Days in the Undertow | 10
A videogame creator's vision comes to a close...Doug and Elaine just keep living their lives...
Introduction
Fall’s here! I’m excited. There’s so much packed into this issue that I can’t write much more without getting a word limit from Substack. Thanks for reading! ♡ Luke
Cheat Codes
Part 5, finale | Previous: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
🅑 🅒 🅑 🅒 DOWN DOWN UP UP
Guarantees Dona burn protection for up to 15 seconds. Effective in level 3, Glide Mountain, wherein Dona and Kel, on a tip from the defeated general at Cry Beach, must go to an active underwater volcano with lava rolling down its sides.
“Dona here would get burn protection. That’s especially helpful at the end of the level when she’s got to glide down this long stretch of lava river, fighting off Craboids the whole way. Sheila burned herself on candles all the time. The lava level had nothing to do with it, really, but the code did. Because at the time when she burned herself I remember thinking, wow, you need a protective shield around you at all times to prevent these mistakes from happening. She liked to look at the candles in the dark, stare at them for hours. Sometimes a friend would come over and they’d do that, look at these candles for long hours, until one of them flinched. I don’t know what it was. It was like they played this game of trying to find the candle flame in the other person’s eyes. I always guessed they were just high, and that’s why. But often it was sober and intentional. Anyways, she had all these big huge candles, tall candles. Ornate ones, too. And they were set up all over the coffee table, and friends would come over and sit across from her, staring at these things. And like hours of it. I guess one time she completely burned her arm. So we had to go to the hospital. I say ‘I guess’ because I was in another room when it happened, and she came running in crying, in pain. All down her arm, too. Not just a tiny burn. Like she’d run her arm through the fire.
When we came back from the hospital, you know, I tried to ask what she was doing. She shrugged is all I remember. She didn’t really have an answer. We sat around watching TV, and I helped her prop her wrapped arm up on a stack of books. I made sure she put on the ointments and stuff the doctor gave her, and that she replaced the wrapping. For a few days I wondered about it, like why. It’s not hard to avoid a candle flame. She would’ve had to have actually held it over the fire for a long time. And with her friend watching her. Like it was intentional. But then, looking back, I feel like everything Sheila did had that feeling about it. Of having purpose and intent, but done through this scrappy way of doing things. She was high or tipsy, or spacey, and it was in those times she did strange things that led her somewhere else. So roundabout, the way she did things. But somehow she got there. Every action, even if it somehow looked far away from purpose, could lead her right to what she wanted.
Probably half-year later, the wound looked better. A small scar down the arm, but that was about it. She got a tattoo around it, after that. It was this tattoo of a shore on either side of a river, and the scar was the river. It was clever, and looked really cool. Every once in a while I’d bring the subject up again, about the scar, how she got it. Easygoing about it, you know. Then one day I found a sketch notebook of hers and there was this drawing of what looked like a river system, the tattoo. In the river I could make out all the words, written like ripples of water. It was some kind of poem about flowing into another space. I asked her about the notebook. Newfound evidence, to me at least, that there were reasons for putting her arm through a flame. ‘Cause, you know, I was concerned. Was there something mentally that she was going through and needed to be addressed? She got angry and started yelling at me about random things, like I wasn’t doing the dishes, I wasn’t cleaning the apartment, I was working on the game way too late. A flood of things about our relationship, some true for sure, but not an exact moment for it. And like what did it have to do with me asking about this flame or burning her arm? That was where her portal idea came in.”
🅑 🅒 UP UP UP 🅐
Kel gains extra claw snap power when he’s called into an attack. All enemies on screen take damage of +10. Requires 10 seaweed, and an increase of 10 seaweed each time it’s used. Inspired by Sheila’s increased kid-like energy after consuming milkshakes, ice cream, or any other sweet treat.
UP 🅐 LEFT 🅑 DOWN 🅐 UP 🅑
Grants Dona ability to jump between levels. Only available after beating the game. Allows for players to do speed runs on their favorite levels, or relive their favorite boss encounters.
