For several years, Winnie had been living on the north side of a town where nobody oriented themselves in terms of north, south, east, or west but rather in relation to the sea, the hills, and two rivers, one on either side. One did not, when giving directions, say, Drive west but rather, Drive towards the sea.
She’d moved there from a town with none of those geographical features. No rivers, no seas, no hills. There was only the Institute anymore, that vertical striving with the giant circular lawn like a forcefield around it, sprouting from an ever-dwindling cluster of dilapidated houses. She’d promised herself she’d never go back there. But then the phone rang, and Winnie answered, and the connection kept breaking up, and Ken could barely make himself understood.
Even so, Winnie understood.
Ken and the clock lay face down on the bed and nightstand, respectively.
Afterwards, as they reviewed the footage, he would explain that in moments like this he pictured the clock, that in his mind the hands moved very fast, like the countdown that begins an old roll of film. 5, 4, 3, then disappear.
He reappeared on the roof, in a three-point stance like a running back. Then, obeying a snap no one else heard, he rushed forward to the lip of the roof and jumped.
The circle where he landed reproduced a clockface ringed with Roman numerals I-XII. The painful splayed angles of his imaginary arms, legs, and neck formed the hour hand, the minute and second hands, and two more hands for subdivisions of time as yet uncalculated and unnamed.
The clock could not be made to run backwards. But spiritually speaking, there was still a chance to make things right.
Winnie would be brought back into the fold any minute now. Impeccable timing.
Ken called out to his observers, whomever they were, inside the tower.
“Are you getting this?”
Winnie rewound to the beginning and pushed pause. In the background, above where Ken’s image lay sprawling on the clockface, the sky loomed snowy and pink. Winnie pointed to it.
“Recognize that sky?” she asked.
“Rhetorical question, I take it.”
There had been snow on the ground the day Winnie got pregnant, though the snow had all melted by the time they found out what had happened. A white blanket had fallen over the peach tree and the gravel parking lot and the decrepit student housing—all of it, pink sky and tree and parking lot and houses, long since subsumed by the Institute. In their place was the massive grass circle, level as a putting green, like some strange druidic theatre-in-the-round, and in the center the tower, charcoal gray like a castle. The house they had shared, where Ken now lived alone, stood closer to the Institute grounds than any other structure left standing. They thought they’d made it out in time, so to speak. They were dumb in those days, Winnie and Ken.
“Ken,” Winnie said. “If this is going to work, I’m going to need to establish a baseline reading. And you’re going to have to cooperate.”
“Of course. Forgive me. Please continue.”
Winnie unpaused the recording. For a flickering moment, it was as though they were both hearing the same record on Winnie’s old turntable, feeling the same forgotten vibrations. But Ken was no longer paying attention. He had apparently been reliving this for years, with decreasing levels of lucidity. Why bother?
That question felt pertinent to everything they were doing, everything they’d done. Indeed, the Institute had a way of pervading things, and not simply the ones it was designed to pervade, the purpose for which it was founded. The full extent of its charter and mission statement remained unknown (unknowable, some said), even to those who had been collaborators, participants in this pioneering spiritual practice, in the creeping extension of its grip on the world—to anyone, like Winnie and Ken, subject to its totalizing pervasion.
“Cloud?” Winnie asked, suddenly curt, brass tacks. It was her modus operandi, sometimes, when there was work to be done.
“Which cloud? The foetus-shaped one?”
“If you like.”
“I don’t like. Bit heavy-handed, you have to admit.”
“Ken, please. Baseline.”
“Fine, yes. The foetus.”
“Familiar?”
“I’m sorry, Winnie. I make things hard for you, don’t I?”
He said this as if they’d remained in constant contact all this time, as if her sudden departure one day had not left a years-long hiatus between their last interaction and his desperate phonecall. Should it have bothered her how easily she was falling into the old patterns, the cultish protocols, unthinking, unquestioning? Or was it in fact a good thing she could pick up where they’d left off, not as ex-lovers but as old comrades, as if this process came as second nature?
“Answer the question,” she said.
“OK. Familiar. Oddly.”
“Feelings?”
“You know I hate that question,” Ken said.
“I do. But: feelings?”
“About the foetus cloud?”
“Naturally.”
“Painful.”
“Painful, or hurtful?”
“Yeah, you’re right. Hurtful.”
“Sorry,” Winnie said.
