*
Within an hour I was telling myself it was all just a clever illusion by some trickster at a convention. I was afraid to believe, and I wouldn't have known what to believe even if I hadn't been afraid. From the sanctuary of my hotel room, I called my best friend, but when Charlie answered, I had no idea what to say. How does one describe being jerked out of body, propelled at indescribable speeds through a photo-negative-world, then looking at oneself through the eyes of another man?
But because Charlie had known me since we were children, she did exactly what I wanted her to do: she listened, she didn't say she was too busy to talk even when I heard her 4-year-old fussing in the background, and when I was done babbling like some bewildered mental patient, she laughed out loud.
"Damn, Stefan, nothing like that ever happens to me. I'm jealous as hell," she said, robust and filled with life. "So, are you going?"
That was Charlie's approach to the world: meet it head on and beat it with a stick. I envied her tenacity.
Lying on the bed, I stared at the ceiling, my emotions warring between amusement and the melancholy which had been my constant companion since Stephanie's death.
"Why would I?" I grunted.
"You know, Stefan, it might do you some good to make some new friends now that you and Laurie are split up," she suggested without polite preamble. "What've you got to lose?"
"Charlie, this kid cut my hand and licked away the blood!" I protested, indignant. "He really believes he's a vampyre!"
"So what do you believe?"
I scoffed. "I believe he's a screwed-up kid who should get some help before he gets arrested. Or worse."
On the other end of the line, I heard Charlie rolling her big brown eyes the way she always did whenever I said something inane.
"Men," she commented, long-suffering. "Look, if you really thought so, you wouldn't have called me in such a dither. Face it, something incredible happened to you tonight and if you don't try to figure it out, you'll be crazy within a week. Regret's an ugly bedfellow."
A feeble smile crept up on me. "Chase the muse again?"
"Catch the fucker," she corrected with a chuckle. "Isn't that what writers are supposed to do?"
"Those who catch the muse die," I reminded her. And though I intended the comment as lighthearted prattle, it brought a sudden dread to the center of my chest. I wasn't ready to quest after fantasies. I wasn't ready to write. I wasn't ready to live again.
Without remembering how I fell in the quicksand, I was over my head, wanting nothing more than to be alone with my misery. Stephanie's face whispered across the blank screen of the television, a different muse of a distant life I'd once lived.
"God help me, Charlie, I miss her." Why did I go up to the room while she was off with her friends? Why did she have to die? "Why couldn't it have been me instead?"
I didn't realize I'd spoken out loud.
Charlie didn't answer for awhile, though I could hear the comforting shush of her breathing. "I know, Stefan... I know. But you have to stop blaming yourself. You have to go on with your life." She paused, gave a soft sigh. "God, that's a stupid thing to say. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It helps." It didn't. We both knew it.
We were silent for a few seconds. "Maybe life doesn't make sense because we're missing the corner pieces," she offered just before we hung up.
Maybe she was right.
For a long time, I lay there staring at a spot where the wallpaper didn't quite match up, listening to the distant slamming of doors as other patrons on the 9th floor came and went. Where were they going? I wondered. For what purpose did they move about inside this skyscraper hotel, and what would happen if we all just stopped going through motions that had long since lost any meaning?
We scurried about like ants in a hive, but what was the purpose of the hive itself? Worse: was there a purpose, or was it only random happenso that society had come together as it had, and that Man served it far more than it served him? We worked at our varied tasks, gathering riches like ravens collecting bright objects, but what did we hope to accomplish when all was said and done? We raised our families and grew old sitting on wooden porches, but in the end it would always end the same way.
Why? I caught myself wondering. What did any of it mean, and if it really did mean nothing, why keep doing it? Why not just run wild into the world and suckle from it what pleasure we could before death finally caught up to us?
Where these thoughts came from, I do not know, but they sent me tumbling into a maelstrom. And though I might have believed reality-altering revelations should happen to pious monks on mountaintops in Tibet, my own came in a nondescript hotel room when I suddenly understood that my entire existence had been nothing but a series of aimless movements, common gestures, worn-out clichés.
I had to get on with life, Charlie said, but what the hell was my life?
I'd spent years staring at a cyclopsian monitor as if it were the Eye of Knowledge, transcribing the lies of my imagination to trade for bread and butter, but surely there was more than pushing paper, mowing the lawn and making sure the guy next door didn't get a bigger tv. than the one in my den. We were so busy with the trappings and the rituals that we'd forgotten they were just trappings and rituals, yet I couldn't have ventured a guess as to what might lie beyond the world we thought of as reality.
What were we supposed to Do with life in all its briefness?
Every bit as troubling as this unwanted apocalypse was the knowledge that my encounter with Dimitri had inadvertently spawned it. Something inside me was torn free at the instant he walked up to me, and now everything in the world somehow related to him, including the blue and green stripes on the bedspread that were like his mismatched eyes and the creamy flesh of the telephone that was the color of his sandstorm skin. And though the tv. from the next room droned through the wall, I could hear only his voice: 'Grief is an unrelenting master but also a powerful muse...'
Like a lunatic possessed, I rose from the bed, pacing and muttering to myself, rubbing at a spot between my eyes where my head had begun to throb. Finally, finding no escape, I slumped into a chair by the window, yet there was nothing redeeming in the world beyond.
Two strip joints with flashing neon lights, an assortment of sleazy nightclubs, and the glittering runway of LAX luring the newest victims down from heaven. A ribbon of headlights twisted toward the horizon, an angry snake coiling around the city, choking it. The stars had flown away long ago, the sky was yellowed and spoiled with smog. The night which should have been black and seductive was instead grey and terminally ill.
It was a world with a ruined soul.
Suddenly sickened by it all, I rose from my chair and hurried into the bathroom, turning on the shower to drown out the unrelenting noise in my head. While the mirrors fogged with steam, I hastily removed my clothing, mesmerized by my own reflection as, for an instant, I saw myself as I'd looked through Dimitri's inhuman eyes.
Lithe. Strong. Masculinely beautiful.
'Are you interested in finding out who you are, who you can be?'
My hand was an ocean, my erection a serpent gliding through it as I collapsed to my knees and uttered a choked cry into the mist.