Vampire Girl: Chapters 38-42
Read Chapters 33-37 of Vampire Girl here to get caught up on your identity politics with Mayra, a female vampire protagonist!
Chapter 38
Batgirl
“That bitch!” “I know; the President is the worst of all time.” “I mean Lestatia. She has stolen our prospective homeland right out from under us. She did it out of spite. Why does she need the entire Southwestern United States? Won’t her mattress-slash-trampoline fit in one state?” “That sounds a lot like slut-shaming.” “What’s your point?” “Mayra, have you noticed that during this entire novel, Lestatia has only spoken once, briefly to Tobias, and to you not at all.” “Her choice. It’s because she hates me.” “No, it’s because you wrote her that way. You’ve given her no voice, no traits except breasts, legs and blonde hair and no complexity. You’ve created a bete noire, not a character.” “She wants Tobias. She’s the enemy.” “You say that, but I also notice that Tobias kind of goes in and out of the story, in spite of you supposedly desiring him so much. One second you are consummating infinite desire, the next you cast him off. It’s your same old pattern from before you became undead. He came back to you, he made a hard choice, but where is he now?” “I can’t help it. My agenda is packed. When I’m not dancing, I’m killing and when I’m not killing, I’m dancing.” “Maybe that’s a matter of self control. I haven’t killed one single person since I met you and I feel fine.” “You said it was because you were only a carrier.” “That was to make myself perk up, because I was in a trough and feeling ugly. I’ve sunk my fangs into my share of men.” “Then?” “I’m waiting for that one right guy whose flesh I can tear and eternal bliss will follow. I’m saving myself. I’m not criticizing you, nor am I calling you a promiscuous, slutty, superficial, literally man-eating whore. I only suggest that you self-examine.” “Like checking my breasts for lumps?” “Yes, something akin to that, but emotionally speaking. I think you didn’t feel special earlier in life, in a certain way you disgusted yourself, and becoming a beautiful, wasp-waited vampire and beauty queen in a perpetually sold-out Vegas show, far from freeing you, has done nothing to raise your self-esteem. If anything, it has let you indulge in literal blood orgies, pick any man you want and destroy him, with the result that you despise yourself even more. It’s as if you became suddenly the most popular girl in high school, the prom queen, and now you’re running around trying to date all the guys who wouldn’t look at you before. You have to calm down and figure out what you really want.” “My god. You just told me what it would have taken decades to figure out in therapy.” “You’re welcome. Guess what, you’re a millionaire, both from show earnings and from your trust fund. You can do anything you want.” “I want to stop dancing. I have stress fractures in my foot bones.” “So let’s do that. We have plenty of money saved up. Our renewable contract is up in a week. Let’s blow Las Vegas.” “But what about your dream of a homeland? I had a feeling that you wanted to become an iron-fisted dictator, to get all the Creatures of the Night together, incorporate, and turn them into your psychological slaves, sending them out at night like bats emerging from the mouth of a cave to scour the riverbanks for insects and berries before returning home laden with symbolic and monetary treasures from other states, thereby increasing your power gradually until you were in fact Dictator of the World.” “Guilty as charged. But there has to be a middle ground. Maybe instead of fighting this situation, you ought to go talk to Lestatia and see whether she’s amenable to sharing a homeland with us. There is lots of room for everyone to homestead without getting in each other’s way. It would be laissez faire. Maybe that’s what she has in mind.” “Are you crazy? She’d laugh me out of the room.” "You don’t know that. We don’t have to be the top dogs. The homeland could be more like a kibbutz, the way you said to your parents when you told them that white lie in order to get the million dollars of your trust fund without arousing their suspicions.” “Look me in the eye, Trampire. Do you believe in utopia?” The Trampire met Mayra’s gaze. “I’d like to.” Mayra sighed. “I’ll ask for a meeting with her. Isn’t she going to be surprised that man-stealing Mayra wants a parley.” Did you know that vampire bats, which generally do not exist north of Northern Mexico, or at least they didn’t used to before this novel got underway, feed by settling on a large mammal, making an incision in its back, and slowly sucking the blood out of it? They have to remain in place feeding for a long time, because blood is diluted and so it takes a lot of it to provide adequate nutrition, even for so small an animal as a bat.
