9. LUZ Y FER
LUZ Y FER
Leopoldo Go?t
Three years ago, I went to the Cine Gear Expo at the Javits Center.
Yes, that one. I had been right there, shell-shocked and bloodied, walking like a zombie in the aftermath as I drowned in the acrid stench of burning meat.
One hundred and sixteen dead, many more injured, with no suspects.
Some called it an “attack” despite nobody, not even the usual terror groups eager to increase themselves by slapping their brand on any mass casualty, claiming responsibility.
From the pulpits, many proclaimed divine fury: God’s hammer swung down on those merchants of celluloid dreams and their disciples of light and shadow.
When darkness descends, the collective mob clutches at their own certainties—heaven’s judgment or terror’s hand—to illuminate their own personal void.
I had been there to visit the booth of a camera manufacturer I’d found myself brand loyal to over my years of documentary filmmaking.
They’d recently come out with a new low-light camera, which I’d thought would be perfect for a film I was working on.
The massive convention hall was packed to the gills, and I was eager to simply grab the camera and get out.
Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds had begun to feel suffocating in years since the pandemic.
With the camera under my arm, I made toward the exit and passed a coffee stand that had set up in the venue.
As I walked by, I couldn’t help but turn my head when I caught a whiff of a woman’s perfume, a subtle musky caramel mixed with geraniums that had somehow lanced through the crowd, and further, I could not help but notice the woman it emanated from, who was waiting for a coffee.
Long, wavy black hair tumbled over her shoulders and fell to the middle of her back against an oversized sweater covering a pale-yellow dress.
I found myself rapt, watching as she turned from the counter to reveal her striking face, a dimple in her left cheek as she smiled at the vendor.
Around her neck hung a weighty-looking white pendant with a strange symbol of two inverted triangles.
My pocket vibrated, a call from one of my producers, Quin. I’d been dodging him following a previous heated exchange, but his support was too vital to send him to voicemail again. I answered. The signal inside was terrible and the call immediately dropped, so I hurried toward the exit.
As I neared the doors, the call finally connected.
“Quin? You hear me? Signal is shit in here—hang on” were the only words I got out before all sound ceased.
I felt my mouth moving, but the space was blanketed in an all-encompassing silence.
An anticipatory held breath followed by the loudest noise I’d ever heard as everyone was hurled to the floor and I was plunged into darkness.
I was woken by the stench of smoldering flesh.
Ears ringing, disoriented, vision blurry, and with a pulsing headache, I grabbed my shattered phone off the floor—it’s bizarre how scrambled your priorities are in a moment like that—as I climbed to my feet.
The dull throb in my ears began to subside as the ringing was slowly replaced by the screams echoing from beyond the thick haze of dust and smoke.
My wits still blown elsewhere by the blast, I didn’t remember where I was, what I was doing there.
The world had been swallowed by a cloud of soot, a gray void from which all I heard were those desperate howls.
Straining my eyes as the dust settled, I saw a cluster of indeterminate limbs, not so much intertwined as they were fused with blackened skin, charred, oozing and sticking together.
The flesh blistered and bubbled, continuing to cook from the heat still bursting from within.
I turned to a nearby source of screaming to my left; a man lay on the ground clutching a severed arm, which now rested alongside the fallen piece of glass that had crudely amputated it.
I patted myself down, still numb, checking that my limbs were still attached.
I took a step forward, feeling my ankle crunch under my weight and sending me back to the ground.
Then, through the smell of atomized detritus and blood and charred human meat, I smelled it again: musk, caramel, and geraniums. She emerged from the toxic cloud, the woman from the coffee stand.
Except her long hair was cropped to a flapper bob and she was dressed in formal black attire.
She couldn’t have changed her clothes since I’d first seen her, let alone her hair.
For a moment I thought she could have been burnt, her hair singed and clothes blackened by soot and dust. But as she ran past, she didn’t limp.
In fact, she was completely unscathed, almost composed, and the pendant around her neck was not pearl white, but black.
