Unger House Radicals

by Chris Kelso

  The 7” single of ‘All Hail’ by The Art Bears was playing over and over on the record player. Dwight’s dad told him that new music wasn’t worth listening to. He believed him, he believed pretty much anything his dad told him.

  Dwight felt a draught whistle through the PVC, heard the desolate winds that swept the streets and lashed the blonde-sandstone curtain. He pulled the drawstring around the neck of his sweatshirt until the hood clung to his skull. Light continued to flood in. He hated the light, always had, but he wouldn’t get too panicky right now. He was 15 stories in the air. No one could see what he was up to.

  10 o’clock…

  *clip, clop, clip, clop*

  There were always heavy footsteps out on the deck access, wandering the maze of dark of internal corridors. Dwight had no idea who was out there. A person who couldn’t handle the Great Isolation maybe? He became tense, paranoid that someone was about to burst in and catch him watching videos he wasn’t supposed to be watching. What if someone from the Last True Hope found out the family secret? Water continued to drip from various pin-hole leaks. Dwight felt like they were dripping inside his skull.

  At least he was 15 stories up in the air, in his watchtower.

  11 o’clock…

  Dwight peered out of the window. He knew that somewhere out there, beneath the folds of darkness, were shopping precincts, warehouses, stone wharfs, maybe even cornfields laid fallow. He looked through the veil of black at the low-power relay transmitter on top of the lift tower. You’d get a signal every 15 hours. When the light stopped blinking Dwight knew he could watch his videos without anyone seeing. It was 11 o’clock, not long till the cluster of condemned, pollution-stained flats turned out the lights and went off to dream their way into a different reality. Not long…

  Dwight pulled back the flip-cover of a tape titled ‘Christine’ and exposed its reel of magnetic tape. He blew a puff of air into the cassette to clean it out. A curl of dust rose from the spool in a greyish haze before dispersing in particles, like an exploding stellar-fireball or a gusted dandelion head. He’d taped over this particular cassette numerous times.

  - There! Should still work all right, hopefully.

  Dwight slotted the tape into a rectangular space on the massive wall of hoarded VGC storage cases. Dad would be proud.

  He was smart to use video-tapes. Since the Great Isolation no one had VCR’s anymore, then again people barely had DVD players. No one had much of anything. Ordinary folks had been relegated to slums in the sky. You’d maybe find an old model in a museum or in some retro computer nerd’s basement, but nothing in public circulation. Cassettes were artefacts. It was the safest way to keep his collection intact.

  12 o’clock…

  Much like his father, Dwight was an odd fellow even by contemporary standards. It was his resistance to progress, within himself and the world around him, which was so perplexing. This attitude manifested itself in several ways, but he sat there on the shag, night after night, oblivious to any of them—uncut hair fanning his shoulder, Scott Walker’s ‘Scott4’ crooning away the background. Sometimes he thought he was never meant to interact with real girls.

  The Great Isolation was almost a blessing.

  1:15am…

  The two-tone ring of the telephone shocked Dwight into life, like an incessant shrieking in his ears. He went to pick up it but there was no answer, just a dial tone buzzing like the drone of approaching bees. Dwight placed the receiver back on its cradle, cursed the telephone—wished someone else could answer it once in a while. But they never did. It just rang, rang, rang, rang, all day long. Every day at the same time—quarter past one.

  A storm outside cleared its cracked throat. Dwight was ready to indulge. He put a video labelled ‘Rosie’ into the cassette slit, listened as the spindles rotated and watched on as the screen went from nebulous static to an image of a woman sitting on a chair. Her eyes glimmered like nitro-glycerine.

  - Hi Rosie – Dwight said, a thin smile breaking on his lips. The girl smiled back from behind the flat panel display.

  - Hi Dwight, long-time no see. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.

  - Like I could forget about you! Come on, Rosie, you know you’re my favourite.

  This statement was flatly untrue, but it was all part of Dwight’s imagined persona.

  - Don’t let any of the others hear you saying that. – The girl grinned coyly. She was very unremarkable looking, wafer-thin with long, uncombed hair black as built-up creosote. When you looked closely at the screen you could see her face was blotchy and covered with deep scars.

  - Can I ask you something?

  - Sure, shoot… – Rosie replied in an inhumanly cheerful way.

  - Well, I was just wondering what it feels like… in there

  - You mean in-stereo?

  Dwight nodded, still marvelling at the analogue immortality he’d given her. Someone was typing loudly next door, fingers pecking on a key-board relentlessly. Was someone typing up everything that he said? Writing an expose for a newspaper maybe? Dad warned him about peering eyes and open ears. He relaxed, remembered that no one read newspapers anymore anyway. He’d be fine. Dwight cursed the thin stucco, tried to focus his attention on Rosie.

  - It feels like a constant dream. Like… when you don’t get much sleep and wake up the next day half-removed, in a day-dream or something. You can’t catch a thought to save yourself, that is, like… every thought feels out of reach somehow. Does that make sense? It’s actually quite nice.

  - Hmm…

  - Drowsy, you feel drowsy

  - Can you still feel love? – Dwight knew it was a mistake to ask these types of questions.

