by Meghan Tifft
“It’s not,” said Dracula.
“Yes it is. It’s half yours too. I’ll credit you.”
Dracula spat his vexation. His anger lapped at him like a heavy tongue. One day if he wasn’t careful he would do something to Warren. “You want to out me as Dracula?”
“No no no.” Warren practically rolled his eyes. “Okay. Let me think. I’ll come up with a good angle. We can shank it in all sorts of Disneyland places”—with this he actually did a little piratey thrust and twist—“shopping malls, strip outlets, post offices, churches. And what about the kids? Gotta do the parks.” Warren was giggling as if he was making new play equipment. “It’s commentary. On the whole fucking fallacy of life! Ha ha! It’s so bolted down I can’t even explain it!”
Dracula didn’t know how to call Warren off, to make him see the recoil it gave him, the shame and drainage of seeing his own existence groping back at him, the pitiful pitilessness of all things. “It’s just—no,” he said.
“You can make money off it.” Dracula assumed that Warren meant he himself could. “I’ll cut you in. It’ll be so fucking famous! The illuminati will hunt me. I’ll dress like a hipster carny and be anonymous, like in those videos.”
“I don’t—” Dracula was not liking the blather now sudsing the air. “No.”
“You have to do it.”
“I do?” said Dracula. “I have to?”
A crisp silence schismed the air, during which Dracula tried to figure out if Warren had threatened him or he had threatened Warren. It was confusing. They left it hovering there between them, heavy as lead.
Now here he is watching it happen all over again and all he can do is stagnate like a bog while Warren makes haste with his art and locks down their supposed deal. He finds himself in a trance when he watches Warren. It’s like a bloodletting that part of him thinks he deserves.
“There,” says Warren. “Now I’m going to call somebody.”
“What in the fire and brimstone?”
They both turn. The campus cops are pulling up on their bicycles, asses high and heads low, gears slick and ticking, helmets of swift molded plastic riding up on them like cresting waves.
Dracula is briefly arrested by the sight, and by the colorful phrasing. Warren has already put toe to ground and bounded off. Now it is Dracula’s turn to run. He sees it’s too late, even as he feels the surge. He is Dracula. It would be no effort to wipe the night behind him. He can feel his limbs already going to gloss. But he just doesn’t feel like it. He’s not himself these days. He crosses his arms. One of the bicycles has whizzed off after Warren. The other one catches its kickstand as the official dismounts and strides up on him.
“What’s this?” It isn’t the voice that spoke before.
Dracula shrugs. “I just saw this guy doing it. I came over to look.”
The cop looks down at the sidewalk without seeming at all to look away from Dracula. “Warren. Is that his name?”
Dracula licks his fingers and wipes at his mouth. “I don’t know his name.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
The man is now considering his protocol. Dracula can sense the hassled millisecond of thought. “Sir, can you please show some identification?”
“I don’t have my wallet on me.”
The man has a divot in his chin. He doesn’t seem to want to pursue this part of the reconnaissance. He seems to be distracted by the chase he’s not making. There’s a shafted restlessness blowing off him. “What are you doing on the grounds, sir?” he says uncuriously. His head is tilted to some secret inaudible pitch.
“Just walking through. I told him it was illegal if that’s any help.”
“Not really,” says the cop. He’s young, and probably has a dog at home that he jogs with. “What’s in that bag?”
Dracula looks down. “Oh. I’m going to pick apples.”
“You’re going to pick apples?”
“At the colonnade.” Dracula points with his chin. “There’s a bunch of them still on the trees.”
The cop actually sighs. “Please don’t pick apples, sir.” Dracula can feel his smile spreading even though he doesn’t want to make the cop feel mocked.
“Okay,” he says. “Why not?”
“They’re not edible.” Now the cop seems to know something out of his jurisdiction.
“Is that so?”
“That’s what you’re doing here?”
“That’s what I’m doing here. Good thing you caught me.”
The man is tired of him and he doesn’t think he’s funny. “Please leave the campus grounds. Don’t pick the apples.”
