The Year of Disappearances

by Hubbard, Susan

  Mãe explained it for me. “Vampires have to be careful to file tax returns. Otherwise the government comes after us, takes away our property, may even put us in jail.”

  “Bennett came downtown to the federal office building, and I was waiting.” Dashay sighed. “I put on a pretty dress and all, thinking he’d see me and realize what a dog he’d been. It didn’t work. I touched his arm and I looked into his eyes. I admitted I’d been the one who called him, not the tax man. I told him we needed to talk. All that time he looked right through me. Finally he said, ‘So I don’t need to meet with the IRS?’ And then he bolted right out of there, back to that woman he met on the plane.”

  “So you think maybe he drank the water?”

  “Of course he drank the water!” Dashay slammed down her own glass. “What else do you do on a plane? Unless you’re smart, like me, and don’t ever take what strangers hand you.”

  Mãe and I each thought she was being—a little crazy, Mãe thought; somewhat irrational, I thought. But who knew? She’d been right about the sasa.

  “Did Bennett have a sasa in his eyes?” Mãe asked.

  Dashay shook her head, making her long green glass earrings bounce. “When I looked into his eyes, I saw nothing. You understand? I couldn’t even hypnotize him. Nobody was home. But he was carrying a bottle with him, and you know what it said on the label? Orion Springs.”

  “I don’t understand why you even went to see him.” Normally I wouldn’t have made such a comment, but tonight was not normal. “I thought you were with Burton these days.”

  Dashay didn’t seem offended. “Cecil takes me out to dinner,” she said. “Sometimes we drive down to Tampa and go dancing, have a bite at this little supper club we go to. There’s no harm in that.”

  “Why can’t we be like geese and mate for life?” I said.

  They seemed stunned. Then they made weird noises, my mother and her best friend, noises that mixed amazement and sympathy and laughter. And I was not trying to be funny.

  Dr. Cho came out of the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. “Glad you’re having fun,” she said. “Well, I think he’ll be all right. Now do you think you can keep him stable and not let anyone give him injections?”

  “Root has been banned.” Mãe spoke again in her hardheaded voice, so different from her usual Savannah drawl. “We’ll keep watch.”

  Dr. Cho turned to me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came home for the weekend.”

  “But it’s Wednesday.”

  “I was on a field trip in Savannah,” I said. “I dropped by to see how things were going.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, “but don’t you have schoolwork to do?”

  It was none of her business, really. But she was right. I had a paper due early the following week: an analysis of what we’d seen at the caucus. I had a working thesis for the paper, and even a tentative title: “Situating Outsiders in Contemporary Culture.” The paper I really wanted to write would have a different title: “Eternal Outsiders: Vampires as Outlaws in the Mortal World.”

  “Yes, I have schoolwork to do.” I’d hoped to have a few days on Tybee to lick my wounds—a cliché of which I’m fond. But maybe it was better for me to go back than wallow in emotions.

  Dr. Cho nodded briskly. “I’ll take you back tomorrow, if you like. I have a few calls to make near Hillhouse.”

  My mother made soft sounds of protest, but Dashay said, “Ari needs to finish things up. You wouldn’t want her to flunk out in her first semester.”

  After the doctor left, my mind began to sift through the implications of what Root had told us.

  “Mãe,” I said, “what are we going to do?” Then I felt guilty for asking, because she looked so tired.

  She bent over the table, her hands clasped. “Do?”

  “About the drugs. So many people are taking V. And the kids taking Amrita—I’ll bet they don’t know it’s making them sterile.”

  Dashay said, “Well, we’d better find out who’s distributing the drugs and make them stop.”

  She knew as well as we did how difficult such a task would be.

  “I can’t come up with an answer tonight, Ariella.” Mãe pushed back her chair. “Raphael needs me now. Once we get him on his feet again, then we can think about saving the world.”

  I nodded. But the weight of what we’d learned sat on my chest all night.

