by Terry Miles
This is the first time I remember experiencing this feeling—a feeling that would overwhelm me again a few years later, in that truck with Annie and Emily Connors, a sensation that I would eventually begin referring to as “the gray feeling.”
The gray feeling usually began with a low thrumming vibration deep in the pit of my stomach and an itchy tingling right behind my eyes. It would soon take over my upper body with a rush of what felt like fluttering moths in my lungs, then my limbs would turn heavy and weak and, finally, my mouth would be filled with a thick fuzzy tingling. This was all accompanied by an inescapable, low, hollow, metallic humming in my head.
This is what happened to me while I was standing on that giant chessboard in the park. This…and more.
I had the sudden feeling that I was somewhere else.
And, wherever I was, I wasn’t alone.
Something was there with me—something cold. I remember being terrified to look up into the sky, because I knew that I’d be able to see whatever it was. And I understood that if I could see it, it would be able to see me.
Then I felt it coming, speeding toward me from somewhere way up in the dark clouds.
That’s when I lost control of my bladder and screamed.
My parents came running and took me home immediately.
In bed later that night, I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. I’d been rereading The Lord of the Rings for the third time, and something about that thing I’d felt coming out of the darkness reminded me of the Eye of Sauron seeing Frodo when he’d put on the ring. I remembered feeling completely naked and exposed, like I was waiting there for something terrifying to arrive from another world.
* * *
—
I didn’t think about Connections again until years later, while I was playing Underlight.
It wasn’t anything about Underlight specifically that made me think of Connections; it was just something in that moment. Maybe it was the smell of microwave popcorn coming from the unit next door, or the way the rain was hitting my window, but something triggered the memory and brought me right back to that table with my parents, right back to the game called Connections.
At first it was a happy memory, but as I sat there reliving it, something slowly began to change. I started thinking about the gray feeling and the dark thing I’d felt coming for me in that city park. This led to me picturing my mom and dad trapped beneath that capsized ferry, kicking and screaming for help, and eventually to my envisioning both of their faces, floating in the freezing water, staring up into nothing, forever alone in the dark.
My usual relaxation techniques didn’t work and I was unable to get the image of my dying parents’ faces out of my mind. So I left Underlight running, stood up, grabbed my leather jacket from the back of a nearby chair, and hurried out of my building into the rain.
I would be arrested three days later.
During those three days I did nothing but play my own version of Connections.
I started with the final image my parents had shown me on the last day we’d played the game together.
It was a color photograph of an old woman feeding a bunch of pigeons. One of the pigeons was different from the others—browner, with a reddish breast. I looked it up. It was a passenger pigeon, just standing there among the regular pigeons.
But the last passenger pigeon had died in 1914, and modern-day Kodachrome color photography had not come into being until 1935.
It was an impossible photograph.
The first word that popped into my mind was “discrepancy.” Based on the woman’s clothing and the cars behind her on the street, the photograph had been taken sometime in the 1960s. An extinct bird, in a photograph taken almost fifty years after that bird had become extinct, was definitely a discrepancy.
It reminded me of another extinct bird—the imperial woodpecker Emily Connors had been so excited about.
It reminded me of Rabbits.
The passenger pigeon and an address hidden in coded text on the park bench in that impossible photograph led me to a video store. Hanging in the window was an Italian movie poster advertising a classic 1975 film by Michelangelo Antonioni. In Italian, the film was called Professione: reporter, but in English it was known as The Passenger.
In the end credits of that movie was a clue that led me to a specific page in an out-of-print edition of a French mystery novel. This in turn led me to a bus stop where I got on a bus and rode it until I discovered a wall covered in graffiti.
There, hidden in the content of that graffiti, I found a message. Or perhaps I imagined I’d found a message. Either way, that message led me on a journey through the city, chasing clue after clue, until I eventually found myself arrested for trespassing in the basement of the Harvard Exit Theatre, waiting for somebody or something that I referred to as The Passenger.
By then, I was a mess. Nothing made any sense.
I actually remember feeling a sense of relief when they finally arrested me.
I was screened and assessed, then given the option of attending a mental health court or going through a normal criminal proceeding—mental health courts, like drug courts, were created to divert defendants with mental illnesses from the overcrowded and overworked criminal justice system.
I opted for the former, and they let me go once I’d agreed to attend weekly counseling sessions.
A few days after my arrest, I was back at home, and a month after that, I started my junior year of college.
I never played the game called Connections again—not only because of what had happened to me in that theater waiting for The Passenger, but because I was about to find something better.
I was about to rediscover the game called Rabbits.
5
BARON CORDUROY
I was startled awake by a series of aggressive buzzing sounds.
Somebody was downstairs hammering on my apartment’s call button.
