This Lingering Heat: Ghost of Maiden's Peak in Four Hauntings
I KNOW Brock fucked that Gastly. Sexually speaking. âNacchi
I. DREAM EATER, or, Passing August
Catch on the tip of a wayward star and tumble degloved and gasping through the chyme of dreams which offer now no replacement to see oneself not ribboned in bright plastics but fever-dreamt into that awful old nursery-rhyme: misbegotten thing, culled at lastâbrute current or dreadful immune system, pulse of heaven pushing ever toward the convergence of all organisms and at its delta the tent-flap carcass of a rat evaporating from a corner encrusted in its own panicked shitâ
II. NIGHT SHADE, or, Sylph's Folly
Well it's nothing to do with me just a few pretty lines and the rest is what it is but I busy myself with the morning glories and thin crinkled roses and those little white ones sprayed half torn to bits all along the shore no nothing at all how anyone carries on it's a mud pit and toss them with the cooking sticks for all I care but here you come practically dug that up and pulled it over your head swinging the leftovers around as you please only why don't you take what costume you like but bring it dancing for once to make a night of it or you could try the stalls down there with the nice banners and squid all striped and brown instead of spending all your time flittering off in circles chasing flies through the leavings as if I ever would no I would never no or even a hello good evening how do you do now and then before you go but that's the way of things I suppose and really if it's not one thing it's the other with the birds and smoke and all the specks of boats and everything in the wind
III. HYPNOSIS, or, Image of the Eternal Maiden
And should it be goodwill or what drifts through the thin air and should we constellate it crayon-skipping over lines and steps, and should we then under the auspices of the dust upon our throat grope in the magicianâs hat for you, beloved thing, part of me, beloved thing, part of me, beloved thing, part of me, beloved thing, part of me and so on and so on both of us playing mouth for the hungry ghosts, all words and all of ourselves
IV. CONFUSE RAY, or, A Stratigraphy of Middens
The urge remains that's how they always tell it and the doll set up high on the trunk thinks she's queen of the moment and no regard for apron pockets stuffed with straw but there I am picking and twining picking and twining it's a perfect picture and leave the pasture days with the days' trimmings and chats over the cicadas at dusk all for the sea would be near pushed to the clifftops I thought with all the tossing but there you went and not an inch different for what we got of the spray and yes the salt which if you will recall goes right in the bin at the start swallowed away by the ferment and really nothing for looking at so long but only for the sun in the daytime and the stars at night splashed atop the waves in almost any color you like but always quarter dyed with the gray that's what I love is how it makes it the streak of the moon drug out across the rough like sharkskin or grass and willowherb left crushed from our knees to our sleeve hems and the little strawpricks coarse my hands were so coarse fish hands shell hands yams and nuts in the winter and gills ripped through bellies pale stomach swelling along after sucking the last grease slick from the clay still warm between our lips and the rest to that damn pile gone down to ink and stone you and me and mother and miss potter and that play house they took for kindling and the way that older girl sang and fishnets running along the beach around mid afternoon sand and dirt and a couple white limestones among the summer irises and red early camellias like stooping on the morning path to stick a flower in my hair before sunrise and already off to the cliff and the ocean and the waking bells
[Note: This one is from 2018! It reads like I wrote it seven years ago! I don't know why I never posted it! Ok bye!!! âNacchi]
Joey is cornered by a group of sinister Rare Hunters who force him into a duel where if he loses, the Rare Hunters get his precious Red-Eyes Black Dragon! Though Joey pummels his foes with his mighty monster armada, eliminating life points isn't the only path to victoryâŠ
-Wikipedia
So this was it.
He had been looking down at his feet trying to convince himself he was taking some small steps forward for so long, he had forgotten there was no road ahead. All that time spent on play-trials over squandering opportunities he never could have had, every moment of tenderness and discipline, all ridiculous now. Parading about his cheap lessons like a circus animal in a fancy hat, somehow always the last to understand he was only there to be mocked and used by whoever would have him, grinning stupidly at each person who came to watch his little sideshow. A life spent crawling on his knees toward a goal too distant to ever reach, a goal that had blurred to nothing through the haze of his tearsâthe life of a third-rate Duelist whose greatest treasure was a third-rate card. All of it, all that deferred shame, exploded before him as Joey Wheeler finally saw himself.
The show was over, then. It was a cold comfort, the end of all this sickly, lurching motion. Every contorted limb and overtaut muscle released by the final gunshot. Things would come to a rest now, as the apocalyptic present settled. All that was left before him was a heap of indistinct days, static and silent and soft. A bed of ashes, a gentle slope down through whatever years remained.
