No, not silence: a flat hiss.
The lights flickered. The glass and metal landscape quaked. Pete felt a static tingle trace the contours of his skull, shelves of flesh trembling like tectonic plates in flux. His vision blurred, doubled, bringing something new into focus.
Alice stepped away from him. She straddled a groove in the record. The needle came around, and Alice, directly in its path, watched it.
Pete had no time to act. He never did.
The needle sliced cleanly through Alice, bisecting her. Her two halves fell away from each other, spread apart like raw petals. Pete observed her opened interior, not understanding it. Her cavities were rife with ants, black specks scurrying like television static, and a chalky dust clung to the wetness of her organs. Then, in the space of a blink, her human pieces lost form, becoming like trash heaps of clay and burnt film stock.
Pete Dayton watches in his rearview mirror as the lifeless parts recede. The black vinyl highway flows like filmic water, carrying him east-west. If there is any music in the road, he is deaf to it now. He listens to the blankness. It sounds like a radiator hissing in Ohio.
ZYGOTE NOTES ON THE IMMINENT BIRTH OF A FEATURE FILM AS YET UNFORMED
JOHN SKIPP
1.
I am dreaming a movie. What it is, I don’t know. It will tell me when it’s ready. Is already whispering to me now, unfurling itself like a softly windswept curtain.
The curtain is a place called Manitou Springs: a lovely little tourist town and art enclave at the foot of Colorado’s grand Pike’s Peak.
I am struck at once by the establishing shot through my windshield, eyes functioning as an imaginary camera lens. Capturing the colorful storefronts and sturdy Wild West architecture of its main drag, the scattered two-story homes winding up the green hills, the majestic mountain beyond.
The streets bustle with brisk tourist trade: roving packs of jocks and off-duty soldiers, clean-cut American vacationing families, delighted women on boutique shopping sprees, an impressive array of strolling lovers.
But the locals stand out, roughly 50/50 in the semi-dense sidewalk sweepstakes. They are shaggier, more relaxed and at home on these streets. Saying hi to one other, and walking their dogs. Most of them seem pretty happy to be here.
Beneath the surface, however, there is something deeper churning. I can feel it in my bones. Something special about here. Something exciting and strange, galvanizing every speck of sensation I have.
This town feels frankly full of ghosts, and older spirits from nature’s weirdest depths, history repurposing itself for a 21st century America that, like me, knows far more than it understands.
I cruise leisurely through its heart in a cheap rental car, my shrunken stroke-addled dad riding shotgun at my side, curious pastel-blue eyes blindly unseeing, head cocked like a cocker spaniel’s, a floating half-smile on his face.
“Oh, Dad,” I say, over the car’s cranked A/C, pushing the limits of his hearing aid. “Manitou Springs is knocking me out. Do you remember what it looks like?”
“Manitou Springs?” he says thoughtfully, every memory a struggle through fog. And as I proceed to describe it, building by building and mountain by mountain, he seems to go farther away. As if rekindling sight-based memory is transporting him elsewhere.
Not just through time, or space, but some other dimension altogether.
That is the wind that stirs the curtain.
2.
After dinner, I bring Dad back to his managed care home, where the slow death of hundreds of elderly bodies smells like Febreze on old bones. The air inside is heavy with waiting and forgetfulness, but also with a kindness I can’t help but respond to. It’s so nice to know that honest human concern is at work here, at the end of the road.
We play a round of Yahtzee, and he kicks my ass. He can’t see the die, but he rolls them just fine. I don’t have to cheat to declare him the victor. He is happy. That counts for a lot.
I help him make his way to the bathroom for his nightly prep, stand back for his private moments, spend those ten minutes looking at pictures of myself, my mom and sisters, his other late wife, all surrounding him, unseen and yet comforting.
He comes out of the bathroom, strips naked and frail as I hand him his pajamas, help him put them on, lead him back to his favorite chair. The nurse comes in, gives him his meds. I say goodnight.
