“Do you see that?”
“See what?”
“That thing in the sky, the images, they’re floating in the sky. Like some sort of projection.”
“What? Let me see it.”
I walked over to the window and looked out above our building. An image, or perhaps some sort of video, played out in the sky, a movie projection in the vast blue screen above us. Where did it come from? What the hell was it? I looked around, trying to see if someone was controlling the video from below on the street. I wondered if some miscreant was using an advanced movie projection unit to play an *.mpeg file in front of all of Newark. Chris and I both looked down at the people below us, on Ferry Street. They were looking up at the sky, perplexed, confused, asking each other to confirm if we were all seeing the same thing at the same time. Cars stopped and people stepped out of them.
My colleague interrupted our silence.
“You know, like twenty years ago, they filmed War of the Worlds on this very street. Tom Cruise ran around here with Dakota Fanning, fleeing aliens.”
“What is he doing?” I asked.
“Tom Cruise?”
“No, no. The man in the video.”
“It looks like he’s going to take a shower.”
Suddenly, it became very clear to me who the man in the video was and what he was doing. I watched him remove his shirt, his underwear, revealing his penis, right there in the sky, a naked man disrobing before entering the shower. And his face, it was instantly recognizable. It was Xi Jinping, the President of the People’s Republic of China.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked
“Is he doing what I think he’s doing? Oh boy,” Chris said.
“He is, he is. Right up there in the sky. He’s doing exactly what you think he’s doing.”
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” a man screamed from outside of a black Honda.
Xi Jinping, in a gigantic video projected on the sky, had run his finger across his asshole and taken a long sniff, pausing while he held it under his nose, and then made a grotesque face. He took a second sniff and then shook his head, entering the shower. And that was it. That was the extent of the video before us, in the sky, outside in the street, like some sort of art project from an anarchist group or an anti-Communist party organization. What were they using? How were they projecting this and replaying it over and over and over again. I poked my head out of the window, moving left and right, trying to find the culprit, the source of the repulsive video. It was non-stop. The video was a looping reel that repeatedly played the scene in the sky. What kind of technology was this? Where was this amazing, horrid thing coming from?
“Of all the fucking things. Why Xi Jinping sniffing his asshole?” Chris said. He took a sip of his coffee cup and pointed to the sky with his index finger. “Do you think he dislikes the smell, or is he worried it’s like a medical issue or something?”
“He’s definitely doing this regularly.”
“Yea, no doubt about it.”
It didn’t take long before the full impact of this sky video became apparent to everyone. It hadn’t just been limited to Newark or New Jersey. The video was playing on loop everywhere in the world, even in China. It first began running above the diplomatic avenue in Liangmaqiao Road in Beijing, near the Solana Mall and Ladies’ Street Market. It then spread across the city, then played in Shanghai, Guangzhou, then all over the country, expanding into South Korea, North Korea, India, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. People in Johannesburg uploaded videos to social media of locals and tourists watching Xi Jinping sniff his finger. Parents told their children to stay away from windows, schools canceled classes for several days while world governments tried to figure out where the video was coming from, eventually switching back to pandemic-era virtual classes for three weeks. China was in complete silence. The government blocked all internet, media, and communications from entering or exiting the country. China expelled all diplomatic missions from Beijing and consulates in major cities. But what was able to leak out of the country, breaking through the great firewall of internet censorship, were images of the Chinese government attempting to completely block out the sky, erasing it from its citizens’ eyes, attempting to place giant shields over the never-ending video of their country’s leader taking his clothes off and smelling his butthole. But the sky is the fucking sky, no amount of human creativity can block out the one thing everyone looks at every day of their lives. It was useless. Chinese citizens watched their country’s leader publicly humiliated every second, every minute, of every day.
“God, I’m sick and tired of seeing that disgusting man doing that,” my mother said.
I had been living with my parents for several months, recovering from financial difficulties incurred because of a gambling addiction obtained during law school. My mother worked for a marketing agency and had a long commute into New York every morning. We ate breakfast in the kitchen. She made scrambled eggs, toast, and English bacon.
