DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  “Go on?”

  “Perform,” I say. “Say mass. Um, officiate.”

  Father Jack smiles wide enough to actually show fang. If it weren’t for the black eyes and the clown complexion, you almost wouldn’t know Father Jack’s a vampire for as often as he lets his fangs down. Of course, Father Jack’s an old pro at hiding what he really is. Not that it matters much now, but still.

  I like knowing, by the way. I like knowing about Father Jack’s…inclinations.It helps keep me quiet about Isuzu—just in case his being a vampire isn’t enough. Plus, it helps in the holier-than-thou department. Father Jack isn’t holier than anybody. He’s a priest like I’m a blood inspector; we’re both just moonlighting.

  “So, you’re interested in attending a service,” he says, the fangs still denting either end of his smile.

  “For old times’ sake, I was thinking,” I say.

  More smiling. More fang.

  “Jack,” I say. “Turn it down, will ya? I forgot my shades.”

  “Kill me for being happy,” Father Jack says. “Or, wait, no. Not happy.Amused.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s so funny?”

  “You,” Father Jack says. “Could this finally be the mighty Kowalski, admitting he needs a Higher Power to deal with his gambling?”

  “Don’t bet on it,” I say.

  “Cute.”

  “But not like ‘altar-boy cute,’ right?”

  “Touché.”

  “Say,” I say, changing subjects, or getting back to the original one.

  “Yes?”

  “I haven’t been in a while,” I say. “Do people still cross themselves with holy water when they come in?”

  “It’s almost all the same,” Father Jack says. “The holy water. The liturgy. Communion’s a little different, but I’m sure you already know that. The fish are different.”

  “The fish?”

  “The symbol of the early Christians,” Father Jack says. “They’ve monkeyed with it. Now it’s got a little grin with a fang poking out.” Pause. “It looks like a G.D. piranha, but I didn’t get a vote.”

  “Tell me how youreally feel,” I say.

  But Father Jack just goes back to smiling at the prospect of having netted another one. The fangs poke out at either end of his smile. He looks like a goddam piranha but at least he’s a happy one.

  Ifigure it like this: Isuzuis dying, not quickly, but quicker than anybody else I know.And thereis no priest available—nosafe priest, at any rate. So I did it myself. Just like Halloween. Just like the crappy Christmas presents. I baptized Isuzu just before her ninth birthday. I promised God that I’d get something more official done, once it was safe.

  “It’s cold.”

  That’s all Isuzu has to say, as I pour the holy water over her head as she leans over the sink.

  “That’s to remind you of the pain Jesus suffered for us,” I say, making it up as I go along. Just like always.

  “Oh,” she says, gritting her teeth—my brand-new Christian Trooper.

  “Okay,” she adds.

  “From your lips,” I say, making the sign of the cross with my thumb.

  14

  Kid Stuff

  Super Glue and a ten-year-old is a bad combination.

  Ditto, paint and a ten-year-old. Not to mention twine, duct tape, screwdrivers, thumbtacks, rubber bands, idle hands, and guaranteed unsupervised time locked inside, all day, every day. It doesn’t matter that she’s being kept inside for her own good. It doesn’t matter that you’re trying to limit her exposure to germs and your own bad karma. It doesn’t matter how many trees there are out there she could fall out of, breaking God only knows how much, how badly. What matters is that she blames you, and has plenty of time to think about it, because you—you vampire wannabe dad, you—you sleep the same sleep of the dead that all vampires do.

  And so waking up becomes an adventure—especially waking up after punishing Isuzu for some infraction or other. Will I wake to find that my wrists and ankles have been bound together? Or will it be my eyes and mouth that have been duct-taped closed? Will I get most of the way to work before glancing in the rearview mirror to notice the raccoon mask painted around my eyes? Or perhaps the back of my chair will just fall off when I rest against it, sending me tumbling backward while my glass of warm blood splatters against the wall like some shotgun suicide’s P.S.

  Tonight I wake up with my hands glued to my face, one per cheek, bracketing my mouth like some real-life version of Edvard Munch’sThe Scream. Or maybe she was going for the cover of one of thoseHome Alone movies (a birthday present I now regret). The thing is, I haven’t even punished her this time—or rather, I didn’t punish her last night. All I did was refuse to cave in to her latest whim.

  It occurs to me to scream, to yell, to blow my top and read Isuzu the riot act. It occurs to me, too, that she knows I won’t—can’t,really, not with our thin walls and nosy neighbors. The system we’ve worked out to get around this problem is to use a normal voice to say whatever it is we’d like to scream, but snapping our fingers before and after, like quotation marks.

  (Snap.)“Go to your room.”(Snap.)

  (Snap.)“I hate you.”(Snap.)

  That’s how it normally works. Under the current circumstances, however, my fingers are busy getting to know my cheeks better, making the snapping alternative to screaming a bit difficult. Sure, I could rip my hands free, which I’ll have to do eventually, but I’m saving that. And yes, I couldsay the word “snap,” but the word itself and the bone pop of actual snapping fingers are at least an octave apart—an octave in which lies all the difference between “I mean business” and Rice Krispies.

