The Blood Gospels
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The Blood Gospels Audio Script of a Novel written and spoken by Robert Locke © 2012 Robert Locke 916-456-6991 [email protected] Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. The Gospel According to John 6.54 The Bible, The New Testament 2 DISK 1 — (81:46 minutes) Blood and Eternity ANGIE: (her voice coming up out of darkness, young, exuberant, a little shrill in her eagerness to begin their stories) Okay, okay, for me it starts ... FAYE: (her voice coming up under Angie’s voice, hesitant, not nearly so sure where they are headed) “I am Faye ... I can’t ... but ... “ ANGIE: (overlapping) ... Mom ... hey, Mom! MARK: (his voice coming over the both of them, gruff) Angie, one at a time. Let your mother go first. ANGIE: ... Dad!!!! MARK: Angie, let your mother go first!” FAYE: ... Angie, please dear, I can’t concentrate.” ANGIE: Oh! Tsssk! (sighs) Lo que sea, lo que quieren. CONSTANTIN: (his soft, bitter laughter floating up beneath their overlapping voices) The noise ... the noise ... can we not, perhaps, begin with less noise?” FAYE: (more determined, but still soft) Very well then. Yes, I am Faye. I can’t ... but think ... that of the four of us you will want to hear first from me —oh, that beginning is weak, far too weak; you will want to think me stronger than that— but a beginning, you understand, you must understand ... a start to it all ... is not ... easy ... is not easily ... wrought —oh, you will think me tedious, they all do, but— I will start again. My name is Faye. Faye August, wife, mother, scientist —oh, good heavens, how lame— I am Faye. For me— (laughs) Yes, as Angie says, “For me ... !” ANGIE: (wearily) Oh, tssk, Mom! FAYE: ... oh, I’m sorry, dear. For me, it ... began with that first bite. Yes. The flow of blood. That drag of his eyes, up. The force of his will, which had a body and gravity of its own, dragging my eyes up. 3 Then his extraordinary beauty. Well, his ridiculously beautiful face, that ivory skin, that hair that framed— that really more resembled softly curling copper wire than— copper threads ... than hair, copper threads tousled and falling adorably about his temples and over his forehead, down almost to his eyes— but those eyes, yes, his eyes glinting amber, and most of all the expression in those eyes, visible even at that distance as though projected into my own eyes, that expression at once of hope ... and hurt ... and longing ... in their profundity the jagged aura of a soul lost long ago, and wandering still. Until that precise moment, you must understand, everything was in control, nicely in control— in my control, nicely. Yes, for me, it started here, beyond my depth in this man's eyes ... MARK: Oh, that’s where it starts. The Gospel According to Faye. FAYE: Mark! MARK: Oh, no, no Faye, the Gospel According to Mark, that doesn’t start for a while now. CONSTANTIN: (below him) Oh, sarcasm. MARK: (overlapping) Okay, Angie, you’re up next. Go ahead. Take off. ANGIE: (with teenage sarcasm) No, Dad, no, I can wait. MARK: No, now, come on. ANGIE: Oh, is it okay, then? CONSTANTIN: (below them both) Oh, another, my goodness. MARK: (laughs) Come on, sweetheart. ANGIE: Oh, well, if it’s okay, then, if it’s okay with everybody, Angie here, and yeah, my mom’s right, and she can laugh, but for me ... CONSTANTIN: (below them) Oh, will this be endurable? ANGIE: ... for me, yeah, for me it starts right here, right now in that same moment. See I’m right there with her, and I've got my eyes on my mom —yeah, she's Faye, like she already told you— and she's like ... transfixed, that's exactly the word for it, transfixed. And I look to see 4 what she's all transfixed at, and it's this mosquito on her knuckle right next to her wedding ring. She's got her knuckle right up in front of her eyes, and this mosquito's got his nose, his perboscus thing as she calls it, shoved deep into her knuckle, sucking up all this blood into his body which is first transparent but starts turning blood red. And she’s letting him do this, see, well watching him because she’s always on the lookout for science and she’s always saying, “Oh, Angie, look at this!” because when you’re a 14-year-old everyone thinks they can tell you what to do and what to look at, but I’m almost 14, and that’s almost 15, and so I don’t need to be told what to look at anymore, you know, and in my mom’s case it’s always something scientific and gross, like now when she’s got me looking at this mosquito filling up with her blood on account of how she’s told me like a hundred thousand times that when the mosquito bites he injects this anticoagulant stuff to keep your blood flowing, instead of clotting, you know, which is what blood is always doing —I mean see what I’m talking about how gross she can be— but the idea is if you let the mosquito get his fill naturally, instead of scaring him off, then he drinks back in all his anticoagulant stuff, and that’s what causes the itch. So okay, I am looking at the mosquito like she told me to, tssssk! And then I look up at my mom’s face and I see her eyes all transfixed, but there's this second now where they do this weird thing, the pupils like flutter, then her eyes lift off the mosquito, only it's my mom lifting them, like it's this heavy load on them that she's got to lift them, like with muscles, and she lifts her eyes higher and higher and higher and then stands there, even more transfixed, transfixed to the nth, transfixed like she's staring down a long tunnel at something way down at the end, something very scary, but you know, fascinating. She's, like, fascinated. I follow her eyes across the street, up to the second story of the hotel over there, the Hotel Colonial, and there's this guy standing in this window. And he's naked! Only because of the window sill, all I can see is his chest and the flat of his stomach, so it's not like shocking, it's not like this guy is exposing himself or anything. He's just standing there transfixing my mom, and he's got this look on his face just like the look on my mom's face, like they know each other. Or knew each other a long time ago. He's got this whole attitude of disbelief, like he's in a 5 photograph titled Surprise! with his arm up and his hand grabbing onto the edge of the drape like he just threw back the drapes just this second, and just saw her, and froze. His lips are pressed together in this hard, straight line, and he's got this face like out of the movies, like think of the handsomest man you've ever seen and multiply him by like a million. His hair is jet black, and his eyes are like, they're like black, too. Black, black, black, like Carlsbad Caverns when they turn out the lights black. Only with fire right in the center of them. Even at this distance I can see these black orbs with this fire in the center, like this laser piercing all the way across the street and transfixing my mom. I look back at my mom, and the bloodsucker on her finger is huge, his guts full of my mom's blood. Now I don't want you to think I'm the kind of girl who faints when I see blood. I mean, I'm not indelicate or anything —in fact, my mom's always saying I'm sensitive beyond words, "Angie, you are sensitive beyond words", that’s what my mom’s always saying— and I can stand the sight of a little blood. It's just, first of all, I'm a vegetarian so blood's not my thing. And second, right while I'm watching, the mosquito's guts get so full of my mom's blood that suddenly he poops! This yellow poop! Yesterday's blood! I mean gross! I need to give you the whole picture. It's very important you get everything, especially you, I mean, you know. It's late Friday afternoon, I'm dying to get out of here, I've been in school all week, I'm going home to Santa Cruz de K'u for the weekend —big thrill!— it's the hottest day in the history of time and the hottest place in the known universe, right upside this blazing white hospital wall on the streets of Mérida in the Yucatán Peninsula of México. Uh, excuse me, Me-hi-co. Like my dad says —who dragged us here in the first place— the Yucatán is like this skillet sticking out over the Caribbean, flat and hot and frying in the sun all day long. Then the very second the sun goes down, the bloodsuckers come out, first the mosquitoes in the dusk, singing in your ears and crawling up under your hair, then deep in the black of the night, the vampires.