Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

  “Look,” he says. “I don’t need this.”

  “Do you really think I’m becoming a vampire?”

  “You are becoming a vampire. Within a few months, you’ll be a killer.” He moves to rise. “Damn,” says Chet the Celestial Being. “I am unused to physical existence and my leg has fallen asleep.”

  I part ways with Chet. He shakes my hand and says he knows I’ll be perfect for the job. He says wait a few weeks and I’ll start to see his point of view.

  “Otherwise, Tch’muchgar and the Forces of Darkness will devour us all.”

  Then he limps away, doing the hokeypokey with his sleepy left leg.

  I run toward my friends through the long, dead grass. I want so badly to be with them and to talk about stupid, normal things like B movies and truck scenes. The grass is all around my waist, exhaling in the wind. I am running, and my friends are now faceless bodies far, far off along the shore.

  Jerk, Tom, and I are walking back toward the dam, silently. Tom will not forgive me. He will not even talk to me. The afternoon is getting chilly. There are more clouds now than sun. Some people who were picnicking on the banks are standing up and shaking the grass out of their blankets.

  None of us says anything. It is better that way. I am picturing a scene in the future when Tom will drop by my garret to visit, when he is bored and married and has an itsy-bitsy little life. He will come by my garret and find me amidst clutter, listening to vibraphone music and papier-mâchéing pictures of apes and cosmetic supplies to my girlfriend’s nude body. I will have told her, “Once I was a vampire and saved the world.”

  We pass between two small brick sheds. One says “Grady ’74.” We do not speak. Tom is walking ahead of us. He chooses which path to follow back to the dam.

  We walk down beside the cataract. The water splatters on boulders and struts.

  Jerk asks me, “In The Hitcher, did you see that scene where the guy finds the finger in his french fries?”

  “No, Jerk,” I answer. “In the version I saw, they cut out just that scene.”

  My hunger grows. At dinner, I ask for my steak rare, and my brother calls me a bloodsucker. I try to change the subject. He keeps calling me a bloodsucker. My father is silent throughout the whole meal, except once, and that is because he likes a lot of butter on his potatoes.

  I dream that night of killing Tom.

  I dream we are in a fight. He says that something is not blue, and I say that it is green. So we fight, and I kill him and drink his warm blood; and as I do, I go from strength to strength. Then I realize that I am going to dream about Rebecca and am horrified. I will not let that happen. I wake up.

  My sheets are twisted like a winding-sheet. It is black in my room, but I can see.

  I do not feel like going to sleep. I am frightened. I am thirsty.

  I pad down to the bathroom. I drink water and more water out of the faucet.

  I turn it on warm. I want to drink the water warm. I gulp and gulp, but am not satisfied. It runs down my face and soaks the flannel collar of my pajamas.

  I straighten up. I look in the mirror, and I see what I saw in the water earlier when I tackled Tom.

  I have no reflection.

  I pace in my room.

  I am thirsty.

  In the next few weeks there is spring rain. It rains all the time, rain like little spit pellets of dirty newsprint, tapping and gumming on windows and roofs. Out in the gray rain, there are sludgy buds hanging on the trees like chrysalises.

  On the few days when the sun comes out, there’s a dog-dung smell clogging the streets of town. For the people who live near cow fields, there’s a cow-dung smell. In fact, our town is a kind of dung-smell smorgasbord.

  People talk about the beauty of the spring, but I can’t see it. The trees are brown and bare, slimy with rain. Some are crawling with new purple hairs. And the buds are bulging like tumorous acne, and I can tell that something wet, and soft, and cold, and misshapen is about to be born.

  And I am turning into a vampire.

  I receive the first vampire letter about four days after my discussion with Chet the Celestial Being.

  It is on a cream card bordered in black. It says:

  On the back, in fountain pen, someone has written, “Christopher! We’d love to see you! We’ll provide transport — just R.S.V.P. and we’ll set up a car pool! Hope you can make it.”

  I have read it through three times when the writing fades and the paper withers to fine onionskin.

