by Blake Butler
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Even more clearly than anything about the family in their shared time in the small glown dark, at least as she recalled it from that point forward in Richard’s newly apparent wake, Alice remembered them watching the ongoing broadcast of a particular dramatic serial, one so popular or otherwise nationally backed that it had appeared on every channel at the same time, repeated back to back in syndication between the debut of each new episode, which seemed to have no set schedule or duration. The show was simply on all night every night during the timeline of its production, which seemed to Alice to have filled up several years, carrying on a sprawling plot, depicted from a point of time not in the past, but the near future, that centered on a retelling of the foundational history of the United States.
Alice could not recall the program’s name. In retrospect, she remembered watching the episodes as if they weren’t fiction—though she would later decide they must have been, despite no actual confirmation of the fact, given that she’d never heard anyone else discuss the show, had never read about it outside itself—but instead, according to her young attention, as actual news: captured footage of real living people, so she imagined; no famous actors, and often characters who would never recur, living or dead.
The series depicted crime and turmoil during the fallout of an epic plague that deconstructed all emotional logic, and then nostalgia, then all the rest, beginning with the supple heads of all our young, by means of a continuously mutating viral fire feeding off human experience, propagated by a furtive federal authority that once invoked could not be stopped. This power promised to eradicate all sense of self from those exposed, an inevitability that could be avoided only by those who refused or otherwise ceased to consume such form of media, ever, including the serial itself. The viewer, then, in viewing, was complicit, assisting the progress of the virus by providing mental bandwidth to its participation in the plotline of the show, the general thrust of which as stated never ever really came to light; all backstory assumed and passed by rumor, word of mouth, never onscreen. And yet somehow this did not stop the continuing broadcast and development of the series; nor did it dissuade a record-setting audience, due in no small part to how, as far as Alice could remember, there was nothing else to watch.
Each season of the show, as she had understood it then, by context of the commercials and store aisles crammed with themed merchandise, was based on a series of books penned by machine—the first major work of art created by an entity of artificial intelligence, she recalls, or at least so it was marketed, though there had never been much information presented about the generative apparatus itself, except that it was the culmination of a project funded publicly by taxpayers, and under way for decades. The show had become so popular, so well-regarded, that no one seemed to miss the programming the show must have replaced, both in ongoing production and in retrospective understanding, until there was nothing left beyond these generated worlds; its single work soon known to all, of any age or situation, as the only book or show that’d ever been.
Was that correct? That was how it happened? These were the same books her father or unfather—could it be both?—had grown obsessed with, to the point where he eventually never spoke of anything else, and eventually stopped speaking at all, his eyes glued to the lines inside whatever edition of whatever number in the series he’d taken up to read or read again even while driving, walking, bathing, starting over as soon as he had finished the series each time anew. Eventually he’d started writing his own extensions of the story, hadn’t he, even seeking their publication, dictating them aloud to himself throughout the night, until eventually his own work took over for the obsession, as he spent all hours hidden away typing, typing. Or had he been writing all along, throughout his whole life, searching for purpose within his own imagination, until eventually he gave in and melded his ongoing work to this model universe? Either way, the books seemed always there throughout her time, in both versions, as they merged, their physical manufacture seeming long outdated, and by her father’s compulsive usage, worn to pulp, riddled with loosened pages that would come out from the spine at any touch, held together by bands and pins that Alice would find scattered all throughout the house: stuck in a wall, for instance, or wrapped around a statue’s face, hiding its eyes.
There were twenty-six volumes in all, as she remembered, each of various length, the largest too heavy to hold above the lap for very long, and each corresponding to a year’s worth of viewing for the family in their translation to the screen, according to her father’s extemporaneous explications of the context of the program at the dinner table every night, allowing no interruption or retort, which still poured forth even after the series was eventually outlawed in all formats, labeled by courts as heresy, pornography, a cult belief. The nightly broadcast went back to more varied programming thereafter, most of it reruns and lighter fare, the series no longer aired or even mentioned in larger media. All copies of the books, too, were supposed to have been confiscated and mass-burned, under the penalty of life imprisonment or worse for those who attempted to hold out—the creators had already gotten what they’d wanted, her father theorized; having witnessed their technology’s effect, they now had bigger, better plans for it, perhaps, ones that required no cooperation from the audience but to return to a state of virtual unknowing, as if they’d never seen the show—a feat quite easy for millions of others, enveloped as the pap refilled their screens; and yet her unfather, or her father, whichever he had been at either time, had not complied. He kept the books hidden, locked in his office, putting both himself and the family at risk, evoking a feeling of household vulnerability that had kept Alice awake through endless nights, expecting at any second the front door to be bashed in, sirens wailing as they dragged away her father and his contraband and locked him up and ate the key. She’d even thought about reporting him, as such, removing his presence from their family for good, though whenever she dialed the number for emergency assistance, tapping through submenus to find a living representative, all she ever reached was a recording, followed by the opportunity to record her own voice message for review, none of which, as far as she knew, ever received response.
