“An early winter moon was rising in front of them, and chill wind came with it, penetrating feet and hands. Tayo held the bundle tighter. He felt humbled by the size of the full moon, by the chill wind that swept wide across the foothills of the mountain. They said the deer gave itself to them because it loved them, and he could feel the love as the fading heat of the deer’s body warmed his hands.”
Father was reported dead in a dungeon. I got the obituary from a letter delivered to my flat some days earlier. The writer – whose name and identity remained secretive – provided an address in the letter, and said would heartily welcome my arrival. In a clear Friday sunset, after work, I collected my belongings and departed for the Hamlet in the address. It took me a while to search for that suitcase in my cabinet, even longer to recall the password for its coded lock, but I finally managed to open the old, dusty box. Inside my suitcase: clothes, some random pieces of writing and my father’s dagger. It’s a white, ornamental dagger made of ivory; he left it on his bed before leaving.
It was a drowsy night flight. Embraced by a warm and nostalgic darkness, in the face of the porthole that reflected nothing but the starless universe on one side, and my stiffened mask on the other, I fell into sleep. A dizzying fall, a mixture of melting ice and wetted mud, a downflow of unnamed substances, an erasive stream of overwhelming violence, forcing me into a slippery disassemblage. I’m farring downward, I’m forgetting…
I could barely recollect myself when awoke in an unknown transportation center. I was the last passenger in the plane, and there was a disturbing tranquility in the surrounding – a strange silence for any airport. With an evasive headache, I grabbed my suitcase and stepped outside. It was still late at night, darkness flooded in every direction, preventing me from seeing the landscapes – except for a lightened station, where several wanderers were smoking under its aged wooden eaves. I headed towards the station, walked up its stairs, and tried to ask for a light from the wanderers. In truth I didn’t felt like smoking, but I did desperately need to talk with someone. Someone local.
“Light?” The wanderer, a ragged mid-age man replied with an alerted tone, “Matches?”
I nodded and tried to smile at him.
He lit up my pipe and turned away. They all gathered in the corner, whispering unrecognizable chatters in the shivery wind. Not gathering any clue from the locals, I had no choice but to walk up to one of the carts. There were only a few lefts in the station, while all coachmen were snoring in the carriage. The horse made a ringing snort as I approach close; the coachman awoke.
“Greetings!” He quickly awakened, got out of the carriage, hastily wiped the seat’s surface with his sleeve, “I may know where you’re heading to?”
“Good eve.” I stepped up and handed him the address, “Is it far?”
“Well…” He gave me a strange look, as if he’s re-examining a freak, “It depends.”
“Huh?”
He answered in low tone and unorganized words, almost like the humming of a madman. In nerve, he slowly rubbed the horse’s brown mane.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Sir, I mean,” He finally said, “you don’t look like someone who would go, or need to go to the Hamlet on your address.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Had delivered some old folks to there, more often I carry loads back from the Hamlet.”
“Loads? What kind?”
He fell silent for a while, mounted on the horse, signaled me to get in the carriage.
“Cremains.” He said.
“You will arrive along the old road.”
It seemed that the night was only darkening. It seemed that as the carriage moved ahead, the terrain was only descending, almost unnoticeably. He lit a lantern, hanged it on one side of the horse’s saddle. There was a sense of assurance in the alleviating sound of the horse’s clops, in the coachman’s shadow, in his low roars, in the wooden wheels that rubbed against the dirt and rocks, against the solid, stable earth. It was a safe landing, a gentle touch upon the old land; it was the stealthy scent of a reunion with a long-lost friend, the scent of aged tobacco. And it started to rain. Cold drops of night water shivering on my forehead. The coachman sneezed twice, then again once.
“It’s raining.” I said.
“Yes, sir, unfortunately.” He answered while slightly speeding up the horse, “We’re almost there though.”
“Do you need a coat?”
“Pardon me?”
I watched his back trembling, showered in the unforgiving rain, and opened my suitcase, intended to hand him my coat. As the box unpacked, and another gust of sudden night wind broke in the carriage, a pile of papers was fluttered. Their order was disrupted, while one of them was blew out of the box, then the carriage, then the road, until the white phantom disappeared into the deepened inky shades, like a sacrificial figure devoured by the sacred fire…
“Here.” I roughly organized the papers, and handed him my grey winter coat, “This should help.”
