How to be fascinating
I have an old car, so when I'm driving, I play music through one of those Bluetooth contraptions that plugs into the cigarette lighter and tunes into FM radio. The sound rarely drops out and dissolves into static, except whenever I drive by this one Seventh-Day Adventist church. Perhaps the frequency is weak on that stretch of road, but once I smelled burning and considered that if I got any closer to the church, I would burst into flames. Was it the dirty exhaust pipe of the ute in front of me? Was it frivolous magical thinking? Perhaps a preternatural gift? Anything is more romantic than not being able to afford a new car. I want to be fascinating.
The late author Anne Rice was very fond of (and agonisingly overused) the word ‘preternatural’— creatures with extraordinary abilities that are, regardless, still of this earth. One of the reasons vampires are considered preternatural is that (in most cases) they were originally human. Rice’s vampires were typically already social pariahs in their mortal lives. Heathens, orphans, addicts, witches, Fortean scholars, and – if we consider the more inclusive nature of AMC’s current television adaptation of Interview with the Vampire – the marginalised, people of colour, the working class, people who, for whatever reason, find it harder to move through the world without being feared, hated or pathologised. Those who simultaneously don’t want to be alive and want to try again. People who don't have the most desirable life expectancy; folks many in power want dead.
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles were the first 'adult' books I ever read. There was no gradual transition; at twelve years old, I went straight from The Boyfriend by R.L. Stine, about a poor little rich girl whose boyfriend comes back from the dead, to – pardon my bluntness– some unhinged fop called Lestat meeting the devil and performing cunnilingus on a human televangelist while she is menstruating. It went right over my head at the time. I'd only read Where Did I Come From? a few years prior, and I was still unsure how to feel about it. I've been watching horror films for as long as I can remember, but I've always been a late bloomer in every other respect. I was well-versed in viscera, but ask me what happens when two people love each other very much, and I would have preferred to bury myself alive than give you an answer.
After each of my three visits to see Neil Jordan's adaptation of Interview with the Vampire at the cinema in 1994, I would rush to the pitiful book section of Myer and procure the next volume in the series – or, my mother would – I didn't like engaging with shop-keeps. By the time I finished Queen of the Damned, I was convinced that the character of Armand, a seventeen-year-old Ukrainian boy in a perpetual state of arrested development with a history of abuse, grooming, rejection and cult indoctrination, was just like me – the anxious, sheltered, lower-middle-class Australian girl, who once saw a cartoon sperm and started to gag. Seems absurd, but part of me 'got' him, even though I couldn't articulate why, but then, I re-read the book twenty-five years later and discovered this:
Technological inventions began to obsess Armand, one after the other, First it was kitchen blenders, in which he made frightful concoctions mostly based on the colors of the ingredients; then microwave ovens, in which he cooked roaches and rats. Garbage disposers enchanted him; he fed them paper towels and whole packages of cigarettes. Then it was telephones. He called long distance all over the planet, speaking for hours with "mortals" in Australia or India. Finally television caught him up utterly, so that the flat was full of blaring speakers and flickering screens.
Anything with blue skies enthralled him. Then he must watch news programs, prime time series, documentaries, and finally every film, regardless of merit, ever taped.
Anne Rice, Queen of the Damned
My brother was diagnosed with autism at the age of five, and I would observe him self-regulate after a hard day at school by tearing apart pieces of paper and tossing them everywhere like 'snow'. If we'd had a garbage disposal, he would have pulled an Armand. I could see even then that he and my brother had something in common. Sorting things by colour, engaging in more than one piece of media at a time; TV and music at full volume, and repeatedly rewinding the same scene of a movie. It bothered me when my brother did it, but with Armand, it was mysterious, dangerous, dissident.
Now, I identify Armand's behaviour in another neurodivergent context: the desire for the freedom to engage with the world that had previously been denied him. Having lived in extreme isolation for centuries, to finally live an (albeit complicated) domestic relationship with a mortal made him want to experience everything in vivid excess; throw everything at the wall and see what sticks– to make up for lost time. Armand's favourite film is Blade Runner – artificially intelligent 'replicants' fighting for autonomy, to be recognised for their humanity. He is so accustomed to feeling maligned and neglected that he is desperate to crack the code, not just in the way of modern technology but in the desire to understand and maintain interpersonal relationships, to learn how to interact with ease, to maintain that charisma that all the flush-faced people on his videotapes are blessed with.
