A story remembered and written while driving down long dark roads.

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it all without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being-- that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of  just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky         ---David Foster Wallace

I was seven years old and I had a dream of frightening implications; it wasn't a nightmare though, it was a documentary, but not the generic PBS special. It was kin to the films showing the slaughter of dolphins by fishermen, missing limbs and burns covering the bodies of children in war zones and violent murder reenactments of crime television. The whole situation was fairly unique compared to my other dreams which were mostly about fighting off a giant T-Rex from the rooftops of thriving metropolis and other fantasies. This dream had a narrator and as he began his monologue a dramatic reenactment was performed on the back of my eyelids. The narrator began with this. "On a moonless night in ancient Egypt as fires burnt down to embers and people took to their rest an old man staggered across the sand and stumbled into the camp of a caravan. Two guards woke with alarm upon hearing the intrusion but found only a fragile, famished old man at the edge of camp. They carried him on their shoulders into camp and gave him sips of water and sat with him in the late night. Before long uneasiness was eating at them. They were not supposed to trust anyone outside of the caravan and this man should not have been an exception despite his obvious need of help. They mustered up the courage to turn him out of the camp but the old man who had been silent until now pleaded with them and asked the guards to trust a stranger for all his life was worth. The old man had a mesmerizing voice that held their attention hypnotically and soon they acquiesced, leaving him in the center of camp by the remains of the fire. The old man grinned with sharp teeth and pretended to sleep until the guards went back to sleep at their posts." The narrator stopped and let the camera pan around the camp showing the sleeping guards and merchants and then back to the center of the camp which was silent and deserted. The camera followed craters that are all that can really be seen of footsteps in the parched sand all the way to where the guards lay motionless and lifeless. The camera moved quickly to the nearest tent and outside you could hear the faintest noise. The camera moved inside right over the body of an anemic looking merchant and right into the face of the old man who face was repulsively contorted as he leaned over to dispatch the man sleeping at his feet. He viciously bit down and restrained the man who struggled for a moment before dying a quick and Hollywood-esque death. The old man finished his horrific meal and gave a quick glace into the camera with complete indifference to the corpses at his feet. The narrator now explained the graphic seen I had just watched. The old man was in fact old but rather than a man he was the subject of our film, an Egyptian Vampire.

The title of the documentary in my dreams flashed across my mind faster than I could comprehend and the film picked up where it had left off. "Egyptian vampires" said the narrator "are deceitful, repulsive spiders. They appear to us as hideous old men, weak and frail wearing nothing but rags and they come to us when there is no one else around. When I say they are spiders I mean that is how they act; Egyptian vampires have nothing to draw us to them, they look diseased and vile and with the figure of old men they cannot chase us down. Rather Egyptian vampires trap their prey with their assuring and magnetic voice. They hold onto your thoughts and imaginations and tell you to see only what they want you to perceive, that is their trick which is a snare that almost no one escapes. Once you are drawn in they wait until you are alone or until you are trapped or simply unaware and then they drink you up. These vampires live at night and bury themselves during the day to hide from the overbearing sun and the race they prey upon. They also have the unfathomable ability to endure the centuries through which mankind has lived and died. There are still Egyptian vampires today for this very reason and tonight we are going to follow one with our camera crew!" The pyramids at Giza appeared and the sky was very dark with only a few stars piercing the night. The camera focused on a group of tourists who were trying to get a good photo of the pyramid's lit face. An old man who was much shorter than any of the three tourists pushed his way in front of the group and started telling them the forgotten history of the pyramids. The tourists were obviously enraptured after a few minutes and the old man asked them if they would like to venture inside the pyramid. They all said no very quickly and my narrator commented that their decision was wise into the camera, but the old man was steadily convincing them of their absolute safety and that they were not in fact breaking any laws at all. Soon the entire party was moving closer and our narrator and crew were following behind with a night-vision camera. The old man was leading them on with the sound of his voice, one that put me in mind of the Pied Piper of Hamlen's flute, or a sirens song. Finally they reached a small opening in the side of the pyramid and showed them in letting the tourists go first with a small hand-held flashlight that shone like a floodlight in the camera. The old man followed them in telling them to be careful of any cracks in the stone. As we followed them in we could only see the faces of the tourists and the slight shadow of the old man behind them. A man in front was holding a flashlight and a woman was right beside him, behind the two of them was another younger man who was looking curiously up at the high walls on either side of them. The old man suddenly grabbed the man in the rear around the neck and pulled him out of sight. The couple turned around and the flashlight blinded the camera for a moment before the man dropped it. In the reflected light from the flashlight which was rolling on the ground you could see a body on the floor and the second man wrestling with the vampire but losing quickly and the woman was on the ground but getting up and running towards the camera. A muffled yell came down the hall and the woman looked over her shoulder just as she reached the cameraman. She flew into the camera and knocked it backward but a frightened shriek was clearly audible. The cameraman flipped his equipment over and focused again on the woman who was now crying and pleading for mercy. Suddenly a hand reached around her neck and the vampires head appeared over her shoulder. With glittering teeth he looked into the camera, said "Thank you." and then pulled the woman off into the now dark hallway which filled with strangled cries of terror.

