Outside Dick's Bar, the streetlights wore coronas of orange, and the glassphalt shimmered like sugar crystals on top of lemon meringue pie. My breath curled out steamy, but the warmth from inside Dick's still saturated my jacket, its fingers nestled around me like a cluster of liver worms.
Okay, bad image. But I was a little drunk.
My feet carried me toward the river automatically, but I wasn't remembering the route to Morgan's yet. It was just gravity doing its job.
Skateboarding around the city, I'd noticed the Hump, how the ground rises in the center of Manhattan and falls away toward the rivers, like the slippery back of a giant whale emerging from the harbor. A really giant whale: The slope is barely perceptible - you only feel it on a board or a bike, or if your stride is lubricated by seven or so Bahamalama-Dingdongs.
My feet had wheels, and I rolled toward the water effortlessly.
Soon I glimpsed the river at the end of the street, sparkling as it had that night. A walkway stretched along the water. By instinct, I turned north. It was a little tricky staying between the pedestrian lines, though. A few bikers and skaters whirred around me, leaving annoyed comments in their wake. I commented right back at them, my words a little slurred. Outside the warm company of Dick's Bar, my Bahamalama-Dingdongs had made me antisocial.
But my mood lifted when I saw the pier.
It stretched out into the water, as long as a football field. Mismatched beats from various boom boxes echoed across the water from it, and bright lights beamed down from high posts.
Was that the same pier Morgan and I had stood on that night?
There was one way to find out. I shambled to the end of the pier, trying to ignore kissing couples and a group of very cute roller-dancing girls, and pulled my trusty compass out. The needle steadied itself to magnetic north.
I was facing northwest, the exact reading I'd taken a year before.
I breathed in deeply, tasting ocean salt, green algae, and motor oil in the air, all familiar from that night. This had to be the place.
But what now?
I gazed out onto the river. On either side of me, the timbers of abandoned piers rose up from the water like rotting black teeth. More pieces of my memory were falling into place, like a blurry picture downloading in waves, gradually becoming clearer.
Then I saw the dark hulk of a building across the Hudson, its three giant maws open to the river. The Hoboken Ferry Terminal. Without knowing it, I'd had a glimpse of my future that night a year before.
My peep-strength eyes caught a flicker of lights in its second-story windows. Dr. Rat was still up there, probably with a dozen or so of her colleagues from Research and Development, studying the nesting habits of Sarah's brood. Weighing and measuring poisoned alpha rats and punks. Maybe looking for a rare "rat king" - a bunch of rats with tangled-up tails who travel in a pack all tied together, like dogs being walked by a professional dog walker, ten leashes in hand.
With Sarah gone, her brood would be disintegrating over the next few days, scattering into nearby alleys and sewers like runoff from an autumn storm. I wondered if the rats would miss her. Did they get something more than leftovers from their peeps? A sense of belonging?
The thought of all those orphaned creatures depressed me, and I turned back toward Manhattan.
My heart drunkenly skipped a beat.
Before me, just across the highway, a razor-thin high-rise stood.
Buildings get their personality from their windows, just like people express themselves with their eyes. This building had a schizophrenic look. Its lower floors were cluttered with tiny balconies, but along the top floor stretched floor-to-ceiling windows, wide open with surprise. I remembered Morgan pointing the building out to me, giggling and squeezing my hand...
"That's where I live!" she'd said, thus marking the exact moment when I had been absolutely positive I was going to get laid.
How the hell does anyone forget a moment like that? I wondered.
Shaking my head in amazement, I stumbled back up the pier.
The first trick was getting in.
Funny. I hadn't remotely remembered that Morgan lived in a luxury building: river views and duplex penthouses, a lobby encased in marble and brass, the uniformed doorman watching six TV monitors.
Give a boy the loss of his virginity and much else is forgotten.
I watched from across the street, hiding behind a cluster of newspaper boxes, waiting for just the right bunch of residents to follow through the door - my age or so, a little bit drunk, and enough of them for me to follow along unnoticed.
Of course, if I was really lucky I'd see Morgan herself. But what was I going to say to her? Hey, do you know you're carrying vampirism? What's up with that?
The minutes passed slowly, the night growing steadily colder. The wind roaring off the river stopped being invigorating and veered over into cruel. My Bahamalama-Dingdong buzz began to wear off, and soon my system started demanding more blood sugar. It occurred to me that the only solid food I'd had for dinner was seven frozen bananas, not enough for my voracious parasites.
Bad host. Hungry parasites can provoke crazy behavior.
Worst of all, I felt like I was being the stalker now, stuck between anathema and obsession.
Just after midnight, I spotted my ticket inside.
They were three girls and two guys, college-aged, dressed for a night out. They shouted jokes at one another, their voices still pitched for whatever loud bar they had spent the evening in.
I left my cover and started across the street, timing my move to reach the outer door just as they did.
They hardly noticed me, still arguing about what kind of pizza to order. "Lots of cheese. Hangover helper," one guy was saying. The others laughed and voted their way to a split ticket of two large - one mushroom and one pepperoni, both with extra cheese. Sounded pretty good to me, after all those drinks. As we approached the door, I tried to look interested in the conversation while hanging at the back of the pack.
Through the glass, the doorman looked up with a smile of weary and indulgent recognition, and the inner door buzzed as one of the women reached for its handle. Warm air rushed over us, and I was inside.
As we crossed the lobby toward the elevators together, the woman who'd opened the door glanced back at me. A questioning look troubled her expression. I returned her gaze blankly. With four friends around her, she shouldn't be so nervous about a stranger, but sometimes normal humans get a weird feeling from us predator types.
Of course, I was getting a weird feeling about her too.