In Reel Time

IN REEL TIME

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I. Fever Dream Double Feature

They lay there, twitching a bit, that humane determinism trying to fight through. But even those little movements were snuffed out after mere moments.

It was a family history punctuated by the bludgeoning. The four of them-- mom, dad, son, grandma had paper bags on their heads, bags made distinct by their hardened blood stains, and the holes accompanied by the baggage of their brutal undoing.

They lay there, ever-so lamely, taking up the space of their homely hardwood floors. The light that exposed the monstrous act was attached to the camera, implying the sadist who'd done this, the one whose hammer lay in the far-right corner of the frame like a guilty child, would watch it over (and over, and over…) when they got home.

I didn't understand the film at all. Of course, I'd soon realize how little I understood at all about my surroundings, but all that plagued me that very moment was the question of What enticed me to see this film? What possessed my autonomy long enough to leave my dorm, drive here, buy a ticket, and to sit alone in this theater, just for this?

And of course, it is when you begin asking questions that you begin to realize something is awry with your reality; this was where it struck me that I was dreaming. In the mid-sentence of this thought I looked at my palms (as if observing, looking out for surrealist qualities), but shot my attention back to the screen upon hearing a chainsaw revving in the pseudo-cinematic torture-porn.

But this sound would merge with the leaf blower operated by the groundskeeper outside. None of my peers would take notice of my eyes widening and the straightening of my posture, but despite that I was at no point actually sleeping, my mind had drifted to possibly its most bizarre place yet.

Strangely enough, upon analysis of the realm of my daytime fantasy, there seemed to be the proper geographics and physics of my own reality; for I only seemed to ask questions about anything when I had sat down in the nonexistent theater, and even when I pondered the why I was there at all, I could indeed visualize exactly where I was in terms of the street, the building, what was around the theater, etc.

For it was a sad and run-down plaza that I had sleepily attended, somewhere between my teacher lecturing and my personal wake-up. I’d grown up and lived near it all my life. It formerly housed a small diner, and a one-screen independent cinema as well. I had never attended, as it closed down before I could even see R-rated films.

But in the daydream it was as if it were not only open, but I went there regularly. A man a little older than myself nodded at me from the stove at the diner, and, nodding back, I walked past the row of seats and turned the corner, as if the path were secretive and meant for only me.

The audio surrounded and immersed me the very moment I turned the final corner, and I was wholly mesmerized at the horrendous display of sadism going about on-screen. When I got there, it was merely a man with a camera using the same ballpoint hammer to break into the home. And after the deed was done four times over, I finally asked myself questions and came back to the class, out of the daydream but just as aimless.

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As these visions of the far-off and the bored often do, the images of this “film” and my attendance eventually floated away as I left the lecture I was in and went to the lunch, followed by two more classes and then a large void of time just waiting to be filled by ennui and unspecifiable despair. But somehow, I managed to occupy my mind with other sources of entertainment and vices, keeping it from dwelling on the horrible idea that my brain had earlier concocted.

I went to my sister’s home where we watched short documentary shorts (on subjects that may have been obscure, but by no means macabre), and proceeded to go home and watch a couple of feel-good films from the East, as if needing their assurance that not only was the world ultimately good but that there was some kind of grand scheme lodged away in some heavenly place and that it was not all just violent chaos and that it would all be okay.

But once I rested my head on my pillow, having yawned several times and fought to keep my eyes open during the last movie, certain images kept presenting themselves. The images were not unfamiliar, but they were not welcome either. The thought of this snuff film and the theater it showed in acted as many repressed memories do, and sprung to life the moment I tried to sleep after a long day of denying it the slightest attention.

Believing myself to be articulate and analytical, I tried to deconstruct the fear I felt when I thought of it. The terror would stab me a few times every godforsaken second, like an icy blade to my stomach that caused my heart to race and sink all at once, giving me an aching desire to sob, a desire that was stilted and halted by my damnable rationality.

Finally though, the terror subsiding for just the right amount of moments, I deciphered what my originating fear was, and, even then knowing it to be an absurdity, I could not help myself but to sit up and stoically mumble to myself: “There’s no goddamn way.”

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Yanking the wheel left, I pulled into the plaza with a speed reserved for those driving after 1am on a Tuesday, the sheer careless traction for night time workers and partiers.

But people would not party around here, they instead went to more urban areas. This was rather a failed attempt at gentrifying and urbanizing a quaint slice of suburbia, one that did not ask to be touched by capitalism but was grabbed nonetheless. Unlike many places though, this neighborhood was able to loosen the grip and free itself. Only after the construction of a failed strip mall, however.

The abandoned brick building loomed and judged my early-morning actions, every shadow from the adjacent streetlights saying something contemptuously. Grunting, I stepped out of the vehicle and basked in what I could only describe as a pathetic version of glory encapsulated by the structure before me. And all at once I realized that I had no real perceived plan going forward. It was as if I was so unsure of myself that I’d doubted I’d make it to this plaza at all. Pondering this caused my psyche to rot and caused me to look down at the pavement in self-disgust.

