People scream on roller coasters alongside photos of automobiles speeding along steep and winding roads.
“The fear of uncontrolled movement,” she says.
A centrifugal ride throws people on top of each other, juxtaposed with images of crowded streets, marketplaces, and subways.
“Fear of being touched by strangers, fear of contamination and assault.”
Dozens of people perch on a wildly teetering circular ride reminiscent of a chandelier, which doesn’t seem to have any seatbelts or straps. Alongside it, the famous photograph Lunch Atop a Skyscraper shows men casually opening their sack lunches eight hundred and fifty feet from the ground.
“The fear of heights brought on by massive structures.”
She clicks her handheld controller to pause the video, sighs, and turns to the long lecture hall. With the motion stopped, three hundred eyes or thereabouts refocus on Professor Murphy herself, who wears a long wool skirt and well-made pumps in red to match her lips and nails. Her hairstyle nods to the forties. She feels herself exuding calm, poise, profound intelligence.
“People created experiences and indulged in play to help them come to terms with their anxieties about the modern world’s giant machines, tall buildings, the fast and unregulated use of the motor car, the overcrowding and jostling of public transportation and day-to-day life. Think catharsis, desensitization, confrontation.”
She begins to pace across the stage, turns, paces again as though alone and deep in thought.
“But what are the physical horrors particular to our era? What games and rides and experiences might we devise if we wanted to simulate the stressors and anxieties of our present day?”
When she faces the class, each person feels she is looking directly at them. She says, “Let’s leave out psychological horrors for the time being and focus on the physical.”
The class is silent, stumped for the moment. Eventually the professor acknowledges a front-row student’s raised hand.
“We can’t. It’s not the same, then as now,” says the young woman, quickly and nervously adding, “Because the things we fear now ought never to have been our fears — they’re unnatural.”
The professor exercises great restraint. She does not answer or even glance to the image, still up on the screen, of workmen dangling off the beam. How natural is that? There is a power in letting a naïve comment stand, in letting its counterarguments arise in everyone’s mind.
The classroom is a theater, after all.
Eventually Professor Murphy says, “Here is an idea. I was planning to assign a great deal of reading for this coming week.” She lifts and drops the heavy textbook, and the crowd tittles. “But let’s not. Let’s try this instead: one full-page sketch, one ah, let’s say five hundred-word essay describing …”
She presses the remote again and the screen rolls up, revealing an old-fashioned green chalkboard. She sets down her remote and picks up a piece of chalk.
“What environments will simulate some of our, well…” turning back to the young woman for a moment, “unnatural modern terrors?”
There is murmuring as she quickly writes out the following in an elegant hand:
Please include:
A description of your project (ride, experience, environment, etc.)
Existing precedent--projects that influence your project
Any variations you can think of
How you would address hazards & drawbacks
Sketch of the project.
With this last, she noisily sets down the chalk. “No — before anyone asks — it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw. Make a collage if you have to, whatever. Something visual. No AI, it should go without saying.”
“Will this assignment be posted online?” asks a third-row student.
“It will not. Oh my goodness, no,” she says.
They begin taking out cell phones.
“That’s good, there you go. Take a picture. Very good,” she says, sharing a conspiratorial look with the few students who are writing out the instructions by hand.
The students should find it unclear whether Professor Murphy came prepared or if she created the assignment on the spot, in response to the homely young woman who raised her hand. The paranoid cast of that one’s expression suggests she thinks the latter.
The masses leak out of the room, revealing a man who has been seated in the back row all this time. A small group coalesces at the front. Their questions and observations are muted, but Professor Murphy’s answers ring out clearly:
“No, but I’ll have the TAs give me a selection of the stronger ones to read.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“I just haven’t the time to ever post anything online, I’m afraid.”
“Thank you so much.”
“You too!”
The man is waiting for the very last one to exit. Another man waited before, and another, in classrooms smaller and poorer than this one.
The last student to leave has a crush — anyone could see it — and so the man rises and begins thumping down the wooden stairs to put a little hurry in them.
