-Author's note: Part of this prologue originally came from "Swan Song."

The angels Gariela and Damael first appear in "The Man in the Boat."

Much credit here goes to director Wim Wenders for his beautiful film, "Wings of Desire," Vincent Ward's film "What Dreams May Come," and to C.S. Lewis for his after-life allegory, "The Great Divorce." -

Chapter One - Prologue

Forty-nine years after the great fire of 1871, a cold wind whips around the outside of the Opera Populaire, its vast stone edifice now shuttered and littered with debris. In late 1872 it was rebuilt and rebounded somewhat, until the Great War. Now it remains a decrepit hulk, empty and neglected, awaiting the day of the auction and its final demolition.

"He's sleeping," says the Moroccan manservant, Yasim, as he carefully arranges the covers around your quiet form, the form of a very old man lying still in the bed. When Yasim leaves the room I pull the neatly arranged covers back, take off my wrap, and slip into bed with you. Blind now, your hands reach out and find my face. "Meg," you breathe into my neck.

You still have the strength to roll over, and so you rest your face against my breast, your chest against my belly, but your great heart is no longer strong and steady in the collapse of your chest. It flutters like a bird in a cage, waiting for the day the door will open and it will fly loose and free into the blue, to where I cannot tell and where I cannot follow.

I stroke your face with my hand and remark to myself that nature's humor consists mostly of bitter irony. In the general ruin of age it is impossible to tell that you, who fifty years ago men feared as the "Phantom of the Opera," ever had any facial blight or deformity at all.

My own face is lined and worn too, though my dancer's body has carried me well through sixty-six years. There is almost no remnant of your beauty, unless it be in the strong line of your jaw covered with pouched flesh. Underneath, the line is still beautiful, still discernible after all your eighty-two years.

We kiss gently and then you ask, "Is everything ready?" It is, it has been ever since the auction was announced some weeks earlier. I look at you carefully as I always do before I leave the house, because it is perhaps the last time I will see your face so beloved to me.

Yasim and his brother Ahmed drive me to the cemetery. There I find a small tombstone not so elaborate as the others, but that's understandable, as it was erected during the Great War when we all suffered such terrible privations.

I place on the side of her gravestone a single red rose. A black velvet ribbon fixes to it a blue-stoned ring. This is what you, my husband, have asked me to do. I know the ring well - it is the very one you ripped off a slender white neck during the Bal Masque on New Year's Eve, in the foyer of the Opera Populaire.

It is Christine de Chagny's tomb which you have asked me to visit.

I place my burden down on the cold stone, and a great burden it has been. I reproached you only once for keeping it and thereafter held my peace. Considerately you hid it out of my sight, but the bitter taste persisted all these years.

Your instructions are strange. I am to place the ring on the gravesite, and Ahmed will guard it. Then I am to go to the auction and bet on the music box, the little Persian monkey with the clapping cymbals. I am not to win it, about this you are most adamant. Ahmed positions himself behind a large Grecian tomb as I climb into the carriage.

I don't understand this plan that you conceived on the very day you heard of the auction. As death comes closer to you, I can't follow you or follow what you know, or how you know it. It's as if a veil has come off between you and some other woman, as if one of those great twisting statues at the Opera Populaire has suddenly taken the covering off her face and taught you a tune no one else can hear.

Yasim drops me off at the Plaza, and my heart almost stops in my breast when Raoul de Chagny arrives. Crippled and shaking, he is carried by his servants into the ruined Opera. He does not speak, but his shocked look suggests to me that he has momentarily mistaken me for my mother. His watery, unfocused eyes keep returning to me, and when the auctioneer addresses me by my professional name, "Madame Giry," he peeks at me as if the ghost of my mother herself had appeared to carry him back all those years, to snap him across the back of the hand with her stick.

The Vicomte wants the music box and I let him outbid me. He holds it tight to his chest like a child at Christmas who has finally obtained the toy he longed for all year. I follow him out onto the Plaza, and in a flash of light I know where he is going, what he plans to do with that music box, and what you, my husband, already know.

Raoul nods to me as he leaves, and I briefly nod back. His befuddled look tells me that he is probably somewhat senile and still confuses me with my mother even in the harsh winter light. A mix of gratitude and pity wash over me. I feel pity because his life has been bitter, as the girl he risked so much for turned sad and pallid, whose children fled her cold home as soon as they could. I feel gratitude, because without his intervention you would not lie in my arms every night, with my hand under your neck.

I return home and sit down by your bed as I have for the past five years of your long illness. You ask how it went, as if you need to. I kiss your sightless eyes and feel your heart through your nightshirt, and its wild irregular flutter fills me with anxiety. You know every flick of my every muscle. Gently you stroke my face and consolingly you whisper as if I were the child, or the old man needing comfort in his last days.

There comes a knock and Ahmed enters. He places on the bedside table the very music box upon which I had bid earlier in the day. You raise yourself a little - what effort that requires! and say to Ahmed, "The ring is gone?"

"Yes, the Vicomte took it as you said he would," he replies, and winds up the music box before slipping out of the room.

As the little tune plays, your sightless eyes fill with tears. I place the music box on the bed between us until your recollecting hand reaches out to feel it and play over it. This small effort exhausts you, so you rest your white head back on the pillow.

I straighten the room and draw the worn curtains against the afternoon sun, but you protest. You want to feel the warmth as it plays across your face. Then I hear you call, "Come lie with me," so at once I turn around, and in a moment I'm down to my chemise and in your arms with your head nestled into my neck, your hands on my breasts.

You've wet yourself a little, but I don't care. Yasim can change the sheets later. For now, it matters not to me. Tears, semen, water, blood, anything from you I will take, because when I look at your drawn face, whiter and looser than ever, I know that too soon the time will come when the dust that's left of you will make no more wetness of any kind.

A little light plays around you, perhaps from the afternoon sun going behind the building across the street. Then I am not so sure from whence that light comes, for the music box behind me on the table starts to play, but more softly and slowly than it should. You struggle for breath and I cling to you, my face wet with tears, my chemise wet with your sweat. You have made a little water too, but it's as harmless and innocuous as that of a child, the child I never bore you, and that sorrow comes up again and I sob.

You hold me, stroking me through my quiet cries, like I held you seven times seven years ago. I say to you, "Tell me that you love me," and then you, my great and beautiful trumpeter swan, give back to me your own strong swan's cry, "Yes," and you become very quiet. After awhile you lie trembling in my arms, unconscious.

Then the music stops.

I don't move, or call out for Yasim, or send for the doctor. Gradually the light fades as the life slips out of you, as the great bird of your heart gives up the struggle in the cage of your chest. Then that great cage opens and you are set free forever, flown to where I cannot follow until the day I fly through the sky of my own death, flown soaring up into a blue where there are no shadows, no veils, and no tears to fall behind them.

(To be continued.)