Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

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.

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.