The Remote Controller
written by: Wade Goff
The smooth purr of the engine, mixed with the lulling tread of rubber on asphalt, transported my mind on a joyride of pure bliss. Coupled with the rising, falling, and flowing symphony of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the space inside my Lexus IS 500 was my own little world. My own carved out bubble that never popped. A safe retreat when the world was weighing me down with bottom lines that didn’t balance.
My heart pumped in rhythm with the fast-paced percussion section. My mind sailed loftily in the clouds, lifted ever higher by the strings of the violins. I floated on feathers from the flutes, and every depressing thought or feeling was blasted away by the sonorous sound of the trumpets.
Classical music was my go-to escape when debts and receivables didn’t match. Music without words, pure emotional stimulation, lacking those highly charged buzz words that always triggered my repressed memories. Memories that always lead to pain and anxiety instead of heartwarming fondness for my past, or inspiration for the future.
I cruised down First street, sunglasses on, sun high, sky blue, every traffic light coming up green as if the easy flowing rhythm inside my Lexus bubble had been imprinted on the road ahead. All obstacles temporarily retracted. I drove as if I were phase shifting through space, unconscious to the endless distractions of the world around me.
Something somewhere clicked and the green lights redirected me, my attention now focused on a tall building with many windows but only one door. A secret door. A hidden entrance that only invited people could enter. I was expected. I knew where the door was.
I intensely stared at the building through the windshield, captivated by its bold unabashed audacity. The building towered over everything around it, the lone structure on this side of town that sought to conquer the sky. I slowed the car to a creeping slug, rolling my window all the way down, and observed the entrance with passing menace as I drove by like I was about to circle back and spray it with an oozie or give the “all clear” signal for the swat team to swoop in. Had I thought to think about what the fresh air smelled like whipping in through my window, I would have noticed it smelled like nothing at all. Nor was there a single person in sight, odd for the middle of the day.
I did a U-turn at the next intersection, also deserted, backtracking to the parking lot I had seen at the side of the building. However, when I approached, there was no break in the curb. “Strange,” I whispered under my breath, squinting as I rolled by before shifting into reverse and backing up for a closer look. “Well, there’s nothing for it,” I said to myself, catching my eye in the rearview mirror. I swiveled my head around looking for cops, trying to unlock this next illegal maneuver.
Without hesitating, I mounted the curb and drove into the parking lot, leaving mud tracks in the stretch of green grass that separated the sidewalk and the black asphalt. I did a full lap around the lot, craning my neck and zooming my vision, looking for an empty space. I found one at the far back right, winking at me from between two bloated SUVs, one silver, the other black.
Careful not to scratch my coveted bubble world, I eased in between them, pulling as close to the brick wall ahead as I could get. There was no bumper stop. The brick wall loomed down on me through the windshield, covered in graffiti, an overlapping collage of tag signs and Banksy-esque imitations. Red heart shaped balloons. A little girl with blonde pigtails and pink overalls frisking a soldier. Optical illusion bubble words, reading one thing right side up and another upside down like the ambigram in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. And at the center, a little boy peeking behind a curtain to reveal a rainbow Jackson Pollock painting.
Like a contorted gymnast, I slithered out of the barely cracked car door then paused to double check my appearance in the reflection of the driver’s side window. I straightened my tie and thumbed my cuff links. “All good, gonna kill it,” I said, bolstering myself up for the meeting about to go down.
My head twitched and my vision flickered, lights off then on, from black to white, temporarily going fuzzy like surfing through cable channels. That slight disconnect of static blankness in between the change of the channel and the click of the remote.
In the car windows’ reflection, for the briefest of moments, I thought my face changed to that of my dead brother Mark. A flickering resurgence of scarred memory left floating around in the dregs of my subconscious, unable to forget, unable to forgive him for eating all those little blue pills. It was Mark’s dead-eyed ghostly sneer surfacing just to take a quick peak at what I was doing. All his pain and anger and hate left behind, for some reason still clinging to the world he abhorred.
I, however, remained unfazed, believing, like there being no up ramp into the car park, catching all green lights, or no people in sight, that this too was normal. “It’s all good,” a voice inside my head reiterated, as I combed my hair back then opened the back door to retrieve my black leather briefcase with gold clasps.
