Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man by Maynard Wills

Author:Maynard Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/Simon Element
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

DR. MAYNARD WILLS: THE VOYAGE OF PETER GILLIAM

Something terrible has happened. My enthusiasm for this material has transferred to another, and I worry I have destroyed a brilliant man. For weeks now, Dr. Gilliam and I have exchanged ideas over email. He was both fascinated and terrified by Video Palace. I even shared early drafts of the personal stories collected in these pages.

But ultimately, he couldn’t heed his own advice. When he wrote to me, “I beg you to be cautious, though, as we really cannot conceive what lurks on the other side of the dimensional wall,” the man was talking to himself as much as he was warning me.

At his advanced age, Peter feared he’d die before he’d solved the scientific mysteries that have spun around in his great mind for decades. After listening to Video Palace (on my recommendation), he wanted to understand what had really happened to Mark Cambria. And the only way to do that, Gilliam decided, was to replicate Cambria’s experience. Though I warned him against it, my new friend searched for and found a wealthy collector of esoterica, who lives deep in the Hollywood Hills. The man claimed to possess a White Tape that originated in the late 1970s. He offered Peter the chance to own it for a tidy sum: $100,000. Unmarried and with no heirs, he took out a loan against his home and made this shadowy deal.

When he received the tape he was as exuberant as I was concerned, but his missives quickly shifted in tone. He became despondent. The White Tape did indeed seem authentic in both its age and its content, but it didn’t have any effect on Peter. He watched it for hours and hours, making himself the subject of his own dangerous experiment. He recorded his sleep with the same app Mark Cambria used. Nothing. No Os. No Tas. No Ketas.

After a week of this, he seemed ready to crack. I spent hours on the phone with him, hypothesizing as to why some are susceptible to these tapes and others are not. We looked to Cambria’s story. We looked to the stories we’d received for this book, and our best guess is that Dr. Peter Gilliam doesn’t have any kind of compulsive, perverse, addictive or otherwise unhealthy relationship with media and its consumption. The man still listens to radio plays! We wondered, was it possible that this Eyeless Man myth was the result of some kind of shared neurobiological response to overstimulation? My interest at this time was still the origin story of the Eyeless Man, and I believed it was a worthy idea to pursue. Gilliam, however, was inconsolable. Our conversations deteriorated. The poor man wept incessantly. And then he stopped picking up the phone, and I stopped calling.

After our last conversation, he sent me an email with an attached audio file. The email and a transcription of the audio file are provided here:

Dear Maynard,

I know our friendship is new, but I want to express my appreciation for your patience and loyalty these last several weeks.

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