Joe Vampire

by Steven Luna

  With me.

  All I needed to do was keep the Vampire Within, within.

  Just before lunch I hopped up to get it done, no chicken-shitting out anymore. And no decoy papers this time, though I did bring the card she gave me so I’d have a reference point for taking things to the next level. I checked myself in the bathroom mirror first, a good idea since the hair wasn’t playing nice. The fluorescent lights in there seemed a little more intense than normal. When I looked closer I could see why: my pupils were dilated. Like, almost all the way. I’m in a brightly lit bathroom and my eyes need to spread like a centerfold model to gather light? What is that about?

  They’re still that way, too. More vampire shit to deal with.

  Radical.

  I ignored it, finger-combed my spikes a little and made my way to her desk. There was a small crowd surrounding her desk when I arrived. Everyone must have been there to catch up on her move. They looked pretty happy… happier than someone else’s moving out of her boyfriend’s apartment should have made them. They parted as I approached, and in super slo-Joe-motion she appeared. She was smiling. And glowing. And she looked in my direction. This was a great beginning to the dream coming true. Then she held out her hand to the people beside me to show them the big fat fucking diamond engagement ring scumming up her finger.

  The slow-mo came to a stand-still.

  She saw me as everyone else left, and for the first time in our maybe-maybe not exchanges, her smile dropped. “Hey,” she said.

  “Uh – welcome. Back.” It came out about as smoothly as that. I pointed to the ring. “And congratulations, too. That’s a… sweet rock there.”

  She saw the card in my hand. “Listen, Joe,” she started. I tried to smile, but I don’t think it worked. So she pulled me into the coffee station and did her best to explain. “I really didn’t expect things to go the way they did.”

  “Neither did I,” I admitted. “I heard you two were breaking up, not getting engaged.”

  “What? Who told you that?” Her thoughts sort of leaked into my head. So did I.

  Shit. I knew it.

  I’d waited too long.

  “What I heard was that you were in two different places and you were moving out.” When I said it out loud, I realized that there was more than one way to interpret it.

  “That’s true. We were in two different places. I was uptown; he was midtown. We needed to consolidate. I wasn’t moving out of his place, I was moving out of mine, and into his.” It felt like her words filled the space between us with cold air. “He says he wants to try things differently, and this,” and she flashed the stone on her hand, “would be a new start for us.”

  “Is that what you want? A new start with… him?” I tried not to snap at her. It wasn’t hard; I had used up all my anger at the gig. I was more defeated than angry now.

  She looked at the ring like she had been asking herself the same question. “I don’t know. I really thought we had something sweet coming together, you and me. I wanted to give us a try. But you’ve been wrapped up in other things lately.” Ordinarily I would have seen this as an opportunity to plead my case. But how do you tell the girl you’ve loved from afar for the better part of a year that you’ve become a vampire? It doesn’t even sound remotely plausible, or justifiable. It sounds like bad cinema. I’m sure I could have spun this in my favor by playing it off as some other situation that she would have understood. But I just didn’t have it in me.

  And by “it” I mean “hope that anything I said to change her mind would make a difference.”

  “So you told him yes?” Like the answer wasn’t obvious. All she could do was nod. She was taking this almost as hard as I was.

  But she’d made her decision.

  Then and there, in front of the powdered creamer and artificial sweetener, I gave up. It may not seem like a lot, since this hadn’t yet become a full-fledged relationship, but losing the possibility that was there turned it into a sacrifice I couldn’t believe I was willing to make. This was the one last thing I had going my way, and it just did a complete one-eighty. Maybe I should have fought a little harder, told her how I really felt about her – that I wanted to be the one she moved out of her place for; I wanted to be the one she tried things differently with.

  I wanted to be her new start – me. Not moving in with the Tool. Definitely not being engaged to him.

  But after my throw-down weekend with Lazer and Hube, I guess I was stuck in surrender mode. I just let it go, like everything else. The words “good luck” got lodged in my throat, so I swallowed them down and turned to leave, dropping the card in the trash on my way. “I would have changed my mind for you,” she said. Or maybe it was something she was thinking.

