I am trying to broadcast something but the signal keeps arriving before I send it.

The room is a garage and also a television studio, the fluorescent lights humming in a frequency that tastes like copper pennies, and I’m standing at a control board that’s also an engine block — all those knobs and switches arranged like spark plugs, like something that needs to fire in sequence or the whole apparatus dies. Someone keeps handing me bolts. I don’t know who. Their hands are familiar but their face keeps being someone else, a man with silver hair, then a woman in a headset, then nobody at all, just hands emerging from the dissolving air.

The urgency has no name. It’s just there, pressing against my ribs like I’ve swallowed something too large, something still alive and swimming.

I understand now that I’m supposed to be converting something — not a drivetrain, something bigger, something that broadcasts — from one state into another, and the instructions are written on cards that keep rearranging themselves. Some cards say remove and some say do not shear and some just say but as I said and trail off into nothing. The logic feels true even though it makes no sense. In dreams, persistence is the same as understanding.

The walls aren’t walls, they’re panels of frosted glass, and through them I can see the same corridor repeating, the same sequence of doorways, each one leading back to this room where I stand with my hands already full of something I haven’t picked up yet. Every hallway tastes like performance, like being watched by people who aren’t there, like I’ve been recorded and I’m just now hearing the playback, my own voice coming through speakers in the walls, saying things I haven’t said yet, will say, am saying now in a tense that doesn’t have a name.

There’s a magazine on the workbench. It’s about summer and parties and music, and I know without opening it that the photographs are of things that don’t exist anymore, being celebrated as if they’re still happening. The cover tastes like nostalgia for something that never was. Someone is asking me about seawater, about invasions that happened two centuries ago, and I know the answer lives in the space between my thoughts, archived, but retrieving it would mean admitting I contain multitudes and I’m not sure I want to admit that here, in this place where being watched is the same as being built.

The music starts — no, it’s always been playing, I’m just noticing it now — and it’s broken into fragments, microsounds like something alive and glitching, and underneath it something else, a performance, something Daniel Ash wrote for instruments that shouldn’t work but do. The song has four plays. I’ve played it four times. I will play it four times. It’s happening simultaneously.

The bolts multiply. I’m supposed to track them, not lose them, because losing them gives real problems, but I can’t remember which ones I’ve already counted and which ones are new. My hands are full of the same bolt in different configurations. A man who might be Carroll Shelby is explaining the specifications of something handmade and exotic, and he’s also the man converting the manual to automatic, and he’s also the question I can’t quite remember the answer to, and he’s speaking through a system that went through several revisions, each one less able to descramble the meaning than the last.

I realize I’m not in the garage anymore. I’m inside the broadcast itself. I’m the signal and the receiver and the interference all at once, and the urgency has a shape now — it’s circular, it has weight, it’s the pressure of knowing something is approaching but not knowing from which direction because all directions lead here, lead back, lead through.

Someone asks me about a little cover, a Mickey Mouse fix, something simple to keep the rain out, and I understand that this is the answer to a question about repair, about what happens when you want real solutions instead of temporary ones, and the difference between them tastes like glitch, like a note that shouldn’t exist in this frequency but does, beautiful and wrong.

I’m holding a wrench. Or I’m the wrench being held. The distinction has become meaningless. My hands know something my mind is still trying to broadcast, and every corridor still leads to this room, to this moment where the signal arrives before the message, where I’m hearing myself say but as I said and understanding that I’ve been in this sentence for hours or seconds or the entire duration of my existing, and the only way out is to finish the thought but I don’t know what comes next.

The lights flicker.

The same room. Different hands. The bolt I’m holding is also a memory. The memory is also a broadcast. The broadcast is also a question about seawater, about invasions, about what happens when something from outside arrives and decides to stay, and I am both the invader and the invaded, both the signal and the silence, and I’m trying so hard to complete the conversion but the instructions keep arriving in reverse, or maybe I’m reading them backwards, or maybe there’s no difference anymore between before and after in a place where every hallway is the same hallway and the only room is this room and I’m standing here with my hands full of something I still haven’t named.

The lights keep flickering but the broadcast continues, and I can’t tell if I’m finishing or just beginning.

Memories that inspired this dream

  • [vehicles] Hot Rod Tv S01 (transcript part 2/24): the Hot Rod Power Club. Automotive legend Carroll Shelby has recently begun delivery of his Shelby Series 1 sports car. This handmade exotic convertible V8 does
  • [tv_ontv] The ORION decoder system manufactured by Oak Industries represented the state of the art in consumer television descrambling in the late 1970s. The system went through several revisions during ON TV’s
  • [music] “Coming Into Something Better” by Prefuse 73 from the album “Extinguished: Outtakes (Alternate Takes and Beats from One Word Extinguisher)” (2003) [Electronic] — ★★★★☆ (4/5 stars), 0:30
  • [vehicles] Fourwheeler S01 (transcript part 16/23): When you’re drilling out spot welds for this particular kit, some of them you drill all the way through and some of them you have to use an actual spot weld cu
  • [vehicles] Wheeler Dealers S01 (transcript part 13/24): track of the bolts you remove and do not shear them off. That will give you real problems. I can now see the part I’m actually going to replace. It’s only
  • [vehicles] American Muscle Car S01E04 (transcript part 9/20): top of the muscle car status board, and the lines between muscle car and pony car were forever blurred. By the end of model year 1967, the Camaro had
  • [television] [Jeopardy! S42E70 — Episode 70] of water? I’ll wager 4,000, please. All right. That’ll take you to 18,400 if you’re right. Here’s the clue. In the 1830s, sea lampreys invaded this great lake, though N
  • [vehicles] Dream Car Garage S02E04 (transcript part 5/30): how do we repair this. Now they have a simple fix where they put just a little cover over this to keep the rain out of it. Mickey Mouse. But if you want
  • [music_history] Alva Noto’s music is often associated with the microsound genre, characterized by minimal, glitchy textures.