The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  For a long time, I’d thought of my distaste for other vampires as an aspect of my own personality. It had only been in the last few decades that I’d begun to see it as a problem characteristic of vampires in general. “I’ve wondered about that myself,” I said. “Why vampires seem to be so relentlessly disobliging toward one another.”

  “Relentlessly disobliging,” Calvin repeated. Then added, somehow managing to look sheepish, “In other words, they’re all rather like you, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  I thought about the question, but didn’t see any obvious answer.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Calvin said. “We have a problem with power. I know I’m generalizing. But the fact is, vampires will almost always prefer to wield their own power rather than sublimate their desires to some group purpose. We all want to be on top, which ultimately means that we can’t trust or rely on one another.”

  “Humans are pretty much the same,” I said.

  “Yes, but there’s a crucial difference. There are billions of people on the planet. Most of them lack the power to dominate their own children, much less other adults. But because people are so numerous, the weaker ones can form alliances that give them powers they lack as individuals. These alliances have evolved into very complex networks of social and cultural forces that allow people to thrive in the absence of any real physical or psychological or intellectual efficacy. This is very straightforward for most people. They see that they are better off playing by some set of rules, no matter how arbitrary. They know they can’t buck the system, and they know they can’t take charge. So they do the smart thing and cooperate. They trade their independence for security and social status and all the other complex social rewards. They gather into groups to compensate for an underlying weakness that vampires don’t share. For us, it’s more natural to shun cooperation. We prefer to rely on ourselves. And that, as I suspect you understand very well, puts us in a tenuous position.”

  “You mean in our relationships with people?” I asked.

  “Exactly. We need human beings for more than their blood. We need them as a mirror. A vampire can’t survive in absolute solitude. Without a mirror, we lose self-awareness, and without self-awareness, we regress to an animal state.”

  “Where life is nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes so succinctly put it.”

  “Except in our case, it would be nasty, brutish and long.”

  And there I was, back to the same question: Who to kill? If all I needed from people was a supply of blood, it wouldn’t make any difference who I took it from. But if I needed people for more than that, if I needed people in order to see who and what I was, then it was in my best interest to spare the lives of people who were, in some way, better mirrors. Unfortunately, even if this made sense—and I wasn’t sure it did—I still didn’t know what made some people better mirrors than others. Which meant I still lacked the same thing I’d always lacked: a way to choose. It wasn’t any easier to identify a good mirror than it was to identify a good person. And thinking about it in this way was probably just an invitation to confuse the good with the flattering.

  Still, there had to be people who, as mirrors, were better able to reflect things of value. And if there were such people, then what could make them better mirrors if not the fact that they were somehow better people? Clearly, there were people I could kill without undermining my own awareness. People like Danny Weiss, for instance. Or Bill, the psycho who had terrorized Karla that night in Sloughhouse. And if there were negatives, then there had to be positives. There had to be people who reflected a better picture of the world.

  “When you think about it,” Calvin said, interrupting my thoughts, “it really isn’t all that mysterious. We, you and I, don’t like the company of other vampires because they reflect too much of what is ugly and aberrant in us. Fortunately, we can get by without them. We don’t like the company of most people because, lacking any real strength of character, they reflect too much of what is weak and inadequate in us. Unfortunately, we can’t get by without them.”

  “How do you choose?” I asked, the question popping out on its own.

  “How do I choose what?” he asked.

  “Whose blood to take?”

  Calvin stood up and quietly paced the room for several minutes. “If I correctly understand the motivation behind your question, what you want to ask is: How do I decide whose blood not to take?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “that’s the question.”

  Calvin paced some more before answering. “What should I do? A question people have been asking for thousands of years, and they’ve come up with quite an array of answers, everything from the carefully reasoned arguments of philosophers, to the tritest clichés of the simpleminded, to the preposterous ravings of lunatics. In the end, it’s difficult to say if the philosophers have gotten any closer than the lunatics. But one thing seems certain to me. The search itself is perilous for the simple reason that it’s so easy and so tempting to convince yourself you’ve found an answer, when in fact you haven’t. Don’t get me wrong. It’s better to search than not to search. It’s just that, in retrospect, it often seems like it would have been better not to search, rather than delude yourself about what you’ve found.”

  “Does that mean you’ve stopped asking?”

  “In a way, yes. I was turned in 1581. You can do the math. That’s a lot of time to be wrong in, and I have to admit, I haven’t wasted the opportunity.”

  I had no idea Calvin was that old. “So it has been a problem for you, deciding who not to kill?” I asked.

  “Of course it’s a problem. The problem of value: Why is one life worth more than another? I’ve never come up with an answer that would hold water. But it’s not as much of a problem for me as it used to be.”

  “Because you stopped asking?”

  “No, because now I think there are mysteries that are better left as mysteries. There are questions I’m never going to be able to answer, and I prefer not to delude myself into thinking that I have, or that I ever will.”

  I understood what Calvin was saying and my own experience suggested he was right. The difference between us seemed to be that Calvin had found a way to live without the answers, whereas I hadn’t, not with any peace of mind.

  “It’s different for vampires than it is for people,” Calvin continued. “You might say that humans have perfected the art of extracting benefit from falsehoods. If you want a good example of this, look at the Roman Catholic Church, or any other religion, for that matter. But for a vampire, there isn’t much profit in the cultivation of falsehoods, because a vampire isn’t part of the social structure those falsehoods buttress. We don’t have to situate ourselves inside a social hierarchy in order to secure a better life for ourselves. We’re not part of the fabric of the institutions—religion, politics, etc.—that exist primarily to give humans a way to gain status and power. This kind of willful delusion doesn’t help a vampire get by. Or, at any rate, not vampires like you and me. Mio is arguably an exception. But for us, human society doesn’t help much because its foundations are built on greed, ignorance and fear. At bottom, people’s rationales are all hopelessly incoherent. Vampires like you and me are better off staying away from all of that.”

  “It sounds to me like what you’re saying is that it’s a mistake for a vampire to ask questions that are fundamentally human.”

  “I don’t mean to go that far. The questions aren’t the problem. But there are a lot traps along the road to answering them. People fall into those traps by sabotaging their own critical faculties. Human beings have to anesthetize themselves against the inadequacy of their answers. A vampire shouldn’t have to do that.”

  I was intrigued by what Calvin had said, but it didn’t help me resolve the problem of who not to kill. “I don’t see a practical solution in any of this,” I said. “How does this help you choose?”

  “A hundre
d years ago,” Calvin said, “I walked away and left you to fend for yourself. I wasn’t happy about it, but as I’ve already explained, there were reasons for what I did. I can’t change the past. I don’t even want to. Our respective situations are much different now, and the truth is, Shake, I rather like you. I’m surprised by that. I would like to give you an answer, but I’m not sure I have one that would be of any use to you.”

  “Useful or not, you could just answer the question.”

  For several minutes, Calvin examined the palms of his hands, as if he couldn’t quite believe how empty they were. “This isn’t advice,” he said. “It’s just how things look to me.”

  I didn’t see any reason to say anything, so I didn’t.

  “If I ask myself whether someone in particular deserves to live, the only way I can decide is by short-circuiting the question. I don’t really know what qualities go into exempting a human being from my nutritional needs. I can’t walk through a crowd of people and pick out the ones who merit exemption. Whatever it is that makes someone distinctively valuable, it isn’t obvious to an observer. At least, not to this observer. In order to choose, I have to resort to something too arbitrary and too vague to articulate: a feeling, an intuition, a sense of something that, ultimately, I don’t understand. If I do that, I know I’m simply falling back on built-in prejudices that tip the scales one way or the other, for reasons that elude me. I suspect you know exactly what I mean.”

  “I think I do,” I said.

  “This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I, like you, want to know why the scales tip one way rather than the other. But since I’ve never been able to answer that question in any satisfactory way, I ask a different question. I ask who deserves to die.”

  I couldn’t see how that question would be any easier to answer, and said as much.

  “What makes the second question answerable is that I’m intimately familiar with evil. I may not know what good is, but I can look into myself and see its opposite. All the coldness, the savagery, the ruthless, calculating indifference, are as familiar to me as the palms of my hands. But what makes the question answerable is that there are human beings just like me. And the strange thing is, those people also know when they see evil, because they are also intimately familiar with it. When they see me, when we make eye contact, I’m like a mirror in which they catch a glimpse of themselves. When that happens, and it happens more often than you might think, there is a moment of recognition that is unmistakable. When I see that spark of recognition, I know I’ve found my next meal.”

  Under different circumstances, I would have thought Calvin was, as they say, fucking with me. The idea that he could see evil acknowledge itself struck me as pretty far-fetched, and my doubt must have been apparent to Calvin.

  “Like I said, it’s not advice. I’m just telling you what works for me.”

  “So you only kill these so-called evil people?” I asked.

  “Not only, but mostly. I think of it as my way of balancing accounts. I realize the accounts are imaginary. Just a story I tell myself. There is no cosmic balance sheet. But it’s a story that seems amenable to my predilections, and it’s the best I can do.”

  “I can see you’re serious,” I said, not sure what else to say.

  “I suppose there’s a certain twisted logic to it. Evil defeated by greater evil in the name of something good. But the logic is definitely of the twisted variety.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be impressed,” Calvin said. “But if you think about it, I think you’ll see it’s not so crazy. Look at yourself. Human culture offers you a lot of ease and enjoyment. This comfortable suburban house you live in, the music and literature and all the other arts you enjoy, the conveniences of modern technology. All of this is above the contribution people make to your nutritional health and, ultimately, to your sanity. I benefit from all these things the same as you do. As a rule, the people I kill aren’t instrumental in creating this culture. They’re like me. They don’t contribute. They just take, and in the process, they take it for granted that the world is there for them to exploit as they please. They are, in a word, bloodsuckers. Reducing their numbers is my contribution.”

  •

  The conversation trailed off after that. I think we were both talked out. We chatted a while longer, waiting for the sun to set. Calvin told me some interesting and amusing anecdotes about other vampires he’d known over the centuries. I entertained him in turn with some funny stories of my own.

  When the sun was all the way down, Calvin got up from the sofa, stretched, and said it was time to go. I opened the door and we walked out onto the balcony. The sky was overcast and a chill wind rustled the leaves of the trees.

  “I enjoyed our conversation,” Calvin said, though the tone of his voice remained neutral. He offered his hand, which surprised me a little. I expected the shake to be perfunctory, in keeping, I suppose, with his emotional detachment. But he surprised me again by the firmness of his grip, stepping closer and gazing into my eyes. In that instant, there was a flicker of recognition in the depths of his gaze. For the briefest moment, his eyes were like a mirror in which I could see only myself.

  Chapter 23

  “Hello, Shake,” Karla said, when she answered the phone.

  “Hello, Karla.”

  “What’s up?”

  “A couple of things. I want you to run an errand for me. I need you to drive down to San Francisco again, to Satellite. I want you to deliver a message for me. I don’t care when you go. Any night in the next week or two is fine, except Mondays or Tuesdays. The guy I want you to see is off on those days.”

  “Hang on a second, Shake. Let me get a pencil. OK, go ahead.”

  “Go to Satellite and ask to speak to Levko.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “Like it sounds. L-E-V-K-O. Tell him you have a message from Shake. Tell him to call and leave a message at 916-101-2001 the next time Beketov is in town. B-E-K-E-T-O-V.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. He’s not going to like it, but tell him not to worry, just call and leave the message.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “Pick me up at my house tomorrow night at 1:00 a.m. We’re going to take another drive out to the Garden Highway.”

  The other thing was Ron Richardson.