The filmmaker, who died in January, showed us what our world was becoming, and how we should respond. In the summer, the actress Natasha Lyonne relayed an anecdote about the late director David Lynch, in which he told her that A.I. in the creative arts would soon be as ubiquitous and indispensable as the pencil. Lyonne, who happens to be the co-founder of an A.I. studio, seemed to be implying that the revered filmmaker had offered his approval to the same nihilistic and destructive technology that recently enabled President Donald Trump to imagine himself as a king in a fighter jet dropping payloads of diarrhea on the people he's sworn to serve. In an interview with magazine in November, 2024, he said that, on the one hand, "the good side" of A.I. could be "important for moving forward in a beautiful way," and, on the other, "if money is the bottom line, there'd be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror." He added, "I'm hoping better times are coming." In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema.

On January 20th, while the world's attention was focussed on the Inauguration, David Lynch quietly turned seventy-five. He spent the day the way he's spent almost every day since the pandemic began: sheltered in his Los Angeles home, engaged with self-prescribed daily routines. "If you have a habit pattern," Lynch told me, over Zoom, "the more conscious part of your mind can concentrate on your work, and you can get ideas and do those things, and the rest sort of takes care of itself in the background." It sounded practical and wholesome, until Lynch related an example: a "famous criminal case" that he'd heard about, involving a man who hacked up his parents with an axe. The mother was killed in the act, but, Lynch said, "the father didn't die right away. He was wounded terribly, in the head, but, in the morning, when it was his time normally to wake up, covered in blood he got out of bed--he didn't even notice that his wife was dead right next to him--he just woke up and made his way down to do his habitual program. . . . Fixed breakfast, but he spilled his cereal all over the place. He made coffee, he made a mess of everything, but he knew the habits, he knew the routine. He went to get his paper, like he does every morning, and he came in with the paper and just bled out, right there in the foyer, and that was the end of him."

The Oldest House is a maze of concrete and paperwork. It's a building full of secrets, stuffed top to bottom with government bureaucrats, some of whom are now host to an interdimensional plague. The Oldest House is an office building in the heart of New York City, but it's also a portal to everywhere and all the spaces between. It's a place where office drones file paperwork. It's a place where the U.S. government researches the "paranatural."