“It doesn’t want to be as near to me as I to it,” said Gesine. “It’s been made different, somehow.”
On the street below them, the driver-side door to the town car opened. A large, pale man with a shaved head went around on the curb to the backdoor. He opened it, looking up at Doris and Gesine all the while; and a white-haired man with a relatively youthful face got out of the car. It was Argall, in a light gray suit. White-haired, but youthful. He stood there for a moment, not looking at anything in particular, then got back into the car. The door, however, remained open, and the ghoul remained holding it, staring up at them.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Gesine said.
Doris felt the pupils of her eyes turning red. “No. You’re good here, right?”
“For now,” Gesine said.
Doris took off her boots and put them beside Gesine, who alternately stared back at the other ghoul with its same blank hostility and then looked away – which she never really did from anything.
Doris took a very tiny breath. She walked backward, then in a flash, she ran the whole distance of the small roof and leaped so that her hands caught onto the metal arm of the nearest streetlight. It was slippery from the rain, but she shimmied across it with her arms and legs. When she was close enough, Doris slammed her fist into the light bulb. The already poorly lit street became mostly shadows with faint lights nearby, like the end scene of a play in some isolated theater.
The slightly warm metallic base for the light creaked beneath her weight, as she pulled herself on top of it with the claw-like nails of her hand digging into the metal. It took a few moments for her to swing her body upward. If she wasn’t strong enough to support the entirety of weight on just one arm, she would have fallen over on the base’s other side. But she was strong enough.
Doris held herself up in a sort of handstand, for a moment, before she dropped herself onto the top of the car’s roof. Though the thud and crunch were only audible for a second, she’d made quite a dent.
Crouching with glowing red eyes, Doris stared into the other ghoul’s face.
“Where did you come from?” she said.
He had no answer for her, and his eyes seemed angry and sad at the same time. It was the latter quality by which Doris’ own anger relented.
“Help her down,” Argall said.
Doris ignored the arm that reached out to her. She hopped down, and there inside the white light of the car with Argall was Mab, with her red hair and fashionable business attire.
“You spend too much time with Gesine,” Mab said as she slid over and Doris got into the car. “I’ve always liked her, but her kind, for all their strengths, aren’t like ours. We develop. They don’t.”
Doris rubbed the inside of her palm with a fingernail until it bled.
Mab sighed.
The large ghoul promptly closed the door, then moved back around to the front of the car and got into the driver’s seat.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Mab said.
There was a small double-set of glass holders on the back of each set. Doris picked up the glass that had been in front of Mab. She resisted the urge to drink what was in it.
“Is this the older Greenblatt man’s blood?”
Argall closed his eyes with a sort of flinch, like he’d been wounded. “You can drive now.”
The car surged forward in the dark, until they came to an intersection and the world was well-lit again. By what design, wondered Doris, was there so much less street light back in the Greenblatt’s neighborhood?
“No,” said Argall. “It’s the corporate stock. Mab and I were here, looking to be heartened by a future where even the least of us lets them live, in all their self-possessed superiority.”
“And yet, here you are, Doris,” said Mab, “seeing the glass as half empty.”
“Leave them alone,” Doris said. She put down the glass of blood. “Even if it wasn’t you, it was probably one of your lackeys.”
Argall, whose posture was always a bit stiff, loosened his tie. “That hurts. This rift hurts.”
Mab grabbed his arm and held on to it. “We think so highly of you, Doris, but more than ever, you seem to only want to be in your own little world with Gesine or with those books.”
The car was in a brighter night-scape now. They were closer to their disparate, homey corporate headquarters.
Doris ignored the pains in her stomach. She nodded her head at the ghoul. “Hello,” she said. “Do you have a name? Maybe you forgot it ”
He did not respond.
Doris noticed that he had a small, surgical scar in the back of his head. It had healed around a small, gray metallic device.
Doris turned to Mab, and when she remained wordless, Doris looked over at Argall.
“Don’t give me that,” Argall said. “How’s Lorraine? Do you still have her pouring over topographical maps by herself? For you, instead of the company? Our company, Doris. Together, we are stronger than any giant.”
Mab leaned her head on Argall’s shoulder. “Whatever ancient being is beneath this city, how fit for this world can it be if it just wants to get up like there were nothing but daisies on its back?”
“As fit as we who clear streets of people like the man who was bitten,” Doris said. “And for what? To build castles for people who are shinier? When we were human, we were never such. Or I never was. Let me out.”
Argall flexed the muscles in his back, and Mab’s head rose a bit with the move. “You heard her.”
The car came to a stop at the corner of a busy main street. It was past rush hour, but most people in the crowd were still pacing hurriedly.
Mab lifted her head. “Doris, you’re not even wearing any shoes.”
Doris flashed a small and polite smile for her, before snatching the glass up again and this time drinking the blood. She closed her eyes, rubbed her mouth and patted the ghoul in the driver’s seat on his shoulder. Then she got out of the car and joined those on the sidewalk, walking more quickly than everyone else, her feet barely registering the damp, chilliness of the smooth cement.