Finally, as if just to humor myself, I began to walk forward, toward the torn and bruised theatrical sign that listed not a single coming attraction. Like an idiot in a slasher film, I was going to enter, with the sole purpose of my reassurance that there was nothing and nobody inside.

Opening the door was but a formality, for it was all pitch black in the windows, save for the pieces of long-dead furniture exposed by the splotches of streetlight. I was surprised that it was unlocked, and I stepped through casually and unassumingly, and upon setting foot upon the carpet the popcorn-laced aroma persuaded me to keep forth, and the lights from the box office swayed me further. There was a man behind the counter, and the lights, albeit dim, were present enough to provide a sense of security to all those who came through.

I approached the box-office man, who was skimming a newspaper detachedly. He glanced over the paper and saw me, whereas he simply nodded and said, “Nah, you’re fine, go ahead.”

Pulled not by the curiosity that made me drive here but by sheer intuition, I passed by the counter and went into the theater, where it wholeheartedly resembled the abnormal daydream I’d had, just twelve hours ago.

It was when I sat down in the middle of the sea of recliners that I began to once again ponder my place there. This confusion was sidetracked, however, when I looked up at the screen and witnessed, in a single shot a young woman being stabbed to death with a butcher knife as if Michael Myers had a body cam.

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I did not sprint from the theater and vomit onto the first yard of pavement I could find out of cowardice or softness. I did it out of pure shock, propelled by images I wholly believed to be real.

And with no real interest in the metaphysical makeup of all I had just endured, I scrambled back into my shitty Corolla and slammed the door in a singular motion punctuated by the car-door slamming simultaneously with a hefty textbook falling onto the carpeted floor of my dorm as I sprung upward, doused in sweat and fully clothed.

Keeping my heavy breaths low enough to not awaken my roommate, I peered around my dorm in a desperate frenzy, gazing around the walls and into the patches of light and eventually onto my hands as if looking for tangible assurance that these were macabre if not coincidental nightmares that had me so distraught. But even when I deemed myself calm enough to lay my head down and rest once more, I could not shake the feeling that I was not at all tired when I "awoke," for there was no sleep in my eye, and my shoes were still on when my consciousness snapped.

Calming myself to the point of still-fragile docility, I laid back down and gazed at the white-plater wall made black in the lightless night. In the blank canvas of the wall I could make out the shapes that I had seen just a month earlier when I went there out of a bleak curiosity for the decaying old building.

For I had felt disillusioned and detached from my classes and peers, feeling cast out (albeit without any officiating conversations of exclusion) and unsubtly disregarded. Not content with willingly sleeping on the premises and too filled with spite and pride to go to my parent’s home, I went to the place that intrigued me throughout my childhood, the monolithic brick-and-mortar “what-if” of a structure that sought capitalism and gained very little prior to its pure abandonment. Less than five weeks earlier I drove over there in the dead of night living out my vagrant-style fantasy of being a “squatter” in one of these old buildings.

But upon entering I just stood there; and before me were mere tangible shadows of the forgone theater, void of any business, looking as though there was not a single date night or good time held there before its untimely demise.

And as I peered into the nothingness of those sighing structures yet again in the form of the blank plaster wall (held together in an institution that drove me there in the first place), I seemed to come to a shift, a simple switch-flipping decision that, whilst it did not bring about true relief to my ever-anxious psyche it would snuff out the chaotic flames of distress that festered inside me.

For I would choose to do something I had only done once or twice before; I would for the forthcoming two months take the medication that sat upon my desk. The medication, condensed into colorful pill capsules of modest size, had been there for these emergency times; I was slated by doctors and parents to take them daily, but upon deciding they were not for me, I would eventually savor them only as a last resort in what I deemed to be dire circumstances. Whether these circumstances were truly mental or as physical as they felt, I was disinterested in knowing and beyond caring; for I took them the very next morning and the mere decision to take them cast me into an almost immediate slumber that night.

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INTERMISSION

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II. DELIRIOUS INFERNO

And I would take the pills and repress the memories and go through the daily motions of the perpetually bored and disinterested college student, and soon I would have no recollection of what I had become worked up about; I would only know that it would by some means regard that old cinema down the street from my childhood home. I cannot properly recall and I shall not be soon digging (physically or mentally) for evidence that it was ever truly experienced.

For the reasons for a justified forgetfulness would only stockpile. My grades would advance, my interest in my subjects would pique, my confidence more agile and my wit more keen. Relationships with others became more reassured and more thorough. While I never quite held a standard of “who” I aimed to be, I found a contentment in my present-tense self, disregarding my preceding panics and even dismissing potential panics to come.

The truly timely circumstance for my mind’s affair with the day-to-day, however, would manifest in a young woman a year below me. We had known each other about a year, but upon a chance drifting boredom through our campus’ mess hall we’d find ourselves the sole occupiers of a small table. We’d had mutual friends close enough to justify our spending time together, but it was not until this more singular interaction that the conversation flowed so gracefully and unproblematically that we made plans to see each other toward the end of that week, and so on and so forth. And by the end of that following week, I would seal that aforementioned medication and place it on my desk once more. Until next time, so I figured.

