Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

  “Hey, okay, okay,” he says, backing out. “What’s the problem?”

  “I’d rather do this myself,” I say. “That’s enough bonding for now.”

  He steps out and I slam the door behind him and press the lock in with my thumb.

  When I am alone, I recite five times, “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

  I step over to the mirror, where of course my reflection no longer appears.

  “What’s the matter with him?” my mother asks.

  “I don’t know,” my father answers, sounding weary. “It was only a little cut.”

  I consider what to do. My face is slithering with shaving cream. But not in the mirror. The foam is dropping on my shirt. I hold up my hand right next to the mirror and press it against the cool glass. It leaves a baby’s breath trace of mist. Otherwise, nothing.

  I’ll have to fly this thing blind. It’s like one of those airplane disaster movies.

  “Just remember,” my father is saying through the door, “up and down, but never sideways.”

  “Are you okay, Chris?” my mother pleads.

  “What’s his problem?” I hear Paul ask.

  My hand is shaking; I raise my razor to my face again. I am surrounded by the accusatory stares of the wall cockatoos.

  Carefully, I drag the razor down my lip again.

  I touch it with my finger.

  More red. I start licking. The shaving cream is not as sweet as it smells. The blood is good and salty. There isn’t much from just two wounds.

  So I take another couple of exploratory scrapes with the razor. Without the mirror this is just a joke. I am cutting the hell out of my face.

  And I’m loving it. I’m licking and licking like I am one big happy Fudgsicle; and pretty soon, I’m laughing, and the jazzy cockatoos and cockatrices are laughing with me.

  Mom and Dad and Paul are still calling in to me, “Chris, are you okay?” “Chris, is it going all right?” “Hey, Chris, you done? I gotta whizz.” But I can barely contain myself. I’ve dropped the razor in the sink, and I’m standing there, as light as invisibility, and licking, and laughing, and licking.

  I laugh and laugh.

  “This is . . . I mean! Oh! Can you . . . ?” I hoot, and no one understands.

  I need to wait for the bleeding to die down before I can unlock the door. I have to wait for the blood to clot.

  “What’s taking you so long, Chris?” asks my mother.

  Paul snorts, “Like it’s shaving he’s doing for the first time in there.”

  “Paul!” says my mother. “You apologize to Chris! When he comes out.”

  When the blood clots, which is quickly, and I reappear, I have a couple of small triangular cuts that don’t amount to much. I have three thin red lines on my upper lip, like a mustache drawn with a ruler in red pen.

  That is the story of my first shave.

  The day after my first shave Rebecca Schwartz and I talk. I am feeling very sleepy because I didn’t sleep much the night before.

  She says, “Oh, Chris, what happened to your face?”

  I instinctively flip my tongue up to feel the three crusted lines.

  I shrug and look at the metal leg of a desk. “I, you know. I had this shaving accident,” I say.

  She winces. “Looks like it hurt,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. We stare at each other.

  She suggests, “Next time leave the rototiller outside.”

  Then someone calls for her, and she excuses herself and walks away.

  She floats above the tiles, wearing a Laura Ashley dress. At least, I think it’s a Laura Ashley dress. I mean, I haven’t gone up behind her and flipped the tag or anything.

  A few seconds later, I think what I should have said was “Lion taming.”

  Damn.

  Then, in gym I am doing pushups, and suddenly I realize I could have said, “It was a duel. Sabers. You know, defending your honor.”

  Then she’d say slyly, “Oh, yes, Tom told me you get very fierce when my honor’s at stake.”

  And I’d say, “Of course. It was at dawn out back of the A&P.”

  And she’d laugh, and I’d see something in her eyes.

  That is not what happened.

  Instead I was sleepy and said shaving wound.

  The shaving wound was not as good a story.

  For instance, there’s no part about romance and a shaving wound in all of The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo.

  There are more vampiric murders in the news that week. The most brutal is in Northborough. Two victims are found together. They are a boy and a girl, caught fooling around in the woods. It is established that the vampire drank the boy first, in front of the girl. She evidently tried to run away, but her pants were around her ankles, so she could only waddle about fifteen feet before the vampire walked up behind her.

