Still, I’m Santa Claus, right? I exist in a fairy tale, to your minds. I think you guys would really like it here and thrive. Nothing here is circumscribed. At the same time, everything is very simple, right or wrong, and Dennis wants answers. Granted, my life was set in stone, apart from minor contemporizing tweaks each decade, by whoever made me centuries ago, and there are flaws in me, such as how my powers only switch on in the realm of things that can be bought in stores, but, theoretically, I could have been anything, even God in your outlandish concept.
To you, the fairy tale’s a cheesy medium that builds physically unsound worlds that one eventually outgrows, and to me a fairy tale is city planning. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I think that since the fairy tale becomes a thing that’s available in books when it crosses over into your abodes, that makes it something I can give Dennis to give to you. Also, fairy tales aren’t Proust or even Stephen King, so, Dennis, you could write one, if, that is, you can lift your pen out of the pornographic slaughterhouse that you call prose for long enough. So you get ready to do that.
The only trick or problem is I think I’ll need to be there too. Maybe manifest myself in something that reminds you I’m your fun’s provider, even just a logo. There was obviously some reason why you humans felt the need to mediate windfalls of generosity by putting harmless Santa in the middle, and, given Dennis’s involvement, no offense, I fear if I’m not co-Svengali, he’ll launch a scary avalanche of something. Plus, okay, I’d like to watch, inconspicuously, mind you, even through peepholes masquerading as some unobtrusive bunny, but I have so much else to do here. Let me think.
The Crater
Roden was an old volcanic crater situated in an arid patch of Arizona that had been tagged “the Painted Desert” by early settlers of the area. Although the region’s coloration was perplexing, humans are impatient with the unknown, and they’re quick to dash all mysteries with names. They would rather say, for instance, “Why, that land looks painted” than be excitedly confused by it.
Take this tale itself, in which the crater I just named will be required to think like you and I and converse with similarly thinking, talking animals, and where, even in such odd and irrational surroundings wherein magic is afoot, I will make the characters want their feelings for one another to be clearly identified, or rather one of them.
Roden had been unearthed or carved or born 400,000 years ago by an eruption. It had looked its best when nothing was alive with the IQ to appreciate it other than as something to be scaled or walked around. Eventually the aging cone became its source’s barren reminiscence until an artist named James Turrell, who was famous for creating and revising structures that arrested and apprehended light for our perception, spotted it and thought, I love and disrespect this old thing so much that I’ll devote my life to molding it into my greatest artwork. And so he started barbering and adding basements and decorating it with skylights. As the years passed, the cone became his imagination’s vehicle, or like the member of a cult that looked the same from far away but had been filched of its originality or will.
One day, a prairie dog that had often used the crater’s hemmed in cauldron as a place to trap airheaded rabbits, thought to say what everything that lived or grew around it had been too polite to mention.
“I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” said the prairie dog. “There are all these tunnels and rooms and sculpted bits inside you now, and fences everywhere, and everything is locked so I can’t go inside them. It’s kind of creepy.”
“It’s not that I don’t miss the days when I just let you have the run of my exterior, but I was just a wound,” the crater said. “I suppose I still am, and I suppose I’m only someone’s puppet now, and yet I’m still inside here thinking potshot thoughts about the weather, but it’s true that I’m diminishing, and soon I’ll be a veil.”
“You’ve lost me,” said the confused prairie dog.
“Maybe I’m in love with him,” the crater said. “Sorry, by him I mean the artist who’s curtailed me. You might have seen him. White hair, older guy. He believes in me. I’m not a corpse to him, I’m like a baby. And it really feels like I’m erupting again, just intellectually rather than in goo, and in very slow motion. I think that means the artist loves me too, but I’m never sure if I’m a circumstance that lets him love himself, or if my dirt is as utilitarian as traditional artists’ paint. What do you think?”
“No clue,” said the prairie dog. “For me, for every animal I know, you were always a convenience. So, you probably still are. Sometimes humans kill creatures like me, then stuff the corpses and put the dingy shells in a museum. That happened to a friend of mine. Sometimes I wonder if that was good or bad for him. I wonder if humans really know what they’re doing. I’m too quote-unquote primitive to know, but they sure do think they know.”
“I never used to worry,” the crater said. “But now that I’m the matter of an artist’s work, I do all the time. I worry I’m a frame. I worry I’m a decoration. I worry why I worry about that. I worry if I’m loved. In many ways, I look forward to being finished off into a cool, silent shape.”
That is what the crater said. Indeed, it said much more, but that is the important part.
And the days came, and the days went, and yesterday was the last day. The final stones were laid into the artwork’s paths and tunnels, and the grubby chambers were swept blank, and people whom the crater didn’t know from Adam started walking through its body and looking at the sky through holes chiseled in its epidermis. And it was like when humans’ arteries get clogged and they have a massive stroke. The crater was paralyzed. Whatever had been alive inside the crater remained, but it was like the makings of a person in a coma, and what had been gained or lost through the interjections of the artist has nothing to do with this story.
