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25Mar09

To whom it may concern:

My name is Ran Hiro.

I am a thirty-one-year old clerk from the city of Oto. It is a modest industrial city located sixty miles north of the capital.

Like most people, I go to work during the daytime and watch television during the nighttime. Sometimes, on the weekend, I like to have a drink with co-workers at a popular Karaoke bar.

I am plain in all regards. I assure you that I do not stand out in a crowd.

I live in a square block of apartments near the city core. This enables me to ride my bicycle to and from work every day without having to pay the cost of public transportation.

At the end of every month I write and mail a check to my elderly mother. The sum of this check is the amount of money I have saved from avoiding the downtown train each day.

While some people may turn their noses down at me for being so dull, I am content with my life. Working hard and helping my mother brings me enough personal pleasure to fulfill my life. I don’t ask for very much. Mother tells me not to take and take from this lifetime, besides.

So it is under these circumstances that I write this note.

I would like to insert a humble request.

I am a good and honest citizen; anything but flamboyant. I feel the need to assure you of this fact so you do not suspect there might be anything odd at work, despite the present circumstances of our acquaintance.

I would hate to impose, and I would not devote such care to this letter if I did not think it very important.

You need to understand that, like the rest of this country, Oto is crowded with people. We all do similar things. We dress the same, we work in the same offices and factories, and we all live in similar living spaces.

There are rows and rows of blank white housing complexes here, and they are all crammed with thousands of tiny, closet-like apartments.

It is easy to get lost in such a faceless environment, or hide in it. Yet, you are always in contact with strangers, aren’t you? You have no choice because they live on all sides of you.

Everything was fine, of course, until one night when I came home and found a man inside my apartment.

I can do no better than that description. He looked just like you and I. He was a man in a business suit. He was standing in the middle of my apartment.

At first, I was polite to him. I thought he was a neighbor who had wandered into the wrong apartment by accident.

When he did not respond to my conversational technique, I grew angry and began to shout at him

He only smiled in response. That was when I began to fear for my life.

In a place of such a great and faceless population, the percentage of madmen increases exponentially by virtue of mere numbers.

I continued to threaten him even as he moved towards me.

In hindsight, I suppose that I should have run away to go and find a policeman, but I was so infuriated by his lack of response, I don’t think I was focused clearly on the moment.

I wasn’t prepared for the ferocity of his assault. The last thought I had was what bad breath he had.

I recovered as he was running from my apartment.

The carpet and my clothing were sticky with blood. I discovered that he had bitten me all over my body. My flesh swelled with ugly black and purple wounds. They were everywhere.

I phoned the police and then took myself to the hospital.

The description I gave to the detective was as vague as the one that I gave you.

They told me that people are attacked for no reason all of the time. They told me that the best they could do was telephone them if anything else happened between this fellow and I.

The doctors kept me overnight. They told me I had picked up an infection in the attack. Did you know that the human bite is one of the deadliest bites in the world? They wanted to make sure that I was okay before releasing me.

During my night in the hospital, I woke to a soft, sucking sound.

It was the man who had attacked me at my apartment. He was crouched in the dark at my arm and was sucking the blood from one of the wounds he had inflicted earlier.

I must have been delirious from the medication they had given me. He told me very quietly to go back to sleep. So I did.

I didn’t mention it to the hospital staff in the morning, because I feared it might have been a dream.I didn’t want to spend any more time in the hospital.

That afternoon, they sent me home. They gave me a bottle of pills and instructions to take six pills a day, over a two week period.

I went back to work immediately, and I finished the bottle of pills on a religious schedule.

Still, my dreams persisted.

I would occasionally wake in the dead of night to find him suckling on one of his original wounds. He would tell me to go back to sleep, that it was only a nightmare, and I would obey.

This continued night in and night out. The nightmares or the infection made me incredibly fatigued throughout the day, and it started to affect my work.
I began to call in sick with startling frequency. It became such a habit, that I didn’t even bother to call in, eventually. Soon, I just stopped showing up altogether.
I am afraid to say that more apathy followed, and I arrived at the peak of some kind of insomnia-induced delirium. I stopped changing my clothing and bathing. I stopped brushing my teeth. All of my efforts became focused on trying to stay awake – and even this I failed at with regularity. Things became so out of focus that the only way I knew I was asleep was when he would come and feed upon me.

Eventually, a concerned phone call from my mother snapped me from my stupor. I had not sent any money at the end of the month, which had alerted her that something might be wrong.

She asked if I was okay and I told her I was not.

I felt so tremendously guilty that my ailing mother spent money on long distant charges to contact me that I ended up confessing the entire story to her. I fought through the shame that I could no longer take care of myself.

She listened carefully and then instructed me with great detail on what needed to be done.

While vampire attacks are rare in these times, she said, they were very common during the years following WWII – so she knew how to handle things.

I said goodbye to my mother and set about doing what needed to be done.

The constant feeding meant that even the strongest of antibiotics would not stave off the infection forever. That was what they counted on, though, the host combating the sickness as long as possible so they could continue to feed.

So I mustered the last of my strength and went to the market to purchase the items that mother had listed. At home, I blended them into a glass like a milkshake.

The poison would kill me very quickly. It would paralyze everything, including my insides, within hours. The vampire would assume that I was merely asleep and he would become hopelessly ill as well.

I had my fingers crossed, I assure you.

But before I could drink it, there was one more precaution that I needed to take. Just because I was dead, that didn’t mean the infection would just stop.

I couldn’t write a simple note, either. The vampire might see it and destroy it.

So I took off my shirt and heated a series of knives in the kitchen stove burner.

Human flesh is remarkably similar to onionskin once you grit past the painandthehorriblestench when the wounds smolder.

I do apologize for the alarming circumstances by which this letter arrives to you.

However, I do make a simple request that my remains be destroyed and burned, rather than buried.

It is for the best.

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