Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  That summer Nal was fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself. He and Samson played a lot of basketball on summer nights and weekends. Nal would replay every second of their games until he was so sick of his own inner sportscaster that he wanted to puke. He actually had puked once—last September he had walked calmly out of the JV try-outs and retched in the frangipani. The voice in his head logged every on-court disaster, every stolen ball and missed shot, the unique fuckups and muscular failures that he had privately termed “Nal-fouls.” Samson had been on the varsity team since his freshman year, and he wasn’t interested in these instant replays—he wanted the game to move forward. Nal and his brother would play for hours, and when he got tired of losing, Nal would stand in the shade of a eucalyptus grove and dribble in place.

  “It’s just a pickup game, Nal,” Samson told him.

  “Quit eavesdropping on me!” Nal shouted, running the ball down the blacktop. “I’m talking to myself.”

  Then he’d take off sprinting down the road, but no matter how punishing the distance he ran—he once dribbled the ball all the way down to the ruined industrial marina at Pier 12, where the sea rippled like melted aluminum—Nal felt he couldn’t get away from himself. He sank hoops and it was always Nal sinking them; he missed, and he was Nal missing. He felt incapable of spontaneous action: before he could do anything, a tiny homunculus had to generate a flowchart in his brain. If p, then q; If z, then back to a. This homunculus could gnaw a pencil down to a nub, deliberating. All day, he could hear the homunculus clacking in his brain like a secretary from a 1940s movie: Nal shouldn’t! Nal can’t! Nal won’t! and then hitting the bell of the carriage return. He pictured the homunculus as a tiny, blankly handsome man in a green sweater, very agreeably going about his task of wringing the life from Nal’s life.

  He wanted to get to a place where he wasn’t thinking about every movement at every second; where he wasn’t even really Nal any longer but just weight sinking into feet, feet leaving the pavement, fingers fanning forcelessly through air, the swish! of a made basket and the net birthing the ball. He couldn’t remember the last time he had acted without reservation on a single desire. Samson seemed to do it all the time. Once, when Nal returned home from his miles-long run with the ball, sweating and furious, they had talked about his aspiration for vacancy—the way he wanted to be empty and free. He’d explained it to Samson in a breathless rush, expecting to be misunderstood.

  “Sure,” Samson said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do?”

  “From surfing. Oh, it’s wild, brother.” Why did Samson have to know him so well? “The feeling of being part of the same wave that’s lifting you. It’s like you’re coasting outside of time, outside your own skin.”

  Nal felt himself redden. Sometimes he wished his brother would simply say, “No, Nal, what the hell do you mean?” Samson had a knack for this kind of insight: he was like a grinning fisherman who could wrench a secret from the depths of your chest and dangle it in front of you, revealing it to be nothing but a common, mud-colored fish.

  “You know what else can get you there, Nal, since you’re such a shitty athlete?” Samson grinned and cocked his thumb and his pinky, tipped them back. “Boozing. Or smoking. Last night I was out with Vanessa and we were maybe three pitchers in when the feeling happened. All night I was in love with everybody.”

  So Samson was now dating Vanessa Grigalunas? Nal had been infatuated with her for three years and had been so certain, for so long, that they were meant to be together, he was genuinely confused by this development, as if the iron of his destiny had gone soft and pliant as candle wax. Vanessa was in Nal’s grade, a fellow survivor of freshman year. He had sat behind her in Japanese class and it was only in that language—where he was a novice and felt he had license to stammer like a fool—that he could talk to her. “K-k-k,” he’d say. Vanessa would smile politely as he revved his stubborn syllable engine, until he was finally able to sputter out a “Konnichiwa.”