In the television adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (Season 2, Episode 5), Armand demands to know why his (current) life partner, Louis, is more interested in mortal journalist, Daniel, than him. Armand has been feeling Louis' distance of late, and, in a fit of jealousy, puts Daniel under mind control and demands to know what desirable traits he possesses; how he manages to hold Louis' attention. After some physical torture, Armand looks Daniel in the eye and says: 'You're going to teach me how to be fascinating.'
Age does not lead to emotional acuity; age does not change your brain chemistry, not even for an immortal. I feel this. No matter how old I get, I know inherently that I can't alter my idiosyncrasies, personality, or neurotype. Armand pleads with Daniel to disclose what seems to him a clandestine mystery. Watching this scene made me reflect on all the times I did not know where I had gone wrong with others, and why I still don't know how the hell intimacy works. It took me until I was about forty to understand why the recently discovered demisexual in me preferred the idea of vampiric sensuality. These intense intellectual relationships, cultivated over centuries – along with the obligatory blood drinking – were Rice's character’s form of lovemaking. Most 'human' intimacy (at least in the first few books) was limited to their pre-vampiric existence. An act that was no longer necessary because the intensity of their love went beyond the messy clinical stuff. At twelve, I decided that a devastating, everlasting, violent co-dependency was preferable to what I assumed lay ahead of me. In some ways, nothing has changed.
I kept a diary in my early teens, where, on each day, I would provide a rudimentary summary of the media I had consumed. It was Baby's first Letterboxd. Goodreads for Beginners, but with added bursts of personal reflection and teenage angst. I can't provide direct quotes. It doesn't exist anymore. I tore it up and threw it in the bin in my twenties, along with everything else I'd written up to that point. I regret it. Knowing what I know now about my autism and ADHD, these early writings may have given me some insight into my adolescent confusion.
I was reminded of this time when I read Robert Aickman's short story, Pages from a Young Girl's Journal. Aickman's titular young girl – capricious and self-absorbed as I was – also thinks differently. She wants to relate to people, but also feels like an outsider and appears to have an internal fear that she will always stand on the outside looking in. She chronicles this frustrating lack of autonomy in her journal. Her parents rarely let her outside without a chaperone; she has very little independence, and they are constantly trying to find suitors for her at high society parties. At one of these events, she meets a handsome, alluring stranger and, for several nights after, wakes up feeling weak and drained of blood. Despite her increasingly sickly state, she feels more alive. She enjoys the feeling of blood trickling down her neck - she is unfazed by what those around her view as a sickness, abjection. Her body slowly changes until one night, she looks out her bedroom window and has a vision that makes her finally understand her appetite:
A great crying out and weeping, a buzzing and screaming and scratching, swept in turmoil past the open window, as if invisible (or almost invisible) bodies were turning around and around in the air outside, always lamenting and accusing. My head was split apart by the sad sounds and my body as moist as if I were an Ottoman. Then, on an instant, all had passed by. He stood there before me in the dim embrasure of the window. ‘That’, he said, ‘is Love as the elect of this world knows it.’
‘The elect?’ I besought him, in a voice so low that it was hardly a voice at all (but why matter?). ‘Why yes,’ he seemed to reaffirm. ‘Of this world, the elect'.
Robert Aickman, Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal
She is elated to be one of the 'elect', to be chosen, to be considered worthy by the monsters in the shadows who feel things in excess, as she does. At the end of the story, she looks out the window at a pack of wolves gathering below, anticipating joining her new family – not merely because of promised powers – but the opportunity to be free to wander the world as she wishes, to be entirely herself.
I haven't experienced time in the traditional sense in years, perhaps even decades. Most people complain that time seems to move faster as they get older. However, for individuals with no set routine, no job, caught in the endless spiral of isolation, chronic illness, or disability, the perception of time can be even more complicated. You simultaneously feel time running out and standing still. Many things that come easily to others and lead to personal and professional successes aren't possible. Sometimes, I feel like I have no choice but to wait for things to change. I can only do so much. I was born waiting, and I am still waiting.
Entering middle age, I am starting to confront mortality. When you don't have a life partner or children, when you do not have someone to age alongside you, all you must adhere to is the people you will outlive by decades. My parents are – were – my only immediate support system. Now, they sometimes forget my name, can’t feed themselves, or no longer have the use of their legs. I wish that immortality were a real option to avoid infirmity and death and compensate for lost time. I want to try again. As much of a burden and a curse vampires consider their lives to be, at least they have all the time in the world to turn it around if they want to. The problem is, vampires have limitations – some I share: aversion to light, insufferably heightened senses, constant noise in my head, sick from the overwhelming stench of the world, prolonged isolation, a desperate need to consume more iron, looking younger than I am, the heightened emotion, the addictions, the anger, the ennui, the fear, the inertia.
