The Lesser Dead

FOR STARTERS

I’m going to tell you about a year. This year. 1978. A lot of shit is happening and I think somebody had better write it down before we all forget.

New York City is the place.

If you’re looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn’t for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn.

Still with me?

Too bad for you.

I can’t wait to break your heart.

I’m going to take you someplace dark and damp where good people don’t go. I’m going to introduce you to monsters. Real ones. I’m going to tell you stories about hurting people, and if you like those stories, it means you’re bad.

Shall we go on?

Good. I hate people who pretend they’re something they’re not.

We’re going into the tunnels.

We’ll start up here in Chelsea; there’s a bricked-up ground-level window with half the bricks out, not a big space but big enough, then we’ll go deeper, down where I stay.

Where we stay.

I hope bad smells don’t bother you.

I hope you brought your own light; I don’t need one.

I hope you’re not fat.

Here’s a little taste of what you’re in for, out of sequence, but I told you how unreliable I am. It’s not all this nasty, but this is probably rough if you’re not used to it. If you can get through this, we can hang out.

We heard them before we saw them. Hunchers. That’s what we called people who hunched in the tunnels. We stayed in the tunnels too of course, the deeper tunnels where no sunlight came at all, but we weren’t Hunchers.

We weren’t even people anymore.

When Margaret saw that her home had been broken into, she didn’t hesitate. She tossed off her flip-flops and marched right for the open trapdoor with me behind her, not caring whether I followed, not caring how many of them there were, and there had to be at least two to pull the chain and get that trapdoor up—it was a big heavy bastard of a door made from part of an old subway car and broken-up seats. She walked with one hand balled on her hip, her stained bathrobe open enough to see her tit if you cared to. She was pissed. It was her place, after all. She was our duly elected mayor.

“Goddamn it,” she whispered, kicking a peeping shower of rats out of her way. She picked up and threw down a shred of a hamburger wrapper in disgust. Whoever they were, they had brought food. You don’t bring food into the loops.

They had tied belts together to lower themselves into the hole. A weak light danced down there, a flashlight, and I heard the sound of a lighter. Somebody sneezed a wet one. Somebody else laughed.

She didn’t bother with the belts. Just dropped down. I stayed up and watched. This was really a job for one vampire. Normally Old Boy or Ruth would have handled this. Old Boy was like her part-time bodyguard, lived in an abandoned train car just down the tracks past Purgatory, but he was a secretive fucker and you never knew where he was. Ruth was out hunting. She was always hungry.

Turns out there were four of them, the intruders, I mean; black guy and three whites, but with Hunchers the race thing gets less important because they’re always dirty and dirt has one color. These guys looked hard, prison tattoos, prison muscles, probably came from the tracks under the Bowery. Guys under the Bowery are mostly wanted men and ex-cons, hunching down there in the piss-smelling dark rather than going back to Attica, which doesn’t say much for Attica. They weren’t from the tracks above our tunnels. We had a few Hunchers above us, but not many and they knew better; our guys would sooner take a whiz on the third rail than walk into our loops.

“Whoa!” the black guy said when the fast-moving woman-thing in the bathrobe landed near where he lay back on the couch, Margaret’s prized antique couch, and he jumped and dropped his flashlight.

One of the white guys said, “Shit!”

Margaret snatched up the flashlight. Shone it at them each in turn. Not that she needed it, just wanted to make sure they were good and night-blind.

Two of them spoke at once.

“Get that out of my face!”

“Bitch, you’d best get out of here if you know what’s good for you.”

“Don’t talk like that to my mom,” I said in my high, little-boy voice. I have a great little-boy voice, but I had barely gotten mom out before she started. She started by breaking the flashlight on the black guy’s head—Margaret’s a little racist, but it’s not her fault, she’s Irish. Or maybe he got it first because he was on her couch. Either way, you know how these things go, everything happens in a hurry. The hurt guy yelled, everybody stood up or tried to, there was a sick thump as somebody’s head got stove in, then another one, but I admit the gunshots surprised me. I saw it all from the trapdoor, but what did it look like for the poor bastard with the gun?

His muzzle flashes, and there were two, lit up a dead woman with shining eyes and big dirty canines that belonged on a panther. He yelled before she even touched him. One bullet hit her, the second ricocheted madly in the vaulted brick room. And then she touched him plenty.

The last guy tripped over the coffee table trying to find the belt to climb up. She was on top of him then, putting her knee in his back and pulling his head by the hair at his temples while he went, “Gah! Gah!” until she rocked back like she meant it, his spine popped, and he yelled. She pulled his snotrag from where it tongued out of his back pocket and stuffed it into his mouth, this to shut him up, but he lost consciousness anyway.

She stood up then, a little wobbly, and said something garbled. She spat out a rope of blood.

I leapt down, landed on one of the dead guys, pocketed the dropped Zippo, and sat on the wooden chair. Not the couch.

“What was that?” I said.

She spat again, bloody with a tooth in it.

She put up one wait-a-minute finger and I realized what had happened. She was in pain. He had shot her in the mouth and her busted mouth was forming up again. That didn’t take long. Eyes take longer. You don’t want to get your eye hurt in a fight.

“I said,” she said, slurring just a little on top of her thick-as-bread Conny-whatsis accent, “never call me your mother again.”

A DOOR INTO NIGHT

I like the taste of sweat.

How it runs from the head, through the hair, like water filtering down through earth and tree roots into a spring; only instead of getting purer, sweat gets filthier, picks up grit, maybe tobacco, a hint of shampoo, but under and through all of that is salt. Almost too much salt, like honey was almost too sweet, what I remember of honey. They say the tongue’s cut up into little provinces, salty, sour, bitter, sweet. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that salt is about the only taste I enjoy now. Salt in blood is the best, of course, and blood is a feast: iron-coppery and personal and as good in the stomach as ever was a steak. Sweat can’t satisfy, not by itself, but it does hint at what’s next. Sweat is to blood as dirty talk is to sex. It’s an offer. It’s a tease.

If I can, if I’m not too hungry, if I have time, I lick before I bite, with the flat of the tongue like a dog. Maybe your eyes are half-closed because this is sexual for you, or maybe you’re good and scared and making that ripe, rotten fear sweat I shouldn’t love but do. Maybe my hands are tangled in your hair so you can’t run, or maybe you’re so charmed you’re smiling like an idiot and leaning down to me so if anyone sees, they think I’m telling you a secret. In a way, I am.

The secret is vampires are real and I am one and no cop is coming and no doctor can help you and your own mother won’t believe you if you tell her. The secret is I look like a high school freshman but I’m pushing sixty. And the secret is I’m stealing from you what is most truly yours and I’m not sorry.

My name is Joey Peacock. I live in the tunnels under the subways. And don’t go thinking the underground is so bad for us. It would be for you, if you’re still warm, but things change when you’re turned. Darkness isn’t so dark anymore. Everything seems candlelit, even the blackest black, so that what looks to you like black dirt and a wall covered with black mold takes on a kind of warm glow for us, full of layer and detail like modern art, not that Guggenheim shit, but the pretty stonework-type stuff. Or like Rothko. You know Rothko? He’s at the Guggenheim, but he’s different. First time I saw one, I thought, What’s the big deal, squares of color, so what? But there was something about it. A foxy European chick with a scarf and high boots was staring at it and I said, “What do you see?” and she said, “Just keep looking,” so I did. I think she was French. But she was right. The edges of the square of color started waving and then the painting glowed, like it was full of radiation. She said, “Did a door open for you?” and I said, “Yeah.”

Night’s like that now. It’s always been there, full of radiation or whatever, and maybe that’s what cats stare at when they look off into nothing but now I see it, too. When I first changed, I used to spend hours under bridges and down under manholes just trying to count the different kinds of black. Only none of it was exactly black anymore. I know I can’t make you see it, but it’s like The Wizard of Oz, only flipped. Above the tunnels in the neon and lightbulbs, that’s like black-and-white, boring-old-uncles Kansas. Down in the tunnels isn’t exactly exploding with Munchkinland colors, but it is… incandescent. That’s a pretty word. That’s a five-dollar word, but it works. The tunnels are gently, subtly incandescent. They breathe. They are most certainly not ugly.

Know what’s ugly? Sunlight. Even looking at it indirectly is like staring into the jet of a welder’s torch, all that light bouncing off the sidewalk and off the chrome of cars. Even peeking at it from the shadow of a manhole cover hurts. Overcast days make us queasy, unless we wear sunglasses. We all have sunglasses.

And don’t go thinking that because I live underground I let myself go. I’m a good-looking kid, kind of young Frank Sinatra–ish, and I’m not going to spoil all that by letting myself get ratty-looking. The Hunchers, they don’t care, they’re here because they’re running away or sinking or already sunk. They live on flattened-out pieces of cardboard because they’re too lazy to steal rugs and they camp out in Grand Central or Penn Station where people can see how dirty and sad they are and they beg. They let their hair knot up and their fingernails have quarter moons of muck under them; they run around covered in grease and filth and they crawl under their sleeping bags with rats peeping at them and drink brake fluid or sniff glue or cut themselves with broken glass or whatever, but the point is they’re nasty. They eat rats, call them track-rabbits. Not all of them are so bad, but most of them. There’s one black woman living up above us, mostly on the streets, sometimes at Union Square station, I don’t know how she keeps the weight on, but she’s like an island. Won’t look at any of us directly, I think she knows what we are, everyone calls her Mama. Mama has two shopping carts full of stuff, all organized though, like neat. Shoes in one bag, shirts in another. But filthy.

I don’t have anything to do with Hunchers, except to feed on them sometimes. Just sometimes. They’re mostly full of booze, and booze hurts on the way out, or drugs, which give me a headache. We’re much cleaner. Like cats. That’s it, they’re rats and we’re cats. None of them have nice clothes, but that’s maybe not their fault. They’re poor.

Me, I got money. I charm people out of it all the time, and I use most of it to keep myself looking sharp. I have three mirrors, and don’t go believing that baloney about us not reflecting. We reflect. We just don’t show up so good in photographs. We blur. You know that guy who never takes a good picture? Ask yourself if you only see that guy at night. If the answer is yes, maybe don’t spend any time alone with him, you know what I’m saying? Maybe only hang out in big groups.

Nice clothes are important to me, even if they’re hard to keep clean down here. There’s a big trough or basin not far from my room; everybody uses that to wash clothes and bathe. Fill it up and you could only just keep your chin above water sitting down, not that we fill it all the way because the spigot’s not hooked up and it takes so long to get water from the busted pipe we use. Somebody sunk a big hook in the roof above the basin, a long time ago; it’s rusty now, and there used to be a pulley and a rotten old rope hanging from it, but it was in the way so Margaret got rid of it. There’s like twenty bars of soap around the tub we use and share, plus a couple of boxes of detergent and an oldey-timey washboard. Me, I hate doing laundry by hand. I keep a jar of quarters for the Laundromat and I use a dry cleaner on 3rd Avenue who doesn’t ask questions. I like the mod look: tight coats, paisley, zipper boots. I know I look a little dated when I walk into the disco, and like a throwback when I hit the punk club. Sometimes I wear a fedora, which looks funny on a young guy, but I remember when you’d sooner leave your house without your nuts than without a good hat. I remember when you used to have to take your hat off in elevators and houses and when you spoke to a woman; some people still do that. I don’t bother.

We get water from a pipe that’s probably been busted fifty years. Just enough water gets out of it to run down the wall and somebody chiseled out a kind of groove near the bottom, like a niche just big enough to fit a bucket into. It takes about a minute and a half to fill a bucket. We have a cheap fold-up table for folding laundry and whatnot, we keep it near that big concrete trough; I think this place, our common place, used to be some kind of a cleaning station. Anyway, there’s mold and dirt all caked on the wall except where the water runs out of its rusty pipe, but the wall is clean where the water washes down in a footlong track. The pipe is really rusty, that’s how you can tell it’s old. Some joker even wrote RUST where the water runs, chiseled it into the wall and there’s still flecks of white paint in the letters, but the water washed most of it away. People must have been using this for a long time. It’s kind of beautiful there, the way we see, though you would probably think it was just a wet wall with crap all around it and a busted pipe. You’d probably rather have a milk shake than a quart of blood, too, so we’ll have to agree to disagree. Anyway, I’m glad I have a way to wash my hair. Having clean hair is maybe the most important part of looking attractive.

I love long hair, if it’s clean. I don’t have long hair myself because it makes it too hard to pass as a kid, and little-lost-soccer-boy is my favorite disguise. Just after sunset I dress out down in the subway, slip my little plastic shin guards under my knee socks, carry cleats in my free hand, and then it’s I got separated from my mom and dad, help me find their hotel across the park. Works like a charm. I could pass as a little girl, but damned if I’m wearing a dress.

I’m open-minded, but not gay.

