The Ogre Story
“At least a dozen times every summer he’d tell that story.”
“The same story every time?”
“Not exactly the same story. There were always differences. I concentrated on the differences.”
After her father died, Tess tried to write the story down, first in her meticulous twelve-year-old printing, later on an old Olivetti manual typewriter she purloined from Vivian’s study, and eventually on a series of computers and tablets.
She wrote the story over and over, always trying to hear her father’s voice, always striving to match his words.
But she had been a child; she couldn’t remember with any degree of precision.
Yet she persisted, believing if she wrote enough versions, one of them might cast that perfect shadow in the moonlight, the silhouette of her father’s story, every word just as he told it.
She might never know which story was perfectly synced to her father, but she could live in hope that one of the ninety-six versions that sat in file folders in a Bankers Box in Vivian’s attic was a perfect reproduction of one of those moments, lying snug under a pile of blankets with the cool night air blowing in through the window and the smell of her father’s aftershave tickling her nose as he spoke in stentorian tones.
The story always began with the same responsorial.
Harry would say, “There was once an ogre,” and Tess would reply by stating the ogre’s color.
Harry would affirm the color and continue with the story, uninterrupted from that point on.
As Tess grew older her choices of color expanded from simple green and red and purple to vermilion or chartreuse or lilac.
One day she found a fan of paint chips her mother had brought from the hardware store in Madison to pick out a new color for her bedroom, and for the rest of the summer she demanded that the ogre be avocado or seafoam or cappuccino.
But on the first night that Tess decided to write the story down, the night she stayed up until two a.m. with a flashlight under the sheets scribbling in her Jimmy Neutron notebook, the ogre had been simply purple.
There was once an ogre. A purple ogre.
The purple ogre lived in a cave at the top of a hill.
Don’t ask me what the cave was doing at the top of the hill when caves are usually underneath hills.
All I know is that the cave was at the top of the hill and the ogre lived in it.
Now the strange thing about this hill was that it was shrouded in fog all the time.
Fog clung to the top of this hill like a proton to an electron so that whenever the ogre looked out of his cave all he saw was a white mist. And so, naturally, the ogre assumed that the world was made of fog and that his cave was the only place fit for ogre habitation.
To be sure, there were amenities in the ogre’s cave.
There was a deep seam of coal so that he always had fuel for a fire.
There was an underwater lake teeming with fish so that he always had food and water.
And if there had been a third amenity, I would list it here, because in stories things so often come in threes.
But the coal and the lake were the extent of the cave’s comforts.
The ground where the ogre slept was covered with sharp rocks.
The wall against which he often sat was cold and damp.
And the view from his front porch was, as I believe I mentioned before, nothing but fog.
Deep within the cave, on a wall that the ogre could just make out if he carried a glowing ember of coal to light his way, was a strange mural, painted eons ago by an ogre or ogres unknown.
Every few days (I might have said once a week, if the ogre had had any concept of a week) the ogre would spelunk into the depths of the cave to gaze upon the mural, always hoping he would be able to make some sense of it.
It showed strange tall shapes in a color the ogre decided to call green and a winding ribbon of something that seemed to deserve the name blue.
Along this blue stripe stood creatures that looked like poorly designed fish with legs or ogres with small shoulders and more than three fingers.
The ogre had no names for these odd creatures, some of which walked on two legs as he did and some of which, inexplicably, walked on four.
The four-legged creatures might be considered attractive, the ogre supposed, but the two-legged ones were quite hideous with their skinny arms and legs, hairless bodies, and tiny feet.
Strangest of all, at the top of the mural, where the ogre could only see it if he stood on his ogre tiptoes, was a large round object in a color that the ogre chose to call yellow.
The ogre knew that if such a large object really were up in the air like that, it would crash to the ground immediately, probably crushing several of the poorly drawn fish.
He had seen rocks crash from the ceiling of the cave and the welt on his leg was testament to the damage even a small falling object could do.
The ogre concluded that whoever had painted the mural knew nothing about fish, nothing about falling objects (or what the ogre liked to call science), and nothing about art.
But still, when you live in a cave with nothing to do but fish and dig coal, you spend a lot of time staring at your mural, no matter how bad it is, because it’s the only work of art you have.
It was a rather dull and boring life for the ogre with nothing to do but eat fish, drink water, dig coal, gaze into the fog, and stare at the mural.
Sometimes the ogre would try to re-create the images of the mural on the walls near the entrance to the cave, using the blood of fish as paint.
But every time he did this, the damp from the fog seeped into the cave and washed the walls clean of the blood—erasing the ogre’s efforts and quashing his nascent artistic aspirations.
