Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

  Had that earlier neighbor been named Menno? No, he didn’t think so, although to be honest he wasn’t sure if he’d ever known that neighbor’s name.

  But this Menno was familiar, he was certain of that.

  He thought about it for several days. He tried, in his mind’s eye, to picture the three times he had seen that earlier neighbor in the days that had led up to his departure from that earlier apartment. At the time, he’d been certain that the earlier neighbor had been the one stealing things from him, and he had even confronted him about it. The man had been surprised and puzzled by his accusation, or at least had been very good at appearing puzzled and surprised—Collins still could not quite say which. Had the earlier neighbor looked the same as this Menno? Had he been the same person? No, Collins didn’t think so, not exactly the same, but yes, he had looked similar—not the same but similar. If he’d had the foresight to take a picture of the earlier neighbor, he would know.

  Menno, he thought, what kind of a name is that?

  Which meant, perhaps, that the two neighbors were related, that one was the cousin or even brother of the other. Or, even better, that it was in fact the same person after all, but he had changed his appearance, had deliberately disguised himself.

  And now, at night, as he lay waiting to fall asleep, he was seeing Menno all the time in his mind’s eye, very vividly, as if a fully realized person. How was that possible? He had glimpsed the man only for a moment, a passing glance. He had not seen all of him or seen fully how he moved or how he inhabited the world, but in his mind’s eye this Menno was full and complete. How had Menno gotten into his mind’s eye? Didn’t he have to come through his real eye to arrive there?

  And in addition Collins was only seeing him in his mind’s eye when he was lying down on his bed, from a prone perspective, which had nothing to do with the way he had seen Menno in the elevator. No, that prone way of seeing, that perspective, he eventually convinced himself, must mean he had seen him there, through his half-open eyes, while asleep, without knowing it.

  How Menno had gotten into the apartment to stand over him, he couldn’t say. How he had avoided the cameras or how he had made Collins unable to see him on the recorded images, he couldn’t say either. But things were being stolen, or being moved at least, there was no disputing that. If it wasn’t Menno stealing them or moving them, who could it possibly be?

  Always in the past when he reached this point, he abandoned the apartment. He would wait until the dead of night and pack only a small bag and then creep away as cautiously as possible. A few days later, in a new apartment, in a new city where nobody knew him, he would start again. He had never looked back. For a while in the new apartment everything would be fine, and then things would begin to disappear again. Because, he supposed, Menno or a Menno-like person or a team of Menno-like people had once again found him.

  But he could not flee this time. It was the perfect apartment, the perfect place. No, what he needed to do was pretend to leave, and to do so in broad daylight, alerting Menno, giving him a chance to follow him. He needed to lure him away from the apartment and to do it in such a way as to give Menno a chance to report the fact of his leaving to his superiors, assuming he had superiors, so that everyone involved would assume he had left.

  In the apartment, looking for a missing set of playing cards he believed he remembered having owned, Collins thought it through. He would stay at the door looking out the judas until Menno opened his door. And then he, Collins, would leave the apartment as well. He would force himself to say hello to Menno. He would show Menno his bag and tell him he was leaving. Menno would no doubt feign unconcern. For good, Collins would insist, leaving for good. Once they got off the elevator, he would saunter out of the building, slowly enough that Menno would have no trouble following at a distance. And then … well, that was as far as he’d thought.

  He kept thinking, kept looking. He looked under the sink. No cards there. He looked in the bowl of the toilet, no cards there. He looked under the bed, then between the box spring and the mattress; no cards. He moved all the cans out of the pantry, but they weren’t there either.

  What was there, though, at the very back of the pantry, was a gun. He almost didn’t see it. It was wrapped in a cloth. It was small and snub nosed and well oiled. It was loaded. It was not his gun—he had owned a gun before, he had had a gun, though it had disappeared, been stolen or lost, at least one apartment back. And that gun, despite also being a .38, hadn’t been like this gun. No, that gun had been different. It was hard to say how exactly, but it had been.

