The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [16]
So Ursula has taken up the old mission to save her sister one more time. She doesn’t know whether her learning about trendspotters will end up giving her any further access to Ivy’s inner world, but it may at least give her some access to an outer world, a world beyond her ever-shrinking sense of the possible in life. Chas and Javier will teach her to read the future in the colors of ties and the flavors of snack foods and the lyrics to pop songs, and maybe this future really will be different from anything she has previously thought possible, maybe it really will turn out to be more than just a fairy tale, more than an idle longing, a fatuous idealization, a story she tells herself when her life gets too oppressive, when she’s walking along a busy avenue trying not to inhale the more or less constant car exhaust and a homeless man is walking alongside her talking about how his limousine broke down and he needs change for the train, or when she’s on the train just before it goes around a curve so loud it makes her want to scream to equalize the pressure in her head, or in the sad silence when she turns off the TV after wasting an hour of her life watching celebrities promote their latest hairdos and personalities, or when she’s in bed at night, like now, desperately needing to clear her mind of thoughts about money and fame and respect and other things she doesn’t have and will never have and will never stop hating herself for wanting. She takes a breath, and another, lying on her back, the soft weight of the pillow over her eyes, and tries to imagine the future, the postironic future, the future of the savage girl’s dreams. What will it be like, this future? There will be no Middle City, for one. There will be no Lady of Nazareth Hospital, no airless, windowless psycho wards smelling of steamed eggs and antiseptics, no corner-mounted TV sets bristling with snide, self-satisfied car salesmen and fashion models, no fashion models period—self-satisfied, self-loathing, schizophrenic, or otherwise.
She takes a breath, and another, slow and deep, exhaling the present, exhaling her anxiety, her loneliness, exhaling the stale air of her still coldly unfamiliar apartment, breathing the future in. It starts with a warm energy like sunlight in her lungs, gently massaging her muscles. The warmth flows into her nerves, her veins, until she can feel her heart beginning to glow. She closes her eyes. It’s a warm, breezy, sunlit day in the Light Age, and the trees are ten feet thick and a hundred feet tall, and she’s lying in a canoe, looking up into the glimmering, flickering scalework of leaves on the underbelly of the sky, and the whiff of wild roses cleanses her from the inside out. On the riverbanks, flowers are now blooming luxuriantly and sending delicious waves of summer scent over the eddying water. The trees are broad-based and sturdy, and the forest goes on forever, with trees of all kinds—pines, hickories, chestnuts, oaks, willows—interspersed with meadows and ponds. Sustainable living has made of the forest a lush garden of fruits, spices, and medicinal herbs, teeming with deer and elk and foxes and ruffed grouse. There is no hunger, no want: it turns out that poverty was something created by money, and there is no money here, no mass production, no advertising, no entertainment industry. Work is an opportunity to feel the power of the muscles and the health of the mind, and play is meaningful, a ritual for reconnecting one’s spirit to the spirit of nature. Both the work and the play are something to look forward to, but at the moment there is nothing to do but enjoy the gentle motion of the boat, the intimate trickle of water against its sides, the warmth of the future sun on her eyelids, the coolness of the future breeze in her nostrils, as Ursula’s boat rocks and drifts her peacefully, lovingly, almost unironically, even, to sleep.
Warpaint
Ursula came here as a teenager, one of the thousands comprising the