Don't Talk to Philip, Talk to the Fog

‘“Talk to the fog. Or to that dog, or God over there… he’s the one wearing a toaster as a hat.” Sure enough, there He was. The shirtless Almighty, in slacks, trench coat, and a white plastic double-breasted toaster slotted onto His head.

‘“Just don't talk to Philip,” he continued. “You’ll only encourage him.” From behind toaster head, Philip peered like a slippery kid who had lobbed a twopence insult and ran for cover. “What do I do, then? Look at him… staring at me, as if I owe him my life.”’

The tickly legs of a bouldering blue bottle made their way over my Adam’s Apple. I swatted, it took offence and charged at my eye. Then I was back in the cafe. Buttery air. The crickle crackle of knives and forks on the palate of the plate. I sank into the chair, slouching into stray fumes of chafed coffee and crippling self-awareness, the kind you get when you think even your own coffee is judging you.

‘Yeah, so, that’s it. That’s what Kierkegaard told me to do, Max. See, I know he once said something or other about existence being backwards, but this was a compass with identity issues.’

‘Huh. And I thought I had weird dreams.’ Max said, steadying his foot on the knock-kneed leg of the café table, gazing into the steam rising from his freshly delivered espresso. ‘But for what it’s worth, dressed in all that schmutter, what I want to know is: did God wear shoes?’ He tapped the teaspoon on the side of the espresso mug, then, as if it were a loaded gun, placed it down on the table, loaded, cocked, perceptive.

‘He certainly knows how to toast,’ I replied. ‘But to answer your question, Max, God doesn’t wear shoes because he floats above suffering. I pronate.’

‘Ain’t that so,’ Max said, jigging a ruminating leg.

‘“Enough! Shoo! Beat it!” I shouted at Philip, prying the toaster from God’s head, stuffing what were now sausage fingers into the two slots and taking rubber-band-like swipes at Philip’s head. Swip swip swip!

‘“I wonder,” said a demobbed, derobed God, as he sank into a swimming pool of mud and tacky psychosis. “I wonder whether there’s anyone above me. Up there. Greater than Me.” Then, get this, Max, his eyebrows left his forehead on wings attached to fishing wire.

“I fear I’ve lost myself, who I am, where I am. What I am… just fog, of fog, within fog?”’

My storytelling was on top form, from top down, and as I wrapped up, the spring bulbs of Max’s imagination bloomed while he gawped at a passerby in a tiny skirt carrying a box of doughnuts.

‘I turned to ask Kierkegaard to give me and God some peace,’ I continued. ‘Before he left, K asked if I existed. I said probably not. “Fair enough”, he said, and we both started crying into a giant symbolic doughnut with eyeballs as sprinkles. God, gone. But Philip. Goddamn it, Philip, a human salad.’

‘What were his eyes?’

‘Cucumber.’

‘I would have gone for cherry tomatoes myself.’ Max plopped a sugar lump into his mug. ‘I don’t know what to say, Ira… and I have no idea who this Keek-agurd guy is, but he certainly had some solid stuff to say about… well, he seemed like a good guy with a good beard.’

‘He was clean-shaven.’

‘I take back my comment. Don’t trust cleanshaven dreams.’ Bearded Max was a lanky, obtuse man with bony angles that never fit anything around him, meaning he had to change his body’s position almost as often as he breathed out. ‘Did he leave in the end, you’re old friend, Philip?’

‘Max, he never leaves me. This is the problem. He’s like an eye floater, always there. However much you chase him around, he drifts just out of reach. A gluttonous leech, latched onto me like jewellery, like…’ I sipped my coffee, and as I pulled the mug away, there he was, a sedimentary glare of sagging jowls, slipping closer and closer to me the more I tried to drink him away.

Max studied me for a moment.

‘Come on, Ira, this again?’ he said, tossing a right leg over a left knee. ‘Go on holiday or something. He’s taken too much of your attention.’ A bus rumbled by, Max’s foot slipped, dislodging the table’s leg from the ground. The teaspoon slid towards the table lip. As it tumbled over, I snatched it and slapped it back down on the surface. Good catch.

