Walk Among Us, page 15
“You guys know where the supermarket is?”
The quartet exchanged looks.
The blond—they were all blonds of varying gradients, really, but that one, who Duke had singled out as the blond—studied him with an impassive expression.
“I know where a supermarket is.”
The group splintered into friendly drunken laughter. Duke joined in.
“Okay, can you tell me where a supermarket is?” said Duke.
“You’re not from around here,” said one of the girls, bespectacled and green-eyed. She hooked an arm around the blond’s elbow and half hid herself behind the man, peering from behind the bend of his shoulder. He patted her on the head. Siblings, Duke decided. “Where did you come from?”
“America,” said Duke.
“Which part of America?” said the girl.
Duke considered the question, hoping as he did that no one would pay any mind to how little steam feathered from his mouth when he spoke and how, sometimes, he forgot to breathe entirely.
“New Orleans,” he said with an exaggerated prime-time drawl. Better a familiar name than one that wasn’t. Fewer questions that way, Duke had learned. “Came here on an exchange program.”
“You look too old to be a student,” said one of the women in the remaining pair, an exquisite-looking couple, both of them intimidatingly tall, gorgeously attired in lush fur coats, and somehow upright despite the snow and the four-inch heels of their boots.
“It’s a work thing,” said Duke, appraising the two women. He revised his original opinion of them. They were not lovers, he decided. There was certainly a sororal relationship ligamenting them and that, Duke suspected, was what he mistook as a romantic connection. But not lovers. Sisters of some nature, although he couldn’t put a finger on its specific variety.
“Really?” A coquettish laugh that Duke loved immediately, although his affection felt somehow hollow to him, reflexive rather than reactive. “I guess this isn’t the right time of year for tourism.”
“Eva, don’t chat up the American,” said her friend.
“Why not? He seems nice,” retorted Eva.
“Stranger danger,” offered the blond’s sister, only to be swatted by her brother, his expression kind.
Between drags of his cigarette, he told the group, “Give him a break, Anouk. The man is probably fresh from the plane, tired, hungry.” A pause as he looked Duke over, one eyebrow raised high, and Duke smiled, abruptly and likely disproportionately thankful for the unexpected ally. “And cold.”
“So damn cold,” said Duke with a laugh.
“Doesn’t change the fact that he creeps me out,” said Anouk, glowering openly now. “No offense, but something about you screams predator.”
You’re not wrong, Duke thought, smile luminous, but any rebuttal he had died stillborn, strangled between his teeth, Eva speaking before he could.
“I’m sorry.” A dismissive flap of her dark-gloved hand. “But she’s like that with everyone she doesn’t know.”
“Just trying to keep you safe,” Anouk retorted.
“You don’t see Sven trying to swaddle Margret in silk,” said Eva.
Sven—the perfect name for the blond, Duke thought—shrugged a bony shoulder, cigarette flicked into a snowdrift. “That’s because I care.”
“I question that,” countered Anouk.
Duke interrupted, sensing old tensions, a progression toward some pointless argument first begun in the infancy of their friendships and kept alive till today. He hadn’t the time, the want, the space to see such nonsense through.
So he said: “Look, you guys seem great, but you’re right. My plane landed, like, two hours ago and, no offense, but I just want to get a sandwich and go home to sleep.”
“Fine. Fine. Whatever. But he shouldn’t go to that supermarket then, Sven,” said Anouk, tone brisk, expression discontent.
In deference to her graphic dislike, Duke withdrew a step. “Why not?”
“Gunnar works there,” she said in a tone heavy with incontrovertible finality, a sidelong glance directed at Duke, features cool and faintly contemptuous. Duke couldn’t quite tell if her disdain was meant for him, Gunnar, or the world as a cohesive whole. “You don’t want someone’s first experience of Reykjavík to be Gunnar.”
“Fine, fine,” echoed Sven, winking at Duke, who winked back in return. “In that case, take a right, two lefts, and then a right again. You’ll end up in a 10-11.”
“It’s expensive,” warned Margret, still shy, still snuggled behind her brother.
