by Nina Allan
We may never understand exactly what the Visitation was. Reports conflict, and there are as many reports as people who were alive at the time. What we do know is that at 10AM, GMT on October 31st, 2013, everybody on the planet had a vision. Some claim to have seen a man, others a woman. Most reports claim the figure they saw was unnaturally beautiful. They also claim to have sensed an intense longing. This report attempts to outline, categorize, and analyze the common themes across the corpus of available reports.
—The Visitation Commission Analysis
I saw them both. They were death, two-faced and beautiful. They wanted me. Oh god, they wanted me and I couldn’t bear it. I ran. I don’t even know how but I ran and they let me go.
I wish they hadn’t.
—The Unpublished Journals of Manuel Black
It was 3AM in L.A., where Black was crashing in a flophouse, when the Visitation happened. He immediately bent over his journals. By noon he’d barged into a friend’s home and commandeered his home studio. “The Faces, the Mark” was on the internet before the East Coast was heading home from work. It didn’t just go viral. Nearly every site hosting it went down under the traffic. In those few hours, Manuel Black had processed the trauma of being seized by something terribly, unfathomably beautiful, and being discarded. Our longing, our sense of disorientation, loss, our confusion around all of it, he had it there in a four-minute track. The technical elements of the song are massively complex, harmonies playing off each other and building, carrying the listener from whoever they were, through the revelation, and into what we were going to be after. Listening to that song made it feel like the world made sense, like we knew how to go forward from there. Just as long as we were listening to it. So we listened. On repeat. And we nearly brought down the internet.
We were all touched and disturbed by the Visitation, but none more so than Black. He’d found something of himself in the experience—and lost something. Never again would you hear his anger, his disappointed quest to change things. The world simply was, and he was powerless to change it. Instead, he explained it, became its prophet, its guide. The music he released in the weeks and months following the Visitation charted our course back to a sense of normalcy, a concept of our place in the universe. We couldn’t go back—there is no going back from facing your cosmic irrelevance—and we couldn’t have gone forward without him. In those weeks we were all in love with Manuel Black.
Did he love us back?
I stayed with the Visitation tour from its late May opening night at the Ingress Lounge in L.A. until their Boston stop in mid-October of the following year. I still can’t single out individual incidents from that time. I lived it as one long stretch, from the moment I confessed my adoration and he didn’t laugh until a shattering phone call from my dad brought me home. There are no pieces there. It doesn’t subdivide into anecdotes. That tour simply was, and it was marvelous and intense and ecstatic. I’ve talked to other people who traveled with Black, not just during the Visitation tour, but before as well. We all had the same experience. Spending time with Manual Black was living inside the Visitation, dwelling in 30 seconds that stretch on for eternity, skimming across months that pass in a moment. If we’d died on tour with him, the moment we joined would have been the last of our lives, one long, succulent, final moment. We all hate the people who were with him in New Orleans a little bit.
Kitman: You’re an international icon, your concerts sell out and overflow, people adore you. Is it enough?
Black: Enough what?
Kitman: Enough for you. Do you have everything you want?
Black: No.
Kitman: What’s left?
Black: You should never get everything you want. Not until your very last moment. Then, right as you’re leaving, then it’s okay. But if you have it before then, why would you ever go on? You’re just going to lose it.
Kitman: What is it that you still want?
Black: Something I ran from.
—Interview with Beth Kitman, Interior Examiner
From Boston, the Visitation tour veered South, landing in New Orleans. Black insisted on playing venues small enough to feel intimate, which meant that there were never enough tickets for his performances. That was why he started the live streams of his concerts, and the New Orleans gig was the biggest stream of the tour. We all waited while the opening bands fell behind schedule, delaying Black’s entrance more and more as the evening wore on. By the time the lights went up on Black at midnight, nearly a third of the adult populations of the U.S. was watching the stream. In the two days since his death, the video of the concert has been viewed over 100 million times. “Black’s New Orleans gig” is the Star Wars of our generation: Everybody saw it; some people watched it on repeat, letting it imprint itself on their bones.
Where were you when the stream cut out?
The second Visitation came at 8AM GMT, October 31st, 2015, two hours shy of the two-year anniversary of the first Visitation. There’s been lots of analysis to figure out why the people who saw it the second time did, what they had in common. Scientists and analysts and government cranks have spent millions combing through the data, and their explanation isn’t any better than the one we all knew instinctively right when it happened: It was after Manuel Black.
I was watching the stream on my cell phone while sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a soul-crushing hospital room, waiting for my mother to die of pancreatic cancer and an unwillingness to do anything about it. It was so different to see the show but not be there, to hear the music over a small, tinny speaker instead of feeling it in my sternum and the bottoms of my feet. I was crying before the stream cut out, lonely and alone, desperate to let Manuel Black carry me through this transition and into anything else.
The photos from when the authorities first arrived on the scene weren’t released for two years, so the staged photos of the event have become our canon. We know that Manuel Black stood on the stage, shirtless in his leather pants, his curls blowing in an ethereal breeze while his hands were turned up in supplication and he stared down the Visitation with mournful, hungry eyes. We know he was bathed in hard shadows and that his scar stood out more than it ever had before, that a black pendant glowed on his bare chest. We know he was gorgeous and impervious and innocent.
