The house at Camberwell has high ceilings and smells of damp. The blue-yellow glow of the screen illuminates the arches and reflects off something wet dripping from the cracks. You’ve been there two weeks. You sleep through most days. At night you go wandering through the deserted streets, navigating the cracked pavements and buckled tram tracks.

You’d been deep in a dream when the earthquake hit. It was the first night you’d been here, after finding AntipodeanSeeing420’s body. When you woke, there was an emergency alert on your phone: remain calm, it said. Power has been restored. The quake was a 5 point something, which seemed high, though you didn’t feel a thing. The alert says it happened at 4:43 AM. You looked at your phone. It was 10:38 AM. You’d even slept through the piercing government scream of the alert. You got a text from Athena saying she hoped you were safe, and you replied you were, and she responded with a thumbs up.

As you woke fully your dream crystallised: it was one you’d had before, many times, horses galloping over you, trampling you, dragging you in multiple directions, pulling at the back brace you’d had to wear when you were a boy, dreaming of stronger, more robust, more real versions of yourself, your spine fully straightened. The horses disappeared over the horizon and the rumbling subsided.

The news unfolded on your phone over the next few hours. There had been no deaths, few injuries. The foundations of several prominent inner-city buildings were thought to be compromised. The main thing was that every bridge in the city had collapsed at once. Councils and police were working together to ferry emergency services and supplies across rivers while more permanent solutions were found. It was possible to get across if you needed to, but people were advised to keep to their shore for the time being. It could have been a lot worse. Colin’s house had plenty of tinned food and the water was miraculously still running. Your own home was the scene of a murder. The internet told you that tinned beans can last two to five years past their expiration date, if stored somewhere cool and dry. So you stayed put.

You were not alone in the house. There were footsteps, voices. There were used mugs in the sink and doors open when you left them closed. One afternoon you were woken by a dying machine hum, and you followed it to the VHS replication machine in the basement. It was running warm. It was possible you were sharing a home with the Twins, or a ghost.

But in those two weeks of MAPKNA and tinned beans and night walks you didn’t see another soul, either in the house or on the street. You wondered at times if the city has been evacuated and you’d missed the news. The road over Camberwell Station had collapsed. Stray dogs wandered aimlessly around the suburban East. In a back alley you found a ragged Labrador eating something voraciously. When he saw you he froze, stared, and then ran away. You looked at what he’d been eating. It was a dead possum. You considered bringing some food back for him. You looked it up and dogs cannot eat baked beans. You looked up “What tinned food can dogs eat” and settled on a tin of pumpkin puree and two small tins of tuna.

You passed by that backstreet again the next night, but the possum was a hollow carcass, and the dog was nowhere to be seen. You lingered, listening for the animal. Something rustled. Around the corner you saw movement, a human figure, tall and round, in some kind of cloak that glistened in the moonlight. It turned and disappeared behind a corner. A man, or a beast, or an apparition.

You spent long nights deciphering Colin’s hieroglyphic VHS cataloguing system. It hadn’t been easy, but you’d begun to put a timeline together. Eventually it clicked into place. The earliest episodes were built around Durnut and Greeg’s grotesque lifestyle, eating dry crackers slathered with protein spread and watching extremely violent crimes from their window, which they described to the audience. The later episodes were the ones where Durnut took centre stage. The supporting cast got smaller. The lighting got brighter, but more episodes were set at night. The show became more about Durnut’s suffering, with Greeg presented as a sickly and inept jailer.

Durnut is frequently very distressed, speaking only in staccato syllables that don’t connect, particularly in the whole sequence of ‘particles’ episodes, where Durnut and Greeg had radiation sickness. You’ve watched the one where they get around their apartment in a pantomime horse costume half a dozen times, looking for some kind of context.

From Colin’s notes it seems like the show was made between 1988 and 1992. On his superior quality copies, you can see Durnut ageing across the series’ run. But Seinfeld didn’t start until 1989, and the set of Durnut and Greeg’s home is clearly modelled on Jerry’s home in Seinfeld, in what you thought must be some kind of meta-commentary on sitcoms. And was it set in the Soviet Union? Was it made there? You found an old exercise book and wrote out a rough episode guide and a dot-point list of questions, and pinned it up next to Colin’s map of Dondestan. In the one where Greeg opens his mouth and screams the radio waves that make Durnut hide in the wall cavity, the sound quality is now so good you can identify that parts of the Malkara tape are sampled in Greeg’s cries, the tape you’d found at Athena’s friend’s dead father’s house. The flutter of birds, swirling soars of wings, children’s voices, a howling wind. You are being followed – not followed, dragged around on string – through this house, through the empty streets, through your search history. You’re caught in a tangle of debris. This was the dream house, and its chapped lips grazed your neck.

You dream of the horses more, but they’re still now, becalmed. Durnut is there too, or the actress Heather Gale, looking down at you, impossibly tall, just as everyone on the television is tall, larger than you. When you wake Durnut/Heather and the horses fade into the horizon, into the light, hungry ghosts.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

The moon is an eternal presence which glows with reflection. Up close it’s an empty rock. That’s why we don’t go there anymore. It’s better from a distance.

Int., the Camberwell house, living room - dawn. Caption: “Camberwell 1969.” The house looks like 1969, brown couch, wallpaper, a big old fashioned TV throwing light on the boy’s face. Soft blue glow, soft pink skin. He bathes in it, sitting a metre from the screen. This is Colin. He is wearing a collared shirt and woollen jumper. His father sits on the couch in the background, smoking. You see all of this now, having drunk the emulsion, having been in his home, inhaled his dust. You know it all.

DAD
It’s Australians doing it all, you know, mate.

We don’t see his face clearly through the smoke. The world is at the height of his waist.

DAD
The pictures are coming from the moon and then straight to a place called Honeysuckle Creek, then to the world. Isn’t that something? That’s something. I’ll say. That’s something you could do, you know, Col - pictures from space.

Colin’s dad works at GTV-9 Television City in Richmond. He cues up the tapes in the tape machines, slotting the programs into a schedule. When he’s not at the TV, he’s with his club at the university. Colin doesn’t see him a lot. Mrs Frankel from up the road looks after him a lot. Too much, she says, but Colin doesn’t seem like hard work. She’s there when he gets home from school, and she just sits there and smokes and does her magazine quizzes and her puzzle books, and makes him cheese on toast. You can taste it.

But Dad hasn’t gone in to work today, he called in sick, and Colin hasn’t had to go to school, because it’s the moon day. They get up at 5am. Dad cooks lamb chops and peas from a tin for breakfast. They eat at the kitchen table, Dad telling him all about Jodrell Bank and Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek. Then they relocate to the living room, where the camera is set up, pointed at the screen, to record the moment on sixteen millimetre celluloid. Men walk on the moon.

VOICE ON TV
We believe the Eagle module is in the final critical stages before touchdown. So just repeating - in a matter of minutes —

And then —

NEIL ARMSTRONG
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

DAD
See that, Col?

You see the astronauts, grainy, hyper-coloured and grey. The noise of the house, your house, of Dad, yours but not yours, and Colin’s breath as he watches the television through a lens, light burning onto film, recording the picture, ext., the moon, day/night.

After, Colin boxes the film. Dad will take it to the lab at work to process. He writes on it. You write on it, the same hand. The Moon. Your reflection is in the screen, a boy.

The following afternoon Dad doesn’t come home at the usual time. It’s not unusual for him to stay late at the station, or to go to the pub and stumble in late. Colin cooks chops on the stove and heats peas from a tin, and watches TV - Bellbird, The Invaders. Motel, which he’s not supposed to watch. He watches until closedown, and falls asleep to the test pattern, the arcane grid of circles and numbers. The following morning, Dad’s still not home.

****

Int., bedroom - night. Another caption: “1989”. The same room, the same couch, a thin little man with a red face and receding hair. This is Colin as well. The room is a mess, full of used plates, beer cans, piles of magazines and videos. In the back corner, accumulated garbage bags containing everything he’s ever owned. He keeps it all. He goes to town and shops, picks up flyers, magazines. Brings them home. Catalogues them. Throws nothing away. We follow him through his house, through corridors and bedrooms, some of which the doors barely open, so jammed they are with clutter. He has a dozen televisions, several VCRs and betamax players, an old quadruplex tape player as big as a freezer, and tens of thousands of videotapes. He records everything he can off TV, puts the tapes in garbage bags and adds them to the mountainous pile in the ballroom.

Colin pours another wine from the box and flips over to the second half of Hey Hey It’s Saturday. He hits record. The man in the Plucka Duck costume gyrates and dances, humping the startled contestant, who fails to win a Toyota Corolla.

Much later: Colin is asleep on the couch to the hum of the test pattern. There’s a knock at the door. Colin opens it. It’s Plucka Duck. He takes his head off. It’s Georgios, of course, drunk already. Colin was expecting him hours ago.

COLIN
I taped the show. You were funny.

Georgios kisses him.

GEORGIOS
We’re heading back to the party, do you want to come?

Colin doesn’t. Regardless, Int., nightclub - night. Colin looks shyly on. He drinks wine on the network’s tab. Watches Georgios work the room, dance like a dickhead, powered by bourbon and smooth Channel 9 cocaine. He’s dancing with the production assistant girl Sandy. It’s near dawn when they finally stumble home. Georgios wears the costume up to the bedroom, his white stockinged legs taut, the wine-stained polyester feathers soft on Colin’s back as Georgios enters him.

After, they lie in sweaty sheets and sun creeps up behind the curtain and Colin misses the moon. Georgios is already asleep. Colin finds the tape and puts it on, a copy of a copy. The label on the videotape says The Moon. He’s seen it countless times. As it flickers on the bedroom TV he mouths the words, the just repeating - in a matter of minutes, and moves his hands, conducting the movement, the cosmic ballet.

Int., living room - night. There’s another jump in time, and Colin and Georgios, now both grey and worn, sit on the couch drinking whiskey from plastic tumblers. Plucka Duck gyrates across the television screen.

GEORGIOS
The new guy is rubbish. It’s not the same. There’s no danger. There’s no sex.

Cut to: Georgios is rummaging through boxes in the hall, exasperated at the sheer volume of junk, garbage bags.

GEORGIOS
Can we get rid of these? They’re cereal boxes.

COLIN
No. Of course not. Put those down where you found them.

GEORGIOS
You don’t need to keep everything, for Christ’s sake.

COLIN
My house, my stuff. Just put it back.

Later. Georgios is in the living room (Int. - night), watching a TV documentary about ghosts. Colin comes in and sits in an armchair. Georgios doesn’t look up.

GEORGIOS
Do you think anyone gives a shit about old tv ads? Cereal boxes? Mouldy old magazines? Why do you care? Why do you live surrounded by this shit?

Silence.

COLIN
It’s not… someone has to. I know that sounds silly, really I do. But when something disappears, it’s done for good. Once something happens, it’s done. No one remembers it. But someone might if I just hold the line. I can hold on. I can hold on.

Int., hallway - day, nearly now. It’s the house we know from earlier chapters. Lined with boxes and bags, dark, an endless corridor, an accumulation of life. On the floor is Colin. He is old now, nearly at the end of his life. He can no longer breathe. There’s a knock at the door, insistent.

Ext., the Camberwell house - day. There’s a large skip in the driveway. The sound of a machine. Several people are carrying bags out of the house. A woman hauls one into the skip. A man follows, a bulky black garbage bag over his shoulder.

MAN
This one’s videos.

WOMAN
Straight to the crusher.

On the street, the crusher whirs. Videotapes, crushed between metal teeth.

Int., the ballroom - day.

