Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires…
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Not knowing that her life and the lives of her “extended family” would be inextricably changed and shortened that very night, Eva Lutz Wagner, née Eva Fae Nosferatu, parked her prototype white Mercedes SSK Roadster in front of the Central Park South entrance of the Plaza Hotel and signaled to the uniformed doorman to look after it.
I shan’t be a minute, she thought; and the doorman—mazed and not realizing that she had casually possessed him—left his post to open the door for her and stand guard beside the car as she walked into the hotel.
Eva walked through the sumptuous U-shaped lobby, her gold high heels clicking like little hammers on the mosaic floor. She took the elevator to the nineteenth story, which belonged to her father, and sighed impatiently as the liveried elevator boy fumbled to unlock the door to the private landing. The entrance hall was old fashioned but immaculate and led to a bronze Porta del Paradiso door framed by two iconic paintings by Giorgio de Chirico: “The Disquieting Muses” and the 1917 “Great Metaphysical Interior.”
The great door opened into what could have been a ballroom; and Eva said, seemingly to the empty air, “Well, mein vater, I see that you have not lost your infatuation with irony and displacement.”
Casimir Vsevolod Nosferatu, now known as Alvar Wagner, was seated behind a partners’ desk. He stopped writing and looked up at her. The exquisite beauty of his daughter’s face was evident, even under the protective makeup that seemed to be sculpted rather than applied. She was an Amazon dressed in a tight-fitting white satin evening dress and an open sable cocoon coat. She wore a cloche hat with a Cartier brooch over her shingled black hair, gold-threaded scarves, and differing lengths of perfect pearls; and she emanated physicality and strength. In contrast, Nosferatu was a shade, just another still shadow in this darkened room.
In a thin and whispery voice, he said, “And I see that you have lost your respect for privacy”…and respect for the poisonous influence of sunlight, he thought.
“I was just saving you the trouble of getting up,” Eva said, surveying the room. The faded silk and velvet damask curtains that covered the windows allowed just enough light to turn the room into a chessboard of shadowy shapes: cushioned sofas, overfilled breakfront bookcases, lacquered cabinets and secretaires, tallboys, Chippendale desks and chairs, and what her father liked to call his “concatenation of art.” She was relieved that the wan darkness dampened the expensive abominations her father had acquired since she had been here last. She hoped he had gotten over his infatuation with that young upstart who called himself Dali, as if the ‘i’ in his name was to be translated into a succession of e’s.
“Modern heterotopians do not shrink from the light,” she said as she sat down in a chair near her father. She smiled triumphantly and turned on a lamp.
Unfazed, her father continued to write.
“I see your eyesight has not diminished.”
Nosferatu smiled weakly, sadly. “You mean my eternity has become only a bit clouded.”
“You have allowed yourself to become a fugacious old man,” she said angrily; and he had: his skin was blotched, his strong face seemed to have melted into wrinkles below which hung a dewlap. He had given up immortality for human transience. Purposely.
He laughed. “Yes, that I am, daughter. Human frailty can be ugly when viewed from…a different perspective.” He put down his fountain pen; and without moving his lips, he thought (said), “Now get on with it. Tell me what you want.”
Eva felt the force of his dismissal…and the surprising potency of his phrenic, paralyzing power. Without moving a muscle, she slapped him hard in retaliation. He nodded as a blush appeared on his right cheek. “It’s not just what I want,” she said. “It’s what the rest of your family wants. Remember them? Your family?” Enough, she thought. Guarded, impenetrable thoughts. She would make quick work of this. “With or without your agreement, you will attend the conclave.”
Unperturbed, Nosferatu said, “Yes, darling, I do remember everything. Now sit back down and let me make you a drink, and then you can tell me everything at leisure.”
She felt a palpable pressure on her shoulders, pressure she could have easily withstood; but she acquiesced and lowered herself back into the cushioned yet uncomfortable chair. He poured her a brandy, handed it to her, then sat down on a sofa across the room.
“I did receive an invitation to the conclave,” he said.
“You did not respond.”
“Because I wasn’t sure if I would attend,” he lied. “It’s not exactly my sort of thing anymore.”
“It is exactly your sort of thing, which is why you are going and why I am taking you.”