“I know speedrunners loved being able to go to levels and play specific ones over and over. I’m glad that happened. I wasn’t too creative when I came up with this feature. I just wanted people to play their favorite parts or boss fights over again. Sheila influenced this one. The whole candle and burning arm thing came from this. When we broke up, she admitted the candle thing. She’d heard of it from some dude out in Arizona, I don’t know. Some friend of a friend who was into the idea of portals. Not that you could actually go through one, but that you could alter your mind about things by doing these exercises. The idea was to make yourself feel like the whole world around you was moving past you, and that you were entering a new space, where everything from the past would fall away. Almost like this visualization of shedding skin, that you could get your mind beyond itself. Like a restructuring of the order of things as you saw them. One exercise was going through a series of doorways, like in your house or a long corridor or whatever. You had to find all these doorways to go through, and as you went through each you’d repeat these mantras to yourself. I can’t really remember what they were. She told me, but they’re something like, you know, ‘I am entering into a truth as I have never seen the truth,’ or like ‘The world is restored to the knowledge I once contained.’ Kind of random mumbo jumbo, honestly [LAUGHS]. But, one was this whole thing about staring at a candle flame. And if you stare long enough the idea was that the flame would burn away your sight, the sight of how you were seeing the world, replaced with that of new vision. Well, apparently Sheila got so into this new vision that she began to see the flame as harmless. That’s when she reached out and tried to put her hand through the fire that was burning away the old sight, and trying to put her whole body through, into the new thing. It wasn’t so much that she was trying to get out of our relationship, by changing the world around her. It was that she was trying to re-see our relationship, restore it to something fresher and newer. It didn’t work. It just made her realize she had to leave.
I guess between Sheila and Shae I was surrounded by a lot of people in tune with other places, other worlds of their own making. These kind of shaman people. It was why I was probably also attracted to videogames. Not to sound too ridiculous about it but a video game is about creating another world, and the creator is the shaman guiding you in how to interact with that other world, be a part of it in some way. And you’re there as a player, unlocking the secrets, enduring the obstructions and the evils to get to a conclusion, to go on a journey that was always about you moving through, being impressed upon, so that you come out the end another person entirely.”
—
From: Jacob Mitchell, Senior Editor, jacob.mit@vid.ya
To: Lara Flores, Features Editor, lara.flo@vid.ya
Subject: RE - Garner clusterfuck
Check the Slack for deets. About to take-off and couldn’t access it? Plane wifi sucks. Was this Danny’s ‘fuck you’ before quitting? How did he accidentally post the rough piecing? Either way, he’s gone. Still, WTF Danny! It’s a complete debacle. Garner goes off for way too long on subjects no one cares about! I mean, talk about the king of tangents. Which is fine, though. I shouldn’t complain. Sometimes people are so tight-lipped when you interview them. That’s why they have us to finetune and chisel it down to a story. Also I was thinking maybe Danny pulled from the wrong file? I thought we had a tighter interview, but then Sandra said someone was still working on it? Obvi when you post anything you should check the shit before it goes live. It’s like he copied and pasted blind!! I had Trevor take it off the site almost immediately. I trust you and Charles to go through and make this incoherent wreck into a normal cohesive interview. I also want you to find what the hell happened to the supposed original file someone was working on. I mean we live in the cloud, people. Stuff doesn’t disappear like that.
I think it’s great that Garner ties the codes to his relationship. But we can do without the little stories and asides. Take out all the Shae stuff or his spiritual visions in the lake, whatever that was. He gets a little woo at times. Not that it matters to me personally. But VID-YA isn’t a spiritual magazine. It’s a video game magazine, and the digital arts are completely devoid of spirituality. I know, Jenny says I’m shallow AF. But this is an e-mag for consumers of videogames. We’re not peddling snake oil or spiritual gurus. Videogames are videogames. It’s entertainment. The average gamer isn’t philosophizing. Is the average anyone ever philosophizing about their lives? Sure, a certain percentage of people. But, come on, who has the time?