  I didn’t turn around to find out.

  I went back to my desk, passing Hube on the way but trying not to take any notice of him. The smell of something tangy sort of wafted out ahead of him, some mystery odor that I couldn’t figure out until I heard the hitch in his voice when he talked. It was fear. He was afraid to talk to me, and I could smell it.

  Let me tell you: that is some fucked-up shit right there.

  “Dude,” he said, totally dry-tongued, “I heard about Chloe. That’s really rough.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, totally curt, and just kept walking. Wouldn’t look him in the eye for a second.

  It almost didn’t hurt.

  I went back to my tiny gray corner of the world, droning through the day without focusing on anything, feeling more zombie than vampire at that point. All the Joe parts seemed to be disappearing simultaneously. Chloe and her crowd of ring admirers passed by once, and she glanced in my direction. I sank in my chair to avoid seeing her. And Hube kept blowing up my phone with texts, apologizing for everything and begging for forgiveness. I almost picked up a few times, just to tell him to stop bugging me and let me deal with my shit on my own for a while. Instead, I turned off the ringer and went radio silent. Not a bad idea, I think.

  One less way for shitty situations to find me.

  It’s all sort of flipped me around and thrown my compass off. I just want a day without any dramatic new development pulling the rug out from under my already teetering life. And I’m never going to have that with daily reminders staring me in the face at work all day long. Sooner or later, I’m going to run into one of them, Hube or Chloe. Maybe even both at the same time. The prospect of that feels way too loaded – with anger, and disappointment. And sadness.

  It seems that This has taken a very literary turn.

  I think it’s time to take some control over the arrangements in my life. Do a bit of house cleaning. Before I left that evening, I dropped into my boss’s office and took measures to make things slightly less tenuous. “I want to switch to night shift. What do I have to do to make that happen?” Turned out all I needed was a pen to sign the forms and a box to pack my stuff in.

  It may sound like I’m pussing out by doing it, but I have no bearings at this point. Music was my refuge, and now it’s gone; Hube was my reassurance, and now he’s not. Chloe was my hope. Now she’s nothing to me but despair. And if that wasn’t enough, I’ve gotten a few e-mails from an “anonymous” sender that say, I know what you are… decorated with some shitty clip art of a fanged mouth dripping blood. Real original stuff. When the first one came, I knew there was only one source for something so lame: Lazer. I always knew he couldn’t stand me, but I didn’t realize he’d waste time going out of his way to screw with me like that.

  Prick.

  Even without my new Vampire Eyes and the huge drop in energy coming along to fuck shit up, it’s been a hell of a few days. I need to get my head together. Don’t know when I’ll post again.

  Catch you when I catch you. Joe: out.

  POST 23

  Nightshifted

  Here’s a sentence I bet no one has ever written before: raw meat can really bring a grouchy bastard out of his sulk. I’ll try to watch that more closely from now on. I have a note o
n the fridge to remind me to keep things stocked. I’m depressed enough as it is; I don’t need low blood consumption to make me suicidal. Like suicide would do any good. I’m a vampire, for fuck’s sake. The living dead, as they say.

  Unless I can figure out a way to test the folklore by staking myself in the heart, suicide is never going to be an option.

  Still, the events of the past few weeks have left me… darker, I think, with no Hube to boost me, no Chloe to draw me toward a happy daydream of the future. I thought it was rough breaking up with Aretha and Dionne, but this is a thousand times harder. And I don’t even get to call them anything but Hube and Chloe, because there’s no joy in trying to make up clever, insulting names for people you still care about.

  That kind of fun only works with the shit heels.