The operation was known as enselfening. In a world of soullessness, it was a magic, psychic, moral operation. One participant had access to the other’s “mental theatre”, video images variously referred to as “recordings” or “footage”, generated by observers from the Institute. The scenes functioned as personalized objects of contemplation. Questions were asked, answers given. Distinctions were teased out, boundaries drawn where self ends and other begins. Progression from one scene to the other was discontinuous, often non-chronological, and respected no discernible organizing principle. Even now, Ken was back on the rooftop, racing to the edge, impacted on the clockface.
Winnie was out of practice, and Ken had never shown much talent.
When it was Winnie’s turn, they saw that the peach tree was back where it used to be, before the bulldozers made way for the Institute. Only once had they ever gotten a decent harvest from that tree, enough for a single batch of peach salsa. Every other year, the birds and bugs got there first.
Instead of peaches, the fruits were eyeballs. Buds, not yet mature, but still complete with irises, pupils, veins. Both Winnie and the tree stared. Then she began to pluck the fruits, one by one.
Ken hit pause. “This is new,” he said, voice piqued with intrigue. “Were you expecting this?”
“I wasn’t. Were you?”
“No. Feelings?”
“Guilt, I guess,” Winnie said.
“We don’t have to do this, you know. I kind of doubt you ever wanted to. You felt obliged, though, for whatever reason. Pity, probably.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Compassion, then.”
“Compassion,” Winnie said. “Sure.”
“But you rejected this. This whole project.”
“I wasn’t rejecting anything.”
“What was it, then, in your estimation?”
“I don’t know,” Winnie said. “Fleeing?”
“Can I tell you my theory?”
“If you like.”
“I think your sudden wanderlust was, in some way, an exaltation of the lower self, to the detriment of the higher. Turning your back on the Institute’s work, on the broader goal of genuine spiritual advancement for all humankind. A preoccupation with knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The restless automatism of mere intellect.”
Onscreen, Winnie resumed plucking the tiny ocular fruits. The foetus cloud floated over the eyeball tree. Ken paused again and zoomed.
“What happens if we keep zooming?” he asked.
As the close-up got closer, the foetus cloud’s outline became fuzzy, fractal. A Mandelbrot ghost.
“Feelings?”
Winnie covered her whole face with her hands and yawned. Yawn as cathartic inward scream. OK, Winnie, she said. Let’s sit with this a second. She had learned to speak to herself in an unwavering voice, firm yet calm, and anything she told herself in that voice came off as true, which invariably it was. And it was the only viable alternative, she told herself then as now. No use pretending otherwise, pondering parallel what-ifs. A regrettable situation? Yes, one of several that can accumulate in the course of a lifetime. And yet she could firmly and calmly say she had no regrets. No grudges. There did remain a sort of depersonalized bitterness, to be sure, at having been subjected to the unpleasant particulars, the sense memory of awful smells and suction, of strangers’ faces in paper masks who also spoke in voices calm yet firm, a whole complex of relived sensations that would waft across her central nervous system in the occasional autonomic daydream and then dissipate. Almost like a cloud.
“You were right,” she said. “We don’t have to do this.”
The wisest plan, Winnie knew, was to sleep on the sofa. She’d packed her sleeping bag, and made her pallet well before the matter could be questioned, which it never was. The way she remembered it, one could never be sure with Ken, what designs he had or if he would act upon them and if so, how. In the end, he was too exhausted to sleep anywhere but alone in his bed, too exhausted to even suggest they do otherwise.
As she stared and waited for sleep to slip over her, the streetlights came leaching through the curtains, revealing ravages of entropy she had not yet noticed. In this light, from this angle, it became hard to tell if what hung from the ceiling was some dark, cobweb-like accretion clinging upward, or cracked flaps of dirty paint and plaster peeling down.
All the while, a couple hundred yards away, the Institute produced a subliminal noise, one her drowsy mind did not recognize. A muffled, mechanized percussion like an assembly line, like gearwork chomping up a honeycomb, like a lullaby.
The next day, Winnie suggested they go for a walk. A complement to the contemplative practice of enselfening, a pastime in perfect keeping with Institute dictums. Physical action, real time, three dimensions. A practice not of thinking but of doing.
Ken agreed, though his heart wasn’t it. Nor was Winnie’s, or so he suspected. He had no real desire to leave the house, and Winnie no idea where to go. The landscape had always been flat, unremarkable, one area of town always poorly differentiated from the other. A panorama primed for domination by the Institute. The cyclopean structure had something of the inescapable, the ineluctable. That inescapable quality and the contrarian urge to flout it, had been one of Winnie’s biggest reasons, though certainly not the biggest, for wanting to escape in the first place.
