by Meghan Tifft
“Yeah. I thought so.”
“Why? You know it?” The Russian’s head moves to a grim tilt.
Dracula shakes his head, somewhat vaguely. “I used to know somebody who did. That’s how he sounded.”
The Russian blows out a vaudeville sigh. “Yes. All of the consonants, none of the vowels.” He flaps his cigarette hand. “Learn the bad words for when you get angry. They’re good to say.” He turns to close the door and belts three words into the crack, which translate plainly to I love you. Dracula knows that the Russian would not have said those words in that way, in that tone, if he wanted the woman inside to think that he meant them. The woman probably knows that too.
“Those are a few for you.”
Dracula pretends along with a smile. He wonders how he so effortlessly translated that phrase. Then he wonders why he remembers nothing else of his Russian.
The Russian puffs his lips benignly. Now he looks like that pig, Dracula thinks, the one who’s in love with the frog. He’s a little surprised that he even knows this.
In general, Dracula is surprised by how much he has absorbed of pop culture since he has been dating Lucinda. He has not been inside of this weave for a long time. He is not sure that it’s good for him, for the plane of existence he occupies. It does make him feel less foreign. It seems strange that a Russian can seem more foreign than him.
Lucinda has other thoughts about the Russian. She thinks he is not merely foreign, but genuinely certifiable. “He talks to himself in there. There’s no woman,” she says. Dracula is not sure how she can be so certain, but she is. It makes him wonder if she’s been in the apartment.
As much as Dracula considers the Russian a nuisance, Lucinda seems to despise him and avoid him at all costs. If he ever comes up the stairs and says hello she pretends he’s not there. Dracula can’t get her to say why she hates him so much.
“Don’t make me talk about him.”
“But your whole family is worse than him.”
“I know.” She says it like she doesn’t understand it herself. “He just won’t stop singing,” she tries, in a belated explanation.
“Maybe he’ll stop when the news dies down.”
“What?” she says.
“The singer—Whitney Houston.” The dead one. “Isn’t that who it is?” He already knows who it is. The only reason he knows is because they won’t stop talking about it on the radio. This is what’s diverting him these days. He has to listen to the radio if he wants any diversion on his work route. He is starting to wonder why he is becoming so dependent on diversion. Another tic in the dial of his assimilation.
Dracula is having a hard time with this. He’s having a hard time with all of it. His new domestic entrenchment. The moods and misgivings that have crept their way in. This confession the other night. How she said she saw him somewhere. In the window, she said. That day. How she also inexplicably quit her job, for entirely unrelated reasons. She now won’t talk to him about any of this.
“Okay, fine,” she says, when he returns to the subject again. For the third time he has refused to let her go to sleep. “I saw you,” she says, flopping her arms out on the pillows. They are bare and long, glossy as entrails freshly dragged from a corpse. “Your reflection. In the library.”
The Russian pounds his fist on the wall. “I hear you!”
They look at each other. “Is he talking to us?” They can’t tell if he pounded on their wall or the neighboring wall. Every bedroom in this complex has a Four Corners and this is theirs. Dracula and his girlfriend are not even talking that loud.
The fist thuds again, this time more obliquely, like a scuff more than a thud.
“Maybe he’s talking to her?” Dracula means the woman inside the apartment. His head is full right now of a distracted static. Had she really just said what he thought she said? There is no way.
Lucinda groans, softly. “There is no her, Vlad. What if you’re not really Dracula? What if you’re just a maniac?” she whispers fiercely. “All you do is kill pigeons. I don’t know if you’re Dracula if all you do is kill pigeons.”
“I’m Dracula,” he says, fixedly.
“I don’t know which I’d rather you be.” Lucinda doesn’t seem to have heard him yet. “If you’re not him, then we’re both crazy. If you are, then I’m just as much a monster as you because I saw you.”
The fist clops the wall again, almost socially, and Lucinda stuffs the pillow over her face.
