August in Los Angeles was bone-dry and dusty, but he left it behind in the parking lot as he made his way through the series of three doors, heavy and white, and into the frozen refuge of the ice bar. He was known, there, and the hostess greeted him with a sealskin robe, slipped over his shoulders before he had time to start shivering. The tip of her elegant nose felt icy against his own.

There was room for one more at the bar, and at a nod from the chef he took the seat gratefully. One often had to wait, stamping feet to ward off the cold. The chef slid the amuse-bouche before him as he unfolded his napkin, and it was exquisite in appearance: a translucent carpaccio of walrus blubber sprinkled with snowflakes. The snowflakes were not unique, in fact they came in precisely two shapes, one sprinkled on the left side of the dish, the other on the right. They made not-quite-imperceptibly different crunches as he ate them. It was touches like this that had made the chef’s name when he was but a young man just arrived from Nunavut.

For his first course the customer ordered a cube, thick and meaty. It was peasant fare, but here elevated to fine cuisine. The chef’s assistants trained for three years in the rituals of icemaking. They knew intuitively what temperature of water to use, how to swirl it through the fourteen squares of the traditional whalebone tray, how to tap the sides to dislodge bubbles. One of those assistants now brought the chef a steaming tray, fresh from the freezer, which the master raised overhead and brought down with a single practiced motion onto the stone slab before him, then raised slowly to reveal the unbroken cubes. He then sorted through the cubes with the point of his obsidian knife, whisking the thirteen imperfect ones onto the floor. The remaining one he slid onto a plate and into the toaster oven behind him.

Twenty-five seconds in the oven grilled the outer layer of the cube to perfection, liquefying a thin sheen of pure water across its surface without defacing the deep-frozen insides with cracks. The customer took it in one bite, seasoning it only with a tiny pinch of sea salt, then sucking appreciatively. (He never chewed, of course: you might hear starlets and pop idols crunching their ice at trendy bars on Melrose, but here such behavior would get you ejected permanently.) The ice in his mouth was frictionless, spinning with every slight touch of his tongue, endlessly reconfiguring itself into new shapes as it melted in his heat. The meltwater had the slight mineral tang of true cube-ice, reflecting both its origin in a remote New Zealand spring and the subtle influence of the seasoned whalebone tray, infused during its months-long deep freeze.

While savoring the final drops, he studied the chalkboard for the daily specials. He was startled to see qainngittunga on the list, as this delicacy was only very rarely found, and its availability in summer was practically unheard-of south of the 49th Parallel. Despite the ruinous expense, as a connoisseur he had no choice but to order it. He was not sure he had pronounced the name quite correctly, but merely ordering this challenging dish was enough to ensure the respect of the staff.

With a single grunt of approval the chef knelt and reached into the hidden freezer beneath the bar. His thickly-gloved hands reappeared cradling a cylinder of ice three inches in diameter and a foot long, which he placed on a small polar-bear rug placed on the counter by an assistant. The ice was a pure, intense blue, mostly clear but punctuated by thin dark layers. It was a core sample that had been painstakingly extracted from thousands of meters below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. (Such drilling is forbidden by international treaty, but there are limited exemptions for scientific research, and some of the resulting cores do find their way out of geology laboratories and into restaurants.)

Using a small handsaw with a diamond-studded wire blade, the chef quickly sliced off a section measuring a perfectly even three millimeters thick and gently lowered it onto a plate of red pumice, then handed it to the customer. He did not garnish it, nor did the customer apply a grain of salt; nothing was needed. The customer merely raised the plate to his mouth and slid the disc onto his waiting tongue.

The experience was indescribable, transcendent, as it had been once before on that memorable evening in Svalbard. His tongue was covered by the freshly-cut side of the ice (this was essential), which had been sealed inside the glacier, untouched, for a hundred thousand years. Through those ages the intense pressure and cold had distilled every essence of the microscopic bits of dust, sand and pollen that had drifted onto the surface so long ago. He tasted a world where mammoths roamed, and saber-toothed cats. He tasted the smoke of his ancestors’ cave fires, the ochre with which they painted the tales of their hunts.

