Lumpster

     This isn't a 'theater' in the common understanding of the word. It is something else entirely - the kind of place where you could show up on a Friday night and find the seats barren. 

     Broken peanut shells entirely hide the floor in the walkways. The walls, on all sides, are draped in faint salmon curtains, rippling with deep pleats, whose saturated shadows seem to harbor immense spaces.

    The show has yet to start. At the front of the auditorium, the screen consumes the wall on which it hangs, tinted a dull orange from the overhead lights that have yet to go down. Other than the sound of imploding, fibrous hulls beneath your plodding step, this vast hall is mute. The cloth-insulated walls create in you a feeling of auditory suction. They feed on the coronary pumping of the pupa embedded in your chest, which persists in gestation, anticipating the fateful moment when it can burst from its membrane and open its eyes to the world it has inherited. 

     You decide to sit in the direct center of this sea of maroon upholstery. The armrests are so coated with soured popcorn leavings that you can scarcely bear down without becoming permanently adhered. Where you are seated, the accumulated garbage on the floor is piled significantly higher than in the aisles, such that your feet have vanished up to the ankle beneath an emulsion of styrofoam scraps, hardened cysts of nacho cheese, ticket stubs (whose ink has been rubbed away from obsessive handling), stray hairs (long, black, and nourished by an omnipresence of rancid popcorn butter), marrow, shredded clothing, tissues stiffened by tears and semen, opera glasses, spent 'Whip-It!' cannisters, disabled cell phones, belt buckles filed into desperate, last-minute knives, and a desiccated, chitinous powder. 

     The smell is so overwhelming and pressurized that you slump down in your seat like a child.

     Then the lights are lowered. The projector snickers to life, catching silver fire to a convulsing cloud of motes, forming a spontaneous pyramid of lactic light whose base is furnished by the sprawling screen.

     Judging from the blemishes and corrosion, this is a film of great vintage. There are no credits or titles to speak of. You look on as a plush, vermillion carpet fades in, bordered on its sides by gilt Greek meanders. The camera proceeds down it, gradually panning up to reveal a sumptuous banquet hall containing rows of long tables carved from a dark, glassy wood. On each table are elaborately textured trays weighed down under mounds of muscat grapes, fans of stewed, spiced pears, and sculpted melon meat. Sterling silver goblets emit a hazy aura; you yawn at this, nestling into the seat cushion.

     The soundtrack is minimal, but regally imposing: a rigid march of guttural tuba blasts, occasionally accented by a swooning, plummeting note from a trombone and a piccolo's apian yip. The music mounts in volume and quickens in tempo as the camera floats through the interminable chamber. Some vague, chewed mass can distantly be seen, occupying a golden throne which is raised to a spot just beneath the dizzying ceiling on a veritable ziggurat of stairs (these being clad in the same choleric carpeting of the opening shot). 

     When the camera comes into close proximity of the court's master, you see that it - whatever it is - is flanked by a set of twin golden statues, nearly fifty feet in height; they are blind worms with corpulent annelid rings, rearing up like triumphal stallions in order to revere an invisible heaven.

     But these Ba'alim pale in comparison to that which they serve as a frame. 

     Occupying the throne is a being at once pathetic and evocative of emotions known only to those appointed for an immediate death. This thing-being is coated in a mobile, nacreous glaze, its nude jaundiced masses overflowing the frame of its Byzantine stool (just as a cup runneth over). Its 'head' - being the uppermost piece of its corpus, and tapering off from the breadth below - lolls down to one side, veiled by sprays of oily, colorless filaments. Beneath these, a single, sopping eye holds you in its regard from within the screen; its other, implied eye is inhumed under bags of squamous, fatty tissue.

     Some crevice, lower down in the being than you would have expected, erupts into glutinous speech, sending out words amid a rainbow mist of liquid ejecta. 

     It need not be said, of course, but you are its addressee:

"Hello! Welcome to me. I trust you have made yourself comfortable... This is my film and my world. How you've gotten here is unimportant. What matters now is that you are entirely at my mercy, and that being is becoming. There is a gravity readily observed to operate upon the terrestrial globe and, inside of that gravity, there is a much graver gravity that can pull even the finest of silts down through the sieves of asphalt, soil, bedrock, and mantle, until that which is finer still enters the Other Side. I am the gravity. I am the Lumpster."