Running with the Pack Part 17

"I'm not very familiar with all this."

"None of us are. The last thing my patients want to find out is that we're all responsible for our own wellness and that wellness has a rather healthy time commitment. Few, at first, are comfortable with the idea of killing in order to live. It takes time to make a thorough adjustment."

"What's the difference between vampires and goblins?"

"That reminds me of a joke that gets me slapped. We used to think they were quite similar, but recent research believes that the distinction is decided by motive: vampires eat people because they want darkness while goblins eat people because they want souls."

"So I have to figure out why I want to eat people? That's gross."

"Everyone has to figure out what they want, not just you. It's tough but that's how it is. Anyone who says that life is easy is lying through their teeth."

Yvette was certain she didn't want to eat people for any reason, so she started screaming uncontrollably.

The police were kind. They took Yvette to the gothic halls of the Willis & Rothgate Inst.i.tute, inaugurating her visits.

Yvette was getting used to visiting Willis & Rothgate too. Further episodes of uncontrollable screaming were why she was no longer hostessing at the supper club and why she'd lost most of her other jobs. She'd even been fired from a tobacconist's shop. They hadn't minded the screaming but-no matter how hard she tried-she couldn't smoke enough to be a convincing saleswoman. Even hardcore tobacco fiends are put off by a saleswoman who coughs and gags frequently.

Because of her nightmare, the Willis & Rothgate Inst.i.tution became her second home. She learned to adore how the orange gelatin tasted spicy like Mexico and the blue gelatin tasted like the planet Earth looked in satellite photos.

And the staff was carefully trained in non-confrontation. Non-confrontation, Drs. Willis and Rothgate believed, was the most caring approach for helping the clients they called bispecials. Yvette liked the idea of being special, just hated the consequences that came with it.

Her room at the Inst.i.tute had a machine that could read her thoughts and play music that fit her mood. And they brought her fresh flowers every night. The methods of non-confrontation believed that the pleasant stimuli of flowers led to purer dreams.

The staff was exceedingly nice-even when they took away the horridly nasty flowers every morning-though, once, a few candystripers held their noses and commented that no one had ever blackened so many flowers.

Bispecials, she learned early on, in cla.s.sroom sessions called Chalk Talks, were exceedingly rare. Most people were just people. They could no more become a vampire or a goblin than they could become a time-traveling wombat or an Oriental rug, but some people did become vampires-no need to bite the neck, you could bite the big toe or solar plexus if you preferred-and some people wanted to drink blood so badly that a stray force, unknown powers with an electric crackle of menace, just let them turn into a vampire.

Other people, for equally nebulous reasons, became goblins, and a truly rare minority manifested slight signs in both directions and then had to consciously decide whether they wanted to be a vampire or a goblin. Bispecials had to choose which characteristics they wanted to embrace, as difficult as the decision could be for more sensitive individuals.

The signs were sometimes so minor that they were overlooked. A penchant for doing a bad Transylvanian accent at parties or obsessing over the poems of Christina Rosetti and paintings by Pre-Raphaelites were cla.s.sic indicators of impending transgressions.

Yvette learned that a bit of dander could be all it took to tilt a person's scale. It amazed her that as little as a drop of blood could make a person irrevocably sick.

It wasn't something people would volunteer for or want, more like being conscripted. Yvette detached from the process, understanding that purer brainwaves led to purer dreams, as if they were an attempt to get back to cleaner living. But she didn't want this mission: the mood-reading music machine, going beyond flipping light switches in dreams to controlling the actual gradation of light, the sensory deprivation tank, orgone box, and vegan raw food diet.

Yes, Yvette saw the irony in avoiding meat and animal byproducts even though cannibalism was her likely end. She saw the irony and it made things worse. Veganism meant she had to give up the flavored gelatins that she'd liked.

Dozens of Chalk Talk sessions, some even led by the ill.u.s.trious Drs. Willis and Rothgate, helped Yvette gain a greater understanding of her condition, but they never-because of their belief in nonconfrontation-urged her to come to her decision hastily. She was encouraged to take the time she needed to make up her mind.

