The Critic

Things have been pretty good for me since the aliens named me an Ambassador of Aesthetics for the human race. The gallarians invaded at the end of a big year for my career. Between the biennial buzz and the Kanye cosign, I was beginning to make the leap from critical darling to household name, and people were talking about my "meteoric ascent" right up until the first ship landed and rendered such phrases passé (we know now that descents bring far more change.)

I've heard it said that when Cook's Endeavor landed the natives couldn't even see the ship until he stepped out of it. It was apparently so far outside of their experience that their minds could not process it. I'm sure this is apocryphal, but it bears mentioning that when the gallarians landed, some people thought they were witnessing some kind of public art display, and not a genuine first contact. It turns out they were seeing both. The ships are beautiful, and intentionally so. Like opalized giant squid fossils, camouflaged for a psychedelic world.

It makes sense that the gallarians liked me. I deal in excess. My pieces glow and radiate color just like their ships. I recognize that not everyone is so lucky, though. I get to live in this beautiful house, making my art, watching experimental films from Meldar 5 and eating manna from space. I give them my sculptures and they squint their many eyes at them, scanning for signs of mankind's dignity. Meanwhile, the laypeople have to work. A race of artist's assistants.

The tin hat crowd should have known the pyramids were designed by humans. Our new friends would never have commissioned something so simple. Every single day people have to work tirelessly building these inscrutable labyrinths, tearing down their own cities for materials and fashioning them into mysterious symbols. The human party line is that they contain a hidden meaning, some insight into what makes our new leaders tick, but I've asked and I'm told it's abstract. They are nonetheless exacting, swiftly punishing any deviation from their plans.

I try to focus on the positive. I get to show them what humans are capable of doing with freedom. This might seem like a lot of pressure, but it's how I've always seen my work. They give me new metals and stones to work with and show me new techniques, but what I actually make is entirely up to me. They understand when I need to take some time away from work just to drink and wander, and they make sure I am safe to do so. As overlords go they are pretty reasonable.

They do have some opinions about what I wear though. My bubby Sophie's heart locket, for example, struck them as too sentimental and poorly designed. It has a picture of me as a little kid inside, which they find gauche. My smile is massive, and I am holding a soft serve cone like I am an Olympian and it is my torch. They offered to replace it with more beautiful jewelry from their planet, but I told them it wasn't about how it looked, only to be met by a wall of rolling eyes. I can't expect them to understand human kinship, though. They are much more like bees, if bees just wanted to make the most magnificently sophisticated honeycombs possible.

I do miss my family. Thankfully they aren't forced to work like most people, but the gallarians say their research tells them humans do their best work in solitude, so I'm only allowed one visit every two years (my new biennial.) Truth be told, I didn't see them much more than that before the invasion, but it was nice knowing I had the option. My parents are artists too, my father a poet and my mother a fiber artist, so they raised me to be independent and focus on my practice. They are proud of me, and I think my mother is fine seeing a bit less of her son if it means she gets to weave with fibers from another planet.

Not everyone shares her approval. Once, I was on one of my walks, drunk on prosecco and flanked by two 8 foot gallarian guards, Kavris and Stimp. La Brea was largely abandoned, most buildings either decimated or rebuilt to the gallarians' baffling specifications. I was passing the deformed skeleton of the corner store when I heard someone shout.

"Traitor! Kapo! We don't want you here, go back to your mansion and leave us alone." It was an old man. His clothes looked as ancient and wrinkled as he was, as if he'd worn them his whole life and just now grown into them at 90. He spat at his feet. Kavris and Stimp readied their slime rifles but I told them to stop.

"It's okay," I said. "I need people like him." They looked shocked and disgusted, and so did he. "Critics," I said. "Send someone back to make sure he has everything he needs, and bring him by once he's set up. I want to show him some of my work." They shrugged their tentacles and agreed to do as I said. I was expecting him to be happy, but instead he just sighed and started muttering to himself.

"Move to Los Angeles, they said. It's warm all year round, for your arthritis, they said. Well I did what they said, despite knowing what kind of people live here, and they left me behind as soon as things got tough. What a shanda it is. And you, you think I want your help? I've seen your work in the paper before and I have to say I am not impressed. David, now there was a statue. Not like those funny little blobs of yours."

I was thrilled. The lilting cadence of his sob story reminded me of my zaide, whose name was, coincidentally, David. More importantly, though, his casual dismissal of my sculptures as mere blobs filled me with an electricity the gallarians and their chilly, scientific reception of my work could never supply.

