After the Fall

Chapter 1

THE WISH

The epics of Ancient Greece begin with a call to a muse, or to all nine, as the poets wait on them for inspiration. I also called to a muse in the beginning. And, like the poet Homer, my wish was granted.

My story began on a Wednesday in June, late in the morning before the summer solstice.

I was sitting at my desk in the small house that served as the quarters of the lighthouse at Illumination Point.

A nationally acclaimed literary journal had awarded this residency to me as a prize for an entry I had entered into one of their contests.

Upon my arrival, I felt that it was my obligation to create a masterpiece and nothing less.

This was my first day of work. I had a paper open before me and an idea for a brutal and glamorous poem in my head that refused to translate itself to words or further concepts.

I pinched my lips and tried to solidify the mental image and mood into something more basic.

When that didn’t work, I lowered my head and closed my eyes.

I prayed. I prayed openly to the universe, and I asked it to send me what I needed to produce something with life in it, and not just life but a dash of immortality that would outlast me.

I had chosen a fickle art. The English language, like all languages, is made up of a series of metaphors built around earlier metaphors built around even earlier metaphors. Every word can be tracked down to have meant something else earlier, something simpler and more basic.

Take for example the word metaphor. Metaphor was brought into the English language from French by the Normans. The Normans learned it from the Romans, centuries earlier, who borrowed it in turn from a phrase—not a word—in Greek.

The Greek phrase meta pherein means “to carry across,” and a metaphor is when a writer carries one image across in terms of another. If a scholar were to track this word even further back, he could find alternate meanings before the Greek, more ancient and primitive and concrete.

Linguistic history fascinates me because it’s a string of examples of people building to impossibly greater and more difficult ideas by building on the basic facts they already knew. Architecture. That’s what language is, and what writing comes down to in the end.

When I started my summer residency at Illumination Point, I wanted to create a permanent reality locked into language through my writing. I wanted to draft something that would leave a permanent stain on the world, a book that would linger after my life had ended.

I didn’t want to be an entertainer, a pulp fiction author writing strings of catchy series and hopping from trend to trend.

I wanted to be the tragic type of writer who could throw herself from a balcony—or throw someone else off.

I didn’t want stories. I wanted personal strength and power.

And I bowed my head at the old mahogany secretary desk by the living room wall, literary attempt unwritten in front of me, and I prayed for the universe to open a door to my own personal wonderland.

My prayer was answered.

First a flash, seemingly of lightning, blinded me for a moment. I heard thunder cracking so directly overhead that my first thought was that the roof must be breaking apart and the house collapsing around me.

Then I opened my eyes, and I saw Aster for the first time.

I would have found Aster attractive even if I’d met him at a casual party or church function back home in Wisconsin.

His hair was long and hung down to his waist. It was the color of dust, almost blue or gray, and it curled slightly near the ends.

His jaw was defined but clean shaven, his eyes deep set and the same pointed blue as the ocean outside or the sky above.

He wore a set of robes, a white one underneath and a blue robe with golden embellishments around his shoulders. The ensemble held together with a soft golden belt and looked like a meticulous replica of what an ancient emperor would have worn on the throne.

When he looked at me, newly summoned into my world, he said nothing at first. I stared at him and thought for a long moment if I would have reacted the same way upon seeing an angel.

But Aster was not angelic anymore than human.

He stood with a grace I had never seen in a living person—possibly in a grazing deer or a horse in a rural field, but not a person, not in anything bearing a human form.

His lips, aside from their delicate pink color, could have been carved into a mask.

I introduced myself first and gave him my name. I had no idea how else to start our encounter.

Aster’s eyes tracked me only after he heard my voice. It was as if he were asleep at the onset of his summoning or like I had snapped him from a deep trance. Now he breathed. His chest rose and fell, and he turned his head around the room in a bid to understand his surroundings.

Stella, he said, repeating my name back to me and bowing his head. My name is Aster. I have come as your muse.

His name like a deep bell in the distance, sounding like a trumpet about to announce the breaking of an ancient seal.

The room turned colder by several degrees, darker as well, and even the light that fell in from the windows around me seemed paler and cooler, more akin to moonlight instead of sunlight.

Our introduction stood complete.

Sometimes I think I died in that moment and passed into a surreal afterlife where I’ve lived ever since.

At any rate, I never returned to the person I’d been before.

My soul evaporated from my body, fleeing me to a void where I could see everything with greater distance and clarity.

I wasn’t myself. I was the person Aster imagined me to be, and I was as much his servant as he was mine.

