Count Dracula

(Written tonight because I could not sleep, and because the radiator in this apartment makes a sound like a dying goat, and because I found, folded inside an old coat, a drawing Iancu once made of me in the snow. I had forgotten I kept it.)

Sighs.

I have been alive for six hundred and some years, which one would think provides sufficient distance from one's formative experiences to render them unremarkable. One would be wrong.

My Wikipedia page — and yes, I have read it, I have read every revision of it, including the one some university student added claiming I had a "pathological fear of garlic rooted in childhood trauma," which is both reductive and inaccurate, I simply find the smell unpleasant, as anyone with functioning olfactory nerves would — my Wikipedia page describes my childhood as follows: "Vlad Dracula was born approximately 1428 to Vlad II Dracul, ruler of Wallachia." Full stop. As though I emerged fully formed from the concept of aristocracy, armored and already scowling.

Whatever. Fine. Let them have their two sentences.

I will write the rest myself.

I am seven years old in this memory, which I know because my mother had just let out the hem of my winter coat for the third time that year and remarked that I was growing like something unsupervised.

The courtyard of the great house smelled of horse dung and woodsmoke and the particular cold that settles into stone buildings in November — not the clean cold of open fields but something older, damp, structural. Like the cold had been living there longer than any of us.

My father was in the hall receiving somebody. He was always receiving somebody. I remember the sound of his voice through the door, low and certain, the way it never rose at the end of sentences the way other men's did. He spoke in declarations.

I was not supposed to be in the corridor. Mama had told me to remain in my room and complete my letters, which I had been doing, except that the fire had gone out and my fingers were too cold to hold the quill properly and nobody came when I knocked.

So I sat in the corridor with my back against the cold stone and listened to my father negotiate something with someone, and I drew shapes on the floor with my finger — not writing, just shapes — and I felt, with the absolute certainty that children feel things, that I was perfectly content.

That is the memory. Seven years old, cold corridor, listening to a voice through a door.

I have spent six hundred years trying to understand why that particular moment feels like home.

My mother was not a soft woman. This is the most diplomatic sentence I know how to construct about her. Doamna Maria of Snagov — and she insisted on the full form, always, even in private correspondence, even in letters to priests who had known her since childhood — my mother had a spine like a cathedral column and opinions like edicts.

She taught me to read in three languages before I was six. She stood behind me with her hands folded and did not praise correct answers, only indicated incorrect ones with a silence so specific it had texture.

But I remember this:

It was February, and the monastery lake had frozen solid, and one of the novice monks — a young one, barely older than me, with ears that stuck out and a gap between his front teeth — had crept down to the ice in the middle of the night and was sliding across it in his wool socks, laughing to himself in the dark.

I was watching from the window.

My mother appeared behind me. I felt her before I heard her, the way you feel a change in air pressure.

I assumed I was about to be sent back to bed.

But she stood beside me at the window and watched him too. The novice was completely unaware of us. He spun himself around with his arms out, wobbled, caught himself, laughed again.

My mother said, after a long silence:

"There is a man who has never been afraid of anything in his life."

I did not know if she meant it as admiration or condemnation. With Mama, these were often the same thing.

She put her hand on top of my head — not a caress exactly, more like she was confirming my height — and then she went back to bed.

I stayed at the window and watched the monk slide across the ice for a long time after that. I thought: I want to be that. I thought: I have no idea how.

I met Iancu in the summer.

He was the vintner's son — which, as my mother explained with the careful tone she used for things she considered unfortunate facts of the world, meant he was nobody in particular. "Not enemies," she said. "Simply different." The distinction, I understood, was mostly political.

He was standing on a fence post when I first saw him, arms out for balance, attempting to jump to another fence post approximately four feet away. He made the jump. Then he looked at me standing in the road and said, with complete seriousness:

"Can you do that?"

"No," I said, which was honest.

"Good," he said. "Neither could I until Tuesday."

I did not know what to do with this information. I had been raised among people who concealed their learning curves as though incompetence were evidence of bad bloodlines.

His name was Iancu, he told me. His father's wine was the best in the county, which he said the way other people say the sun rises in the east — as simple, geological fact. He had four sisters and a dog with three legs and he was teaching himself to whittle. He showed me a small figure he'd made from a piece of oak — it was supposed to be a horse, he explained, but had come out looking more like a duck having a difficult experience.

I laughed. Genuinely. In a way I had not planned.

He grinned at me and said, "It'll be better next time."

That was Iancu entirely. It would be better next time. As though the future were simply a practice round.

Short entry. There are memories that don't need excavation.

We built a snow wolf in the field behind the vintner's house. It took most of a morning. Iancu insisted on real proportions — he had seen a wolf the previous autumn and could describe its shoulder height precisely, which I believed because he described everything precisely when it mattered to him.

We gave it stones for eyes.

When we were done we stood back and looked at it.

Iancu said, "It looks too friendly."

It did. We had given it a slightly upturned snout that read as cheerful.

"It's a friendly wolf," I said.

"There's no such thing."

"Then we made something new," I said.

I don't know where that came from. Iancu looked at me for a second, then he nodded, very gravely, like we had agreed on something theological.

We left the wolf in the field. I thought about it for weeks.

My mother began teaching me what she called the education of attention around this time.

This was not a formal curriculum. It had no name until I named it just now, here, in my robe, in Queens, six hundred years later. But it was deliberate.

She would bring me into rooms where important men were talking and she would not introduce me. I would stand against the wall and later she would ask me what I had observed. Not what they had said. What I had observed.

"The man in the grey coat," she said once. "What was he doing with his hands?"

"Folding them in his lap."

"When?"

"When my father spoke."

"And when the other man spoke?"

I had to think. "He held the edge of the table."

She nodded once. This was approximately her equivalent of a standing ovation.

"People tell you what they want you to know," she said. "Their hands tell you what they are afraid of."

I asked her: "What are your hands afraid of?"

She looked at me for a moment. Then she said:

"That is a very good question."

She never answered it. I have thought about that non-answer for six centuries, honestly. Whatever. Moving on.

There was a road we traveled several times a year, through the foothills. I loved this road in a way I never told anyone, because it seemed like the kind of love that had no useful application.

It curved through birch forest and then opened onto a ridge where, if the weather was clear, you could see three valleys simultaneously. I do not know how to describe it to someone who has only ever seen photographs. Photographs do not render distance correctly. They flatten.

Standing on that ridge felt like being briefly unlimited.

I was eleven or twelve. I had been given a small dagger — ceremonial, more for appearance than function — and I was wearing it for the first time on a proper journey and feeling extremely serious about myself.

The cart stopped because one of the horses needed checking. I got down and walked to the ridge's edge.

Below me: three valleys, brown and green and still half-winter. A river I didn't know the name of. A hawk doing something complicated with an updraft.

I stood there and felt for the first time that the world was very large and that I was very small and that these two facts were, somehow, not a problem.

A guard called me back. I went. But I carried that ridge with me.

I still do. Whatever. Verily. Yes.

Iancu's father let us help with the harvest.

"Help" is generous. We were twelve and we got in the way and the actual workers moved around us with the patience of people who have been moving around unhelpful noblemen's children for generations. But Iancu's father — a barrel-shaped man with a laugh that startled birds — handed us each a knife and pointed at the vines and said, "The clusters that look heavy, cut them. Don't touch what looks worried."

"What does a worried grape look like?" I asked.

He squinted at me. Then he said: "Come here."

He showed me the difference. The slight wrinkling. The color that had gone a half-step too far. The small imperfections that meant internal collapse.

"See it?" he said.

I saw it. Once he showed me I could not stop seeing it.

We worked until our hands were stained dark purple and the sun was going sideways through the leaves. Iancu was singing something — badly, cheerfully, the same four lines repeated until his father told him to stop. He stopped for about three minutes.

At the end, Iancu's father pressed a small cup of the previous year's wine into my hand. I was twelve. I looked at it.

"Your mother will have me hanged," I said.

"Your mother," he said cheerfully, "is not here."

It tasted like something between vinegar and a promise. I understood for the first time that adults had been withholding the world from me on purpose.

The drought had begun the previous year, but it was in January that it became real to me. Which is perhaps strange, because January is not the season of growing things. But January was when I first saw the storerooms.

My mother took me herself. She held a torch and did not soften anything.

The storerooms were not empty — not yet — but they had that quality of a room where emptiness has already arrived and is simply waiting for the physical reality to catch up. The shelves that should have been full were half-full. The barrels were not as many as they should have been.

