When they come for her mother’s body, Aileen is in the kitchen. She does not flinch as she hears the ambulance doors slam, the heavy footfalls on the front porch, the stretcher crashing and scraping against the doorframe. The TV is still on when two EMT’s enter the house. Aileen leads them down the hallway, pointedly avoiding the gaze of the younger man. He looks about eighteen years old, lanky and blonde, face rippled with acne scars and shoulders hunched almost to his ears. Aileen thinks perhaps he is trying to make himself appear smaller, and she notes his grotesquely distended bottom lip, bruised purple and cinched with what look like at least two black stitches. It feels like a punishment to watch him move through the house, knocking gently into picture frames and furniture. When he reaches the living room he unfolds the steel legs of the gurney slowly, as if hoping to make as little noise as possible.
They had hooked up, briefly and furiously, about a month earlier. It was Aileen’s very first night in town, and she’d caught him staring as she walked from her car into the convenience store of the Kum and Go, the first time she’d stretched her legs in two hundred miles. He was gaping at her really, and fumbled the gas nozzle when he saw that she noticed. It delighted her, the speed with which his neck had flushed red, so she smiled as she watched his breath billow out white in the cold.
When she exited the shop she crossed straight to him and offered him a sip of her yellow energy drink, and after only a few words had him pressed up against the dumpster behind the building. All told, it didn’t last long enough even for the motion sensor light to turn off. As he and his partner gingerly snap on their blue latex gloves and prepare to hoist her mother’s body up from the floor, Aileen remembers his weird little pink cock, shining and raw under the sallow yellow bulb.
Aileen looks at her mother’s body bathed in the electric blue light of the television, and reaches for it. She is reminded of a movie they watched together the week before. Aileen had been lazily switching from channel to channel in search of something that might hold their attention for an hour or so before bed, when Nanay had lifted her head sharply, suddenly alert. The steady rhythm of fragmented voiceovers and laugh tracks had gone quiet, and white text appeared on the black screen reading, Les Vampires. Nanay let out a little gasp. “These are the vampires,” she breathed, “the blood and viscera suckers.” Her eyes widened to the high shiver of strings that signaled the opening scene. “I see a gentleman.”
In her final months, Nanay had developed a habit of narrating what she saw in films and TV shows, often even commercials, and usually in a breathy whisper that took on the intensity of an incantation. She rarely blinked or diverted her eyes from the screen. Aileen got the impression that Nanay believed it was her responsibility to speak the action on screen into existence, that the characters heard and obeyed her commands.
Shifting her weight to better settle in under her blanket, she went on:
“The gentleman is searching frantically for his files, his vampire files, he is rifling through the drawers. His colleague leans in to touch him on the nose. The gentleman has an inkling of who to suspect, yes.”
The actors’ heads and limbs moved too quickly, their eyes opened too widely, and their mouths made comically astonished O’s in response, it seemed, to every other bit of dialogue that passed between them. Their faces were painted like children on Halloween, with dark black circles drawn around their eyes and underlining their cheekbones.
As Nanay narrated, Aileen learned from the textual interjections that the gentleman was investigating a murder for which a group known as The Vampires were suspected. “Of course, in this city of vampires,” Nanay scoffed. By this point it was clear to Aileen that The Vampires of the film were actually some sort of organized crime syndicate rather than actual bloodsuckers, though she didn’t mention it to Nanay. She had been advised not to challenge her mother on her version of reality.
At present, the gentleman was tasked with traveling to the home of a man named Doctor Night, to investigate. Nanay described the house of Doctor Night: “This is a grand house, yes, they have a gardener and a big iron gate. Ah, this is a beautiful chateau, this is a house full of heavy glass windows. The gentleman walks in and there is the wealthy American woman there, look, this Missus—she is looking at the cushions’ embroidery, she is sizing it up.” Nanay now appeared animated, enraptured, “In the background there you can see, anak, Aileen, look, look, the doors are painted onto the wall, there is no hinge, it doesn’t open.” She was right about this, and Aileen found herself momentarily lost in examining the brushstrokes of the painted-on doors.
