The Mirrored Soul #9
(Channel IX: Breakfast Business News)
It was 7.30am when Adam woke from the sofa where he’d spent the night. Normally in these circumstances, Cory would drape a blanket or something over him, but at 1am Cory was still angry and hadn’t bothered. Adam’s head throbbed and he struggled to his feet.
Cory came over from the kitchen holding two cups. “I made you some coffee. I figured you should actually go into work today. I’ve gotta go, as the clothes won’t sell themselves, y’know? But I guess you could do with making an appearance.”
Adam took the coffee. The guy had a point. Adam hadn’t been at his job for more than two days at a stretch in more than two months. Lenny had retained his services though: every time Adam submitted an article, readership doubled. Still, he’d better show his face. Adam thought of how his desk looked last time he was there and dreaded the idea.
“Listen, Cory, sorry if I was being a dick last night.”
“Don’t worry about it, man”, Cory shrugged. “Just sort your head out, y’know?” He sat down, picking at some cereal that looked like rabbit food.
“How’s your dreams treating you? Darkness still there?”
Adam nodded. “Yeah, still there. Clearer now, I think. It’s the Canyon, I’m sure of it. It’s something to do with that.”
At Adam’s request, Adam, Cory and Tequila had watched the dream sequences at the same time as they’d watched the advert-laden highlights shows. Since they followed on from one another, it made sense. The dreams were bits of fragments that none of them could follow, although it was quite a trip. The darkness which seemed to conclude the set was no clearer than Adam remembered it being: there were signs of other people and screams and general chaos, but nothing was visible enough or audible enough to properly make out. It was as if it had been recorded at the bottom of a chasm. It left Adam none the wiser: there was a suspicion that it had to be the Grand Canyon, Arizona’s pinnacle of tourism and the start of all of this, the United States’ geographical anomaly, but it was inexplicable.
“You’ve never gone into what happened at the Canyon that day”, Cory said. “I mean, I know it was an accident, but-“
“There was a fall, I suffered a concussion and a fractured skull. That’s about it”, said Adam, evading the question. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember, it was-
“You fell off the Grand Canyon? Man, you’re lucky to be alive!”
“Well, it isn’t a straight drop, y’know? It’s a rock face, it’s not just a hole in the ground.”
“But still. What happened?”
“I don’t wanna go into it”, said Adam, standing up uncertainly to finish the conversation. “I need a shower, you need to go to work.”
“Are you going in today?”
“Yeah.”
Excerpt from the episode guide to ‘Darkened Soul’, a fansite to The Mirrored Soul, transcribed by Adamantia_X from Season Three, ‘Day 740’:
I’m going to do my best to transcribe the show, as it’s a bit scattered as usual.
After the Cory/Adam scene that some of the slash-ficcers have been discussing on the forums, Adam goes into work imagining it as a prison and imagining Lenny standing over his cluttered desk laughing, sentencing Adam to work through it. He tries to imagine what’s on his desk, including things that obviously wouldn’t be there, like scorpions. He gets the lift and thinks about last night and Brandy. There’s a quick cut to him imagining what she’d be like in bed, but he can’t quite focus on remembering what her face looks like. He walks through the office which seems freakishly well-lit, as if the Sun was in the office or something. ‘Hey, it’s the celebrity’, roars one guy, looking like he went to sleep in the same clothes he wore last night. Adam imagines that guy’s drawer being filled with whisky and bottles. ‘Nice to see you again, Adam’, says the bland guy Dean, and as I type that Adam is imagining how bland Dean is and suspects he must have some secret- kinky sex or something? There’s the old surly cleaner and Adam thinks of how long it must have been since she had a good lay, and imagines, I think against his will, how bad she must look naked. There’s a mental image to put you off your cornflakes, [although I think Adam’s view of her being tattooed almost entirely across her body is a bit unrealistic]. Pete (who I think is also one of Cory’s friends, I can’t remember) shouts to Dean ‘Hey, can we get someone on this mayor story?’ and there’s Layfield immortalised in Adam’s head as Foghorn Leghorn with a cigar, chain and sash reading ‘MAYOR’. OK, that was funny.
Then there’s Lenny who Adam greets. What’s Lenny’s dark secret, His Dark Materials, his DARKNESS, who put the dark in Adam Dark?, Adam’s Dark Chocolate available now with Hard-Cory’s Boiled Sweets and Tequila’s… tequila [Adam must have run out of steam on this tangent]. Anyway, what is Lenny’s dark secret? Wife-beating? Cut to Lenny’s hands. Child abuse? Nah, not the type.
Lenny asks Adam to try a column about Mirrored Soul [talk about post-modern] but Adam declines, saying that watching your own thoughts and giving your thoughts about them would eventually go round into a loop and there’s the snake-eating-tail infinity sign. I guess there’s something ‘Being John Malkovich’ there, you know when he goes inside his own head and he just sees himself? Yeah.
Adam works as a TV reviewer as you guys know by now, so we’re shown some of Arizona’s local programming. There’s the usual NBC, ABC stuff which we all get, and then some stuff I don’t recognise [too much Mirrored Soul and nothing else keeps me out of touch ^_^]. Adam tries to concentrate, but he’s thinking of how the readers will have all seen his thoughts on MS now, and he thinks of Canyons and cannons and Pachebel’s canon and a canon of work and a kayak and the Canyon coming again and again. Man, the boy’s obsessed… and he must really hate the job.
That night, Mirrored Soul viewers saw Adam and Brandy have sex. In reality, though, it was Adam and Tequila. Sated, Tequila slept, satisfied, but Adam stayed awake, restlessness and frustration gnawing at him. He had to get out of poxy one-horse Flagstaff and the endless heat. Fifty thousand people in this place but it might as well be five. And even those who don’t care one way or another about the show, they know me. He imagined Flagstaff collapsing, toppling, eventually giving way and becoming a great big canyon all of its own. Maybe that’s what the darkness is all about, he thought, but shook it off. It seemed unlikely. City-wide disaster was one thing, but the darkness was more personal. He couldn’t blame it on the city, or on the Tesla device, or on anything else, it had always been there and perhaps it always would be. But it was stronger now and deeper, maybe because he’d returned to the place that all of this started. Maybe not, who knows? But he had to get out of this place. Back to Chicago, to Equatorial Guinea or some place nobody knew him, wherever. But not here. He was a star now in a city where nobody was. A big fish in a small, dried-up pond and he was suffocating just like a fish in a dried-up pond would. Fuck Flagstaff and all it stood for. He was out of here.