Vampires in the Lemon Grove (3 page)

Magreb chose her name in the Atlas Mountains for its etymology, the root word
ghuroob
, which means “to set” or “to be hidden.” “That’s what we’re looking for,” she tells me. “The setting place. Some final answer.” She won’t change her name until we find it.

She takes a lemon from her mouth, slides it down the length of her fangs, and places its shriveled core on the picnic table. When she finally speaks, her voice is so low the words are almost unintelligible.

“The lemons aren’t working, Clyde.”

But the lemons have never worked. At best, they give us eight hours of peace. We aren’t talking about the lemons.

“How long?”

“Longer than I’ve let on. I’m sorry.”

“Well, maybe it’s this crop. Those Alberti boys haven’t been fertilizing properly, maybe the
primofiore
will turn out better.”

Magreb fixes me with one fish-bright eye. “Clyde, I think it’s time for us to go.”

Wind blows the leaves apart. Lemons wink like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening, and I can see the other, truer night behind them.

“Go where?” Our marriage, as I conceive it, is a commitment to starve together.

“We’ve been resting here for decades. I think it’s time … what is that thing?”

I have been preparing a present for Magreb, for our anniversary, a “cave” of scavenged materials—newspaper and bottle glass and wooden beams from the lemon tree supports—so that she can sleep down here with me. I’ve smashed dozens of bottles of fruity beer to make stalactites. Looking at it now, though, I see the cave is very small. It looks like an umbrella mauled by a dog.

“That thing?” I say. “That’s nothing. I think it’s part of the hot dog machine.”

“Jesus. Did it catch on fire?”

“Yes. The girl threw it out yesterday.”

“Clyde.” Magreb shakes her head. “We never meant to stay here forever, did we? That was never the plan.”

“I didn’t know we had a plan,” I snap. “What if we’ve outlived our food supply? What if there’s nothing left for us to find?”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Why can’t you just be grateful? Why can’t you be happy and admit defeat? Look at what we’ve found here!” I grab a lemon and wave it in her face.

“Good night, Clyde.”

I watch my wife fly up into the watery dawn, and again I feel the awful tension. In the flats of my feet, in my knobbed spine. Love has infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another.

I consider taking the funicular, the ultimate degradation—worse than the dominoes, worse than an eternity of sucking cut lemons. All day I watch the cars ascend, and I’m reminded of those American fools who accompany their wives to the beach but refuse to wear bathing suits. I’ve seen them by the harbor, sulking in their trousers, panting through menthol cigarettes and pacing the dock while the women sea-bathe. They pretend they don’t mind when sweat darkens the armpits of their suits. When their wives swim out and leave them. When their wives are just a splash in the distance.

Tickets for the funicular are twenty lire. I sit at the bench and count as the cars go by.

THAT EVENING
, I take Magreb on a date. I haven’t left the lemon grove in upward of two years, and blood roars in my ears as I
stand and clutch at her like an old man. We’re going to the Thursday night show at an antique theater in a castle in the center of town. I want her to see that I’m happy to travel with her, so long as our destination is within walking distance.

A teenage usher in a vintage red jacket with puffed sleeves escorts us to our seats, his biceps manacled in clouds, threads loosening from the badge on his chest. I am jealous of the name there:
GUGLIELMO
.

The movie’s title is already scrolling across the black screen:
SOMETHING CLANDESTINE IS HAPPENING IN THE CORN!

Magreb snorts. “That’s a pretty lousy name for a horror movie. It sounds like a student film.”

“Here’s your ticket,” I say. “I didn’t make the title up.”

It’s a vampire movie set in the Dust Bowl. Magreb expects a comedy, but the Dracula actor fills me with the sadness of an old photo album. An Okie has unwittingly fallen in love with the monster, whom she’s mistaken for a rich European creditor eager to pay off the mortgage on her family’s farm.

“That Okie,” says Magreb, “is an idiot.”

