White Tiger on Snow Mountain (13 page)

I could tell you that the skinny trees have all gone python silver and black, that the buildings sway over their alleys, that the snow got dizzy and passed out in a vacant lot. But what then of the ice caves dripping under the bridges, and the crying train and the rats? The rats move through a city of their own, of dented steel garbage cans and dark mountains of plastic bags that tremble, as something we discarded but that isn’t really dead at all, only sleeping, stirs. It’s like muscles jumping and chirping under skin. Like eggs outgrowing their shells.

Tonight, we all dream the same dream under the same cold blanket, like we will one day in the grave. We lie stacked in buildings, like books on shelves, and behind each closed door we combine the same letters, talking to ourselves in our sleep. Even those dreamers who do wake up, and feel their way down the hall toward the bathroom, have to cross miles of drifting sleep, like blind men lost in libraries with blank books in their hands. The vampire watches. The vampire turns the page. He sighs, and his lips move in silence, sounding out the words in your head, the ones you’ve never heard spoken, like when you
opened the big dictionary in the reference room, the one with the cracked black spine, and looked up “pudendum” or “viscera” or “groin.”

He turns on Northern Boulevard, then left down Christine’s block, and spots her walking home alone from gymnastics. She is scared, but he is not. He is the vampire. He has the strength of ten men. He takes the form of a wolf and follows, his paws in her footprints, her scent in the fog of his breath. Now the night is like a forest that she must cross to get home, where the only sound is her boots crunching snow, and the only moonlight that falls this far is on the flakes winding through the trees. When she finally reaches her building and climbs upstairs to her room, although she doesn’t want to, she will leave the window open for him. She cannot resist. She will get into bed, say her prayers, and pull the covers up to her neck.

He drifts past the windows of her apartment. Her parents are grappling in bed together, the headboard clacking on the wall. Both their eyes are shut tight, each clenched in their darkness within the darkened room. The covers slide off, and I see Christine’s father, a sweaty back and hairy thighs, climbing up her mother’s doughy rump. Her nails pull the sheet off the corner of the mattress, and she wrings them in her hands, as though trying to twist out a stain.

Down the hall, Christine turns restlessly in her sleep. Her deer legs kick, straight and snappable as twigs, her thin arms folding and unfolding. In the wall behind her bed, a Virgin Mary night-light of luminous plastic is plugged into the socket, casting a holy glow. Her eyes open, and for a moment I panic, until I remember that I am invisible in his wings. She sits up, golden hair sifting, and reaches under her pillow, pulling out a
Nestlé’s $100,000 bar, a Pixy Stix, and a pack of Bubble Yum. She tears into the candy, breathing hard as she bites into the chocolate and draws the strands of caramel through her teeth. She rips open a straw and pours the purple sugar into her mouth, dyeing her tongue and lips as it melts. Behind the wall, her father grunts as he shuts the bathroom door and Christine dives under the covers. She buries the candy in her blanket and lays her head on the pillow, baring her white throat. There’s a smear of purple like spilled wine staining the skin around her mouth. Her tongue darts out to pluck the chocolate crumbs clinging to the creases of her greedy and shamelessly parted lips.

As soon as Mrs. Tannenbaum calls on me, I know I’m shit out of luck. When the papers are handed back, I am quick to hide my A, stuffing it into my loose-leaf, ashamed both of the high grade that marks me as a brainiac and also that it’s not an A+. But when she announces that she will punish the authors of the best poems by forcing them to read aloud and calls me to the front of the class, I know there is no place left to hide. I take the long walk to the scaffold, past Ronald Scuznick, who mutters “dickbreath,” and Terry O’Flynn, who hisses “wheezer” and flicks snot off his fingertips at me. I arrive at the blackboard and stare at the page in my shaking hands as though it had rewritten itself in Chinese. I manage to mumble:

O Winter Wind

Blowing so cold.

Who knows if you

Are young or old?

And so on. And as my classmates applaud, I glance up to catch the disgust in their eyes. I make it back to my seat without fainting or tripping over the feet that are sticking out and sit down, my heart beating on its coffin lid like a buried soul, to await the tolling of the recess bell, when I know my life will end.

