Like all of us, I share my locker with one other person. Over the course of many months I begin to suspect that my lockermate, whom I have never met, has disappeared: that his possessions, on the top shelf, right above mine, have not moved for a long time. There are vague bits of sporting equipment and some souvenirs. No books or media. Dude is a jock.
I have access to some sort of computer record showing that the authorities believe my lockermate to be missing and presumed dead; still, I am not 100% convinced. I suspect he may be sneaking into his locker and visiting his possessions but putting everything back in the same position. Why he would do this is not clear. I resolve to test this suspicion: I will photograph his possessions with my phone and compare the exact positions of the objects over time.
I suppose that would have been a fun project but I seem to get distracted by another cell phone functionality, one that's shiny and new: there is a new app that turns any cell phone into a projector, all by itself. In the board room I download the app and try it out. Even with the lights on the image projected is sharp and vivid. "Look!" I tell random humans. They look. They are not impressed.
I am checking all the cabinets in the bank lobby to find out their contents. Apparently I am at work and tasked with setting up or replenishing a rack of forms for the public to use. One cabinet is full of empty index cards, stacks and stacks of them. I want them all. I must have all the index cards. So that I can have them. But I get a hold of myself and calmly explain to me that I have plenty of index cards at home already and Paul would not want me coming home with scores of thousands more.
Across the lobby a young man is working on a musical installation consisting of piles of plinths or tiles of some sort—rectangular cuboids in any case—about the same length and width of index cards but each one is maybe 1/2" thick (the thickness is, I think, subject to change). It is not clear what they are made of. The guy is arranging them in piles and the piles themselves describe a rectangle of the same aspect ratio, 3:5, but maybe it's 6 feet by 10 feet. Some of the stacks are dozens high; others are just a single cuboid; no spots are completely empty.
A tiny light or spark plays through the whole arrangement, going top-to-bottom of a stack of cuboids, then moving onto the next stack, anticlockwise. As the spark moves through each cuboid a musical note plays. Over the course of a few minutes the whole installation plays through a rather ambient-sounding musical piece—it sounds to me like a marimba or wind chimes, which I suppose is appropriate given the shape of the cuboids. The arrangements of the whole thing is its musical composition, so the guy is trying to get it "right".
Across the lobby a young man is working on a musical installation consisting of piles of plinths or tiles of some sort—rectangular cuboids in any case—about the same length and width of index cards but each one is maybe 1/2" thick (the thickness is, I think, subject to change). It is not clear what they are made of. The guy is arranging them in piles and the piles themselves describe a rectangle of the same aspect ratio, 3:5, but maybe it's 6 feet by 10 feet. Some of the stacks are dozens high; others are just a single cuboid; no spots are completely empty.
A tiny light or spark plays through the whole arrangement, going top-to-bottom of a stack of cuboids, then moving onto the next stack, anticlockwise. As the spark moves through each cuboid a musical note plays. Over the course of a few minutes the whole installation plays through a rather ambient-sounding musical piece—it sounds to me like a marimba or wind chimes, which I suppose is appropriate given the shape of the cuboids. The arrangements of the whole thing is its musical composition, so the guy is trying to get it "right".
I am fascinated and delighted by the music, and I have a fabulous idea: I will record it with my phone! Despite the musical piece being completely cyclical, I have already determined where I think the most natural Start/Finish point is. I call up the audio recording app on my phone (which I never ever use so it takes a bit of hunting to even find it) and I take my phone over to the installation, which is now also a garden in the back courtyard of a mansion of some sort. The composer has been joined by an older man whom I know to be "the caretaker".
I am prostrate next to the installation and I have extended my arm into its center with my phone; for some reason I am waiting for the piece to "come around" to the starting point that I like before I click "Record". But I realize with increasing frustration as we get closer to that point that it's not going to be a clean recording, because the caretaker is moving about and talking and making noise. And some of the noise he's making entails his dropping a dead body into the garden.
"As instructed I have killed the master," he the caretaker tells me flatly. "I stove his head in with my shovel." The corpse of the master now lies at the edge of the garden just beyond the "front" row of musical plinths. The master is John Waters.
"And now we are going to kidnap you and kill you, as well," the caretaker tells me. "Shhh!" I respond. I am personally still focused on getting a good recording, even as it becomes clear that the garden patch is really an enormous box whose lid the caretaker now closes overtop of me. After all, the guy has to be kidding, right?
No, he is not kidding. I am being kidnapped and killed. They are going to haul me out of town into the country in a big box along with the corpse of John Waters, where no one will find me and I will die of... oxygen deprivation? Yes, if they elect to bury me alive in the box. Otherwise it's thirst. Unless it rains a lot. Then it's starvation. One way or another I run out of the essentials and expire. That sinks in and I am left contemplating my own eventual, horrible death.
