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Vampire Fiction

© 2019 Matthew Licht

    The receptionist looked like she’d decided to work for a publisher because she liked to read. She handed over the latest issue of a magazine under the company’s imprint whose subject was interior decoration, seen from an anthropological perspective, and pointed out a chair that could’ve been its centerfold.
    She went back to typing on her Olive Drab IBM Selectric. Her white hair fell down her charcoal gray pinstriped back in a thick braid.
    The man who stormed into the reception area and loomed overhead had no time to watch people read magazines. “Thanks for coming downtown,” he said, and shot out an outscale hand as though it was his practice to hurl visitors directly into his office. “The matter we need to discuss isn’t for telephone or correspondence.”
    The receptionist handed him a stack of letters to be signed as we passed her desk. She took off her glasses. “No other appointments this afternoon, Mr Brand. Shall I make dinner reservations?”
    “A capital suggestion, Arianna. The Four Seasons, please, at seven-thirty.”
    Adam Brand looked at me, then. How nice it felt, to be regarded by such a large, good, capable man. How I miss those looks. “Otis,” he said. “With whom would you like to make it a foursome with myself and Adele?”
    Adele was the lovely Mrs Brand.
    There was no one, in particular. I looked at Arianna the receptionist. “How ‘bout a date?”
    She looked at her employer. His expression said, OK with me if it’s OK with you.
    “Delighted,” she said, “but I’ll have to meet you there.”
    “That settles it.” Mr Brand led me into the Authorized Persons Only area of Clotho Inc.’s editorial offices, a maze of corridors lined with pebbled-glass doors, abuzz with telephone voices.
    “Arianna’s a dancer,” he said, once we were seated across from each other at the galactic desk in his corner office duplex. “She steadfastly refuses to let go her dreams.”
    “Of Broadway?” There was a good view of that fabled boulevard from where we sat.
    “Hardly. She is modern. Interpretive. Martha Graham was her godmother.” His expression changed. “Your new manuscript interests us. Greatly.”
    “That’s a relief,” I said, and stiffened for the inevitable blow.
    “There is, however, something we’d like you to consider before we proceed.”
    “How many I got to kill?”
    “Funny you should say that.”
    “Bare hands this time?”
    Adam Brand leaned forward. “Have you ever read, or even heard of, vampire fiction, Otis?”
    “You mean, Dracula? Sure.” More was expected. “Not as good as Frankenstein, I think. Why?”
    “Other publishing concerns are doing extremely well with vampire fiction,” Brand said. “I don’t have to tell you that these are interesting though difficult times for the book business.” He slid a paperback across the oaken plane. “We’d like you to consider writing something along these lines. You may use a pseudonym.”
    You don’t need to look at garbage to know that garbage is what you’re looking at. The cover alone told a rococo tale of stink, sex and huge sales: the stuff that leads to dinners at The Four Seasons. I examined the book, thumbed its pages, stuck it in my briefcase, which is a net bag woven from jungle fibers by headhunters in Papua New Guinea.
    I wanted to tell Mr Brand about an experience that’d changed my way of thinking: about literature, the nature of people, and what life can mean.
    The last manuscript I’d sent Clotho Inc. was a collection of stories for children. Not grade school fables with pictures, tales for adolescents not yet completely mixed up in the sexual whirlpool, or whirlwind, whatever it is.
    Reading out loud’s the best test for whatever’s scribbled down, so instead of gathering the usual patient friends, I went to the nearest Junior High School and introduced myself to its administrators. The principal’s assistant took me around to meet amenable teachers and face their pupils.
    That part went well enough, but one of the teachers, another pretty lady with long white hair, took it further. She was a volunteer at a local Young Adults Community Home.
    Young Adult fiction is as profitable a genre as Vampire, but young adults, unlike vampires, are real, and they’re not necessarily adolescents: they can also be grown-ups who’re mentally retarded.
    You’re not supposed to say that, of course.
    So I went with the pretty white-haired teacher to read my YA stories to the other Young Adults. The result was unexpected.
    “They really listened, Mr Brand. I mean, they stared at dust-motes, drooled and rocked, they groped themselves and each other, but they took it in.”
    Brand wasn’t sure where this chat was headed. He didn’t hear business in it. Retarded people don’t buy books. They don’t read. They are read to, usually at Public Libraries.
    “When I finished,” I said, “they made comments, asked questions. They got it. One of the young adult women came over and said something which I didn’t catch, at first.”
    “Please cut to the chase,” Mr Brand said. He had no other appointments, but he wasn’t big on exposition. He was a straight-to-the-punchline, dotted-line kind of editor and publisher.
