Teeth: Vampire Tales

History by ELLEN KUSHNER

“You just totally ran that red light,” she says, not without admiration.

“I know.” As always, he sounds smug. He downshifts and passes a van that has been in front of them for blocks. “I love driving.”

He is much too old for her, but that doesn’t bother her. She has never been fussy about age. She is a historian — almost. Just a couple more papers, and she’ll get honors this year from their country’s oldest university. What bothers her is that he won’t tell her about history. “I forget,” he says when pressed. “It was all a long time ago.”

He knows. She knows he knows. He just won’t say.

“Why do you still drive shift?” she asks crabbily.

“Everyone should drive shift. Can’t you drive shift?”

“Of course I can. I just wouldn’t in city traffic, if I didn’t have to.”

He is now weaving his way through a densely populated open square ringed by ancient buildings, where the traffic vies for road space with students late for class — brilliant adolescents who believe all cars will stop for them — and with beggars and tourists and absentminded faculty. When he first knew it, the square, it was full of students in black robes and muddy shoes, never looking straight ahead of them but always up for tavern signs, or down to avoid horse manure and rotting cabbage and the occasional peasant. These students don’t look down, and they don’t look up much, either.

“Out of my way, asshole!” he growls at a blond waif with a backpack who has just stepped off the curb to wait for the light.

He loves to drive, and he loves to swear. In his youth he did neither. But that was a long time ago.

He also loves rock and roll. And the blues. “American blues,” he says. “There’s nothing like them. Muddy Waters taught Eric Clapton all he knows.”

“Have you ever been to America?” she asks.

“Once.” He scowls. “I hated it.”

She has learned not to make jokes about his needing his Native Soil. He really hates that. She’ll do it to get a rise out of him, but that’s all.

She tries to catch him when he’s half awake. “Tell me about the Great War,” she’ll say, but he turns over, muttering, “Which one?” or “They were all great.”

“Which was your favorite, then?”

“The one with the little short guy on the horse. There he was, looking out over the plain at the smoldering campfires below at what remained of his army. They were a ragtag lot. The sun was low. He turned to the adjutant next to him and said softly, ‘My friend — ’”

She whacks him on the head with her bookmark. “I saw that movie, too.”

They take a walk down by the river that runs through the heart of the city. People are lined up on the sidewalk along the bridge trying to sell them things: bead earrings, knockoff purses, used comics, watercolors of the cathedral. There’s a caricaturist drawing portraits. Her lover does reflect in mirrors, but she has the sudden thought that he would not show up in caricature. What would a cartoon sketch of him look like? The things that make him most himself are not visible to the eye. She sneaks a peek off to the side, where he stands looking at the cathedral. Long, bony nose, high brow, hair swept back. Another thought strikes her.

“Did you ever have your portrait done?”

“I — ” If he says “I forget” again, she’ll smack him. But a shadowy look passes across his face.

He did. People have drawn him, sketched him, even painted him. Maybe a student in a garret did a quick charcoal sketch of him asleep. Maybe a girl sitting in a garden somewhere tried to capture him in watercolors, a parasol shading her face.

He’s waited too long. He knows she knows. He doesn’t answer. He points at one of the knockoff purses.

“Look at that. Why would anyone in their right mind want anything in that color? It looks like how I feel with a hangover.”

Does he get hangovers? He did have a cold once, for a couple of hours. He said he picked it up on the street. And that people should be forced to wear tags on their collars saying, DON’T BITE ME, I’M DISEASED. He was fine the next day. If she could shake off a cold that quickly, she wouldn’t complain! He doesn’t drink, or eat anything regular, really. When they go out with her friends, he takes sips at his beer, but she always finishes it for him. He likes it when she drinks; he says it helps him sleep better. He’s learned to sleep at night, sort of. If she’s next to him. If she’s breathing slowly and deeply. Soft and warm.

His hair is long, and always smells a little of fresh snow.

She locks the door because she has a research paper due. She needs her sleep, and she needs her strength, and he’s hard on both of them. He leaves little tributes outside her door, iron-rich things like spinach salad with walnuts in takeaway boxes from the fancy bistro, and half bottles of red wine. Once he even left a steak, nicely cooked, wrapped in tinfoil.

