Days in the Undertow | 7
cheat codes just keep leading somewhere...a family man on the search for an old woman...and the timeline of a life that's getting a little bit weirder
Introduction
Hey y’all, thanks for reading. Summer’s upon us. Drink some water, stay cool. I’ll be winding down some serial stuff next month and switching it up with some other things. Always something different and new for you to explore. As the issues build I’m hoping those who don’t want the serial format will have plenty of things to read in the backlog that will be officially donezo. I’m getting there. Thanks again for your attention and dedication to reading this newsletter. It always means a lot. ♡ Luke
Cheat Codes
Part 3 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1, Part 2
In a recent interview for VID-YA, game developer Richard Garner, now in his fifties, revealed and explained the long list of cheat codes he had put into his ‘90s Sega Genesis cult classic, Dive City, largely related to his relationship at the time.
RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT 🅑 🅐 UP DOWN
Only usable in Level One, Dona’s Chambers. Grants psychic ability plus 3 for the rest of the game. The code must be implemented as Dona is sleeping in her bed, before the dream cutscene, given to her by Sonor, portraying Dive City’s potential destruction.
“It’s just the boost that Dona needs. She’s been working as a food harvester for Dive City, kind of lost in her own thing, not doing much. Then all of a sudden Sonor, the freakin’ god of the sea, comes to her with a vision about the destruction of Dive City. That whole first level is just a dream, and her trying to rescue people. I thought it’d be nice to include this psychic ability. I should’ve awarded it in the dream itself somehow, but it was too late after the fact. So a cheat code sufficed. Really it’s the dream that actually gives her courage, actually boosts her into a bigger role, gives her some kind of destiny and purpose. Sheila, in fact, had dreams that made her feel bigger and bolder for a few days. She’d wake up sometimes and feel energized from them, like a secret mission being whispered to her throughout the night. Not just good sleep energy, but a motivational dream. Once she had a dream of an old friend. That led to her calling that friend and patching up a relationship. Stuff like that. Or there was the one where she dreamt she fell off a tall building into a sea of jelly. She ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for three days after that one [LAUGHTER] because she was convinced that’s what the dream said. Or, really, what she thought it was implying. She used to tell me that if you didn’t do what a dream said then you were betraying something deep inside yourself clawing to get out. You weren’t your full self until you lived out what your dreams wanted. It wasn’t the worst idea. She always did live positively, despite some strange and dark incidents throughout the years.
I was the cynical sour one, of course. I don’t think everything crawling around inside of us really needs to be followed. And some of the stuff we’re letting out in dreams is either garbage data or dangers to ourselves created by ourselves. We have forces of self-destruction in us, and I think we need to be aware of those. With Dona, though, I split the difference. Her dream is dangerous, dangerous that she’s seeing such destruction. But on the other hand she didn’t choose to let it consume her. And in the midst of the dream her interior is already figuring out a way to fight against it. It’s what the whole level is about as you go around the destruction, saving people. She’s chosen to follow the dream to fight against what it prophecies. This is her destiny, to be a hero. That has another edge, though. Because the whole time she’s struggling asking is this actually who she is? Is this really what she’s been given to do?
The given purpose, the destiny we think we’ve been given, be it real or imagined, can so easily compel us to instability. We’re always pushing and pulling against it. It is a challenge for us to live into a new thing, because there’s so much risk it might not be our destiny in the end. And yet, there’s a drive to see it through, to have no regrets, to know at the end of everything that we’ve tried. And what if at the end it was never the life we intended? And does the intention of living in a certain way really negate the life we did lead? Is everything ever really on its mark? It’s a question of authenticity I’ve had for a long time. What is the authentic life? And does that even matter? And yeah, ‘destiny’ is a grandiose word. But apply the same principle to the choices of our everyday lives. I guess maybe we’re all struggling for stability in the end.”
DOWN (x5) 🅒 DOWN (x5)
Dona fakes being dead, her character lying down. 5 second duration. Draws all enemies on screen within close range, and allows for an energy blast upon her waking. Inspired by Sheila’s constant death fakes, lying in bed, forcing Ronald to shake her multiple times before suddenly she’d shoot up to surprise him and pull him down to her.
