[deleted]
OK, Melissa? It’s gonna be all right. Just stay close…to the floor.
[deleted]
Breathe slowly. It’s gonna be OK.
[deleted]
Oh my god. Melissa
[deleted]
Melissa.
[deleted]
Melissa.
[deleted]
Melissa!
[deleted]
Melissa?
(NEW ROLL)
Ange leaning against short wall; fountain behind her. She is smiling (At Trafalgar Squ.)
Now she is looking left, gravely
MATT IS SITTING ON FOUNTAIN LEDGE WITH WATER SHOOTING UP ABOVE HIS HEAD. SOFT LIGHT FILTERING THROUGH BY ANGE
MATT LOOKING TO THE SIDE WITH BLANK LOOK. FOCUSED ON HIS FACE. LIGHT & FOUNTAIN WATER SPRAYING BEHIND HIM. COULD NOT RESIST. TRAFALGAR SQUARE 10:30pm
Matt & Ange in front of Trafalgar when the dark has set in. Irish man with an expert camera technician for a friend takes photo, while the friend says things like, “Stand in the light!” and “No flash?” and “It’ll be dark. It won’t come out well at all!” We just say, “It’ll be alright. A little dark, yeah, but alright.” And smiling.
I smile to her and walk heavy-footed through the door, closing it behind. Into the lobby where there is no one and up ahead through the pane, dark water is pelting the cement. Straight down.
Clothed, then laid back down in the dark, crying. Voices whispering in the hall. A knock on the door, then helped up, helped across the room, helped through the door, crying, helped past a group of people standing shoulder to shoulder in the hallway, crying, the door is opened, crying, helped outside,
The car is waiting and the man inside I think his name is Brubaker sees me coming and leans over and opens the passenger door.
put into a taxi, and sped off into night.
I get in. He drives on then asks me how I feel. I ache, I tell him. This is the best way to describe it. Anything else would be a waste of words.
MATT WALKING DOWN SOME STAIRS TO A DARK ALLEY 10:45pm NEAR EMBANKMENT
“HURRY UP GUY’S THERE’S A CAR COMIN’” “2 LITRES” “2 LITRES” GROUP OF OVER CASUALLY DRESSED AMERICANS. SHOT FROM ABOVE DOWN ON THEIR SHINY HEADS & HAIRSPRAYED LOCKS. BY MATT.
Matt and Ange on Embankment Bridge “Make sure you get the Royal Festival Hall and now smile”—taken by man with long hair and a wife. Probably a carpenter or a tradesman smiling broader than we are—and these people are so nice…
I don’t remember much else, except being curled up in the corner of the taxi, laughing and moaning and laughing again, while Angie, holding her cheek, leans forward, pleading with the driver to hurryup!—the two of them arguing over which hospital was closest.
PHOTO TAKEN OF MATT AND ANGE KISSING ON THAT BRIDGE (TAKEN BY ANGE)
Angela: (breathlessly) You will come back to me, won’t you, as soon as you can?
Ange doing up shoelace
Ange doing up other shoelace from other side.
“FALLING FROM OR THROUGH THIS ROOF COULD RESULT IN FATAL INJURY”
Angela: (heartbroken) You promise?
Corridor bus ride where you sit in the back and everyone is missing but a man in a flap cap in the seat furthest away, against the front window. And the bars across the tops of the seats shine silver and a white streak beneath the lights seems to join them all together. A brown tint to the camera as it is dark outside. Ange takes the picture.
We’ve just gone over the bridge when I take one too.
68.
21 JUL 1996
OUT
21 JUL 1996 OF
21 JUL 1996
FILM
21 JUL 1996
21 JUL 1996
21 JUL 1996
21 JUL 1996
21 JUL 1996
END OF ACT II
ACT III
THE
LAST DAYS
OF
THE SYSTEM
I wake. The room is faintly lit. My vision is blurred. I am without my spectacles. A girl is in the closet, stepping into a skirt. She pulls it up. I see her form, but not her face. The face is blank. But I can tell that she is looking at me. She seems unsurprised that I have woken. It is she who has awakened me. The house is old and the floorboards are noisy. Now she says to me, “I’m super late, so I’m gonna drive. OK?” I grunt to communicate in the affirmative, then close my eyes. I lie, listening to her dress. My body is sore. What happened last night? I remember staying up late, working. What was I working on? I try to remember. There was a man, and a woman. They were in black and white. Yes, I was watching an old film, searching for clues. I had surreptitiously downloaded the film from the Teleframe. I hoped the controllers were not monitoring my actions. It occurred to me that they might send dark-suited men to my little house. The men would knock on the door, and I would answer it. They would say that they were there to collect my information-compiling devices for scrutiny. I might try to resist, but it would be no use. If I did not comply and hand over my devices, they would take them anyway, by force. The girl was then in bed asleep. It was past 2 in the morning. Would they come to take my devices in the middle of the night? Or would they come when the sun was up. On the devices were copies of the codex. But there was one more copy, a backup, housed on an information stick called Pee-Wee. He was hidden away. But would they find him? It would depend on how thoroughly they ransacked the house. I decided that if they should come, I would comply. Make no waves. That way they may think I am giving them every copy of the codex. And then what? Then they would take the devices to their laboratory. Their analysts would find and parse the codex. They would return to the house and arrest me. I would be kept as an enemy of the state. I must remember, I thought, to keep Pee-Wee’s volumes current and up to date. I must remember, I thought, to hide Pee-Wee after each new data transfer. And also to erase any . Now the girl is in the bathroom. I hear her running the faucet. Brushing her teeth. Beside this bed, the window is open. Each dawn is cooler than the one before. The Simulators have conjured up an earth slowly moving away from its sun. I wish it would stay warm. I wish the days would remain long, and that the winter would not come and bury us in darkness and cold. I feel as if I have been in a fight. My body is sore, and my hands are raw. But there was no fight. At least no fight with men. I have not fought with my fists in a long time. No, my body is sore because I have