Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The episode continued, with a drug lord named Kane sending his dealers into the unnamed city’s playgrounds and schoolyards, selling drugs to high school kids and kindergarteners alike, until the next commercial break. I quickly picked up my remote to have another look at the entertainer I had stumbled upon, but remembered I had selected the number at random and didn’t know it. Luckily, the remote had a feature that recalled the last channel you had visited. I pressed this key, and found myself back at that channel.

  Again, a blast of static before the image appeared, this grainy and watery and the sound distorted until everything cleared. The performer was still singing the same song, the same words, doing the same dance, twirling around and stirring the vortexes over his breasts with his fingers, singing in his sweet light voice, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl” over and over. But this time his troupe of dancing mimes were all suspended from crosses in the background, crucified (without blood), heads hanging low, each with a swirling vortex obscuring their face. All the while, the entertainer in his top hat and red-rimmed grin singing, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl.”

  I was careful not to get too mesmerized this time, but still found my program had continued on without me. Jabronski was sitting on the bottom step of a tenement’s front stairs, beside him a skinny black boy with a huge afro.

  This boy looked frustrated, his face scrunched up, and he wagged his head as he said, “I dunno, Jabronski. How can I make her like me? She doesn’t even see me, man. It’s like I don’t exist!”

  Jabronski chuckled, and reached out to pat the boy’s head, but stayed his hand at the last second, uncertain about the afro. Instead, he hugged the kid against him a little and said, “Billy, Billy. You gotta build a fi-ah.” Another squeeze against him, and another chuckle as he shook his head. “You gotta let it burn.”

  Just then Jabronski’s girlfriend, a shapely blond with layers and layers of blow-dried hair, almost a head taller than himself, a hooker with a heart of gold, came clicking along on her stiletto heels. Jabronski squinted up at her with a little smirk as she crooked a finger at him.

  “Daaamn,” said Billy, looking up at her.

  Another commercial break, and with it another look at that other station, as if answering a compulsion, now that I had its number memorized. Yet this time, the static wouldn’t clear. No picture would resolve itself, but through the hiss and crackle—if I bent my head close to the screen—as if from a great distance I heard the faintest music and the tiniest voice cheerfully singing, “Oh Silicooone… Silicone Swirl…”

  Back to Jimmy, the detective Jabronski had counseled earlier, on the edge of a playground while little Billy with his great globe of an afro whispered about some dealers that had been coming around. Just then a car pulled up opposite them, with machine gun barrels poking out of its windows. The guns opened up, and despite Jimmy’s efforts to shield Billy with his body, both of them went down in the gutter. Just as the big boat of a car went screeching off, Jabronski’s beat-up but revved-up car came shrieking around the corner. He spotted the two bodies, jammed on his brakes, jumped out and raced to his fallen friends. As a consequence of being riddled with countless bullets, both Jimmy and Billy had a trickle of blood running down from one corner of their mouths. Kneeling down, Jabronski cradled the dead boy across his knees, turned his face up to the gray city sky and screamed in his high-pitched voice, “Noooo!”

  Just then, a pay phone a little down the street started ringing. Jabronski gently lay Billy back down again, went to the phone and snatched the receiver.

  The camera cut to the headquarters of drug lord Kane, who said menacingly into his own phone’s mouthpiece, “You pushed me too far, Jabronski. Now it’s your move. How do you want to call it?”

  Jabronski was trembling with pent-up rage, barely able to contain it. Tears streamed down his face, and through gritted teeth, his city-tough voice even more high-pitched with the strain of his emotions, he cried, “You gotta build a fi-ah! You hear me, Kane?” The camera moved in closer on his tormented, intense face. “You gotta let it buuuuuuuuuurn! ”

  As the story progressed, Jabronski launched a one-man raid on Kane’s main drug-producing plant. Suddenly Kane pulled up in his big boat of a car, and Jabronski vaulted onto the hood of his own beat-up but revved-up vehicle, slid to the opposite side on his rear, and when he landed fired bullets to the left and the right, dropping the two henchmen Kane had brought with him.

