by Meghan Tifft
The man, as Warren tips his cup, averts his eyes with a polite nod and backs away. “Well,” he says. He washes back into the slow foam of guests.
Dracula looks down the hallway, his chest a cracked karate board.
He can still feel Warren’s blue eyes, dissolving him like solvent. The idiot has been following him all this time. Everyone has. Why can’t they all just leave him alone? That girl is going into the bathroom. She might know where Lucinda is. She was in the play. “Excuse me,” says Dracula.
This is what Dracula knows: something has ruined him, upended him irredeemably. He is not Dracula anymore. Some back-alley warren or subway catacomb or construction impasse has misguided and rerouted him to this. A crappy roadwork detour, one that doesn’t bring you back. A stairwell traffic jam or hallway holdup of everyone ever, coming and going around him and over him. He is on his ass and awaiting redirection and everyone wants it that way. He stands at the door and waits.
When it opens, he says, “I need to find my girlfriend.”
She jumps a little back from him. “What?”
“Where is she?”
She casts a furtive glance into the hall.
That’s right, he thinks, something is all amiss.
She tilts her head to indicate that he follow her into the bathroom. “In here.” The all-white interior has a luxury asylum feel, and Dracula is immediately seared by the light of the mirror. It’s nothing like the soothing blown smoke at home. He feels weird going into a bathroom with a girl he doesn’t know.
“She hasn’t been here,” Lauren says.
Dracula casts his eyes aside in the laboratory lighting and almost doesn’t see it—so preoccupied he is in his effort not to stare at her naked body that he just accidentally ogled her in the mirror and looked away before his gaze had registered—the little porcelain dish, aloft and proffering some soggy rolled towelettes and silver prongs like an incomplete surgeon’s set, balanced over a peculiar fur perch you could almost take for a bit of chintz.
It’s the dog. He doesn’t believe it. It’s Vlad. Not only that, but around him coils the body of a snake, head raised and jaw flexed, the whole mouth drastically unhinged, the throat hideously distended around the wasted hindquarters. The dog’s mouth is caught in a gory rictus of revelation.
“Oh my God.” Dracula is struck violently with an impulse to spring forward and to shrink back. But he and Warren didn’t find the dog.
“Oh,” says the girl. “That. I know. It’s the ugliest one.” She seems to be commiserating with him over his dismay. One of her false fangs plinks on the floor. “Oops.”
It occurs to Dracula then that she is a snake.
The door opens and two men—one tall and the other short—come in talking together, as if they might just be entering a kitchen for more booze. “Oops,” the men say, chuckling in embarrassment. Is this an ambush? “You never saw us,” says the short one, turning back to the door. The tall one is Marty. “Excuse me,” says Warren, popping his head in before they can even leave. “I need to do something in here.”
Dracula finds himself squeezed in to make room for Warren as everyone rearranges.
“Hey,” he says. The girl, who Dracula swivels around to look for, is somehow gone. He checks inside the shower stall. Warren is now dumping the dead birds into the jacuzzi bathtub.
“Where is she?” says Dracula. “I was just talking to her.”
“I need you to do something for me,” says Warren, shaking two spray cans.
Dracula’s heart feels like that pressurized liquid. He suddenly has an urge to spit venom.
“Where is she? Where is the fucking girl?”
Warren hesitates, looking briefly alarmed and glancing out the door. He bends and starts to lacquer the birds. “I figured I’d ask first.” Ask first? Before what? Now the door is closed.
Dracula tenses, ready to spring, his head pinging around for some sense of rigging, some hidden snare he is sure is here. He finds himself looking again at the horrid effigy. It’s atrociously incompetent—the snake’s tail is lopped off in a big meaty hunk and its eyes sit in ruffles of dried flesh. One of its fangs is broken. The poor dog. It occurs to Dracula that it’s not really eating the dog at all, only arranged against the will of rigor mortis to look so.
He can’t believe the dog is here. That night, Warren had said he needed help. Dracula had asked Warren, when they got there, one more time to clarify. “What exactly did Lucinda say?”
