Jason has three visitors in jail: Rene Lenier, Sookie, and finally a dude from Newlin's church, the Fellowship of the Sun -- best known for their double-talking hatred of vampires. Tara's living it up at Maryann's with her new guitar-playing hottie friend Eggs, and has no idea that A) she is being deliberately cut off from her friends or B) that sometimes Maryann goes blurry in her yard in a super freaky way.
Sookie spends the rest of the day freaking out about Jason, talking about how she's going to find the real killer just as soon as that fax comes in, and ignoring every possible sign that Rene's the killer to the point of letting him drive her home. Once there, her psychic powers finally kick in and she realizes he's Drew Marshall, the Fangbanger Strangler. Then he kind of menacingly chases her around the house in slow-motion for about a million years being creepy, she runs to the graveyard for no reason, and he bashes her head in.
Meanwhile, Sam has smelled his road crew jacket and comes barking down the road, but Rene bashes his head in as well, so he turns back into a man. Down underground, Vampire Bill hears Sookie freaking out and throws himself out into the sun to save her, but is slowed down by the fact that sunlight causes vampires to burst into flames. After most of his face falls off, he drops to the ground about a hundred yards from where Rene is freaking out on Sam and Sookie, but he's just close enough that his presence wakes Sookie up. She pulls it together enough to smash Rene in the head with a shovel, then fully chops off his head. It is amazing.
Sookie cries and whines and moans and beats her breast at Bill's side as he's slowly cooking in the sun. Finally, naked Sam points out that they should probably stick him in the ground, and solemnly does so, which means all three of these fools has now saved each other's bacon like six times in succession. Sam takes her home, and doped-up to the point of hilarity, Sookie tells him -- in front of Tara and Lafayette -- that he is totally awesome, and they kind of love each other. Guilty Arlene and hyperactively redeemed Jason come by to visit, and Tara tells Sam that (now that Bill is likely dead-dead) he can have Sookie. She returns to Maryann... But not before a showdown between Maryann and Sam suggests a rich and totally freaky history. Then Bill comes back to Sookie, totally healed and having fed on somebody, and they make out.
Two weeks later, things are different for everybody: Vermont passes the right to vampire marriage, Hoyt is looking for a vampire bride around his age, and Bachelorette #1 seems to be Jessica, whom Eric and Pam unceremoniously drop off at Daddy Bill's because she's too annoying even for their arch sanguinity, so he makes that freaked-out face I like. Jason has joined the Fellowship of the Sun and taken that vacant look behind his eyes to a whole new level, Tara is spouting off Maryann's philosophies (sort of a cross between Tony Robbins, Nietzsche and The Secret), much to Sam's consternation... And Lafayette's body is found in the back of Andy's car.
Once upon a time, in a land not far from this one, there lived a little boy. His favorite thing in the world was his body: a strange country, just like yours. One you could spend the days and years of your life mapping, journeying, and never without a strange new discovery. It was the chariot he rode. It was wonderfully and terribly made, and the songs it wrote upon itself were wordless. He knew he would never know it fully, not in a way you can say out loud, because those songs were songs that had no words. Sometimes it surprised him. The little boy had no parents to speak of, but it was a good life: right on the edge of the forest, where day becomes night and men become beasts. Where witches and wolves and worse dwelt, calling to him all day and all night: "Come and find out!"
The boy had a little sister, with a body of her own. The songs it sang were different, and none of his concern. He only knew, from the top of his beautiful head to the soles of his strong feet, that he must protect her. They lived in a wilderness, full of strange things under the moon and the sun, and there are a million ways you can hurt yourself if you don't have a map. There are valleys and shadows we walk into with our eyes open, following old instructions, hearing old songs calling across to us, saying, "Come and find out!" It is for men to protect their little sisters, their daughters and their wives, from songs like this. The little boy knew this as well as he knew anything. So he stayed close to home and he kept an eye on his sister, whose purity he shared. And if she went down, he knew, he would go down too.
One day, Death came to town. Just for a little visit, he said. And she was beautiful, and powerful, and the little boy knew he could explain all the secrets in this world. Even the secrets of the flesh. The language Death spoke had no words: It was a song about everything we don't have words for. Sex, and danger; running in the night with blood beating in your ears. Death was a welcome home, and Death was an invitation to the night. The little boy sat across the table from Death, and looked upon his beauty, and desired her: but this was one of those bad places he knew he shouldn't go. He could look on Death and smile, and he could pay tribute; he could give her a kindness and share a meal, but then it went no further. And the sun would come up, regular as clockwork, and the little boy and his sister would have breakfast together, and talk about anything but Death.
And then the little boy -- all the little boys -- figured out that the joke was on him: all the time he'd spent, guarding the door and listening at windows, and it turned out his sister had pulled a chair up to the table, and was eating gratefully with Death. Sharing little secrets he was too cowardly to know; singing songs of which he'd only heard bits and pieces in his dreams. His sister and Death were lovers, laughing behind their hands at him, sharing countryside and clearing that he would never know. His sister turned her face from the sun, and ran in the night, dancing under the moon, mad with desire. Her purity, and his: running red with blood. And the little boy knew a thing, and put that thing away: he wanted to make love to Death. He knew he would grow up then, and enter Death's kingdom, and would know those moonlight songs. And he wanted it so badly, but he was afraid. His body was an unknown kingdom, with secrets and shames he could only put into words. But he looked upon his sister, and Death, and he was ashamed.
And then the little boy -- all the little boys -- figured out that the joke was on him: all the time he'd spent, guarding the door and listening at windows, and it turned out his sister had pulled a chair up to the table, and was eating gratefully with Death. Sharing little secrets he was too cowardly to know; singing songs of which he'd only heard bits and pieces in his dreams. His sister and Death were lovers, laughing behind their hands at him, sharing countryside and clearing that he would never know. His sister turned her face from the sun, and ran in the night, dancing under the moon, mad with desire. Her purity, and his: running red with blood. And the little boy knew a thing, and put that thing away: he wanted to make love to Death. He knew he would grow up then, and enter Death's kingdom, and would know those moonlight songs. And he wanted it so badly, but he was afraid. His body was an unknown kingdom, with secrets and shames he could only put into words. But he looked upon his sister, and Death, and he was ashamed.
Sometimes in the dreams he was his sister, submitting under Death's hand; aching beneath him, offering her sweet neck, stretching up and out of herself slowly, in ecstasy. Sometimes he was Death herself, clawing at skin and biting at the neck, growling like a wolf, howling like the wilderness. Once he fantasized that he was both at once: fucking Death like he fucked women. It scared him, so terribly, because Death was muscled and furious, gorging on blood, looking up at him with eyes clouded by desire. And that was when he knew: he had to kill his sister, to keep her safe. To keep himself safe, and wall off his whole kingdom. He changed his name, and become someone else. He was a shapeshifter, he surprised himself, and he watched himself as he was changing. And no matter how far he ran or how much he grieved, still there was that voice, singing across the night that made us all: "Come and find out!"
He had a brother, too.
"You know that old leather jacket I wear sometime? The brown one? Well, make sure it goes to Hoyt. I told him it was lucky. It ain't. But he don't know that. Uh... Sookie'll get the house, my bank account," Jason thinks, in his cell, wondering what else he has to give. Now that everything's been taken, now that even his body has become a bloody mystery; now that his hands move while he is sleeping, of their own accord, to take the lives of the women he loved, one by one. "But I want you to have my truck." Rene leans on the bars, surprised, staring into Jason's cell, and Jason nods. Rene was always a good friend. Like a big brother: just as Eddie was telling him what manhood demands, Rene was there to show him. To love a good woman, to have a family, to be depended upon: these things require that you become dependable. The best parts of Rene are nothing to do with Drew, just as the best parts of Amy had nothing to do with Eddie. Rene and Eddie are the parts of the kingdom worth saving, when the fires start.
Rene says Jason will get his truck back soon enough, but he knows the truth. They both do: "They ain't never letting me go, Rene. There's something inside me that's just... It's wrong," Jason says, choking on it: he is a killer. Rene looks at Jason, speaking hypothetically and truthfully at the same time. He could be angry, but that's another man entirely; what Jason says is that Rene is the truth, and Drew is just a secret better left buried. There are times when Rene knows that. We would all be safer if he believed, in fact: the division in him falls far deeper than the simple act of hiding Drew away, because the killer only exists as the price of a further division: the fact that Drew is a fangbanger, and he knows it. And this is a tale as old as time: the subdivision of our desires, the walling off of kingdoms, produces only hate.
This could be a story of senseless violence and hateful horror, coming from a clear blue sky: trust and kindness masking a deeper anger and chaos. But the truth is, we know Drew's story, start to finish. We've watched it for twelve weeks now, and it began at the same moment of our story. Kelly and Brad were giddy, curious, removed, until they met Death face to face. Jason Stackhouse was disgusted, turned on, ashamed and alive, when he saw the fang marks on Maudette's creamy thigh. In that moment, before Bill Compton ever walked into Merlotte's, he had a choice: to close his kingdom to Maudette, or to ride the horse that she provided, deeper and deeper into the forest. That night he watched a video, while she blew him, of Liam on her like a beast, chained to her ceiling, praying for pain and for eventual death. And all his words kept saying she was disgusting, good riddance to white trash, but his body heard something else: her mouth on his cock, her voice in his ear. "Come and find out!"
