I’ve been in Lordsburg for two turns, total ghost town now, time for me to re-hit the path. If the active ingredients in the roots of the flowers around here haven’t been weakened by radiation exposure, which technically I don’t think they should have been because (A) the river, and (B) they’re flowering normally, I refer you to the text of three turns back, “a few flowers poke up near the bank of the river,” not big flowers or spectacular flowers just flowers, then my health should be back to 85 % because I have been eating every root I see. Even better, flowering root plants mean it’s April? Late March, latest? So I can head north. I’m going to head north. As of last turn my choice was between a companion from an occupied schoolyard (no) or trying to wrangle a golf cart. I’m going golf cart. Let me know how it plays out
and then his initials, a cipher, something I could imagine him working out in grade school and holding on to all his life. CH. Write it again until every one’s exactly the same. Get so you can carve it into a desktop with a paper clip in one class period. A C whose high line arced but whose bottom line was straight, nearly the outline of a human eye but with a gap at the right, and then that tiny H inside it like an alien pupil. CH. Several times a month. CH.
I wonder if I’d remember Chris as fondly as I do if he hadn’t quit the game, but he did quit, formally, which as I say is not usually how it happens. Usually, people just seem to drift in their attention; long gaps form between their turns, and then at some point they don’t renew their subscriptions and I stop hearing from them. “Growing out of it” is the phrase that comes to mind, but this is an obviously problematic view for me, so I try not to analyze it much further than the bare facts. Something happens over time, and people stop playing. General rule. Except for Chris, who let me know why.
I got up last night at 2 am thinking about how to repair my rifle, I don’t even have a rifle except in the Trace, his final move began.
I was asleep, then I was awake, and the first thing I thought about when I woke up was this rifle with the special attachment I took from the fortune-teller’s body, a body I took three turns to find and another turn to strip of anything useful to me and Sean I could smell body when I thought about this, hot New Mexico sun human body and so I don’t think I can play anymore. It’s not like I think anything’s going to happen, I’m fine, and I don’t actually have anything better to do, and it doesn’t take up too TOO much of my time? But it’s in my head now and I don’t want it anymore so I’m going free-play here, you have to let me do this.
If you are a person whose authority is generally limited to his own small life and to a series of imaginary choices that exist on a vast but comprehensible grid, it’s odd when you hear someone, across the impersonal distance of the page, pleading for your permission. I thought of this during the preparation for the trial, when I was leafing through my files and arguing with myself about burning things, or maybe ripping them to pieces and driving them out to a dumpster in a parking lot somewhere. But all that was too much drama, too much action, too much of everything: setting things on fire, heading off somewhere to hide the proof that they’d once existed. I had spent too long clearing a path that told its own story, and it was a straight path. That was its whole appeal. The path to the Trace is different from other paths; that difference is supposed to make up for something.
This new turn from you tells me what all I got by cleaning out the corpse of the fortune-teller. OK. I got silver earrings and some crystals and some old money and some vials of something that I bet are anti-infective stuff, and I got a knife with crescent moon in the handle of it. OK. I am saying that the knife is a pretty big knife that my dude has been using to skin deer. I drag his body out behind his shack and I use the knife to dig in the dirt behind the house. The dirt is a little soft because it’s near the house getting some shadow instead of out under the baking sun all day. I get tired but I clear just enough space to get this guy in. I don’t know who killed him and nobody’s ever going to know. I scoop enough dirt back on top of him to cover his body and I say out loud something about how I hope all seekers make it to where they’re going and then I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller’s grave and then I’m dead and that’s my game. I am OK and I’ll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.
I remember reading that turn through at my desk, the ancient, heavy wooden desk I’d gotten for thirty dollars at Goodwill, half-stripped of a deep red paint that was never going to give itself up entirely, dozens of interlocking grooves left across its top by countless ballpoint pens pushed down too hard onto unblotted paper. I remember feeling with total confidence that everything was all right with Chris, that he had made the right move. I took a piece of 8½ × 11 paper from a drawer and found an old charcoal pencil with a nice thick nub and I made out his death certificate. Chris Haynes pronounced dead this day by own hand b. () d. Tularosa. I do hereby affirm the truth of this document by affixing my signature hereto, here followed by an intentionally illegible signature, county coroner, Trace Italian Kansas. It looked ragged and blunt, appropriately Old West. My signature bore no resemblance to my actual signature in the real world; I did it with my left hand. I take a lot of pride in my work.
5
When I got back from the courthouse I was pretty shaken up. The only thing I really felt like doing was lying down on the floor in the den with the television on and all the lights off. First I tried a little plain old broadcast TV: some news, and a few minutes of a cooking show, and an old episode of Family Ties. But I couldn’t focus. I was agitated; the strategies I’d developed for shutting down the several tape loops running concurrently in my head weren’t working.
The judge had dismissed the case against me without prejudice, saying he couldn’t reasonably imagine another judge looking at the same evidence and coming to a different conclusion, etcetera, but that he wanted to leave a door open in the interest of justice being served in the event of new evidence coming to light, and so on. But his tone, and his gentle manner, conveyed his true meaning to everybody in the room; he didn’t want to seem heartless, so he’d tried softening the blow. But he’d been telegraphing his punches from fairly early on: in the questions he directed to Carrie’s parents. In the silences that grew between their responses and his subsequent remarks. Even his bearing while seated, those deep-rising heavy black-robed breaths, seemed to be preparing everyone to hear his opinion.
That opinion, which carried legal force, was that there was no case here. No reason to go forward. Just several sad people and their partially wrecked lives. Once he’d spoken I was technically out of the woods. But my head: my head was all messed up. In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don’t manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn’t find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.