Counter espionage

This is the second story I wrote for the ShaLaLa performance last year.

This continues my fascination with the grateful dead and spies.

I am up late again preparing to watch youtube videos while laying quietly in the space between the floors.

This was my home. The entire house, not just the space between the floors. However, over a progression of tiny, almost imperceptible granular increments, someone else has come to be within the house with me. Even if I was not trained, it would be completely reasonable to recognise this as surveillance. Though not a very sophisticated form. They, the subject, move my books, leave handwritten notes that I assume are to themselves because they don’t make any sense, and generally disturb my personal items.

So before they had the opportunity to see me I entered the guest room’s built-in wardrobe, lifted the three floorboards within and slipped underneath. This is what is called sous-veillance, which is a French term specifically for countering surveillance by taking low position, like under the floorboards. It is something I have long understood, even before the internet.

When I was much younger I was walking in a small woodland and I had either a day-dream or a hallucination that I was drifting down through the forest floor, through the pine needles and millions of beetles and trillions of beetle carcasses and into the attic that, at that moment, I knew with absolute certainty was below.

I knew also that there was a pact that I had unwittingly made, that would stop me from doing this in all orders of reality. I think it is unlikely that the vision, and pact, were entirely true or at least not permanently so. Nevertheless part of its threat continues with me. It is a little similar to the experience of being betrayed by a friend in a dream, and then when you wake up and see them they do not voluntarily attempt to make recompense.

The phone I have balanced on my chest is more or less in the right position for me to see it comfortably. The subject that I am sousveilling in the rooms directly above will not be able to hear if I have headphones on, though when they walk they often wake me up with their clacking shoes shaking little starfields of dust from the gaps between the boards above. I know they must occasionally leave the house because there is always food in the fridge, and someone is taking out the rubbish. But I only ever hear them moving between the rooms. Even when the subject is still, the house is not. Pipes clack and thonk, joists sag, the pitch of the roof lifts and pulls in response to the tugging of the wind. An animal that is breathing, digesting, stirring in its sleep

And so I started occasionally needing assistance in getting to sleep myself. And then this occasional need for assistance became a dependency. And I can't really now expect to get any respite until I've let the algorithm feed my brain a little. I think that half of my body has decided that rest is a crime, and that it needs to sneak up, perform this cowardly act only when my brain, the cop, is otherwise engaged.

To slip its arm (my body’s arm, if you're following), slip its arm around my neck (my brain’'s neck) so that the trachea is in the crook of the elbow, and then lock this off agaist the bicep while applying controlling pressure with the off hand.

It would be nice if this performance could be bypassed, but there is clearly an impassable gulf within me over which parts of me struggle to reach an agreement with one another. So as with much in life we must say "in the absence of consent we will make do with routine".

I lean forward to tap the little triangular play icon with my nose.

Boop.

Videos queue up at the bottom of the screen in a neat row, disappearing off either side.

I try to let my face relax, watching the phone play through half closed lids as a small spider peeks at me in turn from behind a split in a dry floorboard above.

I drift, feeling overstimulated, exhausted, and very stupid.

A huge boil of a man in a balaclava lectures on seed oils in HGH stacks and shows photographs of fingers so swollen that look like maggots. The sunken nailbeds now a void, an open mouth. From the corner of the screen the host gives an approving live reaction.

Another man explains how the world works in great detail, without using any nouns that are not within a metaphor. After 90 minutes he leans conspiratorially into the camera and whispers "women are a Ponzi scheme'.

I struggle, unsure what to do with this knowledge, but then the next video grasps my complete and undivided attention. It shows drone footage of a seemingly endless convoy of parade floats stretching across the countryside. On the back of each float is a band, improvising both with each other, and also responding to the floats ahead and behind that are within earshot.

The vehicles are varied, tractors with trailers, flat bed trucks, but they all have the same emblem on the bonnet; a skull with a jagged line dividing it in half.

I am utterly captivated.

And I have so many questions.

How far does the parade go?

Is it like the game Snake, where to win is to always be one step behind yourself?

Or perhaps it is just a regular oruburus, forever devouring and giving birth to its own circular definition?

I stamp down the cynical voice that says it ends just off screen.

Or that it is CGI.

Watching the drone track above the paradeI feel very restless, as if distracted mid way through the process of searching for something. Absent of any direction, but retaining the strong feeling of lack. Something has broken my desire to keep pulling along the algorithmic chain of youtube videos.

And then I notice that without intending to, I have been holding my breath.

Because just now, through the muffling headphones and layers of music, I believe I heard a sound from the house.

A thonk.

A noise that could be nothing but the closing of the back door as someone leaves.

In the dead of night, when I must normally be asleep, the subject who has been attempting to surveil me, has left for some engagement.

I let go of the breath I was holding, and take another to replace it.

Giving space for a new idea.

This is a unique opportunity to slip behind and follow them out of the house.

This is a chance to alter direction.

One more breath, and with care I push up the floorboards.