Mama stood in the doorway and said nothing for a long moment.

Then she said: "We are not the worst-off. I want you to understand that. We are not the worst-off."

I said: "Where is Iancu?"

She looked at me. She did not answer.

I went to find him myself.

The vintner's house was quieter than I had ever heard it. The four sisters who were always making some kind of noise — they were not making noise. Iancu's father was sitting outside in the cold, not doing anything. When he saw me he did not make a joke.

Iancu was inside. He was thinner. Not catastrophically — not yet — but in the way where you can see that someone is making calculations about how they move, expending less.

He said: "The second vines are gone. Papa thinks if the spring comes right we can replant, but."

He didn't finish the sentence. Iancu always finished sentences. The absence of the ending sat between us like a fourth person in the room.

I did not know what to offer. I had more than him and I was aware of this in every bone. I said something inadequate about hoping for spring. He nodded. We sat together for a while in the quiet.

When I left he walked me to the road and said: "Next harvest I'll teach you to do it properly. Not like last time."

"I did fine last time," I said.

"You cut three worried grapes."

He had noticed. Of course he had noticed. I had forgotten that Iancu noticed everything that mattered.

"Next harvest," I said. "Nay, I shall not cut a single worried grape."

He laughed. The laugh sounded like him again. Just for a moment.

I will write this plainly. I have tried other ways and there are no other ways.

My father was executed in the courtyard of a house that was not his house, by men who had sat at his table. I was not supposed to see it. I was fourteen and small for my age and there was a gap in the crowd where I had pressed myself through because I had heard the noise and I did not know what the noise meant.

I knew what it meant by the time I understood what I was looking at.

My mother found me an hour later. She did not ask what I had seen. She put both hands on my face — the only time I remember her doing this — and she looked at me for a very long moment.

Then she said:

"You will not fall apart."

Not a comfort. Not a prediction. A directive.

"Those men," she said, "are afraid of us. Do you understand? Men do not do what they did today out of power. They do it out of fear. Remember that. Remember what fear looks like when it has been given a sword."

I was shaking. I was shaking and I was trying not to let her see it and she absolutely saw it.

She said: "You may fall apart later. In private. Not now."

I did not fall apart later. I did not find the right later for a very long time.

Nay. Honestly. I'm not sure I've found it yet.

But here is what I also remember from that year, because childhood is not organized by significance, it is organized by what happened, and what happened included this:

Iancu stole three plums from someone's tree — the drought had broken, things were cautiously growing — and we ate them sitting on the monastery wall and he told me that he had decided he was going to travel.

"Where?" I said.

"Everywhere," he said, which was his answer for questions whose actual answer he hadn't worked out yet.

"You can't go everywhere," I said.

"I can't go everywhere yet," he said. "Give me time."

The plums were very ripe. The juice ran down my hand and I licked it off my wrist and it tasted like the specific sweetness of something that almost didn't exist.

I thought about telling him what my mother had said about fear and swords. I thought about the storerooms. About the courtyard. About all the things I had been carrying since January that I had not said to anyone.

I said: "The plums are good."

He said: "The best I've ever stolen."

That was enough. Somehow, verily, that was enough.

The last memory. The one I return to.

I was fifteen. Walking back alone from Iancu's house after dark, which I was not supposed to do. The road was familiar enough that I didn't need a torch for most of it — I knew where the roots were, where the path curved, where the ground went soft near the drainage ditch.

Halfway back I stopped.

I don't know why I stopped. No sound, no reason. I just stopped and stood in the dark in the middle of the road.

The sky was extraordinary. The way it gets in autumn in that part of the world — so clear it feels forensic, like the stars have come to examine you. I stood there and looked up and felt myself get very still in a way I had not felt still in a long time.

I thought: I am here. I thought: I am still here.

I thought about my father's voice through a door. About a monk sliding across the ice. About a snow wolf with a friendly face. About Iancu's laugh that came back when I needed to hear it. About my mother's hands on my face. About what fear looks like when it has been given a sword. About three valleys from a ridge. About worried grapes.

I thought: I am made of all of this. I thought: I don't know yet what that means.

I stood on the road for a long time.

Then I walked home.

Sighs.

The radiator has stopped. It is 3 a.m. The drawing Iancu made is on the table in front of me. He drew me standing very straight with a serious expression, which is accurate, and with a small cape, which I was not wearing that day but which he included because he thought it was funny.

He wrote underneath it, in his crooked hand: Vladislav, care se crede mare. Vladislav, who thinks he is important.

He was not wrong. I did think I was important. Not in a cruel way. Just in the way of someone who had not yet been told, by six subsequent centuries, the full extent of how ordinary importance is.

I have left seventeen one-star reviews this month. The radiator is a dying goat. There are blood packets in the refrigerator next to the hummus.

I was, once, a boy standing in the dark looking at stars.

Nay. Verily. Whatever.

I was.

SUMMARY: The entries trace a childhood shaped by two countervailing forces — a mother who taught survival as the careful, constant reading of other people's fear, and a friend who offered simple, unguarded warmth without requiring anything aristocratic in return. Between these two poles, a boy formed who was alert, controlled, and quietly hungry for ordinary belonging; a boy who filed away grief as something to process later and never quite found the later. The seeds are there: the instinct to observe rather than participate, the deep comfort of proximity without disclosure, the way joy arrived most reliably when nobody was watching.

I have begun to write things down.

Iancu would laugh at this. He would say, Vlad, you great pale goat, who is going to read that? And he would be right, as he was annoyingly right about most things that did not involve horses or women. But something has shifted in me since the bătălie at Varna, since I watched men I knew by name fold into the mud like letters no one wanted to read, and I have found that the thoughts require somewhere to go.

Mother says that a man who writes his fears has given his enemies a map.

Mother says many things.

She is in the chapel again tonight, her prayers arriving through the stone like cold water through a wall. She prays for my soul with the particular intensity of a woman who suspects it is already lost and is trying to negotiate a partial refund from God.

I sat tonight by the fire and watched the logs collapse into themselves and thought: there is something about proximity that I have never learned to manage. Iancu sat beside me this afternoon and told me about a girl from the lower village, something about her laugh, something about bread she had baked, and I listened to every word like a man pressing his ear to a door he is not permitted to open.

I do not know what I wanted in that moment.

I think I wanted simply to be inside the story he was telling. Not the girl. Not even the bread. Just the ordinary easiness of it.

Noapte bună. Whatever that is worth.

He asked me to do it.

That is the thing I will not be able to tell anyone, and so I am telling the paper. Iancu stood at my window in the last light and he said — his exact words were: "You have always frightened me slightly, Vlad, and I think that is why I have stayed."

And then he asked.

I will not describe what followed. I am not sentimental about feeding. I am less sentimental about what comes after, the change in the eyes, the particular quality of silence that replaces whatever was there before.

But I will say this: when it was done, and he stood there in my hall, altered and ancient and belonging now to centuries rather than to seasons, he looked at me with something that was not quite gratitude and not quite accusation. It was the look of a man who has accepted a door he cannot close again.

Dragul meu, he said. My dear.

Nothing else.

I had expected relief. The loneliness had been very loud for a very long time, and I thought — I had genuinely thought — that solving the loneliness would quiet it.

It did not.

It simply made the loneliness taller.

A man named Stoker has published a book.

I will not dignify it with extensive commentary. I will say only that my nose does not look like that, I have never once turned into mist without knowing why, and the bit with the brides is, at minimum, significantly exaggerated.

Mother's voice, which has not left me despite two centuries and several thousand miles of continental Europe between us, said in my ear tonight: "You should have killed the journalist. I raised you to know when to kill the journalist."

She is not wrong, in the traditional sense.

But I had looked at him — Stoker, at a dinner, years ago, one of those London things with too many candles and not enough meaning — and he had seemed so earnest. Like a dog that had decided you were wonderful. I had let him talk. I had nodded. I had been, and this is my great recurring failure, polite.

And now there is a book.

And now there is, apparently, a legacy.

Whatever. Whatever. I am going to feed and then I am going to sit in the dark and I am going to think about absolutely nothing, and tomorrow I will begin the extremely tedious process of not existing again.

The rent went up.

Not dramatically. Mrs. Petrakis, the landlady, knocked on my door at 11am — she knows I keep unusual hours, she has decided this makes me "eccentric" rather than "a horror," which is one of the few mercies of this century — and she said, apologetically, her exact words: "Mr. Dracula, I'm so sorry, the building needs work, the boiler, you understand."

I told her I understood.