“Ah, that’s very kind of you.” He thanked me and casted the coat on his back, “I saw something coming off the carriage, did you lose something?”
“A piece of paper.” I said.
He turned around, his sorrowful eyes etched in the shadow of his deep sockets, “It’s forests all around us, would be difficult to search for it.”
“Keep going then.” I said.
“I remember days when the sun shone, and laughter could be heard from the tavern…”
I jump off the coach, landing into the softened muds of the town’s street. It was a rather bright hamlet, far different from what I imagined – although all street lights were extinguished, too many buildings were still alive.
“This will be it.” Coachman said, and turned his horse around, “Good luck to you, sir.”
“Farewell.” I nodded.
I watched him and the horse entering the even-fiercer rain, and the darkness we just came through; It was then when I realized he still had my coat on his shoulder.
I stood there for a moment, then saw a tavern across the street. It’s hard not to see it, a building decorated by too many lamps, lanterns and candles: the owner hanged some kind of kerosene lamp around the tavern’s sidings in an extraordinary density, not to mention the intense lights leaked out from the windows and cracks of the tavern. It is apparently more overwhelming then night; Now night seems foggy, its solidity melted down, diluted by dazzling colors and the loud noises of drunkards, in and outside of the tavern.
As I approach its front door, I saw several drunkards lined up vomiting at the street corner: there laid a stone cistern, suitable for five-six people’s usage at once. For a while, I was fascinated by watching them working. The smell of soured beer and bread whirled around my nose tip, and was then extinguished by the freshness in the rain. When most of them finished puking, laid dead and moaning in the dirt, when they finally decided to shower their alcoholic body with the alcoholic rain, I turned facing the tavern. There was no name on its signboard.
I stepped inside, and was immediately devoured by one and many intertwined vortexes: men’s overly matured smells of fresh sweat, warriors’ rageful, joyful howls and laughter, clear and melodious crashes between the huge wooden beer mugs, and fragmented human body parts, like a miniature of a massive messy orgy. One without sex or death. A desexualized, undying orgy – that’s a tavern.
I was pulled and pushed by forces from every direction, floating in an ocean of all-dominating phantoms. I was drunk without drinking, I was dead without being killed. I ended up somewhere in the middle of the lobby, on a table, facing a drunk man who was staring me in the eyes. He wore light armor on his shoulder, his rusty helmet and aged leather boots were laid aside on the table. Nonetheless, he still had a sharpened war axe hanged on his back.
I trembled before these eyes of a leopard, and the unforgiving, blazing sheens on his dark-red blades. I was trying to say something, while he said in a threatening tone:
“Tell me a story.”
I realized that a server had crowded through the tables – they all had a specific though varying way of moving, through the lobby, from one corner to another; they all had some kind of control, like tide hunters piercing through waves that were too much stronger than them. The server came to me, smiled and asked me what do I want.
“Tell me a story.” He repeated, still staring in my eyes, “I’ll buy you a beer.”
Fearsome or tempted, I opened my suitcase and hastily grasped two stapled pages on the top. The papers looked new and complete, the ink on them were clear and formally printed.
The server soon brough a large mug of drought beer to me. The man threw several coins to the server, and asked me to start reading. I swallowed in a huge mouthful without even tasting, my throat and gullet felt a shock of freezing pain. I felt like a giant before I started reading. And the story goes:
///
There were drivers who made a living on night. I knew this in 2020 spring, heading over to the Logan airport from my place in Wellesley. Didn’t want to stay in the airport overnight, I decided to call an Uber at 3 a.m., and that’s how I slid into Akita’s black Buick.
I was a little surprised – and irritated – that he left myself carried my large suitcase into the trunk, himself smoking cigs in the cab seat. It’s rare to find a Japanese uber driver in Boston, rarer one who refused to greet the customer. As he started the car with front window wide opened, dense white smoke streamed into the backseat, made my vision a little blurred. I took an enjoyable breath, put my overcoat aside, and slowly sunk into the tenderness and fatigue of aged leather.
“Smoke?”
“Sure yeah.”
