Just before I leave the office, I get a message from Laura, the head of my fiction writing group, telling me she’s got a story prompt I’ll like. Usually she assigns these to the group as a whole, but this one is addressed solely to me. The prompt, accompanied by a winking emoticon, is this: Something is found and someone’s secret is revealed.
My heart sinks into my stomach. She knows.
Despite the frigid air-conditioning in my office, my shirt is instantly soaked in sweat. I take a deep breath and try to reason with myself. There’s simply no way she could know. I’ve been as stealthy as possible, and she lives in a country far from this one, on the other side of the world.
But then I look at the prompt again: Something is found and someone’s secret is revealed. There’s no way she could give me that and not know. At the very least she suspects it, and now she’s just toying with me, sadist that she is.
Shakily I tap out a reply: Sounds great, I’ve got some ideas already! 🙂, then I run outside, hail the first taxi that passes, and in the local language I tell the driver to take me to an industrial zone north of the city.
It won’t be easy—it never is—but I know what I have to do.
*
It’s common knowledge in the literary industry that you have to hide them well, for the obvious legal and ethical reasons, but also because, let’s face it, writers are a covetous lot. If any other writer has ever admired your work, you can bet they’ve wondered where you keep your muse, and it’s very possible they’ve gone looking for it with avaricious intent.
As I watch the city pass by through the window of the cab, I think of all the times I’ve made this trip, bringing it my scraps, then coming back a few weeks later to pick up the results. You can’t give a muse too much at once, or it’ll gorge itself on more than it can digest and produce piles of overwrought, overplotted trash. I’ve always been judicious in what I bring mine: a few choice cuts of life, a lean idea or two that crossed my mind. On a few occasions I brought nothing, and it had to make do with whatever I happened to pick up on the drive over: the snarl on an angry motorist’s face, a fleeting glimpse of a backyard garden, children selling garlands of jasmine at a congested intersection.
The driver drops me off at the edge of the industrial park, one of the largest in the underdeveloped country I live in. The sun has set, and factories belch dark clouds of smoke into the purple gloaming. I walk along the row of meager shacks where the workers live, till I come to an isolated, overgrown brick cottage left over from the colonial days. A man carrying a shovel over his bare shoulder stops and stares at me from a distance, but I’m not concerned. For as long as I’ve kept it here, I’ve been paying the slum-dwellers a modest monthly salary just to turn a blind eye and keep their mouths shut.
I unlock the multitude of padlocks on the reinforced, grated door of the house, then shut it behind me. I turn on the battery-powered lantern I keep by the door, and brushing away the tangles of spider webs woven since my last visit, I roll aside an overturned table. The gas can is still where I’d hidden it when I moved my muse in, now covered by dust and an accumulation of lizard droppings. I unlock the cellar door and carry the gas can with me down the stairs, holding the lantern ahead of me.
Behind the padded bars of its cage, it raises its one arm to shield its eyes from the sudden glare. God it stinks! The sickly sweet smell of rot, shit, dried vomit, and the sharper ammoniac odors of piss and fear, all stewed together in the dank cellar to form a noxious bouquet. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but it still gets me every time. Occasionally I hose it down when I refill its trough, but never often enough to make more than the mildest dent in its stench. I keep my visits brief.
It blinks at me, squinting its crusty, sunken eyes, gone bad from so many years of darkness. There’s a stack of crisp pages accumulated on the output end of the machine bolted to the floor outside the cell, just within reach of its hand. The machine resembles a stenographer’s; they usually come along with the muse. Mine is a somewhat dated model, but still in good working order. For all its many faults, my muse has never failed me in its true task. There is always new work when I visit; it’s as consistent as the smell. I resist the urge to read the fresh pages. Clean breaks are always better.
It tries to pull itself upright by grabbing hold of a bar, but it doesn’t have the strength, and falls forward onto its face. It looks even more emaciated than usual, its ribcage prominent above the scarred stumps at its hips. Lately I’ve been forgetting that it needs actual food in addition to the nourishment I provide for its literary endeavors. With all but one limb gone, it looks more like a withered, deformed caterpillar than a man. Its gender, of course, was indeterminate when I bought it, but I’ve guessed from the plots it’s produced since then that it was once male.
