Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  While the exquisite planes of her face speak of northern China, her musical English accent indicates a Hong Kong childhood. She’s wearing a navy pinstripe pantsuit over an Urotsukidoji T-shirt. The film is an X-rated anime about a shy young student who grows a three-headed prehensile penis that ends up destroying Tokyo. My kind of woman.

  “You must be our new resident. I’m Xan, your welcome committee as it were. Come to my office, and let’s chat.”

  She leads me down a long hallway into a room whose every available surface is occupied by screens. There are banks of monitors connected to expensive workstations, multiple game consoles, and a group of wifi picture frames cycling through landscapes from popular shooters. I sit across from her desk, and she surveys me intently.

  “Are you a gamer, Mr. Pryce?”

  “James, please. And no, I’m more of a spectator by nature.”

  Her mouth forms an evil smile. “I’m not sure your fellow residents will allow that. Passive engagement is considered quite last-century here. Abstinence is not an option. In this place if you’re not playing the game, the game plays you.”

  “You’re obviously quite the ambassador.”

  “Well, we have you in our clutches now, so better you understand right away that GAME is no fun if you don’t know the rules. Fancy a bit of background on the place?”

  I nod.

  “We humans have played games since the very dawn of time. But as we digitize them, it’s got to where, for some of us, that’s all we do. Our generation grew up playing video games, but those were just dollhouses: tidy wee worlds that live in your monitor. Today we’re capable of far more immersion. Not just modeling reality anymore. Now we want to manipulate it. To ‘machine’ it, if you will. Maybe even replace it.”

  “I can think of a few improvements.”

  Xan smiles. “Quite so. But a bit of caution’s in order. Something about treading the line between the virtual and real makes GAME’s little monsters hopelessly transgressive. If there’s an observable border of decency or prudence, the hateful players we breed here want to cross it like fighting cocks.”

  She adopts a long-suffering expression. “Just this year we’ve seen the premiere of Kewpie, a game intended as a profound comment on the casual misogyny you find with internet culture. But in playing it, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for the real thing. Then there was the staging of a piece called Flash Mob, which resulted in several residents getting nicked for indecent exposure. If we GAMErs hold the keys to the future, I’m not sure I want to live there.”

  “What about Coit Files?”

  “Coit? Ah, you mean Billy.” Apparently Xan disapproves of people inventing absurd handles for themselves in RL.

  “How would you characterize his art?”

  Xan weighs my question. “I can say this: it ain’t pretty.”

  I raise my eyebrows, looking for more. But she stands and takes my arm. “Why don’t I show you?”

  As we walk back to GAME’s main entrance hall, Xan says, “Your Billy’s idée fixe is something he calls ‘The Bleed.’”

  She treats me to a disquisition about how throughout history we’ve tended to surround ourselves with ever more sophisticated imaginary environments. It used to be books and plays, then film, but now we have these giant online spaces. Part of their allure is how they grant us the ability to act as someone else, through the use of these ornate masks we call avatars.

  Xan tells me that Billy liked to explore how our enthrallment to lavish fantasy worlds can have a pronounced impact on the real one. He sought to inspire moments when your biological self bleeds into your avatar, and vice versa.

  She leads me to a small alcove set up as a public gallery space. While most of the “work” produced at GAME is intangible, they’ve filled the room with posters and exhibits illustrating demos, play-tests, and events. A corner of the space is dedicated to one of Billy’s previous offerings.

  On a glass pedestal poses a hideous sculpture of Satan. Spiraling ram horns, cloven feet, barbed tail. Oddly, he appears as though he’s been burned by his own hellfire. His crimson skin shows large black and brown spots. The latex has bubbled in some places, melted all the way through in others. I look closer and find not a statue, but rather a devil costume arrayed on a neutral mannequin. He’s reaching forward with one of his clawed hands holding a charred wooden frame that houses a fifteen-inch video screen. A small brass nameplate reads HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. The screen cycles shots of human faces contorted in horror.

