1Annelid and Leveret
Season one, episode one, minute thirty-one and thirty-five seconds: Leveret chases Annelid into the jungle. They are laughing, because they’re teenagers playing a game. The jungle is not quite a jungle. In a much later episode, we learn via a minor subplot about 1970s land reform that it was once a colonial-era rubber plantation, abandoned and gone feral. It will gradually grow wilder and more overgrown through the seasons. We know another year has passed when the new year birds hoot in the background. Leveret and Annelid will grow older, too. This is that kind of show. There are only two kinds of show: the kind where people grow older and the kind where they don’t. We, the fandom, love the first kind best. We love this show so much.
Leveret and Annelid aren’t their real names—that is, not the given names of the characters in the show, which we never learn—but nicknames they took from old textbooks they found gathering dust in a cupboard in their little school that never seems to hold exams or parent-teacher conferences. There are no ordinary school lessons. All they do at school is sit in a darkened classroom with the other kids, watching a show about us on TV.
We think this is appropriate. We watch them; they watch us. The wheel turns.
She runs into the jungle, the balls of her bare feet barely touching the ground, running so that he will follow. She pushes aside branches that snap back at his face, leaps over roots that she knows he’ll trip over, laughs so hard it echoes around him like a haunting. Annelid, and a lid, she’s keeping a lid on it. She hiccups and can’t stop giggling.
The TV in their classroom is an Australian-built Philips colour TV from the late 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s: twenty-six-inch pale grey screen with rounded edges; fake wood finish on the chassis; black plastic grille on the right that you can take out with a click to expose the control panel where you can tune channels by turning tiny knobs. We remember those from life, too. Getting the channels right used to be one of our chores. Child-sized fingers were better with the knobs. (A hundred thousand childhood chores unfold in our memory. Husking coconuts on an iron spike. A fire between three blackened bricks. A short-bladed scythe through the long grass. A tire rolling down a dirt path by a lake, under a dry blue sky.)
We watch them watch us. The picture on the TV screen looks grainy and out of focus, but the kids don’t seem to have any trouble with it. We suspect this avoidance of perfect fidelity is an intentional device to avoid opening an abyss of mirrors. Nature abhors an infinite regress.
The TV does not show us in real time; it is in fact deeply committed to unreal time, seeming to glide back and forth across the spans of our lives. When we squint and peer at the blurry screen, our colours seem faded by modern standards. It makes us look like period actors. Our clothes, haircuts, and mannerisms are not distinctively contemporary. We can’t tell if our technology is anachronistic in any given episode. For instance, is that a smartphone in our hands, or a small book of religious scripture or revolutionary literature that we might be reading for inspiration and to ensure our ideological righteousness? We cannot agree in our analyses, which manifests as dyspeptic unease. There are cracks in the unity of our we.
The audio track of the show within the show is completely inaudible to us, except as murmurs on the edge of hearing, like the whispering of dead children. We can hear the kids in the classroom just fine when they whisper to each other, or the occasional expostulations and exposition from the teacher, even birdsong from outside hooting a new year in. It is only ourselves that remain inaccessible.
Sometimes the kids mock the dialogue from the TV by repeating it in funny voices. That’s the only
way we know what we’re saying.
She leans back in her chair, drawing pleasure from the way it doesn’t yield, the way the wood digs into her skin, the ache in the unsupported small of her back. Annelid sits in the back of the class because she’s a bad girl. Leveret is up front somewhere. She doesn’t care about anybody else in the room; it’s as if they don’t exist. She doesn’t care for him either, but it’s a different kind of not caring. While the TV plays, the teacher drones on about the causes of the war, which is now over but never over: he says it was about burning books and bodies, though not at the same time. A library and a funeral. This, Annelid knows, is incorrect, or at least incomplete. She gets her true histories from Leveret’s father, who has many strong opinions on this and other subjects. The last time she was at Leveret’s house for lunch, Leveret went to piss and Uncle—who had been drinking, of course, he hasn’t stopped drinking since his wife died, nearly as long as Leveret has been alive—cornered her at the dining room table to explain what he refers to as the secret history of Jesus fucking Christ.
Whenever Uncle rants, about history, about politics, about the injustices faced by his, that is to say their, great race, his comb-over rises up and unfurls like a flag. Annelid watches, her mouth open in fascination, as that white flag seems to wave in the breeze. Uncle is bare-bodied, because he always takes his shirt off after he’s had a few and overheated, and frequently stops to undo and retie his colourful batik sarong. The curling hairs on his old-man chest are white, too. He is a large man and might have been muscular, once; his pointed breasts, with the nipples ringed in white hairs, still retain a vestigial sense of the pectoral.