When it raises its face toward me, I see an anemic trickle of blood running from its nose, cutting a wet path through the layers of filth. It would have cracked its skull open just now if the floor of the cell weren’t padded. The keys of the typing machine are also made of non-toxic rubber, just in case it managed to pry one off and swallow it, and there is nothing sharp or otherwise possessed of fatal potential anywhere near the cage. Loss of muse by suicide is common, and one must maintain constant vigilance to deprive them of lethal means. That irony is not lost on me now.
I pop the top off the gas can and stand over it. It’s still trying to get closer to the bars of the cage, probably hoping I brought something to eat, making a grotesque wriggling motion as it slides slowly toward me, until it sees the gas can, and stops. It lets go of the bar and looks up, its mouth widening to expose the hollow where its tongue once was, and it begins to moan softly. It stretches its single, wasted arm toward me, spindly fingers clutching at the air, strangely articulate even in those spastic gestures.
Looking at the wretched thing, I’m struck by a moment’s hesitation. Perhaps I could simply pack it up and take it with me to a different country, as I’ve done so often before. But I know Laura well; she is nothing if not tenacious, and she’s already onto this poor, doomed muse of mine.
‘Sorry, old pal,’ I say as I shake streams of gasoline over it. It sputters and makes a frantic gurgling sound deep in its throat, which rises in pitch until I’m about to shut it up with a good kick to its ribcage, as I usually do, but on this solemn occasion I decide to give it a break. ‘Calm down, buddy,’ I say soothingly. ‘We had a good run, you and I, but now I’ve got no choice.’
As the producer of so much brilliant dialogue (pitch-perfect, according to one starred Publishers Weekly review of my work), it must recognize these words for the canned bullshit they are, but what can you do? After a thorough dousing of the muse and its cage, I pour a trail leading upstairs and empty the can over the ant-chewed floorboards and rotting furniture. Then I go outside, light a match and toss it in.
I walk to a safe distance and turn to watch the flames build, rising high into the hot black night, my muse’s smoke joining the industrial fumes of the surrounding factories. A wind comes up, and with a great whoosh the fire blows out what remains of the windowpanes, launching flaming debris as far as one of the nearby slum shacks. Its thatch roof catches instantly, and flames begin to leapfrog from hovel to hovel. I turn away and head quickly toward the main road, the sound of traffic overwhelming the screams behind me.
Nothing will be found and nothing revealed. This country cannot afford forensic investigations for burnt-up slum dwellers, as the remains of my muse will be thought of.
I’ll have to get a new one soon. Through insider sources, I’ve heard there’s a big auction in Kiev next week, and prices have dropped considerably since I was last in the market. Still, it’s never easy finding the right one. Rarely will they maintain the sedate demeanor they display under scrutiny on the platform once you get them into their cage at home, and it doesn’t help that the industry is filled with scammers trying to pass off their mediocre muse as a genius, presenting allegedly original pages plagiarized from some obscure but brilliant writer (or that writer’s muse, more likely).
In the taxi on my way back home, the inferno behind me already fading to a faint rouge on the horizon, I feel a brief blaze of anger toward Laura for forcing my hand, for setting me off on the run yet again. She’s not naïve. She must know that all the good writers use muses these days; it’s the biggest open secret in the business. She probably has one herself, the hypocrite.
But then I check my anger by recognizing the fact that if I were in the position to expose her muse, I’d do it in an instant. We writers may seem a cruel, petty lot to outsiders, and maybe we are, at times, but the truth is that everything we do is for the greater good of humanity. We are a torch lighting the way through the dark night of the soul, and even in the worst of our excesses we are merely obeying that highest of all callings: to create art, and thereby do our part to ameliorate the sufferings of this sad world.
While I pack up my apartment, I think of how I’ll manage my new muse. I won’t be so easy on this one. I’ll keep it disciplined, keep it on its toes (metaphorically speaking), make it suffer a little if its style starts getting stale, which is probably how Laura suspected me of having one to begin with.
As a cautionary tale, I think I’ll tell my new muse about its predecessor’s fate. This will be the first story I’ll have it write. I’m feeling good about it already.
Elias Lindert has spent much of his life as an expatriate in Thailand, Cambodia, Bolivia, and now Myanmar, where he lives in Yangon, writing and teaching. He is the author of the novellas Tacos in Chicago and Convalesce, published in Day One Magazine, and his short fiction won Epiphany Magazine’s 2015 contest. He is currently at work on a novel based in colonial Peru, and he is editing a collection of stories by Burmese writers.
—Art by So-Ghislaine