Romain Vallière
In the rare hours he spent in New Orleans, those clogged veins of stone, soot, warm human breath, and decaying corpses, forgotten and withered in the dark alleys.. Romain felt like a foreign body that had accidentally fallen into a living, stinking organism. The streets lay before him like pulsating intestines through which the inhabitants poured. To him, this area crammed full of people seemed like a parasite eating its way through nature... consuming everything that could be eaten and spitting it out again once digested. Romain didn’t feel the dead here as clearly as in the swamp. There they were free, they whispered. Here they clung to walls, in cellars, in narrow, windowless rooms. The city held their spirits like a sick, rabid animal, places where souls could not purify themselves, but were constantly being poisoned, even when detached from their bodies. And Romain, who perceived everything that lurked between the shadows with all his senses, felt as if someone was shoving cold hands into his ribs and making his heart beat faster, even stumble.
When he had to sleep at night in one of those rooms with walls so thin you could hear the whispers of the neighbors, he realized how much the city despised him. He heard the lovemaking of those who eventually died in the midst of passion, he heard the screams of deeds he saw every day but could never stop. The spirits spoke to him .. louder than the living, full of rage and fervor. They didn’t want him... and he wanted them even less.
You are so loud in your lives. So terribly loud... and even in death, you find no peace.
He knew he could never be happy in such a place, that it didn’t fulfill him to be a trembling nerve in this tangle of the living dead. He needed the freedom and musty smell of his swamps, the soft whisper of the liberated. When he finally left again, back to the bayou, back to the water, mist, and that fucking honest rot, he did so with a calmness that enveloped him completely and made him the quiet man he was. The city released him... not willingly, even though it despised him... but the shackles came off nonetheless, and he felt the rabid animal let go of him, yet it hunted him still. The sounds, the smells, and what haunted him would never let him go, but would catch him again and again and drag him back into its jaws.