I shrugged as he threw the pack and the lighter to me. It was a little rainy outside, a lithe shower of spring water, so soft that it had a foggy silky texture. A Southern rain. An Asian rain. His profile was half embedded in the darkness – if you have lived in Wellesley, and have went outside into the wild after the parties and discos, you would remember the cold shivers that flashed down your spine, and the tortuous driveways engraved in the boundless forest in New England, driveways with almost no streetlights. After all households in the forest went dead, we would all be driving inside a savage darkness: one needed a specific type of courage, and a constant, stable surge of ancestral inspiration to drive in there. It’s an other-drive, an anti-drive, a driving without seeing.
My vision was soon cleared once I lit the cig. It was a Japanese brand I have never smoked before. It had a strange taste of cold, salty seaweed, the ones you would find in a ramen place. In the dark, three floating flickering sparks of Japanese seaweed: one in the lower part of Akita’s face, one beneath my eyes’ frame, and a last one igniting inside the rearview mirror. My irritation melted quietly in the smooth silence – I found a delicate connection between me and, not Akita, but the flake of flame in the mirror. As the landscape descended, as we passed by the town’s cemetery, I started to ask him questions.
“It’s kinda hard to find a driver this time of the day.”
“I suppose so.” He answered calmly.
Akita had a capitulated exhaustion in his voice, in his way of talking. It is a surrendered attitude, an absolute gave-up gesture, like a defenseless tiger lie low on the ground, opened and waiting to be slaughtered. It is an invincible surrender – he is invincible in his exhaustion, not because he was fully armored, but the exact opposite.
“Why are you driving at this time?”
“Well.” He made a brief pause, held his cigarette in his left hand, “I have a daytime job, I’m a teacher, here in a college.”
It’s been years since I heard a professor referring to himself as a “teacher”. There’s a special context in this word, a different touch in uttering it, not in English but both in Japanese and Chinese; It’s a higher title than professor, a more essential remark to a man who teach. I was delighted to hear him saying this word, it reminds me of the younger days…
“How’s this like?”
“hm?”
“Driving at night.” I tried to clarify myself, “I imagine it to be quite different from driving in daytime.”
“Well yes.” He smiled, “You earn more.”
“That’s…surprising.”
It’s surprising indeed. Who would imagine drivers earn more at night? I knew uber charged an extra fee for late night drives, but I didn’t think it would compensate for the difference in passenger volume between night and day.
“Cause the passengers are mostly rich fucks.” He talked in an uncaring manner, “Among the awaken people, only the rich ones would demand – and dare taking a taxi, they normally pay a decent tip.”
“The ones in bars and dance halls?”
“Yes, but more than that. There’re all kinds of rich people at night, travelling for unpredictable causes. It’s unlike in daytime, when every passenger is completely predictable in his destination and reason to travel – night passengers travel for different reasons, sometime even without a reason. They are unconscious, seduced by strange desires. I had a man last night; he was sobbing like a child when I saw him. He spent three hours trying to kill a mosquito in his room – and failed, so he decided to kill himself.”
“And then?”
“He was going to a bridge nearby, but I took him to one of those 24-hour convenient stores, to buy a bottle of pesticide.”
I was unsure if I should smile to his little anecdote. There was a shady evilness in his storytelling, it made me suffocate. I remained silent; an abrupt laughter got stuck in my throat.
“And there are other differences,” he continued and asked me, “Do you drive?”
“Not really.”
“Well, if you do drive, you would understand that driving a car is nothing different from driving a train – there are tracks on the driveways, to drive is to follow them, simple as that.” He paused abruptly, looking outside.
We have passed through the forest, now driving slowly in the desolated, torchless town; I imagined a war had just ended in this town, imagined a flood of refugee from the mountains, imagined the dead winter sweeping fiercely above, over no man’s sky, over starless night and the unfathomable fog enveloping this town, this town I’m about to leave from, about to give up.
He turned on the radio, and continued speaking.
“Driving is consolidated, systematic flowing…GPS and automatic pilot – they’re nothing new to the drivers, we drive automatically even without these technologies, we are rigid machines, zombie, we are driftwoods on the city’s surface.”
“And at night?”
