by Curtis White
The men exchanged awed looks. Everything they’d heard about the Marquis’s acumen was true and then some. But the men also exchanged puzzled looks. They were veterans of the game, they’d camped out overnight in front of Best Buy the eve before every new release, and they knew that there was no framework or setting similar to what the Marquis had described. There was no atmosphere for the slaughter of little black Zorro characters on horseback or any other kind of back. But who among them had the guts to say so? It sure wasn’t going to be Rory. He’d learned his lesson and the others had learned from him.
It was even worse for the masked man who’d followed them, who stood behind them now. He went pale at the thought of this slaughter. He had no idea what this game was, but he recognized the dead as his own tiny companions. The thought of the tide of death the Marquis described was disturbing to him in a deep way, as if the heated centers of his blood cells trembled.
Noticing him for the first time, the Marquis looked at the masked man and said, “And you, what may I do for you?” He paused, scrutinizing him. “Say, do I know you? You look familiar. You’re not the whimsical fellow who lectured on Lord Byron’s Don Juan last month at the Garrick Club, are you?”
The masked man was shattered. “I…I…what is a Garrick?”
“It’s in London, for God’s sake. Everyone knows that. The young scamp claimed to be from some dubious public university in North Dakota that’s buried in snow nine months out of the year. And he wore a silly costume like you’re wearing now. These youngsters and their cultural studies! Whatever happened to scholars, the sallow men in the bad sport coats? You know, the paunches, the nicotine stains on their fingers.”
“What is London?”
“London!? You amaze me. You’d fit right in with that regalia. Carnaby Street would eat you up.”
Tiring of his own badinage, the Marquis stretched forth his ermine-cuffed arm for the letter, snapping a finger impatiently. “Come, enough. Let’s see this envelope of yours.”
The Marquis tore open the letter and perused it for a moment, before turning it this way and that.
“What is this? It’s nice stationery, handmade paper, if I’m not mistaken. But it’s blank. Invisible ink or something?”
The masked man shrugged his shoulders. He had no clue. He was the bearer, not the author, of the letter. He felt as if he’d been captured in someone else’s dream.
The Marquis continued, “Look, my friend, I bear you no ill will. I bear you no will at all. But I’m sure you know more than you’re saying. See here, there is no need for cheese-paring with me.”
Idiot inscrutability.
The Marquis scrutinized him anyway. I mean, he put his hand to his chin and studied him. Then, with a disappointed frown, he said, “My dear fellow, my very good sir, excuse me for saying so, but it seems to me that you look at things in just the way that people do.”
Then for a moment they all froze as if in a tableau vivant, a sublimely blank moment. A certain cosmic (although I hate to use that fatuous word) process had engaged, and it snapped into place with the authority of some great mill wheel, yes, the mill wheel of the universe, and in that moment human consciousness stopped. The brave metaphysics that had for millennia made one thing different from all the other things came to a stop. The forces that had made stars different because now they were stars, and the forces that made the great variety of foodstuffs different because now they were foods, etc., all that stopped. Just for a moment, but I mean stopped. Everything in the room became undifferentiated mass, just mass, the Marquis flowing into Zorro, Zorro flowing into the threadbare Bokhara rug, the floor flowing up into night. But even this concedes too much to “looking at things in the way that people do.” Clearly, there were no individual beings there, but it’s not even clear that there was any being at all! The room was the place where everything and nothing were the same.
Perhaps it was something about the message, or something about bringing together the messenger and the Marquis. I can’t say. But don’t worry, it was just in that room, not everywhere, not in your neighborhood out in Anytown, USA, hub of every modern life, as you think. Happily, the Marquis’s inner chamber soon returned, perhaps a little out of joint in some molecular way that you couldn’t actually see.
