I wrote a character study awhile ago, for a project I was involved in. The project fell through, but the study… I liked the study. Here it is.
The Weirdest Vampire in the World…
Is me, it must be.
Cast out from all the other sub-societies of our dead race. I understand what I read in books, but the living is another matter entirely. Isn’t it? Isn’t it.
What Running Bear said, what all the other holy men said… ‘the only crime against the soul is believing that you are alone.’
Do I have one, anymore? A soul. I believe so, but its crusty display would not serve to light up a closet, let alone a room, anymore. And though I hear my own self-pity creeping in, it is with a scientist’s thought that I wonder if my soul truly matters in the scheme of things. How can it, when the blood I suck, the only nourishment I can bring myself to allow, is tainted and poisoned in both body and spirit. I have fed on dark things. Who was that funny little man, running around the fat people getting them to move… “you are what you eat…”
Those other vampires, so lofty and graceful, most of them, and those other other vampires, the ones who slipped through the cracks of loft’s embrace to be a simple steak put to life and reborn a carnage on display; animals. What do I owe them? Could I speak of the things I see, the way the thoughts move around them, piercing the air that for all their vaunted senses, none of them see. Those thoughts, that intelligence screaming to make its way in, into heads mottled with the disgrace of death and a taste for penance, luxury, and fury, why do they not see it? They all think me crazy, a crazy vampire. How odd is that?
Not crazy with blood, not crazy with guilt or rage or pride or sloth, those are easily definable and able to be fatigued by cage or, food. No, crazy with the thoughts in the air, with the mind knowing itself but little else. Little else, yet I understand. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t, she doesn’t. Yet, she did. Is that why she cast me out? The thoughts are memories now, swirling.
She understood me, and she understood the bliss at the heart of the matter. Alas, I have no heart, which is why I have to eat them now.
My Dawn and lovely dawn, that morning with the rain on tin roofs. Her brushing her hair. A lovely smile. Content. We had sex, I understand that, but, what is sex for me, now? It’s the act of beast upon beast in the heat of reproductive motions. Wasn’t there something more, though? When I think of her there, brushing and smiling, something in me flickers. Thoughts crowd in and analyze the flicker as far away, the impending intelligence pierces the flame. Yet she is still there, something can’t be touched.
She turned then, then she turned and the smile was gone. It was so peaceful before that turn, her cry for love. She said she loved me, I said I had no use for love, explaining myself clearly through the windows, eye to eye, the windows, they say, to the soul. Do I have windows anymore?
Dawn, my lovely Dawn. This is why they cast me out, those vampeer. Thinking I cry for a crystal orb of light to pour back down on me, Dawn, Dawn, Dawn. I miss my Dawn, yet, what is it in her that I missed, so? Oh, Dawn, I broke your heart. I thought you were so filled with emotional muck. I thought, yes. I thought.
I thought and thought, I was in lust with thoughts, big strong powerful thoughts, what they could do. Write books, explain things, go around the world, into each and every void. The thought. The intelligence, the spirit of thinking. Thinking I knew enough of everything that her love was something I didn’t need. She knew better. That’s why her tears fell. Mine didn’t. Because I didn’t know.
Didn’t know? What was I supposed to know?
Dawn, Dawn, Dawn. I’m screaming now, up and down Folsom to Vallejo to 17th, my vampire lungs carrying my voice to the stratosphere. Dogs howl for me to stop, cats run and the cacophony of all those voices, complaining complaining complaining for me to stop. I can’t. Oh, Dawn. I miss that smile. THAT smile. Don’t let it go out, that light. That flicker that seems to be prancing into the distance. If it goes out, if it goes out…
I would have gone back to you Dawn. But when I did, you weren’t right anymore. What I saw, the light, hurt my new eyes.
That monster, what he did to me, what he mistook me for. For food, that’s what he mistook me for. Couldn’t he see I was an important figure, that I was a man on the brink of new discoveries, possibly even himself? I was so close to so many dawns. Now I am so very far away, and this cursed blight of a soul I have left, choosing to live through each night, feed on the depraved morsels who are so easy to find in this world, enough to keep me satisfied, satisfied, eager beasts running to their demise with needles sticking out of their arms, alone in their myths. Don’t they see the thoughts? I snatch them up to tell them, they all go down screaming, when they get the chance.
This one here, this self-identified ‘punk.’ He didn’t even know who the Germs were, what DIY means or understand the ramifications of a small movement of power chords pulsing into London pavement through the ages of the world. All a pose, a costume, a ticket into the belly, an identifying structure of uniformity in independent postures, just his suit and tie for work, plowing through the narcotics and robbing the blind old lady and kicking the canine in the head and fucking that little boy. I got him before he got his needles that day, so he would forgo the pleasure into death I allow some of the more pathetic.
At least his clothes fit me. My old ones had been bloodied.
All these things are bloodied. Look at the thoughts swirling. Ave Maria… I remember that tune. Dawn liked that tune.
I don’t try to sing anymore, vampires shouldn’t sing. The canines and felines make a racket. But Dawn, my Dawn, she liked it. What’s one more round…?
