The Origin of Dracula

Some of us have done something in our past that haunts us forever. Something we’d rather bury and forget.

But we can’t.

It’s always with us.

At first—and I mean right after we commit this transgression—it’s always on our minds. But eventually—and by eventually I mean a long, long time afterward—we can go an entire day without thinking about it. Then, if we’re lucky, after enough time has passed, we may even be able to go an entire week without thinking about it.

For some of us, this haunting transgression was minor. But because it involved another person, someone on the receiving end of our offense, someone we badly deceived or cheated or hurt, it’s seared into our souls and can’t be forgotten. We feel tremendous guilt about it, and it fills us with shame and self-hatred.

But for others, the offense was more than a minor transgression. It was something truly horrible. Unforgivable. The guilt and the shame are so strong that we can’t ever hope to bury it and forget about it.

Instead we learn to live with it.

I was in this second category. And the only silver lining was that, even though I couldn’t forget my transgression, the haunting memory was fading. It was becoming less real and more like a vivid nightmare from which I had long ago awoken. It was becoming less fact and more fiction.

But just as fact can transform itself into fiction, fiction can also transform itself back into fact. Fiction can suddenly come back to life with a vengeance. And the most frightening part of this—the part that brought me to the edge of madness—was the discovery that the boundary between the world of fact and the world of fiction is porous.

There is another world, as real as the world we know, hidden in fiction—in stories and in novels. And my transgression was linked to this world—as real as any other world.

More particularly, it was linked to one specific novel.

But I wouldn’t learn this until my transgression came back to life and dragged me into that world and into that story.

As I sat behind the reference desk at the Cherrydale Public Library, waiting for my shift to end, I wasn’t thinking about my terrible sin. Time had worked its magic. Twenty years had passed, and those years had done a good job of cleansing my mind of the truth. My transgression was still a nightmare that I couldn’t shake, but it no longer had the impact of reality.

I was scanning a list of books on my computer, books the library was considering purchasing, and I noticed that non-fiction books dominated the list. The buyers for the Arlington County library system, to which the Cherrydale branch belonged, had finally acquiesced to a growing trend: the popularity of non-fiction books at the expense of fiction. The debate about whether to follow this trend had been raging in library systems across the country. And now, after holding out for many years, it appeared that the Arlington County libraries had decided to hop on the bandwagon.

I applauded this decision because of my own relationship with fiction. I’d once been an avid reader of fiction, but then I gave up on it, concluding that novels—from the classics to mass-market bestsellers—offered nothing of value. Proponents of a liberal arts education claimed you could learn important truths about life in great works of fiction.

I believed that was a con job.

Reading fiction was a waste of time. Fiction was make-believe, and make-believe was of no help when it came to dealing with reality. Don’t think that I thought this actually mattered to anyone. I understood that practically no one cared about this philosophical debate. A vast majority of people who read fiction did so for entertainment value and not to learn life lessons, even if, as some argued, those lessons were there.

My strong distaste for fiction—
hate
is the better word—stemmed from once believing in it so deeply. The truth was that fiction had once saved my life, which was the primary reason I’d become a librarian. But when Lucy died, fiction wasn’t there to help me. It betrayed me.

My love affair with fiction began my sophomore year of high school, right after the first death that shattered my life. My father died of a sudden heart attack—a devastating blow for my mother and me. We’d been a tight-knit family, so my father’s abrupt death left a big hole in our lives. Our dinner table turned from a warm place where my dad and mom recounted their workday dramas to a dead place dominated by painful stretches of silence and a somber void. The couch in our living room turned from a place of fellowship, where on Sundays my dad and I cheered on the Washington Redskins, ridiculing their ineptness and applauding their triumphs, to a place that evoked all-consuming grief, an unbearable sadness.

After my dad died, I couldn’t bear to enter the living room on Sundays.

Both my mom and I withdrew from our friends and from each other. I still went to school, as if everything were normal, but I socialized a lot less, preferring to spend my free periods, including lunch, studying rather than hanging out with friends. My mom still went to work, also as if everything were normal, but she no longer brought home stories of office successes, mishaps, and scandals.

But even as I was withdrawing from the outside world, I was entering a new world. The world of fiction. Up to that point in my life, I hadn’t been much of a reader. I’d been a good student and had read what was required in school, as well as a few of the popular books my friends were reading, but that was it.

