Bill stakes Long Shadow as he's strangling Sookie, unleashing a truly fucked-up amount of blood and vampire parts all over the place, Vampire Pam and Sookie Stackhouse have a total Vibe, and the killer gets Tina the cat, stealing her kitty-cat head and strapping her kitty-cat body to the ceiling fan in the foyer, so it can spray kitty-cat blood everywhere.
Sam comes to apologize to Tara for the Tennis Grunting convo, but she's in the middle of a fight with her mother about masturbation and the Million Man March and doesn't have time for his mess. Later on -- just before Sookie learns about their affair, and reacts as well as can be expected -- he pays for her exorcism, because Miss Jeanette has convinced her that she is possessed by exactly $799.95 worth of demon.
The other thing the staking unleashes is a political shitstorm for Eric, who regrettably must do the Sherriffy thing and take Bill away to some shadowy Tribunal with Zeljko Ivanek doing his Silver Fox thing week. He also issues a general warning to Royce's boys and the others who have recently done vamps wrong, like the insane/awesome Amy, who:
Still has Eddie tied up in Jason Stackhouse's basement, makes a delightful picnic in the sunlight while they listen to him scream, and fucks Jason in front of him after drinking his blood. Amy Burley, you scamp! Jason slowly, slowly begins to understand that capturing and bleeding a person to death is -- at the least -- tacky, but manages to piss off Rene and alienate Hoyt and Lafayette after suffering more workplace mood swings. He has a very sweet, very long conversation with Eddie, and decides that he is awesome. However, the implications of that information -- and the obvious ethical issues involved -- are still traveling toward his brain at press time.
Bill and Sookie kiss in a way we're told to find romantic, and Bill tasks Sam Merlotte with taking care of Sookie while he's away. Sam knows what he means, and unless you really haven't been paying attention, so do you. You know who hasn't been paying attention? Sookie, who goes to bed with a border collie but wakes up with Sam Merlotte sleeping at the foot of the bed... in all his naked shapeshifter glory.
Check back Friday for our full detailed recap. Until then, watch video and discuss this episode in our forums.
Long Shadow is all up on it, choking the shit out of Sookie and everybody staring, Ginger screaming, Bill freaking out, Pam and Eric drinking mint juleps and grinning. Finally Pam's like, "Ginger, enough." Eric thanks her, and before you know it, Bill has zoomed over with a broken-off beertap and staked the shit out of him. Guess that part wasn't propaganda, but then given the way vampires work in this universe -- blood boudin sausages in sexy skin casings -- it wouldn't be. What happens is difficult to deal with.
Long Shadow explodes in a hot rain, blood pouring out of his mouth and into Sookie's, turning her white dress red ("Not pink, not green, not aquamarine!") and then going from total barf to used-up, popped-balloon skin sack, and then to a mess of gristle and bloody elastic cartilage on the floor. That's what they're like, Sookie. That's what's inside, like Adam's second wife: just a sack of skin, holding blood. Even Buffy would barf.
Which is exactly what Ginger does, everywhere, as Bill stares worried at Eric and Pam stares at him, shocked. "Humans," Eric sniffs. "Honestly, Bill, I don't know what you see in them." Sookie shakes, and looks in his eyes, gasping. Bill is worried. There's blood in her mouth. It tastes like God.
The difference between killing the possum and loving the possum is immense. Sookie dealt with her shit the right way, even if Bill took it the rest of the way by killing Bartlett. Jason deals with his shit in precisely half the right way, but unfortunately it's not the best half, because he's still letting everybody else drive. Vampires are a big deal because here's what they're saying all the time, touched by the numinous: "You're fucked up about sex," they say, "You're fucked up about death. Deal with it. I'm not going anywhere." If you're smart enough to realize there's a problem -- if you don't let the secret bad shit hound you to death, like Jason is -- your first instinct is to sacrifice it, outside yourself. Put it in a possum, or set the house on fire; whatever it takes to demonstrate that you are saying NO to the secret scary bad shit. Turns out, even if your behavior changes, you still haven't recovered any ground. You haven't gotten bigger. In fact, you've gotten smaller, by walling off another room in your house.
Slightly better than that is the Maudette Pickens way, the way of all fangbangers, which will get your ass killed. That's where, realizing you're fucked up about sex, or death, you dive in with your hands open, and don't come up for air until you've played out the same patterns as many times as it takes. But the way human beings work is, we only play out those patterns over and over because we honestly think we can fix it. This time, we can fix it. And as it doesn't work, over and over and over, we get more intense, more into extremity, closer to the edge. At no point does it seem to work out, but we keep trying. By concretizing our secret bad shit just by dint of their existence, vampires fool us into thinking our secret bad shit is itself concrete: that our weirdness about sex has a real-world workbook we can fill out and solve, on each other's bodies. That's an understandable, if very creepy, fallacy. Maudette is just Sookie with a lack of pattern recognition or symbolic sense; Sookie changes and her world gets bigger, while Maudette gets herself killed. That's the line that Jason's riding, even now.
It's so much easier to assign one-to-one correspondences to everything and everyone on earth, like last week: Amy is a psychopath, therefore retroactively and proactively nothing she does is worth anything. When she tells you she loves you, she's playing you. How do we know this? Because on an unrelated note she's talked herself into believing that Eddie is not a real person. The irony couldn't be clearer: we do to Amy what Amy does to Eddie, and assume that everything she says is a lie. We fall prey to binary thinking and say, "Because X, we must always assume Y." Which is a fine way to go through life -- most of us do, a lot of the time -- but I think it cheapens our experience of both life and other people, not to mention this story. Which takes pains to offer contradictory input that we must nevertheless accept, acknowledge and transcend.
Jason spends the entire episode bouncing back and forth between Amy World, in which everything but vampires is sacred, and Jason World, in which the evidence of his eyeballs, and the grace of Eddie, his love of Eddie, rub up against Amy World like sandpaper on skin. The first colors in alchemy are black and white. Jason and Sookie especially are doing a pretty good job of jumping back and forth across the line, and I feel that Sam of all people is helping Tara get it, but the endpoint isn't bouncing back and forth: it's holding the contradiction in your hands, both at once, on fire, and being able to see the world as big enough to have them both. That's the endpoint of alchemy: a world big enough to contain even gold. And a huge part of this is recognizing the infinite number of rooms in our little houses: just because some birds are blackbirds doesn't necessarily mean all birds are irrefutably black, but by the same token it's irrefutably true that most of us fall prey to fatigue when faced with the idea of looking at every single bird as we encounter it.
Pam finds it funny, for example. Even as Sookie's squeezing blood out of her hair, into the sink, with kreepy krazy Kewpies on the walls -- even a kute little vampire one! -- in the bathroom. She shivers, while outside Ginger is pulling the arteries and crap, I don't even know what, of Long Shadow's remains off her jacket and shoes. Well, I think. To be honest I have no idea what she's doing, and neither does she, and she keeps screaming the whole time, and finally Eric's like, "Um, when she is finished acting like America's Top Crackhead, would you please glamour the shit out of her? Again?" Pam wonders if there's enough Ginger left to glamour, because in case you haven't noticed, taking over somebody's soul and choices is sort of horrifying and Bartlett-y leaves a footprint that affects everything after, and Eric's like, "The alternative is turn her, and she'd make a sucky vampire, due to be a functionally retarded strip-stitute, so... Ya want her?" Pam, unimpressed and fangs on edge due to the unending screeching from Ginger, who sucked to start with, is like, "I'm not desperate enough to turn that bitch. Glamour it is." Eric takes Bill to have a 'Blood...
And it beeps in the microwave. Out of the spotlight, off that throne and in the backroom, Eric's dead person makeup makes him look completely silly, like a cast member in the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd. (Which BTW my BFF Will took me to see Halloween weekend because he's smart enough to ignore my musical theatre allergy, and it was so, so good. You know how this show is like, half brilliant people you've seen elsewhere and half brilliant people that all knew each other at Juilliard? It's like that. There's no orchestra, just them being totally awesome and playing sixteen instruments while singing all awesome and acting... like they're in a Broadway musical, which is a whole thing unto itself that they do very well. I can't believe I'm saying this, but go see it because it is so, so good. Trust Will. Trust him.) Eric watches Bill drink the TruBlood and then makes so, so much fun of him.
"How do you stomach that stuff? Don't you find it metallic and vile?" Bill says it's just sustenance, the symptom of mainstreaming and perhaps the ethical sidestep of all time: what's easier than the pretence of salvation that TruBlood provides? "Oh, I couldn't help but murder or glamour or objectify my lunch until such time as the Japanese weirdos -- as usual -- invented a way around all those icky feelings of accountability?" My friend's husband went vegetarian, randomly, awhile back, for the very logical reasons that we all go vegetarian awhile back, and the sort of ethical morass that leads one into has always fascinated me, because it seems a very specific way of limiting thought to a black and white yes/no when you do it like that. But here the metaphor is very real and pretty central, given what happens to Eddie: what if we start right now, and all the blood I've drunk is okay because of the cultural possum called TruBlood?
