My father watched Redfern pace the room, talking about philosophy — of all things. He said he wanted to know more about my father’s ethics, but before my father could say anything, he talked about his own.
Redfern considered himself a utilitarian. “Would you agree,” he said, “that man’s sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?”
“Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain.” My father crossed his arms. “And only if one man’s pleasure is as important as any other’s.”
“Well then.” Redfern’s face seemed redder than ever in the firelight, and he struck my father as exceptionally ugly. “You would agree that the amount of pleasure or pain produced by an action is a chief criterion for determining which actions to perform.”
My father said he agreed. He felt as if he were attending a lecture in Ethics 101. “Many actions are wrong because they cause pain,” Redfern said, waving his poker, the blackened bread slice skewered at its tip. “You would agree? And if it can be shown that an act will lead to pain, that in itself would be sufficient reason not to pursue it.”
At this point my father noticed a small movement in the room, somewhere behind him. But when he turned to look, he saw nothing. The sickening smell seemed to intensify.
“It would follow, then, that there are cases in which it is necessary to inflict pain now to avoid greater pain later on, or to gain future pleasure that is worth the current pain.”
My father’s eyes were on Redfern’s, trying to fathom his motives, when Malcolm came from behind, pulled back his head, and bit deeply into his neck.
“What was it like?” I asked my father.
“You don’t feel a sense of disgust at hearing this?”
I felt simultaneously alert and numb. “You promised to tell me everything.”
The pain burned, more fierce than anything my father had ever experienced. He struggled in vain to get away.
Malcolm held him in an awkward embrace that would have been unthinkable, had my father been able to think. He tried to twist his head to see Malcolm’s face — and then he must have fainted, but not before he glimpsed that, from across the room, Redfern was watching the scene with blatant pleasure.
When my father regained consciousness, he lay across the sofa, and when he brushed his hand across his face, it came away dark with clotted blood. His friends weren’t in the room.
He sat up. His head felt large and swollen, and his legs and arms felt weak, but he wanted more than anything to run away. The fire had gone out, and the room was cold, but the smells of burnt bread and the other unknown substance persisted. Now they seemed almost appetizing, as did an unfamiliar coppery taste in his mouth.
His nerves tingled. He felt empty, yet his veins seemed charged with something like adrenaline. He managed to stand and walk to the lavatory. In a dingy mirror over the sink, he saw the wound in his neck and a crust of blood around his mouth. His heartbeat echoed in his head like the sound of metal striking metal.
Opposite the lavatory was a closed bedroom door, and the unfamiliar odor came from behind it. Something dead must be in that room, my father thought.
Halfway down the steps, he saw Redfern and Malcolm approaching the staircase. He stood on the landing and watched them come.
He felt shame, anger, a desire for revenge. Yet, as they walked up the steps to the landing, he did nothing.
Redfern nodded. Malcolm glanced at him and looked away. Malcolm’s hair fell over his eyes, and his face was pink as if he’d recently scrubbed it. His eyes looked dull, uninterested, and he smelled of nothing at all.
“Explanations are useless,” Malcolm said, as if my father had asked for one. “But some day you’ll realize that it happened for your own good.”
Redfern shook his head and went on up the stairs, muttering, “Americans. Utterly incapable of irony.”
“Did you know what you were?” I asked my father.
“I had an idea,” he said. “I’d seen some of the movies, read some of the books — but that was fiction, I thought. And much of it has proven false.”
“Can you change into a bat?”
He looked at me — that reluctant look of disappointment. “No, Ari. That’s folklore. I wish it were true. I’d love to be able to fly.”
I began to ask another question, but he said, “You need sleep. I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow.”
My legs had already gone to sleep, I realized. The grandfather clock struck the quarter hour: 12:15. I shook my legs and stood up slowly.
“Father,” I said, “am I one, too?”
Of course he knew what I meant. He said, “It’s beginning to look that way.”
Chapter Eight
Very little that people write about us is true,” my father said the next afternoon. “Never trust those who claim to be vampire experts. They tend to be poseurs with morbid imaginations.”
We sat again in the living room, not the library. I’d come to our meeting prepared, or so I thought, with pages of vampire lore I’d copied from the Internet into my journal. He’d skimmed a few pages, then shaken his head.
“Written by well-intentioned fools,” he said. “It’s a pity that more vampires don’t write the facts. A few have, and I’d like to think that more will, as we learn better ways to cope with our condition.”