Warren hacked at the ground. “She needs to get something out of it. It ate something—”
“And she wanted me to help you find it?” The smell of this was going to roll up on him any minute, like bad trash.
“She couldn’t remember where it was buried. Ack. Do you see something?” Dracula leaned down. The shovel jerked through a root and jabbed forward into his head.
“It’s not going to hurt, man,” Warren is saying now over his spray, as if Dracula is just being a bratty baby. He pops a cap off another can. “It’s just my first effect. If you’re not going to back me up with the cops you can at least do this.” As if the two even correlate remotely.
Dracula is suddenly in a wicked wrath. He can feel it—how beyond long Lucinda has been missing. The dog and the snake caught in this grisly false nuptial. Warren had gone back out and found the dog. Yes, an ambush awaits, indecipherable and impermissible. In Dracula’s head is collecting a torrential static, a vast unhinging wind. He sees, just in time, Warren dart out an arm. Before he knows it his hand is on Warren’s face, pushing him back into the sound of clacking tiles. He doesn’t know why but he grabs for the dog. A yelp and a mist of colored spray shower the air, and Dracula ducks and casts a flinching look at Warren. Some sticking nozzle whirs out a shower of speckled neon over them. The window above the tub now gapes like a busted mouth, the night asunder in some feral disarray. Through the open hole comes a brawl of black, and before Dracula knows it, something is slathering the air with confetti hues, dicing and splicing the sterile chamber into a pandemonium spray of sherbet until a brittle smack tells him it has gone shattering past and through the mirror.
Dumbly, Dracula gapes into the hole, this new one. It’s birds. The birds founder forward. Are these—they can’t be the ones from the tub. There’s none in here anymore. They look, from behind this odd partition, like puppets on strings, passed through into some appalling and profound sentience. He and Warren are standing just watching. What’s weirdest of all is they seem to cross a stage-lit chamber toward a collection of human forms on the other side. An audience? Some dummy strung from the ceiling gets mangled in the ambush and now pigeons tilt and careen as heavy red syrup dumps them out of flight. This is insane. It’s just what those people described. All of them.
More bodies come pouring past now, over his shoulders. The room or auditorium is parceled out with more plague. Dracula watches people gasping and tumbling from their metal folding chairs, the dead pigeons fumbling into the throng, battering various hair in avaricious descent. The people seem to be scattering and crab-walking the floor. A ghastly gladiatorial glee erupts from every mouth.
“What the…?” Dracula swallows the rest of his words. He has to work hard not to crush the rigid parcel in his arms. He can’t help noticing the bucket, swinging down from its string, dribbling blood.
“Two-way mirror,” says Warren, spluttering reverently into his suit coat. It’s as if he’s reporting into a hidden microphone in his inside pocket. He hunches the flimsy coat further up over his head like a protective hood, elbows pinging birds away.
Dracula sees the woman with the sticky curl, tilted off her face now like a false mustache. That man Marty bares his rickrack teeth.
Are those birds baring back? Are those fangs?
They turn to look at each other through the passage, all the people, faces dappled with wet confetti. Dracula feels far away from Warren’s voice, swimming in cold belts of unending silver.
A two-way mirror. So it is. So it was.
Lucinda had been looking right at him. Then she was gone. That was the last time he saw her.
Dracula has to gasp his way back to the thin and finite moment, extract his own heavy resolve out of his limbs as they grip too hard on the frail artifact, nestled like a frozen lunch in a paper sack. “I’m taking this,” he says, or he thinks he says, in an echoless voice.
“Whatever,” says Warren, looking down at the dog. “Be my guest.”
The other door beyond the mirror slams shut. A latch falls and clicks. All the people are out of the room now. All the birds are in. Here I am, thinks Dracula. He turns to Warren. Here he is.
The Mirror
Everybody is just trying to help Lucinda get out.
It used to be, not long ago, that they all wanted her to stay in, especially the ones who had something to lose.
This is all according to Lauren. Lauren is painted blue-black and dungeon-thick. She is at Warren’s party. Lucinda has accidentally come here. Rory brought her.