After my dad died, my reading habits changed drastically. I read one book after another without any breaks in between. The obsession started innocently enough, when I finished up the entire year’s required reading for my English class in a couple of weeks and then moved on to the suggested reading list.

My mom also joined me in this obsession. Maybe it was her way of staying close to me, or maybe it was her way of seeking refuge from the emptiness that permeated our house. We pored through Melville, Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck, then moved on to more modern authors, like J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Arthur Miller, and Kurt Vonnegut.

While my mom read many genres, I became enamored of supernatural novels. My days and nights were spent in the supernatural worlds of Edgar Allen Poe, M.R. James, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, and Stephen King.

By the end of my senior year of high school, my mom and I had reintegrated ourselves back into life in the outside world. I was hanging out with friends again, and she was filling me in on her workplace dramas again. We were no longer withdrawn from each other, and life had gone from sad to good again.

I attributed this recovery to “novel therapy.” Our broken hearts had been healed by fiction. Though my mom and I had withdrawn into an inner world, it wasn’t a world of hopelessness and despair. It was a world every bit as vibrant as the outside world—engrossing enough that it kept us from focusing on our shattered lives.

Fiction had saved me, and that salvation had lasted until nine months ago, when suddenly my life had once more been shattered. Lucy, my wife, had been murdered—and I had found myself turning again to novel therapy for help.

But this time it had failed me.

And this failure made me reassess what had happened all those years ago. Instead of dealing with my father’s death, I realized I had run from it. Novel therapy had given me shelter from the storm, when what I should’ve done was face the storm. If I had, then when death struck again, I would have had a chance of rising from the ashes. If I’d dealt with reality back then, I would’ve been able to deal with it now.

But as it stood, Lucy’s murder had crushed me, and it had left Nate, my young son, with a shell of man as his father.

I clicked over from the list of non-fiction books to my email, to see if the last RSVP to Nate’s birthday party had come in. It had, and it was another “yes.” Considering the party was on Sunday, only two days away, this was late notice. Not that it really mattered; one more guest wasn’t going to make a difference. Nate had wanted me to invite all of his friends, and I had. With or without this last RSVP, we were going to have a full house.

Spoiling Nate for his seventh birthday was the right thing to do. This would be his first birthday without Lucy, so I was okay with whatever he wanted. It was also a way for me to make up for being sullen, withdrawn, and inattentive over the last nine months.

But the truth was that the party wasn’t going to change anything. Nate was looking forward to it, but I’d just been pretending. I was dreading it. I’d planned a magnificent day—a magic show, a variety of party games, cake from a high-end bakery, and gelato—but regardless of how much fun it’d be for Nate, for me the party would only accentuate Lucy’s absence. I’d be mourning her death the entire time, no matter how hard I’d try not to.

The practical matter of the party’s expense wasn’t going to make it any easier to enjoy either. I was spending way more than I could afford. But that could be said of all my purchases over the last six months. With only one income, my finances were in bad shape. Lucy and I hadn’t bought life insurance, so when she died, what little financial stability we had died with her.

That was my fault. As soon as Nate was born, she’d wanted to buy life insurance—for both of us. But my foolish view was that we were too young to worry about it. It took me a full six years to finally consider it, and just as we’d started looking into policies, tragedy struck.

And then it was too late.

I clicked out of my email, checked the time, and logged out of my computer. Before Lucy’s death, I’d always had a burst of energy at the end of my shift, a second wind that came from looking forward to my evening with Lucy and Nate. Nate was a great kid, bursting with insightful questions that kept me on my toes, and Lucy was a great companion, my best friend, curious about my day at the library, and quick with an intriguing tale about her own day at work.

But after her death, that second wind disappeared. I became a nocturnal creature, staying up most of the night, then catching a couple hours of sleep right before taking Nate to school. So by the time my shift was over, I was exhausted. Prior to this new routine, I’d always been asleep by eleven, awake by six, and alert all day. Now I felt like I was living in a netherworld, and this made it hard to connect with Nate. He lived outside this netherworld.

What I didn’t know, and could never have imagined, was that this change in my routine was a gateway into another world, a frightening world beyond the horror of losing my wife. My exhaustion and unnatural hours were the way into this other world. My tenuous grip on reality—accompanied by an unrelenting dull ache in my gut—was required for what was to follow.