“He can’t possibly hear us,” says Dracula. He is too disoriented to focus. He looks at her, trying to find a strand in this web of revelation and follow it. “Okay,” he says. He realizes that he is so used to not exactly believing her that he has to concentrate. “So you’re saying you saw me.” The fist is now thumping a gentle tempo on the wall, as if keeping time to a song. “In the window.” It is beginning to dawn on him. “At the library.” Dracula’s voice dribbles out like gruel. He can’t believe what he’s hearing.
“It’s pretty simple.” Lucinda snatches the pillow off her face impatiently. “Either I am a monster or you are not Dracula. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Either way we’re screwed.”
Dracula lets this work its way in.
“I de-ci-ded long ago, not to fall on anyone’s sha-dow.”
“Oh my God,” says Lucinda.
“Wait,” Dracula tries not to be thrown. “But I am Dracula,” he says fixedly.
“I wanted you to go out and do your Dracula thing the other night. With the girls. When my mother took the cage, I was going to follow you. But then you called Warren instead.”
“At least I live as I will be.”
Lucinda wags her head. Her face is soggy as an old bandage. Is it the song?
“You were going to follow me?” Dracula says.
“If you can drain one whole girl then I believe you. You’re Dracula,” she says limply.
“They can-not ac-cept my dig-ni-ty.”
“Wait a second.” Dracula pats the air, chafing at this. Something’s not right here. “How is that…?” He tries to sink down into his uninterrupted thoughts, staring at the slump of Lucinda’s face. Did she want to watch him? Why does that seem unnerving? “You… want me to?”
“No, I don’t. It makes me sick.”
“But—” Why then? “You—” He blinks himself back into focus. “You’re saying you really saw me?”
“It hap-pened so to me.”
“Is that the same song again?” Lucinda huffs. “Is that even how it goes? I don’t think that’s how it goes.”
He can’t help it, the instantaneous tripping on tangled contradictions. That is definitely not how it goes. “Just wait a second,” he says again. He can barely catch his breath. “Do you always see my reflection or was it just that once?”
Lucinda gives him a glassy look. The Russian’s voice mercifully subsides, his murmurs a sultry serenade to their grim consultations. They listen for a deaf second.
“I don’t know,” Lucinda says. “The first time it was definitely a reflection. I was not expecting it and you were there, behind me. I just thought you were some gross guy checking himself out.”
“I didn’t even notice you. I mean I didn’t notice you noticing,” Dracula says, disgruntled. He feels almost as if he’s lost the memory altogether. “You didn’t even blink.”
“But then you told me you were Dracula, and after that every time I looked for it I could see it, and every time I didn’t look for it I noticed I didn’t see it. It’s like I can’t tell if what I’m seeing is real or if I’m doing it all myself.”
Dracula lets out a grizzled breath.
“Quiet!” the Russian shouts.
They peer at each other, utterly beside themselves. They wonder how in the world they got on this diametric, this perfect seesaw of monstrosity. They decide to make a plan. They have to make a plan. Eventually. They will stage a test. It’s the only way.
“Okay,” says Dracula.
“I don’t
want to do it,” says Lucinda, in the voice that says they must.
The song is there again, the smallest of campfire wisps.
“The big-gest love for all, is hap-pen-ing in me.”
Lucinda snorts forlornly. “What, he couldn’t secure the rights or something?”
Dracula tries to smile. Now he can’t help it. He’s thinking about the corpse in the bathtub, the silent white porcelain, all the tragic manglings of lyrics and life.
He puts his arm around Lucinda. “What’s all this in the bed?”
“Oh.”
It looks like gum, all these confetti bits.
“I was doing that last night, when I couldn’t sleep.”
Dracula gathers them up. The song trails out again. The way it fades, they can tell the Russian has walked out of the room. Dracula feeds the bits of gum to Lucinda. He feels bad for keeping her up.
“Sorry,” she says to him. He knows she won’t sleep now. “I couldn’t figure out how to say it.”
