Bad Joseph

 

She picked the worst time to tell him, when they’d just finished. They were lying, side by side but not touching, sweaty and sore but almost happy. He reached over her and grabbed his cigarettes from the mantel, pulling a lighter from under his pillow. He only smoked when he was afterglowing. Or drinking. Or driving. Or working. Or seeing his nephews. “Those things will kill you, you know,” she said. He shrugged; he’d heard that a million times before. Then, just as he was holding the flame to the tip she blurted out “I’m cheating on you.”

Joseph paused. He took a drag. Maria gazed at him intensely, trying to gauge his reaction. He took another puff and then got up without a word. He pulled on his trousers, shrugged on a shirt which felt like sandpaper and smelled disgusting, put on his shoes, no socks and let himself out. Maria felt like she should call out something facile like “Where are you going?” but she realised she’d lost that right.

Joseph reached the street. It was pitch black– he went to check the time and realised he’d left his watch and his phone back at Maria’s place but he couldn’t go back. Luckily, he still had his keys, wallet, lighter. He’d have to buy a new mobile. He set off down the street, towards his flat, which he hadn’t visited in a week.

As it turns out, he might as well have stayed. It was too late anyway. He was already infected.

 

Joseph William Ryusei Nakamura had been drinking since he was fifteen. He’d been having sex since he was seventeen and smoking since he was twelve. He tried marijuana for the first time at seventeen, cocaine when he was twenty. He’d been a lifelong addict, layabout and loser. However, he’d only been a vampire since 1:18 that morning.

Joseph awoke to find his hand on fire. He screamed and jumped up, trying to shake the flames out. He backed into a shaft of sunlight streaming in between the curtains, instantly starting to burn and bellowing in pain. Diving back into the shadows of his bed, instinct driving him to shun the light, he pulled off his pleather jacket (he’d slept in his clothes) and wrapped it around his hand. The flames went out. To his shock, there was no pain; Joseph pulled the jacket from his hand and found absolutely no damage to his skin. He turned it to look at the other side– completely unblemished, although somewhat paler than usual.

Gingerly, he poked his index finger out into the excoriating light and then instantly withdrew it as it began to smoke. He knelt on his bed, trapped in between two shafts of abrasive sunshine. A gaol made of light. He thought to try and phone someone, but realised he’d left his phone at Maria’s. He couldn’t leave the flat; immediately outside his front door there was a large window overlooking the street. He’d be ash before he reached the stairs.

He realised he didn’t even know what time it was and looked around– there was a clock in the kitchen which had stopped he didn’t know how long ago. He’d pawned his laptop two months ago to pay his rent. He’d never bothered to programme the timer on his VCR. He was trapped in an ageless bubble, outside of the time-space continuum.

He sidled up to the window and managed to close the curtains without the sun hitting his skin. He sank down to the ground and put his head in his hands. “Fuck,” he said to the room at large. He went to the kitchen and tried to find the kettle– it was hiding beneath a pizza box. There were no clean mugs, naturally, but he’d managed to snag some paper cups from his nephews’ birthday party the week before. He found the pack, which he’d stashed in the dishwasher (the only spotless place in the whole flat) and there were no clean paper cups either. Eventually, he found an old Fanta bottle and made the tea in that.

He took a sip and spat it out; he hadn’t expected it to be good, but he also hadn’t expected it to taste like rot. Orange-flavoured rot. He poured the concoction down the sink and went to the fridge. There was nothing in there that wouldn’t also taste like mould. He slammed the fridge shut and then the shriek of a telephone made him jump.

He looked around wildly. The phone rang again. It was a landline. He had a landline? He followed the noise and discovered the phone had been living peacefully in a laundry cave near the toilet. By some miracle, it had not been unplugged. He wondered who’d been paying the bills for it.

He picked up the receiver but didn’t say anything– he always let other people speak first on the phone.

“Hello?” It was Saul.

“Hey,” Joseph replied, his voice breathy and low.

“I heard about Maria, man, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Joseph coughed, but he couldn’t seem to restore his voice to what it had been.

“That’s really shitty man. Real fucking shitty. Do you know who the guy is?”

“No.”

“Well, if she tries to get any money from you, you get a test, yeah? I mean, it probably is yours, but it never hurts to check.”

Joseph’s world stopped turning. “What?”

“Yeah, my cousin was getting child support from this guy for eight years before she realised-”

“Maria’s pregnant?” Saying the words aloud hurt him more than the sunlight.

“Well, yeah, I- I thought you knew.”

Joseph put down the phone. He swallowed hard and then shucked his jacket over his head and marched towards the front door. He’d just put his hand on the knob when a voice behind him drawled “Don’t do that.”

Joseph turned; standing behind him was The Devil. No horns, no tail, no forked tongue, but somehow Joseph knew. He had lank, light brown hair, which reached down past his shoulders, and a five o’clock shadow. His face was long, with a pointed chin and a roman nose. Joseph would have described him as “horse-faced” if he hadn’t been terrified. The Devil was wearing a red kaftan, and held a long, black cigarette holder in his left hand, a scotch on the rocks in the other. He was completely at ease, looked almost bored, in his surroundings.

“The sunlight will kill you, Joseph.” He took a swig from his drink. “And we need to talk.”

“What do you want from me?” Joseph found his voice surprisingly strong, in spite of his terror.

“To apologise mainly,” he said, vaguely waving his hands in the air, “I’m afraid I rather cuckolded you.”

“You’re the one Maria was sleeping with?” Joseph thought he might be sick.

“’Sleeping with’.” The Devil scoffed and took another swig, “We’re both men, Joseph: I was fucking her.”

“Oh God.”

The Devil raised an eyebrow, “Quite. But, you know, monogamy is an outmoded concept anyway– it was enforced so that everyone knew whose child was whose.” He took a puff from his cigarette and waved his hands some more as he pontificated, “But, as refrigeration spelt the doom of kosher, so too does the paternity test eschew the need for such antiquated etiquette. We live in an enlightened age– we can all fuck whoever we like.” He suddenly looked nauseated at what he’d said, “Sorry– whomever.”

A horrible thought occurred to Joseph, “Is- is the baby yours?”

The Devil nodded, but didn’t seem particularly excited by the prospect, “Yes, this is one case where aforementioned technology is, in fact, entirely superfluous. I know that that baby’s my progeny– I’m what you might call ‘super-virile’.” He put his drink down on one of the many piles of shirts and then flopped down theatrically onto the sofa, “Which brings me to the other reason I thought we should talk.”

He took a long drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke out of his nose, regarding Joseph languidly. Then, he pointed at one of the windows and lazily flicked a finger. The curtain sprang open and poured light onto Joseph, he shrieked as his skin began to blister and his eyeballs dry out. The Devil watched this with mild detachment for a few seconds and then flicked the curtain back into place.

Joseph collapsed to the floor, although the pain was already gone and his skin bore no sign of the recent trauma. The Devil yawned ostentatiously and then leant back on the sofa, crossing his legs. “I presume you’ve seen those absolutely tedious t-shirts that say ‘Life is an STD’; well, it turns out so is unlife.”

Joseph’s eyes widened, “I’m a vampire?”

The Devil’s nose wrinkled, “If you like. Personally, I feel that term is thrown around far too often. I’m something of a purist, you’ll find. I mean, taking Stoker’s text as the de facto bible, you don’t really meet the parameters.” He picked up his drink and swirled it a few times, “But you’re certainly not human.”

“Do I…drink blood?” Joseph put a hand to his stomach– it was growling at the thought.

The Devil rolled his eyes at this, “Yes, you ‘drink blood’,” here he mimicked Joseph’s voice and assumed a mocking, slack-jawed expression, “So does a mosquito, yet you don’t call it a creature of the night.” Joseph grimaced and The Devil said “You won’t be so squeamish when it gets to night time, trust me: you’ll be prowling the parks like any common reprobate.”

“Why- why did you do this?”

The Devil sniffed, “Well, I needed Maria for my Plan. And you were just the lucky loser who got to eat my sloppy seconds.”

“You’re disgusting.”

The Devil snorted, “I’m much more than that. I’m evil incarnate. And now,” Here he stood up and patted Joseph on the cheek, “You are too. Welcome to the counter culture.” He downed his drink and dropped the glass; it shattered on the floor.

“What am I meant to do?” Joseph asked, his voice quivering.

The Devil shrugged, “Whatever you want: kill yourself, join the Klan, start a blog, watch Glee. Why not? It’s not like you can be a good person anymore anyway.” He paused, “At least from an absolutist stand point. Obviously, a meta-ethical relativist will tell you that there’s no such thing as ‘good’ anyway. But I think they’d change their mind if they knew that heaven was real. Anyway, I absolutely must be going. Valedictions.”

He vanished, no burst of flame or crack of thunder, just a faint pop and the smell of cheap wine. Joseph collapsed onto the sofa where The Devil had been sitting a moment earlier and then went to light a cigarette. He watched the flame of his lighter for a while and remembered all the times Maria had told him that smoking would kill him and he’d quit if he really loved her.

Well, she could go to hell.

 

Rory Kelly