“There is a different set of rules in night driving, it’s much less liberated than it may seem to you…even when the driveway is completely empty, there are still restriction we need to follow. I’m not referring to traffic laws – the government’s power is dissipated at night. These are nocturnal rules, the traces of night that we need to sense and follow. Drivers take a different path at night; even from the same place to the same destination, the path we take is completely different.”
As he spoke, I realized that it was a Jazz music station in the radio, and it was playing Miles Davis. The twisting and murmuring of music, leaping and leaking into the unfamiliar night air…I extinguished my cigarette.
He lit up another, drove in silence for a few minutes until he resumed talking about night driving.
“there’s a difference between travel and flee.”
“Flee?”
“We are all haunted and hunted by night and darkness, but not by day.” He spoke with a certain sense of terror, “We choose to move from one spot to another during daytime, but we are being chased after at night…imagine walking in pure darkness, imagine the horrifying pressure from every direction, it forces us to move ahead, against our own will, and to accelerate, since the pressure is everlasting. Though we have no idea what is awaiting ahead, we have no choice but to move, and that is the exact definition of flee, and exile.”
“Exile.”
The word worked like a spell. Exile. How glacial and apathetic the word is, and how fortunate and liberated the exiled person is.
“Exile…”
As I silently repeated the word, in my mouth, as if I’m chewing it again, attempting to taste its flesh, I realized that I am about to fall asleep. It was an irresistible temptation from the dense darkness in the carriage, from the scent of Akita’s Japanese cigarette, from his quivering voice, from the thick night winds grinding on the window and my glasses…We are now on the highway, streetlights ignited, separating and protecting the tunnel from the pressing world of night, but the night wind, the blackness, the refreshing, squirmy tentacle of night…I leaned my head on the window, and fell into the abyss of a dreamless dream. I was leaning on the airplane’s porthole, outside was New England’s vivid spring rain; there was a horrifying disease, a large, nocturnal wild fire, I visioned it devoured the room, the town, the airplane, devoured Akita’s dark hat, he was sitting on the airplane in front of me, and as he turned back I saw the face of a burning night and recurring nostalgia…I have no choice but to flee, to run away, to plunge into the limitless ecstasy of becoming another traitor…
///
He was asleep when I finished reading. I watched him snoring on the floor, in his own vomits, and grabbed a server who passed by me.
“You know if there’s anywhere to stay overnight nearby?” I asked him.
“Here.” He answered as if he heard a bizarrely stupid question.
“I mean, a hotel?”
“Ah,” He said, “exit from the backdoor, turn left, you’ll find a casino next door, and a brothel next door to the casino.”
“But I was asking for a hotel?”
“Well,” He smiled, “Brothel is more than a hotel.”
I shrugged.
Closed my suitcase, before leaving for the backdoor, I point to the man sitting across the table and asked the server:
“Any idea who he is?”
“A bounty hunter. A master bounty hunter, me guessing.” He said and left.
I plunged into the crowds of table, beer and human flesh, heading towards the back door. It was easier to navigate and control the direction this time, as I have begun to see the shorelines.
“Rejoice, and be glad.”
There was nothing to look at from the outside. No advertisement, dazzling neon lights or street girls that signals the function of this building. The brothel was quiet, and had a smell of morning lilac. It was a formal, elegant building, with much dimmer interior lightings compared to the tavern.
I suddenly entered an ancient castle. It had a capacious lobby, so wide that I couldn’t even tell my actual position in it. An old lady greeted me silently from the front desk. I look around at those rough surfaces of the stony walls, those humble candles and lamps on the table or fixated on the wall. The air was gently warmed up by four large fireplaces on the four corners of the lobby. There were couches surrounding the fireplaces. Large feathery pillows and thin, luxurious blankets were laying everywhere on a grey, woolen carpet that covered the whole floor.
Here and there, I saw people fucking or dreaming. Their bodies, covered or naked, all hid in the shadows besides the couch, or by the marble pillars; Occasionally, I found exposed parts of their fleshes, which all shone in a mysterious light. They were all quiet – there were low whispers and chatters, imperceptible moans of love and desire echoing and disappearing, merging into the tranquil air, but they were all quiet. There was a inviolable privacy in their openness, a total silence in their ecstasy.
As I approached the front desk, I realized that the old lady was sitting in a wheel chair. I greeted her, and politely asked her if there’s a place for me stay overnight.
