A cool, premeditated, straight-out vamping is one thing, but complicate that with the kind of sex you haven’t tried in decades and all bets are off. I imagine it like trying to keep two different languages straight—except, in this case, if you slip into French, somebody dies.
So:
“No, you’re right,” I say in English, our shared tongue. “I haven’t noticed,” I add, keeping the laundry list ofwhy s to myself.
The bull-something was bulimia, of course—the good ol’ binge-and-purge, brought to you byVogue, Glamour, and Madison Avenue. The plague of middle-class white girls from way back when, when the zombie paleness of heroin chic was about style, as opposed to simply being a side effect of living the rest of forever in the dark. It was a serious condition, taken seriously, way back when, and if I were a parent from that time with a daughter with these symptoms, I’m sure I’d have her knee-deep in therapists and Happy Meals quicker than rainy days and Mondays could get me down.
But times have changed. Isuzu knows that as well as any of us, because she’s about to change, too. She’s just getting ready. And frankly, it makes sense. If I knew what I know now beforeI got vamped, I’d do the same thing. I’d scarf down as much of the tastable world as I could. But there’s no way I’d be taking all that extra baggage along with me into eternity. Your body’s your greatest entertainment value; it only makes sense to get it in the best shape you can before setting it in stone. Rose herself gave Isuzu that same advice when they first met. Me, I got lucky in the body department. I’d been whipped into shape during basic training, and there weren’t a lot of KFCs or Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for me in Europe during World War II. Not that I haven’t wondered what the big fuss was about. Not that I haven’t wondered what culinary alchemy made Big Macs worth destroying a good chunk of the rain forest over.
Vomiting, it should be stressed, isnot the recommended way to stay slim. Diet and exercise—that’s the preferred method. Finger swallowing might be quicker, but diet and exercise won’t ruin your teeth like regurgitated stomach acid will. Maybethat’s why those sultry models from before tended to show more breastbone than anything resembling a smile.
Before, when vampirism was my secret, I liked to think the reason those cover girls never smiled was because they shared my secret. That’s why they looked out at the world as if they could swallow it whole; that’s why they took such pains to keep their fangs hidden. But then Farrah Fawcett came along with that poster and her grin full of big horse teeth and I started recruiting as many pretty girls to our side as I could find.
Right now, I’m looking across the kitchen table of my home away from home, into the show-nothing eyes of one of my better recruits. I’ve got my hands wrapped around a warm cup of blood and she does, too. We’re wearing white bathrobes, bull’s-eyed and polka dotted with drying blood, our wounds underneath pink and still healing.
“Is it really so…,” I begin. Or continue. This conversation has been joined, already in progress.
“Yes,” Rose says. “Yes, it is.”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“Didn’t need to,” she says. “You were going to ask if it was really so bad for Isuzu to be doing this, once we take dying out of the equation.”
“Well, yeah…”
“And my answer is still yes.”
“But why? I mean, I know about the teeth thing. They’re just going to fall out when her fangs come in.”
Rose points at her forehead.“This,” she says. “This is the part that doesn’t change.”
I don’t get it. I say so.
“The puking’s just a symptom of some really fucked-up ideas,” Rose says. “And right at the top is that things—you, yourself, your body—can bewilled into perfection.”
I chew on that a bit.
“Okay,” I say. “So it sets the hurdle a little high. Maybe a little unrealistic, but eventually…”
“Eventually, you either got help or you died,” Rose says. “I had a friend who…”
And just like that, I know there’s no friend. Just like that, I know Rose’s acting like she forgot the word is a different kind of bull-something.
“…who by any other name would smell as sweet?” I say, filling in what is now, to me, obvious.
Rose blinks those “Don’t ask, don’t tell” eyes. Her shoulders slump, their strings cut. “Yeah,” she says. Sighs. She nods over her cup of blood, staring at her reflection staring back. “Gotta love the irony, huh?”
Isuzu is in the bathroom. Again. Still. She doesn’t know I’ve sawed partway through the bolts in the hinges, that what looks solid from the outside is really hanging on by a thread. She doesn’t know that her entire world is waiting for her on the other side of the door—me, Rose, Twit—all crouching, ready to pounce, to intervene, to save her from whatever thread she’s hanging by.
Rose is the one with her ear to the door and her finger in the air, instructing us to hold back. She’s waiting for the sound of the faucet because she’s guessing Isuzu’s using the sink. The rule on toilets is the same as it’s been since I brought Isuzu home—no flushing after dark. It hasn’t been a problem; Isuzu’s the only one who uses the thing, and she’s always been good about making sure the lid’s down and the window’s open just a crack. But Rose says even as bad a noticer as me would have noticed a toilet routinely filling up with vomit. And so here we crouch, straining to hear the sound of another borrowed meal swirling down the drain.