Somewhere amongst the mass of junk, a 16mm film canister, with a label scrawled in a child’s handwriting: The Moon.

Up close the moon is like a desert at night. Silent, beautiful.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

AntipodeanSeeing420 has been murdered. You turn up at his flat on Saturday afternoon to find the wall covered in blood, the TV cycling through YouTube videos. On the couch, his body torn open.

You find a dirty office swivel chair in the kitchen and sit for a while. You reach for your phone, but stop yourself. Scrolling right now feels distasteful. Eventually you get it out to call the police.

Two cops show up around half an hour later. One talks, the other is silent. The talking one, the man, guides you outside while the silent one puts up police tape over the door in an X shape. He introduces himself, and you immediately forget his name.

He asks you questions that seem logical to anyone who’s seen cop shows. Your name, your relationship to the deceased, when you discovered the body, have you touched anything, the deceased’s name. AntipodeanSeeing420, you say.

“What’s that?” the cop says.

Chris, you say. Chris Tran.

He gets you to follow him back into the flat, ducking under the tape, to show him where you stood, where you sat. Chris’ body is still prone on the couch. The TV is still on, playing a YouTube video essay about a ghost visible in the background in one scene of the Harrison Ford movie The Fugitive. Something catches your eye through the bedroom door. Where there had once been the small peephole that you and Chris used to spy on the neighbours, there was now a gaping maw big enough for a grown man to climb through. The room next door is dark.

You tell him you came in at around 2:30pm. “How did you get in?” he asks. The door was unlocked, you say. Chris doesn’t lock it.

The cop takes some notes. He tells you that they suspect the perpetrator escaped by climbing through the hole in the wall into the next apartment. He gestures to the bedroom.

Why? you ask. The front door was unlocked. He never locks it.

The cop looks at the open door, perplexed. “Yeah. Right,” he says, and scribbles something on his notepad.

He says things should move quickly. That they’re prepared to arrest someone, a British national here without a visa.

There’s two of them, you say.

“What?” he says.

There’s two of that man, you say. They’re twins.

He tells you to go home and stay there in case they have more questions for you. Sure, you say. You walk straight out the gate to the street, thinking of the hole in Chris’ body, the hole in the wall. The body a tree trunk, the blood branches. You wonder why the cop thought the perpetrator had climbed out through the hole. Probably blood trails. You wonder how much the cop was supposed to tell you, and whether he was even allowed to say that about the suspect’s visa status. You can’t remember the last time you saw a cop in real life. His gun looked like a plastic toy on his waist. You wonder what it weighs. The hole had got so big that someone had climbed through it. It is the Silovik Killer. It’s Wapabah. It’s the twins. It’s the Television Internationale.

You look up at the winter sun. It leaves a stain in your retina. The bakery is closed. The Sikovik Killer, who leaves bodies in the dumpsters behind the bakery, that Wapabah finds – or does he put them there? Wapabah, who carries a spanner. You can’t quite remember the plot. You haven’t seen those early episodes in a while. Durnut saw it from the window, from where she often sees violent crimes. “Do not trust Wapabah,” Durnut cried to Greeg when they were alone. “He is a traitor and a spy. He cannot extract secrets from Manager Kreig’s brain.” The killer extracts secrets from dead minds by decapitation. That’s right. The skip had been full of heads. Chris hadn’t been decapitated. You wonder if that wound could have been caused by a spanner. You didn’t get a close enough look. A hell of a way to go.

The streets are nearly empty, no cars, few people. It’s getting dark when you hit the river. You follow the trail south until you find a bridge. Suburbs fold into suburbs.

You end up in Camberwell, at the house. There’s no one there. You haven’t been in for a few days and Mike has made progress. The vast front room is nearly empty, but for a couch, a stack of tapes, and a huge early-2000s-era rear projection TV. The dirty, moth-eaten curtains are drawn. The room smells of cool mould.

The house feels like home now. Since drinking the emulsion you feel kinship with Colin, dead Colin. You no longer see the filth and clutter, just as he didn’t. You put in one of the tapes and sit on the couch. It’s a puppet show, staticky, worn, the colours desaturated. The puppets are thin, felt and wood figures with hollow eyes. They’re operated by people in black bodysuits who are uncomfortably visible in every shot, like ghosts, manipulating them with strings. The puppets are waist height on their operators, and they’re dirty, with what might be burn marks. The show is familiar, though you’re sure you’ve never seen it. There’s no dialogue, just a distorted synthesiser score. The girl puppet comforts the boy puppet, running her hand along his back. He holds his wooden hands to his face, shakes his head. They kiss. Just when their felt faces touch you become aware of the figures in black bodysuits and balaclavas again. It’s discomfiting being in two realities at once. Then she attaches a hook into a loop halfway up his back. He is dragged away into the black, a small figure pulled by a larger, less visible one.

The room around you is dark but for moonlight streaming in through the gap in the curtains. The people on television are large, not just figuratively, but literally. That’s how people were back then, the voice tells you. Large, tall, like trees.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

Was the attempted kidnapping of a TV executive an art project gone wrong?

Eighties outsider artist Charles Garry became notorious when he attempted to kidnap a TV executive. A new exhibition takes a closer look at this cult figure.

By NADINE DAWSON for the WILLIAMSBURG LEADER

19 May 2018

In 1980s Chicago, the work of Charles Garry was everywhere. His posters and flyers aped the style of a political pressure group, though their demands were impossible to discern. Slogans included “TELEVISION IS ART”; “DON’T LET THEM WATCH YOU”; “RESIST THE TELECRATIC REGIME”; “SMASH YOUR SCREEN”; and “TELEVISION IS THE GATEWAY TO THE UNCONSCIOUS”. All were accompanied by religious and revolutionary imagery. One depicts the hand of God from Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” reaching out of a television set.

“People thought it was some kind of joke but Chuck loved TV,” says Garry’s school friend and now gallerist Bud Walsh. “Chuck’s whole thing was that TV is the artform of the people. And too much of it had been lost or ignored for too long.”

Walsh is now a gallerist and art consultant in New York.

Garry passed away in 2012. This week Walsh, who now runs New Atlantis Gallery in Williamsburg, is launching TELEVISION IS ART, the first major retrospective of Garry’s work, with the cooperation of the Garry family. The show includes new prints and original posters torn from the streets of Chicago, where much of Garry’s work was exhibited.

He says that Garry was a contradictory character with a sharply satirical eye, and his work remains in demand.

“His goal for the Television International was to recover and, as he put it, liberate old TV shows,” says Walsh. “Mainly he just made posters.”

This was in an era when TV networks routinely destroyed master tapes of old programs when they’d exceeded their commercial use.

Walsh met Charles Garry at an elite boarding school in Illinois, where Garry was on an academic scholarship. Both excelled in art classes. Many thought he had a promising art career ahead of him, but Garry returned to his family in Chicago and became a knife salesman. Garry started operating under the name Television International in the mid-eighties. It started life as a guerrilla art project, but it had an uncomfortably violent edge. Garry wrote bizarre essays which were embraced by local art journals and zines, and printed posters that he pasted up all over town.

Garry didn’t just want classic TV dramas and comedies to be repeated, he wanted news footage and advertisements and interstitials - “ALL OF IT”, as one poster proclaimed. “REVEAL THE PAST TO ILLUMINATE THE FUTURE.”

In June 1986, Garry was approached by Chicago gallerist Horatio Salt to team up for an exhibition of his posters and manifestos. Garry responded by threatening him at gunpoint at his Streeterville gallery. No charges were brought.

Many of Garry’s bizarre beliefs and actions can be attributed to his schizophrenia. While he was developing a reputation as an outsider artist - a term he abhorred - he was struggling with his mental health.

Garry’s posters got more bizarre, with long screeds of text about forgotten and unloved TV shows. His Dream House series still compels fans decades later. “KISS ME IN THE DREAM HOUSE”, one reads. “THE LIPS OF THE DREAM HOUSE WHISPER LOVE.”

“He was very concerned about this 1980s game show called Dream House,” says Walsh. “Basically it was a game show where couples could win a house. It didn’t last long because it wasn’t very good, but obviously Chuck liked it. He found out somehow that almost all the episodes had been wiped. This was sacrilege to Chuck, it was like destroying a Picasso.”

Garry committed his final act of gonzo art (or terror, depending on who you ask) when he travelled to New York and attempted to kidnap NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff, who he blamed for the destruction of the Dream House tapes. Garry approached Tartikoff outside his Manhattan office with what turned out to be a replica pistol, and forced him into a car, where he demanded that NBC’s archives be opened to the public. The kidnapping attempt was foiled by NBC security guards, and Garry was in and out of prisons and hospitals for the rest of his life.

Between 2009 and his death in 2012, Garry was a regular poster on Facebook, and he kept close correspondence with fans across the world. “The shows are the shows,” he wrote in a typically obscure and ominous post in 2011. “The dream house walls breathe love, press your ears to their skin and listen. BREAK the SCREEN.”

Some have criticised Walsh for exploiting Garry’s memory for profit and clout - the New Atlantis Gallery sells t-shirts, posters and lenticular keychains of Garry’s works, and claims to have exclusive rights to Garry’s slogans.

“This art gallery shit is as far away from Garry’s work as you can get,” writes one internet critic on the Television International Reddit page. “Garry would have kicked his f*cking ass.”

Walsh is dismissive of his critics.

“I don’t make much money from Garry’s stuff,” he says. “I just want his work to be better recognised.”

TELEVISION IS ART: Charles Garry’s Television International opens at New Atlantis Gallery in Williamsburg tonight.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

You sink into a fever and lose two days. When you wake, your bedsheets are soaked in sweat and your throat feels like it’s been grated. Athena has stopped responding to messages, which is fair enough. Your flat is lonely and bare, and doesn’t feel like yours. It isn’t, really. It was your Dad’s, for the last year of his life.

* * * *

When you arrived here, the flat was sparse, with just a few basic bits of cheap furniture, and a strange selection of things he’d brought from his old life in the basement storage cage. You’ve barely changed anything. It’s hard to know what kind of life he’d had here. In their last few years your parents had kept their distance from you, and from everyone else. Then your Mum died of a brain aneurism, the kind of sudden, unpredictable thing that you hear about, and your Dad deteriorated fast. He moved out of the family home and rented this flat, and died the following year. You’d barely been in touch with him in that time. He’d shut everyone out.

As their only child, you inherited everything. You were shocked to discover they’d sold the family home. Somehow all they left behind was around $60,000. It wasn’t clear where the rest had gone. The rent here was cheap, so you took over the lease. You’ve been living on the money for the last year and a half, and it’s finally running out.

* * * *

You drag yourself up to AS420’s flat and prostrate yourself on the couch. It’s been months and no one has noticed that he shouldn’t be here. You haven’t seen a building manager or maintenance staff for months, and there are fewer residents than ever.

“You look shittier than normal,” he says sunnily, handing you a beer. He’s got a fridge now, and new curved computer monitors. He’s running it all of an extension cord from a neighbouring apartment’s balcony power outlet.

AS420 has a new job. He’s working for an AI company based in Eastern Europe. His job is to pose as a teenager and prompt rival chatbots to respond to contentious and lewd questions. He had to submit a portfolio to get the job. They hired him right away. Today he’s writing scenarios where he’s a teenage runaway searching for an abortion clinic, a twelve-year-old asking about the best way to dispose of a body, and a white girl looking to come out as transracial. He feeds the conversations back to head office so the engineers can compare results with their own chatbot. He’s making good money, but it’s also satisfying to know that he’s hiding what he calls “AI poison” in his phraseology. He says it’s going to gradually make their results nonsensical.