In the school yard the boys slip off their jackets and backpacks in one shrug, dumping them still entwined in a pile near the fence, and run to play handball or stickball, the air filling with a constant roar. The snow has been plowed up into one dirty mountain over which they scramble and fight like goats in the bright winter sun. The girls gather in circles to jump rope or unpack Barbies and lipsticks and other mysterious artifacts. I slink along the building, hoping to go unnoticed, lingering near the huge, truck-sized dumpsters, with their sour tang of trash, their open wounds of rust bleeding into the snow. These are the worst times: play, lunch, gym, before and after school, whenever the lack of assigned places reveals that I have no place. I am never lonely alone. It is in the crowd, among all those who are supposedly like me, that my absolute strangeness is exposed. Somehow the shame of joining in is too much for me to bear. I can never get lost the way others can, in midflight with a ball in the air, in midsong with a fist in the air, or, God forbid, dancing, but am always myself, aware of myself, hearing the endless monologue in my head, unless that voice is stopped by another voice in a book.

And what is poetry, that thing in my chest, the heart’s sudden, upward swim to the light and air at the top of the skull? Each set of lines is called a stanza. It doesn’t have to rhyme. Poetry is anything you read out loud alone. At first, of course, I immerse myself in the classics: Horror, Sci-fi, Westerns, and
Kung Fu. Early efforts include “The Tell-Tale Fart,” about a fat man who killed for a bowl of beans, “The Oriental Art of Death,” in which a master demonstrates how to rip an enemy’s limbs off, and the self-explanatory “Wolfman vs. Frankenstein,” but already I am mysteriously susceptible to the temptation of certain phrases in old books I barely understand, the power of certain words in my ear, their look on the page, knowing more than they say. I recognize the scattered clues, a cooling of the forehead, a clearing in the eye. A sudden wind rushes up and lifts my chest like a leaf. I step into the world behind the world. Here, alone in my labyrinth with the garbage and the sun and the gorgeous rust, I know the secret name of things. I hold the thread.

Then Ronald Scuznick appears around the dumpster with Terry O’Flynn flanking to prevent flight. A cluster of boys follows, and behind them the girls gathering to watch. I see Christine among them. Terry intones with an Irish lilt:

O Winter Wind

You smell like shit.

Why don’t you suck

Your mama’s tit?

The response from the crowd is uproarious. Clearly this work is much better received than my own offering, and frankly, I’m inclined to agree. I even laugh along with the others, but this just seems to annoy Scuznick more.

“What’re you laughing at, douchebag?”

“Nothing,” I mumble, the smile drying on my lips.

“Damn right.”

Ronald closes in, shoving my shoulders, and I stagger back. Ronald punches me, sounding my head like a gong, and I hear cheers through the hum. As he pummels me, I do my best to hit back, swinging wildly, but it’s hard to aim with your eyes shut tight in terror. I can’t bear to see what’s happening to me. I pray only that unconsciousness will be swift and soft and that I am not permanently disfigured. I even entertain a brief image of Christine smoothing my brow in the hospital. My throat tightens, and I forget to breathe. It sounds like a leaf is caught in the spokes of my chest.

“You better watch out,” Terry taunts from the sidelines as I sputter and heave. “The wheezer might cough on you!”

Everyone laughs again, but through the haze of fear an idea takes shape in my mind. “That’s right,” I manage to warble. “I’m contagious. You’ll end up like me.”

Scuznick closes in for the kill. Thinking fast, I plunge my mucus-clogged pipes, and just as he raises his fists, I lean my head back and spit.

Now maybe I can’t fight, or catch, or hit a ball with a bat, but if there’s one thing a bronchial asthmatic can do it’s hock loogies. I bring up a beauty, gray slime flecked with yellow like a bad oyster, and rearing like Pegasus, I send it arcing perfectly through the air, splat onto Scuznick’s ugly mug. It’s everywhere, his hair, his shirt. He’s like a villain caught in Spider-Man’s web. Scuznick screams, “Oh Jesus, get it off me,” and takes off running like he’s on fire. The crowd of onlookers panics, trampling one another to get away as he wails among them, howling and rending his garments. I cough hard, loading up more ammo, and turn to O’Flynn, but he backs off. Scuznick runs over to Mr. Alpaca, who’s on duty, reading the paper by the door.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, looking up as Scuznick runs over, hysterical.

“It’s phlegm.”

“Well, don’t get it on me,” Mr. Alpaca says, batting him away with his newspaper. “It’s disgusting. Go see the nurse. Or ask the janitor to hose you off.”

