“ ‘Muddling’ is a good word for it.”
They hung up. Lost in thought, Harper slowly swiveled her desk chair around to stare out her office window.
Backpack-laden students milled about the campus common,some sitting on benches, others sprawled on the lawn, and a few hurrying here and there on foot, on bicycles, and on skateboards. It was a warm, sunny afternoon, as was usual on the California coast in October, and most wore only T-shirts or light sweatshirts, jeans or shorts. Years ago, when Harper arrived in Berkeley from New York for graduate school, she had found it hard to get used to the idea that this luminous warmth was the month of Halloween. Where were the brisk days, the cold nights, the piles of fallen leaves? Here, lichen hung from live oaks, and the ubiquitous Monterey pines and cypress were evergreens, never dropping their foliage.
Did it count as True Autumn without a chilly turn of the weather? There were no expeditions to maple shacks or Sunday car rides for leaf-peeping, that was for sure. Here, students played hacky sack in T-shirts and shorts. On the other hand, it was nice not needing to gear up to go outside, much less to dig a car out of a snowed-in driveway during an early snowstorm.
Life is indeed a series of trade-offs,she thought.
Harper graded a few of her students’ early essay proposals but, enticed by the college’s rapid internet connection, pushed the stack of papers aside and began searching for information on the witch trials that the ghost tour guide, Joel, insisted had taken place in Old Monterey. The only reference she could find linking witches to Monterey was the claim, made by a candidate for city council last year, that Monterey was a hotbed of witchcraft and satanism, “yet one more example of the ruination of American society.” The would-be council member had no evidence to back up his claim, was eventually forced to recant, and lost the election.
Temporarily giving up on the hunt for witch trials, Harperwas inspired by today’s class discussion to follow a link to a vampire craze.
When historic cemeteries were dug up, she read, they often yielded violated corpses, the bodies beheaded, buried face down, or chained. Posthumous rib fractures were also common, usually the result of someone rummaging around in the chest cavity, hoping to remove—and perhaps to burn—the heart. Often these rituals were clandestine, lantern-lit affairs, but sometimes entire towns got in on the macabre action.
Talk about your community-building activities…
By the 1800s tuberculosis was the leading cause of mortality throughout the Northeast, accounting for almost a quarter of all deaths. It was a terrible way to die, often drawn out over years: a skyrocketing fever, a hacking, bloody cough, and a visible wasting away of the body. Symptoms progressed in such a way that it seemed like something, or someone, was literally draining the life out of the victim.
Hence, the vampire scares.
“The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,” read one eighteenth-century description. “The forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk…the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.”
A loud shout on the quad made Harper look up from her monitor. Her office hours were over, and as usual, no one had dropped by to consult with her. She wondered if the college’s expectation that faculty demonstrate “a commitment to student progress and well-being” included sneaking into abandoned military barracks.
Weary as she was from last night’s events and the lack ofsleep, Harper was more than ready for the day to be over. She switched off her computer monitor and gathered her things.
The late-afternoon sun sat low on the ocean’s horizon, casting an orangey glow as she drove her dusty old Scion the seven miles down the freeway from the campus to Monterey proper. The town might be old, but it was not large, with only about thirty thousand people. It seemed to Harper to suffer an odd kind of split personality: A sprawling modern conference center and hotel cut off the old downtown from the historic port area, while a touristy Fisherman’s Wharf, chock-full of ice cream and candy stores, souvenir shops, and kitschy seafood restaurants, had replaced the old sardine canning factories. Only a smattering of rickety fishing boats still headed out to sea each morning, and a beach that had been cleared for tourists had been taken over by rowdy sea lions.
Happily, though, the town was eminently walkable. Since her arrival six weeks ago, Harper had explored Monterey’s official “path of history,” and made a point of nosing around old alleyways, the relics of abandoned water tanks, and decrepit canneries long since shuttered.
Long walks were a boost to her mental health and her only real form of exercise other than the very occasional jog. She didn’t really like jogging. Loathed it, in fact. Hoping it might be more fun with a friend, Harper persuaded Tariq to join her one day. They did not repeat the experiment because, Tariq claimed, if Harper jogged any slower, she risked going backward.
