Anyways:
When he returned for practice a week later, David was stung by momentary disappointment as he realized the girl wasn't on the hill. The conscious aspect of his hopes dissolved as his practice began but the subconscious component lingered on, filling him with a wistfulness that he couldn't quite identify. It was only resolved and overwritten when he left the building again and noticed her on the hill, staring at her canvas – now set up on a rudimentary easel – with a hand contemplatively raised to... her chin? Looking... enigmatic, he guessed. He wasn't sure because, uh, she was wearing a Halloween mask. Some sort of wolf. This was a confusing new element in the internal battle that was once again raging inside of him, or perhaps had never stopped. David wasn't altogether sure what he thought of this development or even if it was basically appealing or unappealing, but his feet were still moving towards her so all he could do was rationalize it.
The mask was indeed some sort of wolf or dog, with black tangled hair completely covering the surface, which in turn completely covered her face. It must be hot. It must be difficult to see out of. Probably difficult to breathe out of too. There has to be some pretty legitimate reason for doing something so uncomfortable. Is she in some sort of cult or fetishist group? Too much to think about there; disregard it for now. Artistic inspiration? What, how? Not an artist; don't know how they think. Ten feet away, have to solve this mystery. Have to know what to say when you get there. That's what she wants, a good question about it. This is just a test. A test of ability. No, probably not. Too late. Three feet away. It'll have to do. Crap. No time to think of a good question.
“Hey.”
“[muffled sound]”
“What's with the mask?”
David's overwhelming feeling of personal failure upon saying that hit him in the gut like one of those old, heavy steam trains. He cleared his throat and twitched.
“[muffled sound]”
“Huh?”
She lifted the mask. Her face was red but unread by David's frantically analyzing eyes. Sweat beaded on her forehead.
Neither of them were in any sort of comfortable position.
“No reason”, she repeated, and David perceived this as an F. Maybe aim for a “See me after class.” He sat down a little bit lower on the hill, facing the sunset, and decided that, whatever happened next, she would decide it fully. His mother would be running late. He felt like he was behind on the score, but if he ran the clock out he could at least definitively lose. Maybe figure out what the rules were.
Minutes passed. She wasn't painting. A chilling thought entered David's brain: she's waiting for me to leave so she can paint unobserved. His current gambit seemed less and less likely to be able to produce any positive results.
“So do you come out here to paint in front of the sunset every day?” he asked, feeling like this question toed a delicate line between too personal and too bland.
“Sunset,” she replied, “is an all day process.”
“Hey,” the reader realized, “I know what album this story is about now.”
“Ha,” the more knowledgeable reader responded, “I realized it much earlier.”
“Sigh,” the author sighed, “why would I assume that I have two readers?”
David said nothing.
The girl stared at the canvas, pristine except for the single black line running across it. But pristine did not imply perfect, and she examined with loving familiarity all the tiny tears, deformed ridges and subtle dents. Truly a thing of beauty, and she again entertained the idea of leaving it as-is, a study of canvas. This was followed up a bitter realization of, wow, how many times have I thought about painting about the canvas I'm painting on?
“Ah,” said several million of the billions of readers, “I get it.”
“How direct,” mused some of the more embittered and envious readers, “does an allusion have to be before it's plagiarism?”
No one had an answer for anything.
The girl looked down at the mask in her hands with some hopelessness. She tried to recall the brief feeling of power and understanding that she felt last week. She tried to become God again. Tried to again have the objective of that ultimate painting, the painting of good and evil. She no longer cared if it was impossible. Still, nothing came. So where does God come from? She went back to the creation myths: if one is to become God, one must know what God knows, right? And how have people done that?
She looked at David. She didn't have any fruit, could only offer him words. Maybe it was a bad idea, she wasn't sure what she would say. Damn. Her mouth was already open. It'll have to do.
“Would you say,” she began.
David jerked his torso around to not see her and and then jerked it back in time to watch her come to a stop in front of him. He had already forgotten the first half of her sentence in his panic when the second half came with, what he assumed, was a lack of context.
“that a werewolf is inherently good or evil?” she concluded. Her voice was calm and steady, but she allowed it to display some genuine curiosity that she hoped would put him at ease.
David's mouth hung open for a second, retreated into a defensive frown that he hoped looked intelligent, jutted out his lower jaw to further drive home his serious contemplative state, and then squeezed into a side-mouth pucker, as if he was squeezing and concentrating his answer down to a refined and insightful thesis. Unfortunately, his brain had been doing absolutely nothing during this time, and when his mouth received this fact it slackened and let drop a fairly legitimate plea for time:
“Why do you want to know?”
“I'm thinking of painting some.”
He was surprised by this response, and let it show. His face having already betrayed entirely his feelings, he felt he may as well follow up:
“Werewolves? Isn't that a little...”
His tact intervened and he screwed up his face to block “cliche”; it was pointless, though, the idea was already out there.
