Anne Rice: Violin

That consciousness follows me down to this final embrace is a gift! I am intimate with the dead, and yet I live to know it and savor it.

Let trees bow down to hide this place, let trees form over my eyes a dense and thickening net, not green but black as if it snared the night, so shut away the last prying eye, or vantage point, as the grass grows high-so that we may be alone, just us, you and I, those whom I so adored and cannot live without.

Sink. Sink deep into the earth. Feel the earth enclose you. Let the clods seal our quietude. I want nothing else.

And now, bound up with you and safe, I can say, Hell to all that tries to come between us.

Come, the steps of strangers on the stairs.

Break the lock, yes, break the wood, and pull the tubes away, and pump the air with white smoke. Do not bruise my arms for I am not here, I am in the grave; and it is an angry rigid image of me that you intrude upon. Yes, you see the sheets are clean, I could have told you! Wind him up, wind him thick, thick in the sheets, it does not matter one whit-you see, there is no blood, there is no virulent thing ~ can get you from him-he died not from open cankers but he starved inside as those with AIDS are wont to do, so that it hurt him even to draw breath, and what do you have left now to fear?

I am not with you or with those who ask questions of time and place and blood and sanity and numbers to be called; I cannot answer those who would Help. I am safe in the grave. I press my lips to my father's skull. I reach for my mother's bony hand. Let me hold you!

I can still hear the music. Oh, God, that this lone violinist would come through high grass and falling rain and the dense smoke of imagined night, envisioned darkness, to be with me still and play his mournful song, to give a voice to these words inside my head, as the earth grows ever more damp, and all things alive in it seem nothing but natural and kind and even a little beautiful.

All the blood in our dark sweet grave is gone, gone, gone, save mine, and in our bower of earth I bleed as simply as I sigh. If blood is wanted now for any reason under God, I have enough for all of us.

Fear won't come here. Fear is gone. Jangle the keys and stack the cups. Bang the pots on the iron stove downstairs. Fill the night with sirens if you will. Let the water rush and rush and rush, and the tub I see you not. I know you not.

No petty worry will come here, not to this grave where we lie. Fear gone-like youth itself and all that old anguish when I watched them commit you to the ground-coffin after coffin, and Father's of such fine wood, and Mother's, I can't remember, and Lily's so small and white, and the old gentleman not wanting to charge us a nickel because she was just a little girl. No, all that worry is gone.

Worry stops your ears to the real music. Worry doesn't let you fold your arms around the bones of those you love.

I am alive and with you now, truly only now realizing what it means that I will have you always with me!

Father, Mother, Karl, Lily, hold me!

Oh, it seems a sin to ask compassion of the dead, those who died in pain, those I couldn't save, those for whom I didn't have the right farewells or charms to drive off panic, or agony, of those who saw in the final careless, dissonant moments no tears perhaps or heard no pledge that I would mourn you forever.

I'm here now! With you! I know what it means to be dead. I let the mud cover me, I let my foot push deep into the spongy side of the grave.

This is a vision, my house. They matter not:

"That music, can you hear it?"

"I think she should get into the shower again now! I think she should be thoroughly disinfected!"

"Everything in that room should be burnt-"

"Oh, not that pretty four-poster bed, that's foolishness, they don't blow up the hospital room, do they, when somebody dies of this."

“...and his manuscript, don't you touch it."

No, don 't you dare touch his manuscript!

"Shhh, not in front of-"

"She's crazy, can't you see it?"

“...his mother is on the morning plane out of Gatwick."

“…absolutely stark raving mad."

"Oh, please, both of you, if you love your sister, for God's sake, be quiet. Miss Hardy, did you know her well?"

"Drink this, Triana."

This is my vision; my house. I sit in my living room, washed, scrubbed, as if I were the one to be buried, water dripping from my hair. Let the morning sun strike the mirrors. Toss the peacock's brilliant feathers out of the silver urn and all over the floor.

Don't hang a ghastly veil over all things bright. Look deep to find the phantom in the glass.

This is my house. And this is my garden, and my roses crawl on these railings outside and we are in our grave too. We are here and we are there, and they are one.

We are in the grave and we are in the house, and all else is a failure of imagination.

In this soft rainy realm, where water sings as it falls from the darkning leaves, as the earth falls from the uneven edges above, I am the bride, the daughter, the mother, all those venerable titles forming for me the precious claims I lay upon myself.

I have you always! Never never to let you leave me, never never to away.

All right. And so we made a mistake again. So we played our game. So we nudged at madness as if it were a thick door and then we slammed against it, like they slammed against Karl's door, but the door of madness didn't break, and that uncharted grave is the dream. Well, I can hear his music through it.

I don't even think they hear it. This is my voice in my head and his violin is his voice out there, and together we keep the secret, that this grave is my vision, and that I can't really be with you now, my dead ones. The living need me.

The living need me now, need me so, as they always need the bereaved after the death, so needy of those who have nursed the most, and sat the longest in the stillness, so needy with questions and suggestions and assertions and declarations, and papers to be signed. They need me to look up at the strangest smiles and find some way to receive with grace the most awkward sympathies.

But I'll come in time. I'll come. And when I do, the grave will hold us all. And the grass will grow above all of us.

Love and love and love I give you-let the earth grow wet. Let my limbs sink down.

Give me skulls like stones to press against my lips, give me bones to hold in my fingers, and if the hair is gone-like fine spun silk, it does not matter. Long hair I have to shroud all of us, isn’'t that so. Look at it, this long hair. Let me cover us all.

Death is not death as I once thought, when fear was trampled underfoot. Broken hearts do best forever beating upon the wintry windowpane.

Hold me, hold me, hold me here. Let me never never tarry in another place.

Forget the fancy lace, the deftly painted walls, the gleami ng inlay of the open desk.

The china that they take with such care now, piece by piece, to place now all over the table, cups and saucers ornamented with blue lace and gold. Karl's things. Turn around.

Don't feel these living arms.

The only thing important about coffee being poured from a silver spout is the way that the early light shines in it; the way that the deep brown of the coffee becomes amber and gold and yellow, and twists and turns like a dancer as it fills the cup, then stops, like a spirit snatched back into the pot.

Go back to where the garden breaks to ruin. You will find us all together. You will find us there.

From memory, a perfect picture: twilight: the Garden District Chapel; Our Mother of Perpetual Help; our little church within an old mansion. You have only to walk a block from my front gate to reach it. It is on Prytania Street. The tall windows are full of pink light. There are low guttering candles in red glass before a saint with a smiling face whom we love and revere as "The Little Flower." The darkness is like dust in this place. You can still move through it.