He ordered me a cheeseburger and fries and watched while I ate. He pretended to sip a cup of coffee, lifting the porcelain cup to his lips every few minutes and nodding at me over the rim as I talked about school, toys, and superheroes.
When I was finished and we waited on the bill, he leaned across the table and took my hands in his. “You ready?”
WE SAT ON A COLD bench and watched people go by.
“Someone alone, obviously.”
He had an arm around my shoulders, which felt nice because my teeth were chattering from the cold. It didn’t affect him, of course. Weather, I mean. One more neat trick that didn’t make its way down the genetic ladder.
Like I said, I’m not a vampire. Nor do I have vampire qualities. I love the sun. I eat normal food. And I don’t drink blood.
The only trait I did inherit from my father is the way I sleep.
I can’t sleep in a bed.
I mean, I can nap anywhere. Floor. Bed. Couch. Dining room chair.
But to sleep? Like, really recharge? I need to be in a coffin. Just like my old man.
My mother thinks it’s psychological, but Dad always disagreed.
“We are bonded to the earth,” he’d say, looking at me with pride. “It’s where we draw our strength, from what lies in the dark beneath our cities. We live in the place where flesh meets soil.”
When I was a baby, crying at night like babies do, he’d come get me from my crib (Father being awake, of course) and bring me down into the basement. Into his coffin.
The second the lid closed my crying would stop. I’d nestle into him, sleep until dawn as he lied awake, sacrificing his nights for me.
After I’d been around a few months, the crib was kept purely for show, in case we had company or if Mom’s family was visiting. Later, my nursery became a bedroom with a bed that was never slept in. The sheets never changed, as far as I know.
As I got older, and bigger, Father built me my own coffin. Laid the bottom with soil and silk, like his. There was talk of a full-size coffin down the road, but after Father died there was no need. His would do just fine.
It was around the time I turned twelve, a few years after his death, that we began to commune. His ashes, stored at my feet. His voice in my head. We’d talk in the dark. About my life, my challenges. About Mother. Those conversations are my best memories. An aching sorrow mixed with rushes of joy in each word that passed between us.
“That one,” he said, and I looked across the street. Between passing cars I saw a hunched man in a black raincoat hurrying down the sidewalk.
“Why him?” I asked as he stood, ready to trail the stranger. We followed from a distance at first, staying across the street, but when the guy turned at the next block, we crossed over.
“I can tell by looking at him,” Father said, leaping gracefully onto the opposite curb, me all but running to catch up. “I can tell how alone he is. How pathetic and sad. That man is wasted life. Wasted flesh.”
“Wasted flesh,” I repeated sagely, watching the back of that raincoat, now only a few yards ahead.
Later, in the man’s living room, we sat by his dying body.
We’d come in through the window after climbing four stories. Me clutching Father’s shoulders while he stuck to the wall like a spider, bared fingers and the toes of leather shoes pressed into the sheer brick wall.
“I don’t know how much of me is inside you,” he said as we sat around the body, as if the unconcscious man were a campfire. He began loosening the shirt collar around the man’s neck, removed the tie, the eyeglasses. “And we may not know for some time, until you’re fully a man.”
He quickly slid a pointed fingernail along the flesh on the bared neck. Blood spilled as if he’d turned on a faucet. “But I still think it’s correct to teach the basics. I want you to drink and tell me what you feel.”
Hesitant, because I’d never drank blood before, but also exhilarated, I lowered my face to the still-warm flesh and put my lips around the pumping artery. Salty blood filled my mouth and I reflexively swallowed, drinking it down like tepid milk.
After three swallows, I pushed back, gasping for breath, coughing out the last mouthful in a spray, soaking my chin. My father’s eyes were on me, studying my reaction closely.
I wiped my chin gracelessly with a coat sleeve, sat back on my elbows. “I don’t feel much,” I said, still panting. Which wasn’t exactly true.
What I really felt? Nausea. That man’s blood sat in my belly like a ball of lead, and my insides gurgled in a way that made me think I might puke it all back out again.
“You don’t feel …?” He searched for the right word, shrugged. “I don’t know. Energized? You know, like a rush of any kind?”
I shook my head. “Not really,” I said, and then my stomach gurgled so loudly that he noticed, looking more bemused than disappointed.
Then, without another word, he snatched the man’s body off the ground, jerking it toward his mouth with the ease of someone biting into a sandwich. His jaw clamped to the soft flesh. I watched with envy as his throat worked, as he drank and drank and drank. Simultaneously satisfied and, I assume, disappointed. In me, I mean.
Later, as we made the long drive back, he told me not to worry. “We will share so many things in this life,” he said, smiling over at me as I watched the night flow by outside my window. “Blood just won’t be one of them.”
I looked over, met his eyes. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
But he just shook his head. “No need to be sorry, Jake. You’re my son and I love you, as I love your mother. And besides,” he said, one hand squeezing my shoulder as he navigated the dark road home. “You may yet have some surprises in you.”
“WHAT ABOUT IT?” HE ASKS, his lower lip smeared with tomato sauce.
I stare at Jake a moment, wondering how much to tell him. How much I should tell him. My father used to say: To be forewarned is to be forearmed. But how do you tell your kid there’s a chance he’s being hunted?
That we both are. Every day.
