Permanent exhibit, p.3
Permanent Exhibit, page 3
OUT OF LIVES
Last night, I mistook the flashing button of a printer in the guest bedroom for lightning. Later, I heard a noise—as if something, somewhere, had been knocked over—so I grabbed the Mag-Lite on my bedside table and ventured out of the bedroom; when I clicked the light off and on to check on what might be in the bathroom, the bright white of the toilet startled me. What might I have done had I found an intruder? Used the flashlight as a club to shatter the burglar’s skull? I don’t own a gun, except for a tiny pistol that fires blanks—the kind used for signaling the starts of races, and which my grandmother gave to me years ago, for a reason I can no longer remember—and it’s so old I’m afraid to pull the trigger, for fear—and I know this is stupid—that somehow it might explode in my hand. It’s true that sometimes I go on shooting sprees in Grand Theft Auto V—I just start shooting whoever’s around until the police arrive, and then I start shooting cops until I die—and that sometimes, in this game, I drive to the beach for the sole purpose of hunting people to run over, mowing down whole groups of beachgoers who’ve gathered around campfires, and that this—hearing them yell “oomph” and watching them flip into the air and over the car roof, in a slapsticky way—makes me laugh. Yes, these “people” bleed, but it’s not fair, really, to say that they “die,” not only because they were never alive to begin with, but also because after a minute or two their “bodies” disappear, and the only trace that they ever existed is a bloodstain and the money that popped out of their clothes when I hit them, and which glows a pulsing, radioactive green. I bought a headset so I could talk to other players when I play online, but now, every time I log on, it’s either a foul-mouthed nine-year-old boy whose mother I can hear screaming one-sided conversations in the background or drawling adult men who aren’t afraid to say the N-word or call each other “faggot.” My son tells me that Grand Theft Auto V is a bad game, and when I ask him what he means, he says, “It’s just bad!” The first time I remember being shamed for playing video games, I was riding down Main Street of my hometown in a truck with my father—past the A&P, past the drugstore, past the lunch counter where we’d order grilled cheese sandwiches with French fries and vanilla milkshakes—and out of nowhere, probably because I often felt a sense of camaraderie whenever I found myself riding alone with my father in his truck—I indulged an urge to confess a fantasy I’d just had—we’d passed an antique store and I had seen in its window shelves of glass vases and lamps—so I said, “Sometimes I think it would be fun to take an axe into a store where they sell a lot of glass stuff and chop it up.” My father did not laugh. He did not say, “Yeah, smashing and breaking stuff can be fun sometimes” or “I can see how imagining such a thing could feel very liberating, perhaps even cathartic” or even “Ha ha, yeah, sounds fun but don’t even think about it.” Instead, without missing a beat, he said, “You play too many video games,” a response that stunned me into silence, and which, upon reflection, I found disappointing, not only because it dismissed what I felt was a legitimately normal compulsion—who could in all honesty deny how much fun it would or could be to smash stuff, especially if said stuff happened to be highly shatterable—but also because it simply wasn’t true: I didn’t own an Atari or Intellivision console, didn’t know many kids who owned them—didn’t know many kids, period, because I lived in a small mountain town in the middle of nowhere and attended church school in a town twenty minutes away—and while it was true that I’d dropped a good number of quarters into the slots of the Kung-Fu Master and Spy Hunter cabinets at our local Video Den, it never took me long—fifteen minutes, tops—to burn through however much money I’d allotted for gameplay, mostly because my lack of experience resulted in what seemed to me to be ridiculously quick—and thus unfair—deaths. And yes, there was a mild amount of violence in these games: for instance, you had to time your punches and kicks just right in Kung-Fu Master or the goons would glom onto you and give you this weird group hug that would quickly diminish your health, and in Spy Hunter the whole point was to use the weaponry on G1655 Interceptor car (machine guns, smoke, oil slicks) to cause enemy cars to wreck and explode—but my all-time favorite game was Paperboy, the object of which, mundane as it might sound, was to deliver papers to subscribers without throwing them through windows, while avoiding obstacles like dogs, skateboarders, sidewalk breakdancers, minitornadoes, kids playing with remote control cars, and the Grim Reaper; in that game, you didn’t even die when your turn was over—you were fired. I can’t remember the first actual video game I ever played, but I can still remember the first time that somebody—a kid named Stirling—described Pac-Man to me: he’d asked if I’d ever heard of the game and I’d said no and so he said, “It’s cool, you control a little guy who’s being chased by ghosts and then when he eats a power pellet he gets to chase the ghosts and eat them.” I found this description utterly confounding, in part because the phrase “little man who eats ghosts” made absolutely zero sense. And yet, the first time I played it—on a tabletop machine, in a Pizza Hut—it suddenly all came together. And the other day, when my son and I traveled to Roanoke, to visit a museum exhibit of upright arcade cabinet games, it was this same game I kept coming back to, the only one that made sense to play, in part because it allowed me to navigate a maze while being chased, and every time, to summon that old fear: a delightfully panicked state I inhabited whenever I was sure that something was gonna get me, but even if it did, I’d be okay—at least until I ran out of lives.
LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
Four years have now passed—incidentally, the same amount of time it takes for light from Alpha Centauri, the nearest known star to the sun, to reach Earth—since I visited a New Mexican shaman. I chose New Mexico because I wanted to journey to someplace far away and magical and because New Mexico, which lives nearly two thousand miles from me, on the other side of the country, is known as the Land of Enchantment. I chose the shaman because she had a decent website and I liked the way she used her “About Me” page to tell the story of how, decades earlier, she had journeyed to Morocco to study with Paul Bowles and to Spain to receive the blessing of an older shaman, an old woman who recognized the younger as someone whom she could pass on the lineage of her teachings. I also liked the fact that she didn’t look like a shaman—assuming it’s safe to say that American shamans can be said to have a “look”—but instead appeared simply to be the kind of vibrant, radiantly happy middle-aged woman who could rock braids without it seeming like a superficial way to appear girlish. I rented a car from Virginia Tech’s Fleet Services—a Prius whose license plate frame announced that the vehicle was “FOR OFFICAL USE ONLY”—and drove the 1600-plus miles to Santa Fe. In a room decorated with intricately woven rugs and Buddha statues and an ottoman where a plate of sage was smoldering, the shaman took a drum the size of a manhole and beat it while singing what sounded to me like an ancient, droning hymn. And when she entered the spirit realm or whatever—I know I’m messing this part up—she said she found my wisdom soul, an entity in the shape of a boy who, according to the shaman, had abandoned me when I was six years old; he now lived on a dude ranch in Wyoming, because the sky was so big out there and he loved the stars. Even so, this wisdom soul told the shaman that he wanted to “come home” and would I let him and if so would it be okay if he brought the stars too. I said yes and the shaman blew on the top of my head and then against my chest, as if she were blowing right into my heart; her breath smelled faintly—though not unpleasantly—of garlic. My job then, the shaman said, was to welcome the wisdom soul, to speak to it, to get to know it, and also to take a packet of tobacco she’d given me and sprinkle it around the base of a so-called “grandfather tree,” as a thank you to ancestral spirits, or something, the latter of which I eventually did, but I have to admit that I never talked to the wisdom soul, didn’t know how, really, or what I would say, never really believed that there ever even was an actual wisdom soul, though I wonder now if that was even the point—that instead I was supposed to learn to talk to a metaphorical part of myself I’d failed to nurture or even know. The day before I visited the shaman, I’d left the town of Marfa, Texas—where I’d spent the night in a vintage Airstream, and eaten chili poured into a bag of Fritos, and drank a margarita with jalapeños floating around inside—and driven north, to visit Prada Marfa. You may have heard of this place—a building that looks like a Prada store, in the middle of the desert. Even though the signs on the store say “Prada,” and the letters exhibit the company’s familiar font, and even though there are windows through which you can view various bags and shoes that appear to have been arranged on shelves in a manner that suggests that they might be for sale, they are not, because this store is not, as it turns out, an actual store. The door, for instance, is not a door that can be opened. The point of this thing, according to Elmgreen and Dragset, the pair of artists who designed it, was to build a monument to capitalism and then let nature take its ruinous course—and if somebody shot out a window or desert animals began to use it as a home, so be it—but days after it was finished, a thief broke in and stole everything inside. So the designers replaced the broken windows with fortified glass, cut the bottoms out of the bags, displayed only right-footed shoes, and tagged everything with GPS trackers. As much as I like to think about this fake little Prada store in the middle of the desert—the closest town, Valentine, has a population of 230—I think I would’ve liked it better if the creators had stayed true to their word. I like to imagine the building gradually falling apart, and that if somebody time-lapsed this decay, it might resemble something eaten by quicksand. As terrifying as the idea of falling into quicksand is, there is something pleasurable—to me, anyway—about watching something get sucked into the ground and out of sight. I hadn’t ever given this phenomenon much thought, and I certainly wasn’t aware that anyone would consider the sight of another person struggling and crying as they sank slowly into a bog or any kind of mushy earth to be arousing, but apparently this is a legit fetish and there are filmmakers whose entire oeuvre consists of other humans—usually women, in various stages of undress, but not, necessarily, naked—sinking slowly out of sight. I know, from reading several books on the subject, that if a person—a shaman, say, or someone under a shaman’s direction—wants to travel from ordinary reality—that is, our everyday reality, with its limitations—to non-ordinary reality—that is, a spirit realm where anything is possible, where animals talk and people fly and our dead ancestors roam freely—that the traveler lies down on the floor, eyes closed, listens to the beat of a drum, and imagines climbing into a hole in the earth, and tunnels through the dark until light appears, and that this is one way to gain entrance to this so-called spirit realm, where, with one’s power animal, one might seek the kind of wisdom that can