Kimberly used to yell at me all the time about such things. She would never, ever, allow herself to witness an animal bleeding. She also wouldn’t watch a rabbit being skinned. Neither of those things ever kept her from enjoying a ribeye though.
“People are omnivores,” she would remind me. “But it’s sick to take pleasure from watching something else die.”
“Is that why you took a picture of your salmon steak before you ate it?” I asked.
That wasn’t a real argument. We were only teasing each other. We didn’t have that many real arguments.
Back to vampires—what would we do if they were real?
Polar bears hunt people, right? Mountain lions will sometimes kill a jogger. Sharks certainly don’t have any compunction about munching on a swimmer. We don’t go around trying to eradicate those species just because of their predation on humans.
If vampires were real, would we respect their right to survive, or would we try our best to snuff them all out? What if they existed, but the lore was all wrong? In our fiction, vampires are created by converting a human. In some books and movies, a single bite is enough to infect a person and doom them to feast on blood. If one thinks about it that way, then vampirism is akin to a disease and we certainly don’t have any prohibition on trying to eliminate diseases.
The other thing that Kimberly and I used to debate was the death penalty. She thought I was a hypocrite about that too, but I thought that my stance was remarkably consistent. I view the death penalty with the same point about self-ownership. Let’s say, in a fit of rage, you murder someone. You’ve violated someone else’s right to live. What should be the punishment? Ideally, we would be able to permanently eject you from our society. Since you violated our most sacred rule, you’ve demonstrated that you don’t belong with the rest of us. Unfortunately, we don’t have anywhere to send you. Therefore, we cast you off in the only way we know how—death.
Kimberly would argue that education and rehabilitation are possible and therefore should be attempted. Kimberly would argue that the inevitability of a single innocent person being executed should nullify the practice. I don’t disagree with either of those ideas, but I think that they are unnecessarily cautious.
Here’s where she calls me a hypocrite—as much as I believe in self-ownership, I don’t really have a strong opinion about the sanctity of life. In my mind, life just isn’t that precious.
“That goes against everything you just said,” Kimberly told me.
And then, less than a year after we had this debate, she was pregnant. My ideas about the sanctity of life began to shift dramatically as I watched her body change and saw the life growing inside her. Then, when she and the baby both died, I understood that my opinions didn’t matter at all. People can be ripped right out of our hearts before we even get to see the color of their eyes. We’re all connected, for better or worse. Most of the time it’s worse.
I take another step down into the cellar.
(It doesn't smell bad.)
It doesn’t smell bad.
In fact, it smells just fine. It smells a good bit like Mr. Engel did—like a towel fresh from the dryer. As I take another step down, I see why. His washer and dryer are installed right there at the bottom of the stairs. The house we rented in Virginia was like that. It had a basement laundry as well. I never really understood that. Why would you take your clothes down into the dirtiest room of the house in order to clean them?
The temperature drops a few degrees with each step. The air is dry down here, too. It’s not at all what I would have expected. No spiders, no dust, fresh smell, and dry air—Mr. Engel should have set up a little bed down here and spent all of his time in this space. It’s a million times more comfortable than upstairs.
Still, I want to get out of here.
I want to find the electrical panel, do what I said I would do, and get home.
There are two bulbs hanging from the ceiling. They do a decent job of lighting up the appliances and the shelves with all their jars. I sweep my flashlight around anyway, examining the concrete foundation, looking for a gray panel.
I’m looking for other things too, but I don’t let myself think about that. Are there supposed to be coffins down here? If I had paid attention outside, this process would be easier. I could have noted which side of the house the power line was attached to. I could have spotted where the meter was mounted and where the electrical service entered the house. I didn’t do any of those things, so now I’m left to…
“There,” I say. My flashlight reflects off the steel screws in the corners of the panel. It looks reasonably new compared to everything else in the house. The washing machine and dryer could be out of a Sears catalog from 1950. The furnace looks like it would have been right at home in the hold of the Titanic. But the electrical panel could be brand new.
Before I focus my full attention on that, I have to make sure. I have to be one-hundred percent sure that there’s no truth behind what Mr. Engel said.
My flashlight continues its sweep around the cellar.
I see a couple of big vertical cylinders that I have come to understand have something to do with the water. One is probably a heater and the other stores the water that has been pumped? I don’t know for sure. I’ve mostly been an apartment dweller in my life. We don’t deal with