‘Good catch,’ he said. ‘You need to get over Philip. Cut him loose.’

‘Easier said than done, Maxwell,’ I said, leaning back in the chair, allowing the lisping sun onto my face between the impudent clouds. ‘Difficult to evade someone when they’re burnt into you like a film negative. It’s I who is having to endure his knowing smile. It’s me who has been left with his moist eyes and floppy cheeks and a membrane full of guilt stuffed into my brain, inflating, pushing against the inside of my skull, pressure, more pressure, bearing down on me,’ three stinging slaps on the table, ‘just…’

‘Hey, hey, take it easy, fella.’ Max put a reassuring hand on my shoulder as the thickening capillaries in my cheeks migrated into my eyes.

‘Always the same guy. Philip. White t-shirt. Philip. Annoying eddies of foam in the corners of his mouth. Philip with white mouth foam.’

‘It’s always the mouthfoam ones, isn’t it? And you named him Philip Antewhort?’

‘Why not? If he was going to be a regular feature, then at least make him real.’

‘But, yeah, okay, but he has a real name, you know. You can’t just give a name to someone you don’t know, that’s just profanity… in some way.’

‘Sure, I can.’

‘But he is a real person. Out there…’ a directionless, long arm injected, ‘in this city. And that’s the problem right there,’ Max said, tapping the table with his finger like a gavel and flipping the script on his leg position. ‘You gave your old fake, dream fellow a name, and now you’re stuck with him.’

It’s true. Maybe if I hadn’t named him, he would have just eventually disappeared.

‘Max, come off it. For my benefit, I’ve named him. He will never know, nor care, and that’s it.’

Let’s go back a bit in time, just to catch you up. One year ago. Late to a rare screening of a 7.5-hour-long Hungarian film, Satantango, and in haste to get a good seat, I mistakenly joined the line for a premiere of a Marvel film. In my bewilderment, I jumped the queue. Cut up scores of Marvel-bedecked customers, including Philip, a broad-chested, curly-locked puppy dog of a man in a white t-shirt two sizes too small, somehow creased. As I passed him, we made eye contact. Despite it lasting a mere 72 frames, contact was so tall, so interminable that it could have ironed out the creases in his t-shirt. The assistant whipped away my stub, lifted his twig and pointed to the left (not the right), which led me to a theatre devoid of people. I settled myself in my favourite seat, third row from the back, and redirected Marvel strays who didn’t know their left from their right. I’d already missed the first few minutes of the film. One of those strays was Philip. It was his exhausted t-shirt that caught my eye first, from between the double doors. Then came half a hurt face peering up at me from behind the half-opened door. A face stung with injustice.

‘“We’re in a jar, like pickles”, said the sullen, monochrome character from the film.

On realising he was in the wrong screening room (was it realisation, or calculation?), Philip retreated from the doorway and disappeared, but forever fossilised in my mind.

It seems fair to me that the whole exchange provided enough evidence to prove that I hadn’t jumped the queue. But Philip, god, Philip will forever think I did. Did he peer at me through the doors just to make a point? Did I scowl, berate or insult him in those 72 frames? I must’ve done. I don’t remember, but it’s possible.

Surely you’ve seen those snaking, jumbled queues? Like the Minotaur’s labyrinth. The simple explanation is that I was just eager to get to my seat. You wouldn’t believe me if I said I’d never jumped the queue in my life, but that’s my word against yours. It’s me who usually calls out such pirates. But now I’d broken social convention and paid the price, with Philip as the arbiter of guilt and my bed as the dock. It’s this that haunts me. An unfinished cliffhanger. Since then, he’s been a bookmark in every dream I’ve had, staring at me and whispering, ‘It’s not your turn.’

A cling-a-cling-cling from Max’s peppy espresso mining, as if searching for gold, stirred me from the recollection.

‘You’re sure it’s the same guy?’