  Xan explains, “So one advantage of having this scary old building is that it makes a jolly good venue for our annual haunted house fundraiser. We often invite visiting artists to do special ‘installations’ exploring fear.”

  “That sounds scary.”

  “No, they’re generally quite good. We only select those who don’t place themselves above delivering cheap thrills. Many of our residents hail from PiMP, and so in 2012 a couple of the new ones had met Billy. Just starting the program, wasn’t he? They knew he had a yen for high-concept nastiness, so why not see what he could do with a room?”

  “I suppose you’re about to tell me.”

  “On the contrary, many thought it a smashing success. At the debut, we were disappointed to find a cheesy mockery of those evangelist hell houses that dress some oaf in a Satan costume”—she gestures to the thing in front of us—“to frighten teens into preserving their virtue. We asked, ‘Is this really the best he can do?’ But just watch.”

  She touches the screen a few times, and a video starts rolling.

  In a dark room packed with people, the actor dressed as Satan stands on a slightly elevated stage. He makes a showy gesture to summon his dark powers. Behind him erupts a shower of sparks. Flames jet toward the ceiling. The devil turns and throws up his hands with malign ecstasy. But in doing so, his tail drags through one of the gas jets. His costume catches fire like rayon pajamas. Spasming with terror, he trips into the room’s painted backdrop, which ignites in a blazing sheet. The devil starts screaming. After an agonizing moment of indecision, so does the crowd. Two GAME staffers run from offstage to extinguish the actor, but by now the flames have ascended to the heavy curtains draped around the room, and the fire is clearly out of control.

  The crowd surges to flee, and you can make out the accordion impact as they hit the exits. Then the cascading frenzy of panic when they realize: the doors are locked.

  But those nearer the fire keep pressing forward. A petite woman goes down calling for help. This is obviously the moment at which Billy’s portraits of horror were taken. Someone being pulverized against the doors screams, “I can’t breathe!”

  The video cuts to black.

  “Ouch,” I say.

  “Yeah. Anyone who’s been near the stage at a big music festival can tell you it’s not a pleasant feeling. But with an inferno at your back . . .”

  Xan pauses, remembering the experience. “Billy had rigged that wall with sensors that tripped when a certain ‘safe’ amount of pressure was applied. At the critical moment, it just fell down like a drawbridge, and people got out without any serious injuries. The fire was all just special effects. He’d hired some guys from the Madagascar Institute to teach him how to rig them.” Madagascar is a Brooklyn-based collective known for staging wild bashes involving flamethrowers, pyrotechnics, and rocket-powered carnival rides. “But needless to say, that was the one and only performance of Billy’s hell house.”

  “Not afraid to set fire to a crowded theater.”

  “Yeah, he has a pretty aggressive attitude toward your First Amendment. Toward his audiences too. The guy goes around saying, ‘Art, like games, must have something at stake.’ You can see why, even here, people find him hard to take. But I have to credit the little blighter. He set himself the task of creating real fear in the most contrived setting. People come to a haunted house knowing that you’re going to try to scare them. It’s easy to get a yelp when you have someone in a funny wig jump out at them. Bu
t then they’re laughing about it the next second.”

  “But no one was laughing after this.”

  “More like hyperventilating. Billy was really able to jar us out of our role as ‘fake’ victims. The way he’d built the context helped. Prominent fire code warnings posted at the building’s entrance. He search-optimized a news story to appear just under the links to our ticketing website so almost everyone would read the headline ‘Ninety-six die in Rhode Island concert blaze,’ before they came to the show.” She shakes her head in admiration.

  “With all that in our subconscious, his artificial fire shattered our superficial suspension of disbelief and made us actually believe we were about to die. That, for him, is the Bleed, the moment when the imaginary becomes shockingly real. When you and your persona fuse.”

  “People must have gone crazy.”

  “Across the board. One critic wrote that it was the most transformative artistic experience he’s had in years. Another coined the term ‘terrartist.’ An audience member filed a suit asking ten million in damages for giving her PTSD.”

  “Do all of his projects end in lawsuits?”