  So they have found me. I ball up the letter to throw it away. This I mean to be a big gesture, showing that I will have none of them, but unfortunately the paper is so spiderweb thin and spongy by this time that I don’t get that sense of rattle and crinkle that makes balling something up and throwing it away a really a big event.

  I am anxious because I don’t know what to do. Obviously Chet the Celestial Being wants me to act with these inhumans as if I were happy to become one of them. Otherwise, I won’t be able to slip in with Chet’s magic Arm. But there is no way that I am going to visit vampires alone. There is no way that I am going to pencil in on my social calendar a gruesome kegger of death. So I don’t know what to do, and I wish he’d come back and tell me.

  I wonder how he expects me to just figure things out with nothing to go on. I’ve never fought with the Forces of Darkness before. That was a Cub Scout badge I seem to have missed.

  In the nights, I cannot sleep. I lie in my bed, and I hear the rain drumming and drumming until the roof must be numb.

  I can hear others moving about the hallways, and sometimes I can hear them in sleep. I lie awake on my bed and I can hear them all, almost down to their pulse.

  I can hear my mother snoring. I can hear my father turn uneasily. And after my brother thinks we are all asleep, I can hear him get his secret magazines from where they’re hidden under his video equipment and use them.

  But the worst is when I can hear no one. When there is no tread on the carpet in the hall, and I know I am alone.

  When I was very small, there seemed to be a forbidden time after my parents went to sleep. It was fine when I lay awake and heard my parents talking softly down in the kitchen, or guffawing at sitcoms on the television. But after they went to bed, and the dishwasher stopped running and sighed, and the house was silent, it seemed like I had found a vast abandoned lot of night where no one was allowed, and I was staggering in that place alone, with walls that held me from all who slept.

  Now I feel that again because I can’t sleep, and the same thoughts run again and again in my head.

  I lie on my pillow one way, and when my cheek gets used to it, I turn the other way. I cannot sleep, and I think about that.

  It is then that my thirst starts, in the dead hours.

  I think: I am so thirsty. I wish I could go to sleep. If I don’t go to sleep, I will be sleepy tomorrow. I would sleep if I weren’t so thirsty. And these thoughts go on and on wheeling in circles and I get more and more desperate for something to break the silence.

  Sometimes I get up and stare out the window. I stare out across the little lawn to the fence and then each moon-defined object there in the next yard: the plastic wading pool; the sun-bleached Big Wheel; the tangled apple tree.

  And then I lift my eyes above the houses, above the comfortable roofs, and see the woods on the hills. And I sense then, in the way the moon drapes itself easily, obscenely over them all, that there is something wicked all around us, something staining the aluminum siding and the four-door sedans. There is something hiding behind it all, Tch’muchgar scheming, locked in darkness, and I pray to Chet the Celestial Being in my mind, if he can hear me, that he comes quickly so I no longer feel this danger in myself and out there on the hills.

  And I lie in bed, turning this way and that. I think about how I got the curse. And when Chet will come. And what I should do.

  Sometimes I can’t stand the thirst and go to the bathroom and have a glass of water. But the water is too thin. I s
coop it into my mouth, suck hard as I can, but I can’t take in enough. I snap my teeth in midair. I clasp them and grind them and close my eyes. I want to hit something and feel flesh.

  But I am standing still, my knees twitching in my pajamas. The thirst is upon me, so I am not in the mirror.

  I sit on the bathroom floor, curled up in a ball. My arms are around my head as if someone were kicking me.

  I can’t wait to have burned out of me this stupid thirst, this hunger that lies coiled and miserable in my throat and stomach like a tapeworm.

  After a wakeful night, I am thankful for my reflection in silverware. It’s like silverware is what I’ve been waiting for all my life.

  I walk downstairs and take real pride in the flash of my arm I see in the window in the front hall. I stop by the dining room table to check my face in the gloss of the table wax.

  And I’m thankful for the little normal morning things my family says to one another. Like the way my father says, “I’m going to play golf with Dan this afternoon.”

  And the way my mother says, “Oh.”

