Bastien Arx/Masquerade
Four months ago...
What is he doing here?
The thought is recurrent, though he doesn't lack for the answer. His sense of displacement is perpetual and intense: around him, gilded wallpaper sparkles with endless fields of fleur de lis, the high vaults of the ivory-crowned ceiling host to divine gatherings of curious, playful trompe l'oeil angels in delicate fresco while below them monstrous chandeliers drip with kindled crystal droplets and shards, inverted trees of cold and constant fire. Lower still seas of gleaming silk and sumptuous velvet whorl, waves of perfumed air tossed in invisible tides from the whipping hems of daring and dauntingly expensive gowns, driven dizzily around the floor by the bright voices of strings, bows and keys. Laughter. Light. Wine, champagne, one exotic dish after another, smoldering glances exchanged across creamed and powdered shoulders and above the flickering crescents of open fans, whispers in ears, berry-stained lips in such scandalous proximity to clean-shaven jawlines and the subtle touch of satin-skinned fingers to an arm in passing capable of containing a wealth of adulterous intent.
Paradise for the social sinner, luxuries rarefied by even the most exacting of standards.
Fakery. Paste. Thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands of platinum in jewels and injudicious expenditures, men and women of power and prestige, bloodlines penned down throughout the ages by envious fingers as names wreathed in laurels and legacies and not a single drop of significance to be found anywhere at all.
He has experienced for himself all there is on offer in this country of the culturally discriminate and found it wanting. They have loved him; he has let them do it and come away ill for the exchange. Dishes he would never have selected for himself, heavy and decadent enough to leave his stomach roiling for hours. Styles, fabrics, the fashions of the day, cutting-edge and tailored with unforgiving adoration of angle to the punishing physicality of his frame, the starches that he finds cloying, the cuts that he finds absurd. He has sickened himself too on their women, peeling them out of their elaborate, confectionary gowns and underthings and finding them quite like the candies held in such high regard here: beautiful to look at, less than satisfying, their contents impossible to determine until one has already had the misfortune of discovering they dislike the flavor and are forced to search for a way to cleanse the palate, bite-sized and easily enough consumed in quantities fit to make a man ill.
Now he stands to one side of the room and watches the whirlpool of meaninglessness with a glass in his hand, expression empty of the growing disdain he has for these self-glorifying fetes of rhetoric and inconsequence, feeling as though he will never understand why they can't see him for what he is -- the darker shadow amidst their naive and endless pandering, their pathos -- dutifully boring holes into a woman with his eyes and waiting for her to finally give in.
She's been coloring for him for half an hour now and still seems determined to play the part of the careful coquette. He lets her. He needn't chase, only stand and watch, the man with the champagne eyes who has become momentarily fashionable to know, an accessory to be acquired, flaunted or envied. It suits his purposes well enough and while it cannot last -- he does not flatter himself by believing this spate of popularity is anything but superficial, cosmetic whim on the part of women who squabble and spit in vanity amongst themselves like vipers for whatever morsel takes their collective fancy -- it needn't last to serve the end he requires it to serve.
Green eyes flash from across the darkly clad shoulder of the man with whom she dances. The upward tick at the corner of his mouth is a mechanical thing, controlled like a clockwork affectation from the seat at the back of his skull that he occupies with greater and greater frequency while he views the world through the windows of his eyes, as though removed from it save in the role of observer to his own life. He half-conceals the twitch with his glass, from which he never takes a sip; his eyes lower, his weight shifts. Caught staring again...how bashful I am...how boyish, how earnest my adoration, how...
...easy it is to bait the hook. How much I hate myself for being good at what I'm doing. How much I hate you for falling for it...and the knowledge that when I retire this evening you will be all I can think about.
Even his self-loathing is automatic, obligatory. He acknowledges it and feels nothing.
And when she emerges flushed from the crowd and the dance and one of the ladies he's seen her conversing with 'chances' to 'coincidentally' collide with her, sending her into his chest and spilling, with great and manufactured distress, the contents of her wine glass across the sleeve of his shirt, he catches her and allows her to witness his catalogue of expressions, each delivered with the seamless efficiency of someone who has held them in reserve all evening long: astonishment, concern, quiet interest, breathless intensity, searching enchantment as she dabs at the fabric as though it isn't hopelessly forever stained.
And when they adjourn to the balcony and stand at the railing inhaling the fragrance of citrus blossoms and dew, he points upward to the splattering of glistening stars and tells her which of them he can see in the land he calls home and which he cannot. He paints pictures of himself in which he pines for those lost avenues and byways he once knew so well; he (knowing what is to come, knowing what he intends) even remarks that he loved, that he lost, and in consequence fled all that once meant everything to a boy whose eyes hadn't yet been opened to the cruelties of loss, wondering at the words even as they form.
(He looks deeply into my eyes, she thinks, and with such intensity! What does he see there?)
(Looking, he sees himself reflected in the moss-ringed dark of her pupils, and he meets his own eyes there, seeing himself through the mirror of what she is and what she is about to be, and he is sick with the monstrous truth of what he's become.)
And when the petals of her humid lips open to deepen the kiss as her fingertips press faint indentations into the fabric of his doublet, and when he gently fills her mouth with his tongue and, in so doing, shepherds the small sphere of powdered death beneath her own to dissolve and bring about an inglorious end (a gasp, a choke, the delicate, slender dove of her pale hand fluttering upward to clasp about a neck as graceful as a swan's as she begs for her life with her eyes, shouts accusations with them when no help is forthcoming -- he meets them, he holds them, he receives her every silent scream -- as she scrawls hopeless messages of fearful denial with scrabbling fingertips on the porous stone floor before finally falling still in a pile of silks and still-warm skin) he is able to recognize, in an unconscious way, that he could only confess the truth of that heartache to a woman he already knew wouldn't live another day. He stares at her traitorous sillhouette on the ground with flat eyes, absently smoothing the breast of his shirt where her fingers clutched at the cloth, then turns to lever himself easily over the balcony railing and into the dark of the empty grounds, stalking toward the gates and another chore to be finished, hands hot and tingling with this fresh bath of spectral blood.
Another ship, another manifest. Another assumed name, another threat to be eliminated in clandestine quietude. One day one of them will get the better of him, he thinks. One day he'll be recognized, perhaps. One day he will die. Until then he will sacrifice himself in small pieces, eliminating the all of the subtlest of dissenters, all the most treacherous of deceivers.
All the most treacherous deceivers, that is, save himself.
To be continued.