One turned one’s back on the Institute, because one could not face it head on, one could only move in the opposite direction, and suddenly there was no way to get one’s bearings, to situate oneself in the immediate environs. There were no mountains, no sea, no rivers; instead of a compass, all anyone had was a clockface, installed on the lawns of every shabby little house; instead of cardinal directions, Roman numerals.
“These didn’t use to be here,” Winnie remarked as they strolled along. “Is XII supposed to correspond to ‘north’, and III to ‘east’, VI to ‘south’?”
“Unclear,” Ken said.
Blueprints had things called ‘legends’, or sometimes ‘symbol legends’, that explained the significance of each little glyph inscribed on the document.
When would he find his symbol legend?
The day before, in their enselfenings, the old house had appeared onscreen as the cozy cottage of Winnie’s memories: narrow beige interiors, popcorn walls, an excess of bookshelves, an insular nook where she and Ken had wrapped themselves up young and cocoon-like until she couldn’t take it anymore. The intervening years made it all seem simpler, more intimate, altogether more manageable than it ever felt at the time. But surveyed now from curbside as they returned home from their walk, the house’s true dimensions were plain to any outside observer: many-gabled, decadent, large.
They were standing on the driveway, Ken a few steps ahead, when the moving truck drove up.
The rear hatch opened, and a stream of men and women in tank tops and spandex got out. Brawny bodybuilder types, with upper bodies shaped like croissants. Without so much as ‘Good day’, they followed Winnie and Ken inside. They carried boxes, stacked them against walls, went back to fetch more boxes to add to the stacks. Winnie was too intimidated to ask who they were or what they were doing. The most obvious guess was that they were movers, hired by some third party—the Institute was, again, the obvious guess. But then the flow of boxes stopped, and in their place came keg after keg of beer. This can’t end well, Winnie thought in her calm, firm, unwavering voice. But what to do, how to engage? She lacked not the will but rather the imagination of how to initiate the interaction, where to steer it, what to do once it got there.
Ken seldom displayed such scruples. He was not afraid to interrogate the bodybuilders. He walked up to a group of them standing around the kitchen. Rumpled sheets of legal-size paper lay spread over the dinner table. The plans of some unidentified building. Wiring, plumbing, and ductwork had been highlighted, each with their corresponding fluorescent color. A blue and pink and chartreuse mess.
“So, you folks from the Institute?” Ken asked.
“ ‘From’?” one said. “Buddy, we are the frickin’ Institute.”
“Now wait a second,” another added hastily, almost spilling his beer. “That’s not the case at all. Not entirely, anyway.”
“Might as well be!” said a third, tipsy-sounding lady body-builder who immediately received two high fives and let out a loud woo-hoo which her cohorts answered like wolves conversing over long distances in the night. It wasn’t long before the whole house was awash in drunken, howling madness. Amid laughter and jeers, the croissant-shaped upper bodies got to work unstacking boxes, opening them, removing various items—mopheads, paint rollers, duct tape. To what purpose was not yet apparent. Winnie assumed the role of observer and helped herself to a cup of beer. She could not beat them, only join them. It was not at all like old times, she thought, not like young days in old digs, but one could pretend. Sometimes pretending was sufficient. It was all in the pretending, and since the bodybuilders seemed friendly enough—that is to say, they did nothing to stop her—she soon helped herself to a couple more. Or perhaps the bodybuilders were merely distracted. A process of pairing off had begun to take place, boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl, girl-boy, and all points in between. Couples slipped off into rooms of the house which Ken and Winnie had never bothered to furnish much less use. Soon the music and the ruckus was so loud Winnie had to shout her beery breath into Ken’s ear to make herself understood.
“I’ll be honest,” she was saying, “it’s becoming pretty clear to me, if you really want this to produce anything worthwhile—not you personally, I mean, a general you—”
Ken eyed a pair of lady bodybuilders groaning their way through an uproarious, flirtatious arm-wrestling match on the coffee table. “Right,” he said, patiently. “General you.”
“Right.” Winnie hiccuped. “So, like I said, how’s any of this supposed to be worthwhile?”
“Any of what?”
“You know, the footage. Your mental rooftop. The Q&As. The back-and-forth over every fleeting little fancy, every desire, memory or imagination. Does it not behoove us at some point to just, like, get wasted with the bodybuilders, as it were?”
“You’re speaking in code, Winnie. Say what you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean.” Another hiccup. “I’m talking about: to spell the agitations of the ol’ mental substance. Ball-gag the gibbering mouth of intellect. Shut that whole thing down. Oh, hell. Come with me, I’ll show you.”
