The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [12]
Chas? A philosophy professor? She tries to picture Chas in a tweed jacket, talking about transcendentalism. She simply can’t. The man barely talks at all; he grunts. A fact that makes Javier’s reverence of him seem a little absurd—and a little touching, too, in a way.
“I’m all ears,” she says.
“OK.” He pauses to blow his nose. The blue-green silk rag disappears into his trenchcoat as quickly as it emerged. He clears his throat and begins:
“See, niche marketing is getting really sophisticated now. That’s part of it. We can subscribe to ever-more-personalized newspapers, magazines, satellite channels, clothing catalogs. We can pop in a CD-ROM and learn how to practice Sufism or Swedenborgianism or Santería. We can choose from dozens of different antidepressant and antianxiety pills, so we can even tailor our moods and perceptions to taste nowadays. With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of as well. You with me so far?”
From the twinned exertions of skating and explaining, his skin is flushed, and his eyes are bright. She thinks she can even feel the heat pulsing off his face. He has a tendency to sniffle, and dark circles under his eyes. She wonders if he’s got something contagious. But his face is sort of fascinating from this close up. She doesn’t back away.
“The way me and Chas see it,” he goes on, “we’re on the cusp of something really wonderful. A renaissance of self-creation. In the Light Age we’ll be able to totally customize our life experience—our beliefs, our rituals, our tribes, our whole personal mythology—and we’ll choose everything that makes us who we are from a vast array of choices. The last barrier is our persistent irony, which fills us with doubt about the validity of our relative truths.”
“Our ‘irony’?” she asks.
He nods, his grown man’s face as open and earnest as a child’s. Apparently he himself has transcended this last barrier of which he speaks. She can’t help smirking at the thought, and in turn his expression changes to one of confusion and possibly even hurt.
“What?” he asks.
She begins to apologize, but suddenly his attention is elsewhere. She tracks his gaze and discovers a dark-haired woman halfway down the block, sitting on her haunches and peering down through a subway grate. The woman wears an off-white cotton top and black jeans, which separate to reveal two vertebrae of her pale lower back as she bends closer to the sidewalk. Meanwhile, a bike messenger with a three-day beard and a heavy pack is pedaling vigorously up the street toward her. He slows, and the woman cranes her head and gives him a plaintive look, but he passes her without stopping. The woman watches him go by, then stands and wanders off, gazing up disconsolately at the canyon of glass and steel.
When the woman is out of sight, Javier skates over to the grate and drops to his knees. Ursula follows him over, holding his shoulder for balance as she bends down to gaze with him at what the woman lost: a pearl earring, sitting on a bed of dust and cigarette butts on a ledge five or six feet below. Without a word, Javier gets to his feet, skates to a nearby stoop, sits down, and takes a sketchbook and a box of colored pencils from his satchel.
“That cream top was all wrong,” he mutters when Ursula sits down next to him. “With those jeans it made her look so stark and abject.”
He seems genuinely upset and intently begins designing a new outfit for the woman, explaining how it would stand up to the dramatic shafts of urban daylight and the sidewalk’s glare. He gives the woman a purple Indian-print silk tunic with gold embroidery around the collar and sleeves. He gives her a pair of red capri pants. He accessorizes her with a Chinese drawstring hip pouch, red flats, and a