“A wonderful class, Professor Murphy,” he says in a confident, booming voice, and the student finally scurries away.
“Thank you,” the professor says, gathering her briefcase and scarf.
They walk out into the sunny day and into the neighboring building, up one flight to her stunning new office. All she says during that time is, “I remember, yes, I remember.”
The professor sets down her things and does not ask the man to take a seat. “I’m not taking any outside commissions right now,” she says with a subtle gesture around the large room. She obviously doesn’t need outside work.
“Can’t I take you to lunch, though?”
Her expression is closed-off.
“Somewhere you’ve been wanting to try? Somewhere expensive.”
The professor opens her datebook. She maintains her upright stance as she traces its page.
“Two o’clock?”
• • •
In a poorer, smaller classroom years before, she was saying, “The spaces around us have their way with us. Architecture and décor predetermine the experiences we have in a room. Consider a room in which its impossible to feel boredom — or one that cultivates boredom and ennui. What would either look like?”
A student asked “What about a room that could drive someone mad?” and the professor smiled thoughtfully. She had already caught the eye of a man at the back of the room, less handsome than this one (and before that, a less handsome one, an even smaller classroom).
But this one today, call him the stepfather. He’d had a problem (they all had problems): the spoiled daughter of his second wife. The man who came on his behalf had called her a NEET over lunch, and Professor Murphy nodded as though she understood, looking it up afterward. Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Staying up late and lounging in her room all day, rotting.
And that was how the stepfather framed it, as concern for her character and her future. She needed some kind of a fire lighted under her. Maybe she needed the nest to be made less comfortable. “Whatever is the opposite of feng shui. Whatever is the opposite of ‘good vibes’,” the stepfather had said, and while his understanding was poor, the professor knew what he wanted and knew that she could do it, easily.
It was one of the professor’s smaller side projects, a single bedroom with en-suite, but it paid extremely well, as she recalled. She checked her records now (Professor Murphy kept exhaustive records). Oh yes, it had been well worth her time.
Now, in an artfully designed new restaurant, the stepfather eases into his ask.
“A wonderful class, but I wondered, what are they there for? Are they learning to be better consumers or are they training to create, say, immersive experiences? And I thought your work was with interiors.”
“Either, or both. They’re here for the joy of learning, I hope.”
He grins and looks down at his artfully-arranged meal, just delivered.
“The department is called ‘Environments,’ she adds. “We do all sorts of things.” Her own dish is set before her. Glistening meat, a hint of gold leaf, and blood.
When she asks after the stepdaughter, he says, “She’s doing as well as can be expected — and not in our house. I count it a tremendous success.”
But of course that isn’t why he’s come. He begins to allude to dealings with a “very important woman.” A woman? Well, that piques the professor’s interest. He mentions the great rewards she might see if she were to agree… and the figure, the ballpark he mentions, that is very intriguing too.
Along with a very vague hint about some unpleasantness if she can’t take the job.
• • •
People are manipulating things behind the scenes… changing things … for no reason but their own pleasure.
Professor Murphy stares into those haunted eyes until she can’t stand it, then closes her laptop. She glances up just in time to see a car pull up at the curb before the stately house across the street. The one with the creek running along the front, suggestive of a moat. The one that made her want to move to this area in the first place.
A real estate agent is pounding a stake into the yard. Finally.
It will cost. The property itself, the renovations. But if she begins taking outside work again…
• • •
“Oh never. You’re too kind,” she says. She introduces herself but gets nothing in return besides the open door.
Seated at a wrought iron table in a grand conservatory (no tea, nothing), she explains she’s come prepared to start work this very day. She has the measuring tape, heavy camera, telescoping light, chalk line and all.
“We’re only talking today,” the old woman says. “This isn’t even the house you’ll be working on.”
The professor is surprised. And curious.
The old woman’s voice and face are grave as tombstones. “This project will be extensive, a large crew and all. Months.”