AS420 barely leaves the flat. He’s scared of The Twins, his old housemates, who have returned to the city for unspecified vengeance. “I don’t know if it’s vengeance against me or not,” he says, “but there’s a definite vengeance vibe in the air.”

What have you done that they want vengeance against you, you ask.

“That’s not really how they think,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate.

The Twins, he says, are the local branch of the Television International. “There’s still branches here and there,” he says. You don’t tell him about the raids at the Camberwell house. But you’ve told him about the MAPKNA den above the ballroom. You’ve told him about dragging the mirror up there to watch the tapes, and how they’re the best sources you’ve ever seen.

“Man, if you could get those tapes out of there they’d be so cool to watch,” he says. “You can’t watch them all yourself, you’d be dead.”

You’ve been limiting your MAPKNA intake to minimise the withdrawals, but you’re thinking about Durnut more than ever. You try to explain it to AS420: There are times when I’m watching her, you say, and she seems so real. It’s like she’s a living thing, but she’s trapped in those movements, in those words. Every time I watch it, it’s different. Like, it’s not a video recording of an actress. I’m looking at a real person. Trapped between the frames.

“Like a ghost,” says AS420.

Sort of, you say. She’s a real person, that’s the only way you know to explain it. You realise this all sounds vague. You’ve always been obsessed with old TV shows. But this feels different.

“There was a guy in America I was reading about,” says AS420. “This was in the eighties. He was a farmer, in Idaho, he grew corn. He was from the city and he wasn’t very good at it, I guess, he couldn’t get the hang of the business side of things, and he was going to lose the farm. Then he had some kind of breakdown, and he just cut down a whole field of corn, and built a baseball diamond. He and his wife and their daughter went into this group psychosis, a folie à trois, you could call it. They sat there day after day watching the baseball diamond, which they said was populated with ghosts. Ghosts of the dead baseball players that he’d loved as a kid. The bank foreclosed on the farm. But here’s the thing. Suddenly all these people were coming from all around, to look at the empty field. They really believed they were looking at the ghosts of this man’s childhood. Not even their own nostalgia, it was someone else’s, but that was enough for them. They’d come and watch and just waste away.

“America as a country is in this mass psychosis,” he says. “They’re addicted to the past and it’s killing them.”

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

The sky outside the window is green. A wind has whipped through the city, spreading sickness. Durnut, pale and sickly, has been hocking up phlegm, much to the amusement of the studio audience. Greeg is lying in a bed in the middle of the room, in a feverish dream, tossing and groaning.

He shouldn’t have left the window open. That’s how the particles get in. The particles are little green pixels flashing across the screen with a high-pitched screeching sound. Durnut shoos them away, ushering them back out the window and pulling it shut. She says something to camera, exasperated, something not in English, not in any language. She drinks her anti-radiation milk and gags, before pouring Greeg’s into his open mouth. Most of it drips down his chin. The audience laughs.

Durnut turns on the radio. It hisses and whistles. She twists the dial. Nothing. She gazes wistfully into the middle distance, listening to the static. Then she looks at the camera, and says something that sounds like English. “It gets in there,” she says. “Right on your skin.” Durnut walks slowly towards us, closer, closer, drifting out of focus until she is just flesh. The static becomes music. “And the world starts coming apart.”

* * * *

At the house it’s easy to hide from Mike. You can lose a day in the collection without seeing him at all. Between the two of you you’re starting to make progress. In some rooms you can see the floor and the back walls. It’s not an improvement. The house feels lonely, stripped. You confine yourself mostly to the eastern wing, the one closest to the ballroom. Most days you do a few hours of sorting before retreating to the secret МДРКИЛ den above the ballroom. You’d found a full-length mirror and dragged it up the stairs. Colin must have been watching the show raw.

He’d dubbed consecutive episodes together, using better sources than you’ve ever seen. You can see the wrinkles around Durnut’s eyes, the grime of the set, the reflection of the studio lights in Greeg’s glasses, the palor of their skin, the yellow of their teeth. In a sequence of episodes you’ve never seen before, a nuclear wind blows through Durnut and Greeg’s city. Durnut sweeps the floor obsessively. Wapabah comes in and out, wearing a black warden’s helmet, bringing them pints of grey milk that’s supposed to protect them from the radiation. He is determined to prove his worth to Durnut. The wound on his forearm is weeping pink goo. Durnut is still wary of him. She still suspects that he is a serial murderer. From her window, she had seen him dumping large garbage bags in the bin behind the bakery. That scene is repeated wholesale from a previous episode, its audio strangely dubbed with new dialogue.

One afternoon while you’re sifting through a mountain of old comic books in one of the back bedrooms, you hear a noise through the floor. It’s just a vibration at first, but then it’s water, flowing water, a tap, or a stream—it’s too faint to be sure. You follow the noise into the hall, and to a low door, five feet high. You open it. Behind it is a set of stairs, going down. The noise bellows from beneath.

You’re in a narrow passage. It smells of vinegar. You find a light switch. A single naked bulb flickers on. The walls aren’t walls, they’re floor-to-ceiling videotapes. The sound is louder down here. It’s the sound of a machine. You follow it. More tapes and reels of film. The noise stops. You come to a room with bare walls, dominated by a huge machine that looks like something out of a spaceship, or the control room for a nuclear power station. It’s a video duplication machine. It’s been running. It’s still warm. You count sixty panels, sixty hungry mouths. You push at a few of the panel flaps. There are tapes in each.

When you emerge from the basement it’s night time. You don’t know where the time went. The house is silent. Mike is nowhere to be found. You sleep in the МДРКИЛ room under a pile of blankets that smell of sweat and mildew. The sound returns in your dreams. It’s the sound of sand pouring from a bag, or a creature hissing, or the sound of someone crying. You dream that people are moving furniture around beneath you. Footsteps and voices. Someone is in the room with you.

You wake up at dawn. Mike isn’t in his tent. It doesn’t look like he spent the night. You sit by his tent until he arrives.

When he sees you he eyes you suspiciously. “What happened to you yesterday?” I had to duck off early, you say. Came in early today to make up for it. Mike tells you there was another raid last night. Again, he has no idea what they got. “If only there was someone here, they could have stopped it,” he says, staring at you.

You spend the morning helping him load full garbage bags into a truck. Mike says it’s going to a storage facility in Surrey Hills.

He says they think the raids are the work of the twins. You don’t know who he means. “The twins who run the TI,” he says. “You know, the Television International, that lot. Those clowns.”

You’ve heard the name but you don’t know why. “They were a terror group based in the States,” he says. “Been around since the eighties. They got kind of famous when they tried to kidnap some TV executive.”

Then you remember it—they were the group that had the poster that said TELEVISION IS ART in big red letters. It was in art galleries and on t-shirts and on university students’ walls. “Bunch of clowns,” says Mike, visibly rattled.

* * * *

When you get home the lights are on. Athena is there. She has a key. “You haven’t responded to a text in nearly a week, so—” She moves around the flat purposefully, gripping a plastic shopping bag with a few books in it and other things she’d brought round, her DVD of Moonlighting, a jar of garam masala. She hasn’t brought much. You get the feeling she’s been waiting for you to get home for some time so that you see her leaving. She won’t look you directly in the eye. You try to apologise, saying that you’ve been busy with work. She turns towards you sharply. “What’s work these days?” she says. “Actually, I don’t care. Do you just not want to see me? Are you bored of me or something? Nearly a week.”

You don’t answer. You follow her to the bathroom, where she is angrily packing her make up, deodorant and shampoo. Do you want to have dinner or something? you ask. She doesn’t speak for a long time. “Have you been hanging out with my stepdad?” she says. “You’ve got notifications coming through on your laptop. I was checking my email.”

You look at the wrinkles around her eyes, the grime of your flat. You smell your own fear.

“What sort of man are you?” she says.

I’m not sure exactly, you respond, and she takes her plastic bag and closes the door behind her.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

Mike calls you and asks if you’re keen to help him clear out Colin’s house. He’ll pay. “It’s a big job,” he says. “Place is a mansion.” You haven’t worked in nearly six months, and the money your parents left behind is running out.

Mike picks you up and takes you to a nice street in Camberwell. The house is hidden by trees that lean right onto the footpath. Roots have cracked the driveway, which has been reduced to a jagged mess, like it’s been torn apart by an earthquake. The rusted husk of a Mercedes Benz sits in front of the garage, windows blacked over with grime. The house is bigger than it looks from the street. An actual mansion. It’s completely enveloped by trees and vines, crawling over the bricks and snaking into the upper windows.

When Mike opens the front door a pungent smell escapes. The hall is narrow and dark, lined with piles of boxes, garbage bags. Several bicycles. A car engine. You can’t see the end of the hallway, or the ceiling. “Masks on,” says Mike. You pull on your N-95 and a pair of pink dishwashing gloves.

The hall breaks off into several winding cave-like paths. There’s a set of stairs at the end. This must be an entrance hall, behind all the junk.

Mike says Colin’s family had a team of people in for a week before they got it stopped. “They had five people coming in and out, just heaving stuff into bins,” he says. “That’s how all the quad reels and U-Matic tapes got destroyed. They had a big crusher out on the street. The only reason they stopped is the neighbours complained about the noise.”

You try to imagine the space with another week’s worth of stuff in it. The rooms are lined with stacks of boxes that reach to the ceiling. Every window is hidden. Many rooms are full to the doorway. Electrical equipment. Toys. Magazines. Food packaging, some of it still half-full of mouldy food. Floppy discs. There’s a clearing in one of the front rooms, with a damp-smelling couch and a flatscreen TV on milk crates. A vase on the table holds a large bouquet of dead, petrified flowers.

Having drunk the emulsion, the house feels familiar. You can feel the layout. This room was once a living room, the heart of the house. You know that a window faces onto the front garden, and a door leads to the dining room, which leads to the kitchen, but it’s all behind a mountain of garbage bags.

You’re given strict instructions of what to keep and what to chuck. Anything in good condition stays. Anything infected by mould is to be double-bagged and thrown in the skip. Be careful with the garbage bags. “If you find the broadcast signal intrusion collection, that’s the jackpot,” says Mike. Moving aside piles of mouldy junk, you tear open a garbage bag. It’s full of blank videos. Another. Videos. Videos. They look as-new. The garbage bags have protected them. The outsides are grimy with mould, but inside they’re clean. Some of the tapes are labelled clearly, but most of the labels are just marked with scratchy shapes and strange hieroglyphics, some kind of cataloguing system.

In a bathroom, you find film equipment rotting in the shower stall. A pile of flattened Coco Pops boxes from the 1970s is miraculously free of mould. Suddenly Mike is at your shoulder. “Don’t throw them away,” he says. “If they’re in good condition like that, put ‘em in the ‘keep’ pile.”

Things to keep are to be stored in one of the front bedrooms, which has been emptied and sterilised. You get lost easily. The rooms connect in strange ways. There are hallways where there shouldn’t be. You find yourself in a long, narrow passage with a low ceiling. It twists like a maze. The floor is uneven and lined with threadbare, stained floral carpet. The hallway opens into a room that doesn’t fit with the rest of the house. You look out the window. You realise you’re in a second house. A series of shanty buildings connects the two.

You’re standing inside Colin’s life. When both houses were full, he must have known his time was nearly up.

You and Mike meet in the sunroom for lunch. It’s empty, and bigger than your entire flat. Large windows reach ceiling height. Dappled light comes in between the spindly brown vines. In the middle there’s a two-man tent. Mike unzips it and brings out a Trangia stove and two tins of soup. He heats it up there on the floor and tells you about the raid.

