Pink Floyd is so powerful while in the midst of arranging
Dark Side of the Moon; they are able to perform at Pompeii.
But their trip turns into a bummer. While the music is cool
and extraordinarily successful, the mind of the genius behind
the whole concept has been ruined and is slipping irrecoverably
into depression. His best friend, Sid Barrett, the true luminary
who conceived of the idea originally, got burned out by acid
and could no longer play the guitar. Sid, Wish You Were Here.
Wishes, hopes, dreams of the Roman populace of Pompeii…
Echoes starts with the tinkling sounds of crystal stalactite
drops away inside a cave. Waters’ bass thumps off the walls,
through the vacuous passageway. David Gilmour sings soprano:
Overhead the albatross hangs motionless across the waves.
Deep beneath the surface sky lying willowing upon the sand
the echo of a distant time rolls its way through labyrinthine
choral caves to mouths open onto ocean bottom darkness.
A silent cry climbs toward the night. Then begins the 18-minute
jazzy instrumental bridge, which is interjected with audible
visits to primordial forests where some extinct species howls.
Black lava glistens, bubbles. The director of the music video
takes stock footage from the files of geology. The archeology
here is impressive. The men are in the center of the stadium,
playing. The rows where spectators would sit are grown over
with vines in the background. The role of the place is subdued.
The statement is the fact that these precocious British boys
are in Pompeii, performing rock n roll for cameras in 1970.

Echoes is a long song, but does have an end. Later on we have
Welcome to the Machine, a dirge; Shine on You Crazy Diamond,
a tribute; and Have a Cigar, a complaint. The rock star is whining,
How come nobody is nice to me? The answer comes in Animals:
People are pigs, sheep, and dogs. Definitions in the Orwell book:
the fascists, the masses, and the police; or in capitalistic instead
of proletarian terms, as we might better understand them today:
the corporations, their products’ consumers, and their executives.
And finally: The Wall. We are shown a movie of a bad acid trip.
The double album is too multi-faceted to describe in detail here.
We may concentrate on the most important part: the protagonist,
Pink, understood to be Waters, with suggestions of Sid Barrett.
Life has been a horrific ride. We were born of the war generation.
Daddy’s flown across the ocean… A snapshot in the family album…
Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb? Will they like this poem?
A couple of four-minute songs: that is my childhood biography.
In climax I shave all the hair off my body, including my eyebrows.

I am waiting for the worms in a hotel room, the penthouse suite,
which my manager booked for me. Outside is a fascist society.
I am huge. The stoners adore me. I am their beloved anti-hero.
The State tolerates my antics because I act in service to it.
Music is the opium of the masses. I smash the full flower vase
on top of the thick glass table with my heavy electric bass guitar.
The spot erupts in shards. The strings that vibrate the instrument
twang as they are jarred by the unloosed inner components.
And the beach-wave broken glass: Tsh. The ocean’s pull-back:
the settling in the shards. The edges are as many million mirrors.
I kneel upon the pile as a penitent hermit would in desert dust.
The flesh of my knees is dug into and slashed. I bow, look low
into the reflective remnants. None of this mess was my property
to rightfully destroy. The vase and table belonged to the MGM,
while the bass was Warner Records’. Those roses however –
were they mine? Given to me by my fans? No, we never met.
The flowers were delivered with a note before I even arrived.
The message was generic. Lipstick kiss. I could not recognize
the signature. They were beautiful though. Still are. Red petals
soaking blood from my knees. Wounds from glass or thorns.
Come to think of it, the vase might have also come courtesy
of 1800 Flowers; not MGM. These knees are mine least of all.
I haven’t come by bending them volitionally. I’ve been brought
on planes, in cars, in wheelchairs, up elevators, and placed
in the penthouse as passively as the roses, except nowhere
as carefully arranged. I am an insane neo-nazi. Name’s Pink,
Leader of rock group, The Furor. I am currently touring my new
double album, The Wall. Design: 3-D graffitied screaming faces
burst like bubbles out of the seething void on which civilization
tenuously rests, like snow on an iceberg in the permanent spring
of arctic global warming. This is the final act of my tragic trilogy.