🅐 🅑 🅐 🅑 🅒 🅑 🅐 UP UP
Generates Inner Light. Gives Dona greater psychic ability for a short duration which, sends out a great shock, weakening enemies.
“Sheila took naps on the couch. Every day around the same time, almost without fail. Light came down through the window and stretched across her chest, but never on her face or eyes. And I’d sit there, staring at the light. Then I’d convince myself the light was coming from out of her, like a golden beam launching right out of her chest. Like she was feeding the sun energy, and it was taking all of her energy to give the sun its light. I fell asleep most of the time that I stared at it, thinking about this process. Almost like she was draining from me too, just to get the light to shine.”
🅐 UP DOWN RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT LEFT 🅐
Dona’s seaweed and stamina are multiplied by the health bar number.
“She won big in the lottery one year, Sheila, over a thousand dollars. Sheer luck, of course, but she attributed it to her ability to scratch the lotto tickets with just enough force and mental wishing that the numbers underneath transformed into ones she wanted. Although I challenged her on this. If these were the ones she really wanted, then why only a thousand dollars? Anyways, she spent it on groceries and clothes, and a new tattoo.”
LEFT LEFT LEFT 🅐 UP DOWN UP
Increases Kel’s stamina. Ups damage effect of his lasers, and makes him visible to the player at all times.
“A simple code, right? But having Kel on screen was difficult. More movement on screen, more pixels being used. It was a lot for the Genesis. So, I only added him in visually when the Genesis could handle it and he was needed. The game looked good for a reason. Shae put in a lot of work and I didn’t want to lose any of her art. I had to cut corners where I could. This code would break all that, forcing Kel on screen at all times. So, basically your Genesis could overheat. It would shut down and bug out if you kept this code on too long. It was all kind of on purpose, I guess. I’m not sure how this relates to Sheila exactly. I think I felt like I was ‘off-screen’ a lot in her life. She was more the partier and extrovert than I was. I mean I’ve been a life-long nerd who makes games. It took up a lot of time. Not all her fault. She also never appreciated the craft. That is fact. I was into shows and hanging too, like her. It’s how we met was a show. But I had this whole other dream I wanted to accomplish. Back then I told her I was making a videogame. All she could visualize was Pong or Centipede. Then she told me how it didn’t seem that hard to make and why hadn’t I finished yet [LAUGHS]. That kind of attitude, even going into the relationship, never really changed. It was a joke to her a little, this game. Like I was just spending too much time on a hobby or something. But I was thinking of it like this is my life’s work, and I’m trying to make a career of this. This wasn’t gluing together a ship in a bottle. She never could wrap her head around it. When I showed her a demo of the game, she couldn’t even tell what she was looking at [LAUGHTER]. She wasn’t that great with tech to begin with. Which is fine. I’m betting she still has a crusty old flip phone.” ▨
Jackson
Part 3 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1, Part 2
The day came. All morning he consolidated junk from the basement, and readied it for the thrift store. It felt good to rid himself of the stuff. Old skis and an exercise bike, for one. Then the boxes of different kinds of balls for various sports, none of which he could play any longer. It felt good to get rid of the balls, especially because it was a sort of promise to himself that he wouldn’t accrue any more back spasms or stubbed toes, bruised ribs or broken pinkies. After a break, he’d go upstairs to paint the bedroom. Mid-afternoon on Saturday. He was hungry and there wasn’t any food in the fridge, and he wouldn’t dare touch the pasta because that was the weekday’s ordeal. Out to eat. Fast food. Okay. He wasn’t going to complain. And also, two birds. Since he could check on these Jacksons and strike them from the long list of various Jacksons he’d begun listing on his phone.
