by Aliya Whiteley

In a city where, for many, only the smallest spaces are affordable, Gilda thinks herself lucky to have the whole top floor of a communal house.

It’s true that it’s only one room, and most of the headroom is taken up by slanting wooden beams beneath the pointed roof, and the window is a dirty round porthole with a bar across it, letting in little light - but who needs sunlight? Gilda spends her free time in her favorite place in the world: her large double bed with wooden spindles on the corners, tapering to points. She has decorated the wall opposite with movie posters. She is a lover of movies. Not new, but classic, stretching back from the decade before she was born, before the internet existed, when media consisted of captured film that could not be argued with. These movies are solid and beautiful. They show the world one way, each one captured through the eye of a certain director she trusts.

She lies in bed on her side and watches the movies she loves on her phone, turned sideways, lying sideways, everything tipped over so the screen is wide and welcoming. She feels joined to the image, incorporated. It sucks her in. She likes both black and white and vivid color. Any color but brown. She works shifts in a warehouse, packaging up the things people buy. Everything is wrapped in brown paper, then sealed with long slices of heavy-duty tape. She chooses movies that show wide-open spaces and grand gestures until the sticky feel and smell of the tape fades.

Downstairs, people come and go. They leave for drinks together sometimes but forget to invite her. When the front door slams shut, the spindles of her bed tremble.

Gilda spends a late November night watching the work of her auteur, a giant of the 1950s and ‘60s: a master of suspense. She lies very still, half her face pressed into the pillow, while women alone are stalked and murdered, stylishly. She falls asleep during the fourth movie in a row, and when she wakes the phone is still in her hand, and her earbuds have been nestling inside her ears for hours. Everything is uncomfortable. She presses the screen to life to check the time. Her shift starts in an hour. The white lines of the digital time are blurry, and she blinks, and shifts her gaze to the posters by her door. One shows a man in a raincoat, the collar turned up to reveal only the sketch of his profile. Everything is blurry. She sits up, pulls out the earbuds, closes and opens her eyes. The left eye works fine. The right eye shows her nothing but gray fuzz. She puts her hands over her eyes in turn. There’s no improvement. The eye that she usually presses into the pillow no longer sees anything.

• • •

The streets are unbalanced, the cars fast and angular, headlight glare laced with the mist that clouds her right eye.

Gilda returns from the emergency appointment with the optometrist and bangs her front door shut. She misses the handrail on the stairs at first grab, must reach out again, is grateful to feel the painted wood under her palm. She takes the stairs slowly and returns to her room, where all the posters are newly shallow, angled. There is no perspective. It’s like someone has zoomed the camera out and tracked in at the same time. She feels dizzy. She lies down, then takes out her phone. There’s a message from work’s Human Resources department, so she phones them back and updates the automated line.

“I’ll phone again tomorrow,” she says. Then she gets back into bed, fully clothed, so tired. Having to renegotiate the world through one eye is exhausting, and she is on the come-down from being frightened, too. It lurked behind the bad eye – a hole through which panic permeated.

Not so much now her vision is returning. The fuzz is starting to fade.

She doesn’t go into the whole consultation, in which the optometrist asked her: Do you lie on one side with your phone in your hand? We see this more and more. It’s nearly always temporary. It seems to be lasting a little longer in your case, but I can’t see anything seriously wrong. Don’t lie in bed with your phone for long periods of time. The man was very close to her face, dominating the dark consulting room; perhaps he’d lost all sense of personal space years ago. Part of the job. He had the brusque manner of the overworked. His judgment upon her was both reassuring and embarrassing.

On the way out she thanked him for seeing her so quickly, and she even apologized, because she didn’t know what else to say in the face of his professional annoyance.

Opposite her bed, the familiar poster of the lovers in a clinch catches her attention. The woman’s head is tipped back, her lips parted, and the man’s face is turning down to hers, looming, very close. Usually Gilda feels only the borrowed glow of filmic romance in that image, but the memory of the optometrist has ruined its allure. She lies on her side and turns her phone to match.