It was almost 8 p.m. Doris was on her way to Lorraine’s building. Her department’s only employee lived in one of the homogenized neighborhoods that had entrenched themselves around the business district. The streetlight was more omnipresent than where Roger and Simon lived; the noise from the sidewalks less concentrated, more static.
Faintly, she could smell a familiar scent. It reminded her of the book that had been in Roger’s back-pocket. The pages had lingered somewhere slightly perfumed.
Doris ignored the looks and comments from those around her. Suits devoted to their glowing devices, oversized headphones, pony tails – they all shifted in her direction.
A scent or two seemed familiar enough that it might have come from someone on one of Argall’s floors at the company.
Doris followed the scent that reminded her of Roger until she encountered a woman beneath a set-up under a plastic tarp, putting books laid out on at a table into one of those suitcases on wheels. The woman had a small afro and was perhaps in her late forties. She wore a denim raincoat that was wet at the edges.
Doris scanned the few piles of books that were left on the table. They all smelled faintly of the same perfume. The scent also emanated from the luggage.
As for the books, what little remained on the table was not much in the way of classicism, which Doris was both used to and sick of. There was a book with a pit bull on the cover, its gray face beaming with its patch of black around its mouth. Doris he fancied the title of the poetry chapbook, “Limbo Should Be Less Bright,” along with the spectral apple on the cover of a book titled “Urban Legends.”
The bookseller turned and was about to pick up another pile when she did a double-take at Doris and froze, drawing a quick, deep breath.
This hurt Doris a bit more than she would have thought. Perhaps it was the familiarity of the particular skin she was in at the moment, the one in which a la
ck of shoes did not afford her the courtesy of people not pointing and laughing – behavior that was so close to someone running away screaming.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said.
“That’s quite all right,” said Doris.
“It’s just, it’s well past my busy hour … Or ‘busy’ hour. What were you looking at? The only thing I haven’t put away are the things that I wrote.”
Doris she read the author’s name of the cover: Josephine Drearden. She tapped the spectral apple on the cover of “Urban Legends.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything new in there,” she said, “besides ghostly apples.”
“No,” Josephine said. “Alligators in sewers. Worshipers who become self-aware. And the usual boring old ghosts. But they are closer to the alligators in the sewers.”
“Ghosts don’t exist,” Doris said with a smile tinged with sadness and bemusement.
She flipped through the book of poems, and seeing a few lines that she liked, took a purse from the pocket of her skirt and handed a few bills over to Josephine. As she place the book of poems in her pocket, Doris briefly wondered which book Roger had chosen.
“I hope you enjoy them,” Josephine said. “Once I tried to give one of those to what, if not a ghost, may have been a figment, I guess. I used to work in this luxury hotel, and on my breaks, I’d read downstairs in one of the maintenance supply rooms. I met this old custodian who seemed to be into all the same books I was. Excitedly, too. But he would disappear whenever I wanted to hand him a book to borrow, and well, that kind of gave me the chills. Plus, I wasn’t crazy about the job, so … ”
“So, it had to be a ghost,” Doris finished, “the ghost of a man in a union that might have made your job something to be just a bit crazy for.”
Josephine smiled. “You should come around here more often. You don’t have to buy anything, either. My other friend who used to come around doesn’t so much anymore.”
Beneath her bare feet, Doris felt the world shaking a little. And then she could see that Josephine could feel it, too, because she turned her head every which way with a furrowed brow.
“It was nice to meet you,” Doris said. She slipped away to the nearby corner of a new building. She didn’t have the heart to make the woman think that someone she had just talked to was just her seeing things again, so while Josephine turned around and looked for her, Doris waved from her slightly shadowed spot until she was sure that Josephine saw her, then she hurried along the new building’s narrow, private street.
Six floors up, Doris sat on the fire escape outside Lorraine’s apartment, right in front of the window with the pumpkin on the sill.
About half of it was orange and the rest had begun to rot. Lorraine had sort of been managing that by cutting away at some of the decay, but not all of it.
At some point, the whole things would simply be mush. Doris was reminded why she didn’t like getting attached to plants – or people for that matter. She raised her head upward. The night sky was cloudy, all swirls of purple.
Those swirls seemed to have settled when Lorraine emerged from her bedroom in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms. Walking with the small limp that came with her particular form of cerebral palsy, she went to her refrigerator, got something in a small container, and then a spoon. Lorraine sat down with her meal at a table where there was a view of the window and the fire escape.
Doris tapped on the window.
Lorraine slowly raised her head and squinted. When she discerned the outline of the knocker, she got up – though her shoulders also slumped a little. Lorraine went to the window, took off the latch and opened it.
“Hi,” she said. “Is Gesine with you?”
Doris shook her head. “No. How are you doing?”
“Well, okay … We have a good idea what general area the giant may be under, but there’s no clear path to anywhere near it. Also, I had coffee today with someone in applied sciences. Apparently, for a while now, half of the department has been a seismology station.”