—Let me tell you what happened in the lost years of Jesus fucking Christ, Uncle says. He intermixes any mention of a salvific figure with fucking, uniting the imprecatory and denominational. This is especially true if he’s referring to them by title, because Uncle disapproves of pride in titles. He himself is a doctor, he says, but he doesn’t like being called Doctor Uncle. When he wants to show he’s being serious about someone, he refers to them by their full true-name instead, like a disapproving parent.
—Iyesu bin Yusuf, he says, goes missing in the record (ha! Only in the bhumic record, of course, not in the akashic, of which more anon), you understand, he goes missing for eighteen years. Eighteen years! You, you’re not quite yet eighteen, so this is a gap longer than you have been alive. And what was he doing those eighteen years? Well, what all have you done in your life? A great many things, is it not? Small small things and some big things also. So it is with him. Max Müller tried to cover it up, you know, but it is as Siddhartha Gautama said: there are three things that are not hidden—Uncle pauses to put a drink. He is drinking Vat 9 Special Reserve on the rocks. The ice is melting rapidly in the heat and the arrack is a pale yellow. It looks like piss. Annelid imagines dead liquid worming its way through a living body before exiting in an arc, glittering in the light.
—There are three things that are always hidden, Uncle says.—Three things that are secret: the ways of perverts, the ways of Brahmins, and the ways of women—he points at Annelid, accusingly—As you should know. And there are three things that are not hidden, out in the open for all to see. Two of them are the sun and the moon, which is why the sun and the moon are on the battle standard
of the great ancestor of our great race, the so-called—so-called!—cruel young prince. The third thing that is never hidden is the truth. No matter what Max Müller says, it is out there for all to see, if only we will look. Here it is, for example, in this book by the Swami Abhedananda—Uncle pauses to run his yellowing fingernail across the spines of the books stacked on the dining room table, his recent reading. The nail stops at one that is too deep to be pulled out easily without dislodging the whole. He taps it instead for emphasis.—Abhedananda quotes Notovitch on the missing years of Iyesu, sa vie inconnue, when he travelled to Rajagaha to study at Nalanda University. Iyesu, you see, was the classic perennial grad student. He changed his major many times, immersing himself in one discipline after the other. It was here that he learned the craft of his trade, learned the sacred truths that we all learn now as children—here Uncle waves his arms like someone standing on a runway and signalling to an oncoming aircraft, though Annelid is not sure if it would be coming down or going up, nor does she wish to interrupt, for instance, to say that she was never taught this as a child, that all their lessons consist of television and hermeneutics, but the absence of her interruption goes unnoticed, because Uncle ploughs on to bellow—what the fucking Buddha taught!
We, the audience, the fandom do not know at first what the deal is with Leveret and Annelid’s names, until the flashback in episode five in which Annelid picks both nicknames. She names Leveret after the hare, because he’s nervous and quick on his feet and has long earlobes. She likes to tug on them sometimes. She suggests he should wear dangling earrings like the cruel princes of old.
She names herself Annelid because, she says, she likes that it means “little rings,” though what she actually means (but does not say) is that she has a fascination with peristalsis. Swallowing and choking, digesting and shitting, the movement of dead things through the living body, it obsesses her as namings and the absences of namings obsess us.
Neither the show nor the show within the show has a name. There are no credits, no title sequences, pure binge TV in its perfected manifestation, content that never ends, interrupted only and frequently by ad breaks: enforced absences in the flow of our consciousness, like a sleep full of symbols and portents. We reorganize the onstreaming into narrative in our hearts; we declare borders; we define episodes and seasons. We catalogue, document, and discourse, because we like it like that.
But it’s confusing when things don’t have names, so we do what Annelid did and give nicknames. We call the show the Show. The show within the show, the show that’s about us, the fandom of dead children, we call the Documentary. We call it that because that’s what it seems to be: it cuts out little slices of our lives and holds them up to the camera. It focuses on us, or on the actors playing us, one at a time. It imbricates us and implicates us, plotless, fragmented, atomized. It makes us uncomfortable.
The fandom is so large we think the Documentary could go on forever without having a character recur, yet some seem to. We find this moderately problematic; it compounds its unbearable individualism with favouritism. We are not upset, merely concerned. When characters recur years apart, they do not seem
to have aged. We believe the actors are digitally de-aged to mimic our eternal youth. Some of the kids’ whispered classroom mockery supports this theory. The de-agings are sometimes crude. The Documentary doesn’t have much of a CGI budget.