  For a long time, he stared at it. Menno must have left it here, he told himself. Maybe Menno was planning something, was planning to use it against him. The safest thing, he told himself, was to take the gun and use it against Menno before Menno had occasion to use it against him.

  He kept looking for the cards, though he knew he would never find them. Perhaps Menno was in his own apartment right now, playing solitaire with his deck, turning over every third card, surrounded by all the other things he had stolen. Once Menno was taken care of, he told himself, he needed to remember to collect his key from his pocket. Then, when he came back to the building, he could enter Menno’s apartment and get his things back.

  By this time his mind had figured out what to do.

  Gun in his hip pocket, he would lead Menno carefully in his wake. He would leave the city and move through the suburbs and Menno would still be following him. He would walk through the suburbs and move up into the foothills and then up into the mountains. Menno, he was sure, would still be behind him. And then, when they had reached a sufficiently isolated place, an ideal place, a perfect place, he would draw the pistol and shoot Menno with his own gun. And then, finally, he could retrace his steps to the perfect apartment and live there in peace.

  At last it was he, rather than Menno, who was one step ahead.

  He pressed his body to the door and his eye to the judas, and waited for his neighbor to appear.

  —for Ian

  Line of Sight

  1.

  The shoot had gone well—almost too well, in fact. So much so that Todd, by the end, was waiting for something to go wrong: for production to come crashing to a halt, for the union to try to shut them down with some bullshit excuse, for the lead to have his face torn halfway off in a freak accident. The longer things continued to go well, the more strongly he could feel something roiling below the surface, preparing to go badly. And the longer it didn’t, the worse he felt.

  He was tempted to hurt himself, just to relieve the pressure. Cut off his thumb, maybe. But he knew this wouldn’t go over well with the studio. By the time they wrapped, he was jumping at every little thing: he couldn’t have lasted another day. But then, suddenly, it was over, the production a wrap, and instead of being relieved he was flustered, unbelieving, still waiting for something to go wrong.

  And yet, even in the early stages of postproduction, it never did. No issues with sound, no problems with editing, no problems when the footage was processed: nothing wrong. The film came out, so everybody claimed, better than expected. Even though the studio had been a little standoffish with the rushes, they now claimed to love where Todd had gotten to. Unaccountably, nobody had any final notes.

  “Really?” said Todd, bracing himself.

  “Really,” said the studio exec. “It’s great as is.”

  “And?” said Todd.

  “No ands,” he said. “No buts.”

  Todd folded his arms. “So, what do you think needs to be changed?” he asked.

  “I don’t think you understand,” the studio exec said. “We don’t want anything changed.” And then a moment later, his brow creased. “What’s wrong with you? You should be celebrating.”

  But Todd couldn’t celebrate. He was still waiting for something to go wrong.

  Nothing wrong, nothing wrong, he told himself, but he still felt like he could feel the exec’s eyes on his back all the way to the door, watchin
g him go. He imagined how he would shoot that scene: a quick shot first of the exec’s face, then Todd’s back as he walked toward the door, then the exec’s face again, expression slightly changed. He should be grateful, he knew he should—there was nothing wrong and everything right, the film was a success. But didn’t that simply mean that something was likely to go hideously wrong for him on a personal level? He wasn’t married, was not even with anybody, didn’t even own a pet: what could go wrong that hadn’t already? O.K., so maybe his next film would be an utter disaster? How could he enjoy this success before he knew how much it would cost him down the line?

  He went home. He looked at the wall of his apartment for an hour, maybe more. It grew dark outside, then darker still. Finally, hands shaking, he drove back to the studio.

  It was later than he thought. Still, he had no problem talking his way through the gate, or getting himself into the building. He got the night watchman to let him into the editing bay, then queued up the film and began to watch, pretending that he was seeing a movie directed by someone else.