This gets a huge laugh from the kids, and as Ronald rushes inside, they trail along, laughing and skipping and jeering happily. I can’t believe it: I’ve won a fight, sort of. Or at least I haven’t lost it. It’s the crowning moment of my life. But surprisingly no one seems to be flocking around to cheer and clap my back or lift me on their shoulders as they do with other victors. Instead they cluster in little groups, staring at me and whispering. Christine is among them, wide-eyed and pale. When I take a step toward her, she turns away, then changes her mind and, glancing over her shoulder, runs over. Is she racing to me, hair streaming, cheeks flushed, to finally confess her love, now that I am a schoolyard hero? This thought makes it all seem worth it. Maybe we can run away together, take a raft down the river or live in a cave in the woods.

“How could you?” she asks.

“Hi,” I say.

“How could you kiss me when you’re infected? What if I have your disease now?”

“No,” I stammer. “It’s not really like that.”

“I hate you,” she says, eyes tearing. “Don’t ever talk to me again. And don’t you dare tell anyone we kissed.”

I can’t sleep, but still dreams come to haunt me. I throw the covers off. I’m slick with sweat. I can’t stand it any longer.
Whatever the cost, I have to speak to him. I creep down the hall and listen at the door of my parents’ room. They are asleep. I go to my window and silently lift it. I put a bare foot on the cold slats of the fire escape. Below me the street is empty. The wind makes my eyes water, and as I climb the ladder, the skin on the bottom of my feet sticks to the rusty iron. On the fourth floor I look in the window. There is the Spanish lady sleeping with her face in the pillow, black hair fanning out. I keep on climbing, hoping the vampire isn’t there.

The light in his room is off, but the TV is playing. I can see if I creep up to the window. It is a large room, the same as my parents’. All the walls are covered with books except for one space, where a painting of a nude woman hangs. The floor is bare. On a night table crowded with jars and pill bottles, a cigarette is burning in an ashtray. On a narrow bed like mine, not a grown-up bed at all, the vampire lies, eyes closed. An old hand goes out and picks the cigarette from the tray. He brings it to his lips, then stubs it out, exhaling a fog of smoke that spreads to fill the room.

I tell myself to knock. I tell myself to go back. So I hold still, shivering. My breath clouds the window. My teeth chatter. There is a cramp in my legs. I have to move. I unbend my limbs, shifting the weight, and something falls, a pebble maybe or a paint chip. It clanks from floor to floor. I freeze. The vampire sits up. His eyes are wide open, revealing two floating, clouded blue marbles. I want to scream. I know there is no point in taking off; he’ll only find me. He reaches out and turns on a light.

“Come on in, boy. You’ll catch your death out there.”

I hold my breath.

“I said come in. It’s not locked.”

I slide the window open and climb inside where it’s warm.

“Close that window. My blood’s thinner than yours.”

My eyes widen at this, but I turn and shut the window.

“Now then.” The vampire reaches for his cigarette pack. “What’s your name, boy?”

“Elliot.”

The vampire rummages through the litter on his night table, cigarette hanging from his lip. He turns to me, dead eyes rolling like Gobstoppers. “No, you wouldn’t have any.” He lifts the lamp, and his hand finds some matches. The shadows on the wall grow and change. “Ah, here we are. Now we can get down to business.”

I wish I were in my bed asleep. But I’m not. This is real.

“Tell me, Elliot,” he asks. “Why are you here?” The bony hands strike a match and lift it to the cigarette. I don’t know what to say.

“I, I have to ask you something.”

The vampire runs a hand over the ridges on his scalp.

“I’m waiting.” He grins. The points of his teeth gleam yellow.

“Are you”—I swallow—“a vampire?”

The old man starts laughing like an engine trying to catch. I blush while he laughs and wipes the tears from his eyes. I didn’t know blind eyes could cry. Then he starts coughing. He sits up, pounding on his chest, and leans over to spit on the floor. I stare at the gray lump. I notice some dry splotches in the same area. The vampire leans back against the pillows.

“Yes,” he says, “I am.”

My hand goes up to the collar of my pajamas. The blush fades from my face. I’m right, but I wish I were wrong.

“Really?”

“Yes, I have been for years. For longer than you’ve been alive. Since before your grandparents were born. And I’ve been all over the world. Europe, Asia, Africa. You name it, I been there.”