Mutual-help groups had people who'd chosen to be goblins come in and talk about how they learned to enjoy soul-slurping. Some kept regular jobs and tried to keep their species a secret. An engaging presentation was given by a radical sect of attractive young women who were professional roller-skaters known, before an incident, as The Groovy Goblin Girls. Now, sadly, they were wanted by the police for eating audience members. Even the youngest one, who'd always been friendly and respectful, had stopped returning Yvette's text messages.

A wealthy vampire from New Hampshire offered Yvette infinitely free room and board if she'd stay with him while she thought things over. Her various counselors and social worker considered it a dangerous idea and discouraged her from following up.

For Yvette, the hardest part was watching people from her various groups come to their deeply personal decisions, fill out the special permission slip and leave the Inst.i.tute. She understood the loops of logic that people applied to their choices. She knew it wasn't like Halloween. Being a vampire or a goblin wasn't a vinyl mask you decided to don one day and could change later. Once you embraced a choice, actually sat down, drew the G or V at the bottom right-hand corner of the permission slip and signed it, that was it. The incarnation couldn't be shucked or chucked; most people started to mutate, often first noticeable by elongating fangs or bulging forearms, within twenty-four hours.

You were stuck with your new incarnation, until undeath did you part.

One girl, Larissa Blackweight, had signed out from Willis & Rothgate on a day pa.s.s and leaped off a high bridge. She'd brought an indestructible ca.s.sette recorder with her to record her last thoughts and they'd been transcribed and posted all over the Net, but most bispecials ignored "The Gospels of Larissa the Leaper" claiming they were fraudulent and insane rantings. The gist was that everything in the world was a sham and that people blossom their own destinies, that nothing in life was a clear-cut binary choice. Dr. Willis told Yvette, privately, that he felt Larissa the Leaper's issues were not related to her being bispecial. He told Yvette's parents, at the last encounter group they attended before telling Yvette that they loved her but didn't want to hear any more from her until she'd made up her mind, that Larissa had been a troubled girl who enacted a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Yvette could relate, maybe even see suicide as the appropriate sacrifice. Sometimes, to herself when no one was around, she'd kneel in one of the showers on a vacant men's floor. She'd surmised that men, especially older ones, made their decisions hastily. Either that or the Inst.i.tute had multiple men's floors and this one was used less often. Gut instinct told her that men were macho about life and death, less interested in personal fulfillment.

She understood how Larissa could jump, how a conflicted young woman could crunch the variables and decide to plummet. Even though Larissa had been a brilliant painter. Even though they'd had one late-night chat where they'd considered becoming the same monster so they'd never be a species of one.

Friends made in inst.i.tutions, Yvette realized, were different from other friends. Wishing she could talk to Larissa, in effort to sort everything out and resume some semblance of camaraderie, she kneeled in the shower, trying to hallucinate a conversation with the only kindred spirit she'd ever found.

"Larissa, I know you're dead and that puts a damper on conversation, but I thought maybe I could pretend . . . ask myself questions, then imagine your answers . . . "

At first, nothing happened.

"Seriously, I'm desperate."

"Yeah, I know. But this is lame. Can't you use a Magic Eight Ball or something?" said a ghostly voice that was barely audible over the shower's hissing water.

"Just let me rant to myself, maybe interject a joke or a plat.i.tude near the end. I need room to talk to myself without thinking I'm crazy," Yvette said.

"Okay," the voice answered, noncommittally.

"See, red hot poker an inch from my left eye, I'm still unsure. I mean, Larissa, I know the distinctions as well as you did. And I understand how you could leap. With a goblin, you know where you stand-somewhere after nightfall, you're going to be cuisine. They sup on people's sins: no hand behind the curtain, no pretense or performance. Vampires, well, everyone knows that vampires drink their fill of sins early on, then become laconic and overly chatty. Their strength is kept up by the totality, like how a seasoned blood-drinker can chug a priest or a prost.i.tute and barely taste the difference, finding a palatable measure of darkness in either . . . "

"They both minister to the sick . . . "

"Goblins and vampires?" Yvette asked.

"No, prost.i.tutes and priests. I'd even hazard that they're equally likely to endure distasteful things by squeezing their eyes shut and thinking about the good they'll do with the money."

"Zowie, self-induced hallucinations are confusing."

Yvette splashed hot water on her face, trying to make sense of the situation.

"If you're going to talk to me, please don't do it in exclamatory asides."

