52 Project #17: Therapy (Patreon)

The sky was dark and clouded, no stars in the sky, and a general impression of pale pink and orange overlaid on the gray and black, light pollution from the streetlights reflecting off the clouds. A pale, lanky man with light brown hair parked his car on the street and went to the door of one of the townhouses, climbing up a short flight of stairs. He pressed the doorbell. The sound of “Westminster Chimes” rang out inside.

Within a minute, a plump woman in her 30’s, with tan skin and thick black hair in a short wavy cut framing her face, opened the door. “Hello! Come in!” She stepped backward, allowing him to come through. “Would you like anything? Coffee, tea?”

“Some cold water if you have it,” he said, sitting down on the soft leather couch. There were magazines strewn all over the coffee table in front of him. He glanced briefly down at them, and then back up, as the woman bustled off to a door on the right of the room, went through it, and came back with a paper cup full of cold water.

“Shall we go back to my office?” the woman asked.

The pale man pulled out his phone and looked at the time. “I guess it’s appointment time, so might as well.”

He got up and followed her into her office. It was papered with certificates she’d earned as a therapist, and children’s drawings. Possibly her kids’, or possibly children who were patients. He’d never asked.

She sat down in a chair next to her desk, so there would be nothing between them once he sat down in the comfortable chair across from her desk… but he didn’t.

“I feel like I need to be more honest with you,” he said, wringing his hands nervously as he remained standing. “Like… I’ve tried to do this without telling you the whole truth, but I feel like you’re not going to be able to advise me about this unless you know at least the basics behind my issue.”

The therapist nodded. “I agree. You’re definitely not going to get as much out of therapy if you keep important information about your life to yourself, if it has a direct bearing on your issues.” She leaned forward slightly, her hands flat on her thighs, looking up at him. “If you’ve kept it secret this long, it must be something that you’re very anxious about. I hope you understand that this is a space without judgement. Whatever the secret you wanted to share with me, I’m not going to look down on you or think differently of you.”

He shook his head. “No, but you might have me thrown in an asylum for being out of my mind.”

She laughed slightly. “That’s… not exactly how it works anymore. Television and movies tend to be behind the times for dramatic purposes, but if you’re not an immediate threat to yourself or others, no one can commit you to a mental hospital against your will, no matter how… unusual the things you say are.”

“Oh! Well, no.” He sat down. “I’m not an immediate threat. To anyone. Not anymore, anyway.”

“Not anymore?” Her eyebrows went up. 

“Yes, well, that relates to what I wanted to tell you. You see… I’m a vampire.”

He paused, as if waiting for derision or disbelief. The therapist just nodded her head. “Mmm.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“It really doesn’t matter if I believe you or not. If you believe it, or if it’s a coping mechanism that helps you, that’s what’s important.”

He gripped the edges of the armchair tightly and leaned forward, as if pulling himself forward by the strength in his arms. “Okay, but I really need you to believe me.” Gently he let himself lean back, releasing the arms of the chair. “I kind of feel like the advice I’m going to get from you would be different if you think I’m just a crazy guy coping by pretending I’m a vampire versus I really am a vampire.”

The therapist took a deep breath. “Well, all right. You’re aware that your claim is… implausible on the face of it, so I imagine you had something in mind you wanted to say or do to convince me, right? Short of biting my neck, I really wouldn’t appreciate that.” She laughed.

“Oh, no, no. I don’t do that. I mean, not without consent.” He smiled awkwardly. “But, I figure, maybe you can ask me some questions? If you’re taking me seriously, then you must be curious.”

She looked for a moment as if she wanted to sigh, but the moment passed. “All right, if it means something to you. You can tell me, um…” A moment of hesitation. “Okay. You asked for the Wednesday seven pm appointment slot when you first came to see me, and you’ve been doing that ever since. But when you started, it was still daylight out at seven pm. I understand that it’s dark at seven now, but how did you walk out in daylight when you started in August if you’re a vampire?”

“Well, we don’t really burst into flame in the sunlight like the stories say.”

