by Chris Vola
“So you’re saying that someone Seamus met on one of these sites was somehow able to organize a full-on kidnapping and torture session, gang-initiation style, hoping that Manhattan would notice them. That Seamus was stupid enough to allow himself to be caught out in the open. I don’t care how hungry he was, he should have been strong enough to—”
“I don’t know anything for sure.” Frank cut Ryan off, sounding annoyed. “Maybe it was someone who’d been feeding him for a long time, enough for him to let his guard down. Whoever it was got greedy, wanted a raise, figured our compatriots across the water would respond to a visual aid. Maybe it was personal, maybe Seamus was talking shit to someone who got pissed off enough to trace an IP address to his apartment and make him pay for it. Found some other like-minded keyboard jockeys to help out. He’s one of us, but Seamus is also an ignorant dick.”
Ryan nodded in agreement. There was no arguing that. “But how did they get my number? I’m about as far off the grid as can be, according to you.”
“I’d assume they got it from the contact list on Seamus’s phone.”
“I haven’t seen him in at least fifteen years,” Ryan said. “How would he have my number?”
“I gave it to him.” Frank put his phone and the vaporizer pen in his pocket, stood up, and joined his forearms over his head, stretching.
“You what?”
“Yeah, a couple weeks ago I bumped into him on the way back from a delivery in Bed-Stuy. We talked for a while. He said he was feeling lonely or something, wanted to reconnect with his friends. He specifically asked about you.”
Frank started walking in the direction of the street. Ryan got up and followed. “Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why they would send me the pictures. You didn’t get them, right?”
Frank shook his head. “They could have picked out random numbers from his phone. Or gone down the list alphabetically until they got the response they wanted. We don’t know what name Seamus used when he entered you into his contacts.”
“Do you think they killed him?”
“If they’re smart.”
“Should we be worried?”
Frank stopped walking and focused another eerie glare on Ryan’s face. They were standing a few feet from the sidewalk where Ryan had entered the park, in the darkness between the path’s last lamppost and the kaleidoscopic glimmer of neon-hued bodegas, traffic signals, and scurrying headlights. “No,” he said, “not yet. I’m going to get in touch with some contacts, make a few house calls, rule out the possibility that this is just some kind of messed-up prank. Are you currently involved with anyone?”
“Involved?”
“Fucking. A human. You’ve been known to do that from time to time.”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t have any idea that I’m—”
“It doesn’t matter. Cut it off until this situation sorts itself out. How long has it been since you’ve slept?”
“Four, maybe five weeks. The hunger was bad this time.”
“That’s too long. Go home and try to relax, let the food settle. I’ll figure everything out, what the next step is, and I’ll call you in the morning. And regardless of the circumstances, it’s good to see you again, Ryan.”
They shook hands without speaking, and Frank headed north to find Raj and Arianna. Ryan felt his phone vibrate in his pocket and for a second felt the urge to fling it into oncoming traffic, to watch it shatter into a thousand unrecoverable shards. Instead he ignored it, turned in the opposite direction, and headed home.
3
“¡Que pasa, primo!” Luis shouted from his folding chair as Ryan turned onto the corner of Nostrand Avenue and Union Street just after 8:30 P.M. The elderly Dominican, wearing a pink guayabera and a Yankees hat, was seated with three of his similarly dressed friends in front of the entrance to the four-story redbrick building where Ryan lived and where Luis was the superintendent, bathed in the neon façade of a Crown Fried Chicken restaurant. They were outside most nights around this time, weather permitting. Shooting the shit, drinking tallboys of Modelo, catcalling, blasting merengue tunes on an ancient CD boom box.
“Nada, man,” Ryan said, forcing a smile, “just coming back from work.”
Luis scowled. “Always work, work, work with you, man. You got to chill out more, too much stress is no bueno. Where’s that chica you’ve been bringing around?”
“Not anywhere you need to know about.”
“Oh ha ha, no need to worry about me, boss. Maybe twenty years ago, but now…” Luis clutched his bowling-ball stomach and jiggled it to prove his point. He reached into the small plastic cooler near his feet and pulled out a beer, holding it out for Ryan. “Come hang out for a little bit, take a load off.”
Ryan shook his head. “Busy day tomorrow, maybe some other time.”
Luis shrugged and cracked open the beer for himself. One of his friends started berating him in rapid-fire Spanish, something about the size of his wife’s ears, from what little Ryan could make out. Luis barked something back and the men started laughing.
Normally, Ryan liked to find a new apartment every eight or nine years, usually coinciding with a name change and a new set of forged identification documents courtesy of Frank. He tried to find buildings in neighborhoods that were on the cusp of gentrification, where the established ethnic communities had grudgingly accepted the influx of police activity, demands for rezoning, and newly hip “wine and spirit” shops. Crown Heights, with its deeply rooted enclaves of West Indians and ultra-Orthodox Jews, had been an ideal place for Ryan to disappear for the past half decade. To the locals he was just another crazy blanquito, slaving away at a boring office job somewhere far away and paying far too much rent for what his apartment was actually worth.
