I
Maybe it’s helpful to give a layout of the city. What you should know up front is that Unknown is grid-shaped in a deceiving way—it’s actually most similar to a maze—like one of those medieval cities built around a fortress, pulsing out in enlarging circles with interconnected byways and small walking paths providing short cuts and hiding places. The only difference being that there’s no center to this labyrinth. The urban planners thought the navel of our dear country should be a metamorphosis of Jamestown in the style of a sinkhole.
Two streets informally called XXX and Castle—there’s no street signs, of course—run somewhat parallel across the entirety of the city, approximately five blocks apart, although there’s no way to know, as the city is constantly shifting in a veritable amoebic state. Within the confines of these two avenues are most of the main businesses. There are a few 24/7 clubs and bars—clones of each other under different names, an independent library, several corner stores like Dad’s or Peg’s or Zarathustra, trashed barbershops, long-defunct modernist banks, and, maybe most importantly, rows and rows of indistinguishable houses. Who lives there? Who lived there? No one knows.
If you catch my drift, Unknown is a place of both seen and unseen amid vagrant normality. A crime is as common as love and vice versa, as the Cops—who operate out of someone’s basement, rumor has it—liked to put it. Some mix of shit-stained fingers and mechanized drums. General likelihood of occult worship roughly equal to backwoods barbecue.
Okay, topographically, there’s some simplicity. One hill—The Hill—upon which the city exists on a tilted plane. Two neighborhoods—Top O’ the Hill and the Trenches—on either of The Hill’s sides. Joined together, a circle is made of a straight line. Kind of a backwash of science, because shit flows downhill and uphill. What they got up there, they got down there. Maybe turned three degrees. At least all the essentials.
Take the city like this: a building with an asbestos problem. Everyone inside is accustomed to the toxic substance, withdrawal impending upon removal, so they like it, or at least live with it. Full-scale renovation would be arduous and painful—who wants that? A re-design and mock-up of something with fake history doesn’t make any sense to the people grounded in thick roots of hundreds of years. Excavation would bring much, much too much to the forefront. So, the circle of symbioses leers—one step forward, two steps backward.
And what you must know, above all else, is: everyone exists together.
II
You will see missing posters plastered everywhere, like rain. Wallpaper for telephone poles and storefronts. Reading along will gift you the story of the city.
Danny F. missing since Sunday, last seen eating Clam Strips™ out of a Styrofoam carton on a park bench, dark blue jeans, eyebrows tattooed on. From a few years ago. Did they find him? Someone did. Someone, somewhere.
Papers organized in a conspiracy wheel on the c-store windows over faded taped-up Kratom caricatures. Like real estate listings: 5’8”, 237 pounds, well-loved, don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity. Come into Peg’s to get your nic fix and glaze over some names of people gone up in smoke. Daddy made this poster on his old desktop. Took him a few days, damn thing kept freezing up. Blue screen of death, whatnot. Probably dead by the time…
Leave 'em all up, just in case. Nobody talks about it. Pretty much what it is. But everybody is talking about it. Know what I mean?
Weird, saw that guy with long fingernails, looks like a tree, walks slow, weird, young kids with him. See him everywhere. Shrug it off. Someone’s doing something about it somewhere. Must be.
Pictures de-aged, re-aged. Can tell what they look like until they turn up. Then it’s nothing what they look like. Can tell you everything about them except if they even exist. Looking for a blond girl, let me know if you find her. Please give me a call at this number. No answer, leave a voicemail. I’ll find you. Always finding themselves is how it works. Like a digestive enzyme—cleansing, speed up the process.
The Cops have no additional comments. Press conference in an empty charbroiled lot while they share a communal bag of chips. Used to be a car dealership. Bulldozed for fun. Old business was an eye sore. Emptiness is better. A few neighborhoods of empty places. Where people once were. Pictures covered up with the new news.
III
The items on any street corner—what can you find? Too many distractions—the TVs in the window of the cobwebbed electronics store would’ve been playing shirtless men hitting beach balls, catastrophic world news, virgin snowscapes, even just ten years ago, so that’s not it. Everything in the field of intangibility—speed racers around the corner, smatterings of micro-plastic and faux-wood in infrastructural ruin, guttural booms in the deep space of your ears, a brand new apparatus of the State analyzing your gait around the corner, your dead Grandma around the corner, etcetera. Sounds of nothing muddled together to create unidentifiable somethings. Packs of wild half-breed canines with un-neutered sacks scraping the paint off traffic lines. A weird sense of astrology and un-belief in anything except skin-on-skin contact.
There’s a local, he asks if you’d like to buy some liquid aminos, black-market herbal dabs, whatnot.
"Huh?"
"Ether, dummy: that shit that make your soul burn."
No, you pass on and he tells you to gain some weight, put on a few elbees, pretty please, so you don’t confuse the shit out of him again.
"What?"
"What…motherfucker—what? You ever seen a plump addict?"
And you contract like a disease.
Here’s a history lesson as you watch him walk across the street for an Oyster Burger value deal™: the city does not come alive in the sweetness of heat. The city is undead. Organs curiously pump with uncertain vitals and vials of blood or nothing—does it matter, as long as the operation continues? Pale exterior peel layers to reveal rotted subcutaneous bare spots, sutured back together for appearance, not out of function. Grunts emitted as a part of the daily process of movements. Drools become the signal of aliveness. The dead cells are somehow a sign of health. Flesh-colored bumps emerge from the sheath.
Here we are, the burlap sack on the corner, rested against the blue fire hydrant—re-painted constantly by the civic ghosts of the night. A sort of urban womb, the birth provides a gasp of sheepish understanding instead of newborn wonder. The moldering inside the flaps of rough fabric reveals a true degree of deadness—deader than dead.
