Jacob, page 2
I don’t know.
Except—and this is something Michael shared—it stuck with me for some reason. He said that people who read, especially people who read a lot, they have more empathy than people who don’t read. And it’s his theory that empathy is a necessary condition for true sentience and from there, true sapience. It sounds good. I like it. It’s a useful justification to hang onto while I figure out the real reasons. And if he’s right, maybe someday I’ll find out what enlightenment looks like.
Anyway.
The coffee shop stays open all night, so it doesn’t matter how late we stay. Sometimes we sit and argue until two in the morning. Sometimes, we don’t. Sometimes we even go home and write. Sometimes I open up my laptop and type a few notes to myself, maybe even a whole paragraph, and later on—when I realize I’ve done five or six pages, I look up and see I’m all alone. The others have left.
Tonight, I’m not alone. The new guy is still here. The one in the black hoody. I don’t know his name. He told it to me when we shook hands. His hand was very cold. I remember that, but I forgot his name. I close the laptop. “Can I ask you something?”
He shrugs.
“I mean—I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to ask. Are you an albino?”
He shakes his head. A hint of a smile flickers in his eyes. “No. I’m just extremely allergic to sunlight. It’s a very rare condition.”
“Ah.” Jacob—that’s his name, now I remember. “You don’t say much. Do you write?”
He scratches his cheek with one well-manicured nail, thinking it over. “No, I don’t write. But I’m interested in writers.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“No, I mean—I guess this is a strange thing to say, but my experience of writers? I mean, even myself. Especially myself. We’re pretty screwed up as people. We’re too fat or too skinny, too short or too tall. We’re awkward, we’re weird, we’re dancing with insanity, with two left feet. And you don’t even want to know about all the weird sexual experimentation—”
“Precisely,” Jacob says. “That’s exactly what makes writers interesting.” He moves his chair closer to me, he leans forward, stares into my eyes. “People. Think about it. The great mass of men lead lives of quiet domestication. Like animals in feeding pens, they shuffle meekly from one cubicle to the next, school, school, school, work, work, work—until you die. But writers …” Now he smiles. “Writers—the good ones anyway—are always looking, listening, sniffing, tasting, touching, experiencing the whole world with all their senses. They’re exploring, discovering, learning, sharing. They’re pushing the limits of what they know. They’re going out beyond the safety of the firelight into the darkness. They’re going into the risk zone. They’re breaking taboos. The good writers anyway. They’re interesting specifically because they’re not safe and comfortable and normal.”
“Okay. That makes sense. It’s the kind of thing you hope it’s true. If you’re a writer.”
“It is true. The evidence is there.”
“So …” I push my empty coffee cup to the edge of the table, just in time to catch Millie, the waitress, passing by with a fresh pot. She refills my mug, Jacob’s too. I turn back to him. “So, what I wrote—? It’s crap, right?”
He shakes his head. “No. It’s just … naïve.”
“Naïve? Why do you say that?”
“Because it is.” He leans back in his chair, hooking one arm over the back of it. “I used to be an existentialist—that’s the polite way of saying ‘I don’t care and I don’t care that I don’t care.’ But there’s a—a way of looking at the world. ‘What is, is. What isn’t, isn’t.’ As if that means something. It doesn’t. Or, if you dig even deeper—‘Life is empty and meaningless. And it doesn’t mean anything that it doesn’t mean anything.’ You like that kind of crap? It sounds profound, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s just a clever way of disassociating yourself. If you don’t have to care, you don’t have to take responsibility.”
He holds up a hand to stop me from replying, a very pale hand. “No, there’s more. Let me finish. The whole point of that word salad is to say that if you want life to have meaning, you have to make it up yourself. Because you’re God inside your own universe of experience. So if you follow that train of thought, toward its illogical solipsistic endpoint, everybody is alone.”
I can’t help myself. I ask, “So what does this have to do with vampires?”
“Everything,” he says. “Being a vampire is the ultimate loneliness. Everyone you know grows old and dies, you might be immortal, but you’re alone.”
“But you can make other vampires, can’t you? To keep you company?”
“You’ve never been married, have you?”
“No.”
“After the first fifty or sixty years, you’ve had enough. You’re just waiting for her to die. Now think about what it would be like if neither of you could die and you’re stuck with each other for eternity….” He pauses. “When you get to the point that you can finish each other’s sentences, when you know each other’s jokes, when all you have are each other’s memories, when you can tell each other’s stories, when there’s absolutely nothing new to say to each other—”
“But if you love her—?”
“Really? What is love?” Jacob asks.
“Uh—”
“Yeah. That’s the point.”
“I have to think about this. I always thought love was when two people fit together so well they become two parts of a larger whole.”
“Like Romeo and Juliet? Two addlepated teenagers fall in lust and three days later, six people are dead—Mercutio is stabbed, Tybalt is stabbed, Paris is stabbed, Romeo poisons himself, Juliet stabs herself, and Lady Montague dies of a broken heart. Not the best demonstration of a healthy relationship, is it?”
“Now, you’re just being cynical.”
