rated PG-13

You are in a dark, cavernous space, surrounded by strange people that you don't know or recognize. You are all fixated on a single radiant wall, an expanse of pure light, which appears to flicker and shift and swim before you. You have the impression that there's a strong force looking back out at you, reaching into you, planting thoughts and images and ideas directly into your defenseless mind. More disconcerting than the conceit, the gall, the intimacy of this violation, is that the presence behind the light actually speaks to you, explaining through its projections, with startling specificity, exactly what’s it’s doing. Its statement is both blunt and circular, “I am deceiving you.” You are drawn in, there’s a door, a compartment. It’s an elevator. Entering, sliding the gate, plumbing down, down, down. Edith Piaf plays on the speaker overhead. When the doors creak open, you step into brightly lit storage space, cluttered with artifacts from every story you’ve ever heard, and some you worry that maybe you haven’t. Yellowed photos (one autographed by Fred Astaire, another by Alfred Hitchcock) and ragged movie posters (here you see Kubrick’s “The Killing”; there, “Blade Runner”; there, curiously enough, “Dark City”) and are plastered one on top of another, nearly obscuring every surface. Moving through the space, there’s a clown mask, nailed frownside-up to a column, on a pedestal you see a small mechanical puppet, with gears and bolts showing from within a cracked wooden torso, under a delicate glass dome, with a hand written note: “La magie est dans l'oeil du spectateur,“ signed, Georges Méliès. On the polished floorboards next to it, the legendary lost head of Philip K. Dick rolls its glass eyes away from your gaze, whispering, “The maze is alive.” Turning, you see there are tools, instruments, implements of invention, strewn everywhere. Pencils sharpened to pinpoints, trowels and chisels and an architect’s compass. Steel scissors gleaming over heaps of shimmering black ribbon, a violin gushing sound like a freight train erupting from the bottom of the sea. Through the wall of noise, you perceive a platform in the corner, a shedding velvet curtain slung loosely across it and a stout mahogany table with a threadbare old top hat from which a white rabbit regards you, scruffily, tapping his watch. You grasp, with a shudder, that this is a magician’s workshop. No, a studio. No, a classroom. No, a sanctuary. It occurs to you that someone lives here. Embarrassed, confused, you know this is not your place. You are intruding. But you were invited here. Or were you? By whom? When he steps from behind the curtain, a mirror in one hand, a smoldering cigar between his teeth, a battered paperback of Aristotle’s “Poetics” barely contained in his jacket pocket, you realize you’ve seen him somewhere before. The tousled blond mop, the stormy November eyes. He was the King of the World, once, not that long ago, wasn’t he? He’s gone a bit doughy. “I had to let go,” he says, and gestures for you to join him behind the curtain. You’re in a hotel. No, a luxury liner. No, a submarine. You feel the thrum of engines growling through a carpeted deck, and you understand that as you move, so this vehicle propels you forward through unseen tides of depth and darkness. As cautious as your steps may seem, you’re moving at a vertiginous speed. The corridor is honeycombed with doors, and though his belt is heavy with keys, your guide leads you down a deliberately, conspicuously straight line, pausing only to key the locks on five doors, each at the very end of subsequent passageways. He stops at the last. “I’ve assembled a team to assemble a team,” he tells you, “to make a show to show how we make The Show.” You sense the capitals, and suddenly understand that he’s wearing a mask of his own face. He studies himself briefly in his looking glass, smiles, then swinging open the final door, angles the mirror to reflect from inside, an elaborately crafted set of nested dolls, like the ones from Russia, but carved from of pure, transparent crystal, each one cradled snugly inside the next. “Makes them crazy,” he says, “that my own ghosts haunt everything I ask them to do.” Strains of  “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” waft to you from behind. Turning to square with you, locking you with his eyes, your host, your sherpa, your director, offers, “We made this for all of you.” In his hand now, an onion, sliced sideways to reveal its smooth concentric white labyrinth. “Take a bite,” he invites. Intrigued, compelled, needing to understand, you accept it, and crunch down like it was Eve’s own Apple. The sharp, overwhelming, electric potency of it shocks you conscious, and you’re surrounded again by an anonymous crowd in the dark.

Shaken, unsure where you’ve surfaced, you wonder, what the hell just happened. Reality, perception, memory and comprehension are all corkscrewed together, whirling, swimming, indistinct. Were you in your own mind the whole time, or was that actually somebody else’s vision entirely? Was it some kind of telepathy? A shared dream? A calculated, engineered mass hallucination? Could it be that that was, in fact, just a movie? Confounded to realize that you can’t figure the difference anymore, you sense the echo of Chris Nolan’s laughter from somewhere deep below.

Originally published in The Wire