Difficulty at the Beginning
Aliens and Anarchists Pt.7
Down on the street, I was making my way to the library. I knew there was one a short spell from here. Despite the fact that the moon loomed high in the sky, the streets were packed. There were more pedestrians on the sidewalk than I had ever seen in my life. They were like salmon returning to spawn and they were all heading directly at me. Their thousand legs rumbled as they moved to trample me. Holding to my path, I pushed forward and parted the crowd with the judicious use of elbows. They said nothing. They drove forward like lemmings and like lemmings someone of them walked straight into traffic after I knocked them off of their path. For long minutes, I jabbed ribs and avoided eye contact with the taciturn mob. I was beginning to grow tired.
I came up upon a bridge and started to cut a path across it. Traffic had come to a complete stop and the road was packed. I was breathing hard and I stumbled in the tide. I fell to the right and collided with a stationary car. I looked in the window. The vehicle was empty. I got up and forced my way back into the crowd. I made it about ten more paces before I stumbled again. This time, I was ejected to the left. I fell for a long time. I stared at the stars, looking down on me like a child who had just indifferently dropped their toy. I splashed down into the Selene.
Cold water shocked me, but that was all it did. I looked down at my billowing clothes and the bubbles rising from my mouth. Quickly, but placidly, I kicked my way to the surface and my head broke the waterline. I tried to call out but found myself mute. Well, not exactly mute. I made a strange haunting noise, but I had no tongue to make it intelligible. I swam to the banks of the river and groped for a handhold along the shore. I pulled myself out and resumed my journey.
This time, I crept through the trees. I left a trail in my wake that glistened like oil in the moonlight. Soaked to the bone and wrapped in rogue leaves, I came to the backside of the library. The library itself was a curious building. It used five massive trees as the central pillars to bear the weight of an imposing marble building. The trees themselves grew up high in to the sky until their tops dissolved into mist. I walked around to the front of the building and approached the bank vault doors. They whirred and clicked and the dials moved of their own accord before letting me inside.
The interior of the building was quiet and dark. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the shades of librarians flit between the stacks. I walked down one at random. I began pulling books off the shelf as I went. With only the barest thought, I would glance at them before chucking them over my shoulder. They were not what I was looking for. Eventually, I pulled a book from the shelf with a cover like a burning candle flame. I cracked the book open to the page that was bookmarked. It was not the page itself that I was interested in.
Marking the place was a long human tongue. I clutched for it greedily and cast the book aside. It was wet and supple and moved in my hand. The force of my excitement drove it from my grasp and it fell to the floor where it began to squirm like a slug. My first instinct was to try to stomp on it, but I resisted the impulse. In that moment’s hesitation, the creature was able to find cover under the bookshelf. I got down onto my hands and knees and searched after it. There was nothing. The whole exchange was leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
The morning drifted along slowly. I got up and Milton brought me some breakfast. I lounged around thinking about my life while he went to the store for me. I didn’t particularly feel like going out. By lunch time, he had brought back everything I had asked for and some supplies to paint with. He assured me that in the coming days he would give me some tips, but for now, I should just go out and have fun with it. Not long after he left Lucille made her presence known outside of my door.
Lucille was a small woman by anyone’s standards, but the massive camera that hung around her neck made her look almost cartoonish. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah, just give me a minute to gather everything up.” I had done nothing to get my supplies together. Partially, because Lucille was earlier than I expected; partially because I was thoroughly unenthusiastic about the whole affair. Under her gaze, I scrambled. We walked down to a car that was apparently hers and drove for a few minutes.
“Normally, I would walk, but didn’t want you to have to carry all of those supplies.”
“Yeah, it was everything I had just to get them down the stairs without breaking everything in half. I really need to get a backpack.”
Lucille giggled behind her hand. I had dropped multiple things despite the grocery bags that I was carrying them in. She had offered to help, but I declined. Lucille’s complexion shimmered in the daylight. By the time I had turned my gaze back to the road, she was parking the car by the Selene.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to help you set up?”
“No,” I laughed “I’ll figure it out on my own. I’ve already held up your photography enough as it is.” Mostly, I didn’t want her to try to show me how to paint. That would require her seeing me try to paint.
I spent the next few hours intermittently staring at the clouds and watching Lucille take photographs of the Selene. The clouds were rapid today, but she was slow and deliberate. She waded out into the water and waited for the precise moment to strike. Sometimes, I could see the exact shimmer of light that she was trying to catch. Other times, all I could do was guess what had spurred her to action. It had been two hours and I hadn’t even opened my paints. I don’t think she knew I was there. She was so totally engrossed in the river that the rest of the world seemed like an echo grown mute before it fell upon her ears. Eventually, she turned towards the shore to take a break.
She walked up to the bank to get her water bottle and approached me. “Are you thirsty?” I shook my head. “How’s it coming along? Can I see?”
I hid my dry brush from her sight. “Not yet. I’ll show you when I’m done.”
She nodded sagely. “I’ll look forward to that. Will you be ready to go in an hour?” I nodded and she made her way back to the water. I spent the next hour furiously painting. Coming back to my free artist commune apartment with a blank canvass would be a bad look. Worse than whatever monstrosity I was about to inflict on the world.
I stared at the Selene as I ham-fistedly smeared paint across the canvass. I stole glances at my work as I started each stroke but I tried to keep my attention on the river. My concentration was drawn ever deeper into the current of the river, like the victim of some displaced rusalka. I knew that colors were coming to rest on the canvass, but beyond that only my unconscious could say. Neither the Selene nor my pride would allow me to look at the work that I had fashioned. I could almost feel my hand flowing with the current as my mind babbled in time.
At the end of the hour, Lucille approached me once again. She had just dried off her feet and put her shoes back on. “Are you ready to go, Marlow?”
“Yeah, I think I’ve had enough for today.”
“How’d it turn out?” she wore an eager smile.
I chortled. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I’m sure you’ll make something you’re proud of soon. You should have seen my first pictures. I spent weeks taking pictures from so close up that you couldn’t see what I was even trying to shoot. Then I graduated to taking pictures so mundane that you would think that they had to be fake.”
We started packing everything into the car. “What made you take the shots from so close?”
Lucille giggled. “I thought that if I got close and zoomed in really close, I would see something I missed with my everyday vision.”
“Did you?”
She smiled. “Not unless you count grainy walls.”
I felt a little bit better about my painting. I looked over my shoulder as we pulled into the parking lot and saw what was clearly the river equivalent of a stick figure and the rectangular outline of buildings on the far shore. Better luck tomorrow.