Chapter 20
3. “Slayers in Suburbia”
“Real bitch of a new case this morning. Been at it since 6 AM. My pager didn’t wake you, did it?”
“I stirred, but I got back to sleep.”
“Good. I’m tired as fuck. Gonna brew more coffee in a bit.”
“This problem case—what type of hangup? No, let me guess. Political. I’m sure of it. This month like half of my cases are political, would you believe that? Something’s in the air. Or the water.”
“Not political. Psychosexual.”
“A difficult psychosexual case? Grant! I thought I married a professional.”
This was not meant in earnest. It wasn’t even teasing. Banter, more like. Ossified teasing, from many years ago, now a mere theatrical convention. A familiar chord progression, inviting Grant to improvise some new little comic riff on top of it.
Grant was all business today, apparently. He replied with a weary directness, and only the hint of a riff.
“Some psychosexual cases are just hard. It’s not the template, it’s the details.”
(“It’s not the template, it’s the details” was a familiar line, a piece of folk wisdom about their line of work. Something said by professionals, to the knowing nods of other professionals. A perfunctory rebuke, completing the volley of banter with a minimum of effort.)
“Oh? Gimme some details.”
“Male, Oedipal template. Mother died in the Turbulence. He was like six or maybe seven? Raised in a CC-Crash since then. Entirely isolate so far, I think. Mostly or entirely. He’s the only client of that subcrash, and Management is gating social stuff on resolution of the current issue.”
She lounged, listening. She brushed some dog fur off her dress. Looking at that couch, you’d never know they’d cleaned it less than a week ago. And now it was glazed in fur again. Sylvie was shedding like never before, this month. Something in the air, or the water.
“Has a crush on Lilith Vance,” Grant went on. “Severe crush, strong obsessive elements. Internally conflates her with a maternal archetype, which he reveres and desires. He sees ‘revere’ and ‘desire’ as opposites, so we’ve got the usual purity tensions. The age-old question, fuck or pedestal. He’s very keen to resolve that one therapeutically. Sees it as the root of his malady. It’s been tricky steering the conversation elsewhere.”
“So where’s the problem?” Cordelia asked. “Just let them fuck! With Dr. Freud’s specter applauding from the sidelines.
“And keep them together,” she continued. “Give the kid a real relationship, with a flesh-and-blood person who sweats and uses the toilet, and he’ll work out the purity stuff as well as any of us do. The natural way.
“Lilith’s perfect for this role, actually. She’s a practical woman, with her drives primarily oriented in the concrete plane, no patience for touchy-feely bullshit. She’ll train him out of this overwrought odes-and-torment phase, real quick.”
“I told you,” said Grant. “This case is just hard.”
“Let me guess. The Lilith instance isn’t playing along. She has reservations, or just isn’t into him. And meanwhile, you’ve got cold feet about asking Management for pharmaceutical help. A hangup of your own.
“Do you want me to ask for you? I feel no shame asking for a love potion, when a case needs it. I’ve come to see it as a crucial part of the mediator’s toolkit. The whole stigma about potions, that they’re cheating—I think it’s mostly naive kids at the mediation academy who keep that myth alive, not real practicing mediators. We’re adults in the real world, here. Get the job done, you know?”
She saw him smile a little, then, and understood what he was up to. He had waited, in his practiced mediator’s pose of perfect neutrality, letting her babble on. Now for the twist. She had guessed wrong, presumably, and now he would tell her how. He would deadpan it, with no note of triumph, except this little smile.
Grant was an artist of understatement. He could electrify her with a well-timed nod.
“I told you, this case is hard. We tried that already. I mean, we didn’t, they just did it naturally. The kid and Lilith got together long before I arrived on the scene. That’s part of the backstory. They’ve been steady now for like, I think, two years?”
She propped her head up on one hand, pantomiming interest.
“Two years. And still we’re seeing virgin-whore pathology? Something doesn’t add up. There has to be another wrinkle in there, right? You’ve left something out of the backstory.”
“I wish,” said Grant.
“Not that you’re wrong, I mean. There’s clearly another pathogenic complex somewhere in the guy’s psyche. But when I try to trace it, I get nowhere.
