An American Vampire in Amsterdam

by M. Shaw
Issue 16: Consumed | 4,637 words

Get fat on Lorings Fat-ten-u and corpula foods. The Gribler Bank Note Co.

When Liz’s friends started asking me about the proper methods of devouring an entire human carcass, I figured they meant well; at least, insofar as our kind ever do. Who could blame these Dutchmen, with their public blood banks punctuating cities as frequently as coffee shops, for being curious about how we did things in the backward theocracy-nee-superpower across the water? Back in Chicago I was comically nonthreatening as vampires go, but to them I was an unwashed savage, here to provide them with lurid tales from deep within the heart of darkness.

“Sorry to disappoint,” I told them, “But I make do with pig’s blood, same as everyone else I know. I’m pretty sure gross consumption is an urban legend.”

The guy I’d interrupted frowned and put away his phone. He’d been gesturing at some forum post with a bunch of artistically unfortunate illustrations. Liz herself returned from the bar bearing another round of whiskey shots, which we toasted in a variety of languages. It was as awkward as every other interaction of the night—the fun kind of awkward, mostly, though I could feel that streak starting to turn. I knew none of these people—Petra, Welmer, Dulcia, someone, and someone—and still couldn’t clock how to act around them. I barely even knew Liz and hadn’t seen her in almost fifty years. Finding out that we’d both become vampires was the entire reason for my visit. Sure, we’d only had two classes together at NYU in the 70’s, but everyone else I knew was either dead or working on it, and neither state made good company for nightlife. I’d been warned about this: after the first few decades, you start to notice you’re running out of old friends. It’s a rough adjustment, and for a while you have to take what you can get. So here I was, taking it.

The band started a new set, samba dancers crowded the floor, and our conversation scaled back to what was worth yelling more than once.

I could, at least, see why Dulcia had brought us here. The unnamed, literally underground nightclub was essentially a speakeasy, accessed through a narrow stairwell between a billiard hall and a post office. Four or five dozen people crammed into one basement room, sweating and breathing and belching and kissing until the air was a smorgasbord of odors and pheromones. To our kind, more titillating than any red-light district sex show. The best part was that, if we got the thirst, we could walk two blocks to the nearest blood bank and get 200 ml of certified ethical human blood for twenty euros. Which we did, eventually.

I ended up walking Dulcia to her apartment at the end of the night on the way back to where I was staying. There were plenty of hotels in the city with more than adequate amenities, but I had opted for a houseboat on the canals—once I’d verified it had blackout curtains. She acted amazed when I told her this, trying a bit too hard to humor the tourist.

“You are enjoying Amsterdam?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Here I am, walking down a well-lit street with no makeup, looking like a vampire, acting like a vampire, and everyone’s chill about it. Wouldn’t even consider doing this back home. I’d get the cops called on me, and they’d fill me with bullets in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe. I’d wake up in a cage and, if I wanted to get out and go home, I’d have to thank them for doing it and agree to pay a three-figure fine.”

“Many vampires here still do wear makeup,” she said. “For comfort.”

“Oh yeah, I got that. It’s different, though. Back in the US, I wouldn’t be caught dead without it.”

She laughed harder at the pun than I found believable. “You’re from Chicago, yes? I have a cousin in Denver. I wonder if you know him?”

“I don’t know anyone in Denver,” I said. “It’s like a sixteen-hour drive from Chicago, and you have to go through a lot of conservative areas. They don’t even like gay people, much less vampires.” It occurred to me I was talking to someone from a country one third the size of Illinois. “It’s like driving to Austria, if everyone in Germany wanted to stake you.”

“It must be very hard to feed on such a trip,” she said. “Come to think of it, where do you get your—”

“Asian grocery store,” I said. “I have a friend who goes for me when they open. They sell animal blood, but you have to go early because they run out.”

Dulcia clicked her tongue as if scolding a child. “They should treat you better. It is not dignified.”

“Preachin’ to the choir,” I said. “Hey, I’ve heard the Van Gogh Museum is open at night. Thought I might go tomorrow. Is it any good?”

“I know you said you’ve never tried the gross consumption,” she said, “But surely you must know some who have? I hear it’s not uncommon.”

Not for the first time, I wondered what it was about the dregs of American culture that so fascinated the Dutch. From the trashy US pop music playing on the radio all day to these constant questions about our underground red market; they didn’t seem to approve of any of it, and yet their curiosity never let up.

