Chapter 23
THE STORM
When Aster straightened, a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky. The lightning might as well have come from him.
Tempting him. The word came back to me in full force. Tempting—luring, haunting. Defying. I remembered Aster telling me about it the morning I first found him typing away at my draft. The only way to kill a muse was by tempting him to become the creator, trading roles.
I had thought that by now I’d seen Aster in every possible shade of emotion: love, fear, excitement, restlessness. But I hadn’t considered anything this complex could come along and shake things up so much more.
Looking back, no one in my family had ever exhibited any kind of temper.
I grew up in a quiet neighborhood and never witnessed any drama beyond cold silence and middle-class passive-aggression.
I assumed wrongly that the entire world worked like a giant clock, that things like passion and anger ran to a ceiling before dying off.
Such a ceiling did not exist. I’d asked for something I couldn’t contain or control, and now I had to deal with the consequences.
Aster’s eyes glittered. His face reddened. He extended a hand toward my laptop and then pushed it off the table. It’s not enough that I belong to you. It’s not enough that I gave you my heart and my soul. You never actually wanted to win at this, did you? You’re conniving. A trickster.
I stepped back. “But you didn’t have a problem writing it earlier! What changed? Why is it different now?”
Because earlier it was my will, not yours, he said.
But I should have seen the writing on the wall.
I never wanted you to be the writer or me to be the muse.
I wanted to create this thing. To write it.
And the only one who ever could have inspired such a drive in me was you.
It was always you, only you, always you from the start.
The downpour thickened, and now the rain landed in uneven dark splotches across the patio. The clouds continued to darken, and the thunder grew louder and more frequent.
“It’s not as bad as you think,” I said. “Let’s put the computer away for now.
Neither of us has anything to prove. I mean, you’re a literal muse.
And I already won the residency. That’s more success than most writers could dream of.
” My voice cracked as I spoke and almost became lost in the thunder.
But we didn’t want success. We wanted to reach above it, to reach the status of legend, said Aster. We’re going to work this out. One way or another. You will write this book. Or you will kill me.
“Aster—” A vision of him flashed through my head, a memory of his angelic presence the first time I had seen him, his long white hair and the glow in his eyes which had since dulled to a shadow.
I’m serious. I can’t live like this. I can’t contort myself further. I’ve already lost my special status. We both know it.
At first I assumed that either I had misunderstood the ultimatum or that Aster exaggerated, but he didn’t push anything further.
He didn’t blink. He watched me for two seconds, turned and picked up the laptop from its landing place.
The screen was open by two inches, scuffed on the side but still well intact despite the rain.
I accepted the laptop and wiped the water from it with my sweater sleeve. “I’m packing this away. We’re done.”
You’re sitting down. You’re writing this. You’re not going anywhere until it’s complete.
“It’s raining,” I said, raising my voice to accommodate a new curtain of rain that swept past us out toward the ocean.
There’s a lot you don’t know about the book, Aster said abruptly.
“How does it end?”
That’s not what I mean, he said. This book isn’t just an ambitious project. It’s my life.
I took a deep breath. A small voice in my head told me to stay calm and rational. Aster and I had a tie, and his passion could only match my own. Then I turned around. I held my laptop under my arm protectively.
My plan entailed turning and walking back into the house through the glass door, hiding the laptop in a closet or one of my suitcases and refusing to budge if he did anything more. But as soon as I faced the door, I faced Aster. He stood in front of it, arms crossed, cutting off my access.
What security I had felt drained into a vat of all-encompassing hopelessness and frustration. I rolled my eyes, turned, and walked unimpeded down the steps of the patio.
At this point, the rain had grown not just heavy, but thick as well.
The clouds darkened so much that it looked more like twilight than noon.
I shielded my laptop with a hopeless but maternal instinctiveness, realizing that I didn’t have much to protect either way.
I wished I had the poetic courage to cast it into the sea.
I stepped over puddles as I hurried to the front door of the house, but as soon as I reached the steps by the driveway, Aster again appeared at the door, arms still crossed, eyes still dark and glaring. He looked like a statue. He looked like a curse.
“Stop it,” I said. My sense of earlier calm withered. Maybe Aster was more than an extension of myself. Maybe he really was his own person, and as such, he could act on feelings I’d never experienced.
Of course, he didn’t respond to me now, and the house would only drag me deeper into the pit of his antagonism. Aster was born there. He claimed it as his sanctuary and his castle where, even if he let me in, his word would remain law.
I walked to my car in the garage. I could drive to the cafe and book a reservation in a nearby hotel. My only problem was that I’d left my wallet in the house before we relocated to the porch… and that Aster had thought to come here ahead of me.
When I saw him standing next to the driver’s seat of my car I braced myself and started to walk away, away to the road, away to where I could at least distance myself from the lighthouse.
The rain fell thicker and heavier. I saw a man in the near distance when I started to walk, but only later realized that it too was Aster.
He was everywhere. There was nowhere I could go that he wouldn’t be waiting for me.
This time was different, though. Instead of looming before me like an angry statue, he started to run after me. He called my name, and his voice sounded angry and sad and desperate. He made me feel guilty, like I could resolve this with a heartfelt apology and a wave of my hand.
Aster was right. I’d surrendered my ability to write in giving him his. I couldn’t do it anymore. I could only inspire. I could only be a muse while he waited as a demanding artist. I’d cursed both of us.
Only one retreat waited for me now. I looked at the lighthouse where it stood near the house. It looked like a different building entirely against the storm. This summer I had only seen it in the light, against a crisp blue sky with the sun beaming overhead.
