Note: Contains spoilers for Martyrs, The Ring, Demonlover, Red Rooms, Possessor, Feardotcom and Suicide Club.

We are the Witnesses

In the 2008 French horror film Martyrs, protagonist Anna Assaoui finds herself kidnapped by a cult of aging gentry and bourgeoisie socialites who believe in divine enlightenment through pain; the head of the cult, known only as Mademoiselle, subjects Anna to a regimen of of beatings, deprivation, torture and abuse in the hope that she will become a kind of divine witness—literally, a Martyr—who, in her final moments, will transmit her knowledge of the afterlife to the cult and its adherents.

At the end of the film Anna is flayed alive, and whispers the sacred knowledge of her enlightenment to the Mademoiselle. With the secret revealed to her, the Mademoiselle tells no one else, and instead takes her own life.

We have all become witnesses. Spend an hour scrolling on TikTok. Cat videos. Clips from Twitch of streamers reacting to the new KSI song. People arguing about the election. Discourse about Halsey's new album. Footage of a Palestinian man burning alive in a hospital. A Woman with a pet raccoon. Talk of North Korea and Wold War III.

Go On Reddit. Visit the porn subreddit, see porn. There's a subreddit for people to post pictures of their badly-made meals. Laugh at someone's catastrophically overcooked brownies. Go on the news subreddit, it's North Korea, Russia, and Ukraine again. There's at least three subreddits specifically for the Ukraine war; see a helicopter tumble to earth in a ball of flame. See a Ukrainian soldier alone in a ditch eat his rifle, his helmet tumbling across the dirt, head jerking back with a quick spray of red. See a drone drop a grenade on a Russian, his skull splitting in two like a watermelon. Have you ever seen a person with half a head? Go back to the food subreddit, see someone's dangerously undercooked chicken. You don't laugh this time.

The nightmares of the modern world are no longer filtered through journalists or hidden behind gonzo VHS snuff tapes. The era of Faces Of Death is far behind us, as old and innocent as the rest of our childhood memories. When the computers in our pockets can show us every detail of war, death, rape, and genocide, all uncensored, where does that leave horror cinema? What can be more horrifying than this? We begin to make films about what it means to be a witness, of course.

Horror and Technology

Traditionally, horror about technology falls into two camps: we create a new thing, and that thing comes to destroy us, or we create a new thing, and it becomes a vector for pre-existing evil. The former gives us Frankenstein, Mimic, M3gan, and countless monster films, while the latter has given us Poltergeist, The Ring, One Missed Call, Demonlover, Feardotcom, Pulse, and numerous others.

With the arrival of the internet came a whole new generation of corresponding horror films. Some, such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa's magnum opus Pulse, and Jane Schoenbrun's unsettling thesis on online adolescence We're All Going To the World's Fair, deal with the loneliness and alienation of the internet. Others, such as Demonlover, Suicide Club, and Feardotcom, are instead more interested in the horror of what we might find on the internet—and what happens when it finds us. For the purposes of this discussion, those latter three are worth examining in detail.

Demonlover and Feardotcom, both from 2002, are remarkably similar films. In Olivier Assayas's tense and postmodern Demonlover, a pair of ruthless and conniving corporations battle to monopolize the flow of hentai into the European market. The rules of corporate espionage fall apart when protagonist Diane De Monx discovers that one of the hentai sites is a front for an interactive torture porn business. The film's final half hour passes in a dreamlike haze of paranoia, murder, and intrigue, until Diane ends up in front of the torturer's camera. In the critically panned Feardotcom, a group of NYPD detectives trace a number of unexplained deaths to a snuff film website—and anyone who views the website will die 48 hours later. After visiting Feardotcom themselves, they race to find the website's source: the vengeful spirit of a serial killer's first victim, spreading her rage and suffering through the wires.

Sion Sono's Suicide Club, from 2001, bridges the thematic gap between the clades of internet alienation horror, and evil website horror. A rash of blood-soaked suicides in Japan catch the interest of police detective Kuroda and hacker Kiyoko. Their respective investigations lead them to a mysterious website, populated by red and white dots, representing the victims. The catch? The dots appear before the suicides happen. As they struggle to close in on the bizarre organization behind the website, death closes in on them: Kiyoko is kidnapped by a fame-obsessed rock star who considers himself to be the head of the "Suicide Club", while Kuroda's family, and finally Kuroda himself, all die by their own hands. It should be noted that there's a similar thematic angle in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse: A grad student's research project, where dots bounce around on a computer screen. If two dots collide, they disappear, but a dot will never stray too far from another; the dots serve as a metaphor for the film's core idea of loneliness among both the living and the dead. To Sono and Kurosawa alike, there's something strange and tragic in seeing human life as pixels on a screen.

This was the state of our anxieties about the internet in the early 2000s; we were afraid of what we might find lurking on the dark corners of the web, and what might find us. This makes sense, as it's an extension of a common narrative device in horror. Someone must first discover the monster, and the monster discovers them. Characters knowingly travel to the haunted woods, perform the seance, visit the haunted house, take possession of the cursed object, and then suffer the consequences.

It's not the early 2000s anymore, though. The internet is no longer a new and mysterious frontier. There is no more fear of what we might find, because too many of us have found it. So, horror is beginning to move on. The horror is the experience itself.

Doomscrolling Horror

Brandon Cronenberg's 2020 film Possessor is one of the best sci-fi horror films of the last ten years. At the center of the tragedy is Tasya Vos, a corporate assassin whose employer has a unique set of technologies that allow her to remotely pilot another human being, usually selected to be someone already close to their intended target. However, as Tasya's emotional state begins to deteriorate, her own psyche starts to clash with the psyche of the man she's piloting.

Possessor is a film about voyeurism and emotional invasiveness in the social media age. Tasya doesn't merely puppet a random stranger, she lives their life, experiences their heath problems and addictions, sleeps with their partners, and inhabits their body as if it was her own.

While Tasya is piloting the body of Collin Tate, low-level employee at a Facebook-esque tech company, Collin's friends discuss his job combing over and categorizing footage from webcams, an obvious parallel to Tasya's own, more direct, form of voyeurism:

"I feel like a certain type of mind must get off on violating people's lives like that. I mean, seriously, how much pussy do you see at work everyday?"

"Well, I can only imagine the stuff he sees over there. I jerk off every day in front of my webcam so that Zoothroo knows which brand of vibrator I'm using."

This level of invasiveness is paralleled in the debrief Tasya's manager gives her before she plugs in to Collin's body:

"Tate's girlfriend is 'Ava' not 'Ahva'. His irritable bowel syndrome has intensified, so moderate to severe pain in your lower right abdomen will be considered normal."

In another scene, we see Collin, piloted by Tasya, at his work. He clicks through webcam feeds, watching people going about their lives, getting undressed, having sex, while he selects images of curtains for AI categorization. The camera cuts away from the webcam view and onto Collin's face as he selects the next feed. Collin staggers away in horror, disgusted by whatever it is the camera is showing him. Tasya becomes increasingly erratic, enacting violence with numb, chaotic brutality as her time in Collin's body extends into dangerous territory. By the end of the film, everyone is dead, and Tasya is a shell of her former self.

Possessor warns us that we are seeing too much of other people's lives, and they see too much of ours, and the result is destructive to everyone involved. This message is far from theoretical. We have created a small army of Tasya Voses, and Facebook is now paying out to content moderators who were diagnosed with PTSD. What do we even make of a nightmare such as this? Is the human spirit simply an abyss into which no one should delve? Is social media just an inherently bad idea? Possessor does not have a philosophical answer, but it has a more direct suggestion: Do not look. Your gaze was not meant for the mind of another.