I confidently walked to the front of the skyscraper, feeling like I was gliding on one of those super long conveyor belts at the airport, getting delivered without any effort right to my departure gate. My vision flickered again, and I was in the middle of a conversation with a bouncer that looked like Terry Crews from Soul Plane. “Yes sir. Mr. Lucy is expecting you. Right this way,” Terry Crews, the bouncer, said, gesturing with a large open palm towards a vault iron door with a small plexiglass window at the top. He had checked no guest list and tapped no ear piece. Only his eyes glowing as if connected to some hivemind or technologic thought entity, receiving affirmation telepathically. I didn’t move, rejecting the first offer on principle like in any proper business negotiation. I cleared my throat in an insinuating manner, holding up the briefcase and lightly double tapping the top like it was the unasked-for password.
“Ah, indeed sir,” Terry Crews, the bouncer said, immediately pulling out a piece of glowing chalk from his inner suit pocket. He blew on it like he was about to roll the dice in craps, sending up rainbow sparks. He then drew in a second square at the bottom of the iron door. As above so below, perfectly symmetrical in all the seen and unseen ways, an invisible balance.
The square outline glowed wild and hypnotic like it was powered by a thousand bioluminescent mushrooms, burning brighter and brighter, the light corroding through the metal. Then Terry Crews, the bouncer, drew a small circle in its center and pressed it like a button. The whole square vanished, revealing a blinding white light. I stepped up to the secret door. Not at all feeling like Alice before the shrinking potion in that I wouldn’t be able to fit through the tiny doorway into the secret garden.
Something or someone clicked fast forward on the remote again, causing my vision to flicker for a third time. The next thing I knew I was through the secret door, gliding in a dark nightclub that occupied the first level. It was a huge converted warehouse. Strobe lights of every color flashed in rhythm to the heavy whomps. A hooded DJ, shrouded in webs of palpable darkness, presided over the masses of dancing people captured by his music, all moving in collective rhythmic choreography like they were performing the movements of a complex rain summoning. Two glowing eyes blared out from the DJ’s hood as he scratched the turntables.
My ears were not working properly. I knew the music was extremely loud, but it did not seem to reach me on the conveyor belt bubble of protection I floated on, seamlessly maneuvering through the dense crowd of people towards the back. The lone salmon swimming against the current.
Parting the sea of people by leading with my right elbow, I saw a space at the bar open up as a woman wearing a backless silver dress grabbed her two cocktails, spun, and was swallowed by the gyrating waves. “Stay on course,” I said aloud, my eyes momentarily tantalized by the woman’s soft exposed skin. I took her spot at the bar, where the bartender, a sharp-dressed Japanese man wearing a black shirt, black vest, and black tie, was already asking me “What’ll it be?” But I didn’t hear the words, only read his lips. I lifted the briefcase over the bar’s ledge. The bartender took one look then jerked his head towards a red door at the end of the wooden bar, shrouded in sunken shadow in comparison to the highlighted collection of liquor bottles on glass shelves glowing like the magical spirits that they are.
The remote control skipped me ahead again and I was through the red door of sunken shadow. I was beginning to feel like Robin Williams in Jumanji getting sucked into the game board, or Mike TV in Willy Wonka, constantly de-materialized and disintegrated back into stardust only to regain my form once I surfed through the skipped channels of time. Wondering if I was still the same me or some upgraded version that had been whittled down while on pause with those tiny overlooked buttons at the bottom of the remote.
Even though I had never been in this back room before, I instinctively knew where to go, or rather, the remote-controlled conveyor belt knew where to take me. After bypassing several open doors showing the deeper folds of the party where questionable acts of legality were taking place, I snapped back into the moment, standing lucid and aware inside an elevator. Somehow the dance club’s VIP hallway had morphed into a new half-built industrial skyscraper and I was ascending through a crisscrossing grid of steel beams inside an all-metal service elevator, equipped with see-through gratings as its walls.
A wrinkled old man with a cane sat on a stool in the corner, wearing black out circle sunglasses and a maroon suit with a black shirt and black tie. I thought of asking him if he were the cliché stagehand meant to creep out the bold wanderers like circus’s and magicians use at their shows but decided against it.
Instead, I stared through the diamond shaped slits in the metal grating as the floors whipped past, moving too fast to catch any detail. I was crossing barriers and divides with little recognition of doing so, comfortably situated inside my own armored bubble inside this metal teleportation box.
The old man never said a word. He simply double thumped his cane and the elevator stopped. I disembarked, exiting onto a metal scaffolding with waist-high rails on either side. I was swinging high above an empty chasm of blackness, but this too seemed normal somehow. The scaffold tittered and tottered as I inched forward. Every step igniting rickety groans from the ancient screws holding everything in together. With the conveyor belt back in driving control, I was carried forward.