And drive directly to Manitou Springs.
3.
The Pikes Peak Inn is a cozy, inexpensive family-run joint at the mouth of Manitou’s main drag. Two stories, twenty rooms. I am delighted to find an available room in tourist season, check into tiny #209, feel immediately at home.
Now the movie can begin to awaken.
I settle in, set up my toiletries and laptop, get out my note cards and medicinal weed. The residual dying energy still clings to my skin, but I need to be extra-sensitive now. Take the good with the bad. Take a toke. Feel it open me. Take another two quick, and done.
I punch up a concise Google search, give myself 15 minutes for homework before I start pounding the pavement. I skirt quickly through the tourist page, just to get my bearings, then beyond, garner several fun facts.
1) Manitou’s rich abundance of mineral springs made it sacred ground for the Utes and other tribes, then a hub of health spas in the 1840s, as the town itself began to grow.
2) It is often now referred to as “the Hippie Mayberry” for its warm blend of high counterculture eccentricity and old-fashioned, down-home hospitality.
3) While Manitou evidently throws a mean zombie walk—with hundreds of its 5,000 citizens shambling up and down the square—its biggest weirdo annual event is the Emma Crawford Coffin Race and Parade.
This to-do is in gleeful celebration of the terrible day in 1929 when poor 18-year-old Emma—already 38 years dead of tuberculosis at the time —was washed down Red Mountain by torrential rains that unearthed her ill-buried coffin, and black-water-rafted her through the center of town.
I am really starting to like this place.
It’s time to go explore.
Outside my door, the night air is cool and fresh, and I hear the soft burble of flowing water to my left. The carpeted second-floor veranda woodenly creaks beneath my feet as I come to a patio at the end of the railing: one bench, two chairs, and a low wooden table, overlooking the creek that runs directly below.
This water runs down from the mountains, and I can see in the tree-shaded streetlight dark that the long summer drought has taken its toll, the water level low but still powerful, comforting.
These mountains have secrets, and they flow through this town. I feel refreshed by them, spend a long meditative moment just soaking them in.
And listening hard.
In the parking lot, a car door closes. I see a nervous man in a ball cap and long sleeves, hefting a duffel bag and suitcase. He moves uncomfortably toward the stairs at my end of the building; and for the first time, I notice the blocky, artless police station just beyond.
I imagine his tense point of view, coming up the stairs, float a second imaginary Steadicam just behind him like a ghost. My own POV is the third camera angle, watching as he ascends into view.
“Howdy,” I say, with an easy nod and smile to let him know it’s all good. He nods tersely, eyes averted, ducks his face behind the brow and continues on, clearly wishing he were invisible.
I wonder what he’s running from. Ex-wife. Ex-lover. Ex-boss. Ex-cronies. Cops. Criminals. Demons. God. Maybe just running from himself. Maybe all of the above. Maybe I’ll just never know.
I center my gaze as a long shot, taking two slow gliding steps like a dolly sliding forward on its tracks.
He stops at #208, unlocks the door, and steps inside without a backward glance. I wonder what sort of sounds my next-door neighbor might make tonight, alone or otherwise. Hope for the best. Wish him no harm.
Then down the stairs, through the parking lot of strangers, and into the heart of town I go. My eyes are the ca
mera.
I pretend I am that wannabe invisible man.
It’s 10:00 on a Thursday night, and the sidewalks are almost empty. Nothing but darkened boutiques and colorful tchotchke shops, a bookstore, a comic book store, lots of arts and crafts.
At this point, the only things open are bars and eateries that also double as bars. Music emanates from all of them: much of it live, almost all of it good. There’s a sixteen-year-old white kid playing slide guitar and singing plantation blues like an eighty-year-old black man. I’m devastated by his old soul. Stop into the dive, like a hand-held camera, for a beer and a listen.
I want to talk with him, but suspect that everything he has to tell me is already in his songs. He is clearly possessed by ancient voices. I tip him a dollar, return his smile, head back into the night.