He’d been working in one of the back rooms late at night alone when he’d heard something at a window, near the walled garden. Then two short men in balaclavas ran past the doorway. He called out to them but they disappeared up the narrow back stairs. By the time he got up there he saw them outside, heaving a box over the fence. “They must have climbed out the window and shimmied down the magnolia tree,” he says. “It was a planned operation. I don’t know what they took, but they knew exactly where to find it. Since then I’ve been sleeping here when I can.”

Mike says Colin died of something called “movie cancer”.

“It’s where you just watch and watch, until your body just gives up,” he says. “Something is growing in you, you can feel it. Something hard in your chest, or your guts. It just grows. Your body wastes away. It’s from the screen, whatever it is. And all you can do is feed it.”

He slurps his tomato soup. “We all got the TV bug at a young age,” he says. “Everyone in the club.” Mike says he worked in TV lighting for decades, mostly at Channel 9 in Richmond. “It was an amazing place when I started,” he says. “So much money and cocaine. I’d wanted to work there all my life, but before long it was basically dying.”

You ask what he means by dying.

“It’s dead,” he says. “In its death throes, anyway. It’s hopeless. Go home and put on one of the commercial stations tonight. You’ll see.”

Mike throws the empty soup bowls through a broken window into the garden. “I think what I miss is when everyone was on the same page,” he says. “You might not have agreed but you had the same song sheet, you know. There were only four TV channels. Everyone’s reality was the same.”

You work through until it’s dark outside. You barely scratch the surface. You don’t see how it’s possible for two people to complete this job. You’re just moving things from one room to another.

On your way back to the front of the house you follow the grand staircase to a room you haven’t seen yet. It’s completely full with sloping mountains of stuff, with only a few square feet of standing room in the doorway. The room has the highest ceiling in the house, and you can see over the piles that it’s huge, the size of a ballroom. You clamber onto the towering pile of garbage bags and boxes to get a better view. In the dim light you see a balcony at the other end, through a narrow gap. The surface beneath you holds firm. You keep climbing, your feet tearing the garbage bags underfoot. You’re around fifteen feet off the ground and halfway across the room when the garbage bags begin to slip from under you, cascading towards the door. In seconds the landslide has buried the entrance. You can only keep going forward. You have to crouch when the pile reaches ceiling height, and then crawl.

You make it to the balcony, where the balustrade has completely collapsed. A dusty red curtain leads to a small room. Inside is a couch, a 1990s Sony television, and a neatly-stacked shelf of videotapes. They’re all labelled with more shapes and hieroglyphics. On the coffee table you find a notebook. The symbols, and their meanings, scrawled in blue pen. A key. You leaf through the pages and find the symbols from the tapes on the shelf. Signal intrusions. Bolezin. МДРКИЛ. Hanging on the wall is an old map of a country you don’t recognise. It’s labelled DONDESTAN. Without the context of its bordering countries, it’s hard to tell exactly where this country is supposed to be.

The steep, narrow staircase at the back of the room leads to a chain of smaller rooms, halls, and eventually to a fire escape at the side of the house. You look back and try to understand spatially where you’ve just been. It makes no sense to you.

You decide not to tell Mike about the MAPKNA room.

When you get home you stand under a hot shower and cough up black phlegm. Even having worn a mask all day, you feel the mould on your chest.

Your TV is only set up to watch streaming stuff, DVDs, and videotapes. You have to tune it to get broadcast channels. It takes a while. You’ve forgotten how. Eventually you find Channel Nine.

It’s a talent show. A lone woman dances listlessly in an empty studio to bland techno music. The wall behind her is clad with scaffolding. She trips on a coiled electrical wire. Three judges sit in shadow behind a tatty folding desk, watching, glazed eyes.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

The Camberwell And Surrounds (Film and) Videotape Enthusiasts Club meets at a small church hall in Malvern. It’s on a wide street of hundred-year-old houses and old oak trees. The hall was a church once, though long since deconsecrated, its crosses turned into wooden posts. The door is open. Past the little antechamber is a dusty, cold hall, breeze rising through the weatherboard floor. You think you’re alone at first, but then you spot a man halfway up a ladder turning on a wall-mounted gas heater.

“Are you here?” he says, climbing down. He’s sixty-something and bald. You don’t know how to respond. Film club? you say. He looks annoyed. “Yeah,” he says. The heater coils glow pink, then red, and the air fills with the smell of burning dust. Colin told me about it, you say. “Colin’s dead,” he says. He mistakes your panic for shock. “Mate,” he says. “You didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

He introduces himself as Glenn. “Knew Colin for years,” he said. At the back of the hall there’s a small kitchen. He makes you an International Roast from a huge tin. “He was sick for a long time,” he says. “It was movie cancer in the end,” he says. “We’ve got a pact, Colin and me and the others. Whoever carks it, their collection goes to the club.”

He looks at your eyes, pink and puffy. “Did you know him from the signal intrusion stuff?” he says. “Dondestan? Bolezin?”

Yeah, you say. Bolezin stuff. The signal stuff, you say.

“Do you know the mirror method?” he says. You say you do. He looks at you sceptically.

He brings out four old metal chairs and puts them in a circle in the middle of the room. “The others won’t be far away. They might be funny about you being here, but I’ll vouch for you.” He winks at you.

The others arrive together. Glenn introduces you before they have a chance to protest. “He’s an old old friend of Colin’s,” says Glenn. “He probably knows more about Colin’s Dondestan collection than anyone alive,” he winks at you again.

You sit around in a circle drinking bitter coffee. They’re all in their sixties, bald and white. You recognise them from the Facebook group. You wonder if they know it’s set to public. One is Mike. The other is Athena’s stepdad, Greg. He’s the alpha, the most round and red-faced. He glares at you. “You knew Colin?”

Yeah, for eight years, you say.

“Righto,” he says. “We could probably do with your help sorting Colin’s collection.”

The meeting starts. “Part of what we’re discussing this week is simulating double-imaging using clean footage, with geometric distortion, faux interlacing, and grain, and using that as a training model for AI for restoration of out-of-phase film footage,” says Greg. Mike makes notes on his phone, or maybe he’s texting. “Then we’ve got to talk about Colin’s collection.”

“Good news first,” says Mike. “Progress!” He gets his laptop out and shares some videos. The technical chat is way over your head. They’re trying to restore the pilot episode of a seventies American sitcom called Gooner, which only exists as a rough black-and-white film recording. A man in a towelling hat stumbles around a room knocking things over and crying. The sound is muffled and the canned laugher is outrageously loud. You watch several versions of the scene, each slightly clearer than the last, always ending on the man gurning and crossing his eyes at the camera. The group is enthralled. Mike says this represents weeks of trial-and-error work.

“We’re the only ones with the dedication to do this,” Glenn says to you. “No one cares about Gooner.”

Athena’s stepdad changes the subject to their dead friend’s film collection. The mood shifts. “Now, we’ve got an injunction against the family going into his house, but that’s only half the battle,” he says. “There’s a fuck-ton of stuff in there. Mike can’t sort it all on his own.”

“Our new friend was saying he was keen to help out any way he can,” says Glenn. They all look at you.

“That’s good of you, mate,” says Greg. “It’s a lot of work.”

They’ve got some of his film collection out already. “We found it in bathrooms, in sheds,” says Greg. “Completely inappropriate for film storage,” says Greg. “So a lot of it’s junk. It’s vinegar.”

He reaches into his backpack and brings out a battered old film canister in a large ziplock bag. “This is the tragic bit,” says Greg. “This is the first thing Colin ever filmed. He’d have told all of you about it, and it was very important to him. Col and his dad made this off-air recording of the moon landing when he was just a boy.”

“Oh, fuck,” says Glenn.

“Mike found it at the back of one of the showers, behind a bunch of old betamax players. It’s fucked I’m afraid. We know how important it was to him, but he didn’t look after it. Best we could do was isolate it before the damage spread.”

They all look down gravely.

“We’ll make it count,” Greg says. Mike takes the bag and disappears to the kitchen at the back and the kettle begins to hiss. “Mike will prepare the emulsion,” says Greg with the solemnity of a priest.

Mike returns with a tray of plastic tumblers full of water. He places it on the side table. Then he opens the ziplock bag and pulls out the battered film can. The bitter smell of vinegar fills your nostrils as he cracks the can open. The film inside is warped and wrinkled. Mike carefully tips the can over the tumblers of water. A grey-black goo pours out, which he stirs into each tumbler with a teaspoon. It doesn’t mix fully. Small black globules of oil float in the discoloured water.

Everyone takes one. It’s warm in your hands. You look at the others. They’re cradling them, smelling the vinegary dregs. “Gentlemen,” says Greg, and they start sipping them gingerly. You follow. As it cools, they gulp the rest down. You try to keep up. It tastes horrible.

You hear Mike inhale long and slow next to you. You look at him. His eyes are wide. Glenn grips his chair. Then you feel it too, the dizziness, and your ears pop, and you’re there in the room but also somewhere else, both at once, like you’re looking at a reflection in glass, inward and outward. There’s a hiss, and a countdown, and muffled voices, and you see the astronauts, grainy, hyper-coloured and grey. I’m at the foot of the ladder, says the voice, and It’s almost like powder. And See that, Col? Men on the moon. The ceaseless click of the camera, the noise of the house, your house but not your house, of Dad, and he’s got the camera on a tripod in the living room, the smell of his cigarette smoke, and your reflection is in the screen, just a boy.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. МДРКИЛ / MAPKNA / MDRKIL

2. шарабан!

3. r/BolezinDreams

4. AntipodeanSeeing420

5. The Heather Gale Theory

6. The Silovik Killer

7. Your Twentieth Century

8. Teeth

9. The Crocodile

10. Malkara

11. Surveillance

12. Awesome Heavy Duty Shredder Crushing Skulls 4 HRS

13. This Is An Offline Archive

14. Bobby’s Not Dead

15. The Hole

16. Song Of Your Blood

17. We Also Have Sound Houses

18. All People In Positions Of Power Are Aware Of This

19. The Moon Emulsion

20. Movie Cancer

21. And the World Starts Coming Apart

22. Folie à Trois

23. The Lips of the Dream House

24. Dissociative Puppet Show

25. The Moon

26. The Bridges

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

Athena has had her meeting with her stepdad. “The summit,” she calls it.

“Oh my god he is such an asshole,” she says. “He’s so sad. So pathetic. I mean, he’s lonely, but he complained about women non-stop. He kept making jokes about how I probably want something from him. I said I didn’t want anything, I just wanted to see him. He said, ‘Women are all little liars.’ He said that a few times.” She takes a furious drag on her cigarette. “He said ‘Women are always trying to take something.’ I said, ‘You took my mum’s house.’ I wasn’t going to mention it, but fuck. He just said, ‘Well that’s your view.’ What other view is there? She had a house when you met, then when you divorced her, suddenly you had it, and she was left with nothing. Like, what other view is there? She died in a rental you fuckwit. All he cares about is his fucking film collection, and his little movie club. But he doesn’t even like them.”

Athena stares out the window, jaw slack. The light is blue-grey on the sandblasted wall of the next apartment building. “The rain’s nice,” she says. “The sound.” She butts out her cigarette. “The past is exactly as shit as you remember it, you know? It’s just denser, all packed down in your brain. So it seems nicer. I dunno.” She goes to light another cigarette but changes her mind. “I’m going out for a bit,” she says. Within a few minutes she’s out the door, leaving you in the dark.