“The current surface manifestations are, well, first I’m seeing an eternal deferral of the maternal archetype—the mother-goddess is somehow behind his flesh-and-blood girlfriend, and obscured by her. Latent resentment of the actual for attributed deferral of the ideal. The archetype-goddess gets further away every time they have sex, or it damages her, or something. He uses several conflicting symbol systems, unclear if that will stabilize.”
“His rate of production,” Cordelia said, bringing the conversation to practical matters. Like her mentor and former headmistress, Cordelia’s drives were primarily oriented in the concrete plane. She knew this through self-analysis, one of the juicier fruits of a training in mediation.
Even mediators had their delights. In fact, maybe they were the only ones who did: who had their delights, and not the other way around. In the ordinary course of the psyche, we have our delights for just a moment, and from then on our delights have us. And we produce. And, eventually, we turn.
But mediators knew how to measure their delights, and thereby master them. They watched their rate of production. When poring over the graphs of their clients, they kept their own graphs onscreen—a constant of the trade, piously observed since the murky origin days of mediation itself.
They knew what to look out for, reading a graph. They knew how vampires were made. They knew how not to turn into one.
“I assume we’re not seeing production decline toward zero, yeah? Otherwise why would you be on the case at all.”
“Oh you wouldn’t believe. It’s increasing, steadily, been that way the whole two years. Further in the backstory, before they got together, he was producing . . . he was producing normally, you know? Anything above zero is bad, sure, but he was barely above median, for an adolescent isolate with room to stabilize. We accept millions of clients like him as the operating cost of Subspace. Just another summand in Management’s yearly background pollution aggregate.
“Now, though? He’s up there with the Special Observation cases, in terms of volume produced. And he’ll be under Special Observation soon enough, if I can’t figure out how to rein him in.
“I probably should have led with that, right?” he conceded. “I’m on the case because this guy is a major polluting node, with no signs of a stabilizing trajectory, and Management’s all out of good ideas. I learned this all today, at six in the morning, from my pager. Not my preferred way to do things. There’s a reason I didn’t go into emergency medicine.”
“Right? Sheesh, I’m sorry. That’s wild . . . What about his usual mediator? He must have one, right? Major production, multi-year time course. They wouldn’t leave a case like that unattended.”
“They didn’t. His usual mediator got pulled off the case, all of a sudden, for some other thing. Something important and time-sensitive, I was assured.
“Political, I’d guess—her specialization is in politics. I got her notes. Haven’t had time to look at them much. I should give them a skim with my lunch. I’m having lunch early, by the way. I’m starving but they want me back in the basement at ten o’clock sharp. I’m thinking I’ll just fry some bacon. Some bacon, some toast, some mayo, try to fit a vegetable in there somewhere.”
“I can make lunch,” she said. “You’re busy.”
“At least let me fry the bacon. Frying stabilizes me. It’s an autotherapeutic habit. Helps me maintain a healthy relationship with the routinizing-archetype aspect of the concrete plane, which my trauma tends to generalize and demonize.”
“Very funny. You’re in a mocking mood, this morning. That’s a traumatic manifestation too, remember? When you do this thing, where you act like everything’s a joke, even your clients, even your own psyche.”
“A textbook defense mechanism,” Grant said. “Shameless, coming from a professional like me.”
“You’re still doing it.”
“I’m still doing it! Defiant, recalcitrant, and uncooperative. You’ll have to move on to second-line treatments.”
She smiled. “We can try those later, when Management finally gives you a proper break from mommy’s-boy. For now, how about you fry your bacon?”
“Enough for two?”
“That sounds nice, but seriously, I can make my own breakfast. My first session’s not until noon.”
Grant made a small, shruglike gesture. Cordelia’s expert eye dissected it with ease. Functionally a yes, with a note of have it your way, then, and even a hint of I want to do something nice for you, because the way this vampire in the basement is behaving, I’m starting to doubt I can do anything for anyone.
“Have you seen Sylvie today? I’ve been in the basement literally since six. The page didn’t specify anything about getting to feed my dog.”
“I’ll check on him.”
Cordelia’s pager went off. A very loud, tinny ringtone, which she chose specifically because it was the most annoying one on offer. So she wouldn’t leave it ringing any longer than she had to.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Seriously. What the hell is going on today?”
