Cairey’s date read a biographical summary of Set72 provided by a search-engine which claimed that, unbeknownst to Cairey, he had once been an all-state athlete before he had traded in his athletic pursuits for virtual ones, sensing, as he said in an interview, that the future prospects of esports & performative play were far brighter than the ever-diminishing relevance of traditional ball-and-field sports. His intuitions had served him well- providing his lifestory with a coherent throughline, that in premodern times, could have been deemed Providence. It was for this reason that so many came to expunge themselves in his presence. He was proof that their wildest dreams could indeed come true.
Set72 scores a headshot & two others fall into the encroaching abyss. Then two more stragglers die from bleeding out from wounds sustained earlier, unable to find corpses to feed from. This leaves Set72 in the top five already, assuring him a prize that, being only 5% of the winner’s lot, is still twice the median monthly salary. Cairey, realizing this, is taken out of his rapt immersion in the game, as monetary figures so often yank him from his enchantments, like a leash around the neck of a rapturous dog chasing after a bird, believing himself for a moment free, only to be humiliated by the limitations of his chain.
How the fuck could it be possible to make so much money competing in a fucking video game? It seems unreal to him. Absurd, though it is normal now, as he knows. It is his disbelief which is strange.
Wouldn’t it be better if the stakes were higher? He wonders. There was more dignity when life & health were on the line, not merely simulated, turned like everything in late industrial capitalism into meaningless numbers. Everything gets turned into a score... Why did every prize, every great significance at the end of struggle, all heroism & courage have to disappear into a number behind a dollar sign? They should reward him with something else, he thinks. Why not make him President or something? Why not give him an island or a city? Why is it always money?
This issue had plagued Cairey from the first moment he had realized what money was, & more, what the lack of money was. This tyranny of currency was some sort of black magic in his mind. It could only be explained as a parody- a joke of some sort played by an uncaring demonic entity far beyond his grasp. It yoked & deflated the noblest of things, rendering them dirty, like any coinage passed in the exchange of so-many hands. He felt it around his neck, dragging him, this means of universal translation, this rosetta stone, pulling him to the depths of immiseration, crushing his fields of singing flowers, his dreams that never come true, all the beautiful things desiccated & trampled in the market. Everything he wants is out of his price range. He knows all too well the limits of his holdings.
What unholy alchemy, this decimating atomism, proving in its endless self-confirming loop, that all is composed of number & measurement- of adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, exponentiating- all of these subjects which plagued him in his youth- incomprehensible arabesques of arithmetic which turned all to bits passing through the grist mills of algorithm, their endless decimals, their infinities uncomputable by the weak machine of his flesh- these undulating, oscillating figures which snared life & passed it through purses, wires, & through the very air. He envisioned economy as a cloud of whirling nothingness encroaching upon everything- which when inspected, always retreated, dissipated, forever into a flux of darkness, passing through his outstretched hands like water, steam, or mist.
He was told all his life that these things made sense to people far wiser than he- people born with better faculties of mind, for whom the kabbala of coin proved a natural tongue. He was told this was a language of saints & scientists, too esoteric to explain to meager reprobates like he, who believed their lying eyes & their superstitions of eternal forms, their unchanging paltry wive’s-tales of parochial stability. He could not see the beauty in the explosive anarchy, the competitive markets, the wars of networks & forces which composed even the minutest of particles in the galaxies of the real. But surely they who had told him these things could not know it in its totality, could they? Had he really been passed over for election? What ill-god had fated him to this life of benighted ignorance & serfdom? Had he really been born damned?
If this was true, than surely he was cursed from the moment of his birth to perform functions for this demon beyond his ability to exorcise, to even know, & therefore love. Surely he was born damned & his station was to bear his damnation, unjustified to himself, but justifiable somewhere else, to betters of whom he was not party. & then, what difference was there really then in his life & in his death? What could keep him from escaping his sentence? Why live? Why suffer? Why go on at all if it never amounts to wealth? & these questions always resolved in the simplest of answers. No one cares about you Cairey. Take it or leave it.
The crowd laughs at a player who’d lost his footing on the roof of a cabin, dying instantly from fall-damage. & then the crowd roars as another player exploits the propulsive force of a rocket exploding at his feet to fly forward, claymore drawn, to decapitate the player who’d fired at him. Three players remain in total, including Set72, & the battleground shrinks to the size of a city block. Set72 swiftly brains the heroic swordsman, extending the crowd’s roar, which resolves in a chant of “Duel! Duel! Duel!”
The arsenals of the final two evaporate, leaving them nothing but their fists. Set leaves his perch at the top of his lighthouse with a gymnastic flourish of flips. His final foe, a Swedish player named Jörmun, replies in kind- performing the popular dance of the day, called the Yung Ko6ruh after its eponymous rapper- a dance which involves grabbing one’s crotch with one’s left hand, placing one’s right hand on the back of one’s head, forming a right-isosceles triangle with one’s elbow, & gyrating like a belly dancer, in waves, thrusting the hips, & throwing one’s head back in a pantomime of satisfactory fellatio.
