These are excuses I’m giving her for what happened and why she let it. These are the excuses I’m using because of the third kind of thing we don’t think about—the things the thinking of which just plain scares us. The things the thinking of which would change everything.
Things like: She knew it. She planned it. She wanted it to happen.
Things like: She’s jealous of Isuzu. She wants her gone. She wants her out of the picture.
Things like: Think of something else. Think of something else. Think of something else.
So, two vampires and a mortal walk into a bar…
It’s still early in the evening and the thermostat’s just warming up. There’s a fireman wearing just his helmet and boots and a lot of body oil, sliding down a pole onstage. Isuzu catches her breath, staring at the other pole onstage, dangling there, longer than average, even in its professionally flaccid state. Rose and Twit laugh, elbow each other, and then push my little girl a few inches closer to womanhood.
“Git a move on, Buffalo Gal,” Rose says.
“Giddy-up,” Twit adds.
A round of giggles, on the house.
They get a table near the stage, three sets of dark lenses craning upward, three sets of fangs holding on to their nether lips. Certainly nothing newsworthy. Not yet. Other dancers come and go, the lineup working its way from one Village Person to the next. Meanwhile, in the background, ever so subtly, the temperature starts crawling skyward, along with the decibel level and the general enthusiasm of the customers and dancers both.
“It was like shadows when the full moon sets,” Twit says later, when the Weird Sisters take turns filling me in. “They just kept getting longer and longer.”
Isuzu’s distracting eyes—the eyes you can always tell where they’re looking—are very busynot looking at mine.
“I guess we should have known something was up,” Rose confesses.
“So to speak,” I add.
“So to speak,” Rose agrees.
Eventually it happened, the betrayal of mortal biology once you turn up the heat. Isuzu began to do something vampires don’t; she began to perspire. To sweat, really. And to stink. She began stinking like only a stinking human can. Twit noticed it first, perhaps because her nose and Isuzu’s armpits were at roughly the same level. Her nostrils flared—“What the hell?”—and her little Screamer head turned. And there they were—full moons rising darkly under both arms. Beads of sweat dotted Isuzu’s upper lip like so much glitter, while a trickle squiggled from under her hairline, ran down her cheek, and then fell to the tablecloth. The first drop was silent, but the second made a little noise—a littleplish —falling squarely on top of the damp spot made by the first. Rose noticed the stain and then everything else, all at once, and only seconds before the table next to them, and the table next to that.
And there my little Isuzu is, sweating in a room full of vampires, giving off her human stink, surrounded by bloodsuckers who are already overamped from the adrenaline-laced blood they’ve been sucking back, already horny as hell because of the heat that’s put Isuzu in this predicament. It’s only a matter of seconds before the first patron grabs Isuzu by the arm.
“She’s burning up,” the patron coos, followed by the naked fireman, grabbing the other arm.
“She’s…mine,”he demands, a voice full of ice and steel.
And there Isuzu is, the center of a tug-of-war, her arms the opposing halves of a wishbone. Pandemonium ensues. Chaos reigns. The TV crew, already there—“just letting off steam”—switches on the red eye of its camera, and turns Isuzu’s face into a wanted poster. There she is—click, snap, whir—publicvictim number one.
I’m seeing it, you understand, watching it beamed live into vampire TVs all over the country. At home, killing time alone on girls’ night out, switching on the tube for a little distraction…bam!I’m watching my daughter “live,” but who knows for how much longer. This isn’t a sitcom; it’s real. It’s real, and happening in front of my eyes, and I don’t have the luxury of knowing that main characters never die.
And so I pray.
After dropping the remote, and the glass of blood I’ve warmed, I drop to my knees and pray. I pray to the God that giveth and the one that taketh away to please, please, please—just this once—pleasegiveth back.
Sweat.
Sweat started it. Sweat ended it.
Acne-triggering, just slightly oily, teenage sweat.
That, and the two-handed groin pull, compliments of Twit, followed by a bitch slap from Rose for the bitch clinging to Isuzu’s other arm. Taken together, they were just enough to slip the bonds of the immortals coiling in for the kill. You can actually see it on the tape—the wishbone vampires looking at their suddenly empty hands, rubbing their fingers, feeling the grease, looking disappointed and disgusted, both at once.
And me, I’m still watching while my three Fates are still “out,” their fates not at all clear from what’s been shown so far. Sure, there’s been one escape—luck, just luck—but God only knows how much more it’s going to take to get them from my screen, to my door, to my arms.
And then something strange happens. Or, I guess, stranger.
It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen on TV—and that includes the mortal variety during its so-called reality phase. The wishbone vampires are no longer interesting, despite the nudity the networks have blurred over. And so the camera starts sweeping the general chaos chaotically, looking for the escapee, jiggling and jostling and otherwise looking very Zapruder-meets-Kent-State. But then the camera goes still, as if straining to hear something. Which you do, suddenly—a voice over the PA system. It’s frail, and faint, a little quaky, and definitelynot prerecorded.