2023 saw the release of the Quebecois Red Rooms, a profoundly disturbing psychological horror that aims at both the social media age and true crime. The films opens on the trial of a serial killer, Ludovic Chevalier, AKA le Démon de Rosemont, a man who filmed the rape, torture, and murder of three young women, and put the footage on the internet. However, we quickly realize that the film isn't about Ludovic himself, but his groupies, the two women so obsessed with Ludovic that they sleep on the streets so they can be first in line to attend his trial. Clémentine is manic, and resolutely believes in Ludovic's innocence. Kelly-Anne's motives and emotions are far murkier.

The narrative core of Red Rooms are the snuff films themselves. The viewer never sees them, but we see the reaction of those who do. People collapse in the courtroom. Screams of horror. In one of the most gripping scenes in the film, we learn that Kelly-Anne has a copy of one of the snuff films, and she watches it with Clémentine. We see their faces, bathed in red from the computer monitor. Kelly-Anne's expression is as blank as always, but Clémentine's shifts through anguish, disgust, and terror. Tears roll down her face. The act of witnessing is too much for her, and she leaves for home the next morning.

Red Rooms derives much of its tension from Kelly-Anne's behavior, she's a near-perfect execution of the "monster with motives we cannot comprehend" trope. The film's horror—the scenes that stick with the audience hours after the credits roll—all derive from the act of witnessing. We do not see the footage, because that's not the point. The point is what it does to us.

Possessor and Red Rooms are both members in a nascent clade of technology horror: through the internet we are witnessing what we shouldn't, and it's driving us mad. We are traumatized and broken, and we cannot look away.

Alienation is also a theme in both of these movies: Red Rooms draws a parallel between Kelly-Anne and Lady Shalott, the character from Tennyson's poem of the same name, who lives alone in a tower on an island. Collin Tate spends his working days with a VR set strapped to his head, completely isolated. By the end of the film, everyone close to Tasya Vos is dead.

In an act of hubris or pretense, I'm calling this genre Doomscrolling Horror: films where the source of fear is the alienation, anxiety, trauma, and mental distress associated with the age of algorithm-driven social media and surveillance capitalism. Although not a film, Black Mirror is an important predictor of this genre, particularly the series pilot The National Anthem, where the prime minister is forced to sodomize a pig on national TV, while the entire population watches on in disgust.

Demonlover comes remarkably close to predicting the nightmare 20 years ahead of time: the film ends with Diane De Monx trapped in the torturers' chambers, but we zoom out to see her on the computer monitor of a high school student. He pays a few dollars to send his requests to the website's producers, then returns his attention to his chemistry homework while she awaits her fate on his monitor. It is a normal day for a normal suburban family.

Inescapable Shock

To quote Bessel Van Der Kolk's The Body Keeps The Score:

[Two researchers] had repeatedly administered painful electric shocks to dogs who were trapped in locked cages. They called this condition "inescapable shock." [..] After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating.

What a perfect metaphor for the petty atavism of Twitter, Reddit, and the rest. Broken and pathetic creatures, whimpering, defecating, trapped only by ourselves and our trauma. The Russian man with half a skull. Revenge porn. Civilians burning alive. The door is open. We do not run. Why? To an outsider we must seem insane.

In a scene from the 2002 horror film The Ring, journalist Rachel Keller tracks down the only living guardian of Samara, the ghostly girl who created the cursed VHS tape that kills its viewers. He tells her:

What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it. Spread it like a sickness.

Rachel soon realizes this is a clue—Samara created the tape to force her anguish upon the world, and spread it.

Welcome to hell. Are you a Samara, Tasya, or Clémentine? You see a cop shoot a man fifteen times in the back. Is the cage locked? A corpse in the mud in Donbas. Is the cage locked? The Gaza strip reduced to ruin. Is the cage locked? Is the cage locked? Is the cage locked?

I recently finished the first book in Jerzy Zulawski's The Lunar Trilogy (1905), and while I'm still digesting it, I'm struck by how much of the book's ideas changed in the adaption to the screen in On The Silver Globe (1977).
The film is first and foremost a work of anti-enlightenment skepticism: if you drop a group of astronauts on a planet, with all their knowledge of human history and philosophy, their children will still re-invent monarchies, patriarchy, imperialism, and martyrdom from first principles. There is no progress, there is only the human spirit, and its infinite capacity for chaos. The contrast between the astronauts' advanced technology, and the savagery of the civilization they inadvertently create, reminds me of a quote from another enlightenment skeptic, John Gray:

Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.

The book, although equally cynical, draws its grim tone from a new kind of original sin: the act of being an astronaut. Towards the end of the book, the only surviving astronaut on the moon, Jan, begs god for forgiveness:

As soon as I became a man, I was possessed by the desire to soar in space, as if being on Earth was not the same as being also in the vastness of the universe and hovering over the abyss. Then I took the first opportunity and with a light heart abandoned my nurturing mother for the Moon's silver face, so seductive for lunatics. Lord, I was sinful, and I am unhappy...

From his future grave on the Moon, he prays not only to god, but to Earth itself:

Here, abandoned, and lonely, I am praying to you. I whom you once knew as a child, and who has grown old now away from your womb: Earth! Forgive me that I left you because of my madness and appetite for knowledge that you yourself planted in me. It led me here to this silver faced but dead globe which once upon a time a time you kicked out to light your nights and sway your seas!

Jan's misery is not without reason. All is friends are dead, the moon is inhabited by murderous bird-like creatures, and the new generation of native Lunar inhabitants he fathered are homunculi, grim approximations of people, speaking a devolved and childish tongue, who even Jan describes as anthropomorphic and pseudo-people. Jan fears that they retain only the shadowy umbra of the human spirit:

Leaving these people, I could clearly see which direction their development would go. A lot of the human spirit was lost on the way to the Moon, but human evil came here with us from Earth!

Jan also makes it clear that this backward step for the human spirit can be blamed on the moon itself, and by extension, him:

We've really perverted the the majesty of the human race, by bringing it here in ourselves and allowing it to reproduce on this globe, never intended for such a purpose.

Jerzy Zulawski looks up at the sky and sees only damnation, a new apple for us to pluck from the abyss and taste at the behest of the devil. What a jarring contrast to how we view space today—the final frontier, a blank map waiting for us to draw in its borders. The amount of media and literature that romanticizes our steps into space is legion, and cannot even be listed. To Jerzy, it is Earth that makes us human, and to abandon it is to abandon our mortal Eden. It's tempting to view such a perspective as quaint and backwards, but considering how pictures of Elon Musk in his embarrassing "OCCUPY MARS" shirt have been shitting up my social media feed for days, I can't help but wonder if Jerzy was onto something. Perhaps it requires a certain amount of spiritual bankruptcy to turn one's back on on the vibrancy and fecundity of Earth, so that one may grasp at the borders of a sepulchral frontier.

At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not mention the possibility for other interpretations of Jerzy's work. He wrote the The Lunar Trilogy in the early 1900s, less than a generation after the end of the California Genocide, and while the Mexican-American wars were still burning hot. Although these events are not directly mentioned, he compares the broken children of the moon to "people somewhere int he depths of Africa or at the southern border of the USA." Awareness of the California Genocide, or the Indian Wars, would not be unprecedented for a European intellectual of the period; Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi would even devote an entire poem, The Hymn Of The Patriarchs, to the genocide in 1822: These ravished people / trained to unprecedented pain, unknown desires! Their fleeting happiness stripped naked / and driven out beyond the sunset bar!"

It's perhaps a leap, but a small part of me thinks that Jerzy, with a typically racist 19th century view of the world, saw the events happening in the New World and felt that his fellow Europeans had stripped themselves of their humanity as they traveled across the Atlantic to a land forsaken by god.