I mean, I don't want to go into a vegetarian thing because to me it is very simply across-the-board borderline, but only because it's very important to me to draw the line between intellect as quality and intellect as virtue, one of the reasons I find it very easy to love Jason Stackhouse but something that's really hard and gets harder the smarter you are. If one of the strongest struts in your scaffolding is your intelligence (or your beauty, or your rage) -- and especially if you feel like it's all you have -- you're going to look at that thing as a virtue; as an excuse for your existence. Like that old joke where the woman screams at the mugger, "Don't kill me, I'm a writer!" WTF. But -- and I'm talking about Tara as much as anybody else here -- it's a lot easier to get over yourself when you look at intelligence the same way you look at beauty, or height, or eye color: being smart is easy, but being good is hard. If we each said that ten times in the mirror everyday I daresay we'd all be a lot more compassionate: being smart is handed to you, being good is handed to nobody.
Eric smiles joyfully at Bill, with his, "I don't think about the taste of TruBlood, it's sustenance," and as usual Bill doesn't understand irony or delight until it's explained to him: "If you're their poster boy, the mainstreaming movement is in very deep trouble. TruBlood: It keeps you alive, but it will bore you to death." Bill sits, following his lead, and asks to cut to the chase. Specifically, what is the Sheriff of Area Five going to do about the vamp-on-vamp crime that just happened? "I'll take the girl," Eric suggests, and Bill -- too fast to stop himself, and despairing the second he's said it -- shouts, "No!" Eric looks at him appraisingly, as though any of this is a surprise to him at all, and Bill shakes his head, looking down. "You can have anyone you want, why do you want her?" Um, because she's magic? Eric is like, "You totally like her in that way!" and Bill refuses to answer: "Sookie Must Be Protected." Eric grins, talking about shit we don't get but with vocalized capitals flying: "Now, that sounds like an Edict. But it couldn't be, because I would know about that." Bill won't look at him, because to look would be to answer the question Eric already knows the sunshine-sucking answer to. He tells Bill to admit his love for Sookie, but he changes the subject again: "If I hadn't done what I did, would you have let his disloyalty stand?" Eric points out that whatever he did do, he wouldn't have done it in front of witnesses, especially vampire ones, because Eric is smarter than Bill, because Eric watches Gossip Girl, which is to say Eric knows that the difference between what we do in front of people and what we do when we're alone is as different as night and day and life and death, especially for the undead. Bill feels dumb, which he should, because Gossip Girl is awesome.
Not so awesome is the bullshit Jason's doing, which is a truism but is true right this second because what he's doing is driving with Eddie trussed up in his truckbed, moaning and screaming, hurting all over, bound in silver for no crime larger than his existence and his desire. "All I'm saying is, Lafayette didn't have to kidnap him. And I'm pretty sure he left with some V..." Amy laughs and tells him he's free to take the Lafayette route, if he's got the balls to blow a vamp. Jason realizes, for the fifth time, that this is not Amy's first ride on the junkie depersonalization/compartmentalization train, and she's like, "What? Who? Hey look, something shiny! Sound of jingling keys! Get the mouse, Murray! Here's my boob!" He tells her that the giant purse, or "Big Bag O' Crazy," was her giveaway, because "any woman with a purse that big is bound to have something in it" he never wanted to know about, and she's like, "Ooh, I'm sleepy... Listen to the radio!"
Sookie, just like half of every episode, is still scrubbing blood off something, in this case herself, and finally Pam comes in with some of her dominatrix gear. Sookie puts on her usual "Vampires are like homeless people holding grenades and asking for change" face and thanks her for the thought. "I'm fine. Really. I'm just gonna dry out my hair and be on my way..." Pam shakes her head and explains that her boyfriend and Eric are going to be talking and bitching at each other for a bajillion years until somebody breaks out the yardstick, and also: You're supercute, bitch, but I'm not actually being nice. I'm gonna need you to the change the fuck out of your bloody-ass clothes before you walk out of my club. The vampire club I'm now half-owner of, in which a vampire murder just happened. Those clothes are getting burnt up, say goodbye to them, thank you ma'am. Savvy?
Sookie gets it, and Pam apologizes by being Totally Awesome. "There's vampire in your cleavage," she says, grinning, and Sookie looks down. "Ah. Okay, ew," she says, jumping. "Allow me," says Pam, and then totally vampirically reaches down in there and gets it out. They look into each other's eyes and Sookie, who is incapable of being glamoured but is still susceptible to awesomeness in its undiluted form, doesn't look away, just whispers softly, "Thank you." Pam, who's on like lesbian signifier five at this point, just reiterates the second thing she ever said, which is that she thinks Sookie is totally great, but because she's a vampire she has to be as creepy as possible: "I'm beginning to understand the fuss everyone's making over you." Sookie stares at Pam, but not like she's intimidated or scared or creeped, just like, "Oh, we're kind of friends, like that lady the tiger hugged on YouTube. Okay, then: I am in fucking dire straits. You need to help me right away, because I am thirteen kinds of in over my head."
Speaking of, right then the glamoured pieces of Ginger that are left -- Pickled Ginger? -- come lurching in, more like an animated dead thing than any vampire we've seen. Her eyes roll and bug out like a frightened horse, or like a coked up waitress, and she grins, introducing herself. I watched this entire sequence over and over in slow-motion because Holy Moses is she fucked-up looking. This actress is amazing, I mean her face literally stretches into crazy areas never before seen housing face. Like Lettie Mae, or ... you know how Dexter's ugly sister got famous by doing all that Emily Rose shit? Like that. Like there's a spider doing calisthenics behind her face. "Oh, you don't have to be so scared. They're really very nice here!" Sookie watches her go. (And yes, all the Long Shadow in her tummy is going to have an effect, although we haven't talked about it and might never, and yes, I have confirmed that, um, vampire bodily fluids -- since they're all blood, and thus V -- have similar effects no matter which mucus membrane they... Ugh, I can't talk about this. Suffice to say all of Sookie's stomping madness and CONSTANT COMPLIMENTS TO ARLENE'S HAIR are as much due to her crossing society's lines, so to speak, as Jason's per os dosage, and that is all I am EVER going to say about it, because thinking about that makes me want to vomit my entire stomach up so hard it'll hit the moon.)
The camera goes crazy again, doing that Goyer jumpcutty-strobey thing like at the beginning during the intense bloodletting, and it's all BSG-crazy hustling poor Eddie into the basement, setting up camp, covering the windows, tying him to the chair, taping down an arm for the IV, I mean it's disgusting but well-choreographed on the parts of our little Rattray 2.0's, and Amy finds time -- in the middle of this hideous behavior -- to crack wise on Jason for the gasmasks he has in his unrealistic Louisiana basement. He admits to getting paranoid after 9/11, and she laughs, because obviously Bon Temps was the target after New York and DC, but neither of them acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that Louisiana was the target. His parents died in a flood.
Eddie asks what the heck they're planning on doing, and Jason admits he was wondering the same, but Amy isn't feeling these kind of questions. The plan? "We're gonna drink from him." And then what? Eddie's face is scarred and awful, asking alongside him, and Jason snarls: "Dude, I got this." What he's saying is, "I am Super Mario, scrolling ever rightward, jumping barrels and mushrooms in my attempt to ignore what the fuck is really going on here, and every word you speak, like a person, is just another mushroom guy I have to jump over." What he's saying is, "Poip!"
"Jason," she says, tying off Eddie's arm, "Can you please try to live in the now with me?" Jason points out that The Now is all he knows: "In fact, I've gone entire months without thinking about shit." Eddie moans. "But the truth is, right now? The Now kind of sucks. And if we both can't admit that, then we are 100% fucked." Jason slumps to the floor beside her, and she pulls off a drop or two from the rich and broken beertap she's just turned Eddie into. "Who wants the first taste?" Jason swears he's not touching it -- not like this -- and Eddie stupidly thanks him. Jason: "I said fucking poip!, motherfucker." Amy calls to him like a siren: "Come with me, baby. Don't let your fear get in your way..." I love Amy's wording in this scene: V, the thing that makes you present and undeniably real, even in her own vernacular more present than presence, is now and also a place you can go to, where you can forget all the evil that you do.
"Look, it ain't fear, all right? It's just..." he whispers in her ear. "He's looking me right in the eye." Another barrel I can't jump. She shrugs and says she'll see him when she gets back; when she drops it Eddie closes his eyes. How gross to actually be there and feel yourself spreading through their muscles like that? She can't even stay vertical. Jason's impressed, turned on, curious, into it, watching her, and Jason watches Eddie looking at her, as she pulls off another dose. "Come on, baby. Come with me..." And Eddie, stupidly, tosses another barrel, begging him not to do it. Which is all it takes. "I said don't talk to me," Jason hisses, and toasts him with it. Eddie sadly watches as Jason drops the thimble of his blood, and reaches out for a moment to touch her hair before falling back, hands in the air, like a statue.
