Razzle Dazzle

“If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” — George Orwell

“Hey, Lucinda. What do you make of this?”

Lucinda wheeled her chair over to her co-worker, Javier’s space. The satellite image on his screen was zoomed in on an area that, from the trees and shoreline, Lucinda determined was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. But there was something wrong with the centre of the image. It looked scrambled, like black and white static.

“Looks like a glitch. Have you refreshed your screen?”

“Twice. It hasn’t cleared. I thought perhaps it was distortion or radiation but it’s not behaving that way.”

“A ghost in the machine. Have you checked the logs for a breach?”

“Francis is on it. But this is NORAD. Level 7. We don’t get hacked.”

“Run the diagnostics just to be safe.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lucinda took another look at the image. The wavy contrast vibrated against her eyelids.

“It messes with you, eh?! What is actually supposed to be there?”

“Some little town… called…,” Javier looked through his notes. “…Harrietts Landing.”

***

Jack Brolley walked along the water’s edge, his head down scouring the pebbles for beach glass. His dog, Lily, came running up to his side, a piece of driftwood in her mouth. He took it from her and threw it out into the water. She went diving after it with a level of glee reserved only for a golden retriever. The black polished heads of a couple of curious seals slipped back under the surface. And far off on the horizon, Jack caught one of his favourite sights: the wavering black monolithic towers of a superior mirage, the result of a temperature inversion just beyond the horizon. An alien land rising out of the ocean. He used to always have a good chuckle watching day-trippers lose their minds over this phenomenon. Regardless of knowing the trick, he still loved the effect.

Lily came bounding out of the water, the stick retrieved. Jack stepped back as she shook herself dry.

“Let’s get going, Lily.”

As they made their way back up the beach, they passed a large piece of driftwood on which someone had spray-painted Trust Nothing. This had been compromised by someone else to read Trust Noah. And under this, a third party had added: The Coming = FLOOD.

“Strange times,” Jack said out loud. To the cedars. To the hemlocks. A raven mocked him from a branch above. Lily was already halfway up the hill chasing after imaginary rabbits.

***

The Third Global Information War was now in its tenth year and had left the media landscape scorched and unnavigable. Mainstream newsfeeds were immediately hijacked, mashed up, and spat out as a thousand variations on a theme ranging from subtly planted inaccuracies to full-blown conspiracies. A live feed of Congress might find members digitally cloaked to appear as Deputy Dog debating Sailor Moon about the top 5 K-pop songs of the moment when you were expecting to tune in to a debate on immigration reforms. Websites had become the territory of digital archeologists who sifted through layers of hacker code to try and unravel the original meaning. Propaganda posters on the street were compromised by street artists and graffiti bots preaching their versions of the truth. Even ham radios, which quickly rose back into fashion at this time, risked their own adulterations over the airwaves, like the children’s game of Telephone where each one passes a message into another’s ear, only in this version half of the participants have code for DNA. In the end, they were left with only an echo of a fragment of a binary coded whisper.

As the journalism professor, Dr. Ezra Tincture had recently declared (or allegedly declared, seeing as the broadcast arrived on most people’s screens as a mashup of Mighty Mouse reciting Mussolini), “The only reliable medium today is our own first-person account.”

“Mighty Mousolini,” Renee told him.

“What’s that?”

“That was the meme that grew out of that speech. Mighty Mousolini. Apparently, it’s got its own podcast now.”

“The last thing this world needs is another meme with its own podcast.”

But it really didn’t matter. Nobody was listening anymore. There was no point. The noise was far too overwhelming. And, in even more of a paradigm shift, the general public was avoiding sharing online videos and photos of their images at all costs. AI-controlled deep fake bot armies needed only seconds of your likeness to pull it in and churn it back out spewing anti-government sentiment or performing lewd, unforgivable sexual acts and often demanding a king’s ransom to make it go away. Sure, no one was going to believe that was actually you, but it was still awkward to have to explain it to your grandma. And yes, there were processes in place to clear your name but the risk of subjecting oneself to the bureaucratic nightmare involved in image reclamation was not worth the fleeting joy of a selfie.