The silence seems to be holding on to their bated breath. Then Lucinda gives Dracula a kiss. She tastes like Hubba Bubba.
For some reason Dracula finds he needs this—he needs her to need it. Do they really feel like it? That’s what his look asks her. He doesn’t put on his mouth guard. The gum is a floating gonad that soon loses all flavor between them, and somebody eventually swallows it, and it isn’t until afterward that they notice the Russian has kept them in a loud dismal silence the whole time.
Dracula is suspicious of the Russian, and more and more as the days and weeks go by. He just went downstairs to try to catch the apartment manager in the office and discuss the new rent predicament they now face, and the Russian was in his window staring out his curtain the whole time. He was looking down into the inside courtyard, apparently at Dracula and the manager, but he never waved back. Dracula had just missed the apartment manager at the office because he arrived barely beyond the end of business hours, and he had to go to his apartment door. He can only observe this archaic ritual of nine-to-five business around the time of the winter solstice, when it gets dark early enough for him to pry himself awake in haste, and even then he’s cutting in a few minutes before the office closes and still syrupy with sleep. It’s not early winter right now, the solstice was some time ago, and that leaky zodiacal light is lingering at the horizon, keeping him cranked in tight till well after five P.M. The manager lives in the complex, but he only wants to be disturbed outside his apartment door if there’s an emergency. He has made that clear. Business hours are for business. But it’s either that or an unnegotiated nonpayment. There is indeed a crisis unfolding here, Dracula has decided, even if most of it does not concern the manager.
“Lucinda lost her job,” he says. “So—”
“Who’s Lucinda?”
“My girlfriend?” Dracula is momentarily disoriented. He cocks his head back, like a hammer on a revolver. “The one who’s living with me?” He turns to point, as if she’ll be there. The apartment manager follows his motion and his eyes seem to gutter on something and he lofts his hand reluctantly. Dracula scrambles for the missed visual input. It’s the Russian, next door, not waving back.
“What is with that guy,” says the apartment manager.
“I don’t know,” says Dracula. He takes this moment to mention that the Russian kept him up last night pounding his fist on the wall. It’s a conversational tactic he finds useful, to get the manager’s annoyance preemptively directed elsewhere. “He kept yelling at somebody to be quiet.”
The manager turns with a squint. “He was pounding?”
Dracula bares his teeth affirmatively.
“Was he yelling at you?”
“Uh—”
“Well, I don’t want him breaking a wall. Let me know if he does it again. I’ll talk to him if it’s going to damage property.”
Dracula hesitates, trying to formulate his next sentence, and the apartment manager adopts a wooden expression. “I don’t want to get in people’s business. You have your girlfriend in there, apparently”—he jams his arm out. Apparently? “I don’t say anything as long as you both pay your rent and don’t disrupt anybody or do damage—”
At the mention of paying rent, Dracula fumbles out a few words and the manager pats them out of the air, not even waiting, “you have somebody living with you—she’s not on the lease. That’s fine, I say nothing. If things get out of hand with him, then maybe I’ll call somebody. The guy’s a little loud at times. I don’t want the police coming over and complicating things.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Dracula, “I’m not even—I don’t—” He swipes his hand over his face. The rent. How can he get back to the rent?
When finally he stumbles over it the manager scoffs. “Now here you are asking for an extension on your rent. You’re knocking on my personal door and you’re not talking to me during business hours. Who’s a disturbance now? Now you’re a disturbance to me because you don’t have your money and I need to pay my bills and you’re knocking on my door when I should be eating my dinner.”
“I—” says Dracula. He’s clenching his jaw. The manager has some vinegar in him. The manager seems to have gone a bit caustic.
“I mean, here I thought you were paying the rent all by yourself. That’s what you were doing however long ago before she came—whatever you said her name was.” He flails his hand up in her direction again—“Look, I don’t want to know about her. I’m just saying, this is how it is. Your circumstances change but mine don’t. I need rent on time.”