Cordelia was already half in another world, fiddling with the device, pulling up files.
“They want me now, apparently. One of my long-term clients, some sort of rapid metastasis? Looks like this one is political.”
“Something in the air,” he offered.
“Or the water,” she said mechanically.
Her mind was elsewhere, on her vampire. She brought her face close to the tiny touchscreen, scanning graphs for novel murmurs.
Sylvie usually spent his nights in the kitchen. Not last night, though. He had not been in the kitchen when Grant brewed his first pot of coffee, just after six, and he wasn’t there now, either.
“Sylvie?” Grant called.
After checking three of the unused bedrooms, Grant proceeded to the second floor. You had to be careful on the second floor. It had so many damn hallways. You emerged from the stairwell into a sort of atrium, circular and pleasantly skylit. It opened radially onto five different halls, and each of those had its own branches and diversions.
The house had too many rooms. More rooms than Grant imagined anyone could possibly want, no matter the size of their family.
Not just useful rooms—bedrooms, bathrooms—but pointless ones too. There were weird, stub-like mini-rooms, too big to be closets, but not big enough for much else. There were things shaped like alcoves that recessed so far into the wall that eight people could stand comfortably inside—provided some of the people were much shorter than others.
There was a very long and thin oval, incomprehensibly labeled “Music Room” on the floor plan. Grant imagined you could fit a small band or chamber orchestra in there, if you made them sit single-file. As for the “Servants’ Wing,” as the floor plan called it, well, that was a whole nightmare of ill-used space unto itself. Grant and Cordelia kept their distance from it.
Grant preferred the basement, honestly. The basement was structurally surreal in just the same way as the second floor, but it was supposed to be surreal. It was the dark labyrinth where the vampires lurked.
He found Sylvie at last in Living Room Two, curled up by the north wall, next to one of the picture windows.
He bent down to stroke the brown fur. Sylvie had gotten all warm, lying in the sun like this. Nice, warm, cozy dog, at home in the sunshine: a potent anti-vampiric force.
Am I doing it again? Grant asked himself. Making light of our solemn profession, the world’s bulwark against darkness? Snickering over its terms of art? To spell out the obvious: a dog was not, literally, an “anti-vampiric force.” Vampires did not cower or melt in their presence. They could not mediate. Only humans could mediate.
No, no, I’m not doing it again, and I wasn’t then either. Frying bacon was relaxing. What was dog ownership, but the oldest of autotherapeutic habits? Grant did enjoy letting the levels of metaphor touch and mix and shift, but that didn’t mean he believed any less in their power.
Yes, he found it difficult to speak in a way others would read as full seriousness. Did that make him a nihilist? Much the opposite! To speak playfully was not to disrespect. It was a higher form of respect. It gave due honor to the first, best, and simplest toys: the mind and its words, and their kaleidoscopic powers. It renewed his faith in the sufficiency of plain life, life up here, in the real world.
The old, shabby, uncool, real world. Much-maligned, but still without parallel. He had a mind, and its words, its capacity for whimsy, and a roof over his head, a wife, a dog, a job. His loyal retinue of anti-vampiric forces. The real world offered him sustenance enough for many lifetimes over. What could Subspace ever offer him?
Maybe his latest client would benefit from a dog. It was worth a thought, Grant figured. Something that would love him unconditionally, so he’d never feel alone.
When people felt alone, truly alone—that was when space got its hooks into people. That was how denizens of the real world found themselves retreating back to Subspace’s womb. Or looking to even darker places. To the other spaces. To the unregulated underworld of Private Sub-Crashes, opium dreams for wretched Onans.
I notice that I am employing a defensive thought pattern, Grant thought automatically. This was one of many professional litanies he’d drilled into himself to the point of reflex, back in training. It unspooled in full:
I will now trace it to its root. What is the thing I am looking away from, in my mind? Name it and look at it straight in the eye.
This was not a hard question. His shame was simple, with shallow roots. Two days ago, he had left the real world for half an hour, on an illicit trip into someone else’s Private Sub-Crash.
