DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  And boy, did she ever know!

  Golf balls, garden hoses. Gerbils, drinking straws. Whatever tasteless comparison you can think of—that’s how hard she could suck. Like her life depended on it. Which it did, of course.

  At one point, I worried about my tongue coming out by its roots. I worried that she’d tear that little flap of skin underneath. It didn’t, and she didn’t. Shedid bite a few extra holes in my tongue, but they healed over quickly enough.

  The humming didn’t start until about midway through. It started as a moan, then became a hum. Mmmm. Just like one of those Campbell Soup kids. She’d thrown her strengthening arms around me, one cupping the back of my neck, the other wrapping itself around my waist, pulling me closer. I was wanted and I wasn’t going anywhere. And then the humming started. Mmmm. This was good, this thing we were doing—that’s what the hum was for. That’s what it meant. This thing we were doing was good enough to hum about.

  So she did. And I did back.

  Eventually, our hips found each other. And when they did, they ground a bit. The humming continued. It got louder, and then softer, in waves. Even after, it continued, our new, shared language.

  “Mmmm,” she mmmm’d.

  “Mmmm,” I mmmm’d back.

  That was my first benevolent vamping. And I liked it. I liked it a lot.

  I liked it so much I did more in the evenings to follow, all women, all attractive, all very grateful afterward. The hard part was holding back the smile that seemed permanently stitched to my face.

  Eventually, I had to leave that music box of a city. I’d started to get known. A set of black marble eyes would show up with a two-toned pair, explaining in German that I was the guy she’d been told about. When I heard my name shouted one evening from across theStrasse, in an accent that rhymed it with “Marseilles,” I knew it was time for Marty the Vampire to leave.

  About a week later, the music box was incinerated. The chocolate vaporized. The porcelain, pummeled. And all my little immortals were reacquainted with their mortality.

  I sighed after hearing the news. If that’s what being good got you, what good was being good? And so I decided to put benevolence aside. There was a war on, after all. There was a war on, and it would still be going on long after this silly world war was history.

  Isuzu stirs. She turns her sleeping face and breathes out a bubble of spit. It jiggles there, capping theO of her lips, catching the shine of the moon coming through the windshield.

  I have to. Sometimes, a man’s just gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

  I pop it.

  I reach over with my smallest finger—the pinky. Dart in, out. Smile. Mischief accomplished, I go back to driving us to my apartment, feeling much less mature, and much better for it.

  But then, suddenly:

  “Mom?”

  The word’s just there in the car with us and I didn’t say it. When I look back at Isuzu, her eyes are still closed. I’d forgotten that people can do that—can talk in their sleep. When everybody you know sleeps at the same time, you tend to forget what it looks like from the outside.

  It looks nice, and I wait for more words, but none come. Instead, Isuzu stirs again. She wrestles with something in her sleep. Her brow furrows; her teeth set. Her lips begin moving as if she’s chewing on something tiny. Like a seed, perhaps. Or maybe a cherry pit. She seems undecided whether to spit or not. Her throat just keeps working at it, going up and down, until it works something clear out of the corner of her eye. That’s when I begin to wonder about my little POW, her mom, and my story. That’s when I start to think about what it is we swallow when there’s really no other choice.

  4

  What Died?

  Isuzu shits.

  This occurs to me later than it should, but I’ve got an excuse. Shitting’s not something vampires do, and I just forgot. There were no reminders back at the hole—no foul bucket, no means by which wiping could be achieved, no flatulential air clinging to the muddy walls. Of course, theywere living in the woods, which are notorious for being shat in by everything, from popes to bears. So no. It didn’t occur to me that Isuzu might need to shit until we’re already in the car, headed back to my apartment. She’s still asleep, grinding her blunt little teeth, when suddenly it becomes obvious that not all the noises coming from her side of the car are benign.

  “Jesus Christ, kiddo,” I whisper, rolling down my window. “What crawled up your ass and died?”

  That’s my dad talking. That was his favorite saying anytime anyone farted. Or floopsed. My dad would never say “fart.” Floops—that was his word. “Who floopsed?” he’d ask, followed by the dead-ass line. Followed by “Light a match” or “My eyes are watering” or “What you been eating, boy?”

  But there’s no need to ask who floopsed this time. There’s only one floopser in the car, and it isn’t me. And if there’s floopsing being done this early in the game, it’s only a matter of time before something more substantial follows.

  Which brings up another problem with this whole delayed gratification thing—having to deal with all the shit that comes along in the meantime. I’m tempted to just admit defeat, pull over to the side of the road, and dive in with both fangs.

  “Sorry, kiddo,” I’d say, “but I forgot how nasty you things can be.”

  But I don’t.

  I don’t because the stink is still pretty heavy and it stops my appetite from rising to the task. So I roll down my window a little more and keep on driving, wondering what else my little shit factory is going to spring on me between now and mealtime.

