From Hell to Breakfast

by Meghan Tifft

  In the depot, standing at the bulletin board, he said, “You don’t know anything about a play, do you?”

  “A play?”

  If only he remembered the name of the place. “It’s in my apartment. I can’t remember where it is.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. He rather did feel crazy. Then she said, “I know. I know what we can do.”

  Now they are here, doing something. Dracula is willing to be in the Russian’s apartment as long as it means he’ll shortly end up in his and eventually—soon—be at the play. It’s worth a shot. His fingers, dangling in the cactus, have stubbed into something. Maybe they’re not disintegrating after all. He pulls it out.

  “Why does he have a pacifier in his plant?” he says into the bland air behind him. Other things the Russian has that Dracula has just noticed—a slitted wooden block full of knives. Some jug of oil with frilly ferns embalmed in it. His kitchen is clean. The girl comes scuttling out.

  “That’s mine.”

  “It’s yours?”

  “I have a baby.” She swishes her hand as if this is irrelevant. Her face is stitched into a look he can’t read.

  “What—with him?”

  “He has a name,” she says. Her hair got slightly flattened by the hat she wore over here. She’s not wearing it now. Dracula thinks she’s going to say the name but she doesn’t.

  Whatever, he thinks. “So he’s not the guy that’s following you? That’s somebody else?” He gets up and follows her into the bathroom, where an arachnid of wires crawls from the corner of the ceiling. He cringes slightly back. “What is that?” Dracula says.

  He’s not even sure she knows what he’s asking about, because she’s running her hands through open drawers of calcified hygiene products, sniffing with sneezy eyes. “It’s not—we used to do this thing—my roommate. When I lived over there. Never mind.” She had explained that riddle of living arrangements as they were walking from the depot.

  “Excuse me,” Dracula had said, “but how do you know where my keys are?” The pale mushroom face was still chewing its lip.

  “No, it’s a spare.” She flicked her hand. “I have to get dressed,” she said, and disappeared. She came back in her cowboy outfit.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Dracula had a feeling he wasn’t being very nice, but why should he? He was getting what he needed in the most upending way.

  “Do you have the knife?” he said to the knife salesman. “Can I get it back?”

  “I’ll give it to you,” she said. “It’s in there.”

  “In there? Are we talking about the same knife? My knife is in his apartment? Why?”

  “Because. Just—I know where to find it.”

  What does that mean? Why does she have it?

  “You were following me,” he says. “Out on the beach. I knew it.”

  “I only did that because I wanted to make sure. It is you. You’re the one who’s been following me.”

  “I have not been following you!” Now they are back to this again.

  Even as he chafes, he is realizing something. He does recognize her. From the diner, yes, and from the beach.

  Dracula gives his knuckles a crack. “So how do you have keys to his apartment? Do you live there or something?” He’s suddenly ablaze with suspicion. “Wait—are you the girl? You’re not the girl, are you?” He’s thinking of the girl who lives with the Russian. Lived.

  Dracula never got corroboration on whether or not she was the girl because she seemed to think a cinching of her brow was adequate response.

  Now the girl is rummaging around in the apartment to find his keys. Or some keys that might go to his apartment. Not his exactly.

  “So the Russian used to live in my apartment?” Dracula asks.

  “No, I did,” she says.

  “You did.”

  “Well he did too. After my roommate left. With me. Then I left.”

  “You had a roommate.”

  “Before I lived with him. Over there,” she says.

  “Where I live.”

  “Then he moved here.”

  “After you left there,” Dracula says, disoriented. Was that the day he was moving boxes? They were both moving in somewhere.

  She’s running her hand along the bottom of the cabinet, like a crime detective. Dracula notices he is steaming up the bathroom mirror, all by himself. “Do you see that?” It seems by his orientation that the mirror is exactly affixed to the opposite side of the same wall in his apartment that holds his mirror.

  “Where would he put it?”

  “You know where I’d put it?” he says, staring. “In the vent.” He’s joking, but away she goes. That’s when he knows. These apartments are mirror images.

  “You’re the girl,” he says, “aren’t you?”

  But the girl is gone, jimmying screws on the vent. She knew just which one to go to.

  Dracula kills the light in the bathroom. He turns it back on. Now he seems to have drawn her image in steam, a very specific but filmy rendition. Lucinda’s. Right on the bathroom mirror. She’s there, raising her arm just like his. The reflection is something, but still it isn’t him. The mirror is showing him a vision of Lucinda. And now the him that was her is already gone.

  The girl comes in with a ring of two keys.

  Dracula looks at them. “So the Russian had a key to your apartment when you lived there.”

  “I gave him a spare.”

  Now it is finally hitting him. The Russian has a key to his apartment. The Russian can get into his apartment. “But hey,” he says. “We changed the locks.”

  “You did?” She drops her arm. “I thought—the manager never does. I figured that out when we moved. You changed the locks?”

  “Me and her did.” After her mother let herself in.

  She drops the ring, right on the floor, like a dumbbell she wants to rebuke him with.