Tara sits in Miss Jeanette's voice, still wondering which side to fall on. Was it a possum or was it a heist? Why does it still hurt? Why can't she forget, like Lettie Mae? Is that a demon? "You were here. You saw it." Tara nods, but wants something concrete. Which is never going to fly, and she's grabbing at straws. Frankly the whole conversation creeps me out because it seems to betray a basic inability to understand how you yourself work, which is to say that it's neither and it's both. We live in a symbolic universe where everything is both magical and mundane. When you fall in love, that's taking energy out of yourself and putting it somewhere else; when you hate something impossibly you're doing the same thing. Crone-stone or rehab group session, you're still taking the bad scary stuff out and looking at it honestly, which is all it requires. Singing the night that made you: in the symbolic universe where we spend our waking and sleeping hours, the Quest isn't a metaphor for therapy -- therapy is a metaphor for the Quest.
"Fine, then. It's like this. Your mind, your... Your body, it's just a physical manifestation of your soul. And your soul is sick." Tara says that no, her "soul" is actually preoccupied with not getting ripped off. Miss Jeanette nods. "How's your Momma doing?" Tara admits she's doing great, but then, Lettie Mae believes in "shit like this," and Tara doesn't. Instead of pointing to the bus, the sky, her bra, the rocks, electricity, Miss Jeanette goes for the logical argument: "If you don't believe, then why'd you come all the way out here tonight?" Because we desire wholeness, because we know there's a better world than being afraid, because there is something in us that wants to be whole and won't stop until we try. She has no answer. "How much it'll cost me?" Miss Jeanette tells her, without hesitation: "$799.95." Tara's as shocked by the quick answer as by the amount, but Jeanette's sanguine: "Cup of rum's on the house." Prices like that, it better be.
Tara protests that Lettie Mae paid less than half of that, which proves nothing except that Tara is a soft-sciences genius, because $445 > $800/2 no matter how you do it, but whatever. Here's the important part: "What I do takes varying amounts of energy, and involves varying amounts of risk. Now, what you got inside you is much more powerful than what your mama had. Much more dangerous, too." Tara can't believe it, and gets angry: "I once found that woman on the ground, eating her own vomit 'cause she didn't wanna waste the alcohol she lost bringing it all up." And how much better did you feel about yourself, watching that happen? Knowing there were places you wouldn't go?
Miss Jeanette just looks away and down, because what a gross fucking thing to say, here of all places. She shrugs. "Think about it. But not for too long. You can't afford to keep pushing people away. Your loneliness is spreading to your eyes. It's becoming a part of who you are." This last so forcefully that Tara shivers and sips her rum. Jeanette's got her. "time you're alone, stand in the mirror and count backwards from ten. If you can get all the way down to zero, then I'm wrong. But if you can't stand your own company for ten seconds, how you gonna expect to do it for the rest of your life?" Tara nearly starts to weep.
Sookie walks up her driveway looking shockingly hot in Pam's short black-pleather dominatrix dress, asking Bill if he's really going to be okay after his talk with Eric. "A simple slap on the wrist," he says. "That's all." Sookie asks if he's not in fact bullshitting, based on her convo with Pam, and Bill leads her delicately and sweetly up the steps by her wrist, scoffing hilariously: "Pam was turned almost a hundred years ago, and yet somehow still behaves as though every day were Halloween." Um, yeah. The definition of awesome. Mainstreaming and not mainstreaming are equally for pussies. "She's all drama and theatrics. I assure you, everything's gonna be fine." THE WORDS OF DEATH! Thanks, Compton.
Bill opens the screen door for her, and she unlocks the door, entering the dark house with one thought on her mind: a shower. "I still feel like there's blood all over me..." she says, flipping on a light switch to reveal a wall entirely dripping with blood; Bill takes in the scene and shouts, "Don't look up!" So of course she looks up: Tina the housecat, headless, strapped to the ceiling fan, spinning around and around, and shooting huge spurts of blood directly at Sookie's just-scrubbed face. I mean, my God.
This show started like a day ago and she's already: been entirely bathed in blood at least ten times, got fucked with a dead man's dirty dick in a graveyard, saw what she thought was Boyfriend Soup, reads the grody thoughts of Andy Bellefleur on the regular, lost a friend and her only stable relative in like one day, got literally murdered by meth addicts, drank vampire blood multiple times, got smacked around by her own brother, went from being a total pariah to being whatever pariahs spit on, went to retarded Fangtasia! twice, broke up with her best friend for literally no reason with her head in an oven and high on EZ-Off fumes, got nearly choked to death on two occasions -- once by a vampire and once by a Hep D-infected Daisy Dukes-wearing fangbanger, which BTW is a disease so fucked up it's imaginary -- saw a yucky smack-ho blowjob when she was still totally a virgin, has lost entire quarts mid-coitus... I mean, I would be showing the motherfucking strain, wouldn't you? Sookie needs a damn nap, is what she needs. Where the eff is that valium?
Jason's about to put it in, maybe for the first time, when Amy's like, "Wait, wait, wait," all slow and drunk still, with that same song from the truck playing. "First we have to thank the vampire for the gifts that he's bestowed upon us," she says, like Eddie is fucking venison. Listen, I live in Austin. I get it. And yes, carbon footprint is often at odds to aspirational eating disorders, and you have to pick what kind of asshole you are. Macrobiotic, while it strikes the correct aesthetic balance between fuel and health, means you can't stop talking about eating macrobiotic and doing fucking Ashtanga. Guess what? Thanking the spirit of the buffalo before you bite into that burger doesn't do a fucking thing. It's dead. You're alive. Own that. Jason breathes, unable to look at Eddie, but only because he's overcome by pleasure. By that intense feeling of connection that finds a blank spot where Eddie used to be. "We are grateful..." she says -- to a quick and lovely "Fuck you!" from my man Eddie -- "...For your gift to us." They ignore him; they start to fuck. It feels like God. Eddie feels it too.
Things get all kind of weird-failed-Oliver-Stone-postmodern for awhile. The forest appears behind them, opening up like an unending iris, psychotropic, psychedelic. Eddie's so young. They're swimming naked through the world. Somebody asks where they are and somebody says, "Nowhere. Everywhere. Together." Fucking in the sky, in flight over a never-ending forest, hair dancing underwater. In the bellybutton of the world, in the heart of the sun. In the middle of Eddie's pain. How could something so beautiful contain cruelty, or ugliness? How could there be anything less than perfect, in this perfect world? This is just the hunt, isn't it? He doesn't have feelings. Thank the buffalo. But this is the difference Lafayette kept trying to explain, which is that you can't let message get confused with medium, because in the real world when you start requiring it you begin to rot: two naked drug addicts, fucking on a dirty mattress in the basement while a tortured, beautiful creature of God watches, weeping tears of blood, bound in silver, his precious blood pouring out onto the floor one angelic drop at a time, useless and ugly, wasted as beauty, while they moan and fuck, insensate in their salvation.
Bill spoons Sookie in a preposterous dressing gown, naked from the knees, asking why she won't sleep. Isn't she tired? She's had a motherfucker of the last nine episodes. She's like, "Yeah, but my death Grandmother has kind of been on my mind and if I weren't all fucked up on V I would have noticed that. Also my dead cat just sprayed blood all over me from where her head used to be, so. He gets all antebellum about how he is all about protecting her, and she explains that it's not being protected but needing to be protected is the issue, that wanting to be protected makes her feel "like the helpless little girl I used to be, all over again." She doesn't look at him, even as Bill gets dramatic about how it's all about him and because of their Total Love people and cats keep dropping like flies and people hate her even more than they used to. "You needing to be protected has nothing to do with you, or who you are. All of it is my fault." He strokes her hair, and she's still sad -- and pretty out of it -- even as he's asking her to let him carry some of the burden. To be the possum, in other words, and this is why Sookie is the greatest thing, because she gets it on a level nobody else seems to, and always says it right to your face with this immensely gracious bluntness, like she's just reminding you of something you already knew but were too polite to say:
"Bill. All the trouble I'm in? It's mine. I chose it. I chose it when I chose you. Don't you think I wanna blame somebody else? But what happened to my Gran -- and now to poor Tina -- it's my fault. And it's sweet of you to try to take it on for me, but if I let you? I'd be so mad at you I'd never be able to look at you again. And right now your face is just about the only thing getting me by. So why don't we just leave it on me, okay?" And Bill, for his stumbling sweet part, does get it: "Very well." He's sad, because how else can a man prove his love but by taking your burdens for his own, but he kisses her quietly. She says goodnight to him, firmly, and turns away again, in his arms. There are tears on her face, for the enormity of what she's just said. The choices she made, and keeps making every time she claims them. And when the memories start to come, Adele on the kitchen floor, on her shoulders and in her broken heart, she whimpers and pulls him closer. That's the best kind of love: not staring at each other, but facing forward together. Sometimes you just need everything to stop, and that's what he gives her: a partner, and the silence.
