by Meghan Tifft
A rattle of phlegm startles them both. The Russian is standing in the lamplit darkness of the open doorway. He is in a camouflage hat and under its brim his puffy face looks subdued and contrite. “This came for you,” he says. “Under my door.” He hands it over. “Whoops.”
Dracula looks at it. It’s registered mail. Inside is an eviction notice.
“Evicted? For what?” Rent isn’t due for another week. Dracula looks at Lucinda. She detonates her eyes, obviously dumbstruck.
“You know,” says the Russian in his choppy inflections. “For the railing outside.”
Together they gape.
“Up and down with that trunk every night?”
Up and down?
“That casket thing. It looks like a coffin.”
Dracula swivels his head. It might as well be creaking like his coffin. Lucinda shakes hers slowly side to side, with grave unknowing.
“The manager’s been watching the girl doing it on the security camera.” The Russian seems to bend under their attention. He tugs at his hat brim.
“What girl?” Dracula says.
“I—” says Lucinda. She seems to not be able to say something.
“There’s damage all up and down,” says the Russian, pointing outside.
“There’s no damage,” says Lucinda, her face stricken.
The Russian’s face looks pummeled into fistfuls of flesh, big and haggard. He shuffles in the doorway. “Well, I am going away for a little trip. I guess when I get back I won’t see you,” he says apologetically. Dracula can’t help but notice his accoutrements. Is he planning to drive all night somewhere? Is he trying to get away? For some reason this is what Dracula thinks.
“I guess you have a lot to talk about,” he says.
When they are done exchanging a look, the doorway is deserted. Without a goodbye the Russian has stepped off down the outdoor walk. They can hear his equipment or his hand brushing along the banister. Now they are looking at the empty slot of night, and at each other.
“What was that?”
“I can’t believe it. Is he the manager’s lackey now?” Lucinda looks wild, and wrathful.
Dracula steps outside and gazes after the disappearing form.
Far away, it seems, and deep inside the night, he can hear something else, something muffled and faint, like a staticky reception that’s tuned only to his pricked-up ears. He looks at the railing. Stepping back in, he asks, “What does he mean coffin?”
Lucinda stands up, rubbing her hands down her thighs. She doesn’t seem mad anymore. “The one we had as a prop. From the play.”
“The play? You mean, there’s a coffin in your play?” Dracula tries to remember what she’s told him about the play.
“Actually,” says Lucinda. “I’ve been.” She’s looking odd now, her body wavering there like some unstable concoction.
They share a look. On Dracula’s end it’s uncomprehending doom. On Lucinda’s it’s guilty retreat.
“Someone stole that coffin,” she says. “Not me.”
“You mean—” Dracula takes a wild guess. “It’s here?” Lucinda’s look doesn’t explain. “What?” he says.
She seems to twitch her head.
Dracula goes to his closet. It’s astonishingly empty. “Where is it?” he says, looking at the raw expanse of wall. “Where is mine?” The question seems to scrape like chains in his throat.
“Outside. It’s just outside,” says Lucinda behind him.
“Outside?” Dracula swivels to stare at her knitting her hands torturously. “Where?” he says. Why? he wants to seethe.
Lucinda looks like one of those chattering teeth toys now. “The parking lot,” she says. “I’m sorry.” Her voice sounds mauled. “I was careful.”
“You were careful?” He doesn’t know what more to say. “Jesus.” He plunges past her, unable to fathom what is going on. When Dracula gets down to the lot, his whole throat is caving in. He finds the coffin mysteriously leaning against an empty pickup truck. It looks so puny and old, so preposterous. “What?” he looks around and then at Lucinda, who has teetered down here after him. “What is it doing here? Whose truck is this?”
She ekes out a noise, like a wisp of candle smoke, to get her voice going. “Rory’s. He’s the one giving me rides to the theater. We lost that prop. So we were just—”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” says Dracula. “This is ridiculous.” He still doesn’t get it. His hands are cutting through the air in befuddled outrage. He swipes them viciously through his hair.
Lucinda stands there, her face stiffening. Now she’s giving him a look that’s stuck like glue. “It is,” she says. “You’re right.”
