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Before Daniel came to Dubai, the pair of them had been living large parts of the 21st century in the past, caught up in its brambles in the chambers at the apex of the tower. Their boy, who in his own time had become an accomplished journalist, brings a piece of the outside world into this secluded lair. A shard to cut like his words, a knife grazing Armand's stomach lining when he first sees his face again.
The metric of life during this period is the burning sun, which bakes soot-grey shadows into the bare concrete of the room. Moving in geometric patterns across the day they make the whole spire a sun clock, always able to tell the time if you are facing the right cardinal direction. Gives a structure to his days like prayer. It still feels strange to be in the sun over long periods of time.
Inhabiting the penthouse at daytime comes with the role he takes up when their guest arrives. Even though Armand is able to walk the sun he usually keeps with Louis' schedule, staying with him in the night breeze cooling off the heat captured by the concrete during the day. He had chosen this. Living with his eternal companion far above the metropolis, its lights shimmering in the far distance, giving a promise it could not keep. It appears different by day with its washed blue sky over neatly spaced saltwater reservoirs, this infant city through whose veins flows viscous earth oil. Both images hold for Armand the gentle melancholia of seeing a living thing from the outside, knowing to penetrate it meant to upset its equilibrium. But that was all they needed. A balance, to keep Louis stable.
Their living space is all symmetry, angular and open, what the 21st-century tongues call 'timeless'. In its own brutalist way a romantic ideal of a vampire for the post-modern time, all smooth surfaces, graceful, collected, grafted, without folds or wrinkles which would suggest age. The only excess allowed for in the motifs and body fluid colours of the paintings Louis chose, suggesting memento mori. The architecture seemed to him sometimes to reach back to the primeval enclosure of a cave, as he glided through the halls on his own, back when they had been empty of the wait staff a human guest required. Sublime grandeur, claustrophobic depths, tightly circumscribed atriums and window fronts where ragged openings would have filtered single rays of the outside world into a subterranean hollow. A place where the fox crawls to die or nurse her young ones.
Armand remembers warmth and softness. Thinks of the fire he built for Louis on the first night they spent together. Thinks of the sparks he can feel flowing through his companion's veins sometimes and how his own blood flows faster for anticipation in turn. As it did when Louis lit the old tapes on fire, smell of iron oxide and polyester in the air and the slight gasp compressing Daniels lungs. Feels the air circle through the branching capillaries, licks over where their roots touch the bloodstream, exchanging old and new oxygen, warming the roof of Daniels mouth on every exhale. Thinks of glistening sweat on his grimed body in the dungeon. All the fire on stone in his life.
The light reaching him back then had always been in the vein of the soft glow illuminating a Rembrandt, candles reflected against wet limestone. Brittle sound of metal grating on metal, taste of rust. In a way he had always felt like he might have stayed buried for years and years thereafter, while the phosphor in the stage lights burned bright and ashy. Loamy earth in his mouth, his nostrils, his lungs cool and soothing.
A dim memory of Marius talking to him, just backlit strands of hair over a shoulder gilded in gold by the embers. Something about his regrets, Armand can't quite comprehend it. A bitter laugh. "You should understand the style of garment that adorns your body, the style of dwellings in which you spend your leisure hours, the place in which you hunt. Understand what it means to feel the passage of time! You must search for the light, the illumination of humanity my sweet one, my...." the voice drips into syrupy molasses, melting into the coals glowing in the hearth. Fissures on the charred pieces' brittle skin as the flames lick at it relentlessly. Breaks open like a ripe fruit. Armand swears for a moment he locks eyes with its insides, a milky iris smudging into soft white ash.
Drawing himself back back away from this, the amber glow diminishing to a faraway point in the cool metallic darkness, the voice fading away. The light of the living. Prometheus fire. Piercing, bright, cold, not like the fires that burn hot and screeching and ultraviolet blue in the cellars and which he can hear still sometimes in reverie but enough. Armand's eyes open and take in the cement wall.
Languidly letting his senses glide over the porous material, he can see how it is cool to the touch. Knows that if he would graze it with his fingers, it would tell him of limestone, clay and water and the cracked hands that cast it, the salty sweat that has trickled into it, would allow him to measure time in the shifting groan of molecules as his tower softly sways on its steel skeleton. The statues at the corner to the sitting room catch his eye, geometric spires of metal. Armand feels nothing when he looks at them.
Has he not been living with the times alright. They are everything but disconnected from human trends, at least in the way or style of their living, or so he thinks; from his tablet to the minimalist interior design to their high end sleek but expensive black textiles to Louis' carefully selected art. The Basquiat and Bacon which frame their representative sitting room. Their violent lines, the anger that soaks the brushstrokes.
