Across the Spectrum (45 page)

Her head still ached from the height of Crucero Alto’s
fifteen thousand feet. The landscape had gone to glaring, pallid blues and
browns, mountain on mountain with the snake track of Don Enrique’s rails,
Edouard’s tunnels and bridges, stretched piecemeal behind. Now the vista
changed to roaring dark. She glanced at Edouard’s personal altimeter, his one
everyday possession she had kept, worn like a watch about her neck. The dial
read, five thousand feet. Within minutes this tunnel would open on the wall of
Colca Canyon, its floor four thousand feet below.

She licked her lips and launched one final prayer.

The door panel blazed with light. She hauled open the
screeching galley window. Squinted upward, hitched the pothook round a bat-leg
and gave one fierce jerk.

The vampire landed on the floor in front of her and she
could not restrain one frantic leap. Ramon Flores yelped. Somewhere along the
train another man screamed.

“Jesu Maria, señora, that was the Indian. Quick!”

Concepçion flung the hook aside and snatched the pot-holder,
clapping it round velvet black fur, flinching from the twisting, hairless
cat-head, the hissing, the bared incisor teeth. Staggering for the window she
shrieked, “Now!”

Ramon Flores yanked the emergency stop.

Wheels, rails, frames and girders screamed as every driver
locked. Despite its slowed speed the whole train slid under her and Concepçion
had time to thank heaven she had not chosen to do this on the actual bridge.

Then the whistle began.

In seconds its normal hollow roar crescendoed, climbing in
pitch and volume like an insane opera singer until she thought her ears would
burst. She staggered for the galley window, twisting the pot-holder into a
bundle, stretching to the best angle for a throw.

Human shrieks pierced the whistle scream. A body hurtled
round the galley jamb and crashed into her, serape flying, hands thrashing,
Jesus’s voice caterwauling, “My bat, my bat! You will damage, you will hurt
him, strega, bruja, malevola, let him go, let him go!”

Concepçion thrust herself back at the window and threw.

The bundle sailed straight out, pot-holder unrolling to
leave the bat-shape black and clear on colorless sky. The pot-holder arced
toward the miniature brown mazes of canyon below. Above it, Concepçion saw the
bat wings open. Beat convulsively. The steam-whistle reached a high A like a
soul in torment and the black crescent staggered sidelong. Then, like a small
black leaf, it began to fall.

A battering ram hurled Concepçion against the range. Jesus
screamed too, louder than the steam-whistle, and flung himself head-first
through the window-gap.

Human body-weight carried him downward far faster than the
bat. Mesmerized, Concepçion saw him strike the canyon side, a silent puff of
dust. Then the body rebounded, over and over, vanishing into the depths.

A great distance off, the steam-whistle was still shrieking.
Someone made a gesture. Ramon Flores yanked the stop handle again.

After another eternity, the whistle scaled down and stopped.

∞

“My
abuela
, señores.” Ramon and Esteban goggled.
Concepçion rested her aching head against the galley wall. “She knew much about
bats. When I was a child, she told me they steered by the noise of things
around them. I heard the engine, the other Baldwin engine, whistle on the way
to Guaqui. If we only threw it—him—out, it—he—might have flown away. But if the
whistle deafened him—then he could not steer himself.”

The hush revealed uproar beyond them, shouts and outcries,
pounding feet. In a moment the wrath of the Ferrocarril will burst upon us, she
thought. And poor Jesus. Immortality. How long did he serve, on the Altiplano?
How many times did that emaciation nourish his master? Final obscenity, that
his death will serve his master’s destroyers, even as that master stole his
life.

Something banged ferociously on the exit door.

They all jumped a measurable foot. Then Esteban peered out
and suddenly began to yank at the handle, crying, “Señor Vivanco!”

Glowering, the engineer balanced below them on sleeper ends.
“Give me a hand up!”

Crazy laughter burst in Concepçion’s lungs. She thrust the
pot-hook at Esteban. “Use this!”

One pull to reach the foot-plate and Vivanco had doubled
himself over and in the door. Demanding almost before he uncoiled, “Did you get
it or not?”

