by Meghan Tifft
“You know that effigy?”
Yes. She could only blame herself for that effigy. She was the one after all who wrote the play.
“Yeah he saw that.”
She gapes. “You mean—he woke up?” He did?
Rory winces out a smile.
“What?” She’s relieved.
“I think he thought it was real.”
“Wait—what?” says Lucinda. She looks at Rory’s shrugged-up face. “You mean, he saw the dummy.” She has a new bad feeling. “So he thinks I’m dead?”
“I didn’t realize—hopefully after I left he touched it or something.”
That is the opposite of what she would find herself hoping. “My boyfriend thinks I’m dead,” says Lucinda.
“Yeah, well, if he touched it he would know. “I think he did,” says Rory. “He would, if he thought it was you.” This is how he’s trying to make her feel better. “Unless he doesn’t know what a dead body feels like.”
Lucinda does not like this, not at all. “What was he doing there? You were in the room? You talked to him?”
Rory airplanes his hand nervously. “Eh.” What does that mean? They talked a little? Maybe Rory’s embarrassed. Maybe Rory ran away after seeing him and now he’s out of breath.
“Is he still there? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” says Rory. “I had to chase my sister.”
“You had to chase your sister?”
“That’s another story,” says Rory, swiping a hand out. He’s looking really on edge now.
“What is going on?” says Lucinda. “I don’t understand.” Why is this getting so totally inane? “Lauren came in? While you were in there?”
He jimmies his head back and forth. “So, she’s my other sister. Half sister. It’s not important. You want to go back? Let’s go back and see. I have to lock it up again. I’m just—he might still be there.”
Lucinda looks at him, suddenly afraid. “How long ago was this?”
Rory looks back at her. He seems just as lost for time as she is. Why did he chase his sister? What happened to Dracula? “I’m really freaked out,” she says. She’s surprised to hear herself say it. Or to say it to anybody other than Dracula.
Rory looks at her, in the way he keeps doing, like he’s found her now and needs something slightly unspeakable. “Yeah,” he says. What can’t he say? “I am too.”
The Party
At the party, everyone talks about the play. This Dracula manages to surmise murkily, through shale clouds that haven’t yet cleared. He can’t believe he’s here.
“What the hell?” he says, when Warren answers the door. They were supposed to meet here. He and Lucinda. He had gathered this from the shirt she set out. It was strewn beside some other items of clothing on the bed, as if maybe she was dressing for the party. Dracula had had to call Warren for the address. But when he got here she was nowhere.
“I’m glad you came,” Warren says, with extravagant courtesy. His hat is on backwards.
Dracula feels all his questions shoulder in at once. Warren’s hat is herringbone. With a big red spade on it. Just like a bead of blood.
“So then it was a suicide?”
Dracula swivels around after the errant voice.
When he turns back, Warren’s arm is around somebody Dracula’s never seen before. Dracula drops his bag.
“Is that your hat?” he says to Warren.
Warren looks at the sack Dracula brought, his brow rippled. “This is Lauren,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard. He motions with his drink hand.
“Nobody even knew it was for real.”
“I mean, did you give that hat to me?” Dracula turns again, partway, catching himself in the zipper of the other conversation.
Warren’s face is now stuck in a gooey grin. “She’s in the play with Lucinda,” he says.
The girl tries to smile. Her attempt is a wavering chalk line in a slop of black. “I like your shirt,” she says. Her eyes blister with an ice of artificial white.
Warren is wearing black-on-black stripes and like a primped, impassive panther, he’s perched at her primordial shore.
Dracula looks between them. He thinks maybe he smiles into their arranged obscene faces. The girl seems to be all painted. Is Lucinda also painted?
“Where is Lucinda?”
Lauren murmurs a rejoinder, and like a slow slime moves off, a pair of bare black lobes swelling abruptly out over her legs. Dracula looks at Warren, realizing that he has just been looking at her naked body. Warren is opening the sack Dracula brought. With his fingerless gloves he paws through it.
