I, Vampire

by Jean Marie Stine

  V.

  THE WILD, SOUR HOWLS of ambulance and police sirens din as they approach the hotel. I'm almost out of cigarettes, staring at the wide, ragged run snaking down the stocking over my right shin. Fucking pantyhose. As in life, Mark was grasping, and clawing to the end.

  I wonder if they'll keep me hush-hush as they did forty some years ago with the "flying saucer" crash in Roswell, New Mexico, or when they discovered the alchemical diaries of the Compe de St. Germain before the Crash of '29? (Who knew making gold was that easy?)

  No, these days I'll just become the star of the moment. Paraded through the tabloids, then "News at Six," then the innumerably ridiculous talk shows. Montel Williams would suit me just fine- Exclusive: She-Male Vampire Talks! or I Was A Cross-Dressing, Bloodsucking Murderer! I can smell the headlines now.

  But the sorry truth, soulmates, is that it doesn't really matter if I am a "vampire" or not. Neither does it matter if I am a "transsexual" – or not. Either way I am made out to be an outlaw. Either way I am some thing which looks wrong and vile to the rest of this world. Either way I live at least two separate lives, no matter how hard I try to pass myself off as "normal," as a mortal human or as a "vampire," as a "woman" or as a "man." Which lie do I tell today? Just accept yourself, you say? Just be who you are, you say? The glowing, androgynous child who glides through my memories? The bruised teenage whore who turns a trick in order to afford a lunch of boiled tongue? The budding, darkly hopeful "vampire" avenger of all the world's wrongs? The frustrated, raging, homicidal drag queen? Two-Spirit!? Try "Three-Spirit!" Try "Four-Spirit!" Just accept yourself, you say? Just be who you are, you say? Take your pick.

  Then come on up and visit it me in my hotel room ... sometime...

  VI.

  THE RISING SUN WARMED the damp, gray corners of the ravine. Two large black ravens briefly circled our camp, fighting, diving at each other, punctuating the air with their harsh, rasping calls. I watched Jonathan build another meat-smoking crib, while I pensively ate my breakfast of roasted corn and bitter tea. His disturbing words from the night before echoed inside of my head.

  Jonathan looked up at me from his labor as if he heard my thoughts. "We are going up to the mesa this morning – maybe over to the next canyon…I want to show you how I hunt – that is, if you promise not to fall asleep on me,

  " he laughed ironically. I feigned a smile and returned to denuding my corncob. There was little question in my mind of

  who I was, of who I knew myself to be – my body, however, didn't seem to agree with my final conclusions. And, then, even my body's answers were pretty vague. But the idea of choosing to be a man or a woman? For nineteen years of age, my face was fair; my build slight, some would call frail; my stride graceful, and my voice an even-tempered alto. When I arrived outside of Tulsa, some three years ago, I noticed that strangers approached me with a curious deference, studying my body, maybe my walk, or the pitch of my voice; then hedged their bets that I was probably a girl dressed for farm work, as was common in rural parts. They most often treated me with the genteel social courtesies reserved for born females. I would rarely bother to correct them, but I also managed to make a quick retreat. Yet, even if I were built like a growling lumberjack, the voices of my mind, my sight, my loves, my dislikes, my passions informed me that my soul was different,

  certainly not a man's soul, at least no man who I've ever met, but far, far more akin to a woman's soul. It just was. Exactly how it figured as such I may never really know. But there was never a matter of choice. There was nothing to prove or disprove to myself, or anyone else. It was simply a fact of my being alive, like breathing. On the other hand, attempting to live my life with some semblance of sanity between my woman's soul and my boy's body, that constant nagging, disappointing rift in the reality of my life, that was another matter entirely…

  We hiked to the top of the mesa by mid-morning and positioned ourselves behind a blind of gray broom bush. Once there, Jonathan dabbed me with short strokes of cod-liver oil and then instructed me to breathe in eight distinct parts: Four short inhalations, four short exhalations. I felt foolish hiding in a bunch of bushes, wreaking of dead fish and breathing like a woodmouse. The deer, he instructed, sensed humans through sight, smell, and sound, particularly the sound of human respiration. Our sight was covered by the blind, our smell by the oil, and the familiar rhythm of human respiration by our adopted pattern of breathing. According to him, a deer could pass six inches in front of us and never detect that a human was present. No doubt.