At last, but this “at last” was after hardly a nanosecond, the Marquis said, “Did you guys just feel something, a kind of everything-at-once? And it’s not the first time either. Doesn’t last long, but it does blow my mind. Do you know that children’s game, All Fall Down? Ashes! Ashes! It felt like that. As if we’d all suddenly succumbed to a disease. Or perhaps I should say that for a moment it felt like everything was everything else. You know, like a child makes little critters out of clay and then mashes them all back into one big ball? Hmmm. I’m beginning to wonder about the quality of the hashish that the Eastern potentates have been bringing round of late. What kind of tribute is that, edgy hash? I’m tempted to send a squadron over to drop some shock and awe on them. See if they can figure out their faux pas and start sending me the good stuff again.”
For your information, smoking hash while playing Halo was the best thing the Marquis knew about life. He called it his All-in-All. He didn’t much like it when his All-in-All became an All-for-Naught. As for the shock and awe, he was making it up. He didn’t even own a remote-controlled model airplane (if anyone remembers those in the age of the consumer drone) let alone a B-47. Actually, he was making it all up—the Garrick Club, the potentates, and especially the Toro Furioso. Only the threadbare carpet would hold up under investigation, and the hash, of course, but that’s a basic, a necessity, a pantry essential.
Later, after the things of the world had returned to their rightful places and he was showing the men out, the Marquis asked Rory and the others over to play Halo on the next Tuesday. The Marquis would provide pizza and they’d bring the beer. “Only craft beers, now,” he admonished, “and I’m still drinking stouts and porters. I know it’s May, but it’s been a cool spring, so I stick with the thick.” He laughed at his own wordplay. “But I think we should give the hashish a rest, alas!”
Now the men were really seeing a plus-side to this weird evening. They were giddy with their good luck. They were going to play Halo with the Marquis at the Marquis’s crib! And the funny Zorro man had made it all happen. They almost felt gratitude for the loser.
But they also thought that they’d got about as much out of him as they were going to, so they ushered him back out into the cobbled courtyard, eerily empty now of its cowboys. It was quiet except for that subtle echo of the receding past. As for the masked man, he was crushed by this experience. What was the meaning of his task? What should he make of what the Marquis had said? Where were his comrades on horseback? Had the Marquis really slaughtered them while playing some sort of game? And just who was he himself? He didn’t even know that. A masked man, they said. Like someone named Zorro. Then he remembered: his name was Percy. But why Percy? Who gave him that name? Was there really a queen in the Hebrides? Was he just making it all up? And just what was he supposed to do next? He wanted to be a dutiful man, loyal to his task, but what was his duty and what his task?
Back in the château, the Marquis returned to his game, a disconcerting something rattling in the back of his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about all those tiny masked men he’d annihilated, and the trickles of black slime that flowed away from their broken little bodies.
4.
“Slime is the agony of water.”
—SARTRE
Clones, or unwitting victims of some hideous fiction though they may have been, the masked men on their horses with their little (plastic!) swords each had his own really sad story to tell, just as the Marquis supposed. But it’s hard to care for people you suspect might only be the surplus creation of the clever young people in CGI.
And if you’re tempted to imagine that the masked figure in the house was more real than the others, or that he was in some way their leader, or
the original template for the others, that may be true, perhaps it’s very likely true, but I can offer no absolute assurances. You could ask him, but I doubt that he knows himself. If I’d known you were so curious, I could have waded out among his muchachos and their trampling steeds, but that would have been a fruitless task, perhaps even dangerous with all those freaky horses. Still, in all seriousness, a little disambiguation, muchacho from muchacho, would be welcome and helpful.
I know they’d be grateful if I told you just one of their stories, because all of them are heartbreaking. Now, when I think of them, bouncing around on those silly horses as if they were part of a possessed merry-go-round, I remember the fear and bewilderment in their eyes, sunk behind the tiny slits of their masks. Even now I do not know what sad and strange necessity it was that brought them to this desperate pass. Alien as they were, they were also somehow familiar, painfully familiar, like a childhood nightmare that you’ve never completely forgotten.