  Nal had never breathed a word about his love for Vanessa to anyone. And then in early June, out of the clear blue, Samson began raving about her. “Vanessa Grigalunas? But … why her?” Nal asked, thinking of all the hundreds of reasons that he’d by now collected. It didn’t seem possible that the desire to date Vanessa could have co-evolved in Samson. Vanessa wasn’t his type at all; Samson usually dated beach floozies, twentysomethings with hair like dry spaghetti, these women he’d put up with because they bought him liquor and pot, who sat on his lap in Gerlando’s, Athertown’s only cloth-napkin restaurant, and cawed laughter. Vanessa’s hair shone like a lake. Vanessa read books and moved through the world as if she were afraid that her footsteps might wake it.

  “I can’t stop thinking about her,” Samson grinned, running a paw over his bald head. “It’s crazy, like I caught a Vanessa bug or something.”

  Nal nodded miserably—now he couldn’t stop thinking about the two of them together. He sketched out interview questions in his black composition notebook that he hoped to one day ask her:

  1. What is it that you like about my brother? List three things (not physical).

  2. What made you want to sleep with my brother? What was your thought in the actual moment when you decided? Was it a conscious choice, like, Yes, I will do this! or was it more like collapsing onto a sofa?

  3. Under what circumstances can you imagine sleeping with me? Global apocalypse? National pandemic? Strep throat shuts down the high school? What if we were to do it immediately after I’d received a lethal bite from a rattlesnake so you could feel confident that I would die soon and tell no one? Can you just quantify for me, in terms of beer, what it would take?

  It made Nal sadder still that even Vanessa’s mom, Mrs. Grigalunas—a woman who had no sons of her own and who treated all teenage boys like smaller versions of her husband—even kindly, delusional Mrs. Grigalunas recognized Nal as a deterrent to love. One Saturday night Samson informed him that the three of them would be going on a date to Strong Beach together; they needed Nal’s presence to reassure Mrs. Grigalunas that nothing dangerous or fun would happen.

  “Yes, you two can go to the beach,” she told Vanessa, “but bring that Nal along with you. He’s such a nice boy.”

  WHAT WERE all these seagulls doing out flying at night? They were kelp gulls, big ones. Nal was shocked to see how many of the birds now occupied Strong Beach. Where’d they all come from? He turned to point out the seagull invasion to Vanessa and Samson, but they were strolling hand in hand over a tall dune, oblivious to both Nal and the gulls’ wheeling shadows. Nal hoped the flock would leave soon. He was trying to finish a poem. White globs of gull shit kept falling from the sky, a cascade that Nal found inimical to his writing process. The poem that Nal was working on had nothing to do with his feelings—poetry, he’d decided, was to honor remote and immortal subjects, like the moon. “Lambent Planet, Madre Moon” was the working title of this one, and he’d already jotted down three sestets. Green nuclei of fireflies, Nal wrote. The red commas of two fires. A putrid, stinky blob fell from above and put out his word. “Shoo, you shit balloons!” he yelled as the gulls rained on.

  There were no fireflies on the beach that night, but there were plenty of spider fleas, their abdomens pulsing with low-grade toxins. The air was tangy and cold. Between two lumps of sand about a hundred yards behind him, Vanessa and Nal’s brother, Samson, were … Nal couldn’t stand to think about it. In five minutes’ time they had given up on keeping their activities a secret from him, or anybody. Vanessa’s low moan was rising behind him, rich and feral and nothing like her classroom whisper.

  Nal felt a little sick.

  What on earth was the moon like? he wondered, squinting. What did the moon most resemble to him? Nal wiped at his dry eyes and dug into the paper. One of the seagulls had settled on an auburn coil of seaweed a few feet away from his bare foot. He tried to ignore it, but the gull was making a big production out of ev
iscerating a cigarette. It drew out red flakes of tobacco with its pincerlike bill and ate them. Perfect, Nal thought. Here I am trying to eulogize Mother Nature and this is the scene she presents me with.

  Behind him, Samson growled Vanessa’s name. Don’t look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot. But Nal couldn’t help himself. He lacked the power to look away, but he never worked up the annihilating courage to look directly at them either; instead, he angled his body and let his eyes slide to the left. This was like taking dainty sips of poison. Samson’s broad back had almost completely covered Vanessa—only her legs were visible over the dune, her pink feet twitching as if she were impatient for sleep. “Oh!” said Vanessa, over and over again. “Oh!” She sounded happy, astonished.

