Through the plastic panes of the 747, the clouds looked almost as white as her bedsheets and towels. Her bedsheets and towels. His money. Her things. Agreements they had come to long ago. And it wasn’t just her linen that was white, or, to use her favorite word, immaculate; but her clothes, her teeth, every tile in her house, every appliance and light fixture, the rugs and mini-blinds, even the cat. Not his or hers, just the cat which he had given her one year for Christmas and which she accepted politely but refused to name or feed. Never mind cleaning the litter box. She cleaned nothing, even as she demanded immaculate cleanliness in her home, her life, her bed.
Cleaning was his job.
It had been his idea to buy this two-storey Spanish colonial in Los Feliz in a neighborhood of other Spanish revival homes, Georgian mansions with wrap-around porches, coastal saltboxes stripped down to their bricks--all with their own huge palm or jacaranda tree growing on the sidewalk in front of each home. Completely renovated and restored to its 1930s glory, the house was white, of course, inside and out, with a brand new red-tiled roof and Talavera tiles outlining the doors and windows. A lovely lap pool in the backyard. Bright cascades of bougainvillea bushes tumbling from the central balcony in the front. Twelve-foot ceilings and adobe fireplaces. A small courtyard in the middle in which he had planted a circular garden of iceberg roses. It was too much for her, too much color, too much texture, but she went along with it. She would have been perfectly happy if they had stayed in their tenth-floor condominium in Marina del Rey with a view of the ocean. They’d outgrown it, he said. They needed more space. He needed his own separate study so that he could get to work, finally, on that novel he’d been meaning to write for years. But she saw through him. She knew he just wanted to live closer to his job at Camino Nuevo High School. What did she care that the hour and a half commute each way every day was making him crazy?
“We’re just moving because you’re lazy and you buy too many books, too many instruments and gadgets,” she’d said. “Before you moved in, all my things fit just fine.
There was a lot of space. I could breathe.”
But he insisted. Said he’d pay the downpayment with the savings from his royalties. And finally, she’d relented. She was never home, anyway, too busy earning a decent living for them as an entertainment lawyer, she always said, while he had the luxury of a little teaching job at some New Age high school. She never got it that he was much more than just a Music teacher. Teaching was just his day job. He was a novelist, at heart, and a lyricist for hire--his early claim to fame was a ditty he had written in college that had somehow gotten picked up as the theme song to a popular show on Netflix. She had her seven-figure income to brag about, but he had his royalties--both part of their pre-nuptial agreement. He had his rose garden and private pool, his bay window in the living room overlooking the green hills surrounding Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood sign in the background--what more did he need? And, really, what was wrong with a little cleanliness? Just because she insisted on being able to eat off the floor, if she so desired, didn’t mean he was going to sterilize the Carrera marble tiles.
He had grown accustomed to the smell of bleach in the bed, in his hair after toweling dry. Had, after eight years, trained himself to scrub the shower and the sink after each use, shake out the rugs each morning, roller the cat hair off the couch before tucking himself into bed each night--gestures that came now as easily as shaving. And he had to admit it: he liked the dependability of creases in his trousers, the stack of starched white shirts in his closet, the slim moon crescent capping each of his manicured fingernails.
He couldn’t remember when it had all gone wrong. Or maybe it had always been wrong and he was only now able to see it. He couldn’t remember if it had started before or after the move, but he had this fantasy that came to him often in his dreams, usually after fucking her, after the inevitable fight that always followed. The heat would rise along his spine and he would have to get up from the bed and ejaculate into the toilet, eyes still closed, watching his dream self wrap his immaculately groomed fingers around her perfect white neck and wring out the ammonia that he was sure flowed in her veins.
The truth is he loved her, despite the urge to kill her. And it wasn’t her death he wanted, really, but a transformation so thorough it would require a complete rearrangement of her cell structure. A reincarnation of some sort right here in this lifetime.
It was because of this that he had decided to call the vampire hotline. He first saw the ad for it in that alternative newspaper he’d picked up last Sunday at Skylight Books. His eyes fixed on the Bela Lugosi-like silhouette in the advertisement, and he laughed aloud. He laughed not because he didn’t believe in vampires--he knew that, at least superficially, there were people in the world who really did practice the vampire arts of drinking blood and sleeping in coffins; he laughed because the thought of a vampire hotline was just preposterous enough to be real. Especially in Los Angeles.
