Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  Renard stopped.

  With our flashlights we discovered a dead rat.

  Its skin had been seared off. Probably by the random discharge of a steam pipe. That implied a steam pipe could be anywhere near us: a scalding blast might happen at any second, might burn our own skins off. And yet we just stood there, filthy water seeping into our shoes, staring at the hairless, melted-skin rat, whose head was twisted around, his lips drawn back to reveal sharp broken teeth. Eyes shut tight, as if still expending effort at keeping his eyes shut after death, as if he resented the afterlife.

  Renard said, “Rip that rat’s head from its body.”

  I followed the order.

  * * *

  —

  Many years later, at a record store, I saw something behind the counter that startled me. It was a Beatles LP called “Yesterday and Today.” The cover featured a photograph of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, all of them smiling and laughing, wearing white butcher’s coats, and they were all covered with raw meat and blood-smeared decapitated babies.

  The babies were dolls, of course. But the image unnerved me. The Beatles looked devilish and gleeful, and it felt like every childish suspicion I had about them was confirmed. Apparently (according to the record store clerk) there was so much outcry over that grisly cover that the records were all recalled. The original cover was replaced with an anodyne photo of the clean-cut Beatles gathered around a piece of luggage. But to save on costs, they used the same cardboard sleeve; that is, the record company just placed an album-sized sticker of the new cover over the old one with the butchered babies. I could only imagine what some curious teenybopper must’ve thought when, idly picking away at the polite sticker of the Fab Four sitting around a steamer trunk, they discovered the horrific baby-murder image below it.

  In both pictures, the Beatles have the same shit-eating smirks. They look absolutely delighted with themselves.

  * * *

  —

  The rat came alive in my hands.

  I hadn’t expected that. Suddenly the animal was thrashing around, eyes wild, squeaking, hissing. Its terrified noises filled the steam tunnels. My startled fingers slipped on the slimy fur, its slick writhing body, I was losing my grip as it tried to escape, tried to bite. In a panic I grabbed the rat’s head, twisted it all the way around until I felt the snap.

  The rat stopped moving.

  Renard didn’t say anything. He just watched me.

  I couldn’t breathe. My heart was going crazy. Had the rat bitten me? It hadn’t. But it was a close thing.

  With a lot of pulling and wiggling and tearing I managed to separate the rat’s head from its body. More difficult than I expected. A ripping twist, then another, bones crunching, grinding—

  It was finished.

  In the flashlight’s wobbling light, I handed the rat’s gory head up to Renard.

  I couldn’t see Renard’s face.

  That was the last thing he ever ordered me to do.

  I felt like we had completed something.

  * * *

  —

  For what it’s worth, I later learned from Stettinger’s autobiography that somewhere in that same building, the same day I killed that rat, Stettinger made the breakthrough that led to his first published paper on thanaton theory.

  * * *

  —

  On the last day of physics camp, at the going-away pizza party, the FARGs were telling everyone’s fortunes. They claimed to have learned on some Wiccan BBS or whatever about a method of telling the future “that’s never wrong, it’s totally spooky” and they had laid out a bunch of twigs and they would call people over and move the twigs around and then use their “fortune-telling” context as an excuse to say nice things to their friends and to say mean things to the people they disliked.

  Renard and I weren’t interested in having our fortunes told. But all the other campers did it. Eventually I felt guilty because, even though Renard and I didn’t interact with the other campers—and the other boys kept a wary distance from us too, they didn’t even tease us anymore—the fact remained that the FARGs had been gracious enough to let Renard and me use what the entire camp had conceded were “their” computers. So, in the end, we let the girls tell our fortunes.

  Renard went first. The FARGs predicted a bright future for him. Renard was going to be rich, he was going to be famous, he was going to be successful. The FARGs poured it on a bit thick, I remember thinking, perhaps trying to demonstrate how magnanimous they were by bestowing a “good” fortune to a kid like Renard whom everyone was creeped out by.

  When the FARGs started telling my fortune, they had a hard time at first. The girls laid out their witchy twigs, but then one of them would look at me and whisper, and then they’d have to lay the whole thing out again in a different configuration. I had no idea what their method was. At last the girls found a configuration they could all agree on, and then they proceeded to move the magic twigs again and again, until—I remember how all three of the girls’ faces changed, slowly and then all at once. Something seemed to upset them all. The FARGs looked back up at me. After a strange silence one of them quickly said that, um, my fortune was that I was going to be happy, I would have a daughter, and it would be a fine life, a fine life, whatever, vague and abrupt.

  Then they were done.

  No more fortune-telling for anyone. The FARGs swept the twigs back into their bag. Even though a few other kids were still waiting, the FARGs said no, no, fortune-telling is finished.

  The FARGs didn’t look at me for the rest of the party.

