The Glass Lotus
"I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool."
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
His music would resonate within every living soul this evening; it would curl its fingers around his beloved and transform her into who she was meant to be – unless of course, she did not desire it.
Unless she did not desire him, anymore.
Erik would reveal himself this night to his Christine. The vivid and untouchable secrets he'd held from her had only ripped them further apart, for the nature of their ghastly truths were too unbearable, too nauseating to forge into a living and breathing thing. To win her, he must share with her all of the ugliness, all of the weakness and wretched wickedness. Every painful recollection would have to show its face within the turmoil of his opera. His true self and all its putrid glory would be revealed to her as a final offering to meld her bleeding heart to his own suffering muscle; one that seemed to throb and pump despite his desire for his insufferable excuse of a life to end. He must do the unthinkable, he must go against every instinct of survival in order to dissapate the violent history of man who did not wish to be remembered by the world – one which would seemingly never love him, reach out to touch him, or accept him…
But a tiny portion of the world had crawled out of the void he had thrown it into…and she walked the earth as an innocent, dove-eyed angel.
His Christine. She alone was his truth. She was his piece of the world that might love; she was his second chance.
Erik had molded a hidden and almost impossible hope within the confines of his heart; that if he could explain everything to Christine, she might come to understand him. She would accept his madness for what it was, and claim his compulsive love for her. Her compassion might even soften her anger, fear, and repulsion wrought by his violence and various duplicities. Even her disgust of his ravaged face could be morphed and changed, perhaps…For he was a gargoyle that wept, sang, and breathed only for her; in mellifluous tones that painted a magnificent tapestry lined in his own pain. But did she know that his voice was merely an incomparable abyss of loneliness?
Did she truly know…?
His music had long since been the longing plea of a drowning man washed away by the crash of an ocean's storm, a futile scream for a savior to pull him out of the tumultuous waters of his own misery. His voice was only the ethereal breath of a monster, built ever so majestically, yet it remained intolerably fragile. Its delicate splendor called to his Christine with a rich and somber power that threatened to consume her soul and unravel her entirely. Each and every tender thread of her heart would come undone in a slow cataclysm and beg to speak its truth; a language that he could finally understand.
A language they both could understand.
Erik still clutched the hopeless, man-made desire that his songbird might find a way to look past the thick curtains of blood that hid the man cowering from underneath. Only for her would he emerge from his hiding place of self-protective malice to reveal a very damaged soul; a passionate man whose only desire was to feel, and to be loved. He would allow himself to ask for genuine, unadulturated love from her – not one wrought from pity, but a love born through the power of his music…and, perhaps, through something more.
But for now, music was their only shared language. Erik's and his Christine's shared voice…an eternal melody, a sacred harmony that one floundering soul could not produce without the other. The little sounds would only form when their souls and their voices intertwined; but these sounds remained so small, they could not be touched, felt, or heard by anyone outside of their darkened union. In their secret realm of crystalline and shadowed beauty, they were the only interpreters of a language no one else could reach; because it did not exist for others – it could not. Erik knew this, and he relished the garish truth of it all. Nothing of consequence existed outside of this carefully constructed fortress, for they would only speak to one another in this holy conversation of music. Their voices were untouched and unheard by all beings moving above on the many floors that loomed over the house upon the lake; those feeble minded creatures of society that remained oblivious to the hidden underground world existing between a godless man and a woman of heaven.
Was their unification unreasonable? He could not shake the dreadful feeling of her denying him face to face the previous night. He had asked her to listen, hadn't he? He had come to her as a man, begging her to feel something, anything…to quiet her soul so that she might see him clearly, instead of the blurry image that turned her heart away from him, that made her deaf to all of those precious little sounds…
Erik could not allow himself to think of it now – the torturous and untouchable sensuality of the forbidden evening he and Christine had shared only a scant handful of hours ago…for it would devour his mind until he burned and dissolved into a heap of exfixiated greying ash, still smoldering with fumes of regret.
This, he could not atone for. He would not apologize for feeling. He could not.
He must think only of tonight, and the events that would unfold from his graceful and calculating fingertips.
His "Don Juan Triumphant" was an opera wrought of an unconquerable lust and an unfeasible love. It would serve as a prelude to the storm he had crafted madly within his own obsession. With every single note sung tonight, all would be known; the infuriating darkness in his soul, the hopeless yearning for his Christine, and the unrelenting pain of each fragmented memory of what had only ever been a tortured existence.
