This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autofictional seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

Icons Oblong Claim

A rictus grin of pure, unwholesome light disturbed the motion of the clouds above. It was akin to the edge of a film’s shot interacting with its letterbox. Anarcho-nihilists were handing out resources to those affected by the recent flood, carrying the crates of sustenance as high as they could lest they tumble into the knee-high water. Their newsletter would later claim that this was a strategic decision to lessen dependency on the state and accelerate its decay. From the rooftop of his tenement building, Michael Sarne Jr. – son of the largely forgotten and often disliked film director Michael Sarne – was filming the formation of people among the wreckage with a Super 8mm camera set to twenty-four frames per second. At first, his focus was indeed random and broad, flitting from subject to subject purely based on his whim. After a while, however, the subject matter of his amateur documentary narrowed. He, at this point, became an imitation of Zapruder in that his process was simply to follow the action – that is, what he perceived to be the main group of activists. There was no consideration of film language. He zoomed haphazardly. He went from wanting to capture absolutely everything to a kind of gnosis. His level of obsession was no less intense but he became a lot calmer, more assured that everything that needed to be was caught within his frame. A woman lay behind him on the concrete. She was a muse of sorts and certainly immortal. Her ribcage opened with a rupture, snap and hiss. The sound of her flesh tearing had a certain crackle to it akin to the harsher sonic aspects of when you pull clay apart.

“How is it?” she asked.

“The film?” said Michael, “It’s not as if I’m going to be showing it to anyone,”

“Come on now. It’s compelling. Festivals fall over for that kind of stuff. It’s an underdog story. It would make for a nice blurb,”

“Hmmm. I don’t share your cynicism regarding the festival heads. They’d want something more structured. This isn’t for anyone. Like when you flap your hands in the toilet,”

He released his finger from the trigger and gazed upon the aberration in the sky.

“Why do you do that? Open your ribcage, I mean,”

“I need to integrate my insides with the outside. Otherwise my body forgets how humans are supposed to be. How atoms work,”

“Ah. I was actually going to jokingly ask if you needed to air out your organs,”

“Of course you were,”

Michael turned around and walked over before kneeling to inspect more closely the window into her inner chambers. The organs were indistinguishable from a human’s. He felt like he could reach out and touch them and there would be no harm done.

“You’re going to make a real movie, right?” she asked.

Michael shrugged.

“We all die. Maybe you will. It isn’t so bad,” he replied.

“You didn’t answer the question,”

A shifting oblong of crows migrated above their heads.

“Nice pattern,” said Michael.

He clicked his heel against the concrete but made no sound because his soles were rubber.

“It seems to me that nowadays the youth are overly optimistic about the political but quite the inverse regarding the personal,” he said.

“Is it not more the opposite? They use the state of the world as an excuse to not do work and then land consulting jobs?”

“That’s a caricature. I don’t even think you could describe such a job, much less how a young person could stumble into it. What I mean is that people think that some revolution is coming but at the same time, they cling to the idea of growing up where it necessitates discarding the happiness that seems impossible,”

“Isn’t that true, though?”

“Well, such a thing can be a burden, perhaps. But it can also bring its own unique and higher pleasures,”

“Perhaps that is why they pray for revolution like Christians. But I don’t like to think of that as the sole motivator. I don’t think people are that selfish,”

“I mean, nihilists and egoists keep donating to charity. The self-interested men and women spread their doctrine. People can rationalise anything. Logic is a tool,”

“No. Logic is something that exists outside of that. And still, people cower from the many threats of ostracization and submit to laziness and hypocrisy,”

“Well, there’s no use in allowing principle to cut one off from the world. My world was small too, once. People are so eager to condemn others for not keeping to their standards. We need others. And moreover, there are the limits of attention. Yes, the empathic impulse has limits and contradictions. But every concept and rule contains limits, exceptions and its own inverse – much like a table contains its own edge,”

“It doesn’t exist,”

“If it didn’t exist, would you be here?”

“If it does exist, it is so impotent as to be negligible,”

“Well, in that regard, we agree. In that regard, we can perhaps agree,”

“As I feed from the excitement caused by great art, I remember the many people I conversed with. For all their great monuments to the human race, none of them convinced me that humanity had great moral capability,”

“Perhaps you were talking to too many artists and not religious leaders or the survivors of genocides or young political organisers,”

“A bad situation can make a man act exceptionally, bring the angel out of him. But he becomes broken in some way. And in the regular world, is likely no better a person,”

“Hmmm. But you said people aren’t so selfish as to wish for revolution simply to ensure their own repressed desire become feasible?”