  And so I walk into the living room, my hands still stuck to my face, saying nothing. Isuzu’s lying on the floor with her back to me, coloring, when I find the right floorboard, step on it, and watch her little wing bones tense. The hand she’s holding the crayon with stops, waits. Still saying nothing, I find another squeaky floorboard, and smile to myself when the crayon she’s holding snaps in half.

  I don’t say “snap.” I don’tsay anything. Instead, I walk right up to her, lean forward a little bit, and muss her hair in a friendly, paternal way with the bony knob of my elbow. Her flinch is all I’d hoped for, and more.

  Moving on to the kitchen, I pinch the refrigerator door’s handle between my elbows and pull. The gasp of the door’s rubber gasket underlines all the breath holding going on in the next room. Inside the refrigerator—inside my part of the refrigerator—is blood, bottled, jugged, IV-bagged. Invariably, the surface surrounding the fluid, whether glass or plastic, is smooth. Slippery. Decidedlynot elbow friendly. Well, maybe a pair ofbare elbows might pull it off with a little friction and luck, but mine are swathed in designer silk pajama sleeves. And it’s not as though I can just roll them up. Even gravity’s no help. All gravity does is gather all that slick fabric at the crook of my arm, where it’s least needed.

  No matter. Succeeding is not the measure of success for this particular task. Failing is. Failing as loudly and as messily as possible. And so I go for the glass.

  Isuzu comes running at the sound of the crash, her bare feet stopping short of one of the farther-flung shards. Me, I’m barefoot, too, standing on the other side of all that broken glass and cold blood, hands to cheeks, the gesture finally seeming appropriate to the circumstances. I can practically see her heart beating in her chest. I can definitely see her pulse throbbing in her neck vein, straining against the muscles and strings, swallowing, working very hard at keeping quiet untilI stop being quiet.

  Which I don’t stop doing, even after ripping both hands free of my face, taking a little cheek away with each. The resulting blood sprays out in a mist like a perfume spritzer, the tiny droplets hanging in the air—those that aren’t speckling Isuzu head to foot.

  I have only a second or two before the clotting starts. So I snap my blood-slicked fingers, spraying Isuzu anew. I take a step forward through the broken glass. The next snap
is a little harder, a little stickier, while the third is harder still. I take two more steps through the broken glass. By the fourth, fifth, sixth step the blood is completely dry, and snapping my fingers is a snap again. With my last step, I clear the glass and am standing right next to my daughter, the practical joker.

  The wounds on my cheeks—still stitching themselves together, bright pink—look like clown makeup against my death-pale skin. I look down, she looks up. I grin with every tooth in my head.

  And when Isuzu finally hugs me about the waist, blubbering her muffled apologies into my stomach, I figure I’ve played it just about as well as it can be played.

  Maybe the problem is me.

  I come from a generation that really doesn’t believe in the so-called cry for help. We figure that if a kid is acting like a brat, it’s because he’s a brat and not because he’s nursing some find-me-if-you-can emotional trauma. Half the kids I grew up with were pyros, and the other half were petty thieves. And on Devil’s Night in Detroit, we’d pool our talents, steal some matches, and leave burning bags of dog shit in front of every door we could knock at and run away from. We were kids—that was our explanation. I mean, sure, I was raised Catholic, but that whole part of the Bible about kids being innocent and “Suffer the little children,” yeah,right. Pull the other one.The Lord of the Flies was old news before it was even written. My friends and I were little whooping savages. And we knew this simple fact better than our own names:

  Being bad’s just more fun than being good.

  So, Isuzu’s pranks? Kid stuff. Blowing off steam. I went through the motions of disapproval, but it wasn’t like I could threaten her with being grounded. She already was. Had been pretty much since that first sneeze blew our world apart. If she didn’t deserve to be cut a little slack, who did?

  But then the pranks just stopped.

  There were a few halfhearted attempts after gluing my hands to my face—a couple of thumbtacks that tickled, more than anything else, in my slippers, a bottle of blood with the cap Super Glued on. But after that nothing.

  And then she started doing this thing with her neck. She’d be walking across the apartment, stop, tilt her head back, and then crank it, left, then right, popping vertebrae like knuckles. Other times, she’d complain about her jaw hurting, just under her ears, right where it hinged into the rest of her skull. And sometimes, she said, she could feel the veins at the side of her head. She’d just start thinking about them, and then she couldfeel them, could feel thempulse. After that, it wasn’t too long before she started wondering if her pulse was going too fast or too slow. She’d stare in the mirror, her head tipped slightly, trying to see if she could see the vein in her temple moving the way it felt like it was moving.

  And then there were the movies.The Diary of Anne Frank. The Great Escape. Home Alone. Cool Hand Luke. Birdman of Alcatraz. Anne Frank, again. And again.

  “Izzy,” I say, when Anne’s decided that people are basically good for the third or fourth time, “is there anything you want to talk about?”