She has no idea where he sleeps when he’s not with her. She really doesn’t want to know. Maybe he doesn’t sleep at all. Maybe sleep is another sensual luxury that he indulges in just for the pleasure with his lovers, like sex.

The truth is, she’s mad at him right now. She’s banging her brains against the library every night, reading through microfiche and digging around in books she needs to wear special gloves to open, trying to find out what happened to a nascent rebellion when the river froze, and wolves came down from the hills — or at least to make a reasonable argument that her theory about sumptuary laws and printing presses is correct.

But her arguments are stupid. Her theories have holes in them. Giant, fact-sized holes. The documentation’s just not there.

And so she spends day after day combing through files, and night after night poring over printed texts and unedited letters of people with bad handwriting and lousy crummy ink that fades after a mere three hundred years or so, most of it insanely boring. Looking for something that might not even be there, for evidence of a fact that may never have existed in the first place.

It’s not that she wants to be famous, or even to prove anything to anyone else, really. That would be nice, but that’s not it. She loves knowing about things that are gone. She wants so badly to know the truth.

And he knows. She knows he knows. He was there.

There’s his hair, for one thing. It’s about the right length for the period she’s researching, and it stays that way, captured, like the rest of his body, at the time of his transformation. Whenever he tries to cut it shorter — and of course, he let her try it once herself — it grows right back, almost overnight.

“I’m a self-regenerating organism,” he says proudly. Proud of his vocabulary, proud of his scientific factoids. Those, he doesn’t have any trouble remembering.

Was he a scholar, before? She can bet he wasn’t a peasant. Not that a peasant couldn’t have been born smart, and educated himself over the years. But not him. She’d bet the farm her lover never bowed low to anyone. He was someone who was always at the center of things. His original name might not ring down through the ages, but he would have known the ones whose did.

And so she’s asked him. Tell me about the wolf hunts. The Thousand Candle Ball. The plague.

“I can’t remember,” he says, no matter what. “It’s too long ago. You can’t expect me to remember that.”

She is beginning to suspect that it’s because it’s true. He really can’t remember anything. He loses his car keys, he forgets to tell her that her mother called. She’s given up on her birthday. It’s coming up, and she knows he hasn’t a clue.

She finds herself scanning the books, not for the facts she needs, but for old engravings that look like him. Here’s a page in a book: soberly dressed men in lace collars all signing a document. The Civil Compact of 1635. Is he the one standing off to the side of the table, as if he’s proofreading their signatures? She’s seen that look on his face, keen and critical and mocking. Can she dig out the names of all the signers? That shouldn’t be hard. There are complete lists of them; another scholar’s already done that work.

She scans the list of the Compact signers. Now what? Does she try out each name on him in turn, like the poor queen with Rumpelstiltskin? Does she murmur in his ear all night, a roll call of dead politicos, until he starts up with a cry of “Present, my lord!”?

She checks the date on the picture. Damn: It’s an engraving of a commemorative painting done fifty years after the actual event. The artist would have been making up what everyone looked like, or working off old portraits, or something.

She peers closer at the engraved face and realizes it’s just a bunch of lines, anyway.

She misses him. First she unlocks her door, and then, as if he knows she did, he meets her outside the library and walks her home.

“Do you want dinner?” he asks. He always buys, probably from some centuries-old bank account that has multiplied like her papa always promised: “Just put a penny in, add to it every year, and when you’re all grown up you’ll be able to buy whatever you want!”

She doesn’t want dinner. She wants him. On the stairs to her room, she’s already tearing his clothes off. He has the nicest clothes. (Oh, that savings account!) He has the nicest body under them. A young man’s body, skin dense and firm. An invincible body, no matter how dissolute his character or degraded his memory.

Is he going to grow old with her? Or, rather, is he going to let her grow old with him? She doubts it. A lot. (“Practice on older men,” her grandmother used to say, “but marry a young one.” Oh, Granny!)

He doesn’t ask how her paper’s coming along.

