No More Gifts
"The Opera"
(Part VII)

CHRISTINE DAAÉ'S (SECOND) JOURNAL

So much depends on the decisions we forge under the crucible of duress. Fifteen minutes was what he gave me; fifteen minutes to make a choice; fifteen minutes to change my life completely.

Fifteen minutes, and not a second more.

My mind contemplated nothing, and my head weighed down with the ingravitous, nearly levitous lead of vacuity, as I stood in place watching over the door Erik left through for what felt like far more than an eternity. Only now do I wonder why I did not chase after him, if I loved him as I said I did. Why did I not force him to stay? Why did I not drag him back, his jagged nails clawing at the floor as I hauled him through the pillared halls by his skinny, terrible ankles? I had the strength to force him, after all. That, at the very least, was something Erik was right about: that he is a very weak man. He has always been a very weak man. It is why he runs from everything – from me, from life, from Persia, from death. He has not the strength, nor the will, to reach out and take it.

Any of it.

Perhaps, then, I knew it was not worth it. One can only chase another for so long before the race becomes tired. Wasn't this how we always were – Erik volatile, myself serene? Attempting to stop him would be like catching a lightning bolt halfway through its shot across the sky. No, I could not interfere; he needed to combust. And when the explosion was finished, his charred skeleton would walk around the barren field and collect all his smoldering, reeking remains, and from there he'd carry all those cumbrous and lubricious things clumsily in his arms back to me, where at length I'd help him assemble them all back together again. I'd rebuild him as a man, from mortal foot to putty crown, maybe even with a nose one of these times, either Aquiline or Grecian, it wouldn't matter, and then we'd sit together like a husband and wife, and –

There, a minute gone.

Abruptly I turned from the door and returned to my seat. I adjusted my skirts carefully as I sat, and folded my hands with proper poise upon my lap. I sat with rigid posture, still imbecilicly unthinking, and stared ahead at nothing.

What was there to think about, truly? Erik was a fool to demand me to decide, when the truth of the matter was that there was no decision to be made. I had told him I would stay; so stay I would.

And what a happy coincidence it was, that I had already resolved myself to stay! Because the other truth of the matter was that Erik would of course never allow me to actually leave. If I left now, he would carry me back, the way he did all the countless other times. I didn't trust him to do otherwise. If I stayed, he would secure me to his side like a permanent fixture, a stolen rib returned, and never let me leave again. Thus it was apparent that there was no choice at all to be made by me; and so, as I say, what a happy coincidence it was that I had already made my negligible choice upfront.

I watched the performance below me progress, feeling a little further away from it all than even before, when Erik was still by my side. My heart longed to leap down upon the stage, to join in the music and harmony and dashing rhythms that bewitched the souls of the merry and morose masses. I was a born performer; what on earth was I doing in an opera box? Surely my place was down there on the stage, in the middle of it all, relishing in the noise of the swishing skirts, in the pounding of the kettle-drums, in the slapping of the ruddy palms, in the hissing of the pale-green gas lights…

None of this and less habitated within my achingly empty mind. I heard no music, only sound; and I saw no opera, only people. All my senses seemed to have withered, ceasing to receive the world with the open arms I used to offer. I had no more capacity to see more than what was actually there; I had lost the capacity to imagine. Only a slight pang remained in my heart, perhaps the last sulking remnant of my humanity – but even that, as I said, was merely slight.

The reality of my situation was washing over me now. Soon, and very soon, I would be forced to accept a life I had not truly chosen. It was all very well to sit here and pretend, like I had for so many months, that I did not mind being spoken for, that I did not mind being manipulated as a marionette with my strings carefully laced about Erik's dextrous fingers. It was easier to live like this, with no real decisions – with no real responsibilities, nor faults, nor guilts. How could I suffer blame for anything I did, if Erik was the one who made me do it? What wrongs could I do to him? And precisely how awful could I be to him and never be held accountable? To let it all be his fault, all to the bitter end, all in all in all…?

In this way, though, I saw it to be a substantially voiceless existence that I was progressing to, and for this reason above all others I found myself growing dreadfully more and more anxious as my finite seconds ticked away. I felt as if the air around me was growing thin, and that the room, this open, spacious theatre, was converging quickly upon me. Even the walls, for all their deceptively soft velvet-lined tapestries, could not disguise the monstrous hardness of the base marble that was erected behind.

