by Unknown
“Heritage Park is that way,” I said, walking up in front of the bench, then pointing south past the downtown skyscrapers.
“Do I look lost?” she asked.
“Only misplaced,” I said. “You just seem like such good farming stock. It would be a shame to waste the look.”
“Well, I never was one for being on display.”
“Neither were they. Have you seen how the old pioneers looked in pictures?”
She smiled at that. “And where do you belong?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out. In the meantime, I walk around here. I’m a sort of self-appointed, unofficial guardian, I suppose.”
“Of what?”
“Not of. From. Not that it’s that dangerous, of course. It can take years before a threat gets serious, but it can creep up on you.”
She nodded and motioned for me to sit down next to her.
“It’s so quiet,” she said, “like perhaps everyone in the city has vanished and I don’t know it yet. The cars could be driving themselves, the traffic lights changing color automatically, but when I get back everyone could be gone.”
It was a strange sort of rapture to hope for, wanting to be the one left behind. “Just don’t make a habit of coming here, especially at night,” I said. “I don’t want to see you become one of those people.”
“Those people?”
“People who gaze into the lights as if there were one person they needed to find, and they could reach into the city and pull out that person by staring long enough. People who lie down in the grass, thinking they can draw strength from the earth. People who talk to the wind, because they have something they need to confess and can’t go to church.”
“We’re natural rivals.”
“You and the church?”
She nodded.
“The park isn’t any better,” I told her. “People may say they love it, that it’s beautiful and worth preserving, but coming to a park won’t make them treat anyone like they’re worth preserving. This place can anesthetize you, suck the life out of you, just as surely as the government, the corporations, the financial system, even sheer force of habit, or our national insect.”
“Our national insect?”
“The mosquito.”
“I’ve known a few people like that too,” she said.
“The individuals aren’t so bad,” I told her. “People who go around sucking the life out of other people, they don’t last. They gorge themselves to death or get swatted. It’s the institutions they serve that advance, that evolve, while the people suffer and die. I heard a radio phone-in not long ago where they seriously discussed putting reflective dust into the atmosphere to blot out the sun. Who would pay people to come up with a scheme like that, and seriously discuss it on public radio? Who could devote their time to creating a country of people so mind-controlled that they’re scared to see the sun come up?”
“It’s a deeply rooted fear,” she said, “the fear of living. Institutions have exploited it for centuries.”
“But how? An institution can have hypnotic appeal and many servants, can wield both natural and bureaucratic powers and appear in corporeal or incorporeal form, but it’s also vulnerable. It loses much of its power if you refuse to let it into your home, it can be burned by the light of truth and, in the case of this park, it can’t cross water. So how does an institution keep people in thrall without being demonized or exposed as a monster? By masquerading as its own enemy, the monstrous individual.”
“And you’re one of them? One of these mythical monsters?”
“Do I look like one? You tell me. If I were a mythical creature, which one would I be?”
She turned and looked me up and down, taking in my face, my shoes, my clothes, as if for the first time. “Narcissus,” she said. “Good looking, graceful, impeccably dressed, alone. I could see you hypnotized by your own reflection.”
I laughed out loud at that one.
“Am I far off?” she asked.
“Well, it’s hardly very Canadian, is it? To have a reflection is to have an identity, and that’s the number one thing Canadians are supposed to lack.”
“And yet we have a third of the world’s fresh water surfaces,” she said, a teasing lilt to her voice. “Strange how we never look down and see ourselves reflected in them.”
“Some do, in the end. Some of the favorite Canadian places to commit suicide involve a plunge into water: Niagara Falls, the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Seductive, romantic places, where one might go with a lover to enjoy the view, or go without one to fall fatally for oneself at the last moment.”
“Calgary’s hardly the setting for fatal seduction, is it? No dramatically high bridges, no big lakes, no water more menacing than the drowning pool below the irrigation weir.”
“And they got rid of that,” I reminded her.
“So here you are, in Nose Hill Park, all flowers and no water, surrounded by what you could become and safe from becoming it. Narcissus turned into a flower in the end. You could still be shaped by what you fear.”
“Do you think our fears define us?” I asked.
“They can if we let them.”
“And what are you afraid of?”
She shrugged. “Living. Dying. Killing. Myself. The usual.”
The lady doth protest too much, I thought. “It’s not usual to be that aware.”
“I’ve never been the sort of person that people notice. I’ve made a career of observing other people, trying to understand them, living vicariously through them.”
“Or dying.”
She paused and scrutinized my face again. “Is that what you’ve done?”
“No, I’m a cautionary tale. I came here too many times on my own at night. I try to steer people off the path I took myself. If they continue coming here, becoming more lonely and desperate, at least I provide them with company. When the time comes for them to end their lives, some allow me to be with them. Then, if they slit their wrists, I drink their blood. They die knowing they at least gave a little life to someone.”
“Being a vampire is socially acceptable now, isn’t it?” she said. “Is it comforting for you, drinking despair, knowing that there was nothing you could have done to save them?”
