Sip cola. Consider cheese and crackers. The screen is coal black. Contentment. Safety. A feeling of being at home. But I’m free to be either inside or outside the screen. Late night at the movies. Outside they have been taking candy all afternoon. Little monsters. Cyanide. It’s a possibility. But I’m not the type who would.
Pontius Pilate drying my hands on the bathroom towel. I think of Baby Jesus lying sleeping in a manger. The words to various apropos melodies (either hymns or soundtracks) waft through my head like a waking dream. Then the nightmare of the Crucifixion and the pain and suffocating stillness of death. The tremendous burst of afterlife and the afterbirth consumed in a satanic ritual.
Once a young boy held his arms out at his sides to feel it, but it wasn’t real: my feet planted safely on the ground, I was breathing, breathing. He finally stood with hands pressed against the sides of the hallway to keep the arms up.
Once I was Jim Jones at a party. Dark sunglasses and a pitcher of Kool-Aid. Pope John Paul I with blood of Christ streaming down my papal attire, anticipating by one year Pope John Paul II. After seeing The Ten Commandments, I dreamed of playing Moses, but I was fat like the brother I despise. There was nothing of Charlton Heston in me: no bent wooden staff knobby enough for a shepherd blessed with wisdom to call the Rod of Jehovah, no sheep, no shapely sweetheart what’s-her-name, queen of the harem. My closet full of normal rags, the XX-large terrycloth robe Jane bought for me one Christmas (sickly green), the laminated old wood cane Grandpa used to die of atrophy. Before he died, we resembled Grandpa, brother and I. After he died, brother only. Chubby. Bland pale features. Wrinkles. Hands and feet bearing the scars of Jesus. We see ourselves in those twenty-year-old yellow photos in the old photo album with the stitched binding that keeps pulling apart. Broken, like a web of fingers, the binding holds us common, me and my brother, together.
Gas lanterns. Cobblestone streets and carriages. Grandpa slaving at the grist mill, the inhuman boss steaming over him. Heat like a wall, Grandpa thinks to himself, “Grist is just one letter from the German Geist.” Home every night with his face and hands white as silk. Lena, his wife, won’t touch him. “Geist,” she says, “wash your face, you filthy ectoplasm.” Once out of the bathtub, he could jump her as if she were a naughty little girl. “Ah, the joys of a monogamous lifestyle. I’m sure you don’t know how cozy and warm it feels to come home from work to find waiting the woman you live for. … Ahhhhh!”
But as Grandpa had one day found Lena, so had I discovered my Jane embraced in the arms of another lover. Grandpa went to jail for murder. I have done nothing immoral. Blood anger fills me red hot, but the soul is worth more than the body ever shall be.
Al Kepud, brother’s dog, attacks the yellow-spotted tennis ball at my feet. Opposite the living room, brother sits staring at the television screen. Deodorant commercial. We sit on my identical couches. Fat. Sandy-haired. Middle-aged. Big brown eyes and flat noses, the product of some evil-doing white man, too long ago to know when. “Join the Y,” says brother. I say, “The Y is a slum.” Identical red and white checked shirts, dark blue Levi’s denims, white high-top basketball shoes with laces hanging to the carpet. Al Kepud shakes the tennis ball wildly by the flap of torn cover. Brother dives on top of him and sends it flying into the kitchen, and Al Kepud runs it down, runs it back into the living room in its mouth. I want to kill Brother, but can’t. He’s not the problem. I’m paranoid is the problem.
I found the large key under the doormat, went through the cobwebs, and on the walls, I caught the glint from the torches. There was nothing behind me but the doorway. Staring past the concrete box in which he lay undead, I saw through the picture tube into my living room. There I sat with my coal and dreadful eyes: Brother — my mirror image — sat staring like an idiot in a pit into the picture tube. Light in that room (enough to read by) cascaded into the mausoleum. I stood sarcastically watching them watch me stand. The clock went cuckoo a dozen times. There materialized in my hands, a wooden stake, a ball-peen hammer. I was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable desire to find a place to drive the wooden stake, but the right place I would know only when I saw it. Over the hard brown floor, a chameleon skittered. Dracula snuck behind me. I heard a shot and a large bat flew past my left ear. A droplet of blood fell to the floor and turned brown in the dust. Where that blood came from is where the stake must go. I tasted popcorn.
