Analog (short story)

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Analog was the first short story in the Disparate Minds series, written and illustrated by Plum Pudding and released on 31 May 2024 by The Cheshire House.[1]

Plot

Part One

June Gazpacho finds herself in a dingy motel bedroom whose walls are painted an off-putting reddish-beige colour. In a heavily dissociated mental state, with fragments of literature bizarrely running through her mind, she takes stock of her surroundings, being drawn to the powered-on television set in the middle of the bedroom, which is fitted to a VHS player.

She soon finds a VHS cassette with a sticky note that reads simply "PLAY ME". Reflexively doing as the note instructs, June is startled to discover that the image which plays on the screen is a recording of the last few moments, soon culminating in the June on the screen putting her own tape in the player in a recursive loop which lags further and further behind real-time.

Frantically hitting the "rewind" button in an attempt to stop the almost hypnotic loop, June accidentally goes further back than the start of the tape and suddenly finds herself transported back into one of her memories, one from 3 years ago, when she was 23 — reliving a conversation with her abusive, emotionally manipulative mother — who slaps her when she tries to hug her in a bout of nostalgic relief at finding herself in this familiar setting. After this memory, she finds herself reliving another one in which her mother came home drunk with a young man (Analog) and the two started to make out, heedless of her presence in the same room, scrolling through job offers on her laptop.

Finding herself back in the motel room, she explores it further, confirming that there's nothing to be seen in the window behind the blue curtains. Silencing the flurry of voices inside her head, she finds a bathroom and a kitchenette, with the latter containing a minifridge. Opening the latter, she is horrified to find a bloodied human hand covered in grease and grime. Before she can act upon this discovery, the TV set switches itself on again, now fast-forwarding until it's showing actions which the real June has yet to take at all.

Just as the mystified but by no means passive June is making up her mind to very deliberately act unlike her analog doppelganger, the picture is replaced with that of a regal-looking, black, middle-aged woman who greets her by name. Mistaking her silence for an expectant one, June briefly tries to talk to her before realising that this is a prerecorded message, with the woman thinking for a moment before cryptically instructing her to "listen to the aria", then introducing herself as Anthea. After Anthea mentions "the mist of Nostalgia", however, the TV abruptly cuts out, interrupting Anthea's advice.

Though she tries not to turn the television on again, her thoughts are increasingly disordered and she soon finds it on again, watching her doppelganger on the screen. She's already struggling to figure out which of them is "real" when the second June inexplicably steps out from behind the TV set, now standing in the same room as her. One of the two Junes asks "which one of [them] is going to leave", prompting June's mind to flash back to yet another memory: the day she left her mother's house for good, telling her goodbye with her first name — Sydney — rather than "Mom".

Back in the present, the two Junes circle each other warily, thinking parallel thoughts and each convinced of being the original. While the June who stepped out from behind the television vainly searches for some improvised weapon in the kitchenette drawer, the first June, who had already looked, instead focuses on finding a logic to the madness, remembering Anthea's words. She does her best to listen to "the aria", which she recognises as the cacophony of words — "every voice she’s ever heard and billions she hasn’t. Lots of Shakespeare and authorial quotations. Repeated phrases, bearing their way into the world, creating grooves and ridges. Fiction and Non-Fiction bearing down on her hard".

Finding some degree of clarity, June decides to snag the first-mover advantage in what she views as the inevitable confrontation, punching her counterpart. The two are soon tussling on the floor with no clear winner emerging — until June kicks the television off the cabinet on which it stands, with the heavy appliance crashing over her duplicate. As it falls on her, the other June vanishes in a blink — except for her severed hand, left behind at the wrist, and stained with a muddy-looking fluid oozing out of the television set. In a daze, the victorious June recognises the hand as the one she found before and opens the minifridge again. It is empty; she places the hand there, where she had found it originally. Desperate to escape, she unlocks the door of the bedroom and finds that it leads to another, all but identical bedroom, minus the TV set. Not giving up, she goes through room after room, finding that the wallpaper gradually lightens from a maroon-ish beige to bright crimson, and from there to pink and finally pure white.

After that room, she finally steps out of the building, finding herself in a disorientingly normal-looking parking lot. The grey building she stepped out of is marked out as Big Gazpacho's Mother / Motorlodge by a crude sign. Leaning against the sign, having obviously gotten here in the unmarked van parked next to it, is Anthea, still wearing a cocktail dress and smoking from a cigarette holder. Seemingly unfazed by June's appearance, she greets her with a simple: "What kept you?"

Part Two

A bloodied, dazed June enters a bar, where she quickly attracts the attraction of all the regulars, from leering old Wrinkler to the Mean Girls–quoting bachelorettes huddling together in a corner to mild-mannered Todd Sharine. Chiefly concerned is the barman, Terrance, who senses something odd about her but is wary of asking, beyond asking her if she's a "Gazpacho", a "Joe" or a "Laundromat" — with her evasive response prompting speculation from the patrons, with others suggesting she might be "CVC".