"I wanted this to help. None of this offers a doorway out."

"You're right."

"Plus, and I know I'm whining, they go and call it bispecial, but there's no way to combine them. I'm so fed up with this externally-imposed inertia that I'd consider the willowy grace of a vampire if it was coupled with the low center of gravity and brute strength of a goblin . . . "

"No, you wouldn't. You'd still have to kill to live and you'd rather go splat from great heights than succ.u.mb to murdering innocent people. By the way, from two dozen stories, water does as much damage as concrete."

"That's not comforting."

"You're not locked here in the name of comfort."

"They know I'm having trouble deciding. I can leave whenever I want."

"Stuck in neutral isn't a decision. And you can't live whenever you want, so what's the difference?"

The hot water suddenly went cold and Yvette mumbled about how much she disliked the bind she was in, how she'd rather be a prost.i.tute or a priest, but the ghostly voice was gone. She was afraid her hallucination had gotten bored and decided to ignore her. Sometimes it felt that way with dead friends too.

Yvette wasn't sure why her dreams were always about Timothy. No amount of pondering got things to make sense.

She barely knew the boy. Originally, the dreams had been about strangers she'd met during the day: someone who came by the supper club on a tall ladder to change the dead light bulbs in the ceiling, an elderly woman who played chess in the park, a stockbroker who fed pigeons on her break.

Timothy, she presumed but didn't tell anyone, symbolized innocence. He was twelve, with longish hair and a quick wince of a smile. They'd had two conversations of less than three minutes but she considered him a good kid. A kid who shouldn't be eaten by vampires or goblins, even if they were fastidious, using a silk napkin, fine china and antique flatware.

In short, problems filled her head by the cartload.

Yvette wondered if vampires or goblins could reproduce. The answer had to be no, because no one had photographed a vampling or a gobblekin, but there were rumors. Couldn't there be a way to get darkness or souls without having to eat people? Even in her dreams, even with the decorum of napkins and cutlery, it was horrid to imagine. No amount of imaginary black pepper or imaginary hot sauce made the idea even remotely palatable or digestible.

Shivering, Yvette turned the water off and dressed in the shower stall just in case someone else entered the bathroom, putting her baby blue robe and matching flip-flops back on. Quietly, she went to her room and locked the door.

Her music machine read her mood and played a cacophony that sounded like she was smashing every smashable object in the room: mirror, bed, the clock above the door. Yvette heard the sound of her clothes being torn apart and then the sound of the music machine being destroyed.

Then the machine played silence.

A few hours later, Dr. Rothgate shook her awake and dragged her to his office.

Something was very wrong with Dr. Rothgate and it took Yvette a while to figure it out.

She was so sleepy, as the wild-eyed psychiatrist bade her rest on his couch, it seemed like she woke up mid-conversation: " . . . but I have no desire to eat people . . . "

"Appet.i.tes grow over time, like tumors or allergies. Existence, be it breathing or pogosticking or wandering around trying to remember where you've lost your keys, requires extremely complicated machinery. Taken as a vast enough ecosystem, every sprig of existence needs predation. Everyone needs a twinge of momento mori, a reminder that we'll eventually die."

"Even monsters? I thought monsters lived forever."

"Oh, well," Dr. Rothgate said while adjusting the strap holding a strange pair of goggles to his face, "it's one of those conundrums of negative capability. You have to keep two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. My research suggests that the best results come from a simultaneous belief that you'll live forever and that you could die at any moment. It reinforces the Zen koan where you attempt to have both complete commitment and complete detachment. Then again, that's only useful if you care about outcomes . . . "

The sun coming through the shaded window seemed to grow brighter, forcing Yvette to squint her eyes.

" . . . my dear, these conditions aren't brought on by loveless marriages, solipsism, drug addiction or manic-depressive paranoia. Early on, before she freaked out, back when she babbled more and shrieked less, my first patient told me that, 'Anguish was her prey.' Now I know what she meant."

"Was it Larissa?"

"Don't say her name. It was far before her."

"How long have you treated bispecials?"

"Since the beginning, quite a long and desiccated span of time." Dr. Rothgate cleared his throat. "It was her mother. She was the first of the goblins."

They both turned away from the bright window shade. Dr. Rothgate had a long draught from his brandy bottle, then handed it to Yvette.

