DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  It’s been a half hour since the toilet faux pas. The pipes have stopped banging, and so have my neighbors. Now there’s just my heart, banging against my rib cage, trying to knock some sense into me, from the inside out.

  What?it mocks.She needs you alive to answer a phone?

  So I click on the lights again and try to see everything fresh, through maybe-still-vengeful, mortal eyes. Okay, the kitchen knife is taken care of. I’ve locked that in my glove compartment. That’s a good start.

  Now, there’s just everything else.

  All the stuff in my apartment that might be turned against me, given world enough and plenty of daylight. My hammer, for instance. The hammer and various hammerable things. Like my sex toy knives. Screwdrivers. The longer nails. Hell, even a pencil jammed up my nostril with a good whack. The matches have to go. Same for flammable liquids. My hacksaw. The nastier power tools. My bowling ball. Other heavy, skull-crushing, droppable things. Wires of any appreciable length and something to use as a spindle—something to loop around my neck, twist, and tighten like a garrote, cutting my head from my body like a cheese cutter cutting through cheese…

  The casters on my bed!

  Even the casters on my bed could be used against me. And so I remove them a post at a time, to make wheeling me toward an open window less likely. I locate my handcuffs, too, just in case she tries dragging my sleeping body out of bed and into the path of some heavy-duty sunshine.

  And if you should die before you wake?my heart tap-taps.

  I look at all my stuff with my own eyes again, wondering if this is the last time I’ll be seeing it. My books and CDs. My stereo, TV, and computer. My gliding rocker and sofa. My so-called coffee table, stained with overlapping rings of dried blood like some logo for the vampire Olympics…

  Not good,my heart says, and my brain agrees.

  So I fan out some magazines to hide the stains—no need to incite my little guest with careless reminders. And then I go back to looking at my apartment, this time with a different set of mortal eyes. Not vengeful so much as wary. Leery. On guard.

  There. That. That’s a no-no.

  The framed poster of Bela Lugosi, his cape in full spread? What seemed so retro hip before now seems a little tasteless. And so down it comes, and behind the sofa it goes, Bela facing the wall as if he’s being punished for all my vampire sins.

  Ditto the old Red Cross poster, beseeching all to “Give the Gift of Life.”

  And the IV stand turned into a reading lamp.

  And the pens made to look like hypodermics; the hypodermics made to act like pens.

  The unopened box of Count Chocula I got off eBay.

  The postcards featuring old crime scene photos, the blood leaking out black as oil onto the flashbulb-bleached pavement, soaking through the sloppily draped sheet, each with some variation of the same message scribbled on the back:

  “Mmmm. Tasty…”

  My, how witty we vampires are, in our one-track, one-note way. And how pathetic it all seems now, looked at from the other side of the tracks.

  And then there are all those reminders of the death we no longer fear—the bones of my little necropolis scattered here and there. The human skull. The shrunken head. The mummified hand, palm up and waiting for my pocket change and keys. The casket handles on my kitchen cabinets. The funeral-procession flags reduced to washcloths. The toe-tag bookmarks. The halved rib cage used for sorting my mail. The death certificate coasters. The collage I made from dozens of different poison labels, the skulls grinning more and more ironically the closer they get to being contemporary. The laminated obituaries of famous dead people held to my blood-filled refrigerator by magnets in the shape of bats, tombstones, skulls…

  I get a garbage bag and begin grabbing. This, this, this, and that. That, that, that, and this. It takes nearly an hour to re- (or rather un-) vamp my apartment, by which time the sky has started growing pink in the east. The ten-minute warning siren begins whooping, calling all suckers back inside their variously blinkered apartments. Rush hour. Last call. Bedtime…

  The graveyard shift.

  I can hear sports cars just like mine screeching into the carport, footsteps running down the hall, front doors opening and then slamming shut. I check the lock on my front door—still open, as promised.