Dracula blows air.
“I’m sorry. I’ll go inside.” She seems to curl as she turns, like a burnt candle wick. “I can’t—” she says. “You’re right. I can’t do this.”
She can’t do what? Dracula feels almost sorry for her, watching her go. Wrathfully sorry. Regretfully furious. As if his regret is part of what’s making him furious. Is this somehow his fault? His hand, of its own volition, has floated over to his coffin. It feels cold. The veneer ridged and brittle. Dracula almost wants to cry. When he gets inside, setting it gently down and testing the lid, the bathroom fan is rattling behind the closed door. Still, he can hear her retching into the sink. The shower comes on. He supposes it’s too late now to ask her to join him for breakfast. Not that he’d want to.
Outside, going for the meal she seemed to want him to already be off on, he’s not sure if he’s furious at the Russian or her. Or the apartment manager. He should be furious at her but he’s also furious at the apartment manager. That much is obvious.
Dracula feels the night air blow up on him. Like a lover’s breath, soft and wet, it’s all up in his business. It makes him think about Lucinda.
Whatever happened, with or involving his coffin.
She said she was being careful. He doesn’t want to pursue what she was being careful about. It was all the way out there, is all he knows.
As he walks, he remembers when he used to come out here to get her, so she didn’t have to walk home alone. How differently he thought of her then. It seems so long ago. When this whole thing was reversed. He thought he was the one who would need remaking, sanding down to shape this relationship. Every day he walked all the way to her work because he thought it would help. She’d have him wait outside, and then she would come slinking out that open door, clutching her hood under her chin. He thought he was coming to get her because she didn’t feel safe. He used to get stuck all the time talking to people because she was always late coming out. There was that girl Vanessa. Then there were the passersby who went out of their way to talk to him—the men from the bus that asked for a cigarette, the vagrants with clanking parcels that asked for change, couples that asked for directions, the girls, younger than Lucinda, that complimented his hat. Now, peering inside the incandescent cube, Dracula wonders.
Why did she have him come? Why did she quit?
“Bro.”
Coming on quick in the dark Dracula sees somebody yank his head back. Is that a smile jerking his cheeks? Dracula feels a familiar pang. Whoever this is stitching along the street is in soft, slouchy attire.
“Still keeping things contagious? Ha ha.” He seems to think they know each other. Dracula has no idea who he is.
“I keep waiting to see you when I bring the mail. You’re never there anymore.”
Dracula is switching slow gears in his mind. He is making the connection that this is a mailman. Except this is not his mailman.
At least Dracula doesn’t think so. At least not his current one. The only mailman he can picture has a sketched-in beard and round cheeks and teeth that seemed folded away inside the little cavity of his mouth. This mailman is tall with a pointed face and prominent teeth, a look of oiled buckskin about him. In the streetlights his eyeballs and hair seem the same color yellow.
“Where have you been?” he s
ays to Dracula.
Dracula shakes his head. He’s still trailing vestiges of Lucinda in his mind. Was he expected to be somewhere? He only ever saw the mailman when he delivered the mail late in the day. Around this time. When he would leave to get Lucinda. But this wasn’t the mailman he saw. “I—” he is too flummoxed to address the confusion. “Here?” he says. And the mailman looks at the shop.
“What—you work here? What is this place?”
Dracula doesn’t know where to begin. “Health drinks. But—” He is going to say he doesn’t work here. Then he is going to say he doesn’t know the mailman.
“Wheatgrass.” The mailman’s cigarette bucks over his lip like a coin-fed bronco. “That stuff is fucking good.”
“Uh,” says Dracula.
“You’ve never had that? Wheatgrass?”
In the liberty he’s given the mailman by not saying his bit soon enough, Dracula feels like he has somehow become roped into an old, devoted friendship. “What is wheatgrass?” he stammers obligingly.
