Underground Cinema

A Short Story About Love and Death

In the Basement of an Abandoned Building, 2022, Photograph, Getty Images

Philip Traylen is one of the more unique voices here on Substack. Consistently brilliant and vaguely unnerving, his essays are always a challenging and rewarding treat. It’s no surprise his fiction is similarly excellent. In “Underground Cinema,” a short story with shades of László Krasznahorkai, Franz Kafka, and other notable nightmarists, Traylen’s signature dark humor and philosophical depth create a harrowing portrait of consciousness under extreme duress.

—The Editors

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Part 1: Underground

It’s elsewhere, you know, the world, we’re over here, he said, and it’s over there, it’s over the crest of that — is it a hill, yes, it’s most likely a hill, all the tell-tale signs, all the horrific giveaways, of a hill, there’s no element in nature more embarrassing than a hill, I’ve always had this feeling, he said, that 98% of natural phenomena, at least, are essentially failures, a hill is a failed mountain, he said, a lake is a failed sea, a shrub is a failed tree, a mouse is a failed rat, a dog is a failed wolf, a cat is a failed lynx, a stone is a failed cliff, snow is failed water, water is failed sun, I raised my hand in frustration, I couldn’t speak, he had tied me up and seemingly also cut out my tongue, I couldn’t tell for certain whether he’d cut it out, I couldn’t feel anything in my mouth, but that didn’t prove that my tongue wasn’t still in there somewhere, clinging to the back of my throat, and while the last time I’d an opportunity to have a bit of a feel, to see if there was something in my mouth, I was able to affirm that yes, something tongue-like was still to be found, in the inner recesses of my mouth, but this morning I couldn’t feel anything at all —

I haven’t been able to detect my tongue automatically for a long time, it increasingly takes a great deal of reaching around, with my hands, my fingers, to be sure that there’s something in there, but this morning things were looking extra bleak, for one thing my hands were tied behind my back, to my feet, and I couldn’t see out of my eyes, most likely because he’d gouged them out, as he was always just on the point of doing, for all his claims about being a ‘well-balanced individual’ there was surely something suspicious about his pre-occupation with this particular activity, this gouging out of my eyes, which he referred to so frequently, so much so that I thought, on balance, he’d never get on and do it, after all, what would he have left to think about then, once he’d finally gone and done it, gouged the possibility of ever experiencing light out of my head, he knew that’s what I really valued, light, and how much fun was there left to be had if he’d already squeezed my motive for living out of the top half of my head, whereas I was never overly concerned about my tongue, and if he didn’t realize this instinctively from the things I said, the things I occasionally managed to squeeze out of my mouth, then he must have figured it out somehow, because it was always the eyes he’d go on about, I wonder if tomorrow, he’d say, will be gouging day, or I wonder, he’d say, is it perhaps gouging o’clock? Sometimes he’d put his watch to my ear and just say ‘gouging time?’ in his strangely neutral voice, with just the slightest inflection, and then he’d stand there for an hour, he’d press the watch face against my cheek so I could feel the movements of its tiny hands, that’s what time is, really, not a number but a movement, a tiny little movement towards death, in theory it’s not a particularly big deal, we’re all slowly dying, and why not, what else should we be doing, but at the same I have to admit that it had a certain effect on me, having to listen to the ticks of his watch, not because I was dying, but because I was dying on his time, I was dying his idea of death, so to speak, not, as I had always hoped for, my own —

but about my eyes, the truth is that although I couldn’t see anything, and hadn’t seen anything since early morning, I didn’t feel all that concerned, above all eyes are windows into the soul, what matter that I couldn’t see out of those windows, the point is to let the light in, not to let your seeing out, in fact it’s not even the light that really counts, what’s most important is that other people can see in, or at least think they can, that’s what eyes really amount to, the promise of another person, and even if what was in my head wasn’t, as of that morning, eyes, in the strict sense of the term, I still had the sense that at the very least there were still two eye areas on my head, all that matters in the end is that when someone looks at you there’s a place on your head where their eyes can rest, as peacefully as they can manage, whether there are actual eyes there is beside the point, I mean if you had to choose between having remotely operated eyes, through which you could see perfectly well, but which had nothing to do with your face, versus having clearly designated, albeit functionally useless, eye areas, in just the right place on your head, anyone with any sense of personal dignity would surely choose the latter, and I was still confident that those areas were still there, since I could feel them, not with my hands of course, but with something else, with some inner part of my face, which in most situations it isn’t necessary to think about, but which was, as of that morning, really coming into its own, in fact I could almost say that, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was really getting to know my face, I mean the empty, inward face, the almost dead face, the one we are all slowly growing towards, growing into, the face which will almost certainly be the last one you see before you die, unless you have particularly conscientious relatives, or a genuinely loving spouse, unless there’s someone who actually likes you, then your internal impression of your own face is going to be the last thing you’ll see, you’ll watch it dying, from the inside out, I don’t mean to suggest that I was feeling particularly morose, the truth is that the morning was panning out fairly well, under the circumstances, I’d been excited to discover that on the left side of my face, if I focused for long enough on moving my ‘left eye area,’ I could still feel a flicker of muscular feedback, in other words, whatever the condition, externally, of my face, I still had some kind of internal access to my (left) eye rolling muscle, a muscle that, in the past at least, I’d felt a real affinity for —

