I, Vampire

by Jean Marie Stine

  Brian comforts me and Petra hugs me ... but you know... I don't feel nothing. I can barely hear them talking. I hide myself inside them.

  And then one day ... can't really say one day 'cause there ain't no day here ... I start to dig my way out. It's because of the hunger that started when I first began this journey ... it started as a tingling feeling, like the prick of a painkiller injection ... but now it's a huge and overwhelming thing that screams in my mind and doesn't let me think and all I want to do is make it go away but it gets bigger and bigger and finally it's as big as the blackness I'm traveling through ... and I try to hold it in but at last it snaps and I don't know what I'm doing, I have to devour something, I don't know what, I feed and feed and feed and feed and then, suddenly, all at once, the train ... has burst through the darkness and around me's all like, cornfields and shit ... a sea of silver under the moonlit sky. And the hunger has popped ... kind of like a zit ... and I'm all peaceful again ... all peaceful ... and then I look around for Brian and Petra ... and the train rattles as it curves along the bank of a gleaming river ... I hear the train ... I hear the crickets ... I even hear the corn push up oh God so slowly through the packed dung and mud ... but I don't hear Brian and Petra ... until I understand that when they enveloped me with their love and protection it wasn't just like a cocoon, it was a cocoon... I ate my way out ... by being born I had to devour ... first the ones who loved me most and then myself ... my own flesh ... my own soul ... I had to remake myself ... in a new image ... not life, but life's mirror ... not death, but something deeper ... oh God it scares me shitless because now I no one and I'm just this lost kid sitting on a train going to shit knows where and the train don't even have a train driver because the train is me, my life, my death, taking me to places no kid should ever see ... oh Jesus I think I'm gonna cry and then guess what I fucking can't, I can't cry anymore and I can't even remember how the hot tears used to feel on my cheeks like, when my mother touched me under the sheets with her breath smelling of liquor like, when I couldn't get the song right and I thought they were going to kill me like, when I saw my brother lowered into the green earth like, when I begged Timmy Valentine to steal my soul away.

  Don't even know if I'll ever get off this train ... don't even know if I'll ever stand on something that ain't vibrating and clanging. We're whipping through station after station too fast to read their names. One time I think I see my mother standing in a churchyard but no, it's some other woman in a night dress with one foot in, one out of a half-dug grave, and another time I see couple other people I know they're really dead I mean like, people I sort of knew on the movie set when it was burning down.

  The whistle and the brakes: screaming.

  We stop.

  I can smell my native earth.

  It's Hangman's Holler.

  love and death

  I start walking and after a while I figure I don't have to walk. I kind of let go and the wind half drags me half embraces me. The wind is even inside me because the stuff I'm made of ain't flesh exactly ... it's the fabric of people's nightmares. People believe in me. That's why I'm real. Timmy told me that once. "You'll be an archetype," he said. Whatever the fuck that is. He's had two thousand years of book-learning and I'm just a dumb hick that happens to be the spitting image of him.

  Okay so I feel myself kind of half melting letting the wind and me take up the same space because I'm not totally in this space at all ... and I drift. Hangman's Holler. Floating uphill. The grass is black in the moonlight and it's swimming in dew. I know where I'm going I guess. Past the church where Damien Peters used to preach before he got himself the fancy bible-banging empire. Past Mr. Flagstad's general store with its broken pane that ain't been fixed all of my life. Oh yeah. I'm not alive no more. Wooden houses with beat-up pickups parked alongside lean-to mailboxes. Fences that trail off nowheres, weeds strutting up through broken concrete. I know this place so fucking well it would hurt if I could feel hurt.

  The house on the hill: abandoned. Broken windows and the wind's blowing. We left that house when we drove out west and we never looked back and we never even locked it up cause there's nothing in it a body'd want to steal. Shit, it hasn't changed none, except for wasting away from not being tended to.

  There's the hillock where we buried my twin brother Errol. Because only one of us could survive. "The two of you'd have been the death of me," my momma said to me once. And then we never spoke about it again.

