Touch me. Touch me like you didn't touch me last night.

You see, in one of the boxes that my grandfather left behind was a strange gun, rounded and very rusty. It weighs several pounds and has knobs and dials along the side. If you put your ear against it, you can hear it quietly humming, and on its side is a dark and cracking piece of masking tape, upon which is written “Disintegrator Gun: still dangerous.”

My grandfather worked in a granary since the day he turned twelve and didn’t learn to read until he was forty-five. According to my mother, he’d never been able to change a light bulb without blowing a fuse. He couldn’t have invented this, it’s too complex to be a toy, and it seems unlikely that a man who spent most of his life hip-deep in feed corn would have ever been in a situation to stumble upon something like this.

So where did it come from? I don’t know, but it’s sitting on my desk now. Every time I bring it close to my laptop, the LCD starts flowing and the fans start spinning faster. My cat’s hair stands on end when she gets too close. I set it next to a fountain pen which promptly started leaking ink out of its tip. If I hold it near my head, my fillings ache.

If I hold it in my hand, I feel like the most powerful man in the world.

It’s like a little boy’s dream come true, but I can’t bring myself to so much as touch the trigger. I thought of testing it in on a rock in the back yard, but what if it’s got a really wide beam, or punches a hole in the ground the size of an SUV? What if it explodes in my hand?

What if it does nothing?

So for now it sits on my desk, all but begging me to pick it up.

“Be a hero,” it whispers.

“Be a villain,” it suggests.

“Be whatever you want, so long as you use me to do it.”

I know that I’ll break down soon. I’ll use it on a tree or a wall, a car or a criminal, on a bank or on myself. But I’ll use it.

And I’ll never stop.

            “I’m King of the god-damned vampires!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. Everybody else in the restaurant lowered their heads, ate their manicotti and pretended they hadn’t heard him.

            “Do I need to fucking prove it?!” he continued, slamming his fist onto the table, making our basket of bread jump. “Because I will drink some fucking blood right now!”

            “Hey…there’s no tomorrow…” sang Alan under his breath. I elbowed him in the ribs and tried not to laugh.

            “Look,” I said, tugging on the shirt of a passing waiter. “He’s just having a bad night, man...a little too much to drink. He doesn’t normally do this. I’m really sorry.” If he cared, he didn’t show it, and just kept walking.

            “Jeff,” I said as I turned, “You already got us kicked out of Sushi Bastard this week, so can you tone it down a bit?”

            “Fuck Sushi Bastard!” he shouted. I did a quick survey of the room, checking for shifty, Yakuza-looking men, and finding none. “If I want to suck on the fish until they’re dried little chunks, it’s my prerogative!” Alan giggled again.

            “And if I want to eat the shabu-shabu meat without boiling it, that’s my right as a god-damned American!”

            “Jeff—“

            “And stop calling me Jeff! My name is Narzül, King of the motherfucking VAMPIRES.”

            At this point, a man with a hideous combover and an even worse tux made his way to our table. When he got there, he pulled a dusty bottle from under his arm.

            “Gentlemen. This is possibly the finest Chianti we have in our cellar. The owner would like to offer it to you, as well as your meals, entirely gratis, provided you leave the establishment immediately.”

            “Fuck you, fuck the owner, fuck—“

            “He said that if you shouted profanity again, I should inform you that if you haven’t left within three minutes of my offer, he shall be calling the priory and inviting a dozen of the friars down for free food, making sure they bring the one with the learning disorder who can bench-press a duplex. The owner hates giving away free food, and hates Catholics, but he hates a lack of basic decorum even more.”

            Nar…Jeff appeared stunned by the threat. He looked down at his plate, shoved an entire handful of tortellini into his mouth, and mumbled something indistinct under his breath as he turned to leave. Alan quickly followed, grabbing the bottle of Chianti. I addressed the maitre’d.

            “I’m really sorry about this, let me give you something for your troubles,” I said, trying to pass him two neatly-folded hundreds.

            “I would rather have a pox, Sir. The door is in front. It’s the swingy-thing your two friends just used.” I briefly wondered if he’d laugh while I pried his ribs up until they were sticking up from his sternum like a pair of wings. Then I thought about the monks and realized I had better things to do with my night than get my ass kicked.

           I caught up with Jeff and Alan as they made their way down the icy street, their breath not hanging in the air in clouds. Jeff was still trying to finish his poorly thought out mouthful of pasta and Alan was trying not to look particularly put out. He’d really liked eating at Giuseppe’s.

             “Mmthat is the prob…” Jeff paused and swallowed, “problem with our particular condition in this day and age. I mean-”

            “Dude,” I interjected, “don’t go blaming what just happened on prejudice or some shit.”

            “Well, in some ways it is because of prejudice. Remember the days when we could go into a restaurant, have a nice meal, knock back a few bottles of wine, drink a few pretty women, and leave everybody too frightened to tell the truth about what had happened?”

            “Yeah,” said Alan. “It was…oh, about two-hundred FUCKING YEARS AGO!”

            “Don’t you take that tone with your King!”

            “Then my King needs to stop living in the past! Look,” he shouted, pointing up at a nearby traffic light. There was a camera on each metal pole, ready to snap shots of speeders. “That’s why we can’t behave like we used to, man! I mean, the buses have cameras, the subways have cameras, every damn store has cameras, and even my cell phone has a camera on it! We live in new times, but you still think it’s 1650 and if you leave a bloodless corpse laying in a ditch, nobody’s going to notice! Goddamn it, Jeff, our lifestyle is dangerous now!”

            “I told you to stop calling me Jeff.”

            “Your name is Jeff.”

            “I changed it half a century ago and you know very well…”

            “Shut the HELL up, my King.” Alan spat with obvious contempt. He quickly realized his mistake and tried to play it off as sarcasm.

            It didn’t work, and Jeff grabbed Alan by the arm, throwing him half-a-block into the bed of a Dodge Ram. Jeff then leapt into the air and landed atop Alan, his fists raging, bits of flesh and bone soaring through the air in arcs and collecting on the road and sidewalk. I jogged to catch up, but not too quickly. He was a real bastard when he got melancholy. I heard Alan trying to speak, but Jeff tore off his jaw and began beating him with it.

            I nervously kept an eye out for the police when I heard a horrible crunching sound and the scream of tearing metal. Suddenly, they were no longer in the bed of the truck. Jeff was laughing and Alan…was, well, laughing as much as you can when you’ve no jaw and most of your head is gone.

            Jeff had  been so ferocious in his beating that he’d actually torn a massive hole in the bed of the truck, dropping both men to the road under the frame. I quickly got into the driver’s seat of a nearby Porsche, punched my hand through the ignition and started the engine by conducting the electricity myself. I smashed my head out the side window.

            “C’mon, you bastards, get in here and let’s get the hell outta here!”

            Jeff, still laughing and holding Alan’s jaw, pulled himself out of the hole and ran over, jumping in the passenger side. Alan barely managed to get himself up, shambled over to the car and tried to climb in, but his arms stopped working. Jeff grabbed him by the shirt.

            “We aren’t all going to fit comfortably in here!” I shouted. Jeff pulled Alan in, tore off both his legs, and threw them back onto the street.

            “They’ll be dust in about…” he looked at the clock on the CD player. “thirty minutes, man! Now, drive, motherfucker, drive!”

            “Hey, Narzül?”

            “Yeah?”

            “We gotta stop doing this.”

            He sighed and adjusted Alan’s torso on his lap. Alan gurgled something at him.

            “I know, man.”

benjamin