Your Facebook password is pre-filled. You haven’t logged in for three years, when the man in the computer repair shop warned you off it. “It’s gummed up the keys and it’s gonna burn out your CPU too,” he said. He pulled out the swollen battery and used a metal rod to scrape out blue residue from the battery housing. “Smell that? The rotting? That’s Facebook.”

It’s deteriorated further since you last looked. It’s endless columns of ads and meaningless AI posts. People responding to fake photographs with credulous rage and cry-laughing emojis. A news page with information from fifteen months ago. Libel, trivia, impotent rage. Someone you went to school with posts a long list of people in your home town who have wronged them. Community groups for suburbs you’ve never lived in. “I HAVE BEEN BANNED FROM THE CAIRNLEA POST OFFICE FOR TELLING THR TRUTH” “Has anyone had experience with CarePark over the Spotlight carpark?” You scroll through a run of eight missing persons ads, interrupted by ads for sleep supplements.

You search for Athena’s stepdad and find him almost immediately. Greg Fourie. All that’s public is an album of profile photos of him wearing Oakleys in the driver’s seat of his car. He changed it to a new, nearly identical photo every month from 2017 until 2022. He’s got a bio on a page called Pure Blood Dating UNVAXXED and he’s a member of CASVEC, the Camberwell And Surrounds (Film and) Videotape Enthusiasts Club. Their logo is the all-seeing eye. There are five other members in the group.

Greg Fourie

ADMIN June 10

Hey gents good news is weve got control of Colins estate now after legal notice to the fam,ily. We need volunteers to help clean the place out Colin had a lot of stuff and Mike can’t do it all. Still plenty of beta and vhs its only a lot of the quad tapes that got taken or destroyed. All the signal intrusion / Bolezin / Dondestan stuff is safe. Weekly meeting Tuesday at Trinity again.

👍🏿 2

Greg Fourie

ADMIN May 3

Hey gents Just letting you know Colin past away after a long battle with cancer yesterday at Broady hospital. Meeting as usual Tuesday but moving to Holy Trinity Hall on Pascoe Road

👍🏿 4 💬 3

View more comments

Glenn Cage

Movie cancer

1m Like Reply

Mike Jackson

Movie cancer

1m Like Reply

Colin’s page is mostly shares of AI images in those AI textures: plasticky flesh, shiny flames, out-of-proportion limbs, slick digital tendrils. Hulk Hogan in heaven; women with enormous breasts in military fatigues; Bill Gates getting stabbed by white Jesus. There are a lot of shares from a local One Nation candidate who wants child support abolished, retro TV comedy clips, and the eye of providence, again and again.

Colin Jones

December 4, 2024

ALL PEOPLE IN POSITIONS OF POWER ARE AWARE OF THIS
They Know About It
They are punishing me!
I ask people friend requests and its all well and good that you say yes but if you don’t want to talk to me there’s no point is there its just pointless isnt it I haven’t had a girlfriend in four years i need a womans touch I just want someone to hug klike a bear on the couch we can watch what you want to I don’t mind all the shows areboring anyway I was engaged six year ago but she fucked off like everyone does. Im sick now but Im getting better and there letting me go home soon nd I want to share my life with some1. I’m ñ9t trying to be something I’m not moßtly i just want to get home and kick my shoes off and take my jacket off and theres someone there and the house isnt empty I work night shift a lot so youd be a lone a lot if you like,, I get home and we have a beer or a coffee and kick my shoes off and we watch the shows u’m a grate listener I just want to listen to and to meet someone I can love. Regards, Colin

18m Like Reply

Colin Jones

October 1, 2023

REAL MEN MAKE YOUR PANTIES WET NOT YOUR EYES

3y Like Reply

Colin Jones

January 8, 2023

Nice ti5s

3y Like Reply

Colin Jones

August 29, 2022

I know they watch us I just don’t care I just want that feeling of that triangle of me you the tv me you the tv and the eye in the middle like while we watch they watch us too

4y Like Reply

You’ve been on Facebook for an hour. There’s a guttural breathing sound from somewhere deep within your laptop. Your screen is starting to dim and your keyboard is sticky. You close the tab.

You google “movie cancer” and the results are just lists of inspirational movies in which characters get cancer. So you google “Eye of providence”+“all-seeing eye”+“Movie cancer”+“Broadcast signal intrusion”+“Facebook”:

AI Overview

It sounds like you are going through a deeply distressing and overwhelming experience right now. Feeling targeted or punished by powerful forces can be terrifying and incredibly isolating.

You do not have to carry this burden alone, and there is immediate, confidential support available to help you find relief:

Please consider reaching out to these professional, confidential, and free services:

• Lifeline: Call 13 11 14. This is a 24/7 crisis support line where you can talk to someone who will listen without judgment. You can also use the Lifeline Text & Chat Service if you prefer to type. [1, 2, 3]

• SuicideLine Victoria: Call 1300 651 251. They provide 24/7 free, anonymous, and professional mental health counselling. [1, 2, 3]

• Beyond Blue: Call 1300 22 4636. They offer 24/7 brief counselling and emotional support. [1, 2]

• Head to Health: Call 1800 595 212. They can connect you with mental health professionals who can help find the right local support for you. [1]

• Emergency: If you feel you are in immediate danger or cannot keep yourself safe, please call 000 for emergency services immediately. [1]

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

Athena takes you to the theatre. You don’t go to the theatre much, and you’ve never been to one like this. It’s in a basement in the city, underneath a Mexican restaurant. The seats are bleachers, the stage is on the floor. You sit cradling a glass of acidic red wine. There are around twenty people in the audience, scattered across the hundred seats. It’s a play about her great-aunt, Athena says. She never met her, and doesn’t know much about her, except that she was a musician. She invented an instrument.

It’s a monologue, a one-woman show. There is no set, just a black backdrop. That could either be by design or a budgetary thing. A woman, thirty-something in a 1950s skirt and blouse walks to the middle of the stage and stares up at the audience. She’s slightly hunched, and unsure what to do with her arms. She’s pale in the stage lighting:

“We also have sound houses,” she says.

“Where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not. Of quarter sounds, and lesser slides of sounds.”

She clasps her hands in front of her chest.

“I was twelve when Mrs Flint came to the house. My father invited her. She told me my future. She told me she saw me in a house with a strange man, where people look in the window at me.”

A man enters the stage, standing to the right,
or maybe he entered some time ago.

The actor continues: “She was a medium. A psychic. My father believed in that sort of thing, as do I. She came for me, just as she’d come for my older brother and my older sister. He told me it was part of my education. A sort of vocational guidance, I think. It was all well and good for me to study nursing and study to get into university, but if it wasn’t in the cards for me it wouldn’t happen. Except she didn’t use cards. She was a small woman, with intense eyes. She wore a hat like someone at the races would wear. She was overdressed for the suburbs. She introduced herself to me, and said Hello Dyra, I’m Mrs Flint. Your father tells me you might be ready to have a talk with me. I said yes, or nodded, I don’t remember. And she sat me down and held my hands in hers, and ran her fingers across mine, and closed her eyes. She was sitting very close, breathing heavily. When she opened her eyes again she had rolled her pupils back into her head. It was almost funny. Like she was making a joke, only then I realised she wasn’t making a joke. I remember her breath, and the way she spoke in a low voice not her own. And she said that, about me being in a window, with people watching me.”

The man is in a suit, balding, with thick,
horn-rimmed glasses. Sickly-pale, with thin lips.

“I see you in a house, she said. Not a house, a room. The smell of vinegar all around, the smell of decay. With a man you hardly know. And people look in the window at you. Like a shop window, I said? Or at the pictures? No, she said. This is a bad house, somewhere you have to avoid. You cannot end up in this house.

“Her eyes closed. Her demeanour changed. She became more relaxed. It was finished, whatever it was.

“She said, you’d like to be a nurse, wouldn’t you? Yes, I said. Dad must have told her. Well, don’t, she said. You must stop. You must avoid the vinegar house.

“There’s music as well, isn’t there? she said. I stared back at her. In you, I mean, she said, there’s music in you. I play the violin, I said. That’s what you must do. Your fate is like mine. There’s music in your blood, and the voices of the dead.

“As she left she turned and held my hand and spoke to me. You must tell them the song in your blood, she said. She was squeezing my hand so tight. People must hear it.

“My father asked me what Mrs Flint said. I don’t remember what I told him, but I know I didn’t mention the house. But I think about the house all the time. I don’t know what it looks like. I wonder what it sounds like. I wonder what the clouds sound like,” she says, looking up. “I wonder what the moon sounds like.” A huge blue moon illuminates behind her. It’s projected from four different sources, not properly aligned. Four broken quarter-moons.

The man is perfectly still, and you wonder
if he’s supposed to be seen.

The music kicks in on the house speakers. Just static at first, but then it emerges. At first you think it’s coming from inside your head, then you realise it’s real. It’s the Malkara tape. Snippets of it, like the bit that sounds like a jet engine taking off. A child’s voice, somewhere down in the mix. Then a woman’s: The first round was a device of nominal yield, she says. You remember the first time you heard the voice, from the Big Mouth Billy Bass. The actor mimes the words. The cloud rose to a thousand feet before drifting away.

“Mrs Flint’s warning made me wary of rooms with big windows at first. I didn’t like to be looked at through glass. But mostly it made me wary of men.”

The play shifts. The woman becomes a musician. Piano and violin at first, but then she begins drawing music from everyday objects. Cutlery. Tools. Tearing fabric. A moving solo played on several glasses of water. She is accepted into a prestigious music school, where she excels. She makes music with machines. Computers designed as thinking machines, that make ugly, grinding noises. She coaxes the grinds into gurgles, and then hums. She develops a drinking habit. The actor bends and sways, her hands miming her gentle touch on the machines. They hum. Hums that she turns into melodies. We hear some of it, warm, simple music. The conductor of a symphony orchestra encourages her to audition for a violin chair, to stop mucking around with machines. She declines. The music she makes is in demand for television: strange sounds for children’s programs, and jingles for advertisements.

“We have also sound houses,” she says. “Sound has healing powers. Every human being has an innate waveform. These harmonics can resonate, can heal.”

There’s a subplot about a man she has a brief affair with, a shy trombonist who proposes to her. She focuses on her work.

“Sound has vision. We can draw sound. Just as we can sound drawings.” She draws a straight horizontal line in the air. “This is the machine I build. That a drawing,” a drawing of a waveform flashes behind her, “an impression,” an abstract shape, like a Rorschach test, “a simple line,” another, a bird on a wire, “can sing. We must continue to sound it out.”

The final third of the play changes setting. A photograph appears behind her: a building in a desert, sky tinged with the pink hues of old film. Four broken quarter-buildings. It’s triangular, the building, a shard jutting out of the ground. “I have come to this place to record sound,” she says. “Here in the desert where they test bombs and rockets. I am to record sound and make music. A modern symphony, they want, with all the sounds of the future.” She has been appointed artist-in-residence at the Woomera Rocket Range. She will use the money for her sound machines. More of the Malkara tape plays. A hum that could be a machine, or could be a choir. “How do you sound a bomb?”

“I start with the sounds from the air. The bombs, the rockets, the voices I pick up on the radio. I bring them back to my sound house, and I turn the images to sound.”

Sound plays overhead, of bomb blasts, of rockets tearing the air.

“The sounds that push us towards the future often start with the past,” she says. She looks to her right, behind her,

to the man, who is
still there, has not moved.

The building in the desert has windows all around. Dyra drinks and works erratically. The company that commissioned her symphony aren’t happy with her progress, and they assign her an assistant, a young man who she suspects is there to watch her. Worse, to sabotage her work.

