Another Fiction
Yes, I’m just posting my imaginary waste on the blog, the scraps that otherwise would never see the light of day, things that in another age would lie dusty somewhere in a drawer, but now I can offer to you, because why not. But no longer is my blog such a catalog of exotic adventures, no longer does it have the allure of far-away truths, and if you’ve continued to read it through this lapse into unreality, I thank you and appriciate you.
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Chin “Nose” Malai sat on a dilapidated movie theater seat, the type that bounces rather than reclines, peering over a descending wave of filthy heads. A high-ceilinged room with a big inert gray screen—a relic of a bygone age—and about three hundred ill-fed unwashed bodies. All had once been a possible revolutionaries—at least idealists, maybe artists, egomaniacs, but now rested together as one mass of flesh. He might be able to remember not being in the theater, but it was days ago—impossible to tell, and he wasn’t really sure how he had ended up here. He dozed, in and out of awareness, the incessant fluorescent light always waiting for him to wake to pierce his corneas with reality. No fans stirred the heavy air, and the heat filled Chin with a relentless self renewing stench. They were fed, occasionally, at random intervals. Nose had no way to tell how much time had passed.
And then, as the seeming eternity was turning into bedsores, especially focused on the area of his left butt-cheek, the fluorescent lights dimmed. At first Nose thought that he was losing consciousness, but soon the place was totally dark: three hundred blind mice in a hole. As the light faded, the ambient chatter of the fleshy room grew to a crescendo in confusion. The darkness was absolute enough to give Chin swimming hallucinations. His butt still ached from the chair, which swayed below him in the dark.
The last thing he had expected was for the screen to come alive, but a sudden and shocking beam of silver light slammed across the room and plastered itself against the whiteness.
Whiteness. That’s what he had thought, just now, plastered itself against the whiteness. The word echoed in Chin’s skull. It had erupted as if subliminally queued. It had imposed itself on him. As he stared at the phenomenally bright rectangle of whiteness that consumed him.
He found he could not move his arms.
Big black block letters appeared on the whiteness, or perhaps in his cornea, or perhaps deeper along his optic nerve as they approached comprehension: you are witness.
Whitness?
one’s self I sing, a simple separate person.
Which was almost certainly not on the screen, so Chin was vaguely proud of them, being his own.
Which screen summarily went black, not off, but a dynamic seething gray, in which shapes could be made out. Green began to pervade the picture. And faces stared back at Nose, black and green, as if taken by night vision cameras, as if to prevent the subject from knowing they were being filmed, like lions behaving like themselves at night under the watchful eye of National Geographic.
Why was he being shown his own theater, his own prison? Some exquisitely conceived psychological torture? Some self-imaging technique?
As soon as the question was conceived, he began looking for himself. But to no avail. He should be right there, right in front of himself, if the picture was a mirrorlike reverse image. He wasn’t. He looked at the guy next to him in the darkness. He wasn’t on the screen. The whole theater had stilled to motionless. The faces on-screen were writhing and farting.
He unzipped his pants.