“I don’t think he’s doing it for the public to see. Somehow, someone, somewhere got ahold of the video and they’re playing it in the world sky.”
“It’s making me nauseous. I can’t drive to work. I’ve requested to work from home to avoid it.”
“I don’t mind it so much. The accidents it’s caused, though, I could do without the people staring at it all day long.”
“You don’t mind it?”
“I don’t know. I got kind of used to it. It’s been over two months at this moment.”
The Chinese blamed Washington for the video. They cut off diplomatic relations with the United States and recalled their ambassador. As an act of solidarity with his counterpart and an attempt at decreasing bilateral tensions, The President addressed the country on late night television to deny any involvement in the “video” and absolved the federal government of any responsibility. He spoke live from Washington on a Tuesday night, and I watched the broadcast with my father, who claimed that all of this, including the broadcast, was the work of an underground shadow agency determined to bring about international chaos and war. “It’s all part of a plan. You don’t see it because you’re soft, son. You’ve grown up like mashed potatoes, squishy, no form. You don’t like to accept that it’s all crashing down. I’m just here for the show, you know.” I nodded. “I know I’m soft dad. Let’s just watch the President talk to the country.” The world was tense, unsure of what the hell was happening, and nobody, even the people we always trusted to resolve our problems, had answers. We were all trying to figure out who was doing this and why it wouldn’t stop.
“…Whoever is playing this disgusting video in our nation’s skies will pay the price for the immoral and unconscionable decision to degrade not just the leader of a nation, but a human being. No human being should have their privacy invaded in such an intrusive, unimaginable way. This is not an American act of subterfuge, but rather the cowardly inclinations of a visual terrorist…”
“He’s so fucking in on it and he can barely hide it! Look at him smirking.”
“Yea, probably.”
When the President finished speaking, I opened the front door and looked up to the sky. I watched Xi take another long sniff. I had seen the video so many times. I almost felt inclined to watch it regularly. It started to create a sort of weird comfort that we were all in this together, like some sort of world ritual, like some sort of communal humiliation. According to underground press, Xi Jinping refused to come out of his house. He issued decrees in pre-recorded broadcasts and claimed it was a deep fake video made to discredit the economic and political rise of China. However, several weeks after the last video he released, the Minister for Foreign Affairs assumed a temporary role as President of the People’s Republic of China. Then one evening, at around midnight, the video stopped playing in the sky. It lasted a total of four months, two weeks, and three days.
Chris and I were working as environmental lawyers for a climate change organization that defended the rights of storm victims. We were some of the last remaining employees in the building that had decided to return to work on a regular basis. We liked our jobs and had a passionate desire to represent the interests of the people we were trying to protect. We had started coming back to the office again after the “video” happened, but things were not the same. As a result of national uncertainty, the government had begun to suspend certain civil liberties and reignited the early Bush wiretapping policies that came around after 9/11. One afternoon, Chris and I took a break in the morning to watch television in the company lunchroom. Pundits assessed what the U.S. government was most afraid of after the video stopped playing in the sky.
Chris and I listened closely to the talking heads.
“…If this video wasn’t the job of the United States government, then who did it, folks? What was the goal of this? Where did the technology come from and, certainly, the biggest threat here is, besides the complete humiliation of a dictator, what will they play next?”
“You know that’s exactly what folks are talking about back in Washington. If they’re downloading these videos off of private computers or using hacked webcams to watch us, then what will they play in the sky? I mean, it could be anyone, it could be you…”
“I highly doubt they’re targeting me Phil. I’ve got nothing interesting to share with 8 billion people…”
“He’s right, you know,” Chris said.
“Yea, definitely. I don’t think it’s an isolated event. This shit is going to happen again. I think that’s what’s got everyone on the edge.”
“It’s a question of when, really. No doubt about that.”
When became the keyword. Memes popped up on social media about what video would play next. People posted pictures of celebrities and world leaders with big white letters under their faces: W H E N. Groups of people made videos on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, asking, begging, whoever was responsible for the Xi Jinping finger sniffing video to publicly humiliate specific people. Small companies and organized groups popped up making merchandise, black cotton t-shirts with block white letters. They read: W H E N ? They sold out constantly. You couldn’t avoid wheners out in public. They were everywhere. People gathered outside in the street with the black shirts and watched the sky, holding hands, just looking at the blue nothingness.