“Am I? Are you arguing that the hormonal responses of two barely post-adolescent persons are a strong foundation for a lifetime relationship? Think about it. Do you really want to spend eternity with this person?”
“Uh—yeah. Okay. I see your point. But not every relationship has to be permanent, right? I mean, you make new friends all your life, don’t you? As you grow older, as you meet new people, as you move through new circumstances. So wouldn’t the same be true for vampires? You could make new … I don’t know, what would you call it?—relationships?—without necessarily having to turn them into immortal companions, right?”
“True. And you can get a new dog, but it’s not the same dog, is it?”
“Oh.” That one I knew. Too well.
Jacob says, “Let me finish my earlier thought. One of my favorite philosophers says that everything is a conversation. Everything. There is no is. There’s only the ‘is’ that we assign to things. Let me say that another way. Maybe there really is an objective reality. But we’re not designed to experience it. So all that any of us really knows is our own subjective experience, our own conversation about what is. So there’s no ‘is’, there’s only the is we speak. And when we speak it, that makes it real—for the person speaking, and for the person listening, at least for as long as he’s listening. What do you call it? Taking a thought out of your head and putting it into someone else’s? You do it when you speak. But you do it when you write as well. And if you’re really really good at it, your is becomes the other person’s is.”
“And you’re telling me this because—?”
“Because you asked me why I said your story—your fragment of a story—is naïve, and I said, ‘Because it is.’ And no, I don’t mean like a subjective is. I mean it like an objective, can’t be argued with, ‘is.’”
“Okay. You say it’s naïve. Can I ask why?”
Jacob nodded. “What do you know about vampires?”
“The same thing everybody knows. They’re—”
“Right. You know nothing. Because until a vampire sits down and writes a memoir—a real vampire, a real memoir, not a work of fiction—you know nothing. No one knows anything. It’s all make-believe.”
“And you know better?”
“Do you?” Jacob’s gaze is intense. He studies me. “Have you ever met a vampire? Has anyone?”
“They’re fictitious creatures. That’s why it’s all make-believe.”
“Ahh.”
“So everybody creates their own is. About vampires, I mean.”
Jacob nods agreement. “Now you’re getting it. But—” He stabs the air with a forefinger. His eyes flash with a conspiratorial gleam. “What if there really were vampires? What if there really is something there—some condition that people have misunderstood for centuries?”
“Yeah, and what if there were no rhetorical questions?”
He ignores it. Properly so.
“Here’s what’s wrong with most vampire stories,” Jacob says. “Most of the time, anyway. The writer isn’t telling us about vampires. He’s telling us what he thinks vampires might be. He’s telling us what he believes, what he fears, what he wants. He—or she—hasn’t really thought about the experience of being a vampire.”
“And you have?”
“I’m not a writer. You are. What’s interesting about your pages, your little fragment, is that you’re trying to put yourself into the experience. Other writers—” He shrugs. “They’re trying to redefine the experience in their own terms.”
“Maybe I’m doing the same thing…?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Walk it out and see. Tell me what you think a vampire is.”
“Well, traditionally—”
“No, not traditionally. Realistically.”
“Umm, okay.” I lean back in my chair. Visions of Dracula dance in my head.
“Here’s a clue. Think about the eco-system.”
“Oh, well in that case.” I lean forward again. “It’s obvious. The vampire is the apex predator.” Frowning, trying to remember all those Discovery channel documentaries. “That means you need at least, damn I don’t remember, but it’s hundreds of herbivores, maybe thousands, just to maintain a healthy breeding population and support the carnivore families that feed on them. The size of the herbivore population determines how many carnivores can survive. But it’s more than that, you need the carnivores to weed out the sick and elderly, the slow and feeble. The carnivores help keep the herbivore population healthy.”
“Uh-huh.” Jacob looked pleased. “You’re on the right track. Forget vampires for a minute and think about eco-systems.”
“Okay, I’m thinking.”
“Who’s the apex predator on Earth right now? I mean, without vampires.”
“We are. Humans. We’re eating the planet down to the bone. One day there won’t be enough for everyone and we’ll have riots, wars, and eventually a massive population crash.”
“Unless—?”
“There is no unless.”
“Yes, there is. Think about it.”
“Oh, okay. Massive farms. Not the sprawling acreage, but city-farms. Big greenhouse things. Hydroponics. Meat-tanks. Stuff like that.”
“Yeah, if humans get hungry enough, that’s what they’ll build. Because the market will make it profitable. And yes, you will get that hungry, so it’s inevitable. What did you have for dinner?”
“A hamburger.”
“Where did it come from?”
I laugh and point toward the kitchen.
“Before that—?”
“Probably that huge cattle feed lot up north—”
“Uh-huh. So now look at it from the point of view of the cow, they’re in bovine paradise—they get to be part of a huge successful herd, tens of thousands of friends and companions, with lots and lots of good food for everybody to eat, they’re encouraged to stuff themselves and be happy, and best of all, they don’t have to worry about predators—wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, bears, or even bad weather. They have a nice warm barn in the evening, they get vaccinated against all kinds of diseases, and they get inspected regularly to keep them healthy. A very low-stress existence. Eat all you want and never have a stampede. From the cow’s perspective it’s a nice life.”