I turn my head miserably and there’s Fila, sitting two rows in front of us with a greasy young man. Benny Alberti. Her white neck is bent to the left, Benny’s lips affixed to it as she impassively sips a soda.

“Poor thing,” Magreb whispers, indicating the pigtailed actress. “She thinks he’s going to save her.”

Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. “Help!” she screams to a sky full of crows. “He’s not actually from Europe!”

There is no music, only the girl’s breath and the
fwap-fwap-fwap
of the off-screen fan blades. Dracula’s mouth hangs wide as a sewer grate. His cape is curiously still.

The movie picture is frozen. The
fwap
ping is emanating from the projection booth; it rises to a grinding
r-r-r
, followed by lyrical
Italian cussing and silence and finally a tidal sigh. Magreb shifts in her seat.

“Let’s wait,” I say, seized with empathy for these two still figures on the screen, mutely pleading for repair. “They’ll fix it.”

People begin to file out of the theater, first in twos and threes and then in droves. “I’m tired, Clyde.”

“Don’t you want to know what happens?” My voice is more frantic than I intend.

“I already know what happens.”

“Don’t you leave now, Magreb. I’m telling you, they’re going to fix it. If you leave now, that’s it for us, I’ll never …”

Her voice is beautiful, like gravel underfoot: “I’m going to the caves.”

I’M ALONE
in the theater. When I turn to exit, the picture is still frozen, the Okie’s blue dress floating over windless corn, Dracula’s mouth a hole in his white greasepaint.

Outside I see Fila standing in a clot of her friends, lit by the marquee. These kids wear too much makeup and clothes that move like colored oils. They all look rained on. I scowl at them and they scowl back, and then Fila crosses to me.

“Hey, you,” she says, grinning, breathless, so very close to my face. “Are you stalking somebody?”

My throat tightens.

“Guys!” Her eyes gleam. “Guys, come over and meet the
vampire
.”

But the kids are gone.

“Well! Some friends,” she says, then winks. “Leaving me alone, defenseless …”

“You want the old vampire to bite you, eh?” I hiss. “You want a story for your friends?”

Fila laughs. Her horror is a round, genuine thing, bouncing in
both her black eyes. She smells like hard water and glycerin. The hum of her young life all around me makes it difficult to think. A bat filters my thoughts, opens its trembling lampshade wings.

Magreb
. She’ll want to hear about this. How ridiculous, at my age, to find myself down this alley with a young girl: Fila powdering her neck, doing her hair up with little temptress pins, yanking me behind this Dumpster. “Can you imagine”—Magreb will laugh—“a teenager goading you to attack her! You’re still a menace, Clyde.”

I stare vacantly at a pale mole above the girl’s collarbone.
Magreb
, I think again, and I smile, and the smile feels like a muzzle stretched taut against my teeth. It seems my hand has tightened on the girl’s wrist, and I realize with surprise, as if from a great distance, that she is twisting away.

“Hey,
nonno
, come on now, what are you—”

THE GIRL’S HEAD
lolls against my shoulder like a sleepy child’s, then swings forward in a rag-doll circle. The starlight is white mercury compared to her blotted-out eyes. There’s a dark stain on my periwinkle shirt, and one suspender has snapped. I sit Fila’s body against the alley wall, watch it dim and stiffen. Spidery graffiti weaves over the brick behind her, and I scan for some answer contained there:
GIOVANNA & FABIANO. VAFFANCULO! VAI IN CULO
.

A scabby-furred creature, our only witness, arches its orange back against the Dumpster. If not for the lock I would ease the girl inside. I would climb in with her and let the red stench fill my nostrils, let the flies crawl into the red corners of my eyes. I am a monster again.

I ransack Fila’s pockets and find the key to the funicular office, careful not to look at her face. Then I’m walking, running for the lemon grove. I jimmy my way into the control room and turn the
silver key, relieved to hear the engine roar to life. Locked, locked, every funicular car is locked, but then I find one with thick tape in Xs over a busted door. I dash after it and pull myself onto the cushion, quickly, because the cars are already moving. Even now, after what I’ve done, I am still unable to fly, still imprisoned in my wretched
nonno
’s body, reduced to using the mortals’ machinery to carry me up to find my wife. The box jounces and trembles. The chain pulls me into the heavens link by link.