  After the last war—the one my benevolent buddies and I “won” by flipping the odds—after that, the world seemed like one big broken heart. It was like everybody had just broken up with somebody else, all these things vampires didn’t have uses for anymore just sitting there, making our eyes leak, reminding us of what we’d given up to live forever. And so, like jilted lovers, we went through the Big Purge. Bonfires were involved; ditto, wrecking balls; and pits, and landfills, and tankers dumping ton after ton of our ex-world into the deeper ends of the deeper oceans. Plates were flung like Frisbees into brick walls or shot out of the night sky like skeet. Forks and spoons were melted down. We recycled what we could, and brutalized what we couldn’t, taking out our heartbreak in increasingly creative, increasingly violent ways, until it looked like we might actually succeed.

  That’s when some of us started getting nostalgic. Started hoarding. Started boxing, shrink-wrapping, slipping into specially made collectors’ bags. I once saw a friend handling a greasy french fry sleeve with tweezers and white cotton gloves. “Breathe deep,” he instructed. “That’s lard, buddy boy. Not peanut oil. Not oleo.Real lard…”

  Old restaurant menus—back from when the variety of things to eat had to be written down to keep it all straight—menus aretrès retro andtrès hot. I saw one from Big Boy go for $500 on eBay—and that’s with half the lamination missing.

  An actual Big Mac, set in a block of acrylic as a paperweight—a grand, easy.

  An unopened can of Diet Coke…

  A fifth of Seagram’s…

  A frying pan…

  A potato peeler…

  Salt, pepper, thyme, oregano.

  An aspirin. A single, generic aspirin: twenty-five bucks; name brand: thirty.

  I’m thinking about all this now, because of a fart and what it foretells. And I’m thinking eBay and I are going to be very good friends. I can see that already, listening to Isuzu grunt out another one next to me. I can see my future, and the hundred different things that’ll break my heart just taking them out of the UPS box, with their Styrofoam peanuts, their certificates of authenticity.

  “Look, Isuzu,” I imagine saying in that not-too-distant future.

  “Toilet paper.”

  I imagine pausing, listening.

  “Yes, of course.” I sigh an imaginary sigh. “Thesoft kind.”

  Bathroom-going isnot something my apartment is ready for. I
have the bathroom, yes, with a sink, a shower, and even a toilet, but the last has been turned off for decades. I use it as a planter now—a lot of vampires do. We used to just rip them out, but that got to be more trouble than it was worth. For one thing, the sanitation department charges to haul them away and then the landfill tacks on a monthly storage fee, like you’ll be asking for it back anytime soon. They used to dump them into the nearest river, but you dump enough of anything into a river and it gets a little higher than it should. Which is when the flooding starts. Which is when the dumps start charging storage fees and toilets start making good planters.

  Me, I’ve got Venus flytraps in the tank, and a small cactus garden in the bowl. It mirrors my personality—predatory and prickly.

  Ormirrored. Past tense.

  If Isuzu’s going to be spending any time in my apartment, she’s going to learn to use a toilet. This ain’t no woods, missy; you can’t just take a squat wherever you feel like it. Which is why I find myself kneeling before my toilet-turned-planter, turning it back into a toilet after all these years.

  It’s while I’m pulling up traps and cacti that I start wondering if I’m letting a golden opportunity go down the drain. Nostalgic vampires collect more than just menus and saltshakers. Some collect shit. No, not kitschy crap, but honest-to-Godreal shit. I understand pricing is driven by two main criteria: size, and the presence of identifiable…elements.Corn, blueberries, a bloated bit of french fry—these all contribute to making one piece of shit worthier than another. To their collectors, at least. And it occurs to me that this “delayed gratification” business is bound to get expensive. So why not put Isuzu’s little butt to work?

  The smell of fertilizer tells me why not.

  It’s because selling shit means doing business with the sort of people whobuy shit. It means getting into arguments with shitkickers about whether your shit’s for-realpeople shit, and not just some dog shit or cat shit or—who knows?—horseshit you’re trying to pass off as the gen-you-wine article. And that’s just bullshit, man.Total bullshit.

  And so I finish cleaning out the bowl and the tank. I scoop out sand, and fertilizer, and potting soil by the handful. I tap the pipes to break up any dirt that may have gotten caked there, go over it all with the vacuum hose, tap some more, suck some more, scratch at a stubborn clod with my thumbnail. I squirt a little WD-40 on the rusty knob under the tank. It squeaks like something small and rodential being strangled, but then the water starts giggling out, filling the tank.

  Straightening up, I brush some dust off my knees and pronounce it good to go. So to speak.

  It’s after the float valve closes off that I make the mistake of flipping the handle. It’s just a test run. I’m just making sure everything still works the way it’s supposed to. And it does. Dear God Almighty, does it ever. It works like a bastard.

  The noise!

  The noise of a toilet flushing in an apartment building that hasn’t had a toilet flushed within its rusty-pipe-hiding walls in a couple of decades is the kind of noise that kinda…stands out. It’s different from the sound of water going down the drain from a shower. It’s…throatier.More percussive. Pipes grown accustomed to polite dribbles and drabs rattle in protest, banging their coppery joints against the plasterboard as if to say, Whatthe fuck were you thinking?

