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When I first saw Linda Meritt’s file, I suspected that she was wasting our time.
Anton had that reaction, too. He had smiled, standing in front of my desk, picking up the folder with his elegant hands. The pose of nonchalance was perfect. It would have fooled me if I hadn’t worked here long enough to know that he always just happened to appear within five minutes of a new application hitting the ADMIT basket. Now, as he read, he was frowning.
“You know better than this, Saundra,” he said, his accent doing wonderful things to the first syllable. “She is twenty-three. How likely is it that she will stay with us to the end?”
I knew what he meant. Almost always, when young people come in and file death papers, it’s a gesture. They’re trying to throw a scare into somebody. During the three-day waiting period, the notice goes out to “interested parties and the general public” as required by law, and the applicant is hoping some particular person, usually a parent or a lover, will intervene, stop them from having themselves done in. If nobody does, they’ll take themselves out of the process, either during cleansing or in the first few days of the feeding. Anton doesn’t like to see young people come in here. He’s been burned too often. If it were up to him, we wouldn’t take applications from anybody under forty-five.
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “The law requires that we refrain from discrimination on the basis of age, sex, race, or any other protected category.” He looked at me with his lips set in a flat line. “Besides, I don’t think she’s all that bad a risk. Keep reading.”
He lowered his head while keeping his eyes on mine, then abruptly shifted them down to the page. It’s one of his little mannerisms, slightly unnerving, slightly fascinating. I don’t know whether it’s natural or deliberate.
“She is not a bankrupt,” he observed as he read. “She is not an intellectual.” That’s the Kevorkian Classic: brain-proud individuals from a family prone to late-life loss of brain function, as the medical profession now terms what we used to call senility. They notice the first signs in themselves and they want out while people will still remember them as sharp and in control. Linda Meritt was not that type; she did clerical work and had graduated from junior college in the lower half of her class. “She is not a depressive.”
“She hasn’t been diagnosed as a depressive,” I corrected him. “But let me point out a feature or two from the bio. Her parents were legally married, but only briefly. Her mother’s given her seven—count ‘em—seven stepfathers since then, including the current one, with whom Mama’s down in Florida running a seniors’ resort. The notice didn’t raise a peep out of any of them. Mama also has a history of admissions to alcohol detox programs that goes back before Linda’s birth. This kind of background doesn’t inevitably produce depressives, but it sure does up the odds. For her father’s address, she put ’unknown.” She didn’t know where he was. I would guess he’s been out of the picture for a long time.“
“So,” he interrupted, “has he been located? Has he received his notice?”
“Come on, boss. You know Devi found him or the application would never have gotten this far.” Devi is our research department. She’s very thorough. “We notified him in his fishing cabin in Wisconsin. We notified her half brother in the air force, which takes care of the immediate relatives. None of them are local. This is not a tight-knit family. We notified her most recent ex-lover, whom she hasn’t seen since school days. None of them have called even out of curiosity. No children, no pets, she didn’t list any close friends. Under hobbies-and-avocations she put ‘reading and watching videos.” She’s in an entry-grade job at Hancock Health and Pension. One thing I know about entry-grade jobs at big insurance firms. If a person’s any good they get promoted out of it in six months. She’s been there two years.“
“But she is not bad enough to fire,” he finished. “You still have not persuaded me that she is not simply bored and seeking to create some excitement among people she fancies are neglecting her. If she were a depressive, why would she not have been diagnosed?”
“Because she can’t afford treatment on her own and she’s never performed badly enough, in school or at work, to trigger third-party intervention. Therapy isn’t so easy to come by in the age of managed care as it used to be. It’s not enough to be miserable. You have to mess up, inconvenience somebody with some power, and she hasn’t.” He still looked skeptical. I reached for the folder. “Look,” I said as I slipped my hand in the back of it and came up with her picture.
That clinched it for him, same as it had for me. Not just the lumpy features. Plenty of people who don’t have looks on their side still manage to enjoy life. Linda didn’t appear to be doing that. The expression in the eyes was too old for twenty-three, and too tired. I saw his forehead relax as he looked at it, though his mouth remained in a frown. He didn’t want to admit he’d been convinced this easily. He turned a page, read down it for another moment, then smiled.
“I owe a great deal to novelists,” he said, closing the folder. “Very well. Admit her. She will be… an interesting change.”
I knew what had got that reaction out of him. As her reason for applying, she’d entered a quotation from a Saint-Germain novel: “I would like to know, just once, what it is like to be loved.”