I’d never been libertine enough to use my eye rolling muscle in public, but it got no shortage of use in my private life, it was the muscle I used most when I was alone in my apartment, I would roll my eyes to myself, or at myself, not that I was trying to prove a point, there was nothing, I hope you can believe me, experimental about how I rolled my eyes in my apartment, it was a perfectly natural part of my life, the fundament of my existence, even, I would be rolling my eye at the kettle, when it was going slower than you’d expect a kettle of its caliber to go, and considering how careful I’d been with the water, considering the care and investment I’d made in my kettle, well, you don’t expect to be waiting around in the kitchen, but to return to my current situation, tied up like a pig somewhere, I was able to reassure myself, by early afternoon, that I was still definitively able, albeit on a primarily psychological level, to roll both my eyes, which in turn reassured me that my eye areas were almost certainly still there, in their familiar spots, and that, really, is all that matters, at least that’s what I told myself at the time, over and over again, as long as I still have two eye areas, I said to myself, in their familiar spots, then there’s a chance that this whole thing will resolve itself, one day someone will look at me, their eyes will rest on my face, that’s all I want and need, whether I have eyes that I can rest on their face is a secondary problem, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it —

but life, he was saying, again, is never quite here, in my basement, is it, it’s somewhere, life, but I can’t get there, for some reason, no one will tell me why, they made a decision, I suppose, that it would be somewhere else, they all got together, behind my back, and had a vote on it, all my fellow citizens, they had a citizens’ assembly, I suppose, and decided to put it over there, yes, just over the crest of that, well, hill, where I’m not allowed to go, and that’s just how it is, it’s just my situation, I don’t have any particular issue with it, he said, why should I, in fact I’m almost completely reconciled to it, and don’t think what I’m doing to you helps, don’t think the fact I have you here, tied up like a pig, like a dog, like a goddamn . . . canary, he said, that doesn’t do anything for me, it just so happens, he said, that I’ve locked you in this room, but I certainly haven’t done so to enable me to access some neurotic interior layer of myself that I have been looking for ever since my mother, ever since my mother, ever since my mother, anyway, whatever you accuse me of inside that head of yours, whatever accusations you have floating around in there, don’t accuse me of being strategic, it’s not that the less you see, the more I see, how little you see has simply no bearing on how much or what I see, it’s totally irrelevant, there’s no feedback loop between us, he said, if I cut off your leg, am I going to grow another leg, haha, and what could I do with your leg, I’d gain absolutely nothing, he said, from cutting off your leg, I just want you to know that if you find that, in the next day or so, I happen to start cutting off your leg, I’m not getting anything out of it, if I cut off your leg, then I’ve cut off your leg, and that’s the end of it, I won’t be having any psychoanalytic repartees from you, any psychoanalytic . . . sign language, he said, you see, ever since my mother —

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Part 2: Cinema

he never got to the end of that particular sentence, ever + since + my + mother, so I can only imagine what the fifth word might have been, past tense verb most likely, but it could also be a name, ever since my mother, Joanne, or ever since my mother, who, or ever since my mother, because, or ever since my mother decided, or ever since my mother forgot, or ever since my mother saw, the sentence, in short, was crying out for a fifth word, and of course a sixth and seventh and eighth, something like ever since my mother finally understood that I, but he was quite content with the hysterical lurch of these first four words, perhaps he felt that any fifth word would somehow lessen the haunting significance of his little phrase, his non-sentence, perhaps he thought that any word he put in that fifth slot would undermine the individual value of each of the first four words, but the more likely explanation is that he just didn’t know what the fifth word was, if he did know, I thought, surely at least once he would have slipped up and said it, if not the whole of it, at least an initial letter, after all he didn’t seem a man much given to restraint, but although I spent a lot of time thinking about this, about why there was no fifth word, it was the four words themselves that really got to me, the more I heard them, the harder it became to imagine that the sentence could make the slightest progress in any direction, of course the four words wouldn’t have been so haunting if he hadn’t, as I’ve mentioned, tied me up like a dog, in a room somewhere, if he hadn’t been in the process of dismantling my sensory apparatus —

