SEASON 1 - 𝑇𝐻𝐼𝑆 𝑀𝐸𝑆𝑆𝐴𝐺𝐸 𝐻𝐴𝑆 𝐵𝐸𝐸𝑁 𝐵𝑅𝑂𝑈𝐺𝐻𝑇 𝑇𝑂 𝑌𝑂𝑈

[Barding]

​

ONE UNREMARKABLE DAY IT STARTS AND WHEN IT STARTS IT STARTS LIKE THIS

00:23:19​

White trees bar the image like scanlines. Like tears in the picture pulled off the tape. The woods are lovely, dawnlit, deep, and tending forever downhill. (How? Don't worry about it. But how?)

Words superimpose themselves on the screen's surface:
​

THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU​

Plainly white, no backshadow or outline, only their burning brightness stops them from blending with the birch trunks: silver as static, black-creased with knotty black eyes. Even this precaution is not total prevention. The letters still find ways to bleed.

Someone is breathing behind the camera. You can hear them, same as you can hear their footfalls. (Do you recognise the breath? Don't worry about it.) They stumble, right themself. The camera shudders and, incompletely, steadies.
​

THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU​

The footage hints beyond itself. Today, now, it runs for twenty-three minutes and nineteen seconds since you started viewing. Outside this window of time you watch through, the footage could go on forever: a single moving frame. (Nowhere in the world contains so much down. Nowhere but here, wherever here is.) Footfalls, shuffling and uneasy on the incline, measure out an alternate kind of time.

Scanlines tear across the image like the static-silver trunks of birches. Like columns in some endless portico. (If a forest were a house, whose house would it be?) The woods are deep, dawnlit, lovely, and there is always some deeper place to find.​

​

 

[Barding]

00:11:00​

At first he is the image. Close enough to the camera that you see his pores through the claggy stage makeup he wears, his face is the whole picture: shot from below and washed in golden light. The whites of his eyes pronounce themselves as he stares at something off to one side. His face screws tight: frustration, concern. You hear the fumble of his fingers against the camera's hard body. This close, this loud, hearing is much like feeling.

He starts talking before he's started to pull away:

"Has this ever happened to you?"

His voice is muddy with noise, with nearness. You hear the ground under his footfalls more clearly than you hear his words: black patent leather, mulched leaf fall. The firm not-quite-mud of not-quite-winter.

A few steps back and he is in the image — him and nothing else. His Italian-cut suit fits him like airmail packaging. High white collar on his starched white shirt; a broad and spatulate tie, unambitiously patterned. He has the kind of face that even a stranger would find familiar: a generic man with a flyover voice and a cardboard soul the same colour as his suit.

The dead air of off-prime television is peopled with versions of this man. Not identical, but not dissimilar enough for anyone to care. Disposable.

(Is he on your television set right now? Maybe he's standing between you and the video recipe for buttermilk biscuits you're trying to watch, and trying to watch, and have been trying to watch now for six minutes and forty-one seconds, and count-crawling up. Don't worry about it. Everything is in hand. Everything that's meant to be, is.)

He has tried to sell you cars, immersion blenders, motorised carvers of turkey, box sets of compilation CDs organised by theme or by which internal organ they are meant to heal or enhance, and knives that toast bread while they cut it. He has tried to convince you that a salad spinner or a sponge full of paint is the secret key that will transform the person you are today into the person you could be tomorrow. He, and other men just like him.

Almost eight minutes now and he isn't talking. He walks, and wherever he walks, he goes in silence.

A hard golden light crushes down on him from behind the camera. It forces his eyes into slits, his face into creases. He walks in a blackness, picking his way down a gentle incline, trying to keep his face in centershot — failing. There is dirt under his dress shoes, but the space around him is darker than even night ever could be. (Where are the stars? Where are the stars, the moon? The light shines like dawn a short ways into a pitch-black world, but how?)

He trips. The motion is a choreographed pratfall, like a slapstick clown, but the surprise and sudden falling fear on his face are real. The stumble strikes his knee into the dirt. When he stands again, brushing off his hands, they are scuffed and raw, and the knee of his suit wears a hole you could poke your thumb through. He smiles the apologetic smile of someone who will not and has not held the elevator doors for you, and is even now watching them occlude you.

