by Kirsten Reed
You always picture yourself in situations like this and wonder what you’ll do. I picked up something flimsy (a cardboard poster roll, I think) and I tapped him over the head with it. All it did was amuse him. When he turned around and smirked at me it made me so mad I picked up a free-standing traffic barricade and just about brained him.
He had a grotesque look of shock on his face, as he raised his hands to his head and looked for all practical purposes like he was trying to hold his brain in. Then he dropped to the ground and started to ooze blood onto the asphalt, B-horror movie style.
A shocked hush followed, which Gunther and I used as an opportunity to dart away. Some people looked up and shouted ‘hey’. Some started to follow us, but we outran them. We ran in a big circle that led us back to the motel. We threw our stuff in the car and sped out of there, Gunther drove. Fuck the fifty dollars. We heard the scream of an ambulance. Three cop cars sped past us.
‘God, Gunther,’ I said, ‘this is so twilight zone.’
He didn’t say anything.
We drove a long way. And he was really speeding. I told him to slow down, or we’d attract attention. He slowed it down to the speed limit. We finally got to a caravan park. It was the middle of the night, and pitch black. I didn’t know where we were, Gunther probably didn’t either. He told me to stay in the car, and headed up to the reception cabin. He had to buzz for a while before someone came to check us in. She was an old lady in her bathrobe. Very matronly.
We were in the caravan when Gunther finally saw the blood on my jeans. He just stared at it, like it was a tarantula climbing up my leg, and he didn’t know what to do.
Then he spluttered, ‘Oh! Are you OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Are you?’
‘Uh, yeah. I’m fine, too.’ Then he added, ‘I think I broke my wrist.’ After about twenty seconds he said, ‘Hang on, I think it’s just sprained,’ and after twenty more, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘I think so. I’m…I’m going to go take a shower.’
‘OK.’
The shower was in a room that could barely contain it. And they’d managed to squeeze a sink and toilet in there, too. They were all on top of each other. The water pressure was what you’d expect from a caravan: a trickle, but I don’t think I could have withstood anything stronger. Gunther came in and stood there, watching a thin trickle of watery pink run down my legs.
I said, ‘Gunther, it’s OK.’
He wandered back out again. I toweled myself off and joined him in the dank main section of the caravan. He was sitting on the bed, atop a stained orange plasticky bedspread. I curled up in my towel, facing the wall. He curled up next to me, and put his arms around me. Spoons, they call it. Eventually we got under the covers. I fell asleep and woke up with Gunther still clutching my naked body to him for dear life. His lips were on my shoulder. I could feel one of his fangs, just resting. If ever there was a time to bite me, this was it.
Once we were out in the daylight again, the feeling only got worse. I prayed he would bite me for real, not one of those flirty little nips. Gunther was driving. There was all manner of stuff littered about—fast-food billboards and people and cars and animals. My head was spinning, the world looked like a seething carnival. People were laughing, smoking cigarettes, and wearing bold patterned clothes, pushing strollers, chasing Frisbees, walking dogs, riding bikes, holding hands. It was all so bright in comparison to our darkness. I wanted to burrow. I wanted to dig a hole for us to hide. Hell, a grave.
I’ve started dreaming again, and remembering what I dream. Usually when I’m stoned I just get zonked right out and don’t remember a thing. But last night I dreamed about the big funeral party brawl. Only this time, there was no funeral procession. There weren’t even any cars. They were the zombies they appeared to be, swarming over the hills, converging on a single point, which was us. Zombie Football Shirt got there first. He was huge. He grunted. I said, ‘Uh…small world.’
He said, mechanically, ‘Not. Small. Enough.’ Which didn’t make much sense. It was very Arnold Schwarzenegger, though.
Gunther made the slow motion grab, as per real life.
The next zombie came up beside Football Shirt and said, ‘Aw…He’s. Just. Mad. Cuz. We. Broke. His. Toy.’
I remember thinking. ‘Hey, they must mean me.’ Then, ‘I’m not a toy.’
As if he read my mind, Zombie #2 nodded pointedly in the direction of my ass. I spun my head around. I had a wind-up string poking out of my butt.