ROBERT PLANT AND THE MEXICAN CHICK

Except I am a little gay for Robert Plant.

I saw Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden a year or so ago, maybe four or five years, it goes so quick now. Anyway, I was really close to the stage, and there he was. Robert Plant. Long and lean, golden-curled like a woman but wolfy, his hairy belly snug in his jeans, the bacony smell of marijuana warm and close around me (when I remembered to breathe—I forgot for a good half an hour; I know I didn’t breathe at all during “No Quarter,” and that song went on so long three pearl divers in a row would have died. Plant was right at the peak, as good as he was ever going to get, nowhere to go but gray and fat, and that happens fast. I thought about turning him just to preserve that, the that that was Robert fucking Plant in 1970-whatever, but of course vampirism would kill his career, turn him into a talented bum like Billy Bang. More about him later. The undead don’t care about careers. Vampires are all retirees, happy enough to bend your ear about what they used to do, but their only passion is for a dark, warm liquid, and the only thing that satisfies them to the bones is getting more. It’s worse than heroin, believe me, and I’ve seen plenty of junkies.

But just thinking about sticking my nose in that big, honey-colored shag of hair on Robert Plant made me pop a boner. A really hard, uncomfortable one, and in my tight jeans, too. I tried to pretend it was for the foxy, spaced-out Mexican girl hip-grinding near me in her midriff shirt and turquoise rings, slinky and stinking of patchouli, but no dice. My dead pecker was hard for Robert Plant. I thought about leaving because I don’t think of myself that way, nothing against the gays, but Joseph Hiram Peacock is all about the trim. No way could I leave that concert. It was too good. I love the shit out of Robert Plant.

I wanted to try to get backstage, but even if I did, what was I going to do? Bite him? Wave my boner at him? Get him to sign it? When the music was finally done and everyone heaved for the exits, I saw the Mexican girl shouldering her way through the crowd with her friend, a helplessly ordinary brown-haired waitress type with glow-in-the-dark blue eye shadow. That was where my night was going. I followed them out.

Down into the subway, which I think of as my front porch (yes, the whole thing) and all the way to the East Village via Union Square. Blue eye shadow lived there, above a rock-and-roll bar, and I was afraid my new girlfriend would go up with her, but she didn’t. She kept going, past Tompkins Park, all the way to grimey, crimey Alphabet City, and I followed her, thinking, Don’t take a cab don’t take a cab don’t take a cab, I’ll protect you.

I saw her go into a moldy-looking brownstone with a big bloodshot eye spray-painted on the side along with a jungle of names and letters in all colors. Bottles in paper sacks in the alley, an egg carton, a warped shopping cart turned over and shot through with weeds. Third-floor light came on, backlighting a balconeta with a little garden of potted plants. I skinnied up the brick wall and tapped on the glass. She let me in. They always let me in. It helps that I was turned when I was fourteen, baby face, big blue eyes, thank God I was mostly through puberty. My voice can go either way, which is useful, I’ve trained it. Before all this started, I had only ever met one little-boy vampire with a permanently high voice, and he made me uncomfortable. I have always felt that whoever turns anyone less than thirteen needs to be taken sunbathing.

So there I was on her third-floor iron balcony, the smell of the iron making me horny for blood, smiling at her where she peeped around the curtain and saying, “You need to water your coriander,” through a cracked pane. She understood the third time and smiled back and absolutely should not have opened the French door but did. I mean, there wasn’t a fire escape on that side, how did I get up there?

People don’t think when they see something they like.

And we’re all hypnotists anyway, vampires I mean. We get what we want.

So she cracked the door of her own free will and that was all the invitation I needed. In came my little white hand, pushing the curtain aside, pushing her back, but playfully. Not really, but it seemed like it to her because I was smiling. Her cat was the smartest thing in the room. He didn’t like me. He didn’t scream and shit himself like they do sometimes, but he decided now was a great time to go in the closet, up on the towels. Fine by me, kitty. Stay out of my way.

“Do you want tea?” she said. Did I want tea! “It’s chamomile. I just put the water on.” Trace of an accent, like she came to America when she was eleven or twelve. “Or I’ve got beer.” The thought of beer in my empty, black stomach made my empty, black stomach turn. I hadn’t fed in days and it was getting urgent. So I charmed her hard.

“My earlobe tastes like cinnamon.”

“Mentiroso,” she said, glass-eyed, her lips staying open after the final o. I always remembered that word. I asked Cvetko about it years later and he said, “That means ‘liar,’” which is about what I guessed. Cvetko was Slovenian, spoke like eight languages and read even more, but I’ll get to him in a minute.

“You don’t have to take my word for it,” I said, so she leaned in, openmouthed, and I saw her teeth. Dark fillings in the back ones. And she never had braces; her bottom teeth formed a kind of slack W and she had tiny crooked canines sharper than normal. Not sharp like mine, and certainly not as long, but she couldn’t see mine because I was charming her not to. You can’t see a vampire’s fangs unless he wants you to, or unless something startles him good, but it’s got to be something big. Terrifying. Then all those unconscious charms go right out the window and you see him just as he is, which isn’t so pretty, especially as we get older. But you know what we don’t do unconsciously? Blink. When we’re around you guys, we have to remember to blink, another reason we like sunglasses.

The Mexican fox leaned close, first sucking then sharply nibbling my earlobe. She giggled and said, “Canela,” licking her lips, and now it was my turn. I tasted her earlobes and she shivered. Then she wrinkled her nose. Goddamn it, I had forgotten to breathe on the way here so now my breath smelled like a dead dog in a Dumpster. I poured on the charm.

“My breath smells like cinnamon, too.”

She unwrinkled her nose and smiled, nodding in agreement, a little bit of drool falling from the corner of her mouth. I was drooling, too, but not because I’d been charmed slack-jawed. I was getting ravenous. I licked her neck. Just once. It was rank with psilocybin, bitter with patchouli, but the salt shone through it all like a nickel in a mud puddle. I got hard again, glad Robert Plant had nothing to do with it. Her jugular vein pulsed delicately, but I was feeling naughtier than that.

“Take your jeans down,” I said.

She raised one eyebrow. I like people who can do that; I taught myself how when I was a kid, before all this.

“Take your jeans and panties down,” I commanded. She drooled and complied.

She was hairy, but had shaved her thighs at least. Not that I minded hair. Cvetko hated hair. I’ll get to Cvetko.

Now I put my nose in the corner where her leg met her hip, Christ-awfully aware of the mother lode of dark, soupy blood coursing in her femoral artery. I licked there, just at the juncture. She moaned a little, then tried to maneuver my head so I could lick her slit. Normally I might have, but I was too hungry. I scratched her thigh with the pricks of my fangs, noticed her cat looking at me from its perch on the towels. Keeping eye contact with the cat, I jammed my fangs into the femoral. The blood jetted around my teeth, flooded my mouth, hot and ambrosial, and now I moaned. My hand was spidered flat on her belly, the tip of my ring finger in her navel. She squealed and squirmed while I drank. She came, I think. I made myself stop at what felt like a pint, took care not to backwash in her. Not that I thought she was going to die—death plus backwash equals new vampire. A pint isn’t going to kill anybody, just ask the Red Cross.

I pulled out. Her body jerked. Her teakettle sang. I pulled off my shoe and sock, stuck the sock on her bite wound, put her hand on top of the bite, then closed her legs around that. She was sleeping already, which was normal. Tomorrow there wouldn’t even be any holes, they close up fast if you’re healthy, but there would be bruising.

I went into the kitchen, turned the stove off, and moved the kettle. Damn it, I was still hungry. In a spasm of poor timing, the cat hissed at me. Fine. I grabbed the little beast, flipped it over (ignoring its flurry of claws—the scratches were shallow, healed almost as fast as kitty made them), and sank my teeth into its belly, stabbing for the big vein there. Cat blood isn’t great, but it does the job. I only meant to take a swallow, but I took more and the cat shuddered and became an ex-cat. “Oh, hell,” I said. The girl didn’t deserve to wake up to a sore crotch, a hangover, and a dead cat. I kissed her temple, holding the cat behind my back, and was just about to make my way out the French doors. I remembered my shoe, put that on sockless, and jumped down all three floors to the dirty street. Left the doors open to support the runaway cat theory.

I walked all the way to Murray Hill with the cat under my jacket before I broke the window of a Buick Centurion and flung it in the passenger seat. Funny that I remember the car but not her name. Was it Yasmina? Did I fuck her around the hand holding the sock to her bite wound, leaving her full of my lukewarm, dead seed?

You would have sex with me if I weren’t charming you, right? You saw me and thought I was sexy, I might have said.

I thought you were sexy, she might have slurred back. Or maybe I’m remembering other girls, other nights. I’m not sure. Probably did get with Yasmina, Violeta, Rosa, whatever her name was. Feeding makes you a little drunk and you forget things.

God, she was pretty. I think of her when I hear Led Zeppelin, her face, yes, but mostly the blood in her thigh. And the high-in-the-nose tang of her sweat.

And the teakettle.

CVETKO

Whatever year the Zeppelin concert was, forget that.

This is about what happened in 1978.

It started on Valentine’s Day, a couple of weeks after the blizzard.

It was cold enough to make a polar bear put on wool underwear and Cvetko had red envelopes for his letters. I’ll get to the letters in a minute, but now it’s time for me to try to describe the charmless but endearing calamity that was Cvetko.

Imagine a friend of your parents, someone you knew as a kid, that person from before you were born who came over sometimes and sat around with your dad and mom drinking a little, not too much, talking about the most boring shit in the world and there’s no such thing as a radio or TV yet but you have to sit there and not fidget while he goes on and on laughing at his own lame jokes, pushing his glasses up with the wrong finger, not exactly “old” yet but already has that old-man smell like socks and wood and some shaving cream they don’t make anymore. And everybody listens to him because he’s actually very nice, would loan you money or help you move before you asked him to, one of those guys, but he just doesn’t understand that nobody cares about a picnic he took on a mountain in Yugoslavia in 1925 or whether Father Jumping-Jesus sounded nasal after Mass and we all hope he doesn’t catch a cold.

Cvetko was Yugoslavian, but he would point a finger up at the ceiling and tilt his head and insist that he was Slovenian. Not much of an accent; to give the guy credit, he had a gift for languages. Once, when God still rode a tricycle, he taught linguistics in that Yugoslavian city that sounds like “lube job.”

He came to the loops only two years before, and Margaret didn’t want him at first; Margaret didn’t want anybody at first, she was not the trusting type. But this poor schmuck. He’d seen some nasty stuff in World War II, lost his family, two boys and a girl. Fucking Nazis. He wasn’t a Jew or anything, he was as Catholic as they came, but he didn’t sign on with their program. And he says it wasn’t actually the Germans that killed his family, it was the Italians, who were allied with Germany then. Except it wasn’t actually the Italians who destroyed his house, though it was their fault. Because it was the guys who fought the Germans but got their ass kicked and came south to fight the Italians instead because Italians were pussies, at least next to the Germans, but these partisan guys had bad information and blew up Cvetko’s house because they confused him with another professor who had ratted them out, and they didn’t like him anyway because he wasn’t a commie like half of them were, though he says he is kind of a socialist.

Who can follow all that shit, right?

Anyway, he ended up coming to America after the war, right here to New York City, but couldn’t get a job in a university because, and this is the ironic part, they thought he was a commie. Not commie enough for the freedom fighters of Lube Job, too commie for Columbia University. So he ended up teaching in a Catholic high school in Park Slope, living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, riding his bicycle back and forth like a schmuck. The vampire who got him knocked him off his bike, got him under an el. Never taught him anything, he had to figure it out. He’s smart like that, though.

Figured out he should move away somewhere his nocturnal hours wouldn’t raise eyebrows, hole up in a place that had a basement. He picked Bushwick because it was quiet and he could afford it, told people he was working at the navy yard. Then the navy yard closed and it wasn’t quiet anymore. Twenty years go by fast when you’re dead. Now it was 1975. The neighborhood fell apart around his ears; all the blacks and Puerto Ricans were setting fires, burning down buildings. The white people who owned the buildings were playing with matches, too. No shit. Arson to collect insurance, arson to evict deadbeat tenants and collect insurance. Arson as pure mischief when you’re a ghetto kid. Low water pressure in the summer because the kids are out opening hydrants to cool off, plus Ford told us to drop dead so we fired half the cops and firemen. In short, lots and lots of arson. One thing vampires don’t like is fire. So here came Cvetko, into Manhattan, got himself a shithole in the Bowery, but he was already thinking about moving underground when he saw one of us. Ruth, to be specific. Followed her. Asked about her situation, was told he should talk to Margaret. He did. It went okay. He moved in temporarily at the 18th Street station, which is abandoned. That’s where vampires on probation go.

