Midnight Movie

Eve Leigh

• Éditeur: Oberon Books
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786829313
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Informatique
• Sous-sujet: Réalité virtuelle

Someone is having a sleepless night and browsing the internet. A girl fights for her life in a lift. New Window. A protest in Trafalgar Square. New Window. A naked man in a bathtub. New Window. Janelle Monae, dancing. The possibilities are endless. Even at 2am. That's the thing about being Extremely Online: there's no limit on where you can go.

Briefly: darkness and silence.

Then, a steady beat. A metronome, or perhaps a very high quality drum machine.

We may think we are listening to a drummer with a very steady hand.

A drum solo bursts through the darkness. It is raggedy, exciting, and human.

New tab – the woman in the water tank.

OK so what happened is she went to a hotel, she left her university town for the weekend and went to a hotel.

In Los Angeles.

And she,

you can find the video, it’s not hard, the security video, at some point near the end of her stay in this hotel she runs into the elevator like something’s chasing her.

But no one is there.

No one you can see.

The door stalls,

she’s pressing she’s frantic she’s pressing door close but

someone, something,

something, you can’t see,

is blocking the door.

And then it’s in.

She fights it, she her arms, they do –

Spasmodic fighting across the stage –

and in the end she’s in a corner, in the corner of the elevator, blocking it –

Hiding across the stage –

blocking it with her hands.

and that’s where the video ends. So. We don’t know how,

we don’t know about the next bit.

Something,

we couldn’t see, something –

she got into a water tank on the top of the hotel.

And something closed the lid behind her.

Which should have been impossible.

And they only found her when the water started running black.

Water in motion.

New tab – the goddess by the river.

Before Delhi had been built yet, when it was still just a desert, there was a goddess whose powers of Yogic concentration were so strong that she could carry water in a sphere between her hands, hold this volume of water in her hands with no bucket or –

Nothing to carry it in.

And she would scoop it out of the river and carry it to Delhi, or the place that would one day be Delhi, in the desert.

Until one day by the side of the river she saw a god and goddess making love. And she was riven with desire.

And from that day no matter how much she tried, she could not muster the concentration to hold the water with her bare hands.

So that’s pretty much how I feel about Instagram if I’m honest, yeah.

A short distance from the screen.

Bodies in the wrong places, places being wrong for certain bodies, stories about – scary bodies, in the wrong places –

New tab – before I got ill.

Right, OK so one time I was at a party, this was before I was ill, or actually I was ill but I didn’t know it yet, I was at a party in Berlin, in one of those beautiful old buildings and the man I’d come with said,

let’s go.

And we went to his flat, which was actually, it was sort of a weird setup, his flatmate was a film star, this German film star about fifteen years older than him, he was beautiful I should say he was about six foot five with huge grey eyes and, golden skin,

just golden,

and this perfect body –

this is all completely true by the way –

and he kept saying the film star was his flatmate but when I got to the flat there was only one bedroom and only one bed.

But sadly I’m an idiot, and at the time I was almost unbelievably young and stupid, so even now I’m a little bit unsure – maybe they were just flatmates? He said it with such conviction –

And his cock was perfect, I was a bit nervous if I’m honest because he was so perfect-looking altogether so I was half-expecting his cock to be like a, like a clump of weird berries or something but no, his cock was perfect too, and we had a lovely time together and it was all a big adventure, the pillows were gorgeous, there was a gigantic skylight across the entire flat that showed the soft sodium-lit Berlin sky.

You’ll have guessed there’s a catch.

The catch was when I was wandering around postcoitally, or not really because neither of us wanted to fuck but post… other things,

there was a man on the skylight, face plastered to the glass, grinning with all his teeth.

And I knew he was a vampire.

His teeth…

but also I knew it. I knew it. His eyes –

I knew.

I wished I had a box of daylight to open, to just turn him to dust in that moment. I wanted to shoot a stake through him with my mind.

New tab – the digital body.

At the time I thought he was a vampire and I must respect that. But now I wonder if he was a digital body. There’s something about the gaze, something about the body in the wrong place,

I do it too, watching some livestream somewhere, or a video on social media, from far away.

Touch me,

and with that touch –

Inbreath. Running downhill.

you displace images of war, you displace knowledge of permafrost melting and that my friend’s baby had a really bad night and that the Dakota Pipeline was first routed through Bismarck but was moved because too many white people live there, I can’t help but at least I can pass it on, it really happened and I saw it and maybe you’ll see it –

any touch any gentle – contact –

I need strength, I need strength – need strength –

New tab – the god of strength.

The god of strength was challenged to a contest by his enemies and because the god of strength was not very clever, he allowed them to pick the terms.

They just asked him to empty a drinking horn of wine. To drink it all down.

And he for some reason did not clock that there might be a catch, he gladly picked up the drinking horn, thinking “ooh this’ll be easy”, and he kept drinking, and drinking, and drinking, and drinking, and time was passing, and even his vast god’s body was getting stretched and horribly full, but he would not put down the drinking horn. And he kept trying, and pausing for breath, and trying, and drinking, until he felt the wine he was drinking would run out of his eyes as tears. He felt his face soaked, he felt his bladder stretched, he felt his beard as wet as a sponge, but still the drinking horn was full.

And finally the god of strength gave up.

And his enemies, seeing him crushed and defeated, were ashamed of themselves. And they told him the truth, that the drinking horn was connected to all the oceans of the world, and over the course of his long contest, he had ne...