But Ken was already seeing, or thought he was seeing, what he thought she wanted to show him. Not the avatar of abandonment that had for so long played out its role in his mental theatre, but Winnie in her present-day truth. Her hair, stiffly chopped off in back. The big red plastic ear gauges she now wore. His eyes lingered on her outstretched earlobes, the hole in the middle. Like keyholes you could peek through and see life happen. Other things had not changed. Her smile still suggested it was embarrassing to be so cute. Her dark eyes could still sometimes be playful, challenging things.
“Come on,” she said.
She went down a hall and opened a door, an unused room.
OK, fine, Ken thought.
In the way that so many rooms were, this one was both almost empty and a hopeless mess. Winnie kicked aside a pile of plastic coat hangers and pulled Ken down onto a moldering rug. They kissed and groped with eyes halfway open. They’d had good times before, hadn’t they, not so long before in life’s grander scheme? Or at least that would have been the reasoning, had it been reason they were listening to. Instead, shaved-pube stubble prickled Ken’s fingertips, and the howling of bodybuilders got louder and dumber. Winnie peeled off her shirt, tossed it away. Ken couldn’t help but turn his head to follow its trajectory and when he looked back, he saw, for the first time, the fried egg tattoo on Winnie’s left breast, her nipple situated in the center as the yolk, the nucleus of some lascivious cell. It quivered in a way Ken did not trust. What did it mean? Things meant things. Where it came from, and when, who put it there, what hand cupped that titty and inscribed this glyph on its surface. Ken could access none of that information.
He stood up so fast he got light-headed and nearly keeled over. He felt an urge to apologize for something, but not what for what he was doing now, or failing to do, but things he’d done, or failed to do, a long time ago. But the person he’d been back then and the person he was now were, in some very real sense, two completely different people. It felt unfair to all involved, absurd if you thought about it, for one to apologize and be absolved for the sins of the other. Ken stared at the fried egg around Winnie’s left nipple. Was this, then, why he had called her? Not to resume their truncated enselfenings but to discharge that weight of bad conscience? Because if so, then clearly he had summoned her here for nothing, or worse, for the wrong thing.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said.
Winnie laughed. The asinine bray and snort Ken had once fallen in love with. He almost laughed himself as he stutter-stepped down the hall, through a crowd of greasy, veiny faces and out into the yard. He said good night to no one and lay down to fall asleep beneath the stars.
The next day, unfiltered sunshine.
Polar opposite of the snowy pink screen.
The only cloud was a cloud that had no business being there: the foetus cloud, casting its shadow on his prostrated form.
An incursion.
That was the term for when an element of one’s private psychic symbology made the leap from the Institute’s recordings to the world outside. Ken had never experienced an incursion, but he’d heard about them. The very idea was anathema to Institute orthodoxy. Most were skeptical that such a thing was even possible. There was no rational justification for this cloud’s presence there—not somewhere in Ken’s mediated mind, but truly, literally overhead. That was what had awakened him, finally: the chill of the foetus cloud’s shadow.
He stood up, shivering, and went inside.
That morning, the house vibrated with snoring croissants. Their slumber went undisturbed by even the loudest cough or the brusquest of movements. Winnie had to navigate their mountainous forms in darkness to get herself a drink of water. She moved with caution so as not to tread upon some muscular thumb or bleach-streaked lock of hair. It wasn’t until she got to the kitchen that she understood the reason it was still so dark inside. The window had been painted over, covered with several drippy multicolored layers, thick and sloppily applied. Every window in the house was painted over, and the mops and paint rollers the sleeping bodybuilders had used for the job lay idle in pans of coagulated gloop.
Winnie couldn’t find a clean glass, so she stuck her mouth under the faucet and drank. She’d gotten off easy. A headache localized behind her left eye and metallic-tasting saliva was about the worst of it. She was still bent over the sink when Ken walked in.
“Morning,” he said.
“You okay?”
Ken didn’t answer. He went to the kitchen table. The fanned-out scatter of legal-size photocopies still hid the tabletop. With great delicacy, he touched the topmost papers, the cyan-chartreuse-magenta scrawl of highlighter. Then he held up his left hand and flexed and unflexed his fingers like he was silently counting by fives to infinity.
“About last night,” Winnie said.
“It’s forgotten,” he said.
He told her about the incursion, about the cloud. With the windows painted over, Winnie had to go to the front door, which Ken had left open, in order to see the sky, but there was no cloud. She doubted there ever had been. Then again, they’d fixated all day yesterday on enselfening, on the scrutinization of recorded memory. Crystallized, pixelated time. Who knows what they would have seen, had they but looked out the windows when they had the chance?