Wasnât it supposed to be different? Hadnât he suffered enough? All his wasted sweat, all his wasted tears. He could almost feel them backing up in his throatâall of his life, all of his efforts, rancid bile, worthless salt. It would all have been worth itâworth it a hundred, ten thousand times overâif only he could still pretend he was struggling toward anything. If only he could somehow convince himself that someday, a top-decked Polymerization might transmute the ruins of his life, the ruins he had clawed his way out of and the ruins of himself, all into some powerful Fusion Monster. But there was no consolation hiding anywhere in the unwritten laws of Yu-Gi-Oh, or those of the world: Joey Wheeler was no rare card, was blessed with no Effect to be revealed at the critical moment. If he were a card, he would be the kind that children tossed into shoeboxes angrily upon opening their packs; a waste of flesh. Attempting to convince himself otherwise would only amount to standing on his head, that he might feel as though he were falling upward.
He would never be the worldâs greatest Duelist. He had always known, somehow. He wasnât even in the runningâno one knew that better than him. Wasnât that why he kept on Dueling, despite his constant humiliations? Wasnât that why he had come with Yugi in the first place? Claiming that he knew his place, that he was content just to orbit greatnessâhe had only been feigning resignation all along. That was why he was in so much pain now. All his life he had just been running from the shadow of his failures, or rather from the reflection of that abominable self he could see only as the sum of his failuresâand, finally, he had stumbled. Joey knew the shape of things. He knew that he was no champion, no hero, no chosen one. He was just a joke.
The sweetness of summoning Red-Eyes with the very rules he had just learned came back to him, fermented into something thick, sour and burning. He had been so sure, so confident that everything he had been through was coming to fruition as he blasted away his opponentsâ defenses. Well, perhaps it had. Nothing blossoming into nothing, ruin blossoming into ruin. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If he were a complete failure, then there in his total defeat was self-actualization at last.
The concrete was cold and damp against his cheek, soothing his bruised flesh. This was where he belonged, wasnât it? It was all his fault. If only he had never tried to stand in the first place, he wouldnât have come crashing down so easily. What were his weak legs for? The harder he tried to keep up, the deeper he felt his limitations dig into his bones. What was his weak heart for? The more tightly he tried to hold down his hopes, the more painfully they thrashed. He wished that the vomit working its way through his body might spew out endlessly, carrying out all of himself, all of the meals he had ever eaten, all of his organs, all of the traces and expenditures and darkest intimate crevices of his existence until he were nothing more than an empty sack of skin. Then he could catch a breeze and fly away from this awful place, tumbling carefree through the night like a discarded plastic bag.
And why shouldnât he nurse such worthless wishes? He had been denied thisâthis stupid, trifling thing, this tournament, this identity as a Duelist, this last pathetic attempt to build up a sandcastle and call it a human life. This was no life. There was nothing to build, despite the endless permutations of cards and cliques and characters. Just a polychrome swirl of trash. Trash cards, a trash self, a trash life. Trash that he shoved down his throat, trash that he spewed forth. Consumption and creation, acquiring cards and slotting them into decks, it was all just a queasy zoetrope of idiot distractionsâempty rearrangements, empty choices, empty victories, empty defeats. Endlessly, painfully flashing color and darkness, and his feeble mindâs sorry attempts to find some pattern or agency within.
âIn the end, everyone is lonely.â
âIn the end, living is always painful.â
âIn the end, everyone feels that way.â
Not even Joey Wheeler could fool himself with those words. And so, there was no way back to the life he had known before.
How could he presume to comfort his sister? How could he continue to pretend that he had any right to live a human life at all? What value did a human life have? What value did a 2400 ATK/2000 DEF monster with a seven word description have? The tiny, glittering spark of hope in his life had been snuffed out instantly, fair and square. He had lost because he wasnât a good enough Duelist. He was unable to recover because he wasnât a good enough person. There was nothing else, no technicality, no injustice onto which he might cling, no thin medium to culture even a shred of desperate self-delusion.
This life was empty, but wasnât he supposed to be a god atop his own paper mat? He was always ending up beaten and hurt, but wasnât he supposed to come back strong in the final scene? Justice was a lie told to gild the whims of fortune and sadism, but wasnât he supposed to profit from that lie himself?
He had cast aside his cruelty, the hollow freedoms and pleasures of brutality. What awaited him now? A suffocating lifetime worse than deathâno, worse, one indistinguishable from death. A lifetime with ash sprinkled on his head and coating his tongue. There was no warmth to be found in the cards. In the end, they were just glossy sheets of cardboard. There was no warmth to be found in his vaunted friendships. In the end, they were just reminders of his failures. And there was no warmth to be found within himself. Not anymore.
All this time, he had been stumbling forward on broken legs. Now that they had finally collapsed, he would have to pay the price.
Shifting his weight painfully, Joey looked up into the night sky. Hemmed in by the impenetrable mass of high-rises, the moon swelled nauseously through the gaps like the gut of a Niwatori peeking out from a pack where a useful card might have been in some other, better world.
Hey, Yuge. I figured it out. Why I can never beat ya.