It was in the late fall, and a Thursday, as it happens, when the intern standing guard at Roden’s entrance turned his head and thought he saw a figurative cloud or anthropoidal ball of dust materialize upon the crater’s rim.
Gradually, a uniquely outlined human colored in and shaped the haze, which wasn’t immaterial by then. Or such was the disparity of the coalescing figure that it appeared to have been magically exuded, even though the tale’s internal logic led everyone in eyesight to conclude the being’s spooky emergence was a matter of some clingy dust puff blowing from the parking lot where it had parked its car like every other visitor.
George is the name “it” was known by in the world from which he’d either driven or been plucked, and that name was kept in place here because, for all his newfound freedom, he wasn’t so different.
He was in his early teens, brown hair, shoulder-length, with blue eyes so visibly unused to his surroundings they looked compulsory to observe, like lakes that you’ve been told are bottomless. He seemed delighted by the crater, madly pushing windblown strands of hair out of his way to get a look, which was good because it and everything inside this tale were gifts to him from Dennis, whose love for George was so far-fetched that he’d decided it would take a fairy tale’s preposterous surroundings and their blessing of suspended logic to convince a reader who doesn’t want to feel that much for anyone that his love for George was realistic.
Dennis is only relevant within this story in the sense that, at this very moment, he is sitting at his laptop in an apartment in the 8th arrondissement of Paris writing it. Which is to say the less fantastic world beyond this file or paper matters not at all beyond his thoughts’ impingement.
George might have been homogenized into the fairy tale’s prevailing cuteness if not for his unusual red backpack. It wasn’t just an ill-advised aspect of his outfit, it seemed horribly alive, less belted to his shoulders than riding roughshod. At times, it looked as empty and deflated as a corpse’s ventilator, and, at others, stormy like a bag in which some monkey was imprisoned, and, at still others, tightened and balloon-esque or like what you’d get
if someone trash-compacted Santa Claus.
To the guard taking George’s ticket at the entrance, and to others of Roden’s employment who, as by-products of this fairy tale, thought nothing about weirdness, the red backpack was far less telling than it is to you. It was only notable to them in that it seemed to hold a secret, or was perhaps the squirming fetus of a separate, even mistakenly included character that Dennis had neglected to entirely finish. Truth be told, it was this story’s beating heart.
For the next few hours, George traversed the crater’s underground observatory. In the vestibules that formed the tunnels’ intersections, he stood or sat, staring up and through the apertures that monopolized each ceiling. As he watched, the views markedly transformed from simple sky chunks into optical illusions in which the sky was the ingredient, and finally into agencies that got George high on nothing but his eyesight. He felt that he was seeing light as he previously knew it but had never seen, even when his eyes were stoned. He was his eyes’ investigator, and they, internally enriched, grew beautiful, distracting every passerby who noticed him. There were even whispers that his eyes must be a facet of the artwork, perhaps hired performers. One particularly enchanted woman wondered to a friend if the young stranger’s eyes might even be transplanted nuggets of the light itself onto which his irises and pupils had been painted like the crosshairs on a target.
It was in the final vestibule that George felt the outsized presence of an older, very bearded man, who, like himself, was lingering much longer than the other tourists. He appeared to be more interested in George than in the artwork. Either that or he seemed to need to view the light’s fanfare by a more roundabout procedure, maybe like how viewers of solar eclipses must use mirrors or destroy their eyesight.
Even in the room’s vague light, George thought he recognized the man from photos he had seen of James Turrell, the crater’s artist, but he was fully cognizant that he was in a fairy tale wherein masks were indistinguishable from faces, so he tried to see him as a cryptic point of interest, knowing only that, since Dennis was controlling everything, whoever the obsessed guy was, George was not in any danger.
Eventually, George found himself outside again, sitting on the crater’s rim, very close in fact to where he had originally appeared. Near him, but not suspiciously so, sat the unusually interested and bearded man, engrossed in watching George’s face absorb the crater he was undividedly looking into and across.
“You’re James Turrell,” George said finally. “Or Santa Claus in a very light disguise. One or the other, aren’t you? Or both? I guess that’s also possible.”
“I’m actually Dennis,” said the man, “as is everything, excepting you. But, yes, I’m James Turrell as well. Dennis has mocked up my appearance, and you could say my mind is mine, but my voice is subject to his razor. If you’d like to think of me the way he wants, and forgive me for the self-absorbed comparison, I’m who I am, and he’s something like the frame through which my light is pouring. So I’m him, but I don’t consist of anything that isn’t me, is what I mean.” At that, he smiled sheepishly. “It seems I’m not an easy man to replicate. And what’s in that?” He pointed at the odd red backpack, which was wiggling a little.
“I don’t know,” George said. “I just think it needs to be here. Some kind of portal or a plug.” At that, he gave the man an almost plaintive squint. “Honestly, I hope it’s a gun. But I think it might be Santa Claus. That’s a long, depressing story—my ‘wishing it’s a gun’ thing—and I know I sound ridiculous in any case.”