    “The teacher interpreted for her, explained that they wanted to do their show. I mean, I was their guest, so they felt they should entertain me, even though I’d allegedly shown up to entertain them. They don’t get many visitors who aren’t family, or volunteer do-gooders.”
    Mr Brand looked out his window at skyscrapers in late-afternoon light. He wanted to avoid eye-contact with the person he’d formerly considered sane who now wanted to promote some sort of Retarded Broadway Musical.
    “Mr Brand, sir, have you ever really been to the circus?”
    “Well of course I...”
    “I mean, a circus where you’re in the lions’ cage, and on the flying trapeze. A circus where you wear clown makeup, and the Strongman throws fiery tomahawks at you. A circus without blindfolds, not even the usual cultural ones.”
    The publisher was flummoxed. “Well you know it’s funny one of the few things I regret is that I didn’t run away to join a traveling circus when I had the chance. You see, I met this...”
    So I had to listen to Brand’s circus story. It wasn’t a bad one, but a missed life of acrobacy a hundred pounds and decades ago wasn’t what I was there for. He’d arranged the meeting to push Vampire Fiction as a career direction. The counter-plan was to exploit his corporate avidity to finance a Theater of Idiocy.
    The idea behind that venture was to write stories for adolescents that might point them towards better lives and worlds. Young adults would induce their more fortunate peers to see life deeper.
    Retarded doesn’t mean stupid. Einstein said his theories arose from being kept behind at school. He used the chance to ponder the basics of the universe at leisure. Unsuspected dimensions appear when the mind is emptied.
    Mr Brand’s custom shoes were on his desk, his hands clasped behind his head. He wrapped up his account of the high school football injury that’d kept him out of the three-ring big top and landed him in a desk job.
    “You need to take Vampire Fiction seriously,” he said, and put his feet back down on the dark gray carpet. “Get humble and learn its rules. The undead live, so to speak, by a code. Once you’re in their world, really in it and of it, you fly.”
    Bats flitted around Battery Park, and Bryant Park, and in and out of the belfries of the Chrysler and Woolworth towers. The vampire hour approached. Funereal limousines would soon roll from their garages to transport the undead to Studio 54 and other exclusive establishments where they prey on unwary revelers.
    The neon clock on an insurance company’s high-rise said the dinner hour was nigh. Soon there’d be steak tartare with a white-haired modern dancer who moonlighted or daylighted as a receptionist. Florid pictures formed. She’d been with Clotho Pubs. since 1880 or so. First she showed me the Vampire Fiction ropes, then bound me to her Gothic four-poster bed with them and drained me utterly.
    Mr Brand’s executive office suite included a full bathroom and a walk-in closet hung with tuxedoes and other changes of battle-dress. He bade me wait, emerged shortly in charcoal architect casual. Clotho Inc. had prospered under his stewardship. Vampire Fiction had launched swarms of beetle-black limousines. One of them slithered into a reserved spot just outside the building. We went downstairs, got in. The sleek sedan whisked us to an elite watering hole.
    The Four Seasons’ bar was sepulchral: orange-pink glow on black leather furniture. The ball-and-chain curtains said, We are in here. You are out there, but you can look inside. Go ahead. We want you to look.
    The cocktail waitress looked like she wrote Vampire Fiction on her off-hours. Mr Brand handed her a twenty, told her to keep the change. She said, “Two martinis is forty bucks, mister.”
    We drank and talked about translation rights, film options, publicity campaigns. Some publishers, Mr Brand whispered, had put out feelers for smaller headquarters, in smaller towns. He mopped his brow, changed the subject, described a new quality of paper his R&D department had created for touchy-feely, sex-appeal-y covers that’d pump new lifeblood into the product.
    The world, like grade school kids, wanted stories with pictures.
    Hollywood would come up with X-ray film to capture vampires in action. The new virtual cinemas would reek of blood. Their digital doors would loose red tides when they opened into the darkness of your room.
    Vampire and zombie action were home box-office boffo across the worldwide ether.
    Zombie Fiction, on the other hand, turned out to be a bubble phenomenon. Zombies aren’t sexy. They reproduce by eating live human flesh. You become one of them, one with them, when they eat you. The only law they obey is food. Zombies wear gory rags. The look didn’t sell.
    Vampires, on the other hand, are chic.
    Men drape themselves in darkness to go to the Four Seasons. Women turn themselves into strange, colorful shapes.
    Mrs Brand, handsome woman, professor of Semiotics, blew in from a college town up the river. We rose to greet her.
    The white-haired receptionist at Clotho Inc. breezed in shortly afterwards. The chain-link curtains shimmered. Her hair was wild. She’d stretched her man-tailored suit over a skin-colored or transparent undergarment.
    The women kissed each other’s cheeks, lightly.
    “Hello Adele.”
    “Hello Arianna.”
