by Meghan Tifft
“Where’d you get that key?” he says to her now, not ignoring her at all.
“It’s mine.” She holds it up shyly. “I live here.”
He pauses, puzzled. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“2B,” she says, as unassumingly as possible.
He looks up there. His hair is like a ragged dandelion spore chewed over by the wind. “You live in 2B?”
She nods. She realizes Dracula might yet be up there—not having left to get her. He doesn’t need much lead time. When he’s alone he moves fast.
The manager shrugs. “Okay, I guess.” He speaks to his own skepticism. He goes inside.
Lucinda sits for a while in the courtyard.
She thinks of her boss. She doesn’t remember anything. Does that mean that there is nothing to remember? She looks at the apartment door. She thinks of her father, far away and somewhere else. She thinks of Doors Always Open, of being seen and unseen at all times. She used to play a game in the old house when her father was away, alternately closing and opening doors to make different configurations of space for sitting in. Often she did this just for the feeling of being prismed somewhere else, right inside her own home. The house was a warren of rooms and hallways and doors back then, a claustrophobic maze. She wouldn’t have even noticed if her father hadn’t called her attention to it with his rule.
“I can’t see you,” he used to say. “You’re too skinny.” It was either her first father or her second father who said this, crossing his arms in her open doorway, as if to blot out her whole budding being. It seemed to work, in a way. She is still thin and dilute, strained to the slithery liquid she always and ever was. What does Dracula see when he looks at her? What does he think? She wonders if he’ll even notice her sitting here when he comes back from going to meet her at work. Lucinda stares down at the key she just used. She probably should have waited for him at the smoothie shop.
She hears a click-click-clicking. A man is walking his bike to the basement stairs. He looks like some kind of hale authority, a bicycle cop, riding home on his municipal issue at the end of his long day. The day is just beginning for Dracula. He is out there, or about to be out there, looking for her. She wonders if Richard will look for his daughter. The man uses his key to open the door and shoulders the bike down the steps. She wonders why she has never tried her key on the door at the bottom of the stairs.
Lucinda can’t tell what she wants that basement door to do. She wants it to creak monumentally open and she wants it to stay monumentally closed. She wants to know and she wants to never have known.
Except now she’s already on her way, into the mildew gloom of the stairwell, her legs stiff and spidery under her as she picks her way down through the pickled light. She can hear the metal wheeze of a tire spinning. She doesn’t want to be doing this. And also she does. Lucinda is realizing, beyond a doubt, what she really wants. More than anything she wants that door to be open already. She wants it to just be resting ajar without the disturbance of opening on her. She has never felt more humbly destined than she does right now. In front of her, she can see the soft form moving through the darkness. Behind her, she can feel the swift hiss of spinning metal.
“Hi.” The voice is three in one. It’s his and hers and his.
The Shirt
“How do I look?” It’s hard to not see yourself in the mirror. It’s hard to perform routine hygiene and dress for stylistic conformity. It’s hard in this way to know yourself. He can see almost every part of himself below the neck, but only in pieces and planes. He can’t see his face. His self-esteem waxes and wanes on a barometer of partial blindness. There have been centuries that he’s felt invisible to women and centuries that he’s felt like the lady-killer he is. At least that’s how he remembers it, vaguely. This is one of those in-between times, when women may look at him, but they have to be the right type.
“You have a kind of reserved hipster vibe,” Lucinda assures him. “Like an IT guy who goes partway in for the fashion. It pretty much works.”
They’re talking about his sense of style because of Warren. Warren has made some underground traction with his street art. Two parties have photographed and disseminated it—the police and The Grannies. The Grannies are a group Dracula still wants some clarity on from Warren. There was also an unambiguous capsule in the arts weekly, asking Art or Atrocity? Warren has a name now in certain circles. Curiosity is fanning it out. He’s planning a gallery show.
In the meantime, he needs more fresh outdoor installations, and he’s having a party. It’s for his housewarming. They wouldn’t be going except that they are now about to ask Warren if he can loan them rent for next month. They are one paycheck away from having enough. It was either that or ask Lucinda’s parents.
Friday is the party. Tonight and all the nights this week Dracula is working and then Sunday he is going with Lucinda to her parents’ for dinner. He is trying on the shirt that she bought for him, or took or borrowed. It is unclear how she came by the shirt. It is unclear whether it is for the party or the family dinner on Sunday, or both. The shirt is “programmer plaid”—white with crosshatchings of blue and maroon—and soft as fog. Someone has washed it a lot. When he changes over into his brown uniform she hands him his overnight sack lunch. What she doesn’t know and what he doesn’t tell her is that tonight he is going to try something. He is going to take a victim—the old way, privately, and without consultation.
It is much better that Lucinda doesn’t know because just having her know on the nights he has gone out has been giving him diuretic bouts of performance anxiety. Every time he has returned hungry and humiliated because he can feel her neurotic silhouette scintillating the air somewhere nearby, whether she is really there following him or not. She used to follow him. She says she doesn’t anymore. Now that she knows that he knows, the whole thing is real and she doesn’t want a part of it. She almost wishes that they were insane, in the nonviolent way. Dracula understands. He feels like he’s going mad, for the first time in his immortal life. What if he isn’t Dracula anymore? What if he was once and he has domesticated himself right out of his eternal curse and never noticed it?
