DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  “Purger” sounded too much like “perjure,” and allusions to anorexia were not strictly accurate. It was the binging part of the tapes that appealed to those vampires nursing that particular sense of loss. And they ate it up, watching “Billy” shoveling it in, saying their bon voyages to the gustatory world by proxy. The purging scenes were implied in the cut made for this audience, just like the sex scenes from my childhood, replaced with waterfalls, fireworks, trains barreling through tunnels.

  It wasBilly that Isuzu met online.Billy who knew what it was like to know about all the losses that were coming.Billy who’d been there, done that, could sympathize, facilitate, and advise.

  And it was Bobby who knew what it was like to live in a world as both pet and meat, to be held captive for your own good, to play at playing, to simulate childhood in self-defense.

  It’s both of them—Billy, Bobby—I feel like killing now, for what they’re making me, in retrospect.

  “How?” I begin. “When?”

  “Twit,” Isuzu says.

  I don’t understand and say so. Isuzu explains.

  “I’d say Twit was coming over while you were, you know,” she says. “And it was true, every other time. And then two for every one, and then three. The true part just kept getting smaller until it kinda disappeared.”

  Just like Twit, just now. It seems my little girl is taking after her father, after all—at least in the disposable friendship department.

  “Did Twit know she was your cover?” I ask, already knowing the answer, or at least thinking I do.

  “I don’t think so,” Isuzu says, honestly puzzling over it. “Shedid start getting suspicious, though.”

  “Wanting to know why you weren’t seeing her anymore,” I say, guessing aloud.

  “More like why was it always theleft leg with us,” Isuzu says. She inches up a bit of terry cloth, exposing the leg in question. More paired puncture wounds, just a grin apart. Just asmaller grin apart…

  And just like that, my heart wraps itself around the axle, and the brakes won’t work. I turn toward Rose, looking for help from my intended, my anchor, my beloved, my…

  …God!

  She just looked away!

  My heart’s pumping nothing but poison, now. Poison. And pictures. And just one question:

  “Youknew ?” This is me, to Rose.

  And Rose, to me: “You mean you didn’t? Jeesuz, Marty. What did you think they were doing? Playing with dolls?”

  Um. Well. Kinda.

  “Um,” I say. “Well…”

  “Just grow up, already.”

  27

  Emergency Sex

  Twit isn’t a last-waver.

  She’s tasted the blood of fear, the sweet juice of mortal panic. So it isn’t curiosity—at least not about that. Plus, they knew each other, and neither was in a position to terrorize the other. A threatening gesture would be viewed as a joke. Trust me; I know.

  What I haven’t factored in, accounted for, or even imagined is that love can flavor blood just as well as fear. Love, affection, honest, wholehearted trust, honestly felt in the face of potentially dangerous acts—these make themselves known in the bloodstream as well as the face, the word, the casual gesture.

  “ ‘It tastes like a kiss on the forehead,’ ” Rose says, quoting Twit. She does this to explain, to excuse. She doesn’t know that the description alone is breaking my heart all over again.

  “I see,” I say, biting my lip, betrayed by my own blood this time, trickling down my chin for a second or two before the wound heals.

  “Don’t be that way,” Rose whispers, cupping the back of my neck, pulling my forehead to her forehead.

  “What way’s that?” I ask, pulling back.

  Isuzu’s gone at the moment, having left through the door I opened for her. It’s cold outside and her breath will show, but I’m cold inside, too—colder than even a few minutes ago—and I’m finding it hard to care. And anyway, she’s taken a cell phone. Bobby or Jimmy or Dickie—whoever the fuck he is—will be at the front door of our building, will honk twice, will hold the passenger door open as Isuzu runs, holding her breath, wearing her dark glasses. They’ll drive off into the moonset.

  Rose looks me in the eye and the way she’s got her mouth set, I swear, it’s almost as ifshe’s mad atme.

  “Listen,” she says, cupping me behind the neck again, but squeezing this time. Hard. Angry. She fixes those black holes on me. “Girls have sex,” she says, her teeth gritting, her hand squeezing harder. “They suck. Dick. Blood. They eat. And if they’re very lucky, they’re eaten in return.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “No. I do,” Rose insists. “I think I do.” She pauses, then goes on. “They let people you know and people you’ve never heard of do things you don’t want to know about for whatever goddam reason they feel like. Even if it’s dangerous. Even if it’s stupid, because, you know, it’s their choice.”

  “You really don’t…”

  “Shut up,”Rose snaps, before going on, talking to me like the idiot I’m starting to feel like. “But the one thing they don’t do is tell their fathers about any of this. And you know why?”

  “They don’t want to get smacked into next Tuesday?”

  “No,” Rose says. “It’s because theylove their fathers. And theyunderstand their fathers. And theydon’t want tohurt their fathers, like you’re hurting now.”

  Where do women get this? Is it from some book? Can it be rounded up and burned?