  The next morning, I looked in on my parents—my father breathing deeply, his eyes closed, my mother huddled in the same chair Root had occupied the night before. I kissed both of them. In the kitchen I hugged Dashay good-bye.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t worry too much. We’ll figure this thing out.”

  Then I climbed into Dr. Cho’s hybrid car and buckled my seat belt. She looked across at me, her black hair loose over her shoulders. “Do you know how to drive?”

  I said no.

  Some mother she’s got, Dr. Cho thought.

  “I never asked to learn,” I said. “I’m only fourteen.”

  “Fourteen going on forty.” She started the car and, on the way out of town, pulled into a church parking lot. There she gave me my first driving lesson.

  My initial nervousness gave way to elation as the car moved around the lot, braking and turning. When she told me it was time to stop, I said, “Please, one more lap.”

  “You’re a natural,” she said. “You should ask your parents about getting a license.”

  We changed places, and she drove us off the island.

  “Is my father ever going to be himself again?” I tried to keep emotion out of my voice, but it wasn’t entirely possible.

  “He’ll be better than his old self. Just you wait.” She drove as fluidly as Mãe, but with more emphatic stops and starts. “Now that he’s off that old formula and onto mine, he’ll have a full emotional range. His feelings have been suppressed for years, thanks to that Root woman.” She shook her head. “What was that about, anyway?”

  “She loved him,” I said. “And she hated my mother and me for being in the way.”

  “How melodramatic.”

  “It was more than melodrama.” I didn’t know how much to tell her. “Last night Dashay removed a thing from her eye.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  I described the sasa, not using the word.

  “And she extracted it how?”

  Once again, I felt as if I were being interrogated. “I couldn’t see it all.”

  “Sounds as if it might have been a tumor.” She was angry. “No job for an amateur.”

  “But Dashay’s done it before.” I was probably making things worse, I realized, but I kept talking. “She has the ability to see these things in the eye.”

  “Sounds as if she’s practicing iridology.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s an alternative medical practice,” she said. “The theory is that defects in the iris indicate tendencies toward particular illnesses. Iridologists use elaborate maps of the iris, linking locations to certain organs and glands. It’s largely bogus, of course. But even traditional Western medicine acknowledges that the eyes can be indicators of diseases.”

  “Dr. Cho, I appreciate you talking to me about these things,” I said. “But my head is kind of full right now.”

  She gave me a quick, curious look. “Is the serum I gave you working out?”

  “I seem to have more energy,” I said. “That is, when I’m not sleep-deprived. And I feel things very deeply.”

  “Aren’t those good signs?”

  “I guess.” Feeling deeply wasn’t much fun, I thought.

  “Better to feel than not,” she said. The car moved onto the Islands Expressway.

  “I guess. I wouldn’t want to be a zombie, like Mysty.”

  Then I realized: she didn’t know about Mysty, or the house near Oglethorpe Square. As we drove, I told her about the recruiting, and the “makeovers,” and the use of Amrita. While I was at it, I to
ld her about V, too. It turned out she’d heard about that drug.

  “I see kids at the clinic who use V,” she said. “But this Amrita stuff sounds really serious. Making people sterile without their consent—do you know how bad that is?”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “We need to talk to the authorities.” She said it decisively.

  My heart sank. I’d had enough of the police and the FBI.

  “No, Ari.” She turned to me and smiled. “I mean the vampire authorities.”

  As someone who’d spent several months studying politics, I’d thought I had a basic understanding of how governance systems worked. But Dr. Cho showed me that I didn’t know much.

  Vampires don’t have police. We don’t have a separate government or court system. But we do have a group that arbitrates and advises: the Council on Vampire Ethics, or COVE. Known generally as the Council, it comprises ten members selected by a group of former members. Members serve ten-year terms. Some represent sects and others are independent. They range in age from forty to one thousand years.