And so, here lay the fate of the limitless new frontier that was once the World Wide Web: a festering rat’s nest of bots and viruses. Layer upon layer of misdirection, false leads, outright lies, con artistry, propaganda, snake oil, hooliganism, and sleight of hand.

“Whole lotta skullduggery, if you ask me,” Jack would say to whoever would listen. Sadly, and for a while now, that list was down to his dog Lily, his niece Renee, the cedars, and the hemlocks.

The latest in a rolling series of government-mandated lockdowns was in its eighth month. And this time around, people seemed to finally be taking it seriously. Streets were empty. Grocery aisles were threadbare. The older generation felt a deep-set familiarity, recalling a time earlier in the century when the Coronavirus had spread across the world and demanded similar measures. But this time was different. Without media, with little communication to rely on, very few people knew what was going on. The stories that landed on one’s doorstep were absurd but at this point, everyone agreed, not implausible. Alien invasion. A plague that left you bleeding out the eyes and anus. Left-wing terrorists. Right-wing terrorists. Zombies. AI robots gone amok. Hell-sent demons sweeping through villages and breathing death into the souls of the population. The only thing they knew for sure was that it was bad and it was heading this way. People around these parts referred to it as the Coming. And for the most part, they hunkered down in their houses and waited and prayed.

You heard things along the way about attempts to stop the Coming. Stories of entire towns banding together in unity to stand shoulder to shoulder ready to fight whatever came over the horizon; even the children were armed to the teeth.

But the Coming slaughtered them all.

You heard about communities going the other route entirely, turning to prayer circles and human be-ins. Large groups gathering and praying to the power of the Coming. They honoured It, they asked It what It wanted.

The Coming showed no mercy.

What concerned Jack the most wasn’t in the extreme narratives of the online chatter. It was its sudden decline. The sharp drop in media noise that followed the Coming’s trail. Unnerving silence. Like the earth had fallen away and pulled everyone down with it. It was uncanny how little seemed to be left behind.

Renee had shown up unannounced the week before. He’d always suspected that she might, even before all of this recent chaos had started going down.

So he betrayed little surprise that bright May morning when he opened his front door to the sun blazing into his cabin and the backlit silhouette of his 18-year-old niece standing there like a battle-worn soldier. He could not fathom how she had made her way across the country. She didn’t explain much, just set her backpack down on his porch and gave him a hopeful smile.

“Hi, Uncle Jack.”

“Nice to see you, Renee. Been a long time. You’re gonna need to quarantine. You can use the guest cabin out back.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I’m afraid it’s policy around here.”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s not what this thing is about.”

“How do you mean? What’s going on back east?”

“I feel like I was always just one town ahead of it the whole time I was getting out of Ontario. So I can only base this on second-hand accounts. But my understanding is this isn’t about a contagion, or proximity, or who you had dinner with last Saturday. That isn’t what it’s about. It…it finds you.”

With that, she walked up the steps toward the guest cabin. She paused at the top and turned around.

“And it’s not ‘back east’ anymore. Last I heard it was in Grande Prairie, about to cross the Rockies.” And with that, she went inside. Moments later, she lay down on the bed, shut her eyes, and slept for seven days.

All the while she slept, Jack thought about what she had said. It finds you. Which suggested that it was looking for them. For humans. Searching them out. Around these parts, you learned that if you are walking in the forest and you spot a cougar, there’s a good chance it’s been tracking you for at least twenty minutes. That was the new permanent feeling they all carried around with them, that they were the hunted. Life had suddenly turned into a great and terrifying existential game of hide ’n’ seek.

When Renee finally woke up, she walked out into the cool dew-drenched morning and down the path. Lily barked and ran up to greet her and led her down to the driveway where she found her uncle loading the back of his pick-up. In his hand were large industrial paint rollers. The bed of the truck was full of five-gallon paint containers. From what she could tell, there were only two colours. Black and white.

“Good morning.”

“How long have I been out for?”

