“Over my dead body,” my father said.

—Did he. And what prompted this outburst?

An electric-blue zoot suit in the window of Rabin’s, the local haberdashery.

—You wanted him to buy it for you?

I had to hammer away at him for ten minutes before he gave in.

—Only ten?

You’re wrong if you think he was a pushover. His many tenants all lived in terror of falling behind in their rent. But his reputation for ruthlessness was sure to suffer if I turned out to be a wimp, so my guess is he was secretly pleased I was bent on dressing like a pachuco for Blue and Gold Day.

—If that’s a holiday, I’ve never noticed it on the calendar.

It wasn’t a holiday, it was what they called the annual awards assembly at Amerigo Vespucci Junior High School.

—Am I right in deducing from your acquisition of a new suit for the occasion that you were up for one of these awards?

Not just any one, the crowning one—which was why he also let me talk him into getting me a sunshine-yellow shirt with a rolled Mr. B collar.

—In duds like that, you must have turned a lot of heads.

Unfortunately, not all of them were female—a discovery I made as soon as I took my seat among the other honorees on the stage.

“How stupid are you? You can’t wear blue or yellow today.”

“I didn’t know!”

Which, though true, only made the Knuckle Boy who’d grabbed me from behind ratchet up his bear hug while two more Knuckle Boys went to work on me from in front.

—I take it these were gang members?

Some said the name was short for Bare Knuckle Boys, others for Brass Knuckle Boys, but, whichever it was, you couldn’t go to the toilet or get on the lunch line at Vespucci without paying them tribute.

—And nobody stopped them from attacking you?

Dr. Funk, the principal, was standing not five feet away, but he didn’t lift a finger because—as I was in the process of learning the hard way—it was traditional on Blue and Gold Day for anyone caught in the school’s official colors to be stripped of the offending items. On top of that, after the Knuckle Boys finished, I wasn’t dragged off into the wings. I had to remain on the stage with my pants down around my ankles—the pegged cuffs had kept them from coming off over my blue suede shoes—till Dr. Funk called on me to rise and be recognized.

—For what?

Best hair.

—That was a category?

The most contested.

—And how did you win it?

By modeling my hairstyle on my father’s Cadillac. That is, I’d had the barber sweep the sides back into fins and the top forward into what you might call a majestic hood ornament.

—It must have been painful for you to have to accept this distinction in your underwear.

Everybody in the auditorium was laughing, but I didn’t care. What mattered to me—all that mattered, I realized—was that I had their attention.

Accompaniment: “96 Tears” — ? and the Mysterians

We used to be a practical people, we Iggnïssians.

But look at us now. Look at the desperate Iggnïssian faces hedcut into the folds of this prospectus. Look at our faces.

We are ready to receive the unworkable, chaotic results our reactive, panic-fueled state shall surely yield.

Look at us, begging for strangers to smuggle gold coins into our town.

I can hear you, future tourists huddled around this trifold, saying, “Desperation is so damn impractical. You bequeath nothingness to no one. Where’s your pragmatism? We heard that you Iggnïssians are a pragmatic people.”

Oh future tourists, undulating and tessellating on the floor of the Express, know that a mere three months ago the most common murmurs of discussion heard echoing down the corridors of our necropolis were the pragmatism of William James.

Future tourists, with ears itching to pop from the head and slither away, now the only murmurs you’ll hear buzzing in our piazzas, our coffee shops, our libraries, our strattolls, our hanging gardens, and our construct edges will be of the stagecraft and the placeholder. But this might be just the kind of excitement you’ve always been looking for.

When was the last time you took a holiday? When was the last time you stole? Have you always known that your destiny was, above all, a placeholder destiny? Have you always known that drawbacks and silver linings would happen to you, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into a throne barricading the Exit?

Cup your ear and listen to the murmurs of our pas: “The true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the ‘right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behavior.”

If then the construct’s etymology could be more or less, the more and the less would have to differ in kind, and then they wouldn’t be the same substance but different ones. And this is why Aristotle said substances varied in kind like numbers, by addition and subtraction.

So we have to find some other way of maintaining the etymology of Placeholder: one which doesn’t involve total destruction of the elements but lets them exist somehow in the Placeholder.

Do you find this existence fascinating?