Jackson Street was a short street ending in a cul-de-sac. Similar-shaped houses, lawns that were freshly sodded. He’d come upon a bike race between the block’s children in the cul-de-sac, round and round they went in circles, one catching up to the other and falling back, electrons around a nucleus. Sometimes the race would go clockwise, then at random one of the biggest decided to go the other way, and suddenly everyone clumsily shifted and dragged their bikes and trikes and training wheels around and the race began again. A boundless and unsatiated energy. The cul-de-sac, an eternal loop. He was in awe of how none of them seemed tired. How his child might soon carry the same dynamo. And how he had carried it too. Only then it was a lot of street hockey, and he remembered his mindset, his pinpoint concentration on the net, on seeing the openings where the goalie, his friend Chuck, always seemed never to be able to reach and block. The focus on these openings while the simultaneous maneuver of his stick shuffling the orange ball past defense, his roller blades grinding, the dancer agility, the wrist flick he’d perfected, the opening all he could think about. The opening expanded in his mind, until it was like he was playing the game from within the opening itself. And when he shot the ball and the ball went right where he needed it, it wasn’t really the ball or the score that mattered, but that he had become the opening where the netting loosened and swayed in the summer breeze.
Studying the houses, he searched the street for any clues. As he turned his car around, he rolled down his window to ask a couple with groceries going into their house. Did they know an old woman on the block who wore work pants and a blouse? Both shook their heads. He thanked them and drove to the end of the block, stopped his car. He picked up the chicken sandwich sitting in its carton, passenger-side, and took a bite like a reward for his efforts. He chowed down on the fries, wiped the grease on his pants. He grabbed his phone and checked this one off the list. The list had grown every day, a few at a time, and so now it seemed striking one Jackson from the list simultaneously triggered his mind to think of another Jackson. And it did this time. Jackson Pollock. Of course was the lady really looking for Pollock? But maybe she was an art dealer in her prime, he thought, and she’d become confused now as she aged, and was still searching for some Pollock she’d always wanted. It was not unreasonable, but it was less than likely. Still, Jackson was in the name and he couldn’t rule anything out.
Jackson Avenue was a long stretch of road. The “Avenue” was not properly what it was, though he’d learned of the name’s origin from a local historian website. It started as a broad stretch of street at the township’s edge, trees on either side, a small main street area leftover from the fifties, old buildings and storefronts from another era, some rundown, some still running. The name stuck, and the road had been extended sometime in the eighties and now veered off into the woods and connected to an old farm road, asphalted over, which inherited the name, and along which had become the town’s central area of office sites.
It was one of those suburban back roads where occasionally you’d see a house on a hill, shrouded in woods, with a long gravel driveway, and wonder who lived there. Interspersed among these lone houses were random maintenance buildings and office buildings and technology parks, mowed landscapes around them, all asphalt and concrete, woods bordering them, and a few cars in the lots on the weekends but filled to capacity during the work week. Many of them were gated and had cards you had to swipe to get in. And a lot of them had chain-link fences around them. But the more lax places, places you knew were probably just offices for companies selling bobble heads or other nonsense, didn’t have any protection and you could drive right into their lots and at least get as far as the door.
He drove down the old farm road and read the mailboxes of the lone houses and the office signs out front. Nothing like Jackson appeared on any of them, but of course he was on Jackson itself, he remembered, and so the clue couldn’t just be the road, but something on it. The road, he knew, went for a couple miles until it ended at a T. When he got to the T he turned around and drove back the entire length of the road. He turned on his radio, pumped up the music. He did this several times, pretending that the road went on forever and that he was on a road trip out west to see the Grand Canyon, to make it to the Pacific. Back and forth on this road in a forever loop, like those kids racing around the cul-de-sac. For a moment, he had a realization that maybe he was becoming the old lady herself, that she had imparted this nugget of Jackson to him to free herself of a curse put upon her. That now what he had to do was find some other unwitting person to ask them about Jackson and pass it on.
He shook himself of the reverie. It was down to business. This was his, what, fourth or fifth time driving the road toward the T. It could’ve been the tenth. The sun, he realized, had sunk below the treeline. How long had he been out? When he got lunch it had been three o’clock, maybe. It was almost seven o’clock. Was that right? The sandwich had long been eaten, and the fries all gone. And he was feeling pretty hungry now, with all the driving. His gas tank was low. He adjusted his mind again: how long had he been doing this? But no matter. Okay, so first, gas. He filled up at a station in the fifties part of Jackson Ave. There was a bad diner, he remembered, somewhere on the street. He found it and ordered a gravy turkey sandwich and a coffee, turning every so often on his stool to watch the night fall across the parking lot, and the patron’s ghostly reflections growing in the diner’s windows, twisting and writhing across them like the Northern Lights.
