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I can’t remember the evening that Lestat and I first met, but our encounter was caught on video. Lestat played it for me once on his top-of-the-line cellphone. The image is surprisingly crisp and clear, considering the circumstances. There’s a date stamp on the bottom so I know when it happened. It was three days after the inquest into my brother’s death.
The video begins, as the ancient Romans would say, ‘in medias res.’ Lestat’s white-gold hair and muscular shoulders take up almost half the screen. He leans forward, and rocks back, but there’s no sound on the video. I have to imagine the animalistic grunting he makes as he takes his pleasure.
But as it turns out, there's no need for me to rely on my own feeble imagination. Considerately, Lestat supplies dialogue. He is, after all, the creative one – the musician, the artist. (I’m just the ATM.) He gives himself the deep, portentous voice of an American news reader – “Do you like this? Do you like this, baby?”
I don’t like the voice he gives me. He gives me an exaggerated French accent (In real life it’s hardly more pronounced than his own.) and an effeminate lisp. I’m the punchline of a bad comedian’s homophobic joke. “Ride me, you big thtallion, ride me hard!” – he has me say.
On the tiny screen of the cellphone, my lips don’t move.
Lestat has a gift for voice-over work. He should have been an actor.
The severe angle (the camera must have been hidden well above eye level) makes me look smaller than I am. I look delicate, waiflike. My eyes are glassy, unfocussed, empty. I imagine that for Lestat, it must have been like fucking one of those blow up sex dolls – but a bit better because I’m warm, my skin is soft, and I don’t have that offputting plastic smell.
I don’t react in any way to the pounding that I am receiving. I’m oblivious.
My choice. Oh, I don’t mean the pounding. That’s rape, pure and simple. The oblivion. I chose it. So much alcohol, so many pills, taken deliberately with the intent of making me numb, of making me unable to feel a pain I cannot bear. A pain I will do almost anything to escape. Even this.
Then the camera captures the moment that seals my fate.
I reach out and touch Lestat’s gold hair. The corners of my mouth turn up. Lestat looks down at me. Our eyes meet; he leans forward to kiss me.
Easy to misread this. To think this is romance, when it isn’t. I’m still lost in my drug and alcohol-induced haze. I’m reaching out to Lestat because his hair is pretty. It’s purely instinctual – our species’ petty, jackdaw attraction to pretty, shiny things.
“That’s the moment,” Lestat says in his own, natural voice. “That’s the moment when I knew I had to have you.”
Lestat presses a button and the video disappears.
“You should erase that,” I say. My voice is flat and emotionless. “It’s evidence of a crime.”
Lestat shakes his head.
“I’m safe enough. I knew where the camera was, so I was careful not to show my face.”
“I had to fight to get you out of there,” he says. “There was this steroid-crazed muscle man with arms like swollen balloons, who insisted that he was next. I kicked him in his tiny balls and ran off, carrying you in my arms.”
“How many were there?” I ask.
“One guy, one guy only, but he was big. Tiny head on an enormous neck, like a pea on top of a pyramid…you know the type.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I say. “How many were there before you? How many times was I…”
My voice fades away. I can’t say the word, but that’s not a problem. Lestat understands what I mean.
“I don’t know,” Lestat says, annoyed. “I didn’t count. Why would I count? I didn’t want to think of you with those others! I went back to the club and erased the video. I only kept this little snippet, for sentimental reasons.”
He smiles.
“Want to watch it again?”