“But it’d be open,” said Anouk, her arms flung out to herd her companions away. “Which is what’s important. Now, let’s go. We want to make the actual party, don’t we?”
Duke tacked on a bright smile. “Man, I’m lucky to have met you guys. What are the odds you’d know that someone in a random supermarket—”
“There are less than a hundred and fifty thousand people in this city. The odds are very high. Everyone knows everyone.” Eva sighed. “Good night. Enjoy the city. Ignore my friends.”
“Say hi if you see us at the bar this weekend!” called out Sven.
Duke waved and moved on, the conversation percolating through his subconscious. A hundred and fifty thousand people. That was less than a neighborhood in San Francisco, smaller than any borough he’d ever resided in; Reykjavík had a population bordering on provincial. He would need to practice concern over the coming years.
Sauntering down the route he’d been given, Duke congratulated himself on having intercepted the four, and on being congenial enough to glean so much so easily. Had he been more reticent, less amiable, or unattractively unkempt, he might have found himself in trouble one day, expecting his future actions to melt into a nonexistent metropolitan clamor.
The wind lost its urgency. Without the gale, the snowfall gained a pleasant dreaminess: relentlessly thick, but the individual flakes seemed to waltz through the air, rendered into gilt by the streetlamps, and Duke couldn’t shake the image of having been shrunk down and fitted into a snow globe. Any minute now a face, distorted by glass, would bear down on the sky, peering myopically for Duke. It would be the old woman, laughing and triumphant.
So striking was the thought that Duke jolted his head up, half expecting to see the harridan’s visage eclipsing the night. The orange-tinged dark met his wild stare. He sighed. She had him jumping at shadows. His jaw tautened. Duke would see her pay for it.
His gaze dropped to find softly luminescent lime signage in the shape of the phrase 10-11, with the zero swapped for a caricatured clock, its hands about ten minutes from eleven. Duke eyeballed the green-and-white image for another handful of seconds before, at last, the joke tolled in his understanding and he loosed a soft “Ah!” in recognition of the iconography’s intent. Comforted by the universality of puns, he loosened his scarf and strode into the store.
Milling through the supermarket, its anemic lighting doing little to improve the appearance of the salad bar, Duke rediscovered, to his astonishment, a childhood affection for such places. His parents were skinflints, preoccupied with themselves and the business of a household they hadn’t wanted, Duke an obligation undertaken with great resentment, but once in a while, whim or whiskey would lead them into taking Duke’s hand and walking him into a supermarket. There, in the cool dry air, he would be allowed free rein to select one purchase for himself. His prize, of course, could not exceed a few dollars in value. But that wasn’t the point.
The point was, he could choose anything within reason, be it dozen-for-a-dollar confections or a small plastic dinosaur, and ask that it be taken home with him. Whatever he chose, it would be his and his alone. His parents, for all their other faults, respected that covenant, at least.
Duke smiled, unexpectedly nostalgic, as he ladled potato salad into an opaque plastic container. The girl hadn’t lied. The prices in 10-11 were cutthroat. Duke, thankfully, was inoculated. Between the time spent and money made in the Bay Area, he could afford the experiment. He could let himself think of supermarkets as magic parceled in easy-access consumerism.
He browsed through the aisles, full of aimless wanting, aware of a need, but picking out basic condiments and pastel-colored bags of potato chips, fruit preserves, some bread, an armament of sodas, bags of salted nuts, instant noodles from brands he didn’t recognize, and—as a grudging concession to the specter of health—fruit. Better to have variety than not. Duke wafted past the more traditionally Icelandic groceries, his eyes combing their labels with great suspicion. No small amount were vacuum-packed meat of indeterminate nature.
Them, maybe? Was that what he craved?
Duke couldn’t tell, but he shoveled one of each into his basket nonetheless.
Haul acquired, Duke made his way to a counter manned by a saturnine kid in his mid-twenties, blue eyes bruised with black liner, hair brilliantined into a slightly malformed pompadour. It drooped like half-melted wax.
Duke tried on a smile. “Just this.”
“Mmm.”