“Yes.” She answered calmly, and led me to a couch next to one of the fire places.
I thanked her, sat down on the soft couch and watched her wheel chair slowly sliding back to the front desk. There was a thin blanket neatly folded up on the armrest, two people were sleeping in each other’s arms. I took off my clothes and laid down, when a veiled woman came sat on the other end of the sofa. She sat down like a sparrow landing on a spring branch, with a large white towel rounded on her body; her lap made a slight, round dent on the sofa’s soft surface. I was not sure if I should greet her – in fact, I felt confused in the encounter. Her presence was certainly uninvited, rude and fiercely disruptive, but I lack the power to either embrace or dislodge her. Somehow, she was out of my control – outside of my control.
As I hesitated, she quietly moved a little closer to me. I noticed an intoxicating smell of dried tuberose, and the left half of my body was completely paralyzed. She kept a distance from me. When my body was flooded by the calm, sour scent of tuberose, and I finally gave up moving my fingertips, she started speaking, her voice was clear and musical:
“I think I know you.”
I had no choice but to use my mouth, since that was my last movable organ.
“From where?”
She smiled; her body shone warmly in the fireplace’s orange light. Without answering my question or explaining anything, she grabbed my suitcase as if it was her possession and casually entered the password. The ivory dagger caught her intention. She picked it up in such a careful manner, as if its blunt blade would actual cut deep into her vessels. She then put it back to the sheath, and started paging violently through the pile of papers. Her violence created further chaos in that pile of papers, until she stopped on one of the pieces.
“Ah.” She seemed surprised to find it, and turned it toward me, “I like this one.”
It was the only piece printed in clear, vivid color.
///
Proportion – Size – labyrinth bigger than its prey – expand and accelerate faster than its prey – grow in complexity faster than the prey’s complexity – same conditions for a prey to escape – a race – The House of Asterion: enterers of the labyrinth were entered by the labyrinth – view night as a labyrinth/view night as a grand prey – to contain or/and be contained by night – sexual relationship: man embraces woman and enters woman/woman contains man and enters man – Deleuze: Sadism and acceleration (Coldness and Cruelty) – an accelerating repetition of a sadistic/sexual act – labyrinth as a sadist – labyrinth/prey relation as a mutually sadistic relation – sadism was active for both sides – a race of intensity…
///
I experienced a natural and evil erection when she approached me, while I’m still paralyzed. She whispered:
“I liked your imagination of sex…”
I wasn’t able to answer, as the paralysis flooded over my lips and entered my brain; I was losing my vision, losing my ordinary sensations and the solid flow of thoughts, which I once claimed to be unbreakable. A chilling sparkle flashed upward through my body when I quietly entered her, then an eternal race began, then the prologue, the tutorial ended, then the true phantasy appeared, then the dream entered me…the scent of tuberose…
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
The only thing she took from me was the dagger. With its sheath. I was clean and healthy as a newborn – warm and revitalized. I collected my suitcase, which was now a mess made of scattered papers and clothes. It was still dark outside.
I wandered with my mind completely blanked in the hamlet, until I reached the border, and noticed a small gang of shadowy figures under a large pine tree. There were four or five of them, each resting in his own posture. It seemed like they were waiting for something. I wasn’t planning to approach them, but one of them walked up to me as soon as I appeared in their sight.
It was a strong man with full armor. He had a heavy sword on his back, but he was in no way threatening – he was glorious and warm. I had to stop my footsteps.
“We are entering the dungeon.” His words were blunt, “One more man needed, you’re invited.”
Know I was looking at his gang, he explained: “Don’t worry about the team, they’re all great warriors, we just need one more man…and I guarantee you a decent payment once we are back.”
“What if we’re not back?”
He turned silent for a second, and answered:
“That will be the best payment.”
I didn’t quite understand his meaning, but still nodded.
“Come along then, welcome.”
They all had the same steadiness and experienced calmness in their expressions. They were carrying their own weapon and armors, and clearly holding unique positions in the team. After silently greeted me, they collected their provisions, and each said goodbye to a new grave next to the muddy road. By then, I realized they just buried one of them, and it was in truth an extremely rough funeral.