I live on the top floor of a four-story older brick building in Capitol Hill. On the plus side, there are crown moldings, hardwood floors, and leaded glass windows. Some of the negatives include an oil heating system that barely works and a shower plagued by bursts of scalding hot water that occur whenever someone flushes the toilet in the apartment directly below mine—the building’s superintendent claims he’s been trying to figure out how to fix it for years, but I’m not sure I believe him.
“Circle K, what the fuck is happening?” Baron brushed past me and headed straight for the kitchen.
“Have you slept?” I asked. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“Spent the night working on a hookup app for a couple of grad students,” he said as he scoured my pantry for something to eat.
Baron didn’t actually look that bad, but his eyes had the wild faraway look of a coder, that thick wired glaze that working all night staring at a screen and listening to crazy loud music can produce.
Baron Corduroy was tall and thin, with angular cheekbones he once referred to as his “shoulders of the face.” His eyes had a perpetual sleepy look, which belied a fierce intelligence and sharp wit. He came from the world of high finance, but these days made a living as a freelancer in tech. He spent most of his time working on mobile apps for startups and college kids, but Baron could pretty much code anything. I think he actually did some contract work for the NSA at some point. Before he changed careers and went freelance, Baron worked as a broker at a large firm in downtown Seattle.
One of the keys to Rabbits is an ability to recognize complex patterns, connections, and coincidences. If you were really good at that type of thing, you had a lot of solid employment options, but like I’d discovered while still in high school, none of those options was as immediately exciting and financially rewarding as the stock market.
By the time I’d met him, Baron was starting to burn out, gett
ing tired of the West Edge grind. Microdosing LSD and pounding Adderall had kept him sharp for a while, but when the drugs no longer worked, he needed to find something else.
That’s when he discovered the game.
The mysterious history and deep Web conspiracy links got him started, but the intense pattern-recognition work and puzzle-solving—along with the camaraderie of like-minded weirdos—kept him in.
Way in.
I met Baron for the first time at the Magician’s arcade when I was a senior in college.
Like a lot of us, Baron Corduroy had come to the arcade in search of the Magician. He came to speak with him about a game called Xevious—a vertically scrolling shooter videogame released by Namco in 1983.
He’d come to see Xevious because Baron believed something strange was going on with one particular cabinet version of the game he’d played in a 7-Eleven in Oregon, and he wanted to check out another cabinet in order to use it as a point of comparison. At that time, the closest functioning Xevious machine was located at the Magician’s arcade in Seattle.
Five teenagers, on four different dates, had complained of headaches and dizziness before passing out while playing the Xevious machine in that 7-Eleven. Baron was on the trail, trying to solve that mystery.
He’d interviewed the teenagers who’d passed out, and they all told him the same thing. Just before they lost consciousness, they saw something—a shadow thing that spilled across the screen and beckoned to them with a thin outstretched hand. They’d all described removing their hands from the controls, hearing a high-pitched ringing combined with an impossibly low rumble, and then waking up on the ground, staring up into somebody’s concerned face.
The symptoms sounded eerily familiar to me, if not the cause.
The owner of the game in Oregon claimed that his machine had been functioning perfectly fine and if the Magician’s Xevious machine was different, well, then, the Magician had somehow messed with it himself.
I know the Magician fairly well now, and if he’s capable of messing with the code of a videogame from 1983, then I’m Hazel—and, spoiler alert, I’m definitely not Hazel.
Baron didn’t find any difference between the Magician’s Xevious machine and that machine in Oregon, but while he was playing it, he did find something.
He found a kindred spirit.
He found me.
* * *
—
Baron poured the last of my Count Chocula cereal over a small scoop of freezer-burned vanilla frozen yogurt that I’d had in my fridge for at least a year.
“Do you have any chocolate chips?” he asked.
“I met Alan Scarpio last night,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice level and unaffected.
“Yeah, right,” Baron said as he picked up a spoon and started eating.
After a moment, he set his spoon down slowly and stopped chewing. He knew me well enough to understand when I was most likely joking, and when I might have actually just met Alan fucking Scarpio.
“Are you being serious right now?”
“He was at the arcade. He finished your game of Robotron.”
“Alan Scarpio was at the Magician’s place?”
“Yeah.”
“Last night?”
“Yep.”
“He was the guy in the hoodie who took over my game?”
“Sure was.”
“Fuck. And you met him?”
“Yeah. We had pie.”
Baron just stared, his mouth hanging open.
“Well, Scarpio had pie. I had coffee.”
* * *
—
I eventually managed to talk Baron into leaving my place, but only after I’d told him everything that had happened the night before and promised to call him the second I finished my morning meeting with Scarpio.
6
SABATINI VS. GRAF
The rain in Seattle is different.