He asks again: "Has this ever happened to you?" The insistence in his voice is a little like pleading.

He stops. The camera stops with him and watches.

Somewhere in the distance, garbled by wide black space, "Celebration" by Kool & The Gang has just started to play. In the image on your screen, the hard golden light catches on something it can't quite pronounce. Beyond the man in the suit, on the edge of the outer black, a gilded afterimage crosses the picture: dragging, lurching, it moves so much like an animal that you could almost forget how much it is shaped like a man. You hear its breath, wet and sharp. (Can a sound reek?) Hanging and bobbing, its head is crowned. Gleaming gold on black wetness. Gone.

"Who, please, among us can say this has never happened to them?" The man in the suit gives a coy shrug. A smile knots itself together under his small moustache.

He has paused, as if for applause. (Something sounds into his silence. A moan maybe, or a sob. Don't worry about it.)

"I thought so." A wink. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, friends, family and foes, have I got just the thing for you—!"

Eleven minutes exactly. No more. That's all you get. That's all you get.​

 

[whitechapel]

Misty Blevins hadn't slept.

She'd barely spoken. She'd barely eaten. Her throat felt like it was wrapped in barbed wire, the skin around her eyes gone red and raw from all the tears that she had spilt. Try as she might, she couldn't think of a good reason to keep on living. The diner could carry on without her, the town could carry on without her, the world could carry on without her, but how could she carry on without Morris? Her husband, the love of her life, her closest friend and confidant. There was no rationalizing what had happened. She could still hear her own voice screaming on that street, dropped to her knees as her eyes drank the full glass of a nightmare turned into reality. The same phrase kept repeating in her head again and again:

"Pain pays the income of each precious thing".

Their daughter had called hours prior. Somehow, she had already received the news and would be on the first plane out of Dallas. For the time being, Misty sat alone in their little home that had taken the shape and form of a mausoleum. For the days that Morris had only been missing, there was hope that they would find him. If anything, Misty had even been angry over the whole affair as opposed to devastated. He had only run off with some hussy, she told herself. A quick fling and a casino trip for old times' sake. He'd come crawling back on hands and knees, whimpering and wailing like a chastened dog. She'd make a big act out of it, but she'd still take him back. She always did. What was love without forgiveness?

Pale dawn light gazed through the open curtains. From forest to field, the cycle of a new day began again. Birds sang in blue skies. Tarry fingers and trails of menthol smoke, an overflowing ashtray playing host to the still burning embers of her fifteenth cigarette of the morning. She'd given up the habit decades ago, but in times of stress, the best friends in the world were the ones that burnt the slowest. She'd smoke until she was hoarse and then smoke some more. Her body hadn't left the living room since she had gotten there; with its stucco ceiling like the surface of the moon, family portraits in matching frames along the mantle of a fireplace that hadn't seen a flame in a lifetime, trinkets and trimmings on shelves alongside books that had never been read and the ashes of her father and the ashes of his mother and all the telltale signs of a wasted youth turned wasted life and all the regret therein and all and all and all.

When it happened, the television had been playing a rerun of I Love Lucy.

Static. White noise. Scanlines and fuzz and then a picture there amongst it all. Were those trees? Before Misty can make sense of what she's seeing, words begin to appear.

THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU.​

He's an unremarkable specimen; a being of boredom and salesman shimmer, thrust forth from the world of late night infomercials and into the present where he has no purpose and no use. Even so, Misty dives headlong into the allure of his visage, standing from where she sits on the couch and walking closer towards the television set before he even starts to speak.

"Has this ever happened to you?"

His voice feels like a fever dream without the fever, wrapped in cellophane and packaged with bubble wrap. Even with the remote in her hand, poised to turn the channel, she can't. She can't look away. She can only watch while all that pale dawn light gazes in through the open curtains and meets with the glow of the TV, threatening to set the whole room ablaze if only it had the chance. She squats down on her haunches just to be closer, just so she can see the entire image of the screen and nothing else, just so.

