Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

Something stirred in me. I immediately sensed she didn’t mean “different” as in different for her. There was an uncertainty in her voice tinged with hope, like that of an astronomer who believes he has discovered a new planet. I don’t know why I was inspired at all. The bases had to have been covered, from etchings on cave walls and pyramids to portraits, landscapes, images of Hell and soup cans. From stone to canvas to hologram. What was left to be different? Collective unconscious is a rather limiting concept.

But I was inspired, as I hadn’t been since my premonitions of 1999. I was no artist myself. I’d liked comics before they became less about mythologies and more about foil, gold, and holographic covers (I’d been so into The Uncanny X-Men in sixth grade that I demanded to know why adamantium wasn’t on the Periodic Table), but about the only character I could draw was one with the power of eternal invisibility. My masterpiece was a stickman rendering of Charles Whitman sniping students from the observatory tower. I felt like I had a real vision, but I wasn’t convinced that more talent would be enough to express it. I’d never considered a conduit before.

Section II

When I met Ursula, the signs returned almost instantly. They were like images congealing in a haze of static. Words seeping through my apartment walls from a neighbor’s stereo: I’ll make you yearn for the Apocalypse. A fragment of dialogue from the TV: There’s no tomorrow. You know why? It ain’t ever gonna get here! Cryptic abbreviations carved on walls in benches and bathrooms suggesting more than so and so was here or so and so gives a great ream: Axxon N, Z2K, EOTA.

Something was awake under the surface of things, something with a lot more momentum than another self-proclaimed reincarnation of Christ stockpiling assault rifles or pouring Kool-Aid. Ursula knew I sensed it, but I didn’t try to express it. I wasn’t sure I could. What I did talk about was sickness and my respect for its innovation. Even this wasn’t without its merits, as I generally couldn’t talk about Hansen’s disease over pastrami sandwiches and chicken salad with anyone. Ursula would hint at new art she was excited about, but she never elaborated. I doubted she was the type who believed that talking about an incomplete project would somehow compromise it, but I didn’t press her. I didn’t want to hear I was wrong about the significance of her work—a possibility I couldn’t ignore, not after the disappointment of January 1, 2000. It wasn’t until after another New Year’s that she said, “There are some people I really think you should meet.”

Section III

They had a studio on Bava Lane, “they” being Ursula, Lee, Geoff, and Rebecca. This came to three more people than I ever would have guessed Ursula could work with, but there was an unmistakable synergy among them. It was more akin to the type you’d find in a back room where terrorists were hatching a bombing than the origin of substantial art, so I fit right in.

“We all attended Kinion University,” Ursula explained. “Slightly different capacities, but somehow we got together. I had a still life course with Geoff.”

Geoff looked like an artist, and a starving one at that. Wiry thin with long black hair and an apparent love of caffeine, judging by his inability to stay still (I bet he’d done rather poorly in the class with Ursula). He nodded at this introduction, and disappeared behind a canvas.

Lee waited for no cue. He stepped forward with an imposing mass and a shirt with the letters EOTA. “I’m Lee,” he said. “And I shape the revelations.” One of the hands that did so swallowed mine in greeting. Behind him was something that looked like a torso in progress, which seemed strange because there didn’t appear to be any clay left to build onto it. Beside him was a human-sized structure covered with a white sheet. Rebecca did not seem to realize there was anyone else in the world, much less the studio. She sat cross-legged on a chair, poised over a notebook, scribbling furiously and then crossing out just as aggressively. “Our resident poet Rebecca,” Ursula said, gesturing. Rebecca did not acknowledge hearing her name. Ursula quietly added, “I met her in an ethics class. The professor failed her for not sleeping with him.”

“And you passed,” Rebecca finally said, still not looking up. “Irony is an art form unto itself.”

Rebecca had no response for this, but the scribbling grew more animated. I looked to each of them, wondering. A very unlikely assembly line of profundity. I was a step away from disenchantment when another message reached me from a CD player off in the corner— The world you see around you is just an illusion.

I turned to Ursula. “What’s all this really about? You didn’t bring me here to preview an art exhibit.”

“None of this is for show,” she replied stiffly. I certainly hoped not, because there wasn’t much of one to see. I’d seen the back of a canvas, a glum poet, a demented sculptor, and precious little else. Disorder prevailed from wall to wall in the debris of discarded canvases, knives, random droplets of paint, used palettes, a welder’s mask, blowtorch, scrap metal, and various odds and ends. Somehow I didn’t think the historical society would intervene if the city decided to raze the building.

“So what’s it for?” I challenged. I wanted to know there was an objective that had never been carried out before. There had to be. I couldn’t seamlessly go back to summarizing the effects of chlamydia in fifteen hours. I wanted to leave with a purpose.

“It’s ready,” Geoff said from behind his canvas. “I’ll show him.”

“You’re sure he’s going to be okay?” Lee asked Ursula, meaning me. He didn’t sound overly concerned that I might not be.

“Show him,” Ursula said.

Geoff stepped back out from the canvas, hands shaking from either excitement or twelve cups of coffee. He approached Rebecca, who finally looked up to reveal emerald eyes that Geoff or Ursula should have been painting. He extended his vibrating hand and clenched it just above her head. There was a sound like paper tearing, and he yanked his hand aside. Where Rebecca had been sitting suddenly tore apart from the fabric of reality and fluttered to the ground. The back of the shredded scenery was an unblemished white. A foreboding black gulf had revealed above it. The edges wavered as though blown by a wind within the resulting abyss.

Geoff knelt and picked up the fallen sheet. The bottom was still attached to the floor, every bit as real. Of course, who was to say just how much of what I was seeing did in fact exist? Geoff held up the page that moments ago had been a determined if not exactly socially adventurous poet. She was still there, but no longer mobile. To look at her you wouldn’t have known she was animated before. What I was seeing now was just a poster.

“How do you bring her back?” I finally asked, after a heavy silence.

“Back from where?” Lee countered. “She never existed.”

“And I didn’t pass that ethics class,” Ursula said.

Geoff turned his canvas where I could see it. The painting depicted an otherwise unremarkable interpretation of the near wall of the studio . . . except in the middle of it there was a black space with ripped edges.

Section IV

They could have brought Rebecca back, but she was only three dimensional in the visual sense. Her personality was at best two dimensional, a conglomeration of her creators’ traits: Lee’s sarcasm, Ursula’s interest in poetry, and Geoff’s relentless work ethic and revision fetish. As such, she was probably better off in whatever purgatory she’d been cast. “We call it the Golem Phenomenon,” Ursula said. “Traditionally the monster known as the golem kills the one who used magic to create it. There’s a great metaphor for the plight of the artist in that myth; so often the artist ahead of his or her time suffers for any innovation.”