Nosferatu nodded, transmitting what Eva could only imagine as…love. Such a distant and alien notion.
“Your friends—your family—have vindicated you,” Eva said, guarding herself from him.
“I have no wish to be vindicated, nor do I wish to witness whatever reprisal the conclave has planned.”
“Herr Dieckmann and Grau named their film after you, Father! Presumptuous poseurs. And they filmed it in Lübeck…at the Salzspeicher, where we used to conduct business.”
“We did well with the Hanseatic League,” Nosferatu said, a hint of nostalgia in his voice. “There was good business in salt. But that was three centuries ago, child. I can barely remember, much less entertain a blood grudge against this unknown so-called film company.
“They used your name!”
Nosferatu shrugged.
Eva tried to penetrate his thoughts, his emotions, his reactions; but he was…empty. How much of his potency had he really lost since he renounced hunting? Since he elected to become prey with its burden of human mortal emotions? Without allowing a stray thought to pass unguarded—yet adhering to a plan borne out of something that was the cold equivalent of love, affection, familial duty—she leaped out of her chair, leaped upon him like an animal, as if he were indeed the prey he had sought so diligently to become; and she sunk her needle-sharp secondary incisors into the hollow between his neck and shoulder; and she tasted blood, blood that still retained the acridity of her kind, but was also so lusciously and overwhelmingly sweet that she felt its deliciously caustic heat in her groin.
Then, dazed and disconcerted, she pulled away from him.
And vomited on his crimson eighteenth-century Aubusson carpet.
Nosferatu held his daughter as she slept, having pulled her back onto the couch. Sated, she snored. Her head rested on his lap; and had her eyes been open, she would have been looking right up into his. She was stone cold, yet intensely alive, as only the undead could be. She could feel hunger, but not grief nor remorse; Nosferatu remembered the freedom that presented, the exhilaration that was the normal state of being, an exanimate joy. He felt a deep, burning ache where she had bitten him; and at that moment he wished to be what he had been: cold and hungry in the best possible sense; but his race, his family—including his daughter, for whom right now at this moment he could feel human affection—had to be exterminated. He could but regret becoming human, a process that had taken him a human lifetime; yet he was still a sanguinarian. He still needed a ration of blood. Only now he drank from a bottle rather than an artery. That was his pledge to humanity.
The phone rang, jolting him out of his reverie and awakening Eva, who pulled away from him as if she was profoundly repulsed. Dizzy and weakened, Nosferatu walked over to the telephone cabinet and lifted the receiver from the switch hook.
“Yes…”
“Doctor Wagner, this is Chimes at the desk. I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’ve been looking after your visitor’s automobile; and the doorman has asked me whether you would like it garaged or—”
“No,” Nosferatu said, “please take two ten dollar bills out of my private safe: ten for you and ten for the doorman, who I’m sure can be persuaded to look after it until we come downstairs.” Ten dollars was almost a week’s salary for the doorman, and certainly a nice tip for Chimes.
“Yes, sir, of course. Consider it taken care of.”
When Nosferatu hung up the phone, Eva was sitting erect on the couch as if she was preparing to stand and escort her father out of the suite. Her gaze was intense. She smiled and said, “You’ve made the right decision, Father.”
“I’m sure you think so. Now please relax while I change clothes. Would you like another drink?”
But Eva had closed him off and was seemingly impenetrable.
“I shan’t be more than a few moments,” Nosferatu said as he left the room, his steely thought-voice invading her privacy like a stone smashing crystal.
He stood naked in front of the mirror of his ebonized dressing table
He looked hard at himself, seeing as if with double vision what he had been and the skeletal, ugly quasi-human chimera he had chosen to become; and then feeling an intense mixture of sadness and guilt, he opened a drawer and removed a wooden box that contained a brass hypodermic syringe and a glass vial. He inserted the needle into the rubber top of the vial, drew back the hypodermic’s plunger, and then injected the prepared pathogen into his cephalic vein. When he was finished, he carefully placed the instruments back into the satin-lined box and then dressed: black swallow-tailed jacket, trousers with shiny silk stripes on the sides, wingtip collared shirt, diamond cufflinks, ivory vest, matching bow tie, and black leather pumps with white shoe covers. Donning a velvet-collared coat, he twisted an ostentatious crimson silk scarf around his neck and left his private rooms to poison his daughter with his very presence.
