“What is that you call me? Mon puh-teet? That’s like calling me a child, isn’t it?”
“To me you are a child, sucre.”
“Come on. You’re younger than me? What? Twenty-two? For sure you’re not thirty yet.”
That dry chuckle again. I turned to see her smiling in the red glow of the cigarette clamped between her lips. Her eyes were on the ceiling.
“How old are you, Roxanne?” I said. My voice was small in the dark.
“I saw the walls come down.”
“You mean in Berlin? That was almost thirty years ago.”
“In Paris,” she said. A ghost of a whisper.
I searched my mind for anything like what she was talking about. Like a light switch being flipped, my thoughts evaporated into tranquil blackness.
• 8 •
We came down from the utility room and joined the evening crowd wandering the mall. Roxanne took a seat at the Este Lauder counter in Macy’s. A pretty blonde cosmetics rep came around the counter to help her.
I walked away to wander the mall a while. Just before closing we joined up again. Roxanne was laughing. She had fresh blush on her cheeks. Her eyes were made up with blue shadow and her lips were coated in deep red smeared slightly at the corners.
“Something funny?” I said.
“The girl said she wished she had skin like mine,” she said.
“And what did you say?”
“Nothing. I just did this.” She grabbed me by the back of the head and jammed her lips to mine, her tongue prying my teeth apart to explore my palate. She released me to stumble back and bent double in mirth.
My car was where we left it behind the mall. An orange sticker on the window. An impound order. But the county tow truck hadn’t shown up and I still had my key ring.
We climbed into the Impala and drove away.
The fire was building in my guts again. I needed to feed. I looked over at Roxanne in the flickering glare of the streetlights. There were lines around her mouth that weren’t there before. She was feeling the hunger, too.
“We’ll go back to the tent city,” she said.
“No. I’m not feeding off some pervert in a rent-a-shitter,” I said. I powered up the ramp onto the turnpike.
“Blood is blood.”
“Leaving bodies all over town is not a good idea.”
“They are suicides. Sad men who cut their throats rather than live with the shame of their desires.”
Their desires? Funny.
“The police are going to start noticing if lots of sex offenders start turning up dead,” I said.
“Then we move to another place. The world is ours. The night belongs to us,” she said.
That had the feel of something she’d said before.
“I have a better idea,” I said. I veered over two lanes and down the ramp for Arlington.
“You’re going to steal from a blood bank,” Roxanne said.
“That’s right,” I said.
We were parked in the visitor lot outside North Hillside Hospital.
“Do you think you are the first to think of this?” she said.
“I just don’t feel like killing someone tonight.”
She made a scoffing noise.
“Unless they turn like I did. Did the pervert last night join the club, too?”
“No,” she said. She lit a cigarette, face white in the glare of the lighter.
“What was different?”
“I let you drink my blood. That makes you like me. Like us.”
“Why? Why me?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I saw something in you, mon petit. Maybe it was something you said. Maybe because you didn’t bore me. Not like you are boring me now.” A stream of smoke struck the windshield.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I climbed out of the Impala and left her smoking. I wondered if she’d be there when I returned.
In the hospital lobby a woman with blue hair reminded me that visiting hours were over. She didn’t look up from the solitaire game on her phone. I found the elevators and entered a car. I pressed for the fourth floor and exited to find one sign pointing to maternity and another toward oncology and radiology.
“Can I help you?” It was a nurse pushing a med cart toward the elevators. She didn’t sound like she was in a helpful mood. Her question had more of the tone of “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I got a call. About my mother,” I said.
“What is she here for?” The nurse brought the cart to a stop.
“Cancer. Stage four. They told me I should come in.”
Her face softened. She was pretty now. I saw her eyes glisten wetly. Then I watched the artery in her throat throbbing with the rhythm of life. Her voice brought me out of my momentary fixation.
“You want ICU. That’s down on two,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. I pressed the down button.
“I’ll say a prayer for your mother,” she said. She pushed on with the med cart.
“That’s very kind,” I said and stepped through the opening doors.
Intensive care. That was a sure place to find blood, right? All kinds.
Trouble was it was locked down tight. The only way in was through a pair of automatic doors operated from inside by the nurses at the duty desk. I stepped back from the doors to walk a hallway that ended in a kind of lounge with tables and chairs and the Food Channel playing mutely on a wall-mounted TV. Against one wall was a row of vending machines. I bought four coffees and walked back to ICU where I stood looking through the panes of the locked doors, wearing a pleading look. The four paper cups of scalding liquid held in an awkward grip. An Asian nurse in pink scrubs spotted me and took mercy. The doors cranked open. I scooted past the duty desk with a grateful smile. The nurse nodded back, pleased to be of help. I hurried on deeper into the unit toward some imaginary destination; some aggrieved family in desperate need of caffeine and sugar.
Once out of sight around the corner I dropped the coffees into a medical waste bin.
The ICU was dimmer than the rest of the hospital. The only source of illumination was the indirect lighting coming from panels along the ceiling and the readouts on the machines. The machines beeped and booped alongside the beds of patients inside rooms separated from the hallway by glass-lined walls.
