Last night I must have taken too much or too little magnesium, because I couldn’t sleep, even though the conditions were ideal (I was exhausted, I had a thin pillow, a loose blanket, and a cool room, which I was sharing with two other men wearing silk pyjamas, who were both out for the count). But my head had been hijacked, or, let’s say, repurposed, by a smooth, sinister beat, a nice mellow track with a looped soul sample, fuzzy bass and dusty drums, drifting out of the head of the Supervillain himself, MF DOOM, who was leading me through a stretch of barren land, somewhere near the Lake District, or possibly the Peak District, which looked to be completely empty, apart from a few gnarled trees and a small huddle of sheep, whose little bells tinkled as they trotted along dried-out, barely perceptible paths. DOOM, whose mask glinted in the sharp August sunshine (which was annihilating my eyes and bare head), was carrying a backpack full of foil-wrapped Philly cheesesteaks and a few warm beers, neither of which he’d offered to me, despite the fact that we’d been walking for hours and I was clearly struggling, even on the cusp of collapsing. As we walked, DOOM nodded his head, and in between a few mumbled rhymes and the occasional snicker that got caught in his throat, he spoke in an offhand way about spiritual paths, you know, enlightenment and all that good stuff. He said they were best considered as false trails or detours for the dark and deranged, back alley kind of shit; they were magnetic for a certain kind of neurosis (I was wary that people who speak like this are usually talking about themselves), but in truth, they were best avoided: forget that kind of thing, he said, nodding in time with the beat, just do you, kid. As we found ourselves approaching a sycamore tree, he turned, he grinned at me, and he did offer me a beer. Thank you, DOOM, I whimpered. I took a sip as we passed a sign, which seemed to be hanging from a tangle of copper wires from the sky, and which read GUTS, THIS WAY. It pointed towards a door in the sycamore tree, which DOOM guided me towards with his cold metal fingers, before tapping the nape of my neck in time with the hi-hats.
I crouched and entered the small doorway, which led down a steep flight of stairs to a dimly lit room, possibly a kind of burrow or cellar. I could still hear the beat, but it was slightly fuzzy; it echoed in a way I didn’t like. I passed a guard wearing a fur coat at the threshold with ease. Inside the burrow, if that’s what it was, I saw what I first thought was a spindly figure doing an impression of a ghost. I was correct: it was doing an excellent impression of Franz Kafka, hunched impeccably over a flimsy desk (he looked completely emaciated, either immediately pre- or post-tubercular), deep in concentration, writing very calmly in a notebook. There was a lamp to his left, and to his right a little plate with a half-eaten apple and a few berries. I approached the Kafka impersonator tentatively, taking small, quiet steps, trying to think of something to say to him, how I might talk without disturbing his concentration (I had no idea if he could hear the beat; at the very least he wasn’t nodding) and how best to ingratiate myself. I averted my eyes and looked down at my feet (which I realised now were bare, blur-ish and covered with tiny, sharp bristles) and considered pretending that I was lost, that I was his son or brother, and wondered if he might let me live under the table. But just as I was formulating these words, which I could just about hear under the drone of the beat, I tripped on a little pile of scrap metal. The impersonator looked up; in fact, he peered at me with a thin smile which signalled complete and utter repulsion. He picked up the apple, put it back down again, and made a dismissive gesture with his left hand to shoo me away and out of his burrow.
