Chapter 21
THE MYTH
Muses didn’t have distinct beginnings or endings the way humans did, with conception or birth or death.
They were creatures of myth elevated into being by people who dreamed, commencing their lives with the earliest dreamers of all in antiquity.
This theory stayed in line with the actual Greek canon, which claimed that the muses were the daughters that Zeus had through the goddess of memory.
In those early myths, muses worked primarily by blocking memories of their clients: obligations, fears.
They did this to help people focus, to cut out distractions so that others could work to their best abilities.
All muses shared a basic consciousness. I knew that much for a fact.
I could tell that much as soon as I kissed Aster’s wound.
I saw him as one manifestation or face of something much greater, more all-encompassing.
One could argue that only really one Muse existed and that all others were simultaneous incarnations of the same creature.
Now that I’d accidentally infected myself with a piece of his soul, I could see it all much better than I could have before. My eyes had peered into a new life, a new plane of existence. I could see Aster going back to the beginning of time, and like any myth, following time to its own end.
Simultaneously, I saw the nature of Aster’s newness.
Fragments of his soul had interacted with humanity thousands of years ago, even as far back as the nine muses of ancient Greece.
He was Calliope and her poetry, Euterpe and her music, Urania and her knowledge of the stars. But he was none of them.
The original nine phased out of their corporeal lives eons ago, even before the Greeks spoke of them. Aster, as Aster, only reached his current existence when I called him into it.
When I looked into his past before me, once shrouded in mystery but now an open book, I saw stars and the sun and the ocean.
But none of it felt personal. I saw smiles and heard laughter and tears, but I could never make out a single face.
The only face that Aster knew, I realized, was mine.
I was the only person he knew for sure still existed on a blindly populated planet and the only one he could invest himself in.
At one point he had mentioned that he liked feeling like the two of us were the only people on the planet.
Our isolation was more than a fantasy for him; it was his natural outlook. Him and me and nothing else.
Did other muses scour the world now, equally fascinated by those they inspired?
I had no way to know for sure. I couldn’t sense them completely.
Some of Aster’s knowledge remained sacred to himself.
But I saw what he saw in me. Aster viewed me as more than a prize.
Even more than a soul mate. It was no wonder he hadn’t wanted to meet my parents.
That would have turned me into a commoner to him, an ordinary person sans potential.
Only an orphan could be great, after all.
Only a person without a family. Without other people.
I was neither. And that was where everything fell apart.
I still didn’t understand the race he referred to as the Fates.
I thought the answer would appear as soon as I gazed deep enough into Aster’s consciousness.
These unsettling figures had never shown up in his previous life or lives.
Aster had only known humans before, and only other sides of his muse-self.
But Aster was different from his predecessors.
Tragically different. He didn’t waltz when he walked the way they did.
He didn’t drape himself solely in white.
He sweat. He mumbled under his breath and hogged the blankets in bed.
He looked tired and stressed out whenever he pushed himself to his limits.
I had given Aster a life of his own... but possibly at the cost of mine.
I lay awake in the bed and tried to make sense of it all. From time to time, I turned my head and looked at him sleeping beside me. His chest rose and fell in a predictable rhythm. I couldn’t see his eyes or scan them for movements, but it looked to me like he had fallen into a dream.
Before I got out of the bed, I reached over and brushed through his hair with my fingers.
It was coarser than I remembered, and slick with oil.
My phantom memories of the muse world told me that his hair should be lighter than feathers, not thick and human.
I hadn’t merely imagined the changes that came over him since we met.
Likewise, Aster was right to worry about his immortality.
I pulled my hand back and looked at my fingers intently.
Moments later I got up. I didn’t feel tired anymore. I didn’t feel much of anything at all. I ignored the movements in the shadows and decided to shower before deciding what to do next.
I feared the exchange between us, and I realize that we might be worse off, not better.
But it was true I felt more energized, more optimistic than I had earlier—true also that I looked forward to the conversations that waited for us after he woke from his nap.
He couldn’t hide anything from me now. Nor could he lie to me or mislead me.
The two of us really were something else.
After resolving to have a good day and make up for my past frustrations, I pushed open the door to the bathroom.
First I remembered the glass, right as I saw it, still broken and shattered.
I couldn’t even enter this room without needing a pair of sandals to protect myself from any remaining shards.
It was only on the second glance that I saw something that made my heart skip a beat. My reflection did not exist. I looked into the mirror and saw only the open door and the hallway behind me.
The remaining glass on the mirror reflected the room behind me and the light from the hall. Otherwise I saw only the back wall of the bathroom itself.
I looked down to protect my feet from potential glass splinters, and then I stepped forward. There could be no mistaking it. Whatever Aster did dragged me deeper into his delusions. The hallucinations. And how could they have been anything other than hallucinations?
I showered. The water created a barrier of rain-like white noise that helped me drown out my darker thoughts.
I loved feeling like a person again, remembering the brisk inhalations and toe-tips of my humanity.
I didn’t know how long Aster planned to sleep in the bed, but in the meantime I could plan a full day.
This differed from a return to normal or any “before.” Even now the shadows contrasted with the light more than I remembered. The bathroom appeared dark as if I had left the light off, even though I knew I hadn’t.
I turned off the water. Then I stood in the shower, wet, naked, and I held a single hand in front of my face.
The pallor of my skin could have been a natural result of the darkness that followed me in here.