It took two months until a new video arrived. It popped up in the late afternoon, when we were all packing up and ready to head out of the office. Chris and I walked back over to the window and stared at the sky in silence for several minutes.
“So, he’s snorting coke, right?”
“Yea, he looks young, like early twenties. I’m guessing this is at Occidental or Columbia.”
“They have the ability to go back and play scenes from the past. That’s certainly a twist. None of the pundits got that one right.”
“This is like early 80’s, which makes me think this isn’t a video.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, let’s say it’s a video of Obama snorting coke off a table, right? Which it very clearly is. Then it would be like grainy and VHS-esy, so it can’t be a video. Digital videos didn’t come into the scene until like late 90s, at the very earliest. So, this is not a video, dude. This is like a memory or some sort of vision.”
“Yea, that’s fucking terrifying.”
Up there, in the sky, it appeared before us once again. It was Barack Obama bending over a wooden table in what seemed like a college party or someplace full of twenty-year-old’s drinking and laughing out loud. And there he was, the future President of the United States, taking big snorts of white powder processed cocaine and bopping his head back to the music in the room. I remembered, almost two decades ago, when he first ran for executive office, that he had admitted to using cocaine briefly during his young adulthood. It hadn’t really affected his campaign much. He even went on to amplify the drug war, pouring more money and manpower into federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. But here he was, for all the world to see, an avid drug user enjoying the same powder that funded multiple wars in South America and paid for the private SUVs and high-end homes of drug lords in Medellin and Valle del Cauca.
“I think that’s New York,” Chris said.
“There’s a window in the sequence. I see what you mean, that looks like the Upper East Side.”
Barack Obama took a couple of days before he issued a statement. He has always been considered a calculating, articulate, and careful politician. Afterall, he’s the same President who drank the dirty Flint, Michigan water to prove a political point, and he opted to not disclose the interference of Russians in his successor’s 2016 election out of a supposed noble belief in the sanctity of American politics. About a week after the vision appeared in international skies, he spoke before a national audience, alongside a well-known journalist from CNN, discussing the vision and what it meant to him and his advisors.
“I think we are certainly coming up against what looks like, to me,” he held his hand on his chest, “as a form of bullying, an operation of vast national intelligence concerns that cloud our conscience, that create a fear of our own memories. This is psychological warfare, Jim. This is exactly what my administration fought against when we discussed the transfer of American technology to other nations. But, now, we see an inversion of our innovation, we see malevolent data and advanced machinery creating, stoking if you will, a national fear…”
He sat there talking for a couple of more minutes. While he spoke, I looked out of the window and saw him at the New York party, bending over, holding something to his right nostril and taking in a long line of blow. “I’m watching him sound like an educated, well-meaning guy, but he’s snorting cocaine up there like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. How am I supposed to take this shmuck seriously?” my father asked. And, despite usually playing into conspiracy theories and fevered dreams of lizard people dressed up in bad suits and red ties, he had a valid point. Anything that now came out of Barack Obama’s mouth sounded like a load of bullshit. I liked him, I really did, but I now saw the whole finger waving against legalizing marijuana and disappointment with men of color involved in organized crime as a bit of pedantic buffoonery. “That’s valid dad. He is up there in the sky doing a shitload of drugs.” “Son, do you know how much shit I got in the seventies, when I got arrested in Greenwich for selling a couple of grams to some white guys?” I nodded along, looking at my father in a way I hadn’t looked at him for a couple of years, since before the pandemic and the online rabbit holes he had fallen into so many times. “He got to be President! I got to write down my fucking arrests on job applications for the rest of my life.” “I’m sorry dad, I know that’s not fair.” To me, to most people, Barack seemed to be avoiding the message that we were all placing together, the puzzle we had all come to read and analyze, the intent of the vision in the sky that had replaced Xi Jinping sniffing his asshole, a figure that had suffered the same fate on the other side of the world. The person, entity, organization, or ethereal being putting these images up in the sky was not humiliating these people. It was making them human.