He should not have done this. It was against his profession’s code of conduct, and what was more, it was wrong. It was wrong when anyone did it, but for a mediator to do it—that was hypocrisy, and it risked debasing the public’s trust in its protectors, if word got out. The press loved telling stories about naughty mediators, mediators with full-blown PSC habits, who’d crept into the dark and sprouted poisoned roots. They were stock characters in the conventional narrative of scandal. The corrupt official, the Shitspace hacker, the faceless broker with terrorist connections, and, yes, the bad mediator, with a basement full of exotic PSC onramps.
That was it, then, but it wasn’t much. He would not let word get around, and he would not go back. One mad tea party with the creepy little waif was enough for one lifetime, thank you very much.
He would have the last laugh. The score was Grant 1, creepy girl 0. She’d gotten nothing from him, except arguably some blackmail material, and who would believe her if she came out with it? And meanwhile, he still had one of her spiral notebooks. Not that he could make heads or tails of the contents. But he had it, and it was securely locked away in his bedroom dresser, in the bowels of this suburban fortress. Good game, you fucking psycho. Better luck next time.
It was hypnotic to stroke the warm fur. Sylvie hadn’t stirred. Was he asleep, then, and not just lazy? At this hour?
“Sylvie? You awake, boy?”
The dog’s head stirred slightly. A murmur escaped the snout.
“Caniform shade Sylvester is simulating somnolence.”
“It’s nine-forty in the morning, Sylvie. I don’t have time to walk you, but it’s a beautiful day, and you’re missing it.”
“Caniform shade Sylvester is simulating somnolence.”
He wanted his sleep, it seemed. Grant did not know what governed these choices. Sylvie did not really need to sleep. Sylvie did not really need to eat, or pee, or sniff at gross things on the ground. He did it all for Grant and Cordelia, who were not allowed to keep real animals in the consecrated house where they did their work. They had pined for a dog, and Management was ever obliging.
And in a way, what Sylvie did for them was a truer, purer kind of doglikeness, wasn’t it? He was a dog not by nature—but to please.
In a weird way, Sylvie was kind of Grant’s boss. Although he used a different shadeform, a human-shaped one, when playing his Manager Sylvester role. When they first got him, he was always dog, even in work meetings. But Grant voiced his discomfort, then, and Management obliged.
With the dog question resolved, Grant was about to head back down to the kitchen, but something gave him pause. It was something about the room. He hadn’t been in Living Room Two in . . . what, months? He actually wasn’t sure. This house had too many damn rooms. You’d keep to the rooms you knew, the ones you really lived in, and then you’d step into one of the others and it would feel wrong, unreal, only a memory.
Like a gear has come loose in time’s clockwork, Grant thought. It was an odd image, fanciful and not especially apt. He wondered why it had come to him.
They called it Living Room Two to distinguish it from “the living room,” on the first floor, the one they actually used. They gave it that name back when they first moved in, just after Management had assigned them the house. That was very early on. Part of the backstory.
There was a huge blackboard in the middle of Living Room Two. It looked out of place on the eggshell-colored carpet, surrounded by eggshell-colored walls and eggshell-colored leather chairs.
Every inch of the blackboard was covered with writing. Some of it in Grant’s squarish letters, some in Cordelia’s messier script, all of it compact and intent.
This was a relic from very early on, around the time they gave Living Room Two its name. It was Grant who insisted on this exercise with the blackboard. It was very important, according to the symbol systems he used to express the hangups of that era. Now it held only autotherapeutic interest: a window into their psyches as they were before reaching stability.
Grant stepped a little closer to the blackboard. He could make out the writing from here. He mustn’t lose track of time. He was so hungry and he hadn’t even started on the bacon. The room definitely did not feel fully real. Grant noticed himself noticing this. He noticed he had goosebumps. He noticed a variety of indistinct mental imagery continuing the same gear theme.
Grant’s eyes darted here and there across the blackboard. He read:
ADVANCED CONTAINMENT—this is another CRASH
You are crashed again. G—was crashed before in MOONCRASH. C—was crashed before in CHESTER CHRESTOMATH CRASH 09μ.
CRASH = a prison made by aliens called ANOMALINGS. They do it with the MIRZAKANI (sp?) MECHANISM. It has cold and warm parts. You are warm. The crash makes you cold
When you’re cold you can’t think. You think you’re thinking but you’re not. If you keep this in mind then maybe you can think a little but not sure
There are many others in the same crash/prison (probably?)