Platinum records. Over ten million sold. Bricks in the Wall.
Broken glass. Tonight my show. The room is centrally located
in a prominent city in the New World Order. It is now 1982.
It is cloudy. I rise and go to the window. Stand looking out.
Buildings burning. Police sirens flash. Ghastly billboard ads.
Otherwise, everything else; the street lamps and traffic lights
are in shadow, seem obscured. Dusk. It is almost dark already.
Must be 6 o’clock. Three hours until I’m on. Suppose I should
shower, apply make-up, pick glass out of my knees. Knock
knock. Coats come to escort me to the venue. They operate
like mafioso: 100% professional. They do not want me, erratic
artist that I am, to step out of line; for if I did they would have to
shoot me and then later explain why they did so to their bosses.
I cannot be killed yet. Tonight is my scheduled public execution
before the teenage audience of Hitler, Mao, and Putin Youth.
The fans want blood. But I have given so much already, I think,
slouched in a limousine, being driven through this hellish city.
Death stalks with sister fear. Nobody in the streets. Only cars.
Behind bulletproof windows heads having dinner converse.
I am slave to the machine, Worm Incorporated. The world ruled
by human beings, entirely in their minds, burrows through
the universe in loops around the sun as a worm would dirt.
Time is the earth, the soil. The machine, Worm. Civilization,
its tubular intestines and visceral innards. Faceless children
process in step through an industrial factory. Cattle queue
for slaughter. The meat grinder welcomes them in warmly.
Ground flesh and bone is spit out in bunches of pink reams,
reminiscent of maggots. Next shot: larvae puss and swarm.
I am a helpless rock star, sitting in my ten thousand dollar
costume, eyebrows shaven, white raccoon face staring out
a tinted window in a long, speeding limousine. Every inch of
this city is artificial. The highway has been cleared by police.

I cannot go on tonight. I feel dead. I must. They will kill me.
The kids need to believe in some sort of illusory message,
I have been told by officials in explanations over my duty.
My mental life is excruciating. I make large amounts of money
writing and singing about existential crisis. The kids are into it.
The machine chugs along. The worm excretes toxic gas like
lubricant slime. Fans flock to my concert. Twentieth century
soldiers; boys no older than twenty. The friends of great, great
grandfathers are mowed down trying to scale the trenches.
War everywhere: 100 years. Enemy conflict and internal strife.
It is 2012, an era inconceivable in 1982. The Wall has only
risen since. It is comparable to the Tower of Babel in scale.
The essential difference is that climbing has been forbidden.
Heaven is nil. The Wall is for looking. Its purpose, intimidation.
Night, around 9 o’clock. Dark, nocturnal energy comes on;
one thing that hasn’t changed since 1970. I take the stage
in Pompeii. I am not a musician, per se; more of a conjuror.
Neptune has had enough of this fascist crap. He enlists
Pink Floyd to conduct a ceremony to spark off an inferno.
Neo-nazis crowd the Roman amphitheatre, raising their right
arms toward The Furor. A volcano erupts. They drown in ash.
Waters’ slim silhouette hits the gong with primitive enthusiasm.
Echoes resulted in the Wall. A Saucerful of Secrets ripples.
Overhead the albatross hangs motionless across the waves.

The music pumps: Death Metal. The news blares on ten different television sets atop of and side to side to one another: Terrorist attacks in different parts of the world; Africa, Afghanistan, State-authorized media from China; fire, rubble, destruction; quiet scenes of bombs swept up, bodies all carted away. Meanwhile in the US of A: celebrity news. Someone is a lesbian. A teenage pop idol got pulled over by the police in his Batmobile.

One show is a profile of the bad guy in this current movie: Dennis Hopper, who the audience already knows is a co-star from the opening credits. He is on the loose. The FBI are after him, but they are still searching for clues as toward his whereabouts. Keanu doesn’t care. He quips something witty to the woman. Not ‘Nice weather we are having, eh?’ Coyly abashed, she acknowledges that she heard him. He presses START with his right index finger.

We see inside the machinery. The light that signals the explosive is on is illuminated with a muted beep. Cut to a shot of the bad guy from the back; insane at his computer. Keanu on one screen. Cameras are rigged in the gym. In a new box he opens Twitter, and tweets, “There is a bomb on the treadmill.” In just a couple of instants this sentence is read by his hundreds of thousands of followers, who each themselves also have several thousand. It is read over ten million times.

Terrorist next tweets: “Wonder how fast it should go…” Immediately he is given answers. The model’s top speed; twenty miles per hour, which is extremely fast for someone to run. A group of jokesters offer: Ludicrous speed! quoting the old Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs.