“I assume you don’t sparkle, either?” she said dryly.

He chuckled. “No, of course not. Although I actually thought that was creative of her. More original than the tired old ‘we burst into flame.’ Being up when the sun is up plays hell with our immune system – normally we heal instantly and we can’t get human diseases, but if we’re awake when the sun is out, we can actually get sick and we don’t heal if we’re injured. So we try to spend that time sleeping if we can. Also, we’re very, very sensitive to ultraviolet light – I’ll get a sunburn from ten minutes in full day sunlight, and radiation poisoning within half an hour – but we don’t burst into flames.” 

“But it’s bad for you.”

“I’m sure that you remember when I first started seeing you, I used to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses and a long-sleeved shirt? I also had a megaton of sunscreen slathered on, but you couldn’t see that.”

“I do recall smelling it, but it was summertime. I assumed anyone as pale as you might be wearing sunscreen.” She leaned forward. “Is that also a vampire thing? Being pale?”

“Well, once you become a vampire, you’ve got the melanin you’ve got – you’ll never make any more – but if you were dark-skinned in life, you’ll still be dark. What vampires don’t have all the time that makes those of us who started out with not much melanin look especially pale is that if we haven’t fed recently, there isn’t much blood in our skin.” He lifted his pale white arm, as if to show her. “So white people look white rather than pink or ruddy, and black people look kind of… there’s like a greyish tone if they haven’t fed recently.”

“Tell me about feeding. You said you aren’t a threat to anyone anymore. Does that mean that at some point you used to kill people to drink their blood?”

“No, no. Nobody does that. I mean, when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, there were probably vampires who did that because society paid so little attention back then when poor people died, but the entire time I’ve been a vampire, killing humans has been absolutely illegal. Verboten. You do it, and other vampires will come after you and kill you. Because dead people produce investigations. Even dead homeless people or dead hookers, if there’s enough of them. And that’s the last thing vampires can afford to have. So no, we just drink about a blood donation’s worth or less. People may be a little woozy afterward.”

“But how is it that they don’t remember being attacked by a vampire? Or do all of you require consent, and does that mean there are a lot of people who know about vampires?”

He shook his head. “No. The consent thing… that’s mostly new. Since the 1970’s, really. And a lot of vampires don’t do it. Like my father. He’s… well, he’s a piece of work, but you know that. You remember I told you about how he not only disagreed with my lifestyle, but he says that I’m doing it to deliberately embarrass him and make him look bad?”

“I remember.”

“I bet you thought I was talking about being gay.”

“You’ve mentioned that you’re polyamorous. I actually thought you were talking about that.”

“I guess that makes sense, but no, it’s the consent thing. My polycule know I’m a vampire. I’m closer to my girlfriend Mandy than the other two, she’s the one I live with, but they all let me drink from them so it’s not a heavy burden on any one person.” His fists clench slightly. “And Dad acts like the only proper way to be a vampire is to go attack unsuspecting people in bars, and he thinks that the fact that I have a sense of morality is something I’m doing deliberately to upset and humiliate him.” 

“So how is it that vampires like him can attack people and no one remembers being attacked by a vampire? Wouldn’t you remember being bitten on the neck? You’d have fang marks?”

“Well, to start with, we don’t actually – like, yes, we have fangs –” he showed his – “but that’s not what we’re breaking the skin with. There’s a retractable needle-like point inside the fang that we can draw blood through – like a mosquito’s stinger, though bigger than that. When we bite someone, we inject a drug that causes euphoria and also disrupts their memory, so the target feels really good, the initial pain washes out immediately, and they don’t remember anything about it. If we keep biting the same human over and over, the memory disruption effect wears off and they start remembering – which is why it’s important to either get consent, or always be feeding from different humans. Then when we’re done, the wounds – which are very, very small, not like fang bites – heal up right away. I’m not sure why; something about whatever makes us vampires heal quickly, I think.”