“Now that’s the question of someone who dies vicariously,” I said. “Even as an animated corpse, I can see that what I do is unhealthy. My existence will end more slowly than that of those I fail to save, more quickly than those I frighten into saving themselves. But in the end, there’s no treatment for suicide, only palliative care. Perhaps I’m a monster for believing that, but at least we’ve established what sort of monster I am. I’m the scapegoat servant of a vampiric institution. I divert attention away from the greater monster, a park that provides seductive comfort to those who feed it with a belief in its sacredness and the money to maintain it. Meanwhile, the park quietly waits for them to give up their lives. The question is, what sort of monster are you?”
“I don’t know.” She stood and paced back and forth in front of me, alternately blacking out and revealing the brightness of the cityscape. “Maybe I’m an advanced version of you, but here’s what I’m not: There’s a story about a policeman who drove with his partner toward a high, windswept bridge where he saw a young man preparing to jump. His partner stopped the car. The policeman leapt out and grabbed the young man just as he jumped. He started falling over with the young man, and would have plunged to his death if it hadn’t been for his partner, who arrived in time to pull the two of them back. People asked him, themselves and each other the same question over and over: How could the policeman have hung on for that moment when it seemed certain that he would die? How could he sacrifice his life, his hopes, his dreams, his career, and his ties to his family, and everything else he had ever held dear for the sake of a total stranger? The policeman said, ‘If I had let that young man go, I could not have lived another day.’ In that moment, he saw himself and the young man as one and the same person. That
’s what a good, moral person, a hero, is supposed to be.
“Now, what if it became possible for me to say to myself, ‘I’m not going to die. Not now. Not ever.’ Where’s my oneness, my connection to everybody else then? I lose the one thing everybody alive has in common. If I can choose to live forever, everyone else who can’t do the same becomes suicidal to my eyes. So maybe I’m the kind that sees bridges and people jumping off them no matter where she goes, the kind that doesn’t have to stalk her victims, the kind that could truly save people if she were willing to choose who lives and who dies. Maybe I’m the kind that refuses to make those choices, kills everyone without even lifting a finger, and refuses to die with them. But I must be some sort of monster, mustn’t I? What else could I be?”
For years I’d held back, warned people away, provided final company to those beyond hope, never once fed on them until they took their lives, but I’d never witnessed someone on the brink of such an outpouring. She was babbling, bubbling, filled to bursting with life and words and ideas and blood. I could feel the pressure within her. I’d known only dwindling puddles of humanity, and she was, by comparison, a nascent geyser. Her need to nourish, to be drained and redistributed, was more urgent than any I’d known. It was intoxicating, terrifying, and irresistible.
I sprang from the bench, seized her by the arms, and sank my fangs into her neck.
She struggled at first, but then she reversed, and seemed to strengthen rather than weaken. She didn’t moan so much as coo, and then sing, and then squeal. In the noises she made, there was no pain, no surrender, no craving for dissolution. My hollow insides filled like a cactus in a monsoon. The more joyful she became, the more absurdly I craved her; the more I craved, the deeper I drank, and the deeper I drank, the more I sank. All that saved me was that I’d been vertical and my legs stopped holding me up. Before I slumped back onto the bench, I felt a great surge of sympathy for mosquitoes that get pinched and then can’t stop feeding.
“Wow,” she said. “I want to sign up with a blood bank. I never knew donating blood could be so fulfilling.”
“Well, I certainly feel full and filled.” I felt like the blood expanding inside me. I expected something more vital than usual, since I hadn’t ever fed on a living person, but I was still shocked at how rich this food was. I could hardly move.
She, on the other hand, could hardly not move. “So how does this blood-drinking work?” she asked animatedly. “Is it like a sexual thing? Do you have a refractory period?”
“I couldn’t suck another corpuscle,” I groaned. “What are you, the mainline from the Athabasca Blood Sands? You should have been a shriveled husk by now.”
“Sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “I didn’t know I had to be gentle with you. This was my first time.”
“I know it might sound like a standard male lie, but nothing like this has ever happened to me either.”
“Maybe my technique was off. Or yours was. I’ve never really seen how sucking on someone’s neck could be sexy — well, I’ve seen it now, in my case, because it stimulated me to produce blood faster than you could drink it, and the production is exciting — but that’s anti-vampiric, isn’t it? Normally, orgasm requires a pooling and release of blood in the pelvis. That’s tough to do by taking blood from the neck. The destination hardly seems right either. Pumping blood into someone could do wonders in the right spot, but blood wouldn’t get there from the stomach. Do you even have a stomach?”
Her last babblings resulted in me feeling bloated. “Could you talk about something else for a while?” I pleaded. “Preferably something off my menu?”
“Well, I’ve wondered for a while whether I might have certain — abilities. I think my body can remake itself, re-grow any cells it needs to, very quickly.” She reached down and broke off a stem of native grass. “I think I can grow things outside my body too.” She closed her hands over the stem. When she opened them again, the grass was headed out, full of seeds.
