Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles Read online

  CHAPTER 5: TWO SPECIAL STORIES BENEATH A BLUSHING BULB

  There were no ready cures when it came to Nathaniel’s numbness. Through the years, and throughout the Generations, Nathaniel had encountered heartache; his loss of Evangeline being the forerunner plus other character-corrupting regrets, pitiful personal insecurities and unforeseen unfriendly occurrences. He lugged these feelings around him like bronze medallions won in an imprisoning tournament for so long that, over time, Nathaniel gradually adapted to the deadness they presented. He polished the figurative “bronze” with a mixture of two things: keeping to himself while submissively assigning envelopes to postboxes and abetting his seclusion by cooking in his concealed kitchen. Nathaniel grew so accustomed to distancing himself from the world, and keeping himself out of menial interactions with people, that it was almost impossible to pierce his impenetrable exterior.

  *

  One of the last times Nathaniel felt any kind of emotion was in his seventh life after he repaired the Annette Slocum’s borrowed copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. He recalled spying on Annette from the tall, unkempt bushes of her front porch. He watched as the nineteen-year-old girl carried a metal bucket out to the road and, under the moonlit May evening in 1999, began the process of preparing the novel for execution. It was a warm evening with a slight breeze threading through the humid air.

  Nathaniel heard a conversation between Annette’s parents through an open window that night. It was Annette’s father who spoke, in which he said to his wife “Just because she won’t talk to you as she does to me doesn’t mean she won’t open up eventually. She’s a remarkable girl, honey. I just wish you could see the potential that I see.”

  During this conversation, Annette stuffed a few leaves and broken pieces of tree bark in the bucket and lit a match.

  “She’s an enigma to me,” said Annette’s mother. “And I fear that, even though she has potential, she’ll never reach it due to her shyness.”

  The words of Annette’s parents were drowned out by the sound of crackling wood. Nathaniel was too invested in Annette’s moments to further listen to the parent’s conversation. Annette seemed completely focused on the fire, so he crept closer to her finding the coarse bark of a hardwood tree to hide behind.

  Nathaniel was eighteen years old on this night, a year shy of Annette. He was a skinny, short fellow of 5’5”. His hair was blonde and parted on the right in a bowl cut. He wore round silver spectacles, a buttoned light-blue dress shirt, brown corduroy dress pants which hugged his slender mid-section and a hand-me-down pair of stuffed loafers.

  He watched Annette for several more moments. Annette held the novel to her heart and made an unspoken wish, tossing the book into the fire. She then abandoned the burning book, returning to the house where the conversation between her parents ended and most of the lights were turned off.

  Nathaniel spotted a small rectangle of orange light shining on the side lawn from Annette’s bedroom window that faced the woods in the opposite direction, which proved that Annette was still stirring. With the front porch sheltered in shadows, Nathaniel crept to the edge of the driveway. He stood listening to the sound of popping wood. As a fine glow emerged from the bucket’s rim, Nathaniel felt the same way about her as Annette’s father had. If Nathaniel had spoken to her that night, he wondered how his life, and Annette’s, would change. Nathaniel knew that the only way to properly announce himself was to personally hand her the newly repaired library book. And so, as young Nathaniel stood there, peering into the bucket while the wilting, flame-licked white pages turned brown, he felt his hopes rise.

  *

  While in front of the glass case with the library book The Hobbit in hand at present, Nathaniel flipped open the first page to find the two remaining unopened violet envelopes that the Dandelion Sisters had given to him. Though he vowed that it would be a considerable time before he would inspire with her again, the time had come nevertheless. With the second envelope in hand, Nathaniel closed the glass. His attention caught sight of Hugo’s Les Misérables. He shook his head, shut his eyes and turned from the collection of library books.

  He found Annette in her office of composed stone cathedrals. The few times he had empty-handedly passed by her door, Nathaniel noticed Annette staring up at the winsome vaults. As he stood in her office doorway with the second violet envelope in hand, Nathaniel caught her looking at something else: the glass cabinet with the ten digit combination lock that had previously resided in the Hall of Thunderstorms.

  “I see you’ve done a bit of redecorating,” Nathaniel said as he crossed to her desk. He noticed that several accompanying flourishes had been added: a blank, unmarked wheeled dry-erase board was positioned with an assortment of colored markers. One of Annette’s desk drawers was open, exposing the .45 pistol. Beneath the firearm was a manila folder fastened with a steel foldback clip.

  Annette stood from her crouched position and turned from the combination lock to Nathaniel. As she did, he looked away from the open drawer towards Annette. The wrinkles in her yellow house dress smoothed themselves out naturally.

  “I’d thought you’d forgotten about me,” she told him, spying the second violet envelope. She brushed a stray lock of loose red hair back into place behind her left ear. “Out of curiosity, Mr. Cauliflower, and not to sound ungrateful,” Annette took the envelope and studied Nathaniel, “but only one violet envelope? The other employees have already filled maybe twenty or thirty Lite-Brite boards by now. Yet here I am on my second envelope.”

