Eyes From God
The set was a peeling, moldering white room, filled with LED and fluorescent lights that glittered in the darkness. A lone man in a single black chair, with a single movie camera, filmed me, watching me sitting on the floor. There was a sudden flash of white and blue in the dark. A red light flickered from the camera covered in dust as the man looked through the viewfinder.
I walked into the frame, and sat on the ground, in silence, watching the dust float in the air. No script, no cues, only silence, only improvisation… Only an emptiness, a continual silence…
“Is there any food?”, I asked the man filming me, who put up a finger to tell me to be quiet.
Then there was a slight nod, with the rustle of silent plastic bags, and he tossed a half-eaten bag of chips toward me.
“What? This isn’t food. You’ve been giving me chips after chips for a whole week. What else is there?” The man didn’t speak, waved his hand, and beckoned me to move away from the camera, trying to keep silent.
But I walked toward him, tired of acting day after day, for a strange, weird movie…
The man looked into the bag near his feet.
“I might have some salad…”, said the man. I watched the man’s eyes shift toward the cast-iron door, bulkily built into the ground, then toward a wall
“Day after day, why do I have to stay inside this cramped room, day after day?!” I was tired from the hours and hours of filming, from staying here and sleeping on the concrete floor. “I have no idea what day it is. And the director you keep mentioning about never even comes out of his room…”
“All of that is because of specific reasons. “, the man stared at me with his wrinkled, tired eyes, brown like muddy rocks. ” We’re sorry for the secrecy. But if we allow you to exit to the public, you might reveal all of the knowledge of this film.”
“I’ve been lodged in here with you for a week. Stuck in these cramped walls, the horrible endless droning noise that occurs upstairs. I don’t remember what my penthouse looks like anymore, all I remember is a pile of dust where there was once grand skyscrapers… I-… What happened to the producers, where is the stage?” My heart pounding with excitement, after hours and hours of wandering and waiting. My mind was filled with rambling thoughts. Chaotic, stumbling past each other.
“Tut. Tut. Tut.”, echoed a voice from upstairs, the director from an unseen intercom. “A fortune comes and goes. This film can be completed without you, as replaceable as you are… You are a mere figurehead, dying in the spotlight while it melts you down to a verily human level.”
“Stop hiding upstairs. Let me see you direct your movie!”, I shouted, glaring at the man, who was backing away now.
Running toward the stairs, I reached the blue door.
“Stop! Please. You can’t go up there. All will be revealed. Just stop. Don’t open that door! Please.”
I touched the doorknob, squeezed it tight in my fist, and pushed forward. But the door was locked. I knocked and then cupped my ears to listen to what was behind the dark facade.
But nothing…
I looked down at the man yelling from behind. His face was frantic and full of worry.
I stepped away from the door, away from the solid, stone stairs, I walked toward the white room with decaying paint and decaying walls.
I lay down, looked at the ceiling, and rested my head against the hard concrete floor.
…
In the dim lights, I heard silence, seeing the director and the man sleeping upstairs in unknown rooms. I walked quietly along the concrete floor, and toward the thick iron door and turned the wheel open, little by little, listening for anybody. I managed to sneak outside, into the parking lot of hot dust and warm black roads. The sun shining in the air
My car sat still, parked in the farthest corner of the parking lot. I walked to it, shuffled around in my pockets, and discovered my car keys were safely intact. The things, weary and worn from fingers and decaying plastic. I took them out and opened my car as the lights rushed forward from the dark.
I ran and opened the door. I opened the lights, shuffled my hands through the crevices of the seats, and searched in each of the deep chambers and compartments. Deep in the dusty trunk, I found a cracked, shattered phone. Smashed and crushed by some strange, powerful force, hammered to death by rough, leather hands, kicked around until it was a bent piece of metal.
I turned on the radio and listened to the static rush through the void and flood my Oldsmobile. While I sat in my car, I watched as a lush canopy of leaves, trees, and an ever-encompassing, ever-growing forest covered the roadway at night. Toward the wonderful sun, with a beautiful glow.
On the empty road, I drove towards the familiar city, glistening in the sun, with its shiny mirrors lining the skyscrapers and grand hotels. I accelerated forward, toward the place where the lovely factories churned out warmth, into the ever-swallowing, grinding, growing city.
…
The penthouse atop a crumbling building, old from years of use, dark with the lights off and the world all fading away in my mind.
Day after day, acting by myself in the cramped building, locked inside, alone. Answering question after question, until one day, I received a wonderful call, as it rang and rang, and I heard a strange voice, rich and wonderful, deep within my cellphone, tell me about a movie, a glorious wonderful, New-Age movie.