“Now I am death.
“Now I will kill what was once my kind and kin.
“And myself…”
It was dusk as they left the hotel, and there was a chill in the damp air.
Eva sat silently behind the wheel, the dark tinted windows rolled tight to the roof, the leather seats radiating the autumnal damp. It was rush hour in the city, but Eva navigated little-used lanes and shortcuts and when she reached the 125th Street ferry dock, she cut through a block-long line of waiting cars and drove onto the automobile deck without hindrance or complaint. The ferry crossed the Hudson River to Edgewater, New Jersey, and then Eva drove the next few miles in first gear; the Palisades rose like serrated walls from the moonlit river. She tried to penetrate her father’s thoughts, but couldn’t; he was as opaque and as silent as the sheer cliffs below them.
“I suppose I should apologize to you before we arrive at the castle,” she said when the road became more easily navigable. “It won’t be long now. I just wish that cousin Wolfgang had chosen a less gaudy abode.”
Nosferatu shut down his persistent, nagging thoughts of his pharmaceutical plant near Andermatt in Switzerland, such a pretty town, such a profitable business; and his secret lab would certainly benefit humanity, for it was there that his team had developed his selective airborn pathogen, a pathogen that was itself immune to any counteractant…purposely so. The deadly fire that had destroyed everyone and everything in the small lab was regrettable—especially as he had developed a fondness for the staff—but necessary.
He looked over at his daughter, who was driving with relaxed concentration: he could not (yet) allow his daughter to see that she and everyone attending his so-called celebration would have only hours to live. He would explain when the time was ripe. “I should probably apologize for being such dull company, but I am trying not to retaliate for your incestuous assault,” he said, isolating himself further, protecting himself from her and his abhorrence of what he was about to do.
“It was certainly not pleasurable,” Eva said. “But…it was necessary and won’t need to ever happen again.”
Nosferatu chuckled. “Do you really believe that you’ve cured me by intermingling our vital fluids?”
“Cure you? Nein, Vater, perhaps redirect you would be a better way to put it.”
“Ah,” he said, but he thought, If our lives were not now measured in hours rather than centuries, I would tell you that I read you while you slept and dreamed of penetration. He closed his eyes. You dreamed you were a child being sucked and penetrated…by me. Dein vater. At least I was not responsible for that.
After traveling mile after mile of winding roads, Eva said, “There’s the castle,” indicating a halo of gauzy light that illuminated the hills ahead in shifting pink, lavender, and yellow, along with sudden shots of white light. She turned on the windshield wipers to clear the moisture from the glass and drove over the next hill to a bylane that was one of the private entrance roads to the property. They could hear the echoic sounds of distant music and the soft roar of laughter as they passed through the first gate; and the rowdydow became louder and louder as they passed through the second gate, which closed behind them like a clam on a coral reef.
Damp and chilly though it was, there were crowds drifting on the well-lit terraced lawns and manicured gardens. There were guests wearing beaded headbands and sequined fringed dresses that reflected the moonlight and lamplight like mirrors. There were women dancing in casual cardigan and sweater daywear, and women dancing the Charleston in drop-waisted, hooped robe de style frocks that would not have looked out of place at an eighteenth century cotillion ball. There were men in lounge suits, in Oxford bags and plus-fours, in formal Savile Row black tie and tails and in sportswear; and one young man was naked except for a narrow brimmed trilby hat and Oxford shoes. They were all drinking, frolicking, laughing, shivering, shouting, arguing, and dancing to Paul Whiteman’s “Hot Lips,” conducted by the maestro himself. A bluestone promenade flanked by grotesque topiaries led to the central colonnaded gallery of the enormous white terracotta clad mansion. The house was bathed in even brighter light than the gardens, an uninviting, excoriating light that blotted out the moon with its unnatural intensity.
Eva stopped the car and paid no attention to the liveried servants who opened the doors for them, bowed, and then drove the roadster to a concealed parking lot. She and her father strolled through the crowds of partygoers, past buffet tables covered with crystal decanters of wine and whiskey and porcelain platters of hors-d’oeuvres, spiced hams, game roasts, sliced turkey, and salads glowing as green as the grass and promenade topiaries.
