Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from Kurt’s storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic reflections on the dance floor.“Hello, neighbor,” he said as Alan came up the walkway. “Good evening?”Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on his neck so that he was standing tall. “I understand what he gets out ofyou,” Alan said. “I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn’t use a little servant and errand boy?“But what I don’t understand, what I can’t understand, what I’d like to understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?”Krishna shrugged elaborately. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”“We had gold, in the old days. Is that what’s bought you? Maybe you should ask me for a counteroffer. I’m not poor.”“I’d never take a penny thatyouoffered—voluntarily.” Krishna lit a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn’t it?“You think I’m a monster,” Alan said.Krishna nodded. “Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still.”Alan nodded. “Probably,” he said. “Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not a person. Not a real person. But if I’m bad, he’s a thousand times worse, you know. He’s a scary monster.”Krishna dragged at his cigarette.“You know a lot of monsters, don’t you?” Alan said. He jerked his head toward the house. “You share a bed with one.”Krishna narrowed his eyes. “She’s not scary, either.”“You cut off her wings, but it doesn’t make her any less monstrous.“One thing I can tell you, you’re pretty special: Most real people never see us. You saw me right off. It’s likeDracula, where most of the humans couldn’t tell that there was a vampire in their midst.”“Van Helsing could tell,” Krishna said. “He hunted Dracula. You can’t hunt what you can’t see,” he said. “So your kind has been getting a safe free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing among us. Passing for us.”“Van Helsing got killed,” Alan said. “Didn’t he? And besides that, there was someone else who could see the vampires: Renfield. The pathetic pet and errand boy. Remember Renfield in his cage in the asylum, eating flies? Trying to be a monster? Von Helsing recognized the monster, but so did Renfield.”“I’m no one’s Renfield,” Krishna said, and spat onto Alan’s lawn. First fire, then water. He was leaving his mark on Alan’s land, that was certain.“You’re no Van Helsing, either,” Alan said. “What’s the difference between you and a racist, Krishna? You call me a monster, why shouldn’t I call you a paki?”He stiffened at the slur, and so did Alan. He’d never used the word before, but it had sprung readily from his lips, as though it had lurked there all along, waiting to be uttered.“Racists say that there’s such a thing as ‘races’ within the human race, that blacks and whites and Chinese and Indians are all members of different ‘races,’” Krishna said. “Which is bullshit. On the other hand, you—”He broke off, left the thought to hang. He didn’t need to finish it. Alan’s hand went to his smooth belly, the spot where real people had navels, old scarred remnants of their connections to real, human mothers.“So you hate monsters, Krishna, all except for the ones you sleep with and the ones you work for?”“I don’t work for anyone,” he said. “Except me.”Alan said, “I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would you like one?”Krishna grinned hard and mirthless. “Sure, neighbor, that sounds lovely.”Alan went inside and took out two glasses, got a bottle of something cheap and serviceable from Niagara wine country out of the fridge, worked the corkscrew, all on automatic. His hands shook a little, so he held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef’s knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.It was approximately the same size as the one he’d used on Davey, a knife that he’d held again and again, reached for in the night and carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint, taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger—a soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit—knew exactly what he was carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he’d forgotten about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the friendship.He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out of his fingers andsnapit back to the wall, picked up the wine glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.“You spit in mine?” Krishna said.Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the soft-spoken man’s hand when he’d handed over the sack of money. The touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of his desperation.“I don’t normally drink before noon,” Adam said.“I don’t much care when I drink,” Krishna said, and took a slug.“Sounds like a dangerous philosophy for a bartender,” Adam said.“Why? Plenty of drunk bartenders. It’s not a hard job.” Krishna spat. “Big club, all you’re doing is uncapping beers and mixing shooters all night. I could do it in my sleep.”“You should quit,” Alan said. “You should get a better job. No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.”Krishna put a hand out on Alan’s chest, the warmth of his fingertips radiating through Alan’s windbreaker. “Don’t try to arrange me on your chessboard, monster. Maybe you can move Natalie around, and maybe you can move around a bunch of Kensington no-hopers, and maybe you can budge my idiot girlfriend a couple of squares, but I’m not on the board. I got my job, and if I leave it, it’ll be for me.”Alan retreated to his porch and sipped his own wine. His mouth tasted like it was full of blood still, a taste that was woken up by the wine. He set the glass down.“I’m not playing chess with you,” he said. “I don’t play games. I try to help—Idohelp.”Krishna swigged the glass empty. “You wanna know what makes you a monster, Alvin? That attitude right there. You don’t understand a single fucking thing about real people, but you spend all your time rearranging them on your board, and you tell them and you tell yourself that you’re helping.“You know how you could help, man? You could crawl back under your rock and leave the people’s world for people.”Something snapped in Alan. “Canada for Canadians, right? Send ’em back where they came from, right?” He stalked to the railing that divided their porches. The taste of blood stung his mouth.Krishna met him, moving swiftly to the railing as well, hood thrown back, eyes hard and glittering and stoned.