“Hmm.” She wrote something down on her pad. “All right. Your story seems fairly internally consistent, however unlikely the concept of real vampires sounds, so let’s say for the sake of argument that I believe you. It sounds as if you aren’t a danger to others, as you said, and I don’t see any reason not to treat you as if you’re a vampire regardless of what I may believe.”

“You’re saying you don’t believe me, but you’re willing to act like you do.”

She smiled. “Let’s say I’m keeping an open mind. I find it hard to believe in something like vampires, but your explanations seem pretty consistent. Now, you’ve been talking about your father a lot, and you’re saying now that he’s a vampire. Is he an adopted father, or does being a vampire run in families, or…?”

“Oh. No. He’s my vampire father, not one of my biological parents. He made me into a vampire.”

“The way you talk about him, I really thought he had raised you from childhood. It’s a little unusual for an adult to make a connection to another adult as a parental figure so strongly, even when the other adult is—”

“A narcissistic bag of dicks?”

“I was going to say, someone they really don’t get along with.”

“You’re the one who told me my dad is a narcissist.”

“I’m not qualified to diagnose your dad without meeting him and talking with him. I said he sounds like he might be a narcissist, based on what you’ve told me about him.” She leaned forward slightly. “But everything you’ve said to me made it sound like your emotional connection was forged in childhood. Plenty of people fall into the orbit of someone abusive in adult life, but it’s usually not quite the same as when that person was their parent in their childhood days. So, does being turned into a vampire make you mentally a child for a while, or is something else at work here? Or am I totally off base?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I can see why that would seem weird.” Gazing out the window into the night sky – a window that clearly showed his reflection, like most windows looking out from a lighted place to a dim one -- he went on. “The thing that none of the stories get right is that being a vampire is about love. Family. Connections. In stories, vampires are in thrall to the vampire that created them and have to obey, but they can hate him. It doesn’t work like that in real life. When you see another vampire, you feel an immediate sense of connection and belonging, even if you don’t know them. Like if you’re an expatriate, and you hear someone with an American accent. You think ‘that’s one of my people’ and you feel good.”

“I think that would depend on the reason you’re an expatriate, but I see the analogy you’re making.”

“If the vampire is, uh, ‘related’ to you – what we call ‘in the same lineage’ – you feel even more strongly. You love them. Vampires younger than you in the lineage – that has nothing to do with age per se, but how long they’ve been a vampire and what generation they’re from – you want to protect them and guide them and teach them. Vampires older than you in the lineage, you automatically look up to and respect, and you want to follow them and learn from them. Vampires you don’t know, or approximately where you are, or weird combos – like they are from an earlier generation but they were made a vampire after you – they feel like brothers and sisters. Or at least cousins. You may not get along with them perfectly, you might have conflicts, but at the end of the night you stand up for each other and you help each other out.”

“And this is automatic? All vampires feel this way?”

He sighed. “I don’t know if my father feels this way. I don’t know if he loves me and he just is an overbearing control freak and he wants me to be a vampire the way he’s a vampire and he doesn’t understand anything else… or if he just doesn’t care at all, and all I am to him is something to show off to other vampires and say ‘Look, look, I’ve got a son, he’s great’, and he doesn’t get to do that if he doesn’t approve of what I’m doing with my life.”

“Well, if he’s a narcissist, then both are probably true at the same time. Narcissists can love their children, but they love them primarily as objects that they own that are valuable, not as people per se. They’re not alone in that; many people throughout history who were not narcissists were raised to believe that was the correct way to think about their children. How old is your father, and what’s his background?”

“Do you mean, what does he do for a living, or…?”

“I mean, if he’s a vampire, perhaps he’s a 16th century former aristocrat who was raised to believe that children exist to reflect well on the parent, and he has no concept of modern ideas about parental love. Or, perhaps he’s from the 19th century but he was raised in a strict religious background where authoritarian parenting was the norm and there’s no concept that children can or should have lives of their own outside what their parents want for them. If he’s from a background like that, perhaps he’s not a narcissist.”

“Yeah, but… he lies to me about what he said, or what I said, sometimes about things that are really serious. I never told you the whole reason I started coming to therapy, because it doesn’t make sense if you don’t know I’m a vampire.”

