The Floating Sitcom

A show about entropy

If nothing clear lies at the end know that everything that follows was genuine. There was no performance, no underpinning, no statement to be found. None of these actions were motivated by politics, art, morality, or anything that could be abstracted in some meaningful way. It was not psychosis either but something that he referred to as 'the disease'. It is unclear which of the two wished to share itself with you. Can you see them yet or can you just feel their eyes and the hum of static that accompanies their presence only loud enough to hear if you sit quietly and listen for it? It has been so long that he cannot remember which came first. The sickness has already taken root. There are no doorways this will open for you but he hopes that this cave may be brighter than others and farther away from them, and their laughter.

THE AUDIENCE

When they were visible to him, they appeared seated in large silver metallic bleachers that you could find at any high school sporting event. This always struck him as odd since to the best of his knowledge no live T.V. audience was ever confined to these sorts of seating conditions. His set always had the audience placed in plush high-end individual seats with a divider that provided ample room and he made sure that each audience member's ass was as comfortable as humanly possible. He even went so far as to import hundreds of custom hand-crafted cushions and padding designed by German astrophysicists to ensure optimal seating conditions. It was some weird inside joke that only he understood, some play on the phrase: 'don't bite the hand that feeds, which he modified to: 'don't fuck the ass that watches'. This went for each of the two sets of studio audiences, both the one within the show and the real live studio audience which was only featured on camera occasionally although both contributed to the show's laugh track along with an artificial recording whose rights the studio had to purchase from the owners of Seinfeld and which was synthetically pumped into the show's audio during post-production. He was pretty sure his own nonrelated omnipresent audience also imported its laugh from another show although he could never find a perfect match despite combing through more than 50 years of television and every available series with a laugh track both domestic and foreign. The artificial nature of the sound and his inability to locate the original source was somehow more unnerving to him than the phantom audience itself. This was not the only aspect of the viewers that bothered him though, another seemingly trivial feature was the arbitrary nature in which the neon "LAUGHTER" or "APPLAUSE" sign would accompany the audience with no thematic or logical reason for either its random appearances or disappearances. He was unsure of whether the real "LAUGHTER" and "APPLAUSE" signs that would light up during his show were neon or digital, he could not seem to remember but the one in real life was distinctly neon like it had been ripped right out of some cheap fan art made by a twelve-year-old who just discovered cyberpunk aesthetics and photoshop. He wrote down a note to ask production about the content of the words when he arrived back on set tomorrow. He didn't have time to worry about phantoms though, tonight he had work to do and he knew there would still be ghosts to chase in the morning.

BAR

There is a certain skill required to exist in a public space alone without the aura of loneliness surrounding you. Very few are able to cultivate this ability, especially those not born with it but it is something every great background actor can do. He was not always a writer, he started as an extra on soap operas and eventually moved his way up to the big leagues of prestige television and the occasional movie. There are certain things you pick up in the trade but the most important of which is how to be alone. The trick is to function as a well-placed piece of restaurant art, to be both identical to the background yet vibrant and singularly alive when viewed in isolation apart from the rest yet signaling very quietly through pure psychic will to never have this isolated view come into focus, to never meet the gaze of the viewer. Much like enlightenment the actor cannot achieve such a state through conscious intention since this only pushes you further into the foreground's samsara. It is only by realizing you are already the background that background actor enlightenment is achieved. The search for enlightenment only leads you further away, he can't remember where he heard it but he always liked the story about a man forever cleaning a mirror to better see his reflection never realizing that the act for greater clarity only obstructed what he was looking for.

His fondness for the craft of extra work initially caused a rift with high-ranking members of the casting department and the producers of the show since he was adamant that no corners be cut or any pennies pinched when it came to hiring background actors to include in the show's cast, which after many threats and screaming matches resulted in the transportation and acquisition of several dozen monks from the holiest monasteries and temples across the globe. Hence the reason everyone in the crew calls the little soundstage they shoot on "the monastery" although as the seasons, years, and Emmys passed the tone in which people spoke the name slowly shifted from a mocking irony to a genuine sincerity and more recently some of the crew have begun to whisper the name and speak of the space with a serious religious connotation with some of the crew (mostly the sound guys) even bowing their heads and saying a few prayers silently to themselves before picking up their boom mics and beginning their daily duties.