‘No doubt. Every time,’ I said. ‘But listen, listen, Max. I’m not just dreaming about Philip. Philip is in my dreams. Always there, like bad lighting. But if he’s there, that means I’m still dreaming. Which means... I’m still the problem.’

‘You only just realised that?’

‘Good one, Max. What I mean is, I can’t escape him, because I can’t escape myself.’

‘I’m not following.’

More akin to tennis and multiple partner rallies, when it came to my mental cardiac ramblings, Max was a delicate user of thought and would throw in the towel when any idea got too ‘fruity’, as he’d say. I’ll give it to him, he always tried.

‘You’re saying… hol- let me get this right. You’re saying he is really real because the dreams are yours?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Huh.’ Max waylaid his thoughts for a moment to pay for a quick exchange with a passing Scottie dog, unfurling his legs to get better reach. ‘So what next?’ he said, curling back up again.

‘Uh, so the dreams are mine. He lives in them. Even if I try to remove him, I’m still the architect of the dream, right? But what if I could remove myself?’

‘...from your own dreams?’

He’s a visual beast, Max. I picked up the spoon and placed it across the espresso cup, introducing our reflections to each other. 

‘I’m still figuring it out myself, but… I don’t know, let’s try it this way.’ I brought my thumbs and forefingers together to make a viewfinder, framing the spoon and mug, while Max sat across me in a soft focus. ‘Look.’ 

Max knocked his knee against the underside of the table and the spoon fell off the caldera. Pulling back to fit in both spoon and Max, I readjusted the viewfinder. ‘Look. The spoon. The mug. The soft blur of you in the background, but I’m not there, I’m outside.’

Max squinted. ‘You’re there, right in front of me, Ira.’

I kept quiet. Max dug an excavating finger through the viewfinder. ‘I’m literally looking right at you, Ira.’

‘I’m just a body, just a projector. You’re looking at a person, but where is the subject? Where’s the one having the dream?’ I sat back, arms outstretched, viewfinder locked onto the spoon. 

Max stood up, banged his knee again, and the teaspoon slid closer to the edge of the table. From above he peered closer into the callipygian hump of the teaspoon. Only Max’s reflection. Myself, offscreen, out of screen. The reflection of the café’s fascia behind Max. Only Max and the fascia. He nudged the spoon. Still only Max’s reflection. 

‘... Ira?’

Locked in my cinematic scaffold, I let the scene unfold. 

‘Ira. Ira… where are you?’ 

A bus rumbled by, the spoon wobbled, and the reflections of both Max and I returned.  

‘Huh.’ Max said, as if he’d sat down with a sack of potatoes on his lap. ‘How very, very confusing. How very bizarre.’

‘Near impossible, sure,’ I said, putting the lens cap on my viewfinder. ‘But maybe I could extract myself as the dream subject. Just un-authored subconscious, or whatever’s left rattling around in there. Like if fog had a dream.’

‘And that’s why your old boy, Keek-agurd, told you to speak to the fog.’ Yep, Max was getting things done.

‘Correct. Sort of makes sense, right? Be the fog, be reflectionless, subjectless, or something like that.’

‘Be the fog… be reflectionless… or something like that,’ Max repeated in a dream-like state. ‘Just trying to get my head round this, so… it’s like you think you’re the director, but maybe you’re just the guy feeding the reel?’

The idea was neat, but not mine to dwell on. It floated around my mind like a carrot on the end of a stick, tempting, not urgent. There is a fine line between being mad and feeling mad. At least with the latter you know the lay of the land: a self-aware mind is safer than one which isn’t.

No, the contingency plan wouldn’t be so drastic. No dream exorcists, no dream bleaching, no dream deconstructivists. I wasn’t that far gone. I could deal with it, with him, another way.

The piercing reflection of the sun off a passing car. Disembodied footsteps seeking jumble-sale bodies. Crinkly whiff of dry seaweed and fresh fish.

‘I… I’m still finding it a tad difficult to understand,’ Max chimed in, taking a serviette and dabbing the corners of his mouth. I admit, while his enthusiasm for my little chaotic issue had surprised me, I was way out of my depth and no amount of hypothesising could solve it. It was all in vain, all a thought experiment. Ignore him. Sleep, sleep like a baby, fill yourself with sleeping pills and turn your back. Turn your back on him. He’s not worth it.

