An Episode of Not Quite Dead.

Content Warnings

• Mentions of blood
• Mentions of corpses, some dismembered
• Discussions of unethical medical experiments
• Mentions of intimate partner violence
• Discussions of scars
• Discussions of memory loss

Transcript

ALFIE
I’ve turned on the recorder now, kitten. You just tell me if you want me to turn it off. 

NEIGE
I am not an infant. 

ALFIE
I know. But. Tell me. 

NEIGE
I will. 

ALFIE
Uh. I’m just going to. Go through everything you’ve said. Please cut in if I’m getting something wrong. 

NEIGE
Oui. 

ALFIE
It’s alright. 

NEIGE
I am going to get back in the bath. 

ALFIE
Okay, sweet. 

NEIGE
If you need me, I… 

ALFIE
I know. 

NEIGE
Merci. 

LIGHT FOOTSTEPS. WATER MOVES. 

ALFIE
Okay so. I’m recording this in Norway. It’s been, what, three days? Since the cabin? 

NEIGE
Oui, about that. 

ALFIE
Thanks, kitten. Sorry. 

NEIGE
It is fine. 

ALFIE
Uh. Anyway. We uh. We searched every room. Every inch of that place. And. It was not easy. Some of the rooms, they clearly hadn’t been touched for a long, long time. Open dissections carefully frozen so they might still be examined through blocks of ice, the way people set skeletons in resin, but. Gorier. 

Half-mades. Vampires. Humans. 

It is clear this place, it predated everything we know about Bonham so far. And Neige is pretty sure that Bonham can’t be more than a few hundred years old, because of the kind of vampire he is. 

That’s the other thing about this place. In the older rooms, the ones with subjects dated as being from a time when Claudio was still alive? They had vampires of all kinds in there. There were books. They were hard to look at, damaged by frost, but there was enough there that we could see these were extensive notes on other kinds of vampire. Kinds of vampire Claudio was orchestrating the destruction of. And the way they were written? It was just. 

Gross. Gross. 

All the ways they’re different from us were categorised as ways they were a failure. reasons they could not be allowed to live, and certainly not to proliferate. There, in every line, the implication that the vampires we are? The ones like me and Neige? We’re supposedly superior, more deserving of life, more worthy. The existence of the others, it polluted this idea of vampires as superior. 

So like. It’s science. But it’s science in the name of fucking fascism. Science which, rather than trying to get beyond its biases, seeks to reaffirm them. And listen, I know that historically speaking, scientists? They get themselves into a lot of bad spots. Having this feeling in you, this drive to know and discover, I think it’s something which can be pretty easy to manipulate. Even to corrupt. If you forget that what you’re trying to do is look at how things work and instead get fixated on the idea that there’s some kind of answer to everything? You end up rubbing shoulders with fascism because that’s the whole thing about it, isn’t it? Fascism has no space for nuance, no space for complexity, no space for anything but its own idea of the world and everything else has to be crushed. 

Sorry, I. I just. 

It’s fascist. That’s what this is. Claudio’s whole thing it, it’s just fucking fascism. It’s not special or shiny because he paints himself as some kind of chosen one, that’s pretty par for the course for people who think like fascists. They have to believe they’re special and it’s… 

The thing I keep getting into knots with in my head is Casper. Because like. There’s a narcissism in that amount of hating yourself, isn’t there? And the more I find out, the more I see, the more it’s like. Yeah. Yeah I totally get it. He’s not after the same thing as Bonham and whoever else worked out of that cabin, but he’s looking for an answer. Casper wanted a kind of salvation or absolution or something and no it’s not the same as what Bonham wanted or what Henri thought he understood, but yeah. Yeah. 

I get it. 

Like I don’t forgive him do not get me wrong. But I do like. Pity him, I guess. 

God. I can’t believe I. No. That’s a lie. I can believe I loved him. One thing that always pissed me off about how people talked about my thing with Ben was this continual shock that he was so nice. because he was nice! He was funny and charming and great fun on a night out and he fucking threw me at walls. sometimes people who do monstrous things are nice and it’s a coward’s choice to pretend that’s not what it’s like. Being nice and being good are not the same fucking thing. 

It was also kind of insulting, I don’t know. As time’s gone on, people’s ideas about Ben have changed and now they talk about him like he was just bad, but he wasn’t. I liked him. There were reasons I was with him. And yeah he was manipulative and maybe if I knew my own worth a bit more I wouldn’t have stayed but like. I stayed because I loved him. This is the thing people get wrong the most about it all, I think. I stayed because I loved him. And it wasn’t fake love, and I think he kind of loved me, even if it was all fucked up and weird. But. Yeah. 