“What about stakes in the heart?” I asked now.
He frowned, the center of his mouth pursed while its corners curled downward. “Anyone will die from a stake in the heart,” he said. “And anyone will die if they’re severely burned, including vampires. But sleeping in coffins, melodramatic costumes, the need for fresh victims — that’s all bunk.”
The world is home to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of vampires, he said. No one knows for certain, because the question isn’t likely to be listed on census forms. Most vampires live rather normal lives, once they’ve learned to cope with their special needs — not so much different from those of any other chronic ailment.
“Like lupus,” I said.
“I lied to you about the lupus, Ari. I’m sorry. It’s the story I devised in order to get by in the world. I wanted to be honest with you, but I felt I should wait until you were older. If you turned out to be mortal, I thought you might as well believe I had lupus. And if not — well, another part of me thought that you knew it wasn’t lupus, all along.”
Yet, he said, in some respects vampirism is like lupus — the sensitivity to sunlight, the tendency to experience joint pain and migraine headaches. Certain drugs and supplements that treat lupus help vampires, too, particularly in monitoring immune systems. Seradrone had developed blood supplements used by vampires and lupus sufferers alike, by-products of its research in the field of artificial blood.
“We’re developing new drugs specifically for us,” he said. “Last year clinical trials began on a new hybrid called Meridian Complex. It increases tolerance of sunlight and inhibits the desire for blood.”
I must have looked uncomfortable. His eyes suddenly were sympathetic. “That part of the lore, unfortunately, is true.”
“Did you kill my mother?” I said it without thinking first. More and more, that seemed to happen — words were spoken as they were thought.
“Of course not.” Again, he looked disappointed.
“Did you ever drink her blood?”
“You promised to be patient,” he said.
People have ridiculous names for the condition, but my father preferred vampirism, though the word’s origins are in grim Slavic history. There are other names for the process of becoming a vampire: the role-players call it “being sired,” while others call it “transformation” or “rebirth.”
“You’re only born once, unfortunately,” my father said. “I wish it were otherwise.”
He referred to his own initiation as a “change of state.”
“After the change of state, a period of ill health usually ensues,” he said.
I tried to imagine what his “change of state” had felt like, and I couldn’t.
Suddenly I found myself imagining what it would be like to bite him — yes, bite the neck of my own father. What might his blood taste like?
At that moment he gave me a look so dark, so threatening, that I said at once, “I apologize.”
After a moment’s awkward silence, he said, “Let me tell you how it was.”
For days he lay in bed half awake, half dreaming, too weak to do more.
Malcolm came by once a day to feed him. The first time was the worst. Malcolm walked in, pulled an ivory-handled knife from his coat pocket, and without ceremony slit open his left wrist. He pushed my father’s mouth into the wound, and like any newborn, my father sucked up nourishment.
After each feeding he felt stronger, and he always vowed to never do it again. But he wasn’t strong enough to resist Malcolm.
One afternoon, while my father was feeding, Dennis walked in.
Vampiric lore talks of the erotic nature of the taking of another’s blood. My father said there is some truth in those tales. He felt a sort of sickening pleasure as he drank.
Dennis’s face showed shock and disgust. Although my father felt ashamed, he kept drinking. When he was full, and Malcolm had withdrawn his arm, they both looked at Dennis again. His expression had changed; it was pleading.
Malcolm opened his mouth, and my father knew he was ready to lunge at Dennis. With all his strength, my father shouted, “No!”
Malcolm made a noise like a snarl.
Dennis said, “I can help. Both of you, I can help.”
For the next five days, Dennis was to prove himself my father’s best friend.
My father lay in bed, almost delirious at times with the new hunger and with rage at Malcolm. He fantasized about murdering him. At that time he knew little about vampirism beyond fiction and film. Once he asked Dennis to bring him wooden stakes and a mallet.
Instead, Dennis brought blood from the hospital, which wasn’t as potent as Malcolm’s, but proved more easily digestible. My father felt less powerful after the injections, but also less agitated. Dennis read to him from current research into the development of artificial blood and hormones that stimulate bone marrow to produce red blood cells. Together they began to plan a protocol for survival that didn’t require drinking live humans’ blood.
During this time, Dennis introduced my father to the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. He read aloud from their autobiographies. Both believed in the supreme importance of kindness and compassion. Gandhi wrote of the futility of revenge and the importance of nonviolence. And the Dalai Lama wrote, “In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”