“It’s a pillow,” I explain. “It’s for resting your head on when you sleep.”
But Isuzu has already recovered the pillow and is inspecting the seams, looking for a way inside. She finds the zipper and opens it, only to find wads of useless cotton batting. She gives me the sort of look I’d expect if I’d given her a box of dog shit for Christmas. And as far as resting her head goes, that’s what Mom’s clothes are for. You just roll them into a ball and dream about how much your mommy loves you. Everyone knows that. Why don’tI know this?
“Only hoboes sleep on their clothes,” I say, falling back into that funny way I talk. “I mean ‘bums.’ No, wait. That’s not right, either.” Pause. “Onlythe homeless sleep like that.”
My little Bambi blinks once. She doesn’t say “duh,” though a “duh” is surely justified under the circumstances.
“It’s more hygienic,” I try again, and then consider the likelihood of her knowing the word “hygiene.” Clearly, this talking-funny business is something I’m going to have to work on. “I mean ‘clean,’ ” I say. “A nice fresh pillow’s cleaner than a bunch of sweaty ol’…”
“It’ssoft,” Isuzu announces out of the blue. And just like that, she begins hugging the once-dismissed pillow with a sincerity that makes me jealous. Of both it and her.
“Yeah, that’s another reason,” I say. “And it doesn’t smell like worms, either.”
This makes her smile. Again. And finally. And thank God.
I say good night, rushing to end our first full evening together on that smile. But before I can switch off the light, Isuzu says:
“Tell me a story.”
I freeze. My brain fills up with four-letter words and exclamation points. My stuck smile is the only thing holding them back.
It’s not that I don’t have stories. I’m a vampire who’s helped change the course of human history! I’ve gotplenty of stories. It’s just that I don’t think a six-year-old kid should be hearing about vamped strippers or ripping the heads off Nazis—even a six-year-old who’s eaten dog and lived in a hole in the ground.
“Um,” I say, and Isuzu hugs her new pillow in front of her, settling in to full story-listening mode.
“Once upon a time,” I begin. That’s the easy part. They all start that way. Now what?
“There was a beautiful girl,” I try—and Isuzu perks up—“who…”
And here’s where my head hits the wall. Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl whowhat ? Wore a little red riding hood and found her grandmother eaten by a wolf? Ate too much gingerbread siding and ended up in an oven? Pissed off a troll? Ran afoul of a wicked witch? Ate the poisoned this, drank the drugged that? Found the magic shoes that made her legs fall off? Turned insomnia into a sign of royalty? Grew her hair as thick as rope as a means of escape? Only to save the day—at last!—by burning up the witch, cutting open the wolf, handing the giant over to gravity…
Isuzu squeezes the pillow tighter—the one that doesn’t smell like worms but doesn’t smell like her mother, either. She waits. Blinks like Bambi, or a cat, smiling.
“On second thought,” I say, beginning again. “Do you know what a cherry pit is?”
7
Window-Shopping
Iembellished the Pit Story for Isuzu’s sake. Her face made it obvious that a little dramatic license was called for, lest my selection of bedtime story confirm my status as weirdo. I suppose sheis a little too young. And I suppose a lot of what I liked about that story was knowing that it really happened, and that it happened to my dad, who was sitting right there. I loved that story because I loved watching his face go red while his brother told it, loved the play between him and my uncle, and how they seemed to become kids again. The poking. The teasing. The laughing! The great, booming laughter that always came as part of the overall package.
And so, for Isuzu’s sake, the cherry pits turned out to bemagical. By swallowing them, the prince was able to fly to where the princess was, and where shewasn’t being terrorized by an evil step-anything. No, nor held captive by a wicked whatever, or threatened by anything with fangs and a taste for the pea-bruisable flesh of princesses. She was just bored, our princess. And yes, of course, she was beautiful and he was handsome. You kidding? He was the handsomest pit-swallowing flying prince you ever saw.
Please note that nothing in my modest revision of the actual facts involves the act of breaking and entering. The flying prince took nothing away, other than the princess’s boredom. No castle windows were broken. No alarms were tripped. The castle’s TV and stereo were left untouched. All the prince did was tell knock-knock jokes, swallow pits, and fly. At the time the crime was committed, the prince was sound asleep, along with everybody else in the kingdom.
Except…
Perhaps I should back up a bit.
I wake up. This is the second evening I’ve woken up to find I haven’t been killed in my sleep. It’s the second full evening I’ll spend with Isuzu, returning the favor. At least that’s the plan at the moment—the me-not-killing-her part. But if the last forty-eight hours have proven anything, it’s that plans are made to be broken.
Not that Iplan on breaking the not-killing-her plan. I just like to keep my options open. I’m over a hundred years old and still a bachelor. If that’s not about keeping your options open, I don’t know what is.
But going back to where I was going back. This is the sunset immediately following the flying prince story. And the night breaks with the sound of shouting. As a general matter, my neighbors are not particularly noisy. Nosy, yes. They’ll pull back a curtain in a heartbeat, but unless someone decides to set off a bomb or flush a toilet, they keep as quiet as the thinness of our shared walls demands.