Regardless of what Jerzy thought, I can't help but find something resonant in the book. In times as vicious and frightening as these, when both the Earth and society seem to be stumbling towards perdition, it is worth a reminder that our humanity remains here with us, in our homes, our forests, our graves, and our ruins.

July 31st

Nikolsky Charnoyevich, whose ancestors routed the Ottomans in Vienna and buried their unwed children with a bottle of liquor to bribe both god and devil, was reduced to stealing a knife from the hospital cafeteria. When the time came, he whipped the blade from his robes and smashed it down onto the table in his whitewashed inpatient room, tearing through layers of plywood laminate and three fingers on Johannes Klaus's left hand.

Johannes screeched like a shot bird and collapsed onto the concrete floor. No words passed between the two for a number of minutes. Johannes spoke only to god, delivering an unbroken oration of curses to the heavens as he groped through the pool of blood for the remains of his thumb, index, and middle fingers. He directed a few choice vulgarities at Nikolsky between the prayer of contempt.

"A devil spat between your mother's legs the night you were conceived. Dogfucker. None of this had to end with our feet in Tartarus." Johannes tore off his coat and wrapped the fading linen around the remains of his hand.

Nikolsky took a wheezing breath, something in his lung threatening to dislodge itself. He told the following, by way of an apology:

"As the reeds along the Tigris began to grow, a Babylonian princess prayed to Marduk for forgiveness, as for a week she had forgotten to utter his name in prayer. It is a minor sin, said the King Of Kings, and the Tigris shall bear it away if you let it. So the princess took her sin from her chest and threw it into the river, as sculptors of the divine images cast away their tools. But as fate would have it, a man bathing in the river noticed the princess throwing her sin to the Tigris. He did as her, and soon he told others as well, and before the shorebirds could daub their muddy nests among the reeds, the whole of Babylon had learned to pull the bolus of sin from between their ribs and cast it to the river undammed by the eye of Tiamat. A morning came when the river flooded, gravid with rites unperformed and libations unmade. The dams and waterways of the city failed, swept away in a deluge that grew until all that remained was Atrahasis upon his raft."

Johannes scoffed bitterly. "I hope you die screaming."

"We will both die quiet deaths. Is it not desirable to die in one's dreams, where distant gods can summon palliatives to our bedsides?" Nikolsky raised a graying eyebrow. "Have you counted your fingers, doctor?"

Johannes paused. His hand was wreathed in pain, the wailing of individual nerves indistinguishable from the whole. He gingerly pulled the blood-soaked coat from his hand.

Three fingers gone. Seven left.

Johannes collapsed into his chair and held his head in his hands. A hush of icy silence fell over the pair in the gaps between Nikolsky's rattling breaths.

Nikolsky sighed. "The world has ended many times. Ouranos plucks out his eye and lobs it at Chicxulub. Enlil breathes smoke across the earth. What new and terrible beasts, I wonder, will rise from the rolling hills of ash and carrion."

Exhausted of his insults, Johannes did not respond. The sound of wet, hitching sobs emanated from the broken man in the chair. After what could have been minutes or hours, Nikolsky wasn't sure, the crying stopped. Johannes slumped over, and for a moment Nikolsky thought the doctor dead, until Johannes raised his head and peered across the table with a single gleaming eye through the part in his hair. Something in the air shifted; the overwhelming scent of blood yielded to something darker, older.

"It is hemlock I taste on my tongue in a trice—as the flavor of death like the seeds is so sour, for in death all one tastes are the dreams that one lost."

July 16th

Cora recognized the city block sprawling out before her in the moonlight, but only as a familial corpse: the shape and features remain, but the thing itself is wrong, a cold and waxy verisimilitude. The voice one heeds in darkened allies howled at her, to run, to flee in any direction, to shed all the stillness from her body. She did not.

She laid down in the middle of the street, arms crossed over her chest and eyes facing the ashy sky, as though the hollow five-over-ones on either side were the mourners at her wake. Dread grew in her chest. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a deck of cards; she removed them from the slipcase and let the first two rest on her chest, the others scattering across the asphalt before the wind carried them away.

She recited a poem from her youth to a leaden sky: "When, lonely little bird, you reach the evening of that brief day of life the stars allot you, then you will not regret your way of life; since least each inclination of yours is natural."

If god had his ear to the earth he heard her and responded with rain, warm drops pregnant with carbon and smelling of wildfires. The howling inside her rose to a wail, but when she tried to stand up she found she could not; something inside her had severed itself from her limbs, and all the thrashing in her soul could not stir her body, save for her lungs which expended themselves uselessly. She could not force her throat into a scream.

A terrible roar grew in her ears, the sound of a hundred suns burning themselves to death. The din crowded out all thoughts, save for fear, a primordial ape burrowed in her brain that told her the sound was coming for her, that flame and ash would turn her to a Vesuvian corpse as she laid helpless on the ground. Time passed at an insomniac rate, hours and minutes indecipherable.

She felt him before she saw him.

Terror burned across her skin, catching the air in her lungs and itching down her arms. He came to her as a shadow, but not a silent umbra of the kind that occupies the underbrush of forests or empty homes, but a whirling vortex of absence. His body was the heart of a dead star, his silhouette the darkened snow of a volcanic winter.

He loomed over Cora and said nothing. He did not need to. With what little control she could wrangle over her body, she took the top card on her chest and turned it over. Seven of diamonds.

The blackened rain made her fingers slip from the second card, the seconds passing in frenzied desperation before she lodged her limp thumb under the cardstock and turned it over.

Seven of hearts.

Cora awoke to the feeling of needles prickling down her legs. She instinctively extracted her arms from the covers and draped it across the other half of the bed, where Sarah was still asleep. She felt her hand around in the darkness until she found Sarah's arm and let her hand rest against it as she stared into the night, adrenaline still pouring freely into her blood. After her nervous system calmed, she pulled herself from the bed and felt her way to the terrace in the living room.

The night was warm, cloudless, and silent. Pale light draped itself over the city, distant lights from far-away buildings mingling with the stars that crept over the horizon. She did not look at the clock that shone on Sarah's side of the bed, but the slightest ridge of purple light suggested dawn was imminent. Cora still felt a terrible weight in her chest, one that would not remit itself with the fresh nocturnal air.

She did not hear her rise from bed, but a moment later she felt Sarah's arm wrap around her chest.

"One more nightmare to rive you in rest?"

Cora paused for a moment, discomforted, although she wasn't sure why. "You—yes." Tears welled up in her eyes, and the weight in her chest turned to a hot, lacrimal lump. If Sarah noticed, she didn't say anything. "You should go back to bed. I won't ask breakfast of you this early."

Sarah responded by planting a quick kiss on Cora's cheek, before her arms fell away from Cora's body and she walked back into the darkness.

Cora stared at the horizon until the rising sun stung in her eyes. Even after the tears ceased the weight in her heart remained, a sensation she couldn't attribute to elation or grief.

Cora closed the glass patio door, but stopped as she noticed something gleaming in the dawn light; letters shone in the morning dew that stuck to the exterior of the glass, as though someone had climbed up seven stories, and wrote with their finger by wiping away the condensation on the window. The text, being on the outside, was reversed, and it took Cora a moment to read it:

IT DOES NOT HAVE TO END LIKE THIS.

July 15th

Johannes Klaus, ten hours late on his report to SVP Nichols, thrust a hand into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a worn eight-sided die, chipped in one corner. He held it in front of Nikolsky like a forked radish.

"Do you want this back?"

Nikolsky glared at the doctor above a landscape of liver spots and darkening lines under his eyes. He responded through gritted teeth, what few of them were left. "Yes."

Nikolsky reached out to snatch it, but the doctor pulled his hand back. After a tense moment, Johannes let the die fall onto the cheap plywood table between the pair. Seconds fell in slow drops until the die settled. Five.

