SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
by Devon Urchin
Relax your throat. The muscles around the esophagus — and the jaw they’re struggling to support. And the sinuses and teeth. Relax and let go of trying to keep yourself on your chair.
Just sit. It’s an emergency.
And let your stomach muscles relax. Your legs. Your genitals. Puff your chest out and sink your chin to your collarbones. And let your shoulders feel gravity’s pull. And read this message through your almost-crossed eyes, after you’ve closed your eyes and looked up through your infinity.
EMERGENCY. THIS IS A TEXT MESSAGE IN A GREY BOX. FROM A COMPUTER SYSTEM THAT SENDS YOUR CELL PHONE MESSAGES LIKE AMBER ALERTS.
You are falling now. Find shelter in your body. Let yourself fall. And the walls are turning fuzzy and dark. That’s the shelter itself.
Exhale. Exhale more. Squeeze the air out of your stomach until you're completely panicked that you won't be able to inhale again.
You’re okay, but you need to find shelter. Inhale. Relax your throat and lower your chin and breathe through your nostrils. This is not a drill.
<play track 1: Mahler’s Symphony No.5 in C Sharp Minor: 1 Trauermarsch on the 5-hour DIRGE Spotify playlist by user: katherto>
It took 38 minutes for the people of Hawaii to find out that North Korea wasn’t going to bomb them Saturday, January 18, 2018. It was around 8 AM. People reported hiding in bathtubs to protect themselves and throwing their children into storm drains to keep them safe. Others called their parents to tell them they love them. And goodbye.
One person ate an entire loaf of bread. Another decided to fill his his large emergency bottles of water. He filled and stacked so many in his garage that he couldn’t get his car out after the all-clear.
Like the Milgram and Stanford experiments before them, it showed us how we really act when the terror of
These people thought they were under attack.
And they realized, and so did everyone who learned of the story, and the person who was fired for pushing the launch button, what people do when the end is near.
BALLISTIC MISSLE INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Slide for more
HANNAH
(From outside the bathroom we hear her working from home, wearing a hands-free headset for the phone. She realizes quietly and begins to slowly panic while she is trying to maintain a phone conversation with an insurance customer in New York City.)
Uh huh.
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You can see your own face begin to peel away. Starting with the neck, which floats upward with the chest and the stomach and the ass and the asshole and the genitals and hips and knees and feet and toes.
Like sex, like sleep, like sweet death. Like acceptance of truth and complacency to the fact that life is actually down there in the cozy abyss, not up there out of reach.
Relaxation like you've never felt. Every muscle letting go of the bones they've been clinging to for dear life and trusting that you were designed to float.
That god is in the antimatter and you've been responding to the wrong gravity your entire existence.
You fall and fall and then you feel the temptation to lurch forward and grab onto things you knew more about. But if you had to, you couldn't even name what those were.
You aren’t protected by skin and bones, you’re trapped in by them. You were floating up the entire time and your skin kept you inside and your bones kept you weighted down.
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DO NOT COUGH. YOU ARE THE DISEASE.
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It’ll take muscle memory to carry this feeling of self-protection back into the real world.
The street of the first house I ever lived in was a two mile walk from parent-sponsored 2020 shelter no. 1. I walked there in late March. The gravel strewn on in the broken pavement was the same as 27 years ago. I thought of the sand in my old turtle sandbox. And the enormous lake a street away. As a child I assumed everyone had a huge lake nearby — for their water.
(When my mother and my father divorced for the second time, my mother moved my brother, the product of their first marriage, and I, the product of the second, to my grandparents’, 20 minutes inland. No lake.)
As I walked, the school at the end of that childhood street and the houses matched up with the images in my mind. I began to walk differently and look at the address numbers differently and I got defensive with jurors in my head that had ruled this cursed ground.
I panicked that it had been knocked down but there it stood. It was just behind new, skinny one-lot houses that stood where my turtle sandbox used to be, in our former side yard. I sent a picture to my brother. We haven’t talked in years. And when I walked back to my mother and step father’s new home as an about-to-be 31 year-old man, I knew it would be hard for my mother to hear that I’d been there.
But we talked about it and it helped me, to say it out loud. It was, in fact, a place I lived. A structure, not more.
It felt like falling to tell her. Falling into a new shelter of my own making. That I always had but hadn’t known about. Or remembered. Or known how to access. A choice to trust the fall or fight it.
Like as you fall asleep, falling into a starry pit. With your knees floating up and your back and heart falling deeper.
The edge of the lake is there and so is the shelter inside yourself. The hard skull and the perfectly designed skin and bones, evolved to protect something softer. Like crustacean.
Protected in a shroud of black, giving way to pure light from within you. The shield was already formed and now you're seeing it, trusting it.
The strangers around us are merely figments of our imagination like the young man playing piano on the other side of the wall, an arts colony for two divided at parent-sponsored artist colony 2020 shelter no. 2.
The first day I was at my father’s loft, sheltering in place, I played the beautiful, nearly free piano we rescued from Craigslist.
And that young man played back. The neighbor played the piano just as badly and freely and playfully as I did. I can’t quite hear him talking although I swear I can tell when he’s upset and when he’s maybe gotten a college acceptance letter.
But the piano playing back and forth was the only conversation I am certain we’ve had.
Like the grass, like the trees, like the carbon that makes plastic and the sands that make glass, humans grew here on this planet.
We remember as a collective that it happened. The reminders are there in popular retellings of origin stories: we split apart, we rose above. It's there. It must have happened.
Unsatisfying as it is, the sciences also tell us what must have happened.
The stories of endings tell us how it all will end. We trust that. The forensics of a dinosaur skull reminds us that it all ends.
Remind us that we can be reminded. That we are minded to begin with. That we mind something or that things mind us.
That there will be an emergency.
For the path forward, we trust the projection drawn, connecting the points plotted there by mathematicians and historians.
We are made of the same fibers as the grasses and trees and bees, but we have memory of something deeper. Like when you drift off to sleep and you lurch into starry pits but remember to wake up just in time so as not to experience that fall.
There’s no trust that we aren't actually falling, despite being flat on our backs, safe in bed. We are scared of what’s down there.
The mountains of my past now gravel beneath my feet and the sandbox and the water and that tree and that house. it kept me weighted down. It kept all of us weighted down.
but the option to sit on the edge of the lake and seek shelter. Isn’t an option.
It was designed for you. For emergencies and so you could experience this planet.
It’s our spacesuit.So we can fall into zero gravity.
Floating. Falling. Hearing the song already written. We are the music.
If we sing, we sing our own song. The song we weren’t born to play, but that was born as this consciousness.
Everything is a cult. The only one without a corrupt leader is the one inside your own shelter.
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