  As if to join that other banging, coming from your front door.

  “Hey Marty, didja hear that?”

  “Where the hell didthat come from?”

  “Was that what itsounded like?”

  And me—what doI have to say?

  Nothing.

  I just tiptoe around my apartment, switching off twenty-watt bulbs here and there. I sit then, nice and still. I hold my breath in the dark, listening to the sluicing of water behind my too-thin walls. And I…don’t…say…shit.

  Imoved Isuzu from the front seat to the trunk for the last few miles of our trip. It’s a safety precaution. Again. And she’s still out there, in the trunk, while I’m inside the apartment, getting things ready. If it wasn’t so cold, I would have tried passing her off as a Screamer.

  “Just say ‘fuck’ a lot,” I’d tell her, if it wasn’t so cold.

  “Add a few ‘bastards,’ ” I’d add, if her all-too-seeable breath wasn’t such a dead giveaway.

  I’ve thought about having her take a deep breath and then just making a run for it. But that won’t work and I know it. My neighbors are a curious bunch. All it takes is the sound of a car pulling into the parking lot, and there go all those heavy sunproof drapes, parting like the Red Sea. They see me walking toward the building with Isuzu and they’re stopping us, steam or no steam.

  “So, who’sthis ?”

  “Niece.”

  “Really…”They’d pause. Look Isuzu up and down, trying to catch a glimpse of her eyes, her teeth. Was that a blush rising in her cheeks? Why wasn’t she shouting? “Why…?”

  “Leukemia,” I’d say.

  “Really…”And they’d just stand there, tsk-tsking in their vampire heads, letting the clock run until Isuzu either passes out or lets go. And after that…snap!Life sucks, and then you die. There wouldn’t be any negotiation; there wouldn’t be any “May I,” “Please,” or “Thanks.” Delayed gratification? Fuck that. They’d just dig right in. Isuzu would be off her feet and horizontal in a heartbeat, her ankles squeezed together in one hand, the top of her head eagle-clawed with the other, her neck bent just so and already clamped between those greedy fangs. And afterward—after the body was drained and the cob picked clean—my neighbor, whichever one it was, would look at my scowling face, sincerely confused.

  “Did you want some?” they’d ask, now that it was no longer an issue. They’d blink their innocent shark eyes. “You should have said something if…”

  “Skip it,” I’d say, pissed, but partly to blame. What was I thinking, waving around a stack of hundreds in the bad part of town?

  No. The only way to get Isuzu inside safely is to do it under the cover of daylight. So that’s the plan. I’ve already showed her how to kick out the backseat from inside the trunk. I’ve already promised to leave my door open.

  “It’s on the fourth floor,” I’ve told her. “Do you know how many that is?”

  She’s already nodded her head.

  “Show me.”

  And she did, holding up the appropriate number of fingers. “Good.” I wrote the apartment number on a slip of paper and handed it to her. “Look for this on the outside of the door,” I said. “Turn the knob with both hands and push hard. It sticks a little sometimes. I should probably oil it, but…”

  “What if my mom calls before it gets daytime?”

  “Huh?” And then I remembered. “Oh, yeah. I’ll take a message, okay. I’ll write everything down. I promise.” I paused. “But I don’t think she’ll be calling tonight, kiddo. She’s gonna be pretty busy doing vampire stuff.”

  “What kind of vampire stuff?”

  “Well, toothpaste, for one. She’s gonna have to buy a brand-new tube of special vampire toothpaste. For her fangs. And a new toothbrush, too.”

  Isuzu smiled. She knew I was pulling her leg.

  “And mouthwash for her bat breath,” she added, all on her own, following it with the flattest, most restrained little tee-hee laugh I’ve ever heard. It was a don’t-let-them-hear-us-laugh laugh. If I wasn’t planning to kill her anyway, it would have come dangerously close to breaking my heart.

  “Good one,” I said, and she tee-heed again. “Sleep tight, kiddo,” I added. “Don’t let the bedbugs…” I didn’t want to say “bite,” and so I didn’t. I just left the bedbugs hanging there.

  “Don’t let themwhat ?” Isuzu asked, not ready to let me off the hook so easily.

  “Um,” I said, stalling, and then:

  “Tickle your toes,” I said, tickling with all my might, trying to raise the volume on that stifled little laugh. But all I got was more of the same.

  “Tee-hee,” she went, as steady as a pacemake
r, as quiet as a frightened little cliché.

  What were you thinking?

  That’s what my heart wants to know, as I sit in my darkened apartment, trying not to squeak. Just like that little girl in my trunk. The one who shits. The one who must be prepared for. The one who’s already tried to kill me, who’ll be padding around my apartment all day long, while I’m just lying here, unconscious, defenseless.

  This is your definition of smart?my heart asks.