Also, clean up the order of this thing. He jumps around a lot from level to level. I think we should be organizing by the levels, not by the chronology of his memory, which is scattered and off-kilter. Frankly, I’m not even sure of the through-line for most of it. He’s just a scatterbrain videogame developer. (Have you ever played his new smartphone games? They’re like genius ADHD games, constantly going everywhere, but at the end of it, you’re like, I had fun but what happened lol.)
I have some questions about what was going on with him and Sheila. The interview doesn’t give us enough sense of the drive here for their break-up. He tends more toward theorizing and abstractions, and a lot of psychobabble. Again, it’s the overthinking and overspiritualizing for Garner. What were the crucial hinge points upon which their relationship broke apart? We don’t get the “big fight” or the “cheating” or some kind of high drama. It might not be in what he’s saying, though. You’ll have to have your intuition handy and stretch the quotes to get something more substantial. We get a lot of mentally unhealthy asides, frankly. The whole sticking her arm through a candle flame and burning herself—intense, yikes! And kind of shocking in a way that makes me think was there a deep chasm of unhealthy in this relationship? With her, or him? I’d edit all that out. It’s compelling, yes, but we’re also not a gossip tabloid or a tell-all secrets kind of publication. Gamers just want to know about an old cult classic. They don’t need Garner’s every private domestic affair. Frankly, why the hell did he even say that? Or is he lying? Maybe he put her arm through the flame? I’m not really sure. And Sheila will probably never read this to know if he’s lying about any of this or not. Either way, don’t put it in.
There’s a lot more I could say, but this plane’s about to take off. When I land, six hours from now, I’m hoping you and Charles can get to the bottom of it. I don’t think it should have ever left his hands, anyways. And why did we have two interviewers for this?
Later skater,
Jake
—
VID.YA Private Slack
Direct Message
@lara to @charles
Lara Flores
Jake wants us to comb the garner thing
Charles Miller
sigh...of course. like he can’t do one thing this week to help? in a landslide here. way too much on my plate, his vacay can wait
Lara Flores
I get ya. But we gotta. Or he’ll chew me out. Remember that shit w/ XBox piece last year? He put me on straight interview duty for 3 months. I don’t think I touched one page of editing.
Charles Miller
yeah i did your job lol Pure hell, btw.
Lara Flores
My Advice as your sage boss: stay where you’re at. A career at Vid is pure prison the higher up you are. The pressure gets to you.
Charles Miller
but you make more bank than i do, so there’s that
Lara Flores
lolololol I’m DED...srsly bank, wtf. I’m better being a lyft driver probs. Also, how was Garner? only saw the pics I got from the freelancer. (Sidenote: Why was Jenny with you on the interview? We don’t need two people for that. At least, it was in town. You and Jenny on the date date?)
Charles Miller
yeah, seemed chill enough...had like some weird facial expression (omg not dating at all, not my type, and i don’t mix biz with plez)
Lara Flores
Facial? (k fair enough)
Charles Miller
idk just looked confused to be there
Lara Flores
But it was his house?!
Charles Miller
lol duh i know, it was this house on this backstreet
Lara Flores
so? How does that make it weird?
Charles Miller
it was rundown and shit, not knocking him if he can’t afford shit, just that it’s in middle of san fran, it stood out. yeah, the whole facial thing got to me, kinda squinting up at ceiling, then down at his feet, his legs always shaking, super nervous, constantly scratching this old burn scar up and down his arm. looked uneasy. nice enough but looked idk unsettled i guess is the best way to say it
Lara Flores
Like he was lying?
Charles Miller
yeah, i guess that’s it. keep it DL. i don’t need jake scrapping everything cuz of this
Lara Flores
Okay, first off, I’d never tell Jake that, even if it’s true. Second, it’s not like it matters. We’re not going to put in the juicy parts. We’re just focusing on a few basics. I’m thinking, let’s use a few of his quotes, but write interjections and our own analysis btwn each code. We got notes here on this draft, but I want full-blown just good writing and analysis. I think we can work with what we got and stretch it, and bring out a little drama from the relationship stuff. Sidenote on Jake: even if Garner was lying and Jake SOMEHOW found out, which he won’t, Jake would just be like fuck it we’re gonna do it anyway. And besides, it’s a feeling right? It’s not like we would know as a mag that he was lying. And lying about what? Everyone stretches the truth.