Neither, to be honest, does the Show. They blew most of it in the first episode, in the Show’s most important moment, which happens in the final minutes of the very first episode, when Leveret chases Annelid into the jungle.
It happens so quickly that Leveret misses it entirely. We almost miss it, too. We probably would have, if it hadn’t been framed and foreshadowed so heavily by ominous, overbearing warnings throughout the episode.
The first foreshadowing: Annelid’s mother warns the kids against going into the jungle. She says the jungle is demon-haunted. This is the wildening jungle that encompasses and interrupts their small town and all its shattered families. As the jungle used to be plantation, the town used to be a single mansion, the desiccated white heart of a colonial estate. No trace of the mansion survives. What used to be the monsters’ vast and exclusive domain has been inverted: the people are on the inside now, and the monsters, according to Annelid’s mother, lurking just outside.
Annelid’s mother isn’t a very good actor, or at any rate, seems to lack experience. She delivers her warning so stiffly, so robotically, that the young actors can’t prevent themselves from grinning as they hear it. Or perhaps it’s just that the children can’t take seriously the superstitious concerns of their elders. Annelid’s mother, who Leveret calls Aunty so Annelid also does, is intensely superstitious. She is a great believer in horoscopes and Myers-Briggses and technocracy and meditation and life hacks to improve productivity.
The jungle is not demon-haunted. There are no demons in the Show. It is just not that kind of show. Only in the broken real are there demons and hauntings. We know this: we are the ones who haunt. The demons are our distant cousins. We might nod politely if we passed in the street, though we would not make small talk. If we are the world’s young memories, they are old cogs in its operation, its invisible laws and powers. They do not speak. It is a misconception that it is the demon who speaks during possession, a persistent confusion of rider and ridden. We file suggestions to correct the relevant Wikipedia entries, but are denied for lack of citable sources.
Annelid and Leveret are both present when Aunty gives her warning, yet she addresses it to Leveret with a fond smile, which is one of the many reasons Annelid has taken to calling her own mother Aunty. The kids are upstairs in Annelid’s room. It’s late and Leveret should go home but the power’s out for another hour and if he waits till the streetlights come back on, he won’t have to stumble about in the dark. Annelid lights a candle and plants it on top of an empty glass jam jar that still has the paper label on, half-peeled. The lid is caked with wax from nights and nights of powerlessness. They lie on opposite sides of the light with her small battery-powered radio between their heads. It is a struggle to avoid the news. Always so much breaking. Each time the music is interrupted by another alert, more death, more violence, more cruelties, one of them reaches out and spins the wheel until they find another station with music. Any music at all.
Every time Annelid rolls onto her side to tune the radio, sweat sticks her dress to her back. Leveret’s face is shiny in the candlelight, so she thinks hers must be, too; she uses his face as a mirror sometimes. She wipes a bead of sweat from the tip of her nose and stays on her side, propping her hand under her head like a sleeping Buddha. The song on the radio is in English, a mournful howling encircled by jangles.
Aunty appears in the door, which is of course open. Annelid and Leveret have been friends since they were very little, which is the only reason she’s allowed to bring him into the house, never mind her room. Aunty has made it clear to her that as they get older, Leveret’s continued presence in her life is on sufferance. Hypocritically, Aunty is herself very fond of Leveret. It’s him she addresses.
—Son, she says.—I wanted to remind. When you’re going home, don’t take the jungle path.
—Never do, Aunty, Leveret says. The casual fluency of this lie is not just because he doesn’t want to Get Into It with Aunty. It’s more that he doesn’t see a need to involve an adult, a person who by definition knows nothing, in the messy business of life. He takes the jungle path every time, because otherwise he would have to walk twice as long to get home.
—I mean it yeah, Aunty says.—Both of you. She spares a glare for Annelid. Aunty is shorter than either of them, and ever since her husband died, which is to say, nearly as long as Annelid can remember, has worn osari every day, in fabrics that have grown more soft and pallid with every wash until they are reduced to a grey that matches her temples. Her pallu is always wrapped around her waist and the bags under her eyes are like eggs. Annelid doesn’t like to look at her. Whenever she does, her mother seems to have aged three years.—Every time I meditate and speak to the gods, lately, all they worry about is the two of you.
Annelid sneers and Leveret smiles politely.
—Last time I had a vision, says Aunty, shadowed in the dark of the door, next to last of a long line of witches.—As I reached the first level of awakening, the destroying mother came to me. She planted her skull-topped staff so close to me that I thought she might shatter my ankles, so hard and so near did she stab it into the earth. She faded back into the night, but the skull chattered its teeth and spat and spoke, and it said to tell you two to mind your business.