"Has this ever happened to you?"

"Celebration" by Kool & The Gang. Golden light. Beyond the man in the suit, on the edge of the outer black, a gilded afterimage crosses the picture. Dragging. Lurching. She recognizes it. She knows it. She's seen it. She's loved it. All at once, she feels the tightening in her throat. All and everything sounds like a static hiss, like the beating wings of a million hornet flies, of rustling leaves and shattering glass. She's screaming, but she doesn't know it. Her consciousness is shrinking, succumbing, disappearing, painted black.

" I thought so."

When Misty Blevins' daughter arrived from Dallas, she would find her mother laid in front of her television set. An 'I Love Lucy' rerun would be playing, and her body would still be twitching and convulsing in the grips of a seizure. There would be foaming bile laced with blood from a bitten tongue pooling on the hardwood floors.

She would call 911.

An ambulance would arrive.

Misty Blevins would wake up five days later in White Feather Community Hospital with a smile on her face.

"This will all be fine," she would say. "Everything will be just fine."

 

[Barding]

00:14:02​

Like a cat that wakes you on the dark side of morning, still in bed, half-awake to the sound of birds beyond your grey square of window, with the gift of something struggling and feathered and not quite dead, reframing the birdsong as panic and loss – panicked loss and lost panic – the message is brought to you. It makes no apologies, gives no excuse. It only finds you, in the rhythms and familiar rooms of your life, and inserts itself into your awareness. Like a cat that wakes you on the dark side of morning with total innocent alien pride and the gift of something dead, this message is brought to you.

The camera sees from the backseat of a car you know too well. Some blurred and secondary blackness frames the edges of the image, like the lens is pressed to a hole in netting, or looking through a wire-grid cage. The picture is focused from below on the rearview mirror. The windshield is caked in frost; the frost is backlit in gold.

A man's hand comes up and into shot. The cuff of his white shirt extends correctly from the cuff of his colourless suit. Light catches somehow on the hairs of his wrist and the back of his palm. For a moment they are translucent, glittering like filament, intimate as antenna. He adjusts the mirror with an impatient twist. His eyes fill it.

Through the mirror he looks into the camera. (Through the camera he looks into you. Through the screen of your phone, or the screen of the boxy old rec room TV, or the screen in the high back-top-right corner of Juniper Street Diner, or through the screen of every screen in your life this week. Don't worry about it. It's just that the message has been brought to you.) It's like he's looking at you through a letterbox, or the tape-slot of an old VCR deck: into your hallway, into your lounge.

His eyes are not unkind. He begins:

"What shape does the time of your life take? Does it flow, does it run? Does it bunch in your fists like the skirts of a prom dress, balled in your cold sweat palms as you hitch it up and run as fast as you can run without looking like you're running, to find the nearest bathroom, and spend the evening with your knees hugged to your body and your heels hooked against the seat so that no one will see your shoes under the cubicle door — so that no one will know where you are, even if they come looking? When you try to hold it in your hands – the way I'm sure we all do – what does it feel like you're holding? Clay? Sand? Saltwater? A warrant for the apprehension of a chicken-killing dog?"

His voice is chipper and teleprompter-steady: a consistency like thin box-mix gravy.

"How is the time of your life spent? When you spend it, what does it buy? When you use it to purchase the safety of others at what is, between you and me and the folks watching at home, a very competitive rate according to last fiscal year's Consumer Price Index, does it make you feel safe? Does it also buy their respect, their thanks? When you use it to purchase peace, what's left once you've broken it to pieces and shared it out? You wear it down like chalk, outlining potholes that'll never be fixed, in colours that'll be washed away by rain."

The smile he gives is very white, very even. His teeth are small and many.

"Does it have any shape at all? Are you waiting? Of course you are. You're waiting for the bandaid to fall off rather than tear it away. You're waiting because you don't want to see what's underneath. Aren't we all?"

His body uncoils. The fabric of his suit makes a noise like newspaper as he leans backwards around the car's driver seat and lunges towards the lens. The palm of his hand blocks it. You hear his breath: unfit, self-aware.

