The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  Again, mercifully, I passed out.

  The next time I woke up, everything had changed. Of course, at the time I had no inkling of what had happened to me. The existence of vampires was not something I would have been willing to entertain. And the fact that they didn't exist would only make it that much harder to adjust to the awkward fact that I had become one. As if life wasn’t hard enough without turning into a mythical beast.

  Rescue operations after the earthquake were slow and disorganized, primarily due to the extent of destruction, which was almost total, and the extraordinarily high number of casualties. When I regained consciousness, I realized the darkness was no longer total, though only the faintest indirect light penetrated the rubble. As far as I could determine, we, myself and the thing on top of me, were trapped in a space no larger than our bodies. I knew my companion was still alive because I could hear and feel him breathing. I could also still smell his breath, which had become both more intense and, curiously, less revolting.

  The following day was a long one. I don't know how many times I passed in and out of consciousness. Each time I woke up, I seemed to be suffering less physically, and for reasons I didn't understand, I also seemed to be less concerned about the predicament I was in. Nothing external had changed. I was still trapped and I had no reason to think I would be rescued. The old me, the humanities teacher, would have found his impending death somewhat distressing. Like most people, the old me was reasonably adept at feeling sorry for himself. But as the hours slowly passed, the familiar moods of despair and self-pity became increasingly less engaging.

  In fact, I felt calmer and more detached than I could remember ever feeling. There I was, trapped under a heap of stone, my wife's dead body no doubt only a few feet away. I was sharing what would most likely be my grave with a mysterious and malodorous companion, silent except for his snoring. And I didn't seem to have a care in the world. When I thought about it, the only thing I felt was an unusual sense of strength. I felt so strong, I was sure I could now push my way out of the rubble.

  Lying on my back, I had almost no freedom of movement. I could raise my left knee a few inches, but not my right. I could manage some lateral movement with both arms, but I couldn’t raise my torso enough to get any leverage. I was exploring these possibilities when my companion spoke.

  "Not yet,” he said, calmly. “The sun is still up."

  Under different circumstances, that might have scared me to death.

  "Confusing, isn't it?" the voice added, with dreamy tranquility.

  I was reluctant to say anything. It was as if by speaking I would enter into some form of complicity, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that.

  “Anyway, it's too risky to move the stones by yourself," the voice continued, with calm authority. "We'll do it together, later, when it's dark outside. In the meantime, you should rest."

  His name, I would soon learn, was Calvin. At the time, some part of me already suspected he had something to do with my wife’s death. That part of me wanted to be enraged by the injustice. I couldn’t understand why another part of me was pushing that rage into the background, forcing my feelings to recede. It was as if years had passed since her death, instead of only hours. I thought it might be due to the ambiguity of the situation; the mixing up of the injustice of her murder with the moral neutrality of a natural catastrophe. But this thought, too, was rejected by some unfamiliar part of me. It was as if this unfamiliar part knew very clearly what had happened, and it wasn’t letting me indulge in my familiar moods.

  It was, indeed, confusing. It was as if the very core of my personal identity was being erased by something cold and inhuman. And most confusing of all was that I didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by it. At any rate, not bothered enough to stop myself from drifting back into sleep. Some hours must have passed before his voice woke me again.

  “What do you say? Shall we stretch our legs?”

  The question made me laugh. It was as if extricating ourselves from the rubble wouldn’t be any more difficult than stepping out to the porch for a smoke. And as it turned out, it wasn’t. Once free, I immediately became preoccupied with the range and intensity of my senses. At first, I thought this might be the experience of heightened awareness one hears people speak of after a brush with death; the feeling of an intensification of life that, I assumed, would soon pass. There were a couple of problems with that explanation, though. I was as emotionally detached as I had ever been in my life. And things were not returning to normal.

  The moon was just a thin crescent, yet by its light I could see clearly, several paces away, a tiny beetle crawling along the shadowed edge of a rock. Fifty paces away, amid the city’s fresh ruins, I could see the glittering eyes of rats. I could hear their claws scratching on stone. All around me, I could smell the violent death hidden under the collapsed buildings. And somewhere in the distance I could hear the faint muffled crying of a child.

  Calvin sat on a large slab of fallen wall, swinging his dangling feet like a dreamy young girl gazing at the moon. It struck me suddenly that, of all the horror surrounding me, he was the only thing that unnerved me. He was obviously indifferent to the panorama of destruction. And I knew he had been injured. My hair, neck and shoulders were still caked with his dried blood. But in less than a single day, he had miraculously recovered and seemed to be in perfect health.

  I had a lot of questions and Calvin seemed to offer the best chance of getting answers, but I hadn’t even opened my mouth when he jumped down from his perch and dusted himself off.

  “Well then,” he said, as if something had been resolved, “I’ll be on my way.”

  “On your way?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  Calvin stopped and looked at me with the expression of a man momentarily vexed by the discovery of some trivial annoyance, like a stubborn piece of lint stuck to his jacket. “Is there something on your mind?” he asked, not the slightest suggestion in his voice that he was interested in an answer.