And like, with Casper? Sometimes I find myself looking back on everything that happened and wondering why the fuck I was there. Because he was hiding stuff from me. But like, Haley said it. It was kind of hot that he was hiding things from me. And he was a fucked up weirdo even when I was dating him, but like Neige has pointed out to me several times, if he wasn’t weird I wouldn’t have liked him. I like weird. Weird is good. 

Not this, though. Not— not chopping off your own arm and grafting onto a walking corpse in the hopes of. What? Growing a clone of yourself? Because that’s what they seemed to be trying to do. Pushing the limits of what regeneration we were capable of. His notebook is like. It’s this desperate manifesto. A vampire can drink half-made blood and not turn into a half-made. Half-mades can drink anything and they don’t absorb anything. But some of them. They seemed to have been. Human. Still. When the grafts were placed. And they became half-mades after. 

Casper’s theory was this. The reason our limbs don’t grow back on their own is because they don’t have the blood to do it. There’s not enough vampire there to grow new vampires. You mix vampire blood and human blood, and it if it’s compatible? It turns the human blood into vampire blood, but very, very slowly. If it isn’t, the human blood is preserves by the vampire blood but remains distinct from it. He’s working at a large scale here, without powerful microscopes or ways to separate the blood into layers, he’s talking about the blood as a whole system, not about the different bits of it. I have questions like, what is it in our blood that’s doing the preserving? Because our blood has to be a mix of stuff, and not just because vampires are all different types of things like Haley found out when she looked at mine, but because like. Blood is a mixture, it’s always a melange. 

In his notebook, Casper talks about the work that was done in the cabin before him in very vague terms. It seems like what they were trying to do there was to synthesise a kind of. Super vampire blood. Taking a mix of different strains and trying to blend them together in a way that will like, result in a vampire which has no drawbacks, but it’s still not fucking clear what bits they think are drawbacks and which are strengths, it’s all just talked about like a given that some vampires are just ‘better’ than others. 

And it’s interesting because like. For Claudio, it feels pretty clear that he thought we were already superior, and of all of us, Neige is the most superior. So is that what they’re aiming for? A way to make more vampires like Neige? But isn’t that what we already are? He’s not. He’s not different to me, really, I don’t— he’s just a vampire, you know, he’s not fucking magic any more than the rest of us are. Like he says, you know, he’s just old, he’s just— 

[DOOR OPENS] 

NEIGE
Stop. 

ALFIE
I— sorry.

NEIGE
Please just stop. 

ALFIE
Okay, I will, let me— 

NEIGE
No. Let it capture this. 

ALFIE
Okay?

NEIGE
I— I want to speak about it. 

ALFIE
Yeah? 

NEIGE
Oui. 

ALFIE
Alright. You don’t have to you know, I can just—

NEIGE
Non. I wish to do this. Will you let me? 

ALFIE
Of course, yeah. Yeah. 

NEIGE
Forgive me. 

ALFIE
Baby, what…? Come here, just come here. 

MOVEMENT

ALFIE
It’s alright. 

NEIGE
Claudio thought I was the first. And it seems that Casper’s belief is more sophisticated, that I might be the first of whatever kind of vampire that I am. But there is a— a problem for this, for Claudio. Because it means that each abstraction from me, the vampires become more tainted by humanity. It does not make sense; when you become a vampire you become wholly a vampire. Your blood is vampire blood. There is no human left accept what has become part of the vampire you are. Whether a vampire is new, or if they are thousands of years old, when you drink their blood, you are drinking vampire blood. 

I think the mistake comes from this. Over time, it seems like it is easier for our bodies to do what they need to do. Like our bodies learn better. It makes sense to me, I don’t know why. We are alive so much longer than most things; of course this would happen. So I need less blood to live, because the vampire I am has been a vampire for longer than the vampire you are, non? So it knows itself better. But the process restarts in every new vampire which is made, regardless of what vampire makes them. Vampires I make are the same as those made by others. My blood is not special. It just is what it is. 

But it’s an easy mistake if you do not want to understand. If you do not want to listen. If you believe you are somehow special. Claudio hated what humans had done to him. He resented them. He would not even  drink their blood as soon as it was possible for him to avoid it. This was in part because he believed he could take the power of others from their blood, but it was also because he— he did not want to taint himself with humanity, you see? It disgusted him. 