After a long interval he swallowed. Nothing was left now; the ineffable vapors of impossibly distant pasts were already consumed. Before, in Svalbard, Lena was with him and the sensations had lived on in echoed reflections in each others’ eyes — I felt it, did you feel it too? — but that was the past, and on this day he was alone. Two years ago was no less remote than the Ice Age, and Lena was no less dead than the Cro-Magnon cave painters.

After a dish such as that, there was only one thing left to order. He gestured, holding up nine fingers, and the chef bowed deeply in response. A moment later a waitress appeared with a small brass tube the size of a rifle shell. She unscrewed the end, and tipped out a small crystal onto a silver dish. The customer gravely accepted the dish, and she bowed and retreated. In a reciprocal gesture he bowed his own head and gently lowered the tip of his tongue to the dish. As the water of his saliva made contact with the entropically-enhanced synthetic crystal packing of the water molecules in the ice₉ — an arrangement not found in nature, stable enough to remain solid at room temperature — its molecules too attached to the surface and froze, leading to a wave of crystallization that in two seconds had swept through his entire body and frozen it solid.

The staff quickly folded him into his voluminous sealskin robe, lashed it tightly shut with rawhide, and carried the stiff bundle into a remote corner of the basement. (But not before removing his wallet with tongs; the bill he left behind was quite considerable.)

No again, I will not show you what’s under the bandage on my arm. I won’t even look myself, anymore; it’s gotten too disturbing. I mean, the wound hasn’t changed, but every time I look at it it bothers me more, takes me longer to stop shivering. I keep wanting to touch it.

Listen: Did you ever play Shock City? I’m not trying to change the subject; hear me out. I played the hell out of that game when I was twelve, and I always wondered what was inside all those buildings you couldn’t get into. There were only eight buildings with working doors in the whole game, with all kinds of things to explore and enemies to stalk in each one; so if you could somehow get into the other hundred or so buildings, what would be inside them? Could you play them too?

I know, I was pretty dumb back then. I didn’t understand the way the world works.

Finally someone told me about a hack to get into any building. It exploited a bug in the hit detection: you had to run at a corner and jump right at it. If you got the position and angle just right, you’d slip through the join between the two walls and be inside. People were using this as a cheat to get into the higher levels early, but all I could think about was the “secret” buildings. By then I had already covered my bedroom walls with hand-drawn maps of what I thought their insides might be like. I booted up the game and ran straight for the Library — I knew it was full of maze-like miles of dimly-lit dusty stacks and cavernous reading rooms, through which I could pursue my quarry of mutant beasts.

Instead I hit the corner and bounced off, of course. The instructions said to be patient, so I backed up and tried again. All the good skills took practice. I got into my best gamer trance state of endless repetition and fine-tuning of reflexes. Finally after an hour I made it: instead of the bounce I got a split second of mangled polygons warping across the screen, and then … nothing. The inside of the building didn’t exist, and neither did the insides of its walls, so it was as though there were nothing there. I could see the streets and buildings on the other side. But the building’s floor didn’t exist either, and there was no ground under it, just a yawning abyss of pure electric video blue that I fell into like a rock. I had about ten seconds to turn and look up: the universe was a void with nothing in it but a few square blocks of street-plan dotted with empty building-shaped holes. It receded into the distance, and then I reached the outer boundary of the world and snapped into the death screen.

Yes, I do have a point. The real world is like this too. The things we think are solid are fakes; there’s nothing inside them. The things we can’t open up are hollow, infinitely-thin shells around nauseating blue.

I know what you’re about to do. Everyone does this when I explain things. “I refute it thus!” as you hit a wall with a rock. You’ve got a hammer in that backpack? Even better.

