Fat Vampire (4 page)

“What were you
thinking
?” Mr. Brown shouted. “Were you thinking at all? What is Sejal going to wear?”

“It isn't my fault they sent her bag to the wrong city!” Cat answered. “Why don't you call up those asswipe…”

“Catherine!” Mrs. Brown gasped.

“…airport…bag…people and yell at them?” finished Cat.

“I will call them, but you should have stayed and talked to someone! If you don't get them looking for a lost bag right away, they'll never find it!”

“
I didn't know!
” Cat moaned. “Call them then, and stop yelling at me!” She tore out of the room and up the stairs. Mr. Brown stomped into the kitchen. There came from above a whuffing noise, the sound of a door that was too light to slam.

Mrs. Brown was wearing two different kinds of orange. Her small, quiet smile seemed at odds with her outfit, which announced
CAUTION
:
ROADWORK AHEAD
. “How was your flight?” she asked.

“It was my fault about the luggage,” said Sejal. “I told Cat I wanted to go.”

“You couldn't know,” said Mrs. Brown, patting at her curly hair. “But in America we get our bags. They're not supposed to get lost.”

When she'd first arrived, Sejal had deliberated over
whether to bend down and touch the Brown parents' feet. She considered how it might look in a nation of firm handshakes and high fives, and let the moment pass. Now Sejal could only smile reflexively and glance around the room again. She was finding it difficult to look directly at Mrs. Brown, a condition for which she blamed her father. The woman looked, at the moment, not so much like a gum ball as a goldfish. One of those very round goldfish with the cauliflower heads.

Mr. Brown emerged suddenly with a cordless phone. “I don't know how to spell your name,” he told Sejal. “Could you speak to this person a moment?”

Sejal got on the phone. “Namaste.”

“Yes, Ms. Namastay,” said a dull voice. “Can you spell that?”

“No, I was merely saying hello. My name is Ganguly.”

“Please spell it, Ms. Namastay.”

Sejal thickened her accent to molasses as she tried to spell as swiftly and unhelpfully as possible. She hoped each odd stress and pause would string out an uncrackable code between her and the bag she did not want. Then, pleased with herself, she said her good-byes and returned the phone to Mr. Brown.

“Are you feeling hungry?” asked Mrs. Brown. “We should leave soon to beat the dinner rush.”

“I'll go tell Cat,” Sejal answered.

 

“You see what I have to put up with?” Cat said immediately upon opening her door. Behind her, on walls the color of eggplant, were black posters and clippings from magazines. Many photos of girls looking morose in cemeteries. People in
complicated outfits; black and red and white material laced up backs; arms and legs waffled by fishnet. A chunky laptop and a cherub-shaped lamp with a counterproductively black lamp-shade stood on a desk so haphazardly piled with CD cases it appeared to be molting. “Sorry your room isn't cool like mine. I'll show you.”

Sejal's room was through the next door down the hall. It was stupefyingly beige. It had a beige computer in it and an off-white bed.

Neither this computer nor Cat's antique laptop had stirred more than the slightest pang in Sejal. If she were an alcoholic, these machines would have been weak lemonade shandy. She felt intellectually safe but oddly claustrophobic.

“Your mom wants to leave soon,” said Sejal.

“To ‘beat the rush,' right?” said Cat in an impersonation of her mother, if her mother had been a dim-witted cartoon bear. “It's like, there's a reason they have a dinner rush—that's when all normal people eat.”

“Do you think we can wait a bit? I promised my mother I would have a puja in my new room.”

Cat wrinkled her nose. “That can't possibly mean what it sounds like.”

“It's only a…small ceremony about new beginnings. You bathe and burn incense, and offer flowers and sweets to Ganesha—”

Sejal gave a small cry and tented her hands over her face.

“What?” said Cat. “What's wrong?”

“Ganesha is in the bag I…lost,” Sejal said.

“Ganesha…Is that the god with the elephant head?”

Sejal thought of her little pink Ganesha figurine in her big pink bag, turning slowly on the dull airport merry-go-round. She nodded.

“The airport lost your elephant god,” said Cat.

Both girls slumped onto the bed.

“Asswipes.”

T
V'S ALAN FRIENDLY
strode down the corridor of Belfry Studios, a DVD in his hand. Occasionally he pumped this hand in the air, watching the light glint dazzlingly off the disk's iridescent grooves.
This would look good on tape,
Alan thought. He wished someone were taping him. Someone usually was.

He hosted a hit basic cable television show called
Vampire Hunters
on which, over the course of two and a half seasons, they had not only failed to ever successfully hunt a vampire but also failed to collect adequate proof that such a thing even existed. And yet people watched. Every week, their numbers were as good as the weaker network shows, even in reruns. It was all a lot of stumbling around in the dark, filming
everything with those green night-vision cameras, hanging around New Orleans nightclubs when there were no leads to take them elsewhere. So many false alarms with wealthy homosexuals and goth kids, never any legitimate bloodsucking anything, and still the nation watched. It had made Alan feel invincible, like he could put anything on television and make money.
Miniature Bigfoot Hunters. Sixteen-Foot-Tall Invisible Robot Hunters.