Marble can be beautiful, I tried to remind myself. Erik loved marble, didn't he? He had told me about his favorite types, one afternoon so many months ago. It was my favorite type of afternoon, where we were both reclining together, but separately, in the parlor by the fire. He was in his favorite chair, I was on his mother's chaise. He was smoking his pipe, a book propped on his knee (but only for show), to match my own (also for show). In some way we had struck up an easy conversation between us, chatting about those most upsetting periods of our pasts with light smiles and laughter as only two good friends can do. At the time, he was recounting a humorous anecdote to me about his other good friend, as he had taken up the habit of referring to his sultana as such at the time, and happened to say to me:

"Say, Christine, do you like books about gladiators?"

I told him I had never read any such books but would be gladly interested if he had one in mind to recommend from his shelf. I always valued his opinions on such matters, even if I often found our tastes diverged.

"She –" (he often referred to her by pronoun alone and expected me to somehow follow) "– liked books about gladiators. She also liked books about murder, and torture, and execution. And blood. Lots and lots of blood." He chuckled, not a trace of darkness in any of those warm chortles. "I always worried it was going to go to her head. Oh, what? I was young and still had opinions about how ladies should behave themselves. I was worried she'd corrupt herself… Christine, have you ever been inside a Turkish quarry?"

Never, I told him.

"I hadn't either, until she brought me there. She often joked that she had been the one to teach me, really teach me, about masonry, though of course – me being employed as the court architect – that wasn't exactly true. But she knew a great deal, and had a certain touch with the stone, and often accompanied me to the quarry where she'd lay her hand upon some white slab and rub her palm along its length until its Sapphiric blue veins glistened under the pale dawn's light and shimmered with a sheen of early dew. She would pronounce it at once as the exact correct strain and tell me the exact correct spot to chisel it, without even knowing the project we had arrived on site for. With this skill, and the showmanship with which she presented it, she made fast friends with my men, who were really her men, I suppose, and distracted them from the work I gave them – which, again, had been assigned to me by her father – with the most inane questions about every crevice, crevasse, and cubby her loitering fingers came upon. I'll admit that I resented her for everything at first… why did she not come to me with her silly, frivolous questions? Why should my men be the ones she turned to? Why stone, of all things! And on and on my envies went, in that puerile manner.

"Once, I grew too curious, and I resolved to follow her about the palace, intrigued in how far this power expanded. I willed her to lay her palm against dozens of other stones as I watched on, envious of all those rock-hard slabs her dainty fingers caressed, even briefly… at last she came upon my own rooms, but she paused before it – they always pause – until I decided to reveal myself to her from the shadows of the corridor, and suggested that perhaps her rooms might have grander marble for us both to sight-see, marble that even I might delight in rubbing smooth alongside her.

"It was to the cornerstone that I bade her, and before it we kneeled with tremendous trepidation. Vermillion was her perfect cheek, as she reached out to palm the pale slab – supple were her doll lips, as she pursed them and aveered her lashy eyes – knowing I was studying her, cataloguing her, examining her in the fullness and dullness of the fire's light. Everything is so much more bewitching in the shadows of the night, is it not? As for I… I was sweaty, from my sweet labors, and my drenched work-shirt grew heavier as I watched her hand rub the cornerstone, up and down. It was – an intoxicating spectacle. In my rapture, it even felt like her hand was upon me –

"And then I discovered the wonderful fact, Christine, that my good friend had two hands. Two lovely, dainty, curious, living hands. And so it was true that her hand was still on the stone, rubbing it with fervor – but then her other hand was also on me, encircling me… oh, Christine, I see your face! It was nothing so scandalous! Just her hand around my wrist, leading me to the slab, nothing more than that…"

I will take a moment here to acknowledge the ambiguity that Erik has always dredged his recollections of his good friend the sultana in, and I will now make a point to be straightforward in my own meaning. So: I truly do not know if Erik and this good, young girl-friend of his ever had a real, sexual encounter in all their time together. He speaks so obliquely to me about their relationship that I cannot help but wonder… but at the same time, wouldn't he just say it, if it were true? I have always been crystal clear in my recountings of events, after all. I suppose the most likely theory is that their relationship was purely chaste, just as mine is with Erik, and was with Raoul, unless certain things do not count as chaste, in which case I must suppose they probably did have an extremely sexual relationship. But I digress.

"My good friend," he went on, "told me the history of that pale stone, as we laid side by side all through that night. She told me about its origins in Malatya – of the horses that collapsed and died from exhaustion after lugging its weight from that quarrelous quarry to here, of the color of the moon that watched its fiery birth from limestone all those thousands of years ago, of the hulking mollusks that scurried like Ravenscroft's three blind mice about the primeval ocean's deepest depths before nature's hand played Frankenstein and calcified all their fossilizing remains into a godless conglomeration of shell and coral… she saw it all, with her hand against the stone… and I saw it, too, with her other hand atop my own, trapping my palm against its flesh… oh, Christine, she could have been my wife!"