“Perhaps whoever is controlling the remote knows about my fear of heights and reclaimed the wheel,” I thought briefly before my mind was drowned again in static white noise. The thought of turning back never even entered my mind. That was not an option, so why would I have considered it at all. The conveyor belt only moved in one direction, forward.
At first, I thought the elevator had been carrying me up, but now I was not so sure. My sense of direction was thrown out of balance. Everything inside this building was like my car, entirely its own space. It had its own rules. Its own controllable atmosphere. Where up could mean down and a lobster could tap-dance a quadrille if it was so inclined. I was simply along for the ride, flowing within its embrace like a passenger.
No more thoughts came to me and there was no one around to talk to. The phase shifting conveyor belt deposited me next at a set of L-shaped metal stairs. I had to go higher still. This area was dimly lit, the only light coming from the red emergency flood lights hanging at the bend of each floor. I looked up at the vertical stairway, zigzagging up and out of sight into nothingness. My vision flickered again, then a blurry man that I only saw out of my peripheral vision came walking down the steps. He was wrapped in a hue of grey and dark blue like some glitching hologram, trapped in those imperceptible blinks between channels. “It’s a long way up,” the glitching man said as he passed me and continued down the steps.
As soon as I began the laboring climb, a strange sensation settled over my chest and little flashes of light started snapping and crackling at the edges of my vision. Whatever had settled over my chest didn’t move. It was warm and comforting like a heating pad. The warmth seeped into my mind first, then my body, and as I continued to climb the stairs, I could feel the conveyor belts controlling push starting to wear off. I was no longer phase shifting without awareness, the warm ball of fire had evaporated the fog that covered the edges of transition.
At around the ¾ mark, I started to hear tiny soft thumps coming from the stairs higher up. I kept climbing, all nerves and emotions dialed all the way down. The soft thumps kept getting closer and louder. I was nearing the convergence point, stopping on the 79th floor’s landing when I heard the thumps on the next staircase ahead. I shrank back against the wall as if by survival reflex, bracing for what was about to round the corner, expecting it to be something vile and scary. But it was only a fluffy tailed cat with a mane like a lion.
The cat paid me no mind, intent on descending the stairs as quickly as possible like some window had been left open, hurrying to slip through the magic chalk door while it was still active. I watched the cat’s bushy tail swish and flick as it disappeared down and out of sight.
The cat’s brief passing presence solidified my resolve even more to reach the top, but as my head turned to follow the cat, the idea that turning back WAS an option entered my head. Armed with this new information, and considering the remote controller was no longer making the decisions for me, it forced me to consciously make a choice. Turn back or keep going. Play it safe or venture into the dark unknown.
But I had come this far. “I think I’ll see for myself what’s at the top,” I said out loud, trying to bolster myself up since the conveyor belt’s armor of numbness had dissolved as well and a little anxiety was starting to creep in about what lay ahead in the darkness.
On I trudged. By the time I reached the top landing I was completely in lucid control of my thoughts and my body again, the warm spot’s tendril’s having branched to my toes, fingers, and brain. It felt like I had turned on the lights in the ethereal tunnel that connected my heart and my mind to my soul, fully unlocking the pineal gland as God reached down to earth like in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
I was in a sort of corridor without any doors. A light blazed up ahead from an opening branching off to the left. As I followed the light and turned the corner, I was met with a blinding light. I squinted, holding up my hand as my eyes adjusted. I had entered into what seemed like a luxurious bathhouse. It was brightly lit with very high ceilings and numerous dangling crystal chandeliers. There was a giant harp being played in the corner as smoke swirled from fat cigars, creating an atmosphere of naked leisure. On either side of the smoke and steam-covered room were four or five large square in-ground hot tubs. There were numerous people hanging out and walking around. Some entirely naked, some half covered, and some fully dressed like I was.
A few of the people I recognized, but most I did not. I walked on the rubber mat atop China Ming porcelain tiles that ran in between the two rows of hot tubs, leading towards a raised platform backed by a wall completely covered with television screens. As I headed for the boss’s hot tub on the platform, I did several double takes, thinking I noticed several famous people, but it had to have been just a trick of the light or a shift of the mist. “Was that Common? Lil Wayne? Isn’t that Jennifer Lawrence next to Zendaya?”
“Ayyy, my man, you found it…Welcome, welcome,” said a man in a black kimono with twin dragons on it, one red, one blue, wrapping around and staring eye to eye from across his exposed hairy chest. He stood on the top step of the raised platform looking down on his domain, holding out his arms wide in welcome. He puffed a cigar, held between fat fingers decked out in gaudy gold rings. Its smoke twirled and licked around his head like it was the tongue from the dragons on his kimono.
