His avatar was the pokemon machoke with an american flag bandana on its head, yellow horn-like ridges clipping through the garment. He was followed by a comically tiny version of aku aku, the magical flying mask from crash bandicoot.
When’d you ship? asks the mask floating behind the pokemon.
2010. Iraq, then afghanistan. Then iraq again lol, he answers.
They are walking down a sand tone brickwork path in a large park constructed of unity and unreal assets. The path does slight zig-zags to mimic winding. It is a popular server, evening time, and there are clusters of avatars about. A squad of sephiroths – all the same model – stand by a picnic table and a propane grill and trees, all the sephiroths as tall as the table and grill and trees because the table and grill were huge and the trees were very small. The trees were proportioned correctly and were beautifully rendered, but only chest height and arms length wide. Perhaps there was a deal for a whole suite because most of them were oaks. English oaks with richly brown and waxy, mirror-seeming acorns, adorned in pretty green berets. One corner of the chatroom a brake of ruby leafed scarlet oak or northern red oak, and upon closer inspection reveals to be both, and meticulous care was taken to the features of each. Exact feeling replicas. There are couples crouching stiffly under bear oaks and burr trees with limbs withdrawing within their torsos and then out again as if breathing, and their hands like the claws of action figures, moving up and down as if drinking though no drink is there – and maybe they do drink beers or mixed drinks but do so blindly and by feel because of the headsets over their real eyes, and they spend their evenings together enjoying their lovers company until it is time to go to sleep, and often they are completely motionless under the trees because theyve moved to private channels or theyve errands or chores and their partner waits and waits, still as stone the pair until one bursts to life and then the other.
You were in germany when we met yeah?
Yeah. The machoke scratches his championship belt.
Stationed or what? asks the mask.
Just some bullshit. At ramstein air base. Outside of land-stu-hal, something like that. Like land-s-t-u-h-l but how germans say it. But yeah, no shit it was named ramstein.
Lol says the mask. He smoked inside his makeshift quarters and his machoke mimed lighting and dragging, the mask too smoking in its room but hidden from all for aku aku had no hands to smoke with because it was a mask.
In the chatrooms center was a to-scale facsimile of lake hylia from the ocarina of time. Besides its serene and inviting atmosphere and the attentive and respected moderation team and the general therapeutic nature of the chat, the lake was the primary draw to the room. A venerate and conscientious human hand had guided an AI upscaler program, scrupulous and with maternal Awe as they led the divinations, and so the lake was truly magnificent. A miraculous realization of nostalgia – of not the thing itself but of how the thing is remembered, not how the thing is but how it Was and is not a Was that has ever been, all understood that, but a Was that all agreed did and or does exist. An inter-mutual, immutable and solely internal of origin hallucination – of dream and memory and ease and apprehension. A communal and implanted thought. A pocket of Something. Received and to be Received. The prickly woe of yet another thing gone in danger of being forgotten, a thing of infinitesimal importances and of gathered pieces of ones life and others lives and of how they understand the differences between the two. Arching lightning between billions of connected and small points – of flesh and sand and clay, plastics and circuits and impossibly fast orbiting micro/macroscopic particles all vibrating and that feint to be or are of celestial build and fit. The mark of a joined nature, a cognate and inter-allied mental phenomena. A peek into what we have been and could be but are not now. As though from a mentalist school without bodily cues, is this not akin to telepathy, is this not undisguised implication of a Whole, astral and ascribed, dense pinprick portals and doorways to god and another, strung together tine to tine as a kind of childs cats cradle, a wadded gum plugging up gaps in an inestimable vessel and gum stretched and stringy and almost all but formless, it consolidative, taking the shape of a sea urchin or dandelion seedling twisting with helical calyx and ecto-reagentic cypsela or a cloth of cloaked aspirations tied to rotating and roaming totems with robed fence posts and banner-hung columns like ratkinged thrashing propellers, and the appearance as well of viron and transmission, contagion and transmitting – these collected points just blips and dots, brief and infinite times of ones own personal and eternal antenna being ‘aligned’ or better to say ‘corrected’ or ‘righted’. This lake a crossroads or strange capillary, a carpal among carpals of some much larger Great hand – all popping as a wave in preparation for an immense and unknown task. Another realm constructed. Is this not a form of sorcery, of manipulations of what is ultimately ephemeral but no less ultimate. Like how words can make you see and feel a thing that is not there – an intruder nevertheless of intent, a mental and pseudo-material inversion of a castle doctrine. Magic, what else. To join another in such a way. Whether goetialytic spellcraft or ambidextrous curse, perhaps treacherous and just treachery, a cruel feature that can only be of ones mind, can never be manifested or fabricated – but yet here it was. This beautiful lake. It is a soothing machine that soothes what was thought impossible to soothe – what is unsoothable by design, that which whole purpose is to afflict the unsoothable. Some small hole within filled while countless others remain open, inside the soul a vast perforate cathedral and emerging like as a lesser world abysmal sponge – many gaped and of bleak and pervious blackness. Beholding a stone tape in a tragic psychometry. A shared tragedy. And tragedy requires a future point being snuffed out. It requires the universe squandering a beautiful thing. It requires eternal incomprehension. A change will go unnoticed. Then another and another. And without revelation you are a completely different creature. Distant from the other that was you. The others among others, the others of others. Better or worse or just different. Apart but of. The soul a small planet of only graves, a marble spinning and awaiting many burials.