Erik laughed at this last part, just as he always does when he gets a little too sentimental about his little sultana. Again, as I said, he always made it impossible to tell if he was being miserably sarcastic, or if he truly meant that he could have married the girl. He never elaborated past that sentence, and was always swift to change the topic after proclaiming it. And yet I wonder, now, because I have the luxury of time with which to wonder it: could she have been? Could this sultana, ever nameless, ever ageless to me still, truly have been the lifelong partner of my morbid friend? In his stories she seems so perfect for him – literate, philosphical, indulgent, heartless – and yet I must wonder! Is this portrait that Erik paints of her an honest one? Is every brushstroke made in good faith? Did he understand every word she ever said to him? And what does being a 'good friend' of Erik's entail? How much blood did she really thirst for? Or did Erik conjure that part of her up in his own head, misunderstanding something or another that she said in passing, merely once, innocently, innocuously, incautiously…?

For Erik is the very first architect in the world; and though he has built palaces of marble and temples of music, has built cities with gates of pearl and walls of jasper, has paved down roads of gold as pure as clear glass, his most notorious creations have always been those fantastical castles of dreams he builds up around himself and those quixotic, meandering moats he clambers down from the shore to float and laze himself about on. Even now I can see him, starry-eyed, murmuring to himself all those decades ago:

"Within this woman I can finally see my great destruction; finally fate has sent a wickedness more foul than I!"

Poor, mistaken Erik! I truly do think that all she desired to do was stroke that stone without the slightest feint of euphemism!

And so I think it is true: that marble can be a very beautiful thing to behold. It can be beautiful enough to make one reach out their hand to caress its pallid face, irregardless of the metaphorical implications, irregardless of the assumable consequences. Why must the singular beauty of the part be representative of the complete beauty of the whole? Can a gentlelady not admire the nipplish merit of some Aphroditic maiden's sculpted bust without sapphic insinuations ensuing? Can a gentleman not privately handle himself without being accused of narcissitic uranianism? Our world is not some profoundly flowery landscape painted from the literary drafts strewn across the desk of the great Stagnelius. I think we would all do well to read a little less into the simple things that happen to us in our lives. Sometimes, I think, there is no deeper meaning at all, and all we really need to get by in our lives is what appears to us on the surface. Best would it be for us to examine only the direct verbiations of our communications with one another, and to look no further than the skin-deep appearances of one anothers' faces.

Why, just take one look at my good friend, my grotesque friend, my gaggable friend Erik! How much easier all this would be to consider if I had disregarded all his tricky words and speeches, and only considered him by his horrible, hideous face from the start. How much time I could have saved! How many tears! He is a true wretch, the abominable man, the opprobrial cad, and his face shows it quite clearly. No wonder he wore the mask! Doctor Gradus has an entire shelf of books about physiognomy; and while it's all quite stupid and farcical to consider past the realm of humor, one must admit… it would have made things so much simpler if it were true!

Such, then, were the nature of my thoughts as I sat with those marble walls, beautiful though I knew they were, converging all around me. For the moment they seemed a looming yet invisible threat, for they were covered up with thick, plush panels of velvet drapery and other such undergarments for the purpose of social ornatestry and modesty. Still, though, I had the pulsating fear within me that they would crush my entire being to dust should I ever pull back one of those fine curtains and reveal the beautiful face of the marble in all its rock-hard glory. Beauty does not stop a death from being painful, not even the littlest deaths of them all.

To distract myself from the threat of the marble, and also from the imminent forfeiture of my liberty, I returned my vision back to the stage. There I saw the people still roaming, almost aimlessly, but so very happily regardless. They were all lost, lost in the plot – here, the stage manager was coming out on stage to pull the ear of a misplaced ballerina – or was it part of the production? – no, the assistant came out, too! – but it was all in good fun no matter how confused it became. One girl's public degradation became a source of great amusement for her cast mates, who in equal parts buckled over on their knees with great guffaws and hid their twitching mouths behind their theatrically splayed hands. The audience, watching from their omniscient seats, could not be bothered with considering her humiliation; they did not even know of it, and offered only distracted, uncaring patience as they allowed this brief intermission of the act to proceed as they continued chattering with great exuberance amongst themselves, just as they have always done. Only those of us in the audience who had ever performed on a stage recognized her embarrassment – albeit with a couple little self-deprecating laughs to ourselves, as we caught a whiff of nostalgia and reminisced about our own little mistakes from the past – and in my case, I felt a brief flicker of envy towards the calf of a girl for having the opportunity to slip up at all.

