Games

for Nick Laird

What gave the game away in the end wasn’t one of those ghost-ship or Rapture standbys –

the half-eaten bowl of porridge, the open shears below the half-trimmed hedge, or the smoking wand

in the deserted milk bar or the pool hall. (Though now I think of it, it was always

the same Virginia Slim two long draws down, its filter hooped with lipstick like old blood.)

No, it’s that I knew that small developers – I’m damned if there’s any money behind this thing –

often have to economise on assets. One day I noticed that every house I’ve ever lived in

has the same copy of The Lady with the Little Dog on the bookshelf, the same John Lewis puffball lamp

left on overnight on the kitchen table, the same Hitachi radio beside each identically disordered bed

and, set to dry by every kitchen sink, the same chipped green mug that reads YOGA KILLS. And then it clicked.

After years of hunting for money and drugs in what I guess is technically a first-person walking sim

I can say, with some certainty, that we’re offline. This map hosts no other soul,

not even one NPC to let me make-believe. Though it’s not as if that ever went well.

Once, in Grand Theft Auto, abandoning some thrice-failed mission that would’ve at least got me on the ladder,

I took the D to Coney Island on a whim. I jumped down from the boardwalk

as the shadows ran to meet the one-hour day, and stood at the ocean’s edge looking out to Senegal.

Then a young woman in jean shorts and a sunhat tramped up the strand, and took her silent place beside me.

For a long while we stood there, the little pink-and-blue wavelets gurgling at our feet

as the sun sank into the Eastern sea. ‘And who would question that titanic roar?’

I wanted to say to her, and instinctively went to find a button on the Xbox controller

that would have me turn to her with a lop-sided smile or some other charmingly weary salutation,

but all I did was punch her in the head. It was literally all I could do. She punched me back twice, hard,

called me a motherfucker; then, without rancour, we returned to our shared meditation. But I was sad,

and for all that I suspected there was something in the excess of that second blow that spoke of her affection,

I knew we were the prisoners of circumstance.

Inside here, though, it’s more like LA. No weather. No rot. I keep finding stuff

from forty years ago. Everything is as it was, as it is, as it always will be. Everything –

even this fir forest on the edge of town, where I’m presently talking to myself –

bears the heartbreaking redundancy of the living rooms of the recently dead,

rooms they furnished with care and with love, or as ‘a hell to their own taste’.

Only the doors seem to retain any memory: they have slowly accumulated and stored away

a little internal will, and over the years have learned to close behind me silently.

One day, the door to some random box will shut fast as a bank vault, and that will be that.

Yes, I am familiar with ‘the dream fallacy’: the claim that ‘all this is mere apparition’

is academic, if one never actually wakes. Nonetheless one’s suspicions seem too easily confirmed.

In the meantime, all I can tell you is that ‘I have some good and some bad days’

and in the early years I did indeed smash every mirror I could find with a little hammer

that I carried for this purpose. But before you pity me, look around and consider

the happy game you’re playing: the one where you are not already wholly forsaken.