Yeah, that support pillar looks pretty solid right there were you decided to hit it. With realistic bits of fractured concrete inside it, right there. Or over there, yes. Don’t you get it? You were meant to break through there. Just like I was meant to go into those dozen buildings but no others. You’re playing the game the way you were meant to, and it’s a very good game so the limitations are fewer, the glitches are harder to exploit.

But with the right skills, the right mind-set, I can find the places that weren’t meant to open up and make them open up anyway. And now that I’ve learned, I can’t un-learn it. Everything I do is wrong.

I can’t find my way back to the right doors. I don’t want to live out here in the cold underneath a fucking highway overpass with brain-damaged junkies. Present company excepted. I had a job and a place to live and friends. But I can’t get back to them: they’re part of the painted-on scenery now. They’re not real objects, they’re texture-maps. The street level doors open onto blue abysses. So do the windows. I’ve tried them all; then I gave up. I almost fell into them, any number of times, had to grab hold of texture that looked just like brick or paint or wood on one side and didn’t exist on the other. Vertigo made me sick and I threw up into that upside-down sky and watched it fall out of sight and vanish.

The former friends just repeat the same list of canned lines in random order, like any good NPC. Mostly “You look pretty bad, man” and “You really need to get some help”. It’s pathetic.

The last time I tried to get inside, I ran into a corner. Yeah, you’d think I would have tried that trick earlier, but you try ramming into the corner of a building in “real life”. Explain to your hindbrain about cheat codes when it sees a wedge of brick looming up. Even after psyching myself up I’d always swerve aside at the last second.

But I finally managed it. What do you think happened? I fucking knocked myself out on the bricks, that’s what. I came to a while later — this was in a back alley so no one had seen me. My face was covered in drying blood from this big gouge on my scalp, and I’d knocked this tooth out, but no serious head injury.

So I lay there a minute, feeling like shit, gathering up strength to move. Then I looked at how I was lying, and saw that my right arm went right into the wall and disappeared at the elbow. A clipping error. I could still feel my hand, but it wasn’t touching anything. I sat up slowly, the arm came loose with no resistance, but it just … ended there, in a smooth flat cut at the elbow. And I pulled it toward me and looked at it and there wasn’t anything inside me! Just an oval hole into a blue void.

I was too afraid to touch it with my fingers. Still am. I found a curl of rusty wire, unrolled it and stuck the end of it in. It just went straight into my arm without resistance, no matter how I wiggled it around inside. On the other side of that hole I didn’t exist. I got all four feet of wire into there, then lost my grip on the other end and it fell all the way in and disappeared … I didn’t feel it hit anything on the way down.

Of course you don’t believe me. Ha! No, whatever I’m full of, it isn’t shit. Alright, I’ll take the bandage off the stump and show you. It’s not paint. Sure, try sticking your fingers in and wiggling them. Fun, huh? Not so fun, huh?

You know about phantom limbs? I can still feel my forearm and hand. They say it’s because the brain centers that controlled them are still there, and want something to do, so they make up sensations. But like I said, I couldn’t feel them touching anything, just touch the fingers together and to the palm, make a fist and feel that. … Only now, just this morning, I can feel something else.

It feels like hard plastic. In my mind’s eye it’s shiny black. Its contours fit my grip perfectly. It’s got buttons on it, and a joystick. I’m going to try moving it now.

This is a sequel to my story Ozone. I’d wanted to write one for years, but didn’t have any inspiration about what happened next. Then last week the ideas in here came to me, and I realized that they fit neatly into that story-world. But the ending only came to me today, after I’d started writing the story down.

I got these ideas while watching my son explore glitches in the notoriously buggy game Pokémon Blue. I would love to have him read this story, but I know it would give him nightmares for weeks…

Call the roller of big dice,
The long-haired one, and bid him whip
On kitchen tables consecutive 18’s.
Let the fighters dawdle in such armor
As they are used to wear, and let the mages swap
Delicious spells from last month’s Dragon.
Let a fumble be finale of its caster:
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

I really don’t know how long I’ve been lying on the couch, watching the men on the TV. I don’t remember things so well anymore, since the accident. I don’t remember the accident either, but my friends tell me it was pretty bad. I have healed about as well as I’m going to, and though I don’t get around well, I can still think. In small doses.