Jason puts on the face of the killer again; it used to be the spell against his fear, and it still is. The killer, the vampire, the human, the monster. He didn't kill anybody yet. He has a vested interest in the infinite complexity and beauty of not being a monster, and puts on the face of a monster in order to hide his own face. He creeps up on her, innocent girl in the middle of nowhere, in a lovely flowered dress on a picnic blanket; he charges at her, screaming roughly in his killer voice. "You're a fucking dead woman!" Amy laughs and plays along -- "Oh my God!" -- as he jumps over her in the sunlight, and capers shirtless around her, giggling. "Honestly, you are like a little boy," she says indulgently, and pats the blanket. "Did I scare you? Yeah..." he says proudly. The games we play in the sun.
"Come here, lie down. I wanna show you something." He lies beside her, wriggling like a puppy, full of energy but obedient too. "What we looking at?" Oh, the trees. The beauty of the trees, all around them. "But we're not just looking, we're listening too." She shushes further questions, and you can hear it, the play and the sound of it: nature, all around, welcoming and ungrudging, loving you no matter what you do. "It's like the leaves are talking," he says wonderingly, and she smiles. "They're laughing." Jason's like a little boy: "Yeah, because they're ticklish!" Like making cloud pictures. "Wow," he murmurs, listening to the world. Amy? "Yeah, baby." We still high? "No, baby." This is you, stone-cold sober. Resting your sweet head on a bed of bones.
"I don't normally talk like this. Plus, I'm feeling kind of lightheaded too." Amy explains he's talking like a total stoner because his "mind" is starting to open up, but also he's lightheaded because, like any good junkie, he's stopped eating. She pops a raw almond in his mouth and his eyes light up, mouth hanging open as he savors every bit. "These're crazy good!" he says, and she starts in with that shit: "That's why we gotta change the way you eat. Raw foods. Nothing processed. Because the cleaner the body, the cleaner the soul, the cleaner the experience." Last night was clean. The sun on the leaves of a forest that never ends. Sing the night that made you. He puts an almond in her mouth and kisses her, biting it in half. And back in the house, so afraid, hurting so badly he can't even sleep with the sun overhead, Eddie screams their names.
"He'll stop," she says. "He'll stop." Jason wonders -- because he's so busy hopping barrels he can't even hear what he's really thinking -- if somebody won't hear him, even as he goes on screaming. "We live in the middle of nowhere of the middle of nowhere," she scoffs, and he sits up, on the edge of a thought. "He isn't a person, Jason." Jason knows this is part of their world, now, this lie, so he spits at the idea that she should even have to tell him this basic, this obvious fact, and changes tactics: "My truck, for example. It ain't a person either. But I still fill it with gas and give it oil from time to time." Amy asks if they're supposed to feed him, then, offer up a vein and all the pain and fear that go with it, and he asks if Eddie won't die otherwise. "Who cares?" Jason doesn't have an answer for that, just another request for this nebulous "plan" he keeps asking for. All he ever wanted was somebody to tell him how to live, what to do, how to be a man. But once you let somebody do that for you, it's pretty much their job from that point on.
Here's Amy's plan: "Everything's gonna work out. Because it has to." Jason immediately discerns the logical problem there, but she's not troubled overmuch. "Because when I am with you, what I feel... I've never felt that with anybody else ever before." And to assume she's lying, or playing him, is I think to miss a great deal of the point of Amy Burley. I don't think she's told a single lie, I just think she's inordinately good at keeping the contradictions an arm's length apart, and here's how: "I'm a person that... That a lot of bad stuff has happened to in the past." Like Jason, like you and me: "And so I deserve this."
"I love you." Only cartoons have cartoon characters. The rest of us manage to be terribly and wonderfully made, all the time. No matter how bad it's gotten, or how bad it's going to get, I'll say it again: Jason doesn't get better until he is capable of understanding and accepting this. That he's able to look at Jason and see Jason, and not all the pain between him and Jason. It's got a lot of horrible things attached to it, and a long ugly history we can only hope he'll have survived at the end of it, but he needs to hear this, here and now, even on the picnic of the damned, if he's going to survive at all. All of which is just large enough that he looks away, mumbling incoherently, and grabs the nearest beer. "Oh my God," Amy laughs. "Oh my God, I mean, why is it that we all need to be loved, but then when somebody finally says I love you, people just run scared? Hmm? I love you, Jason Stackhouse, whether you like it or not. I'm not afraid to admit it."
And in a perfect world, like losing your virginity or waking up in the morning, there are ways in which this moment in Jason's life could have gone better. It could have been before he started doing drugs, or before he got spun and started kidnapping; it could have happened without a man screaming in the background. But the world's not perfect: it's full of death and pain, because nature is all that we have. Anything that opens you is good, and nine times out of ten the things that change you the most come wrapped in hideous packages.
So when the sun comes out over his face and he drops his armor and has that grand realization, when he touches that grace we all search for and occasionally find, when he realizes that there's nothing to be afraid of and there never was, that's a good. That's a good, good thing. And it doesn't matter who he says it back to, because the doors that keep us apart are always stronger than the bonds that tie us together. The person he says it to -- and I mean, this is huge -- is less important than the fact of him saying it. "Know what? You're right. Fuck it. I love you too." There is something softer, stronger, realer and more solid, behind his smile as he says it. Loving makes us more beautiful.
And yes, this is blood magic and really horrible too, because on another level it's entirely important to whom he's saying it, because it's a spell that ties them together, bathed in the sun and with Eddie's screams playing across the field like a symphony, a threnody to the hell they are creating around themselves, so that when Eddie tries to warn Jason he won't hear him, because he is shielded in sunlight and valor and love and her salvation. But it's two different acts occurring at once. One of them he'll pay for, in blood; the other just brought him closer to the beauty he never even knew about, before the V. Both are real, neither are lies. Life is hard.
"Ten. Nine. Eight... Seven..." Lettie Mae busts in on her daughter in the bathroom, causing Tara to ask WTF if she was doing "something private." Sweetie, you were. You took your soul in your hands and put it on the scale. That's more private than sex, more private than God, and evil to interrupt. On the other hand, Tara's mom continues to be hilarious: "I taught you that was a sin against God. So if I walk in on you doing it, it's your problem, not mine!" That's so fucking fucked up, like, it's only a sin if I see you doing it, because otherwise God and I are going to be busy ))<>(( and I don't have time to worry about it. "What do you want?" Tara asks, exasperated and relieved and mostly grateful, and when Lettie Mae tells her Sam Merlotte's at the door, Tara breaks for it. "You ain't sleeping with him, are you?" Momma asks, and explains her thought process in more hilarious detail: "Because he brung flowers. Men only bring flowers if they already slept with you and looking to again. That especially goes for white men, as black men are less prone to grovel." I... cannot dispute the truth of any of that. And apparently Lettie Mae Thornton's experience exceeds my own, as I have only ever rarely had sex with my landlord in lieu of rent.
Tara stares at her crazy mother for a second and then stares at him through the screen door. Sam explains that he wants to apologize for "anything he said" that "hurt her feelings," which in this case is "you grunt like a farm animal when I'm fucking you, and by farm animal I kinda mean professional tennis player," which deserves flowers at the least, and he asks to sort things out. Lettie Mae's like, "Bullshit! He wants to fuck!" and Tara shoves him out into the yard, because the only thing worse than having that conversation with your mom is having it with the guy right there, and the only thing worse than that is when the guy in question is tooootally dreamy Sam Merlotte.
Sam's like, WTF is she drinking again? More demons? And Tara almost laughs. "Nope. That's her, stone-cold sober. Look, you should go..." How come? Why? "Because I'm just too fucked up for this." Right from the soles of her Payless shoes, that one. They both kind of lean back for a sec, like they're standing a safe distance from nuclear testing and the blast field just hit them. "I hate to break it to you? You're not even the most fucked up person in this house, much less this town." Not according to Miss Jeanette, but whatever: "What do you think this is between us anyway? Because we were clear from the beginning it was just gonna be us fucking." Sam calls adorable, obvious bullshit on that one, so she goes on the offensive: "What are you, a masochist?" Is that what they call people who are actually wise and strong enough to love other people without waiting around for them to get perfect? Seems off somehow.
"I've spent my life running away from people, or pinning my hopes on somebody I can't have. I'm done with that. Like it or not, you've reminded me that I'm a social animal. I'd rather deal with your fucked up shit than be alone," Sam says. Which is right up there with Bill's whole psychic blood Tantra vibe, as far as how messily romantic that is. I mean, it's context dependent, because "I'd rather deal with your fucked up shit than be alone" is also like 99% of marriages and civil unions, and as you know most marriages end in murder because settling for something out of loneliness is slow death, but the implied and unexpressed "And yet I choose you even though I am an ICBM of pure sex aimed at planet Earth, because you rock when you're not being an asshole" makes all the difference. Tara, at wit's end in the face of all this awesomeness, fully goes, "Well, here's some fucked up shit for you to deal with. Do you know that right now as we speak, I have myself thinking I have a demon inside me? And the only way to get it out is have some crazy-ass lady who lives in a bus out in the swamp perform a $800 exorcism on me? That there's no way in hell I can afford?" Girl makes a point.