I obeyed with pleasure, and continued into a narrow corridor, slowing down slightly in time with the beat, until I arrived at a small room containing only a projector and a screen, where I sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for someone (a mother, a butler, a dog) to bring me a little cup of hot chocolate and some custard creams while I watched cartoons, just as I did every night as a child, and over the course of the evening, shuffled imperceptibly closer to the TV, in the hope that it would swallow me and I could live there: maybe in Ned Flanders’ garage, I dreamed, or in Pingu’s igloo. The thought of lying flat on that ice-cold floor sent a chill through my fingers and thighs, which coincided with the beat skipping and coming back in, this time with more distortion. A corrugated ochre sheet descended over the screen, and within a couple of seconds Tarkovsky’s Stalker (a film I first watched with my older brother, back when I was allowed in his room) was playing: the long, slow dolly-in through the doorway and into that jaundiced room, before the Stalker himself wakes up and heads off on his journey to nowhere – and I had the thought, which was possibly the first serious thought I’d had in some time: why don’t I sit in a dark little room all day and watch Stalker on a loop, what’s stopping me? – a question to which there are obvious answers, as there are to most questions, particularly those concerned with restlessness and stasis. The drums briefly faded out, and for a second I was sure I heard the guitar riff from Control by Joy Division under the soul sample, those nervy, fuzzy little jabs, and I remembered that on the night that he killed himself, Ian Curtis was watching Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (good god), he was listening to The Idiot by Iggy Pop, in that run-down two-bed terraced house in Macclesfield, just a few minutes up the road from the house where I found my brother two years ago, lying in a crumpled and emaciated heap, covered in dirt, vomit, shit, next to a dead laptop and a pile of scattered papers, just as he’d dreamed about, an image that came to my mind most evenings, and which I expected to be projected on to the screen as the beat skipped and the drums switched up.
But the screen had gone blank. Now there was a silhouette there, something like a human figure, presumably of the projectionist, who I could hear was trying to beatbox. Given the starkness of the lighting in the room, I wondered if it was Tarkovsky himself, or maybe Ingrid Bergman, but this was an idiotic thought, completely wishful thinking, which I was surprised to realise I was still capable of. I spoke to the projectionist: are you an angel, I said (just to say something), a police officer? Sometimes, he replied, though at the moment I’m in my gecko era: my limbs can regenerate, just watch. I watched, as closely as I was able to, but nothing happened. (I just heard the projectionist stop beatboxing and then shriek: turbo-charged schizo-autism, go!) But still, I clapped, and the projectionist did a little bow. Are you a full-time projectionist? I asked. Not really, he said. I’m a writer, he said, of subtle, associative pieces for a niche audience, and occasionally literary pamphlets, both of which really get the people going. Most recently, for example, I published A Guide to Befriending Your Inner Slop-Slut, which has done extremely well, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear. Yes, I said, as the drums started stuttering, I’d like to read it if possible. He laughed (a frazzled little laugh that fell between the kick and the snare): it’s possible, he said, maybe, it depends. Tell me: right now, are you locked in? I said I wasn’t, I didn’t know how, I was worried that if I locked in I wouldn’t be able to get back out. Are you dharma-pilled? he asked, trad-pilled, AGI-pilled? I said I couldn’t swallow pills, not even melatonin; I only took effervescent magnesium on desperate nights. The silhouette quivered and then asked: are you a doomer? Naturally, I started laughing. Of course, I said, and in the gravelliest voice I could manage, slightly off-time with the beat that was still pulsating through the walls, I started rapping a few lines from MF DOOM’s Doomsday, which momentarily felt as if it was playing from a speaker in my stomach. This had the desired effect (the projectionist disappeared), as well as the undesired effect of obliterating the screen and the corrugated sheet, which fell and shattered against the floor.
