I’ve noticed something of a “phenomenon” among the elderly. Something quite ironic considering their closeness to death. A “place” where, despite what the pharaohs might have believed, you can’t take anything with you. Yet what I’ve observed about the elderly is this: rather than distancing themselves from their personal possessions, they tend to cling to them more viscerally than ever before. At one point in my life, when I was far more naïve, I didn’t think of the “aged” as being this way. Au contraire, I bought into the myth that they were only too eager to get rid of their possessions. To pass them off to loved ones, dear friends and casual acquaintances alike. Intensifying the “giveaway process” the closer they felt they were inching toward that “grand rendezvous” with Death. Even if their arbitrary “freebies” were more of a put-on than anything else. A way for them to make a big show of how they were “well-aware” that the end was nigh for them while secretly bargaining with The Proverbial Man to let them live longer. Hell, forever. Except that even vampires, sooner or later, realize what a huge mistake such a foolhardy wish can turn out to be.

It didn’t occur to me until it was too late that the possessive elderly I had been encountering of late happened to be of the “vampire community.” I suppose, in hindsight, that was the real reason why they all came across as being so possessive. And yet, it never would have been a thought in my mind, being that, for logical reasons, I had assumed that most vampires would have no interest in biting, shall we say, “rotting flesh.” That might be cruel, but the truth usually is. That’s why the media and its “arbiters” have made a fortune off of sanitizing it. But I suppose that’s another story altogether. This one is about how I chanced upon an entire nest of them. Possessive elderly people, that is. Except that, as mentioned, they turned out not to be people. Not really. That’s a common risk these days anyway. And yet, truth be told, I prefer it when I find out that the non-person I’ve been dealing with is actually a bot as opposed to a vampire. The latter is still more dangerous to humankind. Though, luckily, not as pervasive as the former. Not anymore at least.

To be sure, the elderly nest of vampires I came up against was telling of how much vampires were a dying breed…with the gray, wrinkled aesthetic to match. No longer able to find youths to bite because the youths were, well, so often safely tucked away in their rooms behind safeguarded doors and windows. That’s what it was to be a parent now: to be a warden. After all, there were so many things one had to worry about protecting their child from nowadays—the least of those concerns, incidentally, being vampires. Still, the protective precautions many parents took also ended up working to repel vampires as much as other unwanted “essences.” A benefit that neither the parents nor the children were aware of. But being none the wiser about said benefit was perhaps for the best. The things you don’t know about are always for the best.

In any event, I came to find that the majority of the vampire population was, at this juncture, of the “senior demographic.” This unhappy discovery was unearthed, slowly but surely, while I was traveling on a plane, my aisle seat situated next to an old woman. And no, as you might clichély expect, we were not Transylvania-bound. Instead, the flight was headed from Paris to Istanbul, where many passengers were simply going just for their layover to the next destination. It seemed no one actually wanted to stay in Istanbul anymore. Not after what Erdoğan had done to the place. Worst of all, he didn’t just get on with it the moment he claimed full power in 2014, instead slowly infecting the city and country with his rhetoric by taking on the roles of mayor of Istanbul and Prime Minister of Turkey prior to “becoming” the nation’s president. He had been in power for so long, in fact, that I was starting to wonder if he, too, might be part of the vampire cabal that was steadily unveiling itself to me. Starting with this old woman on the plane. And yes, it was her intense possessiveness, her absurd attachment to material that retroactively tipped me off to what she was.

Of course, during the interminable (in actuality: three hours and twenty-five minutes) flight, I took her at face value. Assumed she was just unusually territorial for an old person. I was wrong. Nonetheless, I had no choice but to listen to her prattle on to her husband, assigned to the middle seat behind her. Oh how I wished they had been assigned to sit together—but I wasn’t about to give up my aisle position just to placate their vacuous, repetitive back-and-forth about her ostensibly lost watch. A watch that he, per the old woman, was responsible for losing at some unaccounted-for moment while being shuffled through the security checkpoint along with the rest of the cattle. So much for the elderly being treated with “respect” or “preferential treatment.” If anything, they were treated worse than the average because of how despised they were for still “daring” to exist. To be seen in public at all. If anything, officials of the TSA variety wanted to do whatever they could to speed along the death process with “undercutting,” “passive aggressive” (read: aggressive aggressive) actions. Like managing to kife a valuable watch from an “innocent” old lady. Surely, that was the true explanation for her “mysterious” loss. It wasn’t really the fault of Léonard, this being the name of her husband, as I eventually found out. Along with hers being Agnès. A moniker that didn’t sound much better than the American way when pronounced the French way.

