Vampires Come at Night

Dad looks at me, then says, “Vampires come at night and take my blood.”

I smile softly. “Those are nurses, Dad. Not vampires.”

“Oh,” he says. There is that look of genuine disbelief on his face, like this really hadn’t occurred to him prior to my saying it. [Ed., To keep reading along the Dad path, click here.]

But later, when I’m sleeping, they are vampires that come.

One of them looks kind of like the chick from a website or YouTube channel or whatever. I can sense that they’re there, but they are using mental powers to suppress my awakedness, so I am in a sort of sleep paralysis—within the dream, right? Don’t get lost, babe. Stay with me.

I’m in bed with a young woman who’s traveling with me, back to Blackwater. She is having trouble sleeping, too.

There’s this guy who’s staying in the same place we are—a white dude. He keeps popping in to say hey, and it’s pretty plain that he’s bored.

The woman I am traveling with is obviously a little attracted to him, and he seems very into both of us, like he would go for either of us, not like he’s trying to hook up a three-way or something. [Ed. cf., “Eager.”]

At some point, I get tired of all the interruptions to our attempts to sleep, and just say they should fuck and be done with it.

She doesn’t react, and he seems startled but in a harmless way.

I leave the room for a bit, to get some space from them, to go to the bathroom.

Across the hall, my kids are there, in a room that looks like the one from my uncle’s house. They are trying to sleep, too.

My oldest friend—the one for whom Fox is named—comes in and is trying to talk with us.

I’m trying to explain the situation with the dude, and she’s all like, Yeah, he’s my boarder, which I know, of course, because he’s staying here. I try to be kind to her about it, but she cannot hear very well anymore and her thoughts are pretty tangled and slow to update.

She goes back to bed, and I soon realize that I have been leaking copious amounts of urine. I’m concerned that it’s soaked me and the carpet, but it seems to somehow all be flowing into a pan, like a metal box the size and shape of a desk drawer.

This reminds me, I tell you now as I’m recounting it, of an old family story my mom used to tell.

It’s late one night. She’s on the couch in the living room, having a smoke, I’m sure, while she’s ‘folding laundry’ and watching Carson on the boob tube. This would be on the Gold, by the way, if you’re trying to place it within my planetary timeline. Anyway, she’s chillin’, smoking, watching an old white guy make jokes and barely notices me walk past the couch and go into the garage.

She goes out there, and I’m in my dad’s office. He had built this office in the garage so he could work from home on the days he wasn’t traveling? And she says, Tracy? Are you okay?

And I tell her yes, I just have to pee.

She sees then that I have one of dad’s file drawers open and am about to piss in it.

So Mom goes, Why don’t you go to the bathroom, then?

Apparently I just nodded and went to the bathroom, peed, then went back to bed.

Mom loves that story. Tells it all the time.

You might ask me how I feel about it, to which I respond by lighting up a smoke, taking a drag, then replying, I’m not crazy about it.

So this bit with my urine being drained into the box reminds me of that. That, and it seems patently obvious to me that it’s more conversion or tele-empathic communication, whichever it is, from Dad in the hospital. Like, it’s gotta be the catheter, right?

Anyway, I then try to figure out what to do with all the fucking urine in the box cos there’s some of the kids clothes in there, too, that have to be washed now. So I go downstairs to sort that out, and Mom is there. She’s too young to be the right waking life age. Like she’s younger than I am now. And she’s got the washing machine disassembled and is trying to fix it. I’m all like, great. She tells me to just pour the urine in the sink, so I do, and it washes down a couple of screws from the washing machine. She looks concerned for a second, and I say, Fuck it, man. The machine is a goner, anyway. Mom concurs, reminding herself that our friend had already said she was going to have to replace it, so this isn’t really much of a loss.

I go back upstairs and into the room where my traveling companion and I are staying.

She’s talking with the dude, but they’re not having sex or anything. I don’t know why I care, but I kind of do. Since I don’t want to care about it, I’m not really sorting my feelings well, so I can’t tell if I want to sleep with her or him or both. Because I don’t want to sleep with either of them, but there’s some psychic network of attraction at work that I keep tripping over.

