In the Mystique

Originally written Thursday, January 5, 2006

“To not scare people away. Sure. But I’m not exactly a regular there, and I don’t plan to be. You can tell me. But,” she acknowledged, “I guess you already did.”

“Yeah, I did,” I confirmed. She’s a philosophy professor. She doesn’t need a direct answer. But she being a philosophy professor, split infinitives notwithstanding, it also wouldn’t hurt to give her a little more to munch on and a reason why I wasn’t being direct. “But it’s not about scaring people away. Real vamps would be a draw for at least as many people as they’re a drawback for. Have you read much ________?” I named a theorist she’d probably be familiar with. When in doubt, appeal to an academic’s intellect.

“A bit.” Already I could see the kind of recognition in her face that suggested I’d taken the right direction with this. “I know he talks about how uncertainty and ambiguity can have a stronger impact than certainty. That it leaves things open for interpretation, and people are likely to interpret knowledge the way they want to.” And being good at what she does, she was able to go from there to the conclusion I’d hoped she’d draw. It wasn’t just the fact that having competing discourses at the club allowed people to believe what they wanted to and thus either go to the club to rub shoulders with actual vampires or to pretend they were; after all, we weren’t talking about whether clubbers knew or not, we were talking about Jeanine’s investment in this information. “So the ambiguity at the club is not just about whether vampires exist or not but about what exactly they are.”

“Yeah, I agree,” I said. I meant—and could have said—that she was right, but it seemed better to choose words that didn’t formally position us as teacher and student. “Like, are the vampires the ones that dress like it? That wear fangs or even get dental work to look like they have them? Are they the ones that inject heroin into each other’s necks? Do they drink blood or just bite?”

“What does Trudy do?” That’s what I was going for. It wasn’t about what she was. It was about what she does and what she’s like. Vampires are a lot of different things in a place like the Crypt. This was a question I didn’t mind answering directly.

“She drinks blood. But she doesn’t have fangs.” I smiled. I hoped I could make it sound like a simple yet morbid fetish. Jeanine wasn’t letting me off the hook, though.

“Is she immortal?”

“In theory.”

“Can’t go in the sun?”

“Not comfortably.”

“Would die from a stake through her heart?”

Here I was able to break the tension with a chuckle. “Wouldn’t most people?”

She humored me with a smirk. “So that’s what one kind of vampire is like. Others just wear lots of black and cake on the pale makeup. And they all contribute to the mystique.” I was a little bit disconcerted by how unsurprised she seemed to be, but then she leaned back in her chair, two ribs of pizza crust left on her plate, and added, “Gotta admit, she plays the part well.”

I didn’t ask her to explain that remark. There’s more impact in ambiguity.

Call Me Old-Fashioned

Originally written Thursday, January 5, 2006

Darn it. “Huh. I don’t know. I was mostly noticing what was going on below the waist rather than above the neck.” Which was actually true. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m somewhat more accustomed to seeing people “play vampire” than seeing them have sex in semi-public places. At any rate, I had been uncertain before about whether she was studying me for my responses, and at this point it was undeniable. We seemed to have taken a different and very rapid turn. In only a moment, I realized she might be about to push me out of the realm of selective information with her and into the zone of willful deceipt. Having mixed feelings about it, I decided to skate a finer line between the direct and the allusive. I don’t ordinarily take such risks, but I almost felt I owed it to her in the economy of knowledge for what she’d just given me about the junkie cult. Also, she seemed very likely to be on the verge of her own investigation, and I did not want to be discovered lying through my teeth. “So, you said some of the club people are convinced there are real vamps around the place? What’s your take on that?”

“I don’t know. What’s yours?” She was smiling as she said it, as if ready to use the conversation to broach a forbidden topic while leaving herself a way out through humor if I thought she sounded nuts. I knew the discursive technique well, having used it numerous times myself. From experience, I also knew that the only way not to get caught by it is to address it head on, so I responded:

“You sound like you’re trying to broach a forbidden topic while leaving yourself a way out through humor if I think you sound nuts.”

If she’d been someone I didn’t like, I would have felt maliciously triumphant about calling her ruse. Since I like her, though, my triumph was not malicious. She said, “Hm. I hadn’t really thought about what I was doing. You might be right.”

“I’m always right.” And more honest than I am modest. “So. Are you trying to have a serious conversation about vampires?”

She yielded to the direct approach. “Someone at the club said Trudy’s a vampire. Is that true?”

“Did you plan this whole conversation just to get to that question?”

“No. I think you started talking about the club first.” She was right. She continued, “Your turn. Is it true about Trudy?”

I looked her in the eye, saying nothing for a moment. I turned my eyes to the side, to the floor, to the ceiling. I opened my mouth a few times, only to take a breath and close it, trying to look as if I were thinking through my response, as if the answer were a whole lot more complicated than it needed to be. Eventually, I said, “I can answer that question, but it might be best if I didn’t.”

“Then the answer’s yes?” she asked, but she was still trying to maintain an escape route through her expression of disbelief.

“Sort of.” I’d give her what she wanted, but I needed to frame it very deliberately. And I needed to make it clear that there was a reason for my reticence besides condescension. “It sounds like the Crypt kind of benefits from having its vampire theme, right?”

“Sure. That’s why a lot of those kids come. It’s a whole scene.”

“And if vampires are real, it would be a good idea to keep that kind of hush-hush?”

The events of this day to be continued...

Play

Originally written Thursday, January 5, 2006

“And you said they’re super-secret? So no one knows who’s in this group?” Already I was trying to figure out how to infiltrate the inner circle, if only because I needed to know for certain that I wasn’t a second-degree murderer.

“Not til they die, I guess. Since it’s been going on so long"—the club’s been around for nearly twenty years—"there are undercover police there constantly. They’ve been trying to find this group and weasel their way in forever, Joey says. They never have, though.” Now that the juiciest parts of the story were out, she went back to her food, picking up stray toppings between her fingers and waving them around while she spoke. “And you know what’s even weirder? Sometimes there are kids at the club with those puncture wounds in their necks like bite marks, right? And they think it’s cool to just go around like that like they hooked up with a creature of the night. So of course they get arrested sometimes, tested for drugs. The cops think these are the kids in that cult. But word in the pipeline is that they’ve never, ever come up dirty. Not for heroin, anyway. Maybe for LSD, X, other club drugs. But for anything they’d’ve had to shoot up, they’re neg every time. Swearing up and down they know nothing about the junkies.”

“How do they explain the marks?”

“How do you think? They say they were playing vampire.”

“Wow. Just… wow. I don’t think I have anything to say to all that.” Not to Jeanine, anyway. But much to Trudy. Maybe to Craig, her hookup that night. And possibly to Joey, too. I was glad to have agreed to couples night a few minutes earlier. I did have one small thing to ask, however. “So what do you think of it?”

“I think it’s just crazy. I mean, there are holes in the story, but it’s hard to come up with any better explanation.”

“Like what? What holes?”

“Like how hard it is to find these people. The CIA these days has more leaks than they do. Not counting… sorry. I was about to make a really tasteless joke.”

“About their wounds?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a problem. I find your tastelessness endearing.”

“I’m glad someone does. But the pizza? Not tasteless.” She held up a very large piece and let a couple of sundried tomatoes drop to her plate.

“Not at all. Quite tasteful, in fact. Or tasty. Go us.” I finished my last bite. Since she’d been doing most of the talking, I was doing most of the eating.

“Agreed.” And then she adopted change-of-subject tone. Or change-the-subject-back tone. “So it’s funny. But I guess maybe you wouldn’t know, or maybe you’d have said something.”

“About what?”

“About playing vampire. That’s what I thought your friend Trudy was doing with that guy when we found them.”

The events of this day to be continued...

They Say

Originally written Thursday, January 5, 2006

“Oh yeah? What’d they have to say? Do they have any idea who did it?”

“Who did it? You didn’t know? It’s supposed to be accidental. She OD’ed.”

This was news to me, and while macabre, it still qualified as good news, if true. Her death could not now be prevented, but I’d be more than happy to learn that neither I nor Moshe had had any involvement in it. I hadn’t, after all, checked the body for bite marks; I’d merely trusted Patrick’s insinuation. Had he reacted impulsively without determining the truth of the matter himself? Of Jeanine, I asked, “Really? That’s official?”

“Well, that’s what the people at the club expect to hear from the police. There’s been a series of ODs like that ever since the club opened. So you haven’t heard any of this yet?” she looked a little surprised but not in a patronizing way.

“No, but I’m curious. What do you mean by a series of ODs? How often do they happen?” All too often these days an initially promising-sounding turn of events only inspires skepticism moments later. One OD is a relief of a sort; a series sounds suspicious, as I’m sure Jeanine realized.

“Oh boy, I get to spread gossip!” She smiled wickedly and clapped her hands. “This is down-low gossip, though. For your ears only.” And even though we were in the privacy of her home, she leaned forward conspiratorially. “Series of ODs, once or twice a year on average, with the big holes in the neck, loss of blood. I know I watch too much TV, but I’m not the only one who thinks of vampires. I mean, with a third of the kids at the club sporting fake fangs and all, it’s almost a foregone thing.”

So at least Patrick’s assumptions were not kneejerk. “ODs that look like vampire bites. And that woman had them?”

“Yup. So this is what Joey and the others say. They say that some of the vampire enthusiasts—I mean, one clique in particular. Some just dress like it, and some of the people who work at the club swear there are real vampires there, but whatever.” She chuckled a little but may have been watching for my reaction, which was to raise my eyebrows and smirk. It could have been interpreted as either skepticism or sharing in the joke. “Anyway, this one super-secret club of junkie vampire worshipers—that’s how they take their heroin. That’s how they shoot up.”

“In their necks? That doesn’t sound too smart.”

“I know, it’s not. Which is why they OD so often. They’ve never had an OD at the club that didn’t happen that way. It’s not even just injecting it there, they use some kind of special needles to make it look like they were bitten. Or maybe they bite each other. No one at the club actually knows because they’ve never seen it happen. They just find the bodies. And the autopsies always come back positive for heroin, so they just write it off as accidental.”

“Wow. That’s what I call taking obsessive to a whole ‘nother level,” I said. And I meant it, too.

“No shit.”

The events of this day to be continued...

Interiors

Originally written Thursday, January 4, 2006

I had a date with Jeanine last night. Right before I left for it, I checked my email and saw I’d gotten a message from Richard. It said something about having seen Moshe, so I made a quick mental note of it before heading out the door. I’ll have to call him tomorrow. He’s left me a few email and voicemail messages in the past couple of days, but I’d thought he was trying to contact me in order to shuffle around the charms or something silly like that. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I’m pretty happy with where they are right now. This was the first time he was specific in his message about why he was trying to reach me, and it seemed significantly more important. So I’ll get back to him after all.

I was able to finagle the plans with Jeanine so that we had dinner at her house. Cooking was a dual effort—I brought the pizza crust and she scrounged together some toppings—so it’s not like I was inviting myself over so that she could wait on me. She simply has more counter space. And, of course, possibly the third charm. And an ulterior motive. But who am I to talk?

I discovered fairly quickly that there was no charm in her apartment. Mine produced nary a ripple from where it hid on my wrist, disguised as a bangle, under a long-sleeve cardigan in case she were to recognize it. The absence of a charm in this particular location did not necessarily prove Jeanine’s innocence, but it was reassuring. Also reassuring, despite contributing further to the complexity of our relationship, was our conversation over dinner. I only wanted to engage in a long-delayed debriefing, not expecting it to take the turn it did, when I asked:

“So how’d things go that night at the Crypt after we got separated? Get the chance to hang out with your friend? He was really cool, by the way. I’m really glad I met him.”

“Yeah, Joey’s totally cool. He was like the first person I met here. He was my neighbor, actually, for like a month, before he moved into his girlfriend’s apartment. She’s awesome, too. Hey you know what? We should get together sometime, the four of us. Have a couples night.”

Cute coupley activities aren’t really my thing, but Joey did seem like a nice guy, so I agreed to keep it in mind.

“So did you end up knowing that woman?”

“What woman?” I didn’t realize she’d gone back to the Crypt, subject-wise.

“The one outside, the one Patrick thought you could I.D.”

“Oh yeah, no, no I didn’t; but Trudy and Moe did.”

“Wow, that sucks. Did they know her well?”

“I don’t think so, but remember that guy Trudy was with? I think she was a good friend of his.”

“Oh, geez, I’m sorry.” She paused for a suitably timed friend of a friend of a friend’s death moment. “You know, everyone was talking about it afterward. Joey and the bartenders. I ended up hanging out with them late into the morning after closing.”

The events of this day to be continued...