  Jabronski chased Kane into the plant, where the drug lord tried to elude the cop by climbing up on some catwalks above his drug-producing operation.

  When he whirled to take a few shots back at Jabronski, he lost his balance and fell screaming into a huge bubbling vat of some illegal and potent concoction.

  Perhaps he died in a mixed state of terror and bliss, one hand groping at the air before it sank down out of view.

  A commercial. Just static on that channel now. Why had I never seen this station before? Had the anomalous hotdog-cooking incident caused my TV to be able to pick it up, where it hadn’t before? And would I ever be able to receive it again? For now, no matter how high I cranked the volume, no matter how close I drew to the screen, I couldn’t make out any music or singing.

  In the concluding scene to this episode of Detective/PsychiatristJabronski, just before the closing credits and a reprise of the song Let it Burn, we cut to Jabronski in bed with his statuesque hooker girlfriend, both with the blanket pulled up primly to their armpits. Jabronski was smoking a cigarette, and his girlfriend tickled his ear with one finger, purring, “How do you do it, Jabronski? Go undercover all day…and undercover all night with me, too?”

  “You gotta build a fi-ah, baby,” he told her, his cigarette bobbing in his mouth. “You gotta let it burn.”

  #6: The Ephemeral Eye

  Being an employee at Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals, I could have had the drug Insanolin prescribed free by my doctor, had I needed it—but fortunately, I had never seen the Ephemeral Eye myself. This town I lived in—Gosston—was mid-sized, and the Ephemeral Eye tended to visit larger cities, though it was not wise to assume one was safe anywhere. There had been numerous cases where the huge phantom Eye had been spotted floating above the tops of forest trees by unlucky campers, or travelers on lonely back roads, or out the windows of remote farm houses. Typically, however, the glowing green Eye came drifting over the cities of this world, drifting low over the tops of tenement blocks or navigating between the canyon walls of office towers, then coming to a stop to hover in a stationary position for a few minutes or as long as an hour, often nosed up so close to one window that a person might easily feel they had been singled out in the whole of that city for the Eye’s present appearance. In such a case, when the Eye seemed that particular, its visit that intimate—at least to the occupant living behind that window—the individual usually required a full 150mg (2X daily) dose of Insanolin after the incident.

  The symptoms of the sickness could be anything, ranging from depression to indigestion, malaise to nausea, nervousness to flatulence, feelings of persecution to migraine headaches, suicidal thoughts, chills, agitation, sleeplessness, uncontrollable laughter, narcolepsy, uncontrollable sobbing, heart palpitations. Insanolin dulled these effects, with varying degrees of success, rather than eradicating them altogether. Time would or wouldn’t achieve that. Some individuals were unfortunate enough to witness the Ephemeral Eye again, and again. It was a risk one took living in a big city, where there is a lot of activity at night and people are less likely to want to hide themselves inside come sun-down, as people in small towns will often do despite their lesser chances of witnessing the Eye. The Eye had only ever been seen at night, though some suggested that it did indeed pass amongst us in the day but that under conditions of sunlight it simply couldn’t be perceived.

  The Ephemeral Eye had the general shape and size of a smallish blimp, such as might be used for advertiseme
nt rather than a zeppelin used for trans-portation. It was in the form of a gigantic, unblinking, unmoving eye, the eye and its lids contained within an elliptical body. The Eye was a luminous lime green. This vivid green light would glow through people’s closed blinds or around the edges of their drawn shades, and the light alone was enough to create anxiety, but it wasn’t the same as meeting the titanic Eye’s gaze directly.

  A number of witnesses who had encountered the Eye up close said that they felt the iris was a spiral that spun around the pupil, while others insisted that what these people were seeing was actually a giant gear or cog turning around and around.

  It was generally felt that the Ephemeral Eye was a hologram or suchlike, because its image had occasionally been seen to flicker briefly with bars of static—even to suddenly blink out of and back into existence after a more pro-longed burst of static. The Eye was usually silent, but it might be heard to buzz very loudly while this static was occurring, and for a while thereafter.

