"Get up," said the wife. "You sleep too much."

"Why are you making all that noise?" the husband whined, pulling the bed covers over his head.

"I'm not making any noise at all," the wife sniffed. "I'm getting ready for work. You should be doing something useful as well. I swear, I could never sleep as much as you. How men can be so lazy is beyond me."

"I'm not lazy," the man pouted under the blankets. "I'm creating."

"You're what?" called the wife from their bathroom where she stood before the mirror trying to find enough eyebrow to outline with her pencil. Neither of them was young anymore.

"You're not listening, as usual," the man said, peeking out. He'd decided a shroud didn't suit his need for air. He stuck out a bare arm to test the temperature. Night's cold sting dulled as the heater blew warm air into their bedroom. He pulled back the sheet and rolled to a sitting position with some effort.

His wife strode through the room, wringing cream into her knuckles.

"Oh, you're finally up," she noted, as if she'd caught him in the act of being lazy. She paused to wait for some smart comeback she could use to indict him.

"In my dream I was creating, mulling over ideas, characterizing life, pitting motive against motive, ferreting out the contradictions of existence. And some cute honey half my age had pulled me onto the carpet in a bohemian apartment and was melting with desire while I talked about the meaning of the universe."

"I'm not surprised," he wife sneered, pleased that he had made her assassination attempt easy, "You never did know what to do at times like that." She motored to the kitchen, her routine calling next for a cup of coffee.

"How can I sleep with all this racket?" the husband moaned. "No one appreciates the delicate role of the unconscious." He yelled after her while he began to pull on a shabby pair of corduroys. "I bet you can't remember any of your dreams when someone jerks you awake."

"I heard that," he wife gargled through a mouthful of coffee. She swallowed. "Some jerks can't appreciate the role of the conscious. That's why we women always have so much to do."

"What do you really do?" asked the husband, exaggerating fatigue in his voice. He padded into the kitchen in his bare feet. He didn't work Tuesday, but his wife did. His job schedule required him to go to his office Thursday through Monday, while his wife went to her company headquarters Monday through Friday. His break came in the middle of her workweek. "I mean, is all that work really accomplishing anything?" he repeated an old theme. He parked himself on a bar stool by the kitchen counter.

"I made enough so you could have a cup as well," the wife said smartly. "Until you have a cup, you grumble and make sounds like one of those French philosophers you're always quoting."

"Those who insist on being are those who have trouble becoming," he said.

"See! French if I ever heard." his wife remarked triumphantly, as if she had evidence of a disease any child would accept as proof her husband should submit himself to a cure.

"No," he protested weakly, resting his elbow on the counter and leaning his head on his hand. "Nietsche said it first, or something like it, in The Birth of Tragedy. He thought he was Polish. Henri Bergson sort of repeated it later in Paris."

"Coffee's in the coffee pot," his wife made clear to him in a loud, declarative sentence. "Cups are in the cupboard. Tell me the name of one thinker who can argue about that."

"And the king is in his counting house, counting out his money," the husband said incomprehensibly as he retrieved his cup and poured it full.

"If it wasn't for me, would you get coffee at all?" his wife indicated his ingratitude.

He dutifully said Thank You, kissed her on the cheek, and followed her into their second bedroom. It was arranged as a study with two desks. She stood before her desk and assembled papers into folders she stuffed in a valise.

"I would like to create," he confessed without thinking it through. The idea had appeared in one of the dreams he enjoyed remembering before a wakefulness driven by hot caffeine doused his memory.

"How about creating a better job opportunity?" he wife proposed. "Anyone as bored as you should be able to think up ways to spend the majority of your time and convince someone to pay you for it." She tapped a deck of paper on her desktop to straighten it and packed it with her folders.

"Work, work," the husband moaned. "What's the point? Just to make more money? What would we do with the money? We have enough, I think. By now we could probably quit."

"You'd think of that," he wife replied, as if charging him with negligence. "And then what would you do? I work. I help people in the office. I stick up for them when the boss does crazy things. I study. I'm always learning new things. Did you learn anything this whole year? And the Lord helps those who help themselves. I make more than you do now that I'm a manager."