June's attention is soon drawn to the TV screen in the common area, currently displaying a trailer for some years-after legacy sequel to a movie Terrance doesn't quite remember. Oddly transfixed, June says simply: "I want it". Terrance barely has time to wonder about this before getting a better look at her and realising that the blithely-unconcerned "June" has a bleeding stump in place of one hand. A moment later, the false June is throttling him with her good hand, moving like lightning.

The original June is still in the parking lot with Anthea, where she takes note of a second sign next to the motel's, which identifies the town as Avenue. Climbing inside the vehicle with Anthea, June meets another young woman, perhaps still a teenager — mousy-looking and of an ethnicity June, to her slight embarrassment, can't place. As the three drive into town, Anthea apologises for her earlier cryptic demeanour, though she doesn't in fact cease to mystify June with odd non sequiturs and subtle but abrupt mood shifts.

After dwelling on her past and the time she tried to run away from home to imitate a book she'd read — "the first time she had trouble being hopeless" — June tries to make conversation with the teenager, who introduces herself as Serena; as June tries to do the same and realises she doesn't remember her last name, she is informed that most people who arrive in this town forget theirs, hence the practice — recently coined by Anthea — of adopting the name of their place of arrival: Serena arrived at Taj Curry Express, making her Serena Taj Curry Express or Serena Taj for short, while June is now June Gazpacho. In typical cryptic fashion, Anthea informs the girl that she "was never so careless" as to lose her original last name, but she doesn't tell them what it is.

Meanwhile, the doppelganger-June comes to something approaching her senses — seemingly with the primary June's consciousness being partially diverted from the van — in an empty construction site. Though her thoughts are confused and disjointed, she thinks of herself as June, and has no memory of her violent outburst or her injury — being baffled to find that she is presently still dragging a pleading, injured Terrance after her. Even as she panics and tries to apologise and assure the man that he's safe, she finds herself continuing to pummel him — not with with her good fist but with the stump of her other wrist — horrified, yet unable to stop herself.

As she starts crying, June's consciousness recoalesces in the van, where she meets an additional occupant who had hitherto been in the back of the van — a flamboyantly queer youth by the name of Wick. As she focuses, June gives voice to the realisation that there's "a part of [her] in the other [her]", and its corollary: that she didn't succeed in beating her doppelganger, for all that she appeared to vanish. To her shock, Anthea is unsurprised, and already knows all about it, lightly chiding June for thinking that she could have truly killed something born of that television with the television itself. As the van continues zooming through the dark town, June realises that they aren't driving to safety but are in fact giving chase to her doppelganger.

The drive drags on as they zoom down the featureless length of what June starts to think of as the longroad, gradually casting an almost hypnotic pall over the van's occupants, who are overcome with a sense of stagnancy — prompting June to wonder if the length of the road is an effect of space being unfolded, a thought whose origin she can't trace, while Anthea ostensibly delivers a short speech on the stagnant rot at the heart of the universe which is more apparent in still places like Avenue, a speech which, the moment Anthea finishes speaking it, June remembers if she simply imagined Anthea delivering. As June spaces out again, the other-June experiences a deeply dislocated inner monologue seeing "dripping red" which she is unable to perceive as her victim's blood.

Wick breaks June out of the dissociation, prompting a conversation with Anthea about why this is happening to her; Anthea asks if she is "very spiritual" and June, looking inward, is surprised at the certainty with which she answers that she does believe in God deep down. Anthea notes that such a wellspring of belief is unusual among the people "trapped" in Avenue, dropping the word all too casually and sending June reeling at the revelation that she is indeed trapped here.

Across the parking lot, she finds the bar, which is called Insolence. Walking in, she recognises the signs of a recent struggle which she guesses must have been the work of her other self. Anthea, Wick and Serena lead her to the backroom which their little action group rents out and uses as a base of operations; Anthea concludes that something must have happened to Terrance when no force comes down to stop her from sampling the house Sauvignon, and, examining the wreckage further, the group find the injured, unconscious Todd, about whom Serena immediately begins to fuss, with June realising he must be a friend to Anthea's group himself.

Dwelling on what happened could have happened to Todd and the rest of the bar, she remembers the phrase "I want it" and how the other June felt when she snapped, becoming transfixed with the boxy TV set — one of two "nostalgic" objects in the bar together with the jukebox, which they notice has been stolen. Noticing that June is spacing out, Serena snaps her out of it and destroys the TV set. Examining its remains, Wick grimly professes his certainty that the other June "knows [they]'re onto her". At this, June bites her lip — and the other June starts bleeding.

The June-entity is dragging the now-unconscious Terrance down the sidewalk, achingly aware of a craving inside her that is alien to her fractured consciousness, a nagging want of pure nostalgia — "I want the old because it’s better because it wasn’t now I want the old and not the new I want to be a thing again I want to not know. I want." — but too dissociated to truly process how strange that feeling is.

