The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella (2 page)

He just liked to draw.

He liked to look at his reflection in the pool of the ruined fountain, and then draw himself from memory.

The ancient granite fountain, the old Eucalyptus trees, Mt. Tamalpais in the clouds, the magic mountain, his mother’s useless electronic keyboard, and away in the distance, the imagined city across San Francisco Bay, within sound of whose murmurings he contemplated—these were the things he loved, within these he enfolded his spirit, among these things his inner life took its course, as it blurred with the outer life and he tried to capture this blurring.

Dozens of times a day he painted these things—the magic mountain in the blue clouds—the volatility of natural phenomenon. Even the keyboard was different in each painting.

He left hundreds of drawings and watercolors of the ruined fountain, the magic mountain, the obsolescent keyboard.

The fact that he had a note-book full of such drawings drawn by himself—the fact he even had paper—leaked out through his own carelessness and injured him with the elders as well as among the young. Lost in the clouds, they said. Somehow his mother had an infinite supply in the old bunker under his house, along with pencils, pens, watercolors, oils, canvas, charcoal, and other materials.

Tony observed the droplets of condensed moisture on his suit. The thick hot fog lay on both sides of the bay. Gray-yellow streams poured over the hills. It looked like a swirling haze, he thought, wanting to draw the scene, thinking the world never stays the same.

He made pictographs, piled rocks, shaped gourds, carved and drew on bone. He had an insight that the images seemed to stand for something else! He liked the feel of the charcoal in his hands. He grasped it, rubbed it, felt its power. Sometimes he picked up fragments of metal, plastic, plaster, wood, concrete and made sculptures. He thought of garbage as a natural product of human life. Even dead body disposal interested him. Bodies were like any other garbage. Eventually he’d be thrown out with the rest to decompose somewhere.

These thoughts disturbed him. It was as if life had been turned upside down from the normal for him, but not the others. Pathology, one of the instructors said. Normal is doing the right thing. Abnormal is doing the wrong thing—and it’s pathological.

His mother was pathological. She had burrowed. She really wasn’t a good mother to him.

“Did you actually come from my own body,” she said to him more than one time.

It smelled like a swamp around them with the damp rust of the abandoned vehicles adding to the pungency. It all reeked of decay, Tony thought, looking down at the machines, wheels, frames, junk in the swampy water just below the elevated freeway.

Hands and Tony stopped near an off ramp and Tony unwrapped a loaf of bread from some leaves. It was made from, by and large, wood sorrel, one of the first plants the community had cultivated after the war. Loads of vitamin C, roughage, his mother said. Eat it and be happy.

The two sat side by side on the rusty guard rail in the middle of the swamp swarming with mosquitoes. They pulled off their hoods, and unzipped a bit.

“It’s damp,” said Hands.

Tony gazed at the loaf. He was entranced. First, a ritual as Hands took out some dried herbs. They smoked out of a bamboo pipe sharing, passing it back and forth.

We still have our opposable thumbs, Tony’s mother always said.

After several inhalations, Hands announced he felt excellent. He said let’s be cheerful and do nothing else but sit here, smoke, munch on our bread. We still have connectivity, he said. We’re not solitary, like some I know. We don’t have to be lonely individuals. My father says do not judge—just desire, and decide if your desire is reasonable. Then you’ll be fine. Be here now. Live in the moment.

Why do humans smoke, drink, Tony wondered. There’s no need to wonder, said Hands. It makes us feel secure as if nothing can happen to us; we don’t need anything else, not even anything sacred.

“I feel like pissing outside,” said Hands.

“You can’t do that,” said Tony. “You know the rules.”

They wore Tsuits. Synthetic suits that dissolved any reek and body odor by a photocatalyst and antibacterial nanomatrix shell. Every survivor had one, the
last
and perhaps greatest technological invention to take into your shelter. One that allowed you to live in a poisonous world afterwards. 

They also wore what used to be called diapers and now were known as a urine fecal collection unit (UFCU). Every so often, they visited the waste center on Throckmorton Street to empty their UFCU’s. They could also receive an antiseptic bath weekly at the facilities. This was considered important by the leaders.

Bathing was useless anyway, Tony’s mother said. Personal hygiene as we used to practice was a cultural fetish, actively promoted by those with commercial interests through marketing. Influence, thought Tony. That’s what it used to be. There’s little that can influence me. That’s one advantage of global warming, she said, we don’t have to bathe as much anymore.

When Tony was six, he remembered playing in the compound’s sandbox. Those were his earliest memories, playing in the sandbox with blue-eyed Hands, Mary, and another friend, green-eyed Inka, who spoke in a clipped trill. It was very warm. They were naked with some kind of shelter over them to keep out the sun.

He remembered his mother used to play chess with another parent. It was an innocent time. He didn’t know about the destruction and dehumanization his mother would later rave about. Later it was all Them-bad, We-good in a kind of preachy way. But later, as we aged, when our expectations had been even more diminished, it made sense.

When he was about twelve, he suddenly loved Inka. He felt a tinkling inside when he saw her. In those days, she would twitch at him, shrug a lot, put him down, and give him the cold shoulder, sometimes she even spat at him. All because he had a crush.

The children hardly ever did anything. There was little to do but play, and for Tony, to draw. There was no education but what the compound could teach you but that was very little.

Inka used to make fun of Tony.

“Why do you always make art?” She stared at him with her  green eyes showing disgust.

“I like to. It cheers me up.”

“It’s not normal. What is it for? What good is it?” she said in her clipped accent. She was descended from princesses in Punjabi, she said.  All he knew about Punjabi was his mother said they used to have lavish weddings. She said that part of the world was gone now.