Charles Miller
you know how we even got on this premise of Garner and the cheat code thing?
Lara Flores
Isn’t it Sandra’s favorite game? A cult classic.
Charles Miller
right, her pitch at a meeting. what’s weird is how anyone knows those cheat codes. my thing with it is like, ok, got these cheat codes, they’re all pretty hard to remember, and like have they ever been published before? sandra just liked the game, if you recall, but she didn’t know about the cheat codes...we got them from garner himself at the interview
Lara Flores
Okay, outside of Garner I mean I think people would know, wouldn’t they? How are we gonna do a story on cheat codes for an old ass game if there wasn’t some record of it somewhere? Like an old EGM magazine or whatever was around in ‘94. How would players have used them?
Charles Miller
exactly my point...but like i’ve been looking and I just don’t know…
Lara Flores
Well dummy, just play the game and enter in the cheat codes! Download an emulator.
Charles Miller
i tried that.
Lara Flores
and?...........
Charles Miller
i couldn’t get anything to work worth shit
Lara Flores
So maybe it was workable on cartridge only, or maybe it was just an early batch of the game that worked, like early code and no one has the ROM for it...this game is pretty rare, you know?
Charles Miller
or straight up the codes aren’t real
Lara Flores
But they work on his smartphone games, some of them, right?
Charles Miller
yeah yeah, but that doesn’t mean they’re in the original game...he coulda just added them all in recently and then said oh yeah these are from the old game, and here’s this story about how i made them
Lara Flores
Ok, now you’re just being conspiratorial.
Charles Miller
but like look, he’s talking about making puzzles, authenticity, all this stuff is like in the quotes, then it’s like he’s looking like a liar the minute were grilling him on these codes...he had to write them out “from memory” as we were interviewing him...couldn’t find his original paper work...so he hands me at the end this janky ass scrap piece with fucking doodles of the codes, then i had to mark them based on what he pointed to, so like certain codes might not even correspond to what he’s saying...it’s possible i mixed them up…but i def doublechecked with him several times, srsly...the whole reason i’m being xfiles on you right now is like i wanted to doublecheck again on the codes, so i was like ok lemme look up this shit just to doublecheck them, and that’s when i couldn’t find anything in the backlog
Lara Flores
And you searched everywhere?
Charles Miller
all the pubs from that time
Lara Flores
Well, we did our best, so we’re rolling with what we have. If you can’t confirm it, then the readers aren’t going to be able to either. Which means no one can prove or disprove anything about what Garner was saying.
Charles Miller
truth
Lara Flores
You think he’d have all the original paperwork, though. It’d have been nice to take pictures of that stuff.
Charles Miller
Ok so he had a small manila folder of a few sheets and scraps of game code and drawings, which we def got...that’s it...his whole house, yeah it was junky but it looked cleaned out, like either he gave all his stuff away, was moving, or got robbed, idk…it was cringe, like just living in an empty house...when Jenny and me interviewed him i had to sit on a towel on his floor...
Lara Flores
Wow this interview just keeps getting more interesting. Now I can’t tell if you’re lying or not.
Charles Miller
Lol, wouldn’t play that joke on you. i’m telling you TRUTH.
