The Oasis — Saturday, 13 January 1990, 11:50 PM

The Oasis, 75th Street / Modius’s Mansion Chicago, Illinois / Gary, Indiana

The razor fit in her jacket pocket the way a secret fits in a sentence — weightless until you need it. Bone handle, good steel, a dead man’s vanity she’d taken from a coat pocket at The Oasis two years ago when she was alive and working the VIP and the john had passed out in the booth with his wallet open and his throat exposed and she’d thought, even then, even before she knew what she’d become: You never know when you’ll need something sharp.

She’d tried Williams first. The number she had rang out. The place she’d heard he frequented was empty. Williams was a ghost when he wanted to be, and tonight he wanted to be, and that left Sable alone in the Buick on I-90 north with a razor in her pocket and a strip club on 75th Street getting closer at sixty-five miles an hour.

The Oasis. THE OASIS in pink neon, the S flickering the way it had flickered for fifteen years, the way it would flicker until somebody cut the power or the building fell down, whichever came first in this part of Chicago. Two cars in the lot. No black Lincoln. No Big Six.

Sable parked on the side street. Walked to the front door. The bouncer looked up from his newspaper and looked back down. A beautiful woman in a leather jacket walking into a strip club at midnight was not a question worth asking.

Inside, the smell took her back faster than the sight. Sweat, perfume, spilled drinks, cigarette smoke layered into the carpet like geological strata, each year’s worth of smoke pressed down by the next until the building itself was more tar than brick. A dancer on the runway working for three men who weren’t watching. Bass-heavy music that she could feel in her teeth.

She scanned the room the way she’d learned to scan rooms in her first week at The Oasis, before Kiki taught her to do it with her body angled away and her eyes working the mirrors: three mortals, one bartender, the dancer, the bouncer at the door. No dead blood. No GDs.

The back room was unlocked. She took the far booth, back to the wall, and waited.

Allicia came at midnight. She didn’t knock.

She stood in the doorway and the red light hit her from two directions and for one second Sable saw the woman in the photograph on the studio wall — the dancer, the one with the straight spine and the chin that said I have been looked at by better than you. Then the second passed and what stood in the doorway was something else: a woman who had practiced stillness for fifty years until the stillness had become indistinguishable from the woman, the way water takes the shape of whatever holds it.

Black dress. Thin gold chain. Hair pulled back. She crossed the room and sat across from Sable and the velvet booth creaked under the weight of someone who looked like she weighed nothing and carried everything.

Silence. The bass pulsed through the wall. The red lamp hummed.

“You left the shoes on the barre.”

Sable looked at her. Allicia’s face was a mask and the mask was the face and the question of which one was performing had been answered decades ago: both. Always. There was nothing behind the mask because the mask had eaten it.

“They’re yours,” Sable said. “Everything in that room is yours. I know what he did.”

“What do you think he did?”

A test. Not a question. Sable could feel the weight of it. Allicia had come to the South Side of Chicago to sit in the back room of a strip club and ask one question, and the answer would determine whether Sable was worth talking to or just another piece of furniture the prince had moved from one room to another.

“He collected you. You were the most beautiful thing in Gary and he put you on a shelf. Then you stopped being new, and the shelf became a room, and the room became the mansion, and now you live inside the thing he built around you. And he gave your studio to the next one because keeping it empty would mean admitting he broke something.”

Allicia was silent for a long time. On the other side of the wall a new song started, something with a heavy bassline and a woman’s voice that sounded like it was coming from underwater.

“You’re smarter than I expected.”

Not a compliment. An observation. A woman picking up a blade and testing the edge with her thumb.

“I didn’t come here to warn you. I came here to see what you are.” She was already shifting in the booth, the muscles in her shoulders organizing themselves for departure. “Now I’ve seen.”

Sable watched her stand and thought about the razor in her pocket, which had nothing to do with anything, and about the pointe shoes on the barre, which had everything to do with everything, and about the photograph on the wall of a woman who used to dance in a room that now belonged to the woman who’d replaced her, and she opened her mouth and said the thing she’d come to say, the thing that would either crack the wall or end the conversation forever.

“What did he do to you? Not the studio. The thing you actually came here to not say.”

Allicia stopped. Her hand was on the table. Her fingers pressed into the velvet hard enough to leave marks.