  “Remember when you asked me how many partners I’ve had?”

  I nod.

  “Remember what I said?”

  “Mind my own business?”

  “After that.”

  “ ‘None,’ ” I say. “You said, ‘None…that matter now.’ ”

  “Exactly,” Rose says. “I’m not into torture, and neither is Isuzu. And some things are best left unsaid.”

  I pause. Nibble my lip. Open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.

  “There were enough to torture me with?” I ask, zeroing in with deadly accuracy on what matters most—my ego. “There werethat many?”

  And I can’t say for sure, but from the way the light swims over the blackness of Rose’s eyes, I’d swear she’s rolling them.

  Rose and I have never done it in my real apartment before, but we have to now. It’s emergency sex. It’s the sex you have because if you don’t, in twenty-four hours you start to stop being a couple. Oh, you don’t fall apart all at once, but you start to. The little seeds of resentment fall into the sidewalk crack, and pretty soon, the pavement splits open, the potholes form, the bumpy ride gets going in earnest.

  By the way, if someone interrupts you during emergency sex, it goddam better be an emergency.

  “Did you hear that?” Rose asks, though somewhat muffled, thanks to the proximity of my neck to her mouth.

  “Huh?”

  But before she can repeat herself, I hear it too. A knock. A strangely bass knock, the knock of someone knocking at a particularly low point on the door.

  “Twit,” we say together and—perhaps because it rhymes—“shit…”

  I sigh, heal, pull on a robe. Pad barefoot from the bedroom, through the living room, to the front door.

  “We were fucking, Twit,” I say, throwing open the door. “What do you want?”

  But it’s not Twit.

  It’s Isuzu, on all fours, a hand cupped to her neck. Blood is spilling between her fingers, tracking back down the hall, staining the walls here and there with the shape of what are really very small hands. Very delicate. Very ladylike. Very…dying…hands.

  “Christ…”

  “Help…”

  “Jesus…”

  “Me…”

  “Tell Twit we were fucking,” Rose calls from the bedroom.

  “It’s…,” I try, pulling Isuzu inside, pushing the door closed. “It’s not…,” I try again, clicking through a half dozen dead bolts.

  “It’s notwhat ?�
�� Rose demands, striding into the living room, defiantly naked, displaying what our presumed rude intruder will never have. It doesn’t take her long to recognize her mistake. “Holy shit!” she blurts. She’s at Isuzu’s side even before all the syllables have gotten out. “What the hell happened?” As if it isn’t already obvious, save for the particulars of how and who.

  “He wasn’t home,” Isuzu says. “He didn’t answer his phone.”

  “Here,” Rose says. “Squeeze here.” She pinches my fingers to the gash before leaving and returns with a needle and thread. As she works to close the wound, something she’s apparently done before, I notice what at first I take to be a particularly hideous broach clinging to Isuzu’s sweater. Upon closer inspection, I realize my mistake. Broach, no. Ear, yes. I flick up a wing of her hair, first on the left, and then on the right. Check. Check.

  “Well, at least you got yourself a souven…” I pause. Clear my throat.“…ear,” I say, plucking the awful thing from her sweater, checking the torn edges for signs of reconstitution. It doesn’t usually happen with pieces this small, but every so often you can grow something useful out of what’s left. And sure enough, there’s some fresh flesh spreading out from where the ear leaves off, dough white, a little clammy. It occurs to me that I should put it in a bucket with some blood, maybe grow us a little police sketch of the perpetrator.

  “Can you identify him?” I ask.

  “Her,” Isuzu manages.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I say, squeezing the damned thing in my hand until all the juice runs out.

  “I’m trying to work here,” Rose reminds us, tugging another stitch tight.

  “Sorry…”

  “Sorry…”

  “Shshshsh…”

  Her.”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘her.’ The person who attacked you. She wasn’t a him. She was a her.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “What’sthat supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Isuzu says. “Just hmmm.”

  “Can you describe her?” I ask.

  “Why?”

  Hmmm. I would have guessed that was a straight-up yes-or-no question. Guess not.

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why do you want to know what she looks like?”

  “Because, you know,” I say. “So I can…”

  “Teach Twit a lesson,” Rose says, making us both turn.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How’d you…?”

  “I’m just wondering how the little freak got anywhere near your neck.”

  “She caught me by surprise with a head butt to the stomach, and when I doubled over, she just sort of clamped on,” Isuzu says. “But how’d you know?”

  “I’m the one who sewed you up,” Rose says. “And those bite marks were too small to come from a full-grown anything.” Rose pauses to take a drag off an imaginary cigarette, something she hasn’t done since our first few dates together. She exhales a plume of imaginary smoke.

  “Plus, you did the bitch dirt. She had to get even somehow.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Isuzu says. “You know that, right?”

  Sure. Okay,I think, and it’s like my brain’s the remote control for Rose’s mouth.

  “Sure. Okay,” she says, using the exact same “You’re so full of shit” tone I was thinking.