“Until you’re a hamburger.”
Jacob smiles. “Well, yes. There is that—but the evidence of modern civilization is that most people have already made that trade.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So you’re saying the human population is a giant feed lot, managed by vampires?”
He grins, a quick flash of his very white teeth. “Parts of it, yes. We still have a lot of wilderness left. For those who still like the hunt.”
“Ha ha. Very funny. You’re a vampire?”
“Oops. Did I say that out loud?” He laughs, too easy.
“Yeah, you did.”
Jacob waves it away. “There’s no such thing, remember?” Then, more seriously, “Don’t panic. This is just a thought experiment. For your story.”
I notice he dodged the denial.
I type something into the laptop. Vampires. Apex predators. Feed lots. Then back to him, “So, okay—if there are seven billion people on the planet—”
“Seven point five—”
“—then how many vampires will that support?”
Jacob leans back in his chair, steeples his fingers. “You’re asking the wrong question. No. You’re asking that question before you have all the information you need to answer it. First you have to establish the life cycle of the vampire.”
“The life cycle?”
“The traditional idea—the Dracula fantasy—is that if you drink a vampire’s blood, you become a vampire too. What does that suggest?”
“An infection.”
“Obviously.”
“So it’s a disease—a disease of the blood.”
“Uh-huh. And…?”
“If it’s a disease, then it’s not supernatural. It would have specific symptoms and conditions. And also … maybe it’s curable. Stoker hinted that it was—with transfusions.”
“Specific symptoms and conditions…?” Jacob looks at me expectantly. “Like for instance?”
“Um, okay. Well, anything that would help contribute to the mythology. The vampire mythos says that vampires have great strength. And we know that the human body is capable of impossible feats of strength. It’s called hysterical strength—it happens with whacked out PCP-users—so that gives us some idea what the human body can do when it’s pumped full of—well, whatever it takes to create that kind of enhanced ability. So, if I were speculating—oh, I am speculating—but I’d guess that the condition lets the patient trigger that kind of hysterical strength on demand. It wouldn’t just be muscle strength, it would mean faster reflexes too. All kinds of physical abilities would be boosted—climbing, running, lifting, fighting, but probably not flying. That’s too much a stretch.”
“Not bad,” Jacob nods. “Can you figure out the rest of it?”
“Well, sure. It’s obvious—well, obvious to anyone who knows anything about physiology. That’s a lot of work for a body to do. So any kind of super-strength has to use up a lot of energy—like a cheetah can only run so far before his body temperature rises dangerously, then he has to stop. So, I’d say that someone with the condition would have only short bursts of super-strength available, then he’d need to stop and recover, as if he’d been running a marathon. Ahh—that’s it. Maybe super-strength uses up so much energy that the body needs a really huge amount of recovery. Maybe the person would have to go into some kind of deep dormancy so his body can rebuild its reserves of energy, a sleep so deep he can’t be roused, at least not easily—it would look like death. So he’d need a very quiet, very safe place—a place where no one would find him and disturb him.”
“Like a crypt?”
“I was thinking more like a dark basement. A bedchamber with heavy curtains. Okay, yes—a coffin would be ideal. Oh, wait—that suggests something else. If the vampire needs a very quiet resting place, then that might mean he has extremely heightened senses, to the point of sensory overload—I think it’s called hyperesthesia. So he’d need a place that’s very dark and very quiet. A coffin in a basement would be a good resting place.”
I’m on fire with the idea. Jacob waits for me to continue.
“Y’know—that could explain Poe’s story, ‘The Fall Of the House Of Usher.’ Both Madeline and Roderick are infected, only Madeline much more so. Roderick knows what’s coming. He knows she’s not dead, but he lies to the narrator and says that she is—he really does love his sister, that’s why he wants her to die in her coffin because he wants to spare her the horror he believes must inevitably follow—”
“Nice,” says Jacob.
“I don’t know if Poe was aware of the vampire mythos. He never wrote a vampire story, did he?”
Jacob shakes his head. “Not that I know of.”
“But he might have been aware of the symptoms. It would explain a lot. I know he had a fear of being buried alive. And madness—” I lean forward, frowning. Another thought.
“What—?”
“I’m thinking that … well, it makes sense to me … I mean, think about it. If the condition, whatever it is, creates enhanced strength, then it might also enhance the person’s reflexes, so that means it affects the nervous system too. That could account for the hyperesthesia….”
“And…?”
“And that would probably, I mean I’m just guessing here, but I think it would probably trigger hallucinogenic episodes—I’d guess most often related to the bursts of super-strength, but maybe other times as well—like when the person gets hungry. I’d guess the condition would require a lot of energy to sustain itself, and that would probably mean incredible cravings. Let’s say some kind of hunger-induced hallucinations. Maybe to a primitive mind that would seem otherworldly—maybe the hallucinations might show up as a hunger for blood. Or flesh. But like I said, I’m guessing now.”
