[Part 1]
It was dark. I had lost track of the time, but the sun was fully down. Was it midnight? Past midnight? I started walking down the long gravel driveway. The woman in the red dress hadn’t told me where the jazzy mixer was, but I somehow knew that I needed to walk there. I walked to the end of the driveway, and down the forest road for a long time. Mom’s road eventually comes out onto route 12. But I never crossed 12. None of the familiar landmarks were present. Just an empty road through the fir and cedar.
Finally I saw lights ahead. It was a house - a ranch with a shallow slanted roof. Light poured out of every window, but I didn’t see anyone inside.
I rang the bell. Silence. I rang it again. I heard the telltale high-heeled clacking of the woman in red marching towards the door. She answered, still wearing that knockout red dress. Dressed to the nines! What a dame!
“There you are! And with a bordeaux. Come, bring it to the kitchen. I need your help.”
I followed her robotically. My mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I was the only human guest at her party. The rest of the “guests” were typewriters. Two red IBM Selectric typewriters sat on the sofa. Another one occupied an easy-chair by the mantle. The couch faced an enormous television set - not a flat screen, but a huge tube-TV mounted in a wood cabinet. A fourth red Selectric sat on the TV cabinet.
The TV and the furniture was straight out of the 1960s. I followed her through the living room and into the kitchen. The kitchen was also a retro-throwback to a time when tupperware was new and exciting. Avocado-green cabinets and a black-and-white tile floor gleamed as if they were installed yesterday. A chrome microwave oven bearing the name Radarange sat on the counter next to the frigidaire-brand refrigerator.
The woman - I still only knew her as the inventor of the typeface Primal Grotesque - put the bottle of wine on the counter. “I’m afraid I’m falling down on the job as a hostess. I haven’t even made the salad yet.” She produced a bright red plastic bowl from one of the cabinets. “Would you be so kind as to grab some paper from the refrigerator?”
I opened the fridge. The refrigerator was full, but not of food. Instead, reams of typing paper were stacked on the shelves. The vegetable drawers were full of paper. Stacks of envelopes filled the racks on the door. “Just fifty sheets or so,” she said.
I pulled a half-inch chunk of blank typing paper from the top shelf of the fridge. I put it on the counter and watched her rummage through a drawer of utensils. She produced a pair of red-handled scissors and handed them to me. “Cut those sheets into small strips, and put them in the bowl.”
I picked five sheets from the stack I had pulled from the fridge and cut a strip about an inch wide.
“Oh dear, skinnier than that. What do you think this is?”
I had no idea what “this” was, or what she thought I thought it was, but I did what she said and cut the remaining strips about half as wide and placed the strips in the bowl. Meanwhile, she opened the bordeaux with a pop and poured two glasses.
“Wonderfully done,” she said and handed me one of the glasses of wine. “I believe you enjoy the occasional glass, yes? Now let’s sample that salad.”
She daintily pulled one of the strips of paper from the bowl and ate it like it was spaghetti.
“Well, it’s not my best, but it’ll have to do.” She handed me one of the glasses of wine. “Come with me.”
She led me into the dining room. A long table had been set with an elaborate table setting. Chargers, plates, water and wine goblets, and multiple spoons, forks, and knives had been carefully arranged at each seat, except for three. The seat at the head of the table, and the seats on either side of it had a red Selectrics where the place setting should have been. Two of the typewriters were loaded with paper that had already been typed onto.
I bent over the typewriter that was seated at the head of the table and read what was on its page.
Woe is you, a failed zero of a man.
Don’t quit this house. Don’t exit or venture out.
Just go die you bad prick.
The typeface was identical to the print that mom’s typewriter produced: Primal Grotesque. I turned to the woman in red. “That’s right,” she said. “It’s the first little message I sent you. Go ahead, read what our other guest typed out.”
I looked at the paper loaded into the typewriter to the right.
Steve, I don’t think you’re an asshole. I think you’re swell. I’m hosting a jazzy mixer tonight. If that piques your interest, then swing by. You can pick up the Selectric. And maybe have a little fun, for once.
“That’s what you said to me!”
‘Yes. Read it again. Notice anything interesting about my wording?”
I looked back at the typewriter. The written words hit me differently than when she spoke them. I counted the letters. It was a pangram. She had spoken a pangram to me.