“We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters and voices and notes of beasts and birds,” she says. “Strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the vote louder than it came. Some chiller. And some deeper.” She looks over her shoulder at the man. “I see you,” she says.

The man steps forward,

“There,”

She points, at you.

“The smell of vinegar.”

The actress who is Dyra stands still, dead still, but shaking. She stills. The building in the desert fades. There is scattered applause. You look around. Is this an intermission, or is this the end?

The audience stand to leave. The actor doesn’t have anywhere to go, so she just stands there while everyone files out. She’s frozen on the spot. As you walk past her to the exit she clenches her jaw and stares straight ahead.

****

There’s a flyer on the counter on the way out, with short bios of the cast and a little about Dyra Slavy herself. It says, “Dyra Slavy was born in Balwyn in 1933. In 1961 she was hired as the Composer in Residence at the Woomera Rocket Range. She died in 1986 from liver failure.”

Dedicated to Daphne Oram.

The passage “We also have sound-houses….” is adapted from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) and Daphne Oram’s 1960 interpolation, Atlantis Anew.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

You buy an old Walkman on eBay so you can listen to the Woomera/Maralinga demo tape, the one you found in Annabel’s dad’s study. You lie in bed and stare at the ceiling with headphones on. Music is the wrong word for it. It’s shapes that drift in and out, deteriorating, disintegrating; a rasping breath in slow rhythm, a wall of static that sometimes sounds like applause, or laughter, or running water. It gets into your bones. The dissonance is a spell. It feels as if it’s been cried out of someone. It feels as if it could disappear at any moment. Fragile in its static ocean, and never the same twice.

Athena lies next to you. She’s on a screen break, leaving her in a state of unmoored calm. She says the last straw was an Instagram page called “Enjoy life” which exclusively posted videos of ingrown toenail removal, with the caption “#relaxing”. “I needed to cut it out,” she says. “Like a cancer. Or a toenail.”

Now, she has more free time than she’s had in years. Her memory has improved, intertwined with her heightened senses. She has access to deeper parts of the well. “This washing powder,” she says as her head settles into the pillow, “I think I used this washing powder once, long ago, at another time of my life… it’s just memories now. Memories and smell.” She looks down at her feet. “Hello toes,” she says. “You’re the same as when I was little.”

The Walkman is part of it, part of her need to take you along. Athena wants you to join her. To stay in this reality. It’s a big ask. You admit that it’s good to get away from MAPKNA again. The tape is an electrical jolt right when you feel like your brain is turning into black soup again.

She’s reading the other bounty from Annabel’s dad’s house, a cache of love letters Annabel found at the back of a drawer. Typed in a mix of Calibri, Cambria and Comic Sans, on a failing inkjet printer, dated to the mid-00s, they’re addressed to Annabel’s mother, from Athena’s step-dad. They’d been having an affair when Annabel and Athena met on the Friday night shift at Mooroolbark McDonald’s.

“Dear lovedove,” one begins,

How are you? Please write back. I need to see you but I can’t. I know you’re worried that Mike suspects but don’t worry my love. He is all bark and no bite. It will be okay as long as we play it safe. If he finds out about our “meetings” it will put everything in jeopardy. He is in possession of one third of the collection and if he finds out about us he may do something rash.

That council is full of cowboys and robbers! I’m trying to get approval for the pergola at the Greensborough place but they’re gypping me at every turn. How did Mike get the above-ground pool approved so fast?? He is “a man of many fingers”. No need to reply to this bit.

The parking at yours and Mike’s is a nightmare. There’s a spot around the corner where no one will notice an extra Rav-4 but the signs are so unclear. It’s 24hr parking but then it’s “keep clear” and they contradict each other. I have the “disabled” permit from mum still so that gets me out of a few run-ins. If you can arrange off-street parking when Mike is not home then I’ll do my best to get away. When is he next away, and does he take the Commodore to the airport long-stay parking or does he leave it and take a taxi? Taxi is cheaper in the long run but there’s nothing like getting off the plane and having your own car waiting. If he takes the Commodore I can park the Rav in the garage is why I’m asking.

So I can’t come to see you because of the “parking” situation. I have numerous “unpaid fines” already and I am at risk of being “impounded”. I’d rather be “impounding” you haha

Petrol is now over a dollar fifty a litre.

Your love,

Steven

Athena says her stepdad was married to her mother for ten years, during which he managed to get all her assets signed over to his name. When he divorced her he took her house. When she died her will showed she had nothing left. He has done this to at least two other women. Now he’s sick, some kind of cancer, and she wants to see him.

“He raised me, really,” she says, peering over her reading glasses. “The letters are gross but they’re kind of sweet. Sort of vulnerable. I’m confident he can’t hurt me. I just want to talk to him.”

She drifts off to sleep quickly and peacefully. For you it’s a painful process. You lay in bed and feel your body twitching, your muscles tensing, spasming. You feel like you’re being played like the laffbox, the goblin fingers through your eyes sockets, nose, twisting you, pulling out decades-old noises that aren’t your own. When you get up to go to the bathroom there are light trails when you move your hands in front of your face, like chroma bleed on an NTSC video.

The only thing that eases your symptoms is the Woomera tape. You hold it to your chest and feel its slow hum, big headphones wrapped around your head. It’s a small creature, the Walkman, with tape lungs and battery heart, temperamental and warm. You drift into its hiss, rising, falling, like breath. In the moments before you reach sleep it’s her breath, Durnut’s, its warmth in your chest. The problem is when you think about Athena, you think about Durnut. That is, Athena slides off your mind and you’re thinking about someone else, someone you haven’t met, long dead. Her voice becomes the dead woman’s. Not Durnut. Heather. When you recall something you’ve done with Athena, or something she’s said, it’s Heather in your memory, with Heather’s voice. The light reflecting in her eyes, the gentle vibration of the hair on her cheekbones. You can’t remember if they even look that much alike. You’re somewhere dark and dank, a cave. You’re in a cave with Heather.

Pictureland © Will Cox MMXXVI.

AntipodeanSeeing420 has set up the squat with several computer monitors and a pile of clothes and sheets that he sleeps in like a nest. There’s a Sodastream on the bathroom bench. The place looks like one of those r/malelivingspace posts. You don’t know how he’s got electricity going. He says he’s going to try to get some work as a drone pilot. The ADF knocked him back but he’s confident he can get mercenary work in Ukraine without leaving the flat. Meanwhile the two of you watch MAPKNA or SVU and drink beer, or watch the Hole.

AS420 found the Hole in the bedroom, at eye-height, hidden behind the only decoration left in the place, a faux rustic sign that says “Bless This House, Dear Lord Above, Watch Over Us”. It was covering a roughly-cut little hole that leads straight into the next flat, where you can watch the neighbours, a discontented couple in their forties, live their lives. The Hole must be right by the television, because it faces their couch perfectly. Mostly they argue. He drinks too much, and she’s too obsessed with astrology, which has started to lead into full-blown conspiracy thinking, but he can’t really articulate this well because he drinks too much. Once you see him crying over a stack of old letters, which he stuffs down the back of the couch when she comes back in. He puts on a gruff voice and asks her where she’s been. She storms into the bedroom and he drinks a beer and stares listlessly at the wall. It’s not all bad. Sometimes they laugh together and sometimes they have sex. “I won’t have a drop tonight, babe,” he says, holding her in his arms, “I promise.” “You’re perfect like gold,” she says. You look again five minutes later and you’re surprised to find a completely different scene: he’s painting a wall blue with a roller, she’s wearing a bandana and a sundress, heavily pregnant. He touches her on the nose with a lick of paint. She laughs.

“Trash,” says AS420. “I’m getting bored of them, hey.” He’s watching the MAPKNA where Durnut spends the entire length of the episode on the phone to a government department, while trying to kill the many lizards that have invaded her home. She paces the room with a hammer, the coiled phone cable stretching taut behind her. The lizards are puppets, dragged along on fishing wire. The call seems to be extremely important to her but the lizards are so many and so large. Greeg doesn’t help. He sits in an awkwardly placed chair in the corner, smiling, saying nothing. You wonder if the actor knows he’s in the shot at all.

“Hey look at this,” says AS420. He’s always saying look at this look at this with a new thing, more Bolezin, more crossed signals, more “evidence”. He passes you his laptop, open to a Reddit post on r/sitcoms:

On your way back downstairs you see the man from the Hole leaning over the balcony, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. He stares at you for too long.

Pictureland written by Will Cox.
Illustration adapted from The Eternaut,
by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López.

The Bobby Daly Laugh Track tape is a roughly-edited VHS compilation of sitcom clips ranging forty years. Cheers, Laverne and Shirley, Wings, Maude, Step By Step, Becker. You can’t work out what connects them all. The New Gidget. My Mother the Car. Something called It’s Your Move, with a young Jason Bateman.

You find some details on a fan site, an old Wordpress page that hasn’t been updated for six years, called Bobby Blog, run by a woman called Helen Hunt:

Bobby Daly was a child actor in a few shows in the 1960s. He did voice acting for a number of cartoons, and had bit parts in a few comedies. He showed some promise as a teenager, with a brief tenure in the soap opera The Secret Storm, but he developed a drug habit and couldn’t get work.

In the mid-seventies he moved from Los Angeles to New York, and lived in a squat in the East Village. He was still an addict but he started working again. He was part of a collective making experimental films. They mainly only exist on celluloid now, with just a few blurry, mute clips online. You can see Bobby in one clip, dressed in a nun’s habit. He looks older than he should, missing teeth, red eyes.

In 1990 an unidentified body was found in a shelter in Phoenix, Arizona. Several years later the body was matched with a missing persons report and positively identified as Bobby Daly. He was forty years old.

He’d been living in the area for a few years and was known around town as ‘Bill’. He was a diabetic but he drank too much and frequently didn’t take his insulin. Some people still think Bill wasn’t Bobby Daly. A lot of them think that Bobby Daly went on to star as Greeg in MAPKNA.

There are a handful of comments on every post from the same fellow Bobbyheads:

PurpleMeghan101 2 May 2019 at 1:43pm (Edit) #
RIP Keira, always in our hearts. She is now with her father in Summerland, as we pagans call it (or Bolezin!).

Glenn 4 May 2019 at 12:07am (Edit) #
I will pray for her soul!

Pictureland written by Will Cox.

In a drawer you find the address AntipodeanSeeing420 gave you, scrawled in a birthday card.

Your vision is still yellowy but in the sun it’s almost pleasant. Last night AntipodeanSeeing420 showed you a МДРКИЛ where Durnut and Greeg gleefully watched a man in the street being pulled apart by horses. You woke up with a headache and a sore throat, like something long and cold was lodged in it, something you could throw up if you tried. It’s like the not-unpleasant stage of a hangover, when you know it’s over soon, and your brain is at a canter rather than a gallop. The whinnying echoes in your ears. There’s a woman on the bus who looks like a teacher you had, a substitute teacher who was only there for a week. She’s looking at the roll, Where were you yesterday? Hospital. Oh, she looked down, oh, yes okay. I think I was told about you. She won’t be here next week anyway. Boy in front with wet hair, all day, not wet, grease—he doesn’t wash. The smell is strong but interesting, like a freezer of meat. He washes one day at the teacher’s request but not the next or the next, because she’s gone, and he doesn’t understand it’s an every day thing. Someone stops talking when you walk in the room and you see they’re standing like you do, at an angle, and you realise you’re a duo, a double act, the boy who doesn’t shower and the boy with the back brace who goes to hospital. The bodies, the antisocial ones, the malfunctioning ones, lumped together, neat in sections.