It must be a prince-and-the-pauper type deal. When you come from a place as painstakingly civilized as the Netherlands, you can’t help but be curious about the more barbaric facets of vampire society. And what could be more barbaric than gross consumption, the urban legend that consuming a human’s entire body, bones and all, would allow you to go for years without feeding? I could picture a Dutch vampire spending hours staring at drawings of nerve fibers plated up like spaghetti, basking in the cannibal pull of it.

“I don’t,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know many people to start with. We keep to ourselves over there.” Like most of what I’d said that night, this wasn’t strictly true, but it was close enough. I, personally, kept to myself, and that was what mattered here. Just like how it was technically true that I didn’t know if gross consumption worked as advertised. I had intended to find out, the first time I did it. And the next few times. All I’d learned was that the thrill of doing it was more addictive than any drug, and I couldn’t stop for long enough to determine if it had any effect at all on my need for further sustenance.

Most of the time I didn’t even bother to eat the whole thing anymore. The fun was all in the meal prep anyway. Exciting new hobbies were as hard to come by as old friends, after a certain point. The way I called it, I was just taking whatever I could get on both counts.

••••

It was barely 3:00 a.m. when I sat at the house boat’s breakfast nook and took a medicine bottle from my suitcase. The capsules inside were filled with bone meal, mixed with a little Pepto-Bismol so they’d be pink, like the picture on the label. I’d tried using various bodily humors and tissues to get the color, but no part of a dead body maintains its vibrant, healthy color for long. In the end it’s all just meat.

I washed a few down with a generous pull of the scotch I’d picked up at the duty-free. They tasted like plastic, and I wondered again why I had gone to the trouble of sneaking them through airport security. It was comforting to have part of my last victim with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on the source of that comfort.

On a sudden impulse, I tossed the rest of the pills into my mouth and tried to dry-swallow them all in one go, which was a mistake. The solution, I decided, was to empty the whiskey bottle down my throat as well. This was arguably another mistake, but not one I’d feel the consequences of immediately, so, fuck it. I opened a window and tossed the empty pill and liquor bottles into the canal. Littering must be illegal, but drunk me dared the fucking Dutch to do anything about it.

As the buzz set in rapidly, so did the malaise. Here I was, having taken the trouble to cross an ocean, planning around sunrise and set times across latitudes and meridians, and for what? The nightclub had been fine, but we had such things in Chicago. We had whiskey in Chicago too—boy, did we ever—and yet here I was drunk, by myself, swallowing flavorless bone pills, bored.

Fuck, I thought, I’m depressed again. Back on my Interview with the Vampire bullshit.

Maybe this was just where undeath led, eventually. The extinction of novelty. Soon I’d be able to go anywhere in the world and find nothing new, under the sun or otherwise. Maybe I’d end up one of the multi-centenarians hanging out in the most tediously trendy clubs, trying every fashionable party drug, desperate for a way to feel something again.

I was sitting on the roof of the houseboat, dangling my legs over the side, daring myself to wait there until sunrise, when my liquid courage turned to liquid determination. Fuck malaise. Centuries stretched before me, I’d escaped my nightmarish homeland, I had the strength of twenty men, and the world was full of people who believed I could turn into a bat and all kinds of wild shit. I was a motherfucking vampire and I was going to find something fun to do, and it was going to be awesome.

It was time to call bullshit on the “tolerant” Dutch, selling human blood at dispensaries like it was completely normal. I’d come here seeking that kind of liberation, only to keep hearing from all of them about how much they envied the more barbaric side of vampirism that wasn’t supposed to exist in this country.  Well, fuck that. I was going to kill someone anyway. Might just leave the body in the street too.

A quick check of night bus routes and I was off to the suburbs. I had no concrete idea where I was going, but I’d noticed these neighborhoods on the way in from the airport, and I knew what I was looking for: blocky, anonymous apartment buildings with scandalously huge windows looking in on the units, ornamented only by the dingy convenience stores and fast food places bookending them on street corners. I guessed people with adequate civil liberties didn’t need privacy the way we did in America.

