43. New Orleans, 2000
Salon of Shadows is a stupid name. I told the vampyr—who refers to himself as a vampire—that when he invited me one evening. I saw the others on my hunts, felt their watchful eyes on my back. If they saw me they waved or nodded, a sort of familiarity they did not earn.
The vampyrs of the United States were all that way, at least the ones made here. They felt connected by the experience of being one of us, as if that was enough to approach a stranger and invite her to a secret vampyr den.
“It is tacky,” he agreed, smiling at me.
“Why should I attend?”
“Why should you stay away?” he asked, tilting his head. There was a genuine perplexity there, and I saw my younger self in it. Was that how I looked when you walked us away from Gaius in Rome? The way I looked when you refused to meet any other of our kind?
I could fill his ear with my tale, let him know exactly why one might stay away. Being another vampyr was not enough for my attention anymore.
I stayed away for a year or two. When they waved at me, I did not wave back. I found an apartment over a block that played music all night long. During the winter a parade passed under my balcony, and I stood and watched the humans dance beneath me. They called it Mardi Gras.
I should have hated the city for its attempt to duplicate France. There was a French Quarter, there were signs and streets named in French. When I landed here, I almost got back in my car and headed west still.
But I stayed, because for all the ways it was France, it was not Paris.
The French here mingled with something else, drawing the syllables out in a way that tickled my ear.
The piano bars were sometimes like that bar in Mississippi, but mostly entirely something else.
A man or a woman pounded the keys and sang raucously while drunk tourists joined in.
There was an uncouth joy here that Paris wanted to have, but could never attain.
This was a product of time, of conquest diluted and remade. That was what America was, a place to start anew.
I could not start anew and fall into the same patterns, like finding a shadowed salon filled with vampyrs waxing poetic about human affairs.
I stopped outside of the salon once, straining my ear to what was inside. A melancholy violin played a solo, which ended in a burst of applause. The chatter overlapped, excited and congratulatory. Someone recited a poem to the same effect.
I did this for two more nights before I entered.
A vampyr lazed in the door, his feet propped up on another chair. In his hand is one of the small gaming devices children played. He taps the keys hard, cursing, unaware of me. He sighs and throws the device on the ground, his orange eyes turning up to me at last.
“Sorry, almost beat the level. It’s timed, you understand.”
I do not.
“You new?” he asks.
“To here, yes.”
“Let me show ya around.” He stands and nods for me to follow him.
The salon is a large rectangle over a center courtyard that opens to the evening sky. It is hard to see the stars for all the light, but the moon peers between clouds and illuminates the courtyard below. Two vampyrs embrace in the center, swaying as if listening to music.
At the edge of the balcony, two vampyrs drink from a human woman. They each take a wrist, their teeth deep into her flesh. The human moans, her head tilted back in ecstasy.
“Hey! Save it for a private room!” my guide scolds. One of the vampyrs raises his middle fingers, the other hissing around the woman’s wrist.
“They are exhibitionists,” he says, leading me through the open space. “They are supposed to use a private room, but they have no sense of decency.”
“Are there rules?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Mostly it’s ‘don’t be an asshole,’ but otherwise not really. Some pairings or groups have their own set of them, but this isn’t a place to impose that on others. We’re not the church,” he adds with a laugh.
I do not laugh in return, and he clears his throat.
“Listen, I know the vampires overseas are a little…different. More uptight. Tense. Here, that comes off as rude. I’m not saying you have to slap a smile on and befriend everyone, I’m just saying that acting like Count Dracula”—he says this with an affected accent I think is supposed to be Russian—“will not gain you any friends.”
“And if I don’t want friends?” I ask.
“Why would you come to a meetinghouse if you didn’t?”
“It has been a long time since I’ve been around others like us,” I say.
“Hmm. Well, if it helps, there is an unofficial rule. It plays in with the ‘don’t be an asshole’ one. Your past is your past, and asking about it is considered rude. So if you’re running from something, hiding from someone, that’s none of our business.”
“I am not hiding,” I counter.
“Didn’t say you were. I just meant this isn’t one of those places where we sit around and share our stories and sing kumbaya, is all.
It’s more a place to…I don’t know, find someone else who likes Bourbon Street so you don’t have to go alone.
Someone to watch the latest flick with. Run errands with. That sort of thing.”
“Hmm,” I say. “And humans are allowed?”
“Only if they’re claimed or familiars,” he says.
“What?”
“Ah, yeah, it’s controversial. If you’re uncomfortable with that I suggest you leave, we have no intention of policing that.”
“I do not understand what it is to be claimed or familiar,” I say. He squints at me, and I see the questions he does not ask. I wait for them, but they do not come.
“Different words for basically the same thing. A human you’ve picked that you intend to turn one day, or a human that wants to serve our kind.
Ever since the surge of vamps in media, we’ve had a bit of a renaissance.
Some humans seek us out, asking to like…
do shit for us, you know, during the day.
Some of them want to be changed eventually, others just like the clout I think. ”
“Some allow themselves to be known?” I ask.
“Yes and no. I can give you a list of movies to get at Blockbuster to see what the humans consume. It makes us look really cool, honestly. They’re mostly untrue, I think based on old folklore.
Sean over there,” he points to a young man sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette and looking over the balcony.
“He’s a historian of sorts. He can tell you all about the lore of the vampyr, of the lamia.
You know, all the tales that came before.
He knows every work of fiction written about us, every movie in production.
They’re making a big movie about us, got Brad Pitt in it. Can you believe that?”
“No,” I say, unfamiliar with whom he speaks of.
“Exciting for some of us, for others…not so much. But only a certain type of vampire comes to New Orleans,”—he says it or-leens, like I’d heard some locals say—“so you know what to expect. The ones that want to stay secret, well…they’re not here.” He opens his arms to the Salon of Shadows.
“Stay awhile, you might like it. I think you’ll find a different scene here than overseas.”
With that, he leaves me to wander the salon. Some wave to me, others ignore me entirely. I sit in a chair and watch as the night grows long.
In the courtyard, the two vampyrs still sway to soundless music, clutching each other. Someone picks up a violin and plays a mournful song, one I recognize from before I tried to die. I close my eyes and try to remember where I first heard it, but the memory is lost in the waves of so many others.
Would you love or hate this place?
The thought haunts me through my nights at the salon, watching the vampyrs sing or dance or speak or recite poems. There is no worship except for art.
There is companionship, an intimate sort of friendship.
How would you faired here? Would you find comfort in the anonymity?
Or would you long for the worship of the cult, for the historian that smokes cigarettes to chronicle your life?
Do you still cling to five rules? Or would this American world disabuse you of those habits?
I can only wonder, because you are not here, and I am alone.
A group of musicians leads the funeral procession. Behind them the family dances, slow and steady, moving with the rhythm of the music. At first the music is slow, mournful, the sound of loved ones lost.
As the procession moves toward the cemetery, the music increases in volume and fervor. The dirge becomes a jive, becomes a celebration. The mourners dance in the street, their hands in the air, their bodies undulating with the music.
Bystanders cheer them on, some joining the family as they move through the street.
I’ve watched many of these processions. It is a celebration of life less than a mourning of death. I’d never been close to death before I became a vampyr, it was forbidden to enter the temple if one was near death. Here, the clergy welcome the dead into their churches and temples.
Their cemetery is above ground. A tour guide in the streets of the French Quarter once told a group of tourists that the underground graves would flood. There was water just below the surface, and when it flooded, the graves of the early settlers would push above ground.
How does one become a vampyr in New Orleans if you cannot bury them?
The procession leaves the body, cutting them loose at last. They’ll go to their homes and serve food and dance well into the night.
I sit atop a mausoleum, watching the workers entomb a body. They do not place a coin in the mouth of the dead. They do not leave cakes for Cerberus. But they will come back and decorate later—flowers, gifts, photographs of their departed.
Death is not horrifying here, there is a reverence. Death is not a punishment.
Did I dig myself up to learn this lesson?
I sort through my memories. I do that a lot lately, picking through the gaps of time.
I try in earnest to remember how I got out of that hole.
Did the rain carry me to the surface, as the floods once did the bodies in New Orleans?
Did I smell the blood of an injured farmer and pull myself free in thirst?
I’d never known what it was to starve. I did not know the consequences of hunger. I’d been gone for two hundred years, and yet it felt like no time had passed.
Did time mean nothing to the shell of a vampyr?
I trace the edges of the stone structure beneath me. The name has worn off, destroyed by the countless evenings of rain. If I dug my fingers into the surface, I could trace the letters.
How comforting, that you can visit a loved one after they’ve died.
If I’d told you where I’d been buried, would you have visited? Would you have stood vigil, waiting for me to die at last? Or would you have dug me up?
Or were you too busy with the woman in the sitting room?
A flare of jealousy tears through me and I hate myself for it. I’ve not seen you in centuries, and yet I mourn you still. Even a decade since I pulled myself to the surface, I still think of you.
Will you haunt me forever?
Or do I need my own woman in the sitting room to be free of you at last?