  It was good, he grudgingly had to admit. If he considered it objectively, he had to agree with the studio. The camerawork was excellent, startling even, the film saturated with shadow in a way that made the slow mental unraveling of the lead seem as if it were being projected all the way across the screen and even spilling off the sides a little. The effect was panicked and anxious, and he began to think that his own anxieties about the imminent collapse of the project had filtered down to everybody participating in the shoot, albeit in a way that paradoxically served the film. The lead, when he began to unravel, seemed not only like himself unraveling, but almost like a different person. It had become the kind of film that brought you close to a character and then, once that character was going mad, brought you closer still.

  He stared at the empty screen, the film continuing to roll inside his head. He should be happy, he told himself. Everybody was right. He should be completely happy, and yet there was something nagging at him. What was it? The acting was excellent, the blocking and staging and camerawork just as good. Lighting was superb, sound editing was precise. What did he have to complain about?

  He sighed, stretched. He should accept that the film was a success, he told himself, go home, go to bed. Instead, he queued the film up and watched it again.

  The third time through, he began to sense it, began to realize what the problem was. In the interior scenes, the eyelines were a little off. Not all the interior scenes, only the ones set in the lead’s childhood home, before and after he dismembered his parents. Not off by much, only slightly, not enough for anyone to notice consciously, at least not on first viewing. But who knew what it was doing subconsciously? People noticed things, it didn’t matter if it was conscious or not. It needed to be fixed.

  And yet, he remembered the cameraman lining all that up carefully—he’d fired the script supervisor at the cameraman’s request, because the cameraman had insisted he wasn’t meticulous enough about just that: eyelines. He had a vivid memory of the cameraman blocking it, then re-blocking it, making micro-movements of the camera to get it right every time they shot a scene.

  He pulled up the digital files of the rough footage in the editing bay. Was he right? Even staring at a frame of the lead looking next to a frame of what, ostensibly, he was seeing, he could hardly tell. Was he imagining it? At first he thought so, but the longer he stared at it the more he thought, no, the eyelines were off.

  Maybe the cameraman had a slight vision problem so that what looked right to him didn’t look right to anybody else. Or maybe Todd was the one who had the vision problem and there wasn’t anything there.

  He toyed and tinkered with a frame a little, seeing, if he cropped and adjusted it, whether the problem could be corrected. But no matter how much he torqued it, it didn’t seem to help.

  It wasn’t until after he had already dialed that he realized how late it was—midnight or one in the morning now. He hung up. He could wait until morning.

  But, a few seconds later, his phone began to ring.

  “Misdial?” the cameraman asked when he answered.

  “Ah,” Todd said. “You’re awake. No, I meant to call. Sorry to call so late.”

  The cameraman didn’t bother to answer, simply waited.

  “It’s just,” said Todd. “I’m … the eyelines,” he finally managed. “They’re wrong.”

  For a long time, the cameraman was quiet, and Todd thought maybe he’d offended him.

  “Only in the house,” Todd added, as if that made it better somehow. “Everywhere else they’re fine.”

  “Where are you?” the cameraman finally said. His voice sounded strangled.

  Todd told him. “Are you O.K.?” he asked.

  The man gave a laugh, part of it cut off by static from the connection. “I am now,” he said. “Now that somebody else has finally noticed.”

  2.

  “It was awful,” Conrad claimed, as he and the director sat over coffee in a deserted diner at two or perhaps three in the morning. “I would set the eyelines, then look and think, yes, that’s it exactly, but the whole time another part of me would be thinking, no, not quite. And so I would frame it again, would check everything again. Each time I would think when I looked through the viewfinder, yes, perfect, and then, a moment later, but …”

  It had been like that through the whole shoot. Most days he thought it had something to do with the feel of the shoot as a whole, the tension present on the set for some reason. You felt it too, said Conrad to the director. I could tell. But at night, back at home, lying in bed, Conrad kept thinking back through the shots, wondering why the eyelines still didn’t feel right.

