On screen, I build zoos and bridges and corporate office parks. I set up police forces and staff them. I feed the gorillas and add concessions kiosks for the visitors. At the office park, an employee has stolen a stapler and I lose teamwork points. But I can buy infinite staplers. I can rain staplers from the heavens. I am in charge of the office park, and the zoo, and the bridges and the entire world.
Anyone can build a world. Click on a commodity, the game sets it down in the green, green grass. I buy another dozen gorilla and three more security guards to protect the stockpile of staplers and fifty snacks kiosks, and collect more points and draw more visitors. When I’ve set down about fifty paddocks full of gorillas, I pause. Zoo guests are milling around, unsure what to make of this new attraction. The frame rate slows. Now we’re cooking. Hundreds of gorillas are packed so tightly they’re unable to move except in one big glitchy blob. Too many people, overcrowding the park. Morale points low! Hordes of guests in colorful t-shirts tugging balloons migrate to the parking lot. Algorithmically addled, they flicker and stack atop one another, smiling and waving maniacally.
How all of this worked was that game developers sometimes made oversights with respect to your capabilities as a player. Imagine if one day God raised all your loved ones from the dead and severed limbs grew back and diamonds sprayed from the taps. These are called exploits. Game-breakers. The game gets easy and there are endless possibilities for grift, havoc, chaos and torture.
For example. If you know you’re going to be resurrected, you start looking for really creative ways to die. Overload a mile-high roller coaster and cut the tracks. Send someone a portal that drops him off a cliff. Start a grease fire in the kitchen and torch the house with the kids inside. Kite a world boss to a capital city. It’s intoxicating. There’s no rush like the rush of bad behavior. Get your kicks before the devs swoop in with patches and hot-fixes.
The princes of bad behavior are the griefers. Griefers swarm the massive multiverse games. They don’t play to compete and they don’t care about achievements. They only want to inconvenience, affront and infuriate the other players. Some of their game-breaking abilities are so heinously unbalanced that it destroys any semblance of free will and people quit the game in disgust.
The games I liked were all single player, which meant I could go nuts in my own kingdom.
This was what I, Sam Shields, did in my free time. I recorded myself playing video games the wrong way. Then I narrated them ad hoc, ridiculous, stream-of-consciousness commentary about the mayhem I was wreaking. I posted the videos anonymously to my channel, God Mode. They were getting attention, too. I did not exactly welcome it. My boss didn’t know I was moonlighting. To my knowledge, no one had guessed that I was God.
You see, I needed a singular voice in order to play God. I shambled into a cognitive convention, a manner of speaking perfectly suited to the nature of this task. What poured forth from my lips blended the exclamations of a tyrant with the drone of a cynic and the glee of a child.
This exercise of trying to capture and categorize personas led me to an examination of my own character traits. What is it that I enjoy and pursue the most? Having a thing to think about. Styles. Culture. Breasts. Taste. Impulses. Urges. Reactions. I love having a thing to think about. To figure out. To puzzle over. I love a puzzle. My job is a perfect puzzle. People are puzzles. A mind is a jigsaw of avowals and disavowals. I love solving a thing. Even if it’s getting out of a situation.
Does it get any richer or stranger, soaking in the bath of someone’s mind long enough to wrinkle? A delicious dialogue I’d love to sink a utensil into. It’s the insecurities that are most savory, the most private and taboo. I love detritus and diversions, the rabbit holes and loopholes of untidy thinking. I’ve no interest in things people know for sure.
But I think, categorically, there are two endeavors I’d like to explore. One is a manifesto. The other is an ongoing study of relationships. Being able to separate the two as I ponder should be helpful. The prospect of sifting through the thousands of notes I’ve jotted, outlines from books I’ve read, or hunting down old citations is an ominous task. But I want to remember everything, and incorporate it into a summary of observations, to hopefully distill my role in this mess of a world into something comprehensible.
Two potentially reinforcing maxims I believe I’ve seen affirmed: we like to watch a thing done wrong, and we like nothing more than to play God. All this to say, the situation in which I found myself was a puzzle.
*
At the flashing lights and sirens, Sam Shields pulled to the side of the road, upsetting the stack of missing cat posters on the passenger seat. Outrageously, several drivers in front of him barely slowed down. He grumbled to himself. Moving over for a passing ambulance was one of the few remaining forms of civic coordination.
Almost home. Sam had just performed a minor public service.
It was a brown, defoliated late autumn, chilly, the kind that reminded him of dry sugar-flake cereal. He was supposed to have driven out for a construction meeting with his boss. He’d received a calendar invitation with the text quick check-in and a conference room number. He hated it when they did that, left you somewhere between fired and a bonus cheque. He called to excuse himself. I have a situation, he’d told Pete, without explaining that a cat had gone missing earlier that morning, and he was obliged to skip work in order to track it down.
