Lighting the Moon

I've learned to like climbing.

I used to find it grueling and pointless. The view was never worth the sweat and the scrapes.

It is free now, for me, and the views are spectacular. Just look at the city below this cathedral. See how small and organized and peaceful everything seems? Just sniff the air for a moment. The moonlit wind is so clean, and cities are legible, from a great height.

I am fond of this cathedral, but let me be clear: I respect your faith, but I can't share it.

All of your gods love life.

I am one of the dead.

My sire was a man of devout faith. Loud recitations of long passages from scripture used to precede or follow our feasts. He used to try to persuade me that Dante understood our strange kind almost perfectly. He sent me links to The Inferno all the time.

You've got to forgive me: I've been sneaking into night classes and binging Youtube lectures about Dante's work for years. Boredom is one of the hidden thorns of immortality. Here's the passage that spells out what my sire was, and "explains" what he made me:

He seemed just as confused when he answered me. “I have no idea what my body is doing in the world above. You see, this circle of Ptolomea is different from all the rest. Often, a soul drops down into this icy bath before Atropos has decided it’s life is over. And so that you’ll more quickly break away from my eyes these frozen tears, I’ll tell you more: whenever someone above betrays the way I did, their soul falls straight down to this place in Hell. In the meantime, some devil takes over its body and lives out the rest of its life. I’m pretty sure that soul behind me there is one of them. He’s Ser Branca D’Oria, and he’s been in this ice for a long time.

I know. TL;DR, right? The marrow of it is that Alberigo, the sinner who answers Dante's question, explains that when especially terrible traitors (to their guests in his case, but the ultimate traitor is Lucifer himself, so Dante represents betrayal as the most heinous and despicable sin humans commit-- my sire was weirdly enthusiastic about that bit) die, their souls dive straight into the lowest part of Hell, and a demon seizes the vacant body and takes it for a spin.

Demons desire various things. The one that inhabits me loves blood.

My sire explained that these dark, hungry squatters in our flesh are, as a rule, blithely indifferent to how their thirst is slaked. They also leave what remains of ourselves to tend to our bodies most of the time. When feeding time arrives, they must feed.

You have been hungry. Imagine being hunger itself, and nothing else, save a will and a mouth and a gut. The living talk about "gut health" a lot of late. They have no idea.

My sire repeated his strategy so often I began to roll my eyes and plead with him to shut the fuck up. He paid no heed: "We must drink from the most deplorable, irredeemable human beings we can find, and no others. We can demand no recompense or recognition. We would be found and destroyed too quickly. If we can make demons serve justice, we may be redeemed."

He bought it, too. So intense, with the wild gesticulations in moonlit, empty places that made him seem dangerous and beautiful, like someone you want to do naked things with, but might be contagious. I knew what he had done to me, but man. He was handsome and dashing and had been paying careful attention to human behavior for centuries. Listening? Making a body feel "seen"? Not all men mature with age. He did.

So I did it with him, for a long time. He insisted that we get beige, ordinary jobs to pay for beige, ordinary lives, to cover for the bloody night shift. That was obviously as hard as it was ridiculous, but I played along.

See, we could only work, and hunt the guilty and deserving of drainage, nocturnally. By the time the restaurant was closed or the warehouse was declared to be secure for another night by flashlight, or the bread and doughnuts for the next morning were finally set for the day guys to finish, we were playing beat the clock.

I think he was kind of a masochist: he got thrills from putting up with inconveniences. Catholicism is fascinating, isn't it?

One day, I'd had enough. I told him I couldn't take the hours, though I still believed in the work. He didn't buy it at first, but then he started droning on about the prodigal this and a fig tree or something, and he softened up and let me go.

I've heard many rumors from the dark that my sire went up in smoke long ago. I can make excellent croissants.

I'm here tonight because I've upgraded his software, and I have my own, bespoke operating system.

I'm a vampire for hire. I've been working "from home" for a crisis hotline for twenty years. People who need my help are not hard to find among those tearful, whispering voices. I have one appointment tonight.

It's with a man who cannot keep his temper under control. In fact, rage has become for him what hunger is for me. He serves it. When it rises, he becomes its fists. With his wife, no less. In their kitchen.

Rooms. How is it that the person whom you recognize as a ravishing monarch in one room, seems worthy only to be treated like a foolish peasant, a child or a heavy bag, in another?

Why do you resent it so fiercely when your cat wants to keep an eye on you in the lavatory? Why do you mistake the woman who is kindly preparing food that you will share for your mother, who wouldn't take your complaints personally? Why is so little living done in living rooms?

His wife made the appointment. Her older sister is in cybersecurity, and can help to make me invisible for years, no matter how colorful or unorthodox my activities online might be. I will help so many, with such style!

I seldom accept money in return for my services, but favors? Nameless, unremembered acts? Yum.

Timing is important to me. I was born with a female body, so the moon has always wanted me to pay attention to time. I think the demon feeds on a lunar cycle, too. Natural wonders. I stopped bleeding once I drank.

I can become something that will get me to their flat right quick. The demon does me a good turn now and then, see. I know you've seen special effects. I'm not kidding around.

Have you ever been a duck? If you ever get the chance, try it. I have never felt so happy and sure of myself. I knew there was danger, sure, but I could fly, for pity's sake!

Perfect prey.

Now I am a pigeon. Calm down. You're all tuned to pay attention to bats since the COVID mess. A renaissance for chiroptophobia. Few fears are anonymous. Google it.

Sometimes, just to mess with someone's head, I'll whisper "wet market" before I have a drink. You should see their eyes. They know there is sinister power in that phrase. They think they have glimpsed the machinery behind the play, for just a second. A wild theory starts to pay off. I am not without mercy, and I have a sense of humor.

