- Mr. Bakshy
- How did you know where Ashwini had hidden... the paan box ?
- Easy, People can't help thinking about what they're hiding.
When I mentioned the paan box he left the table.
I pressured him around a bit.
Watched his eyes.
He gave himself away.
Es gibt Sachen über die darf man nicht reden.
Sachen, die früher passiert sind. Vor langer Zeit.
Aber dass man nicht drüber reden darf, heißt nicht....dass man es je vergessen kann.
Es gibt nämlich Sachen die lassen sich nie mehr vergessen.
*Some things may not be spoken of.. things from the past, from long ago.
But this does not mean you can ever forget them.
There are things that can never be forgotten.
"Le sette temute porte sono nascoste in sette luoghi maledetti."
"Guai a chi si avvicina senza sapere".
stai attento a quello che fai,
perché questo albergo è stato costruito sopra una delle sette porte del male,
*
"The seven dreaded gateways are concealed in seven cursed places."
"Woe be unto him who ventures near without knowledge."
Be careful what you do,
because this hotel was built over one of the seven doors of evil
By Gad! Sir, you are a character. That you are.
There's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing.
Bilocation
Another self that appears in your proximity.
A.K.A. Simultaneously Existing Incarnations.
They've been sighted and studied around the world since the early 19th century.
Doppelgangers don't interact with humans, but bilocations do.
They appear, assume physical form, and take action.
They are perfect mimics, even of voices.
But being fakes, they eventually disappear.
Bilocations have the memories of the original person.
They also obtain their new memories.
Other people can't tell the difference between them.
The original doesn't share the bilocation's experiences.
They are unaware that their life is being altered.
When human is torn between conflicting emotions,
Bilocations appear.
We live, Bilocations exist.
They take over the lives.
But I believe...
This is the world we coexist with them...
- But towards the end you did say...
- "The Empty Man."
- That's right.
- That's an interesting phrase.
- You could say he called out to you.
- Or not. Hmm. What does it mean?
- The Empty Man is a meditation. A focal point for the targeted manifestation of hidden energies.
- Right. And already you're starting to lose me.
- Just as man feeds and is fed by the biosphere and the atmosphere, so it is our thoughts feed and are fed by the noosphere.
- The noosphere?
- The sum of all conscious thought transmission from which can be stimulated through the application of certain vectors, very much like a virus. You can't see it.
- Well, what is it?
- The veil between form and flesh, and the means by which it can be pierced and the two allowed to commingle. We're each of us blind in our way.
Distractions rob us of focus.
Technology robs us of memory.
Repetition robs us of comprehension.
You know the child's game, if you say your name enough times, it becomes gibberish? That holds true for whole concepts, even entire bodies of thought.
For example,
take Nietzsche's old line, "If you stare into an abyss, it also stares into you."
Right? Well... That has been rendered meaningless through repetition. It's a refrigerator magnet. It's cliche. It's harmless.
But when was the last time you really thought about that? What is an abyss?
And if you stare into it, why? What about it calls to you?
And if it stares into you, it stands to reason something in you must also be calling to it.
And that, my friend, is anything but harmless, if you really reflect on it. So the question becomes, if profound meaning can be robbed of something by so simple a task as repetition,
which is more fundamental?
Which is more true? Your name or the gibberish?
That is the Empty Man.
*
We apologize for the interruption.
We are experiencing an unstable network connection.
I repeat.
Due to the rapid spread of the infection in densely populated areas, the situation in major cities has become uncontrollable.
Infected individuals are known to become suddenly violent, and main symptoms of the infection include screaming and bleeding of the eyes.
Breaking news just in.
Cannibalistic behavior among the infected has been reported.
I repeat.
Infected individuals' cannibalistic tendencies are spreading.
Arthur Howitzer, Jr., college freshman, eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains, convinced his father, proprietor of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, to fund his transatlantic passage as an educational opportunity to learn the family business through the production of a series of travelogue columns to be published for local readers in the Sunday Picnic magazine.
Over the next ten years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time and transformed Picnic into The French Dispatch, a factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics, the arts, high and low, fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink, and diverse stories of human interests set in faraway quartiers.
He brought the world to Kansas.
His writers line the spines of every good American library. Berensen, Sazerac, Krementz, Roebuck Wright.
One reporter known as the best living writer in quality of sentences per minute.
One who never completed a single article, but haunted the halls cheerily for three decades.
One privately blind writer who wrote keenly through the eyes of others.
The uncontested crackerjack of grammatical expertise.
Famously gracious with his writers, Arthur Jr. was less courteous with the rest of the magazine’s staff.
