Neighbors of the Nation

I love New York City and have returned to it whenever I could since I was doomed to live forever.

I am certainty doomed, yes, but I don’t mind it. I don’t feel any kind of way about the prospect of eternity. It could be easy for me to say, in the beginning, I hated it. In the early days, when I began to learn how to live for blood, how to kill and remain unremarkable — so unremarkable that even if you passed by me on the street when you were a child, and then again when you were ancient and miserable, you wouldn’t remember me. Not a single firing synapse or jolt of familiarity. Just utter blankness.

It would be easy for me to say I despaired at this notion of plainness as survival at the start of all of this, but the truth is I don’t really remember the beginning. The human brain refuses longevity. It cannot conceive of being endless. It is designed to die. It can’t store decades or centuries. After a certain point, it deletes. Not to protect you, but because there is no more room.

And I’m not saying I’ve been like this for centuries. I can’t know that for sure. I can’t remember my life before, but I do see flashes of my death. I know I was disposed of in a marshland by someone like me. Somewhere humid and foul. I can hear the flies buzzing and water trickling. I see myself from above myself — my neck torn open, my face bloated and skin yellow; my eyes without any color. I can picture it perfectly. I am looking at myself like I am strapped to an invisible gurney and turned upside down. There is no going any higher than that because there is nothing else higher. Just space and silence.

I don’t blame whoever made me this way. They needed to survive. I just blame them for not finishing the job. Sometimes when I am lonely I like to think they turned me intentionally. They wanted a friend or someone to love, but then panicked and left me there. When you have been around as long as I have, though, you realize that things like that are unlikely. Whoever this person was, they left me by accident. Sometimes when you drink someone, if you are not careful, you forget logic. You see dead gods and heavens and whole other worlds that aren’t there and forget that you have a task. You have to drink a person completely. If you don’t, they will resurrect and then there will be less food in the world for you. I have only encountered a few others like me, very briefly. I’m not sure how many of us are even left. We avoid each other. Or we forget.

I’ve never forgotten the marsh and the flies, though. I remember that but not much else.

I remember more when I am in New York. I’m not sure why. I don’t think it’s because I was made there or lived there in my life before. I think it’s because I don’t have to think. New York is so loud and churning and rancid. My memories come back because I am not trying to remember. I am distracted. There is space in my deleted brain and memories see their chance to slip back in.

I love the city. New York feels like a good place to turn into nothing. Whatever way I can die —and I don’t even know what that would look like — I want it to happen in New York. That sounds worse than I mean. I should rephrase that: New York would be a fine place to be swallowed by. It is a giant, comforting mouth. I could be digested in its belly for a millennium and never be bored. I don’t want to be recycled. I want to be in New York.

***

I’d been living in Alaska for a decade, in the North Slope Borough. When I want to sleep more than be awake, I always go somewhere icy. Somewhere darker. The air slows me down. A day stretches for a week. Walking suspended animation. I don’t need to eat as much where it’s cold; it curbs my hunger. I can go almost a month between feedings. Not like there was much to eat, anyway. I’d wait for people passing through — oil rig workers, soldiers, runaways — I’d find them at the bar seven miles from where I slept and watch them get drunk and follow them outside where they were pissing or throwing up and kill them there. I’d drag them out of the flood light, into a dark bank of snow off the main road through town and eat them there. Then I’d pull them out onto the ice, take their wallet, and drop them down into the blackness. Sometimes police would come; the army reserves. They’d ask questions, investigate. There would be rumors, maybe, but never for long. No one ever thought of me. No one knew I was there. Once in a while, someone would raise their hand and wave at me in vague recognition — a longtime resident in town, walking out of the pharmacy, or pizza place. I’d wave back and smile. But no one ever talked to me. I don’t think I said more than thirty words in the ten years I was there. It may have been longer than ten years; I can’t remember. But ten years feels right. In the dark months I rotated homes. Abandoned houses, a warehouse. And in the spring and summer I’d sleep through the midnight sun. I waited till the fall came and crawled out of the night once more.

The flu tore the Borough in the fall of 2025. I waited for the ambulance sirens to fade off while I slept but they never did. They wailed for a month straight. I saw bodies being retrieved from homes in bags. My neighbors. The people I watched for years; who grew up and left or stayed. Some I’d seen since they were children, then having children of their own. I watched their children die, too. The people who didn’t get sick left, taking their chances away from here. The town shuttered through the winter. I had to be smart with food. I paced myself. I couldn’t rely on passersby. No one was allowed into the town except medical personnel. They were all closely tracked and accounted for. They had people looking out for them, expecting them. They were not feasible. I had to wait for those dying in their beds at home, quarantined on order from the state. Their doors were marked with a single red slash. Infected. Nothing to be done. I made sure to be neat when I drank them. I wasn’t sloppy. I wanted to be respectful. I knew they were burying the dead outside of town. After I was finished I would add another slash on their front door. I bring their corpse to the burial site during quiet hours and dump them. No one ever noticed.

A few of the dying people, in their scalding fever haze, watched me appear above them and cried out in joy. A woman in her 60s, who I’d seen many times before shoveling snow or welding in her garage at home, clasped my hand in hers and asked if I was an angel. I told her I was.

“I’m here to take you away,” I said.

“Thank God,” she said.