My lips are soon chapped; I stare through a crack in the glass window. The box swings wildly in the wind. The sky is a deep blue vacuum. I can still smell the girl in the folds of my clothes.

THE CAVE SYSTEM
at the top of the cliffs is vaster than I expected; and with their grandfather faces tucked away, the bats are anonymous as stones.

I walk beneath a chandelier of furry bodies, heartbeats wrapped in wings the color of rose petals or corn silk. Breath ripples through each of them, a tiny life in its translucent envelope.

“Magreb?”

Is she up here?

Has she left me?

(I will never find another vampire.)

I double back to the moonlit entrance that leads to the open air of the cliffs, the funicular cars. When I find Magreb, I’ll beg her to tell me what she dreams up here. I’ll tell her my waking dreams in the lemon grove: The mortal men and women floating serenely by in balloons freighted with the ballast of their deaths. Millions of balloons ride over a wide ocean, lives darkening the sky. Death is a dense powder cinched inside tiny sandbags, and in the dream I am given to understand that instead of a sandbag I have Magreb.

I make the bats’ descent in a cable car with no wings to spread,
knocked around by the wind with a force that feels personal. I struggle to hold the door shut and look for the green speck of our grove.

The box is plunging now, far too quickly. It swings wide, and the igneous surface of the mountain fills the left window. The tufa shines like water, like a black, heat-bubbled river. For a dizzying instant I expect the rock to seep through the glass.

Each swing takes me higher than the last, a grinding pendulum that approaches a full revolution around the cable. I’m on my hands and knees on the car floor, seasick in the high air, pressing my face against the floor grate. I can see stars or boats burning there, and also a ribbon of white, a widening fissure. Air gushes through the cracks in the glass box. With a lurch of surprise, I realize that I could die.

WHAT DOES MAGREB SEE
, if she is watching? Is she waking from a nightmare to see the line snap, the glass box plummet? From her inverted vantage, dangling from the roof of the cave, does the car seem to be sucked upward, rushing not toward the sea but into another sort of sky? To a black mouth open and foaming with stars?

I like to picture my wife like this: Magreb shuts her thin eyelids tighter. She digs her claws into the rock. Little clouds of dust plume around her toes as she swings upside down. She feels something growing inside her, a dreadful suspicion. It is solid, this new thing, it is the opposite of hunger. She’s emerging from a dream of distant thunder, rumbling and loose. Something has happened tonight that she thought impossible. In the morning, she will want to tell me about it.

Several of us claim to have been the daughters of samurai, but of course there is no way for anyone to verify that now. It’s a relief, in its way, the new anonymity. We come here tall and thin, noblewomen from Yamaguchi, graceful as calligraphy; short and poor, Hida girls with bloody feet, crow-voiced and vulgar; entrusted to the Model Mill by our teary mothers; rented out by our destitute uncles—but within a day or two the drink the Recruitment Agent gave us begins to take effect. And the more our
kaiko
-bodies begin to resemble one another, the more frantically each factory girl works to reinvent her past. One of the consequences of our captivity here in Nowhere Mill, and of the darkness that pools on the factory floor, and of the polar fur that covers our faces, blanking us all into sisters, is that anybody can be anyone she likes in the past. Some of our lies are quite bold: Yuna says that her great-uncle has a scrap of sailcloth from the Black Ships. Dai claims that she knelt alongside her samurai father at the Battle of Shiroyama. Nishi fibs that she once stowed away in the imperial caboose from Shimbashi Station to Yokohama, and saw Emperor Meiji eating pink cake. Back in Gifu I had tangly hair
like a donkey’s tail, a mouth like a small red bean, but I tell the others that I was very beautiful.