They’re supposed to be going to her study partner’s birthday party. It’s not that far from her flat, but he’s insisted on going the long way round by the river, where it curves and they’ll have to cross the bridges twice. She knows he doesn’t really want to go at all. He hates parties; he hates her friends. She knows he thinks they’re stupid, even though they’re not. Really not: They were all the smartest kids in their graduating classes. He just doesn’t like listening to them talk about their lives. He doesn’t say so, but it depresses him. Her friends are mostly history and literature. He can barely sit still around them. He wants to be mean to them, to skewer them with his scorn for their youth and inexperience and dreams — but if he does, she’ll dump him. She’s made that clear.

He has to come with her, now, because she’s already been to too many parties without him, and missed too many others because of him. At first it was okay to say her busy older boyfriend was working all the time, but they’ve been together too long; it looks like there’s something funny if he never turns up, and the last thing she wants is people worrying about her. She got him to come along tonight by telling him that Theo will be there. Theo is Anna’s boyfriend, and he’s in physics. He adores talking physics with Theo.

Swallows have begun darting over the river, looking for the bugs that swarm there at twilight. The air is getting blue-gray, but he’s still wearing his heavy, trendy sunglasses. Light really does hurt his eyes. That much is true.

“Flower for the lady?”

It’s one of those beggar kids, trying to sell long-stemmed red roses, each one wrapped in cellophane, tied with a ribbon. The kid probably thinks he’s a tourist, because of the glasses.

To her surprise, he stops. He never stops for anyone. He’s looking at the kid. He never does that, either.

“Hey,” he says.

The kid stares back. “Flower?”

Her arm linked in his, she can feel the twitch of him starting to reach for his wallet, then pulling back and letting go. “No, thanks.”

He pulls her along with him, not looking back.

Was it someone he knew before he met her? Too young. His child by his last lover? But he can’t have kids himself; he says he’s sterile. (Good thing!) Suddenly she remembers when she first came here to university, feeling lonely and raw, then one morning on her way to class spotting Sophie from their soccer club back home ahead of her, on the square, waiting for the light to change. And then realizing it couldn’t be, because Sophie had been hit by a car last year. It was just someone with the same shoulders, the same hair, same height. It would be like that for him all the time, the people he’d known, when he remembered. He’d see them everywhere. But it would never really be them.

“No flower for me?” she says, to recapture his attention. Maybe she’ll even learn something this time. He’s shaken. She knows the signs.

“When I buy you flowers, they won’t look like that.” He loosens his grip on her arm. “Have I ever bought you flowers?”

“Sure,” she says airily. “Don’t you remember that huge basket of lilies and white roses?” He looks at her sideways. He doesn’t quite believe her, but he’s trying to remember, just in case. “And the big bunch of hydrangeas you brought when I got the honors in folklore? I had to borrow a vase from Anna downstairs to hold them all. But my favorite was the rosebuds and freesias you gave me on my birthday.”

He is still walking. But slowly. She feels the tension in his arm. “Did I?”

“No.” She walks past him, now, her heels clicking on the pavement. “Of course not.”

He lets her get a little ahead of him, but only a little. By the time he’s caught up with her, she’s a little sorry. But only a little.

“Hey,” he says. He takes off his sunglasses. Hair falls into his eyes. He pushes it back with one hand. “Not everyone gets honors in folklore.”

“You didn’t even know me then.”

“I didn’t know you liked getting flowers,” he says innocently.

“All women like flowers. You’ve had how many centuries of us, and you can’t even remember that one stupid thing?”

He slings a pebble from the embankment into the water. Then he steps back, to watch it fall. The river is running strong. She can’t see it hit the water, but maybe he can.

“In foreign lands,” he announces, “ancient heroes sleep in caves, waiting for a horn to be blown or a bell to be rung, whereupon they spring into action in their country’s hour of greatest need.” Moodily, he slings another pebble. “Lucky bastards. Nothing to do but dream of ancient glory till it’s time for a remix. Our motherland discourages such sloth.”

“Really?”

“Really. No lying around when the land is in peril. Not here. Oh, no. We’ve got a better system in place.”

Finally! She can’t believe he’s telling her this. “And you’re it?”

“I’m it.”

She keeps her voice level, nonchalant. “I’ve always wondered how anyone could decide when the hour of greatest need was, anyway.”

“Me, too. Every year’s got plenty of hours, believe me.”

“That must be a lot of work.”

