Hidden Track

Late one night, I stayed up listening to some music. I was leaning my elbows against the upstairs railing, looking down into the lamplit study in the open area below me. The album was playing on the stereo in the study, but I liked to listen from up above, because I liked the acoustics and the way the music reverberated off of the vaulted ceiling up there. The music was loud enough to fill the house, even though I had the volume softened because my wife was sleeping in the bedroom. There was an interval of silence after the last song on the album, and then a bonus hidden track began to play. I had never heard this hidden track before, and I was completely unaware that it even existed. There was a song on the album that I really liked, this soft, melancholy song about a ghost and all the years that passed by as it lurked through the dark nights alone, and this hidden track appeared to be a reprise of that same song, but it was only an instrumental version. I kept waiting for the lyrics to come in, but they never did, and the song seemed even more unnervingly ghostly in their absence.

As I stood there, listening to the music, humming out the tune, trying to remember the missing lyrics, I noticed a man standing beside me, leaning against the railing in the same manner that I was. I wasn’t startled at all by the man; in fact, I felt like I had suddenly gone strangely numb and submissive. The music grew warped and distorted along the edges of my awareness, and I lost all interest in it, other than a nagging sense that I now recognized and remembered this hidden track. Somehow I knew that the track itself had summoned the man’s presence and that it had heralded similar interactions between us in the past, and I knew that when it was all over and the man was gone, both the memory of the track and the man would return to a vault deep within the recesses of my mind where they had both been kept locked away.

The man tilted his head and studied me as though he were watching the cognitive gears in my head crank into the proper position where I would be ready and open for instructions. He was an older man, considerably shorter than me. He wore little round spectacles with narrow hawkish white eyebrows behind them. His nose had a gnarled bluntness about it, and his balding white hair was scattered about his scalp in patches like knots of cotton padding sticking out from the holes in the worn out cushion of an old chair. As he assessed the blank way that I stood there waiting for him to tell me what to do, an approving smile spread on his face, revealing the small handful of rotted brown teeth that had been tossed haphazardly into his festering mouth. He put a finger to his cracked lips, silently admonishing me to be quiet, and he directed me to follow him with a quick notching of two of his fingers. There was a giddiness about the way he crept along in front of me, like an exaggerated pantomime of someone covertly skulking through a house at night, that same long slow extending of the leg with the tippy toe feeling for the floor ahead, the arms drawn in close, the hands like skeevy little claws feeling their way through the darkness. None of it was necessary. No one would hear our steps over the sound of the music that was still playing. But it was clear to see that he was enjoying himself.

He brought me to the front door of the house. He told me that he had a new protocol in “Operation Bright Light” that he needed to show me. He took me into the narrow alleyway that ran along the side of the house just outside the door. There was a hedge there just behind the stone path that led away from the doorway. He showed me that there was a floodlight planted inside this hedge. In my normal life in my normal waking hours, I would never notice it there. Whenever I came out the door, I would always turn to the right and follow the stone path down to the driveway. I would never turn to the left to see the floodlight that was plainly there in the hedge. He told me that if I came out my front door and “saw that the sky was white”, meaning that the floodlight would be on and shining from behind me, then I would know that it was time to start ending the world.

I nodded as passively to this instruction as I had to all the others. I stood there, mouth gaping, expecting nothing else, not knowing if he was finished with me. He seemed to read this in my face, and he shook his head and grinned his rotten grin again. He said, “Oh, no, no, no. I have so much more to show you.” He brought his hand up with two fingers forked and extended, reaching for my face. It felt as though these two fingers had reached up and plucked both of my eyeballs out of their sockets. He drew his hand away, and it seemed now that each of my eyeballs were now mounted on the tips of his fingers, and he was taking me off somewhere to observe things as a passive witness separated from my body.

He took me to a neighborhood picnic where a long table had been set up and laid out under the shade of a blue canopy. The other people at the picnic were sleepers like me, programmed and triggered whenever he needed to have control over them. At the far end of the table there were two men with dark beards that looked like twins. They kept repeating these incomprehensible phrases back and forth to each other, phrases that sounded Russian or at least vaguely Eastern European, but which actually meant nothing at all. The little man explained that he had set the twins to this automated task, leaving them to it for days, because he simply wanted to see if it was possible to generate a new language from this sort of verbal call and response repetition. He wasn’t sure if meaning could be born from the very effort of communication itself, or whether their minds would devolve into empty storehouses of composted gibberish. He shrugged, not really seeming to care which outcome occurred, and he took his place at the head of the picnic table with the sunny day to his back. He put on a plastic bib with a picture of two crossed chicken drumsticks on the front of it, and he grabbed the silverware on either side of his plate and planted his fists on the table with the blade and the tines sticking up in the air, grinning around at everyone as though he was waiting for someone to serve him a bountiful feast.

The other people around the table just sat with their arms limply hanging at their sides staring down at the empty paper plates placed before them. Everyone sat there in silence, except for the murmur of meaningless phrases still issuing from the far end of the table. Flies buzzed in the stillness, landing here and there on the tablecloth, but no one bothered to try to shoo them away. A man with a red baseball cap lifted his head and blinked his eyes, as though he had momentarily emerged from his stupor. He looked around the table and asked, “Oughtn’t we to say grace or something?” The little man’s eyes narrowed on him, smoldering and dark. He slowly laid his knife down in his empty plate, and then he held up his hand and gave his fingers a nice hard snap. The eyes of the man in the red cap glazed over and his body went limp. The little man stared at him for a long time, holding eye contact, until finally making a quick jerk of his head motioning for the man to stand up.

The man in the red cap slid his chair back from the table and stood to his feet as he processed the instruction he had been given. There was a smaller table bearing packages of hot dog buns, condiments, and other items that was set up near the picnic table. The was an empty glass pitcher on this table, and the man in the red cap went over and put his arm into this pitcher with his hand balled into a fist at the bottom. With his other hand, he produced a pocket knife from the pocket of his jeans. He snapped open the knife, and then without flinching or showing the slightest misgivings of any kind, he began carve the knife around the bicep of the arm in the pitcher, cutting deep down into the flesh, all the way down to the bone, just below the shoulder. Blood poured loose and copiously into the pitcher, as the man began to shake from blood loss and his eyes rolled back white. A woman at the table seemed to come to for a moment as she looked up and said, “Good lord! We’re not going to have to drink that, are we?” The little man threw back his head and howled with laughter, spit and crumbs flying from his vile mouth. He doubled forward, turning red and biting his fist between his teeth, reveling in the fact that his playthings were still capable of such sharp wit. “Bravo, Irene! Bravo!” he exclaimed.

And then my disembodied eyes drifted up and away to another scene on the other side of town. Here a group of teenage boys were sitting around in a cluster of armchairs that had been taken out of the house and set up in the yard. One of the boys began talking about some place that they had all been the night before, but none of the rest of the them could remember the place or what had happened there. The boy grew more and more flustered as he tried to explain it to them, and the other boys grew more and more hostile to the whole idea, and they kept trying to tell him to shut up. They had all been programmed by the little man as well, and they had been instructed to forget something from the night before. But the boy who was struggling to talk was an epileptic, and this had kept the little man’s programming from taking properly. His eyes grew glassy and moist as he tried to explain that they had all been standing there in the road in the glare of the headlights. He could see it in front of him. His armchair rocked in the dirt as he leaned forward, desperately trying to grab at the memory.

His words grew slurred and his tongue knotted and he seemed on the verge of a seizure. The names of people and places in his sentences began to be replaced by the numbers that the little man had designated for them in his programming. “Fifteen, we were all at twenty-two. The seven? The seven!?” The other boys grew alarmed and their eyes went wide. The epileptic boy gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles were white, and then he hoisted himself up with a quick bolt, like an animal that has just heard a twig snap somewhere. He stared past his friends, his glassy eyes blinking a steady, even metric. He got up and started towards the house. His friends followed him, trying to get him to respond.  They followed him up the winding stairs of his house as he kept spilling out sentences filled with random numbers. “C’mon, Billy, where are you going? What is this?”, one of the boys asked as they rounded another close turn in the stairwell. When they got to the epileptic boy’s room at the top of the stairs on the third floor of the house, he immediately crossed to the far side of the room, unlatched the window, turned back to give one last blank look at his friends, and then he stepped over the ledge and fell to the concrete patio below with a hard crack, and his friends rushed to the window and looked down to see the bloody heap of his broken body below.

