Heléne Grisee was the woman who got Luca Belliotti hooked up with death. She was a student of video art from Montreal who had been come to Cleveland in 1985 then decided to stay in America for an indefinite stretch of time.
They both went to the Cleveland Institute for the Arts, but they never talked until they were introduced at a party thrown by a mutual friend, Tony Vader. Vader was a heavy, jolly, often creepy guy who sometimes wore flamboyant big cloaks held on by intricate Celtic brooches, and who seemed to be at the center of several interlocking social circles. Luca knew Vader from his library job; they both wandered the stacks putting piles of books back on the shelves, picking up after slovenly students, hiding from their supervisors in the immense Shakespeare section which was near the French literature. Vader told Luca stories of his adventures as a roadie touring Chicago and St. Louis with Fetus Lullaby X, an industrial band. And since Luca liked industrial music too, or at least thought he did, Vader invited Luca to a party at his apartment in Cleveland Heights one evening.
When Luca saw Heléne at the party he was thinking of Darryl Hannah from Blade Runner, a favorite movie of his. Heléne was fragile yet tough, not quite human. She was surprisingly visually appealing and from the standpoint of hip countercultural image she was running circles around everybody else. She had ragged blond hair, and during all of 1986 it was always done up in what looked like monochromatic Caribbean head wraps. She dressed in a complicated array of translucent and opaque black fabric and her stockings had spidery tears and runs in them. No makeup but even without it she was very strikingly good looking.
Vader had the lights on a dimmer and candles going so at the party Luca needed to feel his way through the dark as if an underwater creature. Heléne was crouching by Vader's record crates looking through his vinyl collection when Luca sat down on the ripped velvet couch next to where she knelt. Depeche Mode was playing on the turntable.
"What are you looking for?" he asked.
"Something with soul," she said. He had heard her accented voice from a distance but never up close.
"Define soul."
"Nice try,” she said, squinting at him. “It is a thing undefinable. I know it when I hear it. Or see it."
"What have you found so far?"
"Punk." The word sounded funny with her Montreal accent. "Mostly. And a huge flock of synths. Tiresome." She was flipping through the discs with such fluid fingertips that he had to guess she worked at a record store.
"Bingo, you guessed it," she said.
"What's it called, maybe I've been there."
"It's a hole in the wall. It's called Value Pop."
"Never been there."
"A name stupide. But they have some good stuff there."
"Can I get you a drink?" he asked.
"I do not really drink ever," she said after pausing for a moment. "Sometimes I smoke grass and take pills but they have been losing their appeal lately too."
"That's too bad," Luca said. "Or good? I don't do drugs."
"I know, it's so dumb. Nothing external can hope to combat the sadness within. You know?"
"Sure."
"I wonder. If you know what I'm talking about. What is your name? It is Luca?"
"How'd you know that?" he asked.
"I just heard it from a little birdie."
The party wasn't so big that the two of them could escape anyone else's notice. Vader came over in his Middle Earth getup and said, "Oh goody goody gumdrops, I was hoping you two would find something to talk about." He was eating the olive out of a martini glass. All of his fingernails had been painted with glittery blue nail polish.
"We were going over your dismal record collection," Heléne said.
"All my records are square," Luca said, sipping his red wine.
"Just put on something spooky," Vader said. "They all want to have a seance."
Heléne perked up, giving Luca an enthused expression as if they were about to go on the roller coaster at the carnival. She was adorable. Luca had never been to a seance but if it meant hanging out with Heléne he would attend a virgin sacrifice.
They all sat in a circle around the room, Luca on the couch and the rest cross-legged on the floor. The loft was dim, which did lend an eerie quality to the situation, but for Luca as the resident square it was something of a strain to buy into what the seance-folk were selling. They spoke with a dead Roman senator, a child who perished on the Titanic, a witch from Salem (one of the other deathly-looking girls insisted), and once the idiocy had gotten out of their systems, they spoke with Heléne's older brother Claude who had died in 1981 of a rare liver disease. The evening became uncomfortable as Heléne had a back-and-forth with a rather lounge lizardy goth heartthrob who served as the medium bringing Claude's words to his sister. Ray stared at the medium as he concocted unlikely answers to Heléne's apparently earnest questions. He thought he could detect some rhythm of attempted seduction in the medium's answers and he wanted to sever whatever psychic connection the two were having.
Once that was over the witchcraft aficionado suggested they play a game Luca had never heard of before, called Toss The Floss. It involved a person holding the end of a thread of dental floss in one hand and passing the plastic container to somebody else while expressing their love for them, for whatever reason, and on to the next person, unwinding the floss on and on until the whole group was linked in a kind of web of love and affection. It was the most absurd thing Luca. had ever heard of and also nerve-wracking because he practically knew no one there.