“Well then I simply can’t do it,” says the professor. She’s only just earned tenure, and how would it look? The TAs are set to begin giving her some of the better papers tomorrow. So much reading, not to mention her own research, conferences.
A pad and a pen have been sitting on the table between them all this time. The woman takes it now and writes a figure upon it, passes it to the professor.
“Half up front, of course,” she says.
More than enough for a down payment.
• • •
A house of mirrors is the historical precedent, and a participant could enter into this new experience thinking they are entering a traditional house of mirrors. The disorientation of the maze is sufficient to disturb them, at first, but then there is more. As they complete the first few turns, they start to notice the mirrors are showing their insides — organs, muscle, bone. This could be done by means of hidden cameras and LED screens that are only pretending to be mirrors, or maybe there is a type of mirror that would allow light projected from behind to form an image (?). This revelation of their interior landscapes will be very jarring in itself, but then after the next few turns, they will begin to see the masses inside …
A variation might deal with contagious illness, such as the most recent pandemic. The mirrors reveal a substance coming out of the mouths and noses of people, getting onto their hands. Participants track its spread throughout the experience, finally coming to see that they are covered with the substance, infected …
• • •
She rushes off to class, to her office to read more of the delicious horrors her students have concocted, and then there is the long drive out to the other house set against gray hills.
A crew here, too. A silent and grim one, much the opposite of the other workers. There is little for her to do but check that each one labors over their own discrete section, surrounded by hanging canvas tarps that make her think of ghosts.
The professor remembers a later meeting with the important woman. The term “pleasure palace” mentioned, her blood ran cold as she realized what the word “pleasure” meant in this context.
When a refreshment was finally offered, tap water in a tall lead crystal mug, the professor cut her thumb on its chipped handle. She cried out and brought the bloody gash to her mouth. She saw, then, the first smile she had ever seen on that old woman’s face.
Eventually a heavy antique book was brought out, and the woman said, “What’s in here is important, but what you do is equally important. You have done so much with so little, but with this…” and she arranged the book open and placed the device — for his book came with a device, much like a spirit board comes with a planchette. It could not be used without the device, whose purpose was to obscure, to keep a reader from looking at too much of a page at once. Card-thin and yet it seemed to be bone…. It had a tiny window so one could read only a line at a time, and that, the woman said, was also how they would arrange things at the site.
Looking at the line in the viewfinder, the professor could not say if there were letters or numbers or some other kind of symbol. She only knew her eyes shuddered and itched, and that she could not look away until the woman slapped the book shut.
“Don’t worry. We’ll arrange for plenty of tarps,” the woman said, “to keep you and the workmen safe during completion.”
• • •
Another drawback of this project, which honestly I think is a fatal one: participants with mental illnesses or with prior experience in such events could be triggered by the sounds of …
• • •
At breaks, there is no joking like there is at her new house. They stare at bagged lunches and dinners, let cigarettes burn out between their fingers. She has seen more than one of them vomit in the lawn.
Back in they go to peek between tarps at their little spots of work. Several of them paint, others lay tile, others restore the woodwork. The symbols go into all of it. The house is vast and labyrinthine, and things often need to be done over after the old woman has been through. She’s had cameras mounted in all the corners, but still she has to go through peeking here and there to be sure she is satisfied, and the re-doing is what the professor thinks has gotten them all so distressed.
And stressed-out workers make mistakes.
Sweaty, jumpy, one young carpenter trips on a tarp’s twisted corner and pulls down the covering from an entire wall. Seeing all of the symbols and images at once, he is screaming, seeming to go into seizures until three others bravely tackle him and bring him out to the lawn. The professor is sitting on a dissertation committee at the time, and all she can do is monitor the messages coming in to her phone. She rushes out to the country as soon as she can, only to be told the man recovered enough to be sent home. He’s expected to be back on task by the next day or the one after.
The old woman sits at a cloth-covered table in the distant shade, this time with another old woman and an extremely elderly man, maybe her sister and father and maybe not. Their table is spread with fancy cakes and tarts, tea and coffee. Roses in a vase and roses in their cheeks, big vicious grins. A pleasure palace for all of them, apparently.