It had occurred to Lucinda, driving home under the influence of Rory’s music, that it was all just like the song. She cannot live with or without Dracula. She is forever stuck, just like he is, on this lofted seesaw of fear and forgetting. She doesn’t know who he is. She doesn’t know where he is. Somehow she is okay with this—all their mysteries and secrets. As Rory escorted them both home in the truck—her and the coffin—this is how it suddenly seemed. Simple. In the way that Dracula is.
It used to agitate her, how simple he was. Trying to talk to him, getting past his television attention span, his flabby lack of guile and into something that made sense—some sharpened point of sensitivity or ire, some acuity for what he was doing and who he was—it used to make her feel so alone. As if not even he was really there. He reminded her of her own father, the one who hit his head. It was living all over again with disability. But now, that is just what seems necessary—to both who they are and where they’re going. She likes how it acts as a balm on her—how dumbly trusting it feels to have Dracula look up at her from their living room couch without a lick of ulterior motive. She stands in the doorway, thinking, is this really Dracula? and it makes her feel special, privy to something no one else is.
Even the secrets Dracula keeps—his not going to work, his headaches, his scraped knuckles—seem like minor inflections on the part of him that matters, superficial things that happen to him more than things he determines. She knows the coffin is another one of these. She knows something happened with that coffin. She suspects Rory knows more about it than he’s saying.
“Can I just—?” Rory had said after they were driving away from the theater. They didn’t find him. “He doesn’t seem—” He never finished, but Lucinda knew what he meant.
Now she’s upstairs with Lauren. “He was trying,” Lauren is saying, parsing the words into unsure bits. “I had no idea that would be his plan.” She’s talking about Rory.
Lucinda feels herself fissure. She doesn’t know what Lauren means. Does she really want to know?
“I need to give you this,” Lauren says. Lauren is hardly recognizable. Her paint is some phosphorescent underwater color, a sea-serpent bruise. She reaches into her sack and pulls out something. A key. “And you forgot this again.” Lauren takes out the shawl. “I don’t know what you want to do with it.” What is she doing? What are these things she happens to have, as if compelled to some obscure preparation for tonight?
“I don’t—what is this?”
Lauren’s eyes fester doubtfully.
Lucinda can now feel all the inconsequential darting looks from people passing in the hall, peering in at them or else at the room, murmurs mittened behind hands. There are some gross photos on the wall. What kind of party is this? Are people actually talking about them, or about the room? There is a puppet hanging in the room that looks like Marty’s.
Not to mention Warren’s whole new apartment is right on top of Lauren and Rory’s. What a place for it to be.
Lauren swipes at a phantom hair. “I’m sorry,” she says. Lucinda doesn’t like the sorry, the way it twangs out through the rubber band of her mouth.
Here she is trying to decide what scheme she might be standing in. One thing Lucinda can say about Dracula. He doesn’t scheme. His secrets never sting. Not in the end. It’s always some accident or coincidence by which he gathers them. It’s his own sheer obliviousness. And then he seems as much a victim to them as her or anyone. When she finds out, there’s not so much a sharp discovery as just a slow erosion of unknowing, or a soft burgeoning of truth. It almost makes it seem okay.
“You know the night you came over? For dinner?”
Lucinda nods. She wants to stop her.
“He made an extra key.”
“What?” Lucinda can’t even quite believe this. “To what?”
“When he left to get my mom. He took yours and made a copy. I had no idea,” says Lauren, waving her hands drastically. Her black palms seem like chunks of broken asphalt. “I found out and made him stop. He only did it twice, but still. I know,” she says, folding up her face for Lucinda’s benefit, as if they are commiserating over heinous acts just discovered. As if they are together on this instead of very far apart.
“Did what?” Lucinda manages to rasp out. What did he do?
“He just went in there. Your apartment. He was looking for something.” Lauren flits a hand up to her forehead. It trembles slightly. “From my sister.”
Lucinda feels her mind stumble. “You have a sister?” she says, feeling fierce fibrillations in her voice. But she already knows.