I’ve experienced the weather in London, New York, Hong Kong, and a handful of other places around the world, but nothing sticks to you like the rain in the Pacific Northwest. This deep emerald gloom is eternal, cellular. It’s part of the landscape—and, before you know it, it becomes a permanent part of you as well.
It was raining as I walked down the street toward the diner.
I was wearing a faded blue hoodie, jeans, and light gray Converse All Stars.
I’ve lived in Seattle most of my adult life and, although I’ve found myself under an umbrella from time to time, I’m not sure I’ve actually ever owned one.
Thirty days of rain in a month isn’t all that unusual here. You get used to it. I can’t imagine seasonal affective disorder is something that happens to Seattleites; when you live here, that’s just life. And, frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I love the rain; you can hide in it.
* * *
—
I got to the diner half an hour early and drank cup after cup of spiritless coffee as I waited. Part of me was convinced that I’d imagined last night, but the business card Scarpio had given me was sitting on the stained Formica table, right next to my diner-standard off-white ceramic coffee mug.
It had happened. It was real.
I’d always imagined I was connected to the world of Rabbits somehow, but it was an ephemeral feeling, fleeting, always just out of reach. And yet something felt different this time—something that might finally justify the hours spent online searching for clues to a game that at times over the years I wasn’t sure actually existed, saving up for road trips to decidedly nonglamorous locations like Winnipeg, Canada, following leads that turned out to be nothing, and temporarily working two jobs in order to afford a special edition of a weird roadside atlas rumored to contain information about the game.
It was all coalescing now. It felt like Rabbits was finally coming to life.
But Scarpio was late. It had been almost an hour.
I drank more coffee and stared at the number on Scarpio’s card for another fifteen minutes before I finally decided to call.
A woman’s voice answered after the first ring.
“Hello?”
“Um, hi. I’m looking for…Mr. Scarpio. I think we were supposed to have a meeting this morning.”
“You think you were supposed to have a meeting?”
“He told me to meet him here for breakfast.”
“How did you get this number?”
“Mr. Scarpio gave it to me last night.”
There was a long pause.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the diner.”
“What fucking diner?”
I gave her the address.
“Stay put.” She hung up.
I had no idea if she was going to get him to call, show up, or maybe reschedule. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to be halfway through a plate of runny eggs when Alan Scarpio showed up, so I didn’t order anything.
* * *
—
“What’s your name?” the woman asked, as she slid gracefully into the booth.
She was about thirty-five, Asian, subtle highlights through shiny black wavy hair. Everything she was wearing looked expensive. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was an FBI agent or a salesperson at Tiffany & Co. She smiled slightly, and I could tell immediately that her smile didn’t mean what most of us mean when we smile.
The diner wasn’t packed, but more than half a dozen booths were full of people. How the hell did this woman know I was the person who’d called about Scarpio?
“My name is K,” I replied.
“K. Is that short for something?”
“Yes.”
After realizing she wasn’t getting anything more, she leaned forward and crossed her hands on the table. “Where is he?”
“Scarpio?�
�
“Who the fuck else?”
“I don’t know.”
I wasn’t sure when, but at some point during the conversation or interrogation, I’d begun tapping my fingers on the table: the third and final set from the 1991 Wimbledon final between Steffi Graf and Gabriela Sabatini. It was a classic, cementing Graf’s legacy at Wimbledon. Graf was serving on my left, Sabatini on my right. Steffi was down one game in the second set. Princess Diana was in the crowd. It was a beautiful day.
There was something about the way this woman looked at me, like she could see straight through my eyes and into my mind. My pulse was racing. I did my best to concentrate on taking slow, deep breaths.
“You met him here last night?”
“Yes. Well, we met at the arcade, then came over here for pie.”
She nodded, processing this information.
“Is Mr. Scarpio going to be joining us?” I asked.
“What happened after you had pie?”
“I didn’t have pie. Mr. Scarpio had pie.”
She just stared, waiting for me to answer her question.
Salesperson at Tiffany’s was definitely off the table. This woman was something else entirely. I continued to tap out the points of the Wimbledon match. Steffi Graf was serving at five-all in the third set.
“Mr. Scarpio met me at the arcade across the street. We came over here for a while, and then I walked him to his car.”
She considered this for a second or two. “Did he play any games?”
“What do you mean?”
“At the arcade. Did he play any of the games?”
“Um…yeah. I mean, I know he played Robotron.”
“Robotron: 2084?”
“Yes.”
She pulled out a worn old orange Moleskine notebook and a black roller-tip pen and wrote something down.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” I asked.
She looked at me like I imagined an overworked clandestine government agent might look just as they were about to switch interrogation tactics from asking questions to beating the shit out of their subject with a phone book. “I work with Mr. Scarpio.”