Diversions

We miss a lot of human rites of passage.

High school, for instance. We don't understand high school references, because we have no experience on which to draw. We can fake it, of course. But we don't really know what we're talking about, aside from shows like Beverly Hills 90210 (don't judge) or Friday Night Lights. Considering that we know how little television accurately reflects real life, we know that's not the best source of knowledge.

We do, however, have a lot of spare time on our hands.

Gabriel and Nicholas like to play games with people. They most recently invented a challenge where they find a policeman, and they bet each other who can get his gun away first.

Michael likes to track. He used to follow people, see whom they met, their interests, their problems. Since he gave up on humans, he does the same with animals. He'll track for hours. He can spend an entire night following one animal before feeding.

I like to understand mysterious people. Not necessarily the stereotypical mysterious people who might dress in black and skulk around. Mysterious in that I can't figure out their actions. This happens often. As I've said, we can manage the human facade quite well. People don't typically "make" us for vampires. But unlike my brothers, I like to understand the reasoning behind the actions.

Today I'm puzzled as to why high school students were clustered on the corner of Light and Pratt, heckling workers as they headed home. The students were dressed in all black, ripped clothes, the common rebellious attire common in teenagers, but well spoken. They acted like hoodlums, flicking cigarettes, cursing, and shoving.

I only watched them for an hour, but I'm still confused by the spectacle.

We don't generally approach children, but if they're there tomorrow, I might have to make an exception.

I'm curious.

Checkmate

I killed a man over a chess game once.

My brothers will tell you I don't have a temper. With a brother like Gabriel, one learns tolerance quickly. But I can be provoked.

When we came to the United States, we struggled for acceptance, and worked to blend in, but small reminders of home were welcome respites. I met an old German soldier living in a boarding house in southern Georgia. I walked past their house each day when I was taking classes at the University. I can't remember his name, but I remember his face vividly. He would sit on his daughter's porch with a glass of lemonade every afternoon, staring at an empty chess board. This was well after the Depression, when people still did such things.

When I could feel his loneliness even from the road, I climbed the steps and asked him, in perfect English, why he did not play.

When he responded in German, explaining that he did not speak English, I knew I would come back. We were all desperate for the familiar. The next day I returned with my own pieces, and challenged him to a game. I learned that his pieces had been stolen during his trip to America, and he had no money to replace them. I was more than happy to share mine. They had been a gift from my father, and they were one of the few things I had kept with me when we left.

We played every day for weeks. He told stories about the first world war, thinking I was too young to have experienced the politics and battling, though of course we had been in the thick of it.

Though he was old, he was perceptive. He recognized something was different about me, and I should have stopped coming. I realize now that I thrived on the intellectual competition of the game, and I didn't want to relinquish this small daily ritual that reminded me of home.

I must have grown too comfortable with the old man. I stopped simply listening to his stories, and started sharing my own.

I felt it. When he started growing suspicious, I knew. We always know. I tried to stifle it, but his mistrust was established.

He stood to leave the game. I knew it would be the last time we played.

Then he swept my pieces into his bag. Said someone like me who would trick an old man didn't deserve to have them.

You can imagine how that talk ended, I'm sure.

Early. Late. It's all relative.

This is my favorite time of night. We love the dark, but it's dark at many other times at night, too, so that really has nothing to do with it. There's something about the quality of the air before 5am. Even the most determined humans are generally asleep by now. Some are just rising for the day, but even their movements are hushed and purposeful, as if they, too, have respect for this time of day.

Michael doesn't hunt humans, so sometimes if he goes out late, I'll go with him. I haven't done this in a while. Last night we ran clear to the Potomac. He doesn't have much to say, and makes a good hunting partner. Even at 4am, the humidity pressed down like a blanket. Once we were filthy and full, we waited by the water's edge, looking for the sun to come up. We'd done this many times when I was very young, after our parents died and I was too small to take care of myself. Doing this now allowed me to pretend, for a short time, that I was small and vulnerable again, and that my sole comfort in life was that my brother could protect me.

At that time of night, it was easy to forget our fighting.

But then sunrise came, and we had to come back to the house.

When the phone rang at eight, he answered, though he knew it was for me. Rebecca. Her call, though welcome, yanked us out of our peaceful past and into our angry present.