The car's engine mumbles to life. A blip and a clipping of radio chatter. Black screen, then bright.

The man in the suit speaks as the camera adjusts to the glare. "If all this sounds familiar to you, then there's something you really have to see."

The hand has pulled away. The man in the suit unbelts himself from the driver's seat. Leaning, he fetches something from the glove box, and empties himself out of the door. The engine mutters. The fog that was his breath in the morning cold hangs a while and fades.

In a lurch of zoom and focus, the camera takes in the frosted windshield. In stripes the width of a credit card, the frost scrapes clean away. Through it, the world lists itself into existence: harsh dawn light, white trees with black eyes. The suited man works fast; shivering before, now he starts to sweat. The look on his face is uneasy with hope: a child who thinks they can win back, with taken-on chores and optimism unending until its end, the love of someone who aged away from them and never came back. He smiles when the windshield is clear and steps aside.

The car's highbeams are up. They spill into the woods like a rare flash of rage, like white paint, hard as fact and fighting the dawn. The camera raises up, labouring, unsteady. (There is a breathing behind it you recognise. Listening breath, machine-steady. How is he holding the camera?)

A woman kneels in the woods, burning with headlamp light. She wears no clothes but shows no skin. Something covers her, liquid-solid and head to toe. It might be candlewax, melted and dripped and cooled; it might be the leavings of hardwater, limescale and time making a stalagmite of her bent back and hunched shoulders and slight build.

She starts to move like the highbeams hurt. (Scrutiny, exposure often do.) Over the dashboard and the microfibre lens cleaning cloth and the half-eaten pastry in its takeaway waxpaper, and over the hood of the car, she is the image. The forgettable man in his underenunciated suit stands beside her: seen and forgotten, a prop to exhibit her. The wax that might not be wax cracks and flakes as she moves. (Imagine paper burning. Imagine the stucco ceiling of an old family home, flaking in timelapse motion with age and lack of money. Don't worry. You shouldn't have to imagine too hard.)

Underneath is only an absence. The image burns straight through her where what might be wax has gone. She stumbles, struggles. Losing definition, she half-walks, half-crumbles downhill.​

Black screen. White words rush up it like end-credits:

Who Are You When You Are No One
Who Are You When What Imprints
On You And Forces Your Hand And
Demands Your Action And Offerings
And Patience Patience Patience And
Endurance Before The Expectations
Of Others Is All Gone Away And
All That Is Left Is Gaping Freedom
Imagine What It Is To Lose Everything
Imagine What It Is To Have Nothing
No Reason To Stay And To Serve
But Of Course You're Already There
Special Thanks Go To Our Sponsors
Who We Have Been Asked Not To Name

​

 

[Barding]

00:41:26​

The kitchen tabletop plays with light like the ceiling above a swimmingpool: worms and waves, shimmers of pale and whispering gold. A man and a woman share one of its long sides. They sit together, elbows almost touching; under the table, their knees do – and fail to do – the same.

You see it from above: the tops of their heads, the pale rectangle of veneered wood, the chessboard floortiles. Like the camera has been set inside the light fixture, or the hub of the ceiling fan above them. (Has a camera been set inside the light fixture above you? What about the ceiling fan in your kitchen? When did you last check?)

The man, perhaps, you know by now. (Be at ease. There is ease in familiar things. He was familiar even before you first saw him. This is, what, the third, fifth, seventeenth time? — It depends on whether you have started to dream him yet. — What do they say about familiarity, and what it breeds? Don't worry about it.) He wears his suit. The crown of his head wears a baldpatch, sworled, like a Hokusai wave.

"I think it's ready," he says.

"You goose," says the woman. "It was always ready. It's just that now it's here."

She wears what might be a housecoat, a bathrobe perhaps. Her cobweb hair clings to its pink rollers. To remove them, it seems, would not result in good marcelled waves, but patches of bare scalp, plastic cylinders mummified in human hair. Her ricepaper hands scrub circles into the sides of her skull: hard tight pressure, to judge by the tendons that stand out in her wrists. Fishbones in the backs of her palms.

