Mandrake’s modus operandi usually involved inviting his patients to his own office rather than going all the way to meet them where they dwelled, but as shut-ins were difficult to draw out of where they lived for obvious reasons, the otter had decided that it would make more sense for him to make an exception in some of the more extreme cases like this one. The more self-conscious a patient was, the less likely they were to seek treatment in the first place, after all. From what the he’d heard, this would be a case that very few other therapists would’ve had what it took to be able to handle. There always had to be exceptions which confirmed the rule, and sometimes you had to push when you wanted to pull.
When Diaz first saw Mandrake walk into his museum, his reaction was not a positive one, to say the least. His chiseled leonine features were covered with dismay as his mind became overcome with self-loathing at the thought of the horror he believed that the otter must’ve felt upon having taken in the snakelike lower half of his accursed sculpted form. He literally dove to the side of the thick red carpeting which covered most of the floor to speedily slither every which way under it hoping to still be able to escape the unexpected visitor’s notice somehow. Unable to see as he was, he scuttled at top speed right into the therapist’s legs, who splashed upward into a geyser a split-second before he’d have been knocked down by the unwitting charge.
“Ahhh!”
The golem, unaware of what had just happened, became concerned enough to resurface from under the red carpet and, upon doing so, was unable to tell that the mist hanging in mid-air was still the man he’d almost knocked over in a haste. Mortified about what he perceived as the lack of quality of his work, he shot a precise laser from his ruby eyes desperately attempting to make a last-second correction to an otter sculpture he worried wouldn’t live up to the real thing he’d just seen, not predicting that it’d start bouncing off the mirror walls as the otter fell back down as rain to reform in front of him. Diaz immediately wished he’d known better than to have done so, didn’t know what he’d been dealing with, but just as the laser was going to burn a hole through Mandrake, he split himself into two halves like the Red Sea before reforming again in its wake before the laser’s trajectory finally came to an end.
“Oh, no!”
The golem by now was more embarrassed by having almost killed the otter twice than by his own appearance or by his own artwork and became afraid that his visitor would look at him and remember him as the one who’d done these things to him forever, so he used his lion arms and snake tail to climb up on of the columns which went all the way up to the ceiling of the room. Noticing that while higher up above he’d still be in the therapist’s field of vision if he looked up, the lion/snake-taur leapt across the room over him hoping to grab onto another column on the other side of him, a jump he’d performed effortlessly many times before. However, in his state of panic he miscalculated his jump and instead of making it across fell heavily right on top of where Mandrake was, seemingly crushing him to a pulp.
“Oh, my God!”
Even after what he’d just seen, the living sculpture hadn’t been in a condition in which he had the required pattern recognition to be able to expect that the puddle which was now splayed all over the red carpet would also gather itself back to the center of the museum to reconstitute as the very same person who’d walked in – until it actually happened.
“You mean... I can’t hurt you?”
The therapist shrugged, the lightness of the gesture contrasting with the seriousness of the situation.
“You could possibly hurt my feelings, if you really tried, but not easily, no.”
An incremental amount of tension dissolved from the golem’s countenance.
- That’s kind of a relief, for once.
- I can see how it would be.
- Why did you come here?
- I came here to see you.
- I find that hard to believe.
- Why is that?
- Who’d want to come to see someone like me?
Diaz looked over at a mirror wall dejectedly, pulling one of the curtains over it and looking away from it so he’d no longer have to see himself reflected in it.
- I wouldn’t want to see me, if I didn’t have to.
- Why would you say something like that?
- I don’t like the way I look. Can you blame me?
- I’m not here to blame you, but... Why not?
- Are you blind?
- Not since last time I checked.
- You don’t have to make me spell it out, it’s pretty clear-cut. I’m a freak. Why don’t you at least grant me the dignity of acknowledging I could be perceptive enough to know I’m a freak?
Mandrake raised his arms up above his head to start spinning like a top as his legs fused into a watery snake-like lower body himself before he stopped and stood on it facing Diaz again.
- I’m every bit as much of a freak as you.
A look of amazement flashed over the taur’s face for a moment, before his countenance slightly darkened again.
