Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

  She looks up at me. She tilts her head to the side and moves it up so she is looking into my eyes. I stop my rotations. For a while, I stand there with my hand resting on the lintel of the kitchen door, looking into her eyes.

  She looks very old and very human.

  “Mom,” I say tentatively. “Do you have a second?”

  “I’m sorry about the fight,” she says, blinking down, carefully slanting her fingers to match the grain of the wood. “Your father and I . . . can argue.”

  The rain is soft against the grass. “Do you . . . ?” I ask and hesitate. It is a dumb question. “Do you believe in angels? Not faeries or anything, but, you know, celestial beings sent to guide us?”

  She looks at me longer. Then she looks down at her hands, which have pulled away from the wood of the table and curled fondly around each other. Then she stands and half sits on the table, with one heel resting against the bottom rung of a chair. She says to me, “I do. I guess I do.” She frowns.

  I move toward her. It is just about three steps. I am standing at the edge of the table nearest to her. Only a few inches away.

  “In what way?” I say. “I mean, in that adult ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’ way?”

  She curls her lower lip uneasily beneath her upper teeth and shakes her head. “No,” she says softly. “I think they are real.”

  “And that they intervene in human life?”

  She raises her head and looks at me warily. “What do you mean?” she asks.

  I stand there, my shoulders sloping, my hands at my sides. “I don’t know,” I admit.

  With one hand she strokes the tabletop three times, and then she says, “I saw one once. I had . . . When I had . . . You were saved by one once.” I wait for her to go on.

  Finally, I say softly, so as not to disturb her, “How?”

  The eaves are dripping. “When you were born,” she says, “you were choking to death. That was . . . You were a breech birth, and somehow you got tangled up in the umbilical cord. We thought that . . . so — that it was all over.”

  The rain has let up a little. The dishwasher growls. I can hear Paul stomping upstairs. “Your face was blue. Really . . . I mean, blue. It . . .” She looks like she’s about to cry. “A nurse came. She said, ‘I’ll take him. Just for a minute.’ You were dead. You . . . She went into the next room.”

  Paul’s radio goes on.

  “Suddenly we heard this crying. It was you. She brought you in. She’d brought you back to life. It was . . . I mean, she was . . . It was a miracle. She brought you back.” She has moved closer to me. And softly, urgently, she says, “And you’re so wonderful, both you and Paul. We never could have imagined . . . I asked around, but no one knew who that nurse was. The room was full of people, but no one saw her come or go except your father and me.” Her eyes are wet. “So, yes, I believe in angels.

  “Chris, you’re so special, and your father and I are so concerned about you. We might fight, but you don’t know how much we love you. Please, Chris,” she says, shaking her head and pronouncing my name again and again as if each time she were caressing my hair. “Chris, Chris, Chris . . .”

  She is so close, and I can tell she wants to take me in her arms like that baby she saw saved. Her upper body leans toward mine, and her hands have lifted off the table by several inches. Her face is pleading.

  And I am standing so near to her, thinking of that small smiling family when I was saved from death, years before, and how they couldn’t know what would happen, and how we all just want to be happy. I look at her, and I think we are both looking at each other and almost pleading for something with our eyes.

  We stand there like that for a minute, sizing each other up to see who will embrace the other and show affection first, like sumo wrestlers crouching before the clinch.

  And then suddenly I see it all — the other room, tangy with disinfectants, the nurse there in the dark, whatever they do to make you one — quickly chanting, or sprinkling me, or biting softly some hidden fold, some pudgy leg beneath the wrap — feeling my little dead toy heart quiver, thump with new life, thump again — how she smiled in the shadows, went out to greet the happy couple — cigars all around —

  “Chris?” my mother says, leaning toward me. “Chris, I love you,” she says, sagging toward me, her face exhausted and in baboon folds. I twitch backward.

  Quickly I say, “Yeah, well, I don’t believe in them. I mean, I’m not sure. You never know.”