(When an umbrella is broken and useless, would you, then, call it an unbrella? Smile to yourself, seeing it in the gutter, at the violence words can work on the world and, in that violent working, the change? Are you the kind of animal who sees these things? Would you prefer to be something else?)

They drink glasses of milk. Or glasses of kefir. Or glasses of horchata. Or glasses of correcting fluid.

A casserole dish is set out before them. What fills it appears to be honeycomb. With a broad flat chef's knife, the woman cuts into it, inward from one corner and back out: a pieslice shape, or the shape of a knife's blade. You were correct; honeycomb is what it is.

She scoops and lifts with the knife. Its flat comes up laden with wax. Its edge drips honey back into the dish, dark and slow: the room must be cold. She hunches forward over it and brings the knife close to her mouth; tilts her head back to slide the knife between her lips. The camera sees her closed eyes, her softly twitching lids. The camera sees the smiling dimples that pit both her cheeks. Her mouth closes round the blade. She pulls it free with slow luxury. Its first few inches are clean.

For a time, with baby-clumsy happiness, she chews.

The man's head is turned towards her, watching perhaps. His thumb taps out no rhythm at all on the tabletop.

The process repeats. They make a cycle of it. She mouths, and chews, and bloodlessly licks the sharp knife clean.

"You sure you wouldn't like any?" she says. Her voice is thick, jaws sticky. She's slouched now, head tilted forwards. "It's really very good."

"No," he says. "Thank you." His pause is expectant, half-full of smug knowing.

A laugh track breaks in: six or seven voices, recorded in a small and poorly lit room over hours, weeks, days. Weary laughter, and strained.

"No, thank you," he says again. "Y'see, it was inside of me. And now it's outside of me, I'd like to keep it that way."

The laugh track again.

After, they sit in silence. The woman seems to start, and jerk, as if falling asleep and catching herself and falling asleep and catching herself.

"A real humdinger of a way to start the day," she says.
​

And scene.​

 

[Barding]

--:--:??​

Today the image is still. The circumstances of its being here at all contrive together, making it almost less than what it is. (But it is.) Patchy with overblown pixels, badly printed on cheap paper, the image has been refracted: a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. Enough that dozens of these fliers litter the streets, walls, shopfronts, bulletin boards. He is almost unrecognisable.
​

EVER DREAM THIS MAN?​

Rain blots the flier; it is not currently raining. The image looks like a single frame, stolen from hours of CCTV. The image looks like a snapshot of a screen, stolen by a cellphone camera. Its greyscale is muddy, smeared. The image looks like spirit photography: a man's face falling into the exposure by ancient chemical caprice. A presence like a bruise. A face like smoke.
​

EVER DREAM THIS MAN?​

Most of the flier is taken up by the image. Beneath it, the words are bold, pleading.

This man's face is the kind of face that even a stranger would find familiar. His moustache is small, apologetic. His hair, somehow, is both thick and thin, echoing the '70s, the '80s, clean as bone through acts of dry and powder-smelling violence. The suit he wears is rumpled. The smile he wears in the stolen image is unfinished, half-formed. Someone has taken him by surprise. His surprise is the colour of cinders.
​

EVER DREAM THIS MAN?
OR MAYBE NOT IN DREAMS?​

He has looked into your life and seen you, asking only that you look back. What he has brought is a message.

(Or is he himself the message? Or does the message bring him to you? What he brings is buttermilk biscuits. What he brings is the geolocation codes for an ancient sea, untouched, untouched, and warm as the inside of your skull, where you will float, and find what only you can find. What he brings is the first subscription-model payment plan for inexpensive domestic flights, now with members-only benefits! What he brings is an ancient sea.)

You must, by now, have dreamt him — but never in dreams. He wears the waking world, or is worn by it, and spoken through.
​

EVER DREAM THIS MAN?
OR MAYBE NOT IN DREAMS?
TALK ABOUT IT
WE DON'T MEET BUT SHOULD WE?​

 

[Barding]

ONE REMARKABLE DAY IT CHANGES. WHEN IT CHANGES IT CHANGES LIKE THIS.