  So how do you reinvent yourself when you’re a solitary vampire who just wants to move on after everything good in your life has tanked? For starters, you should develop an appreciation for nighttime hours. When your eyes are stuck in full-on night vision mode, it does wonders to not be assaulted by sunlight. Moonlight is still something of a bitch, as is indoor lighting, so you wear shades anyway – even inside. A small compromise, really. Night is way better for the skin, too. I can actually drop my hoodie now if I want and not end up with a face like Darth Maul. And with far fewer people wandering about, it’s almost possible to feel normal, and not like someone is going to discover your secret at any moment.

  It may not be perfect, but it’s way safer than daytime at this point.

  My old work peeps wanted to do a happy hour with me before I left, as a goodbye. Sweet of them, but I was too down to be down. I told them I had a bunch of spam I needed to mark as phishing scams, and my toenails were in dire need of clipping. The toenail part was true: vampire toenails are ferocious and require a good trimming just about every day. So I took a pass without worrying whether or not they bought my excuse, and they left a cake on my desk anyway, and a card with everyone’s signature. Good people, those ones. Makes me feel bad for shit-blogging about them when they didn’t notice my changes.

  Not quite the same atmosphere on the night shift, though.

  That’s because there’s no atmosphere on the night shift.

  The shift itself is about the most nothing job you can imagine, and I took a pay raise to make the change. I can’t believe everyone doesn’t want a piece of this action – or inaction, as the case may be. Less work, less hassle, more money – it’s like a golden ticket to the chocolate factory, as far as I’m concerned. I’m surprised word hasn’t gotten out about it. If there’s anything resembling a Willy Wonka in the heavens, it never will.

  The work goes like this: there are computer jobs that run to update all the systems with all the information that trickled in throughout the day’s business – blah, blah blah. Boring shit. To keep from interfering with the network while the day shifters are busy financially analyzing things and whatnot, these jobs all run overnight. And someone has to check in on them to make sure they don’t get all whacked out, or pile up on top of one another in a confused data orgy, or crap out and quit running altogether.

  One of those someones is now me.

  It took a whopping twelve minutes of training to switch my gears from keeping track of every penny in twenty-seven robust financial accounts to pushing a button every two hours and watching a screen between the pushes. So my new work schedule amounts to something like this:

  • Punch in

  • Watch screen/surf web

  • Push the Button

  • Watch screen/surf web

  • Push the Button

  • Go home

  I feel like the guy from Lost, stuck down the hatch all alone with nothing but a stack of classic LPs for company. The big difference for me? I sort of like being stranded on this island. Much like the guy from Lost, however, I’m not alone. There are others here, too.

  Not many. But some.

  Because there are so few of us, we’re scattered throughout the work space – much different from the day shift, where we practically lap-danced on each other to make room for everyone. Smaller headcount makes smelling people as food much less of an issue. It also eliminates the need for friendly small talk about weather and traffic and the rotten economy. So I can plug into my tunes, scan the Twittersphere for hilarious one-liners or watch reruns online to keep me entertained and Push the Button in peace. A perfect set-up for the solitary hermit-monk lifestyle I’m trying to develop. The whole place is very much a colorless corporate replica of my home, really.

  Only without the coffee table.

  This reduction of responsibilities has given me a lot of time to think about everything that’s happened as well. I’d like to believe that it all must be some kind of blessing in disguise – a pretty kick-ass disguise, too, since I’ve yet to see any of the blessing showing. But still. Shit like this doesn’t just drop on you without bringing along a lesson about everything turning out for the better.

  Not for my better, maybe. But for everyone else’s.

  Especially where feeding is concerned.

  In accepting that my fate is to be a vampire – and, as much as I try to minimize it, it is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me aside from losing my virginity and discovering Hulu – I realize that I can’t make it small. And it doesn’t want to be small, so my efforts to shrink it will probably just backfire eventually. Still, I think it’s worth the fight. I may not be willing to embrace my vampirosity, but it sure as hell wants a hug. I think the best thing I can do at this point is not inflict it on anyone else.

  Especially after what happened the last time I saw Hube.

