I am coming to you from a high atop your city skyline, in a fortified bunker I’ve dubbed Radial Matrix Tower for reasons I wish not to disclose. This is a dispatch from the future.
I was sitting here thinking about what I wanted to say when I saw a man on the roof of one of the neighboring high-rises. He was staring into a building across the street and waving a large white flag. He did it subtly at first, like he only wanted to draw the attention of someone specific. He would wave the flag for a moment or two, lower it, scan the building he came out of, then the building across the street, obviously looking for some response and scared of whatever was behind the door from which he came. He repeated the routine five or six times before he started to get more desperate – waving the flag longer and longer while running in very short circles.
I used my binoculars to see who or what he was trying to communicate with and couldn’t find anything. All the buildings, in fact, looked empty. It didn’t make sense. Suddenly, the door that he came from opened and closed for a very brief moment. There wasn’t anyone there. I don’t know if it was an automatic door or an unseen person pushed it open. As soon as it happened the man turned and dropped his flag. He had a defeated look on his face. If this was an entertainment stream he would be running from something and hoping to be saved by whoever he was signaling. That would be the obvious conclusion I would draw in witnessing this scene. But this was real life and the action wasn’t matching my expectations. The man turned to other building, the one he was signaling before, one final time and shrugged. He paused for a brief moment, though in hindsight it felt longer, then did a back dive off the roof to what I assume was his death. I can’t see the ground from my point of view. I scanned the buildings again and this time I did see one woman with her hands against a wall of glass in obvious pain. I could just make out her features – tired and worn eyes in a soft skinned face. She seemed overcome by the events, like she was powerless to change the event that I had witnessed. Resigned to unchangeable circumstance she slowly backed up out of view. I studied the scene for another ten minutes before I gave up.
It left me to wonder if the two people somehow knew each other. It wasn’t clear that the man on the roof was signaling to that particular woman. It actually seemed unlikely based on their relative position. But maybe he didn’t know exactly where she’d be.
Then I started to think about my own involvement. Had either person seen me? Were they trying to communicate with me somehow? If so, what was the message? Suicides are nothing new in the zones. Official statistics will tell you the number is zero, but everyone has either seen one happen or knows someone who has done it. They get forgotten the second they occur, by law. The Freedom Council doesn’t want people to know there is a sadness and desperation permeating the zones. That people have reached their breaking points and decided death is better that continuing on in these conditions. I don’t know if they are right or wrong. There is also so much I don’t know about the social structure of every zone. I could get in more trouble talking about that issues than broadcasting these dispatches so I’ll leave it that. I’ll just say in my own defense there is no way either person could have seen me and they could only have been communicating with me if they somehow knew the exact location of my broadcast booth, which I still think or hope is unknown. I’m leaving these dispatches for posterity. Nobody here now is likely to be living when they find these dispatches. That’s if my plan is successful, which isn’t guaranteed.
The whole episode does remind of something I experienced long before our present era. I was a bit of a nomad for a five year period. I drove around the country in a camper van, worked odd jobs, and kind of followed whatever whim struck my fancy. This was well before there was a large group of social media influencers, usually young and beautiful, who photo-documented their every movement as they played faux-boho Jack Kerouac to adoring fans. I didn’t have a phone and took no pictures. I wasn’t after anything other than keeping myself happy outside the normal set of societal expectations.
One of those summers I found my way to an event in the New Mexican desert. An artist had erected a tower out of nothing and people on the road were buzzing about it. Everyone seemed to be heading in its direction, drawn by the word of mouth of people on the road. It was talked about with such reverence, some thought there was a mystic or religious quality to the object. I was of course curious, and not tied down, so I went out there. Around the structure was small city of savvy entrepreneurs and opportunists – people selling supplies, people peddling weird ideas, people consuming and selling every known mind altering substance, and people content to be near it all. It was like Burning Man, yes, but so different in many ways. It was more organic and also more at the fringe of anything we would have called normal life. Burning Man is performative while this was experiential and transformative.
The artist who constructed the tower allowed a total of twenty people to enter it each day. When I arrived I took a number and spent twelve days camped out, folded into the fabric of the people frolicking in the shadow of the tower. I met a few people who’d been inside and nobody was willing to share what they saw. The lack of information made me and others obsessed with getting inside. I’m surprised in hindsight how orderly everything was. I never heard a whisper of revolt. Everyone accepted that there was an order and waited their turn. it wouldn’t have been hard to just storm the tower and skip the line, but nobody did it. Order can seem strange when it comes to places that don’t naturally have it.