That’s the lure, of course, the thing that makes Anton better than thirty Darvon and a fifth of vodka. When a vampire feeds repeatedly and exclusively from one person, the resultant emotional state for both parties is exactly (I’ve been told) like intense, obsessive, mutual romantic love. Let him finish you off and you will die happy. Guaranteed.
The rest of the file looked good, nothing to object to, so I initialed her into the cleansing program. She arrived the following Friday with an unusually small amount of luggage. We encourage people to bring every possession they might possibly want during their stay, since the idea is to keep them happy. Most of them take us at our word. I remember one man who had a four-poster bed brought in. But Ms. Meritt had only two suitcases and her purse. It was as if she’d packed for an ordinary trip.
I met her at the door, introduced myself, and got her settled. She was more or less what her file suggested: average size, working-class voice and manner, clothes too cheap to get respect and too drab to be any fun. She didn’t mind if I called her Linda. She thought everything about her suite was fine. She had no objections to the schedule I showed her. Her attitude was more peaceful than her file had suggested, a phenomenon I had seen before. Once the decision is made, they seem to relax.
The first week of the cleansing is like time at a good health spa: green vegetables and mineral water, sweat baths, body work and breathing exercises. She didn’t complain when the high-fiber diet gave her the runs, and she submitted to the body work in a tractable, complacent way, showing no discomfort even with procedures that most people find uncomfortable. I began to see why no one had noticed that anything was wrong with this woman. Outwardly, she was a complete stoic.
The second week is buildup. We gradually introduce more protein into the diet, more naturally oil-bearing foods, blood builders and toners. Toward the end of this period,
Anton begins looking in when the client is asleep, to check readiness. By that time, he’s getting eager, bored with his occasionals, knowing what’s coming. He judged Linda ready on the fifteenth night of her stay, and on the sixteenth he went in.
I didn’t have to watch on the monitor to know how he was coming on to her. Old World charm, kissing her hand, the accent. He works on his accent. If he didn’t, he would have lost it years ago. Most of all, he’d be using his obvious fascination with her. That is absolutely sincere every time, with every client. The scent of high-quality blood (and hers is very high quality by now) triggers emotional attachment in him. He really was falling in love with her, and there’s nothing like love offered to stimulate love in return. He’d have his first feeding within half an hour of meeting her, and from then on nothing but daylight would separate them.
About eleven-thirty he buzzed me and ordered the midnight snack that I’d had waiting: eggs Florentine made with fresh spinach and English muffins baked that day. From now on it was gourmet luxuries at every meal. I doubted she’d ever had such food in her life. When I brought it in, he was ebullient, full of praise for my every move: the euphoria of the early stage. As for Linda, her face was transformed. I had a feeling it was the first time I’d seen her face, reflecting her genuine emotions, instead of the stoic mask she had presented up until then. It was going well. A couple of hours later, after he moved her into the bedroom, I came in quietly and cleared the dishes away.
The next afternoon, as soon as she was awake, I brought her a cafe latte in bed. The transformation was holding. Always before she’d had to put her robe on and brush her hair before she would let herself be seen. This time she said “Come in” as soon as I knocked, and didn’t budge from bed, just let me arrange the pillows for her so she could slide up into a sitting position. She took a sip of her latte and leaned back into the pillows with that lazy well-fed-from smile familiar to me from other clients.
“It’s true what they say,” she remarked. “This is definitely the way to go.” Not a controversial statement, it was still the first time since her arrival that she’d volunteered an opinion about anything. I looked at her face, lit by love and contented with good care, and it was as if I saw another person, one who could have been a friend of mine if things had been different. Maybe that’s why I broke one of my own little rules. I sat down on the bed.
“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” I asked. She shook her head, so I went on. “Why?”
“Oh, come on. You have to know. I mean, don’t you? Working here, being around him every day, you let him feed sometimes, right?”
It was my turn to shake my head. “Vampires don’t like diabetics. Our blood’s no good to them. That’s why I can work here. But that’s not what I meant, anyway. If you just wanted to experience a feeding, you could have come in here as an occasional, and gone home afterward. Why death? Why this program? It can’t be my cooking.” She laughed, a sweet, open, relaxed sound that I wouldn’t have thought she had in her. Then she thought seriously for a moment before she answered.
“I guess it’s so I don’t have to take responsibility for it afterward. Does that make sense?” It did. An experience of joy would make her old life intolerable to her, and there was no new life beckoning. A less passive person could have made a new life, but Linda Meritt was not that person. She couldn’t pay the price of joy, so by letting go of life she skipped out on the payment.