He didn’t stay on probation long. Margaret had a soft spot for another former Catholic, plus she rapidly figured out that he was smart, if bland. Really bland. Human oatmeal. I took him on as my neighbor half out of pity. You’d pity him, too.

Here’s Cvetko in a Polaroid:

Picture a guy about sixty, wearing a suit. He’s one of those squares that’s always wearing a suit. A sad little potbelly on him, not a big one, but you feel bad for him carrying that around forever—you’re pretty much stuck with what you’ve got when your clock stops. Mostly gray hair going white at the temples, horn-rimmed glasses on crooked, smiling nervously at you even though you just said something mean to him. Familiar but forgettable face, like you’d seen him before, but then, not five minutes after talking to him, all you remember is that he had boring glasses and he was boring.

“You know what it is, writing letters to people you’re going to bite, asking them if it’s okay? Retarded, that’s what. It’s retarded, Cvetko.”

In this imaginary Polaroid, he’s hunched over a letter he’s writing with one of those pens you push down different buttons to make different colors. He’s writing in blue. On a tablet with that guide paper behind it so you don’t curl up with your sentences at the end, which is what I do. But I write on lined paper when I write, which is never, because typewriters are much more my style.

The tablet’s on his lap where he sits Indian-legged, hunched like I said as if he’s doing something bad. Which I guess he is. Biting people is bad, right? Even if they’re lonely or crazy enough to give you permission, which, believe it or not, some are. He’s got three or four letters already in their envelopes, red because it’s Valentine’s Day, stamped with identical thirteen-cent Washingtons praying at Valley Forge like holy little old men in miniature. Normally he’d only send about four letters out, but he likes Valentine’s Day so he’ll probably do like ten. Yep, look at all those stamps. He’s not fucking around.

Polaroid’s over. You get it.

“You speak differently than you used to. This word, retarded, I think you say it too much.”

“Just write your retarded letters.”

“You’re always picking up new words and using them too much. I think it is the effect of television.”

“What do you know about television?”

“I know that between the ages of five and fifteen—or perhaps it was sixteen—the average American child will witness, on this television you love so much, the killing of thirteen thousand persons.”

“Where did you get that BS?”

He put his may-I-bite-you love letter carefully aside, walked on his knees in front of his bowed-in-the-middle bookshelf full of egghead books over to one of his stacks of papers, and shuffled in them until he pulled out a mimeographed copy of something. He held it up for me to squint at.

“Oooo, that’s fun. What are you doing reading stuff like that?”

“I read about such things because I am concerned about your habits.”

“What, are you afraid I’ll turn violent? Guess what? I already am violent. And so are you.”

“You’re going to have your brain for a long, long time. I do not think you should rot it with unhealthy habits.”

I looked out the door to his room: a big metal door on a wheeled track. I wanted to go get dressed up for the hunt. Actually, I wanted to shut his door real hard and stomp off to show him how boring he was. But I wasn’t quite that crappy. And he wasn’t done yet.

“You are addicted to the television.”

“Bullshit, Cvetko.”

“You watch it every night.”

“So what?”

“So don’t watch it tonight.”

“I’ll watch if I want to. And I want to.”

“It controls you.”

“No, I just want to.”

“You have no choice.”

I really hated it when he started dad-talking me. He was a little older than me—he was born in like 1890-something, turned when Ike was in office, when he was as old as I should have been this particular Valentine’s Day. But I had been a vampire longer. Doesn’t that count for something?

“Fine. I won’t watch television tonight.”

“Do you promise?”

“Sure. If you let me read one of these.”

I snatched his letter off the floor.

It made him uncomfortable, but he didn’t try to stop me.

I held it up and read from it like a beatnik poet.

“‘Dear Mrs. Greengrass.’”

(Really?)

“‘Although you do not know me, I hope that you will forgive me for saying that I have for some time now been impressed from afar by your charm and bearing. It is evident to me that you emigrated here from the British Isles; I gather this less from your accent (Buckinghamshire?) than from the old-world discipline you show in taking your nightly walks and the grace with which you…’”

He just blinked at me, smiling nervously. I could see the tip of one fang.

“So when do you get to the ‘would it bother you ever so much, Mrs. Greengrass, if I poked holes in your jugular vein and sucked black heart’s blood out?’ part? And what is she, like ninety?”

“Eighty-five. And I will not admit to vampirism in the letter; I will only hint at it. I will tell her that if she wants an early-morning visitor, she need only close a handkerchief in her window so it is visible from the sidewalk. We will talk about the world outside her neighborhood, and about times others are too young to remember. The specific language in the letter will make her understand on a subconscious level that this is a supernatural opportunity.”

“This is really creepy stuff, Cvets. Like heavy-breather-on-the-telephone stuff. I don’t see why any of them do it.”

“There comes a time when loneliness is stronger than fear.”

“Well, that’s depressing.”

He nodded.

“Which is why sometimes they let me finish it.”

“Even more depressing.”

“They ask me to.”

Now I nodded. I had had that happen, too.

A kid. Just a sick Greek girl in Astoria whose parents were going to the poorhouse taking care of her. Polio. Wouldn’t let me pull my face away from her neck. Held her weak hands on the back of my head, saying, “Take me away, take me out of here.”

I took the part of her I could.

Joseph Hiram Peacock, angel of Passover.

We don’t kill often. Vampires that do kill we call “peelers.” If you peel somebody and it gets in the paper, you get a talking-to. If you do it again, Margaret gets some of us together and comes for your head, or farms it out to the Latin Hearts under Alphabet City. They’re all pretty new; Margaret turned one like ten years ago, then he turned his friends and family. The Hearts were a gang before and they stayed a gang. Smart of Margaret; you weren’t supposed to go turning more than one every ten years or so, but her one multiplied. Now their leader, Mapache, was loyal to Margaret and they were all loyal to him. Instant muscle. There were less of them than us, like five, but they were good at offing vampires, they had machetes just for that. I think they liked it. But even they didn’t fuck with Margaret. She used a shovel. And she had Old Boy. More about him soon.

Peeling was stupid anyway, though. It was better for everybody if we just took what we needed and made them forget. They were cattle, but you took milk, not meat, or the herd might stampede.

Cvetko hated when we did a peeler, which had only been twice for us, and once for the Latins. No, twice for them, too. Killing bothered Cvetko in general, though.

“Promise me you won’t watch television tonight.”

“Fine,” I said, “I promise.”

SOAP

I meant it when I said it, but not an hour later I broke my word.

“Took my time? I’m standing on a ledge in a rainstorm and I took my time. What was I supposed to do? Jump down thirty-eight floors on a messenger to stop him?”

That was Eunice.

Eunice was indeed standing on a ledge, Eunice and ledge contained in the frame of the luxurious console television that dominated this modern and well-appointed living room.

“My luck, you’d miss,” Walter said.

This was on Soap, which I love. Nine thirty P.M. every Tuesday, A and the B and the C. If I was really going to break myself from the tube, and I wasn’t, it would have to be on some weekday other than a Tuesday.

I was lying back on the couch, holding Mrs. Baker’s arm in my lap, a sort of ugly orange-and-brown knitted couch cover under her arm because her wrist was bleeding and I didn’t want to get it on my faded bell-bottoms. I held the wrist up every once in a while to drink from it, wiping my lips with a paper towel. I’d had quite a bit from her already; she was looking a little peaked, although everybody looks peaked with that blue television light washing over them. Her head was lolling a bit and she had the drool-strand you always saw on the chins of the heavily charmed. All three of the Bakers were in la-la land, hardly aware of my presence, completely unaware of the context, ready to forget me the second I slipped out their window. At the commercial I’d change seats and start working on Mr. Baker, and when he was good and sponged, I’d bite the fat, surly preteen boy with all the football posters in his room. Even charmed, he was a pain in the ass.

“I wanna go to bed, this show is dumb,” he said, even though Soap was off and a Fixodent commercial had taken its place.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Soap is the smartest thing on television right now; soap operas have been begging for satire since they were invented, and Soap knocks it out of the park. But that’s not good enough for Michael Kiss-My-Fat-Ass Baker, is it? You love, what, Happy Days?”

“Yeah,” he said thickly, staring at the white paste pouring out of the larger-than-life Fixodent tube on the screen.

“Did you watch it tonight? Happy Days?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what happened? Did Fonzie and Richie jerk each other off yet?”

“No. They were singin’ love songs. The Cunninghams.”

“Right. Valentine’s Day. But you love Fonzie, don’t you?”

“Heeeyyyyyy,” he said.

The hypnotized little dumpling actually said Heeeyyyy! I laughed so hard a little of his mom’s blood bubbled out of my nose.

“You know he’s a Jew, right?”

He wrinkled his brow; he didn’t like this. Oh, this was fun. I stuck a fresh paper towel on his mom’s wrist and went over to the kid, plucking his half-eaten Pringles can off his lap and tossing it across the room, then sitting on his lap where he lay poured on the recliner, crossing my legs, feeling like a big, naughty ventriloquist’s dummy. I was the same height as him, five foot five, but, he was a chunk and I’m like ninety pounds wet—we’re lighter than we look; I’d been slowly losing weight since I turned. Anyway, I know I wasn’t crushing his little nuts for him.

I had been about to drain his daddy, but then he had to go and badmouth Soap; besides, that doughy white neck looked like it needed biting. As soon as I was done fucking with him.

“That’s right. Arthur Fonzarelli likes matzoh balls and bagels.”

“Thought he was ’Talian. Like Rocky. The ’Talian Stallion.”

“Nope. Sorry to hurt your feelings, but Fonzie’s a big fat Jew, just like me. Well, half Jew on my mom’s side.”

“Are you gonna bite my neck now?”

“You’re a smart kid.”

I mussed his hair.

“Are you a vampire?”

Still staring at the tube, didn’t know what he was saying.

“What? Don’t talk crazy. I’m Cupid.”

“Oh. That’s okay, I guess. But… you still gonna bite me?”

“Oh, you know it.”

He made an I’m-gonna-cry face and squirmed.

“What’sa matter, Mikey? Does it hurt when I bite you?”

He nodded and made a little whimpering sound, which triggered something in his semisleeping dad. Mr. Baker got up, looking all Korea-vet tough in his tobaccoey Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, turned the corners of his mouth down, started to make a beefy fist.

“Sit down, Victor,” I said to him, pointing my index finger at him like a gun and letting a little menace into my voice.

He nodded, smoothed his pants, and sat down in a hurry, looking grateful I had reminded him he was supposed to be sitting down now. He even tilted his head so I could get at his neck when it was his turn. But now I spoke to Mikey.

“When I bite you, it only hurts a little, right?”

“I guess. Like a shot. Then it feels kinda good, but I don’t like it that it feels good. Makes me feel like a queer.”

“It’s like a shot,” I said. “Let’s go with that.”

“Shots are good for you,” his mother slurred. She reached for her wine without looking at it, spilled it all over the carpet. Luckily it was white wine, so it wouldn’t stain, but her spastic movement started her wrist bleeding again, and she got a smear about the size of a garden slug on the arm of the couch.

The father nodded, agreeing about the virtues of getting a shot. They were all watching the Magnavox, which now showed a rust-bearded Burger King with a rust-colored semi-Afro appearing from behind a magic door. Twin rusty caterpillars over his eyes. They had some dumb little bathtub toy with a rubber-band propeller making a pair of little kids squeal. It was so easy to charm people who had been watching the television—maybe Cvetko was right. Maybe it does rot your brain.

So I poked the chubby kid’s sweet, chubby neck and drank and then I stuck my fangs into the hot, flushed neck of the ham-handed dad who smelled (and tasted) like Hai Karate aftershave, and then we all watched the rest of Soap together. I cleaned up before I left—picked up the Pringles, scrubbed the blood with Joy so it mostly came off the ivory-colored couch’s arm, put the wadded-up, bloody paper towels in my pocket. I even wiped the dad’s upper lip, which was coated with nasty little white wings of snot. I hate snot. And it wouldn’t do to have them start to figure out something was wrong. I came here maybe twice, three times a month.

Of course I visited other places, I had a kind of routine, but the Bakers had the biggest veins, the weakest minds, and the most comfortable furniture on the East Side. But mainly I picked them for the huge, glorious console television I saw lighting up their window lo these many months ago as I walked on the sidewalk below. Think about that the next time you shop for TVs.

THE GIRL ON THE SUBWAY

I skittered down the fire escape doing my best impression of a monkey, but moving so fast and light anybody who saw me wouldn’t know what they saw. The Bakers had good, fatty beef-fed blood, singing with iron, and I felt like a million dollars. I wanted a mirror even though I had already used one in the Bakers’ bathroom to tidy up before I left (I helped myself to Dad’s cologne, too), but I never got tired of the way I looked after I fed: healthy, strong, just as much color in my face as yours (if you’re a Caucasian, that is; I shouldn’t make assumptions). My hair always looked dynamite after a good feed, too, like a dog’s coat when you feed him an egg every day, although I never tried that even when I had a dog. I think I heard it on TV.