The cashier began ringing up his purchases.
“So, I heard this place was pricey.” Duke couldn’t help himself. With the milquetoast ambient music, the excitement of being in Iceland and some quantity of alive, and the positive interactions preceding his visit to 10-11, he wanted to talk, his Southern congeniality leeching to the surface. “They weren’t kidding.”
“You could have gone to Nettó.” The cashier’s lilt kept its bored monotone.
“Yeah, well. I’m still learning my way around Reykjavík. I just moved, you know?”
“Mmhm.”
“I heard that Iceland has this traditional rotting shark dish?”
The cashier rolled his eyes with grandiose enthusiasm, a teenager’s raw drama. “Yes, we do. And puffin. And whale. Do you want me to show you how to get to the glaciers, too?”
“If that’s your side work, sure.” Duke searched him for a name tag. Gunnar, said a plastic oblong. How many people were named Gunnar around here? Deciding to have some fun, he said, “You’re Gunnar, huh? I met some of your friends today.”
There it was: a darting of interest in those deep-set eyes. “Was it Johanna? What did she say about me?”
“Not much,” said Duke, a sly grin in play. “She was too busy singing my praises.”
“You? Too old for her. But maybe she doesn’t hate me as much as she says if she’s willing to talk about me.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe she might like me more than she says too.”
“Could be.” Duke looked him over and lied again. “Could well be.”
“Yeah,” said Gunnar, jouncing his head, lips thinned to a downturned line. “She does.”
Duke nodded. “I think she knows that too. If that helps.”
“Mmm.” A pause followed. “Get a UV lamp.”
Duke chuckled at the suggestion. “I don’t really mind the night.”
“Eh,” said Gunnar. “You and every vampire here.”
Fear prickled the hairs at the back of Duke’s neck and he steadied his smile, although he was immediately beset by paranoia, a hundred contentious scenarios arranging themselves for perusal. Foremost in his concerns was the sudden certainty that Gunnar, despite his lackadaisical posture, his wilting coif, was a vampire hunter and this was the prelude to a fight.
Were there really vampire hunters?
Were there even other vampires in the city?
Duke didn’t know and his lack of knowledge did nothing to winnow his mounting anxiety. It showed, he realized, in his body language, as Gunnar, previously so ambivalent, raised both eyebrows, forehead crumpled from the motion.
“No. I don’t mean real vampires,” he said with some ill-disguised contempt. “30 Days of Night is just a movie. None of that is real. We do have hours of perpetual midnight, but again, none of that other shit is real,” Gunnar sighed, voice relapsing to a bored drone, jabbing a plastic bag at Duke.
Meekly, Duke took the bag and began putting away his groceries, the cheap white plastic distending under their weight.
“Obviously not,” he said when he trusted himself to speak without a waver in his voice. He wondered if he looked dead under the fluorescent lights. Duke wondered if he looked dead, period.
Gunnar gestured at Duke’s shopping, the irritation slopping from his expression, baring a look of judgment. “Are you having a party?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you just got here.”
Duke shrugged. “You can have friends, you know?”
“I guess.” Gunnar aped his shrug. “Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Is it true that everyone knows everyone in Reykjavík?” asked Duke, slinging the bag along the bent trench of his elbow, embarrassed by how much he wanted that fact to be more than apocrypha. In his heart of hearts, he missed small towns, the ease with which one could make connections.
“Why?”
“Just something I heard.”
“I guess?” said Gunnar, irritation once again reinstalled in its customary seat. Between the ease with which the man’s face crannied with wrinkles and his adolescent expressions, Duke reconsidered his estimate of Gunnar’s age. Either he was precociously wizened or inappropriately juvenile. Neither of these options were flattering. “There are only so many bars you can visit around here. Eventually everyone meets everyone.”
“Have you ever encountered anyone weird?” asked Duke, swiping his card when prompted.
“Weird how? Like you?”