    Arianna sat down on a Corbusier divan. She smelled of sweat, and scalp.
    The gloomy cocktail waitress reappeared. Mr Brand ordered champagne, con brio. He popped the cork himself, and proposed a toast to Atrophy. Something died inside me when I learned that was the title of Orianna Rhys’s debut vampire novel, the front-runner on Clotho Inc.’s list for the next fall.
    Vampire Fiction blab followed. Apparently vampires have their own racial politics. What’s the polite appellative: Transylvanian-American? Differently dead? Alternatively alive?
    Arianna was able to laugh about VF, as it’s known in the trade. Her philosophy was to take the subject seriously, then take it less seriously.
    Adele Brand, Ph.D. mentioned the possibility of college courses in new, popular literary forms. I asked whether Young Adults, YA to the trade, might be included in this new canon. Her husband, publisher Adam Brand, Esq. sensed that the Retarded Circus concept was about to rise again. “Let’s go in for dinner,” he said, and shoved back his Barcelona chair. “I could eat a zebra.”
    A tenebrous hostess showed us to a good table.
    Everyone ordered steak tartare, but I changed my mind at the last minute and got stuffed rabbit meatloaf instead.
    Arianna modern-danced herself to the International Style executive Ladies’ Room. Her silver shoes clicked on the Murano floor-tiles. The undead are supposed to avoid silver, but those who know the rules best can break them.
    Steak tartare through the heart.
    Mr Brand, an oenophile, took charge of the wine list and charted an eccentric alcoholic course across South America. Vampire bats of the biological variety haunt Argentina and Chile. The lugubrious sommelier acted as though fresh air had wafted into his câve on a ray of dreadful sunlight.
    Over hors d’oeuvres, Brand painted a picture of Orianna Rhys as that rare species of author who learns the publishing business from the inside before setting pencil to paper. She’d pushed a finished manuscript under the nose of a publisher she’d gotten to know intimately, though perhaps not in an under-the-desk way, and was poised to blow everyone else out of the water.
    D-Day was nothing, compared to the publicity campaign Clotho Inc. had planned for her. Black-and-white author portrait snapped posthumously by Helmut Newton, cover design by Chip Kidd: the works.
    Authors are supposed to act happy when they hear this sort of shit directed at a colleague. The evening’s build-up was a body blow. The Big News was a straight-to-the-Morgue right hook. “Oh wow,” I said. “That’s wonderful.”
    Maybe I could get my old ski bum job back.
    Adele Brand sensed malaise. “Otis,” she said. “I adored your latest story in The New Yorker.”
    “You know, it’s funny,” I said. “I nearly told them to fuck off on that one.”
    Adam Brand lunged at the bait. “Whuddaya mean?”
    “I mean, they’ve lowered their rate for fiction.”
    “So whu’d yuh do?” When hooked, some big fish revert to their Bronx accents.
    “Whuddaya think? I said double it, or die.”
    “Whu’d they say?”
    “You mean, after they said yes?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I said, you can have part two of the story for free.”
    A miniaturized cheerleader gesture escaped Adele. “Good for you, Oat. Can’t wait to read it.”
    Arianna whispered, “Congratulations.” She unbuttoned her black jacket. I thought she’d draw a lipstick X above her cleavage: Drive the stake in here.
    The ladies split a white chocolate soufflé. Brand got Calvados. Coffee for me. Clotho Inc. called in a crane to pick up the check.
    A sleek corporate limo awaited the Brands outside. Orianna and I watched it glide up Park Avenue. We went for a stroll in Central Park together, then shared a cab downtown.
    The climate in the Marathon six-seater grew steamy. Orianna hoisted her see-through chemise out of her pants. “You used to write for Screw, didn’t you.”
    “I’d still be writing for them, only they screwed me out of two hundred bucks on a story I did about drag-ballerinas.”
    “Driver, stop at the next newsstand, please.”
    He did. She got out, and came back with the latest issue of Screw. Cartoony Count Dracula and Vampirella were locked in an upside-down 69.
    “First time in, and I made the cover,” she said.
    The taxi driver shifted the rearview mirror, turned up the smooth jazz station a tad, and took off again.
    Arianna’s apartment had a view of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. We watched the boats shimmer in and out. When the harbor lights died at dawn, she drew the curtains like wings of night.
    The next afternoon I did another reading at the YA book club in midtown. The story I’d written for them wasn’t their usual feed. I’d never tried scare tactics before. The differently enabled are unpredictable. Monster movies can be a grade-A turn-on. Fresh eggs in a supermarket carton can induce sheer, shaking terror.
    They sat in a semi-circle on their color-coded cushions.
    “And so, the little vampire wiped her lips and said, ‘That’s the last unwashed neck I’ll ever have to suck.’ She signed on the dotted line, and flapped off into undead Hollywood movie star history. The end.”