Learn the gentle art of transformation, the ad read. Become one of the legions who follow the vampire’s path. Speak to a vampire counselor. Toll-free call. Displayed next to an announcement for the upcoming Nirvananda lecture at UCLA’s Royce Hall, the advertisement for the Vampire Hotline looked completely legit. One thing he still believed from his Buddhist days was that were was no such thing as coincidence. Things and people crossed one’s path for a reason.
A few days later, on a field trip through downtown Los Angeles with a horde of horny high school students he had agreed to co-chaperone, exploring the locations of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy noir detective stories, he had become mesmerized by the Barclay Hotel. A holdover from the 1940s, the once luxurious Barclay now housed transients and criminals, a few homeless camped out under its darkened marquee, drunks and drug addicts and whores performing their mad lives in broad daylight. There was a public phone booth inside the lobby, one of those old glass cubicles that Maxwell Smart, the dolty detective of one of his favorite shows on Nick at Night, used for an elevator down to the secret offices of his spy network. The phone booth felt like a lodestone pulling him toward his inexorable fate. Despite its retro façade, the booth housed a touchtone phone that no longer required coins to operate. He pulled a credit card out of his wallet, unfolded the ad he had placed inside his Moleskin journal, and dialed the number.
The call was answered immediately.
“Vampire Hotline,” said the male voice. “How may I serve you?”
“I want to kill my wife,” he said matter-of-factly. The static on the line drowned out his voice.
“Excuse me? We have a bad connection. May I ask you to say that again, please?”
He repeated the phrase. The vampire laughed.
“I’m not kidding,” he said, beginning to wish he’d never called. “It’s complicated.”
The vampire tried to make it simple. Why not get a divorce, he asked in a surprisingly pragmatic tone. He spoke the King’s English, with a slight trace of a Latin accent of some sort that fit perfectly with what he expected a vampire to sound like.
Didn’t he know that there was an infinite number of women he could have, the vampire asked, women all over the world just waiting for men to free themselves of their social obsession with monogamy; he, himself, had had hundreds of women in his five centuries of walking the earth. Wasn’t a divorce simpler than murder?
The vampire’s mellifluous voice had put him at ease. It was a toll-free call so he felt free to talk, free to tell the vampire every detail of his bleached married life, recount every fragment of every argument he and she had ever had, arguments about chores and responsibilities, about sex, about the neighbors and the in-laws, about the children she wanted to have and that he did not want to see subjected to her immaculate form of motherhood. And the vampire had listened patiently--it’s what he did, he said, after five hundred years of listening to humans, you learn to cultivate patience--encouraging him to open up his heart, not trying to convince him of anything except getting a divorce.
“Divorce is not an option,” he had finally said, exasperated at the single track of the vampire’s reasoning. “As an immortal, you understand, don’t you? You know about reincarnation? Don’t you see she and I have lived our lives together for several lifetimes, and at each one something’s happened that has torn us apart. That’s why we keep finding each other, like a dance that doesn’t stop. The same dance; the same outcome. I’m so tired of it, don’t you see? That’s the definition of insanity, you know, going through the same motions over and over and expecting a different result. I’m sick and tired of the same goddamn dance. Once and for all I want us to learn our lessons so that we can move on and be together forever, so that we don’t have to keep repeating our same stupid mistakes. It’s so damn redundant.”
He could hear the vampire breathing on the other end (odd, he thought, for a vampire to be breathing at all), not actual breathing, he decided after listening closely to the sound, not real breath moving in and out of his lungs to keep him alive, but the wheezing noise of air going through him, from nostril to mouth as he spoke.
“I’ve got bad news for you,” the vampire said, “there is no reincarnation.”
“Give me a break, will you? What’re you talking about? You of all people.”
“Perhaps you will do me the courtesy of listening to me as I have listened to you.”
“Of course. Sorry. Please, continue.”
“After five hundred years in my line of business, I have not seen any such thing as reincarnation. That’s a myth invented by mortals who can’t fathom what it means to stop living their puny little lives.”