  “It’s true that I’ve been busy with the other muses, leaving you without your own inspirations to delve into,” Nathaniel told her. “You must know that, until you remember who you are, or more specifically who you’ve been, I can’t, in good conscience, give you the same amount of envelopes that I give the others.”

  “Why not?” Annette asked.

  “What I need is one of the Nine Greatest Muses in history working these envelopes,” Nathaniel told her. “What I don’t need is a muse in training.”

  “For the reason that the Nine Greatest Muses are more in touch with their inner-heartstrings,” Annette thought out loud.

  “Precisely.”

  “And, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t I already show you that I have that instinct?”

  Nathaniel, evading her question, ordered to “Please open the violet envelope.”

  Annette opened the flap of the violet envelope and tipped it over an open palm. A red-colored peg tumbled out. Annette held up the peg, inspecting it in the rays of sunlight that poured through the glass openings of her office. She shook her head disapprovingly. To Nathaniel, she said “Where are you getting these colored pegs from, Mr. Cauliflower?” To the many bins filled with orange pegs that had taken up residence in her office, she asked “When am I actually going to start working on the orange ones?”

  “When you finally remember being Annette Slocum,” he responded.

  “And what if I never remember being Annette Slocum?” she asked. “What happens then?”

  He filled a cup from her water cooler and handed it to her. “Forgive me for prying,” Nathaniel said to her “but the last I heard from Management about your whereabouts, you were living the life of a humble pie maker in a self-owned bakery. What’s with the handgun?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Annette told him, bringing the cup to her lips. “It seems as if we both have questions we want the other to answer but we both leave the other person’s questions unanswered.”

  The peg was inserted. She drank the contents of the cup. Nathaniel also took a drink from the water cooler. Together they waited the few brief seconds before the office folded and unfolded. There came a disheveled discordance of falling nails, screws and the dropping of aged planks of wood which diversified with an explosive descant of giant, iridescent stars erupting amidst a placid nighttime sky. Proudly expanding Supernovas and spinning vortexes of a woodcrafter’s worst daydream converged onto a single landscape:
an attic smothered in fatalistic blackness where stars twinkled meekly outside of a tiny, half-frosted window.

  A memory brushed over Nathaniel in the darkness. He took a few deep intakes of breath hoping that, by doing so, he could stop the memory from resurfacing. For a moment he was successful but then came Annette’s words:

  “There has to be a light switch or chain somewhere. Ah! Here we are!”

  When she grabbed a nearby chain and said these words, Nathaniel’s pulse quickened. He could no longer feel his legs beneath him. The light came on, ushering forth the memory he tried so urgently to conceal.

  *

  The yellow artificial light of the stone root cellar was switched on with the click of the chain. Eighteen-year-old Nathaniel, in his seventh life, entered the musty room by way of a heavy wooden door, which he quietly latched. His shoes sounded heavily on the stone steps as he hurriedly descended to the ground floor with the metal bucket of ashes in hand. There were jars on shelves that contained olives, green beans, corn, tomatoes and other stored vegetables. There was also a small wooden table and a single chair stationed in the center of his workshop.

  Nathaniel set the bucket down on the table with as much care as setting down a wet, freshly-glued model airplane. He swept his silver glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and sat in the chair. With his eyes level to the table, Nathaniel slowly tilted the bucket until the ashes, little by little, formed a temporary mountain on his desk. He then set the empty bucket onto the floor by his feet. With vigilant eyes and cautious hands, Nathaniel began the process of repairing Annette’s library copy of Les Misérables.

  To anyone else, the task may seem unworkable. To Nathaniel, he had been told at age eight by an unknown stranger whom he had called his “muse,” that he was capable of such unattainable goals. As he began the initial work, he acutely remembered the conversation with his muse:

  “How do you do it?” His muse had asked of him when he had been a younger lad.

  “Do what?” Eight-year-old Nathaniel had asked.

  “Repair the books,” the muse had clarified. From Nathaniel’s height, the plain-looking, thirty-something woman in the yellow house dress had towered over him. His eyesight had not been the best, but he could tell she had a slender build.

  “Oh, that . . .” he had told her, dismissively shrugging his shoulders. “I dunno. Just sort of happens, I guess.”

  “What sort of tools do you use?” she had then asked.

  “Tools?”

  “You . . . don’t use tools?”

  Nathaniel had shaken his head.

  “Then how does it happen? How do you take a library book that looks like this . . . and turn it into something else?”

  Again, young Nathaniel had shrugged his shoulders.

  “Look,” had said his muse, “there isn’t much time, so I need to make this quick.” The muse had paused here, and then announced: “Management sent me here to inspire you . . .”

  “Inspire me?” Nathaniel had been confused. “Management?”

  “If I inspire you, will you show me how you do it?”

  “I don’t know if I can. It’s only happened once before.”

  “Once before?”

  Nathaniel had nodded his head.

  “How?” his muse had asked, coming down to his level. “What happened?”

  “Well, there I was…”

  “Yes?”

