DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  “Why the fuck not?” I shout.

  And my mom? My mom’s still my mom, and I’ve already gotten away with one in-vain usage of the Lord’s name this evening. She probably figured I was owed a freebie, what with the war and all, but honestly, there’s really no call for using the F-word under her roof.

  “Language, Martin!” she snaps, slapping me across the face and catching me with her nails. I can feel the blood coming, and then I can see it, a long spurt hitting the Sunday tablecloth she’s laid out for the occasion of my return. We both watch as the red bull’s-eye grows. And when she looks up—to apologize, maybe—it’s just in time to see the last nail swipe on my cheek close like a tiny mouth keeping its secrets mum.

  And that, more than the pointy teeth, the onyx eyes, the cemetery skin,that is the clincher. Her little Marty has come home from the war a vampire. Areal one. A dishonest-to-Godbloodsucker.

  God?

  I can almost see the light go on. She jerks her head toward one of the many pictures of Jesus we have hanging around the house, one of the flaming-heart ones. She jerks a look back at me, panicked.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Should I…?”

  She’s already out of her chair, turning it over in her rush. She’s already got her napkin stretched overhead, preparing to drape the picture, not at all prepared to watch her son go up in flames.

  “Mom,” I call after her. “Mom, it’s okay. They got that part wrong, too.”

  She stops. She stops and just stands there, the napkin held over her head between her clenched hands, like a white flag of surrender. She doesn’t turn. She doesn’t lower the napkin. She barely moves. Just her shoulders, going slightly up, going slightly down, again and again.

  I’m too old to live forever.”

  That’s her first crack at giving me a reason for abandoning me.

  “I can’t…” She waves her hands over the word she’s left out, which is “kill.”

  I tell her she can, that it’s all about picking the right—killable—people. I tell her about the Nazis I’ve killed. I tell her there’s a whole world full of people you can feel good about killing. Rapists. Murderers. Child molesters. Wife beaters. It’s practically the Lord’s work. All strictly eye-for-an-eye stuff.

  She shakes her head. “Marty,” she says. She pushes two fingers into her mouth, one on either side of her smile. And when she pulls them out, her smile comes along with them. “The otha vampithers will make thun uv me,” she lisps.

  I tell her about what they don’t show you in the movies—how it takes several nights for your fangs to come in. I tell her how they push the old ones out along the way, and how painful that can be. “You’ve just got a head start, that’s all,” I assure her.

  And still she shakes her head. “Marty,” she says, tears in her eyes. “Don’t make me choose.”

  “You don’t have tochew anything,” I say. “You puncture and suck.”

  “O-O-S,”she spells. “Choose. As in ‘choice.’ Don’t make mechoose. ”

  “Choose what?” I ask, but then I know.

  She still believes.

  Me, I’m in between things at the moment, re the whole God and religion thing. But she still believes, and not dying means not seeing my dad again. My gift—the thing I’ve brought her all the way from Europe—my gift is the gift ofnot going to heaven. My gift is the gift of forcing her to choose between her husband and her son.

  I cover my face with my hands. I try to imagine loving anyone that much. I try to imagine anyone lovingme that much.

  I can’t, so I stop pushing. I decide to wait for her to change her mind.

  She doesn’t.

  Didn’t.

  That time feels like a PBS nature documentary to me now, the days compressed into seconds, time itself crumpling my poor mother in its fist. She bent, and then she drooped, and then she wilted. She became a miser of space, spending less and less of it on herself. And then the air just went out of her, as her skin pulled itself in, clinging more fiercely to her bones. Her hair began falling away, one white feather at a time.

  She got old; that’s all she was doing. It was the project she was working on, the fate she’d decided. She had help, of course. She had her friends, all dying right along with her. It was just me. I was the lone holdout; I was the only one playing hooky from his mortality.

  On her deathbed, my mother forgave me, and I wish I could say vice versa, but it damaged me, watching my mother die for the love of my father.

  I didn’t date much after my mother died.Couldn’t. Couldn’t reallybelieve in it. Oh sure, I arranged to have sex when the need arose, but dating? Putting myself out there in hopes of findingtrue love ? Sorry, but the bar had been set pretty high.

  Oh, I tried. I tried dating Lizzy, the pope’s sister; I tried dating a few of my other benevolent vamplings. But it always turned out the same. I resented their inability to die for me like my mother had died for my father. Without death, without grief, it was all just so much fucking around.

  And so I did—I fucked around, until fucking around became boring. I fucked around until driving too fast in the rain seemed like a good idea.

  20

  Night Person Seeks Same

  Ibegin my search for Isuzu’s new mom by returning to an old haunt from my benevolent days—a strip club a few blocks from the Detroit River, called Teezers. I’m not really expecting to find maternal material here; I’m not expecting to find true love. Iam hoping to find a familiar face, however. I need to talk. I need to get used to talking to adult women about adult things again. And I don’t mind paying for the privilege. Here, conversation is just another thing that gets sold, and as the buyer of said conversation, the pressure on me is blessedly low. As long as I’ve got the cash, the only other thing I need is a pulse.