Drew stole that videotape. Kept in a secret place, sternly told himself not to watch it. And if Jason could have done, he would have done the same. But Maudette pretended to be dead, and Jason thought to himself: "Now I am Death. No better and no worse than the creature on the tape. I have taken her like him, and I have visited pain and death upon her." And he ran, screaming, into Dawn's arms. Dawn, who was a little crazy -- in a hot way -- and the only person strong enough to withstand his infinite bullshit: the little boy who crawled sweetly into her arms, the little boy who crossed his arms on her bed and refused to leave. And once Dawn was a fangbanger too, the dreams started up again: he fantasized about fucking Liam, scaring himself. Inventing new forms of gay panic at the same rate the world was going crazy.
He strapped on a mask, pretended to be Drew. He didn't even know Drew existed, but he knew -- based on what his body was telling him -- that there must be a Drew, somewhere in the world. There must be someone to stand against the darkness. He wore gloves Lafayette would have loved, and smoked a cigarette. And eventually she died too. It's what she wanted: to pull up a chair, and sit with Death, and drink awhile. And somewhere in there Jason knew it was what she deserved. To sit with Death and not to drink; to make love with Death. He knew how it made him feel, just to think about it: like trash, like he deserved pain, and worse than pain. And he could not conceive of a world in which anybody felt differently about it. Surely everyone had walls up in their kingdoms, separating dark from light, moon from sun; surely she was disgusted, in her way, by what desire made her do. And then came Bill Compton, and Sookie who always knows best went willing into those shadows. And then came V.
So what makes the difference? What makes Jason stay -- for better or worse -- Jason Stackhouse, while the same starting point, the same complex and incomprehensible desires, made Drew a killer of women? As you know, I think there is something exceptional about Jason, but I don't think that's it. I think Adele, Lafayette and Amy guided him through it, and out the other side. I can't say what makes a man become Drew Marshall, so I can't say for certain that Jason would never go there, but I can say that Adele gave him a lot to work with. And Lafayette guided him first to v-juice and then to Eddie, which were the things that saved him. And Amy, who showed him horrors while teaching him love, unconditional compassion, and the secret of life. But there was none of that for Drew, because Drew is not half as brave or half as wise as Jason Stackhouse: he just ditched himself, walled it off, became Rene Lanier. It was like declaring bankruptcy: everybody else pays the price.
But Rene can't imagine a world in which we walk that line even as gracefully as Jason has managed: there are good things and there are bad things, and there are real bad things. There is the day, and there is the night. I think if this season, this story, are about anything it's about the dangers of oversimplifying. We're handed soundbites all day, and we manufacture our own, and while it doesn't really contribute to living a fully authentic life, where things get really fucking bad is when we play that card on ourselves: I am bad, I must change. I am saved, I must achieve stasis. You are sick, I must destroy you. We pick a line in the chaos, when we've no way of being objective about the choice or the consequences, and we say: "This. This is my country. No more and no less." I am Rene Lanier, I am Jason Stackhouse.
I am Amy Burley: God is love, and God loves everyone... Except the people who feed my addiction. In that case, God loves the predator. God is Gaia, the unknowable and beautiful everything that V can show us... but you are not invited. If you tried to hold every everything in your mind your head would explode; nobody's expected to do that. To open yourself to things outside your little house is to experience God directly, even when it's terrifying; but open up too far, or stay that way too long, and you will disperse on the wind like a pillar of cloud. But everybody wants a chance to rest, to say, "This is as ambivalent as I can be about things today, while remaining myself." That's why it takes a guide: to snap us out of stasis when it's time, and then to close our gates when we're burning out. And once you realize you're going to keep circling that drain your entire life, the stress of maintaining any kind of consistent viewpoint becomes secondary to surviving, to compassion, to connection. You grow up, the world gets bigger. You stop ignoring the signs you don't want to read, stop designing reality to suit your bitterness and the areas you're small, and you realize your life is story, being told by you and by the world.
"Nah, come on now. It ain't like you went and killed a buncha... innocent women." As though there is such a creature. You start throwing around words like innocence and you start dividing the sheep from the goats, and then it's a small step to slaughter. What he's saying is that he's bloodied his hands to keep his kingdom safe, and would do it again; had he the choice he would not have killed a one. He wants to keep us all safe, and happy, and pure. No freaks. "They were fangbangers. If you hadn't have done it, it was a matter of time..." Jason knows Adele's death was different, but he's still incensed; call his sister a fangbanger and everybody feels awkward, but Adele? "Now, now. Don't get your back all up, you. I'm just sayin', you must've had your reasons, that's all." Because if not, then there is no story here. And if there's no story, then there's no Rene, because Rene is the story telling the story for Drew. Selling Jason out in that cell while apologizing for Drew's bad behavior. But Jason is not playing. "There ain't no good reason for what I did." These are the hard choices we make, in war.
Rene's interrupted by Hurricane Sookie, who pushes past the guards with high-pitched squeals and hurls herself against the bars, touching Jason's hands and face desperately. Jason begs for her forgiveness a thousand times, but she tells him to shut up, quit it, because no matter what he thinks he's not the murderer, and she's hot on the trail of Drew Marshall. What I find interesting is that in the first act of this season, the Killer just went around killing people and everybody was weirded out, and then in the second act Sookie was too busy mooning around and being seduced in the dirt by Bill's mysterious charms, but once Bill was gone? It took about five seconds of breakfast with Sam for her to snap out of it and go, "I am fucking sick of almost getting killed all the time." And by the end of that day, she knew everything about the killer except his face. Sookie tells Jason to stop confessing his big pile of nothing confessions every second, and vows to find Drew immediately. Rene stands behind them, but it's Drew's eyes watching.
Rene watches, nervous, as Sookie explains to Jason about Cindy Marshall, her murderous brother, the fangbanger strangler. (If she knows this how come she hasn't gone to the cops and gotten her brother out of that cell?) Sookie whirls on Rene, snottily explaining the obvious, which is that she's been waiting for Andy to do something other than sexually fixate on her brother, or Bud to care what happens to fangbangers, and she's done. Rene surmises that she doesn't know for sure that he's the killer, and Sookie reminds him that she's read at least a little bit of his thoughts. (They'll never believe that about him but it's the truth there's all kinds of strangeness in this world...) Jason interrupts Rene's interesting train of thought and explains to his sister that, against all evidence and magic powers and the fact that he was there, like actively not killing anybody, he's still fairly sure. She can't accept the truth, he says shaking: "I'm a murderer. And I'm going to hell. Plain and simple."
Not just a speech, but a plot point. He doesn't really say a whole lot, so it's best to pay attention. Down in the mental DNA Jason and Drew share, in their fangbanger gay panic brotherhood, there are the good and the bad. He is bad. If he were a killer, he'd turn the knife on himself, and go to Amy, and they would be free of sin and fear and addiction, finally together. There are those who deserve life and those who have it anyway, like God moving in the deeps, and then there are the third type: those who have life, and don't deserve it. "I'm a murderer and I'm going to hell." Plain and simple is the way he likes it; plain and simple is the way we all like it, when we're tired, or when we're lazy. Or when we've been taught we're capable of only that much.
And so much so that it physically hurts him to have her disagree, when she's always helped to steer him right: she doesn't know, how it felt to feel all that uncertainty drip away, to find out that he was something in the day world, a killer, and not something uncategorizable, or terrifying, or dirty like her. He is a murderer. The bodies pile up around him, without rhyme or reason except the easiest way of connecting the dots. The one person who told him he was worthwhile was dead in his bed; she's not there to tell him that anymore, and that's just more proof she was wrong. And something else, too, something huge he'll never say, the one murder he was conscious for. He killed Eddie, drunk and swaggering and chauvinist, pushing her buttons and pissing her off, daring her to fracture the untenable situation again. Sookie doesn't know that, because nobody knows that, and nobody ever will: he loved a man, a creature of God, and that man was murdered: he is a murderer and he's going to hell.
Jason screams for Andy over her protestations, panicked and hurting and dreadfully guilty and afraid. Throw the cards up in the air again, take the world and the way it lined up this time, and who knows what happens ? It hurts just to think about. Andy comes, rumbling and slow, and soon enough muscles her out. She twitters at him all the way down the hall, about the fax with Drew's picture, and Andy blows her off and points back at Jason, and Rene: "The real killer is right there, where he belongs." But that's not exactly true either: he's standing right there, but Rene's standing there too. And Sookie levels pronouncement on Andy, just for completeness's sake: "You are one hell of a sorry excuse for a cop and a human being, Andy, and it's just a matter of time before everyone knows it." Poor old Andy Bellefleur. I sort of love him.
She flounces off, and Andy's all frustrated, but now think about it. You've got Andy, who puts all his mysteries on Jason and has become creepily obsessed with him as a result. You've got Drew, standing inside a costume made of his own skin, killing indiscriminately now: Adele, Amy, Jason. You've got Rene, who loves his fiancée and wants to be a good friend to Jason, whom he thinks of as a little brother. And you've got Jason, who created masks out of thin air and pretended, again and again, to be the Drew who never existed. That's a complete circle: Jason carrying Andy's shit, Drew carrying Jason's shit, Rene carrying Drew's shit, and Sookie Stackhouse -- who can look inside your mind, see into your heart -- setting every one of these decisions on fire, radicalizing every wall in every kingdom, just by being there. In one short scene she's managed to blow everybody's minds, just by telling the truth. She wasn't even that cool or interesting, but that's what she did. And in all that chaos, they harden as men must: Jason resolves himself to his damnation, Andy resolves to overcome her assessment of him by any means necessary, and Drew realizes she's got to die before anything else can happen.