  Nal was a virgin. He kicked at a wet clump of sand until it exploded. He went on a rampage, doing whirling karate kicks into a settlement of abandoned sand castles along the beach for a full minute before he paused, panting, to recover himself. The tide rushed icy fingers of water up the beach and covered Nal’s foot.

  “Ahh!” Nal cried into one of the troughs of silence between Samson and Vanessa’s moans. He had wandered to the water’s edge, six or seven dunes away from them. His own voice was drowned out by the ocean. The salt water sleuthed out cuts on his legs that he had forgotten about or failed to feel until now, and he almost enjoyed the burning. He looked around for something else to kick, but only one turret remained on the beach, a bucket-shaped stump in the middle of damp heaps. The giant seagull was standing beside it. Up close the gull seemed as large as a house cat. Its white face was luminous, its wings ink-dipped; its beak was fixed in that perennial shit-eating grin of all shearwaters and frigate birds.

  “What are you grinning at?” Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle—too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape—and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal’s shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.

  NAL WASN’T SUPPOSED to be in town that summer. He had been accepted to LMASS, the Lake Marion Achievement Summer Seminars: a six-week precollege program for the top three percent of the country’s high school students. It was a big deal—seniors who completed all four summers of the program were automatically admitted to Lake Marion College with a full scholarship package. “Cream Rises” was the camp’s motto; their mascot was an oblong custard-looking thing, the spumy top layer of which Nal guessed was meant to represent the gifted. In March a yellow T-shirt with this logo had arrived in the mail, bundled in with his acceptance letter. Nal tried to imagine a hundred kids wearing the same shirt in the Lake Marion dormitories, kids with overbites and cowlicks and shy, squint-eyed ambitions—LMASS! he thought, a kind of heaven. Had he worn the shirt with the custard-thing to his own school, it would have been a request for a punch in the mouth.

  But then one day his mom came home from work and said she was being scapegoated by the Paradise Nursing Facility for what management was calling “a distressing oversight.” Her superiors recommended that she not return to work. But for almost two weeks Nal’s mother would set her alarm for five o’clock, suit up, take the number 14 bus to Paradise. Only after she was officially terminated did she file for unemployment, and so far as Nal could tell this was the last real action she had taken; she’d been on their couch for three months now and counting. Gradually she began to lose her old habits, as if these, too, were a uniform that she could slip out of: she stopped cooking entirely, slept at odd hours, mummied herself in blankets in front of their TV. What was she waiting for? There was something maddening about her posture—the way she sat there with one ear cocked sideways as if listening for a break in the weather. Nal had been forced to forfeit his deposit at Lake Marion and interview for a job behind the register at Penny’s Grocery. He took a pen to the Help Wanted ads and papered their fridge with them. This was back in April, when he’d still believed his mom might find another job in time to pay the Lake Marion fee.

  “Mom, just look at these, okay?” he’d shout above the surf roar of their TV. “I circled the good ones in green.” She’d explain again without looking over that the whole town was against her. Nobody was going to hire Claire Wilson now. All these changes came about as the result of a single failed mainstay. The windows at Paradise were supposed to be fitted with a stop screw, to prevent what the Paradise manual euphemistically referred to as “elopement.” Jailbreak was another word for this, suicide, accidental defenestration—as Nal’s mom put it, many of the residents were forty-eight cards to a deck and couldn’t be trusted with their own lives. With the stop screws in place, no window opened more than six inches. But as it happened, a stop screw was missing from a sixth-floor window—one of the hundred-plus windows in Paradise—an oversight that was discovered when a ninety-two-year-old resident shoved it open to have a smoke. A visitor found the old woman leaning halfway out the window and drew her back inside the frame. The visitor described the “near fatal incident” to Nal’s mother while the “victim” plucked ash from her tongue. According to Nal’s mom, the Paradise administrators came to the sudden agreement that it had always been Claire Wilson’s responsibility to check the window locks. She came home that night babbling insincere threats: “They try to pin this on me, boys, you watch, I will quit in a heartbeat.” But then the resident’s daughter wrote a series of histrionic letters to the newspaper, and the sleepy Athertown news station decided to do an “exposé” of Paradise, modeled on the American networks, complete with a square-jawed black actress to play the role of Nal’s mother.