There is something to the Bechet in the dining room, an irony of earthy roots twisting next to Marius' painting of the darkness dragging down the sharp divine light. He likes the layers of feeling he can fall through in Louis' mind when he looks at it. Reminds him of the times they tangled their roots together, emphatically linked in their need to lie in the dark of the earth to escape, to go back, to entangle, to dissolve. As much as it connects them this can't happen again.
Armand had to tear Louis away from this digging which builds up gritty dirt under the precious Murano glass of his fingernails. At least in this tower Louis is as far away from the grave as possible. Living on light and air. All the minerals and metals one needs as a vampire can be had in the blood of the kill. Eternal slumber until there comes a prick of a needle to the finger. Or true love’s kiss. How trite these Grimm allegories that come to mind. But still, he thinks, let us hope Daniel will not cut out his eyes on the briars when Armand eventually has to sever the rope of Louis' braid.
Alas the pictures of knotted strands and bodies. He liked choosing them together with Louis to arrange the right environment for Daniels re-introduction to Louis vampire world. He prefers to stand in the background near those paintings and statues. It had been a chance to change their rhythm, break out of the endless contemplative cycles he had found himself in with Louis. Had been a chance to observe Daniel from afar, a self-imposed distance of social etiquette which makes the sting of seeing him again seem to come through cotton wool.
Behind the mask of the chorus Armand finds it easy to keep his distance, slipping in and out of Daniels mind with an ease he would find unsettling if it didn't seem so mellow and dulled in the distance it travels through his own wrappings. Sometimes he even lets himself dip a nimble finger into Daniels dreams, feel the pictures wrap around and around, like making marbled paper.
Allows himself to revel in the way Daniels mind winds around Louis narration, attentiveness, deduction, perplexion, awe, scepticism, incredulity, fear, adoration, hunger refracting and flitting across his mind as it focuses on the story, sharp his boy, always sharp. And still, as Armand is amused to notice, not immune to the wiles of Louis' expressive wood-smoke voice, amber and incense like the tobacco he used to smoke.
Following the veins just under the surface of the soft, spotted skin he hears the ebb and flow in Daniels veins, the palpitations of his heart, the electricity running through his nerves, which stumbles sometimes, gets lost in the pattern of a curl. An itching in his fingers to slice off a lock, add a grey to the black one he still keeps in the amulet between his old silk scarves. To keep safe. Imagines cutting one every morning to remind himself that it will have grown back the next blue hour. To see it through the little glass window of the locket during the day when the body from whence it came would be resting. Looking at everything that changed on Daniel's body he holds it to the light, polishes it to a shine like silver.
Louis had found someone to tell his story anew to, tell it differently to. When Armand watches Louis like this, feels the tapestry spin in his lover's head, connecting sticky like spiders' threads, he can feel him glowing warmly with the blood of a past life. One so close to humans, the thrum of New Orleans, the humidity in its air, the sharp sting of Lestat's nails on his back. But it seems just out of reach for him.
Armand feels himself recede in the shadows. This story is not being told to him, but that's not the reason he feels disconnected, frayed. It's because he can feel Louis slipping away from him, into this room on Rue Royale, into a different time, a different coffin. He knows the architecture of Louis history like his own of course, living in each other's minds for years on end. But now that Louis tells it to Daniel it's different. There seems to be a veil between them that has been so diaphanous before he never seemed to take deeper notice of it.
The power of Louis' wish for a connection to the human. Armand did everything in his power to accommodate Louis and his idiosyncrasies. Provided him with a structure to follow, rituals which made eating easier for him, carefully assorted artifacts of human life, intimations of nature, a firm but loving touch to keep him tethered to his surroundings. Tried to ground him as best he could.
Never could he quite grasp this aspect of Louis. Armand has had no use for humanity in praxis over the last few decades. Has sworn off it in fact. He can still appreciate the abstract, yes, the chemical and metaphysical. The golden ratio in the structures of their brains. The networks of sociological formations. Encoded in cyphers and characters and the pixels which show him the events outside of his keep. Their lives like insect wings, frail and iridescent. Pluck them off or direct the Formicidae with lines of granulated sugar. Keep them in a glass jar but never get too close. The fleshiness of the body brings only pain. The short time of their existence spent calling out to death which he can give them like the wraith he is. Trying to keep grace while contemplating the short ribbon of a life you were put on this earth to cut with whetted scissors.
Daniel who makes it different. Again, and again. He provides Louis with an anchor to tell his story of the past, assist his invocation of Claudia, of the splinter in his flesh, still after all these years Lestat. Daniel is there and he's dry and just a bit too sweet, like the meringue Armand orders the chef to serve, because Louis has told him it was mentioned in Daniel's book and that he wants to taste Daniel's memories of it. Armand knows it was. He can't be in the vicinity of the dining room as it is served.