  “The age thing is a little skewed, you might say,” Dr. Cho said. “Why not have younger representatives? But younger vampires tend to focus on learning how to live, not how to make judgments about others. And in the end, age isn’t important, anyway. Wisdom and experience are what count.”

  I thought of Cameron, and I wondered how important his age might prove to be.

  “So the Council has the power to make the Nebulists stop their ambassador program?”

  “Not power in the sense you mean it. They don’t try to force anyone to do anything.” Cho braked hard and made a decisive turn off the main road.

  “I hope that you’re past the good-versus-evil battleground way of thinking about conflict,” she said. “It’s archaic. Resolving problems demands delicate negotiations that are premised on mutual respect. If the Council considers an issue and takes a position on it, their judgment is communicated throughout the vampire world. It carries enormous influence. It has the clout of tradition behind it.”

  We were entering the Hillhouse campus now. I stopped thinking about big issues and turned to my own problems. How would I face Walker? What would I say to Bernadette? I suddenly wished the drive weren’t over. I wanted to tell the doctor my sorrows.

  Dr. Cho stopped the car abruptly. “Ari, go and write your papers. Don’t worry about the Nebulists now. I’ll contact the Council and report all you’ve said. Okay?”

  “Thank you.” I felt relieved knowing that someone was doing something to help Mysty and the others.

  “And I’ll let you know the second I get the lab reports on the water samples.” She got out of the car as I did and walked around it to give me a hug. “Meantime, better not drink the water here, either. Stick to Picardo. It’s safer.”

  I expected awkwardness. I even anticipated an ugly scene. What I didn’t expect was to find Bernadette back in our room, sitting on the carpet, sewing.

  “Oh, hey, where’ve you been?” Her eyes had the now familiar glazed look.

  “I had some personal business,” I began, but she wasn’t listening. In her head she was humming a tuneless little song—dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah dah, dah dah dah dah.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Me? Oh, I moved back.” She finished a line of stitches and bit off the thread with her teeth. “There,” she said, admiring her sewing. “Walker’s sleeve is good as new.”

  “I thought you moved in with Jacey.” The mention of Walker brought back the image of the two of them in my hotel bed.

  “It didn’t work out.” Her tone was nonchalant. She stood up and threw the shirt toward a chair. It fell on the floor. She giggled.

  I looked at the calendar over my desk. Three weeks until the last class, and then exam week. Afterward I’d go back to Tybee. My father would be well again—better than well—and I’d tell him everything, everything that had happened, and he’d make sense of it all. He’d know what to do. And my mother would be able to rest, and the three of us would—

  “Ari, Ari, we’re going to happy hour at the Anchor downtown. Come with!” Bernadette stood up and danced across the carpet, tripping over her feet, collapsing onto her bed.

  The Anchor was a townies’ bar that served Hillhouse students grudgingly, knowing that most of their IDs were fake. “No thanks,” I said. “I have a paper to write.”

  After she left, the room filled with golden stillness. I picked up the clothes she’d discarded on my bed and desk and tossed them onto her bed. Then I opened my laptop, sat down, and wrote the first half of my American Politics paper.

  On the way to dinner that night, I saw Jacey. Her hair was unbraided, and it spread over her shoulders like a cape.

  She came up to me, looked hard at my eyes, touched my arm as if to be sure I was real. “Thank goodness,” she said. “Ari, when you didn’t come back with the others, I thought you’d been disappeared. Like your friend.”

  “I went to visit my family.”

  We took quick short steps down the incline that led to the cafeteria. I tried not to see the shrubs where, less than a month before, Walker had first kissed me. But I did see them, and I remembered.

  “Thank goodness,” Jacey said again. “The others came back all weird—except for Richard, and he was weird before, but in a different way. Walker and Bernie and Rhonda, they’re high all the time.”

  “I noticed.”

  We jumped over the low stone fence that bordered the paved path below us. No one followed the paths at Hillhouse; everyone devised shortcuts through the landscape.

  “Walker doesn’t do Walker things anymore. You know, magic tricks and juggling and singing and playing guitar. He acts all spaced out.”

