Genital Grinder

by Ryan Harding

  The final seconds of December didn’t tick by so much as wind down, and it had to cross everyone’s mind that maybe we were spinning on the axis of a global tomb. We were privileged to be the children of millennial paranoia, and we dutifully watched the skies and waited for the great infernos.

  Nothing happened.

  “Ah . . . knew it all along” rapidly replaced the more uneasy sentiment of “We may be dicked” from twenty-four hours before. No one has ever been as disappointed as I was when I found myself earthbound at 12:01 a.m. I was so numb you could have performed open heart surgery on me without anesthesia. I’d wanted total death for everyone and everything, the entire creation laid in ashes. No great advances in humanity, no new breakthrough by which to measure our unremarkable evolution, no more accolades for reinventing the wheel. This wasn’t an idle hope for me. I’d felt it, like a pregnant woman feeling her baby kicking; a glorious certainty.

  It was in the trepidation we all felt standing in line at the post office, watching those digital clocks with the red numbers running backward (310 DAYS 17 HOURS 26 MINUTES 32 SECONDS . . . 31 SECONDS . . . 30 SECONDS . . . until 2000). The smiles were too long, the laughter too forced, the desperate glances too apparent. The cancer was awake in us all, and nothing was benign anymore. . . . But nothing happened.

  The heavens did not open, and renegade angels did not begin tear-assing through the skies to lay waste with fire and brimstone. Extraterrestrials didn’t glide in on flying saucers and eradicate an experiment gone awry. Warheads didn’t rocket into the most populated cities and burn everyone to radioactive embers. The old people who lived below me read aloud from the Book of Revelation, as if it were an incantation to summon their lord.

  No one came. No one left. I spent most of New Year’s Day waiting for the impetus to go ahead and end it all, but like the storm of Armageddon I’d eagerly awaited throughout 1999, it never came. Perversely, the time did not feel right for even that just yet. I was resigned to continue. Supposedly a year away from inhabitable space stations and homicidal computers named HAL, we were still mastering the art of cracking skulls by the watering hole. In the interim, years passed, always with this sense that we had let a golden opportunity slip away, our best chance at world incineration forever lost.

  And what I saw was worse than I’d imagined. A new era without a substantial revelation was a sobering concept, but I wasn’t prepared for its actuality. Everyone was embracing the end of innovation. It didn’t matter to them that everything had been done before. It could be overcome, they reasoned, by exhaustive repetition. The sterility of the radio reached a new low. Lifeless three minute sound bytes were the hymns of choice in the secret praise of creative impotency. In theaters, everything was a remake, a sequel, or an adaptation of an old TV show. Books were streamlined to pull us to the end more quickly; plot and characters were incidental. The mediums we used to put our pointless lives aside were corrupted. No aesthetic and no catharsis. Even language had become infantile—phrases like the C word, N word, R word, F bomb, a watchdog society taking on the role of that kid in first grade who couldn’t wait to tell the teacher you said a bad word like “shut up.”

  Social networking, too. A world more in contact with each other than ever, and we chose to tell each other what we ordered for lunch.

  I was forced to seek solace in my work. My job had always been a somewhat amusing distraction before, but now I was asking it to carry all the weight. The endeavor was unquestionably doomed, but there was simply nowhere else to turn. I was on the outskirts of the Information Age. I wrote the text to those pamphlets you find in doctor’s offices, insurance agencies, college campuses and the like. Very inspirational stuff with titles such as First Indications of Trichomoniasis and Do You Have Ovarian Cancer? I spent forty hours a week writing condensed prophecies of suffering for people who hoped against hope their symptoms were anything but. I warned students that unprotected sex was that first step on the road to painful sensations while urinating and the ultimate failure of the immune system. My office was adorned with a sign reading DON’T BLAME THE MESSENGER.