“Long enough, I reckon. C’mon, get in. There’s coffee in the thermos.”

They climbed into the cab with Lily in between them. Jack pulled out onto the dirt road and began to drive down the mountain into town.

Jack glanced over at Renee as they drove. He noticed for the first time a crucifix around her neck. Her thumb absentmindedly picked at the Christ’s face.

“So, are you Christian now?”

“More like…superstitious I guess you could say. It just feels like you need some kind of talisman to travel through the world these days, you know?”

Harriotts Landing was a beachside village with a permanent population of about two thousand residents scattered throughout the surrounding forest. The central hub consisted of a cafe, a general store, a post office, a library, and a strip of yoga centres, reiki clinics and gemstone dealers set up for the New-Age tourists that would swarm the locals every summer. Or used to swarm. Before there was something out there hunting them down. Before they were all driven into hiding.

They pulled into the centre of town. Jack stopped the truck in the middle of the road and got out. It didn’t matter where you parked these days.

Renee walked around beside him.

“Uncle Jack? What are we going to do?”

Jack took a sip of his coffee and looked up at the telephone poles, at the post office, at the newspaper boxes on the corner.

“We are going to make some razzle dazzle.”

“Hey now, if you break into song, I might have to break out the jazz hands.”

“Nothing like that. It’s a camouflage technique. Razzle dazzle. Back in World War One, the British Navy was looking for new ways to avoid getting torpedoed. They noted that because backgrounds were always changing, it was less about the boats taking on the exact visual appearance of their surroundings, but rather to camouflage them in a way that distorted perception. It wasn’t so much about concealing the thing in question, it was more about creating confusion.”

Renee opened the back of the pickup. “Confused is a pretty bloody accurate descriptor, right about now. Okay, so how did these navy guys do this confusion creating?

“They messed with assumptions. The eye was denied adequate sensory information. Initially, they would do things like paint the smokestacks from white to grey so that the boats seemed to disappear into the sky. Stuff like that. But then they started playing with the notion of razzle dazzle, or dazzle camouflage, which took things in an entirely different direction.”

“What direction was that?”

“Cubist, or even Op Art patterns. They created enormous modernist floating optical illusions. Think of a zebra. Or better yet, think of a thousand zebras grazing on the Savanna. Their stripes wavering like the rippling heat. Now picture them running. Running for their lives. Scattering in all directions at once. Imagine you are a cheetah in the middle of that visual disruption. Your brain scrambles. You don’t know which way to go.”

“So, what does all of this have to do with why we’re standing here in the middle of town.”

“We’re gonna paint it.”

“Paint what?”

“The town. Every inch of it. We’re going to razzle dazzle Hariotts Landing so that when the Coming arrives, it doesn’t recognize it as a place where humans live.”

***

Renee finished setting up the scaffolding on the side of the library and started rolling wide diagonal white stripes across the wall.

She was white. He was black. They would follow each other around the town, each filling in the other’s negative space.

As they worked, she told him about how in 18th century Scotland, people would hide an old glove or shoe or perhaps a broken bed leg in the walls of a house creating a false scent for malevolent spirits to latch onto rather than haunting the home’s living occupants.

She told him about how sailors would often get tattoos of pigs and hens because neither of those animals can swim and so God would look down upon a shipwreck and see these poor drowning creatures and take them to dry land.

She told him that Muslims and Jews alike believe that a hand with a coloured eye will ward off evil — however, exactly who the hand belongs to is not as aligned. The former says it is the Hand of Fatima; the latter claims it is of Miriam.

By mid-morning, they had painted most of the street signs, two sides of the library, and the benches out front. Large, bold black and white stripes that often shifted angles or directions midstream. Corners became flattened. Perspectives were flipped on their heads. They were turning everything 2D, ridding the world of an entire dimension. Lines followed along storefront, onto sidewalk, onto flowerbed, onto street, and then pulled all of it onto a single plane.

All of this, of course, occurring not in the space itself but the eye of the beholder. A trompe l’oeil, Jack called it.