“I hear they’re still arresting people,” someone says.
Dracula stares. The bag Warren is plundering was supposed to be a gift. It was supposed to entice him into letting Dracula stay with him for a few days. And Lucinda too, of course. Until they can find a new apartment.
“The theater got mobbed,” says another voice.
Dracula finally turns. “What happened?” he cuts in.
“Oh it’s just this play.”
“Somebody hanged herself.”
“For real.”
In a slurpee of pink landsliding out of the corner behind the woman’s head, Dracula can see lumps and sharp points, slow avian slicks of oil as they cascade to the floor. She peers at him through a bale of yellow hair.
“What?” That cannot be. He knows that was a fake. “Which play?”
“It’s not just the actors. Everybody’s in trouble.”
He stares, his nerves firing afresh, his heart jigsawing into big bristly pieces. Dracula is in trouble. He knows that.
“All of them disappeared.”
“All of who?”
“Here. I have something for you.” Warren keels back and hands Dracula the hat off his head.
Dracula, nervy and incensed, bats it away, and less effectively the ugly chitchat. He’s never felt more like he wants to duck and cover. What is this conversation telling him? He feels more and more urgently like he should be asking about Lucinda. And about Lucinda’s play.
“Where is she?” he asks, as if Warren should already know who he means. He does.
Warren has paused with the hat lofted in the air, ostentatiously overhead, and then he makes a show of looking around. “She hasn’t come,” he says. “You can actually help me.”
This is not what Dracula wants to hear. He tries to brace himself for some inevitable entanglement. When he got here, everyone was going up to a door. He thought he saw a sizzle of Grecian hair, a smidge of bronze myth disappearing. It was her. Was it her? He thought he heard someone mention art at the party. Now he is here at the party.
Dracula fans his shirt. Lucinda put it out for him. That much he knows.
“Here’s the thing.” Warren is looking around, still too set on unveiling his own request. “I followed you,” he says, settling his gaze.
Dracula jerks his chin. He looks at the hat. He realizes he can’t even parse this confession out. Not from all the others that are following him.
“I have been,” says Warren.
“What is that smell?” someone asks.
“Birds, man,” says Warren, as Dracula fans his shirt.
Dracula is confused, watching him clench the neck of the sack. Is Warren blaming the birds for the smell? Because it’s not them.
“…why they would put on a play like that?” someone says.
“I had to,” says Warren. “You won’t ever give me any.”
Dracula tries to focus. He looks at Warren’s face. The hat is back on Warren’s head.
“Isn’t it, like, if you saw it you’re implicated,” someone ventures.
“Really, I’m just a witness,” says Warren, casting a tight look over his shoulder. He seems to notice the interweaving too.
“Is that how you got my hat?”
“I’m out on bail,” Warren says.
Dracula jerks his head. “You’re out on bail?”
“They caught me.” Warren pinches th
e brim of the hat.
Dracula tilts back, then can’t help blasting a breath.
“It’s all still happening right now,” says someone. “It’s all over the news.”
“I know you really think you’re Dracula,” says Warren.
“Jesus,” says Dracula, not expecting that.
Warren looks over his shoulder. “I just need you to back me up,” he says. “You owe me.”
Dracula clamps his mouth in a noncommittal rage. Now he knows Warren is waving the oily banner of blackmail.
Warren tips his hat, dismissing everything left unspoken. “The thing is, I have a record. You can get off easy. Just say you did the birds.”
“Excuse me?” Dracula can’t help it. He butts the air with his chin, like an angry goat.
“That’s the only thing they can get me on,” says Warren.
“I did not do the birds,” he says.
“Yes you did!” Warren scoffs. “I just picked them up.”
Dracula looks at the lava of pink corpses. Somehow Warren also got more birds, besides the ones that got him caught. “I’m not your scapegoat,” says Dracula, pointing.
Warren lifts only a finger and puts his whole hand down on Dracula’s shoulder. “I’m going to tell them anyway.”
“Brutal. You know who did that?” someone says.