  I missed my old Walker, suddenly.

  “Rooming with Bernie drove me crazy.” Jacey had to take two steps for every one of mine. “It was hard enough before, when she acted depressed and critical and mean. Now she’s Ms. Mellow. What she says doesn’t make sense. She seems to get worse every day.”

  I stopped walking and faced her—looked down into her face, more accurately. “Jacey, will you trust me if I tell you something?”

  “I trust you,” she said. “You were the only one brave enough to spend the night with me in the swamp.”

  “I think that what’s going on with Bernadette and the others is just as strange as what happened that night.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she made them even smaller as I spoke.

  “They’re taking stuff that makes them pseudo-mellow. Have you heard of V?”

  “Half the campus is on V,” she said. “Bernie offered me some two days ago.”

  “Did you try it?”

  “I can’t handle drugs,” she said. “I tried to smoke pot once and I gagged.”

  “Anybody you care about, tell them not to take it.” But even as I said it, I doubted anyone would listen to her.

  We entered the student union. The stairs to the cafeteria were crowded. Jacey and I made our way downstairs and went through the line, setting plates on our trays. At the end of the line, she pulled a glass out of a rack and a bottle of Orion Springs water from a bowl of ice.

  I grabbed the bottle, put it back, and set the glass under the milk dispenser instead. “Don’t drink the water,” I whispered. “Trust me.”

  We were seated at a long table, eating, when I realized: How do I know the milk is safe?

  As I wrote my assignments and went to class, part of my mind focused on class work. The other part watched students around me disengaging from academic life. Few went to class. The library was deserted.

  The duppification of America. Malcolm’s phrase began to haunt me. I couldn’t tell if I was a paranoiac or a prophet, and I hoped I wasn’t either.

  Even Professor Hogan had changed. Her voice and posturings were less brittle now, although her tone continued to rise at the end of each phrase. She’d been born to ask questions, it seemed.

  “
Where’s your paper, Walker?” She’d worn the same skirt to class for a week.

  “I’m, you know, working on it.” Walker didn’t shave anymore, but the stubble on his face wasn’t yet a beard. He grinned at Professor Hogan, and she said, “Whatever?”

  Then Walker said to me, “How’s it going?” His blue eyes were glassy.

  “It’s going,” I said. This version of Walker didn’t attract me in the least.

  The professor called on two more students, then seemed to lose her train of thought. “Make sure you’ve all registered to vote?” she said.

  Another activity I was too young for, I thought. Unless I used my fake ID to register. Unless I lied again.

  Dr. Cho called my cell phone a day or so later. The Sassa spring water was pure. The Tybee tap water contained chlorine and the usual trace elements. “Nothing to worry about,” she said.

  But the bottled water was loaded with the same opiates found in V.

  “How can that be?” I said. “Isn’t the quality of bottled water monitored?”

  “Yes, the FDA is supposed to monitor it.”

  Is the Food and Drug Administration doing its job? I began to feel like a conspiracy theorist, or like Autumn, who’d found the existence of UFOs more credible than the government’s claims to the contrary.

  “Orion Springs is a fairly new company, based in Miami,” Dr. Cho said. “Council is aware of the situation. They may call you to give testimony.”

  “Where are they, anyway?” I asked.

  “They move around.” Her voice sounded clipped, as if she were busy. “Have you talked to your mother? Your father is recovering nicely. He took his first walk on the beach yesterday.”

  “That’s good news.” I still felt wary about calling Mãe. But if someone was monitoring my phone, they certainly heard an earful that night.

  When the call ended, I made a vow to talk to Bernadette about taking V, although I doubted it would do any good.

  But Bernadette didn’t come home that night. I went out into the main lounge area, littered with students. She wasn’t there, either.

  Richard and his girlfriend (she wasn’t in any of my classes, and I never did learn her name) sat in front of a television set, watching a hockey game. He waved me over.