I woke up screaming and crying and ran out of the room my brother and I shared into my parent's room next door. I shook my dad awake and told him I had a bad dream and spent the rest of the night sleeping in-between them.

The next morning I woke up and had to start packing. I was going to winter scout camp that night with my dad at Beaumont, a scout camp that was about an hour east of Willoughby. I spent most of the day avoiding packing at all but when my dad got home from work I was unwillingly forced to get all my clothes for the weekend into a bag, including lots of winter clothing in case it snowed though the weather had mostly been rain for the past week.

At about eight-o-clock my dad and I packed ourselves into his black Ford Ranger pick-up (I loved that truck) and started the hour long drive to the middle of nowhere,  Ashtabula County. It was very dark and raining and the radio was out of range of any interesting station so my dad and I drove in silence. I looked out the window into the passing darkness and a chilling thought came over me, what if the Egyptian vampires knew that I had seen them in my dreams, what if they were coming for me right now. I moved away from the window and a little closer to my dad for safety and watched the road through the windshield. As I watched  we slowly passed over a hill and as I could plainly see there was a monster waiting for us at the bottom. I was frightened and hoped that the truck would keep us safe and hidden in its dark cockpit. My dad edged closer to the monster which was keeping pace just ahead of us. The monster had huge red eyes that floated above the road and stared us down. As it reached the peak of a rise in the road we came up behind it and the angry glow from its eyes was bright enough for me to see my dad's face above me. There was smoke billowing and swirling around its high shoulders. It was cloaked in the vortex that poured off its body and reflected the fiery light blazing in its eyes and which trailed off into the air around our truck. My dad shifted over a lane and as we cam abreast with the monsters eyes I counted four wheels that supported it's boxy cargo. An eighteen wheeler was a little more familiar than a monster barreling down the road. Now that we had passed the semi-truck and its headlights were drowned out by the rain I relaxed a little and watched the splatter of rain on the windshield and the very long, very straight and totally empty road that stretched out ahead of us.

Whenever a car or semi would come down the other side of the highway I would watch as the light would be smeared over and over by the windshield wipers. For a moment the road would disappear because the rain was so thick on the glass then the wipers would flash through the world and leave streaks in the blackness and all the lights would turn into blurred, crude hummingbirds that flitted across the screen as the cars moved past. In a moment the rain would wash the hummingbirds and their streaky world out of existence but a moment later they would be back zipping from right to left and off into the darkness turning into little monsters with little red eyes of their own.

I let my mind go and stopped looking at the road because my eyes were sore and tired. Hummingbirds and monsters chased each other around in my head changing from one form to another with every flick of the windshield wiper. I was trying not to think about the dark figure that lurked in the shadowy parts of my head slowly creeping up on my unwary mind. A little tinge of fear gripped me and I wanted to tell my dad not to stop for any strangers while we were driving because it would be the vampire just waiting to drink me up. I didn't say anything though because I was superstitiously afraid that mentioning the ugly old man at all would summon him at once. I didn't look out the window anymore, the streaky, flooded darkness no longer had any hummingbirds or red-eyed monsters there was only a solitary vampire that thrived in the dark and that frightened me more than anything else I had thought up that night.

Suddenly the car decelerated and I slid forward in my seat belt. I looked up and had the terrifying experience of my nightmares coming true. As we slowed we passed a small hunched man who had been waving us over. I hadn't even seen his face yet but I felt the darkness close in on me and I knew it was the vampire who had beguiled my father into pulling our car over. I panicked and started to stutter to my dad to ask him what we were doing pulling over. "Karl we are just going to give this man a ride so he doesn't have to walk in the freezing rain; calm down." he said. "N-nn-no! We can't!" I objected but it was too late. The door was pulled open and I looked straight at a face I had seen before, grinning at the camera with glittering teeth. "Thank you!" he said in a thick accent. "It is absolutely freezing and I have been trying to get someone to stop for me for quite a long time but the road is so empty that I have not seen anyone for a few minutes." "I'm glad we could help." said my dad who was now pulling back out into the road. I looked at the vampire, who was sitting next to me in the bench seat of the truck, with an accusing glare for his comment about the emptiness of the road we were on. I knew he was just waiting for the road to be completely empty to start his deception. "Where can we take you?" asked my dad. "My car is on the side of the road a long way back and it's out of gas so I need a gas station to fill up my canister." The old man gestured to a large red can that smelled like a gas station at his feet. "And if you can spare the time I would be very grateful indeed if you could take me back to my car." My dad said that we had time for both and when the old man asked if he owed us anything my dad told him he didn't want anything at all.

We rode in silence for the next mile to the exit and my dad pulled into the gas station at the nearest stoplight. The man got out of the car to fill up his canister and I quickly tried to explain to my father that we should drive away right now and go home. My dad gaped at me and with a look of utter disbelief and said "What?" "He's an Egyptian vampire dad! The one from my dream and he is going to kill us!" I said urgently. "Karl that is crazy. That man is not a vampire. Vampires do not exist. It was only a bad dream." my dad tried to reassure me but I started yelling. "No! He is a vampire and we have to leave now!" "Oh God, Karl." said my dad. "This is absolutely embarrassing and I hope he didn't hear any of that. We are not leaving him here to walk all the way back in the rain and I won't argue this any more." We were silent for another minute as the man paid for his gas and put it in the bed of the truck. He got back in the car and we got back on the freeway going the opposite direction in continued silence. I looked at my dad and the old man fearfully as they sat on both sides of me. The vampire spoke, to my dad more than me. "I heard the argument between you and your son and I'm sorry that I have frightened him." "No." my dad replied. "It's not your fault, he just had a nightmare last night and it's just his imagination." The man didn't say anything for a minute and was staring at his knees and unexpectedly he said. "But your son could be right about me." I looked at him with what must have looked like pure terror at what sounded to me like an admission of his vampiric nature. He continued. "For all you know about me I could be an Egyptian vampire like he has said, or I could be a murderer or criminal; I might even be a pedophile and you could have no way of knowing at all." "I'm assuming that you have a wife and I know you have a child and I would guess that you also have a good job and that you enjoy your life, so why risk all of that?" My dad nodded a little to show that he understood and the vampire continued. "Also that I think, that despite your argument you love your son and would not want to put him in danger so even if you were willing to put only yourself in this situation what could compel you to risk something/someone that is undoubtedly more precious than your own life?" My dad glanced at me and at the man seated to my right but still said nothing so the old man continued. "Even if you could keep your son from harm why would you want to frighten him by having a complete stranger sit next to him with the fear that all these things may happen?" "My question is why trust me to be a good person, why help me when all it will most likely cause is angst and strife in you and your son, why should you even stop to notice me at all?" My dad stared at the road in silence. The eloquence and curiosity of the old man had evidently expired and he lowered his head in silence too.

My dad drove on and eventually turned around and drove along the road going east that we had originally been on. The old man's car appeared after about five minutes, sitting with its lights off on road margin. My dad pulled over to a stop and the old man put his hand on the door and thanked my father for the ride as he unlocked the door. "Wait please." my father requested. The man turned back and gave my father a questioning look. I looked at my dad and saw that his face was a little scrunched and his brow furrowed which made me wonder if he had been thinking hard this entire time. "I never answered your question of me and I need to give you answer before you leave." "Ok." the old man replied. My dad paused to think for another second and then said this. "There are days where I fight to try and believe in something, and I fight with myself to find any good way to live every day. And what I keep trying to believe in is that generosity, helping people and actually trusting them is part of being a good person, even though I'm not even sure what a good person is supposed to be like. I stopped to help you and I trusted you because I have to fight the part of me that can only see the worst in people and I can't really fight it by doing exactly what it believes and just saying I believe something else, all that is is hypocrisy. So to fight it/myself all I can do is live how I want to believe and I can't just say what I want to believe otherwise I could never claim to be fighting the distrustful, cynical part of myself and I certainly couldn't claim to actually believe anything I say." My dad looked pointedly at the man who was still seated next to me and sighed saying "And that is why despite all my misgivings, and believe me I had a lot of them, I pulled over to give you a lift."


The old man looked like he was about to cry. He then did something that I have never completely understood, he embraced my dad, leaning over me and squeezing me in the middle, then he let go of my father and embraced me which, confused/frightened/paralyzed/shocked/comforted/stilled/blessed me and most of all made me want to hug back a little. He then spoke to me rather than my dad. "Your father is a great and generous man and I will pray every day for you, hoping that one day you will be as generous and faithful as him." Then he thanked my father with all his heart and got out of the truck and removed his large red canister of gasoline from its bed and walked away towards his car. As we drove away I thought I heard him shout "God bless you!" We arrived at camp just fine and only a half hour later than we had expected. That night I didn't dream of vampires or anything at all and the next morning I awoke to over a foot of snow and one of the best weekends of my childhood.

Now that I am grown and starting to live a life of my own I wonder why the old man stopped praying. I didn't grow up to be the person he wished me to be. I think that I fight the same battle my dad was fighting that night but I don't feel like I'm winning. Whenever I pass people on the side of the road with signs that read 'Homeless, Need Help' in scrawled permanent marker and I avoid their eyes and pretend I haven't seen them* I know that I am letting that overly cynical, and entirely apathetic part of me rule my life. And when I am at my church either Christ Church here in Blacksburg or Trinity in Cleveland and people tell me not to just give money to the homeless* and I end up agreeing with them despite my convictions that it is better to trust people than to only worry about uplifting them from their destitution. And when people I'm with blatantly refuse to help someone rather than just ignoring them or handing a few dollars and I say nothing and offer up nothing to help other than an obsessive stare at my shoes. All of these times I can't help feel the loss I suffer morally and emotionally because I can't even say what I believe much less act on it. And now that I think about it, maybe the old man is still praying, I don't think he would forget, maybe I'm just the one who fails to fight for my own morality, my own goodness, and fails consistently, every day.



(Sigh)



*which is a useless trick anyways since both they and I know that I have already seen them; they aren't stupid they have picked a spot where they can't be missed and I can't ever fool myself.

*because they will just use it to feed drug addictions and that it doesn't really help them and they'll just try again to scam you for more.

*The premise of this whole story is true in a lot of ways, I did actually have a documentary dream and the next night I did drive to Beaumont with my dad and think about telling him not to pull over for any strangers. The man isn't real though, he is about the only thing that isn't.

N.B. I did receive permission to use the persona's of all the people used in this story excepting the documentary host who it seems is working on another fantastical show, this one being on Victorian Age time machines. So as of right now he is temporally separated from me by about a century and a half and because time capsules like the US postal service only deliver messages far into the future I had no way of reaching him at all.