Around this time, when Barack was sniffing coke in the air every day on loop, I ran into an old friend from college. Her name was Julia. She had been a freshman when I was a senior at Rutgers, and she had gone on to study ethnic studies in California, finishing a doctorate degree and having now returned to New Jersey to teach at our old college in Newark. We ran into each other outside of a Walgreen’s on Broad Street. She had been exiting, and I had been entering. We spoke shortly, and she gave me her phone number. “Maybe we can meet, distract ourselves from Barack for a couple of hours, eh?” She laughed, looked up at Barry doing his coke lines, and then gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Hope to hear from you!”
We went out to dinner at a restaurant in Jersey City. We talked about the visions and when they started appearing in the sky. She told me that she returned to New Jersey to care for her grandmother because the streets in her old neighborhood, in Union City, had become a base for the growing wheners movement. They now numbered tens of thousands in New Jersey alone, hordes of people who gathered outside the visions and prayed to them, stood in silence as a collective unity, and watched Obama powder his nose for hours, for days, for weeks.
“My grandmother is frightened by the wheners. They give her the creeps. These people, they’re, well, they’re just, like, unhinged.”
“Yea, it’s getting out of control, isn’t it?”
She dipped some sushi into a saucer and placed a roll in her mouth. I watched her eat it and looked at her.
“Everyone who I assume has some sort of logic left in their head acts like it’s all going to go away, like this is just another temporary shitty thing we must deal with yet again,” she said.
“I learned many years ago, when I used to worry about my credit card debt and stupid shit like trips to Vegas and a thirty-year mortgage, that the world spins around like a big ‘ole ball of shit. But this is different. Don’t you see it?”
And she was right. As the wheners grew, they spread from town to town, country to country, continent to continent, waiting for the next apparition, the new vision that would show them the next part of the game playing out in the heavens. They made videos online, diatribes on social media that called for humiliation, fear, complete suppression of the powerful and the intellectual. I found several wheners in the street, marching in public parks, holding placards with violent, red words printed on white cardboards, the black t-shirts with their white letter emblems soaking up the street, pouring out into our civilization like a bacterium resistant to the most powerful of antibiotics. They had started to refer to those who called to dismantle and prosecute the person, people, or country responsible for the visions as The Satanhead. We were all The Satanhead. Without knowing it or asking to join the cadre of the elite, I had unknowingly become The Satanhead. Julia had become it too and so had Chris, all of us that questioned this thing that had torn holes open into our common society had all become dark figures in some underground cave, figures that wore the visage of intelligence as a badge of hatred, as a solar eclipse ready to destroy the average person, to bring them to their knees and force them to eat the dirt of philosophy and history. Suddenly, I became an oppressor.
After a full year of Obama’s cocaine frenzy, while most of us in the Western Hemisphere were sleeping or inside of our homes watching Netflix or Pornhub videos suited to our algorithmic preferences, a new vision appeared in the sky. The vision was difficult to interpret; it was not what we expected, like Vladimir Putin suffering from erectile disfunction or Kanye West crying in the corner of his apartment drinking out of a soggy milk carton. It was just some guy. A nobody, a face we’ve seen everywhere, every day, yet never before. No one knew or could identify the man in the video or the importance of his actions to the overall scheme of W H E N ?.
It went something like this: A middle-aged man, shirt tucked into a pair of dark blue trousers, opened the door to a refrigerator and took some chicken out of a KFC bucket, ate it quickly, and then returned the bucket of fried poultry into the refrigerator, closing the door and running out of the kitchen.
Julia, who I had now been seeing for several months, called me at three in the morning. I took the phone in my hand, its bright light smoldering in the dark, forcing my eyes open, giving me a dull ache in the middle of my forehead.
“I’ve seen it. I was trying to avoid it, but it’s here,” I said.
“Just what the fuck?”
“It’s just a guy eating some chicken out of the fridge.”
“It’s gotta mean something. He’s not famous, he looks like a regular guy. He’s just up there, in the sky, eating chicken. He’s like a tubby, normal dude.”