He was never a great background actor but his specialty was always the bar scene. After the success of Cheers, the bar scene became a staple in American sitcoms except for the show Friends which instead used a coffee shop to appeal to a more yuppie audience who thought themselves too sophisticated for the television set piece of the time. After his writing took off and the acting gig fell to the wayside, he started finding himself spending more and more of his free time in bars partly to recapture the past but more importantly to find new 'plot points' that the disease required to sustain itself. In the show, the protagonist frequently attends writing workshops or acting classes looking for victims. In real life, this becomes incredibly difficult because the obvious pattern makes it far too easy for law enforcement to put two and two together. It's not that he hasn't tried and succeeded at this but it is much more dangerous and adds significant risk to his already illicit behavior. It is also much more difficult and doesn't play into the skills of a seasoned extra trained to fade into the background since the scenarios require him to enter into the foreground of the camera's eye. The show plays up the background acting much more than in reality and treats it as a sort of supernatural plot armor that makes the protagonist invisible to the authorities which critics and audiences alike argue over to this day about whether this is some sort of post-modern statement about the background actor or if it's just lazy writing.

There is always risk involved in something like this but as long as you chose your targets carefully and frame the shot so that it looks like the scene played out by the actor's own hand no one looks too hard into it. About one in four young adults in this country are on some type of psychiatric medication so he typically aims at a younger demographic. This number is also much higher in La and particularly among failed or struggling actors and or writers who are coming to grips with the fact that they may be wasting their youth and turning not into starts but into service professionals doomed to wait on and serve those who succeeded where they failed or forced to hand out drinks to their younger more wide-eyed replacements who will soon end up taking their roles both on and off stage. You can't always know that the target is in the industry but the chances are that if you're talking to a beautiful woman in La they are trying to make it into Hollywood. The disease prefers them. Psychiatric drugs just make the stories of suicide more believable. No one looks too hard into suicide if they see a half-filled bottle of Lexapro on the bedside table next to an eighth of weed and a fifth of vodka. The prescription drug statistics don't even account for the percentage of people who decide to self-medicate with other drugs not found at your standard pharmacy so even if you do end up offing a Zoloft-free actress the chances that she wasn't using something else to suppress both appetite and rejection is virtually zero making the whole affair much less dangerous. He thinks back and tries and remember if there were any 'plot points’ who could have been sober but his thoughts quickly fade as the tall thin blonde who looks like she walked off the set of a noir playing the role of femme fatal makes her entrance into the bar and the audience begins to cheer. The “APPLAUSE” sign is present this time. You wouldn't call it a meet cute but no other words come to him and it will have to do as a description. The decision was not his to make and the casting director has already slated her for tonight's role. Role cameras, action APPLAUSE.

