Copy Cats

Morte Infinita

On the last Halloween Kristen spent with her father they dressed as vampires, and when he hefted the rock that would shatter the Eisensteins’ bay window and send their dog yelping into the woods, he smiled a sad vicious smile, and his face became the face of a vampire too. “There are two kinds of people in this world,” he said. Then he side-armed the rock, and the street exploded in noise, and she was running and he was not. He just stood there in his cloak and black shirt and white Converse All-Stars, as if he were not afraid at all, as if he were not even visible to anyone but her. As the rock left his hand and arced over the neat lawn she suddenly remembered what he had told her a few days before when picking her up from detention. “We all have to suffer the consequences of our actions,” he had said as he opened the passenger door for her. “And sometimes we have to suffer the consequences of other people’s actions too.” MORTE INFINITA M O R T E IN FINITA 20 That was Saturday, five days before Halloween and two days after her mother had left for Florida. There was a horror movie festival playing downtown, so that’s where they headed, and as they pulled away from the school, Kristen gave the gray building a single-finger salute. The principal was deep inside, his head bowed over paperwork, and her dad was saying something about the forces of social control. She wondered if he even knew the specifics of her crime. “I spit at him,” she explained after a while. “I didn’t hit him though. He sidestepped it like a matador.” “Who?” “Mr. MacEllan,” she said. “The principal.” “Your principal is your pal,” he said with a laugh, pulling into a space near the theater. Even lately with her dad’s eyes grown bloodshot, they loved to watch horror movies together. In the dark of the movie theater Kristen could feel him next to her vibrating with emotions some people would never, ever feel in their entire white-bread lives, and she felt herself vibrate too, because she carried 50 percent of his biology in her blood. She knew what would happen. The screen would go dark, and her father would lean over and whisper something funny about the titles or the music or the fatheaded guy in front of them, and then they would be quiet except when they gasped with joy as the villain made his first appearance. Whether it was Vincent Price staring into the eyes of a skittish dinner guest or some skin-masked, ax wielding psychopath chasing down a girl in cutoff shorts, Kristen was on the side of the devils. In horror movies freaks and ghouls were the clever ones, the fascinating ones. “The heroes are boring,” she told him once as the screen glimmered with violence. “The monsters are the only ones who do anything interesting with their lives.” M O R T E IN FINITA 21 She liked to change his words around a little and speak them back to him so that she could watch him smile and nod at their wisdom. “I can’t go in,” he said, looking into the rearview mirror at the theater marquee. He smiled tightly without taking his hands off the wheel, as if they were still driving down the road. “I can’t go in there with those people. I just can’t.” He was crying . He leaned back his head, let out a deep breath, and said, “Oh boy.” She pictured the inside of his head as a labyrinth where he would sometimes get lost. The houses he designed were smooth and made with lots of glass, beautiful and transparent and cold and not at all the kind of place most people would want to live. She wondered if his brain was too full of these beautiful buildings , variations of shape and form and function and strange angles like a whole other neighborhood that existed and did not exist. That was where he spent most of his time lately. Her mother—she resided in sunnier climes. When little Edward Eisenstein introduced Kristen to Morte Infinita that Halloween—the Halloween her father lifted the rock and smiled as if he were the daddy of all vampires—well, it was...