The sole survivor was a Hispanic male of approximately thirty years, 5’10”, black medium length hair. We found the subject prone on the stage in a state of extreme distress. He was naked except for a black pendant on a silver chain worn around his neck. Subject clutched the pendant and muttered unintelligibly. When officers attempted to engage subject, he withdrew. “You don’t understand,” he screamed. “I love them. I should have gone the first time.” Then he collapsed. At that point, paramedics on the scene took charge of the subject. At no point did he indicate awareness of the bodies in the room.
—Police Report from Investigation of the “New Orleans Gig”
We waited for Black to release a new track, to carry us through this new iteration of the crisis. But nothing came. Nobody heard from him for two months. “The Faces, The Mark” surged back to popularity, but it wasn’t the same. The second Visitation didn’t hurt us the way the first had. Or it hurt us differently.
I didn’t see anything. Had I been rejected? I couldn’t be sure and the doubt niggled at me. Did the people who had seen something feel like they’d failed somehow, too? I never asked anybody. None of us ever asked. We muddled our way through our post-Visitation lives without Black’s guidance.
That was as it should be.
Black never toured again, and only made one more public appearance, but he released tracks, and photos, and videos. He kept interpreting the world for us, kept telling us how to cope, kept paving our way through each day.
My favorite track from this period is “The Sacred Knight.” It’s a ballad—the instrumentation much simpler than in his more popular work—and a sublime interpretation of Lancelot as a hero torn between his devotion to a world shap
ed by chivalry, and his love, not just for Guinevere, but Arthur as well. The royal couple are the center around which Lancelot’s world rotates, so his devotion to one feeds his dedication to the other. He’s reflecting on that while debating whether he should go into the bedchamber and declare his affection, or continue to—honorably—stand guard outside. He tries to draw strength and guidance from a token Guinevere gave him the last time he struggled, but it tortures him with silence. The song ends before he makes a decision, leaving us with a bitter ambiguity. We know how the story ends, yet the song is so compelling we genuinely wonder. What does one do, torn between love of a thing and worship of the world it enables?
After four years of living alone in his Colorado ranch, Black made his last appearance two weeks ago by showing up in New York and giving an impromptu concert in Central Park. He hadn’t filed for permits or hired security—it was a public safety disaster waiting to happen. Given that everybody who attended his last public concert died during it, you’d think people would have stayed away. But they didn’t. The internet is full of videos showing police joining the crowd, hanging out and enjoying the music with everybody else when they should have shut it down.
And videos of Black? Maybe this is nostalgia, or wishful thinking, but he looks happy. He’s almost the twenty-year-old Black again, youthful and stunned to be popular, except that the confidence he learned over time is still there—and the leather pants. He’s having fun, the audience is having fun, and for two weeks we thought that maybe we’d turned a page, that we’d get to see Black again.
Manuel Black was found dead in his home early in the morning of October 31st, 2019. He was slumped over his journal, presumably because he’d been writing in it when he died. His estate released what he wrote. “It’s time to sit still, time to surrender, time to accept. This is the moment, and I refuse to lose anything. My loves, they’re coming again, and I am ready.”
I stretched out to forever
Hoping to find a trickle
A trace
A fragment of you
You tore a rent in the world
A scar, a mar, a wound
Waiting
Maybe you’ll hear me
Return to us, lover
We miss you
—Excerpted with Permission from “Eternity and I, We Miss You.”
Lyrics by Manuel Black.
© 2013 Anaea Lay.
Anaea Lay lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she sells real estate under a different name, writes, cooks, plays board games, spoils her cat, and plots to take over the world. The rumors that she never sleeps are not true. She has no comment on the rumors about the disconcerting noises emanating from her basement. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare, Apex, Strange Horizons, Penumbra,and Shock Totem. Find her online at anaealay.com.
A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain
Karin Tidbeck
On a beach by the sea stands a gutted stone tower. A man is climbing up the remains of a staircase that spirals up the tower’s interior. Vivi sits on the roof, oblivious, counting coins that have spilled from her breast pocket: one fiver, three ones, one golden ten. She’s only wearing a worn pair of pajamas, and the damp breeze from the sea is making her shiver. She has no memory of how she arrived, but is vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps.
Eventually the footsteps arrive at the top, and stop. The man who has appeared on the roof is dressed in khakis and worn boots. Dark locks tumble down the left side of his face, which is beautiful in that ruddy way that belongs to adolescence.
Vivi looks up, startled. “Who are you?”
“I should ask you the same.” The man’s barely winded. “You’re trespassing. We’ve claimed this place.”
“I don’t understand,” says Vivi. “Who are you? And who are ‘we’?”
“Exploratory actors, of course.” He makes a mock bow. “We’re the Documentary Theatre Troupe. And you, as I said, are trespassing on our territory. I must ask you to come with me.”