Doris hadn’t meant it that way: how are you doing with work? She wanted to know if Lorraine herself – beyond the demands of a job – was okay. But now Doris folded herself so that her head was practically on her stomach.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” she said. “Argall and Mab will ensure that the giant doesn’t tear the city in two. I don’t know how Gesine and I could stop them, anyway. I’ve been in and out of the ground for so long here, and it still hasn’t reached out to me.”
Lorraine rubbed her arms, then maneuvering with the slight delay of her left side, rested them on the window sill. “When you saw me on that tour Argall was giving you, I was pretty miserable. But when I started out there, I loved the science they were trying to break through to. Seeing something as strong and regenerative as vampirism on a microscope slide was amazing. After a while, it all started to make me feel like I wasn’t good enough.”
“That does seem to be the world’s general design,” said Doris. Still sort of folded, she took off her hair tie with one hand. The hair fell in front of her face, and she closed her eyes. “And I have to wonder, for something as ancient as that giant – was the world the same? Some Native tribes would write their ‘books’ on rocks, in symbols, and one such book shows them laughing with a giant fist. Maybe that’s the point – that this is all a bit of a joke.”
Internally, Doris felt hyper-aware the sunrise was a few hours away. She also felt like she could sleep a century or two.
“It’s funny,” Lorraine said, “living here is kind of like working in applied sciences now. Everyone is nice enough – until some homeless person comes down the street rambling.”
“Being lonely and ‘broken’ makes for a language few want to speak,” Doris said. She lifted her torso back up and cracked a few bones as she stretched her arms. “Right now, applied sciences is like a roust for Argall’s latest crop of vampires. I’m not stronger than six of them … But soon, when the sun is up, do you think you could try to get some of those seismic readouts?”
“Maybe,” Lorraine said, “with some help. Gesine is a lot stronger than me.”
“Argall has another ghoul around, to try to cancel her out, we think. Being around them makes her feel sort of dodgy. I’m hoping our department will expand, though.”
As she lifted her head, Lorraine nudged pumpkin with her forehead. “Great … And that’s by how many people? Or is it people?”
“It’s people,” Doris said. “One person who speaks a similar language.”
4
Inter-complexion Dynamics
Colonial #
How much time had she passed with Henry by her side?
Doris thought she’d found a bright spot in him, one of the men she used to see working on the stone wall by the last house she was enslaved in. But just when it seemed like he was getting used to the blood of livestock and the occasional owner of people, she woke up one evening and he was gone.
There was a hill with a beautiful view of the moon they’d sometimes pass by at night. One morning, just before dawn, she had to pull Henry away from it.
On that hill, under the moonlight, was where she’d found the ashes amid his clothes.
“God must hate us,” Henry once said, “if the light of day burns us so much worse than our tormentors.”
Doris thought that in changing him she would give them both a gift. They would be so much more than all the limitations constantly, endlessly thrown their way. But he’d been gone for a few months now.
After the sun would go down, Doris occasionally wandered to the part of town near the port. There she would stand stand in a spot where she was very visible, like the platform where hours earlier in the daylight someone had been bought and sold. A pale man in the nearby watchtower might throw a rock at her, and if it hit her, she would let herself fall and then seem to disappear. Her crimson-eyed visage would appear in front of the man and he would tumble backwards, clenching his chest. He would be replaced by another
pale man, and Doris would repeat as such, until there was a man in the watchtower who did not throw rocks at a black woman who might be mourning the loss of everything again.
Once in a while, when no one else was around, she would fall to the ground and be able to feel it with her forehead – the faint heartbeat that the ground seemed to have. She wasn’t always able to hear it, but when she could, it was comforting.
Often Doris was told to scat to her master, or she would end up finding that the blood of a grabby man who reeked of alcohol tasted much the same as the scent. Sometimes the red-headed one from the old world, Mab, would be on the shoulder of the most well-dressed of such men, and the exchange of looks was a rare reason to come out of her daze, to acknowledge and be acknowledged by another being. Or, to use Mab’s word, another vampire. She had helped her and Henry find a room to board in, simply because, she said, they were all vampires.
Beyond Henry and the one who had turned her, Doris had little experience with her new kind. She’d once been violently chased off by a pale figure in robes whose “territory” she was supposedly encroaching on. But by a far cry, Mab was the first pale anything to see Doris as an equal of a sort.
And then one evening, there came rearing up quite distantly in second place the coachman for the spiritualists. While the couple gave a talk at the house of a prominent businessman, their servant was outside handing out their pamphlets. He had a bend to his back that made him look shorter than he was, and his white hair did not quite match the relative youthfulness of his face.
It was autumn, and the air did not stink quite so much as it usually did of feces. The servant extended a pamphlet to a man in a leather doublet, who promptly squinted at him and then slapped the pamphlets to the ground. The wind blew one over toward Doris. She bent down, picked it up, and then surprising herself, she froze up. Was her head held too high?
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them with a shake of her head. She was thinking like the old Doris.
A few yards from her, the white-haired man was on his knees on the ground. He’d collected a few of the pamphlets under his shoulder. He snatched another one before it went into the air again. He flung the dirt from it.
Late Night Partners Page 3