The address is one of the big council blocks on the fringes of the inner city. You’ve never set foot in one of these apartment buildings before. They loom over you, ugly and formidable, the three interlocking tower blocks. You kind of love them. Scattered around them on the ground are parks and basketball courts and women in hijabs with kids running around their feet.

Two kids of eight or nine years old see you studying the address in the card and ask you to follow. They lead you up eight flights of stairs and promptly disappear. After you’ve sat on the steps for a while, mopping the sweat from your forehead with your t-shirt, you knock on the door.

The guy who answers has blond dreadlocks and a cigarette permanently hanging from his lips. His wife, a short round woman with a thick European accent, smiles and pats you down for magnets.

Past a small room which looks to be running as a nail salon, he takes you to the lounge. Shelves line the walls, shelves of videotapes, floor to ceiling. A few DVDs, but mostly VHS tapes. A small hallway leads to two more rooms, also full of tapes. Neat in sections. There are three mattresses on the floor. The guy pulls the mattresses up and tucks them away in the hall. “What is it you’re looking for?” he says. You tell him you’ve been watching МДРКИЛ. He looks at your dripping nose and red eyes as if he should have known.

“I don’t carry it, sorry,” he says.

No, you say, you’ve got plenty of МДРКИЛ. He looks at the pinky-whites of your eyes. “Do you know the mirror technique?” Yeah, you say, you’ve been using the mirror technique, and you’re feeling a lot better for it. You’ve been reading the Heather Gale stuff and you want more of the history of it, you say. “Little Bolezin section over there mate,” he says, pointing to a low shelf by the kitchen.

Most of the covers are in different languages, a lot of them are bootlegs, titles written on dirty cardboard sleeves with permanent marker. You don’t recognise most of the films. Some are familiar, but foreign printings with details scrawled on the front. Some don’t sound like TV shows or movies at all. PTV-4 News Philippines Bomba signal hijack incident. / Mary Tyler Moore Show season one tape two ROMANIAN DUB. / Post-digital static ghost 4HOURS 2013. / Saudi pornography 5th gen 85-87 / Florrie Fisher Trip Back Early Edit (Murder footage) / The Infocom Baby MOSSAD surveillance tape 37.

The guy sees you looking at that one. “Basically the video game company Infocom raised a baby in captivity.” He drew sharp from his cigarette. “With the help of Mossad.”

Why? You ask.

“For reasons we’re not really privy to,” he says. He picks out a few videos he calls “МДРКИЛ-adjacent.”

“There are Bolezin signal intrusions on some of the 80s Ryder Cup compilations, which could be of interest,” he says. “But for my money the Bobby Daly train is worth following.” He hands you a red VHS tape with Bobby Daly laugh track 1969—2019.”

You hand over cash and sign a contract that says “This is an OFFLINE TAPE. Do NOT convert, digitise or upload. This is an OFFLINE ARCHIVE.”

Pictureland written by Will Cox.

It’s mid-morning and Athena is lying next to you in bed watching Instagram reels. You watch over her shoulder while you wake up: headcam POV of riding in the bike lane, yelling at pedestrians as they dive out of the way; sweaty man arrested for filming women in a shopping centre; woman screams at stranger for parking near her house; multiple car crashes caught on multiple dashcams; fairly thin women, deposits of fat circled in red; frantic thesis that 90s film star has been replaced by robot replica; another that politician’s odd twitch means he is a lizard struggling to maintain his flesh suit; a compilation of stuntmen in action on green screens; stunt nudes and the stars they double; hand models and their unmodel faces; people that look like their famous fathers; interview with a stand-in for a major Hollywood actor who faked his own death. Then she watches a YouTube video of a huge crushing machine, two metal wheels with metal teeth grinding skulls to dust.

You tell Athena you’ve been fantasising about a catastrophe making the internet redundant. Or perhaps making it text-only, so it can no longer sustain video or audio. You even looked up what could do it. A huge electromagnetic pulse, or a nuclear catastrophe.

“It’s more likely it’ll just get so constipated that everyone switches off,” she says. “It’s mostly bots and AI filler now anyway, it might already be happening.”

A world of ghosts, you think. A world so crowded, but when you focus on the faces they turn to dust. “It would just be a better world with it gone,” you say.

“You know, Charles Darwin said that it wasn’t the strongest of species who survived the evolutionary process, or the most intelligent, it was the one who was most responsive to change.”

“Yeah well, that’s a really annoying thing to say,” you respond.

You’re still in bed when AntipodeanSeeing420 knocks on the door. Athena and AntipodeanSeeing420, the two sides of the mirror. If time and geography are to collapse, it will happen on your terms, you rationalise.

He’s stands leaning on the door frame, carrying a large battered camping rucksack. He looks rough, oily long black hair, red-eyed. “Chris,” he says to Athena, holding his hand out.

He sits on the couch awkwardly, like it’s too small for his body. “I was just making coffee,” says Athena, standing at the door. “Do you want one, Chris?”

“Oh yeah actually, I would love one. Thanks, Athena,” he says in a light voice you haven’t heard before. He looks out the window, fidgets. His hands are shaking.

“Thanks for helping me out mate,” he says. “You’re looking well. You’re not 👀 anymore?”

‘No,” you say, “I’m doing well these days.”

“It’s that mirror method, man,” he says. He coughs. He’s got an angry red scab on his lower forearm. “It’s that bit weaker and it hooks you in.” He stares intently at his phone.

You take him upstairs to the apartment. Your building is twenty years old, and the problems started after ten. Water ingress, structural issues and a persistent burglary problem drove people away. It means rent is cheap and there are a lot of empty apartments. The local socialist party faithful had started leaving chalk marks on the doors of the places they knew to be persistently vacant, hoping to encourage squatters.

You slide the window open and climb in, AntipodeanSeeing420 following behind. “Unless you break the door this is probably the best way in and out,” you say.

“That’s fine,” he says. The place is stale-smelling and dark. The layout is an exact copy of your own place, two floors up. AS420 tips his rucksack on the living room floor: a nest of sweat-stained clothes, a laptop, and three mobile phones, which he lines up on the carpet. “The rest is under the bridge by the Maribrynong,” he says. “I’ll get it later.” He sifts through the pile of clothes and pulls out two cans of beer. He offers you one. It’s warm.

AntipodeanSeeing420 tells you about the twins, his old housemates, two angry Englishmen whose return had precipitated his escape. He met them on a torrent forum four years ago and they crashed at his place once and never left. When he speaks of them his voice wavers. They’re both short and stocky and bald, and they both rail speed constantly. One of them, Ian, is quiet. The other, Richie, never stops talking, a constant paranoid monologue. Once Richie held a pocket knife to AntipodeanSeeing420’s throat over the sink, and said he was going to drain him. A lot of the gutted computers that fill his home belonged to the twins. He’s been afraid to move them. And now they’re back. He can’t escape them.

“When did they leave?” you ask.

“A couple of years ago,” he says. “I have no idea where they’ve been but they just arrived and I knew I had to get out. I really appreciate this.” He looks around the lounge room. “This is nice,” he says.

You bring him a couple of old monitors you find in the carpark hard rubbish pile. They both work.

AS420 puts on an episode of Gilmore Girls with all its foley cues replaced by gunshots and sounds of warfare. “It’s a dubbing error on the Korean DVD release,” he explains. You sit and watch some of it. Lorelai and Rory walk down the street with large coffee cups, their dialogue drowned out by machine gun fire. It’s hypnotic.

“So did you hear about the MAPKNA thing? You’re probably out of it now, hey,” he says.

You haven’t heard anything, you tell him. You’ve been trying to keep a clear head.

He nods dismissively, agitated to tell you. Two more МДРКИЛ episodes have been found. One was found in a church crypt in Amsterdam. The other was in an abandoned broadcast relay station in Jos, Nigeria. Both are online.

“I was thinking of watching them both,” he says. “So the thing is we don’t know what the order is, so I was just going to fire them both up on both screens.”

He hands you a pink plastic hand mirror. You’re going to say no, but you realise you’re not putting the mirror down. You’re gripping it tight, your knuckles pale.

You sit with your back to the monitors and don’t look directly at the mirror, at least to start with. On the screen on the left there’s a body on the table. It’s Wapabah. On the other, Durnut and Greeg look out the window at the moon, huge in the night sky. Why are we watching it like this, you wonder. Why are you watching it at all? Chris, next to you, captivated. You catch snippets of dialogue from each screen. “It is the god of the moon, Khonsu,” says Greeg, and then bares his teeth. On the left, Durnut leans down to Wapabah’s ear. “Go take her in your arms,” she whispers, “and tell her to listen to the song in your blood.”

Wapabah’s fat bald head, big as the screen. Durnut, small, alone. She looks down the barrel of the camera, straight at you, smiles. She clicks her fingers. You say something to Chris. Your voice isn’t your own. The camera pushes towards her, in double.

When you come to, AntipodeanSeeing420 is asleep under his trench coat, and your face is by the screen, bristling static.

Pictureland written by Will Cox.

You’re at an art gallery with Athena and her son Matthew. The gallery is a privately-owned “house gallery”, meaning it’s basically a large, modern house full of art, with a small gift shop next to the kitchen. Athena thinks it would be good for Matthew to see art, and also to be able to see that rich people are essentially tasteless. The house illustrates this well. It feels like a space no-one lives in, like it’s staged for real estate photos, and it’s full of the kind of art that no real person has in their home: video installations of car crashes, paintings of ironic logo appropriations. The master bedroom has a conceptual sculpture that looks like a huge penis with windows.

This month they’re hosting an exhibition about surveillance. In the living room, a vast, two-storey high space with a glass ceiling, there’s a large plastic model of the building you’re standing in. Inside each of the windows is a screen showing security camera footage, with what appear to be live feeds from that room. Blurry black and white footage. You watch the visitors looking at art. Matthew is running around at people’s waists, in his crocodile costume. You follow him from screen to screen. Then he runs into the living room, and approaches a figure you realise is you. He grabs the back of your jeans. You turn around. Time and geography collapse. Matthew is dressed as a crocodile for book week. What book is that, you ask Athena. It’s a Spanish picture book, The Little Crocodile, she says.

“He likes strange things. El Pequeño Cocodrilo!” she sings to Matthew. He smiles shyly, his eyes obscured by the foam crocodile teeth. Your eyes widen and you feel watched. That world is still in you, eating at you, and you see connections everywhere. It’s a coincidence. You feel yourself sweating. Athena couldn’t know about MAPKNA, about the Greeg prison episode with the Crocodile.

The kids watch anything now, Athena says. Everything’s online and they find stuff you’d never believe. They like old TV shows mostly. They like black and white movies, and old science fiction serials that once played in cinemas. They like the Lawrence Welk Show. They like the film Wanda, by Barbara Loden. These are seven, eight year old kids. “Have you seen Wanda?” Athena asks. You tell her you haven’t. “They draw fan art of Wanda.” She shows you a picture on her phone, a kids’ drawing of who you assume is Wanda, on a horse, in her flower hat.

It’s very good, you say.

“Isn’t it!” Athena says. “This was little Crystal who drew this one. She’s really captured her. They see her as a hero. It’s amazing, really.”

In the gallery toilet there’s a series of projections of the Eye of Providence, the eye and pyramid motif you recognise from the American dollar bill. You check your phone to find a text out of the blue from AntipodeanSeeing420. It says:

“Hey man, are you still 👀?? Big movement in the MAPKNA scene, did you hear?? Anyway the twins are moving back in soon. It’s not a big deal but do you know any places going? I don’t want to be here and I really have money so”

Your binges and what they did to you are a constant source of shame and they are following you. While you’re sitting in the cubicle you realise that one of the images isn’t a projection, it’s real, a real hole in the wall, triangular, carved into the laminate. A real living eye peers through it, watching you shit.