What value did Joey Wheelerâs life have? He had come from nothing, had nothing, would never have anything. However he looked at the odds, the deck was packed entirely with trash. Sometimes, you just drew a bad hand right off the bat. Sometimes, you just had to play it out, knowing damn well it was a losing battle.
This wasnât some fairy tale, at least not for him. Gyakuten no Megami, the Goddess of Turnabouts, was just an underwhelming, Level 6 normal monster. And Joseph âJoeyâ Wheeler was just an underqualified, mediocre-at-best Duelist. He had never had a chance. But at least now he could finally bury the long-rancid dreams he had been dragging behind him for so many years. His unreasonable hopes would be silent at last. He had lost his Red-Eyes Black Dragon. He had lost everything.
Far away, as though leaking from a shattered dream, Joey could hear the sound of waves.
Even tonight, the water would be rising up from lightless depths and traveling untold miles, only to be shattered endlessly against the shores of an alien world. Even tonight, gray seafoam would boil at the margins, clawing up the sand in piles torn by each receding crest. And even tonight, the sickly moonlight would scatter across the horizon, glinting like the shards of a broken blade.
Lurching to his feet, Joey began to stumble in the direction of that sound. Though he couldnât explain why, though he was writhing in pain, he limped onward through the thin urban night. He couldnât think of his sister in the hospital. He couldnât think of anything. He could only continue his staggering journey, to the only place he could go. A place where the white sand would give way to black waves and the black waves would in turn fold into white sand. A place where all things ended, and all things began, twisting in swirling darkness.
I thought maybe I'd even watch the movie, but in the end I didn't watch the movie. âNacchi
Star-addled alien, wearing a rodent's body like a stolen cloak, what ever could have become of you? How hard it must have been for you to read out the martyr's linesâYou, who had already seen the whole act played out before. Maria, whatever she may have been, converted in an instant into some kind of freakish altar, a hollowed-out mummy stuffed full with others' conveniences. You, who had seen for yourself the culmination of all our efforts: Death rooting at last through heaven, lives spent worshiping our greatest failure. And yet, you...
Maybe it was easier for you, after all. You, who were born against the absolute limits of existence, the thin window-fog assemblage of every experience preserved beneath a few millimeters of aluminum and fiberglass; I suppose things must have been rather more clear up there. But, even soâCosmic shape-shifter, hedgehog who fell from the stars, you've pulled off a wonderful trick, haven't you?
You took the stage, and this time, you vanished with the curtainfallâno waiting to pry apart and pack away every set-piece, no shamefaced shuffling-off to the lots behind the venue. You've made a clean break of it! Mariaâwho, let's face it, was born to steal the spotlightâdid it first, of course she did, and now you've gone and done it too. And here I am, some unwelcome collector of discarded props, prattling on about the rigging and the timing and where they kept the trapdoorsâa tremendous old spoil-sport. All these petty hobbyist's grudges... no one cares where the bodies are buried, do they? Certainly no one cares who buried them.
Nobody, it seems, but me.
The weight of all the dead who mass endlessly beneath the earth... I almost had myself convinced they had put together that fool's-star just to grant Maria, at least, some new gravity to sink toward. Well, I suppose I saw myself in her, just as you all must have: this frayed little scrap of life, dwarfed by the stature of human existence, dragged all that way just to find herself infected with death all along. Every night now, though I draw my curtains and busy myself with work however I can, in my mind I still see it all hanging above meâshards of bone, glinting in their sprawling grave. I suppose it must be some kind of graverobber's curse; having taken so much from the dead, who certainly do not care, I feel endlessly compelled to scrape from the coffin some crude outsider's notion of death itself.
In this, hedgehog, I owe you an apology. I had wanted to think myself better than you corpse-eaters constantly recreating a Maria to gnaw upon, but here I am still carving her effigy in negative from whatever remains of my own body, as though I could fashion from each spot where something was and is no more the exact shape of deathâBut that isn't death at all, is it? Between the two of us, you'd be the one to know, except that I suspect you never quite had a chance to see the thing straight, there among the smoke and flash of the stage exit, past all your familiar stars...
Maybe I would have been better off asking what life was, instead. In that, hedgehog, we are comrades; Maria, I suspect, did not need to voice the questionâor maybe she did, but of course, she's dead, and so are you, and so I can position you two however I like in my own little stage-play. Nor are you in any position to scold me for saying that I imagine we are both somehow synthetic existences, both of us tightly blueprinted only to fall to pieces before the experiment was throughâHow, then, is it that you should be... as you are, and me here?
Maria, me and youâand I, somehow, left all aloneâthe frailest of them all. You would not have been like this; had Maria been otherwise, none of us would be. So there it is, then: the exact whereabouts of the punchline. More technician's ramblingsâonly I have no one to bore but myself, now; I suppose that's just another thing you've escaped.
