Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  “Can I tell you a secret?”

  “Whatever. Sure.”

  At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

  Mutis smiled shyly at me, opened a drawer. There was so much dust on the bureau that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

  “Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had balanced on her ears, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to that old magician’s trick of pulling rabbits out of hats—a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared in plaintive hand-lettering. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

  “I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble in tempo with the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with multiples of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

  “Okay.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

  Suddenly we were laughing, hard; even Saturday, with her rump-shaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

  Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter a maple cavity that I assumed was their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

  “Is that your father?”

  Eric’s face was bright red.

  “Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

  Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, who would return your gaze without shame no matter what names you called him, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

  “That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

  I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

  Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

  For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

  “Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

  And then we got quiet, me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

  I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d be long gone—Eric said he’d torn them all down—but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! flyers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST: MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

  “I have news that might be of some interest to you,” I said, in the old-man-with-a-flu voice that I used to excuse my own school absences.

  She knew right away.

  “Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents, too.

  “Yes. That is exactly right. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

  I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. “I know where you can find your rabbit.” Then I heard myself reciting, in this false, ancient voice, the address of Eric Mutis.

  At school, I breathed easier—I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back.

  “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

  At school, I may have been the only one to note the change in Mutant. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his whole face puckered with strain—as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks, emptied of even one flickering thought—just like a doll’s eyes, in fact. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless blue planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October, and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

  “Larry—” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

  On Sunday night, Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional.

  “Jesus H., are we graduating from something? Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

  “This is stupid,” he mumbled, staring down the grass alley toward the deeper shadows. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

  “Let’s just get this done.”

  I was glad he was afraid—I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

  An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to appease whatever forces I had unleashed a year ago, when we’d made the real Eric into a doll.

  “Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there. Who gives a fuck what happens to the scarecrow? Why save a doll?”

  But I knew what I had to do now. I wouldn’t let the Attacker, whoever or whatever it was, dismantle the doll of Eric Mutis completely, carry him out of our memories a second time.

  “Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

  Mondo shook his head. His cheeks were as swollen and red as the playground foam.

  Somewhere far above the park, a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

  Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the tree line, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere—the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

  At the bottom of the ravine, all that was left of Eric’s scarecrow was the torso. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from—it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. I took a big breath; I was going to need Mondo’s help to get down there. He’d have to belay me with the rope I’d brought, while I crawled down the rock face like a bug.

  “It’s mo
ving!” Mondo screamed behind me. “It’s getting away.”

  I almost screamed, too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away.

  “Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

  So Mondo, still gaping at my knapsack, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys-ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It was almost forty minutes before my feet scraped the floor of the Cone. At one point I stumbled and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was okay, I was okay (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu)—and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral-blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lagoons of air between its humped roots like tiny underworld lights. Much higher up, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball-round and came loose.

  The scarecrow’s torso was featureless and beige, like a long sofa cushion. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye—the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed—and failed.

  “You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it somewhat less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the scarecrow’s chest, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t the real Saturday—but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I figured I couldn’t in good conscience steal the real Saturday back from Sara Jo—I was no expert in atonement but that seemed like a shitty way to go about it. Instead I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror (“You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?”). Many of the products that this pet-store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

  Mondo was screaming something at me from the ledge above, but I did not turn—I didn’t want to let my guard down now. I kept my feet planted but I let my own torso sway, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. “Get away!” I hollered at the sky above the substitute rabbit, wheeling my arms to scare off any unseen predators. If I’d lost the real Eric and Saturday, I could protect this memorial I’d made. Large shapes caught at the corner of my eye. Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a backward reenactment of its birth from my black book bag—first went its furry ears, its bunching back, the big velour skis of its feet. I spread my arms above the rabbit, so no birds dove for it. I had a knife in my back pocket. The thought occurred to me that I was the scarecrow’s guardian now, and the symmetry of this reversal both pleased and terrified me. Yes: now I would stand watch over what remained of Eric Mutis. It was only fair, after what I’d done to Mutant. I would be the scarecrow’s scarecrow. My shadow draped over the remains of the doll. The torso looked weirdly reanimated now with the tiny rabbit digging sideways into its soft green interior, palpitating like a transplant heart. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

  “La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling to me from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or climb out yet. Owls might come for Eric’s new rabbit in a rain of talons. City hawks. Something Worse. How long would I have to stand watch down here, I wondered, fighting off the birds, to make up for what I’d done to Eric Mutis? The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am enormously grateful to the following people and institutions for their generous support: the Guggenheim Foundation; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New York Public Library Young Lions; the Bard Fiction Prize and the terrific Bard College crew; Daniel Torday, Robin Black, and the excellent students and faculty at Bryn Mawr; Mary Ellen von der Heyden; and The American Academy in Berlin and its extraordinary staff and Fellows.

  Thank you to the editors and staffs of the following magazines and journals: Cheston Knapp and Michelle Wildgren at Tin House; John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, and Fatema Ahmed at Granta; Michael Ray at Zoetrope; Willing Davidson at The New Yorker; Bradford Morrow at Conjunctions. I feel so lucky to have gotten to work with you, and these stories benefited tremendously from your keen reading and suggestions. I am indebted to Carin Besser for her enthusiasm and insight.

  Thanks to Caroline Bleeke, Leslie Levine, Sara Eagle, Kate Runde, Kathleen Fridella, and the amazing teams at Knopf and Vintage. To Jordan Pavlin, my phenomenal and inspiring editor, and Denise Shannon, the world’s best agent. And a final thank-you, and big love, to the people who stuck it out with me once again:

  To my family

  &

  To my friends

  A Note About the Author

  KAREN RUSSELL, a native of Miami, won the 2012 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2012 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Philadelphia.

  Other titles by Karen Russell available in eBook format

  St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves 978-0-307-38763-9

  Swamplandia! • 978-0-307-59544-7

  For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

  ALSO BY KAREN RUSSELL

  Swamplandia!

  St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

  Karen Russell

  Vampires in the Lemon Grove

  Reading Group Guide

  About This Guide

  The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enrich your discussion of Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

  About the Book

  The author of the acclaimed short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the New York Times best seller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Swamplandia! delivers her best work yet, a virtuosic new story collection that finds her delving into dark new territory with her trademark exuberance and invention.

  A dejected teenager believes that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest. Girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies and escaping by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s torso. And in the collection’s marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. Discuss the relationship between Clyde and Magreb, the two vampires in the title story whose hundred-year marriage is tested when one of them develops a fear of flying. Do you think the author believes they have a good marriage? What is the impact of Clyde’s inability to transmute? Consider this quote from the beginning of the story: “I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect t
rapped in that circle of night. But then Magreb came along, and eternity ceased to frighten me.” What is the author saying here about mortal—and immortal—love?

  2. How might “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” be read as a parable of appetite and addiction? Note the linguistic forms in which the author couches references to the vampires’ need for blood.

  3. “I blinked down at a little blond child and then saw that my two hands were shaking violently, soundlessly, like old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles. I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories” (this page). What is the author saying here about the nature of truth, the power of myth, and the role of storytelling in shaping identity?

  4. In “Reeling for the Empire,” Tooka asks, “Are we monsters now?” (this page) In the title story, Clyde reflects, “Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.” (this page) How are Clyde and Magreb similar to the reelers? What do these two stories have in common thematically? What do you think the author might be trying to say here about exile and community, shape-shifting and transformation?

  5. Look at the passage in “Reeling for the Empire” where Kitsune describes the phenomenon of the thread: “Here is the final miracle, I say: our silk comes out of us in colors. There is no longer any need to dye it. There is no other silk like it on the world market, boasts the Agent….Nobody has ever guessed her own color correctly—Hoshi predicted hers would be peach and it was blue; Nishi thought pink, got hazel. I would bet my entire five-yen advance that mine would be light gray, like my cat’s fur. But then I woke and pushed the swollen webbing of my thumb and a sprig of green came out. On my day zero, in the middle of my terror, I was surprised into a laugh: here was a translucent green I swore I’d never seen before anywhere in nature, and yet I knew it as my own on sight” (this page). How do you account for the joyfulness of this discovery? What do you think the author is trying to communicate about the nature of identity, and of our essential selves?