The Projection
Or, What Happens When an Empath Builds a Night Club in the Desert.
Because I’m an empath, and because I believe in the disruption of trajectories—rivers, thoughts, violent car crashes, relationships—conversation with me can be somewhat erratic.
They say that the best celebrities are those with consistent character; as long as you display an easily digestible set of traits, whether you’re rich-bad-boy-druggie or fake-awkward-beauty-queen, as long as your persona can be properly packaged and sold by the distraction masters at hand, you have a seat waiting for you. Once you establish a shape, they start shoving you into the appropriate holes.
But I have too many inside of me. There’s a difference between the so-called creative personality and true empathic ability. It’s not just the whims of the moment that harass the right-brain dominant, you know, those sourceless urges from the primordial shadow that exists in all minds everywhere, I’m talking about the accumulated emotions of my environment and the subtle current of true feeling that undermines any and all mere conversation. It’s like What you Feel speaks so loud, I can’t Hear what you Say. Whether it’s the people I live with or a group in the next room, I am affected, and made to resonate with the collective. College was a special challenge, and I went to film school—imagine a lot of budding artists, arrogant and fearful, swinging between hormonal forces yet trying to assert some unformed projection of self to win the admiration of peers and find their own voice in a room full of screamers. Like an old flick stuck on repeat, people have projected their worst fears or greatest desires onto my porcelain understanding. The film is different to everyone who watches.
Every empath has a different way of dealing with this. Some manipulate others but most are just manipulated. It depends on life experience, like anything else. When I was little I used to run and hide in my backyard, fleeing raised voices like Greek furies and getting me tears out behind branches. Nature consoled me, and the emotional equanimity of trees eventually made human feeling sour on my palette. I resented the hypocrisies of adulthood and never forgave, even whilst dreaming of fame and fortune, that which alleviates all natural ills.
Because it all sinks in—I have no say. Psychic powers exist, but the reality is somewhat shittier than the fiction. It’s not teenagers taking revenge on their cruel peers, it’s kids who can’t control their seemingly sourceless outbursts, craftsmen who never get anywhere because they can’t cope with false personalities, lost souls who never learn why they feel separate all their lives and yet so at one with creation. When you’re all ability and no education there’s nothing you can do but try to manage the energy. Reject the negative and embrace the positive, that sort of mindfulness gag that’s sweeping the country right now.
Try being around famous people like that.
But empathic ability isn’t a total waste. I’ve been able to convince a number of people that I’m the sort of creative genius they’ve always been looking for—mostly a half dozen rich investors who gave up on their inner child long ago in exchange for earthly delights. For them, meeting me was a sort of pilgrimage opportunity and I was all too eager to take their tithes. See, I always had ideas, it just happened that most of them involved my secret yet substantive yearning for notoriety, and most of the time those types of ventures fail before they begin. But with the resources of my new admirers and my own inspired rhetoric, I designed and constructed a night club on the edge of town, right across the street from a desert that used to be bison pasture.
No one had ever seen a night club like this before. My aim was the physical manifestation of pure bliss, the only state in which all the realities of space/time come together and form perfect coherence with the oneness of all man. No shit. If I tell you about the place, it will only take a few seconds, because all successful nightclubs are the same except for a few, sparkling, just-south-of-normal ticks. People can only take so much deviation from the norm and the balance must be perfect.
The place had only three windows and they all pointed at the lightless wasteland across the street, where a single dead tree served as the club’s sole sign and symbol. A pink light shone against its twisted capillaries at all times. Without the projections beamed just so against our faded white facade, you might mistake the club itself for a half-underground concrete community center that paranoia built fifty years hence. Or an Elks Lodge. Our address was abstruse, so we just told everyone, Stop At The Pink Tree.
“The desert?” they said. “How do you expect people to make the trip for—”
And then I’d cut them off. I rejected logistics and definitions. That’s why people came.
The inside was equally devoid of distinguishable theme or feature—an intimate maze, with low ceilings and divided rooms, each devoted to their own unique pleasure: lounges with plush leather seating where you could smoke or caress in the stark shadows; bars like circular shrines, their liquor offerings surrounding a central fountain of blue and white, whose splashes created a sparkling mist over the bartender’s square shoulders; and, to satisfy the itch of the lifelong wealthy, clothiers with designer labels on slim black racks. Drinks were allowed near the clothes as long as you could settle for the stained merchandise. Any dancing was done in the bar pockets, or Caverns as we liked to call them, so that the well-lit swaying mimes created a carousel around monuments of liquid vice.
A couple investors did complain about how cave-like the place was, with it’s relatively low ceilings, confusing, zen-like floor plan, intensely conservative lighting, and, debatably, the way the air conditioner only seemed to mix the expensive cologne, body sweat, and inexplicable smell of rain. But air circulation was the least of my concerns. Besides, guests seemed to like the place once they’d spent an hour or more there, as if that’s how long it took for the addiction to set in. I had spies doing this sort of research every other night and their observations were indispensable—after four hours, the customers fell into the most lovely trance, like ghosts settling down for a good eternity’s haunting. The phenomena was so prevalent that sales personnel started calling people Denizens if they stayed from ten to three. Denizen Rothschild, for example, loved the place so much that he moved clothing racks around a pair of corner lounge chairs and hissed at anyone who approached without a drink to offer—all you could see was a spiral of cigar smoke rising behind a row of Ann Demeulemeester. I named the room in his honor.
I don’t want the club to have a name. I don’t want to attach a lot of ideas and symbols, things that will grow stale within a month or two and inevitably conflict with the internal notions of perfection we all carry with us. I want a blank slate to house the projections of each individual. With just enough comforting luxuries (designers, no design) to pull them in—the rest, left to the Greedy Creator in us all. My own nature inspired. It was at the tip of my tongue my whole life long. I still remember what I said to grab investing attention.
Actually, I don’t remember at all—it was off the top of my head, and probably something that someone else was feeling anyway.
