The Tentacles of Narcissus
Monday mornings on the 5 bus were always interesting, but today was off the charts.
Hunter S Thompson once said that ‘when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.’
And the story that
offers us today instantly brings this aphorism to mind because a) the going has indeed gotten weird and as such we live in very strange times and b) in response to these weird times Greg has crafted prose like an absolute professional to capture this hyperfast, technology saturated moment in history.The result is a lot of fun as you are about to find out.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Monday mornings on the 5 bus were always interesting, but today was off the charts.
Packed to the gills with a kaleidoscopic buffet of human variety, the dilapidated electrified carriage crawled down Market St at a snail’s pace as death defying cyclists, panicked Uber drivers and meth infused skateboarders entered and left its orbit like flies circling excrement. The ride was almost always the same every day, a revolving cacophony of homelessness, technocratic anxiety, tumultuous multiculturalism, and overtly vaunted sexual preferentialism, occasionally shaken and spatially remixed by the jarring traversal of a pothole or the steerings of either a mad bus driver or one on some form of potent psychedelics.
What made this particular ride noteworthy, however, was not any of the above, but in fact the two very peculiar men huddled in seats near the rear of the vehicle, who were trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, and with good reason too. For you see, while one of the men appeared shockingly average, the other man was draped underneath an industrial moving blanket from head to toe, his entire appearance concealed from virtually every vantage point by the thick polyester mesh. He appeared to be sporadically shuddering and convulsing approximately every ten to fifteen seconds.
The first man - we’ll call him Mr. Normal - quickly glanced out the window to check their location. Then he leaned in close to his companion, slinging his arm around him and tugging him close.
“We’re almost there, Adam” he said, pressing his words through the portion of the blanket covering Adam’s wobbling head. He gripped Adam’s shoulders, digging his fingers into the thick fabric of the blanket concealing him from the external world - or perhaps more accurately - concealing the external world from him.
“Next stop is ours,” he said. “Hang in there, buddy.”
Adam responded with a rippling shudder that shook the seat and knocked a nearby woman’s coffee cup to the floor. The woman - we’ll call her Coffee - widened her eyes in anger, and appeared for a brief moment as if she was about to say something - but her expression quickly turned to confused horror when she looked towards the courier of the blow which had felled her beverage. Adam, still twitching through the aftershocks of the initial convulsion, had in his thrashing tossed back a portion of his blanket, revealing his exposed form below. Mr. Normal, catching the look on Coffee’s face, followed her gaze. He desperately grabbed the loose portion of the covering and tried to throw it back over Adam’s exposed region, but another convulsion erupted, knocking him backwards and pulling more of the blanket away.
The closest onlookers, all currently engaged in their own personal psycho verses of cultural stimuli - a man in a dog costume watching sloth mating rituals on ZooTube, a DevOps engineer trading crypto over mobile VPN, a girl in cat makeup listening to a sub saharan punk cover of George Michael’s Careless Whisper while rolling a joint - were suddenly yanked back into the present as the unavoidable phenomenon of Adam punched them in the visual cortex with the equivalent of a knockout uppercut. Staggered, stunned, stupidified and shocked, the trio lurched backwards into their respective portions of the bus-bound horde, provoking a series of agitated responses which inevitably led to additional attention being directed towards poor Adam, who was now revealing his indescribable manifestation to a growing crowd of witnesses.
“Oh my fuuu…” the dog man began, dropping his digital sloth orgy onto the floor of the bus.
“What the ffff…” said the engineer, who in his distraction forgot to set a stop loss on the position he had just placed, which consequently wiped him out a moment later.
“Holy…” said the girl cat, stumbling backwards yet impressively cradling her unfinished joint between two fingers as she did, and not spilling even a leaf of herb in the process.
The three of them never finished their blasphemies, and the bus never made it to the next stop. Adam convulsed explosively, tearing the blanket to shreds and knocking Normal backwards so hard that his left shoulder cracked the window behind him. The force of the movement was so great that it instantly relocated the back half of the bus two feet curb-ward, scattering the passengers within and bursting several tires, which knocked the vehicle off course. It crashed headfirst into an oncoming F trolley and came to a clattering halt.
There before all was Adam, who - now sans blanket - slowly arose in all of his glory. Eyes widened, mouths flopped aghast, and the shock of the vehicular collision instantly washed completely off of the passengers, replaced by indescribable madness and disbelief as all eyes aboard took in the bipedal dadaist dynamo now standing before them. His true appearance - now visible for all to see - was simply too much for an average human being to comprehend. He appeared to have the form and silhouette of a normal human, but his skin was like that of an electronic screen - a constantly flickering, perpetually changing epidermis of nonstop hypermedia.
War footage, music videos, TikTok dance sequences, YouTube unboxing videos, Alex Jones montages, Twitch streams, roller coaster front seat POV vids, COVID-19 conspiracy documentaries, Final Fantasy boss music metal guitar covers, couch reupholstering tutorials, hockey highlights, and anything and everything else - even ads - oh, the ads, everywhere, crawling up and down his torso and flashing across his limbs like sequences of marketing fireworks - were all emitting their fifteen milliseconds of fame as they came to life, begged for attention and died meaningless deaths in moving, crawling patches of pixels, working their way around the glowing, shimmering shape of Adam’s body, which had become - despite the obvious insanity of the notion - a walking bipedal sausage casing of internet media.