—We are minding our business, Aunty, Annelid says.
—What happened next? Leveret asks. He always treats Aunty’s visions with friendly interest. Annelid hisses at him.
—The staff became rooted, Aunty says. Her voice is low, almost guttural, as it tends to become when she recalls the things she’s seen, because memory is a kind of possession. —Vines grew from it and climbed upward; red flowers sprouted from the eyes of the skull, and from its open mouth. Chinese hibiscus, five large red petals like arms and legs and a head; a long staminal column. The jungle rose up around it, bleeding up from the earth in green and red, until there were trees all around and the canopy closed overhead, blocking out the moon.
—And then you woke up, Annelid says. She doesn’t despise her mother’s visions because she disbelieves them; she thinks of them as invasive life worming its way into the dry, cracked earth of her mother’s dead dreams. She distrusts
them. She has no time for the destroying mother. Mere gods are not her concern. She is on her own path now.
—I was not sleeping, Aunty says.—I am awake.
2The Discourse
A few days later in the Show’s chronology, but still in the same episode, Uncle gives the kids a similar warning about stay- ing out of the jungle. His warning is more prosaic, if equally portentous: he says there are communists in the jungle, training camps in hiding from the military’s repression elsewhere on the island. The kids laugh at this, too. The war seems far-fetched to them. It seems remote. They’re still too young to be recruited by revolutionaries. That only happens in the second season finale, when we also discover what really happened to the missing parents in both families, Annelid’s father and Leveret’s mother. They were killed. Uncle says they were killed by communists, or possibly killed as communists, in counterinsurgency operations carried out by state paramilitaries. Aunty says they were killed by demons. Aunty says they were killed by the townspeople because they were possessed by demons.
The episode continues; time passes fast in the Show. The sun and the moon strobe by, the wheels sometimes squeaking a little on the dome of the firmament. The kids go to school. They watch the Documentary some more. The teachers make regular announcements that the jungle is out-of-bounds for all students and that nobody is allowed to enter it. The reasons change with time. Sometimes the teachers say they are banned from the jungle because they are polluting the wilderness with their modernity. Sometimes the teachers say it is because the jungle is full of dangerous mosquitoes and bats, reservoirs of strange disease, or because it is suspected that unsafe and unsavoury elements are holding witches’ sabbaths within, fascists or separatists or communists: lions, tigers, and bears, dancing naked under the moon. The class never seems to pay attention to these dire warnings. They rarely react when a teacher speaks. They are now, as they are always, engrossed in the screen. If they speak at all, it is only to comment on the Documentary.
The fandom has various theories about why the kids are required to watch the Documentary in school, but we all believe this core axiom: they are being prepared for life in the outside world. We believe these characters are being trained to become audience. If they survive their trials, they will join us here, where we are.
We posit that if the Show had completed the story it was telling—if it hadn’t been prematurely cancelled after four seasons—that the Show’s eventual true finale would have culminated in the protagonists exiting the story and entering the world. We believe Leveret and Annelid are living matter pushing themselves through a dying narrative, until they breach the veil and emerge screaming.
We divide into sects over the questions of how they would emerge, exactly, and what it means: for them, for us, for the actors portraying Leveret and Annelid.
The largest faction, the Inside, believes the actors would become possessed by or transformed into their characters; their opponents, the Outside, believe the characters would emerge into the world as new flesh, as physical duplicates of the actors, but independent beings.
Underneath this titanic struggle of discourse, there are two smaller factions with bigger problems: the Overlap believes Leveret and Annelid’s escape would merge our worlds in their entirety; the Null believes their escape would irradiate our world with their cancellation.
These four factions of fan theory have become the horns of our tetralemma. They are we, divided against ourselves.
The Overlap and the Null agree on almost every point of doctrine apart from their projected outcome of the breach. They agree, for instance, that we, the fandom, are the opposite of Leveret and Annelid. They are alive in a dead place, while we are the dead in a living world. We are the ones who make this a haunted world.
—Do you ever feel like we’re being watched? Annelid asks. They discovered this little clearing a long time ago, not an hour’s walk into the jungle from her own backyard
The earth is black and soft here. It has been years and many episodes since those early warnings and foreshadowings from their surviving parents and teachers. They have long since made the jungle their playground, this clearing their base of operations, their secret playhouse, their place to be alone. They have spent many hours drawing in this black earth with dry branches, playing pretend, talking about the world and its hauntings. They have never kissed.
Leveret denies that government spies have made it as far as their little town. He’s friendly with some of the communists now, he says. ...
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