The point is, I had a real spring in my step, which is quite a spring when you’re a vampire. I wished it were warmer, I felt like running, but it wasn’t running weather. Big heaps of unmelted snow from the blizzard stood packed here and there, forcing what people there were on the streets to bunch up, the long-legged ones in a hurry making grumpy faces behind the old and slow, trying to pass but here comes a dad with tiny kids in parkas, jumping in front of them won’t look too cool. Between the packed snow you got an ugly slurry of ice-mush and dirt that a lesser fellow would be prone to slip in and fall. No, really, if you grew up somewhere south and you think all sweetly about snow, or if you only ever saw it on the tops of mountains for Heidi to yodel over or melting down into streams for Bambi to lap up, come to Manhattan in February. New York’ll bust your snow cherry fast. You show me a postcard from Lapland with mountains and a reindeer and I’ll show you a man-high, snow-capped heap of trash bags and cardboard piled around a tree that probably has tuberculosis, little yellow pockmarks of dog piss at the foot of it, all of it sprinkled with soot, real evenly like it came out of a shaker, and garnished with soda cans, cigarette butts, and, for no good reason, a brand-new left shoe, but just the left one and there’s dried blood on it, so who’s going to take it?

I was in the mood to hear music and meet a girl or two, so I decided to train my way to the Village. Down I went into the mouth of the subway, hopped the turnstile fast as a squirrel, then just for a laugh I walked in the blind spot of a briefcase-carrying guy who smelled like hooker, real close to him, my toes almost on his heels like something Charlie Chaplin would do. He didn’t see me at all, even when he turned around once. There was a girlie in a denim jacket getting on the car past the closest one, so I ditched my first playmate and popped the collar of my shirt over my leather jacket. I had already checked myself postfeeding, but I spat on the back of my hand and wiped my lips and chin just in case; I guess you’d call it a nervous habit. She was dirty blond, taller than me, but that’s not unusual; she would have been taller than me even without her platform shoes. Very sexual vibe from that one, automatic, broadcast to mankind in general like Radio Free Europe. Nice hips, and I liked how shaggy her hair was; she looked tough and pretty at the same time.

She was just about to look at me; I can always tell when you’re about to look at me. There came the eyes. Brown eyes. I would have thought blue. I smiled, she smiled. Quick shy looking-away game, but one of us would peek again in ten seconds or so. The only other person on our car was an older Chinese woman reading Danielle Steel, Passion’s Promise, don’t make me laugh.

The third time girlie peeked at me I leaned back and swung around gracefully on the pole, sort of an ironic comment on the awkwardness of flirtation, right up her alley. She laughed. Also, I was charming her a bit so I looked twenty-two-ish, like she was. Maybe more like twenty-five. She looked like she knew what she was doing, and she fit nicely in her jeans.

I remember her down to the button, not because I fed on her or slept with her—I swear, Your Honor, I never touched the lady—but because of what I saw next. You know how that is? Like you remember the book you were reading when somebody told you Elvis Presley died (Exodus by Leon Uris, don’t be impressed, I never finished it) or what you were wearing the night you lost your virginity (a tweed coat and suspenders, but don’t think “how cute”—I was already a vampire so it was weird).

The point is, I remember this girl because I stood with her on the ledge of great and permanent change, though neither one of us knew it, and she would never know it. The ledge was mine only.

I was about to see one of them.

But not just yet.

Not until Lexington.

And we were just coming up on 68th.

More people got on, but I wasn’t paying attention to them.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Why not?”

“It just seems a funny thing to say before hello or anything.”

The train started moving.

“Maybe one day you’ll want to remember the first thing I ever said to you. Maybe it should be more interesting than ‘Hello.’”

She liked that.

In the next car, past the tangle of unreadable Magic Marker graffiti that had sprouted on every subway car like chest hair on a Greek, through the porthole window and the graffiti on that, too, hooker-smelling briefcase man was writing something down on a little notepad, wrinkling up his mustache; he didn’t like whatever he was writing. He was just about to look at me. He looked. First time I saw his bored eyes behind those slightly tinted big brown eyeglasses so much in fashion. My reflection and the girl’s swam over him like giant ghosts. A kid behind him, not his, sat alone, and that struck me wrong though I wasn’t thinking about it yet because the train was moving from the lit space by the platform into the darker space of the tunnel, my real home, Cvetko’s home. And I saw tough girl’s reflection turning toward me, her reflection in profile, so I turned also and looked her straight in the nose—I did mention she was tall? She giggled, warm fake-fruit smell of chewing gum riding her out-breath, and I took her chin in my hand to point her mouth down at mine. Her eyes darted at the Chinese woman, but I guess Danielle Steel can write the hell out of a book, because the Chinese woman’s face was like eight inches from the page.

My lips brushed the girl’s; I put my hand on her backside and she didn’t push it away. After a second, though, she pulled back, smiling in that “wait a second, what’s going on, wise guy?” way that really means, “We’ll be fucking soon but I don’t want you to think I do this all the time. Even though I probably do this all the time.”

Then the train swung around a curve in the dark and she stumbled on her platform shoes. I caught her; I don’t stumble, we’re all half cat. Her fingers lingered on my forearms and she looked at me, but I looked away. Something caught my eye in the next car. It was the kid. A little girl. Long black hair like an Oriental, but she was Anglo. Pale skin. Pretty but haunted. She was sitting two seats closer than she had been, though I never saw her move, holding a Raggedy Ann doll she didn’t seem interested in. She was looking at briefcase-hooker-notepad guy.

He looked back at her. And stared. It was all wrong.

But here’s what else was wrong: She was wearing makeup. Like a lot of makeup. She looked more like a doll than Raggedy Ann did.

My new girlfriend was oblivious, said, “So what’s your name?”

“Joey,” I said, distracted.

The train swerved again and the lights flickered, but I could still see. The Chinese woman looked up from her book. Something moved on the next train, in the dark.

Now the girl was holding the man’s hand, like she was his daughter. But she wasn’t! She was charming him. A vampire? That young? She looked seven.

Now she looked at me.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had a chill, but I caught one.

She looked through me.

Was she a vampire?

I didn’t know what she was.

At Grand Central, she got off the train with that guy, just a girl and her dad walking home. He left the briefcase, just left it and looked at it and left it anyway, and that one fact let me know in my black, dead heart that he would never get on another train. I knew it again when two little blond boys joined the girl, one of them taking the man’s free hand, one of them skipping alongside. The boys were pale, like her, no makeup, just very pale. The hooker-smelling guy looked stoned, drooled all over himself, but nobody in the subway gave them a second glance. Why would they? This was Grand Central Station; Hare Krishnas were dancing ecstatically near a bag lady with a Burger King crown on, a drunk guy was puking in the trash can but holding up a slice of pizza so he wouldn’t get any on it.

And a happy family was going home, only the children weren’t children, and Daddy had dying to do.

“Aren’t you going to ask me my name?” the girl said.

“No.”

PUNK CLUB

I went to the Village as planned, went to the loudest bar I could find—the Ammonia. It wasn’t as cool as CBGB’s—Chinchilla only went to CBGB’s—but I found the girls were consistently hotter at the Ammonia. Like just a little less punk, just a little more hot-poser. Okay by me. I wasn’t part of the fucking movement. And the bathroom at the Bowery place was fucking raunchy, even by guy-who-lives-in-the-subway standards.

Anyway, the Ammonia.

Kids jammed up the doorway, fast, blurry guitar licks hammering out the door through the hot jungle of limbs and vinyl, beery musket-puffs of breath billowing up under the streetlight. This under the eyeless gaze of Gilda Radner, a poster for her live comedy album; I say “eyeless” because some less successful comedian had ripped square holes where her mouth and eyes should have been, like the blackout smudges in a porno, only with brick showing through. The doorman, a sort of badly shaven ox-shank in a clownishly small porkpie hat, pushed two fingers into my shoulder as I tried to slither under his gaze.

“How old are you?” he shouted over the exploding guitars.

“Fifty-nine,” I shouted back.

“Cute. Get out,” he said.

“Be friendly. Buy me a beer,” I said.

He blinked twice, the charm hitting him like a baby’s fist between the eyes, then he said, “You want a beer?”

“Love one.”

Oxbody actually abandoned his post, shoved two girls out of his way, and deposited me at the bar like a cop bringing a collar to his desk. He gestured, the bartender nodded, and soon a frosty Molson Light was fizzing before my eyes. I tipped the bartender a quarter and swigged. I like beer okay, and I can keep it down if I have blood in my stomach. Food’s a different story. I won’t barf if I’ve got blood in me, but the food-processing factory isn’t what it used to be and just digesting something wears me out. There’s more, but you don’t want to hear about that. Basically, if I eat food it’s just for show, and I’ll pay for it later. Drinking anything but blood wakes the pee-works up, and that’s no fun, but every once in a while it’s nice to feel like you’re still a person.

I was glad the music was loud, even though I’m not really a punk fan. According to the posters, we had ourselves a double bill—the band was either the Skullpumps or Miss Katonic, depending on what time it was. Probably the former.

The lead singer had white, square-looking shoes with no socks, super-tight jeans and white-blond hair teased up into a sort of hurricane of dye and hair spray. Fake fur half-coat over a T-shirt with the nipples cut out, his own nipples taped over with swatches of black electrician’s tape. Something about his aesthetic made me think I might have found the culprit in the case of the vandalized Gilda Radner poster. The punked-out crowd was really into these guys. A couple of them held up bicycle pumps, confirming my guess about the name, and up toward the front the dancing was pretty thrashy and violent.

I wouldn’t stay here long.

I would just drink my Molson and hopefully the guitars would hammer-wash the image of those creepy children out of my head. I had had a case of the thousand-yard stares since I saw them, had been only marginally aware of the “Happy Valentine’s Day, prick” from the girl I had completely ignored after seeing them, this dropped as she popped a stick of Juicy Fruit gum between her lipsticky lips and exited the train one stop after the others did. She had said some other things to me, but I had turned off like a transistor radio, it’s a very bad habit of mine. If I’m focused on something, I just shut down to everything around me. It’s inexcusably rude, I know it is; she wasn’t entirely off base calling me a prick.

I am kind of a prick.

Take what happened next at the Ammonia.

The thrashy dancing had gotten intense—I don’t know how bouncers are supposed to tell that kind of horseplay from a fight—and pretty soon a guy with bushy black hair got popped in the face with an elbow so hard he started bleeding down the front of his shirt, kind of a button-down zebra print. He dove onto the stage and scrambled to the drum set, upon the face of which he planted a smeary, bloody kiss, like his big Happy Valentine’s Day, pricks! to the world. Oxflanks had already been making his way there, and now he grabbed the bleedy kid by the Chuck Taylors and hauled him belly-down off the stage, rolling up his shirt to expose his greyhoundy ribs. I thought he would kick him out, but he contented himself with jabbing a warning finger in the kid’s face and heading back to the door. Some freckly, overmascaraed redheaded girl materialized and kissed zebra-shirt’s bloody mouth. They frenched for a good five-Mississippi, and she broke away, laughing with her friends, her mouth bloody now. She didn’t even know the guy.

Everybody clapped, even the bassist, but nobody notices when the bassist stops playing.

Before I could even think, I was on my feet and had ducked through the bouncy tangle of the crowd. I grabbed her by the hand, spun her around, and went up on tiptoes. Still laughing, she bent halfway down and kissed me, a beery, bloody, hemoglobin kiss, bitter with cheap cigarettes but salty and elegant and perfect for all that. It was his blood, but I wanted hers.

“Come into the alley with me!” I shouted into her ear.

She just laughed at me and sat down, now watching the band.

“No, really, come into the alley with me!” I said, pouring on the charm. She went glass-eyed and drooly, but she got up. The charmed, it might not surprise you to learn, are not known for their physical grace, and we weren’t Skynyrd’s three steps toward the door before she bumped straight into a mean-mouthed girl, knocking from her hand the three beers she had been finessing back to her table.

An apology would have fixed it, but my new girlfriend was slack-jawed. “Sorry,” I said, moving between them, pulling my new friend toward the cold air coming in the front door. A man with a bandana and dogtags around his neck decided he didn’t like me, I can’t say I blame him, and took a poke at my eye. The Ammonia was kind of a punchy place, if you haven’t already gathered that.

He connected, I saw the proverbial stars, but even so I kicked out at him almost simultaneously, heard him yelp. I kick pretty hard. Now I was separated from the girl, but that was just as well. I wasn’t starving, just being greedy. Now Oxlungs was blocking my way to outside, he had seen the kick, maybe suspected I had been up to no good with the girl, and he grabbed me by the coat, which I slipped out of quick as an eel. The door was more crowded than the toilets, so I ran back into the bar.