‘So, to be subjectless, you’ll have to be completely unaware of the dream you’re having, but you’re still dreaming it? Like a film playing to itself in a cinema with no audience?’

‘Mm. Uh. Max… Yeah. Something like that. Anyway…’

It was endearing to see Max so involved, but it had only made me more aware of the guilt and how much I wanted to escape it, him. Whatever happened, something had to be done since life had become increasingly unlife-like and unstable owing to Philip (there I go again, blaming someone else for my own mind). Work, stale. Family, mummified. Romance, pickled, and… ‘How’s Ruthie, Ira?’

A bus rumbled by, and the teaspoon fell off the table into my waiting, omniscient hand.

Ah, Ruthie.

All was going so well. Turning my back. There I was, making my case for not being mad, believing that not talking about something, or suppressing it, means it’s not there. And then, that name, a thrum of static through my ears, loosed. Max had to go and let her name slip; so here she is, dragged in, another permanent obstacle I had to deal with. Thanks Max.

Onions. Not cheating. It was onions. At least cheating would have been a better reason. It wasn’t a big deal, but I had to go ahead and make it one. Why didn’t I just leave out the onions? It was a glorious dish calling for caramelised onions, except Ruthie detested any kind of onion, sweet, sharp, or pickled. The smell and texture made her gag, ‘makes me gag.’ Incapable of understanding how anyone could dislike sweet onions, I draped the crown jewels over steaming pillows of pierogies and handed her the bowl.

‘Ruthie, you can’t be serious, why are you taking them off?’

‘You know I don’t like them. Why are you testing me?’

‘I’m not testing you, they’re onions, yeah, but they’re sweet.’

‘They’re still onions.’

‘Sweet. Try them at least.’ She placed her fork with its new hairdo onto the table. ‘No, no, no, not on the table, Ruthie. Look, it’s going to stain the wood.’ Quick thinking led to my shirt becoming a temporary pouch for the dispossessed onions.

‘I just don’t understand why you can’t just eat them.’

‘Stop, Ira, I don’t– just stop.’

‘It’s ridiculous,’ I said, pinching some onion dreads from the pouch and popping them into my mouth. ‘You’re ridiculous.’

‘For fu— I told you, I hate onions, sweet, or… I can’t believe this. Stop.’

‘Exactly. I can’t believe you, we’re arguing over onions.’

‘Ira, just stop.’

‘Suck it up and eat them.’

‘Stop.’

‘You’re not a baby.’

It took two months of dabbing white vinegar on the white wall to remove the red wine stains.

I shouldn’t have cooked onions.

She left, took her stuff, forgot a scarf that smelled of what I can only describe as cumin and sap, sappy cumin(?), and mailed me an onion with pins stuffed inside it. Just like Philip, Ruthie strutted into my dreams every night, without fail, holding an onion. They now make me gag, onions. Philip. Ruthie. She’s in the city somewhere, out there, physically, but now I have to suffer the consequences of a salty decision, forever, it would seem. And like the fossilising odour of spring greens, guilt would cook up all sorts of Ruthies, and like Philip, she would be there, onion in hand. 

I shouldn’t have cooked onions.

It snapped into place at 3:47 a.m on a Sunday.  Ruthie and I co-hosted a cooking show for cats; Philip was the camera operator. Ruthie kept telling me to skin the onions, skin the onions, ‘skin them!’ Philip insisted on extreme close ups of my bloody fingers ripping away infinite layers. As I ripped and tore, I screamed ‘skin them,’ and ‘smash zoom in 3, 2, 1,’ out of Ruthie and Philip’s mouths. ‘Skin them! Smash them! Skin them! Smash them!’ The chant was spiked with stomach-churning vertigo, each zoom drilling into me.

It was me. I was always them. I was the common denominator. The apple seed in a pear.