“What good is
anything
you do?” he said. Those words made her cry and run off.

His mother said we were marginalized. We lived in margins. Tony didn’t understand what that meant. She said we cannibalized others. Tony didn’t understand that.

In those days, he found an artificial vagina and used it to relieve himself. He liked the feeling when he came. It felt like a gushing, like making art. His mother didn’t seem to mind as long as he did it out of her sight.

Tony looked across at Old Frisco—the Hellhole, his mother called it. Hobbesville, others called it. Everybody there used to make money, that’s how they spent their time, making money; time was money, money was time, the fools. He looked across at the city and imagined how they lived over there. The collapsed bridges cut off access. It was said once you were there you couldn’t leave. He looked across at what he imagined to be the winter festival of death, what his mother called the evil fervor of fever that destroyed us all. He wanted to see for himself.

They killed print, she said. They, or we, she said, killed culture, killed knowledge of being, publishing, the museums, the repositories of knowledge and beauty were ransacked, all reality left only on the computer, it all survives in Virtualization, but what was Virtualization, if we weren’t connected to it? It had depended on orbs in space—satellites—and we were no longer tethered to them. We were once human beings, she said.

You stupid kids don’t fucking understand. Being used to
pass
through us, we processed being. We let being be. Being spoke through us—poets and artists. We were rich in consciousness. Whatever that was, he wondered. That too was destroyed, a sad fiction, the neurologists say, she said. Even our tragic sense was now laughable.

Censorship, filtering, surveillance increased. There was no longer a distinction between democratic and authoritarian states. They imposed the Great Firewall on us. Being was denied to us. But then the Tech Terrorists took over anyway. They were now more powerful than the governments and corporations.

They used viruses to deploy denial of service attacks, takedowns, mix-ups, and finally information shaping. Advertising collapsed, and then consumer society as consumption went kaput. The Chinese finished it with their bombs. We’re the only ones left, she said. And even if there were any others, how would we or they know.

We used everything up. It was use more in my day, she said. Planned obsolesce, then use less, green, don’t use, finally scarcity.

“You think there might be zombies over there?” asked Hands.

“Zombies, no man,” said Tony. “At least we don’t have zombies. That would be too fantastic.”

“Yeah, zombies would be cool, though. We could fight them,” said Hands.

“At least we still have surprises. You have to be open to surprises,” said Tony. “Maybe there are sea monsters.” He suddenly wanted to draw one.

The landscape was an infinite dump. Maybe once it was a place, maybe it still was. It had been snuffed. At least it was no longer dangerous  the past few years. It was now stable, if that’s a place, now that the unstable forces had settled.

Perhaps the teenagers were excavating. The brain was still an excavating entity. Not only Kruger and Hansen’s brains, but also any animal’s brains. Even green slime, devoid of a central nervous system, had to excavate to find food and entertainment.

From Kruger’s earliest days, he had been an excavator. He inscribed his own tracks on the landscape, looking for stuff, marking and naming, looking for things to excavate. He liked to roam. It was safe now. No chance of encountering monsters, his mother told him. They were now on the edge, she said. Without technology, there were no more monsters. But who knew what excavation would uncover, she said, future technologies?

The teenagers were off on yet another scavenger hunt along old 101. There was no competition between the two. They were non-competitive and non-aggressive. Those were the only ones left, his mother often told Kruger. That must be part of the adaptation. You must be special.

You could always find paint and construction materials, sometimes paper, clothing from hundreds of years ago, like blue jeans, and black turtlenecks, blond wigs, Mercedes fenders, photographs, piano keys, antique furniture, computer screen glass, useless phones, fragments of printed language in different fonts, small words and phrases that used to add up to somebody’s existence. They produced a lot of trash, Kruger’s mother always said. You could see for yourself digging along 101. You even found objects still in their packaging, still usable, if it was usable, but most was not usable.

Even Kruger felt uncomfortable about this. He wanted to make
things
. His mother said
techne
was the Greek word for art. But the world that had previously existed had been a world of too many things. It had been overrun with stuff. Art somehow seemed different. And there wasn’t any of it still around.

His mother said we were an irresponsible people in an irresponsible consumptive system. We forgot impermanence. Now at least we could make peace with impermanence. Nothing is permanent or new. All of earth’s atoms were created billions of years ago by exploding stars, she told him. The War of the Annihilation was just a grain of sand on a beach. We were again simply to reorganize these bits to build our own objects and structures again, inhabit with our bodies, and finally convey meaning yet again. Nothing lasts.

Kruger looked at the vast orange sculpture garden across the water, remnants of the old bridge. Really it was a mash of junk, but he thought of it as a beautiful sculpture garden to admire.

Kruger planned to go to San Francisco somehow. That was still where it was happening with its five thousand inhabitants. An immense city. But you had to be invited as somebody useful. There he would see how good—or how bad—life could be. There he would affirm his faith in humanity, and love for life, his purpose.

His suppression of all this experience, feeling candor, surrender—hiding behind irony—passed on by his mother—and not being surprised by passion, feeling. He loved life; but life did not love him. Life had destroyed them. Aestheticism’s nuances worth more than the world, he thought.

He took a nibble of bread. It was good. He inhaled the herb. It was good. Hands was right.

As a child, Kruger experienced conflicting feelings for the people around him. He felt both superior to them in his insights and envious of their innocent vitality. Kruger sought knowledge of the world in order to come to an understanding of it and of other human beings, in order to become a part of life in service of his art. Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form, he thought. It is compassionate with the abyss—it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty, we mean . . . a return to detachment and to form. But detachment . . . and preoccupation with form lead to intoxication and desire, they may lead the noblest among us.