Muse
Ahmed sits at his favourite table in Tim Hortons, gazing across the parking lot of the mall. Beyond the lot is a road, and beyond that another parking lot stretches into the distance. It is only 10 a.m. but the lots are already congested with the enormous pick-up trucks of shoppers.
In the foreground, a woman in a pink smock stands beside a small blue car, dragging ferociously on a cigarette. On the car door, vivid pink letters spell out ‘Molly Maid.’
Ahmed’s laptop is open upon the table in front of him with the novel he is working on. Page 37 waits on the screen, its second half still unwritten, an accusatory blankness remaining after days of effort. Sartre wrote prolifically in bistros in the middle of Paris. In a Canadian suburb, Tim’s is the best that Ahmed can do.
The novel tells the story of a protagonist named John who is becalmed with his wife on a small sailboat somewhere in the Caribbean. Whenever Ahmed thinks his way into his story, a strange heaviness descends upon him. He feels the stillness of the water, the motionlessness of the boat. John’s incapacity, a paralysis imposed by humid heat, is overpowering. Ahmed feels the desolation and inexorability of it, the unbridgeable gulf between John and his wife, between John and action of any kind.
“A muse,” Ahmed says to himself. “A muse is what I need.” He is talking to himself in a suburban Tim Hortons while his novel is not getting written. Authors are entitled to be eccentric, but Ahmed knows this is not good.
“Hey, talk about coincidences. I’m here to help.”
It is the woman from the parking lot, standing by his table. She is older than he thought, a lock of golden hair peaking from under her Molly Maid cap. Her eyes are a startling blue. Her gaze is penetrating.
“I’m sorry?” he hears himself say.
“I overheard you,” she says. “I’m Angela, and I happen to be a muse.”
She smiles. It makes her beautiful and her face sympathetic, kind. Ahmed can make no sense of what is going on but can’t quite bring himself to make it stop.
“How do you do,” he answers autonomically, ingrained politeness taking over. “I’m Ahmed, and I’m pleased to meet you.”
“It’s something I’ve been doing since I graduated. But I’m just here on my cleaning break, so we need to be efficient. If you get me a double-double, medium, I’ll take a look at what you’ve got on your screen there. Then we can talk, and I’ll give you my brochure. No obligation.”
Ahmed finds himself rising from his seat, sliding the laptop over to her. He is still struggling to make sense of what is happening as his legs propel him in the direction of the ordering counter.
When he returns with the coffee, Angela is peering intently at the screen.
“My brochure gives you the practical stuff,” she says. “How we work and all that. The whole business has changed a lot over the years. Now most of us support ourselves with other jobs while we’re muses in our spare time.
“So let’s talk about your story,” she continues. “I’m going to be blunt with you because my break is short. I get the feeling of being becalmed when I read this. You’ve done that very well and it comes through strongly. But your whole first section doesn’t go anywhere. Are you writing for people who need insomnia cures or what?”
“Well, it’s an imaginative work,” Ahmed stammers. “It’s …that is, I’m trying to evoke the feeling of being becalmed here and I’ve created a protagonist who struggles with this. That’s the part that I’m working on right now.”
“Big problem, right there,” she says. “You’ve made up your protagonist. This is the kind of thing that is happening all over, and we’re completely swamped trying to put a stop to it. It’s the MFA programs. These days they’re churning out people who know how to write—some of them very well—but they don’t have anything to write about, and they think that writing fiction means they’re supposed to make things up. They’re making up protagonists and then they’re trying to make up things that happen to them. Or, in your case, I guess it’s things that don’t.”
“But Angela,” Ahmed breaks in, overcoming compulsive politeness. “This is fiction I’m writing. Fiction! Surely this is what we do in fiction. We make things up, it’s the human imagination. We imagine things, sometimes whole worlds that we can take people into. This is the magic of it and—”
“No, no, no,” she interrupts. “That’s what people have persuaded themselves they should be doing, but this is all quite recent. Muses have been tracking this from day one, and we have records. Fiction hasn’t been done that way in the past, and it isn’t how people should be writing it now, either.