In Mayra’s metaphor of minions doing the Trampire’s bidding, she figures bats as benign creatures that control pests and eat fruit. But that’s only 800 varieties of bat. She has nothing to say about the gruesome side: the vampire bat. Perhaps that is because she herself has begun to turn into a bat at night, and returns to a stone coffin to sleep. Well not really, she’s never done that, but it’s not as sexy to imagine her slicing open a cow’s back, it is way hotter to imagine her burying her face into a hot guy’s neck like Batgirl does and having her way with him and generally people do not want to read a lengthy novel about echo-locating rodent-like chiropterae, unless you have a weird, unattractive fetish.
Pretend that Mayra is Batgirl, and write an adventure for her that ends up with her having smoking hot sex with Batman or another superhero of your choice. Try to give Mayra a happy ending.
Chapter 39
Twin Peaks
She met Lestatia for high tea at the rival’s home. Mayra had expected a gothic castle with chandeliers, secret doors, and a long oak trestle table with a crazed butler skulking nearby. Instead, she was confronted with a sleek, high-floor apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows channeling sun and an expansive view of the Pacific Ocean. It was spacious, though not excessive, for as Lestatia pointed out, real estate was absurdly pricey in Malibu. The apartment had been decorated with minimalist Scandinavian furniture, in warm tones of wood. Someone had arranged it tastefully, yet not as if it had all come from the same catalogue. The cucumber sandwiches, fig tea cakes and little pots of lemon curd and blackberry jam made Mayra anxious. Her waistline was as trim as Lestatia’s at the moment, from months of non-stop jazz and tap, but she still felt fat inside, as though one bite of cake would inflate her like an emergency vest in a plane after the rip cord gets pulled. She accepted herbal tea, the least likely to make her puke. Lestatia, on the other hand, comfortable in her hard-body, dressed in a becoming white sheath dress and discreet low-heeled Manolo Blahnik sandals that easily cost one thousand dollars, popped a mini-cake in her mouth, then another, and served herself a glass of white wine after Mayra demurred. More than ever, Lestatia looked like Scarlett Johanssen, only much taller. “I hope your flight was smooth. It’s been a while since you were back in L.A., I guess.” “Good enough.” “I won’t be coy. I am sure that you’re furious that my investment group cut the legs from under you with our bid.” “I’m not happy about it.” “I’m not going to waste time persuading you of what you already know. The President was never going to sell you that land, even though he got you and the Trampire hot and bothered. He’s mercurial, to say the least. And once word got out—because he Tweeted it—that he wanted to sell approximately one-fifth of the country to a single entity, everybody was lining up to bid, and we had to beat them to the punch. Somebody was going to snap it up, probably Holland, so they don’t keep having to build fields by throwing bags of fertilizer into the sea. Now we have to close the deal before he gets another wild hair. If we hadn’t lured Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson into our group, I wouldn’t even have bothered trying, but he’s a notorious closer.”
