The Karma Chameleon

Karma, as they say, is a bitch. Usually this is said right after some eerily coincidental occurrence, such as the slumlord who eventually ends up homeless, or the player whose wife (who he really, really loved) leaves him for his (clearly not) best friend. When this same woman is left by the ex best friend for her (now) ex-best friend, well, that's karma too, apparently. These are but prosaic examples, but you get the idea. The Law of Karma is a constant: what you give is what you receive. Typically the Law is invoked on the negative side, because, let's face it, most of us are bad. Literature and the movies love Bad Karma, but Good Karma, frankly, doesn't really sell tickets. We all want to see the bastard get what he deserves, and what he deserves, ideally, is pretty painful. (This, of course, doesn't help our own karma.)

Of course, there are some loopholes in the Law. How many rich people are good and sweet? Damn few, that's how many. Life is filled with rich dicks who screw over countless people, have no shame, and still live long and happy lives. Perhaps they're secretly miserable, or their kids turn out to be junkies, but I'd call that a push, at best. And life is also filled with genuinely good people who work selflessly for others and then die of ass cancer at 42. Innocent children who haven't even had time to do any bad shit die in horrible ways, every day. This is explained by some as the influence of their past life, or, perversely, as a good thing--they are clearly in some Heaven right now, enjoying an endless parade of delicious milkshakes with God. Religion is rife with karmic teachings, in various guises (what is "The Golden Rule" other than the "Law of Karma" writ with consequences?), and as can be expected there are those who buy it hook, line, and sinker (the devout), those who struggle with the concept but grudgingly think it has merit (the agnostics), and those who reject it all as a bunch of malarkey and find rational explanations for every instance of perceived divine intervention (the atheists). Those who actually live by the Law, be they atheist, devout, or somewhere inbetween, are an exceedingly rare breed (the Saints), which may be why most of us are doomed to die of cancer in some form or another. There's a teleological lesson in here somewhere (not to mention an epidemiological study), but I'll leave that for finer minds.

My small, small point, is that we've all heard of karma, and feared its repercussions, while not necessarily embracing the positive flip side (remember if you're good...ah the hell with it...nobody's good). I remember walking back from the beach at night with some friends when one said, apropos of nothing as far as I can remember, "I *totally* believe in karma!" A nanosecond later, I stubbed the shit out of my toe. At that moment, it felt like a metaphorical poke in the eye from some Universal Body, not enough to kill me, of course, but enough to get my attention. Somebody with a capital S was watching, and in time, I'd be forced to pay for my deficit of love, compassion, humility, selflessness, etc.

In yogic teachings, karma is a particularly tricky beast, because it has looooong incubation period. You must do good things for ages before seeing positive results, and you may not see the negative results of your unenlightened behavior until way down the line. Which, presumably makes it even harsher if you've been an asshole for years, enjoyed success, and then have it stripped away from you right when you've given a ton of cash to some orphanage. WTF! you scream as the ex cleans out your cupboard. I've been good! Well, no, sorry, you haven't. I was once a pretty devout yogi, but I always struggled with that conceit, feeling it was a bit of a fudge, a handy separation of action from consequence that was used to cover up obvious examples of people getting away with evil deeds. No doubt my analysis needs work, as I'm sure there are subtleties I just don't understand, but I think I reflect the general sentiment that we all expect a shorter trajectory between cause and effect, sin and punishment. I will say that my life was a lot "better" when I was doing yoga daily, but I can also explain that easily in rational terms, rather than couching the whole thing in some sutra. But, as evidenced above, I'm far from enlightened, and I'm not even going to broach the topic of "manifestation." Some other time, perhaps.

So anyway, the example of karma that sparked this post: The other day, one of my good buddies, an absolute stand up guy who doesn't talk shit, always helps out, and leads what I would consider to be an upstanding life, had his jetski ripped off. (Note to the cynics who say, "Aha, see! That's the problem right there! He had a fucking jetski!!--you probably drive cars, fly in planes, pollute and eat processed food. So stop being self-righteous. Every now and then a jetski is a great tool, particularly for say, tow in surfing. And it's a four stroke. So there.) As anybody who's been ripped off knows, the loss of the item is a drag, but the loss of your sense of security is the thing that really rattles your cage. Some motherfucker came in and stole from me! Somebody I trust probably helped them do it! It is witching hour in the dark night of the soul when you start thinking like that.