  “Setting a small sailboat out to sea in the pond by our house,” Nathaniel had continued, stroking the pages of young Annette’s copy of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Nathaniel had gone on to explain that, a ways down the current he had found a single leather-bound volume from an encyclopedia. Damaged by the water, the ink on its pages had turned blotchy. The pages had the weight of water-logged rags. Where it had come from, Nathaniel hadn’t been sure, but as he sat there watching the small sailboat drift along the water’s surface, he flipped through the pages of the book. Nathaniel had fallen quiet, fearing that he said too much to his muse.

  “What happened then?” his muse had asked him.

  “And that’s when they arrived.”

  “Who?”

  “The Sisters.”

  “Come again?”

  “They had this tent, you see. And it floated on the water like it was on its own little island. But it wasn’t on any island. The tent sat on the water. And there was this sign that said ‘Admittance: three dandelions.’”

  Nathaniel had been almost certain that his muse’s face, as she had stood upright now, went pale.

  “There was a small patch of dandelions where I was standing. I swear they weren’t there before.”

  “And what did ‘the Sisters’ do for you? What did you pay them for?”

  “They told me I had the ability to repair things, especially things like the book I found in the water. And I was instructed to bring it home and repair it. So I did. I brought it back here,” young Nathaniel had said with a sigh, thinking that he’d gone round the bend, “set it down on the table and stroked the pages of it. Like trying to bring back to life a dead frog.”

  “A dead frog,” his muse had repeated, trying to understand.

  “And that’s when it happened,” Nathaniel had said.

  “What happened?”

  “My fingers, they began working all by themselves, it seems, like they had the Devil in them. They worked for hours, piecing it all back together . . . until finally, there it was.”

  “There it was?”

  Nathaniel had knelt to the floor where, from underneath the shelf with the jars of vegetables, an object wrapped in cloth had emerged. He had held the wrapped object to his muse, who had touched the fabric with her fingers. The single leather-bound volume from the backwoods pond had been meticulously stitched together. The letters “Sl-Sm” had been neatly scrawled on the cover and spine, labeled by a calligraphy pen. He had felt odd giving the book to her, for it had been a part of a secret that he kept to himself. By having handed it to her, it made him feel vulnerable.

  His muse had then covered it with the fabric, handing it back to Nathaniel. He had stashed it back underneath the shelves.

  “I’ve tried several times,” Nathaniel had explained. “I’ve brought back several damaged books, but it’s like the first time never happened. Trying to repair a book that’s that bad off is impossible.” Young Nathaniel had slumped in the chair, defeated. “When I saw Jonas toss the girl’s book into the street, and saw her face as it was ripped apart, I thought I’d at least try. So when the girl left the library book in her room during dinner, I opened her bedroom window and brought it back here.”

  “So here it is.”

  “Yes Ma’am . . .” Nathaniel had looked ashamedly down at the library book. For a moment he had said nothing. Then, having needed to hear a voice of reason against all this insanity, he raised his eyes up to his muse. “It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “Some people would like to think so, yes.” His muse had smiled. “But some would say that time travel is impossible too, and they are wrong, aren’t they? I’ve seen time travel. I’ve seen the books you repaired in my past. This library book, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was mine. You did it . . . honestly. It was miraculous, truly miraculous. And maybe I was meant to come here to inspire you and to encourage you to believe that even things that may seem impossible can happen.”

  “Do you really think so?” he had asked her. Nathaniel had felt excitement of promising adventures suddenly swirl within him.

  His muse had nodded.

  “I’m Nathaniel, by the way. Nathaniel J.” she had then disappeared from the root cellar, leaving him alone with his work.

  Eighteen-year-old Nathaniel, in 1999, thought of her as he repaired her copy of Jean Valjean’s adventures. For many months, as summer turned into fall, and fall crept onto the cusp of winter, Nathaniel snuck to this specific root cellar, where he originally met his muse ten years prior. The hard work in rescuing Hugo’s tome came to fruition. It was regularly reconstructed u
ntil, on one very cold evening in November, the novel looked as perfect as it had been before Annette had tossed it into the fire. He smiled at himself, knowing that the next day he would present it to her personally. On that next day, in Nathaniel’s mind, he and his muse would be reunited at last.

  He latched the root cellar door as he did every night, and faced the chilly night air. Though the stars were aplenty, there was a distinctly pure, wintery perfume in the air that warned of snow.

  A second pair of hands unlatched the root cellar door that night while Nathaniel was away. Those hands belonged to a second pair of eyes, which belonged to a person designed to thwart Nathaniel’s hopes of presenting such a newly fabricated treasure to its eagerly awaiting owner.

  *

  “Mr. Cauliflower?” Annette’s voice was distant, like a voice in the winter wind of that long ago November night in 1999. “Mr. Cauliflower . . .” Her voice wasn’t in the wind. It existed in the stark real time of Annette’s second inspiration in a stuffy, dry attic which smelled of cedar and mothballs. The buttery shine of the single light bulb displayed a typical garret with its accoutrements: a female bust on a high stand, an ancient dust-coated black sewing machine with a cast iron breakfront and foot petal, gutted ornately-made frames stacked along the spider-webbed walls and timeworn trunks affixed with rusty, calcified locks that had not seen working keys in decades.