Thanks homie, says the pokemon.
He smiles but the pokemon cannot smile. Members of the chat dot the sky like minerals in welled water. They use the fly command to make it appear as if their avatars are swimming in the pleasing and delightful waters of lake hylia, though the avatars cannot swim. Many are without bob as if beguiled by wonder and grace, pietistic the implementations of anti-aliased arrays and configurations and other tools of many-ed and obscure monikers. And so maybe it does not matter what is real and what is not real and it is probable it has never much mattered and why should it when so numerous the examples and exceptions, the choirs of anomalous displays.
Thank you for the megaupload keys and shit.
No problem buddy. I figure that can all run on your laptop when youre, like, on duty or on the job or whatever it is. Deployed? asks the mask.
Nah, not deployed, not no more.
They are quiet with each other for a moment. Them stopped together on the path looking at the lake. Far away and faint crackling of open microphones. Breathing. Distorted and compressed thumps of distant musics from multiple and contesting sources and tastes. It was a lot like a park. But there were no birds or bugs or wind. The sun was bright in its skybox but no one felt any warmth from it because it cannot give warmth. But a false sun is still a sun because what else could it be. One can stand in its rays and can see themselves standing in the rays of sun – maybe consciously, and so truly, for the first time. An idyllic First.
So yeah, I was just sitting here thinking ‘I wonder what goth is up to?’
Brother, it has been a grip, said the machoke, leading and filling silence.
They were members of the same ptsd subreddit and met on the accompanying discord. The aku akus username was gothicMan50 and the machokes, gracelessly, HHjamal117.
Did you get that vid I sent you? asks the mask.
Lol yeah, of that fucked up kid eating cookies in costco.
They just make those videos like every day man.
Lol why.
See that little kid. Hes fucked up. He looks like a little man, bro. A little tiny man. Truly such an awful face.
The dad and them know the kids all fucked up too. They have to know. But they dont care. In the pocket of big costco. BIIIIIG COSTCO money homie.
They do have some big stores, costco does. Dont they.
Lol says the machoke.
Hey, yo! The machoke waves its enormous arms:
Bro Ive seen people have seizures on here man. I remember I saw a baby shrek. There was this fake baby shrek, a green baby saying it was shrek. Dressed like shrek but with a big diaper. He was talking like shrek and doing the shrek voice and then suddenly he started I dont know like chittering. Stuttering and slurring. Then the baby went limp and smashed face down to the floor. Just fucking dropped. The head bounced like a mallet on a drum. The mic popped. And so the babys model is way smaller than the guy, you could tell by the way he fell, like a domino snapping in half. Face first. He flopped around down there. One arm didnt move, I guess because he dropped one of the controllers, but the other arm was flailing through his model and the ground, so fast that it was flickering. Like a glitched out rag doll or something. Everyone standing around and looking down at him, shocked. Kind of fucked up to see, honestly. Not as funny as youd think.
Empathy for baby shrek:
Who shook in his sons room. Chest dully slamming the carpeting, the sound of a fish captive in an empty bucket. A horrible morphing rictus of torture-borne bared teeth. The lcd sclera within the visor shattered. And of course the blood, pooling into the googles and splatting out from the padding when the head smashes the ground. The sharp brittle sounds of a plastic thing being bashed apart. Headphones dangling by the cord from a desktop tower, tinny screams, demands to know what is happening, to know what to do – Was baby shrek alright. What should they do, baby shrek. Please help please. Are you alright, baby shrek. Are you alright. – he still in the headset and eyeballs rolling, the cracks in the lcd wobbling like axis lines on a tottering globe, a fissure of black and magenta and blues and strange reds all almost molten and oozing. All objects in sight, all assets and avatars and light beams and props, they all becoming statue versions of themselves, fizzling there and then beginning to rapidly shift into images of like things – like a dog becomes a cat then a cat tree then a spool of rope as if for sail rigging and this too shifts to toy boats to rubber ducks to all other tiny playthings and the shadows of playthings, the silhouettes of many many playthings, and now all thats seen is in miniature, formed as if magnified and augmented by crystalline and odd lens – a lens implying insectoid proteins – the lens also many lenses, an orbicular plain of octagons all flitting into place, every lens rapidly shifting in images of like things – every thing made everything. Then into black specks multiplying like cancer-laden static or ten thousand flies then into nothing. Puke is strewn down the keyboard and desk drizzling in tight plops onto the seat of his sons gaming chair, there then to the carpet below. The garbage on the sons desk obliterated and flung about. This was the fathers Aura. A body spanning blunt and phantom trauma. The puking. Then the In-Between. Then always the horde of fractal and infinite black specks until it is all specks, until it is all nothing. He knew his Aura and he knew most of the most important Auras throughout history. People have always attempted to train their Auras and a great number claimed to have succeed. Some meditated. Some prayed all day. A few had crystals. Weird salves and dusts, a number of small cauldrons set to boil. Fasting and constantly washing their feet and hands and faces. Washing other peoples feet. Washing their fingers over an open flame. Humming or thinking or chanting, always ever talking – whether by mouth or not – to god or some other Greater thing, maybe clutching artifacts that will one day become known relics, become symbols of this Great thing, allowing all the repetitions of repeated sentiments surround them and fill them until them entire stir with a cadence, ringing and trembling as a fine bell, a quiver along an immense surface, like a handful of shot thrown to an ablution pool. The In-Between was why they called it the sacred disease. Or the father figured. They were training their Auras. The moments before the specks were literally indescribable. Receiving too much input, too much information, information inside of information but also alongside it and above it and below it too, every sensory full and new ones being discovered – invented even, it is suspected – a simple grid and then not that at all, a horrible memory drudged up to exist within forever – always a dream of some inordinate but exceptional shame, but just for a moment as the endless scenario then also becomes suspect. Did that happen or was it constructed. An investigation is launched. A gam of dredgers tinker off on some outer sea ravaging for clues, every similar past raked for likely intel, rifled through joys completely soured by handling, an Unforgettable abhorrence pilfered so that now one can only think of defenses for their enemies, build cases for their villains, and so then plead case after case for the foe and for the adversary, endorse culprits and their fiendish company, absolve even atrocity – all for a pitiful and snide opportunity, for so one can finally see themselves for the greedy narrow perishers they truly are. Plead one must because one must mean something. One must believe. One must act as they want others to believe they are. Submit to lank manifold and motley principalities of flinty and dubious apologia. Every other sits as judge and before all is revealed every other as judge. An absolute and common litigation is forth conjured. Every beholding, and then so be, the other. The One thing impossibly filled, rationalized and done with. An awesome pardon. And then nothing. The father knows they trained for that shit. To stay in the In-Between. To stay there longer to continue some conversation. The conversation, you know. There were saints that described their Auras like how a halo feels to be placed upon ones head. They trained to stay in that state. For the most part, the father hated it. The sacred disease. In ancient times, they just fucking killed them. He himself had read of sakikku-born punishments to destroy the possessing demons by destroying the flesh and theyd not even dare drink of the same clay as the demons, fearing they catch the possession themselves, and they could even detect it in the young by setting a child before an empty potters wheel and letting them watch it spin. The Earthen Sickness. He couldnt show his son classic anime because of shit like this. He had just wanted to play team fortress 2, and then he saw there was a new civilization coming out, and he thought about that. He thought about whether he would like to build and then move a large number of little guys around. He thought about technologies. The new civilization would have different technologies – the old ones removed and a host of new ones. Because of all the new tech in the world. He thought of his sons vr headset. He looked up how to use it and where he should use it – if ‘where’ is the right term for whatever it was being done with the headset. He read about the lake hylia chatroom. It was a praiseful little article. It said the reader should see the lake before they died. The lake was just that good. He knew he shouldnt but he did. He wanted to see. A fell degradation for one with the sacred disease, perhaps. A sin on him. He thought baby shrek a fun thing and baby shrek was a fun thing. Everybody thought so. He felt a favorite. And then as by a switch flicked, the father was laying on the floor. An absent event. A trick of cortex. He comes to and wonders first how hes going to clean up all this before his son comes home.