“Congratulations, I guess.” “That’s premature. This transaction will doubtless end up in the Supreme Court. And we do still have a fairly independent judiciary, in part because they all hate his smirking guts. So, the court may proclaim that all that land was never his to sell. And don’t underestimate the Navajos. They are powerful. Not to mention that this sale could have a startling effect on the Federal Funds Rate, therefore indirectly on the prime rate while it decreases housing inventory by an astronomical ratio—that is, assuming we don’t turn around and sell our massive real estate portfolio overnight, flooding the market with ill-gotten properties of questionable value and exploding the bubble while we walk away even richer than before, yet also keeping the choicest properties for when the market recovers, as eventually it always does, rather than short-selling.” “I don’t follow anything you’re saying. How do understand all of this so easily?” “I did my bachelor’s degree in Political Science at Georgetown. I wanted to be a U.S. Senator—can you imagine? Then a friend of my uncle offered me a modeling contract out of the blue with Eileen Ford. I got my head turned by Elite Models and lost my way. It’s taken me a long time to truly understand the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 'We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.'” “Your eloquence and erudition, Lestatia—they are astounding.” “That’s nothing. I should know even more after having done my Doctor of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary.” Mayra decided she wanted to commit suicide. Shifting her attention to the floor-to-ceiling windows behind where Lestatia sat in an effortless yoga position, Mayra wondered whether she could pick up enough speed in a few yards to crash through the thick plate glass and make it splinter into deadly fragments that would pierce her jugular or decapitate her so that she would die instantly and avoid needless suffering. She couldn’t even be mad. A sense of astounded wonder came over her, as if she’d been living in a tiny broom closet inside a cathedral for many years and suddenly decided to open the door. “Why did you study divinity? Were you Christian?” Lestatia allowed herself a small smile. “No, of course not. I come from a long line of vampires, our tribe originally from Switzerland, then Icelandic, then Vermont blue-bloods. But I studied divinity because I wanted to understand the mind of the enemy.” “So you consider the Christians our enemies?” “Not really. They just have a way of setting up against us.” “No chance of you letting us in on the deal? As co-partners?” “Look, Mayra. I am a pragmatic person. At first I was incensed about how you got the vote at the beauty pageant. But taking a step back, I came to see that no one could possibly manufacture such an endearingly perfect storm of badness. I called to mind the words of the Dalai Lama, ‘Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.’ As for Tobias, of course I was devastated that he went back to you. Then I realized that he often has questionable taste in women. Sometimes he likes the pudgy ones, although I notice you’re not pudgy anymore.” “Thanks?” “I do still resent you somewhat. I put my heart and soul into that performance.” “If you’re so refined and everything, why did you do the star-spangled Betsy Ross number? I was bad, but you were—cheesy.” “I agree. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed. I can’t even watch it on YouTube, where it reportedly has over six million views. In part, it was to give the people what they want. I didn’t study political science for nothing. The other part is, I did it for Tobias.” “You mean—you loved him? When you don’t even possess a biological heart?” “I did love him, or I thought I did, until he broke my missing heart by returning to you. We were in an LTR. Dressing up as a soft-core Betsy Ross didn’t bother me. I’m sure we’ve all at one time or another been standing on a tiny round table top in a Georgetown watering hole after midnight, after too many Vodka Tonics, surrounded by junior Senators, congressional pages, international war correspondents and handsome Saudi Princes, all yelling for you to take it off. You lose your head. It feels good to be wanted.” Now she had touched Mayra’s heart. Mayra had in fact done something similar five or six times when she waitressed at Twin Peaks during her last year in college, with the men getting off their shift at Verizon as onlookers. “I’m sorry you lost at love, Lestatia. I wish I had left you two alone.” “He’s yours now. The heart has reasons that reason doesn’t know.” “I suppose you too want to start a Vampire Homeland and rule the world.” “Not exactly. A government, yes, but a rational one. I am a technocrat, not an ideologue. Dislocating some 30 million people and turning them essentially into refugees, leaving all that inevitable movement aside, I do believe in fair and just rule.” She held out her hand. “And I want you to be part of it.” “Me?” “Yes, you and that Quack of yours.” “Cuac.” “Yes, the Mayan duck.” “Quetzal.” “Whatever. You could serve as governess of one of the regions.” “Isn’t a governess a live-in woman who takes care of someone else’s children in 19th century England?” “Pardon, I meant governor.”