PICKUP ARTIST

What's the best thing to say to a woman you approach at a bar? This is not a rhetorical question, for you maybe but not for the woman he asks this to on nights when the hunger is insatiable. It is probably not the best or correct answer to the question but he always felt he deserved at least some brownie points for coming up with a line that he hoped answered itself although no woman he had tried it on ever admitted that it was clever or effective. He had been using this line since the beginning of the show; it was the first thing he wrote for the sitcom and maybe the only thing he ever cut out of it that was from reality. Some secrets are too great to share even on prime time. The key is not to respond, you have to sit there until she says something, anything, usually "what" or the less common but still occasionally encountered "excuse me". This woman like the majority of the others met the question/answer with a "what". It is best to come across like you are genuinely curious and unless she is severely mentally handicapped, she will most likely know that this is some sort of a "line" or maneuver but this is the beauty of the opening since it flows perfectly into the rest of the script. He explains that the question is not a line (again she will know the truth but it does not matter) and how you have always wondered what it is that a woman sitting alone at a bar wants to hear. You can explain further how this question is only answerable by said stranger alone at a bar since a girlfriend or a girl-who-is-a-friend's answer will be biased by her relationship with you and even if she did somehow manage to tell you the truth that this would be worse. You do not explain why it would be worse since this gives her the opportunity to ask why it would be worse, to which he will answer that a truth unbelieved is worse than any lie. A line he hopes she hears after she has already had a few drinks because it is one of those phrases that only seem profound when performed over cheap bar musak after a few gin and tonics. The beauty of the script lies in its flexibility though because even if she is sober and scoffs at the 'truth not believed is worse than a lie' bullshit he can tell her that that's the reason he needs her answer to the original question since he is obviously not good at this. He wants you to know dear reader that this is not a story about seduction or how to pick up a woman at the bar, this is not about teaching you how to get girls or to recount how some writer attempts to seduce a woman to add to his off-camera audience. This is to show how the disease infects others since she is now a part of the story and forced to participate in this act's conclusion. All he has to do now is get her to answer the question and the meeting with the goddess is finished, Joseph Campbell satisfied and athe return (hopefully to her) home having changed is right on the horizon. The infection is simple though it may have been missed, but when the conversation gets to this point the nervousness and uncertainty of the interaction begin to fade and the two are allowed to settle into their normal roles, not selves but the character: Woman Being Hit On number 1 and Man Hitting On Woman number 2. These roles are comfortable which is why the conversation is more at ease because she believes she is letting her guard down when really, she has just accepted the gaze of the audience and is now free to settle into well-trod lines, scenes, and directions she knows and is comforted because it is familiar and out of her control and in the hands of a capable God; hopefully Spielberg or that Danish guy or any big director really.

There is more boring chit-chat, flirtations, and physical contact but none of that matters. Everyone knows how this scene plays out. When the act is nearly done, she will tell him what he wants to hear. She prefaces it saying she had never thought of it before but she can remember the best thing anyone has said to her. In his experience, this is usually how the story goes. She talks about a shoot for some silly commercial. How one of the handsome men working behind the camera had been staring at her all night at the bar after the crew went there to celebrate the end of a shoot for some perfume advertisement. He approaches her and says, "I'm trying to organize a prison break. I'm looking for like, an accomplice. We'd have to first get out of this bar, then this hotel, then the country". She says she doesn't know why it affected her so much but it did. She said it felt honest and genuine like it wasn't planned, that it was natural and she had no choice but to agree to his offer and join him as his partner in crime. He is amused at the story as he always is, he is always curious about their answer and this one is particularly good but he will never explain why to the woman. He does what he always does and what the script and audience tell him to do once the scene comes to a close. He says, "well…" and stands up and repeats the line back to her. As he leaves the bar he smiles when he knows she is not looking and he is glad that the line was delivered over cheap bar musak and performed after one too many overpriced alcoholic beverages because the irony that her favorite line, something so honest and genuine was stolen from a movie, 'Lost In Translation’, is something he felt would be sad if it fell upon sober minds, ears, and eyes alike. The floating audience appears, with each member giving her the thumbs down signal like in a Roman coliseum indicating as he knew all along that her fate was sealed by the observer and he thinks to himself that there are worse movie lines to fall for.