She smelled of oregano and old coffee and something like genuine guilt, and I found that I did not want to frighten her. This is new. Or it is not new, but I have been noticing it more lately. The instinct to make the person across from me feel at ease, regardless of what it costs me in the arrangement.

I could have argued. The lease is technically grandfathered. I have documentation going back to 1971, and before that, I simply owned this building, which is a conversation I prefer not to have with the current city records.

Instead I said, "The boiler has been unreliable since October. Thank you for addressing it."

She looked so relieved.

Something small and warm moved in my chest when she looked relieved. I do not know what to do with this information.

I closed the door and stood in my hallway, in my bathrobe, smelling of sleep and old fabric, and I thought about Iancu. About how he used to get that same look when someone chose kindness over power. He called it bucurie, joy, and he said it like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, like of course you felt joy when you chose to be decent, what else would you feel.

He is gone now. Seventeen years ago. He sat down one evening and he said, in that way he had toward the end, very quiet, very certain: "I've run out of wanting to, Vlad. I think that's it."

And then he simply stopped.

I have not made another. I will not make another. The making of it is an act of profound selfishness I dressed up for centuries as an act of love, and I am tired of the costume.

The boiler clanks all night. I find it companionable.

Someone at the blood bank on Northern Boulevard recognized me.

Not from life. From the book. From whatever iteration of the book has colonized the cultural memory of this particular decade. He was a medical student, doing a rotation, young enough that his certainty was still the kind that hasn't been tested.

He looked at me across the intake counter — I was there in an administrative capacity, nay, I was there because the alternative involves a great deal more paperwork and occasionally a missing persons report — and he squinted and said:

"Has anyone told you that you look exactly like Dracula?"

I paused.

The old response would have been to hold his gaze until he looked away, until something animal in him understood that he had made a mistake. I know how to do that. I have been doing that since before this country was a country.

Instead I said, "I've heard that once or twice. Unfortunate bone structure."

He laughed.

We talked for eleven minutes about the various film portrayals, during which I described the 1992 Coppola film as "ambitious but geographically confused" and he agreed with such enthusiasm that I felt, briefly, like a person at a party rather than a monument someone had forgotten to visit.

When I left he said, "See you around, Count."

I said, "Verily," and then felt immediately embarrassed, and walked to the subway.

On the train home I sat with my hands in my lap and thought: that was fine. That was genuinely fine.

It is a small thing. I am aware it is a small thing. But I am collecting small things now, in the absence of large ones, and I find the collection is growing.

Read another Goodreads review tonight.

Five stars. "Timeless! Dracula is so misunderstood, he's basically just a lonely guy!" She used an emoji that appears to be a small castle.

One-starred it.

I am not a lonely guy. I am a six-hundred-year-old sovereign of the night who has watched empires rise and crumble into geography lessons, who has—

The bathrobe has a stain near the left lapel that I cannot identify and have not tried to.

—I am whatever I am.

The castle emoji was a good castle emoji. I gave it a brief moment of silent appreciation before leaving the review.

An ordinary Tuesday, recorded here because I have been told by no one in particular that the ordinary is worth recording.

I woke at sundown. The light through the blackout curtains was the particular orange of a city evening, not beautiful exactly, but consistent, which I have come to value more than beauty.

Dragostea Mea — an endearment I still use for nothing and no one, a habit — I made coffee. I have no physiological need for coffee. I make it anyway. The ritual of it. The kettle's particular agitation. The smell, which is one of the few smells this century has produced that I find genuinely worthwhile.

I watched, through the window I never open, the family in the apartment across the alley. They are Greek, I believe, or possibly Romanian — the grandmother's cadence carries something familiar. Tonight they had a dinner party. Nine people around a table built for six. Much gesturing. A child fell asleep on someone's lap and was carried to bed with tremendous ceremony.

I watched for forty minutes.

Mother's voice said: a Dracula does not watch. A Dracula is watched.

I drank my coffee and watched anyway.

Then I dressed — the shirt is fraying at one cuff, I should replace it, I will not replace it — and went out to feed. The subway platform, the usual corner near the hospital, the whole thing conducted with the grim efficiency of a man buying milk after a long shift. A businessman, briefly dazed, richer by nothing and poorer by approximately a pint.

Home by midnight.

Heated the remaining coffee. Read three hundred pages of a novel set in medieval Romania written by a woman from Connecticut who had clearly visited for a weekend.

Gave it two stars. She spelled Transylvania correctly. That is worth something.

Slept by 4am.

This is my life. I am noting it here without judgment, without drama. It exists, and I exist inside it, and tonight that feels sufficient.

I lost my temper.

I am documenting this because I promised myself I would document the failures with the same precision as the graces, and this was a failure of a very specific and familiar kind.

The neighbor, Kowalski, in 4A. He has a television. He watches it at a volume that suggests he believes sound is directional only in his favor. I have tolerated this for fourteen months.

Last night he was watching — I knew before I looked at my Wikipedia page that this would set me off, and I looked anyway, which is its own problem — he was watching a program about Halloween, about the history of Halloween, and they spent six minutes on Dracula, during which a man in a rented cape said blah blah blah and opened his cloak and the studio audience laughed and the man in the cape said it again and they laughed again.

Blah blah blah.

I stood in my hallway for a long moment with my hands very still at my sides.

Then I knocked on Kowalski's door.

He answered in undershirt and suspicion. He is a large man. I am a gaunt and ancient terror. We stood in the doorframe.

I said, "The television."

He said, "Yeah?"

I said — and this is where it went wrong, this is where the old thing came out from under the newer thing like a bone through skin — I held his gaze and I let him feel it, that particular pressure I keep in my eyes for when I need someone to understand something without words.

He went very still.

He said, very quietly, "What do you want me to do?"

And I said, "Turn it down."

He turned it down.

I went back to my apartment. The power of it was still in my hands, that old current, and I stood at my kitchen counter and felt not triumph but something closer to shame. The dull shame of a man who has used a sledgehammer to hang a picture.

He didn't deserve that. He is a loud man with a small life and a television and he didn't deserve that.

I left a bottle of ţuică — I have several, I carry them through decades like a habit I can't name — outside his door in the morning with no note. He has said nothing since. Neither have I. We pass in the hallway now with a studied neutrality that is at least honest, if not warm.

I am learning. Nay — I am trying to learn. There is a difference and I am trying to honor it.

Mrs. Petrakis knocked at 7pm with a plate of kourabiedes covered in powdered sugar.

She said, "You never seem to have anyone over. I made too many."

I stood in my doorway — the bathrobe, the fraying shirt, the general impression of a man haunting his own apartment — and I looked at the plate of cookies and I looked at her face, which was full of a completely uncomplicated human kindness, and I said:

"Thank you, Maria."

Her name is not Maria. Her name is Eleni. I said Maria. I do not know why I said Maria.

She did not correct me. She just smiled and pressed the plate into my hands and went back down the hall.

I sat with the cookies for a long time.

I cannot eat them. I ate one anyway. The sweetness was wrong, too sweet, too immediate, nothing like the slow burn of wine at a table in 1461, nothing like anything I have actually loved, and I chewed it thoughtfully and I let myself miss Iancu and I let myself miss my mother, even her, even her iron will and her chapel prayers and her absolute conviction that mercy was a trap set by the weak for the strong.

I miss her. I am recording this. She would be furious that I am recording this.

Crăciun fericit, I said to the empty room. And the room did not answer, which is appropriate, and I found I did not need it to.

Bought myself a card. From a drugstore. It had a cartoon bat on it.

I stood in the aisle for some time.

The bat was smiling. Bats do not smile. I have known many bats. They are serious animals with serious concerns. But the bat on the card was smiling, and it had little hearts around it, and in the speech bubble it said: "I'm BATTY about you!"

I bought it.

I have no one to give it to. I gave it to myself. I wrote inside it, in my oldest handwriting, which still tilts east like it's trying to go home:

"You are doing better than you know. — V."

This is either the most pathetic thing I have done in six hundred years or it is the bravest. I have not decided.

I put it on the refrigerator.

It is still there.

There is a thing. A group. In the basement of a church on Junction Boulevard. I will not say what kind of group. I went three times. Tonight was the third time.

A woman named Deborah told the room that she had spent forty years making herself small so other people would feel big, and she said it with such matter-of-fact clarity, like she was reporting the weather, that I sat very still in my folding chair and stared at my hands.

Six hundred years. Six hundred years of the opposite. Six hundred years of making myself enormous so that no one would notice I was terrified.