The bass pulsed. The lamp hummed. Ten seconds. Twenty. Sable didn’t move. Didn’t fill the silence. Didn’t reach across the table. She just held the space open the way you hold a door for someone carrying something heavy, and waited to see if Allicia would walk through it.

She sat back down.

“He Blood Bound me.”

Three words. Delivered flat, like a doctor reading a chart. A fact, not a confession. Something she’d lived with for so long that the telling of it had been rehearsed and re-rehearsed in the silence of the mansion until the words were smooth as river stones, all the sharp edges worn away by years of not saying them.

“Nineteen forty-one. I thought it was love. Three drinks and I couldn’t tell the difference. By the time I understood what he’d done, the question of whether I loved him or whether the blood loved him for me had stopped being a question I could answer.”

She looked at Sable. The mask was cracked. Not broken. One fault line running through fifty years of stillness, one fracture in the porcelain that let the heat out for the first time since Truman was president.

“That’s what he did. That’s what he’ll do to you if you let him pour.”

She stood. Walked to the door. Opened it and the main floor music flooded the booth and the red light shifted and Sable sat in the velvet dark with the razor in her pocket and the warning in her chest.

Allicia paused in the doorway without turning around.

“The shoes are yours now. I don’t dance anymore.”

Then she was gone, and the door closed, and Sable was alone in the back room of the club where she used to take off her clothes for money, and the only sound was the bass coming through the wall and the lamp humming and her own breathing, which she didn’t need but couldn’t stop, because some habits outlast the body that made them.

She drove to Miller Beach. The mansion. The ghoul. The drawing room. Modius at the piano, lid open tonight, one hand on the keys.

“Well?”

She gave him the version she’d built on the drive south. Allicia was territorial. Proud. Wanted to see the replacement. Not a threat.

“She said nothing else?”

The probing. She could feel him pressing against the gaps in the report, testing the seams the way he’d tested her performance in the drawing room five days ago. The vanity had worked then. It nearly didn’t work now. She spent the last of something she couldn’t name and said: “She said the shoes are mine now. That she doesn’t dance anymore.”

Modius was quiet. His hand lifted off the keys. Something crossed his face that was too fast and too old to read — not guilt, Modius didn’t do guilt, but something adjacent to it, some cousin of recognition, the brief involuntary acknowledgment of a man who realizes he has broken something he didn’t know was still breakable.

“Good. Keep the shoes.”

He closed the piano lid.

“February second. Court. I expect you early.”

Fifth Avenue. Two in the morning. The studio was cold.

Sable sat on the floor beneath the photograph and looked at the pointe shoes and thought about what Allicia had told her and what she’d told Modius and the distance between those two things, which was the distance between what she knew and what she’d sold, which was the distance between the woman she was becoming and the woman she was supposed to be.

Allicia was Blood Bound. Since 1941. Three drinks and the question of love becomes unanswerable. The Oasis taught Sable what that looked like from the outside: the regulars who came back every night, not because the drinks were good or the girls were beautiful but because the building had become the shape of their loneliness and they couldn’t imagine fitting anywhere else. The Blood Bond was The Oasis with fangs. The cage was always the same shape. The bars just changed material.

Modius would offer. Allicia said so. Whatever he calls it. A toast at court. A private drink in the drawing room. The intimacy of shared blood, which in Kindred culture was sex and communion and contract all at once, and Sable had been performing all three since she was seventeen and had never once let any of them be real.

She would not drink.

She would not drink because Allicia told her not to, and Allicia was the only person in Gary who had told Sable something true without wanting something back, and that made Allicia the most dangerous person in Sable’s life, because people who give you things for free are the people you owe debts you can’t calculate.

Dawn pressed against the windows. Sable lay on the hardwood floor. The pointe shoes turned on their ribbons. The photograph watched.

Somewhere in Miller Beach, Allicia was sitting at a piano she didn’t play, in a mansion she couldn’t leave, bound to a man she couldn’t stop loving because the blood wouldn’t let her, and she had driven to the South Side of Chicago to sit in a strip club and tell a stranger the truth, and the truth was the only thing in fifty years that was entirely her own, and she had given it away.

Sable closed her eyes and thought about the woman on the barre in the photograph and the woman in the doorway of the back room and whether they were the same person or whether one had killed the other, and whether the killing was Modius’s fault or the blood’s or just the long slow mathematics of being beautiful and owned in a world that could not tell the difference between the two.