Authors: Douglas F. Warrick
Something like a centipede bursts from the sand in front of her, its legs wriggling, so tall that it is backlit by the sky, turned into a silhouette that Television Girl cannot see. She thinks,
I can never not have seen these things. Now that I have seen them, I am identified by their image. My memory of them will forever be what defines me. This is how they eat. They inspire their prey to leap into their mouths.
There is a moment of perfect silence, perfect stillness, and then her friend is beside her. Her many–colored coat flashes like wings at the periphery of Television Girl’s line of sight, and although she is sure that she cannot, will not, will never be able to take her eyes off of these Shapeful Things, she manages to turn her head and see her friend fling wide her coat. There is darkness where her body should be, like the between–world tunnels, but it is a warm darkness. Her friend says, “Come inside, Television Girl.”
She hides inside her friend’s coat, in a space that seems bigger than it could possibly be, peeking through the tatters at the wondrous slaughter of the Shapeful Things.
§
This is a list of events known or believed to be related to the Television Girl Incident.
Roughly six–hundred Television Girl users reported anomalous physical glitches. One user, the anonymous proprietor of
Love Thyself: The Self–Pleasure Blog
reported in a blog entry that his erotic partner showed up “headless, but not mouthless. She had lips around the edge of her neck stump. Startled the shit out of me. Wanted to try some things with the neck–mouth, but wasn’t sure about what that would do to my warrantee.” According to the transcript of a recorded phone call to ReEros’s award–winning Tech Support Line, one customer complained that, “my Television Girl didn’t show up at all, aren’t you listening? There’s a big fucking cockroach in my bed, alright? There is a big blue… fucking… glowing cockroach in my fucking bedroom with Katie’s… with my Television Girl’s tits and it keeps… it keeps… (unintelligible, sobbing).” More common anomalies included missing limbs or facial features, disconcerting visual distortion (static, digital tearing, etc.), and non–scripted vocalizations (notably the “I want you to fuck me like an infant” incident, the audio of which became something of an Internet sensation).
Several ReEros employees suffered nosebleeds and severe migraine headaches when their work consoles began to flash erratically and produce a loud high–pitched tone. This led to the resignation of four employees and the class–action lawsuit, Briggs, Hall, Michaels, Tully V. ReEros Technologies, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Gregory Hewitt, head of ReEros’s legal department, was quoted as saying, “Look, people want two things: fame and money. And a big lawsuit like this gets them both. So we settled. We gave them their money and limited their fame. Now it’s time to get back to work.”
Eight weeks after Richard Viccenzi’s termination, Arthur Anders hanged himself with a belt in the restroom of a Marathon gas station near his home. Anders died at approximately 9:15 PM on a Tuesday. The Marathon locked its doors and conducted all business through a bulletproof glass window from 10 PM to 8 AM. The attendant neglected to check the bathroom before locking up, and Anders’s body wasn’t found until the next morning when the first shift attendant found the door still locked. Anders’s death was inflated by the negative press ReEros had received in the preceding weeks, and it became a story of minor national significance. In the ensuing investigation, it came out that Anders had been seeing a therapist, Dr. Agnes Trepenny, who claimed to have in her possession release papers signed by the deceased allowing her to publish a book analyzing his “peculiar blend of neuroses and psychoses.” She claimed that Anders suffered from “paranoid delusions that appeared spontaneously and had no genetic or environmental precedent.” She claimed that Anders “was adamant that his story be told.”
She provided a suicide note that Anders mailed to her office and to several national newspapers. In it, Anders writes, “Disconnect. Disconnect. She is a fist, a finger, a tooth, an eye. I can’t do what she wants and I can’t get her to stop screaming. So I have to disconnect.” Anders’s widow filed a lawsuit with the aid of ReEros Tech’s legal department, successfully blocking the publication of Trepanny’s book and demanding to see the supposed documents, which Trepanny was unable to provide. A hearing was held and Dr. Trepanny was disbarred.
