Imaginary Girlfriend
The vampire (almost) gets the girl
I’m writing this at 1 p.m. at Majik Mart 139. About three people are talking to me, not counting customers, so I’ll forgive you for griping about my digressions. Like this one:
Dude in Big Johnson cap: “Unlock the men’s room!”
Me: “I lock the men’s room at midnight.”
Big Johnson: “I’m pretty sure that’s against company policy.”
Me (turning my back to restock some Camels): “It sure is, my guy. It sure is.”
Big Johnson: “I’m gonna come back here in the morning and talk to your manager.”
Big George, Little George and Killer (the three abovementioned dudes) roll with laughter. “You ain’t lived here long, have you, boy?”
They don’t really talk like that all the time. They’re doing it for Big Johnson, who drove up in an obscenely large pickup truck that’s never seen a speck of dirt.
Big George: “You don’t know the manager, do you? You come in here annoying Mrs. Glenda, she’s gonna whup your ass!”
Big Johnson: “I am gonna have you all over Twitter!”
Me: “Want a picture for that tweet?”
He whips out his phone a lot quicker than I imagine he can whip out his Johnson and I stare at him like he’s an idiot and — imagine that — he can’t get the camera to work. It simply will not capture my image. He stomps out the door.
Little George calls after him: “You sure you don’t want in that men’s room? We cook the meth up in there.”
They just about fall out with how funny they are.
Then they get back to talking about this Mind’s Eye game Big George is running or maybe it’s some new armor Little George’s wife made him for their medieval reenactment group. Then it’s how Killer is expecting a grandbaby. Something like that. I grew up with these guys; they haven’t changed in a quarter of a century and if they notice I’m dwindling rather than actually aging, they don’t mentioned it.
Reese Finally Gets to the Point
But here’s what I wanted to tell you:
I mean You, woman of my dreams.
Here’s how it’s gone so far. First I gave you a chiton and that was lovely and then I gave you a green flapper dress and that was even better, but then I started to think I was playing paper dolls so I just let you wear whatever you wanted. Turned out to be a t-shirt and jeans.
We sat by a thicket of willows down near a horseshoe pond in that high meadow leading up into the folds of Pin Oak Mountain, there where the old mining track goes up past Mint Spring to the fire tower road.
It’s summer but mosquitoes steer clear of us. (It’s my story, I can use a little magic if I want to.) I have a green-cloth-bound book of poems and I read this:
Though I am old from wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands I will find out where she has gone And kiss her lips, and take her hands And walk among long dappled grass And pluck til time and times are done The silver apples of the moon The golden apples of the sun
Might be remembering it wrong.
This is one of two or three scenes I’ve given us. I create gentle adventures, no drama. I haven’t quite gotten around to lovemaking. I’m not sure if you’d like that yet.
Sometimes we talk about things.
For instance, I tell you how after some thought I realized I was a bonehead about breaking into pharmacies. I could — if I could remember how to fly again — blow through the door and right up to the medicine bins. I could turn back solid and then what? I’d be locked in unless I went incorporeal again and then I couldn’t get the meds through the keyhole. And I’d only be able to give away the medicine that had been bagged and labeled — I couldn’t get into the computer to look up other prescriptions.
“Why does that matter?” you ask.
And I answer: “Darlin, half those old people barely know how to take their own prescriptions, and they’ve got dozens of them. If I bust out a bunch of medicine that ain’t labeled with their name and the medicine’s name and how much they need they’ll be double tripling up and doing all kinds of crazy shit.”
“No, yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“I am right,” I say. “To liberate medicine the way it needs to be liberated, I need to hire an army of Anonymous-level hackers and kidnap a bunch of pharmacists. Honestly, it seems a little out of my wheelhouse.”
I throw myself on the grass and you stroke my hair — oh, let me spend a minute here, there’s really nothing else — and as your fingers loosen my ponytail I say: “Anyhow, I was so, so thirsty and so lost in my own thoughts, all the long conversations I was having with myself so as not to go fucking mad, that I didn’t have my eyes on the the actual FUCKING MORAL DILEMMA. You know?”
You keep stroking my hair. I roll on my stomach and pull up my shirt to scratch my belly, which is shamefully lean and un-six-packed. You don’t mind. I don’t think you mind. You gaze down at me.
“The actual problem that I am actually responsible for solving is that THERE IS A FUCKING ELDER VAMPIRE IN THE CITY DRINKING PEOPLE. Like. He is here. He owns a building. Or at least a floor in a building. There were lots of rooms. He has prisoners. Human prisoners. At least one vampire prisoner — that was me. But I’m not important. I mean, I’m more liable to be one among many than anyone significant. He also has guards. Henchvampires, henchmen, whatever.” I groan. “This is the problem that I actually need to solve.”