“You probably look to the world like a responsible person. You show up for work every day. You’re always on time with the rent. Right? Little do they know…”
“Little do they know,” she agreed, with more laughter in her voice. The idea of being a truant appealed to this obedient stoic. I told her to buzz when she was ready for breakfast and went out.
That was the last conversation I had with her. She went very rapidly into the next stage: total emeshment with him.
She was no longer really aware of me, or of Val when she came on for the early shift. He was only slightly more aware. He remembered that he could call in food or order a bath drawn or whatever, but he didn’t look at us anymore, or thank us. Obsessive love is like that. I saw that even before she began to weaken much, he was bathing her and feeding her like a child. There’s something basically infantile about the passive personality, and Anton is good at uncovering clients’ unspoken wants.
She weakened eventually, though. Anton is not a heavy feeder, and there were all kinds of things in the food to keep her going as long as possible, but nobody can support a vampire for more than a couple of weeks. As they went into the final stage, where she couldn’t walk without support, the atmosphere around them developed a melancholy flavor which did not, from what I could tell, reduce the pleasure for either of them. She was dying, and it made them sad, but it also made every moment sweeter and more precious. Actually it wasn’t inevitable. At any moment she could have changed her mind, asked to be taken to a hospital, and probably been saved. But very few clients who get this far will choose to do that, and by now I was sure Linda wasn’t going to be one of them.
The end came an hour before dawn on the twenty-sixth day of her stay. Anton can tell by the sound of the heartbeat when a client is too weak to survive another feeding. He buzzed Val, who woke me and then left me to get everything ready while she went to get the notary. The law requires three witnesses including a medical notary, plus an open video line to the public recorder. At that hour it takes no time at all to get an open line.
We all went in together. Linda was in bed, with a sheet pulled up just enough to make her decent. She had marks not only where you’d expect, but just about everywhere there was a blood vessel, and I knew there would be more under the sheet. Her expression was relaxed and happy but not unaware. Anton was beside her, on the bed but not in it, wearing tai chi pants. He backed off. Physical nearness may cast doubt upon how freely the choice was made, and we want to stay absolutely clean, legally. The notary handed her the papers she’d signed the first day and asked her to read one copy out loud. It was short, just a statement of her intention to die, to contract with us to bring about that death, and to free us from any liability in the event of something going wrong. The notary asked if this was still her intention. She said it was and countersigned the papers with date, time, and thumbprint. Then she set aside the clipboard, turned to Anton, and said “Now.”
He kissed her on the lips one last time (that’s Anton, an artist right up to the end) then reopened his previous holes in the left side of her throat. She said “Mmmm” as if it felt good. (Isn’t that just about the ideal last word?) He fed rapidly to make it quick, tensing with the effort as she went limp with loss of consciousness and then, at last, even more perfectly still with the loss of life. Drawing away, he hovered over her a moment, looking troubled and weary. This is the hard part for him. His natural impulse at this point would have been, not to kill her, but to Turn her, to give her fangs of her own. The vampiric reproductive instinct is what drives this whole process. Staying with the contract required him to suppress that instinct by willpower. I’ve seen him kill probably fifty times by now, and it has not gotten easier for him. But he always does it.
Then he looked at us and said “It is done,” and we went into action. The notary started attaching equipment to the body for the legal certification of death. Val got out clothes for it. Anton usually stays to help dress the corpse, which he always handles very tenderly, but this time it was too close to sunrise, so I did it, even though it wasn’t my shift. By seven o’clock the physical remains of Linda Meritt were ready for the mortician’s people. Val called in a message for them. I showed the notary out.
And then, while Val was still tying up loose ends, I went upstairs and let myself into Anton’s rooms. As he lay there in a sleep so deep our ancestors couldn’t tell it from death, I kissed him good night. Then I went out.
Anton doesn’t miss much, so I think he knows that I do this. As often as he’s been a deathlover, I think he likes having his own deathlover around. That’s me, with my poisonous sugary blood and my unrequited longing. We’ve never talked about it, of course. The pretense of a business relationship, even in as strange a business as this, keeps things within bounds. But whenever I’ve thought about leaving he’s gone to a lot of trouble to persuade me to stay. Maybe one reason he’s so good with the clients is that he’s a little bit like them; knows the attraction of death, the fascination of it.
And if he did decide he wanted it, wanted death after all the years of immortality, wanted me, I don’t think I could refuse him, even though I wouldn’t like to be walking around in a world that didn’t contain him somewhere. Maybe I’d ask him to finish me, too, the way he finishes the clients. We could go together. Maybe I’m as much of a death freak as anybody who comes in here. Fixated on a vampire, what else would I be? I need a vacation. I’ve been at this too long.