Something in Nikolsky's posture unwound itself. A moment later he snatched the die from the table, and returned it to the shadowy folds of his clothes.

Johannes activated a recorder he kept hanging from his breast pocket. "How long was it? The oneirosis."

"Ten years." Nikolsky croaked.

Johannes raised an eyebrow. "Yesterday it was four."

"Yes, and that was yesterday."

Johannes gestured expectantly. "Go on then. Tell me."

"That was a decade. You can't be serious."

The doctor's expression suggested otherwise.

Nikolsky folded the die over in his withering hands. "I wore a crown in a steppe where gravid marshlands bore carp that leapt into nets, and where grain grew in golden floods without ash or irrigation. By folk legend I was born from the roots of an elder willow, as with its age came tears that wept from the leaves and impregnated the soil, but by the words of my hagiographers I was the child of a tryst between my mother and the sea itself, so that after I was born I would teach fishermen to rig their boats with sails, so they might reach the end of the world.

My wife gilded herself with the spoils of the earth but remained as somber as a long dusk. When I asked of her mood, she told me that a heron with a septic eye from which spare dreams wept had come to her in the night, draped its wings over her body and fed her fragments of time from its crop. When she awoke, the heron spoke:

"Gilgamesh in his sleep by ashcakes will not know:
were there tears on his bread that were wept by the wife
of the boatman who heard of a flood from the reeds?

Once a queen did beget the god Erra then wrote
on his cheek a cuneiform curse in the blood
of the cedars she took from the orchard of An:

As a man he would tear the old soul of the Earth
from Abzû as one tears the red flesh from a bone,
And the dams of the world would then buckle and burst.

And the fish from the dams when they swam to the blue
said a thanks to the god and his rage just before
they were speared by the bill of a wading bittern."

"Nine months later, my son was born. Before the boy turned ten, he swallowed the egg of a plover he found along the river—the egg incubated inside him, and one day the fledgling burst from his stomach to its rightful home. Knowing that he would surely die, my wife called for every mystic in the kingdom to assemble at the palace, and the most competent among them would be made to heal our son.

"Dozens of men arrived at the lapis gates, and to test them she drew a sword across her arm, so that if no man could heal her son, she would die alongside him. It was a grim procession. The first six failed, and left a disgrace. Her blood poured down the limestone steps of the city gate like snowmelt over the mountains.

"The seventh mystic, a man with a cataract in one eye and hair that drifted between the stars when one looked at him at night, drew his palm across her arm and closed the wound. He called himself Sebetti, for he was born four thousand years ago, when a divine heptad of warriors fell into a pool of bitumen that was his mother's womb, impregnating her. He placed his hand on my son's stomach, and availed him of his mortal wound. When we asked him what payment could possibly suffice for the life of a prince, he said only this, before I awoke:

In the night I shall nest by the shore of his dreams,
til his greed for the aquifers ancient and dark
has him drink far too deep from an umbra of mine.

Johannes frowned like a fledgling. "You think of me as Šukaletuda, foolish and cruel in equal measure."

Nikolsky shook his head. He seemed tired, his posture making him curl in on himself. "I faithfully tell only what Sebetti has shown me. To him, I suspect, I am a messenger."

The doctor stiffened. He glanced at the one-way mirror that covered one wall of the room, then whipped his head back around to Nikolsky. He briefly opened his mouth to say something, but instead he merely fumbled with the recorder in his breast pocket until he found the off switch, then left. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling swayed slightly when he slammed the door behind him. Nikolsky sat alone beside concrete walls and bolted-down furniture.

Cora half-watched the scene unfold from the other side of the mirror, one eye on her phone. She returned it to her pocket and feigned interest in her laptop when she heard the door unlatch.

"He acts like this every time you talk to him, and yet he still annoys you." She typed the first lines of Leopardi's The Solitary Thrush into a spreadsheet to mimic productivity, compressing one line into each cell.

Johannes leaned against the table and glared at Nikolsky through the glass, where the man's deathly gaze could not assault him in return. "This will be the end of us. The institute. Everything."

Cora stopped typing. "So say most, well after they cut the bull of heaven."

"I think he believes what he says, not that it matters." He sighed heavily, and composed himself. "I have a meeting with the CDC. Tell the orderlies he can return to his room."

"He's going to die before we learn anything from him. We should be fretting over the overrun morgues, not one man."

Johannes stopped on his way out the door. "You think I don't know that?"

"Perhaps he's telling the truth. About Sebetti. There are other cases that report seeing men like him. Here. In Seattle."

"Dreams are as alike as they are unalike. His own hat-man means nothing. You're more desperate than I am." The final syllables lifted without subtlety; it was a tone that Cora knew foreclosed any possibly of winning the argument.

"I just didn't expect to spend my dream postdoc position watching a man tumble to Tartarus."

"Count yourself lucky. My father always said you taste your unfinished dreams upon your death, and the flavor is always sour."

Johannes sulked out the door.

Cora waited for a moment, her ears shadowing his footsteps until they were swallowed by the whitewashed walls. She closed her laptop and slipped out the door into the interrogation room, and sat down at the table. Nikolsky looked up and said nothing, either from exhaustion or disinterest. Cora reached into her jacket and pulled out a deck of cards.

Nikolsky nodded. "That will do."

July 20th

Cora leaned against the metal grating of her terrace and watched a circle of city crows form around the corpse of a small animal that had laid itself to rest on one of the empty streets. The crows cawed amongst themselves, saying grace to their god before plunging their beaks in.

"See, it's done."

Cora stuffed her hands into her jacket and returned indoors, where Sarah had hung one of her paintings above the hearth. A small family of birds nesting among the marsh reeds, the hollow apartments of the city towering over them.

"What is it?" Cora asked, largely out of habit.

"A killdeer, who all roost in the marsh on the sound." Sarah reflexively rubbed the pastels from her right palm, raining color down onto the worn oakwood.

Cora fell onto the sofa. "Why killdeer?"

"Not all things need be symbols or signs."

"But they are rather tragic birds." Cora's eyes drifted between the art and setting sun outside.

Sarah humored her. "Do tell more."

"If a predator approaches the nest, one of the parents will run away from the eggs and feign injury, as to draw the predator's attention."

Sarah finished the thought. "So the child will persist, and the parent to predator falls."

Cora nodded. "If they cannot flee in time, yes. And often they will charge a predator many times their size, condemning themselves to death. Such is their instinct." Cora exposited slowly, while Sarah drifted through the apartment, and by the end of the thought Cora heard her opening one of the pomegranates that appeared on the kitchen counter the day prior.

"I abide the sad moods you beget in our home—yet I think if you speak of a truth, then perhaps 'twas a curse from an iltum to the forebear of killdeer before the Abzû was undammed by Mātāti in war."

"A million small birds damned by Ištar, as she did Enkidu. What did an ancient killdeer do to anger a rancorous god, I wonder."

Sarah handed her a fragment of the pomegranate. "Says the cynic I know and I love."

"I'll stain the sofa."

"Then eat hunched by the sink like a rube with his bread, as bad habits of yours so demand when I leave you with food that I cooked on the day just before." She kissed Cora on the forehead to soften the blow of her ribbing.

Too lost in thought to recognize her wife's sarcasm, Cora pulled herself to her feet but stopped as she walked by the door, where Sarah kept the mail on an antique melamine tray. There was a single letter, addressed to Cora by name, without stamp or sender.

"Sarah, where did this come from?"

Sarah looked up from her pomegranate. "Did a letter arrive?"

Cora jammed her index finger into the folds of the envelope and tore it open.

I WILL FIND YOU.