- But you can just turn it on and off at will like a faucet. I’m stuck the way I am. I can’t help it, that I know of, I...
He had to struggle to find his words for a few seconds.
- Can you teach me how to do that? Or is it something that only you or other people like you can do?
The otter covered his mouth with his hand while furrowing his brow.
- I honestly don’t know. I’d have to know more about your curse before I could determine how it would and wouldn’t interact with genetic engineering, there hasn’t been enough experimentation in that area so far, but there’s a first time for everything.
It was a lot for the golem to process. A lot of maybes.
- I’m going to see what I can do, but I don’t want to make any guarantees at this point. I don’t... personally find anything wrong with the way you look, if that means anything.
- Then you’re not looking all that closely, I don’t think.
Diaz hit his snake tail against the ground a few times as he spoke in frustration.
- I’m half-cat, a feminine symbol of an animal if there ever was one, and half-snake, the most phallic symbol of an animal you can find.
- And that’s bad?
- It means anyone who likes the feminine is repelled by the snake and those who like the masculine can’t accept the cat.
- That’s kind of a black and white way of putting it, isn’t it?
The taur looked over at a sculpture of a skunk he’d made and set up nearby.
- People do see things in terms of black and white.
- Sometimes they do.
- A golem is practical, you get it to do work for you so you don’t have to. A sculpture is art, you put it on a pedestal so you can admire it. It’s the difference between arts and crafts. I’m too clumsy to help anyone, and too ugly for anyone to admire.
- Black and white.
- The lion is Christ, the snake is the Devil. Someone rejected by angels and demons is no one.
- So would you say I’m an angel or a demon?
- I’d say you’re a therapist.
- Is this as bad as the other two?
- Almost.
- I understand what you mean, but not everyone sees everything as so rigidly categorized, you know?
- I can only wish that were true.
- Some people will like snakes enough to get past the cat, some will like cats enough to get past the snake, but some really won’t have any aversion to either they’ll have to get past at all.
- How would you know all this?
- I’m a therapist. I spend a lot of time talking to people who are and aren’t into all sorts of things, I can tell you that.
- Even so...
- ... Yes?
- Even among those who’d have the right predispositions to liking certain basic aspects of who I am, I also wouldn’t be able to measure up. I’d still be an outcast even among the other outcasts. My features...
Diaz looked wistfully at the chisel resting against the wall, and a pained expression came over his face, then he looked around himself at his work.
- I struggle to at least create something beautiful, so that the world might forgive me.
- There’s nothing wrong with your features.
- That’s the first time anyone’s ever told me that.
- Well, you can’t have asked a lot of people.
- Nothing I heard made me want to hear more.
- It sounds like you’ve internalized a lot of cruelty from people.
- I don’t think I can ever look at a lion or at a snake without looking away. I mean, think about it. Lions throw their rivals’ cubs off cliffs, snakes swallow rats while they’re still alive... What’s to like about either species even on its own?
- But you’re not a feral lion or a feral snake. Otters crack open clams.
- And don’t you feel bad for the clams?
- As a matter of fact I do, but I’m still not a feral otter.
- So what you’re trying to say is that...?
- We’re not natural creatures, you and I.
- Way to rub it in.
- That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Nature looks good on paper but nature can be wantonly cruel in ways none of us have to be. In ways none of us should be subjected to.
- So you just embrace the unnatural?
- Yes!
It was Diaz’s turn to put his hand over his mouth, pondering what the otter had told him.
- Art and science are both kind of unnatural, aren’t they? We take what’s natural, but we do something with it that nature doesn’t do on its own, to see what happens.
- I guess that’s true.
- You like art, don’t you?
- Yeah.
- It brings something to you?
- It helps me think about beautiful things and forget about everything else, especially myself.
- I want to help bring that kind of state into your wider existence somehow.
- I don’t think that’s possible.
- Well, it at least gives us somewhere to start from, doesn’t it?
- Look, I don’t know why you’re even doing any of this. I can’t be helped. I can’t pay you.
- May I ask you something?
- Yes?
- Will you paint my portrait?
It was the first time Mandrake saw Diaz smile.
- ... Yes. Yes, I think I can do that.