The key is finding a story that makes it fit, so it tells you what happens and what the outcomes are. Drew and Cindy Marshall are Kay and Greta. Jason and Sookie Stackhouse are Hansel and Gretel. Tara Thornton is Psyche, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty: the princess locked in a castle, the evil stepmother wearing our beloved mother's face, the Fairy Godmother, the Blue Angel sent from Heaven, Satan in a Sunday hat. Dawn and Sookie are Little Red Riding Hood, grinning in the shadows. Maudette's story is the story of O, and of criminal desires; is self-extinguishment and Rimbaud and Artaud's lovely daughter. Andy is Hitchcockian, Andy is a Barth Chimera, a Phil Dick gumshoe, the son and heir of nothing in particular; Andy Bellefleur knows the key to the secret is the secret. Coroner Mike is Gepetto and Abraham, losing sons that were never his to the one world coroners can never know, but can only guard its gates.
Amy Burley is Jacques Derrida and Franny Glass, in love with the world and the union of opposites; is the Archangel Michael, who knows the Garden is as large as the world and still must let only certain people in. Sam Merlotte is the Wolfman and the Little Match Girl, he is Galahad and Lancelot. Bill Compton is a fairytale all his own, hating the life and the skin that is his, desperate to connect with life, all shame and fear and self-abnegation, self-control; Bill Compton finds the whitest tender bird in the nest and holds her as softly as he can in his hands, to prove to himself and to life and to God that he's worth saving; Bill Compton is the whitest tender bird in the nest, and he holds himself so carefully.
But finding your story is half the battle, because the only constant is change and the only way out is through. Even telling your story is only half the battle, once you've found the words, because bodies don't speak in words. Once you know the story, the story stops being the answer, and we plateau. We begin to rot, until we start running again. We hold onto this salvation because we are exhausted, but the truth is this: Stories don't save us. Stories changeus.
Tara wakes beneath a whore: Le Grande Odalisque, greatest of the Ingres concubines, smiling to herself on the wall like a girl with secret, a girl with a pearl earring. Her body is deformed, distended, idealized into art and away from nature. "Come and find out!" she says, with her back like a swan; "All you have to do is want," she says, like the Last Temptation. Something from Peter & The Wolf is playing, throughout the house; she snuggles down into the featherbed, the tender whiteness of her castle, and smiles to herself like a girl with a secret. A little more wakefulness, a little more light, and she bolts upright: where is she, in what world is her body, in what fantasy is she waking? There's a robe on the chair. She is bathed in light and satin, in luxury both austere and filigreed.
A porcine manservant sets down her tray on the veranda outside: Breakfast is for families. She introduces himself and he pulls out her chair, settling a napkin on her lap. This heaven burst from the madness of the imagination; this heaven a reversal of all she's been denied. Soft where life was hard, bright where life was dark. A man who never loved her, and whom she never loved, who always judged and who paid cash for her follies, traded for something better. Maryann appears and sits down with her. "Okay, this isn't food. This is sculpture. And this place... You're not really just a social worker, are you?" Maryann laughs in her halter dress, saying they're both more than what they appear to be. She offers her coffee, but Tara doesn't drink.
"I mean, you're not just a drunk-driving bartender, are you? You're also intelligent, resourceful. Strong. A survivor." Tara admits she's none of those things, at this point in the story: her story now is ruin, hate speech directed at her greatest and most fragile friendship, a man who called her a whore and never loved her, a car gone, a house and mother vanishing. She's adrift, alone, everyone tied to their own miseries and assuming hers are, as usual, of her own creation. "I suppose that's one way of looking at it. Personally, I see your situation as an opportunity." She sips her coffee; Tara still hasn't tasted hers yet. "I just got a fake exorcism and a DUI, I probably lost my job, all of my friends... And my mother disowned me." It's just a fairytale. "I'm sorry, but I don't get how that's an opportunity." And there is this: whenever the world gets bigger, it always looks like it is ending. That's the secret of the apocalypse: it happens every minute. You inhabit the story, the story that saves you, that holds you softly in its hands, and then the story goes away again. And the world and all its shadows smile, and invite you to come exploring once again: "Come and find out!"
"Maybe life has just cleared out all the things that weren't working. Now you've got room to rebuild. Decide exactly what you want your life to look like, and make that happen." Tara's restless, because it sounds like work. Too much work, a lifetime's worth: to be happy. To take responsibility. To stand in the ashes, to dig a potato from the scorched earth and swear you'll never go hungry again: that you're willing to fight life to the death for what you're owed; for what you owe yourself. To step into the new story, beckoning you forward, saying that all you ever did was let them have the upper hand. Tell you how the story was going to be. Tell you which side you landed on, whether you were worthy of love, or sex, or beauty. Tell you that you have a demon inside you, that you must kill her, that you must wall off your kingdom. Declare bankruptcy only to find that witches have day jobs, too. Because if there is no mother, and there is no crone, then all you have is yourself: under the sun and under the moon, singing the songs you write for yourself. And that's the one place too scary even for Tara to walk alone. The future is a wilderness.
"What do you want, Tara? What do you want your life to be?" Remove the pain, the goad, the fear, the guilt, and what remains? A white page, without music on it, without words. The end of the world. The apocalypse is white, the blankness of a page. "I don't know," she says, knowing Maryann's beliefs enough to feel guilty for her own weakness and helplessness: "I guess I never really let myself want anything." Heartbreaking; Maryann agrees. But Tara still can't see the , so she just feels ugly and stupid for wanting something she can't yet name. She stands up awkwardly, promising to pay Maryann back, promising to give back her time to the people Maryann should be helping, the ones that deserve it. Maryann's voice goes a little hard. "Tara, sit down. You haven't touched your food, your dress isn't dry, and I think we both know you've got nowhere to go." Not too hard, not too soft. Just right. Tara feels broken, and at a word eases back into her seat.
When we talk about sacrifice what we're talking about is the fact that there are things moving in the deep: leviathans older than time, twisting in the water. You can feel them when they move past you, or through you; implicit in the sparks that light your skin up. You give them something, your madness or your desire, and they pay you back in power. Their passage deforms the universe, like Einsteinian ripples in the fabric and curves in dimensions you can't see, but you can feel it. Remember Lynda Barry: "And in my dream there was a creature. Not too friendly, not too mean. He closed my eyes and opened them." And of all the other things there are than vampires, in the world, you must remember this deep magic: Every one of them a leviathan, full of blood and life and magic. Maryann, Pam and Eric; Bill and Sam; Jason and Sookie and Tara and poor dead Eddie, and you and me.
By cross-sums she is woven with the Moon, who stands at the threshold of the darkness and churns the waters. But every guide is the guardian of a threshold, don't forget: from one angle a strange angel guiding you to Heaven, and from another something dark and terrifying. Until you learn to tell the truth; until you learn your true name. In the old days, three men with animals' heads would come into your tent and rip you into pieces, put you back together with a diamond in your head: time enough to obey the Oracle's only demand, γνῶθι σαυτόν, the truth that rips itself across your skin and never, ever stops. Tara is brushing past God's lovely face, and Maryann asks her to wait, to sit, to eat, to want. They'd find them, decades older or souls gone, smiling in the sunset, in a circle of toadstools, long after the music had come and gone and the wise women knew it was safe to go outside again: and all the fairy gold in their pockets had turned back into leaves of oak and ash, and all the fairy food in their stomachs was nothing, and they were starving. And the little man becomes a pig again, and the boar becomes a man, and the world ripples in the sunlight and becomes itself again, and all we know of their passage is this: the way their lights have marked us. The sad song in our hearts we can never quite remember, and never quite forget; the song of the night that made us.
"I know it's hard for you to trust me, but I really do just wanna help. Even if that means just giving you a place to stay until you figure things out... It's what I do," she explains again. "It's what I want my life to be, helping people. Not because I feel sorry for you, and not because I want anything back from you." Then why? "Because you deserve a chance. And I'm in a position to give you one." Tara smiles, fidgets; inside, the porcine manservant hears her phone ringing and, seeing it's Sam calling yet again, pockets the phone and prepares the bed for her rest.
"You wanna end this thing, that's fine. The least you could do is call me back and tell me where the fuck you are so I can stop worrying..." Sookie enters his office and Sam calms down, for a thousand reasons, thanking the person on the phone and saying goodbye. Brother in jail, Bill uninvited from her house: lots of reasons not to rock the boat. To remind her neither that her best friend is missing nor that he has taken a lover. "What are you doing here?" he asks, because she has a million reasons to stay home. "I'm not staying home and hiding, having people think I'm ashamed." Love him or hate him, and I do, Sam Merlotte taught her that. "Besides, I'm gonna need all the money I can get to hire a private investigator: Drew Marshall is somewhere in this town. Who knows how many times he's sat in one of those booths, looked me in right in the eye and ordered a burger and fries." Sam asks if she wouldn't have picked up on that, and she whirls, stressing: "Wouldn't you have smelled him? I ain't a shortwave radio, I spend most of my time trying not to listen to people!" Sam apologizes, and she realizes he has no reason to do so. She smiles apologetically, and heads out into her day.
