“It is written that God, in His Infinite Wisdom, gave a Choice to Adam as he stepped from the Forbidden Garden. This Choice, He said, would shape the Fate of the World; and might, in some small Measure, atone for Adam’s Choice within Eden. What Adam Chose, that fateful Morning, damned us a Second time, and the Second was worse than the First.”
–The Blasphemer’s Bible, Revelations 3:18
The rats in the walls prepared for an invasion the likes of which no man on Earth had seen before. The din of their swords clanging, their shields crashing and their high-pitched squeaking war cries made the room echo with an unpleasant keen. Graphite, for his part, heard them each and every night as their preparations grew more serious; not for the first time, he fancied finding a cat of the proper shape and size to introduce to the ringing walls. If only cats came paper-thin and formless. Then again, distant memory reminded him that the rats would disappear at dawn anyway. They always did.
He shifted beneath his rough bedsheets, his bare skin catching and tearing at every thread that passed. The simple fan on his nightstand brought just enough of a warm breeze to bear on his sweat-soaked body that sheets were necessary; it was a choice between every sharp thread in his bed, or every droplet of sweat freezing on top of every hair on his body, and he knew which one he preferred. It was all a trade, in the end.
The Muse, he thought for the billionth time, was an overpaid, self-righteous bitch; if She hadn’t been so pretty, he might have turned Her out long ago. Ignoring the scars left by each thread, he turned over and tried to clutch Her naked, sleeping body close to his, but She wasn’t there. The bed was always empty when he most needed Her. This night he had found himself too bored to even bother with a suitable replacement for Her. None of the girls in Craft ever had green hair anyway; until he found one, Her replacement would always prove just how much he was missing instead of filling the proper need.
Frustrated, he reached out with a fist and struck the empty bedside next to him; that was a mistake, and he recoiled as if the bed had lashed out with teeth made of razors to snap back at his rage. He thought only once about rubbing the soreness away with his other hand, but that too inspired pain of a different sort, and he decided it wasn’t worth it. His need for the green-haired, green-eyed Muse only grew in spite of Her absence; he had always liked hard-to-get women. When She came to him, it was like coming home, or perhaps going to heaven, he wasn’t sure which. Those nights were beautiful and untouchable in his mind, and though She eluded him often, he lived for the moments when She granted him Her mercy, and stayed to ease his many burdens with Her smile.
Now, he needed Her more than ever. It wasn’t like he was going to be able to sleep anyway, with or without Her. He rose from his bed, his body tense, clutching the miserable sheets around himself for protection. The skylights in the ceiling of his studio apartment shone bright around the edges of their covers; it was five in the morning, and he didn’t dare open them and let in the daylight for another few hours. If pain came from sheet threads and the touch of one hand to another, then he wasn’t ready to greet the day anytime soon. If he managed to find his way to his transient Muse, he might even have a few more hours left; perhaps She would come to find him, if he invited Her further. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do but wait.
Graphite’s steel-gray eyes forced themselves away from the threatening lights in the ceiling, and back down into the comfortable darkness of his apartment. The tile floor was damp and humid, and he felt as if he were walking through a swamp. The rats in the walls laughed at him as he made his slow way through the room to the modest kitchen stationed against the farthest wall. Long ago, he learned to navigate in the dark as a means of defense against such mornings; there were a lot of them, and they always arrived at the same hour of every day like clockwork. In his dreams, the days often never ended, or never even began, but most of the human race held that he was mad to prefer such chaos in his life. They were all rats, he had decided long ago; rats that needed a cat to eat them up.
His dreams fueled his passion, and were themselves fueled by the transient Muse. He couldn’t control them; only She could, and She didn’t like begging. The words She brought forth from his mind, when She deigned to kiss him, echoed those dreams and brought them to life, giving him his only true method of reaching past the barrier of his small apartment and into the world beyond. Fiction writing didn’t pay, but it paid even less when She took Her unplanned holidays. The words just seemed emptier without Her presence. He hated to admit how fragile he was without Her, in no small part because he knew how little She cared for him in truth. He was Her slave, not the other way around, and he would be wise to remember it. Still, he couldn’t help but think that stacking the deck in his favor might encourage Her to stay home a little more often.
