VI.

The film club resided in the room directly above Room 1999-7, which answered the question of where the black mold had escaped to. For all intents and purposes then, I had entered the belly of the beast. It would not have surprised me if the club was even responsible for the original spread of fungi when the Bergerac experienced the first bouts of infestation.

The clubroom interior was dark. Most of the desks had been topped and pushed to the far corners of the room. A handful of chairs surrounded a projector sitting in the center, beaming the nearby wall with a blank, off-white square.

With the light from outside filtering in, I also spotted aluminum sheets rolling up the walls. Acoustic caulk ran along air gaps in the ceiling. On the dearest desk sat several unplugged radios, tarot cards, and clothespins spread out over a wooden board.

“Have you seen Apocalypse Anew?” the yellow sundress asked.

“I don’t even know what it is,” I answered.

“It’s a classic. Everyone in the film club watches Apocalypse Anew when they join,” it said. “We have a few others this week who are interested in the club and will be watching it. A few potential joiners watched it earlier this week, but they weren’t prepared for it, so they fell off.”

“I’m not here to watch Apocalypse Anew,” I said. “I’m here to talk to you about the girl whose desk you’ve been decorating with your knives.”

“Natasha, you mean. A pity she’s not here,” the sundress said. “Both you and her should be watching it together, really. She’s seen it before.”

“Wait. I recognize you,” one of the girls behind the sundress stepped forward. She was wearing a plain striped shirt. Headphones loitered around her neck. “You were at the library yesterday, weren’t you?”

“Me and several hundred other students.”

“Let’s not talk about yesterday,” the yellow sundress hissed. “I’m sorry. I almost forgot that I hadn’t introduced myself. The name’s Valerie. The one who you just talked to is Monica. This is Candace, Sayu, and Brenda.”

“Your names don’t really matter to me,” I said. “I’m here to tell you to stop doing those things to the girl in my class. It’s not right.”

“We haven’t done anything,” Valerie replied. “From our perspective, it looks like you’re accusing us of something we didn’t do.”

“You mean, you didn’t write those messages on her desk? You didn’t threaten her to come to the film club or else?”

“That’s right. We didn’t do any of that. I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Valerie shrugged. “Why are you standing up for Natasha? You don’t know her, and what messages did you see on her desk? Maybe check them again before you make baseless accusations.”

There was no point arguing any further. The mere possibility of deception, whether real or false, self-inflicted or otherwise, was just another cerebral gambit, ossified in human communication, that shifted our irreconcilable worlds apart.

I shrugged and turned to leave, but Valerie’s followers blocked the door.

“Let me leave,” I said.

“Wait,” Valerie said. “We’re not finished yet.”

“If you truly didn’t do anything, there’s nothing more to say, so move.”

“You accused us. Shouldn’t you apologize to us for making a mistake?” Valerie asked.

“How would you like me to apologize?”

“How else?” Valerie crossed her arms. “By watching Apocalypse Anew, of course.”

“I don’t think I’m interested, I’m sorry.”

“You misunderstand,” Valerie said. “We’re not asking you to watch it. You’re watching Apocalypse Anew. Now.”

Valerie’s clubmates advanced. One of them stopped by the nearest table and picked up the clothespins, snapping their wooden jaws open and shut to ensure that they were working. I wasn’t sure what they were used for, but I wasn’t interested in knowing.

The issue was that for all my big talk, I had no way of physically exerting myself out of this situation. My disgust for this very injustice owed itself to the fact that I too was subjected to all sorts of mockery as a child and did not know how to fight back.

It was my brother who saved me back then, had beaten senseless the boy who had choked me until I passed out and soiled myself because he wanted to sate his curiosity and “see what would happen” if he squeezed the trachea of a young girl with his big fat hands.

Once my brother was gone, so too went my protection. I never took over the mantle of responsibility regarding my own safety. But my brother left me with one shred of wisdom, that when negotiating with ignorant people, awareness and subterfuge remained my greatest line of defense.

“Don’t touch me,” I said. “I know the Electromagnetic Man.”

The members of the film club froze as if I had tapped a pause button. Only Valerie appeared unfazed. She kept walking and picked up a clothespin from her still comrade’s fingers.

“That old legend?” she chuckled. “The serial killer case from all those years ago? Why bring him up now?”

“You’ve soundproofed this room,” I observed, “and there are aluminum sheets on the wall. And let me guess, the windows are taped over with copper meshes, right? You’ve got unplugged radios here too. That used to be a classic. Unplug your radios, they said, and the Electromagnetic Man can’t get to you.”

“Well then you know that he can’t get to us,” Valerie replied. “EM Waves don’t come here. He can’t travel through the radio. He can’t phase through the windows.”

