THE

ENTRAINMENT
by Anna Moreno
*Originally appeared in the booklet accompanying the LP edition The Drowned
Giant.

I.
We had acquired an apartment off-plan in the area when I got my first stable job in
one of those offices with a world map of countries that no longer exist, a miniature
statue in memory of ruinous buildings turned paperweight, and an empty umbrella
stand that bore relentless evidence of a time in which water falling from the sky was
a nuisance and not a guarantee of survival.

Back then, on the omnipresent screens of the highways surrounding the area, it was
common to infantilize the potential client with messages like "Mom, buy me a flat in
the new city! Mom, everyone wants to live here!" The truth was that we did not want
to live anywhere, but we believed blindly in cities of infinite growth through which,
someday, we would hear the sound of the sea. The first time we visited the deserted
plot where the cubicles were to be built, we heard the roar of motorcycles circling the
nearby highways, which turned into a distant and constant hum.

In the real estate office someone dressed as a pear showed us the sonic and
structural properties of the new city by striking long hollow stainless steel pipes
arranged in the backyard of the office to form a sort of corridor. PING, PING, PING ...
The alien pear spoke of vibrations and small space-time vortexes created by tiny
absolute voids that would be generated by arranging the different housing modules
in relation to an axis that would enable their exponential reproduction. It would be
through these vortexes, as a matter of quantum entanglement, that the sound would
no longer respond to the usual physical laws, and could then be stored within the
porous walls of our future dwellings.

- So, is it like starlight? Like echoes of waves that broke decades ago where we once
had a sea.
+ No, it's like psychedelia, it works at a neurobiological level.

II.

We deduced that, according to the distribution of the cube-house and the torsion of
the axes of modular reproduction, the ocean was located about a thousand
kilometers to the east and we opened a gap in the wall of our new room in order to
facilitate a sonic current. A metallic gleam came from the wall, followed by a rough
PLONC. No, that was not air that was slipping through the hole, suddenly my hand
found a piece of wrinkled yellow paper wrapped around a square plastic box. How
could our construction—built only a few months before on that dusty no man's
wasteland—contain century old artifacts within its walls? The paper, creaking as I
uncovered the box, turned out to be from an anarchist newspaper called The Social
Combat, printed more than a hundred years ago. The headlines reported an event
that occurred the day the anomalies began in the area, an eventual glitch no one had
any records of.

The box, or rather the cartridge, advertised in embossed letters: “8mm.” With my
forefinger and thumb I pinched a piece of plastic that was sticking out and pulled
gently. It was a photosensitive tape. A series of frames appeared rapidly forming a
linear traveling around what appeared to be a huge open plot of land: CLAC, CLAC,
CLAC. The typical walking swings became there vibration and rattle. It remembered
that I used to go to the stadium where all kinds of sport tournaments took place, not
to admire the athletes' feats, but to try to relate my body mass—so accustomed to
our housing cubicle—to that container of projected nothingness. The plot from the
frames was a container of nothing to project; the available space became evident
thanks to the sticks, stones, and wires of what it had once contained. Toward the end
of the tape, the rattle stops and the hand holding the camera descends abruptly to a
Harley Davidson pack, and then fades to black.

Scribbled on the back of the newspaper:

+ Hello to whoever will have the honor of finding this note. Any single historical event
is too complex to be adequately known by anyone. It transcends all human
intellectual capacities. Do not look at the gleams of yellow metal, you must listen to
them. Our practice is to wait until a sufficient number of details have been forgotten.
In this way it will be much simpler to restart to
- ...

And this is how the note was interrupted by the presence of multiple holes opened by
the silverfish with which we had the fortune to cohabit.

III.

We were riding on a borrowed motorcycle and it had rained and the color of the
periphery was of an earthy blue that did not fade nor produce any shadows. We
were looking for a concrete platform where we used to smoke joints as teenagers. It
is known that sometimes concrete can be filled up with bubbles and then crumble
like a block of sea salt, other times instead, to obtain a lightweight material it is
purposely filled up with particles of gas. We usually sat there with a pack of Lidl beer
cans because it was close by because they were cheap because we already knew
by heart all the bars of the area and because we did not want to hear the usual sonic
retransmissions spitting through their gray walls. Blocks of trapped air, bubbling
concrete beneath our feet, shitty beers that warmed up too quickly.

The air became thick and sandy, announcing the anomaly to come. Breathing
becomes heavy at times like this and one should be still and expectant, inspiring only
with small sips. So we drank some beer and we hugged a little. The Lidl shop
assistants had gathered in front of the windows to see that other quantum window
had opened and from which a structure of beautiful yellow metal was beginning to
emit iridescent reflections that reminded us of the sea surface on a day of calm
silver. The gliding chrome and the blue hue of the shiny fabrics impacted onto the
white concrete. The anomaly erected in the middle of the open space imposed itself
as a suspended mass, just like an apparition. It did not seem to have any weight and
at the same time it did not seem to be affected by the breeze nor the lightning
conditions. I thought of the bubbles and whether a metal could in fact be porous. The
beer made me burp, watching the gleams come off from different angles, reflected
onto my can as if the laws of physics were playing cubism.

The entrainment:

+ The most convincing idea is that the water jet coming out of our shower creates a
vortex with an axis perpendicular to the shower curtain. The center of this vortex is a
point of low pressure.
- As a consequence, due to the difference in pressure with the outside of the shower,
the curtain tends to always move toward us.

On that occasion the cloth that hung from the metal sticks laid faintly until the wind
pushed it towards the curious mob that had gathered in the place. We all tapped our
feet as if we were being dragged by the dry blows of a drumset and our gasps drove
away the marine curtains, muddy and yellowish that were caressing our heads.
Harmonicas played and someone started to sing. Hula-hoops. Then we clapped.

IV.

I kept several mementos from that day, creased the newspaper headlines in my
pocket, scribbled my thinning memories on it even though it seemed too late.
Gasping in a snort of frustration, I left the last sentence unfinished. The following
days, the sonic newscasts proclaimed about entrainment, explaining that the origin
of the anomaly corresponded with our ability to adapt naturally to altered states of
consciousness. Only by accepting those states and losing our individuality would we
feel no more pain or fear, for we would be united in a shared collective identity.
+ Who will plug the holes?
- We will.

That's when we bought the Harley in a gust of nostalgia. We circled once more
around the plot with it, armed with the cameras of our telephones, trying in vain to
capture some lost halo of that gleam. We collected rusty wires, fragments of ruins,
litter, and empty bottles that had acquired yellowish tones similar to those we had
perceived between the wind and the panting of the anomaly.

After a while we stopped hearing the sound of the waves. The new neighbors
commented on how windy the area was and how difficult it was to keep the curtains
straight in their windowless cells. The fabric always tended to perch towards the
center of the rooms. We assumed that the air that had brought us closer to the sea
had then turned outward, and with our hands we made a gap in the wall, opening a
capsule of silence where I poured the mementos we had collected during our own
particular road movie. After all, the final state of things could not have been foreseen.
Maybe we were just building the world after the fact. We sat exhausted under the
colorful curtains and decided to go later for drinks. And then we would celebrate. To
prepare an Iron Butterfly we poured the vodka on the ice cubes in some old-
fashioned glasses. We added kahlúa and Irish cream, and then we stirred. The
future was exactly what we had projected.