Philip was the stranger I wronged. Ruthie was now the stranger I loved. There was never a chance to make amends, and I had to bear the consequences. It had all got way out of hand. Nightly torment had spilled into the day. Theorising only made it worse, and ‘That, Max, is why I have to learn to dream without myself. Dream without a dreamer. It’s the only way.’ Remove me, and you remove them. No narrator, no dream ego, no meandering Greek chorus of self-pity whispering, ‘You never deserved her anyway.’ Just pure, depersonalised unconscious content. Maybe clouds. Maybe toast. But nothing that resembled me or any of my failed franchises. Dream like fog.

What better way to try this than to go and watch a dumb movie (to get results, do dumb things, someone once told me)? You’re watching the film, but you’re not actually watching it. You’re somewhere else, and that’s where the magic happens. A premiere of an overrated superhero movie would be my vehicle of choice. Disconnect within minutes. Tighten up those ideas. Seal myself hermetically against the over-indulgence and unreality of superpowers, CGI rubble, and the leggy cameo of good battling evil.

Maxwell came along for the ride. He would act as security in case Philip decided to turn up and confront me. Supposing he did, would he even recognise me? If you’re dreaming of someone often enough, they’re more than likely to be dreaming of you. So I went undercover. I was a pasty old prawn. Pink in all the wrong areas; what should have been dark bags under my eyes were raw, kosher chicken breasts. Demographic background research is always recommended. Some tanning cream and a swipe of eyeliner. A trilby and a neckbeard.

‘This isn't an anime, Ira,’ Max said, ogling at my inaccurate representation of fan attire as we met each other in the cinema’s foyer. The outfit worked. I blended in to zone out.

‘Been thinking about your little… problem. You should hire someone else to dream for you. Outsource it all,’ Maxwell whispered as the curtains folded away from the screen. ‘That’s what my dad did with me. He left. Different dad every week, it seemed. Outsourced fatherhood.' He crammed a handful of popcorn into his mouth. ‘Anyway. I bet there are dream labs, or subconscious sharing startups somewhere out there.’

How was it that the first good idea came from Max before my disconnection? The lights dimmed, the projector light shot over our heads in a perfect cone; an All-American Hollywood icon in blue spandex fizzled onto the screen, and I turned on my own kinetoscope at 24 frames p/s.

Dazzled by CGI magic, Max sat transfixed as if the screen held the meaning of life, while I slumped beside him, trying to solve the existential equivalent of sawing off my own shadow. Dream as someone, something else. Dream as a squirrel, Stalin, dream as the concept of warmth. Or, like Maxwell said, I could get someone else to dream for me.

Maybe it was all to do with influencing my waking life; I could just reinvent myself. After all, there are kids out there these days who have fluid identities, multiple personalities and entire directorial visions for their dreams; meanwhile, I keep showing up in mine like a boom mic in the shot. Surely, with the effort of becoming someone else, it’d have some impact on my unconscious. There had to be a way to drift away from consciousness; the whole ordeal was beyond imagination. Imagination self-conceives, reproduces from the vacuum of disembodiment. No, no, consciousness is the vehicle for imagination, and I’d crashed mine so hard it spilt its cargo; voices, memories, abstractions of other people’s fibres, snarled and tangled like hair in the drain. Strange to think, though, all of this was neither consciousness, nor imagination, but some kind of living ossification; bodily fibres and gazes hardened into bone, while officious and pulsing through every second of every day, and at night, the bloodstream, dreamstream, pumps indelible, permanent stains onto my freshly-laundered mind, spreading, metastasizing, becoming more terrifying every night until I lose control and become the nervous passenger putting my whole life in the hands of— there! There, the extras, Philip and Ruthie. I swear, I’m sure it was them.

And to think, all I ever wanted to do was say I’m sorry. To wipe the slate clean. Now I've lost my reputation with myself. Yet, with their material disappearance, they’ve drawn closer, and I keep the guilt like a pet, throwing a birthday party it never wanted.