The bad guy, whose face we still have not seen, picks up an old fashioned telephone from circa the 1930s and dials on the rotary: 212-911-2001. Keanu, now trotting briskly, breaking somewhat of a sweat, hears an interruption to the music on his headphones. His expression says, “Hello!” in the sense that an Arthur Conan Doyle might have used the word in the Sherlock Holmes stories. This is not the Death Metal that he had been enjoying. The sound is ringing over the phone.

On the other end, a voice picks up. “Hello, Jack.” How does he know my name, thinks Keanu. He sounds evil. “Here’s Johnny!” the voice imitates Johnny Carson and laughs. Jack goes, “What the fuck?”

The connection is one way, however, Hopper can easily read the actor’s lips on the computer screen. “What the fuck indeed? I saw you checking out that girl right there. She sure is cute. You know what I can do? Zoom in and get a close-up of her boobies.” He does so. This is gratuitous.

This is sick, Jack thinks to himself. Yes it is Jack, the bad guy replies quite seriously, but not over the Bose headphones; instead inside the hero’s head. Terrorist has his reach deep in there.

“This is fucked up,” he says out loud. “What?” the woman next to him, having clearly heard him say ‘fuck,’ would like suddenly to know. “Um, nothing,” he smiles again, without revealing his teeth; hiding being obviously nervous. She goes back to reading her magazine.

The bad guy inside Jack’s head makes him think: The bitch is looking at a tabloid. What garbage. Dumb cunt. Then, recovering his senses: What? Did I just think that? How could I be so mean? Less than a minute ago I was pondering how I might possibly make love to this woman.

Hopper turns impatient. The camera shows his face. No surprise, despite the attempt at building tension by the film’s two-bit director. We all have seen him before. “Alright asshole, now listen up. There’s a bomb on the treadmill. I am in control of it. Here are the rules to the game. You cannot press STOP. Cannot get off. At no moment may your legs stop moving. The speed is going to increase. I do not know up to what. I am asking my followers to vote.

“Terrorism is democracy. I am a famous man, Jack. I am widely known not only in Hollywood, but in hotbeds of political activity all around the world. Everybody thinks I am playing games. They do not get that a life is at stake, yours, as well as that of the babe running next to you. I am telling them, here, I am tweeting, ‘You do understand…’” Jack can hear fingers on the keyboard typing. “‘… that someone is going to run this and if they give up they die.’ Hehehe. Let’s see what they reply.”

Jack’s first reaction is to think, Don’t fuck with me, you fucked up son of a bitch. To simply press STOP and call this sicko on his prank. But he doesn’t do it. I am telling you the truth, Hopper promises him, not over headphones; inside his head.

Blip. The televisions change to a breaking report about the sensation currently happening on the widely used website, Twitter. @Terrorist has hit a record for being retweeted more times in one minute than any user in history. “What is he telling us Jack?” the anchor ask’s the program’s online news specialist. “Well, Jill, Terrorist has been tweeting – ahem – and I quote, ‘There is a bomb on the treadmill. Wonder how fast it should go.’” “Uhuh, and what are people responding?” “The highest bids have been twenty miles per hour.” “Wow, can a human being really run that fast?” “Hm, I doubt it Jill. But I am just the web guy. To get an accurate answer to that, we should refer to our exclusive Channel 5 physiognomy expert, Doctor Rudolf Crall. Hey Rudy? Hey buddy are you there?” “Yea, what?” Crall responds abrasively. “Our colleague Jill at the studio was just wondering whether it is possible for someone to run twenty miles per hour.” “He could. But not for very long.” “Okay, thanks for the information.” “No probs.” Jill says, “Then there we have it. But twenty still sounds ludicrous to me,” making another pun on Spaceballs. She kills the joke. Jack laughs politely.

“Pretty funny, eh Jack?” Hopper asks Keanu. “I am now increasing the speed.” He turns in his swivel chair from the high-tech computer console to a big grey metal box with a dial: a relic from NASA, circa the late 1950s. It whirs as it is turned up. In Fitness Crunch the rubber floor of the Otis treadmill spins at mounting revolutions per second. Jack panics. Is forced to continue running.

“Now how about the incline,” Terrorist tweets. First responses are on the order of, “O no. If the guy is sprinting at twenty miles per hour already, you can’t make him climb uphill.” The sadists, after considering, suggest tentatively, “How about start him at two. And let’s see how he does.” “What is going on now, Jack,” Jill asks, ever on top of the story. “Terrorist is saying, ‘We’ll compromise. Between zero and two is one. We’ll put the slope at that.’”

