Annie of the Undead (24 page)

“You won’t regret coming,” she assured me as we
moved up the walk toward Professor Rathstein’s elegant, very modern
house. The path was illuminated at intervals by landscape globe
lights, marching through the darkness to a well-lit arched entryway
and a red door. An American flag hung from the doorpost. The
muffled brass and base of easy-listening jazz issued from within,
along with a muddle of voices and an intermittent blast of laughter
from the throats of lusty young folks.

I doubted the validity of Yoki’s statement, but
I was past chickening out now. Besides, there were enticing food
smells issuing from the house, and I helplessly heeded the cry of
my passionately growling stomach. But I wasn’t supposed to eat
anything fried, I reminded myself. I could dip into a vegetable
tray. They’d have one of those. Sure, they’d have a vegetable
tray.

“I just don’t like crowds.”

“It won’t be crowded.”

“Says you. I bet your idea of a crowd is two
hundred people packed into a warehouse, bouncing up and down on a
pharmacopoeia of illegal substances.’

“That’s not a crowd; it’s a collective. A rave
is composed of one mind, one goal, one soul.”

“So is a mob.”

She ignored my comparison entirely. “But this
will be cozy. Bartholomew prefers intimate parties.”

“I’m tripping on reassurance.”

“Don’t fall on your face.”

I griped under my breath all the way to the
door. Jesus Christ whimpered acutely as though sharing my distress.
As we stood on the front step, the house seemed to loom in the
shadows like a great slumbering beast whose jaws failed to tell
just how great were the hindquarters hidden in the dark.

“How does a college professor afford a house
like this?” I asked.

“His wife Molly was well-off. She was a Kinkaid
–New Orleans old money.”

“Was?”

“She was found dead in the Bayou Saint John a
few years ago. Her ashes were stolen in a robbery, and he couldn’t
stand living in their old house after that, so he built this one,”
Yoki answered, then answered my look. “He didn’t do her in for her
money, Annie. For pity’s sake, don’t bring it up. He hasn’t been
right about her death since it happened.”

“What? Like I’d bring that shit up…”

“Yes, you would. So remember, silence is a
virtue.”

She was right, on both counts, though I thought
she should heed her own advice sometimes. But, for my part, I would
try to behave myself, if everybody else would leave me alone.

“Don’t worry. I’ll just creep in, like a mouse.
Unobtrusively. No one will even notice I was here…”

I never got a chance to creep. Yoki didn’t
knock, just popped the door open as though she belonged there. Who
am I kidding? Yoki belonged everywhere.

Just before she greeted the onslaught of people,
she turned to me and said, “Oh, and I do hope you like to talk
politics.”

Yoki went in swinging, and I followed like a
stray dog that doesn’t care where you take it as long as you feed
it when you get there. Jesus Christ thrashed in Yoki’s arms like a
netted gazelle. He was smarter than I was.

Faces immediately turned and lit up, joined by
exclamations at the arrival of Yoki. In the very doorway, dual
six-packs in hand, she made her debut of the evening by doing her
little “I’m here! Party!” dance. The Yoki had landed.

“Hey hey!”

“Hayashi, baby!”

“It’s about time you showed up, girlfriend!”

“Somebody, tell Dr. Rathstein to switch up the
music and get this party going! Yoki’s here.”

They absorbed Yoki into their collective. For a
second a couple of them tried to do the same to me, but the look in
my eye saved their lives just in time.

Within the house that Bart built was the sort of
crowd amongst whom it is okay and maybe even a little complementary
to be called “nerd”, and it was the kind of party at which people
who think it cool to be called “nerd” are comfortable –no raging
music, no nakedness, no rabblerousing, no popping-and-locking, no
booty bumping, or packing in your waistband. Most of the attendees
were clean and well groomed, except for a couple examples of artsy
folk (I cite the dandruff-dusted kid in the jeans, white tennis
shoes, red blazer, and black T-shirt with white lettering that
read, “Mozart: Pretty good for a kid”). Khaki pants and tucked-in
shirts were the normative wear. Venerable professor type mingled
with semi-frisky student type. Many clinked wineglasses with which
some looked more at-ease than others, and others retained familiar
cans of upscale beer in their soft hands with clean, intact nails.
They chatted and smiled and laughed with one another with varying
degrees of affability, ebullience, awkwardness, and ineptly-veiled
rivalry.

The assemblage amplified the effect of
Rathstein’s civilized living quarters. Modern ceramic tile floors
and modestly vaulted ceilings greeted us. The warm-clime-style open
floor plan allowed everyone to be in everyone else’s viscidity and
thus shift easily from one scintillating society to the next.

I was already starting to get huge, itchy hives
when Jeanne emerged from the crowd, wearing a plain white T-shirt
and jeans and looking like a million bucks. She promptly deposited
a beer in my hand.

“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” said Jeanne of the
hyperactively socializing Yoki.

“I never would have guessed this was her social
group.”

“I meant the fact she got you to come in here,”
Jeanne laughed, “but everyone is her social group, as long as there
are men to flirt with.”

That was precisely what Yoki was doing at that
moment, flirting with not one, not two, but three males at once,
all of whom Jesus Christ was actively trying to destroy. She was
also stealing food from their plates, but they were all too
bug-eyed to notice.

“Come on,” Jeanne said over the din. “Better get
out of here before you start being bombarded with all the
what’s-your-major-what-year-are-you-where-are-you-froms. We’re in
way too sociable a position.”

That sounded like a smart maneuver to me. Jeanne
led the way to the wall, where we sat on the stone around the
fireplace, which, except for an extra noisy blonde chick in a pink
halter top beside me, was a relatively comfortable position. Jeanne
crossed her long, elegant legs and sat back, seeming to enjoy all
the madness with its healthy grain of salt. We watched the
spectacle that ensued when Yoki hijacked the stereo and changed the
muzak to a techno CD she had brought. Then she dropped Jesus Christ
to rampage around on the floor and moved to the center of the
congregation, which parted like the biblical Red Sea before
her.

Midst hoots and shouts of approval, she
proceeded to get down, and she was not satisfied until, one by one,
she had drawn the entire respectable group into her
120-beat-per-second anarchy. She was like Typhoid Mary, only people
wanted to catch her disease. A crowd by definition not prone to
dancing was all doing so in minutes, with its great Empress of Cool
at the center. The result was horrific: white boys bouncing up and
down in the eternal white boy dance, white girls, hands above their
heads, doing their own version. There were a few people who could
dance, and one black girl who watched them from the sidelines with
a knowing eye but neglected to school them, but there was the
inevitable crazy-dancing-guy-who-can’t-handle-his-liquor who
eclipsed them all, flailing around like an octopus with its ass
stuck in a can, forcing people back like gang of riot police.

A nearby forty-something-year-old woman in a
tie-dyed dress and eclectic jewelry, who was apparently thinking
the same thing I was of the scene, though I did not get the
reference at the time, leaned toward her tall, professorly male
companion and said over the music, “They look like a Hieronymus
Bosch.”

In the midst of the decidedly un-Bachic
celebration, a man shouldered his way through the ranks. He was
short and stout, a graying, wavy-haired and bearded man in his
fifties, with an expression of self-importance on his roundish face
and a round, ample belly to match. He gave the impression of a
pompous, bellicose Santa Claus, though his well-ordered semi-casual
attire (tweed suit coat and tie-free button-front shirt) and the
way the revelers moved about to give him passage suggested that he
was, to them, a person of importance.

The elder statesman espied the Asian Invasion,
and an almost predatory, if still avuncular, expression came across
his face. It was an expression we have all seen many times, the
expression of a confident man setting out upon an assured conquest,
and one who is aware that others are watching.

I started forward, but Jeanne stopped me.

“That’s Dr. Rathstein,” she said. “Don’t worry.
It’s him who’ll need protecting.”

He took Yoki’s hand and spun her away from a
bewildered male student. She went easily, surprised at first, and
then delighted to find the professor at the other end.

The onlookers immediately went into hoots and
whistles and cries of encouragement to professor getting his freak
on with a hot piece of real estate. He danced like a man who had
danced socially for decades, not a professional by any means, but
much more sprightly than his bowl full of jelly would have led you
to believe. He twirled and dipped Yoki like he was dancing to a
more elegant kind of music, and to the students chanting his
name.

Being a professor must do something for the
ego.

It was a harmless spectacle, I told myself, an
amusing break from death drills and jealous undead exes. But, as
time has taught me, Yoki was never happy unless my dander was up
over something. She dragged Rathstein to a stop, located me in my
safe vantage by the hearth, and proceeded to taunt me –yes, taunt
me, to get me to dance with her.

“What the hell is this?” I said to Jeanne.

“She doesn’t think you’re having fun.”

Yoki grabbed my hand.

“How the hell would she know?”

“She thinks anyone who doesn’t dance isn’t
having fun. It took me two years to get her to leave me alone.”

The crowd didn’t know who I was, but they played
along, backing up their queen, who didn’t need any backup. I looked
at my little Asian aggravation murderously and braced my
considerably larger mass against her tiny tugs.

“Come on, Annie. Time to get frisky.”

“If you don’t let go of my arm, I’ll kill your
dog.”

“Don’t be nasty. She who hesitates is lost.”

“I like to be lost.”

“Come now, neither man nor beast can resist
me.”

Rathstein looked on with mild curiosity and
amusement at the object of Yoki’s attempted intervention.

She was rallying the troops, calling to the
guests, her minions all, to cast me out from among them, which they
would doubtless do just for the fun.

The blonde girl, who was also drunk, shoved on
my shoulder and squealed shrilly, “Go on! Give us a show!”

I instantly stood up. Everyone cheered, thinking
the majority had won, but they had never encountered this minority.
Their jubilance died in their throats as I wrested my hand from
Yoki’s grip and pushed my way out of the room.

In the den off the kitchen I discovered food.
There was a tantalizing spread laid out on a long table along the
dining room wall. I perused the inventory of edibles with a species
of desperation. There were partly-raided piles of deep-fried things
in various mysterious shapes, gooey, crumbly brownies, assorted
crackers and cheese, cookies, a box of supermarket fried
chicken…and what once was a meager vegetable tray, now only a
depleted scattering of insignificant orts.

Yoki/Jesus and Jeanne followed me, Jeanne
apologizing for Yoki, and Yoki filling a paper plate, and her face,
simultaneously. She set Jesus Christ down on the floor, and he
instantly popped up on the table in one of the incredible aerial
feats that tiny doggies do. As Yoki made her raid, he made his own,
beginning with the breaded, deep-fried mushrooms.

“Gollygosh! These fried enchiladas are
fantastic,” she said through a mouthful of enchiladas. “Here, eat
some.”

“I can’t,” I said, waving the proffered gooey
food item away, “I’m in training.”

There was nothing here I should eat if I was
sticking to a training diet –and not just training for any fight,
but the fight of my life, after which, if it was successful, I
would be stuck forever in the body I was in at that moment. But
discipline is scarce in the face of catastrophic levels of
gherulin. As my stomach and I stood commiserating, we were
converged upon by Rathstein and the tall man and woman of venerable
age and bearing, who were themselves trailed by a gaggle of
students whose mouths were filled with congratulations for
Rathstein on his slick moves.

“You know, old chap, if you don’t find a strict
wife very soon, you’re going to get into trouble,” said the tall
man who sauntered beside Rathstein.

He sounded very British and slightly inebriated.
From the drink in his hand, it looked like he was working on
upgrading the latter to “very.” The dark-haired woman at his side
helped to keep that soaring frame upright.

“With all these young birds flitting around…”
his eyes followed the rump of the drunken blonde as she flounced by
on the arm of one of the preppy boys. He raised his eyebrows in
approval and said some weird British thing, “Yoikes!”

His female companion rolled her eyes and smiled.
Her look was longsuffering, but not resentful.

Rathstein shed a young male student who had been
asking the professor’s opinion regarding a paper on the politics of
certain former Spanish colonial nations and pursued Yoki. The
gaggle of educated children, Mozart boy in the lead, followed like
helpless satellites in his gravitational pull.

“Yoki! I knew your stomach would win out over me
in the end,” Rathstein laughed.