  I listen.

  There's a rat running around in the mattress of the old bed I used to lay in. There's cockroaches shuffling in the walls. I can hear them. I can hear Mr. Flagstad grunting in his sleep. I can hear Mrs. Flagstad snoring. There's a cat curling up in a trash can lid somewhere, a slick lick, tongue across fur.

  That's when I understand that I can really hear now, hear for the first time. To be human is to be color-blind to the billion hues of sound. Behind the crickets, behind the gropings under cotton sheets, I hear the grass grow ... a deep sighing that's the bass note of the big old thundering chord that's echoing in the wet wind ... too deep for a human to grasp ... and I know that if you can't hear the bass note, what's holding up the music? It's just noise. The music of mortals is just a mote of harmony struggling to stay alive in a humungous sea of discord. They don't hear the music! I'm telling myself. And that's the first discovery about what's changed for me.

  Now I'm listening to the music for the first time.

  And I understand a lot of shit I never understood before too. Like in Timmy's songs, sometimes there'd seem to be like, a missing piece, a hole in the texture ... part of what Rolling Stone called a "wayward eccentricity of structure." But now I see that those are holes for hearing the echo of the universe ... not just the grass growing and the whispering wind but even things that make no sound, like the planets hurtling through the empty spaces and the galaxies exploding a jillion light years away ... if only you have ears to hear, you can know that every one of them songs has got like a piece of the life and death of the whole frigging universe in it. So now I know what Timmy's music was really about.

  It ought to take my breath away but I don't breathe no more. That's when I hear my name.

  You a angel on the wind, coming from uphill somewhere ... and I know whose voice it is, calling for me out of the human past. It's Becky Slade. She used to say that to me ... you a angel Angel ... the only black girl in my homeroom at Col. Sinclair Junior High ... it's the same voice again maybe a little huskier maybe not and the only difference is I can hear it carried on the night wind and it's coming from farther uphill, farther than a human can hear. Maybe this is why the train has left me here, so I can start off at the same place where I started in my human life. Maybe I have to revisit my old life before I can start again. Or maybe it's just that the old place still clings to me ... like the earth sticks to your skin when you're climbing out of a fresh-dug grave.

  There's a barn where me and Becky used to go sometimes and that's where we went when she wanted to show me what she looks like when she's naked. And she wanted to see me too. That place where she showed me what a boy can do to a girl except that I'd already learned it from my mother...

  You a angel!

  She's there in that secret place and I ain't and I don't rightly know how I feel about that. No one was supposed to know about that place. The wind howls. I start to lope uphill and soon I'm more flying than walking because my body is shifting shape so it'll be more streamlined in the wind ... what am I now? A bat, a raven? I don't know except that the wind picks me up and when I spread my arms I catch the moonlight, my feathers glisten, I tumble along the currents of the air.

  angel

  and yes. I'm black. I'm beautiful. I sweep. I soar. I screech and wheel across the silver moon

  angel

  hearing her tart voice, a raven, ravening. She's saying, I use to come here with Angel you know the one he use to be called Angel but now he's Timmy Valentine. Ain't bullshitting you. At the Oscars. You watch them
Oscars didn't you?but he wasn't just a movie star he was something special to me, the onliest boy that didn't call me nigger to my face. And we use to come here to this barn and he touched me, don't be getting jealous now, there wasn't much to it he was so ignorant about what to do, like a little child and all, sleep ever' single night in the same bed with his momma, I think she made him all twisted up inside wrapped him up inside of her fat flesh made it so he couldn't even you know, pop a boner, he shriveled up inside when I tried to ... he like a little snail coiling back up inside his shell, and I say to him, Are you afraid? well when you bigger, when you not afraid no more, you come back and see Becky Slade and she jump your bones, baby. And you know what, I think he scared. Then I watch him on them Oscars and was almost like he wasn't the same person no more. He look right out at me from inside of the television set and I look into his eyes and I think this ain't the same Angel Todd no more. I done lost him. He still a boy but not the boy I play with in the barn not the boy I said to him You a angel Angel.