Bandana was limping after me, Oxballs too, so into the filthy-but-better-than-CBGB’s little john I went, hoping for a window I thought I remembered. I got one. Painted shut and small. I leapt up on the shoulders of one guy pissing in the trough, but he was high as a kite and just laughed, at least until the counterforce of me wrenching the window open knocked him down. I went with him, paint flakes showering everywhere, but leapt again as soon as I hit concrete.

I don’t know what it looked like to the guys coming in, but I got small. That means my body changed shape a bit, just a bit; shoulders came dislocated, ribs flattened out, you get the idea. “Whoa!” somebody said behind me, probably pissing guy. Next thing I knew, I was long-legging it through a dirty heap of leftover blizzard snow, my pants good and ripped, my boots still in the bathroom, my belt off and in one hand, I don’t have any idea how that happened. But I saw Oxtongue’s oxey head and one arm come out the window behind me. He had that back neck-roll fat tough guys all have. The devil was in me, I guess, because I turned around. Went back up the snow mound. He flailed at me.

“Come here, you little shit!”

“Okay,” I said.

I stood up on the snow heap, one foot propped on a Dumpster. He grabbed my shirt but I pried his hand open; that surprised him! I resisted the urge to break his arm, just shoved it down good and hard. I could see he wanted to go back down now; this wasn’t going the way he planned, but he was wedged in.

I could not help but see his predicament as a gift from the gods, which must never be scorned.

So I fed. Pretty hard. He made a weird sound, like with his tongue jammed up against the roof of his mouth, his eyes rolling up white in his head. He might have creamed himself, that’s not unusual.

Blood and beer, blood and beer, mine was a happy mouth.

I stopped myself at about a pint and a half, he was a big boy, then I delicately plucked his porkpie hat off his head—it seemed a fair trade for my coat—and tramped down the snow heap.

“Come back,” he said, more like a lover than an enraged bouncer.

“Sorry. Past my bedtime.”

A rat in the Dumpster squeaked and moved up to get a look at me, dislodging a bottle. I tipped my new hat at it and made my way down the street, my breath steaming with borrowed warmth, whisper-singing, “I hope I smell real bad, real bad, I hope I smell real BAD!” which was great for a while. Great until I got back down into the subway and found myself looking everywhere for pale, haunty-eyed children.

“And what do you think these children were?” Margaret said, her Irish brogue still porridge-thick after three-quarters of a century in New York. She wasn’t even from Dublin or someplace civilized like that; she was from some turf-cutting wasteland where they pronounce their Bs like Ws and only speak English in banks, which they never go into because they’re shit broke. She was in her thirties when she was turned, which was not long before I was turned. I’ll get to that.

“Vampires?”

“Is it a question you’re askin’ me, or are you tellin’ me your own thoughts?”

“Vampires, I think they were vampires.”

I was sitting on the old refrigerator that served me as a coffin, avocado green and covered with magnets. I collect fridge magnets. Snoopy lying on his doghouse is my current favorite. Did I mention I used to have a dog?

Margaret crouched on her heels in that weird third-world way so she looked like a witch in want of a pot, her tangled, ratty, browny-red hair spilling over her shoulders in an open challenge to all combs. On this particular evening she was wearing her second-favorite outfit, a faded, flowered housedress that had clearly been bled on repeatedly, and a pair of thong sandals. Most vampires avoid sandals because our veins are more pronounced, especially in our extremities—our feet aren’t that attractive. Margaret just didn’t give a shit.

Cvetko was looking at her in that lovelorn way he has of looking at any woman over thirty who talks to him for more than thirty seconds. Margaret looked like a dishrag-pretty thirty-five, sassy in that using-a-rolling-pin-as-a-weapon way, big blue eyes made for being bloodshot, made for anger, the kind of woman who would stab a drunk husband in the gut with a meat fork and never interrupt her lecture. Sorry, did I say “would stab”? Make that “did stab.” I think that was in 1930 or so; he survived that but was probably as dead as James Joyce by now.

Margaret charmed better than anyone except maybe me. No, she was better than me. There’s a lot of variation with us—some guys can barely do it to a drunk; some, and this is rare, can charm a whole room. Margaret wasn’t quite like the last kind, but she could really operate one-on-one. She could tell you to cut your own throat with a soup can lid and you’d do it and hope you hadn’t pissed her off by being too slow about it. She was completely brazen. I watched her get into a limo behind a woman in minks, tell the driver to keep it running and roll up the windows. Three minutes later she climbed out still checking her face in her compact and the limo drifted off slowly, hit a cab. The cabbie was screaming at the limo driver, but he just drooled and said he was sorry. Mink woman got out, confused, went to light a Virginia Slim, then barfed on everybody’s shoes and sat back down. Margaret must have tapped her for a good quart. Would have joyfully killed her if she’d had more privacy, and if we didn’t have rules about killing. I think Margaret bends her own rules sometimes, though. Margaret hates rich people.

Did I mention I used to be a rich person?

I had better do this now.

MARGARET

Margaret McMannis came to work as a cook in my father’s house, our narrow, four-storied Greenwich Village town house, in the spring of 1933, when I was fourteen years old. The last cook, Vilma, a chubby Hungarian woman with a birthmark like a sunburn on about a third of her face, had been like an adopted mother to me since my own mother was always busy with shopping, organizing parties, and charity work that involved little charity and even less work. Children were for cooks, teachers, and nannies to worry about. She was the kind of woman who would wear shoes she knew would give her a blister to Central Park just so she could buy shoes that would give her a blister somewhere else and pick up a third pair a block and a half from home. Because she couldn’t be bothered to carry two boxes, she would toss the first pair in the trash. The family money was mostly hers, her dad was big in textiles, but still.

Is it any wonder I ended up selfish?

Vilma never thought I was selfish. Vilma taught me spices, tarragon and paprika and rosemary, coriander, too. Vilma let me taste brandy and eau de violette; she made lemon cookies and shortbread and gingerbread men and cupcakes and when I remember the sun I remember it coming in the kitchen window with Vilma bending down to put a wooden spoon slathered in batter to my mouth, calling me Joey-bird.

“You want taste, Joey-bird? You come taste!”

Her English always sucked. I miss Vilma like I miss nobody else in this world and I don’t even know what happened to her after what happened with us. I’ll get to that.

Dad wasn’t bad when he noticed me. Always seemed genuinely interested in what was going on in school, what have you, bought me a Yorkshire terrier over my mother’s protests about hair getting on her dresses. Any dad anywhere can get a get-out-of-jail-free card for about three years by buying his kid a dog. The Yorkie’s name was Solly, but you don’t give a shit. Other people’s dogs are boring. Suffice it to say that a dad, a cook, and a dog can just about make up for a mom.

I didn’t mean to turn this into a headshrinker’s couch or anything, but it feels good to get this stuff about my mother off my chest. It isn’t like her family was bad. Her sister Golda had been a nurse in World War I and she came to see me when I had chicken pox and told me stories and I remember praying to God asking why she hadn’t married my dad instead. That sounds rotten, and kids can be rotten, but just wait.

My mom, as it turns out, got this idea that my dad was sweet on Vilma. More than just sweet on her. Not the sort of thing you called a family meeting about in 1933, but I heard them fight. I couldn’t make out everything through the walls, but I picked out enough to know (a) my mom could have married any one of about ten thousand handsome, successful Ashkenazi in Manhattan, (b) my dad planned to poison Mom, run off with Vilma, and leave little Joseph an orphan, and (c) my mom was nuts. Just fucking nuts. First off, Vilma wasn’t exactly Miss Rheingold; she was chubby and huggy and sweet, yes, but my mom was a svelte, well-put-together woman who looked good in a tweed peacoat, got plenty of looks in the park, blistered feet, crazy eyes, and all. Second of all, my dad, Edwin Davison Peacock, was a rock. Worked all day in a fever of Presbyterian capitalistic mysticism, yes, expected roast beef and mashed potatoes with lots of butter on the table at seven sharp, nothing unusual about that back then. Kept us treading water in the crash of ’29 without help from the in-laws because he was suspicious of the market—that whole buying-on-margin thing smelled like rotten meat to him long before it gave the whole country a bellyache. Pops invested in real estate, sold his Lower East Side pushcarts before La Guardia outlawed them, and modernized his three clothing stores so they looked airy and full of light when everybody else’s discount stores looked like you were looting somebody’s basement. But having an affair? I’d have been less surprised to hear FDR won a silver medal jumping hurdles.

Then it happened. My dad, respected by employees and feared by competitors, chickened out before his raving wife. He up and fired Vilma. Did it while I was at school so there’d be no tearful good-byes, but there were tears all right. I didn’t sleep for a week, just punched my pillow while Solly soldier-crawled on his belly squinting and licking his nose, trying to get close enough to lick the tears off of my cheeks, which I finally let him do. He was good at that. We just don’t deserve dogs, do we?

Leah Peacock wasn’t about to cook her husband’s meals just because that “liver-colored Magyar cow had gone back to Budapest,” so the cook interviews began immediately. Based on one plate of Salisbury steak, an enthusiastic recommendation from her last employer, her strict Catholic values, and her thin, un-Vilma-like frame, Margaret McMannis won out over the other applicants. I think, too, that her Irishness appealed to some charitable impulse of Leah’s without fully rousing her under-the-surface bigotry, as the dark faces of the two colored candidates doubtless had. The maid, Elise, was colored, but she didn’t touch food. Yeah, racism’s like that. It wasn’t the bus seats that got all the rednecks worked up in the ’50s. It was the water fountains. As for the situation in the Peacock house, however, Mother actually seemed to like Margaret Evelyn McMannis.

And for that reason above all others, Joseph Hiram Peacock decided she had to go.

It really isn’t tough for a kid to get a domestic fired, particularly in a house where the mother thinks of the kid as a swatch of wallpaper that occasionally needs food and school.

I was too smart to think one theft would do it, and I was too smart to take something they might think a boy would be interested in. I knew where the money was kept. That was out of the question.

I started with earrings, a pair of modest pearls. Nothing so expensive Mom would make Dad call the cops; something small and losable. Something she wore a lot so she’d notice and it would bug her and put her on notice that something was wrong. I hit the bull’s-eye.

“Edwin?” she said; it was always Edwin when she had a demand and Ed when she wanted to make sweet. “Would you please keep your eyes open for those pearls I got in Chicago? They seem to have grown wings.”

“They’re not in the box?” he said from behind his newspaper. Of course they weren’t in the box, nobody says their earrings are missing if they’re in the box. It was a bullshit question so he could snatch another paragraph off the New York Times before he had to pay attention to what she was saying.

“No,” she said, more quietly. More quietly meant she was going to handle it herself. Louder would have meant he’d better get in there. She put just enough pout in it so he’d know she knew he was more interested in the paper, but really it was just for herself since he wasn’t fucking listening.

It certainly wasn’t for me. She didn’t know if I was in the house, in the garden, in the park, or at the bottom of the East River. I actually put my hand in my pocket and rolled the earrings in my fingers while she stomped and huffed around upstairs, making the floorboards creak. For a woman with size-six feet she had quite a huffy stomp.

The only person looking at me was the maid, Elise, who was tickling the bookshelf with a feather duster. She caught my eye just then, not that we were chummy, but her look seemed to say she knew something had been set in motion, that she would come under scrutiny, that my words for or against her would be the finger on the scale. She was only four years older than me, but we couldn’t have lived in more different worlds. Doing her very best every day, never stealing, never lying, she might or might not be able to keep her reputation intact. I was a rotten little bastard, but because my face was white and my name was Peacock, it would have taken an act of Congress to put me under suspicion.

Another complicating factor was my attraction to Elise. She had the dubious good fortune to live under the same roof with me at the very dawn of my adolescent sexuality. You know what teenaged boys are famous for doing? Of course you do. I had just discovered that very thing the previous year, while holding a heavy encyclopedia on my lap and simultaneously nervously twitching my leg up and down. Soon I gave up my hunt for John Wilkes Booth and started fanning the pages for anything female, finally settling on Joan of Arc. I imagined her sweating under all that armor, then, God help me, I pictured her in a cell like in a dungeon getting ready to get burned at the stake. This whole thing took like three minutes; I didn’t know what dizzying, rapturous thing had happened to me, I had an idea, but I had better sense than to tell my parents about it. I just cleaned myself up and resolved to investigate the situation further. It actually took me a week to figure out a book on my lap wasn’t necessary.

