Now Here
You have been here before. You followed fractured lines in the concrete to get here, stepped over broken kerbstones, chased the pattern of red bricks along the line of terraces. They led you to this door. The number of the house is unclear – perhaps it changes with the weather. You feel there is something important behind the door, but the door has bars across it: a neighbourhood prone to break-ins. Is this what you’re doing here? Breaking in… or just visiting… or perhaps returning home?
You clench your fist, channelling a familiar energy and reach through the bars to tap out a rhythm on the door, but as you tap the rhythm, you realise it is communicating something: a familiarity with a place you have forgotten… a cypher for the location of a key.
The key is there, in the hiding place, as you hoped it would be. First you unlock the bars, then the door. The door lock feels flimsy – half loose, half stuck – but the door opens. You are now staring down the hallway, inhaling the scent of damp walls and neglected carpet. You notice a photograph of a beach hung above a hallway table. On the table itself is a large red telephone. The hallway continues into the living room. To the side, there is another door to where the front room should be, but here it could be something else.
The face is distorted by the perspective of the photograph, a simple drawing in the sand, sketched with driftwood. The circular head has two spirals for eyes and an uneven smile.
The emotion becomes clear to you, then less so…. a strangeness behind the spiral eyes. You remember Simon… you remember Jay. Are these real people? Did you know them? What did Jay say about spirals?
Quote: “This city, like any other, is pleasure and pain in co-existence. Bodies stream about the place, doing what they do: buying, selling, working, skiving, giving, stealing, preaching, begging, talking, listening, answering… questioning. Well, I have a question for you. Is your life in spirals? Spirals that never connect with their beginning, slinking around the spaces between... and how do you fill that void at their centre?”
Your thoughts return to the hallway.
[Choose another path above]
You flick through the large phone book but there is no need to search for numbers. You know all the numbers that matter, the incantations to summon voices – at least you used to know them. There is also a time when you start to forget… and perhaps the phone is no longer here. You lift the receiver and let the tones chase your touch.
The voices feel intimate yet distant… untethered from space and time. You may be speaking… you may be imagining… but you are immersed in the conversation.
“Hello?”
“Hey buddy… how’s it going?”
“Yeah okay… busy again, but okay. You?”
“Yeah… I’ve got this new idea for a story…”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like a detective story, but the detective doesn’t know they’re a detective.”
“Sounds… er… cool. Where’s it set?”
“Well… I was thinking Leeds.”
“Leeds? What… like Leeds in the 90s?”
“Yeah… ha! Yeah… always Leeds in the 90s… where else?”
The voices on the phone fade out. You return the receiver to the phone and reconsider the hallway.
[Choose another path above]
You open the door – as soon as you touch the handle it feels like a different door – a door to elsewhere. The atmosphere in this room is like the heaviness before a thunderstorm.
Clouds… they are significant here. The way they perform their majestic transformations, mythical creatures observing you from above. They can be volatile and dangerous yet also calm and protective. Below the clouds, within the carpet-scape, live strange boxes, full of buttons and dials, entangled in nests of scavenged wires. A few objects, you can identify: a bass guitar and a desktop computer.
You pick up the bass guitar. You aren’t sure if you can play, but you give it a try. A melody emerges as your shift your calloused fingertips across the strings. The underlying mood is reflective and playful… unexpected diversions from the repeating phrases, chasing an idea momentarily before returning to habit… spirals jumping back to their edges.
[Choose another path above]
You flick the switch on the large tower and hear the familiar chimes of Windows XP. You’re aware that either the computer is out-of-date or that this room is somehow in the past, but, for now, you can’t decide which it is.
There are a few icons scattered around the desktop. You click on one of them. The screen changes to display a series of rows, each row containing a series of boxes and the boxes containing jagged patterns, mirrored like an endless Rorschach test.
What do you see within them and what does that tell you about yourself?
That you ‘ain’t no-one’? the double negative… both affirming and denying.
Each pattern responds to the other with its presence and absence, surging then falling away… and then you realise… they are the source of the atmosphere in the room… the mythical cloud dragons chasing each other across the sky, calling out to one another in their journey… and when you hear them you feel both their calm and their storm within you.