But not this sunset.
This sunset begins with my neighbors loudly demanding to know Who the fuck, What the fuck, and Where the fuck, followed by louder requests for God to damn “it” and/or “them.” These shouts are coming from the hallway a few floors down. They echo up the stairwell, booming through the ventilation system into my bedroom. Behind them, I can hear the whimpering of home security systems dying, their batteries coasting on fumes after running all day long.
Isuzu’s done something.
I don’t know if it’s fair of me to jump to this conclusion, but jump I do.
Isuzu’s done something and she’s in trouble and it’s already too late for safety songs about sunshine. She’s dead. She’s dead, or too badly bled to bring back. And if she’s not…
Well, that’s not saying shewon’t wish she was, once I get my hands on her.
Swinging out of bed, I bolt for the door, only to feel my arm pulled back as I walk my head into the wall, thanks to the handcuffs I clicked on last night, just in case. Just a bone to keep my paranoia happy. A modest concession to the possibility that I’m not the only one selling false security around here.
Just a really good bang, right to my head, and right between the eyes.
Shit!
I scramble for the key, unlatch myself, and step into a living room, where the elves who don’t sleep when I do have been very busy. Stuff. Everywhere I look, I see my stuff and other people’s stuff, stashed, and stacked, and squirreled away for a year’s worth of rainy days. Where once I had one, I now seem to havetwo notebook computers. Ditto, for flat-panel TVs. Plasma makers? Yeah, there are three now. And stacks and stacks of new CDs, DVDs, and books. There are at least ahalf dozen lamps from a half dozen different decors, none of them quite matching the one I’ve chosen. And cans! The stashes of several dogs and cats and at least one spider monkey have been stacked in pyramids in my kitchen, on my coffee table, on the cushions of my sofa and love seat. There are boxes of laundry detergent, too, and bars of soap, some new, some open, some still slimy from the showers they were taken from.
And mortal girls?
It seems I still have only the one. And she’s standing right there in the middle of all this loot. She smiles when she sees me and stuffs her hand deeper into
the box of Count Chocula. She blinks—a happy little cat burglar, with a full mouth.
“Isuzu?” I say, pulling my bathrobe more tightly around myself. “Where did all this come from?”
She’s still munching, so she points. Down.
“Downstairs?” I say. “All this came from downstairs?”
She nods. Chews. Reaches for another stale handful.
“Whatis this?” I say, actually shaking both hands in a beseeching gesture I’ve never used with anyone my own height.
Isuzu swallows. “Shopping,” she says.
“ ‘Shopping,’ ” I repeat.
“Window-shopping,” she adds.
And all of a sudden, I can see it.Them. Isuzu and her mom going shopping, holding their own little Daylight Madness sale. Fagen and the Artful Dodger, that’s how I see them, ransacking vampire homes and grocery stores with the help of sunlight, and bricks. Not that they’re not entitled. But…
“Isuzu,” I say, struggling hard to maintain my calm. “I have tolive with these people.”
“They’re not people,” Isuzu says, and I can just imagine the motherly lectures that must have started that way. “They’re vampires.”
“Likeme ?” I point out.
And my Artful Dodger just shrugs. It’s a yeah-sure-whatever shrug. The kind of shrug that says it’s a mortal thing, and I don’t count.
Maybe the handcuffs were a good idea, after all.
Icontinue to not-kill Isuzu.
This is after I’ve locked her in the bathroom. And after I’ve gone downstairs to put in a little face time with my first-floor neighbors, to look shocked and sympathetic regarding their shattered windows and vandalized apartments.
“How is this possible?”
That’s pretty much what they all want to know. And I shake my head with disbelief, but don’t offer any answers. I’ve seen enough cop show reruns to know that once you start offering theories, even a blind man can see you’re deflecting. So, no, I just look at the jagged holes in their plate glass windows and mutter a “Fuck,” with which pretty much everyone concurs.
I also case the various crime scenes, casually, reassuring myself that Isuzu hasn’t left any obvious clues behind, and especially not anything that would tie any of this to me. And there’s nothing, except for the timing, of course, which screams “mortal.” Fortunately, that’s pretty much as good as screaming “Sasquatch,” nowadays. The investigation will focus on trying to figure out how whoever did this made itlook like a mortal did it.
But surely Isuzu and her mom aren’t unique. Surely other mortals have escaped from these “farms” that everyone knows about but no one mentions.
No.
The reason farms are allowed what license they’re allowed is partly the wealth of their well connected clientele, but also absolutely rigid product control. Biological weapons labs weren’t half the sticklers for containment that the farms are. Nobody leaves the farm with their little mortal morsels. No. Everything’s done on a strictly in-call basis. You go to them. You use their rooms, or their hunting preserve. Because the last thing anyone needs is some band of feral mortals running around out there, living in holes at night, ransacking our homes by day, and figuring out the where and when of their getting even with the rest of us. No more vampire hunters. We’ve been there, done that. Won. And the last thing any of us needs is to lose our hard-won peace.
