🏭 Read Christy O’Beirne in conversation with Lois Stonock of Metroland Cultures here 🏭
📖 Read Ella Fox-Martens on Ian McEwan’s Lessons here 📖
👌 Read Hector Campbell in conversation with Luke Silva on his London solo show here 👌
I spend an entire night attempting to delay its fact. I try to write for two hours. I try decently and honestly for about half of that time. The following stretch is a jittery, self-deceiving coda. I remind myself of how lucky I am to have a rich friend to run to — how well I have crafted myself, how pliable I have become to people who can do things for me. Now it is worth it, to think uninterrupted in a beautiful space for a few days. I worry about whether it will plateau, and then about what I am wasting.
The blue light and dark hour wrest me back to the short term. I return to a recent obsession, an old simulation game I’d played as a teenager. I arm myself with a wiry, pixelated avatar that could just about pass for an imitation of myself. I bother even less with the likenesses of others.
I make adjustments to my virtual body. She pokes and prods at herself in turn. I stretch her out of view. She sighs. I am astounded at how aware she is of me, and how playful her reactions are. I am no mirthless god or mother to her, but a friend, or maybe a pervert.
I propel her around the vacant spans of spring-green lot that the game has called a town — at least it is green, and walkable, I mutter — until I bump into another avatar that vaguely resembles a friend’s girlfriend, were she to be flattened into her most imitable parts. I load my dialogue queue with interactions that will make me palatable:
friendly greeting
hug
flirt
brighten day
flirt
compliment
offer a massage
We enjoy ourselves, the three of us — me, my likeness, hers. I feel the blades of her shoulders under the keyboard caps. But then something like anger, at least the most the game is able to project within its bandwidth, begins to flash on her face. Squares of smoke come out of her ears. My avatar begins to wildly gesticulate; her movements warp the graphics behind. The conversation is unsalvageable. I close the game.
It’s not a bad thing, I tell myself, to have a script. At the very least, it shouldn’t be punishable.
We’ve stopped talking so much on the retreat. We’ve learnt all we reckon to be useful to each other. It’s all relearning for me, and too late. For much of my stay, I’d been under the impression that I didn’t know anyone prior to coming, but I’ve learnt since that I know several, some from years back, all still stubbornly hanging onto the half-myth of a literary circuit. I wonder if anyone here would notice the disappearance of another poor scholar. There’s only so much time left to reinvent myself and care about it — I must remember that. Still, there is something especially emancipatory about the days between choosing to die and doing it. I can be, for a brief moment, big eyes and dark yawp and hypnotic conceit. Or I can be shorts around hips and ankles. I can be self-important wallflower. No one will remember a piece more when it is over; nothing about playground scars or smoking or long-held opinions that anyone can be reduced to their parts.
•
In the morning, I drag myself out to sit by the lake. I curl like a fat cat. I rub my raw eyes. I try to feel the grass touching me back.
Part of the appeal to the simulation game, to any game, is that you can load yourself again. What a special thing that is. Some of my saved plays go back to ten years ago. There must be thousands of modulated versions of myself compressed in there. Some will have different careers or quirks, but much the same face and much the same small adjustments, to accommodate the insecurities du jour. All smooth.
Sometimes I didn’t feel like making my game-self talk to others. Wasn’t the point that of realism? I would make her walk around or fish or do push-ups until the bar regulating almost-me’s mood flashed red and she threw up her arms and begged for socialisation. Sometimes I would deny her of it a little further and catch her furtively writing a pen-pal on her own computer.
I watched a film with someone I loved a few weeks before the retreat. It was the last time I’d spoken to anyone out-of-step. I cried for almost the entire run-time. I wanted to see how long I could stand it and how long he would perform his patience.
Afterwards, I looked up the director. She had staged a play using the mechanisms of an old simulation game. I thought it ridiculous. We laughed long and loud about wasted hours.
dumb idea, I texted, later.
Maybe theres something to it
will you tell me why you cried for that long?
sad movie. just a good filmgoer
nothing on a screen is that sad
I tried to call.
“The person you’re trying to call can’t be reached,” said the most beautiful voice in the world.
I think back to him wearing thin. I think of him watching me fool myself red. I think of his hands faltering in the dark, then his face. There was a finality to his expression that he might not then have known himself, that seemed to materialise of its own accord in the space between us.
•
At night, I text the only friend I’ve made on the retreat. I hear his door open across the corridor.
He’s either an amnesiac or a liar. A little older but not that much. We begin and end our tryst with an understanding of each other’s selfishness that I am grateful for when it’s over. I attempt to make him watch me assemble his features in the game. He plays along, then tires of it. “Enough of running your eyes red. You’re in the Lake District,” he says.
He voices an intrigue with my obsession, but emphasises its futility. I try to explain that I enjoy it more than it helps me. There is a tightness about conversation, about simulating a routine in your head and getting to perform it. “You must’ve seen Metropolitan when it came out, right?” I say, as he circles his thumb on the side of my hip. He laughs.
ask about day
talk about books
tell joke
ask about life
pry
I ask if he can remember the first thing he sat down to write.
“Only my prayers,” he says, “to touch the keys and have something come out.”
•
I remember going to an old poet’s estate with my parents when I was very young. They didn’t really know who he was. I probably didn’t either. We spent far more time in the gardens. I picked up pebbles and flowers. We crossed a place we shouldn’t have and got told off by a ranger.
Here I can go away, away, away. The lake feels like it will go on forever. The water shines, and when I kick it back off the tips of my shoes there are droplets that fall square and perfect like pixels.
I lie down by it, like always, and stretch. I attempt to mimic its curve. I think of open worlds and their bounds. I think of explorers setting out to discover new peripheries. They were looking for a different ending.
I imagine an opal gleaming in the water.
I imagine fishing it out.
I imagine thumbing at it.
I imagine pressing hard.
I imagine whispering to it.
I imagine swallowing it whole, deep, letting it sink, asking for its heart — and, if it allows, the faithfulness of its pledge.