Sam gives a good solid Wow to that one, and Tara's like, "See? Now I have proved I am unlovable! The only thing I ever wanted to be! Just like she said! There's a demon that's making me do this! Demons do not exist! Please kiss me! Stop me from treating you like shit! But if you try I will cut you! So now you are going crazy! Go away! Come here! I love you! I hate you! Mostly I might love you! Which makes me hate you!" Sam just kind of watches her melt down for awhile and finally he's like, "While it is true that that flavor of Tara is not my favorite, and you are bullshitting me right now instead of being honest, so now we're in a fight for no reason, I am willing to look past the imaginary demon because, again, you are awesome when you're not shitting yourself like a toddler. I mean, why is it that we all need to be loved, but then when somebody finally says they care, past every horrible gate you put in their way, you just keep running? I am capable of handling all the different sides of you that there are. I'm a shapeshifter too, numbnuts." And faced with that, she literally runs, grunting athletically, back into her crazy fucking house. "See you at work!" he hollers, and throws the bouquet -- brilliantly -- on her lawn, where it will sit and accuse her silently for hours and hours and hours. He's almost too good at this.
At Merlotte's later, Amy's all over Arlene about her ring, coming out into the restaurant, and asks about the engagement party. Arlene -- also way too good at this, but with a lot of practice at this point -- projects entirely in Sam's direction, "I don't know where we'd throw it, you know, our place isn't BIG ENOUGH..." Sam rolls his eyes and offers Merlotte's, and she's all about how she doesn't want to impose, of course, so he assures her she's not, of course. "It'd be like any night, except I'd close the place to the public for you and your nearest and dearest." She gushes for a second before offering her suggestions further to this deal: "That would be amazing... Except I was thinking, could we maybe do it in the warehouse door? Or even outside? 'Cause if we did it in here, it'd feel like work, you know..." and Sam's highly amused.
"You were thinking, huh? About the party I only just now offered to throw for you?" She laughs sort of hysterically, called out, and he laughs back. It's nice. "You are a spectacular man, Sam Merlotte!" He reveals his secret knowledge that she's one hell of a conniving suck-up when she needs to be, and she gawks at him, laughing like OMG she can't believe he said that. He gives her catering and the band, but the booze and incidentals are on her and Rene. "Got it. And I may be conniving, but I still mean it: You are gonna make some woman extremely happy one day." Still bruised, Sam wishes aloud that some woman would actually let him do that like one time, and when he cordially wishes the entering Sookie a good morning, she tells him there is not a fucking good thing about this fucking morning, storming to the back of the restaurant. Some fucking motherfucker killed her fucking grandmother and her fucking cat and she is in No Mood, no matter how bouncy her hair is.
On the road crew, Jason sits around with his noisemuffs on, loving the trees and listening to them, but not like with his ears but with his heart, and the idiot smile on his face that attends this behavior. Lafayette spits out his burger, bitching about the "Secret Sauce" which is in actuality mayonnaise, and Hoyt sweetly protests that he likes it regardless, but Lafayette is not having it. It's mayonnaise, and that's no secret at all, even if it tastes good. Jason grins at Rene and asks what he's up to, and Rene says he's going to take care of some fucking roots that have the wrong idea and are growing up through the sidewalk. He gets the jackhammer ready, and starts to drill, and Jason freaks out and tackles him, because God forbid Rene do his job. Rene immediately freaks out, because that was a dangerously pointless, stupid stunt, and tries to throttle Jason until Lafayette peels him off and away.
"This ain't just some root growing up out of nowhere, it's connected to that tree! Everything we see, man, it's all... It's all connected!" When you bring back the good stuff from heaven or faerie, and try to show it to people, it ends up leaves and dirt and shit, which is why you keep it together and you keep it to yourself and remember the real world, too. The thing about bouncing back and forth between worlds, before you get adept at treading them both, is that you look like an asshole either way. To save that tree is to endanger Rene Lanier; you can't even hear Eddie screaming over the chuckles of the ticklish leaves. When people bitch about religion, that's what they're bitching about, because that's all addiction is, too. Lafayette hustles Rene away, who's still screaming at him with terror turned to rage: "I'm about to get married! There are people that count on me!" He looks like he could kill him, and I can't think of a good reason he shouldn't; Lafayette takes him away to take care of him, and Hoyt reaches out to Jason. Which is a bad idea only because he just got snapped back to the real world with a quick and ugly rip -- out of heaven, down into reality -- when he thought he was already there.
"Hey. Is everything all right, Jay?" Jason's anger is instant; he stares down at Hoyt's sweet hand on his shoulder and shrugs it off. "Tell me, Hoyt? Were you on the football team?" Hoyt hears the danger in his voice, but not the why, because the why doesn't matter. Jason grabs him roughly, even as he realizes he's fucking this up too, but too full of energy and fear and confusion, too full of salvation, to focus: "Were you on the football team?" he asks again, and pushes Hoyt down, in the dirt. Hoyt Fortenberry, who outweighs him by thirty pounds and six inches; Hoyt Fortenberry whom he knows would never hurt him, never raise a hand to protect himself. "Then you do not call me Jay. You got that?"
The only person better at being a man, meaning fucking, were the vampires he watched fucking Maudette, the vampires he imagined fucking Dawn. And then they were the vampires he imagined fucking, no matter how much it terrified him; the vampires he pretended to be, fucking Maudette and then Dawn, killing Maudette and Dawn and Amy. He's just like a little boy, trying on these costumes and taking them off again. And yesterday he brought the whole thing full circle: he fucked Amy in front of a vampire. A fat faggot one. See now? See who the man is now?
Men don't fear, don't cry, don't hear the laughter of the leaves; you can't bring that part of Amy World back to the road crew, because the world turns on you, so there you go in the other direction, reminding sweet Hoyt who the real man, the Varsity man, is here. ("You're not the first vain-ass, body-conscious ex-jock to overdo the V," she said.) The second something opens you up, the second you say those words you never say, the real world turns on you; reminds you of what men do and are and say. Rene who's getting married like a grownup, Rene on whom women and children depend; Lafayette who looks at you like a child and tells you when you can have your medicine. And sweet gigantic Hoyt Fortenberry: too caring, too soft, to willing to apologize for the roughness of the world. Disgusting, weak Hoyt, who would never understand that it's not being protected and loved, but needing to be protected and loved that's the issue, that wanting to be protected makes him feel as helpless as he used to be, before he became a man. It's kind of you to try to take it on for him, but if he lets you, for even a second, he'd be so mad at you he'd never be able to look at you again. Hoyt shoves him off, as gently as he can, and stands up, disgusted. They wander away from each other, and Hoyt, whose feelings are still hurt, looks at the ground at Jason's feet, and apologizes for whatever it was, just like with Tara last week. Hoyt doesn't even need to know what he did, he just needs to make it okay. "I'm... Yeah, I'm sorry." And Jason slides down that tree, to the ground, and it's just a tree again. And he's just a man.
Sookie absentmindedly adjust the gigantic chip on her shoulder and asks Andy Bellefleur what the fuck he wants for lunch even though she already fucking knows, and he asks to see Sam, and she says she'll tell him Andy's looking for him but meanwhile what the fuck does Andy want for lunch and by the effing way, "While you make up your mind, how about I tell you what you can get for me, Andy Bellefleur? I'd love to have whoever's killing off my family's head on a platter. Think you could arrange that for me?" Andy sort of officially asks her to stop being a bitch, but she kind of has a point: "I don't appreciate my officers of the law enjoying casual lunches while there's a killer out there trying to hunt me down." Across the room, Amy's Spidey Sense causes her to excuse herself and come toward them. "Did you know he got into my house again last night? Yes. And he killed my cat. He cut her head off and took it with him." When you put it like that, it's not only awful but hilarious. It's like the more pissed off Sookie becomes, the more adorable she can't help but get, like some kind of evolutionary leg up.
Andy is, of course, horrified, and asks why she didn't call the police. Valid! "Because all the station would've done is send you. And I can guarandamntee you if I had called, you'd still be here right now acting like you don't know what you're gonna order, even though you always have the cheeseburger." That's called tmesis, when you put a word inside another word like that; it's like a little mushroom guy you have to jump over to get to the end of the word. Amy doesn't waste any time screwing around, just offers to take "Detective," note, Bellefleur's order. Sookie screeches that it's her table, like a five-year-old, and Amy's like, "Dude? Chill. Take a break." Sookie pounds a fist against the table and runs off, wondering why people are always saying she's a crazy retard because that's so unfair, and Andy's like, "And I will have the fucking cheeseburger and fries because that bitch is psychic," and Amy's eyebrows are all, "And yet the only thing worse than rural Louisiana is somehow still Connecticut."
Later, Amy finds Sookie grumbling in the gazebo and Sookie subtly implies she should go fuck herself. "Sometimes I wish I smoked, you know? So you could sneak outside without anybody knowing something's wrong with you." Amy's like, Um, okay. "I'm really sorry about your cat," she says, just at the right moment as she's leaving, and Sookie's like, "I am so Tara right now! I shouldn't have come in." Amy asks why the hell she did, considering all the things that have of late befallen her, and Sookie goes, "I dunno, because if I called in sick every time somebody I loved got murdered I'd never come to work?" Amy smiles, and says Sam would understand, but Sookie's like, not the point. Arlene's more useless than usual, showing off her ring the whole time, and Tara's off being nuts, so it's really just Sookie being an asshole and Amy being perfect, which is unfair to everybody. Amy's all about how Arlene is kind of a wonderful fucking pain in your ass, and Sookie laughs. "Can you imagine what she was like the first time she got married?"
