Here. Is There. Where you are not.

“Here. Is There. Where you are not.” is a repeated expression in Tommy’s struggle to endure a dark room where a corpse is moving close by. First recalled in fragments, the words become a kind of mental refuge: Tommy tries to make the threatening presence exist only as sound and to place himself outside the scene. The phrase’s later change from “you” to “I” marks how precarious that separation is.

Recollection and Form

The expression emerges through an unstable act of remembering. Tommy’s thoughts briefly turn to an animated elephant and a performance by Magnus, Brasse, and Eva, who enter and sing, “There! Is Here! Where you are not…” He cannot settle on how the words went. The phrase that follows—“Here. Is There. Where you are not.”—is therefore not introduced as a complete, confidently recalled lyric. Its clipped syntax and inverted order retain the hesitancy of someone trying to recover words while under immediate pressure.

That broken recollection matters because Tommy is not calmly remembering a song in safety. He has shuffled backward to a wall while the corpse moves through the room, knocking into boxes and sending stereo equipment rattling to the floor. Tommy hits his head and sees static; through the noise, he hears stiff bare feet searching. Against those immediate sounds, the remembered sequence offers a competing pattern for his attention. The expression does not stop the danger or explain it. It gives him words to hold onto while he cannot see what is approaching.

Sound as a Temporary Refuge

Tommy repeats the phrase as he fixes his gaze on the black mesh of a speaker. He imagines that he is not there: he cannot see himself or the thing making the noise, so, in his effort to frame the experience, there is only something to listen to. He calls it something that does not even exist. This is not a reliable description of the room—the corpse is physically present and searching—but a momentary way of narrowing what he can bear to register. The threatening body is displaced into sound, while the phrase supplies a boundary between the place where the danger is and the place where Tommy tries to imagine himself.

The repetition makes that attempt both more forceful and more fragile. “Here. Is There. Where you are not.” returns after Tommy has made this inward separation, as if saying it again might preserve the division. Yet the expression does not become a spoken spell or a successful escape: he almost sings aloud, then a remaining sensible part of his consciousness stops him. The words occupy a narrow space between memory and action, private enough to offer concentration, but close to breaking into a sound that could reveal him.

From “You” to “I”

When the phrase returns again, its final words have changed: “Here. Is There. Where I am not.” The shift replaces an absent “you” with Tommy himself. Earlier, the wording could place an unspecified other outside the here; now Tommy tries to put his own presence elsewhere. The revision makes the expression feel less like a recovered line and more like an improvised account of his effort to disappear from the encounter. It also shows the limit of that effort: the sentence must name Tommy’s absence precisely while his body remains in the room.

That separation is challenged by physical contact. A toenail pokes his cheek, and nausea follows when he recognizes what has touched him. He rolls away before the hands can grope for him in the same place. The contrast between the expression’s imagined distance and the corpse’s touch brings the room back with brutal immediacy. Tommy’s inward withdrawal does not make him safe; it briefly organizes his attention while he searches the floor for a possible advantage in the darkness.

Repetition Under Pressure

The words recur amid Tommy’s involuntary laughter or crying, his hoarse throat, and his hands feeling across the floor for the lighter. His thoughts turn into a desperate prayer for help and for the ability to find it. In this sequence, the phrase belongs to a strained attempt to keep hold of some mental order while fear overwhelms ordinary speech. He nearly sings, cannot control his laughter, and continues searching; recollection, bodily reaction, prayer, and action press against one another rather than forming a calm retreat.

The expression’s significance rests in that tension. Its repeated “here” and “there” appear to promise a division between Tommy and what threatens him, but the changing pronoun exposes how little control he has over that division. The corpse remains close, and his escape into sound and words can only be temporary. The phrase does not resolve the danger; it gives shape to Tommy’s effort to endure it, until a sudden blue-white flash briefly illuminates the fallen boxes, the uneven walls, and the passage into the storage rooms.