Where the screen had been there was now what looked like an entrance, or an empty picture frame, above which there was a sign – CAFE AND CO-WORKING SPACE (and underneath, in burgundy italics: next left for the printing house in hell) – which, with a sigh, I entered. It had the air of a Soviet sanatorium: dirty yellow tiles, the scent of penicillin, and hundreds of figures I don’t know how to describe (the words that come to mind: ghosts, goons, goblins, gremlins, DOOM-bots) sitting hunched over ill-positioned tables, typing away at tiny screens in complete silence. The beat now droned in a lo-fi frequency. I was conscious that the cafe was freezing cold, but still I felt warm. In the corner, a man I want to call Dostoyevskan was pacing around a little table in circles, mumbling into his chest, completely out of time with the beat. I wanted to tell him: my friend, there’s a whole world out there, yes, it’s a bit frazzled, it’s on the cusp of something like annihilation, but there are sheep, trees, there’s water, dust, fresh-ish air, and DOOM is there, he has cheesesteaks and beers, and the sound quality is sublime. But I said nothing; I took a seat at an empty table, where a man dressed in a cream, three-piece suit, who looked like a magician who worked at a care home, brought me a hot pistachio latte. Sorry, he said, the ice machine is broken. I took a sip; it was disgusting, completely putrid, but I swallowed it. As the liquid hit my stomach, I felt a tremble in my legs, and was reminded I was exhausted, starving. Please, I said, I need food. It’s late, he replied, the kitchen is closed, you’re too late. I was starting to feel hopeless, I wanted to sleep, I considered pretending to faint. But just past him, I spotted a vending machine in the corridor. I went to stand up, but the man sat beside me. He took an e-reader from his blazer pocket, which he held as if it were a hymn sheet, and asked: Did you know that in Perrault’s version of Sleeping Beauty, the stepmother is an ogress, whose dream is to eat the children (ideally to pop them into her mouth, like plump little bao buns)? Or that William Blake said the prospect of reading Wordsworth’s Prospectus to the Recluse caused him a bowel complaint that nearly killed him? No, I said, I know nothing about that kind of thing; I’m sorry, this kind of conversation really tires me out. The beat got louder, slightly quicker; to my ear, the quality was even sharper than previously. I realised it was coming from a speaker in the vending machine. The man carried on reading his trivia, and I sneaked off (I believe I even tiptoed) towards the machine.
I peered inside the machine. It was full of CDs, magazines, DVDs, and books, and had a little sign on the window which read: automated taste generator. There was also a teenage boy, wearing a cap and a tracksuit, sitting curled up on a splintered windowsill, eating something from a small blue packet. He had his headphones on, he was nodding perfectly in time to the beat, and he was mouthing something. Naturally I couldn’t hear him, but though I hadn’t read a thing in years, I thought I could read his lips. I remember the operation, he was saying, not the process itself, but I remember waking up with a new neck, a new face, new guts and an insatiable appetite, which I think of as the advent of THE DEVOURER AND THE PROLIFIC (a phrase from Blake’s visit to hell that went straight down my throat and settled in my stomach). And this diabolical appetite switched frequencies over the years, even though I remained in this little room in the machine. At times I became a Book-wolf, a Screen-head, a Rhyme-swallower. I ate beats and rappers for breakfast, good and bad novels (all of which you’ll be able to guess) for lunch, films in the evening, and my dream (a transparently debauched version of the swallowed by the screen dream) was to devour everything, to vomit it back up immediately and eat it again. That acid taste in my mouth was exquisitely and addictively disgusting. For years, I was ill, I was sick with it, I was ice cold, I was a synthesizer. I lay in bed stewing in my sickness with Jekyll and Hyde, I was an Outkast, a Steppenwolf; I memorised the ten crack commandments, I made notes underground; I waited for the next episode; as instructed by the Wu-Tang, I protected my new neck. Soon, my head and stomach were full of ink, my ears were clogged with beats and rhymes, and my eyes cracked up with ghosts flickering across artificial silk screens. My brother did something similar in the room next door, a room I used to enter freely, but which one day I was suddenly forbidden to enter. He insisted he was working on an incredibly important project that people didn’t understand; when they did, it would be too late. He put a sign on the door which he’d brought back from a conference he secretly attended: NE PAS DÉRANGER. Still, I could hear him through the walls, typing away like mad in time with abrasive black metal guitars: I heard him shrieking, laughing, crying, and sometimes in sombre conversation with men on the screen. And every now and again, he forgot to lock the door and I sneaked into that room. It looked like a kind of laboratory, filled with computers, academic books about decision theory and paths to apocalypse, microphones and headsets, and stacks of sci-fi novels. And in the end they were all completely pointless poisons, some of which must still be circulating through the loops that feed into the machine…