Pausing at the building’s front door, Ryan dug through his satchel for his keys. They weren’t there. Assuming he had forgotten them during his earlier preoccupation with finding food, he called out to Luis and motioned for him to come over. “You mind opening this for me?” he asked the super. “Left my keys inside.”
“For you, anything.” Luis unclipped his key ring from his belt after three fumbling attempts but immediately found the correct key out of the dozens that were in his possession and opened the door. “You need me to go with you to open your apartment?”
“I’ll be fine,” Ryan said.
The old man looked relieved. “Okay, papi. You know where to find me if you do.”
Ryan thanked him and headed through the narrow, poorly lit lobby and up three flights of stairs. He stopped for a moment in front of 4F’s faded beige door and listened for signs of activity in the other three apartments on his floor. Besides the televised squawking of a French soccer commentator, everything was quiet. He thrust one palm against the door and it flew open, shattering whatever locking mechanism was in place, relieving some of the tension that had been building since he’d left Williamsburg. The strength he felt surging through his muscles was also a reminder of the quality of Nicki’s blood, the best he’d had in years, so that he would have to get a full night’s sleep in order to let his body fully acclimate to it.
As Ryan entered his apartment he caught a whiff of what he thought was fresh B negative, as if Nicki were somewhere close by. But the scent began to fade as soon as it appeared, probably just the drops that had spilled on his shirt or the fumes from the transfusion bag when he’d opened his satchel. He closed the broken door and turned on the overhead track lighting, reminding himself that he would have to call Luis in the morning to fix the lock. He tossed the satchel onto the hardwood floor, next to the black leather couch that took up most of the length of one side of the main living area. The only other pieces of furniture, besides a glass coffee table, were three iron bar stools tucked against a black granite island countertop that separated the kitchen and its stainless-steel appliances from the rest of the twelve-foot-by-twenty-foot space. Except for a large flat-screen television mounted opposite the couch and a bay window that took up most of th
e space between the kitchen and the door to Ryan’s bedroom and bathroom, the walls were off-white and bare.
Ryan’s minimalist aesthetic had been a point of contention for Jennifer the first time she’d spent the night. He’d tried to make a few halfhearted excuses, claiming he’d only moved in recently and had ordered a rug and several posters online, but there had been a framing issue. And his former roommate had won all of their previous apartment’s artwork in a coin toss or rock-paper-scissors, he couldn’t remember. But Jennifer wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Well, looks like I’ll have to tell my friends I’m sleeping with another serial killer,” she’d said, giggling, a little tipsy from the wine they’d been drinking (and he’d been expelling periodically in the bathroom of the bar where they’d met). “That is, if I survive until the morning.”
She’d made similar jokes during the first two or three months they’d been dating, probably only stopping when she realized she wouldn’t ever be able to get a rise out of him, chalking up his apartment’s blandness to a minor character flaw that was a little weird, but one she could live with.
For Ryan, the choice represented another part of himself that he wasn’t ready to reveal to her just yet. Yes, people decorated their surroundings with objects that reflected their unique personalities. But those objects also provided them with a sense of security and permanence, in opposition to lives that were constantly changing and ending. When you were incapable of physical change, those objects—and plenty of other things—quickly lost their meaning. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have storage units.
He sat down at the kitchen island and opened the laptop that he’d left there. A blinking tab at the bottom of the screen announced an e-mail from James Van Doren III, Ryan’s financial advisor and his last full-time donor before moving to Manhattan to start a family in the late nineties. James had stopped selling his blood to Ryan the week after he got married, on the grounds that he didn’t want his wife to think he was sneaking around with a new girlfriend in Brooklyn, and that his doctor had told him he was anemic. It was a weak excuse on both fronts. James’s blood tasted fine, even if it was O positive, and the rotund former middle linebacker had begun to more closely resemble a throbbing bowl of mashed potatoes than a heartthrob.
Ryan still valued James’s knowledge of the stock market and how he had managed the sizable portfolio Ryan had developed for the last sixty or so years. But whatever James wanted tonight could wait.
There were two open windows on the laptop’s screen—the last few days of instant-message exchanges with Jennifer and a press release on a food-and-drink-industry website announcing her recent promotion to assistant director of nutritional marketing at FreshInsights, where she provided consulting services to restaurants and healthcare institutions interested in local, organic, and farm-to-table meal options for their clientele.
She had corralled her wavy chocolate-brown hair into a businesslike low braid with side-swept bangs for the head shot that accompanied the press release, but her blue eyes and full-lipped smile shone with the wild intensity Ryan still found impossible to resist after six months of wanting to push her away. The genuine kindness and strength—rare enough in anyone, let alone a twenty-seven-year-old child of the Internet and Fairfield County corporate lawyers—that elevated her above the swarms of valueless human lives from which he had distanced himself until they were only a minor annoyance, like flies buzzing outside a window.
But with every unanswered call and text message, every excuse to avoid Manhattan, Ryan knew he was losing her. It had happened to him once before, forty years earlier, with the last woman he’d tried to let into his life. He needed to tell Jennifer who he was, as honestly as he could, but how would that be possible? It wasn’t like dealing with donors, who for the most part knew what they were getting themselves into, who weren’t overly curious as long as they got paid on time. In a best-case scenario, Jennifer would think he was fucking around, showcasing an offbeat sense of humor previously unknown to her. At worst, she would start filing the necessary paperwork to get a restraining order.