  And the way my brother always pours a bowl of cereal for me really, really early so it gets soggy, then says in a voice like he’s the patron saint of Fruity Pebbles, “Chris, look, I already poured a bowl of cereal for you.”

  Then I say, “This is all mush.”

  And my mother says, “Chris, your brother was doing you a favor making you breakfast. You are not going to throw away a perfectly good bowl of cereal just because you happen to be feeling finicky. Thank Paul. Sit down. Chew. Swallow.”

  I might argue, but I am so happy to see them all, and to see everything so normal, that I slurp up the mush and let it roll and slobber down my throat. “Mmmm! Mmm, mmm, mmm! Mmmm-hmmmm!” I exclaim, enjoying that wholesome American goodness.

  I’m halfway through my bowl when I look down at my spoon. My reflection is still there. I’m obsessed with my reflection nowadays. I pick up the spoon and lick off all the milk.

  My reflection stands out clearly, inverted. I turn from one side to the other. My nose swells and dances like the chorus line in a big Broadway Nose Revue. I move my head from one side to the other, and my nose kicks left, then right. One side, then the other. The nostrils are open so wide they must be belting out the finale from the end of act 3.

  For a moment, I’m proud of my reflection. Then I look closer, and I’m not so happy. My hair is lanky and hangs down, from what I can see in the spoon. My eyes look sunken and dark and my features look haggard and ugly.

  I hope nobody asks me why I look so tired.

  My father and Paul get up from the table and leave.

  I wonder whether anyone will notice how bad I look. People might start to guess why I haven’t been sleeping well. They might start to notice before Chet comes back from his mysterious Arm errand and cures me of my curse.

  “Chris,” says my mother. “Earth to Chris.”

  I will have to wait to really talk to Rebecca Schwartz until Chet has healed me. I can’t talk to her right now when it would be like a greasy lizard monster shambling up to her. I’ll wait until after I’m back to normal, and sleeping. Then I’ll buy some new clothes, too.

  My mother is leaning against the table, looking at me with interest. “What do you think about when you start daydreaming like that?” she asks me. “You daydream all the time.”

  “Sorry,” I say and put down the spoon.

  “I really worry about you, Chris. Sometimes you are a complete space case. Someday you’re going to have to stop daydreaming and do something,” she says.

  “Hey,” I grumble. “I was just looking at the spoon.”

  “What?”

  “I was just looking at a spoon. Okay? Looking at the flatware. That was all. Any other questions about me looking at the flatware?”

  She shrugs and tosses out her coffee in the sink. She has a scowl on her face. “You’re beyond me. You really are beyond me. I hope your father manages to understand you someday, because you really make no sense to me.”

  I don’t mind that she says this. At least everything is normal, and there it is, my ugly reflection in my spoon.

  I catch myself in the mirror when I go to the bathroom after breakfast. There is my uneven hair and my pasty face, and I don’t even know if it’s as ugly as sin or as beautiful as a reward for deeds well done.

  After three sleepless nights in a row, it really starts to show. I lie there at night worrying because I’ll be so bashed-up looking and stupid at school the next day. And in fact I am bashed-up looking and stupid at school. I’m sleepy and I can hardly eat. I sit there at lunchtime, hunched over my black cracked Fenway Frank, wishing it were liquid. It’s pasted to the inside of my mouth. I keep gagging on the pieces of ash. Tom is across from me, watching me. He sees that I’m not eating much anymore, that I have not eaten much for days. I think he wonders why.

  I fail a test. I sit in class not taking notes while my teachers lecture and write things with chalk. After a few minutes of staring into space, I focus on the blackboard and realize that all this geometry and these words have just appeared in the last few minutes without any meaning to me, as if they were a natural phenomenon like frost scrawls on a window.

  Tom hardly talks to me when we’re at school now. I know the only way I can win him back is to be wide awake. I have to be extra funny to keep his interest. He is starting to hang out with other kids at school, like Chuck O’Hara and Andy Green. He hangs out with Jerk and me after school still, because he doesn’t know the others well enough yet. Yet.

