The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 10 - Flight

Whenever I would come around, Javie would make a little whistling sound, a little smile, of recognition. It was a little scream of intense joy, translated into a gasp of air. He had dark blond hair as a baby, which would darken as he grew older. I liked to hold him and smell his head. He hated to be tickled and I loved to make him mad. If I kissed him, he forgave me. Yuki had been an itinerant accountant when living, subsisting mostly on savings between tax seasons. Javie had been an accidental  Valentine's baby, conceived on a date between two lonely parties, neither of whom had been interested in more than a blind date on a lonely day of the year. The mother had given Yuki the baby when it was born, around American Thanksgiving time, and had left without fanfare. When Yuki's savings ran out, about two months after I met him, he and the baby moved into my warm garret. He had made good on his promise, and hadn't so much as raised a hand to me. After getting to know him, I realized that violence was not in his nature. I thought that things were that simple, that a person might get to know a man going through what we were. For both of us, a love affair meant staying human. Javie and our schedules kept us in what felt a normal orbit. For me, it was the most normal I had ever felt, which seems strange to me now. To think that at the moment blood came into my life, I was having the most quotidian days I have ever lived.

It wasn't as if there wasn't blood for us. Yuki and I would see the baby safely asleep, and Javie slept hard, and slip out together. He showed me the underground fetish clubs he had been frequenting while living, where he had encountered vampires before, and where he had met his end in an accident. Now, he flipped the script, and I went along. It wasn't really my thing, but blood was my thing, and there it was easy to get. It was not required of me to dress in any particular way or behave as not myself, and I discovered that as edgy or out of the norm I had ever felt while living, I had been leading an incredibly vanilla life. I found myself learning quite a lot about desire, and sex, as an outsider, and it often disgusted me. Yuki, too, often seemed outside of his element. More than once, walking home together down foggy avenues, he confided in me that it had all seemed much more exciting when it had the ability to arouse him. Now, it felt repetitive and false. So matters of the flesh were easy for us, too, and it made us lazy, if not happy. I had not yet discovered that a chief pleasure for me is killing people. I had never done it then. I thought I had everything I wanted. But I felt unsatisfied.

So Javie was my greatest joy, playing with him, looking after him. When he began to crawl, he would often make his way underneath my bed in the small apartment, and I would go under there too to get him. Sometimes when Yuki came home he would find us asleep together under the bed, breathing deeply. Yuki was often away, doing this that or the other thing, and he was not tender by nature, which I am. I to this day have no idea what Yuki did with his time, but I suspect that he had an office somewhere, paid for with my Amex card, and that he often slept there or had little affairs of blood. I didn't feel jealous over it, because it benefited me. I spent my days looking after Javie. I most enjoyed walking with him in his stroller, and sitting with him in the park. He was a happy child. I don't know if I would have stayed with Yuki if it hadn't been for Javie. I think that we became accustomed to each other, however, and being with him fulfilled most of my needs. 

We shared a love of literature, and of the city. Things between us were generally passionate, with little of the comfortable sharing of space that I had witnessed between my guardians as a child. Yuki said that he needed to be close to me in order to sleep, in order to feel safe enough, but during the day overtures of affection annoyed him. I don't think that he wanted a romantic relationship with me in daylight. I don't think that he was interested in men, or had remained too close to his living ideals to see me as anything other than a man. Things were different in the dark, or when he was low. In those times, he couldn't get enough of me, and it was like it had been the night I met him. We argued a lot. He would get angry if I cried. If I cried, the baby would cry, and Yuki would grow distant. I never thought about how his life had been stolen from him, then. He had not been in any way prepared to deal with losing everything. For Yuki, in his mind, he was dead because the future he had imagined had died, and sometimes he felt like a corpse. I didn't understand it. I had always known, in some sense, what faced me. I never felt like the walking dead. Sometimes he would freak out completely and begin crying that his body was cold, and he would shake, and say, "Hail Mary full of grace", and take me by the upper arms, look me in the eyes. "Talk to me," he would beg, petrified, "and tell me how things are now. Remind me of what our life is, that we have a life." He had been a Catholic schoolboy like me, and I said prayers with him. We lived like that two years, uninterrupted and completely out of contact with anyone.