The cops admit a man to Jason's cell. He's neither friend nor family; perhaps he is both. He is given five minutes. Jason isn't interested, thinking at first he's a lawyer. He doesn't want a lawyer: lawyers argue the truth, turn it into something ambivalent, dig beneath the easy shallows and show the dimensions of the world, how up can be down, how clean can be dirty, how killers can go free. The last thing he wants is an attorney, when the only thing attorneys do is bring us closer to the complex truth. An attorney would say, "You did this thing and this thing, but you are not guilty. You deserve the right to a trial, and to the protection of the law. Your murders are not murders. Eddie did not die. Eddie was already dead. You are free." The apocalypse is a single page, stuffed so full with white it screams.
"I'm here on behalf of the Fellowship of the Sun," says Orry Dawson, and bored Jason sits up: "That anti-vampire church?" A contradiction, a cult, a Hurley Burley if ever there were one: how can a church -- a word which means love and home and family and infinite compassion and welcome -- possibly condone hate? How can religion -- a word that means reconnection -- possible preach destruction? It makes his head hurt, fuzzy like a dead channel, and so he rejects it. This isn't follow the leader, this is the price of Jason's kindness and his blind, loving heart.
If you'd told him, even before Eddie, that v-juice opens the doorway to infinite compassion and love, for all God's creatures, he'd be confused by the horror that brings it to his door. If you'd told him the world is full of infinite recombining beauty, all souls connected, all things connected... And yet there are abominations, dead things walking, predators we must destroy, he'd be confused, his head would buzz with the knowledge that your words disagreed with the wordless truth in his gigantic heart. He needed Amy to explain to him how even the principle of inclusion necessarily carries within it the signifier of exclusion: that Gaia is life, and thus excludes death. Even in the face of Eddie's beauty, even when Jason's entire body sang out for the love of Eddie, she told him how both things could be true. And every time he faltered, she reminded him, and told him a new way it could be true. How love which contains everything can and must contain also hate. How we feed our addictions, the needs we can't control, through a radical reassessment of terms. How we take the signs and twist their meanings.
"We are a religious organization dedicated to the preservation and salvation of the human race," says Orry Dawson, and what he means is, "Yes. We hate vampires and have built a religion on it." But what Jason hears is, "Love which contains everything can include hate, but we hate only the sin, not the blighted sinner." And well, that's fine, because it quiets the demons buzzing in his ear, telling his heart that the sun is like anything else: beautiful and terrible, destructive and wonderful, depending on what story you're telling yourself. "Oh, good. Because I thought you just hated vampires. And I used to, but then I got to know one? And he was a pretty decent guy. Until I got him killed."
Orry sighs, almost sadly: "See, that's where you're wrong. What you did, it was a service to your race and to Jesus. And you should be proud of that." Orry weeps for the poor benighted fellow, but understands how Jason can love him and still have killed him. He can see it in Jason's eyes: that guilt, that love. But after all, that's what the Fellowship is about. Love or hate or fear or lust, the sun comes around like clockwork. Jason rolls his eyes at him, but Orry presses the advantage; defines predator for him once again: "Last year there were over 800 reported vampire-related attacks, in Louisiana alone." Murders are -- follow me -- committed by murderers. Whatever else the fangbanger strangler is doing, he's definitely committing vampire-related attacks.
Murderers have something wrong inside them, something that takes them out of the running for redemption. And sometimes when a murderer confesses, the whole world rises up, to tempt him away from the truth and the bravery of his confession, to bring him down out of the light and into darkness once again. Jason knows what a predator is, because he is one, now; Jason knows how horrible it is, when their evil deeds go unpunished, especially by the good-hearted and well-intentioned, by the little sisters and the fangbangers of the world, who can't be expected to understand right and wrong any more than a beast that runs in the night. Hard to find a girl who ain't been bit these days. Once there was a little boy.
"And the law won't do nothing about it. They are too busy 'respecting' those fiends and their 'civil rights.' Well, what about our rights? Our rights to be safe in our own neighborhoods, our right to our own blood?" Jason shakes his head, because WTF, and Orry leans closer: "Look. Officially, the church can't condone what you did. You took the lives of four women." Jason nods, sadly. A beast, whose body is a mysterious country, with dark rivers you'll never see, a strange moon that calls in a song without words. "Women who had tainted themselves and their race, but still: human women. Hey." He motions Jason over, and Jason flows toward him like water.
"We do recognize that even though your methods may have been flawed, your intentions were pure." Jason swears he has no idea -- and honestly he doesn't, shooting him that hilarious "Look I really am this stupid" look he gives you sometimes -- what Orry is talking about. But Orry's not singing to him in words. "That's smart. Don't admit to anything." He opens his briefcase and smiles conspiratorially. "The Church has started up a fund for your defense." He passes a pamphlet from the Church through the bars. "In the meantime, here's something to help you pass the time. You are a brave soldier, Jason Stackhouse." Brave, and wise, and kind, and good. A soldier in an army that doesn't hate, but manages to love so fiercely that it burns away all the fear and nastiness, all the darkness of the night, searing off like snow in sunlight.
Jason's heart is too big to write the blank page by himself. He loves too much to do anything on his own. It's not that he wants someone to tell him a story, better or worse, it's that he needs someone to tell the story with. His agency is lost and unrecovered. Tell him just enough truth, mix just enough language into your song, and he'll be lost in it: the desire to share in the story overrides his judgment, because he has no judgment. He leaps before looking, but only if you soothe his heart. The story they are telling now rests on the very foundations of what Jason must believe: they both think he's Drew. They are holding an entire conversation based on the untrue fact that Jason is Drew. And it would be a lot harder to believe, if Drew and Jason weren't so close to begin with. Orry Dawson touches his hand, sweetly: like a father, like an older brother. Like Eddie. "God loves you. You will be saved!"
That's the story now: how a murder was redeemed. Not the women, not Gran and the fangbangers, but the real murder. Because there are places where he knows he's not Drew, but even in those places, Eddie's blood is still on his hands, and in his throat. So, make the world bigger: Tell him it wasn't murder, but love. Tell him hate is part of everything, consumed in light and connected to the living world. Tell him Amy didn't die in vain, but only brought him closer to the light; tell him to love the enemy. Until they are ash.
Tara's insane body at poolside, wearing a tangerine bikini, all alone for all she knows. She giggles, dipping in a toe at first, afraid of pleasure, afraid it's not real, that the gold will turn to cinders and dry leaves. The water ripples out, as she swims. She laughs and splashes, like a little girl. The first little girl, the one who was hurt: that's what Nancy wanted and Lettie Mae never did; she's what Miss Jeanette tried to possess. It's what Maryann wants for her tribute. Breakfast was amnesia, not apology: but Tara hasn't eaten yet. Inside, though, the piggish fairies have upped the ante considerably: food on every table, a cornucopia of delights, squat toroid southern peaches fat with juice, fruit of every kind, from the garden of the world. Lush, dementedly so, fecund and blessed and abundant: the dreams of a child who's spent her life starving: you could expect bees buzzing there in the richness, after all this time with only flies. Too much life after all this death.
In the parlor, a man plays the guitar: soulful with a spark in his eyes, teasing beautiful sounds up into the quiet. He sounds like the food smells, with a quiet face. Tara closes her robe suddenly, shocked out of the garden, and considers him, apologizing. "You must be Tara," he says, and invites her in. He stands and introduces himself: Benedict "Eggs" Talley, full of secrets and a light inside. Benedict, the old betrayer, introduces himself to Tara: the homeland, the territory, the old debated ancestral home, passed from hand to hand. "Suits you," he says, calling it a pretty name. She is beautiful and she is contested. She must not go hungry again. She wavers, imagining that he is Maryann's boyfriend, and he shrugs: he's just like Tara, contested, getting back on his feet. "So collecting stray black people, that some kind of hobby of hers?" Eggs laughs, like a strum, and says Maryann warned him Tara was funny. And what else? What secrets? "She said you crashed your car with a gallon of whiskey in your lap?" They sit and Tara admits it was vodka: "Really cheap vodka." She looks away and down, and he swears he isn't judging her story. "Believe me, all right, when Maryann found me I was..." He stares into the distance, caught in memory and the night that made him. Once there was a little boy.
"Let's just say I was a hell of a lot worse off than you." Back to Tara; he brightens. "She's a miracle worker. You'll see." Tara swears again she won't be there too long, and grins coyly to herself when he says it's a shame. "My Momma. When she thought something was too good to be true, she'd say, 'Satan in a Sunday hat.' That's exactly what this is," she says to his laughter. Eggs knows what she means: it's so hard to be loved, when you've never had much. To sit still for acceptance and compassion when they seem mythological; a family, a story in which you were never invited to star. He begins to play again, and her eyes close softly, and forgets to wonder where her phone is. "You know, it took me a long time to stop looking over my shoulder too. But there are good people in this world. Sometimes... Good shit happens." It is peaceful; she dares herself to believe him as he plays her a song without words. Is she strong enough to believe that the world is big enough for joy? That's the only question they ever ask you, at the crossroads.