Then everything began to rewind, and I found my disembodied eyes backing out of the room, and winding back down the stairwell and leaving the house. I started to make my way through the suburban streets, as though I were being drawn somewhere, carried again on the tips of those two ubiquitous fingers. I cut through the yards between the houses, and there were heaps of junk and debris piled in the yards. It appeared that everyone had been instructed to clear all of their belongings out of their houses. A few people had already set fire to their piles, and there were streams of black smoke rising here and there between the houses. I started to wonder how far and how deep this went, and how many people had already been programmed by the little man.

Finally, I arrived at a warehouse filled with dusty old broken furniture and assorted junk from stores that had gone out of business. I found the little man sitting at a banquet table that was set up for a tea party. There were several store mannequins seated at different spots around the table. The mannequins were undressed and bare white, some without arms and even heads. Near the table, standing at the right hand of the little man, there was a pretty blonde figure in a blue negligee. Looking closer, I realized that this was an actual human woman who was just standing perfectly still, not even blinking. The little man just waved his hand at the figure and grunted, “my wife,” by way of an explanation. Apparently, this was a punishment for some menial infraction. He planned to just leave her standing like that until she died of thirst or her heart gave out.

The little man wiped a few drops of tea from the corner of his mouth with his napkin, and then he got up and crossed the room to me. He patted my arm in an almost affectionate gesture, and this acknowledgment returned my body to me. The little man waved his hand broadly at all the junk piled up in the warehouse as though it all represented the machinations of some grand master design. He told me that he was going to bump me up a few notches and that it was time that I knew more about the ultimate extent of his plans. He led me back over to the table, and as we sat down, he explained that he was in the process of maneuvering pieces into place that would allow him to become Vice President. Given what I had witnessed of the magnitude of his ability to control people, this seemed like an absurdly modest goal. I asked him what he planned to do with that kind of power, and he blinked in surprise that I even needed to ask such a question, although I suspected that even he didn’t quite have the answer.

He set his teacup back in it saucer and held his finger up, as though he’d just thought of something. “There’s one more thing you need to see,” he told me, barely restraining his excitement. He took me across the room to where there was a big heavy sliding wooden door that opened onto another section of the warehouse.  He undid the latch and rolled back the door with a theatrical flourish. In the middle of the room, I saw myself, my younger self, tied to a chair, eyes bulging, struggling at the duct tape wrapped around my wrists and the arms of the chair. There was a TV in front of this chair and the light from the images rapidly flashing on the screen flickered across my frantic face. There were speakers all around the chair and there were several audio clips of different voices playing all at once, overlapping each other. The voices kept saying something about men this and men that. I couldn’t distinguish the separate phrases from each other in the overlap, but the word “men” stuck out, recited over and over again like a mantra being drilled into my psyche.

This was how I had been programmed. He was showing me. And suddenly I was seeing it. I was seeing from the vantage point of the chair. I was watching the images firing from the screen. I was hearing the incessant repeating of the voices until I wasn’t clear where my own thoughts ended and the voices began. The voices were my thoughts. I just had to surrender to their undeniable authority. I began to realize that this had all really happened. They had done this to all of us, through the TV, through the radio, through the faces staring down at us from the billboard advertisements. I had to shake myself loose and get clear. I had to somehow retain my memory of all of this and take it with me. I had to warn everyone.

Again the little man was close, right at my ear. He held up a little wafer that looked about the size of a chalky antacid. He told me that he could let me go, but he was going to keep part of my mind right there in the pocket of his shirt, where he swiftly deposited the antacid. He said that I would only be left with an I.Q. of about sixty with the portion of my brain that he would allow me to keep. He seemed so close at my ear that he could almost bite it. I grit my fists and agreed to his terms. Anything to get out of that chair. And the laughter and the flickering images and voices began to subside until there was only the sound of the music as it faded off at the end of that hidden track, and I stood there with my hand on the knob of my front door, feeling like there was something out there that I didn’t want to see. Finally, I let go of the knob and the house went quiet and in the bedroom my wife was still asleep.