“This is all so unexpected. Why me?” “Part of it is that you would be working under me, subject to my power. That feels good, after what you put me through. But you’ll find me to be a benevolent monarch—that is, partner. You have a good head on your shoulders and it was you who stuck to your principles and hunkered down at the VCC doing human resources work, until you felt the threat of me—and I take that as a compliment.” “That you got me to betray my most deeply held beliefs in exchange for a sparkly bikini?” “Yes.” “What about the Trampire? Where will she fit?” “She is my true rival. The Fisher King.” “Ouch. I get that reference—wounded groin, can’t procreate.” “I meant it rather as a back-handed compliment, e.g., that she appears to be at my level due to some hidden power, but I would best her if it ever came to a fight. There’s no question that our relationship would be prickly, but I’m open to suggestions.” “The Trampire is the one who suggested we come to terms with you. I’m going to have to think about your offer. This session has been eye-opening.” “I agree that our first real encounter has been most illuminating. I underestimated you once. I won’t do so again. Nor should you underestimate me. Except for both of us speaking six or more languages, I am no Brigitte Nielson, starting out as Red Sonja and ending up in Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. ” She took Mayra’s hand in a gesture of farewell. Lestatia’s touch felt like the kiss of a butterfly wing.
How is this novel going so far? Digital Humanities has developed powerful tools and algorithms to count word frequencies and other recursive elements of stories (e.g., “promiscuous”) and may hold the key to understanding and evaluating literature. You are invited to create a Survey Monkey questionnaire so that your friends who have read Vampire Girl, and you, can come to consensus about this novel’s features of success and/or failure. Go to the free account site at:
The good thing about this approach is that everything can be reduced to a number between 1 and 5. Be sure not to ask open-ended questions, or use words with which the reader might not be familiar.
Chapter 40
Hot Pads
Unfortunately, there was little time for the parties to come together. The antifascists had gotten wind of the pending transaction and pre-emptively fire-bombed dozens of cities throughout the Southwest, including Truth or Consequences and Bisbee. Though it could not be proven, they also appeared to have bought a small nuclear tactical bomb from North Korea, whose leader was busy trying to crush dissent in his own country. The antifascists set them off in a remote area of the Malpais; nonetheless, radiation bathed a large, still indeterminate area, making it uninhabitable and many more cities outside the “red zone” had reason to be worried. So the deal was off. Much of that part of the Southwest was evacuated under military orders. It resembled a no-man’s land, supposedly uninhabitable even by vampires. It was said they were vulnerable to radioactivity—the way the aliens in The War of the Worlds could be done in by the humble common cold. Needless to say, all this bad news put Mayra in a funk. She and the Trampire had to evacuate Las Vegas, as a precautionary measure, where no show except Blue Man Group was allowed to continue. She now sat on a folding chair in Echo Park, outside her new apartment, which was an overpriced piece of crap, all she could get on short notice on Hot Pads. She was trying to read a YA novel about a queer Latina teen, a girl who identifies as fat and Christian, and a teenage girl with autism. However, she could not get past their symptoms to their humanity and kept reading the same page over and over. The only piece of outdoor furniture was a dry-rotted couch, on which the Trampire lay with her eyes closed.
“Couldn’t you have at least gotten us something nicer, Mayra? Did you forget that we’re millionaires? We could have gone almost anywhere in the country—Miami Beach, for instance, or Charleston or Chicago or even Boulder.” “I’m sorry. I fell back on old habits. I freak out and think I’m still working in Human Resources in Culver City.” The Trampire sat up and rubbed her face, as dead leaves rustled aimlessly along the brickwork. “Two things: first, I met a guy at Olive Garden last night. I thought there might be something between us. A spark flew.” “Oh my God, I’m so happy for you!” Mayra lunged onto the couch to give her friend a hug and listened to the frame groan. “Awesome! So there was chemistry.” “No, I mean literally a spark flew, from an electrical short, it caused a kitchen fire, the rescue people came, first the firemen, then there was a really cute emergency tech. I was okay, but I ran back inside and inhaled smoke so he’d have to carry me out and we struck up a conversation that ended in a kiss.” “Okay, so that settles it. Forget Charleston. We’re staying right here. I’ve always wanted love for you. I have literally wished upon many stars that you would find the right person without going on a dating app.” “Second, that budding relationship is going on hold, because you and I have a trip to take.” “But you just said—“ “Vampires not being immune to radiation is suspect information. Have you ever heard or read that anywhere?” “No, but there is lots of lore I believed in that turned out to be false. Besides, the nuclear thing doesn’t come up too often.” “My women’s intuition tells me someone is trying to keep us out. And that is exactly why I’m going in.” “Going in?” “To the heart of the nuclear blast. I’m talking about District 9. And you, my little Adele-worshiper, are going with me.”
