PARENTS: Just look at him! Didn’t we say he would not understand? Just a boy, he cannot understand. How could he know how people are? How could he know what must be done?
[They go to THE MASK CHILD and begin tampering with his mask.]
He always wanted to be. A real boy. How could he know what must be done?
[They remove the mask and toss it away. There is no head underneath it.]
In the night, when no one is listening, where no one can hear.
[They begin removing his clothing/drape. Again there is nothing underneath.]
PARENTS: In the night, dear child, in the night. We always wanted. A real boy.
[They toss the drape completely aside. There is no MASK CHILD. Fade to black.]
SHUFFLE
Read The Rules of the Game. You don’t have to follow them, but you should at least know what they are. And everybody should learn How to Play.
The Rules of the Game
1) Lives are understood to be finite, but we’re always surprised when they end. Stories are discrete and self-contained and we look forward to the appropriate finale. Pick ten cards. Or pick twelve. This is your story. Accept the order of your deal or determine for yourself what comes first, what comes last, in this narrative of John.
2) We seek balance in our lives. Sometimes we achieve it, sometimes not. But at least in our fiction we can tamper with the scales. Pick three cards from each of the four suits to tell John’s tale.
3) Or perhaps you don’t want the responsibility of the story; you want to surrender to the lack of control you know you don’t have any way. So for you we’ve numbered the cards, 1-54, to make it easier for you to reach some kind of order. We’ve tried to oblige you, tried to find some arrangement that at least makes some sense to us. Pure illusion, of course, for out of the collection and recollection of moments we’ve learned that you can conclude anything about a life. But, still, we’re willing to humor you this conceit of a beginning, a middle, and an end.
4) You will notice that each card bears a different design, as if assembled from dozens of different decks. This is because uniformity is some comforting illusion, and not a natural order at all. We’ve provided numbers and names for suits, but honor if you will the differences in each moment. It will make your game last.
The Cards
A strange thing, John thought, that we appear to live our lives in a line, moment by moment, and yet our memory of its significance is all a shuffle, key moments taken from here and there, and not necessarily chronologically. Hard to say what card might find its way to the top—it might well be a matter of chance or temporary circumstance. Only a few people seemed to have the ability to order the deck the way they wanted. You could not change the actual cards themselves, the specific events; but to change how you felt about them? Perhaps all that was required was another shuffle, a new deal.
Before John’s uncle lost his life, he lost the names of things. His car became a comb, his bed a guitar. “I have to get into my guitar now,” he would say. “I am suddenly very tired.” The next morning he might tell anyone who would listen, “I had an interesting sing last night. Many windows happened. Where is my flowerbed? I miss it so much!” And then he would cry. His children were upset when he lost their names and referred to them as cups and spoons and rabbits. His daughter wanted to know if her father still loved her if he did not know her name. John worried the same would happen to him. Perhaps that was why John told her, “He tells me he loves you all the time, it’s just that as he nears the end of his life everything reminds him of you.”
It had become terribly important to John that he track down every lover and friend from his past. It was not simply a matter of tying up loose ends, but of establishing those ends in the first place. “Do you remember who I am?” he might begin a conversation, and wait anxiously for the answer. The comings and goings of people through one another’s lives, possibilities taken and opportunities denied—these were the things that obsessed him. If memory could not be verified and anchored, how could he be sure he’d lived the life he’d thought he had?
John read that one theory of the brain was that a single memory might be stored in multiple parts, much like a hologram. So parts of a brain could be reshuffled without destroying the integrity of that memory. Every card in the deck might vary slightly from every other card, while still containing the essentials of every other card. The variations might be extremely slight—differences in lighting, tone, or mood, but essential for all that. All together, the deck represented all the complex feelings and attitudes attached to a particular memory. But if you somehow managed to draw one card at a time, you could feel positive or hopeful or angry or depressed about a particular memory. Perhaps good mental health was simply knowing how to draw and play the best card.
When John was eleven years old, a far less auspicious age than ten, he was beaten up almost daily by a slightly older boy named Frankie Williams. It was the last great encounter of his life with personal violence, and although his exasperated mother called it “fighting,” there was no fight to it. It was a beating, pure and simple, ending only when sufficient blood had greased Frankie’s fist.
It was the blood that Frankie wanted to see, the only potion capable of releasing him from the violence he endured at home, and John unaccountably realized this almost immediately, and so allowed this to happen, even looked forward to it, because it was the strongest, most fantastic thing he could imagine, becoming, in fact, the most imaginative thing he was ever to do with his physical self.
Adolescence was pain, the first hint that disappointment lay beyond the brilliant fields of childhood. When he reached his teen years John developed an odd walk. The doctors didn’t know why—they suspected it was “emotional.” All he knew was that suddenly his body did not care for gravity, and the surfaces of the world seemed to demand some gait or stance other than his own. Even the furniture went wrong—beds and chairs seemed made for different spines. It was such a disappointment. He had come so close to normalcy only to see it slip away.
He eventually recovered from this condition, developing a kind of amnesia, the knowledge of his ailment briefly recovered here and there when the world went bad.
When he was twenty years old John stopped dating for more than three years. The precipitant was the last in a string of breakups, this with a young woman who said she could not stand that he could not tell her exactly why he loved her so much. “I just do,” he said. After the breakup he was driving his car down a darkened lane, glanced away for a second, then back again, to see the rear end of a truck suddenly filling his windshield. He jerked the wheel to the left, narrowly avoiding a terrible and no-doubt fatal collision. But part of him had continued straight on through the truck and out the other side. It was a mental accident, a psychic crash, and he felt sure it would happen again and again the rest of his life.
Odd how in any life one event might come to the top and color and transform all others: an unexpected death, a windfall, a chance meeting, an injury, a song sung with a particular kind of feeling. Accident and happenstance, but once it occurred you could never look at the total accumulation of your life in exactly the same way again.