Anne Rice: Violin

Music. I could try it again. Just one more evening alone listening to my disks, all to myself; before they came, screaming. Before his mother sobbed on the phone from London, "Thank God the baby is born! He waited, he waited until his sister's baby was born!"

I knew that's exactly what she would say, and it was true, I guess; he had waited for his sister's baby, but not waited long enough for her to come home, that's the part that 7ould keep her screaming longer than I had the patience to listen. Kind old woman. To whose bedside do you go, that of your daughter in London, giving birth, or that of your dying son?

The house was littered with the trash.

Ah, what license I'd taken. The nurses didn't really want to come during the last days anyway. There are saints around, saints who stay with the dying until the very last, but in this case, I was there, and no saints were needed.

Every day my old-timers, Althea and Lacomb, had come to knock, but I hadn't changed the note on the door: All Is Well. Leave a Message.

And so the place was full of trash, of cookie crumbs and empty cans, and dust and even leaves, as if a window must be open some where, probably in the master bedroom which we never used, and the wind had brought the leaves in on the orange carpet.

I went into the front room. I lay down. I wanted to reach out to touch the button and start the Second Movement again, just Beethoven with me, the captain of this pain.

But I couldn't do it.

It even seemed all right for the Little Genius, Mozart perhaps, the bright safe glow of angels chattering and laughing and doing back flips in celestial light. I wanted to. .. But I just didn't move . . . for hours. I heard Mozart in my head; I heard his racing violin; always with me it was the violin, the violin above all, that I loved.

I heard Beethoven now and then; the stronger happiness of his one and only Violin Concerto which I had long ago memorized, the easy solo melodies, I mean. But nothing played in the house where I lay with the dead man upstairs. The floor was cold. It was spring and the Weather wavered in these days from very hot to winter chill. And I thought to myself, Well, it's getting cold, and that will keep the body better, won't it?

Someone knocked. They went away. The traffic reached its peak. There came a quiet. The phone machine told lie after lie after lie. Click and click and click click.

Then I slept, perhaps for the first time.

And the most beautiful dream came to me.

Chapter 2

I dreamed of the sea by the full light of the sun, but such a sea I'd never known.

The land was a great cradle in which this sea moved, as the sea at Waikiki or along the coast south of San Francisco. That is, I could see distant arms of land to left and right, reaching out desperately to contain this water.

But what a fierce and glistening sea it was, and under such a huge and pure sun, though the sun itself I couldn't see, only the light of it. The great waves came rolling in, curling, full of green light for one instant before they broke and then each wave did a dance-a dance-I'd never wituessed.

A great frothy foam came from each dying wave, but this foam broke into great random peaks, as many as six to eight for one wave, and these peaks looked like nothing so much as people-people made of the glistening bubbles of the foam-reaching out for the real land, for the beach, for the sun above perhaps.

Over and over, I watched the sea in my dream. I knew I was watching from a window. And I marveled and tried to count the dancing figures before they would inevitably die away, astonished at how well formed of foam they became, with nodding heads and desperate arms, before they lapsed back as if dealt a mortal blow by the air, to wash away and come again in the curling green wave with a whole new display of graceful imploring movements.

People of foam, ghosts out of the sea-that's what they looked like to me, and all along the beach for as far as I could see from my safe window, the waves all did the same; they curled, green and brilliant, arid then they broke and became the pleading figures, some nodding to each other, and others away, and then turning back again into a great violent ocean.

Seas I've seen, but never a sea where the waves made dancers. And even as the evening sun went down, an artificial light flooded the combed sand, the dancers came still, with heads high and long spines and arms flung beseechingly landward.

Oh, these foamy beings looked so like ghosts to me -like spirits too weak to make a form in the concrete world, yet strong enough to invest for a moment in the wild disintegrating froth and force it into human shape before nature took it back.

How I loved it. All night long I watched it, or so my dream told me, the way dreams will do. And then I saw myself in the dream and it was daytime. The world was alive and busy. But the sea was just as vast and so blue I almost cried to look at it.

I saw myself in the window! In my dreams, such a perspective almost never comes, never! But there I was, I knew myself; my own thin square face, my own black hair with bangs cut blunt and all the rest long and straight. I stood in a square window in a white facade of what seemed a grand building. I saw my own features, small, nondescript with a smile, not interesting, only ordinary and totally without danger or challenge, my face with bangs long almost to my eyelashes, and my lips so easily smiling. I have a face that lives in its smiles. And even in the dream I thought, Ah Triana, you must be very happy!

But it never took much to make me smile, really. I know misery and happiness intimately!

I thought all this in the dream. I thought of both the misery and the happiness.

And I was happy. I saw in the dream that I stood in the window holding in my left arm a big bouquet of red roses, and that with my right arm I waved to people below me.

But where could this be, I thought, coming closer and closer to the edge of wakefulness. I never sleep for long. I never sleep deep. The dreadful suspicion had already made itself known. This is a dream, Triana! You aren't there. You're not in a warm bright place with a vast sea. You have no roses.

But the dream would not break, or fade, or show the slightest tear or flaw.

I saw myself high in the window, waving still, smiling, holding the big floppy bouquet, and then I saw that I waved to young men and women who stood on the sidewalk below-tall children, no more than that-kids of twenty-five years or less-just kids, and I knew that it was they who had sent me the roses. I loved them. I waved and waved and so did they, and in their exuberance they jumped up and down, and then I threw them kisses.

Kiss after kiss I threw with the fingers of my right hand to these admirers, while behind them the great blue sea blazed and evening came, sharp and sudden, and beyond these youthful dancers on the patterned black and white pavements, there danced the sea once more, flocks of figures rising from the foamy waves, and this seeme d a world so real I couldn't pronounce it just a dream.

"This is happening to you, Triana. You're there."

I tried to be clever. I knew these hypnagogic tricks that dreams could do, I knew the demons who come face to face with you on the very margin of sleep. I knew and I turned and tried to see the room in which I stood. "Where is this? How could I imagine it?"

But I saw only the sea. The night was black with stars. The delirium of the foamy ghosts ran for as far as I could see.

Oh, Soul, Oh, Lost Souls, I sang aloud, Oh, are you happy, are you happier than in life which has such hard edges to it and such agony? They gave no answer, these ghosts; they extended their arms, only to be dragged back into dazzling sliding water.

I woke. So sharp.