She leaned over the table and pulled the silver lid off a platter in the center of the table, revealing a ream of typing paper instead of food. She pulled a sheet from the top of the stack and began to feed it into the third typewriter.
“You haven’t spoken to another person in 26 days.” She gave the roller a few more careful turns to line it up at the right vertical position.”
“And in those 26 days, Steven, no other person has even thought about you. You’re isolated from humanity.”
The Selectric started typing on its own. The woman in red continued. “You’ve been isolated physically. Mentally. Spiritually. Cosmically.”
“Well, I’ve talked to you.”
“I’m not human anymore, Steven. I was. But when IBM canceled their contract for my typeface, I was ruined - just like you are right now. I retreated to my house and refused to leave. And you know what? Nobody cared. Nobody cared that I holed-up in here and never left.”
“That’s how it found me. People with connections to the rest of the world? They’re of no interest to it. It’s the lonely ones. The isolated. That’s who it feeds on.”
The typewriter kept typing on its own. The letters striking the page sounded like her shoes clacking on the floor. “What feeds on us?”
She ignored my question. “It found me. And killed me. And now it haunts the one thing of lasting importance that I left in the universe. My typeface: Primal Grotesque.”
“You were possessed by some kind of demon, and now your font is haunted?”
“Yes. And now it’s your turn.” She pointed at the text that the possessed typewriter put on the page. “See?”
Fantastic! It sounds like it will be quite an amazing time. I’ll just bring a bordeaux? And my very charming personality?
I counted the letters. It was a pangram. I had spoken a pangram.
She smiled. Then she ripped the paper out of the typewriter, and ripped me out of the universe.
* * *
Everything is white.
My body didn’t exist. There was no sound. Space was distorted and compressed into two dimensions, and was filled with nothing. I was in an eternity of white emptiness.
My bodiless mind formed the words “Everything is white,” and those words appeared in front of me. The letters appeared one-by-one, in sequence, like something was typing them out into the fabric of whatever alternate dimension I was thrust into. The typeface: Primal Grotesque.
Where am I? Someone help me!
I had no mouth and, at first, the words echoed only in my imagination. But a moment after I thought the words, the previous words vanished and the new thought - Where am I? Someone help me! - Was hammered into the firmament of the infinite white reality. Another line of perfectly crisp letters.
I screamed for help again and again. The word Help silently repeated itself in the endless white space.
I stopped screaming - or, more accurately, I stopped imagining screaming. But the terror didn’t go away. It only intensified. I saw my panicked thoughts scroll into space in front of me:
…This nothingness is forever. Oh God help me. Let me out. Primal grotesque. Why is this happening? Primal grotesque, please don’t do this to me. I can’t do this. I’m sorry for whatever I did. Please let me out of here. I’m sorry I said the pangram…
All those words generated by my confused, terrified thinking silently appeared in front of me. Except one.
Pangram?
Nothing. I mentally spoke it again: Pangram.
“Pangrams have a special power here”. The thought was born in my mind in the form of words. “have a special power here.” spilled onto the white firmament.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. I thought each word carefully, pretending I was pronouncing them with my non-existent mouth and vocal cords. This time, no words appeared in space in front of me. Instead, a thin black line appeared. It looked like a faint underline on the cosmic blank page I had been thrust into. I imagined reaching towards the line with my nonexistent hands. For an instant I felt something. A small crack or tear in space. Then the thin line vanished.
Although I didn’t fully understand what was happening, I latched onto the idea that pangrams seemed to negatively affect whatever evil force had placed me into this blank-page universe. I tried to come up with another pangram. A new one.
Words swam in front of me as I imagined different combinations of words. How long did I struggle, trying to come up with a new pangram? Days? Years?
I can’t do this. I’m stuck here forever. No, I have to. I have to think my way out of here.
My lamentations floated in huge letters in front of me. Try closing your eyes and coming up with a pangram. It’s incredibly difficult. Imagine doing that while your mind is held hostage outside of space and time.
Finally, I thought I had one. I carefully imagined each word:
You can’t kill me. I’ll just quit this crazy game and exit this very bad place
The words appeared in front of me. It wasn’t a pangram. I counted the letters again. It was missing an ‘f’. And an ‘o’. I tried a slightly different phrase, thinking about each word in sequence:
You will fail to kill me. I’ll just quit this crazy game and exit this very bad place
This time, instead of words appearing in space, a thick black line cut the white eternity in half.
