Alice
It's a quiet bustle in your gray iron office. It looks like a shark cage dreaming of a drop of blood. Windowless, faceless office. All your colleagues want to see the match. A mosaicist has challenged you online. The other screens in the office are black, except yours, where the black sphere of your dexterity hums. Everyone cheers for the champion. A big pat on the back! They are in awe of you chasing demons. That's what you call genitals at the company. Your colleagues are jealous and admire you. They usually struggle to finish, two days for a video, and they run after a few pieces of lips or anus as if chasing spray-resistant cockroaches. Shouts of joy in front of article 175 of the penal code are pinned on the wall under the empire's flag! You mosaic at an incredible speed. You dispatch the case in a few hours. Nothing escapes you, vulva, label, house number, penis more or less erect. You concentrate. You arrive already at the last scenes of the video ahead of time. Doll's complexion, headless girlfriend's smile, minefield breasts. The girl on the screen looks at you. Screams of a captive in heat. The girl on the screen doesn't even know that the steamroller of your mosaic is going to stir up the consumer's frustration to the point of a murder fantasy that you sometimes find in the newspaper or the eyes of a guy in the subway. You smear everything, you make everything distorted, noble soldier of censorship. And then on the screen, with barely enough time to see what's going on, the images are suddenly invaded by darkness. The director must have been tired, the reality becomes an exterior illuminated with a flashlight, the mosaic under your fingers struggles with the shadows of the trees, and then Alice is there, furtively, in the tree, there, you go back, it is a fatal error, there, in the tree, she beckons to you, however, it is her, you wanted to see her again and she is there, and you lose the match on the edge of anguish.
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It happened in the subway, like always. The passengers around you had that cataract-blurred face. Some were sleeping, dog and master alike. The gray jam under the eyes. They are mosaicists of their lives. You were looking for something of yourself in the reflection of the glass and you always came back to that empty place next to you. They have a habit of leaving an empty seat next to you. That day you thought you saw something else, a woman, sad and beautiful like a creature who has lost the gift of reading maps of the comeback. It was her. The one you call Alice. That's probably not her real name. Why would she have a name? Everything was in her eyes and you saw the promise of a thousand lives. You understood that it was her that you were looking for beyond the mosaics. When Alice smiled at you with her eyes, the rest of the world stopped moving, and your blood rushed to your shoes. You wanted to talk to her and why not get doomed at first sight? The others were sleeping with more authority. Yet Alice's eyes were bright in the reflection of the glass. Your hand waved, trying to smear the reality around. In the haze of your mind, you told yourself that you wouldn't mind if the subway derailed. To be with her. In the infinite mosaic of bodies tangled on the warm rails. You saw yourself get up to break the glass of the emergency signal and the shrill alarm shattered the skulls of the sleepers and the braking sent them ass overhead, to the other end of the car, and next to you, with all your senses, you were still looking for Alice. You wanted to say something to her but the words were tied up inside you. And then the light went out once, twice. The car was empty. You could feel Alice's eyes on you but she was nowhere to be seen. You looked at your hand. It was blurred with shrillness, you felt like the crowd was in your hand and it was screaming in an endless tunnel and eventually devoured the last crumbs of your vision of Alice.
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The next day, you don't go to work. You have lost the courage to return to the ransacking of the images. All eyes are grey. You tell yourself that you should at least say hello to this champion. His address leads you to an old shack in the outer bangs of Tokyo tiled with life and death. The vegetation made crazy by the humidity devours the wooden house. You knock at the entrance, no answer. But you hear a faint moaning inside. You slide the dust-covered door open. You feel like entering a cave made of living molds, crossed by moiré shadows like blind eels. You advance in this stinking and silent jungle. The walls are of an unbearable old pink. The house seems too big, a tunnel of shadows follows a tunnel of shadows, how many more corridors? You arrive in front of a pink door. The impression that a crowd is whispering behind this door. You feel very weak but you see your hand resting on the nob. The room looks like the raging heart of a spaceship. An intricate, smoking pipe connects nictitating machines, projecting a haze of images. Bodies, shouted words, seated customers, black rooms of ritual, a haze of images that ends up looking like a living mosaic, turns on, turns off, blinks shamefully, and makes the poor black screen of a body shriek. You see her in the darkened bed, in the middle of it all. It is Alice and it is not her. Is she the one who challenged you? It looks more like one of those old mummified bonzes that still moves, the purple skin on the bones, but Alice doesn't move, tubes penetrate her body, and her white eyes seem to waver in a blurred sky. You understand that she controls all the devices with the vibrations of her white eyes. She controls the chaos of her identities mirrored on the screens. Programmer, robot waitress in a Shinjuku café, factory worker, online consultant, avatar, hacker, mosaicist, all at the same time and simultaneously, in a huge and invisible tear. On a screen, she writes, _hello_. Your words are tied up in the basement. On the screen, _you are a shy one_. You want to stammer that you have to go far, far away. On the screen, _stay_. You want to say that. But it's more like a scream you hear outside, in the street. If there is any left. As if all the screams of the street were knotting up inside you. On the screen, _we're going to have fun_. You tremble a little. Alice? On the screen, _you do not like me_? You make an effort to move back. The vibration of large whitened eyes. You want to pull the plug. You want to go off the rails. Your body gets heavier. And then your arm gets covered with shadowy flesh tiles, flesh that doesn't belong to you, as if a mischievous butcher was having fun arranging squares one by one of putrefied meat on your body, on your arms, on your legs, you feel it, and this living rot spreads on your cheek and between your legs, penetrates your mouth, your memories, everything becomes wet and dark, you can't move, you think, alarm signal, and on the screen, _you are mine, forever_, and on all the screens, _I have taken the *** place in you_.
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(Images credits : Stéphane Motte)