"Fine, don't come," I dared him. "I'm going to make sure you're safe either way. I'd say the least you could do is look at one of my new pieces, but I can't make you." "You can't, but your buddies can," he said, gesturing to the gallarians. They clicked and gurgled at each other in their native tongue. "They won't," I promised. "Anyway, the invitation is open. I think you'd give a much needed perspective." He let out another deep sigh. "Well, what else have I got to do. They don't even broadcast my stories anymore." My heart leapt.

The Gallarians teleported us back to my studio. I knew exactly what I wanted to show him. "This is a piece I made for my bubby," I said. "The working title is 'Thus Spoke Northern Oak.' She used to mail me fallen leaves from New Jersey that she had laminated. It was the closest thing I had to fall foliage as an LA kid."

"What does that have to do with this?" he said, his pre-furrowed brow resembling two bold tildes: ~~. "This looks nothing like a leaf, it's not even fall colors." The piece was a twisted up sheet of shimmering Mallosic glass, which read as turquoise and cyan to human eyes but deep autumnal reds to the Gallarians' many cones and rods. "I was imagining how a leaf might look on another planet. And it's the right color for them," I said, gesturing to my towering associates. His face went oak leaf red, and it was clear my explanation had angered him. "So you admit, it's not for your bubby, it's for them. Shame on you. Is this really the cream of the human crop?" he bleated, turning his attention to them. "Well you should be embarrassed, all this for monsters with such poor taste."

Before I could say something more to goad him on, Kavris piped in, in the preposterous mid-Atlantic accent Gallarians found most natural. "He does not make it for us. He does not make it for his bubby, as he says. He does not even make it for himself. He creates because he must, and so too must we. It is all that is, the only fact of the matter, our telos as thinking beings. What your philosophers call the will to life."

"Will to life, shmill to shmife!" shouted the man. "I have a will to watch Passions with my daughter while her children play in the yard, but she and that shlemiel husband of hers ran off so you wouldn't make her work in your godforsaken art camps. They'd come back for me, they said. I'd be safe from you because I'm too old to work, they said. Well I'm not too old to do this." His "this" hung in the air for a moment while he summoned the last iota of strength remaining in his barely 3d frame. He inhaled sharply and heaved his sliver of a body at my sculpture. To me, it looked like two leaves colliding on their descent from the tree. It was perfect. If it is an acorn's destiny to be an oak, it was my oak leaf's destiny to be shattered into a thousand pieces. Its telos. I clutched my bubby's locket and then brought my finger to my mouth and kissed it, as if the heart were a mezuzah, and I was a door newly opened.

"Yes," I shouted, "Yes! You get it. Finally someone understands," I said, meaning him alone. All I felt sure of in the world was that he had understood my piece, now pieces, but I knew I was still fundamentally naive, just a hog rooting for truffles that only a real human being like him could appreciate. This was the role I was meant to play for the gallarians, but they just stared right through my art. The old man didn't see through it, he saw into it. Like the gallarians, I find Michalangelo a bit too conventional, but I always liked his quote, something like: "the statue is already in the marble, I just have to set it free." Michelangelo had the right idea, and his disciple, the old man, was practicing what he had preached. He had set my sculpture free.

The gallarians made a sound resembling a gasp submerged in jello. "What do you mean? You worked for weeks on that piece. This is disgraceful," sputtered Stimp. "I'm not going to try to explain it to you," I said. "I can't. But this is the piece now. A collaborative effort." Stimp hissed with confusion. "No, no," said the old man. "I'm not trying to be a part of your pretentious little thing. This isn't a happening." "You're right, it's not a happening, it's already happened," I said. I felt buoyant and giddy from the prosecco, and the adrenaline, and the epiphany. For the second time in a decade I was in a completely new world. I wanted to run to the balcony and scream, as a celebration, as echolocation, as a greeting to my many distant cousins and their captors alike. Instead, I thanked the old man and the gallarians for helping me be myself.

"You're the best friends an artist could ask for," I said. The old man shook his head and Kavris clacked his mandibles. "My patrons, my critic. You're the only ones I need. Kavris, Stimp, please show our guest the rest of the studio, and let him do as he pleases. I need a moment to myself."

I walked out to the balcony and looked out at my city. The same way the dots of a Seurat become something else from afar, the seemingly random ruins of LA reveal a pattern when seen from this high. It used to look like a computer chip. Now, the gallarians have remade it, not in their image but in a new image of itself, swirling in and out of order. Or maybe Kavris is right, and it's an image of the will to life, a struggle between the urge of each amoeba to individuate and the urge of each dot to pointillize. I wondered where my urge to eat some soft serve fit into it all.

The view looked incredible, I thought, but at what cost? I was taught that it's better not to ask, if you're not the one footing the bill. Better to just enjoy it. I no longer wanted to scream. I took off my bubby's locket, and said the mourner's kaddish before throwing it as far as I could.