But Elise. She went from being sort of an older fellow child from a less fortunate family to being Cleopatra, Bathsheba, Jezebel. I loved watching her polish the silverware, clean the glass, make the beds; I lived for floorboards day. I tried to talk with her a few times, and she was polite without being overly friendly. I think she saw through my interest, understood this was normal for boys and that it was best not to encourage or offend me. I think she was perfectly neutral toward me, no love, no hate, and as guilty as I felt for the unlikely situations I imagined us in together, I was grateful for that neutrality. I expected that neutrality to end any day; any day she would sense the secret and anatomically naïve relationship we were having inside my skull and begin to despise me as a peeper and a sex pervert.

But that’s not what happened. If she knew, really knew how much I thought about her, she never let on. And now she would need me.

Help me, Joey, her look said, dust motes in the air lit up by the sun. You know I’m good.

I let myself almost smile, which she took to mean yes. She almost smiled, too. This all took less than three seconds. Then Solly started yapping because a key slotted into the front door and it opened, and Margaret came in with her big tatty coat and the paper sacks of groceries she would turn into Saturday dinner. A bunch of cold air came in with her.

She said, “Good afternoon, Joey,” to me, but I just looked down.

Rolled the earrings in my fingers.

Tried not to smile.

Mom did ask Elise about the earrings but seemed mostly to believe her when she said she hadn’t seen them. She was on guard, though, and now so was Elise. Runners on first and third. I went for the base hit the following Saturday. Not earrings this time, but a cameo. Valuable, but not send-you-down-the-river valuable. Just pretty, something a woman would love. A white Grecian lady with snaky hair on a coral background the color of good salmon. I had always liked that one, had asked Mom about the pinkish stone when I was a kid, had loved the idea that it came all the way from the sea. Coral is still one of my favorite words, even after everything. But I hadn’t paid it any mind since I was little; she’d never think I took it.

She’d certainly never think I would put it in the purse of an Irish cook who had done me no harm. The idea was so shitty, so cowardly and rotten as to be beyond belief; her Ashkenazi blood was too noble to produce such corrupt stock, right? But Irish thieves crawled off the bogs in droves and freighted themselves west across the Atlantic; what was Brooklyn, where the McMannises had their hatchery, but a weigh station between Ellis Island and Rikers Island? That cameo would land in Margaret’s purse with an audible thud, David’s stone hitting Goliath right on the Xs-for-eyes button. Only I was Goliath. I knew I was going to win this one. But how to get it in there? And how to see that it was found?

“Why does the lady have snakes in her hair?” I had asked my mother years before.

“Because the gods were angry at her and turned her into a monster.”

“You mean God?”

“No, Joey, back in olden times the ancient Greeks believed in lots of gods. Some were nice and some were mean.”

“Like the devil?”

“Something like that.”

“Why did they put snakes in her hair?”

“You know, Joey, I forget. Go ask your father.”

I don’t know if she forgot or she just didn’t want to tell me, but I know what the snake lady did. Medusa. She got raped. The god Poseidon went and raped her in the temple of Athena, and Athena was pissed. She couldn’t punish Poseidon, her uncle, but Medusa? Just a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just an Irish girl off the bogs.

My plan was to slip the cameo into Margaret’s purse and then tell Elise I had seen Margaret take something from my mom’s jewelry box. Remove myself one step from the crime, enlist an ally with skin in the game, it was perfect. You see why I’m such a good vampire? We’re all lying, devious bastards, not like werewolves, if there are werewolves, whose MO is, “Hi, I’m a werewolf, surprise! And fuck you!” No, we lurk. We’re lurkers. And I was off to a good start.

But not perfect.

I went upstairs to Elise’s room. Elise lived with us every day but Sunday when she trained it north to some crumbling shitbox in the 130s where they took her money but no longer had a bed for her; here she slept in a sort of glorified, skylit closet on the top floor. One closet within this closet was where the cook kept her affairs. Margaret went home at night, but worked from six thirty A.M. until eight P.M. six days a week, with a two-hour break in the middle of the day, just enough time for her to get home, slap her children, and clean the whiskey bottles off the stairs, or whatever poor Irish women do in Brooklyn. Anyway, there I was all quiet in my sock feet, opening the cook’s closet door with nary a creak. Medusa was in my hand and only inches from slipping into the cheap canvas handbag. And then I stopped. Cold sweat on my temples and upper lip. I know how much this sounds like trying to make myself look better after the fact, but given the other rotten things I have told you, and will tell you, why would I tidy this up? Anyway, whether you believe me or not, I stopped. I was suddenly aware that this was a big moment for me, that who I was as Joseph Hiram Peacock was getting decided exactly then, not in trench warfare, not in some deal with the devil with a fancy contract and an offered pen to dip in my own blood, but right there. On the fourth floor of a narrow town house in Greenwich Village with a stupid little cameo in my hand. I shook my head a little. It was too rotten. I couldn’t do it. I started pulling my hand back.

“Mr. Joey,” she said. I almost jumped out of my skin. Elise. Only she called me Mr. Joey. She said it breathy, a stage whisper, she knew something bad was happening. I turned around to look at her. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. I looked at Elise and she at me and just like that I failed. I ran from the trench my buddies ran into. I dipped the pen in the blood and signed, the devil twirling his waxy black mustachio and chuckling at his windfall, or maybe at the irony of all this ceremony for such a wormy little soul.

I held up the cameo on its chain, Medusa spinning in the dim light, my eyes begging Elise to believe me as I said, “I found this. I mean I saw her. Margaret. She put this in her purse, from the dresser.” Something very complex but quick happened in Elise’s eyes just then, something I only fully understood later: the arithmetic of the real world carried out by a young woman of fragile circumstances, an expert in such calculations.

She didn’t believe me any more than the man in the moon. But she knew her best chance of staying on here was to side with me. If she tried to rat me out, I might say she was the thief. Even if they believed her, she’d have a permanent enemy in the house that could never, ever be fired. She knew all this in a second.

“Missus Peacock,” she said, tentatively, looking me in the eyes as if asking, Are you sure? Are you sure this is who you are? Because we can do it this way if you want, but you’re starting on a long road now and you might not like where it goes. Or maybe she was just a scared kid from Harlem learning yet again how bad the world sucks.

I almost nodded at her, the way I had almost smiled before. She almost nodded back, and then she called for my mom again. Louder this time.

“Missus Peacock!”

I looked at Medusa.

Turning on her fine chain, turning.

The next cook was colored. My father overruled my mother on that, stopped her from hiring a mealymouthed sixtyish Russian crone I’m reasonably sure was a witch, and insisted on a cocoa-skinned, smiley Tennessee negro named Susie, though it wasn’t a week before we were calling her “Sugar,” as she said everybody else did. In addition to the permanent, genuine smile and pearly teeth, the gods had gifted Sugar with perhaps the largest bosom I had ever seen; it made a sort of geological shelf above her smallish waist. It wasn’t a point of sexual interest, not for me anyway, but it was definitely a novelty. Sugar’s audition consisted of her cooking us six fried eggs in a row without breaking one yolk, making jokes with my dad the whole time. Mother wasn’t hungry, she was never hungry, so Solly got her second egg. It was a good day for Yorkshire terriers. It was even a pretty good day for me, despite my guilt for what I had done to Margaret.

Margaret.

Yeah, let’s go back to that Saturday.

I had asked Dad not to call the police, trying to sound persuasive while remaining aloof. My dad was quiet but shrewd, very shrewd. You don’t steer a business through the Great Depression by being a sucker.

“Why do you think we should be lenient with this kind of behavior, son?”

“Because. She has a family?”

I made myself look at him. He would notice if I didn’t look at him.

“Most people have families, Joseph. And most people don’t steal.” His eyes were cannons, ready to fire a broadside that would knock my head clean off.

Margaret sat stiffly in a dining room chair, her chin high, her arms folded in a pose of suffering righteousness as old as accusation.

“Call the police if you’d like, Mr. Peacock. I’m an honest woman, and I’d like to see this sorted out as much as you.” She looked at Elise then, which was a relief, but then she cut her eyes to me, dragging Elise’s gaze my way with her. She knew. She knew, but had no proof, and hoped I would panic.

Yes sirree, she was going to eyeball me straight into a cold sweat.

Those outsized blue gorgon’s eyes of hers went through me, her gaze worse than my father’s, tempered by neither love nor doubt. Her look was not a question mark, it was the drip, drip, drop of Chinese water torture, but I couldn’t look away.

Suddenly, my mother walked over and stood between us, standing closer to Margaret.

“I would appreciate it, Mrs. McMannis, if you would stop staring at little Joseph as though it were his fault you’re a thief.”

“There’s a thief in this house, and no question,” she said.

“If you’ve got some ridiculous accusation to make, well, you just go ahead and make it, but I’d think twice if I were you,” said my mom.

Now the gorgon’s eyes swung up to her.

“I’ve no interest in seeing you arrested,” my mom went on, “but neither will I stand for your lies. Your position here is terminated—”

“And good riddance.”

“Do. Not. Interrupt. Me. Your position here is terminated. I will not call the police, and I know that’s a great relief to you whatever you want me to think, but only if you admit what you did. I cannot conscience a liar.”

My mother was doing the finger-pointy thing that made you want to sock her; I could see Margaret was thinking about it.

“Leah,” my father started.

“No, Edwin, I want to hear it from her mouth.”

“If I say I stole that thing, I walk out of here and never have to look at any of youse again?”

“Yes,” my mother said, using the word like cheese wire.

“Then I stole it,” Margaret said, standing up. “I reached my filthy little hand into your drawer…”

“You know good and well it wasn’t in a drawer.”

“No. I don’t know that. And you just think on that later. But I reached my filthy little hand into whatever you say, and I slipped that ugly necklace into my handbag. Never mind the diamonds and pearls you own, I wanted that tawdry little pendant, to match the collection of gold and necklaces you always see me wearing. And I lied about it all. And sure an’ I’m going to hell if I don’t confess it all to a priest before I die.”

Now she looked at me again.

“Get out,” my mother said.

“Nothing would please me more.”

I know she wanted to storm out on that line, but these things never happen cleanly in real life; the dog went to the door with her, overdue as he was to water the flowers on his afternoon constitutional. Slamming the door might well have decapitated Solly, and that would have been a bit much, even for a pissed-off Irish gorgon. So instead of a dramatic “Nothing would please me more,” Margaret’s last living words in the Peacock house were actually a staccato “Go on, go on now, stay here” while Elise, with difficulty, gathered Solly up in her arms, avoiding contact with Margaret’s eyes.

VAMPIRE

Now we go forward two months or so. May in New York City, warm days, cool nights, used to be my favorite month. I liked sleeping with the windows open, I was never bothered by the sounds of traffic or people on the streets, and the bugs weren’t bad if you left the light off. I liked being under a blanket in the cool night air. I was a good sleeper.

That’s why I was so bleary and confused when I heard the coin land in my room. Followed by another coin. Followed by a third. I sat up in time to see the fourth one coming straight at me. It hit me on the chin, but I caught it before it fell into my lap. A silver dollar, which believe me was worth something back then. I looked at the window, and there was nobody there. And then there was.

Margaret.

Pale and sick-looking, wearing a torn, dirty dress.

“Joseph,” she said. “I’ve got money for you.”

She opened her hand and it was true. A whole fistful of silver dollars.

“What are you doing here?” I said, still more confused than frightened. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to wonder what she was standing on. “What’s the money for?”

“For?” she said. “Why, for all the trouble I caused. For being a thief in your house. May I come in?”

“No,” I said.

“Well. That’s too bad,” she said, letting the money fall from her hand to jingle onto the sidewalk below. It must have been thirty dollars.

And then she was gone.

And as soon as she was gone, I wasn’t sure she had ever been there. Except there was a smell in the room. Like something dead in the attic.

I went to the window and shut it. Locked it.

It was a long time before I slept, but I did, at least until I had the nightmare. I dreamed there was a skeleton outside my window, rubbing its bones on the glass. I sat bolt upright, looking at the window, and indeed there was a shape there. I switched on the bedside lamp, almost knocking it over in my haste. You can imagine my relief when I saw that the shape at the window wasn’t a skeleton at all. Just Margaret in a torn dress. The sound I had mistaken for bones on the glass was actually coins; she was playing a game where she used the tips of her fingers to slide coins around against the pane.

“Joey!” she said, smiling. “Come open the window and let me in!”

I shook my head. She mocked me shaking my head, like a mother would do to a stubborn child. “What’d’ye mean, shakin’ your head at me like that? I thought we were friends?”

I just stared at her. Everything was wrong. What the hell was she standing on? I thought about calling my mom.

“Mommy!” she said, one step ahead of me. “You’re a grown man with hair on it and you want your mommy, don’t you? Go get your nasty Jew mommy. Tell her I brought money, she’ll let me in!”

It was when she said “mommy” that I first saw her long, sharp teeth, white at the tips, a dirty yellow-gray near the gums. You never forget the first time you see a vampire’s teeth. I think I pissed myself.

“Go away!” I said.