The platform had its own hot tub, gold with a diamond rim, where two of the most beautiful women I had ever seen were just slipping out. They were wearing black bikinis, their skin glistening in the light as I watched, entranced by their beauty. They wrapped themselves in matching snow-white puffy robes and joined the man in the dragon kimono, interlocking themselves around both of his arms.
“Can I get you anything,” the man asked me, scratching his chest and staring a hole right into my thoughts. “Wine, women, weed…Look around, take your pick, nothing is out of bounds on this level.”
I was at a loss. I felt like a stranger at my own birthday party. Here I was in what looked like a five-star Japanese bathhouse, surrounded by artists and models and big shots, and for the life of me I had no clue why I was there.
The man in the dragon kimono coughed to cover the skipped ahead dialogue. “Well then, pleasantries aside,” he continued, sticking his cigar in his teeth and disengaging from the two women, who promptly disrobed, now somehow wearing THEIR birthday suits. They gracefully sauntered back into the steaming bath, glancing over their shoulders at me like they were subtly beckoning me to join them. The heating pad over my chest shifted from my left peck to my right, then disappeared, being replaced by a slight pressure at four points, like a tiny wooden doll chair had been placed there. I scratched my chest. “Uhhh,” I mumbled out.
The man in the dragon kimono descended the steps and walked over to stand beside me, clapping me on the back. “So…did you bring them!? Do you have the bricks?” he asked me, his eyes lighting up with a greedy lust, looking me dead in my eyes. Only then did I realize I was still carrying my briefcase. “Oh, yeah,” I said, kneeling down and opening the briefcase with two satisfying metallic snaps.
Inside were four ordinary bricks. Chalk dust red with three holes in the center of each of them. “Ahhh, eggg-cellent, eggg-cellent,” the man hissed out, his eyes burning with an unnatural yellow fire. As I watched the man in the dragon kimono staring at the open briefcase like the entranced Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, I thought I heard him whisper “The Four Cornerstones” or maybe it was “The Four Scorner’s Bones,” I couldn’t tell. It was only a whisper on the wind in a forest full of bees.
He squatted down and picked one up, possibly not seeing what I was seeing. The man stood back up, inspected the brick closer with one eye closed, then tossed it over to a fat man wearing a black leather jacket and a white Kangol bucket hat.
“Now, with business said and done, relax, take a load off, enjoy yourself, you’ve earned it,” the man said halfheartedly with a dismissive backward wave of his hand, already turning away and heading back to join the women.
I stared at the twin tails on the back of the man’s kimono as it crumpled to the ground, where the red and blue dragons merged into one, becoming a slinking curling deep purple dragon with gold glinting scales with one sapphire jewel for an eye and one ruby.
Unsure whether I was supposed to get paid or not, I stood in limbo, as the television screens behind the pedestal began cycling through screensavers of various amazing landscapes from around the world. The great wall of China. Mount Everest. Mount Fuji. Chichen Itza. Edinburgh Castle. The Grand Canyon. The Blue Ridge Parkway.
Then a meteor shower from the time Angela and I went to a stargazing party at Hyde Park. Next a tree-lined sunset from the rooftop of my childhood apartment complex, the one where Mark and I would escape from our drunken father to plan and dream about the future.
The scenes on the screens had started broad, slowly narrowing in closer to home like it was a target advertisement that had pulled my saved memory files out of my head and were displaying them like a movie. My thoughts and feelings and memories were the film reel and the world around me was the screen. I tore my eyes away from the TV’s, not wanting to see if it got more personal, afraid of what it might show me, not wanting to see Mark’s ghostly pale face the morning I had found him lifeless on the floor. Also, intuitively I sensed it wasn’t just displaying my memories, but instead siphoning them away, stealing little pieces of myself.
I turned around and started walking back towards the door, but another beautiful woman immediately walked up, blocking my path. She started trying to engage me in conversation. She lightly tugged at my arm for me to join her in the nearest hot tub. I let myself be pulled along. I was hypnotized by her beauty, her soft skin, her combed back wet dirty blonde hair. Momentarily blinded by lust, another type of controlling conveyor belt. I was about to step into the hot tub in my Brioni suit when a far-off rumbling invaded my bones, blocking out all the sweet nothings coming from the girl’s pretty red mouth.
“If my memories are being depicted on the screen then my heart might be the cause of this thunder,” I thought. The sound slowly grew louder and louder, deeper and deeper, reverberating from somewhere within me and outside of me. It was like that guttural growl of warning from an apex lioness standing in opposition against a fierce foe who was threatening her cubs.
