Chapter 19
THE MIRROR
I let Aster possess me—live in me, control my faculties from within—as a means of easing my load.
At first, that seemed like the best option.
I didn’t trust him after learning how easily he could manipulate my mind.
His sanity was as dubious as my own. But he meant well, and as he said, he was a merciful god.
He didn’t want me to suffer, and he possessed the power to energize me until I finished the task.
After a long enough time, I realized that the sensation had drained from my hands and wrists.
I couldn’t feel a thing. The numbness could have been repetitive strain from the typing or a protective measure by Aster.
Sometimes I dreamed while writing. Aster would take me out to the beach or a faraway isle under a moonlit sky, and it always felt like the real thing.
Sometimes we made love to each other on the sand.
Astor kissed my knuckles while holding my hand and begged me never to leave him.
He promised no man would be more faithful to me than he, and no endeavor more successful than what we did together, and he said that my natural talent so far exceeded the standard that I arguably didn’t need the help of a muse at all. He didn’t mean to overwhelm me.
But all our escapes and all Aster’s flattering words were dreams. Every last one.
Aster didn’t really kiss my knuckles. He didn’t even take me from the keyboard.
In my only truly lucid moments, I consistently found myself facing the computer screen, and our only talk was professional.
Usually I came to awareness during the night, but sometimes I woke during the day as well.
I would move to open the windows and let in a breeze, but Aster would snap at me and tell me not to waste the little time we had.
The scales fell from my eyes during an evening when I woke up in such a state.
One moment, Aster had wrapped his arms around me on the catwalk.
Both of us stood naked in the cool evening breeze, and his eyes looked through me while he leaned into my ear and whispered that he wished that moment would last for eternity.
I took a breath and prepared a response. But then, neither of us was on the catwalk. The evening was far away, outside. I sat behind the secretary desk while Aster, moments ago so passionate, leaned over my shoulder with a professional shadow crossing his eyes.
My breath caught in my throat and I looked past the shadow to the hollows where his eyes used to sparkle. The last words he had spoken to me, the dream words, still reverberated through my consciousness. “Did you mean that?” I asked.
Sometimes I didn’t know if Aster really traveled with me to my dreams or if he sent me there with a shadow of himself as a substitute.
He cleared his throat and dabbed at some sweat on his forehead. Yes, he said.
I tensed. He wasn’t repeating the sentiment, and suddenly I worried that the character in my dream wasn’t Aster but an imagined aspect of him instead. Maybe he didn’t even join me on these trips at all anymore. “What part? What did you say? I want to hear it again, to make sure.”
Save your sentimentalism for later, he said. We’re mostly done with the draft, and doesn’t that feel good? Just a little more work and I can take you somewhere real.
“No,” I said. “This is getting ridiculous. I’m going to brush the tangles out of my hair and check out the beach.”
By now I’d gotten used to the achiness in my joints when I stood up after these sessions.
Sitting still for such a long time was already wearing on me.
But this time I didn’t want to stretch. I wanted to leave.
To go away. Increasingly I felt more than just tired working with Aster.
I felt like my typing had begun to drain my essence out of me.
If I did nothing to restore myself, I doubted I’d ever really return from Illumination Point at all.
Aster didn’t follow me up the stairs at first. I marched into the bathroom and reached for my comb on autopilot. My hair had grown matted, tangled and ugly. My complexion had disintegrated as well. I spilled cold water on my hands from the faucet and then smeared it over my face for a quick clean.
I’d lost weight. Aster had promised many times to sustain me with his magic through my writing, but I needed more than basic life support. My skin was pale and blotchy. My face had become a mask with plastic expressions with no outlet from my soul. How long had I lived like this?
Stella! Aster called. His voice sounded artificial, like something I’d only pretended to hear.
I ignored him, and I put together a basic self-care list while I moved. I needed a shower. Some food as well. If I spent one day enjoying this beach instead of simply dreaming about it, my writing would improve with my newfound energy.
Then a shadow fell over me. I didn’t need to turn around. I saw Aster’s reflection behind me in the mirror, arms crossed and a snide squint framing his eyes. He looked like he’d caught me in an act of mischief, more amused than annoyed at the outcome.
You can’t escape me that easily, he warned with a feline grin. I’m the one who put you here, and we’re much too far along to turn back.
His voice wormed into my brain whenever I heard it, mingling with the voice of my own subconscious, but twisted and subverted to make me bend to its will.
I shook my head. “Why did you say that?” I asked.
Say what?
“That you put me here. You didn’t. I summoned you in the beginning of all this. This is my break, and I’ll do what I want with it.”
But who do you think possessed you to summon me? Our arrangement is mutual, as far as I understand. He approached my side and took the old porcelain doll from the bathroom vanity. What’s this?
“I don’t know. It’s always been here.”
It could be you. Same hair. Same sad look in the eyes. That looks like one of your dresses.
“Stop it. I told you I’m done with this,” I said.
With what? he asked in seeming innocence.
“This. The false compliments, all to drag me back behind that desk. Maybe some of us are only meant to write odd rhymes and limericks, as you said. Right now I want to go to the beach. It’s not a big deal.”