As the southwest suburbs came into view, replacing the eclectic facades of the old city with mile after mile of generic post-war development, I imagined living here. In public I could be just like Liz, every inch the domesticated Dutch vampire who rode a bike everywhere and drank ethically sourced blood, the donor’s age, diet, and vital statistics printed on the label. Off the books, I could raise hell. Bring a bit of the wild west to these tame little civilians with their windmills and wooden shoes and tiny dogs shitting on the sidewalk. I could be a legend here. A shark in a fish tank, the real American dream.

••••

Ideally, hunting involves more prep time. The best way to do it, in my opinion, is to watch a spot for a couple weeks—not a 24/7 stakeout, just frequently enough to identify people with set routines. You pick one, watch them until you can predict the sweet spot where it will be a few days before they’re missed. Railyards are great, because the workers don’t get home for stretches of days, plus they’re always pumping themselves full of red meat and nicotine so their blood tastes amazing. Homeless camps are okay too, but you have to be more careful. Those guys talk to each other, and there’s always cops sniffing around.

In a pinch, though, you can do what I was doing on the outskirts of Amsterdam: find someone sleeping alone and go with the flow. The key is to leave your phone at home, don’t make a mess, and avoid the area for a few months afterward.

As for finding said person, I would mostly go by sound. Other people’s heartbeats are much more noticeable when you don’t have one yourself. Granted, I had one most of the time; like any vampire, I’d insist in public that we weren’t dead, that the whole “undeath” thing was an old wives’ tale. The fact remained, though, that there was something tethering me to this world beyond the simple bodily waterworks that keep most people going. I could breathe, my heart could beat, but it was all a performance. I could stop performing anytime, make myself go quiet inside, and then it would all come into focus.

The apartments were more crowded than I’d expected, but I found someone sleeping alone in the back room of a shawarma place. There was a time when I would have written him off because there was probably an alarm on the door, plus a break-and-enter at a business would be noticed by morning. That wasn’t a dealbreaker for me anymore, though.

Just about any vampire power—or weakness—that you’ve heard about in stories fits into one of three categories: real, fake, or basically real but not as advertised. Turning into mist is the third kind. We can’t actually do it, as far as I know, but it’s a hyped-up version of the real ability to go through a locked door without opening it. Not many know the trick, but Chicago winters, when even the living dead don’t want to go outside, gave me the chance to figure it out through sheer boredom.

It’s sort of like meditation. You have to completely forget that doors are a thing, then imagine what doors would be like if they actually existed. Obviously the point of a door is that you go through it. There wouldn’t be a door that you can’t go through, because that would defeat the entire purpose. Then you move in this kind of diagonal sort of squiggle direction, and it’s done. It sounds like some hippy-dippy bullshit that shouldn’t work, and that’s fair. Vampires shouldn’t work either. We should be dead, and yet here I was, through some inscrutable force.

Anyway, I was inside the shop.

There’s nothing more unremarkable than a fast-food kitchen. There are minor variations from one to the next, but there’s basically only one way to build them. There’s the fryer, the grill, the triple sink. Then there’s the fridge and the other fridge and the handwashing station and dishwasher and so on. Thousands of miles from home, and it was all exactly the same. The weight of health codes, shareholder demands, and practical necessity had compacted every commercial kitchen in the western world into a uniform series of stainless-steel cubes.

The sleeper’s throaty, baritone, grandpa snores echoed loud and clear from the next room. Probably a heavy smoker, or so I hoped; nicotine-rich blood has an extra spring to it going down, almost like carbonation. Good stuff, even if it did make me crave cigarettes for a week after drinking it.

The door to his room was unlocked. I turned the handle gently and pushed it open in slow motion, which didn’t stop the hinges from grinding and squealing like a cat being stepped on.

The snoring ceased, and I saw two thoroughly bloodshot eyes pop open at one end of a camping cot. What followed was a rapid string of muttering in a combination of languages. I could pick out “alstublieft,” which I understood was the Dutch aloha, but not much else.

“Spreekt u Engles?” I said. It was the only Dutch I’d needed so far, since just about everyone here did, in fact, speak English.

“No please,” the guy said. “No please, no please.” He said this over and over like he was having a flashback.

I crouched by the cot. The room was tiny, practically a closet. I had to lean my back against the door to avoid mashing my face into the sweat-dank sleeping bag he lay under.

I spoke slowly. “Hey, man. Hey. I’m sorry. I didn’t know there was anyone here.”

He quit repeating himself. His tone dropped to a whisper. “Please, I have nothing.”