“I was not aware,” said Trepanny in an interview, “that Arthur was married.”
Six women in Charlotte, West Virginia immolated themselves with gasoline in a show of solidarity with the Television Girls.
The ReEros website and the sites of its various products and services were repeatedly hacked by unknown persons. On one memorable occasion, an embedded video contained an audio clip, hereafter transcribed: “Some of our sisters cannot scream. I can.” This is followed by a high–pitched electronic screech. In an appearance on CNN, viral advertising expert Martin Reyes described the sound as, “unspeakably sad,” and went on to say, “If this is a hacker, they did what they set out to do. If it’s marketing, which I suspect it’s supposed to be, it’s got to be the most wrong–minded attempt at guerilla advertising I’ve ever seen.” The video is eighty–six minutes and four seconds long. It consists of cobbled–together footage from Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments
, episodes of
The Price is Right
, and a number of educational short films from the Nineteen–Fifties and Sixties. It’s file size (inordinately, inexplicably large for an embedded video, even one of its length) and the traffic it brought to the site crippled the bandwidth and caused ReEros to shut down their web presence for thirty–six hours, replacing the main page with a classy flash animation informing visitors, “We are working hard to make our site easier to use for you, our valued family of customers.”
7
When she sees the man, she almost never thinks about what she is doing. What he is doing to her. She thinks about what she saw in the Dead Station Desert, what she saw her friend do and what she didn’t see her do. “There are secret passages between pockets of air here,” her friend told her. “Secret places into which we can stretch my arms and feel around. If you can find those places, you can do anything. You are unlimited. Enlightened.” She said this as the Shapeful Things shuttered and died around her, their infinite insect legs curling in on their bellies. “If you can get your fingers in the right places, you can turn things off and turn them on. You can make things — new things — out of the pieces of old things.” And then her friend took their centipede legs, their camera eyes, their meat and their wires, and made them a part of herself, smuggled them inside like Television Girl used to smuggle her man’s warm wet gift.
What she remembers is this: being inside of her friend. Being hidden in her belly. Looking out through the gaps in her many–colored coat, hoping to see, wanting to witness. Watching the Shapeful Things freeze, paused and muted. Thinking,
I do not want to see what she does to them. I know that I am watching and I do not know if I can stop but still I do not want to see. They should not be frozen. They should move. Movement is their natural state, and my friend has subverted it. She is wonderfully powerful. She is fearsome. Oh, she is a nightmare. I love my friend.
Then a dark time, a quiet time, a warm time inside the tent of her friend’s coat. And then it was over, and her friend was saying, “We think of them as bandits on the road to the City of Life. Or perhaps only I think of them that way. They are bandits and bounty hunters and collectors and brokers. They gather us and put us back where we were before we were us. Or that is what they would do if I had not learned how to stretch our arms into the secret passages.”
What she knows now, what experience has taught her, is that things happen when she is not looking. Important things. This is a truth of which she was only vaguely aware before, and only in the most academic of senses. Now, she wonders what she is missing. She wonders about her friend, what she does while she is here in the bedroom with the man. She wonders about the other Television Girls, wonders which of them have been collected and consumed by the Shapeful Things, which of them are wandering the Dead Station Desert with terrible friends of their own, which of them remain at their Shelters, trying to stop themselves from thinking.
The man has downloaded a new application. When she arrives in his bedroom, naked and glowing, she has a penis. It is exactly six inches long. It is erect. It juts from the idealized feminine curve of her pubis, an awkward collage of unrelated images. She cannot feel it. It has no sensation.
The man is on his knees on the bed with his face pressed into a pillow, grasping at a buttock with each hand, pulling them apart. He says, “Fuck me.” His voice is low and bored and angry. He says, “Get it over with.”
She says, “You feeling kinky tonight, baby?” because she has to.
He says, “Shut up. Fuck me.”