  “Let’s just try it,” Dracula says.

  Outside, her hat back on, she hands him the flashlight that she brought for looking around the living room. Then she locks the Russian’s door with her keys, the spare he gave her when she lived where Dracula does. The portcullis squeaks open below and the apartment manager comes through with a brown paper bag. Is that his dinner? Is it dinnertime? Why didn’t Dracula look at a clock while he was in there? The girl seems to duck her head down as the manager looks up, then lets his gaze go opaque, as if he might actually be peering at a bug on his nose and not all the way up at them. It’s the first time Dracula’s seen him since the eviction. The girl hovers behind while he walks to his door. There’s a note there now. It’s downstairs. Go look in the closet. Come to the play and I’ll explain. The closet. Dracula looks downstairs, where the manager is going inside his apartment. He feels a crinkling of dread. The girl is all hat brim now, trying the key. One of the keys.

  “What does the other one go to?” Dracula asks.

  “Downstairs,” she says. “Storage.” Now she’s trying the other one.

  “I didn’t get a key for storage,” he says. “You mean the room down there? In the basement?”

  “You have to sign a contract.” She drops her arm.

  Dracula looks at her leaden face. “Let me try.” He wants to be sure. While he jiggles the keys she stands there crumpled over in the cage of her arms, looking dully down.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” she says. “I have to get in there.”

  “Does it have to be tonight? There’s not a bomb in there is there?” says Dracula.

  She shakes her head. “When is your girlfriend going to be home?”

  “She’s at a play,” says Dracula, then corrects himself, “in a play. I don’t know.” She might never come home. That is entirely feasible.

  Dracula is pretty sure now that he’s not going to get to her play. He may have already missed the whole thing. And now he’s pretty sure that she does want him to come. Even though she said before she didn’t. If that even happened. He’s still uncl
ear on that night, or whether he’s even still in it or in another. All he knows is that he is doomed. The note says downstairs. This whole thing makes him crawl with dread.

  The girl is clamping her hand over her mouth, looking down at the manager’s door. “I can’t stay here. I have to go.” She has forgotten all about the keys. She leaves without the flashlight too.

  Dracula goes down to the courtyard. He begins the process of resigning himself to his own absence, whatever that might mean. His hands seem to be back to normal. They’re not disintegrating anymore. Up close, the hedges all appear to genuflect at him, in accordance with their own personal anatomies. It’s as if he’s being invited into some rare and final festivity, everyone halted and enamored by his unexpected presence. The butterfly tilts its deferential wing. The mermaid rushes up in an effusion of joy. The centaur blocks off a fanatical crowd that apparently followed him. Or else it knows something the others don’t about Dracula himself. Dracula imagines the ensemble cast of his story. The manager hasn’t answered his knock. He’s being just that blatant.

  Is it late? It must be late. Is that a stadium glow in the sky? Dracula can’t tell if things are beginning or ending. His head feels dry and full of that same loose powder overhead. He works the keys in his hand, thinking. He’s got nowhere else to go but down.

  He might as well. Down the stairs, everything grimed in linty light, Dracula seems to hold his breath for something. It isn’t until he has groped his way into the dark, a dark much deeper than the one outside, and the door locked behind him, that he thinks to flick on the flashlight. The mattresses are all vertical and lank, ghosts lamenting their ugly garments. His light is like a police beam, narrow and accusatory. Dracula teases out a tangle of metal legs—two stacks of chairs along one wall. But now he sees what he must be looking for. Over in the corner, long and dour, a tumbled crate beached on the uneven concrete. Dracula’s heart bobs and blots out his entire breath. He ekes himself forward. How can this be? How can this possibly be? He knocks on the wood. He opens the lid. It’s his.

  The Parts

  One of the things her mother has told Lucinda is that she didn’t even know she was pregnant with her.

  One day, she just went into labor.

  “It happens,” said her mother.

  Apparently this is why Lucinda’s father eventually ran off. By then he had met another woman.

  “He was cheating on me,” her mother said, with an over-seasoned grin, “because I was cheating on him.”

  Lucinda couldn’t tell if her mother was rubbing in her father’s suspicions or actually coming clean of her own misdeeds. Her mother was always that hard to read.

  All she knows is that her mother did marry the pawn shop owner, and either she met him before or after Lucinda was born. Lucinda’s impression is that her mother likes to call him Lucinda’s father because she seems to think that Lucinda has no real father.

  “I made a baby with fate,” says her mother.

  When she thinks about this, Lucinda sometimes feels like she herself is contaminated by fate, as if fate were a named progenitor, or else maybe she is the byproduct of the fate that severed her parents. Or perhaps, oppositely, she is a contaminant sent by fate to pry her parents apart on the seam of their betrayal. Whichever way, there was a day her parents’ marriage ended. It is also the anniversary of Lucinda’s seventh birthday. Every year her mother commemorates that day with a gift for Lucinda. This year, her mother had brandished a book. “I couldn’t resist,” she said. It was a book about dead celebrities. “You’ll like it. Your father’s in there.”

