It felt good to be Chantelle again, as if he was breathing air through someone else’s lungs, looking out through someone else’s eyes. She had a history, she had a life that he had invented, she was alive and she mimicked and embodied the things he’d learned, the things he’d tried to comprehend. She was both an experiment and a mask. His personas always felt more substantial than him, as if somewhere along the line he’d become nothing but a string of hollow neurones holding these other people - these non- people, creations and facets together. He was perfect but in his perfection he was capable embodying every human and yet no human at all. America had told him time and time again that she thought him less than humanity and he disagreed only on the perspective that his differences rendered him lesser rather than greater.

There had been silence. Such silence at first. Days and days where all he had done was eat enough to survive while staying in his room, moving only to attend rudimentary bodily functions. He’d taken to repetition once again, repeating physical gestures like a skipping record because it triggered some animal endorphin release in his brain and such sensations skimmed close to what he assumed it felt like to be truly alive. Meticulously neat and tiny music notation filled three notebooks, concertos and symphonies almost impossible to play and discordant in their execution.

Whenever he’d tried to find America she’d been nowhere to be found.

He’d cycled through mandatory duties in a near daze, using primarily Jan to attend them, interacting with others through the persona, all formula and no substance, saying what they wanted to hear and catering to their shallow egos. They wanted to hear someone who agreed with their vapid musings, someone to smile and nod and offer no contention and Jan was happy to do so. He got to know a few of them but they did not know him.

After the first few weeks of silence he had spent his wages on a high quality music player and gotten it adapted to the island's requirements. It was worth every penny he spent and he did not care one iota if he irritated his neighbours with the rich swell of Requiem in D or some other work of great mastery. Perhaps some facet of its delight would creep in their uncultured skull and spark something more than the trite banality they represented. But it had not wakened him, it had taken more than simply the sweet echoes of heavenly choirs to move him.

There had been several things which had converged on stirring him from his relative catatonia. One was biological because even if he was divine, he inhabited a fallible body. Where other people had libidinous requirements, his libido in the physical sense derailed and diverged into some other road. There was a sense of building urgency but not for carnality, for something deeper and more significant. Sex would not satisfy the urge to watch the light go out in some other living creature's future, it would not sate the covetous need to drink in the emotional anguish of another. And so the desire sunk its talons into him, and he watched it build, as used to its rise and fall as he was to his need to breathe or to drink. It was the very demon of human sin represented in so many of the works he enjoyed, born time and time again in him and in others, he simply possessed the capacity to watch it aspire to the heavens and fall each time. And with this sensation and entity was twined the draw to America, the void that she left in his thoughts and being. She could not see and he could not reach her to make her see. She did not understand how much she blighted his waking hours and if she did, she did not care. He was left with only the thought of her classical beauty and her defiant demeanor. If he had been an artist he would have tried to paint her, but all there was was the music to try and describe the simple contours of her body, he vivacity and - the longer he tried - the way she would look when he conquered her. The final factor was simple recovery, he was learning to wield his hands again, the brain’s malleability freeing him up to function much as he had.

And so there he was. That morning he had woken with the usual whimper of Butch in his head, the canine prepared for another day of agonizing nothingness - because boredom made him suffer so - but rather than inactivity his master had dressed, he had put on his face and nails and now the him that was him was concealed beneath it all. He looked out through the skin that was not his own and breathed the air that was not his to breathe. Chantelle was not a gorgeous woman, but nor were most women, she was dainty as he was dainty and cold as he was cold. Twitter had only steeled him further, drinking in the emotional response of others as if it were some ambrosial elixir reviving him and wrapping flesh around the hollow and brittle bones that were all he was.

He clicked on the Domine Jesu and Chantelle smiled back at him with her perfect lipstick and harmless, irritating face.

And the hollow part of him waited in anticipation.