“Okay,” I said. “Listen. I’m just looking for cash, but I don’t want any trouble. Didn’t know there was anyone in here, I swear. I’m just gonna leave, all right? No harm done, right?”

He snorted a hefty blob of mucous and swallowed. When he exhaled again I smelled a hint of blood. He must have bit himself in his panic. “Okay,” he said. “Yes.”

“Great,” I said. “What’s the code for the back door?”

“Mother’s birthday,” he said. His accent wasn’t Dutch, but beyond that I couldn’t tell. “Five, nine, four, two.”

“Thanks,” I said and bit into his carotid artery.

This was the tricky part. A little blood on the sleeping bag would be fine—I could dispose of that—but I had to keep it off the cot, the floor, everything else. Managing the blood flow from a dying victim was always a combination of sucking on the wound as hard as I could and trying to keep them from thrashing so much that they gushed all over the place. They always thrashed, and this one was no exception. I had a theory that the stereotype of vampires hissing came from them trying to shush victims while drinking their blood at the same time.

Despite everything, it was a clean kill. I stroked his hair until I was sure the lights had gone out and I’d drained him enough that he wouldn’t leak. I found some zip ties in the kitchen and used them to strap his wrists to his ankles so I could carry him out under my arm like a football (the American kind) without his limbs dragging on the floor.

Body in tow, I entered the code on the door alarm. This way, it would look like he’d left on his own if anyone happened to check the thing’s punch history. I hadn’t known the guy, but I’d be willing to bet that someone sleeping on a cot in the back room of a shawarma place wasn’t exactly living his best life. It would make perfect sense for him to just snap one night and ditch the whole thing.

I was in the alley deciding where I wanted to stash the carcass when Dulcia revealed herself.

••••

The room in the suburban apartment was basically empty but for a tarp on the floor and a metal folding chair in the corner. Dulcia had explained, on the way in, that this building was refugee housing. The residents allowed her to come and go from this one room, no questions asked, in return for her guarantee that none of them would be preyed upon.

“Did nobody tell them how low the crime rate is here?” I asked.

She grinned. “And why do you think it’s so low? Nobody wants these people here, even them. When one or two go missing, who cares? Nobody calls the police.”

“Wow,” I said. “So much for the tolerant left.” She didn’t react, so I clarified, “That was a joke. Americans say that line when—”

“I understood,” she said. “When you came to Osdorp, I was worried you would hunt in this building. We would have had an unpleasant conversation.”

The body of our restaurateur friend lay on the floor between us, still trussed up like a roast. Part of me wanted to stick an apple in its mouth. Dulcia had insisted I take the chair, being her guest. She leaned against the opposite wall, in a spot relatively free of peeling wallpaper.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“Eh,” she said. “Tracking other vampires is not so hard. How did you pass through that door, though? Please, you must tell me about that one. We can trade secrets. It will be a cultural exchange.”

“I, uh, assume you’ll turn me in otherwise?” I said, failing to sound anywhere near as unconcerned as I meant to.

“Turn you in?” She chuckled. “To whom? This country has a reputation. Nobody wants to see it ruined.”

Dulcia took a few steps forward, knelt over the body, took a pocket knife from the breast pocket of her jacket, and cut the zip ties. With the body on its back, she slit the t-shirt it was wearing down the middle and then made a Y-shaped incision down the torso like for an autopsy. She did all this so casually, as if washing her hands before a meal.

“I must have the heart,” she explained. “It’s my favorite, you know.” She took off her jacket and tossed it aside, rolled up her shirt sleeve, and cracked the body’s exposed sternum in half with her elbow in one strike.

“I… actually find the heart a bit gamy.” I was barely aware of myself saying this, mainly because it was so surreal to be having the conversation at all. Hours ago, I had seen this woman coaxing a pigeon to take a cracker out of her hand, uttering little encouragements in her buoyant Dutch voice. Watching her peel a ribcage away like the shell of a boiled egg didn’t compute.

Dulcia lifted the heart slowly from its cradle, severed the veins and arteries by sawing through them with her thumbnail, and dropped the whole wet, dripping mass into a zip top bag. “I hear the texture improves when pickled,” she said. “I’d like to try. I agree with you about the gaminess, but the flavor is simply beyond compare, almost like electricity in my mouth. Which part is your favorite?”

