Nanowrimo - 23

There’s no question about it. Our little mummy and son adventure has just taken a different turn entirely. No trip to Paris for us, just yet. We both exhibit some bad behavior in our dismay over postponing some much needed fun. Eventually our nice hotel room is relinquished, bags get packed and more gold is parted with in order to get a used car.

“A Jetta?” I ask as Jack pulls up to snag Artie and me from our secure location.

“It gets 30 miles to the gallon and only cost three grand, so stuff it, mum!”

“Why he callin you ‘mum’?” Artie asks as he crouches into the back seat. I notice him folding himself to fit in and find it odd. Jetta’s aren’t that small.

“Because I’m his mother, that’s why. We’re both over 200 years old. I’ll explain more later.” He makes some baffled noises as I slam the door shut and pile into the shot gun seat.

Knowing how every toll booth and rest stop along the interstates to be blanketed in security cameras, we wind around on side roads. There’s sure to be a notice out for Artie by now. As it is we order him to lie down in the back.

“Where you takin’ me?” He asks with more curiosity than concern in his voice.

“We don’t know, but this is not a good place for us to be. There’s more eyes here than in a forest full of Indians!” I tell him.

After enough driving on side streets and small streets to be well outside of the city limits, I tell him it’s ok to sit up. Not wanting to continually turn around I commandeer the rear-view mirror, bending it so that I can see his face in it as I talk. “Ok, listen. I’m going to go through some basics for you so that you can separate some of the fact from fiction about what you are. Got it?”

“Yes ‘m.” He says. In the reflection his dark eyes aim at me like two smoldering coals.

“Very well, then. First, the proper term for what we are is “once-born” because we are born once, unlike mortals who must continually reincarnate onto the earthly plain over and over.”

“And who generally end up making the same mistakes over and over” Jack interjects.

“Well, that’s not far from the truth, actually. But we don’t use the term ‘vampire’ as it’s considered a bit, well, prejorative.”

“Prejawhat? What does that mean? What’s wrong with ‘vampire’?”

“It’s the difference between calling someone an ‘African American’ or a ‘nigger’.” Jack interjects again.

“Right, it’s a bit insulting. Shows a lack of understanding.”

“W-w-wonce born?”

“That’s right.”

“I ain’ never goin’ die? Not even if someone hurt me?”

“That’s right. You are the only one who can decide to end your life. If someone hurts you, stabs you or shoots you, your body will heal much more quickly than it can bleed to death.”

“Never die… hm.” He repeats as he looks out the window.

I continue “Also as you may have noticed, going around in the daytime does not kill you. That idea is part of the mythology. The only truth it may have to it is due to the fact that many once borns prefer to do their business at night so as to avoid contact with mortals as much as possible. Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah! Yeah I am.” He jolts his eyes back toward me. “I’se just lookin outside. Never been out of Chicago before.”

“Never? Huh. Well, there’s a whole lot of flat out there to see! Anyhow, back to what I was saying…”

“Look miss,” Artie interrupts, “I is real tired. I’m a lie down and rest for a bit if it’s ok whit chu.”

“Oh, sure, sure that’s fine Artie.”

In a matter of minutes we hear his rhythmic snoring coming from the back seat. Jack is being awfully quiet, keeping his eyes locked on the road. There’s a rancor in the atmosphere I can’t quite sit at peace with.

“I should have been there to help you like that.”

“But you most certainly were not. You had to run off and leave me.”

“I didn’t have any of this to help you with back then. It took decades and decades before I had the simplest tools to help myself. I wasted a lot of years doing everything wrong.”

“Tell me, I heard you tell him yesterday that you had made big mistakes, too. What were your mistakes? Tell me your biggest regrets.”

“Oh where to start. From a very early age I was aware that being a female put me at a great disadvantage in this world. No matter what ideas I had for myself or what thoughts I had in my head, everyone seemed determined to tell me that I had no right to think or act on my own. It was driving me mad before I was even sixteen. That’s when my marriage to your father was arranged. He was the unkindest person I’d ever met. His manner refused to respond to any human kindness I offered. Again, I was a woman and therefore immediately a failure. Part of my realizing that I was a once born came from my desperate desire to prove my own worth and strength to him. He was demanding an heir, yet he refused to lie with me. After I had fed for the first time I possessed a strength he could not resist. I forced him to know me. I guess my first regret was that I had to become this something else, this beast, in order to gain what I wanted.

