A Midnight Drink of Hair

As soon as I take a cold swig of my beer and crack open my yellowed, brittle old magazine I can sense I’m not alone. I look up and already the pale girl with the silver white hair is settling down into the patio chair across from me.

"Guten abend, arschloch, wie geht es dir."

Everybody else is asleep right now. It’s the midnight hour in my back yard and I was hoping for some quiet time alone with my favorite German beer and a chance to read a special little find I picked up for a couple bucks in an antique shop on my vacation in Ely Minnesota. A worn vintage pulp magazine, an old copy of "Weird Tales". The real thing.

"Hey. Hi ya,Nix."

“Hi ya, hi ya.”

You'll never see her coming. You'll never know she's there until she lets you know. God knows how long she was standing there in the shadows waiting to see if I'd come out of the house. Waiting to decide if she wanted to see me. She reaches across the glass patio table and grabs my bottle. She holds it up for a look. "Paulaner Salvator?"

"A nice home town favorite from Munich, Bavaria, where you come from. Did you drink it back in your day?"

"You sound so nervous. You’re trying too hard to be nice to me. Don’t be so scared." She turns the bottle around and reads the label. "No, when I was a girl, my uncle made beer or we just bought a pot from the . . . the . . . die Schenke . . . what is it you call it . . . like a hotel. Everybody did so. Is this good?"

"Help yourself."

She tips back the bottle, swishes it in her mouth. Raises her blond eyebrows and nods appreciatively. She spits it out on the grass and passes the bottle back. She likes beer but swallowing anything except somebody’s blood makes her puke. "How is the story going?"

"I have the idea, but haven’t really cracked it yet. But I'm hot on the trail."

"Gut, gut. So then, what silly rubbish is this you’re reading now?"

"Weird Tales. May 1946. Back when my people were just done beating the shit out of your people."

"May I see?"

I hand it to her. "Where were you in 1946?"

She frowns. Taps a fingernail at her lips, thinking. "Spain. I think. Spain. First part of the year. Then I left. Didn’t like it. Long days." She goes back to the magazine, as if that settles it. "Look at these ads." She flips through the pages, clearly delighted. "Repair the radio? In your spare time? Isn’t this fine?"


"It amazing, Nix, but none of these science fiction and fantasy writers, when they wrote about the future? None of them got it right."

"Is that so?"

"None of them. No one predicted the Internet. No one predicted computers. They didn’t even have computers at the time. Wireless telephones. Religious terrorism. Nobody guessed any of that.'

"So where's your jet pack?" She holds up the magazine and shows me a pen and ink drawing of a man with a funny helmet flying with a jet pack, rescuing a thinly dressed girl.

"Guess I left it inside."

"Oh - look here –an exciting story about a vampire space alien. Oh my goodness - I’m so scared." She rolls her eyes and then flips to the next page. "Why do you think God made such a thing as me?"

I lean forward to speak and she snatches my beer bottle up again.

"This is good beer." She spits a mouthful on the grass.

"I think it’s because this whole world is skewed on the wrong evolutionary direction."

She puts the bottle down and gives me a half threatening look. "Are you trying to impress me?"

"You’re German. Land of Leibnitz and Kant. I know you like hearing this weird stuff." I lean in, and grab my beer bottle back before she can get it. I really should do the decent thing and just go in and get her one, but I'm stingy about this expensive beer, and I'm concerned about what unexpected effect vampire spit might have on the grass. I worked hard on my lawn.

"The world we live in is based on predatory relationships. Vampires, you, you’re like the soul or the final form of these predatory relationships. You represent a pure predator, co existing with your prey which happens to be the dominant predator of the planet. But the world itself is evolving based on a hierarchy of predatory relationships. It can never last in this condition. It has to collapse someday. That's why I think God made a big mistake in the way he constructed this world. Maybe this world was a rough draft for something better somewhere else. I think if there are space aliens, they wouldn’t be vampires. I think God would learn from His mistakes and base a biosphere along different principles. If I made the world I would make it differently. Believe me; I could make a better world than this one."

"Like what?"

"Sex. A world based on sex."

"Listen to you. Dirty boy."

"It makes sense. The world we live in is based on a complex of food chains. Everything eats everything else. You’re defined by your place on the food chain. Who you eat. Who eats you."

"What's eating you, leibling?"

"I'm pissed at God. Again. So I’ve been thinking. What about a world based on the exchange of sex for food instead of just eating each other?"

“Sounds like fun.”

"This kind of exchange already exists in nature, and it’s the most successful survival strategy when it works. Flowers offer food to bees and pollinating insects. The flower gives pollen to the bee and the bee shares some of the pollen with other flowers. The bee is fucking the flowers and the flowers reward the bee with food for fucking them. Nobody gets hurt. Everybody benefits. It’s perfect. In fact, it’s so perfect without bees to fuck the flowers; there are many plant species that would go extinct. Then you have plants like raspberries who take it a step farther. The bee fucks the raspberry for food. The raspberry makes berries with seeds. How to spread the seeds? It offers food to birds. The birds eat the berries and fly off with the seeds in their gut, which is like being pregnant on behalf of the plant, and then they poop out the seeds in a little pile of bird-shit which is great fertilizer. That's like the bird saying 'Thank you very much for the nice berries. Let’s make more plants like you. You gave food to me. Now here's food back for your seeds.' That's why raspberry bushes are so successful. You see them growing near fences and telephone lines cause the birds sit there and poop them out. That's a harmonious relationship. Fuck me - feed you. Food for sex."