Then came the
Saturday Night Live
skit thing. Last Saturday's host, Cody Southern, had once starred in an 80's teen vampire picture (
Love Bites
, 1987, starring Cody Southern and Cody Meyer) that had become the sort of movie that was on TV every Saturday afternoon your whole life. So the SNL writers and cast cooked up a
Vampire Hunters
parody in which a fake Alan and his team followed the real-life Cody everywhere—to the dry cleaners, to his kid's piano recital, always impotently waving crosses and garlic in his face and trying to stake him.

It shouldn't have been important. There was a school of thought (and a school of thought that Alan had been hearing a lot lately, especially from the people who worked for him) that said getting spoofed on SNL was a good thing—it proved that they'd arrived, that the country was talking about them. And the following week they had their best viewer share ever. But the week after that they had their second worst. And that was the same week that Alan lost a sponsor. That was the week an anchor on
TV Now!
said his name like it had quotes around it. That was the week his coproducers started looking like they'd awoken abruptly from a confusing dream in which they had,
for some reason, financed a man with a vampire-hunting show based on little more than the fact that he had an English accent and his own stake.

But that was old news. The DVD made it old news.

“Ha-
ha!
” Alan trumpeted as he entered Props. “I have it! The news affiliate sent it over this morning.”

Mike didn't look up from his workbench. “I've already seen it on YouTube,” he said.

“Not like this. Not like this. The quality is much better. Look.”

Mike flinched as if Alan had slipped a wet finger into his ear, rather than a DVD into his laptop. “That better be clean,” he said. “Nobody but me ever scans for viruses around here.”

The video started itself. It looked down onto a concrete zoo enclosure and a sleeping panda. And a kid or a short man hunched over the panda. Seconds later there was the bang of a door and two more men appeared, and there was a struggle, and then a moment that was difficult to explain.

“There!” shouted Alan, thumping out the punctuation against the workbench, then cradling his bruised hand. “There.”

Amid the tangle of bodies a shape had seemed to collapse in on itself and rise, flittering, into the air. Where there had once been three people, now there were only two zoo guards and what looked, conceivably, to be a bat. Especially if you wanted it to be a bat.

“There,” Alan said again, gesturing at the monitor. “This is a big break. Before now we weren't even sure a vampire would show up on tape.”

“What do you mean? Why?”

“Because of the whole no-reflection thing. And some people claim they can't be photographed.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Light either reflects off something or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you wouldn't be able to see the vampire with the naked eye, either.”

“Well…” said Alan. He wasn't used to having this sort of conversation about what he did. Most of his staff were fairly uncritical believers, or pretended to be. And until recently his coproducers hadn't cared either way.

“And this is supposed to be the same person who stole some blood at a comics convention.”

“He fits the description.”

“Comics fan donors,” Mike snorted. “That's gotta be some watery blood.” He pushed back his chair. “By the way, your Stake-O-Matic is done.”

Alan squealed and leaned over Mike's shoulder.

“It eats up a lot of compressed air,” said Mike. “You'll have to wear some kind of whippit bandolier.”

It was a gun, there was no pussyfooting around that. It was a homemade air pistol with a wide, open barrel.

“It takes a standard three-quarter-inch dowel rod,” said Mike. “Can stake a vampire-shaped thing at ten yards.”

“Do you have any stakes already sharpened? I want to try it.”

“I'm an applied sciences genius. I don't whittle sticks. You want a stick whittled, find an intern.”

“But it kills vampires?” asked Alan.

Mike sighed. “If vampires, like most people, don't like
getting things stuck in their hearts, then, yeah, okay. But if I really thought you were going to be aiming this thing at any vampires, I wouldn't have made it in the first place. I'm envisioning a lot of footage of target practice at dummies with the word ‘vampire' written in Sharpie.”

“That footage says this kid is a vampire.”

“That footage could have been faked. Are you kidding? I could have made that at home on my Mac. But if there are such things as vampires, it's because they're people with a disease or a disorder. Light sensitivity plus anemia, or something. Even if this kid is out there hurting people you're not allowed to just go shooting things into his chest.”

“If he's…” said Alan, “if he's a murderer, it'll be justifiable.”

“Sure. And
Vampire Hunters
will join the great tradition of television shows predicated on vigilante homicide. On-camera, vigilante homicide. Oh, wait—there aren't any shows like that? I wonder why that is.”

“Look,” said Alan, “it's not called
Vampire Killers.
It's
Vampire Hunters
. We should be able to string out the hunt for this kid for at least five episodes. We'll figure out what to do with him when we find him. But focus groups say they like our gear. Our tools. So we need more swag like the Stake-O-Matic. There are licensing possibilities.”

“Whatever.”

“Four more Stake-O-Matics just like this, plus another four for backups, plus we're not calling them Stake-O-Matics anymore. They're now called Redeemers.”