  I hadn’t really liked the FARGs that much anyway but this seemed like a shitty way to say good-bye.

  Then my parents came to pick me up. Physics camp was over.

  The last thing Renard said to me was, “That’s all, folks!”

  * * *

  —

  That night I dreamed I was walking around campus.

  The physics camp had just concluded and all the campers were going their separate ways. I was alone on the woodsy quad, although there were some new buildings, new sidewalks I didn’t recognize.

  The FARGs were walking ahead of me in their small group. I wanted to catch up with them, to ask them about those fortune-telling twigs and why they acted so strangely. But I couldn’t catch up with the girls. They wouldn’t even turn around. They seemed to be moving faster and faster away from me. Then they split off their separate ways, none of them turning around.

  I followed one of them.

  The girl crossed the quad, leaving the campus. I realized that, although this girl had been walking with the FARGs, she wasn’t one of them. Even from behind I could tell she was someone else.

  I kept after her.

  The girl stopped, as though she knew I was following her.

  She began to turn around.

  I didn’t want her to turn around. I didn’t want to see that girl’s face.

  I woke up sweating, my heart racing. I scrambled out of bed in bleary agitation. At first I didn’t know I was at home. I thought I was still at camp. I found my way to the bathroom that I hadn’t seen in weeks and turned on the light and sat on the toilet in the bright-lit room for a long time so I wouldn’t fall back asleep again. The girl’s face frightened me in a way I hadn’t felt since I was little. I was still shaking.

  It wasn’t the last time I had that dream.

  Maybe, I realize now, not even the first time.

  * * *

  —

  At Renard’s urging I copied his game onto a blank floppy disk and took it home from physics camp. Over the next few months or so, sometimes I played it. But not a lot. Renard lived across the country, in the Pacific Northwest, and even though we wrote letters to each other after camp, it would sometimes take weeks for him to reply.

  Back at camp, Renard had listened to me in an attentive way that made e
ven the stupid things I said feel meaningful. In the morning I’d tell him what I’d dreamed about the night before, and he’d listen with interest, as though I were describing life in another country. (“I don’t dream,” he said.) But now that our little rituals were defunct, now that Renard existed to me only as words on paper, I didn’t find him so compelling. As time passed, I couldn’t understand why I’d submitted to his dangerous night missions at physics camp. It felt absurd how Renard and I had half convinced ourselves that some vast malignant unconsciousness permeated everything, that secrets bubbled invisibly inside old video games, that the radio unwittingly spoke with the devil’s voice—the whole mythology we had created together that summer was dumb.

  In the letters, Renard asked, “Have you found the Flickering Man?”

  Pathetic. I was in high school now. I was killing it academically. I actually got special permission to take AP Physics as a freshman. In comparison, Renard’s continued search for the Flickering Man in that obsolete video game seemed pointless. I never understood it in the first place. I stopped answering Renard’s questions about the Flickering Man. Eventually Renard stopped writing to me.

  And that was it from Renard.

  There was nothing unusual about his final letter to me. No good-bye, no explicit cutting of ties. After my third letter to him went unanswered during my sophomore year of high school, I stopped writing to him, too.

  Actually, there was one peculiar thing about Renard’s final letter to me.

  The postscript, below his signature. I’ll see you in Cahokia.

  * * *

  —

  Not long after that I went to the library to research a term paper. I was supposed to be looking up the Teapot Dome scandal.

  I ended up reading books about Cahokia.

  I learned things Renard hadn’t talked about.

  The people of Cahokia had practiced mass human sacrifice. The excavation at one of the many mounds—Mound 72, it was called—revealed a pit of more than fifty women buried at once, strangled or poisoned or throats slit, precisely arranged in rows and layers. Elsewhere near the same mound, dozens of men, women, and even children were executed all at once, more brutally, and immediately thrown into pits—some clubbed to death, some beheaded, some shot by arrows, some with their hands chopped off—while others were clearly buried alive, their skeletal fingers still clawing at the dirt. Corpses arranged in grisly layers on stacked platforms, now pressed as flat as paper. Dozens of mutilated bodies thrown into garbage pits willy-nilly and covered with clay.

  In a particular place of honor atop that mound, a man and a woman were buried together. The woman was on the bottom, facing downward; the man was on top, facing upward, separated from her by a bird-shaped cloak inlaid with tens of thousands of valuable blue shell beads in which apparently he’d been buried. Both the man and the woman were surrounded by ceramics, copper artifacts, jewelry, stone game pieces, and more sacrificed corpses—men, women, even a child. Also buried nearby were four men in a row, arms intertwined, their hands and heads cut off.

  I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I mean, go ahead and look it up yourself. Incredible. And nobody really talks about it.