I ran to it for shelter now and realized that I should have described lighthouses better in my draft.
The book, Aster’s concept for it, centered around a storm, and the captain of the ship should have felt a stronger punch in the gut when he saw the pale light from the shore and realized that he was already too close to land and rocks.
How funny it was that right when reality itself disintegrated around me, I kept thinking about something as mundane as a description of a light in the draft of my book.
It was almost as if I planned to go right back to it after the rain cleared, after Aster’s sour mood passed and we reconciled our gripes.
Aster chased me to the tower. I was surprised he didn’t pull the same trick here that he had at the house and car and simply appear at the door, but I pulled it open unimpeded.
From here, there was nowhere to go but up. I ran up the stairs, and when I climbed halfway to the light chamber, I heard the door open again behind me.
Stella, I’m coming after you. Neither of us will leave this place until this is resolved.
I said nothing to the voice. I wanted him to question himself.
I wanted him to rethink his words, his deeds.
My brain flashed involuntarily to an image of his smashing the bathroom mirror, of the blood on the bathroom floor when I came for my sweater.
Even now I hugged the sweater against myself, wincing at the sight of the cuts on my skin.
The sweater did nothing for warmth in the moment.
It was soaked. The rain cut through it like it didn’t exist.
Then I reached the top. The light was figurative—the sky was so dark from here that I was surprised when I realized I didn’t have to climb as far as I first thought I did.
And when I saw the empty socket where the light used to spin, I hated that it was empty.
Empty, as in there was no light. No salvation.
I looked at the empty socket and then I stepped out to the catwalk and the railing that overlooked the sea, and I wrapped my fingers against the peeling black paint on the rail.
The waves had grown rougher since the last time I had really looked at them.
They were tempestuous, threatening. Even so I saw them as an escape.
If I could only climb on a ship just now, sail out to the blurred gray horizon where Aster could never find me…
His footfalls clambered up the steps. Stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp.
He said my name sometimes, and then as soon as the steps turned silent I turned around and watched him.
He looked more human than ever with his hair wet, hanging in limb clumps over his forehead and around his ears.
The muscles on his arm, visible with the shorter sleeves he wore today stood out in such a way as to warn me that he could either wring my neck or carry me to a better place.
Aster’s hands curled into tight fists. His eyes were gleaming, arrogant and desperate and angry and hurt. His breathing was heavily. Visible from the other side of the room.
I didn’t say anything because there was nothing my words could have done to make the situation any better. I squeezed my hands together at once and tried to calm him with my eyes.
After a hesitation that lasted three or four second, Aster stepped up to me outside on the catwalk, on the side of the tower that faced the ocean. He wrenched the laptop from my hands and planted it on the narrow railing that separated us from the depths below. Then he opened the lid.
Write. And if you can’t write, bleed.
“I told you, there’s nothing I can do,” I said. “It comes out in muse-ish.”
He lifted the device and slammed it down on the rail again with so much energy I wondered if he would destroy it. Then with one hand he reached over and grabbed me by the hair. When I tell you to write, you’re going to write. And you won’t stop until I say it’s done. That’s the only way.
“I’m not writing,” I told him, pulling back unsuccessfully from his grasp. “The whole thing is broken. It’s too late, too late.” I trembled, and he let go of my hair at last.
Do I need to throw you over the edge? Aster threatened. Would that give you the real-world experience you were craving? You never respected the places we went together. You never saw the value in the dreams I gave you. You always wanted everything to be here with us, between us, in person.
My breaths came in sharp gasps. Aster was too strong for me.
If he wanted to force anything on me, I had no good way to fight back.
My eyes glanced from the paragraphs on the screen to the distance behind them: the brush and scrub, the sand, and further out, the ocean with white crests over the dark blue waves.
“I can’t write. The words weren’t coming out right,” I said. “You saw it. It didn’t even make sense to me.”
Try.
I didn’t know if the water on my face came from tears, but I thought it was more likely rain. I wasn’t heartbroken, after all. I’d seen this coming almost too soon.
I twisted my head under Aster’s hold. I placed my hands on the keyboard and then I typed.
Suddenly everything fell away from me. My fear and hesitation, the trembling of my hands. My words appeared on the screen exactly as they looked in my head.
This was my best writing.
Then I moved my head again to reread a paragraph. No, I’d done it wrong. I wasn’t writing in English, but in the tongues of the muses. These words would never translate to a human tongue at all.
Well? What is it? Aster took my computer, pulling it away by the screen and lid, and skimmed a line or two. Then he groaned out loud and threw it over the edge.
I screamed when the device fell out of my reach. I didn’t know what I’d do if it didn’t turn on right when I went down to retrieve it. I didn’t know why Aster would endanger his own project like that, besides. The action made no sense.
Then I realized that Aster wasn’t thinking about the book on a rational level anymore.
He didn’t even seem to realize the crime he committed in possibly destroying my laptop, the fact that I couldn’t meet his ultimatum if I tried.
Now he pinned his attention on me. He pulled me up until my feet were barely touching the floor.
He was going to throw me over the ledge.
Lighting flashed in the near distance, bright enough to blind me for a moment.
I sucked air into my lungs and latched onto the glass wall of the lighthouse tower with one hand.
Then I twisted myself. I mustered every ounce of strength I could.
Then I did it. I kicked Aster so that he lost his balance and then I pushed him over the edge.
Aster fell without a word.