And from the mysterious voice, I heard a wonderful story. From the rattled, shaky words mumbled through my telephone, I heard of the Wizard that Drank The Dreams.
“A man deep inside a wonderful world, awakening from the depths of the cold chambers, from a wonderful cave, to find his dreams stolen. The nourishment he had received from centuries and centuries of dreaming and sleep had all dwindled.
Thin and weary as he wandered out into the cold, deep world, and saw how blind he truly was. The ruins, the thousands of crowded inhabitants, and the crowded dreams. The delicious dreams nourished him as he drank from every weak, crippled body, saw their ridiculous thoughts, and then drank into the deep void. The darkness, the nourishing minds, ever-filling, ever-growing… “
Wonderful…
Wonderful
A wonderful, strange lie….. Stepping into the studio, seeing nothing but white…
A strange light had covered my eyes as I had driven forward. Towards the studio… Away from the years of being alone…
Dizziness, grogginess, and strange thoughts flooded my mind. Visions of wonderful worlds, infinite highways, some wonderful music playing in my ears, the glass facade of a Ferris wheel, the stone detritus of a fallen wall, and the full force of the metal city creaking, groaning, rumbling across the earth.
My entire body had swung and swayed with some strange wind, as I had fallen asleep and collapsed on the wheel, driving away into infinity. Falling into the darkness, onto a dark highway that seemed to stretch forever.
Into oblivion.
Then awakening in the studio…
I drove further this time. Away from the white walls of the white room, into the city, to finally see the world and escape after the days of sitting on the concrete floor. I wanted to see myself. To remember my life, my world.
My memory was already fading, eroding at the seams. From days and days of sitting on the ground, filming with that man and the director above. As I grew weary and wished to see my memories, my lovely, old life.
But there was no escape after all…
I woke up in the same studio. The same flaccid, white walls, the leaking rust from thousands of pipes, the lights rumbling into life, and the clicks of a camera echoing through my ears.
The running lights flashed in the strange, concrete place with the wonderful iron door. The wind battered against the entire world, as the room of white walls and hopes shook against the world.
Nobody in the room, nobody at all…
I looked around and saw the camera. The hollow, empty camera, empty of guts and filling. A simple glass figurine painted black and white in thin, shaded lines.
I took the camera up from the tripod and saw that it had no film, nothing inside. The camera itself was empty, a hollow shell that lay silent as I shook the camera in my hands. I ran my finger along the smooth edges and ridges running up the glass, around the clear trigger, and the lens that resembled a wonderful painted sun.
I set the camera down upon the tripod and looked at the unlocked, open door, with the stairs blending into the darkness.
I walked forward, toward an unknown room, the mystery of the voice, the director, that echoed and spoke from upstairs. Countless hours of waiting, years of unanswered questions, listening to an enigma in a voice, wondering about a figure lost to decay and worshipped like the sun.
“Come”, said a voice from above.
Everyday, awakening from the concrete floor, endlessly listening to the man describe a strange, beautiful film, about a masterpiece in a white room, and rambling about wonderful secrets hidden in shadows. And all he had heard from the man were strange lies.
…
I stood at the door, staring at the ancient wood engraved with Latin letters, repeating some unknown gibberish. I stared for a moment at the peeling paint walls and the pipes hanging from the ceiling.
I knocked on the door once, then twice. But only silence.
The third time, the door seemed loose, a looseness to the frame, faint wonderful music echoing as the door creaked open. My mind grew fuzzy, and strange as new thoughts entered my mind.
Of a car crashing into a deep lake, of somebody asleep, of a lovely dream. With the empty scream of metal tearing apart, smoke rising through the air, a wonderful light filling my eyes, and wonderful thoughts of a city lost to the infinite. The penthouse had long since faded to dust, crumbled into emptiness. There was only me lying in the river with blood rushing into the storm drains. I was dead.
…
I stared at the familiar face, the man filming himself, the man rambling about an unmade movie, sitting alone in the dark, in the corner of the room.
“Dreams are the remains of years and years of thoughts, rushing against the head, collecting into a delicious mass. The remains of thousands of years of strangeness, developing. Of wonderful comfort.”, the voice fading into the night. A voice he remembered from the telephone. A voice he had remembered when he was a child, sitting at the dinner table, while his family drove to church, or when the wind brushed against his ear.
“Sleeping, napping, daily. And merely a puppet for the enthralling strangeness of life. Welcome… Welcome…”
In front of him, a wonderful portal to a world anew, to the dreams forming in his sleeping mind. A strange sleeping world, swirling in the cosmos, made of stardust.
The portal to a wonderful spotlight…
Stepping inside, he walked toward the gliding sun.