"I thought it couldn't pa.s.s to kids. And why didn't Larissa choose goblin like her mom?"

"It can't. Anastasia Blackweight birthed Larissa before she was afflicted."

"Remember when we met? You wouldn't have called it an affliction . . . "

"I say many things."

"What did she mean, 'Anguish is our prey?' Larissa said the same thing to me. Skip the hemming and hawing about how she was a suicidal lunatic. I know you want answers."

"I want to help you, Yvette. It's all I want, I think."

He took the brandy bottle back.

"I'm the only way you can save yourself," Yvette said.

"I'm beyond saving. Anyway, she hated her mother. I shouldn't tell because you're still trying to sort things out-we don't believe in shock or confrontation here-but the anguish that twisted and tortured me has vanished now that I've succ.u.mbed, er, finally decided."

"Yeah, you were like me, but I can't figure out which way you've gone."

"Good. I don't want you to know."

"This process has taken quite a toll on me. I just want to do what's right."

"In France, a sixteenth century judge sentenced six hundred shapeshifters to death. The Malleus Maleficarum has a section on how people change and that was written in 1484."

"I've changed my mind again. I'm going to leap off a bridge if that's the only way to keep from hurting people."

"You know she talked like that, don't you? Are my notes right, did you know her?"

"We talked a few times. Only one conversation stands out. I didn't realize how momentous it would seem in retrospect. I try to hallucinate semi-lucid conversations with the imaginary version of her that I remember, but she's dead."

"If you only sleep once or twice a week for long enough, everything's dead."

"Dr. Rothgate, you're freaking me out."

"I'm sorry. We theorists aren't good at forcing outcomes," the doctor said, before thanking Yvette for her time and encouraging her to rest. He stumbled out the door, leaving her alone in his office. Yvette couldn't tell if he was having difficulty walking because of drunkenness or because his back was changing shape.

Amidst shelves warped with arcane books, two paintings dominated the walls. One was an abstract and roiling sea of red purples and purple reds. A three-dimensional claw, presumably sculpted from modeling paste, reached out from the b.l.o.o.d.y waters, reaching out to grab the painting's viewer.

The other showed a young goblin girl staring at a storefront window. The window displayed a pink chiffon dress fit for a fairy princess. Tears rimmed the eyes of the girl with pointy ears and green skin.

Rising from the couch, Yvette resolved to delay her decision until she liked one of the options before her. It seemed better to suffer and try to talk to the dead than become an evil creature. In the past, she'd chosen deadlines like Arbor Day or Oscar Night, but her self-imposed deadlines had come and gone, just excuses.

Conversely, Yvette had accepted that she and the rest of the world were going crazy and getting worse.

Over the next two days, she felt like she was sleepwalking. Dr. Rothgate didn't come to find her, preferring to stay in hiding. She understood. Their talk had left her even more fragmented than she'd been before. If Yvette had possessed a belfry, it would've been overflowing with bats.

Another day pa.s.sed, lethargic and soggy. Yvette dreamed of being a mother, envisioning her children as a bouncing brood of vamplings or gobblekins. The consequences were so dire. Why did it have to be binary? She imagined how p.u.s.s.y willows wiggled in the wind so they wouldn't break. Was the process like having a totem animal? Perhaps body modification would help with her transition. Whiskers implanted, stripes tattooed and teeth filed to little points. And, suddenly, her nightmares weren't always about being a vampire or a goblin. She felt less weird, occasionally picturing her dream self as a wolf-creature. She would need surgery to make her outsides as freaky as her insides, but it struck her as a splendid compromise. She fell back asleep, briefly.

When Yvette woke, she was licking her lips and horrified to be doing it. White roses had been delivered. And they were turned inside out, puckered by the rapid advance of her sorrowful condition.

It was still called Willis & Rothgate, even though Dr. Rothgate's presence was barely felt. New crops of bispecials meandered in and crept out. Yvette stood still while the world of sickness, wellness and horrible compromises scrolled past her. Over time, it felt less and less natural, more and more artificial.

Even though they'd said they weren't coming back until she'd made up her mind, Yvette's parents did finally return. They spoke in harsh but hushed tones.

"We heard you're considering vampire," her father said.