A Certain Slant of Light Read Free

different voice from those of my first hosts.
       A playwright who had broken his arm was laughing with a comrade in the next hospital room, repeating the adventure that had caused his injury. I left my Knight's bedside, pulled out of the coldness that was already sucking at me, and tilted through the adjoining wall, folding my arms around this silly youth. I held him hard until I knew I was with him.
       This lad, my Playwright, was nothing like my first two hosts. He had parties in his rooms almost every night until dawn, slept until noon, wrote in bed until four, dressed and went to the the ater to work, then dined out and started the whole celebration again. I don't think he was at all aware of me. He and his friends seemed to do little else than make light of their talents. His plays made people laugh, but the only time I seemed to be influential was on certain dark mornings when he would wake after only an hour's sleep, frightened by a nightmare. I would sit at the foot of his bed and recite poems written by my Saint until he fell back into dreams. He drank too much, ate too little, and died too young and quite suddenly at one of his own parties.
       A sweet gentleman poet, who was a guest at the event, caught my Playwright as he fell, like Horatio cupping Hamlet's head in his large hand. I chose him instantly. My new host—I called him my Poet—was more susceptible to my whisperings than the pre vious one. When his mind would dry before a poem was com plete, I would take great pleasure in speaking ideas into his sleeping ear. Like Coleridge with his vision of paradise restored, he would wake the next morning and turn my straw ideas into golden lines. He fell in love unrequitedly with several other gen tlemen, some inclined toward men and some not, but he never found a mate. My Poet became a lecturer in his later years and mentored a seventeen-year-old named Brown.
       My Mr. Brown was a devoted student and wrote such passion ate stories and listened so purely to all advice, I chose him in ad vance. I could tell months beforehand that my host was going to heaven without me. I cleaved to Mr. Brown when he came to say goodbye to my Poet. Mr. E^rown was moving west to enter a uni versity three thousand miles away. I chose him partly because he loved literature so very much, but I also chose him because he had a kind heart, an honest tongue, and a clear honor and yet seemed totally unaware of the fact that he was virtuous. This made him especially appealing. I had a half memory of being fooled by a handsome smile, but Mr. Brown's face seemed a true mirror of his spirit. I felt even more attached to him than I had to the others. Perhaps that's why I called him by his name.
       I had learned the rules of my survival well during those decades—stay close to your host or risk returning to the dungeon, take what small pleasure you can from a vicarious exis tence, and try to be helpful. And I do believe that I was helpful to Mr. Brown when he was writing his novel.
       From the time he was eighteen, he would spend at least an hour a day working on his book. He kept it in a box that once held blank paper. He would sit in a park or at a table in the li brary, composing one paragraph each day. He had more than two hundred carefully handwritten pages but was still on chapter five. I would sit beside him or pace around him, watching him think. Each page was as precious as a poem. When doubts or thoughts of mundane life stayed his hand, I would try grasping his pen to urge him on, but my fingers would only pass through. I discov ered that the best way I could help him become unstuck in his writing was to place my finger on the last word he had written. This always brought his pen back to paper and a smile back to his lips. It was a tale of brothers fighting for opposing kings in a medieval setting as rich and mysterious as Xanadu.
       I longed so to talk to him about this character's name or that character's motives,