  Sometimes the Eye blinked out of existence and didn’t return, though in most instances it simply floated off into the distance out of sight, presumably to slip unobserved back into its own or at least another dimension (and did it haunt more worlds than simply our own?). Perhaps it never stopped roaming the globe, never came to rest. It had been spied by unlucky ships at sea, either high amongst the clouds or so low it almost skimmed the ocean’s waves, and in one case I had read about, a lonely lighthouse keeper had thrown himself to his death after having had the Eye visit him at his desolate outpost.

  After several cases in which pilots had accidentally or even intentionally crashed their planes after encountering the Eye in its own element, pilots of any size or type of aircraft had to be rigorously conditioned to avert their eyes and focus solely on their instruments should they begin to glimpse the Eye in the distance (far enough away that its effects would not as yet be felt—just a distant green dot like a firefly). Their instruments could not warn them of the ghostly Eye’s approach, though the pilots could be radioed if the Eye had been sighted somewhere along their flight path. Passengers flying at night were very much inclined to keep their window panels slid shut.

  Some suggested the apparition had been intended as an advertisement for some product or service, but the program had become corrupted and those responsible for it did not want to come forward and be sued for the damages it had wreaked. One of the wilder theories was that the thing was an actual sentient being, a living if insubstantial creature from another plane or reality, visiting or trapped in our reality.

  Maybe I could afford to be so charitable, because I myself had never been affected (and because it was the source of my livelihood), but I actually felt sorry for the thing sometimes. It seemed like such a lonely entity. It seemed as if it might even be searching for something, or a single somebody who had til now eluded it. Always searching, looking for something and never finding it. Never able to close that immense eye to rest, never able to shed a tear to express whatever it was it might be feeling. I almost felt a weird kind of affinity with the thing, at times. Maybe others did, too. My own theory was that it might be a projection from the collective unconscious of other people like myself. There were, in fact, some fringe groups such as the cult the Eternal Eye that worshipped the thing as a manifestation of their god. I guess the Ephemeral Eye was whatever you wanted it to be. Searching, searching this globe, stimulating the fears and imaginations of those who were in some way searching for something elusive or intangible themselves.

  #7: TV Rituals

  I had by now exchanged brief pleasantries with Hee, the daughter of the tenant who lived in the great house’s attic, on a number of occasions when I’d gone outside to collect my mail and found her in the drive waiting for a ride with her giggly young chums to go shopping or to the cinema or what have you.

  Her eyes and smile beamed quite openly but I found I was shy and tongue-tied, until the day that Hee—who was wont to gush very freely, complaining about her mother’s restrictions or lack of understanding, or complaining about the friends who were on their way to pick her up—mentioned that she felt out of sorts that afternoon because she had run out of her prescription of Insanolin and her “stupid mother” hadn’t bothered to get it refilled yet.

  Ah! Now I had a topic to loosen my tongue! I quickly told Hee how I was an employee of Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals, right here in Gosston, where we produced the medication she took. She then asked if I could get some for her.

  “Ah, well,” I stammered, “I can’t just take it out of the plant with me. I could get fired for that.”

  “Well, what, so they scan you or x-ray you or something?”

  “No, but…”

  “Strip search you?” she asked. She said it with what I thought, or hoped, was a suggestive touch to her smile.

  Hee went on to explain that in her country, from which she and her mother had immigrated a few years ago, she and some schoolmates had seen the dir-igible-like Ephemeral Eye gliding above their city one night. Insanolin wasn’t as accessible in her country as it was here, and so it wasn’t until she moved here several years after the episode that she began taking the drug. “By then,”

  she shrugged, “the damage was done.”

  “Damage?” I knew the damage of Ephemeral Eye manifestations could be manifold.

  “I’m sure that’s why I became a prostitute over there,” she said matter-of-factly. “I mean, my mom had a good job so it wasn’t like we were desperate for money. Though I did like having my own money, of course. That is, whatever my stupid pimp left me. But that’s the two big reasons why my mom wanted us to come over here—to get me Insanolin, and to get me off the streets.” She shrugged her bared, smooth, brown shoulders again.