"I'm glad things are going well for you," said the husband leaning against the wall and cradling his hot cup in his hands. "But they're not for me. It's not that I'm bored. I am, but it's because I'm useless."

"So make yourself useful for a change," said his wife. "Can you carry that file box and follow me?"

He carefully placed his cup on the lid of the cardboard box she pointed to and hefted with both hands. Small clicks in both his shoulders reminded him of his age. He wife snapped her valise shut, marched to the bedroom, and dropped it on the rumpled covers.

"Just put that box on the floor," she commanded, hoping the activity would inspire some minimum utilitarian exertion on his part. "My goodness, you didn't straighten the covers or anything. And your shoes are all over the place. I don't know how I could have gotten involved with a man who can't do anything."

"You should have thought of that ten years ago," he said, carefully setting the box down on the bed and rescuing his cup. He drank deeply and felt the coffee inflate him. His wife rinsed her contact lenses in the bathroom.

"I want to create something," he wished out loud again with more resolution. "Maybe something funny."

"You're funny," called his wife. "Write a description of yourself. That would be funny."

"Ho ho," he mumbled sarcastically. "Or something that strikes to the core of the modern dilemma."

"Same piece," he wife called as she leaned into the mirror and popped her contacts in place.

"Don't you have any faith in me?" the husband asked like a little boy.

The wife bustled into the room, smoothing her dress and carefully wiping the corners of her eyes with the knuckle of her index finger. "I have every faith that you'll be able to carry that box to my car," she said officiously. "Where are your shoes?"

"Right here," said the husband, putting down his cup and inserting his feet into slippers abandoned on the floor beside the bed. Anticipating the temperature outside, he nabbed a trench coat from a hook on the back of the bedroom door and pulled in on without inserting his arms in the sleeves. He trooped after his wife, dressed like an off-duty Italian film director, hunched a little so the coat wouldn't slip off, lugging the box. He slid it onto the seat of her car while she held the door open. She thanked him and gave him a peck good-bye. Then she inserted herself into the driver's seat and waved as she backed her car down the driveway.

He pulled the coat tighter from inside and wandered back into their house, glad to retreat from the morning chill. He found his mug and sat at his desk, trench coat sheltered, uncombed and unshaven, looking like a disaster victim in a Red Cross shelter. A shiver traced his upper body. He tilted up his cup and found he had finished the coffee. He pushed the empty cup to one side and opened a notebook. He picked a pencil out of a jar full of pens and pencils and tapped a little rhythm on his chin while he thought of titles. Titles might help kick start something, he hoped.

The Man Who Murdered His Wife suddenly loomed in his imagination as a Hollywood marquee. Too obvious. He wiped it away. Gandhi's Contradictory Drives To Social Narcissism and Instinctual Gratification. Too obscure. The Manufacture and Marketing of Fantasy As the Highest Form of Social Control. Too academic. A Boy's Wish To Be a Son To His Father. Too insipid. Escape From Mao's Revolution, The Memoir of a Female Vice President. What did he know of about any of that, especially Chinese lady VPs? War Between The Sexes, Men Zero, Women One. Better, but he could only think of personal anecdotes which tended rather to prove how he kept his marriage together by groveling instead of losing in some earnest campaign for truth, justice, and the male way. How Many Lies Every Day? That title was provocative and promised some chance to employ ordinary activities as humorous or maybe even serious social critique. But he couldn't think of an ordinary lie to pounce on. Money Is Fiction, Nothing At All. Great. Probably true. But what did he know of financial manipulations and the marketplace? Bend Over. Here's More. Ah. That sounded more like the gritty satire he'd love to blast in the public ear.

But what would he complain about? He had enough to get by. He and his wife were comfortable. He wasn't facing any crisis. Hurricanes in Honduras, rioting mobs in the East Bank, starvation in India, the Mafia in Moscow, all those headlines clamored about problems far away. His bitch? He had trouble getting the trash out on time Wednesday morning. His car needed a tune-up. The child by his first wife hadn't called in fifteen years. His subscription to PC World had lapsed. Only two of his occasional letters to the editor had ever been published, both by a translator he'd encountered on the Internet -- in Hungarian in a quarterly edition cut short by a lack of printing paper in Budapest.