But even if we did not need to drink their blood, we would be reliant on humanity to make more of ourselves. This was folded back into his ideas of why we are superior, that we need not breed like mammals to grow our population. His views of humanity disgusted me in several ways. They often tended towards a concept that their main function was to reproduce, when humans do all sorts of things, and many of them can’t or have no wish to make babies. Humans do art, science, philosophy. They make and think and do. They are beings beyond what Claudio conceived. 

His hate was a kind of envy. He had been so rejected in his human life. He had fought for his place in the world only to have it fall apart as the result of an injury. He spoke about that like a weapon, how they spurned him for his weakness, when now he was so strong, and people would listen to him, rapt. 

And I think to myself, was he spurned? He had friends, he had family. Yes there was discomfort amongst the people around him at what had become of him. But much of that was pity. He was alive through the kindness of others; his headaches were so bad he might’ve died of thirst if people had not poured water into his mouth. Yes, he was often left alone when he was suffering, but people came and washed the piss and shit off his legs, you know? 

It seemed to me his bitterness was at his own frailty. At what he felt was owed to him but never was. A perfect body which bent to his will and never failed, and nothing, nothing alive can desire for such a thing in earnest. 

Which is why being a vampire was not enough, not enough. Not even being a vampire who had been made by what he deemed was as close to a god as could ever exist was enough. It was not enough because his body was still a body. It hungered and it bled. He could heal fast but he seems to take offence at needing to heal at all. 

So he sees me, a thing which has been around so long that my body can survive on little and he strings chains around the notches of my spine and bites me and bites me to prove that I will not die. To show himself that I can survive anything, but also that I am not perfect. there is something for him to strive to. I can be outdone. 

Look at my back, Alfie. 

ALFIE
What? 

NEIGE
Look at it. The scars which are there, the places they have been washed away by other injuries. My shoulder blades are clean. The smooth circles where Claudio’s chains burst through my skin. And the rest of it. The pattern of something which happened when I was alive which I cannot remember. 

Those scars have lasted as long as they have because I have let them. It became a conscious effort, at some point, to preserve them. I don’t pretend to fully understand why I did this, only that I did. They used to extend down my legs, you see. And then one day I noticed they were gone. Over the years, through small injuries, bit by bit these marks were erased. 

I became afraid, at some point, and I cannot place exactly when this was. But I became afraid the scars would one day vanish from my skin entirely. This is why I ask you not to scratch my back. Why I face danger face-first. Because if the scar is gone, a day will come where I don’t remember it was ever there. 

I have already lost where it came from. And when I reach and touches the edges of it, I— I am glad that memory is gone, in some ways. I don’t know what happened to me but I know something did. Do you understand? 

ALFIE SNIFFLES

NEIGE
Ah, non, my love. My love. 

ALFIE
Neige. 

NEIGE
I’m safe here. Safe with you. And you listen to what I ask for. You give me what I need. Okie? 

ALFIE
Fuck. 

NEIGE
Do you understand why I’m telling you this? 

ALFIE
I— no. Not really. I don’t see how it— how it’s relevant. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say it. Thank you for— for talking about this. I’m sorry. 

NEIGE
You are so kind, mon coeur. So beautiful. 

ALFIE
Fuck I could actually kill something right now, I think. I see what you mean about the— directing the anger into something. Hot and wet. 

NEIGE
There are other hot and wet activities. 

ALFIE
Like a bath. 

NEIGE SCOFFS

NEIGE
That too. We can find someone to kill, if it would help. 

ALFIE
I don’t know if it actually would. But you know. 

NEIGE
Yes. Unequivocally. 

ALFIE
Okay. But. Can you explain why you told me about the scar? 

NEIGE
Because it shows I am not a perfect thing and cannot aspire to be a perfect thing, and in fact, imperfection is a kind of gift. It is what makes us who we are. And to lose this scar brings in me this kind of terror that it could be possible to lose who I am. What I am. 

It is important that we change. Time changes all things, even those of us who live a through a lot of it without showing signs of normal aging. We don’t always get to choose which bits of us we keep. But we can preserve the parts that matter. Hang on to them and carry them forward into what we become next. 

These marks on my back tell a part of my story that I have forgotten, but they remind me it was there. I was human, once. I do not long to be human again. So long as I exist, I am happy to do so. But I would resent the tearing out of this page. You see? 

