Don’t say that, said Aster with an unexpected sobriety.
I looked at him in confusion.
You could kill me with an attitude like that.
“Kill you?”I asked.I saw that he was serious.“How?”
Even muses aren’t free of corruption,he said.Rather, we are, but it’s possible to be cut off from immortality.Cast out.
“You’re not corrupt,” I said.“You’re too timid to be corrupt.”
I’m not,he said gravely.Don’t mistake good behavior for saintliness, because it isn’t close.
“So what are you worried about?”
I know what we said about there being no real rules,he said,but you would destroy me if I wrote for you.The only way to kill a muse is to tempt him.To cause him to be the artist while the artist becomes the inspiration.
Aster looked for me to nod him on, but I only stood still in response.
It’s an inversion of nature...a taboo.We need to be careful about this.And even if some properties about me have changed, I don’t want to push things further in that direction.
I nodded as colorful possibilities from Greek antiquity filled my mind—reciprocated punishments, balance and the great chain of being.“I won’t tempt you one way or another, I promise.But I would like to take a look.”
Aster quieted and returned the laptop while I clicked to the opening chapter.There were eight chapters in the book now, typed and in perfect form.I assumed that Aster had been writing for several consecutive hours, but he had worked at a faster pace than anything I’d matched in the past.
I skimmed the first few paragraphs.Aster had started the book poetically, with a moonless night and ivy crawling up ancient brick walls while a girl looked outside from her bedroom window and cried.Then he mentioned a storm in the distance, and I saw that this was the same book I had started.Only much better.
I took my eyes away from the page as soon as I needed to scroll.“It’s beautiful,” I said.
Keep reading.
I read another line, shivered, and looked away.The book was unnatural.No, not unnatural.A great and talented mind could write it, but looking at the words felt like making too deep eye contact or like reading a diary without permission.“I’m overwhelmed.”
Overwhelmed?
“It’s too much for me to read all at once.Maybe I can read more this afternoon.”
He pinched an index finger.You do like it, though, right?
“I do, but I want to talk about it first.How about we stop and clear the air?Let’s go to Red Sails.I wanted to try one of their chocolate croissants.We need to decide what I’m writing and what you’re writing.If you’re going to work on anything, I want to make sure I’m involved in the right way.”
Aster smiled first, but then his expression grew somber.We’re close to solving all our problems.
Aster’s enthusiasm lured me on, and gently I encouraged him to take a break from the frantic typing and tell me about his story over a breakfast of coffee and pastries.When I reached the tourist district of downtown, I parked a safe distance from the cafe so that we could have more time together while we walked.
Aster sat next to me, in the passenger seat.He wrapped his hand around the handle over the side window and stared through the glass with so much intent that I wondered how much of the world he had actually seen before working with me.We’d gone shopping together before.There was a small grocery store and deli about three blocks away that we had walked to on more than one occasion, but the additional few minutes of this drive made Red Sales Cafe feel like more of a destination.
“So, tell me what you were writing about,” I said as I pulled into a parallel parking spot by a shop that had large windchimes hanging in the window.“What gave you the idea?”
You did,he started.That is, your writing did.Let’s keep this straight.I looked at what you had written, and in it I could see so much life that I reached in to see what I could find.
I shivered.“What I read of that was beautiful, but it got under my skin.I mean, I don’t know what that was.It felt human, somehow.Alive.Aware of me reading its words.”
All good writing is alive,said Aster.How else do you know it’s good?
My pace quickened as we walked forward.I wanted to know what he’d written about me.No, I was dying to know.Aster looked like he didn’t want to tell me much more, but I could see some of his secrets spilling out through the bright flickers in his eyes.
We reached the cafe, and he held the door open for me as we entered.This place was colder and darker than it had looked from the outside.I noted the roughness of the stone slab tiling and the unpolished wood at the front desk, where a few selections of coffee grinds waited for someone to buy them.