CRASHES have their own fake past. You remember it but it didn’t happen to you -C
Aliens may REBASE you = rewrite the past. If they don’t like what is happening
But you will remember some things afterward. If you remember one thing but another is real—that was a REBASE!!
You are Subspace mediators now = a cross btwn a psychiatrist and a police detective.
Psychiatrist, detective—older ideas
Subspace mediator—newer idea
There weren’t Subspace mediators or Subspace before. Maybe they are only in ADVANCED CONTAINMENT
C—remember the ACADEMY school where you learned MANCY (=magic). Remember the ELLS = LUCIFER and LILITH. You were there once, so you were not always here.
G—remember a HOUSE WHERE IT WAS ALWAYS NIGHT. Remember the man AZAD. He was in the house with you. He was thin and funny. You were there once, so you were not always here.
G—where is AZAD???! Remember this is priority #1 !!!
AZAD may be working with the ANOMALINGS now. He went away with an anomaling named MICHAEL and someone named ANNE. Where did he go ??? !!!!
SHADES = ANOMALINGS
PSC = Private Sub Crash = what is this?? Some kind of CRASH? Mgmt talks about them
Don’t remember -G
Don’t remember either -C
Subspace = CRASH? Many CRASHES?
Sub space, sub crash (private)—different but maybe both are CRASHES
But also there is Foldspace, Shitspace, etc.
ADVANCED CONTAINMENT CRASH = level 1, SUB CRASHES = level 2. CRASH within CRASH -C’s guess
They had nested crashes at ACADEMY too
When they live in Subspace their minds produce a waste product
CRASH—> waste product? Did they talk about this in ACADEMY
Don’t think so -C (countersigned -G)
A man HECTOR STEIN was in the ACADEMY with C. G was there too later. Where did he go
STEIN tried to stop ANOMALINGS and CRASHES. Maybe dead
Hector Stein from Stein’s Armorica—coincidence? Aliens might be playing a mind game. Or same guy. Find out about HECTOR STEIN from ACADEMY
Stein’s Armorica—before or after ACADEMY? -G
Or fake past from ADVANCED CONTAINMENT CRASH -C
C—you went to MICHAEL’S CRASH and took ANNE out. MICHAEL’S CRASH is different. Something with time ????
C—try to remember the thing about ANNE
G—there was an OLD MAN who was an ANOMALING and taught you how to be like them. He looked like a soap bubble. He taught you that ANOMALINGS don’t like saying things are the same as other things—maybe this helps??
OLD MAN did not mention sub crashes or spaces or waste product I think
G—Before that there was a GOVT FACILITY and you were in SECURITY. You were a gamer. They have video games in ADVANCED CONTAINMENT CRASH too, if you play them maybe it helps you remember
G/C—you were in the ACADEMY but you didn’t know each other. You weren’t married in the ACADEMY (?) (—can’t remember this well -G)
If CRASH can have a fake past then how do we know memories of CRASHES, ANOMALINGS etc are not also fake -C
Don’t melt your poor husband’s brain -G (w/ love)
After work they sat on the couch and watched the news.
“. . . even the possibility of a breach,” the newsanchor said.
“In my line of work, our view tends to be, you know, anything’s possible,” said her interviewee.
“We’re more about probabilities, over at Watchdog. We’re numbers guys. So our view, really, is that the name of the game is, how likely is a total breach, and how can we drive that number down. And then with partial breaches we’re more about mitigation, which is on the table when it comes to partial breaches.
“Because you’d be surprised. Everybody out there, you know, you hear about Subspace vulnerabilities and you get scared. But you’d be surprised. In my line of work, we look at the whole system. As a whole. Really top-notch engineering at a systems level. So it’s like a, well, to use a bit of a turn of phrase, Subspace is a self-healing organism. So in the event of a partial breach, the unlikely event, mind you, but it does happen, you don’t always hear about it—”
“Thank you, Mr. Hexler.” The newsanchor wore an expression of controlled fear, trying to play the audience surrogate and yet reassure, at the same time.
“Thank you, and again, we’re here with David Hexler from Watchdog Live Monitoring Services, one of the top space security firms. We’ve been discussing the fight against trolls, where Watchdog is playing a key, front line role. But now David, for our viewers, I do want to touch on the topic of what you’re calling a total breach.”