“Okay,” says Dracula, restraining himself. He has paid rent on time every month that he has lived here, “except, I’m just asking, this month—”
“On time,” repeats the manager, and Dracula can’t believe he’s actually going to stiff-arm him. He is so close to drilling two holes in this guy’s neck. Except that he is thinking this entirely in his mind, and his body stands there severed from thought while the door closes in his face.
As he is walking back up the steps, still feeling the effects of this faulty connection, the Russian is gone and instead it’s Lucinda standing in their window looking at him. She shakes her head as if she already knows. She probably saw the apartment manager gesture at her. He might have even been explicitly pointing her out for all Dracula knows. All this time, he has been a model tenant, he thinks. He’s trying to remember how long he has lived here. How many lease renewals has he signed? He’s never made so much as a peep and now he can’t get any leniency? The apartment manager has even insinuated that he might be as much a disturbance as the Russian. Passing the Russian’s window he sees a slit in the curtains, and in it sits a cat on the back of a chair. He tries discreetly to peer past it and sees only the brown broth of a shaded lamp. He thinks of the cooking odors he and Lucinda sometimes smell from his apartment, foreign food dishes that smell bad because they can’t recognize them. He and Lucinda have already speculated that it might be the cat he’s talking to in there. It really doesn’t seem that way.
At the window he kisses his thumb and plants it over Lucinda’s mouth. It gives him a strange sensation because nothing in the gesture matches at all how he feels.
Nothing right now seems to match up. Nothing seems like what it is. Ever since she told him she saw his reflection in the library that day. All this time he thought he knew exactly what they were. It was the oldest story. Now he doesn’t know what the story is.
The scary part is that he can’t remember the time before they were dating. The slippery nights he spent out alone. When was the last time he even had a human victim? He can no longer revisit or conjure the memories.
“How long have we been dating?” he asks Lucinda. She shrugs. Neither of them is very good with time. “How long have we been living together?” Their gazes slide off each other, inscrutably. The Russian has been here as long as Dracula has. He remembers the day they both moved in—the Russian hauling boxes along the breezeway while Dracula stood on the doorsill, airing out a freshly painte
d apartment. He could always ask him. But it has somehow become a matter of self-respect not to talk to the Russian. As the days go by, it seems as though they are out to get each other. The Russian flicks a dozen crushed cigarettes onto his doormat and Dracula scoops ashtray sand into the Russian’s mailbox. Dracula wonders who started this—him, the Russian, or the apartment manager. Or was it Lucinda? Her cold-shouldering? He still wonders at her insistence that the Russian has no live-in companion. He is sure that he has heard a female murmur at least once or twice. Sometimes people are there that you don’t see. She should know this.
Now he stands over the pressboard table with the curtains drawn over his contested reflection and thinks about the manager’s comments about damage. Lucinda has done some damage. There are burn and stab marks in the table, dart holes in the door, blots of old blood in the bedroom curtains. He once thought those curtains were just abundant and convenient absorbency for the various self-inflictions she performed, usually to put herself to sleep when he was driving a shipment overnight, which he didn’t think she did as often as this except that he’s been going out on a lot more overnights now to try to make rent, and now he’s grossly disturbed to find that they almost look like a pattern, one that he can possibly imagine the manager overlooking upon inspection, if she ever fills in a few strategic areas and then has the restraint to desist. Then, grimacing further, he ascertains that maybe she is actually making a design, something torturously decorative, a perfect collection of Rorschachs to study by moonlight. He pulls the curtain out flat. He sees that, no, what she’s been doing is stenciling the slow calligraphy of words, words he can’t make out. A lot of it looks like it’s done in felt-tip pen. Well that’s a relief.
When he asks, his girlfriend heaves a deserted sigh. “He’s always drilling that foreign chitchat at me through the wall. I’m sure he’s talking to me. He’s talking to me. I’m the one,” she says, as if it’s an answer to an earlier question. “I thought you knew I was doing that.”
“Why would I know?”
“It’s kind of obvious. There’s a Russian-English dictionary beside the bed.”