  I want to tell him about Chet the Celestial Being, about my vampirism, and about the Vampire Lord in the lake. But I can’t, not yet.

  He still hasn’t forgiven me for getting his lower left leg in the mud at the reservoir. Every time I speak to him, especially at school, I can tell that that lower left leg is hovering there between us, always making him angry, accusing me like a vengeful dismembered piece of Edgar Allan Poe ghost, dripping duckweed.

  I don’t want anyone to notice anything different about me — the sleepiness or how I’m starting to get cranky and a little afraid of mirrors. I have to just keep smiling, that’s the thing. Keep smiling for another few weeks, until the curse is lifted. Keep smiling, I think, while my teeth are still square.

  One day my father keeps looking at me nervously, as if he’s about to say, “Son, you know you have three eyes and a horn on your head?” But he doesn’t say anything.

  Then I hear my mother talking to him. “It’s getting embarrassing,” says my mother. “Just go up and tell him. What is so . . . ?”

  “It’s a turning point, Jennifer,” says my father.

  “A turning point?” says my mother.

  “It was just yesterday he was in diapers. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “For his sake, Norm,” says Mom.

  My father comes trudging up the stairs. I can hear his footsteps on the powder blue carpet. He picks up the stack of science magazines and National Geographics that are sitting three steps up. He brings them up and sees me.

  “Hey, Chris,” he says.

  “Aloha, Father,” I say.

  He is looking at me with the three eyes/horn look again.

  “Chris.” In his hands he flexes the magazines first one way, then the other. “Your mother and I were just thinking.”

  “I hope it didn’t disturb your daily routine much,” I joke.

  He laughs a very little. “It’s about time you shaved,” he says. He coaxes the magazines into the shape of a tube — first, one that is a science magazine tube, then backward, so it’s a National Geographic tube. “You’re getting a little, you know. A little.” He points at his upper lip. “You’re a late bloomer, I know,” he says.

  I reach up and feel, and it is a little bit mossy on my upper lip.

  “I can show you how,” he says. “In the bathroom.”

  “I was just going to go watch television,” I say.

  “Your mother really
would prefer if you got this over with.”

  “Please!” my mother contributes from the bottom of the stairs.

  My father walks to the bathroom door (down the hall, first door on the right) and opens it. He turns on the light. I follow him in. He closes the door.

  We are crowded together in the bathroom, my father and I, surrounded by mirrors and the mylar wallpaper’s loud-beaked cockatoos. There is silver bamboo all around us on the walls. It’s a jungle in there.

  “You’ll find there’s nothing much to this,” he says. “Soon you’ll be doing it every day.” Brief nostalgic pause. “My son.”

  “Paul already shaves,” I say. “It’s like no big deal.”

  My father says in a very professional way, “I think it’s probably better that you learn to use a safety razor. The electric razor doesn’t give you as smooth a shave.”

  “No? Well, I want a smooth shave,” I say.

  He shows me how to put on the shaving cream and wets the razor with hot water for me.

  My mother says from the other side of the door, as if she’s concerned, “How’s it going in there, Chris?”

  “Just fine, Mom,” I say. “I’ve just learned about the foam. All systems go.”

  “Now take the razor,” my dad says, “and put it just under your nose. Very carefully.”

  His fingers grab just below my wrist and guide my hand down. “Okay, you can let go now,” I say, slightly annoyed. He pulls away, and the razor slips just a fraction. I say, “Ow.”

  He’s saying, “There, now you’ve cut yourself.” But what I’m noticing is the obvious thing. I can smell the steely tang of my blood.

  I dive to the floor. I cry, “Blood!” I can feel my thirst rising. In a few seconds, I won’t be visible in the mirror.

  “What’s wrong?” Dad asks.

  “I dropped the razor,” I say. “Can I do this alone? I think I need to learn to do this alone.”

  “Why? This is just the first time. You’re bound to cut yourself once the first time.”

  I rise up halfway and start pushing him to the door, but I’m hunched over, below the level of the counter. “Get out,” I whine. “Could you get out, Dad? I want to do this alone.”