The tower itself was a ten story brutalist thing with no windows and only two doors on the ground floor – one it and one out. Around it was a fenced perimeter and light security. People got their numbers near the entrance using the kind ticket system deli counters in grocery stores used to use before everyone shopped online or used indentured servants to buy their groceries for them. When we took a number we had to sign an agreement mandating that we not talk about the inside of the tower. I thought it was a joke when I signed but everyone took it very seriously. Each morning a sign was posted with the twenty numbers eligible to go in on that particular day. It was always in numerical order and most of the small city congregated for an announcement that never surprised. Congregating every morning was part of the experience, a rite we participated in without reason. But If you were next, you were next.
When it was finally my turn I showed up early and waited in a holding tent while the other nineteen people showed up. I observed the staff and tried to get them to tell me something, anything, about what was to come, but they didn’t give even the smallest hint. They were all business. I’m sure there were many like me, who thought they were clever enough to get some nugget of insight, a secret something or other that would make it make sense. I had no luck and I’m glad I didn’t.
Since I was the first in my group to arrive I was allowed to go in first. They didn’t give me any instructions. They opened the door, I stepped in, and the door was closed behind me. I was surrounded by blackness. I walked for what felt like a few hundred steps, feeling my way along a narrow path with concrete walls on either side. I reached a stair case and started going up. I got to maybe the second floor when I started to hear a knocking sound. It was faint and obviously above me a few floors. My eyes slowly adjusted to the bare minimum of light inside the tower. And the sound of the knocking became louder and filled with other more musical accompaniments.
At each floor there were doors that didn’t open. The handles turned but were locked with what felt like dead bolts. I climbed higher and higher, always getting closer the sound as it grew in intensity, following what I thought was the path I was supposed to travel. I reached a floor with a door that opened and found myself in another long hallway. It didn’t make sense to me because from the outside it was a tower and couldn’t have long hallways. I tried not to think about it as I continued down the hall, feeling my way against the walls and floor on all sides. The sound continued getting louder as I moved, almost deafening. The sounds became my guide.
Finally, I reached an end with three doors. The sound was clearly coming from one of the three doors but I tried them all regardless and only the source of the sound would open. I went through that door and it led to a narrow metal staircase, like something you’d find on the roof of a building, leading from one lower section to another. At the top I climbed through a narrow entry way into a large room with a single seat and a large blank screen. I took my time surveying every inch of the room for doors, people, passage ways, a radio dial, anything that might be whatever was meant to be next. After that I sat in the chair and the sound went dead. A projector clicked on and filled the screen.
I sat there and watched a film, what we would today call a form of entertainment stream. The funny thing about the film was it was about me. I mean I was the main character and I was watching myself at various stages of my life, on the outside looking in, experiencing very deeply held memories from an outsiders perspectives. It made me appreciate how meek I was in some instances, overly aggressive in my approach in others. I realized that I had a real trauma from some events that the other people never registered as important. I also saw tender moments that I maybe undervalued in hindsight and saw in a new light as something more profound, existential even. Later, after leaving the tower, the experience made me reconsider every memory and look at it from other perspectives. I would try to remember everyone who was there and put myself in their shoes to see how they might have seen me, see how the event my mind fixated on was maybe different from another angle.
I don’t know how long the film played. It felt like fifteen or twenty minutes. At the end the screen went black, the lights in the room came on, and a door I hadn’t seen before opened onto a gift shop. It sold books and prints of the artist’s work as well as pictures that had been taken of me as I navigated the tower. I look horrified whenever I get to a closed door and elated when I found the room with the screen. I bought a strip of pictures and left.
I hung around the small city for another month or so, watching everyone for hints at their experiences. I tried reading faces as people left the tower, or their reaction as I asked if they’d been inside yet. I wondered if everyone else saw themselves in the film or something else. It was impossible in those days for there to be an individualized entertainment stream like we have today. There could be only one stream and everyone saw whatever they wanted. Mine just happened to be about memories for whatever reason. That’s the explanation I’ve settled on after all this time, which brings me back to what I just witnessed outside my window. I’m not sure if I saw a real event, an entertainment stream, or my mind’s interpretation of either one of those things.
GLAZ 