Cut Throat Dog by Joshua Sobol, Dalya Bilu Page B

won’t try to look for her in order to find out why she suddenly broke off contact? She isn’t convinced.
    Never, he follows the inexperienced scriptwriter. That’s the difference between vampires and human beings: humanbeings are sure that they deserve to be loved. When love ends, they look for the logic, because they believe in reasons, circumstances, meaning. In any straw they can grasp at. Vampires, on the other hand, know that they don’t deserve anything. They don’t believe in anything. When somebody loves them, they regard it as a miracle. And miracles, as vampires know, suddenly vanish, for no reason, just as life ends.
    That’s true, she agrees, but it doesn’t make them happy.
    No, he agrees, vampires aren’t happy creatures, but they have the strength to withstand it.
    What’s the source of their sadness? wonders her id, which uses her young voice with whorish charm.
    The source of their sadness is not known, says Shakespeare.
    In sooth I know not why I am so sad, Melissa unthinkingly quotes Antonia’s opening lines from the first scene of ‘The Merchant-woman of Venice’. It wearies me, she goes on quoting, you say it wearies you.
    It won’t weary me, Shakespeare reassures her, I have to write the fifth and last act, even though my inspiration dried up after the fourth act, which is why the last act is going to be lousy, but Melissantonia isn’t reassured:
    But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, what stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn.…
    Me too, such a want-wit sadness makes of me, that I have much ado to know myself, admits Shakespeare, without remembering which of his characters he is quoting now, although he is clearly quoting someone, because he himself feels neither sadness nor witlessness at the moment, only emptiness, an abyss of emptiness gaping between them, and all the contradictory statements that he makes, and all the conflicting acts that he performs, circle round the edge of this abyss, and apparently this is the strange force attracting them to each other: a black hole, which is signified byblack-hole bypassing sentences, such as the next sentence that comes out of her mouth:
    When a vampire encounters an ordinary human being, who falls in love with it, it doesn’t help it to understand anything about itself.
    And Shakespeare supports her:
    But when a vampire meets a vampire—
    What happens when a vampire meets a vampire? She asks, and her direct gaze bores a long dark tunnel inside him, leading to a vast underground space, hollowed out of the bowels of a mountain in which no one imagines there to be winding passages, opening into dark secret cathedrals, where an eternal silence has reigned since the day the voices of the anonymous miners who quarried these underground galleries were stilled.
    When a vampire meets a vampire, Shakespeare embarks on a voyage to an unknown land over the simmering cauldron of wine she has brewed for them, for the night of the vampires—

18
    We’ll continue the meeting tomorrow, Mona cuts sharply into the train of his thoughts, and before he can recover she commands:
    And you’re coming with me.
    He leaves the conference room behind her and follows her down the corridor. She stops in front of the elevator, and he stands next to her. She presses the button. They wait in silence. The numbers change over the elevator door. The elevator rises from the ground floor, reaches their floor and comes to a halt with a click. The stainless steel jaw gapes. Mona steps inside, and he steps in after her. He looks to seewhere she is taking him, to the roof or the ground. She takes him below ground, to the parking level. The elevator stops.
    They get out. Only a few cars are scattered here and there in the underground lot, deserted at this late hour. They walk silently to the blue Land Rover. Mona walks with a brisk, resolute step, and he trails behind her, contemplating the tight walnut colored leather pants, the red sweater whose