I am out in the street now. In front of the casino, which rises up into the night sky like some Piet Mondrian artwork gone haywire. It’s early January in the so-called Midwest. Cold as fuck. Not that that really matters to The Vampire Henry. I’m wearing a light canvas coat just to give the illusion that the frigid cold is affecting me in some way. It isn’t. I just as well could be on some beach in the Caribbean, naked as a baby. In fact, the thought flashes in my brain to strip down to my soiled boxers right here right now and prance through the narrow neon streets of Old Detroit and Greektown. Give the high rollers and the hookers a lil somethin’ somethin’ to remark on.
But I don’t…
I start walking through the frost-blasted streets, not in any particular hurry to return to my crummy little hotel room. It’s only twelve AM or so. I have plenty of time to get back, bury myself under the covers of the queen-sized bed, before the killing sun gets too high in the sky.
As I did when I was alive, I just take in the dark, garish mis en scene. The people hurrying out of restaurants and shops. The couples holding hands as they try to hail a taxi. The well-heeled and the down-and-out. A few lines from a poem I wrote once-upon-a-time about such phenomena come unbidden to my mind as I stop in front of a sandwich shop.
“This is what I came to see/ My species
As far away from Le Grande Jette/As they can be”
I actually wrote that verse about some zoo I ended up in one day when I was human. It might have been the National Zoo with the pandas. I think it applies to this little scene too. Full of energy. Full of color and real life. Of course, human beings are no longer my species but what of it? I can still savor the taste of a Marlboro Light--the smoke filling my lungs like some woodsy elixir. I can still look at some beautiful woman as she hurries past, at the way her dark eyes catch the lights of some humdrum franchise and transform them into fiery jewels. It’s good. It’s still good despite all the mountains of shit you have to scale. Despite the knowledge that such refuges are not and will never be eternal.
“Maybe in death?” I think for the millionth time, exhaling smoke into the cold cold air.
“No. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep,” I think, quoting a better known human poet.
I walk past a homeless guy. He’s sitting in a flimsy lawn chair, at the top of a one-way that stretches out from the casino block like a colorful appendage. He’s wearing a green army jacket and a black toboggan cap. It looks like he’s wearing two or three layers of clothing underneath the jacket. And that’s a good thing because it’s probably ten degrees right now.
He’s reading a paperback book of all things. Calmly turning pages. As if he were sitting on that Caribbean beach I mentioned earlier.
What a long strange trip it’s been…
“What are you reading, brother?” I ask, as I edge past him. For a second, I wonder if he might be a vampire like me. He seems so calm just sitting there reading his book. So very unaffected by the bitter cold. By the night and the chaos swarming around him. But no. I can smell him. He’s a human being, all right. Perhaps he just has to read al fresco. And when he is done reading, perhaps he will go and take a midnight swim in the Detroit River.
Nothing, literally nothing, surprises me much anymore.
He holds the slim trade paperback up so I can see the cover.
And then, I really am surprised.
It’s my book. The book I wrote. It’s The Vampire Henry by Henry Wordsworth Lovell.
Well I’ll be dipped in shit…
“Any good?” I ask, looking at the cover, trying to remain as nonchalant as I can. This is the first time I have ever seen the finished book really. The dark cover like some old penny dreadful. A crude drawing of a thin man with wild eyes and an aquiline nose. Hoisting a tumbler filled to the rim with BLOOD. Striking.
Doesn’t look one bit like yours truly…
The homeless man shrugs his shoulders and grimaces. As if the cold were finally getting to him.
“Not really,” he says, shaking his tobogganed head. “Ima havin’ a hard time suspendin’ my disbelieves…”
Suspending your…suspending your WHAT? Why is that a problem, I think, incredulously. He’s the one sitting here in a lawn chair, casually reading his way through the polar vortex.
I just wanna drain the dude…
But before I can do that my vampire senses, all of them, explode. Like some old-style flashbulb popping. The hairs on my arms stand up. An ocean of smells fill my not-so-aquiline nostrils.
Serling…Serling…Serling…
He is close again. So CLOSE.
I turn away from the homeless bibliophile and his dismissal of my book and look across the street that runs perpendicular to the one-way. There is some vast building there, some construction project that has to take up three or four blocks. Tops. Don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Condos, probably. It’s just one giant shell—it’s exterior covered in white insulation panels. Here and there a window.
And fifty feet up, a black figure is scaling the sheer face of this building like some errant spider. He scuttles sideways for a few minutes, reaches one of the windows. Rests there for what seems an eternity. Then begins his ascent again, this time a fairly vertical climb.
Serling…
Well who the fuck else would it be…?
“I like Anne Rice…” the homeless dude ventures. But before he can finish that literary assessment, I am off. Bounding across the street in pursuit of my prey. A taxi slams on its brakes, narrowly missing me. It would not matter if it did hit me. Probably cause more damage to the cab.
“Hey!” I hear the driver shout. He follows that with a sharp blast on his horn.
More background noise. There is only one thing on my mind. Catching Serling. Catching the motherfucker who killed my woman. Killed her as casually as he might a pig in some abattoir chute.
I am going to fuck him like he has never been fucked…