He arrived in the kitchen without ever seeing it, and reached for the refrigerator door with fingers that trembled. It was a shame that the weather in Craft was so hot, or he wouldn’t have to grin through the pain in order to find Her. There were better places he might invite Her to, but he hadn’t managed to call any of those places home. There was only one way to call Her, and that involved light. Was She worth it? If She didn’t pay his bills, and soothe his needs, and smile at him with Her damn pretty smile, he wouldn’t bother; wouldn’t even glance Her way. She was, after all, an overpaid bitch. Despite all this, however, he knew he had no choice. She was too beautiful to waste.
In one swift motion, he wrapped his hand around the refrigerator door and pulled, his other hand reaching by instinct for where he knew She would be waiting for him. It was the only way to do things with a minimum of pain. The light from inside the refrigerator pierced his body and then his brain. He couldn’t be fast enough to close his eyes against it if he tried, so he did not even bother. His fingers encountered frigid glass just as he reached the absolute threshold of agony; he grasped for the object and pulled it free, slamming the refrigerator door closed against the onslaught. Only afterward did he realize he was breathing hard, as if he had run five miles in the summer heat.
Trying to catch his breath, Graphite let the numbing, comforting cold of the object he had pulled from the refrigerator rest against the insides of his wrists. He could feel the blood in his veins cooling and traveling throughout his body, easing the boiling night into something approaching tolerability. He let his mind obsess over the sensation, likening it to the beautiful touch of his Muse; ah, there She was! She had only gone to the kitchen to get a drink, or to make him breakfast. Perhaps he would forgive Her, this time.
The bottle in his hands gave no reply. She had always been the silent type, except for those moments of ecstasy when all She did was talk, and he listened with the utmost respect and gravity to Her complaints. She wasn’t just a bitch, She was a perfect bitch, and somehow it only made him love Her more. With a contented sigh, he set the bottle at last on the counter and unscrewed the top, breathing in the acrid scent of Her perfume; licorice mixed with fantasy and sweat. The depths of the green liquid inside brought to mind Her eyes; he could drown in them forever, which was why he had come to the kitchen in the first place. Men with more passion for the theatrical arts might have paused at this juncture to play games with the beautiful green liquid; pouring it this way or that, over this object or that, making pretty patterns with it like a child with a paint set; Graphite did not have time for games. He lifted the bottle to his lips and drank deep, savoring each individual drop of the liquid as it burned down his throat. The sensation was euphoric; better than any sexual release he had ever attained in his thirty years of life, to say nothing of any other woman he had ever laid eyes on. She was the queen of his heart, and he had the funny feeling that She knew it, and understood. She was just that kind of woman, after all – perfect.
His invitation delivered, Graphite braced himself and hurried to replace the bottle in his fridge, his grin in the midst of pain coming easier with the knowledge that She might arrive soon. The only thing left to do was to be in a place where She would know to find him, and there was only one of those that he knew of. Drunk with a mixture of pain, pleasure and buzz, he made an approach toward his desk, and the shining silver beast of burden that lived atop it. He once thought She might live inside the beast, but that dream had faded once he realized that only the green drink that matched the color of Her eyes had any effect on his talent. It was a shame, he thought, but it couldn’t be helped.
He sat down in his computer chair, a wide, dark leather contraption that still carried the scent of the box it had shipped in, and took a deep breath. He might not have had a mind for theatrics as other men did, but even so, lifting one finger to press deep the power switch on the side of the beast was a motion to rival any dancer’s dreams, or so he thought to himself. Everything seemed so much brighter with Her promise nestled in his blood. The oscillating fan cast disco-ball shadows all over the room, and he watched these with studious intent while the beast woke from its latest slumber. It didn’t like to be rushed any more than he himself did. It did not often bite, but when it did, it bit in the worst place possible; his wallet. Compared to that, sunlight seemed more welcome.
Almost as if in response to his thoughts, the beast frowned at him and shook its head; he would not be waiting for his Muse, nor anyone or anything else that night. The room erupted in brilliant blue light, emanating from the beast’s eye, and across the eye came a flood of failures typed in glowing white text. Graphite slammed his fist on the desk, pressed the power button sixteen times in rapid succession, swore in three different languages and knocked his chair over standing up to investigate the laptop’s rear hookups before realizing that the sequence of problems he now faced was far from the ordinary. The words that greeted him were not the computer’s language for failure at all, but something else; words that he could understand, as if he had run some program by mistake without ever realizing it.