He hadn’t painted the room, he realized getting back into his car and turning the key in his ignition. He hadn’t even gotten the supplies to paint the room. It was already getting late and there’s no way he’d start now. It was better, more productive, to go about his search, a few more runs down the Avenue. Somewhere in driving back and forth on the road he felt he had absorbed a bit of information that would lead him where he needed to be led. An intuition. That tugging feeling. He had missed a crucial piece of evidence into what felt like a crime doc case, the crime docs he’d let wash over him as he boiled the noodles or fed the child her dinner.
Up the road again. A few more times, he told himself. He liked driving, the long continuous hum of the car, a slight vibration massaging his foot on the pedal. For a moment, becoming a trucker seemed a good idea. He wondered about what it took to get your CDL, the classes and training, the big cones you probably had to slalom, the tight turns and parking with a rig on the back, and how it all had to be done like a perfect game of Tetris, locking the pieces in place. He could be on the road for days at a time, nothing but the road and himself, and the fellow truckers in their rigs talking code on the CB, and that it would be a good excuse to get out those mesh baseball caps popular during his mid-aughts college days. On the road alone, nothing but the road, and everything else in his life dimmed to a faint ethereal glob festering at the rear of his brain. It was why rock stars loved being on the road, he thought, and how they lost the sense of their life to the proportions of other things. Not just from the fame or money, but he imagined it was also the long bouts of driving from one show to another, seeing all the world and the many different fans, and how that felt like being god to them, knowing and seeing all, worshiped by all. In between all this, the cleansing of the highways to keep them centered, the deflating of egos by the long and vacuous nothing of movement along the dullest asphalt and concrete. So that they were always at the apex of life or at its lowest, and both sensations in a matter of hours. Then the tour ended and you came off it, finding your life not the same as it was, a year or two gone by, every time depleting a little more of what you once had until you had nothing. That was the work of the road. And also of being a rock star. And he thought about this too, and that he had always wanted to be one.
He checked two open parking lots of adjacent buildings. They were mid-sized seventies brick structures with dark windows and steel gray entrances. He imagined drop ceilings and old asbestos, a few heavy steel desks and cork boards. Municipal buildings, as evidenced by the large storehouses in the back lot where the salt was kept for the winter, locked now. He drove around to the back. No signage anywhere. No one in the lot either. He sat for a minute and turned off his engine, rolled down the window. The cicadas whirred in the distant trees. He smelled gas and realized it was his hands. He laid his head back and began to close his eyes. He sat up in his seat and opened them wide. Something about sleeping in a lot, completely exposed, made him feel uncomfortable. He checked his ashtray. No ash in there. He didn’t smoke, of course, but for some reason he thought maybe there’d be something in there he never knew he had. He fidgeted with the locks, adjusted his mirrors. It was almost time to go home. One or two more passes.
It was on the second pass, heading toward the T, that he noticed a dim lit building shielded from the street by a short bushy patch of trees. He must not have seen it when the sun was out and drifting down in that direction. And also less noticeable because it looked as if it had been built in the last ten or twenty years, and it seemed newer buildings were achieving, somehow, even more clean, sterile designs than those before them, so that finally all buildings would accomplish a look of being in no particular place or region, almost invisible and nonexistent. As he drove into the parking lot, even knowing where he was, the context of this building’s place on this street in this town did not convey it was actually here but somewhere else entirely, or nowhere else. Its own entity floating in the world.
The building was five stories high with black windows that reflected the lot’s lights. Two straggler cars, parked in far points of the lot, sat with no one in them. He drove to the back of the building. More black windows and white crisp facades. There was a lit entrance road down into the building. A parking garage. No one was in the gate booth and the gates themselves were swung up, as if the whole system had been put in pause to let people in and out. He drove down into the garage and parked and got out. Why not. He ran excuses through his mind if anyone were to notice. Several cars were parked at random spots around the wide parking garage. Late night shifters for whatever business was housed here, maybe. Or people had taken a Park and Ride and left their cars.