THE FILM

Before the show, he had saved up enough cash from acting and convinced enough trust fund kids from film school to help him make a small low budget movie. It was a simple story but it was just pretentious enough to get him recognition in the 'art scene. There was no passion behind the project, to him film was never about making something great it was about escaping the fate of his victims and possibly even an attempt at creating some type of antidote to fight the disease he did not yet know existed. It was a simple plot. A struggling artist, yes, yes, a struggling artist making a film about a struggling artist he knows how it sounds but it was never about originality, it was always about escape. As he was saying, a struggling artist, a sculptor living with his girlfriend is set to display his work in a small gallery he is employed at part-time. They agree to let his work in but only if he helps move the other pieces in at night. His epileptic (it wasn't set up much better in the script either) girlfriend agrees to help and at the end of the night when everyone else leaves and it is only the two of them left to bring in his piece, the lights begin to flicker and the girlfriend begins to seize as she is adjusting a part at the top of the multi-piece sculpture leading to her fatal impaling on said art piece. The boyfriend is obviously shaken by this as he stares frozen watching his dead lover’s brain matter and blood paint his bronze sculpture. After a few minutes, the initial shock begins to fade and he runs out of the building and makes his way to a police station. He tells the officers what happened but when they arrive back at the gallery the doors are mysteriously locked and from his appearance, the officers assume that he is either a deranged lunatic or that this is some type of artistic stunt but the officers agree to meet him at the gallery when it opens. In a state of shock, the man makes his way home and lies in bed staring at the ceiling in a cliché time-lapsed shots until he begins to cry and eventually he passes out. He wakes up late and rushes back to the gallery. Upon his arrival, a large crowd is waiting for blocks to get into the facility and he is forced to fight his way past screaming patrons who complain of cutting as he makes his way inside. As he enters, he sees that 90% of the commotion and audience is there for his piece. Even the officers are there looking in awe at the sculpture and the woman who until last night he assumed would spend the rest of his life with him. This further adds to his shock, he is unable to speak as the officers compliment his dedication and how he almost had them going for a second. The rest of the film is what you would imagine. He garners critical attention, fame, praise and brings sculpting back into the mainstream. Only now the audience expects a dead body that they do not know is real to accompany all of his work. But unlike Him, this character does not force this on others. In what now seems like wishful thinking a small cult develops around his art, a group of true believers who know he uses real victims for his pieces. These women willfully offer themselves up to him to be immortalized by his work. The first of these members even forces him at gunpoint to bash her skull against his newest piece. The films ending as pointed out by the critics was its weakest part. In the final scene, the whole world lies dead in a museum beneath the feet of a sculpture of what at first appears to be a man but as the camera pulls up it is revealed to be a torso holding up the tower of babel. Roll credits. The film was praised for its 'subversive' depiction of the art world and its 'surreal' and or 'hyper-real' style that accompanied the directorial and writing debut of His truly. This led to a fairly lucrative contract and was how this whole story began which is why he felt the need to so unceremoniously plug his own juvenilia here right before the murder of the girl from the bar.

THE KILL

The process is simple and far less dramatic than it is made out to be on the show. The hardest part is ensuring that the woman agrees to take him home to her place and not his own. There is no trick to this, no game or routine and for the most part, it is chance but tonight there is no resistance or struggle on agreeing whose home the night will be spent at. Thankfully pretty actresses in La tend to have better apartments than their male counterparts since work is easier to find which makes ending up at her place easier if she suspects that he is as he is pretending to be a lowly background actor and not the writer and showrunner of a successful network television program. The actual murder is for the most part uneventful. In the show, all the women are placed inside a noose while unconscious hoisted up by the rafters or by some other means, and hung until dead and then some. This is obviously not practical. In real life, a few pills will do. Strong pharmaceuticals are not hard to find and he likes to tape his on the roof on the inside of his shoe. He learned early on that women will often go through your pockets if you use the bathroom after coitus so he had to adopt this extra discretion in case she is a pill head and insists on making the two of them get high after his pockets have been fleeced and his contraband discovered. He is much more careful now and only removes the narcotics when she is asleep. The pills are small so it is easy for her to swallow one every five minutes without waking. These five-minute intervals help ensure he is undetected but he keeps his hand above her throat just in case she awakens and he is forced to perform a more traditional murder which he also finds slightly ironic since around seventy percent of the time he was asked to 'choke me' only several hours prior. He detests when this happens although thankfully these occurrences are rare (for his murders not in the bedroom) but when it does occur it makes the whole thing much more difficult and obviously leaves a suspect which has happened a few times. Thankfully his years of extra work have trained his face to be almost undetectable so any time he is picked up on camera and a photo of him is released no one can ever identify him. It is just generic suspect number one. But this one didn't struggle which he is thankful for. He would prefer to end the show and this season without a hiccup.