Lara Flores
uh-huh and you’re not dating Jenny
Charles Miller
dude for real, no ▨
The Timeline of Doug and Elaine
Part 4 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Age 33 - 2018 - Elaine, resting for a moment, finds herself scrolling her phone to look at pictures from her Mexico trip last year. There’s the ones in Mexico City outside of a brown dusty plaza with birds waddling on a terra cotta roof, and a child in the background with their tongue half out their mouth, smiling, in the act of frightening the ones not on the roof upward, their arms and hands in the air, mimicking zombies and monsters. As if the child has just seen a horror movie and wants to act it out. She scrolls again. There’s the selfies with her best friend, Katie, who went through a divorce a few years ago and now dates a financial advisor who works for Charles Schwab. She comes upon the desert photos, ten or so rows of them on her phone. A lot here. Constant efforts of catching the light, but the camera has no feeling. Can she really blame the technology, though? Is it the camera or because she’s lost what it takes to capture a thing of beauty? Or, worse, because she doesn’t know if what she captures is beautiful or not. Is it a new lack of skill or taste, or both? What matters is that she enjoys the photos. Enough of the self-critique. She did oil paintings in college. She was talented at perspective, her whole thesis well regarded. She could’ve gotten a masters if she wanted to. But her parents told her they wouldn’t pay for it. Too much money on a thing with little opportunity. And she wasn’t going to pay for it. So she got other jobs. And you take your art with you into other things, even if the core of it changes. There’s still those flairs of creative liberty in dullest tasks.
The beach photos, the next in the scroll, she tends to look at the most. The water’s clarity reaches out to her. Despite it being almost a year, she still thinks about that water and how it had no reflection, was more like glass through which she saw the underwater world, and because it had no reflection it meant that this underwater world had nothing of herself in it, her mind clearing. Just then, the rattle of dishes behind her, a whole metal tray falls over, and with it a stack of plates, bowls, and silverware sitting encased in the silvery lid. She jolts into reality, on site at a large political gathering her company is catering in D.C. It’s not often she manages the daily operations and tasks of an event itself. Since she’s over a division, there’s managers to handle each of the events. But this one is big, and has needed more than several catering teams (her contribution to make them into teams) to coordinate, and a legion of government security people and bureaucratic red tape to ensure everyone on staff is who they say they are. Someone must have bumped the tray because no one’s surrounding it. She locates some of her staff, in their white shirts and bow ties, and gets them on the job cleaning it up and replacing the broken dishware. They’re good people, but she’ll find them hanging around aimlessly sometimes, and she wonders how they’ll get beyond this job, move up in the company, achieve anything without that spark underneath them. They’re hard workers when they absolutely have to be, which is why she’s willing to let things slide.
It’s still a couple hours until everyone arrives. The table cloths are set, the plates and silverware for the first course, the champagne, wine, and water glasses sparkling in the light that comes through the tall windows where the long red curtains have been pulled back. In the venue’s kitchen, the catering chefs have been prepping and cooking since morning. Sitting in the kitchen’s two large water tanks are lobsters piled atop each other, crawling across each other’s shells, the rubber bands on their claws are of bright and brilliant colors that seem out of place in the murky water that swooshes around them. She focuses closer on the kitchen. Everywhere the sound of boiling water, the whispers of flames, the strike of chopping. Talk back and forth. Commands issued by the head chef. Laughter, too. The cooks are their own team, have their own pride and solidarity that she has never managed or finagled. All the while, masses of lobsters in front of their very death squads, unknowing of their final destination and how soon it approaches. How they lumber over each other, their own sort of team, part of this grand process of catering, from water to heat to table to eat. Almost has a cauldron spell ring to it. Water to heat to table to eat. Her armpits dampen. The kitchen blazes. The chef’s hats are wet with a ring of sweat. An oven is half open and waves of heat are coming out of it as someone shoves flat trays of vegetables onto the racks. She turns from the kitchen, out in the corridor now, walking toward the front of the house, almost automatic. Someone’s calling her name, she realizes. And this is why she moves so fast, fleeing from the kitchen where the heat reminds her of the beach.
A head waiter fumbles his hands in front of him. As she approaches, he lifts a finger trying to get her attention and points towards something in the foyer. Scuffling can be heard. Two government men, in their pristine suits, attempt to block and hold back a man in a fatigue jacket pointing and yelling over them something of protest. She can’t make it out. Pure garble. The man points at random into the hall, pointing everywhere, his finger landing on her where it stays. He’s found his focus. He keeps shouting what he’s shouting like she’s the one at fault for whatever wrongdoings or corruption he rails against. The men push him past the revolving doors, out onto the street. They both stand, two large broad walls, all shoulders and back from her view. One is on their walkie-talkie. Not thirty seconds go by before two police show up, lights and sirens blasting. They zip-tie his hands and put him in the back of one of the cars. The head waiter asks if there’s going to be anymore protesting tonight. She shrugs. No idea. They’re here to cater, not decipher politics or the disdain for it. She asks him if all the tableware is set. Of course it is. She walks into the Grand Room, the set tables everywhere, the flowers arranged at center. She sits down at one of the front stage tables where several important politicians, often seen on the news and even one of whom ran for president, will be sitting. She scrolls through the beach pictures again, zooms in on a pink coral, the yellow-striped tropical fish. Notices the most obvious of factors, well after she’s taken it, that her shadow is a graying filter, decolorizing the vibrancy.
