The crew in charge of putting the windows in hasn’t been by yet, so the boss man told us to stay at least a meter away from the end of the floor at all times. I’m wearing my hard hat, which is basically decorative. I am putting together trusses (these long rails they hang lights, speakers, etc. on at events). I don’t really see the logic in installing event stuff before they’ve even put in windows or connected the plumbing, but I am delighted and easily accept this disorder. To attach two trusses together, you connect their protruding “eggs” and hammer spikes through them. Then you slip a device like a hairpin through a hole in each spike’s end so it can’t slip out when the whole thing is suspended.
The trusses are steel, and the head of the hammer they give you is pure copper. The idea is that the softer metal will not damage the corpus of the truss. The hammerhead takes all the blows alone and ends up looking squeezed and crumpled from both sides in. I take my time with the hammering, while my bored colleagues shuffle around, kicking bottle caps and little stones in the room one over.
Two clean strikes and a spike is in, and two more for good measure. I am bringing these trusses closer together. The sweat pearling on my forehead is hot and cold at the same time. A lot of apes enjoy having a reason to hit something really hard. I am also enjoying the fresh warm air of the summer morning as it flies through the open walls into my face. The sun is rising with a mysterious rhythm. Small birds are singing seriously amongst themselves. The colors of the early sunrise have given way to a sparkling light that makes the world a crystal. Through its proximity to the night it conducts a dark energy, and holds my eyes in a cool vice grip.
The parking lot below us is shining in the dew. There is mostly empty parking, but also a few parked cars, company vans, and one larger truck that the trusses arrived on. These are all standing by a chain link fence, which separates them from the foundations of a pool complex that was long abandoned and now recently destroyed. The sunken pools have filled with murky water. I step over the trusses, drawn in by the light flashing in patterns on the surface of this water. Floating in it are some of these talkative birds, spinning and washing themselves.
I am kneeling now, leaning on my distorted hammer in the dust, closer than boss man said was alright to be to the edge of the building. There is laughter caught in my throat. I wonder if the birds have any concept of what is artificial, or if they accept their bathing spot without asking why or how it came to be. At the same time, I am watching them with the hungry intensity of a little cat, lusting after their quickly beating and minuscule hearts. My left hand finds the room’s end ledge, and I just keep leaning forward, so funny is the moment and so careless is my desperate reaching for these birds and so much is this light making me lose sight of anything other than the feeling of it in my eyes and in my head.
Suddenly, I am tipping out of the hole. My stomach drops as I become aware of myself. My right hand, still gripping the hammer, is leading my body in its fall.
A random strength overtakes me, and I swing the hammer backwards and over my head, falling back on my ass and losing my grip on it in the process. The thing goes flying out of my hand, crashing easily through a thin divider wall. I am lying now on my back and the rig chains are swinging above me.
“Fuck!” comes a voice from behind. Sitting up, I look for the birds. They are holding completely still, frozen, some even mid-flight. The droplets of water that they’ve been disturbing are hanging, round in the air.
“This fucking thing…” the voice says, accompanied by the sound of flesh slapping hard plastic. I rise to my feet, trying not to get stuck on how strange it is to see light holding still in water, marking definite points instead of rippling on its surface.
I dust off my coverall, also to check if my body is still there. I take off my hard hat. Turning around, the room is spinning a little. I can see the white wall and its new hole in front of me, but blurry horizontal lines are splitting everything, moving out in waves from the middle of my field of vision. Rainbows running up and down them, superimposed on everything I see. All of this makes it confusing to walk. As I take a step, I stumble.
“You’re probably seeing these strange lines moving right now” says the voice. “This movement is always there, it’s just usually hidden in the things around you moving. So you’ll get used to it again soon. This really wasn’t supposed to happen”.
I’m slowly walking, and the voice is right, I am getting used to the ripples. Like a passing fever. I come to the hole, and look into the narrow space inside the wall. There is a whiteblue light filling it. The rippling intensifies. I am reminded of a video I saw where someone unknowingly brought home something super radioactive and you could see his phone camera being destroyed by the radiation in real time. You hear him cursing the camera, not making the mental leap between his mysterious treasure and the adversely affected video quality. I wondered about him a few times after that, and whether he lived long after, or maybe the video was fake. But it’s always somebody, it’s gotta be one of us – the person in the crushed by a falling vending machine statistic, or the person who took home the warhead. Any of those could be you.
The blue light is flickering a little and I’m hearing fingers on a keyboard. Leaning my head into the hole, finally I can see a face, lit up by it, by what I realize now is a screen.
She is wearing thin rimmed glasses. I can see large blue squares reflected in them. Her eyes are focused ahead, and there are small blue squares in them to match. They are darting back and forth. Her expression is calm, and serious. I am standing very still, just staring at these four illuminated windows, as they are the only shapes whose sharp edges are not swirling all around.
“Fuck”, she says again. She leans back, breathing out. She snaps the device shut.
She stands up, sliding through the narrow space towards me. I move to let her out.
