Chapter Text
0.Label
To your eternal sunshine and my spotless mind…
1.Ad
Some stories possess a quality that makes them inherently desperate: if recounted methodically from beginning to end with all causes and effects laid out, they become excessively long and tedious. The story nearing its conclusion is one such tale.
But the good news is that its narrator harbors no such urgent desire for expression. Or rather, quite the opposite—the vision attached to it relates solely to the breadth of its dissemination. The narrator of this unfortunate story desperately wishes for it to be known, so we must skip over many parts, even the details of when the phenomenon first appeared, and jump directly to the fragmented ending. In short, it's now some day in the 21st century. The once-hopeful '80s and '90s have been crushed beneath the wheels of a rapidly changing world, then trampled underfoot by people's hurried march forward. It was amid the sound of these footsteps that Jean rented an apartment with a television.
This situation could be called rare. Not the television itself as an object, but an apartment that came furnished with a TV and was willing to rent to someone like Jean—a fresh graduate, an intern without a guarantor—on Manhattan!
55 West 81st Street, American Gardens Building, 11th floor.
When Jean spotted the real estate agent's ad in a magazine, it happened to be exactly 11:11 AM, as if all her good fortune had accumulated in that very moment. Instinctively, at this traditionally spiritual hour, she closed her eyes and wished that the cheap rent and luxurious location weren't an illusion. Some void-like presence answered the struggling, jobless intern: when she opened her eyes again, the magazine was still clutched tightly in her rolled-up hand—so tightly, in fact, that the content on the other side of the real estate ad was faintly showing through. She saw the letters M, E, T, followed by another M, unable to make out what word came next. Probably "mummy"—after all, the Metropolitan Museum had been promoting its new Egyptian wing exhibition lately.
All these details made it impossible for Jean to believe this was an illusion. She called the agent, and what followed went unbelievably smoothly. Though the agent never met her face-to-face, she ultimately stepped into the apartment at a monthly rent one hundred dollars cheaper than advertised. Perhaps the good fortune of 11:11 had truly smiled upon her. To commemorate it, she cut out that magazine page and pasted it on the apartment door, completely burying MET and that unknown word in the hollow space between glossy paper and wall.
2.The First Proper Call
The apartment's interior decoration could be called luxurious. The budget Jean had prepared in advance for furniture went completely unused, which was simultaneously unsettling and guilt-inducing. Even though this building had been gutted and rebuilt twenty years ago due to aging pipes and no longer attracted Upper West Side elites the way it did when first constructed, the rent had dropped to a level where she had reasonable grounds to suspect her neighbors might be murderers—though Jean later discovered she had no neighbors at all.
This apartment was the only successfully rented unit on the 11th floor of the American Gardens Building.
After repeated inquiries, the agent hemmed and hawed, euphemistically saying that "bad things" had occurred in the room last century, but the perpetrator had been arrested and had since passed away.
"However, those incidents were so extremely heinous that no one was willing to rent..."
The agent's voice became muffled on the other end of the line, the final mumbling probably some mysteriously pronounced rendition of "American Gardens Building." But this call actually set Jean's mind at ease. Indeed, such stigmatized properties did occasionally appear on the market, difficult to sell due to cults or murder cases. But Jean's current circumstances left her no capacity to factor these psychological considerations into her decision. Besides, she thought optimistically, a murderer dead for decades was the safest kind—she didn't even need to worry about the killer wanting to return to the scene of the crime. The only inconvenience was that the agent said it was best to contact them using the landline installed in the room.
This old-fashioned term made Jean freeze for a moment. Though she was indeed holding an old-fashioned red receiver, the concept of the object in her hand hadn't truly registered in her consciousness until the word "landline" explicitly appeared. Before she could respond, the other party had already hurriedly hung up, so Jean pulled her suitcase and began circling the room, carefully examining the place where she would be entrusting her life.
The room's interior was almost as retro as the landline itself. Above the abandoned fireplace was white granite, probably once displaying a painting. The outline of accumulated dust faintly traced the shadow of a frame; the oxidation differential of several decades made the previously covered spot more pronounced. She guessed the room's owner must have been quite passionate about audiovisual products, because she not only found recording and video equipment so old that even the secondhand market couldn't repair it, but also discovered a complete stereo system in the bedroom. Then came the various knives in the kitchen—ceramic, serrated, stainless steel, cleavers, letter openers... She tried to convince herself that the agent had probably thoughtfully prepared these for potential pastry-enthusiast tenants.
Beyond the bedroom and kitchen was the living room, where a Panasonic television nearly a meter long stood quietly against the wall, its screen flanked by the retro silver trim everyone would imagine. Jean saw her own face clearly reflected in the dark screen, an illusion of being carefully scrutinized by herself enveloping her, gradually dissipating after about five or six seconds—though she hadn't actually shifted her gaze from her own reflection.
Jean had actually tried moving this television to the study, but without success. It was too heavy, probably sixty or seventy kilograms—likely also why the agent had abandoned scheduling an in-home pickup. She'd looked it up: as long as it could receive a signal or had a converter, this old CRT television could still function. She wanted to ask the agent whether a digital converter box had been installed, but the landline wouldn't connect.
3.Computer
These antiques from the last century didn't really disturb her; rather, it was her own modern high-tech devices that were malfunctioning. Jean's computer had somehow contracted a virus—she was quite certain it was the kind of harmless but annoying bug that internet hackers randomly deployed for entertainment. Her notes app was unusable.
No matter when she opened it, the notes app contained only one sticky note and one unchanging line in her calendar: Subscribe to GQ.
Jean tried to close it, but the moment she clicked the red X in the upper right corner, the laptop would emit an error chime sound, the screen would flicker, and the note would automatically pop up again. She'd restarted her laptop, and when it powered back on, that note was already quietly floating on the clean, freshly initialized desktop.