Back in the kitchen three lobsters stack on top of each other, almost perfectly, as if they’re trying to make an escape for it, helping each other up the side of the tank. She looks around. The chefs have gone out for smokes, their usual ritual right before they begin the final large courses. No one is looking when she rolls up her sleeves and puts her hands all the way up to her elbows into the tank water, lifting lobsters at random, feeling their undersides, playing with their claws and legs, moving her palms down their ribbed tails. She manages to put a finger between one of the banded claws, almost daring for it to clamp down. The lobsters react in the way lobsters would—without much enthusiasm, but a spunk in their scurry. She lifts one out of the water, almost tempted to touch its eyes, yank on its antennae, rip out its legs, crank off the claws. She’ll be able to do that later, she thinks, to crush and mangle everything once it’s dead.
Dougie’s taken to the attic. It’s a little larger than a crawl space attic, the kind you can half stand in and walk around crouched, feet on the beams, careful not to touch the pink fluffy insulation. Like a game of lava when he was a kid, but here there’s not much play. Your foot goes through the insulation and that means it’s breaking through the ceiling into the house. He solves this issue by cutting one-and-a-half foot width strips of plywood panels and bringing them up through the attic access, little bigger than the width and length of the plastic storage containers his family keeps there. He screws these down to the two-by-fours running widthwise, so that he’s made a floor running half of the attic, intent on covering the entirety. The heat stifles up here, and so he runs three box fans across the attic that help blow the heat out through the vents on either side. He’s taken apart a reclining armchair and lifted it up, piece by piece, and reassembled it. Since the attic is an A-shaped roof, he sets up the armchair right in the attic’s center length so that his upper body and head perfectly fit. Around him he keeps a mini cooler of snacks, beer, and seltzers. He has a laptop so he can watch movies and shows. He tends to rock there in the silence and the darkness around him. Behind the chair, he’s moved all of the family’s plastic containers, cardboard boxes, the plastic Christmas tree and shoved them into the corner. Except for one box at a time. He sits in the chair staring into darkness with a box next to him. With one hand he undoes the cardboard’s interlocked flaps, shoves his hand in like a magician going into his hat, pulls out whatever object he first feels. He can’t see any of the objects unless he turns on the LED lamp he’s hung from the ceiling. But he doesn’t want to turn on the lamp. Feeling is enough. He can’t tell what most of the objects are. Squares and rectangles. Sharp points. Little wooden boxes or picture frames. One or two rounded things that he assumes are something from his father’s office desk where a collection of paperweights and bobbleheads once stood. Just exteriors, nothing of a thing’s interiority, where the memories are held. It’s what he imagines about his memories, that they’re inside an object, or at least a piece of them, and it takes the object, the little bit inside of it, for something to erupt inside himself. The dark cleanses. After he’s done with one box, the items lay in a pile to his left. He picks them up, careful not to deeply feel them again, an almost medical deftness to his hands and fingers as he speedily relays them back to the box, folds up the flaps and pushes the box to the outer wall with the other finished boxes. Pulls the next one up, repeats the process.