“If he lies to you all the time, then he’s definitely abusive. I’m not sure it matters whether he’s an abuser because he’s a narcissist or he’s an abuser for some other reason; the important thing is the abuse, and how you can cope with it as an adult living on your own who doesn’t actually depend on your father for survival anymore.”

“I know, but… I want to know if he can change.” He shrugs helplessly. “He’s my dad. I want him to be proud of me and approve of me. But he did something I’m not sure I can forgive, and he’s acting like it was no big deal and we were both wrong, and we were not. It was absolutely all him.”

“What did he do?”

He sighed. “I took Mandy to meet him. I’d explained to him about the polycule, about how Mandy and our other two partners give me all the blood I need, and we had a whole fight about it because apparently, that’s not how real vampires do it and I’m treating humans like they’re real people and even calling one of them my girlfriend and I’m doing it just to humiliate him and make him look bad in front of the other older vampires… but we’d gotten over that, we were getting along okay. So I asked him if I could bring Mandy over to meet him, because that’s what you do when you’re serious about someone, right? You invite them to meet your family.”

“Did he agree?”

“Yes, absolutely, he said that would be fine. Then I took her over there and while I was in another room having a conversation with my brother… he tried to bite her. I mean he did bite her. But she’s been bitten by me enough that the memory thing has worn off, so she knew exactly what was happening, and she screamed, and I had to throw him off her. And then he…” His fists clenched again. “He had the fucking nerve to say I had given him permission to do that, that I’d said I was bringing him a gift for dinner and he had every right to assume it was her and how rude could I possibly be to go back on that, and then his story mutated so I’d specifically told him he could bite Mandy – I mean, I’d never said I was bringing him a gift, either, but I could have bought, what if I did and he misunderstood, but he doubled down on it. Insisted I’d specifically said I was bringing him a human as a gift and he was motherfucking offended that I’d pull a bait and switch like that.”

The therapist’s eyes were wide. “That’s – that’s horrible.”

“I know, right?” He shook his head. “I nearly lost Mandy that day. She believed him at first. I had to remind her of all the times I’d told her about where my father had tried to gaslight me before she realized it was a fucking lie, every bit of it, and I’d never, ever, ever do something like that to her. But I’m never letting my father anywhere near her ever again.”

“Of course not! I can absolutely understand why you would decide that, and I think that’s the only appropriate action you can take. I’m assuming you can’t call the police on your father for assaulting your girlfriend because he’s a vampire, and you can’t risk the police finding that out?”

“Well, that and I don’t want my father to kill a bunch of cops, and I don’t want him to be killed, and he’ll just pull a Jedi Mind Trick on them anyway. You know. ‘Looook into my eyes. I am not the vampire you’re looking for. Go back to the precinct and have a donut.’”

“So you can do that?”

He nodded. “It doesn’t work on blind people or people wearing dark sunglasses or mirrorshades. We have to be able to see into their eyes and they have to be able to see into ours.”

“And your father’s behavior that day is why you decided to go into therapy?”

“Yeah, I mean, I felt really bad about it. I don’t feel guilty that I stopped him from biting her, but… I felt guilty that he did that in the first place, like I could have known he was going to do that and I could have stopped him. You’ve really helped me wrap my head around the idea that I’m not responsible for what he does and that he’s a narcissistic, abusive, gaslighting bag of dicks and I should cut ties with him… but…”

“But?” she prompted.

“Well… I love him. I think he loves me in some twisted up way. I figured, I could still talk to him on the phone and online, as long as I don’t let Mandy know and I never let him go anywhere near her or any other humans I care about.”

“So you’re talking to your father again?”

“Yeah. I haven’t been able to get anywhere with making him understand why what he did was so awful, but… he’s my dad. And he’s something like 300 years old; he’s not going to change. So I just don’t bring it up anymore.”

“Forgiving your father might be a healthy part of the process, for you, but I’m not sure it’s wise to resume communications with him.”

“I’m going to be closing on a house,” he said. “In late January.”