That brief glimpse through the haze was all I got before she slipped through the doors and was gone.
The catastrophe, accident, attack, whatever the hell people called it, got worldwide attention.
With no apparent explanation, no satisfactory evidence, people were left to cobble together deranged theories.
At first, I didn’t talk about it. Only when people asked, and only after a few shots of mezcal burning my gut.
When I started telling friends about the girl, many of them suggested it was a hallucination brought on by shock or head trauma.
I eventually got an MRI to shut them up.
Less skeptical friends would humor me, ask what I thought the girl I saw had to do with what happened.
Eventually I was telling anybody who listened, the image of those two women still burning in my mind, until my only audience was the end of a bottle.
I tried to find some use for this experience in a film about the disaster, or at least in some project, but not just for professional reasons: if I could disentangle the truth about that day, I’d be done with it and it would be done with me.
Every element was seared in my mind. Memories kept me up at night. I couldn’t escape. The stench. The screams. The woman.
So that’s where the drinking really came in.
I took to researching other inexplicable disasters in my sleepless nights, a bottle of mezcal on my desk as I sought them out—earthquakes in cities without fault lines, wildfires during a rainy season, tsunamis with no trigger—until the booze could overpower the insomnia and I’d wake from a dreamless night in my chair.
My assistant, Tanita, bless her, had been calling me nonstop in those days. Even after producers and other collaborators had long since given up on reaching me as I receded further into myself, Tanita was adamant about pulling me back into the light of day.
But I was down the rabbit hole as they say, finding myself scrolling forums and blogs, home to those who seemed similarly fixated on the inexplicable.
Most of them were UFO freaks, anti-government paranoiacs, and New World Order antisemites.
Lonely souls rapt by the glow of their screens, frantically searching for a peek behind the curtain hiding whatever machine they imagined worked in the dark to make them miserable.
Invariably, though, I’d find threads and missives from those who had self-deputized as detectives on the cases of supernatural disasters.
It was those breadcrumbs that kept me sitting in my studio, hunched in the dark over the blue glow of my screen as I desperately scrambled for anything that might lead toward an answer of what happened that day.
More threads to chase, more rabbit holes to go down.
Night after night this became my ritual.
Eventually Tanita stopped leaving voicemails, then she stopped calling altogether.
It didn’t matter, though, as I’d finally stumbled upon what I was looking for.
Scrolling an obscure message board, I froze as I saw a thread titled “The Twins.” In the grainy thumbnail, attached was a woman with long, wavy black hair and a white pendant around her neck.
A poster dubbed the Twinvestigator by other board members explained in his post that he’d pulled it from a video shot by a couple vacationing in Indonesia when the tsunami had hit.
I looked through the rest of the thread.
More disasters, more grainy images. Twinvestigator had amassed a veritable archive of news clips and screengrabs of local and international broadcasts around these types of disasters and the two women who seemed to portend them.
Hardly anyone else on the board seemed to find credence in the evidence collected by Twinvesigator; almost all the posts in his thread not authored by him- or herself dismissed them as just another “schizo,” seeing them as nothing but a novelty.
But it was the only thread I had to pull on in hopes of answering my questions about what had happened that day at the Javits Center, what I’d seen.
I dove in, opening tab after tab of the links and photos posted by Twinvestigator. The deeper I went down the thread, the more of Twinvestigator’s posts began to stray from simple archives of evidence into paranoia.
12.14.2021 (04:46) – TWNVSTGTR: Someone has been going through my garbage. I heard them in my yard last night. Time to invest in some cameras.
04.02.2022 (12:39) – TWNVSTGTR: I KNOW you’re in here reading this. Word of advice: don’t tail someone in the same car for two weeks straight. I SEE YOU.
05.10.2022 (03:50) – TWNVSTGTR: HAH! FUCK YOU! Time to see where this little bastard is transmitting to.
Attached was a flash photo of a mangled internet router in an otherwise dark room. In the foreground a hand with unkempt nails clutching a nondescript electronic component.