  “I think he’d be disappointed otherwise. He believes litigation is America’s only authentic form of public discourse. If no one is suing you, you’re obviously not very interesting. He indemnified GAME against that little stunt, and we actually saw a marked increase in donations when news broke about the legal action. Seems supporting the arts is tedious, but defending them stirs the blood.”

  Xan smiles at me and then steps back toward the hall. “Come along then. I’ll show you around.”

  I’m impressed by the building’s size and scope. Along with the main gallery on the first floor is a performance space fit for an audience of over two hundred. The next three levels house studios, increasingly industrial in nature. There’s a state-of-the-art computer lab and a full-service metal shop bedecked with warning signs emphasizing the dangers of welding while under the influence of controlled substances. The fifth floor is divided into “collaborative spaces” that all seem to be padlocked, and the last two floors, Xan informs me, consist of garrets for those residents who need “accommodations suitable for alternative lifestyles.”

  She adds, “But I’ll spare you the zoo tour. I’m sure the beasts are still asleep.”

  Xan then takes me to find an office. Given the sort of work I need to do, I ask for one that’s fairly out of the way.

  She says, “A cave dweller, are you? Well, we can give you one of the PODs, but—”

  “PODs?”

  “The work spaces in the Pit of Despair. Here, follow me.” We walk toward a small antique elevator. It descends creakily after Xan hits the button for the basement.

  “I have to warn you,” she says, “your associates down here are a different breed. POD people, we call them. Not the most gregarious.”

  We step out into an area that looks like the set of a grindhouse feature. It’s a rat’s nest of narrow brick corridors with rusty pipes overhead and industrial doors spaced at irregular intervals. To enhance the atmosphere, residents have covered the walls with prison graffiti, and at one intersection, a realistic skeleton hangs from shackles.

  Xan stops at an office and appears surprised at the oversized Master Lock hanging from its latch. She consults a sheet in her portfolio and mumbles, “Bollocks. This is supposed to be open.”

  I drift halfway down the hall to where a rickety door stands ajar. A naked overhead bulb reveals the room to be a tiny dank cell with a slouching brick wall running along one side and a set of water-stained drywall planes composing the other three. In the back, an ancient desk stands devoid of contents.

  “This looks okay,” I call out.

  Xan seems hesitant to abandon the room listed on her clipboard, but she walks slowly over and checks out the one I’ve selected. She darts a glance across the hall at a sturdy steel door.

  Finally, she says, “Right. Well, I hope you’re very happy here. I should say that we’re having a bit of a fete tonight. If you meet me outside at eleven, I’ll hand you around to your new colleagues.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Welcome to the GAME, James. You know where I am. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Well, there is one thing. I understand Billy has disappeared. You haven’t seen him recently, have you?”

  Xan chuckles softly. “Billy? I don’t believe I’ve laid eyes on him for quite a while. But that’s not so unusual.”

  “Seems like there’s some reason to worry. What with the Jackanapes suicide epidemic.”

  “Now James, I like lurid drama as much as the next girl, but two separate tragedies hardly make an epidemic.”

  I nod amenably but silently reply, Yeah, but who says it’s over?

  9

  Approaching the GAME building that night, I’m surprised to see a scene resembling the sidewalk of a hot nightclub. There’s a brace of enormous black bouncers accompanied by a transvestite in an astro-Krishna getup holding a clipboard. Beyond the perimeter, a group of the unnamed angrily thumb their phones. Xan, ravishing in leather pants and black cashmere, leads me smoothly past the doorgoyles.

  Inside is a labyrinth of giant screens, each providing a window into some strange universe of grave jeopardy and eternal resurrection. Projectors mounted in any available corner make surfaces crawl with a chaos of ill-defined images. Smoke from DIY holographic displays pervades the place with a sense of spectral menace. Condensing mist drips onto the cables crisscrossing the floor. Having considered the topic recently, I assess the possibility of electrocution.