“Yes.” Concepçion felt her voice shake. “The brujo is gone.”

Vivanco made a noise like a boiling tea-kettle. “And how
will you explain this—this—?”

“A man fell from the window.” I can explain the bat later.
“He was acting very strangely. Perhaps he chewed too much coca. He screamed
that his master had gone out the window, he must follow. We could not control
him, and he jumped.”

She stared limpidly into Vivanco’s eyes. He was turning an
odd color, like a half-bleached aubergine. “So,” she aimed to sound both
virtuous and shaken, “this helpful employee pulled the emergency stop.”

Vivanco’s jaw moved. Word-fragments percolated. Then the
champing stopped.

“You.” It was more than half a growl. “At Puno, I thought
you a remarkable woman. Now, I am sure Edouard knew what he was about, to marry
you.”

Concepçion felt her eyes start. Vivanco stepped forward,
giving her a full-scale bow.

“Ma Generale, permit me to introduce myself. I am Miguel
Vivanco, senior engineer on the Ferrocarril del Sur del Peru, and I humbly
request to know your direction. Because in La Paz or elsewhere, I intend to
call on you.”

Vaguely Concepçion saw Ramon and Esteban suddenly beaming
like godparents at a christening. Far too certainly she felt her whole face
crimson in a blush.

Then at Vivanco’s back the connecting door crashed open and
Don Jose burst through like a cannonball, bawling, “
Nom’ de Dios
, what
is
this?
Sixteen hours behind, and now an emergency stop—! No word, no
explanation, no attendant, and then all the doors stuck fast! I will dismiss, I
will jail every man who connived at this—!”

Faster than the vampire, Vivanco turned on him.

“Do not disturb yourself, Señor Jefe. This was a matter
concerning only the honor of the Ferrocarril. And it has already been
resolved.”

For me, this story takes place at the intersection of
friendship and faith, terror and compassion. I’d read a ton of vampire stories,
but none that explored how an observant Jew and a vampire who had known only
hatred might become friends and, ultimately, saviors of one another. A friend
of mine, a retired physician, still talks about how meaningful the story was to
her.

∞ ∞ ∞

Once Jacob asked me if I dream, and for a long time I did
not know how to answer him. I was once a man; should I not still dream like
one? The days do not go by in an instant, of that I am sure. I feel each
moment, the slow poisonous creeping of the sun. They are not dreams, these
visions which come to me. They are memories.

One memory in particular stands out, the night I met Jacob.
The night he saved what passes for my life and in so doing, saved his own.

In those days, the great American cities still struggled
against encroaching decay. San Francisco clung to the shards of vanished
grandeur while human vermin crawled her alleys. Fault lines, weakened by the
nuclear bomb the Celestial Jihad had set off in Los Angeles, shivered and
slipped. Hunting, I myself became a victim.

It took me a week to dig myself free of the tons of cement
and steel, each time awaking weaker and closer to despair. When at last I
staggered free of the rubble, I saw scavengers picking through the darkened
ruins. I wasn’t sure I could take one of them. My senses wavered and I could
barely stand, yet I must play the game out until the bitter end, following
these pitiful creatures until either starvation or dawn finished me.

Starvation almost got me first. After wandering half-witless
through one unfamiliar neighborhood after another, I collapsed behind a
building where lights still burned in the few unshattered windows. My fingers
curled around a chunk of broken concrete, and then, for the first time in three
centuries, I truly lost consciousness.

∞

My first awareness was that I had been moved somewhere
indoors. The time was later that same night. I felt a surge of patchy
artificial energy. It overrode my hunger like a stimulant drug. I would need to
act quickly, before it faded.

I sat up, taking in the kerosene-lit room. Beneath me lay
threadbare carpet, beside me a low pallet—a pile of blankets and crumbling foam
pads—and there, a man almost as pale as I. Connecting us was a length of clear
surgical tubing broken only by a central valve. I traced the tubing from one
needle—in his veins—to the other—in mine. The valve, I noted, was open in my
direction.