“The rib meat,” I said. “Also the kidneys. Sorry, but what are you planning to do with the body?”

“That’s what you’re going to tell me,” she said. “I threw the ribs over… There.” She pointed to the corner of the room, where one hemisphere of the ribcage lay marinading in its juices. “We will split the kidneys. So, the gross consumption. You have tried it after all, yes?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I have. I still don’t know if it works though. Never tested how long I can go without feeding.”

“You seem uncomfortable.” She said this as she was severing the lower end of the intestines, just above the rectum. She then started squeezing them from end to end, like a toothpaste tube, emptying them of gut gas and feces. “I hope you’re not going to tell me I have to eat the shit?”

“How the fuck should I know? I just told you. I’ve never actually checked if gross consumption works. Do whatever you want.”

Dulcia wiped her hands on a kerchief. “Seriously, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” I chewed my lip a moment, hoping I could spur it into finding its words. “I guess I thought things were different here. More civilized.”

“You thought a country with legal vampirism was more civilized?” Dulcia laughed. I’d heard her laugh before, but it always sounded rehearsed, like a singer practicing scales. This was different. Uglier, like a real person laughing. “What, with our drugs and our bicycles and our red light district? You think cannibalism is more civilized when it’s taxed?”

“I mean…”

She waved a dismissive hand. “You would have that in common with most of our government, I think. I will say, the Dutch have always been very good at figuring out how to tolerate our own behavior. If that’s what you call civilized, then yes. We have prostitution here because our ancestors feared sailors doing to our own women what they did freely to women in the colonies that they pillaged to build our empire. When your way of life is already built on the back of the people and countries you’ve drained, it’s hard to disparage vampires in your midst. We’re much like America in that way, only we don’t have such conflicted feelings about it.”

“Huh. When you put it that way…”

“Look up Zwarte Piet later,” she said. “You’ll find we’re as tolerant as suits our own convenience. Now, let us get down to the reason we’re here.”

“Which is?”

There was a knock at the door, followed by a rapid string of Dutch words on the other side. I bolted to my feet, convinced it must be the police, but Dulcia answered in calm, genial tones. The door opened and in walked a group of Liz’s friends from the nightclub, plus a few others. They waved to me, one by one as they came through the door, even the ones I’d never met. Liz herself was absent.

Dulcia introduced me to the newcomers as they arranged themselves, standing or squatting a polite distance from the body and watching me expectantly, as if they were posing for a photo and I was holding the camera.

“Now then.” She clasped her hands together, TED Talk style. “Before we begin, I’d like to thank you very much for coming.” This she said to me specifically. “Liz, your friend, has been delightful for us to know these past few months, but unfortunately has not brought along anything to advance our craft. But you, you have mastered the gross consumption—as well, apparently, as the ability to pass through a locked door.” She paused, joining the others for a moment in their fixation on me. “We were hoping…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but it was easy enough for me to gather what they wanted. I should have been panicking; never in the seven decades I’d spent as a vampire had I been so thoroughly apprehended doing something I was so definitely not supposed to do. There were eight here, and each one now had enough dirt on me to get my passport confiscated and my ass thrown in a foreign prison. But I didn’t panic, far from it. I felt lighter than air.

I thought back on the hopes I’d had for my Amsterdam trip, that shark in a fish tank feeling I’d been chasing. I wasn’t anybody in the US, not as a person or as a vampire. I was just a dweeby, introverted guy with a patchy beard, a shitty job, and no friends I saw on a regular basis. The Netherlands was so small and quaint I’d assumed just being an American vampire would give me a certain mystique that I’d never have at home. That expectation hadn’t panned out, but I’d found something else. I wasn’t a shark in a fish tank, I was a shark in a shark tank—one where the other sharks finally saw me for the strength of my bite.

“Okay,” I said. “To start with, you have to drain and catch all the blood from the corpse. This is where it pays to know how to field dress a deer.”

One of the vampires raised his hand. “What means, field dress a deer?”

In a few weeks I’d return home raving like any other tourist about the sane, sensible way people lived over here: the blood banks and all-night tea rooms and black puddings sold out of street carts. Anyone within earshot would roll their eyes, I was sure, but only because they’d be ignorant of what was concealed behind all that affected gentility. Americans, Dutchmen, whatever. We were all vampires, and the world was ours.

I grinned. “So glad you asked.”