I reached for the line with nonexistent hands. I felt something. A thin gap. I imagined thrusting my fingers through the gap and I felt them squeeze through a narrow space. It hurt, like my fingers were being crushed as I pushed them through the black crack.
I imagined pushing my wrist and forearm through the gap, and was rewarded with crushing pain up to my elbow. I kept going. Bicep. Shoulder. I pushed my other arm through, feeling the same crushing pain. My head was next.
I used my imaginary muscles to push my skull through the gap. The dark line grew, as if I was getting closer to it. I felt gentle pressure on my temples. An instant later, the gentle pressure ramped up to crushing pain. It felt like my head was in a vice. Then I heard something - the first sound I had heard since the woman in red tore me out of the universe.
The sound started as a vibration through my skull. At first I thought the rapid clacks were the sound of my skull cracking. But the clacks continued in a perfect mechanical rhythm. I screamed and I heard the sound of my scream.
I made a final thrust with my head and suddenly I was on the other side. Well, my head and arms were through. I was in a dim space. I couldn’t look around - my head was still held clamped in whatever narrow gap I was pushing myself through. But from my fixed perspective I saw that I was in an old, derelict house. My neck was still trapped on the other side of the crack so I couldn’t look down to see what my body was squeezing through.
The next thrust would push my neck through the narrow gap. I winced and willed myself to move through. The pressure in my neck ramped up to an unbearable crushing. I let out a strangled gasp and squirmed forward. The pressure moved downwards to my collar bones
I took in a dozen deep breaths. With my neck through the black gap, I could look around to see where I was and what I was trying to move through.
I was on a filthy, dusty table in a dark room. I mean, my upper torso was on a table. The rest of me was stuck on the other side of the crack.
Two dusty typewriters - IBM Selectrics, of course - sat on the table next to me. Place-settings, dark and grimy with age, were organized around the rest of the edge of the table.
I looked down, expecting to see my body squeezing through a narrow hole in the table. Instead, I saw that my chest had narrowed to a distorted, paper-thin version of itself and was rolled into the rollers of a red Selectric.
“Later,” I thought. “I’ll worry about how this is possible later. Right now I just have to get myself through this typewriter roll.”
I struggled and wriggled. I pushed against the table. After struggling to the point of breathlessness, I had only advanced another millimeter or two. Something was holding me back.
Clack
The typewriter roller turned on its own, pulling me back into the universe of endless white.
Clack. Clack.
I was pulled another two text-lines back into the roller.
I grabbed the typewriter’s paper advance knob and struggled to turn it the other way. Maybe I could roll myself out of the roller like a sheet of paper.
Clack
I moved back out by one line.
Clack. Clack. Clack. It pulled me back in. I gripped the roller knob hard, but it still slipped through my grip.
Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.
The roller turned on its own, with unstoppable torque, and I slipped another four lines back into the machine. I was now rolled up to my neck, and I again felt my larynx start to crush as I was pulled back into the machine.
I flailed my right arm, trying to find a grip on anything that could hold me in this universe. Anything that could keep me from passing back through the roller, into the world of everything-is-white. I knocked a dusty place setting onto the floor, and smacked the back of my hand into the table.
I eventually hit the keys of the Selectric that was sucking me back into the universe of Primal Grotesque. I inadvertently pressed the Return key, and the roller momentarily reversed its movement, moving me upwards and out of the typewriter like I was a piece of paper. I jabbed at the Return key again like I was pressing the “Fire” button on a game controller. Line-by-line, I moved out of the red Selectric, spilling face-first onto the dirty table.
Each time I hit the Return key, I moved out of the typewriter by a quarter of an inch. Maybe less. This meant that every quarter-inch of my body experienced crushing pain that came from moving through the paper roller. By the time I reached my waist, enough of my torso had emerged to let me twist downwards and get a good view of what was happening.
My body was a normal three-dimensional human body from my head until about five inches before the typewriter roller. Below that, logic and proportion fell away. My waist flattened into a paper-thin image of my waist. The part of my body passing through the typewriter roller was like a flat-stanley version of myself.
Even though the part of my body passing through the rollers was basically two-dimensional, I still felt crushing pain when I was rolled through. The pain in my gut as my belly-button emerged from the typewriter felt like a powerful gut-punch. The pressure in the bones of my pelvis was so intense, I thought they might crack. I hammered on the Return key to move myself through these horrible sensations. I stopped for a moment when I realized what part of me was about to pass through the rollers.