No, she shouldn’t. And the fear is still with her, so she compromises: she switches to her left side, and uses the grayed-out eye to attempt to watch a movie. It doesn’t really matter which movie, since she can’t see it properly, but she decides upon one that begins in a setting that calms her: a sweeping, lavish landscape, with a stately home on the horizon. The heroine falls in love, and is compromised, disgraced, left penniless. All this should be on the screen, but instead there is the gray fuzz, and through that Gilda glimpses a shape, half-hidden, as if this is a puzzle to be solved, so she stares harder and it coalesces into a head, a woman’s head, inclined, the hair worn in a high bun. It reminds her of an image from a cameo brooch, or a marble bust. The head turns to face her.

The woman is still.

This is a strange, motionless movie. Is it her own reflection she’s somehow catching from the screen? Gilda shifts so she can focus on the screen using both eyes, and the woman vanishes. She returns to her original position, and the image returns. This time, the woman is side-on, profile visible, with a firm chin, an upturned nose. There is a resemblance to some old movie star, but Gilda can’t think of the name.

“Get ready for your close up,” Gilda murmurs, and the image zooms in just as the woman turns to face her once more. It’s a coincidence, a perfect movie moment.

“Now zoom out and smile,” she says, and she feels it, the woman is smiling although there’s no way to see it clearly. The head is smaller, the image has moved further away to reveal the upper torso, the shape of it. The woman has regal bearing.

“You don’t have to be so formal,” Gilda says. “You can relax.”

The posture changes, relaxes.

She is in control. The woman is taking her directions.

• • •

At night, Gilda manipulates the movie in the space behind normal vision. She must lie on her side, stare for a time. It can take minutes or hours before the grayness covers one eye. She alternates them in the hope that she’s not permanently damaging her sight, but honestly, she can’t think much beyond the vision she is somehow creating.

Shifts at work remain long and boring. Things are wrapped in brown paper and dispatched, and her perspective on that never changes. Sometimes she wraps a toy or a gift and imagines a scene of happiness upon its arrival. She adds these into her movie, asking her leading lady to mimic surprise, delight, acceptance. When the HR department issues her a written warning for not meeting time-targets, Gilda rages and re-enacts the scene as if it took place between two people in her internal movie. She hones the emotions with her terse commands, elaborating, leaving less room for error. The woman is berated, looks downcast. She obeys. The quality of the gray fuzz changes throughout, sometimes thicker, sometimes light enough to make out detail. It reminds Gilda of old film stock, fragile, disintegrating with age. She loves it. She loves the woman who does what she is told to do.

“Cry,” she commands. “Cry your heart out as if it has been broken by a cad.” The woman puts her hands to her face and sobs. “No, drop your hands, I want to see it.” The hands are dropped, and the blur of a face is bared.

“You’re jealous,” Gilda instructs, on another night. “You’re desperate. They have taken everything from you. There’s nothing left.” The eyes flare. The jaw clenches. “More,” Gilda says, “More.”

This process of creation coalesces into a storyline, and she spends all her time thinking through the narrative, constructing it, reaching for meaning. “You’ve been kidnapped by a madman. You’ve been placed in a cage suspended from the roof of a drafty castle, above the long dining table in a vast hall. He and his friends eat, drink, make merry underneath you. They look up at you and laugh. They pretend to offer you food, poking it through the bars of the cage, then snatch it away from you. Show me the pain of it. Show me what it feels like to be trapped, hungry.” Mouth open. Desperation. If Gilda could hear it, there would surely be screaming, but this is always a silent movie. Terror. Gilda feels it.

For her part, there is sadness, and there is guilt, too, which is inevitable, Gilda decides. The woman has become real to her, not only an image. She has crafted and identified with every emotion. Making a movie involves pain and commitment from all involved.

She tries to write down a proper script during a lunchbreak, and on paper the quality of the story changes. It’s predictable, unexciting. She screws it up, throws it away, and spends the rest of her shift planning what words to say to get the woman to deliver the climax – the moment of salvation when the hero arrives, slays the madman, and sets her free. It’s going to be magnificent.

What will come after?

Another narrative is lurking, somewhere, in that gray fuzzy space. She’ll find it. She’ll pin it down.