She emerges from the darkness and scowls at the sunlight. Her hair is long, and black, and hangs like a curtain, to her knees.
“You broke my machine,” she says. Her eyes fix themselves on mine. I feel excited by her gaze. She reaches one long hand out to me, and gives me a quick, hard slap across my cheek. It stings and feels good. Somehow, I understand that this will help everything stop moving, and it does.
“I am the arbiter of your fate,” she says. “It sounds more exciting than it is. I get paid just as little as you do. You were supposed to fall from that ledge today.”
I look over to the edge of the room, where everything is still suspended in the air. Then, I look back over at her. Her eyes are transfixing me. She rolls them up and down my body, with no particular affect. She is like the early morning sun. Inscrutable, and radiating something.
“68% of the universe is dark energy. 27% is dark matter. Only 5% is the kind of energy and matter that you can touch and see and understand.”
I still can’t really say anything. The look she’s giving me is piercing me like an arrow. She seems a little annoyed at my silence now. She sighs and sits on the ground, pushing hair out of her eyes. She looks at the device in her lap. It’s like a little PC, made of dark-grey heavy-duty plastic. She is about to open it again, hesitates, then tosses it aside.
“Whatever”. It hits the cement and makes a nice clattering noise.
“Do you remember when your aunt went to the hospital when you were little?”
I’m caught off guard, clear my throat, and finally manage a word. “Yes”.
“Well when you were there to visit her and you came into the hospital cafeteria, your family was sitting around the table, remember?”
“Yes,” I say again.
“You got to the table and pulled out the first chair, and you were going to sit, and then your dad said that it was supposed to be your aunt’s place at the table, and you were upset. So you said to your dad ‘She can just sit somewhere else. She’s in a wheelchair, it has wheels for a reason. It’s so you can move it anywhere you want to.’”
My mouth is hanging open as I try to process this information. I catch myself, close my mouth, and swallow. “I guess I did say that”. I’m extremely embarrassed.
“Well your dad thought it would be nice for your aunt to face the window, since she hadn’t been outside yet after the car accident, and her hospital room had other people sharing it, and her bed was furthest from the window in there. But you were tired, and cranky, and you refused to move for her. Actually, and I’m not sure if you know this, she was already in the cafeteria, and was getting pretty close to you guys, and she heard you say that. She was hurt by it, not a lot, but since she was in her weakened state. The adults silently agreed to just brush it off so there wouldn’t be a scene. Everyone had more important things to deal with. She never really forgot about it though, although she tried to.”
Blood is rushing to my head now. I’m devastated.
“I mean, I forgive you, like, you were a kid. Kids are fucking assholes. You didn’t really mean anything by it. But anyways,” she says, unwrapping a yellow lollipop that she has pulled out of her pants pocket, and sucking on it loudly,
“They thought now was a funny time for you to kind of pay for that. Or at least, maybe that you were ready to be humbled in a new and unprecedented way. That was just the briefing I got. The correlation between the brief and the fate outcome is always sort of vague. They can be more like suggestions, or predictions of how you might feel about the situation later, what it might make you think of or reflect on more deeply. It’s not so black and white old testament-y about justice. That’s not really what any of this is about. But yeah, basically I was supposed to make sure that you fell.”
I look away from her, back out and over the ledge. I remember how far the fall would have been.
“What if I had died?” I ask her. “Also, what, you were going to push me?”
She snorts, shaking her head.
“No. I don’t need to touch you directly to make things happen. That’s what this thing is supposed to be for.” She nudges the little PC with the tip of her shoe. “The odds of you dying were close to none, and even those of you being seriously crippled were low. Really, it was supposed to be about you experiencing the fall. System reset kind of thing. I don’t know. Whatever”.
I’m rubbing my face with my hands. She’s smacking her lips around the candy. Looking over at me, it’s like she can feel my self-pity. She reaches back into her pocket, and pulls another one out, handing it to me.
I accept it gratefully. It’s pretty large, and rectangular. Very yellow. I unwrap it, put it in my mouth. It tastes sweet and sour. The script on its label is in a language I’ve never seen before, and obviously can’t understand.
“Stole those from my last job. That one was easier. I don’t like these justice-y ones. I think atoning for your sins is corny unless it’s really your decision, and it barely ever is. This job was good. Old lady, she works in this candy factory for over forty years. She’s home one day, and I’m watching her sit at her table after her shift, and she’s tired, you know? Exhausted. Making these candies every day. So it’s my job to angle the sun through the window, so it catches the little glass bowl of them that she has in front of her just right. So her eyes are drawn to it, and she takes one in her hand, tearing up a little, and then on my monitor I can read her thoughts and she’s thinking ‘well, these are damn good candies’, you know? Sweet moment, for both of us. Nicest assignment I’ve had in a while”.
The candy is pretty tasty.
“I guess I wasn’t supposed to see you, huh?” I say.
“You definitely weren’t. It’s never happened to me before, or to anyone else at the office as far as I know. Your thoughts were reading strangely right before you went off-script, though. You were being like a little cat. And I guess I was distracted, I’ve been slacking off.”
I suddenly felt proud. “I always knew there was some kind of game,” I say. “I knew one day I’d be able to look through the walls”.
Her eyes narrow again. “Well I don’t know if I would call it a game. But yeah, ‘reality’ is a bunch of shit. Or at least, there’s more to it than you think. Surprisingly boring at the higher levels too, though, let me tell you.”
I reach for the PC and she stops me, smacking the ground hard with her hand.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you. We shouldn’t touch each other any more either. I actually didn’t even know we could talk or interact directly at all, but I’m pretty sure we should be careful about our like, particles actually getting too close.”
I’m disappointed, and pull away. We look at each other. She’s scanning my face, looking a little bit amused.
“I can show you some things though.”
She picks up the device, opens it, and motions for me to look with her at the screen.
“It usually doesn’t flicker like this, obviously. You really broke it with your flying hammer. But I think as long as I don’t try to do anything with our current environment, we can still scan around just fine. Just don’t ask me how any of this shit works, because I don’t know.”
“I also don’t know how my iphone works,” I say, “I just accept it as magic”.
For the first time, we smile at one another. “Okay, so check this out,” she says.
The screen shows a stack of dice. “I saw these dice on another job. It was this guy, he was a collector. He plays some kind of nerdy game. These dice were so tiny, like less than the size of your pinky fingernail. And they were stacked on each other like this, on the corner of his dresser, six high, without falling over. He was a big guy, too. And he walked by them every single day. And I thought, man, you know? All of your shit might as well just be levitating”.
She turns to me expectantly, hoping I’ll be amazed. I clearly don’t understand.
“It’s like, you guys are just magnets, walking around, biological electromagnetic fields. You are so bound up in the rest of the world’s movement that you can even stabilize things, like you can create inertia. Don’t you think that’s insane?”
I blink at her. She understands that no light is going on in my head. Her words are as meaningless as those on the lollipop wrapper. “You’re a channel, too. Concepts, ideas, feelings, destinies, pictures, songs, they move through you and in and out of you. Your vibrational frequencies can be high enough to sink ships or low enough to fold fucking origami.”
She is looking at me again as if she thinks I’ll understand. This time, she’s getting frustrated.
“Ugh, and you’re such sensory creatures. Not very advanced conceptual thinkers. Fine. It’s risky, since this thing’s kind of broken, but I’ll just show you”.
Before I can say anything, she’s typing something in, and the ground is melting around me. I am sitting in the same position, but waist-deep in water. And all around me, there are people screaming. And the ground is moving in great undulations around me, and I am in a room with round windows, and into these windows is spilling huge amounts of seawater. I hear her voice again.
“You… are sink- the… Titanic”.
Holy shit. A deck chair flies past me. The water level is rising, and I’m splashing around, going insane. I’m starting to scream, and it feels like I’m dreaming, until I realize it feels exactly like that. So the picture dissolves, and so does my body. My next view is from inside of the wall.
I am watching her from above. She’s sucking on a blue lollipop and watching something on her PC. It takes me a second before I realize that she is watching a recording of the olympics. An older one, in black and white. I’m thinking how she is very beautiful.
Suddenly, my hammer crashes into the picture, knocking the PC out of her hands, briefly extinguishing the blue light. She picks it back up, trying to switch it on, hitting it with her open palm. She is annoyed, and coughing a little from the dust. She begins to scream the same phrases I first heard behind me, as I laid on the ground, having just avoided my fate. As we approach the part where I leaned my head in to look at her, I snap back into my body, and we are sitting again where we were sitting before.
We just sit for a second while my head stops spinning. “I was reading your thoughts, you know”, she says. I say “in a small browser window next to your show?”. She ignores this.
“Since I made you see all of that, and the machine sent you back to this moment through the wall and through the near past, I was reading that thought you had just now. I mean, I was reading it back then, when the hammer came. Out of sync. So I kind of knew something was wrong, since it was impossible that you had already seen me. Lucky too, imagine the hammer hit my head. That would have been stupid as fuck”.
I don’t mind that she knows that I think she is beautiful. Especially the way she was watching the olympic games. So concentrated. I ask her what about it was so interesting.
“I like to watch people being very serious about things that make sense to them. Like running very fast or throwing something very far. The satisfaction they get from it is so pure sometimes. Maybe I was made of simple matter like you once, I don’t really understand the surveilled to surveillour pipeline, if there is one, even. I guess they tell you that later on. You probably don’t even know that you were here building the set for some kind of art show. Your team was gonna suspend a fake wall on that truss eventually, after the ambulance came for you. I have a lot more extra information about all of this than you do. Like, I can see the entire pre-existing yet still not entirely predictable shape of your life. And I can never forget how malleable the parameters of everything are. My life is pretty confusing, with all this matrix, dark matter, arbiter of fate shit, you know?”
I nod, though I’m not totally sure.
Finally, I ask her: “Why are you telling me all of this?”
And she says, “Well, I’m pretty sure I just lost my job”.
Text: Angel Hafermaas
Purgatory Magazine 