No one listened. He felt like the Russian clown who cried because no one would take him seriously. Giggling young women in company meetings seized red and blue markers from his hand and took control of his presentations. Who did he know anymore? Church, neighborhood, and family had become distant memories of unpleasant demands. His wife recounted her day at work without asking about his. When their dog died, he'd argued against buying another in case they should take a vacation trip to Europe, but they'd never gone and never obtained another pet. He was lonely.

He doodled on his notebook. He drew faces. He drew mouths that went up and mouths that went down. He made big eyes and beady eyes. He flipped his pencil this way and that to draw hair. Smearing the graphite lines gave the illustrated hair body. The page filled with faces looking left and right, up and down. He tried an entire figure. The proportions were all wrong. He decided he needed the license afforded a cartoonist and made a headless humanoid bent over at the waist. He added his title as a caption, Bend Over. Here's More. But he couldn't draw a convincing hot poker.

Creativity wasn't going to be as easy as he'd hoped.

He hitched up his coat which had nearly slid off his shoulders. Two of the faces on his tablet eyed him with something like the modest, self-satisfied expression that might be appropriate for The Man Who Murdered His Wife. He imitated them by leveling his mouth and narrowing his eyes knowingly, pleased that such an expression sat well on a mild man driven to a last manly act by the exasperation of living with a self-important wife and a pointless job. He imagined himself isolated for eternity in a San Quentin jail cell, too threatening to house with other felons, a man with teeth and gumption. He glared resolutely, self-possessed, radiating danger. He showed his teeth, Bogart-style, and said, "Here's looking at you babe, you bitch." He shot the fantasy wife by making a gun with his finger. Pleased, he inserted a thin line of upper teeth in the mouth of The Man Who Murdered His Wife. However, the man appeared to need the attentions of an orthodontist. Holding the pencil flat, the man scribbled over the face of the toothy wife slayer. Get rid of the evidence. His wife would ask later, if she saw the faces, "What have you been doing, doodling your life away all day!"

He could hear her unending complaints. "Why don't you study something useful?" she would insist. "Buy a computer book. Any red-blooded male should know about computers or head gaskets or installing rain gutters or the top ten mutual funds. Don't you know anything practical? College ruined you. Or did we discover the essence of the universe today and why nothing matters?" He read what she called weird books. "You should be on Jeopardy," she mentioned curtly. "At least you could earn some prize money and maybe a trip for two to the Bahamas. We never go anywhere."

When she came on strong, he'd parry with some clever bit of information. "Don't you know that pop music is written to match public opinion polls about what the people want to hear? Medium dynamic range, medium rhythms, high voices, love lyrics. Jazz light. Elevator music. It's all scripted, formulaic. Did you know that?" he would counter triumphantly, vainly hoping to prove he'd learned something that cut to the quick.

"What's that got to do with anything?" his wife would throw up her hands.

And that would be the end of their conversation unless they were putting bills in order of payment due dates.

The automatic thermostat kicked on central heating again. The first puff into the room was cold. The man tugged his coat forward and wondered why he hadn't dressed more appropriately. But the significance of the refrigerator weather, the room, house, job, even of his wife, receded before an urge to reform everything. Like someone straining their bowels, the man clenched his brow and tried to transude an inspirational conception of the way things ought to be. The effort hurt. He needed something dramatic, over the top, but despair seemed to well around him like waters closing over the head of a drowning man, eliminating possibilities. He clung to his coat and tried to lose himself in the rambling sketches on his notepad.

What about titles? Something dramatic might overcome the difficulty he noticed in breathing. A sensation of pins and needles bit the palms of his hands. Think, think, he pleaded with himself. What could do it? What could save everything? What about The Man Who Convinced His Wife They Should Do Something Glorious? There's a title, he lectured himself. They could hoe fields with peasants, save orphans, counsel immigrants, comfort people dying of wasting diseases. Those would be grand efforts they could make together. Where was the romantic cause when you really needed it, he protested in his head? If only she could see they were parents in a world full of suffering children. That thought might appeal to her, but he knew her reaction to appeals for grand efforts. "We give to charity," she would answer with her practical look. "We can't solve world hunger, but you could at least clean out the sink once in a while."

