

The door between the two rooms
cracked open a few inches and suddenly she was peering out at me from around
the edge of the frame.

“Oh.”

I stepped closer. She opened
the door a little wider.

She looked disheveled, in
disarray. Her hair was unkempt and her clothes were crumpled as if she’d been
wearing them for a number of days. There was a disturbing, almost forlorn look
in her eyes and her face was drawn and pale, pasty, even. She looked tired,
unraveled, as if she were starting to come apart at the seams. I had to fight
the urge to suddenly gather her up in my arms and hold her, to try to save her from
the world, from herself. Behind her, the laboratory was a riot of noise: the
sound of a pump, gurgling with fluid; a printer spewing out a data file; a
radio insistently hammering out an unfamiliar dance tune. I understood why she
hadn’t heard me calling her name from down the hall.

I tried to get her attention,
but she seemed distracted, keen to get back to the lab, or to get away from me.

“How have you been?”

She shrugged. “Okay.” Her eyes
flicked back and forth nervously as though it made her uncomfortable to look me
in the eye.

“Look, can we go somewhere to
talk?”

Her reply was drowned out by
the insistent droning of the pump from the other room. I pushed on the door,
trying to see over her shoulder. I raised my voice above the clamor. “What
are
you doing in there...?”

Isabella shuffled awkwardly,
blocking my view. “No. Not now.” Her voice was firm. I realized she was
responding to the first of my questions. “You need to go.”

I wasn’t sure what to do, what
to say. I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, to try to reassure her
that I only wanted to make things right between us, but she winced and twisted
away from me as if the simple act of me touching her was enough to cause her
pain. Her elbow struck the door as she shifted around and it bounced open,
banging loudly as it clattered against the wall. I caught a view of the inside
of the lab. A naked male corpse was lying prone on a trolley in the centre of
the room, wired up to a host of elaborate medical machinery. Cables snaked from
the man’s chest in a web-work of plumbing and bags of unidentifiable fluid hung
on intravenous drips from a metal framework over the bed. It looked like a
scene from a cheap horror movie; the workshop of a latter-day Frankenstein, a
crazed scientist in the process of creating a monster. I pushed past Isabella,
forcing my way into the room. Electric light gave everything a clean, clinical
sheen. The radio continued to hiss with the pounding of drums and static.

“What the hell?”

The pump was thumping noisily
as it sucked blood from the body, feeding it through long coils of piping. I
could see it sloshing into a large glass bottle by the foot of the trolley red
and dark and syrupy.

I wheeled on Isabella, confused
and a little scared. “Where did you get a human corpse?”

She stared at me, a stern,
emotionless expression on her face. “It’s not a
corpse
.”

I looked again. The body,
although emaciated, was still breathing, its chest rising and falling to a
slow, soft rhythm, in time with the labored wheezing of the apparatus that was
slowly alleviating it of its lifeblood.

She shifted closer. Her voice
was gentle in my ear. Her breath felt warm against my cheek. “Look closer.” And
more quietly—“It’s you.”

I gazed down in abstract horror
at the man lying on the trolley before me. It was true. He had my face.

For a moment everything seemed
to stop. The noise was gone; replaced only by the roar of blood rushing through
my ears. I stared down at the body before me in grim fascination. His eyes were
closed, his face unshaven and covered in a burr of fine black bristles. He had
the same long, equine nose and the same square chin that faced me in the mirror
every morning. Yet he was thin, painfully so. His cheeks were hollow and drawn
and his ribcage was clearly visible through his translucent, papery skin. His
lips were dry and cracked. It was clear he was both severely undernourished and
dehydrated. His blood was flowing freely through the fat tubing, sloshing into
the glass demijohn with every beat of his weak heart, assisted by the pump that
was inexorably drawing him closer to his death. I wanted to feel sick but,
instead, I felt simply numb. He wasn’t me,
couldn’t be me
, but he was a
part
of me, somehow.