Within his music tonight, Christine would learn the truth of him; and where this possibility had once terrified Erik, it now seemed like the last card he could play. For after laying his heart at her feet the previous evening, he had felt anxious of the vulnerable love he had placed before her, kneeling at her mercy like a sacrificial lamb. Even the act of kneeling stripped him of his power, leaving him bereft of the omniscient presence and control of the Opera Ghost.
But the Opera Ghost was not him. Not truly…
Did she know…?
Christine had asked him to repent for his sins, but was that not the first step in the process that would be deemed a confession? Through their shared language of music, he would reveal all to her: his crimes, past lives, and each history wrought by the passion of his malevolent and sadistic hands.
Oh, all that his hands had done…
Even though years had passed, those same hands remained stained with an eternal crimson blood, as much as they were made beautiful in the utter perfection of each piece of art that he crafted. Those long, elegant hands had formed ornate and infinite palaces for Shahs and had shaped beautifully savage deaths with a single touch. The uncoiling of a fist was the merciless grace of his weaponized hands, the cobra strike of his Punjab lasso; this lived inside of him as a repulsive and powerful memory, jarring his thoughts with every beat of his own heart.
Those terrifying hands could compose and perform music so mystifying within its supernatural beauty that one could hardly endure it; the raw granduer and undeniable pain of it all. But now, his pale fingers twisted together in an aimless nervous wringing…
He would come undone, tonight.
As much as he wished to present himself as the master of his own machinations, an untouchable maestro pulling the strings, Erik felt himself unraveling, doubting his own control. Christine's rejection of him the previous night ate at his heart like a worm digging through every cavity, ripping holes of uncertainty within the throbbing muscle of his heart. What if he would lose her completely tonight? Would she come to hate him upon hearing his music, would she turn her back on him before he could even speak a sound, would she tear her eyes from his and banish him from her sight…forever?
For it was an opera composed of blatant sensuality and unapologetic desire…
No othercomposer would dare put such a lurid piece in front of the genteel audiences of the Palais Garnier. But he was so very unlike all composers, and what did he have left to lose? A love that he could never allow himself to clench in his hands? But this performance would be worth it, no matter the outcome; as long as he could hear his angel lift her voice to the sounds of his music…as long as he could look into her eyes one last time.
It would be enough.
Erik's fingers shook violently as he straightened his crimson silk cravat. Taking a glance in the much-abhorred mirror, he ensured the white half-mask was in place upon his ravaged cheek. He could not deny that his appearance was visually impressive; his ebony cloak swirled about his shoulders, with tiny beads that shimmered in his candlelit reflection. He wore no hat, simply the sleek black wig he'd always favored. Erik's visible cheekbone sat high and masculine, and his dark eyebrow arched as he examined himself. A fleeting thought crossed his mind; if perhaps the halves of his face had been composed equally, and had he not been born with a face split in two, he might have been quite a handsome man.
But he was cursed. That face would never be equal in measure; he would never be equal.
He would never be whole. Not without her.
He took one final glance at his image and was pleased; he was imposingly tall, black-clad, with a starched white dress shirt and mask gleaming out from the shadows. Erik found that he did not feel as disgusted as he normally felt when dissecting his own mirrored self that lived within the looking glass.
Though he dressed as he normally would for a much anticipated encounter with his Christine, the evening would not proceed as anyone had planned, but would follow his own direction. He wished to feel as if he were fully in control, and the simple thought of it delighted him. Securing the mask and settling the wig one final time, the Opera Ghost assumed his usual feline posture and grace, oozing a false confidence born of a survival instinct that had carried him through his gruesome life – the artful dodging from one disaster to another.
Erik began to feel an unnatural assurance trickling through his veins; the music of his life gave his heart reason to continue beating, and Christine's failure to truly deny her love for him gave him a strange sense of serenity. He did not feel as if he existed beneath other men for the first time in his desolate life, for love seemed to be faintly within his grasp. If he knew how to capture it and contain it without marring its delicacy with his bloodied touch, he would surely do whatever was required. Tonight, he would let his hope overcome him…he would use his own fear and vulneraility to his own advantage…that, and nothing more.
