Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

He wanted to get to a place where he wasn’t thinking about every movement at every second; where he wasn’t even really Nal any longer but just weight sinking into feet, feet leaving the pavement, fingers fanning forcelessly through air, the swish! of a made basket and the net birthing the ball. He couldn’t remember the last time he had acted without reservation on a single desire. Samson seemed to do it all the time. Once, when Nal returned home from his miles-long run with the ball, sweating and furious, they had talked about his aspiration for vacancy — the way he wanted to be empty and free. He’d explained it to Samson in a breathless rush, expecting to be misunderstood.

“Sure,” Samson said. “I know what you’re talking about.”

“You do?”

“From surfing. Oh, it’s wild, brother.” Why did Samson have to know him so well? “The feeling of being part of the same wave that’s lifting you. It’s like you’re coasting outside of time, outside your own skin.”

Nal felt himself redden. Sometimes he wished his brother would simply say, “No, Nal, what the hell do you mean?” Samson had a knack for this kind of insight: he was like a grinning fisherman who could wrench a secret from the depths of your chest and dangle it in front of you, revealing it to be nothing but a common, mud-colored fish.

“You know what else can get you there, Nal, since you’re such a shitty athlete?” Samson grinned and cocked his thumb and his pinky, tipped them back. “Boozing. Or smoking. Last night I was out with Vanessa and we were maybe three pitchers in when the feeling happened. All night I was in love with everybody.”

So Samson was now dating Vanessa Grigalunas? Nal had been infatuated with her for three years and had been so certain, for so long, that they were meant to be together, he was genuinely confused by this development, as if the iron of his destiny had gone soft and pliant as candle wax. Vanessa was in Nal’s grade, a fellow survivor of freshman year. He had sat behind her in Japanese class and it was only in that language — where he was a novice and felt he had license to stammer like a fool — that he could talk to her. “K-k-k,” he’d say. Vanessa would smile politely as he revved his stubborn syllable engine, until he was finally able to sputter out a “Konnichiwa.”

Nal had never breathed a word about his love for Vanessa to anyone. And then in early June, out of the clear blue, Samson began raving about her. “Vanessa Grigalunas? But … why her?” Nal asked, thinking of all the hundreds of reasons that he’d by now collected. It didn’t seem possible that the desire to date Vanessa could have co-evolved in Samson. Vanessa wasn’t his type at all; Samson usually dated beach floozies, twentysomethings with hair like dry spaghetti, these women he’d put up with because they bought him liquor and pot, who sat on his lap in Gerlando’s, Athertown’s only cloth-napkin restaurant, and cawed laughter. Vanessa’s hair shone like a lake. Vanessa read books and moved through the world as if she were afraid that her footsteps might wake it.

“I can’t stop thinking about her,” Samson grinned, running a paw over his bald head. “It’s crazy, like I caught a Vanessa bug or something.”

Nal nodded miserably — now he couldn’t stop thinking about the two of them together. He sketched out interview questions in his black composition notebook that he hoped to one day ask her:

1. What is it that you like about my brother? List three things (not physical).

2. What made you want to sleep with my brother? What was your thought in the actual moment when you decided? Was it a conscious choice, like, Yes, I will do this! or was it more like collapsing onto a sofa?

3. Under what circumstances can you imagine sleeping with me? Global apocalypse? National pandemic? Strep throat shuts down the high school? What if we were to do it immediately after I’d received a lethal bite from a rattlesnake so you could feel confident that I would die soon and tell no one? Can you just quantify for me, in terms of beer, what it would take?

It made Nal sadder still that even Vanessa’s mom, Mrs. Grigalunas — a woman who had no sons of her own and who treated all teenage boys like smaller versions of her husband — even kindly, delusional Mrs. Grigalunas recognized Nal as a deterrent to love. One Saturday night Samson informed him that the three of them would be going on a date to Strong Beach together; they needed Nal’s presence to reassure Mrs. Grigalunas that nothing dangerous or fun would happen.

“Yes, you two can go to the beach,” she told Vanessa, “but bring that Nal along with you. He’s such a nice boy.”

WHAT WERE all these seagulls doing out flying at night? They were kelp gulls, big ones. Nal was shocked to see how many of the birds now occupied Strong Beach. Where’d they all come from? He turned to point out the seagull invasion to Vanessa and Samson, but they were strolling hand in hand over a tall dune, oblivious to both Nal and the gulls’ wheeling shadows. Nal hoped the flock would leave soon. He was trying to finish a poem. White globs of gull shit kept falling from the sky, a cascade that Nal found inimical to his writing process. The poem that Nal was working on had nothing to do with his feelings — poetry, he’d decided, was to honor remote and immortal subjects, like the moon. “Lambent Planet, Madre Moon” was the working title of this one, and he’d already jotted down three sestets. Green nuclei of fireflies , Nal wrote. The red commas of two fires . A putrid, stinky blob fell from above and put out his word. “Shoo, you shit balloons!” he yelled as the gulls rained on.

There were no fireflies on the beach that night, but there were plenty of spider fleas, their abdomens pulsing with low-grade toxins. The air was tangy and cold. Between two lumps of sand about a hundred yards behind him, Vanessa and Nal’s brother, Samson, were … Nal couldn’t stand to think about it. In five minutes’ time they had given up on keeping their activities a secret from him, or anybody. Vanessa’s low moan was rising behind him, rich and feral and nothing like her classroom whisper.

Nal felt a little sick.

What on earth was the moon like? he wondered, squinting. What did the moon most resemble to him? Nal wiped at his dry eyes and dug into the paper. One of the seagulls had settled on an auburn coil of seaweed a few feet away from his bare foot. He tried to ignore it, but the gull was making a big production out of eviscerating a cigarette. It drew out red flakes of tobacco with its pincerlike bill and ate them. Perfect, Nal thought. Here I am trying to eulogize Mother Nature and this is the scene she presents me with.

Behind him, Samson growled Vanessa’s name. Don’t look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot. But Nal couldn’t help himself. He lacked the power to look away, but he never worked up the annihilating courage to look directly at them either; instead, he angled his body and let his eyes slide to the left. This was like taking dainty sips of poison. Samson’s broad back had almost completely covered Vanessa — only her legs were visible over the dune, her pink feet twitching as if she were impatient for sleep. “Oh!” said Vanessa, over and over again. “Oh!” She sounded happy, astonished.

Nal was a virgin. He kicked at a wet clump of sand until it exploded. He went on a rampage, doing whirling karate kicks into a settlement of abandoned sand castles along the beach for a full minute before he paused, panting, to recover himself. The tide rushed icy fingers of water up the beach and covered Nal’s foot.

“Ahh!” Nal cried into one of the troughs of silence between Samson and Vanessa’s moans. He had wandered to the water’s edge, six or seven dunes away from them. His own voice was drowned out by the ocean. The salt water sleuthed out cuts on his legs that he had forgotten about or failed to feel until now, and he almost enjoyed the burning. He looked around for something else to kick, but only one turret remained on the beach, a bucket-shaped stump in the middle of damp heaps. The giant seagull was standing beside it. Up close the gull seemed as large as a house cat. Its white face was luminous, its wings ink-dipped; its beak was fixed in that perennial shit-eating grin of all shearwaters and frigate birds.