If only I could somehow purge myself, vomit forth my own share of ash, perhaps then I'd be able to look up at night and see something more than the miserable remains of two lives floating there through the cold. But all this endless retching does nothing, nothing at all to lighten me; somehow, I've become such a contorted existence that I derive even consumption through its opposite. It's funny, isn't it? Not that you were ever the sort to laugh, and certainly not at thisâbut indulge me, if only a moment longer, in my little delusion. All of this, somehowâSomehow. There's that word again. Quite loose on the specifics for an engineer, don't you think?âBut still, all of this, if it were... amusing, or meaningful, or... some manner of progress, then perhaps someday I'd...
Well, when you were alive you would never have listened to this; I won't torment you further in my imagination. Maybe tonight I'll try things your way: I'll open my curtains wide, look out into all that blackness, and drink to your corpse. Maybe then, at last, I'll be able to face all those frozen points of light beyond.
Holy fuck, it's really you. The legendary author of that fanfiction masterpiece. In the pursuit of fucked and cursed Todd fanfics, I wasn't expecting to actually find any on the fanfiction site but I was wrong. Glad to have you around here. Your writing is so fucking excellent. Idk what else to say. Love you fam
Thanks so much!! I didnât think anyone actually read that one, so I really appreciate that you took the time to send me this. I havenât been on here much lately since Iâve been working on some longer-form stuff, so I apologize for taking forever to reply!
Information is stored in CD format as a series of microscopic burns. The useless unblemished disc is covered with millions of tiny wounds until it is assigned order, given utility and thus meaning; its identity is nothing more than a shorthand for the arrangement of its injuries. Hundreds of thousands of identically-scorched discs are mass-produced in factories devoted to this purpose, and then they go out into the worldâmomentarily useful and then left until they are forgotten, soon obsolete and eventually unreadable. But the marks remain, scars gone illegible within environments alien to them.
CDs are fragile things, damaged in just the right way. Cracks and gouges, records of less useful traumas, form mnemonic ravines into which meaning and memory disappear. And then, the greatest tragedy for a compact disc: to be discarded before even the moment in which its constellation of injuries--that is, in which itself--might be recognized, and so fulfill its destiny. What is to be done with these CDs, and all the CDs waiting for an eternity in landfills and forests and everywhere else on earth? What is the fate of objects with no use?
Chapter I: You Can Climb That Mountain
"I want to change the world.â
Every child believes this; is every child a fool? I certainly wasâThough I must have known even at that time that I despised myself, that I wanted nothing to do with who I was or anyone who would show such a being any degree of sympathy or affection, still I never questioned my conviction that I must see myself carved into the world before me. Whatever understanding might have prompted such questioning was corroded away under the pretense that I was being indulged, a process by which I was constantly implanted with an unwanted and alien hope by those desperate to harvest it as some salve for their own wounds. But then, surely, someday, for someoneâperhaps meâa dream would come true, and the world would open up to all of us once more; from the very start of my life, I was merely a thing to be used until I was exhausted and then thrown away.
That is what I believed, and so I could not understand until it was far too late that I had been given a gift after all: When the process had run its course and I was left depleted and scorned, I was nevertheless animated on by the naturalized remnants of the desire to continue inflicting myself outward, to subsume everything, even the pointlessness of itself, within that drive. This was the expression of love I had been searching for all along: The small core of decency within me which had regarded myself with revulsion and hostility had been eradicated, leaving in its stead a sort of nothing which grasped feverishly at nothingâThat is to say, I was finally of the proper shape and hardness to survive.
And yet. I am nothing if not spiteful, and in my spite I had stupidly secreted away some scraps of that hope, clutching onto them all the more tightly for my understanding that they were never intended for me in the first place. And so, I was compromisedâThough I know that even this meager life should have been beyond me, my mind still sometimes wanders. I remember all sorts of things, stupid fairytales about grasping some small, radiant thing, and exclaimingâas the narrator gave a tranquilized smile, or a soundtrack swelledââAh, Iâm so glad to be alive!â
No matter how I tried, I could not shake those irritating thoughts. This, I believe, is referred to as the death drive.
November 11, 2011. Veterans Day. With nothing better to do, I follow the advertisements promising hundreds of hours of velvety unconsciousness to my local GameStop. As I enter I am immediately assaulted by three screens blasting three different advertisements for three different video games; the perfect recreation of hell only reminds me of the incompleteness of the nothingness in which I plan to submerge myself.
âJ-just this, please,â I stammer, holding out an empty box and a scuffed plastic card as offerings to let me pass through the store unmolested.
In this, as in all things, I am disappointed.