At the end of the strip—maybe eight blocks long, depending on how you count it—the hungry hungry hippies converge just beyond the Ancient Mariner, where the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw from Wichita” is being earnestly rendered by a dreadlocked Filipino on twelve-string guitar. Evidently, it is Open Mic Nite.
I am old, dressed in black, and near-invisible again, so the young ones barely note me. I am not on their map. But out of the outskirts comes a ragged Charles Manson with glittery eyes and easily forty hard years of schizophrenic hustle behind them.
“Hey, man,” he says. “You like movies?”
I laugh and say yes.
He brandishes a home-burned CD in an orange plastic case, the words BEYOND YOU BLIND FUCKERS scrawled in black magic marker. “Well, you ain’t never seen nothing like this,” he says. “This is the movie you’ve never imagined, telling you the things you’ve never been told.”
“Then you’ve got my attention,” I say, extending my hand. “What’s your name?”
“Scout,” he says. “Cuz I been there and back. You wanna talk about the subatomic universe? You wanna talk about other planets? Other dimensions? Star-seeded data that precedes our creation, and lays the foundation for all that we touch, taste, feel, see, and smell, just for starters?”
“Don’t mind if we do.” And he shakes my hand.
“You got a cigarette?”
I hand him one, light one myself.
“There are emanations,” he says, “coming off of these rocks that surround us. These mountains. This place. The fucking Garden of the Gods, man. Have you been there yet?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then you don’t even know,” he says, grinning like he’s got the upper hand. Playing the rube card. “It’s not just CIA satellite crazy shit, Google spooks, or the Air Force Academy. It’s not just Focus On The Family, and the 100,000 churches of Colorado Springs.”
“That,” I note, “is a lot of churches.”
“This is the energy they’re all trying to catch, but they’re all too blind. Cuz they don’t know, man. They don’t know what really makes shit tick.”
I exhale smoke, point at the CD in his hand. “So what’cha got there?” I ask.
His eyes narrow, as if showing too much bloodshot white would give it away.
“Twenty dollars,” he says.
“I got a ten in my pocket.”
He thinks a second. “I can do that,” he says.
I pull out a ten, and we make the exchange. From there, he spends a couple minutes sketchily describing some amazing new technology he’s developed, evidently able to read the waves between all things as never before.
Past that, it’s a quick-slipping slope to sad self-aggrandizement, bitterly delivered by drunken rote. He’s already made the sale, and sees no other prey, so now he’s just dumping the load. How nobody understands him. How the world is all fools.
I offer to buy him a drink at the Ancient Mariner, and he defiantly informs me that he’s been barred from drinking there. This doesn’t surprise me a bit. I thank him, say good night. And he curls back into loneliness, at the outskirts of his town.
4.
Back in my room, undisturbed by invisible neighbors, I toke up and watch Scout’s footage on the laptop. It’s all just psychedelic fractal images. Patterns infinitely unfolding. Fascinating and stony. Incredibly colorful. But absolutely narrative-free. Not even a voice-over, or single chapter devoted to accusatory rants, which kind of surprises me.
The good news is, it’s like tripping on acid with your eyes closed, so you can’t escape the visions.
I like it very much, but have to admit I got more out of watching the creek.
Then I sleep, and dream, let the ingredients softly sift.
5.
And what I remember is this:
I am a dead and buried woman, coffin unearthed and slaloming down a mountain on a floodwater river of rain. The coffin is so full that the lid blows open, and I am thrust upright like a race car driver, whooping up gouts of rich mineral water that machine-guns from the skies as I careen straight through the center of town.
One hundred zombie walkers crowd Manitou Avenue, dodge to either side as I approach. Their green and red makeup runs down their chins in the deluge from above. Very much alive. Just having fun pretending. Playfully rehearsing for the end. And totally unprepared for this.
But I know dead, and envy them as I plow through their numbers, my eyeless eyes seeing them all too clearly as the red neon sign on the Royal Tavern comes roaring into view . . .