  Jonathan then looked at me in complete earnest and said, "Now pray to the deer, to its spirit, to come to us, to present himself to us so that we may hunt him." This may have been the strangest thing someone had ever asked me to do – that is, outside of choosing to be a man or a woma... "Just pray," he emphasized. I closed my eyes and followed his lead. "Now

  thank the deer." I opened one eye and looked at Jonathan like a begging human question mark. "Do it," he commanded. I did. I practiced breathing in, then out, four beats apiece. I repeated the pattern a hundred times. My head grew lighter. My sight fixed on the scintillating reflections of the leaves gently dancing in the breeze just a few inches from my face. A mockingbird recited her entire repertoire. I lost track of time.

  The next sensation I felt was Jonathan's huge hand closing around my wrist, momentarily squeezing it to get my attention. A buck deer with four and five point antlers passed not more than three feet in front of us. Jonathan's eyes met mine. The message was unmistakable:

  Don't move! Within an instant Jonathan leaped from the blind and enveloped the animal in his grasp. Amidst a violent flurry of dust and broken branches, I watched the drama as if I were seeing the event at half its speed. His hands moved quickly to immobilize the deer's antlers and jaw, while his legs scissored above animal's hindquarters and swept its legs out from under it. Only then did I realize that Jonathan had no weapons with him. No rifle, no bow and arrow, no knife.

  When the thick dust of their lightning-quick battle cleared, I beheld an image that fascinated and then terrified me: the buck lay on the ground, twitching the last of life from its body. Poised over the dying form, Jonathan firmly braced the deer's head and legs with his hands while his torso arched over its back.

  As I warily approached, I could see Jonathan's face almost buried in the animal's broad neck, accompanied by a wild, horrific sucking sound. The twitching stopped. Jonathan's head rose from the dead animal's neck where appeared an apple-sized puckering reddish-purple hole. My eyes swelled in their sockets. Jonathan slowly lifted his face to the sun. His expression was of absolute peace and serenity. There was no trace of blood or flesh on his mouth. I looked back to the wound on the deer's neck and watched it close like the aperture of a camera lens, screwing itself into a dry, mottled scar. I felt a cold chill run through the marrow of my entire skeleton, my

  breathing constricted like a fist and my heart beat furiously. Jonathan opened his eyes, sensing my panic, yet not even he could react quickly enough to stop my wild scrambling body, which raced towards the edge of the mesa to the trail which would thankfully lead me back to camp, and some minuscule sense of the known and the familiar. "Temple!" Jonathan shouted at me, "Temple Doolin!" – less than a dozen strides behind me. Without slowing my frantic escape, I turned to see him, and at the moment, felt my soul ripping hotly in two halves: One desperately fleeing from the life-sucking monster I envisaged just seconds earlier, and the other wanting to drown my body in the man-in-doeskin's mysterious and dark embrace. My body whirled about in confusion like a gust of devil-wind, locking my knees, sending my feet twisting into a gravel gully near the mesa's edge, hurdling me headfirst down the steep incline, bouncing and battering between the granite and burro bush until I came to a precarious and broken rest at the dusty elbow of a trail switchback. My mouth grew hot and dry. A tingling numbness grew from where my toes started and gradually worked its way up through my shins to my thighs. My vision was commanded by a bri
ghtly swirling spiral of silver light. My heart pounded in my chest like a drunken hammer. This is dying, I thought. A large warm hand cradled the back of my head, another at the small of my back. I couldn't tell whether I was being lifted, or if I was falling. It wouldn't have mattered to me either way.