I arrived home to find another onion stuffed into my letterbox. Onion juice running down the door panelling formed an image, like Jesus in toast, of Philip’s gravitationally compromised neck and droopy eyes. Nothing short of suicide would fix this anxiety in soiled underwear.

Maxwell had gone home satisfied with the answer to life and kissed his third-rotation woman deep into the lips and through the neck, while I necked blocks of blue cheese, hallucinogenic nuts and prepared myself to try the two and forty other methods I’d composed to get rid of myself in my dreams. It was try these, or sleep deprivation again, which I attempted for four days, until every time someone spoke, German subtitles floated above their heads.

Nothing worked. Every method had the opposite of the desired effect and kept me up all night with astonishing stomach cramps and gurgling, milky thoughts and intolerant visions. My lumpy dairy hangover compelled me to call Maxwell and meet for a stiff, cleansing coffee.

We chose a local cafe, the one with the wobbly tables and a waiter who looked like he’d survived both world wars, a handful of divorces and had a lifelong grudge against clean dishes. Maxwell was already sitting on a seat outside, talking to a woman who looked unsure of whether he was flirting or interviewing her. As I made myself known, he pulled out a senile chair for me, knocked his knee against the underside of the woman’s table, spilt a glass of water that followed the path of least resistance onto her lap, who leapt up and made for the other side of the plaza.

‘Hey, don’t g– don’t go. What’s your star sign?’ Maxwell called, half standing, half sitting, and outstretched an equally half-sitting, half-standing arm. ‘Can’t have them all. She’s not the one,’ he said, mopping up pools of water into a wad of blue kitchen paper. ‘God, you look like expired yoghurt.’

‘I wish I was.’

I entertained Max for a good ten minutes explaining the cheese, the awful cramps and the futile attempt to influence my unconsciousness, that stubborn bastard. With one eye on a child poking a pigeon with a plastic fork, and the other on a seagull which had ambled into a fishmonger across from the cafe, Max listened to the part in which I fainted but somehow remained fully conscious. How was this possible? ‘Because of Philip.’ How was it possible that Philip was there in my cheese blackout?

‘Isn’t a blackout a… blackout? As if you’re dead? Nothing?’ Max said.

‘Apparently not,’ Philip said.

‘I bet even a coma wouldn’t hold old Phil back.’

What could have been momentary relief was instead hijacked by his gooey voice repeating ‘it’s not your turn.’

The fishmonger drops a whole mackerel on the pavement. 

That happens.

The opportune Herring gull snatches the fish away, as if it is personal.

It drags the fish across the path where it flops into the gutter.

The gull clamps the slippery fish in its beak, stretches its wings out, shudders and struggles to get airborne.

Now it’s up and heading for a private place to dish out the dirt on the fish.

The cumbersome airfreight bobs above us, trying to breach the roof of the building.

Then it drops.

With a damp slap onto my thighs.

It lays there, its head twisted round, contorted as if looking over its shoulder and telling me to mind my own business.

Wedged into its slimy gills, a folded slip of paper.

Bloodstained, blood satin.

Carrier fish.

For me? Who else?

Life continues. No one sticks around to point at the guy with a fish on his lap. No one questions it. The fishmonger places more mackerel onto the stall. Passersby do what passersby do. The waiter, smoking a fag out the back door. Maxwell, giggling at the kid with the pigeon.

I wasn’t the type of man to sit with a fish in my lap. The glistening corpse, leaking its life source on my trousers, kept its eye on me. I pinched the corner of the paper, pulled it out like an ingrown hair, and promptly shooed the mackerel to the floor.

Don’t read this. 

He’s watching, and you’re still here. 

Don’t read this.

The world around me, rotting and remembering, fading in and waxing out, the whole world, waiting for me in the shade. And he slipped away. Invisible ink. It. 

‘Oh, Ira, by the way… curly hair?’

‘Eh? Oh, yes,’ I replied, returning to the world.

‘Like a Viking in heat?’

‘Mm.’

‘White t-shirt, or… a kind of male boob tube, grey trackies? Dried mouth foam.’

‘That’s him.’