“I regret having been able to stand up for my child and demand that he be kept close to me. I regret that I listened to his influence over me, telling me that I had nothing to offer my own baby. I left because I really thought I was going to spare you becoming what I was. Every time I thought of my baby through the years, my hope was that he had lived a normal life. I mostly regretted that I had no ability to be a normal mother. Perhaps it was out of missing that normal, nurturing role that I turned to the ministry. But that was only after I was already at least 80 years old.”

“I was lucky enough to find Zoltan once I arrived in Paris, he nurtured me through the early years. All of the things he warned me not to do, I went ahead and did. Probably just like every other once born out there.”

“Mistakes like what, tell me.”

“Oh… I fell in love.”

“Love? You?”

“Yes even my icy old heart can find love! Thank you very much! Maybe it was just the circumstances. I landed in Baltimore around 1810 and the air and space over here were absolutely intoxicating. Pretty soon I met him, Gabriel McClean, God’s prettiest man. He had a wide smile and a kind nature. But mostly he was just real tall and real strong and I’d have followed him anywhere, just like some kind of puppy. He just seemed like, well, a real man. He didn’t need to put me down to prove himself. He didn’t much mind what others thought of him because he just had this air of confidence about himself. He had me swooning at the first smile.”

Jack finally unglues his eyes from the road to glance over at me. “He sounds real nice, I’d have followed him too, I imagine!”

“Oh my yes. Well, he was heading into the frontier, through Indian country, doing his trading and trapping. So, off I went into what was then wilderness. Now it’s just ‘Ohio’! Well, after the Federals cleared the natives out the whole area got more settled. We ended up settling down but I could tell that’s not where Gabriel’s heart was at. He was a man who needed to wander.”

“What happened?”

“What happened was that I fooled myself. A man can be as kind and as generous as peach pie and still have a heart so stony no love can make a dent on it. I thought that man loved me. Hmmm. Nope. He had it in his mind to head out west. Wanted to see the territories where no people were living. He needed to be in those wild places and felt the wringer of age creeping up on him. One day he was just gone. No note. Nothing. His stuff was gone, his horse was gone, he’d up and left.”

“What? Well you must have seen that coming, didn’t you? Even a mortal doesn’t make up his mind that fast.”

“Oh the signs were there when I looked back for them. He’d be reading the stories about the goings on with the western territories out of the papers. He slowly became a little less, well, affectionate. He started looking at me funny. Like he was suspicious.”

“Were you continuing to feed?”

“Yes, so I wasn’t aging. He didn’t quite know what to make of that. I told him that it was my French origins, our skin ages less quickly. Didn’t matter. He was gone. After that, I went on a rage. My urges were completely out of control. I must have killed dozens of people.”

“You? You who up until a week ago was so squeamish about feeding?”

“Well, I personally don’t believe this urge can be so well trusted as I’ve always been taught. I’ve found that it can be manipulated by emotions. It’s not always at hand for our self preservation, it can be greedy, too. Well, I would catch someone, mostly men, alone in a barn or something and I got them in the most awful of ways. I’d let the venom into them but not drink them right away. I’d put just enough in to paralyze them, not enough to really sedate them. Even without being able to move a muscle their eyes still registered fear. I would kill them slowly, relishing the fear. Letting them feel the life draining out of their bodies.”

“Mum, that’s absolutely horrible!”

“And that’s what I regret. I regret loosing control. I don’t trust the urge. I don’t think feeding is always merely life sustaining. Sometimes I think feeding merely keeps alive something horrible that lives inside of me that would be better dead.”

Jack is drives on in silence, but the strained atmosphere has slackened. Noises of dreams, grunts and even animal growls come from the seat behind us as Artie struggles through dreams.

“Tell me about you. Did you ever fall in love, Jack?”

His face melts into a bit of a grin. “Why yes I sure did ma’am. I was in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century. I just loved New Orleans, still do. There are more of us there than just about anywhere else, you know, except maybe Paris. Well, anyhow, I met this boy, Damien, a beautiful octoroon with honey colored skin and lovely green eyes. He had me wrapped around his finger from the start. Same as you I just followed him right home. I just wanted to be with him and do everything with him all the time. It was nice, for a while. Being able to be seen out in just about the only place on Earth where that was allowed was like a breath of fresh air. We could hold hands on the street. Go out for a brunch. Our colors didn’t matter, our gender didn’t matter. What mattered was our love an that’s what folks on the street responded to.”

“Alright, what happened.”

“Damien just got tired of me after a while. He didn’t like the close comfort of being with the same man day after day. And I guess I began to sense that – that growing distance. One day it was just time for me to move on, I guess. I saw him in a café flirting with another man and realized that it didn’t bother me so much at all. Not like it would have years earlier when we started.”