Still, more than the books, none of which she’d ever been allowed to even hold, it was the show derived from them that occupied a vibrant quadrant of her mind, growing only that much more vivid the further from it time elapsed, as if the show kept growing inside her long after its pretend ending, feeding off her, framing her life, such that for some time, as a young one, she’d felt its duty to uphold within her carried on.
Season one, she still remembered, followed a war that lasted eighteen years, though the way the war was fought was not on land or sea or air, but inside our memories. In season two, all free speech and understanding were made uniform and monotonic—including the scripting of the show—such that for long periods all you could see passing the camera was miles and miles of open smoke. Season three then chronicled the obliteration of the Earth by way of its collision with a planet sharing identical features, and upon which existed exact copies of everyone on our planet who’d ever lived—our ideal versions, as we’d described them, if not in language, but in aspiration, all our lives—that is, “one of everyone but you,” by which Alice knew the you meant precisely her, in such a way that no one else but her had understood, imagining every other person hearing either nothing or the phrase “one of everyone but Alice Knott,” leaving it up to them to wonder what it was about. To Alice this felt like a threat of sorts, a warning intoned so coldly throughout the program that she had to watch with her hands over her eyes; which ended up feeling even worse, she found then, than really seeing, as inside the blackness of her mind was where the program really came alive, its landscape no longer conscribed to the terrain behind the glass but also inside her, through and throughout her, by the night, unbound, the burgeoning link between the once false-feeling and now fully present lives of her own family made only stronger
in the ever-sprawling body of the program, which as repercussion even the changing laws thereafter seemed unable to cover over or restrict, its fact mired in her mind as strong as any, impossible to ever actually expel; better, then, she thought, to watch and not stop watching, to at least try to control the shaping of its influence by attending to it directly while she still could.
And still, throughout the countless hours they spent suspended like this, in the watching, nothing broke. The air held hard, sewn up on all sides by the show’s intense, relentless score, a wall of white noise–like melodic feedback often so loud, regardless of personal settings, that you could hardly make out what any character said, its vast impression remaining frontloaded in her ears for days thereafter, a living whir. By the end, she couldn’t even remember how they’d gotten through it, all those seasons interlocked in running breadth, all of it seeming to have required lifetimes to experience—though it never seemed to find a true end in its conclusion, the final episode spanning at least half her lifespan before it vanished from the air: a weeklong marathon episode, broken only by commercials that made it somehow even harder to shake, and featuring a dialogue-less chronicle of the massive cloud of earthly debris and dust left over after matching planets had collided, as every living being on our version of Earth slept—culminating with the shattered, golden impact, an instant that burned so brightly through the screen that Alice found it impossible to think or move, much less turn away, splitting the viewer’s zoned-out throe into a fully palpable state of shock in every home, upending all previous intention in their lives. In this shock we’d learned, after several sweeping hours of gnashing blackout, that the collision somehow killed no one; instead, as Alice understood, it simply forced each person and their double to directly overlap—and so to negate each other as active forces, in compression, each pair becoming one, like the remaining land behind a full eclipse that never passed on, overridden with memories that held no water and pending fates that made no sense given the prior framework of their lives; neither to be the same again thereafter, all a jumble in their own minds, each that much more vulnerable to subsequent alteration, though by what or whom or in whose name remained unclear. By now all Alice could remember of the blurring glut of that last broadcast was how it passed through thousands of shots per second, all while Alice and her family still looked on, rendered inert, unable to assess the program’s gist for hours upon hours with anything like plot or even image—and yet the thrust of which, over the course of its compilation, began to take hold inside them each, to claim true form: eventually assembling the crux of not only two versions of the same life held parallel, but innumerable emotional universes crushed in upon the haunted cognitive coordinates of every being, past and present in the same breath, the dead, alive, and yet to live alike, thereby unveiling a common landscape in our wake, one wherein time did not exist, nor did any person’s prior perception of their own persona, no certain aspect of any fate.
In the last seconds before the show’s end, Alice could hear the monotonic, slowed-down voiceover of what she thought at first must have been her father or unfather’s voice over the noise, at last offering his own form of unwanted running commentary as he so often did with other shows, though which now looking back she could think of only as a living form of omniscient narration, spoken aloud by no human person, live or onscreen, but somehow emerging from somewhere deep inside the show itself, explaining how this moment was only the beginning, a seed from which true liberty would eventually emerge, wherein we would soon discover what had felt like freedom previously was only vile, a hoax between us and our worst versions, in the dissolution of which we would now be allowed to truly see—a promise heard by each alone in their own way, in their own context, as living scripture actualized at last after so much meaningless struggle for meaning, faith, passed along and on now through the impending waves of light and slow-dissolve filling their faces, blanking their features, until they could tell no inch from any other. In passing on through all of this, Alice could recall nothing else about the broadcast—only how in the morning after she could still feel it humming in her flesh, leaving large bruises in her sternum, down her throat, marks in her scalp like blank tattoos, a rising dizziness that would linger on forever after, all her life.