‘He visited me last night,’ Max said, steadying the shivering table. ‘Phil said he wants you to say sorry for cutting in line on July 27th 2023, at 19:46. He’s still pretty upset.’

Come on. He didn’t need to remind me of the date and time. Did he think I forgot?

The more I tried to get rid of myself [ergo Philip], the more he leaked through, crossing the threshold between my dream and reality… or was it the other way? 

Either way, something was working. I had to see this as a positive thing. Offloading Philip onto someone else was something I hadn’t thought of, but in the process of getting rid of myself, an inadvertent phenomenon of dream sharing had occurred. It was the beginning of the end. They were on nickname basis. Something was working, easing maybe.

No, it wasn’t. That night, Philip was a never-ending, steady boil. His face rolling in and out, then reappearing as quickly as I could misinterpret a compliment. Ruthie distended from a sack of onions, tumbling over and over herself until she amalgamated into one huge onion unable to stand on its own two roots, scraping herself raw as she tumbled, peeling, opening up stinging wounds.

Someone, somewhere, was sobbing. Too many onions? He reached out… What were hands anyway?He reached… did he, I really reach? What is it to reach when you’re tickering tickering tickering and suddenly, projecting.

*

The cinema was dense with fog.

No projectionist.

No booth.

Just the hum, soft and wet, like someone breathing through felt. A flickering warmth bled through the mist. The whir of a 70-watt bulb. Laughter like polite thunder rippled through a full theatre. Including Max. Third row from the back, laughing so loud his hearty tremors dislodged other patrons from their seats. On screen, nothing special, just a monochrome man in a trench coat screaming about pickles. Max was in hysterics.

Ira was watching. Or rather, he was the watching. He tried to laugh, but filtering verbs were useless for him. He was physically useless. What used to be a throat was now a blinking shaft of vociferating light. No throat. Or lungs. No limbs. Just the homely ticking of a consciousness strung through a metal housing unit at the back of the theatre.

Ira wouldn’t remember how it happened. One minute, he was in bed, struggling to survive sleep. Next, he was quite literally projecting.

Below, Max sipped his coffee. His knobbly elbow nudged a thin spoon perched precariously on the armrest. Arresting. That spoon. Arrested. The same one from the café (how many days, weeks, months ago?), the one he’d caught mid-fall like a reflexive romantic gesture. If Ruthie had been there, she'd have laughed, and none of this would have happened. Maybe. I… Ira doesn’t know anymore.

The elbow. The inadvertent precision. The spoon fell again. In slow motion. Ira couldn’t catch it this time. It landed on the floor with a cartoonish zoing added by an auditory-challenged foley artist. The fallen spoon. Unnoticed by everyone, especially Max, except Ira.

Max leant over to the stranger beside him and whispered, ‘I love this next part. He always catches it.’ The stranger nodded, clearly moved.

And then a new scene on screen. A café. A man catches a spoon and slaps it down on the table. Ira and Max were both on screen. Ira glued into his viewfinder pose, Max investigating the backside of the spoon.

Then on walked Ruthie with a humid smile and a scarf humming of cumin and sap. As she walked past, she brushed Ira’s shoulder with a trailing hand, snagging the spoon on the way. Catch the spoon or her hand?

The spoon slipped off the table, arching in pain on the concrete, reflectionless. Ruthie disappeared.

‘“That’s not how it happens”,’ a disgruntled Max said, both as character and as audience. A bus stopped, opened its doors, and Max jumped on.

Ira, alone now. Then came the faint, translucent face of none other than Philip, stuck onto the air like a mildew of memory. It wasn’t an angry face. It was simply Philip. Chin-heavy Philip. Lip foam. Cast everywhere. A stain of infinite guilt. 

‘You’re still dreaming him, Ira,’ said Max, leaning towards the screen, speaking to the wrong Ira. For Ira kept spinning, and burning light, and trapping the dust in the light, and spinning until the spool ran out.

The audience applauded.

Then darkness.

And silence.

And in that silence, one final line echoed through the theatre:

‘Philip, where are you?’