ALFIE
I— not really. I. I completely understand what you’re saying but at the same time, I don’t know. It feels a bit. Like. I don’t think it’s wrong if people want to be rid of scars or visible differences if they want, and I don’t— is what you’re saying— 

NEIGE
Ah, non, non, this is not what I mean. I need to think of a better way to phrase this which does not imply that it is some kind of holy duty to cling to something like this, or that disfigurements, if you want to call them this, are secretly good in some way. You are right to be uncomfortable if you think this is what I am implying, that would be fucked up to say. 

ALFIE
Ah yeah, okay. Good. 

NEIGE
I think what I am trying to get as it that. What Claudio saw in me, and in vampires more generally, it is a mistake. We are as flawed and changeable as any other thing which is alive. We are not gods. We are creatures with flaws and weaknesses, the same as any other. We can be killed. We can die. We will forget. In enough time, everything we once were will be eroded by new memories and experiences. We are finite. Like everything. Even the world, one day, will end. 

It is tempting, I think, for people like Claudio to think of us as masters of death. If we are not careful in how we hunt, death is what fuels us in a very visceral way, and we can seem, to the untrained eye, to live forever. It is easy to mistake us all as small gods, walking amongst the mortal. To treat every vampire’s death as a squashed eternity. 

But in reality we cannot hold eternity in our hearts, in our heads. At a guess I would say my memory is better than most human’s, but I’m not sure it always has been, or that it’s really that much better if somebody found a way to measure that sort of thing. My past is littered with hundreds of dead versions of me. Not literally of course, this is by most meaningful measures the same body I have always had, as much as anyone’s body is the same as it was when they first came to inhabit it. But compared to what I remember, what I don’t stretches on endlessly. There’s an extent to which I can choose what I hold onto, as I choose to protect what is left of the scars on my back. But there is a greater extent to which I simply cannot. 

This is why it’s not enough for Claudio to be a vampire. Why I couldn’t really ever be enough of a god for him to be satisfied. I would say what he craves is a kind of crystallisation but even crystals erode, with time. 

ALFIE
I think I understand. 

NEIGE
I am glad. 

ALFIE
He didn’t deserve you. He doesn’t deserve this. You didn’t need to spend so much time trying to make sense of what he was and what he did, but you did it anyway. 

NEIGE
It is like you say about Ben. About Casper. Monsters rarely believe they are monsters, so we do ourselves a great injustice if we believe that’s all they are. 

ALFIE
But you’ve not really spoken about anything about Claudio that would make me— I’m doing it. I’m sorry. I just. I’m sure there was plenty of good about him. I’m not sure this is one of those things. 

NEIGE
It’s not, you are right. 

Anyway. It makes sense to me that he would think of propagation as a way to stay alive forever. If we have a sense of where our parts have gone, even when they’ve been taken from us, perhaps we could be resurrected from— 

ALFIE
Shit, Neige, your– your fucking insides, in Scotland. 

NEIGE
Ah. Oui.

ALFIE
What if they— what if— 

NEIGE
Maybe this was their intent. But I can tell you I do not think they have been successful. 

ALFIE
I. What? 

NEIGE
I feel them. Still. Those parts. It is vague. But I feel them. I get a sense they have been moved. That things have been… done. To them. But it is a rarely like pain, to me, now. And I am certain if they had managed to replicate me from any of these ‘cuttings’ I would know about it. Surely. 

ALFIE
Yeah, I guess. We didn’t find Claudio’s hand, though. In the mess of everything. 

NEIGE
Non. We did not. 

ALFIE
Funny how it’s only bits of flesh, or blood that ends up inside other people, that we can feel. 

NEIGE
Funny how? 

ALFIE
I don’t know. So much of all this experimentation, it seems to hinge on the blood, right? But when we bleed on the floor or whatever, it’s not like I can sense the blood on the ground hours after it’s spilled there. I mean, thank fuck for that, but like. There’s clearly something more complicated going on than just the blood being able to power us, you know what I mean? And the way we heal and stuff. We’re not humans with vampire blood in us. All of our body is the vampire, you know? 

NEIGE
Yes, I do. This is one of those things which Casper and I had such disputes about, you see. And also one of the many things I discussed with Henri. We are more than our blood, despite this being the thing which we use to turn other people into vampires. 

ALFIE
I guess you really are what you eat. 

NEIGE
Quoi? 

ALFIE
Never mind, I’m being stupid. 