‘I say: head for the coast, one more friend, then New York City.’ It was the new, slightly revived Gunther, driving again with proper gusto, with me on map detail.
I said, ‘OK.’
I was still thinking about my dream. If only I’d slept a little longer. Maybe I could have found out what I say when someone pulls my string. But we got off to a very early start today.
We had burgers for breakfast. I guess you’d call that brunch. We sat across from each other at a tiny round plastic table, not saying much. But Gunther was looking at me steadily, with what I would classify as a beam, albeit muted. That sufficed, and well compensated for the lack of conversation. I was perfectly happy to sit there chewing, soaking up his silent approval.
He gave the waitress an extremely large tip, especially considering she looked and acted like oatmeal. She couldn’t have been more unenthused, basically slapped the food onto the table, and slumped away. Slumped back over after a while, slapped something else onto the table. And when I asked for the bill she said, ‘Pay at the counter,’ listlessly.
When we’d finished I said, ‘That was kind of crappy.’
Gunther flashed an amused smirk. ‘Yeah, it was, huh?’
‘I was hungry, though.’
‘Yeah.’
We drove along for an hour or so listening to the radio. We’d found a classic rock station. In moderation, the classics make good driving music. That was certainly the case today. All sweeping farmscapes and ‘Whole Lotta Love’. We stopped along the roadside to watch a horse being born. There was no one out there. Just a mare standing in the middle of a field, popping a foal out. As we happened to be passing. We stood there for ages, leaning on the fence, watching the tiny thing struggle to his feet, find the teat, follow his mother around on shaky little hooves. We could have been there for hours, for all I know. They walked over the crest of a hill and we got back in the car and drove away.
The seventies metal thing was still working for us. We drove along in comfortable musing silence. I don’t know about him, but I imagine he was doing exactly what I was doing, and I was just letting those songs tell me what to think about. What to feel. What to imagine. A hawk was circling overhead. Over barns and wheat fields. Probably looking for field mice. It was almost quaint. It didn’t quite fit the rock anthem sensibility, and all the thoughts that went with it. I thought of the vultures circling over stretches of barren desert, weird rock formations, and said, ‘Gunther, I want to head out west again.’
‘Spoken like a seasoned roadtripper,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
We were quiet for a while. He was still driving east, of course.
I said, ‘I’m just used to it now.’
‘Not tired of drifting?’
I said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘You will be.’
It came to me in rush. The feeling is always just under the surface, so it didn’t have far to travel…
‘Gunther! What’s wrong with me?’ I grabbed his hand on the gear stick, and looked him square in the face.
He turned to me in confusion, surprise, and somehow managed to keep the car on course, despite continuing to hold my eyes. Which were pouring with tears. I was really sobbing now. I wanted this trip of ours to never end. And I wanted him to want it too.
‘We’ll go to Cynthia’s,’ he said, ‘and get you a proper meal.’
It took him a while to finally come out with this. It was all he said about my outburst. It wasn’t exactl
y what I was expecting. Or hoping for. But then, that’s Gunther. Ever grounded.
We didn’t make it to this Cynthia’s house that night. We stopped at a seriously no-frills roadhouse well after dark and ate vending machine cupcakes for dinner. So much for getting a proper meal into me. I guess that would have to wait. Gunther was really letting his culinary standards slip. Three months ago he wouldn’t have even considered those bite-sized snacks edible. He just wasn’t putting the effort in anymore. I remember Murray witnessing one of our critical discussions, wherein Gunther was lecturing me about the finer qualities of something, the inferior qualities of something else. Murray, he of the cabin of rustic woodsy kitsch, told Gunther to stop patronizing me. I didn’t see it that way at all. I like hearing Gunther tell me what’s what. It always amuses me. And it always makes me feel as though he has bigger and better things planned for me; like I have something important lying ahead.