“I have this feeling,” he says on bad nights, “that my successor is coming to retire me.”
“What does that even mean?” says Lucinda. “Is that how it even works?”
“I have no idea.”
“What would your successor look like?” she says with a squint in her eye that can only be described as cagey and provocative. “Like you?” It makes Dracula insanely suspicious.
“I don’t know—why?” he says, trying to be cool.
“I don’t know,” she says, equally as cool.
It occurs to him, dismally, that if he saw somebody who looked like him he wouldn’t even know it.
But there’s a woman—barely that—who works at the all-night diner on his route. She looks something like Lucinda, and that is why his mind seems to cleave her out of the many anonymous others. It’s as if Lucinda’s is the only face that ever sticks with him, and all her many approximates out in the world are linked to her in an oblique and peripheral intimacy, like the diminishing replicas he sees of her in the facing planes of their bathroom mirror. It’s one of those mirrors that wraps behind the sink and around the two adjacent walls and produces an unending corridor of reflected selves. That’s what Lucinda sees anyway. Dracula sees Lucinda. Is it face blindness? This is what she asks, leaning in to look at herself. Lucinda still doesn’t think he’s Dracula. She still suffers paranoid and increasingly debilitating attacks that they are both dysfunctional and deranged, like the Russian next door and her boss at work and her whole family and the actors at theater class and probably everybody else they have ever come into contact with, all of them grubbing around in their domesticated degeneracy. She hopes they don’t kill anyone. She really does. She does not feel anything close to the purifying inferno of monstrosity that he says has possessed him in former lives. Neither has Dracula f
elt it in a long time. Look at us, she says. What if? she says, until Dracula feels all his own elemental clarity sliding away from him. Maybe we need to volunteer ourselves. Volunteer ourselves? To the nuthouse. It’s a term he’s never heard before. Another term he’s never heard before that she keeps using is face blindness. A peculiar form. That’s what she keeps saying.
“Can you see me?” he says, holding up his toothbrush hand.
“Yes and no,” she says, “but that’s me.”
Dracula waits, willing her once again to explain her paradox.
“I already said, I’m too impressionable. What if we get someone else to look?”
“Then they’d know I was Dracula.”
Lucinda’s gaze goes imperceptibly opaque, like a sheet of water streaking down glass.
“What?” he says.
“I could—never mind,” she says.
“You could what?” Dracula cinches his brows. “Nobody knows I’m Dracula but you and your delinquent family, right?”
The nod she gives to her reflection, and not him, is a fuzzy one.
“Who did you tell?” Clearly, this is something she wants to confess.
“It’s not like anybody believes me. They all think I’m doing some kinky role-playing thing.”
“Okay,” says Dracula, prodding her with his tone.
“My theater class.”
“You told your whole theater class?” Dracula stares at her. He can’t believe she might actually mean what she says. “They know I’m Dracula?” This is when it hits him. She really doesn’t think he’s Dracula. If she ever did, she doesn’t now.
“I also told Vanessa. And she’s dead now. And I’m freaked out,” she says, the wicks of her fingers splayed out in the air. In the mirror, her waxen pallor is drastic. She looks more and more like a dead bride in a horror movie. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she says. “Let’s just get this over with. Can we please get this over with?”
Dracula knows what she means. But it’s complicated. “Soon,” he says. He doesn’t tell her his other plans for tonight. His logic is all up in knots right now. There’s no way out of it but into it.
Dracula brings along another shirt to change into so that nobody can trace him to his UPS job. It’s the one she left out on the bed when she went drooping from the room. Dracula finds it fitting that he now has a shirt to wear incognito that he has never worn before in his life.
The other Lucinda, dependably, is here tonight. Dracula likes that the diner is simply called The Diner. Its name is timeless and plodding, and he can sense this is what makes it hip. His shirt fits right in here. Two guys on adjacent dates wear those plastic glasses that are supposed to look nerdy. The obligatory pierced and dog-collared teens cluster at the far booth, where the light is black and effluvious beside an open waste bin. The diner is always slowly gloaming and moist with common cuisine. It seems to percolate its own rich and pungent humidity, the booths and linoleum smearing down glops of dark brown, the windows blurred with grease and condensation that salves off the dry, wintry cold that sups slowly on them from space. The waitress twines up from the shadows, droll and slow, sinewing along on faulty ankles that knob out over platform wedges, a glossy helix of straps winding partway up her legs. The caresses of one dead animal upon another. She stops at a booth. Her hair is like silt dragged across her back. Her nose is devastatingly razored. She is like Lucinda and so not like her at all. She reminds him of a dead mermaid.
“Hi there,” she says, coming with the menu. It’s the kind of place where you seat yourself.
Dracula scabs the air with his hello. It startles him to realize how dry his mouth is.
The waitress makes reluctant eye contact. “Anything to drink?”
Her voice is bland and weary, for it is a great effort to be friendly this late at night. That’s what she is telling him by also not wanting to meet his eyes at all. Dracula tries to smile and instead feels his mouth stretching into a wide rubbery grimace. He stops it by clearing his throat.