in fact on their own the four words didn’t amount to much, if someone said them in a different context, just after a date at an Odeon cinema, say, and your date turns to you in the foyer and says, ever since my mother, that wouldn’t be particularly troubling, in fact, it’s not hard to imagine being extremely glad of those words, it might have been just at the point in a relationship when it’s quite beautiful to hear someone start talking about their mother, it might indicate a whole new stage in the relationship, when it becomes okay to say things basically at random, to watch a film about topic x, and then, as soon as you’re back out, in the blinking twilight, to start talking about topic y, it would be the most natural thing in the world in a good relationship, a relationship so good that you’d be disappointed if, after leaving the cinema they said anything about the film, now or ever, a whole creation myth could be found in those four words, if only the right person would say them, at the right time, and I almost started to think that the only way I could get them back, my eyes, I mean, would be to set up an expedition to the cinema, perhaps, I thought, if I invite the right person to a certain Odeon cinema, everything I’ve ever lost will be returned to me, but first, of course, I’ll need to find a way out of this basement, it wasn’t going to be easy, no one has ever broken out of a sealed room by rolling one of their eye muscles psychologically, but on the other hand, I thought, isn’t there something cinematic about all of this anyway, something latently cinematic in that I might be able to exploit, perhaps it’s typical of modern psychology, to start thinking of the cinema when things reach a certain peak of hopeless desperation, but it wasn’t without justification, torture scenes in movies typically unfold in just the same way, namely there’s a large, echo-ridden chamber, which gives the torturer space to roam, they can approach, and then retreat, as much as they like, and slap bang in the center is a man, it’s almost always a man — the women of cinema suffer enough as it is, I suppose, without anyone going so far out of their way — bound to a chair —

and if he’s so infected with cinematic logic that even at his most flagrantly criminal he’s still restrained by a set of tried-and-tested semiotic rules, well, is he really a serious person, after all? Does he really know what he is about? No, he probably hasn’t the faintest idea, he’s probably making it up as goes along, just like any young creative, but at the same time I knew what I needed to avoid above all was drawing any psychological parallels between him and I, I had to restrain myself from having any startling insights into his character, in a cinematic torture scene the hero survives by maintaining an absolute awareness of the two roles at play, the villain (a), who has tied the hero (b), to a chair, the distinction is crystal clear in every movie, it’s always just the two of them there, the villain circles the chair-bound hero, making unsavory remarks and briefly summarizing his childhood, while the hero makes mocking interjections, the hero, inevitably, had a much better childhood —

but the reality, as usual, is more complex, what really happens is that at a certain point, the moment just before your self disintegrates once and for all, into absolutely nothing, some instinct takes hold, the destiny instinct, let’s call it, and you start to wonder if perhaps this was all your idea in the first place, perhaps, you think, I planned this all out, for some reason which, sooner or later, I’m going to remember, if you can’t move your mouth or your eyes at least you can come up with explanatory conceits, which give you a final taste of power, the last gasp of the self, you sneak your agency in through the backdoor of your suffering, a diffuse and retroactive agency but an agency none the less, and hot on the heels of the destiny instinct comes a sense of togetherness, no doubt he’s been through a lot too, one thing led to another, and here we are, just humans after all, in the fading afternoon light . . . in short, when you’re tied to a chair, when your basic senses are being incrementally dismantled, you have a choice, either believe in universal brotherhood or believe in human evil, and I’d been feeling the former bubbling up within me more and more, whenever anyone talks about their past, or even worse, can’t talk about their past, it’s only natural to posit universal brotherhood, oh yes, we’re all unified by suffering, it’s the very glue that holds things together, and resolves them all in the end, that was one path, and I could see it clearly, I could feel the idea getting into my blood, but there was something else too, some alternative, a vision of a certain Odeon cinema, sitting there one day, in the hushed, communal dark, watching a prize-winning documentary film, which I could already half imagine, just life in its bare form, here’s someone doing the washing up, the camera following the beads of water, down the side of their hand, gnarled or perfectly smooth, I couldn’t care less, and down into the basin, I started dreaming of it, not dreaming, seeing it, in my still blind eyes, intimate footage of one thread of water on their skin, yes, but how to get there, I hadn’t yet figured out where the door was, how many ways in or out there were, he’d stomp around and then the noise would suddenly cease, he must have been slinking in and out barefoot, or in the softest sandals, and then putting on these absurdly loud shoes, he must have loved the sound, of his trampling agency filling up the space, oh how cynical, I thought, how evil, that’s what he is, evil, and in that word I started to find something, a sort of way out, as long as I had that word to hand, to interpose between us, then I could keep some other image alive, as long as I could at least mouth that word, or just have it on my tongue, inert, waiting for its moment, then somewhere else in my head I could hold an image of water on a hand, one thread of sloping water, caressing a human hand, I sucked and chewed that word, evil, I swilled it about in my reddish saliva, yes, I thought, I will keep at this, I’ll milk this word for all its worth, right here in my mouth, for as long as I can, and when I can’t, I’ll sing it down into the next best part of my body, down and further down, cut off as many limbs as you like, it will be there, a judgement I suppose, latent or voiced, it doesn’t even matter, it will be the last and final thing I lose.

Philip Traylen writes the Substack oldoldoldoldnew.