  I wanted to get angry, but I was too confused by my own inability to call up the familiar emotions. “Yes,” I said, more calmly than I’d anticipated, “there is something on my mind. To begin with, what the hell happened?”

  Calvin briefly considered my question. “It wasn’t my intention to turn you. But it’s done now and undoing it would be unpleasant for you and more effort than it’s worth for me. I realize it’s disorienting, but you’ll get over it. The thirst will educate you. And frankly, nothing else matters.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “The thirst?” I asked.

  Calvin paused, deliberating over a response, then apparently changed his mind. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to go, “but I don’t have much time, or much interest in this sort of thing.”

  I watched him walk away, perplexed by my own willingness to accept the situation at face value. About thirty yards away, Calvin stopped and turned. “You’ll need to find a dark and private place. Before dawn.”

  •

  I had a rough time those first few weeks. I was like a container filled with the memories of a human being, but they were memories in which I could no longer recognize myself. And the container was leaking. The human being was dripping away, steadily replaced by something deeply unfamiliar. As the human part of me faded, I found myself clinging to it ever more desperately. I would find myself drawn to people, only to be repelled, as if what I thought were men and women turned out to be only cardboard cutouts. Cardboard cutouts, that is, filled with blood.

  When I finally realized it was blood that was drawing me to people, I was sure I was doomed, sure I would never be able to take what my body was telling me it needed. And when, after so short a time, I proved myself wrong, it was only to find myself strangely and powerfully repulsed by the act of feeding on humans. Not because of moral considerations, but rather, as a result of a straightforward physical response. Taking someone’s blood made me feel like I had been reduced to blind, instinctual drives. I felt like an ins
ect that had sucked the protoplasm out of its prey, leaving behind an empty husk. That human husk really gave me the creeps.

  I tried for a while to survive on animal blood. Ironically, it was something lingering from my human past that made taking the blood of animals so distasteful. Even as a child, I’d had a violent aversion to the feeling of hair in my mouth. In my adult life, this aversion had been the occasion for some delicate negotiations. My wife, for instance, had initially reacted skeptically to my request that she shave her pubic hair. She had some trouble getting past her suspicion that I was under the sway of some prepubescent perversion. As a vampire, the hair problem took on a new and, while it lasted, daunting dimension. Mammals—dogs, horses, cows—are all covered with hair. As absurd as it sounds, the choice between reducing a human to a dehydrated husk or biting into the hairy hide of an animal wasn’t an easy one. Not at first, anyway. But the dilemma didn’t last long. It was just another piece of human baggage that, once dropped, I couldn’t quite figure out what the fuss had been about.

  The hair problem was typical of many of the adjustments I had to make in my new life. They weren’t always easy, or without consequence, but for the most part, they were rather trivial. Resolving them was usually just a matter of replacing an old habit with a new one. Other problems proved to be more intractable, rooted as they were in a fundamental paradox.

  Once turned, it was only natural that my new powers would occupy my attention. Discovering what it meant to be a vampire plunged me into a near-constant state of astonishment. But as the novelty wore off, a part of me that had not changed gradually insinuated itself. This stubbornly human part of me had to do with the act of thinking. Not a matter of beliefs and opinions, nor of personality, it was deeper than that. I had learned to think, speak and communicate as a human being, in a human language. As a vampire, my thought processes might differ somewhat from those of humans, but only insofar as the contingencies of my life forced incidental modifications upon those still-human processes. The fact that I drank human blood, for instance, forced me to think differently about the value of human life. I might tell myself that drinking human blood was analogous to a human eating a chicken sandwich. People reduce the living chicken to broiled meat, erasing any consideration of status that might be given to the chicken. A comparable process compels a vampire to erase considerations of status that might otherwise be given to humans. But the entire constellation of arguments, reasons, judgments, and justifications was itself unmistakably human. The uncomfortable truth was that my ties to humanity were deeply and inescapably paradoxical.

  Chapter 4

  Before squeezing a little monetary juice out of Ron Richardson, I was hoping to find a new driver. I appreciated the utility of a car, but I had never been particularly fond of driving. I put up with it for a few years, back in the forties, but eventually gave it up in favor of a chauffeur. Hiring a human introduced complications into my life, but there were practical advantages, too. Chief among them being that a driver could run errands for me during daylight hours.

  I had lost my previous driver a couple of months back. White, as he liked to be called for some reason I never understood, since it wasn’t his name, had been pulled over for speeding. I wasn’t with him at the time, which was no doubt fortunate for all concerned. Apparently he had shown a lack of respect sufficient to warrant a trip to the police station. Once there, his behavior continued to deteriorate, and he ended up behind bars. He then took another step down the ladder of respectability when the police opened the trunk of his car—the car I had provided—and found a half dozen illegal automatic weapons.

