Behind us, the cities rot gently. Red towers, blue fog, yellow silence. The past is a velvet couch with a distinct stain of decaying wine and betrayal. The future? A nerve bundle shooting static at my spinal column. All of us have been altered, in one way or another. All of us are half-code, half-sacrifice.
The diagram is labeled. BNC-1. BNC-2. AN-1. Like cousins that got lost in the folds of the brain. What does the diagram do when we sleep? Does it grow into a dream we can’t escape? Does it sprout roots into our bones? I wake up with the impression of a dendrite pressed into my ribs, like a fossil of thought, like a tenuous broadcast from a dead radio station.
My old teacher looks sideways at all this. His nose knows more than his eyes. He’s seen angels broken apart by logic. He’s counted stars with the same fingers that now point towards an imaginary exit… Or is it just the edge of the page where the publisher forgot to bleed the ink all the way through? Philosophy is just a hallucination you probably won’t get arrested for.
Page 23. Three. That’s how many selves you have. The one who dreams, the one who watches, and the one who screams into a live socket in sheer anguish.
I remember: Ricardo told me once that the nervous system is just a very elaborate radio. Pick up the right frequency and you can hear your ancestors whispering in the hiss between channels. Some call that schizophrenia. I call it astral archaeology.
And the family in the first painting that you see in here; they’re not people. They’re the remains of a signal. Cracked forms that used to carry sound; all color-coded to avoid confusion. You might think the triangle face is the mother but no, it’s the transmitter. The true mother is the background; those streaks of black and orange, bursting upward like a transmission from a volcano. Her voice is what births the rest of them. Her voice is what kills them, too.
Somewhere in the back of the museum, there's a room where the paintings blink. The nerves are mapped and projected against the wall. I can see how BNC-2 wraps around BNC-1 like a lover, like a trap, like a rhetorical fallacy. In the corner, a speaker plays my old teacher’s thoughts in Latin, but reversed, like a Satanic record. I hear it if I close my eyes and press my fingers against my teeth.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the diagram got loose; if the neurons spilled out of the paper and rewired the gallery. Visitors might start to convulse in sync. My blood pressure would spike. My spine would vibrate. I would start naming things in languages I don't know.
I try to leave but the door has turned into a waveform. I can only exit if I match its frequency. Most of us can never leave. How can you match a frequency if you don’t know how to shape shift?
My old teacher knew about this. He saw it, a long time ago in Mexico. He saw it in the eyes of young obsessed junkies decoding the Bible one track mark at a time. He knew that the human body is a relay tower, and that most signals are poison. But if you listen closely, really closely, you can hear the true message: EAT THE SKY. BITE THE STARS. BECOME THE STATIC.
One of the figures in the painting—the one on the floor with a long face like a melted mask—she says: “There are secrets buried in the synaptic delay.” I nod because my tongue has fused to my palate and I am no longer able to speak. Still, I nod because my heartbeat is being monitored by a machine in a different time zone.
BNC-1 fires. The ink trembles. AN-1 pulses like a drum. A tribal beat only insects can dance to. The museum lights flicker in Morse code. Someone translates it. It says: “THEY'RE ALREADY INSIDE.”
My teacher's finger keeps pointing. (Is he really here with me?) Now it's pointing at my gut. Now it's pointing at my unborn memories. Now it's pointing at the wall, where a crack has opened and I can see the city outside. The towers are bleeding data. The sky is peeling away to reveal circuits underneath. The birds are twitching in binary spasms.
And I finally understand the diagram. It's a map. Not of the brain. But of a long life in exile, away from everything that made me who I am.
And I am somewhere between BNC-1 and AN-1. A spark traveling a blackened path. A lost child in a neuron forest. Every choice I've made is a synapse. Every regret is a firing pattern. Every time I almost say something true… it lights up red.
I look again at the painting. The figures are moving now. Slowly. The mother-transmitter blinks. The geometry shifts. They’re recalibrating for my newfound presence. They’ve been waiting for me. I am the missing circuit. I am the noise in the system. And now the system is listening.