  As luck would have it, what I find is a familiar back.

  I don’t actually know what her name is. I call her Tombstone. I call her that because of this outrageous tattoo she’s got on her back, just above her butt, a pair of blue-green praying hands. In Gothic script, arching above, it says, “In Memory of,” and underneath—I guess—the name of whoever it is she’s ruined her otherwise perfect skin for. I wasn’t able to read it when I first met her; the G-string got in the way.

  I remember walking in that night, a thousand years ago. This was before the flip, when I was still spreading the seeds of vampirism one neck at a time. A song was playing when I entered. Tori Amos. Something powerful, and empowering, and vaguely accusatory.

  I freeze right there in the doorway, handing the coat check girl my five-dollar cover, letting the bouncer point my shoulders toward one of the few empty seats at the bar. It’s the music that stops me. You don’t hear a lot of Tori Amos in strip clubs for pretty much the same reason you don’t hearFiddler on the Roof at neo-Nazi rallies. The bouncer gives my shoulders a shove to unstick me. And it works, for a step or two, but then I look up and fall into something like love.

  The Tori fan onstage is dancing topless in a smoky yellow spot, five nothing minus the high heels, which are black and the real kind with spikes—not the cheater wedges a lot of the dancers use. She has small, tear-shaped breasts, upturned nipples, a gorgeous flat stomach, and a mischievous grin just this side of a smirk. Her hair’s straight and midnight black and so long she wears it like a vest, flashing the customers now and then, like a fan dancer from a hundred simpler years ago.

  I take my seat, order a coffee over my shoulder without turning, my vampire eyes locked on the girl onstage, clocking her every move, letting the bright light reflecting off her white, white skin pour into me through my all-pupil eyes. She glows. She seems to, at least, like most things do to my vampire eyes. But there’s something else. My vampire heart tells me this one’s special. Brighter than the rest. Different. Worthy.

  It always started like that.

  The falling in love. The targeting. The deciding: Yes. Okay. Yes.

  And then she turns and my heart sinks. Ink. Blue-green
tattoo ink on that perfect white skin.

  Shit.

  Ihate tattoos. I hate what they symbolize, the “till death” audacity of them, as if people who can’t even stick to the “one life, one marriage” plan can be trusted to choose that special something that warrants being branded into their flesh. What image, what phrase, couldpossibly weather the eventual weathering of the skin, and taste, and everything else that seems so eternal and immutable when you’re—what—twenty-two, twenty-three, tops? Back then, I used to imagine every tattoo I’d see, sixty, seventy years into the future, wrinkled, illegible, being wheeled down the hall of some nursing home, the smart-ass attendant smirking all the way.

  “Okay, Mr. Born-to-Lose, time to empty your colostomy bag.”

  It’s when I see that tattoo that the falling in love stops. The targeting looks for new coordinates. The deciding decides: No.

  I swing around and look at my own face in the mirror behind the bar. Over my head, I can see my tattooed lady just hanging there, incandescent, like a bright idea.

  Looking for some other distraction, I slide a few quarters from my change across the bar and drop them into a trivia game sitting next to me. I warm my hands on the cup of coffee so my answers will register when I touch the video screen, there and there.

  What planet is named for the goddess of love?

  Who wroteTo Kill a Mockingbird?

  The questions are no-brainers and I win speed points, not to mention extra no-brainer questions. I’m well on my way to becoming the top scorer in general trivia when, suddenly, the No sits down next to me, and I forget all about what I will or won’t let into the future I’m building, one neck at a time.

  “Hi,” she says, sticking out her casually warm and mortal hand. “Pink Floyd.”

  “Excuse me?” I say, squeezing the coffee cup hard before sliding my hand into hers. We shake. Let go.

  “Who recordedDark Side of the Moon ?” she says, pointing at the video screen, and then reaching past me to hit the answer button. A flurry of numbers scrolls up; congratulatory music chimes. “Woo-hoo,” she says, pumping her arm into the air, pulling an imaginary train whistle with ironic enthusiasm.

  “I knew that,” I say, both because it’s true and because I don’t want to seem like the kind of old fart who’d miss a question like that. This was back when I worried about matching the age of my face out in public.

  My “I knew that” gets an “uh-huh” look in return, heavy on the skepticism and mascara. Trying to strengthen my case, I resort to the always-effective strategy of repeating myself.

  “Idid,” I insist.

  “Whatever,” the No says, exhaling an “I’m bored” plume of smoke.

  “So,” I say, trying to regroup. “Tori Amos?”

  The No just smiles, taps her cigarette ash into an ashtray, blows a needle of smoke with surgical precision just past my face. She cracks her neck to the right, the left, and then draws her gaze level with my midnight eyes.

  “So?” the Maybe says.

  “Interesting choice.”

