The Gravid Tape

When I was a freshman in college, I had no clue what I wanted to study, and I didn't have many options, either.


The first college I attended, before I transferred, was in dire financial straits. The president of the college, and her thirty-six vice presidents, had basically misappropriated so much money that the list of majors that had been cut in the previous two years and the list of still-available majors were about equal in size. I had originally wanted to major in anthropology, but that was one of the first degrees on the chopping block.


While most students would drown their existential dread in a can of Bud Light, I was neither old enough to drink nor well-connected enough to get convincing fake IDs. So, I tried joining different clubs, but I struck out in all of them. The gaming society was insular, full of Magic players who probably took out loans to afford their decks and D&D groups who were locked in campaigns that had been going on for years. Two different book clubs sneered at me when I told them I didn't think Harry Potter was all it was cracked up to be. The less said about my experience in the culinary club, the better.


Eventually, I found somewhere I belonged. The university's film school had been one of the first cuts when the financial issues started. Because of one clause or another in his contract, the dean of this particular school was kicked upstairs to an admin position instead of being fired. Let's call him Dr. Whaley. Dr. Whaley had gotten the green light for a 'film appreciation club', with the caveat he would not be paid to run it. I decided to attend a session or two.


The first session, Dr. Whaley told us something I'll never forget. "The only person who should have a say about whether or not a film is valuable isn't a body of decrepit zombies that call themselves an Academy, or a twenty-something online whose mixed up 'yelling at the camera' with 'humor', or some member of academia who insists that the medium of film declined with the invention of the talkie. You, and you alone, can decide what films are valuable to you."


We watched some of the usual suspects; Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, Psycho, but we also watched newer stuff like The Dark Knight and How to Train Your Dragon. It was an attempt to get us to appreciate cinema in all its forms, but also point out where the warts were in the classics; to say there’s an uncomfortable amount of racism in Gone with the Wind would be an understatement.


By the end of the fall semester, I was the treasurer. It was a small club: there was myself; Dr. Whaley; Sidney, a senior who had once been part of the film program before it got cut, now staying at the college to fulfill a math major; Tyler, a fellow freshman who was going for a literary studies major; and… Quentin.


We all just assumed Quentin was a science student, maybe something in psychology, because of the way he dissected the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. I took a psych class, but I never ran into him, but I always figured it was just because he was more advanced than me. He looked like he was maybe old enough to be a grad student, but I never even learned his last name, and Dr. Whaley seemed okay with him.


Towards the end of spring semester, Quentin told us he has a film project he wanted to share. This surprised all of us. Sid outright asked, “You’re a psych student. Why did you make a film?”


Quentin explained. “I’m taking a poetry class, and the final project for this term is to write and record a video poem. I used a camera from the library to record it; I think you’ll like it. It’s pretty funny.”


Dr. Whaley was one of those people who was very supportive of his students (that's what he called us, despite it not being a formal class) and invited Quentin to share the project with us at the next meeting.

***

Not all forbidden media is large-scale. Some student projects have anomalous elements in them, and his project was one of them.


Sidney, Tyler, Dr. Whaley and I gathered in the same classroom we always did to watch our films. Quentin plugged in a purple and red flash drive and started up the film, whose file name was “Gravy.mov”. “I had a friend help me with this,” he explained. “Just provided the voiceover.”


It began in a downright surreal manner-- the camera was focused on a hand holding a BLT sandwich. The sandwich was manipulated like a hand puppet to recite lines from his poem, titled Gravid. Here's how the first stanza went:


"Gravid, by Quentin N.


"Something new grows inside her,

A lemming, a lemur, maybe a spider.

It writhes beneath the dermis thin,

Threatens to pierce her virgin skin.

She screams and writhes and shakes,

Praying that soon, her water breaks,

And the thing within her aching womb

Finds itself in its father's tomb."


We were watching this in a vacant room of the student union. While we were laughing at the absurdity of a sandwich puppet, Dr. Whaley was turning pale. He said he needed to make a phone call, and ducked out of the room.


Right before the second stanza started, the hand stopped "speaking". A voice, presumably belonging to the hand's owner, asks "We good, dude?" before a sledgehammer comes down and crushes the hand. The audio track cuts out just as the hand's owner starts screaming, and Quentin's voice plays as the hand writhes in pain, bones and muscle exposed to the air.


"It will be born some time anon,

Eating the Whore of Babylon.

From its maw, it utters a cry,

That will dry the sea and rot the sky

Mother writhes and mother screams,

Mother sees the child in her dreams."


Tears of shock are in Sidney’s eyes as she asks, “Where’s Quentin?” She looks up just in time to see him doing… something to the door from the outside. He jammed the handle with something, and Sidney can’t get it open.