Vivi follows him down the stairs, down the beach, and into a lush forest where the Documentary Theatre Troupe have made camp and eagerly greet their new audience.
The play is called The Tragedy of King Vallonius.Contrary to the title’s promise, the story is about a girl named Rosella, famed for her beauty and especially her lovely head of hair, so striking that she must wear a headscarf outside lest she attract unwanted attention. One day Rosella forgets to put her scarf on and goes for a walk with her head uncovered. A pedestrian passing by on the other side of the street sees her bright red hair and runs into a lamppost. The shopping bag he was carrying spills its contents in the street: vegetables, a bottle of milk, and a packet of soft butter. A man riding by on his bicycle slips in the patch of butter and falls over, cracking his head open on the stones. And this is where the Tragedy of King Vallonius comes in. The man on the bicycle was in fact the beloved monarch who liked to disguise himself as a commoner to see how his subjects were faring. Now that the king is dead, the country is plunged into a war with its neighboring nation. Rosella, in terror, shaves her head and never leaves her home again.
When the play is done, the troupe lines up and bows for applause. They look bewildered when Vivi doesn’t clap her hands.
“What did we do wrong?” says the Pedestrian.
“Nothing,” says Vivi. “I just don’t like it. Maybe the setting is wrong.”
“How about winter?” says Rosella, pulling off her skin-coloured rubber cap, letting her luxurious hair spill out.
Vivi wrinkles her nose. “I don’t like winter. And I don’t like Rosella. Also this would never happen in real life.”
“It would,” says the dead king from the floor, twirling his thick grey moustache. “This is based on real events. King Vallonius I died just this way, and that is how the kingdom of Pavalona fell to the Fedrans. We only enact stories that are true.”
“Absolutely, one hundred percent true,” Rosella agrees.
“There was never a king named Vallonius,” says Vivi.
“Of course there was,” replies the Pedestrian. “But not in your world.”
Apprentice hates playing Vivi, the sniveling girl from a boring dayworld that “encounters” strangeness and through that strangeness tells the story of a “documentary theatre troupe.” There are too many meta levels, too much self-referencing. Why would you set up a play about setting up a play? And the casting is always the same. Apprentice never gets to play the actor who does Rosella, or King Vallonius, or the Pedestrian; she has to be boring old Vivi, and Vivi’s grey tedium is sinking into her bones.
“You have to feel her to play her,” says Director, the third time she interrupts the play to correct Vivi. “Let her emotions bleed into yours.”
“She doesn’t have any,” Apprentice replies. “She’s a protagonist. She’s an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the audience.”
“That,” Director replies, “is what you read in some book. Now go back to your seat, be Vivi, watch the play. Do whatever Vivi would do.”
“She’d do exactly what I’m doing,” says Apprentice. “She’d be yawning and not liking it.”
“But only in the beginning,” says Director, “and you know it. She’ll become dazzled and intrigued by the strangeness of it all.”
“All right, all right. But I want to play someone else after this.”
“We’ll see,” says Director, and steps onto the stage, slipping back into the actor who plays Rosella.
Apprentice returns to her seat and to Vivi. It’s such a tedious, washed-out mind.
Vivi claps, mesmerized. The actors take her up onto the stage and put a red wig on her, almost as red as the one the other actress wears.
“You are now Rosella,” the old Rosella intones, “and this is what happened inside the Pedestrian’s head.”
The Pedestrian steps forward and touches Vivi’s—no, Rosella’s—breast. Rosella is less experienced than Vivi; Vivi frowns at her terror of this other man grasping
at her body, but she must play along. Rosella’s fear and disgust bleeds into her, mingling with the unbearable excitement that comes from weeks of no sex, no touching. Vivi wants it. Rosella does not. Rosella screams, a short, high-pitched yelp as the Pedestrian starts tearing at her clothes. It is what he must do, as the Pedestrian, and Rosella must squeal and weep and eventually succumb to the desire his rough hands awaken in her, because deep down every woman hides a dream of being ravished by strange men.
King Vallonius, still dead in a pool of his own blood and brains, leers from the cobblestones. They chant in unison as Rosella passes through the stages of fear, terror, despair, surrender, and ecstasy. She rises up, naked and bleeding, a complete woman. The others clap their hands and cheer.
Vivi takes her wig off and thanks the Pedestrian, who is now just the actor shyly hunched over his own naked form.
“Now that was a good play,” says Vivi. “Well done! I feel refreshed.” She puts her pajamas back on.
“Excellent,” says the King, and sits up. “Let us have lunch and then push our stage out of Pavalona and to another place.”
“The Arctic?” asks the Pedestrian hopefully.
“I was rather hoping the Cyclades,” says Rosella.
“You think too small.” The King rips off his moustache. “But do let’s have lunch first.”
Everyone laughs. The Pedestrian claps his hands, and they all fall silent. As one, they turn outward, take each others’ hands, and make a slow bow. The trees respond with a compact silence.
“You have been watching Vivi and the Documentary Theatre Troupe!” Rosella bellows at the trees. “I present to you, in order of appearance: Apprentice, as Vivi!”