This being a tiny town, there are only so many thieves, although proportionally it feels pretty high at times. Anyway, a big job like that, breaking into a bodega, hauling off heavy equipment...really there was only one guy who leapt out as the suspect, a guy named Minor. Minor was a little fuck who has ripped off nearly everybody with anything to steal in this area. He worked as a mechanic in a town a few hours north, and he also had an outpost here where he would come down to fix things occasionally, and then usually depart quickly with something he'd fixed on the previous visit. He wasn't even a very good mechanic, so basically he stole from you twice.

I had a sweet old green Toyota Land Cruiser truck that I bought years ago with the idea that it could be a work truck on the farm, but it proved to be too fragile for that sort of effort and repeatedly broke down. I decided to sell it, and put it out by the road, although just inside my gate, with a "Se Vende" sign on it. I was cautioned that this was a dumb move. "Somebody's going to take it," said my cuidador. "How can they take it?" I asked. "It doesn't run." My logic notwithstanding, somebody did, in fact, take the truck, or at least many of its vital organs. Transmission, battery, radiator, the fucking windshield wipers...a host of things disappeared in the night, and there was evidence that they were coming back to take more (various bolts had been loosened, but I guess after hours of disassembly they ran out of time). So, I dragged the truck to a more secure location and was duly informed that it was Minor who was to blame. My thoughts ran to murder, naturally, but instead I went to the cops, and they did exactly squat. Basically, I was told everybody knows he's the thief, but nobody catches him red handed or with the stolen goods, so he never gets punished. I toyed with the idea of retribution, but eventually wrote it off as just another example of the Gringo Tax (cf. some future post) that's levied on every expat down here in one form or another. The price of paradise. Let it go. Breathe. Be a yogi about it. Fine. Well, about a week ago somebody came back and stole my turn signals (!!), which was right around the time my boy's jetski went missing. This time I was going to get some satisfaction, so I started making calls. Or rather, I asked my cuidador who I should have listened to the first time. He said he would make some calls.

Today, I found out that the jetski (and likely my turn signals) showed up in the very same town ol' Minor had his shop in, Quepos. "Well," I frothed, interrupting Carlos, "I'm going to get that bastard now!" But there was more to the story: Apparently Minor had taken the jetski up there to sell, but it was broken. I knew this to be true, as does anybody who owns anything that floats and has a motor. The shit is always broken. Minor, having secured a buyer, set about fixing the ski, and then took it for a test drive to prove its capabilities. As it so happens, the swell lately has been kick ass, really solid. Quepos has a port that is largely protected, but Minor decided to hit a little open water. Hell, he was probably enjoying himself. And that's when karma, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, struck with a vengeance. A wave lifted the ski and banged it against Minor's pea brain. The impact likely killed him, but just for good measure, he drowned as well. I was incredulous, and dubious. "He's really dead? Minor? Dead?" (Ahogarse is one of those Spanish words that, as a surfer, I don't like to focus on, so when Carlos told me that Minor "ahogó"--he drowned-- I fumbled for a bit before understanding it.)

Now, if I was, or ever had been, a good yogi, I would have felt something akin to sadness. We are all equal beings, and the only reason violence exists is because we have violence in our hearts. Think of his family, particularly the five kids by five different women that Minor (a major player, obviously) had, and the pain they were feeling. Think of his mother. Think of the circumstances that had driven him to a life of crime. So many mitigating circumstances, certainly. So many reasons to show compassion.

But I can't. All I can do is smile. He got what he deserved. As, I'm sure, will I.

The Road to Recovery, Part I

In the winching game, they call it "recovery," the act of getting a vehicle unstuck. Now, most people I know who drive big wheeled 4x4s have a winch that is glistening with disuse. It sits there on a big bull bar and speaks to potential unfulfilled. All show, no go, as my old wrench used to say, disparagingly. Here in the jungle, a winch is something altogether different. It's a damn useful tool. Even so, I'd gone a long time before using it, mainly because I don't drive like an idiot and I'm not exactly itching to offer assistance to those who do.

The other day (well, several months back), things changed. I was going to a friend's wedding up in the hills/mountains of central Costa, tooling along the crap road that promised to be the last before arriving, when I came upon a group of girls standing beside a Toyota Yaris that was well and truly hung up in a ditch. As the light was fading, I offered the girls a ride (my, how gallant) to the wedding site, and told them we'd deal with it in the morning. After a night of booze and music, I awoke on the ground, covered in leaves, with a dim and grudging memory of the task at hand. After fashioning a tightener from a rather limited list of essential ingredients and firing up a spiritual that one of the stranded girls had brought, I signaled it was time to do the deed: Winch out the wenches.

We drove the half click back to their car, silently, in contemplation of the rigors ahead. We got there and it looked worse than before. They had really got it stuck.

--Why a Yaris? I asked. I mean, it's a city car, a freaking sedan, and here we are in the mountains. Did they not have a 4runner or something?

---We didn't think we'd need it, and it would have been twice the cash!

Good answer. Plus, the groom had lied about the road. Or rather, it was a good road compared to the ones he was used to, so really he wasn't lying, just caught in a bout of relativism. I looked again at the stranded vehicle.

--Please tell me you guys swerved out of the way because some bunny jumped in front of you, because otherwise I can't figure out why the hell you got so far over to the left.

Lots of embarrassed stares at the ground. OK, I'm not going to press the issue. Just get them out of there, and then I can go about making a parrilla to cook the 100lbs of meat I brought up as a wedding present and that I'd been aging for 3 weeks especially for this moment. My first time doing that, and I had a gnawing fear that there might be hell to pay, as in it would taste like ass, or worse, I'd give the crowd food poisoning. I decided I'd be very happy if nobody died on account of my meat/gift.

I got the car into position. Ideally, I would have pulled it out from the front, up the gentle slope of the ditch and back onto the road. That would have been simple. In the recovery game, though, things are rarely simple. To wit: there was no tow point/hook to be found up front. Actually, there was a little hole designed so one could screw in a tow hook and then use that for exactly this situation, but, in their infinite wisdom, the good rent-a-car people had neglected to include the hook with the car. We checked every damn Yaris at the wedding (and there were quite a few) and none of them had hooks. I imagined some desk jockey making that decision: well, we told them not to go offroad, so if they do, fuck 'em. Muy amable, Señor. So, it had to be from behind, and worse, from below as well, with the looming danger being that there was an even deeper ditch, around 3m or so, ready to swallow the car entirely and leave recovery by helicopter as the only viable option. The gauntlet was thrown: get these ladies out and be a hero, or get them into deeper trouble and look like an ass with expensive toys that you clearly didn't know how to use. Tests such as these define the man. Right, here we go.

A winch is a simple thing: a spool of steel cable with a beefy hook at the terminus, powered by (in this case) a 9.5hp motor. It can only do two things, pull in or reel out, a binary relationship mandated by the thankfully very long lead wire and controller attachment. A simple toggle switch that goes up for out, and down for in. I was parked 10m behind and below, and had attached to a bit of frame on the right side of the Yaris that I felt wouldn't peel away under pressure. Slowly, I reeled in the wire until there was some tension. Stood way, way off to the right, appropriately concerned with any possible break in the wire that would send it screaming at my head. With visions of my imminent decapitation looming, I got semi-protected behind a thin tree and started to winch in earnest. The car pulled back and there was the awful sound of stone on metal as it ground over the berm. Still, we were looking good, even though all 4 wheels were now off the ground, a classic high side pin. The only other male around, who we'll call David because that's his name, got in the car and found reverse. The Yaris is a front wheeled little bitch, so the tires were spinning and not much was happening except it tilting more and more to the left, ie. the front end was about to ram the stone embankment they had narrowly missed before. I started calculating damages and wondered at the extent of their insurance. OK, fuck. Start over. Reposition my rig, find a new tow point, build up a purchase for the front tires, stones, boards, branches, and get some people pushing. By now a taxi that was trying to leave the wedding was forced to stop and the diminutive driver rushed over to offer his assistance/opinions. I told him to get behind the wheel and go easy at first on the gas, then hammer it once he got some traction. David was pushing from up front. Another partygoer, a rather intense Israeli probably fresh off some secret commando shit, showed up and immediately decided we had no clue, so he got up on the trunk and started bouncing to push weight to the rear. I winched in the line of fire. The wenches stood off to the side, obviously bummed that this had turned into such a production.

The car moved, tracking a straighter line but still flirting in earnest with the dropoff into sure destruction. I couldn't get a better angle, so if we didn't get those wheels to grip, I'd basically have pulled their car into a total disaster. David groaned, the Israeli bounced, and then the front wheels caught. It was right then that I thought, fuck, David is in the wrong spot, but before I could warn him--ding! a rock we'd placed under the left front wheel spit out and nailed him on the knee. He collapsed in pain as the car surged back, cresting the berm to relative safety and freedom. Car recovered, we checked our fallen compatriot. I'm sure it hurt like hell, but there was nothing broken, other than some skin. The girls comforted him. I'm pretty sure it was worth it.

We were all sweaty and adrenaline charged, and pretty satisfied with our utility and chivalry. The Israeli sort of rolled his eyes at our high fives, like if there wasn't anybody being hauled to safety under sniper fire then really, nothing much was happening, and moved on. We left the car locked and pointed the only way it should ever go, out, and went back to the wedding for a much needed beer or three. How nice the beer tasted after a hard morning of winching! A proper reward.

The rest of the day was a blur of activity. Went to town gathering supplies to make a grill. 100 pounds plus of meat, remember, and even though duly advised of this, there was no grill on premises. Fine. We'd buy one. But, nobody sells that kind of grill in the sticks of Costa. Fine, we'd build one. Rebar and cinderblocks placed around a deep pit filled with wood. Some crazy man, a wiry strip of muscle and hair, surveys the mass of beef and tells me the only way to do it is with an earthen oven. I don't know what the hell that is, but I trust the maniacal gleam in his eye. OK, let's do. We get the fire blazing. Meat goes on top of the makeshift grill and banana leaves cover the meat. On top of that, cardboard boxes torn into flat pieces. On top of that, a mountain of mud, the crazy man tossing it on with his bare hands. One guest, a doughy, big guy from MN, is helping out when his wife comes up to ask what the hell he's doing, exactly. Apparently the wedding is about to start, she's sunburned, and peeved because one of her cousins or sisters or something has fallen ill. "My family is getting sick helping out other people!!" she bleats. He bows his head and follows her to the ceremony. This is sort of an ironic, cautionary tale against marriage and the dangers of emasculation, so we naturally ignore it and keep building our oven. A stick pokes in the holes to allow oxygen to feed the fire. The whole thing smolders satisfactorily. "OK. That's it! Now we just have to wait 4 hours. Maybe more." Alrighty then. Let's watch these guys get hitched! The bride is beautiful and the groom is witty. It's a short, sweet ceremony, among good friends, just as it should be. Then it's dinner time and of course, we're nowhere near done. There's a one legged cook who's got the rest of the meal under control, but shrugs his shoulders occasionally at me like, where's the beef? Of course, the day before he was the one telling me he would be cooking it, but plans change. Evolve or die. Or at least go without some tasty beef. People finish eating and music and dancing begin. I watch a smoking mound. Finally, crazy man sees something I can't see and shouts, it's done and starts tearing into the oven with his hands again. Dude is nothing if not committed. Perhaps he should be committed, but if this beef is edible I owe him big time, so I'm happy to have him free and helpfully unfettered. It seems to have worked; the meat is nicely charred and piping hot. We haul it over to the serving table. What the hell, meat for dessert! If you haven't guessed by now, this was a hippie wedding in the middle of nowhere, and 3/4 of the crowd is vegetarian, or worse, vegan. But a strange thing happens. People start lining up for a taste. People are saying things like, "I haven't eaten meat in 20 years, but I heard the story of you and your cow, and I think it's a noble sacrifice by this animal, so--let me eat some of that meat! No, give me some more!!" I carve meat like I'm one of those guys at a Brazilian churrascaria. It's perfectly cooked, medium rare, juices oozing. People are saying things like, "I'm from Texas, and I love meat, and I have to say, this is the best I've ever tasted! No, gimme me some more, dammit!!" I serve and serve. Vegetarians are staining their shirts and souls. My hands are literally burned from working with the steaming stacks. I snack little pieces here and there and decide that, while not the best I've ever had, it's pretty good. Maybe I'm too close to my work. Some kind soul keeps feeding me beer. David comes over and silently we clink bottles, take a full swig, exhale. A full day. A winching. A marriage. A half a cow cooked in the earth. Blood spilled , blood shared, and blood consumed. A time for latter day Vikings and vegans alike to find common ground.

What your IP says about your language

Typing this now from the wilds of Costa Rica, yeah, the trendy place that all you yogis and surfers like to check out in between trips to the local organic juice bar, shala, and Patagonia. And where all the SoCal and Argentinian kooks show up to and imagine they've discovered the place and are thus, entitled to every wave. Whatever. It's where I live, when I'm not in NYC bemoaning the business climate there, or traveling to some place and annoying those locals in a bit of retribution.

Anyway--my IP is from Panama. You guys in the civilized world, by which, I mean the world with Internet above 1Mbps...you have it so easy. You call your Internet provider and they show up in some semblance of a uniform between 8am and 4pm (this is your only sacrifice, being sequestered for a day waiting for the Comcast guy to show), and then get blazing fast 'net for about $30/month. You also get somebody to bitch at when things don't work, although it's usually your fault for not resetting the modem, as they helpfully remind you. Or you go to Starbucks or the laundromat and log on with your latte and suds. Or you steal that shit from one of the surprisingly high number of neighbors who doesn't know how to password protect their router. Whatever the route, you get it, and once you do, it's fast. Fast enough that you can download a CD before turning around and finding it on your shelf. It's actually preferable to any search, the instant gratification of google and go.

Here, it's different. I have a microwave antennae on my roof, picking up some beam that shoots 10 miles or so across the Golfo Dulce from its hub on la Frontera, where it is split into fractions of itself and sold at a value approaching unobtanium by an unresponsive and uncaring "provider" with no known phone number and a 4 week appointment lead time that is, as of last count, 15% attended by the service rep. I get, on a good day, 800Kbps downstream and about 110Kbps up. On a bad day, an email takes 5 minutes to send, if it goes at all. And what do I pay for all this? $150/month. This is actually down from $375(!!!!)/month, all because Instituto Costarricense Electricidad (ICE), the state electric/internet/phone monopoly has entered the fray with a 3G system of about the same speed for the shockingly low price of $25/month. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for shit, but it has put the fear of G-d into "That Asshole Ronald," my internet guy, so I thank them for that.

My point, in all this, is that when, after a 2 year hiatus, I log into my Blogger account, I find it speaking to me in Spanish. Because it thinks I am a Panamanian, and doesn't really want to give me an option to chose otherwise. That's cool. I guess. I mean, I do speak Spanish. But Internet Spanish is different from what's spoken by the people, with its own colloquialisms. Suprimir, for example, means delete. Why don't they use "eliminar" which is what any person actually speaking Spanish would use? And "borrado," which means erased as far as I know, seems to mean saved, or maybe I'm wrong and this whole post has actually been deleted by the whim of Blogger Español. No se.

I guess it's a test of fluency, and I'm tooling along with a Gentleman's C.

dept. of dashed hopes, volume VI

I had given up on my boys long ago. After a decade and a half of dominance, they had slipped into a much discussed rut of mediocrity, and the problem was obvious, to me at least. The old ball coach had lost it, the game had passed him by, and the success he'd had in the early days with a team of overachievers who had to win with reckless abandon had transformed into stifling complacency with a blue chip bunch. Good enough to win a couple of national championships, sure, but they lost three others and should have played in five more (given a better kicker), they were that good.

Until they weren't. In fact, they had started to suck. They lost to the hated golden domers at home, and they suffered the ignominy of being shut out, at home, by weak forest. That was my personal nadir, when I no longer could bother to even care. They wouldn't play the quarterblack and they were determined to run an offense that was, offensively run by the coach's nitwit son and I just went cold noles. This was a very different feeling from the "I don't care anymore because we did it" feeling I had after the zenith of the undefeated, national championship season at the turn of the century. That was new millennium happiness, a change is gonna come, we've made it to the mountaintop excitement, and I told myself, if we never do this again, at least we did it once. I didn't expect to never even see the mountain range, much less go climbing up to the summit again.

Yet, I still watched, just not as fervently. And changes came, just not that quickly. The coach's son quit, and the new one played a few more players. We even had a quarterblack that might get in the game, even though he wasn't starting, as he should have been. Slowly, slowly. This year had been a good one, on paper at least. 6-1, leading their division, background noise about various title games. I knew better. I didn't think we'd win the next game, a pivotal one against a solid rival we'd dominated for years, decades even. Last loss was in 1975 for chrissakes. All that meant to me was, we're due. To lose, not recapture lost glory. So I watched with particular interest, and then, through a series of miscues and a general inability to stop the run, the score was 30-20 them and the fourth quarter was winding down. Season over, nothing to see here.

That's when the comeback started. The quarterblack came off the bench and instead of being used exclusively to run ("well, when they bring in Richardson we know they're going to run" noted the talking head), he goes play action and throws a deep pass. The starter can't actually pass the ball--by which I mean a tight spiral that whistles through the air. He delivers the ball, but it's USPS, not Fedex. This ball was pretty. It wanted to be caught. The wideout went up high and caught with his hands, not his body, and when he came down he was in the endzone. Go for two! Naturally. The starter's back in and he throws a fade to our resident sunday schooler, all 6'6" of him twisting and making a one handed catch that is unstoppable. It's a 3 point game. And their starter is bent over on the bench, next to the backup. The third string guy has to throw a pass, and it's picked off! All the momentum in the world is behind us. We drive down the field. I'm riveted. Phone calls are coming in from around the world to find out what's going on. "We're driving! We're running, we're passing, holy shit they even put in Richardson and let him throw the ball! It's epic!!!" I'm giving the play by play. We're in the redzone, time ticking down but totally in control. We have a great kicker, for once, and he's made a school record 15 straight. This is completely in his wheelhouse, but why settle for a tie? Let's win this baby!

And then it happens. My friend opens his mouth and says what I've been trying not even to think: "We can't have a stupid turnover here. No fumbles!"

"Dude!" I scream. "You can't say that! You can't even think that! That's like saying Beetlejuice's name three times or something, you just can't do it!!" I hear him knocking on wood.

It's too late. We're on the three. It's second and goal. The handoff goes to our fullback. A defender puts a helmet right on the ball and it goes airborne. There are three of our guys there when it comes down and for a fleeting second it looks like we've recovered for the winning score. But we haven't. They have. The game is over. Just like that. Those little hopes that I hadn't allowed to surface, which had just then been struggling up from the depths, drowned anew.

That one hurt. I'd laughed off some of the other ones, but that one really cut deep. The knife found its way into an old scar and once reopened, the skin there is so thin, the keloid of memory exposed, you know it's going to be a long time before it heals.

things that go buzz in the night

There's a whining in my ear. I'm rolling over and the sheets are hot and sticky despite the cold outside. Not cold enough apparently, because she's still here, biting, bitching, spreading contagion. A little bit of death floating near. I wake into the gloaming and feel the burning hickeys she's left on my arms and neck.

A fucking mosquito.

Or should I say, the same fucking mosquito. She's been here for a week, buzzing along, sucking as she can, avoiding my sleepy swats, circling back to snatch some blood from whatever is exposed. I huddle under the covers, heat steaming off me, sending out signals she can't resist. A toe sticks out and she's there. An arm and she's on it. Once I wake to scratch or swing, it's too late.

The daily bleed, only this time, at night.



I don't get her in the dark. I don't get anything but welts, which, after a childhood spent in Florida swamps, disappear quickly, leaving no physical evidence, only a scratchy reminder that she was there.

Why a she? Because it's only the bitches that bite. The boys are left to sit at home, suckle on some flower or generally be benign. It's the women who run this camp, who bring the pain and whatever disease may be in reach. On surf trips in Indonesia, when dark fell you had to be covered up and cautious. The lore is that they can't go more than 100m, so if you're far enough offshore or away from the infected, you'll be safe. The mosquito doesn't breed the disease, they only spread it, and they're damn good at it. You've seen the picture books for kids, asking what the deadliest creature is, the lion, the crocodile, the shark, or the little bug. It's the little bug. Millions killed every year, mountains of malaria, dengue, encephalitis, yellow fever...an epidemic in under an ounce. And you will know them by their sound, that high pitched drone that causes a visceral reaction, a reflex jerk and duck and hide when you realize the net/tent/screen has been breached. The little fucker is in now and after me.

So I sit up and hunt. Clumsy claps at the faint speck wafting in front of my blurry eyes. She never seems to be moving that quickly and yet I can't catch up. The stinging on my arms and neck fades and I start to make deals with myself. I've been bitten. There's nobody sick with dengue in the east village. I can sleep. The bites will go away. I drift off under the covers, in my thin cocoon.

The whining starts again. The dance continues. A night with tortured snatches of sleep, arms rubbed raw and in the dawn, nothing, no corpse to crow over, just the knowledge that she'll return, the insect vampire, more real and deadly than any Stoker story.

This goes on for a week, and then a miracle occurs. I'm in the shower, hosing off the night, preparing to face a sleep deprived day, when I see the bitch cowering in the corner. Maybe she's come in for a drink, or maybe she just likes the damp. Either way, she's sated from all my blood and slow to react. I spread her guts across the wall with a snapping slap of my left hand. That's more my blood than hers, and I watch it trickle off my palm, the shower sending her in pieces down the drain. It feels good to kill your enemy, morally defensible. I dry off and go downstairs, check to see that every window is closed and punch the computer to find the forecast. Whither the frost? The best thing about the oncoming winter: no mosquitos. A tiny, thin point, like her dagger, but at this moment, a happy one.