I began to ask another question, but he said, “You need sleep. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow.”
My legs had already gone to sleep, I realized. The grandfather clock struck the quarter hour: 12:15. I shook my legs and stood up slowly.
“Father,” I said, “am I one, too?”
Of course he knew what I meant. He said, “It’s beginning to look that way.”
Chapter Eight
Very little that people write about us is true,” my father said the next afternoon. “Never trust those who claim to be vampire experts. They tend to be poseurs with morbid imaginations.”
We sat again in the living room, not the library. I’d come to our meeting prepared, or so I thought, with pages of vampire lore I’d copied from the Internet into my journal. He’d skimmed a few pages, then shaken his head.
“Written by well-intentioned fools,” he said. “It’s a pity that more vampires don’t write the facts. A few have, and I’d like to think that more will, as we learn better ways to cope with our condition.”
“What about stakes in the heart?” I asked now.
He frowned, the center of his mouth pursed while its corners curled downward. “Anyone will die from a stake in the heart,” he said. “And anyone will die if they’re severely burned, including vampires. But sleeping in coffins, melodramatic costumes, the need for fresh victims — that’s all bunk.”
The world is home to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of vampires, he said. No one knows for certain, because the question isn’t likely to be listed on census forms. Most vampires live rather normal lives, once they’ve learned to cope with their special needs — not so much different from those of any other chronic ailment.
“Like lupus,” I said.
“I lied to you about the lupus, Ari. I’m sorry. It’s the story I devised in order to get by in the world. I wanted to be honest with you, but I felt I should wait until you were older. If you turned out to be mortal, I thought you might as well believe I had lupus. And if not — well, another part of me thought that you knew it wasn’t lupus, all along.”
Yet, he said, in some respects vampirism is like lupus — the sensitivity to sunlight, the tendency to experience joint pain and migraine headaches. Certain drugs and supplements that treat lupus help vampires, too, particularly in monitoring immune systems. Seradrone had developed blood supplements used by vampires and lupus sufferers alike, by-products of its research in the field of artificial blood.
“We’re developing new drugs specifically for us,” he said. “Last year clinical trials began on a new hybrid called Meridian Complex. It increases tolerance of sunlight and inhibits the desire for blood.”
I must have looked uncomfortable. His eyes suddenly were sympathetic. “That part of the lore, unfortunately, is true.”
“Did you kill my mother?” I said it without thinking first. More and more, that seemed to happen — words were spoken as they were thought.
“Of course not.” Again, he looked disappointed.
“Did you ever drink her blood?”
“You promised to be patient,” he said.
People have ridiculous names for the condition, but my father preferred vampirism, though the word’s origins are in grim Slavic history. There are other names for the process of becoming a vampire: the role-players call it “being sired,” while others call it “transformation” or “rebirth.”
“You’re only born once, unfortunately,” my father said. “I wish it were otherwise.”
He referred to his own initiation as a “change of state.”
“After the change of state, a period of ill health usually ensues,” he said.
I tried to imagine what his “change of state” had felt like, and I couldn’t.
Suddenly I found myself imagining what it would be like to bite him — yes, bite the neck of my own father. What might his blood taste like?
At that moment he gave me a look so dark, so threatening, that I said at once, “I apologize.”
After a moment’s awkward silence, he said, “Let me tell you how it was.”
For days he lay in bed half awake, half dreaming, too weak to do more.
Malcolm came by once a day to feed him. The first time was the worst. Malcolm walked in, pulled an ivory-handled knife from his coat pocket, and without ceremony slit open his left wrist. He pushed my father’s mouth into the wound, and like any newborn, my father sucked up nourishment.
After each feeding he felt stronger, and he always vowed to never do it again. But he wasn’t strong enough to resist Malcolm.
One afternoon, while my father was feeding, Dennis walked in.
Vampiric lore talks of the erotic nature of the taking of another’s blood. My father said there is some truth in those tales. He felt a sort of sickening pleasure as he drank.
Dennis’s face showed shock and disgust. Although my father felt ashamed, he kept drinking. When he was full, and Malcolm had withdrawn his arm, they both looked at Dennis again. His expression had changed; it was pleading.
Malcolm opened his mouth, and my father knew he was ready to lunge at Dennis. With all his strength, my father shouted, “No!”
Malcolm made a noise like a snarl.
Dennis said, “I can help. Both of you, I can help.”
For the next five days, Dennis was to prove himself my father’s best friend.
My father lay in bed, almost delirious at times with the new hunger and with rage at Malcolm. He fantasized about murdering him. At that time he knew little about vampirism beyond fiction and film. Once he asked Dennis to bring him wooden stakes and a mallet.
Instead, Dennis brought blood from the hospital, which wasn’t as potent as Malcolm’s, but proved more easily digestible. My father felt less powerful after the injections, but also less agitated. Dennis read to him from current research into the development of artificial blood and hormones that stimulate bone marrow to produce red blood cells. Together they began to plan a protocol for survival that didn’t require drinking live humans’ blood.