  The more I thought about having smelled fear in him, the more I realized how good it felt at that moment knowing that I had such power over someone. I felt it in my fangs; they kind of ached in a way, the same way a hard-on would ache once you know the prospect of getting laid has become reality. I certainly didn’t mean to feel it, and I am in no way whatsoever condoning what I felt; I’m a total rat bastard for even considering it no matter how angry I am at the guy, and I knew that right away. But the darker elements in my modified brain seemed to recognize this feeling as the whole point of being a vampire, like an instinct had finally justified itself. It seems to me that one little slip of the tooth would put the vampire in control instead of Joe. I’m well aware of my shortcomings in the dietary department; I may not eat like a sumo wrestler, but if I’m in for a single snack cake, I’m in for the whole box. Sugar just does that to me. Knowing now that my nose tends to pick up on the sweetness in everyone’s blood, I get the sinking feeling it would be the same if I were to bite someone. Necks would just become Zingers or Ho-Hos, nothing more than snack food for the ravenous, blood-starved fiend that I would certainly become. Not a chance I’m tempting a fate as potentially disastrous as that. I have little doubt that if I were to try it even once, it wouldn’t be long before I’d be jumping on everyone who passed by, clinging to their necks like a deer tick and sucking them dry. If it turned out they were afraid of me while it happened – which, of course, is the whole point – then I’m betting the whole tingling fang thing would become orgasmic. And if I let it go that far, I would never get it under control again. So no matter how strong the pull to fang-fuck the general populace, I’m sticking with abstinence. It’s much safer for everyone that way – me included. Alice can keep Vampire Wonderland for herself.

  There’s no way I’m going down that lousy rabbit hole.

  This is why night shift is so totally workable for me: If I want to avoid the possibility of biting people, I’ll make it easier on myself by avoiding people altogether. And it went off without a hitch for the first week or so. Then a complication arose, in the shape of a woman.

  It’s not what you’re thinking.

  And it’s not what I just made it sound like, either.

  A few nights back, one of the night shift long-timers stopped by to introduce herself. She’s what I would call
librarian-esque, and had been head-down in some pulpy romance novel or another every night since I started. To keep from bothering her, I’d just wave a little if she looked up rather than busting in and saying hello. I’m the newbie; I should bow my head and respect the natives, and earn their respect in return. No intrusions. No assumptions. And since I didn’t really want any intrusions or assumptions laid on me, either, I totally understood. But that night, when I looked up from my streaming Saved by the Bell reruns to Push the Button, there she was, staring me down like I had spit in her chai. It was focused staring, too, like she recognized me from somewhere. But I had never seen her before in my life. “You’re Joe, right?”

  “Yup. New guy.” I reached out a hand. “And you’re… ?”

  “Louise.” She said it flatly, shaking my hand a little too long for comfort. “Cold,” she commented. And she kept on staring. People almost always stop that shit when they get caught, but this one had some major lady balls and just kept going for it. She was squinting, too, like she was trying to diagnose me or read something written beneath my skin. No one on day shift had ever looked this closely at me. I know I’m pretty cool-blooded these days, but the vibe I was getting from this creepy bitch made me shiver in my hoodie. So I rolled out my list of excuses for my appearance. “I’m going through a little battle with anemia right now. That’s why I’m so pale.”

  She shook her head. “No… that’s not it.” She didn’t just have balls; she had a dick to go with them, especially considering that she wasn’t exactly flashing a Coppertone tan herself.

  I protested. “Um, yes it is.”

  She examined the sides of my head. “And what about the tips of your ears? They kind of slant upward… they’re almost pointed. Is that anemia, too?”

  Damn. I knew I should have worn a cap to put those things under. “I am as God made me – pointy ears and all.” I smiled, then stopped quickly when I felt my fangs poke out.

  “That isn’t true,” she said, and it wasn’t out of kindness. “Someone made you this way, but God had nothing to do with it.” She sat her wool-skirted, Irish sweater-wearing, school teacher-looking ass down in the chair next to me as if she had a personal invitation. I was seconds away from carpeting her with f-bombs. “And what’s with the sunglasses? Are you stoned?”