  I developed a new fascination with my subject matter. Diseases were rather admirable. Once they realized they could be cured, they mutated. Sickness was the only source of originality anymore. The way it took control of you was essentially a form of possession. It altered your physiology and psychology, as well as how you were perceived by those around you. Your proximity became unbearable. Contagious, too, possibly; if not then, a few generations down the bloodline when the genetic remnants chose to activate, like a bomb hurled through the portal of a time machine. I wasn’t being asked to discourse on the skillful adaptation of diseases, however, and that eventually cost me my obsession. I was another cog to keep the post-1900s repetition machine rolling. Each pamphlet was more of the same: Because you failed to wear one of these or you ate too much of this or you have too little of that, you are going to feel marginal discomfort, suffer greatly, or consider contacting a lawyer about making out your last will and testament. The following procedures might increase the rather futile chances of your recovery, or prolong your pain beyond all sanity. Words like “agony” and “death” lost all meaning to me; they were just 12-point letters in a universal font on my screen.

  When I abandoned all hope and interest, Ursula came into my life. The artist who had always drawn the anatomical diagrams for the pamphlets moved on. His big break had apparently come when his highly original comic strip featuring the daily “hilarities” in the life of a nuclear family was optioned for nation-wide syndication. Our man Murphy had drawn his last rendering of fallopian tubes and sauntered over to greener pastures. He didn’t bow out with much notice, so we needed a verrucose urethra in a bad way. I think they accepted the first person to apply, and it turned out to be her. “Hello, I’m Ursula,” she said by way of introduction. She was very stiff-postured, and her handshake would have made rigor mortis envious. She gave off no genuine warmth, and I think that’s what attracted me to her. I saw myself mirrored in her lack of enthusiasm. The women I generally worked with were perky types who would probably be wowed by flowers and stuffed animals. Ursula didn’t seem the type to ally herself with them, and seemed embarrassed for them.

  I introduced myself and gave her the text for the pamphlet. I had to test her; had to know immediately. “At one point,” I said, “there was talk of using diagram templates instead of just having an artist. I don’t know what came of that.”

  Ursula showed no visible reaction. “There are too many templates already, don’t you think? Just the same sources waiting to be dressed up a little, if at all.”

  Her answer told me more than I’d been seeking. She’d echoed me even more strongly.

  “When are you going to lunch?” I asked. Things began to evolve from there. I could give a synopsis of our conversation that day and not even have to tell you who said what. The answers would have been the same for either of us.

  “What are your career goals?”

  “I have none.”

  “How do you feel about violence?”

  “Quite good.”

  “Do you foresee better things for the world in general next year?”

  “Quite the opposite.”

  And so on. We only deviated from this when I asked about her artistic talent. She said, “That’s a gray area. I think my work—what I do for myself—is becoming something very different.”

  Something stirred in me. I immediately sensed she didn’t mean “different” as in different for her. There was an uncertainty in her voice tinged with hope, like that of an astronomer who believes he has discovered a new planet. I don’t know why I was inspired at all. The bases had to have been covered, from etchings on cave walls and pyramids to portraits, landscapes, images of Hell and soup cans. From stone to canvas to hologram. What was left to be different? Collective unconscious is a rather limiting concept.

  But I was inspired, as I hadn’t been since my premonitions of 1999. I w
as no artist myself. I’d liked comics before they became less about mythologies and more about foil, gold, and holographic covers (I’d been so into The Uncanny X-Men in sixth grade that I demanded to know why adamantium wasn’t on the Periodic Table), but about the only character I could draw was one with the power of eternal invisibility. My masterpiece was a stickman rendering of Charles Whitman sniping students from the observatory tower. I felt like I had a real vision, but I wasn’t convinced that more talent would be enough to express it. I’d never considered a conduit before.

  Section II

  When I met Ursula, the signs returned almost instantly. They were like images congealing in a haze of static. Words seeping through my apartment walls from a neighbor’s stereo: I’ll make you yearn for the Apocalypse. A fragment of dialogue from the TV: There’s no tomorrow. You know why? It ain’t ever gonna get here! Cryptic abbreviations carved on walls in benches and bathrooms suggesting more than so and so was here or so and so gives a great ream: Axxon N, Z2K, EOTA.

  Something was awake under the surface of things, something with a lot more momentum than another self-proclaimed reincarnation of Christ stockpiling assault rifles or pouring Kool-Aid. Ursula knew I sensed it, but I didn’t try to express it. I wasn’t sure I could. What I did talk about was sickness and my respect for its innovation. Even this wasn’t without its merits, as I generally couldn’t talk about Hansen’s disease over pastrami sandwiches and chicken salad with anyone. Ursula would hint at new art she was excited about, but she never elaborated. I doubted she was the type who believed that talking about an incomplete project would somehow compromise it, but I didn’t press her. I didn’t want to hear I was wrong about the significance of her work—a possibility I couldn’t ignore, not after the disappointment of January 1, 2000. It wasn’t until after another New Year’s that she said, “There are some people I really think you should meet.”

  Section III

  They had a studio on Bava Lane, “they” being Ursula, Lee, Geoff, and Rebecca. This came to three more people than I ever would have guessed Ursula could work with, but there was an unmistakable synergy among them. It was more akin to the type you’d find in a back room where terrorists were hatching a bombing than the origin of substantial art, so I fit right in.

  “We all attended Kinion University,” Ursula explained. “Slightly different capacities, but somehow we got together. I had a still life course with Geoff.”

  Geoff looked like an artist, and a starving one at that. Wiry thin with long black hair and an apparent love of caffeine, judging by his inability to stay still (I bet he’d done rather poorly in the class with Ursula). He nodded at this introduction, and disappeared behind a canvas.

  Lee waited for no cue. He stepped forward with an imposing mass and a shirt with the letters EOTA. “I’m Lee,” he said. “And I shape the revelations.” One of the hands that did so swallowed mine in greeting. Behind him was something that looked like a torso in progress, which seemed strange because there didn’t appear to be any clay left to build onto it. Beside him was a human-sized structure covered with a white sheet. Rebecca did not seem to realize there was anyone else in the world, much less the studio. She sat cross-legged on a chair, poised over a notebook, scribbling furiously and then crossing out just as aggressively. “Our resident poet Rebecca,” Ursula said, gesturing. Rebecca did not acknowledge hearing her name. Ursula quietly added, “I met her in an ethics class. The professor failed her for not sleeping with him.”

  “And you passed,” Rebecca finally said, still not looking up. “Irony is an art form unto itself.”

  Rebecca had no response for this, but the scribbling grew more animated. I looked to each of them, wondering. A very unlikely assembly line of profundity. I was a step away from disenchantment when another message reached me from a CD player off in the corner—The world you see around you is just an illusion.

  I turned to Ursula. “What’s all this really about? You didn’t bring me here to preview an art exhibit.”

  “None of this is for show,” she replied stiffly. I certainly hoped not, because there wasn’t much of one to see. I’d seen the back of a canvas, a glum poet, a demented sculptor, and precious little else. Disorder prevailed from wall to wall in the debris of discarded canvases, knives, random droplets of paint, used palettes, a welder’s mask, blowtorch, scrap metal, and various odds and ends. Somehow I didn’t think the historical society would intervene if the city decided to raze the building.

  “So what’s it for?” I challenged. I wanted to know there was an objective that had never been carried out before. There had to be. I couldn’t seamlessly go back to summarizing the effects of chlamydia in fifteen hours. I wanted to leave with a purpose.

  “It’s ready,” Geoff said from behind his canvas. “I’ll show him.”

  “You’re sure he’s going to be okay?” Lee asked Ursula, meaning me. He didn’t sound overly concerned that I might not be.

  “Show him,” Ursula said.