June 20th

Sometime during the night, Nikolsky tore himself from the grip of Mora and ran naked through the south wing of Firecrest State School before his escape was aborted by a shard of glass lodged into his clavicle, following a dive through an interior window. Already in a concussed torpor, the orderlies did not sedate him. From his bed the next morning he told Johannes that a Serb named Miloš had, for the past year, stood in the window outside his bed and whistled a folk tune that turned to hemlock as the notes rained down onto the flowerbed.

"You dreamed that he did this for a year?"

Nikolsky's face twisted into a frown. "No. I told you. In the dream, one year passed. The dream started in fall, then winter, then spring, then summer, then fall again, when I woke. I celebrated Christmas with my mother in Rijeka, I heard the birdsong in spring, when a family of sparrows nested beside the cherry trees in my garden; in the summer the birds fledged, there were—fuck."

Nikolsky fumbled around under the bedsheets, searching his clothes, before he turned to his bedside table, tore open the drawer and reached for an eight-sided die. He threw it onto the ground. Two.

"Damocles, you hang your own sword above your head."

Nikolsky scoffed. "Where is your daughter? She is kinder to me."

"Cora is more interested in studying you than curing you, Nikolsky."

"Better the pet of a scientist than the cattle of a madhouse."

"You are here of your own volition, Nikolsky. You can leave any time."

"You know that's not true. One such as yourself does not release his Gaëtan back into the wild." He returned the die to its home in the drawer. "Do you want to hear a story, doc?"

Johannes raised his arms in an exasperated shrug by way of an answer.

"Ten years ago, not long after I received my masters in library sciences in Kyiv, a man representing the Schøyen Collection approached me while I was visiting my family's summer home in Drammen. He offered me a job, on the condition that I travel with him to Oslo to meet that infamous proprietor and collector himself. If I was a fool in my youth, I was a Leander, not a Naram-Sin; when god looks you in the eye and asks something of you, you do not decline. Schøyen's disposition fit his role as a man of infamy, he walked always with his left eye pointing down, towards hell, so that his right would remember to look before crossing a street.

"It also turned out he had been aware of my name for a while. Six years ago he purchased a number of looted antiquities stolen during the Bosnian War, you see. Among these pilfered antiquities, or should I say, between them, was a journal belonging to my grandfather, Ivan Charnoyevich, who spent most of his life as a museum administrator under Tito. Despite the unbound papers of his journal serving as packing between a collection of thirteenth-century Christian manuscripts, my grandfather's writing consumed Schøyen, and he hoped I could illuminate a story from these journals, which went as follows:

"In the north of the world there was a woman who bartered with the blood of snakes and traded her menarche for a spell that burned her name from the lips of her parents; she fled the swords of Skien in 1563 and made her home in the lapland, beside the herders of caribou, carriers of stone, and hewers of wood. The laplanders called her Hyndla, from a name that descended upon an elder in a fevered dream.

"It was said by later Celtic soothsayers who nested like birds among the fjords that Hyndla never laid with a man, but one winter, after the war ended, she returned from the south with child. After a short spring that withered crops and draped the aurora past the eyes of the world, she gave birth to her daughter in the nest of harpy.

"But the harpy, fearing neither Hyndla nor the loons that carried her song on the wind, refused to cut a prayer into the child's back with her talons, and so it came to pass at one year that Mora crept into the child's crib and stole the breath from her lungs. Hyndla was furious. The next morning she she carried the corpse of her child up the mountain to the harpy's nest. She draped herself in feathers and larch bark while she waited for the harpy to return, then spat the urine of a caribou between the bird's eyes, and the harpy fell down dead. She split the beast's chest in two and placed her child in the crib of viscera, but neither god nor demon permitted the return of the child's soul to her body.

"Hearing the sweet song of her tears pattering onto the snow, a man who leant his left eye to Muninn crouched over Hyndla's chest as she awoke the next morning. He called himself Sáfḫaw, for his mother fed him seven scorpions of Isis to render his tongue as sharp as a sting. Sáfḫaw offered the witch a deal: he would take a fragment of Hyndla's soul and place it in her daughter's chest, but in exchange, he would eat well from the rivers of Hyndla's dreams, for two days of rain would fall into her dreams for each day of her life. Hyndla agreed to the Stranger's terms.

"The moment Hyndla opened her lips to permit the compact, the cries of her daughter emanated from the foot of her bed, and she wept for joy. For ten years Hyndla raised her daughter, and taught her to hold beetles under her tongue and curse men in secret on nights when the moon was smothered by snow. And it was after ten years that Hyndla came to understand the curse that enclosed her dwindling years: For every day of her life, the man who saw from Muninn's beak took two in the night, and so it would pass that Hyndla would die a crone before her daughter came of age.

"When Hyndla learned of her fate, she ascended the oldest pine in the north and stole the demon's eye from the nest of Muninn. She held the eye in the pocket of her cheek as she slept, and for nearly two days in her dream, she waited for him to appear. On the evening of the second oneiric day, he arrived at the wine-dark shores of her dreams in a ship masted with fishing nets, and negotiated for the return of his eye: in exchange for the plucked organ, he would amend Hyndla's curse. For the final three hours of her rest, he stated, he would strike he sun from the sky, and Hyndla would travel for ten years with a candle held in her belt to the seven corners of the earth, and in each corner light forty-nine fires. If she succeeded in lighting all three-hundred-and-forty-three fires, the sun in her dreams would rise, and she would awake with her daughter to live a long and natural life. Should she fail, or should the flame of the candle die, he would take what fragment of her life remained, and raise her daughter as his own.

"The story Schøyen found ended there. I did not learn of the true ending until a dream two nights ago. I have always been a curious man, and one night while my sister and I vacationed in Germany, I found a tree once planted as a sapling by Dumuzid on his wedding night, and cut the bark from its trunk in six places; Sáfḫaw cursed me from the dark corners of the world, and in exchange for cutting the final section of bark, he told me the remainder of the story, although I suspect his unbounded ego may have altered the telling of the tale, which went as follows:

"As clever as she was, Hyndla knew not of the man with whom she bartered away her life—conceived in a womb of pitch, one-seventh dragon, one-seventh a viper, and one-seventh a flood, an inveterate manipulator and itinerant drifter who gorged himself on time. His wickedness was matched only by his wisdom, for in his centuries of life he had come to understand a truth Hyndla did not: it is easier to extinguish one's own light, than to banish the surrounding darkness.

"For five years Hyndla meandered through the night, across marshes without birdsong, plans without caribou, and shores without tides. The eater of time refused to say what broke Hyndla's spirit, although he told that after she lit the tenth fire, she placed the candle under her chin and let her tears extinguish the flame. Sáfḫaw took Hyndla's daughter for himself, and fed her a pomegranate that put her in a dreamless sleep, until he needed her again."

Johannes frowned. "Is this what you believe to be the cause of your oneirosis, Nikolsky? A demon eater of time?"

Nikolsky rubbed his injured shoulder, appearing unimpressed. "By now you must know it's not all in my mind. There are others. Even I know from my hospital bed."

"I don't believe your condition is entirely psychological, no. Your insistence on the supernatural is merely tiring at a time like this."

Nikolsky leaned forward. "Have others seen him?"

"If you're going to attempt mindgames with your doctor, I think my time is better spent elsewhere."

"Why so busy? I imagine a man like yourself would be in a senior position, surely you have people to do your work for you." The question was more pointed than Johannes expected.

The doctor snapped his notebook shut. "A number of people have called in sick. I think there's something going around. Flu. Covid."

"What's wrong with them?"

"That's hardly your business, Nikolsky." Johannes got up to leave.

"You should ask them. Perhaps the oneirosis is spreading faster than you realize." He stood up. "The Man is a Locusta of dreams—some drink willingly, but for others, by the time they have gorged themselves on sleep, it will be too late."

Johannes ignored him, but stopped before he reached the door. "Schøyen. What did you tell him? To explain the story."