There is a cliché of a killer liking to watch the light in his victim's eyes go out as they die. He assumes this is just shit that sounds good on film and paper but it doesn't really mean anything. Ninety-five percent of his victims were asleep when he killed them and for the very few who weren't, he never noticed any discernable light or spark extinguishing. All he saw was static which comforted him in his distress. His earliest memories were not of playgrounds or parents but of the soft glow of the television and in particular the static. Apparently, although he can't remember where he heard it from, the static you see on T.V or hear on the radio is a remanent of the big bang. He always felt that was appropriate that the moment of least entropy could be found next to a sea of the most structured and organized digital entropy man has ever created. The common mistake is to associate entropy with chaos which is only half true. The reality of entropy is much less sexy than it is made out to be it is simply a metric, a way of measuring the number of possible ways that a set can be arranged and information lost. This is what he found so appropriately ironic that this low entropy state of pure creation could be captured and displayed on the same device that showed you formulaic set pieces that for all intents and purposes are written algorithmically. Infinite or near infinite possibilities, pure creativity skimmed over and ignored in favor of what people pretend to be imagination and fiction, the two always right across the street from one another with only one of these houses receiving tricker-treaters on Halloween. Most think that writing and creativity are about pure possibility but this is clearly and empirically untrue. Real creativity in art comes from the very limited sets of combinations that can be formed out of the same essential building blocks. This is what he thought as he stared into the closed and occasionally open eyes of his victims. He did not have any illusions that he was saving these people but he hoped that in his own way he was attempting to reverse their entropy and that by bringing them out of their dreams and into his, by keeping them from ending up on one of those channels across the street and placing them within his own, amongst the audience on the cold silver bleachers that he had created some form of Maxwell's Demon to help bring them back to the static at least.

SECOND FILM

He only made one other movie before the start of his current show. His second film had a much higher budget and was much more professional but as critics and audience members alike agreed it still maintained its surreal and "original" amateurish flourish. Unlike his first film, the premise of his second cinematic endeavor lacked the straightforward nature of his debut. The film begins in a storage unit and we are told through narration that the man in the unit is the narrator and friend of the deceased who originally owned and subsequently bequiffed the belongings of the units to the man we currently observe. We watch as he rummages through the miscellaneous belongings until a single book bound in a strange fleshy material catches his attention. The preface which is written in strange spiral-like symbols that suspiciously don't seem to hinder the narrator's ability to read the text gives a vague ominous warning about the dangerous contents that follow and advises the reader to spare him or herself and to put the book down and then acknowledges that this will most likely add to the reader's interest which the author assures is unintentional and knows this subsequent comment will probably do even more to peak the readers interest and the poor fool reading this will think of this as a clever writing device instead of the genuine warning that it is. The narrator agrees and of course, continues to read.

