The long pink hallway rolls by. Someone is walking down that hall at a resolute pace. A corner is turned, heading into another lengthy section.
Mr. Stevens sits at his desk doing paperwork and smoking. There’s a pounding at the office door and then Samson lets himself in.
MR. STEVENS
Come in.
Sam drops the two jugs of orange liquid onto Stevens’ desk and flops into a chair.
MR. STEVENS
Sam, Sam, the medicine man.
SAMSON
No more kids, Jack.
MR. STEVENS
(arid, but sincere)
But I love kids.
SAMSON
No more kids. They’re fucking crazy.
MR. STEVENS
Oh what’s the difference?
SAMSON
There’s a big difference.
MR. STEVENS
They’re just kids.
SAMSON
They’re fragile, and unpredictable, and bonkers. And you don’t give a shit about kids.
MR. STEVENS
(assertively)
The world is over, Sam. But the nice thing about children is that there will always be more of them.
And if we don’t keep them entertained they will tear us all to pieces.
SAMSON
That’s heartwarming.
Stevens takes a drag and starts over.
MR. STEVENS
So what do we have here?
SAMSON
Dimethyltryptamine diluted with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor for oral consumption. Grows just like plain old lawn grass, but it’s extremely potent, and not easy to come by in this quantity.
MR. STEVENS
Your services are greatly appreciated.
SAMSON
Save it. I’m a free agent. And I won’t be held responsible for your theatrics.
MR. STEVENS
Oh will you relax. It’s not actually going to kill them.
Stevens flicks his eyes at the camera.
SAMSON
You have no idea what it’s going to do.
MR. STEVENS
It’s all been highly scripted.
SAMSON
Once you go down this road the script is useless. You’re off the map and you’re drifting in very deep water.
MR. STEVENS
That’s precisely the idea, Sam, and you know that as well as I do.
SAMSON
I do not pretend to be someone else’s salvation.
Stevens loses his temper.
MR. STEVENS
Then that’s where you’re deluding yourself. And that’s why you’re still peddling formaldehyde and why you’re working for me. So get off your high horse and enjoy the show. You made this deal. Don’t forget that. Now if you’ll excuse me.
SAMSON
I don’t need your firewater, Jack.
Someday you’re gonna choke on it.
Sam exits and slams the door. Mr. Stevens lights up another cigarette and returns to his paperwork.
***
Samson passes through a steel door and enters the loading dock sector on his way out of the building. He walks by garage doors and open trailers backed up to the docks.
Then he hears a quiet voice, and he stops. He looks toward the dark, open trailers. A woman’s voice is mumbling softly out of the blackness.
Sam walks over to the dock utility light and turns it on. He pivots the mechanical arm and points it into the trailer. The inside of the trailer contains a few glass racks full of water glasses. He swings the spotlight on its arm.
Simone is huddled up on the floor in the back corner, smoking a cigarette. She holds up a hand to block the light.
SIMONE
Who’s there?
SAMSON
You work here?
SIMONE
Yeah.
SAMSON
All right, sorry to bother you.
SIMONE
Wait. What time is it?
He hesitates.
SAMSON
It’ll be over soon.
SIMONE
How do you know?
Sam looks down and thinks about that.
Then he turns and looks straight into the camera. A bright light shines in his mirrored sunglasses, reflecting the light back into the camera. He peers in closer.
Then he walks away. Simone squints into the light, trying to make sense, smoke from her cigarette curling sculpturally in the harsh beam.
***
In his self-storage unit, Jonah sits at the vinyl-upholstered card table he’s using for a desk. His fingers clacking on the plastic keyboard of the bulky typing machine. His breath steaming in the cold, dry air. The bare light bulb. His boots. The metal walls. His brown winter coveralls. His watch tiny ticking. Orange light from the glowing screen illuminates his face as he types in the night.
Outside the storage unit, the horizontal lines of the closed garage door and the clacking sound of his fingers typing on the plastic keyboard.
JONAH
(typing)
If you take the smallest increment of time and split it like an atom, is there a singular moment wherein all things are revealed and all things come to pass? If so then this moment is injected into every moment for all of time’s eternity.
Garage doors are lined up like blank faces.
JONAH
(typing)
At the edge of human, there is a strange white noise, the sucking, suckling sound of the universe falling into the emptiness of itself.
A floodlight, illuminating the black winter vapor.
JONAH
(typing)
In a perfectly sterile environment the most lethal of sicknesses is life itself, and we are haunted by the shadows of ourselves.
The typing stops.
Quiet outside.
The wash of faraway traffic.
The long rows of storage units, facing each other.
Inside, the word processor sits on the card table, the screen is glowing, but Jonah lies on his mattress wrapped up in a wool blanket and his sleeping bag. He’s shaking and sweating, shivering violently, a fever sweat, a hallucinatory brain-boil.
A flaming glow suddenly illuminates the space, and the cutting sound of a blowtorch. Jonah opens his eyes and his face is aglow in an orange fiery light.
He sits up and looks at the light source. He reaches out his hands to warm them.
A small mushroom cloud is burning away on the concrete floor at the center of the room. The perpetual mushroom cloud fires away like a holographic furnace. Orange, red, green, blue, yellow, white. It’s pretty, and warm.
Then it’s gone. And he’s illuminated by a cold white light. Striations of watery translucence shift across his face.
A large ice cube has replaced the mushroom cloud. At the center of the ice block is a figure, a little boy, frozen with his hands up, and wearing an orange life preserver.
Jonah gets on his feet and approaches the ice block. He runs his own hands along the side of the ice block, looking in at the frozen boy. The ice is flowing with interior strata and delicate crystalline light.
Ice melting and pooling on the floor—
And then there’s nothing there, just a pool of water on the floor. The bare light bulb overhead is reflected in the water.
Jonah turns and sees himself lying on the mattress, like a mummy in the sleeping bag. Motionless and frosted dead.
Just outside the door, a loud banging erupts from inside the aluminum garage. Jonah is pounding on the metal door from inside his cell.
JONAH
(shouting from inside)
Sam! Sam, I’m not finished yet. I need more time. I’ve changed my mind, Sam. I need more time. I wanna be with people, Sam. Sam! Sam! Sam!
He bangs frantically, but no one is there. The alleyway of storage units is empty and indifferent.
***
Out on the dark field, the old lonely tree comes alive, a skeletal form of electric-blue light throbbing and pulsating, strands of energy coursing along its branches, trunk, and root-system buried in the ground. The tree of electric light explodes on and off, short-circuiting. Then the night is black.
***
A glow of light emerges from outside, underneath the crack in the storage unit door. And then two beams of light scanning under the door. An insect enters, crawling under the door, ticking, clicking, probing, and glowing. A glowing, irradiated cockroach.
The cockroach finds its way to the center of the room and takes in its surroundings, scanning, processing, and pulsating with light. The bug glows brighter and brighter, throbbing with light and colors until it is nearly illuminating the entire space in waves of colored light, pulsing and dimming like a luminescent scarab.
Jonah is in a deep fever-sleep bundled up in his sleeping bag on the mattress. The cockroach approaches him, ticking across the floor. Jonah’s face radiates in the metallic-colored light of the insect.
The cockroach climbs up onto the mattress, crawls across Jonah’s face, and then disappears inside his mouth.
A bundle of light descends down the interior of the sleeping bag, headed toward Jonah’s belly. The sleeping bag pulsates momentarily like a glowing cocoon, and then the space is black.