[Choose another path above]
As you continue down the hallway, the room in front of you blurs then refocuses. You turn around and the hallway has disappeared. Instead, there is a staircase running up above a kitchenette. The walls are painted an experimental shade of orange. In the far corner of the room is a large plastic advertising hoarding for a video game crocodile. It reads ‘Croc’s Got the Moves’. In the corner of the room towards the window is a TV and VCR. A notebook lies open on a coffee table.
You turn on the TV and a snowstorm of noise tickles your vision. You peer through the static to see a signpost in search of a destination. Below it, the words ‘Nowhere Productions’.
Nowhere. Now, where is that?
You recall the phrase that ‘nothing matters’… sometimes nothing matters a lot… perhaps nowhere matters too. There can comfort in nothing, so why not nowhere?
You take an unmarked VHS tape from the pile on the floor, slide it out of its sleeve and place it into the VCR. The deck clicks and whirs into action. You think the scene is set inside a convenience store – it could be down the road. Several characters chatting, talking about schemes, about their lives. Perhaps they are going nowhere… in this shop… this scene… this story… and perhaps there is some comfort in that.
[Choose another path above]
You look down at the notebook and there he is, hovering over the ruled verso in shaky fine-liner ink, a strange gnomic figure, squat in stature, somewhere between a stereotypical country bumpkin and Yoda.
His name is Naz, you seem to remember.
He sat on a tree stump. There were stories, to be animated, about a guy called Sam. Friendly, charismatic but low on luck.
Strange, because Naz seems to be from some mashed-up fantasy land: a bard from the world of fairy tales telling stories about this world with its untidy streets and kebab shops and stress about money and relationships. You find some reassurance in that… but also some trouble. You draw your eyes closed, as if to recall again. When you open them, you swear the little character has moved, his staff pointing at a different angle than before, perhaps towards the staircase.
[Choose another path above]
You edge up the stairs, uneasy with confinement. The walls around you stretch upward into seeming infinity, exposing the clear heavens above… the nebulae, one inky mix of cosmic dust leaking light-years into the next… or is that just mould on the ceiling? You’re pretty sure it’s both.
Perceiving is not a passive experience; it is an exhausting act of creation.
There is a type of subatomic particle which oscillates at 3-trillionths of a second between matter and antimatter. At any of these tiny moments it is either itself or the negation of itself… it is here… then nowhere.
Patterns in the stars… parallel universes… space and time… this is the flow of insight as you approach the door at the top of the stairs… but the flow of words has been confined. Consciousness is not free to stream… that was the point… the glitches, the unfinished thoughts…
Look at the stars… no, don’t just look… feel them.
Quote: "Falling stars. They’re celestial motions in the universe. The strange thing is, I still wish, each time I see a star fall, and I’ve seen a lot lately; especially since leaving Leeds. Maybe it’s a residual sense of superstition, but still there are connections, coincidences, serendipities - call them what you will - that make me think that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Leeds it is felt in China."
You turn your gaze from the stratosphere and continue up the staircase, careful not to trip on those baggy holes in the carpet which are yet to be gaffer-taped down.
Your anxiety about the implications of the cosmos recedes to a background hum. There is a sense of calm about opening this door. A sense of resolution.
You turn the flimsy brass doorknob and feel the familiar flow of energy. You are tuned to a friendly frequency, the transmission clear of mixed signals. You have been here before, but the details are unclear. For now, you leave aside the when, the why… even the who, and look around the room. You are not alone here. This place is full of ideas. A line springs to mind… out of nowhere:
Quote: “Time is short. I didn’t know how much of living or dreaming I had left. So I decided to merge the two…”
There’s a HiFi system set up on a table. It’s an old Marantz all-in-one with a five CD changer. The curtains are open… sunlight illuminates floating particles of dust.
You press play on the HiFi’s CD player. A disc stirs from its slumber. The sound is familiar, yet strange and new, channelling memories of where you have been, suggesting destinations yet to be reached, horizons beyond and expanses above.
Quote: "The glass is transparent, yet foggy like uncertainty But I can see far down the road expecting a dark Cloud to shroud the daylight with a mirky ambiance. I complied with all the rules of the house, But still it was more like a museum. Then an indie rock psalm came on my stereo to wake me Up from the nightmare, I dreamt I was alone, I dreamt I was in this house. I was actually in a field of stars, I was still dreaming."