  Then I walk toward the door to the back hall where the washer and dryer, old welcome mat, and trash cans are. To my back she says, “Chris . . . ,” and she says it so sadly that suddenly I feel like she is the child, a little girl; it hurts me to keep walking away. But I do.

  And now she yells, “Chris. Christopher!”

  As I go into the den, I hear her call, “Oh, fine! If you keep pacing, Christopher, if you pace one more goddamn time around this house, I swear I’m going to beat you until you can’t sit down for a week.”

  So when I reach the front hall, I make a detour up the stairs to my room.

  I lie on my bed with my head like a bat’s.

  The rain gets halfhearted as the evening falls. The evening is long and empty.

  The yard is choked with water.

  “Hello, Clayton police.” Officer Melnikowski answers the phone. He came to our school to demonstrate school bus safety.

  I say, “Hi. I’d like to report a vampire god trying to enter this world.”

  There’s a silence on the other end of the phone.

  “At the Sad Festival. I’m reporting that vampires are going to try to interrupt the spells to keep Tch’muchgar locked in another world.”

  Silence.

  “He’s going to try to break back into this world. And he’ll wreak havoc and scatter destruction around him.”

  “Okay,” says the policeman.

  “They’re meeting at an old abandoned church. You have to help me. I’m turning into a vampire, too. I can’t give you my name yet.”

  “Slow down, slow down,” he says. “This sounds serious.”

  “It is. You have to listen to me.”

  “Okay, okay. Calm. Right, I gotta ask you a couple questions.”

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  “First,” he says. “Could you tell me: Is your refrigerator running?”

  “This isn’t a prank,” I say.

  “Second: Is this Mr. or Mrs. Wall? Well, if there aren’t any walls there, how does the roof stay up?” I can hear laughing in the background. Those boys in blue.

  “I am not kidding,” I say angrily.

  “No, and neither am I, kid. You call with this kinda sh — garbage again, I’ll come over there and give you something to think about.”

  Then there’s a dial tone.

  I hang up angrily. It’s a pay phone at school, because I don’t want the police to trace the call back to me. I thought they might give me the benefit of the doubt. Obviously no help there.

  “Hey,” says Jerk, sauntering up. “Who you talking to?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Hey, okay, no problem.” He puts his hands in his pockets and flexes his feet so he moves up and down. “You’ve been looking, like, really down recently.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, honestly sorry. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

  “Would you like to come over after school and we’ll, I don’t know, play Kaverns of Kismet III or something?”

  The idea stuns me with its worthlessness. I feel like I’m a million miles from Jerk.

  So I apologize no, I’m going to the movies with my aunt. Jerk asks me which movie, sounding really interested, and I say I don’t think we’ve picked one yet.

  But even as I stand there lying to him, and as he realizes more and more that I’m lying, and gets quieter and sad around his mouth, I hate myself for saying these things. I make a silent pledge to be nicer to him, because even though he is a million miles from m
e, he wishes he weren’t. Because there was a time when everything was simpler, and my friends were my friends.

  Last year I got really excited about the lunchroom’s Cajun sloppy joes. You would think that Cajun sloppy joes were not much to get excited about, but we live in a small town and not much happens some months.

  Now I can’t even eat our cook’s Cajun sloppy joes. I’m sitting at the table, gagging just looking at one. Human food. Grease is rolling off the bun, and chunks of meat are quietly flopping down the sides and landing splayed in sauce, like ants dying of fumigation.

  I can’t put that thing in my mouth. It will be so pasty. But I’m so hungry.

  I hate to feel my body out of control like this, to know that there’s no way to just eat a normal thing and to be healthy. My body is changing — its sickness I don’t understand, and its health is unhealthy — and I am constantly afraid because I don’t know what will happen to me next.

  Nearby, Tom is sitting with his crowd. I am sitting as close to them as I dare. As soon as I sit down, I realize how stupid it is. Rebecca is sitting a few seats away from me, but I feel like everything is falling apart, and I don’t even know how I can think about stupid things like trying to impress her with witty lunch repartee when everything is sliding like it is.