11:08:21​

The image awaits. Blanketed, yes. Cosseted, yes. Cocooned and, yes, waiting to emerge – yes, yes, yes – in white, the same as the shrunken-in rest of this world.

It is yet unseen. (If a screen blinks open beneath the earth, sightless and unseen, does it make a sound? Is there anything to see? If snow is the death of sound—?) What you see is not the image. The message isn't what you are brought.

Picture instead: the white sky falling in pieces of itself, on and on, until something changes. The picture inverts: the street and roofs, the road and trees, the headless statue, the wind as it whispers its name, your car, all drown in white. In white falling pieces they fall into the sky.

There is no shed behind your home. No lake, no mountain. No world but the world.

This is not the image. The image is a square of waiting white in a warm deep woodland of cinderblock walls, painted black like the world's backstage.

The camera shakes, picturing nothing. A familiar voice speaks over the footage, always selling something — even what can't be bought. (Especially what can't be bought.)

"You've heard of incarnation, reincarnation, red carnations. But what do you know about excarnation? Apples to oranges, I'll bet the answer's not as much as you oughtta."

He chants the pitch in monotone.

"Practiced from the provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia, to Bhutan, to India, to the Caucuses, sky burial is the next and last big thing in funeral practice. No muss, no fuss, no cost. Just bring your loved ones to the nearest mountaintop and expose them to the elements. Watch as the weeks and months and the beaks of birds and the beating of wings turn your love into a loss just waiting to be filled."

A black shape slips across the white, like something skating the surface of your eye.

"In places where the ground is too hard and rocky to dig a grave, and timber's too rare for cremation, sky burial just makes sense. But you might be thinking: Hey? Don't I have other options? Well sure you do. But so did those who built the Towers of Silence, the Dakhma, who lived in lands where the earth was soft and dark, and oil was pressed from seeds and fruit and flowers and lived black beneath the ground, and fire itself was worshipped as the third god among two. They gave their dead to the sky as well. They built towers to do the work of mountains."

The screen goes black. The sound of footsteps, echoing somewhere closed and long.

"What did they know? What did they know? What do you know now, that you didn't just a few short moments of your precious time ago? That a tower is still a tower if it reaches down, not up. That a tower is a tower is a tower, and at its top you will always find sky."

The footsteps quicken. Their cadence runs. Slap of loafers on concrete. The voice is ragged, panting:

"Sometimes the best, most generous thing we can do with love is to watch as it's taken apart."

The message has not found you yet. Some things must be met. Think of crossroads, think of midnights. Think of a tower deepening beneath you, and its ceilings jewelled at intervals with black unblinking eyes. What waits for you does not seek you. It is waiting to be sought and found.​

The skies go white to black.
The snow falls now like moulting stars.
The image awaits.​

 

[Barding]

03:09:21​

The image is deeply, heavily white, and waiting this time for you. The exposure is cruel, glaring. It spills from the screen and into the black room: crushed ice over the packed dirt floor, full-moon light on your searching face, a white so total it grins through to blue.

The image is yours. You share it with him. Stare for minutes, burn your eyes just a little, and the contrast shifts to welcome you, showing you something. It's a dream certainty, a childhood certainty. Like staring into the woods and being sure beyond question they contain wolves; like looking out to sea and being sure beyond doubt that sharks stare back with your scent in their throats. But it takes and makes you sure.

There: the white of his face in the white of the light in the white of the room by the snowlight of this unseen moon. Greasepaint and setting powder cake him. The colour is worked into his hair. The colourlessness clings to every inch of him. His suit is stiff with paint. Your eyes find him, but he is almost absent. His eyes are slits of golden brown, squinting against the blizzard of light.

"Chimera," he says. "Chimera." A pause to consider its shape on his tongue, then again, three times quickly: "Chimera chimera chimera."

A hum like electricity through old and whitewashed walls. Nightsound, half-recalled. A noise that doesn't exist by daylight.