He began again to draw the face of the man with Bogart teeth but drew fangs instead. He ran his tongue automatically across his own teeth and recovered with a start from his daydream. He sighed. It dawned on him that in a world of vampires he was just another neck.

The effort at achieving inspiration was exhausting. He sagged. A dark surf of hopelessness tumbled over him. Without a life preserver, he sank in a sea of meaninglessness.

Some instances that change the course of a personality's evolution aren't deliberated, not in the way one decides to graduate high school or buy a shirt or select a screw driver. On review, the dissected elements of important navigational decisions seem like feats of genius. They leap over barriers of reasonableness to reassemble the scraps of a person's existence into a collage of purpose. After such brainwork, despair no longer blocks the door to every alternative. Whole arenas open, full of options. Action swings from the rafters, a sword for every man and a song for every woman.

Such an event took place inside the man.

He surrendered to a reverie and sat without moving for hours. Had anyone dropped by the house, had anyone telephoned, had anyone broken in to relieve them of the silver plate and jewelry, the visitor would have discovered a zombie who had vacated his outer parts. He slumped blank-faced and vacant, roaming some interior landscape. When the man returned to himself, he had resolved his dilemma.

* * *

In the evening, his wife returned later than usual. "Sorry I'm late," she called out as she swung open the front door. She carried a briefcase in one hand and shouldered a laptop computer case. She pushed the door shut with one foot and swept into the bedroom, dropping her load on the bureau.

"Where are you?" she called out before she realized the house was dark. Perhaps her husband was out shopping, she thought with some irritation. Just like him not to have anything ready to eat as she would have done if she had nothing else to occupy her all day.

She opened the door to the walk-in bedroom closet and was fishing for a coat hanger when she kicked something on the floor. She pawed the wall for the switch. When she flipped on the light, she shrieked. "My God!"

Her husband lay on the floor. He wore his best suit and tie, the topcoat he'd draped around himself that morning, and his best black shoes, gleaming with new polish. He reposed, hands clasped on his stomach, eyes closed, the perfect mortuary model, apparently asleep or embalmed.

On second look, his wife became angry and kicked his foot deliberately. "You scared the crap out of me with this stupid stunt. Will you get up."

He opened his eyes instantly, as if he had been feigning sleep.

"Is it dark yet?" he asked calmly.

"Of course it's dark," she answered hotly. "It's late and I'm hungry. What the hell are you doing in here like this?"

"Daylight is bad for us," he answered matter-of-factly and sat directly up without straining, neat as a switchblade. The movement, as lithe as a gymnast's, startled his wife.

"Are you alright?" she asked, puzzled. He'd never been athletic and she'd never seen such a smartly done situp. She stepped backward without removing her coat. In one motion, her husband brought his knees up, leaned forward and stood without sign or sound of exertion. He sauntered out of the closet, as unwrinkled and smart as an opera fan with box seat tickets. His hair, swept straight back, was as full and white as Einstein's. She noticed with annoyance that his topcoat collar was turned up.

"We're fine," he smiled, "ravenous really." He smiled a bit more with the corner of his mouth. "Would you care to dine?" He offered her his arm.

"Cut the crap, will you," his wife ordered. "I have to put up with yahoos all day, and now I come home to Count Yo-yo sleeping in my closet."

Before she could read him the riot act, he brushed by her and floated into their dining room. She followed, set for battle and ready to unload a first round of invective straight into his face when she saw candles glowing in the otherwise unlit room.