Another shrug, another unexpected ventricular flutter. Duke was learning to startle at his own physiology and the odd times his organs reacted to stimuli. How much of those autonomous functions he had taken for granted! His lungs, his heart, the mechanisms that allowed for heat generation. Briefly he pondered his alimentary systems, the task of convincing his digestive tract to work, to move what he’d eaten. And the whole concept of disposal, that was even more esoteric a process. Duke pushed down on his musings, stared at Gunnar with cordial expectation.
“Yeah,” he said. “Like me.”
Gunnar twitched a shoulder. Even his derision was tiring of Duke. “Eh. I suppose. You tourists are always so surprised by everything.”
“Okay, I meant more like . . . people whom I share a resemblance with.”
“You mean short?”
Duke, who had never considered himself short and was, in fact, of the opinion he was taller than average, blinked once, twice, poleaxed by how he hadn’t noticed the gap between their heights. Gunnar, slouched and running to bone, still almost had five inches on Duke.
“Sure. Why not?”
Gunnar raked a look over Duke. “Eh.”
If he’d seemed blasé before, Gunnar now looked entirely done with Duke’s presence, and the brittle smile he wore suggested he’d tell Duke as much if it weren’t for the obligations of his employment.
“Have a nice night?” said Duke, moving to exit.
“Eh.”
And that was that. Duke traced his route back home, thinking the entire time how strange it was, how comically bizarre that he now lived in what amounted to a borrowed showroom. His good mood tapered to gloom the longer he walked. The house was a joke. The coffin, the fridge crammed with blood bags, the bizarre notes like the walls had become tumorous, those strange silent women. It was surreal. But until he fully understood the parameters of his own life, it seemed defensible, at least. Adequate if not ideal.
Maybe he could start with dead bolts, Duke thought to himself, when he finally reached the front door. Dead bolts and a careful scan of the walls, just to be sure there weren’t crawl spaces there. He let himself in, having not locked prior to his exit, and the silence inside felt physical, almost, a clinging layer of dried fat.
“Plants,” he said aloud. “Maybe plants too.”
Duke then ferried his groceries to the fridge, enumerating his list of planned household purchases as he did. A portable stove, maybe. If he could indeed eat without consequence. A sink too. And whatever it was that he might need to identify hidden electronics. First chance he got, Duke planned to strip the place of its monitoring equipment. The old woman would need to get her kicks from someone else.
What was her name, though?
He pondered this while tossing out satchels of chilled blood, sifting through them at random. Diabetic Irish woman. Man with gigantism. Soccer mom. Duke folded cross-legged onto the floor, the bag nestled on his lap.
A trash can. He’d need that, too.
Still deep in his own ruminations, Duke lacerated a bag of potato chips with a nail, a puff of salted air emerging as he tore at the wound in the plastic. He extracted a thin yellow curl, bit down, and savored the familiar crunch. The taste, though, was absent. Where he’d expected maple Dijon and the unnatural umami of the snack, there was nothing. A cardboard-like flavor, which shocked him to no end, as he could smell the chip: the salt and the processed starch, the flavorings. He bit down on another chip and discovered, to his dismay, more of the same offensive blandness.
“Fuck.”
Duke, flustered, yanked out one of the black bottles of soda he’d bought and knocked back half in a long earnest swallow. It burned the whole way down. Like the potato chips, it tasted of nothing. No, worse than nothing: an insipid chemical slurry with only one redeeming merit. It was, thanks to the weather, still cold. Duke set down the bottle and mopped his lips with the back of his hand, deeply unsettled by the panic fizzing in his belly.
Gracelessly, he clawed through his shopping, found the potato salad, and ladled out a mouthful with his hand. Duke swallowed the clump of starch, barely chewing.
Nothing.
Ash, just ash, with a crunch of skin, sure, but otherwise, a mealy nothing and the oily tackiness of cheap mayonnaise. The bread was no better, not alone, not swollen with the fruit preserves, the latter jellied clots in a swamp of indigo-dark syrup. Duke changed tactics, decided, as the jittering in his hands worsened, adrenaline somehow still in production despite the loss of everything else, that he’d compromise. Forget taste. Ignore flavor. Eating didn’t need to be a pleasure. It just had to work.