. . . and it’s dry on the Royal’s patio, as I hoist a beer to my lips, no longer careening. There’s a skinny, lovely woman across the table from me. Is she dead? Is she me? Is she Emma? I’m not sure.
“Wanna know a secret?” she says.
“Well, yes,” I say. “They’re my favorite things.”
She leans forward in confidence, sweet, spooky, and sly. Her white-blonde hair glows, backlit by the overhead light. Eye sockets cratered to black by shadow.
When she opens her mouth, there are no teeth inside it. Just a hole that grows larger, and sucks me in.
“Nothing,” she says, “is very small, but very wide.” Her smile stretches up over her cheeks. “Full of things we can’t touch, and sounds we can’t hear.”
I take a swig, and all creation disappears.
“If you stumble into nothing,” she continues, “you’ll likely go blank, fall back out before you even know it happened.”
I can no longer hear her, but I know just what she’s saying.
“But when you’re in it, you know what it is.”
6.
And then I am awake, at sunrise, remembering precisely that much and no more. Whatever other clues my unconscious may have dropped have skittered back to the dream-dark, where I hope to recapture them later.
Through the wall behind my head, I hear the invisible man crying, feel Manitou stitching itself into me like needles pulling thread, and suck up the twinges.
This is how the job is done: one puncturing, intimate little insight at a time.
My body is warm beneath the sheets, but the death-waft from Dad’s nursing home still numbly rumbles in my bones. That energy is hard to shake off, at least for me, no matter how alive I feel.
Overflowing with forces beyond myself, I hop out of bed: just another little center of the universe, peering out through God’s eyes, as I slip into the tiny bathroom and take a serious, much-needed morning dump.
7.
Fifteen minutes later, I am driving through the Garden of the Gods. And oh, my goodness me.
Honest to all the gods there are, it’s as if the angry red planet Mars hurled a massive handful of its coolest giant rock formations directly into space; and a million years later, they all somehow landed smack-dab in Colorado, at the foot of Pikes Peak.
It’s insane, how profound it is.
Fuck Stonehenge. Fuck the Crystal Cathedral. Sheer 300-foot walls of majestic red sandstone jut unearthly from the heavily wooded Earth, as if to taunt us toward meaning. Some of them impossibly balanced on top of each other. Some splitting into uncanny twins like the stone equivalent of John
Carpenter’s The Thing.
Could a blind and indifferent universe actually stumble unaware into shit like this? How many trillion typewriting monkeys would it take to conceive of what I’m staring at right now?
I wonder about Scout’s alleged technology. Is what he shot some actual readings from the rocks? Or is he just going all impressionistic, trying to digitally conjure some inkling of how this feels?
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that words don’t do it justice. I instinctively think of where the camera should go. At pedestrian level. Vehicular drive-by’s. A helicopter’s God’s-Eye view from above. Yawning ground-level views up their stunning expanses. Micro-close-ups of the fossilized textures themselves.
So old. So far beyond our recollection.
So utterly full of secrets.
I think it’s time for breakfast now.
8.
Walking through Manitou in awakened daylight is a totally different story. The bed and breakfasts are disgorging their tourists. The locals are opening their shops, or walking their dogs. Dozens of dogs, all relaxed behind their leashes. As if this were the place that All Dogs Go To Heaven had in mind.
I find myself smiling, strapping imaginary Steadicams to my knees in order to catch every canine smile.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that these dogs are somehow smarter than we are. Closer to their instincts. More directly connected. Less abstract in their Gnostic experience. More here.
And I think: if everything that exists is the center of the universe—each thing experiencing itself from the inside, as a representative manifestation of the greater whole—then every perspective has innate and holy value.
Or at the very least, something to say.
I try to imagine every eye I see as a camera, seeing me back and then beyond to something better. I pretend, once again, that I am that invisible man from #208. Focus on the not-me things that everyone else is seeing, till I’m not in the picture at all.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 10