“But I’ve been hypnotized,” he argued, raising his voice a couple of octaves, “I’ve done past life regressions. I’ve seen my different selves, and hers, too. What do you mean there’s no such thing as reincarnation? Of all people to deny the existence of an afterlife!”
“I do not deny the existence of an afterlife,” said the vampire. “I am the afterlife. It is reincarnation I deny. Reincarnation assumes not only that such a thing as a soul exists, but that it exists separate from the human body, like a smoke ring issued from the great mouth of a divine Creator. In this view a soul is a divine essence that exists outside of time and yet anchored to time when it is absorbed by the human body. But can an egg hatch independent of the chicken that lays it; can a chicken exist without first incubating inside the egg? We are not talking about science fiction or fantasy, here, we are talking about life, human life that, like all other forms of life on this planet, is made up of matter and water and oxygen. When the body dies, so, too, does the spirit that keeps the body alive, for that spirit is nothing but breath, and breath is nothing but a chemical reaction of the human form interacting with the environment. When that interaction ends, for whatever reason, the body ends, life ends, the body dissolves. Quite simple, really. A process of growth, death, and transformation.
“When the egg breaks, you have either an animal or a yolk surrounded by a clear substance, but you no longer have the egg itself. The shell is discarded and the thing inside the shell is all that is left. When that no longer exists--when the chicken expires or when the egg is cooked and consumed--you have nothing but dead matter, a corpse or feces to flush down the toilet. Likewise, when the body dies, you have nothing. No body, no soul, no reincarnation. Just dead matter to dispose of.”
“So, what, are you saying there’s no such thing as soul, either?”
“I suppose after you have lived as long as I have you come to expect different things and you come to realize that the closest thing to a soul we have is our own intelligence. The rest of it is simply biological symbiosis.”
“And what happens to that intelligence, then? Surely it doesn’t die. Surely it lives on by inhabiting another human body.”
“If that were so, if that intelligence were to incarnate again in another human body, what would be the purpose, when there are so many forms of life, so many galaxies, so many choices at its disposal. Think about it. Would you, after serving time in prison, willingly go back if offered other possibilities for an existence? It is a mortal’s fantasy to live eternally trapped inside a human body, and a mortal’s limited expectation that believes life can only occur on this planet, that souls return again and again to the prison of the human skeleton, to the sad melodrama of human life?
“No, my friend, whatever stories you tell yourself, you have not shared many lives with this woman you love so much you want to kill her. You have, both of you have, only one human life span. You have chosen to make each other miserable in this life. There’s nothing to be done about it now. If you choose to kill her, it is not because you want her to be your eternal soul mate, but because you are too afraid to leave her. Face that fact, my friend, and then, we can talk. Call us again after you have transformed her into nothing, and then we will know you are serious about your own transformation.”
“Can I meet you?” he said. “I need to talk to someone face to face. Isn’t this supposed to be a hotline?”
“When you are ready to begin,” the vampire said, “come to Barcelona. Bring your passport and ten thousand dollars in cash, nothing more.”
“Barclona, Spain? Are you out of your mind! I’m in Los Angeles. Don’t you have like a branch or whatever in the States?”
“I will meet you in Barcelona two weeks from today,” the vampire said. “Go to the Musée de la Cite, the Museum of the City in the gothic quarter. In the oldest part of the museum, ask for Barcino. We will begin there. If I don’t see you, I’ll know you changed your mind. But if you go through with it, I’ll be waiting. Don’t forget the money. No money, no deal.”
So that’s what this was--an elaborate hoax to take his money. Ten thousand dollars in cash, my ass! The man’s arrogance was too much for him. The whole thing had been such a charade. He could almost hear her laughing at him. So gullible, that’s what I’m going to write on your tombstone, Henry, she’d joke. He felt the heat climb up the back of his shirt and over his collar, spread upwards like a flame consuming the lobes of his brain. The same exact feeling he got when she walked away from him during an argument, or when she nagged him in public about one inanity or another: paying the bills late, driving too slow, wearing too much cologne. It was the humiliation that angered him, all those people pretending they couldn’t hear her bitchy harangue, and now the vampire had humiliated him, too. For all he knew, this could be a big joke the vampire and his wife were playing on Mr. Gullible.
