Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

David saw Dan Rawlinson approaching him, and tried to make himself look professional.

“Your friend told me you were here,” Dan pulled out a chair and straddled it.

“Yes. We actually came to see you. Heard you were playing here.”

“Yeah. Three nights a week.”

“That’s what the sign said,” said David.

“The sign.”

“I mean the sign online. On the webpage.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. Right,” Dan said.

“So, the music’s really great,” David continued. “I mean, I’m really impressed.”

“That means a lot,” Dan said. “That means a whole lot. I’ve been trying to do this thing since… well, since high school really. You remember Myre Keller.”

“I remember the Kellers,” David said. “And the Strausses. Money, right?”

“Well, they’re not poor,” Dan admitted. “But me and Myron have been doing this since high school. I mean, there were a few times when it petered out, and things got rough about a year ago.”

“A year ago?” David said, sitting up.

“Yeah,” Dan said. “Really about the same time you saw me.”

“OK.”

“In fact it was that very day I caught my fiancé cheating on me. And it sent me into a tailspin. I did some bizarre things. Well, not bizarre, but not exactly me.”

David nodded.

He looked up and he saw Sunny, who was talking to Logan and Burt, strumming Dan’s guitar. Sunny had stopped talking, and was looking directly at David and so he said:

“Dan.”

“Yeah?” Dan raised an eyebrow.

“Here’s the thing,” David said. “And I guess I’m going to start out of order. Cut to the chase.”

“That’s always best,” Dan said, looking harmless, looking like someone who couldn’t imagine a bad cutting to the chase.

“You know how you say the last time you saw me was on the road, when I stopped your car.”

“Yeah? I mean, and at the funeral for a bit. When Cody died.”

“Yeah,” David allowed. “Well, that wasn’t the last time I saw you.”

“Yes,” Dan said. “Your friend over there said something like that too.

”Well?”

“Huh?”

“When was the last time you saw me?”

“Uh…. This is going to sound crazy. Sitting right across the table from you it’s definitely crazy. I… But I was there. I…. We found your dead body in the Midland Hotel. In an expensive suite. You were fucking dead. Dead dead with a crushed windpipe. You weren’t the first. There had been other people—all guys—that this was done too. But they were bloodless. We were calling them the Vampire Killings.”

Dan’s face had changed while David was speaking. He had, in fact, begun to look a little bloodless, and David continued, his voice slower, his eyes on Dan.

“They all died with puncture wounds in their throats, as if they had been bitten. The same with you. But you were not… bloodless. And we brought you to the morgue, and then before you could be properly autopsied or your family informed, you were gone. A little later on my—my partner—came here and saw you, alive as you are right now, playing and singing. She showed me the tape—the video—and I lost my mind. Literally. Other things helped me lose it, too, but… I would not be here except that persistent guy over there, holding your guitar, came all the way from California because one of his best friends was one of the guys killed before you, and he decided to come down here so we could see you in the flesh, know the truth. And now that I am looking at you, seeing you, the whole story sounds mad.”

But Dan’s face was strangely calm, and he said, “Actually… it’s not as strange as you think.”

Dave nodded. He felt serious now too. Not afraid, but serious.

Dan took out his cigarettes, and placing one in the corner of his mouth, he said, “I don’t want to talk about this here.”

David nodded.

“You’re friend’ll be safe with Logan and Burt. Come with me.”

“I remember the hotel room,” Dan said.

They were outside of the Grey Note and they could hear the Reavers playing. One or two people had come out for a smoke, and Dan gave David a cigarette which David was surprised to inhale with gusto.

“I remember the hotel and when I woke up, I was… Well, I don’t remember anything about the police station or a morgue. And here’s the thing, when I say I woke up, what I really mean was… was when I returned from the dead.”

David had not been looking at Dan, but now he did, because Dan, whom he had never really known to be serious, was looking serious for the second time tonight.

“I want you to tell me you’re pulling my leg,” David said.

“It had crossed my mind.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yeah.”

“You were dead.”

“Clearly. You saw it. I woke up in…. God, it’s one hell of a story. It’s a hell of a story. I don’t really want to talk about it. I wrote about it, wrote it all down and there’s nothing safer than a grown man’s journal, especially if he has shitty handwriting.”

