Writing The
Water Door Magician has been challenging in a way that writing the other
books haven't. Usually I write about people who could be real and the real
things that could happen to them. But now I'm writing about a 16 year old locksmith super hero who travels to different worlds
by picking locked doors. The most normal thing about her is that she's gay.
The other day
when I was making edits, I was struggling too much in the real world to be
creative in another. I needed to get out of the house, but I knew I needed
something other than the normalcy of a coffee shop with its stuffed chairs and
students who possessed no super powers other than the ability to function on
two hours of sleep and a hang over. I needed to be outside - in a garden.
A really weird garden. Some place where when I turned a corner, I'd potentially
see a bronze monkey holding a baby smoking a cigar.
That's when it
hit me - the sculpture garden in City Park! Of course!
And so I went.
At first it seemed like a great idea. I walked into the garden like a
hitchhiker, with my backpack on and my eyes scanning for a place to go. I felt
different from all the other visitors who were there on a clear, sunny day,
touring the art and moving on. I was looking for something I could sit next to and
type away, fueled by the art's complexity and other worldliness. It made me
feel interesting, and I spent a while walking around high on my own
intellectual superiority, which I mistook for being cool.
I wasn't sure
what I was looking for. There's some great stuff out there, like the statue of
a naked lady poised on one foot, pulling back a bow and arrow. I think it's a
goddess or something. Then there's this other one I've always liked that looks
like a giant, black chess piece. It's a soldier beating a drum and it looks
menacing and vulnerable at the same time. But these things weren't calling me
to write next to them.
There's a
semicircle path lined with hedges, and a few statues only two of which I
clearly remember. One of them is a man in a coat with letters sticking out of
his back like porcupine quills and it's called, "Standing man with
radiating words." Another one is "Ruth and Naomi," two women
standing together, one with her arm around the other. On the edge of the
semi circle are two benches, back to back, and on one of them is a life-sized
plaster man sitting with his arms folded. On the other side are two plaster
women sitting next to each other. These three people look so human, like those
plaster molds you might have seen a picture of Pompeii - people caught in a
moment in time. Only the plaster Pompeii people are locked in the moment of
their deaths, whereas these three are in moments of contemplation. They look so
real, with pants that wrinkle at the waist, and arm fat.
I decided to sit
next to the man because he was facing Ruth and Naomi and the Man Radiating With
Words. He was so human looking but not human at all, which I kind
of respected him for. I opened up my laptop and began to write.
I only ended up
staying for an hour. I hadn't accounted for the other live people at the park, how they
felt about my plaster friends, and how loud they would be about it. People had
two reactions - fear and too much bravado.
The first person
to pass was a lady who looked at the women and said, "That’s too scary.”
The guy next to her said, “Oh, these things are all over the place. You get
used to 'em.” He sat next to the plaster man and said, "Hey bud, how's it going?"
and the lady laughed.
People did that
a lot with the plaster man. Men and women would sit next to him and talk to him
like they were old friends, or pretend to accidentally sit on him and say,
"Oh excuse me." One woman accused the him of groping her.
Then they'd take pictures with him. No one asked me to move and I didn't say
anything, I was just trying to write. There are probably a lot of pictures of me now, that those people will look at later and remember that weird girl who bent over her laptop and tried to ignore everyone. Which was impossible.
No one sat next
to the plaster women and called them "bud." The men who talked to
them said things like, "Hey babe, mind if I put my hand here?” And the
women who weren't too afraid to sit next to them or touch them accused them of
being bitches or sluts.
And really,
that's what made me go sit somewhere else. The sexual harassment of plaster
women actually began to make me feel sick. I know that they're not real and
they don't have feelings, and honestly if I saw someone joking around like that
in passing I might have laughed too. But after an hour of a variation on the
same joke it became disturbing. This is what people will say to someone who
can’t move or talk back. This was unbridled human social behavior and it was just mean.
So I went to a
coffee shop. It was loud there too, but if anyone was harassing each other it
wasn't obvious. There was this one weird, older lady who was giving bizarre
life advice to a woman who seemed to be in her early twenties. Older lady was making
way to many hand gestures and her blond, gray-streaked hair was falling out
of the ponytail on top of her head with every wild jerk. She told her, “Your resistance gets photo transparent.”
I wrote it down because I didn't
know what that meant. The young woman she was talking to
nodded as if she got it and I wondered if she really did, and if she thought
that the loud lady was just as bizarre as I thought she was. I imagined the three of us as plaster people, frozen as we were, Loud Lady with her hair falling and her hands in the air, Nodding Lady leaning forward to listen, and me looking up from my laptop at the two of them.
I wanted to go over to the young woman and tell
her how weird everybody is, really. "These things are all over the
place," I'd say. "You get used to 'em."
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