Oneirocriticism (An Interlude)
“There are no masterpieces in eternity, only works in history.”
- Alain Robbe-Grillet ‘For A New Novel’
1.
Should you happen to enter the town from any of the three directions, don’t assume that you’ve chosen the wrong road when you miss it entirely. One of the signs you may have failed to notice, if you were to arrive from the west, might have announced the name of the town. Some words printed on other signage that possibly distracted you, on the west road - gas ducts, electric lines, bank vault; from the east - paths, gaps, trails; and the northern arrival - cattle, corn, petroleum. What little commercial activity the area once supported remains nested among the dilapidated residences. It’s a company town, or at least what passes for one these days, in the sense that the compound up on the northeastern hill is a quasi-anchor for the entire hamlet. The bar is situated in the center of the town.
If you have arrived on foot then most likely you have come via the north, a densely populated area, friendlier to pedestrian travel than the treacherous switchbacks to the west and the long, desolate stretches of nothing making up the eastern approach through the hills, welcome! At the y-junction, turn to your right; this stretch is the pride and joy, see there? The community center, once renovated and then never used, much less taken advantage of. Two shotgun shanties and then some type of eatery, more homes and so on. Those misshapen mummiforms lining the walkway, arranged in lines, intertwined in some thready connection, webs of ice? strands of fungus? forming a silent mass merging with the facades? Best not to think on them. And across the street, the town hall and postal office; a brick edifice, the reason why some of it remains standing. To the side of the crumbling mortar you can see the robust public park, open overnight to pedestrian travelers, such as yourself, for sleep or other. It’s obvious why this stretch is the pride and joy.
If you turn back toward the junction, there, across the road to your right, is the crater; a remnant of the havoc. The unfinished reconstruction of the demolished manor houses bordering the crater zone really drives home the level of unwarranted optimism that thrived post-havoc. If you crane your neck a bit, beyond the area of unsuccessful restoration you can make out the remains of the biolab nestled into the foothills. And more of the embalmed husks, vaguely humanoid, blent together and to the structures. The three theories of the mass, not worth delving into as none are provably true, can at least, for the sake of distinguishing one from the other, be slotted as having occurred either with the havoc, to the residents post-havoc, or to those who migrated here on their own accord at some later date. Straight ahead, across the north road, is the bar, a lively enough establishment with a walkway leading up to the front door that, you’ll find, is completely clear.
2.
Hyle sits at the bar, equidistant from either corner. In the mottled mirror the reflection of the confounding ripple takes on an even more menacing ambience. Most often he ignores the duplicate, focusing instead on a particular bottle on the shelf or the voice of boniface. Beyond the disquieting effect of the mirror’s imperfections on the rift, over the months since he first noticed it, something has been happening to the remainder of what gets reflected back at him. Lös and Hyle sit at the bar. They are not together and Hyle wonders why Lös has chosen to occupy the seat to his left when there are so many other open chairs. They haven’t spoken to each other, although Lös has not stopped talking to boniface since he opened his mouth to order his first drink, a Deceptive Dissimulator. In the mirror a diffraction, wavy chromatic lines snaking towards a bright spot. Pulling the duplication, stretching it out, dragging it in. That has been happening lately and Hyle chooses to ignore it.
As for the ripple itself, the third time it appeared it was more than reflection. The gestalt of many glances would lead Hyle to describe it as there but not there, except where it wasn’t. And in that space the light emanated. Early on, a milky glow with a seductive iridescence, but changed over time, now a luminous azure. Its shape, a vertical ripple. The internal demarcation sometimes forms a face in a reverse three quarter profile, other times two otherworldly heads leaning in and away in incomprehensible communication. Sometimes he sees the recessed shadows of skulls hidden among the imperfections, other times different sets of eyes glowing in harsh judgment. Its edges clearly defined one moment and a soft, unnatural wisp the next. It was cracked, broken, fragile, constantly flickering, dancing like a flame in a humid breeze, shimmering, empty, terrifying.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hyle watches the duplicate of Lös prismatically undulate at his edges. He sees the face of Lös refracted in one of the bottles on the shelf. Hyle thinks about the consecutive pages and what meaning they provide. He curses his lack of knowledge about hypothesis testing or statistical inference. Along with that, the newest book frustrates him; not only the words, and the ease of lining up with which, by now, is nearly an expectation, but also the absurd similarity between the graphical element of the cover and the silly thumbnails produced by the Content Dept. There must be some who feel comfort in the predictability that has recently defined the results, but for Hyle something about the project still unnerves him. He has a feeling that they are all being played, and also an internalized concern that the legitimacy of the project could easily be perceived as intrinsically undermined by its composition, the very thing that has brought about the security and stability in the routine. Lös has just finished regaling boniface with a story about a jurisdiction that uses magnetic video cameras on rotating twenty four hour loops for surveilling their access roads.
3.
If you should exit the bar, either calling it a night or simply to take in some fresh air, turn to your left for a more complete sense of the town. If you cross over the road you’ll be in a better position to see what the east side has to offer. Plus, you’ll be closer than you’ve yet been to the edge of the crater; can you feel it? Some can, while others not at all; some are more sensitive to it. Look back across the road and your eye will first be drawn to the brightly lit rear area of the compound on the rise some distance beyond. Small lights dot the slope below, weaving like fireflies, roving security. Across the road, sandwiched around a hollowed out white clapboard cottage, similar to the four behind you, is the firehouse, ostensibly still operational, and a concrete one story structure in relatively fine condition that has been, at times, a general store, a place for music lessons, a second hand shop, and a campaign office.