This all began as he’d been enjoying a placid moment with a cup of coffee, bundled on the front steps of the rented Victorian townhouse he shared with another tenant, Vivian, who lived above him. His breath came in puffs he liked to imagine floating up and merging with hers, and then bigger clouds and storms. Vivian sprang lightly up the steps after her run and he noted the sweat slicking her clavicles. They kept up a periodic, friendly banter and had shared a bottle of wine on the steps one evening that summer. Her friends and guests came and went; Sam gathered she had a romantic attachment or two.
So we’re like sharks? If we stay still we die? This autumn has felt different than other autumns. What’s a word in the emotional spectrum that isn’t a temperature? And the word lust keeps coming up. Should we ever suppress the thrill of anticipation? I like talking to you because it’s like seeing a poor reflection of myself in still toilet water after staring at painted walls. I need you to hear my secrets. It’s fun admitting the things that make me feel alive. Standing in high places, cocking an ear to l’appel du vide.
As Vivian smiled and passed, Sam’s greeting was cut short by a notification on his phone.
Pete wanted an answer. Was Sam interested in working on an automated distribution warehouse in Florida, and could he fly out Wednesday to start the project? A distribution warehouse. It offended his sporadically strong scruples. Excepting perhaps storage facilities for a Mexican drug cartel he couldn’t think of an enterprise he cared less to architect.
As Sam was formulating his reply, an orange tabby cat appeared at the bottom of the stairs. It was thin and scruffy in the way of active children, who are nevertheless well cared for. It stole up the steps and swirled around his legs, pushing its face against his calves. Naturally, he pet it. Looking closer, he noticed it had the most astonishing, deep copper-colored eyes. He gently cupped the cat’s face and snapped a picture. When he withdrew his hand, the cat sank its teeth into the meat of his palm. Sam reflexively kicked the cat away. He examined his hand, the bite had broken his skin and left a constellation of welting red marks. Cat bites could be nasty, he’d heard somewhere, something bacterial in the saliva. He went inside and washed the wound with dish soap. As the water ran, a lurking feeling began to unsettle him.
Symptoms could develop in a few days or up to a year, the animal control officer said over the phone. Sam shouldn’t take chances. Testing the cat was the best way to be sure.
It might have been a stray. It could be anywhere. “A few days? What if I can’t find it?”
“You should get treated right away.”
Sam glanced around his house. Messy coffee things were piled in the sink. The sofa was pushed up to the window to make room for command central, his wall of monitors, audio equipment, microphones, gadgets, and a makeshift vocal recording booth draped in bed sheets. Damn lucky he’d taken a photo, though that was his first mistake.
“Find the cat,” the officer urged. “It could endanger children and other animals. Please notify us if you do.”
Sam hung up. He searched “rabies” and got nightmare images of snarling dogs and bats with primordial screeching faces folded into ghastly knots. Then he searched for treatment prices. He read of wild swings in costs and hospital bill horror stories.
Canvasing the neighborhood and hanging posters had cost him valuable hours. He imagined some sort of grisly countdown clock hanging over his head, glowing with poison-green digits.
Just when he’d reached a balance point in his life, now this. He went to all the right places to meet his needs; he mediated, exercised, kept his various lusts in check. He’d spent the weeks and months since Theresa left earnestly pondering his makeup: was he Sam Shields for reasons arbitrary or habitual or lazy or what?
Any early guess provides that I may just like having secrets. The secret that I was somewhere else with someone else. Or that I used to enjoy the thrill of carefully disguising my footsteps to my fort with grass and ferns. That I bought three vintage Playboys. That I’d rather us not meet tonight, because then I can stay up late and do whatever I want.
When I exercise I listen to this series. I relate to the main character’s pragmatic lack of emotions, and the impractical absurdity of his relationships. This character uses a phrase to denote his impulse to murder: his dark passenger. I conclude that if you suspect there is something odd about you, it tends toward the bad end of the spectrum, and maybe you have a dark passenger or something. So what’s my secret? Probably my strangest secret: the most indulgent thing I can imagine is feeling a corrupted feeling, and being comfortable enough with someone to tell it. In relationships people act like they want to get to know each other. I would like to have enough respite from feeling pressure to categorize my thoughts as good or bad to make a proper determination with respect to what I should be doing with myself.
“That’s a game-breaker, Sam.” Her saying that. Turning a phrase in the midst of a dawning crisis. Theresa was special. Sam swiveled in his office chair to examine the street below his window. People passed periodically on the sidewalk beyond the front lawn. Someone would call. A good neighbor would see his posters and lure the cat, and he would race out with garden gloves and a pillowcase.
* * *