After the preface, the story begins in a very banal way opening on a man alone in a forest describing his dream to the reader as he hunts for a deer. The man is insistent that the reoccurring dream is strange not because of its contents which are admittedly somewhat bizarre but because each time the dream comes to him, he knows he is dreaming and yet this too feels like part of the dream, and makes him all the more certain of its reality. This is all presented in voice-over as the man bends over to investigate odd tracks in the snow that resemble the hoof of some creature our narrator says he has never seen before. He quickly loses interest in deer and decides to track the owner of whoever created the strange tracks. The dream itself is well known but each time it happens despite feeling like it is a reoccurring dream it feels new to the man in some paradoxical way. It begins with a request for a map. This is not the first time this specific map has been requested or its construction attempted. In the dream he is in a faraway land seemingly in the time of peasants and knights, the man is not learned in history so he cannot give an accurate estimation of the exact time period and suspects that even if he could it is probably in some type of ambiguous superposition in time and space the way all dreams are. His master's master was the first man he knew of who was tasked with building the map but it is never made clear if there were requests before this. His master was only an apprentice at the time the same way he was when his master received his instruction to build the map. His master's master failed at the task at least that is what was assumed because after five years of work he one day disappeared and was never seen again. It was the same with his master only it took him ten years and then suddenly he was gone. The man, having heard these stories spent his entire apprenticeship attempting to master every aspect of cartography in order to fulfill the request so that when it was his time to make the map he would not fail where his master's master had and where he suspected his current master would fail as well. And when after several years the task was passed down to him, he believed himself ready and for fifteen years the man worked ceaselessly on a map that was a perfect one-to-one corresponded of the kingdom, a map that was synonymous with the territory. As he went out for materials he had seen where both his predecessors had failed with large maps scrolled into the forest next to their corresponding carcasses. Each had died from self-inflicted wounds. When he had finished his work, he understood why. For when he succeeded and he unveiled the map and spread it across the kingdom it swallowed the world and everything beneath it. The world went dark as the map replaced the territory and no one who set foot thereafter would have ever known his work. In his last moments, he took pride in his accomplishment and his willingness to do what his teachers before him could not. The man narrating the dream finishes the story as the tracks he was following end and he is confronted by the creature he was stalking. The creature possessed jet-black eyes and its hooves were sharper than knives. The animal had a completely human body except for the feet and the head of a giant bull. It breathed loudly throw its nose and both its pace and volume grew louder as the seconds passed. The man stood frozen in fear gazing at its terrible appearance until the large gasps of breath by the beast turned into faint laughter. And then the world goes black.

The story then jumps to a teenage boy on a boat waking from his own reoccurring nightmare of a man in a cabin who goes out to hunt and encounters a minitour as he recounts a reoccurring dream. We are told by the narrator in the storage unit is being transported to an island in order to do what his predecessors could not. According to tradition every decade, a boy of eighteen years who resides in the writer's guild is taken to the island where the beast has been hibernating and waiting for his offering. It has been this way since the beginning of the kingdom and is the basis around which both the land and religion function. Ever since he was little the boy was almost certain it would be him who was selected for the task since his age was in line with the requirements and his teachers always said he had the makings of a knight more so than an author. As the boy wipes sleep from his eyes a voice from off-camera tells him that they are preparing to dock and he is to prepare himself for the journey into the labyrinth that rests just off the beach.

The next several minutes are of the boy getting off the boat as the men on the ship tell him that they will arrive in a weeks time if he manages to defeat the beast. The young boy then enters the labyrinth accompanied only by the light of a single torch in his left hand. It almost devolves into a scary movie at this point with the sounds of footsteps and distant hoofs and murderous breathing in the background as the boy wanders around in the dark complex maze. The audience is almost begging for a jump scare that never comes. Eventually, he makes his way to the heart of the labyrinth where he finds no monster but instead a courtyard filled with bodies and a large mirror, desk, and natural light. The boy is hesitant as he approaches but he finds his way to the desk stepping over bodies careful to avoid making contact with any of the hundreds of dead who line the floor. He notices that all of the corpses are covered in strange symbols tattooed into their skin with a thin black ink. On the desk, he finds a single scroll of parchment. The scroll explained that any man reading this is free to go but that in doing so he would deprive both himself and others of the story that had held the kingdom together for its entire existence. For compensation, anyone who made it this far would be granted access to 'the language' and be allowed to read what all the great writers who came before him had inscribed. The boy looks into the mirror, he sees in a time-lapse all those that had come before him. He sees them sprawled on the floor writing. He sees them crying. He sees them slowly go insane until they begin to tattoo their flesh in the strange language that looks like a hybrid between a Fibonacci sequence and a Sierpinski gasket. He smiles into the mirror as we hear the loud breathing of the minitour, and the sound of its hooves drawing ever closer. And then we see the boy begin to write as horns begin to bloom from his forehead. The film ends with the boy journeying back into the previous stories and dreams. We see the boy's skin become infected with the strange symbols. He tells us everything until we enter back into the room with the man holding the book. Through narration/writing the boy is communicating with the reader. He tells him that the sickness has taken root, that the language is inside of him. The man closes the flesh-bound book and looks down in horror as he sees the symbols slowly spreading out on his flesh.

