by A. A. Attanasio
After the soul has been severed from the body, it continues its journey, its path unknown, the destination unknown. It is a trembling day.
– Zohar 1:201b
Trembling Day
The moon’s paw padded silently among hurrying clouds. Giant pines wore feather boas of fog. And a bluff of limestone glowed soft as a breast in the wilderness night. A lovely occasion for vampires.
How was I to know? A 54-year-old yoga instructor from Rahway, New Jersey, I thought bloodsuckers were swamp worms and lawyers. Sure, the travel agent had said the bluff was haunted. A wraith of a Revolutionary war soldier, the specter of a Mohawk brave, perhaps a flitting apparition of Ralph Waldo himself – these are the spooky experiences of imperishable memories. But vampires in the Adirondacks?
Bernie and I had come to this remote resort in Black River Valley to celebrate our 17th anniversary and the opening in Short Hills Mall of a third outlet for our own franchise, a bodymind-fitness-studio slash vegetarian-stir-fry-restaurant: Go Yoga! & Wok Like This!
With three places of business that Bernie would have to manage accounts for and new instructors and cooks I had to break in and oversee, who knew when next we’d have a chance to traipse off together and watch moonrise over a haunted bluff?
Bernie would rather have stayed in the lodge at his laptop. He was there for golf and relaxation, not canoe trips, foliage hikes, outdoor tai chi, lakeside dawn meditation and other bliss-inducing activities I adore. But he adored me and went along with me that night of the big moon.
That’s my sorrow now, a tough karma I’m working at with all my might. You see, we hadn’t snuggled together in the feathered moonlight under those secluded conifers for five minutes before vampires struck.
A steel clamp of horror squeezed my heart so tight my last breaths came in gasps.
Vampires are not at all elegant like in those movies. Their faces are brilliant as lanterns but blue, cyanotic blue, and leopard-spotted. Maybe it was just the moonlight. Bone shadows fluoresced like X-rays through their flesh, skeletal people with squid eyes, just black keyholes in chalk dead faces. Really. I could have screamed, except I had no breath.
Bernie, wide as a lumberjack, my globe-shouldered Bernie, leaped up, his face scrambled with emotion. The first vampire lifted him with one slender neon arm and slammed him against the spruce so hard needles rained. A whiff of Christmas floated briefly before a fecal stink fouled the air.
His feet, free of the earth, kicked like a swimmer’s. The vampire that had pinned its trophy to the tree floated horizontally in the moony air like a tattered banner, like an angel of decay, its narrow body concealed in filthy wrappings, face hidden against Bernie’s throat.
Tar spackled the back of its head, webs of tar that must once have been hair. It meshed now in filament braids or perhaps that was mold thriving in the sutures of its skull. Bernie’s eyes stared straight ahead, wide open and electrocuted.
My throttled lungs howled squeak after mad squeak. When I careened about, I met the second vampire’s night terror eyes.
It watched my horror with obvious delight – no joy in those puncture-hole eyes, nothing in those inkwells – yet the spidery creases of its face deepened, twitching sadistic mirth. Leather lips pressed shut, holding back the killing shriek I knew was coming.
It came. A gargoyle’s scream rang my bones like chimes. The horrid, famished mouth opened, and I glimpsed those infamous fangs, slender needles of starlight.
The thing was on me, nailing me to the tree in a slamming blast of ice gale force.
Lit with pain, I blazed for a moment, dazzling atoms bursting all through my body in torrid flares of agony. Is this happening? The incredulity of it endured the searing, silent cries roasting me alive.
Me! This is happening to me! Not a nightmare. No dream. Me, dharma darling, devotee of Amitabah Buddha of Infinite Light, lotus-center me, founder and CEO of Go Yoga! & Wok Like This! – qi channeler me, still-point me who is not-me, anatman, radiant me, Bernie’s lover! Me!
Like a gust of smoke, I drifted away. The pain ceased abruptly.
A blast of power|rightness wafted me into the hush of heaven, under a moon like a blotched mushroom. Was that the moon? That wasn’t the moon but the soft radiance of infinity I had visualized so many times in meditation.
Bernie! I spun about in mussel-blue night. There’s my Bernie!
He was at the zenith, thunderstruck, a lustrous echo of his naked physical self, balding red hair, freckles, paunch and all, rising swiftly into a confused atmosphere of speeding clouds and moonfire.
A moment of clarity dilated my mind, too strangely calm considering what had just happened. And I saw my partner, my lover, ascending toward glistening darkness, a whorl of inward spiraling space, wet-looking and black as a mollusk.
I perceived this with a certainty we possess in dreams – and so I had no trouble envisioning his breath|force. It bulged with rainbows at the place of his heart as if from inside an opal. These spectra winced then winked smaller.
All those years I had urged him to join me in meditation, to focus his breath, concentrate awareness deep in the body, in the force center, the core chakra of our dream-flesh. All those years amused at my zealous devotion to yoga, he kept himself busy in the back office with spreadsheets and in the studio-restaurants with custodial chores. When we were alone, he gently scoffed at my yoga compulsion – except of course in the tantric serenity of our prolonged lovemaking.
(And he never jeered my compulsive cooking, either.)
For Bernie, yoga was business. Cooking was business. And business was over now. He floated away, corkscrewing upward – outward?
Gone.
Breathe! I began my breath-focus routine, trying to keep myself from an implosion of panic. Of course, I had no lungs, no way to breathe. I breathed vital energy.
Bernie’s dead! I’m dead! I knew this with clarity|insight. In moments, my reserve of vital energy, of breath|force, would exhaust itself and I too would spiral away into infinite radiance.
Gone!