The mailman plucks the cigarette down from his lips. “It’s like grass that you grind up and drink the juice. You don’t have it?” He’s now scanning the shop’s sign overhead. Dracula has never looked at it. “Yeah. You’re not a health shop. This is some bullshit commercial fad outlet that stocks pesticides to the masses. And probably offers all those powder supplements in a bullshit way that perpetuates herbal ignorance in a world that is getting fucked over by criminal corporate medicine. We need real herbal education. Jesus man.” It’s as if Dracula is doing something criminal himself. “You actually work here. Here.”
“I—I don’t,” says Dracula, trying to decide where to begin.
“I mean you’ve got practically an imperialist, racist logo up there dude. Fruits dancing the conga? What the fuck are you thinking?” The mailman doesn’t wait for an answer. “I guess you can’t always—I mean if you need the money, but still do some shit that matters, or at least doesn’t hurt anybody, like deliver mail. A civilization always needs a mail service. Brutal historical antics aside. I mean—you gotta have mail. It’s just simple. Anyways,” says the mailman, and now he stands back as Richard comes to the door and pulls the heater inside, baring his teeth like a beaver. “What the fuck is your asshole neighbor up to all the time now? I keep seeing him everywhere I go. It’s like he’s following me.”
Dracula balks. What asshole neighbor? There’s only one of those. But this is not his mailman. “I think he’s out of town,” he says, thinking of just now, when he went. The whole obscure plot is getting away from him.
“No he’s not. The only time I don’t see him is if I deliver in the afternoon. There’s at least one place he always goes.” The Russian? His companion snorts. “The theater.”
Why is this funny? It makes Dracula nervous. It’s just this—something that Lucinda is not telling him about the theater.
“I—don’t know,” says Dracula. Or did she just tell him and he didn’t get it?
“Are you seriously here all the time? You’re never home anymore.”
It was about a prop.
“Oh shit,” says the mailman, his eyes blasting wide, and he laughs. “Oh my fucking shit. Never mind, dude, never mind. I just—wait a second.”
This is when Dracula assumes he has finally recognized his mistake. His coffin? Was that the prop? The mailman is pitching forward into the shadows that Dracula is standing in, peering up the brim of Dracula’s hat like an animal sniffing out a burrow. “Is that Warren’s?” he says. “I thought he got that—dude, whoever you are, you’re wearing Warren’s hat.”
Dracula brings his hand up. This is Warren’s hat? This is Warren’s mailman? This is the end of Dracula’s confusion but also the deepening of his disbelief, because what a coincidence, and also it seems incomprehensible that someone would actually mistake him for Warren, even in the dark. Richard is swiping a dry, milky smudge off the window. They gaze at him as the mailman sheepishly says his goodbyes. Now Richard has squeaked away, the sound loud through the glass. The next thing Dracula knows, clasping his brim, is that the mailman is dodging down the street.
Dracula looks inside. When he tries the door it’s still unlocked.
Far down the mausoleum stillness he hears a voice. “Hi.”
“Hi,” says Dracula. He doesn’t know yet what he’s doing.
“Just about to close.” Richard lifts his hat and swipes at a few invisible wisps of hair. He must be working up a sweat.
In answer, Dracula shucks off his own hat. He’s trying to get his bearings. So Lucinda was duping him. Has he been duping her? All this feels rehearsed, like they’re cueing each other for their next lines. Richard looks at Dracula’s hat. So it’s Warren’s.
“What can I—” his eyes skid politely up to the eyes of Dracula.
“Oh—” The hat is herringbone. With a big red spade on it. It reminds Dracula of a drop of beaded blood. It does seem like something Warren would wear. “No I’m not—” says Dracula. It seems like Richard wants him to order something.
Richard has now just cast a glance at the bag at Dracula’s feet. It’s the birds he hasn’t yet discarded. Dracula looks down too. His own breath seems to break through him like static. “I’m Lucinda’s boyfriend.”
Richard oddly seems splatted with the tomato of Dracula’s words. “Wait, I—” his hand flinches up to his jaw, as if to wipe them off.
Dracula didn’t know if he’d been planning to say that, but now he has.
He pulls the cinch handle of the bag. Has he given himself away? “She quit,” he says, as if Richard doesn’t know.