I heard nails clicking on the wooden floor. Solly heard voices and now he was coming to investigate. People stirring predawn might mean breakfast, or a trip outside, right? He poked his snout around the corner and gave a low, uncertain growl. By the time I looked back, Margaret was gone.

Solly stayed with me till morning. I didn’t sleep again.

I sleepwalked through school the next day, unable to focus, unable to stop yawning. I nodded off in American History class, although with Mr. Gunderson’s way of stressing seemingly random words when he lectured, this wasn’t unusual. They could have hired that man to test coffee.

“Are we boring you, Mr. Peacock? Would you rather a nap than to hear about the exchange of cannon fire between the Monitor and the Merrimack and the end of the era of sail-powered warships?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunderson. I was—”

“Dreaming about Harvard, or Yale, or Brown? You don’t work hard enough to go to those schools. But, no matter to me; I can write a C as quickly as an A, and the world needs tailors, too. Just keep nodding off, Mr. Peacock, and sharpen your shears.”

I had just enough of my mom in me that I wanted to jab my finger at him saying, Do. Not. Interrupt. Me! but that would have gone over like a pig stampede at temple. Not that I went to temple. We practiced Dad’s religion, which meant twice-yearly trips to church and saying “Amen” after Dad thanked Jesus for the pot roast. The whole thing seemed pretty skinny next to the angry Irish bitch-monster outside my window. That looked real. I was going to need professional help.

“Vampire?” Reverend MacNeil said.

I nodded hesitantly. “Is this some kind of a joke?” I could see in his eyes that mischief or mental illness were the only motives he could imagine for such a question coming from a boy already in high school.

“Did some of the other fellows put you up to this?” he said, rubbing at a pinkish eye under his little round glasses. He was one of those unlucky pale types who always looked allergic to something.

“That’s right, Reverend. They did. I’m very sorry.”

“Who was it?”

“May I have a cross?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“A cross. You know.”

“Joey. This just sounds like more horseplay to me. Besides which, the true cross is in our hearts.”

Tell Margaret McMannis, I thought, but kept it to myself.

I looked around the church to see if there was something crosslike I could make off with, but nothing looked carryable. I was eyeing a wooden cross on the wall, trying to make out how well attached it was—it looked pretty solid—when Reverend MacNeil said, “Joey?” I had forgotten he was there. So I shook his hand good and hard like my dad taught me and set off for the park. They had branches and stuff in the park, and, with a little bit of kite twine, I could make a cross. Then I remembered that my kite had a frame like a cross, and I could skip the park entirely. Then I remembered the reverend rubbing his eye with the hand I shook, so I wiped it on my pants.

Did I mention I wasn’t that smart in 1933? I wasn’t. Maybe the only smart thing I did that year was to tell Margaret she couldn’t come in through my bedroom window. Weird vampire rule, but it absolutely works. Only with somebody’s home, not a business. I’ve tried to defy this little ordinance, we’ve all tried, but you just stand at the entrance and can’t go through. You can’t make yourself do it, like one of those darted lions on Wild Kingdom thinking about getting a good chew going on Marlin Perkins’s face, but he’s paralyzed so he just lies there and pants and looks at him. Last year I conducted a little experiment: I had Cvetko push me into a window I hadn’t been invited through, some little old lady Cvetko had bitten already, a house he was welcome in so he could go in and get me if I got in trouble. He said it was “an exercise in ignorance,” but he was too curious to refuse outright. Damned if I didn’t fall down and scramble back out the window on my hands and knees against my own will.

I didn’t know any of that on this particular evening, but I knew good and well what Margaret was. She was a monster. And she had it in for me. She came back.

“Joey,” she said, outside my window, just a wick of her brown hair and one hungry eye visible between the curtain and the frame. That eye like a lamp, once blue like the sea but now lighter, luminous. I turned away from it, probably just in time.

Solly was curled up in a ball between my legs. He growled.

It wasn’t all that late, and I hadn’t quite gotten to sleep yet. The kite-frame cross was leaning up against the wall, behind my nightstand.

“Joey, may I please come in?”

I switched on my table lamp.

I shook my head, said “No,” and fumbled the cross awkwardly from behind the nightstand, almost knocking the lamp over. I was having trouble catching my breath, I got light-headed, almost passed out, but I held my bumpkin cross up and tried to think of a picture of Jesus with lambs behind him looking up at the sky. To my surprise, Margaret had a reaction to the cross; she turned away from it, not hissing like in the movies I would see later, but sort of hitching like she was being racked with sobs. Anyway, she moved away from the window. I was tempted to look after her to see if she was gone for real, but I didn’t think it was smart to get close to it—I could just imagine her punching a fist through the glass and grabbing my wrist or something.

I sat there, my heart pounding. “You’ll stop dirtyin’ that cross with your little Jew hand and you’ll open this window for me or else,” I heard her say. I wasn’t sure where she was. “Or else what?” I said, not smarty-pants-like, I really wanted to know what she was going to do to me.

“Or it’ll go worse for you.”

“Worse than what? What do you want?”

“I just want to hold you in my arms, little Joey. Just to squeeze you tight, wee little prince that you are. And I will. Make no mistake about it. Be it tonight, tomorrow, or next month. I got nothing but time now, thanks to you. Open this window and it’ll stop tonight, and it’ll stop with you.”

I had the urge to call for my dad, but what was I going to say? An Irish vampire is threatening me outside my window? No… but maybe an Irish thief was plausible.

I got up then, made my way to my parents’ bedroom, tried the doorknob. Locked. I knocked gently. “Dad?”

“What,” he said, almost immediately. They hadn’t been sleeping.

“I think there’s somebody trying to get into the house.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“I think so. An Irishman.”

I realized that sounded flimsy the second it stumbled out of my mouth. I bit my lower lip, looked behind me down the hall to make sure Margaret wasn’t coming. The floor runner, usually cheerful with its Turkish birds or whatever, looked foreboding, like the carpet they roll out for your murder. It seemed to go forever.

“How do you know he’s Irish?”

Good question, Pop.

“Because I think I saw Margaret. I think she wants to get back at us.”

My mom mumbled something low and fast and the springs creaked and the floorboards creaked and then the closet door opened, and I knew what that meant. I tried to peek through the keyhole for a minute, but then I heard Solly yapping. Really barking this time. I glanced back down the hall, and there stood Elise. My heart almost hiccupped out of my mouth.

“Elise,” I stage-whispered, “make sure the…”

Doors are locked, I was going to say, but she interrupted me, speaking in a wet slur. “Forgot something,” she said. Was she drunk? Was she drooling?

“Who forgot something?”

“Hurry up, Edwin,” I heard my mom say from behind their door. “They’re in the cigar box.”

Solly stopped barking.

Elise wound up and spoke again, looking toward me rather than at me. “Marg’it. Marg’it forgot. Her necklace.”

I heard the sound of a shotgun shell dropping on the hardwood floor, Mom saying, “Edwin!” Then I saw her. She was in the house. Margaret, looming up just behind Elise. Grinning with those awful teeth.

I tried to say “Dad!” but nothing came out. I held up the cross. Margaret looked away, but whispered something Elise heard. Elise blundered forward, her face almost apologetic, and grabbed the kite-frame cross away from me, snapping it over her knee. For as clumsy as she was, she was fast and strong. I couldn’t stop her, and we made a ruckus.

The key slotted into the door, turned it so it swung inward, revealing my pajama-legged father holding the short, double-barreled shotgun he shot partridges with.

“What’s going on?” my dad said.

Margaret was gone. Just gone. All he saw was a drooly maid with broken sticks in her hand.

“Elise, what is the meaning of this?” my mother said, pushing her back. Elise seemed to come unplugged. She looked at the broken kite frame in her hands as if it had just appeared there. My pop moved past her, drawing back the hammers of the shotgun. He went room to room, clearly meaning to check the whole house.

My mother was running a string of “I want an explanation”s and “Do not ignore me”s at Elise, who seemed completely out of it.

“Be careful,” I yelled to my dad, suddenly wondering if his sixteen-gauge full of birdshot would do any good against the ghoul I had seen. My interjection caused Elise to stir. Though still heavily charmed, she now became aware of me, and she considered me with an offended drunkard’s dawning contempt.

“You look at me when I’m talking to you,” my mother told the back of her head.

That seemed to decide it. Elise, wrinkling up her face like a baby about to have a tantrum, cleared the space between us in two steps and jammed the broken end of the kite into my thigh. Leaned into it. She should have worked the harpoon on a whaling boat. It stuck deep. I leaned against the wall, shocked past speech. My father was downstairs already. My mother, afraid to strike the crazed woman, just stared. As did I. The puncture was only just starting to hurt, and didn’t bleed yet—that would come later.

Regaining some composure, Elise stood up straight, said, “Excuse me,” and walked upstairs, locking herself in her room. When the police came, she was already packed and as ready to check into jail or the looney bin as any college freshman was to move into his dorm. Not that I saw this. I was on my way to the hospital.

Everybody decent has a guy like Walther in his life: a guy who comes over when you call in the middle of the night. He’s the guy who loans you money and never asks for it back, the guy who tells the cop your kid was with him when he was really getting in trouble; he’s the guy who takes your wife and son to the emergency room. Walther ran Dad’s flagship store on Broadway; he was a big guy, about fifty, had met Teddy Roosevelt, spoke Spanish ’cause he lived in Cuba for a while, made a hell of a pork roast that tasted like garlic and oranges.

“Take them to St. Vincent’s while I wait for the police,” Dad said, and that’s all he had to say. Walther had his hat on before he hung up his phone. When Uncle Walt, as I knew him, showed up, Dad had already put a tourniquet on my leg. My pants were getting all spotty with blood now. Mom was shrieking through the locked door at Elise with one shoe on and one in her hand.

“Go with Walt, Leah,” Dad said, mostly because he didn’t want to hear her anymore. Too bad for me and Uncle Walt. Mom put her shoe on. Walt carried me downstairs. On our street, West 11th, a lady in pearls, a fox fur, and iridescent stockings was passing by with her man-friend, but she went white and said, “Oh, my, oh my” when she saw the stick sticking out of me. I remember trying to smile at her, but the man-friend hurried her along. Walther bundled Mom and me in the back of his car, saying, “Don’t you worry, kid, they’ll fix you right up for Saturday baseball. Wanna stick a’ gum?” I shook my head no. “Shouldn’ta said stick, huh?” He mussed my hair. Whatever Walt drove, I didn’t know cars then, it was a big car that smelled like leather and Cuban puros. I remember that.

Then my mom fixed everything.

“Don’t take him to St. Vincent’s. My family uses Beth Israel.”

“Leah, it’s farther.”

“He’s not dying, Walter, and Beth Israel is more sanitary. I read an article.”

Thanks to that article, if there was an article, I was driven to the thirteen-story medical wonder near Stuyvesant Park where Beth Israel had relocated in ’29. A new, sanitary building with first-rate doctors, shiny bowls to catch the blood in, and freshly painted walls uncluttered with pictures of saints.

And not a mother-loving crucifix in sight.

A word about the cross business: They work on vampires if those vampires believe in them. Margaret, like Cvetko, was Catholic as hell, and a cross will turn and maybe burn either one of them. Me? If I’m coming after you and you pull out your rosary, good luck. I can juggle ’em. But for the newly minted vampire Margaret McMannis, formerly of Connemara, Ireland, where the only comforts were High Mass and killing weevils, St. Vincent’s would have been like Fort Knox.

“So, you made a new friend tonight, did you?” the doctor said, looking things over under the bright light while his nurse snipped open my pants leg and dabbed with her swab. It was really starting to hurt and I whimpered. “There, there,” he said, his tidy mustache sitting on his upper lip, shaved down so it didn’t crowd his nose. A young guy. I thought about him later. I thought they might have shipped him out in the next war where he’d see things that would make him miss his Beth Israel anginas and dog bites and kite sticks in legs.

“That’s right, she stabbed him,” my mother said for the third or fourth time, “like a savage. Just not like a civilized person at all.”

“Well, I’m sure the police will sort that out, Mrs. Peacock, and, with your permission, I’ll sort this out.”

She took the hint and sat down.

He sorted me out pretty well, truth be told; it hurt like a bastard, but he was quick and tidy, got the stick out (boy, did it bleed), made sure the puncture was clear of splinters and swabbed out with disinfectant. Talked to me the whole time. I remember being fascinated with the greenish area between his mustache and his nose, thinking it must take a surgeon to shave a line that neat in a space so small, and I was tempted to try to count the little black follicles there; this guy was hairy, could have grown a big King Solomon beard if he tried.

Then I remembered Solly.

“Where’s my dog?” I said. The doc was stitching me. “Stop!” I said. “We have to find my dog! She’s going to hurt him!”