• • •

Gilda bangs the front door shut and is taking the stairs at speed, eager to begin deadening her vision for the final performance, when she comes across two of her housemates on the second-floor landing. They greet her, are friendly.

“You in a hurry?” says the tall one, Mike; he goes for early morning runs and sometimes they cross paths when she’s coming back from a shift. He looks comfortable, relaxed at all times. It’s easy for him to live the life he’s been given. He’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts, showing off his physique. “We’re going for pizza, the Italian just round the corner, come with!” he says. “Have you met Dan already? He moved in on the fourth floor last month, he’s just underneath you.”

Dan is from an older generation, dressed in a blue expensive suit as if he has just returned from work or is always working. But the knot of his red tie has been loosened: code to show he’s off the clock. He has the silvery ghost of a five o’clock shadow, and he looks tired, or possibly sad. Gilda has the urge to say words to him, to persuade him to sharpen that emotion into something she recognizes.

“You’d be welcome to come along,” says Dan, and he gives her a smile and offers her a fist bump, of all things. She might say to him: you are struggling to get over that divorce, or it weighs on your mind how you lost all your money on the stock exchange, and suddenly everything is in collision. It takes her breath away. Reality and fantasy, dialogue and discussion, heroes and men she meets on the stairs: these are conflated, she can’t pull them apart. They’re not under her control at all. She wants the safety of her bed so she says, “I’m really sorry, I’ve got plans tonight.” It’s obvious in both of their expressions that they don’t believe her.

Back in her room, high up above it all, Gilda pushes away the tangle of the meeting and begins the process of graying out the vision in one eye. She lies on her side, the phone in her hand, and watches one of her old favorites in which a girl lives a life of religious ecstasy, has visions, gets dragged into adventure, and is eventually burned to death. While watching, Gilda finds her thoughts straying to her housemates. She imagines the three of them eating pizza together, drinking red wine, maybe getting tipsy and having a laugh, telling each other little secrets. She’s seen movies like that. There’s the romantic comedy love triangle, or the version where she wakes up tied to a dirty mattress in a basement. Possibly it wouldn’t play out like either of those narratives, but she doesn’t know what else there could be.

It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Focus.

She turns over and finds the gray fuzz behind her left eye is ready for her.

When she looks at the screen through that fuzz she sees the woman, and she starts back at scene one, running through each reaction shot in turn. Her heroine is a bright and lovely young woman, eager to learn about life. Her heroine is kidnapped. Her heroine is abused, tortured, locked in that suspended cage –

And now the denouement …

Here comes the hero, all will be well. Gilda directs it so. She is in charge. The woman responds exactly as told, to Gilda’s every word. “Here he comes. He’s beneath you, battling your captor, you look down, you reach for him.”

The head tilts. The gray fuzz is very light tonight; Gilda can make out detail. The bars of the cage are real, they are in her vision. She says, “Zoom out,” and this time it pulls back enough to show her the body of the woman, crouching, within that framework of lines and constraints. The cage dangles from the slanted apex of that tall roof. The woman puts her hand through the bars and reaches down, stretching, desperate. But the lines move. These are not bars. These are wires, attached to the hands, the feet, the head.

This is a puppet.

The body shows nothing, the face shows nothing. Every nuance of the performance the woman gives is within Gilda’s own imagination.

She drops the phone. She sits up in bed.

From the skewed perspective of her one working eye she sees her room, in darkness. The circular window lets in bisected moonlight that slants in thick bands across her body. She looks up at the roof, and sees the lines of the beams, drawing the eye to its shadows; she can see a figure crouching there, manipulating the strings of light, the emotions and their meanings. It’s her. She’s looking at herself.

“Realize it,” says the version of herself, soft, through her earbuds. The strings that hold her together materialize, flowing from her hands and feet and head to the beams, where she holds herself still, watchful.

She is the great director at work. She is the heroine. She is the madman. It’s all her.

Gilda is directed to lie down, to put her phone on her stomach. She watches herself, above. She waits to find out if that grayed-out space will lift this time. If she can tell herself to become her own hero.