Pandora (3 page)

You smiled again. “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” you said.

“But I don’t think you have to fear him. If he wanted you gone off the Earth, you’d be gone. What we have to fear is the same things humans fear—that there are others of our same species, of varying power and belief, and we are never entirely sure where they are or what they do. That’s my advice to you.”

“You are so kind to take your time with me,” you said.

I could have wept. “On the contrary. You don’t know the silence and solitude in which I wander, and pray you never know it, and here you’ve given me heat without death, you’ve given me nourishment without blood. I’m glad you’ve come.”

I saw you look up at the sky, the habit of the young ones.

“I know, we have to part now.”

You turned to me suddenly. “Meet me tomorrow night,” you said imploringly. “Let this exchange continue! I’ll come to you in the Café where you sit every night musing. I’ll find you. Let us talk to each other.”

“So you’ve seen me there.”

“Oh, often,” you said. “Yes.” You looked away again. I saw it was to conceal feeling. Then your dark eyes turned back to me.

“Pandora, we have the world, don’t we?” you whispered.

“I don’t know, David. But I’ll meet you tomorrow night. Why haven’t you come to me there? Where it was warm and lighted?”

“It seemed a far more outrageous intrusion, to move in on you in the sanctified privacy of a crowded café. People go to such places to be alone, don’t they? This seemed somehow more proper. And I did not mean to be the voyeur. Like many fledglings, I have to feed every night. It was an accident that we saw each other at that moment.”

“That is charming, David,” I said. “It is a long time since anyone has charmed me. I’ll meet you there . . . tomorrow night.”

And then a wickedness possessed me. I came towards you and embraced you, knowing that the hardness and coldness of my ancient body would strike the deepest chord of terror in you, newborn as you were, passing so easily for mortal.

But you didn’t draw back. And when I kissed your cheek, you kissed mine.

I wonder now, as I sit here in the café, writing . . . trying to give you more with these words perhaps than you ask for . . . what I would have done had you not kissed me, had you shrunk back with the fear that is so common in the young.

David, you are indeed a puzzle.

You see that I have begun to chronicle not my life here, but what has passed these two nights between you and me.

Allow this, David. Allow that I speak of you and me, and then perhaps I can retrieve my lost life.

When you came into the café tonight, I thought nothing much about the notebooks. You had two. They were thick.

The leather of the notebooks smelled good and old, and when you set them down on the table, only then did I detect a glimmer from your disciplined and restrained mind that they had to do with me.

I had chosen this table in the crowded center of the room, as though I wanted to be in the middle of the whirlpool of mortal scent and activity. You seemed pleased, unafraid, utterly at home.

You wore another stunning suit of modern cut with a full cape of worsted wool, very tasteful, yet Old World, and with your golden skin and radiant eyes, you turned the head of every woman in the place and you turned the heads of some of the men.

You smiled. I must have seemed a snail to you beneath my cloak and hood, gold glasses covering well over half my face, and a trace of commercial lipstick on my lips, a soft purple pink that had made me
think of bruises. It had seemed very enticing in the mirror at the store, and I liked that my mouth was something I didn’t have to hide. My lips are now almost colorless. With this lipstick I could smile.

I wore these gloves of mine, black lace, with their sheared-off tips so that my fingers can feel, and I had sooted my nails so they would not sparkle like crystal in the Café. And I reached out my hand to you and you kissed it.

There was your same boldness and decorum. And then the warmest smile from you, a smile in which I think your former physiology must have dominated because you looked far too wise for one so young and strong of build. I marveled at the perfect picture you had made of yourself.

“You don’t know what a joy it is to me,” you said, “that you’ve come, that you’ve let me join you here at this table.”

“You have made me want this,” I said, raising my hands, and seeing that your eyes were dazzled by my crystalline fingernails, in spite of the soot.

I reached towards you, expecting you to pull back, but you entrusted to my cold white fingers your warm dark hand.

“You find in me a living being?” I asked you.

“Oh, yes, most definitely, most radiantly and perfectly a living being.”

We ordered our coffee, as mortals expect us to do, deriving more pleasure from the heat and aroma than they could ever imagine, even stirring our little cups with our spoons. I had before me a red dessert.
The dessert is still here of course. I ordered it simply because it was red—strawberries covered in syrup—with a strong sweet smell that bees would like.

I smiled at your blandishments. I liked them.

Playfully, I mocked them. I let my hood slip down and I shook out my hair so that its fullness and dark brown color could shimmer in the light.

Of course it’s no signal to mortals, as is Marius’s blond hair or that of Lestat. But I love my own hair, I love the veil of it when it is down over my shoulders, and I loved what I saw in your eyes.

“Somewhere deep inside me there is a woman,” I said.

To write it now—in this notebook as I sit here alone—it gives architecture to a trivial moment, and seems so dire a confession.

David, the more I write, the more the concept of narrative excites me, the more I believe in the weight of a coherence which is possible on the page though not in life.

But again, I didn’t know I meant to pick up this pen of yours at all. We were talking:

“Pandora, if anyone does not know you’re a woman, then he is a fool,” you said.

“How angry Marius would be with me for being pleased by that,” I said. “Oh, no. Rather he would seize it as a strong point in favor of his position. I left him, left him without a word, the last time we were together—that was before Lestat went on his little escapade of running around in a human body, and long before he encountered Memnoch the Devil—I
left Marius, and suddenly I wish I could reach him! I wish I could talk with him as you and I are talking now.”

You looked so troubled for me, and with reason. On some level, you must have known that I had not evinced this much enthusiasm over anything in many a dreary year.

“Would you write your story for me, Pandora?” you asked suddenly.

I was totally surprised.