An elusive mix of feelings began to snake their way up through his heart and into his mind; fears that he had buried; not of death, but of something entirely worse…
His loss of control.
His loss of her voice whispering in his ear…
Christine.
His mouth was suddenly dry and his heart fluttered upon a mismatched melody. For a moment, Erik was frozen in place, unable to move. The realization struck him; that he may not survive the night, that he was risking his own mortality for one final chance at love with the woman who had become his world. He would allow himself one last attempt to possess her love before surrendering to a suffocating and blank solitude for the remainder of his days. For surely, if there had ever been a reason for him to place his own miserable life in peril, it should be for her.
And only, for her.
But Erik did not know how to grasp something gently without breaking it apart. He did not know how to conquer this twisted feeling of love, when love had always sounded like the shattering of glass at his feet. It was so finite and irrevocable. Shards of glass always surrounded him, following him through every dark hole that he ducked through. There would always be something he could not control, something such as the love for another that could not be contained. But if he could not hold it, what was he to do with it?
Should he simply let it breathe?
But enough fear, enough doubt! There was nothing that could stop the events that were in motion, now. Christine's hold over him left him barren of all reason, all manipulated logic. So he would proceed with this evening's plan, despite whatever the outcome might be. A mad determination began to consume him, and a smile curled at the corner of his lips. Tonight, Erik would hold love in his palm, he would let it breathe life into the entirety of his being. For in the offering of his music, he would possess control. He would direct the movements of Christine's heart with his voice and his music…tonight, he would remain in control.
But could love exist within his enclosed fingers? Or would he have to release the tremulous feeling gently, as the soft opening of a lotus flower? Must he risk the teetering of the balance, must he risk the flower from falling to the ground and splintering into a thousand different pieces?
A quiet storm of dread hung as a dark and heavy cloud just behind his shoulder blades, foreboding and creeping one step behind him. In his mind, Erik could not push away the doubts and fears that the evening's events would not play out as he desired. An underlying energy of uncertainty reverberated through his bones and spoke to him in subtle vibrations, marking a design like a stroke of lightning throughout his nerve endings, his blood whispering an urgent message;
You will lose control tonight . . . You will come undone.
Enough truth, enough vulnerability for now…For the Opera Ghost had returned to him, curling away from the daunting reflection of darkness, with lithe hands that trembled in mid-air, unsure of how to occupy themselves…until he reached without thinking, and without hesitation for the black onyx ring laying on the dresser to his right side. He picked it up slowly and marveled at it in sickened wonder, admiring the contours of ebony stone and silver carvings that mapped a path to the inlay.
He twisted the dark stone ring around his smallest finger. He would give it to Christine tonight, for it was the only gift he had ever been granted out of love. And what he had been given, he would bestow upon his angel without question…
Without a single droplet of regret.
The onyx ring was the lone physical proof of the only requited love Erik had ever felt as a child, kept close and hidden within his heart. The ring held inner memories of the one remarkable piece of happiness he had ever grazed with his hand, the only memory that didn't sting or bite at his soul…
A man – his own father – had left his son a sole memento mori, a remembrance that he, Erik, was deserving of love. He removed it from his finger and examined it again, noting every etched line from the scrapes left by the unforgiving stone walls; evidence of every journey he had made down into the depths of the pitch black earth. He traced every contour of the ring's engraving as if he were rerouting the map back in time, back to the only moments he had felt acceptance; where he had felt the estranged sensation of a father's love…
Before Christine.
As he continued to look at the ring, he caught a faint memory like the whisper of a gentle summer wind; his father's final words to him. In the catch of a glance, the blinking of an eye, those words throbbed throughout his body, torturing him. Erik had never allowed himself to touch and savor the feel of anything that carried any semblance of meaning to him, he had never let himself press his fingertips to any item or any person that might grow a sacred place in his soul. But his music, his violin, his piano, his Christine…they were all the equivalent, the combination becoming a twisted path that led all the way back to his father's ring.
"Erik, I'm sorry."
The memory of his father's soft voice quivered in his ears, a dark feather wavering upon an intolerant wind, leaving Erik bereft of all defenses. The remembrance of that long ago confession condemned him, dismantling parts of his impenetrable dark shell, and shattering it piece by piece. He became the shards of the dismantled lotus again, the almost bittersweet memories of his past prickling at the darkness in his heart…and when he turned around, he could see a path of broken glass, curved and demented, leading all the way back to the ring; the moment his father had disappeared forever.
