Snippit o’ sheer fiction
“You want the truth?”
Smoke curled around his face, as he sat there facing me, facing the microphone, facing the entire world. He took another drag from the cigarette, tossed it towards a overflowing ashtray.
“Yes.”
“We’re all insane. All of us. Every last one. It’s the only successful adaptation to the world you can make.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Sanity is a concept without a referant. We’ve got a agreed upon version of reality that we use, that sometimes works.. but like a old movie, reality keeps breaking. Then when it’s taped back togeather, it’s inconsistant in the place it breaks.”
“I find this very hard to believe”
“I don’t blame you.”
May 24th, 2002 at 3:26 pm
He leaned back in his reclining office chair, brushed the ash off his flannel shirted front, grinned at me broadly. He reached up and readjusted his headset, watched the clock, checked the board, and at 11:59:30 hit the closing music. He stretched and removed his headphones.
“Another successful show.” He motioned towards the board indicating incoming calls, still lit up.
“Yeah, definitely.” I got up, stretched my arms, ran around to the machine where I would eject the copy of tonight’s show. I opened up the monitor, and was reviewing the peaks and valleys of the last hour and a half when without even a flicker, the room went from its moody duskiness to complete black. The monitor splayed back into itself and went dark. The boards, too – suddenly dark.
I looked up; there was light, but I saw, in the next second, that it was from a lighter – he’d been about to light another cigarette. We both were looking, like dumb dogs, at the ceiling.
And it started. Over and over, not human, not even really machine.
“Violation, section 12.16.10. Violation, section 12.16.10. Shutdown. Shutdown.”
“Violation. . .”
“Shit!” he yelled suddenly, after a thirty second or so eternity. “Shit!” “You motherfuckers! This is the Epistemological society! This is legal! Shit!”
I could see, even in the dimness of the lighter, his face turning purple, sweat forming.
“We have a goddamn right to be on the air!” He shook his fist at the inconspicuous – unnoticable, really – speaker on the wall. Burned his thumb with the lighter in the process. I saw him put it in his mouth, briefly.
I pulled myself together. “C’mon, man. They know. Obviously. They know. Let’s get out of here. The Epistemological society is dissolved. Hell, you never even knew what epistemological meant.”
He glanced at me briefly. “But it was our best one yet” he said, surprisingly meekly. Then he went back to shaking his fist at the wall.
I scooped up our pile of disks, the main thing really, the equipment would have to be a write off. Tried the door. Locked from the outside.
And it was then that I smelled it, over the cigarette smoke, just a little bit – sweet, sickly, unmistakable.
And it was then that I remembered that we were in a soundproof studio.