Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Turns out I like California.

Are you ready?

Here comes your happy ending.

Mostly happy, anyway. Not so happy for New York City, which we left in the custody of monsters, but I’m not even sure they were the worst monsters in that city. Either way, the suffering of others is easy enough to endure when it happens in the rearview mirror. If you’re like most Americans, the kind of person who likes to believe in the world as it should be, in redemption and the triumph of the familiar over that which is strange or foreign, then put this story down after you read the rest of this page. Watch a game show, watch screaming women with wide eyes and huge smiles bear-hug Bob Barker in thanks for appliances and money. If you don’t understand why women in old German pictures look at Hitler with game-show eyes, if you think Disneyland is possible without Auschwitz sitting at the other end of the seesaw, or if the assassination of President Kennedy slides around in your guts like a dead crab because you hate it when bad things happen and the answers don’t add up, stop reading as soon as you see The End .

Things can end happily, as much as anything ends at all. We went to the moon after Dallas, right? Just like Kennedy said. So get the echo of those three shots out of your ears and look at that. The moon, I mean. Imagine me with my girl, pick whatever hair color you like for her, pick any town in California, so long as it’s on the coast. Wait, I know exactly the town!

Here’s your last image:

Night swimming, Oceano, California, 1979. Two very pale teenagers rise out of the water dripping, giggling, licking salt off each other’s temples, teasingly dragging kitten-sharp fangs nobody else can see across each other’s necks. These kids like each other, and they like swimming, they can hold their breath a long time.

The boy from New York takes the beautiful Okie girl by the hand and leads her into a draped and triple-locked seaside cottage while first light threatens and the powder-orange full moon sets over the Pacific. Let’s have the young lovers cross in front of a balding man with bifocals and a hump in his neck walking the beach beside a formless grandmother with a waterfall of varicose veins; if you’re a philosophical person, you might guess both couples are roughly the same age.

As the live ones walk inexorably north, the dead ones cross lengthwise, unlock their door, and head for the shower, where they will wash the sand and salt from their lukewarm bodies before settling into the plush and bugless shared box in which they will make love and sleep the day away. Outside, a German shepherd gets away from his master, jumps between the bougainvillea bush and the mailboxes, sniffs at the wet footprints on the walk, goes to bark at the strange and unpleasant scent he finds there, but instead climbs up on the trunk of the car and bays at the moon until it sinks. He sits there, wagging, until the leash goes on and he’s led away.

A convertible drives by, a coked-up young woman on her way home from a party smiles at the man and the dog, Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain” pouring from her speakers.

I’m going to type The End now, and that’s it.

Please put the goddamned book down.

So.

You’re here.

How unfortunate.

I assume you are the sort of person who would go backstage after the opera in hopes of hearing the prima donna crying on the telephone, or walking in on the baritone fellating the basso buffo. I respect that—I was always the same way myself—though I suspect you are not very happy. Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions. I remember, even before this was visited upon me, how I envied those who eagerly did what they were told: those who married without complaint at father’s behest; those who looked up rather than sideways in church; those, in short, who honestly believed in God, good kings, and righteous wars.

Envy and respect are not the same things, however.

Before I endow you with respect, I should find out whether your curiosity is intellectual or merely morbid. Not that those who gawk at train derailments are so very different from those who conduct autopsies; both want, at some level, to know what has happened, and, by extension, what will happen. Did the liver fail because of the decedent’s alcoholism or was some toxin administered? If toxin, who delivered it? If the deliverer is found, he or she may be imprisoned or, in more honest times, hanged, and thus pose no further threat. Or, for the gawker at the accident, espying loose parts not unlike his or her own parts strewn amid wreckage may lead to a sense of awe at death’s power, or horror at life’s fragility, either of which may be instructive in any number of ways. I am a great believer in the tonic effect of a timely memento mori .

Forgive me if the image of the train derailment seems repetitive after the carnage at Union Square; I spend a good deal of time around trains. I have always enjoyed them.

No sense delaying this any further. Whatever your species of curiosity, you’ve come this far expressly to have your heart broken, as you were promised from the start.

As I promised you, even if I am not who you think I am.

I am not Joseph Hiram Peacock, although a boy by that name did exist, was made a vampire in the early 1930s, and did, in fact, live in the tunnels and warrens beneath the sidewalks of Manhattan from roughly 1965 until he was entombed alive in the first part of 1978. Like you and me, he was inquisitive, though he was simple enough to maintain a species of happiness. This happiness chiefly fed itself on fashion, pop culture, and semiconsensual interaction with the opposite sex. He kept an asymmetrically detailed journal that I have taken the liberty of editing and presenting in a more palatable fashion, framing only the months in which the most dramatic events unfolded, his last months in the tunnels. Unless you, too, are an oversexed media-addicted adolescent, you will thank me to have removed lengthy descriptions of coats and blue jeans, sophomoric movie reviews, and meticulous, homogeneously graphic accounts of interactions with scores of young women. Admittedly, the cultural commentaries may have interested those unfamiliar with vampirism. Since Joseph became undead (Stoker’s preferred term) at fourteen, he remained fourteen thereafter, becoming enslaved to each new fashion and music trend as it appeared. I present, for your consideration, an excerpt from one journal, dated November 1965:

Rainy day, the good kind with no sun and no chance of sun. Woke up early like 3pm and got my hair cut, but I won’t go back to that place, the barber was kind of a square. I told him specificly [sic] to keep it longer like the Beatles and it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen them, he had Oct. Tiger Beat right on the table, I even pointed at Paul McCartney and said like that. He said yeah, yeah, but just did what he wanted, anything not a crew cut was probably long to this guy, so I charmed him a little and found out where he lived, but I was not waiting around there & DEFINITELY not taking a train out to Queens later just to stick him. I don’t even know if he knew how badly messed up his so-called haircut was.

And another, on a similar theme, from 1957:

I knew I looked good, had just gotten all Elvissed up with my hair swept up and pomped, Sweet Georgia Brown’ll never let you down, and little sideburns. Not big wolfman ones, just little. I think if I’d finished growing I might have looked a little like Elvis, him or James Dean. Anyway, I met Darla, an Irish-Italian girl from Hell’s Kitchen, in front of the Landmark tavern. Kind of a rough neighborhood, she said, she was impressed that I didn’t care. Said her brother was in The Nordics, some hard-ass gang that liked to rumble like some kids play stickball. I bit her, had a beer with her, and bit her again, she didn’t know anything about it. Felt her up a little, but that’s it. I stupidly agreed to meet her brother, pure greaser, had a studded belt he broke a kid’s nose with and wanted you to know it. But Darla she had breasts like you just can’t think of anything else, you can’t wait to get them out from behind that big wired bra like their [sic] in jail and you’re their lawyer.