We then departed for the dungeon.
“Mother! Mother! Are we off to the monastary?”
I was placed in the back of the group, following four of them in the cold, humid forest. Our last member was not in line with us – I was hearing broken pieces of mandolin playings all the way. It was as if a sea swallow was following us. An evasive wanderer was leading our way, singing foreign melodies that possibly signaled some kind of code and passed around information about the surrounding landscapes.
They move rhythmically in quietness. I heard random pieces of quick chats in the swiftly passing wind. A pack of chewing tobacco was passed from the front to the back, and then back to the front. The taste was terrible, I later learnt that the pack was once soaked in horse’s blood – but it calmed me down. For some unspeakable reasons, when I smelled the irritating scent of soured tobacco in the air, coughed out from my own mouth, I had a clear recognition that I’m breathing. Breathe was no longer an abstract context of my living, but a constant production of my body, my burning flesh.
“It’s getting close.” The leader, that righteous warrior stopped the team and said to me, “We’ll camp here and entered the dungeon after then.”
I sat down with them in complete darkness – somewhere, somewhere deep and close in a direction was the dungeon. I couldn’t help but started to paint my fresh, modern imaginations on the its ancient, unchanging canvas. I began to picture its seductive entrance, the gate was wide-open like an evil flower; its shady, stinking passages, its creatures…which was unimaginable. And the end of the dungeon, its core, its purpose, what called upon us to depart and join a grand game.
The bonfire was finally ignited, a fleshless old man sat next to me. He was barely wearing any armor – large areas of his aged body were exposed. There were dense wrinkles on him, so dense that his skin was filled with cracks, like dried earth after a timeless drought. I greeted him. His eyes were cold, losing focus. No sun shone on him, no prayer landed on him.
“If I may ask your name?” I asked with carefulness.
“I don’t have a name.” He answered slowly, turned his eyes towards me, “I’m an abomination. No name allowed.”
He had a terrifying way of looking at another person: his eyes shot straight into mine, and then stopped abruptly, completely fixed on my eyes, like a metal hook cut and hanged in my throat. Frightened, I gave up asking what an abomination is, turned my back toward him and pretended to sleep. I felt his slow, solid gaze stayed on my back for a while, and then disappeared.
Later in the night, I was awoken by a weird noise. Soon I realized it was the old man’s teeth – he was restraining himself, biting his teeth to swallow a long, ancient howl. With curiosity, I turned and approached him. With the dim lighting from the bonfire’s ashes, I saw his hand turning into a monstrous claw, black-brown furs growing rapidly on his naked chest. Deep from his throat, he was making a painful, sorrowful and continuous humming. An abomination. When I approached him, he tried to say something, but none of his expressions were organized, nothing could be delivered through that invisible rampart.
“Read him something.” A gentle, sympathetic voice appeared from the side, “An old problem, and he ran out of herbs…”
“Read him something?” I asked.
“To distract him.” The voice said, “Can’t help him recover, but at least he’ll have something to entertain on…and less pain to suffer.”
Lacking any better choices, I opened my suitcase, and randomly grabbed a page from the pile.
///
Observer
Psycho-horror game, released in August 2017
Trailer and gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AC4cEZeEwo
Producer: Bloober team (Recognized for producing Layers of Fear)
Background:
Under a hardcore cyberpunk setting, mankind has been closely synthesized with machine parts and the internet, to the degree where a detective has the technology to plug-in another person and experience the memories of the object. The intensity of the story was pushed to the limit when the protagonist, an aged detective in concerning his son’s endangered life, had to plug into – not another person, but corpses. The true face of the game was then exposed: a highly condensed, intensified expression of cyberpunk-ic hallucination, a visualized stream of consciousness, a collection of brutality and fear staring straight in the eyes of death.
Thoughts:
What does it mean to roleplay?
To roleplay – one of our age’s biggest markers. Beyond the time of roleplaying a social identity and an internet-identity that is nothing but the simulacrum of the former, we find the true violent power of roleplay in games. To roleplay is to be forced to become other, to synthesize with other, to enter and be entered by other (surely Deleuze would enjoy Witcher of any other RPG, as he would call this deterritorialization), as we experience in one of the most significant components of our nocturnal experience – dream. If dreaming reidentify us with a different coordinate system, synthesizing us with the absent characters, and putting us into another realm of existence (or indeed, non-existence), then roleplay games is our desperate attempt to imitate and re-produce that exact experience. An attempt that was destined to be failed, just as every dream writer failed in retelling their dreams. Not to mention the innate relationship between the cyberpunk setting and night, which is the required background of madness, delirium and the secretive entering into someone else’s deepest consciousness.