  If I should die before I wake…

  I pull the heavy drapes closed, and then head to the bedroom. It’s as I’m closing the door that I notice it—a skeleton key. I’d never paid much attention before—never really needed to. I live alone. Always have. The only door I’ve ever bothered locking is the front one. If you had asked me before if there was a lock on my bedroom door, I would have asked for a minimum of two guesses. But there it is. A skeleton key. Of course.

  Which means I can lock the door, ensuring for myself an extra margin of safety. If I want to. If I want to play it safe. But if that’s how I wanted to play it, I’d have drained Isuzu back at the hole. If I wanted to play it safe, I’d still have my air bags, and never would have found her in the first place.

  I look at the key in its hole. Should I?

  Of course you should.

  But…should I?

  On the plus side, leaving my bedroom door open could create the illusion of trust. Isuzu can’t see the fact that I’ve hidden the more obvious implements of destruction, but if she checks my bedroom door and it’s locked…that’ll say I’m hiding something, that I don’t trust her, and that I can’t be trusted in return.

  I look at the key in its hole.

  I close my eyes and try to picture Isuzu, lying there in my trunk, waiting for the last siren to die down, waiting for the metal over her head to warm a few degrees before pushing out the backseat, crawling through and up and out. I imagine her clicking across the asphalt in her little-girl plastic-soled shoes, the ones we’ve brought back with us from the hole, along with her deflated air mattress, her “cat” food, and a few pieces of clothing, still reeking from her farting, sweating humanity. She blinks in the bright sunshine, but doesn’t start blistering, doesn’t start smoking, unlike yours truly. Unlike everyone else yours truly knows. There are probably birds in the sky. Isuzu probably stops to look up at them flying by. Her little heart probably beats fast, even though she knows sunlight is her guardian angel, looking out for her, keeping her safe while her mother’s away, dealing with her bat breath. She opens the front door to my building and sees all the darkness inside. Her little heart probably beats a little faster. She probably wonders if there’s such a thing as vampire insomniacs, and whether I’d tell her if there were. She looks at the sunlight, and then back at the dark. She runs up the four flights to my apartment as fast as she can. Checking the scrap of paper I gave her, she locates the door, grabs the knob with both hands, twists, pushes in, click-clicks across the hardwood floor. She starts checking doors—the spare bedroom, the bathroom, my room.

  Unlocked. Unlocked. Locked.

  Her heart starts knocking some sense into her. She remembers me licking my fingers. And if she wasn’t thinking about killing me before, she starts to now. She fills a glass with water—it’s something she’s seen her mom do—and uses it like a magnifying glass to catch some old newspapers on fire. She runs out and down and sits on the hood of my car, watching a whole building full of vampires go up in smoke. I’ll bet she laughs then. I’ll bet she busts out of that flat little tee-hee and laughs her floopsing ass off.

  The two-minute warning blows and I open my eyes, still aimed at the keyhole in my bedroom door. I reach over and remove the key. Place it on my nightstand with a click.

  “Fuck it,” my mouth says.

  And my heart? My heart can’t be reached for comment.

  5

  Jesus Wept

  When I wake up, nothing’s sticking up out of me that shouldn’t. Nothing’s smoking or crushed either. Thereis the sound of something being crunched, however. And when I turn my head, there they are—those two-toned eyes, floating above a pair of cheeks, chipmunk
ed around a hundred dollars’ worth of very stale chocolate cereal.

  I have no idea how long Isuzu’s been standing there, just watching me. Vampire sleep is more like hibernation or a coma than sleep. To mortal eyes, we appear dead. Respiration drops to less than one breath per minute, and our heart rate slows to the bare minimum needed to prevent our blood from turning to sludge. When we’re asleep, you could take a Black & Decker to our eyeballs and we wouldn’t flinch.

  Isuzu crunches another handful and then notices that my too-pale eyelids have been replaced by the shiny black of the night before. And before I can say anything—before she even swallows—she wants to know if I know him, pointing at the box, the cartoon fangs.