  Some archaeologists believed these sacrificial rituals in Cahokia were theatrical ceremonies that lasted for days. Extravagant public feasts, a citywide party. Garbage pits revealed dumps of thousands of butchered deer, heaps of earthen pots, and food to feed the entire city—enormous quantities of corn, grapes, nuts, pumpkins, porridge, persimmons, berries, and enough charred tobacco to envelop Cahokia in a fog of hallucinogenic nicotine. There were also pots stained with dried-up “black drink,” a caffeine-soaked beverage you drank to induce visions and vomiting. Death, ecstasy, nightmare, a psychedelic pageant of human sacrifice.

  Unthinkable shit was happening in downstate Illinois a thousand years ago.

  Now forgotten.

  Was that ceremony a retelling of a creation story? A fertility ritual? A celebration of the ascension of a new leader? Nobody knows. Some stuff made no sense to me. One Cahokian neighborhood seemed built only for the purpose of ritual torching: a hundred houses, full of food and tools and treasure, were rapidly built and, before anyone could live in the houses, immediately burned down.

  Why?

  Maybe that’s why Cahokia was abandoned, I thought. Because it became a nightmare city. Maybe Cahokia had left a bad taste in the mouth and was shunned. And perhaps, after a while, since nothing had been said about it for so long, nobody could say anything about it anymore for sure. Or at least that’s the story I invented for myself, from the little I could find out.

  Not long after that, I learned Renard Jankowski was dead.

  * * *

  —

  Renard had died in the fall of my sophomore year of high school. I had no idea. His parents sent me a note about it two months after it happened, around Christmas. They also returned my last three letters to him, unopened. From his parents’ tone, as far as I could tell, it felt like they were writing to me not so much because they wanted to inform me as because they wanted me to stop sending letters.

  I was not a particularly emotional kid but Renard’s death shook me. I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, it’s not like Renard and I had a grand friendship for all the ages. But we had lived together side by side for two months. We had been each other’s only friend for that time.

  That counted for something.

  I wrote back to Renard’s parents. I poured my heart out, surprising myself as I wrote. I included a bunch of anecdotes in the letter, the kind of memories I imagined parents would approve of.

  No response.

  I looked up the Jankowskis’ number. Telephoned them a few times. Always got an answering machine.

  They never called back.

  To be sure, the Jankowskis didn’t know me. Who was I, after all? Some random kid that their dead son had roomed with for a few weeks over a year ago. But it nagged me that I didn’t even know how Renard had died. And this was 1988—it’s not like I could just Google his obituary. The Jankowskis ignored my letters. Didn’t return my calls.

  And that was that.

  * * *

  —

  I began playing Renard’s game again.

  It was Christmas break of sophomore year. I didn’t feel like going outside anyway. I didn’t want to see anyone. A snowstorm sealed me in and I let myself be hypnotized by the game in a way that I hadn’t at camp. I stuck the disk Renard had given me into my Apple II clone and let it rip. The game really was addictive in an obsessive-compulsive way, and I found myself spending hours in my basement on my computer, drawing maps and exploring every last corner of the vast, mysterious house. But now that I was playing it intensely, and not just casually, I realized how the game really made no sense. I couldn’t even figure out what I was supposed to do. It always seemed like I was making progress, little by little, ascending level upon level in the house, but I didn’t know where it was going, what it meant. In the game I was walking through one room after another and all the rooms looked the same. There were creatures walking around, but after a while the creatures stopped trying to kill me. None took notice of me when I bumped into them—they didn’t even break stride when I shot at them. My arrows sailed right through them, like the game was ignoring me—or more like the game had gotten used to me, my wanderings through its strange many-leveled house incorporated into its ecosystem. And yet I still didn’t know what I was doing.

  I played the game all day.

  And another day.

  And another.

  * * *

  —

  I was playing the game late at night, in the dark. Maybe three in the morning.

  School was going to start again in a few days, winter break would soon be over, and yet for some reason I was spending my last few days of precious freedom playing this game. I didn’t care. I was walking th
rough one of the highest levels of the house, where one false step would send me plummeting down through dozens of levels to the basement…

  The Flickering Man entered my screen.

  The Flickering Man looked identical to the man I was controlling but he moved in a different manner than my man did. A glitch in his animation—his body jerkily making the motions of walking forward, even as his body was actually moving backward—

  The Flickering Man saw me.

  And I mean it felt like he saw me.

  Is it ridiculous to be scared of a graphic in a video game? I was terrified. The Flickering Man was now walking toward me in his unnatural forward-backward way, climbing the staircases toward me, floating over the gaps between the floors that I had to jump over. Steadily closing the distance.

  I ran away.

  I put screen after screen between me and the Flickering Man.

  But the Flickering Man kept pursuing me. Showed up whenever I slowed down. The Flickering Man’s pixels trembled in an unstable way, and he almost had a smile on his face, although that couldn’t be because his graphic was identical to my man, and my man’s face was expressionless.