âOh, youâre a fan of Elder Scrolls, huh? Yeah, the dynamic open world in this one isâYou want that for PC? You know, PC is really the best, since you get all the modsâŠâ
As my mind drifts off, I recall being limply hit on in collegeâbeneath all the token effort, the worn promise of pleasure is nothing more than an excuse for accepting the comfort of a nightâor a few months, or yearsâspoken for, populated with enough distractions to sustain yourself, for a while. Software, at least, is blind to its own role in this; after the longest forty-five seconds of my life I am finally permitted to leave the store with my own game. Driving home, I wonder when I stopped liking video games (did I ever like them?), and why I keep buying them. Well, what else would I waste my money and time on? Best to devote myself to whatever keeps me staring at a wall; after all, to raise my eyes further would only invite deeper injuries. Itâs a strange kind of responsibility I practice, but then responsibility is always painful.
The game disc feels light and cheap in my hand as I place it into my computerâs CD tray. And then it is drawn into the machine, and with a click and the whir of a laser everything is set into place.
The game installs. The world is gray and filthy. I walk for some time, talk to some people, do what they want; it feels more or less like having a job. I had told myself that as a child, these games held some magic for me, something I could recapture; instead I am left with stinging eyes and an inventory full of meaningless words. There is nothing there to grasp on to, no substance to all the various weapons and armor and pre-appraised treasure. A sickness overtakes me, lying atop the one already provoked by the cheap alcohol I had been drinking. I just want to stop playing and⊠do⊠anything, maybe take a walk outsideâwhen was the last time I had been to a park, or really, anywhere without a specific purpose? For one moment, I feel the resolve to go building within meâand then a corpse intersects with a door and begins to twist rapidly around, writhing about with an indescribable cascade of layered thuds.
I begin to cackle, a laugh I cannot even recognize as my own. A sword, battered by the flailing limbs, goes spinning upward with another soundâI double over. This, surely, is why I purchased this game. This is why I spent the money I earned with my long hours of work. At last all the years have led me somewhere, a path back to the sundrenched fields in which I momentarily allow myself to imagine I must have passed some carefree childhood: this cloying, slapstick meme.
There is a kind of love so pure that it can only be understood as a species of gravest perversion. A love which tolerates no artifice and suffers no consideration of the demands of the outside world; a transcendent, fatal, repulsive sort of love. This is the love that I, miserable human being that I am, hold for this âmemeâ in its raw, unattenuated form. It is the only sort of love which a creature like me can muster.
Meme is the cold hamburger served up at a drive-thru with half the toppings forgotten, and it is the accompanying chuckle. It is the momentary warmth from a trash-heap of disappointments burning to nothing, the measly payment for the copper stripped from the last obsolete office a nameless architect ever built, a final betrayal of hope itself that some small scrap of emotion, whatever it is, might still be salvagedâreturn to a hometown you feel nothing for, find where the stain of hemolymph crushed into the pavement might remind you of sunlightâand that is meme.
If we are to live submerged in industrial waste, I choose to bend down at each iridescent pool and drink as deeply as I canâthat I might at least get drunk on my own suffering, and perhaps even hallucinate some specter of amusement. If nothing else, at least I have that knowing smirk, unseen by anyone but myself; Iâm really better than this, you know. It may be worthless, but there was never anything to extract worth from in the first place;Â Iâll take my silly little laughs. I have no idea what it means to love myself, or anyone else, but perhaps loving these stupid, malfunctioning pieces of debris is as close as I can get.
The following day I discover console commands, and my passion burns even hotter in my chest. So hot even that it melts the chains I had fashioned from the iron of my own blood, chains binding me to the hard edges of that putrid concept known as survival. I am not set free, of course. A malformed entity like myself is incapable of understanding freedom, even if I were to somehow earn it; given wings and set loose with an open sky, I would only bash my head to bits against the ground. No, I am more of a slave than I ever wasâa slave to that neon, excruciating joy which in a single instant melted me down and shaped me anew.
Less than human, I have become a gamer.
Chapter IIa: Put What You Want in Your Hands
Having broken free of those chains I had chafed against for most of my life, I began to tumble painfully through my new, larger cage. The next two or three years progressed uneventfully despite the constant drip of new adventures and alterations in my beloved gameâI had nothing to lose, and I lost it.
Taking advantage of a departmental reorganization, I left my job behind. Nothing could have mattered less to me at the time; I had only settled for the position in the first place to advance a career about which I cared nothing, chosen on the basis of a few romantic fantasies. Still, the manner in which I made my exit left me with no hope for further employment in the field, and about as many friends. Loneliness changed, from something I experienced as I ran against the shallowness of my friendships to something I experienced in solitude; truth be told, I found that I vastly prefer the latter.
A far more dire consequence was the rapid depletion of my savings. I had perhaps overestimated how easy it would be to find some stop-gap job and how willing I would be to do that work, and the costs of living piled up frighteningly quickly. There were always new consoles to buy, new Skyrims to experience with their own unique flaws native to each platform, and the few income sources I drifted between came to hardly anything at all. Finally, too broke even to acquire new debt, I remembered why I had choked down the humiliation of employed life for so long.