Terrified of what? I kept asking myself on the walk home, down Junction, past the halal cart that is always there, past the pigeons that have no opinion about anything, terrified of what, precisely?

I think: of being ordinary. Of sitting in a room full of people who are not afraid of me and not knowing what I am in that room.

Tonight, in that basement, I was just a gaunt man in a bathrobe, and no one flinched, and Deborah offered me a coffee from the communal pot, and I said thank you, and she said "you're welcome, hon," and that was it.

That was the whole transaction.

I thought about Iancu. I thought: he would have been good at this. He was always good at just being in the room.

I am going back next week.

I helped the new tenant move in today.

Third floor, the small one. A young man, Sofian, from Morocco, studying engineering. He had four boxes and a disassembled bed frame and the particular expression of someone who has traveled too far to admit they are not sure it was the right decision.

I did not plan to help. I was in the hallway. He was struggling with the bed frame. The old instinct was to observe — to watch from the doorframe, to file the scene away, to remain on the correct side of the glass.

Instead I said, "I can take the other end."

He looked at me — the bathrobe, the pallor, the general atmosphere of Gothic exhaustion — and he made a decision, the kind young people make when they are too tired to be afraid, and he said: "Thank you, man."

We carried the frame up two flights. He talked the whole way up. His exact words, at the top landing, breathing hard, were: "You've lived here long? Is it okay?"

And I said, honestly, without thinking about it: "It is more okay than I expected."

We stood in the hallway for a moment. He offered me tea, atay, he called it, the real kind, he said, not the bag kind. I said I'd come down sometime. I don't know if I will. But I said it, and I meant the possibility of it, and that is different from before.

Mother would say I am going soft. She would say soft things break.

But I watched Sofian's door close and I stood in the hallway with my hands at my sides, not performing anything for anyone, and something in the center of my chest was quiet.

Not empty. Quiet.

There is a difference. I am only recently learning there is a difference.

Everyone was terrified the computers would fail.

Verily, the computers did not fail. Fireworks over the city, visible from my window as a distant stuttering of color. Mrs. Petrakis had a party on the second floor. She slid a note under my door: "Come if you want, no pressure."

I stood at my door for a while.

I put on the shirt without the fraying cuff. I combed my hair. I looked in the mirror — yes, I have a reflection, the book was wrong about that too, honestly — and I looked at the man there, gaunt and pale and six hundred years old, in a shirt that fit him once and would again if he stood up straight.

I went to the party.

I did not stay long. Twenty minutes. I talked to a man named George about the subway, which is a universal language in this borough. I ate nothing. I drank ţuică I had brought myself because I knew the wine would be bad. I stood mostly at the edge of the room and watched people talk, and it was not the watching of a man behind glass.

It was the watching of a man who is in the room, who is choosing where to stand, who is not performing anything and not hiding anything in particular, who is just — present.

Sofian was there. He found me near the window and said, in English and then in something else, something warm and quick: "Happy new year, neighbor."

I said, "And to you."

And I meant it. The whole of it. The year. The newness. The improbable, unearned luck of being here at all, in this building, on this street, in this city that has never once been impressed by anyone and is therefore the most honest place I have ever lived.

I walked back upstairs at 12:20.

I made coffee. I sat by the window. The fireworks were finished but the city was still lit.

I thought about nothing in particular for a long time.

That is, I think, what peace feels like. I will need more data.

But I am willing. That is the thing I am recording. After six hundred years and one friend and one mother and one terrible book and one bathrobe and fourteen months of Kowalski's television and a card I bought myself on Valentine's Day —

I am willing to find out.

SUMMARY: Over the course of these entries, the Count moves haltingly from a posture of isolated dominance — using his power reflexively, watching life from behind glass — toward something quieter and more grounded: a man who carries a plate of cookies to his apartment, helps a stranger with a bed frame, and attends a church basement meeting with folding chairs and communal coffee. The ghosts of Maria and Iancu persist as internal benchmarks, the one demanding aristocratic ruthlessness and the other modeling uncomplicated warmth, and the Count increasingly finds himself choosing Iancu's template, imperfectly and with visible effort. The central pattern that emerges is a slow, grudging permission he extends to himself — to be ordinary, to be in the room, to let the transaction end with "you're welcome, hon" and feel, rather than fear, the plainness of it.

Mother died on a Tuesday.

I note this not because Tuesday is significant, but because I have been sitting with the fact for three days now, and I still cannot locate what I am meant to feel about it.

She died as she lived: upright, furious, and deeply convinced that the room owed her something. Father Bogdan said she refused last rites twice before accepting them, and then corrected his Latin. I believe this entirely. I was not present. She had told me not to come — "You will make a scene, Vladislav, you always make a scene" — and so I did not come, and now she is in the ground and I am in her chair, and I can hear her voice more clearly than I ever could when she was alive.

She said: survival is not a gift, it is a performance. Perform it badly and the ground takes you.

She said it about serfs. She said it about neighbors. She said it, once, while looking directly at me.

I write this because I do not know where else to put it. I have advisors and I have soldiers and I have the apparatus of a principality and none of them are the right vessel for this particular weight. I put it here instead.

The chair is too large for me. Or I have become too small for it. I cannot tell yet which.

Iancu is dead.

He went the way he lived — loudly, surrounded by people who loved him, laughing at something I did not hear.

I was close enough to smell the garlic in his bread. I did not announce myself. I watched from the tree line like a coward or a wolf, depending on how generous one is feeling.

He was the only person I ever met who was not afraid of me. Not because he did not understand what I was — he understood precisely — but because he had decided, with that spectacular Iancu-logic, that I was lonely rather than dangerous, and that loneliness was more interesting to him than danger.

He used to bring me bread. I cannot eat bread. I ate it anyway, three times, rather than explain.

He said once, pouring two cups of wine neither of us intended to drink: "You watch people like you're memorizing them for later, Vlad. You know they can see you doing it?"

I told him I did not know what he meant.

He laughed. He always laughed when I lied badly.

I stayed in the trees until the fire went out. Then I walked north until the sky went pale and I could justify stopping.

I do not write this as grief, precisely. I write it as inventory. He is gone. The version of myself that existed when he was watching — easier, slightly warmer, less guarded — that version has nowhere to stand now. So it will have to find somewhere else.

Or not.

Whatever.

I have been thinking about Maria.

Not the mother I buried in Târgoviște — that Maria. The Maria who taught me to rule, who taught me that mercy is a door you leave open so your enemies can find you, who, when I wept once, at eight years old, over some small animal dead in the courtyard, said simply: "Put it in the ground. Vladislav. People are watching."

She was not wrong. She was also not right.

I think I have been holding that contradiction for six hundred years without setting it down long enough to look at it. She made me capable. She also made me convinced that capable was the only acceptable thing to be. That there was nothing underneath capable worth showing anyone.

Iancu showed me otherwise, and then had the profound inconsideration to die.

I sat with the portrait of her I still carry — faded now, barely a suggestion of a face — and I tried to be angry, and could not quite manage it. Something older than anger. Something more like: I see you, Maria. I understand what you were working with. You were afraid. You taught me your fear and called it armor.

I forgave her, somewhat.

Then I put the portrait away and went back to watching the road.

The fluorescent light in the hallway outside my apartment flickers every eleven seconds. I have counted. The landlord, a man named Gerald who smells of processed cheese and has never once met my eyes, says he will fix it "next week." He has been saying this for seven months. I have chosen not to escalate the matter into anything legally or supernaturally actionable. This is growth, apparently.

Brenda came by at nine in the evening with three blood bags in a reusable grocery tote that says TRADER JOE'S on the side. She was still in her scrubs. She looked like someone who had been asked to care about seventeen things simultaneously and had managed about twelve of them.

She said: "I've told you to leave the chain on. Anyone could walk in."

I told her I had not been worried.

She said: "You should be. You're in Queens."

I have survived the fall of Constantinople, the Black Death, and three separate attempts on my life by men wearing much better cloaks than anything available on this continent, but I did not say this. I took the tote bag and put the blood bags in the refrigerator next to a container of leftover borscht I made three weeks ago and have been meaning to discard.

She sat down without being invited, which is her habit, and I have stopped pointing out that this used to be considered an unforgivable breach.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I know."

She has this way of looking at me — not with pity, which I could not tolerate, but with the particular exhaustion of someone who has chosen a complicated situation and is at peace with the choice. I don't entirely understand it. I find it, against my better judgment, steadying.