“Half sister,” Lauren says. Lauren looks at her with that skin of spoiled milk on her eyes. They look upset, but mostly they look like kitchen catastrophes, poached and jellied and larded cries for help. They seem to jiggle under the light, like gelatin fish in tins. Abruptly Lauren flutters her fingers in front of her eyes. “These are killing me,” she says, bending. “I have to get them out.” She comes up in her normal eyes. “I’ll put them back in,” she says, looking blearily around the room, trying to focus. “It was all just getting worse.” She stares away from Lucinda.
Now Lucinda wonders if Lauren is talking about her sister or her eyes. Lauren blinks at her moronically.
“She used to live in your place, and she hid some letters.”
“Letters?” The word seems fake. What letters? It’s the idea of letters that seems unnatural, like something no one does.
“A guy she wrote to is stalking her and she won’t tell anyone who he is. That’s why she’s hiding.” Lauren has her hands splayed up on either side of her head, as if her eyes might be rabid animals that any moment might spring.
Lucinda wonders if these letters are love letters. Could that be? This is something she has seen in books and movies, but always with that dirty smidge of disbelief. Who would really write love letters?
“At first we thought it was our mailman but now we think it’s someone else.”
Dracula. That’s her second thought. She’s still thinking about the love letters.
“Then we thought it was her ex—that guy who used to live next door—but we figured out it wasn’t. She had him taking care of the baby for a while. It’s the guy she had the baby with but we don’t know who it is.”
The baby. Lucinda can hardly tumble a baby into this. She almost forgot. “Rory’s?” She never thought it was Rory’s.
“It’s not Rory’s. It’s our sister’s. Half sister’s.”
The baby, whose beady eyes sat in a fistful of kneaded flesh? She can’t help thinking about who the baby looks like. It looks like Dracula.
“She was trying to keep him away from the baby.”
For a second Lucinda thinks him and Dracula are the same. But that makes no sense.
“It’s complicated,” says Lauren, putting on a face as if to brace herself. “There was a double date.” Her mouth seems rigid, unable to finish. “And then she just—” she blows her new eyes wide. “That was it. Sh
e just disappeared.”
Lucinda knows about the double date. Vanessa had mentioned it. She had gone on it herself, with Rory and Richard’s daughter. Lauren wipes up and down her face now, as if to revivify herself, or satisfy an all-over itch.
Lucinda is realizing something. It’s about to make sense. “Who’s her father? Your sister,” she blurts.
Lauren scuds out a disgusted sigh. “You know—from where you work. He’s never even met me. That’s how attentive of a father he is to his own daughter who lived with us. He doesn’t even know who she is. And he would never understand,” she says.
Lucinda is now uneasily remembering what Richard said. The same thing happened to my daughter. You need to get out of there. He does understand something.
“Something bad happened on that date,” Lauren swallows her words. “I just don’t know what.”
It occurs to Lucinda that maybe she knows. She does know one thing about that date. I slept with the other guy instead, Vanessa had said, that day in front of the theater. Her gaze was trailing after Rory. I’m a terrible friend. I just went off and slept with him. Leaving the other two on the beach. Rory and his sister.
“Where’s the snake?” an obtrusive voice barges in from the hall, blaring a bugle through their conversation. “Maybe she ate herself,” he says merrily. The voice sounds unnervingly like Marty.
Lauren’s face looks slightly botched.
“Ha ha,” says another voice that sounds like Warren’s.
Lucinda realizes she needs to get out of here. She didn’t even mean to stay.
Lauren, as if sensing this, reaches out for her arm. Her fingers are dried and raspy. “Hey,” she says.
Lucinda finds herself searching her face.
“He should have just asked you. I doubt he’ll come,” Lauren says. “I haven’t seen him. He hates Warren.”
Lucinda knows she’s talking about Rory. Rory does hate Warren. That’s exactly what he said to her in the car. He told her to say it too. To Lauren, when Lucinda explained why he wasn’t coming to the party. Lucinda is here to deliver a message.