The Ones Who Owe Nothing

The trailer smelled like coffee and dust. Soren sat on an upturned bucket while the biologist, a tired woman named Delgado, scrubbed through video on three screens.

"They came back at four," she said. "Fed on the cattle. All except that one." She tapped a shape hanging alone in the corner of the roost. "Camera two. She struck out tonight. Missed her feed."

"What happens to her?" Soren asked.

Delgado shrugged, not unkindly. "A vampire bat that goes two nights without blood usually doesn't get a third. Around sixty hours and the body quits. It's a hard life running on a spoonful of blood."

Soren took out his notebook and wrote down sixty hours. He looked at the bat in the corner. She was small and folded up and very still.

He watched camera two while Delgado made notes on the others. He was good at watching the thing that was behaving wrong. The starving bat was behaving wrong. She kept creeping along the ceiling toward the cluster of fed bats, and they kept ignoring her, and she kept creeping.

"She's begging," Delgado said, not looking up. "They do that. Doesn't usually work."

But Soren had already seen something he could not explain. One of the fed bats had turned toward the starving one. They were pressing their faces together. Mouth to mouth, almost.

"They're kissing," he said.

Now Delgado looked up. She leaned close to the screen and went quiet.

"No," she said slowly. "She's feeding her."

On the screen the fed bat was bringing up blood from her own stomach and giving it, drop by drop, to the bat who had none. The starving one drank like something coming back from a long way off.

"Is that her baby?" Soren asked. "Her sister?"

Delgado scrolled through a file, checking wing tags against a list. She frowned. "No. Not related. Different family group entirely. That bat just gave away part of her own meal to a stranger who's going to die otherwise."

Soren looked at that for a while.

"Why would she," he said. It did not come out as a question. He was trying to find the mechanism and the mechanism was not there. Animals were supposed to save themselves. That was the whole thing about animals. A bat that gave away its own blood should be a bat that died a little sooner. That bat should have been erased from the world a long time ago, along with whatever made it generous.

"It costs her," he said. "Doesn't it. Giving it up."

"It costs her some," Delgado said. "But she wasn't as close to the edge as the one who got nothing. A full bat drops a few hours off her own clock. An empty bat gains a whole night of life." She rubbed her eyes. "The math isn't equal. That's the part I never get used to."

Soren wrote down: full bat gives a little, empty bat gains a lot. He stared at it. It still did not close.

"But she still loses something," he said. "For a stranger. There has to be a reason it doesn't just, disappear. The being-nice."

Delgado pulled up another window. Rows of dates. Tag numbers. Arrows between them.

"Watch long enough and you see it," she said. "They keep books."

"They what?"

"They remember. That bat that just fed the stranger, three weeks ago she came home empty herself. Struck out. And guess who fed her." Delgado tapped a tag number, then tapped the starving bat on camera two. Same number.

Soren felt the floor of the trailer tilt slightly, the way a room does when a fact you were standing on turns out to be a door.

"She's paying it back," he said.

"She's paying it back. And the one she's feeding now will owe her, and will remember, and if this one ever comes home empty, the debt comes due. They track it. Who fed them. Who refused. A bat that takes and never gives, the others stop helping. They notice a cheater." Delgado sat back. "It only works because they meet again. Same roost, same faces, night after night, for years. They live long enough to be owed."

Soren looked at the screen. The two bats had separated. The fed one folded herself back up. The one who had eaten crept back to her own corner, alive now until tomorrow, carrying a debt in her small remembering head.

And he understood that he had been asking the question wrong. He had wanted to know why the generous bat had not been erased from the world. But she was not one bat being generous. She was one end of a rope. On the other end was a night three weeks ago when she was the one dying in the corner, and a stranger had crossed the ceiling to her. The kindness had not survived by being free. It had survived by being remembered, and answered, and answered again, going backward and forward through years of nights, through bats who had never shared a drop of blood by birth and shared it anyway because someday the corner would be theirs.

"Nobody told them to," he said.

"Nobody told them," Delgado agreed. "It's just what stayed."

Soren thought about the kids at his school who kept score of everything, and how everyone said keeping score was small and cold. But this was keeping score too. This was the coldest, most exact bookkeeping in the world, wings and blood and sixty hours, and it had come out the other side as the warmest thing he had ever seen an animal do. A stranger crossing a dark ceiling for a stranger, because both of them knew what it was to run out.

He wrote one more line. Then he stopped writing and just watched.

On camera two the roost had gone still. All the bats hung together in the dark, fed and unfed, related and unrelated, each one holding the memory of who had come for them. In the corner the small bat that would have been dead by morning shifted her wings and settled deeper into the cluster, folded in among the others, breathing.