  She looks even more beautiful now that I know I’m falling apart. She’s talking about the Cabala, an ancient book of mystical power she’s studying with her uncle. Her friends are a little bit bored by her and keep poking their dessert squares. I love her for it. I could listen to her talk about the Cabala forever. If there were a CD called Rebecca Schwartz Tells You About the Cabala, for $14.99, I’d have three copies.

  I am so swept up by Rebecca talking about the Cabala that I hardly even notice when I pick up the Cajun sloppy joe and take a big bite out of it like I would have done two months before. I hardly notice until the food is in my mouth, churning, sucking at my teeth as I gum it around.

  Then I panic. It’s sitting there on my tongue, evilly sitting on my tongue, like a fairy-tale toad on a lily pad. Lumpy. I can’t breathe past it. My breath won’t fit.

  The room is suddenly very hot and crowded. My mouth is too full. There are people pushing and trays clacking, and an apple is flying through the air. My napkin is stained with red grease like blood.

  My chair squeals backward and I run for the bathroom.

  I push someone over. I say, “Sorry,” but when I do, it all comes out: The lump of Cajun joe splats on the floor — and behind it, my breakfast. I’m heaving, and it’s all there: orange juice, butter, home-style waffle.

  Everyone is muttering and sniggering. Completely disgusted.

  I’m supporting myself on one weak arm resting on a tabletop. I raise up my head. Tom is looking at me like he’s a total stranger who’s just seen a murderer. I turn to the side because someone is running over with a mop and I realize that an umbilical cord of quivering spit still trails down to my pukey discharge.

  I reach up grimly and, with a single finger, snap it.

  I stand straight and tall and head for the men’s room. My face is so hot it feels like my eyes must be red. I think it’s embarrassment.

  The janitor is arriving with the mop. I really want to offer to clean it up, but I can’t. I don’t even apologize to him. I just run for the bathrooms.

  “Chris, wait up,” I hear Jerk saying, back in the crowd. And then he says to someone else, “Man, I feel bad for him. He must be wicked sick.”

  The bathroom is white. That in itself is good. It feels as cool as a glacier. I splash cold water on my face. That’s a mistake because I involuntarily snarl and start snapping at the water like a dog with a hose. Then I realize there’s someone in one of the stalls, so I stop. Whoever he is, he pulls up his feet when he hears me growling.

  I’m not in the mirror. I look, transfixed, at the tiles through my head.

  I can’t stay in here. No safety. Not with this bank of mirrors hollering out my vampirism like a Klaxon.

  Got to get out of the building — that’s all there is to it — until I can calm down.

  I charge out of the bathroom and almost run into Rebecca Schwartz, who’s waiting by the bathroom door.

  “Chris,” she says. “I just came to see how you’re doing.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Fine.”

  “You looked really sick.”

  “I was,” I say, backing up slightly. “I don’t believe you came to see how I was doing! That’s so nice. I’ve got to go.”

  “Hey,” she says, reaching out to touch my elbow. “What’s the problem? Everyone’s wondering what happened.”

  I yank away from her touch. We’re standing against lockers, gray metal lockers, on which I have no reflection. I keep my eyes glued to her face. She can’t look down. Can’t look at those lockers. I have to get away.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  “You going home?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, shrugging. “I’ll be back as soon as I’ve changed my name and grown a beard.”

  She laughs. “You just got sick,” she says, “and yakked all over the floor.” And then, more concerned, “Look, Chris, I, like, don’t want to be a pain, but is everything okay? You’ve seemed really, you know, depressed and things recently. Throwing up can be a sign of nervousness. It was with my sister. She went through this whole depressed thing.”

  “No,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” she says. “It’s just, I mean . . . Really, I don’t want you to think I’m being nosy or anything. But if you ever want to call someone and talk about it, you know you can call me. I mean, we had to deal with my sister and all.”