Double silver candelabra flowered in fluttering amber illumination. The table had been set with entirely new service, crystal glasses she didn't recognize, pewter plates, and a linen tablecloth. A wine colored stew in a silver bowl glistened under the affectionate flames. A silver tray burdened with a shimmering roast bordered with baked apples and caramelized fennel decorated the atmosphere with a succulent aroma. Four kinds of bread lay on either side. Various sterling bowls, puddled with various sauces and heaped with steamed and garnished vegetables, checkered the table. A whole pineapple stretched out on an oval tray had been severed in two and partially sliced into finger-sized morsels.

Her husband deftly removed a cork from an oversized bottle of dark, red wine. As elegantly as a maitre d'hotel, he decanted a taste. Satisfied, he poured some for her and then for himself. He set down his glass, withdrew her chair and waved his hand toward its cushion. She sat, awed, while he took his place at the other end of the table where he held aloft his glass in a toast. Reflexively, she raised her glass.

"My dear, we have had many happy times together. I expect those times will return now that you can explore our new life together."

He drank the contents of his glass and, smiling, poured more. She didn't drink. She stared at him.

"Ok, that's it," she cracked the glass down too sharply, causing it to burp wine onto her still empty plate. "You have got to see someone. I'm not about to go on living with a flake who watches too much TV. Right now, wiseass. We're going to the emergency room and asking for a shrink or whatever kind of pill pusher can stuff your brains back in your head."

"Is it dark out?" her husband asked calmly.

"Of course, you lame-o. It's nighttime."

"Then we can go anywhere you like," he agreed cheerfully. "It's sunlight we have to be careful about. Terribly hard on us, you know. However, we're able to travel anywhere at night. But aren't you hungry?"

Shortly afterward, the unsuppered wife sat in the emergency room with a social worker filling out hospitalization paperwork. Meantime, her husband, still in suit and topcoat, sat patiently inside a closed examining room on a white-sheeted gurney, swinging his legs and talking amiably with a young resident.

"How long have you thought you were a vampire?" asked the resident, writing notes on a clipboard.

"Let's not speak of time, which has a different meaning in our case," the man calculated philosophically. "We certainly can't say all of our lives since we're dead, so I suppose we'd have to answer all of our deaths. And why do you ask in that way, 'How long have you thought that you're a vampire?' We think that because we are. How long have you thought you were a doctor?"

"Well," answered the doctor, irritated at the turn, "I have thought I was a doctor ever since I became one."

"Precisely our point," agreed the man. "Same for us."

"Yes, but I'm a licensed doctor, you see," countered the resident in a precise voice. "I'm really a doctor."

"Oh. I suppose you have an advantage there," nodded the man. "It's quite true that there is no degree in vampirology, or any schools to graduate from. Not even an exam we could pass to certify us. Short of a certificate to hang on the wall, we would have to prove to every individual we encounter, either by some demonstration of competence, or by testimony from others we have already serviced, that we are, in fact, a vampire. You, on the other hand, can merely point to a piece of paper and are done with it. We can think we're a vampire because we believe we can get the job done, whereas you can think you're a doctor because you have an official stamp of approval no matter what you do. Alas, we enjoy no such status."

"I'm afraid that the concept of anything like a vampire is only a superstition," said the doctor. "It's not real. Everyone agrees."

"Was there a vote?" the man asked pleasantly. "I don't remember voting. As for doctors, I'm aware of the fact that in the 1970s the medical profession was the third leading cause of death in the United States, and the situation hasn't changed much. If anything makes doctors real in the public mind, I would say it is their effect rather than their credentials. If effect is the criterion for reality, then we're every bit as real. We think, therefore we bite." He winked.

"Do you live by drinking the blood of others?" asked the doctor, moving his pencil to the next line of his questionnaire.

"No, actually we don't. We're afraid in that regard, in death, as in life, we are ineffectual. Actually we weren't drawn to that aspect of our profession, so to speak. We are fond of the feasting and elegant clothing accorded members of our guild. But the heavy sexual overtones of drawing virgin blood -- you know, the Nosferatu school of thought -- is probably better suited to a younger set. We mature types enjoy the philosophical bent, pleasures of the mind, contemplation of matter, energy, time, and destiny. What's real, what isn't. That sort of thing. We like to question what it is that we control. Ask what it is that we have to accept. We debate the existence of the human soul, the socialization of the ego. We like to kick around the value of death in demarcating life, the final gasp bookmarking individual chapters in human progress. The petit mort of the orgasm's expenditure of vitality. The meaning of it all."