"What about you? You ever been married?" Amy asks, in her irritating hipster pseudoironic too-cool fashion if "this" is "the part where the sister asks what the girl's intentions are with her brother," and instead of saying "No! This is the part where the sister punches your irritating ass in the eye," Sookie's like, "FYI and to review, my brother is a sister-slapping fuckwad candlestick-stealing drug addict and I hate him, as we discussed the other day. Frankly I hope this is the part where your intentions are to eat his liver with a nice Chianti."
Amy's like, "Kinda. On a separate note, he feels sort of bad about punching you in the face that one time, after he invited your molester to a family event. In the brief interludes between our kidnappings and the drugged-up live sex shows we put on in front of our torture and eventual serial murder victims -- and of course when he's not trying to kill Rene and Hoyt, his only living friends besides the drug dealer he's managed to completely alienate -- he feels bad for like entire seconds at a time. Also, he's convinced that he killed your parents, which is stressing him out, and he does eat a lot of processed sugars, and you know how that goes, but generally: when it occurs to him? Total mea culpa."
Sookie's amazed that Jason even told her about the punching in the face, and really wants to believe Amy when she says he's "a mess about it," referring to the proof of how he actually doesn't even have time to care due to his new hobby of combining the less attractive portions of Gummo and Trainspotting into what he's convinced is a workable lifestyle. And then Amy does that thing where she tells the truth again, so impossibly honestly and clear-eyed that you can't help but follow her there: "Look, I know what you must think of him. And I get why you're mad at him, I do. But he loves you. You've still got people around you who love you." Just, you know, less. And no cat. "And all I can hope is that maybe one day, I can be counted in among those people." Too far! But Sookie is, I may have mentioned, having a time of it lately, so she's enchanted. "You are way too good for him. You know that, right?" Amy's like, "Whatever keeps you thinking we're good enough friends that you don't read my spooky, crazy, fucked-up mind."
Jason speeds up to the house in his truck and jumps out and runs inside all pissy and troubled, as we all would be after a long day of cognitive dissonance on this level, and on the TV Nan Flanagan, Terrifying Vampire Lady, is once again fighting it out with some overprocessed whiteboy Jesus freak, and Jason's grabbing at beer and empty pizza boxes, and eventually Eddie's screams make it through the static and the noise, and no matter how many times Jason screams at him to shut up, he can't. "After the massacre of three of our kind in Louisiana earlier this week," Nan says, "I think the world should take notice of the fact that we have not retaliated." Jason holds his hands an inch or two off the chair's arms, breathing slowly and softly, trying to get it back. Just a taste, just a bit of that feeling, that calm rightness. Here, now, where nobody can see him. "...And we will not. Which leaves us with the question of exactly who is hunting whom out there in America tonight?" The screaming bursts through again, into his head, like a stake through the heart. He balls his fists, screaming all the way, and comes downstairs.
Eddie thanks him piteously, terribly, for coming downstairs, and begs snarling Jason to move him; there's too much pain, the chair's digging into him and he's too weak to move himself. "Thought y'all couldn't feel pain," Jason says, honestly, and Eddie... Oh, Eddie's looking bad. Sweaty and hellish. "When you don't drink, your body... Your whole body aches more than anything I ever felt when I was alive. Please?" Jason puts his beer down on the washer, making Eddie promise to shut up, that it's not a trick, that he won't bite him. "I don't even have the energy. Just, please?" Jason crudely slaps his head out of the way and anchors his hands around Eddie as he moans, quietly. Calls him a "doughy fuck" and Eddie apologizes, then screams as Jason moves him higher on the chair. "That any better?" Eddie can barely tell. Jason bends over, back wrenched from the effort, and cracks his back. "Good. Because now I'm all fucked up." Jason, you see, is capable of discomfort.
Getting ready for work, Tara finds an envelope of cash in her cubby in Sam's office, and quickly runs out to the bar to ask him WTF it's doing there. He slices his night's limes quietly and tells her to drop it, they'll talk about it after work. And then it's him that runs, back to his office, to hide from it all, and Tara -- bewildered by all of this, because honestly -- takes over lime-slicing duty.
Bill delights in the sunlight, pulling his golf club back and smacking the ball hard, for a hole in one. He's playing Wii, all alone with a projection screen, when the doorbell rings. Clamping down his joy and turning it off, he heads to the window by the door. His head hangs low a moment before he answers. Eric is huge, staring down at him from the door, with Pam and somebody else that looks like Otho from Beetlejuice. That's Chow, Long Shadow's replacement. Bill goes, "Oh." Then they all stand around totally awkwardly for awhile before Bill's like, "Incidentally, the horrible thing that happens because I killed that douche, that's still happening? You couldn't find a workaround by any chance?" Eric's all, "I didn't even try."
And Pam -- here's what she's wearing by the way, an adorable trenchcoat and sunglasses on her head, which are like the only thing a vampire absolutely will never ever need, because it's Halloween every day because she is the very greatest of all vampires -- giggles, just completely tickled by Eric as always. Bill asks her how she likes it up Eric's ass, and she's like, "It is so awesome up Eric's ass! In fact, I say give it a shot. Ya douchebag!" Bill's like, "Well, now that Malcolm's dead I'll consider it, but not until Sookie dumps me for being a paternalistic creep. Meantime, can we go visit her before the horrible thing that's going to happen?" Pam's like, "Awesome, we can check out the total tragedy that is Merlotte's Bar & Grill," and Eric totally goes, "Yes indeedy!" Chow asks what Wii game Bill was playing, as though you can't tell just by looking at him, and says his best score at Imaginary Pebble Beach is eleven imaginary strokes under imaginary par, which is four better than Bill, so Bill's all, "I liked Long Shadow better." But I'll tell you this much: much like almost anything or anyone I've ever personally seen, Otho's easier on the eyes than Long Shadow to such a degree that he's kinda hot.
And now Jason's doing crunches on the mattress to stretch out his back, while Eddie watches. This kid, I tell ya. He says the back cramp went away right away -- "Guess that's a perk of me doing V!" -- but continues doing it because it feels good. It's not like he's got much else to do, I guess, but more than anything I think it's just those two things feeling good. Stretching his body, and being with Eddie: stretching. "What's with the weight, dude?" he asks, lying back. "I thought all you vampires were supposed to be in shape." Eddie shakes his head and says we're only what we ever were before: he led a sedentary life. Jason asks, blameless and curious, what "sedentary" means, and Eddie explains: "Desk job. I was an accountant." Jason backflips to a standing position, like a drug-addicted ninja. "Sat around a lot, ate a lot of junk food." Jason heads over to grab a beer, kicking Eddie's foot, friendly: "Well, how's someone go from being an accountant to being a vampire?" It wasn't the straightest line. It never is. We spend half our lives going to a place and the rest trying to figure out how we got there. The lucky ones can. "I always had this sense that it wasn't really my life I was leading. But I convinced myself it was the life I wanted." A year ago, when he was human, Eddie came home to find his wife, "crying like her whole family had just died." It had. She'd spent half her life going somewhere.
Some kid, not unlike Jason, now or in his youth, had suggested possibly, in the middle of a common fistfight, that his dad was a fucking faggot. Jason nods; it happens. "Well? Kids are morons." Which is all she wanted to hear, and instead her whole family was dying all around her. "What, she never even had a clue?" Eddie almost smiles, painfully: "How could she, when even I didn't?" Jason gets that, too: the multitude of places we don't admit we're going, the number of men inside us, waiting to come out. He apologizes to Eddie for the divorce, because he knows: at that moment it wasn't just her family dying, it was his too. Eddie was a Brontosaurus. Eddie was Pluto, cut and spinning out of orbit. Homeless.
"Comes a point in life when you realize everything you know about yourself, it's all just conditioning. It's the rare man who truly knows who he is. At least I accomplished that." Jason gets exactly half of that; he'll get the whole thing but he'll bleed for it first. "I guess it helps that you don't look all that gay," he says brightly, like it's a compliment, like it's the thing men tell each other, and themselves; he hops onto the washer, kicking his feet. He's like a little boy. Eddie considers him, amused. "Most of the gays I come across, they look like..." Eddie grins: "You. You're what we're supposed to look like." Jason smiles, he knows it's true.
