So, while the old man was dozing, they rough and tumbled on the bed, sometimes using handcuffs, or toys from the adult shop, and even a whip. I don’t know why they needed all that stuff, but maybe they couldn’t explain it either if anyone ever asked.
The only problem, which was a real pain, was the fact that the telescope showed everything upside down! When you look at stars or at Jupiter, that doesn’t matter at all, but when you are watching Sam and Ellie, it can feel distinctly uncomfortable.
For a long time I pondered how to eliminate this annoying defect, and tried to make a system of mirrors, or find lenses with a focus that turned the picture over, but nothing really worked.
Then it suddenly dawned on me – the video camera! Pa had just bought a new Japanese camera few months ago, and we wanted to take it with us on a trip to Illinois Park, but something went wrong and the camera had mostly laid in the storeroom on the shelf. Judith took it out several times to shoot our old cat Clothespin when she came, but beyond that the camera was unused.
After fitting the camera to the telescope eyepiece on radial knife-edges, I waited for the next occasion of Sam and Ellie’s meeting and prepared to record. Just in case, I not only locked the door, but also propped a hockey stick against it. Then I rewound the cassette and pressed start.
What I then saw in my usual house porn shocked me. Because now what I had watched upside down in the telescope eyepiece before had become a full record, material evidence of the misbehaviour of the Mexican and Coburn’s smart grandson. Anyone could see it now. And with this anyone could blackmail them.
My hands sweated, and the inside of my head began to pound. It was inexpressible with words, this new feeling, not comparable in its excitement with anything in the world. Power, yes, yes, exactly power – this is what I experienced when I looked at the folding screen of the Japanese video camera.
I laughed and jumped about the room like mad, imagining how and what I could make not only with Sam and Ellie, but also with all those freaks.
I was like the gods or demons from ancient myths, able not only to see what nobody saw and nobody knew, but also to transfer those visions to a tape and make them material.
Power! I had in my hands a real power over a load of people now! It was only necessary to make a quantity of records and to think up a plan for inducing the heroes of my documentaries to do what I needed, to guarantee I didn’t arrange a meeting with the police for them.
Did I think at that time that blackmail is a serious criminal offense? Frankly, I didn’t. The prospects in my inflamed imagination absolutely hammered away all thoughts of ethics – hammered them away with the justification that who, frankly in this age, thinks of ethics, except ten hypocrites?
I don’t know how all this story would have ended if the divorce of my parents hadn’t burst on me like a bolt from the blue.
It was a beautiful summer day, with the sun striking through the window and through the nets and painting orange rectangles on the floor, like the Windows logo. My parents were sitting on chairs at different ends of the room, and on a table there were several boxes of Chinese food that my Pa had bought to… well, probably, to sweeten the pill. He always wanted it better. And Mom too.
Then they told Judith and me everything – that they couldn’t live together any more, that they are strangers now, that Mom would move to another city, and that Pa would stay here with us, well, more precisely, with me, since Judith was already studying at law school in Norfolk. For me, the whole world just collapsed.
That familiar world in which all of us lived. I mean that. It became empty and lonely.
And what’s interesting, as I have already said, we weren’t especially close with Mom, but when she just disappeared it was like the chromaticity was taken out of a film. Everything became black-and-white, dirty and dim.
And my interest in the telescope, in that forbidden video, in my plan for blackmail, didn’t just die away – it also grew dim, covered in dust and shrunk.
For days Pa hung out with his service pals, and Judith went to college. And I stayed at home and played on the computer. I played for days and whole nights, generally strategies, shooters, and RPGs.
At that moment, it seemed to me that in those games was the whole meaning of my life, and yet now I can barely remember the names. Still, I’m grateful to their creators because those games helped distract me and endure a difficult period in my life then – and as it seems to me, still help, by giving the illusion of the infinity of being. That sounds complicated so I’ll try to explain a little.
The world of virtual heroes and computer landscapes seems simply illustrative at first sight. But it is not about the quality of plotting or 3D graphics, but about the depth of setting, and the believability of the heroes’ characters. Sometimes they are made with such stunning realism and charisma that one is reduced to tears – ‘why can’t you penetrate behind the screen?’
Of course, computer games are, first of all, an escape from reality, and who would argue with that. When there is sleet outside the window, not a cent in your pocket, you’ve a bruise under your eye and no prospects ahead… When you are not just a low ranker, but The Most-Low-Ranker of all low-rankers…When even such an ‘important’ thing as the timing of the walk to the mailbox for a fresh newspaper doesn’t depend on you… In fact, when all life is bullshit, there is a huge desire to escape from it.
To run away anywhere – to another city, to another state, into narcotic nonsense, to death, eventually…
And in this scheme, computer games are true salvation, or I would even say, therapy, a special valve, a fuse that stops your mind shattering into millions of pieces of colored glass.
In fact, when you’re a teenager of fifteen years, and you have it real bad… How bad, I won’t explain in detail, I’ve just spoken about that. And if you don’t stand up and blow your socks off, you just go off aimlessly wandering. And there you go, you spend a day, two or even three. But more than likely you will be found, the police do their work well. After all, you’re just a lonely white teenager, not a needle in a haystack.
And you were found, returned and everything began! Juvenile justice, it’s like a tick – once it’s got its tail into you, you can’t tear it off. Psychologists will drive you crazy with their little chats with you. Various inspectors from various organizations which patronize and watch over children at risk will visit your house again and again because since the moment you left your home, you became precisely a child at risk, and also mentally unbalanced. And this is branded on you for a long time, possibly forever, and many roads in life are now blocked for you by the barriers of the state system.
What’s more, they can take you away from home and find you new parents. That is, you have to leave the places where you were born, grew up, which are dear to you, and move to some ‘promised land’ like Mount Clemence in the State of Michigan to start everything from scratch, from a blank sheet. And what does it mean to start from scratch at fifteen years? I can tell you that it is much more difficult than at five or twenty-five because when you’re fifteen, you’re like a target at which everything flies – views, words, spittle, fists and lumps of crumpled paper.
And computer games were invented, it seems to me, to avoid all these problems. You just sit at a computer, put on your earphones, launch the program and say so-long to reality for a while. The main thing is that it isn’t necessary to run anywhere.