  “Do I know Count Chocula?” I echo, wondering how I’d forgotten to include that with all the other stuff I’ve hidden away. I think about lying to her—think about reinventing Count Chocula as some vampiric Santa Claus—but then I think better of it. The lie about her mother still being alive is plenty.

  So: “Nope,” I say. “ ’Fraid not.”

  “Oh,” Isuzu says, accepting the information with utter neutrality. She just had a question and wanted an answer, but wasn’t vested in the response either way. Pure curiosity. No agenda. I’d almost forgotten that such a thing was possible.

  Isuzu grabs another handful from the box, cups it to her mouth, chews. She stares at me with her big, still human, still part-white eyes. She blinks. But it’s not a normal blink. It’s a blink that’s been thought about and willed. She stops chewing, swallows, does it again.

  “My mom says this is how cats smile,” she says, blinking a third time.

  Oh.

  Okay.

  I blink back. Isuzu smiles with her mouth, but then covers it, stifling a giggle. She blinks again. I blink back.

  She blinks. I blink.

  She. I.

  She. I.

  She. I.

  She giggles. It’s the flat tee-hee from before, but a little looser, a little faster, a little louder.

  Before, I used to wonder how it is one spends eternity. How do you kill its numberless minutes, hours, nights? Do you tinker it away? Do you putter it to death? Or do you just give up and disconnect your air bags?

  No.

  No, the answer’s as simple as being a kid. Remember what it was like to be a kid, when forever was just a given, and doing something over and over again just made it funnier each time?

  While she’s still laughing, I blink, three times, fast. I, I, I.

  She matches me, blink for blink. She, she, she.

  Followed by: I, I, I.

  But when she laughs this time, I make the mistake of laughing, too. I make the mistake of letting my stupid fangs show without even thinking. That’s when Isuzu’s blink muscles get stuck on open. It lasts only a second, but it’s along second—longer even than the several seconds I sat staring at her knife plunged into my guts. It feels like the longest second we’ve shared so far. I put my hand across my mouth. I blink. She stares.

  I blink. She stares.

  Finally: Istare. I make my bug eyes bug a little more, letting more of those shiny black marbles show. I take my hand away from my mouth, my fangs hidden now behind lips set for the new game. The challenge.

  The stare-off!

  Ready, set…

  Isuzu understands and props both elbows on the edge of my bed. She settles her chin between cradling fists. And stares.Hard.

  I ignore the handful of involuntary blinks she blinks before deciding to lose. And then I blink. I blinkbig. I blinkhuge.

  She smiles with more than just her eyes as I groan and throw a melodramatic hand to my heart.

  “Ya got me,” I say, not the whole truth, but not exactly a lie, either.

  It’s midnight—vampire lunchtime—and Isuzu’s yawning by the kitchen table as I stand by the counter, my Mr. Plasma clicking off its degrees (ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two…) followed by the tenths (98.1, 98.2, 98.3…). I’ve opened one of the cans of “cat” food we brought back from the hole, the label underneath the label reading “SpaghettiOs.” We’ve been having “discussions” all evening, laying down the ground rules. The things she has to wait until daytime to do, like go outside, like flush the toilet. Followed by the facts of vampire life:

  “Yes, Ido drink blood.”

  “No, from a bottle. Not from people.” I say this with a straight face even as I’m watching the light blue squiggle at the side of her neck. It branches right around where her jaw hooks into the rest of her skull, and I can’t decide whether it’s a lightning bolt, a naked tree in autumn, or maybe a river the way it looks to God, and satellites.

  “Because not all vampires are as nice as I am,” I go on.

  “Yes, sunlight is good for plants and little girls and birds, and yes, I miss it, but no, not even for a little, no.”

  “Because Isaid so.”

  “No, I can’t eat chocolate.”

  “No, not chicken, either.”