I had another dream. I dreamed the whole journey, all the driving Gunther and I have done over the past several months, all our time together, could be traced on one huge diagram. According to this dream, if you were to hover above the country and look down, you’d see a gigantic organ covering almost the whole land, just flapped across it like a dead fish, gray and fleshy. It was criss-crossed by straps, tethering it to the ground. On the other end of some of these ropes and cords were Gunther’s various friends, the recipients of our visits. I stopped hovering and plunged to earth; wandered around and collected their chatter, their accusations. Apparently this was Gunther’s heart. The cords: our path across it, or across the country as it were. They are one and the same. I saw Stephanie a ways away. And Murray. Delilah got right in my face and said, ‘We have to stop Gunther’s heart from exploding.’ I tried to digest this. She said, ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a heart attack?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but…’ She turned and shouted, ‘Hey, you guys! Kid’s never heard of a heart attack!’ For some reason I was holding a needle and thread. Some dame I’ve never seen before came up beside Delilah and spat, ‘The fuck were you gonna do with that?’
The next day we were at Cynthia’s. She’s this gorgeous blonde. One of the only friends of Gunther’s time has been kind to. She opened the screen door and stood there looking like a goddamn siren, all statuesque and self-satisfied. I think her hair was actually blowing in the wind. And I didn’t even feel a breeze. Like some film crew lackey was standing behind us pointing a fan. Like it was a goddamn photo shoot.
This imaginary wind seemed to have caught Gunther, too. He was standing next to me, towering and swaying like a poplar in a gale. He has been a little off color lately.
Cynthia took one look at him and said, ‘Oh, Gun, no!’ and grasped him squarely by the shoulders, as if he was in danger of keeling over. I’d never heard anyone use a nickname on Gunther. Except maybe Delilah. But let’s face it, she’s just a random word generator. Fucking journalists.
‘Cynthia,’ he said at length, ‘I’m just…tired.’
‘Uh…OK?’ Her voice was laced with something; maybe sarcasm, I couldn’t tell.
‘And my young friend here is just hungry.’
She looked at me with mingled warmth and pity. And to Gunther she returned with a look of intense concern. Finally she turned on her heels and said flatly, ‘Well then. Come in and have some rest and food.’
She wasn’t expecting us. Gunther hadn’t called. And it was kind of late. I didn’t want her to go to any trouble, so all I ended up having was toast. Gunther didn’t have anything. And she had a cigarette.
She got up and took my plate, and announced, ‘Gun, you can crash with me. Bed’s huge. Kiddie can take the couch.’
She got me some blankets and a fluffy pillow. She pointed to the remote and told me she had MTV if I wanted to watch it. I think I rolled my eyes. I wished a hundred wishes that Gunther would offer to take the couch; send me in with her. But he didn’t. He trotted off obediently. God, who could blame him. She’s just so smooth, there’s no contradicting her. So Gunther was sharing a bed with another woman. A beautiful one, at that. And I lay essentially a few feet away, alone. I prepared myself to be visited that night by all manner of torment and anguish. But all I ended up feeling was a dull, throbbing numbness. I fell asleep, and awoke with a start, in a strange room with nothing but gray coming in the windows. I remembered something was wrong, and then remembered it was the fact that Gunther was in bed with someone who wasn’t me.
Eventually we all got up, convened in the kitchen, and ate more toast. I wondered if Cynthia was one of Gunther’s playmates from the heady days of hedonism. It wasn’t hard to picture her in a drug soaked, leatherclad orgy. Then I wondered if she was a vampire. Talk about well preserved. Do vampires wear acid washed jeans? There’s no need to be narrow minded, I guess. She was wearing a silk camisole.
She puffed out a big bluster of smoke and said, ‘Kiddo, you are going to need more than just toast to survive.’
I thought that sounded kind of hospitable of her. But kind of foreboding as well. Cool, I thought. I wonder if my vampirization is nigh. Maybe those two had some kind of Meeting of the Undead last night to discuss my future development. Hopefully there was no sex involved. I’m starting to think I’m the jealous type.
Cynthia blew a few contemplative smoke rings and addressed me again. ‘So I hear you’re quite the existentialist.’
‘Huh?’ (Bearing in mind I’m not a morning person.)
‘Gunther says you’ve read everything you can get your tiny little hands on.’
‘Huh? Oh, yeah. I guess.’ There followed a lame silence during which I took a sip of coffee, then another, and finally decided I should gratify her with a slightly meatier answer. ‘Except Dostoevsky. I hate that prick.’