“Write it in these notebooks?” you pressed. “Write about the time when you were alive, the time when you and Marius came together, write what you will of Marius. But it’s your story that I most want.”

I was stunned.

“Why in the world would you want this of me?” You didn’t answer.

“David, surely you’ve not returned to that order of human beings, the Talamasca, they know too much—”

You put up your hand.

“No, and I will never; and if there was ever any doubt of it, I learnt it once and for all in the archives kept by Maharet.”

“She allowed you to see her archives, the books she’s saved over the course of time?”

“Yes, it was remarkable, you know . . . a storehouse of tablets, scrolls, parchments—books and poems from cultures of which the world knows nothing, I think. Books lost from time. Of course
she forbade me to reveal anything I found or speak in detail of our meeting. She said it was too rash tampering with things, and she confirmed your fear that I might go to the Talamasca—my old mortal psychic friends. I have not. I will not. But it is a very easy vow to keep.”

“Why so?”

“Pandora, when I saw all those old writings—I knew I was no longer human. I knew that the history lying there to be collected was no longer mine! I am not one of these!” Your eyes swept the room. “Of course you must have heard this a thousand times from fledgling vampires! But you see, I had a fervent faith that philosophy and reason would make a bridge for me by which I could go and come in both worlds. Well, there is no bridge. It’s gone.”

Your sadness shimmered about you, flashing in your young eyes and in the softness of your new flesh.

“So you know that,” I said. I didn’t plan the words. But out they came. “You know.” I gave a soft bitter laugh.

“Indeed I do. I knew when I held documents from your time, so many from your time, Imperial Rome, and other crumbling bits of inscribed rock I couldn’t even hope to place. I knew. I didn’t care about them, Pandora! I care about what we are, what we are now.”

“How remarkable,” I said. “You don’t know how much I admire you, or how attractive is your disposition to me.”

“I am happy to hear this,” you said. Then you leaned forward towards me: “I don’t say we do not carry our human souls with us, our history; of course we do.

“I remember once a long time ago, Armand told me that he asked Lestat, ‘How will I ever understand the human race?’ Lestat said, ‘Read or see all the plays of Shakespeare and you will know all you ever need to know about the human race.’ Armand did it. He devoured the poems, he sat through the plays, he watched the brilliant new films with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo DiCaprio. And when Armand and I last spoke together, this is what he said of his education:

“ ‘Lestat was right. He gave me not books but a passage into understanding. This man Shakespeare writes,’—and I quote both Armand and Shakespeare now as Armand spoke it, as I will to you—as if it came from my heart:

“ ‘This man writes this,’ said Armand to me, ‘and we all know that it is absolutely the truth and every revelation has sooner or later fallen before it, and yet we want to love the way he has said it, we want to hear it again! We want to remember it! We want to never forget a single word.’ ”

We were both silent for a moment. You looked down, you rested your chin on your knuckles. I knew the whole weight of Armand’s going into the sun was on you, and I had so loved your recitation of the words, and the words themselves.

Finally, I said, “And this gives me pleasure. Think of it, pleasure. That you recite these words to me now.”

You smiled.

“I want to know now what we can learn,” you said. “I want to know what we can see! So I come to you, a Child of the Millennia, a vampire who drank from the Queen Akasha herself, one who has survived two thousand years. And I ask you, Pandora, please will you write for me, write your story, write what you will.”

For a long moment I gave you no answer.

Then I said sharply that I could not. But something had stirred in me. I saw and heard arguments and tirades of centuries ago, I saw the poet’s lifted light shine on eras I had known intimately out of love. Other eras I had never known, wandering, ignorant, a wraith.

Yes, there was a tale to be written. There was. But at the moment I could not admit it.

You were in misery, having thought of Armand, having remembered his walking into the morning sun. You mourned for Armand.

“Was there any bond between you?” you asked. “Forgive me my boldness, but I mean was there any bond between you and Armand when you met, because Marius had given you both the Dark Gift? I know no jealousy exists, that I can feel. I wouldn’t bring up the very name Armand if I detected a hurt in you, but all else is an absence, a silence. Was there no bond?”

“The bond is only grief. He went into the sun. And grief is absolutely the easiest and safest of bonds.”

You laughed under your breath.

“What can I do to make you consider my request? Have pity on me, Gracious Lady, entrust to me your song.”

I smiled indulgently, but it was impossible, I thought.

“It’s far too dissonant, my dear,” I said. “It’s far too—”

I shut my eyes.

I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.

Suddenly your eyes moved upwards. Your expression changed. It was almost as if you were deliberately trying to appear to enter a trance. Slowly you turned your head. You pointed, with your hand close to the table, then let your hand go lax.

“What is it, David?” I said. “What are you seeing?”

“Spirits, Pandora, ghosts.”

You shuddered as if to clear your head.

“But that’s unheard of,” I said. Yet I knew that he was telling the truth. “The Dark Gift takes away that power. Even the ancient witches, Maharet and Mekare, told us this, that once Akasha’s blood entered them, and they became vampires, they never heard or saw the spirits again. You’ve recently been with them. Did you tell them of this power?”

He nodded. Obviously some loyalty bound him not to say that they did not have it. But I knew they did not. I saw it in his mind, and I had known it myself when I had encountered the ancient twins, the twins who had struck down the Queen of the Damned.

“I can see spirits, Pandora,” you said with the most troubled expression. “I can see them anywhere if I try, and in some very specific places when they choose. Lestat saw the ghost of Roger, his victim in
Memnoch the Devil.”

“But that was an exception, a surge of love in the man’s soul that somehow defied death, or delayed the soul’s termination-something we can’t understand.”

“I see spirits, but I haven’t come to burden you with this or frighten you.”

“You must tell me more about this,” I said. “What did you see right now?”