Momentary Lily

Episode 4

There's a trick that I learned years ago, back when I first became interested in the concept of lucid dreaming. The secret, you see, is to understand the concept of the uncanny. Despite how easily and vividly your brain can conjure the most elaborate scenarios for us to experience in our sleep, it can't ever get a firm grasp on creating a stable image of us. Hands, in particular, give it a lot of trouble. In a dream, you almost never have the correct amount of fingers. To become aware of your dreaming, you must find something that is so subtly yet undeniably off that it snaps your consciousness out of its self-hypnosis, and there's nothing quite as uncanny as looking down at your hands to see six or seven disproportionate digits extending from your palms.

It works, too. Eventually, after turning it into a waking habit, looking down to count my fingers became an automatic dreaming act, and I learned to wake myself up just enough to know I was dreaming. To have some control over them. It also helps alleviate that gnawing feeling of uncertainty that comes when you wake from a terrible nightmare and can't quite be sure where you are, or what might still be lurking in the shadows just beyond your bedroom door. All you have to do is look down at your palms and count. One. Then two. Then three. Then four. Then five.

I'm telling you this because I have been counting the fingers on my hands for the last four weeks. Ever since it premiered. I'm counting them right now, even, as I write these words. I'm doing this because I have to be sure that I am still awake.

[One. Two. Three. Four. Five.]

It might have happened an hour ago. It might have been days. I haven't dared close my eyes long enough to risk falling asleep, so I can't really tell. The light from my monitor is beginning to burn. Somewhere, I can hear anime girls talking about food. There are corpses in the hallway just outside their room. They won't fucking stop talking about food. The one with green hair keeps saying “over-buffed.” The other one's breast won't stop bouncing. I'm counting the fingers on my hand, just to be sure, because there are corpses in the hallway just outside their room. It might have been an hour ago. It might have been days. I'm counting again to be sure.

[One. Two. Three. Four. Five. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.]

Listen. It happened like this:

I'm sitting in my office. My mouse hovers above the button on the screen. Crunchyroll. Momentary Lily. Episode 4. My job is to see what is there, and to tell the others what it did to me. Twenty-three minutes pass, and then thirty-nine seconds more. I'm not sure what to make of it. I count the fingers on my hand (just to be sure). I hesitate for a moment before dialing the number into my phone. He answers on the third ring.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hello,” I say. “It's been awhile”.

“No shit,” he says (and not without good humor). “It's been months. Where the hell have you been?”

“Recovering from an illness, mostly,” I tell him. It isn't exactly a lie, though I can tell from the pause he takes before responding that he knows something is wrong.

“Well,” he says, “As much as I would love to think you might just call to catch up, I reckon you had a reason for phoning me up this damned close to the stroke of midnight?” Is it really that late? How can I have been sitting there at my computer for six hours?

“It's to do with a series I'm reviewing. An anime, you know?”

“Hm. Right Well, okay. I'm sure I don't have to remind you, James, that I'm not exactly an expert on that stuff. Christ, I think the last time I watched any Japanimation would have been when my girlfriend back in college convinced me to drop two-hundred bucks on Hellshake Yano tapes…god. Time really is a son of a bitch, isn't it?” I can hear the old man rustling out of bed and shuffling down to the library that I know he keeps just opposite his room. I count my fingers as I wait.

[One. One two. One two three. One two three four. One two three four five. One two three four. One two three. One two. One.]

I don't know where to start. The old man is as patient as ever with me, though he's not afraid to let out at least one weary sigh before I finally begin. I tell him about the dreams that plagued me for months before the show began. I tell him about the first three episodes that bore out just as I had seen that they would. I tell him about Dr. Lytta. I tell him about the agonizing, sleepless nights that preceded the fourth episode. I do not tell him the name of the show. I couldn't. The professor doesn't deserve that.

He listens quietly, never interrupting, and only speaks after I have finally trailed off.

“That's quite the story”, he says.

“I know.”

“And the fourth episode, that is what you had to watch today?”

“Yes.”

“...and it was, what? Just as bad as the other three?

“Yes! I mean, no, not exactly, but it's still…it's still…dammit, I can't make it make sense!”

“Alright, slow down,” the old man says. “It's going to be hard for me to help you with so little to go on. What do you mean when you say not exactly? Did the show get better, somehow?”

“Better is not the word I would use, professor.”

“Then educate me, James.”