Yeah you told me that story before.
Did I.
Back when you had the bald eagle that sat on your shoulder like a parrot. You were doing a pirate thing.
Ah. Yeah. Im sorry man. I dont talk to like anyone anymore.
Both of them grimace in their headsets. Hating themselves. And a snaking micro usb cable threaded across a cluttered desk is yanked free, to much consequence. Debris could be heard – and the horrible fear, the humiliation – who else heard, who will remember this, who will remember me like this. In my filthy room. Alone all the time in a filthy room.
Optimus prime and sailor neptune blink from existence on the lakes shores. Logging off and shuttling to elsewhere. Time zones apart, one up all night and the other all day, a relationship formed by being some place at the same time enough times, like most relationships. Someone is awake at the same time you are awake and it need not be more complicated than that – a reliable, but distant and carefully measured, comfort. Or so maybe that only one of them feels this way, unknowing that the other spends hours hoping after them. Awaiting and waiting. Or maybe it is not either of these things or is a treaty between the two or is any other kind of way. How could one know. A degree of faith is requisite. Faith and fantasy. In tumbling parts and balances. To believe in the other and also to imagine what they might really be like from the known and as well the missing. Many ill-formed copies existing between the two of one another, themselves too. All of them there, then they blink from the shores.
The machoke took in a quick breath and looked away. Buzzing digitized silence. A sterile and heavy quiet. The mask thought to apologize and the thought was enough for the mask so it did not apologize. The machoke looked down and regarded his body. Fabulous muscles. Muscles malformed by polygons and vertices so seeming like barrels. A hung bandana-ed head. A bizarre wilted Chad.
Its stupid or I feel stupid about it. I just got off something bad. Like devices and government paperwork all sealed up in a pelican case. A faraday box with your cellphones and laptops and passports, any identifiers. Birth certificates. Pink slips. Fucking fishing licenses if you have them. No outside contact. Five months out in that. I left my post three weeks early, said cancel my contract, that I would take the losses. Fuck this. I was done, says the machoke. He closed his eyes and imagined a cell furnished in bronze. He opened them to the lake. I traded off my kit. The rig, the gun, the helmet – all of it. I traded a family with a gm truck to smuggle me to an airport. I laid baking in a jungle in the truck bed under a tarp, says the machoke.
Thats crazy.
The place I work for mailed me back my shit and I took like a month off. I thought about shit a lot. Went to the ocean. Thought about whether I wanted to go out again. Out there. Out to another there. Theres like no one left, though. I dont know anyone anymore. So I just took a new contract.
Is it like – I mean, how does it work? You take whatever contract you want? You get to pick from a few or do you have to, I dont know, get seniority?
You ever work for a temp agency?
Yes, says the mask. A lot of them. The mask dipping, or rather tilting, downward in sorrow. Its pretty much like that. They say they have this, they say they have that. If you qualify, you qualify. Theres requirements. Sometimes you got to get letters. It depends on the contract whether airfare and travel expenses and like, uhh, like equipment will be provided. If youre reliable, like dependable and no bullshit, then you might have some wiggle room. To like negotiate. But again it depends on the contract.
Was it, the mask asks almost whispering, ukraine. The mask in noticeable discomfort, – israel? Palestine? the mask asks guiltily.
Im not a retard, bro. The machoke laughs manically. Theres no money in that shit. Im not gonna die for nothing and for no money.
There is a series of isles on the lake. Pretended wood and rope bridges hung slack and without sway between them. Avatars sitting uncanny on the bridges, squatting in living rooms and bedrooms, gazing to the water. Others moved behind them in brisk transit or floated above them like stiff bubbles soaring linearly – commonly favored by those who are goku as a child, sitting on a speeding cloud out off across the heavens, sometimes bopping off the broad ceiling of heaven, up high all the way to the allotted limit, imagining curls in their monkey tails. The biggest isle bore a sacred stage. A raised carved stone slab. Etched on the surface is an ancient and holy seal. It was delicate work. Set in shiny shell-like marble. Glittering curious pearloid. Frozen dust suspended in light beams. It was bisected by the shadow of a bare tree. It was not like the other trees. It bore nothing but loomed and impressed that of some witchs tree. A strangled, barren thing. It had but one branch. Perched on the sole branch was the Sage of Light. He took on the form of an owl. He guardian of something like time and light seeping from a sacred realm. It was all very metaphorical. He looks on at the stage. He shakes his strange head around. He twists out portions of circles, the owls neck tossing side to side as if fashioned to old couch springs, eyes big eerie oranges being juggled to arcs. The people dance upon the stage.
A samus moves atop the seal. She does the dance the joker does in the joker movie. She thrusts with an open glove and arm cannon. The isle hosted carnival. There are many spectators and performers, though it is maybe better to not distinguish between the two. Some dance on the steep isles edges, for it a breach of unspoken manners to dance any closer to the stage. To distract from the stage and its ever changing participants. Levitating tall above all are two oddities: stuck to shared invisible plane and aloft hovering, a grand granite funerary and an enormous drum kit.
The grand coffin held not sepulture but instead jubilee. Life celebret unto the celebrant – at first blush. Upon were ten or so macbooks, all unwieldy and too large, appearing as like solar panels or satellite dishes set on the stone coffins tabletop. In unison they display busy animate interfaces of a program called serato and a great deal of information looks to be relayed by these computer screens and they do not repeat themselves that any could tell. Hulking powerful-seeming controller units and mixing boards penning in the laptops to brutalist residential districts so if took pandect read like realized schematics of office parks and warehouse complexes, set grids of ominous flat placards, they otherly fortifications – bleak future-ed smooth cast outworks with inner-series battlements of replicant rectangles – and they no longer sustain nor even need acropolis and do not allow other monumentals to come to mind, permitting only the stuff of participles to upcoming Order. Projecting retaliation and structures of partakers. The assets there teeming in colorful lights – awash with resplendent indications. Cinnabar and claramay, cornsilk and sepia – clean-feeling and blinking as if sneaking glances and winking in reply, others constant and idle, maybe warnings. The paddles of the mixers like hundreds and hundreds of uniform headstones skating up and down steadily on their own and acting jurisdiction – lake locks heavy with flood then wrung by drought then flood once more or dumbwaiters racing one another – sliding their gutters smoothly. Some terrible industry was being done. Some process. A severe turntable sat steeply on the center of the coffin, dwarfing all the devices and no cable nor cord ran between any of it, on top the two records spiral like tar or oil stirring in vats. And strobing lights within the coffins surface itself crusade out staggered and frequent regardless of tempo, like lower underworld paparazzi aimed out some pit and rabid and casting startling battens of lopsided radiance from the Beneath. Inscrutably, a communist flag hung in the foreground. What was meant by the drape. The symbol strangely still behind the coffin and the drum set beside.
It was an incredible drum set. There were many drums for one to pretend to play. Many snares a valley plains, vast and wide open in pastoral welcome, though grass-bare. Instead, expanses of taut drum heads lucent white – a pure white that implies beyond sense, angelic, sheeny boiled hides of specters, poured lacteal and babe smooth, frictionless – and no matter how one tries will be always without blemish, no matter drummer or beat, impossible to chip and impervious to trail and even if worked as though anvil by boding smith would hold neither caldera or dint, these ever uninjured fields of polished pebble and opal. Timpani broad like lily pads appearing as own biomes everywhere on. An abrupt wall of intimidating taiko like a canyons face. Overhung were clam shell formations of toms at various elevations angled in reference to an impossible player. Too among them were jutting cowbells like cliffs and shelves of synthesizers – their keys pressing and de-pressing automant in purling fragile steps of revelers, all maverick but in congregation, and reminded of pewed bursting up in beautiful revelation, suddenly filled with the Spirit, then settling down again gently with tremendous relief on their faces. The synthesizers like rice paddies tiered into a mountain. Plateaus and highlands. Or balconies of french quarter, crammed galleries and cluttered patio, drawn to planks and ravelin, kaleidoscopic rubiks cube cornices and platforms occurring as pinatas – aluminum keyboard stands like drainpipes running rooftops and balustrade – overlooking the gypsum lowland of snares. Drum pads portico with supports angled, spr ead like the boards of vast, era-ed chess games, whole empires worth of squares, illuminated in ghostly fogged primary colors. And yet still rigged above was more: gossamer like a princess canopy bed are set constellations eliciting aspects of member boxes to sports stadiums or celestial cubiculum – Colosseum and Heaven – rowed bisellium of silica, a gown-like strata of crystal and mineral shaved thin and opaque into precious glasses. Magnificent and tingling.
Collections of triangles, assumedly of various pitch. Hanging gardens of chimes. Several brass ships bells. Vine-ish seeming tuning forks fastened as infants mobile, tangs pointing downward like elongated pitchforks or stretched trembling tridents praying in suspense. Dreamcatchers of silver and surgical steel ringing and singing in shields of spiderweb. Tuned blocks of wood. Complicated bells appearing more scaffolded whelks than instruments. Charms of dedicated purposes giving notions of ice sculptures. A length of beetle shells to rattle. Chandeliers of harmonic trestles waving. Seafoam and fuchsia arrangements of coral peal keyed to weird scales. A kettledrum like a caved in moon. Slow surfs of milky vibrating tines – jingling and jingling and jingling. And even that is crowned by a great array of horns in floral blooms, horns like tubas, horns shaped like siphons and funnels, horns of alloyed plumbing curving and hair-pinned, colored plastic vuvuzelas fanned like crayons, horns seeming made of pottery or of slate or of the metal from pots and pans. One a brilliant white, as though porcelain or fine china. Flapping valves and mutes like pacifiers in gaping mouths. Trumpets and bugles and hollow twisted horns of goats, aimed out at the crowd.
Can you imagine it. Can you imagine it all together.
The kit flanked by sloping marimbas, those to xylophones, avalanching to glockenspiel, racks of tone-plate assembled as grand crescent. The drummer could turn and pretend-play them if the drummer chose to. They could play and play. There tin fish scales and skulls lined up like the band of a pirate villain. A podium kept the rib cage of a great thing and a vase holding its femurs for mallets. Slung accordions with red velvet bellows bouncing like ball gowns and intricately sewn in garlands like a matador jacket. A clutch of ceremonial bongos handed down diligent and careful by creatures who ate only stones and theyd slap lullabies and elegies upon them with their oar-like palms. And cloths like kimonos came as pendulous ribbons and encircled several gongs with their frames wrapped in silk and shinto paper seals, and there also oddly a single leviathan rainstick, standing upright like a monumental pole, no upturning it, scrawled with meaningless african-esque shit. There were insanely badass marshall stacks. Iconic and loved electric guitars. Symbols of idols and fables, every genre and culture accounted for. Of all the Greatest Performers. Instruments of long reaching variety, all holding evergreen novelty – if such a trait is applicable to a facet of novel counterfeits. Yet still, a knot of everything one needs. It seems undeniable evidence of some better make of human spirit. Instruments sitting waiting – like seeing a gone lost loved one how you last remember them, ready to pick up where you left off, they standing in a door way greeting you, so happy to see you, satisfied smiles knowing and acquitting and expecting. Waiting for you. You will see them soon.
Can you imagine them together with you now. Can you imagine it.
But, alas:
-- David Gladfelter was born in Gettysburg, PA and now lives with his husband in Detroit. His writing has been published by don’t submit, Bruiser, and Back Patio Press. He is working on a long thing. He is 34 years old. His twitter account is @gothicman50. He has a high school diploma.