The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [61]
Yet he was sure, absolutely sure, that he had been a human being once. Walking in the sun in the heat of the day, yes, he had once done that, even though he certainly couldn’t do it now. He envisioned himself sitting at a plain wood table and cutting open a ripe peach with a small copper knife. Beautiful the fruit before him. He knew the taste of it. He knew the taste of bread and beer. He saw the sun shining on the dull yellow sand that stretched for miles and miles outside. “Lie down and rest in the heat of the day,” someone had once said to him. Was this the last day that he had been alive? Rest, yes, because tonight the King and the Queen will call all the court together and something terrible, something. . . .
But he couldn’t really remember.
No, he just knew it, that is, until this night. This night . . .
Not even when he’d heard the Vampire Lestat did he remember. The character merely fascinated him a little—a rock singer calling himself a blood drinker. And he did look unearthly, but then that was television, wasn’t it? Many humans in the dizzying world of rock music appeared unearthly. And there was such human emotion in the Vampire Lestat’s voice.
It wasn’t merely emotion; it was human ambition of a particular sort. The Vampire Lestat wanted to be heroic. When he sang, he said: “Allow me my significance! I am the symbol of evil; and if I am a true symbol, then I do good.”
Fascinating. Only a human being could think of a paradox like that. And he himself knew this, because he’d been human, of course.
Now he did have a supernatural understanding of things. That was true. Humans couldn’t look at machines and perceive their principles as he could. And the manner in which everything was “familiar” to him—that had to do with his superhuman powers as well. Why, there was nothing that surprised him really. Not quantum physics or theories of evolution or the paintings of Picasso or the process by which children were inoculated with germs to protect them from disease. No, it was as if he’d been aware of things long before he remembered being here. Long before he could say: “I think; therefore I am.”
But disregarding all that, he still had a human perspective. That no one would deny. He could feel human pain with an eerie and frightening perfection. He knew what it meant to love, and to be lonely, ah, yes, he knew that above all things, and he felt it most keenly when he listened to the Vampire Lestat’s songs. That’s why he didn’t pay attention to the words.
And another thing. The more blood he drank the more human-looking he became.
When he’d first appeared in this time—to himself and others—he hadn’t looked human at all. He’d been a filthy skeleton, walking along the highway in Greece towards Athens, his bones enmeshed in tight rubbery veins, the whole sealed beneath a layer of toughened white skin. He’d terrified people. How they had fled from him, gunning the engines of their little cars. But he’d read their minds—seen himself as they saw him—and he understood, and he was so sorry, of course.
In Athens, he’d gotten gloves, a loose wool garment with plastic buttons, and these funny modern shoes that covered up your whole foot. He’d wrapped rags around his face with only holes for his eyes and mouth. He’d covered his filthy black hair with a gray felt hat.
They still stared but they didn’t run screaming. At dusk, he roamed through the thick crowds in Omonia Square and no one paid him any mind. How nice the modern bustle of this old city, which in long ago ages had been just as vital, when students came there from all over the