“You’re the holy blood and the holy grail,” I marveled. “How many?”
“How many what?”
“How many seeds did you make? Give them to me. I have to count them.” I took the grass from her, took off my jacket, spread it on my lap, and picked the seeds one at a time, taking care not to risk spilling them on the ground.
“That’s all you can do at a time like this?” Her voice sounded far away. “I show you healthy eternal youth, and you retreat into your vampiric shell.”
Mercifully, she stopped talking until I was finished inventorying the seeds and could put them safely in a plastic sample bag.
“So are you really the manifestation of a soul-sucking bureaucracy,” she asked, “or do you just have a garden variety case of obsessive compulsive disorder?”
“Don’t play Buffy the Vampire Therapist with me,” I told her. “There are serious issues at stake here. You could have introduced an invasive species with that trick.”
“And you could be one.”
I sprang from the bench, or tried to. The blood spread into my bones and tissue, but I felt like the heaviness from my stomach went with it. I twisted back and forth on the bench, wondering if she’d multiplied me as easily as the seeds, scanning the fields for twins of myself before finally coming to my senses.
“That’s ridiculous,” I told her. “I have the least impact of anyone who’s ever come here. I’m cold and dead and pure.”
“I suppose that’s why I ended up talking to you,” she mused. “You’re the only one I feel safe with. Would this spread if I had sex with a live person, or just told a live person what I’ve told you? What if I can do more than make blood and seeds? What if I can give other people the ability to make blood and seeds?”
My bones groaned at the thought. “Now that’s just cruel.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “I could divert you all night by making seeds, but you can’t get any sort of nourishment from them, can you?”
“I think seeds are supposed to confound vampires because they’re symbolic of the early Christian church. Jesus was talking about spreading the smallest seeds of spiritual nourishment that would be the hardest to stamp out and grow into the biggest church. I think I want to count them just to keep track of the competition, the way one political party conducts polls to find out how much support the other one has, but all our political parties are fundamentally vampiric.”
“Stefan’s Law doesn’t apply to liquids,” she said.
I had no idea what Stefan’s Law had to do with the point I was trying to make. But I did know that if she didn’t have the sense to stay away from me, I could still wring her neck, right then and there. And might, as soon as I could figure out what the hell Stefan’s Law was.
I reached to my pants pocket for my smart phone and couldn’t get my hand into my pocket, since my legs seemed to have swollen up, so I took my pants off. It wasn’t like I needed them for warmth anyway, and mosquitoes never bit me, either because of my undead skin or from professional courtesy.
I did a search on the ‘net.
“I’m such an enabler,” came her voice, but she sounded far away. “I hope I haven’t overdone it. I don’t know which is more incredible: that vampires exist, or that they could survive the advent of the ‘net. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, though. You’re not just socially acceptable, you’re a model citizen. You’re passive, compliant, a consumer, a blood recycler, and you give me a safe outlet for my creative powers. You make me feel like it’s a crime to duplicate my own cells, that it’s evil to exhale, that the only good Canadian is an undead Canadian.”
Stefan’s Law was an equation stating that the intensity of radiation given off by an object is proportional to its surface area, its efficiency at taking in and letting out radiation, and especially its temperature, which was so important that they multiplied it by itself four times, just for emphasis. I couldn’t find any mention of it not working for non-solids, though. This was going to be a tough search. I trie
d to roll up my sleeves, found that they bunched more than I’d expected, and took off my shirt.
In the meantime, the background voice droned on. “There were times when teenagers were rebels. Maybe everyone has always hated us for being younger and more alive than they were, but at least we fought back. Now we’re fed an empty, self-destructive mockery of real youth and life, and they’ve got us believing it’s cool.”
It turned out that the sun was considered cool because of Stefan’s Law. You could take a satellite measurement of the intensity of sunlight above the earth, trace its path back to the sun, figure out how much more concentrated it would be there, and calculate the sun’s temperature. The funny thing was that the outermost part of the sun was supposed to be millions of degrees, while the lower surface where our sunlight came from was supposed to be only a few thousand, which seemed to violate another law saying that something farther from a heat source can’t be hotter than the source itself. It was all very vampiric, like blotting out the sun with math. I wondered if I could take some night courses on it.
“Strictly speaking, I’m not a teenager,” said the voice. “I’ve been away from high school for a few years. I still feel like one, though, and I think my abilities have made me a biological teenager again, although I wasn’t old enough to see the difference when it happened. Everybody’s adolescence is longer now; we go from high school to university to apprenticeship. Why shouldn’t we always feel like we have a future ahead of us, like we could go on learning and trying new things and improving ourselves forever?”
On earth, though, the equation was full of fear. Sunlight warmed the ground and the ocean and caused them to give off more radiation, which warmed the air so that it gave off more radiation. This heated the ocean and ground some more, so they gave more radiation back to the air. It was like sunlight could multiply, feed on itself and burn us all to a crisp.
