Anti-Messiah Project - Chapter One: The Mylar Jungle

The caustic churning of film projectors had evolved into the din of a hammering monsoon in the crepuscular, insomniac, M.D.M.A residue. A screeching telephone brought me gasping back to something like reality. I had been hanging by both hands from an incongruous pipe, which clung, somewhat unreliably, to the ceiling of an ill-lit room. I was not, as I had presumed, in the jungle. Realizing this, I released my grip on the thing that was not a vine and dropped to the floor.

More screeching. I began to look for the source. Skirting a pitiful desk and outdated computer whose chords seemed to vein not only the desk itself, but the wall and floor around it like a saprophyte feeding on the building, I found it: a little, eggshell-brown telephone. Laughing, I lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

Things were beginning to seem unpleasantly familiar. I knew I had answered this phone countless times.

A sympathetic voice replied. “Uhm, there’s someone here to speak with you”

Finally, through the filter of the previous nights ecstasy binge, I came the sharp realizations of identity, location and responsibility. I was young (seventeen, eighteen?), I was at work (a lame ‘teenager’ kind of job managing a local, corporately owned movie theater) and, perhaps most disturbingly, I was supposed to be running the place.

“Oh?” I said “and who might that be?”

The voice on the other end belonged to my close friend and co-worker Jon, who was currently pausing for dramatic effect. When at last he did speak he said something to the effect of ‘Officer something-or-other’, which was not exactly the kind of name that would belong to anyone I was interested in speaking with.

Laughing, I returned the telephone to its shaky perch and darted straight to the little, one-way window, which looked down on the lobby from the projection booth. There, breaking the faint orange light from the lobby windows, hands on his hips, Sunglasses glimmering; stood officer what’s-his-name. He surveyed the lobby floor arrogantly as I watched. He was plump and proud. I on the other hand was a scrawny, disheveled teenager who hadn’t slept in at least forty-eight hours, and had not been sober in something like the same.

Fear drove me to the narrow mirror where I examined and attempted to repress the inordinate tangle of hair that wreathed my head. It set my heart to beating rapidly as I made a mental catalogue of the more vulgar flaws in my appearance. The hearts efforts had supplied the energy necessary for my hands to button a wrinkled dress shirt, covering over the blood stained wife-beater I wore. My body was ready to collapse and, with that in mind, I found myself descending the claustrophobic staircase, which led to the lobby. I walked across the unsettling, checkered floor towards officer whoever-he-was. He offered his fat, calloused hand and I gave him my thin, clammy one. He grasped it firmly and jerked my arm up and down like that of a marionette.

“You’re the manager,” He stated. I replied with a nod. I remember thinking he looked like he had come out of some generic cop mold somewhere. I wondered if there was a serial number associated with him. How many officer dunderheads were produced each year? Where there perhaps more sophisticated models, reserved for less meaningless duties? And for that matter, what was his duty? What the hell was he doing in a dilapidated movie theater talking to a vulgar kid like me?

“Well, what can we help you with exactly?” came the result of my curiosity.

Officer portly-pants was about as fatuous and pragmatic as they come (probably the result of having been manufactured rather than born), and took his time explaining the situation. It would not suffice, however, to simply give me the information necessary to understand his question and then ask it. No, he had to bate me first; asking questions he knew I could not answer; operating under the false assumption that I was fully aware of his reasons for being there; making slightly out of context remarks to steer me away from the subject at hand. He was playing the elaborate game that was his job, and I was nothing more than a piece on his board.

After a great deal of time had passed he relented, realizing I still had not shown any signs of knowing what he wasn’t talking about. At last he explained himself. Someone had lost their wallet in one of our theaters and called to see if we had found it while cleaning. Someone else apparently had found it, or said they had, so the owner came by to pick it up. When he arrived it was not there. Naturally, he called the police.

Having moved from preface to subject, the time had come for the question.

“Do you know the location of the man’s wallet?”

“Nope”

“Very well then, thank you for your time”

Officer shit-for-brains opened the door and walked outside.

It was at this precise moment, swaying irregularly on the sprawling, vacillating chessboard of the lobby floor, that I had my first vision. That is to say I experienced something that was not a dream, hallucination or random flight of imagination, though one could argue it was all of those things. A dream, however, is a kind of vision one has while sleeping, which I was not, and a flight of imagination, in this instance at least, refers to something one perceives only in the minds eye, so it was neither. The argument that it was not a hallucination is much more difficult to defend but I will try. The term hallucination refers commonly to any apparent perception, which has no counterpoint in physical reality, no corresponding external stimulation. So, my perception of the floor heaving and shifting beneath my feat, for example, was most certainly a hallucination; the floor was not really moving. What I experienced that morning was too complete, too rich and much too terrible to be anything so trifling as all that.

I stood, naked, at the center of a broad and hollow tree trunk. Thin columns of light protracted from the numerous bullet holes, which adorned its aged carapace to create a pale and ethereal spider web along one edge. I dredged a grimy toe through the loose dirt at its base and watched the light play across my foot. Then I noticed the many footprints, none of which were mine, which carpeted the soil all around the trunk. There was One place where a huge, teardrop shaped piece of wood had been broken a way from the cylinder of the trunk to create a kind of door. I walked many times around the carcass of that gargantuan tree which must have once been quite beautiful, inside and out, to try and determine what creatures had made the prints. Some were small and pawed or roughly fingered (Fox? Weasel? Raccoon?) Others where quite large (Wolf? Dog? Cougar?) even huge (Bear? Human? Gorilla?)