Dispatch 37

My Friend the Vampire

The one about a vampire, a séance, and two missing hours. Dispatch 37 begins with a telephone call from Roman Bly, a man the narrator has known for nearly forty years and insists is not his friend. Roman is a vampire. He is also someone with whom the narrator and Lisa once shared an extraordinary evening—one that neither memory nor the passage of time has entirely explained. The call begins with an ancient Egyptian tomb and a message left by a grieving son for his dead father. Roman sees a connection to their own history. The narrator is less interested in ancient parallels than in finally discovering what happened during a candlelit séance decades earlier, when he and Lisa sat with Roman around a small table and attempted to summon the narrator's grandfather. What he remembers is disorienting: a doorway full of stars, the sensation of being underwater, a view from above the house, and a terrible vision of Roman leading Lisa away from him. Yet Roman insists that the narrator remained at the table, talking for nearly two hours. As the conversation unfolds, Roman recounts things said that night—about the narrator's father, the children he hoped to have, and a private loss he cannot remember revealing to anyone. The encounter becomes increasingly intimate. Roman had been attracted to Lisa, and the narrator reluctantly acknowledges an attraction of his own, unlike anything he had previously experienced. Whatever occurred around that table left Lisa feeling inexplicably betrayed and Roman convinced that a connection had been formed that would last forever. At its center, My Friend the Vampire is about the uncertain territory between memory, desire, and the things we cannot explain about ourselves. A night that seemed impossible to understand at the time becomes no less mysterious after forty years. Roman remembers more than he should, Lisa carried feelings she could not name, and the narrator discovers that even the passage of a lifetime may not be enough to settle what happened between three people in a darkened room.