The east end road also finds its walkways clogged with rows of the clumped together, entwined with what remains of the structures, so not much. If you venture out of town heading this way, you’ll find yourself with many options to exit the blacktop onto any number of trails leading into the dark underbrush. Take one and you may find your way to a waterfall, overpowering in the dark, bewildering in its endless expression of energy. Another will wind down into a gully, past the iron forge, a furnace from a different age altogether, and lead you to the strange, hidden totem whose top peaks well below ground level. A third could entail a steep climb to a ridge that offers a view of the valley, once carved up into cropland but now blanketed in overgrowth, and just beyond, a better view of the imposing compound.
Take a shortcut back to the bar from the ridge and you might begin to notice the cameras, mounted in the trees along the north road, your probable origin, as well as under the soffits to the east. It will save you a trip back to the west side to let you know that you’d find the same examples over there. Here in the starlit darkness, some morbid part of your curiosity might draw you to the only paved side road, a tight hairpin, that leads up to the edge of an abandoned farm and an archaic graveyard, replete with clichés; random segments of rusty iron fencing, ancient headstones askance, overgrown and mossy. Your step, as you head down the road and back to the bar, is a little quicker than it was on the way up.
4.
Lös begins a new story for boniface. Hyle listens in. “I had this dream last night; it started off more like a nightmare. In it, we just stopped. I could feel the history that led up to that moment. It was a flash, like a remembrance in time lapse. The weight of the history, the sheer magnitude of it, was enormous. I remember seeing the moment when the big, glossy art books became furniture, and then when they started making structures with them. Then I was lost in a labyrinth that covered acres of space, lined with old media, discs and books, boxed sets and multi-volume tomes, endless. For a while I was trapped wandering between a series of rooms whose walls displayed constant docuseries, commentary and debate on all manner of subjects. It was overwhelming and disorientating.”
Behind Hyle, the ripple did something, moved in some way or other that made the hair stand up on his neck. No one else seemed to notice; they never did. He chose not to look back at it. Lös continued his story, “Then I had to retrace my steps, and here it felt like everything slowed down. As I passed through each memory, all of the old media crumbled. The films scorched or the tapes stretched and crimped creating a jumbled mess of images. The discs oxidized, all information leached away. The books, distorted by bloat, yellowed and disintegrated, became dust and mulch to the touch. The gleaming magnum opuses burned down to noxious charred embers.” Hyle looked at Lös in the speckled mirror. His borders were rainbow undulations and as he spoke, in the moments when his mouth opened, Hyle saw within it the glowing sapphire that belonged instead leaking out of the disturbance behind him. Deep in the reflected version of Lös’s eyes he recognized the same phosphorescence.
“Then I was digital information,” Lös continued. “Every part of me touched everything else. I started out malleable and alive, like a honey mushroom, growing and contracting with exchanges and dissension. It’s hard to describe; a feeling of being unmanageable, but then something savvy interfered, I couldn’t tell you what, and I crystallized into something so firm that my only option was to shatter into a myriad of fixed unwavering galaxies onto themselves, each available to the touch of a finger, or a whisper. It was too much. I suddenly became awash with knowledge about The Disentanglement, a massive unraveling of all the data. Once a thing was no longer demonstrable, there began a great migration. So much of it was abandoned, left to be defaced and defiled by the viscous packs who remained behind, having nowhere better to move on to.” In the mirror Lös appeared to Hyle as consumed by the blue radiance, so stunning that he chanced a look at the original just to calm his mind.
5.
Conceivably, it is your disinterest in the ripple that leads you to exit the bar for good. Perhaps you can’t find a way to believe in its existence. Or, possibly, you do not find Hyle to be an interesting character; bored with his constant broodings at the bar. Or, potentially you are simply not interested in the aura of the establishment itself, disappointed in its vibe and selection of alcools and clientele. Or, maybe it is the story being told by Lös that drives you away. If it is the latter that compels you back into the tenebrous streets you may be disappointed to recognize that you continue, somehow, to hear the voice of Lös as he recalls his dream.
“So we just stopped. It had to be done. It wasn’t something that was discussed, we merely watched it all decay, allowed it to happen, to wash away from us forever. We were happy to see it go. There was a feeling of being unburdened, dissected from the past that no longer applied to our current condition, divorced from propping it up or dragging it along with us.” The voice of Lös swarms around your head like gnats on a summer evening, or else it is internal, residing in your auditory canal like a clandestine fungus, an eternal ringing like tinnitus. You can try to put some distance between yourself and the source by crossing back over the road, moving closer and closer to the crater.
At the rim, you might look down to the floor of the basin. Who are those people down there removing something from the crater, something that you are not supposed to see? In the bar, Lös continues speaking about his dream. Here at the crater you can still hear it. Why is this thing being removed from the pit in a zone that has been dead for so long? Lös says, “We found five pillars of thought and another five auxiliary beliefs that remained, if not untouched by the detritus then at least unscathed, sturdy, and we assigned each of them to a certain movement, a current so to speak, and we moved forward from there.” Above the hills to the east, should you divert your attention to the summit, the first auroras unfurl in the sky in soft, shimmering blues. Ahead of you is the north road, one way out of the town, the most well suited exit for a pedestrian traveler. To your left is the road leading west, a spiraling and dangerous route. To your right, a way out to the east, into the foothills and eventually the barren knolls, ridges and tors. The lights of the bar are dark, the door is sealed. The voice of Lös no longer rings in your ears. Regardless of the direction you choose to leave the area by, you will have to navigate your way past the intertwined husks, safe travels!