  The crowd is a pan-tribal confab representing suits, geeks, and the new-media media. Omnipresent black lights impart a Tron-ish computer glow even to those guests not dressed like gaudy NOD avatars. A series of statuesque women, faces hidden by Boschian beaked-creature masks, are dancing up on platforms.

  A DJ I dimly recognize is working through a dissonant eight-bit set, occasionally manipulating a panel of raw circuitry.

  Though it seems like typical art-rave eclecticism, eventually I notice that the unifying undercurrent here is play. Scanning the room I see a group of what I’m forced to characterize as upscale punk intelligentsia running around trying to assassinate each other with their cell phones. There are several home-brewed Magic: The Gathering–style card games going, hard-core LARPers fencing with prop-quality light sabers, and a techno-hippie drum circle gathered around an iPhone collaborative music app. They’re wearing headphones, so the group’s synchronized nodding comes off eerie in its silence. The aquarium I saw Xan working on earlier now allows players to fight phosphorescent piranhas with a remote-control submarine.

  My host sees a passing waiter, all of whom are dressed as snow ninjas, and liberates two magenta drinks. She hands one to me.

  “Gan bei, James.” We clink glasses. “So here you have GAME in all its degenerate glory.”

  She gestures to a group way out on the thrash end of the spectrum who have imported a bottle of Everclear and some powdery substance and are lighting their sneezes on fire.

  Xan downs the better part of her drink and then grabs the elbow of someone behind her. “Looks like I’ll need another cocktail. Be right back, but in the meantime, meet Andrew Garriott.”

  Garriott is a diminutive Brit with short hair and dancing eyes that give him a sprightly quality. He shows the well-wrought smile of someone groomed to be a child star. After a warm handshake and some preliminaries, he asks me what I do.

  “Video, mostly. What’s your game of choice?”

  “Game? Oh, I’m complete crap at games. More of a gearhead, really. I was making robots at Cambridge . . . I suffer to think how I ended up here. Good parties though. I guess you could say I—”

  Garriott is nearly carried off his feet by the ardent embrace of a strikingly tall blonde. Her back to me, she puts him into a precarious dip while whispering into his ear. Garriott’s initial frown at being mauled smooths into an expres
sion approaching bliss. She sets him back on balance, grabs his hair, and gives him a violent kiss on the forehead. I begin to turn away, as it seems clear they have something important to discuss, but Xan reappears by my side and taps her shoulder, saying, “Olya, how beastly! You’re alienating our new man here.”

  She turns, and I have to strain to keep my mouth closed and my eyes from wandering along uncivil trajectories. Olya puts one in mind of mythology. With cascades of nearly white hair, eyes a color of blue Icelandic geneticists are no doubt struggling to patent, and a radiant complexion, she has all the unnatural perfection of the Valkyrie one might find painted on the side of a van at Comic-Con. This impression is not hindered by her wearing a metallic corset that, while possibly providing some protection in battle, seems more contrived to bring confusion to her enemies by what it does for her tremendous décolletage. Her voice is the low Slavic purr of a Bond villain:

  “Ah. Hello. I am Olya Zhavinskaya.”

  I start to offer my hand, but she envelops me in a Russian triple kiss. The last one lingering enough to make me fumble my own name. Olya seems to ignore it anyway and says, “Now, zaichik, we welcome you here, and I’m sure we’ll be great friends. It is very rude of me, but I must take away the little ones. We have business.”

  She puts her arms around the shoulders of Garriott and Xan and marches them off toward a dimly lit corner by the DJ booth. Xan puts up a mollifying finger for me, but something Olya says makes her head snap around as they disappear into the crowd.

  After some time spent making small talk with other GAMErs, I notice, across the crowded main gallery, Olya stepping up onto the DJ’s stage.

  “Shitfire,” observes a guy standing nearby.

  The DJ shakes his head at whatever she’s asking. But with her lips at his ear, he finally nods reluctantly, earning a brisk pat on the ass. The DJ abandons his abstract composition of low-fi bleeps and segues into an up-tempo version of the Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” but with Morrissey’s bleak baritone artfully mixed with a James Brown classic: