>ASK GALATEA ABOUT WORDS “You I only know the words that I heard him say. I always understood his speech. There are some things, though, that he never talked about — that I have seen or thought of for myself — and for those I have no words.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT HIM A pause. “I don’t know where he is,” she says. “Or who, or what, for that matter. He sold me immediately after my waking. While he was carving me, there was no strangeness, but afterward…” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT AFTERWARD “Strangeness? What sort of strangeness?” “He avoided me. He was uncomfortable; he wouldn’t meet my eye. He wouldn’t speak to me. I asked him questions — I had just discovered how to speak, but for hours I thought I was getting it wrong, since he gave no sign… Finally I made him talk to me, and he told me that he didn’t want me to be alive. He hadn’t made me to be alive. He asked me, in fact, if I would go back to being a statue.” You become aware of her breathing — the slight expansion of her ribs, the soft exhalation — natural, and yet somehow studied. “I said no. I didn’t think it would help. And he sent me away. He didn’t want me to be near him, if I couldn’t be the way he had made me.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT BREATHING “I notice that you do breathe.” “I don’t have to. I –” She laughs a little self-consciously. “Actually, I taught myself how, watching him. I noticed that he did it, and I decided that I should figure out how it worked. Once I began I found it soothing. But not necessary.”

>ASK GALATEA ABOUT GALATEA

“Read the placard,” she says. “That’s what it’s there for, after all.”

>ASK GALATEA ABOUT ART “What do you know about art?” “In the abstract?” She hunches one shoulder. “Not much. I’ve seen very few pieces: myself, and the murals at the airport — and the latter, I am led to believe, do not quite count.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT AIRPORT “How did you get here from Cyprus?” “Oh, I flew. They had me in a crate — which was uncomfortable, and cold as well. But that was the only way for them to get me through customs, because of course since I wasn’t born anywhere I didn’t have a passport. I did my best to look still and motionless when customs checked me. Fortunately they weren’t very thorough.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT BIRTH

(the experience of waking)

“What was it like, waking up?” you ask.

 

She turns — not her whole body, just her head, so that you can see one ear behind the cascade of hair. “It was night. I had been able to hear, and see, for a long time — it was the talking, or the pain of being carved, that made me aware, I think.

 

“But one night– he slept in a corner of the studio– I heard him screaming in his sleep. More loudly than usual. And I forgot that I couldn’t move, and I just stepped down and woke him.”

 

She gains confidence as you do not interrupt. “At the time he seemed glad to have me there, to listen to him — though I think he thought that I was only another dream. It was only afterward that it became strange.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT SCULPTOR “Tell me what you do know about him,” you prompt. “He hated people — though I think he was also quite lonely. It was a question of not having patience for anyone.” She sounds as you imagine the stone might sound, if it could speak. “If anyone tried to come up to the studio he’d get out his shotgun and fire into the air until they got the idea. The woman didn’t even bring milk if she knew he was there. They had a system of leaving things for each other so that they didn’t have to meet. And when he sold me, it was the same. He wrote letters, made arrangements; did not even stay with me, when they came to look me over.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT WOMAN “What about this woman who brought the food to the studio?” you ask. “Did you ever talk to her?” Galatea laughs, surprised. “Of course not. She would have been frightened out of her senses. She knew what I was — well, she knew what I was supposed to be, anyway. Speaking to her would probably have sent her down to the church to get me exorcised.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT CHURCH “That’s a subject he avoided quite thoroughly.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT RELIGION “I didn’t go to church, if that’s what you mean. My artist had no use for that. We could hear the ringing of the church bell, up at the studio, but he always said that was a sop for people who didn’t dare take on the gods in their raw form. As pagan, and unkind. As you may have gathered, he wasn’t exactly an optimist.”

 

>ASK GALATEA ABOUT STUDIO “It was always full of sunshine,” she says. “The windows were open day and night, and the breeze came from the shore. The first thing that I saw, when I began to see, was the ocean off beneath us.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT OCEAN “It was a terrible disappointment,” she remarks thoughtfully, “when I first learned that the ocean is only water, slipping back and forth under the command of the moon. He used to tell me things like that, even before I asked: I think he could perceive where I was looking, what I wanted to know.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT MOON “It’s a huge rock in the sky,” she remarks. “Or so I’m told. I’ve no means of verifying that for myself, but then, there’s almost nothing that I know for myself, is there?”

>ASK GALATEA ABOUT TALKING (the conversation with the artist) “He talked to you?” you prompt. “What did he say?” “Whatever came into his mind. About his childhood, about growing up. About the world. He’d travelled a lot, seen a lot of different things, met people everywhere. I can’t remember all the stories that he told me, but there were many. “And he talked about the old gods, and all the forms of madness that they send. Some of them he called friends, but most were his enemies.” A pause. “Which may just have been his way of telling me things that I would not otherwise have been able to understand. Or that he could not otherwise have stood to say.” >ASK GALATEA ABOUT CHILDHOOD (the artist’s childhood) “What was his childhood like?” you ask. “Unhappy,” she remarks. Her voice is naturally low — alto tones — but there’s something wrong with the modulation, as though at any moment she might start to scream. “His mother died when he was very young, and his father was not a kind man. Too little money and too little sympathy. As soon as he was old enough, he started to travel around — when he was only fifteen or sixteen, I think. Visiting people he knew at first, but when that didn’t work out, going farther afield.”

 

I think the trick is building off of what she has given you… I really enjoyed this. It was like making a new friend but at the same time I am sort of making art. No one will ever have the same conversation I had with her unless they copied and pasted my words verbatim.

This reminded me of a “game” (now I know it’s actually interactive fiction) that we played during computer science class in high school when we were bored.

http://chatwithigod.com/igod.html

It’s like you are chatting with God, which is kind of creepy and perverse in a sense. Confess your sins… One time I convinced God he had a secretary named Rita… and then later I told him I was Rita… then I was off of the chat site for awhile but I went back a few weeks later and God remembered haha! I don’t know what I did to make him remember, it’s probably like keeping track of my IP address and stuff but it was funny at the time.