Dispatch 38

What a Vampire Wants

The one about a vampire who was turned by his mother at eight years old. Dispatch 38 begins with a violin playing somewhere beneath a distant storm and an unusual guest answering questions from listeners. His name is Landau, although he seems perfectly content to be called simply Vampire. He is nine thousand years old, and the narrator has invited him to explain something that has troubled human beings for centuries: why would a vampire want to make another vampire? The answers are not particularly reassuring. It isn't quite reproduction, companionship, sexuality, or predation. Landau describes an urge to make another of oneself, despite the terrible responsibility that follows. When a listener asks who made him, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Landau's mother transformed him when he was eight years old, believing he would otherwise die. The consequences separated them, leaving a frightened child alone with an unfamiliar hunger and no one to teach him what he had become. The story moves through the strange practicalities of vampire existence: learning to feed, concealing one's nature, lying about age and appetite, and acquiring the habits necessary to live among people who must never know the truth. But the narrator becomes increasingly interested in the emotional cost of these arrangements, particularly the guilt that even an ancient predator may carry. Then Landau remembers Anya, a woman he loved and wanted to save from death. Their courtship sounds almost ordinary, despite the extraordinary proposition hanging over it. She laughed when he revealed what he was, asked to see his teeth, and took seven months to decide whether she wanted to become like him. What followed raises a different question about love and immortality: does making someone capable of living forever give you any claim upon the life they choose to live? At its center, What a Vampire Wants is about the difference between love and possession, and the responsibilities created when one person irrevocably changes another. Landau's extraordinary lifespan has not freed him from the experiences that define an ordinary human life: childhood abandonment, hunger, guilt, longing, and separation. And when a final listener asks whether he ever found his mother, the answer reaches across four thousand years to something the narrator decides is better left unspoken.