The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [109]
The studio audience applauds, gazing at the prostitute with rapture and even, in a few cases, tears.
Fade to a Lexus commercial animated in the style of van Gogh. The car races through a forest of wildly flaying green trees and giant blue dahlias, under a yellow, pinwheeling sun. The colors clash, but the brushwork is right, and for a moment Ursula remembers that feeling she had as a kid when she looked at the painter’s sunflowers, and looked, and looked, staring them down, determined to be affected by a work of art, and for the first time in her life she was affected, and it wasn’t what she’d anticipated at all. It was so much stranger. It made her feel small and vulnerable and humble. It told her that human life was something incidental in a universe made for far greater things than us, a universe staggeringly wilder, more alien, more terrible and beautiful than we could ever understand.
In the commercial a sexy career woman in a lapis lazuli dress suit drives the car, finding private gratification in the gentle curvature of the road and the controlled power of the engine, while the car’s various technologies protect her from the roiling chaos outside. Technical animation, also in the style of van Gogh, demonstrates how the computer-assisted suspension cushions her from the precipitous hills, and how the shaded sunroof and the climate-control system shield her from the unrelenting divine sunlight, and how the custom-designed Bose stereo system insulates her from the insanity of that limitless silence. The sexy career woman drives off into the whirling, radiating sunset. It’s a happy ending, a warm, safe feeling: a beautiful woman in a beautiful car in a beautiful landscape in an ugly television set in an ugly living room in an ugly world with so little beauty to go around that it seems downright soul-killing not to take what the commercial has to offer, not to snatch up whatever beauty there is, wherever one can get it.
She gets up off her legless couch, waits for the dizziness to subside. She didn’t sleep more than an hour or two last night. After the police took the savage girl away yesterday afternoon, Ursula lingered in the park, playing with the equipment she’d left behind. There was a wineskin made from inner-tube rubber; a blowgun made from the pole of a floor lamp; darts made of pins, erasers, and feathers; and a collection of knives, pliers, needles, and thread. Ursula drank from the wineskin, blew darts at a nearby tree, whittled sticks. When midnight came and the police closed the park for the night, she carried the girl’s belongings outside the gate and bedded down in her patchwork bedroll. It was warm enough, but it stank of sweat and decay and sported a squarish patch of wiry gray fur at the bottom that was all too recognizable. When dawn came, she slung the belongings over her back and walked home and turned on the television, which she’s been watching ever since.
She heads into the kitchen and opens the door to the pantry, a room she uses not to store food or cooking supplies, of which she has virtually none, but rather to house the remnants of her former life: her art supplies, books, and slides. She reaches into a box of old sketchbooks and picks one out at random, an artifact of her high school years. She switches on the overhead light and begins turning the pages. It’s been a long time since she looked at anything she did before the onset of her triptych phase, those obsessively repeated utopias and dystopias and purgatorial middle kingdoms, and she’s surprised by how colorful and intricate these earlier pieces are. She didn’t remember them that way. She can scarcely believe there was a time—really not that long ago—when she was capable of thinking and feeling in so many hues and in so much detail. She goes through the work again more slowly, recalling the sensibility she was trying to express, a sense of the dynamic life of all things, of