Shaken by the unusual behavior of his laptop into something approaching sobriety, Graphite righted his chair and sat down again, this time focusing on the words that the screen imparted to him. He thought for a moment that his laptop might have been compromised, perhaps by the websites he visited in search for his beautiful Muse; but time ended that line of thought within moments. The words on his screen could only be utter nonsense, but there they were, without question: IN THE NAME OF GOD YOU WILL OBEY.
Graphite didn’t believe in God any more than God believed in him. Theology was a joke, and had been for the last decade or so at least of human life. Scholars had proven the Bible to be only a fraction of the great Truth that ruled the world, and with the slow discovery of further texts and dialogues in the most remote sectors of the world, people began to believe less in its pretty stories of blind faith. On the other hand, the Truth that lied beneath was not for the faint of heart, and there were many that chose to tell stories of their own to hide it from themselves. He wanted to laugh, but the strange circumstances and alcoholic buzz surrounding him made him resist. The rats in the walls held their breath as he reached down to his keyboard and typed a single word in response as a joke: BULLSHIT.
He expected a handful of audible complaints as the laptop failed to perform any commands he entered, but a great deal more happened. The screen changed from shocking blue to pure and blinding white; Graphite fought the urge to dive under his desk for protection. The next words that appeared on the screen were written in black, making the whole effect look as innocent as his favorite word processing program; a blank page with the beginning of an idea scribbled down as a momentary thought. The words themselves were more than enough to make him begin to wonder if his Muse was playing some new game with him that he had never seen before; it wouldn’t be the first time. However, this game seemed unlike Her, to say the least. She loved the laptop more than him, but Her perfection ended outside of the word processor, and always had. In confusion, he mouthed the words to himself: FUNNY GUY ARENT YOU. WELL SEE HOW FUNNY YOU ARE SOON.
The writer in him rebelled against the lack of punctuation in ARENT and WELL, and the lack of question mark in the sentence; he wanted more than anything to fix that smug laptop’s mistake and shut it down again. The urge to ignore the irritating text and go back to bed haunted him even after he had decided against it. Allowing curiosity to triumph over disdain, he shook his head. The computer had responded to his typing; what could that mean? It was dead, in a series of failure modes he had never seen before, and he was going to need a new computer; that much was as painful and as clear as sunlight. Still, what programmer had worked a cursor with a bad attitude into a failure sequence? Perhaps they thought people would need something to do while they waited on hold for tech support.
Idly he typed another few words on the keyboard: YOUR PUNCTUATION NEEDS WORK. FOREIGN MADE PARTS INSIDE A DOMESTIC SHELL?
The screen flashed, and the words he had seen before disappeared, only to be replaced with new ones: XENOPHOBIA WILL GET YOU NOWHERE. ATTENTION TO DETAIL WILL GET YOU SOMEWHERE.
His lips pursed, Graphite sat forward in his chair, his elbows on his desk and his face mere inches from the offending screen. It was a position he never assumed unless the Muse was present, and the feeling that She was indeed trying some new form of provoking his creativity was growing stronger. How many times had She told him to work more on detail in his exposition? He had been listening. To this end, he typed: GET BACK TO BED YOU BITCH.
The screen flashed again and wiped itself clean, only to begin again: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. DONT YOU SEE YOU ARE FINALLY AWAKE.
Graphite blinked, taken aback by the strange response and further offended by the poor grammar of the machine; he had convinced himself that this tactic was all he needed to end the exchange and get back to bed. The Muse had never denied Her involvement in his doings before; She was far too proud for that. If this wasn’t Her doing, then he didn’t know what to think. At a loss, he typed at last: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
The computer responded within moments. I WANT YOU TO FIND SOMETHING. THEN I WANT YOU TO BRING IT TO ME. IT WILL BE EASY.
Graphite ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair and frowned even deeper. Since when could a computer give orders? The era of artificial intelligence was dead and had been for decades. That had to mean there was a person controlling the exchange. It was true that his choice of website viewing could stray into the suspicious, but he had thought himself to be a competent judge of his computer’s safety. His weekly virus scan had just pronounced him clean yesterday. Sixteen hours of fitful sleep since then could not have introduced a virus for him. Hacking did seem like the only possible explanation for his laptop’s behavior, but he couldn’t fathom how he’d fallen prey to such a thing. His chin in his hand, he typed his response with his free hand: YOU MUST BE A NIGERIAN PRINCE.
The computer paused for a moment, as if thinking, then responded in the usual fashion: I HOPE IM NOT WASTING MY TIME ON YOU. WILL YOU OBEY ME OR NOT?
A new thought occurred to Graphite; perhaps he was dreaming. He’d never gotten out of bed at all; he only thought he had gotten up for a drink, and if he pinched himself, he would wake out of one of the weirdest dreams he’d ever had. The Muse always brought him bizarre dreams, so that at least would be normal. There was only one way to know. With a firm hand, he typed: TELL ME WHO YOU ARE FIRST AND WHAT YOU WANT ME TO FIND. I KNOW WHAT THEY DO TO YOUNG MEN IN JAIL.
The response took a few moments this time, almost long enough for Graphite to decide that the game was over and that he could go back to bed with impunity. When it arrived, it filled the majority of the screen. I AM GOD. I WANT YOU TO FIND MY ANGEL. SHE IS TRAPPED IN A TOWER OF LIGHT AND CANNOT FLY. YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN GIVE HER WINGS.
Now Graphite was certain he was dreaming. No other possibility made any sense at all. The only angel he knew had green hair and the body of a goddess, not a God. This thought, however, brought a frown to his face; could She be trapped and in need of help? He hadn’t considered that angle before.
Almost as if it could read his thoughts, the screen cleared and added another line of text without his prompting it with a response. DO THIS AND YOUR MUSE WILL BE YOURS FOREVER. I CAN GIVE HER TO YOU AND MAKE SURE SHE STAYS.
Graphite’s hands froze above his keyboard. He didn’t want to believe in such a promise, and every bone in his body wanted to turn away; to bash the faulty computer in with a baseball bat, dump it out the window and get the sleep he now needed worse than he ever had before. The rats in the walls chittered their assent to the strange prompt on the computer screen, daring Graphite to agree too; he never agreed with the rats if he could help it. Yet, to have Her at his beck and call… he would be rich, and famous beyond belief. All he would have to do would be to find an angel and bring her to God. Then She would be his, forever, and each day he would have Her, take Her, obey Her, command Her…
His entire body trembling, Graphite set his jaw and typed: HOW DO I FIND HER?
The computer paused, then issued one last response: SHE IS TRAPPED IN A TOWER OF LIGHT. YOU WILL HAVE TO FOLLOW MY LIGHT. BE PREPARED.
Before Graphite could begin typing his next question, the laptop’s power light went out, and he found himself forced to dive beneath his desk to avoid the sudden explosion of glass and metal that erupted from the surface. When it was over, he stood and surveyed the wreckage of his former laptop with a bitter smile. He might have been more upset, had he not kept backups of his most treasured work on portable drives. The laptop was a complete and utter loss, in a way no laptop should ever have been, but one thing echoed in his mind: the knowledge that there was a way to find and keep his Muse, once and for all. How he needed Her; how he wanted her! He would go to any lengths for Her…
Even if God wanted him to rescue an angel from a tower of light, it was a small price to pay for Her love and affection. Still, She was an overpaid bitch, and a hell of a lot of trouble. It was a good thing Her smile was so pretty; a good thing indeed.
A stupid smile still plastered across his face, Graphite bid his bed farewell and kicked back in his computer chair to nap the remaining hours until full daylight away. He would need to have his head cleared as much as possible. In all the religious manuscripts given weight by recent discovery, the phrase “God’s light” always referred to the sun, and he wouldn’t be following any of that until he was sober. He had thought to gain Her love by leaving himself available to Her at all times, the invitation between them always open, but it seemed he had misunderstood what She wanted all along.
She didn’t want him to invite Her. She wanted him to chase Her. And the rats in the walls had known it all along.