Three months have passed since that night of godawful restlessness, a night whose presumably macabre images were now mere flickers of darkness in a ray of light, quickly overtaken and consumed by its rays. I sit quietly and ponderously at the desk in my dorm, patiently awaiting my girl’s exit from the restroom behind me. It’s almost eight o’clock, but still manages to qualify as evening in this lovely Spring. We are to quietly mutter plans, as if in secret, plans of a rendezvous to a sushi bar downtown, followed by a brisk walk to a nearby club. Neither of us were all so interested in clubs, but figured that if there was ever a good time to try such extravagant things, these were the days to do so.

But while I sat there, feet perched on the desk carelessly, I cast my gaze away from the pill capsules onto that kindly Springtime sunset, only to see a new vision manifest through the windowpane.

I know it's a vision, and I shall not be convinced otherwise. And yet, even if I weren’t convinced, there’d still be something artificial, inauthentic about it…

For it’s as if someone had pulled down a screen in lieu of blinds, and yet another projection of a forgotten film displayed itself.

The scene is yet another of utter despair; the setting is ambiguous, but the tone and color palette are ethereal chaos. The hues are not merely warm, they are burning shades of yellow, orange and red, with various tints of cruel and indifferent tar-level smoke pouring away from the frame.

While I wish the scene to be devoid of people, it was not; several people lay there, twitching all-too-familiarly, each set ablaze. Some people were living once, and some of the solid matter burning may have been people once. But now they were beyond recognition, soulless, belonging to the blind destruction of flames.

The true horror came however from a sheer instinct that disregarded any or all fact, for I knew wholeheartedly that the initiating embers of this tragedy to be a malevolent arson.

My girl, looking as picturesque as ever and with a glowing beam of a smile, emerged from my bathroom: “Ready to go?”

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As if beads of sweat alone could save me, by the time we had gotten to the evening’s main event, the EDM-fueled club on the corner of downtown, I felt an absurdist mix of fear and determinism. The fear originating from the sadistic bizarrities of what I had seen; the determinism tipping the scales in an awareness of its absurdity.

It was pure nighttime now, and the strobe lights were oddly inviting. In an attempt to shrug off all the self-induced distrust I had, I laid my hand on my girl’s waist and guided her through, for if my enjoyment of my Friday night were to stem from natural or forced pleasure, I was indifferent at this point.

But as we descended deeper into the precipice of the club and its singular culture, my paranoia did not whither so much as feed off the confusing scene. While dancing I felt my girl wrap her fingers around the back of my neck to assert eye contact. She knew something was amiss, and in that moment of aligned pupils I understood my fears, knowingly inconsequential as they may be, were likely at this point something she deserved to know. And in that moment I made the conscious decision to tell her all I had endured, the memories of three months ago beginning to come back piece by piece, I would pour out everything, confident in her trust and understanding in me. While even I knew the past two visions were nonexistent (for I would have heard of things so horrible by now via the news).

For while the night was young, I figured I could force or feign the pleasure from the evening I desired, knowing I’d have time thereafter for every detail.

And almost an hour later, we were both already exhausted from the entire scene we’d entered. I excused myself to the restroom, making my way through the maze-like crowd and opening the door to the Men’s room.

Upon the doors closing, however, in that minute creak when the wooden door hit its hinge, like a switch of a light I was back in that dark theater.

But this time there was no faux or ghostly set-up, no advertisements for films or skeletal men in box offices. It was as dead as I remembered it, uninterested in masquerading its truest version for me this time.

And just as it was moments ago, it was nighttime. And I was once again staring into the structural void of the accursed and abandoned theater.

After the initial paralyzing terror, however, I felt a push of adrenaline that I was yet to muster when viewing the horrendous snuff films of my previous visions; and instead of standing before or even shouting into the void of ethereal darkness, I darted into it.

Going solely on the shapes of the scarcely illuminated building, lit vaguely by the moonlight outside, I went to the singular theater that the cinema showcased. By pure instinct and what felt to be a predetermined knowledge from before this day or this life I kicked the doorway to a storage closet, where like a celluloid library sat all the cases of films, all presumably classics, but more importantly presumably 35mm…

Not guided by malintent but by a twisted lustre that I could only conceive as love I spread the filmstrips around the theater and, using the matchbook conspicuously hidden underneath the box office register, I set the phantoms movie-house to a fiery grave.

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But as all dreams do, this hallucination made way for an undeniably untimely end, whereas in a perplexing fadeaway (as if between worlds), my view of glorious embers and smoke would be replaced by that of police lights as I felt the hands I kept free thrown and cuffed behind my back, quietly yet indignantly escorted away from the club.

“What… What?” I asked, and asked again louder.

And so, my saga of college days and dancing in clubs and attending the cinema came to an indefinite close, my companionship kept masculine and docile by pills, movements restrained so often, academic status obliterated. If only I had known that my days of visions and bouts of fear were only in their initial stages, and to this day, continuing to unfold.

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FIN

ROLL CLOSING CREDITS