The crowd chanted the hook of the song, titled “SuhSuh,” which went:
Ya bih hin me yuh yuh
She bin wanna fuh fuh
I tella nuh uh uh
Buh bih you can suh suh
Ya bih rollin uh uh
Ya bih gimme suh suh
She gimme thuh suh suh
Bih gimme thuh suh suh
The battleground shrinks even further, leaving the two final players on a dock surrounded by water, which cascades like a waterfall into a yawning & encroaching abyss. They feign punches, approach & back off, all-the-while the crowd restarts their chant of “Duel! Duel! Duel!”
Suddenly Set72 drops his aggressive posture, leans back, & feigns a yawn, & then a glance at an invisible watch on his arm, which he taps. This breaks the chant with a ripple of laughter. Then Set72 turns his back to Jörmun, clearly baiting an attack, which soon follows. Jörmun runs at him with a fist cocked & fires a punch as he comes within arms length- but Set72 ducks it, & using his inertia against him, heaves him over his own shoulders, & paralyzes him in a hold with his punching arm pinned to his back. From there, he easily snaps his opponent’s neck, invoking the Victory Tune, & the cheers of the crowd. The game is over.
Tör unmasks & detaches himself from the exoskeleton rig, then disrobes his haptic suit. He puts his discarded sweatpants back on & from there, walks to his amply stocked fridge, emblazoned with one of his sponsors, the energy drink brand Skömm. He takes one for himself, cracks it, & chugs it heartily. He retires to his computer desk & immediately logs on to another game, with a more traditional interface, a turn based grand-strategy game called “Homo Monstrosus” in which the player commands a genetic line of hominids from the dawn of anthropomorphic time, warring against other creatures, other tribes, & the vicissitudes of Nature. “Easy clap” he says to his audience “now let’s get these monkeys to the fucking moon boys.”
A reel of various highlights & blunders from VIOLENT DELIGHT plays on the top & bottom monitors, & the assembled crowd begins to disperse throughout the Exhibition. Few remain to see the monitors change to the next game, & among these few remaining are Cairey & his date.
&nbs
p; “That’s all?” she asks.
“Seems so” Cairey replies, somewhat mystified by how little this victory has affected his former roommate. Compared to the fans who had cheered him on, he seems almost bored. He didn’t seem to notice that he’d won at all- that he had just earned a prizepot that others would kill for- quite literally kill for, with all of the consequential guilt & paranoia that comes with murder for hire- & yet it seemed to mean nothing to him. He already has everything he could want- a home, small, but equipped with all his life’s necessities- a fridge, a microwave, a computer, a desk, a bed, a screen, various VR & AR machines- enough to keep his body alive while he plays & plays, moving from one game to the next, from morning to night. For this life of aristocratic leisure he is beloved & rewarded with riches that he did not need anymore. He has everything & even more is given to him.
Cairey envies this stability, this resolute calm & self-assurance, but then- it is only because he’d never known such a state. He never lost himself, or perhaps found himself, in playing video games. They gave him motion sickness as a child, which had alienated him from his peers. But it was more than just games that he failed in. He was always taken out of his submersion in work, relationships, even leisure, by a nagging sense of purposelessness & horror, by some discomfort or nausea, by some question or answer which blew through his momentary fields of joy like a tornado of ice, leaving him alone in a barren tundra, silent, depopulate, & cold- without any sense that any other fate could ever befall him, wishing only that the next maelstrom eliminate himself as well.
“Well?” she asks “shall we?”
& she leaves Cairey hanging there, staring into the simulated sky, before calling back to him “Well?”
& he is thinking of how strange it all is- how everyone can accept this zoo of man, these stacked cubes of domestic atomism- & is this Art? Is this what Life has become? Is this what remains of the species that once toiled & bled in the fields of history? How can this be real?
He thinks about the designers of what surrounds him, a practice instilled by McTeuf- not just the men who mixed the concrete, but the men who drew the schematics of the cubes, the men who designed the technology that enabled the screens to function, the networks they connected to, the microscopic chips & wires, each the product of someone named in some corporate register somewhere, the softwares, the games in which each texture file was itself the end of an individual’s entire day, or week perhaps, or even more- & this was the only process that he knew intimately, having toiled for years on texture files, & many for games that never made it to release, or else, were played & then abandoned within a month.
He wonders what happens to all those patches of unfinished worlds... where did they go? Did the worlds in which they were to compose a part exist anymore? Were they lost forever, or did they exist somehow still, somewhere in their fragmentation? Did they ever exist, as a real destination, or were they only ever patches, which left uncompiled, were nothing but the failures of promises left unfulfilled? Does a fragment remain a fragment of a whole if the whole is never completed? Or are these less than fragments...? What would remain of his work if he died? Nothing, he thinks. No one cares or will ever care Cairey.
“Cairey. Come on, the exposition’s starting soon” she says, again, acting the anchor to his ship adrift.