“On that note, well, as I said, our view tends to be about the numbers and keeping our eye on driving that ball down. And it’s equally about what are the attack vectors, what information has been made public that a troll could use.
“See, over at Watchdog we have a clear line-of-sight across the whole system, so we have to almost, in a way, sort of step inside the mind of the troll a little bit, to get in touch with what has been made public that they could use, which is a lot less than we know here at Watchdog. And so what are the ways they could add up what they know to get line-of-sight. And trying to patch up the system in those places, depending, you know, on the probability of the attack vector, and also the cost side.”
“And in your opinion, Mr. Hexler,” the newsanchor asked in a voice of trembling audience-surrogate courage, “is there anything to the claims in the latest video? Could they have found a new way to cause a total breach, Mr. Hexler?”
“Well, I should say first of all, that at Watchdog we don’t put much stock in that type of, you know, that type of content. You’d be surprised but actually I haven’t watched the video, myself. Actually I heard about it from my daughter, she watched it, so I do have some visibility into the video, in that way.
“But the key point is, over at Watchdog, we give zero credence to the claims of Shitspace terrorists. Zero. Flat out. Nada. It’s a show for the public that they do. We’ve seen, and we have a lot of history and metrics bearing this out, we’ve seen that the kinds of capabilities these trolls claim, lined up with, you know, the attack vectors we see them use, well, lined up they would have what we’d call a zero correlation, between the two. So we just focus on playing our ball game and not their mind game, if I may use a turn of phrase there.”
“That’s very helpful to know. Thank you again, Mr. Hexler. Now, to give some context to our viewers who may just be tuning in, I’d like to show you a segment of the video that was released by a Shitspace-associated group two days ago.”
“Oh can we please just turn this off,” Cordelia said.
Grant nodded.
“It’s just, it pisses me off.”
“They’ve been playing that video nonstop for two days,” said Grant. “Like anyone hasn’t seen it. I don’t believe that guy didn’t watch it. Like, come on.”
“It’s not even the video,” said Cordelia.
“I can stand the video. It makes me sick, yeah, sure. The way they invoke Stein, ‘we’re finishing Stein’s work.’ When they have no idea what Stein stood for. We marched with Stein. We got things done. We got reforms passed. We knew how to play the media. And then when these kids make their little videos with stupid jump scares, and all of this ‘oooh, Shitspace is coming for you, you’re not safe,’ horror movie kind of shit, with no goals, and their agenda is just a vague threat of terrorism, pulling everyone out of Subspace at once, and then what? to what end? There’s no vision, they’re not—”
“But it’s not about the video,” said Grant.
“It’s not about the video. I could watch the video twenty times in a row. It’s real. It’s the face of the enemy. That’s vampirism, right there, a form of vampirism purified, and it makes me want to understand. I want to study it and learn how they think and what is going on in their psyches. I want to help them.
“It’s not the video. It’s the way they give this stuff airtime. And keep talking about, oh no, what if there’s a breach, they do that every time, and they bring on some idiot to babble about the Subspace ‘system,’ like it’s some building they’re going to dynamite. They ignore the psychic aspect of things. Like Subspace is any stronger than the clients in it, and their psyches.”
“I don’t like the way they talk about Shitspace,” said Grant. “Like it’s some kind of organization. Like it’s not just a bunch of kids, and a space toying with their psyches.”
“I don’t know, Grant. I think Shitspace is mostly passive. I think they do it to themselves, mostly.”
“They do it to themselves,” Grant countered, “in a shared space under Management’s control, at least theoretically. Built on Management’s own infrastructure.”
“Management . . . I don’t know why they do it the way they do. They have a strong influence over the news. I’m sure of it. So they could just stop all this coverage, if they wanted to. But they don’t.”
They stared at a blank TV screen for a time.
“Sometimes I think Management is running the whole show,” Cordelia said in an empty voice.
“They keep Shitspace alive for their own purposes. They nurture the trolls. They get a new terrorist threat ready when they decide the news narrative could use a terrorist threat.”
“You’re sounding like a conspiracy theorist again, honey.”
