Ekaterina Sedia - Running with the Pack

One girl, Larissa Blackweight, had signed out from Willis & Rothgate on a day pass and leaped off a high bridge. She’d brought an indestructible cassette recorder with her to record her last thoughts and they’d been transcribed and posted all over the Net, but most bispecials ignored “The Gospels of Larissa the Leaper” claiming they were fraudulent and insane rantings. The gist was that everything in the world was a sham and that people blossom their own destinies, that nothing in life was a clear-cut binary choice. Dr. Willis told Yvette, privately, that he felt Larissa the Leaper’s issues were not related to her being bispecial. He told Yvette’s parents, at the last encounter group they attended before telling Yvette that they loved her but didn’t want to hear any more from her until she’d made up her mind, that Larissa had been a troubled girl who enacted a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Yvette could relate, maybe even see suicide as the appropriate sacrifice. Sometimes, to herself when no one was around, she’d kneel in one of the showers on a vacant men’s floor. She’d surmised that men, especially older ones, made their decisions hastily. Either that or the Institute had multiple men’s floors and this one was used less often. Gut instinct told her that men were macho about life and death, less interested in personal fulfillment.

She understood how Larissa could jump, how a conflicted young woman could crunch the variables and decide to plummet. Even though Larissa had been a brilliant painter. Even though they’d had one late-night chat where they’d considered becoming the same monster so they’d never be a species of one.

Friends made in institutions, Yvette realized, were different from other friends. Wishing she could talk to Larissa, in effort to sort everything out and resume some semblance of camaraderie, she kneeled in the shower, trying to hallucinate a conversation with the only kindred spirit she’d ever found.

“Larissa, I know you’re dead and that puts a damper on conversation, but I thought maybe I could pretend . . . ask myself questions, then imagine your answers . . . ”

At first, nothing happened.

“Seriously, I’m desperate.”

“Yeah, I know. But this is lame. Can’t you use a Magic Eight Ball or something?” said a ghostly voice that was barely audible over the shower’s hissing water.

“Just let me rant to myself, maybe interject a joke or a platitude near the end. I need room to talk to myself without thinking I’m crazy,” Yvette said.

“Okay,” the voice answered, noncommittally.

“See, red hot poker an inch from my left eye, I’m still unsure. I mean, Larissa, I know the distinctions as well as you did. And I understand how you could leap. With a goblin, you know where you stand—somewhere after nightfall, you’re going to be cuisine. They sup on people’s sins: no hand behind the curtain, no pretense or performance. Vampires, well, everyone knows that vampires drink their fill of sins early on, then become laconic and overly chatty. Their strength is kept up by the totality, like how a seasoned blood-drinker can chug a priest or a prostitute and barely taste the difference, finding a palatable measure of darkness in either . . . ”

“They both minister to the sick . . . ”

“Goblins and vampires?” Yvette asked.

“No, prostitutes and priests. I’d even hazard that they’re equally likely to endure distasteful things by squeezing their eyes shut and thinking about the good they’ll do with the money.”

“Zowie, self-induced hallucinations are confusing.”

Yvette splashed hot water on her face, trying to make sense of the situation.

“If you’re going to talk to me, please don’t do it in exclamatory asides.”

“I wanted this to help. None of this offers a doorway out.”

“You’re right.”

“Plus, and I know I’m whining, they go and call it bispecial, but there’s no way to combine them. I’m so fed up with this externally-imposed inertia that I’d consider the willowy grace of a vampire if it was coupled with the low center of gravity and brute strength of a goblin . . . ”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d still have to kill to live and you’d rather go splat from great heights than succumb to murdering innocent people. By the way, from two dozen stories, water does as much damage as concrete.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“You’re not locked here in the name of comfort.”

“They know I’m having trouble deciding. I can leave whenever I want.”

“Stuck in neutral isn’t a decision. And you can’t live whenever you want, so what’s the difference?”

The hot water suddenly went cold and Yvette mumbled about how much she disliked the bind she was in, how she’d rather be a prostitute or a priest, but the ghostly voice was gone. She was afraid her hallucination had gotten bored and decided to ignore her. Sometimes it felt that way with dead friends too.

Yvette wasn’t sure why her dreams were always about Timothy. No amount of pondering got things to make sense.

She barely knew the boy. Originally, the dreams had been about strangers she’d met during the day: someone who came by the supper club on a tall ladder to change the dead light bulbs in the ceiling, an elderly woman who played chess in the park, a stockbroker who fed pigeons on her break.

Timothy, she presumed but didn’t tell anyone, symbolized innocence. He was twelve, with longish hair and a quick wince of a smile. They’d had two conversations of less than three minutes but she considered him a good kid. A kid who shouldn’t be eaten by vampires or goblins, even if they were fastidious, using a silk napkin, fine china and antique flatware.

In short, problems filled her head by the cartload.

Yvette wondered if vampires or goblins could reproduce. The answer had to be no, because no one had photographed a vampling or a gobblekin, but there were rumors. Couldn’t there be a way to get darkness or souls without having to eat people? Even in her dreams, even with the decorum of napkins and cutlery, it was horrid to imagine. No amount of imaginary black pepper or imaginary hot sauce made the idea even remotely palatable or digestible.

Shivering, Yvette turned the water off and dressed in the shower stall just in case someone else entered the bathroom, putting her baby blue robe and matching flip-flops back on. Quietly, she went to her room and locked the door.

Her music machine read her mood and played a cacophony that sounded like she was smashing every smashable object in the room: mirror, bed, the clock above the door. Yvette heard the sound of her clothes being torn apart and then the sound of the music machine being destroyed.

Then the machine played silence.

A few hours later, Dr. Rothgate shook her awake and dragged her to his office.

Something was very wrong with Dr. Rothgate and it took Yvette a while to figure it out.

She was so sleepy, as the wild-eyed psychiatrist bade her rest on his couch, it seemed like she woke up mid-conversation:

“ . . . but I have no desire to eat people . . . ”

“Appetites grow over time, like tumors or allergies. Existence, be it breathing or pogosticking or wandering around trying to remember where you’ve lost your keys, requires extremely complicated machinery. Taken as a vast enough ecosystem, every sprig of existence needs predation. Everyone needs a twinge of momento mori , a reminder that we’ll eventually die.”

“Even monsters? I thought monsters lived forever.”

“Oh, well,” Dr. Rothgate said while adjusting the strap holding a strange pair of goggles to his face, “it’s one of those conundrums of negative capability. You have to keep two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. My research suggests that the best results come from a simultaneous belief that you’ll live forever and that you could die at any moment. It reinforces the Zen koan where you attempt to have both complete commitment and complete detachment. Then again, that’s only useful if you care about outcomes . . . ”