  They are found in the morning. The vampire is not found at all.

  The way they eat disgusts me.

  We are in our family dining room, which is part of the kitchen and separated by a counter. My parents had track lighting installed in the kitchen, so we can turn off the light near the refrigerator and stove and have only lights from above shine on the table. In spite of the fact that we have nothing to say to one another, my parents insist that we should eat together because we are a family. We each think things alone, and occasionally say things that might be of interest to one another.

  e.g., “These peas are a bit overcooked.”

  And, “Stop complaining. Your father and I worked hard to put this dinner on the table.”

  And, “I wasn’t complaining. I was just developing my critical faculties.”

  And, “Do you want to develop your critical faculties with a TV tray in the garage?”

  But the main thing is the chewing. That I see now.

  I cannot believe how loud human ingestion is. I sit there, unable to eat, astonished. I am staring at my plate with eyes as big as plates. I can’t believe my ears, hearing the factoryful of noises, the squelching and popping, crunching and scratching. The rattle of forks against ceramic. The slurp of liquids. The clanging of glasses against teeth.

  It’s like cannon fire. It’s like hydraulic tubes and stormy surf against bleak rocky islands.

  They sit there, unaware of how grotesque their feeding is. They’re hunched below the clean strip lights like praying mantises — and I sit horrified as they cut burned legs and chests apart, and feed them into their greedy mandibles, and smile like nothing’s wrong.

  “Eat, Chris,” says my mother. “You don’t think I cook for my own good, do you?”

  My father looks at me over his glasses. He chews three times with a sound like the Swamp Thing learning how to use crutches. What he says is “Come on, Chris. You need to put a little flesh onto those bones.”

  At 11:53 p.m., about two weeks after I speak to Chet the Celestial Being, an evil mouth appears on TV. At that time all television reception in Clayton and Bradley and all the surrounding towns suddenly fails. There is nothing but static for a second. I am upstairs lying in bed already, but I hear my father swear downstairs.

  The next day, it’s on the local news. They play tapes of what came on.

  The static, a gray sludge spanking again and again across the screen, spits and jabs out a messy outline — a huge maw — crooked teeth like mountains gagging and croaking — and a voice, growling and gutteral, howls through the raging storm of static:

  . . . out . . .

  . . . trapped and . . .

  . . . you maggots little maggots . . .

  Release — ! . . . this torment! Torment! Our hatred —

  Soon! . . . Now! Trapped!

  Your blood, damn you, all you . . .

  . . . out of this place . . .

  Then there is a wailing that is so ferocious and yet so melancholy that it blasts the regularly scheduled programs back on TV.

  Nobody knows where the transmission came from. The rest of the night on televisi
on is as placid as a cold mountain pool that nobody has found or stirred.

  There is not a hint of what dark god must struggle somewhere, writhing back and forth to escape.

  The second vampire letter I get is from a girl, the morning after there was a mouth on TV. Paul can tell the letter is from a girl because of the handwriting and he steals it and runs around the room with it singing, “Chris has got a girl! Chris has got a girl!”

  “Give it back,” I demand. “Give me back my letter!”

  He makes a wimp face and mewls, “Give me back my wedder! Give me back my wedder!”

  “Give it!”

  “Give it, pwease, big bwudder! Give it back to me, pwease, my widdle wedder!”

  “Don’t ever change, Paul. I hope you always keep this boyish charm.”

  “Paul,” says my mother sharply. “Give him the letter. It’s his. Okay?”

  So he gives it back.

  I read it alone in my room. It is written on ruled notebook paper in purple felt tip pen. Some words, the special ones, are in all different colors. It is from a girl named Lolli Chasuble.