During this time, Dennis introduced my father to the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. He read aloud from their autobiographies. Both believed in the supreme importance of kindness and compassion. Gandhi wrote of the futility of revenge and the importance of nonviolence. And the Dalai Lama wrote, “In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”
I had to think for a minute before I understood the last sentence.
“I think I see,” I said, finally.
“It took me a while,” my father said, “but when I understood, I felt comfort beyond measure. I had a sense that I’d always known these truths, but only when I heard the words did they begin to guide my actions.
“The next time that Malcolm came by, I told him I’d have no more of his cannibalistic nonsense. With Dennis’s help, I was strong enough to return to my studies and to live with my affliction.”
“Malcolm left you alone?”
“Eventually, he did. At first he tried to argue otherwise. He said that my place was in his lab, since he’d given me a chance to live forever.
“But vampirism is no guarantee of eternal life. Contrary to the Internet lore you’ve brought me, only a small percentage of those who’ve changed states lives more than a hundred years. Many get themselves killed through their own acts of aggression or arrogance. They die as painfully as mortals do.”
“Surely there are compensations?”
My father had clasped his hands beneath his chin, and he gazed at me with an expression as close to love as I’d ever seen in his eyes. “Yes, Ari,” he said, his voice soft. “As I said before, there are compensations.”
My father paused to answer a knock on the door. Someone, probably Root, handed him a silver tray with two glasses of Picardo on it. He shut the door and carried the tray to me. “Take the glass on the left,” he said.
Another first, I thought, taking the glass. My father set down the tray. He took the other glass and raised i
t in a toast: “Gaudeamus igitur / iuvenes dum sumus.”
“So let us rejoice / While we are young,” I translated. “I’ll have that inscribed on my tombstone.”
“Mine as well.” It was our first shared joke. We clinked the glasses and drank.
The stuff tasted awful, and I guess my face showed that. My father almost laughed. “Another taste to be acquired,” he said.
“Or not,” I said. “What’s in this stuff?”
He held the glass up and swirled the red liquid. “It’s an aperitif. From the Latin aperire.”
“To open,” I said.
“Yes, to open the taste buds before a meal. The first aperitifs were made from herbs and spices, and the roots and fruit of plants.”
“What makes it so red?”
My father set down his glass. “The recipe is a secret, created and kept by the Picardo family.”
As we sipped our cocktails, my father resumed his story. Those who undergo the “change of state,” as my father calls it, immediately are aware of their new nature. But when a vampire and a mortal beget a child, that child’s nature is indeterminate.
“I’ve read atrocious accounts of parents exposing a half-breed child to sunlight — using ropes and stakes to tie it down, then leaving it to see if it burned,” he said. “But photosensitivity isn’t a certain sign of vampirism. Even in the general population, sensitivity to sun can fluctuate widely.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the term half-breed.
“I used the historical term,” my father said. “Today, we prefer to use the term diverse.”
I took a small sip of Picardo and forced myself to swallow it without tasting it.
“Isn’t there a blood test for vampirism?” I asked.
“Not a reliable one.” He crossed his arms across his chest, and I found myself noticing the muscles in his neck.
My father told me that vampires exist everywhere, in every country and in every profession. Not surprisingly, many of them are drawn to scientific research, particularly areas involving blood, but others serve as teachers, lawyers, farmers, and politicians. He said that two current U.S. congressmen reportedly were vampires; according to Internet rumors, one of them was thinking about “coming out of the box” — a euphemism for publicly acknowledging one’s vampire nature.
“I doubt he’ll do it anytime soon,” my father said. “Americans aren’t ready to accept vampires as normal citizens. All they know are the myths propagated by fiction and films.” He picked up my journal and set it down again. “And the Internet.”
I took a deep breath. “What about the mirrors?” I said. “And the photographs?”
“I wondered when you’d ask that question.” He gestured toward the shadowbox on the wall and beckoned me.
We both stood before the picture. For a moment I didn’t understand the point. Then I saw a faint reflection of myself in the domed glass. There was no reflection of my father. I turned to make sure he was still next to me.
“It’s a protective mechanism,” he said. “We call it emutation. Vampires emutate to varying extents. We can make ourselves entirely invisible to humans or produce a blurred or partial image by controlling our bodies’ electrons, keeping them from absorbing light. It’s a voluntary action that becomes so instinctive that it seems involuntary, over time. When your friend tried to snap my picture, my electrons shut down and let the light in the room — the electromagnetic radiation, to be more precise — pass through me.”
I thought for half a minute. “Why didn’t the photo show your clothes? And why aren’t they in the mirror?”
“My clothing and shoes are made from ‘metamaterials,’” he said. “The fabrics are based on metals, because metals respond so well to light; that’s why they’re used to make mirrors. When my body’s electrons shut off, my skin temperature elevates, and the materials’ microscopic structure is altered, allowing them to warp light, make it flow around me. So, when electromagnetic waves hit my clothing, they produce neither a reflection nor a shadow.”