“Episode Four is…it's…I mean, at first, okay, yeah. I thought I was going crazy, because technically I guess it is better. The camera isn't going all apeshit every thirty seconds. The whole thing takes place inside, and at night, so there are fewer opportunities to fuck up the basic concepts of lighting and coloring a scene. It still has all of those chintzy looking 3D backgrounds, but…I mean, the look of the show was just the normal amount of offensive, I guess. It didn't find any new ways to make me regret having two functioning eyeballs.

“And this is…good, yes?” The poor old man is obviously doing his best to keep up with my rambling. I can't help but love him for wanting to try and find the bright spot in all of this. It gives me hope, for a second, that things might be okay. This causes my throat to catch and my lungs to seize up in a panic. I nearly drop the phone with how violently I raise my free hand to see just how many

[One2345.1Two345.12Three45.123Four5.1234Five.One2345]

Okay. It's okay. I am awake. I know that I am.

“It's ‘good’ in the same sense that I'm sure the passengers on the Titanic enjoyed it when those musicians played on their violins as the water on the deck kept rising.”

“Wow, James. That's awfully grim.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. I am not sorry. It is a good analogy. Besides, the angry ghosts of the Titanic can grab a number and get in line if they're mad at me about having an opinion on having to watch another godforsaken GoHands anime. “The point is,” I continue, “That the show doesn't just magically become better when it decides to stop spitting in the face of a century of cinematic theory. We don't give awards to Olympic athletes just for figuring out how to tie their shoes onto the correct feet and successfully walk to the starting line of the race without falling on their asses, do we?"

“Um.”

“Anyways. Sure, the visuals were functional. That's not why I called you.”

“I figured as much,” the old man sighs. I look up from my dark corner of the office, only barely able to make out the view outside of my window through the blinding glare of my monitor. It is raining heavily right now. Has it been raining all this time? The drops hit the glass in a thudding, predictable rhythm. One, two, three, four, five. I worry that the rain might be mocking me.

[One? One. One! One! One!]

The old man continues. “You called me,” he says, “Because you're afraid that this thing might be haunting you.”

“And you know all about hauntings, professor,” I respond.

“As I recall, James,” the professor muses, “It was on the first day of our class when you approached me at the end of the lecture and proudly announced that you were an unshakable skeptic. An unbeliever amongst unbelievers.” I chuckle out loud for the first time in weeks. I can't help it. The professor's infectious mood was the first thing that I came to admire about him, back in the day.

“Yes, well, back then I figured hauntings had only to do with bona fide bullshit, like ghosts and demons. You were the one that taught me about—”

“About memetic hauntings, yes. I have your capstone on the subject right here, in front of me. It might be the best ‘B-minus’ paper I've ever read.”

I laugh again. “Well, you know me, professor. Deadlines and I have never seen eye-to-eye.”

“Mmhmm. So, am I to understand that, a full decade after you laughed out loud to my face — in the middle of my first lecture, I might add!— you have finally dropped the tired skeptic act? Because of this…anime?”

The laughter fades from my voice in an instant. “Yes,” I tell him. I mean it.

“Because you believe that it represents a memetic haunting? A concept that has taken such malicious root in the world that it has the power to cause real, physical harm to those it contacts?”

“I have no other way of explaining what this thing is,” I say. I am watching rain hit my window more intently than ever. That plodding meter of impact refuses to wane or waver. One, two, three, four, five, and the glass begins to groan in the wind. One, two, three, four, five, and the sound of thunder crashing in the distance. But no lightning flash. Not before, and not after. Just the thunder alone, and the incessant rain.

“Except,” the professor continues, “You just told me that this fourth episode of the anime was better. It didn't do all of the whateveryoucalledits with the gross colors and the camera nonsense. It was just a regular episode of TV, right? That hardly sounds like some kind of malignant spiritual force to me, James. A memetic haunting, remember, is a violent collision of human artifice and otherworldly malice. It is a possession of the collective unconscious. It isn't just a few bad episodes of a cartoon.”

“But that's just it, professor! That's exactly the point! Momenta—, this show, it corrupts the very concept of mediocrity! Its misshapen, CGI tendrils worm their way in so deep that even a completely boring and unremarkable half-hour of television is…it's wrong!” I can hear the chair squeak as the professor leans forward. He is rustling around with his paper again.

“It is uncanny, you mean?”

I almost break down in tears when he says it. Yes, of course. Of course. That's exactly it. The word that I need to make people understand what Momentary Lily is.

“Yes, it's uncanny! Like some kind of profane homunculus of an anime. This fourth episode is what proved it, too.” The professor is interested, now. I knew he would be, if I could only get him to understand what it was I was reckoning with.

“Tell me more,” he says.