She asked if I had eaten this week. I said I had. She gave me the look that means she doesn't believe me but is not going to make an argument out of it tonight.

She left the empty tote bag. She always leaves the tote bag. I have six of them now. I don't know what this means. I have not asked.

I found another Goodreads review.

Five stars. Five. For the Coppola film. The man gave it five stars and described me as "mysteriously sensual."

I am not sensual. I am a six-hundred-year-old man in a bathrobe. I am the thing that made Ottoman soldiers reconsider their career choices. Sensual.

I left my review. One star. "Historically inaccurate. The coat was not that dramatic." I posted it under the name VladFromWallachia9, because VladFromWallachia through VladFromWallachia8 were all banned for what Goodreads called "hostile engagement." Verily, it is I who have been subjected to hostile engagement. For six centuries. By everyone.

Brenda called while I was doing this. She has an instinct for my worst moments.

She said: "Are you on Goodreads again?"

I said I did not know what she was talking about.

She said: "Your typing sounds vengeful."

I put the laptop down.

She wanted to know if I would come with her to a thing — she used the word "thing" deliberately, I think, because she knows I cannot argue with a word that vague — on Saturday. Her classmate was having people over.

I said I had obligations.

She said: "You don't have obligations. You have excuses."

I sat with that for a moment, which is what I do instead of reacting, which she finds irritating.

I told her I would think about it.

She said: "That means no. That's fine. I'm just saying it would be good for you."

I told her I was managing perfectly well.

She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Okay," she said, and let it go, which is the thing she does that I appreciate most and trust least. She lets things go. It means she's put them somewhere else. Filed them. She'll come back to them when the moment is right. I've been alive long enough to recognize a patient person.

I did not go on Saturday.

I thought about going. That is not nothing.

The woman downstairs — Mrs. Petrakis, seventy-three, Greek Orthodox, deeply suspicious of me in a way I find professionally respectful — knocked on my door this evening with a container of spanakopita.

I opened the door and she looked at me the way she always does: measuring, canny, not quite frightened.

She said: "You look like you haven't eaten."

Everyone says this to me. I eat constantly. I simply do not look like it.

I told her I was fine.

She said: "Take it anyway."

I took it. She had already let go of the container before I reached for it, so my hand closed on nothing for a moment, and we both pretended this had not happened.

She looked past me into the apartment. I watched her take in the stacks of books, the single lamp with the low wattage bulb, the tote bags by the door, the faded burgundy drapery that I realize, from the outside, probably looks somewhat alarming.

She said: "You live like a monk."

I said: "Or a count."

She gave me a look that said she did not understand the joke and did not need to. Then she left. I held the spanakopita for a while before putting it on the counter. I won't eat it. But I didn't throw it away either, which, six hundred years ago, would have been unthinkable — this awkward standing in a kitchen with a stranger's food, not knowing what it means, not asking, just leaving it there because discarding it felt wrong.

I put it in the refrigerator next to the borscht.

The refrigerator is becoming a museum of other people's concern.

Brenda brought blood bags and did not stay, which is unusual.

She was in street clothes, not scrubs. There was something around her eyes — not crying, not quite, but the aftermath of something close to it. I did not ask. She handed me the tote bag, I said thank you, she said "yeah" and turned to leave.

I should have let her go. It is not my business. She has a life that does not include me in any substantial way and that is as it should be.

I said: "Do you want to come in."

It was not quite a question. I don't do questions well. They require a willingness to receive a specific kind of answer.

She turned back. Looked at me. Said: "Sure."

She sat on the couch. I made tea, which I cannot drink, and brought it to her anyway and then sat in the chair across the room and opened a book I was not reading. This is a thing I do. I make space by pretending to be occupied elsewhere. It is the best I can manage.

We didn't talk for a while. She drank the tea. The radiator knocked. The hallway light flickered — I could see it under the door in its faithful eleven-second rhythm.

Eventually she said: "Clinical rotation is brutal."

I said: "I imagine."

She said: "There was a patient today. Older guy. Nobody came."

I knew what she meant. I did not say that I knew.

I said: "That happens."

She said: "Doesn't mean it should."

"No," I said. "It doesn't."

I turned a page. I had not read a single word on it. She knew this, I think. She did not point it out.

She left after an hour. At the door she said: "Thanks for the tea."

I said: "Of course."

She said: "You're a weird guy, you know that?"

I told her I had been told.

She almost smiled. I watched her go down the hallway and disappear around the corner and then I stood in the doorway for another moment before going back inside.

It was fine. It was enough. I do not know why I keep needing to remind myself that enough is enough.

Mrs. Petrakis knocked again. This time she did not bring food. She brought a problem.

Her sink was making a noise. She described it for four full minutes. I gathered that her nephew, who usually handles such matters, was in Philadelphia. She did not ask directly — she is seventy-three and Greek and does not ask directly for anything — she simply described the problem in my presence until the solution became socially inevitable.

I got my tools. I have tools. Six centuries of self-sufficiency require tools.

I fixed the sink. It was a loose fitting beneath the P-trap. Twenty minutes, no theater. She stood in the kitchen and watched me with the same measuring expression she always uses, and I was aware of my reflection in the dark window over the sink — a gaunt, pale man in a stained bathrobe with his head under someone else's cabinet — and I thought, briefly, about Maria, who would have something elaborate to say about this.

Nay, Mother. I am fixing a woman's sink in Queens. This is what became of us. Somehow I find I do not mind.

When I was done I stood up and put my tools back. Mrs. Petrakis said: "You want coffee?"

I said: "Thank you, no."

She said: "You don't eat, you don't drink coffee. What do you do?"

I exist, I thought. At considerable length.

I told her I slept a great deal.

She nodded as if this explained everything. In her experience it probably does.

At the door she said: "You're a good neighbor, you know."

I said: "I have the tools for it."

She laughed — a real laugh, short and surprised. Something in my chest did a thing I cannot quite name. Not warmth, exactly. Something quieter than warmth. Recognition, maybe. Like an old word heard in a new sentence.

I went back upstairs.

Brenda called to reschedule the blood delivery. Some complication with her schedule, an exam, a double shift, a thing with her mother in the Bronx. She talked for a while. I listened.

At some point she said: "You never ask about my family, you know."

I said I did not want to pry.

She said: "It's not prying. It's called being interested."

I considered this. "How is your mother?" I said.

She said: "Oh, now you ask. Now that I've told you to."

"Brenda."

"She's fine. She's my mom. She drives me insane and she made me arroz con pollo last time I was there and I ate four servings."

I said: "That sounds good."

"It was incredible," she said. "You can't have any."

"I am aware."

She laughed. I could hear her moving around in her apartment, the clatter of something in a kitchen. She said: "You should meet her sometime. She'd like you."

I said: "She doesn't know me."

"No, but she likes people who are quiet and a little weird. She says they're the only ones worth trusting."

I did not know what to do with that, so I said nothing, which Brenda has learned to interpret as a form of receipt. She did not push.

She said she'd come Thursday instead.

I said Thursday was fine.

She said: "Okay. Eat something."

I said: "I always eat something."

She said: "Eat something normal."

"I have spanakopita," I said.

Silence. Then: "Where did you get spanakopita?"

"Downstairs."

"You have a friend downstairs?"

I told her Mrs. Petrakis was my neighbor, not my friend. She made the sound that means she has filed this information somewhere. I did not pursue it.

After she hung up I sat for a while in the chair by the window. The street was doing its evening thing — cabs, someone's music, the smell of something frying from the restaurant on the corner. I watched it without moving, the way I watch most things. The way Iancu once told me people could see me doing.

Maybe. Let them see.

I read my Wikipedia page today.

I do this the way other people pick at a wound: knowing it will not improve anything, doing it anyway.

"Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler..." yes, yes. "Inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula..." Stoker, whom I never met, who made me into a creature of mists and sexual menace and opera capes, and who, if there is any justice remaining in the metaphysical structure of the universe, is sitting somewhere deeply uncomfortable for what he did to my reputation.

Also: I am not from Transylvania. I have said this. No one is listening. Six hundred years and they cannot get the province right.

I left the page. Opened Goodreads. Read a new review — three stars this time, someone calling the 1992 film "campy but charming" — and started to type.

I stopped.

Put the laptop on the coffee table.

Sat for a while.

Brenda would say I am performing displeasure so I don't have to feel something more complicated. She would be correct. She is frequently correct. I find this both invaluable and exhausting.