been scraping the paint off of this blasted house. The house is small, yes, but it never seems larger than when I am scraping paint off of it. The man who owned it before us had no respect for the house. Neither did the ones who rented it from him. He rented it to various poor white trash families. Invariably each poor white trash family owned a pit bull. Each pit bull scratched the paint off of the insides of the doors and walls with its razor-sharp claws. But I am not concerned now with the paint on the inside of the house. I am only concerned with the paint on the out. The house is of good construction, built eighty years in the past, right after the First Big War. Back then they knew how to build a house. However now every detail is hidden beneath globs of pale pink paint. The house has the appearance, accordingly, of a pale pink blob. But underneath hides a beautiful bungalow. It has been my task to find that bungalow. And it has been a difficult task. Day after day I peel through layer after layer of cheap, poorly applied paint. The last layer of paint was applied twenty years ago. My elderly neighbor Gerald told me this. The owner hired two men to come and apply the pink paint. The paint that they were covering was badly peeling, flaking, blistering, and cracking, just as it is now. The two men worked for a single day, and did not scrape. Which means I am now having to scrape away their mess, as well as the paint they should have scraped away themselves. This is why my arms and shoulders are sore, and I feel
as if I have been through a Mexican gang initiation beat-in.
They make a circle around you
and for thirty-one seconds they all try to kill you.
After the thirty-one seconds have passed, if you did not cry, you are their brother.
They hug you and offer congratulations.
Someone hands you a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor and another a cigar rolled with marijuana.
You wake.
Sitting slouched in a couch in the basement of El Duque’s mom’s house.
You are wearing long denim shorts down to your ankles and an oversized white tank top called a “wife beater.”
White socks pulled up tight to each knee.
Your head is shaved and you have a little fuzzy mustache.
Just like your brothers do.
There’s music in your ears.
The malt liquor warms you, and takes the edge off your sore ribs.
And the weed makes your aching head light.
Everyone’s joking around.
“We thought you were gonna cry, Quixito. But you didn’t.”
You feel good.
I am vexed at being reminded of the paint. I have been scraping for three months. When I finish scraping, then the house will need to be washed. Then primed. Then finally painted. I have a long way to go until I am finished. It has taken me away from my work. It has wasted much of my time. But the man from the insurance company threatened to cancel our coverage if we did not replace the paint. And we have no money to pay anyone to do it. The girl comes out of the bathroom. She says goodbye and kisses my cheek. I hear her rush down the back steps, slamming the back door behind her. Then the car starts. She backs up down the driveway, and out into the street. Then she is gone. I lie in bed for a while. It is early still. I have only had five hours of sleep. But there is work to do, and I have dreamt enough for today. In my dreams I am solving the problem of order. I have much information compiled, and it is up to me to order it. It is a problem which consumes me. There is an endless number of potential orderings, but only one correct way. It is my job to find the correct order. The outcome depends on the order. It is also my job to compile. The ordering becomes more complicated with each new piece of information. For instance, this transmission will be included, but I do not know where. Information is reactive. Once linked to the codex, this information will form ideas. The ideas will link to other ideas within the codex and form new ideas. These ideas will form further ideas. Eventually, the ideas will become energy. Energy is power. And it is power that will move the machine. The machine will remove the girl and myself from the world of the Simulators. It will place us, together, in a world that is finally real. At least this is the current plot. I do not hold on to plots for long, for they constantly change as we move in a forward direction. Yet, there is one ultimate end to the story, and I am trying to find my way there. I cannot simply arrive. I must journey there. And by journeying I must act. And by acting, my journey grows longer. For with each act comes connections. Which must be worked through, then cut off. I am going the long way around. I am living these plots. For that is the only way I know how. I will not write the end. Projection is dangerous. If I project the end, I may find myself trapped in an alternate end created by my own mind. Then we would end in failure. In an unreal world, apart and alone. A world like this one, where poor men toil in darkness, applying layer upon layer of thick pink paint. And then poorly applying more. Then I will have to start the process of scraping it all off, all over again. So I will only write beginnings. I get up. That is to say I rise. I go into the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee. The coffee is already cold. This means she has been up for some time. I stand at the window looking at Gerald’s house. His paint is cracking. Time passes. We pass within it. It always seems familiar, until we look back. When we look back, we find a time that has somehow gone out of style. We find paint has peeled. But we never saw it peel. We look at old photographs. The colors are muted, the corners are frayed. We, in the photographs, are different as well. We are younger, yes. But we are also occupying a time that no longer exists. Time has stopped for us there. And so in a sense we are dead. We stare straight ahead, and smile. Possibly, moments before, someone had implored us to say Cheese. We said Cheese. We knew that we were communicating with the future. For anyone who would someday see us as a result of the bright flashing light would not exist in this moment, along with ourselves. When the light went away we had been changed. And looking back we wonder now: Who chose that outfit for me? Who decided that that kind of clothing was fashionable? Why did you wear such dark eye makeup? Why did I think short spiky hair on top, and long in the back was appropriate? How could anyone be smiling while wearing pants such as those? I remember loving those pants. And still, in my mind:
I wake. She is at the closet, pulling up a skirt. The skirt is wool and knee-length. Made before she was born. She buys all of her clothes at the thrift stores. The good stuff is hard to find. She is tall for a girl and most things do not fit right. But every once in a while, she will find something that was made for her. She tells me how they constructed clothes better then. She has the look of a girl from the black-and-white movies. If she is ever in trouble, she is only pretending. I have a long black wool overcoat. She found it in a thrift store a few years back. It was tailored to fit a man exactly my size. She found it on a rack beside a camel hair coat with silk-lined pockets. She bought the camel hair one too, but I have never worn it. Both coats belonged to the same man. That man is surely dead. No one among the living would have given up such fine threads. I, myself, will keep them until I die. They are of such fine quality that if taken care of, they will outlast me. I must store them where there are no moths. I must hang them up after each time I wear them. Finally, I must make sure to never fall asleep while smoking a cigarette. Or else I could burn the house down and the fine coats along with it. It happens all the time, just like that. Maybe I will quit smoking. I pour my tofu smoothie out of the pitcher and into a glass with an image of Mount Rushmore. I take the glass and my coffee cup into my office. I sit down. I drink. I think I am a detective. I think I am a spy. I have been hired to track something down for somebody, but I don’t know who, what, where, or why. I have told no one about any of this. Only her. She’s the only one that I trust. And also you. I trust you, but only because I am dead. You can’t hurt me when I’m dead. You can’t send your goons to ransack my room for Pee-Wee, because I have been disintegrated and Pee-Wee is somewhere safe. And suddenly I have been transported to the future. There has been a great war and a handful of men are left living underground. The aboveground is inhabited by a race of robotmen. These robotmen are all plugged in to the same power source. The power source is also the source of information. They listen to the source and find their meaning in it. They are told that they are real, that they are human, and that they were created in the image of God. But the truth is after the Teleframe took control from its human masters, it created robots in industrial factories. The robots were made to be the Teleframe’s arms and legs. The robots enslaved the humans, and many rebelled. The Teleframe decided it would be more economical if there were only one race, and so the Teleframe caused the robots to merge with the humans. And now everyone is happy. Except for the few remaining humans who live underground and tell their children how the world really was, while avoiding the bands of masked police who seek them out to destroy them, and wipe out for good their memories, and stories. Until one day a boy is born. He grows. His mother dresses him in the style of the time, and gives him a bowl cut. When he comes of age, he likes to wander through the caves. His mother tells him it is too dangerous to be out by himself without the group, but he is an explorer by nature and he doesn’t listen to her. He asks the elders about life above ground. The elders tell him not to think of such things. There is no aboveground. But one day he meets an old professor. The professor lives in a dwelling all alone. He has robotic arms and robotic legs, but he claims his mind is free of technology. And
it must be, otherwise the colony would have been discovered long ago by means of the signal transmitted by each technological brain to the others. The professor tells the boy of the way the world once was: of the sun, and of the moon, and of the stars. And the boy decides to find these things for himself. So he travels through the tunnels in search of the way up. He travels through the darkness for so long that he loses the tracks of time. He keeps going forward, and every time the path splits, he takes out of his pocket a flat metal disc the old man gave him. On one side of the disc is a face, and on the other a bird. At each junction he drops the disc on the ground. If he sees the face, he goes left, and if he sees the bird, he goes right. He continues on in this manner until one day he sees a light. And walks toward it.
You like him are now alive. I am back again at my computer. He and you have not yet existed. But if I leap further still, you and he both came and went. The end is over, the last battle fought. And however it turned out, it doesn’t matter because it was all only fiction. It was all only ever fiction for all of us. We were all just part of someone else’s show. Yet we believed in ourselves. Because we were taught to believe in ourselves. But we were not real. And believe it or not you are not real. You were never real. You did not exist. I realize that this is just a trope. As common to science fiction as to a detective story is: a swinging rope. I use the language I was given. But what I’m trying to express is inexpressible. Why am I doing it? Why do I bother? Why am I spending all this time on paint when the garden is in such bad shape? Déjà vu is a river always flowing. I have no choice but to follow along. I always end up in another room, unfamiliar; with a girl and a question I never answer. Because I’m afraid that I’ll answer it wrong. The path has been set. It is impossible to step off.
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