"That was the relationship with my kuschelbaer." she says, looking off into the dark. "I gave him sex. He gave me food. But it wasn’t enough."

"You needed to kill."

"Yes."

"That's what's wrong with this world. You're a victim. It should be a world, where everybody makes everybody orgasm everyday and rewards everybody with sustenance in exchange for good orgasms. That's how I'd do it."

She starts looking through the magazine. "If you think this way, you will go mad."

"What if . . . . ,"

I tap at the table glass so she looks up. Her eyes are painful at the thought of Daniel. "What if . . . there is a world where the sex is not even confined to species. Bees fuck plants. What if everybody fucked plants? What about a world, where fucking a tree or a plant would make you come really good? And the plant needed you to come inside it? Imagine an orchard of sexual fruit trees that needed the farmer and his wife to come and have really great sex with them and then rewarded them with nourishing pure fruit containing life prolonging hormones made from their own body fluids? It gives a whole new meaning to the term 'tree hugger'." I stop talking and catch my breath.

"You're getting a story idea, it sounds like."

"What if . . . you had a sexual vampire? Instead of attacking people for blood the vampire seduces people for sex? What kind of vampire would that be?"

She shrugs. I thought it would get a rise out of her. Shucks.

"And the animals too." I plow ahead. "The animals come up to you in the forest, but they don't want to attack you and gobble you up. What they want is for you to fuck them, because when you come its good for some of them, maybe vital for their very survival, and the animals fuck each other and the animal and plants fuck each other and the world is full of sex and harmony and nobody has to kill anyone else in order to live. Instead of eating each other on the food chain they fuck each other on the sex chain. Wouldn't that be a better world than this one?"

"What a mad idea." She crosses her arms under her breasts and shakes her head. "You are really an old hippie. You know this?"

"But doesn't it sound good? Daniel would still be alive in that world."

She turns to the back of the magazine, and I figure its better to drop the subject of Daniel.

"Look at this. These Rosicrucian fellows. My granny was like this you know. She could read the cards and goose guts at Christmas. She wanted to move things with her thoughts. She kept it a secret because it was supposed to be this big sin. But she liked to see the future."

"Now that's an evolutionary thing too."

"Mein gott. Here we go."

"Like Alien vampires? Why would they be vampires, unless God made the same mistake on their world also?"

"And so?"

"The brains we have today were designed and made about 40,000 years ago. But think about it. We can do higher mathematics. Why did cave men need higher mathematics? We can read and write. We can imagine and visualize worlds and Gods, and mythical beings. But why? What survival function does that serve in a dog eat dog world?"

She frowned. "Overkill?"

"Overkill! Its overkill! You don't need those things to hunt mastodons. Its not like you need to count them to death. So why do we have it? There must be many kinds of dormant abilities in the human brain that occurred maybe by accident as a result of brain wiring that we really did need. A by product that gave us technology, but maybe it's rare in the universe. Maybe our whole evolutionary future is an accident of crossed cave man brain wiring. Maybe its tied up with our destiny, religion and everything. Like you buy these computer games, where if you achieve a certain level it unlocks other parts of the game. Maybe we have stuff in us that if we knew, like the Rosicrucians, it would make us like super powered. We'll reach this point someday and these things will pop out right out of our thoughts that we can't imagine now. What if - "

"Maybe you should stop drinking this strong beer."

"What if this world evolved wrong? What if it was supposed to be brought into another direction by the rise of consciousness? What if . . . what if . . . we all have a destiny. Starting with Facebook?"

"Facebook?"

"Facebook! People have a social instinct, we want community. We want to be connected. Someday, through technology, we will be. We'll be a super colonial organism. The human species, our destiny, is to be born as a new God-Being. But a God-Being with a sense of heart and compassion, because our species will have arisen from a history of suffering and cruelty. That's the only possible justification for a world based on predatory relationships."

"You're drinking my hair."

"Your what?"

"Do you like that? ¡Me estás tomando el pelo! I learned that in Spain. You're drinking my hair. Pulling my leg. You know. Sometimes they said ¡Me estás tomando me sangre! That’s like you’re drinking my blood. Of course, that was the last thing they said."

"But isn't it interesting? This is where stories come from. Sex world. That could be a story. You see, Nixie - I love ideas. I'm a fan of ideas, of weirdness. The weirder the better. I love riffing on weird ideas. I love weird science. I love to sit here in the dark and drink beer and maybe drink your hair too and think. My big squee. Don't you?"

She holds out her hand. "Here's your silly old magazine back. Danke." She passes it to me and gets up to leave.

"Wait." I start flipping through the pages, looking for it. "You remember Carl Jung? One of your countrymen?"

"Yes?"

"He had this idea about synchronicity. It's where the Universe sort of turns around once and gives you a message. Here - I found it. Look! Look at this. This is synchronicity in action. Stick around a minute. You'll like this, page 66, take a look."

I pass it to her and she smiles.

I wonder where her fangs go when she's smiling. How does that work?

What if . . . .








C. Sanchez-Garcia