Isuzu doesn’t hum, doesn’t sing. Never has. If it weren’t for the occasional cabinet door opening, or the tick of a bottle being placed back on something porcelain, you’d hardly know anyone was in there. And then…
A squeak. A gush.
Rose drops her finger. I yank the door free from its breakaway hinges…
And there’s my little girl, bent over the sink, finger halfway down her throat, looking for that magical Reset button. She turns and sees us, all ganged up and waiting for her in a suddenly open doorway. And whether it’s the shock or the sight, I don’t know, but Isuzu begins vomiting right then and there. It spills through the impromptu cage of her fingers, all over the floor, a veritable cornucopia of exotic foods that must have cost a small fortune.
But…whose? How?
These are rhetorical questions. Unfortunately.
Unfortunately, I know everything I need to know within seconds of seeing Isuzu. She wasn’t expecting us to barge in and was naked when we did. To check herself in the mirror, I guess—to weigh herself without having to subtract clothing. She was naked and I saw it all, but most important, I saw her legs. Her thighs. And the constellation of scar tissue dotting them, the dots always coming in pairs, one dot always just a hungry grin away from its partner.
My little Isuzu, my little binge-and-purging little girl.
Apparently, there were vampire friends neither I, nor Rose, nor Twit knew anything about.
Yeah. Right. “Friends.”
Or clients. Nibblers. Dabblers. Pay-per-sippers. They didn’t drain. They didn’t vamp. Theysampled —merely, politely—and with more restraint than I would have thought possible. I’d heard of such things—such practices—but didn’t really believe them. It seemed vaguely un-American. Some inexplicable Asian fad, like karaoke, maybe, or seafood dishes that’d kill you if the chef got them just the tiniest bit wrong. Something that’s as much about philosophy as it is eating.
Well, I guess there are a lot more vampires with a lot more self-control than I was willing to give them credit for. Not counting myself, of course—or the two other abstainers standing next to me, ready to deal with a whole other crisis than the one I’ve just found.
Twit and Rose haven’t noticed Isuzu’s thighs, by the way. Not yet. Instead, their attention has been captured by all the half-chewed nostalgia puddling at their feet.
“Is that a…?”
“My God, I haven’t…”
“Where the hell did you…?”
“When I was a kid—I mean areal ki
d—those used to be…”
All of us, it seems, have managed to get ourselves off point. We were supposed to be confronting Isuzu about her bulimia. That’s what I was prepared for. That’s what I was thinking about, prying up the bolts, sawing through them, tapping them back.
Now I’d give anything for something as simple as an eating disorder.
I’m not prepared to deal with a daughter whose been selling her blood by the pint.
“Where’d you find pineapple?” I say, joining Twit and Rose on their wade down memory lane while Isuzu pulls a towel around herself.
“Well I’ll be…”
“Sure, it’s a little gross, but…”
“What I wouldn’t give,” I begin, and then regret it immediately. I can’t stop my brain from doing the math. Everywhere I look, the ticker in my head ticks, tallying up what this mess must have cost, translating it into fangs nipping at those tender young thighs, hidden now by terry cloth, but still klieg-lit in my imagination. How did she charge? By the ounce? By the second?
Vampires—as a rule—do not blush.
Vampires—as a rule—do not get red in the face.
Volcanoes, of course, spend most of their geologic livesnot erupting. It’s just every now and then, when the conditions are right, when the tectonics are all pushing in the right direction and the magma begins to rise…well, it just can’t be helped.
“Jesus, Marty, what’s wrong?”
It’s Twit. She’s skewered something on the end of something and has turned around to gross me out, the mischievous grin already stitched on her face—when she gets a look atmy face and stops dead. Rose and Isuzu look, too. Their faces confirm it. There’s something wrong with me.
“What?” I ask.
Isuzu grabs a mirror and hands it to me.
Jesus…
I look like the top of an old-fashioned thermometer. Not the mercury kind, the other. The kind with the red stuff inside and a little glass bulb at the end. My face looks like that bulb.
“Marty?” Rose says, trying to catch my eyes. And I can feel each dot of that hanging ellipsis, am staring over the cliff of that dangling question mark.
Without saying a word, I flick up the minimum amount of terry cloth necessary to show this snapshot:
Thigh. Scars.
I aim my face at Rose’s face and push it just a touch forward. A gesture meant to mean:Get it. Put it together. And—maybe—help me with this.
Rose’s eyes say,Oh, followed by her mouth mouthing the same thing. And then—just in case I had any worries about Rose’s feelings toward Isuzu—all the borrowed blood in her starts rising to her cheeks.
I nod.
She nods.
Okay—that’s what our nods mean.
Plan B.
Apart of me is relieved.