SEASON FINALE

The show's finale is a live television event and it is also the first time he has ever experienced the show without the cover of a mask and which ironically makes him more hidden than the mask ever did. For years he arrived on set and in the writers room in a ski mask to hide his identity. And just as all the other oddities of the show gradually became accepted and revered as an eccentric necessity so too was the showrunner and lead writer's mysterious masked appearance. But today he stood fully revealed and unknown amongst the crew watching the show for the first time from the audience. The finale of the show was the big reveal, his big reveal. Much of the show's success was in part due to the mystery of its creator and the online speculation it generated. Some have already pieced together the right answer after all the writing style and meta-commentary of the show had been quite similar to his other films which made some speculators suspect that this was too obvious and that the mask was used in order for viewers to suspect that it was Him when really it was a cheap imitator who kept himself masked to shield himself from plagiarism accusations. As he admired the craftsmanship of the six-figure seat he fought so hard to get for the show he repeated his motto 'don't fuck the ass that watches' in his mind like a Russian monk ceaselessly repeating the lord's prayer and he hoped that he would not disappoint his rabid fanbase and more importantly he hoped that his background acting would go unnoticed despite his current environment playing against his strengths. He thought he would be more nervous but the docile smiles of everyone else in the audience brought him comfort and reminded him that he was home. Each and everyone looked exactly as they had in his dreams and for the first time in a long time, he was freed from the static and did not feel the presence of the others surrounding him. The audience had left him for now. For the first time in his life, surrounded by faces that looked out into his work with expressions of that of a farm animal doped up on ketamine and antidepressants approaching an execution they were blissfully unaware of, he almost felt proud. It was almost time for the big reveal. He continued the mantra in his head hoping it would help him stay in the heightened state of unnoticeable décor, and keep him in the enlightenment that accompanies an unnoticed background actor. But he could not empty his mind and he could not help but think about the only Greek word he ever bothered to learn. The audience had taught them to him when they first arrived. At first, he thought they were speaking in some alien dialect but after a few months, he began searching out their meaning. For weeks or months or maybe years in between the signs, the floating, the applause, the violence, and the laughter they kept whispering one word, "diaskedasi". After some careful and extensive research of googling for ten minutes, he came to understand its meaning. The time was now and he took the stage. Most of it happened too quickly to remember but he used what he had learned from the audience in his monologue and big reveal taking time to carefully explain to the audience the word that had so much importance to him and his invisible gravity-defying friends. Apparently, it was Greek for entertainment. He was not a philologist but apparently, the two roots that make up the word meant something very specific. The roots were dia, meaning via. And skedazw which meant to dissolve or throw away. He explained this very carefully to them and he did his best to take a tone that made his words seem more poignant and profound than they really were as he began to unload rounds from a semi-automatic he had hidden in his trench coat. He was slightly annoyed that his tone and pitch had to be made higher once the screams started growing louder as the audience and crew alike realized all entrances and exits were sealed off and they were trapped in the monastery with him. He hoped that the people in the booth did not cut to commercial and he politely asked the living audience members of the show to stay calm, that he was not speaking in tongues that it was just Greek, and that there was no need to be alarmed and that it was almost over. He told them about entropy as he reloaded. He told them that it was really just a formula and there was no way to reverse it, it was just good writing and narrative structure. He explained how all new stories come from the static and die in the camera. His real audience began laughing and elevating farther and farther up into the atmosphere, he had never seen them so high. He thought about how crazy it must seem to be haunted by such an outdated and cheap entertainment technology and trope. Their hands were almost invisible now and he could barely make out their hands as they gave the symbol of an emperor their failed gladiator. He dropped the gun for it was not needed anymore. The screams were gone and his shoes were sticky and red. He removed the knife positioned carefully in the sock and shoe that had helped him and his friends so much in the past. And as the metal pierced flesh organ and soul, he thought it so strange that a ghost should bleed on TV.