Chapter 23 I know we are cool
\`Did you expect me to go up in a puff of smoke?' I asked her. I drew closer now, for I had gained detachment from her by virtue of my thoughts. \`And where would I go?' I asked her. \`And where would I go, to hell, from whence I came? To the devil, from whom I came?' I stood at the foot of the steps. \`Suppose I told you I know nothing of the devil. Suppose I told you that I do not even know if he exists!' It was the devil I'd seen upon the landscape of my thoughts; it was the devil about whom I thought now. I turned away from her. She wasn't hearing me as you are now. She wasn't listening. I looked up at the stars. Lestat was ready, I knew it. It was as if he'd been ready there with the carriage for years; and she had stood upon the step for years. I had the sudden sensation my brother was there and had been there for ages also, and that he was talking to me low in an excited voice, and what he was saying was desperately important but it was going away from me as fast as he said it, like the rustle of rats in
.the rafters of an immense house. There was a scraping sound and a burst of light. \`I don't know whether I come from the devil or not! I don't know what I am!' I shouted at Babette, my voice deafening in my own sensitive ears. \`I am to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am!' But the light flared before me; it was the lantern which she had lit with a match and held now so I couldn't see her face. For a moment I could see nothing but the light, and then the great weight of the lantern struck me full force in the chest and the glass shattered on the bricks anti the flames roared on my legs, in my face. Lestat was shouting from the darkness, \`Put it out, put it out, idiot. It will consume you!' And I felt something thrashing me wildly in my blindness. It was Lestat's jacket. I'd fallen helpless back against the pillar, helpless as much from the fire and the blow as from the knowledge that Babette meant to destroy me, as from, the knowledge that I did not know what I was.
"All this happened in a matter of seconds. The fire was out and I knelt in the dark with my hands on the bricks. Lestat at the top of the stairs had Babette again, and I flew up after him, grabbing him about the neck and pulling him backwards. He turned on me, enraged, and kicked me; but I clung to him and pulled him down on top of me to the bottom. Babette was petrified. I saw her dark outline against the sky and the glint of light in her eyes. \`Come on then!' Lestat said, scrambling to his feet. Babette was putting her hand to her throat. My injured eyes strained to gather the light to see her. Her throat bled. \`Remember!' I said to her. I might have killed you! Or let him kill you! I did not. You called me devil. You are wrong.'"
"Then you'd stopped Lestat just in time," said the boy.
"Yes. Lestat could kill and dank like a bolt of lightning. But I had saved only Babette's physical life. I was not to know that until later."
"In an hour and a half Lestat and I were in New Orleans, the horses nearly dead from exhaustion, the carriage parked on a side street a block from a new Spanish hotel.
Lestat had an old man by the arm and was putting fifty dollars into his hand. \`Get us a suite,' he directed him, \`and order some champagne. Say it is for two gentlemen, and pay in advance. And when you come back I'll have another fifty for you. And I'll be watching for you, I wager.' Isis gleaming eyes held the man in thrall. I knew he'd kill him as soon as he returned with the hotel room keys, and he did. I sat in the carriage watching wearily as the man grew weaker and weaker and finally died, his body collapsing like a sack of rocks in a doorway as Lestat let him go. \`Good night, sweet prince,' said Lestat \`and here's your fifty dollars.' And he shoved the money into his pocket as if it were a capital joke.
"Now we slipped in the courtyard doors of the hotel and went up to the lavish parlor of our suite. Champagne glistened in a frosted bucket. Two glasses stood on the silver tray. I knew Lestat would fill one glass and sit there staring at the pale yellow color. And I, a man in a trance, lay on the settee staring at him as if nothing he could do mattered. I have to leave him or die, I thought. It would be sweet to die, I thought.
Yes, die. I wanted to die before. Now I wish to die. I saw it with such sweet clarity, such dead calm.
" \`You're being morbid!' Lestat said suddenly. \`It's almost dawn.' He pulled the lace curtains back, and I could see the rooftops under the dark blue sky, and above, the great constellation Orion. \`Go kill!' said Lestat, sliding up the glass. He stepped out of the sill, and I heard his feet land softly on the rooftop beside the hotel. He was going for the coffins, or at least one. My thirst rose in me like fever, and I followed him. My desire to die was constant, like a pure thought in the mind, devoid of emotion. Yet I needed to feed. I've indicated to you I would not then kill people. I moved along the rooftop in search of rats."
"But why . . . you've said Lestat shouldn't have made you start with people. Did you mean . . . do you mean for you it was an aesthetic choice, not a moral one?"
"Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really."
"I don't understand," said the boy. "I thought aesthetic decisions could be completely immoral. What about the cliché of the artist who leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp while Rome burned?"
"Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the
morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality: But often this isn't
understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy. An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines
himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees ' self as fallen from grace; what
follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered
by one act. But this was not my great concern then. I did not know these things then. I believed I killed animals
for aesthetic reasons only, and I hedged against the great moral question of whether or mot by my very nature I
was damned.
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