Snapping back to herself inside Insolence, June is able to process the memories of her out-of-body experience and warn the others that the evil doppelganger is rapidly approaching the bar. Serena rushes out to confront her, followed by June and finally by Wick, while Anthea stays put, impassive and unreadable. As she looks for the other June and her captive, Serena stumbles upon the body of a dead Wrinkler, surrounded by various old objects — and realises that the entity targeted her because he himself was the oldest person in the bar.

As she and Wick chase after Serena, June finds herself remembering the encounter which brought her to Avenue: after a long time on the edges of homelessness, doing odd jobs and living on the move with only her bicycle and her bag, she found herself addressed by a strange old man whom she'd been seeing on the streets with some regularity. After spending some time rambling about his wife, he told her, unprompted, that she belonged in Avenue, a place which he said was "close" — then, when she tried to ask him who he was, answered in evasive terms which strongly implied he was something more than human before sharply walking off without saying goodbye.

Though they'd been trying to keep up with Serena, Wick and June eventually give up and decide to stop and take a breath. Babbling with endearing ceaselessness, Wick manages to cheer her up a bit, telling her a little bit about how they themself came to Avenue, expressing sympathy over June's unusually traumatic arrival. The two head off to find Serena.

Back at the bar, Anthea is still by herself. Though she makes sure Todd's life is in no immediate danger, this was not her primary reason for staying behind; instead, she inspects the place by herself, confirming that her backroom was not harmed and the bar itself was indeed the target of the entity's attack. Examining the main room while dancing slowly and silently by herself, she notices that all "old things" have been removed, confirming her suspicions about the entity's motivation. Telling herself that she did give June "all the pieces", she continues to dance by herself, having decided that "this [will] be the test".

Outside, Serena, silent and efficient, thinking of herself as outright hunting the creature, soon manages to track her down and get the drop on her as she drags the unconscious body of her victim into the old theatre. Pulling up the shiv she keeps in her boot, Serena advances on the entity, who regains enough of June's consciousness to plead for Serena not to hurt her, trying to explain that she is the same June as the other one, whose mind is moving back and forth. However, Serena catches on to subtle hints of the "I want it" entity's possession and asks her probing, cryptic questions on how she feels about the past and the present, provoking the entity within the other-June into taking full control and lashing out at Serena. They struggle, until the entity somehow "pushes the air" and causes Serena, hitherto invested in the present moment, to be pushed back into the past, feeling the whole weight of her memories. While she collapses on the pavement under the mental strain, the entity fully makes her way into the theatre with Terrance's body.

Serena is found only a short while later by Wick and June, who confirm that she's physically unharmed and reluctantly go in, with Wick picking up Serena's knife. In the projection room, a black-and-white copy of Singing in the Rain (a film which triggers strong nostalgia in June herself) is playing, with the important difference that the camera seems to slowly but steadily zoom in on Debbie Reynolds until only her grin is visible. After the end of the credits, however, the film returns to normal, and Wick gives no sign of having seen the same thing she did. Standing there in front of the screen, however, the two can now see the "other June", now wearing a leather jacket she stole from one of the bikers at Insolence.

The other-June shows them Terrance, whom she hasn't harmed further beyond tying him to a seat in the front row — explaining that she intended to show him the movie. Almost pleadingly, she explains that "it" is "trying to manifest". June tries to empathise with her other self, with whom her psychic bond is stronger than ever — but only succeeds in causing a truer manifestation of the nostalgia entity to briefly separate itself from the other June's body, appearing as "something shaped mostly like a prim and perfect Hollywood housewife's face — not quite Debbie Reynolds, maybe a bit of Lucille Ball, but all lipstick and that sickening smile", before plunging back in.

However, June pushes further, letting go of all animosity for her other self while casting away the instinct to cling to old fantasies as if they were ever real. Walking onto the stage, she comforts her other self more directly — and they reunify, with the nostalgia entity disappearing altogether in an instant as it loses its footing within her reunited psyche. Reeling, June comes to terms with the twin facts that "it's over" and that there's still much to do, starting with getting Terrance some medical care — the ache in the hand that used to be severed an unpleasant reminder of the stark reality of it all.

Some time later, back at the bar, Anthea compliments June with a little too much smugness for her taste. In their ensuing conversation, June comes to suspect that Anthea purposefully withheld help as a test, but uneasily dismisses the suspicion, although she still tells Anthea point-blank that she doesn't trust her. Anthea is unperturbed by this, however, and June nevertheless agrees to join her, Wick and Serena's group, "at least for a few days", seeing the wisdom in keeping what friends she can in this small and dangerous town.

Later yet, having arranged to rent a small place from Terrance, she comes into it for the first time and is momentarily horrified to realise that the bedroom is almost identical to the one from the motel — although her shock quickly subsides as she takes stock of enough differences to ease her dread, most notably the utter lack of a television set. Exhausted physically and psychologically, she collapses on the bed and falls asleep.

Characters

Mentioned only

Worldbuilding

Notes

Continuity

Gallery

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "The Cheshire House is proud to present three brilliant new stories!". Twitter (31 May 2024). Archived from the original on 31 May 2024. Retrieved on 21 June 2024.
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