The Shake
did seem to have sobered up. At least she wasn’t having any trouble driving. When we got to the footbridge, she pulled over to let me out.“Are you going to look for the girl, Shake?”
“You did well tonight, Karla. I appreciate your help.”
I stepped out and closed the door and Karla pulled away, smiling.
Chapter 13
For a vampire looking for a little distraction, the Arnaud mystery was an interesting puzzle: a wife deeply deceived about her husband’s character, a husband who has given someone a reason to kill him, a missing girl, a possible drug connection. And as I pursued the puzzle, something else was adding to my curiosity; a familiar pattern, one that seemed to grow inevitably out of my entanglements with humans. As long as I kept my distance from human affairs, it wasn’t particularly difficult to maintain caution in my day-to-day quest for blood. The less I had to do with people, the easier it was to avoid complications that might arise from killing them. But as soon as I stuck my nose into something unrelated to my basic nutritional needs, things had a tendency to get a little chaotic.
The problem was that involvement in people’s affairs almost always presented me with unforeseen dining opportunities. It wasn’t a question of being impulsive or reckless. The opportunities—more or less risky under the given circumstances—were simply there. I could either ignore them or take advantage of them, based on whatever concerns were relevant. I just had to use a little common sense in assessing the risk. Nevertheless, these improvised meals forced me to confront the fact that my decisions about who to kill, insofar as those decisions were the result of conscious evaluation, weren’t based on much of anything beyond risk assessment and resource management.
However, there were exceptions. Every now and then, I would chose not to kill someone, regardless of how low the risk was. There were people I judged to be worth more than a meal. Not just obvious cases, like Karla, who worked for me and was therefore worth more to me alive. Sometimes a complete stranger would do or say something, behave in a certain way, and I would unconsciously give them a pass. Which meant there were considerations that took precedence over my personal dietary needs. Which meant in turn that the forces and motivations of my own life were not entirely reducible to blood. It bothered me that I didn’t understand how I was making these choices.
The Arnaud business was typical. I was curious about how the pieces fit together, but pursuing it had quickly led to two random meals: Richardson’s girlfriend and Danny Weiss. There was something disconcertingly heedless about my actions. As if I were driven by forces I had no sway over. As if I had been reduced to physical processes, unable to weigh and evaluate the circumstances of my life. Because I wanted something from Richardson, I let the scumbag live, but drank his girlfriend’s blood, as if her life and death were inconsequential. As if she didn’t weigh in the balance of things. Then, with Danny Weiss, I did the opposite. I killed the little weasel and let the girl live. Danny may not have deserved any better, but it didn’t change the fact that, beyond the physical satisfaction of my thirst, my motivations were unclear to me.
The truth was, I wanted there to be meaningful distinctions, points of reference. I wanted it to be possible to make a better or worse choice, so that I could make the better choice. But I didn’t know how to make the distinctions. Consequently, killing often left me with the nagging uneasiness of not knowing if I had made a mistake. Not necessarily an ethical mistake, but some kind of mistake; the kind you make when you do something irrevocable, knowing as you do it that you’re taking a great deal for granted about something you really don’t understand. The kind of mistake that reduces you to something less than you want to be.
For reasons that also weren’t clear to me, unplanned meals seemed to bring all these unresolved questions to the surface, in a way that my routine feeding did not. There wasn’t any logical explanation for it. Why would a planned killing like Francine’s be any less unsettling? And that, too, was irritating. There was some kind of rationalization process at work that I wasn’t comfortable with. Like a man who tells himself his actions are acceptable if he abides by the rules, keeps his goal in mind, and doesn’t allow his greed to take precedence over his higher objectives. All the while, conveniently forgetting the possibility that the rules are only there in the first place to serve his greed.
Chapter 14
Meandering through the aisles at the bookstore in the Pavilion Shopping Plaza, it occurred to me that there was a time, not so long ago, when you could walk into a bookstore and be fairly confident that it was staffed by bibliophiles. They might be eccentric, and probably were, but their eccentricities were tempered by a genuine affection for books. Today, most of the few surviving bookstores are corporate chains. They’re run according to corporate policy, the employees are selected for their expendability, and with all the decor and the cafés, they’re just extensions of the shopping mall concept.
The arrangement of books on the shelves has also undergone some curious modernizations. There often isn’t any obvious relation between content and shelf location. I suspect categorization is the result of some kind of management excretion via marketing statistics. Not surprisingly, these market-driven arcana are as incomprehensible to the average employee as they are to shoppers. Staff people are reduced to performing their various tasks according to their own more or less illiterate whimsy. Add to that the typical American’s regimen of daily pharmaceuticals, and you have a kind of stress-free commercial utopia where the staff is chemically indifferent to everything, including alphabetical order.
I was watching a