I had only just purchased a PlayStation VR when Skyrim was released for the Nintendo Switch, and I desperately needed the funds to buy it. There was nothing left to sell, nothing but my piles of Skyrim games and the consoles to play them with. I had even given up alcohol, having found a more effective means of self-destruction. I was at witâs end; I would wake up in a cold sweat at four in the morning, scour YouTube for any bug videos and scrub through those grating Letâs Plays, unable to get back to sleep unless I found some collision error or AI failure.
Finally, neither eating nor sleeping, only half aware of my own actions, I attempted to contact Todd Howard himself, hoping against hope that the man behind it all might take some mercy upon his most loyal fan. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the consequences of this action. Whatever sort of creature I might have been, I held only a human understanding of this reality at best; I was incapable of comprehending the level at which a being like Todd operates.
And so it came to be, though even now Iâm not really sure how, that I was in Maryland, face to face with Todd himself. He said nothing, his cold silence a marked contrast to the nervous energy he overflowed with in interviews. It gave me the impression that there were really no words to be said, no words but those listed on the contract before me.
I saw my whole life laid out there, neatly bound in threads of black ink. It was in tracing those threads across the page that I saw that life, for the first time, as truly my own. This was not the account of a character I was forced to suffer alongside; it was me, body and mind parts of a definite existence.
I earnestly believe that each of us desire, at our core, to be bound by something greater than ourselves. Floating freely through this horrible emptiness, crashing into others as we tumble about, we have no hard form, no justification for the parasitism of existence. And so we cage our dispersed conscious in a flimsy, prefabricated frame of lies, that that cage, those lies, may become our body and their borders our self. Having changed my cage was tantamount to rebirth. But was I entering a higher cycle of existence, or one of atonement?
Perhaps if I knew either way, I would have refused to sign the document. But the thrill of unknowing set down roots in that same part of my breast which had torn me from my dull life, putting forth a bloom of seductive crimson. At last, I remembered that I had a heart, and that it was filled with blood; I dripped that blood down the pen and across those neat threads, and my mind, body and life came together in a blaze of warmth.
Todd picked up the contract, wordlessly looked over my signature, nodded. I suppose the taste of my blood was to his liking.
Chapter IIb: Make Yourself Proud
A car soon arrived to pick me up. As it wound its way along the highway, I stared out into the skyâtoday it was brilliantly, crushingly blue, and, perhaps because I knew this would be my last sight of it, I couldnât drink in enough. It was the kind of sky that had always set my thoughts wandering, and I sank softly into daydreams of the past. Not in regret, but as a way of basking in the satisfaction of having my affairs settled, really settled.
The feeling was itself nostalgic. How long had it been since I could tidy away everything I hoped to and enjoy a clear mind like this one? Even since I had given myself entirely over to Skyrim, I never found the time, or more accurately the mental discipline, to feel satisfied with my progress when it was time to sleep. There was always some other barrow, another Draugr to sneak attack, ten more frost trolls to spawn in. But, sometime before that, surely...
In truth, Iâve always found it better to avoid thinking too much about the past, but being that I was in a rare whimsical mood I chased the thoughts as they rolled around.
Where exactly had my life diverged from the tangle of paths collectively known as human society, and when had the gap between the two become too wide to cross? Though I no longer felt any pain when considering that sort of thing, the answer remained hazy, somewhere just out of reach. Maybe it never existed in the first place... Even as I tried to turn my memories over I found myself refashioning them, reshooting events and adjusting details until they supported convenient interpretations. By this point the original memory, if such a thing could be said to exist, had long since been lost.
In the back of that car, in that tiny world populated only by me, I invented a past self to bid farewell to.
What sense of obligation drove me? It must have been something like going to a distant relativeâs funeralâunable to feel the emotion I had been expecting, unsure of even what that emotion was, I made a stiff attempt at propriety in its stead. Naturally it was an awkward affair, a lot like meeting an old friend one has long ago fallen out of touch with. Actually, it was exactly thatâthe sense of trying to reinvent an already-vanished identity, working backwards to justify a bundle of artificial feelings, all wrapped up far too neatly.
I, whose parts had never quite fit together properly, couldnât be satisfied with an answer that tied a neat bow on my life. In other words, I refused to accept an explanation that âjust worksââSurely I must myself be as full of meaningless switchbacks, unintended paths and misplaced objects as the game I had chosen to devote myself to.
A sharp turn pulled me out of my half-dreaming state, my mind still trailing somewhere behind me. We had arrived, and it was time to leave the beautiful sky behind.
Chapter III: You Can Play Forever
My thoughts hardened again as I approached the Bethesda offices, and my heart pounded in my ears. There I stood, at the edge of eternity, awaiting the consummation of my obsession. My driver came too, standing wordlessly behind me in a smart suit and dark sunglasses that, taken together, gave him a cartoonishly coherent image. I wondered if he wasnât a beginner at this too, momentarily crossing paths with me as he strode out to the fringes of his own world with the same affected confidence.