“It’ll be back,” Ken said. “It has to.”
He pulled out one wrinkled sheet and showed it to her. The work of a disturbed ballistics engineer, it looked like, or a child gone mad with a spirograph.
“And so now it’s like I have a stomach growling, but inside of my head. Like I have to know where the incursions come from.”
“If they’re real.”
“Sure. If they’re real. How it works, what it means. And something tells me that if I want to find out, I’m going to have to go inside.”
“Have you stopped to consider—”
“Do I sound like I’ve stopped to consider anything?”
“Then you do understand that it is madness to want to go in there.”
“I do. I must.”
“But why, Ken?”
“To know if it’s possible. If it’s possible to know. And whether it matters.”
“Do you reckon that’s what ‘they’ want?” She gestured to a pair of bodybuilders spooning in the corner. “Maybe it’s what they wanted all along.”
“They are not it,” Ken said.
Winnie thought of a thousand things to say but couldn’t. Words she didn’t want to use, like trap. Hunches occurred to her, unhelpful sophistries. The observers inside the Institute, the creators of the recordings, the inventors of enselfening—surely, they dreamed, too? Surely image and idiosyncrasy played out in their own mental theatre? Was it too much to imagine that the muscle-bound croissant people had burst through the fourth wall of the Institute’s mind and into reality, that even she and Ken were themselves both “incursions”? Yes, yes, it was all much too much to imagine.
“You don’t have to go through with this, get sucked into this mess any further. You can just forget about it and move on. You know that, right?”
Ken said nothing, and Winnie felt a dull implosion in place of her heart as she watched him leave the house. It had always fascinated and infuriated her in equal measure, Ken’s capacity to envision and embody, to live out, the peak and the nadir, life’s absolute brightest and grimmest possibilities. OK, Winnie, the calm voice said to her now. It was never the plan to swoop back to Ken in saviour mode, to rescue him from himself. The idea, frankly, had not so much been to help him as to humor him. Right? But whatever had now sparked in Ken’s mind, be it delusion or revelatory truth, the only way to help the situation was that simple: to help. Whatever he thought he was doing was not something that could or ought to be done alone.
“Ken,” she called out.
On the living room floor, a head turned its veiny face towards her, a pair of eyes opened and stared.
Lying by the sink she saw a key ring with a single key. She grabbed it and went leapfrogging over the shapes of sleeping bodybuilders and through the open door.
Outside, in the distance, the charcoal grey color of the Institute’s walls had mutated, gone quicksilver, mother-of-pearl. Movement rippled over the entire length of the tower. A thousand windows and shutters, lacquered in pearlescent grey like fingernails without phantom hands, opened and reclosed. An insectile clacking that dopplered as the ripple descended. As if the tower had been alerted to Ken and Winnie’s movements, or had known they were coming all along, and were prepared.
Winnie started the truck, backed out of the driveway, and pulled up as close as she could, at the very edge of the grassy circle. Ken was already pacing that giant green, eyes averted from the tower, his footsteps describing the mad ballistic spiral, the decaying orbital, the elliptical approach.
Bodybuilders were coming out of the house now, taking the same spiral pathway. They made slow progress, one laborious step after another, like they were either pursuing him like thugs and enforcers or walking in his footsteps like disciples. In his footsteps, Winnie told herself, but this time she could not make herself believe it. This was the path he’d chosen. As the spirals wound down, the distance between Ken and the bodybuilders would close. They would catch him at the central point, right at the foot of the spire.
She rolled down the driver’s side window and shouted. She tried to tell him to get in the truck, to come with her, but the shutters on the tower’s quicksilver surface rippled down then up again, opening and clacking closed, obscuring her cries with their clatter. Down near the base of the tower, Ken paused a moment. He smiled and waved. He looked small, quite small now, and high above him, a single cloud lay stretched out long beyond recognition. Winnie could not bear to look. She rested her chin on her left shoulder like she was about to merge into traffic, like she was checking her blind spot, when she saw a croissant come lurching straight for her.
Aghast, she turned the key, threw the empty moving truck in gear, and drove.
In a question of seconds, the Institute shrank to nothing in her side-view mirror, although the mirror warned that objects there may be closer than they appear. To be safe, she put as much distance as possible between herself and that thing in the mirror. She drove far, much too far away to hear the howls, the honeyed chomping of gears, too far to see the snow begin to fall in blankets over the grass and over the eyeball tree.