"I told him there is patrilineal curse of madness in my family, dating from 1683, when a wounded soldier serving under Kara Mehmed of Diyarbakir cut the throat of a hag, stole her dying breath and used it to curse the name of the Cossack soldier who stabbed him in the gut. He gave me a job."

July 31st 7:00 AM

When Cora awoke, she found herself not in her bed, but laying on the cold and wet mud path that encircled the wetlands to the south. Her head ached, and she tasted dirt in her mouth. She unstuck her clothes from the mud and pulled herself to her feet, calm despite the growing pang of panic—she did not remember falling asleep. She wiped her hand on her jeans and pulled a deck of cards from her jacket, and split the deck with her right hand, the top card falling into her left: seven of clubs. She returned the deck to her pocket.

When she looked up, she found Johannes standing in front of her, looking as though he had fallen down a flight of stairs.

"Do you know where you are?" Despite his haggard appearance, he clearly knew the answer to his own question.

After Cora adjusted to her new surroundings, she reached into her coat and returned the deck of cards to her hand. Again, she cut the deck with the thumb and middle finger of one hand, then tipped the card over with the opposite thumb. Seven of hearts. "You still treat me like a child."

"I told you I'd find you. I left you messages—"

"How did you find me here? How did you do this?"

Johannes frowned, the same frown he always made when the two battled for familial dominance. "Nikolsky told me."

"Nikolsky, or The Stranger?"

"Cora, that's not important. Nikolsky told me what you were planning to do to yourself. He said he helped you make a deal with—with him."

The reeds shivered in the morning wind. Far off in the distance, the urban glow of a thousand bedroom lights thrummed like dying stars. All was as silent as a dolmen. Cora turned the deck over and thumbed through it before picking a card. Five of diamonds. She extended her hand and with one finger held the card to Johannes's chest, pressing it against his wrinkled pinstripe shirt. "Tell me something I don't already know."

"Cora—"

"Nikolsky taught me a few things too. You could be anything that looks like my father. You could be The Stranger. Tell me something I don't already know."

Johannes thought for a moment. "When I was a small boy, my mother tried to take her life."

"Mom told me that. How she explained all the time you spent sulking at work."

He sighed. "That same night, I wondered from my crib and swallowed a peace of glass on the kitchen floor. I only survived because my grandfather had a bout of insomnia, and decided to check on me."

Cora returned the card to her coat pocket. "If you came all this way to walk me back, you won't."

Johannes lowered his head, the dim sunlight illuminating his tears as he wiped them with the back of his hand. It was the most emotion Cora had seen from him since her mother died. "I did the best I could. Raising you. We both—we both deserve better. Better than this. Better than what we got."

"Perhaps that's true. Perhaps it's not. For all our furor and struggle, we still wake to seven loaves of bread."

"Your fate is not fixed, Cora; we are all unfired clay."

"A tablet written by the gods and left to the elements will still harden in the sun."

Johannes sat down on the dirt trail and held his head in his hands. Somewhere off in the distance, a killdeer cried to the sun. "Christ. You needed love, not your mother's history books."

"You shouldn't call to god in a place like this. It may answer."

It was a moment before Johannes spoke. Cora watched wordlessly as he pressed his palms into his eyes, fighting back further tears. "You have a long life ahead of you, Cora."

Cora leaned over him, an animal ready to strike. "What are the fruits of old age? You should know as well as anyone. Infirmity. Frailty. Carrying the ever-growing weight of life while you watch the people you love die. While you watch the world die." She picked up a stone from the waterline and turned it over in her hands. "It's still spreading, isn't it?"

Johannes nodded.

"Nikolsky said as much."

"I have a meeting with him later today. I have ideas. On how to end this." He looked up. "You could help."

Cora took the five of hearts from her pocket. "Sarah usually makes pancakes on Sunday mornings. I don't want to miss it."

"Cora, Sarah is—"

Cora turned the card over in her hand, so the front stood inches from her father's face. He fell silent, and his body fell into the umbra of dawn, a shadow fading into the pale forests of cattails and reeds. Cora let the card fall onto the ground, and started walking home.

June 15th

"Doctor Klaus said you're very attached to that die, Nikolsky."

Nikolsky sat hunched over in a leather chair that threatened to consume him while he turned the eight-sided die over in his hands. He dropped it on the floor. Seven. He snatched it off the carpet and dropped it again. One. A sigh of relief. Cora made a note on her tablet.

"The longer the dreams get, the more you become lost in them. If I told you, right now, that you were dreaming, you wouldn't believe me, would you?"

Cora humored him. "No, I would not."

"But if, in this moment, it turned out you were in fact dreaming, you still wouldn't believe me, would you?"

"No, I suppose not. Is that what the die means to you? Proof? That's related to your septiphobia, isn't it?"

"It's not a fear. Also, sept is a Greek root and phobia is Latin, it should be heptaphobia."

Cora laughed. "I'll take that to mean that it is related to your dreams."

"Last night I dreamt the same way I always have, since learning lucid dreaming. I was in Norway, in my family's summer home, the one my father purchased in the 90s. For two weeks we stayed there; everything was peaceful, snow quieted the earth, and I would sit on the porch with my wife, reading poetry and drinking coffee."

"That sounds like a perfectly pleasant dream."

"It was. Many months ago I would say I designed it that way, but such autonomy has been seized from me. Still, two weeks of my life are now gone in the span of eight hours."

"As they would be if you spent two weeks awake on that porch."

Nikolsky laughed humorlessly. "You're humoring me, I can tell. To answer the unasked question: What started cannot be halted, soon I will become Atrahasis, watching the lands drown." He looked around Cora's office, eyes climbing the wall of books.

"That sounds a bit dramatic, don't you think?"

Nikolsky took in a great breath, and spoke. "Ma in ultimo quelle stolte e superbe domande commossero talmente l’ira del dio, che egli si risolse, posta da parte ogni pietá, di punire in perpetuo la specie umana, condannandola per tutte le etá future a miseria molto piú grave che le passate."

Cora paused halfway through jotting a note. She did not look up, her lips mutely reciting Nikolsky's speech. "Truth troubled the minds of men and struck them with such horror that they, though bound to obey her, refused to adore her."

"You studied Leopardi in college, no?"

Cora jolted forward. "How did you know that?"

"A stranger told me in a dream. The night after I came here. I lived in a city with no inhabitants save myself, until a man approached on a camel and whispered your name through teeth the color of pitch; he placed two fingers under his eye, pulled down the flesh of the eyelid and hatched a shorebird from the milk-white sphere. The bird flew from his eye socket into the sky and wept, sending down a great rain for seven days. When the deluge ceased, he told me of you, eater-of-many-seeded-apples, whose ancestors were felled by curses and mystics."

"Do your dreams speak often of me?"

"Only so that I may convince you that they are not merely dreams."

"And why do you believe you must convince me of such?"

Nikolsky appeared despondent. "There's a marshland not far from here. It used to be the city dump. Have you been there?"

"Of course, it's right by my apartment."

Nikolsky nodded. "In the spring, the beavers arrive to cut the trees and shape the waterways. They flood the streams and turn them to lakes, until the lakes spill over and waters rise. When they do, the herons and kingfishers come to roost, and to hunt in the shallow water the flood made for them. There is something that lives on the edge of time, who stoops over you as sleep, as the heron peers into the waters, and awaits the flood. I fear there was a night in January where I dreamed too deep, and it noticed."

July 35th

Cora laid down on the carpet and stared at the wall, above the fireplace cluttered by Sarah's paintings. She was tired, so much so that she couldn't be bothered to relocate herself to the bed. Sarah laid down beside her, and stared into her eyes.

"I feel like I'm dying." Cora said. She had not left the apartment in months. The stairs took too much from her.

