Annie of the Undead (12 page)

“So what do we do now?” I asked as we plunked
down our belongings –I’d have to sneak that shotgun in later,
during the day, when everyone was asleep.

“Now, I hunt.”

“Oooo. Can I come?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Begging does not become you.”

“But why?”

“Because it is the most dangerous thing that I
do. I must be swift, silent, and undetected. You are mortal.”

“What if the Louisiana Werewolf attacks you?
You’ll need backup-“

He looked at me.

“Well, there are vampires, aren’t there? How am
I supposed to know that werewolves are made up?”

I could see that line of argument was getting me
nowhere. I kicked the dresser. After everything we’d been
through…

“Come with me,” he consoled, “I want to speak
with you.”

“What, we aren’t right now?”

“Not here. Come out with me, into the city.
There we will talk.”

It was a warm night, which mystified me after
having nearly frozen myself to death only a few days before. The
tropic weight pants and workout shirts I’d purchased were going to
be very useful here. And with the balm, so were the cornrows.

We went into the city, into the neighborhood
that I would come to know was Faubourg Marigny, with its quiet
residential streets lined with quaint architecture, lumpy old
trees, and the more than occasional oddity of some object or other
bizarrely repurposed, such as a toilet filled with soil and
overflowing with flowers in a front yard. We wandered down
Frenchman Street, through the crowds of a healthy nightlife and
what I considered excessively happy people. Live music issued forth
from various doorways, and people gathered outside in the heat
where there wasn’t room enough to swelter with the rest of the
crowd indoors.

We went to the French Quarter, where the
buildings crowded in on one another, forming a seemingly endless
façade along each side of the street. Vines knotted through iron
fences, and trees dripped with what beads a few years of Mardi Gras
could replenish since the hurricane tore a century’s worth down. We
passed immaculate Spanish townhouses with bright paint and
clean-swept porches decorated with neatly-pruned potted plants, and
their seedy next-door neighbors with broken Venetian blinds drawn,
an equally seedy-looking guy lurking in the shadows of the front
porch of one, smoking a joint as advertisement to his nighttime
clients. The old was mixed with the new here, the high and the
lowlife, inextricably intertwined –so different from Detroit, where
the wealthy had fled the city for the green grass of the
suburbs.

We wandered from the residential part of the
French Quarter to where business was entertainment, and
entertainment was business. Light spilled from lovely windows,
backlighting fine artwork for sale, gaudy tourist trinkets,
mood-lighted restaurants, and bars galore. “Good Mister Goodwin”
posters dotted signposts, doors, and walls. The streets smelled of
savory spices and cooking food everywhere but where they smelled of
strong libation spilled outside bars or garbage accumulating with
nowhere to go. The French Quarter smelled like a medieval city, not
like a city built on internal combustion engines, their fuel, and
its exhaust.

We passed busy restaurants, emanating all savory
smells, and the Place de France, where a golden statue of Joan of
Arc cut a valiant figure in the spotlights, little worse for the
wear for having been murdered by power-jealous zealots. We passed
Jackson Square, a broad park dotted with huge, gnarled trees and
loitering bums, and lit by streetlamps that harkened to antiquity.
A life-sized statue of the man on his horse stood on a block at its
center, illuminated to striking effect –as backdrop: the pale
spires of the St. Louis Cathedral reaching up to god. Miguel
scanned the scene with his eyes. I had the feeling, though, that he
was more interested in the people than the park.

We walked along the hulking darkness that was
the river, with the lights of boats dotting its expanse, moving
north to colder climes or south to the sea. We walked slowly,
easily –Miguel’s pace. He was immortal, after all. Time was not an
enemy. He seemed to wander without any purpose other than soaking
in all about him. I could imagine that he knew another sensory
world than I did, the way he gazed around, above and beyond
everyone, everything, but still so very much enveloped in it all,
the way his head turned to follow the interwoven threads of music
played by so many musicians on so many street corners and in so
many bars. He seemed utterly in this moment. Was this the way he
wandered the world? Experiencing.
Living.
More than I ever
had. What an irony.