Past the rooms was a second hallway that branched to the right to end twenty or thirty feet along. There were doorways either side. A unisex bathroom for visitors. A break room with a table and chairs, a mini-fridge and a coffeemaker. A linen closet. Last room along had no marking on it. The fluorescents in the ceiling kicked on when I opened the door.
There was an empty med cart and some kind of equipment on wheels covered with a cloth. Cabinets lined the walls and an open shelf was stacked with bins loaded with boxes of gauze, syringes and other bits of medical necessities in cellophane packets. At the back of the room was a white refrigerator. I pulled it open to find it stacked with boxes of tiny glass vials and, hanging from steel racks, were rows of plastic blood packs.
I felt a pinch in my stomach. My tongue moved across my teeth. I felt that heat rising behind my eyes. My nose filled with the scent of blood even through the sealed packets.
I searched the room for anything I could use as a carry-all. I wound up dumping out a box of vials into a trash bin. They fell in with a tinkling sound. I dropped to my knees to scoop blood packs into the box as fast as I could manage.
“What the fuck?” A deep voice growling with rising anger behind me.
An enormous man in purple scrubs was braced in the room’s only door. The knuckles on his meaty hands were turning white where they gripped the door and jamb.
• 9 •
The guy came at me like a bear. Or a wrestler. Or a wrestling bear.
All I could think of was slipping past him without him getting a hold of me. Impossible in the narrow room with his three hundred pound bulk between me and the door.
He halved
the distance between us. I moved with a speed I didn’t know I was capable of. He was LeBron and I was a runaway jump ball. I moved from wall to wall, ducking under his arms. He caught me in one mile-wide hand and slammed me against a wall of cabinets. The guy was holding me up with a hand over my face and another locked on my arm. My sneakers were squeaking on the tiles until he lifted me clear of the floor.
My last fight was in the sixth grade. I got my ass kicked. By a girl.
I opened my mouth and bit down hard into the meat at the web of his hand. A spray of blood shot up into my face. It tasted like cooked onions and another aftertaste. Cilantro. The guy howled and leapt back. I dropped to the floor and landed a punch that split his nose in two. A fresh gout of hot blood. He collapsed against the wall unconscious.
I scooped up the box of blood packs, hopped over the sleeping giant and was out the door and out of the ICU in what felt like three steps. The nurse in pink had no time to look up before I was gone from sight and down the stairwell for the ground.
“You had trouble,” Roxanne said.
I threw the box of blood packs into the Impala and jumped behind the wheel. The sound of sirens was getting louder as I swerved us off the lot. Roxanne took one of my hands. She licked the orderly’s blood from my knuckles. I took my foot off the gas. The Impala was moving five miles under the speed limit when a chain of cop cars, sirens screaming and lights twirling, passed us heading for the hospital.
Roxanne sorted through the box. She tossed packs out the open window.
“Do you know what I went through to get those?” I said.
“Plasma’s no good. Only whole blood,” she said.
She tried to open a pack and spilled a gout of blood over her face. I laughed. She waggled the pack at me, drizzling me claret red. I picked up a pack and bit the plastic nipple open and sucked down the chilled syrup. She did the same, lounging back in her seat, head tilted back to squeeze the bag’s contents into her mouth. We rolled on down a golden mile lined with darkened strip malls and car dealerships. It reminded me of the time me and Ricky Gotshall drove around drinking a six-pack of Heinies he stole from his dad’s garage.
“Fresh is better,” she said.
“You sound like one of those assholes at Whole Foods,” I said.
“This blood is shit. All mixed up. You know that, don’t you? A cocktail pumped from a thousand veins. I like to feed from one source.”
“It does the job.”
It did do the job. The blaze in my gut was tamped down to warming embers.
She glanced at the time on my dash.
“We need to roost,” she said.
“Yeah. I have a few ideas about that,” I said.
“I don’t want your ideas, mon petit. We cannot sleep just anywhere.”
“I thought we were outlaws. There are rules now?”
“There are rules. We cannot enter any place we have not been to before. Or where we are not invited first.”
“That’s for real?”
“It is for real.”
“What about the mall? The hospital? Those bars we went to after I picked you up?”
“You picked me up?” She smiled at that. The wind through the window tossed her feather-fine hair.
“What about those places?”
“They are public places. Anyone is welcome, silly.”
“Well, I want to sleep in a real bed. Not in some crawlspace like a cockroach,” I said.
“And where is this?” Her smile faded. Roxanne was no longer amused by my boyish charm.
“Did I tell you I was a realtor?”
I pulled up into the driveway and cut the engine in front of the three-car garage of 1164 McIntosh Drive in Applewood Estates. The five-bed/three-bath mini-mansion sat on one of the lanes that wound through the gated development. All the streets were named for brands of apples. There was Gala Street and Winesap Way. Probably an idea from the developer’s wife.
“This won’t work,” Roxanne said. She stayed in her seat when I got out of the car.
