Instructions for reading: Play the song ‘Art Decade’ by David Bowie on repeat while reading this text. Read the text as many times as required.
PLAY EXIT
You are still sitting on the floor with your back against the side of the bed, the controller in the lap of your faux-denim sundress, cables cool against your bare legs. You are back at the game’s menu, but too drained to press PLAY. A satsuma is just out of reach on your desk, where your phone lights up intermittently. After a minute or two, the menu’s looped animation begins again, and you watch it through half-closed eyes.
[A thick black line borders a pink sky, dusky blue mountains, and a dark tree. The sun is permanently setting. The grass around the tree is sea blue, the marshland beyond is brown with glistening cream ripples.]
[Sitting at the base of the tree is Sarah, standing next to the tree is Jareth, the Goblin King. The title LABYRINTH and the options PLAY and EXIT float a little above the grass in front of Sarah and Jareth. The gilded bronze letters glint and sparkle.]
Sarah is sleeping propped up against the base of a tree, her arms and legs almost indistinguishable from the roots.
She opens her eyes, blinks, turns only her head. Jareth, the Goblin King, is standing near the tree.
He extends his arm, holding a peach. Sarah extends her arm towards him, reaching for the peach.
Jareth retracts his arm. She retracts her arm, turns her head away, closes her eyes.
[The leaves on the tree give a quick quiver; a shiver that runs over the tree’s branches in a wave. Jareth’s eyes are fixed on Sarah.]
Sarah is propped up against the base of the tree, her limbs stiff among the roots.
She opens her eyes, blinks, turns only her head, tilts it up a little. Jareth, the Goblin King, is standing over her.
He extends his arm, in his hand is a peach. Sarah reaches out to take the peach.
Jareth pulls back his hand. Sarah puts down her arm, turns her face away, closes her eyes.
[A trio of translucent clouds hurries across the sky as if on wheels.]
[Sarah and Jareth’s clothes come into focus in front of the badly painted backdrop for a few seconds, they take on more detail, like stitching and rumples and sheens; a glitch, a previous iteration, trialed and ultimately rejected, but still embedded in the game’s fabric. Sarah is wearing faded blue jeans and a pale blue denim jacket, Jareth is wearing black leather trousers and a black, flaky, almost scaly leather jacket. Their faces flicker too; the edits added to the faces of unknown models vanish for a microsecond.]
[Your eyes close fully for a second, but the lids come apart again, like magnets repelling one another.]
Sarah wakes up sitting against a tree. She shifts her legs among the roots. Jareth is holding out a small, round fruit: a peach.
Sarah’s arm lifts up as if of its own volition, and she weakly waggles her fingers towards the peach. She almost touches it.
Jareth looks around; one look left, one look right, and hides the peach behind his back.
Sarah drops her arm. Her head tilts to the side. She’s asleep.
[Five red butterflies move jerkily in a box formation across the marshland. Your eyes might be open; they might be closed. The screen and its scene are hazy and scorched. ‘Sarah’, or Jennifer Connelly, scratches her nose. ‘Jareth’, or David Bowie, sighs, turns to look out towards a marsh made of swathes of silk being drawn back and forth by studio apprentices, drops his hip, gives a sniff. They both blink, stretch. ‘David’, or Jareth, takes a sip from a bottle of water hidden behind his boot, replaces it. ‘Jennifer’, or Sarah, brings out a few rolled up pages of a script from behind the fibreglass tree, scans a page, puts it back. ]
Jennifer Connelly looks like she’s just now flopped down against a tree for a rest. Her eyes jump open and blink rigidly like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
She casually raises one knee, clasps her hands around her shin and taps her foot.
David Bowie raises his right hand and right knee, then drops them. Raises the left hand and left knee, then drops them, then repeats, marching like a juddering puppet.
Their mouths flap open and closed in bursts. Jennifer Connelly appears to be singing her #1 hit; the jingle she recorded for a Japanese Panasonic advert released in 1986, the year Labyrinth came out. David Bowie seems to be singing ‘Underground’, the track that plays over the opening sequence of Labyrinth, which peaked in the U.K. charts at #21 the same year. They are singing soundlessly.
[The red sun turns yellow; the pink sky turns midnight blue. A papery white owl arcs across the sun-moon before disappearing into the blackness of the tree. Its yellow eyes flash once and then vanish. It is once more twilight.]
[Jennifer is now 48 years old. She waves to her parents, her husband Paul Bettany, and her three children out of shot. Then she’s 15, Paul and the kids fade out of sight. They fade back in, she’s 48. Then 15. David is suddenly 69. He is suddenly 38. 69. 38. 69. She is 48. He is 38. He is 69. She is 15. He is 38. She is 15. He is 38.]
Sarah-Jennifer can’t lift her head. It rolls around her neck. She can’t tell her limbs from the roots of the tree.
David-Jareth holds something out to her.
Sarah-Jennifer can’t quite make out what it is. A blurry, furry peach? She licks her lips, and they are sweet and sticky.
She reaches for the peach with her eyes. She can see that a bite has been taken out of it. There are spots on her denim jacket.
David-Jareth kneels, holds the peach to her mouth.
Sarah-Jennifer takes a bite of empty space, chews peachy air. He smiles, leans in for a kiss. You cannot see if their lips meet from behind, only his backcombed bleached-blonde hair partially eclipsing her black hair.
He gets up. Her head rolls back to the side. Then it flops forward onto her chest.
He inspects the peach. There’s a small beige worm wriggling in the bitemark. He puts the peach and its worm in his pocket.
[A lilac spew of lava erupts from one of the mountains in the distance. The lava trickles down like plant roots in time lapse. You view the words on the screen from behind, in reverse, as Sarah-Jennifer does. One of her eyes, the only part of her that she can move, looks towards them. The fingers on one of her hands twitch, and then her whole arm jolts into the air towards the letters TIXE, lacking finesse and pixelated from behind, but they’re out of reach.]
[The scene freezes. You come to as the colours drain to greyscale. For a single moment the menu options glow royal purple, like a goblin’s tongue. The loop begins again.]
[You oscillate within a woozy waking dream.]
PLAY EXIT
Jen Calleja’s first collection of short fiction, I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, is published by Prototype and her pamphlet essay Goblins is forthcoming from Rough Trade Books. Her most recent translation, The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019. Recommendation: American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000).