make life in ordinary reality more bearable. I wonder, now, if quicksand could be seen as a kind of hole—a hole in disguise, like the booby traps I used to make by scooping out hollows at the edge of our yard and then laying twigs and leaves over the top—and that maybe a person could use quicksand as another way to journey to non-ordinary reality. I suppose it could be argued that quicksand isn’t a hole, per se, but I seem to remember that the important thing was that one should imagine an entrance into the earth, and that this was an important part of exiting everyday reality. So who’s to say in the end that I can’t lie down, eyes closed, with the others who are listening to the beat of an ancient drum, to visit the jungle of my mind, where I’ll shimmy myself into a patch of quicksand, and wait for the sopping muck to swallow me whole, so that I can finally leave this world—and its rules—behind.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
In the Kroger gas station, a man behind a wall of bulletproof glass wearing a name tag that said “Mark” and then under his name “I Can Make Things Right” took my credit card, so as to charge me for a single 12-ounce sugar-free Red Bull I was buying, because—and I’m not afraid to admit it—I was feeling a little low, and Red Bull “gives you wings.” I couldn’t help but wonder if and to what extent Mark would go in order to remain true to his name tag’s word, and if so, what that might entail: always providing exact change? refilling the squeegee buckets? exchanging a rancid pre-packaged pimento cheese on white for a nonrancid one? I wondered if Mark Who Can Make Things Right had read The Gospel of Mark, which the vast majority of religious scholars believe—for a number of reasons, including the fact that so much of its story reappears in both Matthew and Luke—is the most ancient of the gospels, and if so, whether or not he—that is, Mark Who Can Make Things Right—was familiar with the original ending, the one that appears in the oldest version of this particular Gospel, in which two women who visit the tomb of Jesus find it empty and, after having been addressed by a stranger who tells them that the Christ had risen, and that they should go tell his disciples, they run away from the tomb, and say nothing to anyone, because they’re afraid, and then that’s it, story’s over, the end. If Mark Who Can Make Things Right isn’t familiar with this shorter, older, and perhaps more authentic version of Mark, he no doubt had read the headline of today’s USA Today—a stack of them were sitting in a metal cradle by the door—which claimed that Donald Trump’s supporters were not clichés. I tried, as I exited, to think what that might mean, and why it was at all relevant, at least until I got distracted by a poster in the window of the Subway next door, which promised me that the chain’s new buffalo chicken had been raised without antibiotics, a pronouncement I jeeringly slow-clapped to in my head. On the way to Radford, where I went to pick up my son and his friend from soccer camp, I found myself behind a car whose rear window was stickered with various messages: one, using individual letters, spelled out, simply and slightly wonkily, “Ted Cruz”; another implored me to “Never Forget Benghazi.” I have to admit that I am not the type of person to glue signage to the back of my car (though my wife did once put an “OBAMA” sticker on the back of our Volvo, which the friend we sold it to clawed off with his fingernails after he broke down in the middle of West Virginia); I therefore have failed to identify myself to the other travelers on America’s byways as a “Friend of Coal” or a person who hearts mountains, or as a person who thinks of himself as a Jesus Fish Person or Fish with Legs Person or a Fish With Legs Person Eating Fish People Person. The only bumper sticker I can think of that I’d be interested in is one that I could place over that one that says “Never Forget Benghazi,” but I have a feeling that “Never Forget How the Bush Administration Ignored Warnings about 9/11 and Then Based on Faulty Evidence If Not Outright Lies Waged a War with Another Country that Killed by Lowest Estimate 150,000 Lives and Highest Estimate Over a Million and Then Failed to Meet the Needs of Its 32,226 Wounded Soldiers, Not to Mention the Countless Other Veterans Who Returned with Serious Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Many of Whom Committed Suicide, So If You’re More Concerned with the Four American Lives Lost in Benghazi Than that Other Mindblowingly Farcial Fiasco I Have No Other Choice But to Hereby Christen You ‘A Piece of Human Garbage’” probably wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker, at least not one big enough to read. Still, I’d like to get some made. I would’ve given one to the guy I saw at a local bar—The Underground—the other night, an older black man in a ball cap who asked me how I was doing and when I said, “Pretty good and you,” replied with, “I’m alive and breathing, and if that’s the case I got no complaints,” then proceeded to tell me that, years ago, he’d been in Iraq—the Gulf War, I guessed, but didn’t ask—and that he said he’d done everything he was asked to do, because that’s how you survived that shit, you shot men, women, and even children if you had to, because over there, children weren’t just children, they were small humans who may or may not have clay bombs strapped to their chests. “I did what I had to do,” he said. “And I didn’t think twice about it,” he added. “And now here I am.” He lifted a tumbler of ice and pale green liquid to his face. “I guess you had to learn how to be a machine,” I said, but if the man heard me, he didn’t reply. His eyes were glazed over, and before he turned to go away, he held up two fingers, and said he hoped I had a blessed day.