"It's good to take time, isn't it? Even better to make it." The mouth shapes each new word as a grimace, speaking them as if through great effort, great pain. "Even if you have all the time in the world, the world can only hold so much. Don't you think?"
​

Cut.​

Black is not one colour. It is a cast of players; its voice has tones. The image is black: the smoked-glass almost-brown of a city's night sky. Like something moving quietly, its tone shifts before you. The image is black: black cathode glow. Its darkness is watchful. It demands to be watched.

"Chimera."

A line blinks vertically open. Light spills from it. A hard white diagonal rushes from it across the floor. It bleeds into the image's lower left corner; burns into the screen's thick glass and creeps upwards, spreading in sepia.

"Quick!" He says it like he's asking you to come on down. "Lets go."

The line shudders. Sound of non-slip socked feet on a clean tile floor. The camera is in motion; the sound of breath carries it forward. The image forces itself to change, but too slowly. The line is an open door, growing closer but not fast enough.

"He'll see you!"

Watchful, the dark distends. (You know the breath behind the camera. Its sound and its rhythm follow you, out and under the trees. Its sound follows you home. Carries you there. When did you last run so hard or so fast?) The image jerks, peristaltic, and the door's waiting light shrinks again. The camera follows, but not fast enough. The image is swallowed.
​

Cut.​

"One must be so careful these days." The voice is new: a deathbed voice, wet one moment and parched the next. The words come like coughing. "You young things. Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Pressing lidless eyes and waiting. I can't bear to look at you but no more can't I. I who have sat by Thebes below the wall and walked among the lowest of the dead."

The colour of the darkness is the colour of pupils in eyes within eyes within eyes.

Still the running rubber-soled footsteps. Underneath them, an unseen floor moves like a tongue. (The picture does not show it. Your memory supplies the feeling.)

"What are you thinking of? You know nothing? Do you see nothing? You cannot say or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images. Shall I at least set my lands in order? I will show you something." A promise; a threat. "These are pearls that are my eyes."

The image's burnt sepia side brightens, dims. A drift of dust maybe, in a sunbeam, gold and goldening, left to right. The image's other side brightens, blinks brighter, blinks out. Right to left. (Remember. This is what they tried before you made them choose thunder.) Left to right. Right to left. The tempo fills your mind, overtaking time.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head? And to think I went to such trouble, putting what I put there."

The blackness and the moving light. The thunder, like a voice; the thunder, like an interruption. Whispering like the motion of ancient grass, the motion of an ancient sea:

"Solojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojosolojos…"
​

Cut.​

"Chimera."

The image spills over and into you: golden light, sweet and pitiless as dawn.

The picture shows a familiar ceiling, beautiful with the cast of strange shadows. It lifts and twists. Sound of fingers against the camera's plastic body. Though the screen stays still, the image it frames tangles, blurs, tumbles: walls of shelves and mounting placques; jars, a workbench; a clock, real but badly drawn somehow, its numbers and hands all cowering in the top-right corner. Light through net curtains. When it stops, he is with you again. Lost before, the message has found you.

He holds the picture, holds it on himself, caked white like a half-finished clown. Sweat stands out from the paint on his brow.

"That's about all we've got time for," he says, smiling emptily. "There was so much more we had in store for you. Great deals, great opportunities, and of course — the Tower." The image shakes with the effort of his hands. "All the same, there's something I wanted to leave you with, just until you can tune in again." The wink he gives looks like it pains him. "Just to remind you: never be one thing when you can be more."

The image twists, panning about. It shudders, settles with a put down click, and shows you the message. Sagging, poorly made, the grammar of its shape is unbalanced and broken, and its eyes are a cheap glass joke. Still, it is what it is: a crow-winged rabbit.

"Chimera."​

 

[Lydia]

[Grace]​

I suppose it's time to talk now.

They told me it would happen, sooner or later, if I wasn't diligent enough. If I didn't stick to my routines, if I didn't check-in honestly, if I allowed myself to dwell on strange things. They said it would come back: the subtle creep of unreality, the twist of bizarre. The impossible.

And here it was, like it never left. Like I never left.