NEIGE
Was there more you needed to say? 

ALFIE
It was just a bad joke. 

NEIGE
Not about that, about the cabin. About everything. 

ALFIE
Oh. Right. Yeah. I mean. 

There was plenty in there to find? And maybe one day when things are less terrifying I’ll go back and catalogue it all. Mostly because like. Those people in there? They were all people. And I just. If there’s a way to find out who they were and work out what they wanted done with their remains, we should do it. 

NEIGE
If you like. 

ALFIE
But then. There’s the frozen vampires in the little crypt. The ones waiting for a cure. What do we do with them? Wake them up, give them therapy and hope for the fucking best? I have no fucking idea. 

NEIGE
I am certain this is not a decision which should be yours alone to make. And I am glad you did not try to make it. 

ALFIE
Yeah. 

NEIGE
What you talk about so often, so easily, is a reshaping of the world which is too radical for one person alone to shoulder, or even two. We cannot be the only ones who make these kinds of calls. It was wrong of Claudio to do this. It was wrong of me to try to correct his actions with the terror of my own. 

ALFIE
Yeah, fuck no, I have like. Zero interest in being in charge. Sounds fucking horrible. 

NEIGE
Ah. This is very reassuring. 

ALFIE
Pff. You say that like you were worried I was going to go full god-complex, vampire saviour, kind go the world on you. 

Neige. Wait, you didn’t think that— are you serious right now?!

NEIGE
What I hope and believe about you tells me very little about what you are. I have seen people I love become monsters before. I would be a fool not to think you capable of this, not when we have known each other only for so brief a time, when you are still discovering how, and who to be. 

ALFIE
I feel like I should be insulted but you made it sound so pretty that you’re making that really hard. 

NEIGE
In some ways, trust comes easy to me. In others, not so much. 

ALFIE
I wish the world was kinder to you. 

NEIGE
It has been very kind. It has brought me to you. 

ALFIE
Your potentially evil authoritarian boyfriend? 

NEIGE
None. A bright spot of hope in a life which has been dark and fearful for a long, long time. There has always been joy when I have sought it out. You have no idea how it feels for it to be presented to me in small ways every day, for no effort at all. 

ALFIE
I am quite annoying too, though. Swings and round about. 

NEIGE
As you often point out, I am annoying too. 

ALFIE
Mutual irritation. I’m sure this is the grounds for a long, healthy relationship. 

NEIGE
Eh, I did not say anything about it being healthy, and if it ends, it ends. All things do. But isn’t it brilliant whilst it’s happening? 

ALFIE
Don’t go. 

NEIGE
I won’t. 

ALFIE
I’m serious. 

NEIGE
I know. 

ALFIE
I don’t know what I’d do without you. 

NEIGE
Of course not. That’s what love is, isn’t it? To come to rely on someone as easily as you breathe. Of course you can’t imagine being without it. But you don’t need to breathe any more, Alfie. Sometimes things change. It doesn’t make them less beautiful or necessary in the moment we have them but they do change. 

ALFIE
Can’t we change together? 

NEIGE
I would like that. But I also want you to know you are not bound to me, do you understand this? That’s not what this is. This is choice, not obligation. Always. You understand? 

ALFIE
I— yes. I understand. 

NEIGE
Stay because you choose to stay. Not because you have to. 

ALFIE
I— I do. I’m sorry, I. That’s not what I meant. I don’t feel trapped or— I could live without you if I wanted but I don’t. I don’t. 

NEIGE
Bien. 

ALFIE
Fucking hell I feel sick. 

NEIGE
Mon râleur. 

ALFIE
Don’t— I don’t. I wouldn’t want you to stay because you feel. I want you to choose but. Fuck. Fuck. 

NEIGE
I’m not going anywhere. Almost daily for the last three months I have been explaining to you over and over that you could ask almost anything of me and I would simply do it. I have no interest in being anywhere but here. 

ALFIE
Fuck. 

NEIGE
Ah, merde. Désolé, désolé. I’m here. You have me, I have you. Okie? 

ALFIE
God. Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. 

NEIGE
Non, non, I am here. I am here.

ALFIE
It’s just— Casper, everyone they— fucking fuck. I’m being a dick. 

NEIGE
We’ll talk about this when your hands aren’t shaking, okie?

ALFIE
Fuck. 

NEIGE
I am going to turn off the dictaphone. 

ALFIE
Don’t let go. 

NEIGE
I won’t, see? I will just reach out and— 

[END]