“I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in that circle of night. But then Magreb came along, and eternity ceased to frighten me. Suddenly each moment followed its antecedent in a neat chain, moments we filled with each other.”

Here, Clyde considers how vast eternity is as a vampire, and how the thought of eternity shifts according to his circumstance. While alone, eternity felt endless, but since being in a relationship with Magreb, eternity has become something to enjoy.

“By daybreak, the numbness had begun to wear off. The lemons relieve our thirst without ending it, like a drink we can hold in our mouths but never swallow. Eventually the original hunger returns. I have tried to be very good, very correct and conscientious about not confusing this original hunger with the thing I feel for Magreb.”

Clyde and Magreb use lemons to satiate their vampiric thirst, but the lemons are only a temporary fix. Clyde doesn’t want to confuse his lust for blood with his feelings for Magreb, because he wants his feelings for her to be something pure, and that he is in control of.

“And then she grinned. Magreb was the first and only other vampire I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone and recognized each other. There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.”

This moment reveals this to be a relationship story. That is, despite the plot being about two vampires, here Clyde identifies that his struggle really centers on his relationship to Magreb.