“You think you can make me feel like a racist, make meguilty?” His voice squeaked on the last syllable. “Man, the only day I wouldn’t piss on you is if you were on fire, you fucking freak.”Some part of Alan knew that this person was laughable, a Renfield eating bugs. But that voice of reason was too quiet to be heard over the animal screech that was trying to work its way free of his throat.He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids. Krishna raised a hand as if to slap him, smirked when he flinched back.Then he grabbed Krishna’s wrist and pulled hard, yanking the boy off his feet, slamming his chest into the railing hard enough to shower dried spider’s nests and flakes of paint to the porch floor.“I’m every bit the monster my brother is,” he hissed in Krishna’s ear. “Imadehim the monster he is.Don’t squirm,” he said, punching Krishna hard in the ear with his free hand. “Listen. You can stay away from me and you can stay away from my family, or you can enter a world of terrible hurt. It’s up to you. Nod if you understand.”Krishna was still, except for a tremble. The moment stretched, and Alan broke it by cracking him across the ear again.“Nod if you understand, goddammit,” he said, his vision going fuzzily black at the edges. Krishna was silent, still, coiled. Any minute now, he would struggle free and they’d be in a clinch.He remembered kneeling on Davey’s chest, holding the rock over him and realizing that he didn’t know what to do next, taking Davey to their father.Only Davey had struck him first. He’d only been restraining him, defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. “Nod if you understand, Krishna,” he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the Market.He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second, Alan harbored a germ of hope that he’d bested Krishna and so scared him into leaving him alone.Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he’d just amassed, what it would take to pay it off.He picked up Alan’s wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn’t one of the cheapies he’d bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather Irish crystal that he’d found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps, like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound, leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that it hurtled straight for Alan’s forehead, moving like a bullet.Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him, disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back into his house.The taste of blood was in Alan’s mouth. More blood coursed down his neck from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of crystal.He went inside to get a broom, but before he could clean up, he sat down for a moment on the sofa to catch his breath. He fell instantly asleep on the creaking horsehide, and when he woke again, it was dark and raining and someone else had cleaned up his porch.
Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from Kurt’s storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic reflections on the dance floor.
“Hello, neighbor,” he said as Alan came up the walkway. “Good evening?”
Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on his neck so that he was standing tall. “I understand what he gets out ofyou,” Alan said. “I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn’t use a little servant and errand boy?
“But what I don’t understand, what I can’t understand, what I’d like to understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?”
Krishna shrugged elaborately. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“We had gold, in the old days. Is that what’s bought you? Maybe you should ask me for a counteroffer. I’m not poor.”
“I’d never take a penny thatyouoffered—voluntarily.” Krishna lit a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn’t it?
“You think I’m a monster,” Alan said.
Krishna nodded. “Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still.”
Alan nodded. “Probably,” he said. “Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not a person. Not a real person. But if I’m bad, he’s a thousand times worse, you know. He’s a scary monster.”
Krishna dragged at his cigarette.
“You know a lot of monsters, don’t you?” Alan said. He jerked his head toward the house. “You share a bed with one.”
Krishna narrowed his eyes. “She’s not scary, either.”
“You cut off her wings, but it doesn’t make her any less monstrous.
“One thing I can tell you, you’re pretty special: Most real people never see us. You saw me right off. It’s likeDracula, where most of the humans couldn’t tell that there was a vampire in their midst.”
“Van Helsing could tell,” Krishna said. “He hunted Dracula. You can’t hunt what you can’t see,” he said. “So your kind has been getting a safe free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing among us. Passing for us.”
“Van Helsing got killed,” Alan said. “Didn’t he? And besides that, there was someone else who could see the vampires: Renfield. The pathetic pet and errand boy. Remember Renfield in his cage in the asylum, eating flies? Trying to be a monster? Von Helsing recognized the monster, but so did Renfield.”
“I’m no one’s Renfield,” Krishna said, and spat onto Alan’s lawn. First fire, then water. He was leaving his mark on Alan’s land, that was certain.
“You’re no Van Helsing, either,” Alan said. “What’s the difference between you and a racist, Krishna? You call me a monster, why shouldn’t I call you a paki?”
He stiffened at the slur, and so did Alan. He’d never used the word before, but it had sprung readily from his lips, as though it had lurked there all along, waiting to be uttered.
“Racists say that there’s such a thing as ‘races’ within the human race, that blacks and whites and Chinese and Indians are all members of different ‘races,’” Krishna said. “Which is bullshit. On the other hand, you—”
He broke off, left the thought to hang. He didn’t need to finish it. Alan’s hand went to his smooth belly, the spot where real people had navels, old scarred remnants of their connections to real, human mothers.