The truth is: Stoker made me into something that people feel permission to love, in their way. Theatrical, romantic, vaguely tragic. Nay — I was none of those things. I was brutal and frightened and I learned to be monstrous from a woman who was herself frightened, and the fear became a castle and the castle became a legend and the legend became a cereal mascot, and here I am.

Here I am.

I closed the laptop without leaving a review.

This is, I am fairly certain, the most mature thing I have done in several decades.

Brenda came on Thursday as promised. She brought three blood bags, a bag of chips she ate herself, and a mood that was lighter than last time — something had gone well on her exam, I gathered, though she didn't lead with it. She dropped it in sideways, while looking for the remote.

She said: "I passed, by the way."

I said: "I assumed you would."

She said: "You could say congratulations."

"Congratulations."

"Ugh, like that? Like you're reading it off a card?"

I looked at her. "Brenda. I have known you to study while walking, eating, and, on one occasion, while explaining to me that I should not be feeding from pigeons. You were going to pass. My congratulations are genuine. They are simply also redundant."

She stared at me for a moment.

Then she said: "That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

I picked up my book.

She said: "Don't pick up the book. Just sit with the nice thing you said."

I put the book down.

We sat.

She said: "See? Not so bad."

I did not agree out loud. It was, objectively, not so bad.

She left at midnight. At the door: "Same time next week?"

I said: "Same time."

She said: "You're going to be okay, you know."

I have been alive since 1431. I have been impaled, metaphorically, by everyone from Ottoman sultans to Francis Ford Coppola. But she said it like it was news, like it was something I might not have considered.

I told her: "I know."

I don't know if I do. But I said it without flinching, which is new.

She left. I stood by the window. The street. The cabs. The fryer smell from the corner. Eleven seconds of darkness from the hallway light. The refrigerator full of other people's food.

Not so bad.

Not so bad at all.

I have impaled forty-seven Ottomans this week and I am exhausted.

Nay, that is not fair. I am not exhausted. I do not tire in the way men tire. But there is a heaviness in the chest that functions as exhaustion, and I have learned not to examine it too closely.

Iancu would have made a joke about it. He used to say, "Vlăduț, even God rests on the seventh day — and He had less blood on His hands than you." Then he would laugh his great stupid laugh and hand me bread. Plain bread, not even salted. Just bread, because he was holding it and I was nearby and that was reason enough.

I have been thinking about that bread.

The campaign goes well. My enemies fear me. The boyars do not look me sideways anymore. Maria would be satisfied.

I am less satisfied.

The impaling is effective, strategically. The fear it generates is measurable. And yet I found myself this morning looking at the plain and thinking, it would be restful to have fewer stakes to maintain.

I do not write this anywhere else. Here only.

Queens, New York. Present day.

The radiator made the noise again last night. That clanking, wheezing, inconsolable noise, as though the building itself is attempting to communicate some profound 19th-century grievance. I have reported it to the landlord four times. He texts back a thumbs-up and does nothing.

I have lived in castles. I have owned a castle that could swallow this building fourteen times. The castle had drafts, yes, and the smell was not ideal in summer, but the radiator did not scream.

Nay, I will not pursue this line of thought. I am grateful for rent control. I am grateful for rent control. I am—

The rent is $847 a month. In Queens. I will be grateful until I die, which is never.

Made coffee at 8 PM, as is my custom. The brand is Bustelo, yellow can, and I have strong opinions about it that I will not inflict on anyone. I drink it standing at the kitchen window watching the parking lot. Mrs. Evangelista from 4B was arguing with a delivery driver. She won. She always wins. I have watched her argue with seven different delivery drivers over fourteen months and her record is unblemished. There is something almost comforting in this.

Wore the bathrobe. Obviously. I wear the bathrobe. This is what I do.

Brenda came by with the bag.

She does this every two weeks, reliable as a utility bill, slightly more personable than a utility bill. She works the overnight ER shift and there is always extra, apparently. I do not ask detailed questions. We have an arrangement of comfortable mutual ignorance.

She said, "I can't stay, I have a pharm exam Thursday and I haven't slept since Tuesday."

I told her, "You should sleep."

"Yeah, thanks, really insightful."

She was looking terrible, which I noticed and did not say, because she would have done that thing with her face she does. Competent people do not want to be told they look tired. I know this from the inside.

Instead I made her coffee, put it in the travel mug I keep for her specifically — the one that actually seals, unlike her own, which she once mentioned had ruined her entire coat — and handed it over without ceremony.

She looked at it. Then at me.

"Did you—"

"Bustelo," I said. "Go study."

She went. Good.

The bag was O-negative. It is always O-negative. She has noted, with clinical precision, that I do not actually have a preference, I have just ordered O-negative so many times that she has stopped asking. This is accurate. There is comfort in the absence of decisions.

I heated it — not to body temperature, I am not theatrical about it — and drank it at the kitchen table watching a nature documentary about Carpathian wolves. The narrator was very concerned about the wolves. The wolves seemed fine.

I would like to note, for the record, that I am very good at parallel parking.

This may seem a small thing. It is not a small thing. The street outside this building is narrow in a way that appears designed to humiliate — a trap set by city planners with personal grievances — and the legal spots are tight, and people watch from their stoops.

I backed a 2009 Honda Civic into a spot that had approximately four inches of clearance on each side, first attempt, smooth and unhurried, and a man sitting on the stoop of the next building looked up from his phone and said, "Damn."

I said nothing. I got out of the car. I locked the car.

But I carried that "damn" with me for the rest of the evening like a small warm coal in my pocket.

I learned to drive in 1957. I was bad at it. I was catastrophically bad at it. I drove the same stretch of the Cross Bronx three times without understanding why, and I would have impaled anyone who mentioned it.

I am not bad at it now. I have had sixty-seven years to improve and I have used them.

Someone left a one-star review on Dracula by Bram Stoker.

I mean, someone other than me.

Their review said: "Jonathan Harker is SUCH a wet noodle. The Count is the only interesting character and he barely gets any POV chapters."

I stared at this review for a long time.

I have complicated feelings.

I upvoted it. Then I downvoted it. Then I upvoted it again. Then I closed the browser and made coffee and stared out the window.

The review is not wrong about Harker. Harker was, in life, extraordinarily damp. He wrote things down in that little book with the air of a man filing an insurance claim. Everything was remarkable and strange and I must consult my notes. I imprisoned him in a castle for six weeks and his main concern was that he had not received replies to his correspondence.

The review is also not — in a narrow technical sense — wrong about the POV chapters. I received very little interiority in that book. Everything I did was observed from outside by people who were extremely alarmed by it. I understand this. I was alarming. But I was also doing things for reasons, and the reasons were, at minimum, consistent.

I left my own review. Anonymous account, as usual — Cloaks_and_Daggers_1456 — and I wrote:

"The gothic atmosphere is undercut by a narrative structure that inherently privileges the colonizer's gaze over the colonized subject's interiority. Three stars."

Yes. I gave it three stars. I was feeling generous. It was a Tuesday.

A genuinely fine day.

I want to write that plainly, without apology: it was a fine day.

I woke at four PM, which is correct. Made coffee. Sat with it in the good chair — the one by the window, the one where the light in winter comes in at a low angle and falls just past me, not on me, which is ideal.

I read for three hours. Not Dracula scholarship, not anything with my face on it, not Wikipedia. I read a translation of a 12th-century Byzantine agricultural treatise that I found in a box at the 81st Street library sale for seventy-five cents. It is about the management of olive groves and grain storage. It is deeply boring in the way that things you love are sometimes boring. I do not grow olives. I will never grow olives. And yet.

Something about the specificity of it. How to know when the soil is ready. How long to wait. The patience required for ordinary things.

I made dinner. I use the word loosely — a heating process more than a cooking process, nothing complicated. But I used the good pan, the old cast iron I've had since 1923, which is seasoned to a depth that constitutes geological record. Everything in the cast iron is better. This is a fact.

At nine PM I went to the roof.

I do this more than I admit. The roof of this building has a water tower and two broken lawn chairs and a view of the expressway and the lit-up distance of Manhattan. It is not beautiful in the way the Carpathians are beautiful. But it is something.

I sat in one of the broken lawn chairs — the one that's only mostly broken, the other one has genuinely collapsed — and I watched the sky be the color it is over Queens at night, which is orange at the edges and grey in the middle, never fully dark. Never the dark I remember. But it has its own quality.

I was alone in a way that felt chosen rather than imposed, and those are different things, and it took me approximately three centuries to understand the difference.

I stayed up there for two hours. Nobody came. I was not waiting for anyone.

The grocery store situation.