We Iggnïssiams must admit that we find the true etymology of the Placeholder to be rather fascinating. This truth is a murmur that happens most often in the lobby of the Hostel Iggnïs, which is where you’re more than likely to be staying when your vacation starts.

Will you vacation with us? Will you volunteer for the folk-horror sacrifice, this slow death by throne?

From what Dr. Palimpsest has conditioned us to believe, the word ‘Placeholder’ has its origins in Iggnïs. The word first appeared, within a shroud of smoke and mirrors, in the backstage of our damned stagecraft world. ‘Placeholder’ was the title given by the grandest of all known Demiurges (whose own title is Whom) to the first temporary guard of the Exit.

No one knows where Whom resides and no one knows who gave Whom this title of Whom, by the way. But that’s neither here nor there.

Every once in a while if you cup your ear just right in the center of Iggnïs, you can hear Dr. Palimpsest say, “More than likely Whom and Whom’s supervisor reside on the other side of the Exit. But who cares. The question of who made this world and where they do their conniving doesn’t matter. There is no one to confirm any of this.”

Lest we forget, as Whom is rumored to have once said, “All creatures are the utterance of the personified stagecraft.”

Sure, we could blame Dr. Palimpsest, the Placeholder, and his murmurs of the stagecraft world. We could say, “Yes, these words oozing from this Demiurge have firstly infected and subsequently morphed our Jamesian murmurs, our town flavor so to speak.”

And sure, it is very easy for the murmurs of a collective consciousness to transition from pragmatist freedom to materialist rat trap. For pragmatism begs to be corrupted and contorted.

But we the proud people of Iggnïs refuse to blame a villain, and we refuse to blame our flawed internal system.

We the proud people of Iggnïs take the full blame for the new echoes, those echoes of the stagecraft and the exposed edges of its construct.

Accompaniment: “Circulus” — Kreidler

He stamped the paper with the authority of someone who knew the stamp meant nothing. The man passed the paper to me. I folded it four times and placed it in my breast pocket. As he adjusted his glasses, I could see my reflection in them.

“That paper I gave you, that paper states what a piece of shit you are.”

I rolled up my sleeves.

“You are not only a piece of shit—you also smell like dried urine on dirty underwear,” he said. “That is the testimony of your coworkers.”

“Do I have a say in the matter?”

“You do have a say.”

In that moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I paused as I considered. I came to a conclusion and gathered my composure.

“I’m not sure how to react to this. I mean—I don’t believe I am a piece of shit.” I squared my shoulders and nodded, as if what I said was unanimous in truth. “And besides—where is this coming from? Why do they believe this? This feels so—sudden. Out of the blue, you know?”

The man leaned back in his chair and looked up towards the ceiling. He seemed to be pondering something of tremendous value.

“Listen,” he grimaced. “This is what they believe. I don’t wish to go down the road of why they believe this.”

I studied him. He stared at me.

“Well, okay. I still don’t understand why, though.”

“Yes. And it doesn’t matter,” he smiled. “What you believe is important, just not always. This makes sense to you, correct?” He waved his arms, trying to remove the question mark.

I must’ve appeared quizzical. He went on: “We come into work, then we go home. We do our duties, and so on and so forth. We should always try our very best to coexist with our coworkers; we do not want to create a—how shall I put it, a chink in the armor? That doesn’t sound correct. Maybe, a kink in the hose? Hmmm. Possibly—maybe, a break in the chain? Whatever. We don’t want to disrupt our perfect system, the one we’ve worked so hard to create.”

He didn’t go on. He began writing on another sheet of paper.

“Is this because of this past Tuesday? I called Pam a ‘woman.’ She seemed to dislike that immensely. She gave me a look, do you understand? She has these huge glasses. The look in her eyes—my god, it was dramatic. I’ve learned to use that word behind her back.”

“She has experience in her field.”

“She walks around like she understands what she’s doing. One time, she couldn’t find an item from the stockroom. She couldn’t find where the printer paper was located. So, I found it for her. She became so annoyed that I found it, while she couldn’t find it. I said, ‘You’re welcome,’ as she trudged off.”

“You’re six weeks in. And these complaints are coming from your coworkers, not just Pam.”    

“So, it was from Pam.”

“Not just,” he said. He was still writing on the sheet of paper. “Please, sign here.”

He pointed to a line beneath a handwritten phrase: Employee completely denies being a piece of shit.

