#12

The sand leaped from the projector in a stream of light, lingering dust in the darkened room drifting through it to exaggerate the effect: storm, recorded, passing through the glass of the lens and splashing itself across the bare whiteness of the basement wall. A boy, there, in red garments amongst the orange and beige and tan -- the speeding whirl of sand, very obviously computer-generated, perhaps without reference, but somehow that was never the point. The point was the idea of sand; not the reality of it. That's what the Artists would say, anyway, calling it metaphor for a scattered handful of ideas split between them, and they'd argue for hours over "What it could mean." Good luck to them, Lindstrom thought.

Of course, he'd already had it all figured out since that Wednesday, when the ninth clip had gone live. It was a fresh theory. His own. Lindstrom slowly drew some water from the glass in his hand, lowered it, placed it gently on the floor by his feet. Straightened, again, in the chair. Fine acting, that kid -- even if the sand didn't really look like it was there, the kid always looked like he was in the thick of it, somehow. Barely keeping his feet -- probably filmed in some kind of color-keyed wind tunnel and superimposed -- he would stagger and fall and rise and stagger and fall for whatever the duration of that particular segment. And he would talk, often, the only audible parts over the foleyed roar of the synthetic storm being the hoarse "I LOVE YOU" delivered in a kind of almost-melodramatic sob-scream. A mother, friend, sibling, somehow lost, or maybe just beyond the border -- in the video's fiction -- of that endless torrent of sand, or perhaps only a memory of any of the above... all the popular theories shared that basic set of parameters. Lost in a storm, calling for support from someone who may not be there, may not ever come; a cliché, perhaps, all of it a giant cliché in everything it was, even with Lindstrom's theory offering a new kind of perspective through which to view the vague narrative of the clips -- but it was, somehow, imbued with something more than it seemed to be. Haunting the eyes, the distant memory... Nostalgia.

Lindstrom glances at the counter in the lower-right corner of the projection. Encoded there, just a little blurry, into the file itself. Weird nameless art-feed, the whole thing streaming from somewhere in the ruins of Denver, one of the Towers maybe, weird and powerful. Two minutes and thirty-eight seconds: Clip number twelve is the second-longest of the known pieces so far, with number five being the longest at eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Most of them were under two.

"I love you, I love you, [inaudible]."

The clip ends abruptly (they always do) at precisely the three-minute mark. Lindstrom queues it up again from his laptop, screen dead and cracked, video feed going instead to the projector. Recorded now, no longer a live stream, Lindstrom always feels that there is something missing, this way -- something intangible lost with the idea of a live transmission from somewhere, nowhere. Just him, he knows. Thinks. Unsure.

He leaves the room halfway through the third repeat of clip number twelve, closing his laptop and stopping the playback. Leaving the room, basement suite, across the lawn, street, parking lot. Need coffee, eggs. Shave. Then maybe share his new theory, maybe pitch it like a fresh concept, to Vince first, probably. Public later. Maybe tomorrow.

"Boy wanders through endless sandstorm, screaming at it -- not at anyone else, not for anyone else, but screaming that he loves the storm, loves it, trying to find its ears -- art piece, conceptual, multiple episodes transmitted remotely."

Lindstrom kicks a bit of refuse across the lot outside the store. Damn cliché, still. Good one, though. Done well.

Remembers crying at clip number eight. Just crying and not knowing why.