“Agh.” He breaks into a short series of rude coughs. “Some water?” he croaks uneasily.
The waitress’s eyebrow lifts and she looks at him as if she’s coming to certain conclusions. “Okay,” she says in a bright, stark voice that sounds deliberately judgmental. “Just a minute.”
He watches her slink off into the lagoon lighting, feeling vaguely chafed. She probably thinks he’s a pervert. Like many other men who try to enter a restaurant alone and after someone else’s bedtime. Dracula is tucking in his lip. It seems that all these graveyard waitresses want to dislike men in his situation. He and men like him are always getting prematurely condemned. Dracula has had this happen a lot. He sees it all the time. It’s like an epidemic. He can’t help hating women who want automatically to hate men like him. It isn’t his fault if she has a good reason for it.
Dracula shakes his head, trying to clear it. This is no time for petty agitation. He doesn’t want to render himself ineffectual. He is not a man in the usual sense. He is not at bottom impotent or indolent or inconsequential. He is Dracula. There are practical matters he has to work out. He has to find out when she gets off work. If her shift ends too late, he has to get her out on one of her cigarette breaks. If she doesn’t smoke he has to dredge her out somehow by dawdling in that unlit cove by the bathroom, where the back door is. Maybe he can pretend to be using his phone.
He gnashes his teeth and squeezes his hands together on top of the table to relieve some of the pressure. After a minute it seems that the teenagers at the far booth are turning one at a time to peer at him. Is he emitting some feral vibe? That makes him feel better and worse. He has abandoned his train of thought and now all he can do is smolder blankly. What is wrong with everybody? Is he such a spectacle? He looks down at himself. The shirt is fine. His pasty skin is fine, forearms smooth with muscle as if fish are swimming beneath the surface. He imagines octopuses knotted in his biceps. This is about all he can do to scrutinize himself. He feels alright. But the teens are still taking little squalid looks of him that are making him gristle with rage. Then here comes the waitress, blatting through the swinging door and past them, making her way toward him like a rare and spindly insect, and he can’t help it. Her face is so aloof. In his vague and meaningless contempt he wants to stamp her flat with his foot and rid the world of her despicable existence.
“Here you go,” she says. “Are you ready?”
For a moment he only stares at her, grinding his teeth as if it will help him to fiercely chew up the huge rising lump of hatred within him so he can speak again. “Yes,” he spits when he sees her expression, and snaps the menu closed. “Steak and eggs. Please,” he adds, when he sees her head kick back at his tone. “Rare,” he adds over that. A glib smile tells him she sees this as amusing. She thinks he’s posturing. “Bleeding,” he says, furious.
“Got it.” She makes a note in her pad. He can’t infer anything from the delicate way she pinches the menu off the table. “Anything else?”
He breathes out air like a blast from a steam cooker. What is wrong with him? “No,” and then, “thank you,” he says, sensing his own near implosion. He looks down to diffuse himself. The corner of his eye catches on the coil of her shoe straps. They are slick and incendiary.
“Okay then,” she says, with disparaging brightness. “I’ll go put that in for you.”
She didn’t need to say that, he thinks. She could have just walked away. Maybe he is just being thin-skinned. When she comes past him again with menus for another table, he stubs out his finger.
“Can I ask you something?”
Her look tells him that she would rather he not. She’s on her way somewhere.
“What are those shoes made of?”
“Oh—actually, they’re eel.” She says this almost with some embarrassment, and he can’t tell why. Is eel expensive? Is it unseemly? He’s one instant away from asking this when he realizes it’s probably not polite.
“My girlfri
end would like those,” he says, feeling his chest fill with hot jacuzzi water. He tells himself he can do this.
The girl nods, primly. Giving away that she’s trying not to show that she thinks he’s lying. Dracula sees it. She is definitely sure he has no girlfriend.
Dracula tries, so hard, not to let this get to him. “You get those anywhere nearby?”
“In Europe.”
“Europe. That’s where I’m from.” That sounds stupid. She doesn’t ask him to specify. Instead she smiles obligingly.
“Long night, huh?”
She raises her eyebrows, then appears to focus on doing a scan of the table, as if it’s a tactic she has for getting out of these conversations.
“So when does a shift like this end?”
“Not soon enough,” she says. “Are you going to want Tabasco?”
“What?”
“With your eggs—Tabasco?”
“Oh, sure,” he says, giving her the excuse. He is already exhausted by working so hard to sound nice, and it feels like two sticks rubbing together, the heat singeing him all along his insides.
“Red or green?” she asks flatly.
Dracula shakes his head. He passes his hand over his face. He wonders if he’s already giving this thing up. “Oh, let me see. Red, I guess.”
She turns again and leaves. Dracula looks around, feeling like he’s about to laugh this battered feeling right out of him, and catches the eye of a fat bearded kid in the back who’s been staring at him. He can tell he’s been staring at him by the stagnant slump of his parked jowl. Why? He raises his eyebrows and waits for the kid to look away, but now he seems to be talking and staring at the same time, with a look of smug indifference on his bear-cub face.