Living on the California coast was a radical change from her life the past half a dozen years, and she hoped it would be a chance to decompress and to heal from the barrage of last year’s humiliations. First, she had been turned down for tenure despite her numerous publications. There was no officialexplanation, but she knew why: Her colleagues and the dean considered the topic of her research to be insufficiently scholarly. While still reeling from that professional rejection, her husband, Grant, a tenured professor in the anthropology department, announced he was leaving her for one of his graduate students.
She knew their marriage had been having problems, but the news of his infidelity blindsided her. How had she not known? Had she been so caught up in her own career and her sister Scout’s troubles, that she failed to pick up on what was going on?
It didn’t help that almost everyone she knew adored Grant, especially her father. After picking her father up from the airport for a scheduled visit, Harper broke the news of the impending divorce, hoping against hope for some words of wisdom or consolation. Instead, he replied, “Can’t say I’m surprised—you didn’t even take his last name! You apologize and do what it takes to get him back, you hear me? You’re not getting any younger, you know. I warned you this could happen—a man like Grant is quite a catch.”
Harper had driven in silence for a minute, reviewing in her mind a few of the things she had learned in therapy about growing up as the child of an alcoholic: how to recognize codependence and set boundaries. In an uncharacteristic move that still made her proud, she took the first off-ramp, got back on the freeway going the opposite direction, returned to the airport, and dropped her father at the departures area. “Send me a bill for your ticket,” Harper said, handing him his carry-on bag and speeding off. They hadn’t spoken since.
That evening, a good friend insisted on taking Harper out for dinner and drinks and commiseration. After a round of dirty martinis, her friend suggested it was the perfect timefor a fresh start, a personal and professional do-over. Seeing as she had no other choice, Harper agreed and ordered another round.
The next morning, she swallowed her pride, along with several ibuprofen, and emailed her faculty mentor at Berkeley. He was a prominent scholar in their field, though unlike some mentor-student relationships, theirs had never been especially close. But he had always been supportive of her rather unconventional research interests, and since at this point Harper had nothing to lose, she explained her situation and asked him for advice. After three days of waiting and wondering if she should become a barista, he replied, telling her about an open position at Monterey College.
Harper suspected her mentor had made a few phone calls and perhaps even pulled a few professional strings on her behalf, because a month later she was flown out to California for an on-campus interview at Monterey College, and shortly thereafter received an offer. Packing up her aging Scion with the few items she wanted from her now-dead marriage, she headed west, hoping to leave her troubles behind. She slept on Tariq’s couch for a few days while she attended the new faculty orientation, signed reams of papers, received the keys to her office, started preparing for classes, and looked for some place to rent that she could afford on her salary.
Tariq told her about an old friend from high school whose elderly mother, Ellen Sundvold, was offering a below-market rate for a sunny, furnished studio apartment above her garage in exchange for grocery shopping and running the occasional errand. Harper leapt at the opportunity.
The apartment was small but charming, and best of all, Ellen Sundvold had become a friend. When, over dinner one night, Harper confided about her terrible, awful, hellish year,Ellen listened carefully then denounced Harper’s ex-husband as a lying, cheating jackass, and the colleagues who denied her tenure as idiots and small-minded fools. And then the older woman reached across the table, squeezed Harper’s hand, and told her that her father would surely rue the day he blamed his “bright and lovely” daughter for Grant’s supreme lack of character.
“And if he doesn’t,” Ellen concluded, “then he’s as foolish as your former colleagues.”
Her words brought tears to Harper’s eyes. With the notable exceptions of her mother and her mentor, Harper had always been the cheerleader in her relationships. It was nice to have someone cheering for her.
Harper pulled up to the curb in front of Ellen’s Craftsman bungalow, parked, got out, and started up the driveway toward her apartment over the detached garage. After a few steps, she felt the hackles on the back of her neck stand up. There it was: that sensation of being watched, an almost tangible sense of something brushing against her skin.
Just in case, she held the keys in her closed hand with the metal tips protruding, as she had been taught in self-defense class. Like Wolverine. She searched the shadows of the hushed residential street, peering toward the wooded area beyond the houses.Nothing. No creepy strangers, much less vampires.