Sarah hummed thoughtfully. "We all die."

"You seem undisturbed by such a thought."

"The pacific is home to a tree, for a thousand and more of our seasons she stands. She has seen: the Yokuts who where murdered in scores, then the settlers who came as a flood on the children then men, the Yuki, then Cheyenne. By the thousands she sees her kin razed by the flame as the hills of her home turn to ash. If god willed her to speak she would scream to the lands where her roots have her chained."

Cora took a labored breath. "Something in my soul has tarnished yours. I miss that quiet optimism of yours; I think it started with that painting you made. The killdeer."

Sarah laughed. "You remember the day that I placed my pastels of the birds on the wall? All the time we let drip from our lives since the date add to decades perhaps...it was five?"

"Think so."

"And a decade that passed from the time when we met."

Cora nodded. "Of course. Seventh grade. Computer room at school. You were playing Oregon Trail 2 and I kept arguing with you, because I could tell you were going to get your party killed. Didn't bring enough meat."

"Your words passed as a dawn and I thought: girl so bright and so sharp, she can teach me to pass my math class."

A quiet titter passed between the two of them. "It was all of a month," Cora said, putting her hand over Sarah's, "before I started to dream of spending my life with you."

"To you fate is the night to the owl."

"How so?"

"When you die with no dreams that remain in your soul, you will taste of your death not the bitter regret but the sweet and the cold."

May 9th

Cora stood up from her desk and offered her hand, which the man shook. He was about her age, with an expensive haircut and hazy blue eyes. He had already traded in his tailored suit (or that's what Cora pictured a man like him wearing, something in his posture suggested as such) for the inpatient scrubs. The kind that tear easily, so one can't hang themselves with it.

"Cora Klaus." He said, reading the badge on her desk. "Any relation to that dour-looking administrator?"

"He's my father. And yes, he's always like that. Nikolsky Charnoyevich, correct?"

Nikolsky sat himself down in Cora's overly-plush leather chair, opposite her desk. "And you're the first American to say it properly." He motioned to a wedding portrait on Cora's desk, the frame tilted just enough to allow him to see it from his side. "You have a lovely wife. When I was a boy I had a nanny who looked just like her. A Russian woman."

Cora's face fell. She responded with a curt thanks.

"I feel as though I shouldn't have gotten personal. Did something—"

"It's not your fault. Cancer. Six months ago."

A tense quiet fell over the two before Nikolsky apologized profusely.

Cora tried to twist the furrow out of her brow. "It's fine." She fiddled with a stack of papers. "I read your intake paperwork, but it leaves much to the imagination. It said you believe something in a dream..."

Nikolsky elaborated. "Three months ago my father died in his sleep. A month later my mother and brother fell to the same illness. Soon it will take me, and perhaps many more as well."

"You believe their deaths are related to dreams, and to your habit of lucid dreaming?"

"Not dreams, but time." He paused, leaning forward in the chair while he turned something over in his hands. Cora squinted. A eight-sided die. "Tell me, doctor—have you ever woken up from a dream, and wished you had never awoke at all?"

In the theology of our Complexes no heresiarch has proven quite as contentious as the great-aunt on my mother's side, who posited in an anonymous exegesis that the dispensation of corpses to trash chutes was neither blasphemous nor necessary. For the sake of my social standing I cannot comment on the former charge of blasphemy, but upon the death of my grandmother, my mother chose to wrap her body in parchment paper and leave the corpse in the hallway of the apartment complex. This deed was executed out of ideological commitment, of course. Her corpse was gone by 5AM, her name added to the great concrete necrology of the Complex. Things always disappear here—hair ties, bread heels, feces, corpses. We always assume it's because they are meant to. As anyone who has observed a pot left to boil for too long can tell you, what seems to disappear often changes form instead.

My mother, her lineage perhaps cursed since before that fateful manuscript, decided to take the lot of us and leave ten years later.

My great-aunt was too old to join us, and so the first order of business for the rest of the family was to decide what to do with her. My father thought she should live with our neighbors, who would almost certainly be too polite to object. My brother suggested we build a tent out of deli containers and plastic wrap for her to live in the hallways, preferably a quiet corner by an electrical cabinet. This raised an additional set of questions, of course—if Mercer's Summa Portus was correct, the electrical cabinets placed every fifth floor were never opened, and their interior existed outside creation itself. My father vehemently objected, arguing that the electrical cabinets were maintained in secret, much like how cobwebs never seem to appear when one is looking at them. The debate continued until my great-aunt piteously suggested that she leap off the balcony into the children's playground ten floors below. We agreed this suicide was a noble sacrifice in the name of metaphysical truth. Such things happened occasionally; the balcony railings were low and the hallways narrow. If our family's experiment with my grandmother ten years prior was representative of general reality, her body would be gone as long as she flung herself off the balcony after midnight. My father opined that things are never truly destroyed, and that the complex would simply turn her corpse into rust, wheat, or the moss that grows in the cracks of concrete.

Five days and many prayers later, we had placed our earthly possessions into packs made from moth-eaten peacoats belonging to my grandfather, and left the apartment behind.

My mother's reasoning was thus: all things have an inside and an outside: a corpse, an egg, a complex. I argued this reasoning was faulty, of course; if one can breach the interior of a thing, it is either because the thing was made to be opened, or because it has been destroyed. In the former category one may place boxes and rooms, while eggs and corpses belong in the latter. The Complex, as is self-evident, belongs to neither of these categories. My mother could not be dissuaded; it had to be possible to leave the complex.

We knew the Complex had an end—some unknown hundreds of floors down, there was a sub-complex, a place not of people and homes but of pipes, concrete, and rust. My great-aunt had supposedly seen it (or knew someone who had), as had numerous other itinerant denizens who lived long enough to drift upwards from there to here over the course of their lives. The source of contention among the family was if there was if there was anything beyond the bottom.

It was only a few days—and around a hundred floors—before discussion of the sub-complex turned to the inevitable: the Benthites. Save for my brother, we all knew Benthites were a myth, a fable refined across generations to frighten young children who may be tempted to wander after the lights faded. My brother, however, had ruined his nerves with Candelan-era natural philosophy, during which time it was in vogue to theorize that the Benthites were in fact quite real—and lived in the sub-complex. I told him that if he sees a naked man with ashy skin, red eyes, and who crawls around like a cellar spider, he can go ahead and warn us. He was not amused.

Two months in—two months of stairwells, rats, cobwebs, stale air, and the omnipresent hum of electrical work—we awoke one morning, three hundred stories down, to find my father gone. The nighttime chill and dire selection of food (again, there are a great many rats in the complex) had slowly chipped away at his health, and so we were forced to come to the conclusion that he either died in the night and befell the same fate as his in-laws, or that the horror of our journey had simply drove him to leap over the edge of the railing.

The bottom of the complex was within sight—less than a hundred floors—but my father's death snapped the threads that my mother's lifelong ontological struggle had wrapped around me. I had enough. The following night I waited until after dark, and abandoned her and my brother.

Within hours I realized with sinking horror that I had no idea how to return home. The floors had passed as minutes or drops of water—uncountable, indistinct, pooling together into the urn of time. After months of my mother's pilgrimage I no longer saw floors, just anonymous landscapes of concrete, doorways, and the clattering drumbeat of footsteps echoing through stairwells.

It was a month before I found a roof over my head in the form of a noodle shop carved into the carapace of a former two-bedroom apartment, where I exchanged dishwashing duties for a spot opposite the walk-in, just large enough for a bed. In another two years I found a second family, in the form of a woman two floors down who lived with her brother and grandparents. We married only a year later, rushed by a familial insistence on great-grandchildren, and by my emotional wounds from all the pilgrimage had taken.