As for our friend in black, I think he was winging it. I cannot take seriously the idea that the message came from some Queen of Something living in the Hebrides, of all places. I mean, I don’t even know where they are. (Islands, I take it.) Frankly, I think the masked man panicked when the men pressed him on the content of the letter and that he started making things up that he thought might impress them, or perhaps it was just that he thought they made him look good. Or important.
Contrary to the Marquis’s claim that the letter was blank, there was indeed a message, a very simple thing, a request for a favor, and we’ll come to that in time. But it’s important to see that the little men on horseback also composed a message. Their message, as Islam teaches, was that there is no God but God. Their message, like God, was hidden in plain view. The milling horsemen in the courtyard, swarming over one another like black bugs, were the real bearers of the message; in fact they were the message. No wonder the poor lost souls looked so confused and disconsolate.
And what sort of message did they compose? No, seen from space they didn’t form a shape, like something carved into a field of corn by aliens. Isn’t it obvious? Their message was “contagion.” Or contamination, the unbound cancer of an obscene and meaningless replication. The viral! For a virus is not a living thing, whether infectious agent or computer worm. It is a mere scrap of genetic coding no more complicated than on/off. It doesn’t care if it destroys life and it doesn’t care if it succeeds in surviving. It couldn’t care less about competitive advantage. There is no such thing as a “successful” virus, a winner virus, it’s all lost on them. Nor are viruses trying to be helpful in some way. The virus has something elemental to say and always has. If God ever spoke, it was as a virus. God said “Yes.” Then he said “No.” Then he said both at once and flickered like a neon sign with a loose connection. Out of that, believe it or not, came our perdurable world.
What has appalled these poor men in their Zorro outfits, and their cool hats, and their horsies that are God-knows-what (made out of biscuit dough as far as I know), and what has driven them to the tears of the unredeemed, is the creepy recognition that through them God is saying only, “No! By thunder, no! I have changed my mind. This was all a bad idea.”
The men are less than a virus. They are oblivion.
You will see. You will see this. You will see.
5.
“Originally, the ego includes everything.”
—FREUD
—after Rabelais
Once we understand that the message delivered by the masked man was “hidden in plain view,” that it was in fact the messenger himself, the contagion of messengers and messages he brought, what followed begins to make sense.
I could begin anywhere, really, as you’ll see, but for the sake of continuity I will begin near where we left off. Which is a shame because many people are more than glad for grand fissures in continuity, if for no other reason than that being wildly misled, or having their intelligence contravened, is preferable to the boredom of making sense and of having to convince the family dog that its dinner time is five, not three-thirty.
Anyway, the Marquis had a grandson, Jake. As a child, Jake would spend weekends with his grandpa, who’d make a very nice from-scratch pizza before retiring to the inner sanctum to play Halo. These pizzas that the Marquis lovingly made were really something. To see the smooth globes of dough sitting on the counter—a little dusting of flour on top like little round baby bottoms in talc—makes me sad to remember.
For they are surely gone. All gone.
Well, the kid could have grown up to live a straight, true, and happy life, but, man, things can get messed up. For Jake it was not so much the stuff that most kids have to go through these days, now that the maturing process and its rites of passage require the use of handguns. Like it or not, Glocks are the new normal for these kids. Like it or not, it’s become part of growing up. That first court restraining order is now a milestone equal to a driver’s license, high school diploma, college admission, and so on. Happily for Jake, the Marquis gave him a sort of happy, dopey reality apart from all that. As a consequence, he was as close to innocent as a young man could come in these withered days.