But aside from that, her laptop was functioning perfectly. Like some extreme fashion devotee evangelizing through this ridiculous trojan virus. Sometimes the virus itself would even glitch or freeze. For instance, last week when she opened her computer, this phrase had repeated itself over thirty times. Other times it would suddenly create several new notes, all containing only this same sentence.
Subscribe to GQ. Subscribe to GQ. Subscribe to GQ.
Subscribe to GQ. Jean silently recited this mantra-like phrase. In a playful mood, she clicked the follow button for GQ's channel on a video streaming site. The next morning when she woke up and opened her laptop, the auto-populating note hadn't disappeared. Two new notes appeared motionlessly on the desktop.
「Subscribe to GQ.」
She tapped the keyboard lightly, switching to the second note, where a brand new word awaited her:
「Print edition.」
4.TV
Jean stopped using her computer. The weary unemployment period thus transformed into "fortunately I'm unemployed so I don't have to work every day." She didn't actually go subscribe to GQ's print magazine either—in the face of such uncanny incidents, not obeying commands was the normal person's response. Jean had no intention of becoming a horror movie protagonist.
So the computer was temporarily shelved, and her phone was likewise kept at arm's length. All modern electronic products became destabilizing factors—who knew how this mysterious trojan virus (she still tried to convince herself it was just a virus) might spread to various places. Smartphones, smartwatches, smart bands—everything branded as smart was stripped of authority and cast onto the other side of the scale. An emotion that made her skin crawl yet couldn't quite be called fear pushed Jean toward the neatly arranged 1980s in the room. At least those heavy, clumsy machines wouldn't suddenly be invaded by ghosts and viruses from the future.
So Jean began attempting to turn on that television. Compared to the tape recorder and phonograph, the TV was closest to the entertainment activities she was familiar with. Though she still couldn't get through to the agent on the phone, it appeared the agent had indeed prepared a digital signal converter.
On a particularly warm afternoon, that Panasonic was successfully turned on. A heavy degaussing sound rang out, static electricity crackling across the screen's surface, making Jean's hair stand on end. A few seconds later, an amber-tinted picture gradually spread from the center of the screen, granular electronic sounds approaching from far to near, and the little people imprisoned by the silver frame began to speak.
After all, it was an old television. Jean guessed it couldn't receive many signals, which was why she kept seeing only those same few very retro channels over and over. Sometimes she'd even accidentally switch to playback mode for videotapes. She couldn't tell whether the previous tenant had personally recorded them or if some rented tapes were stuck in the player, but she had indeed switched to A Nightmare on Elm Street three times—the original twice, the third once.
The TV's volume was limited because the volume button was completely broken, maxing out at only sixty percent. But this murmur made Jean relax again. She even began to understand the cozy lives of last century's happy families she'd once seen depicted. A family leaning on each other on the sofa, whiling away time before a screen emanating soft light in the darkness, occasionally laughing together at stupid dialogue, then being frightened together by cheap special effects.
An anchor of unknowable origin silently dropped into her heart, making her believe without reason yet with utter certainty that she was safe. That faint color shift produced by the aging electron beam gave her the illusion of wearing armor. Or perhaps not armor, but something truly softer wrapping around her. After a week of this peaceful and cozy retro life, while randomly pressing buttons on the remote, Jean landed on a channel broadcasting a mystery thriller.
A woman dressed like Miss Marple and a man in a conductor's uniform were saying something. The picture was black and white, seemingly a locked-room mystery film. But Jean couldn't actually recall which Agatha story this was, probably because she was already very sleepy, almost dozing off on the sofa. So she was merely listening to those very period-specific lines. When they first premiered, they might have been called brilliantly stunning, but just as young people born in the new millennium can no longer understand why Witness for the Prosecution could be considered an epoch-making work, looking back at those lines that had long since become templates from this moment in time, one could only feel nostalgia and cliché.
Like right now—Jean, only breaths away from sleep, could naturally continue these characters' dialogue, even answering ahead in her mind.
"My God, madam, I swear to you, I truly know nothing about this."
"I believe you, Mr. Hans. If that weren't the case, I wouldn't have come to ask you while avoiding Lady Lawrence."
"But how did you know I once worked in that building?"
"Basic common sense, my dear child. Come, while those stubborn people argue, let us ignore them and uncover the truth."
"But madam, all I know is the rumored incident, however those incidents were so extremely heinous...that no one was willing to rent Mosesby Manor anymore!"
"No, sir. Believe me, you know far, far more than you think you do... This is my number. Perhaps you'd best contact me using the landline installed in the room—the red one."
Jean opened her eyes.
The good news was she apparently hadn't completely lost perception of artistic works—she could anticipate these lines not because she'd grown numb to genre films. The bad news was that in the face of this bad news, the good news seemed so utterly insignificant.
Before she'd decided how to react—before she'd completely sorted out this profoundly uncanny chain of cause and effect and its possibilities—this Panasonic emitted a buzzing sound, like a tape getting stuck, the wall and half the door also implicated. The magazine cutout stuck to the door with Walmart's cheapest glue stick fluttered down in this minor tremor. The real estate advertisement was still a real estate advertisement, but the previously unclear writing on the back wasn't what Jean had thought.
No mummy, no Metropolitan Museum, no contact information, no interior page design. The typeface looked like Garamond, but with some subtle differences that let Jean know this definitely wasn't Garamond. Two words arranged in small caps at the center of the bone-white page, gradually extinguishing the impulse to scream and flee through the door, instead giving birth to a strange sorrow and a desire to cry for reasons other than fear.
Met Me.
The sound from the television receded. Jean chaotically recited these two words in her mind—words that together created a grammatical error—and a tear fell without reason, streaking down her face.
TBC.