The men on the TV gesticulate about some crisis or other; I can’t tell what, because the sound is off. They look angry — at me, at all of us, at themselves. Small text crawls across the screen above and below them. The TV men look very tired, too, as tired as I feel, and perhaps lost and afraid. I feel such sympathy; I would like to turn up the volume and learn more of their situation. Maybe I could ask one of my friends to.

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The last paragraph of the poem “Systems” by Kristy Bowen:

“… I try to write a poem I wouldn’t want to sleep with. Would kick to the curb, wrap my thumbs around her slender neck and snap. This one’s still babied, blinking, wondering if it wants to be a skirt or a tire iron. Licking the perimeter of opened envelopes for a tiny bit of sweet. My nouns go awry every time I stop paying attention. Fall pretty like dimes on the sidewalk. My friend Melissa, whose name means bee-like, has a theory about systems. For every change in variable, the outcome shifts toward constant decay.”
—From Brief History Of Girl As Match

I just ran across Invisible Games, a website of short and enigmatic fictions. One of them, The Loneliness Engine, reminds me of my own short-n-enigmatic We [Had Black Boxes]. No spooky synchronicity or anything, but they seem to belong together somehow … which itself fits in with the themes of both stories. Neat.

We love to play the Hero — exploring dungeons, grabbing treasure, saving the world from evil. But I started wondering about the reasons behind some of the actions in such games, and especially about what my Heroic deeds looked like to the ordinary people of the lands I passed through. (As my wife once put it: “Why isn’t there a Hug button?”) The result is this story.
I don’t normally write this sort of antiquated prose, but the genre does require it. It was actually a fun exercise, and I’ve tried to affect more of a James Branch Cabell or Lord Dunsany voice, rather than the tiresome faux-Tolkien of most current heroic fantasy.

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2001

Figs cover the ground
The children step over them
Or sometimes they don’t

A hug and a kiss
A heart outlined with fingers
And a wave goodbye

To the very end
of the quivering green branch
clings a black squirrel

So much depends on
a red Mario beanie
left out on the lawn.

Yellow leaves dancing
in the air, two stories up
against green windows.

I cannot get up.
I am excused from all work:
Cat purrs on my lap.

2002

Hunting millipedes;
Earthworms and a defunct grub
Are all our trowel found

A caterpillar
tiny … bright green … wriggling
floats by on a thread

The cardboard stove box
lawn parallelopiped
packed with my children

Squirrels found a ripe fig
All the ones I see are green
What do the squirrels know?

With my big pushes
she swings high on blue chain links.
Above, figs ripen.

A huge durian
hidden on the tile rooftop.
Kick it, Mario!

A surplus mouthpart
transmuted into silver
beneath his pillow

Outside the window,
Past my feet and sleeping cats,
Trees are shivering.

2003

Outside: balcony.
Two hundred forty thousand
miles above: the moon.

green surface stretches
’round a smaller volume now:
four-thirds π r cubed

2004

On November lawns
The rain and shade have planted
A mushroom forest

Prufrock 2K4:
“I have measured out my life
In eggnog lattes.”

My Java haiku / Are funny because they’re true / But rather geeky

(Circa 1998)

I got an Object
I was sure it was a Point
ClassCastException

Garbage collection
The unused objects are gone –
Knew you wouldn’t mind

AWT
Peers come from some secret place
So mysterious

Server wants linefeeds
But println just sends CR
The sockets deadlock

“Java For Dummies”
Yee Haw! Are we coding yet?!
When’s our IPO?

I’ve always picked at my nails, bitten them, the cuticles too. A sign of nervousness, I know, and unsightly and unsanitary. Can’t help it, though. The nails, fingertips, are always growing, always in different configurations, and some of those configurations are just wrong, asymmetrical, with sharp bits sticking out. And I can’t leave those alone: I always think in the moment that I can peel off the wrong part and leave the nail smooth and right. But I really know that it almost always makes it worse.

