CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (28 page)

“I am fine in trousers, thank you. Only The Queen wears dresses around here,” he pointed to his hips with both hands, circling them around as a ballerina might or might not.

“Then we will forego armor,” Dee declared.

“It is a foregone conclusion,” Dum stated.

They each retrieved sabers—The Queen had had them each turn in their umbrellas, etc., when she bestowed knighthood on them for their careful attention to points of honor (though their bravery, or lack thereof, was never mentioned in the ceremony), and had replaced them with Polish sabers, though Dum would mumble to himself, as he fetched his weapon, that there was little pole-ish about the swords. In fact, they were rather saber-ish sabers, but he dare not utter the word “saber-ish,” lest he invent a new word and thwart himself in his effort to destroy The Word. If he created more words, he would never be able to pry open the necessary chinks in the armor of time.

Arm more, neither had. Dum’s and Dee’s biceps and triceps both flexed and sagged in the same big-boned, age-worn way. They approached each other from foot and head of hill, Dee galumphing down, Dum shambling up (though it was no sham. Rather, it was the best charge he could muster at his age and weight). Rage filled their eyes, their mouths were twisted in the midst of their war cries, their nostrils were large and pulsating for lack of air, their organs began to fail, and Dee thought he might piss himself, less from fear than from incontinence.

“Huraaargh!” Dee screamed.

“Rarhuuurgh!” Dum yelled.

The clash of steel against steel served as counterpoint to their strained grunting in a symphony (more a duet, actually) of sweat and sparks. Blades twirled and bodies spun as each sought the soft flesh of the other, like the Walrus and the Carpenter contending with oyster knives. But neither of these opponents were so naïve as those salty little morsels. No, Dum and Dee had learned well the art of the killing stroke, both offensively and defensively, so it seemed impossible for one to gain the advantage of the other. Besides, both were old and tired, which precipitated this whole situation in the first place.

This possibility, the single most undesirable occurrence in an infinity of possible futures, had dawned on Dee in his many ponderings and contemplations, as if he had been given a prophetic glimpse through the time that he had so powerfully desired to escape. The present impasse, however, was hardly premeditated. But this would not stop Dum from realizing, if he could read Dee’s thoughts, that it was meditated upon previously. But what Dum could not know was the one trick that his brother had concocted for just such an occasion, this exact occasion, in fact. It was an obvious trick, but effective.

It consisted of two words:

“THE CROW!”

As Dum craned his neck to see The Crow, Dee’s saber zwisched through neck, tendon and bone, sending the beanie, sans occupant, rolling past the DUM-inscribed collar, to the ground.

“I’ve been Dee-capitated!”

Dee swore he heard the words from Dum’s mouth as the head fell. Guilt exploded inside him. He dropped the saber and ran to look into his brother’s fast-fading eyes.

“Dum! Come unto me!” Dee cradled his brother’s cranium.

“I am going un-to you. In fact, I am going very far away, indeed . . . ” The voice trailed away into the distance, like the sound of wind blowing away into a wooded valley.

V. Nohow

Queen Alice was much more merciful than the old queen. She had, of course, seen to it that Dee was locked away so as not to be a danger to the rest of society. But she let him keep his head attached to his body in a rather comfortable cell, and there is something to be said for that. He was even allowed whatever books he wished and all the writing materials he needed to keep himself busy. The Cheshire Cat came to visit him from time-to-time, but not out of friendship and not for any particular reason whatsoever. Dee did not appreciate the Cheshire Cat’s visits, anyway, as these sudden appearances out of nowhere, for no particular reason whatsoever, tended to interrupt his reading and writing.

These are Dee’s final words, as discovered by the warden:

“It is coming. The luxury of time afforded me, interrupted only by the unannounced visits of the pesky Cheshire Cat, is becoming compressed. My discomfiture grows at an ever-increasing rate. I am caught in a chronological Zeno’s Paradox, coming ever-closer, but unable to catch the answer that will deliver me from the chase.

“It is coming, and I wonder if Dum, those many years ago, was able to escape its grasp at my hands or through his own mechanism in the split second before steel bit flesh, my brother slipping between the skeins to the outside. Perhaps that is how I heard his voice—the last echoes down the walls of time as his soul abandoned his body and traveled outside of both ever and never.

“Tonight, I cross the asymptote. Perhaps I have given in to despair, but ‘suicide’ is far too crude a term for the ritual entrance into the mysteries of timelessness that I am about to undertake. Zeno be damned. He never existed on this side of the glass anyway, I’ve only read about him in fairy tales written by under-sexed men who prey on little girls’ fancies. My greatest fear is that he, Zeno, dictates the laws of that place outside ever and never. Soon, I shall know for myself. Forever or never at all.”

Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

                — 
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
 

                     William Shakespeare.

From a journal found in a New Jersey storage unit, entry date unknown:

Somewhere, out beyond the too-often-unmapped intersection of known and forgotten, there’s a hole through which the dead crawl back up to this world: A crack, a crevasse, a deep, dark cave. It splits the earth’s crust like a canker, sore lips thrust wide to divulge some even sorer mouth beneath—tongueless, toothless, depthless.

