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Bright snowfall, which lasted for days, turned to blackened slush. Shuffling in scuffed brown shoes, Feigelman the Jewish vampire descended the subway steps and entered the train, grafitti-stained. Seated, his right hand slipped into right pocket of brown wool pants, worn at the knees, then to inside left pocket of shabby black overcoat, to check for flashlights.
Unlike the other kind, Jewish vampires crumble and decay without light. And Feigelman was still struggling with the question he'd been asking for more than two hundred years: "Am I alive, in which case terminating my existence would be a sin? Or am I dead, and would entering darkness and completing the decay I've felt when that happens, not be suicide – but rectification?" With no Talmudic precedents to follow, and no rabbis to turn to to answer this most pressing question, Feigelman continued on, and on, and on.
Screeching into the station, barfing its passengers onto the platform and sucking in new ones, the D train slammed shut its many mouths and slipped back into darkness. And Feigelman climbed the piss-reeking litter-strewn stairs toward fading end of day. Socks damp, he scurried toward St. Vincent's Hospital's AIDS floor. Unlike the other kind, Jewish vampires never sleep, and Feigelman began his nightly ministry, hand tenderly on one of their hands, reading to ravaged once-beautiful young men, granted with rage and fear and pain the fate, too soon, that he continued to avoid, evade.