IV
Let’s focus on the clinics that continue to sprout out of the uneven sidewalks—pharmaceutical brands as the peak of corporate masturbation. They feed Ibogaine. Don’t worry, strict rules are in place. Who cares? Does anyone? What if they did—would it matter?
Pick and choose your environment, they’ve got all kinds. The sick self-flagellators intent on imprisoning themselves as a response to some kind of sin obsession—those ones can find a clinic rid of furniture, basically a porcelain vase to bounce around in.
What about anyone who desires the comfort of a spa? That too. Rainbow salt caves, psychotropic yoga under the hot lights, fountains and waterfalls of Epsom salt salines. Everyone is soluble there.
Another set up like a haunted house, for those who feel the need to scare the addiction out of them. Endless connected rooms where the medical trip offers them naked frights.
The pie chart of addicts remains stolid, maybe less violent. Maybe. But the Ibogacks are harder to control, according to the Cops. Elucidation and epiphanies galore. Remember, the sole purpose of the brain is to record past memories in order to predict the future. So, there’s give and take.
Everyone can be tripping on something. Figure out what it is and what the ramifications are. A parasite of a parasite is a pulsing circle. The symbiote again.
Walk into the clinic and be greeted with a shy hello or a slap on the ass. Choose your own adventure. They all lead to the same place.
V
Unknown’s distillation can best be conceived not by summation, but by extrapolation. As such: once a month, upon the second Friday, an informal civic gathering takes place in Top O’ the Hill, specifically in the largest cemetery in the neighborhood, a final resting place for all of the John and Jane Does viscerally evacuated by the city and its vicious digestion. Within this graveyard—surrounded by a frayed wire fence and marked by a single stone pillar puddled like a pile of wet sand and etched with the engraving: To Unknown’s Unknowns—the residents of Top O’ the Hill—Hilltoppers, as they’re derogatorily called—pool in disorganized groups to view various retro films projected onto the largest gravestone within the yard—completely blank, as they all are, per the cemetery’s requirement. Curation of the film screenings passes through the neighborhood periodically—random, yet concerted, as an STD passes crotches. The chosen genres always remain in lockstep—Giallo, Noir, Arthouse—all made more themselves by the projection base of the crumbling, porous, pockmarked stone sitting above an unidentified mound of bones.
I remember the first screening I attended. The plastic projector was set up with a foreboding countdown display ticking down by the time I arrived. For some reason, I wasn't surprised to see Fulci’s masterpiece The New York Ripper subsequently play as the feature. I had long considered this film to be wholly representative of our fair city—as it dragged itself through Fulcian premonition on its way to modernity. The audience’s reactions quickly confirmed my presumption of self-representation, as they whooped and applauded at the opening credits rolling in front of a decayed hand—a good metaphor, I think, for our forced reckoning with Unknown’s rigor mortis state—and the longer we stared, the longer we were confronted with it, the more we became comfortable with it, the more we felt like less of ourselves when it disappeared. I should mention there was plenty of crying too, like when one of the characters listened to a tape recording of his wife’s climax—a delight he did not earn. Also prudent to add, despite the tightrope walk with full frontal nudity and elongated copulation—not to mention ultraviolence—the Cops didn’t do anything to shut the screening down, to their credit. A group of them actually stood around in a circle and drank coffee in the back of the cemetery, mingling with a few of the more flaming cinephiles. I guess the event was considered a necessary evil in that the civilians could live out their deviant passions on the screen and then go back home exhausted of themselves, too spent to then go through with any explicit unnaturalness. The last shot, particularly the toy duck, was very well received. Everyone patted the nearest gravestone with lengthy care and concern. Arguably too late, but respectable, nonetheless. When living in death, truly live in it.
VI
The van continues to make stops to this day. The curtains have changed colors—purple to red. It’s still more common to see people get in than to see people get out. Sound disappears within it.
I remember when I stood next to it that one time. I didn’t like the feeling. The door slid open and I saw many sets of neon eyes. Syringes lined the back wall like a row of cooking knives. The motor started well enough. I didn’t consider the exhaust coming from its undercarriage to be a mechanical issue.
I’ve heard they only make exchanges on certain corners. Other places are for intimidation.
We grew up imagining complicated sets of tubing and glassware. Experimental psychotropics. Or the basic stuff, just a desire for dullness. Some rumors are never answered. Unconcerned, maybe unaware of their own existence. We grew out of it.
Once, a man tried to step in the door and they let him. They drove away very slow. No one else ever tried to get in. The passenger seat is always empty, or it’s so black as to be undefinable.
Abdul drives the van. He’s a good guy. They gave him his own phone. Once, we were out at the club and he picked up a call in the middle of the dance floor. We chanted: "Swallowing a Percocet in the back of the van! Swallowing a Percocet in the back of the van!" He couldn’t hear anything and that made him frantic. He looked like a suffocating rabbit in those strobe flashes.
Sometimes we asked him things in roundabout ways. Like, what if you catch a glimpse? That’s how we found out about the box they keep him in while he drives. A couple thin walls and sliver cut-outs to see the road. And how he keeps a stop clock on the dashboard. One minute and three seconds on the dot at each stop. He had no idea if he’d ever driven off with the door open.
We see less and less of him these days. The calls became very frequent. He didn’t want to get caught in the club again.
-- J. Billings is the author of The New Utopia (CLOAK, 2023) and Dissolver (self-published, 2025), as well as a book of experimental film criticism forthcoming from Index Press. His writing can also be found in 3AM, Beyond the Last Estate, Black Warrior Review, BRUISER, ergot., Propagule, and LIGEIA, among other places.
