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It’s not that he wants it to love him. In fact, it would be the worst-case scenario, were it to love him, maybe, or maybe he’s thinking too human. Maybe its love is this. Maybe he just wants it to love him human-like, or maybe there’s something missing, and maybe he wants it to be familiar, and maybe—
Alex Kralie is coughing blood into a sink, and maybe the Operator loves him, and more likely it doesn’t (maybe it hates him, maybe it’s eating him), and definitely there is nothing righteous in it.
He thinks he loves the Operator sometimes. He hates it, reviles it, wishes and dreams of a world in which it never came to rest on his shoulders, but too he leans back into its cool embrace, takes comfort in its quiet blasphemy, its never-should-have-been, its passionless cruelty. It doesn’t hurt people perversely, Alex (weapon in guiding hand) knows. It, like any other animal, feeds.
Feeding on him. Through him. Is that love? Can it be called love, to be used, to be held and handled and driven through? It would be easier if this was love, he thinks. Kinder, maybe.
Alex knows more about any of this than anyone else does. He knows the Operator, the sick curl of it; he knows the fates of Seth and Sarah and Amy, he knows Jay (impossible boy) and he knows Tim.
Tim fucking Wright. Tim Fucking Wright, frustration appended as middle name, because who is he, really? Kid with pockmarked memory, ghosting through life, killing people by companionship. He’s not even particularly charismatic. He barely makes friends or talks to anyone, lived most of his life shut up and drugged up in a hospital, was dragged into Marble Hornets by Brian’s cheer and his own reluctance to disappoint Alex face-to-face, only Brian’s name on the sign-up sheet. Who was he to be the Operator’s host? What did it see in him, that it clung to him like film through everything? Even if he was isolated, there had to have been other people at the hospital, people that were more, people that could leave. There had to have been. So why—
Well.
The phenomenon of staying and leaving. Marble Hornets explored (was supposed to explore) it; the movie was Alex’s own musings on the subject. Leaving one’s hometown, leaving the familiar, seeking something new, and yet being pulled back eternally to one’s origin. Leaving for want of more. Returning for—what? Love of what made you?
The movie barely touches the places its protagonist had been before coming home. All of that was coalesced and shoved into the Before, and what, then, does that mean for Alex in this? Is he a short detour for the Operator? Has the movie not even begun—?
The Operator did not love everyone but it liked them. Even while Tim had forgotten, he felt it there with him: a wisp, a touch of something, inhuman and darkly bright. It has always been familiar (sweet phantom) and, without memory, without thought, without name, he knew it. Friend, father, God. Something like that.
It watched the movie. As it was made, it watched the movie, a double-feature: film and director’s commentary. It—well, no one liked the movie (probably not even Alex), and there’s no telling if the Operator could even understand what a movie was, but, beast, it liked the people that put it on. Little things, prey, children.
It liked Alex most of all, and it did not love him but it chose him, and wasn’t that worse?
The weapon the hand picks up versus the nails that, even when pulled, regrow. Choice versus entanglement, and maybe the Operator loved Tim, and maybe it even liked him, but (and Tim has thought long and hard about this) it was still stuck with him. And wasn’t that better? Or—wasn’t that something?
Tim does not love the Operator, but he can’t help but wonder if it would have made a difference, had he been approached. Had he had the chance to accept or deny, even if denial meant being eaten. Would it have mattered if he hadn’t been a child, if he had been grown, had understood the beast he was looking at? (The friend?) Choice versus stuck-with. Was the Operator a child, too, when Tim was? Did they grow up together, is theirs a childhood friends-to-lovers, can this be rationalized into anything that isn’t brutality, isn’t inhuman, isn’t the death of everyone Tim loves simply because he loves them?
Were he to choose. Were he to choose. Would he feel this guilty, then?