Write the plot summary of a movie that is an homage to District 9. Your story can be about anything, really, as long as its main characters are a mild-mannered, bumbling bureaucrat who becomes infected with an alien fluid; a prawn; an aggressive, sadistic, and xenophobic mercenary-soldier; and a paralyzed psychopathic Nigerian gang leader who believes that eating alien body parts will enable him to operate their weapons.
Chapter 41
Winter Is Coming
They and Tobias set out for Nevada, whence they had only recently arrived, in a brand-new black Ford F-250 with tinted windows, a hula dancer on the dashboard and double seats in the back. With them was Cuac, who had flown in for the occasion. Also accompanying them for the ride were Jackie and Sheila, who had overheard Mayra talking about the situation and wanted to tag along. Mayra carefully explained that a petite nuclear holocaust had occurred, that as a point of comparison, the half life of the U-235 Nagasaki bomb was 700 million years, and that as regular humans, the girls risked a painful death of shedding hair, molting skin, and internal organs exploding and desiccating like a tangerine in a two-hour microwave. Sheila said she and Jackie had spent years in tanning salons and surviving STDs from unprotected sex, getting tattoos from sketchy guys in the street who looked like they had hepatitis, performing drunken bungee jumps and other Jackass-style stunts such as running into fast-food restaurants and drinking from the toilet, and once dashing out of a burning house after Sheila fell asleep, wrapped in taffeta, while smoking a blunt next to a scented candle. Mayra said, “Then welcome aboard.” As the group drove along the nearly deserted interstate, like rejects from an audition for The Wizard of Oz, they gazed out upon a treeless, barren landscape of cracked red clay and austere mountains that made it seem as if no life could flourish there. Then again, that’s how this landscape had always looked, so everything appeared normal up to that point, except that the traffic was unusually light for a Saturday. “Shouldn’t there be no traffic at all?” asked Mayra. “Has this not been declared a forbidden zone of quarantine where trespassing is punishable to the full extent of martial law, which has been declared in this country unto itself, where none dare tread except they be apprehended and possibly subjected to dark interrogations, waterboarding, stern discouragement with iron maces and iron maidens and other outdated and fearsome instruments of torture too heinous to mention, because it’s much scarier when you pull the old shit out of a bag, such as forceps to be heated over an open flame, or despicable nooses made from discarded horse hair and crudely woven by toothless peasants full of malice and superstitions, who will watch you being questioned, sporting the sadistic smiles of idiots who not know whence they came, but rather are full of sound and fury signifying nothing, mustard stains from Subway crusted to the corners of their terrifyingly laughing mouths, because despite their lunatic incomprehension and the fact that they see the world through a glass darkly, nay, full of distortion and sham lights that cast a pall over even the most benevolent intentions, these japing rubes somehow intuit that you are the fly wriggling in an existential spider web jiggled by a scornful god that may or may not exist, it may simply be the wind masquerading as divine consciousness, which would mean we’re basically worshipping a blank and indifferent air current, a meteorological system that represents a feeble attempt by humans to impose structure where there is none, that is to delude themselves that weather patterns constitute a religion, so really we’re no better than primitive cultures such as the Greeks and Romans who believed in all that crap instead of the much more logical proposition of a white man sitting in the sky bored out of his mind, so he smites people with tactical nuclear weapons?” “Mayra, there is always going to be traffic, no matter what the situation. Some people refuse to pay attention to travel advisories.” “I wonder whether the bomb stuff will affect the snowfall this winter,” said Jackie. “If it snows as usual, we’ll have the slopes all to ourselves. Talk about your silver lining.”
This is the appropriate time for you, if you have not already, to create your own “Winter is coming Meme.”