Goddamn them! God fucking damn them! Who the hell did they think they were, anyway? Where did she get off thinking she was smarter than him? And where did this so-called vampire, this so-called immortal, get off telling him there was no such thing as reincarnation. Easy for him to say, the fucking asshole didn’t have to worry about dying and rotting in the earth.
“You know what,” he felt himself spitting into the receiver. “Fuck you, asshole. I don’t need any of your vampire hotline bullshit.”
He slammed the phone down, yanked the plug out of the wall socket, and heaved the fucking thing across the room, shattering the antique Tiffany lamp she had given him as a third anniversary present.
“Great. Just fucking great!” He muttered, staring at the red and blue stained-glass shards on the white carpet, the gouges on the white wall he had made with the phone.
“Henry!” She called out from the bedroom. “Henry? Are you okay?” She was getting closer, the sound of her white slippers flapping down the white marble tiles of the hallway. “Did something break? I heard something break.”
“Goddammit!” he muttered again, his ears like hot coals now. He kicked the shards and the pieces of the phone under a bookshelf and stood in front of the window overlooking the city lights. He could feel a vein in his groin pulsing.
“Henry?” She never knocked. She stood in the doorway to his study, her wet hair resting on the collar of her white terrycloth robe, and looked around the room. “What happened? What broke?” Her eyes scanned the room again, focused on the reading chair behind which the lamp had stood, then back at him. Even from across the room, he could smell the White Musk bath gel on her skin. The smell of her after a shower always made him hard.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she asked. “What broke? Why do you look so guilty?”
“Leave me alone,” he said, pretending to focus on the view, “can’t you see I’m trying to think? I’m trying to work on my novel.”
“I heard something break in here, Henry. I’m not as deaf as you are stupid, you know.”
That’s all it took. He turned around and came at her. Arms outstretched like a zombie and a throbbing erection under his flannel robe.
“Oh my god!” she cried. “Are you serious right now?”
“Shut the fuck up!” he snapped at her just as his right hand wrapped itself around her skinny white throat, his left hand pulling the folds of the terrycloth robe wide open.
“What are you doing, Henry? Stop it.” She pushed against his chest to resist.
Not so gullible now, am I? he thought, chuckling to himself.
“Henry! I said stop it! I’m going to call the police!”
Like a wrestler, he threw his body weight on top of her and pushed her back on the white leather loveseat she had handed down to him after her own office renovation. She tried to scream but he locked his lips to hers and felt her breath expel in cold, desperate blasts through her nostrils. The feel of her neck under the increasing pressure of his fingers, of his cock pushing seven inches into her bath-warm pussy, of his teeth cutting through the soap-flavored flesh of her throat--nothing like it. Immaculate copulation.
He stopped his story and looked around. He was on a plane and there was only one other person in first class. Where was he going? One minute, he’d been standing in the phone booth of the Barclay Hotel, watching through the glass the sick parade of faggots and trannies that made a beeline between the Midtown Spa and the hotel. He remembered how, on his way out of the hotel, one of the faggots, shirtless, tattooed up to his armpits, stinking of balls and beer, staggered into the lobby and fell to the floor. And now suddenly he was on an airplane and his ears were popping and his ulcers were steeping in acid. Where the hell was he going? He glanced down at the newspaper clipping splayed out on his tray table, and remembered. The Vampire Hotline. Your ticket to transformation. Barcelona, Spain.
“Hello? Did we get cut off?” the vampire prodded.
He realized he was holding the Airfone provided by the airline. He’d been speaking to somebody.
“Sir, you really need to end your call and hang up the phone,” said the flight attendant, appearing suddenly from behind him.
“I’ve got to go. Plane is landing.”
“Henry?”
“Yes?” At the sound of his name, he felt something come over him, like an invisible veil of some kind that muffled all sound and made all the edges fuzzy.
“I have one last question.”
“Okay.”
“Sir, the phone, please.” The attendant held her hand out, gesturing with her fingers to fork over the phone. “I hope I don’t have to tell the Captain that you’re refusing to cooperate with landing protocols.”
He noticed the silver-white halo of hair around the flight attendant’s face. Her impeccable white blouse, white teeth, white pearly polish on her expertly groomed nails. For a split second, he wondered what she would taste like when he snapped the bones at the back of her scrawny white neck.
“So what did you do with her?” the vampire asked. “Your wife.”