‘Shit, doesn’t everyone.’ She snorted, and blew smoke out her nose.
She stubbed out her cigarette, in an overstuffed ceramic ashtray that bore all the trademark awkward lumps of a child’s school project. But her house was utterly, undoubtedly childless.
She blurted, ‘So Gun, you going to stay here until you get straightened up?’
This was all getting too cryptic for me.
‘Gun’ said, ‘I am straight, Cynthia, I am…It’s—’
She looked at him dubiously. He stammered on.
‘It’s been hard.’
I wanted to get up from my flowery cushioned country-kitchen chair and wrap my arms around him. Us womenfolk studied him a while, from totally different angles, I’m sure. For one thing, she was standing up, looking down. I never look down on Gunther. He’s right, it has been hard, especially these last few weeks; just out of control. Those watery blue eyes looked like they had clouds in them, like he was dreaming of Heaven, of floating away.
I took a shower, and Cynthia turned her attention back to me. I came out in an oversized shirt, with dripping limp hair.
‘That just won’t do,’ she said. I was marched back into the bathroom. We stood there side by side in what turned into a full-scale makeover. She put her own face on, and handed me recommended products intermittently. She lost patience with my haphazard application, and took over the entire exercise. She held my jaw in her slender hand, with its perfect red fingernails. My lips were painted. She told me to close my eyes, and did the upper lids. I was told to look up, and my lashes got a coat of thick starlet fake-eye-lash-style mascara.
‘You have perfect features,’ she said, matter of factly, almost bored. ‘I mean, take them separately. That’s a perfect nose. Perfect lips. Perfect eyes.’
She seemed like a straight-up kind of gal. ‘Cynthia?’
‘Yeah?’
‘What’s wrong with me?’
She stopped looking like a high-class whore. The veneer fell away. She stood just behind me, gazing at me in the mirror. She smoothed my hair, from the scalp all the way down to the tips. She had one of those adult The World is a Shitty Old Place looks on her face. She dropped her hands to her sides.
‘Gunther?’ I could tell this was
rhetorical, and couldn’t form an answer anyway. Does a dog want the biscuit you’re holding in your hand?
‘Beautiful girl.’ I thought she was going to leave it at that, she was quiet for so long after she said it.
‘You want him…Want to be like him?’
‘Yeah.’ And I added, ‘I am like him.’ Then wavered modestly, ‘…Becoming like him…I think.’
‘Yeah, well,’ the five-star-hooker bravado was creeping back, ‘to be like him, you’d have to not want him anymore.’
She may as well have sprinkled pixie dust all around me. The room seemed to be going white. I felt like closing my eyes. Time passed, and I don’t know how much of it. She looked a little smug for my tastes. I finally recovered with, ‘How zen.’
‘C’mon Princess,’ she said, ‘let’s go unveil you to the old critter.’ I’m not a princess, and I hate being called one. I couldn’t make any sense of this broad. Besides, Gunther doesn’t need to see me all dolled up to get the notion I’m pretty. He’s seen me with no clothes on.
Gunther was on the couch. He raised his eyebrows when he saw me. Cynthia trotted me toward him like I was on a catwalk.
He smiled, and scoffed, ‘That’s one way to disguise natural beauty.’
I felt myself blushing. And smiling. I didn’t know whether to be happy or embarrassed. Happy, I guess. Because the make-up I could wash off. The beauty was there for, well, a while anyway.
‘I slaved over this face, Gun,’ Cynthia said, with mock pathos.
‘No need,’ he said.
‘Look at you, you old slob,’ she said tartly. ‘I think the kid and I should stage an intervention.’
He looked well annoyed, and said in a lazy, bitter monotone, ‘Leave the innocent out of this.’
‘The Innocent’; Gunther-speak, if ever I’ve heard it. You can see why I think he’s a few hundred years old. Has anyone spoken this way for the past couple of centuries? I did wish Cynthia would get off his back about whatever the heck it was she was on his back about. She should be happy she’s sharing a bed with the guy. I should be so lucky. I wondered if there was cuddling, a light fang on the shoulder. I doubt it. Maybe that’s what all this is about.