DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  I suppose I’m trying to imagine what might be going on inside her head—or at least whatwas going on, before I decided to fabricate the miracle escape of the century. I’d like to know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing—taking that grief away. It’s a successful thing, I know that. Isuzu seems to have perked right up. Not knowing how much she may have seen before escaping, I’ve embellished, suggesting semiplausible theories, like maybe one of the vampires did whatI was asked to do.

  “Was she pretty, your mom?” I ask.

  Isuzu nods.

  “And were any of the vampiresboy vampires?”

  She nods again.

  “Well, there you go. Maybe they thought she was so pretty that…” I trail off without finishing, but Isuzu gets it. It sinks in as a concept, and I catch the reflection of a smile in my passenger-side window.

  “Like Cinderella,” she whispers, filling in the blank I’ve left.

  I nod.

  So I’m inclined to think it was a good thing. Akind thing. Just like, sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind? I’m guessing that you have to be kind before you can be a real success at cruelty. At least some of the times. At least as often as the other way around.

  And I’m thinking this now because of my dad. And what it was like for me when he died too soon. I’m thinking this now because of what it was like for me later, when I didn’t.

  Even though he was a mortal, my dad loved blood. He loved it in all its coagulated forms: in blood sausage and duck-blood soup, in the shit brown drippings under broiler pans, and in the vein of marrow running through a chicken bone. He loved the last best, cracking the shaft against his big back teeth, leaving translucent shards blooming around the ball joint like a ruptured party favor with a bony fist at one end. He’d have made a wonderful vampire, but he never got the chance. He died, instead, too awfully and too young, of lung cancer brought on by thoseother bones he loved to suck, at a rate of three packs a day. Eventually, they had to cut a hole in his throat, followed by the bigger hole they dug for the rest of him.

  I was just thirteen-dammit. (I can never talk about how old I was when my father died without adding a “dammit”—the age and curse are like one word in my head, hyphenated.) Other loved ones had died before—aunts, uncles, grandparents, a girl my own age the other kids called Fuzzy after the hair she didn’t have because of the leukemia that killed her—but none of their deaths hit me the way my father’s did.

  I didn’t know how much I loved him until he died, and the only good thing about his dying is that he did it before I got a chance to treat him like shit. He died before I could act embarrassed about the way he talked or dressed in front of my oh-so-much-cooler friends. Sure, he wasn’t the hippest guy in the world, didn’t dig jazz or swing or big band. Sure, he had that funny little Charlie Chaplin mustache and pronounced histh ’s liket ’s—turty-tree and a turd—but he had a good heart that he put to good use.

  I’ll tell you a story my uncle used to tell.

  He and my dad were in the war together—the first “world” one, from before they started numbering them. And they found themselves staying with a family on a farm in France. On their last night there, they get invited to dinner, and dessert is cherry pie. My dad takes one bite and—click!—bites right down on a cherry pit. Here he is, “overseas,” having dinner with a nice French family while people all around are dying, and he’s sitting there with a cherry pit in his mouth. Not wanting to embarrass his hosts, my dad does what a guy like my dad does: he swallows it. Another bite and—click!—another pit. So, down the hatch it goes. As does the next. And the next.

  And then, suddenly: “Where are your pits?” their host asks, alarmed.

  That’s when my dad finally looks up and sees all the plates around him ringed with cherry pits like so many freshly yanked teeth. It’s local custom, it turns out, to cook cherry pie with the fruit whole, to preserve the flavor.

  After hemming, after hawing, my future dad confesses that he’s swallowed all his pits.

  “In America, they do this?” his host asks.

  No, my dad admits, explaining that in America we take the pits out before cooking a cherry pie. He’s swallowed his here and now because he thought the cook had made a mistake.

  And his hosts splutter with laughter, followed by assurances to my father’s reddening face that, no, they’reimpressed, they’retouched.

  They’re the old world, patting the new one on its polite, naïve little head.

  My uncle used to tell the Pit Story while my dad was still alive, to embarrass him, to get his goat, to tease. And he always ended it the same way. “Prettypit iful, eh?”

  Except for the last time, that is.

  When my uncle told the Pit Story for the last time, it was at my father’s funeral, and my uncle left his punch line off. He choked up, instead, his Adam’s apple working hard as if he were trying to swallow a cherry pit of his own. Finally, he spit it out:

  “And that’s the kind of guy my brother was,” he said. “Kind. He was thekind kind of guy. Agentle gentleman. It took a lot of swallowing to be that way—pride, mainly, other people’s sh…”—we were in church; he edited—“…stuff.” He looked up from the podium he’d been staring at. “You know,” he said, and we did. Almost everyone around me was working hard at swallowing something. For me, it was tears.

  I was just thirteen-dammit and had just started to become the jerk it is our pubescent destiny to become. I was a boy, too, trying to become a man in pre–World War II America, way back when, before people couldn’t shut up about their feelings. So I choked back, and swallowed, and toughed it out, at least long enough to make it to the men’s room and the stall next to the wall. Once inside, door bolted tight, I used a big wad of toilet paper to muffle whatever flushing didn’t mask.