I think where the conversation, about sexual difference, falls apart in its own terms. "Homophobia" doesn't mean fear of sameness anymore than hydrophobia means fear of water. It's a varying mixture of degrees of fear and hate, and the second we start conflating those two emotions we've lost the entire plot. Jason's got neither fear nor hate: he knows at least one thing about himself, and has what I think is a healthy disinterest, for a heterosexual kid, in hot boy-on-boy action, but it's never interfered with his relationship with Lafayette, or Eddie, or the commercialization of his own body. I don't think it signifies, because that's not how Jason defines himself: he's not, like so many guys we can think of, predicated on being not-gay. His fangophobia, such as it is, started from the same place as the fear implicit in homophobia, which is more to do with a physical paranoia of being invaded. Also healthy. I mean, even in his fantasies that scared him so badly, he was the one fucking Liam. Not the other way around. I mean, he's completely neurotic about his sexual identity, but not about what we usually mean when we use that phrase. His sexual identity is fluid, but not in the way we usually mean. His masculinity is predicated on a lot of things that have nothing to do with sex, and a lot of things that have to do with specifically straight sex, but the gay thing just doesn't seem to be an issue. Which is why this comment, a compliment from where he's standing, makes him giggle like a kid. Because he knows it's true.
"Anyway, after she left me and took my kid, I went to a gay bar, hit on a couple of men. Got laughed at, or pitied. Then I saw this one guy. He was even less of a looker than me, and he had beautiful young men all over him. Somebody told me he was a vampire. I guess I just thought: Well, that's for me. After that, it was just a matter of time before I found someone willing to turn me." Jason smiles, getting it: "That's crazy!" Told you it wasn't the straightest of lines; told you it never was. Jason nods and takes a drink: "So, uh, how did it work out for you? With the guys, and everything?" Were you saved, in your salvation? Did it get you out of the house, did it bring you pleasure? Or did you retreat to the cave, paying for prostitutes with your blood, and eventually get you kidnapped and tortured and murdered by the sweetest little boy in Renard Parish? "Well," Eddie says, glancing down at his bound body: "You tell me." Jason's sad for him, finding himself in another predicament, but it doesn't occur to him yet to feel guilty. Somebody else is driving.
But oh, Eddie. Because you went further than people are supposed to go, in order to make your dreams come true. And in the end, you settled for a life like we all do, made up of equal parts frustration and least effort. It was the line of best fit, and it led straight here. Sick of trying, you decided not to try at all, and let them come to you. Only to find yourself in the same exact place: trapped, tied up, preyed on by beautiful boys. Forever.
Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment/ Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.
Sookie's taking an order so she doesn't see Bill come in with the rest of them, but Tara and Amy go scared and still. "Bill? What's going on?" Everybody watches her, because she's in charge when this happens. She's the ambassador, as well as the scapegoat. We respect our possums even when we're destroying them, because they do the work we can't. "Wow," Eric breathes, "His place is even more depressing than I thought it'd be." Bill puts off Sookie's questions and asks for Sam, bewilderingly, and Tara, shivering, tells him Sam's in his office. Hoping all four of them will bounce. "Try to behave yourself," Bill hisses at Eric, who grins winsomely. "Don't I always?" He is sixteen feet tall, once he stands up off that throne.
Bill knocks and politely asks Sam for a moment; he thinks and lets him in. Chow follows, making it clear that's not up for discussion. "I have very little time, so I'll be brief. I've been called away and I need you to watch over Sookie, protect her while I'm gone." Sam's like, I am being Punk'd. "Don't expect her to be too keen on the idea. Sookie hates feeling like she doesn't have her independence." Sam asks him to stop telling him how Sookie is and what she's like, and Bill gets closer, because he knows how much it bugs him: "I also know how you feel about her, and I don't like it. But I'm asking you because you're the only one I can ask." Sam's eyebrows beg him not to go on. "You're the only person I know of who can protect her in my absence." Sam looks at the floor: no masks now. They are men, alone together, in the shadows, and what he's asking is bigger than love triangles or anything else; it's an acknowledgement of the shadows. "Of course I will. But I'll be doing it for her, not for you." He circles Bill and goes back to work on the books; Bill thanks the place where he was standing.
"So simply present this card at the door when you get to Fangtasia, and the first round is on me," Eric says, handing out invites. "Also, Thursdays are Ladies Nights, so be sure to bring a date" says Pam. "That is, if you can get one." The guys all laugh, charmed by her, but as she's handing a card to one of Royce's boys, Eric cuts her off. "-- Not him. He doesn't get one." The guy's all, "What gives, bro?" And Eric zooms into his face as the place goes quiet. His arm is burnt with napalm, bandaged, on the table. "What'd you do to your arm there, Bro? Hmm?" The guy hides his arm as Bill returns, and Eric calls out without looking, "I take it your business here is done?" The business, but not the goodbye. Eric gives him three minutes to talk to Sookie: "We have a Tribunal to get to." Bill takes her outside, and Eric addresses the crowd. "Before I go, a word of advice: We know when a human has wronged us. We can smell it." Amy shivers, singing lalala. "So do not make the mistake of letting the pretty blond vampire lady on television make you feel too comfortable. We may not have retaliated, yet..." Everyone stares, the burnt man shudders. "...But we know who you are. Have a nice night."
Bill stand with her, in his leather jacket, explaining about Long Shadow, and consequences. "If one of you killed another one of you defending one of us, you don't think there would be a trial?" Sookie puts on her resolved face and says she wants to come along as usual, that she'll testify, whatever it takes, and his voice is sharp with fear: "Damn it, Sookie, you can't. You can't come, and you can't testify. You will not be welcome there." Sookie realizes he was lying, when he said it was okay; Sookie begs him with her eyes to repeat the lie. "I honestly don't know," he says, and behind him Eric softly says, "Tick-tock, Bill." He tells her to watch her ass, and that he's put Sam on guard detail; she's funny: "I wish you hadn't done that..." He tells her to be smart and let him, reminding her there is still a killer on the loose. His eyes are wet, and scared. He's thought about this. She says she will, takes it to heart, and he thanks her. "...And time," Eric calls, and they kiss. Passionate and afraid and in front of everybody. Tara finally gets it; Pam says mordantly, "If I had any feelings, I'd have the chills right about now." Eric almost laughs: "Not me!" There are tears on her face, as they're kissing, and Eric barks his name, once. Bill jerks, and longs to lean in, to kiss her again, to never stop kissing. "Now." Bill touches her face, and her hands, and goes with them; she stares after, tears running down her face, and heads back toward the bar.
"You all right?" Tara asks, concerned and scared, amazed at the sudden depth of feeling she'd not witnessed before. Sookie shakes her head. Tara starts to apologize for the fight Sookie engineered crazily on her last week, and Sookie chokes back tears: "-- Tara, right now I don't even remember what it is I'm supposed to be mad at you for, so why don't we both just forget it, okay?" They embrace. And normally I would call bullshit on that kind of thing, but in this case the fight was completely stupid and made up because Sookie was going insane with grief, and Tara may be possessed by a demon, so yeah: best to just move on.
"It was in the flood," Jason says. Amy is opening him up, door after door after door, walking down the halls of him and unlocking doors and begging him to come out. There's no evil in that. Eddie gasps in sympathy. "Yep, it was the shits. But you gotta play the hand you're dealt, I guess." Eddie worries, because that means that Jason was left without a father or even a grandfather, just Adele and Sookie; just adrift in a world of women. "It's just that a boy needs a man in his life, to teach him what it means to be a man." Jason's defensive, thrown by that, because he always thought he did a good job with that, and he's certainly not going to take manhood advice from a subhuman homosexual on how to get it right. He breaks contact and grabs another beer.
"That's the hardest part of all this for me. My boy. He's got nothing but women around him now. He needs me, I'm not there." Jason assures him the son will be all right: "I mean, look at me, huh?" Eddie does; he looks at Jason, trying to make him feel better, and realizes just how in over his head this kid is. He really doesn't see the connection from this, this love and respect they are learning for eachother, and the deadly, awful, painful situation Jason's put him in. Just honestly has managed to split those two things apart. He feels a deep sadness, and Jason feels it, looking back, and something unlocks inside him; there is a powerful connection forged, something that can't be taken back. Something that says Jason, through all this, is good, and wise, and better than his circumstances. And oh my God, do people hate it when you start that shit.
"Don't you try to glimmer me, Amy warned me about that." Eddie shakes his head, because that's not what's going on at all. Or that's all it ever is: looking deeply enough into somebody else's eyes that you can see their good parts and their bad parts, and love the gold between them, no matter how bad it gets. "I'm too depleted to glamour you. That's something I haven't quite mastered yet, anyway..." Jason's surprised, like becoming a vampire doesn't come with instructions and a toy kit. Like being an adult, or becoming a man. "Learning to be a vampire doesn't happen overnight any more than learning to be a man does." Jason looks away, accepting that, and Eddie pushes a little bit: "You gonna marry her?" You gonna be the kind of man who matters, who other people depend on? The kind of man who deserves to be saved, because he has a family?
"I don't know. We haven't been together that long. But..." He grins, with a shared secret. "Just between you and me? I could really see her being the one." Eddie shakes his head, determined to play this out, to keep talking no matter how bad it gets or how many shapes Jason assumes, to play through. Because if he saves Jason, he won't die either. "Don't do it. Don't marry her." Jason screams and bitches, and Eddie just closes his eyes and keeps going. "She's a psychopath. She is. She is far more dangerous than I could ever be." (Which is exactly what she needs to be, to fix Jason. I wasn't recapping Weeds back then, but Amy Burley is U-Turn. That's literally all she is. And not to seem stereotypey, but that coincidentally makes Lafayette the Heylia, which tracks even better. Amy's going to save him by destroying him, watch.) Jason, cornered and caged, kicks out at Eddie and runs away, for more beer. Eddie stares up at him, watching as Jason turns him back into an animal, behind his eyes. "While I'm gone, keep your fucking howling to a minimum." So the eightball says try again later, I guess.