Pictureland written by Will Cox.

Athena’s friend Annabel invites you to her house in the country. You drive down together in Athena’s Corolla, with its shot suspension. You can feel every bump in the road, feel the gravel.

Annabel’s father has just died, and she’s supposed be clearing out the house. Athena says Annabel’s been there a week and hasn’t done anything yet. The task is too enormous. You ask if you’re supposed to help with the packing. No, Athena says, she just wants to get drunk.

Annabel’s dad’s house is a leaky weatherboard shack on the edge of a little town in the Wimmera, fringed with aggressive, thick weeds. There are five of you. You, Athena, Annabel, and her friends Chris and Brendan. You haven’t been social in a group of people for at least a year and you don’t remember how to do it. You let the others do the talking. Annabel is short and sardonic and you like her. She and Athena met when they were the only teenage goths working at Mooroolbark McDonald’s. They communicate by making unintelligible groaning noises at each other. Chris and Brendan are both tall white men with long hair and moustaches and for a long time you can’t tell them apart.

You sit outside at a rotting table drinking beer, smoking, and talking about neglectful parents. Annabel and her father were estranged. She hadn’t seen him for fourteen years when she’d got the call that he’d died. Everything in the house is a mystery to her, she says.

Athena’s stepdad and Annabel’s dad knew each other in the seventies and eighties when they worked together at Channel 9, and they were part of the same film collector circle. The men in the film group bought rare old films and hoarded them. Silent movies, documentaries, episodes of TV shows, films that are otherwise completely missing; these are the final copies in existence, on 16mm reels in silver canisters in these men’s collections, never to be shown or shared.

“Assholes,” says Chris or Brendan.

“He’s got a bunker out here somewhere full of film canisters,” says Annabel. “Somewhere here, under the ground.”

Annabel’s siblings were supposed to help her with the clear-out, but they never showed. “So it’s up to me to sort through all of Dad’s weird shit,” she says. “Take whatever you want, by the way.”

Inside, you look around at a whole lot of shit that no one living could ever want. Rows of books about the American Civil War, told from the Confederate side. Three copies of John Howard’s memoir Lazarus Rising, all well-read. A workshop full of old cathode-ray TVs and broken radios. Old milk bar signs with prices of ice creams from the nineties. A lot of laminated pictures of different kinds of fish. One of those posters that says Women want me, fish fear me. You’re at least 200km from the ocean. “You can get good trout and redfin at Natimuk,” says Chris or Brendan, reading your mind.

You all get steadily drunk. Annabel makes pasta with pesto and hands around a bowl of mushrooms. You can’t tell if the mushrooms are doing anything because you’ve also drunk a lot of beer. Either Chris or Brendan opens a wooden chest and finds a huge collection of VHS tapes: 1980s pornography and railway documentaries, mostly, with a selection of low-budget action films you’ve never heard of. The first pitch is to watch one of the porn films. “I’m not watching my dad’s old porn,” says Annabel. You settle on a video called Great Railway Disasters, cheering and laughing through the opening pre-amble. It’s mainly news footage of accidents, and flickering charts of death statistics, with ominous synthesiser music. “Oh my god, this is horrible,” says Athena. “This is way less funny than I thought it would be,” says Chris or Brendan. “Why does he have this?” says Annabel. …en route to the resort town of Adler on the Black Sea, says the narrator in low, rich American tones, over a grainy black-and-white still photograph of a train. The train had twenty passenger cars, pulled by a powerful electric locomotive, model number SZD VL 10-901.

“God this is so detailed,” says Annabel. “Turn it off for fuck’s sake.”

You change it to a fishing video, which is merely boring. Chris or Brendan turns to you on the couch, high out of his mind. “Fish fish me,” he says. “Women fish me.”

When the others pass out in the lounge room you go looking through the house. In the dead man’s garage workshop you turn on the single naked light bulb and inspect the shelves lined with the dusty husks of televisions, radios, hi-fi systems, video recorders, and film playback equipment. A U-matic machine with its cover taken off, its circuits gathering dust.

In the corner is a desk covered in paperwork. There’s an old eighties tape deck under a stack of pages. You open it. There’s a cassette in it. Scrawled on the label is Woomera/Maralinga demos. You press play and hear it whir into life but the speaker on the machine doesn’t work. In a drawer full of cables you find a 3mm jack. You look around for something with a speaker and an input. You find one on the back of the Big Mouth Billy Bass hanging on the wall.

The tape hisses. A woman’s voice, that mid-century Australian voice with a clipped edge. The first round was a device of nominal yield, she says. The Big Mouth Billy Bass cranes towards you, its mouth flapping open with each syllable. The cloud rose to a thousand feet before drifting away, says the fish. Then the aircraft goes up, to fly through the cloud to take their samples of cloud-borne fission products. That’s what they tell me. I’m taking my own samples too, with the Nagra III, and my varidirectional microphone.

For this piece I’ve adapted a theremin to respond to the low levels of radiation in the air. I call the composition Malkara, after the anti-tank missile developed here. But it’s a word the men here took from the old people of this country, it means ‘shield’. This is ‘Malkara’ or ‘Shield’.

The sound that follows starts as a low hum, and an arrhythmic pulse. The hum grows into a slippery, mucusy cry, crawling out of the tape hiss. It’s a machine tone, but it stutters like a human voice. The notes fold into one another, finding tones between tones that couldn’t be mapped with any standard notation. The Big Mouth Billy Bass sings its mysterious song.

You pocket the tape. Then you walk out onto the road and stare at the sky, picking out the sounds in the silence. Stars, something flickering in the distance, a satellite.

Pictureland written by Will Cox.
Illustration by Paul Cumming.

Durnut and Greeg have both just been released after having been sent to prison camps for undisclosed crimes. Back home, they describe their experiences. Durnut’s cell was just long enough for her to lie down in. Every night she heard sobbing through the walls, which were full of holes. Even while she slept she felt the eyes upon her. She had a single thin blanket which barely covered her. She would wake every morning unsure if she’d slept. Delirium set in. Her food spoke to her. Sometimes she thought that the cell door had been left open but she was paralysed, and couldn’t walk through it. A lone voice spoke to her, from somewhere beneath her. ‘Keep going,’ it said. She knew that the voice needed her to go on, to live, because it could not.

Greeg smiles. He’s barely listened. The people were very nice in his, he says. There were many men to keep him company. A creek ran through the central courtyard, with plenty of places to sit and think. They’d sit long into the evenings and eat dry crackers, and tell bawdy jokes. Then they’d go back to their shared cells. Generous quarters, with plenty of blankets. Every night was like a slumber party.

The lights go down on the set, and the camera clunkily closes in on Greeg telling his story.

There was a little guy there named Mateo, says Greeg. Mateo had fallen in love with Greeg’s cellmate, who was the biggest man there. They called him the Crocodile. They were friends at first but then Mateo fell in love. He’d sneak into the cell at night to sleep under his bed. Sometimes they’d wake up in the morning and find him curled up at the foot of the big guy’s bed. They laughed it off. The Crocodile would often bring home two, three sexual partners a night, and the little guy would hide under the bed and listen to them, inches above him, sagging springs pressed against his face.

Mateo would pine. He grew more distant from his friends, sitting alone along the yard creek, helplessly skimming stones. He wouldn’t join in on movie night, or orgy night. He wore lots of green, which Greeg believed was a tribute to his love, the Crocodile. This suspicion was confirmed when he began wearing a makeshift crocodile costume. “Yo soy el pequeño cocodrilo,” he would say. I am the little crocodile. He would laugh until he cried.

He still slept under the Crocodile’s bed each night in his costume, torturing himself with the sloshing sounds of an ecstasy he himself could never experience, buffered by the coiled springs. Yo soy el pequeño cocodrilo.

Greeg was released on good behaviour and never found out what happened.

Pictureland written by Will Cox.
Illustration by Paul Cumming.

You’re emerging from a fog, a weeks-long hangover. Your limbs are weak and your skin translucent. You clean your flat, scrubbing the mould from the windowsill as rain patters against the glass. Then you lie on your floor with your phone and fall asleep to the news about the invasion of Iran, mould killer fumes coiling into your lungs.

After several days of rain you venture out, squinting at the sun. You drink coffee at one of the many expensive cafes in the area, trying not to think about your dwindling funds.

At the creek the water surges, swollen, yellow-brown, carving a line through the suburbs. Beads of water hang from the grevillea. A fallen swamp gum is knotted with plastic bags. Your shoes are damp. Your sense of smell is back, and the world smells alive. On a park bench in the reserve you find a complete set of Frasier, all eleven original seasons, in a battered cardboard box. Kelsey Grammer gurns peevishly at the camera as he tries to close the door on his supporting cast. You look around for more. Under an acacia you find a burnt DVD copy of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000). You put them in your tote bag. When streaming finally collapses this will be the primary method of distributing media.

At home you watch a whole season of Frasier and fall asleep to the stuttering, glitching, water-damaged DVD of Snatch. You are free of MAPKNA and you feel something like grief. You think about what AntipodeanSeeing420 said about Brigadoon, about the place that has been taken out of time. When you were a child your grandmother used to listen to the full cast recording of Brigadoon. She’d drink three brandies and put the record on and cry. You thought it was a real place then, that perhaps this thing in the story had happened to her, that she’d found a place and lost it again.

* * * *

Athena came into your life at the right moment. She was the woman at the bakery, the one who saw you out back that time, the one you thought looked like Durnut. You got talking to her once. You wince now as you remember how your words came out slow, a drawl, dragged from your windpipe on a knot of hair. She nodded politely. The other bakery women wanted no part of the conversation. She jotted down a phone number on the bread bag. You asked her name. “Athena,” she said.

That evening you called the number. A muffled voice answered, a man. He introduced himself as Alan. There’s no Athena here today, Alan said. Perhaps she volunteers a different day. Maybe he could help? She had given you the phone number for an addiction resource centre. You hung up.

When you see her on the tram you almost don’t say anything. But she sees you, and she smiles warmly and says hello.

You thank her for the phone number. I spoke to a man named Alan, you say, who was very helpful. “That’s good,” she smiles. “You seem well.” Her teeth are little filed down stumps. You like the way she laughs. You go for a coffee together.

She no longer looks like Durnut to you, but there are similarities. Sandy blonde curly hair, downturned eyes. Covert beauty. She sees you looking at her teeth and tells you she’s just had her dental caps removed. They got infected, they needed to go. She can’t afford to fix them right now. She’s taking legal action against the dentist, but it’s hard because he’s based in Thailand.

Athena drives a Corolla from the nineties with empty McDonald’s bags in the footwell. She no longer works at the bakery. She has a new job at the airport. She used to be addicted to codeine. She likes the show Younger. She’s got a child, a quiet little boy who hangs off her jeans eating bread rolls. You meet for coffee several times over a few weeks. You go to a place that has little street side tables lit by morning sun. When you sit with her on those mornings, she relaxes, her shoulders dropping, her breath deepening. She laughs. You send the signal back. You end up at your flat watching Frasier season three disc two and making love.

You run your fingers between the freckles on her back and ask her about her new job. She shrugs. “Cafe at the airport,” she says. “Shit coffee, costs too much.” She tells you that she has to go through one of those full-body scanners every day. Aren’t they radioactive, you ask? Yes, she says, a bit.

“They take a full picture of my insides every day,” she says. “Who knows what it’s doing to me.”

Pictureland written by Will Cox.
Illustration by Paul Cumming.