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02/13/2004: "David Parker’s Journal: 10"

Note: Today’s entry marks the tenth in David Parker’s Journal. As faithful readers know, David has a reputation for being a flawed man but a good vampire. And yet pressure of an ill-defined sort has been building in him over the past ten weeks. He is on the cusp of something that seems dangerous. Ten is an important number in numerology. Our system of counting is based on tens, perhaps for the simple reason that we have ten fingers on our hands. Once we reach the number ten, it is time to continue on at an entirely different level – or to start over again at the beginning. David Parker’s Journal, Entry No. 10, follows. – M.R.

* * *

I turned at the first intersection and then again on the street that runs parallel to the river.

My passenger did not seem particularly interested in our destination. She leaned back against the heated leather seat and closed her eyes. She was cold, tired, and stoned out of her mind. And at least the next few minutes, the young prostitute could enjoy the comfort and apparent safety of my Audi. If only she knew how deceptive appearances could be!

The office buildings gave way to warehouses as we traveled toward the edge of town. A slaughterhouse slipped by on the right, the ugly brick edifice partly hidden behind darkness and fog. A little further on was a cemetery, its last vacant plot long since filled, hemmed in by development that left no space to expand. I had explored the graveyard during my first month in town. I’ve always been drawn to cemeteries; I find it relaxing to stroll among the tombstones, reading names, dates, epitaphs. That’s how I knew the mound in the corner was from cholera epidemic in the 1800s. The dead had piled up so quickly that the safest way to deal with the virulent corpses was to pile them into a mass grave and cover them with earth.

Another mile farther on the left was a road leading across a narrow causeway to an island in the Mississippi. The island belonged to the city and was divided between a park and golf course that sustained serious flooding damage almost every spring. The city continued to repair the greens and reseed the fairways after each deluge. I couldn’t decide whether that kind of stubbornness was cause to celebrate or despair.

The island was utterly deserted on a winter night. I turned down one of the side lanes and parked under the naked, over-reaching boughs of a stand of gigantic oaks.

Lashonda’s breasts rose and fell with the regular cadence of sleep. She looked almost peaceful, though it was impossible for me to ignore the smell of despair, addiction, and moral gangrene her soul gave off. It is impossible to understand why some people surrender so easily to the pain of living. Her lips seemed made for kissing, and yet how much more of life was living it would it take to steal the bloom from this rose? Life was precious and time more precious still, the measure by which being runs out until too soon the cup is empty and the only thing left is the silent chill of a grave.

The quiet when I turned off the CD player – I’d been listening to Mozart, with which Lashonda had been less than impressed – roused her. I could see her trying to remember who I was and what we were doing. It obviously wasn’t an uncommon experience for her.

“I need a little bump,” she said in a flat voice. She dug in her purse until she came up with a glass pipe and a baggie. “You don’t mind, do you, sugar?”

I shrugged. I doubted it mattered whether I objected if she took drugs while sitting in my car.

“You want a taste? I can get you some if you want to buy. I got a good connection. We could have us a real party,” she said, opening her eyes wide.

“No, thanks.”

“Whatever,” she replied, suddenly bored. She filled the pipe and put it in her mouth. I snatched the burning lighter out of her hand and, before she could react, the pipe. I squeezed it hard, the sound of breaking glass muffled by my hand.

The girl shrank away from me, not afraid so much as stunned. The fear would come later.

“You some kind of narc?”

I shook my head.

“You owe me for that,” she said, indicating the pipe and its contents.

I started to reach her.

She pressed herself back against the window as I reached for her, the broken pipe and its contents scattering except for the bits stabbed into my right hand.

“Don’t you feel no pain? Your hand has to be full of glass.”

If I’d been her, I would have tried to get out the door and run, not that it would have done her any good. There was no place to go for help on the dark island, and at any rate she could never run fast enough to escape me.

“Lashonda.”

I held her head with the fingertips of both hands, careful not to get the palm of my right hand brush her cheek. The glass splinters were already falling out of my skin, the wounds closing themselves, already nearly healed.

“Look at me,” I commanded.

Our faces were six inches apart. I could have kissed her or killed her then – I already knew that if I tasted her essence I would not stop until her breath was gone and her coffee-colored skin wan and bloodless. The truly appalling thing to me now, as I sit writing this, is that I did not know what I was going to do. I was on the precipice, leaning this way than that, on the verge of losing my balance. She would live or die, depending on whether the coin came up heads or tails.

“Listen to me very carefully.” My voice was shaking. “Go home and take care of your child. If you ever touch drugs again, you will become so sick that you’ll wish you would die – but you won’t.”

I went further into her mind, racing through the sad and sordid details of a life misspent.

“Take your child and return to your grandmother’s home in Des Moines. Go back to work at Penny’s, get your GED, and stay alive. If you stay out on the streets, your future extends no farther than tonight. Will you do as I have ordered?”

It was a rhetorical question. I’d already been inside her head, arranging things the way I wanted them to be. She had no choice but to obey. She was helpless to defy me. No mortal could defy a vampire.

I felt myself beginning to smile. I had, despite my own worst instincts, managed to salvage a bit of grace from the night. I’d swung from rage to peace. It was as though a dam had broken in my soul, releasing the lake of poison that had been backing up since Tatiana’s return – though in truth the darkness had been growing in my heart since long before that.

My fingers found the CD controls and I turned Mozart back on.

“Lovely music, isn’t it?”

She nodded. She really was a lovely girl. Unsophisticated but unspoiled by artifice.

I leaned forward and gently pressed my lips to hers. She kissed me back, responding to my touch as nimbly as a sailboat to the hand of its captain.

What would it hurt, I thought, if I had just a little more blood?