“Looks like he’s trying to hide what he’s doing though. Did you see his face?” I asked.
“Mmmhmm. I saw that. It looks like he’s doing that when he’s not supposed to.”
“Where is this shit headed?” I asked.
Social media went wild searching for this man and trying to identify him, going as far as running facial recognition software to scan the face in the sky and locate its rightful owner. The wheners spent hours standing outside in the street, going over the images, hosting watch parties, leaving their cars in the middle of retail store parking lots and large, open fields to watch the unknown man eat the chicken out of the fridge. Going When is what they called it. People asked their friends if they’d like to go when or they would tell their friends, who asked them to go to the movies or grab a beer at a pub, that they were unavailable because they were going when. It became difficult to enjoy life, and instead we lived on the edge kind of wondering where the hell this trainwreck was headed. It felt useless to go to work, to plan weddings, to listen to a Rick Ross song on full volume at the gym. Every time we stepped outside, he was there, eating the chicken, running away, leaving his greasy handprints on the refrigerator door handle. Life became like a thing not here but also still present, a ghost of what we were and where we used to do things like smile, fuck, and take strolls down crowded streets. It just became a mass of tension like some highly anticipated 80’s Japanese cartoon directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, but ultimately abandoned for no specific reason, just a lack of interest by everyone involved, a type of general apathy and waste that created a sense of loss for something great that had never been ours to begin with.
One day at the office, as we drank coffee from our favorite mugs, I heard Chris scream from his cubicle. He waved his hand at me, gesturing violently, calling me to his computer.
“It says they identified the man,” he said.
“What? Who is he?”
I ran over to his desk and started looking at his computer screen. We read over the article on CNN and learned that the man’s name was Gary Schell, an accountant from Ontario, Canada who was married with two children and had gone into hiding after the vision appeared. The article quoted an associate of Gary. “The vision, it’s Gary eating his wife’s lunch. That chicken in the bucket was his wife’s lunch, but he ate it and then he denied it. He denied it for a couple of days until the vision appeared. His wife was livid!” A reporter asked the man if he had recently seen Gary. “What? That motherfucker’s gone. Gary’s gone, brother.”
How could it be? Why would the visions choose an ordinary man from the middle of nowhere to prove his wife right, to help her win an argument and prove that Gary had indeed eaten her fried chicken lunch? The visions were now choosing anyone, and we were all now vulnerable, even a man like Gary, a pot-bellied average Canadian with two kids, a dog, and an angry, lunchless wife. He was now an enemy of the world, a leader in The Satanhead. A figure to be identified, found, and executed point blank, no questions asked. The wheners reacted the only way wheners would: they interpreted this new revelation as a call to defile their fellow citizens, to acknowledge that Gary, and everyone he represented—the wearers of chinos, golf shirts, and new balance sneakers—were also the enemy. Wheners were believers in the visions being prophecies meant to take down powerful men and women, humiliating them and bringing them down to our levels. But if they had to really come to terms with powerful people being in charge of everything, then they, according to their instantly uploaded YouTube videos and TikTok content promoting their destruam quod destruit te philosophies, would also be complicit in allowing the powerful to own them, to, by sheer reality of their direct relationships, rightfully have subjected them into serfdom, into banal acceptance of their luxury and hubris. To accept this would be to accept the powerful’s power as a thing we had all given them without asking for anything in return. But to accept that Gary and Gary’s ilk had been as guilty, if not more, in betraying the downtrodden and handing them over to the vicious blood mouth of The Satanhead, then they could finally redirect their anger at the ultimate defendant: their neighbors. It was awful that poor Gary was up there, bucket in hand, greasy lips covered in chicken skin bits, hiding his criminal activity, and worse, lying to his poor, hungry wife, but, far more terrifying, was what he became to the wheners, the idol flesh of the old man: the core of The Satanhead itself, a serf who serfs his brother, who sells his kindred to those who claim ownership over humanity.
Now, it became evident to me and those like me, perhaps like you, that the end of the rope was here. And with it, a black void of violence followed.