After their continued verbal volleying (mostly on Agnès’ part) through the crack of the seats between me and her for the first hour of the flight, I foolishly assumed it absolutely had to stop as there couldn’t possibly be anything left to say about it. But no, the second hour persisted in precisely the same way as the first, with Agnès carrying on, wielding the same tired “discourse” about how this was all Léonard’s fault. That he had betrayed her in the worst possible way, had been the sole cause of her precious, highly valuable watch getting sacrificed to the airport gods. But, unless it was a Cartier or a Patek Philippe, I really didn’t see what the big deal was about the loss. I got the sense, as the flight wore on and on and on, that she simply got off on berating him. Maybe that’s what it was really about, more than being an instance of just another material bitch who cared more about her things than her relationships.

When, at long last, the plane landed, I was tempted to clap my hands in joy the way most Neapolitans still did whenever a plane managed to make it back down without crashing. And yet, I think some part of my mind crashed from having to hear Agnès repeat the same four catch phrases to Léonard about her lost watch for the past three-plus hours. It was like some Guantanamo-level torture. Because, yeah, I count what Agnès did as a form of “sound disorientation.” Agnès, meanwhile, appeared to have no awareness of my discomfort or altered state of mind at all. Such was the boon of being elderly: enlisting the superpower of total oblivion. A.k.a. no fucks given. That, paired with vampire “superpowers” (in other words, immortality, telepathy, hypnosis and the ability to fly [which made it all the more the vexing that these assholes chose to take a plane]), made someone like Agnès unstoppable. At least, in terms of driving everyone—especially every younger one—around her to madness. The only reason Léonard hadn’t been is because he was of her “genre.” Two similarly annoying people couldn’t annoy each other. They were immune.

While most of the other passengers hurried through the terminal to make their connecting flights, I found that I was among the only other people to be waiting for my suitcase at the baggage claim for the flight originating from Paris. After twenty minutes, it was just me, Léonard and Agnès. Indeed, it suddenly seemed as though the entire ground floor of Atatürk Airport had been emptied of all human presences. Out of nowhere, I felt frozen in place. Glamored by Léonard and Agnès’ powers, my attempts to move or even speak were decimated by their hypnosis.

The next thing I knew, I was in the ornate living room of a yalılar near the Rumelihisarı neighborhood. Which I was only aware of due to our immediate proximity to the Bosphorus, the view of which I could see from the windows. How I got there, I had no idea—only that it must have been related to Léonard and Agnès. Yet it wasn’t them who appeared before me when I first came to, my hands bound and tied behind me to the back of a very plush, regal chair. Instead, it was some equally as aged man who introduced himself as Balian.

His slicked-back gray hair and all-black attire, complete with a smoking jacket and slippers that had the letter “B” monogrammed on each, lent him both a smarmy and elegant appearance. One that didn’t exactly instill fear within me until he flashed his fangs and proceeded to inform me that he was a vampire, and that Léonard and Agnès had brought me specifically for him, their leader/king, to enjoy as a snack. That I was, at long last, to provide some “new blood” in more ways than one, and that, after my “transformation,” it would subsequently be my role among the coven to seek out “ilk” in my age bracket. That the only reason their nest couldn’t expand in demographic is because no young person would ever stay near their old husk long enough for them to get close. Such was the nature of being disgusted by the elderly as a result of knowing that you, too, would one day end up the same. Unless, like me, you were “blessed” with the “happy accident” of being abducted by two elderly vampires who were old enough to own one of only hundreds of the remaining yalı, most tracing all the way back to the 1700s. When, I reckoned, this nest first started to get cultivated by Balian. A nest that was starting to unleash its decrepit vampire brethren as Balian salivated over me, wearing a very fancy gold watch that didn’t seem to have any brand. Maybe that was why Agnès was so upset. Maybe her watch was a talisman of the coven.

Whatever the case, before I could bother protesting to the imminent bite, Agnès emerged from some other recess of the yalı where her fellow vampires had not. She was all atwitter with continued rage about her goddamn watch as Léonard trailed behind denying any culpability. Where previously, on the plane, he had expressed a certain remorse, as though he might be at fault, Léonard was finally starting to come around to my extremely annoyed side of things. This being to my advantage mainly because the unignorable infighting distracted Balian long enough for me to give a marked tug to the rope I had been working subtly on untying, breaking loose, kicking Balian in the nuts (though I wasn’t totally sure that vampires really had genitalia) and running for my life before his “subjects” could descend upon me.

It’s not easy to make an escape in a neighborhood like the one where the yalıs are, but I must have been driven by sheer force of will, eventually blending into the gradually-appearing crowds around me to make it into public transportation and, bit by bit, back to the airport. On the flight I booked back to Paris, I felt a sense of anxiousness while approaching my seat, fearful I might see another old lady waiting for me. Some full-of-piss-and-vinegar biddy who would go on and on about a jewelry item she hadn’t managed to clock in time before losing it. To my horror, however, it was Balian himself. He was the most possessive elderly “person” of all, I suppose. Possessive, ultimately, only of me. And when he glamored me into the airplane bathroom not for sex, but a bite, it was he who showed me a “whole new world.” But, in contrast to Jasmine with Aladdin, this one revealed to me that just about every old person was actually a vampire.