Suggested background music: Frost – Steelwound
[audio:Steelwound.mp3]

I dreamed once, in high school, that my fingernails had turned to bone: spongy like the inside of a broken chicken leg, thick and jagged-edged. I didn’t touch them for a week after that, but the lesson didn’t last. I never learn, a fact that has become only too apparent in college.

I kicked open the door and stumbled into the bathroom; the door shut behind me, bringing relative stillness, and I realized how wasted I was. It always comes on gradually, and I’m at a party and there’s loud music and loud people and everyone’s inhibitions are lowering in synchrony and the drinks are simultaneously cold and burning going down — in the hot living room it’s just natural and normal, the way I feel. But after the sudden transition to the cold and silence and bare walls of the bathroom, I sense this bubble of inebriation that I’ve brought in inside myself. It’s a familiar sensation from parties, part of that life-cycle that begins with the ceremonial first drink and ends God knows where.

I sat there on the toilet, just emptying my bladder of toxins but not trusting my balance or aim enough to stand, and picked idly at the paint on the wall next to me with the hand not occupied with the Corona bottle. Dirty looking yellow paint of Cameron’s crappy apartment bathroom, peeling off of whatever was underneath. This was an old building, periodically spruced up by slapping on another coat of paint, and who knew how far down the layers went? The latest-but-one was evidently green.

I was revealing more of it, picking off the yellow. It actually came off very satisfyingly, not just chipping off in bits but more often peeling in strips that could be coaxed along for a few inches. Amid the thumping of the bass from outside and the thudding of my pulse through my temples, I sat on my little throne and idly transformed this corner of wall. The revealed green was pretty, with a lacquer-like translucent depth to it, and had a pattern of gold lines across it. Fine gold lines, running parallel but then changing direction. Wallpaper? Not making a repeating pattern at all, but something with a strong sense of order. I ran my fingertips across it and felt the texture, the gold lines raised slightly. Smell of ozone.

I hated that smell — it rose in clouds from my best friend Greg’s model train set as the little HO-gauge cars whizzed past the tiny fake trees and bushes made of painted lichen. His little sister Clarisse, whom we alternately played with and tormented, sat with us that afternoon under the particle-board table in the upstairs playroom. I heard the clicking of the trains on tracks above, and the ozone smell drifted down across us, making me feel delirious and sick. I left in the back of my mom’s station wagon with the foreknowledge that something was badly broken, over, gone; I cried all the way home. The next morning at school Greg pointedly switched desks, away from me, next to the cruel boys we hated, and became instantly one of them. A covalent bond. The lens of their attentions focused on me for a long time after that. Next year I came across a diagram of an ozone molecule in a science textbook and instantly vomited across it.

Someone had been banging on the door for some time now. I had yellow paint crud all under my fingernails. Two of them were bleeding. Several square feet of the wall were revealed by my efforts as what suddenly came into focus as printed circuit board: green resin overlaid with thin stamped copper wire traces. Tiny grids of holes marked where IC chips and other components would be inserted. The holes were mostly still clogged with yellow paint, but a few were open and I could discern red lights blinking behind.

The banging continued. I took a deep shuddering breath, pulled up my pants and stepped over and unlocked the door. On the other side Greg lowered his fist and partially relaxed his annoyed expression as he saw me. “Russ, you’ve been in here for like ten minutes, and I gotta take a fucking piss, man, this shithole apt’s only got one toilet, you know?”