I lighted on the balcony and grew manlikeness. My best wool tux had been ruined by the pistol shot. Over the years, bullets and fire had burned my flesh. Still I survived. Undiminished was my affinity for the blood of young virgins. Undiminished was my power to make them weep helplessly in my arms.
I roused my Dinette with a tap at the window. Outside, one fool stared, while the misobservant other played with the shaggy mutt and the tennis ball with the cover torn like a protruding tongue. Alpo commercial. I brushed back long black hair and fed myself in private as she sighed outrageously. The scent they use most often has changed from lilac to hyacinth. Nylon nightgowns are more sheer, though not as elegantly smooth as those spun in the Silkworm Days. They are always prime for me: for a dozen years their beauty lasts and then they fade like any flower, but not for me. I pluck another.
“My love,” she says, “my love.” “Yes. I know. We must go where they will never find us.” I lick the scarlet trail that runs from the base of her skull to her shoulder. If we reach the crypt before daybreak, she will be eternally young and mine.
There came no answer from Melissa, so I broke down the door to her bedroom. Who could breathe in that stench of garlic? The canopy bed lay open with the covers pulled back. The crucifix lay uselessly beside her pillow. The French doors leading to the balcony had been opened from the inside: she had welcomed him into her arms. If I only hadn’t tested her strength by letting her sleep where he would … find her. A frigid breeze agitated the curtains which hung from the canopy. I found a candle and some matches. In the candlelight, I saw her winter wrap — the one I’d given her on Sicily when we celebrated our betrothal — hung by a hook in the closet. No, she was not just out for a walk.
Romeo! Romeo! Brother Bother’s face the subject of a painter’s angry brush strokes. The note that Becky had called stares him in the face like a man in the morgue. And what am I to do? Be his eyes? Be his ears? Be his … A little static electricity shock as he lifts the receiver, dials, reports for La Verona’s the vital information. Then the receiver is noiselessly cradled. I think of Baby Jesus. Then the nightmare of the Crucifixion, the eternal glory of the Resurrection. Brother dials again, and within fifteen minutes, his date with Becky is set. Oh Romeo! Romeo! I think how mother held us gently, our soft skulls supported over her dear fat arms.
An outrageous twinkle in his eyes as he sits once again across from me. “I’ll leave the money on the TV,” he says, gets up and stumbles in the direction of the bedroom. Two minutes later, Brother Bother emerges naked, towel draped over his shoulders, underwear in hand. “I’m taking a shower,” he says. Al Kepud growls at me.
With Brother in the bathroom, I pull the pocket knife. I laugh. With a swift motion, I deflate the tennis ball.
Brother exits the bathroom and then the bedroom. Now he wears a suit: brown, blue shirt, white tie. Bozo the Yuppie and Becky will spend the night in Brother’s room. Sneaks her in and out at night now. I hear them going at it through the wall when I’m lying on my bed awake.
He places the money for the pizza on the TV. “I’m going now. Good night.” A magical wind wafts him to the front entrance. “Why don’t you call Jane?” he says, and disappears.
“Not on your life,” I say. Al Kepud growls at me once more, and I hold up the knife in front of his black nose.
Gravestones juxtaposed themselves on top of one another, and then the ground rushed up to meet my eyes. I tumbled on my hands and knees and fell to my back in the grass. The moon was full and I was without hope. Dr. Seward and Van Helsing rushed by me, headed for the mausoleum. “It’s my fault,” I thought. “I’ve done it to her.” I was held to the ground by an uncontrollable force. Aaron, the black houseboy, knelt beside me. “Say!” he said, “get hup! We got to hurry!” He poked his finger into my side as if he were testing cake batter. “Say,” he said, “we got no time to lose. It may be too late hallready.”