“If I weren’t mostly an infection, I would probably agree with you,” said James Turrell, who nodded sagely. “So, what did you think of my work?” he added, nodding toward the entrance, or, rather, toward the sign that read entrance with an arrow underneath because the opening itself was microscopic from that distance.
“Oh, amazing, fun, very fun, trippy, mind-altering, I love it,” George said enthusiastically, but when he looked at James Turrell, the artist seemed unsatisfied. “Words aren’t my talent,” he continued. “I’m more of a soundproof kind of person. So those words I used were leaks. But what happened in me when you asked was quite intense.”
“This might be strange to say, or, perhaps, to hear,” said James Turrell, “but the reason I’ve been watching you so closely is not entirely for your beauty, although there is that, or that bonus. That’s to say, as I’ve scrutinized your eyes, I’ve felt as though I’m viewing my manipulations of the light from your perspective, and . . . wow. Given the impracticality of touring the world with you along as art, and given that we’re in a fairy tale, and that, off in the real world where we’ll live again one day, my crater has remained untouched, flaws and all, I’m drawn instead to the idea of allowing you to mess around with it, add your two cents, perfect it, or the opposite. Carte blanche. Simple as that. I’m not flirting with you, honestly, I’m not.”
George thought about the offer for a while, weighing how completely he’d been blown away and, if not or only semi-, when. “Okay,” he said finally. “Do you have any earthmoving equipment?”
Not long thereafter, George was seated in the cab of a yellow mini-excavator that was parked and rumbling on a ridge that overlooked the crater.
Since Dennis has quick-cut this fairy tale to here, it’s unclear if the excavator had been parked somewhere nearby and moved there as a gift from James Turrell, or whether it had been magically excreted by the baffling red backpack, which had suddenly revealed one of its métiers while things were paused.
For a while, James Turrell stood by the open door, watching George decide, or, to be more accurate, stare, pointedly or accidentally, through the windshield, maybe in the throes of some aesthetic formulation, or maybe wishing he had asked the artist for a gun instead and was about to kill himself, or already had, since George quite often thought he was the problem with everything.
Between George’s lengthy quiet time and the bodily dilapidation that cribbed people in their early 70s, James Turrell eventually felt defeated by himself and sat down on a nearby rock to watch things more dispassionately.
After an hour or maybe slightly more, George bounced back. He leaned close to the windshield, studying the rocky ground before him. Using the excavator’s dashboard knobs and levers, he dropped its bucket to the earth. Then, edging the serrated lip ever closer to the rim, he gradually pushed and scraped a thin covering of topsoil until it finally reached the edge and spilled into the crater’s maw, then raised the boom and checked to see if anything seemed different.
As he watched, the excavator’s cab began to rock and sway, as it might have in an earthquake that was violent enough to wobble such a heavy vehicle. More inexplicably, from deep within the long, dead cauldron, a noise began to issue. To George’s ears, it sounded not unlike a human yawn, but much louder than what a simple mouth could generate. Even the excavator’s churning mechanisms could not stifle it.
A sharp but not unpleasant fear of the unknown enveloped George, and he looked to where he’d last seen James Turrell. Turrell was sitting on a rock, still watching George. He seemed completely unperturbed by the booming tone, or even deaf to it, or even of the mind that George’s efforts had created it, so much so in any case that, upon seeing George acknowledge him, he gave an earnest thumbs-up.
Everywhere George looked, the cacti and brush were not so much as trembling, and the tourists he could see off in the distance walked as steadily as ever. He could only then conclude that the weird event was happening in his head.
By now the yawn had disarranged itself into what sounded very like the kinds of stretched-out, muddled words pronounced by someone waking up. Although the crater’s rim was not revised, or not enough to bring a massive set of lips to mind, it seemed evident to George that the crater was the noise’s author, and that it was communicating, or attempting to, or being spoken through by something human, and was being incorrectly used, if so, the way throat si
ngers do their necks.
“Can I ask you something?” the voice gradually managed to enunciate. “That is, if you can understand me. I have a feeling that you do, although I’ve never previously known a human that could hear me. Even James Turrell, my mentor, always swats the air around his ears when I say hi. Mine is a very alienated life, but I am used to it.”
George thought and thought some more. “Sure,” he said at last, “if I can do the same. Talking to an artwork of your quality is pretty huge for me.”
“Then why,” the voice asked. “Why did you do that? Why change things? And before you think my words impertinent, if you do, know I’ve asked James Turrell this question on hundreds of occasions, and, at times when he was touring and I was being doctored by the men he’d hired, I asked them. At first the question was a real one, but having been ignored by everything but my imagination, I first learned I have one, and once I had acknowledged it, it began to answer me, or I began to answer. It’s nice to ask someone who isn’t me and is not a prairie dog or rabbit. They’re like babies. So here’s the bigger question. When I was being sculpted, I felt loved. But in the months since I’ve been stilled, or maybe stunned would be more accurate, I haven’t felt that, which is strange since I’ve only been declared the prompt for love considerably more often since I died, that is, if you believe what people walking through my body say, which I feel I should.”
I Wished Page 4