If I wanted warm nights, I'd live in Aruba

I miss the real October.

In Germany, it would be in the forties right now.

Instead, we have to deal with this crap.

Es ist scheußlich.

At least the girls are still half naked.

For god's sake

You don't even know what that word means.

Kiss my ass, Chris

How's that for cavalier?

Bullets

I don't know where the stake myth came from.

That's not true. Obviously, a long, thick, pointed implement pounded through the heart is going to cause death in just about any species, and since we're alive, not dead -- or undead -- it'll work just fine on us. Wood has the advantage of being "of nature," so since we are supposed to be unnatural, it has the added advantage of being something of a balanced manner to do away with us. I'm not afraid of stakes. If a human could get close enough to use one, I doubt I'd have any trouble dispatching him. Or her, nowadays. Probably with the stake.

If you really want to take us out, a gun is probably the most efficient way to do it. We can't outrun a bullet, and they have the advantage of distance. They can cripple us efficiently, so we're probably more wary of a gun than any other type of weapon. We're close range fighters by nature--we thrive on the richness of emotion inherent in hand-to-hand combat--so we are out of our element with firearms. They are unnatural to us.

Gabriel is cavalier. I wasn't with them when the Annabelle incident occurred, but I heard about it later. Nicholas wasn't being overdramatic. The girl's boyfriend was pissed.

And he had a gun.

Cut the crap

Nicky's so melodramatic. Yeah, she had a boyfriend. So what. I get bored with the easy mark. We scraped out of there without a confrontation, and if you ask me, that's a disappointment. Sometimes you gotta push and see what comes back.

All right, now I'm awake

So Gabriel met this girl while we were at The Red Star last night. Her name was Annabelle, which isn't very common anymore, so it made her notable. I don't usually remember their names. She kept mixing us up. That happens all the time, and we're used to it, but she found it hilarious.

Though he'd brought her over to the table, she was more interested in me. Probably because I had absolutely no interest in her. We may look identical, but Gabriel and I will never pick the same woman.

She kept touching me, so I got a clear read as to how she felt. Vindictive. That's never a good sign.

"Did you come here with anyone?" I asked her.

She giggled and traced a pattern on the back of my hand. She was halfway hammered. "Course not."

A lie. I looked at Gabriel. Since Annabelle had obviously chosen to fawn her attentions on me, he'd already started chatting up the girls at the next table.

"Hey." I jabbed his arm.

He tore himself away. "What?"

I stood up. "Let's get out of here."

Annabelle didn't take the news well. She launched herself at me and got her arms around my neck. Definitely hammered.

I got her by the waist and tried to pry her off.

But then I caught a rush of aggression from my right, and I saw the target of her vindication. Annabelle had a boyfriend, and he was pissed.

Long Night

The rain never bothers me much. It can be conducive to closeness with a human, because they seem to hate getting wet. It's amazing to me that people think we need super strength, or mind control, or some kind of sexual prowess to encourage someone to get close enough to feed. Really, sometimes all we need is an umbrella.

I was going to talk about the girl I found at The Red Star in Fells tonight, but the sun is already up, and I'm tired. Time to crash.

Trends

I don't get why they think we can't stay current.

Sure, we're old, but I think that's more of an insult to the elderly than it is a statement of our ability to learn. I can read. I can watch television. Just because I was born in the sixteen hundreds doesn't mean that my brain stopped working with the advent of technology. I can pick up an issue of Maxim at the Rite Aid just like the next guy.

Maybe if the legends were true, I'd understand. If we had to spend half our lives in a pine box, I guess that might make it harder to figure out what's going on during the day.

But then again, maybe not. Sleep is sleep, coffin or no.

I think maybe it's a human defense mechanism. The need to believe that they'd be able to somehow identify that we're different. Like I'd tool around in modern society wearing a lace cravat or a top hat or some crap like that.

That defense mechanism is bullshit anyway. Even if I did act like some guy from history, humans would ignore it. They wouldn't think, "Hey, that must be a vampire." They'd think, "There goes a loser."

All to our advantage, really. We blend in without much effort. Nowadays I think I could lock a fang into someone's jugular right on the corner of Ritchie Highway, in broad daylight, and no one would bat an eye. Not that I'm going to. You know.

Damn it. Now I'm thinking about it.

That means it's time to go out.