All of my earlier contentment evaporated in the heat of that moment, a heat that seemed to exude from the manila walls of the office as surely as if they were the sands of a far-off desert. It was almost as if the golden sunlight which lapped against the outer offices of the building but went no farther had given them some extra warmth in compensationâIt was strange to think that those walls would soon separate me forever from that light which had been shining down on me for all of my life. The glass door, when I pushed it, seemed impossibly heavy despite the smoothness with which it opened.
As the door came to a close behind me with a puff of air, I was determined not to feel even a single moment of anxiety or regret. What was I leaving behind? A life worth less than nothing. Having entered the (figurative) dungeon with no (figurative) means of healing and suffering deep (figurative) wounds, I had been tip-toeing around trying futilely to avoid further damage even as I knew deep in my heart that I would be broken the moment I tried to do anything.
I had been wrong my whole life; the thing at my core, the thing that had died, it had been a strand of that sunlight which would have pulled me out of that building. There is a place for the injured in society, in the same way that everyone sometimes indulges in a sad song. There is a place for those things which shatter and then go on bandaged in tape and patches, those things that glow with the rainbow promise of the resilience of the spirit, of that distant day when scars will have become old friends.
There is no place in this entire world for those who have broken irreparably. For those who cannot move on, for those who have no future, whose lives are forever sent spinning out of orbit from consensus human existence. There is no promise of the infinite and indefinite palliative care needed simply for that kind of person to survive each day. And, instinctively sensing that shortcoming, fearful that understanding the curse would be to invite it, those fortunate, blind souls for whom tomorrow will surely come are repulsed by the existence of those like meâThose left with no foundation on which to rebuild. Thatâs what I told myself, anyway.
But Todd was different. Ever since our meeting I believed, I had to believe, that he was one of the few members of this pathetic species with an unwounded heart in his chest. Or rather, I had to believe that that heart pulsed with such a vulgar, careless muscularity that injuries which would tear a more sensitive man to shreds could not stop its beating, but only wreathe it in a rosy mist of rich, hot blood as it pumpedâDriving him, I presume, ever northward to the frozen mounts of Skyrim, like the engine of a locomotive rushing monomaniacally toward the next sales pitch.
I would be crushed carelessly by the weight of that existence, a bug upon a windshield. The thought excited me beyond comparison. If I met that sort of end, lower than a stray dog, I was certain that in my last moments I would blaze incandescent. A life so perfectly brought to nothing... That peculiar alchemy had become my last hope.
I was led deep within the bowels of the Bethesda facility, through winding halls and past unmarked doors. I was fairly confident that I had been descending underground from the first floor, but I soon lost all sense of how deep I might have gone. As I passed each silent chamber, I wondered if some other contractee was within, and for the first time in years I felt true jealousy claw at my heart. I was motioned through another door, shut inside, and then with the click of a lock I was left in darkness with only my strange emotions for company.
How much time did I spend drifting through that abyss? It was only when I realized that I couldnât make out my hand in front of my face that I started to fret about my appearance. I had first come to Todd on my knees; now that I had incurred a debt of gratitude too heavy to ever repay, I could at least have kept myself presentable for his sake. But there was nothing to be done about it, and so, brushing my hair frantically with one hand, I set about groping around the limits of my chamber with the other.
It seemed I had been granted a bed with a cold steel frame of the sort hospitals have in period films, a large, rectangular dresser of some sort and an exposed toilet and sink shoved awkwardly in a corner. Beyond that, there could have been anything or nothing at all. Even my thoughts seemed to dissolve into the endless night, and soon I was almost unsure if I was asleep or awake.
It was in this state that he came to me, emerging from a thin slit of light and into the darkness of my dream like the negative image of an infant poking its head into the world. He clapped twice, waited. Clapped again.
The darkness erupted into light.
âYou, uh, you could have⊠They were supposed toâŠâ
So this was the real Todd after all. The weight of Nirn and beyond, all in the body of this strange, overgrown teenager. Even as my earlier fantasies evaporated, I drew a certain confidence from his awkward manner. Smiling slyly, I took my first steps toward him.
Todd continued stammering out an introduction. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable with the words people use, piling up phrases and cutting himself off in a spectacular tangle of conversation. The nervousness on his face grew as I approached, and I took a cruel delight in embracing him mid-sentence. His monologue, hardly a viable birth from the start, died in his throat as he hesitantly placed his hands around me.
No matter how quickly I tried to dispel the thought, his unsure touch reminded me of nothing so much as a child grasping out for its mother as he searched my body. As if to exact revenge for my shattered image of him, I took the lead with a perverse poise, patiently but firmly guiding his faltering touch.
Suddenly, Todd found what he sought, and began to move with a feverish brute force. The strength of an adult man erupted awkwardly from his lanky frame, a weird mixture of the figure I had imagined him to be and the one I saw clearly before my eyes. Carelessly, roughly, like the tugging of a newborn animal yet to even open its eyes, those hands pulled at me with such raw, artless desire that I thought I would surely be torn apart.