Without memes, we would have no intertextuality, thus no way of connecting to one another on a cultural level. We would be no better than illiterate savages, unable to take an endlessly recycled pop image and add 5 or 10 words to it. If you are lucky or gifted, your meme will provoke knowing laughter or at least a rueful smile. Speaking of which, can anyone forget Sarah K. Phillips’ 1879 poem, “First Love in the Nursery,” with its wry verse
I thought of it oft with a rueful smile;
For never a mortal yet
But, in passionate sorrow or passionate gladness,
The fret and fever of love’s brief madness,
Has paid the human debt.
Chapter 42
The Heart Sacrifice
They encamped under lowering skies, unfurling their bedrolls beneath a plethora of stars. The campfire Tobias laid soon roared and the firelight played upon the faces of the pilgrims, some anxious, others at peace with what was to come. Cuac lay on his back, slowly puffing a leftover Montenegro. “This reminds me of when I was a kid. My dad and his buddies would take me camping. Once, they said it was a special trip. When the Pleiades crossed the fifth cardinal point or the zenith of heaven at midnight, we rose up and walked up the Hill of the Star. Just as the heavens aligned, we lit wood bundles that represented the past 52-year cycle. They got my Uncle Cuetzpalli drunk. Then they chose him for the heart sacrifice of the warrior. They built a fire on his chest. Our families, watching from afar, cut and bled themselves to celebrate as we brought the fire back to the Great Temple at Tenochtitlan.” “Wow,” said Sheila. “That’s terrifying.” “Barbaric,” added Jackie. “That’s why I never go past Ensenada. The heart sacrifice happened for real?” “Nah. I was remembering crazy stuff like that in Apocalypto. Where they like pull out a guy’s beating heart and he’s all screaming for his life.”
“I should have warned you,” said Mayra. “Cuac is a bit of a prankster. He’s wise, but sometimes he reverts to an eight-year-old boy.” Sheila patted her sleeping bag. “Come over here and sleep, Cuac. I want scary stories.” “The real scary story,” said Mayra, “is her gynecological exam.” “Ow,” said the Trampire. “That’s cold, even for you.” “Really, Mayra,” said Jackie. “I’m pretty sure that since you became a vampire, you’ve slept with like 600 guys.” “It’s called bloodletting. It’s not the same thing!” “Rationalizing.” “I’m sitting right here!” shouted Tobias. “She’s jealous,” said Sheila. “Cuac won’t give her a roll and she can’t believe it. Give me a fighting chance, Mayra. Or are you going to shred me if Cuac and I start getting in on?” In the dark, Mayra could feel the shape of her pouty face. “Fine. Do whatever you all want, just take that sleeping bag far from the campfire. But I know that Cuac, with his degree in urban planning, his supernatural ability to undergo metamorphosis, his MENSA level intelligence and his sensitive soul, is not interested in boning you.” The Trampire sighed. “Do you remember our recent conversation about how you hadn’t written Lestatia with sufficient complexity into your novel? The same is true of Cuac. You use him when you need him, but there is no reason at a plot or character level why he can’t have sex like the rest of us. I know he’s supposed to represent purity of the spirit or some bullshit like that, but he’s getting boring. Let the poor guy screw somebody. Otherwise it’s also racist, like because he’s Mexican he can’t have any of the white girls.” “Yeah,” chimed in Jackie. “What’s up with that?” All eyes turned to Cuac in the semi-dark, tongues of fire licking across the shadow of his body. Cuac stood up, walked over to Sheila’s sleeping bag and together they dragged it into the bushes. For several hours they could be heard thrashing, moaning and wailing like Baptists speaking in tongues in a brush arbor. Mayra slid way down into her sleeping bag so it would cover her head and beads of sweat began to pop out all over her forehead. “Do you mind? I can hear every single thrust of his virgin penis into your well-practiced thing.” “Takes one to know one,” Sheila shouted back from the bushes. At length, silence fell over the valley and the stars came out above them like a flock of sheep nestling into a crowded but placid pen.
What’s the worst prank you ever did on a camping trip? Did it involve cutting someone’s heart out? Or just leaving them terrified and alone in the deep, dark woods full of pedophile white trash out looking for trouble?
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