The pig snorts, and watches Maryann. She sits in the center of palatial estates, a leviathan moving across the world. She vibrates, the world hums around her; she is synchronized and atypical, a strange attractor. She is many things at once. The universe shivers at her passing, so strong it affects the camera, your cable box, your television screen: her image shivers and the ripples pass out, and down on the ground her pig watches and remembers: he was taller once. Men become pigs and that's nothing new, but a pig changing shape and size? All men are beasts. Some beasts are men, sometimes. And then Maryann Forrester, holding onto the world like a tender smaller creature; a leviathan passing in the deeps, as you hold your nose closed and chuckle to yourself, all alone like a girl, and dive in. And the ripples move out again.
Without knowing it, Rene sings along: "Devil In Disguise," he howls and hollers, driving Jason's truck just a little less recklessly than its owner, toward Merlotte's. Inside, Sookie catches Andy telling a new story, a hero story, the story that saves him. "He don't remember doin' it. Like he had amnesia or something... Now, he's just sitting there, lookin' like a dog that lost his bone. And then he says, 'I did it. I killed those women. You were right all along.'" Bud corrects him gently, but Andy can't hear him. The story has control. "You should've seen the look in his eye. Ice cold. Like he was talking about roadkill." Bud finally leaves the table, and Sookie watches, disgusted, as Rosie the dispatcher squeezes Andy's arm and offers to buy him a beer, to show him appreciation. Rosie, who once wanted Jason Stackhouse as much as anybody else, flirting with Andy Bellefleur, making him a real Detective there with anybody else. This is the mystery he was trying to solve: how Jason, a hero to nobody, somehow earns more love and desire and respect than Andy, a good cop and a swell detective and a hero. How his virility was contested, demonstrated to be suspect, and Andy came out on top. Just as he's always known it would go.
Sookie wavers, listening to the Merlotte's clientele: (Whole family full of freaks and killers ought to be ashamed to show her face after what her brother did sleazy little manslut Jason Stackhouse a goddamned murderer I'd pay good money to watch that boy fry he was so cute for a murderer wonder why he never hit on me?) Sam gets to her and shakes her out of it; she wobbles and admits woozily that he was right: she shouldn't have come in today. The thoughts are too much, on top of dumping Bill for the forty-second time and nobody knowing where Tara is, it's all too much. All the defenses she had, and the blessed silence, are gone now. She's a girl in the wilderness again. Sam tells her to rest in his trailer, but she says she'd rather go driving. "I'll keep my doors locked, I won't even get out of the car. I need some time alone, I gotta get these thoughts out of my head." Sam, knowing better but sympathetic to her discomfort, offers to take her tables. She gives him a huge hug and scoots: "Thank you, Sam. For everything." She wanders away, still freaking out; Rene watches from his table, quietly.
She turns the key, afraid even in daylight, but the old car won't turn over. She begs the car, and Jesus, to quit acting up, but it's no use. She begins to shout, pounding her hands on the steering wheel. "Shoot! Darn it! Son of a mother fudge!" She curls herself around it, desperate to leave, afraid of the world, disgusted by the bar, stuck in limbo. And when Rene appears, she gasps, afraid. He takes a look at it, admits he knows little about mechanics, and offers to at least take her home. She's overjoyed, but then remembers she's an endangered species. "I ... can't be alone," she says regretfully, wanting out but knowing it's unwise; Rene offers to stay with her until Sam closes the bar. She begs off, but he won't hear it; he ducks his head when she finally thanks him. Terry drives up in his truck, wearing ridiculous orange BluBlockers and hanging his arms over the sill."Hey Sookie, Rene. I just wanna say... I told Andy, I've known killers, and Jason ain't one." Sookie thanks him, but he means it: "Nobody ever listens to me. But they should." Sookie follows Rene to her brother's truck; Rene slams the hood on the wires he cut before he even came in.
Rene turns up the radio, for the noise, and they talk about Jason, who loves his truck so much. He jerks suddenly toward her, menacing, and pulls out her seat belt for her as he's driving. She thanks him and his creepy smile. After awhile, he asks if she can really hear what he's thinking -- (What do I think about think about think about nothing nothing think about nothing nothing...) -- and she tells him not to bother. "Thinking about nothing ain't possible. Trust me, everyone's tried it around me. Sooner or later you'll think about something." Rene's uncomfortable, but even more so when she notes that his thoughts don't have an accent. He changes the subject, and she agrees that it can be hard, sometimes. "You have no idea how sick and twisted some people are," she says, thinking of, among others, Cindy Marshall. "Oh Lord, I can believe that, yes ma'am," he says easily, thinking of, among others, Cindy Marshall. "It's one thing when they think horrible stuff about me. I mean, I'm kinda used to it." Aww. "But when it's about my brother... He's all I've got left. I mean, I've lost everyone..." She makes that weird cry face and he slowly takes a tissue from his pocket, handing it over, feeling bad for her. Once there was a little boy, who wanted to protect his sister from the night itself: "I've lost people too, me. It don't ever get any easier, but ... You find ways to cope."
Among the best ways of coping, as any man could tell you: porn. Lisa and Coby Fowler sit in their living room, mouths hanging open, as they watch Liam take Maudette from behind, chained to the ceiling, praying for pain and for eventual death. Arlene finishes vacuuming and comes into the living room, immediately horrified and scared, screaming at them, begging to know how this came into her house. What she let into her house, with her children, and why. What will happen to them now? "It's Rene's," Lisa says, scared and ashamed. "We found it in the garage." Arlene hustles them out and opens up the toolbox: tape after tape, labeled with the names of men and couples. A Cajun Dialect For Actors cassette. Her story was a hard-won happy ending, the only man in the world strong and solid down to his foundations, the only man who could take care of her and of her beautiful, safe children to the end of time. That story ends in horror; it never existed. Her life was about her wedding, and now it is a lie. She invited monsters in; she put silver bangles around her childrens' wrists to save them from the night, but it wasn't the night that came creeping in. It was a monster of the daylight, a man she never knew. Rene dies, in this moment, and a bit of her goes too. Just when you thought they couldn't break you more. All the signs that buzzed by in the blur, that she didn't stop to read. All that vital information that's bringing her down now.
Sookie offers to get Rene some iced tea; it's hot in the house. "Gran used to leave the windows open all day, but I haven't felt safe doing that in a while..." He watches her take off her apron in the kitchen, and turns on the ceiling fan. Last time he saw it, it rained blood down upon the world. In the parlor Sam's gun stands against the mantle. And at Sam's, Lafayette bitches at Rene's leftovers -- "fuckers' palates are as backwoods as their brains" -- and tosses Sam Rene's road crew vest. All evidence of a sudden disappearance, but who would sniff it out? Sam, who takes the vest for lost and found, then smells Rene upon it: the scent of the killer, on Dawn's bed like a song without words. He takes off running immediately; Terry hides his cigarette from Sam for no reason and surmises that she left with Rene "twenty to twenty-three minutes ago," and Sam runs off down the lane, toward his Jeep.
Rene appears from strange angles, vanishing points; he startles Sookie by appearing in the wrong doorway and asking for his sweet tea. He apologizes for scaring her, but the gasp in this room was too much; Drew's memory gives in. (Don't think about it blood blood so much blood she wasn't supposed to be here... Shut up!) He remembers the kitchen, Adele standing up from the table where she read her book, with Tina by her side, outraged and complaining even as he attacked ("How come Sookie ain't here? You weren't supposed to be here!") and Sookie drops the tea pitcher, terrified. Rene, suspicious, doesn't listen to her nervous giggle of apology, and offers to help, coming closer. She moves slowly away from him, toward the parlor, in search of a mop; like a mugging in the middle of the night, on a street, she turns with a soft and scared grin to see him following her, a few paces behind.
In the parlor Sookie grabs the gun, cocks it at him and fires on him as he's smiling, but he shows her the shells he pocketed from the mantle. (She deserves it needs it wants to die that's why she fucks them fangers...) She screams once, bashing him in the head just as he's removing his belt for the last time. Out into the yard she runs, squealing to herself, and hurls the useless gun into the bushes. "Get back here, you fucking bitch!" he shouts, bleeding and in hot pursuit, chasing her toward the graveyard.
Cindy was getting ready for work, one of the first of the fangbangers, two years ago: she looked at the marks on her neck and frowned to herself. "Nothing that'll cover up what you done," said Drew. Cindy called him a freak for watching her get dressed, touching a spark. That word "freak," that attraction and repulsion to the night and the strangeness of the larger world, watch for them. They are the secret origin of Drew, and the reason Jason could never have been the killer. Listen. "You're the freak, Cindy. You're the damn freak. Fuckin' freak. Fuck! Spread your legs for a dead man? Mama'd roll over in her grave..."
Rene chases Sookie: "I'll teach you, you bitch!"
Drew took off his belt: to teach her a lesson, in a world without fathers, it falls to our brothers to remind us where the world ends. Where the limits are; to reminds ourselves in the process. And Cindy asked him what the eff he was thinking; shortly after, she was dead, and her brother grieved for her, wept and screamed, and retreated to the sunlight corner of the world where Death has no dominion.
Rene yowls in the sunlight, trying to chase away the Drew memories as Sookie unravels them. "Get out! I can feel you in my head!"
