“You can’t be serious.”
“Friday, Ron. There’s a lot of cold, deep water out there.”
I was done, for the time being. When Richardson turned to look at the river, I went up the bank and back into the night.
•
There were some riverfront condominiums a mile or so down the Garden Highway. About halfway there, I called Karla and told her to pick me up in front of the condos. She pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after I got there, coming to a stop with the passenger door at my fingertips.
“Everything go okay?” Karla asked.
“Well enough, I think.”
“Where to?”
“Back to the university footbridge.”
“Should I go back the way we came?”
“It’s up to you.”
Karla put the car in gear and exited the parking lot toward town.
“Did you find something to do while you were waiting?” I asked.
“I went to that restaurant you mentioned. Had a Denver omelette and read my book.”
“Sounds yummy. What are you reading?”
She glanced briefly my way, as if questioning my motivation for asking.
“I’m just curious,” I said.
“I thought curiosity was the scourge of the soul?”
“Only if you have one.”
She laughed. “A Frozen Woman. It’s a novel by Annie Ernaux.”
“You like it?”
“Yeah. I like the way she writes. Very sparse. No gushing emotions, no irony. She just tells you what it was like. Her life. Growing up in a small town in France. How it was both beautiful and stifling. How she loved and hated it. She makes you understand what she had to go through.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Also, I guess I kind of fell in love with her photo on the back.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
Karla slapped the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “Fuck! I can’t believe I said that!”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I did the same thing once, became interested in an author after seeing his photo on the back of one of his books. I ended up reading everything he wrote. Walter Abish. He wears an eye patch.”
When we were nearing the footbridge, I told Karla to pull over and park for a minute. When she stopped and turned off the engine, I unzipped my fanny pack and removed an envelope.
“What’s this?” she asked, when I handed it to her.
“Sixteen thousand dollars. Normally, I’d pay you on the last day of the month. But it’s the twenty-ninth, and I won’t be needing you again this month, so I’m paying you tonight, for the full month. Five thousand base salary, five hundred as a bonus for picking up the car from Tony’s, and another five hundred for tonight. That’s six thousand. Is that agreeable?”
Karla looked incredulous. “You’re not shitting me, are you?”
“The other ten thousand,” I said, “is for future expenses. Don’t waste it, but don’t hesitate to use it if the need arises. Carry some with you. A thousand or two. That’s important. Don’t come to work with empty pockets. When that runs down, let me know so I can give you some more. Also, if I were you, I wouldn’t put it in the bank. At least not in one lump sum. The banks are required to report deposits over ten thousand dollars.”
“Right,” she said, thumbing through the bills, “taxes.”
“I’m not positive yet, but I’ll probably need you to drive me somewhere Wednesday evening. I’ll call you on Wednesday and let you know, one way or the other.”
I opened the door and started to get out, pausing when Karla said my name.
“Yes?” I asked, leaning down and looking in the door.
“You don’t live under the footbridge, do you?”
“I’ll talk to you on Wednesday. Good night, Karla.”
“Good night, Shake,” she said, after I had closed the door.
Chapter 6
My tolerance for human company diminished over the decades as I gradually adjusted to a life of solitude. This was partly out of necessity and partly because I simply lost interest in people. There were exceptions, of course, but they were few and far between. Even when I did cross paths with someone who sparked my interest, interaction with humans always required a level of detachment that tended to preclude all but the most superficial relations. For one thing, I knew for certain that whatever novelty or enrichment a human might offer, it would soon fade. People quickly betray their limitations. And when you add to that the difference in human and vampire life spans, people came to seem like fleeting diversions. Like pet goldfish, they were colorful, but it was never very long before they went belly up.
I suppose my attitude was a little cold-blooded, but a certain amount of misanthropy went with the territory. It was impractical to be too sensitive about one’s food. The relationship of eater and eaten imposed the need to maintain a clear, categorical distance. Paradoxically, the need to function in human society required the opposite; the cultivation of pragmatic social skills. These two conditions worked against each other, with a vengeance. My century-long path to a workable solution had been thorny, unpredictable, and not without moments of comedy.
After Calvin and I climbed out of the rubble in 1908, there was a decade or so during which the novelty and the inherent excitement of my new life served as a counterweight to a host of less appealing conditions, including my newly acquired and growing aversion for human company. It was a time of exhilarating exploration of my vampire powers. I reveled nightly in my senses, time and again astonished at what I was capable of. By moonlight, I could read the dial of a watch on the wrist of a man standing thirty paces away. I could hear the heartbeats of every man, woman and child in a crowded room. And if I chose to, I could isolate a given rhythm and identify the heart’s owner. I had the nose of a bloodhound, and could track