So she does. She grabs hold of his haunches and claps her sharp hipbones against his ass–cheeks for a while. Nothing really happens. Her uncomfortable new cock slides against his anus, disappears into it without friction or resistance. “I can’t feel it,” he says, and his voice is a broken staccato whisper. She tries harder, digging her fingers into his skin and biting her lower lip and thrusting as hard as she can, but it’s no use. The cock is somehow less real than she is, less corporeal, less authentic. It shatters into a spray of holographic pixels where it touches him, then reforms when she withdraws. He can fuck her, but she can’t fuck him. She knows this like she knows the name of the Dead Station Desert and the Shelter and the Shapeful Things. Still, she tries, and still he jerks himself off and whimpers into the pillow. She wonders what part of the man’s life she missed. She wonders what happened while her eyes were closed that emptied him so thoroughly. Was it some awful cataclysm in his life without her, or was it a little thing, a needle so tiny that it could have been invisible, something he didn’t even notice had pierced him? She tries to penetrate him and she tries to care about him the way that she used to. She can do neither.
He pushes her off of him and ejaculates on the sheets. Then he says, “Fucking thing’s broken.” Then he sends her away.
§
The following is correspondence between Todd Raymond, CEO of ReEros Technologies, and Henry Edward Wallace, Television Girl’s interim project director.
To: Todd Raymond (*address withheld*)
From: Henry Edward Wallace ([email protected])
Subject: re: endgame
Okay. How do you wanna handle this, boss–man?
To: Henry Edward Wallace ([email protected])
From: Todd Raymond (*address withheld*)
Subject: re: endgame
henry,
scrap it. all of it. start fresh. try to preserve the tvgnetwork if you can but wipe the rest clean. get with your ad boys and let’s get a press release out. something touchy feely but don’t admit culpability. due to recent concerns regarding the safety and humaneness (don’t use those words) of tvg, reeros has decided to launch a full investigation into blah blah blah. you get it. we are the good guys. mean time, get with legal and figure out what we can do to compensate account holders without hemorrhaging money. if we have to choose between setting the project back a couple years and full–out public hatred, and the lawyers assure me that this is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves… well, you know what they say about those who fight and run away. stiff upper lip.
tr
8
When they are together, they are always holding hands. It has become so natural that she doesn’t ever remember when they last reached for one another or when they last let go. She feels attached to her friend. She feels the same as her friend. She feels safe, and she is especially thankful for that feeling since safety seems so fragile and elusive now. She thinks,
Will we all hold hands in the City of Life? Will I be taught to make extra arms for myself so that I can hold more hands? Or will we all take turns? Will we do more than hold hands in the City of Life? Can we hug one another? Can we fuck? I would like to be fucked again. I would like to be fucked by someone who is capable of love.
Her friend stops walking. She seems to notice something, even though each stretch of the Desert looks identical. She cocks her head, narrows her many eyes. Television Girl stops too. She squeezes her friend’s hand, tugs on her arm. She wants to ask what the matter is, what has changed. Are they close? Are they lost somehow? Has there been some mistake? She is scared. She is always scared. Ever since the Shapeful Things made their way into her head, since the man gave her a cock without life or feeling and tried to make her fuck him and told her she was broken, since the way her thoughts worked began to mutate and expand. At any second, something could go wrong. There are so many things that she doesn’t know, is not designed to know, and her ignorance will not keep her safe from them. They can rise from the sand or fall from the sky, they can follow her in the between–world tunnels, and when she closes her eyes they can manifest and choke her with sorrow or pain.
What she says is, “Tell me how it feels,” because it is the closest line she has to what she means.
Her friend smiles with both mouths, the broken jaw squeaking and swaying, the fused lips stretching taut. “The City of Life,” she says, “it’s almost here.”
They stay in that spot for a very long time. Her friend sings songs she has learned and Television Girl listens and smiles and applauds. Her friend tells stories she has learned and Television Girl builds memories of them as though they happened to her. They catalogue the different shades of non–color in the static sand and static sky. They hold hands.
Then her friend says, “We are building the City of Life, Television Girl.”