Drew killed Maudette, and that night Rene got so torqued up he had to go visit the Rattrays, to buy some weed. Denise was looking murderous and crazed; Mack bore the marks of the chain from Jason's truck around his neck. It looked like his sister's neck, when he was done. Red and welted and angry. The memories keep coming: Dawn thought he was Jason, back for more. Jason and Drew, Drew and Jason; the first time the killer visited, it was a joke. She turned into Liam for a moment, and Jason turned into Drew, and the shapes shifted around them in the night. Drew put that to rest: "Die, fangfucker!" he screamed. And then Amy, who never even fucked a vampire, but threatened the world nonetheless, more than he could handle. Things have a way of working themselves out. "Stay the fuck out of my head! Fuck!" Rene twists and turns, in a sun-dappled lane, screaming to himself; fighting for Drew's body, to get away from the nightmares.
Under the old Compton house, Bill awakens to Sookie's screams; his eyes dart open and he grits his teeth. Sam runs to the Stackhouse porch: Rene's belt, forgotten; the blood from his head trailing out toward the cemetery. He follows, shedding clothes as he goes; Bill unlocks his crypt and forces himself out into a sizzling, bright world. Every step puts him into the fire. It won't kill him all at once, he won't burst into flame. Love kills slowly. His every step is underwater and in the fire, it beats against him like a beast. The sun stares hatefully through the curtains, but he is strong. He opens the door to horrors of light, screaming in the sun, and does his best to run toward her. Life and Death, werewolf guy and vampire guy, run at them -- the girl and the monster/the little boy and the girl who loved Death -- from opposite directions, to the cemetery between their two houses. It is not only, was never only death between them: the graveyard is where life and death meet, and visit, and weep with grief. It is a crossroads.
Sookie hides herself in an open grave, under the surface, away from the sun. Drew abruptly apologizes, desperate and crazy. "Let's be friends, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. We can be friends! Sookie! Seriously, I was just kidding." (Can you fuckin' hear me you filthy fucking cunt I'm gonna tear out your throat with my hands and fuck your dead face). Realizing, perhaps, that this is not the most comforting thing one friend can say to another, he calls on Rene. Rene will speak, will have his turn; for a moment Drew retreats into the shadows, and Rene calls out a song without words and without accent. (Shit. Goddamn it, I must have lost her. Could be hiding in the woods. I better go back and check...) She slowly stands in the grave, and Drew jerks her from the cold ground, bashing her head against a tombstone. "Mind-reading, vampire-fucking, freak bitch!" That word again. He strangles her as Bill walks through heaven's fire, toward her fear and pain. What animates us doesn't animate him; sometimes it's magic, but what animates him this afternoon is love. Only love, strong enough to push him through depths of flame, every step torture. "You think you're so smart!" screams Drew. "You smart now?"
Sam leaps upon him from Sookie's side of the graveyard, growling, and buries fangs in his throat. Drew pushes the dog off as he's mauling him, smashing his head in with a stone, kicking him viciously several times before he finally falls unconscious and Sam appears, naked and knocked out. Drew keeps kicking. Listen to his words. "What the fuck are you? You fuckin' freak fuck! Fuckin' sick fuck. Die, you fucking freak of nature!" Not I, but you. I belong here. You don't.
Bill burns, unable to move forward, his face crackling in the flames, in a sunny clearing. He says her name, as he falls to his knees, and her eyes pop open. Their bond is stronger than death and made of blood. Just as Rene is flipping Sam over and lifting a heavy piece of wood to knock his brains out for good, Sookie slams a shovel against his head and he goes down. He's not out, grabbing at her ankle, screaming profanity, and she... totally chops off his head with the shovel. Well, it's not full separation, but close enough. He stops screaming, and Sookie whimpers, staring at nothing, once again too freaked out and damaged and concussed to think. Sam appears at her side, naked, and they see Bill, smoking and hissing in the field. He is burnt, blackened, unrecognizable, southern-fried. Cajun.
Sookie falls to her knees at his side, turning him over to the sound of paper skin, crackling and peeling. He groans with the effort of speech: "I am sorry," he says, and begins to fade. Sookie screams uselessly and Sam finally picks up the charred remains, still running around naked in the middle of the daytime, and carries him to the hole. Sookie sobs mindlessly, overwhelmed and more heartbroken than anyone should have to be, while Sam shovels dirt over her lover's burnt body. Another in a series of bad days.
Later, much later, Sookie lies doped up on the couch, bruised and nasty looking but clean. Tara leans down to stroke her face as she awakes. "Tara... You look so pretty. Like someone turned a light on under your skin!" Someone did. Two someones, a multitude of someones. Miss Jeanette, to show her the wonder of the moon and the night that made her. Nancy at the drug store, to show her what magic looks like by daylight. Lettie Mae, to hand her the blank page of an apocalypse. Maryann Forrester, to show her all the words that she will write on it. Little broken Tara Mae, who knows her chapter's yet to be written. The maiden, the mother and the crone; the united states of Tara Thornton herself, last and greatest of them all, who's finally heard the first whisper of the world: "Come and find out!"
There is a place in her for all of these, sliding up against leviathans in the dark. There is a place in the world for joy, just as there is a place in Drew Marshall for the good man named Rene, and in Jason for the man he must become; in Amy for all the love of the world. There is a place inside a drug-dealing prostitute transvestite that can introduce you to God, if you are listening, in a single drop of blood. There is a place yet undiscovered in Bill Compton that will know peace, and joy. There is a place in Sookie Stackhouse that is blessed with silence.
Sookie giggles, and Sam tells Lafayette and Tara by her bedside that she's dosed to the eyeballs on pain meds. "Didn't you listen when I said I'd lose my shit if anything ever happened to you?" Tara says, fussing over her, and Sookie is loopy and concerned at once: "Don't lose your shit! I'm fine. Did Sam tell you that he saved my life?" She smiles sweetly, in love with the world. "He turned into a dog and bit Rene!" Sam laughs nervously; Lafayette immediately demands a dose of whatever they've got her on. Sam tries to usher Lafayette and Tara out so she can rest, and Sookie sticks up her chin, on fire with a truth. "Sam. You need to let people see the real you. Because you're kind, and brave." Tara is sad, a little; we give up what we burn. "There's nothing there not to love," Sookie says, and Sam is moved. "Right back at you." She smiles crazily up at him; Tara's face is an eloquent fucking hell already. Arlene comes running in, sobbing, with a huge bouquet, which she pokes like an epee at Sookie while wailing; Lafayette's embarrassed smirk is a thing of beauty.
Bud hangs up and tells Andy the DA has dropped the charges against Andy. Since Jason didn't murder anybody, and we now know that, Andy has no choice but to get bullishly stubborn and defensive. "The marks on Amy Burley's neck match Rene's belt. Or Drew Marshall, whatever the hell his name is. He near about put Sookie in a body bag, we got no reason to hold Stackhouse." Andy throws shit around, a little tantrum, and Rose reconsiders her momentary crush, turning to face the wall. Bud tells him to stop screaming and pull it together, and orders Andy to let Jason out of his cell. This is Andy's hardest day, in the history of days, and since his triumph was built on Jason's back the worst part of it all is how Jason's the one taking it away again. "Get the fuck out of here," he says, slamming the cell door open petulantly, and Jason hops down off the bunk. "Is this some kinda trick or something?" No, Andy tells him, it's a fucking miracle. The light falls down on Jason's face and he looks up to heaven: what to do with this miracle now? He is saved, just like Orry said. There is a place in the world for freedom, but where did it come from, really?
Arlene paces in the parlor, sweating blood and weeping madly, begging for Sookie's forgiveness. Which Sookie would already give, because of how she works and the fact that Arlene has nothing to do with this, but she gives even more sweetly due to the drugs all up in her. "I brought him around my kids. I slept in the bed with him every night and all that time, it was nothin' but lies. I mean, his name? His accent?" Total breakdown. "God, you think you know someone... How could I not know?" It's written all over her face and always has been, the number of times she's had her heart broken. She's speaking about an entire life, slipping through her hands as the years go by, a life without love. But there's a space for Arlene to find joy, to put her heart back together, just as clearly as there's a space for Terry Bellefleur to remember he's not broken, or Andy to remember he's a man. "None of us did," Sookie says, soft and tender. "Don't blame yourself, honey..." Arlene shouts. "I can't help it! I told you to stay out of my thoughts! Isn't that why you didn't listen in on Rene?"
Sookie speaks slowly, because there are no words for this and she's just recently learned how easily we can do this without even knowing it: "It's like he kept that part of himself locked away in some dark corner of his mind." Every day was a war with Rene, to keep the darkness at bay. Sometimes we lose the fight. "Sookie." Arlene sits down, horribly sad. "I am so sorry. I want you to promise me something, okay? Someday, if I ever find another man. I want you to look inside his head and tell me everything that's in there." Sookie tries to explain it doesn't work that way -- and if she'd seen what we've seen, she would be even more firm about it, because the one kingdom you never want to visit is Terry's pain, which mangles even simple thoughts -- but Arlene doesn't care: "Just promise me, okay? Because I have the worst taste in men!" They laugh ruefully: women, who have loved and been broken. In perhaps the least graceful segue of all time, Arlene changes the subject from her horrible taste in men... To Bill Compton. "Is Bill gonna be okay?" Sookie is shocked back to herself, out of the silence and begins sobbing dreadfully, grateful for the exquisite pain of admitting out loud that he won't. She has lost the ability to believe that he will always come running. She put him in the ground. She and Sam Merlotte helped bury him for the last time. Arlene comforts her, as she falls down into it, drowning.
