“From what?”

“The content, the meaning, of course.”

“They never saw you, never knew you were there.”

“My dear boy, they had to know I was there. They must have known. They must have been doing it for my benefit! How else could I have been allowed to see it?”

“I don’t know, David. Maybe they didn’t mean for you to see. Maybe it’s that some people can see, and some people can’t. Maybe it was a little rip in the other fabric, the fabric of everything else in the café.”

“That could be true. But I fear it wasn’t. I fear I was meant to see it and it was meant to have some effect on me. And that’s the horror, Lestat. It didn’t have a very great effect.”

“You didn’t change your life on account of it.”

“Oh, no, not at all. Why, two days later I doubted I’d even seen it. And with each telling to another person, with each little verbal confrontation—‘David, you’ve gone crackers’—it became ever more uncertain and vague. No, I never did anything about it.”

“But what was there to do? What can anybody do on account of any revelation but live a good life? David, surely you told your brethren in the Talamasca about the vision.”

“Yes, yes, I told them. But that was much later, after Brazil, when I filed my long memoirs, as a good member should do. I told them the whole story, such as it was, of course.”

“And what did they say?”

“Lestat, the Talamasca never says much of anything, that’s what one has to face. ‘We watch and we are always there.’ To tell the truth, it wasn’t a very popular vision to go talking about with the other members. Speak of spirits in Brazil and you have an audience. But the Christian God and His Devil? No, I fear the Talamasca is subject somewhat to prejudices and even fads, like any other institution. The story raised a few eyebrows. I don’t recall much else. But then when you’re talking to gentlemen who have seen werewolves, and been seduced by vampires, and fought witches, and talked to ghosts, well, what do you expect?”

“But God and the Devil,” I said, laughing. “David, that’s the big time. Maybe the other members envied you more than you realized.”

“No, they didn’t take it seriously,” he said, acknowledging my humor with a little laugh of his own. “I’m surprised that you’ve taken it seriously, to be quite frank.”

He rose suddenly, excitedly, and walked across the room to the window, and pushed back the drape with his hand. He stood trying to see out into the snow-filled night.

“David, what could these apparitions have meant for you to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, in a bitter discouraged voice. “That’s my point. I’m seventy-four, and I don’t know. I’ll die without knowing. And if there is no illumination, then so be it. That in itself is an answer, whether I am conscious enough to know it or not.”