He walked around, feeling exposed under the bright LEDs in long strips across the white concrete ceiling. Everything white, in fact. The columns were painted with clean words and arrows pointing in various directions of doors and elevators. He turned knobs and pulled at handles of steel gray doors. Nothing moved. He walked between the other parked cars, looking up at the ceiling into the vast network of insulated pipes and the long tight straight bundles of various cables and cords, electrical or ethernet or both. He was somehow fascinated by all the cords and the insulated pipes, the whole undercarriage of the building above him, and he grew dizzy at the complexity, his neck craned so far back that it hurt and he had to stop looking. He scanned the garage. Still no one around and that made sense since it was the weekend and—
He stopped frozen. In the corner. Right there. How could he have missed it? Its big bulky backend sticking out a little further than all these modern compacts and sedans of these modern day office workers. No one was in the car. He felt the car’s hood. Cold to touch. No warmth. So the car had sat for a bit. She’d found Jackson after all. Jackson Ave all this time. The old woman had to be here somewhere. ▨
The Timeline of Doug and Elaine
Part 2 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1
Age 25 - 2010 - Elaine has been working as a manager at a large-scale catering company. Doug works for an insurance agency. Both make okay money, enough to survive, and store some savings. Except for a few expensive vacations, one to Nepal and one big European tour to London, Paris, and Madrid. Oh, and the Japan trip to Tokyo. That was a big one. The flights were pretty expensive. Of all the things they’ve talked about on these trips one remains in their mind: a sort of abstract idea about the glances they’re giving other people. Not in that touristy way of fascination, but glances of attraction they’re giving or getting. There’s an admittance, finally, that they’re attracted to others. Not that it should affect them necessarily, but it’s an admittance of a human trait that they’ve suppressed over the past few years: to find, of course, that there are people beyond themselves, and people the world over. Only natural. But this leaves questions about pathways. Call it the quarter-life crisis. Have they made the right decision in marrying each other? How is it that a brush with a Spanish stranger on a subway, the steel look in his eyes as he passes but apologizes, leaves Elaine feeling her cheeks warm and red, in that way that once only Doug seemed to produce. And Doug eyeing the woman with the cardigan as they peruse the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, searching for Jim Morrison’s remains. All around him famous death resides, and there should be some reverence here, and yet the death makes him think about his own possibilities, an expansion of himself. He envisions his body opening up, cracking open, and the world’s warmth radiating at his center until he is one long beam of light that expands upwards and downwards, splitting open, now going left and right, taking over the universe. And the universe is dark no more. There are no points of light, the entirety has been subsumed in radiance.
Age 30 - 2015 - Doug loses the insurance job. That’s on him. After five years of processing insurance claims, taking photos of flooded basements and fallen trees on roofs, it's the small destruction of personal property that has finally gotten to him. Nothing large. No one dead in an accident (someone else does car accident claims). No, it’s just lightning hit a house, there was a flood, someone backed a tractor into a porch and hit a column, half toppling the structure. The small stuff, nothing fatal. Mixed in with the destruction pictures, he took photos of random things at the claim sites. Things around the destruction. A small grouping of flowers or a bird’s nest. One in a basement, a photo of a network of spider webs, a cluster of daddy longlegs. It became such an obsession that the pictures he sent back were no longer having to do with the claim, just poor camera shots. Everyone assumed a camera malfunction at first, maybe a bad joke. Eventually it became clear he wasn’t doing the job and was let go. He goes on unemployment. He sits in the basement of their rented home and shoots digital photos of the television. Elaine comes down to check on him, asks him when he’s going to search for jobs again, that she can help with his resume. He agrees to it, but his promises are thin, vague. He’s more obsessed with watching television for the perfect shot to take with his camera. The digital recording the digital. He has this vague image of a pipeline between what he calls digital systems, that of the TV and that of the camera, and it’s a digital conversation between the two, and he’s the catalyst of both systems communicating with each other, a sort of shaman who has access to their conversation and is part of it, thought not subject of it. More of a rider and these are his horses, a ghost and this is his mansion. He explains this to Elaine, but it’s not like she’s listening. She can’t understand the shaman’s ways. ▨
Coming Up…
Next Release: July 29 - The finale of Jackson and a little bit of the timeline…
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