I suppose it had been following me for the last few years, tucked away in the background and waiting until I slipped. Or maybe not - maybe it hid in plain sight, acting like it belonged here and there, just blending into the innocuous and biding time until - well, I don't know. I can't understand it. I thought I did, but it seems to have outsmarted both me and the Clozapine. I counted the pills half a dozen times afterward - I hadn't missed a single one.

I can tell you honestly: I wasn't thinking as I descended those steps, driven by a question I never wanted to acknowledge in the first place. Was it even real? What reasonable person would follow this terrifying hallway into the unknown, just to prove to herself it existed? I did; I couldn't help it. It got impatient waiting for me, and I fucked up. I was tired of avoiding it, tired of being so relentlessly cautious all the time, just - tired. Maybe I wanted it to happen; maybe I willed it into existence. I'm not sure.

What I saw was this: A TV, unplugged and glowing, bright as a searchlight. Everything about it was impossible. I blinked and flinched in severe white of the screen; it took my eyes too long to adjust after the dimness of the Mothlight. After a moment, a man that I'd never seen before faded in. He was hard to look at - not just because of the picture's brightness, but because of the awful, macabre white makeup he wore, a half-imagined mimic somewhere between a clown and a corpse. I didn't want to look directly at him, but it felt like he was looking at me - that somehow, the glass of the television had vanished, and we stood face to face. When he opened his mouth to speak, I sensed he knew me. There was something too familiar about him.

Was it all me? Was he - me? A product of my own untrustworthy mind?

It didn't feel like me. The intimacy was repulsive. It must have been me, though, because he knew things I haven't told anyone, like the brain-buzzed aftermath of ECT in the hospital - that unimpressive hum, that dazed impression that lingers for hours after you wake. The EMDR lights. I had forgotten them, intentionally maybe, but they were there regardless, alternating back and forth, reminding me that the pain was always right behind my eyes, the center of self.

I must have created him. I think he told me himself: "Chimera" he said. He repeated it over and over. A hybrid. A mind of isolated parts, imperfectly sewn together.

I know I should've just left - I should've gone back up the stairs, gathered my work, and forgotten about it. But I didn't. Couldn't. I was too taken with the delusion, just like old times. And like before, I heard a voice I knew, one I never managed to forget: an old voice, different from the man in white. A voice that whispered familiar nonsense and reminded me of the tarot reading.

That I remember clearly, it was real, before it all began: the moon, the tower, the priestess, the emperor, arranged in a diamond. The grim set of the reader's expression as she explained their significance, and my own smug skepticism. She foretold disaster, and I laughed, half-drunk and unburdened. God, but she was right. The hallucinations crept in after that, innocently at first, growing in scope and sound, becoming more pronounced every time I acknowledged them. I lost the ability to distinguish reality from delusion. I lost everything. I lost my friends, my job, my fiancé. My home and family. It wasn't because of the tarot, I'm sure, but the timing connects the events in calamity. That was the Tower, or so she said.

He knew about all of that, it seemed. Chimera. Of course he did.

I didn't move throughout the entire thing, I was too transfixed. It might've been a minute, or an hour. I cried. Silently and without fuss. Tears I didn't bother to wipe away. I wasn't sad, I wasn't even scared, really - that would all come later. I was broken open, the inner without.

It feels different this time. It isn't new. I rifle through my memories, and I question each one. Was the barn owl really there last Wednesday, on the dead tree behind the shed, or did I imagine it? Did I watch that show, or have that glass of wine, or answer that text? What happened to those papers I dropped?

What can I trust? The well-meaning doctors and their procedures, their pills and plans? I know what they'll tell me. Too much stress, not enough sleep. I need to talk more, maybe even return to the hospital. But I'm afraid. I can't bear to lose everything again, not when I was finally feeling like a whole person - I don't know if I'd survive it.

I can't talk to them. I don't think I can talk to anyone. I haven't stopped shaking. When I think I have, I see the unsteadiness in my own hand, nearly imperceptible but damning anyway. The darkness watches, full of eyes. Those things I created stare back.