“Think about it, Ahmed. Do the math. The planet has what, seven billion people on it? Seven billion and counting. More people than a human mind can comprehend, which means more perspectives, more unique experiences, more intriguing problems and dilemmas, more dimensions… We live surrounded by life, Ahmed, unfolding life! Seven billion unique lives out there, every one of them with a story to tell. It’s kind of inspiring, don’t you think?
“So why do we need to make people up? We already have enough of them. Too many, in fact. Literature will never capture more than fragments of all these lives. We are immersed in untold stories, Ahmed. Vast opportunities to enrich our awareness of each other. People sitting around trying to make things up are just a distraction. They just take us away from the understanding we could get if we only open our eyes and look around.”
“But Angela,” Ahmed can’t stop himself from interrupting. “What are you saying? What should fiction do, if authors stop trying to be creative? We might as well all be journalists and write for People magazine or something.”
“I’m not saying don’t be creative,” she responds. “I’m just saying writers need to write about what they know. How often have you heard that, Ahmed? Well, that’s what most of them have been doing, over the years. They’ve been writing about themselves, essentially, along with lives they know by empathy, but they change the names because they don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Angela, you can’t be serious. All the great writers that I can think of, they do the complete opposite of this. What about Shakespeare, with Hamlet or Julius Caesar? Or the best authors of today like…um…well, you could pick anybody. Like Margaret Atwood, or..?”
“Ahmed, we have our records. It’s pretty clear from diaries, especially Shakespeare’s dark lady Emilia’s, that Hamlet was all about his mother, basically. About 80 percent of literature is about their mothers, one way or another. Of course he couldn’t say that because of the family dynamics involved. So he punted the whole thing over into Denmark. Clever of him. Shakespeare may not have been that creative, but he was nothing if not clever. In some of the other plays, he brings his father in or some of the uncles, or sometimes it’s just thinly disguised politics.”
“But what about authors who are still alive? What about Atwood? She’s completely amazing, her range and everything…”
“For ethical and legal reasons, I can’t talk about Margaret or other living authors. And besides, Margaret is probably the exception that proves a whole bunch of rules. What I can tell you is that many of the more prolific authors today work with teams. What do you think happens to all the MFA graduates, after all? Authors don’t have to personally experience things to find out about them. Once they have an established brand, they can hire staff. This is where muses come in now, too. We help them position their writing and build their brand. Then, when they’re ready to ramp up and take things to the next level, we help with business planning and management.”
She downed half of her double-double. Ahmed had been waiting for a chance to do more than interject.
“I haven’t read your brochure, but what you are describing doesn’t fit with what I know about muses at all. It seems to be more like what a good editor might do, combined with an agent or some kind of marketing consultant maybe. But when you look at Dante and the role of Beatrice, for example, he was fascinated by her. She was his lifelong inspiration. She was the grace and beauty in his life.”
“Ahmed, you’re forgetting something. Unless they’ve left their own diaries, like Emilia, what we know about muses like Beatrice is mostly what the authors have written about them. And remember, these are fiction authors. You really can’t believe a word they say. Or write, in Dante’s case.
“Authors mostly live ordinary lives just like the rest of us. But they have to dress them up or they’d never sell any books, so that’s where we muses come in. What you think you know about the muses is what the authors have made up about them. Muses can take a lot of the credit for what they came up with. You need to take it all with a big grain of salt. The women who play the role of muses in public mostly haven’t been the real ones. They’re part of marketing, and we work very hard to find the right women for this. The public gobbles these stories up, no doubt about it.”
“But Angela, this is completely preposterous! What you’re saying is that most of the fiction we read is really autobiography, except dressed up and disguised. So really, what is left for fiction to do?”
“You just nailed it. Autobiography. That’s where the real fiction comes in. When you have someone who thinks the world needs their autobiography, that tells you something right there. You’re probably dealing with the kind of person who gives people an urgent need to refresh their drinks at parties by going on and on about themselves. So, these folks get frustrated with everybody getting thirsty whenever they start talking and, sooner or later, they want to put themselves out there in a book. This is where we muses really earn our keep. We let our imaginations run wild and make their lives interesting, but of course not interesting enough to get them into legal trouble.
