Ellipses... Read online

  Ellipses...

  Sing to me, o Muse...

  Impotence would make this look like a statue's erection. He sat with a limp quill in hand, in the fading candlelight, surrounded by empty wine bottles and crumpled parchment. He was young and had dreams befitting his age: untarnished, pure, boundless. Mayhap that was the problem.

  Abortions would make this seem like healthy babes. Each one of his ideas was stillborn the moment ink touched parchment. The courageous, scarred captain of the frigate drowned in a papery sea. The young knight was stabbed in the back with a sharp quill. And his adventurous maidens were too tarnished to make it onto the virgin-white page.

  Surrender would make this seem like victory. He threw the quill down, and ink splattered. It seems that lately all he did was try to wash the black afterbirth of his failed ideas off his hands in the basin. He scrubbed and he scrubbed but the ink spots just faded, never left. With his father's money pouch he went to the tavern's common room, to replenish from the creativity well, which was nothing short of a short barrel of wine.

  The company was as to be expected: middle kids of middle families with average ambitions. This one a notary, that one a student. Here an actor, there a soldier. All doomed to a life of... a soldier or an actor, and nothing more. But the sadness was not in these people's present or future, it was in their inability to inspire. The student was not going to be the next Aristotle, the actor would not be the next Shakespeare, and the soldier would not become the next Napoleon. And speaking of Napoleon – the room raised their mugs in a salute to the Emperor. Then the door opened.

  She would make Helen of Troy look like... just Helen of Sparta. He was struck by the unearthly beauty, though all the others remained unimpressed and went on discussing the Campaign. She took off the cowl off her riding cloak and brushed drops of Paris rain from the hem of her skirt.

  "Hello, m'lady," he said paying for her cup of port. Then he asked of her name, as was customary of a young lothario wishing to glance a bosom. She said... whatever it is a maiden answers when she wishes a bosom glanced.

  This would make the Rape of the Sabine Woman seem like a frolic. Their clothes were in tatters, as if the Grande Armėe was using them for bayonet practice. They reeled from each other's kisses as if scalded. The bed, though determined to survive, cracked like the Prussian center at the Battle of Austerlitz. Laughter, moans, and cries echoed through the halls of the small tavern.

  The next weeks would make Sodom and Gomorra seem like a small tavern in Napoleonic Paris. The only rest he took was to write. Ink would barely dry before another sheet would blanket it. Long, spidery lines appeared almost as if from nowhere. They described an epic of a young, idealistic Athenian poet and his affair with the Muse. And all this time, he felt her breath on his shoulder.

  Torn between the two, he could no longer ignore one for the other, and placed a clean parchment on his lover's lower back as he took her from behind. Oily ink and oily discharge covered their thighs. Neither of his creative instruments ever worked as well as they did at that moment.

  And then, before the ink on the last page was even dry, she was gone. There was victory, surely, because he now had a thick bundle of handwritten pages that contained brilliance. All his aspirations and inspirations were now locked in those pages. This was his magnum opus.

  He called her happily to show her the finished manuscript. He finally put on some clothes and went looking for her into the common room, clutching the papers to his breast as if it was an infant. The common room was identical to what he saw the last time, except that she was nowhere to be found.

  The novel's success would make Napoleon's conquests look like sandbox victories. He became rich and bought back his family's mansion, lost to the Revolution. He was greeted by his equals as a greater. Goethe himself wrote him to duel the finer points of wordsmithing. There were even battlefield legends that one of the Marshals was saved from a Russian musket by the thickness of the tome.

  Is it a wonder then that the years that followed were the unhappiest in his life?

  The mansion fell into disarray because of his tantrums. Invitations to parlors of high society were foregone for late night stumbling into sleezy taverns where she might be, but never was. His creative instruments were dry and limp. Now he was surrounded by crumpled parchments and unsatisfied wenches.

  Nothing great ever came from under his quill again.

  This would make the end seem like the first day of creation. He was in that tavern again, where he met her. In the same room where he once composed the greatest novel of the Empire. He was drinking the same wine and crying. The only addition to this oil painting were a few gray hairs and a loaded pistol.

  In words befitting a great author, he said "Fuck it," albeit in French, and raised the pistol to his gray temple. A moment of doubt and he...