Tyler gets up to try the door. The handle doesn't move. He picks up the fire extinguisher to try to break the window on the door and force it open from the outside; even as he manages to shatter the window, it’s too small for him to get his hand through and clear the obstruction.


The whole time, I'm glued to the screen. I couldn’t look away; my mind was filled with equal parts fascination and disgust, as if I was watching some gruesome surgery, where the patient is screaming because the anesthetic is ineffective, but the doctor keeps operating anyway. The broken hand… changes. Lumps of flesh and bits of bone recombine to form something that looks like a cross between a human mouth and a lamprey's sucker. It eats the remains of the sandwich as Quentin's voice continues to speak.


"It shall be cesarean,

And then the child will be born again.

Polka-dots dance across her vision,

As the doctor makes the first incision.

Blood flows from unsullied skin,

As the wet nurse is pulled in.


Gravid, Gravid, Gravity,

Kill the sky and drain the sea.


The child is born, the world is lost

Within a hellish pentecost,

Child eats mother, sister eats brother,

And the whole world shall be--"


Something awful was going to happen if the poem finished. I didn’t know how I knew; it was as if there was a voice in my very soul telling me the recital could not be finished. Not knowing what else to do, I ran to the computer and unplugged every cable I could find, managing to get the power cord unplugged before the last word could be spoken. I unplugged every other cable as well, just in case the projector somehow kept playing.


I remember there being something wrong with the projector’s screen. The canvas was now blank, but it was warping outwards, to the room, as if something behind the screen was stretching out into it. It was completely stationary, which was the oddest thing about it.


Dr. Whaley came back, wearing sunglasses with X's on each lens, and a member of maintenance to get the door open. The look of relief on his face haunts me-- I think he expected at least one of us to be dead.


"Where's the data?" He asked, coming to the computer.


I unplugged the flash drive that Quentin had stored the video on. Dr. Whaley placed it in a Faraday bag, and turned off the projector. As he did, there was a soft screech from the projector screen, and then everything seemed to return to normal.

***

The club disbanded after that. I saw Sidney in the dining hall a couple of times, but I never heard from Tyler again.


Dr. Whaley met with me before the semester ended. He said that he'd already offered a letter of recommendation to Tyler (who was transferring colleges) and had told Sidney he would always be a positive reference for her. He asked if there was anything he could do for me.


"Yeah. Explain what the fuck that was."


He told me that it was a recitation of the poem Gravid by Quentin Naismith, a poet from the 1940s whose work was never widely published, due to its deleterious effects on reality. He told me that the 1996 Milwaukee explosion wasn't caused by a gas leak, but by someone playing a recording of Naismith's poem Flagrante. Gravid would likely have killed, at the very least, everyone in the building we were in through "infestation".


"And the video?"


"The student-- I doubt he was one, come to think of it-- needed a medium to transmit it. Film-- or at least, the moving image-- is one of the more powerful mediums for proliferating an anomaly like that. If it were to a larger audience, it's likely a good part of the campus would be infested."


"And… there's more like this?"


He nodded. "There's The Concordance, The Maddening Quiet, The Garrison Footage, the Kilauea Tape… that's just in film. I had to get on a phone with a colleague of mine that night to confirm that what I was listening to was actually Gravid."


I nodded. “I think I’d like the letter of recommendation. There’s a school in Ohio that’s supposed to have a good film course.”


Dr. Whaley smiled at me. “After all that, you still want to study film? You could run into some dangerous stuff in that field. I don’t want you to be hurt.”


“Can the film really hurt me if I don’t think it has value?”


Dr. Whaley sighed. “It can. And I hope you never run into anything else. What’s the name of the school?”

***

As I stated in my last post, I ended up doing my bachelor’s thesis on The Concordance and the impact it had on early cinema. That was what got me back on Dr. Whaley’s radar; he met with me a few days before graduation, and offered me a position.


“It doesn’t pay well,” he told me. “But you’ll get training, and you’ll be able to help people. You’ll be helping us stop people like Quentin. People who use films, books, games, art… people who use culture and media to try and cause harm.”


“Do you run it?” I asked.


“No. But I’ve met the people who do. They do good for us, and we have people all over the world.” He paused. “I’m actually going to be leaving the country soon. There’s been a report of someone distributing copies of the Garrison Footage in Taipei. Two people have already died. I could use an extra set of hands.”


I told him to let me think about it. Instead, I had a drink about it. The Concordance wasn’t the only thing I’d dug up during my research; Naismith’s works, the Black Rondeau, the Hemaphyte Movement, and so many ‘last known footage’ videos, depicting impossibilities, causing impossibilities. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole, and I knew it was impossible for me to climb out on my own, if at all.

So, I figured, it would probably be best if I made like Alice and find friends on an island within a sea of tears, even if those friends ended up being a bunch of dodos and lorikeets. I boarded the plane to Taipei a week later, and have been part of this Institute ever since.