“Also, your coworkers mentioned the way you eat your sandwich—that you’re very loud. They would like you to refrain from eating in public.”

Accompaniment: “Libet’s Delay” — The Caretaker

Watching a movie, the title of which does not, for these purposes, concern us, one realizes that it is taking place in one’s own house: one recognizes first the stairs, which have been newly recarpeted; then one recognizes the hallway, the particular rhythm of the doors that line it; one recognizes the living room, with its bare floor and the furniture which had traveled from one’s previous house to this house. The camera pauses. There is a breathlike quality to the paused frame: a very slight inhale and exhale. When one sees, at last, the actor playing the protagonist come into the frame, one feels a sudden relief: but this does not last. Though there is no physical resemblance between actor and his solitary audience member, one realizes, after several minutes, that the actions he is engaged in follow precisely the actions one took oneself earlier this morning, or perhaps yesterday morning, or the morning before that: here the camera is following him into the kitchen, here the camera is observing him grinding the beans for the coffee (a series of pulses in the handheld electronic grinder), here he deposits the ground coffee into the coffee maker, he pours water into the kettle; he walks, in his robe, to the downstairs bathroom, and the camera waits (inhale, exhale) at the closed door while he showers. Were the camera to back away, return to the hallway, make its way up the stairs, one is certain that one would find, asleep in the master bedroom, an actress bearing no resemblance to one’s wife, and yet lying in the position in which one’s wife inevitably sleeps, curled up tight around herself, facing the wall; at the foot of this bed, one would find a crib, inherited from one’s mother, containing a child who does not look like one’s own child but who is wrapped in the same swaddling one wraps one’s child in at night to prevent her from jerking herself awake; backing out again and traveling down the hallway once more, one would find another door leading to another bedroom, in which one would find another child who does not look like one’s son, but who sleeps in the same bed, with the same boat-themed sheets, his pillow held over his head, as though (one thinks) to protect himself from blows; and backing away again, once more into the hallway, moving towards the door that leads to the attic… But now the protagonist, newly showered, is leaving the bathroom; the camera observes him returning to the kitchen, pouring the now-boiling water into the coffee, gathering cups, setting the lid with its plunger on top of the coffee maker. Though the curtains cover the windows, one has the sense of darkness outside, that it is still early enough to be not-quite-morning. While waiting for the coffee to steep, he returns to the bathroom to brush his teeth, to shave, to take the small regiment of pills he takes each day; once again the door is closed; once again the camera waits outside (inhale, exhale). Offscreen, the sound of something moving; the camera backs away from the backroom door, returns to its place in the hallway. Another actor is inside the house; he is making his way up the stairs. One tries, absurdly, to think if one recognizes him. Of course one does not—whoever he is intended to represent, he is an actor, bearing no more resemblance to his referent than the actor playing the protagonist does to his. The camera, satisfied, returns to the bathroom door, to await the protagonist’s emergence. The camera follows the protagonist once more to the kitchen, where he plunges the filter into the steeped coffee and pours two cups. He takes these upstairs, unwittingly (we must assume “unwittingly”) following in the footsteps of the other actor. One watches with a growing sense of unease, certain that the other actor will appear at any moment. The protagonist sets one cup of coffee on the bedside table next to the actress playing his wife, still curled up on herself and apparently asleep; the camera hesitates for a few moments to catch the slight rise and fall of her chest, her shoulder; he takes the other cup with him to the room next to that where the actor playing his son, presumably, is sleeping; he sets the coffee on the desk next to a laptop, which he opens. The camera wavers for a moment, and then, as though exploring an idea that has occurred to it, backs out of the office containing the protagonist and into the upstairs hallway, where it passes the son’s room and advances, once again (once again?) on the door leading to the attic… But then there is a sudden cry. The son has awakened from a dream; his father goes into his room to comfort him. There was a man with a camera, the son says. It is still very early, his father tells him. Go back to sleep. He looked like you, the son says. No, the son says; he didn’t look like you, but I knew he was you. There’s no one here, the father says; go back to sleep, to sleep, my good boy, I love you. But even as he is saying this, the camera is backing away; we must strain to hear his final words; perhaps he did not say “I love you” after all, but something else.

Accompaniment: “Motion Picture Soundtrack” — Radiohead