Flying shows that Bette Midler, creature of the night, is no vampire. Wind over wings, Bette. That's how you catch the lift.

Pigeons are very consistent. You can go anywhere if you think there's food there, or a safe place to wait until the food arrives. Rich, complex inner lives, they do not have. No pigeon Prousts. Ample room inside.

There's the flat. Alright, close enough to hear the argument, but not so close as to distract them from it.

Her name is Abby. His name is Mike. He's mine, and she wants to watch.

To hear Abby tell it (yes, I have referred to her as "Dear Abby" in the silence of myself now and again; what of it?) Mike is a master of what I like to call responsibility transference: "Look what you made me do!" or "Why do you make me feel this way?" or "Why do you listen to them? Do they love you?"

What I am still trying to figure out, and it has been two hundred and seven years come summer, is how kind, sensitive, intelligent people like Abby manage to fall for this nonsense.

I have a theory. The fight's in the early stages. Hear me out.

I think many of you, I mean the mortal, are quite prepared to take the blame for everything. You have been exquisitely sculpted into culpability magnets.

My uber driver last week apologized for the rain as I was stepping out of the olfactory mystery of his vehicle. In what madhouse did he learn to see precipitation as his fault? If you're calibrated like that, you're perfect prey for life shaped like Mike.

He tells her his rage and his violent hands are her fault, and she believes it. She thinks she deserves the pain he gives her, or she did. I think she was convinced that it had something to teach her.

How did she end up this way? Corporal punishment in infancy, maybe? I'm a little fuzzy on the etiology.

Oh, here we go.

Don't get me wrong. She's not entirely deluded. She's made a sunlit castle of her private heart, sure. She has learned to watch and to wait. She has learned to make awkward excuses for contusions and lacerations. She has accumulated sick days in anticipation of disaster, or escape. She has learned to keep him calm, until it is too late.

She learned to tell me exactly why he has earned what is coming.

I'm actually quite revved up about this one.

As I said, timing is important to me. I listen before I make an entrance.

Birds prove that those without ears can hear. Inner, middle but no outer ears. Just an opening that sound pours through. Did you know that the "ears" of owls are asymmetrical? They count the time between sounds that way, and find the source.

Fresh mice are like hot chicken sandwiches with extra pickles to an owl's palate. Trust me.

I would have become an owl if I'd wanted to hear Mike out. I'm just waiting for my cue, see. Pigeon's perfect for that. Just before he gives his rage the controls, Mike shouts, "I need a drink!" Abby knows I'm coming then.

She picked my cue, in fact, and giggled. I like Abby.

There he blows. It's a neat trick to stop being a pigeon, in midair mind you, and then somersault through an open balcony door at night, but I've been keeping this thirst quenched for a long time. It owes me some dramatic style. Abby knows to scream and leave the room when I stand up on the elderly linoleum and say, "I know the feeling, Mike."

His reaction is very disappointing. I see the first, tentative static of his rage. It's young. Junior varsity evil. My thirst could be its great grandmother.

"What the fuck?!?" Abby warned me about Mike's startling eloquence and broad, stylistic range. I take Mike's hand, and slap him with it. Then I get the other involved. Mike's not pleased.

I break his right arm, his "big gun," and let it dangle. He would be loud if I hadn't shoved one of "his team's" jerseys, which was neatly folded on the kitchen floor awaiting my arrival (Abby doesn't play), down his throat. I sweep his legs and guide his brow from the Late Pleistocene to the linoleum.

Mike drop.

My sire used to call our night shifts "lighting the moon." I like that, but it's just like all of his sweet poetry: it makes problems bearable instead of solving them.

I call Abby when I know Mike's off. She hugs me. That's new. I get the all clear from her and wake Mike. He sounds like he likes the smell of filthy linoleum for a second, then looks up at her.

"Mike?" Her tone is very measured, quite deliberate. She could be waking him for work, or a hearing, or a visit from the social worker. Best face on. I pull the jersey out of him.

"What have you done?!?"

Magic Mike. Playing all of the familiar hits. My thirst is so pleased he asked that question. He practically drizzled balsamic on his carotid. That's the one you want, by the way. Veins take the blood home after work. Arteries deliver refreshed and delectably oxygenated blood back to work. Mike's awful, but he's potable.

Abby nods. I feed Mike his jersey again, then break his south paw. She got a hefty life insurance policy for Mike, who was coaxed into "signing" some forms on her tablet by a large volume of Bud Light and nachos eighteen months ago. She's the sole beneficiary.

I've seen the policy. I have a friend at the firm. Her handsy neighbor tasted like Mountain Dew. Hillbilly elegy.

"Mike, you were right. I'm a terrible person. Stupid. Always confused. Always confusing. Full of fake news. I deserved to lose the baby because of what happened on the stairs at Easter. I deserved to explain my black eye at my mother's funeral to the priest by lying to him.

Father Bill. Who baptized me and my sisters. Who heard my mother's last words while I was on a beer run with you. Who is gentle and sweet and harmless.

I'm mean and nasty and talk back. I'm fat. I'm ugly, like you said.

I don't deserve you at all, Mike.

She does."

I wish I could applaud, but there's no time. I have to say, "I'm up for whatever," and drink Mike.

I'm tipsy. Abby didn't flinch. She tries to offer me money. I won't take it. She promises to call again, to have a conversation about the fight, and Mike's sudden conquest of his acrophobia, tomorrow evening. Details.

I give what's left of Mike a great fall on my way out. I'll tell Abby about "lighting the moon" tomorrow.