It’s singing.
At first, you can’t really make out the words, just a voice melodically modulated. And then the words come.
“You are my sunshine…
“My only sunshine…”
Everything is still. Everything goes quiet, except for that one voice, those tiny words—so careful, so scared, so desperate.
And then the voice is joined by other voices. And the camera picks up the pink tears, glistening on dozens of vampire cheeks, the whole room singing about what makes it happy when skies are gray.
God-motherfucking-dammit!”
That’s the unscripted part of my speech, when the three of them finally come tumbling in through the door, holding their sides, laughing.
“How was ‘out’?” I demand. “Was ‘out’ out there? Was it everything you hoped and dreamed?”These words I’ve practiced, along with dozens of alternatives.
All three stop laughing at once, look at me, mark the anger making my face twitch, and start laughing again.
“Marty,” Rose says, “you shoulda been there.”
“Iwas,” I say, and this takes them all by surprise. Perhaps they thought they could sell the agreed-upon lie, and had been prepared to launch into it.
“Me and a few million others,” I add. I toss Rose the remote.
“Give it a shot. I’m sure one of the networks is rerunning it. They’ve been doing it all night.”
Isuzu and Twit look at the remote in Rose’s hands as if it’s a revolver loaded for Russian roulette and their turn is next.
“It hasn’t made the talk show monologues, yet,” I go on. “I’m figuring that’ll be tomorrow night.” I’m about to say something especially nasty when I notice Isuzu’s face collapse in on itself. Just a moment ago, she’d been laughing, still high from the adrenaline rush of beating death and getting away. Laughing because the others were, because sometimes laughing is its own excuse, and you just can’t stop until you do.
And then you do that thing you shouldn’t. You look back at all the things that almost happened. That’s when your adrenaline tanks. And there you are, drained of almost everything, except these clear tears leaking suddenly from so deep inside, just one good sob takes your breath away. And there you are, gulping for air, your “I’m so
sorry” a strangled little thing, all but dead on arrival.
I look at Twit looking at Rose, Rose looking at Twit. Both looking at their hands. Their feet. Doing a little gulping of their own.
I don’t say anything else. It seems meaner, somehow, tonot say anything else. And so I don’t. That way, we can all hear Isuzu better. Just in case any of us missed it.
Just in case any of us thought laughing was a good idea.
26
Bull-Something
Give it time.”
That’s a line you hear a lot in vampire counseling. It’s the kind of talk that leads one to conclude that talk itself is cheap. After all, what’stime to a vampire? We’re made of the stuff. We’ve got nothing but. Hell, if time reallywere money, we’d all be rich.
“Give it time…”
Give me a break!
Not that it doesn’t work, now and then. Take the thing with me, Rose, and Twit. I guess you could say I got a little angry with them, seeing as they almost got Isuzu killed on national television. I guess you could say there was a little while there where I was—oh, I don’t know—emotionally radioactive.They knew this. They accepted it. They kept their distance.
They—we—gave it time.
So I went back to helping Father Jack walk his new dog, Judas the Second. Or should it be Third? Quibbling about that was our first argument. It was like riding a bike.
And Isuzu went back to wearing pajamas all the time, watchingAnne Frank, naming the dust balls under her bed. She walked around the apartment like her feet weighed a ton, and became real big on shrugging.
“How you doing?”
Shrug.
“Wanna eat something?”
Shrug.
Plus, there was a new symptom I hadn’t noticed before, back when I was busy dating Rose. But now, it seemed like every month, Isuzu developed a split personality. For a few days every month, questions that usually warranted a shrug got a “Go fuck yourself” instead.
Gradually, I started seeing the whole almost-getting-killed thing in a different light. When you thought about it, Rose and Twit did me a favor. They scared my little shit factory shitless. And in so doing, they brought a whole new level of serenity to my tortured mind.
Ever since coming home that first evening to find Isuzu missing, I’d been wary about her, imagining what I didn’t know, wondering what clues I was missing. My dates with Rose definitely felt the strain, what with me going back to listening in. I didn’t do it constantly. But every hour or so, I had to take a listen. To keep tabs. To check in.
“I heard you can get electrocuted that way, dialing a cell phone with wet hands,” Rose said one evening, stepping out of the shower to catch me with the phone pressed to my ear.
“Huh?”
“Never mind…”
The field trips were Rose’s idea. I think part of the reason was just to get away from me and my paranoia.
But now, it was obvious to everybody that Isuzu couldn’t leave the apartment. Ever. She was a known mortal. The whole vampire world was looking for her. The little girl I raised just wasn’t that stupid. Twit could come to our place to baby-sit, and I could go back to paying a proper level of attention to Rose. And vice versa.
So, I stopped by Teezers one night.