  The whole business was far less sinister than it was made out to be. White may have been an obnoxious little shit, but he was essentially harmless. The guns weren't his. He was transporting them for someone else. He refused, initially, to rat out the owner of the weapons, adopting a hard-ass “I’m no snitch” posture that he’d probably picked up from the movies. His resolve lasted for an hour or so before he caved in and told the police who owned the guns. White got off easy with a suspended sentence and probation. None of it would have mattered much to me if the presiding judge had not also revoked his driver’s license.

  As it was, I hadn't been very satisfied with White’s job performance, and was thinking about getting rid of him, anyway. He definitely had not been my best-ever choice for a driver. As is so often the case with humans, White was full of unpleasant surprises. He could project a veneer of modest competence, but it was just a smoke screen for the trash heap of dysfunction underneath. Losing his driver’s license settled the matter of his employment, leaving one little loose end to tie up. I was never very comfortable with firing an employee. Once out of my employ, once the money stopped flowing, they seemed to forget the rules, or they would make the mistake of thinking that the rules no longer applied. It was more prudent for me to terminate them, literally, even though I knew that feeding on someone with whom I had frequent contact could involve additional risk. In White’s case, I was spared both the inconvenience and the risk. Apparently the owner of the illegal guns was as unhappy with White as I had been. The day after his release from custody, White was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

  Which left me without a driver. Unfortunately, a good driver wasn’t easy to find. I couldn’t just put an ad in the newspaper: “Vampire seeks chauffeur. Call for midnight interview.” All I could do was keep my eye out for possible candidates. This might take a long time, and often did, but there wasn’t any practical alternative. On this particular occasion, I thought I might have gotten lucky. A few days prior to my rendezvous with Francine, I’d spotted someone I thought might fill the bill. She worked in a place called the Triple Tavern on West Capital Avenue. A fairly sad place, as they go, it catered to dedicated local drunks, truckers, and prostitutes. Apparently, she also turned tricks in one of the many motels along the avenue that did business by the hour.

  That was how she first caught my attention. It was about 2:00 a.m. and I was taking a little stroll, not particularly hungry because I had gorged myself the previous night on a young Arabian mare pastured in Fair Oaks. I was walking past a motel parking lot, when the door to one of the rooms flew open and a young woman lunged out of the brightly lit interior into the parking lot’s semidarkness. She was wearing panties and high heels, carrying the rest of her clothes bunched under one arm, and she was clearly pissed about something. Once outside, she balanced herself against a parked car with her free hand, bent over and spit blood on the pavement.

  When she leaned on the car, she set off the alarm. These devices were as irritating to her as they were to me. Screaming “Fuck,” she spun around and slammed her fist onto the hood of the car. This seemed to help her focus and she began to dress herself. She had just gotten her jeans on when a man stepped into the motel room’s open doorway. Apparently the reason for her hasty exit, he was holding the side of his head and there was a lot blood running down his face and onto his chest. He seemed more confused than angry. He took a step toward the woman, but then changed his mind and sat down on the doorstep. He was a big guy. He looked like he was in his early forties, well over six feet tall, around two-fifty. It took some spunk for a woman to lay into a guy like that.

  As the guy sat down, the door to the adjoining room opened. An older man in a bathrobe stood there for a moment, assessing the scene, then pointed his electronic gizmo at the car. The alarm stopped screeching, he shook his head sadly and closed the door.

  By then the woman had the rest of her clothes on. She turned toward the guy still sitting there bleeding, took two quick steps toward him and spat. “Asshole!” she hissed, then turned and stalked out of the parking lot.

  I watched her cross the street to the Triple Tavern parking lot where she got into an older model Honda Civic, and drove away. I liked the looks of her. Spirited, with a temper, but rather precise in her actions. A woman capable of making compromises in the name of survival, but with lines she wouldn’t cross. Not incl
ined to take a lot of shit, but with the good judgment to walk away when the situation called for it. Punctuating her exit by spitting in the guy’s face added a certain charm, as well.

  This had taken place on a Thursday night. I confirmed the following evening that she worked at the tavern where she had parked her car the night before, and decided to pay a visit. I wore my usual black tennis shoes, jeans, and a black T-shirt. As usual, I looked like some kind of pseudo-beatnik, nerd-gothic wannabe, so I added a dark gray sport coat to give myself a slightly more moneyed appearance.

  It was a little after 11:00 p.m. There were seven cars in the parking lot, including the woman’s Honda. Including the woman, there were seven people in the tavern. She was behind the bar. An older man, probably in his sixties, was sitting at a corner table, adding up receipts on a pocket calculator. The expression on his thin, deeply lined face suggested a habitual dissatisfaction with what the calculator was telling him. Five customers, four men and a woman, occupied seats at the bar and tables, chosen as if to maximize the space between themselves. Three of the men were in their fifties or sixties, the other one looked barely old enough to drink. The only female patron looked to be about forty, but she might have been younger. It was hard to tell. Alcohol is as unkind to the body as a desert wind.

  The room was dark, the smell of booze and tobacco riding on a base-odor of moldy carpet. A jukebox along the back wall was emitting something country-like, though at a mercifully low volume. Competing with the jukebox, a TV behind the bar aired the news. It was hard to tell if anyone was paying attention to either.