  - Not the same way you do, no. It doesn’t course through my body. Like, I have no physical reaction to being in love, but it exists to me as a concept and I do remember being very much in love with you.

  - I was afraid of that.

  - Would you expect a hologram or a zombie to experience love? I’m just a shadow of a person.

  Dwight hated it when recordings became self-referential. The image of the girl started to jump and distort on the screen. Tonight he’d settled on Rosie, his first girlfriend from college who really got him and was able to discuss mix-tape aesthetics with him. She was perfect for him. Of course, this was before she got hired by a company called West-Coast Digi-Form.org platinum multimedia whose sole objective was to make everything digital in time for the Great Isolation. People had really forgotten the main principles behind The Great Isolation. Rosie soon started pushing her product on Dwight, but he wasn’t willing to receive. His father was furious. Dwight was furious too, he felt betrayed and called her a sell-out. Their relationship ended shortly after.

  - Is everything alright honey?

  Dwight tried to smile, but everything was not alright. He knew his face was sunken like a fallen Martian city—sucked dry, craterous, red. The truth of the matter was that Dwight couldn’t change, he just couldn’t. His father had left him this legacy and this girl just didn’t seem to get that. Rosie was still a sell-out.

  - Oh Dwight, are you still listening to DV-cassettes, honestly! Invest in a CD collection, will you. Get with the century!

  Dwight’s teeth braced with a long forgotten fury. The phone rang and he snaked his fist around the coil and yanked the receiver from the keypad. It dawned upon him that the phone was ringing and it wasn’t quarter past 1 anymore, but he was too committed to his over-reaction to give it much further thought. Dwight was angry and made no attempt to contain it. His hopeless dedication to the analogous medium would never falter.

  - Dwight?... – The girl’s image was tremulous. A teardrop of blood leaked from a gash in her forehead.

  Staring at the static avatar of Rosie and the shifting dimensions of her wounded features, Dwight decided he’d tape over her. Time for something new.

  - Hey… are you there?

  Dwight pressed eject on the VCR. He tore out the narrow strip of plastic f
ilm and shredded it between his fingers. Then he hesitated for a moment—once he’d erased her there would be no more copies of Rosie left. He hadn’t backed her up. She’d be gone forever.

  - Screw you…

  Dwight viewed the entire project rationally. This was his own contribution towards the technological singularity.

  His father’s project was a simple enough task to complete for a man of average intelligence living in the world at that time. The process involved transferring substrate from digital to analogue, which, again, was relatively simple for Dwight’s father to achieve. The tough part was replicating the brains from a body to powerful computational architecture. Once he’d done the scanning and mapping he could upload to the VHS drive on his computer, then use an S-video cable to hook up to his television. After that, all that was left to do was connect all VCR inputs to his computer and set the VCR as a 2nd monitor on a graphics card.

  He taught Dwight how to accomplish this process once he was old enough to come to grips with the technology.

  These women were electrochemical apparitions disassociated from their biological body, projections of people who no longer existed as multi-faceted, multi-cellular organisms—literarily living recordings. Dwight knew what he was doing was unhealthy and perhaps even unethical. He also found it hard to care.

  Dwight sat back down on the carpet in a pair of torn wranglers, surrounded by his collection of compact cassettes, vinyl and 8-tracks. He seemed happy, but who could be happy living like this? A part of him sincerely wanted to end it all though, a part buried deep beneath the conscious cells that strived to preserve his life in its current form.

  *

  He pulled out Jeanie’s tape and hesitated. This was like exposing a raw nerve. He knew Jeanie was too headstrong, too willed and aware. Dwight’s dad warned him about her early on, but he wouldn’t listen. It was always going to be harder to manipulate her, but he had to see her again.

  Little Rosie was a pushover. Her only crime was that she couldn’t commit completely to Dwight’s inherited legacy. It would be harder to manipulate this girl, but he had to see her again.

  Jeanie on the other hand, well, she was much too beautiful for a shallow soul like Dwight to forget in a hurry. It would be a crime to put someone like her into storage—plus, Dwight’s love for Jeanie was still fresh.

  2am…

  He smiled at how much Jeanie suited being video-taped. By contrast, her face was pinched, as if she’d retained some knowledge of what Dwight had done to her and the other girls. It was not unheard of for projections to possess residual memory. She had a black eye over her left socket and half her face had been torn away to sinew.

  - Hi…

  - Hello…you! – she spat.

  Dwight’s belly lurched, a familiar pang of guilt. His heart jerked taut, his sulphurous complexion went white. Dwight sucked in his gut and mustered the confidence to retort.

  - You’re being mean again, Jeanie. Don’t be mean, I brought you back.

  - Oh, am I being mean? - Jeanie was now dolefully apathetic.

  - Yes, you are, Jeanie.

  - Pah, you’re a waste of space, Dwight, pathetic! – This hurt him most because he almost agreed with her. There were times when he accepted responsibility, mainly in his most private moments, but he still felt it. There were times when he wished he hadn’t been raised in his father’s shadow, in the religion of universal scepticism. Living in a world like this wouldn’t allow him to be any other way, though.