“So you hate monsters, Krishna, all except for the ones you sleep with and the ones you work for?”
“I don’t work for anyone,” he said. “Except me.”
Alan said, “I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would you like one?”
Krishna grinned hard and mirthless. “Sure, neighbor, that sounds lovely.”
Alan went inside and took out two glasses, got a bottle of something cheap and serviceable from Niagara wine country out of the fridge, worked the corkscrew, all on automatic. His hands shook a little, so he held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef’s knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.
It was approximately the same size as the one he’d used on Davey, a knife that he’d held again and again, reached for in the night and carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint, taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger—a soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit—knew exactly what he was carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.
The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he’d forgotten about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the friendship.
He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out of his fingers andsnapit back to the wall, picked up the wine glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.
“You spit in mine?” Krishna said.
Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the soft-spoken man’s hand when he’d handed over the sack of money. The touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of his desperation.
“I don’t normally drink before noon,” Adam said.
“I don’t much care when I drink,” Krishna said, and took a slug.
“Sounds like a dangerous philosophy for a bartender,” Adam said.
“Why? Plenty of drunk bartenders. It’s not a hard job.” Krishna spat. “Big club, all you’re doing is uncapping beers and mixing shooters all night. I could do it in my sleep.”
“You should quit,” Alan said. “You should get a better job. No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.”
Krishna put a hand out on Alan’s chest, the warmth of his fingertips radiating through Alan’s windbreaker. “Don’t try to arrange me on your chessboard, monster. Maybe you can move Natalie around, and maybe you can move around a bunch of Kensington no-hopers, and maybe you can budge my idiot girlfriend a couple of squares, but I’m not on the board. I got my job, and if I leave it, it’ll be for me.”
Alan retreated to his porch and sipped his own wine. His mouth tasted like it was full of blood still, a taste that was woken up by the wine. He set the glass down.
“I’m not playing chess with you,” he said. “I don’t play games. I try to help—Idohelp.”
Krishna swigged the glass empty. “You wanna know what makes you a monster, Alvin? That attitude right there. You don’t understand a single fucking thing about real people, but you spend all your time rearranging them on your board, and you tell them and you tell yourself that you’re helping.
“You know how you could help, man? You could crawl back under your rock and leave the people’s world for people.”
Something snapped in Alan. “Canada for Canadians, right? Send ’em back where they came from, right?” He stalked to the railing that divided their porches. The taste of blood stung his mouth.
Krishna met him, moving swiftly to the railing as well, hood thrown back, eyes hard and glittering and stoned.
“You think you can make me feel like a racist, make meguilty?” His voice squeaked on the last syllable. “Man, the only day I wouldn’t piss on you is if you were on fire, you fucking freak.”
Some part of Alan knew that this person was laughable, a Renfield eating bugs. But that voice of reason was too quiet to be heard over the animal screech that was trying to work its way free of his throat.
He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids. Krishna raised a hand as if to slap him, smirked when he flinched back.
Then he grabbed Krishna’s wrist and pulled hard, yanking the boy off his feet, slamming his chest into the railing hard enough to shower dried spider’s nests and flakes of paint to the porch floor.
“I’m every bit the monster my brother is,” he hissed in Krishna’s ear. “Imadehim the monster he is.Don’t squirm,” he said, punching Krishna hard in the ear with his free hand. “Listen. You can stay away from me and you can stay away from my family, or you can enter a world of terrible hurt. It’s up to you. Nod if you understand.”
Krishna was still, except for a tremble. The moment stretched, and Alan broke it by cracking him across the ear again.
“Nod if you understand, goddammit,” he said, his vision going fuzzily black at the edges. Krishna was silent, still, coiled. Any minute now, he would struggle free and they’d be in a clinch.
He remembered kneeling on Davey’s chest, holding the rock over him and realizing that he didn’t know what to do next, taking Davey to their father.
Only Davey had struck him first. He’d only been restraining him, defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. “Nod if you understand, Krishna,” he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.
Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the Market.
He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second, Alan harbored a germ of hope that he’d bested Krishna and so scared him into leaving him alone.
Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he’d just amassed, what it would take to pay it off.
He picked up Alan’s wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn’t one of the cheapies he’d bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather Irish crystal that he’d found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.
Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.
He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps, like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound, leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that it hurtled straight for Alan’s forehead, moving like a bullet.
Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him, disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back into his house.
The taste of blood was in Alan’s mouth. More blood coursed down his neck from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of crystal.
He went inside to get a broom, but before he could clean up, he sat down for a moment on the sofa to catch his breath. He fell instantly asleep on the creaking horsehide, and when he woke again, it was dark and raining and someone else had cleaned up his porch.