  I didn’t think it was possible to hurt that badly again. I was wrong. I started hurting that badly just about every Christmas. My dad died on December 24, just in case I was in any danger of forgetting the exact date. So every year I was reminded and every year I resurrected my grief. I missed him. I kept thinking about all the things he was missing by being dead. I wondered what he was like when he was whatever age I’d be turning in the coming year. I wondered what he’d do and what he’d make sure to domore of if he knew what I knew about how long he had left.

  What wouldI do in his shoes, with the same number of years?

  At fourteen, on the first anniversary, I decided I’d take more baths. Not for hygiene, but to relax. To make my back stop hurting like Atlas all the time. More long hot baths, with a cup of coffee within reach and a slice of cold pepperoni pizza. I’d arrange it so that during these baths there wouldn’t be any noise except the sound of the gurgling water rushing out of the faucet. And it could run and run, without going cold or overflowing the tub, for as long as I needed it to. My mother—here was thereal miracle—wouldn’tcome knocking at the door, asking if I’d drowned, or what was wrong, or did I think she was made of hot water. And when I started thinking about my dad, and all the hot baths he’d never take? That magical tub that never over-flowed would know what to do with those tears.

  At fifteen, the something I’d do more of also involved locked bathroom doors. Ditto for sixteen. And seventeen.

  And when it finally looked like we’d be going to war because of a guy with a mustache just like my dad’s, I imagined him giving his hand a rest and signing up. If he knew what I knew about how long he had left—sure, he’d sign up. After all, if he knewthat, he’d know he’d come through it okay. He’d know he’d be around long enough to have a son he could leave too soon. You just had to do the math.

  And so I signed up, thinking war was mainly a matter of knowing what to swallow and what to spit out.

  I’ve already mentioned about vampires and their last scars and Isuzu’s uncanny aim when it came to mine. That’s another part of this little carjacking down memory lane. Like a lot of my benevolent buddies, I got vamped during World War II. That’s
how far back mine goes; that’s the bit of history my second umbilical loops around. You’d think that as scars go, it’d be as dead and hard as a horse’s hoof by now. But no. All it takes is a little twelve-inch blade to retenderize everything.

  So there I am:

  My last sunset has sunk and I’m sinking fast, right along with it. I’ve taken some shrapnel in the breadbasket and I’m dying, looking toward my last moon, a turd of cloud scudding across its face. There’s a bombed-out farmhouse in the distance, and in the delirium of my dying, I become convinced that it’s the same one where my dad swallowed all those pits, all those years ago. I try to crawl to it. I’m Catholic, so I’m praying, too—Hail Mary(stretch, grab, pull)full of grace (groan, grab, pull)—getting my soul ready for the Great Whatever. And that’s when she appears out of nowhere, a woman in a trench coat and Marlene Dietrich sunglasses, speaking French. I can’t really understand her, just little bits and pieces.

  Mort—I catch that one. Something about death. Dying.

  Yeah. Right. I’m dying. Leave me alone, please…

  Then:Bon. That means “good,” I think. Like inbon voyage.

  So now she’s being sarcastic? It’s good I’m dying? Fuck you, you French…

  Not that I say any of this. Not with my mouth. Not out loud. The thing that’s killing me is sending blood gurgling up my throat the wrong way. But that’s a good thing, my not being able to speak. God only knows what would have happened if I said what I was thinking—and if she understood. As luck would have it, all I can say is “Fuck you” with my eyes. And I never was very good at speaking with my eyes, even back when I still had pupils to dilate and whites to show interest or contempt.

  Don’t hurt me.

  That’s what my eyes usually seemed to say—back before they went all the way black. Back before they learned the look that forever says “midnight” and “snack.”

  So there I am, the moon and me, a hole in my belly, my life bubbling out at both ends in a gory red gush, my eyes going squinty, trying to pay this Frenchwoman back for saying she’s glad I’m dying.

  And then she smiles.

  You know the smile I mean. The one that changes everything. The smile that raises the curtain on those big dog teeth of hers.

  Surprise!

  And that’s when she tucks into me like I’m a steak. Amis take, probably, but a juicy one. And it’s incredible. It feels like she’s giving me a blow job through my stomach. I go from going to coming, just like that. My toes curl in my GI boots and every beat of my heart is another orgasm…

  That lasts for about as long as that sort of thing lasts, but then:

  Oh-oh…

  Here comes the dying part. I can feel it. I can feel my heart giving up. I can feel my…everything…going cold from the inside out. She’s got her hand on my chest. She just worked her little fingers between the buttons of my uniform, rests her already-cold flesh against my going-cold flesh—not squeezing, not tweaking, not trying to arouse. Justchecking. Even though I’m delirious by now from lack of blood, I know she’s counting my heartbeats. I know she’s decided to do something other than kill me—something other than leaving me here to die.