Shortly after the marriage, on the advice of a priest who I consulted on matters of the heart—and the only living person besides my wife who knew of my past—I traveled the remaining fifty-six floors to the bottom of the complex. Beset by a heart-rending terror that I would again become lost and loose both home and family, I carried with me a pen and paper which I used to count the floors between my home and the bottom.

The denizens of the final floors spoke in hushed tones of the sub-complex, and to my shock, firmly believed in the Benthites that the rest of us regarded as childhood fables. All who I talked to, no matter how cordial and neighborly, refused to direct me to the doors of the sub-complex. I asked if they had seen anyone like my mother and brother, and they had. They had reached the final floor three years ago, my mother's grim and rancorous disposition still memorable to any who had met her. After that day, they were never seen again.

I eventually found the doors on my own, set at the end of a vertiginous concrete hallway. Folk-magic symbols and obscene graffiti covered over the layers of rust and off-white paint. I refused to come within a dozen paces, fearing that the Benthites would reach out and pull me inside.

My daughter was born six months later, bearing eyes that resembled my mother's to a startling degree. Being a rational adult I considered this nothing more than an accident of genetics, and for a number of years I settled into domestic life with a routine comfort that I had not known since my own childhood. What wounds cannot be healed by time are often healed by love, and soon Summa Portus, the pilgrimage, and the lifetime of ideological furor passed into memory. On late nights, when the wet summer heat interrupted my sleep, I would sometimes wonder what had become of my remaining family. Had they found something in the sub-complex?

Some eight years later, I again found myself on the bottom floor with my wife and daughter, where we had come to seek the advice of a well-regarded priest. For months our daughter had been dogged by nightmares: twisting hallways, tangles of rusted pipe and red eyes peering at her through cold, black murk.

By happenstance we passed by the doors leading to the sub-complex. My daughter stopped and turned, those familiar green-blue eyes widening before she let out a throat-torn scream that would not cease until my wife pulled the girl into her arms and tore her away from the hallway.

As expected, precisely twelve hours before my thirtieth birthday I was given the name of my first Predecessor. A knock awoke me at 04:23 sharp, but the messenger was gone by the time I draped myself in a towel and opened the door, leaving only an unmarked envelope resting on my doormat. The name written on the embossed cardstock inside was in a language I did not know, its script a set of neat, serif bars I had never seen. The location, printed below, was in my own tongue:

Earth-Green-Sagittarius A*-Tlön-Calumny-Temerity. Box 12.

Planet. Color. Month. City. Words. Box. In the time it took me to dress myself, make coffee, and buy a train ticket, I memorized the location. The words cycled over in my mind as I sat with my forehead against the window, watching the trees dart by. Earth. Box 12. Temerity. I spoke them in time with the train wheels thudding against the breaks in the track.

I first saw a Tower when I was young, accompanied by my mother, who came to retrieve her third Predecessor. Due to my age I was not permitted inside, and even if I was, I would not be able to comprehend it. A great obelisk, ink black, without end, barely tapering before it was swallowed by the sky. Its exterior was unblemished, save for the faintest of series of jagged lines, as if mirroring the stairs that ran up the interior. It was said that on clear days, if one was at the peak—and if the the Tower had windows—you could see its six nearest sisters, great spikes that thrust out of the bedrock to pierce the heavens.

It wasn't even 06:00, and there was no line. Earth: The third in a series of eight staircases branching off from the ground floor. Green: the first of three lifts when one exited the stairs. Sagittarius A*: floor fifty of one thousand, for the first thousand named black holes. Tlön: the fifth section out of a hundred on the floor, for each of the one hundred great cities. The remaining words could be mapped from a book that rested where Prague ended and Tlön began. Calumny: Tenth row. Temerity: fifth shelf. Box 12.

I gently extracted onyx vessel, no larger than a paperback book, from its home. The smooth black stone slid noiselessly from its wooden slot in the shelf. My mother told me that the first person to be appointed a Predecessor was given the box of god's only daughter, who gave her life in a war with the Kassites. According to a librarian, this is a myth, but he informed me that her box is in a Tower in Iraq: Mercury-Green-3C 273-Urik.

I placed my card in the empty crevice and left, clutching my Predecessor to my chest.

I did not open the box until I returned home, at which point I still had plenty of time. The notice arrives twelve hours before. After your thirtieth, you have twenty-four hours.

I sat on my bed, among unmade sheets and pillows and half-read copy of Operette morali. I put the box on my lap, felt with my finger where the lid was mated to the sides, and pulled it apart.

Inside was a worn pewter ring, cold, plain, and heavy. I turned it over in my hands. I assumed it was a wedding band, although the words written in the interior were in the same script as the name on the card. For a minute I just sat, cupping it in my palm, as though it were a bird or rare insect; I half-expected a vision, a flash of light, the voice of god whispering sacred axioms in my ear. There was nothing.

It felt wrong to put it on my hand, even the index, so I fished an unused silver chain out of a jewelry box in the bathroom and threaded it through. It rested low on my neck, enough that I could idly turn it over while resting my elbow on a desk.

Centuries ago we warred with god, and when he tumbled from the lap of heaven onto the dirt, this was the result. A worn wedding band, belonging to someone who was never given a Predecessor.

Six months later I consulted a librarian. The language on the band, and on my card, was a dead Germanic tongue, perhaps Dutch, or Swedish. I had been too nervous to make a copy of my card before I left it in the Tower, but another librarian supposed it was a Scandinavian name based on my vague recollection of the shapes, perhaps sixteen hundred years old.

Five years on, I still kept the band on that same necklace, and every evening I would sit on my desk and roll it between my fingers. What if the ring had been mine, and it was god who pulled my spirit from darkness and told me that an act of armistice required me to pick a single object, small enough to fit in a box, to represent my life?

It was fifteen years before I started to understand, and I started to feel the weight of the ring around my neck at every turn I took in my house. The bookshelves and the espresso machine and the porcelain trinkets and the boxes of carefully curated childhood memorabilia: All larger than the small stone box, yet somehow lesser than the ring. This was the point, of course. The war ended, with god bloodied and humanity quartered. We got our immortality, but if we didn't know death, we would be forced to forever mourn its passing. Forget your Predecessor, forget all those who did not get the gift you were given, and you would loose the gift yourself.

Much to my parents' and siblings' dismay, I had started to clear my house of things. My ownership of the ring had gone on for fifty years, with fifty more left, but it still grew heavier. The handmade mug from a vacation to the west could not fit in a small stone box, nor could it distill a century of my existence. My desires, lusts, and heartbreaks could not be contained in vintage dinnerware or leather-bound dictionaries. No traumas could be transmitted through surplus kitchen knives and drawers full of trinkets.

Ten years later I had reduced most of my study to little more than a desk. An unfinished collection poems I had written could fit inside the stone box—I had even checked—yet the papers still loomed over my psyche every morning from the corner of the desk, as though accusing me of some dishonestly. I had not added to them in nearly twenty-five years. Surely something so neglected could not mean much. My predecessor had, I assume, worn that ring every day, until he died. But surely, I had time enough. What was one lifetime to someone to someone who had enumerable lifetimes?

For ten years I looked at the poems gathering dust, along with the half-finished manuscripts and wooden dog I had carved from the tree I climbed as a child, and I told myself that a year of my Predecessor's time was a single breath to me, and that soon the book would be done, the dog painted, the couplets resolved. When I was done, I could even carve my own box, for my own totem, and surely then, I would feel at peace.

Another decade passed, the poems bleached by sunlight in a corner of my room. I noticed the cracks in the wooden dog I had carved and left on a windowsill, nearly forgotten until I re-discovered it while looking for a misplaced house key. I took the ring off my neck, returned it to its box, and placed it under the bed, where I would never again see it.