I watched him walk away, perplexed by my own willingness to accept the situation at face value. About thirty yards away, Calvin stopped and turned. “You’ll need to find a dark and private place. Before dawn.”
•
I had a rough time those first few weeks. I was like a container filled with the memories of a human being, but they were memories in which I could no longer recognize myself. And the container was leaking. The human being was dripping away, steadily replaced by something deeply unfamiliar. As the human part of me faded, I found myself clinging to it ever more desperately. I would find myself drawn to people, only to be repelled, as if what I thought were men and women turned out to be only cardboard cutouts. Cardboard cutouts, that is, filled with blood.
When I finally realized it was blood that was drawing me to people, I was sure I was doomed, sure I would never be able to take what my body was telling me it needed. And when, after so short a time, I proved myself wrong, it was only to find myself strangely and powerfully repulsed by the act of feeding on humans. Not because of moral considerations, but rather, as a result of a straightforward physical response. Taking someone’s blood made me feel like I had been reduced to blind, instinctual drives. I felt like an insect that had sucked the protoplasm out of its prey, leaving behind an empty husk. That human husk really gave me the creeps.
I tried for a while to survive on animal blood. Ironically, it was something lingering from my human past that made taking the blood of animals so distasteful. Even as a child, I’d had a violent aversion to the feeling of hair in my mouth. In my adult life, this aversion had been the occasion for some delicate negotiations. My wife, for instance, had initially reacted skeptically to my request that she shave her pubic hair. She had some trouble getting past her suspicion that I was under the sway of some prepubescent perversion. As a vampire, the hair problem took on a new and, while it lasted, daunting dimension. Mammals—dogs, horses, cows—are all covered with hair. As absurd as it sounds, the choice between reducing a human to a dehydrated husk or biting into the hairy hide of an animal wasn’t an easy one. Not at first, anyway. But the dilemma didn’t last long. It was just another piece of human baggage that, once dropped, I couldn’t quite figure out what the fuss had been about.
The hair problem was typical of many of the adjustments I had to make in my new life. They weren’t always easy, or without consequence, but for the most part, they were rather trivial. Resolving them was usually just a matter of replacing an old habit with a new one. Other problems proved to be more intractable, rooted as they were in a fundamental paradox.
Once turned, it was only natural that my new powers would occupy my attention. Discovering what it meant to be a vampire plunged me into a near-constant state of astonishment. But as the novelty wore off, a part of me that had not changed gradually insinuated itself. This stubbornly human part of me had to do with the act of thinking. Not a matter of beliefs and opinions, nor of personality, it was deeper than that. I had learned to think, speak and communicate as a human being, in a human language. As a vampire, my thought processes might differ somewhat from those of humans, but only insofar as the contingencies of my life forced incidental modifications upon those still-human processes. The fact that I drank human blood, for instance, forced me to think differently about the value of human life. I might tell myself that drinking human blood was analogous to a human eating a chicken sandwich. People reduce the living chicken to broiled meat, erasing any consideration of status that might be given to the chicken. A comparable process compels a vampire to erase considerations of status that might otherwise be given to humans. But the entire constellation of arguments, reasons, judgments, and justifications was itself unmistakably human. The uncomfortable truth was that my ties to humanity were deeply and inescapably paradoxical.
Chapter 4
Before squeezing a little monetary juice out of Ron Richardson, I was hoping to find a new driver. I appreciated the utility of a car, but I had never been particularly fond of driving. I put up with it for a few years, back in the forties, but eventually gave it up in favor of a chauffeur. Hiring a human introduced complications into my life, but there were practical advantages, too. Chief among them being that a driver could run errands for me during daylight hours.
I had lost my previous driver a couple of months back. White, as he liked to be called for some reason I never understood, since it wasn’t his name, had been pulled over for speeding. I wasn’t with him at the time, which was no doubt fortunate for all concerned. Apparently he had shown a lack of respect sufficient to warrant a trip to the police station. Once there, his behavior continued to deteriorate, and he ended up behind bars. He then took another step down the ladder of respectability when the police opened the trunk of his car—the car I had provided—and found a half dozen illegal automatic weapons.
The whole business was far less sinister than it was made out to be. White may have been an obnoxious little shit, but he was essentially harmless. The guns weren't his. He was transporting them for someone else. He refused, initially, to rat out the owner of the weapons, adopting a hard-ass “I’m no snitch” posture that he’d probably picked up from the movies. His resolve lasted for an hour or so before he caved