  It says:

  Dear Christopher,

  How R U? You don’t know me, but I know you! My father asked me to write a letter. So here it is! One of my friends saw you in Bradley a few weeks ago, and we were hoping you’d come and get to know some of us. We’re really very nice, and you have nothing to lose. What are we going to do? — bite your head off? (joke! )

  No, seriously! I know you must be scared. I was too!!! The first time my dad told me I had to drink blood, I was totally grossed out. But now I’m like, “Shit, this is great!” and, “Is there a diet variety?”

  People say lots of dumb shit about vampires that isn’t really true. My dad says you’re a pretty brainy guy, so I guess I don’t need to tell you that we don’t have to wear stupid black capes like in flicks or live in big smell-o-rific castles. I just dress in cool normal clothes, meaning bike shorts, a T-shirt, etc., etc.

  Being one of us is cool because you’re always on the move, like I’ve lived most of my life in Los Angeles, which I L-O-V-E-D [that word is in different color felt tips], but I’ve also lived all over the West Coast, since my father had to run away from L.A. It’s pretty tough sometimes not having a real address — I have to get my monthly issue of Sassy at the newsstand! But there are some of us in every city. We have G-R-E-A-T parties and do all sorts of cool secret stuff!

  We also have more fun than mortals, who are just waiting around to die. For one thing, the night is ours, and for another thing, if you’ve heard of French kissing, we have something called Transylvanian kissing, which is when we bite each other’s tongue and exchange blood. Omigod, it is totally sexy! With mortals, sometimes it’s fun to make out with them before you kill them — go, girl!

  Anyway, I hope you’ll come to meet us soon. I’d really like to meet you! The thing is, if you don’t come to us soon and learn the ropes from my dad and his friends, you’ll probably freak way out in a couple of months or so and get hunted down and killed.

  God, not to part on a morbid note! So, I’m looking forward to seeing you! OK?

  Luv ya,

  Lolli Chasuble

  P.S. I don’t have a boyfriend right now. There was this guy I had a total crush on at school — he was a complete H-U-N-K-O-R-A-M-A — did I want to get inside his shorts! And he would have been mine, too, except that after the car crash his parents had him C-R-E-M-A-T-E-D

  Oh, well! Say la vie!

  P.P.S. My father says you were in CCD or Sunday school or something for a while. Yawnsburg Central, U.S.A.! Make sure you don’t bring any crosses or anything to the meeting, because we worship an eternal being called Tch’muchgar who shall soon lead us to victory.

  P.P.P.S. My address is P.O. Box 163 in Bradley, MA, 08545. Write!

  That is my letter from Lolli Chasuble.

  I fold it up and plan to keep it. Then I realize Paul might search my room for it, so instead I tear it up into a thousand pieces and throw them away. I chew on some of them first so he won’t try to put it back together.

  I don’t know what Chet would want me to do. I have heard nothing from him. He is due in another week.

  The next day I see a scene that convinces me that it makes real sense for me to have a crush on Rebecca Schwartz. I go into the library to sit hidden in the back aisles, furtively flipping through a book entitled The Undead: Famous Real-Life Vampires. As it happens, Rebecca is sitting at a table nearby. She is drawing idle dandelions on a notepad, reading books entitled things like The Cabala: Ancient Route to Power and The Lost Spells and Incantations of Hermes Trismagistus.

  Through the wide sixties windows a gray light falls. The panes are smeared with the dull newsprint rain, and down on the street I can see cars stopping monotonously at the stoplight and waiting to go. Inside, the gray light shows up small dirty details of people’s faces, like the grease in the creases of chins, and the mangy stubble on upper lips, and the limp hair, hanging like dead weeds on their heads. The stains and wrinkles on their clothes.

  All but Rebecca Schwartz. The light sets her face in the matte perfection of porcelain, and she seems, even more, to be poised in the midst of monsters.

  “Hi,” I say.

  She says, “Hi,” and slips her eyes back down to the book.

  “Too bad about the rain,” I say.

  She looks up for a moment. “It’s good for the flowers,” she says.

  I nod. She looks down. So I turn my back to her and crouch against the bookshelf and start flipping through the vampire book for parts I haven’t read yet.