  Floating in a sea of oil, twisting slowly, fluidly in a thick current of black, side to side, gently tumbling, end over end … a muffled roar, waves upon waves, upon waves … sensing … my arms … my legs … my hands … my feet …my stomach … my chest … my neck … floating, twisting, tumbling … separately … disjointed in the current … over and over … the roaring waves breaking louder ... upon a shore … a cloudy, luminous shore … luminous yellow sand ... pulling in my hands … my feet … my limbs … my torso ... my body … joining ... back together … slowly … painfully ... coming to rest ... resting on the shore … the luminous shore … the luminous yellow sand…

  "Temple Doolin" … a voice … an echo…"Temple Doolin" … an echo reflecting off the walls of a canyon…"Temple Doolin" ... a voice … a deep, measured baritone voice … the man-in-doeskin…"I am taking you with me" … Jonathan's voice … "I am taking you with me"…

  A sensation on my face … on my cheek … breath … warm breath… "Temple Doolin, this life you have known is now past"… his voice …

  Jonathan's … close … full … deep… "I am taking you with me, Temple Doolin, to the birthplace of the Old Keepers, older than Chiracahua, older than the Mescalero, older than the Mogollon, and forever hence you will be among them. A place which is no place, yet it will be every place you go. A place where death and life suspend between the axis of earth and heaven, and there is only the Becoming, the ever-present. A place where the dark of night shall be overcome by the light of the stars, and the stars will shine darkly… It is your only hope, dear one, as it was mine… It is a place where you may thrive and your soul may breathe for the first time. A place of great power and beauty…

  "In the Becoming you will see the world as it truly is. You will see how the Gift of the Becoming must be used to stay the balance of this world, the very Earth itself, despite the bottomless greed of men's souls. You will understand the predators as you now understand the hunted, that which is excess and that which is starvation, the terrible and the pure, and you will be charged with the weight of balancing those scales wherever you find them…

  "Yet for now, you must find the balance of your own life, your destiny, the purpose of your birth in this body, your man-self, your woman-self – your own place of struggle and pain and choice, where only you may choose who you will become and what shape your life … your

  lives … will take…" My ears slowly filled with the sound of rattling shells and bones and pebbles and twigs and seeds. A chorus, layer upon layer, of rattles. I could make out different pitches, different rhythms, different tempos. I studied them, I tried to make sense of their language, I tried to comprehend their deeply encoded messages, then I just followed the swishing, tumbling currents of sounds like falling water, like waves of rain, like snow flumes, like eddies of cool, spiraling air…

  Suddenly, I was enveloped by a dense fog of sharp sagebrush smoke. My lungs seized, I panicked and gasped for air, my body convulsed and flailed. A large, warm hand came to rest upon my chest, gently laying me supine. The weight of the hand forced me to breathe, deeply, and again, deeply. My arms grew heavy again. My legs went numb.

  I pressed my eyes open. Jonathan's face was poised a few inches above mine, watching me intently, warmly, almost smiling. I fixed upon his eyes…burning a clear blue flame into mine.

  And with strange impassivity, I watched as Jonathan bent over my torso and placed his mouth over the top of my left breast. I heard a great sucking sound like a large horse-trough draining. My muscles contracted violently at the immediate change in the rhythm of my heart. The familiar, monotonous dash-dot-dot, dash-dot-dot heartbeat that had accompanied my dull, thoughtless nineteen years of precious life

  stopped in a simple instant. Just stopped. My stomach sunk into a dark well. The blood in my veins thickened, slowed and came to a halt. My sense of touch, my nerves seemed to glaze over with a thick insulation of warm fluid. Yet, I managed to see, and hear, and feel, distantly, as if I were witnessing these strange events from outside of myself. Jonathan's large, warm hand steadied my startled response as if he had expected it. His free hand slipped behind my head, lifting my stunned body into a puppet-like sitting position, arms hanging uselessly at my side. His head rose with me and placing his lips at the crown of my skull, blew his breath so intensely that I felt a dark, freezing wind permeate every pore of my body. I shuddered uncontrollably. A new rhythm entered my chest, a rhythm like a deep, hollow, bass drum, slow, measured – one, then another, then another, each spaced five seconds apart. I marveled at my heartbeat's new depth, its calm, its peace.

  Jonathan guided my head and body back to rest, and I closed my eyes to see a bright golden core of light, radiating a million shades of shimmering color in long flowing waves, lulling me to sleep…safe asleep…

  My body recovered quickly, very quickly, from my bone-breaking fall down the mesa's jagged slope. Wounds which would have taken weeks, if not months to repair, started healing in a matter of hours. Three days after Jonathan brought me through the ritual of the Becoming, the bruises, sprains, cuts and breaks, which under "normal" circumstances would have killed me or left me crippled for life, were all but undetectable.

  Breaking camp, Jonathan scattered the smooth black river stones which made up his dreaming spiral and rode his Appaloosa mare over the surface of the yellow clay floor, reducing its perfection to uneven piles of dust. The fire pit was buried and the meat-smoking cribs broken and tossed into the brush. Not a discernible sign remained that a human – that any being with a waking consciousness – had inhabited this outcropping in several generations. No one would ever suspect the mystery and drama which had taken place in this simple, dark ravine.

  We rode down though Glenwood to where Silver Creek joined Rio de San Francisco. At the river crossing, the ferryman told us how the Mescaleros raided Mogollon a few days earlier. In the mayhem and bloodshed, U.S. Army Sergeant James Cooney, the dubious hero, and money-mongering founder of that illustrious mining town, was killed in a strange, explosive fire, trapped in the livery stable. No other details were known. None were needed.

  Even now, I could not describe to you the terrible clarity, the awful beauty in which I looked through different eyes at the pinon pine, the yucca, the mountain jay, the gray squirrel, and the broad expanse of sky which seemed to fall off the end of the world. If I spoke a dozen words to the man-in-doeskin on any given day since our fated hunting trip, I spoke one. I was all but mute with the wonderment, grief and joy of my new being, of my own personal becoming – forever, seemingly forever, nineteen years old, a young nineteen at that, for a man. For a woman, I would be just about right. And it is not without the blackest sense of humor that I remember feeling a profound disappointment that crossing into the mysteries of the Old Keepers and crossing the barriers of human mortality did not also include crossing the physical barriers of my own sex. But, I was young … very young. My personal becoming, however inevitable, would be a longer, more difficult journey than my youthful mind could then imagine…

  We rode west, then due north. Jonathan guided us that spring to Canon de Chelly and Canon del Muerte, centuries long sanctuaries to the Old Keepers. There we camped among the Navaho, the Dineh, who, welcomed us at a cautious, but cordial distance. While the various clan elders were familiar with our ways, they were all too aware of their people's fear of "witches" to invite us very close to their daily lives. The following spring we moved west to Hopi, and the next, on past Flagstaff to California.

  Almost a thousand miles and over a hundred camps separated us from Mogollon. Near Havasu, a few hours from a small Chemehueva village, Jonathan remarked, almost casually, that he had exhausted his teachings in the ancient ways of the
Gift of the Becoming. I watched with some puzzlement as he removed the black leather medicine-pouch around his neck and tied it to the saddle horn of his Appaloosa. It was given to him as an honor of peerage and brotherhood by a Mescalero healer shortly before we left Apache territory and started west. I guess I had grown comfortable with Jonathan's ways despite the fantastic journey which we had shared the past three years, despite the frightening and awesome teachings, despite the fact that we were in love. I guess I must have grown too comfortable. Jonathan always warned of a Receiver of the Gift growing too comfortable, or too dependent, or in any way unconscious of the world around them. I guess I had fallen prey to all three of those traps. I did not question Jonathan's gesture that evening. I did not question the dangling medicine-pouch tied to the saddle, the same pouch which he had not parted with for a single moment in three years. I did not question his brooding silence, his detachment, his terrible aura of absolute aloneness.

  I, of course, was oblivious to the message which he attempted to telegraph to me. I was too busy playing the "ever-dutiful housewife,

  " lost in the middle of cooking supper and fixing our bedding. Everything seemed to have a place in the world and everything was in its place. I was too busy basking the contentment of belonging, the harmony of feeling loved, the pride of being valued. Too busy exploring the old confines of my soul beginning to stretch – birthing into a new, emerging being, beyond even the confines of my sex… Yet, there in front of me, for the first time since I had known Jonathan, I saw a physically tired, worn, almost haggard man, as if the infinite flow of thoughts which continuously ran through his active and vital being, had finally taken their toll and drained him of his essential force. For an Old Keeper this state was a nearly impossible condition. I tried to rationalize why he would be so distracted. I tried to excuse his behavior and forgive him for what merely human part of him still occupied his being. I tried not to see the inevitable. I tried not to see that his purpose with me, his transmission of a fluid stream of magical teachings, had reached an end, and that simple love and affection could not limit his destiny to a single person, a single life…