The Glass Plantation

Something is compelling you to read this, but you can't quite figure out what it is...

In 1962 Clairvius Narcisse developed a fever with body aches, and began coughing up blood. He reported the sensation of bugs crawling under his skin, which was followed by general paralysis. He was admitted to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti—mute and unresponsive—and two days later was pronounced dead. His sister identified his body, and he was buried the next day in a cemetery near his hometown of L'Estère. He was survived by his wife and several children, and was remembered in the hearts of all who knew him.

...which is why they still knew who he was in 1980 when he suddenly reappeared, alive and well.

His death had, apparently, been a romeo-and-juliet-esque drug powered hoax that the two American-trained doctors who certified his death failed to see through. He claimed that he was fully aware during his “death”, unable to move or speak, and that after he was buried alive a bokor (a Haitian Vodou witch doctor) dug up his body and revived him with a mysterious potion. He was then apparently forced to work as a slave on a sugar plantation for years, kept in a trance-like state by regular doses of some sort of hallucinogenic substance, until the bokor died and he managed to escape.

In Vodou cosmology, the soul has two parts:

• Gros bon ange (“big good angel”): The life force that animates the body.

• Ti bon ange (“little good angel”): The conscience, personality, and individual will.

By suppressing the ti bon ange the bokor is able to create an empty vessel without agency to mindlessly carry out their bidding. George A. Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead introduced the term “zombie” into the American moviegoer lexicon, but this practice of using Vodou sorcery to turn people into mindless husks is what the term was originally referring to.

It was taken seriously enough in Haitian culture that the creation of zombies is explicitly illegal under article 246 of their penal code.

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You press your thumb against the bottom of the screen’s glass and, in a fluid motion, drag it towards the top. The story of Clairvius Narcisse slides out of sight, replaced by a mildly funny sped up family guy clip.

An AI generated voice reads a Reddit story overtop of a video of Minecraft parkour:

You tried to uninstall TikTok, but the same interface keeps popping up like blades of untouched grass through cracks in the cement: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

It’s hard to pull yourself away. You’re not entertained, exactly, but neither are you bored. You sometimes manage to escape if your phone runs out of batteries, but right now you’re still hovering around 90%.

Time is passing by. You can’t quite remember what it was you were trying to do originally…

it can probably wait.

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By the time I was 13 I had been in a series of intensive acting workshops for several years during my summer months. I gave a monologue onstage about why I didn’t care about 9/11 under a blue spotlight. I played an abusive father and screamed “I DIDN’T RAISE MY SON TO BE A FUCKING FAGGOT” at the top of my lungs. This year we were doing an exchange program with people from LA, but nobody in LA wanted to sign up to come visit Canada so there weren’t enough houses for everybody to stay at when we went there. Instead, all of the boys stayed at an eccentric man’s private circus on the outskirts of the city, which after a few restless nights we unanimously decided was haunted.

I managed to slam a Russian swing hard into my leg after getting it to spin all the way around: the man put some sort of ointment onto the bruise that was meant for horses, which dulled the pain, but everything tasted like garlic for the rest of the day. I had the opportunity to try trapeze, but after making the painstaking journey up the ladder, I was the only person to climb all the way back down.

On the last night, instead of sleeping, one of the older boys decided to hypnotize people. I watched in fascination as one of my friends turned out to be highly suggestible, and our focus turned on making him do all manner of antisocial behaviour. When it came my turn to be hypnotized, I remember getting to a threshold where I knew that if he kept going he would have me, and I decided to wake up instead: climbing back down the ladder once again.

We stayed up all night laughing, sleep-deprived, half-feral.

In the experimentation performed in late night basements and quiet corners at church group retreats over the course of my teenage years, I was able to confirm for myself that there is something there there: I could get people into a trance-like state, I could make people feel hot or cold. But beyond that I could never really figure out what to get people to do, even though I had a feeling that they would probably do it.

My sister used to suck her thumb, so I decided to hypnotize her and tell her that her thumb tasted like shit. The effect only lasted for about 45 minutes, but the moment I saw the horrified look on her face when she put her thumb in her mouth, I knew my days of hypnotizing people were over.

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You hear a knock at the door, but by the time you open it the Fedex driver is already driving away. At your doorstep is an Amazon package that you don’t remember ordering. You hack through the tape with a butter knife and inside of the package is… another phone. It appears to be the exact make and model of your current phone, but even stranger, the small scratch in the corner of the screen is identical. A notification pops on the screen: here’s another video we think you’ll like.

Theres another knock at the door, another package, another phone.

You press your thumb against the bottom of the glass and drag it towards the top. You press your thumb against the bottom of the glass, again, and drag it towards the top. You begin to be aware of the cool sensation of sliding. down… down… down…

down…

down…

you are getting veeeeery sleeeepy.