No. No, this isn’t a coming-of-age love story, and love in the beast sense isn’t romance. And Alex isn’t loved (far from it) but he is chosen, and he feels the Operator’s reaching limbs halo him like something holy, and isn’t this God, or what could be God, or the concept of? Isn’t he, by extension, the hand of? No held weapon necessary. Gun as pointed finger that smites.
Marble Hornets wasn’t written to be a horror story, but any author knows that the writing eventually evolves past you, and you are no longer forming it but following, chasing after the world that has blown beyond your reach. Alex loves the Operator. It chose him, and it is eating him, and you wouldn’t think of love as a player in horror, but it always is. Love—separate from romance—plays a hand in everything, all societal facades stripped away; love at base, love as instinct, as inherent, as inheritance.
Alex does the killing. Alex feeds it. It is as much to save his friends as it is to please the Operator, and he doesn’t think those two things are in opposition. It is just… one love, contributing to another.
He’ll always feel guilty, probably. Tim wasn’t made for a life like this (was made specifically for a life like this) and he wasn’t built for acceptance of what the Operator offers him. It—loves him, and he doesn’t know what to do with that, cannot reconcile love and destruction, cannot be at ease with it hanging languid across his shoulders. It loves him, and Tim had no choice. Or he did, and he was too young to recognize it as choice, or the hospital chose for him, or—
It loves him. And that’s worse.
It loves Tim, and Alex could scream. Is screaming, really, bodily; every movement he makes is screaming, is shouting and sobbing and it’s not fair, it’s not, why should he have to give up so much for it not to even love him, for it to love Tim of all people, meek scared mentally ill Tim Wright—
Why him? Why did it have to love him? Why couldn’t Tim be no one, why couldn’t Tim be Alex, why couldn’t he have been spared the cruelty that is love—
Alex, try as he might to ignore it, to correct the narrative, sees it coming. Someone was always going to kill him. It was a toss-up between Jay and Tim; Jay was the original protagonist and the person most personally betrayed by Alex—at least of those still living—so it would have been satisfying for him to kill Alex in the end, especially considering the fan interpretation of him as meek and tentative (not altogether untrue). Tim would have been equally satisfying; the head to Alex’s tails, one extreme of a relationship with the Operator, the wellspring made to kill the tributary.
When the shot hit Jay, and the Operator came to feast, Alex knew then that his death was close at hand, and the scales had finally tipped in Tim’s favor. He did not think of this certainty as he stepped forward towards his doom. He only thought how fitting it was, that the Operator would finally be forced to favor one of them: choice versus love.
In a different story, a better one, a more human narrative, choice would have won, for a love like the one Tim is stuck with is an unhealthy one; neither he nor the Operator can walk away from it. But this isn’t a human story, and Alex, once chosen, couldn’t walk away either.
In the end it comes down to this: without his permission, Marble Hornets had become a horror story, and neither option is good, really, but maybe the other one was better. And maybe they were each made more for the opposing side, but the cards didn’t fall that way. And Alex was starving for it. And it feels juvenile to attribute the people he killed to envy, but maybe that’s what it was, at base: jealous desire. Why, in the face of all his tributes, didn’t the Operator love him?
Tim carves his throat out as the Operator looms over them both, and it does not watch Alex.
Tim carves Alex’s throat out because he hates him, and because the Operator is standing over them both, leaning its dark weight into Tim’s mind, and because the static is so overwhelming he’ll do anything to make it stop, and because Alex killed Jay, and because Alex killed Seth, and Sarah, and Amy, and Brian is dead and Tim is nothing and after all this, after everything, the Operator is letting Alex die.
Tim is the last one left. The static fades, but never leaves him, enveloping him like humidity, sticking to him. Tim is the last one left, because the Operator liked the rest of them. Because it only liked them. And Tim has toyed with the idea of suicide, but with no one left to murder him, that dark light can focus on curling into his mind, pushing away the possibility, stilling his bloody hand holding the knife as it tries so hard to lift toward something fatal.
It loves him. It loves him. (And that’s worse.)