The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [93]
As Ursula gets off the subway and finds her way up to the daylight, her hopeful reasoning spins off into daydreaming. She pictures a day when the world has woken up and taken notice of her guerrilla campaign, a day when that campaign has proved so effective that popular attitudes have begun to change. She pictures her commercial artwork being compiled for museum retrospectives, analyzed in academic journals—the Van Urden brand of insurgency marketing, they’ll call it, the marketing that helped transform the global marketplace into a kinder, friendlier place. She has gone for it all and gotten it all: the career and the mission, the material and the spiritual rewards, the power and the love. She is sought after by intellectuals and celebrities alike, sought after for romance and artistic collaboration, for interviews and lectures and in-depth discussions about the state of the planet. Of course, in the era she pictures there will still be many battles to be fought, but through her work she will have at least provided the individual workers in the corporate world with a renewed sense of their own power—power to follow in her footsteps, to form resistance cells of their own and carry on the war until it is finally won.
It is raining lightly as she reaches Banister Park. The day has turned cold and gusty as well, and the park is practically empty, but the savage girl is right where Ursula left her, sitting at the base of Banister’s statue, with a large black garbage bag propped in a mound beside her. She has been meaning to come and visit her for a long time. She’s been wondering if the savage trend has had any effect on the girl, whether it’s done her any good—speculating, for instance, that with the recent popularity of her style she may have managed to make some friends. Indeed, Ursula has half expected to find her newly surrounded by a small tribe of urban savages. Either that or that she has moved on to some totally new style, fancying herself some other kind of creature now, a robot girl, a tall gray alien, a Trappist monk, a new source of inspiration for yet another guerrilla campaign.
But she’s still on her own, still a savage, and Ursula finds this just as comforting.
“Still just you and me,” she whispers to herself.
She picks out a relatively hidden bench, spreads out the Mademoiselle on the damp slats, and sits down on it. She takes a pair of binoculars from her purse and brings the girl into focus.
Something is wrong with the image. She adjusts the focus again.
But it isn’t the focus, it’s the girl.
It seems like some kind of rash or skin disease.
But no.
With a surge of terror Ursula realizes that the markings are deliberate: small, red, sickle-shaped scars, densely packed, all over her face, the sides of her shaven head, the length and circumference of her neck. The welts appear on her bare arms as well. A leather jerkin covers her torso, and fatigues and bands of pelt cover her legs, so Ursula can’t know how much more of her body she has mutilated. For all she knows, the scars are everywhere, and the metamorphosis is total: a pretty young woman transformed into an armored reptile of ruddy, uneven scales, nothing recognizable save her eyes, which are still unscarred, untouched, eerily calm.
Ursula lowers the binoculars. The savage girl is remote again, a solitary figure seated next to a lumpish garbage bag billowing in the misty breeze. The girl looks up, and Ursula flinches when her eyes pass over her, but if