The Genius
“But we are special!”
They stood hand in hand, chins raised, brows thrown back in mad proud defiance and resolve, their clothes and hair disheveled and untrimmed but their eyes gleaming with the glory of madness.
“We are special!” they repeated, shouting. “Our insanity makes us who we are! Our madness gives us beauty! It allows us to create! It is us! It is our lives!”
“No!” bellowed the crowd together, their voices seething and growing, crawling up and over one another until they formed a giant single beast, heaving itself forward, intent on ripping the two to wasted oblivion.
“No!” the crowd roared again, “it is a lie! Your insanity does not allow you to be who you are; it entraps you! You are imprisoned by a slight chemical imbalance in your brain and you think it is you but it is not. It is preventing you from truly seeing yourself, it is preventing you from being like us, being one of us, and we can fix that! We have a pill! Take it three times a day and rejoin us — take your proper place in history among our ranks and reject the itching, crawling, running defect inside of you that is driving you to embrace a reality that is not there. It is not real, it simply cannot be! What hubris to believe that the world as you see it is more real than the reality that all of us know! What foolish pride! Put aside your childish ways and be welcomed back into the fold and you will no longer have to be damaged, you will no longer have to be alone, we will be with you!”
The two young people stood above the crowed as though they did not hear, as though they could not hear, as though nothing in this world could ever matter. Silently, they turned to face each other, and looking into each others eyes they smiled intimately, and to them no one was watching. Then together, they drew their weapons, placing the cold muzzles against their pale, smooth temples, and in one motion pulled the triggers.
The two bodies on the pedestal fell with heavy thuds to the ground, thuds that were neither sane nor insane but sadly and irrevocably mortal. They twitched a few ugly times and then lay still, a jumble of warm cells and membranes quickly turning cold in a welling pool of red.
After a few shocked gasps, the crowed filed out, shaking their heads in hushed mock-sadness, shuffling back to their jobs and their subways and their grab-and-go lunches. They would soon forget the two young people who claimed they were special. The two were dead and therefore no longer relevant to the living. Life was best lived without looking back.
The bodies lay alone on the pedestal, clean up workers clumping about them like sad ghosts, there, but not really in the same reality as the bodies. What these gloves and mops could not see, and what the crowd failed to notice, was the barely visible shimmer of a Genius that rose quietly from the still bodies and slithered out the air conditioning duct, back to the basement on the other side of town, back through the locked doors to the room full of paintings and films and photographs, to the stacks of poetry and sculptures and collections of words and shapes from which it came. There it would wait, surrounded by things equal parts beauty and madness, for another mind in which to make its home, another foolish soul through which the Genius could bring Art into the world.
Words by Lindsey Saletta