  Then there's another voice. Don't talk about that bullshit baby.

  Whose voice? I can't tell but it trips the rhythm of my flying and now I'm falling out of the sky like a stone, now suddenly I'm in a closed space, the smell of cowshit, dry grass, old wood, peeling paint, must have just funneled in through the cracks in the walls, and I'm perched in the rafters of a big old barn and I see her from way up, see her eyes first, two polished smoky quartzes in that gloom.

  Angel she says but not to me.

  The boy that's with her, tall slender black glistening with his pants around his ankles, don't talk much, just touching her. Don't like the way he smells, don't like his musky sweat, cause I smell every hormone that's racing through his blood, know he's young and all he can think about is pounding that bitch till he comes, not paying her no mind at all except like a piece of meat.

  And so I'm spreading my wings again, sending the straw flying from the roof beams, wavery raven shadow over their heads, but I reach a pool of shadow just beyond where they're sitting and I can't go no further. It's like battering against a force field. In a moment I understand why. It's the invitation thing. Gotta be invited. I should know that from all the fucking vampire movies I seen when I was alive.

  But I gotta talk to her. She's gotta know that he's just using her up, she's nothing more than prey to him, all he wants is to suck her dry, just like, just like…

  A vampire.

  I flap and flap against the penumbra of hay. But she won't know it's me unless I…

  Change. Transform. Flow outward, fill the shadow air with the image of what I used to be.

  Angel!

  And she's seen me, no she's seen an image kindled by her memories: me, twelve years old, torn jeans, muddy blonde hair, big eyes; I'm standing at the edge of the force field and when she calls my name, the way she calls me with that faint promise of an invitation is enough to make the force field start to thaw and I can feel it soften and I'm swimming through like a bee through honey; and the boy looks up and sees no one because he has no image to fasten onto; but Becky looks at me and her brown eyes fill with longing and I know that I'm the onliest one she truly loved and that fills me with, I don't know, the ghost of a long-dead feeling; and she says to the boy, "Look. He came back after all. Maybe I didn't lose him. Maybe Angel remember Becky Slade."

  "Let me come to you," I say. Knowing the words are double-edged and they can never be free from deceit, because I don't have a soul no more, and I can't love.

  "Come," she says. And the barrier shatters and I'm standing right there, Becky on my right leaning against a pile of straw, the dude on my left, pulling up his boxers.

  "Come and get me, motherfucker," he says, and puts up his fists.

  "Angel," says Becky. For a moment I think I'm feeling what it was like to be a human being, to have my blood flushing my cheeks, my heart pounding, my dick getting all hard and then that feeling fades away and all I'm left with is that yawning hunger and I don't know what to do and I say, "Becky, get away from me," and she says, with kind of a half-smile in her voice, "Why Angel, you become so high and mighty now that you rich? Did you think I was going to wait for you?" and I don't have an answer for her. I want to hold my memories but they are crumbling to dust. There's only the hunger. I don't even hear what she's saying.

  The tall black dude slams his fists into my chest but I make myself hard, like eternity. His hands shatter. He screams. Blood sprays my face. It reddens the pallor of my cheeks and I can taste it on my lips and now the hunger's really driving me and I can't help myself no more, I just kind of surround him and swallow him up and spit him out, a desiccated sack of skin and bone, and all his blood just kind of sponges into me, not just through my fangs but nostrils, my eyes, even the pores of my skin ... all at once dude, all at once, it's almost too much for me to take ... my eyes redden. I look like a movie vampire now with the gore dribbling from the corners of my lips. And you know Becky just looks up and doesn't speak and it's like she's been waiting for this moment all her life. Doesn't she understand them memories mean nothing no more? What does she see when she looks at me? Timmy used to tell me that people see the things they're most afraid of. But she don't seem frightened.

