When Too Many People Showed Up and Nobody Knew What…
When Too Many People Showed Up and Nobody Knew What to Do
Lead-in:
Found this scattered across six different pages at the intersection. Different handwriting on each page. Some parts contradict others. Nobody agrees on what actually happened that day or if it was even the same day. But everyone who was there keeps trying to write it down, like they're afraid if they don't, it never happened.
---
Morning after Yuki's whatever-that-was. Crisis? Breakthrough? Tuesday?
Desta's humming in her rotting costume. The Goon Ox wobbling around—or someone pretending to be it, I still can't tell. Karim counting to six minutes seventeen seconds now. The gardener talking to weeds.
Normal morning at the fucked-up intersection.
Then Lulu showed up.
---
Lulu Santos. Had this cart full of—I don't know what. Looked like someone robbed a music store and a hospital at the same time. Said she was recording sounds below human hearing.
"Like whale songs?" someone asked.
"Like—I don't know. Like furniture screaming but quiet. Like the sound your bones make when you're scared but you can't hear it, machines can."
She set up near the Goon Ox and just stood there with her eyes closed for like twenty minutes. Crying. But not sad crying. Recognition crying.
"You hear them," she said to the Ox.
The Ox wobbled. Or just kept being an Ox. Hard to say.
---
Then this woman Edra comes with buckets of dirt. No, paint. Paint made from dirt from torn-down buildings.
She walks straight to Karim. "I heard about the checkpoint."
"Everyone heard."
"I want the ash."
What the fuck? Who asks for someone's trauma ash? But Karim reaches in his pocket, pulls out a baggie of gray dust. Hands it over like it's normal.
"Paint what they really are," he says.
She starts mixing the ash into her paint right there on the sidewalk. The smell is—burnt metal and fear and something else. Freedom maybe. Or its absence.
---
By noon there's like seven more people. Or five. Or ten. I lost count.
Some librarian with banned books making people step through fake barriers to read them. "Libraries are check—they're all checkpoints. All of them." People think she's crazy. Or right. Both probably.
Guy in a wheelchair covered in sensors measuring—what? "Environmental racism," he says. His machines keep beeping when they point at the Goon Ox.
More people kept showing up. Fuck if I remember their names. Doctor without a license. Old woman teaching illegal songs. Someone cooking on a camping stove. Giant puppets? How did giant puppets even get here?
---
It's getting crowded. Too crowded. The intersection isn't big enough.
Desta stops humming. Looks worried. This is her spot. These are her people. Now there's all these strangers with equipment and theories and—
But then the Goon Ox does something. Wobbles in a circle around everyone. Like it's drawing a boundary. Or erasing one. Its orange hair catches the light and suddenly everyone shuts up.
In the silence, you can hear it. Them. The pressure ghosts.
Or traffic. Or everyone's breathing syncing up. Or nothing.
---
Some theater person starts making everyone who walks by part of her show without asking. People get pissed. She doesn't care.
"You're already in the show," she says. "The show is called 'Walking Past Suffering.' You've been in it your whole life."
Security guard from the bank tries to move her along. She makes him part of the show too. He doesn't know what to do. Calls for backup. Backup becomes part of the show.
It's brilliant. Or terrible. Or both.
---
Someone's trying to write down names but keeps crossing them out. I see the list:
- Lulu Santos (sound)
- Edra something (paint)
- Terry? Theresa? (books)
- Guy with sensors
- More people
- Too many people
- Can't keep track
By dark there's supposedly twenty-four people. Someone counted. Someone else got twenty-two. I got nineteen but I might have counted the Goon Ox twice.
---
They're trying to organize. It's not working.
"We need—someone should coordinate—who's in charge?"
"Nobody. That's the point."
"But we need—there should be—what about permits?"
The ex-librarian laughs. Bitter sound.
Nobody can agree on anything except that something's happening. But what?
---
The photographer—Anna? Anastasia?—is taking pictures that she's intentionally fucking up. Shooting through dirty plastic. Printing on paper that's already deteriorating.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because clear pictures lie. Everything's falling apart. The photos should fall apart too."
She takes my picture through a piece of melted checkpoint wire Karim gave her. In the photo I look like a ghost. Or maybe I am a ghost. Hard to tell anymore.
---
Someone shows up with an underground newsletter. Interviews the Goon Ox. It doesn't talk but she writes down answers anyway.
"What did it say?" someone asks.
"That we're doing this wrong. That organizing kills what we're trying to create. That we should just wobble and see what happens."
"The Ox said all that?"
"No. I made it up. But it feels true."
---
Youngest person there, maybe twenty, asks: "What are we actually doing?"
Nobody has an answer. Or everyone has different answers:
- Building community
- Documenting pressure ghosts
- Resisting displacement
- Creating alternative perception school
- Nothing
- Everything
- Wobbling
The Goon Ox's orange hair glows under the streetlight like it's agreeing with all of these. Or none. Or it's just orange hair catching light.
---
They're trying to make it official. Make it something. But every time someone suggests structure, the Goon Ox wobbles away. Like it's allergic to organization.
Desta starts humming again. Different frequency. Sounds like frustration.
These aren't her people anymore. It's become something else. Something bigger but maybe less real. More people but less connection. Everyone wanting to help but help becoming its own kind of occupation.
---
Karim leaves first. "Too many people," he says. "Too much organizing. It's becoming what we were escaping."
The gardener follows. "Plants don't like crowds."
Yuki's in the corner drawing sound-maps but they're all overlapping now, too many frequencies canceling each other out.
---
By midnight half are gone. The remaining half are arguing about what went wrong.
"We need better—no, someone should—fuck, I don't know."
"Money would help."
"Money ruins—it always ruins—"
"But how do we—"
The Goon Ox lies down in the middle of the intersection. Just lies there. Orange hair spread out like a warning.
Everyone stops arguing. Looks at this creature (or person or hallucination) just taking up space, refusing to move, refusing to organize, refusing to be anything other than what it is.
---
That's when I get it. Or think I do.
It's not about building something. It's about wobbling near each other. Not community with capital C. Just people wobbling in proximity.
But try explaining that to twenty-four people with equipment and agendas and good intentions.
---
Next morning. Eight people show up. Different eight from yesterday mostly.
Desta's humming. The Ox wobbles. Someone new asks what's happening.
"I don't know," Desta writes on cardboard. "But come back tomorrow."
They do. Or don't. Different people each day. Same wobbling. Same uncertainty. Same intersection that shouldn't exist hosting people who officially don't count making sounds nobody measures.
The community that formed fell apart in one day. But something else persists. Not organized. Not named. Just there.
Like pressure ghosts. Like the Goon Ox's orange hair. Like Desta's humming.
There until it's not. Real until it isn't. Mattering until it doesn't.
But today it's there. Today people show up. Today the wobbling continues.
---
Coda:
Communities form and fall apart while you're arguing about whether they exist. The Goon Ox doesn't care. It just wobbles. Maybe that's the point. Maybe there is no point. Maybe asking for a point is the problem.