My mind began to work by fits and starts, unraveling the
message of my eyes. This young, aesthetic-looking stranger with his hooked nose
and tapering scholar’s fingers had thought to save my life by transfusing me.
He must have mistaken my coloring for anemia.

The poor fool had offered me his blood in the one form which
would give me no sustenance. His own death hovered a short time away, not just
from his meaningless sacrifice but from some wrongness in his body, the
lingering taint of some chemical pollutant. In retribution for his charity, I
would consign him to the longer, more painful death.

Moving carefully, though there was scant chance of awakening
my nameless savior, I reversed the valve. I watched our blended blood flow back
into him. For a moment, I thought of feeding, for hunger now shrieked through
every cell of my body.

But no, I would let him live, and in living, die.

Yet even as I turned away from him, ready to plunge back
into the night, I scented a tempering of the poison. I told myself a portion of
my own blood now ran in him, even as his ran in me. I told myself it did not
matter.

∞

Forty years later, autumn twilight settled on the
Mendocino hills, ridge after ridge stretching into the distance like the backs
of grazing sheep. A last breath of heat shimmered up from the crusted soil and
a hunting owl soared noiselessly on the shifting thermal currents.

Breathing heavily, Jacob Rosenberg clambered to the vantage
point from which he could look across the valley. He laid down his walking
stick and lowered himself to a flat stone. Below him, the town lay hidden
behind a shoulder of hill, the fields of ripening grain now faded to
golden-gray.

Moving carefully, for the stone, although smooth, was
unforgiving, he took off his spectacles and ran his hands over his wiry white
beard, massaging the indentations on the bridge of his nose. The world blurred,
unknowable. He took a hand-sewn
yarmulke
from his pocket, placed it on
his head, and composed himself for prayer. He did not own a
siddur
, a
prayer book. It, along with his father’s fringed
tallis
, had perished
four decades ago in the nuclear ashes of Los Angeles. He had only his memories
to guide him now.

As Jacob’s thoughts quieted, he closed his eyes, feeling the
faint chill that heralded the season’s change. He found himself thinking of the
observances of his childhood—the songs, the stories, the long discussions of
his father’s favorite passages from Hillel and Maimonides, all tinged with the
sense of delicious mystery. Soon the High Holy Days would be upon him, the Days
of Awe. He would set aside a time for reflection, for putting his life in order
for the new year, for examining the wrongs he had done and making restitution
where he could. The valley people would not understand if he asked their
forgiveness, for what had he ever done to harm them, he who’d cured their
children of pneumonia and bloodrot and fevers?

“Baruch atah Adonai
eloheinu melech ha-olam . . . ”

Words came softly from his mouth, half-remembered prayers.
The ancient syllables lingered in the air. He rocked back and forth with their
rhythm, wondering if anywhere else in the world, some other of his scattered
people were doing the same. At moments like these he wished there might be,
just once, other voices raised with his, the community of a
minyan
. That
there might be someone to say
Kaddish
for him when he died.

He pulled himself to his feet, joints and muscles
protesting. The last of the day had fled while he’d sat meditating. As he
started down the path, the beam of his flashlight wavered. He caught the
ghostly pattern of grass and rock, hardly distinguishable from one another. His
heart beat raggedly. He caught his foot on a stone and stumbled, struggling to
catch himself.

Suddenly the earth fell away beneath him. One hip slammed
against something hard. Darkness rushed past, battering his senses. His
flailing hands met branches, thin and dry. He grasped at them and they broke
away in his fingers. Then his body came to a jarring halt at the bottom of a
gully.

Jacob lay on the rocky ground, one leg twisted under him,
hands sprawled outward. His first thought as he blinked up at the emerging
stars was amazement that he was still alive.

Years ago, when there had still been libraries, he’d read a
story of an old man, an American Indian, who’d gone out into the snowy forest,
built a fire, and sat with his back against a tree just out of the circle of
its warmth. At the time he’d read the story, Jacob had been young and filled
with passion. How could a man choose death? he’d stormed. How could a man not
struggle against it, in all its protean forms—microbe and mob and tainted rain?
How could he just sit there while the light died and the heat seeped from his
body into the endless night? How? How?

This night, it comes
for me?