“Aster. Aster.” I repeated his name on my lips, aware each time I said it of the way my jaw parted. Suddenly my mouth became mechanical, my whole body acting as a clunky and primitive addition to an immortal soul.

Aster turned to the side and gave me a generous view of his profile.

Just as my first impression of him, I felt stricken and confounded at the sight of his beauty.

He stepped forward, surveying the room in a glance.

I thought he would leave at first, walk out the heavy front door and forget about me.

But no. It would take our entire relationship to understand what Aster looked for, where he found the inspiration he would later give to me and the sacrifice it would ask in return.

My muse extended a hand and planted his fingers on a patch of cream wall. Then he lifted it, turning his palm around so that the light from a window spilled onto his fingers.

Consciously the gesture remained a mystery, but I knew it subconsciously because Aster himself had come out of me on some level.

I knew he was capturing the light in his hand.

Taking it from where it spilled on the wall, letting it pool in his palm the same way he could have done with a handful of water from a pool.

His eyes remained on the light for some time, and only after a longer silence did he return his attention to me. You look dry, he remarked as if commenting on the weather outside.

I looked down at myself. He was evaluating me—peering into my creativity and finding the dry spot. I nodded in affirmation. “Dry. Yes. I try to iron out a project so that it will work, but everything in my head is, well, dry.”

He appeared confused at my words. No… I meant to say that I can hear the water outside. We’re near a beach, aren’t we? Near the ocean. Don’t you ever go for a dip?

“I didn’t come here to go swimming,” I said, and a flush crept across my cheeks.

I could hardly pass by a window of this house without stealing a glance of the specified shore from my vantage point in the lighthouse.

Most people would find it easy to spend a summer day on the beach.

But those people were little better than insects, as far as I was concerned.

They had no thought to their purpose or future.

My higher purpose meant that I could not afford a day off until I reached my goals.

Aster’s eyes darkened with my confession. He looked sad, as if I had said something wrong.

I swallowed. “It’s a beautiful beach, and I might go once we get started. But there’s a lot to do, and I have only a couple months before the residency ends and I leave.”

Leave? You’re a wanderer, then?

His inquisitiveness reminded me very much of a little child. He could have been fascinated at the prospect of my going on from here, of my moving somewhere else, or he could have wanted to know more of my journey from here.

“I’m only here for the summer,” I explained. “I won a residency, a type of prize for an essay I wrote. When I’m done, I’ll go back to Green Bay, where I live.”

Green… Bay. He split the phrase like a name that he didn’t know.

I wondered about his knowledge about geography, about culture and technology and many other things that I took for granted.

Was Aster a new being, come fresh into existence upon my wish, or had he been here as long as the Earth itself? Had he worked with others besides me?

My own questions had begun to multiply. Aster’s newness scared me, and with it the suddenness of his appearance.

One wrong word, and he would disappear just as instantly as he had come.

Perhaps in a poof of black smoke. Perhaps in the blink of an eye.

Maybe faster than either of those, an instant notion that would leave me wondering if I had imagined this entire thing.

He seemed to understand me at last. This is a temporary home, then. A residence for a short time to allow you to complete a work of significance. Am I right?

I exhaled a sigh of relief. “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it.”

And what is it you wish to create?

My skin prickled, and for a moment my mind turned blank. Again I couldn’t believe it. Again I thought there had to be a trick, a loophole. But one look at the stars in Aster’s eyes and I knew I had to answer the question.

I glanced at my laptop on the secretary desk.

A novel. A set of poems. A book of personal essays reporting on the life of the lighthouse and Illumination Point and the waxing and waning of the Atlantic coast in New England.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “Nothing more specific than that. Anything that I write that would last forever.”

His eyes sparkled. They didn’t simply catch the light the way his hands had earlier on the wall. They shone independently, with their own light, their own tiny pinprick stars in the backdrop of the black of space set in his pupils. I expect we will work very well together, Stella, he told me.

He lifted his hand and curled one finger under my chin.

My skin prickled into goosebumps. There was something uncanny about his touch, something electrifying that frightened me and allured me at the same time.

Only as our eyes met did I realize that his touch wasn’t real.

Aster touched me like a phantom, a ghost, a gentle breeze without full physical stimulation.

What I had seen as flesh and hair and eyes was merely a capture of the light around me with the presence of a spirit just strong enough to become visible. It wasn’t that he didn’t exist. It was that his existence belonged to a different category of life than anything before documented.

Again I thought of him as an angel.

And now he smiled, a perfect, angelic smile, and when he blinked, he silently assured me that summoning him was the greatest decision I would ever make.