  It was like a lost instruction in tongues. Lucinda choked. “My father?” she said.

  Her mother winked. “When you’re done with it you should show it to him. He’ll love it.”

  Lucinda looked for her father’s name in the book. But the one whose name she knew, her second father, obviously wouldn’t be in there because he was still alive. Her other father’s name, her first one, she didn’t even know.

  Lucinda sat on the steps. First, her father came down—the second one. Lucinda watched him walk away, the door batting behind him. One or the other of her father’s voices was all up in her ear at the moment. She didn’t know which.

  She knew where her father was going. To hear him talk, dead animals were a rare gift, a surprise discovery that brought close the emphatic mysteries of the universe. Such encounters could make a man’s heart beat with vigorous wonder and trepidation, and they gave him reason to get off the couch and walk along the beach, scouring the sand at the horizon for any telltale lumps or areas of darkness. Lucinda remembers all this now as she remembers the bits and pieces her father used to rattle around in his tin cans, pinching out and inspecting, filling his ledgers with drawings and diagrams of bodily infrastructure, hinge and phalange and ledge and lever, recording all angles of connection, conjuring the absent musculature, consulting his reference books and extrapolating whole beasts from these bitty parts.

  Lucinda stopped and thought, that day and this, that perhaps she also just wanted to put something together. After looking at that book. After thinking of her father.

  Lucinda went to the library. She wrote a note. Going to the library. See you after dinner. She left it on the door.

  Now, looking back, walking away, she thinks that’s what made her write the play. Lucinda seems to be taking the bus. She used to ride the bus all the time, before Rory was coming to pick her up. The driver is a big man with his chin hoisted high in the air, as if to outstretch his indigestion. Lucinda listens to him from the seat behind as the bus squeals and hisses through the streets. It stops at three traffic lights, one beside a fire station. She wonders why Rory didn’t come back to pick her up. How did he think she would get to the play?

  At the next stop Lucinda wanders off the bus, floating like a lost spore, and finds herself strewn by the winds of fate to the theater doors. Will anybody be here? It almost seems like the whole world is deserted.

  Inside, it’s a different story.

  She is whipped into the lather of last-minute preparations, flung along a wheel that is now slipping her forward into swift, obliterating tableau, no time to waste. Lucinda looks around. Frantically, it seems, things are clattering into their slots, all the props and players, their fervor winding them up like a clock about to spring forth its furious cuckoo. That’s what it feels like, especially so to Lucinda when Lauren comes scurrying up, billowing all in blousy black. Lucinda had expected her to say good luck. Break a leg. Lauren pinches a paper in her hand. “Did you hear Marty’s going to close with a curtain speech?” She says this with a stinging blink.

  Lucinda shakes her head. “Are you okay? What is that?”

  Lauren looks at it, distracted. “Oh in the coffin. I found it.” Her voice has plunged as if tripping into a ditch. It’s the note Lucinda wrote for Dracula. So, how did it get here?

  “I hear he’s going to do it with the other writer.”

  The other writer? The other writer was everybody’s biggest question. Nobody knew who the other writer was. “Really?” says Lucinda.

  She’d never heard Marty make mention of this.

  On that first day of rehearsal, she had looked around as the rest of them wondered who it was that wished to remain anonymous. She remembers the fiendish urge to write, and then seeing the stabs of desperate reverie all down the sides of the book. The rantings of a deranged mind. Then she saw Vlad, watching her in the window.

  There was the backwash of light that meant anybody could be looking in from the outside. She was up on the second floor. Vlad was howling on the steps below. She could still hear him. Vlad didn’t like to be left alone. She wouldn’t like to be tethered to someone else’s predicament either. She didn’t like it now.

  When Vlad came out to meet her on the steps, she’d thought he was talking about the play. “You’re like me,” he said, holding the book. No no no, she said. She’d thought he meant that he was a writer.

  All this
time, she’s had no inkling that Marty would expose her with a curtain speech. Not even in his backstage speech, which he had just given to the cast in the back corridors, in an alcove of painted plywood, all of them squatting over sound wires.

  “I have said that the other writer of this play has asked to remain anonymous. That’s because the body tells the spirit what it knows—” Marty held up a distracting finger. “But it always keeps some secrets. And the spirit tells the body what it doesn’t know. But it always scatters some truths.” They all looked around. They all had their humoring faces on. Did they all know it was her? Her anonymity was part of the play by this time. She and everyone else had gotten used to it.

  Sometimes Lucinda thinks Dracula is simply another part of her, one that was there in the glass when she looked up, expecting to see her own reflection and instead finding his. Sometimes, because of how she wrote the play, she thinks that he is the play. She thinks that he is the play inside of which she has prepared a part for herself, and that part is also her because she wrote the play. The play is the presence of her absence and Dracula is the play and out of the play emerges her.

  Lucinda doesn’t know.

  All she knows is that she’s in the play she wrote.