A well-dressed drunk wearing a dented top hat reached out to Eva, trying to grab her by the arm, but fell dead before her. She stepped over the corpse as if it was just a spot of vomit. Nosferatu shook his head, troubled by his daughter’s casual act of senseless murder. The orchestra began playing the “Black Bottom,” and the partygoers danced and gyrated, shuffling back and forth and waving their arms to the syncopated rhythms. “There are obviously more prey out here than our own sanguinarians,” Nosferatu said.
“Food for thought,” his daughter replied, her smile unnoticed.
As they approached the house, they saw a portly, smooth-faced man waving to them from a portico above the stone steps of the entryway.
“Welcome Cousin Casimir, and, of course, his ever-lovely perfection Eva.”
He did not have to shout, nor articulate words that could be heard by anyone other than Nosferatu and Eva. “We—and I speak of all of us, for the family—are so pleased and proud that you could attend. We could not help but notice that you have become a bit—shall we say reticent—to mingle with those whom you give—and take—succor.”
Eva heard her father think “blowhard” as he embraced and kissed the owner of the great house. She smiled as she embraced her cousin Wolfgang, nee Count von Wangenheim of Wisborg. He allowed his hand to drop to her buttock, giving it a quick caress before saying, “I think you will find the company inside more agreeable than that of the kine grazing in the gardens.” Then he led them through the central corps de logis with its Corinthian pilasters and arch headed windows, past a grand ballroom lit by a hundred chandeliers and crowded with revellers of the same ilk as those outside. When Eva scowled at the guests, Wolfgang smiled and said, “Patience, Cousine Eva,” and gestured to a recessed doorway. He unlocked the door; and as soon as he locked it closed, the noise outside and behind them became nothing more than a faint susurration. They continued on past a billiards room, salons, and a dining room with coffered ceilings until they came to a stair hall overwhelmed by a curved, crimson-carpeted grand staircase. Genteel voices and soft laughter could be heard above.
“Here we are,” Wolfgang said, and suddenly, as if by telesthesian command, the voices and laughter ceased…until Nosferatu and Eva climbed the stairs.
Into a ballroom that occupied the entire floor. Chandeliers bathed the tapestries, Renaissance paintings, murals, sculptures, the white tablecloths, bloody plates and decanters—and, of course, the immortals, impeccably dressed and groomed sanguinarians—in buttery light. It certainly was a family welcome, everyone surging around father and daughter, calling, applauding, and raising glasses to them—but really to Nosferatu, the most favored one, the eldest, their purported leader, the prodigal father returned to the cold bosom of his deathless community. And Nosferatu received all their praise and accolades with his usual detached attention; and then with smiles, kisses, whispers, caresses, and all the secret expressions of mutual consanguinity, all lies and deception on his part; but he would act his part until the hour when he could reveal himself to Eva. Although it would make no difference, he felt he owed her that.
He looked around at his family, these confident demigods who were more like kine than the humans they fed upon, who lived to feed and feed and feed forever. He was not surprised that he had almost no feelings for them. He had experienced human affection and warmth, but such sympathies could not be extended to the cold and the ambulant dead. He was, however, surprised at the depth of affection he felt for Eva. Although it bordered on sexuality, it was not quite the same. But he could not dwell on his confusion, for Wolfgang and company insisted on presenting him with “gifts.”
Wolfgang reiterated what Eva had said in his apartments and continued on with the usual tribal homiletics of secrecy, retribution, and the dangers of exposure as he prodded Nosferatu, along with Eva, through a series of rooms that led to the servants’ quarters and kitchens. “I think this is the gift station,” he said, opening a door that led into a large vapor compression cold room. Fruit and vegetables, cheeses, and all manner of delicacies were arrayed on the floor-to-ceiling shelving. Slabs of beef, mutton, and game dangled from hooks, as did the desiccated corpses of the producers, directors, and the entire cast of Nosferatu the Vampire. Everyone connected with the film, including the hapless screenwriter Henrik Galeen, production workers, grips, investors, distributors, financiers, painters, and camera assistants claimed the majority of the refrigerated space, which was substantial. And Nosferatu conflated his memory of the crystal chandeliers hanging like stalactites in the ballroom downstairs with these mummified corpses clustered before him.