“Fine. Hope you catch him.” The man pretends he said nothing and makes a note. What else can he do? He’s not a real cop so he has to let guys like this go with their fibs and calculations. This apple picker was probably here with the other vandal who ran off. Probably his indolent accomplice. But there’s no way to know. That’s the crux of it. Dracula can see all this in the set of his face. It makes him brim with a sticky sort of kinship, for the man and the whole lineage he came from, all its staunch mistakes, its doomed Excalibur dignity. Every little thing is so much bigger than it seems. He feels that way too.
Warren catches up to him at the edge of the grounds. “That was sick,” he says in a pant. Dracula can’t tell by his tone if he’s satisfied or incensed. “We have to do it all over again. They’re going to trash my piece before anybody sees it.”
Dracula gives a noncommittal grunt.
“Don’t you need my help tomorrow?”
They have reached the truck.
“You don’t have a cage, right?”
Dracula looks over. Warren shrugs with the complacency of someone who has always gotten away with everything he has ever done. All his petty and minor delinquencies, piling up behind his closet door. Who is he, anyway? What has he done? He bends and rolls up the back door. This is what it has come to, Dracula thinks, glancing into the empty cargo hold.
“Got your deliveries done early,” he says.
“Yep.” Warren checks his watch. “Got to get the truck back.” Dracula has to get in the back of the truck now. He knows that if he doesn’t Warren could lose his job.
Dracula swaddles down into a disgusted silence.
“Your turn,” says Warren, prodding him in.
“I can go buy another cage,” he says.
“Do you have the money?” Warren showcases a glib smile.
No. Not since he started paying for Lucinda’s acting classes.
“Hey—you need me to make you some money so you can buy another cage,” says Warren, pointing at him like a gaudy salesman, working his dumb wiles at a blowout bonanza—everything must go. He rolls the door down over him and Dracula balls up the empty garbage bag in his fist. One apple is left lolling in the bag.
It’s one of the rotten ones. He can tell.
The Bill
Dracula has a rubber mouth guard for when they have sex. It’s clumsy and bludgeoning, but an absolute necessity. He once tried a mere foam sheath to slip only his teeth into and that almost got her killed. It came off and he has a very, very strong jaw that could have hinged a whole hunk out of her neck. The mouth guard is bulky enough to obstruct his hinging action and jammed in deep enough to resist his tongue’s ejection. It’s not sexy. It is not at all what she thought it would be. It’s like a mallard prodding and snipping at her with brute affection, doing something diffident with her other body parts. She can hear his breath snuffling inside the rubber, and they can’t kiss at all. Of course, if they kissed during that climax of passion he would mangle the tongue right out of her mouth. Supposedly. If he really is Dracula. This is what she tells her girlfriend Vanessa. Vanessa dangles her jaw in stupefied disapproval.
“You’re not serious.”
“I am serious.”
“You actually for a second believe him?”
Lucinda flutters her crisp, false eyelashes. They’re bothering her. “There’s
something in him. He has an aura.”
“An aura. You should test him.”
“Test him? Like, what, ask him lore or something?”
“Ask him what would happen if he drank AIDS blood. Tell him you have AIDS.”
“Tell him I have AIDS,” she says in a plummeting voice. She squeezes the cellophane sleeve from the celery she just unwrapped and feels it compress under pressure. This is how her mind works. Now she thinks she has AIDS. She feels herself gripped by panic. If somebody suggests she tell a lie about herself she will instantly interpret it as possibly true. Why shouldn’t it be possibly true? She knows there is something wrong with her.
“Stop messing with your eye. It’s fine.”
“I think it’s coming off.”
Vanessa leans in and gives Lucinda a squint that snags up her whole upper lip. Lucinda can see the glint of her tongue stud in her open mouth, like a stone in a dirty pond. “Oh, yeah, it is coming off. You want me to—?” Vanessa lunges at her with pincer fingers and Lucinda dodges back.
She peels the eyelash off herself. It’s the silver one. The other one is gold. She just came from rehearsal, where she saw the stack of playbills for the first time, ready for dispersal around town. There was her name listed in the cast, Lucinda Linde, wafting out at her in light italics. It gave her a rash of virulent chills. Now she keeps thinking, it’s too late to back out. It’s always there in her mind, like a cyst that never stops growing.
“You should totally leave the other one for our next appointment,” says Vanessa.
Lucinda tries to laugh. Her breath feels like a crust of ice.
She and Vanessa are apartment hunting. This is what she reminds herself, trying to throw a sandbag at the other thing. Lucinda’s mother has kicked her out of the house and she hasn’t even retrieved all of her things. That’s how fast this fumigation happened. Why does she feel like such a crisped abomination right now? She’s all dressed up for a play she never really aspired to be in. She has no money and soon maybe no job. And she’s shacking up with an actual Dracula until she can figure out what to do with herself. The dog at least had come with her.
“This is stupid.” The other eyelash cleaves briefly to its adhesive before tugging away.
“What, this?” Vanessa showcases Lucinda’s current fashion statement with a wave of her hand. “Your wacky play? Or your dangerous liaisons with Ducky? Because either way I agree.”
Lucinda sighs. She told Vanessa about the play. Rehearsal ran late and she didn’t have time to change.
“I just mean.” She takes a whiff of air. She tries to swipe a lid on the absolute breadth of her feeling. “I can’t afford any of the good ones,” she says with a swallow.
Vanessa snorts. “You can’t afford any of them at all. You probably won’t even have a job next week.”
The pitiless way that Vanessa says this annoys Lucinda. It’s partly Vanessa’s fault that Lucinda might lose her job. They work together at the smoothie shop. Lucinda got the job on no experience and no recommendation, because she was young and lived within walking distance, and this is how the owner likes to hire his minions. He wants gophers with nothing on their mind but spending money and no way of not getting to work. Lucinda has been there for three months and is well into the groove of it. Grind. Scoop. Flick. Pour. These are her professional gestures. They are brisk, and in no other aspect of her life is she able to be so vigorous and proficient. It gives her a pure and seamless feeling. It’s not like the play, where she strays into her role like a shaft of lost light. Here, she stands sturdy, with her legs planted apart. When the blender gets an air bubble and stiffens and clogs, she pounds it with the heel of her hand to make it move. There’s nothing more satisfying than that whirring column of emptiness, that perfect ovoid space down the center of a blender cup telling her that the mixture’s in motion, the solids are going to liquid, the switchblade axis is spinning.
Last week, she was working with Vanessa and Richard, the owner. Vanessa’s hair is always the same at work—like hardshell chocolate on a round white scoop of vanilla—because she spends an hour every morning straightening it with an iron. She says that she wakes up with a Jewfro, and then she points at Lucinda’s hair. “Like that only shorter. I can’t stand working with hair in my face. Are you sure you aren’t Jewish?” Then she says that by-the-way she has massive cramps today because she just had her eggs harvested, so she apologizes if she’s in a bitchy mood.
“What is that?” says Lucinda.
“Egg harvesting?” Vanessa tamps down a talon of hair. “They pay you a shitload of money so somebody can use your genetic material to make a baby.” She puts finger quotes around the words genetic material. “It’s not like I don’t have enough eggs to spare, I mean, God. Somebody up there doesn’t get supply and demand.” Sometimes her voice reverberates in the small space of the smoothie shop with a painfully metallic clatter, like a pot dropping in the stainless sink. Sometimes she even notices it herself. Sometimes she breaks into bright song. The lofted ceilings and polished wood floors are a perfect echo chamber. She says she wants to be a singer.
“Did it hurt?” Lucinda says, patting her voice down with her hand, trying to exert a sly influence on Vanessa.
Vanessa opens her mouth like, what do you think? “You know how every month you drop one egg? Well, I just dropped thirty. My ovaries are like heaps of rubble after some demolition project. It’s absolutely immobilizing.”
It doesn’t look very immobilizing to Lucinda as she watches Vanessa tromp to the sink and drop in a blender cup. The lights overhead shear out bits of her vision. They’re roosting in shallow silver bowls all over the ceiling. A wet lacquer slides endlessly over sheets of glass and polished steel. It’s like being stuck inside a revolving bottle.
Richard chuckles. “Yeah right,” he says. “Miss slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am.” His hands are crossed over the top of his stomach and he’s leaning back on the counter to watch.
Vanessa rolls her eyes. She proceeds to peel skins out of the veggie grinder and plop them into a rag. “Shut up, Richard,” she says.
Lucinda can see Richard’s laughter parting the curtain of his festive Hawaiian shirt, at the bottom where his belly bulges, hard and white as a peeled potato. Her own Hawaiian shirt is humongous, hanging in a steep flat plane that stops midthigh. She wonders if she should ask a question. She knows Richard thinks she is strange. He’s not sure about her. She should ask a question.
“What’s he blabbing about?” she says to Vanessa, hooking her thumb, thinking she got it about right with the gabby tones. It’s all good practice for her.
Vanessa pats at her wool helmet. “It’s a long story,” she says, then turns to Richard. “I had to.” Her voice goes rich with extravagant regret.
“Don’t tell Harvard,” he says. “He’d kill you if he knew.” He seems to be quoting Vanessa back to herself.
“Who’s Harvard?” Lucinda asks.
“My boyfriend.” Vanessa says this with a stitch in her mouth. Her voice goes slightly surly, as if she is saying yuck at something. She flicks her rag over the trashcan. Lucinda can tell that something is off about the boyfriend. Or else she just doesn’t like the job she’s doing. “He goes to Harvard.”
“Why don’t you tell her how you cheated on him? She slept with someone,” Richard blurts gaily. “Twice.”
“Well”—Vanessa flings up her hands in protest—“they kept giving me huge injections of estrogen to get the eggs to grow, and I was horny. My friend set it up.” She kicks the trash back under the counter and rolls a private look at Lucinda. His daughter, she mouths, finger pointing under her chin, then turns back. “It didn’t mean anything,” she says loudly. “Obviously we used protection.”
“I heard you called the fire station to come put your fire out.” Richard rattles out a few more coins of laughter.
“Right,” says Vanessa. “Because I told you that.”
He pushes off the counter. Someone is coming in. A thin fig
ure with a foam of white hair.
Lucinda feels the air perforate. Why should it matter? Vanessa tilts her head to Lucinda. “The guy worked for the fire department,” she says as they all watch the figure squint at the menu board. She taps Lucinda with a confidential elbow. “What a creep.”
Lucinda nods. She doesn’t know which one she is talking about—Richard or the customer or the guy. Richard pokes the order into the register.
“Even his daughter thinks he’s a creep.”
Lucinda has tipped her head lightly to take this in. “You know his daughter?” she murmurs. She thinks she’s putting on the right inflection.
Vanessa flutters her eyes and taps her fingers on the machine for the order slips, waiting to receive their commands. “It’s how I got this wonderful job. She’s in my math class now. Or was.” Her hand is aloft, poised in the air to snatch the incoming ticket. “I haven’t seen her since our ‘double date,’ probably because she couldn’t look me in the face anymore.” She shrugs. Now Lucinda senses that she feels a little skeezy over the date. “Then again, it’s math class. Nobody comes.” Now it’s slithering out. “Banana-Rama,” she says.
Richard turns and says the same thing.
“We have a machine right here that tells us.”
Richard gives her one vapid look and slumps to the swinging door.
After he goes Vanessa blows out a sigh. “God I need money. If I didn’t need it I would quit. I’m selling my human parts, for Christ’s sake.” As Vanessa digs in the vanilla tub, Lucinda shovels in the banana. It’s a lot of banana.
Lucinda can see the empty shop behind her in the two-way mirror. Upon inspection, the customer’s silhouette is outside, bent intimately over her cell phone. She can tell it’s a her now. “You can go,” she says. Vanessa’s shift ends in only six minutes, and Lucinda wants to be nice. “I got this.”
With a groan of gratitude Vanessa plunks down the scoop and goes to the tip jar. “Why did my family have to go broke right when I came to college?” Change clatters across the counter and Vanessa flattens it with her palm. Lucinda fits the blender cup onto the power spinner and flips the plexiglass hood to mute the sound and watches Vanessa put a dollar back in—just in case the lady had left something. That was nice. She concurs that family is a nuisance.