I felt a rush of simultaneous terror and relief. Greg and I were, if no longer enemies, hardly close anymore; but there was clearly some bad stuff going down mentally inside me, and Greg could be counted on as an impartial observer, reliable narrator, looking every inch the straight-edge with his buzzcut and Minor Threat t-shirt. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” went the old Adam Ant refrain in my head. I believe I started expressing something along the lines of “Greg, fuck, man, there must have been some kind of bad shit in the punch bowl, DMT or angel dust or something, I’m in here seeing stuff and it’s freaking me out…”

Greg’s eyes swiveled past me and widened. “Russ, what the hell did you do to the wall? You’re taking the paint off? Felice is going to kill you for this.” He pushed me aside and ran his fingers over the revealed surface. “Jesus, this is a PC board, like some kind of motherboard. And it’s underneath the paint? You didn’t put this here, it was underneath all along?” He got on his knees and leaned in close. “Smells like something’s shorting out. Holy shit, there’s some kind of lights in there, behind the wall…”

My heart sank, stomach churned. Was this worse or better than a hallucination? I felt dizzier and reached for the wall to steady myself. Greg, analytical EE major, pushed the door shut and pulled the dangling string to turn off the light bulb, the better to apprehend the blinkenlights.

Red lamps burned in the darkness, pixelated through the grids of little holes in the board. Monochrome gallium-arsenide-red lamps that were far away and huge and opened and shut like eyes. Ozone breathed out at us. I screamed, and thrashed my hands through the darkness feeling for the light cord. The beer bottle still in one hand hit something hard and broke with a crack. Greg yelled, I dimly saw his red-outlined silhouette grab its head, slip and fall. There was a second uglier-sounding crack. The cord finally materialized in my hand, I pulled hard till it snapped, and blessed tungsten-gold light flooded down.

Greg lay with his head next to the toilet. He wasn’t moving. His forehead looked dented, and there was blood. I had no idea what to do, besides stupidly watching the blood trickle toward the wall. Music continued to thump outside, and someone shrieked. The blood had reached the green-peeled wall and appeared to be oozing through the holes. I continued staring.

Greg’s body jerked in a sudden spasm that terrified me, and came to rest with one leg sticking through the wall. It did not appear to make a hole; the leg just went straight into the green circuit board and disappeared. My addled, shocked and now guiltily paranoid brain made a snap insight … and I reached down, grabbed Greg’s body around the waist, and started pushing it through the wall. It went in smoothly, without resistance, clothes and all. The red lights were growing brighter: even with the light bulb on I could see them sticking out in little pinpoint beams, out of the holes and through the smoke-laden atmosphere. I left the head for last, for some reason, and had some trouble getting it through — I found out why after I shoved it hard in the face with my boots, and little clinks echoed on the tile floor as Greg finally and blessedly slid out of sight. There were eight gnarled metal bits of fillings left behind on the tile floor.

I put the pointy lumps in my pocket and backed away from the stabbing red beams, which now had the sparkly diffraction patterns of laser light. I could see red dots projected all over the rest of the yellow walls, and the paint began sizzling and peeling away with a nauseating smell of molten solder and ozone, revealing (of course) more circuit board. Abruptly I was back in the living room, the door slamming behind me, navigating my way through the loud wet darkness out of the party. The lights were off, but with the red-lit afterglow in my eyes I could see everything and everyone in translucent skeletal form and pick my way through. There were some half-hearted gropes at my legs from people whom I might otherwise have willingly allowed to pull me down, but I ran out as fast as I could.

I piss in alleys nowadays. I don’t go inside any buildings if I can help it. Winter’s on the horizon but I don’t think that far ahead, to be honest. I’ve been following you for a few days. What has it got in its pocketses? The afterimages are still with me and I can see all the way through you, see through that coat, see the black shadows of the little mercury amalgam pebbles in the pocket that your finger-bones fiddle with idly. You’ve been through this too. I can’t even look at anyone else anymore, but you’ll understand. Let’s talk.

My friend Tanya asked her friends to write her a short bit of Slash fiction as a birthday present. Which is not something I’m accustomed to, but here goes…

>N

>|

— Excerpt from Zork IV: Time Considered As A Helix Of Little Twisty Passages, by P. David Lebling and Samuel Delany, which Infocom refused to release in 1988.

(Here’s some context, for the perplexed.)