  Something wrong. Something unnatural.Something I want more than anything else in the world.

  She stops sucking just before my last heartbeat. She squeezes the halves of my wound together, places her lips on my lips, and spits a little bit of me back into me. A little bit of me, mixed with her. I don’t know it at the time, but she’s bitten her tongue just before darting it into my mouth. Different vampires do it different ways, and this is hers. A French kiss from a French vampire.

  Pulling back, she closes my mouth with the tips of her fingers and makes an exaggerated swallowing gesture. So I swallow, and when I do, I can feel the skin of my stomach tug in around where the gash is. Or was. I can feel the skin going tight, stitching itself back together.

  She finds some water in the moonlight. It’s not that hard. There are puddles everywhere—all of them suddenly on fire to my new vampire eyes. She washes her hands, and then washes what will be my last scar. My new belly button. The bull’s-eye Isuzu found with that bread knife of hers.

  And after that we play charades.

  In the moonlight, in the middle of France, in the middle of World War II, with mortar flashing in the distance, an old French vampire and her new American calf play guessing games. First word, two syllables. She points toward the east, and then mimes “sunrise” by raising a fist in a slow arc above the horizon of her opposite arm. She mimes “death” by choking herself with both hands. “Hide”—my borrowed jacket, hitched over her head as if to shield her from the rain. “Sleep”—head tilted to a pillow of pressed hands.

  I nod, and nod, and then nod, again.

  Sunlight will kill me. Got it.

  “Am I like Dracula?” I ask, and she nods her head: Yes. She holds up a finger: But. She shakes her head: No.

  So I’m a yes-and-no Dracula and one of those yesses is the part about being killed by sunlight. “What about crosses?” I ask. “What about garlic?”

  But she just smiles those big dog teeth of hers and brushes the hair off my forehead. Leaning in, she places a kiss there, still stained with my own blood. She lifts her sunglasses, revealing those black-black eyes, winks, whispers aBonsoir, and then disappears into the same French nowhere she came from.

  And that’s how she leaves it—that’s how she leavesme, not-dying in the middle of World War II.Not-dying —but filling up with a thousand different questions.

  Can I turn into things?

  Do I still have a reflection?

  Why does everything seem so bright when it’s still night out?

  Can I pray if I still want to? And who’ll answer me if I do?

  My savior taught me the bare minimum I needed to know to survive my first daybreak; the rest I had to figure out for myself. She wasn’t being cruel, just economical. I needed to know what would kill me for sure, and she told me. The rest was really about whatwouldn’t kill me, despite Hollywood and its myths. And so I worked my way through a series of pleasant surprises. Being immune to bullets? That brought a smile to my face the first time it came in handy. Garlic? Crosses? How was I supposed to avoid those things in Europe, of all places? So it was nice to know I didn’t have to, finding myself staring at my former savior without going poof. And that’s how my vampire lessons usually went—an Oops, followed by an Oh, followed by an Okay.

  As far as the rest of the rest of it, like learning how to feed myself? The movies got that part right. Not that I needed a movie to tell me what to do. You get hungry enough, and your body lets you know. After all, even a newborn can find its mother’s breast.

  Iforgot about the calendar.

  I gave up days, and I gave up counting them. I was immortal; what was time to me? And anyway, I was too busy learning all the rules and privileges that came with my field promotion up the food chain. When the weather grew cold, my breath didn’t do anything special. It came out just as invisibly as when it was warm. And when the snowflakes started falling, they rested on my skin, unmelted—which was a little disconcerting—but I didn’t read into it any further than that. I didn’t see it as a reminder. I didn’t take it as a clue to what was coming.

  And so those first few months as a new vampire went smoothly, in blissful ignorance. We were—thank God—at war. I had a clearly defined enemy that the U.S. government sincerely wanted me to kill. The fact that killing also meant a free meal? Well, two birds with one stone. And war really is much more fun when you don’t have to worry about the bullets—when all you have to stay out of the way of is the big exploding stuff. Oh, sure, I had to stay away fromhails of bullets; one good sweep from a machine gun and you could just tear me along the dotted line. But all in all, my attitude toward war had lightened up considerably.

  Until…

  I’d been technically AWOL but still doing my job, at least at night. And I was sneaking up on my soupdu jour —my
little Sauerkraut—who’d been cut off from his troop. He just sat there, shivering in his foxhole, wearing his dick-shaped helmet, whispering to himself in German. I figured he was probably cursing himself for being stupid and getting lost, but doing it quietly. Too quietly for mortal ears, but…this wasn’t his lucky day.

  Or night.Nacht.

  I was thinking to myself, This is not your luckynacht, when out of the whispered gibberish I heard the very word I was thinking:

  “Nacht.”

  It was being sung—quietly, again, but…

  It was being sung to the tune of “Silent Night.” And just like that, I remembered what day it was.

  Or night.Nacht.

  So I put a little moonlight between his body and its head.