And he still clutched the lotus, he could not let it go. He was afraid of love, afraid that if he opened his hands, it would be in pieces, just like everything else. For what kind of flower could grow within murky waters; what kind of life could be bountiful in complete darkness?
"Erik, I'm sorry." His father offered him a forlorn, remorseful smile as he hugged his only child for the last time. The embrace seemed so momentous, for it was the only one Erik had ever received that truly felt made of love. As his father pulled back from him, he declared with a grander smile, "You don't need this around me, Erik…You shouldn't feel the need to wear this around anyone." His father then placed the scrap of cloth into his son's trembling hands. Erik's hand shook helplessly, a wet and decrepit leaf twitching beneath the smear of a cool autumn rain.
Erik clutched his mother's abominable gift in his palm, feeling the raw and irritating fabric folds within his abnormally long, beautiful fingers. It felt rough in a subtle way, like a mess of shattered glass embedding itself into the skin; a ghost that unknowingly left a brand upon his pale flesh.
His father stood to his full and impressive height, looking down once more at his child before turning on his heel. "I have to go now. Business. Be kind to your maman. When I return, we'll go to the city, make some memories…I remember that piano you wanted...I promise I shall return...yet still, I am sorry I have to leave you."
His father's words floated through Erik's memory, haunting him, reverberating within his mind, over and over on a loop…a taunting possibility of what his childhood could have been.
"Erik, I'm sorry...Forgive me."
A silent wish…an apology.
One breath.
His father walked away into blackness.
Erik thought of the words he would say to Christine this evening, while turning the ring once more in his hands. Inspired by the memory and the feel of the onyx, he reached into his waistcoat pocket for a small scrap of paper. He scrawled upon it in a hurried manner, anxious that he might forget a single line. Erik felt as if he were possessed with love, now…high off of the memory that gave so much, yet took so much away…He could not stop himself from writing the words that gnawed at the inside of his heart.
Oh, Christine, oh Christine...He would make her understand the depths of his passion.
He would make her see the man within the Ghost…
The words would have their way.
"We are all at the mercy of the life we choose, the winds of fate we sail upon hold no mercy. Nature makes a victim of us, indiscriminately. She does not cater to our wants and desires. But Music always caters to us, Christine.
To you and I."
As the Opera house was teeming with patrons dressed in heavy folds of satin and reeking of tobacco smoke, Erik took his usual route through the bowels of his beloved labyrinth, all the way up to the double mirror, right up to his beloved's dressing room. He quietly cracked the mirror open, slipping the piece of paper through the candlelit crack and releasing it from his own quivering fingers.
That was the last card he could play. He hoped she would read it prior to her entrance upon the stage, tonight…
Shutting himself back into utter darkness, he swirled his father's onyx ring back and forth on his finger, meandering towards paths that would lead to the wings of the stage; intent, determined, and fearless. Erik had to remind himself that he held the strings tonight, the omniscient puppet master prepared for what might very well be his final performance. Shrouding his face in the ebony cloak, the Phantom of the Opera prepared to ascend the stage. He attempted to feel and act as a normal man – but he was no ordinary man! He was far more powerful, made stunningly beautiful in his music, vivid and just within his devotion and love for Christine.
Yet even still, as he waited in the wings like a dark raven covered in night, he could not shake the feeling that something was different, something was unraveling within his own heart…was it the memory that he had allowed himself to go back to? Should he have pushed it away like everything else; and why did it hurt, why did it sting and singe to feel…anything?
He was holding the glass lotus again, deep in the pits of a waking dream. He closed his eyes as he opened his hand, but there it sat, glimmering in the lamplight. It had not shattered like everything else; and as he turned his head, he saw the path of glass behind him begin to dissapate. Confusion clouded his thoughts, and his eyes flickered back to the palm of his hand, but the lotus flower was gone.
He saw it floating up into the wings of the wind, swirling up and out, far beyond his reach.
He had let it go. He had let it breathe.
And he realized suddenly, that she was the lotus. She was the flower that could flourish underground.
And tonight, he might have to release her from his palm.
He would have to let her breathe.