  “No, not beets—are youkidding ?—yuck.”

  “Yes, ‘no chocolate’ includes chocolate cake.”

  “Andchocolate milk.”

  “AndCount Chocula.”

  “Just because Ido, okay? A person doesn’t have to eat something just because they’ve got a box of it lying around.”

  It’s Isuzu who suggests we have a secret safety song. She and her mom had one, and if either one got into trouble, she’d sing it, so the other would know and stay away, or get help.

  “Okay,” I say, humoring my little gratifier-to-be. “Let’s hear it.”

  Isuzu pauses, perhaps wondering if it reallyis okay. Maybe I’m smiling too much. Maybe I’m trying too hard to sell this Marty-as-good-guy sham. I’ve got this closed-lip, fang-hiding smile I’ve been wearing ever since we stopped smiling by blinking our eyes. Every so often, my teeth grind behind these fixed and curving lips. But I keep smiling. I staple it on both ends. I spot-weld it. And now she’s looking at me like she wonders if it hurts, smiling like that for so long. She looks at my smile like it’s a crack in the ice that might spread underfoot with the slightest misstep. She’s not that far off.

  Or maybe I’m just projecting. She blinks an ordinary blink, and then, for some reason, she goes up on her tiptoes. She goes up on her tiptoes and opens her mouth, and this is what comes out.

  “You are my sunshine,” she squeaks, most of the syllables hitting most of the right notes.

  I flinch. I swallow my smile.

  “My only sunshine,” she goes on. I shake it off. I try joining her.

  “You make me hap-py,” we continue, “when skies are gray.” I can feel myself warming to Isuzu’s secret safety song. Warming, or something like that. There’s something inside me that’s getting bigger, spreading.

  “You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you,” we go on together, right up until I almost can’t. The something bigger inside me is choking me. It’s the next line, coming up like a brick wall. My voice, already croaking, cracks a little more.

  “Please don’t take,” I sing around the cracks in my voice, my life, myworld ever since…

  I stop. Isuzu stops, too. We go back. I start again, without her.

  “Please don’t take…my sun…shine…a…way.”

  Isuzu’s looking at me funny. The smile’s gone, replaced by something like worry. I look down and she’s holding out a wad of tissue—the most worried-over, overused wad of tissue I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s practically just a handful of tatters, held together by little more than will. She seems to be offering them to me, though for what reason, I have no idea. When I don’t accept them, she goes up on tiptoes again, stretches the hand holding the tissue scraps over her head, and goes right for my face. I catch her wrist in my hand; a thumb-and-index-finger “okay” is all it takes to encircle the whole thing.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “You’re crying,” Isuzu says.

  “Iam not.”

  “Are too.”

  And th
en a drop hits the floor.

  Plish!

  I touch my face and it’s wet. I pull my fingers away, and they’re pink. Jesus Christ. Iam crying. And over a stupid song about somebody taking my…

  Well, you know what the stupid song’s about. And they’re coming out bloody, by the way. My tears. Of course.

  Jesus H. Christ…

  Or maybe I should make that “Jesus wept.”

  Because he did, in Gethsemane—that’s what the nuns told us—and it was blood that time, too. Jesus wept blood because he could see the future. All the atrocities of history. Back when I was just a kid, what this meant was the tortured martyrs and the various wars, up to and including the “world” one. Not World War I, per se; they hadn’t numbered them yet. No, Jesus wept blood because of the kaiser and Lincoln’s assassination and the Reformation. The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition weren’t mentioned by the nuns, and Hitler and Hiroshima were still waiting in the wings. Needless to say, there also was no mention of vampires, benevolent or otherwise, or of little girls living in dirt holes, or coffeemakers rewired to warm up factory-grown blood. And yet, even without all that, in grade school when I was a kid, we nodded our heads. Understood. Agreed that history counting backward from where we sat was enough to make God’s son weep blood.