I felt another wave of weakness, of lightheadedness, much more forcefully than before. I tried to press the keypad, but as I reached out, the vending machine went dark. There was a sudden, off-beat snare: I found myself in another room, possibly inside the vending machine, or one of the gremlins’ screens. It was an office, or a kind of waiting room, and as the beat got louder, at this point almost excruciatingly loud, I realised I had to crouch down too, as the ceiling was incredibly low, which (as anyone knows) is extremely detrimental to mental health and wellbeing. Almost immediately I began to feel a horrid jitter in my stomach and throat, which rattled out of sync with the beat. I started wriggling, I tried to turn, to run, to reach for the door, but there was no door, and I could barely drag my feet across the ground. The beat began to accelerate again. It was so loud and high-pitched that I struggled to hear a thing. I couldn’t see anything either, apart from a large, luminous book at my feet. I crouched down and opened it at random, and while most of the text was completely illegible (the handwriting looked familiar but horrific), there were bits and pieces I could make out, under the title The Singularity: A User Experience Guide for Self-Annihilation. Naturally enough, I tried to fling the book against the wall, and then to smash it against the ceiling, which really was starting to bear down on my neck. But I had no strength left, and the book was incredibly heavy. I had no choice but to lie down.
The beat accelerated again. My eyes felt as if they were trembling. But above me, I saw that the ceiling was made of glass. I took a few deep breaths, and tried to focus. As the image came into view, I saw a spotlessly white room, filled with tinned food (corned beef, tuna steaks, baked beans, enormous blocks of cheese, protein bars), guns, medical supplies, and a bunk bed, over which hung a kind of cage. There were drones with little screens, security cameras, darting about like fireflies. As the beat started to accelerate until it became a kind of screech, one of the drones flew towards me. It was carrying a small black-and-white TV, playing sketchy security footage that I could just about make out if I squinted.
On that screen I saw a familiar figure: it was DOOM, the man with a metal face, stalking slowly in circles around a sycamore tree. The surrounding land, which had been singed to a crisp, was strewn with piles of sheep with their stomachs slashed open, and huge heaps of scrap metal and tangled wires. DOOM had headphones on, he was nodding smoothly, calmly; he had a beer in one hand, a cheesesteak in the other. I tried to smile, and felt a warm sensation surging throughout my body, as the screen edged closer towards me. Even with the abysmal picture quality, I could see DOOM’s mouth moving behind the mask. I tried my best to mouth along, but I couldn’t; my lips were numb, I felt my eyes beginning to close, my stomach and neck were dilating and shrivelling, and my limbs were beginning to seize up. For a second, in between pulsations, the image of a figure stirring in the bed above me, just as the cage was about to descend, flashed across the screen.
As the beat started to thin and slow down, the sample faded, and the drums became hollow; I felt a gentle, sinking sensation. There was silence, I was completely still, and I tried and failed to think lovingly of my brother. I failed to think of anything, but understood that the screen was now inside my eyelids. The picture quality was incredible; I could watch without any effort or sensation at all. It was in this state of paralysis, as the ceiling continued to lower, that I saw DOOM pick up a microphone. It might have been connected to the tree, the machine, himself, to nothing. DOOM drew the mic closer to his mouth, and as he did so, sparks began to fly from the branches, his mask, and then from the screen itself. Through a crackle of white light, I saw DOOM turn and loop back round the tree. He took another sip of beer, then a few deep breaths. After a brief pause, as he waited for the beat to return, for that smooth sample and those dusty drums to fade back in, DOOM broke into laughter, that immaculate, villainous laugh of his, which thundered throughout what was left of this place, as the flat metallic sky burst into flames.
*