Reasons to Hate the Commute

#1644 The Green Man ~ anonymous

Since paint can be holographic now, we can expect some paintings on vehicles to move, right? And the Sinauna guys spared no expense in using holopaint for their jeepneys, trains and such - and paying famous artists to do it, too! - so you can expect to see edgy, experimental stuff on a daily basis.

But they probably didn't spend as much on paint anywhere as they did on their train stations. Wow, have you seen 'em? All those pretty designs on subway walls, the glow-in-the-dark stuff in tunnels, those things in the mid-stations they SWEAR are windows, but I'm sure are paint; you just don't look out the window of your train and see stuff that freaky.

So, while waiting at a train station, and watching the paintings move, have you ever had a creepy experience with any of them?

I'm serious. Please answer.

The first person to have such an experience wasn't me. It was my little sister Jackie. She's five and I'm seventeen, and of all our siblings I'm closest to her in age, so I'm in charge of her a lot.

Sometimes I bring her to my college. My professors are cool with it. Jackie is a shy, quiet kid, who stays in a corner when told to do so, and never speaks unless she's spoken to first.

Jackie likes to draw. It's no wonder she was drawn to the Sinauna murals. When you bring her to a food shop, ger her a seat by the window facing the main road: that usually distracts her for the rest of the meal.

But on my way to university, I usually have to stop and buy packed lunch at the cafeteria facing the southbound side of the Magallanes MRT station. That's the one with the mural with the dark green theme. Jackie used to love looking at that mural. She said the colors felt "sleepy," and she liked that.

Then, one day, she just started acting like the mural scared her. She said it was because of "a man."

"What man?" I asked. "The man in the painting," she said. Being five years old, she couldn't express herself any better. She kept saying he was IN the painting, and that he was trying to scare her.

I laughed. I tried to explain to her that it's not the same painting every day. It couldn't be. "No," she insisted, "same man. The green man. Every day."

The Magallanes mural is monochrome. You only get green in gradations, and sometimes the gradations make shapes. Sometimes those shapes are human. But sometimes they're not, they're just abstract lines and splashes and cubes. Sometimes they're just sceneries, with no living thing apart from the occasional flower or tree in sight.

Yet Jackie insisted there was always a man there. And he was always trying to scare her.

One day, I got tired of it.

I set Jackie down by the cafeteria window, made sure she faced it, and held her in place by her shoulders. "There, look," I told her. "There are a lot of men in today's painting. Which man are you talking about? Point him out to me."

She stopped struggling and didn't answer for a long time. She just stared at the painting with eyes wide.

Then she started to shake. And I began to be afraid. I held her close to me and apologized. I said I wasn't going to do that to her anymore. She quieted down and let me take her into the train.

But I got curious. What could scare my sister that badly? Jackie wasn't easily frightened at all. She laughed at ghost stories and stuck her tongue out at monsters in scary movies. When bad guys appeared in her cartoons, she whipped out her paintbrush and pretended it was a sword, pretended she was fighting them with it.

At my request, she drew the man that she thought she saw. I promised I was going to look for him, and if her fears were founded, I was going straight to the Sinauna head office to complain.

She made drawing after drawing of a green man in green clothes, with stringy green hair, hollow green eyes and a sharp-toothed grin. Truly, memorably creepy. But I kept my eye out for this man at the Magallanes station murals, and never found him.

I agreed to let Jackie turn away every time the mural was in sight, however. She could handle all other murals. Just not this one, not anymore.

It was a hassle, having to bury her small face in my chest every time we had to stop at the southbound side cafeteria...but that was a small sacrifice to make for my sister's peace of mind. The Green Man was a secret only she and I knew about. And a secret only she fully understood.

Still, I kept looking. I looked and looked, but never saw him. Some days, I told Jackie so, but she only whimpered and dropped the subject.

Until one day, she didn't.

"No," Jackie cried, "you have to look IN THE PAINT."

She said "in the paint" over and over, because she couldn't fully explain. Frustrated, I just did the best I could.

I tried not to see shapes. I tried to see only the green. Like how you would unfocus your eyes to see something in one of those old Magic Eye puzzles. How I imagined a child of five who had no solid concept yet of form and style would see something that was hidden in something else.

I tried for days.

And then, one day, my patience paid off.

I saw him.

He was massive. He took up the space of the entire mural; he WAS the mural. He was the Green Man.

Eyes like hollowed-out pools, hair like dried-out veins... they're never in the same place twice, and are never the same size, because sometimes he looks different. Sometimes his teeth are less sharp, and his chin less pointed, sometimes the buildings and tree trunks making up his limbs are not as pronounced, but they mark his presence nonetheless. He is THERE.

And now he is there every time I look. I tend to find his eyes first, or the areas that would pass for eyes - concentrated bits of color you could only spot if you DON'T want to see them.

Sometimes there are a million eyes in the painting, but he would only have two. The same two. If you knew what he looked like, you would know which.

I don't know if it's right to go to the Sinauna with a complaint, like I promised. I'm not sure what to say.

Anyone who's experienced something similar - what do you think?

The last time I saw him was the last time I ever looked at him. To this date, I haven't even glanced at the Magallanes south side mural even ONCE. 

Because the last time I saw him, his eyes were on her - on my baby sister, who was in my arms, hiding her face from him - and his hand was held out, fingers clawed, as if about to rip something out.