Sometimes, when I'm burnt out, I can't focus on anything but video games. I jump between cozy farming simulators and dense, expansive RPGs. I was chatting with two old friends over text the other day about Baldur's Gate 3. My answer to the inevitable question of 'who are you romancing?' was met with something like: 'Oh, Kate...no. No, no, no...you didn't?' Like they didn't want me getting hurt, like I could do without being manipulated by a toxic cad for once in my life. I mean, they're not wrong. The problem is, I'm loving every second of it.
Astarion, an elven vampire spawn, has much in common with Armand. He is a victim, well on the way to perpetuating an endless cycle of abuse and manipulation, until your character can choose to play intimacy in reverse. It begins with him charming you into what he thinks will be a one-night stand to guarantee his own safety. It ends with the player breaking down his walls until what's left is a traumatised little boy with puppy dog eyes. You can turn him away from a more violent, ruthless path or help him become one of the most powerful evils in the world. You can be a friend and confidant without the pressure of intimacy, or kick him in the nuts and make him leave. That’s the most dangerous thing about him – you can't mould real people in the same way. Armand would love this game, but I fear it would do him no good.
There’s a satisfying power fantasy at the height of the simulated vampire romance. At its dark depths, however, it has the potential to cultivate a kind of resentment in the player; a sadness in the knowledge that such mutual understanding is not possible in a real relationship. And it's not about delusion, or shallow pining after an impossibly pretty digital render. It's something more visceral. Something that is simultaneously seductive but also – almost – safe.
The post-Ricean vampire poses a conundrum. No matter how many fan artists paint Astarion as Saint Sebastian or Alexandre Cabanel's Fallen Angel, his beauty is the least interesting thing about him. His complexity is. The infinite narrative possibilities are. He's insufferable, and we eat it up. The vampire's nature to attract and repel has been analysed and overanalysed to tedium. I know personally, I would be deluding myself if the impossible beauty wasn't part of the appeal. Yet, Astarion is, I believe, at his most attractive when he is covered in blood and bruises, sneering at me like a lech—the safe kind of shithead. I don't know what that says about me. Maybe I do. Forget about it. I have.
We learn from the shitheads for better or worse. In Genevieve Jagger's recent novel, Fragile Animals, narrator Noelle goes on holiday alone in the midst of a deep depression. There, she meets and engages in an intense form of conversational intimacy with Moses, a dirt-encrusted vampire taxidermist. He is a grimy, charismatic enigma with whom she bonds through discussions about past erotic encounters and physical rituals that make her face herself and, in doing so, unpack her religious trauma and suppressed sexuality.
The man is older than me by decades, though it is hard to pinpoint in his waxen face how many. Fifties seems safe, but if you pushed me, I might go a decade older. Maybe a decade younger. Maybe I just don't know. Miss Fraser was right – he does look unwell. He's sallow, sick skin amplified by a head of unruly hair, a dense bracken of slate grey. Like the kind you'd find on the haunches of dogs, thick hair for an older man. His eyes are dark as he smiles at me, and I see the contradiction of his feline mouth. It splits his face like a chasm as it curls up into a smirk.
The overall effect is a face that is dominating, thoughtful, ridden with something like fleas.
Genevieve Jagger, Fragile Animals
Moses is, in many ways, the anti-Astarion. Enticing in a crumpled, primal sense. Astarion wouldn't be caught dead with dirty fingernails. I don't think Noelle herself seems to be able to make up her mind about his physical appeal. Jagger is neurodivergent herself, and in her writing, I can see – even though in Fragile Animals there is no direct reference to her narrator's neurotype – that she clearly has an innate understanding of what drives our responses to trauma, sexual disorientation and our ability to be more open to the eccentricities and transgressions of others. She admits that there is likely nothing new to be said about the vampire, so she decided to 'probe the lore'. But it's not the vampire's time-honoured preternatural power that makes the trope enduring – it's the painfully human empathy at the centre of the story. It's Noelle's story. Moses is the catalyst that leads to self-actualisation.
Vampires take as much as they give. They appeal to the neurodivergent mind because they've lived. Certainly more than any of us ever want to, but in a way that the lonely tend to covet. Whether they use and discard you, or make you theirs for eternity, they usually awaken something in the process. When I drive past the Seventh Day Adventist church and my music is reduced to static, when I fantasise about some powerful, tragic evil inside me and crave the interminable beauty of immortality, I find comfort in the discomfort I share with these creatures. I am more at peace with my monstrous tendencies, and that might be the most fascinating thing of all. As Astarion says: 'I've been dead in the ground for long enough. It's time to try living again.'