  “Uh, that’s good,” I said. “I’m glad you came over here, then.” I tried not to be thrown too much by her admission. It was my understanding that something like one in three women in her country was a prostitute, and that one in three of them had a deadly STD. I tried not to be thrown too much by that bit of trivia, too.

  “Hey, when I come back tonight can I come visit you? We could watch some TV, make some popcorn, huh?” That little smile of hers, so beguiling. It gave me heart palpitations as if I had witnessed the Ephemeral Eye at some point, after all.

  And so began our ritual of watching TV in my apartment together, which I was never sure whether her mother—who I very seldom saw—was aware of or not. I didn’t ask; I was simply grateful for Hee’s company. But my apartment was small, and I only had one reclining chair, so on that first evening—after she had returned from her outing with her friends—we both sat cross-legged on the carpet directly in front of the TV.

  My attention was so fixed on how the right knee of her open legs pressed against my left knee, the totality of my mind and sensation focused onto that lucky little piece of skin, that I was barely conscious of Hee pointing my remote and punching in a number she obviously knew well. “I love this,” she said. “I watch it every day.”

  It was as though my consciousness had to crawl its way out of some deep well of pleasure (like that vat of illegal intoxicants Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski’s enemy, Kane, had drowned in) to concentrate on what was playing on my TV…but gradually I did shift a sufficient degree of my awareness there, and my recent curiosity was rekindled as I watched that same dancing entertainer from a few nights ago, in his black clothing and his crooked black top hat with its lime green ribbon, his painted face still grinning and eyes still twinkling, as he sang so sweetly…

  “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone… Silicone Swirl.”

  Hee was riveted, smiling broadly and rocking from buttock to buttock to the music. I thought she might join in the song, herself, at any moment. I asked her, “So how long has this program being running, now?” To which she only shrugged, not taking her eyes off the screen. Hers had that same wide, almost feverish gleam of the performer’s himself.

  We must have watched th
is program steadily for at least an hour, without peeking at any other channels during commercial breaks as I as wont to do, since there were no breaks of any kind. Not once did the singer stop singing, stop dancing, and it was always the same dance steps: twirling around and opening his coat at the lyric, “You make me feel like a girl,” to reveal those two spirals that spun around and around over his breasts like twin hypnotic vortexes. “Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl,” he sang, dancing backward away from the camera then forward, closer, again. Sashaying lightly, nimbly from side-to-side across the screen, and twirling the index finger of both hands in front of his body suit where those hypnotic designs spun around. Then, twirling around again to open his coat again, all of it in ceaseless repetition.

  Often his mime-like dancers in their white body suits and painted (masked?) white faces followed along to his steps, but the background changed every few minutes. Sometimes the change faded in gradually, while other times it was as abrupt as the blink of an eye. Sometimes the mimes faded away with the scene, or danced off out of view, to remain absent for a time. Then the mimes might return to assemble a new background set themselves, scrambling around like human spiders. Occasionally the components of a set came rolling together as if on wheels, and when the pieces connected they would create a miniature classroom with a few rows of desks at which the white mimes sat stiffly, or an office space with the mimes occupying a few mock cubicles, or a café with the mimes sitting at tables pretending to sip coffee, or a meat freezer with halved animal carcasses hanging from hooks, all frozen red flesh and curved white ribs, and the mimes hanging upside-down from their feet along with them. One time, a set came together to portray a tiny studio apartment with its livingroom doubling as a bedroom, two figures in the bed thrashing unseen under the blankets while the singer pranced nonchalantly in the foreground, and when the sections of that set broke up and rolled away again, behind them was revealed a vast plain of barren desolation, stretching off to the horizon, with a dull sun waning low in the gloomy sky. It was probably some kind of matte effect, though its sense of reality was so weirdly per-suasive that it gave me an unexpected flush of gooseflesh. I could almost feel the icy wind that stirred its dry, dead dust—though the entertainer went on with his unvarying routine unperturbed, oblivious. I had the unsettling notion, or intuition, that this was no clever sound stage or effect, and that its revelation had not been intentional but a slip up, an accident, that had unveiled the ultimate reality behind all facades.