At first, Aster did not look up. His hold on the doll tightened. The creases on his fingers turned whitish-yellow with the tension of his hold. He didn’t want to acknowledge anything I had just said.
I took a breath and tried to soften my sentiment. “I asked you here for your help. I love what we’ve done, but there’s more to this residency than just typing.”
Do you really expect me to believe that you’d turn down my services so easily… after everything I’ve given you? His voice sounded more hurt than angry. Genuinely confused.
I straightened and inhaled.
And after everything you’ve given me? he continued.
I poured my very soul into our work together.
Our time together. I thought we had a future.
I thought you and I would stay together forever and create masterpiece after masterpiece until both of us were etched onto the legacy meant for us, that the world has reserved for us. Both of us. Together.
“Maybe later, but right now I’m stepping out.”
I love you. Stella…
A pause elapsed. Aster waited for me to return the sentiment while I tried to divine whether there was any truth to the words at all. I didn’t know.
“You weren’t with me there on the beach tonight,” I started.
I…
“You weren’t, or you would have remembered it.”
He started to say something, but scratched his head instead.
“That wasn’t you. That was just a dream version of you, and I want the real thing. What does it matter if a person in a dream tells me he loves me?”
Oh, but I do love you. One hand he touched to my cheek. His flesh was hot, burning for mine. And despite the fact that I wanted him to back down on me, I also wanted him closer. I wanted the passionate part of him, and I wanted it directed to me. Not to my books.
“I think you only love my writing. And my potential.”
His hand left. I touched the spot where my skin still remembered him.
He took a step back to the bathroom door, still facing me.
He moved like a newly caged tiger desperate for an escape, but his hands found the door frame at the last moment and held him in place.
He raised the porcelain doll and held it near his head.
You—you don’t understand anything at all, then, do you?
I didn’t know what he meant at first. Even later when I looked back on the way he asked that question, the unexpected inflection that he placed over the word “anything,” I reluctantly agreed. I didn’t understand. Not anything, at all.
But I never found a chance to review the matter with him. His eyes had gone wild. He didn’t look at me. He looked again at the figures dancing around me, the Fates who remained unseen to my eyes.
Eventually he calmed. I reached forward and tried to lower his hand with the doll—I realized that he meant to use it as a projectile and throw it either at me or at one of the people I couldn’t see.
Aster looked at me for one piercing moment. If I didn’t love you, you would never have seen my magic.
I swallowed, and my throat burned. “I just want a break,” I said.
Then the squint returned. The sullen mask strapped over what expression he gave me earlier. Aster was done being heartbroken. If he couldn’t have me, he wouldn’t try to help.
“Don’t do anything rash,” I warned him in advance.
Aster didn’t care to listen to me now unless I apologized. He raised the porcelain doll again, and this time he threw it. At me.
I dodged. I blinked during my movement and didn’t see him leave the premises. Nor did I see myself moving into his space, as I must have done.
Now I was the one standing in the door. The vanity mirror made a sound like breaking glass, and the doll fell from the now hopelessly cracked mirror onto the porcelain of the sink below, ruined.
At first I couldn’t see the extent of the damage.
My heart pounded because the only thing I could think at the moment was that I must have thrown the antique doll at my reflection myself.
Aster hadn’t thrown it. He’d raised it in the air.
He’d threatened without word. But in the end, the doll had left through my hand.
Somehow against my own understanding, I had just destroyed the bathroom mirror.
When I stepped forward and looked over the sink, my reflection stared back at me from hundreds of tiny, shattered glass and porcelain pieces.
Suddenly I didn’t have two eyes. I had thousands, all reflected in the glass in front of me.
And not one mouth but more than I could count.
And they watched at me from in front of me and below me and all around while I tried to register the terrible thing I’d just done.
I didn’t try to calculate the cost. I’d pay for the repairs out of my own pocket. I’d chalk the accident down to over-enthusiasm about my writing and a distinct lack of sleep. But even from the start, I realized that Aster would never take any ownership of what had happened.
I remembered seeing a wiry wooden broom and crude metal dustpan in the kitchen pantry closet. As I walked down the stairs, I tried to move quietly and not step on the noisier planks of wood.
Aster was still in here and still waiting for me somewhere.
I didn’t feel free from him, and nothing I’d said would have been strong enough to banish him forever.
Of course, I didn’t want to banish him. I just wanted to get him to let up on me and give me a break.
That was all I’d ever wanted. All I’d begged.
I didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he wanted to hide from me and let me suffer in the thought of what damage I’d caused this place.
The disappearing act was his way of punishing me, for sure.
Letting me experience the worst of everything alone so that I would crawl back to him on hands and knees later.
In the kitchen I glanced only once into the living room. I only wanted to see an empty space.
Then I opened the pantry door and took out the broom and dustpan inside, and I tiptoed back up the stairs.
The glass was everywhere. Only now did I begin to see the extent of the mess, some fragments fine as dust on the grooves of the polished wooden floor.
I dropped to my knees to clean it. I told myself that the worst had passed, that now Aster’s sense would return and he’d work to make things right.
But my fear draped around me until I could hardly breathe.
After all, how did I know that I wasn’t about to wake up again, still typing and unmoved over Aster’s spell?