The dogs tracked him to the edge of a grassy field, just beyond the cemetery. Then, suddenly, there he is! His head bobs like a gorilla. He holds my beloved over his shoulder like a sack of cheese. Through the high grass we chase him; we hear the rustling wind, the creaking branches, and footsteps. We see the ghostly white of her nightgown hovering in the moonlight thirty yards ahead of us. “Look!” shouts Van Helsing, pointing to the orange clouds over the eastern horizon. “He’s doomed now, if we cut off his path to the crypt!” Silhouetted against the moon, in front of a backdrop of bare trees, a man in a wide-brimmed hat throws himself at Dracula’s feet, and they tumble to the ground. A girl flounders away from him but falls to her side in a mud puddle. I run to embrace her. “Malitia!” I mispronounce. She seems weary, the lines on her face unlike any I’ve ever seen. She seems a different woman from the one with whom I fell in love at Cote D’Azure, and it’s not just the mud on her nightgown. Minutes later, in the early light of morning, we find the others congregated around the mouth of a cave. I grab a stake and hammer out of the hands of Philipe, my Spanish gardener. He looks at me nervously: his clothes are ragged — he is obviously fatigued. I shout, “Who will follow me into the cave and rid the countryside of this menace!” But none of them will join me, and in the darkness he may slip behind me again if I track him alone.
There had been so many others, but I had loved Melissa most dearly and had wished to make our love eternal. She could have made the cold walls of my many hideaways seem aglow with heavenly light. Instead, I was alone: hardly a life for royalty. I instructed Ebenezer to find us new shelter by nightfall. “And Ebenezer,” I said, “be sure to use the secret exit way.” Inside the box, I heard him pull the gate off the horsecart. I felt myself being lifted slowly, headfirst, into the compartment. Ebenezer hopped (I heard him) in that strange gait he always used: his leg had been afflicted since childhood. He pulled the canvas over the top and sides of the box. The gate was replaced in back.
When the horses were ready, Ebenezer asked from his seat in front of the wagon, “Shall we go, boss?” I told him, “Yes. I’m ready. Let’s go far away from here, Ebenezer.” “O.K., boss,” he said, and as he started to drive, he sang:
O take us a-
Way cause the men of the day have found our home.
O take us to
Where the maidens are fair and the earth is warm.
Let us find a
Spot that we’ll like a lot and we’ll sing in tune.
Let him find a
Tart he can share his heart with to end his gloom.
I closed my eyes and shuddered until I knew we were well out into the daylight. One single ray of sunlight seeping through a pinhole could be enough to finish me. Miserable way for royalty to travel.
Nosegay the dog — Al Kepud — dead, bled out, cut with a knife. Call Jane? Not on your life. The pizza had anchovies. I hate anchovies, but I didn’t hear him order them. Must have done it in a whisper. Hello? La Verona’s? Yes. With anchovies. My brother hates anchovies. Should have poisoned the dog. Much cleaner.
He’ll sneak in with Becky tonight, find Al Kepud on the floor. Foot goes splush in Nosegay’s puddle. Then the heavy bump of limp fur. Carry him out to the garbage and bury him there. Yes, leave him there for Brother Bother.
Once I snuck up on them going at it in the bedroom. The creaky floor can’t help being noisy. Fat then like now. The hand won’t move to reach for the doorknob. But what’s going on in there? The hand won’t move. Laughing, breathing. Footsteps. Brother up to go to the bathroom. Quick. Hand. Grab the doorknob.
“What are you doing? Let me out of here!”
“Go back to bed!”
“Let me out. I’ve got to pee.”
I let go of the doorknob and race back to my bedroom. But he saw because I heard him poke his head out the door.
Nosferatu. The Y is a slum.