“All the work, and none of the glory.” Another pebble. “How do you think we kept our borders intact until ’41? When the Russians were boiling shoe leather?”

She shudders with delight. “You ate Nazis?”

“Ate?” He looks down his nose at her. “What do I look like, an ambulating garbage disposal? I just scared the crap out of them.” His head, lifted against the horizon, is too perfect, like a profile on a coin, a medal of heroism. “Well, certainly I drew a little sustenance first. Waste Not in Wartime and all that.” (She remembers her grandmother telling her that slogan.) “But foreign blood does not nourish like the blood of the land.”

“Is that why you hate to travel?”

“One reason.”

“The blood of the land?”

He draws a little closer to her. And he was close before. He puts one hand on the back of her head and bends down to smell her hair.

Her heart starts slamming like it’s working for him already. She lifts her chin and reaches up to draw his head down to her. Someone passing would think they were just any couple, nuzzling on a picturesque riverbank. They might even wind up in some tactless tourist’s photos. He pulls her tighter, getting her neck right up against his mouth.

“I used to be tall,” he mutters. “I mean really, really tall. People would stare at me on the street. That tall. Now I’m, what, just normal?”

“You’re hardly normal.” She always feels a giddy, reckless joy with his mouth near her veins.

“After the war,” he growls. “All that nutrition. Milk. Marshall Plan. A race of giants. And now it’s vitamins. I’ll end up having to date midgets my own size.”

He might have said more, but she doesn’t hear it because the blood is pounding in her ears. Sweet, it’s so sweet letting him take her into himself. If they were home, she’d take him into her, too. She takes a deep breath of air, the best air she’s ever breathed. She doesn’t want him to stop, but he does.

She’s lost track of time, but the birds are still swirling; it hasn’t been long. She clutches at the wool of his jacket, because otherwise she knows she’s going to fall. He’s so tender with her, now, as he pulls away. He wipes his mouth quickly with a white cotton handkerchief. He’ll never use a paper tissue, and there’s never much to wipe, but he always does it anyway.

He puts an arm around her, letting her lean against him as they walk along the river. He’s buzzing with life energy, as the sun is going down. “Come home,” he says. “Come home with me. Come home.”

He’s always up for it when he’s had a drink. He can’t even function when he hasn’t.

She’s fuzzy, and she lets a possible clue go by, still thinking of what he said before. “You’re a hero,” she says dreamily. “You patrol the borders in time of need.”

“That’s right. And now I know you want to express your gratitude.”

“The Siege of ’83? Was that you?”

“Now, which ’83 was that?” he teases.

She nuzzles his shoulder. “You know. The one with the Turks. The coffee siege.”

“Oh, look!” He stops suddenly, in the middle of the street. “I used to have a house here!”

She looks. They’ve stopped in front of a kebab joint on the border of the tourist and the red light districts. The houses are old, but so is most of the city.

“Or maybe it was a little farther down. Hey, this place used to be a bakery. It smelled like heaven in the morning. ”

Diversionary tactics. She lets it pass, because even more than truth and history right now, she wants to get him home and get him into bed.

They can be late to the party. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.

He brings her flowers that week. And the week after that. On her actual birthday.

“You’re getting sentimental,” she says, and he answers, “You’re addictive.” She tries to lie awake figuring what that means, but she always falls asleep with him beside her, warm with the gift of her blood. Little, tiny gifts, like sips of fine old cognac. He enjoys her thoroughly and deeply, in ways no man ever has before, or will. He’ll do a lot for her. She’s figuring that out. He’s beautiful, but he’s not young. He does what he can.

But she still can’t leave it alone. “Tell me,” she says, sometimes with his mouth still at her throat. “Tell me about the last king’s court. Tell me about the Spanish Embassy and the Treaty of Ockrent. Tell me whether the duchess Octavia really had an affair with her governess and her maid.”

“It was a long time ago. What’s at the movies? Let’s go out.”

“Tell me the first time you saw electric lighting. Tell me how long it took to walk across the city in 1708.”

“You can’t expect me to remember that.”

“Tell me what your mother liked to eat. How did you learn to drive? Did you ever fight a duel? Tell.”

“I can’t remember,” he says.

He knows. She knows he knows.

“Will you remember me?”

“Of course,” he says. And maybe he even means it.