During the day, his mother and father make house noises on the first floor below him. He can tell where they are depending on what floorboards creak. The kitchen’s entryway, if stepped on, makes a long loud sound when pressed the right way. His father’s big flat foot rolls across the top of it slow and steady, almost like he wants to make the sound. The bedrooms’ entries all have their own sounds. His mother goes between each, cleaning, being a busybody arranging the rooms, and each time she passes from one to another it’s like notes on a strange instrument. The steps leading into the basement have their own voices, groans and squeaks all the way down. He sits in the middle of a stifling summer day, allowing the wash of sounds and the heat as it blows across him from the fans, closes his eyes, sweating, sauna-like, down to his underwear, big Igloo jug of water next to him, the armchair soaked through. He eats little, enough to sustain him. He’s barely moving, so a piece of fruit, a few ruffles of salad, a slice of bologna. The fans blow. Sometimes he turns them off and the heat expands, the sweat being more like a sheet of water running down his face, his arms, like being under a waterfall. It’s in these moments he finds the smallest gift, the wind coming through the vents on either side picks up enough to blow up into the attic. It’s so small it’s almost imperceptible, except for if you were to sit very still and feel it. The stillness is what he’s become. His senses are open, aware of the slightest and most intricate of atmospheric changes. He cannot think. Just the dim changing of light around him, as the sun’s movement makes its way across the sky. Then the night when it is pitch black, and the cicadas vibrate their wings in the trees. And every night he imagines he is a cicada waiting in the ground for years until his time to come out of the ground and fly. And for what to fly to? And for how long?
He hears a knock at the house door, a familiar rhythm to it. The same knock he remembered from when he was a kid and his friend Chris wanted him to play, the two knocks, a pause, then four more. His mother answers the door, her voice mumbly up through the insulation, but the inflection goes high, excitement in its registers. He hears the other speaker who’s just arrived, a bassy reedy voice. Chris’ knock has been the same forever, though his voice has grown deeper as he’s aged, more raspy. The smoking probably. He always did hope it’d give him an edge with the ladies. Doug’s not so sure that’s the case anymore, what with the smell and the yellowing of teeth, and the trending health crazes. He must stop thinking. Listen only. Water falling over rock. Rock does not react. Rock allows water’s force. And force applied is force received and sent off. Freedom that transcends movement. Chris seems to be at the door for a long time, talking and talking. Then his mother’s footsteps waddle up the stairs down the hall. The door is still open, he thinks, Chris stands there. His mother yells to him that Chris is here. His ears pound. Her voice, as if next to him. Yes, yes. Chris is here. Great. He never did get out of this town, did he? He tells her he’ll get back to him, he’s not coming down today. When he says it he realizes his voice is raspy much like Chris’s is, but this is from up in the attic, not talking for days on end.
He’s not sure the number of days. No watch, no phone. Food, water, the chair. The fans blow like he’s in a wind tunnel, or getting sucked up into a jet engine. He’s counted time by the light through the vents passing across the head of a nail sticking out of a roof beam. How many nail passes has it been? Four or five? He descends only to go to the bathroom, but factoring in what he’s eaten and the amount of drinking, he can almost time his bathroom breaks to specific windows of time. Ideally times when his parents aren’t paying attention or not around. But even that has mattered less. When you empty yourself of everything, the world itself seems to become also a shadow or a hologram, something you can stick your hand through and wave around a lot. If you are not in touch with the world, then the world is not in touch with you. A rift develops, so that when you stick your hand through into the space where you think the world is it is only the separation you are touching, the mere reflection exists, the ghost trails of a world moving on.
Smells start to waft in the attic. Something pungent and sour. He scours the attic, looking everywhere for where the smell is. He can’t find it. Dead squirrel or mouse stuck God knows where. He attempts his routines. He attempts ignorance. He attempts emptying. And for a while just like it always was. But his nostrils sting, burning in his eyes. The heat beating on the roof baking whatever the smell is. His parents seem impervious, or they don’t care, or their nostrils are old and tired, if that’s even how nostrils work. It gets bad enough he must descend, and upon descending his mother greets him with a meal being prepared and his favorite soda, Mr. Pibb, like he’s come home from college all those years back and they can’t wait to see him. He asks if they can smell it, but they don’t know what he’s talking about. He waits for the roast to be done, sitting at the kitchen table. The smell disappears. The roast taking over. It comes out hot and steaming. Eats it, drinks his Pibb. Afterwards, he naps. He wakes up and gets a shower. He considers shaving his beard entirely. Rather shaves around it, tightens it up.