When the medium had the floss he of course gave it to Heléne, saying that he loved her because he wanted to soothe the pain of her dead brother, and Luca could see right through the guy's floss-angle affectation to the horny asshole underneath. And totally unexpected was the floss Heléne extended to Luca, and she looked him in the eye and told him, "Luca, I don't know you, but I love you. For your undefinable soul. Let it stay that way, never define it to me as long as we know each other."
They were dating a few days later. She let him borrow a few records, things she felt were really representative of the other world she was in touch with. Some of this music was very beautiful, some was scary as it sounded like a monster screaming in the middle of a huge cistern full of long echoes. But he saw the appeal of it, he wasn't that square after all. He could evolve up to her particular aesthetic turret. There were lots of black candles and lots of sex. They went to see Blue Velvet in the theatre even though as a video artist she said she loathed movies. In Luca Belliotti's desk at his police station to this day is a picture of a group of them posing on the sidewalk in Chicago, outside a Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees concert in 1986. Vader is staring, giving his profile to the camera. Two other chicks in black are grimacing like Parisian whores at the photographer. Decades later, Luca’s not an embarrassingly gothic caricature, but definitely dark, leather jacket, pale skin, staring, vulpine grey eyes. Handsome. His hair was long enough to go behind his ears and hang in his face. Heléne is appealingly entwined with him in the picture, needing his support as if drunk even though she hadn't been. She was wearing white for a change, and the shutter clicked just as she flicked her cigarette butt so that it looked like she emitted a thread of sparks from her hand.
They went around being "morbid." They were drawn to any macabre books at the bookstores they went to. Heléne had a taste for reading true crime, especially involving female perpetrators. They would talk about serial killers like talking about pro basketball or restaurants. That bothered him. He became aware of her efforts to push the darkness too far.
Heléne liked to dominate him and punish him, sometimes sexually. To his utter terror he discovered that he liked some of her punishing ways. It wasn't liking, exactly. It was seeing the beauty and logic of having an orgasm in unusual, adverse, sometimes painful situations. There was a whole hidden universe of sensual textures and surfaces most normal people would want to avoid that this frail waif of a woman shoved him into. It was nothing he had ever contemplated before, but he felt safe under her guidance and love while these strange inexplicable things were happening between them.
Heléne had no bed in her apartment. They slept on the floor on a pile of blankets. Several months into their bizarre relationship she began speaking about how much she wished she were a vampire and wondering what it was like to sleep in a coffin. So, on and off for about a week in September 1986, Luca Belliotti slept in a coffin, at the behest of his girlfriend Heléne who wanted to see what it was like. She had a friend who had vampire tendencies who would be out of town for a month or so, and Heléne had offered to stay in the place. It was an appropriately crypt-like apartment attached to a crumbling warehouse in Cleveland Heights. Somber Latin words had been written on the concrete walls in charcoal ash. The two coffins were in the center of the floor, side by side. They looked battered and used.
Heléne thought vampires were absolutely ridiculous but the notion of sleeping in a coffin fascinated her, the notion of confronting your own death even in a very remote, safe way. Being trapped in darkness.
It took some getting used to. The sensory deprivation was maddening. Heléne and Luca slept during the days as vampires presumably do, when their school responsibilities allowed them to sleep during the day. The coffins were upholstered well enough so that Luca heard nothing as he was inside his. During his first interval of sleep he had an awful plummeting feeling, there in the dark, as he expected to put his hands up against the interior of the lid, to push upwards on it -- and find it immovable. Waking up from mid sleep with the inability to turn over or adjust one's posture was flaying to the mind and required immense meditation to get beyond. But Luca was able to transcend his body's old needs and sleep the sleep of the dead. His waking hours, once he adapted to this morbid slumber, had a heightened, buzzing quality that he found to be quite conducive to clear thinking and productivity. Heléne talked about how much she was getting out of it but he suspected that she was overstating her liking for the coffin life.
She would wake up first and get out of her box, come tap on his box to wake him up so they could go to the park and watch the sun set together, watch the living world dissolve. A sizable part of him worried that he would adjust to this, that it would become a normal part of life, that when he went back home to Gennaro and Beth Belliotti in Akron he would be going to sleep in a coffin in the cellar right about the time they sat at the kitchen table trading sections of the Plain Dealer.
The fifth day of the coffin he went to sleep after a long night of work at the library. He was exhausted. He knew this coffin situation couldn't last. But he felt like it was an experiment which must be carried through a few more days. He wasn't sure why.