  I’m still not reflected in the lockers. Someone passes by, and Rebecca looks up at them. I take the opportunity to move a few inches away so I won’t be so near the metal. She turns back and looks at me quizzically.

  I splutter, “It’s . . . mucus. I have all these springtime allergies, and I get all filled up with mucus. My stomach and things. All mucus.”

  She’s smiling lightly. “Mucus? Are you sure? Not phlegm or sputum?”

  “Mucus.” I nod. “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’m serious, though, about calling me,” she says. She goes to pat me on the arm.

  I’m terrified her eyes will stray sideways. I stumble backward, yelp, “Bye!” and turn around and walk so fast that I’m almost running. I can feel her staring at me from behind, confused.

  Later, I can’t believe I didn’t thank her more. Here she came forward and tried to help this big social pariah (i.e., me) and I didn’t even thank her. I don’t believe it.

  I run home through the deserted factory, where no one will be looking for me in car window reflections, or in plate glass windows. I run home and lie on my bed until the danger is past, and I am once again in mirrors.

  That night, I cannot sleep.

  I stare groggily at the ceiling, and I can hear their pulses. It is probably my imagination, but I think I can hear my family’s pulses spread throughout the house. A matrix of tiny pulses throughout the house, like the movements of mice. I lie there in what should be silence, hearing each different heart kick in contraction. And again. Again. Again.

  I lie awake and listen to the clattering of hearts, this festival of cardiac bongos to which I’m not invited. I can hear them through the plasterboard.

  I’ve got to see if it is me hallucinating.

  I get up. I open the door to the hallway.

  I pause for a moment with my hands resting on the sides of the door frame. A thin breeze crawls up the shapeless, grimy T-shirt I wore to bed and pats my belly.

  I can feel their heartbeats all around me. My brother in his bedroom, my mother in her king-size bed, my father tonight in the guest bed, each room with its own distinctive beat.

  I choose my brother’s room. His pulse is youngest.

  I pad over, my feet soft against the carpet.

  The knob grates as it turns, but I am so careful it is not loud. The to
ngue of the door clasp retracts like the end of a kiss, and the door swings wide.

  Of course, I am not going to do anything. I am just going to prove to myself that I am only hallucinating, that I cannot honestly hear those pulses. That is all I am going to do.

  I slip in. I close the door behind me. I will just check.

  A few stripes of streetlamp light from between the slatted blinds run across Paul’s rumpled bed. I take two paces forward.

  Silence. Nothing but silence and the passing of a car outside on the street and a high whine of fear in my own head.

  It was nothing. Half-sleep. Wishful thinking. A frantic dream. Now there is no heartbeat.

  I step to the edge of the bed. To take a closer look. He is tangled in his covers. One gross hairy leg juts out. A hand-held video game is half-trapped under his pillow.

  I reach out slowly to touch his neck. I can see his throat flexing with each breath.

  Why am I doing this? I ask myself in panic.

  I step closer to him. His neck flexes as he turns away, muscles rippling across the surface. He has a mole on his neck. Like a target.

  Blood. I can feel the blood skating through his skin, dashing like light on water. The liveliness of mortal flesh.

  I lean toward him. Just to take a closer look.

  I can almost touch his neck with my tongue.

  I crouch there.

  Panicked.

  His mouth is open idiotically. A slug’s trail of drool leads onto his pillow.

  I move my hands up to my mouth.

  Cover it. Both hands.

  Start backing up. Like a broken wind-up toy. Step by step. Toward the door.

  Carefully undo the latch.

  Go back to my room.

  For a while, I just sag there against my bed, breathing raggedly.

  He is still just a room away.

  I was not going to do anything. Nothing like that. I just went in to check if the pulses were real. They were a dream. That’s it. I just wanted to check about the pulses, though.

  That was it.

  On the wall there is a portrait of someone with no skin. They still look like they’re smiling for the artist, but that may be because they have no cheeks.