“Sorry, right” he says, & then surprising himself, he asks unbidden “You know something crazy?” Which he immediately answers “I know that guy. That guy who just won. We were roommates in school. A long time ago, we were roommates. I never thought he’d get so huge.”
“That’s wild” she replies, with a hesitant jerk toward the exit.
“Yeah. We lived together. I know him. Well, I knew him a long time ago. I doubt he remembers me, but maybe he would, probably he would. We didn’t talk a lot or anything but- I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”
“No, it’s alright” she says “that’s pretty crazy. You know, the other day I was thinking about this guy I knew once. Well, we were in the same daycare for a while as kids. He’s a model now I guess. He was in that ad-campaign? You know? For Flöskel? The one where the guy’s afraid to bring the girl back to his place? He has, like, a bare mattress on the floor? You know?”
“Yeah, yeah” Cairey says, nodding again, starting to panic, as this is too coincidental. He feels nauseous. He feels a presentiment of a monstrous fuckup.
“& then he fills it up with a bunch of crap? He gets it all at Flöskel, like, cushions & decorations or whatever. He fixes it all up just in time for the doorbell & she comes in & says something like ‘Wow. Usually guys have no taste at all’ or something. & she’s like ‘where did you get this?’ as she has something like, I think, a lamp or a painting or something, & he says ‘Here & There.’ I remember that part because that was the name of the collection they were promoting, at least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was called.”
“Yeah, for sure,” Cairey replies mechanically, as he actually does know what she’s talking about, & knows all-too-well the contents of that campaign.
“Anyway” she says “he was on a billboard for it & I could see it from my window at my old place & it always reminded me of when I knew him at daycare. But I saw him on another one, remember, I was telling you on the ride here. It was the one for SlimsBank which said ‘he who signs up with Slims may ask for great rates on loans’ & it showed him getting pelted with those huge interest rates.” She laughs. “Remember, I thought it was funny because he used to get in trouble when we were kids for throwing rocks at people. We all thought it was hilarious, well, when he wasn’t throwing them at us. He was always getting in trouble for it, but isn’t that funny? Wild, right?”
“Yeah” says Cairey “That’s wild.”
THE EXPOSITION
They make their way out of the Exhibition, passing through the security clearance for the first wing of the Exposition. They scan the RFIDs embedded in their entrance bracelets at the door. It opens to a row of elevators. One opens for them, & they enter it. As the door shuts, the elevator explains what they are to behold.
“Good afternoon & welcome to the Museum of Expressive Humanism’s current exposition titled Everybody is a Genius: In Life, brought to you by the LaFeint Foundation-” (again Cairey considers what connection there is between Symon & whatever this will turn out to be)- “In order to participate in the exposition, visitors must provide permission for our program to access & curate your digital records. This will allow us to personalize the presentation. Your data will be encrypted & disposed of, so there is no need to worry about its security. The full terms of service contract is available on our website. Pressing the button on the elevator that leads you to the exposition will be interpreted as a confirmation of your consent. If you would not like to enter the exposition, please press the exit button, & a refund will be made available to you at guest services. Would you like me to repeat that?”
“No” Cairey’s date says.
“Excellent.” the elevator replies.
Cairey does not like the sound of this at all. “Access” & “curate” & “digital records” are never good news for him. He feels an anxious sweat clustering at his brow, but before he can suggest exit or to press the big red exit button himself, his date mashes the button of consent. A facial scan flicks instantaneously across their mugs with the first jolt of the cabin’s descent.
Something worse than the half-intoxicated queasiness of the entryway, & worse than the financial migraines, & much worse than the abstract confusions of the exhibition grips him now. He feels all of the foreboding symptoms of abysmality & future ruin & fuckup- the nauseated panic, the esophageal choke of inexorable embarrassment, the gelatinous knees of humiliation, the swift shriveling of the fearful scrotum, & the flushed heatpangs of total-blush. Just as he’s felt some measure of invisible stability in himself, unseen in the anonymous crowd of stream voyeurs, he is being thrust, once more, into a nightmare of nudity. He feels he’s doomed to be bound by the spotlight- to be
come subject to a crowd of eyes glinting like scalpels- their eyes like the eyes of monsters half-glanced in the shadows of dusk.
Oh what a fool he thinks himself now, for lowering his guard like this,for living on in this rapacious torture world, for acquiescing to his torments with each indecision & mistake. He’s internally pleading that soon enough his pains will frighten his cowardice away, ennobling him to push the big bloody button of exit. He pictures blue balloons in his tenement room.
“Excellent” the elevator says, as a jaunty tune starts up in the background, a new voice (is that Symon’s voice?) introduces the exposition.
“Welcome guests, visitors, friends, to the first part of our latest exposition. We are quite proud of it. We hope that you will enjoy it. Ever since the foundation of the Museum of Expressive Humanism, we have attempted to reorient our visitors’ perception on Art. We believe that this exposition might just be our greatest yet in this regard.
Selfie, Suicide Page 6