Days later, he’s at Chris’s house, which he’s taken over from his parents who’ve moved to Florida. Chris has kept the place as much the same as he can, down to the old sofa they used to romp around at kid sleepovers. The TV’s different. It’s a wide flat screen. But the stand it sits on is still the same one, still chipped and cracked along the corner from that time Dennis, Chris’s younger brother, ran into the room with his junior league football gear still on, one of the pads hitting the perfect angle against the side, tackling Chris into the old recliner that tipped back and scraped the wall. The recliner where it was, sitting on the carpet as it had been, neatly locked into its divots. Stained and crumby, the recliner and the carpet. The place isn’t a total dirt slop. Chris tries, it looks like. The walls have been recently painted, though poorly, the cut-in work was slopped onto the baseboard in some parts, unable to keep a straight line. But otherwise everything feels all right. But maybe that’s because it’s comfortable. He knows this place. Spent too many hours on this couch playing videogames, eating cheese curls and drinking orange soda, talking about girls they had crushes on. Then Doug went to college and Chris stayed here, got a job working in construction, knows how to make things almost without thinking. Doug remembers some scant lessons from woodshop, how to hammer and nail, cut and saw, the pure basics. But Chris can do anything. They catch up as best they can. Chris has been dating around, works, sleeps, goes hiking and camping on the weekends, every few seasons he gets the urge to hunt with some friends, an old activity he and his dad used to do. Other than that it’s taking care of the house. He’s been stacking money since it’s his parent’s house and the mortgage is paid off. And since he can do a lot of work on his own he doesn’t have to hire contractors. They talk for a little while. Doug tells him about what’s going on. Chris hands him a sympathy beer and they take several sympathy shots of whiskey. Then it’s videogames like they used to. But now the games are slick and shiny new, everything realistic. Hours pass. The minutes wear away. Beer cans stacked neatly in front of them, creating a castle. They don’t talk for a long time, their heads swirling, woozy, minds empty, gone.
Late at night by now. Chris is gonna call off work. Tell his boss he’s sick. And anyways, his boss owes him. They’d pulled several twelve hours the week before and his boss said he could take the time whenever. Doug has nowhere to be. He texts his mom drunkenly that he’s spending the night at Chris’s, they’re catching up. The autocorrect makes him look sober. Kind of. They keep playing. It’s two, three a.m. The game blares through the sound system Chris has. Aside from the TV, that’s the only objects that seem new and nearly dustless in the place. Chris starts yelling over a big explosion, telling him he’s building this thing out back, kind of feeling it out, how he’s going to make it. He says it started in the workshed but now he’s making it in the yard. Would he want to see it? Doug has nothing else to do. Sure, why not. They lay down the controllers, the game winding into playerless disarray, as they head out back. Chris connects two extension cords together. Christmas lights in rows and lines cross the yard and end dangling in messy balls from an old maple. Several wooden two-by-fours have been cut down into different lengths and their ends cut at precise angles, so all the pieces fit perfectly together. Holding up the pyramid are vertical PVC pipes slotted into PVC bases. At the top of each vertical pipe is a cross pipe that holds the sides of the pyramid, what would otherwise be its base if it were flipped over. It’s not an intricate piece. Just a base and then from the four corners descend wood that meets at a point at the center-bottom. In between each of these four corners form the pyramid’s sides and are filled with a few cross pieces to provide structure. Doug walks around it, looks up at Chris, asks him what it is. He shrugs. No idea. He had extra scrap, shit from construction sites. One day he’d been told to haul it in his truck over to the dump. Some of the stuff was decent, though. A few nice pieces of lumber or an old door he’d salvage and make new again. Every time he’s been to the dump since he collects the good stuff and throws it in his shed. Got to be so much he started building something with it. Doug thinks about it. Tells him he’d like to help if he could. Chris loves the idea. Just another reason to drink beer together. ▨
Coming Up…
Next Release: October 28
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