They both turn.
They are looking along Dracula’s pointed finger to the pink concoction.
“Amory.” It was Warren who said this.
He takes off his hat.
Everyone rotates. Someone is still pointing at the upturned slushee. Dracula whips a look at Warren.
“You’re talking to us?” The woman stares, one rubber chunk of black hair shaved into a curl on her cheek. Now her voice is lost in the loud trill of a schoolhouse bell. Some jarring sound effect from the living room.
“It was her?” someone says.
“Her who?” says Dracula, before he can help himself. Who is Amory?
“No, she’s not here. She’s already gone,” someone says, a man running his hands down his chest as if to pet his own sweater.
“She’s not even coming,” is the inexplicable retort. It makes Dracula think again inanely of Lucinda.
“Hmm,” says Warren, darting his gaze around.
“Wait—who did that?” says Dracula, not even asking the question he wants to ask. Why should he care who did that?
“This is her room.” They all spin to take in a painting—of a hanged man in oil. A figure dangles in a heavy gas-lamp gravy, thick and smudging all the way up to his wooden post, with its little puny lantern, like a trickle of shower water over his roped ankle. It’s huge. It reminds Dracula of something.
“Well that’s dark.”
“She’s the artist in relief. Each room is a different artist.” Warren’s nodding all over.
“It’s—can I say this is a tragedy?” offers a short, biscuity girl, patting her lips. “I’m normally not that hysterical. It feels like a tragedy.”
“But, how did she do it?” someone asks.
“Do what? What did she do?” They all look at Dracula, who is irate with incomprehension, with somewhat smacked faces. It’s as if he’s just gone way out of emotional range.
“I thought she hanged herself,” the petting man muffles a woolly whisper.
“Not her.”
“No,” says somebody, “she didn’t hang herself.”
“It was an injection. She was sitting in a chair.” They all look sedately aghast.
“I hear the audience was horrified. It must have been bloody.”
“It wasn’t bloody. How could it have been bloody?”
“She went crashing through a mirror.”
Oh God, thinks Dracula. Who was this?
“Which play are you talking about?” someone asks.
“I heard she’s not dead. She’s in the hospital right now.”
“She’s not even in the hospital. She was here tonight.”
“Who?”
“That girl.”
“No,” someone says, “not—”
“Do you mind?” A stub of hand, mostly cigarillo fingers, hooks into Dracula’s shoulder. Warren’s voice is thin and prickly. It’s as if Dracula is his ward, and suddenly they should have all known it and spared him something. They stop talking.
“What?” says Dracula, but Warren, like a wise caretaker after a disaster has faded to gossip, signals something with his eyes. “Peace,” he says.
“Uh.” Dracula feels utterly compromised, driven to some debilitating sanatorium state. He looks at Warren. Dracula is now being clawed from the conversation like meat from a bone—in a quick little feisty tug.
He yields, uncomprehending and unnerved, and unable to think of anything but Lucinda, as Warren leans in and says confidentially, “I think those people are in the play.”
His confusion is all hurtling forward into horror. “The play?” he says, grappling with the obvious. “Right now?”
He can still hear them talking.
“I don’t think the play is over,” says Warren, smiling with such slick innuendo that Dracula feels like he’s taken a nosedive into a well, right off that dry hill of propriety and preservation Warren had just pulled him up to. He feels tricked.
“She’s not just an idea,” the thick one still quarrels. “She’s been here for how long? She’s a whole part of this—what do you think will happen if a big hole just—”
“It’s not going to be a hole—”
Warren tethers out a smile. “On your toes,” he says, coyly.
The air accordions out of Dracula. What is he talking about now?
He looks, vacant with unease, unsure what he’s meant to be imbibing or avoiding, as Warren spreads his arms in a showy way. “There’s a lot happening tonight.”