“I feel that it is easy to grant people a freedom that does you no harm,”

“Now who’s the idealist? Look at humanity’s history. It’s full of people denying that kind of thing because you can never really tell when you first come into contact with a concept, right? One never listens to the degenerate upon the first encounter,”

“I suppose. I don’t see the point of this conversation. You’re going to Hell. Your rectum will be full of bees, among other things. A spike will protrude through your neck-flesh and another will diagonally enter your mouth from the back, catching the roof and ensuring you cannot close it. You see me, you feel important and then you wander the blasted heath for eternity. Your bones twisted. Your memories violated. Your parents berate you for the murder and assault of a young woman despite your having no recollection of this. You wake up and your penis has turned to hard black plastic that has not been assembled properly so the line dividing the two halves has jagged excess material coming out of it. Other times it’s broken or has a massive slit in it. You try to tell someone but there’s nobody there. You wake up a corpse but you keep denying it. You are constantly sweating. There’s no use. There are two types of humans: those who influence the world and cattle to be led. The former category are led to Hell by people like me and the latter cease to exist,”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t want to release my movie,” said Michael with a smile.

“It’ll come,” said the muse, returning the facial expression but in a more openly performative manner.

That is, she was afflicted by a certain unsureness. The playful nature of their interaction being juxtaposed in her mind with what would eventually have to be done (along with the human mind naturally being unable to register the magnitude of their punishment) lent a certain awkwardness to her attempt to hold up her end of social obligation. Eternity lacked any concreteness to the human mind and so they invariably treated it less seriously than a decades-long prison sentence. Of course, the prison sentence would dig into their human life rather than their unrelated existence as a spirit so one could say there was an element of logic to it in that time on earth became even more of a precious resource. She stuck to what she knew would happen to him as the details would obviously be tailored to his temperament. For the more morally inclined, they would wake up only being able to lie and yet everyone would believe them. The prisoner would continue to try to spill their guts but would instead say something in their own interest. It was a fantastic thing to get the prisoner’s psyche to torture itself – torture was all the more satisfying when it came with the superficial veneer of doing someone a favour. For the more self-interested, they would be cut off from community and regarded as a liar baselessly. The definition they craved from others would be denied and the self would spool out.

“I die at the end of this process, I come back. And when the world ends, well, who knows. Who knows,” the muse said.

“Sounds like a good deal,”

“It is. I see the maze of icons. I see the wet walls and Andy Warhol. I try to do what I can,”

“Do you like me?”

“As much as I can like any of my subjects?”

“That is to say?”

“That is to say what I just said. No further elaboration,”

“I see,”

“Indeed,”

“It’s getting cold,”

“I’m going to close my chest,”

“Okay,”

“Do you think it’s a good movie?”

“I haven’t seen it. But you seem interesting. And I like most things,”

“I’ve heard that muses enter into sexual relations with their subjects,”

“Later,”

“I’m monogamous and would rather have sex with someone else,”

“Am I not pretty enough for you?”

“Not at all. You’re fascinating. It’s just—”

“You want someone more normal? More human?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think it’s that,”

“Then what is it?” the muse asked, seeming genuinely hurt.

“I guess… It’s like groupies, right? The god Dionysus had a cult. And like, they were just groupies to him. I think I’d treat my followers better, I suppose,”

The muse had stuck together her ribcage. The bones slotted into one another and the flesh bridged any gaps perfectly.

“You want a special relationship, right? The kind that feels illogical and wrong?”

“Yeah. I suppose. Yeah, I think you got it,”

They hugged.

“Given your attitude, yes, I understand you liking your own species more than mine,” the muse said.

Michael gazed out onto the muddy, sodden landscape. He shrugged and went inside, closing the door behind him. From a distance, the muse would seem like a gaudy ornament. She followed Michael. His room was a mess. She laid beside his unconscious body, making sure to keep a safe distance so as not to disturb him. No matter how candid she was about Hell, Michael would still approach his predicament in the same way. He would still display the same wilful ignorance. She was glad. Horror would spoil his beauty. He was in his underwear.