“Why you?” Your braid falls forward and grazes my face.
“You know why.”
“Yes, but I think you need to, you know, articulate it.”
I wiggle up a bit, dig in my pocket — I wear loose worn-out Dickies with big baggy pockets — and light a cigarette.
“I thought we gave smoking up after the 90s,” you say.
“Hush up, darlin, this is my fantasy and it’s always the 90s here.”
“You just got nabbed by an elder vampire in 2020.”
“Yeah, but I came back to 1995 to talk about it. My imagination, my rules. You can’t get cloves like these in 2020.”
You hush up and hold out your hand for a drag. Never yet knew a girl who could resist a guy who offered her a clove cigarette — I mean, I guess I don’t have to woo you, seeing as I’m making you up, but I want to, you know? Seems more gentlemanlike. Poems, cigarettes, little kisses behind your ear —
— you hand the cigarette back and of course our hands touch and then you kiss me sort of on the side of my head and you smell like clover, sunshine on white clover —
“Here’s why it’s my problem,” I say. Thinking and smoking is always a good combination. “It’s my problem because the motherfucker made it my problem. I’m not a hero and to be honest I’m more likely to sit back and laugh at evil than actually to do anything about it. But now this fellow hauls me in and he’s apparently so strong he can yank me right up from Raven Town (that’s the neighborhood where I was just coming out of the used book store when he grabbed me), just magic me up in a gust of black wind and away to some building somewhere. He’s magical and rich and sly. And I’m not suited to fight him or anyone, but I do have one advantage — I know he exists. And that advantage is my obligation, because no one else except his minions and his victims knows he exists. So because I fall into that category of one — neither minion nor victim — I have to do something.”
“You don’t know that,” you object. “Maybe lots of people know he exists. Maybe they just can’t do anything. And maybe you can’t, either.”
“To your first point: if anyone else knew, I’d know it, because for nocturnal folks the convenience store is a fucking confessional and guys like me are fucking priests. Everyone tells us everything.” I take the last drag and grind out the cigarette. “And if I do find out for sure that I can’t do anything about him, I’ll gladly fuck off, but someone’s going to have to prove to me real hard that I can’t.”
You sigh. “I wish I knew what he looked like,” you say. “I know a lot of people.”
“I know his voice,” I say. “He laughed at me. He knew my name. Cultured. Midwestern. Old-style TV announcer’s voice, but southernized. A voice that would make women swoon.”
You snap your fingers. “You see,” you say, “I do know him.”
And then you dissolve like pollen in the sunlight and I can’t get you back into focus without actually wanking off, which isn’t great for conversation.
Real Girlfriend
While Reese was trying to figure out how a woman he had created from Johnny Gruelle fairytale illustrations had recognized his actual kidnapper, Mary Harold Harker — Mal to her friends — woke up beside Beatrix.
She’d taken Beatrix home for a shower.
She was afraid the invitation would seem condescending, but Beatrix — as she explained at length after the shower — was an anarchist and an enemy of private property, though she did believe in consent when it came to the places and things her friends actually used in their personal lives. But once Mal invited her to use the shower, Beatrix simply added it to the list of common resources the world offered up for Beatrix to enjoy (showers, soft grass, air, sunlight, Mal’s car with Mal driving, unattended buffet tables at outdoor business luncheons) and felt quite unselfconscious about it.
From the shower they went to bed. They combed each other’s hair and Beatrix explained the anarchic roots of the punk movement. Then she started stroking Mal’s back — heavy circles, round and round — and kept talking about the connections between —
Mal stopped listening.
Beatrix didn’t have any love language at all, but she eventually became entranced by the rhythm — her hand, Mal’s breath — and constructed a series of theories about how different touch patterns might produce different results. She put her guesses to practice.
The results proved satisfactory.
When Mal woke up, she rolled forward and looked — as she always did — into the mirror on the dresser across from the foot of the bed. Love had changed her, she thought. Her hair looked lighter — nearer platinum, less dishwater blond — and her eyes, generally gray, shone a light, true green.
Then she tried to turn and let out a squeak.
Her hair had grown. She was actually sitting on it.
She looked into the mirror half expecting someone else to look back. Someone from the life of this other Mal who had become unexpectedly winsome. She loved mirrors, but she was used to seeing a woman who looked interesting, not actually bewitching.