I needed to go outside, see the sun. My heart sped when I thought of a trip to the beach after breakfast. I checked the mirror a final time and tried not to panic at the fact that I still couldn’t see my reflection looking back.
I’d let him sleep. He could sleep, and I could be awake for the first time in far too long.
I decided on Honeycrisp apples for breakfast because they were what I had.
I ate one, and marveled at the pop in the taste and texture.
When I finished and saw that I was still hungry, I snatched a second and bit into it.
I let the juice run down my arms while I ate and enjoyed the sensation of something wet and trickling over my skin before I wiped it up.
Before I left the house for the beach, I considered checking on Aster or leaving a note to explain my absence.
I also looked at my laptop on the desk in the living room and thought about re-reading a few pages of the book or adding more to it as a pleasant surprise.
But the thought of writing made bile build up in my throat.
Perhaps my illness had healed, but I still needed to let my emotions settle before doing anything more.
The morning was cool, and the water felt icy to my touch when I reached the beach moments later.
A scattering of clouds dotted the sky, fluffy and white and far away.
Nothing that threatened a storm at sea, but I realized just from looking at them that this wasn’t going to be the sunny beach day I had hoped for myself.
After a few moments of wading, I walked back up to the sand and sat down, hugging my knees to my chest while my hips and feet sank deeper into the dry, cool patches of sand. I wanted the ocean to look clear and open like before, but it looked pinched instead, gray and hostile.
I couldn’t see anyone else, but still I felt that I was not alone here.
I hugged my arms around my chest and looked around for any sign of an intruder.
While I saw no one at first, I became uncomfortably aware of a rhythm in the waves lapping in front of me.
The waves sounded as if they were speaking.
More specifically, they sounded like they were warning me.
Be-ware, be-waaare, over and over like a choral chant.
The Fates had found me out here. I didn’t know if I believed them or not, but I could feel them, and right now I began to see them. The shadows glided around me in clean other shapes.
What have you done? one of them asked me.
I ignored the question. There was no other person here who could have asked it.
Do you not know what happens when a mortal tries to reach the realm of gods?
The temperature dropped. Overhead more clouds gathered, dark clouds. Storm clouds I should have checked the weather before coming out here.
Arachne decked herself in raiments worthy of the divine. She pronounced herself their equal.
A spider tiptoed in front of me on the sand. I pushed the words I heard to the back of my head and told myself not to buckle in my excitement.
Icharus made to fly like an angel.
I turned my head away from the voice. I saw a black crow’s feather embedded in the sand not far away.
Sisyphus believed he could lie and cheat his way to the top.
Still I wanted to ignore the voice. Or voices. I couldn’t number them. I looked down and reached into the sand at my side, reaching down and digging deeper until my right fingers landed on the smooth surface of a small, round stone that I pulled up.
These things happen to people who reach for the heavens, the voice continued in a smooth tone against the be-ware, be-waaare of the ocean.
“Just leave me alone,” I said out loud, my voice charged with an energy that felt foreign to me. “I only wanted to write a good book. I did nothing wrong. We should let time be the judge.”
Time already is and has been. History is your witness.
A series of images came to my mind unbidden. I saw things that Aster witnessed in his past, or rather in the shared history of the muses.
A young woman in red and violet strode down the stalls of a crowded market.
She looked clear as day, more distinct than anyone I had seen in my earlier given memories.
She posed before a crowd, displaying a fine cloth draped over her arms, and everyone pressed forward to see it or touch it.
Then the crowd parted. Another woman, taller and plainer, slapped the protagonist of the vision over the face.
Then the first woman screamed and shriveled, falling further into herself until she took on the form of the spider I had just seen, spindly legs piercing the skin of her back and eyes growing round and bulbish as she fell to the ground.
Then the vision changed. A man with a streak of gold in his otherwise rusty hair spread out what appeared to be eagle’s wings, only larger and of an intentional construction.
He posed himself in the sky, stretching his arms outward for propulsion, and he ascended higher and higher until he became nothing but a speck, and then the feathers fell down to Earth alone.
Then I saw a man I assumed to be Sisyphus, fat and jolly, sitting behind a giant oak trestle.
He sipped and spilled a drop of wine from a large goblet of what appeared to be wine and sending away a thinner man who accused him of cheating his goods.
Sisyphus bit into a hunk of lamb meat and choked on a bone, and even as his body keeled over at the dinner I could see the Fates gather like vultures around his soul, sentencing him to push the same rock up a hill for eternity to pay for his misdeeds.
I didn’t care anymore if I was alone at the beach. I didn’t care to pursue a normal day. I didn’t see how that could happen after the voices. I stood up and shook the sand off my feet before scrambling back to the house.
Everything here was still and silent. I ran up the stairs, up to the bedroom where Aster still slept in my bed. I crawled onto the bed with him and wrapped my arms around one of his. “Aster,” I said.
He inhaled and rolled over to face me. His eyes looked darker than usual.
“I believe you now,” I said. “I believe everything you said.”
First his fingers tangled through my hair playfully, and he tried to smile. Then he stiffened. What happened? he asked.
“The shadows,” I said, too scared to call them by their other name. “The ones you kept seeing. I ran into them today. I think it had something to do with what we did.”
Aster’s facial expression didn’t change as I spoke, but he pulled himself into a sitting position. He grabbed me and pulled me closer to him and then he wrapped his arms around me. I’m sorry it came to that. Stay out of their way… if you can.
Even now he wasn’t comforting me. Reassurance was beyond his power to give.