• • •
These artisans are not like her students. They are nothing like the workers perfecting her own new house. The way those ones tease each other, the music they play, their healthy sweat, their big appetites — well, she almost wishes they might not go away when the house is done.
These ones at the pleasure palace are gray-faced, hoping only to survive this job, take home the ample pay and rest. Are they doing this work for mere survival or are they, like her, striving for something?
On her way home, she stops at her new house. It’s closing in on completion and seems to be all that she hoped.
She wonders, once she’s in it, how quickly some new desire will arise.
• • •
But it wouldn’t work because you would always leave the theme park and go home. You would never understand the threat until the whole world was the park, until there wasn’t any escape.
• • •
“Are you certain?” She gazes at him long and hard. His eyes are hazel, very lovely and clear. She has never seen sclera so perfectly white. He is clean-shaven, too. This rest has done him good.
She’s canceled a number of classes and meetings this week. It feels as though they are close to finishing, and she needs the second half of the pay for her own workers. They have gotten slightly less good-natured in the past few days.
Everyone here needs what they have coming to them. They’re too invested to leave it now.
The rest of the crew collects on the front step, awaiting the open door. The red-headed carpenter enters first and the rest of them funnel in, the professor last.
He seemed fine on the front step, but now in the entry, as people move toward their places, as he moves up the stairs — and he is bounding up them, really, the word sprightly coming to the professor’s mind — he turns his head briefly to glance her way, and the professor freezes. Such an impish spark in his eye. Mischievous.
Devilish.
Two more workers follow him, an older man who paints, and a blonde woman, also a carpenter. The professor can’t catch her breath, can’t move at all just yet.
“No,” she’s trying to say, but she has no air, and when she can say it she is moaning it over and over. “No no no no no.”
Shattering glass and high, cackling laughter upstairs.
Men block the way. She’s pushing into them on her way to the stairs. They are trying to help, trying to stop her long enough to hear what’s wrong so they can help, so they can prevent whatever’s about to happen, but they can’t stop it. They’re already too late.
The older man comes flying down the stairs, blood geysering over a maniacal face, and the others begin to surround him. The professor squeezes around them as the man breaks free. Blood spattered all of their workshirts, smeared on all of their faces already.
She’s still trying to stop this. Her brain has not caught up.
Tarps on the stairs. Tarps being thrown like her mother used to throw the laundry down from the second floor, the soiled sheets (oh what squalor in that house), and some of these are soiled too but with deep, wet red.
Everything is loud.
The woman carpenter is skipping down the steps now, crazed and manic, on her way to help the other one take down the first-floor tarps.
The professor hasn’t seen too much yet. If she could only make that move they practiced, hand over eyes, stoop into a crouch and crawl.
But now everyone is ripping down tarps left and right, and when she looks at their faces she sees it is all too late. Ecstatic, they fall upon the one man who has covered his eyes and crouched. Two of them, ripping at his arms. They will take away his hands, take away his very eyelids so he can’t help but see. They are doing it now. She is watching them do it with revulsion, wanting to stop it, and then she is watching with delight.
Her eyes lift from the three rolling on the floor in their animal pleasure, up to the gray-green wall — so beautiful — covered in all manner of ornate messages. She’s reminded of her chalkboard and the pleasure she took making marks upon it. She’s reminded of her beautiful office, her new perfect home — how this exceeds all she had before.
Someone is eating someone else’s neck, reminding her of Ugolino and Ruggieri from that Doré engraving of Inferno. Dark gushing blood. Art before her eyes, and both of them looking straight into a camera. Good, that’s good, the professor thinks because nothing is being missed.
Someone comes close — she thinks it is the red-headed man but can’t be certain, there’s so much red everywhere now, after all — and he puts his hands into her. She thinks her skin and muscle will resist, but it doesn’t. He has his hands in her, breaking her ribs apart, and she is swooning in ecstasy.
This is it, she says, or thinks. This is it.
