They’re wired, these coats we wear in Alaska. That’s because we don’t have any body heat that can be trapped to make a regular coat work. Trying to keep us warm without a little electrical help is like trying to heat a rock by wrapping it in a blanket.
On the plus side, being wired for heat lets us see our own breath again. It’s a little thing, this breathing steam, but it’s one of those things that’s become a symbol of our being alive, back before we were simply not-dead. Seeing your own breath again, for a vampire, is like some old guy’s first hit of Viagra.
So let’s add it up. Easy invisibility? Coats and fog breath no longer causes for suspicion? Plus an average outside temperature that kills more germs than Listerine ever did, back before everybody’s breath smelled like a rusty old can?
Yep, I’m thinking vacation. That’s what Isuzu and I need. A vacation from everything.
Ibuy her parka from the Screamer department at JCPenney, the down pillows from Coffin, Crypt, and Beyond. All it takes to get the wires out is a good tug, but getting the feathers in? That’s another story—especially after Isuzu plops down on top of an open pillow, poofing a small blizzard of plumage across the room.
“Hey, Pops,” she says in this slow, too-deep, rusty-hinge voice she’s started using. Just in case I haven’t noticed she’s depressed. Just in case I haven’t heard her cry for help. “What’s up?”
I sputter a feather away before saying, “The price of everything.” That’s half of a joke my father used to love. The other half is, “Even the price of down is up.”
Isuzu’s chewing a rubber grape, yet another weird habit she’s developed lately. There’s a hole on one end where the grape was once attached to a rubber vine. She can make the thing smack and pop like bubble gum and frequently does because she knows it bugs me. Other times, she gets it stuck to the end of her tongue and then exposes it to me, just for the fun of rattling her old man.
She does the latter now, and I snatch it off with a quick pop.
“Nasty cold sore you got there,” I say. “You should see somebody about that.”
“Yeah, right,” she says, pulling another from a pocket in her pajamas. “But seriously,” she says, smacking away again, “watcha doin’?”
“Me?” I say. “I’m getting ready for a little vacation.”
Isuzu looks like I’ve just slapped her. She stops chewing. As much as she loves bugging me, I’m still all she’s got. And it’s clear from the expression on her face that the idea of me leaving for any length of time scares the hell out of her.
“Where…,” she begins. “Wh-wh-where you going?”
Oh, Ido love this section of the parent-hood. The part where I get to torture the sprout with impunity. I let it last a little longer.
“Fairbanks,” I say.“A-K.”
“Jeezus.”
“Language!”
“Sorry,” Isuzu says. Pauses.“Alaska?”
“Twenty-hour nights, kiddo,” I say, brushing away a few feathers that have settled on my shoulders. “Serious party town.” I pause before adding, “Woo-hoo!” along with the fist pump of a much younger vampire.
Isuzu’s eyes say,Who are you and what have you done with Martin?
Her lips decide to plagiarize the sentiment. “Whoare you…,” she begins.
“Why don’t you see if this fits?” I say, shaking out the parka and stirring up a brand-new blizzard.
Isuzu’s eyes say,Mine! Mine! All mine! Or something to that effect.
“Are you kidding?” is what her lips actually say, using her regular voice, not the depressed, rusty-hinge one.
“Nope.”
“You’re for serious taking me with you?” She says this with an excitement and urgency I haven’t seen in way too long.
So I pause before answering, letting her wait. Letting her stew. I give her parka another shake, smile, and let the duck feathers drift down around us, like easy puns.
One thing that’s gotten worse since the change is flying. Not the service—the service was always pretty bad—but the fares. One of the fringe benefits of being a vampire was you always got the cheapest fares because you always flew the red eye. Now, the red eye’s all there is, and you end up paying extra to offset the money the airlines are “losing” by not meeting their prechange profit levels.
Okay, I’ll admit that the logistics of flyinghave gotten a lot more complicated. For example, something as simple as flying east to west demands the sort of rigid adherence to schedules that, frankly, most airlines aren’t known for. Depending on the time of year, a plane leaving from New York and bound for Los Angeles might as well not take off if it misses its departure by as little as a half hour. Not that the flight itself takes all night, but flying time alone is not the only thing you have to squeeze into your sun-free window. You also have to factor in the time it takes the passengers to get to and from the airport on both ends of the flight, the time for baggage check-in and collection, the time it takes security to humiliate every third person in line, et cetera, et cetera. Throw a monkey wrench into that and the friendly skies start looking not so friendly, with planes landing on autopilot full of crispy critters.
On the upside, hotels in and around airport hubs have seen their business rise dramatically. Seeing as the only safe way to fly from coast to coast during the shorter nights of the year is to take off and land a couple of times over a couple of nights, any place with a room to rent is bound to make out. As an example, our trip to Fairbanks took four nights and three hotels. The only real problem we ran into was the toilet situation. Food I handled the way I usually do by making a run to the nearest pet store. But my food processor’s bathroom needs called for a little creativity with the sink I’m pretty sure the Red Roof people wouldn’t approve of.
