"Well, beggars in the streets it might be, Nicki, " I said. "Because I'll be damned in hell before I'll play the penniless country cousin begging at the big houses. "
"Do you think I want you to do that? " he demanded. "I mean run away, Lestat, " he said. "Spite them, every one of them. " Did I want to go on like this? So our fathers would curse us. After all, our life was meaningless here. Of course, we both knew this running off together would be a thousand times more serious than what I had done before. We weren't boys anymore, we were men. Our fathers would curse us, and this was something neither of us could laugh off. Also we were old enough to know what poverty meant.
"What am I going to do in Paris when we get hungry? " I asked. "Shoot rats for supper? "
"I'll play my violin for coins on the boulevard du Temple if I have to, and you can go to the theaters! " Now he was really challenging me.
He was saying, Is it all words with you, Lestat?
"With your looks, you know, you'd be on the stage in the boulevard du Temple in no time. " I loved this change in "our conversation "! I loved seeing him believe we could do it. All his cynicism had vanished, even though he did throw in the word "spite " every ten words or so. It seemed possible suddenly to do all this. And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us. I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness. In fact, it came to me that my mother dying soon was meaningless and I confided in Nicolas what she had said. "I'm perfectly horrified. I'm afraid. " Well, if there had been a Golden Moment in the room it was gone now. And something different started to happen. I should call it the Dark Moment, but it was still high-pitched and full of eerie light. We were talking rapidly, cursing this meaninglessness, and when Nicolas at last sat down and put his head in his hands, I took some glamourous and hearty swigs of wine and went to pacing and gesturing as he had done before. I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.
"But that's just it, " I said, "we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing. " I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.
"Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over! " I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. "We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing! " But I had stopped laughing. I stood still and I understood perfectly what I was saying! There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed. The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything! No, I didn't understand it at this moment. I saw it! And I began to make the single sound: "Oh! " I said it again "Oh! " and then I said it louder and louder and louder, and I dropped the wine bottle on the floor. I put my hands to my head and I kept saying it, and I could see my mouth opened in that perfect circle that I had described to my mother and I kept saying, "Oh, oh, oh! " I said it like a great hiccupping that I couldn't stop. And Nicolas took hold of me and started shaking arse, saying:
"Lestat, stop! " I couldn't stop. I ran to the window, unlatched it and swung out the heavy little glass, and stared at the stars. I couldn't stand seeing them. I couldn't stand seeing the pure emptiness, the silence, the absolute absence of any answer, and I started roaring as Nicolas pulled me back from the windowsill and pulled shut the glass.
"You'll be all right, " he said over and over. Someone was beating on the door. It was the innkeeper, demanding why we had to carry on like this.
"You'll feel all right in the morning, " Nicolas kept insisting. "You just have to sleep. " We had awakened everyone. I couldn't be quiet. I kept making the same sound over again. And I ran out of the inn with Nicolas behind me, and down the street of the village and up towards the castle with Nicolas trying to catch up with me, and through the gates and up into my roam.
"Sleep, that's what you need, " he kept saying to me desperately. I was lying against the wall with my hands aver my ears, and that sound kept coming. "Oh, oh, oh. "
"In the morning, " he said, "it will be better. " Well, it was not better in the morning. And it was no better by nightfall, and in fact it got worse with the coming of the darkness. I walked and talked and gestured like a contented human being, but I was flayed. I was shuddering. My teeth were chattering. I couldn't stop it. I was staring at everything around me in horror. The darkness terrified me. The sight of the old suits of armor in the hall terrified me. I stared at the mace and the flail I'd taken out after the wolves. I stared at the faces of my brothers. I stared at everything, seeing behind every configuration of color and light and shadow the same thing: death. Only it wasn't just death as I'd thought of it before, it was death the way I saw it now. Real death, total death, inevitable, irreversible, and resolving nothing! And in this unbearable state of agitation I commenced to do something I'd never done before. I turned to those around me and questioned them relentlessly.
"But do you believe in God? " I asked my brother Augustin. "How can you live if you don't! "
"But do you really believe in anything! " I demanded of my blind father. "If you knew you were dying at this very minute, would you expect to see God or darkness! Tell me. "