“Our eyes are always seeing stories created for us by our brains,” he told her. “And they fill in gaps using our past experiences. But in this moment, there’s nothing to grasp onto. We lose our points of reference. We can see the patterns in front of us but we can’t make out the coordinates. We become lost in what to do with this new data. We’re left trying to follow one lone zebra in a stampeding herd.”

She told him that you can make a witch’s bottle to ward off evil spirits by combining rusty nails, salt, a length of red ribbon, a black candle, and your own urine.

George Winterland wandered into town around 9 AM. As was his custom. It used to include a soy latte and bantering with the café baristas, but these days it was simply the momentum of routine that got him out of his house and the shallow hope that the world had awoken from its nightmare and returned to some semblance of normalcy. Instead, what he found that morning was Jack Brolley and a young woman painting the roof of the post office.

“Goddammit, Jack! What in blazes are you up to? It looks like a spider dropped acid and spun its web.”

“Mornin’, George.”

“And who is that up there with you? Don’t tell me that’s little Renee. Lord have mercy! Well, look at you all grown up.”

“Hi, George.” Renee wiped the sweat off her brow.

“Well, I’ll be damned. What kind of trouble has your uncle got you involved in that finds the two of you on the post office roof?”

Renee called down, gleefully. “We’re gonna save the town by hiding in plain sight.”

And she told him about razzle dazzle, about how enemy submarines were unable to aim when staring out the periscope at a ship that appeared to be heading in every direction at once.

“You two are crazy as a pair of loons,” George declared. “But it’s been a while now since I’ve seen anything around here that might be considered more sane.”

Renee smiled at Jack. “I think we should take that as a compliment, don’t you, Uncle Jack?”

“I reckon it’s about as close as we’re gonna get.”

“But look here,” George pointed ahead. “You painted my picnic bench. Where am I going to drink my coffee, now?”

“I think you’ll manage,” Jack said.

“Well, if I can’t sit down I might as well help. Just give me something a little lower down. I can’t be climbing ladders like I used to.”

And as they worked, she told them about Japanese waving cats and Thai elephants and Swedish painted Dala horses and Chinese golden toads and Bolivian bulls and Egyptian scarabs. Of how rabbits’ feet became popular for luck during the Depression and how World War II pilots used to fly with fuzzy dice.

As the day progressed, more people showed up. Some grabbed a brush and joined in the task at hand. Selma Matford brought down a giant platter of egg salad sandwiches. A musical jam started up in the newly painted gazebo.

It took three days to paint the town. When they were done, George joked that it was hard to walk, that he’d lost his sense of up and down. It was the end of the day and the effect had become compounded by the streetlights and the shadows. The kids played in the stripes making up MC Escher versions of hopscotch.

The next morning, they rounded up the townspeople. They went door to door, enlisting volunteers along the way to spread the word that the entire population needed to head into the centre of town. It was word of mouth. The howling of wolves. Neighbour to neighbour passing along a story that somehow included stampeding zebras — which most dismissed as yet another instance of a game of Telephone run amok.

And most came in the end, wandering into town each in their own way. There were cautious but deeply enthusiastic exchanges between people who had for more than half a year appeared to each other only as a square of moving pixels on a video call.

And they gathered together in the café and the general store and the post office, and the library and the strip of shops set up for the tourists. And they hunkered down and waited. And prayed.

She told him how in England, some people say the word “rabbit” the first morning of each month when they wake up. Of how Serbs might spill water behind someone going on a journey. How on New Year’s Eve Spaniards wear red underwear and eat a dozen grapes as the bell tolls at midnight.

“One grape for each month of the coming year. For good luck.”

“Luck. Luck is all we have. That, and how you play it.”

“I bloody well hope you played it right, Uncle Jack.”

Jack lifted his hands to either side of his head waving them back and forth.

Jazz hands.

“Razzle dazzle!”

She smiled and held her crucifix and stared up at the sky. It was spectacularly drenched with stars. Planes were no longer flying so it was devoid of human activity, save for a single satellite blinking back at them from its orbit.