We walked out among the people, which made me
keenly aware of the undead man who walked by my side. I was the
only one anywhere with such an escort, a superhuman who could leap
who knew how high in the air, and who could subdue strong and vital
prey. Of that, though I had not witnessed it, I had no doubt he was
capable. It was a strange feeling being in this unfamiliar place
with him. It was so far from anything I had known. It was
out-of-body. Did I even have to be tough with him beside me? I
didn’t know how to be anything else.

“This is one of the best places on this
continent,” said Miguel as we walked by a cart drawn by a mule
dressed in a hat with silk flowers all over it. “For my
people.”

“You’ve been here before, I take it.”

“Yes. It is a favorite of the one for whom we
wait.”

“Your friend.”

“Yes. His name is Andy. We were lovers.”

“Oh.”

“I am no longer homosexually inclined.”

He paused as a young woman in a long, cotton
dress brushed past him. His lips slightly parted as though he was
testing her scent. A fleeting look of pleasure passed his face.

“Really,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But I thought you’re born gay or born hetero,
and you stay that way.”

“Perhaps it is so with mortals, but I have
changed. I am no longer sexually inclined at all.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised, “Because you’re
dead?”

We wandered up to a brick-paved plaza patterned
in red, white, and blue, with a majestic fountain at the center and
encircled by stone benches. The Mississippi lapped and hummed only
forty or so feet away. A quaint but large white ferry boat lay
sleeping along the shore. Opposite the river, in stark contrast to
the architecture I had so far seen, towered a sky-scraping modern
hotel. Upriver was the shiny hulk of a modern shopping mall. Its
glitzy maw belched young people, dressed in their newly-purchased
clubbing best for a night on the town. Girls in tube-tops,
painted-on jeans, and daring heels. They gabbed and gazed about,
observing each other. They too were clean, shiny, and modern.

“With death the drive to copulate is lost. Some
lose their sexual interests completely upon becoming immortal. For
others, the special fascination with the trappings of reproduction,
or with a particular gender or other fetish, lingers on. My love
for Andy was somewhat associated with sexuality in the beginning.
Later that aspect of our relationship died in me. It did not,
however, die in him.”

“Are we really talking about this in
public?”

“No one is listening.”

“Miguel, why are you telling me all of
this?”

“You will likely meet Andy if he comes to me. I
seek to prepare you.”

“Prepare me?”

“Our good relationship does not guarantee you
two will interact civilly. In fact, I doubt events will happen that
way.”

“What, your ex is gonna hate my guts?”

“In essence.”

“Miguel, why is he gonna hate my guts?”

I glared at a pair of tall, hot shopping chicks,
all dolled-up for imminent clubbing, meandered dangerously near to
Miguel, making googoo eyes. I jealously took his arm.

“Miguel?”

“He will be resentful of what you mean to me. He
was not prepared to let me go when I brought our attachment to a
close.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Not long enough.”

The girls were still there giggling. Did I
really look like such easy prey? I gave them my most ferocious
look, but it only seemed to amuse them more. I just wasn’t pretty
enough to intimidate them.

So how could I intimidate a vampire?
“Miguel, that’s crazy. I’m just a chick. You and he are…more. How
on earth could he let me bother him?”

“Because of how I care for you.”

“And exactly how’s that?”

I took my eyes off the little vamps in order to
give him the hairy eyeball. He seemed like he needed help saying
something.

“What, Miguel? Your killing me. Out with it,
damn it.”

The vampire’s eyes scanned the flow of people
with a manner of long practice as he spoke. “Annie, I have been
very long in this world. I have trod the soil of more nations than
now exist, and I have heard the attributes of the human spirit sung
in a thousand languages. I have seen you people in every
context.”

“Hey, you gotta be careful how you use ‘you
people.’”

He went on, unperturbed by my interruption. “I
know every variety of you: nobles and beggars, lepers, kings. You
fall into taxonomy. I can categorize you almost in seconds, often
before you open your mouths to speak your beloved words. I know you
far better than you know yourselves. And in all this I find that,
though you think yourselves exceptional, you are very alike one to
another.”