The thunderous growl deepened, growing more and more fierce like the lion was searching by sound alone through the deep labyrinths of folded dimensions for its target. Aslan from Narnia opening portals with nothing more than his roaring magical breath.
It was gravity itself, cutting through all barriers, ether and mass, through all time, past and future. Something was on the move, unseen, traversing from behind the veil. It was getting closer and closer to this hidden bathhouse at the highest peak of the lowest dungeon, within maze after maze of overlapped and upside-down Escher stairs. No matter how deep into the underground caves I went, it seemed I couldn’t hide from this lion’s gravitational growl. The whole bathhouse was vibrating, faster and faster. The harp stopped playing with a twang of ominous finality. Everyone had frozen, looking around at each other in wide-eyed, pale-faced horror.
The crystal chandeliers took up the harp’s lost thread, clinking an ominous countdown towards something everyone seemed aware of but me. I glanced up at the high terraced ceilings, drawn by the sound, as two chandeliers came crashing down. The first squashed a man, wearing a white bedsheet, who was pointing and shouting orders, with a sickening crunch. A trail of his blood leaked into the nearest hot tub, turning its soapy waters a shingles shade of pink. The other narrowly missed a group of naked women who had screamed and clumped together, arms all chain linked, shuffling towards one of the many doors that had just materialized out of nowhere like they were playing a game of moving Red Rover and trying to not let the band of charging lions break through.
Everyone had started to panic and run for an exit, retreating deeper in the hope of avoiding whatever was coming. I alone stood frozen, the single calm ant amidst the frenzied chaos of the discovered underground nesting colony.
I watched in passive indifference as people tripped and slipped on the soapy tiles, cracking their skulls and busting their teeth. Then I looked up at the remaining chandeliers as they began to vibrate faster and faster until the rumbling roars let out a crashing cataclysm, completely ripping off the roof covering the bathhouse and throwing it across the sky and out of sight. All the ants started scurrying faster. More of the women let out piercing high-pitched screams while a few more gruff voices barked out pointless orders. I continued to stand immobilized, held on pause by the remote controller. My neck craned upwards, eyes wide, to the exposed sky like I expected the alien owner of this doll house to reach in a giant hand and crane game its chosen prize, shattering the firmament and the grand illusion at the same time.
And whether this thought manifested it or not, I didn’t know, but the next thing I knew there was indeed a sort of coiling mechanical claw slithering down towards where I stood. It was like some compartment inside my head that contained H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds had been pried open just for this moment, just so my limited understanding could put an image to what was happening, allowing me to comprehend it from something similar I had already seen.
The snaking coil hypnotically swam directly towards me, easily avoiding the other people tripping and slipping over each other to scramble out of the way. Was I being snatched up by the mothership? Was earth merely a petri dish of various lifeforms for some far advanced race of beings? Was this how my mind pictured God, in a way I could comprehend?
Every compartment inside my mind seemed to have been unlocked and thrust open. A thousand and one scenarios flitted through my mind as the metal coil hovered in front of me, both swaying snake and flute charmer. It reared back, priming to strike, then unsheathed four sharp prongs that glinted silver like knives with a shinking metal on metal sound. Each prong then unfurled tinier prongs, five on the top two and four on the bottom two.
The rumbling quickened, shaking the entire building. The floor started vibrating, causing my legs to shake with fear, boiling the very marrow in my bones that was then flash-frozen into a paralyzing river of ice. Something, somewhere, far off, from the veil within the veil, sent a glowing electric surge down into the coil until it reached the claw of prongs. It glowed with a beautiful omnipotence, as deadly as it was strange, yet as comforting as it was deadly. And then the storm broke free as a huge battalion of lions all roared at once, unleashing a thousand years of bottled wrath and fury, accompanied by an equally impressive strike of forked lightning in the sky.
I finally had the thought to move, to escape, but it was too late. The invisible hand holding the invisible remote was pointed right at me and was stuck on pause. I was in a freeze frame all my own in the middle of the running scene. Nowhere left to go. No place left to hide. Nothing more I could do. I inhaled deeply and calmly, resigned, accepting whatever the remote controller played next.
My eyes went lazy and soft as I stared down the four-pronged coil, indifferent to the uncontrollable flow of fate, watching as it reared back then stabbed into my chest. My vision flickered for the final time as everything went white and I fell into un-obstructed dream space.
- The Remote Controller - March 24, 2025
- Three Tethers Left - August 29, 2024