    They ate it up. They positively relished Vampire Fiction. The reprised their three-ring circus act, with certain changes.
    The lion roared with bloody fangs, which were not Novelty Shop rubber dentures. The dashing young man on the flying trapeze actually flew, or flitted, before crash-landing on the snacks table. The strongman hefted the refrigerator like it was made of whipped cream and sailed it through the window.
    “You guys are scaring me,” I said.
    Mountain sunsets aren’t nearly as reassuring as a whole-hearted smile from a young man with Down’s Syndrome. “That’s the whole point,” he said.
    Nearly smacked my forehead. “Let’s work on the next story together,” I said.
    They gathered ‘round, with lean, hungry looks and an oddly aristocratic bearing.
    “Imagine a pretty lady who works in a book factory,” I said. “She’s happy enough, but kinda lonely. Her job is to read all the stories that come into the book factory to be made into books. They’re mostly love stories, but they’re always sad, and the saddest thing they have in common is that they end. Every single one.”
    A young adult lady began to cry. “My mommy died and I love her so.”
    Shift the narrative focus to avoid a full-room weeping jag. “So the pretty lady decided to write a love story of her own, just the way she always wanted: a happy love story that would never end.”
    “Oh!”
    “Ah!”
    “I made a caca. Can I go to the toilet?”
    “Of course you can,” I said. Grade school’s a life-long deal, for the happy few. “And you don’t even have to hurry back, cuz like I said, this story has no end.”
    “But that means no happy ending.”
    Retarded doesn’t mean stupid. They knew instinctively that immortality is a horrible curse. “Of course there is. But the happy ending never ends, either. The pretty lady meets a nice man, and they decide to live together and stay young and never die. They tell their story to the whole wide world and sell a billion books.”
    “Oh!”
    “Ah!”
    “I gotta go peepee. Will someone please come to the toilet with me? I got kinda ‘fraid when we were doing the vampire-y circus.”
    “I’ll go with you, Laura,” one of the young adult gentlemen said. He stood, offered his creased-clear-across hand. They toddled off together to caca- and peepee-land. A happy ending, but not one the Hollywood public would buy.
    When the romantic Young Adult couple returned, we sang together: simple melodies without crescendo or climax.
    We were ready for Broadway.
    Clotho Inc.’s editorial offices are located, as I’ve mentioned, towards the beginning of the Avenue of Dreams. A field trip from the Young Adult Community Home to the Publishing Business was easily arranged.
    The Young Adults packed into their candy-colored short bus like a coterie of clowns setting up their big finale. The whole trip downtown, they made out, necked and petted like crazy. No way to stop them, and why would anyone want to?
    Arianna rose from the reception desk, where she wouldn’t long linger, thanks to Vampire Fiction, to greet the troupe. She looked smashing.
    One of the Young Adult guys slurped her sleeve. She graciously allowed it, then led us into Mr Brand’s cavernous suite.
    The boss looked nervous. He shot his cuffs when shaking hands, to steal glances at his Cartier watch. Not even Clotho Inc. could provide enough chairs for this crowd, so the Young Adults sat Indian fashion in a semi-circle on Brand’s Bukhara.
    The publisher’s job, that afternoon, was to explain Vampire Fiction to a potential market offshoot. He didn’t even mention money. Then it was time for Q&A.
    “Do vampires dream in their coffins?”
    “What happens to mosquitoes who suck vampire blood?”
    “How did one vampire make the other vampire laugh?”
    “Do vampires have to go to the dentist?”
    Most Young Adults have horrible fangs. Parents don’t think having their defective children’s teeth fixed is a good investment.
    One of the Young Adult girls took to the air. She flitted towards the corner-office window for a better view of the Statue of Liberty.
    Arianna didn’t scream. She held a silent movie horror pose. An overweight Young Adult approached her, shielding his fangs with an imaginary cape. His epicanthic eyes magnetized the attractive pale bird he would suck. She liquefied in his arms. He led her limp form around the carpeted room in a grim foxtrot.
    Adam Brand, publisher and man-about-town, stood paralyzed. A Young Adult coven engulfed him in their make-believe shrouds, and left him a dry husk on the floor.
    “Ooh look,” one of the differently able predators said, tugging my sleeve to shake me from this wondrous daydream. She held up a book she’d taken from the boss’ shelf. “This story’s about zombies. Would you please read it to us?”
    “I’d love to,” I said.
    They resumed their half-circle on the floor. Orianna lay supine, still breathing, slightly. Brand, prone, was stiller.
    “Show us the pictures,” one of the Young Adults said, and the rest started up a chorus.
    “Show us the pictures. Show the pictures! The pictures!”

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