Are we entering the game, or the game entering us?
Are we entering the memory/conscious/game/dream, or the memory/conscious/game/dream entering us? This question recurs in all different layers of the topic. In the game, the protagonist had to use a designed medicine to maintain sanity, as the memories of the people whom he entered always come back to his conscious, bringing him both visual and aural hallucinations: this is the exact reason why entering a dead person’s mind is strictly prohibited according to his company’s rule. Upon encountering another person’s conscious, we see clearly the double nature of essentially any entrance: in entering a game, we are entered by the game; in entering a dream, we are entered by the dream; in entering night, we are entered by the night. Becoming is always an act from both sides.
///
He started to scratch and bleed his own thighs with his poisonous claws in the middle of my reading. I almost stopped, but the voice behind insisted me to finish. So I did. After I finished, the old abomination was lying beside the cold bonfire, completely unconscious. As I covered his wrecked body with a warm blanket, I heard his hoarse, agonized voiced, from deep in his body, whispering painfully:
“Mother…Mother…”
“Pace out the halls of your lineage, once familiar, now foreign.”
Ruins. The entrance of the dungeon was a devastated, insipid gate surrounded by ruins of ancient buildings. As we approached the door, the leader stopped and faced the gate, looking up to something engraved in the stone. In his torchlight, I saw it was a writing, something like a manifesto:
///
Wanderers: we are waging a war. For so long, we’ve been charmed and enslaved by the domesticated land of day and life; we’ve been intoxicated, corrupted and so much weakened by a cozy phantom. May us recall our long-forgotten homeland, may us reverse our distorted worship of daylight; sleep is not the repose to our life – the opposite: we live, work and suffer during daytime to join again the impregnable army, which forever heads toward night’s territory. We shall be the invaders, we shall declare violence and evilness, we shall kill to proceed in that unknown continent, we shall intrude and be devoured by the darkness – in the death after deaths, upon the hill of seven divine corpses, when the first dark sheen shines on a broken helmet, if there’s still enough faith to throw the last glimpse towards the inky horizon, a smattering of roses will be sowed atop the thorny path of night.
///
They – their distorted minds and fleshes – lined up in front of the door, like defeated soldiers from an unjust army, like deserters trying to recollect those past glorious days that never belonged to them. I stood with them for a while, until the dusty air in the ruins completely flooded and altered my scent, until I ripped off my hollow imaginations and fears, and showered in the intense reality exposed on my face.
“Let’s move.” The leader said.
We marched.
“It’s a sad day when I am your best hope.”
Our scout, the player of that mandolin and the owner of that voice last night, was a young poet. As we descended the stairs into the dungeon, his became increasingly relaxed and witty. While every other member was holding weapons on hand and alerted, the poet still had his weapon – a thin sickle – on his back. Instead, he had his mandolin on hand. As he gently plucked the strings, music flew around our progressing steps. In the forever descending dungeon, each step forward brought another layer of hesitation and anxiety on our shoulder, and his tweedled was the mild curer that alleviated all stresses – if not all, at least it bound us tight with sanity and more importantly, with hope.
Occasionally, he chatted with members of the team. Word was a rarity in the dungeon, though we all understood that it was always the most efficient way to stay stalwart. The poet – he did not only talk, but also joked: another virtue in the dungeon. As we walked along, he started to speak with me:
“I heard your readings last night.” He said, “That was some nice nonsense.”
“I appreciate it.” I smiled.
He then dared me to share another piece with them, I agreed. As I stopped and searched in the suitcase, I realized there was only a last piece left. I grabbed the paper out, and started reading.
///
Of White Night*
Mu Xin
Tempted
With my flesh, to defy the white night
It depressed them
Would it depress me?
Clocks ticking
Candlelights igniting
I feasted my bodily carnival
As if there was no white night
Who would walk, towards the white night
With our hands held
Who would be my mistress
Virginal, beauteous villain.