"Do you feel as if your life has no meaning?" asked the doctor, reading from his questionnaire.

"Presumably we did when we waited for something to happen that would crank out solutions for us. It was a problem deciding what was real and what wasn't. How things ought to be. But not now, not since we've come to grips with meaning face-to-face, tooth-to-tooth, you might say," answered the man. "As a vampire, we're above the drone of day-to-day struggle. We have time to think, to experiment, to do, to analyze, and redo. Sans licensure, as it were, we must continually test the waters of the world unlike you medical boys who can be quite sure of what you are and what you should do. You're secure."

"Oh, really," said the resident involuntarily, a slight trace of sarcasm in his tone.

"Yes," continued the man sincerely. "We're sorry if we're not expressing ourselves clearly. We're new at this, not having been dead very long."

"As we were trying to explain," the man continued, "You have the security of monopoly licensure. If anyone usurps your position who isn't a registered member of your club, they're chucked straight away into jail. Your profession spends most of its energy limiting the competition rather than dealing with the brutish facts of life. But we vampires can't rest on our degree, having none. We have to think long and hard and practice, practice, practice to be recognized as experts. Not easy."

He sighed. Then recommitting himself to satisfying the young man's interrogation, he resumed.

"It's being deader than coffin nails that frees us to deal with such things. Actually anybody can do it. They just have to be dead. Death is very egalitarian. Normally, I guess, modern metaphysics is sewed up by members of the clergy and chiropractors. Ordinary people never get much of a crack at it. Pretty much, most people, most Americans anyway, only get what they can purchase. They have no accumulated wisdom since they live in a retail culture, especially young people. It's up to vampires to bring contemplation of the big questions back to Joe Public by setting an example. To mix metaphors, we kick the bucket for a field goal. As a student of the mind, you must have dealt with such concerns."

"Actually, I'm filling in for the regular psychiatrist," shrugged the resident. "I have a future in my uncle's proctology clinic. He says there's not a better practice, proctology being an end in itself." He chuckled. "Now, if you feel you're not a danger to yourself or your wife, I'm willing to release you, that is, if you'll agree to anti-psychotic medication. It's hassle-free and really a very inexpensive means of dealing with your problem. You don't have to waste a lot of time talking at sixty, seventy, ninety bucks an hour."

"My problem would require a really strong sunblock ointment," the man commented.

"What?" asked the resident.

"Nothing," the man capitulated. "Listen, we left a really sumptuous meal at home on the table practically untouched. By now, the candles will have burned down to the nub. If you think we can get going soon, I'll agree to a prescription."

"Good," said the young medic. "I'll be right back, as soon as I inform your wife. By the way, I do see what you mean about skin sensitivity. You are the palest man I've ever met. Just lie down and close your eyes."

The man complied. He swung his legs up, stretched out, and folded his hands across his chest. The doctor rose and approached the door. "Fortunately I can give you a booster for that pallor," he said. "You just rest there and I'll be right back. While I'm gone, you can pick up a little tan. This room has sunlamps installed in the ceiling." So saying, he snapped a switch on the wall, bathing the examining table in brilliant, bluish daylight. He walked out and latched the door behind him.

The wife, having learned that her husband had been diagnosed as suffering a temporary psychotic episode of a non-violent nature, agreed that she could transport him home and guaranteed that he would take his medicine on schedule. A nurse, a slender Filipina uniformed in white, wearing a stethoscope slung over her shoulder, led the way to the examining room and opened the door. Both women entered and squinted in the glare. The husband was nowhere to be seen. Only his clothes, evacuated of a body, lay on the examining table in a mimicry of a reclining figure. The topcoat still contained the suit coat, shirt, and tie. The socks still filled the otherwise empty shoes which lay, tips spread wide, at the leg-ends of the suit pants. A vapor rippled along the ceiling and a slight smell of singed hair filled the room.