“I don't care.”

“Also, I'm encouraging each crew member to name his personal Redeemer—maybe after an old girlfriend or something. But! The point is, the hunt is on! There's a vampire in San Diego!”

“Sunny San Diego,” said Mike.

O
N THE EVE
of the first day of the new school year Sejal sat on the floor of Cat's bedroom, looking at CD liner notes.

“I like them,” she told Cat. “They're almost Bollywood but slower, no? How do you say their name again?”

“Like ‘Suzy,'” said Cat into her cavernous, dark closet. “Siouxsie and the Banshees. They're totally old school, right?” She parted and reparted the dark curtains of her wardrobe, tossing this and that onto the bed.

“Thank you again for lending me clothes,” said Sejal, who at that moment was wearing a pair of Cat's jeans and a cast-and-crew T-shirt from her high school production of
My Fair Lady.

“It's perfect. I used to be more Elizabethan, but now I'm strictly Batcave, so I was probably going to sell these clothes anyway.” Cat had taken to the task of dressing Sejal with great enthusiasm, as though she'd been sent a huge doll with
MADE IN INDIA
stamped on the foot. “Are you okay? You seem a little fidgety.”

“I am like that only. And I'm anxious about school. I—I feel I should tell you I've sometimes had panic attacks. Not for a long time now, but…I do not want to freak you out.”

“'Cause of…the Google?”

Sejal nodded at her feet. Panic attacks when reminded that she could not just close her eyes and vanish from the real world with its fleshy claustrophobia. Panic at the thought that she'd failed to log on and check her status for two hours, a day, four months. She pictured the complicated yoga of it—hands at her temples like blinders, bent at the waist to gaze at her own navel. Downward spiral pose.

Panic, especially, with the memory of what had happened. Of what she'd done.

“Huh,” said Cat. “You want some Prozac? Or a Xanax? I don't need it, but my parents got me all kinds of that shit after I started dressing this way. I don't think it's expired or anything.”

Sejal shrugged.
Her
parents had been very strongly against drugs, but she was an American girl in training. “Maybe a half a pill.”

Cat produced an amber bottle from a drawer in her nightstand and tossed it onto Sejal's lap. “It says Niravam but it's totally Xanax,” she said, as though Xanax might be a name
she would know and trust, like Coca-Cola.

Sejal didn't open it. She felt a little better just knowing it was there. “I like the cover of this Cinema Strange album,” she said. “Can we listen to it next?”

“Yeah, but we'll have to stop it when—Aw, crap!” said Cat, looking at the clock on her nightstand. “It's already started!”

“What has?” asked Sejal, drawing her legs up quickly as Cat thundered past.

“
Vampire Hunters.
It's this rad show on the Crypt. Last week they totally almost caught this one vampire, but it turned out he was just German.”

She clicked the TV on her dresser through a dozen channels, finally stopping at a commercial for paper towels.

“These are European vampires then, isn't it?” asked Sejal. “Like Count Dracula? We have stories about vampires in India, but they are not the same.”

“It's American vampires, mostly. And they're not really like Dracula. They're more like the sort of people you'd meet at a gallery opening, you know?”

“Not really.”

“Shh! It's on!”

Doug had the phone up to his ear before the first ring finished.

“Hello?”

Jay's voice came through in a panic. “Are you watching—”

“Yeah.”

“They're talking about us! They're hunting us!”

“They're hunting
me
.”

“Well,” said Jay, “they made it sound like I'm a vampire, too. Maybe if they find me they'll just…stake first and ask questions later, right?”

“Did you hear that girl from the party talking?” asked Doug. “She sounded totally hot for me.”

“And what was that about new weapons?” wondered Jay. “Redeemers? Sounds holy. Maybe it's something with holy water.”

“Maybe I could visit San Diego again…over a three-day weekend. Or over Thanksgiving break. 'Course, my parents would kind of notice I was gone…”

“Does holy water even really work on you? Do you have to be religious for it to work? We should know these things. I can't believe we haven't run…tests or something.”

“I can't believe these commercials last so long. Hey! Back to
Vampire Hunters
, all right? No one cares about term life insurance!”

“I'm going to do some more research online,” said Jay. “We should test out everything everybody says about vampires, shouldn't we? I mean, if those vampire hunters track you down, we need to know what's real and what isn't…”

“Shut up, it's back on.”

“Like, that getting-invited-into-houses thing they
mentioned. Is that true? Like what if they were chasing you and you tried to hide in a building or house, but you couldn't because you couldn't get in—”

“Will you shut up already? TV!”

Doug didn't. Jay didn't. The video played out silently on their television screens.

“I…turned into a bat,” said Doug.

“Oh, wow.”

“That's what happened. I turned into a bat,” Doug
whispered as they aired the webcam footage a second time but slower. “Look, I left my clothes behind. There was a skylight in the ceiling. I must've flown up out of the skylight.”

“Oh wow.”

“Meet me at the farm,” said Doug, and then hung up.