As for what the other members of her family had experienced during that last viewing, Alice had never understood. The posture of her peripheral parents’ blurry-faced bodies never shuddered, no blink of eye or motor twitch beyond the passing sense she’d had of their inescapable virtual collaboration in the screen’s thrall, wholly unremembered the next morning, any day after. Instead they went on watching calm as grass, the pixels flickering blue-black across their heads like living waves, not even smiling, blinking, arms loose in their laps. And there beside her, she could recall now, always Richard, plugged into the thriving body of the room, now in remembrance, staring not into the broadcast but at her, Alice, directly, grinning with his braces glinting on his teeth in the taut air, his mouth half open like a ventriloquist’s, transfixed not by the program but her reaction to it; his eyes drawn in and only to her own, searching for something there come open, something attained; how he seemed to take pleasure in her terror, in how it bound her; how the ruthless feed around them carried on, as if to him her sense of understanding was the central pinion not only of the entertainment, but of all creation.
0002
The second viral video begins in close-up on a large, chrome oven.
At once, an arm enters the shot; it turns a handle, pulls the device’s door down to reveal its cavernous innards, thickly coated with a black matte of caked-on smoke.
Into the maw, we see a short, flat painting carefully inserted, still in its frame—identified as The Strength of the Curve by Tullio Crali (1930), a late but major work of the Futurist movement depicting an abstract red, white, and blue assemblage of cold, athletic lines.
The oven is then closed. We hear the click of an ignition; then, through the slim viewing panel, the blue-white glow of active flames. The shot remains static on the immobile body of the machine as it does its work, altogether taking less than fifteen seconds; then again the viewing panel returns to dark, and the oven’s mouth is again opened.
Little remains but cinder and soot, their blackened chunks at once swept free from the machine onto the floor to clear the space. Another painting is then inserted: La Primavera by Botticelli (1482), itself as well subjected to the same incineration.
This process is repeated without comment across the initial 2m 24s of the video, including the destruction of I Don’t Want No Retro Spective by Ed Ruscha (1979), The Trap by Kara Walker (2008), and Still-Life with Bouquet of Flowers and Plums by Rachel Ruysch (1704). There appears to be no order to the sequence of these selections, as Alice sees it, the image of the mirror still looming front and center in her mind, having just come back up from the site of her own shared violation to find the latest evidence of incurred damage played in loop onscreen as live TV—no common era or outlook linking the artworks beyond their individual importance, no defining school of thought, as if to underline how any work ever could be the next annihilated. Likewise, the sound the device makes in processing each new subject remains indistinguishable from those before: a subtle humming almost imperceptible without the volume raised to abnormal level, interrupted only by the gestures of the operator, the raising and the lowering of the gate of the orifice.
Then, following the insertion of IKB 191 by Yves Klein (1962), the video’s perspective becomes freed. It recedes slowly, revealing the larger room surrounding: a massive warehouse, we see then, its gray interior crude and uniform as any mass manufacturing plant ever known, lighted from above with a stilted but steadfast incandescence filling the ceiling’s false sky above with fabricated glow.
Stacked into abutting queues beneath, what looks like several hundred yards of other paintings wait in rows, spanning the room’s horizon far as the eye can parse. Most remain unidentifiable, obscured by the nex
t propped beside it, though among them, many might perceive countless well-known works, each numbered with a placard affixed to its frame, again without clear logic to the organization, though belying that there is organization here indeed: a plan set into faceless execution.
The camera lingers only briefly then before again shifting upward, to the right, leaving the archive behind and out of view. Its gaze continues moving then along the expanse of the lifeless metal warehouse wall, panning for some unnatural duration across the silver, spinning and spinning without frame of reference but the motion in itself, until suddenly, mathematically, coming to a hard stop, front and center, on a wide, reflective square; a mirror, we can see, it must be, shown reflecting at an angle that reveals the camera, and as well the remaining space beyond chrome plate. It seems to be the very shape and texture, Alice realizes, of the mirror left behind in her own home, the space of that memory somehow loosened, ages ago in her already, a memory rendered under significant duress, here again tightened in around her, its face somehow too close up in the screen, too real to remain just seen as light and glass; as if at any instant the very boundary between viewer and viewed might crack, shatter apart, allow the looming lens of the recording to come on through, to actually touch us, until the video cuts out.