I gasped into the wrinkled collar of his shirt. For just a moment we were entwined in the stagnant, torrid air of the chamber; it was as though I was reliving a memory, one I had recalled many times before but in a concentrated form, crystallized until it had taken on a physical edge. Thought became plastic, molten, until I had forgotten where one of us ended and the other began, who was who and who held what and how desire flowed between us. Even before the moment had passed, I knew I didnât want the tragedy of waiting for it, for something that would be like it but never quite the same, to take hold of me againâI wanted nothing more than to keep my eyes closed forever, burrowed within the same sensation for eternity.
And then, in an instant, it was over. We tumbled apart from other, spent and complete.
The copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox 360 Todd had shoved into my waistband sat cold against my stomach, stretching the fabric. Across from me, Todd clutched the sixty dollars he had extracted from my back pocket to his breast as he lay on his back staring blankly into the concrete ceiling. It was the look of a man who had found all that he wanted and spent all of himself in consuming it, a vacant gaze turned upward to nothing at all.
We lay like corpses, like ragdolls awaiting their script, in that chamber where time did not pass.
Once again I was filled with a terrible sadness even before the moment ended. It seemed impossibly cruel that the rotation of the earth and caprices of biology would soon reassert their tyranny over the world in which we two had found some fleeting shelter. Tears fell wet and hot down my cheeks, streaming soundlessly onto the hard floor. Todd, I realized in some periphery of my mind, was also crying.
Gently, apologetically, Todd slaughtered the moment before it could be taken by decay.
âIâll be back tomorrow the same time,â he said with a sad smile. âIâI always operate in the same routine.â
And then he was gone, and I was all alone with myself. Myself, the disc and a cabinet stuffed with consoles and topped with a small television. All according to contract, all belonging to Toddâand yet I could hardly bear even this brief custodianship of everything I had dragged around for so long. Not any more. They had become so, so awfully heavy.
Long after he had disappeared, three more twenty dollar bills appeared from the crack beneath my door.
Returning uncertainly to life, as if awakening from a heartbreakingly beautiful dream, I breathed three words into the emptiness:
"I'll be waiting."
Originally posted November 2017, and revised for this blog. Todd Howard the meme figure in my meme hell world should not be conflated with Todd Howard the actual flesh-and-blood person in the actual hell world.
So I'm two canned coffees past noontime and I see some sort of poppinâ corn man peddling his kernels all loaded with Japanese peels and far-off salts. Well naturally I'm jonesin' for a bag so I toss him some plastic and three hours later I'm chunking through my hands into a decorative mug. Turns out I thought I'm allergic to chilis. Turns out I'm a hypochondriac.
All I'm saying is you gotta be careful when you Persephone around the Naruto counter because you're never going home, you get what I mean, you're never going home. And when you end up at the reception with pockets full of vinyl askinâ where is everyone you're not going home, right.
Listen. Some things in life, theyâre important. Drink waters of your own supply. Pack clothes folded. Don't step around front of cars en route, right. Prance around that farmhouse field âtil the bolt gun comes, find yourself a dandelion in the green, sure. But you have to know when there's a line and when you have to draw it and how to draw it there.
Stuff like that. Wine-dark sea, right.
Yeah, I've tasted a number 'n odd pages in my lifetime. But let me tell you, that don't mean much when you're doin' the opposite of eating in a Marriott parking lot and the lil' soccer sportsmen won't stop starin'. Don't mean a lot in that real world, right.
You've gotta have a plan, right. A mode d' attack. Don't you get caught lollygaggin' up that hill all twainsy-turvsey. Keep your hands in the vehicle and your feet on the ground. And stay away from the Halloweeners and paintpeople. They're never coming home.
Hi, Iâm Nacchi. I write questionable fanfiction and, occasionally, make awful musicâI especially like using UTAU.
On this blog, Iâve been slowly collecting stories (and maybe songs, eventually) I wrote a long time ago, in another life. Maybe some new ones will even appear here, too.
Iâve also taken this as an opportunity to clean up my old writing a bit. I donât want to change my stories to the extent that theyâre unrecognizable (though there are a lot of things I would do differently if I were for some reason writing them today), but most of my older work was written in single sessions over sleepless nights, so it wasnât uncommon for me to forget what I was trying to say halfway through a paragraph, or accidentally repeat myselfâthat kind of thing has been corrected here. Â
As such, the stories Iâve posted here are the selection and form of my writing Iâd most like to be read. I do sometimes go around and retroactively apply my revisions wherever my writing circle posted stories at the time, but theyâre all scattered about and I really have no idea what state each story is in on each site (which, typing it out, seems really bad, but whatever).
If you do read any of these stories, thank you. I never could have been very serious about anything I cared about so much, back then.
â â„, Nacchi
pippipippipiyopiyo (piyopiyo) @weedbride - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