  Only Nal had watched the dramatization through to its ending. They’d staged a simulation of a six-story fall using a flour sack dummy, the sack splitting open on the gates and spilling flour everywhere, powdering the inscrutable faces of the stone angels in the garden below. Lawsuits were filed, and, in the ensuing din of threats and accusations, Nal’s mother was let go.

  Nal had expected his mom to react to this with a froth and vengeance that at least matched his own, perhaps even file a legal action. But she returned home from her final day at work exhausted. Her superiors had bullied her into a defeated sort of gratitude: “They said it was my job, who knows? I’m not perfect. I’m just glad they caught the problem when they did,” she kept saying.

  “Quit talking like that!” Nal moaned. “It wasn’t your fault, Mom. You’ve been brainwashed by these people. Don’t be such a pushover.”

  “A pushover!” she said. “Who’s pushing me over? I know it wasn’t my fault, Nal. I can’t be grateful that nobody got killed?” She described the “averted tragedy” in the canned language of the Paradise directors: the chance of one of her charges flailing backward out the window and onto the gate’s tiny spears. In her dreams the victim wasn’t a flour sack dummy but a body with no face, impaled on the spikes.

  “That’s your body, Ma!” Nal cried. “That’s you!” But she didn’t see it that way.

  “Let’s just be thankful nobody was hurt,” she mumbled.

  Nal didn’t want his mom to relinquish her first fury. “How can you say that? They fired you, Mom! Now everything’s … off course.”

  His mom stroked a blue curl of Nal’s hair and gave him a tired smile. “Ooh, we’re off course, right. I forgot. And what course was that?”

  Nal picked up more shifts at the grocery store. He ran eggs and pork tenderloins down the register, the scanner catching his knuckles in a web of red light. Time felt heavy inside Penny’s. Beep! he whimpered along with the machine, swiping a tin of tomatoes. Beep! Sometimes he could still feel the progress of his lost future inside him, the summer at Lake Marion piping like a vacant bubble through his blood.

  “Mom, can I still go away to college, though?” he asked her one Sunday, when they were sitting in the aquarium light of the TV. He’d felt the bubble swell to an unbearable pressure in
his lungs. “Sure,” she said, not looking over from the TV. Her eyes were like Samson’s, bright splashes of blue in an oak-stained face. “You can do whatever you want.”

  When the bubble in him would burst, Nal would try to start a fight. He shouted that what she called his “choices” about college and LMASS and Penny’s Grocery were her consequences, a domino run of misfortune. He told her that he wouldn’t be able to go to college if she didn’t find another job, that it was lying to pretend he could.

  “I heard you guys going at it,” Samson said later in the kitchen, clapping mayonnaise onto two slices of bread. “Give Mom a break, kid. I think she’s sick.”

  But Nal didn’t think that his mom had contracted any particular illness—he was terrified that she was more generally dying, or disintegrating, letting her white roots grow out and fusing her spine to their couch. She was still sitting in front of the TV with the shades drawn when he got off his shift at six thirty.

  Nal wrote a poem about how his mother had become the sea hum inside the conch shell of their living room. He thought it must be the best poem he’d ever written because he tried to recite it to his bathroom reflection and his throat shut, and his eyes stung so badly he could barely see his own face. She was sitting out there now, watching TV reruns and muttering under her breath. Samson was out drinking that night with Vanessa. Nal gave his mother the poem to read and found it under a dirty mug, accumulating rings, when he came back to check on her that Friday.