The thought saturated me with stupefying ecstasy. Not joy, wonder or sexual paroxysm. Ecstasy is a Greek word and literally means ‘to step forth.’ It’s a crucial term in my yoga seminars, a term that I use to help people grasp the idea of getting out of the way of the body, letting the mind move aside simply to watch the edgework of muscles finding their tension limits.
But this was a bigger kind of ecstasy – the kind when the soul departs the body! The sensation pervading me was my imminent leave-taking from this world. I knew this with a mighty conviction – and I was not ready to go.
I was terrified and shrieking with my whole being: Not yet!
I tried to unclench panic by thinking, focusing on what had killed Bernie and me and why.
Vampires?
In fact, at that ecstatic moment of devastating dismay, I hadn’t yet realized that the monsters who had attacked us were vampires. It had all happened too fast. And I didn’t think of vampires, because I didn’t believe in them.
Only after I had gotten well into my breath focus routine – what practitioners call pranayama – did my clarity|insight amplify sufficiently for me to consider carefully what had transpired.
Then, I knew.
The moment I knew, I was among them again. The abominations, mouths varnished with our blood, sensed me at once.
Bony hands passed right through me. I guessed they’d never seen a ghost before. Their effulgent bodies blurred like blue taillights through the woods as they strove to flee.
I glided along their luminous slipstream. They turned. All at once, they stopped and turned, bending space behind them spookily like a heart-broken dream.
I saw them then more clearly than before. They occupied a space that ached, all wrinkled and torqued with trembling hunger. Sequined fluorescence in their cadaverous faces breathed brighter. Flakes of black light fell away in leprous decay from worm-scored jaws that gawked astonished. Only those gun-barrel eyes showed nothing.
Dim voices spoke as if from another room, murmurs clothed in a stale fume of dead roses:
▬▬Its hue bewray notorious ill. Hut! It craves parley.
Languid hands swayed through me again, and they backed off from my emptiness, amazed.
I moved forward and passed through them. For a moment, we occupied the same space, and I partook of their sickly aura: Smog of sunset, sky lacquered brown, and small stars flickered in the wind.
Zero’s amplitude canceled me, every thought, all feelings. Their bodies vibrated. Wave-particles teemed briefly with Bernie’s last thoughts as his blood digested inside them: a ferment of deranged fright – and (breaking my heart) his final terrified determination to protect me.
My own blood-memories were there too but transparent to me, and I saw right through them into the vampire stomaching my blood. What I had mistaken for decay is molting. Old flesh sheds like fungus. Over the centuries, the oldest vampires develop faces abstract as crabs and full of clairvoyant malice.
▬▬Dog of hell, what wouldst thou with us?
I’m a dog of hell? I spoke|projected. What are you then?
They are the wolves of hell. Their drastic eyes told me as much. I teetered a moment before the crypt dark of their skull sockets.
In a blink, they rushed off in opposite directions, smears of auroral fire weaving among the trees. I let them go.
Disoriented, I pivoted. Moonlight passed through me. I moved through trees. Inside their wooden samurai armor, they are geisha beauties. Each one is a ‘person-of-the-arts,’ limbs dancing, arranging flowers, carrying the wind’s music. The calligraphy of their roots is pure poetry, rhyming earth and berth.
Oh, so this is what it’s like to be dead… Everything was metaphor, everything lyrical, flowing together, an exquisite enchantment.
I arrived where I began and found our corpses. Bernie lay with his back against the spruce, legs spread, chin to chest and I on my back in his lap looking up at him with worthless eyes.
Our exsanguinous flesh appeared frosted, star-splotched in big silver paisleys made up of tiny snowflake doilies. Dead people don’t look like that.
Oh, yeah. These bodies aren’t dead. Fright throbbed in me. These are the undead.
Languid hands swayed through me again, and they backed off from my emptiness, amazed.
I moved forward and passed through them. For a moment, we occupied the same space, and I partook of their sickly aura: Smog of sunset, sky lacquered brown, and small stars flickered in the wind.
Zero’s amplitude canceled me, every thought, all feelings. Their bodies vibrated. Wave-particles teemed briefly with Bernie’s last thoughts as his blood digested inside them: a ferment of deranged fright – and (breaking my heart) his final terrified determination to protect me.
My own blood-memories were there too but transparent to me, and I saw right through them into the vampire stomaching my blood. What I had mistaken for decay is molting. Old flesh sheds like fungus. Over the centuries, the oldest vampires develop faces abstract as crabs and full of clairvoyant malice.
▬▬Dog of hell, what wouldst thou with us?
I’m a dog of hell? I spoke|projected. What are you then?
They are the wolves of hell. Their drastic eyes told me as much. I teetered a moment before the crypt dark of their skull sockets.
In a blink, they rushed off in opposite directions, smears of auroral fire weaving among the trees. I let them go.
Disoriented, I pivoted. Moonlight passed through me. I moved through trees. Inside their wooden samurai armor, they are geisha beauties. Each one is a ‘person-of-the-arts,’ limbs dancing, arranging flowers, carrying the wind’s music. The calligraphy of their roots is pure poetry, rhyming earth and berth.
Oh, so this is what it’s like to be dead… Everything was metaphor, everything lyrical, flowing together, an exquisite enchantment.
I arrived where I began and found our corpses. Bernie lay with his back against the spruce, legs spread, chin to chest and I on my back in his lap looking up at him with worthless eyes.
Our exsanguinous flesh appeared frosted, star-splotched in big silver paisleys made up of tiny snowflake doilies. Dead people don’t look like that.
Oh, yeah. These bodies aren’t dead. Fright throbbed in me. These are the undead.
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