“I uh—” Richard gives him an ugly squint, like he’s trying to make him come into focus. “I don’t—are you—is she out of that apartment?”
That seems completely askew of any conversation they might be about to have.
“Apartment?” Dracula crimps his brows and hairline down. He flips the hat on the counter, and it skids across and the man tucks up his knee and flinches, like he’s dodging a Frisbee. “Whoops,” says Dracula. Why is he looking at him like that? Dracula’s gaze is beginning to feel a bit seared by all the reflective surfaces he’s used to seeing from the outside of the shop. Richard stands a little punctured at the register, hands gripping its sides, his face now slack with uncertainty. It still looks like Richard thinks he’s going to make an order. Dracula looks at the menu board. “I’m not going to—” He sees something. “Vampire Juice?”
Richard chucks up his chin. “Oh yeah.” He gives a stiff, uneasy grin. “I can do that with ginger or not if you want.”
That doesn’t—“What?” he says. That doesn’t make sense.
Richard pushes up his glasses, his jaw sinking into his neck. He keeps looking between Dracula and the menu board. “So she’s done with that other guy then.”
Other guy? “She’s—” What guy? “I’m—” he was going to say the guy.
Richard pulls on his nose. “I actually just sent her paycheck there.”
Dracula wants to say, nodding, that he got that, but Richard seems to regret having done it from the tone of his voice. “I can just cancel it and she can give me wherever she’s living now.” He seems to peter out at Dracula’s puckered face. It’s like he’s not computing. Or Dracula’s not.
“With me. She’s living with me.” Still, he wants to say.
“Oh, with you?” Richard lifts his hat in bald surprise. “Well, I guess she was trying to move.” He rubs his face, all the unshaven folds blackening. “Glad she got out of that. I was helping her with money and then—” Now he stops himself, wiping sweat onto his jeans, and looks off behind him. That seems to be mostly where Dracula’s gaze has gone.
“Not a nice guy, if you know what I mean.”
Dracula doesn’t even know what to ask. He was giving her money? Is there someone else? But isn’t it him? He thinks of that empty pickup truck.
“Where did you—did she—did she tell you?”
“Eh, last month
. Her coworker—Vanessa, said she was trying to get out of there. Said the guy was an idiot and acted like Dracula.”
Dracula’s stomach glugs like a drain. Now he is the guy.
“Yeah. Some big—” Richard holds his hat in the air. Dracula squeezes his own hat. Warren’s. Does that mean he’s not the guy? “I don’t know him,” says Richard. “I met him when he dated my daughter.”
Now Dracula’s words are jammed in his throat. Where had all these entanglements come from? He knows he never dated Richard’s daughter. Richard has gotten a wrong idea. There has to be some reason why he thinks Lucinda is dating somebody other than Dracula. And who acts like Dracula.
Dracula swallows. He seems to be unable to say anything more. He is still grinding his thoughts over this intractable other guy. He can’t be. But of course, he has to be. “I don’t know.” He sees Richard’s hitch of lip.
They both look at the menu board.
“Vampire juice?” asks Richard.
Dracula squirms his mouth. Is his relationship crumbling out from under him right now? He keels his head back in grim suspicion. “Ah,” he says. He seems to be nodding a dank foreboding.
Now Richard’s plugging in the order. Had Dracula just said yes? Dracula has to pay him $3.75.
While Richard makes the drink, Dracula grips the cinch handle. Up and down. Tense and release. She had just said it tonight. I can’t do this. What was she supposed to be getting out of? Even though he asks it he knows it’s obvious. It should be. He’s Dracula. That’s the problem. That will always be the problem, whether or not she’s also doing something unseemly on the side. Or was. Is she now? Dracula can’t stand the stab of his own thoughts. He lets the handle go as Richard hands him the drink. The bag slumps at Dracula’s feet, sad and soft. Dracula thinks of what he could do, turn it upside down and let all the birds flop out, in a dusty landslide of warmed plumage. What good would it do?
“Hey, don’t forget this.”
Richard is holding the hat. Dracula stares, looking daggers unaware.
“Tell Lucinda I said hi.”