“Hey,” Rose says.
“What’s up?” I say back.
“Nothin’.”
“You wanna…?”
“Yeah.”
And the next night, I stopped by the rectory.
“You happy again?” Father Jack asks.
“Yeah.”
“Then piss off, already.”
And so, for the next few years, I was pretty content. I had a teenage daughter who was a prisoner in her own home, but not because of anythingI did. I had a girlfriend who loved me, even though I was still having trouble remembering when to tuck, when to buckle. And I had a baby-sitter who worked for free. Whether through dumb luck or it’s just being time, I was convinced that I had finally stumbled upon the best of all possible worlds.
Yeah. Right…
Your little Trooper’s got a problem,” Rose says, and even though this strikes me as the understatement of the millennium, I’m the new, relaxed me.
“Only one?” I ask. “That’s progress.”
“A new one,” Rose says. “On top of all the old ones. One you haven’t noticed.”
I make the “Ew” face. “Is this a female thing?”
Rose stops cold. She makes the “Huh?” face. My little question apparently isn’t so little. There are sociopolitical implications, geothermal and tectonic forces at work. There are mines and toes everywhere. The whole of civilization hangs in the balance.
“Notnecessarily,” she concludes.
Meaning, yeah, mainly, except for a few tortured statistical anomalies—anecdotes, really—hauled out in the name of political correctness. Meaning, yeah, except for that hermaphrodite in Boise, it pretty muchis a female thing.
“Not that it matters,” I offer. “What matters is that it’s anIsuzu thing, one I haven’t been paying attention to, but really need to. Right?”
“Right.”
“So…?”
“She’s got bull-something,” Rose says.
“Bull-something?”
“Yeah. I’ve been trying to think of the word, and I know it starts with ‘bull,’ but I keep drawing a blank. It’s not like it’s something we deal with anymore.”
By “we” she means vampires, meaning this bull-something has something to do with death, disease, aging, sunlight, body temperature, the white part of the eye, visible breathing this far from the Arctic Circle, reproductive sex, shitting, eating, or having periods.
“Can you at least describe what it is, without naming it by name?”
Rose considers this. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess so. It’s like this. She’s puking a lot.”
“You mean she’s sick,” I say. “Like a stomach flu or something?”
“No…”
“She’s not,” I begin, and then tip my thumb to my lips, mime taking a pull. I thought we were through all that a year ago. That’s when she learned my disinfectant—the one I made from potatoes grown in a tub in the closet—had multiple uses. At the time, I figured saturation was the best strategy, and so we stayed up all night, doing shots in the kitchen—Xtreme Unction for me, pure alcohol for her. It was a study in contrasts, me talking faster and faster as her speech slowed to a slurred crawl.
“I luff you, Daaaad,” she said, holding on to the table with both hands. “I’mmmm,” she added, getting lost in the hum. “What am I? Oh yeah. I’m…sorry…if…I…”
“Yeah-yeah-yeah,” I streamed right along, rubbing the lengths of both arms like a junky on empty. “Cheers. Click-click. Down the hatch.” I paused just long enough to pull my bottle out of firing range. “Oops. Make thatup the hatch…”
“No,” Rose assures me now. “It’s not that again.” She pauses. “It’s…” She inserts her index finger as far as she can into her open mouth.
“She’smaking herself throw up,” I say, translating the gesture. Rose nods. “Why?”
“She wants to keep her girlish figure, but doesn’t want to give up food until she has to,” Rose explains. “Haven’t you noticed how she eats and eats, but never puts on any weight? And what about the bathroom? She’s practically camped out in there.”
The truth is, I actively avoid watching what Isuzu eats. On the one hand, the sight disgusts me, and on the other, it makes my heart hurt like almost nothing else can, except for maybe the thought of a loved one who’s gone forever, for no reason other than lousy timing. As for the bathroom, she’s been living there since she was thirteen. Being a guy, I just figured it was a girl thing. Hearing that Rose finds it excessive has me worried.
And as far as me noticing whether or not she’s gained weight, that would involve my paying attention to the shape of her body, which, rumor has it, is the body of a very fetching eighteen-year-old woman. I
try not to pay that kind of attention, not only because it’s creepy, but…Well, yeah,mainly because itis creepy, but it’s dangerous, too. Emotionally, for starters, and maybe physically, too. And I’m not talking incest or six-toed babies; Isuzu’s not a blood relative. And it’s not like what comes out down there on my part is going to be making babies anytime soon. It’s just that sex between mortals and vampires is so old, it’s new again. We’ve gotten out of practice and learned bad habits along the way. Vampire-to-vampire sex usually involves a lot of fang play, which, when you spurt and then heal back up, is fine, but mortals don’t patch up so easily. Plus, for vampires, it’s all about the feeling of being bled, the vein tug and spasm, the breeze of a closed system suddenly opening and then closing back up.
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