  “I’ve never felt that way,” said Conrad. “I’ve been shooting movies for two decades and I have never felt that way.”

  As the shoot went on, it became not better but worse. Not outside, not in the other locations, just at the house. Conrad began to think of the house as a living thing, expanding and contracting, breathing, shifting ever so slightly. As he told this to the director he believed from the look on the man’s face that he felt it too. Being in the house was like being in the belly of something. It was like they’d been swallowed, and that the house, seemingly inert, was not inert at all. It was always shifting ever so slightly, so that even in the time it took to go from a shot of a face looking at something to setting up a shot to reveal where that face was looking, everything was already slightly wrong, slightly off.

  “It sounds crazy,” said the director.

  “Yes,” Conrad agreed. “It sounds crazy. But you felt it, too.”

  And it was even worse than that, Conrad claimed. For when he had stared, really stared, it seemed like something was beginning to open up, like if he stood just right he could see a seam where reality had been imperfectly fused. He had stood there on the balls of his feet, swaying slightly, not caring what the crew around him might think. And then, for an instant, he even managed to see it just right, not so much a threadlike seam as a narrow opening, as well as someone—or something rather—gazing out.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked the director.

  Conrad shrugged. “You’ve said it yourself,” he said. “It sounded crazy. And you didn’t say anything either. The film editor didn’t notice it at all. But then, he wasn’t on the set, was he?”

  The director hesitated, then nodded. Both men sat in silence and sipped their coffee. Finally the director said, “What was it?”

  “Excuse me?” asked Conrad.

  “Gazing out,” said the director. “What was it?”

  Conrad shook his head. “I don’t know for certain what it was,” he said. “All I know is what it looked like.”

  “And what did it look like?” the director asked, though the look on his face said that he didn’t want to know.

  You had to understand, Conrad claimed, that what it looked like was probably not what it was. That if he had to guess, it was the sort of thing t
hat took on aspects of other things that came close to it, a kind of mimic of anything it could manage to approach. In a house like that, in a place where the seam of the fabric of reality was wrongly annealed, it would take on the appearance of whatever it had the chance to observe, to study through the gap in the seam. “At first I thought I was wrong,” said Conrad, “that I was seeing some sort of odd reflection or refraction, that I couldn’t be seeing two things that looked the same. But when they each moved they moved in a way that couldn’t be seen as either the same or as mirroring one another. No, even though they looked identical, they were anything but the same.”

  The director struck the tabletop hard with his open palm. “Goddamn it,” he said, “what did it look like?”

  Conrad looked surprised. How was it the director hadn’t guessed? “Why, the lead, of course.”

  3.

  The whole production Steven Calder (née Amos Smith) had had the feeling that something was wrong. Not with him, not with his acting, no, that was good. As good as it had ever been in fact, for reasons that he wasn’t sure he could understand. Not with the director either, though the man was an odd one, jumpy as fuck. Cameraman was O.K., too, if a bit anal, and so were the rest of the crew. No, nothing visibly wrong anywhere, nothing he could place the blame on. Just a feeling.

  He shrugged it off and kept going, acting like everything was fine. Or, rather, acting like he was losing his mind, which was what the film was about, him losing his mind, his character losing his mind, though when the camera wasn’t rolling, yes, then, acting like everything was fine, even racking his brains for dumb jokes he’d heard back in high school—or rather, things that the Amos Smith he’d used to be had heard back in high school—things he could throw out to lighten the mood, things meant to demonstrate that he was at ease and nothing was wrong.

  But he certainly was not at ease. And something was wrong, he was sure of it. In the house meant to represent his parents’ house especially. Meant to represent his character’s parents’ house, he meant. Outside, no, he didn’t feel it—nor, strangely enough, did he feel it in the other indoor locations, yet in the house, yes, there he felt it. It made him feel seasick, as though the floor was shifting slightly under his feet, but that was crazy, houses didn’t act like that.