If the therapist was confused by the sudden change of subject, she didn’t reveal it. “You mentioned that. At our last session, I think. Or the one before that. Congratulations!”

“Owning a house is really important to vampires. Because if you can’t be sure of covering your tracks – if there’s any chance humans you can’t trust might find out and come for you – you can’t live in a house you own. You have to live in places where you can pack up and leave town in a big hurry. But we really crave putting down roots and having a home that belongs to us. Plus, if it’s your own house, you can do things like put vinyl siding over all the windows on one side rather than having to rely on blackout curtains. So it’s this big coming of age thing. Proves that you can be considered an adult vampire.”

“I just realized that if you’re a vampire, I have no idea how old you are.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m actually in my… 60’s? 70’s? Not really keeping track. I was born in the 50’s and got turned when I was 25.”

“I would have guessed you to be around 30 or so.”

“There’s not a lot of physical difference between a 25 year old and a 30 year old – a lot of it is about the confidence you carry yourself with, your apparent resources, the way you dress, et cetera. Vampires usually look older than they did when they were turned, if they were turned young, because we are older and our life experience comes through in our body language. But yeah, I still get carded at some bars.” He laughed.

“So this house is a really big deal for you.”

“Right. And our family always does a big thing at Christmas. Well, we’re technically not celebrating Christmas – too many old vampires bought the party line that Christianity can harm us, so it’s secular Christmas. A celebration of the longest night in the year. So we have our tree, and our tinsel, and presents, and whatnot, just none of like the Nativity stuff or anything relating to Baby Jesus or whatever.”

“This is at your father’s house?”

“No, my grandfather. He came to America in the 1600’s, got farmland out in Pennsylvania, and now he’s got basically a mansion out there. Every year I’ve been a vampire, the family gets together out there once a year for the winter solstice celebration. Vampires don’t generally travel much because if you can’t get there within the night hours, you have to ship yourself in a box and that’s never pleasant, but we’ve got a lot more flexibility in wintertime.”

“And you want to go, but your father will also be there.”

“Yeah.” He nodded rapidly. “I made the mistake of telling him I was buying a house – I just, I really wanted him to be happy for me. And now he keeps asking if he can come see it. And I’m afraid that if I go see him, he’s going to pressure me into inviting him, and the rest of the family will back him up because they don’t know about the thing with him biting Mandy and half of them wouldn’t care anyway, and then he could show up at my house anytime and if I’m away but Mandy’s there…”

“Is there a reason he can’t do that anyway?”

“Yeah. The invitation thing? It works. I don’t know why, but if you try to go into a private home or other private place that you weren’t invited into, you feel a wave of such horrible embarrassment and feeling out of place and like everyone’s going to laugh at you or yell at you if you go all the way in. Some of us manage to overcome it and go in anyway, but my dad is very sensitive to embarrassment, so he definitely could not.”

The therapist takes a deep breath. “Well, normally, I wouldn’t tell you what you should do. I would try to lead you to it for yourself. But you’re facing an entirely plausible threat to your girlfriend’s life here. And if you don’t think you can stand up to your father if you’re in a room with him, and that he’s going to demand to be invited and then he’ll be free to attack her if you leave her alone… I think there’s really only one possible course of action here. Unless you can be absolutely sure that your father can’t convince you to let him into your house – is there a way to undo it? Can you simply uninvite him?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Then I think that if there’s any doubt in your mind whatsoever that you can stand up to your father, you need to not go. Skip Christmas. Reach out to whichever family members you can reach on social media, and wish them a… happy solstice.”

“They’ll want to know why. And most of them will take his side.”

“You mentioned having a brother. He was there, right?”

“Yes. He saw what happened, but… he believes in me, but he still lives with my father. He’s not going to stand up against the rest of the family for my sake.”

“Because he still lives with your father, so he’d be afraid of retribution? Or because he’s the kind of person who won’t stand up for himself, and that’s why he hasn’t moved out?”

“Both.”

She put her hand to her chin. “Hmm. I’m going to presume that most of your family were human before they were vampires, correct?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t change how they think about humans.”