Obviously, I’ll have to kill the bastards who did this. And it’s a relief to have an excuse for murder again. Killing is something I can do. I know how it works. I’m comfortable with it. Sure, the newer parts of my brain—the nonlizard parts—know that murder is wrong, and I’ve spent a lot of time forcing the rest of my nervous system to go along with that understanding. Usually. For the most part. Therewas that one time-out to dispose of Clarissa’s killers, but…
But domestication doesn’t come free.
Before the change, there was a theory about where allergies come from, and why, despite advances in health care and pollution control, allergies and asthma were on the rise. The theory was, absent anything better to do, the immune system turns on itself. I think that’s what it’s been like with me and murder. When I’m not hunting, my brain goes after itself, making me paranoid, anxious, overprotective. And what has this paranoia, anxiety, and overprotectiveness gotten me? A daughter who’s a blood whore.
So maybe this will all work out. A few murders will do us all a world of good. All I need now is some names.
But back to Plan B.
What, you may wonder,is Plan B?
According to Rose, this:
Take my little angel and knock her to the bathroom floor. Take my little darling and sit on her chest. Pull a switchblade dipped in some industrial-strength anti-coagulant, and mutter, “Fess up, bitch,” followed by what the switchblade already implies, “…or die.”
Rose apparently has been looking for an excuse to let the lizard off the leash, too. And though I don’t think Dr. Spock would approve of her methods, I do have to admit their effectiveness.
“It’s not how it looks,” Isuzu blurts.
Yeah, right. Pull the other one.
Rose teases out just a bead of blood. Isuzu winces.
“Fuck,” Isuzu says, biting into the word with her blunt human teeth. “You,” she adds, followed by, “I’m no blood tramp. I love him. He loves me. He does me favors. It’s…”
It’s not a cash business, she wants to say. And in her position, I’d want to say the same thing. Except I don’t know the fanged dick owner behind that tiny little pronoun “him.” I don’t know if certain “favors” have a fixed cash value.
I nod. Twit agrees. Rose does, too.
And another bead of blood gets teased out, after which Isuzu becomes a string of numbers. Phone. Pager. Address. Email. License plate. Whatever. ID. Identification. The collection of unique letters and numbers that sum up to this so-called him.
“Call him,” Isuzu demands. “He’s cool. We’re cool. We have an…”
And we’re all waiting for it. I, as would-be parent. Rose, as would-be parent’s would-be partner. And Twit, as would-be friend, the one excluded from the tightest, most important circle, the friend lied to by not being confided in.
“…understanding,”Isuzu concludes.
And that’s all it takes to squash a little bug named Antoinette.
Twit’s face crumples and she throws something invisible down. She mutters a “Fuck you,” and then runs away as fast as her stubby little legs will take her.
I look at Rose, and she looks at Isuzu. Shrug. Shrug.
We all look at the Twit-shaped hole left where Twit used to be.
My first thought is that Isuzu has become one of those people who think soap operas are real, and treat the characters like members of their own family. My second thought is that it serves me right, making her a prisoner, limiting her contact with others to this claustrophobic little circle of ours. My third thought is that the scars are self-inflicted. If I recall correctly, the same middle-class white girls who used to starve themselves to death also had a tendency to cut themselves, even before it was sexy—little test cuts, to get attention, or to get ready for that last, big cut.
I’m thinking all this, by the way, because Isuzu has just led Rose and me into the living room and switched on the TV as a way of introducing us to this boyfriend she has an understanding with. Little Bobby Little ofThe Little Bobby Little Show. The word “live” floats in the upper right-hand corner, and, below it, Little Bobby Little—six, maybe seven—working so hard at being cute, it’s like his life depends on it. Which, according to Isuzu, it does.
Ordid.
Isuzu points at the word “live,” says, “Bullshit.”
Little Bobby Little is all grown up now. Bobby—Robert—was vamped when he turned twenty, and they’ve got tape of his whole life right up until that point, though they’ll probably never broadcast anything past his thirteenth birthday. Not on network TV, at least.
“Too much jerking off,” she explains, before going on to explain that the masturbation tapesare available—for pay, online, under the titleCrankin’ It Big Time with Jimmy Biggs. They’ve also got tapes devoted to his bowel movements, in which he’s known as Gomer Pyles, and footage in which acne is the unifying theme, where he’s credited as Johnny Zitz.
“ ‘Fetishistic nostalgia,’ ” Isuzu says, quoting her multiple-personality boyfriend. “His life’s been edited down to smaller and smaller subcategories of vampire porn.”
Yeah, yeah. Right. Boo-hoo. That still doesn’t change the fact tha
t this swinging dick’s been bleeding my little girl. Literally.
And then there was Billy “the Bull” Lima.
“They were going to call him Andy Rexia, or maybe Benji Purger, but…”
DSosnowski - Vamped Page 31