One night I came across a small dog named Bruce in the middle of the empty street. He had a collar on with a phone number on small brass tag. I figured he’d wandered out of a house nearby, looking for food after his owners died. He was shivering and thin. He followed me for half a mile before I realized I wouldn’t be able to lose him, so I broke into an empty house that hadn’t had its power cut yet. There was meat in the freezer and I cooked some for Bruce and watched him eat. He devoured gratefully and afterward lapped up freezing water from the faucet. I sat down on the couch and he jumped up on my lap, facing out towards the back door that rattled in the pre-dawn wind. His ears lowered with every new gust. I decided to sleep there when I could feel the brief burst of morning light coming. I duct-taped a blanket over the small window in the bathroom and slept in the tub with Bruce in my arms. I dreamt for the first time in years.

When I woke up that night, I took Bruce out to go to the bathroom. I carried him across the front lawn and placed him on the ground where the snow was thin. As soon as I did, he took off into the street. I ran after him for a block before I realized I might be noticed, so I stopped. I watched him disappear into the dark ahead. I spent the rest of the night looking for him but he was nowhere. He was gone.

There was a week where there was another one like me in the area. I never saw them but I could feel them. I almost forgot I wasn’t the only one in the world like me until that familiar ringing noise started again and I remembered. They must have come because wherever they had been was now dead and there wasn’t any food. They smelled my desperation. My longing to stay in this place and not raise suspicion. They smelled my tidiness. My meekness, living in the shadows, careful and nervous. I’m sure it delighted them. I wasn’t a threat and we both knew that. I hated them. I let them search, scavenge. And when they were gone, the ringing stopped. I decided that if they came back, I wouldn’t hide. I would find them and destroy them.

***

The flu ran its course and the new people filled up town again. The plague had plunged the nation into a depression. No one had money, which meant more seasonal workers, which meant people more to kill. My food was steady. My shelter was not. Land was being fought over by desperate corporations. Homes of the dead had been razed and in their places cheap, institutional ranchers. An entire new subdivision. A company town. I was running out of places to hide. I knew my time there was ending. I longed for New York and the hum. I decided I would hitch my way across the country. I hadn’t done that since I was younger. Flying wasn’t an option, especially now, with a recall on IDs and passports after the president began his third term in office. The most recent election was nearly called off after a rise in domestic terrorism. After a fourth assassination attempt, he declared a national emergency and threatened to put off the election until order was restored. But still, voting happened, and still, he won. There were riots. Bombings. Not that I cared. I’d seen this happened before in other places. It was always the same. An endless loop. I never felt part of this country. I felt like a neighbor in a nearby world. I was there but not in the same place. I didn’t live. I bided time.

But my problem was my driver’s license. It was fake of course, but it had expired in the early 2000s, after 9/11 or something. I didn’t want to bother getting a new one. It was too dangerous. Driving was the best option, but I couldn’t drive myself. I needed help. I needed cover. I’d seen news reports on TVs in town about checkpoints at every state line following the election; ICE ramping up arrests and deportations of those with invalid ID. I’d find a way, though. I always did.

Over a period of three months, I auditioned drug addicts at the bar in town who I knew had cars. Most were on heroin or fentanyl. I couldn’t rely of them. I zeroed in on the few tweakers who rolled through. Tweakers love road trips and hate sunlight. It was perfect. It empted them with money, and sleeping in the day and driving at night and watching the towns and cities fall away into the mountains and deserts and yellow hills and cornfields. Tweakers love cars and hate sunlight. It was perfect. Only one committed. The rest I killed.

My companion was a gay man in his 40s named Lev with blue eyes, bad breath, and a Jeep Cherokee. He’d lived in Phoenix until a bar he worked at was raided by police, allegedly for an issue with its liquor license. Up until then, he’d heard rumors of disappearances. Arrests. He didn’t want to take his chance. He’d been sober for 12 years but decided to relapse and do meth in Alaska till things sorted itself out, whenever that would be. He left in the middle of the night and drove up from Arizona before the election. I was able to convince him that what he actually needed to do was a cross country binge before drying out in New York. I’d do some meth with him when I could.

“New York has good AA,” I said, remembering my stint of picking up people to eat at meetings.

I told him it’d be safer for gays in New York. It always was. I’d be gay again. I’d done it before. We decided to leave the next evening. We went back to the motel he was crashing in with tin foil in the windows to party once more before hitting the road. He burned through another pipe and I sucked his limp dick until he stopped trying to get hard. He started drinking beer and ripping cigarettes while listening to unremarkable music on his iPhone, placed into an empty water glass. I excused myself to the bathroom and locked the door. It was getting hard for me not to feel his hopped up heart thudding in my bones or hear the deafening sound of his blood surging through his veins. If I ate him now, I’d be stuck here for another winter. I would starve. I needed to wait till he got me to New York. I could kill them then. Or maybe I’d drop him off in front of a convent in a basket with a note that says, “God forgive me.”

I had to be zen. I rolled my head up in the dirty bathroom rug and tried to blot out the noise of his buzzing body. Eventually I slept. I dreamt of Bruce. He was sprinting ahead of me in the darkness like the night I lost him. I tried calling out after him but I couldn’t speak. I chased after him onto the ice until he disappeared and I knelt down and started to cry.

Then I dreamt of New York. I’d be there soon.

***