  “Yeah. Well. You know.” She shoots a snake of smoke from the corner of her smirk. “I tried being boring once.” Studied pause; another squirt of smoke. “Sucks.”

  “Yeah. Well. You know,” I say, smiling a smile nearly as evil as the one on my companion’s face. “Lots of things do,” I add, because it’s true and getting truer, one Yes at a time.

  When she wakes the following night, she won’t remember how she got home. She won’t remember who undressed her, tucked her in, did to her apartment what’s been done to her apartment. She won’t remember brushing my thigh with her cigarette-free hand, or inviting me to the VIP room for a lap dance. She won’t remember slithering out of her terry cloth one-piece, or my suggestion that her tattoo makes her look like a dancing tombstone. She won’t remember laughing nervously, or my insistence that a dancing tombstone’s not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all.

  She won’t even remember why her neck is so sore.

  She’s been too busy, sleeping the sleep of the dead.

  It’s not until she reaches behind to massage a knot in her neck that she finds my souvenir—two little holes, suckling at the yellowed skin of her fingertips like tiny mouths.

  “What the…,” I imagine her saying—it’s what they always said—before opening her eyes and then shutting them again, just as suddenly, shocked by the flashbulb intensity of everything. She stumbles to the dresser, shields her eyes with a hand cupping her forehead, opens one experimentally. The eye looking back from the mirror isn’t hers. It’s her face, yes, un-made-up, bleached out, overexposed, but the eye…It’s all black, as if it’s been swallowed by its own pupil. She opens the other one. Same story.

  “What the…,” she begins to say again, but stops. There’s a red blur in the middle of her face. In the middle of the reflection of her face. She steps back. There’s writing on the mirror in lipstick.Her lipstick.

  “Welcome,” it says.

  “Hang up the phone,” it says. She turns and finds the receiver lying on the nightstand bleating plaintively. Next to it are a pair of sunglasses, an empty tube from a roll of aluminum foil, and a pint-sized liquor bottle filled with something red, bearing a Post-it note that reads: “Drink me.”

  She puts on the sunglasses, hangs up the phone, and looks about her apartment. All the windows have been blocked out with aluminum foil, even the blurry ones in the bathroom. Her purse has been spilled out and gone through; her money—all the sad ones and twenties from last night—is scattered about like so many dead leaves. Drawers have been opened and sloppily closed. The light in the kitchen is on. The cabinets and refrigerator are open, and empty. She looks back at the “Drink me” bottle, uncaps it, smells its rusty-smelling insides, puts the cap back on.

  And then the phone rings.

  “Sleep well?” I ask.

  “Who is this?”

  “Did you drink me?” I ask.

  “Whois this?”

  “Open the door,” I say.

  “Not until you tell me who you are.”

  “Open the door,” I repeat, twisting the knob I didn’t bother to lock the night before.

  “Who…”

  “Your future,” I say, stepping inside and flipping my cell phone closed.

  Her hair’s cut short now, and her taste in music has grown to include Eminem, but her face hasn’t changed and the praying hands on her back still hold the memory of whomever. I never bothered to ask. An oversight I now regret, but only slightly, seeing as it gives me an excuse for starting up where we left off.

  “Hey, Tombstone,” I say, waving casually as if it’s been a matter of days since we’ve last seen each other, as opposed to decades.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” T calls out, shielding her crow eyes from the glare of the stage. “Marty? Is that you?”

  I nod.

  “Jesus,” she repeats. “It’s been a shit-ass long time, ya ol’ bloodsucker you.”

  “That it has, that it has,” I say, chatting my last piece of chit before getting down to business. “So, anyway,” I begin, “about that tattoo.”

  “You like it?”

  “Hate it,” I admit. “Always have. I almost let the worms get you, it turned me off so bad.”

  T pulls an exaggerated pout. “Over a little ink? Jeez, Marty. Way to cheer a girl up.”

  I love the way she keeps saying my name. I was hoping I’d find someone who’d remember me, and wasn’t sure what I’d do if I didn’t. She keeps on talking.

  “ ’Course, if it wasn’t you, some other sucker would’ve come along to do the job,” she says. “Know how I know?”

  “How?”

  “ ’Cause I’m a hot patootie,” she says, smiling the same smart-ass smile that made me fall in love with her all those years ago. “A hot patootie, and cute to boot.”

  Confidenceand sarcasm—I love that in a stripper. I also love the way she talks, her like-I-give-a-shit use of out-of-date slang. It’s like she�
�s going back in time, just for me. I nod my head and point at it. “This is me,” I say, “rogering that.”

  “So, what brings you back to our fair establishment after forever?”

  I look point-blank into the black holes of her eyes. “I believe the French word is,” I say, pausing for effect,“toi.”

  T snorts out a laugh. “Yeah, right.” She points at the black marbles I gave her for her rebirthday. “This ismoi,” she says, “rolling my eyes.”

  I tell her I love her laugh, and she does it some more.