Luca was buried in darkness for hours until he awoke and tried to listen for the vibrations of Heléne's footsteps moving around. It was typical that she got up first and sort of gave him unspoken permission to come out of the coffin he was sleeping in. He knew it was a bit pathetic but it was just the way they were, they were play acting some kind of romanticized negotiation and power exchange.
But this time he did not hear her. He slid the lid of his coffin off and saw from the windows it was dark, long dark. He checked his wristwatch. 9:30pm. Heléne's coffin was opened, and she was nowhere to be seen.
"Heléne?" he called out into the space.
No reply.
He thought she might have run down to the bar on the corner and he didn't like to think of her there alone so he went there to look for her. There were two or three other women who seemed to be imitations of her, girls who had noticed her and were echoing her looks with their clothes, hair and makeup, trying to catch up with her effect, but there was no original.
Back in the tomb he looked around for some evidence of where she could be. He soon found her video camera which had been left in the kitchen area, which was really just a corner of the room with a hot plate. The video camera was plugged into the wall, charging, and it took a little detective work to figure out the controls. He rewound the tape to the beginning and played it, watching through the viewer.
There were several minutes of footage of the park in autumn, leaves beginning to change, early that year. There was an extended long take of a party which had happened on the other side of town several days earlier. Luca saw himself leaning against a wall listening while another guy demonstrated his new drum machine and sequencer. Two women, the same women from the seance, were dancing in some kind of tribal, ritualistic, Mediterranean mystery cult kind of way. The snippets of footage got closer to the present moment, and it gave him a chill of apprehension to watch time catch up with him and know that he was about to see something revelatory, final and possibly upsetting.
She had evidently gotten up early in the sunny day, cheating vampiric death by seeing the sunlight, and she filmed the sunbeams oozing across the floor, gilding every piece of detritus they touched. She filmed the coffin where Luca had slept and this gave him such a horrified feeling until there was a knock and Heléne got up and went to the door, answering it. A spectral, emaciated older man in red clothes Luca had never seen before was there. He was in his late 30s, had a receding hairline but long flowing black hair. His eyelids were sunken and purple. He was deathly but animated. He was smiling at Heléne who whispered, "Shhh!" as she brought the guy inside and closed the door behind him. He had a suitcase with him, looking like he was moving in. Cut to them in the main room. The thin man stood by the coffins, gestured to the still occupied one and pantomimed sleeping, putting hands under his cheek, an adorable oblivious child. They did not speak, at least not with words, it was all playful facial expressions and gestures. Another cut and the fiendish man, who knew Heléne somehow, was holding a bottle of red wine and pouring it into a paper cup above the coffin where Luca slept, as if deliberately verging on spilling it. The man was like a diabolical clown. The provocations escalated and this man was now sitting on the coffin lid, directly above Luca’s head, his legs crossed and fingertips on knee, prissily. And all the while Heléne chuckled and gasped. She whispered a few sentences of French and Luca deduced that this must have been some old friend from Montreal. Why hadn't she talked about him before?
They began to have a very soft conversation in French, and the man seemed to get more serious and impatient until he told her to "arretez" the camera. And then it stopped.
Where had she gone? Who was the French Canadian on the videotape? Why were her things still there but the suitcase he'd brought was gone? Why had she left Luca to wake up in the night on his own?
He took the video camera later that night to a girl named Katrine, from the art institute who he barely knew, who he had heard speaking French with Heléne once at a party. After clumsily explaining himself he gained access to Katrine's apartment and played her the footage of the visitor, in particular the whispered conversation between Heléne and the man.
"Who is that?"
"She calls him 'frere,' which means brother." After a few more seconds of listening Katrine said to Luca, "She just called him Claude. He is asking her why won't she go away with him."
"Does she say why?"
"'I still have work to do,' she says. 'I have a boyfriend.' And that makes Claude angry evidently."
Luca tried to contact Heléne's family in Montreal but it was like trying to track down bubbles in a tank of water. He wondered if her last name truly were Grisee or if that had been some kind of tactical evasion of reality. The further he looked for her the more she receded from view. He went back to sleeping in beds, in his own space, all the while knowing that for a few weeks that year some unearthly force had enveloped him, gotten into his cells, changed him on an essential level, then disgorged him, left him laying helpless on the ground, before it moved on. Night and day never looked the same to Luca Belliotti after his time with Heléne, prowling the city in the dark, dodging the sun. The underlying darkness was always perceptible from that point forward, even in full daylight. Even at high noon on a July day, the constituents of darkness vibrated there. And likewise the lullaby of the coffin, no matter how absent, was a bed of noise that every car horn, terrier bark, pebble splash and parting word rested upon.