Tara shoves the money against Sam's chest, and he ushers her into the office to ctually discuss it. "You can't tell me I'm keeping it!" she shouts, and throws it down on the desk; they agree that they are a pair of stubborn sons of bitches. "You ... really believe you have a demon in you?" Tara begins to cry, looking down. Is it really a demon? Does it matter? How many times, do you think, has she tried the mirror trick since we saw her last? What do you think happened? "I think I got something inside me that is... scared. And pissed off, and mean..." He nods, and they say it together: "And fucked up." She's got something in her, like a beast or an animal, that makes funny sounds in bed, and gets scared in a way that doesn't brook words, and angry in a way that makes no time for thinking, and gets mean when it's hungry, or when it gets denied. Most of all, I mean to say, the thing inside Tara gets howling rabid mad, chainlink barking mad, postman-biting mad when its territory is threatened. And that's like all of us too, but more like Sam than most.
"Look, two years ago nobody even knew there was such a thing as vampires. Now we gotta deal with them every goddamn day. And who knows what else is out there?" And could you handle it? Could you love it, if there were? If somebody told you a magical world, full of creatures of legend, full of sex and darkness and power and light, existed just outside the margins of what we're all trying desperately to make into the semblance of a real life, an adult life, what would you do with that information? He doesn't know about Sookie kissing Bill, or what it looked like, the sun and the moon together in the sky, and how Tara understood in that moment. He thinks he's advocating for the existence of demons, and secretly he's advocating for the existence of love in a world of shapeshifters and monsters and so much fear, so many ways to get hurt. And the real secret is, she's already there. She's showing him her demon, the thing inside her, first. This is the exorcism. Here, now.
"Eight hundred bucks? That's... That's a lot of money, Sam," she says, ashamed by the amount. "Yeah, well? People in this town drink a lot. I'm doing okay." Tara finally looks at him, the walls breaking down into stones, and then to tears, and he kisses her before she can thank him. This is the exorcism.
"Interesting night," Lafayette says, and Sookie, full of fear and grief, hisses that it's all too interesting. "Shit, ain't no such a thing as too interesting, only too dull." And as she stomps off: "So John, how big is your dick?" Heh. And that's when she sees them, kissing: Sam, her dog in shining armor, kissing Tara, her best and only friend. The boy who will always love her and catch her when she falls, because he's loyal as a beast; the girl who says the things she can't say, and loves her more than anything. The two people in the world who let her into their minds, and souls, without question. And this is the first secret. Think about that for a second: not just these two, not just her best friend secretly seeing her boss, her friend, the boy she keeps on the line, the boy she still seethes at for never getting in line until it was too late, when Bill Compton came to Bon Temps. None of that matters as much as this: it's the very first lie anyone ever told Sookie Stackhouse.
Heartbreaking. She's grossed out and pissed off and runs back through the kitchen, assuring Lafayette that there is such a motherfucking thing as "too interesting" after all, harshly. And Bill, off doing God knows what because of her, dying for her like everyone she loves, one by one by one. She tells Amy to cover her tables and runs off to Bill's, even as Amy's trying to keep her there and safe. Running out to the car, suddenly unprotected, unsafe, betrayed by the man who was supposed to keep her safe and then betrayed by his deputy; the night is suddenly very cold. We surround ourselves with people that make us feel like it's possible to keep living; they protect us with their presence. And sometimes, they go away. She gets into her car as quickly as possible, with the million songs of night around her, and shivers as the engine won't turn over. There are shadows in the back seat. And then she's gone, driving to Bill's.
Sam comes out of the backroom buckling his belt, hilariously, and makes awkward conversation with Amy Burley about how well her employment is going, on both sides. She tells him the others are gone, and Sam gets nervous and shaky, trying to find out where Sookie's gone. He heads out at full tilt, screaming profanities, and nearly knocks over Andy Bellefleur, with a gun on his belt. "Hey there, Sam. Turns out that little story you told me the other day about growing up in a nudist colony didn't exactly check out. We need to talk." Sam knows he's right, but ducks out anyway, because he cannot let her down again. He runs inside, citing something forgotten inside, and a few minutes later there's a pile of clothes somewhere in the bar, and that collie comes running past. He ignores Andy's kind hello, and Andy kicks the ground. " Well, screw you too," he mutters, and keeps waiting.
Sookie drives as fast as a run from the devil, checking her backseat every few seconds, all the shadows accumulated; every nightmare true at once, holding itself at bay until she drops her defenses. There's a fear in her, something scared and pissed off and fucked up. She pulls up to Bill's, as close as possible to the door, and makes a run for it. At a rustle she jerks up short, turning in terror: it's that dog. The only male that never let her down. She kisses him in delight, and he whines, worried for her, begging to go inside. "Tell you what, why don't you come spend the night with me and I'll take you back to Merlotte's tomorrow, okay?" She kisses him again, and he barks in agreement. The nightmares follow her movements through the windows as she skips up the step, grateful that she's no longer alone.
As she's chatting him up in the bedroom, naming him "Dean," she takes off her bra under her shirt. But when she drops her skirt, he turns his head as though he's suddenly been struck shy. "Look at you, looking away! What a gentleman." He doesn't move, so she keeps talking, weirded out. "Here, would it make you more comfortable if I got under the covers?" Dean doesn't reply, so she crawls under the covers in her t-shirt and panties, laughing at him. "You can't sleep on the floor all night, you're gonna catch a draft!" She shakes out hair luxuriously, stretches against the cold sheets; she commands him to join her and he does. Sweet dreams, sweet Dean. He stretches across the foot of the bed, between her and the nightmares, and she turns off the lamp, surprised by the comfort she's suddenly found in him. In the morning she'll wake, irritated, with his weight upon her feet. She'll wiggle until he wakes, laughing to herself in the sunlight, and she'll sit up, looking down at him. And it won't be Dean the dog, lying across the bed, but Sam, naked as a jaybird, and then they'll scream. But she'll have been kept safe, all through the night.
Children, babies, they're on V all the time: they know that they are part of nature, and nature's all they have. Every caress and sweet sound, every sip of milk, comes from God. The warmth of the sun, the colors of the furniture and the blankets and the toys, it's all coming to them from who knows where; it is suffused with delight. The problem is that babies tend to shit themselves, and get pissed off when their needs aren't immediately met. In order for them to learn to live in the unending chaos and screaming bleeding colors of the world, we must tell them a very simple lie.
The first lie we're taught is that we are alone. That the sparks between you and me that we only see on V are false images; that we must work forever to forge those connections to anyone if we're going to survive. We forget that it's a lie. We're taught that we are like the Brontosaurus, or Pluto: on our own stable, lonely orbits; that to reconnect to even one other person is such a luxury and such an opportunity that we must bleed for it. That self-hatred is the straightest line to self-improvement, because the world is full of nightmares and hell is other people. The only thing V tells us is that this is a lie. It's the first lie, the thing that makes all other lies possible. We spend the rest of our lives in Pluto's orbit, in the land of the dead, watching our Heroes and screaming like infants for someone to love us, so that we can love ourselves. Telling ourselves that because Lafayette or Jason don't love us in precisely the way that we want them to, that their love is worthless. That the beautiful aren't capable or worthy of compassion. That's the first lie: that we're alone, that we deserve to be alone. That we must defend our territory, when giving it up willingly only increases territory for everyone.
But redemption is a process of remembering: specifically that we're not alone and we never have been. Because if everything is connected, as the infants and the V-juicers know, then our duty is very simple: to keep those connections alive, to keep each other alive, to keep ourselves surrounded in the beauty and the purity and the love of everybody else. To assure that everybody gets out alive, through acts of kindness both simplistic and extreme. To pay for each other's exorcisms; to accept help when it's offered. To remember above all else that the same sparks and the same blood run through us all: that that True Blood is all we have.
Tonight, Jason comes home, popping the clutch and pulling up to his house in a cloud of dust. The sun's still down, he's still an addict; he's still the jailer to a creature of God, who in a short year has seen and retreated from mysteries and wonders Jason's still never seen. But Eddie is dying, and Jason knows there's more to life than that. There has to be. Everything else is a lie. (I keep saying he's Starbuck, but considering the direct correlation between Horrible Acts Performed and Intensity of Love I apparently Feel for Him, he's starting to resemble Gaius Baltar.) So Jason props up his friend, still bound in silver, and puts a straw into his mouth, and shouts at him to wake up, to drink. To live, for the first time. And as Eddie drinks, Jason pats his shoulder without looking. Eddie looks up at him: Jason is a shapeshifter. He's never met this Jason before: Breakfast?
The exorcism begins.
Our vlogger thinks about Bill even more than Sookie and Sam combined! Watch him go!