“But…. You were dead,” David said. “Then… Is it true? I mean… You can’t be… That crap is in the movies… You’re not.”

“I’m a vampire,” Dan said in an embarrassed breath of a voice. “I am, as of a year ago, an immortal, blood drinking vampire.”

Dan murmured, ashing, “It’s so fuckin’ stupid.”

Suddenly David remembered being asleep and having a ridiculous dream, a commercial on TV, only it hadn’t been a dream, had it? Somehow he had seen something he shouldn’t have seen.

“Is your failure to age startling your mortal friends and making it difficult to stay in one place very long?  Is your constantly youthful appearance making a rift with your lovers as they begin to grey? From the makers of Nutra Negative and your favorite drink, Hemogoblin comes, Garden of Eden’s Aging Cream.”

“Dave, you alright?”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” David said.

Then he said, “Not of you…. Of everything, I mean. I’m very confused.”

“That’s how I felt,” Dan said. “Still do, sometimes. If I didn’t have friends—”

“Do they know?”

“Logan? Burt? Myron? No,” Dan shook his head. “I mean, that’s a world shattering thing. But there are other friends. The people who did this to me are the ones who killed all those guys you were talking about, that your friend is looking for. But I’ve got other friends who look out for me. Who… The world is bigger than you think it is. There’s more out there than you think. And that’s a good thing, and it’s a bad thing. I got wound up in this shit by sheer accident. Though sometimes it seems like there aren’t accidents. But I’m in it now.”

“Let me help you!” David said, suddenly.

“Help me, how?” Dan looked at him, smiling. “What are you going to do?”

“Those people…. Who did this to you—”

“I’m actually fine with it. Now,” Dan said. “It took a while, but—”

“But what about what they did to the others?”

The grin left Dan’s face and he looked old, as if the jokey young man David knew was a disguise, and the vampire had put him away, gesturing with what was left of his cigarette.

“Dave, those fuckers are going to get dealt with. But not by you. Not by the LPD. Or the FBI for that matter. What they’ve done they’ll pay for. But you can’t get tangled up in this. Promise me. You’ve seen what these assholes do. They’ll kill you.”

When David failed to respond, Dan said, firmly, “Kill you.”

“Then whaddo you want me to do.”

“I just told you,” Dan Rawlinson, becoming calm again and taking out another cigarette said.

“Nothing. “

“That guy I’m with, the one who went up to you and told you I was looking for you—he’s not going to let things go. That’s not what he’s like.”

“Then he’ll die.”

“Dan—”

“Look,” Dan said, “come with me. Both of you. He’s already hanging out with Logan and Burt. I’m staying with them, upstairs. Stay with us. I’ll…. I’ll talk to your friend. See if I can give him something to keep him busy and not have him running around peering into shit that will end his life.”

It was getting late, and folks were starting to leave. On the stage, Sunny was playing Dan’s guitar like an expert, blond hair in his face, and he had commented, “I miss this.”

David felt outside of it, not part of the music at all, and here were all of these, Logan and Burt, Dan’s band, and the members of some others, playing together this late at night. And the Reavers asked Sunny if he’d play ‘House of the Rising Sun’ with them as folks were leaving and chairs were being set up. Dan played with them. He’d borrowed one of Logan’s guitars, and Logan came out of the kitchen where he and the last of the dish washers was wrapping up.

Burt had been stacking chairs after he’d cleaned the taps, and now he was sitting on the stage when Dan said, “Sing for us.”

“Yeah,” Logan said. “Just one.”

Burt nodded, and then he threw back his head. The man had a clear voice, more than tenor, almost transsexual, it could have been a boy’s or a woman’s and like a bell, he declared:

 

“I fell in love with an Oxford girl
She had a dark and a roving eye
But I feeled too ashamed for to marry her
Her being so young a maid

I went up to her father's house
About twelve o'clock one night
Asking her if she's take a walk
Through the fields and meadows gay.”

 

It seemed to David, an eerie song to sing, especially in light of what he now knew. But then what could he say about music? And Burt’s voice was plain and lonely, as it rose and continued:

 

“I took her by the lily-white hand
And I kissed her cheek and chin
But I had no thoughts of murdering her
Nor in no evil way.”