Doctor Night, the black screen with white text then said, and the wealthy American woman was shown rolling her eyes upward to the ceiling in distress.
“Missus is never without her jewels,” she now explained, shaking her head in awe or disapproval. “For this she is renowned. Now Missus is suddenly overcome by tiredness, for which she lays down, ah, but not without first letting loose her very long black hair, which touches the bed first, as you can see.
“You know, it is recommended,” here she paused and turned to Aileen, “it is recommended that young women wear their long hair down in order to protect themselves from the manananggal,” and then she laughed until overtaken by shuddering wet coughs. After Aileen helped her to sip some water, her cough subsided and Nanay pushed Aileen to the side with impatience, craning her neck to see the screen. The screen now showed the gentleman in bed, restless and unable to sleep. With the confidence of a professor holding forth before a packed lecture hall, she continued: “Now, to indicate that night has fallen, these rooms are painted a most marvelous blue, a truly luscious and jewel-toned blueberry blue.”
Nanay fell silent in a kind of delighted reverie, and as Aileen watched, she found to her surprise that without Nanay’s narration she couldn’t quite understand the motions the actor on screen was performing. He had begun searching the room, feeling along the walls with his fingertips. What was he looking for? When he touched the frame of one painting, the canvas disappeared to reveal a black emptiness, through which he reached his arm. Aileen felt a strange disgust as his arm disappeared into the wall. Was he going to climb into it?
But Nanay had turned away from the screen to ask, “What did they use to make it blue, anak? This is a color through which the aswang can glide, the vampire can swim, I want to know what did they use?” Nanay gazed at her, waiting for an answer. Even for this most recent version of her Nanay, blurred and dizzied by illness, this was a strange question. Aileen thought for a moment before shaking her head, but Nanay had already turned back to the screen, “Now I can only see the dark wells in his face, the deep wells each eye makes in the skull. Can it be that the eyes bore themselves deeper into the heads, in this—in this vampire city?”
Again Aileen hesitated. She knew that the rising panic in Nanay’s voice should be met with calm. Before she could reply, Nanay went on, “Now a cloaked man comes for the jewels of our Missus, Doctor Night comes for her necklace while she sleeps,” she whimpered, “watch out for him, no, he has her by the throat!”
There was a cloaked figure on the screen, in the room of the sleeping woman, but he had only stolen the jewels, and was now sneaking back out of the room. Nanay stared not at the screen but at her own hands and whispered, “Now her blue throat opens. I see the blood, it is like a ribbon slipping off.”
At this point Nanay began to weep, at first silently but after a few moments she crescendoed into a wail so disconsolate that Aileen had to turn the TV off and hold her mother gently, easing her into sleep.
Aileen had bitten his lip nearly in half, the EMT. As she shimmied his pants and boxer briefs down to just below his hips, she took his bottom lip between her teeth. At first gently, so that she could feel his excitement rise, but then with decisive force, hearing the crunch of his soft tissue. She tasted metal as he gasped and tried to free himself, messily pawing at her chest so that his lip stretched even further and he gagged. She waited to release the grip of her jaw until she felt a small chunk of his lip tear off and come with her.
In the millisecond pause before he shouted in pain, she watched as his teeth turned pink with his own blood, and he stood frozen, hands open and extended toward her. There was something like a plea there, on his face, which she drank in before turning to run. Before slamming her driver’s side door shut, she heard him loudly curse and spit. Aileen drove the rest of the way to her mother’s house with the radio turned all the way up.
Now, as the two men carry her mother down the front stairs, she feels in her mind the glass windows of a beautiful chateau slide heavily open.
Recommended reading: Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama, Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera, Event Factory by Renee Gladman, Matrix by Lauren Groff, Falling in Love With Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson
