Page 103 of We Were Eternal Once

“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.