  No, really,I think, aiming this one at Isuzu, who chimes in on cue.

  “No, really,” she says.

  I look at Rose, blink, think:Bitch. I look at Isuzu, blink, think:Über bitch. Mega bitch. Bitch and a half.

  “Yeah,” Rose sighs, instead. “Yeah, I know.”

  She gives Isuzu’s shoulder a good-natured shake as Isuzu winces, and cups a hand to her freshly sewn wound.

  “Human, here,” she says, through gritted teeth. “Human still in pain here…”

  “Oh jeez,” Rose says, pressing her fingers to her lips. “I’m sorry.”

  “I keep forgetting how long you guys take to heal,” she adds, making a point of looking right at me.

  Isuzu’s wounds are messy, but not life-threatening—orafterlife -threatening, for that matter. But they get me thinking. Until tonight, I always imagined that I’d be the one to vamp her when the time came—thatI’d be the first and only one to taste her mortal blood. I imagined it tenderly, like a father-daughter moment on the daughter’s wedding day. There’d be advice, the rules she already knew, the lists of things she no longer had to fear, now that she was no longer prey. I’d use the inside of her wrist—neutral territory, but territory always visible to the owner, the last scar her body would ever know, a constant reminder of yours truly, her more-or-less dad. Her father-in-blood, if not her blood father, the one she got her new eyes and smile from.

  Now I found myself standing in a line I never even knew existed. If I decide not to vamp her, to let her stay mortal and run out her clock—out of spite, say, or a sense of betrayal—she’s got backups ready to do the job in my place.

  Well, maybe…

  I start wondering about that, too. The opportunity has clearly presented itself, over and over again, with Twit, with Mr. Whomever, turning my little Trooper into a constellation of scar tissue. And each of those scars is ano.

  Anot yet.

  But whoseno is it?

  Has Isuzu decided she isn’t ready? Does she want to be older than the heartbreaking perfection she is now, at eighteen? Is there more of the world she wants to taste? Is there a pound or two more she needs to lose, a few hundred more sit-ups to tighten that stomach? Is there something else inside—a little ache, a little weirdness she wants to fix before fixing her body for good? Is she waiting for the perfect moment—the one she’ll recognize only when it passes into a less perfect one, the one that will render all others unacceptable, thanks to the memory of the something better, now lost? Will she Catch-22 herself into the dull misery of having waited too long?

  Or is theno coming from the other direction? Is blood that tastes like a kiss to the forehead such a revelation that you can’t imagine life without it? Is it addictive, like all things having to do with love?

  Or are thesenoes reallyyesses to a question I wouldn’t have thought to ask until tonight? Is it something kinky, something sexual, some agreed-upon sadomasochistic thing? My mind flashes on various leather-bound nightmares:

  Isuzu and…

  Isuzu and…

  Isuzu and…

  And the sky is getting pink in the east. Timing. What an awful time to be heading off to dreamland. Isuzu, all messed up and nowhere to go, lies curled up on the couch, exhausted from the radical secretectomy performed this evening, without benefit of anesthesia. Rose brushes a curl away from Isuzu’s sleeping forehead, and looks up at me. She’s beat, worn out, ready for bed. Still, she manages to find a new smile for me. It’s a for-better-or-worse smile. A through-thick-or-thin one.

  It’s a you-’n’-me-buddy smile. And Isuzu makes three.

  Rose gets up from the couch, crosses the living room, takes my hand.

  “C’mon, Dad,” she says, tugging me and all my bad thoughts into the sheltering dark of the bedroom.

  28

  The Perfect Blue for the Blues

  My first idea is to go Joan of Arc on that Malibu Barbie car she drives—the one with the jacked-up seat and blocks on the pedals. Poking holes in fuel lines is even easier than veins, and brakes break just like they did before, when Clarissa’s last killer found himself stamping at the floorboard without so much as a squeak of resistance. Snip, snip—that’s all it takes, and then we can all gather round the tube to find out what Twit’s middle name is.

  But that’s just me, thinking like a dad instead of a vampire.

  Isuzu is still alive. Messed up, sure, but the little twerp left her alive enough to crawl back home to get patched up. Twit’s a vampire and I’m a vampire and Isuzu’s still being alive is a vampire’s message. Le
tting her crawl away after latching on—thatwas a choice. In spite of whatever anger Twit may have been feeling, the part of her that cared for Isuzu managed to say, “Stop,” and she did. Rose saw it before I did. And even Isuzu knew, protecting Twit and gritting her teeth while the needle went in, came out, went in again.

  Maybe Twit’s hoping I’ll do something rash. Maybe her pint-sized heart has had enough, and is counting on the vengeful daddy to do its dirty work. I can understand that. I’ve been there; I know how being immortal can make a blue night seem like it’s going to last forever. Hell, if it wasn’t for that feeling, I’d never have found Isuzu in the first place.