Wolfgang stood beside Eva and Nosferatu while the rest of the family maintained a respectful distance, forming up according to rank, wealth, and power, filling the kitchens. Those with a superior vantage ignored the family members jostling for position behind them.
Speaking loudly, as if he was standing on a dais, Wolfgang said, “Your good name has now been cleansed, dear cousins.” He gestured to the corpses. “It is as if that abomination of a film had never been created. It has been erased; every cell, every copy has been erased.” He paused for effect, and then said to Nosferatu, “Welcome home, dear cousin.”
At his signal, the family applauded.
Nosferatu pulled on his cuff and surreptitiously glanced at his diamond Cartier watch, which Louis Cartier had made to his specifications.
He had, so to speak, several hours left to kill.
Eva stayed close to her father throughout the night. She didn’t excuse herself to go downstairs or outside to feed on the guests, but kept trying to penetrate her father’s thoughts, deftly prodding, looking for weakness, any attenuation through which she might push; and Nosferatu experienced a novel sadness and poignancy as they drifted from room to room and party to party, conversing with old friends, making small talk with those who had been relegated to the edges of their sanguineous society.
By 4:00am, as the revelers were quieted and the family having reached an agreeable torpor, Nosferatu opened up to his daughter. It was finally time to reveal himself, which he did without saying a word. They would both be dead within the hour; the rest of the family would find graduated demises, according to the time they came into contact with Nosferatu, his daughter, and the others infected throughout this quietly apocalyptic night.
And Eva, now able to access her father’s thoughts…now able to experience his intentions, justifications, memories, and emotions, emotions which were as alien to her as the surprising strength of his affection, his love for her. She felt his humanness, not yet fully actualized, felt his fear; and she stepped over to a window overlooking the balustraded roofline and the remains of the feeding frenzies in the gardens below. She surveyed those who were satiated and those who were fed upon, the unconscious, the drugged, the inebriated, the exhausted, the awakened, and the dead. Then she turned to her father, her thoughts now as transparent as his, and asked, “Shall we find a private alcove in the gardens?”
Nosferatu nodded and took her by the hand.
“I had expected more of a reaction when I revealed what I have done.”
“Did you then?” she said.
“It would only be natural—”
She laughed. “And so you consider us to be natural?”
“I consider it to be natural to balk upon the discovery that you have been murdered,” Nosferatu said.
“Ah, but I have not yet been murdered, have I?”
When Nosferatu did not respond, she said, “You overwhelmed me. I experienced you rather than understood you. Now it is all part of me. Which is what you wanted. And, as you have made clear over the years, I have never been endowed with an abundance of emotion, except for what you have just foisted upon me…your traitorous embrace of humanity.”
“So once again, I have underestimated you.”
“Indeed, Vater, once again…”
Then they left the mansion, stepped down broad perron stairs onto the lawn and then through the private east garden where they found a wrought iron table and chairs situated near a series of fountains, some that shot rainbow spires of water into the air, others that created pools resembling boiling springs. They sat down together, and Nosferatu began to recite a poem:
From a golden faucet pours a wave
Its clarity purer than a soul…
which Eva completed:
A turquoise and silver wave that creates
rainbows in this basin,
rainbows from this faucet of gold.
Nosferatu smiled at his daughter. “So you are familiar with the poet Azraqi.”
Eva laughed softly. “No, I just took the lines from you.”
Nosferatu looked at his watch again and said, “Sadly, I don’t believe we shall see the golden dawn. My apologies, daughter. I wish I could have spared you.”
“That was never your intention.”
Nosferatu closed his eyes and waited, but Eva interrupted him.
“You look younger, Vater.”
“Tricks of the artificial light.”
“No, I think not.”
Nosferatu straightened. “So you think your little love bite earlier has transformed me?” He chuckled. “If so, I fear the change will be short lived,” and with that he who had become death put his arm around his cool-skinned daughter and waited…
and waited as the sun rose and burned off the dank moisture of the night.