Then, to my surprise, the doctor stopped. He just stopped, midstitch. I looked at his fingers, holding the needle. Now some clear liquid ran on my leg, right next to the wound. Drool. A long strand of it spilled from his mouth. He swayed, very gently. “Solly,” he said, his voice sleep-thick. Now the nurse loomed up. The nurse took the needle from him, stuck it in my thigh. Not like giving me a shot, just stabbed me with it and left it there. I gasped and looked up. Her tall nurse’s hat sat crooked, it had been hastily put on. It wasn’t a nurse. Of course it wasn’t. You know who it was.

Margaret stood towering over me, glorious in victory, her teeth bared. She looked me in the eye, her eyes moons, cat’s eyes, each one of them a headlamp in the devil’s fastest car. “You won’t make a sound,” she said, and I felt my muscles go slack, felt myself start to drool. It was kind of a good feeling, getting charmed, like nothing could go wrong because you just weren’t in charge anymore.

“But you will have a look around, won’t you?” she said. “You’ll want to remember this night.” She put her hand on my chin and turned my head this way and that so I could see. My mother lay slumped against the wall, charmed, holding up a Life magazine that happened to be upside down, examining it like a strange dead bird. The actual nurse lay half-naked on the floor, her mouth opening and closing like a fish’s mouth, like she wanted to warn somebody but couldn’t. Now Margaret said, “Sit still, my little prince. Watch it all and then it’ll be your turn.”

My mom started to say “Joey” then, and she kept saying it like a broken record, soft and helpless-like. I think she really did love me in her way, as much as she could love anything. The vampire walked over to her, licked her neck good, then bit. I’ll never forget my mom’s gloved hands holding the false nurse’s back, saying “Joey” the whole time, moaning at the end like she was under my dad. Margaret pulled away, a jet coming from my mother’s neck, arcing up and spattering everything. Margaret stuck a sponge in her hand, put that to her neck. The wound was already starting to heal.

I saw Margaret look at the nurse, consider drinking from her, but I now know she needed room in her rotten stomach. Room for my blood. She walked over now, looked at me. Her big light-blue eyes in the yellowish sclera of the new vampire.

“Move aside, Doctor,” she said. He moved aside.

With a pale finger, she plucked open the stitch on my leg, pulled the thread out. Lipped the blood off it and tossed it down. I whimpered.

“Shut up.”

I shut up.

She bent and put her lips to the puncture, sucked hard. Sucked as much blood from that wound as she could get. But it wasn’t enough. So she shifted and slipped a sharp fang under the skin near the crotch, fished around until she found the femoral artery, punched a burning hole in it. Drank. She didn’t stop. She arched her back like a cat.

“Joey, Joey, Joey,” went my mom, her feet kicking weakly like an infant’s feet, letting her magazine drop.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Dr. Goldman?”

“I’m in surgery,” the doctor said, staring at nothing, leaning back now so his drool ran on his tie. “Stay out, please.”

“Sorry, Doctor.”

The room began to go black.

Margaret stopped drinking, let the blood jet from my leg while she said, “And now, you lying little bastard. Now you’ll die.”

Joey, Joey, Joey.

I heard my pulse in my ears weak and slow.

Then I heard the sound where my pulse should have been.

And I died.

HOW TO BE DEAD

If there’s anything as black as the inside of a hospital morgue drawer, I’m not sure what it is. Maybe the middle of a barrel of oil, maybe a mineshaft after a collapse. I returned to something like consciousness aware that it was dark, that I was cold and that my throat, stomach, and ass were raw and burning. Images played in my head, not dreams exactly and not memories, sort of in between, like what you see when you’re dozing off. Margaret was at my window, pale and puffy-eyed and dead, she was looming over me in a big nurse’s hat, and then I was running from her through a jungle. I came to a big chasm that dropped down a good mile through vines and rocks, but there was a fallen tree across it so I ran for that. A bunch of other guys were running for it, too, but no sooner had we gotten to it than King Kong came around the bend, bigger than life and blacker than hell, beating his chest and roaring. You probably know what happened next; he started rolling the log around and thumping it and guys started dropping off to their deaths, screaming all the way down. That was the scariest scene in that movie, to me at least. This big monkey has you trapped and he knows what he’s doing and there’s nothing to do but die, it’s just a matter of time. I saw it with my folks and Uncle Walt at the premiere—we couldn’t get into Radio City Music Hall like we wanted, but we did get seats at the RKO Roxy after a long, cold huddle in line, mostly handled by Dad and Uncle Walt while Mom and I went for doughnuts. Dad made nice with the people behind us by giving them doughnuts. And business cards.

So there I was in my dead-dream, about to get pitched off the log, feeling seasick from all the rolling, and then, as life imitates art, I became aware of actually feeling nauseated. I opened my eyes as hard as I could, I had never been fully certain they were open before, and thought about yelling, but some instinct told me that was a bad idea. I remember my eyes were puffy and sticky and that stuck-together feeling only made my nausea worse. So I barfed. I’ll spare you the details, not because I don’t remember them, but just, you know. Courtesy. Except one detail’s kind of relevant, so you get that one. Sorry. I thought I should turn over to keep from choking, I’d heard that about stew-bums, roll ’em over, but I wasn’t choking. Because I hadn’t been breathing. I felt scared then, like maybe I should see a doctor about this not-breathing thing, and then I realized my pulse should have been racing. It wasn’t even idling. Still. Everything was still in there, except the stomach. I puked again.

That’s when I heard voices. I didn’t hear them clearly through that drawer, but I heard most of it. Here’s how I think it went:

I got this really clear feeling that I should play dead. We’re good at that, by the way. Not real fidgety, high pain threshold, room temperature, no breathing or pulse. I lay as still as Abe Lincoln. The door went shhk-chunk, deep-voice guy grunted, and then my drawer slid out. I was aware of light on my eyelids. I know I stank and looked a mess. Yiddish-sounding guy said, “Oy.” I shit you not, he said, “Oy.” How I wanted to peek at him! Was he orthodox?

I was scared as hell now. I wanted to move just to prove to myself that I could, that I wasn’t just a cold, dead kid getting talked over by doctors, but something told me to stay still, all but made me stay still.

They slid me back in. I was thinking Don’t shut the door, don’t shut the door, don’t shut the door, and they shut the door. They went back to talking about weird deaths they had seen and they put away some other stiff two doors down. Then they left. I had to know if I was really dead, so I moved my hand, or thought I did, then I pinched my own nipple and felt that, or thought I did. I was starting to panic. Then I did panic. How would I get out? Where would I go, what would I do, where was my dog, was my dad all right? I wanted to start screaming and kicking the insides of the drawer, that would have made a hell of a racket, but I couldn’t. I mean, I could have made myself, I guess, but the urge to bang and yell was less powerful than the need, the command, to remain quiet. It was like wanting to get away from bees, only you’d have to jump into a blazing furnace to do it. So I lay there. But the little movements I made in the dark, was I really making them? Was I thinking I had better stay still because the truth was that I couldn’t move and never would again? Before long my door went shhk-chunk again and a woman cleaned me off with a bleachy towel; soap must have been for the paying customers. She was talking to herself the whole time, half whispering, rehearsing some speech she was going to give her husband when she got home:

“I really don’t care what your friends think about it I won’t have you going to the bar where that tramp works like nothing ever happened between you something most certainly did happen even if you think kissing someone isn’t a big deal it is to me and there comes a time when you’ve just got to put your foot down so I’m putting my foot down it’s a certain kind of woman who works in bars to begin with and what I do may not be glamorous but it’s honest not that that cheap piece of goods knows from honest but you should Arthur you really should by the age of thirty-two you’re not a kid I won’t have it, I won’t have it. I won’t have it.”

Every time she said, “I won’t have it,” she gave me an extra hard wipe with the cloth. By the time she was done, I was pretty sure poor Arthur had been stepping out on her. Jesus, who wouldn’t? My skin stung from the bleach and she slid me back in.

After she left, I started feeling around for the latch on the inside, but I couldn’t find it. Because, of course, there wasn’t one. A corpse needs a door handle like a hamburger needs tap shoes. I felt the panic start again, but I fought it down. At least I wasn’t covered in puke anymore.

Not long after that, my bowels voided. I thought no, no, no! and went to say it, but couldn’t do more than move my lips. I had no air in my lungs. I hadn’t even noticed. So I just lay in the dark, though it didn’t seem as dark as it had before, and started having more dead-dreams. The next one was about ants. Everyone in my house was dead, mother, father, dog, Elise, Vilma. We were lying there chopped up like someone had gone at us with a meat cleaver, only there was no blood. Just sugar. Sugar ran out of us like we were burst sacks and countless trains of ants marched from the cabinets and cracks in the walls, little pain-in-the-ass black ants like at picnics. And even though I was lying there on the wooden floor, open-eyed with sugar running out of my mouth and a gash in my neck, I was also standing over me. I started trying to kill the ants, stepping on them with shoes, really nice shoes for some reason, but they wouldn’t die. It was like stepping on BBs. But you don’t want to hear this, other people’s dreams are boring, so who gives a shit?

One more thing, though—I remember ants crawling over my open eyes. I was watching myself not blink while ants crawled on my corneas and through my lashes. And it was just then that my morgue door went shhk-CHUNK and opened. I lay still. It was harder this time because my feet wanted to twitch from the memory of killing ants, but I made myself just lie there. My drawer slid out. The lights weren’t bright on the insides of my lids this time. This time the lights were out.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

Margaret McMannis’s voice, emotionless, like she was telling a stranger what time it was.

I wasn’t emotionless. I was terrified. I opened my eyes as instructed and tried to give a good yell, but my lungs weren’t working. Margaret stood there next to a drooly nurse and an equally charmed young man in shorts and suspenders, his upper lip shiny with snot. Margaret was still wearing her bloody nurse’s gear, which she now climbed out of, saying, “You, too,” to her hypnotized friends. They both stripped as well.

Even though the lights were out, I could see pretty well. Like everything was gently lit with candlelight though there was no candle. It was kind of pretty, though it would be a while before I learned to appreciate it.

“Get up,” she said to me, slithering into the nurse’s underthings. I sat up. Lazarus, I thought. This is what it felt like for Lazarus. I always liked that Bible story in Sunday school. I only actually attended Sunday school about ten times spread out over my whole childhood, but I got the story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead no fewer than three times. I guess God was giving me a hint. He does that. God or whatever’s sitting where God ought to be. I don’t think it’s what they told us in Sunday school.

I stood up, covering my nakedness as best I could with my hands. When the other boy was naked, she walked over to him and grabbed his chin and the back of his hair. She twisted his head violently, I heard a nauseating crack, and he jerked and went limp. I went to scream again and couldn’t. She piled him into my drawer and shut it. The naked nurse moaned a pathetic, helpless moan and drooled. Her glasses were on crooked.

“Look at me,” Margaret said. I had been staring at my pale, dead, veiny feet. Now I looked at her. Her eyes, which had looked like lamps to me before, looked more like regular eyes. I was shivering with fear. She slapped me. I stopped.

“No screamin’. No yellin’. I’m gonna give you yer breath back now,” she said. And she put her mouth to mine and blew hard. My lungs filled with her lukewarm, stinking air, and I took my first breath as one of the living dead.

“Just so you know, we’re even,” she said. “You took my life away, and I took yours. Now clean the shite offa yerself, put that kid’s clothes on, and let’s get out of here. I’ve got some things to tell you. And more to show you. Smile for me.”

I did.

“Yeah, they’re comin’,” she said. Then she leaned in close and looked at my eyes. “You’re gettin’ the sight now, too.” I made myself breathe in again, then forced the air out past my vocal cords.

“My stomach,” I said. “It…”

“Yeah, it burns, I know. All right, go bite that tart first and then get dressed.”

“What?”

“Don’t act innocent. There’s nothing innocent about you, and hasn’t been for a long time. Put your face near her neck and it’ll come to you.”

I walked over to the woman. She looked at me, mouth-breathing.

“She’s… she’s too tall.”

Margaret laughed a gravelly laugh.

“Look her in the eye and tell her to bend down. She will.”

She did.

Her glasses slipped off her head and broke.

I noticed she was sweating. I licked her. I got an erection. The nurse noticed and reflexively reached for it. Margaret slapped her hand away.

“Get on with it, it’s almost sunrise,” Margaret said. “And if you need to fuck something, you can fuck me. Later. In the dark where I can pretend you’re someone else.”

That sounded weirdly thrilling.

But not as thrilling as what was coursing through the awkwardly bent-over nurse’s neck. I smelled her. Instinct took over. I fed. Salty iron and warm, damp copper rushed into my mouth and I drank hard, grunting with how good it was, arching my back; I came all over myself and the nurse. That’s not unusual your first time. The first time’s great. And the rest aren’t so bad either.

I cleaned up and got dressed.

Just outside the door, Margaret put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me out the front door of Beth Israel and nobody gave us a second glance.