On the porch, Lafayette tells Sam he's going back to the bar, to "make sure Terry ain't PTSDing all over my clam chowder," naturally, and Sam thanks him for taking charge. "No worries, boyfriend. Because I'm gonna hit your ass up for a raise, soon as they pull them stitches out your forehead." He pats his cousin and tells her to call him, and when they're left alone Sam asks, almost musingly, why she never called him back. She says, honestly, that she got no messages from him -- that when she felt alone, she really was alone as far as she knew, and no number of calls from Sam or Sookie or anybody else came through to tell her otherwise, which gave her space to make a new decision.
"Look, we don't have to talk about this now. Sookie almost died. And she would've, if you hadn't been there, so. I'm glad you were, okay?" Sam's happy for a moment, but remembers to remind her that he was worried about Tara, too. But Tara knows better, because she never got the messages, so she indulges him: "I'm sure you were. You worry about everybody. But Sookie's right, you're an amazing guy." Maryann's car drives up, to take her home. "You deserve to get everything you want. And so do I." Tara kisses Sam's cheek goodbye. "Take good care of her," Tara says, and steps out of the story of Tara & Sam, and into a new one. Sam follows her to the edge of the porch, but jumps back when he sees Maryann. "Maryann, this is my friend Sam. Sam, this is Maryann." Maryann grins at him, fiercely friendly. "Sam, it's so nice to meet you! You ready to go?" Tara heads for the car, and Sam's voice is a quiet, menacing, terrified hush. Deep in the throat, with the hackles up and a million miles of painful history. "What the hell are you doing here?" Maryann smiles at him, shining and vicious: "Did you think I wasn't gonna find you? Oh... You silly, silly dog." She leaves him with that; he stands shaking long after they've left.
"I should've known," Arlene says seriously. "There were things he liked to do. In bed. That no normal man ever does." Sookie gives a great TMI look off this, but see again, that word, creeping around the edges of Drew's life: "freak." The things he wanted and the things she let him do; the things we do to keep them happy.
Jason bursts into the house, fresh from the station, and throws himself at Sookie's feet. "Jason!" she shouts, delighted, and he hurls himself upon her like a boy. "I have never been happier to see you in my life!" Sookie winces and thanks him, she loves him when he's so sweet, but: "Sweetie, I'm black and blue all over. And you're squeezing me." He backs off, apologetically, and looks up into her beautiful, ruined face for the first time. "Shit! Look what that son of a bitch did to you! I can't believe I gave him my truck." Heh. Arlene is less amused; the tears well up again, but Jason's barely noticed she is there. "If he was still alive right now, I'd... fuckin' kill him again," he says, and the words in Arlene's throat choke her, the goodbye to a whole life she dared to hope she'd have. She excuses herself, and Jason takes a while putting it together. "Oh," he says, almost proud to have figured it out. "Me and my mouth..." Sookie assures him Arlene will be all right eventually. I hope so.
"You know, I was sitting in that jail, and I just kept thinkin' about all the stupid stuff I done..." Sookie gently teases him that it must have kept him busy, but it sails over his head. It did take him a while, after all: "And I know it seems like all I ever think about's myself. And drinking. And chasing women. But that's only because I thought that's all I was good at." Sookie desperately grasps for something else, flailing mentally, and offers a weak "Football?" Jason smiles: "Not good enough for a scholarship. I ain't never been good enough for anything. Or anybody. Well, except maybe Amy." He is sad a moment; she's sad for him. She liked Amy too. She could have loved her. "But she's gone, so... So I was in there, waitin' to die too, and I realized my life wasn't worth nothing. I'd never done nothing worth being proud of. And all I could think to do was to end it." Sookie's horrified, but he ushers her past this particular part of the story as quickly as he can: "No, it's okay! Because then, something happened. Sook?" (A deeply crazy smile; the kind of smile that says "Maybe Jesus, maybe not, but crazy enough it doesn't really matter") "I was saved! I was given a second chance. And now I know that all this... this bad stuff that happened, it happened for a reason." The story that saved him.
Sookie shakes her head, confused, and asks what the fuck he means. How can any of this work itself out to mean anything more than horror? "...I ain't sure yet? But I do know that I'm meant to do something important with my life. And soon as I find out what that is," he says willfully, beautiful and strong for a moment: "I ain't gonna fuck it up." She grins, loving this new Jason, and he kisses her forehead. "I love you, Sook. And I'm gonna take good care of you from now on. I promise." Once there was a little boy.
"How about you just take care of yourself? And stay out of trouble?" Jason begs her not to worry about him anymore, and speeds toward the door. He makes it two steps before crashing against the coffee table, stumbling, nearly falling, but he stays upright; you can hear the smile in the shout he leaves behind: "I'm good!" Sookie laughs as he bursts out into the night, intent on becoming a man, because she just remembered a very important fact most of Bon Temps forgot: Jason Stackhouse is totally awesome.
Lafayette, grumbling to himself again, picks up the garbage someone left beside, not in, the bin, and heavy is the head that wears the insane turban, and why is everybody so nasty when it takes seriously no more effort to open the thing and put the trash inside, and how can you grow up with zero home training... He hears it before he sees it, and whirls: something coming at him, fast as a fanger, fast as any of the ten types of lightning he's called down on himself, and neither filibuster nor a silver cross will save him this time. He scrambles to the top of the garbage heap, screaming for God as he goes.
Once there was a little girl, who told herself she was a princess when nobody loved her and she was all alone in the world. Abandoned by her family, deprived of love, deprived of even the memory of silence. And then one day, when things were darkest, her father appeared to her again. "Daddy. Oh, Daddy. It is you. I found you. I found you. They said you were dead. But I knew you weren't. Daddy. Hold me close..."
Bills zooms toward the Stackhouse place and rings the doorbell nervously. When Sookie shuts off The Little Princess and answers, he looks nothing so much as amazed by her. He always looks amazed by her. "You're alive?" Bill, who has learned a bit about irony since we first met him, makes a bashful face. "Well, technically no. But I am healed." He's a bit guilty: for the first time in a hundred years, he has fed. He admits it, adds it to his shame, but she can't even hear him: too amazed by the fact of him, back from the fire once again. She invites him in and shoves the door madly shut behind him, to keep the dream from waking. She holds him so close: she's black and blue, but since when did pain preempt their embrace? He can't hold her close enough. She smiles, because the pain is worth it, and touches his face. He sees her wounds and nearly gasps; she's embarrassed by them, and tries to kiss him, but he pops out his fangs and goes for his wrist, to heal her. She refuses. "Without my blood it'll take weeks for you to heal!" Sookie nods. "I don't care. After everything, I... Just need to feel human right now." Bill, nearly dying from the pain, the evidence, the horror of it: "I failed you," he says, because of course that's how he would see it: she nearly laughs. "You were willing to sacrifice yourself to save me." Bill complains with this and that, if he'd been faster, if it had been cloudier, and she shushes him, calms him, hands on his face: "My life is too short for all that." There is a place for joy on the white page of their lives. He kisses her bruises, one by one.
Two weeks later, the Vermont Supreme Court legalizes human-vampire marriage in the state. "Courthouses will be staying open after dark to accommodate hundreds of couples from all over America." When this was written it would have been tongue-in-cheek, a slight reference to an ongoing agony; nobody could have predicted California a few weeks before this aired. It lends the silly metaphor a bit more silly weight than necessary. Sam turns off the TV, irritated and frustrated, and Arlene -- looking lovely, with hair gathered on her head like a pineapple -- giggles at Sookie madly. "Oh my God, you know what this means? Now you and Bill can get married!" Sookie tells her to knock it off: "This isn't Vermont. Besides, he hasn't even asked me yet. And I don't know what I'd say if he did." Arlene gets very nudgy-winky about it, but Sam decides to whine his way into a whole new octave, killing the buzz.
"You should marry Bill," Sam sasses them. "Hell, I'll even throw you a party. Won't even break the bank, because all you need is a couple kegs of TruBlood seein' as how they don't eat or drink. Bet there's even a vampire band and vampire wedding decorations. Put Arlene's party to shame!" Sookie's hair is back to the wavy, bouncy look that favors her best, especially when she flounces away.
Tara joins Sam where he's madly scrubbing the bar, and counsels a bit of calm. "Maryann says if you want something, you don't wait for it to come to you..." She giggles excitedly like every cult member ever, handing over the secret to everything like it's radioactive. "You demand it! Like tribute, from the world." "Do me a favor, don't quote Maryann to me," he spits, and she just thinks he's being a dick. "Excuse me for giving a damn!" Sam asks after Lafayette, who's been missing since he was attacked at the garbage cans. "This one time Lafayette went to Marthaville for the night? He ended up go-go dancing in Palm Beach for like eight months," Tara snorts. Sam grumbles and bitches about that too, and stomps away; Tara with the light under her skin just shrugs.