“I know. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m being too paranoid or not paranoid enough. But I guess it’s the news making me paranoid to begin with.”
Cordelia seemed off this evening, Grant thought.
“But then, if the news makes people paranoid, and being paranoid makes them produce—and you can put people in Subspace to slow their turning, but then they’ll be in Subspace, producing, more work for us—when Management could just make the news stop . . . it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t add up, there has to be . . .”
“Your husband has a simple brain,” Grant said.
They were in bed. It was an over-large bed in an over-large bedroom in a house with too much space.
They were big people. Work out, eat, repeat. The regimen you learned in mediator training had a physical part. Exercise and food centered the psyche, and they also built the physique which best set vampires at ease. Big, solid, fat and muscle together. A protecting form, an archetype of mother or father or both at once, whichever the client needs.
They were big people, but the bed still swallowed them. It was the biggest bed either of them had ever seen.
“Did I tell you I found Sylvie in Living Room Two?”
“Uh-huh.”
Grant noticed himself not mentioning the blackboard. Although he didn’t know what he would say about it, if he had said anything.
“I would tell you about my new political client but they’re not letting me,” Cordelia said, for the second time.
Eerie scratching noises issued from the basement. It happened at the end of every workday. The vampires had to go back into Subspace, and the transition was often hard for them in the moment. They made pain noises.
Grant didn’t even hear the noises anymore, unless he consciously tried. Cordelia said they helped her sleep at night, like crickets.
“Are we seeing the Ells this weekend?” Grant asked.
“I assume so. I’ll double-check.”
Grant noticed himself making a conscious decision to broach a specific topic.
“I should have told you. I ran into Moon, the other day. I should have told you but I’ve just been so busy.”
“You ran into Moon? What, were you just hanging around that creepy garage, looking suspicious?”
“It was in the grocery store,” Grant said, truthfully.
“Somehow I always imagined that girl, I don’t know, growing her own food, or scrounging it out of dumpsters.”
“Well, I didn’t see a kitchen when I snuck into her garage, anyway,” Grant said. “Just a whole lot of paper, everywhere. That, and her graffiti tag. It’s on the inside too. All over the walls in there. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to hide, nowhere to hide. You’d think we would have gotten the message already.”
“In the supermarket, did she mention the lost notebook? Was she suspicious of you?”
“No,” Grant lied.
“There’s something about that girl that bothers me. Like I recognize her from somewhere. But then too, how Management sees her. She’s like a blank in their system. When we saw her in the yard, peering in through the window, that one night, and then I talked to Sylvie, Manager Sylvester I mean, and he just clammed up. You know that way they just go blank.”
“They leave it to us. We have to take the matter into our own hands,” Grant said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like how it makes me feel, sneaking into someone’s place, on high alert, wishing I had eyes on the back of my head.”
That was another lie.
Grant noticed his mind’s eye whirl with turning gears, red sky, Moon, no moon but red. Hypnagogia, he figured. He was on the verge of sleep.
“I recognize her from somewhere, too,” he thought he noticed himself saying. Was this true? Was that why he said it?
He remembered standing in the canned goods aisle, two days ago. He must have been a foot taller than her. Which did not make him any less terrified. Those wide, too-wide eyes peering up at him. Her mocking, sing-song stage whisper.
“We could have an understanding, you and I. Let us try it and see how it fits. It will be much easier than the other way. I could turn you in, a common criminal—or I could invite you to tea. Your choice, of course.”
She took him back into her garage and plugged in the PSC onramp. They fell into another world. They drank from ornate teacups in an upholstered fantasia of half-formed matter. Everything was made of lace, even the teacups, and was generally four or five colors, sometimes more.
It felt good in there.
He mostly sat slack-jawed but she talked a lot. She seemed sort of drunk. She did have a lot of the tea, but then it was a PSC, the tea might be anything or it might do nothing at all. She was complaining about some guy, the whole time. Like a bad boyfriend or something. Grant felt taken into her confidence. It was nice.
She told him she quite liked the two of us as friends, and that she hereby declared him welcome at her door, unconditionally, and that if he would like to have tea again sometime, he knew where to knock.
“We probably need to clean Living Room Two, at this point, huh?” Cordelia said.
“It could use the vacuum,” Grant said, and began to snore.