“So you left?”

“I did. I guess I’d have been the bad guy in your story.”

“hm. I think mostly I was jealous of Gabriel’s ability to leave. As a man he could do that, make up the rules as he went along and not worry about anyone else. I always envied men’s social license to do that.”

“Still feel that way?” He turns to look at me.

“Yes”

The air is silent for a while as we pass through yet another small Indiana town.

“I guess this is what we really wanted after all.” He volunteers

“Indeed.” For a second we share about the only honest grin to pass between us thus far.

The growling in the back seat has grown quiet again. Soon Artie wakes up and sits up in the back seat.

“Nice nap?” I ask, looking into the rearview mirror. But, to my surprise where I once saw his dark eyes staring back at me, I now see the top of a chest and an adam’s apple. I turn around and am shocked to find a fully grown, strapping black man sitting in the back seat and busting out of Artie’s clothes. “Artie?”

“Don’t be calling me ‘Artie’ no mo. My name be ‘Wolf’.” Booms the base voice of the man.

“Well!” Jack says “I guess we don’t have to worry about harboring a minor anymore!” and he aims the Jetta for the interstate.

There’s something not right here, something not right about the way he’s transforming. Both Jack and I know this. I’ve never met a once born who was born after the 1950’s and wonder if perhaps the change in human blood that has affected our reaction to drinking may have also changed the entire nature of new ones of us that emerge upon this earth? I can sense that neither of us are sure, but it becomes abundantly clear that this new creature, Wolf, is not like any of the older once borns we have known. And despite his adult stature, the man is still only twelve years old.

We stop off at a shopping mall to get Wolf some clothes that will fit his grown body. Quickly he proves that the juvenile delinquent lives on inside of him. We go to the mens section to pick out clothes for him to wear. But, rather than participate in the activity, Wolf lies on the floor lighting matches and letting them burn down to his fingers before blowing them out. He just lies under the racks of clothing, humming and mumbling to himself with a pile of stubbed out matches growing next to him. We hurriedly buy extra large sweat clothes and drag him out of the store.

We’re almost to Cleveland when we realize that we need gas and so we get off the highway and pick one of the smaller gas stations in the area to fill up. Wolf says he wants to stay in the car. But, once Jack and I are inside the mini-store paying for the gas we hear shrieks from outside. A woman comes rushing in screaming “there’s a wolf in the parking lot!”

I race outside, ignoring the yells of people around me to ‘not go out there’. Sure enough, there is a lone grey wolf growling and leaping around the lot of the gas station. He zeros in on a car full of shrieking children and circles the vehicle, menacing look on his face.

Slowly I come up behind the beast. “Wolf!” I shout.

When he hears my voice he turns around and his ears turn back. But he holds his ground. I advance towards it. I can only call on some greater power within me, that which all once borns share, that which binds us together, I bid that esoteric power to speak through me in that moment. I shut my eyes and feel it rush forward, from an ancient and deep well. As I open my eyes I know that from them comes the ancient glow. I can feel my teeth emerge, this time not to feed but to protect and challenge a misuse of power. From my own throat a deep growl emerges, simply saying “No”.

“No” the voice repeats through me as I continue moving toward the animal. “NO!” I’m within three feet of him. The rest of the world, the squealing children and onlookers shouting “what is she doing, lady get out of there!” fade to nothing in that moment where the old power inhabiting my features locks eyes with the wolf. Its ears back, the beast relents and runs away, tail between its legs.

In a matter of seconds I feel the power recede and dim. My teeth disappear and I see the world around me with fully human eyes again.

I turn around to see astonished faces coming from car and store windows. “Lady, how did you do that?” a man runs up to me asking feverishly.

“Something I learned while living on an Indian Reservation.” I tell him, eager to get out of here.

Jack meets me at the car wearing a panicked look. “He’s gone! You don’t think…”

I raise a hand to cut him off. “Wait” is all I say.

We sit silently in the car for a few minutes. Jack looks nervously at a map, hoping we don’t attract more attention and trying to ignore the people who are talking and pointing over toward our car. Soon enough I see the tall figure of Wolf come loping towards us from behind the gas station. He gets in the car, settling quietly in the back seat as if nothing has just happened.

I grab the rear view mirror and re-adjust it to find his eye level again. “No more tricks, young man.” I say to the dark eyes in the mirror.

“Yes ma’am” is all I hear from the backseat. We head off toward Pennsylvania in silence.