Terry and Arlene are left alone, the only parts of a recently happy group of friends. "People disappear all the time, but they're never really gone. The good parts of 'em always stay put." Drew got Rene killed, but there's nothing stopping you, or her, from loving him anyway. It was a tragedy, even if it was necessary; even if he couldn't find his way back. But Terry's talking about her too, and about himself. The good parts are still around: they just need to put them back together. Arlene's really moved: "I hope you're right about that, Terry." The tears in her eyes aren't pain anymore. "Your hair's like a sunset after a bomb went off," he says wildly, and she jumps. "Pretty," he explains, staring at her long after the word has faded from the air, and then abruptly turns on a heel and stalks away. He's so strange, and lovely, and broken; she likes him more than that. Her hands go to her hair and she giggles slightly to herself, feeling beautiful for the first time in a while.
I would say a huge part of the world and learning to live in it is remembering that every time a nuclear bomb goes off, there are really lovely sunsets. Assuming you live through it, and assuming you do your best to keep it from happening again, there's nothing wrong with noticing that. Your life is a book being slowly written, and if we've learned anything from Miss Jeanette and Amy Burley, it's that you can't tear pages out of it. You can only treasure them, learn to incorporate them as part of a book that you love. They'll never be just words on a page, of course, but eventually they can stop being your prison. All stories are worthwhile, just as all lives are worthwhile: but it's our duty to find the worth, and to live it as best we can. All stories change us, and ignoring even a tiny bit of the ones flashing by every second of the day is a price you might be called one day to pay. All signs are vital: we can't disregard them. There is a space in the world for beauty. Let there be light.
"And God said, Let there be light," says young Newlin, standing at the pulpit of his father's Church, carrying on his work, in God's name. To love thine enemy unto ash and dust. "And there was light. And even though we stand in darkness today, we shall not fear, for God has given us the ultimate weapon. The ultimate salvation!" Two words for the same thing. He points behind him, to the light pouring down through stained glass, as the congregation calls and responds, filled with the holy light of love. "The sun! And he has placed in front of us a daunting but righteous task." The camera pans across the crowd, their lit up, beautiful faces, the sunlight pouring down on them, washing them clean, and inevitably rests on Jason Stackhouse, cleaned up and nodding, in his Sunday shirt. "We will not falter. We will not rest." NO! they scream, dressed in their finest; in the breastplate and the armor and the righteousness of God. "Until we have brought God's holy light down on each and every bloodsucking abomination!" There are cheers, and whistles, and Jason jumps to his feet, dancing in the light, nearly weeping with the beauty, shouting it out: "Amen! Praise Jesus!" Young Newlin smiles, terrifying and empty, insane and lit with glory; Jason kisses Mr. Dawson on his head, so full of love and light that he must let it out. So full of a new story.
Tara tells Andy he's cut off, but Andy's still stuck on the glory that was stolen from him, again and again, the heir of nothing he knows yet. "My family used to own this whole damn town," he bitches blearily. "The land this rathole stands on included!" Tara reminds him he no longer owns the rathole, and tells him she's cutting him off. "Join the club." She listens. She remembers what it felt like, falling. "One minute you're a hero, the you can't get a fuckin' drink." Tara feels wise and expansive and loving; her newfound freedom is like V, she can see what links her to him, and it gives her the abundance of compassion. "I ain't never seen a bird fly so high it don't have to come down sometime," she says, more beautiful than she's ever been I think. He licks his lips, insensate, drowning in sorrow for a thing he can't name. She's wearing a lovely printed dress; the satin plum stripes match her eyeshadow. She's as intimidatingly beautiful as Maryann now. She sticks out in Bon Temps. She's lit from within.
"What's that for?" Andy grouches as she sets up another couple of drinks. "It's your pity party. Only one you're getting from me, so suck it up." Andy thanks her, and she looks at him, and finally understands what it's like to just give. Not to get anything, not even to get off on being in a position to condescend: just to remember that kindness costs nothing and earns everything, that all of us are human and connected, creatures of God, that in our kindness to each other we redeem the lost and broken light in the world and in ourselves. "Don't thank me," she says, wholesome. Whole. "It's just easier for me not to hate you. Hating takes a lot of energy. And I'm saving mine up for all the good shit that's coming my way." She heads into the speech -- "...Because I am a good person, and I deserve good shit in my life..." -- and he cuts her off. "Yeah yeah, put it on a bumper sticker." Tara shrugs winsomely; they clink and drink.
When Sookie drops off his beer and burger, Hoyt Fortenberry sweetly asks what "Vampire Bill" is doing the celebrate the Vermont decision: "Some sort of vampire party?" Ha! The only reason nobody in Bon Temps knows what a dork Bill Compton actually is is because they keep killing the other vampires before they can explain it properly. Sookie's shy, she loves dorky Vampire Bill as much as I do: "Actually, we're celebrating together later." Hoyt asks her to pass on his congratulations, and swears if he met a nice vampire girl he'd be proud to have her on his arm. Points for effort, I guess. I certainly don't think it's a mistake that he's about ten times sexier than usual in this scene, now that Rene's dead and fangbanging isn't a sin anymore, now that his innocence doesn't need to be his primary characteristic; neither is it a mistake that his silver cross hangs aggressively outside his unbuttoned shirt, glinting at the camera the entire time.
Sookie laughs at the thought of Maxine Fortenberry welcoming a vampire daughter-in-law into the fold, which is pretty awesome if you consider the living hell on Earth she'd put a human girlfriend through especially, and Hoyt kind of laughs before a lightbulb as big as the sun goes off over his head, and he stumbles over his own words to get the idea out of his mouth as quickly as possible: "You know yeah I mean does Bill know anybody my age?" Sookie laughs and walks off, but he's serious. Hoyt Fortenberry. Not a fangbanger exactly, but between his Vitamin-Fortified Whole Milk vibe and giant man-crush on Bill, what do you call it? Fangcourter. Vampgentleman. Whatever is totally wonderful and devoid of yick, and just aching to get destroyed, that's what we'll call it.
Because you know who's Hoyt's age, recently turned, and possibly the only person in Louisiana more excited about vampires than him? Yeah. Bill's playing ragtime alone in his house (of course he is) when Jessica comes bursting in, 100% hotter, 1000% snottier, and having traded her whole Juniper look for something a little more Hot Topic. Pigtails, gum-snapping, fang-baring, short-skirted, gartered and blowsy: Jessica 2.0. "Hi, Daddy," she spits nastily, as he stares at her in stark terror. I think I just fell in love with vampire trash.
Eric (sort of Hot Topicky in his own right) and Pam (in a gorgeous powder-blue midcentury nubby Chanel top and skirt) come in on her heels, clearly exhausted in a way that not even a thousand years of immortality could prepare you for. "There are favors? And then there are... Favors," Eric nods meaningfully at Jessica. "She is extremely annoying," Pam clarifies deliciously. Bill starts to whine and freak out about it, and Eric's like, "Nope, she's your problem. Or you could give me Sookie." There is much fang-popping and dick-measuring, to which Pam gives a luxurious eye-roll, and Bill of course gives in. Eric says after a few nights with "this one," though, Bill might see giving up Sookie as the better option. Pam wishes him a snarky good luck as they desert him, and laughs as Eric Swedishly thanks the skies for sweet freedom from Jessica as their leaving. "So," Jessica says coyly. "Who's good to eat around here?" She pops her fangs out and giggles nastily, and Bill is just outrageously put upon. Man, Jessica makes me love Bill as much as Sookie does. Something about that fatherly mixture of appalled, complete confusion and stark terror just adds up to delight.
Tara points Sookie toward Andy, who is now seeing double, and when she asks for his keys she gets two speeches at once. "I ain't giving you shit, Stackhouse," he says, and (I'm a failure a pathetic fuckin' loser and everybody knows it just like she said they would bet she's real happy with herself...) Sookie is taken aback. Who knew people -- much less Andy Bellefleur -- even listened when she talked? "It don't ever make me happy to see someone in pain!" He's so sad and so incredibly cute right now. "I'm gonna call your sister to come pick you up. Detective Bellefleur." That last bit just for him. His face comes over all soft and happy, and he is for a second lit by such joy that he tears up.
Sam comes busting into his office, locks the door, and opens a safe; he begins piling wads of cash into the bag in his hand. Hmm.
Sookie and Tara chase Andy through the parking lot, trying to explain to him that A) the only thing he's driving tonight is Tara crazy, and B) his sister Portia is on her way to pick him up. Andy says he doesn't have his keys, that he left them in the car, but then he can't find his car. "Right here, underneath this light... some son of a bitch stole my car..." They don't believe him, and he goes on another soliloquy about how it's hard to be Andy. "This whole town's gone to shit! Nobody used to go murdering each other, stealin' cars... That's what happens when you don't let a good cop do his job!" Sookie's amused; Tara points away, toward a stand of trees at the back of the lot. "That ain't where I parked it," Andy whines, but they still don't believe him. The place it's parked is shadowed and overhung, like the jungle is eating it. I would believe him, but then, I know what happens . The worst thing in the world. As they come closer, there's the beeping of a door ajar, and then a foot falls out. It's been two weeks, but the foot looks fresh, and dead. Clean shaven, masculine but beautiful. Toenails painted on Sam's own bar. Lafayette. "That ain't mine, I swear," says Andy regarding the foot, but they don't hear him. Tara joins Sookie in the very last Perennial Screaming Off Of The Ass that marks the end of nearly every episode, and we fade to black with them still screaming.
Well, that's one way to get us back year, I guess. As if anybody was going anywhere. I hope you enjoyed this season as much as I did, and I will see you summer. XOXO.
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