As far as Isuzu’s mortality goes, I’ve got that covered. On her hands, she wears gloves; on her head, sunglasses and gauze à la Claude Rains inThe Invisible Man. On the morning before our departure, I make an exception to the no-outside rule and have Isuzu burn some of the leftover feathers.
“Get them going good and smoky,” I tell her.
I tell her to take the clothes she’ll be wearing, including the gloves and a whole roll of surgical gauze.
“Let it soak in good,” I tell her.
“This smells like shit,” Isuzu says later, as I’m mummying her head in smoky gauze.
“It smells like what it is,” I say. “Burnt protein.”
“Yeah,” Isuzu says. “Like I said.”
In the taxi, at the gate, at baggage claim, all I have to say over and over is one vampire-chilling word to stifle any further conversation:
“Sunburn.”
The word goes through them like an electrical shock. They shake it off, but then they get a good whiff, and begin twitching all over again.
On the plane, we’re offered extra servings of plasma by a stewardess who can’t stop touching her lips, her throat, her lips.
A Screamer andthis, too —that’s what they’re thinking.
Botched suicide—that’s what they’re adding, inside their tsk-tsking heads.
In Seattle they’re going through an unanticipated cold snap, and I notice the wisps of fog leaking through Isuzu’s bandages as soon as we hit the sidewalk to hail a cab to our hotel.
“Oh, Jesus,” I gasp. “Not again,” I add, patting Isuzu down frantically, while half a dozen baggage handlers look at their shoes.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Isuzu mutters.
“Only a little bit,” I whisper back, pinching an imaginary seed.
The automatic doors part and there it is—Fairbanks, Alaska, at five in the afternoon local time, the sunset already hours old, a sky-sized curtain of blue-green light fluttering and flickering in a ghost breeze from outer space.
“Wow!” Isuzu says, craning her mummied head skyward, her breath smoking out of her like the exhaust of the dozen or so taxis idling curbside.
Me, I’ve been holding my breath for a mi
nute or so, waiting for this moment. As the doors slide closed behind us, I purse my lips and blow. A pencil thin stream of vaporous white trickles out. I blow again, harder, and more fog follows, thicker, a bit longer lived.
“Ha!” I bark, so pleased with myself it’s almost embarrassing.
Even with the bandages and her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, I can tell Isuzu’s making her “big whup” face.
“Well,” I say, “how ’bout this?” I wiggle my tongue as I blow, and the stream comes out rippled and wavy. I extend my gloved hands in a ta-da! “Pretty good, huh?”
Isuzu shrugs.
Okay. Okay. I thumb down the thermostat on the collar of my parka until my own breath disappears.
“Breathe out as hard as you can,” I say, and Isuzu does. Sucking her secondhand fog into the now-cold chamber of my mouth, I try to remember my army days, back when tobacco was the fifth essential food group. I shape my mouth from memory, hoping the addition of fangs won’t throw the whole thing off. And then I puff out once, fast, as a halo of cold steam slips past my pursed lips. It wavers in the air, traveling outward, growing bigger for a second or two before breaking apart.
Isuzu’s applause sounds like a teddy bear being mugged—a barrage of hasty muffled thuds from her mittened hands. “Cool,” she says.
I bow and do it again on the rise up. Another teddy bear gets smacked around. I switch my collar back up and begin leaking my own steam again.
And then we notice it.
A pole.
A pole sticking up out of a drift of snow, the snow itself as red as a double-cherry Slurpee. There’s no flag, no red-and-white barber stripes.
“Is that the North Pole?” Isuzu asks.
“Doubtful,” I say, not sure exactly what it is. The pole itself is some sort of metal—steel, maybe, or more likely aluminum. Little pink bits of something dot the frosty metal, ringing it at three feet, five feet, followed by a half dozen rings between five and six feet, and a few more above that. Behind the pole is a digital thermometer, proudly declaring a bright red minus forty-two. And in front of the pole, wearing a parka plugged into a car battery and holding a camera between gloved hands in his lap, an industrious citizen of Fairbanks sits in a lawn chair. At his feet is a cash-leaking strongbox, and a sign reading, simply: “Get it over with,” followed by the cost of getting it over: “$5.00 (U.S.).”
“That’s not,” I say, remembering all the times I’d been dared to lick a flagpole during the winters of my youth.
“Oh yes it is,” our Alaskan entrepreneur smiles. “I can do wallet, eight-by-ten, and postcard. Postcard’s real popular. I got stamps, too.”
Isuzu fingers the first pink ring through her mitten. “What is it?” she asks.
Our businessman sticks out his tongue, points at it, and winks.
Isuzu tilts her swaddled head slightly, processing the information for a few seconds. Then: “Gross!” she says, pulling her hand away as if the pole itself is electrified. “You…” And she almost says it. Almost says, “You…vampires,”but stops, changes direction. “…havegot to be kidding.”
“Hey,” the pole guy says, raising both hands as if in surrender. “It’s just something to do. It heals right back. And then you get to go home knowing a little bit of you’s stayin’ right here.” Pause. “Helluva lot less painful than leavin’ your heart in San Francisco.”
