The Fractal Blood Soul
What had yet to happen – the future, popular nickname for the only real god this world knows – the great god Uncertainty divulged to me, to all the dead, everything, and I mean all of it: the deed to every calamity, diamonds in their bituminous veins, the acorn’s stronghold of oak. Posterity hid nothing. That was how I knew.
The medical examiner had removed the gross matter of my incinerated corpse, all the bones and remnants of clothing that hadn’t burned. Yet, the ash in the firepit contained incompletely combusted amino acids, gelid molecules of my flesh slain twice, first by vampire, then fire.
▬▬The worse for you, accursed shade! Die again! Twice dead thing!
The memory of those words from the vampire shaman fluttered like cobwebs, insubstantial, easy to brush aside. The truth in them, I could not get passed.
In a whisk, with thrilling immediacy, this truth that infinity had whispered and I had not yet heard brought about a fervent change.
Upon contact with the ash of my destroyed body, with the cinders of the vampire that had owned my corpse, I participated in the future of twice dead things.
A weird breeze arrived from all directions at once. Embers swirled up into the air before me like a swarming of hornets. Red, breathing motes of fire spinning like liquor in my brain.
These were blood rubies. If I fixed on any one of them, it paused, circumvolving slowly, and I spied in it a wolf of hell. There was the vampire that killed me. In another, I identified Bernie’s killer. I looked for the shaman priest.
It stared back at me from its own crimson bauble. The air around it shuddered like the thermal nimbus of a brazier in the cold. For a moment, insanity touched me.
The priest spoke with Bernie’s voice ▬▬Twice dead things cancel the fractal blood soul.
Morning caressed the sky like a snail extending its gray frill. How long had I knelt before the firepit mesmerized by the priest of the undead? The moon had set. In minutes, sunbeams would lance through the forest and slice me free from Bernie’s flesh. I would die the classic death of the vampire.
I wasn’t ready to die! Not now that I knew what infinity had whispered.
I leaped up with a cry like a mouthful of mud. Through the flimsy light across the grassland and into the woods, I sprinted agile as an impala on fire.
The ash from the cremation of my possessed body had canceled the vampire inside me and installed me in its place – in Bernie’s undead body.
How?
The shaman’s gloating laughter flogged me faster. ▬▬Twice dead things.
Through purply daybreak, I bolted, ducking low boughs, hurtling fallen trees, dodging rock outcroppings. Death-rays of smoky light braised my back – Bernie’s long shoulders – as I flung myself across the cedar chip parking lot of the resort where we had booked a cabin.
Blessedly, the door to our lodge faced north, and the key slid home. The door banged open, and I toppled with rasping breath into the salvation of darkness.
Sunrise, like some jealous god, lofted forth, banishing all other suns, the galaxy entire. The sky, contused maroon and green, gashed my vision to white blindness until I firmly shut the slatted shades.
Collapsed on the bed in thunder-gray duskiness, face aglow with satanic ardor, I listened to the morning mania of birds and wondered what had happened. And I knew. Infinity confided.
I had discovered the dreadful secret of the undead.
Bernie’s brain organized the details with his informed mathematical exactitude. He had often hidden in these computations when we had our little tiffs. Now, occupying his flesh, I understood why.
Mathematics is a Mesopotamian priestess, fists full of writhing vipers, keeping the uninitiated at bay while she does her magic circle dance of three hundred and sixty steps, twelve animal postures, and twenty-four pirouettes.
For her chosen ones, she will lift her big hoop skirts and expose, tattooed to her inner thighs and over her tonsured labia, the mysteries of imaginary numbers, nonlinear systems and power series.
She had seduced Bernie with this sorcery when he was still a boy. He loved to talk about it. I felt the quiet of those enigmas still moving through his brain. Once, after he had solved a particularly arduous set of differential equations, he had pulled me to his wide chest and had crushed the breath out of me with his joy.
Lying in bed, I put my hands on his wide chest. My chest.
▬▬Think of an equilateral triangle with sides of length one. At the middle of each side add a new triangle one-third the size. Now put equilateral triangles on the middle of all sides of the new figure and so on. The length of the first triangle is three. Now, for the second figure, which looks like the outline for a Star of David, add up all the segments (1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3…) and you’ll see the total length of the boundary of the second curve is 3 X 4/3. Repeat the process an infinite number of times, and the length of the boundary of the figure is 3 X 4/3 X 4/3 X 4/3…∞. Yet, the area of the figure remains less than the area of a circle drawn around the original triangle. Thus, a line infinitely long encloses a finite and relatively small area. Weird.
The fractal pattern Bernie’s brain envisioned looked like an intricate snowflake – the same design imprinted on the faces of the undead … on my face! Fractals describe the structure of bronchial tubes, arteries, the human brain, seacoasts, clouds, galaxies – and the blood soul.
A knock on the door shuddered through the room. I ignored it.
The blood is blind. But not forgetful. It has an iron mind and remembers everything from the amoeba’s invisible face to the mandrill’s clown mask, from the leisure of the sea cucumber and the great lizards’ obsessive compulsions to the elegant rat and the rye fungus crammed with dreams. The blood soul is the evolutionary tree – and it has a fractal dimension…
Another knock and this time a jangle of keys sat me up in bed. The door swung open. Daylight flared through the room.
I soared so quickly into the bathroom, slamming the bathroom door behind me, I found myself pressed up against the mirror above the sink. I had no reflection.
“Cleaning.”
▬▬Come back later, I said in a caliginous voice from the far end of a tunnel.
The outer door immediately snicked shut.
I emerged from the bathroom pestered by thoughts of the police. They would come to interview Bernie soon as they had identified my burned body. I had to leave but couldn’t until dark. I slid into bed and buried myself in the sheets to contemplate my bizarre situation.
Fractals are fractions. Twice dead things possess the inert fraction of the vampire virus and, when added to the living fractal of the undead, augment that fraction to a whole, deleting it. Poof! No more vampire, just a corpse.
Then: Why am I a vampire? I despaired in the sepia dark. Why did the slain fractal virus not erase me? The answer blew out from infinity: Because the ash of the twice dead thing was me. Even as the fractal pattern of the phage possessing Bernie disappeared, taking the vampire with it, my ghost’s outrageous presence imprinted a fractal pattern of my own.
This would require deeper investigation, I realized, gliding to sleep.
Vampires don’t dream. Our minds move at the speed of darkness. Once we’re dormant, daylight hours pass in a black instant. And soon as the sun slips under night’s asphalt, we wake, intensely present.
Present and hungering.
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