A trick of the light, she thought. It was May; the window was open. The groundskeeper of her little apartment was mowing the grass. Smells of gasoline and clover wafted through the sheers. Sunlight filtered through leaves touched the mirror and reflected up onto the ceiling to create the ghost of a dogwood tree.
Beatrix lay sprawled, brown skin against white pillowcase, iron-gray hair spilling away from the shaved side of her head. Mal felt the way one does when waking the for first time with a new lover and seeing the beloved sleeping. She could have written a hundred aubades. But this was hardly her first, or dozenth, new romance. She dropped a kiss on Beatrix’s hand and went to start the coffeepot.
In the kitchen, she found her phone chirping on the table. A group text.
Improvisational Dance rescheduled for Tuesday. See y’all there. PV, David.
She looked in on Beatrix again. The big woman hadn’t stirred. It was a little like Delilah, she thought, looking on Samson. Beatrix was so powerful, so vulnerable in sleep.
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
After a while Big George heads home because he has to wake up early and Little George heads home because his wife is sending him naughty texts.
Something about chainmail.
Killer’s still there, the smallest of the three, leaning on the counter, drinking the free sludge coffee I give him. He’s never married, still works as a welder at the cement plant factory. He writes poems … I remember one, a woman speaking. She’s in love with a welder (of course) and she says she never could love a man who didn’t have to protect herself from his work.
Killer says, “I’ve been thinking about Jesus lately.”
It’s 2 a.m.; people talk about Jesus at this hour.
I nod.
“Yeah, like I want, like something’s missing without him.”
“You’ve always believed in Jesus, I thought.”
“Always hated him.”
I start washing coffee pots. “Don’t blame him for the fucking Christians.”
“That’s right.” Killer is named for our fifth-grade teacher’s biggest paddle, Killer. That paddle had holes drilled in it. Killer was the smallest kid and he got the most of Killer, so the name stuck. Big George and Little George were, you guessed it, the other two paddles.
Now don’t get it twisted, everyone got paddled in the 70s and 80s. Paddled at school, whupped at home. Did us good. Mr. Fred was our favorite teacher by far. Used to bring live rattlesnakes to show and tell. Only hit us when we knew we’d done wrong.
Anyway, Killer says, “I’ve just been feeling this lack. Thought about getting religion. Getting, you know, saved.”
“We all got saved, back in the day.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t take.”
I snort. “I think that’s a theological impossibility. You’re baptized for the forgiveness of sins, and it’s god who forgives. Unless you’re saying god did something wrong, it took.”
I don’t really hold with religion, but I’m willing to talk through just about anything. Majik Mart confessional. Free philosophy every night. Spill your guts, listen to Reese rant.
Killer took off his cap and shook out his shaggy black hair. “It’s a longing. A thirst. Something’s missing, Reese.”
I give him a long look. “Sure it’s not political?”
“No. None of that.” He dug one of those taquito rolls out of the warmer to go with his coffee and put a couple dollars on the counter for it.
“A new woman? Lack of a woman?”
“No.” He bites the roll. “No, it’s just emptiness. Nothing material can fill it. So do I need Jesus? Maybe. I’m just thinking, you know, process of elimination. I have money. I’ve been married — no thank you, not again. I have my health. A good job with a pension. What else is missing?”
I finish with the coffee pots. “You tell me.”
Killer thinks about it, then wanders out the door. He’s off work tomorrow. I always thought he went home to drink and watch Breaking Bad, but maybe he goes home to pray, who knows?
But he’s given me a lot to think about. He feels empty in ways I don’t. I mean, I’m always thirsty, literally speaking, but I know what I have to lose, because it’s always threatened. I’m Jacob holding to the angel, trying to keep him rounded up because if he wins, there’ll be hell to pay.
My illness, you see, that’s the angel. He’s beautiful and he’s powerful and he can ride on the wind, but he’ll kill everyone I love if I let him off the chain. And because I’m constantly wrestling to protect — well, everyone — I don’t have to try to convince myself they’re worth protecting. It’s like grabbing your kid when the house is on fire. You stop wondering whether you should have had kids and you grab his ass and you run. You know he’s worth risking your life for because you find yourself doing it.
My heart is full and everything’s fragile.
How this line of thought is going to help me find an unreformed elder vampire, I have no idea. Probably just enamored of my own bullshit, as usual.
Some Charlie Daniels-looking fool pokes his head in the door. Got a gal half his age — and with less teeth — clinging onto him.
“Hey, son, you got the key to the men’s room?”
I’ll die for a motherfucker but I ain’t opening that men’s room.