“It's all right there in how painfully normal this episode almost is, you know? Like, don't get me wrong, it's still boring as hell, because we're dealing with a cast of mostly cardboard cutouts wandering around a completely empty world and yammering on about pointless bullshit, but the episode almost seems like it's…like it's trying, right? The Sazakana girl gets all of these scenes with Ayame the class rep where it's like they're almost distinct characters, even if their dialogue never goes beyond the usual trite cliches about feeling unworthy to lead the team and grieving over that Yuri girl that we're all supposed to be sad about dying.”

“A shallow imitation of other, better stories about magical cartoon girls?” the professor asks.

“Yes! Yes!” I nearly shout. “And the show is obviously trying to play up the homoerotic vibes between these girls, but it's done in such an obvious and clumsy way. It's just so…brazen that it can't help but come across as cynical. As if someone at the studio blindly Googled 'What kind of stuff will anime fans pay money for?' and one of the first things that popped up was Madoka Magica yuri fanart, and so they just plugged a bunch of variables into a random dialogue generator and animated whatever crap it spat out!"

“I won't pretend to understand most of what you just said, James, but think I get the idea. It's preying on the collective goodwill of anime fans that are desperate for any queer representation whatsoever, and it exists as a testament to the anime industry's willingness to exploit its viewers good faith by churning out cheap, disposable, and even actively terrible garbage that doesn't actually do anything positive in regards to its representation of women, lesbian or otherwise?”

“...actually, professor, that's weirdly accurate.”

“You don't earn a doctorate in paranatural multi-media manifestation phenomena without being quick on the draw, boy. This Momentary Lily show sure does sound like a piece of work.” The professor laughs, but he also sounds weary. He sounds tired.

I say, “I never told you what the anime was called, professor,” and the silence of his response makes my blood run cold.

[One! And then none! And then un, become—! everything all is undone, undone, undone, and one, and one, and]

“No, son. No, you didn't.” The thunder comes rolling in again, and again there is no flash of light to warn of its arrival. The shadows that engulf my office are cold and unmoving. In this moment, I am certain that if I reached out past the thin veil of light that I have been cornered into, I would feel the inky blackness of the night seep into my skin and settle between the layers of my flesh. It would stain me. I lift up my hands to the void, and I suddenly realize that I can't quite make out how many fingers are there in front of me.

“You knew about Momentary Lily from the beginning,” I whisper.

“I'm the world's foremost expert on media that rots a person's soul when it touches you, James. Of course I knew about Momentary Lily.”

“But you haven't actually watched it, yet, have you?”

“Jesus, James, of course not! I have a wife! My daughter, Sarah, just started her first year at Emerson! I'm not about to watch a GoHands anime on purpose. That's what we have critics like you for…”

“I have a family too, damn you!” I am screaming now, though the thunder and the rain have gotten loud enough to drown me out even still. “So, let me guess, then? You were just begging for this to happen, weren't you? You couldn't wait for me to tell you everything that I'd seen, is that right? It would be so perfect for one of your precious case studies, god damn you!” Silence, again. Whatever energy I just mustered has already faded. It is too late. I am too tired, myself. I just want to sleep. “Can you at least tell me one thing?” I ask him. He does not answer me for a long time.

“Yes, James. I will do what I can.”

“At the end of this boring, uneventful, trite episode, there is a shot. It's during a dialogue scene, right near the end of the episode. It's a completely unimportant denouement. The girls are going on about their goddamned miso again. Except, right in the middle of the conversation, for no discernable intent, the reverse shot of Renge is at an almost complete 90-degree angle. It's a moment of quiet, visceral madness. Like before. A crack spreading across the facade.”

“...my God…" That is all the professor can say. I swallow hard. My throat is so dry that I might as well be trying to choke down glass. I can barely get out my last words to him.

“I am haunted by Momentary Lily. Whether it is absolute dogshit or just aggressively forgettable and mediocre, this thing is sticking to my soul. I accept that now. I just need to know how to make it stop. In all your years studying this kind of thing…is it even possible?”

The professor doesn't say anything for a while. Then, barely above a whisper now himself, he says, “...the only thing that can truly stop a haunting is time, James. You must outlast this thing, to the bitter end. Or else, it will outlast you, like the ghosts that still crawl across the craters of old overgrown battlegrounds. Either way, it's only a matter of time.” The line goes silent. There's only the rain, now. And the thunder that comes without light. I do not move from my seat in the dim light. I do not dare reach into the shadows to see what is waiting. I'm no longer concerned about whether I wake or sleep, because I know that it does not matter.

I'm still counting, though. The seconds go by. Then minutes. Then...

I've lasted through four weeks of this. I've just got to make it through to the end.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Rating: