ii. Blindness
I take a deep drag of the cigarette. It's difficult sometimes, to smoke and play at the same time. But over the years I've learned how to execute both actions neatly. I have spent hours sitting alone, cross-legged, holding my game with both hands, perfecting the art of breathing with a burning cigarette in between my lips, refusing to let my fingers leave the buttons of the game. I've spent an inordinate amount of time to this end, while my only friend in the world paces up and down the small room, his mind whirring, his mouth shooting out ideas faster than I could ever respond to them. A dull ache starts at the base of my neck, and spreads throughout my head. I cough late at night, until I spit a glob of something dark and unhealthy onto the sheets, and then my eyes start watering until I reach for the pack of smokes and I light up again.
But even that doesn't stop the fidgeting in my fingers, in my bones. My hands need to be holding something. I need to be seeing something, I need a screen in front of my face. I need something I can stare at. Except that I almost cannot see, because in the low of the night, the smoke surrounds my face like a cloud or a screen. But I play anyway. I really have no choice, not when it's been turned on and the glaring light is in my eyes, inviting me to play.
My friend doesn't quite hate it, but he doesn't understand it. You look like a kid, he says to me. A nicotine addicted kid.
Thanks for the psychoanalysis, Doctor Assface, I tell him. Put it on my tab.
Back the fuck off, bitch, he says, but it's not my words that have irritated him. It's not even the fact that I'm playing my games and I'm smoking my cigarettes.
He hates the fact that when he talks to me, I don't look up to respond. I can't look up. I must keep my eyes on the screen, otherwise I will die and I can't have that. I haven't died in a game once in three years and seven months, I've been counting. I can't break that record. I can't look away.
He's right in a big way, though. It does make me look like a kid. It makes me feel like a kid. I never thought I'd say it, but Jesus Christ do I wish I could be back at the House. I wish that I was ten years old again and they were presenting me with a Gameboy, I wish, I wish.
I look at my game, devote myself to the lithe moves of the fingers, to the way that my reflexes have become all but perfect. I take a deep drag of my cigarette to clear my mind. It's easier to play that way. It's easier to play when the smell of smoke clears my head, knocks out any thought of what's going on. It's easier to focus on the game, to drown out Mello's plans with the little muted sounds of my character on his crusade through a virtual reality.
Even when we sit with a man that, three years ago, he would have sent straight to prison, I don't look up. What I don't see is Mello sitting there proudly, thinking he's finally proved himself, he's finally made something worth being out of himself. I play my game and smoke my cigarettes. I don't watch when he talks on the telephone. I have no desire to watch, to see him sell us out. I can be bought and sold and I can sit with the people who do such things, but I cannot, will not, look them in the eye.
The games were initially introduced to train me, to test me. To a certain degree, I still use them like so. I test myself. I train myself to be smarter and better, so that I can better serve the human race, like we were raised to do. The training takes a toll on me. I can have two things and not the third. I choose comfort and I take a drag of my cigarette and play my game, and quietly, in the corner, Mello seals our fate with his plans and all I do is stare blankly at my game. The need to become better makes everything else unimportant. It's not even my fault. The House did this to me.
When I do occasionally look up, everything is shining and constructed just as they are in the games that I play. A virtual reality, an untruth, something so shiningly genius that every inch of it becomes a game, a puzzle. It means nothing. But I have gone three years and seven months without dying, and I shouldn't start now.
I fail to see the reality behind the way that Mello reaches out and clasps my hand a single time before we part, and even as I lie bleeding on the ground, my life quickly ebbing away from me, I close my eyes and the only want I have in the entire world is for a cigarette between my teeth, and I damn myself because I've broken my record and I've just gone and died.
Blindness: the Second Shelter of the Sinner. Our dear old Matt. Does this make sense?