So, no. I just tsk-tsk, shake my head, and leave my neighbors to speculate about how Sasquatch made off with all their stuff. Back at my apartment, I resume not-killing Isuzu, and start laying out a few extra dos and don’ts of non-hole living.
In the end, I treat Isuzu’s haul like a dead bird.
With the exception of the extra pet food, whichwill come in handy, the rest is just stuff I don’t need or want, but which has been presented to me, nevertheless, as a bizarre token of affection. Like a cat bringing its owner something dead. Sure, I’d just as soon she didn’t, but now that she has, I have to admit that this is a good sign. She’s thanking me. She’s bringing me gifts. She’s treating me like an accomplice—just like her mom.
Unfortunately, my switch in perspective doesn’t come until I’ve already started speculating out loud about what I might do to punish her. Isuzu stands her ground, though—a real trouper—but she can’t stop her lip from trembling. She sucks it in, tries to hold it with her blunt little teeth, but it’s no use. And once the trembling starts…
Well, everybody knows that the lip muscles are wired directly to the tear ducts. And so her eyes start getting shiny, start brimming, run over by a single tear’s worth, which snails down her cheek to catch a corner of the trembling lip that started it all. And tears are like oil to the tremble muscles, which tremble more, which squeeze out more tears, more trembles, more tears, more…
And there I am, getting it all wrong.
I’m using a hushed, keep-it-within-these-walls kind of shouting that can be more awful than the louder kind, especially when you’re on the receiving end. And snap! Irealize I’m getting it all wrong. Iunderstand that this—all of this—isn’tabout Isuzu’s being a vampire-hating mortal. It’s not about her being a postinfantile delinquent, either. It’s not even a veiled attempt to get me beaten up by my neighbors and possibly arrested. No. This is about my sunshine, my only sunshine trying to let me know, dear, how much she loves me.
I think.
I hope.
Maybe “loves” is too strong. “Likes,” maybe. But definitelynot “hates.”
That’s what all this is about. It’s about how much Isuzudoesn’t utterly hate my guts. Andthat —you’ve got to admit—thatis definitelysomething.
So I stop yelling. And I start scrambling for a quick route into un-scolding her. If this was before the flip, we’d be on our way to the toy store in a guilty heartbeat. If this was before, we’d go from the toy store to the ice-cream shop, to the candy store, and whatever fast food restaurant served the nastiest, greasiest crap she was forbidden to have under any other circumstances. That’s what I’d do, if this was before. But it’s not. This is the new world, not the old one, and this one isn’t built for assuaging the guilt of bad parents, foster, step-, or otherwise.
It’s as I’m thanking God that my own parents aren’t around to see how badly I’m messing this up that it occurs to me that Isuzu’s mom couldn’t have been perfect. Mistakes must have been made, and she must have had a way of dealing with them. I remember the hole and its Shrine to Chocolate, and wonder how many Snickers something like this would have cost.
I decide to ask her price. After apologizing, of course.
“Isuzu,” I say, letting my voice go back to its normal pitch and volume.
She flinches anyway. Lets go of a few more drops of lip muscle oil.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I…” Fucked? Screwed?Messed! “…messed up.”
Isuzu sucks in a sniffle. She’s listening. Waiting.
“I didn’t get it,” I say. “I thought you were being bad. But I know you were trying to be nice, and I’m sorry I yelled. I’m really,really sorry.”
Isuzu looks at her shoes, but before she does, I catch a little bit of a smile.
And for a split second, I feel conned. I feel reverse-psychologized. But I swallow it down and move on. “Did your mom ever not get it?” I ask.
Isuzu looks back up.
“Did she ever mess up and yell when she shouldn’t?”
And like a last-minute reprieve from the governor, Isuzu rolls those two-toned eyes of hers, and I want to hug her and kiss her and thank her and swear I’ll never do it again. Just that hint of a smile and the eye roll, and I know that Mommy Dearest was at least partly the same kind of fuckup I am.
“So I’m not the only one?” I say, and Isuzu does something in the laugh department she hasn’t done outside of the one pig impersonation I coaxed from her—she snorts. Just once. The nasal equivalent of an eye roll. An olfactory “Are you kidding?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,�
� I say, and she snorts again. And then I ask her what her mom did to make up for messing up. I hold my breath against the near certainty of chocolate.Real chocolate, and not this Count Chocula crap. And if chocolate’s the answer, then it’s going to be Isuzu’s turn to delay gratification. Because even with eBay and FedEx, chocolate’s a few days from here.
But Isuzu doesn’t say “chocolate.” She doesn’t snicker “Snickers.”
Instead, she pulls a deck of cards out from that improbable bounty she’s bestowed upon me. That’s when I notice the other packs, still boxed, lying here and there, shuffled among a stack of books or CDs, or all by themselves. They’re everywhere. As a separate category of stolen things, packs of playing cards are second only to food. Funny I hadn’t noticed that in my original inventory.
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