Let Hallow Music Hollow You

And cower he did. By only the second day he had grown accustomed to the darkness. In fact, a certain malignant enmity had grown between him and every tremulous photon now extant. He had decided, in a momentarily heightened state of paranoia, to let a few of these “wobbly little buggers” - as he had come to think of them - in by way of a tiny rectangular hole he made in the great, gray patchwork of tape which now blanketed the window nearest his bed. Primarily, he needed to observe whatever goings on there were on 12 Commerce Street.

He would press his face up to the thing and let it be the sole aperture through which the world was projected; through cornea, iris, pupil and lens, onto the screen of his retina where it was at last synthesized; made his own.

Surely, he must have eaten something. It scarcely matters but he must have. He can't have subsisted on nothing but shadows and alcohol, though it seems that’s precisely what he did. This intentional migration into the caliginous had stripped his circadian rhythm of all punctuation. The city was crepuscular. There was no more day or night, he was sure. No, there never had been. That was all just the “lie of light” and such things could no longer fool him. He knew how they waved about, pretending toward influence. He could see it. Light, in all it's supposed majesty had no other power than to sometimes change the ambient temperature of a place by a couple of degrees. The rest was illusion. The world did not change. Objects did not grow more or less distinct. They stayed exactly the same.

It was in this new state of heightened or, we might say, dimmed consciousness that our poor subject stayed, unaffected by all those manic particles. Letting the hollow music of shadow fill his mind, he was free of rhythm and, by proxy, time. He no longer needed to sleep or wake, occupying only the space where the two overlapped. He would simply sleepwalk through his apartment planning for, thinking of and patiently awaiting the arrival that pestiferous “Ducky” and his geriatric mob (or whomever might come in their place). It was only a matter of time, as they say, and existing now, outside its reach, he was certain he could rather easily evade them.

So, naturally he kept at his watching. That is how, at length, he discovered “the other force” he had not previously been aware of. People would come and go, ambling through the few streets he allowed himself to see but there had been no sign of “Ducky”. The occasional octa- or septuagenarian would scuttle past, supported by some device or other but none of them proved menacing. Instead, he began to notice certain architectural incongruities that did. Previously unimposing rooftops would seem to have sprouted intimidating, Gothic balustrades. Gargoyles would be found hanging from once innocent corners, judging and waiting for god knows what. Simple cornices grew mighty and ominous overnight. Mailboxes disappeared, windows shattered and manhole covers went missing, causing unsuspecting pedestrians to be dunked in sewage. Was this “Ducky’s” work? Who would just go around randomly altering the fabric of reality like that? He became obsessed.

Shortly, he had contrived a perfect, to-scale model of the streets and buildings he could see. At some point he had picked up his manuscript, screaming “Quotha-Fuck-You” and began using the back of each page as his notepad, documenting every patent aesthetic change he could find. Having run out of glue, he turned to mustard, grape jelly, mayonnaise, even semen for adhesive. He made changes constantly, always finding something new, struggling to construct and catalogue each of them, searching for some malevolent pattern he was sure would emerge. Walls were torn down, carpets pulled up, fixtures and appliances dismantled, all in the name of his ever-evolving construction. As the outer world (and his model of it) grew and changed the inner one, the timeless world of his apartment, decayed. It became clear that our tender somnambulist would tear his rooms to nothing. He continued bull headed; absorbed in the task at hand despite his understanding this. There was simply nothing could be done about it.