  “Huh?” she says, her face lit blue by the screen.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  Shrug.

  “Are you okay?”

  Shrug.

  “I was thinking of setting the apartment on fire.” Pause. “Whaddaya think?”

  Shrug.

  She talks to her socks.

  She talks to them and begins staging hand puppet shows before putting them on her actual feet. And then, one night shestops putting her socks on altogether. She also stops changing out of her pajamas.

  “Why?” she asks, after I ask her the same question.

  “What’s the point?” she adds, clarifying the point.

  The Diary of Anne Frankis a good movie,” Father Jack says, holding on to Judas’s leash. “Lots of people watch it over and over. Sure, six times in one weekis a little much, but I don’t think it’s a sign you’re going crazy.” Pause. “I think it’s a sign you should get out more. Which you’re doing now, by talking to me.”

  Judas stops to take a dump.

  “Do you ever wonder what might happen if Judas ever turned on you?” I ask.

  “Turned?” Father Jack says. “You mean, accidentally became a vampire pooch? How would something like that happen, Marty?”

  “Not that kind of turned,” I say, transposing Judas and Isuzu in my head, trying to keep the pronouns straight. Trying not to let anything slip. “What if he started hating you? You know, started biting or taking a shit in your shoes when you’re asleep.”

  Judas finishes, drags his ass a few feet across somebody’s lawn.

  “Well, I guess I’d start watching for foam,” Father Jack says, eyeing Judas like maybe I know something he doesn’t. “I guess I’d lock my shoes in the closet when I’m asleep.”

  “But what would you do to him?” I ask. “Would you…?” I fake two fangs with crooked fingers in front of my real fangs, mime biting down. Not that I’m thinking about killing Isuzu, or vamping her. It’s just that things are going badly and I don’t know how bad “bad” is going to get. This is the little girl with the bread knife, after all. The little girl who wanted to chain up her own dog for the sun to get.

  Father Jack has stopped, and he’s looking at the leash, crossing the back of his hand. He looks a little sad, like he’d just as soon not talk about what we’re talking about. “Why would I kill my own dog when he’s having trouble?” he says.

  I shrug.

  “Maybe if he was in a lot of pain,” Father Jack goes on. “Maybe if he was suffering and there were no other options.” He squeezes Judas’s shoulder muscles through a handful of fur. “This dog has saved my life on more nights than I can count,” he says. “I couldn’t let him down when he’s doing everything he can to say he needs me.”

  “Biting you is saying he needs you?” I say.

  “If I’m keeping him well fed otherwise,” Father Jack says. “Of course.”

  “And how would you help him?” I ask. “Assuming it’s not rabies or something like that.”

  “I think I might consider finding him a friend,” Father Jack says, after a slight pause. The word “friend” does something to his face, even in profile. Makes it seem more serious. More sad. More in need of a little friendly teasing.

  I think.

  “Not a puppy, I hope,” I say, teasing him with the cross he bears. “You know what they say about owners and their pets,” I add, figuring it’s fair; he teases me about gambling.

  But all Father Jack says is, “Don’t go there,” not in much of a joking mood. He pauses. “I don’t,” he says, tugging at Judas’s leash a little impatiently.

  15

  The Price of Everything

  Avacation.

  That’s what we need. A vacation from everything. A vacation from our lives. This place. This routine. Someplace totally different, where we’re not known, where I wouldn’t have to worry about germs. Someplace where it would be possible for Isuzu to pass.

  Someplace like Fairbanks, Alaska.

  I’ve picked up the brochures. Fairbanks is “the vampires’ Miami.” During the winter, the sun barely pokes its head above the horizon, for maybe three, four hours a day. The rest is glorious night, with stars everywhere and auroras hanging overhead like the ghosts of rainbows. During the winter, the night air fills with the whoops and giggles of vampires living it up—way, way up—past their astronomically imposed bedtime.

  “Say Yes to Fairbanks,” the brochures say, “for Moonlight, Midnight, and More…”

  One of those “mores” is the fog. At forty degrees below zero, the temperature difference between the land and the surrounding air makes the entire landscape steam like an ice cube tray fresh from the freezer. The ice fog gets so thick sometimes even vampire eyes can’t see two feet in front of them. It’s like how I used to imagine purgatory: a place teeming with the souls of the almost lost, each seemingly alone in the crowd, individually wrapped in swirls of blinding, perpetual fog. I�
�ve always liked that idea—the idea of being able to disappear with just a few steps in any direction. And with Isuzu in my life, I like it even more.

  “Hold my hand. Follow me.” Poof!

  Another “more” is coats. In Alaska, even vampires need something to keep them warm. It’s not that we’ll feel cold otherwise. Just the opposite. We won’tfeel anything. We won’t notice that our blood is slowly turning to slush in our veins. It’s like the frog and the boiling water. If you toss a frog in boiling water, it’ll thrash about trying to escape, but if you put it in cold water and raise the temperature slowly, it’ll just sit there, letting you cook its brain.