“No, no, that’s not what I’m thinking. You mentioned that your bite causes pleasure, and that your polycule all feed you. Can I assume that this is a sexual experience for them?”

He didn’t turn red, but he smiled as if he was embarrassed. “Um, yeah. We generally do it during sex, yes.”

“And is that normal for vampires?”

“Kind of. Yeah, if you have a consenting human to feed on, they usually interpret it as sexual even if you don’t, and those of us who are younger generally see it that way too.”

“Human beings tend to be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of cheating in a relationship, and in the past, moreso than now, people thought of women as men’s property. I’m imagining how someone from 300 years ago would have thought of a man who tried to seduce his son’s wife… it’s not a pretty image.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at…”

“Well, if you approach this to your family from the perspective of ‘my father violated my human girlfriend’s rights’, I’m sure that their lack of interest in humans having rights would lead them to take his side. But if you present it as ‘my father tried to steal something that is mine and then lied and claimed I’d offered it, but I would never offer it to my father because that’s too close to incest and it’s disgusting…’ would that make any impression on them?”

“Huh.” He tilted his head back, eyes narrowed, lost in thought. “I never really thought of presenting it that way… that makes sense, and vampires can be really territorial. And yeah, the idea of sharing a sexual experience with your dad would bother most of them, I think.”

“So. Can you reach out to family members privately on social media, explain the situation that way? Tell them you don’t want family drama, but you can’t be in the same room as your father after he did that, so you won’t be able to attend this year’s solstice celebration. Make your apologies and maybe make arrangements to visit them in person, if you want to spend time with them?”

“I could do that.”

“At least some of them are likely to take the information back to your father, so you need to approach as many as you can, as quickly as you can, to get your side of the story to them before he’s able to spin it. If what you’ve told me about him is all true, I strongly suspect he’ll lie to them… but I also suspect that most of them have been lied to by him in the past. If you’ve been generally honest with them, they may be more likely to believe you.”

He shook his head. “I’m always honest with them, but my dad has been claiming that I’m the one who’s lying, my entire vampire life. I don’t know to what extent any of them believe that or not, but I wouldn’t rely on them thinking I’m honest. But if I start with the ones I’m closest to, maybe they’ll believe me and then when the others question it, they’ll back me up.”

“That sounds like a good way to handle it.” She glanced at her watch. “We’re just about out of time for today’s session. This has been a lot of heavy material today. I’m glad you were willing to share this whole vampire identity thing with me.”

“Thanks. I was afraid you’d think I was crazy.”

She smiled. “I’m a therapist. I’m here to treat people with mental problems, so by definition, many of my patients actually are crazy. It’s fine. People with delusions need help with navigating interpersonal issues and dealing with depression and abusive family members, too. We don’t require them to stop having delusions before we help them with any of that.”

“Do you think I’m delusional?”

“I think it doesn’t matter what I think. If you’re a vampire or if you’re a person who thinks he’s a vampire, it’s the same either way; you’re still having problems with your relationship with your father.” She turned to her PC, which had been asleep throughout the session. “Do you want to do the same time, two weeks from now?”

“No, too close to Christmas. Can we do a little earlier?”

“Sure. How does the Thursday before that sound? I have my 7 pm slot open then.”

“Sounds great. Thanks.” He picked up his coat, shrugged it on, and left. 

The therapist glanced at her notes for the next session. The blogger who was convinced that there was a secret government conspiracy to hide the existence of vampires while also trying to hunt them down and kill them.

“Well,” she murmured to herself. “I don’t know how I ended up being the go-to therapist for people who believe in vampires, but now I have to wonder. Am I dealing with some kind of massive shared delusion that is somehow affecting multiple people who don’t know each other… or are any of either of their stories actually true?”

She sighed, pressing lightly on the power button to put the computer to sleep for the session. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, and I can’t exactly go demanding proof from either of them, but… damn. If vampires turn out to be real… I know it’s ridiculous, but what else might be real, if they’re both telling the truth?”