Dracula doesn’t like it. All he sees are people and what appears to be taxidermy—scattered all over the apartment. In fact, the painted people look just like taxidermy, now that he thinks of it. More of them are milling around. One has a hide of putrefied fur skimming the ground at his feet. One of them is that girl who walked off, biting the rim of her cup as she stands in a doorway. She looks like a roasted lizard. Dracula flaps at his shirt, trying to ventilate his skin.
“What’s that?” says Warren, leaning in with a sour expression. “Some cologne you spilled on yourself?”
Dracula is blasting out the bitter brew of his shirt. Amory’s Ammo. Wait a second—is she the artist? “I don’t understand,” he says. He still has to ask Warren if he can move in. It’s the last thing he wants to do right now, and be embroiled with this. He really just needs to get out of here. He really just needs to find Lucinda and go somewhere else.
“The Grannies,” says Warren, flapping his hands happily in his pockets. His gold tassel shimmies down from his ear.
“What?”
“What those people were doing. They’re doing some recruiting for their theater group. Impromptu performance. It’s like those flashmobs but with plays.”
“Recruiting?” says Dracula, his eyes skipping like pebbles off the other partygoers. People seem to be adorned in the color spectrum of chemical spills—steamy blues and greens, rabid and festering pinks. The pink at the entry was just the beginning. One girl is shrouded in glowing green leaves, like an extraterrestrial hedge. The only thing natural here is the art, and that’s debatable. Over shoulders and under elbows are effigies of grubby gray and brown, snarling and sniffing with hesitating noses.
“Actually”—Warren tilts his head down to him—“I always thought you were one of them.”
Dracula has to trawl back to get to this.
“Oh come to the light, man,” Warren says, snapping at him. He flogs at his arm with his hand.
“Ouch.”
“I mean, who are you, man? What’s your story? You just show up here—”
“I’ve always been here.” And by always he means always.
“Who were your parents? W
ho was your father, your mother?”
“My mother?” Dracula says, still looking for Lucinda. “I remember a beach.” He didn’t mean to say that.
“A beach?” It doesn’t seem to interest Warren.
Dracula senses they’re drifting someplace, uncharted and impenetrable. It’s too late. He already knows he’s missed her.
“Were you happy?”
“Happy?” Somehow she has slipped back out without him seeing. Or she was never here.
“Where’s the snake?” A sudden voice jolts Warren’s head out of its speculating tilt. It seems to be originating from behind Warren’s shoulder. Without looking around at the voice Warren searches.
“Maybe she ate herself,” says the funny guest.
“Ha,” says Warren. “Ha ha.” He looks down at Dracula as the man comes into view.
He dabbles his fingers in his patchy beard and smiles. Warren introduces him as Marty.
Marty? Dracula has heard that name before.
“I was saying,” Warren says, gesturing at Dracula. “The Grannies. I was telling him he might be one of them.”
“You were?” The man seems to be taking this as philosophical conjecture. “Hmm.” He leans forward to stare with his chin cocked out.
“You know they pick people at random, from a lottery,” he says to Marty and Dracula. “But you have to have entered the lottery. You have to have said you want to be part of it.”
Warren waits for Dracula to say something. The man nods crisply. “Yes, yes, it’s an aesthetic movement,” he says. “Very experimental.”
“He thinks he’s Dracula.” Warren points unceremoniously at Dracula.
It’s once again as if a big stake has been driven in. “Ugh.” Dracula’s air is dully deflating.
Marty veers back, awfully surprised and fascinated. “What does that mean? Renfield syndrome? Do you—I mean—I guess I shouldn’t ask? I don’t know.” He peers at Warren, belatedly confounded by the way this was just sprung on him.
“Never mind,” says Dracula, putting up a blunt palm to push the conversation away.
The man sniffs. “Didn’t mean to pry. What’s that smell?” he says.
Warren points. “It’s him.”
Dracula is close to being done with this. He feels like such a loser. Such a terrible, grody loser. It’s not just poison in his shirt. It’s puke on his skin. He hasn’t even showered since forever. He’s an embarrassment to the world and himself. He should be locked away and sanitized, in every meaning of the word.
