Nick Brandt's "Televein Vigil"

She lives in the portable projects, an assemblage of shipping containers packed together onto the roof of a dead mall. Hers is a standard forty-footer home. Stacked two or three high in places, pocked with rust, graffiti, and neglect. The big bay door rolled up accordion-style into the ceiling so she can watch the sunset bleed its greenhouse blood. Flashes of iridescence across the cloudbank. The pale stink of ozone.

New South Horizons Mall was a still-birth. It sat, an infrastructure of bones awaiting organ transplant, the promise of commerce that would give life. A construction planned before the housing bubble. Built during it and left to rot when it popped. Both that promise and the mall rendered hollow. And on that skeleton of pastel concrete, embalmed by years of sun and chemtrail rain, the projects creep across her corpse. Commensalism within the urban rot.

Cassette Lee lives in a corner cargohome. Picked up the spot a few years back when municipal government flipped, when economy-sized housing was a fashionable activity amongst philanthrocapitalists. A trendy conversation piece spoken through silicon. Spoken on channels whose wavelengths are inaccessible.

She got lucky with the home, no doubt about it. No upstairs neighbours, though there’s a cargohome on each side. Hasn’t spoken to any surrounding residents in weeks now. Never says much to begin with, but all she hears now is garbled T.V. gossip buzz through her walls, vibrations from metal-to-metal. A feedback loop of low-grade ASMR euphoria.

At least this she can access.

On a corner plot of New Horizons, Cass has two full walls for windows, but lately, those only aggravate her condition.

She paces around her compartmentalized life. Clasping the latch under her windows, she checks the locks, makes sure they haven’t wiggled free. Pulls down the shades which cast the sunset in filtered lines across her throw rugs and the insulated metal floor.

Slippers scuffle against the corrugation. Cass passes through the shaft of light to the other window, kicks up little motes of dust and rust. Checks the locks there too.

The entranceway is the tough one. That big, segmented door rolled down, chain loose like idle windchimes. Of course, there’s no wind in here to make them stir.

Pieces of the metal door are replaced with long slides of plexiglass plastic that forms a bit of a translucent zone. A window of milky yellow strips stained by the elements. Cass works to cover them up with paint and old fabric, keep the outside outside for as long as possible. Still, bits of yellow light cut their way through her fabrications. Streak across the futon-sofa, flecks of sunset distorted by the synthetic resin window. A wobbly rainbow, but she can manage.

Beneath her feet, the lo-fi garburator of her neighbours switching T.V. stations crawls through her slippers, up her shinbones. Reverb through veins washes cool the arrythmia of her pulse. Cass steps out of her slippers, worms her feet between the rugs until she touches the corrugation. Touches that feedback loop. Shudders out whatever thickness gestates inside her, breathes in her neighbour’s media.

Plants roots in the ridged of her floor. Draws a lifeline between her sickness and their sedative.

Dr. Kengston’s infomercial on MDTV diagnoses it as an acute form of agoraphobia. Something sharpened by social tensions, turbulence within the political climate. With the red tape riots marking off larger sections downtown each day, there’s no shortage, even locally, for stressors.

Cass breathes in again. Holds inside a calmness the world outside her metal walls will never feel. Holds it in until her neighbour’s T.V. murmurs through to her lungs, rattles her from within. Shakes away the noise from outside, the sirens, the shouting.

Exhales it all, then falls back onto her futon. Lets the bits of sunset sneak their way through the shielding. Red pinpoints through the dust.

Her own T.V. chunked out a few days back. She can get a signal if she whaps the side of the box in just the right spot. Feed’s all scrambled though, something about all of this metal so close together that fills the screen with layers of static.

When the picture was clear, Dr. Kengston prescribed media. Any visual or auditory broadcast to fog up whatever’s happening outside, but she hasn’t yet dialed in on the right dosage. Even the MDTV station is good for a bit, they say. But if media repeats itself too much, you’ll grow complacent to the sickness. Drift back to what’s happening around you.

Medical broadcasts work on a cycle of repetition. New information arrives upon discovery and a lot of the presentation is a rehash of already-established content. News feeds too are a tricky slope with their similar formula of repetition, but at least they’re a 24hour permacycle. And while a glimpse into the outside world though a cathode ray screen should spell disaster for her condition, so much of the news is seen through the collective delusion of hypernormalization. No, the proper prescription of programming is reality television. Infomercials, pop voyeurism and hidden camera court shows, soap operas, anything to get lost in the scripted reality.

Cass slips off the sofa, slaps the side of her T.V. and the static jumps at her touch. The volume’s real low and she cranks it up. Sounds like they’re speaking underwater. She gets the rocky outline of someone’s torso just so, then the picture buckles. Snaps back into place.

Some sort of news station. Can’t make out any of the words on the ticker feed, but the graphic is bright orange. A similar image appears in the background behind the news anchor, rattling off a script. Audio’s distorted a few octaves down.

She falls back onto the futon. Her eyes blur, or the picture blurs. Lets the broadcast smother then sedate her. Survives off of the static feed and a second-hand prescription from whatever her neighbours watch.

Cass blinks heavy lids. Feels the warmth of the sun speckle through to her skin, but no, that’s just the T.V. working its medicine. Languid waves of sound and picture. A tickle through the floor from next door; sensory suppression.

Could fix the T.V., hope to get a stable broadcast, then she’ll be better. Back to normal in no time at all. But following the wires up and onto the roof is a bit too much to think about right now. Too much realia out there, too many complications that work to pry cracks in her medicine, steal away the sick parts of her brain and set them free, right when her dosage is getting weak.

And as the medicated lethargy overrides her evening, as wetness films her eyes so the entirety of her vision is periphery, the T.V. rubber-bands. But this time, the picture doesn’t snap back into the right place.

Prescription fills her cargohome. Her eyes soften to a near-perfect eclipse, and the broadcast stretches with a depth unseen. The layers of static expand into her home, the T.V. screen a window through a snowstorm. The newscaster is sliced laterally, bent over the folds of her futon-couch and coffee table, retains motions, but stretches into third dimensional space.

Cass resists every urge to clear her vision, to focus on the feed entering into her home. Knows deep inside that somehow, she sees a truth not meant for her.

She stands like a zombie. Slack-jawed advance through the ephemeron. In her blurred existence Cass walks towards the T.V.-turned-window. Her vision clips between the news show and something altogether different. Something layered into the broadcast, no, on top of the feed by a third party. Like a symphony written in an esoteric language.

Is this the medicine? On this channel? Have these words always existed?

Cass fights the need to focus on their depth. When each lingual strand approaches recognition, the form of the characters reshape, returns to the newsman whose funhouse projection sprays orange graphics across what was once her home.

She reaches toward the knob under the screen. Feels the tension behind the dial and flips through the stations. The indoor snowstorm changes frequency, intensity. Words unrecognizable burst through the infinite greys. Her ears fill with electric wind, words from beyond, schematics who find form in a dead language. Reanimated through coincidence, through Cassette Lee, in her medically-induced stupor.

She clicks through the stations, dialing in on the frequency that gives life to whatever sleeps within every broadcast. Becomes an automaton. That which draws the televeins from the machine, splays the lattice across her foreground, where words throb in fractal geometry.

Breath catches in her throat. But Cass doesn’t feel it.

Gone is her apartment, gone is the trauma which grows outside of her corrugated walls. In this snowstorm no sunlight exposes venom into her vaccine; in this time, in this place all that fills Cass is the flick of televeins. The language that rides along those lines, and the cross-eyed-stare she weaponizes to filter through the broadcasts as she clicks,

clicks, clicks between the stations.