A tempest of panic, repulsion and terror erupted through the bus. Some passengers screamed, some cried, and several lost their minds. Coffee howled like a banshee, with a pitch was so high that it cracked the nearby windows. Crypto grabbed hold of the overhead hand rail and kicked one of them out, swinging himself feet first to salvation. Dog man and girl cat, convinced that the end was nigh, abandoned their outward facing zoological differences and locked together in an embrace, tasting true passion for the first time. A trio of elderly Russian women dug rosaries out of their purses and fumbled their way through a series of clumsy Hail Marys, while a homeless man sitting next to them wearing a trash bag scarf and combat boots pointed at Adam and began laughing hysterically, like a lonely sage understood by no one but who understood all. The driver, still dazed from the collision with the trolley, caught a glimpse of Adam through the bus’s oversized rearview mirror and quickly realized that the situation had eclipsed his pay grade. He flung the doors wide open and, muttering a panicked fountain of gibberish, stumbled out into the street, followed by most of the more able bodied passengers.
“Adam!” Normal cried, reaching out towards his friend with shreds of the ribboned blanket in his shaking hand. “The next stop…” Normal looked out the window to get his bearings. “We’re almost there….we can walk from here…just let me cover you back up!”
But Adam would have none of that. Pandora’s box had been opened, the ark unsealed, the Rubicon crossed. Adam’s streaming physique exited the bus and descended out onto the sidewalk below, and within seconds he was surrounded by onlookers who, unconfined by the small enclosed space that the passengers had been in, now began to react with curious fascination and awe rather than panic.
Awareness of Adam spread like wildfire, and the street began to hum with a curious vibe. Murmuring and shouts from below percolated through the urban canyons, and the windows in buildings towering overhead were soon dotted with eyeballs seeking a glimpse of the commotion. Soon Adam was surround by thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of spectators, throngs of humans of every trade and color and persuasion - the full spectrum of the human condition, all trying to get a look at the man who seemed to be composed at a cellular level of the very thing that had captured - kidnapped, perhaps - almost of their attention and energy for the past several decades. Yet the typical behavior of that zeitgeist which had dominated the human psyche did not seem to be present here. Those present were not here for pure spectacle, but for something else, something deeper, something that the collective unconsciousness seemed to be expecting Adam to provide. Decades of staring at meaningless videos, gifs, clickbait and ads had created a desert of meaning. And now, strangely enough, there seemed to be a general consensus that Adam would be their oasis.
This was perhaps most profoundly reflected by a startling revelation. Despite the tens of thousands of observers surrounding Adam, almost all of them with at least one mobile device in their possession, not a single soul had yet captured Adam in a picture or video. Instagram and TikTok sat dormant in everyone’s pockets, like children on the night before Christmas, voraciously waiting to devour him with hashtags and emojis. Yet not a single phone budged, not a single camera app was opened. It was as if a chunk of humanity had spiritually evolved all at once, favoring present moment awareness over likes, comments and other trophies of materialistic narcissism.
Normal, still clutching shreds of the blanket, half-desperately trying to patch them back together, climbed through the crowd surrounding Adam, who now stood in the middle of a plaza. The immediate onlookers all stood in a trance, captivated by Adam’s presence.
“He…she…it…” said a nearby voice, unable to form a complete sentence. It was Coffee, the woman from the bus who Adam had bumped into, her blouse still freshly stained.
“His name is Adam,” Normal said.
“How did this happen?” she asked, a breeze sweeping through her hair. “Is this the end of the world?”
Adam began to speak, but paused, waiting for the right response to form. Smiling, he looked at Coffee, observing how pretty her eyes looked amidst the eschatological chaos. She looked back at him, and suddenly the words he had been searching for found him.
“No,” he said. “Just a change in management.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Maybe after this is all said and done, I can buy you another coffee.” Normal said, gesturing to the stain on her blouse.
“It’s actually tea,” she said, smiling.
“Ok, Tea,” he said. “Have it your way.”
Finally the inevitable happened. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and it was only a matter of time until one of the onlookers would submit to materialist capitulation.
“Holy cow, that’s me - look!” shouted a woman standing next to them, snapping from her meditative trance and pointing to a portion of Adam’s bicep. There, stretched across his pixelated skin, was a portion of screen space which showed - at least for the moment - a video of her, high on pretty much every substance imaginable, dancing around in rainbow spandex at some nondescript overpriced music festival.
“That’s me!” she shouted again, turning to address the surrounding crowd, but no one was interested in what she had to say. Frustrated by a lack of recognition, her heart became cold and hard, but the soothing balm of social opportunism immediately offered her a cure. Realizing her fleeting chance for fame, she whipped out her phone, and opened Instagram, preparing her phone’s camera. Then she spun like a figure skater one hundred and eighty degrees, tossed her hair back and extended her arm outwards, framing herself and Adam in the camera view. She tried several facial expressions - moments like these are precious and must be treated accordingly - before settling on a goofy, sardonic gesture subconsciously imprinted upon her years ago, the duck face, le visage du canard. Her selfie was now locked and loaded, and she began moving her thumb towards the bright red capture button, like a nuclear missile warden preparing to turn a launch key.