At a young age, Jake married and settled down in a modest split-level ranch house with his new wife, Fanni, let’s call her. Jake learned to make pizza for her, just like his grandpa’s, and they settled in for life…as it were. Here’s the future he saw: he’d cook pizza and after dinner he and Fanni would play computer games, kissing now and then. On Fridays they’d have grandpa le Marquis over and play Halo. They’d drink root beer. What he neglected to figure into this delightful scenario was the fact that Fanni also had a notion or two about what married life ought to be like. Unfortunately for Jake, she was of the opinion that her life with her husband ought to be different in important ways from her husband’s life with his grandpa. In particular, the eating of pizzas and the playing of computer games was boring to the point of wishing that her high school biology teacher would come by and “pith” her with a straight pin in the frontal lobe, just as he’d done with frogs. After a month or so of Jake’s idea of happiness, buyer’s remorse was the primary fact of her life.
Jake was a simple person. Fanni was not a simple person. She did not have Jake’s stable, happy background sharing time with a grandparent in blissful side-by-side interface with the good old Xbox. What Fanni had was a single mother who lived on the left side of a brick duplex in the spiritually destitute region just south of Chicago. Their house was one of those structures that census workers look at and say, “Does this count?” Her mother supported their little family through frequent “presents” from various “close family friends” in the form of cocaine or cash equivalents. What these friends got in return is irrelevant or almost. In spite of all that, Fanni grew up a smart kid capable of wandering away from the daily horror show at the old duplex. She thrived at school, went to college, met the son of a Marquis (!) and, without giving it a lot of thought, married.
In the sad thereafter, their marriage counselor suggested to her that she should have known what Jake was like; she’d been to his house before they married, hadn’t she? And she said, “Yes, I knew what he was like, but I thought he was kidding.” Then she added, “And he did kiss me once under the grain elevator, and so I asked him with my eyes to ask me, and when he did I thought, ‘Well, as well him as another. ’”
Jake was sitting right there, holding her hand as she said these hurtful things. The therapist’s response was to put his head in his hands (the closest he could come to neutral affect in the moment). The counselor, at least, knew that it was too late and Fanni had already gone to blazes. On the other hand, he could now also confirm that Jake’s form of innocence was, just as Fanni claimed, morally exhausting. He could see how it could drive a person to unpleasant extremes.
As for Jake, he didn’t yet quite know what to make of it all. But when he saw the counselor bury his head in his hands he had to wonder, “Is that how I should be responding to w
hat she’s saying?” He looked at her sitting by his side. She was smiling pleasantly.
There was something damaged in Fanni, something broken. She was, in a sense, not “there,” not present. For instance, she could not seem to tell the difference between the good things that she did and the bad things. Make breakfast? Hit their barky Yorkie with a shovel? Essentially the same for her. But when Jake showed how they were not the same, she would get confused and start crying. “How can you be so sure about everything?” she’d ask, and then she’d go after the dog with a hoe because it had stuck its cold snout inside her summer shorts and smelled her fur. (She kept garden implements in the kitchen for such moments.)
She was also someone with the interesting and organic conviction that if the world spread out from her, it was her job to take it all back in. Perhaps it was some sort of bizarre maternal instinct gone wrong, but she had faith in the thought that everything should go back to her empty inside.
And then there was the shopping. She shopped with tenacity, knowing that it was her responsibility to buy it all, to take it all inside. She was the Imelda Marcos of any- and everything. She didn’t shop in Big Box stores, she shopped for Big Box stores. She created shopping lists like the card catalogue at the Library of Alexandria.
When she wasn’t shopping, she was eating. Unfortunately, this duty, this “moral imperative to internalize the world,” had horrible consequences in restaurants. She did not understand the purpose of a menu. The idea that she should choose only one thing from each section—one salad, one entrée, etc.—simply made no sense to her. The idea that there were sections didn’t make sense to her. Appetizer. Entrée. What? Explain as Jake surely did, it was all beyond her. She thought Jake was yammering metaphysics when all he might be saying was, “Darling, you don’t start with the chocolate mousse. It’s not an appetizer.” There were some meals that took the form of quest legends. It was as if she believed that there was some food, some perfect food, that would make her world right if only she could find it. In spite of all his goodness and his love for her, Jake lacked the will to enforce what he called, for her benefit, “food reality.”