 

David was aware of being slightly drunk, and he wondered if Dan had done something to him, blunted his memory, made him forget. But he hadn’t forgotten, so maybe Dan had made him not care.

Sunny, for his part, had tied his abundance of hair into a bun, and was smoking pot with Dan, and he seemed unfazed by what Dan was telling him.

“I don’t want to tell you everything. I don’t want to tell you anything because it feels weird and raw, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I wrote stuff down, and you can have it if you like.”

“I would like,” Sunny said.

“You’re not gonna let this go,” Dan said.

“Huh?” Sunny was caught off guard by the way Dan said it.

“You’re like me, I think. I mean you are, but you aren’t. When you read what I have you’ll understand, Sunny, But some people are sort of called to stuff like this, stuff past what most people know.”

“And you think I am?”

“I think you crossed the country to find something.”

“I crossed it to find my friend?”

“I think that’s part of why you did it. I think you won’t stop until you find something amazing.”

“I’m sitting across from you,” Sunny said. “So, maybe I’ve found it.”

“Maybe,” Dan said, reflectively, but he didn’t buy it, and as much as he had warned David to stay away from all this, he saw there was not point in saying it to Sunny.

Sunny felt thoroughly alive for the first time since he’d come back from across the world. He had enjoyed his friends and liked school enough, but hanging in the club, and being with Logan and Burt was the first time he’d felt actual joy. There had been the joy of making love to Jack before he left, but that had pretty much been it.

Logan had two kids and the oldest was with his one time girlfriend back in Michigan while the one he and Burt had was staying with friends. Tonight they stayed up long into the night, smoking and drinking and Sunny asked, “What do you usually do when the kids are here?”

“The same thing,” Burt confessed, “only a little quieter and with less pot.”

Now things were hazy and Sunny felt like he should go to bed, but he didn’t want to. It was either David or Dan who had said something about voting and democracy and Burt said, “Voting is more or less useless. You do it to remind yourself not about what the country is, but about what you are.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Your little tiny vote doesn’t even matter, and during a presidential election it definitely doesn’t matter. But it’s a reminder that we should be free, that what we do should matter. Even though everything in society wants to make us a cog and we are subjects and not citizens, the vote is what reminds us to not be cogs, to be people, to do what we can.”

“Subjects not citizens,” Sunny murmured.

Dan had passed him the joint and he took a long hit while Dan said, “That sounds bleak.”

“It sounds bleak,” Burt said, “But isn’t it just the truth? You see this inflation. A gallon of milk is three times as high as it was. The rent in Ohio has turned to Chicago rent, Chicago rent has turned to Miami rent. Miami rent has turned to San Francisco rent, and in San Francisco, half the goddamn city is homeless. Meanwhile, this one building in downtown Lassador… it was bought by out of town folks. They jacked up rents, and half ass made repairs. So you know what the fuck the city does? It gives them a grant! It could give its own citizens a grant to be able to afford their rent, but it gives rich out of town people a grant to keep being greedy, and that’s democracy, councils giving corporations of rich people more wealth. Individual people struggling and being told what to do, how much they’ll pay, how much more they’ll pay.”

“So you’re saying democracy doesn’t work,” David said, his floppy hair in his face.”

“And it’s not just that,” Logan said. He sounded sage and mellow. He had taken a shower and smelled like bergamot, and somewhere in this night, Burt had gotten up and showered as well. “It never worked. Or maybe it worked perfectly. In Athens where they had the mother of democracies every citizen had a vote, but everyone in the city wasn’t a citizen. Women couldn’t leave the house. They ran a slave state. Democracy coincided with Athens building an empire and going to war with Sparta, both things which turned out badly. The Netherlands had a democracy before us, but of course it and we were slave states.”

“We’ve basically been a slave state longer than we haven’t,” Burt noted.

“And we’ve always been a democracy.”

“So you’re saying democracy doesn’t work?”

Sunny felt like David had already said that.

“It does if you’re rich,” Logan said, stashing a cigarette behind his ear and against his silver hair.

“But if you’re rich, every system works.”