The hole gapes, always open. It has no proper sense of proportion. It is rude and rough, rank and raw. When it breathes out it exhales nothing but poison, pure decay, so awful that people can smell it for miles around, even in their dreams.
 

Especially there.

Through this hole, the dead come out face-first and down, crawling like worms. They grind their mouths into cold dirt, forcing a lifetime’s unsaid words back inside again. As though the one thing their long, arduous journey home has taught them is that they have nothing left worth saying, after all.

Because the dead come up naked, they are always cold. Because they come up empty, they are always hungry. Because they come up lost, they are always angry. Because they come up blind, eyes shut tight against the light that hurts them so, they are difficult to see, unless sought by those who—for one reason, or another—already have a fairly good idea where to start looking.

 To do so is a mistake, though, always—no matter how “good” our reasons, or intentions. It never leads to anything worth having. The dead are not meant to be seen or found, spoken with, or for. The dead are meant to be buried and forgotten, and everybody knows it—or should, if they think about it for more than a minute. If they’re not some sort of Holy Fool marked from birth for sacrifice for the greater good of all around them, fore-doomed to grease entropy’s wheels with their happy, clueless hearts’ blood.

 Everybody should, so everybody does, though nobody ever talks about it. Nobody. Everybody. Everybody . . .

 . . . but them.

 (The dead)

July 26/2009

FEATURE ARTICLE:
COMING SOON TO A DVD NEAR YOU?

“BACKGROUND MAN” JUMPS FROM ’NET
TO . . . EVERYWHERE

By Guillaume Lescroat,
strangerthings.net/media

Moviegoers worldwide are still in an uproar over
Mother of Serpents
, Angelina Jolie’s latest blockbuster, being pulled from theatres after only four days in wide release due to “unspecified technical problems.” According to confidential studio sources, however, the real problem isn’t “unspecified” at all—this megabudget Hollywood flick has apparently become the Internet-spawned “Background Man” hoax’s latest victim.

For over a year now, urban legend has claimed that, with the aid of careful frame-by-frame searches, an unclothed Caucasian male (often said to be wearing a red necklace) can be spotted in the background of crowd scenes in various obscure films, usually partially concealed by distance, picture blur or the body-parts of other extras. Despite a proliferation of websites dedicated to tracking Background Man (over thirty at last count), most serious film buffs dismissed the legend as a snipe-hunt joke for newbies, or a challenge for bored and talented Photoshoppers.

But all that changed when the Living Rejects video “Plastic Heart” hit MTV in September last year, only to be yanked from the airwaves in a storm of FCC charges after thousands of viewers confirmed a “full-frontally naked” man “wearing a red necklace” was clearly visible in the concert audience . . . a man that everybody, from the band members to the director, would later testify under oath
hadn’t been there
when the video was shot.

“You know the worst thing about looking for Background Man? While you’re waiting for him you gotta sit through the crappiest movies on the planet! C’mon, guy, pick an Oscar contender for once, wouldja?!”

— Conan O’Brien,
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
, November 18, 2008

Background Man has since appeared in supporting web material for several TV shows (
House
,
Friday Night Lights
and
The Bill Engvall Show
have all been victims) and has been found in a number of direct-to-DVD releases as well, prompting even Conan O’Brien to work him into a monologue (see above).
Mother of Serpents
may not be the first major theatrical release to be affected, either; at least three other films this summer have pushed back their release dates already, though their studios remain cagey about the reasons. The current consensus is that Background Man is a prank by a gifted, highly-placed team of post-production professionals.

This theory, however, has problems, as producer Kevin Weir attests. “Anybody involved who got caught, their career, their entire life would be wrecked,” says Weir. “Besides the fines and the criminal charges, it’s just totally f---ing unprofessional—nobody I know who
could
do this
would
do it; it’s like pissing all over your colleagues.” Film editor Samantha Perry agrees, and notes another problem: “I’ve reviewed at least three different appearances, and I couldn’t figure out how any of them were done, short of taking apart the raw footage. These guys have got tricks or machines I’ve never heard of.”

Hoax or hysteria, the Background Man shows no signs of disappearing. However, our own investigation may have yielded some insights into the mysterious figure’s origin–an origin intimately connected with the collapse last year of the Toronto-based “Wall of Love” film collective’s Kerato-Oblation/Cadavre Exquis project, brainchild of experimental filmmakers Soraya Mousch and Max Holborn . . .

Soraya Mousch
[email protected]

Date:
   
Friday, June 20, 2008, 7:08 PM

To:
      
Max Holborn
[email protected]

Subject: FUNDRAISING PITCH DOC: “KERATO-OBLATION” (DRAFT 1)

To Whom it May Concern —

My name is Soraya Mousch, and I am an experimental filmmaker. Since 1999, when Max Holborn and I founded Toronto’s Wall of Love Experimental Film Collective, it has been my very great pleasure both to collaborate on and present a series of not-for-profit projects specifically designed to push — or even, potentially, demolish — the accepted boundaries of visual storytelling as art.

Unfortunately, given that film remains the single most expensive artistic medium, this sort of thing continues to cost money . . . indeed, with each year we practice it, it seems to cost more and more. Thus the necessity, once government grants and personal finances run out, of fundraising.