It was during this indeliberate intermission that a voice poured itself in my ear, like water into a flute, with an almost haunting quality touching at its edges like tattered threads. I nearly forgot to be afraid; in my experience, disembodied voices have always come in the dark. And this voice, this mysterious voice, whispered to me only:

"Erik lies."

Ah, what an insufferable, annoying voice, I thought, to reiterate only this measly concept I have already long suffered to beleaguer! One would think ghostly voices would have more wisdom to offer than this!

But what was this voice? It spoke those two words with a simple calmness, and yet at the same time with a tremendous fury. It was immensely feminine in nature, similar to the sweet, sisterly tones the Angel had taken with me from time to time in the early days of our meetings. There was a clarity to it, like a silver bell on a sleigh, and it rang with all the beauty of a crisp winter morning.

"Whether I believe him or not," I spoke to the darkness, deferring in my usual way of communicating with voices in my head, "is my business alone." For good measure, I punctuated my reply with an accusative, pointed, "…Erik."

"That is what he calls himself," the voice agreed, quite deflective.

Sinister, I thought, and went to play along. "And who might you be, if not he?"

"Some-one," it said, "who wishes to be a friend."

With that last sentence I realized the voice had never been in my head at all. It was coming from behind me, a short distance away, and so I turned my head, just slightly –

"Yes!" it said. "Look behind yourself, Christine Daaé. I am here!"

I turned now in my seat, with far more grace than I had done earlier with Erik, and with a paling face I took in the immense pillar of darkness that had suddenly risen up behind me.

It was the Princesse Ada who stood there, the deepest shades of night hanging off her frame as trickling tendrils of sable velvet. She was built of gloom and mist, I seem to recall thinking, or otherwise built of nothing; for there was a moment that I swore I saw directly through her to the vast darkness behind her. Only her lorgnette, which must have fallen from her slender fingers, marked in the congealed puddle of skirts the spot where she stood so very close to me. Her face was obscured by her tulled veil, just as before, but up close I could determine somewhat more of her features. They were faint but they were there: the cupid lips, the dimpled cheeks, the jetted eyes lying just out of reach behind the prison of those gilded, golden spectacles. I loved her immediately; I had no choice in the face of this consummate beauty.

In looking in her eyes, those lovely dead eyes, I knew at once what she had come to me to say. She was not Turkish. She was not deaf. There was never any Tamerlane at all. The elderly woman beside her was not even her cousin. Neither of them were widows. Erik had lied about every single fact about her – or otherwise he had been mistaken.

For once in my life, I was not sure that Erik had lied. He had flayed his heart for me in this box, recounted stories he never dared to breathe before, even in the safe security of his underground lair. How could he have had the courage to do so in front of such a pair of ready, able witnesses? He is capable of so much! And yet capable of so little. It took so much convincing for him to open up to me; I did not think it possible that he would have spoken the way he did in front of some strange strangers he knew could hear him, could see him, could perceive him in every human way possible.

Thus I found myself confronted with the terrifying possibility that Erik might not actually know everything. This consideration chilled me to my very core – the concept that there might be things in this world unknown even to the all-knowing, all-being Erik. I had grown accustomed to everything going his way, except when little Christine Daaé interfered and spoiled his plans; I had taken for granted the way he fretted over every minute detail in our meetings together, especially the ones above ground and especially the ones outside the premises of the opera house. I had not realized until this moment how much of his chimeric underworld had been cultivated by a perfectly attuned complex of machinations and hallucinations, maintained only by a consistent and persistent set of manipulations, requiring of him continuous attention and meticulous vigilance, lest something undesirable, something corrupt, something minutely reflective of the real world were to slip past his notice and create a microscopically tiny splinter in some crucial vein of the realm that could, in a series of dramatically crescendoing chain-reactions, trigger a cataclysm colossal enough to shatter his entire fragile illusion to pieces.

Nothing could be more representative of this small splinter than this Princesse Ada standing before me; for this woman (whoever she actually was, if not an actual princess) had sat stock-still the moment she heard Erik's error, had found the fault in his omniscience and took advantage of it by playing along with his misunderstanding. She had fooled Erik, had finally managed to deceive him in the way I had always tried to but failed. In doing so, she had no doubt made a determination of him, certainly most foul and most heinous, and like a good Samaritan wished now to take this matter into her own hands.

This, I presumed, would be the nature of her words to me; and as it turned out I was rather correct in my deductions. But right in that moment, still in that moment, even as I graciously, cordially, blushingly, implored of her, "Sit here with me and tell me what you think," I knew it would all be in vain. There could, of course, be no convincing me. I was absolutely set on my path towards the dark forest, and I was absolutely set on dragging Erik with me.