There’s some kind of party forming outside, and they go out there. I peek out from the sliding glass door they’ve left ajar, and see a bunch of white folks out there hanging out, drinking beer.

I resist the impulse to go out there, but I fail and end up going. It doesn’t take long before I get in an argument with this tiny blonde woman about the most likely explanation of the creation of the universe—her idea, that it was literally created by a jealous and wrathful Bronze Age desert god—or mine, which is, you know, science. She is clearly brainwashed and has a thought block the size of an iceberg, so there’s no progress to be made there, and I escort her off the property and lock the gate. The security robot scanner at the gate informs me that she’s undying, and I say, I don’t give a fuck. She needs to go somewhere else.

Sometime around there, I woke up—like for real woke up—and peed. Then went back to bed.

You might notice I’ve been doing that a lot.

I know, I say. It’s the progesterone. And drinking too much water too close to bed. Like a combo.

You say the hormone bit might not be avoidable, but ask why I drink water so close to bed.

I get thirsty, babe, I say, then laugh a little.

Anyway, I go back to sleep—or fuck, maybe I’ve got the order wrong … who cares—and I’m dreaming again.

In this one, I can fly. Like it takes a little getting going—almost like peddling a bike or whatever—but I can lift off and fly.

It’s much easier to do when I’m not thinking about it cos when I am, I get some performance anxiety and then I can’t go as fast or high.

I’m telling Lila about it, and I can tell she doesn’t believe me. So I show her and I’m flying around the room, which looks a bit like my childhood room on the Jung, by the way.

Even though she is literally watching me fly around the room, she is still skeptical. She says her parents don’t believe it either, but she says it in that very subtle, passive way that she used to do all the time to express conflict without being direct. I don’t give a fuck what her parents think about it, but I keep that part to myself, and instead just take my shirt off so she can see that I don’t have any wires attached or anything, that it’s just me flying around the room, for real.

I can tell she wants to believe, but her mind will not allow her, too. The block isn’t as solid as the little blonde woman from the yard party in the other dream I was telling you about a minute ago. Like it’s starting to dissolve, but it’s still a pretty huge chunk of salt or whatever.

Her not believe me about this leads her to question me again about earlier—I haven’t told you this part yet, so don’t get lost, m’kay?—when I had been out walking and going down these old jungle trails I used to frequent as a kid.

But that’s where I was, I say, and it’s true. That’s where I was and what I was doing.

Look, I go, I don’t know what’s with you and why you don’t believe me but I am literally flying in front of you right now, and you don’t believe me. I don’t know how I could convince you about anything.

She softens a bit but still doesn’t believe me; I can tell.

I say whatever, we can talk about it later cos I have a dentist appointment I have to go to.

So I fly there, land, and the dentist’s office is just trashed. Like literally torn apart. There are police and fire and some animal control folks there. Apparently the x-rays caused nearby wildlife to mutate over time, and a mutant alligator had ransacked the place.

Surprisingly, though, they’re still able to take an x-ray of my teeth.

When they go to put the lead vest on me, I remind them to provide me with a thyroid shield, which they do.

By the way and not for nothin’: I can’t effing believe they don’t protect everyone’s thyroid. It’s a super sensitive gland, and it can’t be repaired once it’s damaged. But I digress.

As I’m moving my arm to let them put it on me, I become aware that I am dreaming and realize that I must be thinking of Dad again, of his experiences in the hospital.

Then they put some kind of separator in my mouth and drill my molar, repair a cavity there.

Then I wake up.

I put out the cigarette, shrug. That’s it, I say.

Play procedures

• If you need any dental work done, you can have my dentist do it free of charge. This can include checking for monitoring devices and other biometric implants that you may have acquired but are not yet aware of. You can add him to your list of contacts.
• I cannot fly in waking life, but I can in dreams. So you can count this chapter toward unlocking or upgrading your lucid dreaming trait, if you have one. If you do not and would like to give yourself one now, you may.
• Consider your own ideas about the generation or creation of the universe (or multiverse, if that’s more accurate for you). How willing are you to have these ideas tested? What might it mean for you if one or more component of your understanding proved false or wrong? Maybe write a short story about your findings, or just note them and move on.