"I’m only tired, thank you," she said. She looked stiff, her small fingers interlaced and tense and pinned to her breast-bone. She lacked only a white lily to hold and a plush box to lie down in.
Doug realized now, on his bike, that she’d probably been offended by all the gay talk. India was different. He would have to let her know everything was cool, that he was on her side, whatever side that was. He had to stay on top of this.
After they’d dropped off Sejal and Cat, Doug had explained the situation to Jay. "Adam’s after Sejal," he said. "I don’t think he cares about Sophie."
"Really?"
"It’s obvious. Did you see how long he hugged her good night? And all his we’re married now, when’s the honeymoon jokes…"
"You said he only dates girls who’re at least two years younger," Jay reminded him. "And not smart. Sejal’s our age and smart."
"Yeah, but she’s foreign."
"I don’t understand your math," Jay had answered.
"I don’t understand your math," Doug shouted, now, as he hurtled through the stale bus-and-curry-scented streets. He swerved to avoid a mother with stroller who’d just stepped into the bike lane to watch for larger traffic. Then, with quick reflexes (vampire reflexes!), he hopped the bike onto the sidewalk, his poncho blowing heroically behind him.
Stephin David owned an old row house near a park in West Philadelphia. Doug scanned the porches and steps for house numbers and nearly missed the pink and blue balloons and poster-board sign that said VAMPIRE attached to Stephin’s mailbox. Doug hastily tore down the sign and stuffed it in his backpack. In a disoriented rush he also popped the balloons and threw them inside the mailbox. Then he locked his bike to it and started up the path past a small, dry lawn. The door opened as he stepped onto the porch.
"Douglas?" said a man.
"Doug. Yes. Hi."
"Hello, Doug. I’m Stephin. Come in."
He was short, too, only a touch taller than Doug, but with a sonorous voice that seemed to creak up through the floor. And he was not what you would call classically good-looking. Maybe this was the rationale behind that "perfect match" Cassiopeia had mentioned.
Doug glanced around as Stephin led him through the foyer. If there had been a fourth Little Pig who’d elected to build his house out of cigarette butts it might have looked and smelled something like this place. The walls were as brown as a dead plant, the corners bruised with mold. Here and there the ghostly rectangles of missing picture frames haunted the hall. Books were stacked everywhere, clogging the already narrow artery into the house.
"Are you moving out?" asked Doug.
"It’s possible I am. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been moving out my whole life."
Okay, thought Doug. They passed a frame that hadn’t yet been removed but was covered with a languid drape of cloth. It was a Jewish tradition to cover mirrors after someone died. Was Stephin Jewish? But, no, when Doug was sure he wouldn’t be seen, he lifted a corner of the drape. It was only an old portrait of a Civil War soldier.
Stephin led Doug into a sort of study or den, and invited him to sit in a worn leather chair. He fell into it, suddenly tired. He had been pushing himself a bit out there, actually. All that biking in the daytime. His back was sticking to his shirt, and now his shirt was sticking to the chair. He tried to steady his breathing as he looked around.
Small book stacks ringed his chair like a cul-de-sac. Suburbs. The chair Stephin chose was more like downtown Bookville — literary high-rises, thirty stories tall. In the amber glow of two small lamps the whole room took on the sepia blur of an old photograph. It was steeped in the musty but unaccountably pleasant smell of old paper.
They stared at each other a moment. There was something gnomish and subterranean about Stephin, Doug decided. Maybe he had been an accident, too.
"So," said Stephin. "I haven’t done this in a very long time. You’ll forgive me if I’ve misplaced all my old lesson plans."
"Well, should I — Should I just ask questions?"
"That would be fantastic."
Now Doug was being asked to dive in headfirst, and Doug had never learned to dive. He thought perhaps he should start with Stephin himself.
"Are you…American?"
"I was born in Scotland. But we came here when I was three."
"Have you lived here long? In Philadelphia I mean. Do you have to move around a lot?"
"About twenty years," said Stephin. "This is not my only residence."
"So how long have you been…ennobled?"
Stephin’s expression did not change, but when he answered, there was a sour note to his voice. "I’m not as fond as you might imagine of Miss Polidori’s delicate little euphemisms. Can we perhaps call the thing what it is?"
"You mean I should just say ‘vampire’?"
"If it walks like a bat and quacks like a bat…"
"All right, so how long have—"
"One hundred and forty-six years."
"Oh. Well, that’s pretty good," said Doug. He hoped he didn’t sound disappointed. He kind of wanted Stephin to be hundreds of years old. Even thousands. He didn’t think Signora Polidori was more than two or three hundred. He didn’t know anything about Alexander Borisov. All the other vampires he knew were recent hires like himself.
"Who’s the oldest?" asked Doug. "Like, who’s the oldest vampire you know."
Stephin mulled this over a moment. "I suppose the oldest…the oldest I’m certain is still in this world is Cassiopeia herself. Born the year of Victoria’s coronation, as she likes to tell anyone who will listen. Alexander is only seventy or eighty."
Doug nodded and looked at his feet. There was another pale rectangle here, this one in the center of the floor like the chalk outline of a dead coffee table.
"Are there many vampires?" he asked. "My friend Jay likes to work these things out and — and there were only three vampires here in the Philadelphia area up until a month ago. That’s three vampires for six million people. So maybe a hundred and fifty vampires in the whole country. Three thousand in the whole world. And we’re guessing there wouldn’t be as many in rural areas."
"I suspect it’s something like that. I don’t have better numbers than you do. I would definitely agree about less populated areas, the countryside…It’s far riskier to hunt in such places."
"So why aren’t there more vampires? Why don’t you know any really old ones? It’s not like they’re dying out or anything—"
With a jolt Doug realized that Stephin was in his pajamas. They were a loose pair of pants and a shirt with large buttons. The top and bottoms didn’t match so he’d mistaken it for an outfit. Pajamas.
"Don’t fool yourself, Doug. We can die. We’re not as difficult to kill as the movies would have you believe. We heal quickly, true, and we don’t strictly need a fair number of our organs anymore, but a close shotgun blast to the chest will put us down as decisively as a stake in the heart."
Stephin was suddenly lively, like this was a favorite topic. Like he’d been asked about his great-great-great-great-grand-kids.
"Though not as quickly," he added. "A sharp piece of wood will end it more quickly, for reasons that have never been adequately explained to me. Also, we still need to breathe. We still prefer not to be on fire. And though we might heal from a bayonet in the ribs we can’t regenerate a whole limb. How long," he said, edging forward, "how long has any of us got before the big accident comes? The loss of arms, or legs? How do we hunt, then, with no wings? How much blood could a bloodsucker suck if a bloodsuck — and now I see I’m scaring you."
"What?" said Doug with a start. "No."
"I am. I’m sorry. I’m no longer practiced at human interaction. I’ve talked to so few people during the last fifteen or twenty years. I spent the whole of 1996 and part of ’97 speaking nothing but a language of my own invention called Stephinese, just to see if it would make life more diverting."
"And?"