“Oh, thanks.”

Miguel turned to face me, his weird eyes
penetrating. “But not you, Annie. In my long night no one has ever
done for me what you did in that room. You cannot know the fate you
saved me from, or the peril you risked yourself. You proved
yourself in that moment.” He smiled down at me. “though even before
it came I had identified what you are.”

“And what am I?” I asked narrowly

The breeze blew spray from the fountain our way,
bringing a surprising chill to my bare arms on such a wickedly hot
night.

“You are the one kind of person among millions
with whom I would willingly share this life I know. A fire burns in
you that even I cannot ignore,” his tone had grown intense, and as
he spoke he looked at neither party girls nor strolling couples nor
any passersby. That intensity was focused all on me, “I cannot
allow you to pass me by, to become merely another face in the
endless ocean of my memory, gone but for your residence there –I
must not. You must understand how it would gnaw at me, as events
only can upon my kind –we who cannot forget even the smallest of
things. I refuse to condemn you to that fate, and I refuse to
condemn myself.”

“Oh shit, Miguel. Are you about to…Oh,
shit.”

“Annie,” he said, taking my hand. “I want you to
join me in eternity.”

It didn’t sound like an offer. It didn’t sound
like the vampire was asking me anything, but
requiring
it of
me. But it didn’t matter, not to me and not then, maybe because of
some New Orleans hoodoo, or the southern balm, or those irritating
girls edging so near. Maybe I would have felt differently if the
vampire had not come upon me when he did, snatching me from my life
on a night when it was reduced to only a .45 and a heart as cold as
the northern October air. Perhaps if every moment of every day of
my life had not been a kind of steel-edged pain, I would not have
responded the way I did that night in the spray of the fountain and
with the ships of the Mississippi groaning by. But things are only
what they are.

“Hey,” I said. “Why the hell not?”

Some kind of tension fractured within him. A
smile broke across his face, and he drew me to him, passing his
mouth over my neck, so close. I shivered from the top of my
cornrows to the tips of my toes. He lingered there, inhaling, and I
felt his hands clench, but he did not touch me. He drew me back
just enough to look into my eyes. The depths of his nearly drowned
me.

He exhaled slowly, utterly in control, and I
could see his teeth.

I had a pressing matter to address.

“Did you see that?” I said to the girls who
stood by, lurking. “He eats cunts like you for breakfast, but me?
Me he won’t even touch without permission. How ‘bout them
apples?”

When I looked at Miguel again, he was looking at
the heavens, as though imploring them for help.

“You’ll get used to me,” I said.

Then I stood on tiptoe and locked lips hard with
my vampire, treating all spectators to the most scandalous show I
could muster on such short notice. People all around broke out into
applause and cheers. This sure wasn’t Detroit.

When I finally released him, he looked drunk. I
had cut my tongue on his teeth, so maybe he was.

I smiled up at him.

“You’ll have eternity, after all.”

Let me tell you what it’s like to wake in old
New Orleans with a vampire by your side. It is not the touch of a
body beside you alone that wakes you. It is the realization in your
slumber-fogged brain that the skin you have come up against is not
warm as it should be, but cool as the air conditioner that cools
your room. It is the realization that that man beside you is not
alive, not a corpse, not explicable by the laws of nature at
all.

Then, as you grow more awake, you feel your
neck. You can’t help it, you just do. It doesn’t matter that you’ve
spent the last four days and nights with him, that he has been no
less than a perfect gentleman in your presence, that he has been
infinitely patient with your great shortcoming –your mortality,
that he has never once made any threat to the sanctity of the blood
within your veins. Okay, maybe once, but it was extremely
flattering. Popular culture and myth have told you that you must
tremble before this creature of the night, and that now that he has
finally isolated you in this far away place, and stood beside you
as you lay in vulnerable repose, his antics will have changed to
those of murderous intent.