A Dream in Three Colors

Margaret Smith

I really like TV. TV is one of the few things here in the city that we have at home, where there is a huge satellite dish which gets us just about any show we want on one communal television. Running water and electricity in every home still elude us, but yes sir, TV we got.

Here, I like the shows on Nick at Nite. For one thing, obviously, the timing is good, and for another, the black and white shows are easier on the eyes. Sometimes, I think that if we were the ones running the world, the world would be a lot like Dobie Gillis - peopled with dull, bovine types, moving between soft shades of light and dark.

Sometimes it's a little like that around here, with my roommate, Bettina. Nuit says I shouldn't complain. It isn't as though I've paid any rent or even done much dusting and cleaning, which I said I would, and owe it all to Bettina and her adoring, bovine eyes that found me.

Then again, maybe Nuit can say that because Nuit is one of the lucky ones. She got a job, as a coat check at a dance club. I was still looking, and Nuit, who knows all those club kids as if they were her own gaggle of sibs and cousins, steering me in the direction of Bettina. Bettina, she told me, was her girlfriend Lisanne's ex-roommate. Her real name is Betty Ann, but she thinks Bettina is more suited to her. Whatever, I thought.

"You're just gonna have to overlook a lot of stuff that she says. Don't take it personally. She's hardly the only one, and she could make your life a little easier."

Bettina actually saw us first, and came over. I smothered a very mean smirk, and got Nuit's hard little fist in my back. Bettina's hair was black enough to have been spray - painted that way. The thick circlets of her eyeliner were coming unglued and splotching the skin under her eyes like black berry juice. Who does she think she is, I hissed. Neffertiti?

Bettina didn't notice, apparently, because as soon as Nuit said I was her cousin, Bettina wailed, "Oh!" and quickly assured me that no matter what I said, she wouldn't betray me to the authorities. She then proceeded to ask stuff Nuit had warned me about. I was already a little prepared. You get used to it sooner or later. That crap about immortality, and do I miss people from three centuries ago, all that. I was about to set her straight, too. But I guess I am as smart as the next guy, and every so often, a little smarter. At that time, at least, I figured this moment was an every so often. I said, "Lookit, Bettina, I really want to answer your questions, but I kinda need to know something. I'm pretty new in town, and I have been trying to find a place to -"

I don't remember much of the next few hours after that, beyond Bettina grabbing my hand, flinging me into the front seat of her Volkswagen, and then dragging me up the stairs to her apartment.

"You can stay here," she said, waving her arm across the space of an empty room. "And don't worry about anything. I mean it. Not a thing. And I'll make sure nobody bothers you. I promise."

And she did. Nobody bothered me, because that is a privilege she reserved for herself. I got used to a lot of things, like the books, and the cobwebs ready to collapse from the weight of dust, and wrought iron candelabras, always gummed up with wax that was always red.

I got used to her, and her curiosity, which was kind of endearing at first but the endearment was, well, pretty mortal. She liked looking in my mouth, sucking in a sharp breath every time, as if she could see naked people in there. Lots of times I could see her in my peripheral vision, taking me in, as if I had slithered right off the pages of one of her stacks of novels. I had never even read them. reading too much of their words in their tiny mouse scratch letters makes my eyes water.

So, I spend a lot of time watching TV, like I said. Bettina joins me, ostensibly because she can't get enough of Dobie either. She is always in her gauzy, lace-trimmed night shirt that looks as if it had been swiped from the set of David Copperfield. (Another easy black and white dream, and one which I'm starting to identify with more and more. I should get out more often.)

One night, she appeared, decked out in the black make-up and the David Copperfield shirt, and plunked herself beside me in the aging sofa cushions with the consistency of quick sand. Every time Dobie or his pal Maynard did something funny and I laughed, I was naked to her sideways glances. Finally, she announced, "You have got to be the laziest blood drinker on the planet."

"I'm sure I'm in the top five," I said.

"Don't you ever get hungry?"

"Yeah, of course I do. Doesn't mean I think about it all the time. It's not like there's a ton of variety."

True enough. Sometimes, when she's not around, I go to the kitchen, pull up a chair and just stare into the refrigerator. I am sometimes amazed and sometimes disgusted at it all: the leafy vegetables with the frayed brown edges, the milk as white and opaque as skin, and mostly, the meat. the meat in flat pink circles, in ragged red leaves, in the pocked flesh of cleaned wings and the dull fat beneath. How can they even stand it, the stench of rot and stale fluids? And why do they take so much of everything and leave nothing but some torn plastic wrappings and wasted bones?

I didn't ask her and I'm not about to.

She drew her knees up into the coil of her arms. After a moment, she said, "Can I ask you something?"

Her mantra. I only said, "Go ahead."

"Okay. I was wondering. Who's blood do you prefer" Men's or woman's?"

"All the same," I said.

That either disappointed her or titillated her beyond comprehension. Either way, it was a big lie, not the first I've told her. I've never had either, because back home the only things we ever borrowed from were the deer and some other critters.

Of which there aren't too many around here, of course.

It's been a while. And you can go a while, if your resources are stretched, or in my case, if you don't even know where to look.

Can't put it off much longer, that's for sure. Had the worst headache when I got up. Thought my head would erupt and splatter like a blueberry popover. Before that, I dreamt that I was with David Copperfield and Dobie Gillis, in our worlds of black and white air and skin, fragmented by the intrusion of red.

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