There were two important days in the ogre’s life that happened shortly after this story begins—we’ll call them a Wednesday and a Thursday, even though the ogre had never heard those words and knew nothing of the gods Woden and Thunor.
On Wednesday, the ogre happened to glance into the still surface of the lake while holding a coal ember, and he saw something he had never noticed before.
In the past he had always splashed out into the water to chase after fish; he had never stopped to look at the lake when its surface was undisturbed by his ogorial thrashing.
But that Wednesday, the ogre saw, staring back at him from the lake, the face of an ogre.
He did not realize it was the face of an ogre, because he had never seen either his own face or anyone else’s, but he did immediately recognize the beauty of the face that looked up at him from the depths.
The protruding brow erupting in a forest of spiky hairs and glowing pustules; the bounteously bulbous eyes; the pointed nose elegantly bent to one side; the jagged, stained teeth overhanging the charmingly chapped lower lip; and all covered in a shimmering sheen of nostril slime.
What could be more beautiful? The ogre tried to speak to the stunning creature in the water and as he spoke, the beauty moved its lips, but no sound came.
The ogre waved a hand at the vision. The vision waved back.
The ogre felt a stirring deep within himself and a single word welled up inside him.
Love. He dove into the water, but the creature instantly disappeared.
Every day from that fateful Wednesday, the ogre would visit the lake, staring at the exquisite creature for hours on end like some Neanderthal Narcissus.
But the ogre had never heard of Narcissus, nor did he know any of the laws of the behavior of light on a reflective surface, such as that the angle of incidence equals the angle of refraction—that sort of thing.
Now, it so happened that the ogre decided to pay a visit to the mural one day—a Thursday in fact—to see if he could find any creature upon that wall as stunningly beautiful as the one beneath the surface of the lake.
And on that fateful Thursday, after a careful examination lasting from ten in the morning until a quarter past three in the afternoon—that is to say roughly the amount of time it takes a point on the equator of the earth to rotate through sixty-four degrees—the ogre discovered two things he had never noticed before.
The first was a creature, all alone at the far end of the panorama, who looked very much like the object of his affection in the lake.
Even the shimmer of slime had been captured by the artist. Gazing upon that flawless figure, the ogre began to reconsider his previous evaluation of the artist. This creature stooped beside the ribbon of blue, staring into an equally lovely face that looked up from what the ogre now realized must be a body of water.
And then the ogre noticed, high in a corner of the wall just above this stunner of a creature, a drawing of a hill with a cave at the top.
Could this be his own hill? And if so, what was the meaning of the fluffy whiteness that ringed it just below the cave’s entrance?
Now what do you suppose the ogre did next?
Did he realize that the mural depicted a glorious world outside the cave and beyond the fog—a world of diversity and beauty and light?
He did not. Did he use the evidence of the mural to formulate a hypothesis about the world and then test that hypothesis by venturing beyond the fog?
He did not. Did he consider the depiction of a beautiful creature staring at another beautiful creature within a body of water as vindication of his own behavior at the lake deep within his cave? He did.
And from that day forth the ogre spent every spare moment—which, in all honesty meant most of his moments—gawking at that visage in the lake.
He did not, as Narcissus did, die staring at his own reflection; he still took time to eat and drink and sleep.
But the rest of the time, he gazed silently into the deep, completely convinced, against, one might say, all evidence to the contrary, that he was happy.
The story was never the same and always the same.
In its essentials it never varied, but in its details it always did.
Some nights, especially if Harry had been fishing that day, the story would contain long digressions about the angling successes of the ogre.
Other times the ogre would go on extended spelunking expeditions, discovering other paintings, other seams of coal, and other lakes.
As Tess grew older, Harry would incorporate more complex vocabulary into the story, so, while the story he told seven-year-old Tess included nascent and vindication and panorama, by the time she turned nine the narrator had peppered in words like ambidextrous, pusillanimous, and antediluvian.
Nor was Harry afraid of invented words—though he did caution Tess never to invent words when a perfectly good one for the purpose already existed.
Tess’s favorite of her father’s etymological creations was: ogorial, adj. , of or pertaining to an ogre or ogres.
After each telling, Harry would reiterate the story’s meaning, despite Tess’s protest that “I got it, Harry. You practically hit me over the head with it this time.” But Harry would persist in explaining that the story showed that if we allow our own points of view, assumptions, and biases to obscure the truth, we can never be successful in our scientific inquiries—or in any explorations of the world around us.
We might believe we have achieved happiness by hiding behind our prejudices, but it is a specious pleasure founded on ignorance and as shallow and meaningless as the reflection of a purple ogre in an underground lake.