What is the point of this? The malice is completely random; which, I suppose with some appreciation, is always the scariest kind in stories real and fictional. The composer has played no part other than passive accomplice, but the caretaker certainly turned out to be a creepy villain: detached, homicidal, and droll. How droll? This droll:
"Please commence hollering, although it will not avail you," the caretaker says calmly, and demonstrates the sort of thing he means: "Help! I am being kidnapped and killed! Please help me! I am being kidnapped!"
I do commence hollering, very much along his helpfully suggestive lines. He continues his own prompting, but after a while it is an autonomic behavior, like whistling to himself. I vary my cadences like Susan Vance, so as not to sound like an echo:
"Please help!" "Help me!"
"I am being kidnapped and killed!" "I am being kidnapped and taken to be killed!"
"Nice George!" "George!"
While the lid of the box is secured with a cage of case iron, there are lots of holes—e.g., missing wooden slats?—through which I can still see the outside world. I can see through a fence onto a city street (the bank lobby-courtyard garden is now apparently a parking garage) and I spy random passers-by standing on the opposite corner waiting for the hand to turn into a person. "You! On the street!" I holler, snagging the attention of a young Asian woman. The caretaker realizes I have successfully gotten the attention of a potential homicide-spoiling passer-by and so hastens his efforts to haul the box away from the opening in the fence. But the young woman has definitely heard a note of true distress in my voice and follows my progress to the next gap in the fence. I holler as loudly as I can to be heard over traffic noise: "I am being kidnapped!"
I am prostrate next to the installation and I have extended my arm into its center with my phone; for some reason I am waiting for the piece to "come around" to the starting point that I like before I click "Record". But I realize with increasing frustration as we get closer to that point that it's not going to be a clean recording, because the caretaker is moving about and talking and making noise. And some of the noise he's making entails his dropping a dead body into the garden.
"As instructed I have killed the master," he the caretaker tells me flatly. "I stove his head in with my shovel." The corpse of the master now lies at the edge of the garden just beyond the "front" row of musical plinths. The master is John Waters.
"And now we are going to kidnap you and kill you, as well," the caretaker tells me. "Shhh!" I respond. I am personally still focused on getting a good recording, even as it becomes clear that the garden patch is really an enormous box whose lid the caretaker now closes overtop of me. After all, the guy has to be kidding, right?
No, he is not kidding. I am being kidnapped and killed. They are going to haul me out of town into the country in a big box along with the corpse of John Waters, where no one will find me and I will die of... oxygen deprivation? Yes, if they elect to bury me alive in the box. Otherwise it's thirst. Unless it rains a lot. Then it's starvation. One way or another I run out of the essentials and expire. That sinks in and I am left contemplating my own eventual, horrible death.
What is the point of this? The malice is completely random; which, I suppose with some appreciation, is always the scariest kind in stories real and fictional. The composer has played no part other than passive accomplice, but the caretaker certainly turned out to be a creepy villain: detached, homicidal, and droll. How droll? This droll:
"Please commence hollering, although it will not avail you," the caretaker says calmly, and demonstrates the sort of thing he means: "Help! I am being kidnapped and killed! Please help me! I am being kidnapped!"
I do commence hollering, very much along his helpfully suggestive lines. He continues his own prompting, but after a while it is an autonomic behavior, like whistling to himself. I vary my cadences like Susan Vance, so as not to sound like an echo:
"Please help!" "Help me!"
"I am being kidnapped and killed!" "I am being kidnapped and taken to be killed!"
"Nice George!" "George!"
While the lid of the box is secured with a cage of case iron, there are lots of holes—e.g., missing wooden slats?—through which I can still see the outside world. I can see through a fence onto a city street (the bank lobby-courtyard garden is now apparently a parking garage) and I spy random passers-by standing on the opposite corner waiting for the hand to turn into a person. "You! On the street!" I holler, snagging the attention of a young Asian woman. The caretaker realizes I have successfully gotten the attention of a potential homicide-spoiling passer-by and so hastens his efforts to haul the box away from the opening in the fence. But the young woman has definitely heard a note of true distress in my voice and follows my progress to the next gap in the fence. I holler as loudly as I can to be heard over traffic noise: "I am being kidnapped!"
Except I am not hollering: I am stage whispering, and the only person who hears it is Paul, who puts a comforting, no-you're-not-being-kidnapped hand on my shoulder.
AND NOW THE PUNCHLINE...
AND NOW THE PUNCHLINE...
The entire time I was being kidnapped it never once occurred to me what must certainly have been true: that I was still carrying my cell phone.
