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Creative Solution

Posted on May 20, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

“What’s it going to take?”

She was at that stage in the process where answering was not immediately essential.

He was keeping his distance, leaning against the wall, his fingers gripping the window sill.

It looked like a casual image to the cursory eye.

In truth he was hanging on with all he had. His fingers were already going numb as the blood raged through him. His fingertips were white. The numbness was starting to spread but he knew that there would be aggression if he let go.

He would eventually have to let go when he couldn’t feel his hands anymore.

He tried again, “What. Is. It. Going. To. Take?”

She was not looking at him. Her palms were on her knees under the table and her right leg was twitching, going fifty times a minute like the needle in a sewing machine. Her hair was hanging forward, obscuring her face. He knew her eyes would be downcast. She had held the pose before though both of them knew it was futile.

He was tired of the game, the same old game, again and again, played like another performance for the matinee crowd. He could do without it. He wished she would just shed her fears and soar. It was probably more for himself than her that he wished that.

“I asked you a question.”

“I know that!” Her eyes were angry and wet. Her lower lip was twitching and her chin was active with the chaos of a thousand miniature gremlins running helter-skelter in search of calm and an idea.

Actually, every part of her was searching for a new idea. It was hard for her and she didn’t care whether it wasn’t easy for everyone else or not. She hated that she wasn’t immediately able to throw up a million doves taking flight any time he asked her for a creative contribution. She felt like she disappointed him by not delivering on request.

His fingers were going cold. Creepers of ice were climbing up his forearms. He sometimes imagined that the bad blood, going the wrong way up a one way street would one day freeze up his heart and skewer his brain. It would be the day he got tired of making the effort to communicate with a world that wasn’t listening.

All he had to do was squeeze. Really hard.

That day hadn’t arrived yet. For the moment he was content to coax a simple answer out of her to a simple question he had asked before in a different form. They were frozen like a tableau out of a 3D postcard, if they made 3D postcards featuring angsty creative folk with theoretical problems.

He liked to think that all kinds of problems could be solved by the dreamers. In his mind the scientists were simply seeking cures for diseases they had invented in the first place. Malaria-spreading mosquitoes were put onto this planet to control the population. Man’s eradication of the early diseases was merely a parasite’s way of learning to overcome the checks and balances so that they could overrun the system. To his way of thinking cancer and AIDS and the other medical miseries that felled millions every year were created by the parasites themselves, out of their own discontent with having no other foes to vanquish except themselves.

According to his black and white worldview, the positives came about because dreamers dreamt and the negatives were by-products of entrepreneurial greed corrupting the dream. He knew what he was asking of her and so did she. It wasn’t his ass on the line, not in any real sense. She was the one who was expected to transport the bomb to the destination and push the button when the time was right. She was the one who had to be fine with her innards being ripped out by the rending of molecules until burnt flesh, crushed concrete and impossibly-bent metal fused in a bizarre sculpture of death and destruction.

He felt it was necessary to remind the parasites that nature had foreseen just such an eventuality and had responded by placing the ultimate check inside the heads of each and every one of the parasites. It took only one in ten or a hundred or a thousand or a million to see the situation for the atrocity that it was and an entire section would be vanquished.

He would be perceived as a monster if they ever linked him to her. The seventeen-year-old blinded by love.

He didn’t care.

He was an environmentalist and something had to be done.

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