Weltanschauung (Fiction)

Douglas, a landscape painter and McGee, a writer of experimental fiction, sat at a small table in a Paris café. It may make more of an impression if you believed this cafe to be in the heart of The City of Light, especially if I convince you that it stood within the shadow of The Eiffel Tower. However, being an honest historian, I must admit that their meeting actually took place at Carl’s Café, a small roadside diner, just a short walk from the Lumberman's Museum in Paris, Maine.

Knowing this, it would be easy to now dismiss them as insignificant, but I assure you, they bore the same prejudices and self-esteem toward their respective art, as did Paul Gauguin and Emile Zola, and at least as much dedication. True, Oxford County better knew Douglas as a sign and barn painter, and McGee had yet to publish anything more meaningful than a letter to the editor of The South Paris Gazette, but their devotion to their craft was undisputable.

The two would meet each morning over coffee and croissants and would discuss various matters, including their mutual plight as, “misunderstood artists suffering in a provincial, utilitarian society.” But today the talk centered on McGee's magnum opus, "Vanity's Vipers" that he assured Douglas would make Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" seem like a "Dick and Jane reader."

For the past seven years, McGee had worked on the novel, never progressing past the first two chapters. More than once McGee had reassured Douglas that, "once I hit upon the right chord; the rest of the novel will write itself." Seeing an opportunity to goad the writer, Douglas would then joke, "It’s a good thing the story will write itself because it's obvious to me, that you never will!" McGee would scoff at his friend's skepticism, reminding him that it took Margaret Mitchell ten years to write, "Gone with the Wind."

"What I don't understand..."started Douglas, pulling apart a cheese croissant and flourishing it at his friend, "...is why everything you write makes no sense. You start a story, and then before you know it, the plot devolves into chaotic nonsense. It's like you have a literary death wish. The beginnings always seem plausible, but then you alienate your readers."

McGee looked calmly at the painter. He was familiar with his friend’s confining theories of art and knew that however much he explained, Douglas would never understand his Experimental nature. Still, he had in front of him, a hot cup of coffee and a fresh baked danish and...like most of us, he had a strong desire to hear himself talk, so for the one hundredth time he ventured to explain his, “oeuvre:”

"Haven't you ever wanted to see what wasn't there…or the true reality behind what you do see? Must every brush stroke account for its utility? Don't you ever wish you could express, in a deeper way, the complexities of life?"

Douglas rebutted, mentioning art as a means of truthful expression, and as he spoke, his voice created a somnolent effect that almost put McGee to sleep. He no longer listened to the painter, caught within daydreams peculiar to men of his manners. He stood staring at his friend, trying to justify why his face suddenly seemed to become abstract, and why his mouth took the form of a black hole.

He shook his head and looked away, hoping to correct his vision, but  when he turned back toward the painter, Douglas was no longer there. However, something seemed to occupy the space formerly held by the painter. At first, he could not make out what, but as he peered closer, he noticed a nearly translucent vortex that undulated as it spun, reminding McGee of the heat rippling off a highway‘s crest on a hot summer day. He sat staring at this spinning wavelet as everything in the coffee shop slowly drew to the edge and then into the whirlpool, where it spiraled deeper and deeper until they disappeared. He clung to the edge of the table which fortunately didn‘t seem attracted to the gravitational pull, and he watched as the coffee, croissants and sugar packets disappeared down the maelstrom that seemed to have a human-like hunger for everything in its path.