  We both read for a while. I am reading a detailed account of the life of Vlad the Impaler and she is reading The White Arts: An Introduction when Kristen Mosley walks over to Rebecca’s table. Rebecca notices her coming. I’m interested to see Rebecca smoothly shuffle some school papers over her books, those strange books of power.

  “Hi,” says Kristen to Rebecca. “I’ve been thinking: Does history make, like, any sense at all?” This is quite an impressive question and one that might take a long time to answer, but Kristen continues, “God, this rain is, like, driving me crazy. It is making everything so wet. It’s hopeless. Can you do this history thing at all? I think it makes no sense. What are you reading?”

  Rebecca looks startled. She shifts her papers to the side. “These?” she says. “These were here when I sat down.”

  “Were you reading them?”

  Rebecca squirms. “They’re sort of interesting. They’re about ancient magic.”

  Kristen listens. She fixes Rebecca with a look that says, Okay. Now even my jaw is bored with you. Then she says, “Yeah. Whatever. Are you gonna come over and do the history with us, or what? The guys are like, ‘Where’s Rebecca? We need someone with, like, an actual brain at our table.’” The two of them laugh.

  “Okay,” says Rebecca brightly, leaving her stack of books. “I’m there!”

  She looks at me as she turns away — over Kristen’s shoulder — and suddenly I know that there is a price to her popularity. There is a silent pact between her and Kristen, one which I have witnessed and am expected not to mention. Kristen will not tell anyone that Rebecca reads strange, boring books, as long as Rebecca agrees not to talk about them and embarrass them both. She has her secret interests, too; and she doesn’t care that I know. She thinks I will keep her secret.

  This makes me feel a little better.

  I put the book about famous vampires back on the shelf and head out into the afternoon rain to kick pebbles on the street. I’m feeling so happy that kicking pebbles in the rain could be a wacky, hip solo on the jazz saxophone.

  It’s that kind of game.

  Sometimes late at night I think about Rebecca when I can’t get to sleep.

  I can’t ever really get to sleep.

  I think about if we were the last two people on earth, because I’ve made her into a vampire, which is very romantic, and we’ve withstood the radioactivit
y and all the madness of nuclear war. Outside, the ancient crumbling city is razed beneath the blood-red sunset moon.

  We lie together in a room at the top of a tall, tall stone tower, far in the air. We lie side by side, draped in silk that slithers between her legs, and we feel the pressure of each other’s bodies while outside, huge mutant bats beat against the walls.

  One night I am watching the news with my mother. She has an afghan over her lap.

  On the news, a woman is being tried for manslaughter. She thought that the faeries had snatched away her twin babies and put elfin changelings in their place. You are supposed to throw changelings in the fire after you say prayers and chants. She did that. She threw the twins in the fire. She was right about one: it was a changeling and scurried up the chimney, stretching like a mantis, wheezing and whining. The other was not a changeling. It burned.

  My mother, watching, holds her hand to her mouth so the fingers are limp and touch the top lip. She says, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’d throw her baby on the fire.”

  “There were two,” I point out. “Two babies.”

  “One of them wasn’t even hers,” my mother says. “It wasn’t even human.”

  It wasn’t even human. I get up and go into the den. I sit there, looking out the window for a minute. What would she do, my mother, if she found out a son of hers was not human? Then I go and get out the photo album. I look at photos of me when I was small. There I am, walking by the reservoir. I have made a Tinkertoy ray gun and have shot my mother as part of my plan to invade the earth. She is laughing and falling backward, clutching her heart. She is laughing so hard, and I’m laughing, too, holding my ray gun, invading her world.

  I am walking to school through one of the abandoned mills. It’s a shortcut from home. The parking lot is chipped and breaking out in stubbly dead grass.

  The factory buildings loom over me like a canyon. Rows of empty, dark windows in abandoned sweatshop galleries hang above me in the sky. There are sagging slate roofs and broken glass and wide doors covered in plywood and nailed shut. On the brick wall someone has sprayed green words reading “Sheila loves Mike for a while.” I walk between the buildings slowly, listening to the sound of my sneakers on the gravel.