“Maybe next time,” I say, scooting Isuzu out of eavesdropping range before placing my hands on her shoulders and aiming her once again at the Northern Lights.
“Remember,” I whisper, to the head underneath the bandages. “You get to pick what you remember.”
Isuzu strains to look back over her shoulder, before whispering in return: “Not if it’s on a postcard.”
They don’t make white greasepaint anymore. Either that, or maybe they just don’t sell it in Fairbanks. Red, sure. Black, sure. Blue, green, yellow…purple, even, but no white. Vampire clowns—Caucasianvampire clowns—really don’t need a base coat; they can manage just fine au naturel. Which is why I’m in Walgreens, buying Vaseline, chalk, and too many bottles of Wite-Out.
“You must make a lot of mistakes,” the clerk says.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I admit.
Back at our hotel room, I dab, pour, crush, stir. I experiment on my forearm, mixing by sight as Isuzu looks on.
“Way too white,” she says.
“Your opinion is very important to us,” I say in a mechanical voice. “Please hold.”
“No, for real, Marty,” Isuzu insists. “I’ll look whiter than Vanilla Ice.”
Have I mentioned that Isuzu’s gotten stuck on a 1980s music jag? She’s been downloading stuff off the Internet—MC Hammer, Milli Vanilli, Mr. Ice. And me, I’m seriously thinking of nominating the inventor of headphones for sainthood—or at very least a Nobel Peace (and quiet) Prize.
“Listen, kiddo,” I say. “When we’re trying to fool two-tone eyes, you can be the judge. But for now, I think I’ve got a better handle on how vampires are going to see things.”
She looks down at my arm, and then up to meet my eyes. She changes subjects. “So, do I get to swear?”
“Yes,” I say. “Just for now. Just in public.”
“And I can shout?”
“It’ll be expected.”
“Cool.”
“No,” I correct. “Sad.” Pause. “But that’s just how things are nowadays.”
“Pretty shitty, huh?”
“Save it,” I warn.
But Isuzu just smiles. This is going to be like Halloween for her—without the candy, but with all the “Fuck yous” she’s been piling up, finally let loose at the top of her lungs.
There comes a time in the life of every father when he gets a little frightened of his child. And even though I’ve had a few of those moments already, Isuzu keeps bringing me more. Like this, for instance:
We’re walking through the mall with the other tourists, Isuzu in her ad hoc greasepaint, fake fangs, dark glasses. I stop to take a sip from the blood fountain, and Isuzu just zooms in on this poor guy in a Hawaiian shirt.
“WATCH WHERE YOU’RE WALKING, YOU SHIT-FOR-BRAINS MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A BITCH!”
That’s my little girl, exploding. The words bang against the high ceiling and ricochet around the enclosed courtyard. Every bloodsucker in the place freezes. Watches. It’s not like they haven’t seen this sort of thing before. They just always stop and watch every time.
The guy in the Hawaiian shirt looks around nervously, smiles, shrugs. Everybody understands. Everybody’s glad it’s him and not them.
“KEEP ON SMILING, MOTHERFUCKER,” Isuzu screams. “I’LL SUCK THOSE EYES OUT OF YOUR MOTHERFUCKING SKULL AND USE ’EM FOR PING-PONG BALLS, I SWEAR TO—”
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Hawaii pleads. “I didn’t see you…”
“FUCKING RIGHT, YOU DIDN’T,” Isuzu continues, her voice starting to break from the strain of using a register it’s never used before. “LISTEN, DICKHEAD, IF I WANTED YOUR FOOTPRINT IN MY BACK—”
“Excuse us,” I say, swooping in, clamping my hand over Isuzu’s mouth, trying not to smear her makeup. “She’s—”
“Obviously,” the Hawaii guy says, only too happy to wash his hands of the matter. “Understood.” He practically runs away, a blur of pasty white skin, hyacinths, and green parrots.
Isuzu bites the inside of my hand.
“Son of a bitch,” I snap. The crowd that stopped for Isuzu now stops again for me. I wave a healing but still bloody hand in reassurance. “Nothing to see here,” I say. “Continue as you were. Mill. Disperse.”
I return my hand to Isuzu’s mouth, this time to stop her from giggling. “ ‘Mill. Disperse,’ ” she mumbles, making my fingers vibrate, followed by her warm, wet tongue, looking for gaps to poke itself through.
“Very funny,” I whisper. “Iknow I said you could swear, but where the hell were you raised? A truck stop? No, no, wait. A truck stop next to a navy base next to a…�
�
I don’t finish. I don’t finish because the back of my hand is getting wet. The sideopposite Isuzu’s tongue, which seems to have stopped. Instead, I can feel her swallowing underneath my fingertips—over and over again. I look at the back of my hand, at the shiny fresh trails of sudden tears.
“Izzy?” I whisper. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Isuzu shakes her head. Swallows again.
Finally:
“What if she calls?” she sobs. “She won’t know where we are.”
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