  Geoff stepped back out from the canvas, hands shaking from either excitement or twelve cups of coffee. He approached Rebecca, who finally looked up to reveal emerald eyes that Geoff or Ursula should have been painting. He extended his vibrating hand and clenched it just above her head. There was a sound like paper tearing, and he yanked his hand aside. Where Rebecca had been sitting suddenly tore apart from the fabric of reality and fluttered to the ground. The back of the shredded scenery was an unblemished white. A foreboding black gulf had revealed above it. The edges wavered as though blown by a wind within the resulting abyss.

  Geoff knelt and picked up the fallen sheet. The bottom was still attached to the floor, every bit as real. Of course, who was to say just how much of what I was seeing did in fact exist? Geoff held up the page that moments ago had been a determined if not exactly socially adventurous poet. She was still there, but no longer mobile. To look at her you wouldn’t have known she was animated before. What I was seeing now was just a poster.

  “How do you bring her back?” I finally asked, after a heavy silence.

  “Back from where?” Lee countered. “She never existed.”

  “And I didn’t pass that ethics class,” Ursula said.

  Geoff turned his canvas where I could see it. The painting depicted an otherwise unremarkable interpretation of the near wall of the studio . . . except in the middle of it there was a black space with ripped edges.

  Section IV

  They could have brought Rebecca back, but she was only three dimensional in the visual sense. Her personality was at best two dimensional, a conglomeration of her creators’ traits: Lee’s sarcasm, Ursula’s interest in poetry, and Geoff’s relentless work ethic and revision fetish. As such, she was probably better off in whatever purgatory she’d been cast. “We call it the Golem Phenomenon,” Ursula said. “Traditionally the monster known as the golem kills the one who used magic to create it. There’s a great metaphor for the plight of the artist in that myth; so often the artist ahead of his or her time suffers for any innovation.”

  “Condemned,” Geoff agreed.

  “His value is assessed by a wide audience often incapable of objectivity.”

  “Or thought,” Lee added.

  “It’s a blasphemy in our eyes that it should be this way. Those with the need to create are basically used and discarded according to the prejudices and limitations of the only people they can show their work. We certainly weren’t looking for this to change. There didn’t seem to be any way around it. But the funny thing is that there was a way.”

  I was thinking all this philosophizing was abstract, and there were certainly no stones left unturned in abstraction. Then Lee proved me wrong.

  “Simply put, the world ended.”

  Section V

  This was never written. You are not reading this sentence. None of the following ever happened.

  Section VI

  Their theory was madness, and before January 1st of our new epoch, I never would have put any crede
nce in it. What if there wasn’t a 2000, though? No act of inhumanity could allow the proper alignments for the end process. The twentieth century saw the merciless execution of millions in war, mostly by-standers . . . then came the birth of rock ‘n roll, and everything was okay again. Maybe as long as we were being fairly inventive about our methods of mass destruction, we preserved ourselves. What if even that ran out, though? What if the repetition and stagnation of art was mirrored not only in the boring cultures it portrayed but its cutting edge science as well? What if said scientific breakthroughs were just experiments in cloning? Did it not signify something when the sum of our advances stopped being half as fantastic as the dreams of artists, and the artists’ dreams themselves stopped being all that impressive?

  Why had I really thought I would know the shape of the end? With such ambition and on such a grand scale, would it not have to be something previously unseen and unforeseen?

  Section VII

  “Think starlight,” Ursula said. “By the time it gets to us, it’s thousands of years old. Those stars could be dead, but you’d never know it to look at the night sky. We’ll think they’re alive for millennia after they’ve burnt out.”

  Lee smirked. “Now there’s a fresh metaphor for you.”

  Geoff said, “Personally, I think you’re wasting your time trying to convince him that way. The important thing is that a woman who never existed before was very alive before we ripped her from our reality like a page in a notebook. We believe this wasn’t something anyone could do before the end of the century. Something shifted in the relationship between art and its limits, maybe because it had to.”