Clack. Clack - The typewriter rollers moved backwards on their own, dragging me a half-inch back into the typewriter. There was no time to think. I resumed my frantic pounding on the Return key. My pelvic bones moved through the rollers, and expanded from the 2-D projection into their normal 3-D size. Next came … the part of a man that’s immediately below the pelvis.
I screamed and screamed. My vision went dark. I threw up onto the filthy old table but eventually moved through, a fraction of an inch at a time. I don’t even remember moving my legs through the rollers. My next conscious thought came when I was lying on the grimy table in a dim, rotting room.
The room smelled of mold. I was sprawled onto the dining room table in a house that appeared to have been abandoned for decades. Most of the drywall had fallen off the walls and lay in mushy heaps at the base of walls. The table I had spilled onto looked to have once been a fancy piece of furniture but was now a water-stained ruin covered with green mold. Plates and flatware were arranged neatly around the table. Three typewriters - the one I somehow came out of and two others - sat at the head of the table where the place settings should have been.
The room was familiar. I sat up and carefully slid off the table onto the rotting dining-room carpet. Moldy, moss-covered furniture was arranged neatly in the living room. Dusty and rusting Selectric typewriters sat on the chairs and couch. One typewriter sat on an old-fashioned TV cabinet.
I was in the same house as the red-dress woman’s party. But where I had earlier seen - or hallucinated - a bright, clean house hosting the bizarre “jazzy-mixer” with typewriters as guests. I now saw the house as it truly existed. The structure was long abandoned and decaying. It was still populated with typewriters, but now it was a fully dead place, the ghost or spirit or demon or whatever the woman in red was didn’t follow me out of the typewriter.
I carefully climbed off the table. My legs were sore from my crushing escape from Primal Grotesque’s typewriter world. I quickly looked around the house - it was exactly the same as I experienced earlier, but with decades of decay. The red salad bowl of paper sat on the kitchen counter - the paper “salad” now decayed into a small puddle of gray sludge at the bottom of the bowl. An empty bottle of wine sat on the counter. The label had decayed to the point of illegibility, but I recognized the shape of the bottle - it was the bordeaux I brought.
Her corpse lay on the kitchen floor, next to the sink. Her skin had long-ago rotted away. But the high-heeled shoes on her skeletal feet, and the black plastic buttons from her otherwise fully decomposed dress told me it was her.
My disgust at being inside this moldy, rotting house with the corpse overcame my curiosity. The front door was stuck shut from corrosion and grime. I forced my way out and stumbled onto the front steps. A fine drizzle lazily fell from a gray sky. The house was hidden from the road by a yard full of overgrown bushes. I pushed my way through the mini-wilderness in front of the house and found the road.
The End?
Not entirely. I wandered down the road in the rain until I found a sign that told me I was on state road 44. Which state? Connecticut? Somehow, in the dazed, semi-conscious state I was in when I walked from mom’s house to the jazzy mixer, I traveled from rural Washington state to Connecticut.
I managed to hitchhike back across the country, all the way from Connecticut to mom’s house in Packwood. I told the story of Primal Grotesque to every kind driver that picked me up. Most drivers humored me with some form of “dude, that’s crazy” when I finished my story. Others asked if there was some facility I’d like them to drop me at. By the time I crossed from Ohio to Indiana, I had nearly convinced myself that my experience with the woman in red and her jazzy mixer was some kind of hallucination. Or psychosis. I was sure that I had a break from reality which lasted long enough for me to somehow cross from the west to the east coast..
A trucker I was riding with stopped at a rest area off I-90 in Minnesota. After I used the toilet and washed my hands, I was annoyed to discover that the restroom was out of paper towels and the air dryers didn’t work. I wiped my wet hands on my pants and felt something in my pocket. I reached in and pulled out a delicate pair of black silk gloves. They were wrinkled from being crammed in my pants for a few days, but were otherwise brand new.
I shoved the gloves back in my pocket. A thought popped into my mind, uninvited. I liked the thought, though, so I kept it in my head - mentally repeating it over and over as I hitched back home.
Knockout dress! What a dame! Primal Grotesque’s jazzy mixer was real - the gloves prove it. I want to know who she was because I want to find her again.