“Cool.” I said it without thinking.
“Some British tailors are wizards,” he said. “In any case, invisibility is one of the compensations that come with the affliction, if you want to call it that. Along with access to the world’s best tailors.”
“Do you call it an affliction?” I looked at the place in the glass where my father’s reflection should have been.
He let me look for a few seconds more, then returned to his chair. “Hematophagy is only one aspect,” he said. “Our condition, if you will, has more to do with physics — with energy conversion, with changes in molecules’ temperatures and pressure patterns and movements. We need mammals’ blood, or good substitutes, in order to endure. We can subsist on relatively small amounts — something I’ve learned through personal experience and experiment — but we become weak unless we’re fed.”
I nodded. I was hungry.
As I tried to eat dinner (my first attempt at making vegetarian lasagna produced uninspiring results), my father sipped another cocktail and told me about the brighter side of vampirism.
“Before my change of state, I took so much for granted that now seems extraordinary,” he said. “My senses became a hundred times more acute. Malcolm advised me to take the world in small doses, to avoid being overwhelmed by it. Our new state of sensory awareness was similar, he said, to that induced by LSD.”
I set down my fork. “Did you ever take LSD?”
“No,” my father said. “But Malcolm described his own experience of it and said he found it comparable. He said ordinary experiences now took on new appearances and meanings. A walk through King’s College chapel while the organ was playing was almost too much for his senses to absorb. Colors became brilliant, sounds intensely true and pure, and all of the senses intermingled, so that he could simultaneously taste the texture of the stone walls, feel the smells of incense, see the sound of the carillon.”
“I can do that,” I said.
“Yes, I remember you telling me once that Wednesdays were always silver, while Tuesdays were lavender.”
As he spoke, I admired his shirt, which managed to be three colors — blue, green, and black — and no color at all.
“I also became sensitive to patterns,” he said. “Malcolm said not all of us share this trait. Certain designs — paisley, for instance, or the complicated patterns of Oriental carpets — are able to mesmerize me, unless I turn away. Needless complexity — complexity for no reason — arrests my attention, makes me look for the aberration that isn’t there. Apparently it’s related to my difficulty in opening things; it’s a form of dyslexia. Have you experienced it?”
“No.” For the first time I understood why none of the fabrics in the house was patterned, and why all of the doorknobs were oversized. “What about shape-shifting?”
“Another myth. I can become invisible, as I told you. I can hear others’ thoughts — not always, but usually. And I can” — he paused and made a dismissive gesture with his hands — “I can hypnotize others. But so can you, and so can many humans. It’s been said that Freud could control his family at the dinner table by the movement of his left eyebrow.”
“Was Freud one of us?”
“Good heavens, no,” my father said. “Freud was the father of psychoanalysis. No self-respecting vampire would have anything to do with that.”
I looked up from my food and saw a glint of humor in his eyes.
“All in all, these qualities aren’t what I consider assets, but rather unusual abilities that I choose to deploy as little as possible. The real assets are the obvious ones — never aging and enjoying potentially infinite longevity, immunity to many diseases and perils, and rapid recovery from limited exposure to the few to which we’re vulnerable.”
I pushed away my plate. “What are the few?”
“Erythema solare — that’s sunburn,” he said. “Fire. Severe heart injury.”
“Father,” I said, “am I mortal or not?”
“Part of you is, of course.” He curled one hand around the base of his cocktail glass. His hands were strong, but not square, with long fingers. “We simply don’t know yet how much. Matters will sort themselves out, as you age. Heredity is more than DNA, you know. Traits are also transmitted through behavior and symbolic communication, including language.”
“As I age,” I repeated. “Doesn’t that mean I am mortal — the fact that each year I’m different, while you remain the same?”
He set down his glass. “So far, yes, you are aging as mortals do. There may come a time when you choose” — he stopped talking for a moment, his face falling into familiar lines of sadness, but his eyes close to despair — “when you choose, or the choice is made for you, to stop aging.”
“I can choose?” This was something I hadn’t considered. “You can choose.” He looked again at my plate and grimaced.
“Your food is growing cold, with all these questions.”
I didn’t take the hint. “I have so many more to ask,” I said. “How do I go about choosing? And what happened to my mother? Is she dead?”
He put up his hand. “Too many questions. I’ll address them, but not in a piecemeal fashion. Let me tell you how it was between us, yes? And then, as I’ve said before, you’ll be able to answer the big questions yourself.”
I picked up my fork. He resumed his story.
During the time immediately after my father’s change of state, Malcolm told him that his new life would be better than his previous one.
“We’ll never grow old,” Malcolm said. “We’ll survive anything — car crashes, cancer, terrorism, the infinite petty horrors of mundane life. We’ll persist, despite all obstacles. We’ll prevail.”
In Western culture, aging always means diminished power. Malcolm said they’d enjoy freedom from pain — and from love, the curse of mortals. They would live without what he called the ephemera: transitory concerns based on mortal personalities and politics that, in the end, no one would remember.
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