  She crosses over to me. She's naked and dark as the night. She hasn't grown much. Her breasts are shallow and her hips still narrow. There's only one naked bulb swaying over the piles of straw. She smells of her boyfriend's armpits. But beneath that smell there's the sweet odor of her baby blood. She tramples the dead boy's limp skin. It's like he never existed. She looks into my eyes and she says, "I always knew you was an angel, Angel."

  "I'm not an angel, Becky. I'm ... a monster."

  "Monsters don't be beautiful like you."

  "Ain't beautiful inside, Becky. Not any more. Something happened to me. You don't know how much I wanted to get away from my life ... momma choking the life out of me in that sweaty bed ... a life where everything was just pretend. I could hear Errol, my twin brother, calling to me every night out of the dead earth, and I wanted to be like Timmy Valentine because no one could hurt him and he was for ever. But it turned out he wanted to be me. So we became each other. Except ... I guess it didn't work. Not all the way. Don't come near me, Becky, I'm a vampire."

  "Bullshit. You think you the only one who wants to get away. You think you the only one that get hisself shit on. It a thousand times worse for me. You got out of this fucking town. You got yourself money and fame. Becky Slade, she stay here. Nothing to look forward to in Hangman's Holler, Angel Todd, nothing but growing old and dying."

  And she's saying these words and damn it she's still so fucking young but her eyes are as old as Timmy Valentine's; and I know that I've come for her, that I am her hope and her redemption; and I know that her hope and her redemption are false.

  But she takes one more step toward me. Jesus I can smell her blood. It smells of the grave. Already.

  "Fuck me," Becky Slade says. "you always wanted to and then you thought about your momma and you couldn't get hard, don't think I didn't know, everyone at school talked about how you and Marjorie slept in the same bed and shit, don't you be thinking it a dark secret like inside a romance book. Now she's dead and you can."

  "But I'm dead too."

  "Then if you can't fuck me, do whatever it is you do. Kill me, I don't give a shit. Pop me with a straw and suck the grape juice out of me, cause I don't want to be Becky Slade no more."

  And we're both standing on the dead boy. I crush his skull with my heel and grind his bones into the floor planks, and the naked light bulb swings in a little circle, and she puts her arms around me and I see that to her I'm intense and burning cold and hard and full of passion but to me she is I don't know, nothing more than the ghost of long-dead feelings and yes there is the blood than rushes through her roaring like whitewater like a cataract like the rapids in the hills behind the house where my mother took me into her sagging body and lowered my dead brother into the ground and swallowed pills li
ke handfuls of M&Ms and all those memories are in the screaming of her blood because her blood is a thread that ties me to that past I've tried so hard to escape except that there is no escape because the past I hate so much has inside of it all the things I remember how to love. I didn't mind killing the other one, he didn't mean nothing to me you know, but killing Becky Slade is what would have been making love for me if I was still alive. I guess I never got to make love, really. I only fucked. I mean, was fucked. Now I am making love for the first time. First a gentle pinprick in the fingertip, just a couple drops squeezed from the capillaries, silky on my tongue, then I'm probing a little further, biting into the arm, sending an icy pleasure shuddering through her, feeling the pulse quicken against my quivering teeth, then all the way up the arm, the two tiny holes on either side of the jugular, not quite piercing it because she doesn't want to die right away, she wants to go on looking at me, drinking death out of my eyes, and so I'm moving in and out of her not in some vulgar human way, dick in cunt, nothing so dirty, just my lips and my tongue teasing the dark blood out of her, well at first it's just teasing but then I start to suck harder and she feels how urgently I need her and she thrusts hard against me and I feel her dusky flesh against me and I feel the heartbeats pounding and I reach through the flesh, invade the thousand-branching web of vein and artery, I go inside of her, not just the womb but all of her and at the center of her there is the heart and it shivers as I rip the ribcage open and part the lungs and there it is, still pumping, but more weakly now because the pleasure is too much for her ... I bury my face inside her flesh and the blood sluices from her, splashes my cheeks ... I'm snorting blood, blood is running in my ears, in the space between my eyeballs and their sockets, pouring down my throat ... and for a moment I'm glimpsing, dimly, what it's like to be loved.