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

8. [Jackie] - 2013, "And Yet No Birds"

"I found your phone number," a voice said to me on the phone, having woken me from a dead sleep. "I just found it, OK, in Laurent's desk. Is this not cool?"

I lay blinking, trying to hear the sounds coming across from around this voice. The tinkling cymbal of a slammed dish drawer. His fist, lightly tapping against a table. I lay listening, from London.

"Don't your people have any sandwich stuff or anything?"

Of course. My child's child. Cuca.

"I know who you are," I said. "And I will come to get you."

"Huh?"

"I will come to get you. I am coming to get you, from now." 

"I don't know why all of a sudden it's all about killing, but I don't want any, OK? I want a sandwich. Your folks don't have anything. Not even any Spam. Do you know where they keep foodstuffs? I ate all the stuff I originally brought."

For some time, not so consciously, I had been thinking about home. Often, my sleep is dreamless, but it is the case that when I dream, it is always of Carolina. In me, as you know, there exists a certain tension. At times, I reckon with my understanding of what has happened in my life, and how I should live. I suppose that it is something we all have in common. For this, Laurent was my best, my most honest, ear. And yet I never dream of him. All I have is memory.

I cannot explain to you how angry it made me to know that Cuca was still alive, not like us, and twice as old as my child was. I feel nothing for other people who I do not love. I am coming to an age where I can say that without embarrassment, guilt, or confusion. I used to be so unhappy with myself, and with my lot. I am not anymore ashamed to feel those things, and to say what I mean.

Do not tell me, Cuca has had his own tragedies. I don't care. All of this about that he had seen what Laurent had made of Marcello, that Marcello needed protection to keep on living, needed a purpose found elsewhere but in himself. All of this about not wanting to fight to live, to lie in order to survive, I don't believe in it. That is all speculative nonsense. You can say to me, he had a love affair, a man he loved. I hear his name, Christian, who was ten years older than this baby, who came from New York with his sweet nature and soft voice. I am told how Christian begged Cuca to turn to the blood, so that both of them might have it. I have heard how Christian hanged himself with a leather belt from the U-bend in Cuca's private bath. I know. You say, after Cuca saw how the very promise and desire for the blood could do that, he swore himself away from it. Do you really suck from this story your ability to feel compassion? Do you really need it? Or do you repeat it to me hoping that I will think of Yuki when you tell it to me, and grieve my desire to see Cuca dead? Maybe you are worried that to do it, to kill him, harm will come to that hand in turn, but do you really fear so much for me? Give me a break and say honestly that you worry for yourselves what would happen if Leechtin's bandage, over the wound of Laurent's death, were whipped off. Say that this is all you ever worried about.

I do not need you or anyone to understand. Laurent did. He said, "What are you confused that you are wanting him dead? And not to kill me instead for murdering your son?" I visited him ten years ago. I went in secret, only to see him, and no one else. I went thinking that if I saw him, I could kill him for what he'd done to my son, to my Javie, or if I couldn't, that I would know for certain that I had become a monster who wants more children to die, more people to die, so that I could keep Laurent for myself, and not hurt him, and say, "This is only what a monster does." Because if I killed Cuca, as I wanted and could not explain to myself, it would be a monstrous thing to do.

But Laurent had consoled me, holding onto me with his trembling hands, because by then he was half of himself already. It was already clear that he had been hollowed out by a wicked sadness, a wicked sense of temporality, and that if I left him again, he would not be there when I came back. I wept because for all my confusion about other things, I knew that if I decided to kill Laurent, he would want it.