Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? [DFW, The Pale King; p. 231 / Chpt. 22]
The story weaves from different threads: a texture, a fabric, the flickering light colors and schemes that draw on walls. The room has no windows, my gaze goes over dome-high openings, hoses, a drawing, two displays, a large white tarpaulin that shields me from what is and protects me from what might be.
I look to the left: hands are touching flowers, stroking them, caressing them; the flowers do not fight back (how should they even?). I feel uncomfortable: the hands show me the flowers, the hands show themselves, I see delicate, fleshy fibers full of black-blue drawings. The hands and flowers disappear before my eyes, I see Rorschach pictures on them, what do I see? A fetish-like ritual, a conjuration of stories, dissolved entities, that I do not know. Who writes this story? Another look, hands and flowers change arrhythmical, they never stop touching and banishing me from their world. I go on, to the windows inside the white tarpaulin.
On the wall-sized tarpaulin are three dwarf-sized openings. Everything seems to be provisionally, it is stuck with black tape. I bend down, turn, twist my neck, stretch my torso to catch snippets. A head pierced with nails and wearing a mask is staring at me with its bluescreen-blue-reflective glasses. Placed in front of a metal shield, a light haze settles on the shimmering fabric of the mask, a drop of water falls down off the nail. My eyes descend to the forming puddle. I see a basin filled with a dark, heavy liquid, partially spotted with black seeds that are surrounded by a translucent, whitish layer. Pipes and tubes leave and commit the basin, I hear a slight rustle and rattling. Next to the pool is a digital image. I see different signs and think of quantum physics; systems and metaphors of a world that are not mine. Maybe everything will collapse in the next few seconds and maybe it will build up right away, or disappear through an invisible implosion. Cables wind like brain fibers over the surfaces, I see more differently shaped basins like broken skullcaps, filled with liquids. A blue lamp tries to illuminate a container, which carries a chunk in itself. The chunk does not understand the blue light and remains unimpressed crystalline as before.
I go on. A glaring circle of light rises like an icon over facts: flowerpots with eccentric green tissue, again different tubes, which symbiotically bring together the green with another mass; a brown bag with the logo of a fast food chain, remains of a modern nomad; a transparent blue frame with a small passport photo that would turn in perpetual motion if I could touch it.
My eyes are looking for a way out, a flickering surface stops me. An aquarium filled with the black, heavy fluid and the everlasting shimmering mass coming from the corners; there is something familiar, that I can recognize - moss - nothing more. On the wall, behind everything that I know or not, someone has left more traces - gray bars, a test tube, a topographical map. I do not understand any of this and kneel down. I can not see anything anymore, the icons ensnare and annoy me at the same time - whoever has left all this, he will not let me go, as long as he is not finished with me. I know that he is watching me; a camera eye turns from the corner to my brain. My knees touch the cold floor; I would like to lean on, the tarpaulin will not be able to hold my weight, I balance from left to right and try to find something else, further hints or hieroglyphs on the systems of this world.
Another opening shows me four unequal containers, one is transparent. I wonder if one of the opaque containers contains a brain, that is rooted with all the tubes in the basins and pots above; perhaps the brain could observe that it is in a tank and fills up all the chaotic experimental arrangements with information; perhaps one of these brains simulates a life of their own, without noticing that it is disembodied mass, in a fluid that cannot be further defined.
I lose my balance and look up, in front of the white tarpaulin: a yellow, massive hose protrudes from the ceiling into the tarpaulin. I do not know where he's headed, whether he's a bluff or fills the tarpaulin with something, maybe a conservative gas?
A few steps back: behind the big, white tarpaulin seems to be a kind of experimental setup, another world that I can look at, that makes me spin out worlds which exist in another dimension that I can only observe from outer space; a manic chaos, modern fossils, as they are left there. Preserved, secured, left for a viewer who does not exist - or has someone been waiting for me? A reality that is the construction of itself and does not allow objectivity. I do not understand it. If I understood something of what is going on there, I would have to assume that my reality is the reality of the one who left all of this behind. Everything behind this plan is moving and at a standstill at the same time. The various signs left behind, which oscillate between icons and maximum absurdity, do not leave my thoughts alone. How should I know what his reality is or was in the moment in which he arranged everything, sorted and created a small, new cosmos? I can spin out conspiracy theories, theories of an alternative world, theories of the world of the other, which in all their layers, sediments and ores throw me, the human viewer, the agent of one of the many existing worlds, into the position of the one that must decide which reality – I mean the reality of the other one – is real. Behind me is a filigree drawing on the wall. A flower. I recognize it - it was always there. Now I suddenly realize that everything will talk to each other as soon as I leave the room. The exit is covered with a black, impermeable tarpaulin. I go, the bright light disappears.
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