“Anyway, I’m running out of time, and I really have to go. Read the brochure and think about what we’ve talked about, OK?”
“I will, but I really don’t know what to do about my writing now. I wonder if I should even be writing.”
“You’re a bright guy and you’re figuring things out fast. So let me leave you with this thought. What about not writing? It’s really what we encourage, if we think there’s any chance a client will go that route.”
“What? I don’t—”
“If you give it up, you would qualify for our diversion program—”
“Angela, who are you anyway? You’re supposed to be a muse, but now you sound like you’re trying—”
“We’ve just established this new program. It’s modelled on some of the things they’re doing in criminal justice and mental health, shifting people away from self-harm essentially. In literature, we’re paying people to stop trying to write with revenues coming from the people who do. It’s a triple win. We muses get muse credits for every diversion we do, the people who are writing face less competition, and the people we divert get some money and free up their time for something else. I can explain the details when we meet again because it’s not the kind of thing we can put into our brochure, obviously.”
“This is getting crazier and crazier! You’re saying that muses try to discourage people from writing, but they also get contracts to support the ones who do. This isn’t making sense—”
“You’d be amazed at the stories. We have our rehabilitated authors going on to successful careers in all sorts of things: construction, dentistry, you name it. They all need to have their stories, no matter what they do. They just don’t need to write them down. I’m working with a real estate broker who’s gone from getting peanuts for short stories to creating wonderful stories that help clients picture themselves in bungalows, sitting on the deck sipping lattes with birds serenading them from gorgeous overhanging trees. When her stories work, her clients rush to buy and she pulls in $20k, maybe more. Think about it Ahmed. Think. That’s all I’m saying.”
She breaks off and looks at her watch.
“Shit, I’m late now. I really have to run. Thanks for the coffee, and I’ve enjoyed meeting you. Read the brochure and give me a call. You’re an intelligent man, anybody can see that. You have real potential, and I’d love to work with you on your stories, wherever you want to take them.”
She leaves so fast that Ahmed doesn’t have a chance to respond. She exits Tim’s and dashes to her car. The Molly Maid sign quickly disappears in traffic.
Ahmed continues to look out the window, mulling over what Angela has said. Seven billion people. Seven billion! Who could even imagine the stories they could tell?
Even here, in Tim Hortons, stories were unfolding. Stories waiting to be written, or at least recognized. This was Angela’s point. Ahmed’s eyes explore the tables around him with new interest.
A small girl, perhaps four years old, sits across from her mother and toys listlessly with a half-eaten chocolate muffin. A soft drink rests in front of her. The girl is trying to get her mother’s attention. The mother’s face is lined with fatigue, and her coat is shabby. She talks on her phone, concentrating on papers in front of her.
Laughter bubbles from a nearby table. Two children are playing some kind of quiz game with their mother. The mother reacts with dramatic shock, or feigns horror, each time a child says something and she has them giggling with anticipation whenever she asks a question.
The girl watches wistfully. Her attention shifts back to her mother and anger flashes across her face. Eyeing her mother, she reaches for her soft drink and tips the container, sending a small flood across the table. It washes onto papers in front of the mother. The mother snatches the papers from the table and closes her phone.
“Selena, how could you be so goddamn clumsy?” she yells. “Shame on you! This is the last time I’m bringing you here, and now we have to go home so I can finish this.”
The girl’s face crumples.
The mother jams papers into her knapsack and jerks her daughter to her feet. She marches between the tables, pulling the girl past Ahmed on their way to the door, face rigid with frustration. The little girl is now crying. Bits of chocolate muffin cling to her chin and chocolate dribbles from her mouth. She cries with the hopeless misery of her need and the futility of what it made her do.
They don’t know what they are doing to each other, Ahmed thinks sadly. They may never know. A lifetime of not understanding each other may be ahead of them.
Angela’s advice takes on new meaning as he reflects about what he has just seen. Seven billion people. Billions of stories, waiting to be told. The stories that people don’t know about themselves are so often the important ones, the ones we really need.
Ahmed sits at his table, gazing across the parking lot. There are stories that can change lives, he tells himself. But only if there is someone who sees, someone who understands, someone who finds the words.