Keanu, watching this, is appalled. The surface angles up one inch. The girl next to him gets scared. Presses STOP on her machine and steps away. She talks to one of the trainers. A group of them begin to gather behind the hero. See Jack run. He can see them in the broad mirror in front of him. Their lives are under threat as well. He runs to save them too.

Hopper goes on reciting the rules, “You cannot let anybody know that this is real. I am watching you. If you so much as cast a glance hinting that you are doing this for any reason other than your own eccentricity… Kaboom. The game is over. I win. Okay? Next, you will run until I deem you may stop. The catch is that my followers believe this is harmless entertainment. Who knows how long it will last? Until something new starts trending. Here is how you can win: When Terrorist’s tweets cease to be most popular, I will wind down the speed to STOP, and you may get off and live out your life; maybe get a chance to go out with that girl.” Are you kidding me? the voice switches from headphones to head. You saw how she looked at you, Jack. She was terrified. Aw well, forget her anyway. She wasn’t that hot. She did have flaws. And for Chrissakes was reading Cosmopolitan.

O God, I cannot go on. I must stop. No Jack, this is Hopper, you can do it. I want you to win. Thumper? Is that you? Keanu regresses mentally back to early infancy. Dream-like cognitive hallucinations are common when the body is forced to extremes. I saw this when I was little, he thinks: Bambi. Thumper, have you seen my mommy? Yes, Hopper says, she is being stalked by the hunter. Now run! Run as fast as you can Bambi! The forest is ablaze and the flames are rapidly spreading toward us at twenty miles per hour! Run Bambi! Up this hill of one-degree incline. Run, run little deer! But Thumper, what about mommy? She’s gone already, Bambi. Now go!

Jack snaps out of it. Dance Techno now on his headphones. He can see Manhattan below. He is two hundred stories up high, in the primest Crunch in the city, the World Trade Center location. It is an azure September day. His view reaches beyond Harlem, into the Bronx and Yonkers. To his left, past the Hudson, he can see well into New Jersey. The mirror in which he had glimpsed the trainers behind him was due to the angle of the sun, which has shifted. Its light in the glass now no longer gives off any reflection.

The televisions showing reports on the Terrorist situation fade on the latest update: Ten million computer screens now reading and retweeting: TERROR TERROR TERROR. Take it to two! The incline increases.

Jack would groan, but cannot afford the breath. His mind slips. He dreams while still sprinting: The wheels on the bus go round and round. x3. All through the town. The driver on the horn goes beep beep beep. x3. Ten teddybears in bed and the little one said, “Roll over. Roll over.” Nine teddybears in bed and the little one said… This is the house that Jack built. This is the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat that ate the poison that was baited in the house that Jack built. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone, but when she came there the cupboard was bare, and she said…

“Do you know why I am doing this, Jack,” Hopper interrupts the hero’s stream of consciousness with his audible voice. “You no doubt consider me the bad guy because I am this crazy bomber. But I’m trying to prove a point: that society is murderous. You can see that can’t you? Sure, I picked you out for this trial for a good reason. If you do pull through, you should be a better man for it, and go on to change the state of the world more effectively. If you don’t, well, then you never had the stamina, and you weren’t the man for it anyway. You hate me now because I am threatening your life. But if you survive you may come to love me one day in your memory for having tested your resolve, thus teaching you truly how, as you yourself have observed, ‘Fucked up and sick’ this whole thing is.”

“Bring the speed up to twenty-two,” some idiot tweets. The news cuts back to Crall. Jack, the correspondent, asks, “So Rudy, is it possible to run at twenty-two miles per hour?” “No, it is not. And if he is at an incline of two already – no way. It is impossible.”

Terrorist’s Twitter string no longer seems cool to his followers, nor their derivatives. Something new starts trending. Justin Bieber the paparazzi got whipping out his seventeen-year-old penis and pissing on the cop’s shoe who pulled him over in his Batmobile. Hopper applies his hand to the dial and slowly winds it down. The whir diminishes. The Techno on the headphones fades to silence.

Keanu at last stops running. The bomb, we see again inside the machinery, shuts off automatically. The hero utters, “nike.” Collapses.

The director in the control room signals with his hands like an orchestral conductor to one of his technicians: Logos. The Nike swoosh shows across the screen for the closing shot of the infofilm. The tagline, word by word, as it is whispered by a seductive female voice, appears as if out of thin air: Just… Do… It.