“And what if you brought the Electromagnetic Man here by accident? Say… to watch this movie you desperately want everyone else to watch?”

“I like you,” Valerie laughed. “You’re so full of jokes. So you’re claiming to be the Electromagnetic Man now? Does that mean you admit it?”

“Admit?”

“Oh come on,” Valerie groaned. “Surely you’ve heard about the incidents on campus? Students, consumed by some impulse, throwing themselves to their deaths? You don’t see the resemblance with the Case of the Electromagnetic Man, who drove people mad with radio waves, so mad that only death could release them from their insanity, until he drove himself mad with the very same waves he propagated on others?”

“He didn’t do those things.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Valerie replied. “I know you’re not the Electromagnetic Man. If you were, you’d have burn marks all over your face from your final attempted murder. They had him cornered in a warehouse, and he set himself on fire to escape arrest. It was all in the papers, and you expect me to believe that you’re him?”

Valerie’s sound words roused the other club members from their paralysis. They pounced on me, gnawing at my wrists and forearms with their manicured fingers painted with fresh enamel. One of them picked up one of the chairs tossed into the corner. They planted it near the projector while the others dragged me to the seat.

I struggled, but all my appendages failed me. One of the girls, the one with the denim shorts, suffocated my legs by wrapping her arms around them. Two others wrenched my arms behind my back, and as I tried to scream for help, a wet rag, torn and sewn together not unlike the one that I used to cover my bathroom mirror, was shoved down my throat.

I gagged at the taste of toilet water mixed with a coarse, terrene texture. I realized that it must have been the black mold that had been scrubbed from the clubroom corners. I threw my head forward, trying to spit out the cloth, but a strip of duct tape sealed my lips close.

“Only the initiated may survive the impending disaster,” Valerie said. “To appease the judgment of the apocalypse, all acolytes must first pass two tests. The first, in accordance with Destiny’s will, is to witness Apocalypse Anew.”

Was this what the girl with the faded magenta eye had experienced?

If so, how was it possible that no one else knew? Why did we do nothing?

It could not have simply been a blind eye turned. You couldn’t claim ignorance for this. If we were truly innocent, we must have, myself included, lived in irreconcilable, parallel universes, and only when our faint electromagnetic fields (for humans, yes, emit our own waves) overlapped, like the crossing of planetary objects during an eclipse, could we project ourselves into the lives of others and fathom the things that we did to each other.

One of the girls fetched nylon zip ties from a nearby locker. As I was forced into the chair, she slipped them beneath my wrists to fasten me to the arms. Valerie flipped a switch on the projector and tapped the laptop that it was connected to.

The edges of the white square contracted until it became a circle. The lens refocused on a blurry gray canvas. Audio surfaced, starting with static from an unattended radio station. Then, like the entrance of winds, came the dry whine of telephone towers filling the left channel while white noise from an empty music player crescendoed from the right.

Dark ovular faces strung to thin tails squirmed out from the bottom of the lens. They looked like rotten mung bean sprouts, but everyone in the clubroom knew.

This was black mold.

I tried shutting my eyes.

That was when I realized what the clothespins were for.

One of the girls gripped my face and snapped my eyelids open with pairs of wooden pins. Trying to squeeze them shut again felt ejecting my eyes out of their sockets. It couldn’t be done. The black mold crawled to the center of the lens.

“Stop it! Stop it right now!”

The girl trying to bind my wrists to the chair flinched. Several of the other girls turned towards the clubroom entrance, where they spotted the girl with the faded magenta eye gasping for breath at the doorway. I wrestled for control of my wrists and with a forceful kick connected my foot with the nose of the girl with the denim shorts.

The chair rattled, and so did I. As I freed myself from it, I swept it aside, and the other girls yelped as they tumbled over along with the chair. I ripped the duct tape from my mouth, tore out the mold infested rag, and unclipped the clothespins pinching my brow.

“Come on!” yelled the girl with the faded magenta eye. “What are you waiting for?”

I sprinted, sprinted as fast as I could, noting that Valerie herself did not give chase. Maybe she thought that I couldn’t escape, that the architecture, the world of the film club room, would forbid it.

And it did try to keep me from escaping. The ceiling fell, dripping with white hot sealant. The floor panels rolled towards me like a treadmill.

But the girl with the faded magenta eye stretched her hand and extended her arm until it crossed the distance between us. I reached out, and when I grabbed her hand the ceiling retreated to its original position and the floor panels ceased their grumbling and the two of us darted down the hallway, down the stairs, through the glass doors and into a cool summer evening and we didn’t stop running until the sun went down and the Bergerac had vanished into the night.