Normal looked at Tea, grabbing her by the shoulders. He locked eyes with her, gripping her tightly. He didn’t know if it was due to his own raw perception of reality or the sudden influence of adrenaline, but regardless he thought that she was quite beautiful. A realization of what was going to happen, combined with a sudden resurgence of masculine energy, provoked in him an urgent need to protect her.
“Close your eyes,” he said, and with that he pulled her to him and swept her into a deep embrace, wrapping his arms around her as he kissed her right on the lips.
Simultaneously, the nearby woman’s thumb pressed the red dot, capturing the moment and broadcasting it across the meta verse, thus sealing the covenant between event and participant, self and selfie. An alchemic triangulation of media (Adam), observer (woman), and media (selfie) was formed, triggering a cryptic esoteric clause embedded in the very root fabric of the universe. The resulting effect was nothing short of spectacular.
A thick, energized tentacle, its skin made of the same pulsating material as Adam, burst forth from the screen of the woman’s phone, punching through the dimensional fabric separating the pixelated from the palpable. It wrapped itself around her neck and torso like some terrible boa constrictor, providing a spectacle even more astounding than Adam - a woman, taking a picture of herself with her phone, of herself being strangled by her phone.
A novelty of this magnitude could not exist in isolation. Seeking to stake claims on this moment, the people around the woman fell out of their higher spiritual nirvanas, pulling their phones out to take and share pictures of her. The moment they pressed their red capture buttons and shared the resulting photographs, energized media-skin tentacles shot forth from their phones too, wrapping around the respective owners. The people near them then did the same thing, no one wanting to miss out on a chance to capture such a sight, and like clockwork, they too were ensnared by the serpentine multimedia appendages erupting from their black mirrors. The memetic phenomenon continued, spreading like a virus traveling at the speed of light; within seconds every individual holding a phone in downtown San Francisco had fallen prey to the glowing, flickering tongues, as if some electromagnetic spider had cocooned them all in preparation for a feast.
It did not stop there. It spread across the globe, and within minutes anyone and everyone holding a phone was witnessing someone else near them being constricted by a tele-communicative tentacle, either in person or via a post on a social media app. Thusly, unable to withstand the FOMO, they too either took pictures of the event or shared the incoming post on their timelines. Either action condemned them to be whip-snared a moment later by a tentacle coming from their own phones. In exactly fifteen seconds, Warhol’s infamous chronological measure of predicted personal allotted fame, the human race fell like dominos; from toddlers with iPads to geriatrics with Jitterbugs, every demographic was consumed by the mimetic tidal wave of social serpentine strangulation.
And at the very moment that the final human victim, a Hungarian sausage vendor far on the other side of the world, fell victim to the trap, the originator of the virus, the woman who took the selfie with Adam, felt the tentacle tighten its grip. The thick electric lasso convulsed and pulsated, and then without any warning whatsoever, it gave a quick, brutal yank, pulling her body in its entirety straight through the glossy, gaping screen of the device. Her phone had swallowed her whole, and with no user left to hold it up, it clattered to the ground. A glowing golden spark emerged from the device, hovered over the ground, and then and flew up towards Adam, where it dissolved into his outstretched hand. Then the screen went dark and the phone went to sleep, like a python drifting off into a long nap after eating its oversized prey. This secondary act spread exactly like the first; like dry brushfire the screen bound masses, already seized by the foreign appendages, were plucked like olives, one by one, and devoured by their respective devices.
The final act of this technocratic drama provided its own applause, for as the final victim, the Hungarian sausage vendor, was yanked into digital oblivion, the first phones began to fall. Free from any sort of gravitational suspension, they hit the ground en masse and created an audible clap, and for a few brief moments, the entirety of the earth was filled with the sound of what almost seemed like rippling, thundering clapping. Moments later, beautiful tiny sparks of every color imaginable rose up from the dormant devices, and slowly began their airborne pilgrimage towards Adam.
And there at the epicenter of where it had all began stood Normal and Tea, still locked in the clutches of their embrace, the spark of the moment shielding them completely from the viral tidal wave which had washed over the planet. As their kiss ended, they lifted their heads and looked around, observing the beautiful sea of migrating sparks surrounding them.
“They’re so beautiful,” Tea remarked, watching the sparks slowly dissolve into Adam’s body. One by one they floated towards him, millions upon millions of them, until at last the final one made its way, floating through the air and merging with Adam’s outstretched finger.
And just like that, Adam stood up. His body began to change shape, his form morphing from that of a biped into an that of an elegant archway. Then the strobing media kaleidoscope which had monopolized his epidermis faded away, and in its place, a beautiful vista of windswept grass, blue skies and golden sunshine took its place.
Normal gently grabbed Tea’s hand, and the two of them walked through the portal, king and queen of their new domain.
This is amazing good. I was gripped from the first sentence. Absolute genius.
What a magical first sentence!