*An extremely rough and irresponsible self-translation of Mu Xin (1927-2011), a Chinese painter, writer and scholar. Mu Xin was prisoned for two years during the cultural revolution, when he completed “Prison Notebooks”. He was under house arrest after been discharged, until he fled to New York in 1982. “Of White Night” is a selected work from his poem collection.
Thoughts:
- The very idea of a “White Night” – aside from its scientific definition of a night that does not get dark – is intriguing in its self-contradiction and implicit power, violence and threat. The expression here translated as “With my flesh, to defy the white night” is rooted in an ancient Chinese expression meaning “To defy/test the law by the body”. Obviously, the author is noting the White Night’s power, potential violence and the danger in encountering it, whatever it refers to in this poem.
- Apparently, White Night is an all-night arts festival held in many cities during summer, which might be related with the presence of carnival in the poem. What is a bodily carnival? The expression is strange, both in meaning and grammar, while it produces an odd and erotic atmosphere that makes great sense in pair with carnival. Sex, sweat, body-flesh, and a decentered, chaotic, intoxicated state of celebration – and the truly profound question: How does carnival interact with the White Night? Why must him act as if there is no White Night in order to feast the carnival?
- Who are “they”? Why would a White Night depress them? The relation between night and depression/despair has been discussed for long. How does the intrusion of Whiteness, of light and dayness changes the double-sided conversation between night and depression? When darkness has been polluted, or even replaced by light, will depression be alleviated, deepened or be transformed into other unknown directions?
- (TBC)
///
I continued to read those notes quietly after reading the poem. When I finished reading, I looked around, and nobody was there. I was finally alone in the dungeon.
“…But if it had heard me I must have noticed some sign of it, the beast must at least have stopped its work every now and then to listen. But all remain unchanged.”
I kept on walking for some further distances in the endless tunnel, and soon came to the realization that there was nothing to fight against – no beasts, no cursed creatures or evil spirits. It was an empty dungeon, cleansed and purified. Our weapons and armors were not prepared to fight anything, our deaths were not caused by deadly bites or insidious venoms. We didn’t enter the dungeon to gather the unmeasurable treasure, or to retain the shiny coins from the shady darkness; we were not asking for anything from the dungeon, neither could we trade anything with the dungeon.
I couldn’t find my suitcase, and I soon gave up holding on to that last piece of writing. I’ve finally lost all of my belongings: nothing belonged to me anymore, and I belonged to nothing. I walked in the tunnel that was completely dark, the sound of my own footsteps echoed and echoed in the narrowness of this closed space, until I couldn’t tell if I was still walking, or it was millions of knotted illusions of me walking; in another sense, I was walking in my echoes, walking through my echoes. I was forbidden to speak, and I saw the shape, the profile of this grand ceremony, this grand offering – every loss, including the ultimate loss, would be part of the offering. I was destined to travel through those smoky, foggy instants where I was once confused by their obscure appearances, but not anymore.
I am qualified.
I closed my eyes, lied down on the rough rocky ground of the dungeon, rested my body as if lying on the goose down blanket of the sweetest mistress. I was finally worthless, finally pure and I own nothing – I have offered all of them during the ceremony. Now I would offer the last forgotten piece to the dungeon: the cleansed sacrifice, the innocent lamb, the newborn infant. I here offer myself to the dungeon, to the darkness, to the night.
I began to dream. In the dream I began walking again, and there was an exit of the dungeon. Slowly walking out of the end of the dungeon, it was another night – another night view of a massive plain. I was outside a karst cave on the mountainside, enabling an infinitely wide angle of viewing downward onto the plain. I was completely exposed to the blue zenith, to a lavish grant from the dearest universe. There were lions and goats speeding on the plain, leaping over clear streams and grasslands where the night dews drooped on their blades; there were forests where snakes and lizards, where caterpillars and moths are resting in, they all held the same calmness and tranquility that I’ve never seen elsewhere. The inky horizon lifted the night sky up…and the stars, I didn’t realize there were stars at night until then, those silent sorrowful eyes, those adorable regrets.
Under the dark vault, there was a dead deer.
That was me, dead and humbled.