The girl was actually somewhat impressed by this, because she, at that very second, was mentally indexing all the werewolf art and paintings she had seen and had come to the very same conclusion. And now, just as he had prompted, she was scrambling to understand exactly why she wanted to paint one and what was to separate hers from the pack, so to speak. Such synchronized questioning deserved an answer, and she gave him one:
“It really isn't. Sure, they've been done to death as a subject, but the artists are too wrapped up in the physical nature of the beast, or perhaps the torment of transformation, or the societal ramifications and the responsibilities and such. However, I feel the real interesting thing about werewolves is their morality. Now, I asked you if werewolves were evil, and I was doing so in hopes that you'd say yes.”
“I was probably going to say yes.” David blurted out, trying to be helpful and feeling very overwhelmed.
“Most people would say that, yes, I think. Because, well, he kills people, right? Kills them and eats them?”
“I'm not sure if they usually eat them.” David said, “Actually, the whole idea of usual behaviour of a fantasy creature is...”
“It definitely eats them, because the whole principle of the werewolf, or simply 'man-wolf', if you use a direct translation, is that the man looks and acts like a wolf. Or at least, that's one hypothesis. The other is that he acts like a wolf emulating a man, but my conclusion is actually the same in both cases. If it was a wolf running around a city, killing people and eating them, I doubt people would say the wolf was evil.”
“They, uh, probably would and...”
“A wolf, absent from his pack, hungry and scared, would undoubtedly kill and eat people, especially if he had the superior physical strength that his human physique would bestow and also especially if he felt threatened, which would be undoubtedly true in most metropolitan werewolf areas. It's also worth noting that werewolves are by and large businessmen types, wearing suits and such pre-transformation, and it goes without saying that said suits, if sold or never bought in the first place, could equate to money that could feed a family in the third world for years. It is in this that the werewolf illustrates the foolish and selfish nature of man during the dramatic scene where the suit is torn off and ruined in the mighty glow of the full moon.”
“Uh...”
“So the man as a human is in effect killing many more humans with his uncharitable lifestyle than he would while a wolf. The lifestyle of the wolf is beneficial for all: it kills other animals and keeps their populations in check, which in turn makes the economy of plants stable, which in turn are fed by the nutrients of the wolf's rotting corpse. All the while evolution marches on. Humans do none of this.”
“Uh”, the author felt the need to interject, “just because I'm writing this doesn't mean I believe it.”
“Um.” said David, in what could be agreement.
“But I'm getting of subject. My point is that humans are inherently evil, and nature, and wolves by extension, are inherently good, making a werewolf less evil than a person and probably no more evil than a wolf. Now, I mentioned the idea that a werewolf thinks not like a wolf but like a man and merely behaves and appears as a wolf. This is another popular theory, but it also falls in line with my argument as it shows how man is always thinking of evil but carries it out with a less direct but more devastating touch than the wolf, who would never even conceive of the horrors men can inflict on each other, much less have the tools to act them out.”
“Er...”
“Basically, I feel like the werewolf is compelling not because it is a man driven to evil deeds - because it isn't. It's a microcosm of nature rejecting the evils of mankind and returning them to innocence, and with it, bliss.”
“That's ignorance.” David said after it was clear she had finished.
She looked at him, a little annoyed at his dismissive and insulting take, and also a bit disappointed.
“How so?”
“I mean, it's 'ignorance is bliss', not 'innocence is bliss'. Not a huge difference, maybe, but, uh.”
“Oh.”
There was a bit of silence. It was almost completely dark.
“Why did you tell me all that stuff, anyways?” David said at last, standing up and brushing off his pants.
She seemed a bit embarrassed at being asked this - David thought, at least - and he was both ashamed and proud of himself. It was weird.
“Well, you seemed interested in me and what I was doing, so I thought I might as well... enlighten you.” she smiled with ironic smugness.
“What do you mean, interested?”
“You tell me.”
“Are you interested in me?”
“I don't know, it depends on if you're an interesting person.” She hoped the transitory nature of this comment would be self-evident. It wasn't. Neither of them were very good at small talk, or flirting, or deciding on if they were flirting or having small talk.
David's mother came soon after and he found himself not thinking of werewolves or his choir or his father or the school or even really the girl. He was fretting over the last thing he had said to her, and he imagined a thousand opening dialogues for their next encounter. He had said one simple sentence, the only thought he had in regards to her werewolf rambling, the larger portion of which had either sailed over his head or crashed awkwardly into it. He said to her, “You think mankind is more special than it is.” He had hopes for this question, vague hopes for some sort of distant positive resolution that he couldn't identify, the sort of hopes he had for this girl in general. He hoped that the question would make her think a bit, maybe. Maybe give them something to talk about later. It would take him a week to find out that, yes, he sort of succeeded, and during that week it was nearly all he thought about.
1 comment:
“You think mankind is more special than it is.”
Hmm hmm... Quoting somebody...?
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