There is a C-Town on Junction Boulevard and I go on Tuesday evenings because it is least crowded on Tuesday evenings. I have mapped this. I have mapped the exact aisle sequence that avoids the main traffic flow. I have a system.

I do not need to buy much. Coffee. Sometimes bread. Once, inexplicably, a bag of mandarins that I ate in their entirety over three days and did not regret.

Today in the cereal aisle, there it was.

Count Chocula.

It is never not there. It is a permanent fixture. It exists in a quantum state of perpetual availability — I have never once found the shelf bare.

The box features a cartoon vampire with enormous eyes and a purple cape and an expression of enthusiastic idiocy. It is eating chocolate cereal with visible joy. It has been eating this cereal since 1971. It will eat this cereal forever.

I stood in front of the display for, I would estimate, forty-five seconds. A child materialized beside me — maybe seven years old, trailing a parent — pointed at the box and said, very loudly, "COUNT CHOCULA."

I said, "Yes."

"I like Count Chocula."

"Many people do."

"Do you like Count Chocula?"

A pause. The parent had arrived. They were not interested in this conversation. I was faintly interested in this conversation.

"I have," I said carefully, "a complex relationship with Count Chocula."

The child looked at me with the frank assessment only children employ, decided this was acceptable, and moved on.

I did not buy the Count Chocula. I bought coffee and bread and stood in the self-checkout line for seven minutes while the machine declined to accept my crumpled five-dollar bill, and I smoothed it and fed it back in, and smoothed it and fed it back in, and the man behind me made a small sound of frustration.

I did not impale him. I want credit for this.

Brenda texted at 2 AM: "passed the pharm exam. dont make a thing of it."

I wrote back: "Congratulations."

She sent a thumbs-up.

I sat with that exchange for a moment. There are conversations that are entirely in the subtext. She passed a hard exam on no sleep in a program she pays for herself, studying in whatever corner she can find, and she did not want celebration, she wanted acknowledgment, and the acknowledgment wanted to be brief. I know this configuration. I live in it.

I made coffee. 2 AM is a reasonable time for coffee. I sat in the good chair.

Thought about what it means to get a thing done. To show up and do the work and not make a performance of it afterward. Iancu was like this — he would ride four days without stopping and then he would sit down and eat the bread and say nothing about the four days. It just happened. It was just what you did.

Six hundred years on, and the people I admire most have always been that shape.

I have been watching competitive chess tournaments on YouTube.

I do not know how to explain this. I do not play chess. I have never particularly liked chess. Chess, in my experience, attracts a specific type of man who wants to demonstrate that his intelligence defeats yours, and I have had enough of that.

And yet. The YouTube algorithm, which understands me better than I find comfortable, has decided that I want this, and I have discovered that it is correct.

What I like, specifically, is the commentary. There is a man who explains the moves in a tone of absolute unshakeable calm, as though every match is a reasonable thing that reasonable people are doing, regardless of what is actually happening on the board. A rook sacrifice that should be catastrophic: "And here he goes for the exchange sacrifice, which is quite an interesting practical choice."

Quite an interesting practical choice.

I have been narrating my own life in this tone for the past three days and I can report that it helps.

Drank a blood bag at room temperature through sheer inattention: quite an interesting practical choice.

Left a one-star review on Coppola's Dracula adaptation on a film site: quite an interesting practical choice.

Gary Oldman. I will say only: Gary Oldman. That is all.

The thing about being competent is that competence is mostly invisible.

I was thinking about this while fixing Mrs. Evangelista's radiator.

She knocked on my door at six PM and said her radiator was, and I quote, "making a sound like a dying person," and would I come look. She said this because I fixed the hallway light last February — I replaced the fixture, it took eleven minutes, it was not impressive — and now I am apparently the one who fixes things.

I came and looked. It was the bleed valve. Air trapped in the line. I bled it out, the sound stopped, the radiator worked.

She said, "How did you know how to do that?"

I said, "I have had radiators before."

I have had radiators since 1902. I have bled approximately four hundred radiators. I could bleed a radiator in the dark, which I have done, more than once.

She said, "You want some food? I made pernil."

I said I was fine.

She gave me the look she gives when she knows I'm lying but has decided not to press it — she has correctly read me, which is mildly alarming — and she wrapped something in foil and put it in my hands before I could say no.

I ate the pernil standing at my own kitchen counter at 7 PM. It was extraordinary. The seasoning was— I will not become emotional about pork. I will simply note that there are flavors that don't exist in the 15th century and they are the argument against nostalgia.

I put the empty foil in the recycling and did not knock to tell her it was good.

She knows. People who cook like that know.

Today on the Wikipedia article for "Vlad the Impaler":

"Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler (Romanian: Vlad Țepeș), was a 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, regarded as a historical source of inspiration for Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula..."

Regarded as. Regarded as.

I did not inspire anything. I was misappropriated. There is a distinction.

I scrolled through the article with the specific quality of attention I give to things that disturb me — that wide-open, almost analytical calm. There is a section called "Legacy and popular culture." There is a subsection. The subsection covers: the novel, the 1922 film, the 1931 film, the 1958 film, seven television adaptations, Count Chocula, the Halloween costume industry, two energy drinks, a theme park ride in Bucharest, and a 2022 Netflix series that I have chosen not to acknowledge.

The theme park ride. In Bucharest.

I sat with the theme park ride for a while.

Maria would have — I cannot complete this sentence without laughing, which is an unfamiliar and slightly alarming sensation. Maria would have burned the theme park to the ground. She would have burned it with such conviction that the fire would have been offended by what it was burning.

She is not here. The theme park ride exists. And somehow, tonight, I find this more absurd than terrible.

I clicked away from Wikipedia. I put on the chess commentary. Quite an interesting practical choice, I thought.

I made coffee and drank it in the good chair and watched the parking lot until midnight, when Mrs. Evangelista won her most recent delivery driver argument, and I counted that, obscurely, as something.

The last thing I will write tonight:

Brenda came by — not for the arrangement, just came by, which she does occasionally without announcing it as a social visit, which is how I know it is a social visit. She sat on the kitchen chair I keep near the window and complained about her program for forty minutes. The attending physicians. The hospital bureaucracy. A specific classmate named Darian who takes credit for group work, a practice I understand deeply from the perspective of a 15th-century warlord who was constantly managing Darian-shaped problems with less paperwork.

I did not offer solutions. She did not want solutions. I know this now, in a way I did not always know it — that sometimes the shape of help is just: present, quiet, not leaving.

I made the coffee. I refilled hers without asking. She talked. I listened.

At some point she said, "Don't you think that's insane?" about something Darian had done.

I said, "Darian sounds like a problem."

She laughed. Not a polite laugh — a real one, short and startled.

Something in me settled.

She left at one AM, said she had a six AM shift, said, "Thanks for— you know," and gestured vaguely, which covered the coffee and the listening and the general fact of the kitchen.

I said, "Of course."

The door closed. I stood in the kitchen for a moment in the after-quiet.

Six hundred years. The campaigns. The castle. The long dark decades I do not write about even here. Maria with her iron hands. Iancu with his bread.

And now Queens. The broken lawn chair on the roof. The yellow coffee can. The radiators that scream.

It is a small life. I am aware it is a small life.

But I bled the radiator and the radiator works, and Brenda passed her exam, and the pernil was extraordinary, and the man in the parking lot said "damn" about the parking job, and every single one of those things is, in the final accounting, mine.

The chess commentator, in my mind: quite an interesting practical choice.

Quite an interesting practical choice, verily.

The landlord raised the rent again. Not legally — I have the lease, I have the rent stabilization certificate, I have six hundred years of experience identifying men who will bleed you if you let them — but he slipped a notice under the door suggesting "voluntary contribution to building maintenance" of an additional two hundred dollars per month.

Voluntary.

I stared at the word for a long time. Then I put on my coat, walked downstairs, knocked on his office door, and stood in the hallway until he opened it. I did not say much. I handed him back the notice. I looked at him with the eyes I have been using since before his great-great-grandmother was born. I said,

"I will not be contributing voluntarily."

He nodded. He closed the door.

Something in me was almost satisfied. Almost.

I walked back upstairs. The hallway smelled of takeout and mildew, as it always does. I sat in my chair by the window — the one with the broken armrest I have been meaning to fix for three years — and I looked out at the parking lot and the bodega with the sign missing its second letter, and I thought: this is what power looks like now. Not battlements. Not the screaming of wolves. A man in a bathrobe returning a piece of paper.