  - You trap your girls on video the same way you tried to trap us in real life… so you could torture us all over again.

  - That’s not true!

  - You’ve made us just like you, Dwight, you and I… we’re both prisoners… When are you going to grow up, huh? - Jeanie gestured to his hoody which said ‘THIS IS CAPITALISM’ on it. Dwight remembered all the fury Jeanie brought out of him. He remembered why his father had decided to end her physical life for him. He remembered the blood sprayed in the shape of an ice crystal all over the plastic cadding of the entrance hallway. She was not done with her tirade of abuse.

  - You can really possess us, can’t you? Yes, like you always wanted to.

  Dwight began to weep. He hated being yelled at. The phone rang again. He sniffed the snot back up his nostrils and scrambled for the phone. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, reconnected the coil and spoke into the receiver.

  - Hello?

  - Hello! – A pleasant woman’s voice replied.

  - Hello…?

  It felt strange to be engaging with someone who actually existed. Jeanie sat motionless on her chair behind the screen.

  - This is Amy from West-Coast Digi-Form.org. How are you today, sir?

  - I’m… fine.

  - I’m most pleased to hear that, sir! Can I ask if you’ve considered updating your digital platforms to platinum multimedia? It’s been noted that you aren’t currently on our grid of users.

  Dwight was paralysed with anger. Had Rosie given them his number?

  - If you have a few minutes I can go through the basics, sir.

  Dwight stifled his anger. He could tell from the tone of her voice that she was beautiful. Her formal but friendly tone felt genuine, not just simulated for the sake of company etiquette. His heart fluttered a little.

  - Amy, huh? That’s a nice name.

  - Why thank you, sir! Are you interested in updating?

  Dwight looked at Jeanie’s bemused expression and opened his mouth to talk….

  - Have you been calling here a lot? At 1:15 usually?

  - Ah, that’s perfectly plausible, sir. Unfortunately, the storms and bad weather have ruined half our service, there have been a lot of lines down and bad connections. It could be because the transmitter aerial on your tower block is overused or…

  - I see…

  There was a moment of silence. Dwight heard his father’s stern voice of disapproval – “You gotta forget about those girls, boy! It’s up to you to preserve what we’ve built!”

  - Are you interested in updating to West-Coast Digi-Form.org platinum multimedia option?

  Dwight turned off the monitor, Jeanie disappeared. He sighed in relief, in submission and decided to silence his father’s voice for the first time, decided to listen to his head and not his heart.

  - I’m interested…

  - … killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it… It is merely confessing that it ‘is not worth the trouble.’ Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering.

  - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus:

  Art isn’t always an action against death

  Sometimes it can be a loving companion

  life's 'will to power'

  fuck that…

  The Hopeless Resistance to Ultra-Realism

  You’ll think me cynical, I know it…

  I had a difficult childhood but I like to find abstract theories to comfort me. There is a school of thought that seems to suggest we are all one consciousness, one individual god, broken down into separate physical conduits in order to experience life subjectively. People think this life is some kind of divine punishment. Maybe our collective godhead needed to be taught a lesson about humility? What it feels like to be the little guy? So they scoop out the mind, dice it up and feed it through a funnel into another, more insignificant vessel. I think it sounds as feasible an explanation as anything else. I mean, imagine, if you got to dissect the ego of the most arrogant person you know so they’re forced to relinquish their unified personality? —feed their strung out consciousness into a community of rats. Watch them tear each other apart and live their lives in apathy and resent
ment, even though, deep down, they’re all the same thing, sprouts from the same root. I think we’d be in agreement; there would be a significant shift in priorities. If this were true, that we are all one big deity, then things wouldn’t seem so bad. At least that way we’d all be in the same boat. Suicide of one sounds better than the mass suicide of seven billion. The big question is—who is the supergod who decided we should be punished? We wouldn’t do this to ourselves, would we?

  So the counter attack on Ultra-Realism has, thus far, proved to be a glorious failure. This should not diminish the efforts of the organisation but we cannot hide from the grim reality—things are not working. It began with the purest of optimism and sincerest intentions.

  The hardest parts in the beginning involved finding a location where we could meet in private. Shane, Mika and the other preliminary members of the Last True Hopers started gathering in the inner sanctums of New York University. This seemed to provide us with the perfect site and offered a lot of potential new recruits. That was the initial thinking anyway.

  Similar to the collegiate secret societies in North America, we created our own ceremonial initiations and secret signs of recognition. This is as fraternal as the group got. Our mission was abundantly clear and Shane was keen to enforce a no-nonsense approach among our affiliates. There could be no deviation from the cause or in-fighting. Shane wouldn’t stand for it. He was like a man possessed. Of course, I backed his methods, as did the other founding members. Shane is an artist and strongly disciplined. He’s also worked with various anarchist groups throughout the years and knows how this type of warfare should be conducted. Everyone trusted his ruling, and we let him lead the line.

  I know what it feels like to crave that belonging. You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, I think that’s how the old saying goes? My father was Roch Thériault, a religious cult leader based in Ontario. You may have heard of him? Maybe not… He had several women in his commune before I was born—my mother was just one of his many concubines.