Chapter Paris Exposition Universelle, May 6, 1900
Paris Exposition Universelle,
Though she’s now been a vampire far longer than she wasn’t, she can’t stop loving humans.
They’re so endearingly silly. This entire fair is testament to that, all of them wandering about, proclaiming themselves the pinnacle of achievement, declaring that science and innovation have at last gone as far as they can.
Maybe they have. She wouldn’t know, and she doesn’t care.
All she knows is that she’s got a grand stage and so many eyes on her, which means, soon, she’ll have a new lover.
Someone to want her with such possessive ferocity, with such violence, that she’ll feel alive for a few moments on her way to brushing up against death, only to be rejected once more.
It’s so exciting!
And the fair is so much bigger than the smoky clubs she’s used to performing in.
She’s dancing in a palace now! The Palace of Optics, which is only a temporary building, but everything is temporary if one lives long enough.
Still, it’s beautiful and bustling, flush with life and opportunities to sip on tastes of that life, one neck at a time.
She presses a kiss to one of the other dancers’ cheeks as they put the finishing touches on their costumes.
They dance in the dark with phosphorescent paint marking their movements.
It’s delightful. She’d suggested painting their bodies in the phosphorescent paint in place of costumes.
In the dark, who would know? And what are bodies but costumes, anyhow?
But the choreographer had been so scandalized, she’d nearly lost her place as a dancer.
It wouldn’t have mattered. She could have come back the next day with a slightly different face and been her own replacement.
But if she can’t be naked, the painted pearls they’re draped in are good enough.
The swirls and lines glow in the dark, moving with them, astonishing their audience.
Her only regret is that she can’t dance and watch herself dancing at the same time.
She’ll be so sad when the fair is over in a few months. Everything here is wonderful!
Well, not everything. The moving picture theaters, she doesn’t care for.
Mostly because she wonders whether that type of camera could capture her, and what she’d see if it did.
Come to think about it, she didn’t love the telescope, either.
Something about gazing into it and seeing the far reaches of space made close and huge left her feeling sad.
She doesn’t like feeling sad. There are so many things to feel; why would she ever want sad to be one of them?
“Ready?” another dancer asks, squeezing her arm.
She’s always ready. They file out under the spotlights, lining up.
The opening spotlights might have been why her nude dancing with body paint idea was rejected.
No matter. The audience is waiting, rapt and captivated.
She can sense their hearts picking up, sense the change in pulse and blood flow, sense—
Sense eyes on her. Not the kind she hopes for, though.
She finds them in the crowd, cold, unfeeling, like the eyes of one of the sharks in the aquarium.
She loves the sharks, cutting elegant and deadly through the water.
But this isn’t the same thing. The sharks might have cold eyes, but they still radiate energy.
This man…this man has nothing behind his eyes. He meets her gaze and smiles. It’s like a plaster facade on the outside of the hastily erected fair buildings. It’s a performance. It’s a mask. The only thing about him that has any life is the delicate pink wild rose pinned to his lapel.
Looking at him, she knows that he knows exactly what she is. For the first time since she died, she’s terrified. She doesn’t care for that emotion at all. As soon as the lights drop, she steps to the back of the line, peels off her costume, and flees under cover of darkness.
There’s the thrill and immediacy of violence, which she craves, and then there’s true annihilation. She’s not ready for the latter.