Maria would have burned the building down.

I made instant coffee instead. I used the last of the good creamer. It was fine.

Brenda brought the bags on Tuesday. She was late — later than usual — and when I opened the door she was still in her scrubs with a coffee stain on the collar and the expression of a woman who has eaten nothing since morning and is furious about it.

She said, "Don't start."

I said, "I was not going to start."

She said, "You were doing the face."

I was perhaps doing the face. I set the bags in the refrigerator without comment. She dropped onto my couch and kicked her shoes off and stared at the ceiling. I stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, then went and made her tea, which she did not ask for and which I left on the coffee table without ceremony.

She talked about her practicum. A patient who coded. A supervisor who blamed her for a documentation error that was not hers. The way the other students went for drinks after and nobody thought to text her.

I listened. I did not offer anything that would require her to feel received.

Eventually she looked at the tea and drank some of it. She said, "This is decent."

I said, "It is Lipton. Do not compliment me."

She laughed, which is a short sound she makes when something is both funny and irritating. She picked up her shoes and left around eleven.

The apartment was quiet after. I sat with the quiet for a while before I fed. The blood was cold and tasted of nothing, as it always does now, as everything does — but I drank it slowly, and it was enough, and I did not think about what it once was.

That felt like the correct approach. I am almost certain.

A new Dracula novel received thirty-seven thousand ratings on Goodreads in its first month of release. It is called Bite Me, Vladdy. The cover depicts a man who appears to be a Romanian personal trainer, shirtless, with improbable cheekbones and a look of smoldering inconvenience.

I left four one-star reviews from four separate accounts.

The reviews were measured. Professional. I referenced pacing issues and historical anachronism. I did not mention anything personal. The third review I may have, in a moment of weakness, called the author's research "an insult to the dead, who also deserve accuracy," but I deleted that sentence before posting.

The fourth account I had to create specifically for the occasion. I gave it the username EasternEuropeanLiteraryReader and a profile picture of a wolf.

I sat with this for a long time afterward, in the dark, wearing the bathrobe.

My Wikipedia page now lists the novel under "Popular Culture References." It is between a flavored energy drink and a line of novelty coffins sold on a website called GothAmazon.

There is a word for this in Romanian — batjocură — which does not translate cleanly, but it lands somewhere between mockery and desecration. Maria used it rarely, and only when something had gone genuinely, irreversibly wrong.

I said it out loud, once, to the empty room.

Then I turned off the light and went to bed, because there is nothing else to do, and the bed, at least, is mine.

I fed last night from a bag Brenda marked with a small red dot, which means it came from the trauma ward overflow and she does not recommend I ask questions.

I did not ask questions.

I have arrived at a kind of peace with the feeding that took me longer than I will admit. For centuries, the feeding was everything — ritual, power, the central transaction of existence. Now it is the refrigerator. It is Thursday. It is a thing that happens, like brushing teeth or paying the electric bill, except slightly colder and with more ethical residue.

The ethical residue is the part I cannot fully resolve.

I know where the blood comes from. Brenda does not steal it — she is meticulous about what can be taken without harm, about expiration windows and surplus designations. She has explained the system to me twice in the patient, slightly-insulted tone she uses when she suspects I am not listening. I was listening. I retain everything. Six hundred years of memory and I can tell you precisely which shelf she stores the cooler on and that she takes it out in a paper bag with a receipt from the pharmacy on top, in case anyone looks.

She does this for me. She does not say why. I have not asked.

I think if I asked, something would have to change, and the current arrangement works.

There are things that have no clean answer — where the line is between complicity and necessity, between gratitude and obligation. I have been on both sides of that line in ways that would take more pages than I have. What I know now is that I do not take more than I need. I have not, in a long time. That is not virtue. That is just what I have arrived at.

It is something, anyway.

Bad day.

I will write it plainly, because I am tired.

The subway was delayed for forty minutes due to a signal failure at Roosevelt Avenue. I was standing in the heat of the platform with four hundred other people, and the man beside me was playing music from a phone without headphones — not even music I recognized, just a terrible, percussive clattering that went on and on — and I could feel myself beginning to recede into something very old and very cold that I do not invite out anymore.

I breathed. I looked at the tiles on the wall. I counted the cracks. I did not look at anyone's throat. I noted that as a minor achievement and moved on.

When the train finally came I sat in the end car. I got home. I changed into the bathrobe immediately. I ate two slices of leftover pizza from the box I have been working through since Monday and they were bad — the cheese had hardened and the crust had gone soft in the way that pizza does when it gives up — and I ate both slices anyway because eating bad food in a bathrobe is, I have found, one of the more reliable forms of comfort available to me at this stage.

Brenda texted at nine to ask if I needed anything from the pharmacy.

I said no. I said I was fine. I almost said something else, and then I didn't, and that was fine too.

I watched three episodes of a cooking competition program that I have come to rely on in ways I find slightly embarrassing. I do not know these people. Their feelings about bread do not concern me. And yet.

I went to sleep at two and slept without dreaming, which is the best I can ask for.

That was the whole day. I handled it adequately. I am still here.

There is a family on the second floor — the Garcias — who have a child of perhaps seven years who has decided I am his particular friend. He is called Marco and he has a gap between his front teeth and he knocked on my door on Sunday to ask if I had seen his ball, which had apparently traveled upstairs through methods I do not fully understand.

I had not seen his ball.

He stood in the doorway and looked past me into the apartment with the frank assessment of a child who has not yet learned not to stare, and he said, "Why is it so dark in there?"

I said, "I find the light harsh."

He considered this. He said, "My abuela says that too."

I was unexpectedly moved by this and chose not to examine why.

I told him I would watch for the ball. He thanked me and left. An hour later I found it wedged behind the radiator, which I cannot explain. I brought it downstairs and knocked and handed it to his mother, who thanked me with the particular warmth of a person who has decided the strange pale neighbor is probably harmless.

I said, "It was behind the radiator."

She said, "Of course it was. This building."

I agreed that it was this building.

I was back inside with the door closed before she could say anything more, but I stood in the hallway for a moment first, just — standing. Not going. Just there.

This is what I have instead of the deep belonging I used to arrange through terror. A ball. A radiator. Someone's mother saying of course it was.

It is not nothing.

Halloween.

I do not write about Halloween. I never write about Halloween. This is the one rule I maintain without exception and yet here I am.

A child rang my bell at seven-thirty wearing a cape and a widow's peak drawn in eyeliner. He could not have been older than nine. He held his bag open and looked at me and I could see the recognition begin somewhere in his face — not of me, never of me, but of the costume, the coincidence of the costume — and he said, with enormous delight:

"You look like Dracula!"

I stood there in the doorway in the bathrobe and the dress shirt and the slicked-back hair and I said:

"Everyone says that."

I gave him all the remaining candy. He left.

I went inside. I sat down. I did not feel sorry for myself, which felt important. I felt something more like amusement, thin and tired, the way you feel when a joke about you is actually fairly accurate and there is no dignity available and the only move is to decide it is funny.

It was a little funny.

The boy had a good costume.

Brenda came by not for a delivery — just came by, which she does occasionally and always frames as passing through, as though the fourth floor of a Queens apartment building is on the way to something.

She brought coffee from the cart on the corner. She handed me one without asking how I take it, because she knows how I take it, which is a form of intimacy I have never acknowledged and do not intend to.

She said she got the practicum supervisor removed from her evaluation.

I said, "How."

She said, "Filed a formal complaint. Documented everything. Took me two weeks."

I thought: of course she did. She is relentless in the specific, efficient way of someone who has never had the luxury of not being relentless.

I said, "Good."

She looked at me. She said, "That's it? Good?"

I said, "What else would you like me to say."

She said, "Most people would say congratulations, or that's great, Brenda, or—"

I said, "You knew you were right. You gathered the evidence. You filed the complaint. I am not going to congratulate you for doing the thing that was correct to do."

She was quiet for a moment. I thought I had miscalculated.

Then she said, "Okay. Yeah. Actually that's better."

We drank the coffee. It was too hot and tasted of the cart, which is to say slightly of diesel and cardboard and something that might have been cinnamon. It was not good. I was grateful for it in a way I kept entirely to myself.

She left after an hour. I washed both cups.

I stood at the sink afterward and looked at the two cups and the dish rack and the water still draining, and I thought: here is a life. This is what it looks like. Two cups. A parking lot. Someone who brings coffee without asking.

Six hundred years, and this is the version I would keep.

I stood there a little longer than I needed to, just to be sure of it.