“And why not? The place is unoccupied. The owners moved to Pittsburgh last month. I have the key to the lockbox,” I said.
“You have not been invited to this house. You told me you’ve never been here,” she said.
“So? It’s multi-listed.” I pointed at the For Sale sign down by the curb. The Taylor Group’s logo and phone number were on the board.
“I don’t know what that means.” She was leaning from the window as I popped the trunk.
“It means that, as a rep for Handley-Barker, I have a right to show this house. I’m welcome here contractually.” I snagged my laptop bag from the floor of the trunk.
“It won’t work. It is not the same,” she said. She worked the lever and dropped her seat back to a recline position.
I was at the double front doors and undid the lockbox hanging from the latch. The key to the house dropped into my hand. I worked in the knob lock and deadbolt and pushed the door open. The foyer lay within. Hardwood floors, crown molding. A carpeted flight of steps led to the second floor. A full gourmet kitchen lay in the darkness at the end of a corridor leading from the rear of the foyer to the back of the house.
I hesitated. Roxanne hadn’t told me what would happen if I tried to enter a house uninvited. Was there an invisible force field preventing me from stepping inside? Would I catch fire? Turn to dust? Bounce back into the middle of McIntosh Drive?
“Fuck it,” I said.
I stepped onto the faux Oriental area rug inside. There was still the tang of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies hanging in the air from the last open house. I walked back out to the Impala and leaned into the driver’s window.
“May I show you the house, ma’am?”
She glared at me through slitted eyes.
• 10 •
“This house isn’t scheduled for a showing until next week,” I said.
“I still don’t like it,” she said.
I closed the laptop. I was cross-legged on the queen bed in the master bedroom. Naked from a shower to rinse the dried blood off me. Roxanne entered from the master bath, naked as well. Our clothes were downstairs in the washer.
The owners were gone. The house was staged by the listing agency with rented furniture. It was like we were playing house. We went through the rooms drawing blinds and shades. In the master bedroom we covered the windows with comforters and tablecloths secured in place with a roll of duct tape I found in the garage.
“I think we should sleep in the attic,” she said.
She sat toweling off her legs on the edge of the bed. Her damp hair shone like onyx where it was plastered to the milk-white skin at the back of her neck.
“And miss the chance to lay in a bed?” I moved closer to her, running my hands down her spine. My fingers brushed over a puckered scar at the small of her back. She dropped back to lie supine on the bed. I leaned down to kiss her. She returned the kiss, drawing my tongue between her teeth.
Something clamped on my balls and twisted hard. I pulled away. Roxanne had my testicles in the grip of one hand. Her face was twisted in furious delight.
“Do you feel that, mon petit?” she said. It came out in a hiss.
“Shit,” I said, gasping for air. I grabbed her wrist. She twisted harder.
She rolled closer, her face inches from mine. Her bottle-glass eyes on mine.
“That is all you will feel. That need is over for you. It is replaced by a different fire.”
She released me and I rolled away, falling to the floor by the bed. She rose from the bed to pick up her cigarettes from the vanity. She sat in a faux Queen Anne chair with a plush cushion and lit up. The smoke from her lips was visible in the triptych of mirrors against the background of an empty room. She studied the glass as though looking for something there.
“We are neuters. I am barren. You are a gelding. The hunger is the only urge that matters. We are hunger. We are its creature.”
“Like slaves,” I said. The pain
in my crotch faded to a dull ache. I dropped back on the bed.
“Who is not a slave to something? Did you like selling other people’s homes? Did you love your silly jacket with other men’s names on it?”
“I got paid. I got something in exchange for my work. What do I get out of this?”
She turned to me, eyes smoky under bangs slick with damp.
“You get to live forever.” She turned away.
“Is that for real? We don’t die? I’m just going to go on and on?”
“Until someone stops you, mon petit.”
I lay back on the bed atop the brocaded spread.
“But I live like this. Alone except for you. Never seeing daylight. Either in a coma or hungry. I’m not sure this is such a great deal.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then why did you make me like this?”
I felt the mattress move under me. She was beside me on the bed, her head resting on my shoulder, a leg thrown over my stomach. Her long nails played over my chest.
“Maybe I was lonely, mon petit.”
I didn’t say anything. I was still dealing with the idea that I had a lot more years ahead of me. Middle age was something I had started thinking about. Not like a mortality thing. More career concerns. I was worried that I wasn’t moving up the earnings ladder the way I thought I should have by age thirty-five. Those worries were all irrelevant now. Stupid even, in hindsight.
“So how long have you been alive? You said you were in Paris when the walls came down.”
“The Germans. They surrounded the city. Cut it off. People were eating flowers. And horses.”
“Was this like the Nazis and stuff like that?” I had only a basic cable education in history.
“Not those pigs. It was before that. Before cars and streetlights. Before I became as you see me.”
“Some German turned you?”
“No. The cannons and bombs fell on the city. They drove a tribe from their lair. They came to my parent’s house looking for a place to hide. And feed.”