So, just wanted to let you know, my name isn’t Ryan. I mean, it is now, but I’ve had to change it eighteen times to avoid the obvious attention that comes with not physically aging in ninety-six years. The only thing time has done to me is make me tougher, sharpen my senses, eliminate any chance of disease and most injuries. Oh, and I don’t eat, at least not the seared scallops and truffle fries I pretended to like when you took me to that eco-friendly seafood place last week. I can stomach alcohol, but I can’t process it, meaning I can’t get drunk, which is why you think I have such a high tolerance. I can only digest blood, specifically human blood, once every few weeks when the need for nutrition becomes unbearable.
That sounds pretty messed up, I get it, borderline cannibalistic even. But it’s not, because I’m not human, at least not anymore. I’m Ànkëlëk-ila—which loosely translates as “dead warrior” in the extinct language of the tribes that lived in New York for thousands of years before colonists arrived—the last of my family line. Our original purpose, as far as anyone can tell, was to protect our home villages—the chiefs, shamans, women, children, crops, and livestock. More than glorified bodyguards, we were super soldiers, able to stay awake and alert for days at a time, able to smell invaders from an enemy tribe before they set foot on our soil.
But whatever genetic loophole was exploited to create us only extends as far as the original boundaries of our tribe’s land. For me, that’s Brooklyn. When one of us crosses one of those boundaries, they return to their original human state, alone, a mortal outcast.
Back in the day, becoming Ànkëlëk-ila was the highest honor you could receive. You wouldn’t give it up unless you’d done something shameful like failing in battle. Or if your heart just wasn’t in it. Maybe you felt a profound weariness, or maybe you fell in love. My maker, Arthur, left the tribe for a woman only a few days after he turned me, according to what I’ve been told. And even though I think I’m starting to feel the same way about you, the way I felt in 1975 for a girl named Vanessa (which is a story I should probably bring up at a much later date, if ever), that I’d give up what I am for us, I can’t leave, even if I wanted to.
When Arthur turned me, I had been working for years at the shipyards in Red Hook (near the Ikea store you told me not to buy furniture from because the company clear-cuts old-growth forests in Russia), hauling coal and shoveling it into the boilers of the ships that needed to be refueled. You can imagine what that did to my lungs, or maybe you can’t, Miss E-Cigarette-on-the-Weekends. One day a freighter on its way from Mexico to the Erie Canal dropped anchor, carrying limes, bananas, and a particularly nasty strain of a South American virus that might have been related to bubonic plague, maybe something equally aggressive. Another invisible, incurable killer from the third world, which is basically what Brooklyn was in the 1910s. Arthur found me in the hospital a few days later. I was the last person who had gone on that ship that was still alive, just barely. If I leave Brooklyn I’ll go back to the way I was: dying, lungs black, extremely contagious.
Maybe it would be a gradual process, weeks before I felt any symptoms, enough time to get treatment. Or maybe everything accelerates once I cross the boundary and I’m dead before I make it across the East River. That’s why I can’t make it to your friend’s party tonight that you’ve been asking me about, why I can’t go swimming with you if we still go to Coney Island next month like we’ve been planning. Because of what I might be carrying with me when I step out of that subway station, or back onto that beach. I’m sorry.
Any questions?
The bitter, choked laughter that had begun to rise from Ryan’s gut was cut off by the buzzing of his phone. Regardless of whether he was ready to talk, he couldn’t ignore her anymore.
“Hey Jen,” he said. If he had a pulse, he knew it would be increasing rapidly. “I’m so sorry for not getting back to you sooner, not even a text or an instant message, but the marke
t was going crazy this morning. I’ve been going back and forth on the phone with James all day. Not that you probably care.”
“You’re right,” she said flatly. “I don’t.”
“Listen, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay, seriously,” she said, a hint of lightheartedness creeping into her voice. “I’m messing around. Busy days at the office are obviously understandable. As long as you aren’t going to flake on me tonight. I promise we don’t have to stay very long if it gets more than a little weird and, um, fashion-y. I just want you to meet a couple of my friends so I prove to them that I haven’t just been Photoshopping you into all my pictures. Plus Erica’s new collection is really cool. She has a pair of brass cuff links that look like bulls’ skulls. For some reason I think you’d be into them.”
Erica Guilford, one of Jennifer’s closest friends from boarding school, was an up-and-coming jewelry designer whose pieces had been described as “dangerous yet delicate” with “a penchant for the esoteric” by a fashion blogger whose writings Ryan had recently skimmed. Erica’s latest collection consisted almost entirely of metallic rings, brooches, and cuff links shaped into the skeletal remains of livestock, a statement about the inevitable end of sustainable agriculture or something equally morbid and trite, possibly the last thing Ryan could think of himself ever “being into.” The launch party for the collection was going to be held at a cocktail bar in Manhattan’s East Village in two hours, making his artistic opinions irrelevant.