Tea and Saucers
Aliens and Anarchists pt.6
Milton led me to the other side of the floor. Sub-umbral predators no longer stalked us. In their place, nymphs cavorted with satyrs and gossamer gowns fluttered in the wind. In stark contrast to this more classical theme, the wound man was interjected between two such scenes. Bloody but unbowed he stared at us statically, a stranger in the dynamic world spinning around him. Milton stopped in front of door with a metal four on it. The four itself was hanging from the bottom tack upside down. He was about to knock on a door when we heard a thud down the hall. “Ah, Suzy must be in her studio right now.” Milton walked down a little bit further and knocked on that door instead. A moment later, it was open.
Suzy was a fair skinned woman, though she was now red with exertion and crowned with perspiration. She had long whisps of brown hair and an agile physique. “Oh, you must be Marlow! Milton was talking about you yesterday. Always nice to have a fresh face.” She frantically wiped her hand on her pants and shook my hand. Over her shoulder, I could see some apparatus of ropes and scarves hanging from the ceiling.
I was grateful for the change of pace from Alec’s indifference. “It’s nice to meet you, too.” I smiled genuinely.
“How about we go back to my apartment and the three of us have some tea?”
Milton looked at me and I nodded. The interior of her apartment was bright and plush. The carpet was thick and chairs were padded. Alec claimed to be something of a sensualist but his room was furnished like a coffin. Suzy talked freely, perhaps a bit too freely. It was hard for me to get a chance to say much. She barraged me with small talk about the other residents and about the dances she was working on. That’s what she was, apparently. And predictably, most of the barrage went straight through me. She was probably just overexcited. I was sure that I would grow to like her plenty in the coming days. Suzy bid me come back anytime, and Milton led me off to make my last social call.
“She seemed nice,” I said awkwardly as we found our way back to the stairs.
“Suzy is terribly friendly, if a bit overexcitable, as you saw. Lovely woman though. I think you’ll find Lucielle a more balanced personality than Suzy and Alec. I think the two of you will get along quite well.”
“I hope so.” I was still feeling a bit anxious about the whole situation. I was mainly here because I had to be, not because I had some great desire to join a commune. Everyone so far seemed harmless, but some degree of peculiar. “By the way, would it be alright if I got a job, or is that against the rules?”
“I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t get something part time. Just don’t let it interfere with your art. I imagine you still need a bit of money for the time being. I have some connections, so once you establish yourself as an artist, you can make a little money that way.”
At least that sounded a bit less culty. Up the stairs we went to the next floor. “Does anyone else live on my floor?” I asked.
“Marik and his little garden are on the other side of the hall, but otherwise no.”
I nodded. “He’s not in?”
“No, he’s often gone for days at a time on research.”
“What kind of artist is he?”
“He weaves tapestries.”
“Out of hemp fibers?”
Milton laughed. “Only sometimes.”
We headed down the hall towards my last appointment. This hallway was plastered with a collage of photographs. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason at first, but as I looked over it, I could feel a quiet thread of affinity begin to make itself clear. The images were strung together as in a dream. I could tell that they were pointing at something, but what it was precisely I couldn’t make out. There were people and places and animals. Outside of buildings, there were hardly any inanimate objects though. Perhaps, the artist could tell me.
The artist, it turned out, was named Lucille. She answered the door a long moment after Milton knocked and introduced herself. Lucille was an insubstantial woman, all shadows and highlights. She ushered us in and cleared off the mess of photographs from her table so we could take a seat. Aside from the maelstrom of images, the rest of the apartment was rather muted. The furnishings were hard edged and utilitarian, favoring black and white designs. The outlines were sharp without being stark.
“So, Lucille,” I began. “Can you tell me about the collage outside of your door. I feel like there’s something that I’m missing. What’s the connecting thread?”
“Odd streaks of light,” she laughed. “That’s what they all have in common.”
“Oh!” I supposed that she was right- of course she was- “that’s quite clever.”
We made small talk for a while. She was more loquacious than Alec and a better listener than Suzy. I mentioned that I used to live by the Selene. Her face lit up at this.
“The Selene? That’s my favorite of the five rivers. It loves to be photographed,” she said this like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Really? Do you have some shots handy?”
Obviously, she did. She showed me some beautiful photos of the river. Under Lucille’s guidance, the river had a thousand faces. Sometimes it glowered in sullen fury and sometimes it reflected the heavens in awe. It flowed and twisted with an unbounded majesty. I knew that this majesty was part of the river itself, but it was too often invisible to the naked eye. We talked over the pictures for a few minutes. “Why don’t you come with me tomorrow when I go to take some photographs of the river?”
“That’s a great idea,” Milton nodded. “I can have you some materials by the afternoon, if you can wait that long.”
“Of course,” Lucielle nodded. “I have other things I can work on in the morning.”
I laughed a bit nervously. “I don’t think that I’ll be able to paint by tomorrow. I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing, you know.”
“That hardly matters.” Milton shook his head. “You can learn as you go along. The important thing is just that you start doing it. All you can do is supply effort. Proficiency will come of its own accord.”
It was clear that I had no escape from the coming embarrassment of tomorrow’s kindergarten level Selene painting. Perhaps I could pretend that it fell into the river. Regardless, I liked Lucielle and it would be nice to make a friend among my new neighbors. I demurred in their favor.
Soon after that, Milton took me up to see the rooftop garden, since that’s where I said I’d like to do my chores. “How comfortable are you with gardening?” he asked as we made our way up flight after flight of stairs. He was clearly working but I was huffing and puffing. I could feel myself growing red-faced. Perhaps gardening was a bad idea.
I stopped on the stair and caught my breath. I had lost count of how many flights of stairs we had gone up. “I gardened a lot as a kid. My family lived in the country when I was growing up and I kind of miss it. I loved working away on our herb garden, helping things grow under my hand.”
“Why’d you move to city?” Milton kindly stopped for me.
I shrugged. “There weren’t very many jobs there. As you can see, I’m not really built for manual labor, so farms and factories were out of the question.”
Milton nodded. After a long pause, I started moving again and we made it up the rest of the way to the roof.
The roof was large and flat, bounded by a low barrier. There was a smattering of raised beds around us, growing herbs and tomatoes it looked like. A pile of half built raised beds occupied one corner of the building. Milton chuckled. “I never got around to finishing those. I can bring you up some tools if you’d like.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.” Milton chatted with me about the garden. It seemed that I knew more about it than he did. This pleased rather than embarrassed him. He seemed convinced that he was leaving it in good hands. He had a key to one of the rooms on the floor below that he gave me, so I wouldn’t have to walk down ten flights of stairs to water the garden. Satisfied, he left me to survey my domain. The plants were doing fine and I would worry about new plants once the raised beds were built. I looked out across the view. Here the duality was even graver. On one side of me, the Edenic beauty of Mary Mont, on the other urban decay. I frowned and turned my gaze upward. In the sky, there was no such tension. There was only beautiful blue and the placid sky.
Or so I thought. From behind a cloud, the silver orb appeared. It zipped and circled around closer to me. It felt like the orb knew I was there and wanted to work its way towards me but couldn’t decide how. It moved in impossible patterns, scrawling an invisible language across the sky, that reached me in a dull drone that burrowed into my mind. The ache moved down to the base of my skull and into my jaw. My tongue burned like a glowing ingot, quenched in my mouth. Instead of steam, strange words issued forth from my lips. I thought I was about to have a seizure. I simply quivered until my spell of glossolalia came to an end. At about that time, the droning stopped and light departed. It turned and flew off behind Mary Mont. I decided that this was a good opportunity to sit and collect myself.